>> JASON: Hi, everyone!
Thank you for joining us on the virtual Google Marketing Livestream.
My name is Jason Spero, and I lead global commercialization efforts for Google’s performance
advertising products, things like Search, Display, and Measurement.
Automation continues to be a big area of focus for our industry and, I’d assume,
is why you showed up for this session.
Today, I’ll be sharing a few stories from brands and agencies who continue to push the
envelope of what’s possible using automation.
To frame this, take a moment to think about some of your recent purchases.
How much did you research before you moved to action?
Some purchases are straightforward and you buy based on brand loyalty or convenience.
Or shipping timing and cost.
Others are more complicated.
I surprised myself last week when I went to purchase running socks.
I’ve been running more during the pandemic, and it was starting to take a toll.
A friend told me that maybe I needed different socks.
So I started to do some research.
And it turns out there’s a lot to know about socks!
I learned about cushioning, durability, blister prevention, and so much more.
I had turned socks into a research-heavy purchase!
And I’m not alone in this.
As consumers explore their options, even for purchases that sound simple, they’re continuously
expanding and narrowing their consideration sets as they process new information.
And the channels available to discover, research, and purchase,
and to pick up products all keep growing.
We believe that the consumer journey has reached a point of complexity that requires automation
to effectively engage people at scale.
Even the best marketers, the people in this virtual room, will struggle to anticipate
and keep up with all the gyrations in consumer interest and needs.
Now, I want to be precise in what I mean by automation.
Automation is often associated with bidding.
And that’s not surprising given the growth and effectiveness of Smart Bidding.
But today, I want to offer you a broader definition of automation, one that goes beyond bidding
to include budget allocation, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more.
We have an ambitious road map ahead, and we’re continuing to learn from you to understand
how we can make automated solutions better for the future.
There are a few key areas we’re thinking about that I wanted to share.
One is building new ways for you to steer automation and share what you uniquely know
about your business, like when you have a last-minute sale or when you have specific
ROI targets by product line.
The learning period is another area of focus.
We recognize that a 2-week ramp-up after you first activate automated solutions can be
frustrating and unpredictable.
And we’re exploring ways to make this period shorter and to minimize performance fluctuations.
We’re also investing in transparency.
We’ve heard automated solutions can feel like a black box.
That’s why we’re working on providing new insights and testing features,
some of which you’re already using, like geo experiments.
We want you have the proof points you need to demonstrate the incremental value of your
automated campaigns.
Today, I want to highlight some of your wins.
As I’ve met virtually with many of you over the past year, 3 things stood out to me about
how you’re thinking about automation now versus a few years ago.
First, I’m seeing more brands lean in to real-time responses to shifts in demand.
Next, a lot is being done to break down silos.
Teams are increasingly bringing their Search, Display, Video, and other digital practices together.
And they’re optimizing their media buys holistically to achieve real business outcomes.
Third, leading marketers are breaking away from a “set it and forget it” mentality.
Instead, they’re actively engaging with automation and recognizing that these solutions
need inputs and fine-tuning like any campaign.
And most importantly, these changes are driving results for agencies and for brands.
Let’s start with the first mindset shift: using automation to harness all
the signals we can to dynamically respond to consumer needs in real time.
Consider this: 15% of search queries every day are brand-new searches we’ve never seen before!
Even with the most diligent and frequent manual optimizations, it would be impossible to catch
all the possible query variations.
But using automation, you can rapidly detect and adjust your campaigns to take action on
new demand opportunities as they arise.
And yes, broad match also uses automation!
Machine learning works to understand how words and phrases are semantically related in meaning.
So you can capture all the new and different ways consumers are looking for your products
or your services.
And by pairing broad match with Smart Bidding, you can optimize to the goals that matter
to your business.
I want to share a story from tails.com, a subscription company from the UK offering
customized dog food.
Tails.com recently expanded to a new market in Germany, where they had limited brand awareness.
The team had to find cost-efficient ways to scale subscription sign-ups.
They wanted to show up on generic searches and dynamically reach customers researching
dog food options across a wide range of queries.
But they were cautious about expanding from broad match modified to broad match.
They solved this with testing using drafts and experiments in Google Ads
to prove the value of automation.
First, they combined broad match keywords with Smart Bidding to
expand reach while maintaining relevance.
They also expanded their definition of automation beyond Smart Bidding to drive greater impact.
They added responsive search ads to create more tailored ad messaging.
Then, they layered on data-driven attribution to optimize for the most incremental touchpoints
that lead to conversions.
Finally, they used dynamic search ads as another way to capture new query opportunities.
The result?
Conversions from generic search campaigns nearly tripled, leading to an all-time high
in trial sign-ups since the brand’s launch in Germany, all while maintaining a stable
cost per acquisition.
Tails.com has now rolled out this full automation package across its search campaigns and across
other European markets.
The consumer journey can rarely be captured on a single channel.
When I was digging in on running socks, I started with Search, but I found myself reading
reviews and watching videos throughout.
Which brings me to the second mindset shift to get the most out of automation, which is
to value real business outcomes rather than proxy metrics from individual channels.
So I’d ask, what does your CMO or your CFO care about?
What does the business care about?
And what’s their objective?
My guess is that it’s revenue growth or profit or acquiring new customers in a particular segment.
Marketing only delivers its full potential when you understand and optimize to
these real business outcomes.
This requires setting campaign goals that ladder up to both your marketing objectives
and higher-order business objectives.
Take this example from MoneyMe and their agency, Sparro.
MoneyMe is a digital-first lending company from Australia, providing consumers with fast
and easy online personal loans and virtual credit cards.
Their key business objective is to grow profitable loan originations and to maximize the value
of fully funded loans.
To scale growth more quickly, they turned to automation.
Using Performance Max campaigns, MoneyMe was able to dynamically distribute and optimize
their budget across all of Google’s channels,
including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, and more.
They also integrated data from offline conversion imports to be able to measure and optimize
not only to completed online applications,
but for applications that actually resulted in fully funded loans.
This allowed them to ensure lead quality, irrespective of channel.
This cross-channel strategy helped MoneyMe deliver a
22% increase in conversions at a 20% lower CPA.
MoneyMe has shown the growth you can achieve when you align
your campaigns to real business outcomes.
But what also strikes me about their journey is their investment in
offline conversion measurement.
Their cross-channel media was optimized for customer acquisition with accurate data about
what conversions were really worth to their business.
That brings me to the third critical mindset shift: successful automation requires ongoing
management, not just during setup, but throughout the life cycle of a campaign.
And that’s why I love this story from Bose and MediaCom, their agency.
It combines all the important mindset shifts I’ve talked about today.
A few years ago, Bose had an efficiency-first strategy and used automation only in about
10% of their digital campaigns.
Last year, they were facing three material headwinds.
First, increased competition.
They also faced heavy reliance on third-party retail partners, and they
were facing brick-and-mortar store closures.
To tackle this, they expanded their digital goals to not only maintain cost efficiency,
but to also accelerate direct-to-consumer revenue on bose.com.
The team turned to automation as a way to get more revenue at the same spend levels.
But what’s critical is they didn’t just turn to automation overnight.
Bose and MediaCom made sure they laid the strong foundation to give automation
the best chance to succeed.
First, they broke down silos in order to fully allocate spend where the demand was.
For example, they unified efforts across local markets and product categories.
Next, they conducted a total account restructure.
They consolidated campaigns and ad groups to give machine learning more data to work with
to improve its predictive accuracy.
And finally, they’re regularly improving the quality of the
inputs they feed into the automation.
They’ve filled gaps in their product feeds and implemented a global site tag
to future-proof their conversion measurement.
And they’re constantly QA-ing and refreshing their creatives
to make sure they follow best practices.
Over time, Bose has integrated more automation throughout their digital marketing.
They’ve combined data-driven attribution with Target ROAS automated bidding and have
applied this across 90% of their account.
And this is what mattered.
Last holiday, this led to huge results: Bose saw an 81% increase in e-commerce sales
and a 35% increase in revenue.
It’s clear that the role of marketers and agencies is evolving.
Automation is delivering precision and new performance gains.
Automation is also replacing the repetitive, and to be honest, the most monotonous
parts of your teams’ jobs.
Think of tasks like implementing extensions across hundreds of campaigns and across those
accounts in your MCC, building thousands of keyword variations, or managing day-parting
changes across all your campaigns.
So I want to address an elephant in the room.
Automation is changing your jobs, but it will also give you leverage by freeing your teams
to create new and more thoughtful value.
I want to close by sharing areas where marketers are uniquely positioned to deliver a bigger impact
in this age of automation.
First, driving deep consumer understanding.
Customer insights will shape your company’s core strategies around product mix,
segmentation, messaging, and more.
First-party data will also be key in training the machine learning
for your digital marketing and beyond.
Marketers will play a critical role in capturing that data, structuring it,
and identifying where gaps still exist.
Second, what does success look like?
You need a strong measurement foundation and experimentation framework in place to fully
understand what’s working and what’s not.
Privacy-centric measurement should be at the heart of your 2021 strategy and beyond as
user expectations, industry, and regulatory shifts continue to change the ways we do business.
Lastly, armed with customer insights and robust measurement, you can focus your optimizations
on what you’re feeding into automation to help it work to its max potential.
This includes the first-party data I just mentioned about customer behavior and value
and making sure it’s up to date.
It also means refreshing your ads with new creative and offers to reach those customers
with more meaningful messages.
So things are changing, and we all must evolve.
But the role of the marketer is more important than ever in this new chapter.
You know, my introduction to Google came at the moment of the shift to mobile.
I spent 3 years working with all of you to build products and
help your organizations adapt.
I believe that we’re in another moment of macro change.
Automation is bringing massive change to digital marketing.
We know that this requires a shift in mindsets and change management within your companies.
At this moment of disruption, we see opportunity everywhere.
Our belief is that businesses who embrace automation now will “win the future.”
We’re so excited to partner with you on that journey to build the products
and to figure all of this out.
Thank you very much!
>> CHUCK: The mission of L.L.Bean is to inspire and enable people to enjoy
the restorative power of the outdoors.
And in this difficult last year, the outdoors is one of the safest places that you could be so we
were happy to be able to provide relevant product and gear for people to enjoy that.
Having a fairly broad assortment, we want to make sure that we are elevating all of those different
products based on what the consumers need and create relevant experiences for our customers.
But there’s only so many things that we can do.
There’s only so many things we can compute in our heads.
And so that’s when the assistance of automation is going to help to be able to ingest more signals
than we could possibly imagine to understand that there’s opportunity there and then to be able
to pivot quickly into those areas.
Outdoor furniture, outdoor sporting, outdoor gear.
Certainly the work-from-home, cozy category was taking off.
The performance, it skyrocketed.
We saw a 72% increase over our ROAS targets in the fall versus budget while also driving
a 200+% increase in overall demand volume. So there’s even still more room to grow there.
Upon adopting more automated strategies, we’re able to focus on things like overall account health.
Really what it allowed us to do is to increase our bandwidth.
That’s unlocked a lot of power for us.
And it’s not only our ability of using that data to optimize our own campaigns.
But it’s also using that data to share with cross-functional partners across the organization.
It’s the combination of all those things that have really led to a powerful partnership.