Monster Mas LAUNCHING INTO 2020!
Greetings We hope you had an amazing 2019 and look forward to an even better 2020. Technology has turned the world into a global market that connects people from all countries and cultures. Sharing information is more accessible than ever before, making it much easier to generate product awareness or promote your service. According to eMarketer, “worldwide digital ad spend is predicted to reach over $340 billion by 2020.� This is a growth of over 10% compared to 2019. To stay ahead of your competition you must keep up with trends in order to avoid getting left behind. Your business will grow quickly if you retain and actively reach new customers in a proactive way. In this edition we will cover the latest news in digital, and provide tips & tricks from our staff to help you have a superb 2020.
Thanks for all of your support, we hope you enjoy the issue. Please send any comments to - hello@pushgroup.co.uk
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What is adinvestor and why are we investing heavily in tech?
Push were one of the first advertising agencies to heavily invest in tech. We developed a wide range of scripts and a technology product called ‘Push Analyser’ to help us optimise Google Ads. These reports have dramatically sped up our analysis and have given us more time to work on customer accounts. In 2019, we worked with a variety of technology partners and improved our technology infrastructure. We have used a lot of third-party tools to power our report management, resulting in having reports in different places and logons. For higher operational efficiency we know that more automation and machine learning will lead to better results for our customers.
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One of our key requirements was to have a dashboard where we could manage accounts and ads all in one place. We know that Google, Bing and Facebook machine learning capabilities go beyond what we can see and do in the platforms. We started thinking about how we could we build on the overwhelming complexity of data aggregation to highlight where to invest marketing budget for our customers, and merge data across platforms to help drive healthy ROIs. We are proud to launch AdInvestor. Our new advertising platform that takes control of your advertising. This is an easy to use platform that helps businesses identify where to invest ad spend; monitor budgets; complete account audit checks; provide real-time performance metrics; control click fraud, and perform competitor analysis.
OUR GOALS Our goal is to shape the future of PPC marketing for businesses and to maximise ROI significantly with our flagship AI platform. We want to give more control to those managing ad campaigns without increasing management time. Reducing time consuming tasks such as account set up, budget management, and click tracking across multiple platforms, allows for more time to focus on strategies for business growth.
WHAT CAN YOU SEE IN ADINVESTOR? The platform is constantly being developed by our dedicated resource in our London headquarters. We currently have real-time performance metrics and KPIs across Google, Bing and Facebook. At a glance, you will be able to see the results your budget is getting you across each platform.
ad spends hit the set amount, the account will be paused and reactivate after the pause period is over. Adinvestor offers detailed reporting and provides detailed visual representation of how your ads and campaigns are performing to highlight optimisation opportunities. We have different types of reports that show you everything you need to know about how your account is doing against the target set, as well as compared to previous periods. We take click fraud seriously, so we have built in an automated system that excludes certain visitors and bots from clicking on your ads. The system also tracks devices, so that it can block malicious visitors who use different IP addresses to see your ads. Know what your competitors are saying in their adverts with our competitor ads report. This report finds out which businesses are advertising using the same keywords as you and what they have in their ad copy.
Full budget management - In real-time, the system monitors the budget you set and pauses campaigns when budget thresholds are met. Ricky Solanki
Our revolutionary AI system helps you keep track and project if you are going to underspend or overspend Rules for your budgets mean once your
Co-CEO
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What’s Next Our development team have a busy year ahead with our current road map. Watch out for new features like account health scores, predictive negative keyword suggestions and Facebook integrations. We will be releasing a scaled down version of the product for smaller businesses. Your account managers will be screen sharing the platform with you this quarter.
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Shoot For The Stars In 2020 2019 has been a massive year for Google. A plethora of exciting new concepts and product announcements were put forth, all based around the central tenet of being responsible, present and, most of all, useful. As we enter the roaring (hopefully) 20’s, we wanted to have a quick review of the most exciting innovations from Google this year and go over key focuses for 2020 to drive growth. 5 KEY FOCUSES FOR 2020 The days of focusing on just Google to get you volume by continually adding and refining your keyword strategy are over. Everyone has squeezed the life out of this. We now have to focus on 5 key areas, all with smaller but incremental improvements: Automation and Smart bidding. Using data and audiences better. Ad Copy is key. CRO (conversion rate optimisation) on your website or landing pages. Spread your spend/risk Cross Channel.
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IMPROVEMENTS IN SMART BIDDING There are so many more signals now being tracked by Google that it’s just not fast and efficient enough to have basic rules and manual bidding. We have to switch to SMART bidding which instantaneously optimises towards our goals. This must be done properly though, or you can seriously damage your account and its ability to react to change. Smart Bidding involves Google implementing machine learning across its advertising properties, to optimise bids for conversions or conversion value. There are signals that SMART bidding uses that we as advertisers don’t even have access to. Bid changes are real-time and do not rely on a person waiting to collect data (and spending money), to make a conclusion to manually action, for the whole process to then start again! The 3 key types Google Smart bidding - Target CPA bidding, Maximise conversions and Smart Shopping Campaigns. USING DATA & AUDIENCES SMART bidding uses superior audience data to react to who to show to, how much to bid, and which ad copy to prioritise. However as marketeers, we already have gut feelings and data
to prove what type of content is best for different demographics and people at certain steps in a journey. This year we need to make sure we’re not always waiting for campaigns to learn and are instead using audience data to focus our budget and tailor our ads to the right people from day one.
With us losing a lot of our ability on the targeting and bidding front, we now have much more time to write compelling ads and assist with landing page copy. Consumers don't always want to hear about ‘features’ (cheapest price, fast delivery, best components, UK based), they want to hear what this product or service will do for them, how it will make their life easier and how it will make them feel. AKA ‘benefits’. The need for more compelling and better ad copy will be essential to differentiate yourself this year. ADS ARE ABOUT THE CUSTOMER, NOT YOU:
AUDIENCE ACTIONS:
“Years of experience, 10-year guarantees, free delivery, award-winning” etc. When it comes to companies writing adverts it’s often all very me, myself and I.
What we need to now do is 2 things: Overlay relevant audiences to either bid higher or focus ad copy. Run campaigns only to specific audiences. E.g. We work with a hair transplant clinic with locations across the UK. We know that someone in-market for ‘Dating’ converts 3 times higher than a normal searcher. The Age of the Ad!
Whilst telling everyone how great you are can work, we are seeing higher click through and higher conversion rates from emotive ad copy. To write emotive ad copy you need to understand who your audiences are, their needs, their pain
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points, what they love and hate. You then have a range of emotions to appeal to, and can test things such as positive sentiments that give people affirmation, or ads that focus on anger/fear to incite action.
SOME NEW AD FORMATS TO LOOK OUT FOR Discovery Ads Discovery ads offer an almost unprecedented reach. You can serve them across the YouTube home feed, Gmail promotions tab and the Google Discover feed on Android Devices. They are one of the fastest-growing advertising channels and have seen an incredible 25% drop in cost per lead in comparison to similar channels.
Gallery ads In 2019, Google endeavoured to combine search intent with a more interactive and visual ad format. Gallery ads combine compelling images and copy with prime placement at the top of the search results. A user seeing this ad can swipe through multiple images of your product or service, each with its own copy. As with Discovery ads, Gallery ads utilise a carousel format, but, unlike Discovery ads, they sit at the top of the search results page. This means advertisers can now show prospects not only ads related to their keywords but also legitimately related creative visuals which are going to induce clicks. CRO, WEBSITES & LANDING PAGE TESTING
Youtube Home Feed
Discovery Feed (Android)
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Gmail
I always find it incredible that businesses will spend £10-£100k a month on ad spend (£120k £1.2m) but get extremely squeamish when considering a new website for £5-£10k, or £1k a month, on constantly improving it. Basic new sites and landing pages, or CRO packages, can easily double conversion rates. This means cutting costs by 50% or doubling sales/leads for the same spend. There is a finite amount of search traffic that will convert and the more you expand the lower your conversion rates drop.
By using Google Analytics, Google Optimise, Eye Scan and heatmap tools like Hotjar & Eyequant, we can quickly start a testing process to split your traffic 50/50 to two different pages. Sometimes a subtle change in colour of key areas is all a page needs to take off!
23%
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KEY REASONS TO TEST OTHER PLATFORMS: Microsoft Ads: 10% of the UK search audience. Mostly Desktop traffic - which converts higher and is good for B2B. Cheaper costs per clicks and therefore lower CPA/ROAS. Older, less likely to shop around, audiences which lead to higher conversion rates.
Other channels Don’t have all your eggs in one basket! Facebook and Microsoft ads are two key channels that 90% of businesses can make work. Whether because of saturation or just because Google Ads is getting harder to manage because of competition, businesses need to look to expand elsewhere. Every platform has low hanging fruit and we should be capturing this across every channel we can, not just squeezing the life out of Google. It’s been a challenging year too for policy reviews and issues on Facebook and Google where a lot of businesses have suffered downtime which is a killer. So, it’s key to also spread your risk so your sales team aren’t ‘stuck on hold’.
Facebook Ads Enormous Reach. Fantastic communicator to your customers and market. Much more ‘End Goal’ focused - meaning you really can generate a lot of sales and leads direct from FB contrary to some beliefs. Amazing Lookalike audience data.
Charlie Carrol Head of Performance
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The Robots are taking my job, so let's get creative Since we started working with Facebook in 2016, we have experienced many different platform updates and changes. In our office, the Facebook algorithm was often referred to as 'the Green Curtain' from the Wizard of Oz, since it is a powerful feature to our everyday lives, yet unknown in how it functions and thinks. Contrary to the recommendation in the story, we did pay a lot of attention to it! Monday mornings at the Push office start off with a weekly kick-off meeting in which each Facebook team member has to bring along an accompaniment with their cup of coffee. Not a croissant, but a new platform update or a new strategy to test. During the past 6 months, we have realised that there has been a shift in Facebook advertising, and understanding this change will help you achieve greater success on Facebook. The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence has been discussed in many different capacities, however one question or fear seems to dominate the conversation - ‘What would happen
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to our jobs, will we all be replaced by robots?’ truth is both yes and no, we have to shift our focus and change our jobs. Both Google and Facebook have introduced new automation features to make the day-to-day management of accounts much easier and effective. This year saw the rise of features such as responsive ads and smart bidding on Google, and dynamic creative and campaign budget optimisation on Facebook. The features are a testament to the fact that we are entering a new phase in digital advertising. In the last ten years, data has been gathered at scale by both platforms and we are now seeing it utilised to predict our behaviour. As advertisers we do not have access to this data, and this does mean that we have to relinquish some control over to the platforms, but the benefits are immense. Firstly, adopting automation does prove to be much more stable in the long-run, which means brands can focus on aspects such as customer service, website optimisation, and product development. In order to stay ahead as Facebook advertisers, we have had to shift our focus to the ad experience, especially the creatives and offering.
Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories everyday!
which presents a massive opportunity for advertisers to reach new customers and experiment with engaging creatives. With the expansion of ad relevance and engagement scores, Facebook is now penalising brands and advertisers for a poor creative experience. With this metric, your creative is grade on how customers engage and react to it and the copies, and this grade has a direct impact on your campaigns. That said, this does not mean that you have to allocate your complete 2020 marketing budget to a video production company, as it is not necessarily the most polished creative that wins but the most real.
In the last 3 years of creative testing, we have seen that the creative that looks and feels like a post you would see from a friend seems to win again and again. I believe users have become suspicious of overly polished creatives, especially when it is in their feed between the stories and posts from their friends. However, it is worth noting that it is data that fuels these strategies which mean if you are new to Facebook advertising your budget in the first year should be spent on buying customer data, and a lot of it. Targeting broad would not necessarily work in your first month, as Facebook has no historical data around your product, website, offering and customers. This takes time, but we see it as a marathon and not a sprint. Of course, there is no one glove for all and we work hard during the strategy development and account management stage to understand how to leverage existing customer data and to fool-proof your account for the changes ahead.
Gineke Helberg Head of Facebook
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Are You Missing Out On The Microsoft Revolution?
We have seen our managed revenue on Microsoft Ads more than double YoY. Microsoft is obviously doing something right with Bing — but what is it? What gives Microsoft Advertising an edge over Google Ads? LESS COMPETITION = LOWER CPCS
Bing is owned by Microsoft, who offer Microsoft Advertising, a PPC advertising service available on both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines. Microsoft Advertising was known as Bing Ads until April 30th 2019, the rebrand coming mere months after Google itself caused untold outrage with Google AdWords’ controversial metamorphosis into Google Ads.
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Canada
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11%
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7%
24%
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comScore qsearch (custom), June 2019
Despite Google’s unequivocal dominance, Bing still owns 36% of the US desktop search market. That’s a massive number of users your advertising isn’t reaching if you forget about Bing. You may be surprised at how Microsoft’s market share is increasing across the globe.
Google is absolutely teeming with marketers, so you’ll have to pay top dollar to compete with them. The same can’t be said of Bing. On Microsoft Advertising, the volume of leads is lower because the search volume is lower. This means your investment will go further. Whilst there is, of course, variation from industry to industry, Microsoft Advertising tends to have a lower CPC and a higher CTR. AN AUDIENCE WITH GREATER BUYING POWER Bing offers marketers the opportunity to reach a niche audience — an audience who, more specifically, are older, more established and generally wealthier. 71% of Bing users are 35 or older, and one third have a household income of over $100,000. The ability to reach a demographic with a higher average income helps Bing users generate product interest, build brand awareness and drive
sales — especially if they have a luxury or high-end product or service. Bing users are more likely to be established and willing to give your product a chance.
Investing in Bing means you’ll also have the opportunity to market on a good number of their partners, including AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, to name a few. More ad placements generally correlate with more leads!
SIMPLE IMPLEMENTATION LINKEDIN PROFILE TARGETING If you’re already utilising Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising isn’t a huge step. You can put as much or as little effort as you choose into your Bing marketing. What’s more, Bing actually gives you the option to import your campaigns directly from Google. You can even schedule when imports take place, as well as customise them. This means you can import your ads without your budgets. Yes, it may be true that campaigns perform better if you take the time and effort to optimise them specifically for a given platform — but, you can still get by with making similar optimisations in Bing as you have in Google if time is not on your side. MORE INVENTORY = MORE LEADS Bing is natively integrated into Microsoft products, including the Amazon Echo, Skype, Xbox and Office. Six billion searches occur every month on the Bing platform. That’s a massive portion of users you might be missing out on.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and as such offers the ability to target highly relevant audiences using LinkedIn profile information. You can serve text ads, Dynamic Search Ads and shopping campaigns to customers based on their company, job function and industry. This feature is the perfect complement to other audience targeting solutions for companies that focus on B2B markets. SO SHOULD I MAKE BING PART OF MY PPC STRATEGY? THAT DEPENDS. It’s never worth advertising on every platform purely for the sake of being on every platform. There must always be a reasoned rationale behind every aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
Grant Barber Marketing Director
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If you try Bing and find there’s no search volume for your target location and keywords, don’t worry. Not every platform will work for you. The takeaway message is to not forget Bing and Microsoft Advertising. Always consider the platform in the early stages of your PPC marketing strategy planning — and see what happens.
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An Omni-Channel Approach To Business Growth Companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450% increase in qualified prospects. Those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.
“How to build a conversion funnel that will triple your profit”
create a truly seamless experience across devices and platforms for the consumer. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone, or in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience will be seamless. That is the dream anyway.
“90% of consumers surveyed reported using more than one device to accomplish a single objective online” ‘The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behaviour’ - Google
Only Way Online, Neil Patel, 2019
A multi-channel approach is when a company uses multiple channels to spread the message about their brand or product. The channels are usually separate and do not relate to each other which can make tracking and attribution a bit of a pain. An omni-channel approach is about integrating channels with each other to provide a seamless customer experience. Every channel will be able to integrate and relate with one another so the customer is able to switch effortlessly between channels, the goal being to
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Therefore, brands hoping to increase their conversions and engagement, should seamlessly integrate marketing campaigns and sales funnels across multiple channels….(deep breath) and devices. Consideration refers to when the consumer is interested in your product or a similar product. They are finding out a bit more about you and whether they want to. Here you need to prove to them that your product or brand is a viable option for them. It is therefore evidently more important that we know our audience.
All this needs to be understood in order to tailor messaging and ensure relevancy.
Upper Funnel Awareness
Middle Funnel Consideration
Lower Funnel Purchase
Retain
Repeat Purchase
Who are we targeting? Where in the sales funnel? How have they interacted with the brand/ads previously?
So I went to Jamaica in October, best trip of my 20s so far. When I was searching for the best things to do in JA, and most importantly what the weather was like. Then, as expected I started to see display ads pop up. Very quickly my Google discover feed would show several articles highlighting weather in JA, proximity to attractions and hotel ratings. So I started watching hotel reviews on YouTube then looked for the best deal I could find on several travel sites. The site I booked with in the end, had a seamless experience across their app, website, social media channels and blog. All the information I could ever wish to find was readily available to me. A holistic approach we adopted on search display and email marketing, helped a customer to increase leads from 300-1500 over 3 months for a business cost comparison site whilst also reducing the CPA. Efficiency measures the success of your process. Effectiveness measures the contributions your marketing strategies have made to the business...
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“Marketing campaigns are generally becoming less effective, and ironically that’s because of a growing focus on ROI. ” Mark Ritson, - Professor Of Marketing, Melbourne Business School
ROI is a measure of efficiency, not a measure of total effectiveness. There are diminishing returns when focusing solely on ROI. If advertisers are making ROI their target, all they end up doing is reducing their spend, increasing their ROI but making less money overall. If you only look at ROI and do not include effectiveness as a measurement, your strategy will become short-termist and you will lose the bigger picture. Ending up with abit of a hamster wheel effect. By prioritising effectiveness over efficiency as a business, you will naturally lean towards an omni-channel marketing strategy. The ideal conversion path for any business... Reality
Ideal
Direct
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SO HOW CAN WE MEASURE AN OMNI-CHANNEL STRATEGY? The overall key metric will be holistic profitable growth. However, within this, we still need a way of measuring performance to understand the success of our strategy. Retain. How many of those users can you get to come back and make another purchase. This can be via a subscription or another unique purchase.
Awareness. How many unique visitors are you attracting to your site and from what channels? Engagement. How active are the users on your site and what pages are they interacting with? Conversions. Do you measure the conversion rate across channels to understand patterns in purchasing behaviour? Loyalty. How many users make a second transaction within a set period of time? What is your average client lifetime value? What is our return on investment in terms of increasing overall business gross profit? How much has our business revenue increased and how much has it cost us?
Instead of only measuring channel efficiency. We need to start looking at total marketing effectiveness driven by efficiency.
This allows us to be more flexible with budgets as we can see which parts of the marketing funnel are being undervalued so we can target those specifically. To succeed, companies must be able to balance efficiency with effectiveness. Are you?
Monique Anderson Head of Search
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Accolades for Push in 2019 We don’t like talking about ourselves too much but the awards we achieve are based on case studies from our amazing customers, giving us a stamp of approval that we are innovative and focused on keeping our customers ahead. Below is a quick overview of the recognition we received in 2019.
Push are proud to be named in The Drum’s Top 10 UK Agencies! The Drum is a global media platform and the biggest marketing website in Europe, so when
they bang their drum about the best agencies the world takes notice. We were incredibly honoured to be named in their top 10 list of the best UK agencies for 2019. The Drum also recognised us in their annual awards and we were finalists for the first time in 2 categories – ' Digital Agency of the Year' & ' Marketing Agency of the Year' 50-150 staff. The awards focus on creativity and reward agencies that have delivered exceptional marketing campaigns for clients. PUSH NAMED AS TRAILBLAZERS OF THE YEAR! Microsoft hosted their European agency awards in Munich in December 2019, and we were delighted to receive 2 accolades. We were named as trailblazers of the year, which is one of the top awards as it recognises innovation and the ability for agencies to help customers implement new ways to stay ahead online. We were also runner up for Best Account Team in Europe. As we have only been a partner for Microsoft for just over a year we were incredibly proud to win this and will shoot for top spot next year.
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FINALIST FOR 3 GOOGLE AWARDS IN 2019 Push has won 4 Google Premier Partner awards in the last 4 years but just missed out on a 2019 award, all good things must come to an end and we will be back in 2020. We were still honoured to be a finalist in 3 categories though - Growing Business Online, Search Excellence, Shopping Excellence.
Facebook launched a partnership scheme in 2019 and named Push as one of their Preferred Partners. This means we get access to time-saving tools, optimisation recommendations, analytics reports, measurement resources, creative best practices and training as well as speedy feedback and support to help our customers thrive on Facebook.
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Grant Barber Marketing Director
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Why automation is good news Add Testing Smart Campaigns To Your Must Do 2020 List. Smart campaigns are not going anywhere, they are not an Alpha or Beta being tested by Google, they are here to stay and you need to start testing! For those marketers that have been dabbling in paid search for more than 3 years, you will remember the explosion of mobile searches surpassing the number of desktop searches. What you should also reflect back to is the hype and focus Google placed on this phenomenon before, during and once it had happened. Well, when considering smart bidding and strategies we can see history repeating itself except on an even bigger scale. Let’s list some of the signs we can see that tells us as digital marketers “if you’re not testing some form of smart campaigns or bidding you’re simply not ahead of the game”
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Similarly to the growth of mobile usage, there are now a countless number of podcasts, key players and talks at events about pro-automation strategies and why digital marketers should be testing either smart bidding or smart campaigns. Google themselves have constructed a training program (Digital Champions) for their Partners to equip a selected few employees to be able to learn like a Google product specialist and deliver training sessions to colleagues on ‘everything smart bidding’. When looking at smart vs standard campaign spend we can see smart spend is increasing rapidly. (particularly in the e-commerce space) and standard spend is remaining stagnant
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Smart bidding is not going away and it is very likely that all campaigns will eventually be “smart” or use some form of automation. Let’s consider DSA campaigns: You have no control over the keywords, little control over the entire ad copy and depending on how you set your targeting, little control over the landing page, BUT they work. I predict (call me Nostradamus) in the near (remember I said near) future, campaign set up will consist of Smart shopping campaigns, Pay for conversion on the Display network, Smart search campaigns for localised businesses and more use of DSA campaigns for all types of businesses. So to stay ahead you must start testing, failing quickly, re-testing and perfecting today. As marketers we should spend more time on aspects outside the ecosystems of Google ads, Facebook ads manager and Microsoft ads. Pay attention to clients sales processes, and have a better understanding of margins and revenue, personas, and how this should lead the breakdown of the campaigns and copies, landing pages and customer touchpoints. The list is endless.
campaigns, we are (for the moment) far from moving everything to smart campaigns, especially when taking into consideration more mature accounts. SO WHAT DOES THIS REALLY MEAN? Yes, you should be testing campaigns and strategies such as target CPA, maximise clicks overlapped with DSA targeting, and strategically pieced together smart shopping campaigns. However, moving the entire account to such a set up if you have data and good performance is not something we recommend. Smart campaigns, for example, make it difficult to immediately identify or fix a drop in performance. To caveat this, it is essential to have technology like our scripts that can alert account managers of peaks and drops in KPIs. To correctly test smart bidding and campaigns you should also have a fail-safe account set up that you can rely on to avoid any drops in performance.
Jasleen Bandwaitt Head of Strategy and Product Development
Now, remember I said “near” future. Whilst we should absolutely embrace smart bidding and
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Right now at Push we are adopting and incorporating smart tests in all accounts that come through our strategy development process and have some great wins with various budgets. We look forward to growing this portfolio of case studies and sharing these with you soon!
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Push exploring new frontiers
I'm responsible for box 3 and Ricky (Joint founder and CEO is reponsible for box 2). My main task is taking our existing product (a digital Advertising agency) into new markets, which effectively means looking at how we grow internationally. We have been encouraged to do this, not only by the circumstances in the UK but also by our partners Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Like any business, we are looking to increase our pace of growth. Any good MBA student or business consultant will tell you that one of the classic ways of looking at growth is to look at the Anso matrix*. This is something that we have done extensively over the years.
When you look at the UK’s digital market you start to realise the market that we work in is really very advanced. As an agency, this is a great advantage over a lot of international agencies. The UK market for digital advertising is bigger than France, Germany and Russia combined.
*Ansoff Matrix
New Markets
Market Penetration
Market Development
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3
New Products Product Development
Diversification
Increasing Risk
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2 4
Increasing Risk
Existing Markets
Existing Products
This means that if we have to compete against agencies in Munich, Milan or Madrid, we are potentially coming from a position of strength as we've grown up in the UK digital market, which is typically a couple of years advanced to many European markets. This allows us to bring all the skills and the expertise into new markets. With this in mind, we've identified and expanded into two particular markets, as of the last quarter of 2019. Our first is in the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA, and we've opened up an office there in Dubai. And secondly, we opened up a Push South & Eastern European office in Athens.
Top 10* countries in Europe, ranked by digital ad spending, 2016 (billions of €) 1. UK
€14.2
2. Germany €5.9 3. France €4.2 4. Russia €2.6 5. Italy €2.3 6. Netherands €1.7 7. Spain €1.6 8. Sweden €1.6 9. Belgium €0.9 10. Switzerland €0.9
Note: figures are actual gross income; inlcudes classifields /directories, display, mobile and search; includes agency commisions; *out of the 27 countries from which IAB Europe and IHS aggregated data. Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (IAB Europe) and IHS, “Adex Benchmark 2016” as cited in press release, May 23, 2017.
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Both of these are now fully established and we're expecting great things from them. We have seen in both cases that there are really interesting parallels to where the UK market was some years ago, which allows us to expand very quickly. Some people might ask why would you grow internationally? And for me there are four key points. Fast Growth - In many cases there is an opportunity to win in fast growth, slightly less complex markets. Diversification - protect against an economic boom or bust in the UK. Now in the UK it looks as though we're in for a boom period, but any kind of international diversification allows you protect against upturns and downturns in the economy.
international opportunities. In the case of both Push MENA in Dubai, and Push SEE in Athens, both are staffed and headed up by people that have been with Push for some time. In Dubai for example, Anisha was our very first employee at Push in 2007. In an Athens, Yannis who heads up Push South & Eastern Europe joined us from Warwick University with an MBA four years ago. So it's great for career opportunities, particularly when you have staff from all over the world. We're expecting to open up into new, other new markets in 2020. Next on the list we will be looking at Southeastern Asia and of course, the USA.
Global Brands - We've seen that when we've gone into international markets, we have picked up interest from big global brands who are looking for agencies like us to give them a presence across these markets'. Career opportunities - for our staff as we keep on growing. Many of them want to expand into new markets and take
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Always Expanding
In the case of Push MENA, we have very much come full circle. The first time I went to the Gulf region was in 1992. It was my first job straight out of university, where I’d studied Business Studies. The picture you can see is of me, somewhere in Dubai talking to a team of merchandisers about how they can best get more sales for Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. At the time, my first job was for Kraft Foods International or Kraft Jacobs Suchard, as a marketing manager for the Middle East division. It was a great job for me; I was straight out of university and spending two weeks every month in the Middle East. I’d be based in London and then fly out on a Friday night to Dubai and then travel across the region. I had a free reign on how I could develop sales for the range of Terry’s and Suchard products. It was a really good learning experience for me because it allowed me to work with different distributors, look at marketing campaigns, look at the end sale and how that resulted through the different retailers out there.
Steve Hyde Co-CEO
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Meet the Team
opportunity to learn from all my colleagues through our weekly training and sharing of new ideas. One role I’ve enjoyed thoroughly, ever since my placement year, was heading up and facilitating our use of the new BETA programmes that Google is constantly developing. BETA’S
Sean Still just a fresh graduate from university, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d come to start my career off in such an organisation as Push, never mind start off with work straight after University. Alas here I am at the forefront, readily armed to tackle strange problems in ever growing industry with ever changing tools for unique solutions My name is Sean Williams, an account manager here at Push! I first began as a placement student as a junior executive, and have witnessed our little team grow into a large scale family. Enjoying “friendly” games of table tennis and occasional Mario Kart races (which I’m sure my director hates me for by now!). Here I’ve learnt what it truly means to be in a fast paced work environment, but have also been given the
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If you’ve never heard of what a BETA is (that would be amazing in this day an age), it’s essentially something in its “teenager” stage, a period of experimentation and change. This is the exciting part, because it means a time of growth. As a Premier Partner we have the luxury of trying out the BETA versions of products, helping you to keep the edge on your competitors by trying new things that they may not have access to yet. A good example is when Responsive Search Ads (RSA’s) were still in BETA. We had early access to this and were able to utilise 15 headlines and 4 descriptions! This was revolutionary at the time, where you could only have 2 headlines and 1 description in an ad. Now we wouldn’t even imagine doing PPC without RSA’s!
SCRIPT ’S We don’t just leave innovation up to the Google overlords! We understand that we have to take this one step further, through our investment into our own technology: the wonderful world of scripts! Scripts help us to automate tasks that would otherwise be time consuming. In fact, we have been investing in automation since before Google made the word trendy last year. With our all-new ad investor platform, we have developed new ways to manage accounts. From dynamic SQR’s and adding negative keywords to ad copy testing and managing budgets, we are able to take multiple actions all from one seamless interface. WHAT 'S THE LESSON HERE? You not only have access to Google’s constant investment in new programmes to make your accounts better, but also our own evolving technology as well.
We’ll be with you every step of the way!
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8 ways to combat cart abandonment Shopping cart abandonment is a big issue. Current estimates of global cart abandonment rate vary widely, but in Q1 2018 it stood at a whopping 75.6%. To put it simply, three quarters of the people who put an item in their shopping cart on your site probably won’t go on to actually buy it. HERE ARE MY TOP 8 1: Remove distractions Just as you would optimise a landing page to grab a user’s attention and not let their eyes or mind wander, so you need to remove attention-seeking aspects of your checkout page so that a user can follow through with their purchase. These include sidebars, navigation bars and images. Keep things focused, sales-oriented and totally uncomplicated. 2: Show checkout flow Visitors to your site may be frustrated if they can't see how far along far along the checkout process they are. This potentially major annoyance can be easily assuaged by just numbering the steps or creating a progress bar.
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3: Trigger abandonment emails As we know, as many as 76% of shoppers abandon their carts — but what you may not know is that most of these individuals actually plan to return. Problem is, sometimes they forget. However, by triggering a cart abandonment email after a certain period of time, you remind these people to complete their purchase, thereby saving a potentially huge amount of revenue. 4: Request payment information last Would you hand over your credit card details to a stranger? Probably not — so why expect shoppers to trust you with theirs? By asking for payment details last, you can instil a sense of trust in your customers. Acquire the least sensitive information first, such as name and email address, then move onto shipping details, billing address, phone and only then request payment information. 5: Improve cart management A poorly managed cart is a surefire way to turn shoppers off the prospect of going any further with your site. People are simply too busy to be faffing around with convoluted navigation and ambiguous buttons. Keep the cart accessible from anywhere on the site. Show not only that there are items in it but how many. Create an executive summary of what’s in the cart to allow shoppers to quickly review it, and let them edit it without having to start again.
6: Make use of your customer reviews Oftentimes, potential customers need verification from previously satisfied shoppers that they are indeed purchasing the right product or service for them. Customer reviews are perfect for this. Where possible, assign every item on sale a star rating based on the average it has received from users. 7: Ensure your checkout form is easily understood You don’t want to leave any fields in your checkout form left to interpretation. You need straight-talking, ambiguous micro-copy to explain in absolute clarity what is required of shoppers. You can leave explanatory notes alongside fields that may be confusing to some users, such as the CVV number. 8: Avoid surprise costs The single worst thing you can do to a potential shopper is spring an unexpected additional cost on them when they believe their checkout process to be complete.
Gareth Ilbery Head of eCommerce
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The most common is shipping cost. For this reason, e-commerce retailers offer free postage — shoppers love it! If you can’t provide these free costs, at least ensure it’s crystal clear that the cost displayed is not the final cost.
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Did you know that we also design and build awesome websites?
If your site doesn’t look as good as your competitors or if it doesn’t have a great customer experience, you may find that they are not taking the desired action, whether that be making a purchase, submitting a form or some other action. So having a poor website can adversely affect your conversions.
In fact, Push started life as a web design and development agency, so we’ve been building highly converting landing pages and websites for longer than we care to remember!
We always find it surprising that businesses will spend £10-£100k a month on ad spend but get nervous when considering a new website for £7-£10k which will serve their business for many years. New sites/landing pages or CRO packages can easily double conversion rates.
COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS Why do I need to update my website? It’s important to update your website content regularly, but this alone is not enough. In the same way that technology evolves, so too does your business and the needs of your customers. You should be looking to redevelop your website every few years. Can a poor website impact your Google Ads campaign? It’s not unusual for a user to click on multiple ads to see what is available and then return to the site that is the most appealing.
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This means cutting costs by 50% or doubling sales/leads for the same spend. There is a finite amount of search traffic that will convert and the more you expand, the lower your conversion rates drop. The importance of site speed Your ads may drive plenty of traffic to your website, however if it is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ll lose more than 50% of your visitors. Which put simply, means that you are spending double for your traffic! When we build websites for our clients, page speed is an important consideration not only for the reasons above, but also to improve both your Ad Rank with Google and your user experience.
Here are some more reasons why you should consider developing a new website: Your CMS isn’t giving you the functionality you need. Competitor sites look and work much better than yours. Compatibility issues with the latest browsers, devices and technologies.Your site isn’t ranking organically on search engines. A site built with the latest technologies is less likely to be hacked.
Why should Push build your new website? Push has a team of UK designers and developers with many years of experience in producing great looking, high converting websites for both lead generation and full eCommerce sites. We manage over £20 million of Google Ad spend each quarter and we know how to develop a site that converts and provides amazing results. We offer a no obligation and free of charge web proposal that will show you how we can transform your website.
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This is a detailed proposal that outlines our project strategy for your business website. Push has many great case studies where we transformed results. We doubled the conversion rates for a cybersecurity business,increased the conversion rate from 1.18% to 4.7% for a care home company and for a high tech drone firm we achieved a conversion rate of 9.09%.
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At Push, every project we undertake includes: A dedicated Project Manager to oversee the design and development of your new website, providing a bi-weekly call to update you on progress. Competitor analysis and keyword research for SEO.
A professional and bespoke designed website (we don’t use templates). Responsive design so your site looks great on any device and is built for mobile devices. We use revolutionary eye tracking software to help target audience attention to the intended areas of the specific page. The website goes through a conversion analysis process from wireframe to design to user journey. We set up your contact forms and integrate them with CRM systems if required. SSL certificate that secures the information your staff and users exchange with the website. We implement privacy policies, cookie policies, terms and conditions and ensure your site is GDPR compliant. We can also provide hosting and reporting.
Anything tickle your fancy? Let us know your requirements. hello@pushgroup.co.uk
Nemash Patel Marketing manager
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NEW Pushlings
Andrew I’m Andrew and one of the new bloods at Push, having made my first steps into the world of PPC in September 2018. Perhaps we met at the November event at Google HQ. If not, I’m sure we will at some stage! I’ll kick off with a bit about myself (being a Leo, this comes naturally). I’m a true-blue Scot, with my family coming from way up north in Thurso, just a few miles down the coast from John o’ Groats. I grew up in Edinburgh (plenty rain, big castle), before studying for my undergrad at St Andrews (more rain, slightly smaller castle), but I’ve spent most of my summers and free weekends throughout my teenage/early adult years exploring Scotland.
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So if there’s anything you’d like to know about places to go, things to see, or what not to ask for at the chip shop, drop me a line. Surprisingly, I’m the only Scotsman in the office! This left me feeling a wee bit lonely during the Rugby World Cup; but I must admit it was refreshing to rock up to our black-tie Christmas party without the usual anxiety over my tartan clashing with somebody else’s… I moved down to the glorious south almost two years ago now, firstly to study for a Masters at King’s College London, before joining the Push team just a few days after handing in my dissertation. To be honest, the past six months have been quite a blur! I think that’s a strong reflection on the nature of Push, and in particular, two of our key values: Fast and Always Ahead. Everything about starting my role here, from the assessment day in March through to the first five or six weeks of on-the-job training and build-up of tasks and projects, has felt like one fluid, efficient motion. I’m genuinely surprised at how quickly myself and the others who started alongside me Grace, Natalia, Lauren, James - have integrated into the team. If you’d told me in 2017, when I was buried in 20th Century Irish literature writing my undergraduate dissertation, that my first ‘proper’ job would have me speaking on stage at Google
HQ within eight weeks of starting, I’m not sure what I’d have done (apart from, most likely, being significantly less stressed).
awesome new software tools for data collection and expansion into different platforms, like Facebook and Linkedin.
What are these amazing things I’ve learnt? Well, I’ve been working with Charlie and Tariq in our specialised Lead Generation department, driving some exceptionally powerful accounts to deliver high-converting, low-funnel leads across a number of verticals, from insurance to solar panelling to web extensions. I’ve learnt the importance of seeing the bigger picture through the details: small changes can yield results that are bigger than expected.
That’s it from me for now. All the best for the year ahead - slàinte!
I’ve learnt the importance of speed and efficiency: faster changes yield quicker results, which benefit you for longer. And I’ve learnt that it’s almost always worth experimenting: innovative changes yield results that, good or bad, are guaranteed to teach you something new. Through it all, I’ve been able to feel the impact of my team’s work for our clients in real time, seeing the number of leads and value thereof grow month-on-month. I can’t wait to see where 2020 takes us. We’ve got a lot on the table in terms of innovation in Lead Gen both in and out of the search ads interfaces from new automation and bid strategies through
6 Hottest Digital Marketing Trends to Be on the Lookout for in 2020 We make our customers a promise to be “Always Ahead’ and as a company value that all Pushlings live by our code. With this in mind, today we delve into the 7 hottest digital marketing trends you can utilise to stay ahead of your competition in 2020. 1) The rise of chatbots 57% of businesses agree chatbots deliver large ROI with minimal effort. What do I say to the other 43%? Maybe you are not doing it right… Push began testing chatbots three years ago and our first test wasn’t so successful, mainly because people were not interacting with our bot in the first place to give us the data we required to optimise it. Fast forward to today and we’ve had over 600 interactions with our chatbot this year, with over 200 of them being potential sales qualified leads.
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This strategy saves massive costs on hiring someone to monitor your website and communicate with visitors on an ad hoc basis. A chatbot is personable, unbiased and informative. It allows customers to make faster decisions and makes users feel like they’re being treated as individuals. The key to making the chatbot work is the same methodology we apply to marketing campaigns for customers: We need to analyse the data and optimise. Understand what questions prospects ask and ensure you continuously develop your script to answer them, review where people’s conversations drop off etc
If you’re not already on the chatbot train, you’d be well advised to buy a ticket and decide whether it’s necessary to use software unique to your company or one of the existing options on the market. 2) Paying via private messaging apps Many companies have already begun to shift their focus to improving and personalising customer interactions. A crucial way of doing this is by monetising private messaging apps, such as WeChat, Viber and WhatsApp, allowing customers to pay directly through them. WeChat Pay has already made dramatic strides in simplifying payment methods, and Venmo and PayPal users are also getting into the habit of using messaging apps to transfer money to their friends and family. 3) Voice search optimisation From a Google Ads/ Facebook perspective there isn’t a great deal we can do to optimise account performance by voice searches just yet. Projections however estimate that a staggering 50% of all searches in 2020 will be verbal so we expect this to change dramatically in the future. Whilst there isn’t a clear angle from paid search organically there are huge opportunities for voice searches.
If your site is not optimised for voice search, you could miss out on a lot of traffic. As voice search offers far fewer results, it’s harder to place your site within these — but this means, of course, that conversion rates for the select few sites that do make the cut are far higher. How, then, can you ensure that voice search will convert into sales for your business? Firstly, understand users’ language. People may be using longer sentences and more specific keywords with voice search, so optimise for these accordingly. Secondly, keep things conversational and engaging. The exchange should emulate the customer simply asking their friend for advice or a recommendation on a product or service. Finally, make sure to answer any and all questions that users may ask when it comes to your business. Voice search gives you the opportunity to provide more detailed answers than you would on another platform: people are far less averse to listening to a few sentences’ worth of information than they are to having to read that same amount.
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4) Up your personalised content marketing game (again) The competition never sleeps in digital marketing. Every single company is on the lookout for the next big thing, the freshest ideas, the most unique and quirky advertising strategies. High-quality content is and always will be one of the most effective ways of generating leads and closing deals. As we move into the 2020s, consumers are increasingly insistent on adverts with depth. Your content needs to become even more focused, even more highly specialised, in recognition of your consumers’ idiosyncrasies and preferences. Ultimately, you should be striving for a user experience that is holistic, multichannel and incomparably personable.
5) Are you utilising local influencers? Once upon a time, an influencer was a megastar with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers. Now, companies are leveraging much smaller online celebrities in order to reach targeted audiences by using a voice that the audience already know and trust. The influencer simply engages with the brand and reports back to their followers, and you know what? It works. In fact, an incredible 92% of
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customers trust recommendations that come from fellow consumers over those that come from corporate advertising. 2020 represents a prime time for companies to forge long-term partnerships with local influencers. To begin with, map locations and points of interest within your business’s vicinity. Search for YouTubers, podcasters and individuals with high levels of engagement with your target audience. Get to know them, understand their positions, then analyse and discuss a potential ongoing and mutually beneficial relationship with them — one that entails them extolling your product or service to their legions of fans!
6) Automation is inevitable Marketing in 2020 will be a more level playing field than ever before. For one, credit card companies are making it easier for startups to gain approval for larger limits that they don’t have to pay back straight away. Financing companies are now more lenient when it comes to handing out cash to spend on marketing so that non-venture-backed companies are better equipped to compete. Software solutions are increasingly integrating AI and SEO automation software, the latter having the capacity to increase page views by as much as 60% and provide 21% more keywords on page 1 alone. The competition, then, is becoming less centred around your funds and more around your company’s skill at leveraging AI and automation.
Use it or lose it.
Jay Khan Head of new business
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