4 Tests To Kickstart Your Paid Media Strategy in 2020

Spencer Jahnke: Hey, everyone. My name is Spencer Jahnke. I’m a Senior Paid Media Manager here at Augurian. Today, I’m going to be talking about trends and tests to kickstart your 2020 Paid Media campaigns.

Spencer: The first thing I want to talk about today is having an audience-first mindset when it comes to your 2020 strategy. That death of the keyword has been approaching us, but it’s still a huge component of advertisers’ campaign structure and strategy. While the keywords are not dead yet, the way that we use keywords is starting to change.

Platforms like Google and Bing are providing us with so much additional audience data that we really need to start utilizing. It makes the keyword less and less important to be able to make sure that we’re reaching the right user at the right time, structuring your campaigns and your strategy around the audience-first, and using keywords as an additional intent filter.

The reason being as we target higher intent audiences, audiences such as past visitors, or users who have conducted secondary conversion actions, or even multiple purchasers, the intent of our keywords can be more and more broad. For using that same example, if someone has purchased from us multiple times, and we want to make them become a loyal customer, we want to target that individual audience, but the keywords that we want to target can be very broad. We want to make sure that we’re hitting them throughout their entire search life cycle.

The second thing that I wanted to cover today is how social platforms are evolving after increasing privacy regulations. Regulations like ITP 2.0 and beyond are making it more and more important for social platforms to keep the user on their platform all the way from start to finish. Because of this, we’re seeing these platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook, start to push some of these ad units such as instant transactions and lead form ads to try to keep the user on their platform and that they’re not losing that valuable Click ID.

Because of this, us as advertisers should start testing out these ad units to make sure that they work for you. It may also get you some additional impressions now that these social platforms are trying to push those more. The third thing to get your 2020 media strategy a kick-start is to make sure that you’re on the leading edge of a platform’s life cycle. Here at Augurian, we utilize a core in edge approach to our Paid Media spending to make sure that we’re utilizing tactics that are able to scale.

There’s a big opportunity for us as advertisers to test out some new platforms that are not yet saturated. Platforms such as Twitch and Tik Tok and even newer ones, such as Brave Ads, which is a search platform that’s based off of privacy. Being flexible with your budget and testing out some of these new platforms and being the first one into those markets is going to be a huge way for you to find growth for your clients.

The last thing that I wanted to cover today is on attribution. 2020 is the year to reassess your attribution model and to make sure you’re focusing on the proper KPIs.

We talked about all of these new platforms that you should be testing in 2020. Not all of those should have the exact same KPIs. Not all platforms are created equal. Not all users use these platforms in the same way. We shouldn’t be measuring the same KPI across all of them. For 2020, I recommend one looking at a different attribution model. Long gone are the days of last click, so you shouldn’t be using that as an attribution model within your paid search and social.

Another recommendation is to look at some secondary KPIs. You can do this by looking either in Google ads or even in Google Analytics, looking at things like click-assisted or impression-assisted conversions. This will help us get a bigger picture on what tactics or what platforms are playing a big role in the consumer journey, but aren’t necessarily that last click lead generator. We know that these other tactics are key to help growing our business. We need to make sure that we’re able to provide them with some value in some KPIs so that we’re able to continue to get budget for those tactics.

First step in 2020 to reassess your attribution model is step one, get away from last click. Go within Google ads and just make a switch to any other attribution model besides last click. That’s the easy first step. Then from there on, we can figure out how in Google Analytics or whatever you’re using for analytics or your measurement tool, we’re able to figure out how we can make a slow switch to another attribution to figure out how we can value these other very valuable tactics.

Thank you guys very much for tuning in. I really hope these were helpful for you guys in creating a successful 2020 Paid Media strategy. Feel free to follow up with us if you guys have any more questions or would like some more information on strategy for your Paid Media plans. Thank you very much.