A content series is a sequence of related content around a key topic; each piece is a digestible chunk of information that can stand on its own, but also adds to the overall story. Publishing a content series allows you to provide information in a consistent and creative way, and helps to build an audience interested in your particular niche. An effective content series is important for your travel marketing strategy because it adds to the overall story your company is trying to tell while maintaining audience interest, streamlining your content creation process, building credibility, and boosting SEO efforts.
Maintains your audience’s interest
Content series are a great way to sustain audience interest and engagement for the content you are producing. This means it is vital your first instalment of the content series is captivating, establishes credibility, and engages the audience to ensure they continue to return to your page for the next part.
So, how would this work in your travel marketing strategy? One way you may want to utilise a content series to maintain audience interest is to create a course of blog posts about specific locations within a country. For example, instead of creating a combined list of the ‘Top 5 Cities In Spain’, you could share travel insights in five bite-sized segments to make the content more digestible for your audience and to provoke a sense of anticipation for more information about popular destinations within a country.
Streamlines your content creation process
Producing, editing, and managing one-off pieces of content can be a time consuming process. However, utilising content series can optimise and streamline your content creation process, making more efficient use of your time and energy.
Using content series in your marketing strategy allows you to re-purpose the same core content, format, and creative processes to create a sequence of engaging travel content. Not only does this make your content creation process more efficient, but it also ensures that you are regularly posting high-quality content to maintain engagement with your audience.
Builds trust & credibility
Regardless of if your content series contributes to a particular topic or adds to a broader conversation, it can help prove your company’s expertise and credibility within the travel and tourism industry. This is because incorporating a content series into your marketing strategy means you are regularly showing up on your audience’s feed, and people tend to search for dependable sources of information. Therefore, this is an effective way to build trust, reliability, and credibility. As your audience begins to put more trust in your company, you will establish more authority, create more interest, and generate more leads and bookings.
Boost your SEO efforts
Another important reason for creating a content series as part of your travel content marketing strategy is to boost your SEO efforts. You can do this by selecting a theme, researching related search terms, and then selecting focus keywords to utilise throughout your series to increase your visibility around that topic.
As we head into the business end of Q4, it’s more important than ever to get better performance from your digital marketing campaigns. One way to do that is through utilising Performance Max campaigns and especially the new features.
If you are unfamiliar with a Performance Max campaign, you can read our previous article. To recap, it’s a new innovative type of campaign that has replaced smart shopping and can reach all of Google’s inventory and more. Luckily, there are new features that have recently been added to help achieve your business goals this holiday season.
Product feed explanations
All marketers using Google Ads will be aware of explanations – insights the engine gives about fluctuations in performance. While they are already available for Performance Max campaigns, it is now possible to see explanations about your product feed. With this new addition, you are able to see useful explanations about your product type, listing groups, highest selling products and product status. All of this allows you to see the biggest changes in performance, and gives you the information to react accordingly in order to achieve your business goals.
Asset group scheduling
Another useful tool for this holiday season is asset group scheduling. You can apply automated rules to your Performance Max asset groups to schedule when they should be enabled or paused. This means you can schedule them to be enabled to make sure that they are approved in time or to be enabled between specific hours of the day. Not to mention, the convenience of not needing to manually pause and enable asset groups.
Performance Planner
By far the biggest and most important feature is the addition of the performance planner. One of the biggest gripes for marketers running Performance Max campaigns was not being able to use the performance planner tool. Now that it is possible to use it, you can forecast what performance could be in order to maximise ROAS and profit. It’s even possible to adjust your ROAS or CPA targets and budget in order to simulate how performance could change. This is especially useful for the holiday season as it takes into account seasonal events, making the forecast even more accurate.
Planned features
In the coming weeks, Google is planning to roll out two new features that will improve Performance Max campaigns. The first is expanding the number of headlines from 5 to 15, this allows even more testing of combinations in order to find the best performing one. The second planned feature is adding data segments to the insights page. This will allow you to see which of your customer lists are performing best.
Summary
During this important time of the year for many businesses, Google’s new Performance Max features are extremely useful for reaching your business goals whether they are sales or leads. If you would like help setting up or optimising your Performance Max campaigns, please contact us.
As a Drupal Association Organisation Member, we’ve been proud supporters of Drupal for many years and Drupal is our go to CMS for many of our web development clients. When new Drupal releases launch, we’re often busy helping clients plan their upgrade path and with Drupal 10 launching in December, it’s a busy end to the year for our web development teams.
Drupal 10 upgrade path
If you’re already on Drupal 9 then upgrading to Drupal 10 is a relatively simple upgrade. However for older versions of Drupal, the upgrade path is a little more complicated. Drupal 9 provides the required technical architecture to upgrade to Drupal 10 and with Drupal 7 end of life scheduled for November 2023 and with Drupal 8 already retired in November 2021, there is no better time to make sure you’ve upgraded to Drupal 9.
Drupal 10 borrows heavily from Drupal 9 an includes several key features of Drupal 9
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Themes are overhauled with Seven being replaced by Claro as the administration theme, the default Bartik theme is replaced by Olivero and there’s a new theme Starterkit tool for theme creation
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CKEditor 5 replaces CKEditor 4 for a more up to date editing and content management experience
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Some elements of JQuery are replaced by more modern JavaScript components
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Symfony 4 is replaced by Symfony 6 and PHP 8.1 is used
System management and development is greatly enhanced with Distributions, Starter Kits and Recipes that can help make the ideal start points for new projects and there’s plenty of pipeline developments coming soon too. Automatic Updates will help ease system maintenance tasks with intelligent patching capabilities and Project Browser will help admins easily find new modules and themes for their projects.
All in all Drupal 10 promises to be a feature rich and important landmark in the evolution of the Drupal platform and as an agency committed to Drupal development, we look forward to our clients making the most of the new release.
If you’ve ever wanted to look at what ads brands have live on Google but know that conducting search after search will never give you the full picture, you’re going to want to read this.
Introducing the Google Ads Transparency tool!
Launched in September 2022. it allows you to see all Search, Text & Video ads by any brand currently advertising on Google. You can also filter by date, territory and ad format.
Over the past couple of years, Google has been building on its transparency programme. This started with the advertiser identity verification programme – asking advertisers to provide documents that prove they are who they say they are, what country they operate from and details of what is being sold – and has now expanded to include ‘About this Ad’ disclosures.
In Google’s official announcement they said “This transparency helps users learn more about the company behind a specific ad. It also helps differentiate credible advertisers in the ecosystem, while limiting the ability of bad actors to misinterpret themselves.”
This means anyone will be able to click to learn more about the advertiser, but more importantly view all their ads from the last 30 days.
Here’s how
Step 1: Search for a brand/product on Google to trigger an ad.
Step 2: Click the dropdown arrow next to the ad, to the right of the display URL
Step 3: An ‘About this ad’ panel will open, click ‘See more ads by this advertiser’.
Step 4: You’ll be navigated to Google’s Ad Transparency page, which will list all the ads the advertiser is currently serving.
Here you are able to adjust the date range, location and ad format to refine your browsing.
So why is this useful?
The tool allows you to see what creative and messaging other brands are currently using in rotation. It provides an opportunity for inspiration to improve your own advertising, perhaps expanding from text only ads to broader campaign types such as Display and Video.
The tool might also enable you to spot a gap in the market to help differentiate your brand from your competition.
Thinking in terms of competition, it can be a great tool for auditing and providing insight into competitor advertising and the types of copy and creative they use. Being able to clearly see your competitors’ USPs, promotions, brand messaging, photography etc. could influence your performance marketing calendar.
As digital marketers, this is a useful feature from Google, providing better competitor insight to inform and differentiate the marketing strategy we provide our clients. It is also a responsible move in the right direction to provide transparency and control to the user, creating an overall more trustworthy ad experience.
Consumer expectations are higher than ever before; increased mobile adoption has conditioned consumers to turn to their mobile devices for instantaneous information, often while they’re multitasking. Increasingly, consumers are using voice searches on their smartphones, smart speakers, smart TVs, cars, wearables, and other connectable devices to ask for digital assistance in I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy micro-moments.
Voice search is increasing in popularity
Initially introduced as more of a novelty than a feature consumers relied upon, voice search was launched by Google in 2011 as a new way for consumers to search the web on connectable devices.
Every time a voice search is conducted, the digital assistant filters the sounds to ensure it focuses on the search query not the background noise, transforms the query into digital data, conduct a voice analysis, process the digital data, and then connect to external data sources to find relevant answers and translate the information to satisfy the searcher’s intent.
Voice search eliminates the effort required for typing a query into a search bar, particularly on mobile devices where the keyboard is smaller, thus providing the convenience and speed of information that modern consumers crave.
Since 2011, improvements in speech recognition technology has caused a gradual rise in adoption and dominance of voice search which now can’t – and shouldn’t – be ignored.
Embracing and optimising for voice search is important for every business
Voice search is a prominent digital marketing trend. In 2022, Google reported that 27% of the global population is using voice search on mobile.
At Strange, 6.4% of search terms triggering our campaigns used conversational, long-tail, and question terms; indicating the use of voice search.
The voice search trend is set to grow in the coming years, and as voice searches becomes more common, embracing and optimising for voice search is an important consideration for every business.
So, how can you optimise your digital strategy for voice search? First, it’s important to understand how user’s search queries differ from those in traditional search queries:
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Voice queries are longer and more conversational in comparison to traditional search queries because the user is talking to the search engine instead of typing in text.
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Voice searchers typically ask for products or services using questions, so thinking about the which, what, why, how, and where of your offering is important when determining your keywords.
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Voice search queries are often for local content; user’s are more likely to make “near me” searches. So local SEO is important to consider.
Therefore, keyword research and generation by thinking like the user – targeting long-tail, conversational, and question keywords and then using these keywords contextually – is pivotal when optimising for voice search.
Voice search will only continue to grow and improve over time
It was recently announced that the University of Illinois, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are joining forces in the new Speech Accessibility Project to develop advanced voice recognition systems and make voice search accessible to users with non-standard speech patterns (Google). Given that all five tech giants will work together to solve speech recognition problems, instead of separately, further signifies the expected prevalence of voice search in the near future.
It’s likely that voice search technology will continue to improve, connected devices will gain more enhanced voice-enabled features, and consumers will become more comfortable using their voices as a way to search, so digital marketers need to study voice search statistics to identify new trends and reveal how consumer’s search habits are shifting with the ever-increasing usage of voice search.
With Google automatically upgrading Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max, it’s more important than ever to ask what is Performance Max and should my business use it?
What Is Performance Max?
Performance Max is an innovative new goal-based campaign type that will help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display and Search. Simply give your ad creative and Google will use automation and machine learning to determine the most efficient delivery and placement of ads across their entire inventory.
Smart Shopping and local store visits campaigns are being automatically upgraded to Performance Max. If you were previously running any of these campaign types, it is vital to understand Performance Max in order to maintain and increase performance for your business.
Should I Use Performance Max?
The combination of all the different platforms, Google’s machine learning and the limited ad creative that’s needed can create a campaign that is easy to set-up and profitable for your business.
Performance Max expands your reach considerably as it can reach across Google’s ad inventory. This can help you not only deliver conversions, but brand awareness as well. In terms of ad creative, at minimum you just need to provide 4 images, 4 headlines and 2 descriptions.
For one ecommerce client that we look after, ROAS increased by 26% and purchases increased by 24% YoY with using Performance Max compared to Smart Shopping.
However, there are limitations to using Performance Max. One of the biggest is the lack of data, you can’t see which platform or device is converting the best to optimise for it. You also cannot add any negative keywords so you are completely relying on the accuracy of Google’s algorithm.
Overall, using Performance Max can have very positive results for your business, utilising machine learning and Google’s algorithm across different platforms. While the lack of transparency may be frustrating, we would still recommend setting up a Performance Max campaign to replace smart shopping campaigns and in addition to search campaigns for lead generation.
FAQS
What goals can I select for Performance Max?
Sales, leads, website traffic, local store visits & promotions.
Should I stop search campaigns after launching Performance Max?
No, if a search term matches both a Search campaign and Performance Max – Search will take priority. Performance Max can also reach platforms that Search cannot.
Can I see on which platforms my Performance Max campaign is serving?
You can see the independent websites and apps your Performance Max campaign has served by impressions. For Google platforms you cannot see which individual channel your campaign served. There is no conversion data by platform.
Where can I find the creative assets needed for a Performance Max campaign?
Google’s creative requirements can be found here.
Can you disable videos being automatically created?
Currently there is no way to disable out of the automatically created videos.
Does Performance Max cannibalise brand search campaigns?
No, when a query matches a keyword in a brand search campaign, the search campaign will be prioritised over the Performance Max campaign.
Is Performance Max only available for ecommerce businesses?
No, performance max campaigns are available for lead gen businesses as well.
