In May, Microsoft Ads launched a significant update to its Universal Event Tracking Tag (UET Tag).

The UET Tag has always been a fundamental part of conversion tracking, audience building for remarketing and automated bidding strategies. The latest update from Microsoft Ads takes this one step further by allowing advertisers to better understand user engagement on their websites. This new data will provide valuable insights to ultimately help improve ad targeting.

New Features

All hosted in a robust website dashboard, the new data available includes:

• Total visits to your website and number of visits per page
• Session breakdown by country and device
• Quick backs (customers who stay on your website for just a few seconds)
• Time spent on your website

Designed to help advertisers better meet their business needs, drive more traffic and conversions, this new feature will be automatically enabled in Microsoft Ads accounts from the 3rd July 2023. This seamless upgrade requires no coding, with all existing UET Tags being migrated and new Tags automatically enrolled.

To find out more, you can read the full update from Microsoft Ads here. 

Initially launched in 2019, Google Discovery ads were designed to provide advertisers with highly engaging ads that raise awareness and help capture demand when users are most likely to buy.

In March 2023, Google announced the latest improvements to Discovery ads to help brands stand out on their most engaging ad platforms, such as YouTube, Discover (Google app-based advertising), and Gmail. 

Here’s how Google is making it easier to get your products in front of your customers when they’re ready to make a decision. 

1. Spark audience interest with product feeds 

Discovery ads can now leverage various product feed layouts, such as carousels, square, and portrait, to help create meaningful and impactful ads. With this feature, advertisers can deliver more relevant ads to their audiences based on their interests and intent. 

According to Google, adding product feeds to Discovery ads can allow you to achieve 45% more conversions at a similar CPA, when using sales or lead gen goals. Additionally, when paired with video action campaigns, you can generate deeper levels of consideration and engagement with your audience who are exploring content on YouTube. 

2. Turn data into results with better reporting and measurement

Launched at the end of March, product-level reporting allows advertisers to track the performance of their Google Merchant Center catalog items based on metrics, such as impressions or clicks. 

This is important to note as it means retailers who promote a diverse array of products will be able to identify which types of products are generating more interest and consequently take relevant business-related actions to improve performance.

 Additionally, starting in Q2, Discovery ads will be able to utilise more accurate understanding of their campaign performance within the Google ecosystem through data-driven attribution (DDA). DDA will credit conversions based on how users interact with your ads, and can identify which campaigns have the most significant impact on your business goals, using your account data. Pairing these insights with automated bidding strategies, such as max conversions, can lead to even more conversions.

3. Conversion lift experiments 

Introduced last year, conversion lift experiments is a recent Google measurement solution that allows advertisers to measure the incremental conversions based on users or geography.  

For advertisers who are running both Discovery ads and video action campaigns, you can use Conversion Lift based on geography to measure their impact together and accurately assess the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Why is this important?

Today’s consumers shop across multiple different online touch points; more than half of which use YouTube, Discover, and Gmail alongside alternative platforms when conducting product or brand research. According to Google, 91% of consumers take action directly after discovering new information, therefore, it’s important for advertisers to capture audiences in moments when they are ready to make a decision. 

Google’s new tools can help optimise your ad campaigns more effectively. Utilising product-level reporting allows advertisers to identify which products are driving the most interest and then take appropriate action. Data-driven attribution helps to accurately measure the impact of campaigns on business objectives, while Conversion Lift experiments provide insights into the incremental conversions generated by campaigns.

 

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.