In its monthly recap of significant developments, Microsoft Advertising shared the latest news about its new partnership with Baidu Global, advertising opportunities, and Bing’s rebranding to Copilot.
These advancements boost advertiser reach and efficiency, representing a notable expansion as the holiday season approaches.
Microsoft And Baidu: A Strategic Alliance
Microsoft Advertising advanced its commitment to generative artificial intelligence (AI) with a new partnership with Baidu Global, aiming to roll out in 2024 in markets like the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.
This collaboration leverages Microsoft’s Chat Ads API, allowing Baidu Global Keyboard, a mobile app enriched with natural language processing and generative AI features, to deliver tailored and engaging sponsored content.
Screenshot from Microsoft, November 2023
This partnership provides a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a broader and more diverse audience, particularly Gen Z, across various app environments.
Microsoft emphasizes the potential of this partnership to enhance user experiences with more relevant content and continues to explore innovative ways to utilize generative AI in advertising.
Expanded Advertising Opportunities
Microsoft Store Ads, now available globally, offer advertisers a way to boost app and game downloads. This feature allows for broad geographic targeting, including worldwide campaigns.
Microsoft has extended Video and Connected TV advertising to 32 Americas, EMEA, and APAC markets. This expansion underscores the growing relevance of video in advertising strategies.
In addition, Microsoft Advertising also introduced bulk management for predictive targeting to identify potential high-conversion audiences.
The platform has also upgraded its Google Import feature to facilitate importing discovery and demand gen campaigns from Google Ads.
Bing Becomes Copilot
In a significant rebranding, Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise have transitioned to Copilot, enhancing the AI-driven chat experience for users.
These updates highlight Microsoft Advertising’s commitment to innovation and customer empowerment in the digital ad arena, with the Baidu partnership emphasizing AI’s role in future growth.
As the holiday shopping season approaches its zenith, advertisers are keenly preparing for the final rush of consumer spending. Microsoft Advertising provides insights and strategies to help businesses capitalize on the festive season in its Festive Season Marketing Playbook.
The focus is on understanding consumer behaviors and leveraging Microsoft’s advertising capabilities to maximize reach and revenue.
1. Revenue Peaks: A Matter of Timing
Despite some advertisers not yet seeing a peak in revenue, there is no cause for alarm.
Historically, significant revenue spikes are observed around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year, consumers are anticipated to spend more during these critical days.
The National Retail Federation predicts a 3-4% increase in holiday spending in the US, potentially reaching up to $966.6 billion. Similarly, high spending is forecasted in the UK and Germany, emphasizing the global impact of this season.
2. Shift in Consumer Behavior: The Rise of Deal-Seeking
A notable trend this year is the increased emphasis on deal-seeking.
Over two-thirds of US shoppers are spending more time looking for coupons and deals, particularly around the ‘Cyber-5’ period.
This period, including Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Sunday, and Cyber Monday, has become a crucial window for consumer spending.
Advertisers must adapt to this trend and align their strategies accordingly.
3. The Central Role of Search in Purchasing Decisions
Search remains a crucial component in guiding both online and in-store purchases. It’s a pivotal tool for discovering new retailers, conducting pre-purchase research, and comparing prices.
Gen X consumers, for example, heavily rely on search to find the best prices. Additionally, the EMEA region sees deal-seekers spending 33% more time searching than average shoppers.
This trend provides a significant opportunity for targeted advertising, primarily through platforms like Microsoft Advertising, which taps into billions of global monthly searches.
4. Post Cyber-5 Opportunities: Maintaining Momentum
Even after the Cyber-5 period, search volumes remain high, presenting a continued opportunity for advertisers.
Microsoft’s research indicates that many holiday clicks and conversions happen during Cyber-5, with lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Therefore, maintaining active advertising campaigns during this period can yield substantial benefits.
5. Planning For Returns: An Overlooked Aspect
Another critical aspect for businesses to consider is the post-holiday return period. Search volumes for returns peak shortly after Christmas and continue into the new year. Preparing for this influx and adjusting marketing strategies can help mitigate potential losses and maintain customer satisfaction.
6. Strategic Holiday Planning Checklist
To maximize the holiday season, Microsoft suggested that advertisers should:
Launch campaigns early to capture early shoppers.
Use remarketing and dynamic search ads to target holiday-specific products and promotions.
Emphasize value messages and promotions to attract deal-seekers.
Leverage AI for personalized offerings and responsive ad formats.
Utilize store support for profitable online growth, including Local Inventory Ads and Mobile Device Modifiers.
Microsoft Advertising offers more tips and comprehensive resources in its Festive Holiday Season Marketing Playbook and on-demand webcasts to assist advertisers in navigating this crucial period.
If you’re looking for a game-changing solution, join us on December 6 as we reveal a proven formula to help you supercharge your strategy.
In this webinar, we’re cracking the code to customer acquisition and walking you through a unique methodology that has driven low-cost growth for hundreds of SaaS brands – from startups to publicly traded companies.
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Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll take away from this live presentation:
The Power of First-Party Data: Learn how and why leveraging first-party data rather than third-party data is the key to campaign success.
Financial Modeling with LTV:CAC: Discover how to analyze channel performance through use of the Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC) ratio for better budget allocation that your CFO will love.
Getting Personal with Your Pipeline: Develop laser-focused psychological marketing tactics and use gift-giving to boldly identify and emotionally resonate with your precise target personas at your ideal accounts.
With Garrett Mehrguth, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Directive, we’ll dive into key insights on Customer Generation, the proven methodology that makes sure you never miss your growth goals again.
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Attend live, and you’ll even get the chance to chat with your industry peers and ask Garrett your most burning questions.
Register now and access the expert tips to guide you through 2024 and beyond. Don’t miss out!
Google recently rolled out ACA for Responsive Search Ads (RSA) in 8 different languages, marking a significant step forward in digital advertising technology.
This feature aims to streamline the ad creation process, save valuable time for marketers, and enhance the relevance and performance of ads.
What Are Automatically-Created Assets (ACA)?
Automatically-created assets are a feature that enables the automatic generation of headlines and descriptions for RSAs.
The main goal of ACA is to assist advertisers in creating more relevant ads, thereby providing incremental conversion opportunities. This feature primarily benefits marketers seeking efficiency in ad creation without compromising ad quality.
How Is ACA Content Sourced?
ACA pulls content from the advertiser’s resources, including landing pages, existing ads, and keywords.
This process ensures that the automatically generated assets are relevant and consistent with the brand’s existing messaging and SEO strategies. A crucial tip for advertisers is to keep their website content current to make the most out of this feature.
How Can I Manage ACA?
Advertisers can view ACAs in the “Asset source” column in the ad and campaign-level asset reporting, letting marketers understand how ACAs contribute to their overall ad performance.
Additionally, ACAs can be easily managed: marketers can review and remove assets as needed. Notably, any ACA with a “low” performance rating is automatically removed, ensuring only the most effective investments are circulated.
Should I Rely On ACA?
ACA is compatible with Draft and Experiments in Google Ads, allowing advertisers to test their effectiveness in controlled settings.
Advertisers need to understand that while ACA is a powerful tool, it should augment, not replace, their existing assets. Marketers are encouraged to continue providing a variety of assets (up to 15 headlines and four descriptions) to maintain a diverse and effective ad strategy.
Conclusion
The introduction of ACA by Google Ads represents a significant advancement in digital advertising.
This feature not only promises to save time for marketers but also to enhance the relevance and effectiveness of ads. As the digital advertising landscape evolves, features like ACA will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping future ad strategies.
As pay-per-click (PPC) marketing evolves with new trends constantly emerging, it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts.
What worked for your PPC campaigns in the past may no longer cut it.
Not only do consumers continue to change, but the technology available to marketers is always advancing – not to mention search engines and social media platforms throwing curveballs into the mix.
Between widespread adoption of AI, inflation in cost-per-click (CPC) budgets, and new shifts in user engagement, we’ve seen a lot of changes in 2023 that will shape your PPC strategy moving forward.
So, if you’re looking to get ahead in the dynamic world of PPC, the key is adapting and knowing when to pivot.
Download our PPC Trends ebook to access expert insights on what’s coming, what you should pay attention to, and what to avoid.
This sixth edition features commentary from 13 of the top PPC marketing experts. Inside are the latest developments over the past year and how you can leverage these trends in 2024 and beyond.
Let’s dive into three of the core ideas outlined in the ebook:
AI in PPC: The potential these new tools offer, along with the limitations that can lead to pitfalls.
How to control your budgets and maximize value amidst CPC inflation.
The new user engagement channels shaping PPC, and what you should focus on.
AI In PPC: Potential & Limitations
AI had its moment in the spotlight this year, with several shiny new AI features making their debut on PPC platforms. Marketers also began adopting generative AI in earnest.
But now that the dust is settling, we’re realizing that it’s not all black and white.
While some experts champion the benefits of AI, like automated ad campaigns, others advise caution.
AI has its strengths, but it’s not a universal fix – and human thinking and creativity still drive online interactions.
One key point to note is that it’s not always about directly seeking cheaper CPC prices, but rather extracting maximum value from your CPCs as they are.
Here are three key insights on CPC inflation:
Cost-cutting, for its own sake, isn’t always the way.
Don’t obsess over what you can’t control; make the higher cost worth it.
Don’t mindlessly follow the metrics fed to you. Validate your data.
You must also be willing to experiment to discover positive and negative outcomes.
Plus, you’ll need buy-in from stakeholders to be flexible about key performance indicators (KPIs) – and be willing to engage in activity that’s more difficult to measure directly.
Here are three key insights on how you can lean into change, but in service of marketing strategies that have always been effective:
Meet people where they are isn’t a new concept, but it will require you to learn new platforms and new ways of engagement.
Stubborn adherence to one channel or one data source won’t work: You need new channels, new sources of data, and a model to draw insights from various sources.
Embrace the new in service of what you’ve always known about marketing.
Discover more of the trends that made waves in 2023 and are set to reshape the future of advertising.
Read expert insights from:
Akvile DeFazio, Founder, AKvertise.
Alex Macura, Founder/CEO, Your Digital Assembly.
Amalia Fowler, Principal Strategist, Good AF Consulting.
During its latest quarterly earnings call, Microsoft highlighted how it is leveraging artificial intelligence to improve search, advertising, and productivity.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, stated that the company is “redefining how people use the internet to search and create” with AI copilot capabilities.
These include GitHub Copilot for developers, Power Platform Copilot for low-code app development, and Dynamics 365 Copilot for business applications.
Microsoft also announced Copilot for Office productivity apps and Teams, generally available in November.
Microsoft is infusing AI across Bing to provide more relevant personalized answers and recommendations.
The company believes this will increase engagement on Bing and its Edge browser, which continues to gain market share.
Microsoft is also expanding Bing AI integration into third-party experiences like Meta’s chat platform. The goal is to broaden Bing’s reach by allowing it to respond to more contexts.
During the earnings call, Microsoft executives explained they are incorporating AI directly into their advertising platforms. This includes Microsoft’s own search and news ads.
Notably, Microsoft sees AI as a critical way to drive monetization for search through more effective ads. By better understanding user intent through AI, Microsoft can improve ad relevance.
Microsoft pointed to early solid adoption of its Azure OpenAI service, which provides access to large AI models.
The company highlighted OpenAI usage by new Azure customers and digital-first companies looking to build AI solutions. This demonstrates Microsoft’s strategy to leverage AI capabilities to attract developers and workloads to Azure.
While Microsoft plans to ramp up investments in AI, it expects to maintain operating margins stable year-over-year through cost discipline. Microsoft is confident it can gain a share during this new AI wave.
The search marketing landscape is evolving rapidly with new technologies. This year alone, we’ve seen the rise of generative AI, new developments in automation and voice search, and the emergence of new ad formats.
We understand the challenge that professionals like you face. How do you know which ways to innovate with your paid search strategies?
What’s the best way to meet these changing demands without sacrificing efficiency or ROI?
No matter how you look at it, one thing is clear: it’s time to start planning new paid search strategies to keep up with these changing trends.
It can feel daunting – that’s why we want to help.
Get the on-demand webinar now, and learn the top trends in paid search advertising expected to gain traction so you can drive higher ROI more efficiently in 2024.
Paid search experts Sreekant Lanka from iQuanti and Irina Klein from OneMain Financial will dive into the future of paid search and explore the trends, strategies, and technologies that will shape the search marketing landscape.
The latest trends in AI and automation, and what this means for an evolving paid search ecosystem.
New developments in privacy and data regulation.
Emerging ad formats that are expected to make an impact next year.
How new focuses on voice search & visual search are expected to affect paid search marketing.
2024 is just around the corner, and with so many innovations in paid search, it’s never too soon to start planning your paid strategy and stay ahead of your competition.
Learn more in our on-demand webinar, where you’ll have an opportunity to assess your paid search strategy and design an industry-aligned plan for 2024.
How To Boost 2024 SEO Performance With Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters
Join SEO experts and Conductor’s Customer Success Managers, Alex Carchietta and Zack Kadish, to learn how effective pillar pages and clustered content improve site structure, internal linking, and on-page SEO.
This post was sponsored by Directive Consulting. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
At a standstill about how to best market your new tool?
Wishing you could accurately know which ads will return the highest qualified conversion rates?
Does reaching out to businesses often end in learning that they’re not a good fit for your company?
When it comes to SaaS marketing, the key to success is knowing what’s truly attainable with your tool’s features and solutions plus the audience that’s open and ready to buy a new tool.
So, who exactly are these potential B2B customers who are looking for your new tool amid the competition? Your Total Addressable Market (TAM).
Don’t know what a TAM is or how to create one? You’re not alone.
Using a TAM list for your advertising reduces that waste, assuring all your advertising dollars are spent on the right companies your sales team would love to talk with.
For the most powerful go-to-market strategy, your market differentiator will be clear when you consider your true, total addressable market to your SaaS marketing strategy.
With this guide to creating, building, and knowing your TAM, your upgraded SaaS platform’s GTM strategy will be able to:
Guide more productive resource allocation.
Improve your budget allocation.
Make more accurate pricing decisions.
Guide strategic decisions.
Create higher-converting advertising.
Create your ultimate go-to-market strategy.
Understanding and creating your total addressable market, or TAM, is essential for any SaaS company.
If you’re a little uncertain, don’t worry; Directive’s own SaaS PPC experts finessed the exact process here for you. This is based on our own experience as well as hundreds of other SaaS businesses that have used this same process and are seeing serious results.
First, let’s understand what a TAM is and why it’s important.
It identifies the factors that make up your best-fit customer base.
It looks at all businesses and individuals that could benefit from or have a need for your offering and afford your pricing based on:
Demographic data.
Geographic areas.
Firmographic data.
Technographic factors.
Why Is Building & Understanding Your TAM Important?
Understanding your TAM helps your business assess your growth potential and make informed decisions about market entry and resource allocation.
It’s important because it helps guide your go-to-market strategy.
TAM is a crucial concept in business strategy and market analysis as it helps companies gauge the total number of potential customers and the size of the revenue potential.
Most people use third-party data, such as industry targeting on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram, when advertising with paid social media. This approach is flawed because of how each platform categorizes companies in certain industries. This results in a lot of wasted spend on companies you could never work with.
Using a TAM list for your advertising reduces that waste, assuring all your advertising dollars are spent on the right companies your sales team would love to talk with.
How To Build A TAM List
It’s not a good idea to grab the entire market; instead, you should start with a bottom-up approach, looking at our best customers.
Step 1: Create A Lookalike List Of Your Current VIP Customers
When building a TAM, you first need to understand the criteria we’ll use to determine the total available market.
To do this, export a .csv list of your current customers with the following criteria:
LTV (Lifetime value) or how long they’ve been a customer.
Close rates.
Any other information that would be helpful to determine the best customers such as NPS (net promoter score).
Note: If you don’t have enough customer data, you can pull late-stage opportunity companies to get a more extensive data pull.
Image created by Directive Consulting, October 2023
From there, you want to upload that list to any data provider such as Zoominfo, Clearbit, Apollo, or Crunchbase. There are many options to choose from, but you’ll want to choose the one best for you.
You’ll then want to upload that customer list (A CSV file) to the data provider of your choice.
Once uploaded to the data provider, append any data that would be helpful for your company. At the minimum, this should be:
Company name.
Company website and domain.
Employee size.
Industries (categories and tags).
Revenue amount (Please note this is most accurate if your potential customers are public companies, private is often inaccurate).
Image created by Directive Consulting, October 2023
Most of these data providers will also provide you with more data alongside the above.
Depending on your company, there are often other traits you’ll want to add in as a column as well, such as:
Emails sent (If an email provider).
IT tech spend.
X department headcount.
Funding rounds and amounts (Especially for software companies).
Certain technology used.
Now we want to export it from the data provider and append it to your customer list so now you’ll have extra columns and data next to your customer list so you can see things such as ACV by employee size range and industries, highest LTV customers by IT tech spend or technology used.
Step 2: Export “Look-A-Like Audience” Of Best-Fit Customers
Now that you’ve determined your best-fit customer criteria, you will go back into the data provider and create a list of companies that fit that criteria.
Once you’ve found all the companies that fit that criteria, you want to export it and manually verify it’s correct.
Step 3: Manually Verifying Your Data
Now that you’ve exported the list of “look-a-like” companies from your data provider, the list building isn’t done.
We still need to go through each of them and manually verify them. This is because none of the data providers are perfect in how they classify industries and companies.
Download Template – See this template here of a TAM list set up with manual verification and tiering.
If you don’t go through and check each website, you’ll find companies that shouldn’t be in the industry you chose, we’re acquired, or the website redirects to another (Or worse, a 404 error).
Your marketing and sales teams can spearhead the manual verification process, or outsource it to VAs with precise instructions to help determine if the company fits within the criteria you chose.
Image created by Directive Consulting, October 2023
Don’t Skip The Manual Verification Process
Do not skip over this part of the process, as it is imperative. On average, across many data providers tested, we found that 50% of the companies on that list won’t be in the right industry.
This part is critical; if you don’t manually verify the data, you’ll waste a lot of ad spend and resources on companies you could never work with.
Step 4: Segment Your TAM List
After manually verifying your TAM, you’ll want to segment it into tiers. The number of tiers will depend on the size of your TAM and the criteria that make a better and higher ACV client. Less is more here, but you want to split the TAM into market segments to better allocate budget and resources.
For example, if you have 10,000 companies in your TAM list, you could split it into three tiers:
Enterprise (Over 1,000 employee companies).
Mid-Market ( 100 to 999 employee companies).
SMB (Under 100 employees).
This split allows for better allocation of your budget within the advertising platforms, life cycle stage progression (As larger companies usually have a longer sales cycle), and sales routing (Ex: Enterprise accounts to Enterprise AEs).
Download Template – See this template here of a TAM list set up with manual verification and tiering.
Step 5: Aligning Your TAM With Your Go-To-Market Strategy
Now that you have your manually verified TAM list and segmented, you can use it in your go-to-market strategy.
This TAM list should be the backbone of your marketing strategy.
CRM Upload
The first thing you’ll want to do is upload it into your CRM and tag it with something like “Enterprise TAM, SMB TAM, etc. ” this way, everyone in your org will be able to see what accounts are in your TAM, engagement, market share taken as well as inform strategy.
Advertising
It’s a great idea to utilize this list in your paid social advertising. It’s best used with LinkedIn Conversation ads as you can upload the list and target these specific accounts, so you’re wasting your dollars on companies you can’t work with.
Nearly 50% of your ad spend is wasted pre-impressions if relying on industry targeting.
You can also do this in programmatic platforms that allow you to upload target accounts for the targeting.
You can also do this on Facebook and Instagram if using a B2B targeting tool such as Metadata, Clearbit advertising, or Say Primer, where you can import B2B audiences such as your TAM list into Meta for advertising.
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible with the current native targeting that Meta offers.
Create Your TAM & Use It
Creating a TAM is essential for any business, especially for B2B and technology companies. This market research guides every aspect of your go-to-market strategy to help you hit growth goals.
It requires some upfront work and hours, but you won’t regret it.
Need help building your TAM or, more importantly, using it in your go-to-market strategy to drive more pipeline and revenue? Our team at Directive would love to meet you 👋
Aside from the usual suspects, such as China, Japan, and South Korea, other Asian countries have grown their online presence in recent years.
Many other countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, have over 90% online user penetration rates.
Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan have over 100 million Internet users.
According to Nielsen’s report, advertising spending in Asia’s main markets grew by 12%, and digital ad spending increased by 64% in 2022.
The expenditure is also growing in countries such as Singapore and Thailand, showing that these countries are also worth running advertising campaigns in.
Image from Nielsen, September 2022
Customer Journey
When you run ad campaigns targeting Asian countries, I’m sure you allocate most of the online advertising budget to the search and display campaigns through search engine platforms such as Google Ads.
Some of you may also have ads running through Naver in South Korea, Baidu in China, or Yahoo! Japan in Japan.
Have you wondered if you are reaching the target audience effectively in the market?
What if there are other ways to put yourself in front of the audience in those key markets in Asia for your business?
According to eMarketer’s report, 31% of survey respondents selected marketplaces as their #1 search channel for shopping, followed by browsing in-store (18%) and search engines (14%).
The number of respondents who selected search engines dropped from 30% in 2022 to 14% in 2023.
In Indonesia, the channel shift is accelerating toward social commerce, which is expected to grow from $8.2 billion in 2023 to $22 billion by 2028.
Image from eMarketer.com, September 2023
The bad news is that you may miss out on significant business opportunities by not advertising on platforms other than search engines.
The good news is there are platforms where you can advertise in Asian countries. Obviously, I cannot list all of them, but here are some of the most popular websites and apps.
Marketplaces
Taobao & Tmall
Very popular marketplace owned by Alibaba, with each boasting more than 800 million monthly users.
While Taobao is popular for C2C, Tmall is just for B2C.
JD.com
Another popular ecommerce site in China with over 580 million registered users.
Their domestic ecommerce had a total sale of 8,000 billion yen (about 5.5 billion US dollars) in 2022.
In addition to a Japanese site, they have websites for the US, France, Germany, and Taiwan.
G Market
G Market is a top shopping mall site in South Korea with 22 million users. (eBay owns a majority share of them now.) The site is in English, Chinese, and Korean.
Social Media
TikTok
TikTok is popular in China as well as around the world.
In other Asian countries, it’s gaining popularity, especially among younger audiences.
It’s banned in India, but many still use it via VPN.
WeChat
China’s popular SNS/messaging service, it offers services in 19 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, Indonesian, Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese.
China’s popular service has around 258 million daily active users.
The users are mainly Chinese-speaking people in China and other countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the USA, Canada, and the EU.
LINE
LINE is popular in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia, with more than 95 million monthly active users. It offers services in 17 languages.
KakaoTalk
Popular call and messaging service in South Korea with users around the world. It’s available in multiple languages, including English, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Russian, and Spanish.
Social media platforms familiar to Western businesses, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are also popular in Asia. You may be surprised to hear that Twitter has about 42% market share in Japan.
Mobile Apps (M-Commerce)
In 2023, 88.9% of internet users in Southeast Asia will also be smartphone users – a higher rate than those in more economically advanced regions like North America and Western Europe.
It’s definitely mobile-first in Asian countries, but according to Nielsen’s report, more people are using desktops and TVs now than in the past. The rapidly growing streaming services could be another ad platform for your business.
How To Advertise
As the first step, you need to create an account with most of these marketplaces or social media services. Like Google and Microsoft, you can set up the ads yourself.
However, while many have an English site and offer services in English, customer support staff often need help with English. If you have staff fluent in the local language, it’s best to have that person create an account.
Otherwise, you may want to consult the ad agency offering the services to set up the account and campaigns. They know those platforms’ ad products, specs, and audience behaviors and help minimize your learning curve.
Trying Out New Ad Platforms
Different platforms could mean different groups of audiences.
First, you need to understand the user demographics and the behaviors. Even the same person behaves differently when they have another reason or goal for visiting the site.
Test any new platform with a small budget at first to see how it performs for you. If the initial test doesn’t go as well as you’d like, test the images, messages, etc., to see if the performance improves.
Conclusion
It is a rapidly expanding world with new market opportunities you have never considered. There are many ways to reach the target audience in each country.
If you are lucky to have an extra budget, you should explore other ad platforms to reach the audience. It opens a door for you to be seen by a new audience and reinforces the existing audience’s awareness.
If your budget is limited, you may be unable to run the ads everywhere. In that case, it is vital for you to invest in the ads at the platform where you get the most return on investment.
Organic (search engine optimization) and paid search (or pay-per-click) have enough technical intricacies and strategic aspects to them to start with.
Keyword cannibalization is an issue that can make them even harder — and one that can be overlooked if your search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) efforts are siloed, contained within separate teams, or otherwise are not integrated to a level that allows you to understand, manage, and minimize it.
Keyword cannibalization is when there’s a conflict or overlap in your content, strategy, ads, or in how a search engine interprets them.
That conflict can cause unintended negative consequences ranging from creating competition with your own brand for search engine results page (SERP) space to having content ranking that isn’t the strongest option for the user intent desired.
It can happen within organic search, paid search ads, or between SEO and PPC. This article focuses on the latter, with SEO vs. PPC.
Avoiding keyword cannibalization between SEO and paid search campaigns is crucial to ensuring that cross-channel efforts are working in tandem in order to maximize your online visibility and get the most out of your marketing budget.
Keyword cannibalization in this sense can occur when paid and organic listings are competing for the same keywords, which often leads to paying for clicks on ads that you could get organically.
First, determine which keywords you are bidding on in your paid search campaign. You can find these keywords in the Search Terms Report within your Google Ads account.
This is a great resource to use because the platform allows you to track which keywords you are ranking for organically on your website, along with the average position and what pages appear for different search results.
Once you can identify those keywords, cross-check them against your organic keyword rankings.
There are a few different tools and metrics you can use to help with this process.
Tools: Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush (keyword research tool), and Screaming Frog (Website Crawlers) are all tools that can help with identifying keyword cannibalization.
Metrics: Impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and conversions are metrics that can be used as signs that first indicate that there is a problem across your paid and organic search campaigns.
Signs That You Are Cannibalizing Your Keywords
As mentioned above, there are a few metrics you can look at that are often used as early signs to identify if you are cannibalizing your keywords.
If you notice that your:
Organic CTR Is Decreasing
A decline in organic click-through rate (CTR) can be a red flag. The drop in organic CTR can be caused by multiple pages ranking for the same keyword.
When users are presented with similar options in their search results, trying to distinguish between the pages can lead to confusion.
Clicks Are Increasing
You wouldn’t usually assume that an increase in clicks for both your paid and organic search campaigns is something to be of concern – but this, too, can be an early sign of keyword cannibalization.
You will be able to recognize this concern if the increase in clicks is tracked across multiple pages that are targeting the same keyword.
The performance of each individual page will be negatively impacted and can lead to less traffic on your site.
Ad Conversions Are Increasing While Overall Conversions Remain The Same
Before you start celebrating the increase in PPC conversions, check to ensure you’re not paying for what you used to get for free.
An easy way to tell if you’re buying conversions from yourself is if the overall number of conversions isn’t increasing at a similar rate as your paid conversions. You’ll likely also see a significant decline in the number of organic conversions.
Monitoring these metrics regularly will help you identify any unusual inconsistencies across your campaigns and efforts and help detect the early stages of keyword cannibalization.
Once you are able to identify and eliminate current keyword cannibalization, you can take preventative steps to avoid it between your future paid and organic search campaigns/efforts.
If you have separate teams or agencies managing your SEO and PPC efforts, ensure they communicate and coordinate their keyword strategies.
Ensure that your teams understand the importance of avoiding keyword cannibalization and the potential consequences.
Encourage the sharing of insights and data between teams to align efforts effectively.
Keyword Research And Segmentation
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify high-potential keywords for both SEO and PPC.
Assign specific keywords and keyword groups to each strategy to avoid overlap.
Segment your keyword list into distinct categories or groups based on user intent, relevance, and competition.
Consider targeting long-tail keywords in your SEO efforts, which are more specific and less likely to conflict with broad, high-competition keywords used in PPC.
Use Negative Keywords In PPC
In your PPC campaigns, use negative keywords to exclude specific terms that you’re targeting in your SEO efforts.
Negative keywords prevent your PPC ads from showing up for certain search queries, reducing the chances of cannibalization.
Monitor And Adjust
Continuously monitor the performance of your SEO and PPC campaigns.
Use analytics tools to track which keywords are driving traffic and conversions for both channels.
Adjust your strategies and keyword targeting based on performance data.
Conduct periodic audits to identify and rectify any instances of keyword cannibalization.
Adjust your strategies and keyword targeting as needed.
Conclusion
Keyword cannibalization is often a hidden issue – especially when search strategy isn’t unified across paid and organic channels.
Even when it is integrated strategically, you can end up in a situation where cannibalization causes hidden issues or hinders performance.
Understanding keyword cannibalization within a channel is often much easier than detecting it and seeing a direct impact across paid and organic channels.
I highly recommend digging into it within your SEO and PPC campaigns and efforts to make sure you’re getting the performance and return you expect.
Screenshot from Microsoft, November 2023
