I attended Hero Conference for the first time which was held at the JWMarriott in Downtown LA right next to the Staples Center. I enjoyed the talks and that it was a PPC only conference. It was nice to have a singular topic focus on one topic and have a crowd with very similar interests and experiences.
This is a wrap-up of some of the interesting things I heard at the conference.
The Customer Disconnect: How Inside-Out Copy Makes You Invisible
The premise of this talk was around ad copy and that just because advertisers say prospects need them, it doesn't necessarily mean the prospects will listen. The Speaker, Amy Harrison, said we often have a story problem, not a copy problem. An interesting approach to this challenge was to use symptoms as the hook instead. For example, using copy that communicates: "If you notice this in your life then you need to listen to me". Then communicating, "here is what you may have recognized and this is what is causing it". The advertiser needs to understand if the prospect is using a workaround. If so, they can call out that the workaround is not the best way to go about curing the symptom but there is a cure/transformation awaiting them. The advertiser then needs to call out the results in a form of "you had a symptom, you received a cure and now you can...." as well as call out the impact on the person's life.
Mobile:
- Commuter hours are best performing in terms of response for B2B advertisers in the morning and B2C advertisers in the evening
- Target ads by device as a proxy for customer types
- Mobile use skews female and younger
- For app install ads you need to include “Search Partner” traffic in order to appear in Google Play
- Speed issues can punish mobile Quality Score
- When using the texting extension, CTR can go up by 40%
Interesting Mobile Data:
- “How” appears 2X on mobile queries
- “Near Me” - 1.7X
- “Find” - 3X
- “Schedule” - .9X
- Call - 5X
- “Can I” - 3.2X
eCommerce:
- Store convinced pre-Black Friday promotion would work because it was beating the other retailers with the deal but it attracted a lot of lookie loos:
- Revenue +15%
- Cost +33%
- ROI -15%
- Dollar off beats percentage off most of the time as people do not like doing the math
- Shipping often more important than promos (Amazon Prime Influence)
- Target the opposite sex for purchase during gift periods to increase AOV and customize copy for men and women
- Millennials 52% more likely to be impulse purchasers
- 45% Millennials spend 1 hour plus looking at retail sites per day
Check your assumptions on your target customers by listing their:
- Wants
- What they are looking for
- Uses for access
- Is (demographics)
AdWords Bidding:
When you bid up broad match keywords in AdWords and Shopping campaigns the matching will get looser and sometimes conversion rates will fall as a result.
Facebook Talk:
Mobile is becoming video first (by 2020 75% of mobile traffic will be video)
Content consumption:
- 65% of users access mobile while shopping
- 62% of users check phones 30 times per day
- Users typically unlock phones 80 times per day
Fast:
- Scrolling speed- younger users are much faster scrollers
- Users can identify image in 13ms - we must work to make the images break the scrolling and gain attention
- Sound is usually off so video needs to be adapted with subtitles
Quality of consumption:
- Ads that move have 6X more interaction
- Moving logo also helps interaction and CTR
- Price and promo messaging overlaid on image
Facebook ads Impact on Search Ads
- Facebook ads have been shown to drive search volume up 6.3% on average
- Facebook ads Increase in Search ROAS 30-78%
Google Talk:
- It will be tough to compete with Google’s machine learning doing optimization of ad choice etc. Many high performing advertisers have 3+ ads in each ad group.
- The use of Audiences is a big deal to to target, bid and personalize ads – using custom audiences, behavioral audiences as well as demographics.
- Ad extensions are another area where better performing advertisers excel
Best Presentation of the Conference:
Brad Geddes presented on Audience Targeting and was awarded the best conference presentation. I had watched the video before and it has inspired me to use audiences in a much more significant way across accounts with both bid adjustments as well as bid and target campaigns.