What to Do When More Eyes are on Your Digital Presence

The news of international public health concerns is causing a major shift in consumer behavior. 74.6% of consumers said in February that they would avoid shopping centers if the outbreak worsened, and more than 50% said they’d avoid stores in general. For brands, this means your online presence may become your best way of staying in touch with consumers.

If the thought of more eyes on your digital campaigns makes you nervous, take a deep breath. While we recommend that brands take a step back to understand what is and isn’t working in their digital efforts throughout the year, there is no better time than right now. We’ve compiled some of our best digital housekeeping practices that can be completed from the comfort of your couch:

Paid Search

Get a thorough understanding of your 2019 performance.

• When reviewing MoM data, look at your monthly spend for changes due to seasonality and search demand. Review your 2020 plan to determine if budget allocations should be adjusted based on that information.
• 13% YoY Increase in Find a Physician Conversions
• Determine which keywords and/or categories performed the best in 2019 and confirm that your 2020 budget has been reallocated to shift wasted spend to high-performing placements.

 

Refresh your creative with a data-driven approach.

• Identify top-performing ad copy and consider incorporating new ad variations to test against top performers.
• Analyze how your Responsive Search Ads performed in 2019 by measuring lift in impressions. Google expected brands to see this lift with RSAs, so a lackluster metric here should indicate the need for troubleshooting.
• Ad Extensions are forgotten far too often throughout the year, so it is the perfect time to check that all Sitelinks and other extensions are still aligned with your business goals and driving to your best content.

 

Audit your target audience.

• Are the audiences that you have applied to active search campaigns outdated? If you use CRM data such as Customer Match, are those audience lists relevant and up-to-date?
• If you’re having trouble identifying each audience list when tackling the above task, consider adding a naming convention process to your to-do list. Had you named the 2016 event list for what it was, you would have an easier time identifying it as outdated today.
• Make sure you are taking your remarketing strategy to the next level in 2020 by not only using audiences as a lever to make bid modifications, but also by customizing the messaging to ensure you are offering each user a personalized experience.

 

Social

Rotate your creative to prevent fatigue.

• You can research frequency benchmarks, or you can use this time to identify the point of diminishing returns on your creatives.
• Once you’ve identified your point of diminishing returns, it’s time to freshen up your creative. Identify consistent themes in your top-performing creatives—does it use a GIF? Or, lifestyle imagery vs. product imagery?—and let that inspire new ads.
• Apply the same process above to your ad copy.
• Shut off creative where there is burnout, and look for seasonal creative that can be turned off in this time, too. (Hint: anything with a snowflake should hit pause for now.)

 

Clean up your audience segments.

• Look at all audiences running now, and mark how they are performing against goal. You can then identify your top- and bottom-performing audiences and make a game plan based on these opportunities.
• For your top-performing audiences, look for new segmentations you can make within these lists to scale out. For example, if one of your top-performing audiences is the top 10% of lifetime value customers, you could break out this list into recent purchasers (last 30 days) and not.
• For your bottom-performing audiences, evaluate based on their performance whether you will shut them off or rotate new audiences in.
• In the case of all audiences, make sure you aren’t overlapping by taking a granular audience exclusion approach.

 

Build your testing roadmap for the summer.

• Analyzing your campaigns now is an ideal move for several reasons, one being that you can identify wasted spend and use the summer to test new budget allocations before the holiday season (a not-so-ideal time to be testing anything new.)
• Based on your top-performing tactics and creative, shift 5-15% of your account spend—gathered from all of those low-performing audiences and creatives!—to a testing roadmap.
• There’s no shortage of emerging social networks, which can be very tempting to add to the roadmap. If your brand is aligned with the advertising environment of networks such as Tiktok, start with testing 5% of your spend and scale out if necessary.
• You can also create a roadmap based on new tactics, such as adding video or using emojis in ad copy, on the networks already included in your strategy.

 

Programmatic

Align your goals with user behavior.

• Map out your customer’s journey from intent to conversion. What brought them to your impression, and what is the first thing they’ll see on your landing page when they click through? As marketers, we often show customers what we want them to see vs. what they want to see. Use this time as an opportunity to realign your creative with your customer experience strategy.
• Consider user intent in this particular moment and adjust your media mix as needed to reflect where your brand’s audience is consuming content. It should come as no surprise that news sites are seeing an influx in traffic right now. If that’s a category where your audience may be visiting, how can you shift budget to maximize potential? With your audience in mind, continue to think more critically about your placements.

 

Review your creative and test more opportunities.

• Look carefully at ads you’ve run that are most similar to each other. Maybe you ran multiple creatives for a single landing page, or you used similar messaging on a variety of color backgrounds. Use the data you have available to test new iterations of your most effective ads.
• Has it been a while since you surveyed your tech’s abilities? Check if new technology/targeting opportunities are available for your strategy, and shift a portion of your spend to trying a new audience segment with your best-performing existing messaging.

 

SEO

Refresh your SEO goals.

• Reevaluate what you want your website’s goal to be: focused on top-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel, or all parts of the customer journey. Take a data-driven approach by looking at YoY conversions from the last 6-12 months and identifying how organic traffic and organic conversions correlate.
• Review organic traffic performance. Are there any pages that have dropped YoY? If the content on those pages are still relevant to your business, you’ll want to refresh copy.
• Take a look at the keywords you’re tracking. It might be time-consuming, but it’s worth investigating if there are any gaps, especially if your business has evolved since the origin of that list. This is a great time to take an inventory of your top- and bottom-performing keywords to start crafting an improvement plan.

 

Build a content calendar.

• Make sure that you have a long-term content calendar if you produce content on a regular basis. Spring is a great time to make sure that you have a content calendar in place, especially to make sure you have a plan well ahead of the holidays, as SEO is a long-term strategy meant to build a solid foundation for your digital marketing.
• Remember, content calendars do not have to focus just on producing new content! Refreshing old content can be equally helpful if done the right way.

 

Get familiar with your technical SEO.

• Reviewing technical is always important, as technical SEO ensures that search engines can read and understand your site and then access pages to show to users later. If a search engine cannot read a site, then all of the best content in the world will not help a site rank.
• For example, check that the pages you want crawled don’t have unnecessary "noindex" or "nofollow" tags and make sure to take a look at your canonical strategy.

 

Affiliate

Clean up your active offers.

• Audit any offers you currently have live to ensure correct messaging and updated logos.
• Give the same auditing attention to banners on your top publishing sites and confirm that your branding is cohesive channel-wide.

 

Check on the competition.

• Complete a Competitive Analysis to ensure that the correct commission is being offered for your program.
• If partners are slowly dropping your brand’s offers from their pages, it might be a sign that they aren’t compelling anymore or have become stagnant. Review your messaging and audience on that partnership and determine your best next steps.

 

Explore new partnership ideas.

• Consider partnerships outside of traditional affiliates and hybrid tactics (CPC & CPL vs. CPA only) as a means to boost stagnant performance.

 

Amazon

Check your current stock.

• Amazon recently restricted PO orders only to essential categories, i.e. baby product, health and household (including personal-care appliances), beauty and personal care, grocery, industrial and scientific, pet supplies, etc. However, existing POs will continue to be honored during this period.
• Make sure that you have stock available to capture this recent surge in eComm orders. Before pushing ad spend or making any adjustments, it is imperative to understand how much stock is available, your current sell-through rate, and determine how long key/hero items will remain in stock.

 

Take advantage of ad spend opportunities.

• Our clients are seeing surges in efficiency and spend across almost all managed Sponsored Ad campaigns & Amazon categories. There is an opportunity to re-allocate existing budget or generate incremental budget to scale to this new demand.
• It is also worthwhile to determine if certain products or categories are seeing larger upticks than others and potentially shift spend to better support the products that customers are buying.
• From there, there's additional opportunity to stand-up DSP remarketing campaigns to ensure that all this new traffic to your pages is closing the loop on your media spend. By running remarketing campaigns, you will keep customers informed of your offers and remind them that there is still stock available.

 

Looking for an award-winning agency partner to make sure you’re always at the top of your game? Look no further. Rise has proven to reduce CPCs and boost revenue, fast, when brands join our team. Contact us to learn more.