Industry Updates - Mason Interactive

Holiday planning for e-commerce brands is underway, and every year we proactively take this time to position our clients for success in preparation for the busy Q4 holiday shopping season. Historically, Cyber Five was the key revenue driving period for brands, but YoY data indicates that consumers are starting their shopping earlier, and many have already made a purchase.

In the current macroeconomic climate, we are preparing for another year of uncertainty. As your agency partner, we want to be transparent about the market trends and data we are gathering from our partners at Google and Meta.

Key Challenges & Observations

Consumer purchasing is split making each month critical
- October = 32%, November = 32%, and December = 36%
- One miss = ⅓ of holiday
Consumers are shifting away from branded searches
- Aggregate total:
  - Branded: -3%
  - Generic: +1%
Consumers are on the lookout for deals and open-minded about who they buy from
- 36% said they purchased a brand different from their preferred brand to get a better price
- 30% shopped at a store that was not their preferred store
- 56% will hold off on buying gifts until they are on sale
Free shipping options and fast delivery have become table stakes for retailers during Holiday
- Besides price, the top factor that determines where holiday gifts are purchased from:
  - Free Shipping/Shipping Speed
  - Convenience/Proximity to Store Location

Source: Google Internal Data, 2020-2022.

Ways to Win Your Holiday

Be Proactive – We’re recommending that partners supply creative with an increased discount (20% vs 25%) in the event that we need to swap in order to be more aggressive in market
Be Flexible – Base and stretch goals are going to be key to winning your Holiday push
Be Nimble – ROAS floors are a great way to strike while the iron is hot. Confirm ROAS bands with your team to speed up decision making in the moment

Quick Stats: Think With Google

People are shopping earlier than ever
- 26% of shoppers globally have already begun their holiday shopping.
- Many people research and shop months in advance of events, and this year is no exception

Those who have already begun their holiday shopping want help with:
- 47%: Gift ideas and inspiration
- 44%: Starting gift lifts
- and 18% have already made a purchase

Unboxing videos, written recipes, home improvement blogs, and more all help to inform buying decisions

67% of YouTube viewers surveyed have made a purchase as a result of sponsored content
- Video ads can help brands deliver relevant, personalized experiences to audiences at their most engaged moments

64% of U.S. holiday shoppers who used Google said they did so for “discovery and inspiration”
- Visual shopping experiences such as lifestyle photography, videos, and customer reviews can make lasting impressions

Omnibuyers: Searches containing “near me in stock” have grown in the US by more than 90% YoY
- Omni Buyers are paving the way for “intuitive shopping,” where people browse and find inspiration concurrently, online and offline, across multiple product categories
- In the US, people are shopping across seven categories in a two-day period
Searches containing “cheap and best” have grown globally by over 40% YoY
76% of US shoppers want to buy higher-quality products that last longer
- Promote your deals, shopping, and return benefits, in-store inventory, and store pickup options in your messaging and on Search

Best practices for making your holiday advertising shine

If you’re not already a Mason client, book a consultation with our team and we’ll work on a tailored approach for your brand, together.

Introducing Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

It’s no secret that Meta platforms’ performance is impacted by Apple’s iOS 14.5. Apple’s relentless focus on user data privacy resulted in signal loss, changes to targeting capabilities, and most critically, measurement.

Our view: Instagram and Facebook aren’t broken, they’re different. As industry standards evolve, so do the platforms we use, whether for social connections, community and brand building, or business growth and development. This makes the landscape more uncertain, the data more difficult to read, and the insight more challenging to articulate.

Meta has rolled out Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns globally. ASC use artificial intelligence to enable e-commerce and retail direct-to-consumer brands to potentially achieve better performance, greater personalization and more efficiency through advancements in AI + machine learning. These campaigns provide greater flexibility to control creative, targeting, placements and budget, and more opportunities to optimize campaigns that drive conversions.

What are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and how does it work?

Simply put, ASC falls under Meta’s new suite of Total Advantage tools. While Advantage tools are designed to automate a specific part of a manual campaign, Advantage+ focuses on automating a campaign from beginning to end or part of a manual campaign (e.g., placements or creative).

Here’s a simple overview:

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns offer end-to-end automation and support dynamic and static ads

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns combine Prospecting and Remarketing strategies in one campaign

Meta does not see ASC replacing existing products, and it is recommended to test and learn across current Business as Usual (BAU) campaigns

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are designed for Broad reach, removing campaign restraints

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are designed to automate creative, resulting in less audience saturation

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns can test up to 150 creative combinations, reducing creative fatigue

If you’re looking to make your advertising operations more efficient and drive performance at the same time, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are worth looking into. If you’re not already a Mason client, book a consultation with our team and we’ll work on a tailored approach for your brand, together.

Google is constantly rolling out new capabilities to make ad targeting more accurate and efficient. Performance max campaigns are a part of that toolbox. Here’s a quick video from Google that sums them up:

We’ve said it time and time again – the marketing landscape is changing. Ad platforms shifting to prioritize user privacy means we have to rethink our approach.

Implementing Google’s tools and solutions available today will help brands prepare for the next generation of performance marketing. Performance Max campaigns are one piece of the big puzzle to help us in that transition.

Now, let’s get into how we can use performance marketing campaigns to maximize campaign performance.

What are Performance Max Campaigns?

Performance max campaigns are a part of Google’s new approach for making local and shopping campaign management more efficient. They allow you to access all your Google Ad channels from a single campaign–freeing you to allocate more time to other aspects of your ad strategy.

Source: Google

How do they work?

Leveraging automation, performance max campaigns will mix your visual creative, copy assets, and audience signals to figure out what combination of them performs best on each channel your ads appear on. You can even preview how these varied combinations will appear before publishing.

Source: Google

Your ad campaigns’ audience signals will be paired with machine learning to make sure your ads reach the audiences with the highest intent at the right time. Owning your brand’s first-party data is crucial for the targeting to work, and here’s a quick post on how to do that.

Source: Google

Let’s take Guesswork out of your Google Ads.

If you’re looking to make your advertising operations more efficient and drive performance at the same time, Performance Max campaigns are worth looking into. If you’re not already a Mason client, book a consultation with our team and we’ll work on a tailored approach for your brand, together.

Mason recently hosted an interactive webinar with Meta to talk about how Conversions API can help to strengthen ad performance & reporting.

If you weren’t able to attend, or simply wish to relive the session, you can rewatch here.

Why this matters:

Web browsers and platforms are enacting new policies meant to align with a future without cookies. These changes will weaken insights you’re used to accessing–Conversions API (or CAPI for short) is here to help us navigate around that.

CAPI is meant to work with the Pixel and as an alternative to the Pixel. What does this mean exactly? Much like GA4, CAPI is meant to work alongside tracking you already have in place in order to collect valuable data you can leverage after cookies are phased out.

Source: Meta

Should you implement CAPI today?

In short, yes. Without conversion optimization, brands typically see higher CPAs.

It’s recommended that brands implement CAPI as soon as possible–not only to allow time to onboard technical teams, but also for testing & evaluating the quality of the data you’re collecting.

For more information on this, access a helpful document from Meta here.

Source: Meta

The digital landscape shifts with a new emphasis on user privacy, but it’s still possible to leverage data to reach new audiences and accurately track your efforts.

Check out the recording of Strengthen Your Brand’s Ad Performance for more information, and if you’re not already a Mason client, you can start your journey here.

The 4th generation of Google Analytics is already out, and there’s finally a hard deadline for when you have to completely transition over–July 1, 2023. This post will cover what’s new about GA4 and why you should be thinking about it now.

Analytics that Respects User Privacy

We know that consumers are shopping and engaging online more than ever before following the pandemic. As a result, investing in data & analytics is key to understanding customers and reaching new prospects.

As regulators and platforms evolve how consumer data can be used, people are now able to control/restrict how their data gets used for ad targeting. These are the conditions that have called for a new approach to analytics.

TLDR: GA4 is Google’s answer to a privacy-centered digital landscape.

Why does this matter?

GA4 achieves the same goal as its predecessors, albeit in a different way.

In our experience, clients like to optimize around metrics like click-through and bounce rates. In GA4, we’ll be thinking more about engaged users vs non-engaged users. Previously, if a user spent 30 seconds on your website and left without clicking anything, that may have been looked at as a bad thing. GA4 will consider a 30 second session an important event to track, even if that user doesn’t click anything.

GA4 uses machine learning to automatically generate insights from brand data to improve marketing. This replaces the modeled style of tracking from previous generations of GA. See our guide on Enhanced Conversion Tracking to understand this better.

This new generation of GA is meant to be future-proof. It will work with or without cookies so you will still be able to learn about customers even with the identifier gaps that cookies once filled–though you should still be collecting first party data.

New Features

Event editing & synthesis – you can now edit & fine-tune events logged in GA4 within the UI, without writing or adjusting code

Data Import – Track events happening outside of your website/app by sending data directly to GA4. PLUS you can import additional data & signals

Cross-Domain Measurement – Track a user’s journey across domains within the GA4 UI without writing code. You can also use templated reporting to better understand ecommerce funnels.
Migration & onboarding tools – Google understands that most people don’t like change, so they’ve made it incredibly easy to get started with a new GA4 property. There’s a getting started wizard for setup in a few clicks, and you can simultaneously collect data in both UA & GA4. This is called dual set up.

Why You Should Get Started NOW

Simply put, if you want to have QoQ or YoY data the same day that Universal Analytics is out, you’ll want to move over to GA4 ASAP.

There is no way to simply migrate an audience from UA to GA4; it has to be collected by the Google Analytics 4 tracking code. The sooner the GA4 tracking code (and maybe even some basic events and parameters) are configured, the sooner those audiences can grow and be used to support your advertising efforts.

This isn’t a small task, which is why Google recommends getting started with dual-setup. Tagging all of your pages with both Universal Analytics and GA4 will allow you to continue to benefit from Universal Analytics while beginning to collect data in your GA4 properties.

If you want to get a head start on your competitors and be ready when cookies is phased out in 2023, Mason Interactive can help you strategize around this.

Related links:

It has never been more important to understand who your potential customers are. As the industry shifts towards focusing more on consumer data privacy, it’s getting harder to track and measure prospective buyers.

As an agency, we’re staying ahead of the curve so that our clients can succeed despite the coming impact.

Source: Tech Times

We recently attended a company-wide training session with our partners at Google to discuss the future of privacy-centric measurement. This post will cover how you can explore unique implementations of Google’s Enhanced Conversion Tracking protocols.

Don’t know where to start? Send us a message to discuss what this means for the future of your business.

What is enhanced conversions?

Enhanced conversions is a feature that can improve accuracy when it comes to measuring conversion. It supplements existing conversion tags by sending hashed first-party conversion data from your website to Google in a way that still protects user privacy.

The feature uses a secure one-way hashing algorithm called SHA256 on your first-party customer data before sending to Google. The hashed data is then matched with signed-in Google accounts in order to attribute your campaign conversions to ad events, such as clicks/views.

Simply put: Say goodbye to Observed conversions, and hello to Modeled conversions based on hashed data.

Implementation

There are 3 approaches to implementation: manual (preferred), automatic tag based, and API. Once implemented, Enhanced Conversions will start working immediately, however, 60% of data can be missed if Enhanced Conversions is not applied correctly. We can help you with this.

The next generation of Google Analytics – GA4 (Google Analytics 4) has been rebuilt to include more capabilities, including predictive modeling, attribution, and LTV modeling. Once implemented, it will take 12 months of data for features to accurately model. Speaking of which…

First Party Data is Priority #1

About 80% of advertisers depend on third-party cookies. Without them, those advertisers will need to find a new way to reach their customers and prospects online. User’s behavioral and browsing data will be limited. If you depend on third-party cookies it will be significantly harder to personalize ads, A/B test, and gauge attribution.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There is nothing more valuable than owning your first party data. Whether you have been in business for years, or are just beginning your digital journey, now is the time to evaluate what this data means to your holistic ecosystem. Enhanced Conversions will capture all email addresses, including non-gmail addresses, but keep in mind that only conversion data will be recorded.

Plan for the Future Today

Google announced that third-party cookies will be deprecated by the end of 2022, or early 2023 at the very latest.

This industry-wide change is not going away, and we encourage you to be proactive today so your business has time to adapt to new industry standards and best practices. There’s a lot to be done, so if it seems overwhelming, schedule a meeting with one of our experts today.

Glossary:

Third party cookies: Third-party cookies specifically are created and placed by websites other than the website you’re visiting. Some common uses include cross-site tracking, retargeting and ad serving.

First party cookies: First-party cookies are generated by the host domain. They are usually considered good because they help provide a better user experience. These cookies enable the browser to remember important user info, such as what items you add to shopping carts, your username and passwords, and language preferences.

For an example, let’s say you visit a website called learn.com. Any cookies put on this website by learn.com would be first-party cookies. Any cookies put on learn.com by any other site, like a social media site or an advertiser, would be third-party cookies.

Identity Resolution Providers: The process of matching identifiers across devices and touchpoints to a single profile — helps build a cohesive, omnichannel view of a consumer, enabling brands to deliver relevant messaging throughout the customer journey.

Cross-site tracking: The practice of collecting browsing data from numerous sources (websites) that details your activity

Retargeting: Using search activity to retarget visitors with visual or text ads based on the products and services for which they’ve shown interest

Ad-serving: Making decisions regarding the ads that appear on a website, deciding when to serve these ads, and collecting data (and reporting said data including impressions and clicks) in an effort to educate advertisers on consumer insights and ad performance.