How Can Data Drive Local Campaigns?

Data Driven MarketingRelevant, effective digital ad campaigns are data-driven. Implementing a data-first strategy is key to ensuring return on investment on local campaigns. A recent report by SweetIQ shared the importance of using data to learn about who your consumers are, how they found you, and the products they’re interested in. What sort of data should you gather from different platforms including Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, and Bing to successfully execute your marketing strategy?

Google My Business: Google handles about 3.5 billion searches per day. With so much search activity, Google provides a wealth of information. You can discover how consumers are finding your business (local listings, paid, or organic search) and what location-specific action or conversions consumers are completing. Knowing insights on a per-location basis allows you to develop highly targeted marketing campaigns.

 

Data to gather and analyze: conversion clicks against in-store visits to assess which stores are drawing customers in, which listings are gaining the most views

Facebook: Facebook users spend an average of 40 minutes on Facebook per day, making it a prime place to advertise. Your Facebook ads need to be engaging, relevant, and accurately targeted to reach your audience. Facebook’s competitive landscape makes evaluating your analytics even more important. Understanding demographics and ad engagement are critical for successful local marketing.

Data to gather and analyze: audience demographics, post reach, shares, visits to page, and audience response.

Bing: Google may garner the most attention, but don’t neglect this search engine. Bing captures over 30 percent of the US search market and its users are ready to spend money (stat: ). Your competitors may be discounting the value of this platform, which means you can occupy a greater space for less ad spend.

Data to gather and analyze: user demographics, volume of impressions

Foursquare: Foursquare has 50+ million active monthly users and over 2 million businesses are listed on the app. You can gather insight into local search behavior and capture traffic of users who are looking for something quick and local. Leverage data to launch location-based campaigns and market to nearby consumers with special incentives and offers.

Data to gather and analyze: total and average check-ins per each location, number of new vs returning visitors, busiest hours, and demographics


Bing Product Ads: An Emerging Market

Google is king of search engines, but Microsoft’s Bing is still a worthwhile investment. To reach your audience in all the places they are looking, it’s important to have a presence on Bing. This search engine powers nearly one in three U.S. searches and 11 billion monthly searches around the globe. Through a partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo, your ads could appear on the top or to the right of Bing, Yahoo and MSN search results. Just like Google, you can choose to target your ads to different geographic locations, times or days of the week, and consumer demographics.

 

What are Bing product ads?

Products Ads include custom images from your own online inventory, plus unique promotional text and pricing. Product Ads use your specific product information to determine who sees your ads. If someone’s search query is relevant to your products, your Product Ad can show up on the search results. Photos and relevant information help catch a user’s interest, and influences purchase decisions even before they click your ad.

Following Google’s lead, Bing is now showing carousels for their Product Ads in the Bing search results. The new Bing carousels are showing up for a variety of searches, showing eight products within the carousel. Informative product ads can translate into greater engagement, higher click-through rates, and higher conversion rates.

 

Where will your ad appear?

Like Google, Bing Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system. You bid based on how much you are willing to pay per each click on your ad. Bing has limited online real estate so they auction available spaces. You are bidding against other advertisers selling similar products or services who want to place their ads into the space you want. Your ad position is based on several things, including:

 

  • How relevant your ad and website are to the search terms a user enters.
  • How your bid compares to other bids in the Bing Ads auction.
  • Your ad’s click-through rate and past performance.

 

The stronger you are in these areas, the better your chances of winning the top ad position.

 

If you want to extend your paid search campaign to Bing, we can help! Contact us today and we’ll get your comprehensive PPC advertising strategy up and running.