At this stage of the pandemic, everyone is familiar with the long list of challenges facing businesses around the world: nervous customers, employee turnover, supply chain bottlenecks, and so on. Much like the COVID-19 variants themselves, these challenges continue to take new forms with sometimes uncertain consequences.
In 2022, with many small and mid-sized brands adopting digital advertising strategies for the first time, a key challenge is breaking through the noise created by this shift in consumer behaviors and the subsequent marketing activity.
At Semrush, where our business is helping brands manage their visibility on the internet, we faced this very problem when we set out to promote our own niche product with a complex funnel.
Our clients use the Semrush platform to optimize search engine results and market online more effectively. Our platform simplifies content creation, social media, campaign creation, and competitive intelligence.
Experiment early
We started by investing in search and display traffic. Using
teacher database keyword-based targeting, we identified an audience of users who were in the market for our product and began “warming up” these potential customers with display images. We then looked for new media environments where we could drive performance without going over budget. We chose YouTube as one of these channels, given video’s proven ability to create a story about a product. Our marketing team had tried YouTube before, but as we’ll see in a moment, its results left a lot to be desired.
Initially, we set up our YouTube campaigns manually, rather than automating them.
We did this primarily to understand the optimization metrics
the world learns about new discoveries available. We launched several videos and analyzed them based on cost per impression, cost per view, cost per click, and click-through rate. With this knowledge in hand, our team started automating campaigns using performance metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA) and conversion rate.
The next step was to develop a conversion tracking and attribution system. Whereas we previously attributed most ad conversions based on click alone, we now added view-based attribution for YouTube ads using Google Campaign Manager.
With this change, the demonstrable value of YouTube as an sms to data advertising channel, particularly at the customer acquisition stage, became much clearer. And these placements took pride of place among our other paid channels.
Our team then tested every possible audience type, ad format, and bidding strategy
We found that custom audiences worked better for promoting a specific product than for a generic brand. In cases with frequently fluctuating budgets and long conversion funnels, a Maximize Conversion bidding strategy proved to be more effective than a Target CPA strategy. And we settled on the skippable in-stream ad as the most effective ad format for your product.
