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0:00
Hello, my name's Izabella Dabrowska,
today I'm going to talk to you about automation in search engine marketing.
0:10
A little bit about myself:
I am a senior marketing specialist at VakantieDiscounter,
that's an online travel agency based in Amsterdam.
I have seven years' experience in online marketing,
I've worked for some of the leading online marketing agencies in the Netherlands,
over there I specialized in PPC automation,
and I've also worked for quite a few big companies in the e-commerce and travel industries.
0:39
This is what we're going to talk about today.
First, a very short introduction to what search engine marketing is,
for those of you who might need a refresher.
Then we will talk about the automation trend, and some of the biggest challenges it solves.
There are many types of automation, but today we're going to focus on one of them:
feed-based account creation.
I'd like to show you how VakantieDiscounter uses it to its advantage,
so more about what I do on a daily basis.
We will close with the bigger picture, discussing how the role of
a search marketer changes with all those technological advancements.
At the end, I will share some tips on how to make sure you stay on top of
the automation trend, and the best way to make use of it in your accounts.
1:28
Search engine marketing (SEA) means using paid ads on a search engine results page.
Advertisers bid on keywords which users might type in, when looking for certain products or services.
Thanks to that, the advertiser gets the opportunity for their ads to appear for those search queries.
It is a very effective, but also a very competitive way of advertising.
Your ad is going to be shown to people who have directly said
that they are searching for your service, but you're not the only one out there.
How do you make sure that your ad will stand out from the crowd?
You'll want to make sure that people are enticed to click your ad.
You might want to input (for example) the price, the full name of your product,
how many of those you have in stock, etc.
Furthermore, you want to make sure that after picking your ad,
the user will be sent to the best possible landing page from your website.
It's also important to effectively bid on your keywords.
For example, if a certain product is out of stock or has a very low margin,
you want to either bid less on it, or maybe you don't want to advertise it at all.
It's all very logical, but how do you manage it when you have thousands, or even millions of products?
That is where automation comes in handy, because both the marketeers
and the search engines are pushing for more automation possibilities.
Currently, there are many tasks that can be automated,
and I don't doubt that there will be more and more in the future,
because this is clearly the direction that the biggest search engines are taking right now.
Now a little bit about automation areas.
The most common ones are:
campaign creation - which would range from using the interface for building up your campaigns
through Excel and the editors, up to feed-based account creation;
the second one is bid management - starting from manual bid management, through rule-based,
up to algorithmic bidding systems;
account hygiene optimisation - starting from search engine features,
through scripts and alerts, up to third-party optimisation platforms;
reporting - from manual reports creation, through semi-automated,
up to fully-automated dashboards;
the final one is data management attribution -
here we are going from having no data integration between different platforms,
through small integrations, up to having all data centralized in one place.
