Sri Samudrala's Marketing Blog

 This week we learned about the performance planner in google ads. The performance planner helps you organize your ad campaigns and set optimal bids. This will help you maximize the Return on investment potential. The best practice is to use the performance planner on a monthly basis. It uses machine learning to help forecast the possibilities of ad campaigns. The performance planner drives more conversions with different spend scenarios. Using it monthly helps you deal with competitors, and fluctuating auctions. Creating separate plans for each objective helps you achieve incremental conversions. In order to drive conversions, set bids and budgets using the non-last click conversions tool. Lastly, regularly check your plan to make sure the run date and forecast align with one another. 

 Hugging face is a new AI company that is working to create more efficient ways of doing things using machine learning. One aspect they have on the website is text based inpainting. Basically, it allows you to replace a certain part of an image with something else based on what you type in. This is a very cool and creative way of editing pictures. The top picture was a picture I uploaded in to the software. The bottom picture was a result of the things I wanted to be replaced. I wanted to replace the water droplets in the top photo with smiley faces and the result was the bottom photo. Not exactly what I was looking for but still a very cool program.

 A great feature that has increased effectiveness and organization of google ads is automated bidding. Automated bidding is where google ads will automatically set your bids based on your performance goals. Smart bidding is a feature of automated bidding that uses machine learning to optimize for things like conversions and conversion value. This is very beneficial because machine learning maximizes the efficiency of your bids. Smart bidding sets precise bids for every auction which helps create a higher conversion volume and value at an efficient cost. Machine learning algorithmically sets bids for each auction which helps save a lot of time. Smart bidding also has auction time bidding which helps tailor bids to your context using relevant signals. Smart bidding also uses a depth of signals and cross analysis to help the bidding process.  

 Amazon is always innovating getting larger and larger every year. Now Amazon has ads you can create just like google. It has a lot of the same features as google such as creating your own budget and text ads.  There are also a lot of features that Amazon Ads has that would be very beneficial. One could argue Amazon ads is the way to go for digital advertising. Amazon Ads could be the best ad platform  just due to the popularity of Amazon. It is by far the largest online retailer which means more opportunities for clicks. They also have video and audio ads which can be played on devices such as streaming tv's and Amazon echo. This is a very beneficial aspect because so many people use Amazon or Amazon devices on a regular basis.

 Text ads are a very simple but very effective way of getting clicks on products. They simply just made of words but those words have to be informative, engaging, and relevant. They are made up of three main parts: Headline, description, URL. People are most likely to be intrigued by the Headline which is why it is the most important. You can ad up to three headlines with 30 characters in each and two descriptions with 90 characters each. When creating text ads, it is very effective to have three to five ads per ad group, use a minimum of three ad extensions, and optimize ad rotation. These factors will help your ad get more clicks and be seen more often. Having a few different headlines and descriptions also help get seen because they ad more variation to your ad. The above photo shows how first ad had different headlines and descriptions that fit the not only the search term but several other search terms that may be used. This will greatly improve ad success. Google text ads

 Due to a seemingly inevitable recession, many different companies are adjusting their budgets for ads. Many people might think that this would slow down advertising growth but that doesn't seem to be the case in certain instances. For example, google's search ads may not be effected very much because their results are more based on how many clicks they get. However, Twitter relies brand advertising for most of its ad revenue which would make it more vulnerable to the recession. Small and medium sized businesses also might not be cutting their spending unlike big businesses. Many small and medium sized businesses are big on online advertisement. This really helped them stay a float during  the pandemic. However, since then, the growth of their online advertisement has slowed down because people are able to leave their homes. https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-things-marketers-should-know-about-ad-spending-trends-11657274400?mod=mhp

 Cybersecurity firms seem to be laying off many employees at an alarming rate due to the preparation for the predicted economic recession in 2023.This could be seen as a mistake due to the fact that cybersecurity continues to be an everchanging world that constantly has to improve in order to stay ahead of cyber fraud. Some companies are even focusing less on research and development and focusing more on customer retention in order to save money. I believe this could be bad because while keeping customers is important, if your cybersecurity isn't up to date then cyber fraud is more likely to happen. This in turn would result in the company losing customers. Although cybersecurity companies are laying off employees, Cybersecurity jobs are still doing well. Many companies are looking for people who are knowledgeable and qualified to work in cybersecurity. This begs the question of whether it is a good idea to get some kind of certification or minor degree in cybersecurity? I believe

 Impressions are a key component in the world of advertising. Some may say that it is even the most important factor due to the nature of grabbing consumers' attention. Often the best way to grab a consumers attention is to use an element in the ad that relates to them personally or emotionally. For example, Many rescue animal shelters will have advertisements that are very emotional and sad. This is to make the consumer sad for the animal thus making them want to adopt them and give them a good life. Ads are designed to get as many people seeing the product or website as possible. A good ad will get a lot of people to see the product and see what it is about. However, just because those people see it does not result in consumers buying the product. An ad could get hundreds of consumers to view the product but only one could end up buying the item. That being said, The more consumers that see the product will likely increase the sales of the product to a certain degree.