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It’s National Cocoa Day, Reader! 🍫 Chocolate you can ☕ drink!

In today’s edition:

• Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for content strategy

•  🎯 Dial in your Google search ads targeting

• Updated 🔗 link referrers on 🧵 Threads

• ▶️ Video coming to X Spaces

As your brand evolves, the content you publish will change over time. What aligned with your brand five years ago, may no no longer serve your business. 

The same can be true for creators.

But scrubbing years’ worth of video to identify content that should be removed or recategorized differently is a huge undertaking.

Use Bard to Analyze Past YouTube Videos for Brand Suitability

We recently reported that Google's Bard can be used to summarize YouTube videos. Bard does present significant implications concerning Watch Time, but this AI tool can also help you clean up past video catalogs.

Marketers and creators can leverage Bard’s technology to streamline a review of their back-catalogs for irrelevant and inappropriate content and decide whether to keep, delete, or privatize those videos. 

Today's tip is inspired by Jim Louderback, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World. Source: Louderback.com

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With over 90% market share, Google search ads present unmatched reach to relevant audiences. But if you aren’t careful with your targeting, you’re wasting your budget on irrelevant clicks. 

A Proven Targeting Strategy That Yields Conversions

Start With Your First-Party Data

The foundation of effective Google search targeting is first-party data on your known, high-value customers. Export the contact details of your customers like the names, email addresses, and locations from your CRM or email messaging platform into spreadsheet files. Then, upload these customer lists into the Google Ads interface, allowing their system to match them to existing Google accounts using tracking data. 

After 48 hours, check the match rates to verify Google is finding your actual customers. Low match rates reveal flaws that indicate you may need to tweak your initial customer list and campaigns accordingly to align with the reality of online searches.

Observe Broader Audiences To Expand Reach

You can improve your targeting to reach new customers by layering on Google’s broader inferred Audiences like “in-market” and “affinity” to incrementally expand reach. Google builds these audiences by tracking online behaviors indicating potential purchase intent, lifestyle interests, and business roles. 

When first adding these segment groups to your campaigns, enable them for observation only.  

This serves your ads normally while reporting performance metrics specifically for each selected group. After the platform reveals which observed clusters drive more conversions at acceptable cost levels, you can shift top-performing observation segments into fully targeted buckets to concentrate your spending on the highest caliber prospects.

Align Campaign Settings To Business Goals

With your robust audiences assembled, it’s time to confirm that your offline campaign settings are aligned with real-world revenue objectives. 

Google's “Smart Bidding” algorithms dynamically balance conversions and costs through customized performance targets. 

Whether your goal is to increase conversions, cap client acquisition costs, maximize target return-on-ad-spend, or simply utilize the entire daily ad budget, be sure to define key performance indicators for each of your campaigns ahead of launch.

Reflect Business Priorities Through Bidding Strategies

You can complement your audience targeting and financial goals with suitable automated bidding approaches:

• Pursue general brand awareness across the widest reach through Google’s far-reaching Display Network. 

• Promote specific products directly through narrower yet still sizeable Shopping Campaigns.

• Seek targeted converters and direct sales via highly focused Search Campaigns limited to your website and mobile apps. 

Measure Conversions And Tweak Accordingly

Ultimately, Google search ads succeed through continually inspecting, learning from, and optimizing performance, and every campaign element—audiences, goals, bids, ads, keywords, and landing pages—intertwines into a cohesive system for optimal conversions.

As you launch campaigns, persistently measure results daily. 

If conversions lag, costs exceed benchmarks, or spending goes underutilized, reassess your audience targeting for excessive narrowness or a mismatch with your offer.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Brooke Osmundson.

Affordable Option to Attend Social Media Marketing World 2024

Six years ago we created a more affordable way for marketers to attend our conference.

We call it the Marketer ticket and it's ideal if you value learning and networking but have a limited budget. 

It includes access to all of the sessions and keynotes during our main event, including two full days of training. (February 19–20)

If you want to enhance your marketing with AI, improve your strategy, learn to leverage video, and so much more, a Marketer ticket is a great option.

Yes! I want to be there in person.

🗞 Threads Link Referrer: Threads has updated the link referrer for links shared within Threads to allow publishers and website administrators to better track and understand traffic coming from links posted in Threads, separate from general Instagram traffic. Site owners should see this new referrer reflected in their analytics dashboards for traffic and clicks coming from Threads link shares. Source: Adam Mosseri via Threads

🗞 X/Twitter Spaces: X is working on adding video capabilities to Spaces, its live audio chat rooms. Video will be an optional feature that speakers can turn on or off. Source: Mario Nawfal via X/Twitter

Did You Know?

A group of peacocks is called an ostentation.