B2B Digital Marketing Archives

January 12, 2023February 15, 2021 by John Woods

Google Ads Bids Adieu to Broad Match Modifier…Or Does It?

What next for match types for B2B search advertisers?

By John Woods | February 15, 2021

Last week Google announced some significant changes to match types. This is a big deal: the last major change to match types was the introduction of broad match modifier back in 2010. So this is a once-in-a-decade event.

In B2B search marketing we often need fine-grained control over search terms to deliver acceptable ROI from search campaigns, and match types are a key tool in maintaining that control. So while Google’s changes will have big implications for most search advertisers, they are particularly significant for B2B search marketers.

In this post I will outline the changes that are happening and some steps that B2B search marketers should take right away to ensure their Google Ads setup remains cost effective.

What is Google changing?

Google is combining two existing match types, phrase match and broad match modifier (sometimes called modified broad match and abbreviated “BMM” or “MBM”).

Phrase match keywords are written with quotation marks like this: “b2b digital agency”.

Broad match modifier keywords are written with a plus sign, like this: +b2b +digital +agency

Prior to the recently-announced change, phrase match required a search term that contained all of the same words and in the exact order, matching the full “phrase” in the keyword. So for example:

Broad match modifier provided more flexibility in the search term – the words must all be present, but they do not need to be in the same order. So:

There are some nuances around this. In particular, both match types allow some flexibility for words with similar meanings. So for instance:

Once the recently-announced change has been completed, the old BMM syntax (with the +keyword signs) will disappear. The old “phrase match” syntax remains, but with a very important difference:

The new phrase match is (more or less) the same as the old BMM (!)

So for example:

There are some slight differences between old-style BMM and new-style phrase match. In particular Google says that the word order will be significant in deciding whether to match, in some cases. But the differences are quite minor. For more detail, see this Google help article.

So while this announcement has been reported as “Google is retiring Broad Match Modifier”, the truth is a bit more nuanced:

Google is retiring the old BMM syntax, with the +keyword signs.
There is a new-style phrase match, which behaves very similarly to the old-style BMM (with some subtle differences)
There will be no way to recreate the behaviour of the old-style phrase match.

It would be more accurate to say that phrase match is being retired, and BMM is being renamed!

When is this happening?

Google’s announcement says that the keyword behaviour “will begin to transition…starting mid-February [2021]”. The change will be applied to a list of 8 languages (including English) first, with other languages following along later.

So keep an eye for a further announcement or a Google Ads account alert to tell you that the change has gone into effect. It may still be a few weeks or even months before this behaviour switches over for your account.

Another key date is July 2021 – Google says that, by then, the change will have been rolled out globally, and it will then no longer be possible to create new keywords with the old-style BMM syntax.

What should B2B search marketers do about this change?

Bear in mind that this change mostly impacts phrase match. So your action plan depends on how heavily you use old-style phrase match in your Google Ads accounts.

Start by auditing your Google Ads accounts and see how important phrase match keywords are to you at the moment. You can do this in two ways:

Simply count how many phrase match keywords you have as a percentage of all of the active keywords in the account; or
Count the fraction of total account impressions, clicks and spend that is allocated to phrase match keywords.

The first approach is easier but may over- or under-state the importance of phrase match if, for example, you have a lot of phrase match keywords that have very low search volumes. The second approach is slightly more complex to do, but still only a few minutes’ work with a suitable spreadsheet, and will give you a more robust view.

Quick tip: there’s a convenient “Match Type” filter in Google Ads that makes it easy to separate out your phrase match keywords:

Interestingly there is no BMM setting in this filter – BMM keywords are currently combined with broad match. If you want to filter for BMM, here’s a trick you can use:

Here are the steps I recommend:

For your existing phrase match keywords: be aware that their matching behaviour is going to change significantly, and this may bring in bad matches that could harm the ROI of the associated campaigns. So as soon as Google’s change has been implemented, monitor these phrase match keywords closely and be ready to adjust bids, add negative keywords and perhaps even remove some keywords altogether.
Existing BMM keywords won’t change their behaviour very much, but there are some nuanced differences. So you should still audit and monitor these keywords in case the small differences catch you out. In particular if you work with a lot of searches where the word order is significant to you, you may need to make some changes here.
If you currently have a campaign with both phrase match and BMM keywords that are otherwise identical – for example if you bid on both “b2b agency” and +b2b +agency – then these are going to behave as exact duplicates. It would make sense to pause the BMM versions of these keywords as soon as you know the change has been implemented. (Duplicate keywords have no benefits and just cause headaches for account maintenance and performance analysis.)
As soon as you know that the change has been implemented for your accounts, stop using the outgoing +keyword BMM syntax for any new keywords that you create. Use the “phrase match” syntax instead. (Although you CAN still continue to use the BMM syntax until July, it will be retired soon anyway, so why create a problem for the future?)
Consider a planned account update to switch out your existing +keyword BMM keywords for phrase match. This isn’t essential: the old BMM syntax will continue to work indefinitely as a synonym for phrase match. But because it will soon become impossible to create keywords with the old BMM syntax, in the long term these keywords will become a headache for account maintenance. So a planned retirement of the +keyword syntax makes sense. Ideally, work to complete this before the July deadline.

If you are unlucky enough to currently make heavy use of phrase match, consider a more strategic review of your keyword strategy – it may be that you need to make more substantial changes to your keyword mix.

What are the wider implications of this change for B2B search marketers?

B2B search marketing often relies on very nuanced use of keywords. If matching is too broad, it is very easy to bring in a lot of expensive clicks from irrelevant matches, and so destroy the ROI from a campaign. So any change to match types is naturally a concern and needs to be assessed carefully by search marketers.

But on the whole I think this is a sensible rationalisation of match types. At Sharp Ahead, we’ve rarely needed to use much phrase match in the Google Ads accounts that we manage for our clients. We find that in most cases, BMM gives a good balance between specificity and reach, and allows us to design campaigns that give great ROI. So the old-style phrase match isn’t much of a loss.

There are a few nuanced cases where we’ll need to change our approach. For instance the mixing of BMM and broad match keywords like this:

+b2b digital agency

…won’t work any more – the whole keyword has to be phrase match. But on the whole, the changes will be minor. We just have to get used to the new terminology! Just remember:

+Broad +Match +Modifier is dead.
Long live “Broad Match Modifier”!

January 12, 2023November 11, 2020 by Jennifer Esty

Google confirms timing for bringing page experience to Google Search

By Jennifer Esty | November 11, 2020

On Tuesday Google confirmed that page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021.

The news follows the May 2020 announcement of a new set of standards for measuring “page experience”. That is, whether a particular web page delivers its content in a way that gives a positive experience for the user.

The new signals will combine Core Web Vitals with existing search signals, including: mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

What does this mean for you as a website owner?

If you have started already, you need to ensure that your site, and landing pages, meet the new standards or risk seeing your search engine results penalised for poor performance (and higher performing competitors given a boost).

Fortunately Google has put in place clear guidelines for how they will measure page experience. And they have provided a suite of tools to help site owners identify and fix issues.

Search Console: use the report for Core Web Vitals for an overview of how your site is doing and a details into any issues.

Page Speed Insights: get your CWV score and suggestions on where to make improvements (also helpful for ongoing testing as you make changes to your site)

For the full suite of Google tools, visit Google’s Tools to measure Core Web Vitals.

For more detailed information, check out our previous blog post on the announcement back in May.

If you’d like help understanding the impact of page experience on your B2B digital marketing strategy, or with any other aspect of B2B digital marketing, contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.

January 12, 2023November 5, 2020 by John Woods

Google Analytics 4: what you need to know today

By John Woods | November 5, 2020

In October, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 4, their first major change to Analytics in almost 10 years. The move formalises the beta version of Google Analytics App plus Web with a new interface and machine learning.

Here’s what you need to know:

The first thing you’ll notice when entering Google Analytics 4 is a sleek and modern interface. The redesign makes it easier to use and more accessible than its predecessor, Universal Analytics.

Behind the design, GA4 introduces a major expansion to the machine learning capabilities in Google’s analytics offering. While it is still too early to fully understand GA4’s potential, it’s an exciting addition.
GA4 also sees a complete re-haul of the data collection architecture.

With more apps, web apps, ecommerce stores, and complex websites circling the Google-sphere, GA4 looks to plug the hole in Google’s offering by collecting data on the complex user journeys in apps and highly interactive websites with minimal set up.

The clunky Goal Tracking in Universal Analytics has been removed to make way for simple-to-set-up Event and Conversion tracking. This allows user behaviour such as logging in or browsing products to be recognised easily.

But there is a catch.

GA4 is so fundamentally different to Universal Analytics that it requires adding a new tag to your website. And with it, a fresh start on Analytics.

Google has made finding the new tag super easy, but when you add it to your website, your GA4 dashboard will be blank. You’ll need to start afresh collecting data from the moment you set up the new tag.

Thankfully, adding the GA4 tag to your website doesn’t stop Universal Analytics from working – the two run in tandem. But with GA4 eventually looking to replace Universal Analytics entirely, and with no clear way to migrate data (yet), we recommend adding the GA4 tag soon so you can build up historic data when the change does come.

We don’t currently know when Google will start decommissioning Universal Analytics, but with historical data being a pivotal factor in how useful analytics is, you’ll need to prepare.

What to do next:

Add the GA4 Tag to your website
Recreate your remarketing audiences in GA4 so they can start to build up
Add event and conversion tracking
Set up Google Tag Manager (not required but best practice)

In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for more information on GA4 and the future of Analytics. Please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter to stay in the know!

January 12, 2023June 9, 2020 by John Woods

Google is bringing a big dose of science to web user experience…and it matters to anyone with a website

By John Woods | June 9, 2020

Google has announced a new set of standards for measuring “page experience” – that is, whether a particular web page delivers its content in a way that gives a positive experience for the user. These new standards provide a specific, pass or fail benchmark for three aspects of page experience that Google’s research has identified as particularly impactful for users.

Many websites currently fail to meet these new standards. Google is allowing a period of time before enforcement, but site owners are now on notice: they will need to improve their websites to meet these new page experience benchmarks, or face penalties to their SEO rankings.

In this article I’ll give an overview of the new standards, discuss their implications for B2B digital marketers, and highlight some immediate next steps you should be taking to ensure you are not left behind as Google rolls out its implementation of these standards.

Introducing Core Web Vitals

Google is calling the new standards “Core Web Vitals”. You’ll start to see them appear in various Google tools and reports. For example, here’s how they show up in Google Search Console:

There are three separate measures in Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): a measure of how long the page takes to display, when first loaded

• First Input Delay (FID): measures how quickly the page becomes interactive

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures what Google calls “visual stability”, in other words how much the page elements flicker and move around during the initial loading process.

Each of these measures has its own specific benchmarks on a traffic light system. For example the LCP needs to be below 2.5s to score as “good”. Between 2.5s and 4.0s LCP means “needs improvement”. And LCP above 4.0s means “poor”.

I’ll drill into these three measurements in a future article. For now, it’s enough to say that they measure separate and largely independent aspects of user experience: so for example a page that scores very highly on LCP could still score badly on FID or CLS. So each measure will need individual attention.

Why Core Web Vitals matter

Page experience has been important for SEO for a long time. Google and other search engines naturally want to feature pages that will provide a positive experience for users. But to date the exact impact of page experience on SEO rankings has been hard to understand.

This is great news for all of us when we use the web: by providing an explicit incentive to avoid poor page experience, Google is helping to encourage higher standards for user experience across the web.

It is also good news for site owners: with Core Web Vitals, Google is making the impact of page experience on SEO much more transparent. A website owner can use the Core Web Vitals benchmarks as a reliable guide to whether their page experience is good enough to avoid SEO penalties, and can target specific improvements if they are needed.

But there is some bad news for site owners: the Core Web Vitals benchmarks are pretty demanding! It is likely that many websites will need to make significant technical changes to meet the new benchmarks and avoid SEO penalties. This is especially true for niche B2B websites which have often been designed and implemented with relatively little concern for page experience.

Although Google haven’t said so explicitly, I predict that page experience will become a much more significant ranking factor for SEO as Google rolls out these standards. So B2B marketers who pay attention to Core Web Vitals and who take action to ensure their websites meet the new benchmarks will be rewarded with higher levels of organic search traffic. And those who do not take action are likely to see their organic traffic decline.

Google’s announcements so far only relate Core Web Vitals to organic search. But I would not be surprised to see Core Web Vitals quickly becoming a factor in quality score for paid search (PPC/SEM). Google Ads already has a component of quality score for “landing page experience”, so it would be entirely logical for Google to take Core Web Vitals into account in the future. If that happens, Core Web Vitals scores will have a direct bearing on PPC costs: because a higher quality score reduces the amount paid for each click, and vice versa.

There’s time, but the clock is ticking

Google acknowledges that website owners will need time to improve their page experience. Their announcement says that the new measures will not be incorporated into SEO rankings until 2021 at the earliest, and that there will be a minimum of 6 months’ notice of the specific date.

Google has introduced similar policies in the past designed to encourage improvements in user experience. In particular, Google encouraged site owners to move from non-secure http: to secure https: connections, and pushed for mobile-friendly page design. Both of these were introduced gently with a small SEO impact at first, increasing over time. I predict we will see the same with Core Web Vitals: a small penalty for sites that don’t meet the benchmarks at first, but rising to a much more substantial penalty over time – to the point where, like https and mobile-friendliness, it will become inconceivable to attempt any meaningful SEO strategy on a site that does not meet the Core Web Vitals benchmarks.

What to do now – find out where you stand

You can see how your web pages score against the Core Web Vitals benchmarks right away. Check your website with Google’s free Pagespeed Insights tool. You’ll see your current scores highlighted with a blue icon, like this example:

Some things to consider when using this tool:

• Each page will have its own scores. You should check more than one page: important pages like the homepage and the “contact us” page, for example, and any pages that you have built specifically to bring in organic traffic.

• Pagespeed Insights ranks mobile and desktop versions of your page separately. Make sure to look at both. Many B2B sites are built primarily for desktop, a great set of Core Web Vitals on desktop won’t help you much if you fail every measure on mobile.

• The report shows both “Field Data” and “Lab Data” – concentrate on Field Data if it is available. If your page has small numbers of visitors (like many niche B2B pages) there may not be enough data for the “Field Data” report to show. In that case you can use the “Lab Data” report as a backup.

What to do next – plan to pass the benchmarks

You may be lucky enough to find that all of your important pages already pass the Core Web Vitals benchmarks. If so, congratulations! You should still remain vigilant, especially if you plan any technical or design changes to your pages, but it’s unlikely you will need to do any major work.

But it is much more likely you will find that your pages fail at least some of the benchmarks. This is especially true for B2B websites, where page performance and user experience are typically not given high priority in the design and implementation stages. In that case you’ll need to plan and budget for technical or design changes, or brace yourself for an eventual SEO penalty and consequent loss of organic traffic – and perhaps other negative implications too.

For some B2B website implementations it may be impractical to meet the Core Web Vitals benchmarks even with very large amounts of work. If your site is one of those, it may be time to consider a redesign or a complete replatform – with compliance with Core Web Vitals benchmarks an explicit goal for the project.

If you’d like help understanding the impact of Core Web Vitals on your B2B digital marketing strategy, or with any other aspect of B2B digital marketing, contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.

January 12, 2023May 20, 2020 by Emma Grimshaw

Are LinkedIn text ads the best kept secret in B2B brand advertising?

By Emma Grimshaw | May 20, 2020

The LinkedIn advertising platform has evolved quickly in recent years. What started out as a clunky interface with limited audience options and just a single advert format (the humble Text Ad), has matured into a more refined user experience with sophisticated targeting options that are a treasure-trove for B2B marketers.

Their newer Sponsored Content ad format is – on paper – better than it’s predecessor in almost every way. Benefiting from a large image or graphic, a generous character limit, a clear call-to-action button, and prominent news feed placement, you can expect a well-performing ad to generate a click-through-rate of 0.35-0.45%, according to LinkedIn.

Side-by-side the original Text Ad format looks somewhat meagre, tucked away to the right of the screen with just 50×50 pixel thumbnail image, 25-character headline, and 75-character description. And with a CTR of 0.12% being considered by LinkedIn as a ‘good’, it might leave you wondering: why even bother with Text Ads at all?

1 – LinkedIn Text Ads are excellent value

On the face of it a Text Ad with 10,000 impressions and 1 click might not feel like value added. But if your campaign is set to bid for clicks rather than impressions, then this should be considered a success. Where else would you be able to get your brand in front of a well targeted audience of B2B decision-makers 10,000 times for less than the price of a cup of coffee?

2 – LinkedIn Text Ads are highly targeted

If you have already created a sleek Sponsored Content campaign, then you’re only a few clicks away from setting up some complementary Text Ads. Your audience has already been defined and refined, so why not utilise this and reinforce your sales-focused messages with brand-building creative?

3 – LinkedIn Text ads are perfect for brand building

With specialist B2B products and services, there is a good chance that your audience isn’t big enough to run remarketing ads on LinkedIn. Text Ads are a great alternative, enabling you to keep your brand front-of-mind with the same prospects that have likely seen your Sponsored Content ads.

So whilst they might not boast impressive enough CTRs to hinge an entire lead generation campaign on, their power to generate brand awareness for pennies is the reason we think LinkedIn Text Ads are one of the best kept secrets in B2B brand advertising.