US Presidential election data: searcher intent vs. demographic polling

Politics aside, data from the 2016 US Presidential election illustrates that intent-driven search data “trumps” demographics-based polling data.

During the hotly contested and seemingly never-ending campaign season running up to the 2016 US Presidential elections, Americans were exposed to more demographics-based “polling data” than at any other time in history. However, despite the best efforts of pollsters, mathematicians, academics and others, just about every polling projection and prediction was wrong.

Well, all but one.

In the weeks leading up to the election, as polls showed Hillary Clinton leading by a cumulative average of three percentage points or more, Donald Trump was quietly garnering 58 percent of intent-driven Google search queries related to the two candidates. If that doesn’t sound particularly significant, consider the fact that Google search data accurately predicted the outcome of the 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 US Presidential elections.

The question is why. Why does the search activity reflect how one candidate may perform? The answer is that search data can accurately reflect unbiased intent.

Polling sample sizes, bias, mathematical formulas, weighting techniquesand margins of error simply cannot compete with the accuracy of intent-based data from millions of real people. Don’t get me wrong, polling will always have a place in the marketer’s toolbox, but polling data mostly reflects and relies on the demographics of a small number of poll respondents, what they have done previously and not necessarily their current intent.

As Millard Brown found in 2015, marketers who solely rely on demographics data risk missing more than 70 percent of mobile shoppers. For instance, not all consumers of baby products are moms and dads. In a recent study, Google found that 40 percent of people who buy baby products do not even have infant children.

Not surprisingly, it turns out grandparents, cousins, friends and co-workers influence and/or purchase lots of baby products. Just as with consumer marketing, age, race, sex, marital status, previous activities, the number of children living at home and what people say is not as important as their actual intent.

Another advantage of using searcher intent over polling data is that searcher behavior is anonymous. It filters out potential distortions caused by social pressures, expectations and fear. Some people are reluctant to reveal their true feelings to random individuals claiming to be pollsters. In contrast, these same individuals may have less inhibition while interacting with a search box.

Of course, all these factors do not mean search data is always clear or 100 percent accurate, either. After all, “registered voters” and “likely voters” cannot always be reliably identified. Sometimes search data can also be misleading; context and the number of queries are the key. If either of the candidates’ names had not been unique, for example, it might be impossible to ensure irrelevant or extraneous information was not skewing the data.

To appreciate this problem, consider what the search data might look like in a presidential race between a Smith and a Jones — or worse, a Hilton and a Kardashian. Searching for “Paris Hilton” could imply the user intends to book a hotel room in Paris, France, or find information about a certain socialite in the US.

Even though Google puts together fancy tools for special events like elections, the simple fact is that anyone can leverage the same data for any query by using Google Trends — something to think about if you’re looking for predictive, intent-based data without a million-dollar budget or just want historically accurate data to compare with polling numbers.

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‘Tis the season: 6 ways to prepare for holiday shoppers

Whether you've got your holiday marketing plan all mapped out or are just starting now, columnist Christi Olson has tips to prepare your search campaigns for the season.

For marketers, Christmas isn’t just one day a year — months of planning and weeks of meticulous optimization precede our celebration of the holiday season. For many retail businesses, it’s sink or swim during the holiday season, and they are moving from the planning to implementation phases of the holiday season now, with Black Friday just a few weeks away.

Even if you’ve finished your holiday marketing plans through the end of the year, it’s not too late to incorporate a few additional strategies this holiday season.

1. Think holistically for holiday success

Consumers touch multiple channels during the holiday shopping season, and part of what makes a world-class consumer experience is consistency across each of those touch points.

If you haven’t started to sync with your peers across other channels such as email, display, affiliates or social, then set up time on the calendar as soon as possible so you can create a cross-channel promotional calendar. It’s not too late to create the cross-channel view and to update your search campaigns to target and drive consumers from other marketing channels along their purchase journeys.

Some questions to ask:

• What promotions are they running and on what dates?
• Do they have specific, ring-fenced discounts or offers?
• What holiday-specific messaging are they using?
• What tagging are they using for their specific holiday campaigns?

2. Create cross-channel remarketing audiences

After you’ve met with your cross-channel partners, it’s time to put your newfound knowledge to use within search. Take the information you’ve learned from their promotional calendar and URL tagging to create remarketing audiences based on cross-channel consumers. Think “Target and Bid” for these audience campaigns so you can adjust your search messaging based on the cross-channel promotional messaging and match your ad extensions to take consumers further down the funnel.

Some audiences to curate and develop:

• Email Campaigns: Loyal Shoppers, Cart Abandoners who have opened the cart abandon email
• Pinterest & Social Shoppers
• Affiliate Discount Shoppers

Within each of these remarketing campaigns, look at your cross-channel calendar and adjust the ad copy to include the right promotions, and adjust your sitelinks based on where the consumer might be within the purchase cycle.

3. Check your mobile presence

Mobile is becoming an increasingly important part of the holiday strategy. In 2015, the National Retail Federation reported that 56 percent of searches during the holiday season were conducted on mobile devices, and Business Insider reported that 29 percent of total online sales came from mobile devices.

Shoppers research their purchases ahead of time and start shopping early; based on internal Microsoft data, eight out of 10 top mobile shopping daysoccur in November and skewed to the weekends.

• Update your mobile bid modifiers to make sure your brand is visible on mobile devices.
• Use mobile URLS to send mobile shoppers to the right mobile landing page.
  • Bonus tip: With your Mobile URLs, create a custom tracking code so that you can create a mobile device remarketing audience.

4. Show discounts & offers on shopping campaigns

According to the NRF 2016 forecast, one of the top factors for choosing a retailer will be sales and price discounts, along with free shipping. Make sure that you’ve updated your Shopping campaigns so they are mobile-optimized and:

• show price discounts on Shopping Ads by including regular price and sale price in the feed;
• incorporate offers such as Free or Expedited Shipping; and
• check your feed for data feed errors — especially if you are making frequent updates during the holiday season.

5. Prepare to boost your bids & watch your budgets

During the holiday season, manual bid optimization is always going on during the peak shopping days. Instead of waiting and adjusting on the fly, you can prepare in advance for some of the boosts and automate the process.

Start by analyzing your current time of day and day of week purchase trends, not just for the previous month but also during the previous holiday season. Use this to determine how much you should boost your desk and mobile bids by day of week and time of day to capture holiday demand.

Watch your budgets: Use scripts to notify you when you’ve capped out on budgets.

Watch your account invoice limits: If you are an advertiser who is on invoice and you plan on increasing your ad spend spending significantly more during the holidays compared with the rest of the year, you need to have a conversation with your sales reps now. Talk to your reps about increasing your invoice credit limits during the holiday season — and if it’s not possible to increase your credit limit, have conversations about the process for submitting payments outside of the traditional payment window.

Why is this important? In a previous role, my monthly invoice amount was half of what I would spend in a day during the peak holiday season. For three weeks, I was constantly playing catch-up and making sure that our search campaigns remained online and didn’t hit the invoice caps.

6. Schedule and plan before the holiday mayhem begins

Once you get into the throes of the holiday shopping season, you won’t have much time for building out new campaigns, uploading promotions and so forth; instead, you’ll be consumed by the day-to-day tasks of granular reporting and account optimizations. Prepare what you can in advance and know your key dates.

• Don’t wait until the week of to build out your promotional campaigns — build them out in advanced and schedule them with set start and end dates.
• Know your cutoff dates. Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, so the last-minute shipping cutoff falls on Friday, December 23. Look at the year-over-year differences in cutoff dates and determine how they might impact your overall campaigns.
• Don’t just look at the trends from last year; put context behind them. What offers were you running on which dates? Were there differences in shipping cutoff deadlines or issues with delivery due to weather? Were there issues with product availability? Know your stats now so that in the heat of the holiday season, you aren’t having to dig through all of last year’s emails to jog your memory about what happened on which dates.

The holiday shopping season is always a little bit hectic, filled with a dash of craziness and lot of optimization. Don’t rush into the holidays — be prepared.

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Forget about unique content. Try actually BEING local!

Columnist Greg Gifford notes that when all your competitors have unique content, then that alone won't be enough to help you stand out from the crowd.

Is it just me, or does it really seem lately like every marketer is looking for a silver bullet when it comes to SEO? Even though nothing even close to a silver bullet exists, the search is always on for the “one big thing” that can really jump a site up in the rankings.

It’s time for another installment of Greg’s Soapbox. Stop trying to look for silver content bullets! Stop trying to be lazy or look for shortcuts! If you put in the time and do things correctly, you’ll win in the long run.

It’s fall conference season, and I’ve sat in on countless sessions that preach the same thing over and over again: you’ve got to create unique content if you want to succeed.

Technically, that’s true. But in the real world, I’m just gonna say it: it’s a load of BS.

The myth of unique content as a differentiator

Let’s look at the majority of businesses out there. Unless you’re the only underwater basket-weaving supply company in the state, there are going to be competitors in your market. Depending on your vertical and your city, you could have anywhere from a handful of competitors to hundreds, all fighting for the top few spots on page one.

Unique content is important, but there are only so many ways you can write unique content about whatever you sell. There might be 50 plumbers in your market, and they could all have unique content on their sites, but their sites are all still about plumbing. The actual copy might be unique, but the overall content is pretty much the same.

Citations used to be a big game-changer in Local SEO, but they’ve become more of a basic building block. I typically explain to businesses that citations are like your ante in a poker game. You’ve got to have a clean citation profile to be able to sit at the big boy Local SEO poker table.

Unique content is becoming the same thing. As more marketers and business owners become SEO-savvy, more and more websites feature unique content. Does that really make a difference any more? Once everyone has unique content, that factor is no longer a differentiator.

So here’s my push for the rest of the year: If you’re doing Local SEO, worry less about uniquecontent and put more effort into local content. Don’t simply include city and state info in different on-page elements — actually write local content!

Local is the new unique. It’s totally fetch!

I wrote a post here a year and a half ago about making your blog a local destination. Go back and read it. Go old-school Wil Reynolds and do RCS. Don’t pretend — actually BE local.

Share useful information about your area. Interview local figures. Share local news. But don’t just limit your new local focus to your blog — put a local spin on your standard website pages as well.

I’m talking about a fundamental change in the way you write your content, and the way you run your business. If you’re not involved in the community, get involved. Donate your time to local groups, participate in the neighborhood community, support local charities and so on. You can’t fake being a part of the local community. If you’re truly involved, writing local content will be incredibly simple.

Yes, that’s technically still writing unique content — but unique content for its own sake won’t matter if all of your competitors are doing the same thing.

Truly local content will help you stand out. Google will love the legitimate local signals of relevancy, and your customers will flock to your site because those local signals are genuine.

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Why are payday loan ads still showing on Google after the ban?

A deep look at how the payday loan industry is able to keep advertising despite Google's policy changes.

To consumer advocates, payday loans have become synonymous with predatory lending. The small short-term loans often come with astronomical interest rates that can pull consumers who are trying to get by from paycheck to paycheck into a deepening hole of debt.

Just this week, the FTC fined a payday lending group $1.3 billion for deceptive loan practices. Industry watchdog groups have been advocating for more regulation and pressing for change, and in May, Google announced it would start to ban payday and high-interest loan ads.

The ban started rolling out the week of July 20. There were estimates the move could cost Google millions in lost ad revenue. Yet, more than two months later, it appears the ban is likely having little to no impact on Google’s bottom line. as ads continue to fill the available slots on desktop and mobile. Why? Because it’s not an actual ban, and the advertisers quickly figured out how to change their messaging to meet Google’s policies.

In a review over the past month, I have found advertisers showing messaging on landing pages from Google ads that complies with the new restrictions (APR rates no higher than 36 percent and minimum repayment period of 60 days). But the fine print shows the ranges shown on the landing pages are essentially just a way of getting around payday loan policy. And fine print isn’t the only way the companies are evading the rules.

Non-Direct lenders aren’t responsible for actual APRs

With very few exceptions — Discover Personal Loans and CashNetUSA being two — the advertisers are lead generators, or loan brokers, which means they aren’t doing the actual lending. By being one step removed from the actual lending process, these advertisers can list terms that fall within Google’s payday loan policy on their ad landing pages without having to actually be beholden to those terms.

The terms listed on the landing pages (often in fine print at the bottom of the page) from the lead generators’ advertising varies, but often you’ll see some terms that fall within the range of Google’s policy, but when read carefully, make clear that the actual APR could vary outside that range (i.e., higher). Here are just two examples (bolding is mine).

From LoansOfSuccess.com:

“LoansOfSuccess cannot guarantee any APR, since we are a lending network. Though a Representative APR can range between 5.99–35.99%. The Maximum APR is 35.99. When accepting a loan from a lender, the lender can provide a different APR than our range. Please check the loan disclosure before approving and signing the agreement for your loan.”

From WeLoan2U.com:

“Consumers, who qualify with a lender, can be offered loans with APRs below 36% and have payment terms ranging from 61 days to 60 months, or more. Cash transfer times may vary between lenders and may depend on your individual financial institution. For details, questions or concerns regarding your loan, please contact your lender directly.”

LendingTree took this a step farther by explicitly stating on its landing page that because I clicked through “via a paid Google advertisement,” the offers I’ll see on LendingTree will feature quotes “of no greater than 35.99 percent APR with terms from 61 days to 180 months.” Sounds great, except “Your actual rate depends … and will be agreed upon by you and the lender.”

No easy answers

This is an industry that has considerable lobbying power. It is currently fighting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed rule to address the debt traps that often occur with these types of loans. The National Association of Federal Credit Unions is among the groups pushing backon the proposed changes.

In some ways, Google’s efforts to crack down on predatory lending within its ads has only acted to further mask the actual workings of these companies as they keenly adapt to the policies without having to change practices. And it’s yet another game of whack-a-mole for the search giant.

A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “We continue to implement our policy and will take action on ads and advertisers that are not in compliance. These actions include removing ads and permanently banning advertisers from using AdWords.”

I’m told that since introducing the policy change, Google has disapproved more than three million policy-violating ads before they could enter the ad auction and has taken action on thousands of advertisers’ accounts that were in violation of the payday loan policies.

The implementation of the new policy is only a few months old at this point, and Google is sure to continue to fine-tune how it gets implemented on the back end. Whether it will have a material effect on consumers remains to be seen. Google certainly has its part to play — and is still benefiting financially from these advertising practices — but in many ways, this is much bigger than a “Google problem.” And it’s is one of those cases where Google and Bing (and others) should be encouraged to coordinate on ad policies in the interest of consumers online.

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