In the ever-evolving realm of Google Ads, advertisers often face the perplexing challenge of increasing cost per click (CPC). While competition is often blamed, there can be other factors at play. This comprehensive guide aims to unravel the causes behind CPC increases and provide actionable insights to help advertisers navigate this dynamic landscape with confidence.

The Competition Factor

While an increase of CPC is not always related to more competition, it sometimes still is. Competition is a familiar adversary in the world of advertising. As more advertisers bid for ad placements, the demand increases, and CPC rises accordingly. It's a digital battlefield where the highest bidder wins the coveted clicks. To tackle this, refine your targeting, optimize ad quality, and consider adjusting your bidding strategy to remain competitive while maintaining a healthy CPC.

Decoding Ad Copy Impact

The power of ad copies should never be underestimated. If your copies fail to engage your target audience or lose relevance, the click-through rate (CTR) suffers. Google's algorithms take note, resulting in lower quality scores and higher CPC. To combat this, create compelling copies that resonate with your audience, experiment with different messaging, and conduct A/B testing to find the most effective copy that boosts CTR and lowers CPC.

Navigating Targeting Challenges

Targeting in digital advertising requires a careful balance. On one hand, casting a wide net may seem appealing, but it can lead to decreased relevance, lower CTR, and subsequently, a higher CPC. On the other hand, overly strict targeting could lead you to compete with a larger pool of advertisers for a smaller inventory, potentially driving up CPC. The challenge lies in finding the right equilibrium. To navigate this, refine your targeting criteria and strategically narrow your audience to those most likely to convert. To make your targeting more precise, consider leveraging audiences on top of your keywords. In doing so, be mindful of not restricting your reach too much, which could limit your inventory or make you enter more competitive niche auctions. Finding this balance can help improve your campaign performance and manage your CPC effectively.

The Enigma of Keywords

Keywords hold great power in shaping CPC. Changes to keywords or match types can transform them into formidable foes. As competition intensifies, bidding wars escalate, resulting in increased CPC. To counter this, conduct thorough keyword research, identify long-tail keywords with lower competition, and optimize your keyword strategy.

Seasonal Fluctuations

Prepare for the seasonal rollercoaster ride! During peak periods, such as holidays or special events, competition surges, leading to a spike in demand for ad placements. To navigate this, monitor and analyze performance during seasonal peaks, adjust your bids and budgets accordingly, and consider running targeted seasonal campaigns to maximize results while minimizing CPC impact.

Algorithmic Influence

Google's ever-evolving algorithms add a layer of complexity to CPC dynamics. Updates in ad auctions and algorithms can impact ad rankings, display, and pricing. To adapt to these changes, stay updated on industry trends and algorithm updates, conduct regular campaign audits, and optimize your campaigns to align with the latest best practices.

Understanding the causes behind CPC increases empowers advertisers to navigate the challenges within Google Ads effectively. Armed with comprehensive knowledge, they can take strategic actions to overcome competition by refining targeting and ad quality, experimenting with ad copy variations, optimizing their keyword strategy, adjusting bids and budgets based on seasonal fluctuations, and staying informed about algorithmic changes. While understanding the reasons behind CPC increases is a crucial aspect of managing Google Ads, it's important to remember that cost per click should not be the sole determinant of campaign success. In fact, achieving a balance between CPC and cost per conversion/ROAS is vital, with the latter serving as a more significant KPI. Advertisers, thus, should use their comprehensive knowledge to strategically refine their campaign elements while keeping the cost per conversion/ROAS and overall business results as their guiding metrics in this dynamic digital landscape.

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Semetis was the first agency in the Benelux to launch a Display campaign on Twitch together with Circus Belgium. This new placement recently launched allows brands to reach their target audience with different formats than video ads and at a cheaper cost.

What is Twitch ?

A dynamic platform that combines the best features of linear TV, streaming platforms, and social media, offering a diverse range of content such as gaming, sports, music, entertainment, and more.
It has an impressive reach, averaging 1.5 million monthly unique viewers in Belgium (Twitch internal data, Q1 2022 - Q4 2022), equivalent to approximately 194,000 daily unique viewers.

Why should your brand consider joining Twitch?

Firstly, Twitch has emerged as a powerful medium for engaging with the younger demographic. In fact, 53% of Twitch's audience falls between the ages of 16 and 24, while 27% belong to the 25-34 age group, indicating that a significant 80% of its users are from the Gen Z and Millennial generations.

Moreover, it offers the unique advantage of reaching audiences that are typically absent from traditional TV and social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

Lastly, Twitch has experienced a tremendous surge in popularity, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a significant increase in user interest compared to 2018 and 2019. This upward trend in engagement is favorable for advertisers presenting lucrative opportunities for brands to connect with a wide range of users.

New format: Display Ads

Twitch already provided various advertising formats, including unskippable and clickable video ads and recently launched two new Display formats:

• Home headliner with 24-hour visibility: The perfect placement to enhance your brand's visibility and make a lasting impression.
• Medium rectangle and super leaderboard banners: Engage with users and maximize your brand exposure by leveraging these impactful formats.

Beside those two you can also advertise with videos using:

• Takeover during 24 hours: Ideal for significantly increasing your reach and capturing people's attention on a large scale.
• Video incorporated in live broadcasts across different screens: Engage with users while ensuring your message is viewed, thanks to the unskippable nature of the format.

Results

Semetis was the pioneer and successfully launched display banners on Twitch in the Benelux region. CPM's are of course cheaper than video campaigns. On the other hand, inventory is more limited so it could have an impact on your delivery leading to investment underspend or higher CPMs compared to average benchmark for that specific placement.

Conclusion

Twitch stands as a good social platform for reaching out to Gen Z and Millennials. Its diverse content, growing popularity, and ability to engage tech-savvy and gaming-focused audiences make it a prime choice for brands looking to connect with these demographics. With various advertising formats available, including the new display banner option, Twitch provides compelling opportunities to amplify your brand's presence and engage with a wider audience.

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Dynamic remarketing allows advertisers to show tailored ads to users who have previously interacted with their website or mobile app. It’s essential in a performance marketing strategy because it helps advertisers re-engage with potential customers who might have left the website without making a purchase by reminding them of the products they showed interest in.

This feature is actually available in Google Ads. However, to make it work, a very simple set up has to be done through Google Tag Manager.

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

• Set up Dynamic remarketing through GTM
• Debug your implementation

Before you begin

Before starting the set up of Dynamic Remarketing in GTM, there are a few prerequisites :

• Having a product feed implemented in Google Merchant Center (GMC)
• Enable Dynamic remarketing in GMC under the Growth Section of your account
• Testing the dataLayer of your website. You need to make sure that the following events are being pushed :
  • view_search_results
  • view_item_list
  • view_item
  • add_to_cart
  • purchase
• Also, you need to check if during these steps of the customer journey, the item_id and value are pushed in the dataLayer as well. If it’s not the case yet, you’ll have to make the necessary changes to your dataLayer.
• Having a conversion linker implemented in your GTM container. More information here.
• Pushing the business vertical in your dataLayer. It’s not mandatory, but recommended by Google.

How to set it up?

First step : Activate remarketing in Google Ads

Before diving into the GTM set up, you need to verify if Dynamic Remarketing is activated in Google Ads. To do so, go to tools and settings > audience manager > your data sources.
If your Google Tag hasn’t been implemented yet, find more information under this link.

When you have your Google Ads tag, click on the three dots then “edit source”. Then you need to make sure that remarketing is correctly selected, like on the image below.

After that, press ‘’save and continue’’ and on the next page, you’ll find the ID that will be needed for the GTM set up.

Second step : GTM set up

You’ll have to set up dynamic remarketing tags in GTM for the following events (one tag per event) :

• view_search_results
• view_item_list
• view_item
• add_to_cart
• purchase

So go to your GTM container, and create a new tag. As a tag configuration, we’ll choose the Google Ads Remarketing Tag.

Just like for every Google Ads tag, you’ll have to put a conversion ID - the one that was available in Google Ads in the previous step.

Still in the tag configuration, you’ll have to tick the box “Send dynamic remarketing data”

Then you need to fill :

• Event Name : type in the name of the event, or use the dataLayer variable ‘’Event”. You can use the dynamic variable if it’s pushed correctly in your client’s website (respecting the Google naming convention). If it’s not the case (for example, if your add_to_cart is named click_button_add_to_cart), type in the name of the event, and pay attention to respecting the Google naming convention.
• Event Value : Use the dataLayer variable pushed at every step that indicates the value or price of your item(s).
• Event Items : Use or create a dataLayer variable that captures all the items information.

This is how it should look like :

Now, you need to add all the triggers linked to the events you want your tags to fire on (remember : view_search_results, view_item_list, view_item, add_to_cart and purchase).

So for example, your view_search_results tag should fire on the corresponding event, and so on. It’s possible that the dataLayer of your website doesn't respect the naming convention for the events. This is why it’s recommended to manually type the name of the event in the tag configuration.

Congratulations, you’ve set up the dynamic remarketing tags! The last step is to check if it actually works.

How to debug your setup?

First debug option : the GTM preview mode

The first thing you should do is to use the GTM preview mode to check if your remarketing tags are firing correctly, on every event that you want - so all the events included in your triggers.

Second debug option : the Tag Assistant

You can also use the tag assistant to test if your setup was done correctly. The Tag Assistant is a Google Chrome extension that helps to troubleshoot installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more. You can install it on your browser through this link.

How to test your implementation with the Tag Assistant ?

• Record your session and navigate through the website.
• You should see in the results that the Google Ads remarketing tag has been detected
• If you click on it, you’ll see your conversion ID
• Under “remarketing validation”, you can put the ID of your GMC feed
• Then if you check the requests, you’ll see everything that the remarketing tag was able to collect.

What will be the impact on Google Ads?

After a few days, you’ll start collecting data in Google Ads. Go to tools and settings > audience manager > your data sources. Again, find your Google Ads Tag, and click on details.

There, you’ll be able to analyse all the events that have been collected, as well as their value. Normally, if everything is tracked correctly, it should look like in the image below. And if you click on the different parameters, you can identify if all the values that are coming in are correct.

Thank you for reading and good luck with the implementation!

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Digital creative design has been significantly impacted by AI, which has transformed how designers - but also copywriters and entrepreneurs in general - approach their work and improved their skills. In this article, a few of the significant effects of AI on digital creative design will be discussed.

To start, we see that efficiency and automation workflows for design can be automated with the use of AI-powered tools and algorithms. This includes operations like image scaling, color adjustment, background elimination, and even creating preliminary design sketches. Designers can concentrate more on the creative aspects and gain crucial time by automating these tedious activities.

A second topic to discuss is generative design. By using input criteria and restrictions supplied by designers, AI can produce design variations and concept. This feature enables designers to quickly examine a wide range of design alternatives and take into account options they might not have otherwise considered. Huge volumes of data can be analyzed by AI to produce original and creative designs.

AI can also be utilised to optimize the user experience and enhance personalization. AI systems may study user behavior and data to personalize design components. Designers can then make specialized interfaces, content, and interactions that appeal to users more effectively. Based on user preferences and surfing history, AI-powered recommendation systems can make tailored design suggestions for layouts, color schemes, or other aspects.

Design augmentation is the concept of co-creation where AI tools can support designers in numerous ways, hence enhancing human creativity. For instance, they can offer design recommendations, give in-the-moment comments, or assist designers in developing recognizable visual identities. Designers can gain important insights from AI algorithms' analysis of design aesthetics and principles from large collections of current designs.

Ever heard of Natural Language Processing? Through this technique, textual content can be analyzed and understood using AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) approaches. In order to inform their design choices, designers can use NLP to extract insights from user feedback, comments on social media, or online reviews. Understanding user feelings, preferences, and expectations facilitates the creation of design solutions that are more user-centric. Hereunder, you find an illustration of NLP:

Next, AI algorithms are capable of producing and modifying visual content, including pictures, movies, and graphics. They are able to develop new visual assets based on predetermined patterns or concepts, generate realistic visuals from written descriptions, style or artistically portray photos or films, or even build wholly new visual assets. This gives designers more opportunities to explore and provide aesthetically appealing material. A famous example of such a tool is Dall-E provided by OpenAI.

Also, technology allows for more design accessibility. AI can help make digital designs more accessible by automatically identifying and removing potential obstacles. For instance, to make sure that designs are inclusive and usable for those with vision impairments or other disabilities, AI algorithms can examine color contrast ratios, font sizes, and other accessibility criteria.

While AI offers numerous benefits to digital creative design, it is essential to note that human creativity, critical thinking, and design intuition remain crucial. AI is a tool that can enhance and support designers, but it does not replace the human element of creativity and design expertise.

Note: As AI becomes more prevalent in design, ethical considerations arise. Designers need to ensure that AI algorithms do not perpetuate biases, stereotypes, or discriminatory practices. It is crucial to design and train AI models with diversity and inclusivity in mind to avoid reinforcing existing inequalities.

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