In today's world, where the Covid crisis has dramatically changed consumer behavior, it is essential for advertisers to adapt their strategies to the blurring lines between online and offline retail. As consumers increasingly go through online touchpoints during their purchasing journey, they have also become more demanding about the accuracy of the information they find online.

One solution to improve your advertising strategy in this environment is to make use of Local Inventory Ads, a format offered by Google. This feature, available in some countries for a few years, has recently become available in Belgium. This is why we advise you to activate it, if it is relevant for your business. It allows to promote your products to relevant users based on their Google searches and their proximity to your stores by providing them with useful information, including the availability.

What are Local Inventory Ads?

Local Inventory Ads is a feature from Google that allows you to showcase your products and store information to nearby shoppers who are searching for what you have to offer. This can help you reach potential clients who are looking for products similar to what you have in stock, and provide them with the information they need to find your store and make a purchase.

In terms of format, Local Inventory Ads actually look like shopping ads and appear at the very top of search results with your product image and price. There are based on a product feed so there are only relevant for e-commerce with physical locations where customers can go to purchase.

When there is a click on a Local Inventory Ad, consumers come to your local store. Your local storefront can be either a Google-hosted page or a landing page on your website, if it meets specific requirements. In the implementation, you will therefore have to decide which storefront is the most relevant in your strategy.

Here is the information consumers have access to on your local storefront:

• Stock
• Address
• Opening hours
• Phone number
• Website

And if a consumer lands on the product page on your website, he can immediately make the purchase online.

The benefits of using Local Inventory Ads (LIA)

• Connecting your physical stores to your online strategy: Over 80% of shoppers search for products online first, so using LIA can help you reach potential customers who are looking for what you have to offer.
• Boosting your brand awareness: Local shopping ads enable you to showcase your products directly at the top of the search results, which can help more consumers discover your business and increase your brand awareness.
• Increasing your sales: Because these ads boost your brand awareness, you can reach more potential customers online and drive more sales and revenue for your business.
• Driving more traffic to your physical store: Google local product ads can also help you drive more foot traffic to your physical store. By showcasing your store's address and opening hours, shoppers can easily find your storefront and discover more of your products.
• Tracking your success: You can easily track the results of your ad campaign and view how your digital ads are impacting your in-store sales. This can help you optimize your strategy and improve your results over time.

Conclusion

Google Local Inventory Ads are a great way to reach your local audience when they're ready to make a purchase. This can help your business earn more sales and revenue by letting potential customers know that your store has the products they need at a nearby location.

For our Belgian clients for whom it is relevant, we strongly recommend implementing Local Inventory Ads, which are a valuable addition to their digital strategy.

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My name is Alisson and I am the Happiness Manager at Semetis. 

Wait. What’s that, again? 

There is no real definition for “Happiness Manager” as it is a dynamic and evolving role that follows the company culture and the business needs. 

At Semetis, my function is axed on 4 pillars: 

• Human Resources,
• Prevention Security and Wellbeing at work,
• Events,
• Office Management.

I work in duo with Louise, our Office Manager. She is our star when it comes to Events and Office Management while my main focus is Human Resources and Wellbeing. 

As Happiness Manager I live the Semetis’ values and transmit it to the newbies.

I am the person of contact for all Human Resources’ requests and I am responsible for the Prevention, Security and Wellbeing at work. In other terms, providing HR day-to-day support, helping the Management in shaping the ‘Human Ressources future’ of Semetis, making sure that the office is a safe place, maintaining a correct work-life balance - and of course - showing the example. 

What is extremely important to me is to be as close as possible to the Semetissians in order to understand what they need and as a consequence take appropriate actions. It can be very simple actions like inserting nut distributors in the office to power up our brains, but also put in place the “work from abroad” concept, for instance.

A strong culture

At Semetis, we believe that spending time together is crucial to engage our employees and build a strong culture. That's why we have built our own “event team” and “impact team” of which I have been the lead for quite a while. Those teams are constantly reflecting on how we can bring people together, by doing sporty or impactful activities, organizing team competitions, celebrating birthdays or promotions, etc.

If you are curious about what it looks like to work at Semetis, read this article that Louise wrote. 

Conclusion

So, what does it take to become a Happiness Manager in my experience? 

It’s not so much about the diploma, but much more about the soft skills: being a listener, understanding your people, and above all, being unifying. 

If you want to discuss further the role of Happiness Manager, don’t hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn! I’ll be happy to exchange ideas on the topic. 

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10 tips for creating ads that grab the user's attention

Last year, numerous studies were conducted by various parties. Here, we would like to summarise some learnings and best practices to design a campaign that attracts and/or holds the attention.

Overall, there are 4 major factors that determine attention for a campaign.

1. Quality of media
2. Ad experience
3. Relevance
4. Creative

1. The choice of media channel is the biggest determinant of attracting attention from surfers. Internet surfers consume different media channels in different ways. For example, YouTube users are more in the mood to watch videos compared to people scrolling on their feed of social media channels. This also has its impact on the attention users pay to ads on the respective channels. Lumen has thus done some studies to determine the attentive seconds per media channel (see below).

Source

2. Size does matter: ad size emerges in the DPG research as one of the main drivers of attention. Takeovers or full impact formats generate 4.5x as much attention as standard bannering formats. After all, these ads are viewed more and longer. 

3. Higher content engagement drives more attention to ads. Surfers who scroll slower and stay on pages longer pay more attention to ads. That makes ads longer viewable so surfers are more likely to view them longer. (DPG) This is a good reason to advertise on (news) articles rather than on home pages, where people scroll and click away very quickly. According to a Teads x Lumen study, ads placed near news articles achieve 1.3x more attention than homepage ads.

4. Fewer ads per screen result in more attention

5. In the case of video ads: Forced ads take 2x as long to achieve the same effect as non-forced ads in 2s. (Teads) In other words, if people are forced to watch a video (non-skippable ads), they will watch the video with less attention than if they make the choice to watch the ad.

6. Ads that are tailored to website content (= contextual targeting) generate a higher attention span than non-targeted ads. (Forbes)

7. It is not only the size of the ad that counts, but also how much % of the banner is shown. The more of the ad is shown, the more attention there will be for the ad. For example, if half of the banner will remain below the fold, with risks that the message and/or branding clues will not come across. (Karen Nelson Field)

8. The longer the ad is on screen, the more attention will be paid to the ad. This only pays off to a certain extent - the longer the ad is shown, from a certain length of time on, will have diminishing returns. (Karen Nelson Field)

9. Unexpectedness attracts attention (Karen Nelson Field) Door onverwachts uit de hoek te komen met de boodschap en/of de creative, kan de aandacht van de surfer worden getrokken. Dit is grotendeels bepaald door emoties die worden opgewekt door de advertentie. Als deze emoties “high arousal” emoties zijn, zoals beschreven in de afbeelding hieronder, is de kans op aandacht van de gebruiker hoger dan bij low “arousal” emoties.

Source 

Note, however, that the influence emotion has on attention is a lot lower than platform choice. More specifically, half lower.

10. Attention can vary tremendously from creative to creative. For example, we know that the creative is responsible for 49% of the potential impact of a campaign (Google). Therefore, it pays to optimize the creative as much as possible toward attracting attention. Even small optimizations can pay off:

• Captions in a video
• Adding animations to a banner
• Making banners interactive
• ...

Conclusion

In this regard, attention seems to be the holy grail for a successful awareness campaign. Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, not all attention-oriented ads lead to a sale. For one thing, much depends on the user's purchase intent. But above all, many ads fail to establish a link with the brand. Attention to an ad or brand recall is not the same thing. Proper use of branding assets such as logos and colors is crucial for this.

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SUMMARY

This article discusses the challenges that digital advertisers face with regard to tracking and attribution, particularly in light of the GDPR legislation. It also discusses Google's solution to these challenges, called Consent Mode, and the debate surrounding its use of cookieless pings for modelling. It will also compare the full and basic implementations of Consent Mode and their respective advantages and disadvantages.

Introduction

Tracking and attribution have always been hot topics in our digital marketing industry. Indeed, it is at the centre of what we do: measuring and evaluating the success of our digital communication.
These two concepts have become more and more challenging in the past years, and it won’t stop there.

Since the appearance of the GDPR legislation in Europe, advertisers have to clearly explain to their users what they will do with their data and if the users accept this usage.

Furthermore, if they don’t consent to this, advertisers can’t track the behaviour of these users.

Therefore, many tools, that are largely used in digital advertising, are heavily impacted: Web Analytics tools (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc), advertising platforms (Google Ads, Meta ads, etc).

Eventually, fewer data will be recorded by these platforms which will impact reporting and optimization. This is where it gets frustrating: the data we collect is not 100% accurate.

Google came with its own solution to model a part of the data that is missing due to users not consenting to the cookies: Consent Mode. You will find more information about this very interesting topic in this article.

The debate

Even if this feature seems very promising, there is still a lot of debate within the industry regarding the cookieless pings that are used for modelling.

• Is it allowed to send the data included in these cookieless pings to Google?
• If people refuse cookies, why would I still be sending data to Google?

But what is a cookieless ping? This is the information that is still sent to Google for every user refusing the cookies. It only contains functional and non-identifying information. According to Google, with this data, there is no way that Google can understand who the user is (= non-identifying). Thanks to these pings, and thanks to the data that was collected from the users accepting cookie, Google will be able to model the behaviour of these users. Therefore, these pings are crucial for the success of the modelling.

Even if Google claims that it’s GDPR-compliant, the American giant felt the pressure from many advertisers raising questions about this sensitive topic. That’s why they created an basic version of Consent Mode that won’t use any conversion pings for its modelling. Indeed, it will only use the data of the users that gave consent to model the conversions of those that didn’t. In other words, no data of the user itself will be used to model its behaviour.

The 2 different implementations

The illustrations below explain the differences between the full and basic implementations.

• In the full implementation, the modelling is based on conversion pings that are taken from the users that refused the cookies (better modelling)
• In the basic implementation, no data from those refusing users will be used. The modelling will only be based on an extrapolation of the behaviour of the ones that accepted the cookies (less modelled data)

Full implementation:

Basic implementation:

The advantages of the basic implementation are clear: no data about people refusing cookies is sent to Google, but we can still model some of the conversions that we lost.

This seems like the ideal solution, right? Why shouldn’t we use this instead of the standard version of Consent Mode?

This is because it has some disadvantages:

• Google takes a way larger safety net with the basic implementation. In other words, you will track less data which will bring you further away from the “reality”. This loss of data will impact optimization and reporting.
• Furthermore, the basic implementation only models conversions in Google Ads, nothing will be modelled in GA4 at the moment.

Nevertheless, this solution is still way better than just ignoring the behaviour and therefore, the conversions of people refusing the cookies.

Conclusion

Google developed a basic version of Consent Mode which allows you to avoid sending any information to the tech company. This solution is a great way to start modelling conversions and is a first step towards a complete modelled set-up. Furthermore, it won’t lead to any GDPR or legal debate as nothing about the users refusing cookies will be used.
Nevertheless, let’s not forget that this is not available for GA4 modelling and that you will model fewer conversions than with the full implementation.

Are you interested in this topic and want to know more? Don’t hesitate to contact Semetis to discuss it.

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