As holiday shoppers check gifts off their lists during the last days of pre-Christmas shipping, our thoughts turn to our own digital marketing wish lists. Last year we asked Santa for several gifts, and he delivered many of them in 2016. So now we present our 2016 digital marketing wish list of tools and features that will make us better marketers in 2017.

Digital marketing wish list holiday gifts

Gifts are great, but Search Partners bid adjusts would be amazing. Image via Pexels

Short-Term View-Through Conversion Insights

Traditional view-through metrics are full of fat, usually overstating the impact that top of funnel digital ad efforts have on direct conversions. If you could easily see which consumers converted within 1 day or even 1 hour of viewing an ad or video, you could turn some of that fat into gravy, and gain some more actionable insights on YouTube and Display impact.

Adam Edwards
VP, Account Services

Facebook Conversion Attribution Model Comparison

Facebook attributes conversions back to the day someone clicked on an ad. For some analyses, this is a preferable way to look at the data. In general, we want to show ads when clicks are most likely to turn into conversions. But in other situations, I wish I could view data based on the date each user actually converted. This would be particularly helpful for measuring the impact of promos: we could understand if the promo encourages more users to convert by reviewing performance during the promo period. Allowing me to toggle back and forth between the two data sets would make me happier than a child receiving their first bike on Christmas Day!

Eve Denton
Senior Manager, SEM & Paid Social

AdWords Multi-Date Range Comparisons

Currently in AdWords, you can compare two different date ranges at the same time, but you can’t filter on both of them. I wish Google would allow us to apply separate filters to different date ranges.

Why would this be such a great gift? Say you want to see all keywords that meet both of the following criteria:

  • a return on ad spend (ROAS) greater than 5 over the last 30 days
  • an average position worse than 1.5 over the last 3 days

Currently there is no way to view this data except by pulling separate reports into Excel and using vlookups to combine the data. Even a lump of coal is better than that. All I want for Christmas is for holiday bidding to be a breeze, where I don’t have to worry about overbidding keywords with strong historical performance that improved in position since my last round of bid increases.

Pat Watson
Senior Account Manager

Bing Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads are a great way to capture long-tail search queries that are not searched regularly, but that provide valuable traffic. They are also great for keyword research. What better way to find out what keywords you’re missing than by using search algorithms to find relevant search traffic? Since Bing has a huge portion of the US search market, and a highly-qualified user base, we would love to tap into this feature to keep growing accounts on Bing. We know DSAs are coming soon to Bing, but we left it on the list since we are looking forward to when they are rolled out for all accounts.

Kendall Todd
Senior Account Manager & Bing Specialist

YouTube Integration for 3rd Party Platforms

Since YouTube is considered a top-of-funnel advertising channel, we’re always looking at different ways to evaluate YouTube’s impact. Integrating YouTube with third-party SEM management and tracking software like Kenshoo or Marin would allow us to see U-shaped conversion attribution and path to conversion reports to get a better idea of how YouTube campaigns contribute to a customer’s purchase path. Then we could give our clients the gift of more insight into their YouTube advertising efforts!

Alyssa Codd
Senior Manager, Search & Video

User-Specific AdWords Column Views

Because I manage a team of paid search account managers, I’m often going into other AMs’ accounts to troubleshoot performance or monitor the account while they’re on vacation. Each time, I need to reset the columns in order to see Avg. position, Total conv. value, and other columns that aren’t in AdWords’ default view. My Christmas wish is that for a specific user logged into an MCC account, the column view would default to the same column view used for the previous account viewed. This would save me cumulative hours over the year, and that would be the best gift of all!

Brittany Blanchard
Associate Director, Account Services

Dynamic Call Tracking for Shopping & Display

Google’s free Dynamic Call tracking has been a gift to our clients who see a lot of call volume but aren’t quite ready to commit to a full-service vendor. But like missing batteries in the brand new gizmo on Christmas morning, we are missing a lot of value by not being able to easily integrate calls from Shopping or Display into these numbers. Our SEM wish this holiday season is to wake up to some brand new call tracking features!

Dani Mason & Amanda Sherman
Metric Theory Pixel & Tracking Specialists

Attribution Model Comparison for GA Reporting

Rockstar advertisers know that not all attribution models are created equal. While Google Analytics defaults to a ‘Last Non Direct Click’ model in its performance reports, the Model Comparison Tool allows us to consider the impact of valuing the first interactions, last interactions, and everything in between. Unfortunately, there is no option to change the default model for any other reports. This Christmas (and Hanukkah), our fingers are crossed for a way to adjust the default attribution model for all GA reports to better reflect our clients’ business goals!

Barbara Munin & Ashleigh Shapiro
Metric Theory Google Analytics Specialists

Separate Search Partner Bidding for Google

This is a longer post so I’ll keep this blurb short. Last year, I wrote: “Hopefully, this will be resolved next year and won’t still be lurking around on 2016 holiday wish lists.” No such luck. Google, please make 2017 the year this finally gets removed from the annual wish lists!

Jeremy Brown
Chief Marketing Officer

Here’s to a wonderful holiday season, and to a productive 2017!

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