Join Yoldes Rannen, Paid Search Specialist at Vista, EU-North, as she discusses the inner workings of the Paid Search team. Learn about the team structure and how they fit within the Data & Analytics (DnA) organization and create a positive impact!
Paid Search, also called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), is a form of paid channel advertising where ads are placed and shown on search engine results pages, like Google and Bing. At Vista, Paid Search is one of the many ways we highlight and give visibility to the various products and services we offer our customers. The paid search team ensures that our customers get what they want when they need it. DnA is a cross-functional team that includes data product owners, analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and channel marketing specialists from SEM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) among other profiles. All team members come together to deliver a jaw-dropping customer experience and drive profitable growth for Vista and Cimpress.
The paid search fit in our DnA organization
It seems unconventional for an advertising-oriented team to be incorporated in Data & Analytics instead of Marketing. But we believe that DnA is an excellent fit for SEM specialists. Our data product teams build data products to help support our team’s operational data and fulfill reporting needs, thus enabling the Paid Search program to benefit from automation directly tied to these data products that are built hand in hand with our partners.
Data is our currency. Along with automation, it drives the decisions regarding what should be advertised as well as how our advertisements reach the customers.
A day in the life of a paid search specialist
Paid Search advertising involves bidding on “keywords,” like “custom business cards,” to show our customers text-based ads, in addition to showing Shopping Ads – feed-based image ads related to our product catalog. These ads showcase the products we sell on relevant user-entered search queries on various search engines. As a result, they drive traffic to the Vista website, acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers profitably. The paid search team focuses on advertisements in broadly two formats, as stated above:
- Search ads, also referred to as “text ads”; and
- Shopping ads, formerly known as “Product Listing Ads” (PLAs).
The process of “bidding” in a paid search auction on Google or Bing is a way to promote and maximize the visibility of our ads to sell products and services we offer. We examine how users search for Vista products and services, which helps us discover relevant keywords to bid on. We also understand how the ad should be highlighted and how the user experience should be tailored toward what our customers are searching for.
Paid search team structure at Vista DnA
Vista’s Paid Search team is structured to support “cross-functional teams,” which focus on different countries or product categories. The teams operate as individual lines of business headed by general managers. Specialists in the paid search team are directly allocated to each of these teams, and their day-to-day work is more often related to the priorities of these customer-facing teams. Furthermore, product category specialists execute within our largest countries’ product categories, such as Business Cards, Marketing Materials, and so on. As for country specialists, they work across product categories in the remaining markets.
The specialists work to achieve profitable growth across our campaigns, subject to specific return on ad spend (ROAS) targets. Their task is to ensure that our investments are meeting these required ROAS targets.
Our “embedded paid search specialists” attend the routines and rituals of the cross-functional teams they support in order to most closely support their key stakeholders. These processes allow us to propose the best optimizations and outcomes that benefit our customers and stakeholders directly in the lines of business these specialists support.
We are a diverse, experienced team based in multiple countries all around the globe, and this is what makes our team so versatile and fun to be part of. Although we are spread out from Sydney, Australia to Boston, USA, and many places in between, all while working remotely, we always ensure team contact and share our advancements and achievements with one another. This keeps us running as a singular unit with multiple parts. Even though our experts bring many years of experience, we recognize that we’re at our best when operating as a collective.
The paid search team, as mentioned above, works within the Omnichannel Marketing & Site Experience subdomain of the DnA organization. The subdomain also consists of other teams focused on data-driven marketing, site, and channel data products.
What we do?
Paid search tasks are very diversified and vary from country to country or category to category, or both. Therefore, country specialists and category specialists are working together to improve the paid search experience for the customer. This work involves various tasks such as understanding the bidding process and enhancing it, studying our audiences, testing them to maximize the impact, improving reach and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and experimenting with new ad formats, ad types, ad extensions, landing pages, and so on.
Data is the core of our mission
At Vista DnA, our mission is to make this organization one of the world’s most iconic data-driven businesses using smart data solutions and make every customer’s experience with Vista unique and a new level of awesome. With this mission and vision, the paid search team leverages data in the following ways.
Understanding customer needs
Our customer is at the core of what we do, and understanding their needs is key to success. When the global pandemic hit in early 2020, we discovered new, emerging demand trends for products like “floor signs” by analyzing our search terms data. As a response, we immediately created new campaigns for these emerging “use cases” of our existing products and services and helped feed the demand data to our stakeholders to rapidly improve the customer experience on the website as well.
Data helps us understand customers’ needs and personas, and reflect on the measures we can take to fulfill and satisfy them. It is crucial, for instance, to define the audiences we will target in our campaigns. We use tools to create lists that categorize consumers based on the purchases they’ve already made, services they have shown interest in, and so on. Knowing exactly where they are in the purchase funnel helps us reach them more effectively.
Automation and bidding
As a paid search team, we’re striving to drive growth as profitably as possible, which is subject to particular ROAS targets as mentioned previously. To do this at scale, with a program of our size, we leverage automated bidding in Google and Bing, known as Smart Bidding or Target ROAS (tROAS), to achieve our desired ROAS at scale. Internally, we’ve built proprietary technology that studies our data over time to set the appropriate ROAS target for each campaign.
Testing and learning
We constantly test and learn to ensure an optimal customer experience and outcome. As a team, we encourage testing various processes and techniques to dig deeper into the paid search experience and to strive for continuous improvement. Examples include experimenting with the titles of our products in shopping ads, adding our brand name, or altering a product name based on user search data. We also leverage the power of audiences to creatively run incrementality experiments and help generate spend savings to fund other initiatives across marketing.
“Personally, being part of the paid search team is an honor. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel lucky to be surrounded by such talented individuals who teach me something new, highlight a strong sense of achievement, and strive for greatness”.
Thinking of making a career leap into a data-driven organization? Explore possible career opportunities with Vista DnA.