Integrating Paid Search and Programmatic Display Campaigns for Retail Marketing

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Diving into the dynamic world of digital marketing, we find ourselves face-to-face with two heavy hitters: paid search marketing and programmatic display. But they don’t play by the same rules. Each comes armed with its own strengths and challenges that, if approached strategically, create endless opportunities for resonating with your audience at each stage of their customer journey.

In this blog post, we will explain why integrating your search engine marketing (SEM) and programmatic display campaigns is the key to outperformance and provide you with the practical tools to put you on the path to success.

A Customer-Centered Strategy

The first step to integrating your SEM and programmatic display campaigns is to ensure you have a clear overarching strategy in place that is focused on your brand’s desired outcomes and spans across all channels, including SEM and programmatic. But how do you achieve this? First, you need to have a clear understanding of your business goals, your target customers, and your customer journey. Then, you need to define how each channel can contribute to achieving those goals and how they can complement each other.

Ultimately, your strategy should be customer-centered to ensure that resonates with your target audience. To achieve this, utilize a customer-centered framework, like the “See-Think-Do-Care” model. This model divides your customers’ journey into four segments based on their level of awareness and intent:

• See: Customers who are not aware of your brand or product but may be interested in your category.
• Think: Customers who know of your brand or product but are not ready to buy yet. They are researching and comparing options.
• Do: Customers who are ready to buy your product or service. They have a clear intent and are looking for the best offer or deal.
• Care: Customers who have already bought from you and may be interested in repeat purchases, cross-sells, or referrals.

For each segment, you need to define which combination of channels and ad formats will best reach your audiences and create the best customer experience at that particular moment. For example:

• See: Programmatic display should increase your brand awareness and reach new customers interested in your category. Display ads work well here as you can use various ad formats, such as banners, videos, or native ads, to showcase your brand story, value proposition, or social proof. Additionally, broad targeting options, such as demographics, interests, or contextual keywords, can reach a large and relevant audience.
• Think: Both SEM and programmatic display are strong tools to reach your potential customers who are in the consideration stage. SEM ads capture their intent when they are searching for information or solutions related to your product or service. Programmatic display should target them with personalized ads that match their interests, behavior, or location. You can also use more specific targeting options, such as remarketing lists, custom audiences, or lookalike audiences, to reach a more qualified audience.
• Do: SEM drives conversions from your customers who are ready to buy and search specifically for your products or brand name. Combine this with programmatic display to reinforce your message and best deals with timely and relevant retargeting ads that create a sense of urgency or scarcity. You can also use dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to automatically generate and show the best ad variation for each customer based on their preferences or previous interactions.
• Care: SEM and programmatic display should retain and grow your existing customers. Upsell or cross-sell them with related products or services that they may need or want with both SEM And dynamic display ads. Nurture them with loyalty programs, reviews, referrals, or social media campaigns. You can also use customer match or CRM data to target them across SEM and display with personalized ads that show appreciation or recognition.

This type of framework should help align your teams for each goal you set as a business, both at a high level across the brand or something specific, like certain product categories. For example, if you are a retailer that sells multiple product categories, such as clothing, shoes, accessories, etc., you need to define how each category performs and contributes to your overall business goals. You also need to define how each channel can support each category based on its characteristics, such as seasonality, price, margin, inventory, etc.

For example:

• For seasonally variable product categories like “Winter Coats,” the “See” and “Think” campaign budgets should be increased ahead of the seasonal peak to build awareness and brand recognition. Your “Do” campaigns will be at their highest during the actual peak, and “Care” campaigns should be flighted in the latter months to keep customers coming back for new categories or products.
• For a product category that has a high price or margin, such as jewelry, you may want to use more premium inventory sources or ad formats on programmatic display, such as video or native ads, to showcase the quality and value of your products.
• Product categories that have low inventory or high demand, such as limited edition sneakers, would benefit from dynamic pricing or inventory feeds for both SEM and programmatic display ads to show the most accurate and updated information to your customers.

Unified Measurement + Attribution

You should also ensure alignment in your measurement and attribution models across both channels. This entails having a distinct grasp of how each channel affects your business goals—whether it’s in terms of traffic, conversions, revenue, or ROI. This involves comprehending how each channel shapes the customer journey and accurately attributing the contribution of each channel to driving conversions.

Ideally, you should use a unified measurement platform to track and measure your campaigns across channels. Included in this should be an advanced attribution model that can assign credit to each touchpoint based on its influence on the final conversion: 

• Last-Click Attribution Model: If you use a last-click attribution model, you will gain insight into which campaigns are driving the highest conversion rates. This is a powerful tool if you are solely focused on driving conversions. It is, however, easy to overestimate the value of SEM and underestimate the value of programmatic display, as SEM, especially branded search, is more likely to be the last touchpoint before a conversion.
• Data-Driven Attribution Model: If you use a data-driven attribution model, you may get a more accurate and balanced view of the value of both channels, as this model uses machine learning to analyze the historical data and assign credit based on the actual impact of each touchpoint. While this is often the best route, the downside is the loss of transparency in how the model assigns credit.

Whichever model you choose, the key is to create as much measurement parity across your channels as possible so you can use the data to optimize your campaigns and increase your return.

Budgeting Strategies for SEM and Display Alignment

Even if all of these steps are taken, and your teams are strategically integrated, your campaigns won’t achieve your desired outcomes without a similar framework for your budget allocation. You need to have a strategic approach to allocating your budget based on your goals and performance. This approach should be as fluid as possible and direct funds to the areas that are performing best, as close to real-time as you can facilitate. 

The philosophy of this approach is separate from the actual processes that allow you to adjust your budget based on market conditions and opportunities. Having buy-in on a fluid budget strategy starts at the highest levels and requires alignment with much more than the marketing team, so make sure you are pulling in those key stakeholders early and accounting for the requirements across your organization, like budget actualization, finance approval, and any public reporting. 

Communication is Critical

As trite as it may be, communication is vital to ensuring all of the initiatives we’ve discussed actually happen. Your key stakeholders need to have direct, open lines of communication and essentially be working in lockstep, whether that’s internal teams, agency partners, or any combination of those resources. This can and should include shared project planning process and tools like Asana, Wrike, or even a Google doc, as well as shared calendars that show the key events, campaigns, timelines, and deliverables for each channel. 

Recurring cross-team meetings should focus on strategies and outcomes, not just shared to-do lists or weekly reporting. Speaking of reports, your performance reporting needs to be centered around those same strategies and outcomes and not siloed into individual channel performance or callouts so that any insights gleaned from that reporting help improve performance across all channels. 

Integrating Your Processes and Tactics

Once you are aligned strategically, you can start to integrate the processes and tactics across SEM and programmatic that enable cross-channel execution. You need to have a consistent and efficient workflow that allows you to create, manage, optimize, and measure your campaigns across both channels. 

Budget Management Tactics 

As we discussed before, a fluid budget strategy is critical for feeding the ad formats that are most successful, but in order to actually do this, you need a process that allows you to set clear budget plans and then optimize your campaigns in real-time by allocating your budget where it is generating the most return.

A fluid approach to this often involves combining a top-down and bottom-up approach: 

• A top-down budget process allocates your budget based on your historical data or industry benchmarks. This helps you plan ahead and set realistic expectations for your campaigns.
• A bottom-up budget process allocates your budget based on your current data or market trends. This helps you react quickly and take advantage of new opportunities for your campaigns.

Testing So Everyone Gains

A key way to integrate tactics is to ensure you are taking a cross-platform approach to your testing. Identify how insights gleaned from your SEM tests help benefit your programmatic campaigns and vice versa. Each channel has unique benefits that can be leveraged to find new learnings that are not as easily achieved in the other channel.  

• Copy Testing: Tests focused on SEM creative can help understand copy differences at the category level when customers are searching for specific products or categories, and those learnings can inform both the creative and copy generated for display ads. Programmatic tests can elucidate which creative messaging resonates best for your particular audiences, which can then provide better inputs for your SEM keywords and ad copy geared to specific parts of the See-Think-Do-Care framework.  

• Audience Testing: While changes in automation have evolved the way we can target audiences in both SEM and programmatic, there are still valuable tests and collaborations that can help improve performance. Utilize your best performing “Do” and “Care” programmatic audiences as Performance Max signals. Comb search query and keyword lists to build custom intent audiences and “See” and “Think” audiences based on what consumers are looking for at the beginning of their journeys. Additionally, it is now worth revisiting the old tactic of testing SEM keywords contextual targeting inputs as cookie-based options diminish.

• Frequency Testing: While you need to be there at the moments that matter for your customers, you want to be careful about overdoing it. This is where frequency and journey testing comes into play. This is a familiar concept for programmatic advertisers, but to truly understand the optimal reach and frequency for your brand and products, you should be incorporating SEM data into your testing to create a more holistic picture and to understand what points in your programmatic sequencing positively or negatively affect search behavior.

• Brand Search Lift Testing: Similar to infusing SEM data into your frequency testing, brand search lift studies can help you operationalize the increase in brand-related searches that result from exposure to your ads on other channels. An integrated approach to testing here will provide more accurate data for your programmatic campaigns while simultaneously giving better insights for your paid search campaigns so that you can make proactive bids and budget adjustments based on your media plans.

Multi-format campaigns vs. more pinpoint approach

Lastly, to avoid any gaps in your buyers’ journey that your ads are not covering, ensure your integrated approach includes a mix of multi-format campaign types like Performance Max and Discovery ads, with more single-format campaign types. 

You need to understand the coverage your multi-format campaigns provide during the different stages of your customer framework, as well as where there might still be holes that need to be covered by more specific campaigns. With a combined approach, you leverage the benefits of cross-channel automation and AI-assisted goal optimization of multi-format campaigns while also creating a more targeted messaging strategy through a unified SEM & programmatic media plan. 

Conclusion

Integrating your SEM and programmatic display campaigns can help you boost your digital marketing performance in many ways. By following these steps, you can expand your reach to a broader customer base, craft more relevant and engaging ads, optimize your budget and bids effectively, measure and attribute your results accurately, and ultimately achieve outperformance.

Effectively doing this requires extensive planning, coordination, testing, learning, and adapting to evolving market conditions and customer behaviors. It also requires teams that can ensure the sum of the whole is greater than the parts by utilizing the latest in automation and ad tech to create opportunities.

We understand this is challenging. That’s why a proficient partner is invaluable—expertise, experience, and technology to manage, optimize, and measure campaigns across both channels. Access to premium inventory, data providers, creative partners, and analytics tools helps you target customers effectively.

That’s where we come in.

We’re a performance marketing agency, experts in fostering business growth through customer-centric, cross-channel strategies. Equipped with proprietary technology and expertise, we streamline your approach across all channels and harness automation for efficiency. With boundless creativity and a penchant for innovation, we empower you to explore new prospects within both channels.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you integrate your search and programmatic display campaigns for better results, contact us today for a free consultation.

Marissa Abramson

Marissa is a Strategy Insights Manager at Adlucent. She has a passion for empowering businesses to tell their story through media that is fueled by data. She measures success through engaged audiences that are inspired to take action. When away from her desk, you can find Marissa jumping in Barton Springs pool, reading a good book or going on neighborhood walks with her family.