Understanding Instagram Stories Analytics Metrics

Instagram is a one of the best ways for companies to reach their audience and engage with them. Many people assume that posting is the most effective way, but Instagram Stories can also be a powerful tool for a company with a large audience. Using Instagram Stories Analytics can also improve your performance in your market.

Therefore, you should make sure to measure the success of your Instagram Stories. By looking into the analytics of your stories you can further strategize how engagement works with your audience as well as what promotions you should be using.

Learning Instagram Stories Analytics

Instagram Stories analytics are divided into three separate categories: Discovery, Navigation, and Interaction. 

Discovery Analytics

The Discovery section of analytics features reach and impressions. Your reach is the number of accounts that viewed your story, while impressions shows the total amount of times your Instagram story was viewed.

These metrics are big for companies, bloggers, and influencers on the platform. Being able to see how many people your story reaches, you will also use this data to compare how much of your audience is watching your story. And you can compare these numbers to your following count to see how much traction your story is getting.

There are a few simple things you can try in order to boost your Instagram’s discoverability (reaching people who do not follow your page). Adding stickers, locations, and hashtags will make your story more likely to appear on the explore section. If you are a small business you can try supporting other small businesses, food order stickers, or gift cards to boost your discoverability as well. 

Navigation Analytics

Navigation metrics show how the viewer interacts with your story and there are five you should focus on. Forward Taps are the number of times someone tapped to the next segment of the story. Taps Backward are the number of times some chooses to tap back to see the previous section of the story. Next Story Swipe is when a viewer swipes to the next story entirely, which means they skipped the rest of your story. Exit Story Taps is when a viewer exits your story.  This is different from next story swipes because they are more than likely on your Instagram page and only viewing your story. The last one is Navigation which is the all of the metrics put together in one total number.

Navigation Analytics are important because they will help you see what posts on your story are or aren’t working. For example if a viewer swipes to the next story then they more than likely found your posts uninteresting or irrelevant. If they tapped back on your post then that means it attracted their attention and they needed more time to view what you posted. Making your story more visually appealing, with useful, concise information is your best bet to hold your viewers attention and stop them from swiping to the next story. The average attention span of people is about 7 seconds, so you don’t want a lengthy story with massive amounts of text. 

Interaction Analytics

Interaction analytics focus on viewer interaction with your stories. Profile Visits are how many people visited your profile after seeing your story. Replies are the number of viewers who replied to your story. Followers/Subscribers are the number of viewers who follow your profile after watching your story. Shared is how many times your story is shared. Website Visits tells you how many viewers click the link in your description after viewing your story. Stickers is the number of clicks on a location, hashtag, tag, or product in your story. Call, Text. Emails, Routes is the number of viewers that take these actions after viewing your story. Product Page Views Per Product tag are the product views for each product tagged in your story. Last is Interactions which is the total number accumulated from all the previous metrics referenced above. 

This is great data to have because you can see if viewers are taking the next steps that you are providing to them and you can make decisions based on what is working and what isn’t as successful. 

Top Metrics in Instagram Stories Analytics

Lets dive a little deeper into four Instagram Stories analytics metrics.

Hashtag & Location Stickers

We know that you can see the number of clicks on a sticker, making it easy to see how effective they are in your Instagram Stories. Knowing how many clicks your stickers gets helps you to understand if your audience / viewers are in them.

Recently, Instagram has expanded by adding hashtags and location stories. By including this in your stickers, users can now find it by searching from the browser page. In short, your stories are now accessible to everyone on the platform. So make sure to start adding hashtag and locations stickers to your story to get the maximum number of reach and impressions. 

Swipe Ups

Swipe Ups is a great tool for Instagram users. However, this feature is currently only available for business accounts, verified accounts and these accounts need to have more than 10,000 followers. Using the swipe up feature is a great way to drive traffic to content you want to promote. This feature is displayed at the bottom of your Instagram story post so when using it you should add arrows to enhance the CTA (call to action) and attract viewers to use the feature. It specifically sends the viewer to a page you link to whether that is a YouTube video, landing page or blog post. 

Peak Activity Times

Instagram Stories only last for a 24 hour period. The only way to keep them longer is by including them in your Instagram Highlights. Of course to get the best outcome and get the most views, post when your audience is at its peak of activity. There is a way to figure out when the highest follower performance is. 

First from your Instagram account go to the Insights section. Next click on the audience tab and go down to followers. Last toggle between hours and days to see when your profile is getting the most interactions. By doing this you can see the peak hours and upload your stories during these specific peaked hours. 

Trying to leverage Instagram as a business is all about building trust with your followers, and you can do that through posts, highlights and stories. But you should also use interaction and view your engagement. The more people that view and engage with your content on Instagram the more likely you are to capture sales. Making sure you know how your Instagram Stories analytics metrics work is a great benefit and advantage to which will make this possible for you.

New Google Ads Editor Update

Google Ads Editor is a downloadable, free application that you can leverage in creating your advertising campaigns and in managing your Google Ads 

Why to Use Google Ads Editor

Campaign in Google Ads Editor works much the same as it does in Google Ads. Many advertisers find this app a lot more effective, though, when it comes to making multiple updates in a campaign. 

For example, on the Google Ads platform if you want to change your ads for the holidays, you must go to each individual ad group and either add a new text ad and pause your existing ads, or you need to just edit each text ad individually.

However, in Google Ads Editor it is a completely different process. In Google Ads Editor none of your changes are finalized until you choose them to be. You can work throughout your whole account switching ad copy, changing keywords creating new campaigns. Also, you can work on your ads or campaigns in bulk, which reduces your work time and increases your efficiency. And when you are done just all you need to do is click post

Google Ads Editor New Features

Google Ads Editor newest update (1.5) has added additional tools that will improve your ad strength, and has provided increased support through recommendations for ads and image extensions.

Here is a list of all the new features that Google is adding to the Editor:

• Filtering by label

  • Through your labels it will filter at all levels - account, campaign, ad groups, or all items with the same label

• Image extensions

• Improved messages for account errors

• Shortcuts to jump to previous type

• Updated statistic columns

• Checking of ad strength for RSA and display ads

• Recommendations

• Dynamic ads feed

• Merchant feed for App Campaigns

• App pre registration campaigns

• Business name for local ads

If you want to learn more about the changes Google has provided there is a support post that provides more detail.

These updates are a great addition to Google Ads Editor and having the recommendations included to this application is something that wasn’t available before. Prior to this update if you created ads in Editor that don’t have good ad strength it was difficult to know until you could see it’s performance. These new features in Editor will allow you to create the best ads possible right from the start.

Tips on Low Budget & Free Marketing Ideas

Most small businesses typically have small budgets. That makes promoting your business a challenge, especially against bigger competitors. However, even if you have a small budget there are ways to market your business to customers without a big budget.

In this post we are going to go over some low budget strategies to market your business. 

Free Marketing Ideas

There are multiple things you can do for marketing that are absolutely free and typically don’t require many resources.

Google My Business

Get your local views up by creating a Google My Business Profile. It is one of the most effective free marketing strategies available now. By creating your Google My Business Profile your business will show up on Google Maps. When people are searching for your vertical and are nearby, Google will display business on the right hand side of Maps. This  gives you free real estate. 

In order to get to the top of this section to secure your business’ posting in search results, you need to optimize your Business Profile. To do that you need to just verify your Google My Business account. The process is simple and includes a few simple steps of confirming your business address and waiting for a postcard with a verification code.

Be Active on Social Media

Building a community online is always a great way to grow a small business. A strong social media presence and engagement can help you do this. By posting online you will be showing off your brand’s personality and also building trust within your community and potential audience. Make sure you have active business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. There are also more niche social media sites, such as Pinterest or TikTok, that you can leverage if they fit your vertical.

Here are a few ways you can get your community more involved:

• Run polls to get communities’ input

• Promote your blog posts, to drive traffic to your website

• Minimize your long tail content into short, precise, informative posts

Leverage LinkedIn

LinkedIn is typically a source that never gets tapped by companies, especially small ones. There is more to do on the platform than making network connections. You can talk to the connections you make, join on contribute to forums, share your blog posts, and share other content for people to see.

Sharing what you know and helping others to learn is a great way to attract customers, build your brand and gain respect and recognition in your industry. Don’t just use your business account, encourage your employees and coworkers to get active on the platform.

More Marketing Ideas

Apply for Business Awards

Just about every industry has business awards you can win yearly. Winning  gives you an online badge you can place on your website. This helps boost your credibility, which in turn, helps increase your sales. 

If you can’t find any awards for your industry or vertical, make one! In doing so you will generate a lot of buzz, and build connections. This will also boost your credibility as a leader in the industry.

Start Blogging

Creating content regularly should always be part of your marketing strategy. A great place to start is with a blog. 

Having a blog will drive traffic to your website, increase engagement, and strengthen your SEO. Of course this is completely free for you to do online. Make sure your blog pertains to your vertical and gives information that is useful for potential clients. Keep your blogs simple and easy to read. Incorporate the specific keywords you want to target in a natural way throughout your blog post.

Almost Free Marketing Ideas

The following are ideas that won’t break the bank. You will need to throw some resources into them like a subscription or a ticket.

Run a Webinar Event

Reaching out to your audience in person might not be your company's approach to things, and that is why people host webinars. A webinar is a great way to promote your business, you can present helpful content that can potentially interest customers. The two main webinar platforms are Webex and GoToMeeting which are both easy to use. 

Before hosting a webinar make sure you promote it on social media and through your email marketing lists. Ensure your promotions are scheduled one and two weeks out and provide reminders so that your audience doesn’t miss out. 

Networking Events

Try attending trade shows and industry events. It's a great way to level up your business. Events like these have like minded individuals that are looking for new strategies to grow their business. You can even make some nice B2B contacts. These events also have exclusive seminars designed to help sharpen skills and learn how to better promote your business.

Facebook Campaigns

Even if your advertising budget is small, you can more than likely run Facebook Ads. Facebook Ad campaigns typically have a low cost per a click compared to bigger advertising sites like Google Ads. To get a more in depth analysis check out some of the blog posts we have written on Facebook Ads. 

Digital Advertising can be a tricky thing especially if you are a small business with a small budget dedicated to marketing. However, by leveraging these free marketing ideas you can have an impact in your industry and grow your sales and your business.

January Marketing Ideas

2020 was probably the crazy year we have had in a long time. Worldwide pandemics, an intense election, BLM movements, wildfires across the west coast and Australia, the controversy and rise of TikTok… it all happened this year. But, the great news is that despite the chaos, we have made it to the end of the year.  We can all see 2021 in the horizon and we’re hoping for a more cheerful time.

Everyone has been through a lot this year so let’s all just take a deep breath and give ourselves a pat on the back for being able to get through it. Let’s also create some strong positive vibes for the new year and 2021.  We're going to give you some tips to do that through your marketing strategy. 

Easy January Marketing Steps

Updating Your Google My Business Profile

Having a fully fleshed out Google My Business Profile is always important. This is especially true during this time and with so many new regulations. To get an impression when people are searching for your business vertical locally it is a must. Google my Business shows up in Google searches and in Google Maps, so having your Google My Business updated is critical. Make sure you are adding images and videos to show off your place of business. Have your Q&A question filled out so people know what’s going on, and make sure you respond to all your reviews.

If you want to learn more about Google My Business check out this blog where we discuss it in more depth.

Posts Previewing Promotions, Events, or Products

Leveraging social media has been huge in 2020. So if you are planning to have any events, promos or new product launches in the first couple of months in 2021, don’t be afraid to tease them via your social media. Creating hype around these three things gets your followers excited and talking about it beforehand. Then use boost to execute and hopefully along with it you’ll gain some sales or new clients.

Loyalty / Referral Program

Providing value to a customer is always a must. The more value you give, the more loyal your customer becomes. So building a loyalty or referral program for your customers is a great way to show value. Starting the new year with a brand new program can be a game changer.

If you are a storefront you can do the classic stamp card. After every purchase you can give out a stamp on a card and on the tenth stamp you can give either a discount, or free product to show appreciation for your customer’s return business. You can also give customers discounts or better deals for every new customer they refer. It's a win win. Or, if you want something high end, you can create a tier list rewards program based on the amount customers purchase with you over time. The higher the tier (the more money they’ve spent) the better the discount they get.
Once you have a loyalty program set up, make sure to share it periodically on your social media channels so that people who recently find you know the great deals you're providing.

Getting January Started Off On The Right Foot

Start With a New Year’s Resolution

Find a goal you want to achieve as a company and share it online. That way you can give your customers and community updates on how it's going and share milestones. You can even ask people what their new year's resolutions are to try and increase engagement on the post.

If you're looking to give to charity this upcoming year this is also a great way to announce it as a new year's resolution. Let your customers know 10% of all revenue is going to local homeless shelters or to a charity that is close to your heart. It shows that your company cares for others and that part of what people are spending is given back to the community.  

Check 2020 Game Plan

One thing to focus on in the new year is a review of the past years’[ data. Take some time to see what you accomplished and goals you set for yourself or your company over the last year. That way you can make sure to double down on success and reconsider what might have fallen short and how you can better execute in the future. 

Some things to look at are:

• What pages performed best

• What social media posts got the most engagement

• What campaigns drove the most profits and traffic

All of these can be looked at from the perspective of what underperformed. You can then compare the two and see what could have made it better. Were the images intriguing enough? Was the content you made targeted towards your audience? Or was the call to action not strong enough? There are multiple things to look at, expand upon or improve that you can take into the new year.

National Holidays & Observances in January

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

January 18th is the national holiday to celebrate Martin Lurther King Jr.’s birthday and acknowledges his Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in civil rights. This is a day to honor him and his legacy. It is especially important given the events of the past year to acknowledge this well-respected civil rights leaders and show support for related causes.

You can organize an event in your local area. If you do, announce it on social media.. It is a really great time to show unity in your community and demonstrate your business’ ethics and values.

Compliment Day

January 24th is Compliment Day so take some time to compliment someone. You can share a post and have your community tag someone to the post and give them a compliment. You can make the most of this day by thanking your community for their support or their loyalty. Or you can share a post complimenting your coworkers or company for doing so well or working so hard. 

There are multiple other holidays that you can partake in especially through social media to show support or awareness during this month. 

Hopefully these tips can help you get 2021 started with a bang!

Make Your Website More Visible on Google

With everything that has happened this year and everyone going digital, having a website is a necessity. However, getting visibility for your website on Google isn’t always easy to do. In today's post we're going to dive into some of the ways you can get more visibility on Google to help you get more traffic and customers.

Getting Visibility on Google

Getting noticed on Google for a small or medium business can be a challenge. This is especially true for established customers. However, there are some ways you can get noticed on Google and rank higher organically.

Make Google’s Crawling Easy

Google is continuously crawling web pages. They do this to check for any newly added pages they are indexed. It also checks any existing updated pages. The faster Google can index your website and understand what it is about, the more advantage you receive. 

There are ways you help Google index your website faster. First, insert keywords related to your target topic. Have these selected keywords in your meta title, urls, meta descriptions, and in any image tags on your pages. These are all core pieces to SEO (search engine optimization). 

Secondly, you should make sure to have internal links throughout your website pages. This will make it easier for Google to crawl through. This also lets your customers see more of your site and stay on it longer. Finally run SEO audits to make sure there are no indexing issues. One tool we use from Google is called PageSpeed Insights. This tool helps to see how fast your website's loading speed is on desktops as well as mobile devices. It will also provides you with recommendations on how to fix any issues.

Increase Your Website Pages

Blog posts can also serve to bump up your website’s visibility. Each blog post is another opportunity to get noticed by Google and rank for more keywords. Even though this is true however,  you can’t just start pumping out blogs. Google ranks blogs because they give information and advice about subjects that are related to your company. If your blog is considered a trusted source that brings value to the table, then you will get more noticed by Google. Google will consider you more trustworthy for people seeking information on your blog subjects and rank you higher.

Get Google Verification

As mentioned above, Google crawls websites and web pages and ranks it depending on how it is categorized and its readability. If you want Google to crawl your website more efficiently then you should get a Google My Business page up ASAP.

It’s really easy to do:

1. Create a Google My Business account

2. Find your business on Google Maps

3. Claim your business on Google Maps

Just like that you’re pretty much done. The last thing you need to do is to wait for a physical verification code in the mail and enter it into your Google My Business profile. After you verify your Google My Business account, you will be able to optimize your profile. Having your business listing complete and having your website get impressions helps you get notice by Google.

Reviews on Google My Business

Having multiple positive reviews will help you in the long run. Reviews on all directories are great, but having Google My Business reviews is a big advantage as well. Having great reviews gives you a better chance of receiving clicks. Companies and  stores pop up on the right hand side of your search results and company reviews appear underneath. Having your company with multiple reviews in this section can help boost your traffic. Since Google is the most widely used search engine, it is also a great way to get highlighted.

To get good reviews make sure you are giving great service to current and potential customers.. Make sure you ask customers for reviews. Don’t be scared to reach out to past or present customers. Most of the time people will be happy to lend a hand with a review. And finally, whenever you get a review make sure you respond to it, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. 

Strong Titles

Having focused keywords in your titles will help both Google and searchers identify them. A compelling title helps you stand out so aim for a clear and interesting title. You don’t want to be too  extreme in your title, but you also don’t want to be bland. 

Do you want to drive higher quality traffic and  generate more leads and sales, through more search results? Then make sure you follow these tips to get your website more visibility on Google.

Google Encourages Broad Match Keywords

Very soon you will start to see new recommendations from Google that will encourage you to use broad match while you're in Google Ads.

Smart Bidding Elevates Broad Match

Last Month Google published a blog post talking about broad match. “Using broad match and smart bidding together can help with relevant search queries that meet your performance objectives… By pairing this keyword with Smart Bidding, you can use auction-time signals to set the right bid for each of these queries. This means that you no longer need to anticipate and manage every potential search.”

To give you an example, the broad match keyword “men’s shoes” will be able to match “winter boots for men” or “men's footwear”. Google has been pushing the strategy of having keyword to query matching up to the algorithm. And as it progresses over time we have seen close variants continue to expand. 

Should we Trust Broad Match? 

If you feel skeptical about trusting broad match and smart campaigns together, you are not alone. 

Google has shared a couple of examples to show how strong this blend of broad match and smart campaigns works. Here is one:

“Advertising agency iProspect, a dentsu company, used broad match with Smart Bidding to generate long-term growth while keeping performance steady. “We had our doubts using broad match, since we’ve tested it in the past and found we had less control over search queries that impacted performance. With Smart Bidding’s predictive signals as the safety net, we saw an increase in unique search terms generated by broad match, leading to a 20% increase in conversions,” - Kasper Spanjer, PPC strategist.

For most digital marketers, the idea of using broad match keywords is a ludicrous idea. Most ppc marketers have spent years working around broad match and making  successful campaigns. However,Google made changes to search terms and how they are shown. This change makes it harder to get search queries, which now makes broad match keywords more important than ever. 

There are a few reasons why incorporating broad match keywords is something we should all consider and perhaps start using again. Google's changes constitute a drastic shift compared to its past approaches. These new updates are pushing us towards a place where segmenting will be less common and the Google algorithm will take over.

The ability to leverage smart campaigns as the filter for broad match will let you help keep out the drastic broad match keywords. This will be more than likely the new way for marketers to leverage broad match versus the norm of manual bidding. To start getting used to this possible new change, start by changing one adgroup to broad match and testing it.

Google Ads Search Term Query Results Have Decline

In September Google changed search term queries. The new reports are limited compared to the past. Search term reports are a feature in Google Ads that let you see what search terms trigger your ads. They also allow you to see what search terms closely relate to the keywords your ads are targeting. With these changes however, you are no longer able to see search terms that have lower search volume.

There are several reasons why this is such a concern to advertisers, especially ones advertising to niche markets. Google now only  shows search term queries with a  “significant number number of users”. Any business or marketer working in a vertical that has already low search volume is now going to be seeing even less data. Google does, however, update the search query system so when a search term does reach its threshold it will continue to show it from that point on. 

How Do You Maintain Your Search Query Visibility?

Continually expanding your close variant search terms is one of the best options to maintain search query visibility. It will be a challenge since we are working with a limited search query to begin with. However, being able to identify what is a poor match to your account from the search query results and negating these matches will help you see better search query results. 

It will also help you reduce potential wasted spend and expand your negative keyword list, allowing your query list to give you better results. 

Bing (Microsoft Advertising) has not followed Google’s lead in limiting search term query results, so if you are advertising in Bing it’s a great source to leverage. You will be able to fill in some of the blanks that you can’t see in Google to help you identify what is still relevant and useful to you. 

Leverage Other Skill Sets

With this low visibility for niche verticals, we suggest also prioritizing other forms of digital marketing to help you grab some of your marketing presence back. If you haven’t already started doing this we recommend optimizing your SEO first, making sure you can grab as much organic page clicks as possible. To complement your SEO, look into your web development and see what pages you can improve speed on, and how your backlinks look. This will also directly affect your SEO in addition to your Google Ads efforts.  

You can also work on leveraging your social media accounts. We recommend looking into Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. All of these platforms might not work for you depending on your vertical, so if you start seeing more success in a few of them and diminishing returns in others don’t be afraid to just expand the more successful social media platforms. 

Next you can start growing an email marketing list. Providing updates to your customer on how your business is doing, as well as any promotion you may be having such as holiday specials, can help keep you top of mind with your customers.

With the new limited search term query reports it will be a little more tedious in Google Ads for veterans and young digital marketers alike. But, by negating variant exact matches, using Bing as an additional search term query, and beefing up your other digital marketing funnels you can help insure your success in the digital marketing realm! If you want some more tips on ways to promote your business, you should check out one of our most recent blog.

Ways To Promote Your Business

In order to be a business, you need sales, and to get sales you need customers. However, in order to get customers you need to promote your business. Today, digital marketing is the most popular way to promote your business.

Many businesses have a hard time figuring out the best approach when it comes to promoting their businesses. In this blog we will be going over multiple ways to promote your business through digital marketing.

Promoting Through Google

Google should be a top priority when it comes to your business promotion effort. Google captures 90% of market share, and is an easy and effective way to get in front of customers. 

Google Business Profile

Having a Google Business Profile allows you to show up as a business in Google Maps Search results. For example, if someone searches for a doctor, they  will see doctor practices listed in the Google Maps section with both private and public practices. This is because these doctors have Google Business profiles.

If you are one of the top three ranking Google Businesses then you are essentially getting free promotion everyday in your local area. With your Google Business page you can post picture updates and promotions that go straight to your Google listing so your audience can see them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you are a small business you should be trying to push SEO hard. It is an area that puts you on equal footing with bigger companies. As long as you put in the work, you can get some great results. SEO are a set of practices that align with Google’s ranking algorithm. Location based results get big searches and they help you rank towards the top of the page as long as you optimize properly. 

Some things to keep in mind while optimizing your website for SEO rankings are: 

• Adding relevant industry and location based keywords to specific places on your website. Maintaining high page load speed and security. 

• And finally, producing original high-quality content regularly, with tagged images. 

If you are ranking high in Google search results then Google is essentially saying you're doing a good job and promotes your business for you. 

Google Ads

SEO is a long term strategy that doesn’t happen overnight. It can take weeks or even months before you start seeing results. If you want immediate results then what you should be looking into is Google Ads. Google Ads show up at the top of the Google search engine results before Google Maps results and before organic SEO results. Google Ads is preferred for paid marketing because most people use Google for their searches and they have great ad building features and performance metrics. 

Mastering Google Ads will take some practice and understanding. You will need to optimize your campaigns frequently to get the best results. You can do Search, Display, Shopping and Video ad campaigns on this platform. 

Leveraging Social Media

Social media can be a free or paid way to promote your business. The most popular social medias right now are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. However, there are some more up and coming platforms to promote on like Pinterest, TikTok, and Reddit. 

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media platform online right now. It is a great way to keep in touch with current customers and reach out to new ones. Depending on your industry, Facebook can help you attract your more customers and foot traffic. Start by creating a Facebook business page with your contact information and a CTA. Next, use Facebook events to promote and maximize attendance for your events. Finally, you can leverage Facebook Live for tutorials, bts footage or sneak peeks. 

LinkedIn

When people think of LinkedIn they assume it’s about connecting with colleagues and having an online resume. However, it is also a place where you can connect with potential customers, and facilitate partnerships, and group discussions. Customers can also check out your company on LinkedIn before choosing to do business with you. Within LinkedIn they can also dig a little deeper about your business, employees and background. 

You can promote your business indirectly on LinkedIn by adding to group discussions and providing links to relevant content on your website. Just make sure you are promoting your content as well as others.

Instagram

Instagram is the third most popular social media platform being used right now. WIth Instagram’s diverse posting formats, including images, short stories, IGTV series, live sessions, and story highlights, there are a great number of ways to engage your audience and promote your business. The site allows you to advertise promotions for your sales and deals. You can also run contests with a free discount code, which can help you grab a list of possible leads to reach out to. Finally, you can offer advice or tutorials on your products. 

Pinterest

Pinterest is mainly used for photos. However, these photos can be linked back to your website, which creates an opportunity to promote your business and drive more traffic to your website. Pinterest would be in your best interest if you are an ecommerce company, especially with a strong female audience as Pinterest is heavily skewed towards the female demographic. If this fits your niche then we highly suggest becoming active on Pinterest. 

There are a vast number of options available to you to promote your business digitally and we have only gone over the most popular ones in this post. We’ve included a mix of paid and free ways to promote your business. If you implement these strategies it will help you out, just make sure to continuously test out new ideas and optimize your content.

Google Local Ads in Maps Auto Suggest

In October Google began testing ads for local businesses in Google Maps. This can be a very powerful tool for advertisers to attract new nearby customers. During these crazy times it can help local businesses compete by making it easier for people to see if your business is close to their location.

This new feature is great for the food industry. People will often search for nearby restaurants that they haven’t tried before.. This feature will continue to be useful for the food industry, and even the fitness industry, as soon as the US opens up again and returns to normal. Gyms, for example, will be able to get foot traffic from new visitors to town, or from people looking to lose some weight from hibernating in their homes during COVID and the holidays.

How to Set Up Local Search Ads on Google Maps

Let’s go over how you can unlock this feature and attract some more visitors to your local stores. 

Enable Location Extensions 

This is a pretty straightforward process and everyone should know how to do it. If you don’t already have a Google Ads account you will need to create one. After creating your account, go to the account tree and select the campaign or adgroup where you want to add the extensions. Within the list select ad extensions and then click location extensions. 

Set Up or Update Your Google My Business Listing

Another thing you will need is a Google My Business Listing. If you do not have one yet, start by setting one up. Here is a Google resource on how to set up your listing. You should make sure all of your information that has been listed is accurate and up to date.

Use Location targeting and Bid By Location

Next, you need to target a specific location and set bids by that location. That way, your bids increase when people are located nearby your business. This will give you more store visits by soliciting foot traffic from anyone nearby. You can also get more calls to your location, attracting potential customers or guests asking for reservations for tables. 

Optimizing Keywords

Use keywords in your campaign that relate to your location and what people would be searching for locally. For example, if you are a tea shop potential keywords could include:

• Tea shop near me

• Tea near me

• Tea in “location”

Think about keywords you would use if you were looking for something near you.  With keyword testing, optimizing and location target bidding you should see much more traffic to your store.

If you want to review how your ads are doing, you can see location detail clicks which is when someone clicks on your ad. You can see how many direction clicks you got. Received mobile clicks are also tabulated. To see these exact clicks, go to campaigns, click on ad groups, and click ads. Once you are there you can go to the segment icon which is three lines and select the click type section.

Hopefully this new tool can help your local business get back some of the traffic you have been missing over the past year, and will continue to help you grow.

Long Term Marketing Strategies

COVID-19 has drastically changed the digital marketing landscape. The number of businesses going digital over the past year has exponentially increased and given more power to the online industry. Many of us are now dependent on Amazon and Zoom to get through our day to day life. Digital markers have a unique opportunity to leverage this new reliance on technology.

Customer Relationships

If  you are currently having hard time bringing in new customers, focus on the customers you have. This is especially good advice during these trying times. Of course you want to create ad campaigns that promote your services and target their needs through your business. But you might want to also consider refunding clients who prepaid or were on auto-pay during the lockdown period. Sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. This will hurt your cash flow in the short term, but presents a good opportunity. When the economy bounces back, you will regain those lost customers due to loyalty that customers feel for you from this great favor you did for them when times were tough. 

Even if you don’t see a return right away, you will more than likely see more traffic on your site. When people are going through this tough time and unemployment are rates rising, one way or another people will thank you. You will see an increase in things like  customer loyalty, organic traffic, social media engagement, brand awareness and prospects. 

Transitioning To Online

With travel restrictions and social distancing, it's no surprise that companies are moving to online platforms. This year there has been a huge increase in websites, social media campaigns and ecommerce activity. 

If there is a time to transition into your online presence, it is right now. I don’t mean just creating a website and adding a couple of new posts. There is so much more you can leverage that will help you in the long run. 

First, you can create informative webinars. Let’s say you sell a software system. Your webinar can provide more tips and tricks to increase creativity or help increase the speed in using your software. This fosters customer’s or interested customer’s excitement in using your software, increasing their skills and building trust in your company. A second option is to invest or dive into  CRM software. Customer relationship management software is designed to help businesses build relationships with customers, ensuring retention and brand loyalty. The short version of what it does is that it creates a simple user interface for a collection of data that helps businesses recognize and communicate with customers in a scalable way. 

Delivering more online tools to your  company more gives you a long term strategy that lets you interact and stay engaged with customers. This could be critical to thriving during these times.

Running Exclusive Offers

Once businesses start to reopen, you can get people back and interested by announcing sales offers, or promotions. You can leverage these announcements by offering them through social media, emails, or ppc.
Offers will help bring back old customers and attract new customers. This is a great strategy for companies that have been hit hard during the coronavirus, including restaurants, travel, spas and gyms. 

Freebies and discounts help customers save money and that incentivizes customers to reinvest in your company. These suggestions will help you earn money back that you didn't see during your lower sales periods.

Double Down on Strong Advertising Channels

PPC ads are what everyone is using right now. However, if you do not have a digital marketing agency like SalesX it can be hard to manage Google Ads, Twitter ads, Facebook ads, Linkedin ads, and Instagram ads all at once. Unless you choose to take the route of an agency, you should focus your time and efforts on where your target audience hangs out the most. 

If you are a B2B you will more than likely focus on Google Ads. If you are a clothing company you might jump into Instagram and Google Ads to leverage your ecommerce platform. Just comb through what works best for you and provides the most interaction and coverage and work your strategy to get behind those.

Creating a solid foundation for a digital marketing strategy right now will help enhance your business when things get back to “normal”. It will put you a step ahead of your competitors. Make sure to invest into your digital marketing presence and remember the situation your customers are in and consider how you can help or interact with them.

Video Advertising Tips for the Holidays

As we jump into the holiday season this year we all know that 2020 advertising strategies are going to be very different than they have been in other years. Everyone is pushing this holiday season to try to get their businesses as much success as possible. One funnel you should be leveraging in your holiday strategy is YouTube ads.

The platform has  2 billion worldwide users, 79 percent of these users have their own YouTube accounts. It makes sense that YouTube is an effective marketing platform for businesses. Let’s go over some strategies you can leverage to help make your holiday campaigns on YouTube more effective.

YouTube Shopping Campaigns

There is a campaign subtype called YouTube Shopping Campaigns. If you are running TrueView in-stream campaigns and have the campaign goal of product or brand awareness,  you can show six products on the right hand side of your video ad. If someone chooses to click the skip button and stop watching your ad, the products on the right side remain in case the user still wants to learn more. This is possible to do because these two campaign types require that you link your product feed from the Google Merchant Center.

How Do I Show Products in YouTube Shopping Campaigns

The first way to showcase your products in Shopping Campaigns  is to use “All Products.” This is a great option if your product list isn’t large or your video is generic. 

The second option is more specific. You can select products specifically to manually choose what you want to appear. With this option you can select up to ten products, even though only six will show up. The reason to select ten products is just in case a product goes out of stock. Out of stock products will not show up in your ads, so it will automatically shift to showcase another product you selected. The only time it reappears is when the product is once again back with new inventory. 

The third option is to select with a custom label. These would be the exact same lists you create in your product feeds. For example if you have a selected specific products for “Black Friday” and you choose this label, only those products will appear. This works great with specific holiday deals and holiday creatives.

YouTube Sitelink Extension

If you feel like shopping campaigns on TrueView are more your style, you can still drive traffic to your product pages with sitelink extensions. Yes,  you can have sitelink extensions in your video campaigns.
To leverage sitelinks you need to be running a TrueView for Action Campaign. This can be achieved by choosing one of these three campaign goals: sales, website traffic, and leads. You will always need two sitelinks added to the campaign otherwise they won't show up with the video ad. You can allow a total of four sitelinks to be viewed at once. 

YouTube Call-to-Action Extensions

A call-to-action extension is the most common feature used in YouTube ads. This is available for just about every campaign using TrueView in-stream ads. This extension will temporarily appear on the video while the ad is being played. After the ad is played, there is a second extension that appears on the right hand side of the screen until another video is chosen, or the page changes. 

This extension is a great way to drive more traffic to your site, because they are accessible during the ad creation process. Because of its availability you can a/b test multiple call to action extensions with ease. With video ad tests, and call-to-action extension tests, you can find the perfect combination to drive higher click-through rates. 

YouTube Lead Forms

Lead forms aren’t something you think of for sales in the ecommerce world. And to be honest, it is more of a top funnel strategy. However, it is viable for the holiday season. With this feature you are able to gather information from users directly from the ad. The goal of this strategy is to leverage to increase your email database. Having a strong message in the lead form to get people to complete it is best practice. Along with a strong message, we highly recommend keeping your form as simple as possible. The more information you try to gain from the form, the more likely users won’t complete it. Also, people on YouTube are there to watch a video, not to fill out forms. 

We hope that you can test out some of these video ad strategies, even if it is just one or two of them. Also, be sure to continuously test to make sure you're getting the best results. With so many people on the YouTube platform you should get quick insights on what modifications need to be made to better your campaigns. Good luck and happy holidays.

Automated Bidding: Help Save Time in Google Ads

We all know that Google Ads are a taxing adventure. With daily optimizations, new test, tracking, and fine tuning campaigns there is a lot you need to do in an average day as a digital marketer. Leveraging technology in Google Ads is a great way to speed up your workflow. In today's blog we are going to go over automated bidding, which can help you effectively compete in Google Ads. 

Automated Bidding

Automated bidding strategies will help out dramatically when it comes to bid management. They will also help you to reach your monthly KPI goals. Automated bidding is defined as a bid strategy that automatically sets up bids for your ads to increase your clicks to conversions. Below is a chart of strategies around automated bidding that Google has released to help you understand what each strategy is capable of doing for you.

Automated Bidding Concerns

This sounds like the perfect solution to a big pain point for digital marketers right? However, a lot of people are having a hard time giving control overbids in  Google Ads. 

Can AI Really Handle My Bidding?

Adjusting keyword bids manually in Google Ads is a long and tedious process. Reviewing your ad performance, keywords, and making the necessary adjustments can be a full time job on its own. Since this process is something that you often need an expert to work on to ensure great results, it can be difficult to just let a computer do it. Can you really expect a computer to achieve the same capacity and same results? As we talk about auto bidding more you will see that AI can, in fact, help implement bid adjustments just as effectively if far less time.

Automated Bidding Isn’t New

Many people think that automated bidding is a new feature, however Google Ads implemented this a long time ago. However they are just now getting recognition for it. Google Ads has had auto bidding since 2010 and over the past 10 years AI has been learning the algorithm behind automated bidding. With this accumulation of data and learning it is safe to say that automated bidding now has enough knowledge to make optimizations and drive results.

Can Automated Bidding Increase Conversions?

To make a long answer short, yes, automated bidding can help you increase your conversions. There are several strategies that you can use to do this. If you’re targeting impression shares, you improve your visibility. If you maximize clicks you can increase your website's traffic. However, these two strategies are not conversion based. The ones that are conversion based are: maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, enhanced cost per click (CPC), target ROAS and target CPA. 

These strategies have been reoptimized and are continuously improving through machine learning to make them as strong as possible.

How is Smart Bidding Considered Smart

Google ads smart bidding optimizes for conversions in every auction. The machine learning behind algorithms uses this data on an immense scale and at lighting speed. It also focuses on any parameters it identifies, which are known as signals. Some of these parameters are: location, time of day, device, language, browser, operating system, demographic (for display), and product attributes (for shopping). 

Should I Be Using Automated Bidding?

Depending on your business and how your campaigns are doing, automated bidding might, or might not work in your favor. Just like anything else it requires fine tuning in order to make things work. Certain prerequisites also mean that automated bidding might be right for you. 

Compatible Businesses for Automated Bidding

If you have any of these prerequisites automated bidding should be something you consider: 

• You have conversion tracking in place

• Campaigns aren’t limited by budget 

• Targeting isn’t narrow

• Performance metrics aren’t too aggressive

• You have good campaign structure with adequate ad groups

Businesses for Automated Bidding That Might Not Work

If you have any of these prerequisites, automated bidding might not work in your favor:

• You don’t have conversion tracking

• Your budget is limited

• You have narrow targeting (demographics, locations, etc)

• You expect immediate results. 

Smart bidding/automated bidding takes time to be effective.

Automated Bidding Benefits

Now that we have more information regarding automated bidding and smart bidding strategies, we need to consider the best way to leverage them.

Hit New Growth & Goals

As a basic answer, automated bidding is designed to get you the best prospects possible to visit your landing pages. Some of these strategies will give you more traffic, while others will boost the quality of your traffic. By using these bidding strategies you will be able to identify and capitalize on opportunities you might not have been aware of, giving you a great return on your investment.

Improve Your Optimization Score

Optimization scores are how well your Google Ads account is set up to perform. If you have 100% in your optimization score your account is fully running, so it is a valuable metric to track. Google Ads give recommendations to your account and campaigns to help boost your optimization score. Since automated bidding strategies help the performance of your campaigns, applying these strategies will improve your optimization score. This, in turn, will make your account function more efficiently. 

Time Saver

Giving up your manual bidding will get you back hours to work on other tasks and responsibilities in your accounts. Automated bidding has the potential to make countless hours of data, and metrics to try and predict the right decisions for bid optimization, a thing of the past. 

Being able to have time to capitalize on other areas, like search queries, ad copy improvements, landing page testing, new campaigns, and better tracking can be a huge advantage in your business. If you don’t have the man hours to tackle these other tasks, Google’s Smart Bidding and automated bidding strategies can be leveraged to help you reach these goals. Just remember, it isn’t a perfect fit for everyone and it can take some time to get results. Hopefully this time saver can be a great use to you.

Tips for Holiday Advertising in 2020

With how crazy this year has been for everyone, it seems that the holidays will follow the same trend. Online shopping is going to increase more than usual and these increases will appear earlier. This is due to the closure of the majority of store fronts as well as slow mail deliveries. During this Holiday season, ecommerce campaigns are what you want to focus on the most.

Best Practices for Holiday Advertising

Most of these best practices are pretty straightforward, but are often overlooked by companies. One of the most important and basic things is to make sure your customers have a good experience with you and on your site.

Maintaining Your Product Feed

The worst feeling is when you see an ad for a product on social media or Google and then  you reach the site only to discover  that it is out of stock. If you are using product feeds or catalogs, this should be an easy fix for you. Google and Facebook also have functions that allow you to advertise only those products that are in stock. If you are using standard text ads you will need to make the choice of what you advertise. You don’t want to promote a product that you don’t have in stock and can’t deliver. So stay vigilant in what you’re promoting and if you sell out of it,  change your text ads right away.

Shipping Expectations

You need to give yourself and your customer realistic expectations for when their product will be delivered. If a client pays for two day shipping and your company is behind on shipments, you must give them an update on what's happening to their order.

People can have a great experience on your site but that can be completely negated if their order doesn’t come in on time. For example, I purchased a really cool smart coffee table. It was high tech, modern, and expensive, but so worth it so i ordered it. I was told I should get it in six months, since it was on preorder. A year and a half later I was worried that I had been scammed. No updates had been sent on my order, however I went to a friend's house and sure enough they had the coffee table I ordered, and they had purchased it 3 months ago. Eventually I got my table, however, despite my enjoyment of the table, the shipping experience and the lack of information from the company has completely deterred me from getting something from this company again.

Not having a good shipping experience can completely change the perspective of customers which can lead to poor reviews, and can even push potential customers away. The point I am trying to get across is to set expectations for shipping and to communicate when there are problems.  It is better everyone is aware of how long it will take instead of having dissatisfied customers and bad reviews.

Make Sure You Have Pay Options

People purchasing products online dislike the tedious task of entering credit card information several times. It’s  annoying but many customers  also like to protect their privacy. Try incorporating Apple Pay, PayPal or other express checkouts to make the shopping experience more relaxing. It is easier to have everything done in a couple of mouse clicks, compared to inputting your full credit card information, shipping address and possibly billing address.

Share Customer Reviews

People care about others' opinions, especially when it comes to the quality of online products. So flaunt your company's online reviews throughout the holiday season. For local businesses, Google reviews are the most crucial for holiday marketing success. The amount of reviews on your Google Business Profile has a direct correlation with your local results. So if you want to show up first on maps or in searches for holiday shopping, start getting your Google reviews going.

Use Real Images for Products

Seeing products in action is a big selling point for holiday shoppers. Most people during the holiday season go to the mall or retail stores to buy their holiday gifts. Due to the pandemic most people won’t go to congested areas, bringing in-store purchases down for the year, and possibly increasing sales in your online store. There are two main differences between in-store and online shopping. For in-store you get to go inside and think over purchase, pick it up, compare to other products and take it home in your hands. When it comes to online shopping you don’t get to have this type of experience so it can be harder to pull the trigger on a product. 

How do you bring this experience to online customers? The best solution is to take real life pictures of your product and display them. For example, let’s take this Gatorade bottle.

In the first image you get to see what the bottle clearly looks like. In the second image you can get a better understanding of how big the bottle actually is and an image of yourself using it. It can be disappointing to purchase a product online but then when you receive it, it doesn’t measure up to the expectations that you saw online. This will help customers see your high quality products for what they actually are rather than having an assumption in the back of your mind that your product is different from what it actually is.

This is the year to pay close attention to your online shopping experience. Try to put yourself in the shoes of consumers and focus on what makes your website easy and pain free to use. Hopefully these tips will help you to generate more satisfaction for your customers, and increase your sales. 

How to get Bottom Funnel Conversions

In all businesses, but especially in digital marketing, people talk about their marketing funnel. A marketing funneling is essentially a trickle down system of organic and paid marketing which passively entices the individual over time through a series of actions. 

Marketing funnels are constructed through marketing theory and influence in part by business branding. Funnels are continuously changed and fine tuned because it is very rare to have a perfect system that continuously converts customers. The great thing about marketing funnels is that it helps impact your bottom line. In this blog post we will be going over the bottom funnel section of a marketing funnel.

Bottom Funnel Challenges?

One challenge that companies face is converting individuals in their pipeline into customers. This is often encountered in the middle / lower parts of the marketing funnel. The lower funnel is where potential customers start a free trial, attend a webinar, or choose a demo of your product or services. You need to make sure your bottom funnel is  strong, otherwise all the work you did to get your potential customers there will be for nothing. 

Investing in the Bottom Funnel

Most of the time you are putting your efforts into the top funnel, which is brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, and videos. Everyone understands the value of having new leads flowing into their funnel, and are aware that if the flow stops it can drastically affect your business. However, getting leads into the funnel is the easy part, getting them down the funnel for sale is where most people struggle. 

The lead nurture strategy is the most recommended way, but there are other ways to expedite the process. Using paid media to achieve this sounds counterintuitive. Why pay for a lead that is already in your funnel? However, if you have a good amount of leads in the funnel making an investment in retargeting towards that audience can be profitable. 

Using Paid Media for Bottom Funnel Conversions

Using any form of paid marketing can improve your bottom funnel conversions.

Remarketing

The best way to leverage your bottom funnel is through remarketing your audiences, typically in social media or paid search. To do this you need to make sure you have pixels in place like Google Tag Manager, or Facebook Pixel. You want to determine whether you want to use URL based retargeting or a list, or both. 

If you use a thank you page after a submission, using a page URL is the easiest way to build these audiences. If you have multiple URLs you also have the option to put them into one big audience, or break them down individually depending on what suits you and your business. 

Adding Remarketing Audiences to Search Campaigns

Paid search is different because if you have a large enough audience, you can market to them directly in a display ad. But a strategy people tend to miss out on is including these audiences in search campaigns using the observation setting. From there you can add bid adjustments to specific audiences

If you want to add a lower funnel audience you can increase the bid to those users specifically to higher the odds that your ad shows up on top. You can still use these audiences in search campaigns under the targeted section. The difference is that it will only target users when they are searching for those terms. If you use this, try breaking it out into ad groups.

Use Promotions to Increase Bottom Funnel Conversions

Promo Codes

If you are targeting someone who is unaware of your products or their value you can try using a promo code or discount. Even though you might lose some money in the short term, you gain a customer. If you get happy customers from this, you can play the long game for a return customer which will eventually increase your revenue. 

Upselling

To segue from the promo code concept, you can try targeting these same users with upselling opportunities. For example, if someone is using the free version of your product or using a free trial consistently, special offers of new added features or tiers can be effective. Some people may be unaware of what you can offer or the benefits or capabilities you can give them.

Business Development Reps

This is independent from paid media but can help improve your mid funnel progress as you scale. Not every business can hire additional sales team members, but having extra help to vet leads always helps improve your bottom line. Complex lead nurturing and development can be difficult and tedious to construct. Having extra hands to contact leads is a great way to move people through your funnel.

These strategies can make a big difference between a lead going cold or someone becoming a customer and staying a customer. If you are investing in the top section of your marketing funnel, consider what you are doing with your lower funnel to ensure all the leads that you are trickling in turn into conversions.

Setting up Google Dynamic Display Ads

Google Dynamic Display Ads are a great way to showcase products or services that users previously viewed on your website or app. Dynamic remarketing in Google Ads is easy. However, not everyone is eligible for it. Your eligibility will depend on if you want to use dynamic ads and what industry you are in. Let’s go over the basics of dynamic display ads for a campaign setup.

Am I eligible for Dynamic Display Ads

Certain websites and apps are not allowed to use dynamic display ads. If you fall under any of these categories you will not be able to use dynamic remarketing audiences.

1. Identity and belief: Anything possibly related to potential stigmas, discrimination, prejudices, or other classifications along those lines.

2. Personal hardships: Google wants to avoid reminding people of difficult times that they might be going through. 

3. Access to opportunities: Note - Starting October 19th 2020, any ads appearing to target specific audiences that are impacted by societal bias may be rejected. 

4. Alcohol: Anything that shows or resembles alcoholic beverages will be rejected.

5. Sexual interests: Because these experiences are extremely private, alll sexually explicit ads are prohibited.

6. Gambling: Online gambling and casinos are not allowed to use dynamic remarketing.

7. Clinical trial recruitment: This type of ad copy needs to be precise otherwise it can be rejected.

8. Restricted drug terms: If drugs are solely for animal usage, then it will be accepted.

9. Users under 13 years old: There is too much room for error in this category to accept ads.

If your company doesn’t fall under one of these categories then you are more probably okay to use dynamic remarketing.

How to Set Up a Dynamic Display Ad Campaign

During the initial creation of the campaign, choose the “sales” campaign goal objective. Dynamic advertising is only available on the Display Network so choose “Display” as your campaign type. The only subtype option that allows dynamic remarketing is “standard display campaign” so make sure you choose this one.

Next you want to set up your campaign just like any other campaign in your Display Network.

There are additional settings you need to add. First, find the Dynamic Ads section. Then go to the checkbox and click on this box to activate dynamic ads. You will then get another selection box with the options: Education, Flights, Hotels and rentals, Jobs, Local deals, Real estate, Retail, Travel, Other (custom option). Pick whichever business closely represents your account. Last, if you are already using shopping campaigns, there will be an option to sync your feed to the Google Merchant Center. Setting up your feed might take some time, but everything else should be the same. 

Creating a Feed For Dynamic Display Ads

A big necessity for dynamic remarketing are feeds in Google Ads. If you don’t have a feed then you should not use dynamic ads. Any other business besides retail, that is companies that don’t use shopping campaigns, will have to use a feed template. There are, however, some feed limitations that you should be aware of.

Feed Limitations

There are limitations on how many or how large your feeds can be. There are 3 rules right now:

1. There can only be 5 million rows or feed items per account. This includes extensions and ad customizing feeds.

2. There can be 100 user generated or business data feeds per an ad account.

3. Each attribute within your feeds must be 3,000 bytes or less. Google recommends 750-3,000 characters depending on which character you are using.

Feed Templates

Depending on the industry you choose in your campaign setup, you will need to use the proper business type feed template. Every business type feed has different attributes so the template you use does matter.

Uploading Your Feed

To upload your feed in Google Ads, click on the Tool & Settings button in the top right corner. Next, click Business data under the Setup column. Click the plus button to begin your upload process. You will then choose the Dynamic ad feed, and select the business type category of the feed that you created. Lastly, choose the .csv file for the feed, and name it. After that, you should be good to upload. After refreshing you should be able to see your feed listed. 

Dynamic ads are used to customize a message and to put it in front of users. Dynamic feeds for products or services are a great way to connect with users and showcase items that they are already familiar with from past visits. When creating ads make sure you have an ad message that will speak to your target audience and that corresponds with your feed, product or services. This can help improve the performance of your display campaigns for engagement and conversions. 

Ideas for Marketing In October

Today marks the first day of October. October is a great month for creative marketing tactics. Using the holidays to work your content and promotions helps to get some excitement into your advertising and gives you a chance to show off your brand voice. Continue reading for some October related ideas for your blog socials, website and more!

Marketing ideas for October

Bringing awareness to a cause is a way for your business to help support that cause. At the same time, it lets your customers get satisfaction from something fulfilling, and build an even better sense of  community around you and your business. This also allows you to build local audience strength because of the more natural messaging. Let’s go over a few themes you are more than likely familiar with:

• LGBTQ History

• Anti-bullying

• Sustainable energy

• Fire Prevention

• Down Syndrome

Here are a few more themes in October you might not know, but should:

• Eat Better, Eat Together Month

• World Vegetarian Day

• Global Diversity Awareness Month

• Bilingual Child Month

• Adopt a Shelter Dog Month

• Emotional Wellness Month

• National Cake Decorating Day

• Employee Ownership Month

• Church Safety and Security Month

National Bullying Prevention Month

49% of children from the grades 4-12 have reported being bullied at least once a month and that's 49% too many. This October cause is relevant to schools and education adjacent verticals, but also businesses whose target market is made up of parents with school-aged children. There is an easy way to market towards this. Try posting stats on social media or providing links to anti-bullying resources and organizations your customers can donate to. Or you can donate a portion of your profits this month to a nonprofit that is focused on anti-bullying.

Energy Awareness Month

If you're in the energy industry you can write an article sharing statistics or your perspective and promote it on LinkedIn with takeaways in your post. Include the hashtag #sustainablenergy because it is specific to the topic and it will be searched by anyone who is interested in reading about it. Another way you can talk about this theme is to write about DIY sustainable energy ideas that can be used at someone's home, office, or classroom.

World Vegetarian Day

World Vegetarian Day is on October first, so happy World Vegetarian Day! This is a great day to celebrate restaurants or shops that cater to a vegetarian audience. It gives them a thumbs up from consumers recognizing them through social media and on their website. You can even get more creative with this as well. Try for coronavirus restaurants, offer discounts on vegetarian dishes. If cooking is applicable to your business, create  a post offering recipes, information, experiences, and resources.

National Boss’s Day

This is a Facebook and LinkedIn friendly holiday that happens on October 16th. You can give a shout-out to your boss and the great work they do for your company. And if you don’t have a boss, have some fun and choose another “boss” you know like maybe your puppy or cat that you consider the boss of the house.

Global Diversity Month

Global diversity month pays tribute to diverse minds and beliefs held by all cultures around the world. We live in a multicultural society that embraces a vast number of cultures and appreciates all culture differences and perspectives. This is a great post for you to show off your internal staff and highlight their backgrounds. This will demonstrate diversity in your company and bring a presence of unity and culture that consumers might not know about but should.

Fire Prevention Month

As we all know there have been some pretty nasty fires during the last couple of years. That is why fire prevention month is important ,especially right now. Fire prevention month is mainly used to memorialize the Great Chicago Fire that occurred in  October, 1871. This is a great time to teach parents and children how to prevent fires in their own homes and what to do when a fire happens. Similar to the tips we gave for anti-bullying month you can post stats on causes of fires, or how many we have per year. You can give information on how to prevent fires and what to do when fires occur. And finally,  you can donate to a nonprofit focused on fire prevention. If you are in a clothing or technology industry try donating product to local fire departments as a token of appreciation and always remember to use the hashtag #firepreventionmonth.

Halloween Based Marketing

Halloween is probably the biggest holiday in the USA during October. Everyone gets into the Halloween spirit so why not market around it.

Artist Dabbling

Show customers how to make Halloween inspired crafts and recipes. A blog post or DIY video showing off how to decorate you how or “scary” themed recipes for you Halloween party can be a great place to start. Also with COVID, you can provide suggestions for how you can get into the spirit of Halloween while social distance pumpkin carving or pumpkin painting.

Giveaways

To get people into the holiday spirit try doing a giveaway. You can choose an event like best decorated house, best costume, guess how many candy are in the jar, etc. In doing so you can ask contestants to like your post or page and use brand hashtags in order to win. This will help your social accounts get more followers and traction as well as increase the range of your brand's influence. Just make sure you have an amazing prize to really get some hype behind your contest.

Running an October themed marketing campaign is a great way to authenticate your brand, interact with your community, have some fun, and help out a good cause. Don’t be afraid to test it out on new platforms as well. Even though these campaigns are more lighthearted they still give great exposure and attract customers. Try out these October marketing ideas and get ready for the holidays.

How to Create Marketing Videos From Your House

With everyone staying at home and not being able to go into the office, we don’t have the same access to the office video equipment that we are used to. But what if I told you that with a few small acquisitions and a bit of technique, you will be able to produce video content that is business worthy?

During these trying times it is important to communicate with your customers and employees, and to keep your business running as smoothly as possible. Most smart phones now have the capacity to produce crisp footage. Let’s go over some tips that will help you enhance your in-home marketing video content and ensure it is top quality.

Why Video Marketing Right Now

Technology has made it so that almost everyone has access to wireless, high-speed internet connections which makes it easier to let users access websites and social media. People staying at home have a lot more time to themselves. They are discovering new hobbies and watching more television and YouTube videos than ever. With over 1 trillion consumers of YouTube and about 300 hours of videos uploaded to the site daily, it is a great platform to display video marketing content. Video advertising and content are the channels that many businesses are using to communicate with customers and even colleagues. 

Before COVID, video was a highly effective way to communicate your brand, show off your products / services and build trust with your customers. There are numerous ways to do this through video including promo videos, customer testimonials, and product demonstrations. 

Several recent statistics further demonstrate how powerful video content is right now.

• 80% of businesses consider video a valuable marketing tool. 

• 1 billions hours of YouTube videos are watched every day.

• 70% of customers prefer videos for learning about products and services.

Your website is also more likely to get ranked on the first page of Google if it includes a video on it. Finally, businesses report that video content has helped consumers to understand their products and services better.

Creating Videos From Home

Avoiding personal contact during COVID is a must, so everyone is being forced to try and create video content from home. This means you cannot share the equipment that you are used to having. So how do you create good content for your company from home?

DIYing Home Video Equipment

A few years ago, people would be baffled if you asked them to create video content from home. However, video technology has advanced in recent years. With everyday devices like cell phones, you now produce the same or even better video quality than production crews have in the past.

Smart Phones

Cell phones, Tablets, and other mobile devices all come standard with all the tech and features you would need for professional video content. Yes it's true!. To up your production value all you need are some accessories like a stand and microphones which are easily and commonly produced.

Action Cameras

You might have gone on a hike or vacation to a tropical island and purchased a go pro which is just stowed away in your closet. Well guess what? It’s now time to bring it out and start making video content with it. Action cameras help make dynamic images that engage viewers and draw them into your content.

DSLR Camera

If you want a sharp, clean video or picture for your video content you should think of investing into a DSLR camera. Digital single-lens reflex cameras are an essential upgrade to digital cameras, and deals are often available so be on the lookout for one.

Lighting Equipment

A standard desk light or lights from your house may create hot spots and harsh lighting in videos. Try using a nearby wall or white backdrop to help soften the light. Natural light is also a great option. I'm sure we have all heard of the golden hour. However, nature controls how sunlight lasts and shows in your home, which might make it difficult for you to complete your video. If you want to upgrade your lighting for a low price, try getting a clampable LED light for your home video content.  There are plenty of products available on Amazon for just this purpose.

Audio Equipment

Earbuds, headphones, and microphones are easy to access. But if you are worried about how you look to your consumer using these, you can invest in lavalier mics and an audio mixer that can help you produce a more professional sound. Keep in mind that these can be more costly than other recommendations for upgrades so make sure you have some budget for these.

Types of Home Video Content

Being creative is going to be how you are successful with your video content. There are a vast amount of video content options, to continue your effectiveness.

Company Updates

It’s important to keep your customers, and employees up to date on your business status. You can make a simple video with you sitting at a desk providing key progress updates of how your company is currently doing.

Webinars

Webinars have been leveraged for years, but are being used consistently now. Through these you give people an opportunity to connect and interact with your company. It also allows you to explain the process of your product or services. You get to interact with your audience in real time. You also have the option to record your webinar to use for later, or even put it into the editing room and break it down into a couple of videos for advertising purposes.

Unboxing Videos

Unboxing videos are something people on YouTube do consistently so why not show off how your product is packed on your own. You get full control as to how to display your products to your potential customers. You will get to show your audience what they are getting and what it will look like.

How-to Videos

One thing people want to see is how your product can benefit their life. So show off the benefits, functions, and features of your product in a how-to video from home. This will also give your audience a sense of trust that your product will work as ads say it will. Allowing your customers to see your product at work is always a powerful tool.

Voiceover for Your Videos

Let’s say you do a how-to video, but don’t like how your voice sounds. Or maybe there is too much background noise in your house to make it viable. You might want to consider getting a voiceover artist to record your audio. With social distancing voiceover actors have not been affected as much as other businesses. All they need (and typically have at home) is professional microphone, recording equipment and a script and they are good to go. 

With professional voiceover actors you will be able to engage your audience and present the information needed. If you want to go the freelance route and secure some competitive prices, check out Fiverr.com. If you want to go for a more professional source, try Voices.com. This site allows you to post your job and needs for free and you get to reach out to some of the top professional voice actors to help you upscale your content.

Whether you are brand new to creating video content or already in the thick of it, quality video content that can help you business does not need to stop because of the pandemic. With how fast technology has and is continuing to advance, you have access to all you need to create some strong engaging video content that can help you reach your potential customers.

Learn How Google Ranks Your Website for Searches

Do you ever wonder why your website isn’t shown on the top of the Google search page? Or maybe you are at the top, but then other companies flood every other space? There can be a couple of answers to these questions. First let’s go over paid search ads. 

A paid search ad is done through Google Ads.  It is a search campaign that allows companies to advertise specific keywords to show an advertisement on the top 2-3 spots on the Google search results. You can recognize these by the bolded word “Ad” on the left hand side. This is something you should be doing, especially with your brand keywords. It will prevent other advertisers from popping up before you when a user searches for your company. It will also provide a higher probability of users either clicking on your ad or your organic links. Having max visibility can increase your ability to attract customers and help drive results to your site. 

With respect to organic search results, there is no way to control how Google picks your site. However, there are ways to hedge your bets, so that your website appears. SEO (search engine optimization) best practices are where you can align your website with factors that Google takes into consideration when it ranks website links in the search results. Today we will go over these factors for ranking, and how to optimize your website for these rankings.

Ranking Factors

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank as high as possible in organic search results. The term organic refers to  search results that are not paid. 

Here is an example of paid ads and organic search:

Both paid ads and organic rankings are done through an algorithm that Google has designed that takes multiple metrics into consideration. These are your ranking factors. It is unlikely that all Google’s ranking factors will ever be disclosed to the public. However, we do know several of them thanks to some revelations from Google and through experimentation. You should also remember that the algorithm will constantly change to ensure the website links listed are the best quality, and most trustworthy.

Types of Ranking Factors

There are several different types of ranking factors. Most people will talk about on and off page ranking factors. However,  there is a third one to keep in mind as well which are the technical ranking factors.

• Off Page Ranking Factors: Google measures these from your website, mainly through backlinks.

• On Page Ranking Factors: Google measure this primarily on related keywords and the quality of information on your website pages.

• Technical Ranking Factors: Google measures this through your site’s overall performance such as website upload speed.

Technical Google Ranking Factors

Most technical SEO needs to be a joint effort between the marketing and development teams. What is great about fixing these issues is that there is not a lot of ongoing maintenance that will be needed.

Site and Page Speed

Load speed is a huge deal for people online and Google agrees. That is why this is a main metric when it comes to technical rankings. If your page takes too long to load you will more than likely see a huge increase in bounce rates, which will hurt your rankings. Everyone expects to have an easy time using the Internet and if you have a slow site it will cause frustration.  Keep this in mind when you are auditing your site. Figure out ways to make it faster. There’s a plethora of tools you can use that allow you to test your website's speed. For example, try using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how your site is doing.

Mobile Usability

Google uses mobile-first indexing for website crawling. Which means it will use the mobile version of your website when evaluating your page.If your desktop version of your website is perfect, your rankings can take a big hit if you have no optimizations for your mobile site. Make sure to view your web pages to adapt to mobile size. Google has a tool called Mobile-Friendly Test that can give you website insights similar to its page speed insights feature.

Internal Links

Google website crawlers index different content on your website. Internal links, hyperlinks that point to internal pages on your site, help crawlers analyze that index information is done properly. 

The more organized your internal link structure is, the better as it makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for. An example can help you visualize this. Let’s say your website talks about different tea types. You can have a main resource page for “black tea” that covers everything about black tea. From there you have additional articles that cover related subtopics such as the history of black tea, what is in black tea, black tea through the continents, black tea recipes, etc. These subtopics should be linked to other subtopics as well as back to the main black tea page. Every couple of months you should be checking for any 404 errors, redirect loops, and broken links to make sure that your indexing stays organized.

On-Page Ranking Factors

These factors are determined specifically by your website pages. 

Keyword targeting

Keywords are the core for SEO strategy. These are the search terms that people use while using a search engine. Before making content on your site you should be doing keyword research. Keyword research allows you to better understand what your audience is looking for and helps to create content that directly addresses these search queries.

Before building content you should figure out 4-5 related keywords that you want to target. Then whenever these keywords fit into your content make sure to add them into the text.

Search engines can recognize when someone is trying to make a keyword fit unnaturally. This is known as keyword stuffing and can hurt your ranking. Remember, Google takes in a lot of metrics when applying your ranking so aim to produce good content that is easy for your audience to understand, and focus less on adding your keywords in as much as possible. 

Title & Header Tags

Once you have the keywords you want to rank for, make sure to insert them into your title and header tags. Search engines use these tags to figure out what the page is about and how to index them. Title tags are what is displayed the most prominently when viewed on a search page result (the blue section).

Meta description

The meta description is a short description that lives in the HTML code of your page. It won’t appear on the page when it is viewed, but it gets displayed in the search results (the black description of the page under the blue title tag).

Meta descriptions are not the most important ranking factor and sometimes if one isn’t provided Google will pull a snippet of your page as an auto fill. But what is important about this section is that it will give searchers a short summary of your page. This can increase your click rate. It is good to go over this so you can accurately summarize what the page details for consumers.

Image Alt-Text

If you have ever looked for an image in Google, you can assume there is a SEO factor involved. Every image on your website has alt-text, which is also known as an alt-tag.

Alt-text serves to make your website accessible to visually impared readers who rely on screen readers to browse the internet. Also, if your image fails the alt-text will appear instead. And lastly it helps search engines understand the image and index it properly. A properly optimized alt text will help you secure a higher ranking.

URL Structure

This section may seem straightforward but it  has an impact on your ranking score. A url with an assortment of random numbers, letters, and characters isn’t visually appealing, and doesn’t help Google understand what the page is about. If you have a short and simple URL that incorporates the keyword it will be SEO friendly and increase your rankings. 

Off Page Ranking Factors

This ranking factor comes into play with entities outside of your website such as social media or other websites. They should be part of your SEO strategy.

Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks that come from a page outside of your website. Google made a change to their algorithm over 25 years ago that made it clear that the number of quality links to your page would be an indicator that the quality of your web page is strong. There are three strategies you can try to use to increase backlinking to your page.

Quality Content

Having unique content that provides value to your audience will help you generate backlinks. However, this process may take a long time to develop because your business brand awareness will need to grow and other sites will need to find you and reference  you as a source.

Cold Outreaching

This strategy requires you to find an author of a website that has similar content to yours or are directly related to your industry or field. Typically this type of outreach is a backlink for a backlink generated through a request  similar to a sales cold call. It isn’t for everyone, but it is a numbers game.

Guest Posting

Writing guest blog posts on other websites is a great way to get your name out there as well as secure backlinks for your company. If you are a guest blogger ensure that the content you provide is original and gives high value back to the customer. You should also ensure you’re blogging on a credible site and one that your audience might also be viewing. Writing for a random website that isn’t in your vertical or providing lackluster content won’t help you. 

When it comes to SEO, there is no golden ticket or master plan. The thing about SEO is that it takes time to climb the ranks, don’t expect to make a couple of changes and be immediately catapulted into the number one spot. Optimization is a long process that requires ongoing work on your site to attract your audience. However, as long as you are a functioning website that is optimizing to your target audience, you will see organic growth.

Use Brand to Increase Your Advertising

Digital marketing is like a clock, it has so many intricate pieces to make it run perfectly. However digital marketing is even more complex because you need to repair and change pieces daily to get the results. You have your account structure, campaigns, adgroups, keywords, conversion tracking, audience targeting and optimizations for these on a daily basis just to get the tip of the iceberg. But one thing people sometimes overlook is brand. Advertisers tend to focus on their promotions and try to push them as much as possible. A lot of time is spent here and sometimes your branding gets pushed aside.

Today we are going to go over why brand is important and how you can use it to improve your digital advertising. 

Why You Need to Advertise Your Brand

A lot of digital advertising is about results. You need to hit your numbers or exceed them at all times. This is when a lot of marketers forget about their brand to get quick and fast results. But keep this in mind if someone comes in on one of your campaigns and gets to your landing page which is a form fill, they might not have a clue as to who your company is because your brand isn’t getting pushed which can result into them wanting to do more background detail on your company which pushes your conversion back in time or even moves them away from you for a more brand recognized company.

The brain and the internet work off of recognition your brain takes in images and figures out something's value at crazy speed determining if the information on the screen is what you want. Which is why things like click bait exist. Things like click bait are of great use, but don’t grow your business with longevity. The best way to grow your business is to drive people to your site as well as show off your brand to leave an impact on the consumer, so they remember and come back.

Getting Your Brand Align with Your Advertising

Brand recognition and retention in every step of you advertising is essential to have. If you consumers don’t have brand recognition you need to leverage your ads and landing pages to help get your brand name and values out regarding your products and services. 

As your brand awareness grows you don’t need to talk about core values as much in your campaigns. Things to keep in mind for brand recognition are: color scheme, imagery, and tone of the overall account. This lets consumers draw a relation to your company instant in their mind without needing to recall information in their head for example when you are thinking of food and see the colors yellow and red you instantly think McDonalds.

How a Small Business Can Use Brand to Help Advertising

A small business needs to have their branding incorporated in their business and advertising strategy in order for it to grow. Here are some tips to help you do that.

Consistency

Maintaining brand consistency is critical. Make sure your landing pages and website ads are using the same color, language and tone. This will help ensure brand recognition. Consumers will return to your site before and after purchasing products or services to learn more information. So keeping everything consistent will also keep your presence in their minds.

Again let’s use McDonalds as an example. If they change their colors to something like blue and white, customers driving up to the restaurant will be confused and think they are in the wrong place. This applies to any business. If their landing page is a different color scheme than the rest of their website, customers may also be confused. They may even believe they’ve landed on the wrong site and possibly click off, losing you a conversion.

Leverage Your Ad Copy to Voice Goal of Campaign and Your Brand

Expressing the goal of your advertisement should always come first and be partnered with your company's identity to really bring it home. You can kill two birds with one stone by also incorporating this in your ad copy. Having a slog is an effective way to get your point across and provide the solution that solves your customer's pain point. Again, let’s use McDonalds. You go to McDonalds to eat and satisfy your hunger. Their slogan is “I’m Loving it”. McDonalds is simply conveying to their customers that they will love the food that they receive from the restaurant. When creating your ads try to have a slogan to drive home your point. Also, if you have room, include highlights of your products or more information to establish how your product is perfect for the consumer. 

Keeping the Same Landing Page Design

Messaging on your site and landing pages should be consistent. It  doesn’t have to be word for word but you should ensure you continually reinforce your primary message. If your product or services are “an all in one solution”, make it a point to emphasize and repeat the message. This repetition will further confirm to the consumer that this product is an all in one solution. 

Brand Color Language & Repetition

There are many elements to branding, but just keep things simple to begin with. Here are some of the foundations that can help you build a strong identity:

Color

Picking a color scheme for your business is one of the first things people think about. Keep in mind that colors actually trigger emotions in people. To learn more about this check out our blog on color schemes and psychology. Color schemes can coincide with public perception of a brand.  If companies have some type of negative impact on their business, they will sometimes change the color scheme or even the logo of the company to distance themselves from that negative impact.  A well known brand that recently transitioned like this is the Washington Football Team.

Language

We have already discussed this topic extensively but to bring home the point, you should make sure the language on your site is concise and easy to understand. Include some memorable words so that consumers can remember it. Slogans are a powerful way to convey the value that you can provide to the consumer and you can build ad copy from this. Also, don’t feel like you need to get everything crammed into one sentence. Shorter is often clearer and more easily remembered.

Repetition

To increase your brand recognition is to hammer home the same points so that your consumer always identifies you with these points. If a consumer consistently sees your message logo, colors and ad copy over and over again, they will definitely remember who you are.
Companies leverage these skills to increase their brand recognition and boost their digital marketing efforts. Make sure your brand is consistent and conveys the same thing wherever potential customers find you on the Internet. Your audience will remember your company, which will help elevate your presence and bring in more conversions.

Visibility on Search Terms Reduced by Google

Google announced on September 1st that search term reports in Google Ads will only show search terms that reach a specific volume threshold. This has caused a huge concern in the advertising and agency community. This is because we rely on these reports to gain insight and data to further optimize performance in Google Ads.
There are many questions regarding this change including why they chose to do this, and how marketers can maintain their accounts with this new change. We now know a little more and will cover as much of information as possible to help you transition through these changes with Google Ads.

What is a Search Term Report

Search term reports are a feature in Google Ads that let you see what search terms trigger your ads. They also let you see what search terms closely relate to the keywords your ads are targeting.

For example, if you are targeting the keyword “t-shirt” and someone searches for “cheap t-shirts” the search term “cheap t-shirts” will be on your search term report. 

Digital marketers rely on this report to optimize their Google Ads performance through:

• Matching type optimizations for keywords

• Building out negative keyword lists

• Finding new search terms to add to your keywords list

All of these features help to assure your allocation of budget is set up properly and that you are not spending money on keywords that provide no return.

How is the Search Terms Report Changed

Google announced that, starting September 2020, search term reports will only include terms that have significant numbers. You will likely see fewer terms in reports from now on. This means that you won't be able to use this report to see every search term that  triggers your ads. More importantly, you will no longer be able to see search terms that have lower search volume. This is the most recent update that Google has posted.

The Impact of the Search Term Report Change

All digital marketers know that irrelevant clicks are a waste for your ad spend. If you have  several low-volume terms that get picked up daily, it can really add up in your account especially with a high budget. 

The major concern to all marketers is the reduced visibility. This report is an essential part of ad  optimization. It assists with the small tweaks that help prevent vast amounts of wasted spend. It also assists with keyword mining and negating invaluable keywords. Finally, it helps to lower bidding and reduced conversion rates.

Recommendations

Google will more than likely stick with this new change and there isn’t anything we can do as a community to change their mind. On average we will be losing around 15%. There are things you can do to mitigate this loss. 

We shouldn’t let this loss of data interfere with the best practices. Instead, we need to put more effort into making optimizations based on the data we are given. Even if we can’t find the keyword that can potentially waste clicks, don’t let this lost data prevent you from working with what you got, which is still major and valuable data.

Review Bing

Google isn’t the only search engine that digital marketers can use. Yes it takes more than the vast majority of most budgets, but a lot of marketers are using Bing as well. A digital marketer with a seasoned Bing account can attest to the fact that Bing and Google both share search trends in their campaigns and you can leverage Bing to map out search terms. Bing is not implementing the changes to their reports that Google is. So you can leverage Bing regularly to review search terms to optimize both your Bing and your Google Ads campaigns.

Brush up on Skill Sets

Another recommendation we suggest is that if your company highly prioritizes search engine ads you may want to start expanding your digital marketing skills for business growth. You should start looking into social media ads, SEO, EMM, data analysis, website development etc.

It’s early in the game and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the changes Google has made. For example we don’t yet know how they will measure  “significant” and how it will affect overall search trends. What else will Google change? We’ll help by keeping you informed and by providing tips to help you out to help out your accounts. In the meantime, try out some of these recommendations!