Look around you, people are either watching vlogs and video interviews or enjoying branded video content and live stream recordings. This goes to imply that video marketing is at its peak as people are engaging with video content more than ever before. Talking about video marketing, one cannot help but mention YouTube, the platform synonymous with it. Being a video marketer, YouTube SEO needs to be at the top of your priority list. You might be uploading stellar videos on a daily basis, but nothing matters if your videos don’t manage to get seen. After all, with 400 hours of video content being uploaded every minute, how do you ensure yours stands out and attracts viewers? Don’t let your YouTube marketing efforts go waste. Here are eight effective ways to ensure your videos get ranked highly on YouTube and attract views. 1. Use relevant keywordsBe it Google or YouTube SEO, the first and foremost step is conducting keyword research. Start with making a list of potential keywords related to your video, it can be anything that people will use that can direct them to the video. Next, use YouTube’s autocomplete feature to identify the popular keywords people use to search. You will be met with long-tail keyword suggestions here which prove to be a lot more accurate than the generic short-tail ones. Apart from manually searching for keywords, you can also use tools such as TubeBuddy and vidIQ to find the best keywords and tags to use. 2. Optimize the title, description, and tagsWhen you are browsing videos, the first element that catches your eye is the video title, isn’t it? Not only should the video title be compelling and interesting, but it should also contain the target keyword/s. The same applies to the video description and tags that best attribute your video. YouTube video descriptions are highly underrated. Marketers don’t realize that this space provides context and influences ranking too. While you have 5000 characters to play with, YouTube just displays the first 157 characters. So use this space wisely, infused with keywords and appropriate call-to-action words. Another important SEO element is adding relevant tags which make your video easily discoverable. 3. Create engaging videosUltimately, people will watch your videos and will keep coming back for more if you upload fresh, engaging and informative content which happens to be an important ranking signal to YouTube’s algorithm. The more compelling your videos are, the higher is the audience retention which automatically increases your chances of showing up under YouTube’s search suggestions. In addition to the content, it is important to pay heed to the production quality too. For example, poorly lit and inaudible videos will certainly not entice viewers. So, invest efforts in enhancing the production quality of your video in order to drive views. 4. Encourage subscriptionsManaging a YouTube channel that barely has subscribers and viewers is as good as talking to a wall. Don’t stop at just uploading a video, make it work for you by reaching your target audience and encouraging them to engage with your channel and subscribe to it. Building a strong subscriber base increases your chances of being ranked highly on YouTube because it goes to show that you have an engaged community which is a huge plus point. Now, how do you get people to subscribe? Start with asking for it. Make it a practice to insert this call-to-action at the end of every video and include it in the video description. You must also encourage subscriptions outside of YouTube by adding a widget on your website or asking your followers to subscribe on your Facebook or Twitter pages. 5. Add compelling thumbnailsIf you have been using YouTube’s auto-generated video still as the thumbnail, you need to stop being lazy and change your ways. The thumbnail is the first visual reference your audiences get of your video which influences their decision to view it. So it needs to be compelling enough to grab their attention. Instead of settling for an auto-generated still, why not use customized thumbnails which are far more appealing? It is a good idea to show the close-ups of human faces to strike emotional connect and the appropriate amount of text to make it click-worthy. You can also add your brand logo but make sure it doesn’t overshadow the thumbnail, given the restricted space. 6. Use the closed caption featureYou might have come across “CC” while watching videos on YouTube. CC stands for closed captions, an important YouTube SEO tool. Closed Captions (CC) refers to the text overlay or transcription of the video. Using closed captions in videos makes it appeal to a wider audience and lets your viewers watch your video with ease irrespective of their surroundings. This leads to higher user engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, and subscribers. Discovery Digital Networks conducted a study and found an overall increase of 7.32 percentage in views for captioned videos. While YouTube generates auto-captions, you rather add closed captions for search engines to accurately index. This impacts your SEO ranking. 7. Name files appropriatelyIt’s easy to overlook this step but the fact is that naming your video file appropriately is more important than you think. Instead of going ahead with “video_final.mp4” or “brand_filmFINAL.avi,” it is important to rename the video to include the keywords as it is an indicator to search engines about what your video file is about. 8. Be consistentTo improve your rankings and build an engaged community, you must be consistent with uploads. You need to be committed to churning out unique and relevant video content and stay at the top of your game because that is the only way you can improve engagement which in turn boosts search rankings. Just like any other social media platform, maintain a content calendar for YouTube and ensure you reward your community with videos on a regular basis. For more on getting videos to rank, also check out our guide on YouTube optimization. Share your thoughts in the comments below! Marcus is the founder of Brew Interactive, an inbound digital marketing agency that specializes in marketing to the affluent audience through digital. He is also the author of the highly raved book, Social Payoff. The post Eight tips to getting your videos ranked on YouTube in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/12/eight-tips-to-rank-videos-on-youtube-in-2019/
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There are many resources out there for digital marketers to help speed up recurring tasks, leaving more time to focus on more strategic initiatives to help grow and expand accounts. A few of the resources and tools that are out there are scripts, Excel tools and functions, automated rules, automated bid rules, and smart bidding. Each one of these resources can be powerful tools if used in the correct way. We will walk through their benefits and some examples below. ScriptsGoogle Scripts are JavaScript codes that can be used to help control and make adjustments to your campaign performance. They can also be used to pull data to help with daily help checks or reporting that you may look at daily or weekly. You don’t have to be a developer to use scripts, although if you were looking to write them from scratch, some background in JavaScript would help. There are a bunch of blogs and resources out there that already contain written scripts that can help solve some of your problems. Some scripts that I enjoy using are link checker, ad groups with no active text ads, negative keyword conflict checker, account checker, and auto-add negative keyword. Excel tools & functionsExcel can be an overwhelming tool for those who are just beginning and might not have used some of the more advanced functions. Excel can be a powerful tool to help you save time performing bidding, analyzing account performance, and doing competitor analysis. A great example of an analysis that paid search marketers find themselves doing over and over again is competitor analysis by looking at Auction insights. It can take some time to download the data and create all the charts for both brand and non-brand. A way to speed up the analysis is with pivot tables and pivot charts, allowing you to format the data one time and just refresh it every time you want to look at what competitors are coming in and out of the auction at any given time. Automated rulesAutomated rules can help speed up tasks that you might do often, but scheduled automated rules and scripts tend to have some overlap in some of the functionality. I would recommend testing both and seeing which one works best for you. Some automated rules that can be applied are pausing and activating copy, which is useful for clients that constantly have promotions; you can also set rules to activate and pause campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. There are also rules that are more focused on performance. You can create rules to pause low-performing ads or keywords and increase or decrease budget based on performance or day of the week. Please note: It’s important to set parameters for budget changes, or Google could continue to push budgets into a range where you are not comfortable spending. Automated bid rulesAutomated bid rules are part of Google’s automated rules; you can adjust keyword bids based on different criteria. These rules are powerful tools that should be used with lots of consideration. Think about the adjustments that you are making daily or weekly and the steps that you go through. There might be an opportunity for you to automate those steps if your process is always the same day to day or week to week. There are a few popular bidding adjustments that you can implement, raising keywords to the top of page bid, raising keywords to the first page bid, and adjusting bids based on average position. But as you can imagine, if you gave Google the power to increase bids to the top of the page on every keyword, it could start to spend out of control. It is important to set limits on those types of rules and consider a smaller set of keywords maybe these are your top performers or you might have launched a new product and you want to ensure that you are at the top of the page to raise brand awareness. Another popular rule would be adjusting based on cost per conversion, allowing you to increase or decrease bids based on cost per conversion and conversion volume. Some things to think about here are the number of conversions, average position, and impression share. You don’t want to adjust keywords that don’t have enough data, and you don’t want to continue to push keywords that are already at the top of the page. Automated bid rules are customizable so you can determine the conversion, average position, and impression share limits. The upshot with automated marketing functions is that they’re very powerful and can save tons of time, but often have the potential to go haywire if they’re not properly set up. Use them wisely, and give yourself bandwidth to pursue more strategic initiatives which I’ll cover in future posts. Smart biddingGoogle’s smart bidding has come a long way since enhanced CPC was introduced a few years ago. Google has introduced other bidding strategies to include maximize clicks, target impression share, target CPA, target ROAS (Return on Ad-Spend), and maximize conversions. With these bidding strategies Google will take into account device, location, time of day, remarketing and language when pushing out bids. Google does recommend these strategies for advertisers with at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days for target CPA and 50 conversions for target ROAS. Automated bidding is something that is best A/B tested with campaign drafts and experiments to ensure that it is the best decision for your business. In some cases, there might not be enough data to make the most data-driven decision and other bidding methods might be better for your business. Scripts, excel tools and function, automated rules, automated bid rules, and smart bidding are a few ways that marketers can speed up their time spent on recurring analysis and focus more on strategic initiatives to help further grow accounts. Before trying to attack all five of these tools at once, think about which tools will save you the most time and start there. Try to start with automated strategy once a week, you’ll never know how much time you can save. Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate. The post Marketing automation for SEO: Five time-saving strategies appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/18/marketing-automation-for-seo-five-time-saving-strategies/ If there’s one thing that’s universally accepted, it’s that the results of SEO are unpredictable. However, as more investment is made into the channel, we’re being put under increasing pressure to be performance-driven (and show the value we can drive “up front”) in the same way, our paid counterparts have been for some time. Invariably, this means setting targets and being held accountable for whether we hit them or not. But this shouldn’t be an issue and in fact, I believe it’s completely possible, with the right caveats and education, for SEO to become a results-led channel. And ultimately, if we’re going to continue to grow in popularity (and see further investment), we need to be. Measure the right thingsFor a long time, SEOs have talked about “improving keyword rankings”, with the coveted number one spot on a high traffic term, being the primary focus for many marketers. In 2019, however, this approach is myopic. I’m not ruling out rankings entirely, they still have value, but promoting the idea that a small, well-backed site, can outperform a titan like Amazon, Compare The Market, or RightMove for a competitive term, is unrealistic. Moreover, the resources required to do this could be better spent driving change elsewhere and this is why it’s important to measure the right things. For forecasts, I typically look at three metrics: traffic, conversions, and revenue, with the former holding the most importance. My reasoning – While you may receive a significant amount of new traffic from a high-value term, but (more often than not), the traffic will not be as qualified, lowering the “true value”. Used as a vehicle to drive wider site change, SEO. However, it should build results across your businesses search landscape as a whole and this can only really be measured through increased traffic (and from this, we can work out conversion and revenue increases). But traffic isn’t a “clean” metric either and can be influenced through changes in the market, wider media activity, competitors, or even the weather. For this reason, many look to derive a “growth factor” or absolute increase figure from keyword gains, basing the output of expected traffic from changes in position (and the clicks received from this). This is an approach we’ll discuss shortly and certainly can give an indication of any potential performance gains, but its reliance on keyword data still provides a few flaws. Put this into contextA key point to make with any forecast is that it is a projection, based on factors that we believe we can predict with varying degrees of certainty. Apple cannot provide an exact figure to shareholders, for the total number of new iPhones they will sell; nor can Disney foresee the specific number of tickets the next Star Wars film will sell. This context is important, given the unpredictable nature of search marketing. I think we often lose ourselves in trying too hard to be accurate, that we miss the point of a forecast altogether, it’s an indication, not a definitive statement of growth that could be achieved, linked to the investment that is made. So it’s perfectly fine to caveat as such and represent any figures as non-binding. I personally use a “percentage certainty” score depending on my experience of rolling out specific activities (and their impact), which is often well received. Importantly and as a key takeaway for this section, you need to put your data into perspective. If you’re required to project the impact of a minor change perhaps to help and IT prioritize their development queue it may be more realistic to provide a percentage range instead of a specific number. So long as the methodology and your explanation of how this could come to be are logical and data-driven. Ultimately, a forecast is only as reliable as the data and the experiences of the person making it. Projecting growth (or not)In terms of working out the specific figures, each SEO has their own methodology, but broadly speaking, these can be grouped into three: 1. “Experience-based gut feel”This kind of forecast draws on the expertise of the individual and can be a useful, “quick and simple” guideline for making snap decisions. The reliability of the projection is intrinsically linked to the knowledge of the person making it and shouldn’t be utilized in any official capacity or to make business-critical decisions. But this is not to say that this type of prediction isn’t valuable, it just depends on the use case and context the forecast is being made under. 2. “Ranking-focused click curves”This uses ranking data to project an increase in keyword position over time (and the value from this). In my experience, many “off the shelf” forecasting tools use this method, which relies on modeling traffic based on click-through rates from ranking positions. More advanced studies might include competition or seasonality factors (perhaps from Google’s Keyword Planner) and may provide the output as either a total growth figure or shown by month using a compound growth rate or more complex increase curve. 3. “Traffic-based growth modeling”This is, in my view, the most accurate way to forecast and frequently uses historic traffic data to predict the impact of not carrying out SEO activity, taking the market impact, seasonal changes, and other factors into account, and estimating projected increases from this. It’s often incredibly difficult to perfect and typically requires the help of a data scientist. But, if executed correctly, this methodology can provide a good representation of the impact your proposed activity can make. A side note: In many scenarios, you may expect to see an increase in traffic predicted over your time period. However, SEO takes time and doesn’t often conform to the pre-set timelines of a campaign or contract. As such, it may be that a true forecast may not show immediate growth or even (if your site is following a downward trajectory) no increase at all. The key takeaway here is that without the activity, you may be in a much worse place that you are predicted, and no growth doesn’t necessarily mean no value. However, at their heart, each of the above methods still requires an expert to assess the types of changes you are intending to make and their impact. This must be someone with enough experience of the channel to understand how the different projects will move the needle, in the context of your site’s situation. There’s no “official view” of how search activities will impact your performance and opinions may differ between experts. Moreover, the value of each work-stream will likely change by industry (or even by the query) and this is an important context to keep in mind when discussing targets and key performance indicators. Evaluate objectivelySo far, we’ve discussed context, measurement, and methodology. As such, in this whistle-stop tour of forecasting, it would be a missing piece not to touch on evaluating performance and targets. As I mentioned in the last section, SEO takes time and we’ve already established that it’s highly unpredictable. So, holding it to the same degree of accountability as other channels may be unhelpful. Importantly, performance needs to be a two-way and open conversation between your expert and your business (as it’s impacted by many different factors); in my experience, continuing with this approach throughout the completion of a strategy and into the evaluation process is the best way ensure you’re driving the most value from the channel. There’s no official blueprint or road-map to SEO success and it’s highly likely you’ll try things that do not work and others that exceed expectations. Not every fluctuation in traffic or missed target (or over-achievement) for that matter is due to performance and your expert should be able to explain why this is the case. Deviations do not always mean the model is off either; remember, in an SEO forecast, you’re ultimately asking your expert to predict not only the direction of a constantly evolving algorithm but changes to market demand and the world you operate within. It’s not a coincidence that many of us become futurists! To sum up, predicting SEO results can be very hard but is a challenge we must seek to solve if we are to take the channel to the next level within digital marketing teams. A prediction may use a data-driven methodology, but is still essentially the view of a specialist, based on their experience of the search landscape. Not all forecasts will show growth and not all targets will be hit, this shouldn’t be seen as an issue as long as the reasoning behind this can be explained.
Ric Rodriguez is an SEO Director and winner of the 2018 Drum Search Award. He can be found on Twitter @RicRodriguez_UK.
The post A primer to forecasting the value of SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/11/a-primer-to-forecasting-value-seo/ The tale of the online giants can largely be put into two boxes. The first box is the Amazons of the world — you create a landing page, the landing page ranks and you control a new sector of the market. The second box is the online giants that don’t need SEO. This latter box is based more so on success than failure however with questions such as “well, what more could we do?” or “where’s the value in it?” the second being a particular point for brands with big budgets for their Google Ads campaigns. Now, while these points aren’t without merit if you run the world’s biggest shampoo brand and you rank number one for the word shampoo you might wonder where else you can go. Well, with effective CRO, SEO research, market share analysis, and technical optimization, the answer is just about anywhere. Large scale websites onlineQuite simply the scale of data available online provides bigger brands, particularly in the ecommerce industry, with so many numbers that it can at times be difficult to attribute organic search traffic to business performance without running through multiple channels of content groups, product groups, and user definitions. However, by simplifying the data in the first instance, and therefore uniforming tracking across business, the top level statistics provide the basis of obtaining a share in new markets. 1. Content definitions on Google AnalyticsUse URL or page rules to build content area data on Google Analytics — this can work right through to a product level and will tell you some key points. Firstly, and perhaps more obviously, you’ll get to understand the areas of a website that perform better across the basic metrics. Whether it is page views, organic landings, or time on site. Dig deeper and you’ll find highest converting pages, for ecommerce this will, of course, include values. Now, this is helpful as it will immediately identify large subsets of data on performance from the entrance to conversion, that can then be investigated for improvements. This can also be linked with internal data to work out profit based on the target conversion rates (or missed profits where there is none). 2. Query data in the Google Search ConsoleThe Google Analytics data should then be paired with the Google Search Console data to determine which subset of content on site is performing best in SERPs. This again will give you top-level impression data but more so it will identify issues with the types of keywords you’re ranking for, whether these are voice first, buying terms, or position 0. What this provides, paired with the above, is an ability to understand your users (or potential users) in the research phase, therefore identifying where your business currently sits. 3. Search volume dataNow simply pair this with search volume data and seasonal trends. This will highlight any areas where search volume is high but traffic (or engagement once onsite) is low. This might seem obvious, but large brands (in my humble experience) can sometimes fall victim of looking inwards at what they have and not always what they could have on top. Pair monthly volume data with the average value and you’ll get an estimated value of each content segment on your site vs actual value to a business. 4. Build a data studio dashboardGoogle Data Studio is going through somewhat of a revolution and all of this data can be connected to give you insight to your brand data. Utilizing blended data layers will give you the ability to merge all of the above for auditing and highlight where changes (or additions) to online campaigns can be made for an organic benefit. Auditing your data1. Using your dashboardAt each point of your research and marketing planning, you would be looking at data in the account from Google Data Studio. Using filters in the account will allow you to target subsets of data that correspond to the needs of your business. Depending on the immediate needs the Google dashboard timeframe feature can be extremely helpful. For example, using it to identify current campaign patterns by day of the week, around television or news advertising will give you immediate feedback. Long term attribution modeling will tell you more about how these campaigns impact your KPIs. Then, pair it with ranking and search data to know what planning should be included in your next campaign. 2. Looking at user behaviorNext, it is important to identify user behavior within the data and ask questions around whether one group of users are interacting differently with certain content groups or campaigns, if this is impacted by device type and whether you should be looking to identify in more detail specific quirks such as behavior flow through the website. For example, if search volume for a group of search phrases is 10,000 but you only see 100 users per month on your website, losing a potential increase in business, you can audit the data to identify:
This, simply, can be merged with the data on average sales to account for potential revenues. Phase one Search volume * organic market CTR Phase two Potential traffic/average conversion rate * value = Potential market value at your current site conversion rate Of course, this is way before we even consider UX. Conversion types: Do they differ across markets?Finally, once you’ve captured the 32 percent of organic uses from position 1, there is a need to ensure how different users also convert (or if they’re even converting), whether search trends match these conversion types, and where the great exits before conversion are. For example, if you capture 90 percent of a market for a specific product, but only 10 percent of market sales then there could be something wrong with any of the following:
Now by auditing this data and understanding what you lose through attributable blended data, you provide yourself with an opportunity to outline core areas to not only shape the campaign but shape the brand itself. The power of the data should not be underestimated. Driving change at the end of this, there is a need to highlight change and for me, that is very simple. Once you’ve identified the value of the search group, you unlock the value to the business. If one keyword has a potential value of £10,000,000 per year and you rank page two, should you really be going after just the long tail variants? SEO in 2019 looks to be driven by Google search platforms coming into their own for marketing managers and SEO agencies. So watch this space. Keith Hodges is an SEO Account Manager at Polaris. He can be found on Twitter @seokeith. The post How can brands use SEO to capture new users and markets? appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/11/how-brands-use-seo-to-capture-new-users/ Facebook constantly expands its advertising offerings by introducing new features to accommodate advertisers in their effort to make the most out of their platform. Whether it is creating ads that tell the brand’s story with carousel ads, immersing users in their brand’s world with Canvas or Stories ads, or cutting down the time to create creatives while at the same time tailoring the ad to the ad viewer with dynamic ads, Facebook wants to ensure that it gives advertisers the tools to drive results across its platforms. In a world where personalization is vital to make experiences more engaging, Facebook Ads are no different. Advertisers need to customize their offering, ad copy and ad creative to ensure the best experience possible. A great experience tailored to the user’s needs hopefully equals higher engagement — or, in terms of Facebook advertising, conversions. Tailoring your ads to your user, the manual and tedious wayOne way you could promote your products to potential customers before dynamic ads were available was to create a single image or carousel image ad and guide people to specific product pages on your website. But if you were a business with a large inventory to promote, you needed to create as many ads (creative and links to product pages) as your products. And if you wanted to tailor your ads based on where they are on the marketing funnel or the actions they performed (e.g. they viewed or added to the cart a particular product), then things could become really complicated really fast. Dynamic ads (or dynamic product ads as they are formerly known) allow advertisers to not only automate this tedious process but also create highly personalized ads that promote products with up to date information. Dynamic ads: The definition and requirementsFacebook dynamic ads help advertisers display the right product to the right people at the right time. Here is how this happens: A potential customer visits your site and browses through your products. Facebook, through the Pixel, will pair products and users and ‘take notes’ on how they interacted with them. When you create a dynamic ad you can include everyone that exhibited the same behavior, bring them back to your website by displaying the very same products each user engaged with using accurate and updated information available in the product feed. This how dynamic ads can help your visitors to complete the transaction. To be able to run dynamic ads you need to have the following in place:
How to get started with dynamic adsDynamic ads are a powerful offering that can be used across a variety of verticals. Currently, dynamic Facebook ads are available to businesses that sell products (ecommerce), hotel, flight, destination, and home listings. Your business type will dictate the events (standard or custom) you need to implement. Here are the typical standard events needed for ecommerce businesses. Source: Facebook You can add as many events you need to align them to your funnel. Once you have the events implemented, you need to create the feed. 1. Creating a product feedFacebook requires Facebook advertisers to list all of their products in a file following a specific format. This file is the product feed that will feed the products to your catalog. Depending on your ecommerce platform, you may need to create a data feed using a .csv, .tsv, or .xml file or a third-party feed provider to facilitate this process. Download the data feed template and fill in the information. Here is what your feed needs to include: Source: Facebook Be sure to test your feed with Feed Debugger to ensure that your feed is set up correctly and fix any issues that may arise. 2. Creating a product catalogNow, we can create a product catalog. Visit Catalog Manager in your business manager and choose the type that best describes your needs. Name your product catalog and click on the ‘Add Products’ button to upload your product feed. Next, choose how you will upload the data (schedule or a one-time upload) and insert the URL of your product feed. When done, go to the ‘Diagnostics’ tab to check for any issues, if you have done so with Feed Debugger. Now, that your product catalog and product feed are all set up, we can move to the exciting part; creating the dynamic ads campaign. 3. Setting up a dynamic ads campaignTo create a dynamic ads campaign, head over to Ads Manager and choose ‘Catalog sales’ as the campaign’s objective. At the ad set level, create a product set. The product set is a subset of your product catalog, and it contains the products that will be displayed through this campaign. Next, in the audience section, choose ‘Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products’ so you can reach new people (prospecting campaign). To remarket to existing visitors, use the option “Use info from your Pixel or app to create a retargeting audience “. Scroll down below the connections menu and click ‘Show Advanced Options’. Here are some options that let you refine your audience and exclude people who are less likely to take action, such as someone who has already visited your website or bought from you. Next, you want to optimize for the right event type. Choose the event that you want to optimize for (View Content, Add To Cart, or Purchase) and set the conversion window to one that suits your needs. Be sure to fill in any other information (i.e. targeting, budget, etc.) the way you usually do. Now, we will create the ad. When choosing the ad format (single or carousel), take into account the type of images used in your product feed. Typically, landscape images will look great with the single image ad format while vertical images will look better with the carousel ad format. Now for your ad copy, you don’t need to manually insert the product name, description, or any other product information. You can use the ‘+’ button inside each box to pull a catalog field from your product feed. For instance, click the ‘+’ button in the text field, and select ‘Price’ from the drop-down list. There you have it. You’ve successfully created your first dynamic ad. Using dynamic ads creativelyAs mentioned previously, dynamic ads are currently available if you promote products, vehicle, flights, destination, or home listings. If you don’t see your business type here, don’t get discouraged as dynamic ads can be used for all verticals. Here are some examples of using dynamic ads creatively. 1. Using dynamic ads to promote your blog postsWhen using dynamic ads to promote your articles, the articles serve as products, and all product info will be the article’s information. For example, the product id will be the article’s id; the product description will be the article’s description and so on. Have in mind that you don’t need to rename the product feed’s, only the contents of it. Promoting your articles this way, allows you to save time and automate a tedious process. Plus, you can easily choose whom you will target; new or existing audience. 2. Using dynamic ads for a betting companyTo use dynamic ads top promote betting services, we substitute the products for matches/games and take of advanced product feed offerings by changing product availability based on time. Since matches are time-sensitive, we need to ensure that no match would get advertised after the betting period has ended. Although these are just two cases, dynamic ads can be used for the majority of the verticals out there. Making the most out of your dynamic adsDynamic ads are a powerful tool in Facebook advertiser’s arsenal. Since its launch, new possibilities are constantly being added. Here are some possibilities that you will find interesting: 1. Customizing the appearance of your Dynamic AdsIn an endless newsfeed where a majority of the ads look the same, you should create and apply custom templates to your dynamic ads to help stand out and grab your ad viewer’s attention. Depending on the period you are advertising in you can create Christmas, Valentine’s day, Black Friday inspired templates. You can also create “evergreen” templates that include your logo and your brand’s colors. 2. Multi-language and multi-country dynamic adsRecently, Facebook released two new features that help you target your ideal audience within a country where many languages are spoken. Creating multi-language dynamic ads is very straight forward. Set up the dynamic ads campaign the way you normally would, and use the ‘Create in Different Languages’ option. Have in mind that this will only change the ad’s copy, not the information that comes from your product feed. If you are promoting your products across countries that have different currencies and you need to tailor product information to the language of your audience, then you need to create additional feeds that will include currency information (one feed) and country/language information (second feed). Both secondary feeds can be set up in your Catalog Manager. If you are targeting an international audience consider tailoring your ads to match their language. The chances are that your ads will convert better. A secondary feed that holds information on different languages will look something like the above screenshot. You need the product id which uniquely identifies your product, then state the overrides for each country-language combination and provide the all necessary product info for each language. For currencies, you will work similarly. Provide the product id, the country and the price in the country’s currency. 3. Using animations in dynamic ads
The slideshow dynamic ads format helps display your products to users from different angles, including close-ups, without users having to click on the ad. This way, you bring the web experience straight in the users’ NewsFeed. To create Slideshow Dynamic Ads you only need to include multiple images of the same product in the feed as opposed to only one and check the box ‘show when available’ under ‘Catalog Assets’. Final wordsFacebook Dynamic ads are a great advertising solution and should be part of your online advertising strategy. They allow you to automate ad creative creation, tailor your offering to your ad viewer and optimize for success. When done correctly, Facebook dynamic ads can help achieve your KPIs and make more bang for your buck. The post Facebook dynamic ads: A beginner’s guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/08/facebook-dynamic-ads-beginners-guide/ If there’s one thing that is constant about social media, it’s change. So many things influence the way we behave on social media: technology, social changes, economy, and politics. All of them are changing at a rapid speed, so you can imagine how volatile the social media world is. This makes predicting trends for a year ahead quite difficult. However, there are tendencies that stick around and affect the industry in a major way for a long time. For example, influencer marketing has been winning the hearts of social media marketers and the pockets of consumers for a couple of years now, and the ephemeral content, even though it has been around for a while, got a significant boost with Instagram’s investments put into the Stories feature. Considering these points, I present to you the eight social media trends of 2019. These are the tendencies that take their roots in the current cultural zeitgeist, technological development, and social platforms’ respective strategies, and are expected to take over social media this year. 1. Social listeningSocial listening is not a new thing by any means, but the way we apply social listening is changing right now. In the past years, social listening was a way to manage brand mentions and reputations for big brands like Apple or Hilton. However, two things happened that altered the social media listening industry:
How did this affect social listening strategies? Well, nowadays, the new features and data sources allow going beyond basic brand monitoring. You can use social listening for social selling, SEO, and customer care to name a few. If I’d have to point out one area where social listening could really change the current marketing landscape, I’d go with sales. Social selling is a unique tactic that gives you an opportunity to engage with people who are seeking services and products in your industry directly. One tool in particular even added a specific feature dedicated to social selling called Awario Leads. For now, this tactic is extremely underused, but we can expect to see more and more brands taking on social selling this year. 2. Buying on socialSocial selling is one thing, but what if you could choose and order a product without even leaving the social media app? To be fair, it’s not a new thing, Facebook already allows users to buy products from brands’ pages in their ‘Shop‘ section. They also have a Marketplace feature launched way back in 2007 which is an alternative to Craigslist, a platform where individuals can sell or exchange mostly second-hand items. In 2019 we will see more social media companies opening up their platforms for ecommerce. It would be the next logical step for companies which already offer brands a wide range of features for advertising, like YouTube or Instagram. In fact, one of these might be already working in that direction. Last September, The Verge reported that Instagram might be working on an ecommerce app. According to the article, the app will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app. Surely, the app is not an additional feature to Instagram but rather a stand-alone entity. However, this indicates Instagram’s understanding and interest in implementing e-commerce in their product (which is only natural considering that Facebook owns Instagram). 3. TransparencySocial media data has become essential to any marketing strategy, hence social listening is on this list. However, this past year proved just how little knowledge we as a society have of the scope and impact of social media data collected on a daily basis. Last year was marked by an array of privacy scandals, with Cambridge Analytica being the most prominent one. However, Facebook wasn’t the only one who suffered, Twitter, YouTube, and even Reddit reported at least one security breach last year. However, let’s not diminish Facebook’s role in this regard, they seemed to have one PR nightmare after another. This probably prompted Mark Zuckerberg to make a special New Year’s resolution for 2019 to organize a series of public discussions dedicated to how Facebook influences society. That will be only one of the initiatives dedicated to bringing more transparency into the world of social media companies. Data is one of the most important resources in social media marketing, and ethical collection, as well as unbiased evaluation of it, will be a major priority for companies this year. Our century is marked by brands developing personalities for themselves and building relationships with their audiences. According to this study by Sprout Social, millennials are expecting more transparency from brands than politicians or friends and family. Gaining the trust of the audience will become the focus of social media platforms’ strategies. 4. Live streamingPowered by social media algorithms, pivoting to video content has been a trend for a while now. This year, however, live streaming is the new black. Social streaming favors in-the-moment content, another trend that has been taking over social media for a while with Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and, most recently, Facebook stories. According to this Facebook report, daily watch time for Facebook live broadcasts grew four times over the course of a year. You can use live streaming to present a new product, change the narrative during a PR crisis, or introduce a collaboration with an influencer. What makes live streaming so special is the ability to create space for an actual dialogue with your customer in real time. Your viewers feel like they are in the middle of a natural conversation, and you’re speaking directly to them. It wins over highly produced video content because of its authenticity, the thing every marketer is trying to accomplish. 5. Private communities2018 saw a trend of communication migrating to private channels. More and more interactions occur in Facebook groups and private communities rather than on public pages, which is favored both by algorithms and people (unless these people are social media managers). Moreover, social media platforms keep adding new features to simplify the curation of private groups on top of integrating messaging features in their apps. On Instagram, turning your growing Instagram account private creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency encourages people to follow, as described in this article by the Atlantic. Private groups and accounts make you feel like a part of an exclusive community, and who doesn’t want that? Consider creating a private community for your brand, for example, a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. This will give your users an opportunity to not just communicate with you but also with each other, which contributes to building a strong community and encouraging brand advocacy. 6. MessagingThe most private communication channel is, of course, direct messaging. And for the last few years, brands have been engaging with customers through DMs and personal messages on social. For now, brands are mostly using messaging apps and DMs for customer service purposes. But there’s untapped potential to create personalized, automated communication that’s even more effective than email. This year, messaging will become a meaningful part of every social media strategy. Moreover, brands will finally embrace messenger automation. A study conducted by Relay revealed that out of 1000 trending B2B companies on Crunchbase, only 0.5 percent of the companies had a chatbot. Chatbots could make messenger marketing the new email marketing, the open rate for messages is much higher than for emails, and messaging itself is seen as a more casual and personal way of communication. Chatbots aren’t perfect yet, and people still prefer to converse with a human. However, as chatbots become more sophisticated and use more natural language, they will become necessary. You need to figure out which part of your marketing strategy could benefit from them. Integrating eCommerce functions could also be beneficial for messaging apps. This is not the new idea if we remember WeChat, but it hasn’t been explored yet in the Western part of the world. 7. PersonalizationChatbots and messaging can also be a part of a comprehensive personalization strategy. 2019 will be the year when personalization powered by AI takes over marketing. Considering the vast amount of personal information currently available to social media companies, it has become extremely easy to obtain insights into all kinds of information about your customers. Content consumed, purchase history, clicked links, social media interactions, and even personal messages. All this and more can be used to create a laser-targeted marketing campaign just for you. However, some consumers may feel uncomfortable with how personalization is currently implemented in marketing. Brands need to find the fine line between being helpful and outright creepy. One way to do this would be combining personalization and other types of marketing: influencer marketing, personalizing your messaging communication (beyond using first names), and so on. Take an example from Airbnb, which uses information about your past and upcoming trips to craft personalized traveling recommendations. 8. Augmented reality (AR)AR can be used in a plethora of ways, from creating filters dedicated to certain events to actually implementing your product in videos or photos to let customers try it on. At its F8 developer conference last year, Facebook announced that it was testing AR ads. In your timeline, they look like ordinary Facebook Ads but with a ‘Tap to try it on’ button that lets you try products on virtually with the help of camera filters. AR could be the solution for those who don’t like online shopping and prefer to test a product before buying. If social media platforms successfully implement this technology on a wide scale first, they will become an even more attractive platform for advertising compared to digital space. What you need to do in 2019As you can see, none of these trends are coming at you completely out of the blue, most of them are a logical development of social media platforms’ strategies or the way ordinary users behave on social media. So this year, it’s time to become an early adopter and try something new, be it a social listening tool or a messenger bot. In 2019, make sure you:
You will undoubtedly see a boost in your social media ROI. Got any unique social media strategies chalked out for 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter @ab80.
The post Eight social media trends that will make 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/01/eight-social-media-trends-that-will-make-2019/ Nothing forces you to keep a close eye on Google updates quite like having a wide variety of SEO projects and clients. With clients in almost every industry, I’m forced to check early and often when changes appear in search to see how they’re playing out differently based on the industry (and even the search intent within each industry). Moreover, I have to think ahead. In 2018, most of the big changes came from Google’s search ranking algorithm updates, its growing emphasis on structured data, and tweaks in the Google search console. But there’s also a shift in focus from what sites owners wanted to what users need. The rollout of mobile-first indexing demonstrates Google’s response to the impact of technology on human behavior. As people spend more time with their mobile devices, it’s only natural to pay more attention to content that’s optimized to be dynamic and mobile-friendly. Google’s speakable markup typifies both the company’s plans for search and the AI-is-the-future mantra. The growing popularity of voice assistants and their newfound place in smart homes have certainly guided advances in how search engines operate. However, as somebody who drives rankings for a wide variety of clients and personal projects, I’m still holding my breath as to whether voice search can drive any meaningful business metrics. In 2019, content optimization will continue to matter. From structured data to on-page optimization, competition for ranking advantage may come down to which sites can meet Google updates standards. For the SEO community, 2019 requires a better understanding of how people engage online in order to create meaningful content that positively impacts user experience and a site’s search engine visibility. SEOs will need to double-down in understanding four key areas:
Mobile mattersAccording to Pew Research Center, one in five American adults access the internet through their smartphone. In the latest report by We Are Social, mobile phones account for 50% of the web traffic share by device globally. The growth of the mobile industry has not been overlooked by Google, who rolled out the mobile-first indexing in the first quarter of 2018, after over a year and a half of experimentation. This move shows that Google is increasingly using the mobile version of your page for its crawling, indexing, and ranking systems. While this update does not provide any ranking advantages per se, SEO in 2019 will certainly put greater emphasis on optimizing pages for mobile crawlers. Sites that offer two versions of their content will continue to see a negative impact on their SERP (search engine results pages) performance if mobile renderings are amiss. For digital marketers, this means both mobile and desktop content should be equivalent. As mobile web pages become Google’s primary search engine index, webmasters, SEO specialists, and digital marketers must ensure websites are well-coded and mobile-responsive. Checking out how your page’s content renders across various mobile devices is critical to identifying issues like speed and performance which could potentially affect your bounce rates. Content optimization through structured dataThe search engine results page, especially in terms of informational searches, is dominated by structured data and schema: snippets of information that help Google understand the content of your page rather than guess the data. Structured data provides Google contextual information that helps in classifying your page and which, when done right, enhances the appearance of your site in search. In 2019, the SEO community will continue to explore how to further optimize this feature, which is valuable for e-commerce pages and business web pages especially as schema options grow. According to Rebecca Gill of emagine, using expert profiles and structured data can convey to Google who you are, what you’re doing, and why your website should be on page one real estate. Here are some types of information that can be added through structured data:
While structured data enables your site to be featured in Google’s knowledge graph, it’s not a guarantee. Google is stringent and rightfully so on how structured data is implemented. Done right, it can do wonders to your SERP performance. But if the information provided is inaccurate, too broad, or badly formed, Google will identify your structured data as ineligible, which would negatively affect your rankings. Research and relevanceRankBrain, Google’s machine-learning AI system introduced in 2015 reflects the evolution of how people look for content online. Despite very little information from Google about how it works, we know that the technology is an important ranking signal, and it’s unique in its capacity to understand if users are satisfied with their search query results. This means that SEO in 2019 will continue to have a stronger emphasis on watching search intent. What do users want? Information, resources, or products? Mapping keywords based on a buyer’s journey will be crucial this year. In addition, RankBrain’s ability to process both single and long-tail keywords demands even more comprehensive keyword research and expanded awareness about your consumers. Businesses will have to look for all the topics relevant to their industry, understand the search intent around the various topics, and make sure that they match a site’s content closely. Still, Google will continue to favor larger and more authoritative sites, so unless you’re running a page comparable in breadth and depth as Wikipedia or Forbes, the focus should be on niche relevant keywords. In the meantime, consider updating site content. Since 2011’s Google Freshness update, dated content continues to significantly impact rankings in the SERP. Updating old posts, including its publishing data, will tell Google that sites are providing fresh content, especially those that are linked to higher authority sites. It’s not about writing daily, weekly, or even monthly. It’s about making sure that your best content is always relevant based on the most recent information. Last year saw links losing value and the trend will continue in 2019. Relevance is the new “authority” when it comes to links. A competitor analysis audit will be essential to determining just how many links, and what links, will work for your industry or niche. Content and accessibilityIf Google’s priority is user experience, then on-page optimization efforts are non-negotiable. We’ve seen how keyword density is no longer as impactful as before, especially with structured data playing a bigger role in search. Content and writing style will also be influenced by semantic search with Google’s efforts to identify the contextual meaning of the query. In 2019, expect content with more images, videos, and even music embed. Google looks at user satisfaction and rich media is one way to improve online engagement. But even if your content is well-written, accessibility to your site can impact how you rank in SERP. “As of the 2010 census, one in five Americans have a disability, and one in ten people have a disability that directly impacts their computer use. That’s 56.7 million people! This is a huge portion of our potential users, and we have an ethical duty to help all people who will use the technology we create.” – Fen Slattery, Accessibility Lead at Clique Studios. Accessibility is about inclusion and when your website performs terribly for a group of people, it’s unlikely that it will hold any sort of rankings for a significant period of time. Ongoing changesChange is the only thing certain in the SEO industry. Google’s interest in AI technology is firmly anchored on how people look for information online, and the way they do so has changed over the years. 2019 is likely to see even lower organic CTR than in 2018 as Google continues to offer more and more options to keep users in search. For the SEO industry, this means understanding how people think, and how people act. Digital marketers, website owners, and businesses need to be flexible, curious, and creative. They need to look for ways to gain trust and authority, two values that have not only remained important in an ever-changing SEO landscape but are now considered non-negotiable to getting on page one.
Brendan is an SEO Team Lead at CliqueChicago. He can be found on Twitter @BrendanHufford.
The post A quick guide to SEO in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/18/a-quick-guide-to-seo-in-2019/ With all this gushing about PPC and Google Remarketing campaigns, I strongly feel the need to let you know that I am not to be romanticized or this isn’t a sponsored post. I enjoy following remarketing best practices, and I’d like to provide some justifications as to why I think it is the need of the hour. Gone are the days when you were required to pay for people just to see your ads. Today, with PPC advertising, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. The only downside is that you still need to pay for traffic that doesn’t buy the first time around. Here’s when remarketing comes into play. For those who have no idea regarding the term: it is the practice of using ads to target those people who have visited your website or have already shown an interest in your products or services. The method allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website, as they are more likely to click on your ads in comparison to the new ones. Renowned networks like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads allow you to set up such campaigns easily. All you have to do is install a remarketing pixel on your existing site. This will automatically add a cookie on your visitor’s browser. Your ad network automatically identifies the cookie and lets you display a customized presentation to allure them. Why consider Google Dynamic Remarketing?The term allows you to show ads to those who have previously visited your website, but Google Dynamic Remarketing works on another level. Here it will enable you to show previous visitors’ ads that contain products and services they viewed on your site. So why should you use it? A few reasons. 1. Retain site abandonersOne of the prime reasons is that Google Dynamic Remarketing enables advertisers to display ads to visitors who have abandoned their site, but it is mainly based on prior engagement. Which means ads can be displayed to those who have:
2. Google display networkIn layman’s terms, Google’s display network includes web pages or sites where Google ads appear. Right from Google search, YouTube, and Gmail, Google’s display network covers Google’s partner sites across the web. It’s pretty significant and is substantiated where retailers can get the opportunity to reach customers across different sites using different ad formats. In fact, you can choose which sites you want your remarketing ads to appear on, analyze site impressions, clicks, costs, revenue, and so forth. 3. Bid competitivelyBy using Google’s conversion optimizer, you can use conversion tracking on the Google display network to identify purchase behavior from click to purchase. By doing so, retailers can optimize their spend on remarketing. It may quite interest you to know that with the help of this conversion data you will know who purchased (and from where), the Conversion Optimizer identifies trends to help you avoid over-bidding for ad placements. Here are five ways to reduce cart abandonment ratesAs I said before, cart abandonment is a major concern these days. Like it or not, unless you are a master of remarketing you won’t be able to reach out to your previous visitors and get them back. Fret not! Down below I would like you to get acquainted with a few dynamic techniques that can increase customer retention. 1. Narrow down your audiencesBefore you start any campaign, it is essential to segment your audiences. I often find businesses making this terrible mistake of targeting every visitor with the same campaign. No, that’s not how it should work. What’s a better way to split your audiences?
2. There is a way beyond the landing pageIs a landing page everything that your visitors need? Probably not. To make the most of your remarketing efforts, you need to track users beyond the landing page to determine the pages they visit. This includes the landing page, product page, product category page, checkout and what not. Checking all these pages tells you a lot about a visitor’s interest. For example, the products they are interested in or the item they almost bought, and so forth. If someone is showing a clear interest in your product, it apparently means stop targeting them with ads featuring your brand logo. Instead, target them with ads featuring the product they’re interested in and make it too tempting to resist. 3. Cart abandonment campaignsDynamic remarketing can reduce your cart abandonment rates. It all starts with tracking page visits. Try identifying users who tend to make it as far as the checkout but never reach the confirmation page. With the help of event tracking, one can track which products people add to their carts. In case if their products are still waiting for them, you can remind them. Many people quit halfway through signing up for your webinar, filling out a quote, etc — you can track them as well. 4. Create campaigns for existing customersIn the quest for retaining previous customers, don’t forget to pursue the existing customers. According to several experts, it takes five times more effort to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your existing ones. So what can be done is:
5. Guide users along the buying processMaking a purchase is a complex journey for the end user as he/she has to make a ton of interactions with brands. The best advertisers tend to create campaigns that guide users along this journey. Wrapping it up.I hope I have made my point pretty clear stating why Google Dynamic Remarketing is apt for your online store. Share your thoughts in the comments. Charles Richards is a Business Analyst at TatvaSoft UK. The post Drive customer retention with Google Dynamic Remarketing appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/07/customer-retention-using-google-dynamic-remarketing/ Did you know the world’s top 15 luxury brands generate more than 45 million web searches per year? Gucci, ranked as the number one most popular luxury brand online based on Deloitte’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2018 study, has approximately 9.5 million web searches per year alone. Luxury brands, resellers, and even counterfeiters are competing to win the top organic positions for these searches. This means that SEO is not just an opportunity for luxury brands, but an imperative. SEO is a highly strategic and effective way to fend off the competition and maintain a vital source of traffic to luxury brands’ websites. However, before you can get to work on a rock-solid SEO campaign, you need to understand the mindset of the luxury goods consumer. In this first of a three-part luxury search marketing series, I’ll dive into the consumer mindset in the luxury vertical. In the follow-up articles, we’ll discuss how to strategize and execute SEO campaigns based on this mindset and other aspects of the luxury industry. Why do we buy luxury brands? The psychology driving our purchase decisionsThe world’s 100 largest luxury goods companies generated over $217 billion in sales based on Deloitte’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2018 study. That’s no small amount. As consumers we buy these goods for a variety of reasons. My own experience with luxury goods offers some helpful insight into why consumers purchase luxury items. When I was growing up, wearing brands like Liz Claiborne, Reebok, and Guess meant you were one of the cool kids. My first “luxury” purchase was a Liz Claiborne purse, and my grandmother bought me a matching wallet for my 16th birthday. I was so excited that day. But, what was really driving my excitement? Ultimately, the purse fulfilled an emotional need for me – the need to fit in. Carrying my very own Liz Claiborne bag gave me confidence and appealed to my sense of belonging. There are many other factors that influence the luxury shopper’s mindset. As search marketers, we need to have a solid understanding of these factors and how they drive your customer to search for and buy your brand. Psychological and physiological factors to consider in marketing luxury goods
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs sheds greater light on our needs versus our wants. According to Maslow, human beings have a specific number of needs and these needs are arranged in a hierarchy, with physiological and safety needs being more basic than other needs such as social needs. Once our basic needs like food, warmth, and safety are met, we can start to prioritize higher-level social needs like cultivating a sense of accomplishment and prestige. As search marketers, we need to have a deep understanding of our customer and find a way to fulfill his/her need and wants. Although I was convinced it was a “need” for me at the time, my Liz Claiborne bag was really a want. There’s a big difference between spending $30 on a handbag as opposed to $3,000. If I’m looking for a specific handbag to carry my essentials in, then from a functional standpoint, the $30 bag meets that basic need. But, it doesn’t fulfill my higher-level emotional needs. Questions for marketers to ask themselves:
What does it mean for search?You should first determine if the product is a need or a want. Think about the ways you can communicate this information through organic search, for example, through meta tags, and copy. You should also think about how you can communicate the ways your product or brand can fulfill your customers’ higher-level needs. We’ll explore further strategies and tactics for this in subsequent articles.
Our purchase decisions are driven by utilitarian and hedonic considerations. Marketing utilitarian goods and hedonic goods require different approaches. Utilitarian products are useful, practical, and functional. These products are bought out of necessity and meet our basic needs. Utilitarian products include things like groceries, hygiene products, cars, etc. Hedonic products satisfy emotional and sensory needs after the basic needs have been met. These products are bought for pleasure and exceed our basic needs. Hedonic products include things like designer watches, expensive vacations, and more. There’s a significant difference between buying groceries and booking a vacation. Buying groceries addresses a need whereas booking a vacation is a satisfying experience. Several years ago, I bought my first Fendi bag not because I needed it, but because I wanted it and had the means to buy it. It was an incredible experience for me to go into the store and make that purchase. In marketing utilitarian products, advertisers should highlight the benefits and practical, functional features. In marketing hedonic products, it’s important to emphasize the experience it will provide the consumers. An example of a brand that achieves both is Apple. Apple’s iPhone X commercial does an excellent job with highlighting benefits and features and creating experiences at the same time. They make you want to go out and buy the new phone immediately, so you can experience something that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before. Questions for marketers:
What does it mean for search?You should first determine whether your product is a utilitarian purchase, a hedonic purchase, or a little bit of both. Remember, luxury consumers are looking for an experience. You should be thinking about ways to communicate the experience through your SEO strategy. More to come about this in subsequent articles!
Our brains have a physiological role in our purchase decisions. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, is best known for its role in the brain’s reward system. It helps regulate emotional responses, learning, attention, and movement. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, has conducted extensive research about the role that dopamine plays in a human’s ability to pursue rewards that are months or years away. Dopamine levels rise significantly when we anticipate rewards that are uncertain and far in the future. A perfect example of an uncertain reward is playing the lottery. In “Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure” he says that “dopamine is not about the pleasure, but the anticipation of pleasure.” It is the uncertainty that increases the anticipation. As an example, when we place an order for a product online, we don’t get the product immediately. We have to wait for it, and the anticipation is increased through waiting. Buying luxury products and/or shopping a sale can trigger a dopamine hit. Kit Yarrow, San Francisco-based consumer psychologist and author of Decoding the New Consumer Mind, says that during a sale, the body’s autonomic nervous system (the same system that triggers the fight or flight response) takes over and creates a heightened response in the body, like the one early humans had when facing predators. The fear of missing out can switch us into a competitive mode. This physiological response was designed to protect us from predators, not other shoppers. Yarrow says, “The reason [our response] is so powerful is because people don’t even think about it.” Questions for marketers:
What does it mean for search?You should be thinking about how you can communicate the product/brands’ exclusivity from an organic search perspective. More importantly, you should look for ways to build anticipation of your product or brand. We’ll explore this point further later in the series. Final thoughtsUltimately, we buy luxury goods because of how it makes us feel. We crave an experience, exclusivity, and we want to have our higher-level needs met. The Liz Claiborne and Fendi bags, while functional, really met a greater need – the need to belong and the need to fit in. Dopamine drives our behavior. It’s not about the rewards we get, but the anticipation. The anticipation of going to the store and purchasing the Fendi bag before someone else could was a strong motivator for me to buy the bag immediately. In the next article in the series we’ll discuss how you can apply these concepts while also integrating search marketing with other channels in the luxury goods industry. Jennifer Kenyon is a Director of Organic Search at Catalyst (part of GroupM). She can be found on Twitter @JennKCatalyst. The post Luxury marketing search strategy, Part 1: Consumer mindset appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/luxury-marketing-search-strategy-part-one/ Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad. When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue. As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world. Six tips for B2B paid search success1. Tracking & attributionWithout a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting. When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance. Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point. The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process. It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead. This is where you can get onto the attribution bit. Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue. This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions. 2. Bing AdsOkay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search. While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions? A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays. A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong. That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance. With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source. 3. Paid socialPaid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn. The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that. You are able to target people based on things like:
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers. There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click. Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity. 4. Audience targetingBoth Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses. The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design. Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate. Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself. This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends. If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance. 5. Competitor strategyBidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really. I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too. Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider. The steps to take are:
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this. I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position. If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance. 6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales. It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time. In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan. Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC. Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate. ConclusionSo to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible. Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny. The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/ |
AuthorPleasure to introduce my self i am Sean Webb i am 27 years old from Manchester, UK.I am doing affiliate marketing and have spend lots of time learning how to rank easy to medium competition keywords. I have recently started PPL and Video Marketing and learning more about it. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |