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  • Creating Custom Targets in A few steps

    Creating Custom Targets in A few steps

    It used to be that getting precise targeting was available to advertisers with big names and big budgets. In the past couple of years the ability to target specific groups has been opened to small and medium sized advertisers as well. The options for implementing custom targeting are many, but advertisers can start with the most accessible.

    With digital marketing there are two broad methods for setting up custom targets, customer email lists and site visitors. Each have their pros and cons but both are great first step down the custom audience path.

    Email list targeting
    Platforms are getting sophisticated behind the scenes while simplifying the ability to implement email list (customer / prospect) targeting. Two of the most popular advertising platforms, Google Adwords and Facebook, provide the ability for advertisers to load a list of emails (assumed proper opt in steps were taken) and target those users within their properties and partners. In addition to the platforms themselves, companies like Choozle integrate with properties across the web to target people based on email addresses.

    Site content targeting
    With the use of tracking pixels placed on their site, advertisers can deliver ad content that is directly related to information and products visitors viewed on the website. If a site already has Google Analytics setup, then the ability to create custom audiences is already available and targetable through Google Adwords. Many other platforms have proprietary tracking pixels that can also be place on the website. If this sounds complicated, just ask your website developer because it really is quite simple.

    Some first step tactics for custom audiences

    Aid in conversion after submit
    Many companies receive emails from prospects and have a time lag before the sale is closed. Custom audiences can be created based on the email address provided or the goal / confirmation page they land on. Using this targeting method advertisers can deliver a very specific product and promotion driven message to help close the sales.

    Target affinity products / resell
    By segmenting both customer data and site content based on product association, advertisers can cross promote products that are a natural extension of those purchased or viewed. Rather than blanked all customers and visitors with the same ads, the segmented approach will increase response rates and reduce ad waste.

    Reinforce post sale
    Repeat business is the heart of any company, meaning the sales process continues well after the sale is made. Reinforcing the purchase decision through social proof and customer reward programs helps continue the good feelings and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases.

    Admittedly nothing mentioned is revolutionary. The ideas are tried and true. What is relatively new is the access that all advertisers now have to these tactics.

    Give consideration to your customer base and product segments to determine what associations make the most sense. Then craft your first, simple campaigns. Get comfortable with the process before you get complicated with the execution.

  • Top 3 roadblocks to using marketing analytics

    No objective / plan
    In the 4th quarter of every year companies start planning for the upcoming year. The problem is that the planning starts with budgets. They look at what was spent over the past year, consider if the activities will remains consistent or change and adjust the budget accordingly, or just arbitrarily cut budgets. This approach does not establish performance metrics, just spending levels. Too often subordinates are handed a budget with no correlation to objectives. They realize the futility of setting up performance indicators as there is no plan on which to base them.

    Objectives need to start from the top and cascade down, each level responsible for delivering a piece of the goal for the level above. As each person or team works through their objectives, determines the needed resources to achieve it, and most importantly the metrics for its success, they begin to build the plan against which they can measure their performance. By starting with the objectives, teams must build the plan and benchmarks to achieve them; this provides the basis for setting up target metrics for marketing analytics, spending amounts being just one of several.

    Lack of consistency / focus
    Being opportunistic and flexible is part of being an entrepreneur and can uncover opportunities that lead to long term growth. When these do become parts of the long term plan, spending the resources to set up long term plans makes sense. Until then, be honest about the purpose of this activity and keep metrics at a high level.

    If you can’t commit to a direction for at least 6 months (a year plus would be better), don’t building metrics around it. The purpose of creating metrics, tracking and adjusting is to improve your performance. Doing this properly takes time and resources. Too often companies will start down a path and then change in a few months, less than a year. Setting up analytics to track and optimize is a waste of resources and a drain on morale.

    Set up analytics to focus on and improve what is important to the long term success of the company. Look back on the past year. What have you been consistently measuring since the start? If nothing, then there is a lack of focus.

    Restricted access / sharing
    Limiting access to analytics data prevents people who can leverage the information from doing so. Analytics and reporting should be set up for a consistent “view of the truth”, and then openly shared with everyone whose action directly or indirectly impacts results. Particularly in larger companies, silos prevent collaboration, preventing people from assisting each other and identifying opportunities to improve.
    Individuals should be provided with the tools to measure and analyze their own performance or KPIs while given access to view the KPIs of others whose activities affect them.

    The challenge with digital analytics is not technical, but cultural and organizational. Most companies can benefit from well thought out analytics and reporting processes if they simply make it a priority.

  • Social Proof – a few simple things for big results

    We see social proof all around us. From celebrity endorsements on the high end to ratings and reviews on the more common programs. Social proof can come in many forms, but it comes down to people believing in you because others believe it you. Take advantage of this in digital marketing and you’ll see increased customer acquisition and retention.

    Shoppers are looking to reduce the risk inherent with their buying decisions. This is one of the reason repeat purchaser are the most efficient for business; getting over the initial risk is mostly done. But new customers are looking to the experience and opinions of others to mitigate the risk. When you view it from this perspective, social proof helps you show prospects that they will get what they purchase.

    A few of the best ways to provide social proof to new (and current) customers include:

    1. Ratings and testimonials. Show them the experience of others who have purchased from you. One of the keys to this approach is recency of the reviews. Old review are less credible, so you must actively cultivate reviews from your satisfied customers.
    2. Awards and independent media mentions show buyers that you have earned the trust of others who have compared your product or service to your competitors. Highlighting these in your advertising and website will gain confidence from prospects.
    3. Show examples and case studies of the work you’ve done. With a variety of examples you are likely to show things similar to what prospects are looking for, thus reducing the perceived risk of working with you.
    4. Certifications. Often we underplay to role of our certifications in marketing. Share these liberally. Certifications show that you take your work seriously and that the quality of your work is recognized by others.

    Don’t be shy when it comes to social proof. This is your opportunity to demonstrate the quality of your work, product or service and reduce the barriers to new customer acquisition. Link to reviews, create testimonial pages, and keep an updated “news” page to show off your awards, certifications and body of work.

  • Google’s Penguin Goes Real Time

    Last month Google hit us with two pretty major changes to the search algorithm.

    The first was a straightforward update in early September. When this hit, we saw most programs take a slight dip and then recover after about a week. But, then Google announced that they will incorporate Penguin into the core algorithm as well, applying it to every query. This caused a lot of consternation as things fluctuated wildly for a couple of weeks.

    If you are not familiar with Penguin, it is the part of Google’s system that looks at the quality of backlinks – those links to your site from other websites. Until September of this year, Google would run Penguin periodically, assess the quality of the backlinks and then stick you with a score that stays with you for months until the new update is run.

    Now, every search has a real time backlink quality assessment. What this means for your SEO:

    1. If your category in search is very active in SEO / link building, you will see more volatility. As site managers expand their linking partners, the impact will be seen more quickly
    2. There is still NO quick fix to link building, or quick kills. When new links are created, Google still needs to crawl and index pages. Additionally, even with on page changes, we see a lag time between changes and Google’s (apparent) incorporation in search rankings. I suspect the same will be true with backlinks.
    3. Your competitors’ moves will be more quickly felt. This means that your rankings may go up or down based not on what you do, but what a competitor has done. While this has always been true, this change means we will see that impact more quickly and more often relative to what we’ve seen in the past.
    4. For categories in which there is little activity on link building, this is an opportunity to get ahead by moving aggressively into a quality link building program.

     

    Over the years, since Google has removed visibility into organic keywords to a large extent, I have encouraged clients to view rankings as a lesser metric and focus on organic site traffic and quality. Keyword rankings can fluctuate quite a bit day-to-day and the incorporation of Penguin into the real time ranking will exacerbate this. Looking long term, improving visibility is the upstream indicator to growth in site traffic. While we keep an eye on the rankings /  visibility, the our purpose should be to find early indications of problems and not create an environment of knee-jerk reactions to rank changes.
    Bottom line, if you’ve had a good SEO program going, this change by Google should not lead to substantive changes in what you do. But, if you’ve not focused on SEO, your site may have trouble ahead.

  • Hyper targeting ads on facebook

    This past week I conducted a workshop at SCORE Chicago, which is a business mentoring organization for small – to mid sized companies associated with the SBA. The content was marketing on Facebook. We covered the basics of setting up a social media presence, engaging on Facebook (and others) as well as Facebook Advertising. While most were aware of advertising on Facebook, they generally did not know about the level of targeting available. If you are not familiar with the level of targeting on Facebook (and other platforms), you may be surprised by what you can do.

    Here are just some of the (more popular) options…

    • Geographic targeting from national down to zip codes and radii around locations.
    • By demographics of age, gender, income, household, relationships
    • By interest. This is where it gets exciting. Almost anything from music to outdoor activities to knitting if you like. Chances are there FB has interest targets associated to your product or service.
    • By profession and levels or titles (depending on the area).
    • By custom audiences. Upload your email list, previous site visitors, “look-a-like” based on your list or site visitors. Have a bunch of leads, that did not close? Target them with a conversion offer. Want more repeat business? Load your customers’ emails. You can segment lists in almost any fashion.

    With the ability to carve out different segments, you can develop hyper focused ad copy and images rather than just a static ad to all. Take some time and consider some of the ways you might want to target prospects and then look at Facebook’s targeting options, and line it up.

  • UTM Tracking for Your Google Analytics

    Okay, starting with a couple of assumptions.

    1. You care about knowing where your website traffic is coming from and finding better places from which to get it.
    2. You have, or are willing to get, Google Analytics (GA) setup on your site.

    If you are putting links in social media or paid advertising, you should be tagging everyone of them to understand where your best traffic is coming from. Setting up social postings? Tag them. Adding UTM parameter values lets you see what content is driving engagement.

    Most companies that use the UTM parameters do so with paid media, but neglect tagging social messaging and email. I’d even recommend applying the tags to links from your social profiles.

    So, what is the UTM code and where does it goes? The parameters and values are appended to your landing page urls.

    http://shop.volcom.com/Boardshorts/mens-boardshorts.html?utm_campaign=boardshorts_b&utm_medium=email&utm_source=members&utm_content=bs2_copy2

    You have to add the “?”, then add the parameters=value with an ampersand between them.

    Below is an example of how a campaign may be structured.

    utm_campaign utm_medium utm_source utm_content term
    boardshorts_a ppc google textad1 term1
    boardshorts_a ppc yahoo textady1 term1
    boardshorts_b display_premium espn bs1_480x55
    boardshorts_b display_dsp dataxu bs1_480x55
    boardshorts_b display_dsp adroll bs2_480x55
    boardshorts_b email members bs2_copy1
    boardshorts_b email members bs2_copy2

     

    In Google Analytics you can view performance on any of these parameters (called dimensions in GA). You can compare different campaigns, sources, ads, etc for goals or engagement. If you have eCommerce set up, you can track the revenue as well.

    Google Analytics selection options for UTM

     

    Once you are in the habit of adding UTMs to your destination urls, you will start to see a wealth of information that you can use to direct your resources and focus.

    https://fd.idatatools.com/analytics/

  • Microsoft’s LinkedIn View Through Conversion Tracking

    View through conversions have been around for quite some time. The simple premise is that a media channel tracks when a person sees your ad or content and then, some time later, when they go to your site and convert, the tracking tag on your site sends data back to the media channel indicating that a conversion took place. The channel then shows that the user saw the content and later converted, even if they did not click.

    LinkedIn is now launching this metric. As a channel where people do a lot of research, read articles and general share information, knowing if someone saw your ad, or content and then ended up converting, this can be valuable. In B2B, direct conversions are not always the norm, and attribution can be a real challenge for advertisers with less resources. The view through metrics help provide a bit more insight.

  • Ad Blockers Put On Notice by Facebook

    Facebook announced that it will implement ad serving in such a way that ad blockers can’t prevent the advertisements from showing.

    [ad blocking]…reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web. Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected. Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show — as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past — we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls.

    -Andrew Bosworth, VP of ads and business platform at Facebook

    There are things that the ad blocking software companies do that people either want to ignore (don’t care), or just don’t know about, that are not in the best interest of a free internet.

    First, “free” is a misnomer. It cost money to run Facebook, or any other website / application. The ads pay for the operation and a profit for the company. Seeing the ads is our price of admission. By blocking the ads, revenue is taken from the companies that invested in the websites we use everyday. Taken to the extreme, either the sites degrade their service or stop operating. If we want the service, we should pay for it. The ad blocking companies are trying to disrupt a model that is at the very heart of our ability to use the internet. Like them or hate them, without ads, there is no financial support for the internet.

    Second, some of the less reputable ad blocking companies allow publishers / advertisers to circumvent ad blocking by paying them a fee. However you cut it, the ethics of this model are dubious at best. The motive is not a “better user experience”, it’s extorting the publisher.

    There is a choice. When publishers implement advertising in such a way that the “cost” to view the content is too high, leave. It is a difficult equation for publishers, engaged users vs per page-view ad revenue. If they don’t get the balance right, content consumption dries up, as does ad revenue. Consumers can vote with their attention and publishers will listen or fade away.

  • Why can’t I find new customers? Wrong question.

    Not too long ago the paradigm shifted. With few media choices for consumers and large budgets for advertisers, brands would focus on targeting the customer. Consumers watched one of the major television stations, you just needed to look at Nielsen to know which shows. It seemed like every household received the major newspaper in town (or one of the few). The idea of targeting a prospective customer kind of made sense back then.

    For most companies, that’s no longer true. Today, customers find you… the real you.

    They research online, read articles, ask friends and family, look at reviews. With the exception of references, people generally use search engines to uncover the information they are looking for. Companies need to create a presence online that is both useful to the customer and understandable by the search engines. This takes the form of websites, social media, community activity, forum participation and content creation and sharing. When people research their next purchase, you have to be where they can find you.

    Business buyers and consumers, the saying goes, are in control. They decide what they will read, what they will trust and what they will share. Businesses that try to craft a message are finding themselves in tough times. Though perhaps overused, this is why the term “Authentic” has become so prevalent. Brands that look at this as just another marketing tactic, trying too hard to craft a message, fail to recognize the paradigm shift that has given control to the consumers.

    To help consumers find your company, engage.

    Create robust social profiles on those platforms that people interested in your product or service are likely to use.

    Share broadly about your product or service category. Be helpful beyond the scope of your own company. Give them something they want to read, hear or watch.

    Participate in forums as individuals who are part of a company, not just a company.

    All content and communications must be driven by the core values or principles of the company.

    Companies must decide what they stand for. Not some cliche, but what is important to those “in control”, and guide their companies accordingly. This is the core of being authentic. When mistakes happen, and the company makes corrections, the main driver comes from the core values of the company, not the fear of market repercussions. As consumers research, they will come across information (flattering and otherwise) about your company; stick to the core values and the balance will be in your favor.

  • Changes With Google and Bing Search

    There have been a lot of changes in search this year and some big changes in store. You have likely seen many of these, but since they tend to come out in a fairly ad hoc fashion, I am bringing together some of the bigger changes.

    Bing and Yahoo! are breaking up their deal. While there is a lot of behind the scenes organizational stuff, for advertisers it means that Bing is no longer the exclusive provider of search ads on Yahoo!. However for the short term, Bing continues to provide most of the ads we see there.

    Bing is now the provider of search ads on the AOL network, once served by Google. This should give Bing another small boost.

    The bottom line is that if you have the resources and are not already doing so, you should explore Bing. I’ve seen it do really well on some programs vs Google, on par for others and not so well on a few. But, worth exploring.

    Google… Lots of stuff here.

    The Ads on the right rail are gone. We’ve seen some minor price pressure for the top of page positions. It hasn’t been too bad so far though. A little more explanation and early on impressions of this change here (https://fd.idatatools.com/blog/2016/02/big-changes-coming-to-google-paid-search-results/)

    Google Local / Map advertising has moved out of Search Partner status. This means advertisers can opt out of the Search Partners (Google.com only) and still show up on the maps as long as they have location extensions.

    Google up and coming
    Google is changing the text ad format. Currently there are 25 characters for the headline and 35 each for the two description lines. Pretty soon we will have 30 characters for the headline and a single block of 80 characters for the copy/ description. This means more copy rewriting ahead. Also, the display URL will be automatically pulled from the final URL, but we’ll be able to append sub paths.

    Device bidding is coming back. For those who have been in the game a bit, you remember being able to create campaigns specifically for certain devices (mobile vs desktop). Google did away with that and incorporated bid adjustments instead. In the near future, we’ll be able to create device specific bids again. This will help for some programs that see very different behavior between devices.

    While the above is not exhaustive, it does touch on some of the main changes so far this year. If you have any questions about it or other areas of digital marketing, please drop me a line…happy to talk.