Author: Harsha Vardan Hariprasad

SEO

Dominate Paid SERP With 3 Competitive Metrics

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

Metrics that will help you ace Paid SERP

If you’re an eCommerce business looking to drive sales and boost your online presence, these statistics should catch your attention. A search engine results page (SERP) is the page that a search engine returns with the results of a query. It can include both organic (non-paid) and paid results, and vary depending on the search engine and the specific keywords being used. Appearing on the first page of a SERP can be crucial for driving traffic and sales to a business.

SERP Analysis

SERP analysis is the process of studying and evaluating the results of a search engine query. It can provide insights into the competition, the types of results being shown for specific keywords, and the customer journey. SERP analysis can help businesses identify opportunities to improve their online visibility, track the performance of their marketing efforts, and understand the needs and expectations of their target audience.

Overall, SERP analysis is a valuable tool for businesses looking to drive traffic and sales through paid SERPs. By understanding the competition and the types of results being shown for specific keywords, businesses can tailor their campaigns and marketing efforts to better reach their target audience and achieve their business goals.

Let’s now take a look at the top metrics you need to pay attention to in order to bring your A game with paid SERPs and drive eCommerce success.

Cost per Click (CPC)

CPC is the amount you pay each time a user clicks on one of your ads. It’s important to keep an eye on your CPC because it can have a big impact on your overall ad spend. If your CPC is too high, you may be overpaying for clicks and cutting into your profits. On the other hand, if your CPC is too low, you may not be reaching as many potential customers as you could be.

To get the most out of your paid SERP campaigns, aim for a CPC that’s in line with your overall marketing budget and business goals. You can use tools like Google Ads to help set and track your CPC targets.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the percentage of users who click on your ad after seeing it. A high CTR is a good sign that your ad copy and targeting are effective, while a low CTR may indicate that your ad is not resonating with your audience.

To improve your CTR, try experimenting with different ad copy and targeting options. You can also use A/B testing to see which versions of your ad perform best.

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, after clicking on your ad. A high conversion rate is essential for any eCommerce business, as it means that your paid SERP campaigns are effectively turning clicks into paying customers.

To improve your conversion rate, you may need to optimize your landing pages, offer promotions or discounts, or improve the overall user experience on your website. You can also use retargeting ads to bring users back to your site and encourage them to complete a purchase.

4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

ROAS is a key metric for measuring the profitability of your paid SERP campaigns. It’s calculated by dividing the revenue generated from your ads by the amount you spent on them. A high ROAS means that your ads are generating a good return on investment, while a low ROAS may indicate that you need to make changes to your campaigns to improve their profitability.

To boost your ROAS, try focusing on high-performing keywords and ad groups, optimizing your landing pages for conversions, and regularly reviewing and adjusting your campaigns.

5. Impression Share

Impression share is the percentage of the total number of times your ad could have been shown, based on your targeting and budget, versus the actual number of times it was displayed. A high impression share is a good sign that your ads are being shown to a wide audience, while a low impression share may indicate that you’re missing out on potential customers.

You may need to increase your budget, expand your targeting, or adjust your bids to improve your impression share. You can also use tools like Google Ads to help you track and optimize your impression share.

6. Quality Score

Quality score is a rating assigned to your ads by search engines based on their relevance, performance, and other factors. A high-quality score can lead to lower CPCs and better ad placement, while a low-quality score can result in higher costs and less visibility.

To improve your quality score, make sure that your ad copy and landing pages are relevant to your keywords and target audience, and aim for high click-through and conversion rates.

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV is the total amount of money that a customer is expected to spend on your products or services throughout their relationship with your business. By understanding your CLV, you can better tailor your paid SERP campaigns to target high-value customers and maximize your return on investment.

To calculate your CLV, consider factors such as the average amount each customer spends per purchase, the frequency of their purchases, and the length of time they remain a customer.

8. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the total cost of acquiring a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses. By keeping an eye on your CAC, you can ensure that you’re spending wisely on paid SERP campaigns and other marketing efforts.

To lower your CAC, consider optimizing your ad targeting, improving your conversion rate, and finding ways to reduce your marketing and sales costs.

Conclusion

Paid SERPs can be a powerful tool for driving eCommerce success, but it’s essential to track and optimize the right metrics to get the best return on your investment. By focusing on factors like CPC, CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS, you can fine-tune your campaigns and reach the right customers at the right time.

Ready to take your paid SERP efforts to the next level? Why not sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest eCommerce marketing tips and strategies? We’ll keep you up-to-date with the latest industry trends and help you take your business to the next level.

SEO

How to Perform and SEO Audit

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

Performing an SEO Audit: How do you do it?

Why should we do an SEO audit?

The process of SEO audit takes place much before you do any optimization on the site. It is the first step in the SEO process. Sometimes there may be many SEO errors on the site. So they clean all of that up before building out any pages or start optimizing anything so that the work is done on a clean foundation.

Key Elements of an SEO Audit

1. Backend Factors such as hosting and indexing

2. Frontend factors like keywords, content, and metadata.

3. Link Quality & Outside factors.

Tools to use

Screaming Frog (Free software)
Ahrefs or Semrush (preferably)
Webmaster tools (Analytics, Search console)

The SEO audit process

On-Page SEO audit

This looks at what is wrong with the site and if there are any technical errors on the site.

Off Page SEO audit

Go through all the optimizations from the SEO that are done outside your website. These are things like the backlinks you built, your presence and so on.

Analytics audit

Here we go into your analytics and make sure some of those metrics that we care about are in the right parameters.

Search console audit.

Here we look if any outstanding errors are going to hold back your site.

On-Page SEO audit

The Basics:

Is the site indexed?

Is Google even picking up your site? To find this, open site;cleanzen.com. There you can find all the pages being picked up by Google. If you don’t see certain pages there, it means that they are not indexed.

Web design principle

Look at the site and see if it is a good-looking site, does it have a call to action, is the call to action consistent or is it inconsistent? Look if the necessary pages exist. If Google wants to recognise you as a legitimate website, then certain pages should exist on your website. This means having an about page, contact page, privacy policy, terms of service etc.

Does the site have an SSL?

This is the icon just near the website name that you enter. This little icon is a ranking factor. So if you don’t have that, get that done as soon as possible. When you enter something and you remove the s from https, it should always redirect you to the same version.

Check if it is mobile friendly

Google does care about that. Type in mobile-friendly test, and just put your site there and check. Check if your page speed is under 3 seconds. If it is too high, then you need to get that fixed.

Technical:

Go back to cleanzen.com. See if there is a site map. Type your site/sitemap.xml. If you have an XML site map, then it should be there on the page that opens. If a site map does not exist that needs to get created.

Look at thin content pages

See if there are pages on your site that shouldn’t be getting indexed by Google.

Look at duplicate content

Make sure you don’t have pages within your site where there is a duplicacy across the site.

Look for broken links

See if there are any issues with your URL. Ensure that no broken links are there.

Optimization

Look at the meta titles and the meta description for these pages. There should not be any missing titles or meta descriptions.

H1 tags

It would be the top header. Most of the sites don’t even have this as a header. This shows Google what your site is about.

Off Page SEO audit

Look at the backlink profile. See if there is a weird ratio between the number of pages that are linking to you versus the number of links you are getting from these sites. Click on the backlinks and see what kind of websites they are-if they are bad-quality websites. Check the anchor text that they are using.

Open majestic SEO to figure out how trustworthy Google thinks your website is. Find the trust flow, which shows how trustworthy your site is. If a score between 10 to 49 is shown it is considered average. 49 and up is considered very good. Then look at citation flow, which tells how much volume of backlinks and mentions you are getting. These two flows should be a good ratio.

Analytics audit

Look at the bounce rate. The bounce rate should be less than 70 percent. This means people that are landing on your site and quickly jumping off. If people just land on your page and they just leave, it is not good. Make sure that if somebody lands on your site, they need to go ahead and you need to make it engaging.

See if there are any weird irregularities with the traffic. Go to the acquisition, then channels, and see what percentage of the traffic is coming from organic search. Look into the coverage section to see if there are any errors on your site.

How to do an SEO audit fast?

Log into the Google search console.

When you log in to the Google search console you want to look for pages that rank for similar terms. Most people think that if they want to rank SEO or whatever the subject is, they want to create as much content around that topic. Although that is true, it is also wrong at the same time. You want to create a ton of content, but you don’t want to create a ton of pages on the same topic because they are going to compete, which is going to conflict with Google. So when you have content around the same topics, you want to combine. You want to use the model of pillar pages. In the search console, find pages that are competing. Combine them and start structuring them in such a way that is similar to the beginner’s guide to SEO. Find the pages that are popular, but have a low CTR in the search console. Go to click flow, which is a tool that allows you to test your title tags. This will even give you recommendations on how to improve the click-throughs. In the search console, you will also see the popular pages. You need to start leveraging the land and expand strategy. Something already ranks well, the chances are if you expand upon it, you put more energy behind it and you make it even better, it should in theory even do better. But if a page doesn’t rank well at all, and you put a ton of emphasis and effort behind it, the chances of it doing well in the future are slim to none. The land and expand strategy gives importance to the pages that are doing well.

Use the site audit report and Ubersuggest. Once you put in the URL, it takes roughly three minutes to crawl your site. It’ll crawl hundreds of pages and it will tell you what is wrong from a technical standpoint.

SEO

A Complete Search Intent Guide for Marketers

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

The Ultimate Guide to Search Intent

A quick web search has become such a typical answer before you take action. From small things like looking up word meanings to life-changing things like buying a new house, you open your device to do a quick Google search.

This is what Google calls “micro-moments” – instances where a person turns to a device when you need something.

These clicks are the most intentional moments that content creators and SEO companies need to optimize the most. People need quick answers, but more importantly, real solutions that satisfy the purpose of their search or the reason they were searching.

What is Search Intent?

The purpose of a search or the purpose of a user’s search is the reason or reason for each search. Every question a user asks a search engine. It focuses on why someone is searching on Google.

Remember that everything you do has a purpose. When you ask someone a question in person, you get the answer you need. Similar to asking questions in search engines, when you type words into the search bar, you want to know and learn something. When you hit a search, you expect Google to give you the best answer to your question.

Example of Multiple Search Intents– This is an example of a query that has multiple meanings because it provided both information and transactional information on the search results page. Google interpreted my question as a user who is already in the buying phase because I already have a specific product in mind. But the search engine also provided me with informative content to learn more about the product. Confused? Don’t worry; we will talk more about this later in the article.

Google’s algorithm is smarter than we think – it provides answers for all types of users, no matter where they are in the search or buying journey. This is the challenge that Google has set for digital marketers like us to provide users with the content they need at that particular time. No one yet has an accurate way to determine search intent. This is where most, if not all, SEO fails: a careful and accurate understanding of the user’s search intent. If you’re a little lost at this point, it’s best to go back to SEO basics to better understand search and its various pillars and factors.

The Growing Importance of Search Intent

Search engines weren’t always so complicated. Once upon a time, posting simple content and using keywords was enough to get SERP results. But as Google’s algorithm has evolved, so has SEO and its best practices.

However, the concept of search intent did not appear out of nowhere in the search engine optimization environment. It has been gaining importance for some time and only now business people have seen and realized its importance.

The value of search intent began with the release of the Google Hummingbird update, where the search engine released an increasingly sophisticated understanding of searcher querying to find relevant and deliver meaningful results to users.

Search intents are classified into three different types, all of which correspond to Google’s micro-moments: know, do, go and buy. Here are the different types of search intent:

Informational

Intent to know or and intent to do.

Most people look for information online. It could be a local business, kids, cars, online marketing – anything under the sun. People looking for information have a problem or situation in mind and are looking for a name to put it under.

Navigation

Purpose to go.

These are people who are looking for a specific location or want to go somewhere and interact with the physical world or a specific online location. A user can search for a physical store or area (eg “digital marketing company near me”) and see the following results:

Physical Navigation Search Intent Searches based on this search intent can also navigate through web pages. This means that the user knows which website and page they want to go to, but the user is just not sure what that exact URL is: Purpose of Digital Navigation Search

Whichever of the two, the purpose of search is to find a location and go there, either physically or digitally.

Events

This is done by people who want to buy something online. They are often looking for the best deals and places to shop. Event searches are easy to spot if they include the keywords “buy”, “sell”, “cheap” or “service”. These are modifiers that tell Google and SEO that the user is already in purchase mode.

But if the search doesn’t have those keywords with purchase intent, does that still count as transaction intent?

Search with a simple keyword: “iPhone charger”. It doesn’t have “buy” or “sell” indicators, but it does provide results for product pages and online sellers that encourage me to do business with them.

Keywords, queries or whatever you want to call them for another purpose and it all depends on the search engine. Google shows different results that the algorithm thinks users need, which makes our job as content marketers a bit difficult because we have to provide quality content to all users and searchers along their buyer journey.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

How To Maximize Google Ads Results with a low budget

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

Maximizing Your Google Ads Results

Some businesses invest large amounts of money into unsuccessful pay-per-click, or PPC campaigns and never see increased sales.

Luckily, in the world of Google ads, not all campaigns are created equal, and spending more money does not guarantee better results.

Ways that you can create traffic, brand awareness, and sales, for your business with Google ads, no matter what your budget is. There are many ways you can increase the value of your Google ads campaign without additional ad spending.

Set goals using the SMART framework.

As with any marketing campaign, your Google ads efforts should target a specific goal. Clear-cut goals make your campaigns easier to measure and optimize because you can track precisely what is working, and what you need to adjust. However, many businesses, especially those not familiar with Google ads, focus on ineffective goals, or they target too many goals at once. As a result, they have trouble, getting the most out of their Google ads spending. This is where the smart structure comes in. The structure helps you get focused, relevant and practical goals for your Google ads campaigns. Improved goals mean improved optimization, and improved optimization means, better return on investment.

Break down your budget and stick to it.

It can be very tempting to throw money at PPC campaigns, especially when you are not seeing the return on investment you are hoping for. But investing more money in a Google ads campaign doesn’t guarantee that it will be more successful. To get the most out of every cent that you spend, break down your monthly budget into a daily budget, and then set that figure as your maximum daily spend. By optimising your campaign for a more specific daily budget, Google ads will run you a tighter, more optimized campaign. Keep in mind that, Google may occasionally go over your maximum spend to get you more results. If you are budget sensitive, consider setting a maximum, slightly below your exact limit.

Limit your options.

Limiting your ads campaign can help you make the most out of a small budget. There are three main campaign elements you should consider limiting- keywords, location and scheduling.

Limiting keywords – It is challenging to rank for a wide variety of keywords on a limited budget. To find the best keywords for your campaign, use Google Keyword Planner. Look for keywords with medium to high traffic and low competition. The lower the competition, the less you will spend. This way you will get more clicks on a tighter budget. Don’t forget to limit your campaign by using negative keywords. Negative keywords tell Google when you don’t want your ads to display. Limiting your keywords reduces irrelevant clicks and wasted ad spending.

Limiting locations- Google ads enable you to target customers from across the globe and, while showing your ad to a broad audience can seem like a good idea, it’s less effective than targeting specifically chosen locations. To get more out of your budget, limit where your ad shows. Rely on customer data to figure out exactly where your ads will convert most effectively.

Limiting ad scheduling- By default, Google ads will show your ad at any time of the day or night. But that’s not always a good thing. Ad scheduling limits when your ads are displayed. This feature reduces irrelevant clicks and conserves your budget. Consider running your ads during waking hours, business hours or over the weekend, whenever your audience is online. Use the customer data you have worked so hard to collect. If you see most of your digital marketing leads coming in on weekends, schedule your ads to deliver then. If you found that your customers are weekday morning shoppers, have your ads show on weekday mornings. Google ads offer a fantastic ROI, but only if you use them strategically.

What needs to be understood is that a higher budget does not always mean more sales. It’s entirely possible to make the most out of a small budget with just a few optimizations. Apply best practices to your Google ads campaign and make your budget work harder for you.

Tips to budget and forecast Google ads efficiently

Use conversion tracking

The best way to efficiently spend your budget is to use conversion tracking and conversion values. The best way to get the most out of Google ads is to use conversion tracking and to continue to optimize your campaigns over time.

Focus on monthly results.

Set a monthly budget ahead of time. The way Google ads works is when you set your budget. Google is looking at driving you the most conversions over a month. So they are going to try to get the most out of each day. But if you are changing your budget and going up way too much too often for going up and down, it is going to affect your overall results with Google ads. Keep your budget similar, and if you are going to increase it or decrease it, do it gradually.

Use the forecast tool in the Google keyword planner.

Make sure you have a keyword list, choose your match type, set your conversions stats for your overall website, and review your forecast.

Daily over-delivery

Some days your budget will be overspent. Google ads do this to improve performance.

Shared budgets.

You can use shared budgets if you are running multiple campaigns and if you want to make sure you are spending a minimum amount per day, even if it has to be split between different campaigns.

Recommended budgets

The Google ads recommended budgets can help you improve performance.

Digital Management

CMOs in 2023: Challenges, Budgets, Digital Transformation & Skills

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

Digital Transformation for CMOs in 2023

If we look at classical marketing, it is the traditional marketing that packaged goods companies used to practice the four Ps of marketing. Classical marketers have a good grasp of the foundation elements of marketing. What do consumers think? What is psychology? What is the design? What is the purchase funnel and so on? This has done very well, from a classical marketer’s toolbox point of view, until almost the early 1990s. In the 1990s, we entered the third paradigm of marketing with the advent of the Internet on the one hand and the advent of Data analytics on the other hand. The coming together of data analytics and the internet changed marketing into its third paradigm. That is where a new breed of marketers started coming in. People who understood technology, and data, but couldn’t care less about the classic foundational elements of marketing. Since then there has been a dichotomy. So there are classical marketers and the current paradigm marketers who are all about data analytics, technology, etc.

Traditionally if you look at the marketers, you will find that they came from the qualitative part. They had creative sensibilities, aesthetic sensibilities, and cultural sensibilities and they had intuition and innovation. This was a kind of mindset and series of skills and competencies that they had. When you look at the contemporary side of the equation, you are operating with analytics, logic, technology, and algorithms. In addition to the classical aspects of marketing and contemporary aspects of marketing, you need to understand the other areas that surround marketing such as how your business makes money and the aspects of how you credibly and precisely measure ROI. This means that you need to connect the dots between the market actions and investments you make to the business outcomes and the business results that you get. This requires a different set of skills. Many marketing organizations have bigger technology budgets than CTOs in those organizations. You need to understand data, and public relations, because there is a continuum between marketing and communications or public relations. Unless you understand how the world operates in the world of public relations and media relations, you are not going to be successful.

Digital marketing is a skill that requires the understanding of the market and if the latter is good at it, you need to ensure that you add value to their life and learning apart from just giving them a salary.

One way of doing exactly this is by constantly providing them with training campaigns and micro-courses to grab onto industrial concepts quickly. This will further add to their intelligence, taking their productivity up, and thereby ultimately increasing your return on investment.

Not only is this a clever way to mutually benefit the employer and the employee, but it also aids the relationship between them, making the corporate life more malleable to them.

Now that we know that mutual growth is a key point in retaining your employees, let’s see how important it is to digitize the already digitized marketing world.

What can CMO do to maximize marketing contribution to the company?

There is a lot of talk about the rapid changes facing marketing and how marketers should become more social, data-driven, aligned with revenues, and accountable and there is a lot of merit in these recommendations. It is important to separate the strategy and tactics, align the strategy with stakeholder objectives, work on a method that can give great results, and know-how chief marketing officers can align and offer value to the company.

Keeping up with marketing trends enables your firm to stay in loop with the rapidly evolving digital marketing industry. As the industry accelerates through the asphalt roads of the internet and social media, trends are an important factor in deciding who’s up to date and who’s out of date. Encouraging your workforce to engage and track new trends is another smart move and will yield results that you can’t simply calculate.

On the other hand, taking feedback from your comrades makes them feel valued and in turn provides you with a checklist of pros and cons in your work ecosystem. Integrating ideas and add-ons suggested by them will further aid employee retention and mind this strategy works like a charm.

This is not simply fooling your employees into a trap but instead is a way to factually add value to all the parties involved.

Top three objectives of Chief Marketing Officers

1. Align the company and the customer

Here, your primary stakeholder will be your customer. And the rapid rise of social media requires businesses to put customers at the center of their universe, and translate from product-centric to customer-centric organizations. Customers want to align with their favorite brands and they will reward the suppliers that deliver the products and services that they need. Companies are nowadays adopting changing technologies. But changing the culture is even more difficult. Voice of the customer tools are plentiful, and CRM is transitioned into social CRM which means that CRM technology has evolved from customer data management to engaging customers in dialogue for your beneficial purposes. Customers are not the same. So they should be segmented to properly identify and react to their objectives. Customers are not just those who purchase your products but also include industry influencers, social advocates, and media to which our customers subscribe to. It’s only clever for a CMO to make use of the available technology and information to understand and analyze profitable customer relationships, and changing trends or supplement company transactional data with social and other data. This aids him in finding the needs and wants of the customer, hence making the CMO an integral part of the company as they play a pivotal role in sponsoring and refocusing the company culturally. CMO is a person to research and delivers data-driven analysis such as top customers by criteria to the CEO so that the company can better align resources and solutions with customer objectives. Here the CMO can create the messaging to improve the brand and position the products of the company in such a way that they will be well received by customers.

2. Deliver the volume and the quality of leads

Deliver the volume and the quality of leads that are required to achieve revenue goals. In this role your primary stakeholder at the sales team, and sales and marketing, share a symbiotic relationship, marketers should not lose sight of the fact that the sales team is their customer. The goal is to deliver more leads or lots of leads. But instead, to deliver the exact number of leads and agreed-upon cost per lead to achieve a revenue target, you have to start with the end goal in mind to be successful. Management’s revenue target works backward, through the lead-to-customer conversion cycle to calculate the volume of leads needed. It is a complex model, because as the volume of leads rises, so does the cost per lead. Being the CMO of the company, you should find the equilibrium point of the company.

3. Unqualified Leads

Too many marketers continue to send unqualified leads to the sales team which exacerbates the prevalent breakdown between marketing and sales. In the b2b space, research consistently shows that about 25 to 30% of new leads or sales are ready when received, and about 45 to 55% are not sales-ready when received. About two-thirds of this group will eventually become qualified and about 25 to 30% of new leads are not sales-ready when received and never will be. The marketers change the sales role from the lead verifier to lead qualifier when they transfer unqualified leads to the sales team. Marketers must automate lead nurturing processes to manage top top-of-the-funnel until they are objectively scored as sales-ready.

Digital Management

How to Attract and Retain Digital Marketing Talent

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date June 16, 2023

Attracting and retaining digital marketing talent

With a relatively sudden upsurge in the demand of digital marketing, it’s becoming furthermore important to hire better employees and keep them on your side to aid your business growth. After all competition exists, and to compete with the best, you’ve got to have the best.

Keeping your workforce happy and content is simply more practical than losing a productive team and then going on hiring a new one. Stats paint a clear picture of this with over 92 percent companies deciding to set focus on employee experience.

Coming up are 5 ingenious ways to ensure employee retention and satisfaction and grow your business with a one of a kind team. These are in no specific order and so all of them are equally important.

Starting up with probably the most important and wise tip, aiding them in personal and professional growth.

1. Aid their growth

Not only is this a clever way to mutually benefit the employer and the employee, but it also aids the relationship between them, making the corporate life more malleable to them.

Now that we know that mutual growth is a key point in retaining your employees, let’s see how important it is to digitize the already digitized marketing world.

2. Digitize your workspace

Being a digital marketer, one is always enthusiastic about new and upcoming feats of technology and artificial intelligence. Integrating these breakthroughs into your workspace creates a more intriguing and user-friendly environment for the employee.

As important as it is for satisfying the employee, it’s equally important for your firm. AI tools are not simply a replacement to your workforce but a smart addition to it, which aids its overall productivity.

Furthermore, the ease of reduced hard work results in enabling the employee to run their creative brains on the right and more productive path.

3. Trends and feedback are a must

This is not simply fooling your employees into a trap but instead is a way to factually add value to all the parties involved.

4. Certification is a Gallantry award

Just as we told you, adding in value to the employee means everything to them. This includes adding value to their portfolio and thus their professional life. Certifications have more value than ever and at times can become a decisive factor in interviews.

A certificate highlights the skills and specialization of the candidate and ensures an employer of the quality of work the employee can deliver. Giving certifications to your employees in the fields they excel in boosts their confidence and empowers their resume.

This has a bilateral effect as it will increase the employee’s trust in the current firm and thus reduce the chance of him ever switching!

5. Employee satisfaction is the key

Overall employee satisfaction is going to be the deciding factor if your most productive employee will stay or not. Promotions and bonuses being the root of it, you also need to have an optimal work culture which gives importance to the mental health of your employees.

According to studies, more than 60% of American employees are stressed because of their corporate culture. If the employees are feeling mentally harassed by the job, it will either lead to them to quit the job or lose interest and focus all together. This is not good, neither for the employees nor for the employer.

Mailchimp is an email analytics tool that helps businesses track the performance of their email campaigns. It provides insights into email opens, clicks, and conversions, and offers a range of features to help businesses create and optimize their email campaigns.

Mailchimp offers a range of features for businesses to create and send email campaigns, including templates, A/B testing, and automation. It also provides insights into the performance of these campaigns, including the number of emails opens, clicks, and conversions.

Conclusion

Analytics tools are an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. They help businesses track and analyze their online performance and make informed decisions. The tools mentioned above are some of the best analytics tools available in the market and can help businesses of all sizes and industries.

We hope this article helped you learn something new and added value to your time. Want to stay up to date with the latest in digital marketing? Catch us on social media on our handles below and we’re there to help you.

Data Analytics Industry Insiders

Data Protection – What and Why do you need it?

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date March 10, 2023

What is data protection?

Data protection is the process of safeguarding important information, aiming to minimize business loss by guaranteeing data integrity and availability. Data protection strategies usually consist of a combination of data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity techniques, and elements like cybersecurity management, ransomware prevention and regulation compliance among others. Protecting data from compromise and restoring data after corruption are the main goals of data protection.

What are the threats?

Here are four situations in which a data protection strategy would come in handy:

1. Media failure

Data protection’s goal here is to make data available even if a storage device fails. This can be accomplished with synchronous mirroring, RAID protection, erasure coding or replication.

2. Data corruption

If data is corrupted or accidentally deleted it can be restored with snapshots or clean copies of data from a storage system at particular points in time. Most storage systems in today’s time can track so many snapshots without any effect on performance. When data is corrupted or deleted a snapshot can be mounted and that data can be restored almost instantly.

3. Storage system failure

Replication technology on top of snapshots helps protect against multiple storage drive failures. With snapshot replication, only changed blocks of data are copied to secondary storage systems that are available if the primary storage system fails.

4. Data center failure

Protection against the loss of an entire data center requires a full disaster recovery plan. Snapshot replication is one replication method that can be costly. Cloud services are another alternative, offering replication and backup products and services that facilitate rapid recovery in the event of a data center loss.

GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation is described as the biggest milestone in data protection laws, in a generation giving ordinary people unprecedented control over the information companies hold on us. It is all about data rights and privacy to protect individuals.

What’s the reason for the new law?

Today nearly every part of your life can be digitized and tracked. Every picture, every journey, every purchase, and even more of your personal information is collected, stored, and traded by companies and governments. The new GDPR covers things that could identify us – your name, contact details, location of your computer, and personal data. From now on organizations will have to prove they have a lawful reason for holding that kind of data. And more importantly, showing that they keep it safe.

What’s with all the emails?

Companies need to prove your consent if they want to keep information about your name and email address on their system. That’s why everyone’s inbox is bursting at the moment. But some experts don’t think companies need to send all their users’ emails at all. In some cases, companies who are contacting might be acting illegally because if a company can’t already prove consent, they shouldn’t be emailing you to confirm your details.

If you don’t reply to the emails, then that company should delete your information from their system. It is not surprising that businesses are nervous about GDPR. The potential penalties for firms are massive – Up to 4% of a company’s annual turnover. This serious legislation is supposed to empower the people who give companies their data.

What new powers do people get by GDPR?

If a company has to ask for permission to store your data then they will have to be much more upfront about it. If a database of a site you use is hacked, and the information is stolen, then the organization that was storing information will have to tell you about the hack within 3 days and you now have the right to see your data.

What does the new GDPR law do?

The UK government says that it will bring the EU regulation into British law – regardless of how the BREXIT deal pans out. But millions of people outside of Europe are going to be affected as well. Because companies that have operations in European countries all have to sign up to the rules along with organizations based outside of Europe that store data of EU citizens. So GDPR is something, that could affect the way, the whole world thinks about data.

GDPR is supposed to stop data breaches. Facebook has already said that they are going to apply the EU rules to all of their users around the world. Mark Zuckerberg said the social media giant needed to regain users’ trust after the Cambridge Analytical scandal in which the company was accused of using personal data from Facebook users, harvested without their consent, to try and influence elections.

Tips to get your company GDPR complaint

If you are collecting emails which most websites are doing, go and email these people promotional offers, even though they bought just one product from you. Because people are checking out and buying one product, it doesn’t mean that they are opting into continually getting emails from you.

Someone is coming to your website within the EU, have a little notice, at the bottom of your site, and you can talk to a lawyer to figure out the right text, something around, this site uses cookies to provide a better experience. They can either click the accept button or the deny button. If you don’t want to use the deny button, then there is a button that says learn more, and that takes them to the privacy policy.

In your privacy policy, let people know what tracking solutions and third-party services you are using. Let them know how long the cookies will last if you are using an email solution or if you are using analytics like Google Analytics, let them know when they can opt-out, out and how to delete their data, because that way if the user doesn’t want to be tracked, they can opt-out.

And with that we arrive at the end of the post, we hope you learnt something new regarding Data Protection, why it’s so crucial and how you can do it too. Make sure to follow us on our social media handles below and we’ll catch you in the next one.

Content Marketing Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing Social Media

Cracking the best times to post on Twitter

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date March 10, 2023

What is the importance of posting at the right time?

Twitter has been running its feeds since 2016, like other social media platforms on a popularity basis or an engagement, and not on reverse chronology. But now citing users’ feedback Twitter allows people to switch their feeds from top-ranked tweets to the latest post tweets in a click. A reverse chronological feed shows the Twitter users a tweet as they are getting posted. As time passes, more recent tweets would replace these on the top of the feed, and that is why you need to publish your tweet when most of your audience is online.

The average best time to tweet on Twitter?

Just like most social media, Twitter has no best time to post either. This is simply because different businesses have different audiences and so are their preferences and content posting time. But then you can always check out popular social media marketing companies suggesting when brands should post on Twitter. Twitter provides all the tools. Dig into your Twitter analytics. Your Twitter analytics provides a complete overview of your profile visits, tweet impressions, and other engagement factors. You can also use Twitter Analytics to track your progress over time and make new posting strategies accordingly.

To make it easier you can also use Twitter analytics tools. Log in to your Twitter first and click the more button and go to the media studio. There you have to click on the insights button and then click on the audience. The graph provided by Twitter insights there shows when your followers and your audience are watching videos the most on the platform. In the graph each square represents an hour-long block, the darker the square the more active your audience is during that hour. There are also social media sites like sprout social that are dedicated to social media research.

You can go there and find the best times for Twitter global engagement, and there you can find the best times for posting. Check the date on the articles that you read, to confirm that you are looking at the most recent data for the best time. This is because the times that are the best to post on social media and Twitter specifically change almost weekly. The best day to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Thursday. And the worst day to make a post on Twitter is Saturday. The best time to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Friday at 9:00 a.m. In general Monday to Friday between 8 am and 4 pm are great times to post on Twitter.

When to post on Twitter for the most engagement?

Considering the recent Twitter algorithms, engagement plays a pivotal role in tweet rankings. When something is posted on Twitter, the common goal that all brands have is to connect with their audience. If you wish to stand out among the tweets of all other brands, you have to be thoughtful, creative, and in harmony with your brand’s tone.

Things to keep in mind

On average, the tweets that are posted between 2 to 3 am get the most engagement. The least amount of engagement happens during work hours i.e between 9 to 5 pm.
The highest number of retweets and favourites happen between 8 pm and 11 pm.

Experts say that it is not a specific time like 8:00 a.m. or noon. You shouldn’t be tweeting during a specific time of the day, you should be tweeting throughout the day from morning to night, when people are sleeping, there are people all around the world. When you are sleeping someone else is awake. So why not tweet and engage? Business never sleeps. If you want to do well, be out there each and every single hour of the day.

You can use tools like Meet Edgar which will make the whole process easier in which you can keep promoting your content 24/7, so that way you can generate traffic from social sites like Twitter even when you are sleeping. You need to be tweeting multiple times a day, ideally once per hour, and you need to be doing this seven days a week.

The best thing to do is to test out different post timings using a Twitter scheduling tool. Here you will have to experiment. Try to post your tweets in the morning, noon and evening at specific times and see what works and what doesn’t.

Content Marketing Social Media

The Best free-to-use Social Media Tools

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date March 8, 2023

Social algorithms are tough, they are becoming harder to get great traffic from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social websites that are there. Here’s a list of very useful free social media tools that you can use.

1. Hootsuite

It allows you to schedule your social content. With Hootsuite not only can you share content on all social sites with ease and a few clicks, but you can also schedule your content many months in advance. Why this is important, is because many people share their content only once on social sites like Twitter. But if you share your content on Twitter six times in a year, that same piece of content will roughly get 2 to 3 times more traffic. When you share your content most people won’t see it. There is nothing wrong if you sharing the content multiple times throughout the year.

2. ManyChat

If you are someone struggling to get more traffic from Facebook, ManyChat will solve your issue. It is a chatbot tool that leverages Facebook Messenger and what you will find is the click-through and the open rates are ridiculous. It beats out the email. If you want easy traffic, leverage ManyChat. When people visit your website they can do things such as subscribe to you through Facebook Messenger and when you have a message or a blog post, you can push it out through ManyChat. You will get open rates of about 60% and you will get click-through rates above 30, 40, and 50%. Even when it drops down you will still see your click-through rate above 30%. It is that effective.

3. Buzzsumo

When you write blogs or some kind of content, even after you share it on the social web a lot of times, sometimes no one wants to like it or comment on it. But with Buzzsumo, it will show you all the other popular articles within your space, and all the ones that aren’t popular. Look at the topics that are popular, write more of that on your blog, promote those on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and again you will get more traffic, because you are only writing things that people want to read about and see, than just writing whatever you want to write about.

4. SocialBlade

SocialBlade is a platform where you can go on and check statistics from any account from YouTube to twitch Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It will show you, your subscriber growth over time, as well as how much content you are pushing out. It will help in optimizing how much content you should be creating to get the maximum amount of subscribers, fans, and followers.

5. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is an easy way to manage notifications on your website to your customers. It helps you collect emails from your website. If the first hour that you are posting content on the social web, any social site, does well, the chances are it will go viral. You can use Hello Bar to collect and gather emails from your website or your blog. When you collect these emails, then when you push out content on the social web, you send out an email blast to all your email subscribers asking them to check out the new posts. That will help you get way more retweets, likes, and shares, and that will make the post go viral.

6. Subscribers

It is similar to Hello Bar. Here, instead of helping you to get emails, it will help you to gather browser notifications subscribers. When people are browsing your site on Chrome, they can click subscribe and you can give them a notification and let all of these people know when you have your content that comes out and you can even push them to the social sites. That way when it gets released in the first hour, you will get more likes, shares, and comments. This will also help you go viral on the web.

7. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a platform where people, agencies, and businesses can come and get their businesses started. They have multiple applications and one of them being socials. It makes it easy to work with your team members and on top of that, they help you research keywords. Using Zoho Social will help you determine what keyword you are targeting when you are going after these social sites. This is because, if you are using the wrong keywords in your titles, descriptions, and throughout the whole text you will find that, not as many people will see it. A lot of people use Twitter search. Always make sure to use the right keywords, and then you will get more traffic.

And that was our brief list of free-to-use social media tools, now go ahead and use them to the fullest to get your social media marketing game on track. We will see you in the next one, till then, follow us on social media to stay up to date.

Data Analytics Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing

Broad Match #101

Post author By Harsha Vardan Hariprasad
Post date March 8, 2023

It can feel like we are always on high alert in the world of digital media, particularly in paid search, waiting for the next product announcement or new beta that will help us squeeze incremental performance out of our paid marketing budget.

Therefore, it may seem counterintuitive that the product that has been around since Google AdWords’ inception, more than two decades ago, will be the single most significant addition to your paid search program in 2022. That product is Broad Match.

What is the prize’s value?

Google’s internal research indicates that advertisers using broad match and smart bidding experience a 30% average conversion increase at a similar CPA. If your KPI is conversion value rather than conversions, for instance, the exact figure you hear will not deviate too much from this 30% mark, although the exact nature of the test may influence the quoted figure.

In order to provide our clients with the most effective solutions, it is our responsibility as an agency to carry out our own experiments that either confirm or disprove the claims made by our media partners. We have made significant investments in this capability at Brainlabs, and our “Hippocampus” database enables us to track the outcomes of all agency-wide tests.

Two significant findings emerged from our extensive recent testing of Broad Match.

Google’s claims were supported by convincing evidence that we discovered. The median uplift we observed was +19%, which is not a figure to be laughed at even though it was just below the 30% mark.

Perhaps even more intriguingly, our analysis demonstrated how much can be concealed behind an average. Not only did we observe a remarkable median uplift, but we also observed that broad match consistently delivered successful tests. Broad match emerged as the winning variant on 46 of the 54 tests we have documented. A success rate of 85 percent is almost unheard of in digital media testing given the wide range of external factors that can influence it.

But let’s step away from the finer points for a moment. You can’t afford to ignore that number, regardless of whether the increase is 19 percent or 30 percent, especially for a feature whose implementation requires almost no effort. The good news is that your budget doesn’t have to stretch as far as a 19% increase: Instead, you can use that added value to improve your CPA or ROAS goals by enabling broad match and maintaining your current investment.

Broad match is the only solution to paid advertising’s problems.

How did we arrive here?

It’s not hard to understand why broad match has earned a bad reputation over the years. In the past, the presence of a broad match in an account was a sure sign of a hands-off management style, which resulted in subpar results and ads served to users who were not even close to buying your product.

The rise of the broad match has been the story of steady and gradual technological advancement over time. Even though there is a lot of talk about it now, few people outside of Google’s engineering and leadership teams probably could have predicted how big a hit it would be more than three years ago.

In February 2021, there was a turning point if ever there was one. Google informed the industry in one of its most important announcements of the year:

The fact that the algorithm had fundamentally shifted away from syntactic matching to semantic matching was encapsulated in that small print. As a result of this change, broad match stopped being a firehose and became a really useful tool for accurately expanding your ad targeting.
The item upgrades haven’t halted there, and today, Google’s vision for wide match keeps on mirroring a gradual process of updates and execution improvements:

Using cutting-edge natural language recognition algorithms, continuously improving data quality and infrastructure, simplifying broad match management, updating the keyword prioritization process, and establishing a joint optimization process for creative, bidding, and keyword targeting. Of course, Google’s current approach to discussing broad matches with advertisers and agencies is anything but subtle.

One of the opportunities that consistently rank highly is the “upgrade your existing keywords to broad match” call to action, which can be found in the recommendations tab of Google accounts all over the world.

The steady stream of product modifications and enhancements will continue despite Google’s bolder communication strategy, with the possibility that many of them will go unnoticed for the most part.

When Is a Broad Match a Bad Match?

In paid search, auction-time bidding is table stakes, as you probably already know. However, this is especially true when the broad match is used. If you aren’t tailoring your bids in real-time with this Google Ads feature, a broad match will almost certainly result in you spending a lot of money on a lot of users who have very little interest in your product at the moment.

However, in the opposite direction of that logic, it is essential to recognize the value that some of those queries that appear to be more fragile bring to the table when combined with smart bidding. We can easily read a search query report, find a few questionable examples, and overreact as humans: We must exclude these queries because they will almost never convert for us!

However, as long as those users have a probability of conversion that is not zero, you are justified in serving an advertisement by setting an appropriate low bid. To be clear, we are not advocating completely hands-off handling of search query reports; you will still need to employ some human judgment. However, if you’re after performance, you should try to give the algorithm as much freedom to optimize as you can handle.

Focusing on the wrong metrics is another common error. After implementing broad match, your paid search account’s dynamics will change, but that’s okay because the numbers you care about will be moving in the right direction. If everything else is equal, switching to a broad match should typically result in the following changes to your campaign metrics:

It is true that some of these numbers are negative, and the less confident marketers in the room are already asking, “Why are my CTR and conversion rate going down?!?”It must be driving less qualified traffic through the broad match!”But the point is that you’ve added value and increased conversions with that additional traffic, and your CPA and ROAS haven’t changed because your bid strategy has paid less for clicks.

Lastly, being able to direct Google’s automation in the right direction is becoming increasingly important. Remember: An algorithm will optimize solely with the intention of achieving a conversion objective. Therefore, you should be prepared to see an increase in low-quality customers if you haven’t developed a conversion goal that is sophisticated enough to distinguish between your most valuable and least valuable customers.

That could mean MQLs that never turn into sales or one-time customers who never return for more purchases, depending on your business. This trade-off can be mitigated by sharing first-party conversion data with Google.

Conclusion

You have every right to be skeptical of broad matches as a mature, world-weary PPC marketer. Make an effort to overcome that, and keep in mind the steady advancements in machine learning.

Keep your attention on the goals of your marketing while you undergo that mental shift, and ideally, consider ways to advance these goals to better target your most valuable customers.
However, the most important thing is to act immediately—do not let the 19% increase pass you by. It would not be an exaggeration to say that broad match has reached the point where we would consider it an essential component of your search strategy. If it isn’t on your list, figure out how to bring it to the forefront and start testing right away.

Organic Search

Organic Search

Organic Search

Metrics that will help you ace Paid SERP

SERP Analysis

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

3. Conversion Rate

4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

5. Impression Share

6. Quality Score

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

8. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Conclusion

Performing an SEO Audit: How do you do it?

Why should we do an SEO audit?

Key Elements of an SEO Audit

Tools to use

The SEO audit process

On-Page SEO audit

Off Page SEO audit

Analytics audit

How to do an SEO audit fast?

The Ultimate Guide to Search Intent

What is Search Intent?

The Growing Importance of Search Intent

Maximizing Your Google Ads Results

Digital Transformation for CMOs in 2023

What can CMO do to maximize marketing contribution to the company?

Top three objectives of Chief Marketing Officers

1. Align the company and the customer

2. Deliver the volume and the quality of leads

3. Unqualified Leads

Attracting and retaining digital marketing talent

1. Aid their growth

2. Digitize your workspace

3. Trends and feedback are a must

4. Certification is a Gallantry award

5. Employee satisfaction is the key

Conclusion

What is data protection?

What are the threats?

1. Media failure

2. Data corruption

3. Storage system failure

4. Data center failure

What’s the reason for the new law?

What’s with all the emails?

What new powers do people get by GDPR?

What does the new GDPR law do?

Tips to get your company GDPR complaint

What is the importance of posting at the right time?

The average best time to tweet on Twitter?

When to post on Twitter for the most engagement?

Things to keep in mind

1. Hootsuite

2. ManyChat

3. Buzzsumo

4. SocialBlade

5. Hello Bar

6. Subscribers

7. Zoho Social

What is the prize’s value?

How did we arrive here?

When Is a Broad Match a Bad Match?

Conclusion