Author: Narmada Pandi

Categories
SEO

How to Perform and SEO Audit

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.

Categories
SEO

A Complete Search Intent Guide for Marketers

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:

  1.  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.

  1. 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. 

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  1. 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.

    Categories
    SEO

    28 App Store Optimization Tools You Should Use in 2022

    That’s where ASO (App Store Optimization) comes in. ASO is the process of optimizing your app listing to improve its visibility in app store search results and drive more organic downloads. According to a study by Tune, ASO can lead to a 10.3% increase in organic downloads and a 28.1% increase in in-app revenue.

    In this article, we’ll be discussing why ASO is important, the different types of ASO, and the top ASO tools you should consider using in 2022 to boost your app’s visibility and success.

    What is ASO?

    ASO is the process of optimizing your app listing to improve its visibility in app store search results and drive more organic downloads. This includes optimizing elements such as your app’s title, keywords, icons, and screenshots.

    Why Do You Need ASO?

    As the number of apps available in app stores continues to grow, it’s becoming increasingly important for app developers and marketers to find ways to differentiate their apps and get noticed by potential users. Here are a few key reasons why ASO is essential for app success:

    • Increased Visibility – With millions of apps available, it can be difficult for your app to stand out and get noticed in app store search results. ASO helps to improve your app’s visibility and increase the chances of it being discovered by potential users.
    • Greater ROI – A well-optimized app listing can lead to higher rankings in app store search results, which can result in more organic downloads. This can translate to a higher return on investment (ROI) for your app
    • Targeted Reach – ASO allows you to optimize your app listing for specific keywords and target your app toward a specific audience. This helps to ensure that your app is being seen by the users who are most likely to download and use it.

    Types of ASO

    There are two main types of ASO:

    1. On-metadata ASO – This type of ASO involves optimizing elements of your app listing such as your title, keywords, and screenshots.
    2. Off-metadata ASO – This type of ASO involves activities that are not directly related to your app listing, such as building a strong presence on social media or getting reviews from influencers.

    ASO Tools You Should Use in 2022

    1. Sensor Tower

    Sensor Tower is a comprehensive ASO tool that offers a wide range of features to help you optimize your app listing and improve your app’s visibility in app store search results. With Sensor Tower, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and see how your keywords are ranking. Additionally, Sensor Tower offers a keyword suggestion tool to help you find the best keywords to target and a localization feature to help you optimize your app for different countries and languages.

    1. Mobile Action

    Mobile Action is another top ASO tool that offers a variety of features to help you optimize your app listing and improve your app’s visibility in app store search results. With Mobile Action, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and see how your keywords are ranking. Additionally, Mobile Action offers a keyword suggestion tool to help you find the best keywords to target and a localization feature to help you optimize your app for different countries and languages.

    1. App Annie

    App Annie is a well-known ASO tool that offers a range of features to help you optimize your app listing and improve your app’s visibility in app store search results. With App Annie, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and see how your keywords are ranking. Additionally, App Annie offers a keyword suggestion tool to help you find the best keywords to target and a localization feature to help you optimize your app for different countries and languages.

    1. The Tool

    The Tool is an ASO tool specifically designed to help you optimize your app listing and improve your app’s visibility in app store search results. With The Tool, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and see how your keywords are ranking. Additionally, The Tool offers a keyword suggestion tool to help you find the best keywords to target and a localization feature to help you optimize your app for different countries and languages.

    1. App Radar

    App Radar is an ASO tool that offers a range of features to help you optimize your app listing and improve your app’s visibility in app store search results. With App Radar, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and see how your keywords are ranking. Additionally, App Radar offers a keyword suggestion tool to help you find the best keywords to target and a localization feature to help you optimize your app for different countries and languages.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, ASO is an essential aspect of eCommerce marketing, and the right tools can make all the difference in helping your app rank higher in app store search results and drive more organic downloads. 

    By using these tools, you can track your app’s performance, get insights into your competitors, and find the best keywords to target to improve your app’s visibility in app store search results.
    Want to learn more about eCommerce marketing and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and strategies? Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media to stay in the loop! We’re always here, find us Blustream Integrated

    Categories
    Data Analytics Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing

    Improve Your Campaigns With These Critical KPIs

    What is a KPI?

    KPI or key performance indicators are values that you can accurately measure to show progress. It can be used for a business or personal life, or it can be used in terms of marketing. These are essential values that you can measure and can look at those values over time to know if your progress is advancing or decreasing.

    Why set KPIs?

    By setting KPIs you can make sure that you actually achieve your business goals and also that will tell you if you won’t. So you can go back to your strategy and you can tweak it and try again. They can be anything that is specific, measurable, and relevant to your business goals.

    For example,

    • Conversion rate.

    By improving your conversion rate at each step of your customer journey you can get more customers.

    • Relevant audience growth

    Once you have worked out all your conversion rates, you may discover that your Instagram followers are more likely to buy. So growing your Instagram following could be a KPI.

    • Email subscribers

    If you find that your emails are sending you more customers, then one of your KPIs could be growing your email subscribers. When you set KPIs for each phase of your digital marketing and measure it regularly, you will be able to see what’s working and you will be able to go in and adjust your marketing as you go.

    Where do you start with KPIs?

    Start with your goal and work backwards through the funnel.

    1. Awareness – It helps you to broaden your audience, so you can use things like organic social, advertising, influencer marketing, and large content projects, to help you reach new people. To set a KPI for this, you are looking to grow your audiences on the specific networks and channels that drive the most sales. Start by defining the channels, that are driving the most sales, then devise a plan that is going to help you increase your audience on those channels, and measure the relevant audience growth over time.
    1. Consideration – is the phase, where people are a little bit further through the customer journey and they’re thinking about buying from you. To move more people onto the next phase, you need to reassure them that they are making the right decision. So content like testimonials and case studies, user-generated content, blog posts, and videos that answer every question that your customer may have is what works here. The more of this type of content your customers consume the more likely they are to buy.

    What KPIs should we set for this?

    • You can look at the number of pages viewed by each visitor to your website.
    • Look at views on key content that is designed to convert.
    • The time that people spent on your website.
    • Link clicks to sales content from your social media channels and your emails.
    • The number of email subscribers you have.
    • The number of enquiry forms that are filled in.
    • The number of people that are adding your product to the cart.
    1. Sell– This is the ultimate goal. The obvious KPI for base is sales. But there are other metrics we can measure to see how successful our sales process is. This is where the conversion rate comes into its own. For your KPIs, you want to look at the conversion rate for each phase of the buying process. So from a website visitor to a landing page view, from a landing page view to somebody filling in an enquiry form, from an enquiry form to you setting up a sales call, from there to making the sales.

    Set the right KPIs for your campaign – Tips

    • Choose KPIs that are appropriate for the campaign’s position in the sales funnel. A direct response agency means that they’re not interested in things like clicks and impressions. When they can, they want to get down to sales and revenue. When a campaign’s primary goal is awareness or reach, they will look at things like impressions clicks, post-per-click, click-through-rate, and even video completions to tell how well or campaign is resonating with the target audience.
    • Be aware of the limitations in your data structure.

    The level agency uses the client’s system of record whenever possible for setting KPIs. This is great when the client’s system of record works as it should. When the CRM and marketing automation platforms and the advertising platforms themselves, all talk to each other and pass information between one another, that’s not always the case. If your systems aren’t talking to each other, if we are not passing UTM parameters or other advertising identifiers from the advertising into the sales platform or CRM, we can’t use those metrics as KPIs. That is why it is so important to set up your tracking. If you are not storing information from your advertising campaigns in your CRM, in your sales platform, or your other advertising system of record, you should be.

    • Choose KPIs that operate on a reasonable time scale. Even if your campaign golds are tied to revenue or other direct sales KPIs, if you have a long sales cycle, it can be really hard to use those Metrics to optimize an advertising campaign. You have to go up the funnel to find the directional KPI that will tell us what the sales will be like in the future.
    • Evaluate and optimize.

    Once you have established good KPIs and benchmarks or targets that tell you how you are doing against each of those KPIs, it is time to set up a regular reporting schedule. KPIs are only good if they are useful. This means that you need to track your progress against them, and the actions that are coming out of those meetings consistently.

    Categories
    Data Analytics Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing

    8 Ways to Extract Value from Customer Data

    Customer Data : How do you use the most of it?

    When you have more data than you know what to do with, finding effective ways to use the data can be difficult. 

     For example, with more  people using desktop computers, laptops and mobile  devices, all of which are generating more data, it makes sense that 90% of the world’s data has been created  in the last three years alone. And not just because people create data; this is due to algorithms and other programs that track user behavior and create their own data from it. 

     In fact,  daily  global computer usage currently generates more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and this number is only growing due to the proliferation of IoT devices. This is a huge, almost incomprehensible amount of information. And only some of them are useful for specific relevant business interests. 

    So how can a company sift through the mountain of data it collects every day and find the information that is really useful for improving performance, profits, sales or other operational factors? 

    These 5 ways are some of the things a company can do to sift through  information and find what is meaningful and  useful. 

    1. Accept that Big Data is here to stay.

    Big data can look like a huge and unwieldy jumble of random information when viewed in an unpolished way. And  in that context, the real temptation is to  ignore it. However, to ignore big data is to ignore a major opportunity. For example, data science is a growing discipline because of the value that comes from the ability to sift, filter and interpret what is useful in big data. 

    People who choose to ignore big data because of its volume are putting their business at risk. The first step to obtaining valuable customer data is to recognize that good data exists and be prepared to mine  it. 

     2. Invest in Analytics

    The key  to getting the most out of big data, once you recognize its potential, is having the right tools and talents to wade into the ocean of data and find the most useful data. . . sense to you 

    You should seriously consider allocating some operating budget to analytics. Larger companies may have entire departments dedicated to this work, but while this scale yields results, it is not the only way to obtain useful analysis. Even small and medium-sized businesses can find an analytics solution that fits their size and budget requirements, whether it’s staffing or software.

    3. Use Historical Data

    People often think of data as a way to  predict the future, but some of the most important lessons  data can teach us  come from the past. A good long-term plan for using customer data is to analyze historical data. 

    Businesses should always be aware that  the best available data is a set collected over time. For example, you should not ignore sales data from the last 5-10 years, even if it is not part of your current digital infrastructure. 

    Use document management systems and archive this data if necessary, but analysis tasked with obtaining past customer sales data can reveal incredibly useful information about customer behavior and buying habits. If you have existing data, even if it’s not digital, digitize it and make sure your software can access it. Under the right circumstances, it can be much more useful than you think.  

    Of course, getting information about customer behavior and other data sets can  help  increase sales, but don’t forget that another way to make more money is to spend less. In addition to increasing sales, the right kind of customer data can also help  increase efficiency and reduce waste,  which can increase your bottom line. 

    For example, your customer data shows that more and more of your marketing responses are coming from YouTube and Instagram, and less  from Facebook. This may indicate that for your product and target market, you can spend less or reduce your Facebook spend altogether and focus more on platforms that perform well. Let customer behavior data simplify your business.

    4. Analyzing Customer Loss

    “Customer loss” is a term used to describe the turnover  of customers or clients from  regular buyers to doing business elsewhere. This is another area where big data combined with analytics can make a big difference. 

     The purpose of this process is to review your user data and draw conclusions that help explain why some customers remain loyal and others support your business for a  period of time and then leave. You may find correlations between declining customer retention and the discontinuation of certain products. Alternatively, you may find that certain sales or seasons bring you a large increase in customers, but they don’t stick around afterward. By focusing on the specifics of customer attrition, 

     Analytics helps you understand how you can retain more customers and thus generate more consistent profits.

    5. Social media is too much data

    Up to 80% of the information produced today consists of videos, documents and images, a large part of which is published on social media. Analyzing social media and using the unfiltered, unsorted data it reveals can be extremely useful in not only identifying your niche, but also  what the market wants or is looking for. 

     It is important to understand that the content that appears on social networks can be a symptomatic indicator of other trends and factors that benefit companies that are turning around. So don’t think of social media as a channel to reach  your market, but realize that it can also be a window into what that market might be looking for, and you can get ahead of the market to give it to them. Don’t ignore trends, take advantage of them. 

    Conclusion

    More data is generated every day than any human or group of humans can reasonably track. Beneath that data, however, is a wealth of useful and actionable insights. Businesses can only increase sales through strategy and sensitivity when selecting, analyzing, and using the right data correctly.

    Categories
    Pay-Per-Click Advertising

    How To Maximize Google Ads Results with a low budget

    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. 

    1. 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. 

    1. 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. 

    1. 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  

    1. 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. 

    1. 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. 

    1. 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. 

    1. Daily over-delivery

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

    1. 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. 

    1. Recommended budgets

    The Google ads recommended budgets can help you improve performance.

    Categories
    Digital Management

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

    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.

    Categories
    Data Analytics Industry Insiders

    Data Protection – What and Why do you need it?

    Data Protection - What and Why do you need it?

    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.

    Categories
    Content Marketing Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing Social Media

    Cracking the best times to post on Twitter

    Twitter

    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.

    Categories
    Content Marketing Social Media

    The Best free-to-use Social Media Tools

    Free Social Media Tools

    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.

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