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Content Marketing Data Analytics SEO Social Media

Optimizing your SEO and Social Media

Optimizing your SEO and Social Media

Whether you’re starting with your small-scale business or you’re already a full-fledged organization still waiting to live on the internet, the first step in your learning process is Search Engine Optimization. Once a user searches for a particular service, the first result that appears on the page has the highest probability to be clicked on, but getting here isn’t that easy. Hundreds if not thousands of pages are struggling to get here and you’re one of them, let’s see how you can beat this competition. 

There’s a similar story going for social media, except the strategies are a little bit different. Yes, we have talked about SEO before and we’ve talked about social media marketing before, but in this article let’s discuss how both of these are interrelated and how you can get started without losing the balance between the two. Let’s get started with Social Media and SEO 101

Search Engine’s relation with Social Media

While you might already know that social media companies track humongous amounts of user data and use it for their machine-learning algorithms to provide better recommendations, you might not know that this data is sold. This might sound scary but it happens at safe levels, mostly. Well, the point here is that data finds one way or the other to seep into other systems, and somehow the web becomes unintentionally interconnected. 

Search engines like Google sieve through loads and loads of data to optimize the search results for the user. This is important for us to understand because now we understand how our google search engines are affected by our social media presence and activity. 

Understanding Social Signals

Social Signals are nothing but collectively the likes, shares, and comments on social media posts of a particular page as perceived by search engines like Google. These are known for their effect on organic search results by search engines. According to Bigcommerce.com, “These activities are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks”. Just like the above example, backlinking is the process of getting your page featured on another site as a reference to some relevant information. This itself explains a lot about the importance of social media presence and reach.

Google also collaborated with Twitter to increase the database furthermore and added the feature of featuring relevant tweets in search results. The number of tweets, retweets, and shares directly affects your ranking while mentions on sites like Reddit can add to it. Social signals were suddenly discontinued in 2014 but still don’t fail to show significant effects.

Interconnected

Social media posts have a higher tendency to be found as the reach is far more than your blog. Posting your blog’s link on social media would create hundreds if not thousands of impressions and if it comes across a digital creator’s article, they might use it to backlink to your page for relevant information, thus positively influencing your SEO. 

Backlinks

Now that we understand that Backlinks are the backbone of the relationship between social media and SEO, we must know how to gain valuable backlinks. If we seek value, we must provide value as well, so start with producing and posting valuable content. One will only backlink to your post if they find value in your piece of content, that is when they are convinced that their reader would be satisfied with your information.

Build your social media presence and feed them with relevant content regularly. Promote your posts and start an email newsletter to keep your followers engaged.

The Integration

At this point, you can pretty much tell that it’s all about the perfect balance between your SEO, Social media presence, and content marketing. Pour in all the value you have to give to your users and readers, keep a steady flow of content flowing, write blog posts, conduct podcasts, and produce videos and infographics. The more engaging your content is, the more attention your page gets. Here are 5 tips to start integrating your social media and SEO.

1. Quality content

And this might be the millionth time we’re saying this, content is the king and the first step towards successful marketing is well-tailored, shareable content that is valuable, informative, and interesting to your audience and fulfills the user intent.

2. Build a profile

A very overlooked step in this hustle is building yourself a robust profile, a profile that introduces you as you and the page’s owner. A trustable source of information is accompanied by a good explanatory profile of the owner

3. Backlinks

One way to generate quality backlinks other than creating quality content is by reaching out to other bloggers and websites in your industry and asking them to link to your content. It’s important to make sure that the websites and blogs you approach are reputable, as backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites can actually harm your search engine rankings. 

4. Influencers

Digital marketing with influencers can be an effective way to reach a wider audience and promote your product or service. Here’s how to get started

  • Identify influencers in your industry or niche who have a large and engaged following on social media or other online platforms.
  • Reach out to the influencers and propose a collaboration, such as a sponsored post or product review. Be clear about your goals and what you are offering in exchange for their promotion.
  • Once you have agreed to the terms of the collaboration, provide the influencer with any necessary information, such as your product or a unique discount code for their followers.

Monitor the influencer’s post and track the performance of the collaboration. This can help you evaluate its effectiveness and learn what works and what doesn’t for future campaigns.

5. Social Listening

Social listening is a technique used in digital marketing to track and analyze online conversations about a brand or industry. By monitoring social media and other online platforms, businesses can gain valuable insights into what their customers and competitors are saying, and use this information to tweak their marketing strategies.

To use social listening in a competitive space, follow these steps:

  • Identify the relevant social media platforms and online communities where your customers and competitors are active. This could include popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as forums, blogs, and other online platforms.
  • Set up alerts and monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand, competitors, and relevant keywords and phrases. This can help you to stay up-to-date on the latest conversations and trends in your industry.
  • Analyze the data and insights you collect from social listening to understand what customers and competitors are saying about your brand and identify any gaps or opportunities in the market. For example, you may find that customers are complaining about a particular aspect of your product or service, or that a competitor is gaining popularity for a feature that you don’t offer.

Use the insights from social listening to inform your digital marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions. You can then use the information you collect to improve your customer service, develop new products or features, or create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Promote your content on social media, using hashtags and other tactics to increase its visibility and reach. Encourage users to share and engage with your content, as this will help to increase its visibility and improve your search engine ranking.

Monitor and track the performance of your social media and SEO efforts, using tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics to understand what is working and what is not. Overall, combining social media with SEO can help to increase your online visibility, improve your search engine ranking, and drive more traffic and engagement to your website. By creating high-quality content, optimizing your social media profiles and posts for SEO, and promoting your content effectively, you can increase your reach and visibility online and reach a wider audience.

Thanks for reading this far! We hope you found this post informative and helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section below. And don’t forget to follow us on social media for more great content and updates. Thanks again, and we’ll see you at the next one!

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Content Marketing Digital Technology Social Media

Cracking the best times to post on Instagram

Cracking the best times to post on Instagram

If you have been seeing a decrease in the number of views that you are getting and the number of followers you are getting on Instagram it is probably because you are posting at the wrong time. The best time to post on Instagram has recently changed and if you don’t update the time that you are posting, fewer people are going to see your content which means you are not going to be getting as many views, not going to get as many followers and you are not going to be able to take advantage of the organic reach. It is easier to grow on Instagram right now than it was earlier. 

Now is the best time to grow on Instagram, as it is fully monetizable. You can get paid just for uploading reels, and as long as you are posting at the right time, you are going to see a massive increase in both the amount of use and the number of followers that you are getting on Instagram. 

What does Instagram say about the best time to post?

The CEO of Instagram Adam Mosseri has said the following things:

  • Know where your target audience is located
  • Post before peak times
  • There is no perfect time to post. 

Does the time you post on Instagram matter?

Choosing the right times to post or publish your content is often said to maximize the reach and post engagement, which in turn helps in earning a great return for the marketing efforts. So, to think about the best time to post varies according to the industry, or the day of the week. 

3 Best times to post

  1. The first best time to post is from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. You need to make sure that you are posting at the general best times to be posting. Posting somewhere within this time frame should give you a boost in reach, views and engagement. There are two reasons why this time frame is effective. The first is that it covers lunchtime. People who are on lunch break, and taking a breather from their daily duties will check their phones while they eat. The second reason is that a lot of people’s morning schedules are hectic. 
  1. The second best time to be posting on Instagram is from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. This is going to be the time frame that people are leaving work or school. To find out the general best time to post, to make your post go viral, you need to look at the best time to post for your specific account. For this, you need to go into your analytics, see when your followers are online, and begin posting during the time slot where the majority of them are online. You need to wait at least an hour in between each post unless you are doing a story post. 
  1. The next best time to post on Instagram is from 8 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. This is the time when we see a surge in app usage. You need to be posting at these times, for your followers’ time zones wherever they over-index, that is a time zone that you should be posting in when it comes to the best time to post specifically for your account.

Best time to post on Instagram according to the content

1. Instagram feed 

Wednesday – 11 am

Friday – 10 am – 11 am

2. Reels and IGTV

Monday – 5 am

Thursday – 5 am

3. Instagram Live

Monday – Friday – 11 am or 7 pm – 9 pm

4. Instagram Stories

Monday – Friday – 11 am – 1 pm or late afternoon.

As per the research done on over 30,000 different accounts on Instagram, by Sproutsocial, which is a social media management and intelligence tool, here are the best times to post. 

  • Monday- 11am
  • Tuesday- 10am- 1pm
  • Wednesday – 10am -1pm
  • Thursday- 10am-11am
  • Friday- 10am-11am

The best days to post on Instagram are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the worst day to post is Sundays. Loading up reels should be avoided. Posting too much on the story or posting too much on the feed, should be avoided. It makes people ineligible to be able to see your content, which means your reach is going to decrease. You need to be waiting on your feed, for at least an hour in between each post. You should only be posting one to four times a day on Instagram. 

Just because you are posting at the right time on Instagram doesn’t mean you are going to go viral. It doesn’t mean you are going to get more followers. It isn’t just the time you are posting, it is the hashtags that are used, the topic you are using, the length of your video, the sound that you are using, and all these other things that are going to combine to make your post go viral. The posting time is important, but it is not what makes or breaks the reel. Good quality content has great importance for it to perform well. 

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Social Media

Social Media and Privacy: Why is it important?

Social Media and Privacy: Why is it important?

Privacy has become a priority for consumers of digital channels. Many want to protect their information and are more concerned about what they share on social media and who they share it with. 

This is a challenge for social media managers, business owners and content creators who manage social media pages to engage with customers. In addition, many countries have established rules and regulations that affect marketers and require actions to ensure compliance. 

How can companies manage data privacy on social media platforms? In this guide, we look at common privacy issues and important social media privacy laws and tell you how to follow them to protect your customers and build trust. 

What are the most common privacy concerns about social media? 

A new Cisco report, “Consumer Trust Through Transparency and Control,” found that 86 percent of consumers are concerned about privacy and want more control, while 79 percent are willing to invest time or money to protect their privacy, you need to understand the privacy issues affecting the most common social media channels. At the end of the day, it’s about protecting and valuing your customers’ data and avoiding a social media crisis that gives your business a bad reputation. 

Data mining 

Data mining is a way for businesses to gather information using automated computer systems that sort through data to identify trends and patterns. It is often used to study people’s behaviour based on past purchases, location, content preferences or events such as birthdays. 

 Available data sources are: 

  •  Websites 
  •  Social media 
  •  Apps 
  •  Mobile phones or smartphones 
  •  Internet of Things 

The advantage of data mining is that it helps you understand unstructured raw data that can be used to target customers. It also allows you to predict how your customers might behave so you can tailor your message and content more effectively. 

It is important for social media managers to use a data collection method that complies with the law. For example, EU law defines certain restrictions on data collection (see the final GDPR checklist for marketers for more information). 

Ensure that all information collected and used is provided with the express consent and fully complies with applicable privacy laws (for example, create a privacy page if you do not already have one). You must also ensure data security at all stages of the process, from collection to storage, analysis and disposal. 

Data Breach 

When a business is hacked, one threat is customer data, and one source can be social media. Individuals provide a lot of information on social media, such as marital status, location, preferences, and job duties. 

According to the BBC article “How to scrape personal data from social media”, a hacker named Tom Liner compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users worldwide and put it up for sale for about $5,000. This case raised concerns about improving data protection in social media. 

You must use intrusion detection and prevention systems to protect customers from social media data breaches. If you have an IT team or external support, make sure you have systems and processes in place to monitor and manage potential breaches. 

If you become a victim of a breach, notify your customers immediately. To maintain your reputation and retain customers, you must be open and transparent. 

False information 

Social media can be used to spread false information and in some cases propaganda. During the 2016 US election, the media reported that Russia favoured Trump and created 30 Facebook pages for black Americans and ten YouTube channels to promote Donald Trump. 

Trolls or bots are also known on Twitter for impersonating a person or cause. Often the content is inflammatory or used to cause a reaction. It has also been used for stalking, harassment or cyberbullying. 

As the person in charge of social media, you must avoid sharing false information or dealing with trolls. Use the moderators if you find yourself making hurtful comments or posts. You can also use moderation tools or reporting capabilities on social media to address this. 

What are the important social media privacy laws you ask? 

Several social media privacy laws have been enacted in recent years, with more on the way. Let’s look at some of the most important ones. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created by European authorities to protect the personal data of individuals. It also has instructions to limit the export of personal data. 

In relation to social media, GDPR means many things for your social media campaigns: 

Remarketing on social media is prohibited unless the user has participated in such activity by participating or joining. 

Users must agree to your privacy policy, which can sometimes mean opting in twice when redirected from a social media site to a landing page or website. 

Tracking and ROI can be difficult with analytics if you can’t link activity to a social media channel. 

The right to be forgotten 

The right to be forgotten is part of the GDPR that allows individuals to ask companies to delete all personal data from their databases. 

There are several situations in which a person can request this, for example, the information is used to exercise freedom of speech and information or to comply with a legal order or obligation.

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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.

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Content Marketing Digital Media eCommerce Marketing Social Media

Leading the Digital Revolution – Facebook

Leading the digital revolution - Facebook

The spring of 2006 brought a wave of a digital revolution, rising from Massachusetts USA, this wave gradually engulfed the whole world. People were ready to connect with their long-lost friends around the world. If that wasn’t enough, you could constantly know what all your friends are doing during the week. This quickly became the century’s biggest trend, this was Facebook.

As of now, Facebook (renamed Meta) owns a big chunk of the major social media market, occupying big names like Chainspace, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mark played smart, not just with the technological developments, but also with the market acquisition, spending more than $23.3 billion in the process, for a quick comparison, that’s more than Zimbabwe and Maldives’ combined GDP!

That said, the trust that Facebook had in its users has never been the same over the years as the brand and founder constantly get listed in a bunch of acquisitions all around the world, ranging from data privacy to many suspecting that Facebook listens to all its users.

However, leaving the controversies aside for the ones interested, there’s a lot to learn from the ways of the brand and how you as a digital marketer can put all of the learning into phenomenal use. Through the hard times of exponentially growing competition, let’s see how Facebook managed to retain the power it still has in the market.

Strategies to Success

Throughout development, Facebook has undergone nothing less than a metamorphosis. Starting from a medium to stay connected to your friends, to becoming a hybrid marketplace, game zone, organization hub, and whatnot. 

Regardless of the continuous change, it showed that the most important factor for constructive change is sticking to your values. Facebook still, to its baseline, is an excellent way to stay connected with your people. Also, staying relevant isn’t always easy while also accompanying constant change. Keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at the chain of strategies Facebook used to develop itself into an immortal name in the industry.

  • Constant tech developments
  • Market acquisition
  • Tackling competition
  • Sticking to the concept
  • Evolution
  • Secret marketing

We’re sure you already have a lot of thoughts bubbling up in your head right after reading these titles, but let us shed some light on how these unique strategies were put to optimum use.

Constant tech developments

Since the start of the company, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg has barely left any room for improvement. Any possible upgrade to the company was instantly added on without thinking twice of the consequences on the performance or budget, love or hate—this has been by far the strongest driving force for Facebook.

Market Acquisition

Mark has an excellent team of marketing geniuses working alongside him, taking the next right step and avoiding wrong decisions are the key skills of an elite strategist. Having a big share in the market always helps, when you have a bigger market share, you have a bigger community, a bigger following, and thus, a bigger user base.

Tackling competition

This big strategy goes unnoticed by a big part of the Facebook user community. Since its early years, Facebook has been putting a lot behind acquiring the next big thing. When you’re the big name in the market, the easiest way to tackle competition is by owning your competitors. As discussed earlier, Facebook has spent over $23 billion, in just acquiring the potential competition, resulting in not just a bigger community, but also obliterating the competition.

Sticking to the concept

This goes without saying, Facebook has stuck to the basic concept of connecting people even after these years of changes and development. It still reminds you of the early years and even if the potential of UI development is virtually unlimited, Facebook decided to never shift a lot from their initial look, the interface still has almost the same look with just little aesthetic changes that were obvious with time.

Evolution

While acquiring your competition and constantly investing in technological developments is obvious and sticking to base value is necessary, evolution is the third aspect of growth. With time changes era and with the era, trends change. Opinions, choices, values, and fashion, everything changes with trends almost every year and every decade faces a completely visible change in lifestyle. Facebook did an amazing job at integrating the upcoming trends at an appreciable pace and also keeping the user intent alive. Acquiring brands like GIPHY, Beatsaber & many more was a sleek part of this strategy. This goes down as one of the most underrated but effective strategies.

Secret marketing

And at last comes the controversial side of the coin, occupying a little section but enough to express it all. Throughout the past years, Facebook is accused of many things which we won’t list down due to the existence of opinionated polity. But one conspiracy opinion states that all this is fabricated just so as to keep the name of the brand in highlight at all times. This might sound funky but is evident with enough obvious incidents. The brand is always on the news, always in limelight, be it positive or negative, it’s publicity at its finest.

Regardless, what we need to learn from Meta, is the elite configuration of strategies and always keeping up with the world’s pace are two of the key secrets to success.

With that, we conclude this amazing article and you are free to leave your opinions down in the comments down below. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for similar informative content. See you on the flip side!

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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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Data Analytics Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing

Broad Match #101

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.

  1. 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.
  1. 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.

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Agency Life Influencer Marketing Search Marketing

Trends in search advertising

Trends in search advertising

With the discontinuation of ETAs or expanded text ads on 30th June 2022, RSAs or responsive search ads are the only present option. This being just the starter, there is a series of small changes brought about in the whole Google ads ecosystem. Here’s how you can tackle the situation for the best outcomes.

First, let’s understand how RSAs work and what is the basic infrastructure of the ad. Responsive search ads were introduced in the market back in 2018 and were selected as the default format in early 2021. Ever since then, responsive ads have been the way to go for all the digital marketers out there. 

RSA’s work highly relies on machine learning and Artificial intelligence to process huge amounts of data and sieve out the most relevant results to serve the user. This enables advertisers to access a huge amount of user data processing with a tap and lets you create multiple variations or versions of the same content.

Highlights

RSAs optimize your provided keywords and assemble them in an order that is predicted to give the best results, fulfilling the user intent. You can input up to 15 unique headlines and 4 lines of description. Now the AI will analyze all different headlines and break them to create thousands of potential headlines or combinations of headlines or search results.

The advertiser can also opt for NOT jumbling or optimizing their headlines to meet specific user intent or to ensure the specific call-to-action commands. This can also be used if the advertiser is trying to make a specific part of their content visible. This flexibility between the old and new ways makes the transition from ETA to RSA easier and gives the advertiser yet another reason to shift to the new ecosystem for the better. Either way, they ain’t got a choice.

Another huge benefit of RSA is Google’s elite algorithm that can do all the testing for the most effective ad format instantly without the need to post multiple ads and run them in the testing phase to determine the best version of their ad post.

Drawbacks

This, however, does have a few drawbacks too. Recently, advertisers have been reporting the lack of reporting and insights that Google provides about what’s working. Collectively, Google does show which group of ads is performing and what kind of conversions it’s bringing in, what it doesn’t tell is the set of keywords and combinations are the real deal sealers. Although studies have shown that RSAs have increased the conversation rates by even 200% more than their ETA counterpart. 

If the insight problem is solved soon and if the advertisers start getting a more distinct picture of what’s working and what’s not, then the user base for RSAs will feel much more appreciated and will aid the understanding of the advertiser over their ad campaign. 

RSAs are just making things easier for advertisers as each RSA can generate thousands of different combinations of possible outcomes eradicating the need to create multiple ads within the same ad group. The new interface asks you for distinct assets with straightforward keywords integrated into them and all of this can later be evaluated through something called the strength report. 

Range of manual control

Pinning certain assets reduces the number of combinations Google can formulate. Though this gives more manual control over the ad performance, advertisers can try eradicating the same pins in a similar post to see if the automation provides any inflated benefits. Results show highly increased conversions and the conversations with RSAs cost roughly half as many ETAs in many cases.

The only requirement for RSAs to work efficiently is high amounts of data, Google itself recommends the use of broad match keywords. The more data provided to the machine, the better the AI works at processing it and understanding the pattern the data conveys.

Conclusion 

Advertisers really do not need more manual control if the AI is ready to do the same work much faster and without the additional hard work. What we need to do is to embrace the new era of AI-integrated search advertising. Machine learning-powered optimizations are the new future of all of the digital marketing, and you start integrating it with your daily work ethic for a seamless transition.

If you have any questions, make sure to drop them down in the comments and subscribe to our newsletter to never miss similar valuable content coming your way!

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Content Marketing eCommerce Marketing Industry Insiders Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC and Link-Building: What’s the Connect?

PPC and Link Building

If you’re simply starting off to create an advertising method, then you could examine approximately the electricity of hyperlink construction, and what sort of it could supercharge a search engine marketing marketing campaign.

Though hyperlink construction is truly an effective discipline, like every advertising method, it shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. In today’s post, we’ll examine the connection between PPC and hyperlink-constructing, and the way the insights you glean from PPC campaigns can tell your hyperlink-constructing method for extra achievement.

How to Succeed in PPC Marketing

Before we get into how you could leverage PPC findings for higher hyperlink-constructing, let’s move over a number of the essential standards of PPC advertising achievement.

Effective Keyword Research

Just like while growing content material, selecting the proper key phrases will decide whether or not or now no longer your PPC advertisements might be visible with the aid of using a selected target market segment. Researching, testing, and tweaking your keyword choice as you incept and control a marketing campaign will magnetize your target market, and make certain that you’re getting a terrific return on funding out of your PPC budget.

Know your Audience

Although PPC is closely statistics-driven, and a mile’s cry from greater creative, conventional marketing and marketing techniques, you’ll nevertheless want to craft your advertisements primarily based totally on the company expertise of your target market. By going into PPC campaigns with a clean image of your purchaser personas, the target market segments they feed into, and the way this must tell your replica, you’ll be capable of experiencing more potent consequences properly off the bat.

Leverage Automation

All fundamental PPC structures now provide automation tools you could use to herald greater leads, enhance your conversion fee, and experience a more potent ROI, all whilst saving your group time and energy. PPC automation algorithms also are able to read endless statistics units to tell decisions, primarily based totally on your performance, budget, and goals.

Strategies to Follow When Building Quality Links

Now that we’ve checked out the important additives for achievement in PPC advertising, it’s time to run via a number of the handiest hyperlink-constructing techniques you could appoint for a hit marketing campaign. Here are our pinnacle three for the contemporary search engine marketing climate.

Three Main Link-Building Techniques to Use in 2022

1. Digital PR

Digital PR refers to making use of confirmed PR approaches to earn natural one-way links. This method grows linkable belongings, including long-shape weblog posts, infographics, and interactive content material, then sells those belongings to newshounds or guides in a manner that encourages them to jot down approximately your business enterprise or belongings and hyperlink to them. 

This tactic is reasonably tough due to the fact you’ll want to give you a few certainly notable content materials to earn a hyperlink. However, if it’s a hit, you could advantage of a few highly precious hyperlink equity.

2. Contributed Content / Guest Posts

Contributed content material and visitor posting had been famous techniques for hyperlink construction for a little time, and for a terrific reason: it’s a notable manner to generate the sort of accept as true with great alerts that Google favours while rating websites. 

“Providing precious, optimized content material to actual businesses’ websites thru visitor posting allows [business] to construct herbal references from associated web sites with inside the industry,” says hyperlink-constructing agency Hive19. “Like all advertising activities, there are right variations of this – and bad. Specialise in operating intently with editors to offer editorials that seamlessly in shape with their logo voice and editorial calendar.”

3. Reclaiming Unlinked Brand Mentions, Broken and Lost Links

Sometimes, all of the essential legwork is accomplished withinside the manner of gaining a hyperlink, and all you need to do is attain the proper contact. There can be times in which a blogger has noted your logo, but is now no longer connected to it. 

In different cases, there can be hyperlinks pointing to useless pages that had formerly hosted content material to your subject matter or niche, which may be reclaimed with the aid of growing a comparable piece of content material and achieving out to the referring domain’s webmaster.

Sometimes one-way links are misplaced via habitual protection of a referring domain, and an easy e-mail to the webmaster may be sufficient to update it. Combining those varieties of low-putting fruit may be a notable manner to supercharge your backlink profile, and require little or no effort! 

How PPC Analytics Can Help Inform Your Strategy

For many marketers, PPC statistics are used to tell contemporary and destiny PPC campaigns, and their usefulness stops there. Though you could now no longer be privy to it, there are some methods of PPC statistics analytics that may be used to tell and optimize your hyperlink-constructing method.

Use PPC Data to Identify your Strongest Landing Pages

If you’re handling a huge internet site with huge PPC campaigns, then it can be difficult to recognize which pages might be the most prudent to target in a hyperlink-constructing marketing campaign. PPC analytics suites provide a short and clean manner to look at a whole breakdown of your touchdown pages, key phrases, and the way they’re being acquired with the aid of using your target market.

Simply drill right all the way down to the vacation spot URLs to your marketing campaign, and examine metrics like conversion fee, and clickthrough fee with the aid of using key-word, etc. By carving off a share of the maximum-acting touchdown pages, you’ll without problems be capable of prioritizing goal pages in your hyperlink-constructing marketing campaign.

Use PPC Data as a Starting Point to Recycle Content

To turn the preceding method on its head, PPC statistics also can be used to perceive pages that aren’t acting nicely but display loads of untapped potential. Let’s say, for example, that you’re jogging a marketing campaign marketing and marketing a loose e-book in your advertising agency. You might also additionally have a notable clickthrough fee for a keyword like “content material advertising manual”, however, see that a terrible share of human beings is really downloading the e-book. 

This suggests that despite the fact that human beings are finding your replica compelling, they’re now no longer satisfied with the aid of using the content material for your pages. These varieties of eventualities may be a superb starting line as a way to recycle content material and appeal to new hyperlinks via great, authoritative pages.

Look for Spikes in Demand to Inform Topical Content

Finally, reading each of your very own advertisements and the common CPC for sure key phrases may be a notable supply of suggestions while you’re seeking out topical content material. If a sure advert unexpectedly profits a miles better-than-common click-via, and tendencies to your different advertisements cut price a customary leap to your logo equity, it can be time to trip the thrill around a sure subject matter with the aid of using assembly with applicable content material. 

Conclusion 

This article has given you the basics of leveraging PPC insights for a greater focused and statistics-targeted hyperlink-constructing method. We’ve mentioned the connection between PPC and hyperlink construction and the way those precious insights can assist manuals and tell your hyperlink-constructing method for extra achievement. 

Adopting hyperlink-constructing techniques including virtual PR and visitor posting to reclaim unlinked logo mentions, the usage of your PPC statistics will assist, tell and optimize your advertising method going forward. By figuring out your maximum and lowest-acting touchdown pages via PPC insights, you’ll be capable of prioritizing the maximum precious pages for hyperlink construction and notice better ROI in your advertising efforts.

Categories
Content Marketing eCommerce Marketing SEO

Maximize your results with Performance Max Campaigns

Maximize your results with Performance Max Campaigns

Performance max campaigns are Google ads new feature which promises to give you the benefits of unlocking new audiences across all of Google’s channels and networks, they promised to drive better performance, give you more transparent insights, they allow you to steer automation with campaign inputs, and finally, they promise to simplify the process of campaign management and optimizing your ads. 

Optimizing a performance max campaign is very different to optimizing a search or a shopping campaign in Google ads. And the reason for that is that, when Google released performance max campaigns, they made it clear that this campaign was specifically built to work with their algorithm. And even when you are creating your performance max campaign, and you are building out your audience signals where you put in the keywords and the audience that you want this campaign to target, Google makes it very clear that they will only use inputs like your keywords and your audiences as a guide, and that they will go beyond your selections to find more conversions based on your goals. 

So while you can add some optimizations and targets to your performance max campaigns, it is really important to make it clear that this doesn’t stop Google from exploring some keyword themes, audiences and placements that you know are not going to be profitable for your business. Performance max campaigns can be a valuable addition to the total Google ads account and the campaigns that you are running for your business.

Best Practices for setting up performance max campaigns

1. Choose your product landing pages carefully.

Ensure that your product titles or page have only one keyword theme and that it doesn’t include other keywords that Google could try and target. 

2. Include multiple Asset Groups. 

Each Asset group targets only one particular type of product with Audience Signals that target:

  • Specific keywords which are only related to your product
  • Specific Audiences & Demographics that are more likely to convert or buy your service or product. 

3. Take some time on your Ad Copy

Ensure that your headlines and descriptions stand out. It should have:

  • A Keyword Focus
  • Emotional Trigger (like Fear of missing out on the product)
  • Call to Action (sale, discount)

4. Always make sure that you have only 1 or 2 conversion actions active

Where possible focus on Transactions otherwise Google will continue to focus on soft ‘add to cart’ conversions.

When should you use a Google ads performance max campaign?

Your performance max campaign should not be the first campaign you set up in your Google ads account. And it should also not be the only campaign that you run in your Google ads account. The reason for this is that performance max campaigns have been successful when they have been used in conjunction with another campaign. But further than that they are only successful when they are used in Google ads accounts where they have these two things in place. 

  1. Firstly that account needs to have some very strong audiences in the audience manager section of the Google ads, and the key audiences that are helping performance max campaigns are the remarketing or previous visitors audiences Google ads optimized audiences and similar audiences. And the reason why these are so important is that the performance max campaign uses these audiences to give them some baseline data on what potential customers would be for your services or your products. So by having these strong audiences when you start a performance max campaign, you are giving Google a lot of data, so it doesn’t have to run as many initial tests which wastes your budget. 
  1. Secondly, they are successful, when they are used on products or services that already have a good conversion history. The reason why performance max campaigns are successful when these two elements are in place in your account is that you have to remember how performance max campaigns function in that. They are one campaign which then pushes its ads across YouTube, search, display, Gmail and maps. So they are a great campaign to use for remarketing. 

In that, once someone initially interacts with your website or an ad your performance max campaign will continue to target them. When they are going about watching different videos on YouTube, carrying out different Google searches, checking their Gmail or just generally surfing the web.

We are using the search campaign to build those lists and audiences in Google ads, and then after that initial interaction with the search campaign the performance max campaign then steps up and supports that search campaign by retargeting that person as they go to YouTube or look at different parts across the internet. And that is where performance max campaigns are found as the most successful when they are partnered with a highly targeted search campaign.

The reason why you should only be using products or services with a high conversion rate is that your performance max campaign will be going through data from your product pages or your service landing pages and using that as also a data source for potential keywords that they can target in the search element of the performance max campaign. 

How to optimize your performance max campaign?

There are two best options for you to optimize your performance max campaigns in Google ads. And these are to first review your clicks versus the number of conversions or the total conversion value and then remove any keyword themes from your audience signals that are not profitable. 

And then secondly, you can also review your locations and then when you are looking at your locations once again you can look to see if there are any locations which have a high cost, but low conversions or low conversion value. To see success with your performance max campaigns you need to take things a step further by actually excluding products from your feed in Google ads. 

With that, we hope that you now have a clear understanding about performance campaigns and how to optimize them to get the most out of them. We’ll catch you in the next one, follow us on social media to stay updated.

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