In my previous article, I have tried to look at the origin or evolution of e-commerce from where it started up to where it is now.
In this article, I want to look at the different types of e-commerce classifications that you should know as a Digital Marketer. Follow me as we are going to look at that in this article.
#1 Business To Business
This type of e-commerce model allows businesses to transact businesses together. When this happens, it is very possible that the two businesses are online or one of the businesses are online.
Take, for example, the relationship between Jumia and DHL. DHL can assist Jumia in delivering products that are sold online to their doorsteps. This can help in increasing sales turnover for the online business.
#2 Business To Consumer
We can also have businesses leveraging on the internet in order to serve their customers.
In this kind of business model, individuals might be asked to sign up in order to be able to buy products and services and get more from what the organisation has to offer.
A good example is e-commerce websites such as Jumia and Amazon where customers can visit and purchase products and services that they have for sale.
Take, for example, we have individuals that register on freelance platforms such as Fiverr and Elance and they are paid for services they are rendering on those platforms. Some Bloggers also have Google Adsense and Admob accounts that allow Google to display ads on their blogs and Apps.
#4 Consumer To Consumer
This is an electronic e-commerce platform where a single organisation is able to create a platform that allows two customers to transact businesses together.
In this kind of platform, the customers always exchange old products in return for money. Take, for example, I have an old router that I want to sell. I can always upload it to a Consumer to Consumer platform and get paid for such products or services.
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E-commerce has changed the face of business in many ways, but it still hasn’t quite overtaken puns as the best way to make people laugh. While companies have become much more clever when using the internet, they still have a long way to go before they can take down puns in the humor department.
The following list contains 16 e-commerce puns that will make you smile, even if you’re not planning on buying anything online anytime soon. Before we touch the list, let’s quickly look into what puns are. Keep reading..
What Are Puns
A pun is the humorous use of a word or phrase that is similar to, but different from, its literal meaning. A basic pun may employ an existing phrase, or create new words by combining parts of existing words.
There are a few different types of puns: the malapropism (the mistaken use of one word for another), the spoonerism (the deliberate swapping of two letters in two words), and metathesis (when syllables in two contiguous words switch places).
Punning has been around since ancient Roman times when playwrights would joke about famous Greeks such as Socrates.
There are even several schools in Scotland that specialize in teaching people how to construct jokes using puns! So if you’re thinking about starting your own business, why not think outside the box?
It’s easy to get lost in our own product descriptions and forget what we’re actually selling. Keep it simple with and , so customers don’t have to guess which items they want.
The more information on your site, the better chance someone will be able to find what they need. And remember this handy advice: try everything before you buy it!
If you make some mistakes along the way, then maybe something was missing from the description. Maybe If you make some mistakes along the way, then maybe something was missing from the description.
Try before you buy it. If you make some mistakes along the way, then maybe was missing from the description.
E-commerce memes
The internet is a magical place, and it’s never been more apparent than when browsing the ecommerce section. Whether you’re looking for an honest review or a meme that makes you laugh, there are puns galore to be found. Here are 16 of our favorites.
NB: Please if you find this App useful, please leave a Review for us. You should also share the App with your friends and brethren as well. Sharing is Caring.
1) Shop ‘Til You Drop
2) Shelling Out
3) Taking the Plunge
4) A Penny Saved
5) Worth Its Weight in Gold
6) Basket Case
7) Going Once, Going Twice
8) On Cloud Nine
9) In a Pickle
10) That’s the Spirit
11) Spreading the Love
12) Rolling in the Dough
13) Beauty Rest
14) Fight the Good Fight
15) Sealed with a Kiss
16) Hang in There
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In my previous article, I looked at some of the facts that you need to know about project stakeholder identification for a project. In this article, I want to look at some of the facts that you need to know about the project scope statement of projects. Follow me as we are going to look at this together in this article.
A clear and concise scope statement will help you define the success that will guide your project.
Without a strong scope statement, you could end up spending valuable time and resources on work that isn’t even supposed to be part of your project.
The scope statement defines the project and what it does and does not need to accomplish.
The project scope statement is created at an early stage in the project to reflect the stakeholder’s common understanding of major activities to be performed in the project and provide a basis for future project decisions about what should and should not be included in the project.
Depending upon the size and scope of the project, a project scope statement should typically include:
Project objectives, deliverables, exclusions, and requirements.
Project constraints and assumptions
Project acceptance criteria
It may also include initial project organization, defined risks, schedule milestones, initial WBS, and approval requirements.
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The performance of affiliate link promotion depends on the type of interaction you have with your audience, as well as on the influence you have in the online community.
Also, it might be a matter of preference choosing one strategy and not the other. In this article, I want to talk about ways of analysing Affiliate link performance.
It is crucial to monitor affiliate marketing efforts and to evaluate the performance of this type of online marketing. The most relevant statistics you need to keep an eye on are the following:
The products that get most clicks/conversions
Monitor the data above for each type of promotion to conclude if one (or several) of these show outstanding performance and are able to generate the highest number of conversions.
This evaluation can show if certain products perform better than the rest, and it can also show the type of promotion that gets most conversions.
It can also be used to find out more about your audience and how each of these approaches is effective among those users.
For example, some products might be particularly popular among users from a specific location. Or a product mention strategy might be converting better than a banner. All of this can greatly influence your planning and the road you will take with developing your affiliate marketing strategy even further.
• The number of clicks • The number of conversions • The data about those who click (age group, gender, location, etc.)
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The online world has tremendously affected our everyday lives that sometimes it might even seem impossible to imagine our lives without technology and online communication. This trend naturally transferred to the business world, where the new technologies opened up so many exciting opportunities. In this article, I want to talk about some of the fundamental facts about Affiliate marketing.
The businesses out there were no longer confined by location or restricted by infrastructure. Once everyone hurled to the big cities because these have been places enabling your business to grow. Businesses needed more qualified employees, they wanted exposure to more customers and opportunities to network and create partnerships.
All of these required your business having headquarters in a big city, but this is no longer needed. All you need is a computer and the internet connection, and you are ready to take your business anywhere you want. In this article, I want to talk about some Fundamental Facts about Affiliate Marketing.
Speaking of the business world, this term has so long been used in relation to big corporations and management teams, but nowadays, we see more and more one-man businesses that grow and expand their reach globally. There is a significant number of businesses completely set up and run by a single person. Or they start as such, only to expand as their influence online begins to increase. Entrepreneurship has become a popular business model which helped so many wonderful business ideas come to life.
The possibilities on the market are numerous, especially if we have in mind the online market. There are so many different ways and strategies to set up and grow a business, depending on the niche, resources, knowledge, etc. What is safe to say is that these opportunities are a part of the online world, and new opportunities keep popping up. One of those is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing
While every business starting out nowadays will first create a website, optimize it and then head to social media to establish a presence there, not everyone will consider affiliate marketing as an opportunity at first. The goal of this ebook will be to show you the real potential of affiliate marketing and how developing a strategy of your own can help your profits soar and your business grow.
For starters, you will need to understand the difference between being a merchant and an affiliate because these require two completely different strategies.
In fact, these can develop your business in different ways, so you can either focus on one or choose to be both, a merchant and an affiliate, which, although less frequent, is still doable. You will also learn about business models that are available in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate programs and tools will be essential parts of your strategy, which is why you need to learn about those as well. Your goal will be to learn as much as possible about affiliate marketing opportunities and about different affiliate programs and tools that enable you to form your own custom strategy, an approach and a plan which will be oriented towards one idea – improve your business through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a part of online marketing, which means it is connected and related to all of the segments of online marketing. This is why there will be a chapter about this connection, and how using affiliate marketing requires at least basic knowledge of online marketing in general.
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Like any other campaign, it all starts with determining the objectives or goals of the campaign. A few words on this and then we will have a look at what link building can look like. This article talks about some of the ways of starting a link building campaign.
Keep in mind that although what you are doing is called link building, you are actually involved in a kind of online marketing, for which planning always starts with objectives or goals. Your objectives should be first of all realistic and relevant.
Realistic meaning that they should be achievable in the kind of time frame you have in mind and with the resources you already possess. Relevant means that link building should, preferably, not be a goal in itself but rather lead on to the bigger road to achieving some form of success or progress for your business, organization or individual you are promoting. This article talks about some of the ways of starting a Link Building Campaign. Follow me as we will look at that together in this article.
For example, get links from 15 popular blogs, sounds like a nice goal to have,but will this have an effect on the overall growth of your business or organization? Do you have the content ready to convert this new traffic into users or customers, or to maintain a long-term relationship with these new visitors? Suppose you have 200 new visitors during the first week, but your website had no content in that time and most of the visitors had a quick look and left unimpressed. Did your goal achieve anything in the bigger picture? It actually did some harm,
because quite possibly most of those users will not come again even after you improve your content, because they will think, ‘Yeah I remember the site, I was not too pleased’. So setting objectives is key to starting out right, because if you do not, anything you do after that might be effort, time and resources spent in the wrong direction, a direction which might even do you harm.
Lastly, remember that although linkbuilding is a part of online marketing, it is different in the sense of the time span of its results, which are not going to be instantaneous as opposed to putting up an online advertisement or a television commercial. This does not mean that your campaign has failed. Neither should you promise instantaneous results for any website that you do perform linkbuilding for.
What are your assets?
Like barter in old times, if you are going to get links from other people, you need to have something that they are interested in as well – the reason that a blogger or a website owner would care about what you have to give; something that attracts them enough to put up a link for you. That reason is what we call an asset and it will differ from one website to another, and it also depends on whether you are a business, an organization or an individual. Assets need to be relevant for the people you want to attract. Below are a few examples of what an asset could be:
• Data • Content • Products • Services • Community
Lastly, remember that money is no longer an asset you can offer in linkbuilding. Although some might say it never was a preferable one to begin with. Google actively penalizes SEOs, websites and/or individuals involved in buying links. Links come in many flavours.
Next, you will need to plan what kind of links you need and in what sort of mixture. Linkbuilding offers the opportunity to implement many kinds of linking, depending on the needs of a campaign. From deep-linking which involves making links to pages deep within a site structure, to a specific product or piece of content, to brand-linking which means creating links that contain your brandinformation/the name of your company.
You can come up with a sketch of your requirements after you do a complete analysis of your website and link profile. Be on the lookout for areas of improvement and innovation. Here are a few examples of the kind of linking to choose from:
• Links to your homepage/mainpage • Deep linking • Brand linking • Links that contain target keywords It is good to build a campaign with a diverse linking strategy for optimum results and a more comprehensive link profile.
Social links
As long as we are discussing types of links, we have to mention so-called social links. These are the links from social networks. Even though they are not as relevant and powerful as links posted on other websites, it is speculated that social links do have some value in determining ranking, as they can indicate the level of quality of a certain page.
If a certain page is shared a lot of times on social networks, it means that it provides some kind of value, and this usually indicates high-quality or original content.
This is one of the reasons why social media marketing has become an important part of online marketing, and thus it can be related to search engine optimization.
Besides being present on social media and engaging with your followers, another why to encourage social sharing directly from your website is to use social sharing buttons, which can be installed as a plug-in on your website.
Looking for your people
Now that you are on your way and ready to start your campaign, you will need to think about the type of people you will be contacting to ask for links and attract as linkpartners. It is best to make sure that whomever you reach out to is someone who is interested in whatever your content is, since reaching out to people randomly leads to a low response rate and even lower ratio of success.
One of the ways to ensure better responses is to place ‘hooks’ in your content. No, you will notneed a hammer for this.
A hook is something that makes a potential linker interested or committed to giving your content a fair chance, an element that makes the viewer stay put and wants to finish what you have to show, share or say. Here are examples of a few hooks:
Social mediawebsites, like Facebook or LinkedIn, are great places for you to get a feel for how people are spending their time in virtual spaceand how what they are sharing with others.
Identify patterns in the content being passed on and try to work those elements into hooks, which you place in your own content.
Once you feel you have come up with a potential list of people who might be interested in linking to your website, you can search for that list creatively on a search engine.
So, for example, if one of the target linkers you have identified is a travel blogger, you search for a list of travel blogs and then use a tool like the Scraper plug-in on Chrome to get all of those URLs copied off the results page in one go and paste them on to a working page on email or a spreadsheet.
Use a tool like URL Opener to open all the sites with one go. Look for any contact info on the sites, which could be email address, Twitter or LinkedIn account, Facebook page, etc. Tools like Followerwonk will allow you to search Twitter bios and accounts for keywords of your choice.
So, if your website is about cigars and pipes, offering products and reviews, you could look for keywords like cigar aficionado with blogger or pipe enthusiast with blogger or just tobaccoblogger or cigar blogger to get a list of people with Twitter accounts who have blogs related to your own content. You then download these results into a spreadsheet.
Next, you will want to find out as much as possible about these potential link partners you have come up with to help you craft a message that is as personalized and relevant as possible.
Do not send out emails that seem like automated messages with a template. Think of this as SEO for a person rather than a search engine. You will want each person to like you as much as possible if you are to entertain hopes of having a high success rate with your list.
It is also efficient to sort the link targets in the order of priority when doing your outreach. Of course, they will have varying importance and priority in terms of how much Page or Domain Authority they have.
Secondly, they might be sorted based on how many followers they have on social media. Lastly, their relevance to your specific field may also be a factor in prioritizing.
An advisable minimum Page Authority for your targets would be 1 and for Domain Authority a figure of 25. They can be lower or higher depending how long your list is. Use MozBar tool to determine the Page and Domain Authority of a website.
Also be very careful when using generic greetings like ‘Hi Webmaster’ or ‘Dear Blogger’. They might associate your email with automated spam that they are used to receiving. A good message will contain the following if possible:
• The other person’s name • A great subject line • A detailed or specific comment about their work • The use of an authentic email signature • Disclosure of your own current location
It is also best to avoid using one of these famous, free email addresses from Google or Yahoo! as they are also mostly used by spammers unfortunately.
Lastly, remember to follow up with the bloggers and website owners you are targeting as they probably receive a lot of emails, making it difficult to keep track of them all.
Do not let negative responses get you down and instead, ask for feedback about your content. A blogger might not like your current content but they might like something in the future.
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If there is one thing that has revolutionised how business is being done worldwide, it is the coming of the internet.
With the coming of the internet into the business landscape, it is now possible for organisations to do business beyond their immediate environment.In this article, I want to talk about impact of internet on businesses.
Many businesses today are also able to attract and convert more customers than they have coming to their brick and wall offices. In this article, I want to look at some of the impacts of the internet on businesses. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article.
Now the impacts…
#1 Market Penetration
One of the beauties of the internet on business is that it has increased market penetration across the globe. With the coming of the internet, organisations are no longer restricted to a particular geographical location.
With the presence of the internet, organisations can reach out to their potential customers and convert them to loyal customers without them having to come down to their office.
#2 Market Development
Another benefit of the internet on businesses is that it can aid in the market development efforts of the organisation. With the internet in place, organisations can be able to analyse customer behaviour and aggregate what their customers really want.
Another benefit of the internet for businesses is that it has brought about product diversification. Before the coming of the internet, the only option that was available to businesses was to allow customers and prospects to come down to their offices.
With the coming of the internet, organisations now realised that there is a cheaper and more cost-effective way of doing business. Many of them have been able to take their businesses online. This has changed the business landscape astronomically.
#4 Product Development
Online businesses are also able to develop new products and services based on customers’ feedback. Just like I said earlier, It is very possible for them to gather the opinion of the users who might have one thing or the other to say about the products or services that they have used.
This will allow them to create a platform where customers can make suggestions on how those products or services can be better. This will definitely increase customer loyalty and satisfaction level for the organisation.
Unknown Facts About Internet Marketing
Buying and selling is as old as mankind. When this process first started before the advent of the internet. The seller will always have to look for the buyer and it was so hectic.
That was the time of trade by barter before the introduction of money. Then if you have yam and you need rice you will have to look for some that have rice and he is looking for yam.
With the coming of the internet, things changed drastically, it is now possible to even sell products and services beyond your immediate environment, In this article, I want to look at the functions of internet marketing. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article.
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Earlier, I have discussed some of the reasons why internet gas changed how businesses are being done generally. In this article, I want to look at some of the major benefits of internet marketing. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article.
Now the benefits…
#1 Global market reach
First and foremost, internet marketing can increase your global market reach. Without the internet, you will not be able to do business beyond your immediate environment. With the coming of the internet, you can set up your online campaigns. You can also set up your e-commerce store and transact businesses online.
#2 24/7 Online Shopping
All with the coming of online marketing, it is now possible for you to make money while you are asleep. Online Businesses are set up and most of the processes are automated. This allows the process to run without any human intervention. It also allows you to make money while you are asleep.
#3 Drive sales
Internet marketing can also allow organisations to drive more sales. With it, you can actually reach out to prospects that have all the characteristics that want in your ideal customers. This allows you to engage in inbound marketing in order to convert prospects to customers. This will end up increasing your sales astronomically.
#4 Better market research
Another benefit of internet marketing is that it can also improve the market research efforts of the organisation. When you have internet marketing in place, you will have available data about your customers’ purchase behaviour.
This will enable the organisation to understand what motivates their customers’ buying behaviour. This will enable them to properly segment and profile their customers. It will allow the organisation to raise exit barriers for their customers.
#5 Brand awareness
Another benefit of internet marketing for businesses is that it will definitely increase brand awareness for the organisation. When your business is online based and you have a good brand strategy, even those that have not purchased any products or services from you will be conversant with your products and services. This will increase the clientele base for your products and services.
#6 Investment strategies
Also, when organization launch out online, their horizons will be widened and they will have to be looking for ways of increasing their customer base. This will definitely be forced to invest more capital into the business. They will have no option other than to respond to the increase in the demand for their products and services.
#7 24/7 Customer Support
Another benefit of having an online-based business that is fully supported by a stable internet is that it will allow the organization to respond to customers in real-time. Customers do not have to come to the office before their challenges can be addressed. This will definitely increase customer loyalty and boost the sales of the organization.
#8 Personalized Services
Another beauty of a good online business for any business is that it will allow the organization to offer personalized services to their customers. That means products can be individually tweaked in order to meet the need of customers. With that, customers can make individual personal demand for products and services and their needs can be met based on what individual customers can afford.
#9 Lesser Advertising costs
Also, when you are able to build a good online reputation for your organization, you are likely to develop a loyal customer base who can relate and identify with your business without having to come to your office.
When you have this calibre of customers, they are ready to assist you in reaching out to more customers. By the time they start posting about your products and services to their own audience, you will realize that you can reach out to more customers and reach out to more prospects without breaking the bank.
#10 Low-cost information sharing
Added to the lower cost of advertising your products and services, you will also notice that with a good online business and community management, you do not need to go to any radio or television station when you have vital information to pass across. You just need to ensure that your community are well managed and information is posted on your social media platform when most of your audience is online.
This will ensure that any information that you are passing across at that time is able to reach as many people as possible.
#11 Saves cost
Another beauty of a good online business is that it can assist the organization in saving cost and time. Let me say that when you are using the traditional mode of marketing, you are likely to spend more and achieve a little results.
It is also possible that the majority of those that listened to that advertisement at that time is not really interested in what you have to offer. When it comes to online marketing, with appropriate targeting, you can leave out those that are not likely to respond actively to what you have to offer.
#12 Better customer communication
Also, internet marketing as a tool can increase better communication among various stakeholders in an organisation. First and foremost, it will be easy to communicate with customers and prospects without requesting them to come down to your office. Also, internet marketing will allow various departments to communicate and collaborate in order to resolve customers’ issues.
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Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, and it has become an effective way for businesses and influencers to reach their target audiences.
As a user, you may have been wondering if there was a way to see or know who clicked on the link you posted on your Instagram page. This article talks about how you can see who clicked on your instagram link.
We will explore the answer to this question and discuss whether or not it is possible to view who has clicked on your Instagram link.
Truth About Links
Instagram links are powerful tools for connecting with potential customers or followers. But how can you know if people are actually clicking on your links? Can you see who clicked on your Instagram link?
The answer is – yes, it is possible to see who has clicked on your Instagram link.
Instagram Insights provides valuable information about your followers and their interactions with your posts. This data can help you identify which posts are working best and who is actually engaging with your content.
By using Instagram Insights, you can identify which followers are interested in your content and who has clicked on your link.
You can even use this data to track conversions from clicks to sales. Knowing who has clicked on your link can be an invaluable way to inform your future content strategy.
However, there are some limitations when it comes to tracking clicks on Instagram links. First, you will only be able to view the usernames of people who have clicked on your link, not the names associated with those accounts.
And again, the accuracy of Insights data depends on how many people have viewed and interacted with your post.
Ultimately, if you want to get the most out of your Instagram link, you should take advantage of the insights available to you. Knowing who has clicked on your link can help you tailor your content and better understand who is engaging with your posts.
You can also use third-party analytics tools to get even more detailed information about who’s clicking on your link. For example, a tool like bitly can give you insights into user interactions, including the number of clicks and who clicked on it.
However, it’s important to remember that the data these tools provide is not perfect and should only be used as an indication of how well your post is performing.
If you’re looking for more precise data, you should consider using a tool like Google Analytics which provides real-time tracking of website visitors and can tell you exactly who clicked on your link.
The bottom line is that there are some other tools that can give you some insight into your post performance. If you’re looking for more specific data, consider using a more advanced analytics tool like Google Analytics.
How To Improve Clicks
The best way to prompt people to click your Instagram link is to use a call-to-action (CTA) in your post.
You can ask people to click the link in the comments or encourage them to visit the link in your bio. This way, you can track each person who clicks the link and get an idea of who is interested in your content.
By using these tactics, you’ll be able to get more insights into who is engaging with your posts and clicking your links. This information can help you better understand your audience and craft more relevant and effective posts.
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Here are some of the facts that you need to consider when you are to Create Keyword Lists To Drive Business Objectives:
Consider creating lists around the type of search intent, i.e. if they’re looking for information (Top of Funnel Searches), consideration (Middle of Funnel) or conversion/sales queries (Bottom of Funnel)
Having an exhaustive list of keywords that your target audience is likely to search for is essential to building coverage to ensure your brand is visible for the most valuable searches in the user’s buyer journey
It’s essential to know the function of each keyword and assign budgets to each group of keywords depending on the part they play in a conversion
Use negative keywords to cut out unwanted searches, i.e. low conversion/high cost, bad brand associations etc.
How to approach writing ads in terms of driving clicks from searchers:
Relevant: Consider the need state of the searcher and how this can be addressed by your product. What do they want to hear about your product to make your product seem more appealing than the competition based on their need state?
Attractive: Include keywords in the ad copy to increase perceived relevance in order to drive higher click through rates
Directional: Consider offers and always include a CTA to direct their action towards your business objectives (conversions) post-click
This is an example of good copy elements to drive action.
Relevant to New York hotels – 500 hotels in New York NY
Attractive to book – because you have the Best Price Guarantee
CTA – the book is the first word of the meta description “Book your hotel in New York NY online”. That is telling you to take any action, to book.
A landing page is your website. You control this zone and should ensure its closely linked to your ads, keywords, and user intent with directional CTAs to drive towards business objectives
Good landing pages are related to what the searcher typed into Google, as well as the ad copy which they clicked. This increases the relevance of the search experience. If the relevance level is high, the searcher is more likely to engage with the page content
If you include CTAs, you can direct the searcher to take action on your website, this can be in the form of buying a product or filling out a contact form
You should take the entire search experience into account when choosing or designing landing pages for search campaigns
What are the considerations of a good landing page? Consider the search journey. To recap:
The user has a need
They look for solutions online
They click your ad as it’s closely aligned to their need
Next, they land on your website
The questions for landing pages are:
Does your landing page deliver on the promise of the ad and resolve their need state?
Is it aligned to the ad, i.e. relevant, attractive and directional?
For example, in the slide image, we can see a landing page that contains:
A.Product details to entice the searcher and quickly show how the product fits their needs B.Details of how the product appeals to the searcher’s persona and motivations C.A large clickable CTA to drive action D.Appealing and aspirational imagery to quickly infer outcomes.
The elements above can be distilled into what is known as conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization is a process whereby pages are designed to drive as many valuable actions based on how people interact with the page and what they are likely to do.
This includes device optimization where buttons are large on mobile-optimized sites so users can easily click them or use striking colours to highlight a particular area of the page (CTAs). It’s important to identify high impact improvements and device considerations to drive better performance.
On mobile, the PPC ad is the first listing a searcher sees on the SERP
Searcher behaviour is different on mobile than on desktop devices. Mobile Navigation has to be simple and easy to manage with larger CTAs and readable font sizes for smaller screens
A further consideration is the type of traffic that mobile drives; if it is primarily researching traffic and not converting traffic (as is the case with many mobile websites), serving the right kind of content to give mobile searchers the information they require is the most effective way to drive value in your mobile traffic
Google Ads takes into consideration how mobile-optimized your website is, i.e. is it responsive and designed with mobile in mind? This will ultimately affect your quality score for mobile traffic.
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It’s a medium weight on-page SEO signal although it doesn’t have a direct impact to higher rankings. It plays a big role in enticing the user to click-through to your listing If you have an uninspiring or keyword-stuffed meta description, you may get half the clicks of a well written and more click-worthy one. So they really are worth the time and effort. In this article, I want to talk about why Meta Tags are important for SEO.
The meta description can be thought of as your chance to sell the page, so it encourages the searcher to click on your listing. If the page has any unique selling points that none or few of the competitors have, then list them here.
How to optimize meta description tags:
Make descriptive and engaging (this is the most important part to get right)
Try to make your listing stand out from the crowd. Does the page contain any unique selling points?
Describe the page in a natural language and enticing enough to encourage click-throughs
Keep short and concise
Max space is 156 characters (around two short sentences)
Keywords in meta description DO NOT directly improve rankings, so avoid keyword stuffing
Some extra info: Occasionally Google will write its own Meta Description tags in the SERPs if one hasn’t been written or isn’t deemed relevant enough to the keywords used by a searcher.
This meta description includes some benefits, that the process is going to be quick and easy. It’s written with the user in mind with “your specific riding habits”. It includes the main keyword but in a way that makes the snippet relevant to the user and not spammy.
The chosen meta description tag is: Quick and easy snowboard size calculator and sizing charts, to help you find the right gear for you and your specific riding habits.
Note: In this example, the user searches for “snowboard sizing” and even though that exact phrase isn’t mentioned, a close variant (snowboard size) is mentioned, so Google chooses to bold the text. When text is bolded, this improves the chances of the listing being clicked on.
Over time a page will build up trust and authority which is assigned to its URL. Changing a URL without redirecting appropriately can lose trust. Because of this, it’s best not to change a URL where possible and to try and get them right from the start.
How to optimize images:
Add a description in the Alt text
Try to accurately describe the image and this sometimes means including keywords
Make them concise, typically two to five words
Make filenames meaningful
Make them concise, typically two to five words
Filenames and Alt text can be the same but they don’t have to be
Make images web-friendly
Gif, Jpeg and PNG
Balance of small file size and good quality
We need to be honest when describing images through Alt text and filenames, but where it makes sense we can sprinkle some keywords in to add to the overall relevancy. You DO NOT need to be really strict here e.g. sometimes you can include your P1 and P2 keywords but otherwise, you won’t be able to.
If you have multiple images, they should have differing Alt text/filenames, otherwise, this can look like keyword stuffing.
There isn’t an exact science here and it’s important that the Alt text and filenames are descriptive and accurate first – and contain keywords or related words second. In this case, the Alt text contains one of the main keywords and the filename is a related word that will add to the overall relevancy of the page. You’ll always want to keep the size of images relatively low and often much smaller than the original image size. This helps make the web page load quicker.
Fact Check Policy
CRMNuggetsis committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.
This article talks about some of the reasons why URL are important for SEO.
It’s a lightweight on-page SEO signal
They are seen in the search results so they can attract click-throughs when relevant
Search Engines index and retrieve pages based on the URL – and build up search engine trust through them
By default, URLs are often generated from the main heading of the page by the CMS. This is good as default as relevancy is added but the downside is that they often become long and repetitive, so ideally they need to be changed to something different and shorter.
Keep short and concise (around 70 characters before truncation)
Set URLs right at the beginning
Stick to conventions
Use dashes “-” instead of underscores “_” to separate words
Use lowercase characters
Headings help outline what a webpage is about. They are used in a similar way as Microsoft Word. The main heading should be within an H1 tag, secondary headings in H2 tags, tertiary in H3 tags and this can go all the way up to H6 tags.
Why headings are important:
Headings are one of the first things a user notices and the main heading (H1 tag) needs to be relevant to what they have searched. Users scan a page’s headlines before deciding whether to read the whole page or go back to where they have come from.
It’s a medium weight on-page SEO signal and adds relevancy to the page.
Why URLs Are Important For SEO
There are six header tags (H1 through to H6) that are used to outline the hierarchy of content. The main heading should be in an H1 tag. Secondary sub-headings should be in H2 tags. H3 – H6 tags aren’t used as often in body copy but work in the same hierarchal sub-heading way.
The main copy is ultimately where the user is going to find what they are looking for or not, so search engines pay close attention to it.
Main copy: The main copy is text on a web page that features after the main heading:
It’s also known as body text
It can include hyperlinks
Why the main copy is important:
It’s a high-weight on-page SEO signal and adds relevancy to the page
The main content is where the user is ultimately satisfied or not with what they are looking for.
The main copy is ultimately where the user is going to find what they are looking for or not, so search engines pay close attention to it. Main copy: The main copy is text on a web page that features after the main heading:
It’s also known as body text
It can include hyperlinks
Why the main copy is important:
It’s a high-weight on-page SEO signal and adds relevancy to the page
The main content is where the user is ultimately satisfied or not with what they are looking for
Matt Cutts says there isn’t an ideal keyword density formula and hints that thinking about it in such a way can be unhealthy and may encourage you to over-optimize and load too many keywords into your content. He does however say that including the keywords you’d like to rank for is a good thing, but it should be done in a natural way that enhances the readability of the page.
How to optimize the main copy:
#1 There are no strict guidelines on length
The content should be long enough so that:
It satisfies what the user is looking for and
Search engines understand what the page is about
#2 Keyword usage
Ignore keyword density and don’t repeat keywords too often
As a loose rule for 500 words, mention:
Primary keywords two or three times
Secondary keywords one or two times
Tertiary keywords zero or one time
Use synonyms and close keyword variations
Write in a natural human-friendly language
As Matt Cutts mentions in the previous Google video, there isn’t a special keyword density formula and when you mention keywords too often, the search engine may see it as being spammy and count against you. That’s why this keyword repetition recommendation for 500 words should be taken quite loosely.
Using synonyms and keyword variations can help, so instead of saying “SEO training” ten times, you could say it two or three times but then also mention things like “learn SEO”, “SEO workshop”, ”class”, “search engine optimization tutorial” and “how to get to the top of Google”. Even if such keywords were not in your targeted keyword list, they would help by being synonyms or close in meaning to your target keywords, so would add relevancy to a page – but again this should be done in a natural way that isn’t going to annoy your readers.
In SEO, hyperlinks help the page you are linking to. The way you link to pages internally plays an important role in search engine rankings. Linking to pages with descriptive and easy to understand anchor text, that doesn’t look spammy, will pass more relevancy. Also, make sure you are linking to your important pages regularly. E.g. If you wrote a blog post about “5 Things to See and Do in Paris”, it would probably make sense to link back to the Paris destination page.
The words you use in the hyperlink is called anchor text and pass relevancy to the receiving page.
So SEO training will pass more relevancy than click here
Hyperlinks also pass reputation:
The more internal links a page has the more important it is deemed to be, so it will stand a better chance of ranking
Although don’t over-link where it makes for a bad user experience
Image optimization involves making:
Image filenames and ALT text relevant
The file size web-friendly
Why image optimization is important:
It’s a lightweight on-page SEO signal and adds relevancy to the page
Alt-text is often read out to visually impaired people through screen readers
While image optimization is only a lightweight on-page ranking signal, it is one of the most overlooked aspects but still does add relevancy to the page. Also, by adding relevant ALT text you will be helping people who rely on screen readers that may be visually impaired.
Fact Check Policy
CRMNuggetsis committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.
Open Google Search Console (if you have access to it), check the crawl errors report to see if you can see any site or URL errors. If there are URL errors, review what type of errors there are and whether they are for important web pages.
One of the most common types of errors is a “404 page not found”. This means that a URL used to exist but it doesn’t anymore. This could be that the page has been deleted or the URL has been changed. If the page has been deleted, sometimes it’s best to 301 redirect the old URL to the next most relevant page. Similarly, if a URL has been changed, the old URL should be 301 redirected to the new URL.
Soft 404 errors are strange because they often look like normal error pages, where a message says the page could not be found but rather than return a server response code of 404, they actually return a server response code of 200. A 200 response code tells search engines that everything is OK but in this case, it is contradicted by a page not being able to be found. The fix to this, it usually requires letting your web developer or technical person know and they can tweak the web server settings.
The best way to learn SEO is through practice and repetition. For this exercise, decide on a website that you wish to test out your on-page optimization skills on. Pick 10 topics/landing pages to research, then decide on their best keywords and then outline the key on-page optimization elements. The reference URL below will take you to a Google spreadsheet where you can follow the on-page optimization template.
From there, you can:
Download the spreadsheet (File à Download as), or
Make a copy (File à Make a copy..) which requires you to be signed in to a Google account.
You can use Open Site Explorer to benchmark your website against competitors. If you haven’t used a Moz product before, create a free community account:
You will now need to benchmark a website against three of its top competitors for key Moz metrics. You only need to enter the homepage URL of each site to record the homepage Page Authority, Domain Authority and Root Domain Links.
Review to see how far or close your website is from the competition and gauge how much extra work is required for off-page optimization success. The higher each metric is, the more likely it is to perform for off-page optimization.
By changing the Inbound Links filter, you get a better idea of how the whole domain is performing, specifically for backlinks that can pass PageRank. What to do:
Setting the Target to “this root domain” ensures backlinks are reported for the whole domain and not just the URL (e.g. homepage URL) that you enter
Setting the Link Source to “only external” ensures that you only get backlink information and filters out internal links
Setting the Link Type to “only follow” ensures that you’ll only see backlinks that actually pass PageRank and filter out those that do not
Then, review the incoming link and highlight the top three backlinks that you feel offer the most value. When deciding on the best ones, bear in mind the page authority of each but also consider how relevant the backlinks are to the industry and whether they felt authentic or not.
The benefits of using pay-per-click advertising are:
#1 Relevance
One of the very first thing about Google Ads is that your article will only show up where it is important. If you use the right keyword, your article will only show up to customers who are ready to buy. This will increase the conversion rate for your products. It will also ensure that you get ROI on your investment.
#2 Timing
When you are bidding for a particular keyword and your ads continue to run, you can be sure that your like will always show up anytime someone search for that particular keyword. Bidding for a particular keyword ensures that your product always shows up anytime that customers have to make a buying decision.
#3 Qualified nature of the visitor
When you are bidding for a particular keyword with Google ads, you can be sure that you are dealing with an active customer. Most times, when a keyword or a link shows up and it is not what I am actually looking for, I may be passive in terms of how I am looking for, If it happens to be the exact product that I am looking for, the tendency that I will buy that product is very high.
#4 Control
With Google ads, you are in absolute control. You have control of over budget, ads and keywords. You can increase or reduce your ads budget, at times, when you post an article and it is ranked on a search engine, you don’t really have power over the article on a search engine but when it comes to Google ads, you can actually pause your ads if you feel that the ads are not performing as expected,
#5 Accountability
One thing you cannot take away from Google Ads is the level of transparency and accountability that comes with it. You can actually see how many times your articles appeared in a search result and how many clicks you have gathered, In a nutshell, it comes with reports that allow you to decide on whether you should continue with the ads or not. This will allow you to make reasonable decisions on whether to change your keyword or make other adjustments to your campaign.
#6 Visibility
Even among the illiterates, you will always hear “Ask Google’. Google is very popular. The company commands about 85 percent of searches worldwide. So, if you are using Google Ads, you have to know that you are launching yourself to a wider market. Running your ads in this regards will allow your ads to be seen by as many audiences as possible.
#7 Measurability
Another importance of Google Ads is that it also you to focus on some metrics and decide on how you have performed based on that metrics. You can measure the number of clicks , calls and messages that you have received. Please note that every ads have goals that they wanted to achieve. These measurements will allow you know if your ads are achieving the desired goals.
Keywords, Landing Pages and Ad Copy are the three fundamental pieces of a PPC campaign. Always consider how these three items relate to each other to ensure your campaign is relevant to searcher intent.
Keywords: Start out by giving Google a list of keywords, which tells Google to serve your ads on the results page when people search for those keywords Ads: The advertiser writes copy which they believe answers the user’s search query. Ads should be relevant to the associated keywords in terms of their product/service to ultimately drive clicks to the website Landing Pages: The landing page should be relevant to the keyword and the ad for optimum results.
Keyword lists are the list of word combinations that you would like your ad to show for when a potential customer searches.
Fact Check Policy
CRMNuggetsis committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.
In the old days, many approached on-page optimization as simply keyword stuffing; that is, you mention the keywords you would like to rank for as many times within the content as possible.
This made for a bad user and reading experience. These days on-page optimization includes smart keyword targeting, where keywords are mentioned in key elements while still providing a good user experience. This means that the reading experience needs to be good and also that your content satisfies what the user is actually looking for.
On-Page Optimization plays a significant role in the rankings process. Changes are made through a Content Management System, meaning a non-technical person should be able to do it. If you have a modern Content Management System like WordPress, it should be easy to target keywords in key elements. We’ll cover the key elements shortly but they include making images, headings, main body copy, meta description tags and title tags.
Time investment is split between up-front work and ongoing maintenance.
SEOptimer, Mozbar and SEO SiteCheckup are SEO tools that are all able to grab the important on-page elements from the HTML for a webpage. This is useful when we want to quickly review whether an existing page has been optimized or not. It also saves time in having to dig around in the source code.
Mozbar is a Chrome and Firefox extension created by Moz.com. It has more functionality in Chrome as do many other SEO browser extensions.
1) When installed, you can click the M icon in the top right of the browser so it is selected and turns blue (you can click it again to toggle it off when finished). 2) Then click the Page Analysis icon on the top left to inspect the most important on-page SEO elements.
Pre-click on-page optimization as the name suggests is optimizing for what’s visible to the user before they click on a result. This includes:
The title tag
The URL
The meta description
As you’d expect, part of this process involves encouraging the searcher to click on your listing, rather than the others.
Post-click on-page is everything the searcher sees after they click on a listing and when they visit your site. So this is what the visitor sees when they land on your webpage. It includes optimising keywords and the user intent of keywords into the main copy, headings, hyperlinks and images.
Before starting on-page optimization you need to decide what page you are optimizing and what keywords you wish to target. This requires keyword research and ideally prioritizing the keywords as we did in an earlier exercise. For the upcoming on-page optimization lessons, we’ll show examples of how you would optimize the snowboard sizing page.
Portent’s SERP Preview Tool is an excellent way of visually seeing what a Google search result would look like before you make the pre-click on-page optimization changes. This way you can make sure your snippets are the right length and that they look enticing for the user to click through.
Amazon is incredibly dominant in SEO and there are lots of reasons for this. They provide a great user experience on their site, have a big product range and have colossal domain authority. Although as we can see from the above slide, their title and meta description tags are a little on the long side and get truncated which isn’t ideal for click-throughs.
Aside from the main body copy, title tags are the single most important on-page element to get right. They are the first part of a listing a user sees after they make a search and search engines pay close attention to what words are provided which influences how well your web pages will rank.
Source: You can see the title in the source code by right-clicking on the webpage and selecting “view source code”. It will appear as <title>Corporate Training | Digital Marketing Institute</title>
Why Title Tags are important:
It’s a heavyweight on-page SEO signal and the single most important place to include keywords
Getting it right has a direct impact on higher rankings
The most important part when optimizing title tags is to get the right blend of keywords. If it looks like one long keyword list, you may be considered a spammer, but if it includes your main keywords (your primary (P1) and secondary (P2) keywords) and is written in natural compelling English, then you should be on track.
One of the reasons we prioritize the keyword research is for the title tag optimization. This is because it’s hard to work more than three or four keywords into a title tag, so we tend to just focus on the primary and secondary keywords; which are three keywords in total. Often the tertiary keywords (P3) are closely related to the primary and secondary keywords, so they are fairly well represented.
How to optimize title tags:
Work in keywords (this is the most important part to get right)
Include main (primary and secondary) keywords
Main keywords nearer the beginning help
Don’t keyword stuff
Use the space provided
Max space is 600 pixels (around 70 characters including spaces)
Over 600 pixels gets truncated off the SERP listings
Be descriptive and engaging
Describe the page in a natural human-friendly language
Make enticing enough to encourage click-through
Some extra info:
Common sentence separators are “|” and “-”
A brand is optional and commonly used after a sentence separator at the end. The exception to this is for the homepage where the brand is typically at the beginning of a title tag.
Very occasionally Google will write its own Title Tag in the SERPs
This is for a fictitious snowboarding company called “SnoWayBro”. Normally, we pay the most attention in optimizing the P1 keyword and P2 keywords. But in this case, because many of the keywords are so similar in meaning, we managed to accommodate all of the P3 keywords pretty well, asides from “what size snowboard do I need”. That’s because so many of the P3 keywords were close variants of the P1 and P2 keywords, e.g. synonyms or plural/singular differing.
The chosen title tag is: Snowboard Sizing Guide, Charts & Calculator | Sno Way Bro You can see we have used Portent’s SERP preview tool which helps illustrate what the title tag will look like and whether it’s within the recommended size limits.
Meta description tags are only visible in the SERPs and the source code. You cannot see them when you are viewing the main content of a page. As you’ll find out in this SEO module, there is quite a bit of work involved in ranking for a keyword but one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO is improving the click-through rate in a search engine listing where you actually rank.
Source: You can see the meta tag description in the source code by right-clicking on the webpage and selecting “view source code”. It will appear as <metaname=’description’ content=’ Transform your business by providing digital marketing & social selling training solutions to your employees. Find out how it can impact your business today. ‘ />.
Fact Check Policy
CRMNuggetsis committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.
Anyone with a website! From generalist to specialist, from newbie to advanced, Search Console can help you. Here are some of the reasons why a Content Creator should use the Google Search Console.
A business owner who delegates. Even if you don’t think you know how to use Search Console, you should be aware of it and become familiar with the basics. You might hire your webmaster or a marketing specialist to help you set up your website with Search Console. In that case, you can work with that person to ensure you have access and control to all of the reports for your website. In addition, it’s a good idea to learn all you can about how your site is performing in search results so you can make important business decisions about your site.
SEO specialist or marketer. As someone focused on online marketing, Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimize your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. You can use the information in the Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and AdWords.
Site Administrator. As a site admin, you care about the healthy operation of your site. Search Console lets you easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. You can also use it to ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly with respect to search performance.
Web Developer. If you are creating the actual markup and/or code for your site, Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.
App Developer. If you own an app, you want to see how mobile users find your app using Google Search. Search Console can help you integrate your app seamlessly with the website world.
Google Search Console 1.Verify as site owner (when no other site owners exist). Follow Google’s site verification process by acting as site owner e.g. uploading a HTML file to your site. 2.Ask a colleague to be added (when a site owner already exists). Find out who is the site owner and ask them to grant you Google Search Console access for a website.
Bing Webmaster Tools Bing offers a similar product to the Search Console called Bing Webmaster Tools. Follow a similar process to above. The following is text is borrowed from the Google Search Console help pages and you can find a link in the references below.
Verify your site ownership What is verification? Verification is the process of proving that you own the site or app that you claim to own. We need to confirm ownership because once you are verified for a site or app you have access to its private Google Search data, and can affect how Google Search crawls it. Verification associates a specific user with a specific property. Every Search Console property requires at least one verified owner, though it can have more.
Note that you could add any site or app as a property to Search Console, but until you verify ownership of it (or an owner grants you rights on it) you can’t use it in Search Console. For example, you could add www.wikipedia.org as a property to your Search Console account, but you wouldn’t be able to access it until a Wikipedia developer helped you prove ownership (or a Wikipedia Search Console property owner added you as a user to the Search Console property).
Verify a website 1.Either add a new site (see link in references) or click Manage Property > Verify this property on the Search Console home page next to the existing property that you want to verify. 2.Choose one of the verification methods listed below and follow the instructions. Not all verification methods are available for all properties; the verification page will list which methods are available and recommended for your site. Verification methods include (more detail in the link in the references section):
HTML file upload
Domain name provider
HTML tag
Google Analytics tracking code
Google tag manager container snippet
Google sites
Blogger
Multiple people can add and verify a site separately, using the same or different methods. If you use the same method, just be sure that you don’t overwrite any verification tokens of any other owners.
Crawlability optimization steps
Minimise site errors
Use redirect wisely
Create and submit up to date XML sitemap
Minimise duplicate content
Check for indexed pages
Minimize site errors: Site and URL errors can restrict access to useful pages and if too frequent, can lower the overall trust of a domain. In Google Search Console, you can find Site and URL errors under Crawl à Crawl Errors. This example shows a very high number of Not Found URL errors, so further investigations need to be made so the appropriate fixes can be put in place.
Use redirects wisely: if a URL has changed, redirects can be used to take the user or search engine to the right place and preserve the page’s trust and reputation, while avoiding URL errors. There are three main types of redirects:
301, “Moved Permanently”—recommended for SEO. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
302, “Found” or “Moved Temporarily“. Some of Google’s employees have indicated that there are cases where 301s and 302s may be treated similarly, but our evidence suggests that the safest way to ensure search engines and browsers of all kinds give full credit is to use a 301 when permanently redirecting URLs.
Meta Refresh. Meta refreshes are a type of redirect executed on the page level rather than the server level. They are usually slower, and not a recommended SEO technique. They are most commonly associated with a five-second countdown with the text “If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here.” Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to poor usability and the loss of link juice passed.
The most recommended redirect is the 301 redirect as this is thought to pass the most amount of reputation.
The majority of Content Management Systems (CMSs) allow non-technical people to implement redirects. WordPress is a popular CMS and the simplest way to create a redirect is by installing a redirect plugin. For some CMSs, you may need to get help from a technical person to help implement redirects.
1.Create your sitemap: The most commonly used sitemap is the XML sitemap. This is designed for search engines, rather than people, and is one file that contains a collection or all of your web pages. While search engines predominately crawl web pages by following links from one web page to another, they also use XML sitemap for discovering pages. Most CMSs will automatically create an XML sitemap but you need to make sure this has been enabled. If one exists, you can often find your XML sitemap at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Submit your sitemap to Google:
There are two different ways to make your sitemap available to Google: 1.Submit your XML sitemap via Google Search Console – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list 2.Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap: Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml. Be very careful when making changes to the robots.txt file and always check with an expert if you are unsure as you can accidentally de-index useful pages. Once you have submitted your XML sitemap to Google, you’ll be updated on how many of the submitted pages have been indexed. Your goal is to get all your useful pages indexed and aim for 95%+ of all pages. The example screenshot only has 12% of the submitted pages indexed which is not good and would need further investigation.
While a small amount of duplicate content is ok, search engines prefer unique content and may choose to not index content that it considers duplicate. Duplicate content can be identified through: 1.HTML improvements in Google Search Console where duplicate pages will be highlighted if they exist. 2.Copying an extract of text found (e.g. 10 words or so) in a web page and pasting it in quotes into a search engine. If multiple pages are shown in a search engine, this may be a sign of duplicate content. For each web page checked, you can repeat this process three times.
If you want to view what a webpage looked like the last time Google visited it and also when it happened, you can check Google’s cache of the page and this is the version stored in its index.
How to get to a cached link: 1)In a web browser, do a Google search for the page you want to find (you can paste the URL into Google). In the Google SERP, click the green down arrow to the right of the site’s URL and then click Cached.
2)In Chrome, copy the URL path you wish to check. Then type into the address bar cache:www.url-you-wish-to-check.com e.g. cache:https://www.facebook.com
If a 404 page is returned from the cache command, it means the page has not been cached and it’s not in Google’s index. If you see a version of the page, this is what is used in the index and the date and time of when it was last cached will be displayed. This means that when you make changes to the content of web pages, it can take time for Google to update its index.
You’ll remember earlier that technical optimization or technical SEO is primarily about making your website free of errors, easy to crawl and easy to index. Compared to on-page optimization and off-page optimization, technical optimization plays a smaller role in keyword rankings but we will now look at three technical factors that matter:
Site speed: it was quite rare back at the time, but back in 2010, Google officially announced a ranking factor for SEO. It was for Site Speed and it was rare because ranking factors were mainly kept a secret. Although, as it is only a slight ranking factor, improving site speed is more likely to be noticeable in your bottom line in helping improve conversions and sales, rather than SEO. That said, if web pages are noticeably slow, this could have a significantly negative effect on both conversions and SEO.
Mobile-friendliness: with the use of mobile overtaking desktop, this ranking factor has become more important than ever.
HTTPs: this means making your pages more secure.
We will now look at each of these factors in more detail.
Albeit a slight ranking factor, site speed offers additional benefits for conversions/sales, rather than SEO alone. Independent studies by Kiss Metrics and Google suggest a page should load in 2 seconds or less. If a page takes much longer than two seconds it has a bad impact on user experience and could leave the user frustrated and not want to continue using the website. In a later slide, we’ll look at Pingdom which helps diagnose areas of a web page that can be improved for speed such as making larger images smaller, compressing text and files, and minimizing the total numbers of requests being made.
Often a technical person or web developer is required to make improvements on site speed.
Google offer a tool called PageSpeed Insights that grades a web page in how well optimized it is for page speed on both desktop and mobile. It also gives suggestions in areas where improvements can be made.
Google also offers a dedicated mobile page speed testing tool: Think With Google. This goes more in-depth and may indicate that mobile site speed may become a more important ranking factor in the future. Google mentions that “70% of cellular network connections globally will occur at 3G or slower speeds through 2020”, so it’s key to get a fast loading site under such conditions, so bear that in mind for your current and future web builds.
Pingdom is an independent tool that also grades how well a web page is optimized for site speed. It has the added benefit of providing a page speed loading time.
Google’s Maile Ohye, states that “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second. Half a second is fast, to put it in layman terms, it’s close to a blink, while two seconds is shorter than one breath”. Bear in mind, while this advice is still relevant, it was provided in 2010 but the general consensus is that these are still sensible targets to aim for, especially with the rise in mobiles and tablets that often rely on phone data signals.
Google announced mobile-friendliness as a significant ranking factor back in 2015. Although feedback from the SEO industry suggested its initial impact was relatively small, the announcement suggests it will become a stronger ranking factor in the future. This is enhanced further with Google’s plans to prioritize its index for mobile over desktop in the future.
Responsive web design is the most common way of making a website mobile-friendly. It works by making your web pages look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones). Responsive web design uses HTML and CSS to resize, shrink or enlarge content to make it look good on any screen.
If you wish to test whether a website is mobile-friendly, the best way is through the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console. Here you will be able to check if it is and if not, what areas and pages need improving. This requires a verification process to see the data. If you do not have such access or wish to quickly check one URL at a time, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool which will provide similar information but on one URL at a time.
Google announced HTTPs as a ranking factor back in 2014 albeit, a very slight ranking factor.
HTTPs was primarily used to protect pages that collected information like contact us or a shopping cart page. Recently, there has been a shift where ALL pages have HTTPs as this gives all pages a slight ranking boost.
Implementing HTTPs from HTTP requires careful redirect planning
Moving to HTTPs requires an SSL certificate
Adding HTTPs to your site makes your webpages more secure. To do this you need to include an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate which traditionally is something you need to buy, although in recent years you can do it for free e.g. through Let’s Encrypt.
When adding HTTPs (from HTTP), you are changing the URL that search engines need to index. It is critically important that you redirect the old HTTP URL to the new HTTPs URL and this should be done through a 301 redirect.
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It also looks at how we can apply the theory into a real-life successful SEO campaign.
While it can help if you have a technical background, many technical optimization tasks can be either completed or directed by a non-technical person. Remember Technical Optimization is one of the three Pillars to SEO. We can think of these as broad categories for SEO that everything else fits under.
Examples of technical optimizations are making sure a website has clean code, is free from site and URL errors and has minimal duplicate content. We’ll now discuss some of these and others in more detail.
Features of technical optimization:
Activities: involves SEO activities completed on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to content
Ranking factors: this stage is mostly about optimizing the crawlability of the site so that content can be easily found and indexed. Contains a small amount of less essential ranking factors but is still essential to get right
Tech Help: they may require the help of a web developer or someone technical because many changes require code tweaks within the website
Time investment: this is mainly up-front work, with some ongoing maintenance
Tools: there are lots of great tools that can help diagnose technical issues, including Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Xenu Link Sleuth
Note: Google Search Console was called Google Webmaster Tools, so you when you research online you may see both being referenced. The following is text is borrowed from the Google Search Console help pages and you can find a link in the references below.
What is a Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google’s search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views your site and optimize its performance in search results.
Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want to be shown in search results
Create and monitor the content that delivers visually engaging search results
Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance
Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean
Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site:
Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
Which sites are linking to your website?
Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?
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At its heart, off-page optimization in SEO is about building backlinks to your website and this practice is also known as link building. We do this because the higher quality backlinks you have from relevant websites, the more reputable your website is seen in your industry by search engines.
This is often the part that SEOs find tricky at first but with persistence and researching your competitors, it’s one of the ways to really significantly improve your SEO progress. You may not be able to directly control how external websites link to your site but you can influence them by creating great content and/or contacting them.
Off-page optimization requires some upfront work but is a more ongoing and never-ending activity. If you are at the top of your industry and stop acquiring backlinks, you may find that your competitors continue to build them and overtake you.
Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs are SEO tools that help when analysing both your own backlinks and competitors. They all offer a freemium model, which means you can get a free account and use some of the functionality for free.
A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website
One of your key goals as an SEO is to increase the number backlinks to your site
The text within the backlink is called anchor text and some relevancy through the text is passed
A credible page with valuable content can earn dozens, hundreds and even thousands of backlinks
Not all backlinks are created evenly. Some will pass more ranking powers than others, which we will look
Search engines, especially Google, are getting very good at detecting whether a backlink should add to your website’s reputation or not. Here are three keys to look out for:
Topical backlinks that are relevant to your industry and are likely to bring in relevant referral traffic. So not only will you get an SEO boost but you’ll also get some great referral traffic.
High authority and reputable websites will pass high levels of reputation and we’ll soon discover how you can measure authority.
Authentic backlinks are earned on merit, rather than fake backlinks built purely for SEO. Search engines don’t like to be tricked and target sites building phony links with a search engine penalty.
PageRank
“PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.
According to Google, PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. It is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search engine results, but it is the first algorithm that was used by the company, and it is the best-known.”
How to measure the PageRank of a URL: Moz and Ahrefs are popular SEO tool providers who supply metrics that mimic how PageRank may be calculated and estimates a value of how reputable a page and domain is. Moz’s Open Site Explorer offers:
Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Ahref offers:
URL Rating(UR) measures the strength of a target URL’s backlink profile and the likelihood that the URL will rank high in Google. UR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.
Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a given website’s overall backlink profile.
DR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, with the latter being the strongest. Social media links, e.g. from Facebook and Twitter, are sometimes known as social signals and there is a debate in whether they act like regular backlinks or whether they help with SEO at all.
At the moment the general consensus is that they don’t act like regular backlinks and do not pass reputation directly. This may be because it’s hard for search engines to detect a strong enough signal in all the social media noise although that’s not to say this stance may change in the future. Also, many of the social media links contain “nofollow” attributes which mean PageRank isn’t passed.
However, social media often helps SEO in an indirect way and can play an important role. The more followers you have on social media, the more “eyeballs” will see the content that you post.
Some of these people may have websites and may decide to link to your websites, so you can earn regular backlinks through social media. Others may decide to re-share your content, which in turn gets more publicity and increases the chance of receiving further backlinks.
Open Site Explorer is a tool provided by Moz and allows you to research where a website has got its backlinks from. This may be the site you look after, a competitor or any other site that you wish to research.
The backlinks are ordered by Page Authority, so according to Moz, you should get the most important ones first.
Open Site Explorer is great for beginner to intermediate backlink analysis. Ahrefs and Majestic SEO are better for more experienced SEOs because they have a larger and more thorough index of backlinks. Bear in mind, although very useful, these tools are likely to be a simplified version of what Google sees and uses.
We’re now going to do a mini SEO technical audit. It involves having a website in mind, copying the homepage’s URL and also finding a relatively new webpage e.g. a recent blog post page.
This will help to make sure search engines can see your content, have chosen to index it and that the pages are considered search engine friendly.
The quickest way to check if a URL has been indexed is by checking if the current version of it is stored in a search engine.
In Google, you do this by:
Entering “cache:” plus the URL you wish to check in the address bar or in a Google search
It’s important to not include any spaces, e.g. cache:https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com
Check if both URLs have been indexed using the cache command:
This includes the homepage URL and a newly created page’s URL
Make a note of the time and date each was indexed
If you get a 404 page not found, this is a sign the page has not been indexed yet. If your page has not been indexed, make sure it is linked from other pages on your website and you can submit it to Google using “Fetch as Google” in Google Search Console.
Using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, enter both URLs you wish to test to see if they are acceptable for mobile. Hopefully, your webpages will pass the first time. If not, review the issues of what hasn’t passed. Issues could include the text being too small, slow page load speed, or resources being blocked by Google. If you are not very technical and have not passed the test, you may need to run this past your web developer
Using the free Pingdom website speed test, enter both URLs and select the closest test location to where the website is based. Check to see if the web pages load in under two seconds. If it doesn’t scroll down to find out issues of what is holding the website back.
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In this article, I will try as much as possible all that you need to know about search engines. So, whether you are a content writer or just an ordinary user, I will keep you abreast of all the information that you need to know. Just relax and make sure that you read this article to the very end. Different search engines provide access to different audiences and user types e.g. Yahoo! users might be older or Bing users might use a specific type of mobile phone (e.g. Microsoft phones) as the default search engine is set to Bing.
This also varies in different locations, so your territorial targeting could influence which search engines to include in your media mix.
When you want your articles to rank, you need to think like your reader. You have to write with your audience in mind. You must write based on how you feel they will ask their question. Always start with your consumer and look at their consumer behaviour/purchase decision cycle. Here are some of what is going on in the mind of your readers when they are visiting the search engine page:
#1 Identify a need or want
Before your audience visits a website, they already have a need. In order to ensure that your website comes up when your customers come to search engine to satisfy a need, you need to make sure that you always write your article as if you are trying to answer a question. It is very important.
#2 Search for solutions
After your customers have identified a need, they will have to come online in order to look for a solution to their problem. Most times, when customers are looking for solutions. They will have to ask a question. The problem here is that most of the people that are using a search engine to look for the solution will never go beyond the first page in their search. That is why you have to ensure that your article dominates the first page on the search engine result page. Please note that immediately your article presents itself, a prospect will try to establish contact with the organisation.
#3 Evaluate Alternatives
Once you have identified organisations that can provide the services that you need, the next thing is to look at other ways that your issues can be resolved. Also, it is expected that your solution provider will provide you with multiple options for you to choose from. You now have to choose the one that seemed best for you. At this stage too, it is expected that they will tell you the pros and cons of all the options that they have presented to you.
#4 Decide to purchase
after the options have been presented, you need to now choose the date that you are going to make a purchase. At this stage, the responsibility of following up on the prospect will now be handed over to the sales department of the organisation. It is the duty of the sales department to make the transaction happen at the end of the day. It is also at this stage that the organisation is supposed to reinforce some of the benefits that the prospect will derive from the transaction.
#5 Purchase
After the prospect has made a commitment to purchase the product, he now has to move to the stage of actual purchase. at this stage, the organisation has to make sure that all products are delivered up to expectations. They have to make sure that the product is delivered at the right place and at the right time. Doing this will boost the trust that the customer will have in the organisation.
#6 Post-purchase evaluation
After the customer might have purchased the product and used the product, he needs to do an evaluation. The evaluation will allow the customer to know whether the product has achieved its purpose or not. This will also allow both parties to make the necessary adjustments if the product has failed to achieve its goal in one way or the other.
Also, Search behaviour features in stages 2-6 of the purchase cycle make it a highly effective channel to tie in with naturalized purchase decision-making.
In addition, PPC began in the early 2000s as search engines became popular and as user habits, technology and business developed online. New features have been added to enrich the advertising formats but ultimately paid search consists of keywords, landing pages, and ad copy, and this has never changed.
Over the years new features and more advanced targeting options have been added to develop the AdWords suite beyond paid search ads. Now advertisers can run display, video, shopping and email ads through one advertising platform.
Reasons to use paid search include:
Meet & align with business objectives: bringing active consumers to your site
Quick access to the market: you can appear in the search results after just a few hours
Mobile position #1: the PPC ad is the first search result users see on a mobile
Additional advertising features: target specific locations and add ad extensions
Tracking: link to Google Analytics and monitor spend, and ROI on KPIs
Easily updated special offers/time-sensitive promotions: changes to copy are almost instant
Leverage buyer/search intent: consumers are actively looking for your keywords/product
Compete in the marketplace: stay up to speed with your competitors
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Campaign KPIs should reflect your business goals and how they can be achieved online. Use a metric value to determine what success looks like, this is your KPI (key performance indicator). Benchmark your campaign against predefined KPIs to measure the success of your search campaign including conversion traffic, awareness and brand impressions.
#1 Conversion Traffic
Qualified traffic – The function of Google Ads is to drive qualified traffic from users looking for your product. This can result in conversions if your site is optimized to their expectations and your offering matches their need state. Ultimately, it’s traffic with a possibility of other desirable actions like purchases, conversions and brand awareness.
#2 Awareness
If you need to drive awareness, building lists of relevant generic keywords will expand the reach of your offering beyond the people who already know and search for your brand. Generic keywords tend to have higher CPCs and lower conversion rates so it’s important to measure the success of your generic campaigns in terms of reach and acceptable cost per conversion.
#3 Brand Searches
Brand searches are low-cost and high conversion. However, for the majority of businesses, impressions and clicks tend to be lower than generic searches so driving a higher number of brand searches should be a goal of all organizations. This can also act as a de facto measure of your brand growth.
Conversion tracking shows you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad. It is a means to measure valuable actions like sales or leads generated on your site following a click. Most websites will have different conversions with different outcomes and values to the business. Here are some examples of different conversion types (conversion category type can be set up when creating conversion tracking), e.g.
Leads
Purchases
Phone calls
Downloads
Depending on the value of the conversion to your business, you can determine what campaigns can be focused and managed to drive certain conversion types. This will allow for better budget allocation and managing cost per conversion type.
Adding conversion traffic allows you to track back to the campaign and keywords the number of valuable actions taken by users from a campaign. This will have an associated cost and provide other metrics which will allow you to determine if it’s profitable or scalable.
It’s possible to track actions taken on a website like lead form completions or e-commerce transactions
You can create campaigns that link to the App or Play Store and you can count the number of App installs resulting from your campaigns
When people search on mobile and call your business directly from the SERP, it is possible to measure the number of phone calls and the length of each phone call resulting from an ad click
You can also import goals from Google Analytics, firebase or third-party app analytics software
Conversions can be created on the manager account level and shared among child accounts (e.g. Where multiple product lines for one brand is controlled by a manager account with each product line having its own account) or at the individual account level (to keep conversion data separate).
To access conversions, click the wrench icon in the top right of the AdWords screen and under Measurement, click ‘Conversions’. The next screen will display the image shown on this slide.
1.The first is to add a piece of tracking code to the thank you/confirmation page following a conversion. This is the page that shows after you contact the team or complete a purchase. It usually says thank you for your purchase etc. This page is only ever displayed after conversion, so every time it’s displayed, your tag on that page tells AdWords that a conversion has happened.
2. The other way is to use click tracking and insert a piece of code into a button on your website, i.e. when someone clicks a button to start a video or submit a lead form but there is no thank you page because the button was clicked, the conversion is tracked.
Now to talk about other metrics! There are a number of metrics available to see if your campaign is successful or not. These include:
Impressions: the number of times an ad is served to audiences
Clicks: how often an ad is clicked
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): the actual price paid for each click in a PPC campaign
Click-Through-Rate (CTR): the % number of impressions that lead to a click
Cost-Per-Impression (CPM): the cost for serving a batch of 1,000 impressions
Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): how much it costs in PPC advertising media spend to generate a sale/conversion
Avg. Position: where an ad is shown on a search result page
Conversions: an action an advertiser has defined as valuable on a website, e.g. purchase, contact form completion
Conversion Rate the % number of clicks that turned into conversions
Cost per conversion: the total cost of generating traffic divided by the total number of conversions
Impression share: the number of impressions received divided by the estimated number of impressions that were available
Click/Impression assisted conversions: the number of conversions that were assisted by a particular campaign, ad group, or keyword.
Quality Score: An estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad
These metrics aren’t always in real-time but they can be provided to advertisers in almost real-time within a 24-hour period.
You can see performance metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, and. position cost per conversion and impression share at the keyword, ad group, and campaign level. You can schedule your reports to run daily, weekly etc. and have them emailed to specified recipients.
Steps:
Click into one of your campaigns or ad groups
Press the columns icon and click Modify columns on the right-hand side, below the graph and choose what metrics you want to include in your report
Save this set of columns if you will be using it often
Filters give you an immediate change to the metrics you’re viewing on-screen to make some optimization decisions.
You can run reports on the different tabs in AdWords, e.g. Campaign report, Ad Group report, Keyword report etc. to measure the success of your search campaigns. The steps to run these reports are:
Select the level of report you want from the left-hand menu, e.g., Campaigns
Click the three dots icon for ‘More Options
Download the report into .csv or .xlsx
Open your data in Excel and report on critical metrics.
You can segment the data by clicking the circle icon. Segment by Conversions, Click Type, Device, Network, Top vs. Other and Time (day/week/month/quarter, etc.) for additional insights.
If you want to add additional data to your report, you can also segment the data by clicking More Options > Download > Click to add segments.
Filters are also a way to segment your view, but when you download a report, you can add a segment to give extra granularity to your reporting.
When you download a segmented report, this can then be used in a Pivot table to give greater insights over time, e.g. Month, Day, Week, Device, Day of the Week etc. Steps:
To create a Pivot table of your data, select all of the data in the Excel report, navigate to the Insert menu in Excel, and choose Pivot Table
Press OK in the pop-up window to insert Pivot Table
Drag and drop the data point into the “Row Labels” box, e.g. Campaign
Drag and drop the metric into the “Values” box to add up all your data for the row items, e.g. clicks, impressions, cost,
Don’t drag formula metrics like CPC, CTR, CPM or Cost per Conversion into the values tab as it adds up the data and you’ll end up with incorrect data.
You can further segment your data by adding Columns by dragging a data point into the “Column Labels” box, e.g. Day of the week
In the example above we are looking at all clicks (values) for a campaign (rows) which is split by Day of the week (date range for the report = 2 months), you can set your date range for the entire year to see what are the most important days for your metrics, just be aware if there is any seasonality in your yearly activity as this can skew the data. This is a very good way of aggregating many rows of data into an easily understandable table, and we can see which days drive the most clicks. We could also look at conversions and increase spend on high-conversion days or reduce spending on low-conversion days. This is an example of using data insights to create better performance. It’s really important to test these changes first to estimate impact.
To measure the success of your paid search campaigns, link your Google Ads account with Google Analytics. This will help you to:
Enhance your reporting with detailed website engagement
See how paid search channels perform against other channels
Measure ROAS for e-commerce clients
Get a deeper understanding of what searchers do post-click
Follow the steps below to link Google Ads with Google Analytics:
Sign in to both AdWords and Analytics
Navigate to the Admin tab in Google Analytics
Choose “AdWords linking” from the Property level options list and select the accounts or manager account to link
You can also access Google Analytics in Google Google Ads once they are linked:
Use the shortcut to Google Analytics in the Tools tab in AdWords to quickly access your website’s Analytics data (once linked)
This tab allows for fast access to the linked Google Analytics account so you can begin to analyze campaign performance in terms of website engagements, conversions, events, and e-commerce activity
You can also access the planning tools, look at attribution modeling (a set of rules that determine how the credit for conversions should be attributed to various keywords, ad groups, and campaigns), conversion data, and preview your ads in a test environment
To see your AdWords cost click and impression data, navigate to the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics and choose the AdWords menu
In this menu, you can see the linked accounts in your manager account, campaigns, sitelinks, keywords, search queries and segmented by an hour of the day. You can further segment your data by adding a secondary dimension to the report to see how each keyword does against other data points like device type, date, month, etc.
This view gives you detailed website engagement, goal conversion, e-commerce, and click data all in one AdWords view.
NOTE: This is a reporting view only, you can’t make any changes to AdWords campaigns from Google Analytics, it’s for viewing AdWords metrics only.
For deeper reporting in Google Analytics, consider website engagement metrics to determine the quality of AdWords clicks not just in terms of conversion rate or scale
Engagement metrics include: the number of pages visited, average time on site, bounce rate (the % of people who leave the site after only viewing one page), and new or returning visitors
You can also compare metrics. In the screenshot shown, traffic is steady each day but some days drive more goal completions
Analysis and recording of these types of trends can help uncover why, so you can take the correct steps to improve performance
You can also link Analytics to AdWords and easily import a small number of metrics like pages visited, bounce rate, and time on site
By viewing this engagement data in AdWords you can quickly make decisions about your campaigns without having to switch to Google Analytics
You can link Google Analytics to AdWords by clicking on the main menu (three dots at the top of the AdWords screen) and choosing linked accounts, then navigate to the Google Analytics option (as above) and link AdWords to Google Analytics
You can also important Google Analytics goals and e-commerce data in AdWords to align your goal tracking between interfaces in the conversions area within the main menu (three dots at the top of the screen)
Paid and Organic search work side by side so by linking Search Console to AdWords, you can enhance your paid vs. organic reports and see whether users are choosing your paid clicks ahead of organic listings
You can then determine if there are gaps in either search experience
You can link search console to AdWords in the same place as you linked Google Analytics to AdWords, i.e. in the main menu (three dots at the top of the screen) and then in the Linked Accounts area (as above).
NOTE: You need to be logged into Search Console too in order to complete the link
Every time you make a significant change in AdWords or perform an optimization (bids, new ads, keywords, campaigns, pausing items, etc.), you can add a small note in Google Analytics below the graph which can help identify action taken which has impacted performance
You can then revert this change in the AdWords change history if it has had a drastic impact on performance
Change history is used for troubleshooting: to look back on changes made by you or others in your account, set your date, and view change history. This is particularly useful for identifying positive or negative changes in performance.
You can undo some of the actions in the change history to reverse changes that were made if it had a negative impact on performance.
If there is a change in performance and you have added an annotation in Google Analytics to mark the change you made on a certain day, use this as a starter to know what you should look for in the change history.
Steps:
Access Change history for a campaign by clicking into the campaign then clicking on “Change History” on the left-hand menu
Set the date range you want to look at
If you want to undo a change click “Undo” below the item to revert it to its previous state
Fact Check Policy
CRMNuggetsis committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.
Video and Display are awareness generating digital channels that combine the science and precision of online audience targeting with the emotional engagement of audio/video and creative visual formats. First, we must understand that video and display are awareness of generating digital channels.
They combine both the science and precision of online audience targeting, which means highly relevant, effective campaign performance, with the emotional engagement of audio/video and creative visual formats that capture the attention of the audience and make the most of your advertising placements.
If you aren’t sure whether to consider display or video advertising in your advertising strategy, consider the benefits these activities can bring:
Both display and video have the potential to increase brand awareness for your brand or product amongst your target audience
You can drive consideration of your brand or product within your target audiences with visual advertising formats
Create purchase intent for products or services with highly targeted advertising that clearly displays your product
You can choose to increase reach (broad or narrow) for your content across a target audience, and drive frequency of exposure to reinforce your brand messaging
Engage and re-engage with customers via display or video remarketing, which can mean upselling additional products to past customers or encouraging non-converting website visitors to complete their purchase
You have the opportunity to choose from multiple types of ad formats to fit your advertising needs
Video especially can be utilized to complement TV buying strategies and in some cases, video campaigns can extend TV advertising activity by introducing your content to online audiences that otherwise may not have been exposed to your ad.
It is important to distinguish display and video advertising, which are “push channels” that spread a message, from search engine marketing which is a “pull channel” that captures existing demand. Both display and video advertising serve ads to people who are on websites/YouTube and match your audience targeting criteria.
They may not be in the market for your product at this precise moment in time in the way a potential customer performing a search would be.
However, they fit your target audience profile and may have the potential to become a customer in the future, hence the awareness driving function of display and video.
Video advertising is a branch within display advertising and has slightly different bidding mechanisms to display, and as we will see in further examples, it not only drives awareness but also engages audiences with its audio and visual elements.
Search serves ads to people who are actively seeking your product and show a certain amount of consumer intent for your products or services, this indicates they are already aware of your product(s), like it, and have already started to consider making a purchase.
The search network is considered to reach people at the end, or near the end, of the buyer’s journey. On the other hand, display and video can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey – particularly reaching them at the beginning and potentially finding new customers who were unaware of your product or service.
Both display and video advertising serve ads to people who are on websites/YouTube and match your audience targeting criteria. They may not be in the market for your product at this precise moment in time in the way a potential customer performing a search would be.
However, they fit your target audience profile and may have the potential to become a customer in the future, hence the awareness driving function of display and video.
Video advertising is a branch within display advertising and has slightly different bidding mechanisms to display, and as we will see in further examples, it not only drives awareness but also engages audiences with its audio and visual elements.
Search serves ads to people who are actively seeking your product and show a certain amount of consumer intent for your products or services, this indicates they are already aware of your product(s), like it, and have already started to consider making a purchase.
The search network is considered to reach people at the end, or near the end, of the buyer’s journey. On the other hand, display and video can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey – particularly reaching them at the beginning and potentially finding new customers who were unaware of your product or service.
Including display and video advertising in your advertising activity is extremely important.
Display advertising has the potential to put your ad onto thousands of websites and in mobile apps, ranging from large websites to smaller niche websites against related content and interested audiences.
With video advertising, the user can choose what to watch – meaning you can have a captive audience of engaged viewers among those who choose to view your ads.
This activity is made even more efficient when we consider that with YouTube, the advertiser only pays when the user chooses to engage – so we only pay when our advertising is being well-received.
Display advertising has been a very prominent channel for many years and there are a number of platforms that offer display advertising solutions:
Google Display Network (GDN): Allows advertisers to serve video and display ads to over 2 million sites reaching approximately 90% of global internet users. This network includes mobile apps and YouTube and is available across all devices. There are multiple, combinable targeting options available, with diverse ad formats from text to video, to responsive display across devices all over the world.
Facebook: A social media platform with 2 billion users that you can target your ad to based on their interests, demographic, location, and many more signals. The targeting on this platform is very effective, as it is based on strong, accurate user data taken from both within the app and across the wider Facebook network.
AdRoll: Primarily known as a retargeting platform that targets your ads across different platforms and devices, AdRoll uses its own remarketing pixel to display ads to users across the websites they visit and on social media.
Criteo: A specialist Ecommerce shopping display retargeting network, Criteo shows consumers ads for products they just viewed on the advertiser’s website. This would be a dynamic solution that responds to the unique behaviour of each user to show them ads relevant to their onsite behaviour.
Premium network buys: These are usually brought through a media house and advertisers can choose to serve their ads to visitors of certain types of websites – usually a premium website (that is already extremely popular with a large audience), or in a package buy (that can include a variety of ad formats to run across the website or on a specific section of the website e.g. shopping and lifestyle websites, sports websites, etc.). These premium network buys can guarantee reach for a set budget, usually bought on a CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) basis. However, as the name suggests, these buys do come at a premium in comparison to many self-service or auction-based platforms due to the premium nature of their content.
Display advertising has been a very prominent channel for many years and there are a number of platforms that offer display advertising solutions:
#1 Google Display Network (GDN)
Allows advertisers to serve video and display ads to over 2 million sites reaching approximately 90% of global internet users.
This network includes mobile apps and YouTube and is available across all devices. There are multiple, combinable targeting options available, with diverse ad formats from text to video, to responsive display across devices all over the world.
#2 Facebook
A social media platform with 2 billion users that you can target your ad to based on their interests, demographic, location, and many more signals. The targeting on this platform is very effective, as it is based on strong, accurate user data taken from both within the app and across the wider Facebook network.
#3 AdRoll
Primarily known as a retargeting platform that targets your ads across different platforms and devices, AdRoll uses its own remarketing pixel to display ads to users across the websites they visit and on social media.
#4 Criteo
A specialist Ecommerce shopping display retargeting network, Criteo shows consumers ads for products they just viewed on the advertiser’s website. This would be a dynamic solution that responds to the unique behaviour of each user to show them ads relevant to their onsite behaviour.
#5 Premium network buys
These are usually brought through a media house and advertisers can choose to serve their ads to visitors of certain types of websites – usually, a premium website (that is already extremely popular with a large audience), or in a package buy (that can include a variety of ad formats to run across the website or on a specific section of the website e.g. shopping and lifestyle websites, sports websites, etc.).
These premium network buys can guarantee reach for a set budget, usually bought on a CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) basis. However, as the name suggests, these buys do come at a premium in comparison to many self-service or auction-based platforms due to the premium nature of their content.
There are also a number of platforms to choose from when running video advertising campaigns:
Social Video Platforms (Facebook and YouTube) YouTube is a video-sharing, social media network and search engine on which users can upload, view and share videos – it is used by marketers to increase engagement, views, shares and conversions amongst their target audience.
Advertisers can reach potential customers when they watch or search for videos on YouTube – and they only pay when the user shows interest. Similarly, Facebook allows advertisers to display videos within the newsfeed of users that match their audience targeting while they are browsing the site.
Video on Demand (VOD) (RTE Player (Ireland), 4OD (United Kingdom), Videology)
Mirroring traditional TV planning in many ways, users seek out their favourite shows to watch at a time that suits them. These platforms can be considered “premium inventory” given the quality of their content, such as international productions and dramas. They can be targeted similarly to TV and premium display, targeting key audience demographics such as males 18-34 or housekeepers with kids, for example. In these cases, you buy a predetermined number of impressions for your budget and deal directly with the publisher or their sales house.
Programmatic Video Platforms – TubeMogul, Videology
With programmatic video platforms, the emphasis is focused on the audience profile in greater detail and aggregated video advertising inventory from a wider variety of sources. Advertisers can target these audiences across a variety of premium, niche and local sites and report on their performance in great detail. The quality and context of these sites can vary widely, the campaign is optimized to target the key audience demographic wherever they choose to spend their time online.
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