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.

1. Relevant to New York hotels – 500 hotels in New York NY
2. Attractive to book – because you have the Best Price Guarantee
3. 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:

1. Does your landing page deliver on the promise of the ad and resolve their need state?
2. 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:

1. 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

2. Keep short and concise

• Max space is 156 characters (around two short sentences)

3. Be careful with keywords

• Include the main keyword or a close variation
• 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:

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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.

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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.

How to optimize URLs:

1. Include the main keyword or a close variation
2. Keep short and concise (around 70 characters before truncation)
3. Set URLs right at the beginning
4. 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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

If you look carefully at the top of an internet browser, you can hover over the tab which is next to the address bar and see the full title tag.

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:

1. 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

2. Use the space provided

• Max space is 600 pixels (around 70 characters including spaces)
• Over 600 pixels gets truncated off the SERP listings

3. 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. ‘ />.

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.

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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

2. 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.

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.

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In this article, I want to highlight the three types of search engine optimization. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article. The optimize process is broken down into the three core and timeless SEO principles:

#1 Technical Optimization
#2 On-Page Optimization
#3 Off-Page Optimization

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.

Why use Search Console?

Monitor your site’s performance in Google Search results:

• Make sure that Google can access your content
• 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.

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
• Fill gaps in organic optimization: quickly add keywords that don’t rank in the organic channel

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.

There are two ways to add conversion tracking to Google Ads:

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
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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.

In this article, I want to talk more about what you need to know about the bidding process for Video Ads. With your targeting in place, we can now plan our bidding strategy. There are three bidding approaches available on the GDN:

1. Default bids:

• If you don’t set specific bids for your targeting, AdWords will use your ad group’s default bid that you have set when creating your Ad group.
• Google Ads also uses your default ad group bid when you don’t have custom bids enabled or you have custom bids that don’t apply to where your ad is being shown.

2. Custom bids:

• Use custom bids if you want to set bids for an individual targeting method in your ad group. You can set these as max CPC or max vCPM.
• You can set a custom bid on each of the targeting options in the GDN. For example, you can set a max CPC bid on a specific placement. If the user is on that placement, you will be bidding with a higher bid than on other placements that your ad is being shown. Or if you place a customer bid on a certain topic, if the page where your ad is shown matches that topic, your ad will be using a higher bid than for other topics and so forth.
• When you implement a custom bid, AdWords will use this bid on the GDN and not your default bid if the criteria match.
• Note, you can only set a custom bid on one targeting method in each ad group, so it’s important that the customer bid choice matches your advertising goals.

3. Bid adjustments:

• Bid adjustments allow for better control over when and where your ad appears.
• Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease the bid amount for a specific targeting that is used of the max CPC or max vCPM in the ad auction.
• A Bid adjustment is a percentage change in your bid and is applied on top of the bids that AdWords uses to show your ad, either your custom bids or your ad group bid if you have not set a custom bid.
• A bid adjustment for any ad-group level targeting method can be set from -90% to +900%
• A bid adjustment can be set at the campaign level for the time of day, specific days, location and/or device.
• You can also set this at the ad group level for individual targeting methods and top content but you can’t have bid adjustments and custom bids for the same targeting method.
• You can set a device bid adjustment on both the campaign and ad group levels.

Enable Bid adjustments at the targeting method level:

In your Google Ads account:
1. On the side menu bar, click All campaigns and click one of the targeting methods – Keywords/audience/demographics/topic/placement
2. Select the line for whose bids you wish to edit
3. Click Edit
4. Select Change bid adjustments
5. Enter your new bid or bid adjustment percentage
6. Click Apply

• It’s important to develop a bidding strategy because a well-developed bidding strategy will make your ad group be at its most competitive at the right time, the right placement, on the right device when you most need it to be.
• Before developing a bidding strategy, you will need to know what your advertising goals are: in general, you will need to know what the advertising objectives are for each specific campaign and you will need to decide what the best targeting methods are and what account structure you need to meet those objectives.

How do bidding strategies work together? If you make multiple adjustments to the same campaign, all of the bid adjustments will be multiplied together to determine how much your bid will increase or decrease. Let’s say you set a custom bid of €1.00 for the “Beachbound Travelers” affinity audience, a bid adjustment of +20% for the “female” demographic, and a campaign-level location bid adjustment of +10% for people in Italy.

Google Ads will use your custom bid of €1.00 any time your ad shows to people associated with the selected interest. If the ad also shows to someone in the “female” demographic, add +20% of your custom bid to your max CPC bid, to make it €1.20 when your ad shows to these people. And if those people are in Italy, add +10% of your custom bid times your demographic bid adjustment, to make a max. CPC bid of €1.32.

When you are planning your bidding strategy, do not over look your device bid adjustment and consider the importance of mobile (as well as desktop and tablet) in your video strategy:

• Over half of all views on YouTube come from Mobile devices
• Video length (shorter videos perform better on mobile)
• Orientation (increase in popularity of vertical video)
• Specs (logo sizing, screen sizes)

Netflix tested 3 video ad formats (30-second TrueView ad, 15-second TrueView ad and a bumper ad) to see which resonated best with a mobile-first audience. The main results were:

• A Bumper ad proved best for product awareness & highest lift in a search query
• Teaser (15-second) ad proved best for Branded ad recall

They tested what kind of creative resonated with their viewers to help tap into a previously challenging market (Asia-Pacific).

You can alter your bids when your ads appear on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices by specifying a desktop, tablet or mobile bid adjustment at the campaign level or at the ad group level.
Apply bid adjustments for Desktop, Mobile and Tablet devices in campaign settings:

• In Campaigns or Ad groups, select the campaigns or ad groups that you’d like to modify
• Under “Device bid adjustment” in the edit panel, enter a value for “Desktop”, “Mobile,” and “Tablet” from -90% to +900%, inclusive
• You can also enter -100% to opt-out of a device for the selected campaigns or ad groups.

In this article, I will be talking about the advertising buying mechanism for Google Ads. There are three display buying mechanisms to remember when planning activity, including fixed cost and auction buying mechanisms.

Premium Fixed Price: Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
A premium CPM campaign, such as a homepage takeover on a popular news website, is not part of the regular AdWords Google Display Network settings or abilities and can only be done through an AdWords account manager or a premium buy, through a platform such as Adroll or Google DoubleClick. The campaign is based on a fixed price (set by the advertising platform) for every 1000 impressions that an ad receives and generally involves bespoke creative.

Auction: Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC bidding means that you pay for each click on your ad and you can set a maximum CPC bid that you are willing to pay for that click. This bid is then considered as part of the auction as the webpage is loading and advertising space is filled.

Auction: viewable Cost per thousand impressions (vCPM)
vCPM is the cost per thousand impressions for your ad on the Display network. You can set the maximum you are willing to pay for every 1000 impressions.

There are two main mechanisms available for buying advertising which is specific to the YouTube platform:

#1 Premium buys

Mastheads (the equivalent to a Homepage Takeover on the YouTube homepage) or Reserve Buys (guaranteed delivery of a certain volume of video impressions, against a broad or targeted audience segment).

#2 Auction buys (Trueview)

Similar to paid search advertising, an advertiser pays when the user chooses to engage, based on a bidding model.
The YouTube Masthead is priced on a cost per day format, which will differ by market. Typically, this format is used by larger advertisers simply due to cost, however, the reach it achieves is impressive, with millions of unique users visiting the homepage every day.

The YouTube Reserve Buy runs in a similar fashion to Trueview in that it runs as a ‘pre-roll’ before the video the user is about to watch. Reserve ads have the option to be ‘non-skippable’ and must be 30 seconds or less, whereas Trueview is ‘skippable’, and can be of any length. It is worth noting, that Reserve Buy pricing also varies depending on the levels of targeting chosen, and the formats available are constantly being re-evaluated and updated including a reduction in the number of non-skippable formats.

Video and display campaigns should be viewed as an ‘upper-funnel’ activity (except in the case of non-standard formats such as shopping or app installs), and the KPIs for the campaign should reflect this.

Video & display can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey, but its strength is considered to be in reaching people at the beginning of the buyer’s journey at the awareness, interest and consideration stages.

Remember, your campaign objectives will influence what campaign setting and targeting you choose, what kind of ad format you use and what kind of return-on-investment (ROI) to expect. So it is key to decide your objectives early in the planning stages.

Your objectives will also define the campaign measurement you choose to report on, and your campaign optimization should always be related to performance against the objectives set. In short, determining the success of a display and video campaign and ROI is dependent on how it performs against the objectives set.

It is important to know your advertising goals as these will dictate which objectives you choose when setting up your display and video campaigns. Consider the key objectives for effective display and video marketing strategy when choosing your campaign objectives and goals:

#1 Build brand awareness

This is when you have a new business, or launched a new product and your primary goal is to increase awareness of your brand or product. A campaign with a brand awareness objective will focus on impressions, customer engagement, reach and frequency and not on clicks. These types of campaigns will use placement targeting, rich media ad formats and rely on a CPM bidding strategy.

#2 Influence consideration

 This is when you want to set yourself aside from other businesses with a similar product. You need to educate your customer on your product and show them your unique selling points (USP). These types of campaigns will rely on retargeting to your customers as well as audience targeting.

#3 Drive an action

 These types of campaigns are focused on having your customers perform an action on your website, such as buying something, filling in a contact form, downloading a document, or going to a particular page. These type of campaigns will use very specific targeting, conversion tracking and remarketing.

In this article, I will cover the process of setting up a YouTube channel, uploading a video to your channel, managing your video details, and measuring the success of your video with YouTube analytics. There are two types of YouTube channel depending on whether you are an individual content creator, or you plan to operate as a brand online.

1. Personal channels are populated with personal details and only have one administrator, usually the individual themselves.

2. Brand channels are run and managed by an advertiser or company by multiple users; crucially there are no personal details on this channel info.

On your YouTube channel, you can upload videos, create playlists to group your videos in a more logical manner, and customise the appearance of your channel.

If you plan to advertise on YouTube, your channel will be visible for users to click through to, so bear this in mind when beginning to advertise on YouTube. Your YouTube channel should reflect your business, in a similar manner to your website.

It is also very important to ensure you keep your channel updated regularly, for example, any changes to your company branding, any hyperlinks to social media sites that need updating, or just changing the cover photo to reflect your latest campaign or initiative.

To create a Personal YouTube channel:

1. Search for YouTube on a computer or using a mobile site.
2. Try any action that requires a channel, such as uploading a video, posting a comment, or creating a playlist.
3. If you don’t yet have a channel, you’ll see a prompt to create a channel.
4. Check the details (automatically connected with your Google account name and photo) and confirm to create your new channel.

To create a YouTube channel for a brand you will begin with a personal channel that will then be deleted in the process of creating a Brand Channel:

1. Sign in to YouTube on a computer or using the mobile site
2. Go to your channel list
3. Create & fill out the details of your brand account & verify you would like a personal account. Then click ‘Create a new channel’.
4. Use the account switcher in the top right to switch to a personal account (the one that will become the brand account)
5. Visit your account settings, and next to your profile picture click on ‘Advanced Settings’
6. Select “Move channel to Brand Account”
7. Select your new Brand channel and opt to delete the personal channel you are logged in as
8. Select “Move Channel”
9. Follow instructions on the screen to add channel managers

To get started on YouTube, you have to start uploading your content.

To upload a video, follow the below steps:

1. Sign into your Google account.

2. Click on ‘Upload’ at the top of the page.

3. Before you start uploading the video, you can choose the video privacy settings.

4. Select the video you’d like to upload from your computer. You can also create a video slideshow or import a video from Google Photos.

5. As the video is uploading you can edit both the basic information and the advanced settings of the video, and decide if you want to notify subscribers (if you uncheck this option no communication will be shared with your subscribers). Partners will also be able to adjust their monetization settings.

6. click Publish to finish uploading a public video to YouTube. If you set the video privacy setting to Private or Unlisted, just click ‘Done’ to finish the upload or click ‘Share’ to privately share your video. If you haven’t clicked ‘Publish’, your video won’t be viewable by other people. You can always publish your video at a later time in your Video Manager.

Next, add metadata to your videos:

1. Video Title – provide a title that will encourage users to click on or watch the video
2. Video Description – accurately describe the content of the video a user is about to watch
3. Tags – add keywords to your video that can be found in YouTube search

Metadata enhances the discoverability of your videos and tells the system about your content. It is also the same metadata you will later rely on to effectively target your advertising, so it is a best practice among all content creators to complete this step.

You can use Video Manager to make changes to existing videos you have uploaded, including enhancing video quality, editing audio and changing descriptions. To access Video Manager, go to your YouTube Channel, click ‘Uploads’, and then select ‘Video Manager’.

You can add video thumbnails to your videos through Video Manager. This feature lets viewers see a quick snapshot of your video as they are browsing YouTube. It’s important to add a thumbnail to your video that accurately represents the content – this is the viewer’s first impression of your content, it should invite them to watch and engage.

Add a thumbnail to your video by following the below steps:

1. Sign into YouTube.
2. Go to Creator Studio > Video Manager.
3. Next to the video, click Edit.
4. On the right of the preview screen, choose a thumbnail.
5. Click Save changes.
You will need to verify your account to upload custom thumbnails – verification proves to the system there is a legitimate user behind the channel and not spam.

To drive further engagement, you can add YouTube Cards to your videos. With these, you can add a link to click through to:

• Your website
• Videos on your YouTube channel
• Playlists on your YouTube channel
• Your YouTube Channel

Learn How To Make Your YouTube Channel A Success

When creating your YouTube content, it’s important to know the “ABCDs of effective creative” for video:

A: Attract attention from the start
B: Brand naturally and meaningfully
C: Connect with the viewer through emotion and storytelling
D: Direct the user clearly to what you want them to do next

There are a number of tools available in the Creator Studio to manage your video content:

1. Dashboard: Check for notifications and alerts
2. Video Manager: Organize and update videos from one place
3. Community: Review and respond to comments, view private messages, see videos where you have been credited
4. Channel: Adjust channel settings
5. Analytics: Review channel performance
6. Create: Create new videos using the audio library and video editor

You can customize and manage your YouTube channel by clicking ‘My channel’ in the top right corner, ‘Customize Channel’,  ‘About’. Click the “Settings” icon by the subscribers’ button for Advanced options. Here you can add:

• Channel Name & Description
• Channel Art
• Channel Icon
• Channel Trailer
• Sections
• Playlists
• Featured Channels

It’s really beneficial to correctly set up and continually manage your YouTube channel. This ensures continued discoverability of your channel and its content on the platform and keeps your presence on YouTube consistent with your wider online, and offline, presence.

Within the Creator Studio, you can view a number of reports in the Analytics tab to analyze your video’s performance. YouTube analytics reports can help you maximize revenue and retention.
1. Earnings reports: includes estimated earnings and ad performance reports. These reports show your estimated earnings and total views for your channel. You can also see which ad formats had the most impact on driving revenue.

2. Watch-time reports: includes watch time, views, traffic sources, and audience retention reports. Audience retention reports display the views of every moment of your video as a percentage of views, helping you find the right mix of elements like video style, length, promotion, and more. Traffic sources reports show the various YouTube features and external sites through which the viewer found your content.

3. Engagement reports: includes subscribers, likes and dislikes, comments and sharing as well as cards and annotations reports. They are a great way to understand your audience interest.
This would be of most importance to content creators who rely on the organic success of their videos and are at the receiving end of YouTube advertising activity in that they are producing the content advertising appears amongst. You can also Get Free YouTube Subscribers by visiting YTBPals.

In this article, I want to talk about how to create a Youtube Video Campaign. To begin advertising on YouTube, link your YouTube channel to Google Ads. This will allow you to serve your videos as ads to customers watching videos on YouTube and the Google Display Network.
Follow these instructions to link your YouTube channel to an AdWords account using YouTube:

1. Sign into your YouTube channel.
2. Click your channel icon or name in the upper corner of the page to select the channel you want to link.
3. Navigate to the left side panel of Creator Studio.
4. Under “Channel,” click Advanced.
5. Under Ad Words account linking, click “Link an AdWords account“.
6. Follow the instructions, and then click Finish.
7. Once the owner of the AdWords account approves your request, your YouTube channel will be linked to that AdWords account.
You can also link your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the gear icon next to your AdWords account name at the top of the page.
3. Click Linked Accounts.
4. Click YouTube in the navigation panel on the left.
5. On the “YouTube channels” page, click +CHANNEL to choose the channel that you want to link to an AdWords account.
6. In the “Link a YouTube channel” dialogue, search for a channel or enter its URL.
7. Follow the instructions to complete the process.

 8. Once the owner of the YouTube channel approves your request, that channel will be linked to your AdWords account.

The reason this is so beneficial because when you are linking a YouTube channel to an AdWords account, you can access additional video view statistics and additional features that you will find yourself relying upon as you start advertising:

• Ad views count towards overall view count: You can view ad completion rates of videos from linked channels
• Add call-to-action overlays on videos: You can create CTA overlays on videos from linked channels. You can use these to share more information about the content of your video or to raise interest in your channel, other videos, or additional websites – especially useful if you’re hoping to drive a specific action.
• Remarket to users who have viewed your videos: You can create remarketing lists within AdWords based on viewer’s past interactions on your linked YouTube channels.
• Report on earned views and subscriptions to your channel: You can view engagement statistics such as earned actions metrics (e.g. earned views, earned subscribers, etc.) from videos and video ads from linked channels within AdWords and learn the value of your advertising for your wider YouTube strategy.

Be aware that linking accounts does not give the YouTube channel owner control over the AdWords account and does not let the advertiser add, delete or modify videos from the linked channel – it’s purely linking the two platforms to boost your advertising capabilities.

Create a video advertising campaign in Google AdWords by following the below steps:
1. Log in to Google AdWords and click ‘+Campaign’
3. Choose ‘Video campaign’ from the dropdown
4. Select campaign subtype – Standard

5. Click Continue

Create a video ad by entering the URL of the YouTube Video to be used and select your video from the list provided:
1. Select the Ads & extensions tab
2. Click the + button
3. Select Video Ad
4. Select the video you want to promote and click the video ad format from the list provided (In-stream ad)
5. Enter the Display YouTube URL of the video
6. Enter the Final URL of the video
Note, for In-Stream ads, the Final URL can be on YouTube or an external website.

The steps are much the same for Video Discovery ads, until the point you choose your ad format.

For Video Discovery ads:

• You must choose a thumbnail for your ad – think about how this will serve as the ‘teaser’ for your ad on the networks that you select.
• You will write ad copy to accompany your thumbnails – this text follows the same guidelines for Google AdWords text ads.
• When a user clicks on your Discovery ad, you can choose to bring them to either the video’s watch page on YouTube or your YouTube Channel page – you cannot direct users to an external website.

It’s very important to remember your companion banner when creating your video ads. A companion banner is a clickable thumbnail image that accompanies a TrueView in-stream ad. On a YouTube watch page, it appears next to the ad, in the top right corner (on a desktop computer).
You can choose from an auto-generated companion banner or upload your own.
The technical specifications for companion banners that must be adhered to are:
Dimensions: 300×60 pixels.
Maximum file size: 150KB.

Our third video ad format is the Bumper ad, a short, non-skippable format that is no longer than 6 seconds. You will have to have a video already edited to the required length. You will also have to bid on a CPM basis for these ads as they are not view or click-based.
Like you did before, sign in to AdWords and follow the below steps:

• Click the campaigns tab and create a standard video campaign for your bumper ads.
• Create your first adgroup and select the video you uploaded for this ad and select the Bumper Ads format.
• Next, set your budget. “Bidding” will be set to Maximum CPM because of the bumper format.
• Choose your basic initial settings – networks, locations you want to target, the language of your customers, and any advanced settings.
• Click Save and continue.

3 brands; X-box, La Mer and SurveyMonkey used bumper ads for different forms of storytelling, from remarketing to simple storytelling. Great examples of using short-form content to achieve your goals effectively.
X-box: Launch day of the X-box game Halo Wars 2, they invested heavily in remarketing with bumper ads
La Mer: Used bumper ads to efficiently drive awareness of the brand’s new makeup suite, with a bumper ad for each product of the suite
SurveyMonkey: Used bumper ads to highlight the value and ease of its tool by messaging the main components of their platform: “creating surveys, collecting answers, and analyzing results”.

Advanced advertisers may choose to run a universal app campaign to promote their app across the web – but the solution is not as advanced as you may think once you already have an app live within the Play store.
Create a universal app ad in your video campaign:
1. Sign into your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2.In the “Campaigns” tab, click +Campaign and select Universal App campaign.
3. Enter a campaign name. You might use a name that tells you this is an app installs campaign. The on-screen instructions will prompt you through the setup. The benefits of a Universal App Campaign is the wide variety and reach of this campaign which utilises a wide variety of creative assets.
4.Start by selecting the app you will be advertising from the drop-down menu, or “Add a new app” to enter a new one.
5. In the “Ads” section you can enter up to 4 individual lines of text, these will be rotated within your ads depending on the format being displayed
6. Upload your image assets, and be sure to remember:

• You can include up to 20 image files with a max size of 150KB.
• Landscape images are most relevant for native ad units while portrait orientation is most valuable for interstitial content, particularly on mobile.

7.You can also include up to 20 YouTube videos for use as ad creative – in addition to automatically generated videos
created by AdWords with assets from your app store listing
8. Choose any target locations or languages. Just note that AdWords won’t translate your ads so your text and creative will have to align with these settings
9. In “Campaign Optimization” choose to optimize for Installs (gathering new users) or In-app Actions (new users likely to undertake an action, such as a purchase or profile creation).
10. Set target bids and budget – projected install volume is available for Android apps when your Play and AdWords accounts are linked

11. Click “Save and Continue” to launch your campaigns.

Note: Android app installs will automatically be tracked in Google Ads.
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In this article, I will be talking about how to do Advanced Targeting for Video Ads. Observation is an optional feature recommended for advanced advertisers.

• Use observations to get reports on certain criteria without restricting the reach of your ad group. This means that observations won’t change who can see your ads, or where they can show, but they do allow you to monitor how ads are performing on your selected placements, topics, or audiences while your campaign is running.
• As well as this, observations show you how additional criteria perform when they fall within the scope of your existing targeting. You can then use this data help you optimize your campaigns, such as making bid adjustments or to create new ad groups with targeting criteria based on your observations.
• Use observations when you don’t want to narrow your targeting any further but you want to see how certain targeting might perform within the criteria already set.

You can add observations by using the “Edit all targeting” page. You can also add an observation as you would add a targeting method except you will select to add it as an observation as opposed to a targeting method.

To apply targeting options, follow the below steps in your AdWords account:

• In the page menu on the left, click on a targeting method (Keywords, Audiences, Topics, or Placements).
• Click the plus (if you have no targeting yet) or pencil button (if you already have targeting) to edit.
• Click ‘Select an ad group’, then choose an ad group from the list that appears.
• For observations, click the ‘Add observations’ dropdown.
• Select a method from the dropdown.
• Select the criteria you’d like to add and click Done.
• At the bottom of the page, click Save.

You can exclude specific demographics, audiences, remarketing lists, keywords, topics or placements from your campaign targeting to further refine where your ads show.
You can manage targeting exclusions within Google Ads by:

• Navigating to which targeting method you wish to exclude and apply exclusions at campaign or adgroup level, per targeting method.

To exclude by Demographics:

• Click the Demographics tab.
• Click Gender, Age, or Parental status to select a demographic targeting method.
• Click + Targeting.
• Under “Campaign exclusions,” click the Add campaign exclusions dropdown menu, and then click Demographics.
• Under “Demographics,” select the checkboxes of the specific demographics you want to exclude:
• Gender
• Age
• Parental status

To exclude by Keywords:

• Add negative keywords at the ad group or campaign level by clicking the +Keywords button above either table.
• Use the drop-down to select the ad group or campaign that you’d like to add negative keywords to.
• Add one negative keyword per line in the text field.
• To add broad match negative keywords, you’ll need to add the synonyms, singular version, plural version, and other variations such as cup, glass and glasses
• To add a negative phrase match keyword, surround the term with quotation marks—for example, “wine bottle”
• To add a negative exact match keyword, surround the term with brackets—for example, [bottle opener]

To exclude Topics:

• Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Topics.”
• Type a term or phrase in the search box to find a topic to exclude or click each topic to see the sub-topics you can select. Click add » next to the topics and sub-topics you’d like to exclude.

To exclude Placements:

• Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Placements”
• Type a placement in the box, entering just one placement per line. You can exclude up to 10,000 placements per campaign.

You can control the categories of content on which you show and the audiences which that content is suitable for, within the campaign settings in Google Ads:

1. Click the Settings tab.
2. Under “Campaign settings,” click “Content exclusions”.
3. In the new window, select the content exclusion that you want to apply to your ads. Note: Mature and unlabelled content is excluded from all campaigns by default.
4. Click Save.

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be happy to do because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

CRMNUGGETS  is 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.

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Remarketing For Video Ads: How To Persist In Audience Conversion

Remarketing lets you show ads to people who have previously visited your website, watched your YouTube content, or used your mobile app. It allows you to re-engage with them as they visit sites on the GDN or watch videos on YouTube.

• For example, when a visitor leaves your website without buying anything, remarketing helps you re-engage with them by showing them your ad as they go to other sites. You can target them with specific focused messaging or choose to upsell additional products and services to existing customers.
• You can also remarket to users who have watched your videos, with further video ads.

Similar audiences

• A customer audience solution, Similar Audiences allow you to create a list of new users, based on a list of existing users.
• When you create Similar Audiences you can show ads to audiences who are similar to those in your remarketing lists or video viewer lists – these similarities are based on shared traits in their online behaviour.
• You can base your Similar Audiences on your past visitors remarketing list to help effectively broaden your reach to interested users or you could use a list of converted users to potentially more of your ideal customers.

You will add Audience targeting at an ad group level. If you want to try a number of targeting methods and compare their performance, it would be recommended you create a unique adgroup for each audience targeting method:
1.Start by selecting the campaign and ad group you’d like to add audience targeting to.
2.Click the Audiences tab.
3.Click +Targeting, click Edit Audiences and select “Targeting”
4.In the Audiences dropdown menu, choose the type of audiences you want your campaign to reach. Choose from Affinity audiences, Custom affinity audiences, In-market audiences, Remarketing lists, Video remarketing lists:, Customer email lists:, Similar audiences.
5.As you select the audiences you want to add they’ll appear in the “Selected” column.
6.Finally, click Save and continue.

As said earlier, contextual targeting refers to the ‘Where’ – where you want your ad to be shown.

Contextual targeting is the process of matching your ads to the content of a website. Or in the case of advertising on YouTube, the theme or topic of the video content or channel. In using contextual targeting, you are deciding where you want your ad to appear based on the content it will be surrounded by.

You can target your ads based on content in three ways:

1. Content keywords: Allows you to effectively target your audience through the video content they are watching, the search terms they enter on YouTube.com, or on Display Network keywords within the content of a website.
2. Topics: Lets you reach a broad range of videos, channels, and websites related to the topics you select.
3. Placements: Allows you to choose specific YouTube Channels, YouTube Videos, websites across the internet or mobile apps that you would like to show your ad on.

If you choose to target by keywords, there are some factors to keep in mind:

• First, choose words and phrases relevant to your products and services. Just like keywords in Search, AdWords will essentially create a topic around these keywords (though there is no way to know what that theme is) and match that to a website, webpage or app with the same or similar theme.
• It is important to note that it is vital that you tightly structure your keywords by theme in order to be relevant for correct matching. Do not use Broad match keywords and preferably not Phrase match keywords as this will lead to the structure being too loose and your ad showing on non-relevant websites.
• Ideally, it is advised to use keywords in a display campaign very cautiously and with discretion as they can be inaccurate.

Similar to keywords, targeting by topics lets you place your Google ads on website pages about the topics that you choose.

• It tells AdWords what topic you want your ad matched to and not the system automating its own topic around your keywords, this allows for a more precise form of targeting.
• For example: By targeting the “Adventure travel” topic, you enable your ad to be shown on a website that includes content about adventure travel or related topics.
• Targeting on Keywords or Topics by themselves will allow you to quickly reach a wide audience or generate more traffic to your website and your ad will be placed on websites with relevant content. This will allow you to reach an audience that is potentially interested in your product or service.
• Topic targeting will typically give you high impressions and a low CTR and conversion rate but can be useful for awareness-driving and upper-funnel activity.

To add Topic targeting to your campaigns, begin in the same way you started added targeting to your Ad groups.

1.First, choose the Topics tab below Audiences and Demographics.
2.Click the pencil icon to add targeting.
3.From the drop-down menu, select “Add topics”.
4.Choose as many topics and sub-topics as you like. Any topics and sub-topics you have added will appear in the “Selected” column.
5.Click Close and then Save.

With placement targeting, when we say placements we are referring to a website or specific video on YouTube.
We can also refer to automatic placements, where the system automatically displays your ad, or managed placements
where you manually select to display your ads.
Placement targeting involves choosing the website on the Display network, or YouTube video, where you want your ad to be shown. These can be websites that your customers visit and or YouTube content related to your product or services (managed placements).
You don’t need keywords for placement targeting and the system will only look at your managed placements when looking at which site to place your ad. You can target an entire site or specific pages on the site, similarly, you can target a list of specific YouTube videos.

To add placement targeting in the AdWords interface:
1.Click Placements from the left sidebar.
2.Click the + button.
3.From the drop-down menu, select “Add placements”.
4.Type in the name or URL of the placement where you’d like the ads in your ad group to show.
5.If you’d like to add multiple placements at once to your ad group, click the “Add multiple placements at once” link at the bottom of the box.
6.Click Close and then Save to add the placements to your ad group.

You can refine your campaign by combining contextual and audience targeting at the Ad group level. For example, if you sold a compact digital camera, you might want to target users that have an affinity for travel who are visiting a popular travel photography blog to raise awareness of your product.

If you don’t add a targeting method to an ad group, the only restrictions to where your ads can show are by the campaign and account settings. This means your ads can run anywhere on the web, across the Display Network and YouTube, within your campaign and account settings and will result in not receiving a good ROI. So it is worth applying at least one of these targeting options, if not both, in some form.

Groupon combined both behavioural, contextual and location targeting and aligned their ads with their offer categories to show the most relevant ads to new potential customers.

This meant they had rich data about what their target audience liked, and they could place their ads in highly relevant placements, for example promoting family activities for parents or recipe-related ads for foodies.

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