It happens all the time at Portent. I hear it from our team and I hear it from our clients.

For marketing professionals, the list of what we want to do is usually much longer than the list of what we complete. Often, those important but not urgent projects, the ones that we never get to, are the projects that stretch us personally and professionally. Those are the projects that build our organizations. Those are the projects that grow our skill-sets. Those are the projects that make us come alive as marketers.

In a culture that is shifting away from glorifying the 60-hour work week to celebrating a strong work-life balance, working smarter, not harder, is more important than ever.

Working smarter doesn’t mean getting the things you need to do done quickly so you’re done for the day a few hours earlier than normal.

It means staying on-schedule with what you’re doing. It means spending more time on those important but not urgent projects. It means realizing the fulfillment (I hope) in the work you do.

Working smarter, not harder is something I’ve placed a focus on for myself lately. And it’s not just for me- thinking this way has helped our team work more effectively. It’s helped cut stress. It’s helped us stay out in front of what we’re working on and more importantly, it’s helped us deliver better results for our clients.

There are two places I’ve concentrated on during a typical work day to work smarter, not harder.

Revamped Workflow

Plan your day before you do anything else

The first thing I do every single day when I sit down at my desk is plan my day. This can also be the last thing you do before you leave the previous day.

I write down every meeting on my schedule- where it is and what time it starts. Then, I put together my to-do list of tasks and projects to be worked on during the day, prioritizing those most urgent by putting them at the top of the list- if any are due for delivery that day, it’s noted.

Doing so provides a clear roadmap for the day, but also allows me to build in time for long-term projects I’m working to complete. Often times, when I don’t build in the time for that type of work, it goes by the wayside.

Five minutes later, I have my day laid out in front of me- clearly understanding where I need to be, what I must deliver, and what else I’ll be focusing on.

Yes, fire alarms and unexpected things do come up during the day that must be addressed and can throw off that to-do list, but having that list to start that day cuts way down on your ‘what do I need to do next’ wasted time throughout a given day.

Start with what’s hard

Outside of time-sensitive meetings that I must be present for, I get my most taxing and urgent work out of the way as early as possible in the day. Yes, I’m a morning person, but as we all too well know, when a fire starts, it has to be put out on the spot. While we have to give the time that problem or issue requires, doing so can really throw off a day.

Get your deliverables and most important work done as early as possible so you’re not facing a late night if roadblocks do come up during the day.

Work in sprints

Ian, our CEO, is a big proponent of working in sprints and running this way has helped me tremendously. As much as your schedule and to-do list allows, work in 45-minute sprints.

During a 45-minute sprint, forget about your email, close out of Facebook, and yell at anybody who comes by your desk to chat (okay maybe not, but you know what I mean). Use that 45 minutes to focus solely on one ‘to-do’ item without any other distractions.

Get that done and check it off your list. I would challenge that ‘to-do’ items needing more than 45 minutes could be further broken down into multiple ‘to-dos’.

Then, once your 45-minute sprint is done, use the next 10 – 15 minutes to check email, get up to speed on your social profiles, read an article, or chat with team members.

Once you’re caught up, start on another to-do and 45-minute sprint.

Keep your email clean

Inbox Zero is absolute bliss for me.

Typically, the only emails that stay in my inbox for longer than an hour or two are ones that I need to respond to directly before the end of the day.

Otherwise, it’s tools (we’ll get to those later) and a detailed folder system to keep the clutter out.

Actively Meet

I am not a “meeting person” but I have a lot of them throughout any given day.

‘Actively meet’ does not mean working through your email while others provide status updates on what they are working on.

Actively meet and make the most of that time. Raise key points. Work through issues. Create resolutions. Clarify takeaways. Layout next steps.

Get out of there.

Integrating Tools

I certainly haven’t automated my job entirely but there are several tools I use every single day to help me work smarter. The key is finding the tools to help cut down on monotonous tasks, freeing up my time and mind to focus only on the work that matters most.

Here’s what I personally lean on heavily:

Automated Reporting

Depending on your job function and responsibilities, performance reporting can take up a substantial portion of your work week and it doesn’t have to. Automatically pulling data from multiple sources and formatting that data saves our team a ton of time over here.

Instead of spending significant, unnecessary time to gather data, do the necessary pre-work once so you can focus on analyzing and putting together insights with next steps for action.

For heavy Google Analytics users, create a custom dashboard that aggregates all your most important metrics in one place. One click within GA gets you into that dashboard for viewing. Better yet, schedule those metrics for automated recurring email report that’s delivered on exactly the schedule you need it.

Additionally, Google Data Studio provides a source for more formalized, custom, efficient reporting.

Again, set it up once, update your date ranges as needed, and spend your time on analysis instead of data gathering.

Boomerang for Gmail

In all honesty, this is probably the most important tool in my current arsenal. Boomerang for Gmail allows me to stay out of email agony. Remember when I talked about cleaning your inbox?

Boomerang for Gmail allows users to do two primary things.

First, users can schedule when their emails are sent.

Secondly, and where I see the biggest benefit, Boomerang enables users to move emails out of their inbox and automatically bring them back at a scheduled date and time when that specific email is pertinent again.

Get an email with notes for a meeting happening four days from now? Schedule that email to pop back onto the top of your inbox an hour before that meeting starts.

Asking an employee to follow up with you on an item two weeks from now? Boomerang that email back into your inbox two weeks from now to remind them if you haven’t heard anything back yet.

The ability to file away important messages and emails knowing they will come back when applicable is incredibly freeing as a marketing professional.

Reminders – Mac

There are probably fancier and better tools out there, but Reminders on Mac OS is just plain simple and effective.

It’s not my lifeline for day-of reminders and tasks (I have a daily to-do list for that) but anything that’s further than a day away and not in my email goes onto my reminder list and pops up when I know it will be relevant.

Again, like Boomerang, schedule those reminders to pop back up exactly when you know you’ll need them.

Automated Scheduling Software

I mentioned I’m not a meeting person, right?

The only thing that might be more painful than an extra meeting is going back and forth to schedule a meeting. For one -on-one meetings, use an automated scheduling software.

Take the time to link and set your schedule once in a program like Calend.ly. Then it’s as simple as sending a link, and letting the other person choose the time that works best for them. Drop the back and forth time spent on getting things scheduled.

We use HubSpot, which has a meetings capability, and is integrated with a lot of our other marketing, sales, and client service activity.

Pocket

Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I find at least 5 – 10 articles a day I want to read. Shockingly, my to-do list in the office doesn’t call for an hour of reading every day.

And I’m not unique at Portent in this. We joke internally about being a “learning hospital” in order to stay at the top of our game, which means a lot of emphasis on keeping up with what’s new, what’s effective, and what’s not. That can mean a lot of reading, and researching.

While I may get through one or two of those articles during the workday, most of my reading comes during my commute into the office each morning and on my way home in the evening.

Pocket helps immensely with this. Save articles straight from Twitter or your internet browser to pocket and have them aggregated in one cross-device place, when you’re ready to read.

These tools don’t automate the ‘thinking’ tasks we face every day. However, what they do allow is to cut down on the nagging thoughts that can sabotage our workflow and brain space.

Recap

By minimizing data gathering time and overall grey matter usage on menial or repeated tasks, marketers can spend their time thinking about the biggest issues and deliverables they must finish each day.

Pseudo-legal disclaimers:

There isn’t one way to work smarter.

What works for one organization, may not work in another.

What works for me, may not work for you.

But if you commit to making this part of your process, the reward is to focus on work that’s truly more impactful, as well as more interesting. And the benefits of that higher leverage work will ultimately flow to your organization, your customers, and just as importantly to yourself.

Now get home, recharge, and come back tomorrow ready to do bigger and better things.

The post Work Smarter, Not Harder in Digital Marketing appeared first on Portent.

Auditing your Google AdWords account on a quarterly or semi-annual basis is a great way to step back from the day-in, day-out management grind to find gaps in performance or areas for expansion to help boost overall performance.

While some marketing managers and business owners know the importance of stepping back to review an AdWords account, many don’t know where to start when it’s time to dive in for an audit.

Below are 13 places to start when looking to find impactful places for change through auditing your Google AdWords account.

Conversion Tracking and Analytics Setup

Before diving directly into the setup, execution, and performance of your Google AdWords campaigns, it’s important to ensure the method being used to track your key performance indicators is working properly.

1. Google AdWords conversion setup

Within the Tools section of the Google AdWords interface, the Conversions tab displays all AdWords conversions set up in your account. Check the tracking status of active conversions and the live conversion pages on your website to ensure you’re tracking your most important KPIs.

2. Google Analytics / Google AdWords linking

If you’re actively using Google Analytics to track visitors on your website, ensure your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are linked together. When linked properly, marketers running Google AdWords can track campaign performance from an acquisition, behavior, and conversion perspective.

Confirming that conversion tracking is working properly allows marketers the ability to analyze campaign performance around their most important KPIs. This ability will use reliable conversion data when it comes to auditing a Google AdWords account is vital.

If you discover that your conversion tracking is incomplete or not working all together, make sure to take that into account before making major account changes based on conversion performance.

That said, let’s dive into the AdWords campaigns when auditing your account.

Campaign Settings and Dimensions

The settings within an individual campaign hold a wealth of targeting features that affect performance. Exploring these areas at the campaign level can uncover areas of wasted spend or places for potential growth.

3. Campaigns limited by budget

When it comes to allocating spend within your account, identifying the campaigns that are limited by budget on a regular basis provides the most straightforward way to control spending.

If a campaign is not limited by budget on a daily basis, increasing the daily budget will have little to no effect on campaign spending.

If a given campaign is limited by its daily budget on a consistent basis, adjusting the daily budget up to expand spending or down to limit spending, is one of the simplest methods for controlling the overall spend in your account.

Finding high-performing campaigns that are limited by budget create a notable opportunity for efficient KPI expansion.

4. Device targeting

Again at the campaign level, the device by device performance breakdown provides marketers the ability to expand or limit spending on computers, tablets, and mobile devices based on individual device performance.

By adjusting device-specific bids negatively or positively, advertisers can adjust their spending to maximize spending on their best device types from a conversion standpoint while limiting or eliminating spend on devices that convert poorly.

5. Location targeting

Similar to the concept around device targeting, location targeting enables advertisers to further control spending based on their geographic location targeting.

Identifying your highest converting geographic area allows advertisers the ability to push more of their budget into those areas and, conversely, if a small handful of locations are identified as poor converting from a conversion rate or cost-per-acquisition level, budget can be pulled or totally removed from those areas.

6. Ad schedule

Just like the device and location performance philosophy, the ‘Ad Schedule’ tab within the campaign settings provides a campaign level look at campaign performance based on the ad schedule set up.

Within the ad schedule tab, advertisers can find account metrics like impressions, clicks, click through rate, average cost per click, and total spending for each segmented block of time carved out in their ad schedule. Along with those metrics, conversion-centric metrics like conversion rate and cost per conversion point to efficiency performance on marketers’ most valuable KPIs.

Similar to the bid adjustments possible for individual locations and devices, your ad schedule can be further manipulated to take advantage of high performing times and days.

7. Delivery method

The delivery method within a campaign can often times be overlooked by advertisers unsure of its capabilities. If you’re looking to spend more within a given campaign that is not limited by daily budget, switching the delivery method from ‘Standard’ to ‘Accelerated’ can give your campaign a boost in impressions leading to the potential for more clicks, conversions, etc.

Campaign / Ad Group Structure

After combing through and identifying areas for optimization within your active campaign settings, we can shift our attention to the makeup of the ad groups within each campaign. This really comes down to the organization of your ad group structure within a given campaign.

8. Individual ad group performance within a campaign

Within each of your active campaigns, reviewing the overall performance of each individual ad group can point to the potential need for a campaign restructure. This analysis is especially pertinent to campaigns limited by daily budget.

Let’s look at an example.

The campaign below holds five active ad groups, all of which collect impressions, clicks, and conversions at different volume and efficiency levels based on the keywords held within each ad group.

Looking at individual performance, it’s clear to see that the ad group highlighted in red converts at both a volume and efficiency level much higher than the campaign average. That said, the same ad group is only spending 33% of the ad group spending total due to the other, poorer performing ad groups that all share the same daily budget.

In this example, removing the poor performing ad groups from this campaign and placing them into their own, brand new campaign, would allow the opportunity for greater performance. Identifying both higher-than-average and lower-than-average performing ad groups within campaigns provides marketers the opportunity to redistribute ad groups and further control their spending.

9. Ad group relevancy

Within each ad group, it’s important to review the subjective relevancy between the keywords, ad copy, and final URL landing pages. Generally speaking, those three segments factor into Quality Score–the higher your Quality Scores are, the better your ads will perform.

Once way to help maximize QS is through highly relevant ad groups. Each ad group should contain a centralized theme with core keywords, ads, and landing pages all relating back to a singular theme.

If you can identify multiple themes within any three of those segments (keywords, ads, landing pages), that means your ad group should probably be broken up into smaller groupings.

Ads and Ad Extensions

10. Active ads per ad group

The number of active ads and the performance of those ads does affect overall performance within a given ad group. Over time, as more ad variations and testing messages are added into a given ad group, the number of active ads running in an ad group can negatively affect performance.

Generally, try to stick to 2-3 active ad variations at a given time. Stay small, while still A/B testing your ad copy. When too many ads are active in a singular ad group, impressions wear too thin and conclusive testing is tough to complete.

Additionally, simple things like using title case throughout and proper grammar can have a significant effect on click through. Be sure that your ads are formatted properly so they appear clear and professional in the search results.

11. Utilizing pertinent ad extensions

Based on an advertiser’s KPIs and business model, check to make sure that all pertinent ad extensions are being used.

Since Ad Extensions do factor into your Ad Rank, implementing highly relevant ad extensions can lead to higher CTRs and conversion rates in addition to lower average CPCs.

Not every Ad Extension is right for every business. Understanding which Ad Extensions are effective and ineffective to drive your KPIs will help guide your work here.

Keywords

12. Keyword match types

Within each active ad group, it’s worth taking a look at not just individual keyword performance, but keyword performance grouped together by match type. Each kind of keyword match type has its pros and cons.

Exact match keywords can often generate the highest conversion rates but typically come with lower search volume. Broad match keywords, which can bring in a higher volume of impressions and clicks, can also generate unqualified traffic for your website–increasing your costs without driving KPI metrics.

Analyzing keyword performance by match type can provide insight into where performance thrives and drags. While analyzing overall match type performance should not drive the letter of the law when determining your keyword match types, the additional information can help guide keyword strategy moving forward.

13. Search term reports

A search term report does not show the performance of the actual keywords in your account. Instead, it breaks down performance of the actual search queries that trigger your ads.

Reviewing the Search term reports will help with two major keyword optimizations for your ad groups.

1. Find high converting keywords and keyword phrases that are not in your keyword list. Yes, your ads are already populating on those queries, but by adding those keywords and phrases into your keyword list, the likelihood that your ad will populate on that query will increase.
2. Analyzing the search term reports is a great way to find and add additional negative keywords to your negative keywords list. By adding irrelevant keywords to your negative list, advertisers can save spending on poor quality, low converting traffic.

Stepping back and auditing your Google AdWords account on a normal basis can be a great way to find pockets of wasted spending and areas for profitable expansion. At the onset, a full audit of an AdWords account can be a large task but it doesn’t have to be done all at once. Using the 13 reports, strategies, and optimizations outlined here, marketers can make their way through an audit at a pace that suits their expectations and needs.

The post 13 Places to Look on Your Next Google AdWords Account Audit appeared first on Portent.

From businesses ready to go to market with a new product or service, to companies with a longstanding history but little digital presence, business owners, investors, CEOs, and marketing managers are always looking for quick wins when it comes to getting started with their digital marketing initiatives.

Quick-result potential initiatives provide marketers the ability to test and prove a concept, product, or service for profitability before making larger, long-term investments in the digital space.

Everyone wants a quick turnaround on their marketing investment, but not everyone knows where to start. When looking at short-term growth, we’ll focus on a handful of marketing tactics that can be utilized to quickly build new website visitors, customers, clients, or subscribers for you today.

With that said, let’s look at seven places to start when looking to jump start your digital marketing right now. For each tactic, we’ll also highlight a marketer’s ability to measure, target, and scale along with the investment needed from a time and financial standpoint in order to set up and manage these initiatives.

1. Search network PPC marketing

Pay-per-click marketing on Search Networks can be one of the fastest and most scalable ways to start driving traffic to your website immediately. Utilizing an advertising platform like Google AdWords or Bing Ads, advertisers can quickly create keyword-targeted campaigns to serve their ads on search results pages triggered by their core customers.

Set your advertising budget, build your Search Network campaigns, and begin driving traffic to your website almost immediately.

PPC marketing can be expensive depending on your industry vertical and competition, but its turn around time on effectiveness has the potential to be extremely fast. By closely tracking your PPC performance with platform conversion tracking or an analytics solution, it’s easy to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Based on that performance, scale up to grow farther, or decrease your spending to save budget.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: High

Ability to Scale: High

Time Investment Needed: Medium

Financial Investment Needed: High

2. Paid social

Similar to PPC Marketing, Paid Social campaigns provide advertisers the ability to almost instantly promote their services or product offerings across many of today’s popular social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are today’s most popular social advertising options and platforms like Snapchat and Instagram continue to make their advertising options more accessible for marketers.

Unlike traditional keyword-based PPC marketing, paid social platforms mostly operate on demographic and contextual-based targeting methods. Capabilities across these platforms provide advertisers a unique ability to create highly targeted messages and creative for granular customer groups based on their demographics, pain points, and needs. From the advertiser’s perspective, this provides an unparalleled testing ground which is also readily trackable and scalable based on performance.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: High

Ability to Scale: High

Time Investment Needed: Medium

Financial Investment Needed: High

3. Display advertising

Display advertising, most traditionally done through image or animation-based ads, is typically the cheapest paid tactic to drive new visitors to your website. Google AdWords offers a robust display network on which to serve ads, for advertisers who are just getting started.

Advertisers can target their ads through a number of different methods. Manual selecting where your ads show website-by-website can result in highly targeted efforts, but lower levels of impressions and clicks. Utilizing targeting via display keywords, topics, placements, or demographics can result in a higher number of impressions and clicks to an unqualified audience.

From a value perspective, display networks can provide some of the lowest average cost per click figures across all advertising platforms and channels. However, direct response from display advertising is typically poor. That said, using your display ads to drive brand awareness or your remarketing pools is your best bet when diving into display advertising.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: Medium / Low

Ability to Scale: Medium

Time Investment Needed: Medium

Financial Investment Needed: High

4. Remarketing

Remarketing provides advertisers the ability to ‘re-market’ an advertisement to users who have already visited their website. Typically, website users who have already visited a website and familiarized themselves with a service or product are more likely to convert when coming back to that site for the second or third time. Remarketing provides advertisers the ability to get their offering back in front of users who didn’t convert on a first visit.

Utilizing Remarketing lists in Google Analytics and targeting those lists in Google AdWords, advertisers can become extremely detailed in putting together groupings of past website visitors to remarket to. Typically, remarketing is one of the best pay-per-click marketing options from a conversion rate and cost-per-conversion perspective.

Something to note here–in order to be eligible to remarket to users, a website must already be generating traffic. Remarketing cannot be the sole way for visitors to find your website. Utilizing Search Network, Display Network, or paid social campaigns can be a good way fill your audience pools to make remarketing a possibility for your business.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: High

Ability to Scale: Medium / Low

Time Investment Needed: Medium

Financial Investment Needed: High

5. Email marketing

When done right, email marketing has the potential to be one of the most effective marketing channels your business can leverage from a conversion rate perspective, and–depending on the size of your email list–can also be one of your largest revenue-generating channels.

A couple of caveats here:

1. If you don’t have an existing email list, email marketing is not a short-term path to growth. Building a true email list of engaged prospects and customers takes time.

2. Don’t buy email lists; this can (read: most likely will) lead to low-quality response rates in your email outreach and little to show from a conversion standpoint.

That said, if you do have an engaged email list, developing a strategy with product/service updates or promotions can trigger high response at a low cost to the marketer.

Using a third-party email solution and UTM tagging methods provides marketers the ability to closely track email performance and the financial investment needed here is typically low, making email marketing a huge opportunity for quick growth.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: High

Ability to Scale: Low

Time Investment Needed: Low

Financial Investment Needed: Low

6. Link building / PR

When grouping link building and PR into a singular bucket within the digital marketing landscape, we’re focusing on the idea of getting other websites to talk about and feature your product/service/website on their site.

The impact of link building and PR can be as big or as little as the websites featuring your offering or business. Hitting it out of the park with a feature on a highly visited and targeted website can bring thousands of visitors and sales to your website in a single day. On the other hand, working through to identify the right outlets for your business and then building the necessary relationships with the right people at those outlets can be a major time investment. And it is possible that your time investment ends in little-to-no results. Because of that, link building is the biggest wildcard on this list when looking at short-term growth opportunities.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: Medium

Ability to Scale: Low

Time Investment Needed: High

Financial Investment Needed: Low

7. Conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization has nothing to do with bringing more traffic to your website. However, it has everything to do with making the most from a conversion standpoint with the traffic that does come to your site.

Increasing the conversion rate on your website can be one of the most overlooked methods for growth. Most people immediately think of getting more traffic to get more sales. But what if you focused on creating the best and most inviting path to conversion for the visitors already coming to your website?

Depending on how much traffic your website currently gets on a regular basis, improving your overall conversion rate by just half a percent can make a major impact on your bottom line.

Ability to Measure: High

Ability to Target: Medium

Ability to Scale: Low

Time Investment Needed: Medium

Financial Investment Needed: Low

When it comes to short-term growth, finding the right tactic isn’t straightforward. Commonly, the key to short-term success is finding the right mix of tactics that come together to meet your bottom line objectives.

Whenever you’re working through a short-term growth period, be sure to outline specific goals and a timeline for reaching those goals. When combining your goals and timeline along with cash and time investments, companies who are just hitting the market for the first time along with longstanding, established businesses can find success through utilizing a number of short-term digital marketing tactics.

The post Short Term Growth: Jump Start Your Digital Marketing Today appeared first on Portent.

One of the most common questions our clients ask us when starting a new PPC campaign is “Where are my ads? I searched for my keywords and didn’t see my ad.”

This is a reasonable question. They are paying for clicks. So how come they can’t trigger ads themselves?

It’s important to understand the internal and external factors that might prevent your ads from triggering 100% of the time. Below are 9 of the top reasons why you may have a hard time seeing your ads when you search for them.

1. Using the wrong search engine

This may seem like a no-brainer….but it has happened before.

Advertisers using Google AdWords need to understand that their ads will only be shown on the search engine results page (SERP) of Google.com and Google’s search partners. Same rules apply to Bing Ads; your ads will only be shown on the Bing SERP.

Double check that you’re using the same search engine that you’re buying traffic on.

2. Credit card is declined

Although uncommon, credit cards that are on file for your account may be revoked for a number of reasons. The main reason is typically an expired credit card.

If your credit card gets declined, all ads in the account will not be eligible to be shown.

3. Ads or site is disapproved

Editorial policies, however annoying they may be, exist for quality control purposes. If any of the ads don’t adhere to these guidelines the ads will not be eligible to be shown.

4. Exhausted campaign budget

Most campaigns have a daily budget, which cannot be exceeded. If you reach the daily cap number, your ads will be paused until the next day. There are settings options to help prevent this, but regardless, if you have a limited budget, your ads will not show for every eligible performed search.

5. Ad schedule limiting impressions

Oftentimes, companies will set up custom ad scheduling to serve ads only at times that convert the best for them. This allows them to conserve budget for the best converting hours.

Keeping this in mind, if you’re searching for your ads during non-scheduled hours, then you will not see your ad being served.

6. Outside geographic targeting

Some advertisers want to target specific geographical locations so that customers only in their service area will be served ads. If you are searching from outside of the predetermined geographical location, your ads will not be displayed.

7. Low ad rank

Ad rank is a Google calculated metric that takes into account both your maximum cost-per-click and Quality Score. Low ad rank will decrease your ad’s average position within the SERP. On occasion, ad rank may be below the first page, reducing visibility.

8. Low impression share

Impression share is a percentage of the number of impressions an ad receives compared to the number of impressions the ad was eligible to earn. For example, if your impression share is 20% for a keyword, then 80% of the time your ad will not show when that keyword is searched for.

Having a keyword with an impression share of 100% is hard to achieve. In general, a higher impression share is better, but the point is, most keywords do not have a 100% impression share, which means sometimes your ad will not show even when it was eligible.

9. Search result ad fatigue

Searching for your ad over and over again may cause your ads to be worn out of showing on the SERP.

When you continuously search for ads and don’t click on them, Google may determine that your ad is not relevant or useful to users searching those keywords. If that’s the conclusion they came to, your impression share can drop.

After discussing the multitude of reasons why your ads are not showing up when you search for them, you can finally take a deep breath. Instead of hunting in the SERP for your ads, focus on the metrics in AdWords and Bing Ads. That will be a better representation of your ad performance.

The post Why Can’t I See My PPC Ads? appeared first on Portent.

Now that we have built the account structure, populated the ad groups with keywords, written compelling ad copy, and added in ad extensions, it’s time to go live!…

Hold Your Horses.

Are you set up to track performance? Having the ability to track the success of paid search campaigns is vital to the success of your efforts. Being able to track key performance indicators such as leads generated or transactions completed is an invaluable tool for optimization.

If you think about it in simple business terms, you need to know how much revenue you’re generating in relation to the amount of ad spend. If you can’t do this effectively, you will have a hard time validating paid search campaigns.

There are two main ways within Google that advertisers can track the success of their paid search efforts.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords offers an easy way to track conversions by using code that records when a customer lands on a pre-determined page on the business website.

Tracking individual pages such as the “thank you” or “confirmation” page is a powerful way to track the amount of people who complete a goal.

Setting up AdWords conversion tracking starts by clicking the Tools and Analysis tab at the top of the AdWords interface.

Then, click Conversions.

To create your conversion, click the +Conversion button.

The default conversion name will be “Conversion #1;” let’s change that. Name it something descriptive like “Transaction Completed” or “Lead Submitted.”

The Source should be kept at Webpage; after this, save the changes.

Next, after saving the changes, choose a Conversion Category.

There are four main conversion categories: Purchase/Sale, Signup, Lead, or View of a page.

With these four options, you need to choose the category that best applies to the goal we have defined for our visitors.

After you select the category, choose the Markup Language for our conversion code. The default is set to HTML, which is typically what most advertisers use, but there are other types such as CHTML, XHTML or WML.

Save the changes and now the final step.

If you are capable of making these site changes on your own, then do so; otherwise hiring someone to do it correctly the first time is worth it.

Once your code populates it will look similar to the code below:

It is critical that we only post the code on a page which can only be reached once the visitor completes the desired goal.

For businesses, the typical pages for the code to be added include the thank you or confirmations page, which can only be landed on once completing a contact form or purchase.

Click Done to complete the setup process.

Once the code is implemented onto the correct page, your tracking is set up.

Linking AdWords and Google Analytics

If AdWords conversion tracking is the BMW of tracking solutions, then linking your Google Analytics account with your AdWords account is the Ferrari. It will give you great insights that will allow you to take tracking to the next level.

By linking both these Google accounts, advertisers will be able to see their website traffic metrics such as average time on site, bounce rate and page/visits.

In addition to these insights, e-commerce businesses with correctly implemented analytics tracking can track revenue numbers.

Using this type of data, advertisers are able to see how ad spend correlates with revenue figures.

To get started, click the Tools and Analysis tab in the AdWords interface, then click Google Analytics.

Next, click the Admin tab in the upper right-hand corner of the interface.

Then click the account that holds your active Google Analytics profile.

Find your active profile, and click the star to the left of the profile name. Do not click the profile name.

Once the profile star is highlighted, click the Data Sources tab.

Next, click Link Accounts.

The last step in the process is to make sure that your active profile is selected and your ads are getting auto-tagged.

Click Continue to finalize the linking between your AdWords and Analytics accounts.

An account build following the guidelines we have laid out with the proper conversion tracking will make account management that much more enjoyable.

Check out the rest of the six-part series:
PART 1: STRUCTURING YOUR GOOGLE ADWORDS ACCOUNT
PART 2: UNDERSTANDING CAMPAIGN SETTINGS
PART 3: RESEARCHING KEYWORDS
PART 4: WRITING ENGAGING ADS
PART 5: IMPLEMENTING AD EXTENSIONS

The post Building Successful PPC: Tracking Success appeared first on Portent.

Once your account structure is solidified, it’s time to create your first set of campaigns. The first step after creating your campaign is to assign the settings attributed to each.

Campaign settings are applied to each ad group within that campaign. That said, things like daily budget, network selection, and locations, among other settings, are uniform for the entire campaign.

Let’s dive into the standard settings within every Google AdWords campaign.

General

Once your campaign is named, your next step is to choose the type of campaign you want. There are three campaign types to choose from: Search Network Only, Display Network Only, and Search and Display Networks (There are some other more technical options too but let’s just focus on the basics for now). This selection will determine the networks on which your ads will show.

What’s the difference between the Search Network and the Display Network?

The Search Network is a group of search engines that allows advertisers to sponsor text ads appearing after a user searches using a keyword or string of keywords.

The Display Network is a huge group of partner websites that display both text and banner ads. These ads are not triggered by users searching on Google.com, but by the targeting you set up (interest targeting, topic targeting, placements, etc).

Pro-tip: Use a descriptive campaign name that uniquely identifies your campaign. When picking where your ads will show up, stick to one network. Do not set your campaign to serve ads on the Search and Display Networks within a singular campaign.

Networks

When opting into a Search Network-only campaign, it’s time to determine your ads’ reach across Google’s Search Network.

Once within the Networks section, you have a choice to display your ads on Google.com and Google’s search partner sites. Search partners are other search engines that are affiliated with Google. Some examples are aol.com and about.com. By showing your ads on Google’s search partner websites, advertisers should see an overall increase in impressions and clicks.

Pro-tip: When launching your initial campaigns, begin with Google’s Search Network only. Once you begin working to build volume and increase daily spend, look at enabling search partners.

Devices

Within the ‘Devices’ category, advertisers can determine whether to bid more or less depending on if the user is on a mobile device.

Are you a locksmith and potential customers want to find you when they’re in a pinch and scrambling for help on their mobile device? Increasing your mobile bid adjustment could help attract customers stuck with only a phone.

Are you a B2B firm selling high-powered software to executives? You may then want to avoid spending your advertising budget on people searching from their phone.

These bidding decisions are handled in the ‘Devices’ section of your AdWords account. In order to change your device preference, we must adjust our mobile bid modifiers. To eliminate mobile targeting, set your mobile bid adjustment to -100%. If creating a highly targeted campaign meant to attract mobile users as much as possible, increasing your mobile bid modification to the maximum of 300% will help spur mobile traffic.

Pro-tip: To leverage device bid adjustments, think about what devices your customers use to find you. More importantly, think about what devices they use to convert with you. Then tailor your strategy based on that.

Locations

New campaigns by default are set to serve all of the United States and Canada. This default setting is not always the most effective, depending on how your business is set up to serve your customers.

First, start by thinking about where your target market is located.

Targeting can be broken down into geographies by country, state, city, zip code, Nielsen DMA region and even congressional district. Advertisers may also set a targeted radius around any given custom location, like a store address.

Pro-tip: Keep in mind the capabilities and scope of what your business delivers. If you are a local business with a physical location, be conscious of how far your typical customers travel to get to your store. If you don’t ship internationally, keep your targeting within the United States.

Languages

By default, all new campaigns are set to target English language users. Unless your website or landing pages aren’t in English, we don’t recommend targeting additional languages within a singular campaign.

Bidding and budget

The bidding and budget section in the campaign settings allows advertisers to not only set their daily budgets but also how baseline keyword bids are determined in a campaign.

Within AdWords, you have two core options for making keyword bid adjustments–manual or automated. Setting your bidding method to a manual strategy puts the control in your hands. This method is ideal for advertisers with the understanding and ability to review and change their keyword bids on a regular basis.

Additionally, there are a number of automated strategies advertisers can use. Each automated strategy is designed around a different methodology–selecting the right one is up to the advertisers.

After determining which campaign bidding method to use, it’s time to set up a daily spending budget. Setting your daily budget is fairly straightforward, but when doing so, be sure to keep in mind that AdWords can spend up to 20% more than what your daily budget is set at.

Pro-tip: Manually setting your keyword bids provides an advantage if you have the time and ability to do so.

After getting through these standard campaign settings, it’s time to move forward in our Google AdWords campaign building. Look for our next post on building your keyword lists.

Check out the rest of the six-part series:
PART 1: STRUCTURING YOUR GOOGLE ADWORDS ACCOUNT
PART 3: RESEARCHING KEYWORDS
PART 4: WRITING ENGAGING ADS
PART 5: IMPLEMENTING AD EXTENSIONS
PART 6: TRACKING SUCCESS

The post Building Successful PPC: Understanding Campaign Settings appeared first on Portent.

This post is the first in a six-part series written by Portent’s small business team outlining the fundamentals of building your first PPC account through Google AdWords. Follow along in our six-part series as we will be laying down the knowledge detailing best practices for setting yourself up for PPC success.

Structuring your Google AdWords account

Setting yourself up for PPC success through Google AdWords starts with how you decide to structure your PPC account. Properly setting up your account structure forms a strong backbone to create the building blocks of your AdWords account. Having an organized and efficient structure for your campaigns and ad groups will help you better balance your spending budgets, increase your efficiency when it comes to account management, and boost your paid advertising performance.

Getting your account structure right is vital to PPC success.

Determining your Google AdWords campaigns

Before we get too far into it, it’s important to understand what a campaign means in the context of Google AdWords. In the context of PPC, a campaign is a singular set of ad groups (which contain keywords and ads) that share a singular campaign budget and campaign settings. We’ll dive further into campaign settings later in this PPC series but for now, let’s stick to understanding PPC account structure.

Campaigns should be thought of as a container for ad groups: the more relevant to each other those ad groups are, the better.

How your website is organized at its top-level navigation is a good place to start when beginning to build out a preliminary list of potential campaigns.

The screen shot below illustrates an example navigation in which this company breaks down its navigation products by category type:

Following the example above, we can identify four potential PPC campaigns: ‘Specials,’ ‘Paracord,’ ‘Spool,’ and ‘Accessories.’ These campaigns will create the overarching structure for our work moving forward.

With our campaign list taking shape, let’s turn our attention to determining what ad groups will go in each campaign.

Discovering your Ad Groups

At its core level, an ad group is a singular set of keywords and ads. Similar to campaigns, ad groups act as smaller subsets of our campaign as a whole.

Continuing with our paracord e-commerce example, let’s visualize how to organize our ad groups by looking at the navigation built into the website.

Below is a subset which displays the different types of paracord this particular store offers.

Each product type on this list has the potential to be its own ad group. We can use each of these product types to create individual ad groups within a singular campaign.

The following chart gives us a visual representation of how the account structure should be built after we break out our campaigns and ad groups from the website.

After building the structure of your AdWords account, it’s time to move on to filling the structure you’ve just built. That said, we’ll take a look at campaign settings next.

Check out the rest of the six-part series:
PART 2: UNDERSTANDING CAMPAIGN SETTINGS
PART 3: RESEARCHING KEYWORDS
PART 4: WRITING ENGAGING ADS
PART 5: IMPLEMENTING AD EXTENSIONS
PART 6: TRACKING SUCCESS

The post Building Successful PPC: Structuring your Google AdWords Account appeared first on Portent.

Small business owners are typically on a tight budget with every dollar accounted for. It is imperative that advertisers stretch their PPC budget to get the highest return on their investment. Let’s review our five top PPC tips for campaign success on a limited budget:

1. Separate networks by campaign

When advertisers set up their campaigns, Google, by default, recommends serving your ads on both the Search and Display Networks. This is a great strategy if you want to have an outlandish number of impressions and overpay for each click by a visitor…

A more effective strategy is to separate campaigns to serve ads on each network individually. Each network has been made to reach an audience with different goals on different types of sites. For example, if you are trying to run a branding campaign to grow awareness, then the Display network is a good bet. By separating campaigns by network, you can save money and time.

2. Use negative keywords

Using negative keywords effectively will help to weed out some of the irrelevant and unrelated clicks wasting your money.

For example, if you are a lawyer defending DUI cases you will want to filter out terms such as: DUI alcohol limit, free lawyer, domestic violence lawyer, etc. This way, people searching for those specific terms won’t trigger your ads and cost you money. The longer a campaign runs the more opportunities there will be to add negative keywords which are triggering irrelevant clicks. Use Google’s Search Term Reports to find new ideas for negative keywords.

3. Don’t “set it and forget it”

Think of your account as a living thing that needs to be cared for.

Once you have your campaigns built out with all the keywords and ads, you probably think your work is done, but that’s not the case; the work is just beginning.

Advertisers need to be cognizant that their account needs to be monitored frequently. Depending on the size of the account, once a day or twice a week should suffice. When going through the account, you should be adjusting bids, monitoring average position, adding negative keywords and testing ad copy to find the highest converters. Without proper care, things can hit the fan quickly, negatively affecting your campaign’s performance and ROI.

4. Advertise only where you can deliver

Small businesses need to be conscious of where they are spending their PPC dollars. Use location targeting to limit the regions your ads are eligible to show in.

For example, do you sell clothes but don’t ship internationally? Make sure your ads are only targeting your home country. Are you a car mechanic operating in a specific city? Then there is no need to advertise beyond the region of your service.

With location targeting, you can get as broad or defined as you’d like. From zip codes to countries, the possibilities are limitless.

5. Don’t forget–there IS customer support

Call that 1-866 line if you need to talk to a human being at Google or Bing.

Ever want to smash your computer because you can’t get to the bottom of an issue? I do too. But don’t. Errors happen, code is written wrong and often times automated help is not very useful. Speaking with a real person is often the best way to resolve your issues. Getting personalized attention for your account by someone who knows the intricacies of the platform is an invaluable tool.

Hopefully, these 5 critical tips for PPC success for small businesses on a budget will help you to achieve advertising success. Using these tips and following other basic guidelines should help to maximize your PPC budget by increasing the number of clicks you earn and also by showing your ads to a more qualified audience.

The post 5 Critical Tips for PPC Success for Small Businesses on a Budget appeared first on Portent.

Remarketing campaigns through Google AdWords offer advertisers an additional tactic to drive potentially high value visitors back to their website in an effort to grow overall conversion figures.

Remarketing campaigns allow businesses to stay connected with their target audience after they leave their website by showing ads to them on other websites across the web. Users who have already visited your website are likely to be more engaged with your brand messaging and offering after their first visit. Typically, returning visitors browse more pages and convert more often when coming back to a website after their first time. That said, remarketing can be an extremely powerful tool when working to increase the ROAS (return on ad spend) of your pay-per-click marketing efforts.

While remarketing can be a powerful channel for digital marketers, setting up your first campaign can be a challenge. To help with that, we’ve provided a step-by-step look at how to create your first Google AdWords remarketing campaign.

How to set up a Google AdWords Remarketing campaign:

There are three core components of setup required to create and activate a remarketing campaign for your Google AdWords account.

1. The first step is to create an audience to remarket to. This remarketing audience is used to pool website visitors who then can be remarketed to. Called a ‘remarketing list,’ the audience specified is essentially a collection of users who qualify based on requirements set by an advertiser.

2. The second step required in this process is to create a remarketing campaign within your Google AdWords account. Creating this kind of campaign is similar to the standard campaign setup in AdWords.

3. Lastly, advertisers need to add a series of text or image ads into the created campaign. Through this blog post, we will show how to upload image ads into your campaign for remarketing purposes.

How to Create a Remarketing List in Google AdWords:

After logging into your Google AdWords account, click the ‘Shared Library’ link in the lower left navigation bar.

Then click into the ‘Audiences’ section.

If this is your first time remarketing, you will need to add a remarketing tag to your website. This small snippet of code allows for visitors to be tagged with a cookie required for your remarketing ads to be shown to them once off your website. Having this tag active and installed on your website is required in order to pool your remarketing list.

Google AdWords will automatically create an ‘All Visitors’ audience list to help you get started. This list will pool all visitors who have visited your website.

Next, enter a membership duration for the list, which will determine how long the visitor’s cookie will stay on your list. The default and most common membership duration is the 30-day window.

Once your list is created and the remarketing tag is implemented on your site, an audience list size will begin to populate.

How to Create a Remarketing Campaign in Google AdWords:

Once your remarketing list has been created, it’s time to turn your attention to creating the Remarketing campaign in AdWords. To initiate the process, navigate to the ‘Campaigns’ tab of your AdWords account and click the ‘+Campaign’ button. Then select ‘Display Network only.’

Walk through the guided process to complete campaign setup. If you’re not sure which campaign settings to use, check out our post on optimizing campaign settings.

Next, name your first ad group (typically the same name as the audience you created), set an initial default bid, and then select ‘Interests & remarketing’ as the targeting option. Once selected, a drop down will appear. Select ‘Remarketing lists’ as the targeting category.

Click the arrow to the right of the ‘All Visitors’ list to select it. Completing this process has now assigned the remarketing list you created to the remarketing campaign being put together.

How to Upload Image Ads into Google AdWords:

Before moving forward on adding your image ads into your campaign, make sure all the banner ads you have are formatted and sized within Google’s ad requirements.

Once you have your ads formatted and sized properly, adding them into your campaign is as easy as dragging and dropping.

When all your ads are uploaded into the account, click ‘Save ads’ to complete the campaign setup process.

That’s it! After creating your remarketing list, remarketing campaign, and uploading your ads, your campaign is all ready to serve ads. Please keep in mind that when adding image ads, Google usually puts those through a review process. During that review, your ads will not be eligible to show. Typically that review process is no more than 24 hours long.

The post How to Setup a Google AdWords Remarketing Campaign appeared first on Portent.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all of your Google AdWords e-commerce data in one easy-to-read dashboard?

Using custom dashboards in Google Analytics, you can!

Creating these custom dashboards from the ground up can be a time-consuming and frustrating process if you don’t know what you’re doing. Lucky for you, we have a premade e-commerce Google Analytics dashboard ready to download into your GA profile right now. And it’s free! Who doesn’t like free!?

Before you skip down to the bottom of this post for the download, there are a few things you’ll want to pay attention to.

For this dashboard to work in tip-top shape, you must:

1. Have an active Google Analytics account with e-commerce tracking enabled and working properly.
2. Have your Google Analytics and active Google AdWords accounts linked with auto-tagging turned on in Google AdWords.

If you can check those two items off your list, let’s move on to the fun stuff.

Diving into the dashboard

Column 1: What’s most important?

In the left-hand column, get your Google AdWords revenue, spending, and return on ad spend (ROAS) right off the bat.

As you move down that column, advertisers can find a breakdown of every traffic source/medium bringing in revenue to your site. This widget will provide you with a look at how influential your Google AdWords campaigns are in driving your site-wide revenue numbers.

Now we know how our top-line financial numbers are. Let’s move on.

Column 2: How do the paid visitor transactional numbers look?

Find the number of paid visits from AdWords, how many transactions those visits earned, the conversion rate from those visits, and what you paid from a cost per acquisition standpoint.

The last chart in the middle column provides a visual analysis of transactions and the CPA of those transactions.

Is there a day or two of the week that consistently produces above average sales numbers? Not converting on the weekends but still continuing to run your ads? Visualize all of that information here. Over a short period of time, the visual analysis may not provide a ton of value. However, stretched over a longer time increment (like three months or more), transactional trends could become clear, aiding your AdWords account optimization work.

Column 3: Quickly digging deeper

The third and final column on this dashboard provides a deeper look into some of the smaller (but not less important!) details within your pay-per-click marketing account.

Campaign daily budget decisions can be made quickly after a review of this widget:

Find and expand the highest converting non-branded keywords in your account here:

IMPORTANT: This widget needs customization to work properly for your business and non-branded keywords. To customize the widget, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner to activate the widget settings.

Add any branded terms or phrases commonly searched for within the ‘insert branded terms here’ parentheses.

Lastly, see what landing pages are driving conversions and which are not from a conversion rate perspective.

Now I would never claim to make the perfect dashboard, but this one is pretty dang complete if you need a two-minute update on your AdWords performance when you get into the office every AM.

To get the dashboard, click this link and select the active Google Analytics property for your tracking data.

The post The Google Analytics E-commerce Dashboard Every AdWords Marketer Needs Now appeared first on Portent.