I’m going to tell you something that’s a little counterintuitive: you may be hurting your AdWords or general PPC performance by trying to do too much, too fast.

This idea doesn’t get a lot of air time because a lot of under-performing AdWords accounts or campaigns trace back to under-optimization or “set it and forget it”, which we all know is the devil.

Requisite PSA: Getting the most out of your Google AdWords account takes time, expertise and diligence. One of the most common mistakes marketers make, especially those new to managing AdWords accounts, is not paying enough attention.

This post gets into problems caused at the opposite end of the spectrum. Here are some common over optimization mistakes that we see even experienced PPC managers make.

Common Optimization Mistakes

Over optimization can mean a variety of different things. Some are small and easy to correct. Others are more foundational and require larger strategy changes.

Making Adjustments Based On Small Sample Sizes

This is the most obvious and common mistake we typically see. It is very easy to see results pouring in, either positive or negative, and make quick optimization decisions before considering whether you have enough data.

Actionable? Not with this few clicks.

Small amounts of data often do not represent long-term trends and therefore do not warrant snap adjustments. Allow your click data to reach a point of statistical significance before you make changes. It’s not based on feelings, it’s science.

Deleting or Pausing Keywords That Aren’t Performing Well

If a keyword is underperforming, it may seem like a no brainer to throw it out. Why continue to invest budget if you aren’t seeing return? You may be right in thinking this. Or you might be looking at things with too narrow a lens.

Before you give up on a keyword ask yourself why it is struggling. Here are some things to consider:

• Check the search term reports.
• Is the match type pulling in irrelevant queries?
• Is the campaign out of budget restricting reach?
• Does the ad copy and landing page match up with the keyword?

There may be a reason the keyword isn’t doing well that you could easily fix and improve your overall account strength.

Increasing Bids To Raise Ad Position

When keywords have low average ad position, the first instinct is usually to increase your max CPC bids.

Before you go driving up your CPC, check to make sure there isn’t another reason your keyword is getting pushed down in the rankings. Is the quality score low? Is the campaign ‘limited by budget’? There may be things you can to help improve your ad rank without paying more. Do some research first.

Over Utilizing Bid Modifiers

Bid modifiers for ad scheduling, location targeting, and device targeting are a fantastic optimization tool. However, incorrectly using bid modifiers is a great way to throw off an entire campaign.

It’s important to look at performance holistically before making changes. Increasing or decreasing bid modifiers too aggressively or making decisions off already optimized data can have a wide-ranging effect on campaigns.

Never allow a narrow view to dictate optimization or you can risk cutting out entire aspects of your targeting, and revenue, in the name of improved conversion rate or cost per conversion.

Also, making significant bid modifier adjustments at the same time you are changing max CPC bids is not a clean way to make measurable changes. Changing too many variables at once will make it hard to understand the results of the data and know if your optimizations are working.

Bidding Down to a Specific ROAS

Having a solid Return On Ad Spend KPI and goal is a very good idea. But optimizing your campaign budget and CPC bids down to reach that goal can affect your entire marketing mix.

If you aren’t reaching your ROAS goal it makes sense to cut spending for that campaign. Right? Not necessarily. Cutting those clicks and impressions can seriously throttle revenue, lead volume, or traffic. Paid search often contributes/drives a lot more than last click conversions, so cutting back may hurt other channels.

Cutting AdWords Budget When Performance Is Down

Again, “performance” is down. It only makes sense to cut budget. Right? Wrong again. PPC does not work in a vacuum. There are many things that could be causing a downturn that aren’t a result of poor AdWords management or potential. Seasonal trends, increased competition, and change in organic rankings may be to blame.

Additionally, your keywords, ads, and account optimization are only as strong as the landing page and offering they are promoting. A generally poor landing experience or a need for specific conversion rate optimization may be a good place to look before you give up on an ad group or campaign altogether.

Poor Optimization Strategy Can Hurt You Too

The general theme here so far is that there is often more to the story if you just look a little deeper. Making quick decisions or over-correcting your account is bad. With that said, you still need to make sure you’re not driving blind or under-correcting.

All of your optimization decision-making stems from the data. Take a moment to ask:

• Are you looking at the right metrics?
• Is your data accurate?
• Are you tracking goals/conversions?
• Have you tested your conversion tracking?
• Are you using an attribution model that fits your business?

Your optimizations are only as powerful as the data that inform them, so be sure you are tracking correctly.

These are all questions worth asking early on in your PPC strategy. And if you’re already well down the road, it’s never too late.

Be Diligent, Yet Patient in PPC Optimization

We’ve talked a lot in this post about “not doing too much”. Do not take this as an excuse to be passive, lazy, or reactive in managing your AdWords account.

Do not set it and forget it. PPC is a goldmine of actionable. ROI producing data. Use it!

But as you actively work to optimize your paid search results, be patient enough to ask the right questions and understand what’s really happening. Or not happening.

The post Are You Over Optimizing Your AdWords Account? appeared first on Portent.

Email lists are very powerful and have many different applications. They’re a great way to re-engage past customers, share your great content/knowledge, and keep your business at the front of people’s minds.

If you aren’t using yours (or if you don’t keep one), no judgment. Okay, maybe a little judgment, but here are some things you should consider.

First, let’s talk about how to build an email list

There are many different ways to collect customer email addresses. It doesn’t have to be a taboo subject. You aren’t being annoying by asking people to opt in to an email subscription. It’s expected. Here are just a few ways to grow your house email list.

• From leads – lead gen based businesses need contact info to even reach out to the customer. This should already be set.
• From sales – E-commerce sites should already be collecting an email for confirmation purposes so this is should be another no-brainer.
• Newsletter opt-in on your homepage or blog – include options for people to sign up throughout your site, and that absolutely includes your homepage.
• Offer a discount or promotion – provide an incentive like a coupon or special offer for people who do sign up for your newsletter.
• Ask – anywhere it makes sense to prompt people for an email address, meaning they’ll get something of value in return, do it!

Anyone who’s shown interest in your business should absolutely be captured on the house list if possible. Doing this gives you an amazing chance to provide more of your valuable content right to their inbox. When you get more advanced, you can even tailor those emails to reflect exactly what that person saw or researched on your site. We’ll save that for another post, but you can definitely contact us in the meantime if that’s something you’re interested in pursuing.

Email is one of a few ways you can do this kind of nurturing, but it’s by far one of the best. It’s one of the only channels that no one can take away from you. Contrast that with social platforms like Facebook, who can arbitrarily decide that you suddenly pay an arm and a leg to reach a list you thought was yours. For that reason, we call email part of “owned media”.

If you want to read more about Paid, Earned, or Owned media, you can read about the Marketing Stack here.

Ways to take advantage of your email list

Once you have a list built up, there are several different ways to leverage it to get the right message in front of your prospects. Obviously, the first thing most people think of is a promotional email campaign of some sort. But there are other ways that you can utilize this list. It’s pure gold.

Email campaign

Get set up with an email marketing service like MailChimp or run a campaign through your CRM. We like HubSpot for its simplicity, breadth, and ability to scale. Make sure you have a plan in place for how often you should be engaging your audience and what type of content you want to show them. The tools can’t do this for you. You don’t want to spam them. You want to be useful and relevant. Some different email formats to consider are:

• Monthly newsletters
• Lead nurturing emails
• Sales-focused emails
• One-off dedicated emails

CAN-SPAM Act Compliance

Make sure you aren’t breaking the law! This shouldn’t be news, but The FTC takes email spam very seriously. Don’t just jump into email marketing without understanding the laws that protect people’s privacy. There are some basic things you need to do like allowing people to unsubscribe from your list easily, for instance.

Don’t buy a list

If you want to reach an engaged, relevant, and receptive audience, don’t buy a list from anyone. Build your own email list of actual customers who are legitimately interested in your business.

Outside of email marketing, there are a few other strategies worth considering right away.

AdWords remarketing

Upload your list to Google AdWords for Customer Match campaigns. You can use your list to target people with ads on YouTube, Gmail, and in more traditional search text ads. A good PPC agency will definitely be able to help you with this.

Again, if you’ve built your list the right way (nothing purchased or rented!), the people on your list have shown a specific interest in you. Utilizing AdWords to reach out to them in different spaces is one of the best forms of online targeting available to you.

Facebook remarketing

Similar to AdWords remarketing, you can upload your email list to Facebook and do a few different things with it. You might want to target this exact audience with more specific ads. You can do that. Or maybe you want to exclude a particular audience, say current customers, to ensure your ads show only to people who haven’t bought from you yet. Get creative, or work with your agency, to layer in different demographic or psychographic (think “interest-based”) targeting options, along with your email list.

Going further, one of the most interesting things you can do is to create a “lookalike audience.” You can use your email list to have Facebook automatically build an audience that has similar interests and demographics to your best prospects and customers. This is a great way to grow your audience while harnessing the power of Facebook targeting.

There are similar “lookalike audience” offerings in AdWords, but you’ll need to work with your agency make sure your list is big enough to unlock those features.

No matter what your goals are, having a strong email list of potential, current, and ex-customers is an incredibly powerful tool. I’ve personally seen huge success from clients who make it a habit to regularly engage with and leverage their house email list. If you have questions about how you might start building your list or best use the one you already have, let us know.

The post Are You Utilizing Your Email List? appeared first on Portent.

Amazon is a no-brainer for most E-commerce sellers. Potential customers look to Amazon more often than ever and listing your products there is a quick way to boost sales. Getting visibility for your products isn’t always easy, though. Amazon is a search engine just like Google and just like Google it helps to pay-to-play.

Amazon Seller Central and Sponsored Products

Amazon Sponsored Products are just what they sound like. If you’ve been on Amazon you’ve seen these all over the place. They’re very similar in concept to Google Shopping ads. They’re not text ads or banners, but rather an extension of your product listing.

Seller Central is your Google AdWords, to keep the Google comparison going. It’s where you can create your campaigns, targeting, and everything else you might expect for an ad platform. Amazon does not have the targeting features that you might see on AdWords, though. It’s much more limited.

There are two main strategies (or options) to consider when setting up new Amazon campaigns. Automatic targeting and Manual targeting.

In general, automatic targeting on ad platforms is something to avoid. Why give the control to the platform when you can keep it to yourself?

There is some benefit to auto targeting on Amazon, though. Manual targeting just means that you get to set the keywords. Automatic means that Amazon will determine when to show your ads based on your product categories.

Tactics and strategy

Now before I get into how I approach Amazon advertising, I want to preface it by saying there are many different ways to go about this. Also, there are different types of Amazon ads, like Vendor Express, Headline Ads, and Product Display Ads, just to name a few.

That said, let’s focus on traditional sponsored product ads since those are the most standard and common option.

Focus on manual targeting but don’t forget about automatic

My strategy for Sponsored Products is fairly straightforward. Manual campaigns are the way to go….with a little help from automatic campaigns. The end goal of your campaign setup should be to have strong manual campaigns that you have full bidding control over. To get to that point, though, utilizing the larger reach of auto campaigns is a good tactic.

I mentioned already that Amazon targeting is limited. For your manual campaigns, you really only have two targeting methods: your keywords and negative keywords. So building strong keyword lists is the key to success. Luckily, Amazon provides search term reports so finding new keywords and understanding what is working is doable.

This is where auto campaigns come in handy. Set up an auto campaign as a “catch all” for your products. Set bids and budget fairly low and let it run for a week or two.

Once you have a little data (clicks, at least some sales, and a hefty amount of impressions), export a search term report and take a look at what’s racking up the most impressions and sales. You should be able to find some new keywords to add to your manual campaigns as well as some new negative keywords to exclude for all campaigns.

Keep doing this every few weeks. Your auto campaign will serve as a testing ground and your manual campaigns will grow with keywords that you know work. You can bid more aggressively on those and drive sales.

Gauging success

Amazon provides a few different reports. They’re not particularly accessible in the interface, though, and you’ll have to export them into Excel.

Also, Amazon doesn’t auto generate these reports so one of the first things you should do is go into the Reports section of Seller Central and schedule all the reports to run in regular increments so you don’t lose any data.

Final thoughts

Amazon is great. People who go there are ready to buy. And Amazon makes it so easy for them to do just that with things like Prime and general familiarity. People trust Amazon, which allows conversion rates to be fairly high.

But competition is high for many verticals so do your due diligence. Amazon advertising is a great option but look toward search optimization too. Remember, Amazon is a search engine and can be manipulated just like Google and Bing.

If you need help getting started with Amazon advertising or have questions, let us know.

The post Introduction to Amazon Ads Strategy appeared first on Portent.

It’s more important than ever for all small businesses to have a strong presence online. Regardless of industry, customers are online all day long, whether it be on their desktop at work, phone on a bus, or tablet at home on the couch.

Representing your business well digitally is easier said than done. Getting found online can be even tougher. But here are some top areas to focus on that will fit a small business’ marketing budget.

1. Have a website

This is obvious but let’s start at the beginning. For nearly all businesses, having a digital storefront in the form of a website is required. It’s about more than just having a site, though.

There is a lot that goes into making a website high quality. Many of the next thirteen points dive into some of those parts, but to start, make sure your website has a strong domain name.

2. Clearly explain who you are and what you do on your website

This may seem obvious too but I run into websites with this issue more than you’d think. When a user/customer arrives at your site, it should be clear to them who and what you are. Don’t expect them to use common sense. Not all potential paying customers do.

3. Optimize for search engines (SEO)

The last point was for people. This one is for machines. Your website needs to be optimized for search engines so they can find you and list you in their search results pages. Search engine optimization is a full-time, ongoing effort but there are usually some things you can do for quick wins to help search engines better understand what your site is about.

4. Have a call to action

Depending on your business, it’s very likely your site is not meant to be purely informative. At the end of the day, you want customers to take an action. Fill out a form, give you a call, come into your store, etc. If that’s the case, don’t be coy. Be clear with solid call(s) to action.

Lead your users down a path to the conversion you’re looking for. Again, this goes back to common sense. Don’t expect everyone to use it. Also, people online have short attention spans so don’t make them go looking for the very thing you brought them there to do.

5. Produce quality content

Content for the sake of content will not get you far. Content can mean many things. It can be text, videos, blog posts. Really, content is anything and everything a user encounters when visiting your site. Make sure the content people are consuming is worthwhile. High-quality content is both useful and informative.

6. Have a mobile friendly site

Every year, more and more people are shifting their online time toward mobile devices. Make sure your site is mobile friendly. Hop on your phone and take a look at how your site is rendered. Is your site responsive? It should be. Not only will having a mobile-friendly site make your site easier for users to consume, it will also allow you to rank better on Google. Google looks at mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor.

Not sure if your site is mobile friendly? Google made a tool that will let you know if it is, so put your site in and find out.

7. Install Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website. GA is a very powerful, free tool that will allow you to understand how people are interacting with your site. It can tell you things like how people are reaching your site, how many people visit your site, when they visit, for how long, and so much more. If you are an eCommerce business you can install eCommerce tracking too that will allow you to track sales and revenue.

This is a true example of Knowledge Is Power. Give yourself the data and insight you need to improve your site and marketing efforts.

8. Have a social media presence

Start with Facebook but depending on your business, getting set up on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. is a great way to increase visibility and help you engage with your audience.

Don’t stop at just having a Facebook page, though. You should be putting out content on a regular basis and checking in regularly.

9. Paid social

Getting found online isn’t easy. Luckily for you (and Google’s bank account), there is a way to buy yourself some visibility. PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is a quick way to make sure your site comes up in the search results for the key search queries.

Google AdWords is a great place to start. The only road block here is that you have to continue to pay Google to maintain your spot in the rankings, but it’s becoming more and more of a necessity as competition for ranking continues to grow.

10. Optimize your local listings (Local SEO)

If you’re a local business, local SEO is a very big win opportunity. Getting yourself set up on directories like Yelp, Google My Business, and Bing Places for Business will help people find you with relative ease.

11. Put testimonials on your site

Have testimonials, reviews, and/or case studies on your site. People shopping around are skeptical and have short attention spans. You need to earn their trust quickly. Testimonials are a great way to show them that you’re legitimate and that you can be trusted to deliver high-quality products or services.

12. Have a blog

We already mentioned quality content, but having a regularly-updated blog is a good way to facilitate that. Blog posts allow you to share your knowledge and help show people that you know what you’re talking about. Also, blog content will help your rank on search engines.

13. Do email marketing

You’re probably already collecting email addresses in some way. If you aren’t, find a way to start (during checkout, as a form on the site, etc.). Once you have an email list built and growing, you can use it to start an email marketing campaign as a way to re-engage past customers or to help bring people back who are still in the market.

Operating an online small business isn’t as easy as 13 quick points, but hopefully, you’ll find a few new ideas you’re missing out on. Let me know what I am missing in the comments.

The post 13 Digital Priorities for Small Businesses appeared first on Portent.

Most commonly, advertisers starting off with a paid search platform such as AdWords reach their respective audience through keyword targeting. However, with Google Shopping (or product listing ads), e-commerce businesses utilize a product feed as the main targeting tool.

The feed contains information about your products such as price, availability, brand, etc. The better the product feed, the more likely your products will reach a relevant audience with the right search. And the more often your ads reach shoppers looking for your product, the greater your chance of improving not only engagement but conversion rate.

Optimizing your product feed to meet Google’s requirements is step one. But getting the green light in Google Merchant Center does not equate to perfect targeting. There are additional steps you can (and should) take to ensure your product feed accurately represents your products.

First, the basics

Developing your first feed can either be very simple or a big pain. Most common e-commerce platforms can simply export product feeds that automatically meet Google specifications. This is the best option for most businesses as it makes things easier over time when products change (price, colors, etc.).

Depending on your CMS and product catalog size, it might make sense to manually create a spreadsheet product feed. This is only a viable option for small businesses.

Depending on what you sell, different attributes are required for your feed. Refer to this table for a detailed summary of required attributes for item categories.

As an example, for a non-apparel item such as a phone charger, the following attributes are required in your product feed:

• ID
• MPN
• Title
• Product description
• Product type
• Google product category
• Product link
• Image link
• Condition
• Availability
• Price
• GTIN (if applicable)
• Brand

If a product has multiple colors, materials, or sizes there are extra attributes required.

How to optimize

The purpose of this post isn’t to help you just meet specifications, though. Google has tons of help articles to help you do that so if you are having trouble, check those out. Also, you can always call the AdWords help number and get help from a rep.

If you are looking to strengthen your product feed targeting, grow reach, and lower cost, there are certain attributes to focus on.

• Product title
• Description
• Product type

Those three attributes are your friends. Google allows you a lot of flexibility with these attributes and it uses them when determining when to show your ads.

Be descriptive! This doesn’t mean keyword stuffing, but it does mean using the language your customers will be searching with. Let’s look at product type as an example.

Product type is similar to Google product category but with fewer restrictions. Your Google product category must match up with Google’s product taxonomy. Say you’re an online sporting goods store. One of your products might be baseball catcher’s gloves. Using Google’s taxonomy, that product is defined as such:

Sporting Goods > Athletics > Baseball and Softball > Baseball and Softball Gloves and Mitts

But since ‘product type’ isn’t limited by the taxonomy, you can take that a step further and improve that to:

Sporting Goods > Athletics > Baseball > Baseball Gloves > Catchers glove > Leather Catcher’s Glove > Wilson Leather Catcher’s Glove

You can put in whatever you want to help explain to Google what your products actually are. This will increase the chance of your product showing up when, for instance, someone searches for Wilson catcher’s gloves, and reduce the impressions for more general searches like ‘baseball glove’ because in those cases they’re very likely not looking for that specific product.

This is just one example, but the lesson is to be descriptive. This is your targeting. Don’t assume Google will understand your product with one word when you can use more to tell a better story. Edit any and all attributes you can to tell a better story.

Other recommendations:

Besides building your feed to be stronger, there are a few other things to pay attention to that will help performance:

• Keep your feed up to date with all product info, availability, and price. Inconsistencies will hurt conversion rates and could result in suspensions from Google.
• In AdWords, make sure your Shopping campaign is well structured with organized product groupings so you can strategically bid on product groups.
• Make sure to review your search query reports often to analyze relevancy of traffic and add negative keywords when necessary to improve targeting.

Optimizing Google Shopping campaigns can be a little counter-intuitive if you are more used to traditional search advertising. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have tools to improve performance. You just need to take the time and work with your CMS or manual feed. If you have additional questions about where to start, let us know!

The post Product Feed Optimization for Google Shopping appeared first on Portent.

This post is specifically meant to help get you started with banners, though. Whether your banners are for traditional display targeted ads or for remarketing, there are strict specifications to follow. We also have some best practices for you to help you get the most out of your banners.

Are you creating your own banners?

If you are designing and developing your own static banner ads, be sure they meet the following specifications:

Google supports .jpeg, .jpg, .png, and .gif formats.

All image files must be 150KB or smaller.

There are many different accepted image sizes. We recommend sticking with the eight most common sizes to save time and resources:

• 468×60
• 728×90
• 300×250
• 336×280
• 120×600
• 160×600
• 300×600
• 320×100

In addition to those specifications, we have some other best practices that should improve performance:

Messaging

Your banners should convey a clear message. Include things like competitive advantages, sales, or whatever makes sense given your goals.

Whatever you decide to include, be concise. A general rule of thumb (borrowed from Facebook but works well on Google too) is to keep text to about 20% of the overall banner space or less. Allow your imagery to speak for you too!

Call to action

This may seem like an obvious point, but it’s so important that I’m saying it anyway.

Your banners should include a call to action.

What is the desired action of your users? Buy Now? Learn More? Whatever it is, be descriptive and direct. Click here won’t cut it. Tell your users what will happen if they click. Buttons are a great option here.

Design

The look and feel of your banners should in some way mimic the landing page you are using. You want to create a familiar experience for users. If they click, they should feel like they’re landing in the correct place. I’m no designer so I won’t put many restrictions on you here, but I will say we’ve found that using light text and dark backgrounds is something to avoid. Make sure the text is easy to read quickly and don’t let the design overpower the message.

Ad Gallery

If you don’t have the resources to design and develop your own banner ads, Google has a solution for you. Built directly into AdWords is a tool called the AdWords Ad Gallery (formerly Display Ad Builder).

This tool can help you create static ads like the ones I’ve been explaining and much more. You can also use it to create things like dynamic product ads, lightbox ads, Gmail ads and more.

It can be handy tool in a pinch, but if you have the resources, I’d opt to create your own and upload to AdWords.

If you have questions about how to get ads for your business on the Google Display Network, let us know.

The post Google AdWords Display Banner Specifications and Best Practices appeared first on Portent.

As someone who manages PPC strategy, I have to admit that I really enjoy the freedom to jump into an account and immediately produce results on a promotion, where groups like SEO, content, social, and others need to be heavily coordinated in advance from messaging to distribution.

Be careful though: you can achieve so much more, both now and in the future, by coordinating PPC with other departments.

Where are you missing out?

Collaboration breeds success, and if you are leaving PPC out of the conversation, you are certainly leaving money on the table. Here are some commonly overlooked opportunities to include PPC into your marketing efforts that could benefit your business.

PR Wins

Getting your brand in the news or receiving any extra attention online is opportunity smacking you in the face. Sometimes PR wins fall into your lap, but more often, they are the result of countless hours of work and outreach. Regardless, the halo effect of any sort of positive PR will have wide-reaching effects on search habits and volume. You should absolutely capitalize on it.

In this case, coordinating PPC to fully capitalize on the PR win could have meant bidding on new, “stratosphere jump”-related keywords to ensure the top search results included the well-coordinated campaign message or call-to-action that you wanted searchers to see, bolstered by virtue of other surrounding positive articles and mentions. Other strategies to evaluate based on the specific situation:

• Include banners on display networks targeted at sites that are talking about your brand’s PR win
• Use geo-bid modifiers to increase bids in regions that are most relevant
• Update your ad copy to speak more directly to the news

Another side of the coin might be looking to capitalize on the missteps of your competition. If your competition falls short in a prominent review or something larger, you can bet that prospective customers will be searching online about what’s being said. This is a huge moment to be highly visible as a better alternative. (Play it safe here depending on the type of bad PR they experience. Use some tact to avoid any negative backlash for your own brand.)

Offline media buys

Depending on the scale of the buy or campaign, it might surprise some marketers to think of this not being shared with all staff. If your business is investing in a major TV ad spot for instance, you’d expect it to be widely discussed throughout the entire marketing department at the very least. But depending on how siloed folks are, that’s not always the case.

I’ve seen major campaigns fly completely under the radar and not make it back to the PPC team until the last minute…or not at all. There’s nothing like scrambling last minute to pull something together when the commercials have been in the works for months. Why not make PPC a part of the strategy from the get-go?

Print and outdoor media buys can have a significant impact on awareness, and by extension, search volume. Much like a PR or other earned-media win, PPC can and should help you harvest the awareness and potential goodwill that a big media buy creates.

The primary difference between earned and owned media (PR vs. media buying for example) is that you control the “buzz” and the timing to a greater degree. You can plan ahead of time with banners, search ads, and keywords that speak directly to the promise made by offline ads. You can be proactive instead of reactive.

Promotions

Utilizing PPC is likely already a part of your plan when a special promotion is approaching. Including information about the promotion in ad copy seems obvious. That said, it is still worth noting.

If your business is running any seasonal promotions, giveaways, or other special offers like free shipping, your PPC results can benefit massively. Tying promotional copy or info into text and banner ads will boost click-through rate and drive more traffic to the site.

Again, just make sure to include your PPC manager in the plans early on so you have the time to produce the new ads and build out campaigns.

You can also use your retargeting lists to bring back past visitors who’ve expressed interest in promotions like the one you’re about to run. They may have been on the fence before and just need an extra nudge or reminder to come back and convert.

Using PPC to help other channels

So far we have talked about ways PPC can benefit from other channels. It’s a two way street though. Lessons learned through PPC can be used throughout your marketing efforts.

PPC can and should be treated as a testing ground for things like messaging and keyword research. A good example of this is testing ad copy to find the overarching message or specific phrasing that is getting best engagement. You can then use that information to influence meta descriptions for organic listings, print media campaigns, or any other channel where direct feedback and analytics aren’t quite as automatic.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot

• Mismatched messaging that conflicts, or confuses
• Killing your analytics, leaving you blind to problems or opportunities
• Sending traffic to the wrong landing page or offer
• Sending traffic to a completely broken URL
• Killing your Quality Score

Leaving opportunities on the table is one thing. It’s another to make changes to the site, content, or analytics that have a direct negative effect on PPC. Everything you do to your site has an effect on other channels. Siloing can make it hard to see what those changes might be.

Here are some examples of ways marketers shoot themselves in the foot by not including PPC in the larger strategy and plans for the site.

Site infrastructure

If you’re making major updates to your site layout and structure, chances are good that if your PPC manager is in house, that person will be aware of that in plenty of time to plan and react. However, if you’re outsourcing PPC management, or if the site updates that you’re making are small enough to stay under the radar, that may not always be the case. Oftentimes PPC platforms like AdWords are structured in specific ways to align logically with the way the overall site is organized. “Surprise” updates to that master layout can negatively affect performance.

Additionally, if you were to change something like page URLs, that can have drastic effects on PPC. Too many times I’ve uncovered ads pushing traffic to 404 pages because someone made a tiny, last minute tweak to all their landing page URLs, and didn’t share that insight with the full team.

Content or information changes

Updates to on-page messaging, branding, or even promotional offers also can have a negative effect if not properly planned. It may not be quite as direct as broken URLs and disapproved ads, but changing the wording used on the site will affect your PPC quality scores and conversion rates.

It is important that keywords, ad copy, and landing page/site content all align well to provide a quality user experience. It’s called message match and even small changes can negatively affect it and your account’s performance.

Analytics configured incorrectly

Remember the bit about built-in analytics and clear, actionable feedback that’s unique to PPC? Without taking the time to set up and troubleshoot some basic tagging, you’re at risk of optimizing with missing or even wrong data. Proper analytics and goal tracking is crucial for PPC and your entire online marketing strategy.

Beyond getting it right when you’re first starting out, if you are making any sort of site updates it is critical to involve both your analytics and PPC teams to ensure that you’re getting clean data and clear insights. There are many moving pieces with web analytics, which means lots of opportunity to break things. Fixing it after there’s been a problem is always worse. Trust me on this.

Also, any time you make changes (copywriting, structure, page-speed, etc.), it is very likely that users will interact with the site differently, which affects year-over-year data. You don’t want your team members making optimization decisions without a clear understanding of what actually happened.

Tying it all together
As much as I love being the S.W.A.T. team for immediate marketing ROI, the moral of the story is that your online marketing strategy can’t be about just one tactic at a time. To maximize the potential for every channel you employ, they’ve got to work together. Start to finish, top to bottom, impression to conversion.

The post The Dangers of Putting PPC in a Silo appeared first on Portent.

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. The name is a holdover from back in the day before Google Analytics (GA) was around. Urchin was a web analytics program acquired by Google back in 2005, which marked the beginning of GA.

UTM codes are simple snippets of code appended to the end of URLs that communicate with the GA code on your website. Essentially, UTM codes allow you to track where traffic to your site originated in GA.

Why you need them

Analytics is a powerful tool for marketers. Tools like Google Analytics give us detailed information about not only what sources are driving the most traffic to our site, but also the quality of that traffic.

This data can power big picture decisions like which channels you should be investing in, what changes to make to the site to improve user experience, and so much more.

Simply put, without proper tracking, you are flying blind. The key word there is “proper.” Simply having GA installed on your site isn’t enough. You need to empower the tool by setting up proper tracking parameters for all your marketing campaigns.

Where to use them

Luckily, Google AdWords and some other platforms like Bing Ads have built in functionality to tag your URLs without any extra work. It’s called auto tagging and I highly recommend turning it on for just about everyone. It massively simplifies things and works seamlessly with GA.

Just about everything else you do online requires custom tagging. For instance, Facebook and GA don’t play so nicely together so if you want to get detailed Facebook data in GA, you need to tag everything you post there–organic and paid.

Running email campaigns? Tag them.

Promoting on Outbrain? Tag it.

Tweeting about an upcoming event? Tag it.

It’s easy to set up. Just take the two minutes it takes to create these custom tags.

How to create them

Luckily, Google has created a very simple tool to help us out with this, because if you are like me, the idea of writing custom URL parameters is not the most comforting.

Use Google’s URL Builder.

Fill out this quick form and Google will generate a ready-made custom URL that you can literally copy and paste.

Example

If Portent was promoting a blog post via Facebook Ads, we could fill out the basic required fields as follows:

Website URL: https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/blog/internet-marketing/5-inexpensive-ways-grow-smb-online.htm

Campaign Source: facebook

Campaign Medium: cpc

Campaign Name: 5 Inexpensive Ways to Grow Your SMB Online

Result: https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/blog/internet-marketing/5-inexpensive-ways-grow-smb-online.htm?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=5%20Inexpensive%20Ways%20to%20Grow%20Your%20SMB%20Online

Extra: This leaves you with a long and unattractive URL. Don’t leave it there. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly or Google’s URL shortener to polish it off if it’s user-facing (like in a tweet).

Easy as that. If you aren’t using UTM codes, I highly recommend you start. If you have questions about how they work or why you need them, let us know. We’re happy to help.

The post What are UTM Codes? …and Why You Should Use Them appeared first on Portent.

For most small- and medium-sized businesses, competing online against the big players can be daunting. How are you supposed to match their seemingly infinite marketing budgets when you may just have a few thousand dollars a month to work with?

If this sounds familiar, don’t despair. There is still a lot you can do without a large marketing department and massive ad budget.

Before we get to those five tips, remember to refer back to the Marketing Stack. Disclaimer: The key to growing your business is not one channel/tactic.

I won’t go into too much detail here. Instead, follow that link above the chart. Portent CEO Ian Lurie is much better at explaining it than I am. Here is a quick overview, though:

Infrastructure

Having a well-functioning site can go a long way. Users expect a seamless experience, so do what you can within your resource restrictions to make your site easy to navigate, load pages quickly, etc.

Analytics

Google Analytics is free and relatively simple to set up. It is a very powerful tool that will help you understand your audience, how they interact with your site, and what content resonates the best with them.

Knowledge is power. If you understand your audience you can tailor your site and content to better fit those needs.

Content

Your first thought here might be blog posts. That is what most people think of when we talk about creating new content. Blog posts are part of it, but content is so much more than that.

Content can be anything from a video to social posts to evergreen content that lives on your site. If you build it, they will come. Create quality content and make it easy for users (and search engines) to find.

Once you have addressed your foundation, you can start to think about the top of the stack and that’s where our five tips come in. Without further adieu, here are five ways to improve and grow your business online without breaking the bank.

1. Promote your content

If you create a piece of high-quality content that you think your users will love, don’t be afraid to spend a few hundred bucks to promote it. You’d be surprised what a couple hundred dollars promoting a post on Facebook or boosting your content on Outbrain or Taboola can get you.

An initial push could be all you need to get the visibly you’re looking for. If your content is indeed interesting and useful, your audience will help you out by promoting it within their own circles at no cost to you.

2. Engage with your users

You are producing great content and doing your best to get it out there. That’s great, but don’t stop there. Engage with your audience on their terms. That may mean replying to comments on a blog post, replying to online inquiries, or engaging on social media.

Go to them where they’re talking about you or asking questions and join in on the conversation to help create a better experience for your customers.

3. Email marketing

Over time, you should be able to (if you haven’t already) develop a list of customer and potential customer email addresses. You already know these people are in your audience so take advantage of it.

Use an email marketing tool to generate a newsletter of some sort to keep these people engaged with your business. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy. A simple monthly “Hey, check out this cool thing” email will keep people coming back.

4. Guest blog

Don’t be afraid to think beyond your own site. We already talked about engaging your audience where they are but what if they aren’t engaging with you? Find the online community where your customers are and become a voice in that community. This will help you become an industry leader and build better industry relationships.

Contribute to discussions on forums, answer questions on Quora, and most of all, write industry blogs. Most blog owners love this sort of connectivity and engagement from outsiders.

5. Retarget

Finally, retarget to your website visitors. In Google Analytics you can create audiences based on a variety of different things like how long people are on your site, what pages they view, demographic information, and more.

Once you have these audiences built, you can target them with banner or text ads as they travel around the Internet. Retargeting traditionally has much lower cost-per-click averages than other forms of PPC through Google AdWords. The reduced cost and high-level of intent already shown by your audiences should help produce high return on ad spend (ROAS).

Sure, it helps to have a massive marketing budget, but that’s not realistic for everyone. If you are on a tight budget, focus on tactics like the ones listed above to get more visibility and grow your business. And be sure your overall strategy involves all aspects of the Marketing Stack. If you do, you’ll be surprised at how far you can get.

The post 5 Inexpensive Ways to Grow Your SMB Online appeared first on Portent.

AdWords offers several types of ad extensions that can be used to provide useful information to customers. This includes phone numbers, directions, additional products/services, and more.

Ad Extensions are simple to set up and do not cost anything extra. Expect a click-through rate boost when using these too. The differentiation of having them helps your ads stand out from your competitors’ and tends to entice more clicks.

In this post, we’ll explore a few key ad extensions, the features they provide, and how to implement them into your campaigns.

Sitelink extensions

Sitelink extensions allow advertisers to display a short list of links to internal pages of their website that customers might find useful directly in the ad.

The extra links make the ad bigger, allowing you to take up more real estate in the SERP. This provides more exposure to customers. Sitelinks also provide customers with additional options so they can get what they need from your site with fewer clicks and less work on their end.

Adding sitelinks is quick and simple. First, select a campaign, click the Ad Extensions tab and select Sitelink Extensions from the View drop-down menu.

You can create new sitelinks by clicking the +New Sitelink button. You’ll need to set up a link headline and a destination URL.

Create anywhere from two to six for each campaign. It’s a good rule of thumb to stick with an even number to ensure they format neatly.

Call extensions

Call extensions are a great resource if your business relies on phone calls for leads. AdWords doesn’t allow phone numbers directly in ad text. Thankfully, call extensions give us the same capability. You can also optimize call extensions by scheduling the time of the day you want to run them (i.e. business hours).

Set up is simple. First, select Call Extensions from the View drop-down menu. Then enter your business phone number and you’re done.

There is one more key feature within call extensions that we recommend setting up. Google forwarding phone numbers. This is a unique forwarding number provided by Google that allows you to track the phone calls that come from AdWords.

The additional tracking is powerful information. The downside is that Google can tell when customers are calling those numbers which means they can charge you per call (same as the cost of a click). But in our opinion, it’s worth the small cost.

Location extensions

Location extensions allow you to list your business’s address in your ads. There are a couple of different ways you can get your address to show. If you have a Google My Business account, you can link that up so your ads will pull information directly from there. If you don’t have an account, you can manually add new addresses.

To add locations, select Locations from the View drop-down menu. If you have Google My Business, you should link your account to the campaign by clicking Addresses and selecting the correct account.

If you don’t have Google My Business (we highly recommend you do for most businesses), you can select Manually Entered Addresses and +New extension. From here, you can enter your business information and apply it to all the campaigns.

If entered correctly, the address should appear as it does below:

There are other, less-used and more advanced ad extensions within AdWords too. To learn more, a great resource is Google’s AdWords Help Center.

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 6: TRACKING SUCCESS

The post Building Successful PPC: Implementing Ad Extensions appeared first on Portent.