#the same thing with tracking applies to copying specific account urls too!
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i figured out a way to fix this!
links that look like this:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTNoUr7VQ/
will always break, this is because it's a shortened version of the ACTUAL url to the video and is essentially made to be temporary, it also shows what account you were signed into to copy the link like this
so it's not great for privacy either.
the way to get around this is to either copy the link through desktop or paste the shortened link into a web browser on mobile and copy what's in the url bar, if you've done it right it should look something like this https://www.tiktok.com/@_choose.happy_/video/7404861018649808171?_t=8pOORiXwsWI&_r=1
to remove the tracking information linking back to your account, simply remove anything after and including the question mark!
https://www.tiktok.com/@_choose.happy_/video/7404861018649808171
so essentially the TRUE links to tiktoks include the account name, /video/, and a long string of numbers representing which video it is, if all that's there is /t/ and a short string that's the kind that doesn't last. you can do this with
Something I’ve found out recently is that all links to TikToks stop working after 4 months, and will just start sending you to a random page after that amount of time. This is super annoying, but I figured I’d make a post about it since I still see a lot of stimboard gif makers posting tiktok links as credit. Make sure to list the name of the account too!
#not stim#mod speaks#the same thing with tracking applies to copying specific account urls too!#they'll usually show up something like this https://www.tiktok.com/@_choose.happy_?_t=8pOPN3GZyl5&_r=1#just remove everything including and after the question mark and it won't include a popup with your account :D
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If You Don't Web 2.0 Sites Now, You'll Hate Yourself Later
Believing These 10Myths About Web2.0 Backlinks Keeps You From Growing
Table of ContentsHow 7 Things Will Change The Way You Approach Using Web 2.0Cracking The Web2.0 Backlinks SecretListen To Your Customers. They Will Tell You All About Web 2.0 BacklinksApply These 15Secret Techniques To Improve Asia Virtual Solutions4 Ridiculously Simple Ways To Improve Your Web2.0 Backlinks2 Warning Signs Of Your Web 2.0 Backlinks Demise6 Reasons Your Web 2.0 Is Not What It Could Be
Get DA50+Web 2.0 post - From Asia Virtual Solutions
The ranking has actually not changed because May 4th. Google.com: 3 and Google.co.uk: 3. Now ranked in position no. 3 on Google search. The page now has a total of 5 Weebly and 20 Tumblr expired web 2 blogs pointing at it. Offer this a couple of more weeks and no. 1 ranking will be attained.
Ranking no. 1 typically takes around 3 months to do, so I am on track here. This page is now ranked at Google.com: 2 and Google.co.uk 2. Simply another location to go and we have struck the leading spot. I have not included any more backlinks considering that my last ranking report.
1 spot in Google search. So how long has it taken to rank this page no. 1 with just web 2.0 backlinks?Took precisely 83 days to rank no. 1 in Google search UK and U.S.A.. Just under 3 months. How numerous expired web 2 websites did I use? 5 Weebly and 20 Tumblr blog sites.
Now it is your rely on go on and Rank no. 1. Below is the specific schedule I utilized to rank this page no. Asia Virtual Solutions. 1 in Google search. As you can see, you start off slowly constructing the web 2.0 backlinks at a consistent rate. After the end of your first week, you must be ranked near or at the bottom of page 1. Ranking no.
Sluggish and consistent constantly wins the race with SEO.Not every strategy will be the same, but you can utilize this as a loose guide to how it is done. Naturally, high competitors keywords will require more backlinks in this time to rank at the leading area. Month 1: 5 Weebly and 5 Tumblr Posts.
Do You Need A Web 2.0 Backlinks?
Web 2.0 Backlinks
Add 2350 social signals. Rank check at end of month one; ought to be at bottom of Google page one or top of page two. Month 2: New web 2.0 link wheel (not expired web 2s). See my free backlinks page for details on how to do this. Rank check at end of month 2; must be ranked number 3 or 4. Month 3: 15 Tumblr posts.
Rank check at end of month three; must be ranked number 1. To utilize the exact same strategy I have used here just click on the links below. The results are here for you to see, if you use this system you will rank number one on Google search. 4000 Social Signals: To Start With, you are going to require some premium social signals.
We use 4000 social signals from the most effective social networks platforms on earth. You will get backlinks from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn. This is the very best method to get your ranking project began. Nothing looks more natural than a mass of social signals before the backlinks begin to stream - Web 2.0 Backlinks.
You can have the high PA 5 Weebly and 5 Tumblr backlinks done for you, or you can do them yourself. If you pick to do them yourself you are going to require those 10 powerful blogs signed up for you, this can be done here. Or you can get the backlinks done for you the proper way, with the material fully optimized for you to rank up for your picked keyword.
You can check out how powerful the web 2.0 link wheel is right here. I ranked page 1 in 1 day utilizing this precise technique. Month 2 utilizes 10 web 2.0 websites, 5 websites on tier 1 and 5 websites on tier 2. Keep in mind to index the links slow and stable through the second 30-day cycle and you make certain to hit page 1.15 High PA Tumblr Backlinks: For the last push to the leading spot, you will require 15 high page authority Tumblr backlinks.
10 Tips For Web 2.0 Success
I have used this service over and over myself, it works. Ensure you blend up your anchor text as I have actually done so and you will hit leading rank. If you are not in the top area you need to keep the backlinks streaming at a steady rate. You can continue to use web 2 platforms for backlinks utilizing the following service.
I ranked on the top of my page of Google search using this specific technique alone in around 1 month. If you fail to strike the top area then the following strategy is very effective at pressing ranks. The service hits your website with 5 brand brand-new web 2 sites all with your precise keyword in the subdomain URL. Search Engine Optimization.Each of the 5 tier 1 brand-new web 2.0 sites are connected together into a link wheel development.
Each of the 5 tier 1 web 2 (Web 2.0 Backlinks).0 sites get 10 tier 2 high PA Tumblr backlinks fired at them. All that lovely ranking juice streams down to your cash site. This is a foolproof method to get your site to the top. You are going to enjoy me for this; You are never going to have to pay for expired Tumblr blog sites once again.
I have discovered.I have used this software and it truly does work. You can thank me in the comments The software is called Expired Tumblr Hunter (no longer free link removed). Follow the link to get your complimentary copy. See my post on how to discover an expired web 2.0 handbook for free (includes all web 2.0 platforms, not simply Tumblr). This is how to utilize the software application to discover great quality ended Tumblr blogs that will help you rank.
You can discover specific niche related ended Tumblr blog sites by choosing the "Specific niche associated" tab. Then you will need to enter your keywords. This software application is so good due to the fact that you do not need any proxies or VPN.Input your niche keywords and after that hit the "start" button. You do not have to look for specific niche related ended Tumblr blog sites if you do not wish to.
Top 70 Quotes On Web 2.0
Just open the software and hit the start button. After a couple of minutes, I get a list of expired Tumblr blog sites ready to register. The software application even lets you know if Tumblr is offered to register or not. When you have a great list of expired Tumblr blog sites we need to check the backlinks indicating them.
Brief Idea About Web 2.0 SEO Backlinks ...
A Tumblr with no backlinks is useless to us, it will not hand down a good deal of ranking juice. web 2.0 sites. Select a Tumblr that is available to register and right-click on the URL and copy it. We are going to paste the URL into a couple of free backlink checker tools to analyze the backlinks.
I use this one due to the fact that it discovers one of the most amount of backlinks. Take a look at the backlinks pointing to your ended Tumblr. This one has great deals of Pinterest and other Web 2 backlinks (web 2.0 sites). It's not the strongest Tumblr ever, so I would not register this one. We are trying to find an ended Tumblr with lots of backlinks from excellent authority domains.
Usage MozBar to check the quality of the backlinks indicating Tumblr. As you can see, this one is poor. We are trying to find backlinks to the Tumblr from pages with high PA with backlinks pointing to them too. This will hand down some serious ranking juice. Now let's examine if the backlinks that point to the Tumblr still exist.
It is totally free to utilize, nevertheless you do need to register for an account. This tool lets us understand if the backlinks pointing to Tumblr still exist. If the backlinks have actually been removed then there will be no ranking juice passed onto our money website. That's it. Go and get the tool and find yourself some ended Tumblr blog sites with loads of backlinks for free.
The Best Guide To Web 2.0
1 now. Just take your time discovering a Tumblr with some good backlinks. It will settle big time if you do. I simply found an expired Tumblr utilizing the Expired Tumblr Hunter software application that has a backlink from a PA 65 with 9000 backlinks pointing to it. This particular Tumblr has 6 more strong backlinks indicating it.
Web 2.0 Submission Backlink Websites ...
This is a fast tutorial on how to sign up ended Tumblr blog sites. Often when you purchase expired Web 2.0 sites you require to register them yourself. This is how you do it: First off register for a complimentary email address. I utilize mail.com or Yahoo. You can sign up all expired Tumbly blogs under 1 e-mail address if you like.
In this manner, if one gets shut down, you do not lose them all. You can mask your IP address when you register them, you can use a totally free IP masking service. I do not do this, if you are concerned about footprints then you might wish to do this. Click the "Get going" button.
Add your password. Now, for the username use the name of the expired Tumblr blog that you were given. So in my case here it was happyprincekoala.tumblr.com. Then hit the signup button. Now enter your age and accept the regards to service. Click the "Next" button. Then choose 5 things that you are into and strike the next button.
You have actually now verified your e-mail. Now go to your Tumblr control panel. You can visit your Tumblr site URL to inspect you are up and running. Now you can include some material to your brand-new ended Tumblr blog site and get those Web 2.0 backlinks to your money website. If you wish to do the following: From your dashboard click the little individual icon in the leading right of the screen.
The Only Guide to Asia Virtual Solutions
Then click "Produce Blog site" and you are done. It's fast and easy to add an expired Tumblr blog to an existing account. Every now and then someone will beat you to registering the expired Tumblr blog. This is what you will see if this occurs. I understand it's irritating, but it does happen.
The guy that sells them for $1, as included above, will replace them if you get back to him prior to 3 days after the order was provided. Now you have the Tumblr registered it's time to get your effective Web 2.0 backlinks and start ranking. You can discover how to get rid of the redirect in Tumblr backlinks here.
Simply follow the strategy and rank your site top utilizing web 2 sites. I am so thankful I found this technique, ranked many sites utilizing it." - Graham Wednesday, October 24, 2018" Only guide you will need. Follow it step by step and you will rank your site top for your keyword." - Oliver P Wednesday, March 20, 2019" This is the very best guide ever for web 2 backlinks.
I followed this strategy and my site is leading, this is performed in 2019 so they do work. Get those web 2 backlinks, love em x" - alexdp How to Make Web 2.0 Backlinks for Free 5.0 ranking based upon 12,345 ratings Total score: out of based upon 8 evaluations.
In this short article, I am blogging about web 2.0 submissions for SEO benefits and assembling authority dofollow web 2.0 sites list for generating quality backlinks and to improve your website or blog site traffic. The 2nd generation of the internet or evolution in the history of web services describes web 2.0.
Top 60 Funny Web2.0 Backlinks Quotes
There will not be many web designers contributing to the web. Now in web 2.0, the pages soon ended up being dynamic. Any internet user with web 2.0 can create their own pages, take part in commenting, and put photos, articles to communicate or connect with any other user. Such Web 2.0 websites list include blogs, social networking websites, video-sharing platforms, and so on.
Creating material, tweaking and putting links on those web 2.0 blog sites or websites indicating your industrial or targeted page refers to web 2.0 backlinks in SEO. Most of the web 2.0 websites will be high reliable. Even, you are getting dofollow links from high DA web 2.0 sites, it's excellent.
#Asia Virtual Solutions#web2.0 backlinks#Search Engine Optimization#web 2.0#Web 2.0 Backlinks#web 2.0 sites#Benefits Of Using Web 2.0#using web 2.0#link building
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Search Ads 360 is a Google product, part of the Google marketing Platform. Put simply, this platform helps advertisers, digital marketers and businesses manage massive search marketing campaigns with relative ease, regardless of which engine or channel they’re operating on. It’s not a free Google offering but is worth the money when you play your cards right.
It also helps to manage several advertisers under one single account, while allowing marketers to generate reports on individual engine accounts and advertisers. However, managing ad campaigns for all advertisers and maintaining a format could be quite the uphill task. Search Ads 360 has an ad template feature that aids in generating and managing upgraded inventory campaigns.
An ad template is what its name says it is- a template for ads coming from one ad group or group of products and services. An ad template produces one ad for each value or value combination selected by the ad group from the inventory data. This value or combination is specified by the advertiser and is called an ‘ad multiplier’.
If you want each ad template to produce only one ad per group, you can specify the values in the ad multiplier. Else, you can leave it unspecified. However, it is always best to make sure that your template can handle different value possibilities. This is because not all ad groups have the same (or a single) product- they may have multiple with varying results for values specified.
Is it possible to create an ad template in Google Ads?
Yes, it is. Ad templates are a part of the features offered by inventory management in Search Ads 360, by which data from an inventory feed is used to automatically generate campaigns, text ads, ad groups, and keywords. It considers updates, too, so all newly-added data is also used to create the above as and when they come.
Inventory campaigns are beneficial when it comes to advertising products whose prices, stock numbers and other details change frequently. Ad templates also help; once you create a layout for an ad group, the values update automatically no matter how many times they change. Therein lies its most significant benefit.
Why do you need to create ad templates in Google Ads?
With four or five products, an advertiser can afford to change bids, values, and other details manually. However, most businesses have more than 5 products- way more, in the thousands. In cases like this, it’s crucial that products be segmented into product groups and ad groups. However, individual ads can’t be created for these products manually, nor can values be adjusted or updated every time there’s a change, which might even be daily. This is where ad templates shave a considerable amount of time off ad creation.
Here are the benefits of an ads template:
Benefit # 01: Set up one ad for an ad group.
Instead of going through every product and individually setting values, you can create an ad template with placeholders for values, which Google will then pull from your inventory and fill in per item.
Benefit # 02: Auto-update values.
Items with changing values like pricing, weight, stock number or others can be advertised using an ad template. With every update to an inventory, the template changes itself for that product and shows an up-to-date ad complete with the right details. This way, there’s no manual intervention or stale ads.
Benefit # 03: Track changes to templates.
There’s a handy feature called ‘Change History’ that allows you to look back on changes to campaign settings, ad groups, and templates over a certain period of time. The history list tracks the item changes were made to, what changes were made, and the type of change if applicable.
Benefit # 04: Reuse templates.
You can also use single ad templates as an ad group template. This is beneficial when you have similar products in one or more ad group where you can recycle a part or the whole of the ad copy. You just have to make sure that the data needed to make the ad copy more personal is available.
Benefit # 05: Change ad text using text parameters.
Once you’ve identified which ad template to reuse, the text parameters feature can dynamically change ad text for the new set of products. It does this by matching the ad group keyword with a user search query. Note that this ad format does not support an image file, so your text message must be compelling.
Benefit # 06: Choose types of search ads.
Before building an ad template, an advertiser needs to choose between standard, expanded and responsive text ads. Expanded text ads are a format that shows more information and details about the product than standard text ads. Responsive text ads use your provided ad copy, combined with machine learning, to pick the highest-performing versions that are then shown to your audience.
How to create the perfect ad template in Google Ads
Creating an ad template can be a tad complicated but its worth a shot if you have multiple products with varying values.
Method # 01: The default way:
These are the default steps laid out by Google to create the perfect ad template:
Step 1: Indicate the ad multiplier and add optional filters to generate ads for only specific items with one commonality.
Step 2: Key in your ad copy and destination URL to the landing page. These ad settings are the same as that of a manual campaign and include functions and formula columns.
Step 3: Enter text parameters if you want dynamically changing the text.
Step 4: Preview your settings to make sure the settings, targeted campaigns, display URL and values are correct.
Step 5: Once saved, your ad template will be paused.
Step 6: To activate it, change the status to ‘active’. This is when Google begins to display ads.
Method # 02: The AdNabu way:
To have an expert team of professionals create the ad templates for your products and ad groups, sign up for free on AdNabu. With years of expertise in creating and managing successful Google Shopping campaigns, the AdNabu team can help to craft the perfect ad template that is not only ideal for products in one ad group but is re-usable across ad groups. You can see a 30% and more increase in conversions from Google Shopping and search ads with killer ad copy.
What’s more, changing catalogs, sale seasons and discounts can change values of a product; AdNabu can help successfully manage these and generate ads for them automatically. The need of the hour in a-commerce is building ad campaigns that can adapt to changes; one such feature is the ad template, which AdNabu can help you generate.
Best practices in creating ad templates
Best Practice # 01: Preview ads.
After you’ve created your ad templates, Search Ads 360 displays a list of the first 50 campaigns with a preview of the ads. Use this time to carefully peruse each ad and ad group for issues in values, formulae or ad copy. This way, when you change the status to ‘active’, you will know your campaign is working fine.
Best Practice # 02: Harmonize with keyword templates.
Your ad template and multiplier need to match with the keyword you will generate for each ad group. If your ad group has different products but with one universal value, then your keyword should ideally be that value.
Best Practice # 03: Reuse templates.
Instead of creating single ad templates for ad groups, consider creating a handful of templates that you could use across groups. This reduces labor, efforts and time taken but also allows you to customize (with the help of text parameters) values for each product in different ad groups.
Best Practice # 04: Specify alternative headlines.
Sometimes, the automatic headlines generated may be too long or too clunky, in which case it will be considered invalid. To prevent this from skewing data, provide an alternative headline or template as a fallback in such scenarios. Keep it below 30 characters to play things safe. Similarly, for ad copy, specify some static descriptions to use if data is missing for some products. Your call to action must be strong.
Things to consider while creating template ads for Google Ads
Consideration # 01: Using text parameters.
Text parameters are used to change ad copy in an ad template dynamically. This must always be used in line with a keyword template or, at the very least, the keyword that applies to the ad group. Parameter values need to be added to a keyword template first, then to ad template settings as a part of the headline or description copy.
Consideration # 02: Maintain status settings.
When a new ad template is created, its default setting is ‘paused’ which needs to be changed to ‘active’ for the templates to start working. However, an ad based on a template is removed when all inventory items don’t appear on the feed anymore. You cannot re-activate a removed ad; instead, if an item from the inventory returns, a new ad is created with none of the old ad’s performance data.
Conclusion:
Successfully creating, managing and updating an ad template is not a herculean task but it does take a lot of Google Ads knowledge and previous marketing experience.
For businesses without the resources or technical know-how, it’s always best to get in touch with an expert company who can help navigate the confusing steps or even sort it all out for you in the back end. With this setup, you can get regular reports on how your Google Ads performance and consultations on results if you’re not sure what they mean. It goes without saying, finally, that template ads for eCommerce are a boon.
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MP3 Music Downloader 2.5.1 For Android
If in case you have been into the music business for even one month, Audacity will likely be nothing new to you. There's lots of competition in the case of picking out the suitable music app to play songs for you. Whereas it's good to strive some out before finalizing one, Musica is one app that you could try. This is one of the finest free downloadable music apps you can find. This app is understood for proving music from the internet. If you happen to like several specific tune and you realize the url as nicely, you possibly can examine it from this app and obtain that music. You can even obtain songs from youtube on this app. This may assist you to expand your music collection. Thanks for this listing. Earlier I was on the lookout for websites and apps for downloading music and now I obtained this record. I actually like the Wink Music and Gaana App. It additionally accompanies a not too unhealthy playlist, nonetheless if you wish to be free to make one thing of your own and you'll apply it on application. In this application, you'll be able to stream recordings, music, and webcasts and moreover spare them for future survey in disconnected mode. The appliance offers you most up to date hits and exceptionally smooth execution all at one place. As contrast with other functions, Spotify gives you clean execution.
Xrecode is not free, however it's low cost and a powerhouse relating to changing audio recordsdata. With it, you'll be able to convert any file format out there to a different one. To convert a file to MP3 just launch it and drag the file into the box at the top. Pop within the destination of where you want the output file and choose MP3 as the Output Format and hit the Start button. A: AllMusicConverter Platinum edition converts 2 recordsdata at the similar time and has maximum audio conversion pace 6X, while Skilled version can convert as much as sixteen information concurrently with abstract conversion velocity as much as 50X ( depending on your COMPUTER efficiency). AllMusicConverter Professional edition additionally contains audio CD Ripper. Searching for free music downloads? Turns out there are lots of authorized places to get them. Listed here are the highest 10. There are solely 12-14 songs in one regular Audio CD, however if you happen to straight burn MP3 to CD disc, there shall be 110-one hundred forty songs in a single normal CD disc, further in case your automobile can play MP3 inside DVD disc, you possibly can burn MP3 to DVD disc, and there shall be seven hundred-900 songs in one normal DVD disc. Our Tremendous MP3 Encoder Engine can offer the most effective audio quality, wherever you go, you'll be able to benefit from the charms of music. It gives you a sound track searching function with faster outcomes. You can download your desired music information promptly with no delay. It enables you to obtain free music in MP3 recordsdata and to share it with your mates from wherever. All unique, pattern and remix are available for obtain. Nevertheless, because it comprises almost all type of native songs and music composed in India, it made the eighth place on our record. Like different apps, it also comes in a premium version the place you can obtain songs offline it is going to be ad-free. I've also shared greatest rooting apps for Android. Sure, and no. In line with copyright law, distribuiting or obtaining a copyrighted work (such as a music file) without the permission of the copy right holder is in opposition to the law. Because of this the answer was each sure and no. Some music information are copyrighted, some aren't. To go one step further, although some music recordsdata are copyrighted, the artists freely give away and provide the songs for obtain on the web. So, based on copyright law, here is the breakdown for what is illegitimate and authorized. Mp3 Music Download & Free Music Downloader Search, Obtain and Play free music Online and Offline whenever you need. However in contrast to MP3, no licenses or funds are required to be able to stream or distribute content material in M4A format (not like MP3 which requires you to pay royalties on content you distribute in MP3 format). Making an allowance for that you've an final guide to audio codecs, you need a good music participant. Here is the guide to the most effective free music gamers for http://Www.mergemp3.Com Mac. That stated, I feel iTunes can batch convert multiple tracks to Mp3 format with a single click on. Excellent click on on the monitor(s) and one of many options should be "Convert to Mp3". Join audio files perfectly! This MP3 Merger has the flexibility to join, merge or mix audio recordsdata with the same or totally different codecs to MP3, MP4, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OGG, AAC, AC3, AIFF, APE, CUE, MP+, MP1, MP2, MPC, MPP, OFR, 3GP, 3G2, OFS, SPX, TTA, WAV, WMA, WV, ALAC as supply formats. Any separated audio recordsdata could be joined to the most well-liked audio codecs as MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV, and so forth. Though MakeItOne advertises that it could be a part of tracks into one MP3, I haven't been able to figure it out yet.You simply should open the music in TubeMate's youtube part and after that faucet on the download button. Once the choices will seem, merely faucet on Mp3 and that's it, the audio file shall be downloaded into your device. The instrument allows you to save MP3s tracks from many on-line resources like , Grooveshark, Sogou, SoundCloud and others. You could select from which sites the app should take music. If you are a fitness junk, then Rock My Run would be your associate in crime, that's what they proclaim; Greatest workout music. Since it is a running music app it requires customers to register an account or login with existing one, to have the higher record. It has got some cool features to mention like Beats Per Minute (BPM), align your footsteps with the music you're itemizing.Download Mp3 Music is a gorgeous free mp3 downloader app, which is developed and provided by well-preferred on-line service suppliers Outly Restricted and Jamendo ( ). It has an infinite library of mp3 tracks of greater than million from everywhere in the world. Like totally different free mp3 music downloaders, Obtain Mp3 Music app enables you to stream and obtain any monitor for none business utilization. All the music offered by this app are of top quality and grouped by genres equivalent to units, moods. All genres, eg, Pop, Rock, Rap, RnB, Dubstep, Drum, all units and many additional. The app is user-nice, very quick and durable multithreaded mp3 get hold of engine.
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Trust Your Data: How to Efficiently Filter Spam, Bots, & Other Junk Traffic in Google Analytics
Posted by Carlosesal
There is no doubt that Google Analytics is one of the most important tools you could use to understand your users' behavior and measure the performance of your site. There's a reason it's used by millions across the world.
But despite being such an essential part of the decision-making process for many businesses and blogs, I often find sites (of all sizes) that do little or no data filtering after installing the tracking code, which is a huge mistake.
Think of a Google Analytics property without filtered data as one of those styrofoam cakes with edible parts. It may seem genuine from the top, and it may even feel right when you cut a slice, but as you go deeper and deeper you find that much of it is artificial.
If you're one of those that haven’t properly configured their Google Analytics and you only pay attention to the summary reports, you probably won't notice that there's all sorts of bogus information mixed in with your real user data.
And as a consequence, you won't realize that your efforts are being wasted on analyzing data that doesn't represent the actual performance of your site.
To make sure you're getting only the real ingredients and prevent you from eating that slice of styrofoam, I'll show you how to use the tools that GA provides to eliminate all the artificial excess that inflates your reports and corrupts your data.
Common Google Analytics threats
As most of the people I've worked with know, I’ve always been obsessed with the accuracy of data, mainly because as a marketer/analyst there's nothing worse than realizing that you’ve made a wrong decision because your data wasn’t accurate. That’s why I’m continually exploring new ways of improving it.
As a result of that research, I wrote my first Moz post about the importance of filtering in Analytics, specifically about ghost spam, which was a significant problem at that time and still is (although to a lesser extent).
While the methods described there are still quite useful, I’ve since been researching solutions for other types of Google Analytics spam and a few other threats that might not be as annoying, but that are equally or even more harmful to your Analytics.
Let’s review, one by one.
Ghosts, crawlers, and other types of spam
The GA team has done a pretty good job handling ghost spam. The amount of it has been dramatically reduced over the last year, compared to the outbreak in 2015/2017.
However, the millions of current users and the thousands of new, unaware users that join every day, plus the majority's curiosity to discover why someone is linking to their site, make Google Analytics too attractive a target for the spammers to just leave it alone.
The same logic can be applied to any widely used tool: no matter what security measures it has, there will always be people trying to abuse its reach for their own interest. Thus, it's wise to add an extra security layer.
Take, for example, the most popular CMS: Wordpress. Despite having some built-in security measures, if you don't take additional steps to protect it (like setting a strong username and password or installing a security plugin), you run the risk of being hacked.
The same happens to Google Analytics, but instead of plugins, you use filters to protect it.
In which reports can you look for spam?
Spam traffic will usually show as a Referral, but it can appear in any part of your reports, even in unsuspecting places like a language or page title.
Sometimes spammers will try to fool by using misleading URLs that are very similar to known websites, or they may try to get your attention by using unusual characters and emojis in the source name.
Independently of the type of spam, there are 3 things you always should do when you think you found one in your reports:
Never visit the suspicious URL. Most of the time they'll try to sell you something or promote their service, but some spammers might have some malicious scripts on their site.
This goes without saying, but never install scripts from unknown sites; if for some reason you did, remove it immediately and scan your site for malware.
Filter out the spam in your Google Analytics to keep your data clean (more on that below).
If you're not sure whether an entry on your report is real, try searching for the URL in quotes (“example.com”). Your browser won’t open the site, but instead will show you the search results; if it is spam, you'll usually see posts or forums complaining about it.
If you still can’t find information about that particular entry, give me a shout — I might have some knowledge for you.
Bot traffic
A bot is a piece of software that runs automated scripts over the Internet for different purposes.
There are all kinds of bots. Some have good intentions, like the bots used to check copyrighted content or the ones that index your site for search engines, and others not so much, like the ones scraping your content to clone it.
2016 bot traffic report. Source: Incapsula
In either case, this type of traffic is not useful for your reporting and might be even more damaging than spam both because of the amount and because it's harder to identify (and therefore to filter it out).
It's worth mentioning that bots can be blocked from your server to stop them from accessing your site completely, but this usually involves editing sensible files that require high technical knowledge, and as I said before, there are good bots too.
So, unless you're receiving a direct attack that's skewing your resources, I recommend you just filter them in Google Analytics.
In which reports can you look for bot traffic?
Bots will usually show as Direct traffic in Google Analytics, so you'll need to look for patterns in other dimensions to be able to filter it out. For example, large companies that use bots to navigate the Internet will usually have a unique service provider.
I’ll go into more detail on this below.
Internal traffic
Most users get worried and anxious about spam, which is normal — nobody likes weird URLs showing up in their reports. However, spam isn't the biggest threat to your Google Analytics.
You are!
The traffic generated by people (and bots) working on the site is often overlooked despite the huge negative impact it has. The main reason it's so damaging is that in contrast to spam, internal traffic is difficult to identify once it hits your Analytics, and it can easily get mixed in with your real user data.
There are different types of internal traffic and different ways of dealing with it.
Direct internal traffic
Testers, developers, marketing team, support, outsourcing... the list goes on. Any member of the team that visits the company website or blog for any purpose could be contributing.
In which reports can you look for direct internal traffic?
Unless your company uses a private ISP domain, this traffic is tough to identify once it hits you, and will usually show as Direct in Google Analytics.
Third-party sites/tools
This type of internal traffic includes traffic generated directly by you or your team when using tools to work on the site; for example, management tools like Trello or Asana,
It also considers traffic coming from bots doing automatic work for you; for example, services used to monitor the performance of your site, like Pingdom or GTmetrix.
Some types of tools you should consider:
Project management
Social media management
Performance/uptime monitoring services
SEO tools
In which reports can you look for internal third-party tools traffic?
This traffic will usually show as Referral in Google Analytics.
Development/staging environments
Some websites use a test environment to make changes before applying them to the main site. Normally, these staging environments have the same tracking code as the production site, so if you don’t filter it out, all the testing will be recorded in Google Analytics.
In which reports can you look for development/staging environments?
This traffic will usually show as Direct in Google Analytics, but you can find it under its own hostname (more on this later).
Web archive sites and cache services
Archive sites like the Wayback Machine offer historical views of websites. The reason you can see those visits on your Analytics — even if they are not hosted on your site — is that the tracking code was installed on your site when the Wayback Machine bot copied your content to its archive.
One thing is for certain: when someone goes to check how your site looked in 2015, they don't have any intention of buying anything from your site — they're simply doing it out of curiosity, so this traffic is not useful.
In which reports can you look for traffic from web archive sites and cache services?
You can also identify this traffic on the hostname report.
A basic understanding of filters
The solutions described below use Google Analytics filters, so to avoid problems and confusion, you'll need some basic understanding of how they work and check some prerequisites.
Things to consider before using filters:
1. Create an unfiltered view.
Before you do anything, it's highly recommendable to make an unfiltered view; it will help you track the efficacy of your filters. Plus, it works as a backup in case something goes wrong.
2. Make sure you have the correct permissions.
You will need edit permissions at the account level to create filters; edit permissions at view or property level won’t work.
3. Filters don’t work retroactively.
In GA, aggregated historical data can’t be deleted, at least not permanently. That's why the sooner you apply the filters to your data, the better.
4. The changes made by filters are permanent!
If your filter is not correctly configured because you didn’t enter the correct expression (missing relevant entries, a typo, an extra space, etc.), you run the risk of losing valuable data FOREVER; there is no way of recovering filtered data.
But don’t worry — if you follow the recommendations below, you shouldn’t have a problem.
5. Wait for it.
Most of the time you can see the effect of the filter within minutes or even seconds after applying it; however, officially it can take up to twenty-four hours, so be patient.
Types of filters
There are two main types of filters: predefined and custom.
Predefined filters are very limited, so I rarely use them. I prefer to use the custom ones because they allow regular expressions, which makes them a lot more flexible.
Within the custom filters, there are five types: exclude, include, lowercase/uppercase, search and replace, and advanced.
Here we will use the first two: exclude and include. We'll save the rest for another occasion.
Essentials of regular expressions
If you already know how to work with regular expressions, you can jump to the next section.
REGEX (short for regular expressions) are text strings prepared to match patterns with the use of some special characters. These characters help match multiple entries in a single filter.
Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about them. We will use only the basics, and for some filters, you will just have to COPY-PASTE the expressions I pre-built.
REGEX special characters
There are many special characters in REGEX, but for basic GA expressions we can focus on three:
^ The caret: used to indicate the beginning of a pattern,
$ The dollar sign: used to indicate the end of a pattern,
| The pipe or bar: means "OR," and it is used to indicate that you are starting a new pattern.
When using the pipe character, you should never ever:
Put it at the beginning of the expression,
Put it at the end of the expression,
Put 2 or more together.
Any of those will mess up your filter and probably your Analytics.
A simple example of REGEX usage
Let's say I go to a restaurant that has an automatic machine that makes fruit salad, and to choose the fruit, you should use regular xxpressions.
This super machine has the following fruits to choose from: strawberry, orange, blueberry, apple, pineapple, and watermelon.
To make a salad with my favorite fruits (strawberry, blueberry, apple, and watermelon), I have to create a REGEX that matches all of them. Easy! Since the pipe character “|” means OR I could do this:
REGEX 1: strawberry|blueberry|apple|watermelon
The problem with that expression is that REGEX also considers partial matches, and since pineapple also contains “apple,” it would be selected as well... and I don’t like pineapple!
To avoid that, I can use the other two special characters I mentioned before to make an exact match for apple. The caret “^” (begins here) and the dollar sign “$” (ends here). It will look like this:
REGEX 2: strawberry|blueberry|^apple$|watermelon
The expression will select precisely the fruits I want.
But let’s say for demonstration's sake that the fewer characters you use, the cheaper the salad will be. To optimize the expression, I can use the ability for partial matches in REGEX.
Since strawberry and blueberry both contain "berry," and no other fruit in the list does, I can rewrite my expression like this:
Optimized REGEX: berry|^apple$|watermelon
That’s it — now I can get my fruit salad with the right ingredients, and at a lower price.
3 ways of testing your filter expression
As I mentioned before, filter changes are permanent, so you have to make sure your filters and REGEX are correct. There are 3 ways of testing them:
Right from the filter window; just click on “Verify this filter,” quick and easy. However, it's not the most accurate since it only takes a small sample of data.
Using an online REGEX tester; very accurate and colorful, you can also learn a lot from these, since they show you exactly the matching parts and give you a brief explanation of why.
Using an in-table temporary filter in GA; you can test your filter against all your historical data. This is the most precise way of making sure you don’t miss anything.
If you're doing a simple filter or you have plenty of experience, you can use the built-in filter verification. However, if you want to be 100% sure that your REGEX is ok, I recommend you build the expression on the online tester and then recheck it using an in-table filter.
Quick REGEX challenge
Here's a small exercise to get you started. Go to this premade example with the optimized expression from the fruit salad case and test the first 2 REGEX I made. You'll see live how the expressions impact the list.
Now make your own expression to pay as little as possible for the salad.
Remember:
We only want strawberry, blueberry, apple, and watermelon;
The fewer characters you use, the less you pay;
You can do small partial matches, as long as they don’t include the forbidden fruits.
Tip: You can do it with as few as 6 characters.
Now that you know the basics of REGEX, we can continue with the filters below. But I encourage you to put “learn more about REGEX” on your to-do list — they can be incredibly useful not only for GA, but for many tools that allow them.
How to create filters to stop spam, bots, and internal traffic in Google Analytics
Back to our main event: the filters!
Where to start: To avoid being repetitive when describing the filters below, here are the standard steps you need to follow to create them:
Go to the admin section in your Google Analytics (the gear icon at the bottom left corner),
Under the View column (master view), click the button “Filters” (don’t click on “All filters“ in the Account column):
Click the red button “+Add Filter” (if you don’t see it or you can only apply/remove already created filters, then you don’t have edit permissions at the account level. Ask your admin to create them or give you the permissions.):
Then follow the specific configuration for each of the filters below.
The filter window is your best partner for improving the quality of your Analytics data, so it will be a good idea to get familiar with it.
Valid hostname filter (ghost spam, dev environments)
Prevents traffic from:
Ghost spam
Development hostnames
Scraping sites
Cache and archive sites
This filter may be the single most effective solution against spam. In contrast with other commonly shared solutions, the hostname filter is preventative, and it rarely needs to be updated.
Ghost spam earns its name because it never really visits your site. It’s sent directly to the Google Analytics servers using a feature called Measurement Protocol, a tool that under normal circumstances allows tracking from devices that you wouldn’t imagine that could be traced, like coffee machines or refrigerators.
Real users pass through your server, then the data is sent to GA; hence it leaves valid information. Ghost spam is sent directly to GA servers, without knowing your site URL; therefore all data left is fake. Source: carloseo.com
The spammer abuses this feature to simulate visits to your site, most likely using automated scripts to send traffic to randomly generated tracking codes (UA-0000000-1).
Since these hits are random, the spammers don't know who they're hitting; for that reason ghost spam will always leave a fake or (not set) host. Using that logic, by creating a filter that only includes valid hostnames all ghost spam will be left out.
Where to find your hostnames
Now here comes the “tricky” part. To create this filter, you will need, to make a list of your valid hostnames.
A list of what!?
Essentially, a hostname is any place where your GA tracking code is present. You can get this information from the hostname report:
Go to Audience > Select Network > At the top of the table change the primary dimension to Hostname.
If your Analytics is active, you should see at least one: your domain name. If you see more, scan through them and make a list of all the ones that are valid for you.
Types of hostname you can find
The good ones:
Type
Example
Your domain and subdomains
yourdomain.com
Tools connected to your Analytics
YouTube, MailChimp
Payment gateways
Shopify, booking systems
Translation services
Google Translate
Mobile speed-up services
Google weblight
The bad ones (by bad, I mean not useful for your reports):
Type
Example/Description
Staging/development environments
staging.yourdomain.com
Internet archive sites
web.archive.org
Scraping sites that don’t bother to trim the content
The URL of the scraper
Spam
Most of the time they will show their URL, but sometimes they may use the name of a known website to try to fool you. If you see a URL that you don’t recognize, just think, “do I manage it?” If the answer is no, then it isn't your hostname.
(not set) hostname
It usually comes from spam. On rare occasions it's related to tracking code issues.
Below is an example of my hostname report. From the unfiltered view, of course, the master view is squeaky clean.
Now with the list of your good hostnames, make a regular expression. If you only have your domain, then that is your expression; if you have more, create an expression with all of them as we did in the fruit salad example:
Hostname REGEX (example) yourdomain.com|hostname2|hostname3|hostname4
Important! You cannot create more than one “Include hostname filter”; if you do, you will exclude all data. So try to fit all your hostnames into one expression (you have 255 characters).
The “valid hostname filter” configuration:
Filter Name: Include valid hostnames
Filter Type: Custom > Include
Filter Field: Hostname
Filter Pattern: [hostname REGEX you created]
Campaign source filter (Crawler spam, internal sources)
Prevents traffic from:
Crawler spam
Internal third-party tools (Trello, Asana, Pingdom)
Important note: Even if these hits are shown as a referral, the field you should use in the filter is “Campaign source” — the field “Referral” won’t work.
Filter for crawler spam
The second most common type of spam is crawler. They also pretend to be a valid visit by leaving a fake source URL, but in contrast with ghost spam, these do access your site. Therefore, they leave a correct hostname.
You will need to create an expression the same way as the hostname filter, but this time, you will put together the source/URLs of the spammy traffic. The difference is that you can create multiple exclude filters.
Crawler REGEX (example) spam1|spam2|spam3|spam4
Crawler REGEX (pre-built) As I promised, here are latest pre-built crawler expressions that you just need to copy/paste.
The “crawler spam filter” configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude crawler spam 1
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign source
Filter Pattern: [crawler REGEX]
Filter for internal third-party tools
Although you can combine your crawler spam filter with internal third-party tools, I like to have them separated, to keep them organized and more accessible for updates.
The “internal tools filter” configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude internal tool sources
Filter Pattern: [tool source REGEX]
Internal Tools REGEX (example) trello|asana|redmine
In case, that one of the tools that you use internally also sends you traffic from real visitors, don’t filter it. Instead, use the “Exclude Internal URL Query” below.
For example, I use Trello, but since I share analytics guides on my site, some people link them from their Trello accounts.
Filters for language spam and other types of spam
The previous two filters will stop most of the spam; however, some spammers use different methods to bypass the previous solutions.
For example, they try to confuse you by showing one of your valid hostnames combined with a well-known source like Apple, Google, or Moz. Even my site has been a target (not saying that everyone knows my site; it just looks like the spammers don’t agree with my guides).
However, even if the source and host look fine, the spammer injects their message in another part of your reports like the keyword, page title, and even as a language.
In those cases, you will have to take the dimension/report where you find the spam and choose that name in the filter. It's important to consider that the name of the report doesn't always match the name in the filter field:
Report name
Filter field
Language
Language settings
Referral
Campaign source
Organic Keyword
Search term
Service Provider
ISP Organization
Network Domain
ISP Domain
Here are a couple of examples.
The “language spam/bot filter” configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude language spam
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: Language settings
Filter Pattern: [Language REGEX]
Language Spam REGEX (Prebuilt) \s[^\s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,|^c$
The expression above excludes fake languages that don't meet the required format. For example, take these weird messages appearing instead of regular languages like en-us or es-es:
Examples of language spam
The organic/keyword spam filter configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude organic spam
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: Search term
Filter Pattern: [keyword REGEX]
Filters for direct bot traffic
Bot traffic is a little trickier to filter because it doesn't leave a source like spam, but it can still be filtered with a bit of patience.
The first thing you should do is enable bot filtering. In my opinion, it should be enabled by default.
Go to the Admin section of your Analytics and click on View Settings. You will find the option “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” below the currency selector:
It would be wonderful if this would take care of every bot — a dream come true. However, there's a catch: the key here is the word “known.” This option only takes care of known bots included in the “IAB known bots and spiders list." That's a good start, but far from enough.
There are a lot of “unknown” bots out there that are not included in that list, so you'll have to play detective and search for patterns of direct bot traffic through different reports until you find something that can be safely filtered without risking your real user data.
To start your bot trail search, click on the Segment box at the top of any report, and select the “Direct traffic” segment.
Then navigate through different reports to see if you find anything suspicious.
Some reports to start with:
Service provider
Browser version
Network domain
Screen resolution
Flash version
Country/City
Signs of bot traffic
Although bots are hard to detect, there are some signals you can follow:
An unnatural increase of direct traffic
Old versions (browsers, OS, Flash)
They visit the home page only (usually represented by a slash “/” in GA)
Extreme metrics:
Bounce rate close to 100%,
Session time close to 0 seconds,
1 page per session,
100% new users.
Important! If you find traffic that checks off many of these signals, it is likely bot traffic. However, not all entries with these characteristics are bots, and not all bots match these patterns, so be cautious.
Perhaps the most useful report that has helped me identify bot traffic is the “Service Provider” report. Large corporations frequently use their own Internet service provider name.
I also have a pre-built expression for ISP bots, similar to the crawler expressions.
The bot ISP filter configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude bots by ISP
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: ISP organization
Filter Pattern: [ISP provider REGEX]
ISP provider bots REGEX (prebuilt) hubspot|^google\sllc$|^google\sinc\.$|alibaba\.com\sllc|ovh\shosting\sinc\. Latest ISP bot expression
IP filter for internal traffic
We already covered different types of internal traffic, the one from test sites (with the hostname filter), and the one from third-party tools (with the campaign source filter).
Now it's time to look at the most common and damaging of all: the traffic generated directly by you or any member of your team while working on any task for the site.
To deal with this, the standard solution is to create a filter that excludes the public IP (not private) of all locations used to work on the site.
Examples of places/people that should be filtered
Office
Support
Home
Developers
Hotel
Coffee shop
Bar
Mall
Any place that is regularly used to work on your site
To find the public IP of the location you are working at, simply search for "my IP" in Google. You will see one of these versions:
IP version
Example
Short IPv4
1.23.45.678
Long IPv6
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
No matter which version you see, make a list with the IP of each place and put them together with a REGEX, the same way we did with other filters.
IP address expression: IP1|IP2|IP3|IP4 and so on.
The static IP filter configuration:
Filter Name: Exclude internal traffic (IP)
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: IP Address
Filter Pattern: [The IP expression]
Cases when this filter won’t be optimal:
There are some cases in which the IP filter won’t be as efficient as it used to be:
You use IP anonymization (required by the GDPR regulation). When you anonymize the IP in GA, the last part of the IP is changed to 0. This means that if you have 1.23.45.678, GA will pass it as 1.23.45.0, so you need to put it like that in your filter. The problem is that you might be excluding other IPs that are not yours.
Your Internet provider changes your IP frequently (Dynamic IP). This has become a common issue lately, especially if you have the long version (IPv6).
Your team works from multiple locations. The way of working is changing — now, not all companies operate from a central office. It's often the case that some will work from home, others from the train, in a coffee shop, etc. You can still filter those places; however, maintaining the list of IPs to exclude can be a nightmare,
You or your team travel frequently. Similar to the previous scenario, if you or your team travels constantly, there's no way you can keep up with the IP filters.
If you check one or more of these scenarios, then this filter is not optimal for you; I recommend you to try the “Advanced internal URL query filter” below.
URL query filter for internal traffic
If there are dozens or hundreds of employees in the company, it's extremely difficult to exclude them when they're traveling, accessing the site from their personal locations, or mobile networks.
Here’s where the URL query comes to the rescue. To use this filter you just need to add a query parameter. I add “?internal" to any link your team uses to access your site:
Internal newsletters
Management tools (Trello, Redmine)
Emails to colleagues
Also works by directly adding it in the browser address bar
Basic internal URL query filter
The basic version of this solution is to create a filter to exclude any URL that contains the query “?internal”.
Filter Name: Exclude Internal Traffic (URL Query)
Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: \?internal
This solution is perfect for instances were the user will most likely stay on the landing page, for example, when sending a newsletter to all employees to check a new post.
If the user will likely visit more than the landing page, then the subsequent pages will be recorded.
Advanced internal URL query filter
This solution is the champion of all internal traffic filters!
It’s a more comprehensive version of the previous solution and works by filtering internal traffic dynamically using Google Tag Manager, a GA custom dimension, and cookies.
Although this solution is a bit more complicated to set up, once it's in place:
It doesn’t need maintenance
Any team member can use it, no need to explain techy stuff
Can be used from any location
Can be used from any device, and any browser
To activate the filter, you just have to add the text “?internal” to any URL of the website.
That will insert a small cookie in the browser that will tell GA not to record the visits from that browser.
And the best of it is that the cookie will stay there for a year (unless it is manually removed), so the user doesn’t have to add “?internal” every time.
Bonus filter: Include only internal traffic
In some occasions, it's interesting to know the traffic generated internally by employees — maybe because you want to measure the success of an internal campaign or just because you're a curious person.
In that case, you should create an additional view, call it “Internal Traffic Only,” and use one of the internal filters above. Just one! Because if you have multiple include filters, the hit will need to match all of them to be counted.
If you configured the “Advanced internal URL query” filter, use that one. If not, choose one of the others.
The configuration is exactly the same — you only need to change “Exclude” for “Include.”
Cleaning historical data
The filters will prevent future hits from junk traffic.
But what about past affected data?
I know I told you that deleting aggregated historical data is not possible in GA. However, there's still a way to temporarily clean up at least some of the nasty traffic that has already polluted your reports.
For this, we'll use an advanced segment (a subset of your Analytics data). There are built-in segments like “Organic” or “Mobile,” but you can also build one using your own set of rules.
To clean our historical data, we will build a segment using all the expressions from the filters above as conditions (except the ones from the IP filter, because IPs are not stored in GA; hence, they can’t be segmented).
To help you get started, you can import this segment template.
You just need to follow the instructions on that page and replace the placeholders. Here is how it looks:
In the actual template, all text is black; the colors are just to help you visualize the conditions.
After importing it, to select the segment:
Click on the box that says “All users” at the top of any of your reports
From your list of segments, check the one that says “0. All Users - Clean”
Lastly, uncheck the “All Users”
Now you can navigate through your reaports and all the junk traffic included in the segment will be removed.
A few things to consider when using this segment:
Segments have to be selected each time. A way of having it selected by default is by adding a bookmark when the segment is selected.
You can remove or add conditions if you need to.
You can edit the segment at any time to update it or add conditions (open the list of segments, then click “Actions” then “Edit”).
The hostname expression and third-party tools expression are different for each site.
If your site has a large volume of traffic, segments may sample your data when selected, so if you see the little shield icon at the top of your reports go yellow (normally is green), try choosing a shorter period (i.e. 1 year, 6 months, one month).
Conclusion: Which cake would you eat?
Having real and accurate data is essential for your Google Analytics to report as you would expect.
But if you haven’t filtered it properly, it’s almost certain that it will be filled with all sorts of junk and artificial information.
And the worst part is that if don't realize that your reports contain bogus data, you will likely make wrong or poor decisions when deciding on the next steps for your site or business.
The filters I share above will help you prevent the three most harmful threats that are polluting your Google Analytics and don’t let you get a clear view of the actual performance of your site: spam, bots, and internal traffic.
Once these filters are in place, you can rest assured that your efforts (and money!) won’t be wasted on analyzing deceptive Google Analytics data, and your decisions will be based on solid information.
And the benefits don’t stop there. If you're using other tools that import data from GA, for example, WordPress plugins like GADWP, excel add-ins like AnalyticsEdge, or SEO suites like Moz Pro, the benefits will trickle down to all of them as well.
Besides highlighting the importance of the filters in GA (which I hope I made clear by now), I would also love that for the preparation of these filters to give you the curiosity and basis to create others that will allow you to do all sorts of remarkable things with your data.
Remember, filters not only allow you to keep away junk, you can also use them to rearrange your real user information — but more on that on another occasion.
That’s it! I hope these tips help you make more sense of your data and make accurate decisions.
Have any questions, feedback, experiences? Let me know in the comments, or reach me on Twitter @carlosesal.
Complementary resources:
Google Analytics spam & bots (FAQ): Common data quality questions and concerns answered
Ultimate guide to stopping bots and Google Analytics spam (Always up to date)
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Social Media: Facebook Ads
Long as you have an existing personal Facebook account, you can generate your own Facebook Ads account. No sign up fee required. The only payment you would have to give is for the actual ads themselves. Payment would be done via credit card and will be automatically charged after the ads have completed its run.
The reason why digital ads are popular compared to other traditional advertising placements (like print, radio, TV) is because of the flexibility of budget. In print, you’d have to pay around Php 60,000 (depending on the magazine brand and the number of claimed circulations/subscribers) for a full page color spread of an ad but with no tangible data on the RoAS (Return on Ad Spend).
In digital ads like Facebook ads, you get to see how many already saw your ad and engaged on it while its running. You also get to be super flexible with spend (from Php 100 to thousands) so that small business owners get to advertise, too.
I mentioned in a previous post to not touch the “Boost” button if you’re a Facebook Page owner since it’s not practical. You’ll understand why in this post.
To begin, open the FB Ads Manager dashboard (don’t get intimidated by it, relax) and find click the Ads Manager button (top left of screen) to reveal Settings. Go to Payment Settings and encode your credit card details. The good thing about FB ads (even in Google ads) when it comes to credit card details is that once you’ve encoded it, you won’t be able to see the other sensitive details about the credit card (full cc number and CVC/CVV) to avoid “credit card theft” when you add another “admin” to your FB Ads Manager account.
Once you’ve set that up, go back to Ads Manager and click the green Create button. It’ll open up various options on your “Campaign Objective.” There are various objectives available, making FB ads truly reliable in tailor-fitting your ad needs and making ad budget spend wiser. Hover each selection and you’ll see an “i” icon you can hover on which briefly explains what each campaign objective means. Should you wish to further explore what they mean, simply Google it.
Let’s say you’re an FB Page owner without a website. What would your ideal campaign objective be? For you, ideal choices would be Brand Awareness, Reach, Engagement, Video Views, Messages, and Catalog Sales. Why? Traffic means leading to website visits, App installs mean the campaign would target users to install a mobile app, Lead Generation may capture user data but it would require a Privacy Policy page from your supposed website (and you don’t have one), Conversions are for website conversion tracking, and Store Traffic is for those with brick-and-mortar stores.
To get the most bang out of your buck, I recommend Engagement, Messages, and Catalog Sales since those campaign types would direct the FB Ad AI (Artificial Intelligence) to target users who are most likely to engage/message (which could lead to possible customers or sales for you probably). But the bidding cost for Messages and Catalog Sales would be more competitive (a.k.a. pricier) because it leads users closer to the end of the marketing/sales funnel (just Google marketing or sales funnel). When we say “bidding,” it’s the auction nature of online ads (you’re not the only one advertising here so there’s going to be “competition” for online users’ attention) but you won’t have to worry much about that long as your ad content is of quality (good textual and visual content that abides to Facebook’s ad quality rules).
Okay, let’s say you’re going to use “Engagement” as campaign objective (this means AI would target to get the most engagement out of your budget; engagement meaning clicks, reactions, and comments to your post). Once you click that, name your campaign (for data analysts, there would be a strict naming convention for this) like NewProduct_Engagement_04.13-04.18.20.1k. You could actually name it however you want/whatever works for you but if you’re running multiple ad campaigns at once, this type of campaign name works to easily understand what is inside a certain campaign once you view/go back to the Ads Manager dashboard (default view). The naming convention I chose speaks immediately what I will be promoting (New Product), the campaign objective I chose (Engagement), the campaign period (April 13 to April 18, 2020), and the budget I will allocate (1k or Php 1,000).
Click the blue Continue button and copy-paste the same name you chose to the Ad Set Name. Select your preferred targeting which you think fits your campaign perfectly. This is where you get more out of your budget compared to the simple “Boost” button. The Boost button lets you target users’ interests, age, and gender but with FB Ads Manager, you get to have detailed targeting so that you drive the correct customers to your business and have a much wiser ad spend. For an initial campaign, you may open the targeting wide and study the interested captured demographic once the campaign ends, then target that in a new campaign. But if you’re really on a tight budget, go for detailed targeting immediately.
Let’s say you’re selling a new product which is a lemon-scented dry shampoo spray priced at P195 each (excluding shipping). What would a typical customer of this product be? Male? Female? Age? Location? Status? My logic tells me it would be mostly female but I would still open it to both male and female (unless your ad material messaging would be for a specific gender only) since grooming applies to all gender types. For age, I would choose 20-40 years old since buying power for such a product type would be around that age. Yes, 18-year-olds may be able to buy it at P195 but they might probably would prefer to spend most of their allowance on milk tea and grooming basics like cologne, lip tints, powder, and so on. For location targeting, choose the ones where you can likely ship your product (like key cities). For interests, select those who are interested in grooming, hair care, hair products, beauty, beauty products, lemons, and competitive/popular brands of that product (to potentially steal customers from competition hehe). For status, you’d want to target the working class so exclude people who work for “The Krusty Krab” since these may just be fake accounts or people who may not have the buying capacity for your product (a.k.a. tambay). You may study a jejemon/fake account profile so you can exclude them in your ad targeting. Yes, some working class may still use that in their profiles but we’re working on a tight budget here, remember?
I’d also recommend excluding your FB Page followers (since they’d see this product already if they’re following your page via organic / page posting) to really target new customers (helping you increase brand awareness as well). Just go to Connections and choose exclude, then your FB page. Again, we’re trying to get more bang out of your buck here.
For placements, choose Instagram / IG as well if you have an IG account and if you’d want your ads to appear on IG as well. No extra costs here. Other way around, you may advertise purely on IG instead of FB (just deselect the FB placements).
Next, schedule the ad campaign. Be careful to choose Lifetime Budget. Also, schedule it until 11:59 pm of your end date to fully maximize the day run. You may also schedule it to run only on times you’re active on FB should you wish unless you have set a chat bot on your page to accommodate queries anytime.
Copy-paste your Campaign name to Ad Name as well. In Identity, make sure to choose your respective FB Page and IG account. Next, upload your ad material (image or video) and input the ad copy. Select a “call-to-action” button to encourage users to engage with your ad/page. Be sure to apply the 20% text rule (briefly read that here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-text-overlay) and you may access the tool here: http://www.social-contests.com/check-image/
For videos, the 20% text rule applies to the thumbnail, not the overall video content.
You may also use an existing post that’s already on your FB page. Select Use Existing Post and choose from the drop down of Select Post.
If you can’t find the post in the drop down, click Enter Post ID. Go to the organic post on page and copy the long number in the URL of the post.
Click Review to briefly go over your campaign settings and see if you did it right or missed out on anything. Click Confirm once you’re all set to go. Campaign approval may either be fast or may take time. You’ll get a notification (even via email) once your campaign has been approved and is actually running.
#facebook ads#social media marketing#digital marketing#digital marketing ph#digital marketing philippines#fb ads
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6 Keys to a Strong Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy
The healthcare industry is continually pursuing the next technological advancement. Whether it’s a new, improved treatment, a groundbreaking facility or the expansion of physician specialties, healthcare organizations are always working to provide a higher level of care for patients.
Unlike any other industry, healthcare serves a broad audience. And today's consumers are becoming more dependent on apps and websites. In fact, patients are relying on websites at an increasing rate to make healthcare decisions.
This is why it’s important to stay on top of digital marketing and keep your organization at the forefront of change—even online. Use these six keys to a strong healthcare digital marketing strategy that will reach patients and generate leads in today’s patient-centered market.
Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy Includes
Easy-to-Navigate Website
Informational Blog
Resourceful Emails
Videos That Educate and Inspire
Strong SEO Attributes
Engaging Social Media Strategy
6 Keys to a Strong Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy
An Easy-to-Navigate Website
Your website serves as the welcome mat to your organization. It typically is the first impression your company will make and plays a strong role in a patient’s decision to choose your facility or go elsewhere, so you want the user experience to be as easy as possible. Chances are if someone is on your website, they are looking for answers for themselves or a loved one and want to find what they’re looking for quickly so they can take action.
Patients already are looking online for health information, so make sure your website is patient-focused and easy to use. Take the Mayo Clinic’s website, for example. It is user-friendly and has a robust offering right on the homepage.
It’s simple for visitors to make an appointment, contact Mayo Clinic, view resources or log into the patient account. Putting these elements on the homepage makes its easy to find so they don’t have to go searching around the site.
An Informational Blog
Your blog goes hand-in-hand with a strong, user-friendly website. With 1 percent of all Google searches related to medical symptoms, and 3.5 billion Google searches, that’s 35 million online medical searches every day. Take advantage of all those searches with rich blog content that provides information on health conditions, answers to questions, quick tips and advice they can get without going to the doctor. Be sure to plan your editorial calendar around health months or other timely topics relevant to your organization.
And don’t forget, people take comfort in reading about other patients who have experienced a treatment, condition or surgery they are facing, so this can help boost your blog’s readership numbers. While you can feature testimonials in various places around your website, your blog is a great place for reading in-depth about another patient's success. Rather than short clips, blogs are trending toward featuring in-depth patient stories on their journey from diagnosis to recovery.
The Harvard Medical School blog has a steady stream of content that covers a variety of health concerns. Its navigation makes it simple to browse topics by health categories, such as men’s health or heart health. Readers can easily find the blog subscription, and engagement is highlighted by showing the most-commented blog posts.
Resourceful Emails
It’s true that patients go searching for information, but email is a way to be a step ahead. What if the information was in their inbox before they had to even look for it? By sending out an email newsletter at least once a month, you’ll continue to educate patients by providing them with fresh content they can apply to their own health.
The key is to provide your email database with a variety of information to best capture your audience’s interest. Use email personalization and segmentation based on a recipient’s interests and needs so they’re receiving information relevant to them. Send out a video, a current blog post or provide industry news that will give readers information on various topics. Be sure to plan these ahead of time so they are timely according to what’s going on at your organization or in the health industry.
This newsletter email sent out by Akron Children’s Hospital in August helps parents of young children with issues facing preschoolers going back to school. Parents who have subscribed are dealing with many of these situations just before school starts, and this email was timely in providing answers to their problems.
Videos That Educate and Inspire
Audiences increasingly are leaning more toward visual content. According to Wordstream, one-third of online activity is spent watching video. If you can get your physicians on camera speaking about their area of expertise, it inevitably will add to their credibility and capture an audience that is out there looking for the expertise your physicians have.
This Cleveland Clinic video series shows doctors speaking passionately about their areas of expertise, and describing their views on caring for patients. Watching a doctor in a video describing a condition or procedure can make a patient feel more at ease about what they’re experiencing, especially if they’re seeing that physician for treatment. Video can make a patient feel as though they’ve already met the physician and increase their comfort level by seeing their facial expressions, mannerisms and even hearing their voice.
Like the blog, another appropriate place for testimonials is in your video resources. The only thing better than reading about another patient’s experience is getting to see it in action through video, and hear the doctor, patient and family members describing the experience from beginning to end. Video is a powerful tool; the lighting, music and story structure work together to draw out emotion when telling the story in ways a blog post can’t. These elements can evoke feelings of passion, hope, courage, fear and many others that the written word alone can’t capture.
Strong SEO Attributes
You can have the best-looking, most informative website, blog posts, emails and videos, but what good are they if they’re not being found? Through the process of search engine optimization (SEO), you can increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic by centering your content on specific keywords your patients actually would use in their searches. If you’re a hospital with several service lines, you’ll want to do some keyword research with a tool like SEMrush or the HubSpot keyword tool to determine the best-ranking keywords to use on each page. You’ll want to look for what keywords are currently driving traffic to your website, as well as your competitors'.
When searching in SEMrush for healthcare, you’ll see the top keywords, their search volume, keyword difficulty score and cost per click (CPC):
Using these results, choose a keyword that has a lower difficulty score (so it’s not as difficult to rank for) with a high search volume. Develop your content based on this keyword, and work it into your copy. To optimize a page around a particular service line, you need to include it in the page title, H1, meta description, URL, alt image tags and within the body copy of the page. You can create content around that same keyword and related subtopics and link back to that page. Say your keyword is “Cleveland urologist,” some subtopics might be when to see a urologist, incontinence symptoms or overactive bladder treatment.
Keywords are important, but they must sound natural within the rest of the copy. Avoid overuse of the keyword phrase on the page; Google will penalize you for “keyword stuffing” if your phrase appears too many times. While you want the words within the copy, quality content is still king.
Engaging Social Media Strategy
If your healthcare organization isn’t on social media, you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with your audience. Social media is an excellent promotional tool when used right.
In fact, 60 percent of social media users are most likely to trust social media posts and activity by doctors over any other group, according to Infographics Archive. So plan your posts wisely—make sure they are written ahead of time and offer a variety of content on your page. A social media presence expands your reach to patients.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has all the elements needed for a successful social media strategy.
The hospital shares videos, blog posts highlighting its staff caring for patients, upcoming events and dozens of positive patient reviews. A great feature is a “Book Now” button that takes patients to the hospital’s physician page, so patients can easily locate a doctor for their needs.
Tying It All Together
A strong healthcare digital marketing strategy is most effective when it is managed in a streamlined way, where each component is in sync with one another, rather than siloed. In addition to regularly meeting with your team about your marketing strategy to discuss changes or updates, connect these elements through a content management platform. This enables you to track the performance of your efforts as a whole and identify areas for improvement. In fact, many healthcare organizations already are managing their digital marketing efforts on HubSpot or other similar platforms. Doing so helps them review previous efforts, and makes planning their future strategies easier. Platforms like HubSpot can support your marketing endeavors through their continual updates to help you better serve the healthcare industry and the users you are working to attract.
There are many Web Developers in Breckenridge who can help you to get affordable website designed for your business.
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Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/183268112780
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Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/ from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2019/03/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success.html
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
The post Six tips for B2B paid search success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/06/six-tips-for-b2b-paid-search-success/
0 notes
Text
Six tips for B2B paid search success
Having worked across paid search strategies in all kinds of industries, you get to learn they all have their individual quirks: high CPCs, certain keywords that just don’t work, and other things that just drive you mad.
When it comes to B2B and lead generation strategies that are no different, in fact, it’s probably a bit more challenging when you can’t see the direct conversions or e-commerce revenue.
As such, I thought it would only be fair to share six of my favorite tips to help you get the best out of your paid search activity when working in the B2B world.
Six tips for B2B paid search success
1. Tracking & attribution
Without a doubt, the hardest thing about running a B2B strategy is tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns and keywords, but for me, this is where it gets most exciting.
When working on an e-commerce strategy as long as your tracking is set up correctly, you can see your data quite clearly and you can understand where your sales and revenue are coming from. But with a lead gen strategy, you need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance.
Whilst there are many ways you can track your paid search performance, I prefer to append the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs, if you’re not sure how to do this I suggest checking out Google’s URL Builder Tool as your starting point.
The reason I like this approach is that you can get your developers to pull this data through the website form completions and then pull this into your CRM. This allows you to begin the attribution process.
It’s easy and, to be totally honest, lazy to optimize a lead gen PPC account based on conversions in Google Ads. Looking at this data does not take into account whether you actually made any revenue from any given lead.
This is where you can get onto the attribution bit.
Your aim should be to pull a report from your CRM, detailing the leads generated from your paid search campaigns, with the UTM data from URLs and the lead status i.e. closed, lost, ongoing and any associated revenue.
This view will allow you to see what you actually got from the campaigns you are running. You are then able to optimize your account based on the campaigns that generate you the highest quality leads and revenue, rather than optimizing towards the campaigns that generate the most form completions.
2. Bing Ads
Okay, so this sounds basic, but too often B2B companies don’t look past Google when it comes to paid search.
While Bing is unlikely to ever bring you the same volume of conversions, the chances are it will be a lot more efficient when it comes to your CPC’s and CPA’s. So why miss out on cheaper conversions?
A key thing to remember is most businesses are using Microsoft OS on their hardware and guess what the default search engine is? Bing, of course. Even at home Bing is gaining more prominence, have you tried to not use Edge and Bing on a new laptop? It’s a challenge to just install Chrome nowadays.
A very simple and quick way to get up and running on Bing is to copy over your Google campaigns using the import feature. Whilst this works relatively well, you always need to manually check all settings to ensure nothing goes wrong.
That said, it can be equally valuable to build a bespoke campaign and strategy for Bing. Consider things like search volumes, user intent, and demographics, all very different from that of Google. Therefore tailoring your approach can result in much better performance.
With Microsoft owned websites accounting for over 20 percent of search market share in the US and growing you cannot afford to be missing out on this traffic source.
3. Paid social
Paid social advertising has been getting more and more popular among advertisers in B2B businesses, particularly LinkedIn.
The targeting options on LinkedIn should really not be missed. The ability to pinpoint your target audience specifically and serve them tailored ad content is essentially everything we should all be doing as digital marketers and LinkedIn allows exactly that.
You are able to target people based on things like:
Job title
Company size
Industry
Years of experience
Demographics
And many more
If you are a Software as a service (SaaS) business promoting a new accounting tool it is so easy to target an audience of senior-level finance professionals in large businesses; or if you are a marketing agency promoting your PPC services, you can quickly show ads to in house marketers.
There’s also the recent introduction of interesting targeting, which allows you to target users based on interests at a generic level, marketing and advertising, or go as specific as digital marketing or even further to pay-per-click.
Further still, the advertising space on LinkedIn is constantly evolving with text ads, videos, static images, carousels, spotlight ads. The opportunity to serve relevant content to relevant audiences in various formats is everything we want. You just need to ensure you are utilizing the opportunity.
4. Audience targeting
Both Google and Bing are heavily pushing advertisers to use audience targeting within their accounts and the options they now provide can be very beneficial to B2B businesses.
The kind of audiences now available include everything from people interested in SEO, to baby clothes, to interior design.
Modifying your bids based on the audience is a great way to analyze performance; it allows you to qualify users before they get to your site by seeing which audiences convert and which don’t. You can then use this insight to apply bid modifiers and only target the traffic that works for you, therefore reducing your CPA and improving the quality of the leads you generate.
Historically, audiences were seen as a display tactic, but this has become more and more prominent on search campaigns, and the results can be fantastic. I’ve seen CPA reduce by up to 25 percent when I’ve used them myself.
This is a quick and simple thing to setup:
Add relevant in-market audiences at a campaign level
Allow sufficient time to generate significant data
Review campaign level audience reports
Reduce bids on poor performing audiences
Increase bids on audiences who convert well
Just remember that the optimization is only going to be as good as the data you are analyzing, so make sure you leave enough time to see real trends.
If you want to go a step further you could build out specific audience-focused campaigns to give you greater control over your bidding and CPA performance.
5. Competitor strategy
Bidding on your competitors’ brand terms can be somewhat taboo, but it is rife among B2B companies, in fact, all companies really.
I would expect any paid search strategy to already have your own brand segmented out into individual campaigns, if it’s not, you should be doing this now. But I would also recommend adding your competitor brand terms into their own campaign and bidding on these too.
Whilst your CPC and CPA will be higher than your own branded campaigns, you will quite often find they are cheaper than on generic keywords. When a user searches a competitor term it can often be because they know they want the service they offer, so you are just showing them an alternative service provider.
The steps to take are:
Create a competitor campaign
Have an Ad Group per competitor
Select the headline competitor keywords
Monitor your bids closely to avoid position 1 (it will be expensive!)
Review conversion performance
Provided you are not infringing trademarks and using brand terms directly in your ads you are perfectly able to do this.
I would also highly recommend that you set up some kind of reporting structure to monitor the impact that competitor activity is having on your brand. I look at this kind of data almost daily with the view of monitoring the relationship between my brand CPC and my competitor’s impression share and average position.
If you keep a close eye on the data you can do everything in your power to make sure you minimize any negative impact on your own brand performance.
6. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Sometimes you can do everything right in your paid search strategy and acquire huge numbers of visitors to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they all convert to leads and sales.
It is easy to think of traffic from paid search as being highly qualified, especially when you are bidding on long tail keywords and using things like audience targeting, but this traffic is often entering the conversion funnel on your site for the first time.
In order to get the best out of your paid search strategy, you should be continually testing elements on your website and landing pages to work out a way to create the best user experience and generate the most conversions with a well thought out CRO plan.
Basic tests include things like A/B testing different colored CTA buttons and adding conversion focused messaging on to landing pages, but you could go as far as totally redesigning landing pages specific to your PPC.
Sometimes the best and easiest way to optimize your paid search performance is to aim towards increasing your site conversion rate.
Conclusion
So to summarize, the key areas to consider in order to get the best performance from your B2B paid search strategy are:
Setup robust tracking and attribution methods
Make the most of Bing Ads
Run paid social campaigns (particularly on LinkedIn)
Utilize developments in audience targeting
Put together a dedicated competitor strategy
Don’t forget to test and enhance your website with a CRO strategy
Admittedly that’s quite a lot to be considering and working on at any one time but combined these areas will help you to get the best performance possible.
Dan Marshall is Digital Marketing Manager at Moneypenny.
Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?
Get top insights and news from our search experts.
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How to Enhance Your Campaign Tracking with UTM Parameters - DevriX
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From email marketing to social networks, adverting, and search results, there are numerous channels that you can utilize to position the content in front of your target customers. So, how do you keep an eye on prospects' interaction with your content?
Obviously, the very first thing that comes to mind is Google Analytics (GA) with its basic reports. However, what if we say that you can go deeper than the top crust of your marketing reports?
This is where UTM [Urchin Tracking Module] criteria step in! By utilizing UTMs, you can get a more deep-rooted summary of users' behavior and how they connect with your content, which is the focal point of this post.
What Are UTM Parameters?
In a nutshell, UTM parameters are tags that you connect to the end of your URLs to track the development of your marketing campaign. When people click the URL that has actually an adjoined UTM criterion, you can get insights for the channel that they used to access the content and their more engagement with it.
This is an example of UTM criterion in an URL that will appear after you click this sponsored Facebook post:
This does not alter the content of your link. Instead, it supplies you with insights that you can use to analyze the location where the user originated from and his/her interaction.
There are 5 UTM parameters that you can connect to your links:
Other examples of UTM criteria use for marketing campaigns:
Here's an e-mail gotten from Neil Patel
The link consists of the following URL with UTM specifications:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/marketing-hacks/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email
Here's another example from Windows Developer's sponsored Twitter post
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/collective/learning/courses/visual-studio-code?utm_campaign=DC19&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=SC4&utm_term=Grow
Why UTM Parameters Matter for Your Marketing Campaign?
By utilizing UTM parameters you can assess the types of marketing campaigns that work and supply you with the insight needed for the ones that didn't. Generally, there are 5 significant gain from utilizing UTM parameters for your campaigns:
How to Use UTM Parameters
Things initially, make sure that you have actually set up your GA account appropriately. If you haven't inserted the tracking code in your site yet, doing so
with WordPress is simple through a plugin or manually. Next up, you 'll need to establish your Google Tag Supervisor account and set up the container code that
can assist you manage GA on your pages. Next up, you require to begin adding those UTM criteria to your social media posts and e-mail links. Google provides you with
a UTM home builder that can assist you establish the trackable URLs. Go to the GA Analytics Project URL Builder, and get in the URL that you wish to connect to, and the values for the parameters that you
wish to evaluate If scroll down the page you'll locate the automatically generated campaign URL. Go to 'Convert URL to Brief Link' or 'Copy URL'
Paste the code into your social networks update.
Now, you can begin tracking the results of your project via GA. Open GA > > Acquisition > Campaigns
This is where you discover all the projects that you've created trackable URLs for, along with the stats and conversion rates.
These insights need to be completely examined to see what works, what does not, and what needs to be improved for better results. Your posts must not only drive traffic however also much better conversion rates for your pages.
Common Mistakes When Utilizing UTM Tags
Even the biggest business can make some errors in their UTM criterion practices. When you recognize that you've made one, it can be far too late and your whole project can end up being a failure. Here's what you need to prevent when utilizing UTM tags for your campaign URLs:
Designating "cpc" Medium when You Tag a Social Network Campaign
In GA, a "cpc" medium is a default Paid Search Channel. In this case, the traffic from your social networks campaign will be directed to your Paid Browse project. If you utilize this medium for your social media campaigns, you'll require to alter it with the Channel Grouping settings. Neglecting Case Level Of Sensitivity You need to use the
same format when you tag your links, or, you'll have disunited campaign reports in GA. It's better to utilize lowercase letters due to the fact that it helps GA to classify your sessions precisely. Blending"utm_source "and"utm_medium"The"
utm_source" tells you the site that
the link originated from. A source can be the domain, for instance: utm_source =facebook.com, utm_source=linkedin.com, utm_source=twitter.com The medium is the advertising platform that shows the source. For
example: utm_medium =affiliate, utm_medium=screen, utm_medium= e-mail, utm_medium
=social, etc. UTM Best Practices Before you check out and unfold the power of UTM tracking, keep in mind
the following finest practices. Use Google Analytics Correctly When users open your site, part of the code that is performed is GA script. That piece of code can help you analyzes how visitors got to your site by inspecting the recommendation URL. You must guarantee that GA gets as much authentic data as possible about how the web visitors who discovered and clicked your website.
If you don't use UTM tags, GA will not have the ability to extract more in-depth details about the users. Never Use UTMs for Internal Hyperlinks Google Analytics starts a brand-new session for each new visitor when he/she shows up on your URL that has a UTM specification attached to it. GA assumes that you utilize UTMs only for external links and resets the session-level information for each session. It resembles one user visited your site multiple times, and every metric will be altered and reset over and over. Stay Consistent When utilizing UTM criteria it is important to remain consistent because the absence of consistency means lack of focus, and as an outcome, you'll only get a fragmentary data about the users
. For example, if
you send a day-to-day or weekly e-mail newsletter and you want to capture the information, you need to utilize the same format and calling convention to make your sorting and analysis much simpler. UTMs are case-sensitive, so'twitter ', 'Twitter', and 'TwiTter 'will be tracked individually, which will always provide you with inconsistent data about your Twitter project. Likewise, keep away from areas when calling your UTM tags. An"organic linkedin "will end up being" organic20 %linkedin" when individuals open the URL, and that looks bad. Use a Spreadsheet to Track UTM Hyperlinks When you start using UTM parameters for your marketing campaign, you need to preserve a performance history to make sure that everybody that is involved in the project is in tune with its progress. You'll need a spreadsheet
that can assist you track the reduced and complete URL, and as well for all of the private UTM codes that you use in those URLs.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, UTM parameters supply you with a rich supply of user behavioral information. It's actually not difficult to see the gain from using them for your advertisement campaigns, and due to the fact that they're likewise personalized, there is an abundance of methods to incorporate them and enhance your marketing efforts while doing so.
Now that you have the understanding and you know the advantages of using UTM tags, you need to start using them. We're delighted to hear how you have actually applied them in your marketing method!
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