#the lead designer and hardware engineer both have. a lot of quirks

[cherubchoirs]

I posted this in like a comment or something wasn’t sure if you saw it, it’s in the context of V1’s main flesh part bein’ a heart ‘n everything:

Take it a step further: the heart was a donation from one of V1’s designers, someone who put so much of their heart and soul into making their machina magnifica that when the AI was finished and they were constructing the body, they made it literal

It was their greatest creation and they would do anything to make it perfect.

Like, I can’t help but think that there must’ve been someone on that team who had that kind of love or passion, engineering borders and overlaps with art in the nature of creation, and V1’s so finely tuned, made to such precision that it couldn’t have just been a project to them.

OOOUGHGHGHHHH this is absolutely true for how i characterize v1's head designer and now i'm really considering it as a possibility. i'm still in the process of designing them all, but the lead designer has advanced lung disease due to exposure to pollutants and heavy smoke damage that occurred when they were younger. they are on oxygen pumped constantly into a custom made mask - though i do imagine most humans, if not all, are wearing gas masks at this point in the war, given how smoke-filled the air must be, the damage has been done with them and they are aware they likely won't live to see the v-series put into production. yet their passion is evident, they draw up detailed plans by hand and have many artistic renderings of what they believe v1 will look and behave like by the time it's completed. this is the last thing they will do, a virus to destroy the earthmovers from the inside out, something that will halt the devastation of their world (i will note they aren't super introspective in this regard or anything, it's a much more practical 'save the world from burning down' than anything personal as many have suffered in similar ways). i wouldn't at all say they're an idealist, but they are an artist and v1 is a culmination of a vision for them. they work past their limits to create it, they are present with it at every step, and even its preliminary trials, buggy as they are, they see what it will be. v1 is what their passion is. so if they came to the point where they were dying, they would be more than willing to give their heart for v1 since it really already belongs to it

[anettrolikova]

Mastery and Mimicry by Sep Kamvar

You have everything you need right here, he told me. Look at it. Good surf, good friends, this sunset. The problem with having a lot of stuff, he said, is that at some point the stuff starts ruling you.

A recurring theme in science fiction is the idea that one day, our technologies will become self-aware, grow their population, and take over the world. Of course, humans will still be around, otherwise there’s no story, but they will be second-class citizens to the tools that they invented.

I've often wondered why self-awareness always comes first. Perhaps it's because it makes for a more interesting storyline. After all, a technology doesn't need to be self-aware to be self-reinforcing.

There is a story of Bill Joy asking Danny Hillis what he thought about the scenario in which humans one day merge with robots. Danny responded that the changes would come gradually, and we'd get used to it.

That's the way it is with technology. We get used to it.

When the mechanical clock was invented, one of its early uses was to set the arrival and departure times of factory workers during the industrial revolution. At the time, people hated the idea of getting to work at a certain time; it felt like the ultimate victory of machine over man. Now, it's seen as responsible behavior.

But if aliens come from outer space and see people wake up grudgingly every morning to the beeping of an alarm clock, they might wonder who is the master and who is the tool.

Inside of each of us, there are about 10 trillion human cells, and about 100 trillion bacterial cells. By cell count, we are only 10% human.

Given how outnumbered we are, it's surprising that we don't die more often from bacterial disease. You might expect that, of the hundreds of species of bacteria that live inside of us, at least a few would have the habit of getting out of line and growing at our expense.

We can give credit to antibiotics for saving us, but I think that would miss the point. Even before antibiotics, a surprisingly small number of people died from bacteria considering how many of them we host. And if we could invent an antibiotic that would get rid of all bacteria, we wouldn't want to. Our bacteria help us digest our food, store our fats, produce our vitamins, and train our immune systems.

The truth is that we are not alive in spite of the hordes of bacteria that inhabit us. We are alive because of them.

Relationships tend to develop a rich texture as they mature, and us and our symbiotic bacteria have been going at this for some time now. I'm reminded of an older couple, where both partners have their quirks, but each knows how far to go, when to pull back, and what to tolerate; where each knows the other so well, and is so dependent on the other, that it's hard to tell where one person stops and where the other begins.

The relationship between us and our tools is newer, like a younger love. It's fiery and exciting, and we're still trying to figure out our boundaries.

Our tools, like most things, have natural limits to their utility. Up to a certain point, e-mail makes us more efficient. After that, the mounds of e-mail in our inbox take time away from our real work. Up to a certain point, time spent on social networks brings us closer to our friends. After that, it takes away from time we spend with them in person.

Our bacteria can offer us some wisdom here. If we want tools that respect their natural limits, we can design limitation into the tools themselves.

If the idea of self-limiting tools seems antithetical to technology and capitalism, let me suggest that we already build them. A search engine is a self-limiting tool. As is an online dating site. When these tools succeed, people leave the site. Video games and TVs, on the other hand, are self-reinforcing. Their use doesn't lead to disuse; their use leads to more use.

The more self-reinforcing a tool is, the more likely we are to use it at our own expense. On the other hand, the more self-limiting a tool is, the more likely it is to die out.

The key is to find the balance.

Gandhi fiercely opposed expensive technology. And at the time, modern technology was expensive technology. If you opposed the factory, you opposed modernity.

But what Gandhi understood is that tools are most useful to the people that own them.

And villagers didn’t own factories.

We use tools to build our tools. We use an ax, a hammer, and a saw to make a cabin, and we use Python, Django, and Apache to build a web service. These upstream tools are crucial in shaping our society. A world with no hammers would have no houses.

The web, for the most part, gets this right. Most web services are built on top of free operating systems, databases, web servers, and programming languages. They are marketed by accessible tools like Facebook and Twitter and Adwords. And they are often funded by accessible funding sources like YCombinator, or Kickstarter, or by sales through App Stores. The pace of innovation on the web, and the outsized role that software has played in shaping our lives, is in large part because these upstream mechanisms for production, distribution, and financing are more available than they are in other industries.

Look for upstream tools that are accessible, and make them more powerful. The recent efforts around JavaScript, like Crankshaft and processing.js, are nice examples here.

Like the sun, our upstream tools should be accessible and empowering to all

When we build our tools, we should aim for the latter.

An individual ant is a feckless creature. It wanders around aimlessly, seeming to have no ability or purpose. But when you get a lot of them together, it's like alchemy. They transform into creatures that astound us with their intellect.

If software follows content, I imagine we'll start to see lots of APIs that do small things. But they will easily interact with one another to together do big things. And if hardware then follows software, I imagine that we will see lots of small devices that do simple things alone, but complex things together. They might remind us of ants.

When we build our tools, we often depend on metrics to guide our development. We keep graphs of unique visitors and pageviews and watch them closely. This keeps us honest. It's hard to convince anybody that we're building a useful tool if our metrics show that nobody is using it.

But we must take care when we use metrics. Metrics can be like the horse in the old Zen story. Once we decide on them, they have a habit of setting the agenda. As the old adage goes, what gets measured gets managed.

It is useful, therefore, to have missions to balance our metrics. Of course, each tool should have its own mission. But if I were to suggest one mission for all tools, it might be this:

Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

We see this principle at varying levels in some of our tools today. I call them cyclical tools. The iPhone empowers the developer ecosystem that helps drive its adoption. A bike strengthens the person who pedals it. Open-source software educates its potential contributors. A hallmark of cyclical tools is that they create open loops: the bike strengthens its rider to do things other than just pedal the bike.

Cyclical tools are like trees, whose falling leaves fertilize the soil in which they grow.

It’s difficult to build cyclical tools because the alternative is so tempting. Cars are faster than bikes.

But you can’t measure the impact of tools on their own. You must measure them by the ecosystems that they co-create.

Our heads cultivate reason. Our hearts cultivate intuition.

Our heads seek opportunity. Our hearts seek purpose.

Our heads maximize utility. Our hearts give gifts.

Our heads think of self. Our hearts feel connection.

Today, our technologies reflect reason and utility and opportunity and self. But this may be an artifact of our time. We could equally imagine building technologies that reflect intuition and purpose and gift and connection. I might say we're already starting.

When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement for the market economy. But gift economies and market economies have operated side-by-side for much of history. Child care, until recently, was exclusively a gift economy — neighbors would babysit one another’s kids. The creative arts and science have historically been gift economies, and to a large extent they still are. And today, free, open-source software sits alongside ad-supported and paid software.

[jessicakmatt]

Hard Truths: Every Plugin Has a Downside

Hard Truths: Every Plugin Has a Downside: via LANDR Blog

Welcome to Hard Truths, the series on the LANDR Blog where we cut through the noise and take on a harsh reality from the world of music production. This is the advice you might not want to hear—but will make you a better producer.

Most producers get pretty excited about their tools.

The hottest new plugins trigger pages of forum hype from obsessive musicians chasing a better mix.

But we rarely talk about the tradeoffs and drawbacks that come with the processes we use in every session.

My hard truth for today? EQ, compression and other types of mix processing can do more harm than good—in fact, using no processing at all often sounds better.

That’s not meant to be discouraging. You can easily reduce the negative effects by using your tools properly and making good decisions at every stage in your process.

In this article I’ll explain some of the issues with your basic mix effects—and how to avoid them.

Phase shift with EQ

Most mix engineers apply some amount of EQ to every track in their session.

After all, the frequency balance of each track is crucial to make sure the individual instruments in your mix can be heard clearly.

That’s how good EQ reduces the effect of masking. Masking is when instruments have similar amounts of energy in the same frequency areas and cover each other up when mixed together.

Unfortunately, no EQ is perfect. Any EQ you use is just a set of filters. Those filters have certain properties that you’re stuck with, no matter how sophisticated your plugins are.

When you filter frequencies out using an EQ, you make a slight change to the phase of the signal.

When you filter frequencies out using an EQ, you make a slight change to the phase of the signal.

Phase in audio can get complicated, but all you need to know for now is that it means very small differences in the timing of a signal.

Changes in phase aren’t really a big deal for single tracks.

But differences in timing between two related signals can create destructive interference that causes your tracks to compete with each other.

Any time you record something with more than one source at the same time—such as multiple microphones or a mic and a DI—phase issues can show up.

The problem can even occur between samples and instruments in layered kicks and basses.

Here’s where EQ comes in. When you add EQ to only one of a pair of related tracks, you risk creating destructive interference—even if the tracks were perfectly in phase before.

That’s because the EQ’s filter introduces phase shift.

Here’s an example. I have two identical sine wave tones on two different tracks.

https://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Body_Two-Identical-Sine-Waves.mp4

Without EQ, listening to both at once makes the sine wave sound louder.

https://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Body_Play-Them-Together.mp4

But invert the phase of one sine wave 180 degrees and they cancel out perfectly.

https://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Body_They-Cancel-Completely.mp4

The signal is gone. The two tracks are exactly the same so the result is 100% destructive interference!

But adding a filter changes the outcome. With a high pass filter inserted, inverting the phase of one track no longer cancels the sound out completely—even when the filter’s cutoff frequency is much lower than the sine wave’s fundamental.

https://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Body_Filter-Creates-Interference.mp4

The difference between the two inverted tracks is what will be lost to destructive interference when the two signals combine.

The difference between the two inverted tracks is what will be lost to destructive interference when the two signals combine.

Now imagine that was a pair of key tracks in your mix!

Anytime you EQ two related tracks differently you risk introducing destructive interference from phase shift.

The best way to avoid it? EQ related tracks on a bus. Or better yet, skip the EQ entirely. Get your sounds as close to their finished state as you can right from the start.

Nonlinearities and saturation

My next unexpected side effect happens in plugins that claim to give you the warmth and saturation of vintage gear.

We’d all love to own the classic gear that was used on legendary albums, but analog hardware offers more than just vintage vibe.

Analog circuits introduce their own quirks that are extremely difficult to recreate with digital plugins.

I’m talking about nonlinearities. Nonlinearities are the unpredictable harmonics that saturation and distortion create in a signal.

Most plugins designed to give you a warm, vintage sound use some kind of saturation to create their effect.

Most plugins designed to give you a warm, vintage sound use some kind of saturation to create their effect.

Plugin designers understand nonlinearities, but they lead to a specific problem in digital audio. Here’s why.

Saturation creates additional harmonic partials in a sound. These are the overtones that help your brain tell the difference between two different musical timbres.

But adding partials using saturation creates harmonics all over the frequency spectrum.

In fact, some are so high up that they can’t even be represented properly in a digital file. These ultra high frequencies create errors that translate into negative effects for your mix.



This is just another of the invisible consequences that comes from adding lots of processing.

Modern plugins use impressive tech to get around these limitations most of the time, but the best way to avoid them is to use saturation only at the right times.

If you simply decide that analog = good, you’ll end up piling on plugin after plugin and compounding the effects of this problem.

How to make it better

These problems might make it seem like there’s no way to win against the drawbacks of applying effects.

But we obviously need to use them for basic mixing tasks like reducing dynamic range and adjusting frequency balance.

To fix it you need to weigh the control that your processors give over the signal against any negative effects they might introduce.

That’s what pro engineers mean when they give advice like “less is more” and “get it right at the source”

The less processing you can do the better. And getting it right at the source rings true no matter what genre of music you make.

Your best bet is to learn to think about the mix before you even start. That way you can use your tools to your advantage, instead of fighting against them.

The post Hard Truths: Every Plugin Has a Downside appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/hard-truths-plugins-downside/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/614748969657073664

[alanajacksontx]

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

[kellykperez]

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

[evaaguilaus]

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/

[bambiguertinus]

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/

[srasamua]

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/

[oscarkruegerus]

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/

[sheilalmartinia]

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/

[onlinemarketingcourses]

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.

Related reading

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As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Looking for how to automate PPC in 2019? Here are the essential do’s and don’ts of bid automation and content creation in Google Ads.

A new SEMrush study analyzed more than 4,500 PPC job listings around the world. Here were the top skills for PPC, paid search, and SEM for 2019.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

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[jessicakmatt]

The 15 Best EQ Plugins to Shape Your Mix

The 15 Best EQ Plugins to Shape Your Mix: via LANDR Blog

EQ is one of the most basic—and important—tools you have as an audio engineer.

But there are so many different EQs out there, how do you know which ones are for you?

You might be thinking your DAW’s channel EQ is perfectly fine. But not all EQs are the same. There’s more types than you might think.

This article will teach you about the common styles of EQ and how to use them to shape the perfect sound.

Analog EQ

Early EQs were all analog. Some of the earliest equalizer designs are still around today.

Engineers covet these analog beauties for the musically pleasing way they shape sounds. The musical qualities are the result of the unique circuit design of each unit.

Certain EQs became so sought after that plugin designers developed software to emulate them as closely as possible in the digital domain—leading to a mind-boggling ocean of plugin choices.

So what are the different styles of analog EQ? How do they work? What are they used for and where do they work best?

There’s no hard and fast rules when it comes to choosing an EQ. But there are some helpful guidelines that will help you get started with the classic designs.

Pultec-style EQ

The Pultec EQP-1A is the most sought after EQ ever. Well-preserved original units can sell for over $10,000.

The Pultec EQP-1A is the most sought after EQ ever.

Fortunately for us, the EQP-1A has a long history of software emulation. Today’s Pultec-style plugins can sound good—if you know how to use them.

Pultec-style EQ can work wonders to subtly boost top end or extend lows. It can even make broad EQ enhancements without sacrificing any of the original vibe of the sound.

Since the EQP-1A hails from the earliest era of equalizers, it’s control scheme is a little less intuitive than modern designs.

The bandwidth control affects both the high and low band, but low band works differently from the high band.

For the low band, the boost and attenuate knobs are both linked to one of four frequency options. This quirk allows you to both boost and cut at the selected frequency.

The overlapping filters create a steep bump that’s fantastic for boosting the fundamental frequencies of low end instruments.

The high band has separate frequency options for boosting and cutting with overlaps at 5 and 10 kHz.

These controls are interactive and can result in some unique equalization curves.

Best Pultec EQ VSTs

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Free Plugin: Ignite Amps PTeq-X

Ignite Amps PTeq-X is a fantastic (and free) way to get started with Pultec-style EQ. It works just like the original so you can get a sense for creating those quirky overlapping curves.

Cheap Plugin: Waves PuigTec EQP-1A

The Waves PuigTec EQP-1A is a well-emulated, workhorse Pultec EQ. It’s very affordable if you can catch it on sale.

Pro Plugin: UAD Pultec EQP-1A

The UAD Pultec EQP-1A is the industry standard software Pultec. UAD spared no expense in creating the perfect Pultec for your DAW.

SSL Channel EQ

SSL console strips did a lot to inform our idea of what a modern EQ is.

SSL console strips did a lot to inform our idea of what a modern EQ is.

Classic features we’re familiar with today like integrated high/low-pass filters and variable Q were popularized by these consoles.

The SSL consoles are famous for their incredibly powerful filters.

The sharp high/low-pass filters, precise frequency ranges and extremely narrow Q options make this a EQ a first choice for surgical suturing and dramatic tonal changes. Their character is precise but aggressive.

Best SSL EQ VSTs

Free Plugin: Smacklabs Logic Channel

Smacklabs Logic Channel is a good entry-level SSL EQ. This free plugin models the entire SSL channel strip, so you can try out the classic SSL-style compressor and gate/expander while you’re at it.

Cheap Plugin: Slate FG-S

The Slate FG-S comes bundled with their very affordable VMR channel strip collection. The FG-S packs all the features and sound of the aggressive, surgical SSL channel EQ.

Pro Plugin: SSL Native Channel Strip

SSL recently jumped into the software game with their own line of plugins—including an in-house version of their classic console channel strip. Why not go straight to the source?

API-style EQ

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Experienced engineers often refer to API as the “American” sound in contrast to the “British” Neve tone.

They’re two sides of the same classic console coin.

If you’re a fan of music from the 60’s and 70’s, there’s a good chance some of your favourite records were recorded one of these desks.

The classic API EQ comes in a three band (550a) or four-band (550b) flavour.

The bands don’t have individual Q controls, but the EQ is designed so that the Q becomes progressively sharper as you apply more extreme cuts or boosts.

It’s intuitive and keeps you from worrying too much about the Q setting.

API-style EQ splits the difference between surgical and sculpting. Mild settings can be very transparent, while extreme cuts or boosts can be dramatic and vibey.

Best API EQ VSTs

Free Plugin: Bee-Happy 550

Bee-Happy 500 is a free API-style plugin for those looking to start with classic 70’s console EQ.

Cheap Plugin: Sly-Fi Axis

Sly-Fi Axis is part of the UBK family of products that includes the innovative Kush Audio hardware and software. This EQ is an API on steroids that’s meant to exaggerate the analog colouration of the original.

Pro Plugin: Waves 550a & 550b

Waves 550a and 550b are fantastic native emulations of the API EQ. These are great-sounding and versatile plugins to get the API sound on your tracks.

Neve-style EQ

Neve consoles are the world’s most prized vintage recording equipment.

From the early sixties until the mid-eighties, Neve Electronics produced consoles legendary for their warm, musical sound.

The preamp section of the Neve console strip often gets the most attention, but the EQ is a big part of the Neve sound.

Neve EQs are another great option for broad, smooth cuts and boosts with lots of character.

Neve EQs are another great option for broad, smooth cuts and boosts with lots of character.

There are several different flavours of Neve EQ from the various revisions of the console, but they mostly share the same architecture with a high-pass filter, two or three parametric mid bands and one fixed high band.

The fixed 12 kHz high band found on the Neve 1073 EQ is famous for its ability to add air to vocals, drum rooms and overheads.

Best Neve EQ VSTs

Free Plugin: Smacklabs SL84 Console EQ

Smacklabs SL84 Console EQ will give you a taste of the Neve EQ sound for free. It’s accurately modelled using IR technology.

Cheap Plugin: Sonimus Burnley 73

Sonimus Burnley 73 is super economical way to get the sound of a 1073 on to your tracks.

Pro Plugin: UAD Neve 1073

The UAD Neve 1073 is a tremendously accurate emulation of the classic 1073 preamp and EQ. It’s incredibly smooth and musical with tone that screams Neve.

Digital EQ

We all drool over the analog EQ beauties. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t extremely useful and creative tools that don’t have anything in common with the classics.

Digital EQ is essential for any DAW. It’s the most precise tool in your EQ tool box.

Reach for digital EQ when you want to make changes without colouring your sound at all. In the right hands, digital EQ can be powerful, flexible and utterly undetectable.

Reach for digital EQ when you want to make changes without colouring your sound at all.

It’s a first choice for “problem solving” duties like notching out room resonances.

Best Digital EQ VSTs

Free Plugin: Your built-in DAW EQ

Most DAWs come bundled with a capable digital EQ. We’re talking about stock DAW plugins like Ableton EQ Eight, Logic Channel EQ, and Avid EQIII. These are all effective entry points into digital EQ.

Cheap Plugin: Voxengo PrimeEQ

Voxengo PrimeEQ is a robust, well-designed digital EQ from a respected company. Look no further if you’re after a nice workhorse digital EQ.

Pro Plugin: Fabfilter ProQ 2

Fabfilter ProQ 2 is the most technologically advanced EQ on this list. The raw power of this EQ is staggering—it’s a singular feat of DSP engineering. Listing all its incredibly powerful features would take far too long, let’s just say this a top-tier professional EQ!

Great Equalizer

There’s a whole world of EQ out there.

It’s such a fundamental tool that engineers will always have strong opinions about it. And that means that designers will always be creating new and better versions.

Wading through that water is daunting and exciting at the same time.

But now that you know a little bit about the types of EQ, go head try some of the plugins on this list. You’ll find out which EQ works best for you!

The post The 15 Best EQ Plugins to Shape Your Mix appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/best-eq-plugins/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/177459261554