Small Businesses are Making the Most of Mobile Marketing
Did you know 69% of small businesses consider mobile marketing to be crucial to their growth in the next five years? The problem is, a majority of them have yet to significantly employ mobile marketing tactics, according to a study of 500 U.S. small business owners by the online marketing firm Web.com Group Inc.
When it comes to small businesses and the motivation to hope from the desktop experience to a mobile friendly version of a digital marketing plan, there are many different motivations.
The top three are:
At 38% to provide better service to existing customers
36% would like to attract more local customers
While 34 % believe they will be able to gain a competitive advantage
A solid mobile shopping experience to your smartphone and tablet customers will make a huge difference at the end of the day. If you can present a mobile site or even an app (GASP!) giving clear calls to action that are easy to search you will find your mobile conversions and profits on the rise.
The #2 reason for mobile marketing motivations is to attract more local customers, what better way to this than to leverage your existing customers and allow them to share their experiences across the social ecosystem.
What are you doing with your mobile marketing? Are you leveraging your in-store experience? Do you let shoppers use a mobile wallet?
Having a great mobile experience is really simple, offer up engaging channel specific content, make it easy to buy what you want and finally, make it easy to share their outstand experience with their friends, followers and circles. If you can follow these simple steps you will be able to, not only capatilze on the exploding mobile channel, but you will set your eCommerce (or mCommerce since we are talking mobile) mobile experience up as an indispensable tool for your customers.
Custom reporting is one of my all time favorite tools with in the analytics package and I use it for all kinds of different reports.
Since I’m more of an AdWords junkie and I’m a huge believer in ROI and then being able to point to what is and what isn’t working I use this report below.
This is how it’s built if you just want to build it by hand. If you’re not wildly familiar with custom reports you might want to use my shared URL and then start learning how they work and tweaking them for your needs.
Just copy and paste this into a browser and if you’re signed into analytics it will ask for a profile or populate into your account automatically.
This is what your output will look like if you run it like my example:
All the pertinent information has been deleted to protect the innocent, but you can see from this that you would get all of your basic AdWords data plus an ecommerce conversion rate and ROI.
The graph can be altered to display several different metrics or metrics as they compare to each other.
The other thing I like to do is run the dates to compare to the previous time period and compare so you can show people where it’s been and where you’re going.
Under the campaigns within the list you can click on the campaign and it will show your ad groups and of course when you click on ad groups they will show your keywords with all the same data off to the right.
If you’re not someone who uses custom reports this is a great start, don’t be afraid to save one and tweak it to see different things after all it’s the only way you’ll get comfortable with what data can be found here and how to get it in a moment’s notice.
As an agency that does Magento development and online marketing for a variety of sites, Google’s new Tag Manager is going to be quite the blessing.
We understand the problems getting IT time and resources to get things like tag installs completed. Sometimes it can take weeks for the simplest tag.
Now you can use Google’s new Tag Manager as the solution to getting tags installed in a more timely manner and from there you can handle the rest.
As of late last week we did just that on our own site to test out Google Tag Manager to see how it works, all we’ve added so far is the analytics tag and so far it is working as intended.
This should also make the IT guys a tad more comfortable, because there is version control built in Tag Manager, and if by chance something blows up it’s as easy as going back to the last version.
Google says, “the only tags that won’t work are synchronously loading tags or tags with the “document.write ()” code.
The best part about Google is they have the easy mode and they have many variables for more advances users to fire tags in different orders, the ability to work with dynamic pages like one page checkout processes to track events and a whole lot more.
Here are a few resources to make your life a little simpler.
For you WordPress users here’s the plug-in we’ve used for Tag Manager
As stated earlier we do a lot of custom Magento work, but haven’t installed it on any Magento sites just yet, however here’s a couple plug-ins we found to help.
We haven’t tested either one of these at this point, but have a client that is interested in using the new Tag manager.
You can go here and sign up to get started using Tag Manager today! Make sure you check out the developers guide for advanced options before getting started.
Everyone wants to lower their cost-per-click while raising click-through rate. By implementing these fixes to the 10 most common AdWords mistakes, you will position your campaigns to have a positive impact on your ROI. Here is an overview of common AdWords blunders we typically see when taking on a new account. First, we’ll peer into some campaign settings:
1. You should never mix search with the display.
Keep your mobile searches separate from your desktop/laptop searches.
3. Separate your mobile and tablets. (see above)
4. Google Search Network versus Google Partner sites – together or separate? I tend not to separate them at first, but since performance is easy to monitor and segregate, you need to monitor closely in case your partner efforts fall off.
5. Locations and Languages. As a rule, I will always separate Canada from the USA. At the very least, don’t assume that an ad should perform equally well in the US and Canada. Try a less forceful approach with our friends to the north.
6. Take the time to add site links. It will assist your click-through rate in a positive manner.
7. Set your clicks to manual bidding to start.
8. Ad rotation is a biggie. First and foremost – run multiple ads and test constantly. So make sure you set your ads to rotate evenly. Now as we dig into the campaign a bit here’s the biggest pitfall you can avoid – it’s number nine on our list.
9. Too many keywords per ad group – I usually run one keyword per group and max out at four. Keep your ad groups slim and relevant to your ads – you’ll get a better click-through rate which will result in a better quality score … which lowers your cost-per-click!
10. If you’re not running negative keywords you’re wasting money.
Looking for someone to manage your campaign? Our Google Certified AdWords Consultants can provide you with any additional details as well as a proposal. Just fill out the form below.
Are you utilizing negative keywords in your Pay Per Click campaigns? If not, you should be. Negative keywords effectively tell Google to exclude your ad group/ad campaign from users searching for that particular word or phrase.
Why would you want to utilize negative keywords and not be found? If you offer a premium product, you don’t want to be found when people use the terms “cheap,” “inexpensive,” or “free.” If you sell jewelry made of silver and copper, you don’t want to be found when people search for “gold” or “diamond.” These incorrectly targeted clicks can cost a lot of money and lead to very low conversion rates, not to mention dissatisfied users.
We have included an example of negative keyword implementation. For this example, you sell RV parts in a brick and mortar location, and sell your products through your site only.
1. To begin, from the ad group level, select a keyword or keywords using the boxes next to the keyword you want to see search terms for.
2. Click the Keyword Details button and choose “selected” in the drop down.
You will see a list of search queries like this:
3. From here, you can decide what works and what doesn’t. The term “eBay motors parts …” is the obvious choice. You don’t sell parts on eBay, and if someone finds you using that search term, they’ll cost you money by clicking on your ad and will leave your site once as it is irrelevant to them.
4. Select this keyword and add it as a negative to your ad group or campaign. You may even go back and add eBay motors as well.
5. Once you click the button to add the term as a negative keyword, you’ll see this box:
6. From here, you can edit the keyword and add it to the campaign level or the ad group level. In this case, we are going to add the “eBay” part and set it to the campaign level, as we do not do business on eBay.
Congratulations! Now your ads will no longer be shown for a keyword that is irrelevant to your business, saving you money on wasted clicks, improving your click through rate (CTR) and user experience.
Do you have more questions about using negative keywords in your PPC campaign? Then contact ususing our form or call us today at 513.469.7042 from 8 AM to 6 PM ESTfor a free consultation.
Google Adwords has been in our lives for more than 10 years; I’m sure some of you have pay-per-click accounts that have grown and grown and grown… you get it. You have an Adwords account full of paused campaigns, ineffective keywords, expired offers and links to pages that haven’t existed in years. Still, more and more business owners are buying into the idea that paid search marketing is a surefire way to drive traffic to a website and to increase Return on Investment (ROI). Their confidence shows in their spending. According to eMarketer.com, next year’s spending predictions include a $7 billion increase in online ad spending.
What is an advertiser to do in this increasingly competitive space?
Do you have old test ads still running?
Testing is vital to keeping your Adwords Account and PPC campaigns running at optimal levels. Are you clearing out the under-performing test ads? Setting up a test is easy enough and as you monitor your conversions and which ads are working vs. non-performing ads you should be going through your account and deleting those loser ads.
This is important; just because you have a winning ad does not mean Google will stop serving up the loser ad a small percent of the time. By calling out the winning ad, then deleting the loser ad, your campaign will continue to run at an optimal level until it is time to test again.
Are all of your offers up-to-date?
If you are offering money off or cash back in a search ad, you will need to make sure those ads come down in a timely manner. The last thing you want is to have a potential customer click on an expired “50% off” search ad only to come to a landing page offering only 20%.
This is important for multiple reasons. First, you lose a lot of trust when a potential buyer’s expectations are not met. If you are not meeting customer expectations and building trust, what are the chances they will click on your next search ad (not to mention display)? All of this broken trust will end up causing your conversion rates to drop, since site visitors are not finding what they want or expect. By planning out when your offers will come down (with an exact date) you will be able to stay on top of your pricing and visitor expectations.
What do you mean: “That page does not exist”?
Websites have to be refreshed from time to time. You create new pages, make conversion funnels easier to flow thru and even take away services or products you no longer offer. When it comes to major changes to your site, you have 301 redirects to help save you and send traffic to the new parts of your site. But some of those pesky links are easy to miss and instead of sending visitors to a great page full of converting content, they get an error.
This is important to keep an eye on. If, after a redesign or major site change you notice your 404 error pages beginning to creep up, you will want to create redirects to send the broken links back to your homepage or the new appropriate page. When setting up new pages on your site and taking down old pages it is essential to go back into AdWords and check how many keywords are going to dead pages and decide if you want them redirected to your homepage, updated for a new landing page or killed all together. Another easy way to keep visitors from feeling left out when getting an error page is to create a custom branded 404 error page to help soften the blow of a broken link.
I keep seeing the same keywords over and over and over…
When your large Adwords account grows with ad groups and campaigns, you will notice there are times where the same keywords will appear again and again. The big problem you run into here is stat pollution, where you have duplicate queries going to different pages and searchers are seeing ads you didn’t intend and some queries just don’t show up at all anymore.
Duplicate keywords “muddy the waters” of your highly optimized PPC campaign and keep you from realizing the full ROI of your program. By looking at your query data and adding the ad groups into a pivot table, you will be able to see which keywords are duplicated most often and in how many ad groups.
Keeping your PPC in fighting shape will help keep your conversions and click-throughs humming along. All it takes is a little attention to the setup of your accounts, monitoring your keywords and ultimately having best practices in place for adding and removing ads, keywords and groups. If that is too much you can always take that monster account into “dry dock” and overhaul the whole thing.
Who is your competition? This might seem like a basic question, but it is easy to miss a competitor in any given situation. After all, every business has several sets of competitors; if you have multiple product lines, each line has its own group vying for dollars. Targeting competitors is as important – and as difficult – as targeting customers.
Your own particular competitive landscape depends partially on your structure. For brick and mortar retailers, known rivals could poach an uncomfortable portion of business locally or regionally, but they may only nibble at the margins of your potential share of online traffic. Retailers engaging purely online may seem to occupy a simpler space, but it’s important to recognize the possibly subtle differences among those businesses competing for your preferred keywords and those who compete in your specific product space. In other words, there might be a gap separating the results of a competitive keyword analysis and actual consumer purchase behavior.
Beware Assumptions
Simply emulating one aspect of a competitor’s online tactic set could easily backfire. Company X might be seen as the most successful player on the block, but how do you know they haven’t been declining lately because of poorly-chosen keywords or ad purchases? Further, are you sure you are fighting over the same group of customers?
As with most business metrics, competitive analysis must be conducted in a wide-perspective environment if it is to lead to better insights – which customers you are missing today and how you can better reach them tomorrow. It is tempting to focus on a superficial sampling of competition, especially if the planned follow-up strategy is superficial. What are you going to do with the information you gather? If you are engaging an eCommerce or internet design business, make sure they can capably answer these strategic marketing questions. It is much easier to add effective tactical approaches later if the platform was strategically chosen, designed and assembled from the start.
When is the best time to start thinking about marketing your new eCommerce website? Obviously, you can’t post a blog or send a link to the new site if it hasn’t been built yet, but don’t wait – each aspect of your site build-out has marketing implications whether or not you plan for them!
Especially in the early stages of project planning, it plays to keep one eye focused on how you will eventually promote visits to your site. Your ideal customer’s purchase behavior and other demographics might lean variously toward social media, email, mobile, traditional advertising, couponing or any number of tactics and strategies. These choices will, in turn, point to the proper platform for your site and the kind of content you will offer.
When working with your developer, the temptation is to build the site to accommodate a graphic design or existing content. Instead, the most successful sites are built with marketing tools in mind: Will you want to offer special pricing to certain groups of customers? Do you have an existing loyalty program you are administering manually today? Is your product line growing and can the search engines make sense of how the products are grouped?
Taking these potentially complex considerations into account up front ensures that your site will perform to your needs, rather than having to adapt your operations to the limitations of your website. As a bonus, it’s always cheaper to select and build the features you need up front, instead of trying to write code and shoehorn them into place at a later date!
Want to break out of your little box and gain traffic from all points to your website, then Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important sources of your success. It is all an intricate dance that developers play to attain higher rankings on the major Search Engines. Almost a decade ago a good header title, description, meta tags, and general key words would have been sufficient to rank your site in the first page results. As the internet has grown and matured, more “calculus” is needed. Keywords are now Key “Phrases” and even placing specific phrases within your site may not do the trick anymore due to intense competition as well as the advanced algorithms, created to go against suspected spam sites that tend to crop up.
Achieving a high-status ranking isn’t impossible though if it is important to your organization and you are willing and patient to play the game correctly. Here are some important bullets for you to consider:
Select the Correct Keywords and Phrases; Use Strategically. View your website from your customer’s point of view. If you were looking for a specific widget that your company sells online- if you were on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc… what word or phrase would you look up to find it? Google has some “free” tools in their arsenal that you can use to assist in gaining analytics to determine what words people are using to help. Pages that contain these widgets should have those words and phrases tucked into the background code of the site, but also contained strategically within the descriptions on the page. If your company has a blog (and you should) articles should be written containing those keywords (strategically)- but not just for search engine crawlers, they should be relevant and useful to the reader.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is the fastest and most reliable way to drive targeted traffic to your website- thereby attracting people who are already searching for your product or service. A Key Phrase Analysis can be used to create hard hitting PPC ads and landing page.
Analytics: SEO strategies cannot be launched then abandoned to “do their thing.” That’s like throwing your laundry in the washer and assuming that the intended outcome will just happen without keeping the process moving. Continued monitoring and analization of your online marketing strategy is essential to their viability and success. A good source available to anyone (with a Google account) is Google Analytics.
Retargeting or Behavioral Targeting isn’t just for the “big data” players. Ever notice that after you have searched through the Disney Resorts website dreaming about a family vacation (that is sure to cost in the thousands…)- that after you go on with your day and for many days into the future- Disney Resorts ads seem to keep appearing in the banner ads on your USA Today site viewing, Fox News, CNN, etc… Same goes for your PPC ad. You can set up a retargeting strategy that will “remind” lurkers that have left your site about the items they may have left in your virtual shopping cart and will encourage them to return.
Business often embrace the technical activity of building their site, but will then shy away from performing the critical exercise of Search Engine Marketing. This is an important step in assuring that when John or Jane Doe go to Google (or other) and type in the “widget” they are looking for- your online store is of the first options delivered to their search.
Social Networking Strategy Counts: Failure to understand can be catastrophic.
Many small businesses and retailers have watched the social networking firestorm build around them, and in the midst of trying to keep up decide that they need to jump on the fast-moving train- that left the station long ago. Most of the decisions are brought on without much of a thought to a social networking strategy and how it can build the business, and in most cases the company message is turned over to someone younger, and in some cases inexperienced- because “certainly that age group understands how this works”- after all, they live on it, right?
What inexperience causes:
“Because it’s there, we need it!”
Facebook is the hot medium, we need to have a page: CHECK!
Everyone Tweets, we need that: CHECK!
Need to post videos, YouTube: CHECK!
People need to read my thoughts, Blog: CHECK!
Google+ is the “up-and-comer”, we need that: CHECK!
What’s “Reddit”? Don’t care, we need it: CHECK!
Etc…
So there, we have a main site, blog, 50-social pages, a robust dashboard, and a part-time person managing it all with information running 24/7. We have created the ‘perfect’ social networking platform!… for a schizophrenic consumer.
A social networking strategy for businesses is intended to get your company’s message out in a clearly defined strategic coherence. A few years ago, I subscribed to the above thought when working for a different company, we had them all including a Buzz page (remember that one). After spending hours each day trying to manage all of the messages and seeing very little return I began to evaluate. In addition, seminars attended listening to “so-called” social networking strategy experts (who were really just one-week ahead of the curve than I was) wasn’t that helpful. Everything but the Facebook and Twitter page was scrapped, including the blog, to go back to square one and define what this strategy should look like and what fruit we wanted the platform(s) to bear- then slowly, other components were added back.
In the online retail world, social networking strategy can be the coal mine canary that the company must use to gain internet-wide attention. Every site your company participates in contributes important search engine information to build your SEO points. If your company sells electronic widgets and you want people looking for electronic widgets on Google to find your widget store- the company Facebook page needs to post updates regarding those widgets, the company needs to tweet relevant information about the widgets, blog entries should give your reviews of the widgets. And so on… Posting article links for unrelated services to your pages just so you have recent activity doesn’t do anything to promote your product and confuse “followers” of what your business is.
As an agency that does Magento development and online marketing for a variety of sites, Google’s new Tag Manager is going to be quite the blessing.
Google Adwords has been in our lives for more than 10 years; I’m sure some of you have pay-per-click accounts that have grown and grown and grown… you get it. You have an Adwords account full of paused campaigns, ineffective keywords, expired offers and links to pages that haven’t existed in years. Still, more and more business owners are buying into the idea that paid search marketing is a surefire way to drive traffic to a website and to increase Return on Investment (ROI). Their confidence shows in their spending. According to eMarketer.com, next year’s spending predictions include a $7 billion increase in online ad spending.
