Archives for March 2017
Google AdWords Series: Ad Positions and Ad Copy Quality
Today in our fifth and final installment of our series about the most common Google AdWords mistakes and how to avoid and/or resolve them, we focus on a pair of issues that surprisingly get overlooked quite often: not testing optimal ad positions, and writing low-quality copy for your AdWords advertisements.
Let’s take a closer look.
The mistake: failing to test the optimal position for your advertisements
It might surprise you to learn that being in the top one or two spots in ad positions (as listed on search results pages) will not necessarily give you the best results.
If your main goal is to increase your brand image and reach, then being in the top couple spots to get the best visibility is absolutely a goal you should have. However, there are some cases in which it might actually help your business even more to rank in the third or fourth position.
The general principle here is that only people who truly care about finding the best possible result will click your ad and go to your site. After all, they will have to look over to the side of their screen, then go through several other results (if you rank in spots three to give).
If you do not test these ad positions appropriately, you can never be sure about whether you are actually in the position that works best for your business. Sometimes the first couple spots work great, but you might get a better return on your investment in positions three through five. You may be getting fewer clicks, but those clicks will be higher quality, meaning you are spending less for better leads.
We strongly recommend you raise or lower your cost per click bid every now and then, just to see what happens. Track your results whenever you do this. If you manage to get good results while paying a lower amount, then there’s really no need for you to worry more about how your ad ranks in the listings.
The mistake: not focusing on writing high-quality ad copy
Every digital marketer has heard the mantra “content is king.” Most of the time, this is referring to the kinds of long-form content we put on our websites or blogs, or the kinds of content we publish on social media. However, you need to be focused on creating outstanding copy for your AdWords ads as well. After all, your offer should be enticing enough to convince people to click and see what you have to offer.
Keep in mind that you have very limited space, so every word counts. You can use ad extensions to increase the amount of space you have to work with, but even then, there is a limited amount of space, and you have a very limited amount of time to connect with people who might be reading your content before they move on to something else.
You should start by having a compelling headline. This headline should be simple and clear, giving users a good idea of exactly what you can offer them.
For example: let’s say your business sells clothes, and you have a sale on jeans for $20 a pair. You could have a headline that looks something like this: “$20 for Jeans? Yes! | YourCompany.com.”
The headline highlights the deal you have going on, is extremely simple and clear, and instantly attracts the attention of the reader.
Then, in the content of the advertisement, don’t just repeat the offering. Instead, insert a call to action, something like “Take a look at which great styles you can get for this low price.” Again, it doesn’t have to be anything extremely creative—it should be brief, yet effective.
Have you ever seen any AdWords mistakes we have not covered in this series? Contact us and let us know, we’d be interested in hearing how you have overcome your business’s AdWords dilemmas!
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
Google AdWords Series: Know Your Competition and Properly Direct Your Customers
In this part of our Google AdWords series, we continue looking at some of the most common and problematic mistakes people make when using AdWords. Too many entrepreneurs do not understand what they are doing wrong when it comes to their AdWords usage, and it’s our goal to help them get the most possible out of their AdWords investment.
Here are the two mistakes we are focusing on this week.
The mistake: not checking out the competition for your ads
You should always have at least a general level of awareness about the ads your competitors are using in their AdWords campaigns. It’s important to know who you’re competing against so that you can better understand how you need to configure your AdWords to be able to at least keep up with the competition.
First, go and check out your competition’s landing pages to see what they look like, comparing the layout and content of their landing page with the keywords they’re targeting on AdWords. If nothing else, it’s interesting to see the strategies other major players in your field are using to get attention to their website.
You should try to look at your competitors’ ads from the point of view of a customer, determining which ad you’d be most likely to click on. After you’ve clicked through, compare their landing pages to yours. Some questions to ask as you analyze your competitors’ sites:
- Which pages are the most visually appealing and/or informative?
- Which do you think provides the best customer experience?
- What can I learn about my own site as a result of analyzing the competitor’s? Do I need a better design or look, better security, better testimonials, more authority or anything else?
Looking at your competitor's’ ad copy can help you figure out how you can improve in your own content marketing and ad buying. Once you’ve applied some changes to your site, test out that ad copy and see what kinds of results you get. You should be constantly testing your ads until you see improvements in your conversion rates.
The mistake: failing to direct visitors to the correct product or service page
One of the biggest and most potentially damaging mistakes that small business owners make with AdWords is not pointing their customers to the correct product, service or category page. This is hugely problematic for e-commerce businesses — the usual scenario is that the ad directs users to the company’s homepage, rather than the related product or service page.
You could have the most intuitive, well-designed website in the world, but no matter what, you’re wasting people’s time by directing them to your home page instead of taking them directly to the product page. When people click on an ad, it should take them directly to the page of the product or service featured on that ad.
So, for example, if you’re selling athletic apparel and supplies, you should create ad groups for certain sports, such as “football gear” or “soccer equipment.” Then, have your ads leading directly to pages for football gear or soccer equipment rather than the home page. This is significantly more convenient for your users; they searched for that specific term because they are interested in finding those items. The less they have to click around on your site to find their desired items, the better.
You can make these ad results as detailed as you want. Certain keywords could take users to an individual product page, or to a category of products. That’s up to your discretion as you configure your AdWords.
Stay tuned next week as we continue to discuss some of the most common and potentially damaging mistakes made by AdWords users.
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
Analytics and Data Mastery Certification from Viral Solutions and Digital Marketer
Want to learn how to make smarter business decisions? Then you’re going to need to learn how to better analyze your business analytics and digital data. Viral Solutions is pleased to provide Digital Marketer’s Analytics and Data Mastery Certification course, which teaches you exactly that.
According to Google, about 90 percent of websites have installed Google Analytics, yet only about 30 percent of people ever actually log in to their analytics dashboard!
The Analytics & Data Mastery class is an advanced, 7 module, 72 lesson online course. At the end of each module you will be asked to take a short quiz prior to moving on to the next module. Once you have completed the entire course, you can then sit for the final certification exam, and after passing this exam you will earn the “Certified Data & Analytics Specialist ” designation, complete with displayable badge and printable certificate (suitable for framing).
Of that 30 percent, a significant amount of people do not even know what they are looking at. They might be able to find statistics like “bounce rate,” but don’t actually know what the number means, or what they can do to resolve it.
As a Certified Data Analyst, you will be able to collect and analyze data and use it as a tool to answer some tough questions about your businesses, such as why your average order values drop, where you’d be best served by spending on advertising, why your email promos are working (or not), and which blog topics are most likely to create engagement.
Ultimately, without data analysis, you are going to be flying blind with your digital marketing, and will not have anywhere near the level of control over your digital marketing success you could otherwise have.
Here are a few of the things you’ll learn in this course:
- The same strategies used by Digital Marketer to collect and analyze data, then make smart decisions based on that information
- How to develop a full analytics dashboard to determine your company’s digital health
- How to calculate your customers’ lifetime value
- How you can avoid looking at misleading or unimportant data
- How and why to use and track the banner click percentage on each blog post
- How to stay in tune with your audience and gauge the effectiveness of your overall branding efforts
- How to measure the effectiveness of your offline marketing by using digital metrics
- How to track visitor recency
And a whole lot more.
For more information about how to begin this course, contact us today at Viral Solutions!
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
SMO Series: The Proper Use of the Hashtag
One of the primary goals of social media optimization (SMO) is creating greater visibility for your brand through your social media platforms. There are few better tools for doing this than hashtags, which are the focus of today’s fourth part of our SMO series.
At this point, hashtags have become an inescapable part of our popular culture. They appear on television commercials, in print advertisements and in our own personal social media posts. On social media, the hashtag has become the most popular and effective means of categorizing content, which makes it that much easier for you to get your content discovered—if you know what you’re doing.
Here are a few best practices to help your business achieve greater social media success with the use of hashtags.
Try to be as specific as you can
With the hundreds of millions of people using each of the most popular social media networks, you need to cut through the noise and get specific with your hashtags in a way that will allow you to reach out to your target audience. The more specific your hashtag, the more targeted that audience is, which means you’re more likely to get better engagement out of your posts.
If you do not already have a specific hashtag for your brand, you should come up with one or two that fit your brand image or the particular marketing campaign you have implemented.
Use unique hashtags for each social network you’re on
 Hashtags have the same fundamental purpose across all the major social media networks, but the way people use hashtags on each of those networks can vary quite a bit. On Instagram, for example, hashtags are more commonly used as a means of describing the content posted. On Twitter, however, the hashtags are used to categorize topics of conversation.
Therefore, before you begin developing unique hashtags for your business, make sure you have at least some familiarity with each social network you’re using and how people use hashtags on those networks. It’s not as easy as coming up with one branded hashtag and tacking it on to the end of everything you post.
Use some hashtags that are unbranded while staying relevant
 Just as how you shouldn’t strictly post social content that pushes your own brand, you shouldn’t exclusively use your own branded hashtags. If you notice trending hashtags that are at least somewhat relevant to your audience, feel free to post using those hashtags.
Avoid getting too long or clever
 Any branded hashtag you develop should be short and simple. This is especially important on Twitter, where there is a character limit for each post, but it is important across all networks. You want your hashtags to be easy to remember so people will use them in their own posts.
Additionally, hashtags that get too long or clever make it less likely that someone will search for your specific hashtag. This defeats the purpose of the hashtag, which exists to make it easier to find content, not harder.
Show some restraint with how many hashtags you use
 This is a particularly problematic trend on Instagram as of late, with many people loading their posts up with as many hashtags as they can fit in a single post (up to 30). DISCLOSURE: At times we like to have fun with our hashtags and not just use them for technical purposes. However, using too many hashtags in a post looks spammy and unprofessional. Even if it succeeds in bringing in more followers, they themselves will likely be spammers or people who are only interested in you following them back.
In general, using one, maybe two hashtags in a tweet is enough, while there is room for maybe a couple more in an Instagram post. But you don’t want to come anywhere near having as many hashtags as regular words in a post—that just looks bad.
Additionally, you should know what is and is not worthy of a hashtag. Not every tweet, comment or post is substantial enough to add a hashtag to put it out into the larger digital conversation.
Hashtags are an essential SMO tool that, when used correctly, can help you achieve significantly more attention for your brand. Spend some time developing a hashtag strategy you can use for your company to beef up your social media game.
Copyright Viral Solutions 2017
Marisa Fritzemeier
Angel of Innovative Artistry and Design for Viral Solutions LLC
Conversion Rate Optimization Mastery powered by Digital Marketer
As a business owner, becoming an expert in conversion rate optimization (CRO) will surely give you a leg up over the rest of your competition. Unfortunately, most business owners or marketers simply don’t understand what makes for CRO success.
When it comes to testing and optimizing pages and offers, many marketers either don’t test at all, only begin testing if they see low conversions, or only test what others have told them they’re “supposed” to test.
If you wish to create meaningful sales and lead increases, then you must be more proactive with your CRO, and that means implementing proven processes to tell you exactly what to test, and when.
As a Certified Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist, you are uniquely qualified to help brands convert their existing traffic into even more leads and sales.
The fact is, all businesses need to be able to optimize the traffic they’re getting to be able to generate more leads and sales. They need to establish reliable and repeatable processes to identify where they should focus their optimization efforts.
This is where Digital Marketer’s Conversion Rate Optimization Mastery course comes in. In the master class, you will learn:
- Which pages on your website you need to optimize immediately
- Which metrics help to increase your business’s bottom line
- The most important factors to prioritize in your CRO campaigns
- How to improve optimization with the help of case studies
- The most effective tools in your arsenal to help you collect your users’ data
- When and how you should schedule tests of your CRO actions
- How to create reports that show the findings of these tests
This Digital Marketer course was developed by business owners for business owners. These are people who have accomplished big things in the world of business and CRO, and can provide you with practical, fundamentally sound advice for significantly enhancing your conversion rates.
For more information about how you can begin this master class, contact us today at Viral Solutions.