When you search Google on the phrase “Integrating your CRM with Google Ads,” about 2.8 million results are offered. Obviously, this is a common integration issue. Having an integration checklist will help you plan your process before starting (which is the reason I wrote this blog). I hope my checklist will save you time, money and create ROI for you in the long run.

For the sake of giving examples, we’ll use Marketo as our representative Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), and explain how it connects to SalesForce (our CRM). These are not the only choices in the market, but they will serve to illustrate common opportunities and challenges.

Integration Checklist Questions

We list here a series of questions we will explore in the following sections. You might want to jot down answers to these questions first before we review each in detail.

1. Do you have a separate Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM)?
2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection/interface?
3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?
4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?
5. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?
6. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?
7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?
8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?
9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?
10. How many people will own this process?

Here are Additional Details on each Question and what they Imply

1. Do you have a separate MAP and CRM?

Some CRMs have great marketing automation built into their infrastructure and do not need the addition of a MAP. Often though, companies start with a MAP and eventually move to a full-blown CRM.

If you do not have an integrated MAP/CRM connection, budget additional time and resources to connect the two. This often can be a major hurdle in launching your campaigns. One of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing’s (BDOM) clients ran into this issue and an additional 6 weeks of development time was required to launch the campaigns.

2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection?

Both Marketo and SalesForce have invested time and money into creating these connections at the API level. Take advantage of this and use what’s there instead of trying to recreate the wheel.

Be sure to test the connection between the MAP and CRM before launch. In spite of having off-the-shelf solutions, BDOM has found allocating time and budget for running initial tests is key to long-term campaign and larger marketing initiative success.

3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?

Is it one way or two way? Being able to send sales data back to Google Ads will make a much more efficient campaign over time. BDOM has found that where this exists the integration process is easier, and we are able to see a much more detailed view of what’s happening from click to meeting to closed sale. Be sure to spend time familiarizing both your marketing team and sales team with what results say. Having your sales team understand results goes a long way towards getting them to take online leads seriously as they allocate limited time to what they view as the best prospects.

4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?

It will save you time and lots of effort if you bite the bullet and convert all your forms to the native version offered by your MAP. This is probably the biggest source of frustration and delay when going through this process.

One of our clients chose to have a hybrid approach with new forms being built in Marketo and older forms being “imported” into the system. While they were able to make this work, it required additional development time when a new campaign would target the marketing collateral associated with an older “imported” form.

Spend the time and effort up front to convert older forms to your MAP. It will allow your team to be more agile and effective for future campaigns.

5. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?

Make sure your SalesForce campaign fields match your Google Ads fields. Also, importing your cost data into SalesForce can make your ROI much clearer at a glance.

This comes back to the idea of managing your resources effectively. We all have limited budget to drive traffic to our site, whether from paid search or email outreach. Being able to understand which traffic is driving the best leads and how much those leads are costing your company will allow your team to make better decisions on which campaigns are performing best. It also cuts down on the number of “poor” leads your sales team needs to shepherd from marketing qualified to sales qualified.

Your sales team has limited time to devote to qualifying marketing leads and will begin discounting them over time if poor leads are being sent because they appear to be “affordable.”

6. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?

Keeping the naming convention consistent from the start will cut down on significant data issues. It’s easier to match them up at the outset of your integration process than going back to retrofit the data later.

One key field that needs to be included in SalesForce is the “gclid” field. This is the container that Google Ads uses to transmit all the campaign, ad group, ad, search term, targeting and cost info into a nice little package that SalesForce can decode.

7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?

The more touches needed, the more you need to make sure you’re getting a clean, two-way data stream between Google Ads and your MAP/CRM.

Our team spent a lot of time and effort ensuring we are able to follow the lead stream with our clients to understand what is working. Having good, two-way communication between the eventual sale and the click that drove it is key. This can be the area in which a well-connected MAP/CRM solution pays for itself, giving the marketing team the data they need to focus on the best source of high-quality leads for the sales team.

8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?

This is known as shifting a lead from an MQL (marketing qualified lead) to a SQL (sales qualified lead).

BDOM will sit down with our client’s marketing and sales teams at the beginning of any new engagement and ask how they qualify the lead, what makes for a good SQL vs. an MQL and what history the two sides have. This will often result in a better understanding on both sides and better long term buy-in to a process that may not be turnkey.

9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?

Be sure that these are used to score the lead and it transmits to your CRM when the lead is transferred.

This again is a key step for getting sales and marketing on the same page in understanding the process and developing trust with the quality of the leads as they go through the pipeline.

10. How many people will own this process?

Is it just one person or are you splitting the work among different people and teams? Getting the multiple parties involved at the outset to discuss goals and possible issues is vital to having a successful process. Be aware that different team members will have different goals for the integration. Some may not want to do the work required and will need to be convinced of the final result’s value.

The ins and outs of the process will be very dependent on planning details before any steps are taken. Like any project, a road map with clear responsibilities will make your integration much more successful.

Additional links that can help you get started.

Link Salesforce and Google Ads accounts
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7538740

Import conversions from Salesforce
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6299296#setup_steps

Google Ads Integration Questions? | Marketo Marketing Nation
https://nation.marketo.com/thread/44948-google-adwords-workings

Google Ads Integration: Optimize Ads Using Marketo Offline Conversion Data
https://www.marketo.com/cheat-sheets/google-adwords-integration-optimize-ads-using-marketo-offline-conversion-data/

Do you need assistance integrating your Marketing Automation Platform and CRM with Google Ads? We can help. Request a free consultation here.

For digital marketing case studies, go here.

By John Thyfault
Vice President of Search and Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post 10 Steps to Integrate Marketing Automation Platforms and CRMs with Google Ads appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

A Broad Match Modifier is a variation on the traditional Broad Match for your keyword matching options. They can drive an improved reach and ROI. We’ll illustrate in a case study for a community bank client later in this blog. First, some basics on how the Broad Match Modifier works.

The Broad Match Modifier as Your Ultimate Reach: How it Works

When setting up your keyword match types, Broad Match gives you the most reach and variability in the searches your ad can appear on. In addition, the keyword’s cost-per-click (CPC) tends to be lower than using phrase or exact match. For example, if you have set up the keyword “men’s shoes” as a broad match, your ad can appear whenever Google Ads thinks it’s relevant. The ad could be triggered by searches like “shoes for men,” “men’s tennis shoes,” “dress shoes for men” or “loafers for guys.” It can appear on any synonym, plural or variation Google Ads thinks is appropriate.

This results in a wide reach to a lot of different searchers. However, often times the reach is too wide and you are getting clicks (each one costing you money) from searchers who are not looking for your particular product. You are selling dress shoes and your ad is appearing in searches for tennis shoes.

Phrase and Exact Match will focus your ads to appear in front of a much more limited set of searchers. Often times, they narrow the search down too much. The result is you don’t achieve the necessary impression volume you need to reach your marketing goals. What you need is a better balance of reaching a larger audience and yet focusing in on your product – and the Broad Match Modifier affords you exactly this balance.

What is Broad Match Modifier and how does it differ from straight Broad Match?

Broad Match Modifier will allow you to maintain a larger reach for different searches, while giving you some ability to focus the searches that your ad appears upon.

When Broad Match Modifier is used, a “+” is placed in front of a keyword, telling Google Ads to include that word “as is” in the search. Then the keyword can appear in any order in the actual search query, but the modified word or a close variation (plurals, stems, etc.) must be included.

For example:

The keyphrase “+women’s hats” could trigger an ad to appear when the searcher types in “women’s caps,” “white hats for women” or “women’s red caps.” It would not appear on “girl’s hats” because the modifier keyword “women’s” (or a close variation) was not included in the search.

In addition, you can use Broad Match Modifier to modify multiple words in your larger keyphrase you are bidding on:

The keyphrase “+women’s +hats” will trigger your ad when the searchers enter “women’s hats,” “hats for women,” “women’s blue hats” or “lacy women’s hats.” Your ad would not be triggered without both “women’s” and “hats” included in the search. Remember that the order of the words does not matter. This allows for a broader reach than phrase match where the order is maintained.

Case Study: Broad Match Modifier for a Community Bank’s Google Ads Campaigns

One of our clients, a community bank, wished to target real estate investors searching for multi-family properties. After developing an initial keyword list with a split of 30% broad match, 30% phrase match and 40% exact match, the campaign was launched. We targeted three medium size cities and six counties.

After one week’s worth of traffic, we analyzed the results, both from a conversion-to-lead basis and from a search query basis. The phrase and exact match traffic was very low. The traffic we did see performed well but at too low volume to meet the client’s goals.

Broad match generated plenty of traffic volume but a very low conversion rate. When we reviewed the search queries (Search Terms Report) that were driving the clicks, we saw a lot of consumer-based traffic. Terms being bid upon, such as “apartment building loan,” were triggering the client’s ads for terms such as “loans for apartment” and “loans to buy an apartment.” Traffic from these searches would land on the site and exit after it became apparent the bank was offering loans to purchase apartment buildings, not just one apartment. The Broad Match traffic was converting to a lead at less than a 0.5% rate.

Modifying the Broad Match List

We worked with the client to modify the Broad Match list into a more focused Broad Match Modifier list. Some of the terms were updated to Broad Match Modifier, for example:

“apartment building loan” became “+apartment+building+loan.” This had our client showing up for more relevant searches, such as “loans for apartment buildings” and “loans to buy apartment building.”

Results: CTR went from 1.85% to 3.99% in the first week. Conversion rates jumped from 1.78% to 5.10%.

“financing rental units” became “financing+rental+units.” The client’s ads began showing for searches on “best rates for financing rental units” and “banks who finance rental units purchase,” among others.

Results: CTR went from 2.57% to 3.77% in the first week. Conversion rates jumped from 0.78% to 4.22%.

A Winning Campaign

Over the course of two weeks across the entire campaign, we saw the traffic from the Broad Match list (now a Broad Match Modifier list) improve its conversion-to-lead rate to 4.1% while still maintaining a strong volume. The search queries driving the clicks were much more relevant to the ideal customer profile we had developed at the start of the engagement.

We were also able to add to our Phrase and Exact Match list based on analyzing the post-change search queries. We found a series of phrases that were not originally identified and added them to the appropriate ad groups.

Broad Match Modifier allowed our client to run ads in a limited geographic area with a more specific set of targeting options that resulted in improved conversion rates.

By John Thyfault, Vice President of Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Read more digital marketing case studies in Resources.

Learn how our team can help manage your PPC campaigns here.

Contact us now.

The post Broad Match Modifiers: How We Greatly Improved the Click-Through and Conversion Rates for a Community Bank Using Broad Match Modifiers in Google Ads appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Launching a new brand of consumer electronics products is always a challenge. To raise brand awareness and drive the eventual purchase of a new product takes effort and time. The consumer electronics category is by its very nature competitive with short product cycles and shifting consumer expectations.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. was approached by a European speaker manufacturer to launch a new brand of high end, wireless speakers in the US market. The company decided only to launch into the online channel, focusing its efforts on selling direct to the consumer and not via retail.  While this made for a more efficient sales model from a cost perspective, it did present a challenge around building brand awareness.

The visibility of a product on the shelf in a retailer, with the ability to interact with it in person, can be a compelling experience that adds to a brand’s awareness and eventual sales.  The “touch and feel” element, along with the experience of the speaker’s sound in person cannot be underplayed for a new brand. The downside of filling the retail channel is of course the product sitting on a shelf, with its revenue being frozen as it waits for a customer to purchase it.

We Implemented a Three-Step Brand Awareness Building Process for Launching this New Brand Online

We worked with our client to overcome the challenges inherent in launching a brand online in a very competitive category by developing a three-step strategy:

1. Raise awareness through display advertising and social media
2. Remarket to consumers who have seen the first “touch” with additional display ads and focused search ads
3. Take advantage of the awareness created by online media, driving the customer directly to the company’s website and giving them the chance to purchase either directly or with a “Buy with Amazon” link.

This approach allowed for the brand to go from being unknown with virtually no sales early in the year to meeting its revenue and margin goals in time for the holiday season.

Step one involved identifying the right target profiles and reaching out to them using the Google Display Network and Facebook.  The client came to the table with a robust profile of who the likely target buyers were based on focus groups and product research. We used that profile to put the ads in front of the right consumer.  The profile shifted over time as dynamic purchase data replaced static research.  This was done by paying close attention to click metrics, time on site, add to cart and other metrics with a focus on marketing channel and campaign attribution using Google Analytics.

As the marketing outreach progressed, we embarked on the second step of launching remarketing programs, testing both marketing channel sources (Facebook, specific sites on the display network, mobile vs. desktop traffic) and geographies.  Over time, the focus of these campaigns was narrowed to a select set of cities that demonstrated a high propensity to buy.

We Discovered Branded Ads Performed Better Than Product Feature Ads

One surprising result of the monitoring and testing of the messaging for search in AdWords was that the branded campaigns performed exceptionally well over time, but the general feature/benefit campaigns remained lackluster. Many of the individual feature/benefit campaigns were paused due to under-performance no matter how much the ads were tested and revised. Paying attention to the data was key in this decision to shift spend to where it performed the best.

The third step in the process, not necessarily linear, was to update the website to optimize it for the traffic once it arrived.  The site went through two iterations in design with input from us, improving overall metrics.  But most importantly, it was recognized early on that a challenge existed with brand recognition and trust for the consumer landing on the site.  This was addressed in two ways: shifting reviews to a more prominent location on the site and by adding the “Buy with Amazon” button in the checkout. This created a level of trust and endorsement from the Amazon brand, as well as allowing for an easy checkout process.

Throughout the campaign, the success metrics, sales, add to carts, time on site and repeat visits were refined and tied to actual revenue.  This allowed for a continual testing program that narrowed focus on supporting what was successful.

Net Revenue Goals Were Achieved in Time for Holiday Sales

The wireless speaker launch and follow-on marketing were very successful by the holiday season despite being part of an incredibly competitive segment of the consumer electronics category. The brand met its goals in both raw unit volume and overall net revenue.  This success of building brand awareness would not have been achieved without a well thought out strategy that had a willingness to revise underlying assumptions and a high degree of flexibility resulting in implementation changes as the market dictated.  Constant testing and refinement of messaging, targeting, ad creative, landing pages and the shopping cart were key to this success. By paying close attention to the real-time results of the marketing initiatives, constantly building off of successes and quickly ending poor performing campaigns, the brand, with our help achieved its goals and positioned the company for future growth.

By John Thyfault, Vice President of Search and Social Media Marketing

Would you like to build your brand’s awareness? Contact us for a free consultation.

Learn about optimizing landing pages to increase sales in this article.

The post Building an Online Only Brand Using Display and Search Advertising appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

If you have ever thought of driving more traffic to your website from organic search, you are sure to have heard about how important it is to select the right keywords. There are many data driven tools, such as Google Ads Keyword Planner, Keyword Discovery and Spyfu, that can help you identify keywords, understand potential traffic and look at the relative competition that your site is facing to rank for these keywords. This process will often leave you with a large list of keywords from which to select.

The smart marketer knows that the final selection is not just about raw numbers. It’s about finding language that will best describe your product or service. This language needs to match the language your potential customers are using in their search queries.

This final selection of keywords is at its heart a qualitative decision.

Consider the following:

• Take into consideration the unique selling proposition of your products or services
• Consider the tone of voice of your website
• Incorporate the day-to-day language your customers use to speak about your products or services

The subjective nature of this does not mean that you can’t put a process in place that will aid in finding the best keywords possible.

How to do Keyword Research: Five Steps

The five-step approach outlined below will allow you to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with the best keyword mix possible.

Step 1 – Decide what each page you are optimizing hopes to accomplish

Each page of your website should have a primary purpose that it hopes to accomplish. Is it an informational page setting up the next step in the buying cycle? Are you trying to gather a lead or close a sale? Are you setting up a comparison to a competitor’s product?

Different goals for a page will inform the language used on that page and how that language is interpreted by search engines. Search queries have become much more natural language focused over the last five years, with many queries being stated as a question: “How do the laws about European online privacy differ from the US?”, “What is GDPR?” and “How to do set-up opt-in email lists in France?”. These queries are around the same subject. However, what the searcher is hoping to accomplish versus the page that best answers each question is different.

Step 2 – Look at your competitor’s sites that rank well to understand how they are using language

Look at your competition for one-to-one comparisons with your products, services and stages in the buying cycle.

Ask the following:

• How are your top-ranking competitors using language?
• Does it mirror the top keywords results exactly or is there modifying language around the keyword?
• What is the actual content of the page?
• Is it delivering on the intent of the keyword you are looking at?

Step 3 – Add modifying language to your base list of keywords

Once you have clarified your goals for the page and looked at the successful competition, take your keywords and add modifying language that reflects the desired goal of your page. In the above example, our keywords were ‘European Online Privacy Laws,” “GDPR” and “French email opt-in requirements”. While related, each keyword can have different modifiers added to it to make the content of the page more relevant. For example, the keyword “GDPR” could be modified to read “GDPR Definition”, “Understanding GDPR”, “GDPR Timeline” or “GDPR’s Impact on Websites”. (GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU. If you don’t know about it yet, you should find out more.

The modifiers are major signals to search engines of the intent of page content (its goal). Ideally, search engines will match the searcher’s intent as communicated in the query with your page’s content. This match between the search results and the searcher’s desires is what’s going to help your page accomplish its goal.

Step 4 – Draft a title and description for each page for the keywords you are considering

Take a few minutes and plug the different keywords that you are still considering into a rough title and description of the page’s content. Don’t worry about character length yet. You are working on getting the feel of the quality of the keyword you are using. Also, ask if it really reflects the content of the page and its ultimate communications/marketing goal? You can use the best matches later as a starting point when you are ready to polish them up and fit them into the required character lengths.

Step 5 – Select your top three to five keywords and titles that best describe the page, its goal and the customer’s next step in the buying cycle

Take your rough titles and page descriptions and compare them to each other. Find the one that resonates the most for the content and goal of the page. Show them to your colleagues and get their first impressions as to relevance and tone. Select the ones that best fit your page.

In summary, as you do your initial research using the online tools, you will see many variations on a keyword that have the same potential traffic and competition. The five-step process above will help you select the best ones on a subjective basis to drive the right search traffic to your page, achieving your marketing goal.

Learn about SEO services provided by our agency here.

By John Thyfault, Vice President, Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

The post Five Steps to Arriving at the Best Keyword Mix – The Art of Keyword Selection for Search Engine Marketing appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

In a time when the competition for visitors driven to your site from Google AdWords is increasing, using all the tools that are available to spend your budget wisely is a must. This is particularly true for companies that have locations that are only open during certain hours. Or, if you know your searchers have a specific pattern when they’re looking for your type of company, which was the case of our franchise client. This makes time based geo targeting a critical, competitive skill for your tool set.

Getting in Front of the Right Searcher at the Right Time

There are two settings within AdWords that can allow your ads to get in front of the right searcher at the right time. AdWords allows advertisers to set-up schedules when your ads will appear in front of your potential customers. You can set schedules by time of day, day of the week and even multiple live and dark periods during a specific day. This can allow for a very targeted approach to when your ad is being displayed.

We used this to great effect for our office cleaning franchise client, by having multiple live and dark periods during the business week. The client offered janitorial service franchises on a regional basis. The potential customers that they were looking for were divided into two groups:

1. Individuals 

An individual who was already working as an office cleaner for someone else and wanted to become their own boss. This potential customer would be working after normal business hours, from 7:00 PM to 1:00 AM. They would have time to search online in the afternoon, also after 1:00 AM, and on the weekends. They were generally looking for a single unit franchise.

2. The Successful Business Person

The second customer being targeted was the successful business person who was looking to become a business owner and to make a wise investment in a franchise business. They would do online searches during normal business hours with some time spent online during Sunday afternoon.

A Unique Message for Each Targeted Customer Profile

Both customer profiles had a unique set of messages that they would respond to as well as having a different tone of voice in the ad. We created separate campaigns for the two customer segments. The campaigns were targeted to their specific times online and containing the different messaging that resonated with the segment. This improved the client’s performance in both CTR (click through rate) and CPL (cost per lead very rapidly). CTR bumped from 2.5% to 5.9% on average and the cost per lead decreased by 22% within the first month.

The Key for Campaign Performance in Multi-Time Zone or International Scheduling

The above is a very locally geo targeting scenario, being focused on a specific city or state. If this was being run out of a local AdWords account, the geo settings are a simple thing to set up. But often, an advertiser will be displaying ads across multiple time zones or even countries. This adds a wrinkle to how the schedules are set up. The following is the key to getting the campaigns to perform by ad scheduling in a multi-time zone situation. Remember that your AdWords account has a permanent time zone assigned to it when it was originally set-up. This generally matches your billing address but can be set to your choice initially. Once set though, it is unchangeable.

This can make for a bit of a challenge when setting up national or international campaigns. For example, if you are in Los Angeles and you wish to run an ad schedule for a Boston targeted campaign, you need to offset the start and end times by 3 hours to account for the time zone difference. This can quickly result in multiple campaigns that may be identical in all aspects except for the ad schedule.

Customer Profiles, Online Times and Location in Time Based Geo Targeting

Understanding the profile of individual customer segments, the times that they are online and where they are located can dramatically improve your performance. It is all about having the ads live when your customers are searching and dark when they are offline. This will result in a more qualified click on the ad and an increased likelihood to convert to a lead or a sale. AdWords gives you the tools to do this and the smart advertiser will take advantage of them to spend their dollars wisely.

Click here to view a video on AdWords targeting.

The post Improving AdWords Performance with Time Based Geo Targeting: A Case Study for a National Office Cleaning Franchise with Local Offices appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising through Google and Bing is one of the strongest direct response mediums available today. Often though, a higher touch and more personal approach via a telephone conversation is needed to complete the sale for higher priced, complex sale products. This is the case for a recent regional mortgage lending client. They saw a much higher historical conversion from telephone lead-to-loan applications than from web form-to-loan applications. Our client wished to take advantage of this and drive more telephone leads via PPC. Driving these calls through PPC is a great way to increase call volume. It can be challenging to attribute the right call to the right campaign or ad group if you are using a third-party call tracking system. Our agency has dealt with call conversion tracking on several occasions. And, have developed a good approach to maximize our client’s return on ad spend for inbound calls.

Situation:

In this particular case, our client used a third-party call tracking package that reported weekly calls results via a spreadsheet. The client was using Google Analytics to track their AdWords. The AdWords call extensions were turned on, however it not was not counting completed calls as conversions. Because of this, there were no bidding rules set up to maximize call volume.

Our Solution:

We were able to provide a much tighter, more integrated attribution model for this client through the following steps:

Step 1

We implemented use of AdWords’ native call tracking. It counted the phone calls as conversions and shared the data with Google Analytics. AdWords offers a few different options for call tracking. The most powerful one involves using AdWords’ forwarding numbers for each call. It captures the broadest amount of data from the call. It will give you the time, date, area code and length for each call. Be sure to set a minimum length of the call before it can be counted as a true conversion. In this case, we selected 90 seconds based on call history supplied by the client.

Step 2

At this point, the client did have that call effectiveness tied to each campaign, ad group, ad and keyword. A decision had to be made if we were going to use AdWords’ automated bid strategies. Strategies included, “Enhanced CPC”, or “Target ROAS”, or if a third-party tool was going to brought in for a more robust solution. Marin Software Pro Edition was selected as the bid management tool at this point. Marin offers a great combination of bidding rules and tracking. Marin can import conversion data from Google Analytics seamlessly and allowed for the best results for the client.

Step 3

As the call conversion data was imported, the client was able to improve the call conversion rate by 15%, drop the cost per call lead by 20% and optimize campaigns to meet the monthly lead volume goals.

Step 4

The next step was to look at the final results of which calls were most likely to move from a lead to a loan application. Optimizing the campaigns for this aspect required a more manual analysis of the existing call tracking software reporting for conversion to a loan application, and comparing the date/time info with the AdWords results on a call-by-call basis. This led to an improved understanding of which ad copy and keyword combination drove the best quality phone calls. Over time, trends were identified that showed areas where the client could split campaigns into call only and onsite form only campaigns for more effectiveness.

Call Conversion Tracking: The Value of a Deep Review

By going through a deep review of the client’s offer, their customer profile and historical performance, we could blend diverse data streams and deliver improved performance to the bottom line. A little creativity and willingness to look for solutions across different tracking platforms such as AdWords native, Google Analytics and Marin Software allowed for an understanding of the full picture and achieving the best performance for the client’s ad dollars.

Download the Case Study on call conversion tracking.

By John Thyfault, Vice President of Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

John Thyfault

The post Call Conversion Tracking: Connecting Offline Telephone Leads to Pay-Per-Click Leads Traffic. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

What the Data says about Expanded Text Ads for Google AdWords

On May 24, 2016 Google announced that the AdWords interface would start accepting a new, expanded format text ad as of July. This was a profound change to the ad format that AdWords has been using for over 10 years. Many advertisers were understandably excited by the announcement and expected great improvements in performance from the longer format ads.

We’ve had 60 days of data to look at since the launch of the Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) on July 26, and now we will look to answer the question, “Is Bigger Necessarily Better?”

What’s Different in the Ad Format?

Before we dig into the data, let’s talk about what is different in the new ETA format.

• The headline field has jumped from one headline of 25 characters to two headlines of 30 characters each.
• The description field has combined the previous two separate description lines of 35 characters each into one field of 80 characters in total.
• The display URL now auto populates with the domain of the destination URL and adds two separate field paths of 15 characters each. This is a shift from having to enter both the domain and additional text into one field of 35 characters.

Headline Field

The longer headline field allows the advertiser to create stronger, benefit rich headlines that can do a better job of enticing potential customers to click. The advertiser can now include a strong benefit statement and a call to action in the headline instead of having to choose between the two. This was the first area that Beasley Direct and Online Marketing looked at when we were updating our client’s ads. It remains the key field that we are running split tests on. Google has stated the testing of the new headlines is a best practice to take advantage of the new format.

Description Field

The combined 80-character description field is a welcome update. No longer does the advertiser need to worry about words and phrases being too long to fit on one 35-character line. The number of times that we’ve had to make a second choice in language because of the two-line split is countless and this change will allow more natural, flowing text that can communicate the benefits of our client’s products to their potential customers.

Display URL Format

The new display URL format takes a bit of getting used to. The splitting of the text following the domain into two separate “paths”. We’ve found that while there is still the opportunity for the addition of calls to action and benefits into this section, the “/”’s that separate the two fields breaks up the flow of the text enough that it is better to approach it as two separate items instead of one combined as existed in the previous standard ads.

Digging in to the Data

What we’ve seen with our clients’ expanded text ads, and what we expect in the next few months:

• We saw an initial spike in CTR when we rolled out our first advertiser ads in late July and early August. Some advertisers saw an increase in performance of up to 52%. This has fallen off somewhat as other advertisers are catching up with updating their ads. We have seen a slightly higher increase in conversion percentage as well, reflecting the new format’s ability to better qualify the potential customer with more info before the click. We expect to see a net gain over time in CTR and conversion rates based on the expanded amount of text in the ads but not at the high levels seen initially.

• We’ve learned some lessons on sharing too much of the client’s story in the ad and thus lessening the CTR because the potential customer doesn’t feel the need to learn more by clicking. This trap of oversharing is not unique to the new format, just a little easier to fall prey to. We saw a decrease in one branded campaign of 5% in CTR due to too much of the offer/story being told in the ad. We addressed this and are now back to a net increase in CTR with the new ETAs.

• Having the expanded 2-line headline gives the advertiser a great opportunity to tease with more intriguing copy and details. We’ve seen an overall increase in the quality of the traffic from ETAs, as measured by conversion rates. To date, this increase as been fairly consistent, regardless of the advertiser being BtoB or BtoC.

Are Bigger Text Ads Better?

So, are bigger text ads better? So far, yes but they are not a silver bullet. Advertisers still need to work the process, testing message assumptions with a steady stream of split tests for all the new, updated elements of the ads. (Remember to keep the tests distinct and separate as you go through the process.)

Good luck and good profits!

About the Author

John Thyfault

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, Beasley Direct & Online Marketing.

(Contact John at jthyfault@beasleydirect.com.)

The post Expanded Text Ads for Google AdWords: Are Bigger Ads Necessarily Better? appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Why it pays to get in on the conversation

Immediacy, affordability and relevancy are only a few of the reasons Twitter advertising offers wide potential for advertisers. Its active user base is huge (300 million). It offers diverse targeting options. And, most important, tweeting is conversational. Users interact immediately, re-tweet what they like (or dislike), share offers and quickly disseminate information to your benefit.

Finally, Twitter advertising is inexpensive. It provides good tracking and analytics and offers decent targeting options. But it is important to remember that things move fast on Twitter. Old news is no-news on this platform. The relevancy of posts can be very ephemeral.

Your ad options with Twitter Advertising

There are three well-proven ad types that have stood the test of time. They are Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets. Let’s dive straight in to their usage scenarios and benefits.

Promoted Accounts. These are your brand builders. Promoted Accounts help promote your brand or company, in part by letting users know that you are active on Twitter. They can also make your tweets more effective moving forward. Also, they can appear at the top of the “Who to Follow” area when viewed on a desktop. Finally, they appear in line on mobile devices.

Twitter Promoted Account

Furthermore, promoted Accounts can be targeted to specific audiences, based on affinity groups. Or,specific users and those like them (for example followers of @baristabar). Targeting variables include:

• Interests
• Geography
• Gender
• Tailored Audiences
• TV Targeting
• Device Targeting
• Keywords
• Users like your current followers
• Languages
• Users who follow specific influencers

Promoted Trends. These are Twitter’s prime ad real estate. They’re expensive, averaging six figures per day. But they expose you to the widest audience possible as they are seen by millions of users. If you have a product whose promotional phase is top-of-sales-funnel, Promoted Trends are an excellent way to drive mass awareness.

Twitter Promoted Trend

Catching the moment, riding the wave

In Twitter advertising a trend can be anything you want. You create the hashtag. Then, pay to pepper it through other people’s conversations in a specific geographic or demographic target. Make them cool and interesting and people will pick up on them. Pass them around and all of a sudden you’re trending… and viral! Really great Promoted Trends capture the spirit of the moment, der zeitgeist.

True zeitgeist: The Trend people gobbled up

When the lights went off at the 2013 Super Bowl, Oreo had an ace in the hole. Their ad agency’s social marketing team. Literally within 5 minutes these guys conceived and promoted a Twitter trend. It had a cool visual and a simple headline: You can still dunk in the dark.

Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet

The Oreo team was monitoring the game looking for any excuse to tweet. Then a faulty electrical relay gave them a perfect opportunity. Half an hour of enforced quiet time shared by millions of people. And the results were tangible. A big spike in sales of Oreos.

Promoted tweets are ideal for engaging audiences beyond your followers.

Promoted Tweets. These are your scouts and infiltrators, sent to engage audiences beyond your followers. Additionally, you can broadcast them to current followers. Promoted tweets enable you to promote offers and include links to optimized landing pages. Typically one-shot promotions, they don’t have much staying power. But the right offers and call to action can make them measurable and monetizable.

Lead Generation Cards: Capturing Your Leads & Audience Interest

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards make it simple for users to respond to your Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts. Here’s how they work:

1. You add Lead Generation Cards to your account
2. When a user hits your Tweet, it expands to show a description of your offer. In addition, a call to action PLUS a pre-filled form featuring their name and email address.
3. The user simply clicks a button to respond to your offer and send the above information to you.

Lead Generation Cards are excellent for promoting things like product clubs. However, if you’re going that route be sure to include a privacy policy. It’s not only best practice; it’s reassuring your user. You can choose between Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM). Note: The latter can get prohibitively expensive.

A Twitter Lead Generation Card

Analytics

Twitter advertising includes a dashboard providing good information on engagements, engagement rates, likes and link clicks. Some of the questions the Tweet Activity Dashboard can help answer include:

• First, how many impressions do my Tweets receive?
• Which of my Tweets resonates best with my target audience?
• How do my Tweet metrics break out by organic and promoted activity?
• How does my recent performance compare to past results?
• Lastly, do my engagement metrics break down by type?

Again, it’s not super comprehensive. But you can drill down far enough to see who’s interacting with your brand. And, how they’re interacting and what’s hitting their hot buttons.

Always remember that the power to target with pinpoint accuracy is the #1 advantage you enjoy with any social media advertising. Twitter may be conversational in nature – but precision targeting is key to profitable conversations.

Feel free to share this blog, Twitter Advertising – Social Media Advertising Series, Part 4. We only ask that when shared no changes are made, and credits are given to the authors.

John Thyfault

Laurie B. Beasley

The post Twitter Advertising – Social Media Advertising appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Before focusing on Facebook advertising best practices: Justify your budget with the reasons it pays to advertise on social media’s biggest platform.

Facebook is more than the world’s biggest social network. Its targeting options are incredible and audience saturation is huge.

And as with all social media advertising, you enjoy cost-saving opportunities.

To sum it up: (1) Facebook’s reach hits more people than any other U.S. advertising media. (2) Its targeting options enable you to get seriously micro-granular when reaching out to its users. (3) Low minimum spends let you play on Facebook for as little as $50. (4) It’s the least expensive social media advertising available, with an average cost per thousand impressions of $0.25.

So now that we’ve seen the whys for Facebook advertising, let’s explore best practices. And, how to employ them in creating ads.

Facebook Advertising Best Practices

1. Micro Target

Facebook lets you layer targeting options one on top of another, making your audience more and more specific. Use this to reduce your audience into small sets that you can test against each other.

2. Track Conversions

Track ad conversions by adding a Facebook tracking pixel to your website. It enables the platform to automatically track click-through rates and conversions and provide you the metrics.

3. Use Auto Optimization

Facebook has auto-optimization features for optimizing conversions. Therefore, set your goal and Facebook will auto-optimize the ads and the targeting to achieve the highest performance.

4. Try Low Cost Conversions

Facebook supports you in getting lower cost conversions. Such as those where you can experiment with driving demand but not fulfilling it.

5. Finally, Use High Quality Images

And not just high resolution files, but original photography and graphics, too. The closer an image reflects your messaging and your audience’s lifestyle, the better your response and conversions.

TIPS

When you can, feature people in your Facebook ads. Lifestyle appeal tends to work well.

How to create Ads. But first we need to explore your biggest asset: Targeting.

Facebook advertising best practices includes precision targeting, which is what Facebook is all about. Therefore, let’s zoom in on some of your strongest options.

Life Events

People’s personal and business lives are riddled with milestones they share on Facebook as Life Events. As a result you can match your campaigns to virtually every conceivable kind of Life Event. The reason, users tend to post almost all of them on their timelines.

Match your campaigns to users’ lives with Life Events.

Custom Audiences

Your best new business often comes from old business. Custom Audiences helps you nurture leads and build loyalty by connecting with existing contacts and customers. This reinforces your brand and increases lifetime customer value, order frequency, and loyalty.

Create a custom audience by uploading your customer phone or email list in CSV or TXT format to Facebook.

Lookalikes: Your Audience Multiplier

Lookalikes let you rapidly create audiences that look like current customers or targets. Just upload your email or phone list to find a Lookalike audience that mirrors your current one. Also, you can use your Facebook following to create Lookalikes.

Psychographics

Demographics describe who users are, where they are and what they do. While Psychographics explain the whys. Understand these and you can expand your advertising to a wider range of audiences and micro-target within them. For example, include interests, occupations, life roles (mother, father, mentor), spending habits and values.

Getting creative with Facebook.

OK, we’re nearly ready for a walk through of building your ads using Facebook Ad Creator and Facebook Power Editor. But first let’s look at the types of Facebook ads offered:

Marketplace Ads

These standard Facebook ads are a good starting point for most small businesses. They appear on the right sidebar of your Facebook newsfeed.

Marketplace Ad

Page Post Ads.

Page Posts display on users’ newsfeeds like status posts. They’re big and prominent, but remember: Your messaging needs to be spot-on relevant.

Page Post Ad

Sponsored Stories.

These show up in a user’s newsfeed if a friend engaged with the sponsor’s Facebook page – an implied endorsement if you will. But importantly, like Page Posts, they’re prominent.

Promoted Posts.

Promoted Posts display just like Sponsored Stories. They’re only shown to your existing fans and your existing fans’ friends. But they are a great way to make sure fans see your ads.

Sponsored Story

Premium Ads.

Lastly, Premium Ads. Premium ads run only on users’ homepages and feature “friend” information (i.e. you and ten friends like this). Plus, Facebook only shows one ad at a time. Therefore, spend is high: $5,000 a month minimum.

Premium Ad

Ad Creator: 10 Steps to Your Ad.

Ad Creator lets you create ads easily and with a decent level of targeting granularity. The steps are the same for all of the Facebook ads we’ve discussed. In this example we’ll setup a Marketplace Ad.

Step 1. First, find and click the “Create an Ad” button in Facebook.

Step 2. Next, choose your goal or objective.

Step 3. Upload photos for your ad.

Step 4. Connect your brand’s Facebook page.

Step 5. Add your headline and description.

Step 6. View how your ad will look.

Step 7. Create your audience.

Step 8. Create your account and campaign settings.

Step 9. Add your campaign optimization settings. Then hit “Review Order”.

Step 10. Finally, place your order and pay for your ad.

Facebook Power Editor

What’s the difference between Power Editor and Ad Creator?
There’s not a lot to know about Ad Creator. It gets you where you need to go – slowly, but surely. But with Power Creator there is plenty to know. Understand its features and you can do in minutes what would take hours. And, create far more effective Facebook ads.

But don’t worry, Power Creator isn’t complicated…

Duplication
The Duplicate Button lets you create multiple versions of a campaign, set of ads, or a single ad. Imagine you have one campaign and you want to test it according to two different targets. Just highlight that ad, hit Duplicate and you’ve got two identical ad sets.

Unpublished Page Posts
This enables you to create ads for the news feed that look like Facebook posts, but without showing up on your Facebook page.

Custom and Lookalike Audiences
We’ve spoken to these but here’s a recap. Custom Audiences let you upload current customer lists using email addresses or phone numbers. In contrast, Lookalike Audiences let you target users similar to your customers.

Saved Audiences
This feature allows you to save and reuse targeting groups.

Mobile Device Targeting
Remember, only Power Editor enables you to show your ads to users of specific mobile devices and platforms.

But remember, whatever type of ad you’re running, relevancy to the user is key.

Feel free to share this blog, Facebook Advertising Best Practices, and How to Use Facebook Ad Creator and Facebook Power Editor. We only ask that when shared no changes are made, and credits are given to the authors.

About the Authors

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John Thyfault

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, and Laurie B. Beasley, President of Beasley Direct & Online Marketing.

* * * *

Laurie B. Beasley

The post Facebook Advertising Best Practices, and How to Create Ads Using Ad Creator and Power Editor appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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