What is Google up to? Looking at the various Google tools and features, here is what I see is happening at Google.

Google has been developing Google Data Studio (GDS) for several years (this is their free version comparable to Salesforce Tableaux). Both are data visualization tools, which means they pull in data from multiple sources, tools, and databases to create visually appealing reports. Google sees Google Data Studio as a reporting overlay for Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools. All those tools will send data to Google Data Studio. We’ll explain later where we see Google headed with Google Data Studio as it continues to update other tools.

Google Analytics was updated to Google Analytics 4.0 (GA4) in October 2020 and now, a year later, many companies are using it.

Universal Analytics, the previous version, was only a reporting tool. It collected and displayed website data. But GA4 isn’t an update. It’s an entirely new concept of data on the web.

The most powerful feature in Google Analytics 4.0 is predictive analytics. It can predict data. How does it do that? Google bought DeepMind (an AI company) in 2014 for $600m. David Silver at DeepMind developed Reinforcement Learning (a new type of Machine Learning). He developed Alpha Go to play the game of Go (Wei chi). Chess is easy for machine learning: the rules let one predict future steps. Alpha Go however is vastly more complex. How much?

Alpha Go has 10¹⁷⁰ combinations (there are only 10⁸⁰ in the universe). Instead of rules and steps, Alpha Go looks at patterns. In 2016, it won against the world champion. A year later, Alpha Go Zero won 100 straight games against Alpha Go, the previous version.

It’s important to understand these game-playing AI are not controlled. Tens of thousands of games in chess and Go have been recorded over the last three hundred years and are well-known to grandmasters. But the AI often makes moves that have never been seen before. The AI discovers patterns and opportunities that humans have never played.

Google owns this AI software, so it has been applying it to their software tools, Android software for phones, and the Google Pixel phones.

How does this matter for digital advertising?

Google has been collecting data on some two billion people and tens of millions of companies worldwide for twenty years now. Every email you’ve ever sent (including drafts that you deleted), every ad that has ever appeared on your screen, your Android phone movements, air pressure, temperature, and so on, and much more is recorded. Time for a pop quiz: How many Google websites are there? There’s Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, and so on. Perhaps a dozen? Twenty? Forty? There are more than 130 Google websites, and many do not say it’s Google. All of these are collecting data.

AlphaGo Zero looks at that ocean of data on its own to find behavior patterns. It matches behaviors with actions, such as purchases or registration.

Now it becomes interesting. Previous analytics tools (Google and other companies) were like weather reports in the 1970s. They could tell you it rained last week. So what? What’s the weather for the next 30 days? This is important for agriculture, transportation, and many other fields.

Google Analytics 4.0 uses AI to show you future data. It tells you this group will buy in the next seven days. That group will quit your website in the next seven days. Another group will be your top-revenue group in 28 days. This lets you adjust or create new marketing campaigns.

Analytics changes. It’s no more “reports of the past”. It’s actionable future predictions.

The Google Analytics 4.0 data can be imported into Google Data Studio for presentation.

What happens then?

If Google’s AI can find winning patterns in 10¹⁷⁰ data points, what does this mean for marketing? Currently, people enter a few dozen keywords, write a few ads, and manage bids and budgets by hand.

But the Google AI can do this far better. For example, a Responsive Search Ad (RSA) in Google Ads generates over 46,300 permutations. If you place three RSA ads in an ad group, that’s nearly 150,000 ads. Google Ads uses multivariate testing to quickly find the version with the highest click rate. If you have 300 ad groups, that can be forty-five million ads which it uses to find the best ads. Humans can’t do that.

Considering all of this, it’s plausible that within a few years, Google may combine Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4.0, and Google Data Studio into one tool, perhaps called “Google Marketing” which manages marketing on its own.

By Andreas Ramos
Vice President, Digital Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post The Future of AI in Google Marketing appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com .

About Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the local version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Is your Digital Marketing initiative failing? Beasley’s professional marketing team can help. Start with a free SEO audit of your company’s website. Sign up here.

By Laurie B. Beasley

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Places 14th in Silicon Valley Business Journal List of Largest Advertising, Marketing and PR Agencies appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

We are happy to announce the partnership between Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., and The B2B Marketing Expo California for 2019.  We hope that this partnership will bring about the alignment of professionals passionate about direct marketing, online marketing and B2B Marketing as well as highlight our focus on more educational opportunities for marketing in California.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing will be partnering with The B2B Marketing Expo, October 2 and 3, 2019 in Los Angeles, CA.  The company president, Laurie Beasley, will be speaking on October 2, right after the keynote address on the topic “Meeting Maker Marketing Campaigns: How to Connect Sales with Anyone”.  Beasley Direct will also be exhibiting both days.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is a full-service agency focused on lead generation and creating sales opportunities. Offering a range of problem solving services, it helps businesses get more leads and sales all while helping to measure the results and implement better methods.

Beasley was founded as a direct mail agency in the early 1990s, focused on lead generation for high tech marketers. At the time, database segmentation was the next big thing. They’ve grown beyond direct mail marketing and evolved over the years to include SEO & PPC services, email marketing, and multichannel marketing, always learning and never losing sight of the goal: deliver superior results for their clients at an excellent ROI.

Today, the organization has grown to utilize direct marketing and internet marketing to help most businesses get new leads or customers. Above all, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is filled with a team of professionals who love what they do. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing has been recognized for their marketing efforts in multiple industry fronts and fosters a collaborative community within its membership. It is sponsored by organizations like The Direct Marketing Association of Northern California and the NorCal Business Marketing Association.

“I am thrilled to partner with The B2B Marketing Expo. Having taught direct and online marketing certification courses my whole career, I’m a big believer in continuing education. Conferences like The B2B Marketing Expo are a great place to continue your learning with new ideas, different approaches, and new service providers who can help you achieve your marketing goals more efficiently,” says Laurie Beasley, President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

B2B Marketing Expo

The team behind The B2B Marketing Expo California recognize that direct marketing continues to be essential to industry success and is also a key component to a rapidly evolving part of marketing, regardless of sector. We know how important it is for our community to remain at the forefront of the latest developments and practices and partnering with Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is how we are assured that we’re staying ahead in the industry.

“We understand the kind of challenges businesses have in reaching out to their customers, especially when it comes to getting that personal touch in direct communication,” notes The B2B Expo Marketing Director Milen Guergov. “It’s great to see that Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is the kind of partner that we know will be able to give companies that edge in reaching out to new leads and making better connections with existing customers. They have so much to offer when it comes to the marketing world.”

We look forward to supporting Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., with the organization’s ongoing objectives and welcoming its members and associates to our event.

Get Free Tickets

If you would like to find out more about Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., please take a look here. If you would like to register for a free ticket for The B2B Marketing Expo California, you can do so right here.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Partnering with The B2B Marketing Expo appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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.

The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

1. Lack of customer/technical support.
2. Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
3. And, a lack of adaptation to mobile/responsive email templates.

I’d like to explore all three of these complaint areas for a few minutes. But first a disclaimer that I will compare the complaints I’ve catalogued across all email sending platforms whether they be an ESP or an MA platform. I will not get into the differences between using an ESP vs. MA. That’s for another time.

Lack of customer/technical support was the major complaint of 2017

Many email sending platforms, like IBM Watson and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which contains both ExactTarget and Pardot), have removed the option to call in to talk to a live customer or technical support person when you have a problem. You are asked to either fill out a support ticket or interact with a community. That puts the onus on you to frame your question just right, or you’ll get a bogus answer from either. The community usually responds within 24 hours, however you could be left hanging with a big problem for several hours until someone does answer. I predict that email sending platforms that do offer live, 24/7 customer/technical support, like the relative newcomer, Adestra, will begin to steal market share from the other ESPs.

The inability to quickly onboard new email marketing team members was the second major complaint of 2017

I noticed my clients taking a critical eye to the time/complexity it takes to train new email marketing automation team members. Training time is a real cost to the company and affects the ability to quickly replace or expand staff. Some Marketing Automation platforms are so sophisticated and complex, like Oracle Responsys, that you’re almost forced to outsource the usage of it, or at least recruit very specifically for talent with experience using it — which is a limited talent pool. I see clients opting for less complex marketing automation tools, such as Pardot or Hubspot, which have reasonably good training and on-boarding programs and seem to be easier for newbies to learn. They are also more economical for those who don’t need all of the Oracle-like sophisticated features, and who need more basic campaign setup, scoring and nurturing.

I also envision more outsourcing of email marketing operations to agencies, like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., because the labor market will become increasingly more constrained and finding talent (even worldwide) will become more difficult.

You’d think all email sending and marketing automation platforms would support mobile/responsive design. They don’t.

The third major complaint we heard was with platforms not supporting responsive design very well. We’ve re-designed most of our client’s emails to be mobile/responsive, however not all of their email systems have adapted perfectly well to the demands this places on the email sending platform. For instance for one client, their Constant Contact email system would not allow us to drop in a new two-column email template that would re-stack into one column on mobile. Constant Contact does have hard-coded templates that do re-stack, but the client didn’t like any of them. The inability to use your own email creative is very frustrating. We wound up moving the email template over to Vertical Response to test it, just to make sure it wasn’t our code. It worked perfectly there.

With 2018 there will be big changes to market share for email sending and marketing automation platforms. We envision Adestra will steal market share from IBM Watson and ExactTarget (part of IBM Marketing Cloud) because of their live 24/7 support. We project Pardot and Hubspot to supplant Marketo and Oracle for their easier training and staffing. And, tools like Constant Contact will need to up their game or be replaced by upper tier tools who fully support responsive design.

If you need helping choosing or running your Email Sending or Marketing Automation platforms, we can help. Contact us today.

Read about creating email templates here.

The post Why we are Predicting a Major Shake-up in Email Sending and Marketing Automation Platforms for 2018 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Laurie Beasley and David Beasley, Owners of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching two live online Email Marketing Classes for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California (DMAnc.org). The courses will run on Friday mornings, September 8 and 15, 2017 10:00AM-12:00PM Pacific. These courses can be taken ala carte or as part of an online marketing certification offered by the DMAnc. For more info on certification, go here.

Laurie Beasley’s course on September 8, 2017 is titled: Email Marketing Fundamentals: Copy, design, and list strategies for success. For more information, or to register go here.

David Beasley’s course on September 15, 2017 is titled Advanced Email Marketing: Making your email deliverable and how to use email sending platforms and Marketing Automation to your best advantage. For more information, or to register go here.

About us:

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. (www.BeasleyDirect.com) is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About DMAnc (DMAnc.org): The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

The post Live Online Email Marketing Classes to be Taught by Laurie and David Beasley, Owners of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

MORGAN HILL, CA

News Facts:

Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live online Advanced B2B Demand Generation course for the DMA. The course will run on Friday mornings, September 16, 2016 – Oct 26, 2016, at 10:00-11:30 AM.

This course takes a fresh approach to demand generation by helping students set goals with the Sales department. Also covered, managing the touch points for lead qualification, and optimizing communication channels for maximum success. The course explores best practices for all of the marketing channels including email, search, social media, direct mail, and tele-prospecting. It also looks at how the buying committee is changing marketing, and how to segment lists and messages to market to ever more decision makers. In addition, the course will discuss what marketing automation can do to help the process with lead qualification and nurturing.

For more information, or to register go here.

About us:

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. (www.BeasleyDirect.com) is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. The company provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About DMA (www.thedma.org): Founded in 1917, DMA is the world’s largest trade association dedicated to advancing and protecting responsible data-driven marketing and the use of data for good. DMA’s membership is a deep pool of data and marketing talent that routinely brings forward disruptive technology and techniques, and DMA’s unique role in representing both the client-side and supply-side enables it to develop the market for these innovations.

The Direct Marketing Association’s advocacy program ensures marketers’ ability to responsibly gather and process or refine detailed data. DMA’s market-driven educational offerings equip its members to stay ahead of the curve of the rapid changes in thought leadership and best practices. Direct Marketing Association events and communities provide numerous opportunities for today’s marketers. Whether brands, agencies or solution providers, the DMA connects in-person and online to grow their business and their careers. DMA’s signature event, &THEN, is the largest global event for data-driven marketing. It attracts top marketing and advertising leaders and practitioners from around the world.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

The post Laurie Beasley, President, of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., to Teach Live Online Advanced B2B Demand Generation Course for the DMA. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

AdWords Quality Score

When Google first started its pay-per-click (PPC) advertising business, they did not want to create a strict pay-for-position marketplace. Google firmly believed that the ads they served up should be relevant to the search being performed to mirror the reputation for quality that Google built with its organic search results. To deliver this, AdWords first started measuring an ad’s quality by looking at its click-through rate (CTR). Google assumed that the higher an ad’s CTR, the more likely it was the ad was delivering what the searcher wanted. AdWords would serve these ads more often, giving more exposure and traffic to the advertiser.

Over time, Google AdWords expanded and refined this concept of “Quality Score.” An ad/keyword combination that has a high Quality Score will appear more often, be higher on the results page and have a lower cost per click than a lower Quality Score ad/keyword combination. This gives advertisers incentive to take advantage of this by creating good, relevant ads for their keyword selections.

Google measures Quality Score starting at the keyword level, looking at the keyword, how relevant it is to the ad it triggers, and the landing page it points to. Quality Score is a dynamic factor that changes on a second-by-second basis and is impacted by many different factors. The AdWords interface reports on a subset of these factors for the advertiser and the results are not real-time, sometimes reflecting the keyword status of five to 10 days earlier.

Before we look at the major factors of Quality Score, let’s take a moment to review how it impacts your ad’s position and cost per click (CPC). When an advertiser bids on a keyword to trigger an ad’s appearance in the Google results page, they are participating in a real-time ad auction for the top spots on the page. These top spots drive more traffic that is often better qualified for the advertiser’s goal. Its “Ad Rank” determines the position of any advertiser’s ad on the page. Ad Rank is a score that AdWords calculates using two elements; the maximum PPC bid that advertiser is willing to spend, multiplied by the Quality Score of the desired keyword. The higher the Ad Rank, the better the on-page position for the ad.

An Example

Let’s look at an example of three advertisers that are all bidding a maximum of $5.00 per click for their ad to appear. And, see how their differing Quality Scores will impact the ad position and eventual CPC:

Advertiser – Alpha

QS 7 multiplied by a max bid of $5 CPC

Ad Rank = 35

Advertiser – Baker

QS 8 multiplied by a max bid of $5 CPC

Ad Rank = 40

This advertiser’s ad will appear higher on the page

Advertiser – Charlie

QS 6 multiplied by a max bid of $5 CPC

Ad Rank = 30

This advertiser’s ad will appear lowest on the page

Consequently, a higher Quality Score will also influence how much the advertiser eventually pays for the click. Using the same scenario, let’s look at another example:

The actual cost per click that the advertisers will pay will be determined by the Ad Rank of the advertiser appearing in the position below them divided by the Quality Score of the winning advertiser. For our example above, advertiser Baker was the winning advertiser with a higher Ad Rank (maximum CPC bid x QS) of 40 versus Alpha’s Ad Rank of 35.

# 1 Position on the page:

Advertiser – Baker

Ad Rank = 40

Actual CPC = $3.89 (Alpha’s Ad Rank divided by Baker’s Quality Score)

#2 Position on the page:

Advertiser – Alpha

Ad Rank = 35

Actual CPC = $4.28 (Charlie’s Ad Rank (30) divided by Alpha’s Quality Score (7))

#3 Position on the page:

Advertiser – Charlie

Ad Rank = 30

Actual CPC = Minimum Allowed Bid for the auction

The illustration above seems fairly straightforward. But in reality, the ad auctions are complex, with tens or hundreds of advertisers bidding on any specific word and automated bidding tools rapidly changing the scenarios. The thing to remember is that having a high Quality Score will make your ad dollars go further.

Improving a Keyword’s Quality Score

So how does one go about viewing and improving a keyword’s Quality Score? Let’s start by understanding where Quality Score reporting lives in the AdWords interface.

While Quality Score is reported at the keyword level, it isn’t one of the metric columns that appear in the default view within the AdWords interface. You can add it by going to the “column” dropdown in the keyword view and adding it from the display. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Adding Quality Score to Your Google AdWords Program

Source: Google

Now that you can see your Quality Score for your keywords, the next questions are, “What should it be?” and “How can you improve it?”

Firstly, Quality Score should be targeted for improvement at any level below a seven out of 10. An ideal score is 10, but that is hard to attain except for highly branded keywords for your own products. Living in the seven-to-10 range will help to keep your CPC down and your share of impressions up.

To improve your Quality Score, focus on three attributes for your keyword/ad combination: CTR, the relevance of the ad text to the keyword, and the relevance of the keyword and ad text combination to the target-landing page

.

Improve your Quality Score by Improving Your Click-Through Rate:

This will have the biggest impact on Quality Score by far and is the easiest one to understand.

• First of all, use your keywords in your ad text.
• Write compelling ads with benefit statements and strong calls to action.
• Finally, use your display URL to add more text to the ad. This is an ideal place to put a call to action.

Improve Your Quality Score by Placing an Ad That Is Relevant to Your Target Audience’s Expected Search Queries:

• Especially relevant: make sure that your ads are addressing the needs of your audience. If the ad does not answer their need, the audience will click on your competitors. Google looks at your ad much as they evaluate organic search results. The ad needs to address the search with a relevant message.

Finally, Improve Your Quality Score by Creating a Relevant Landing Page Target

• First of all, the landing page must make a clear payoff to the ad’s promise in an easily visible part of the page.
• Secondly, the landing page must not be swarming with ads.
• Furthermore, the time your visitor spends on the landing page is vital to AdWords viewing it as a relevant landing page. This is measured by quickly “pogo sticking” back to the search results page on Google, looking for better results, and/or by Google’s tracking how much time is spent on the page when the visitor is logged into a Google account such as YouTube, Gmail or Google Drive.

As was previously stated, Quality Score is measured by a variety of factors in real time. The three mentioned above have a significant impact on your Quality Score and are the easiest to manage.

In addition, you can find out more about the details of Quality Score measurement and improvement at the following links:

• Video: How the PPC Auction Works and Quality Score

• Google AdWords Help Article on Quality Score

* * * *

The Author

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, of Beasley Direct & Online Marketing. Contact John at jthyfault@beasleydirect.com.

John has more than 19 years of marketing, sales and product development experience, and he brings a proven track record of successful campaign, program and product development expertise. His knowledge of search engine optimization and marketing, combined with an in-depth understanding of customer identification, market analysis and segmentation, allows him to deliver high returns on our client’s marketing investment for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets.

Prior to working with Beasley Direct, John was Senior Client Services Project Director at ThirdAge.com, a first wave baby boomer lifestyle and community website. At ThirdAge he successfully led major client sponsorships for Fortune 100 companies in healthcare (Tylenol), financial services (American Century), technology (Intel & IBM) and consumer products areas (Revlon & Viactive). He was responsible for strategic and tactical goal setting, project management, new product creation and web site production. John previously worked in Channel Marketing and National Account Sales for IDG Books Worldwide, the publishers of the immensely popular “…For Dummies” book series. Additionally, he managed the wholesale distributor sales channel for Tor/Forge Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

John is active in local marketing associations, including the Direct Marketing Association, the Business Marketing Association and is currently serving on the board of directors for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association.

John has taught search engine marketing fundamentals extensively. He has led workshops for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, Northern California Direct Marketing Association (DMAnc.org) and the Business Marketing Association. He also teaches Search Engine Marketing at UCSC Extension (UCSC Silicon Valley Extension).

The post Understanding AdWords Quality Score and How It Can Lower Your Cost Per Click appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Social media has quickly grown to become a major part of online marketing. In fact, 84% of B2B marketers report using social media in some form during their campaigns. Currently, Facebook remains the most popular site among social media users according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. LinkedIn is reported as the second most used social media site. Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter following behind. Developing an effective social media posting strategy is essential to your campaign’s success.

(http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/)

With all these different social media sites competing for your potential client’s attention, it can be hard to plan an effective social media posting strategy. You, as a social media marketer should ask the following questions. When is the best time to post on each of the social media sites? Is there a ‘compromise time’ where one can optimally post on all the sites? If each site has a different optimal posting time, then how can a social media manager manage effectively manage their social media campaigns?

Your Social Media Posting Strategy: Optimal Posting Times

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media site with over 936 million daily users worldwide. Surprisingly though, the number of user visits decrease significantly during the work week. Facebook get the largest amount of its user traffic during the weekend, with Sunday receiving the highest number of user visits. Facebook traffic is at its highest each day between 8 a.m.-9 a.m. and 5 p.m.-1 a.m. Posting on Facebook should be avoided between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. when user traffic is at its lowest. Timing is an important part of your social media posting strategy for Facebook and other social sites.

LinkedIn

Unlike most other social media sites, LinkedIn is geared toward the working professional rather than a personal profile. Because of this, most users log into the site and view content during business hours. The best days to post on LinkedIn are Tuesday through Thursday during the work hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Tuesday between 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. is the absolute best time to post out of the entire week, with the highest level of clicks and shares. Posting on LinkedIn should be avoided between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.. That is when the lowest amount of users are logged in.

Pinterest

From recipes and crafts to home décor and health tips, Pinterest is every millennial mother’s best friend. In fact, 65% of Pinterest users are women who have at least one child. Unsurprisingly, the best times to pin new content on Pinterest are either between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. during the week. This is when a majority of Pinterest users are more likely to not be preoccupied with work or with taking care of their family. During the weekends, however, this changes with Saturday morning having the highest level of traffic. This is most likely due to users having more time to browse and try out ideas found on the site.

(https://www.business2community.com/pinterest/best-time-days-pin-pinterest-01152667)

It is important to note that Pinterest users have a different viewing trend than found on other sites. According to user statistics, 52% of Pinterest users visit the site less than once per week. So it is most important that social media managers post often during prime viewing times throughout the week to better their chances of catching their audience while they are logged in.

Instagram

Instagram focuses more on image and video sharing than on worded posts, as Facebook and Twitter do. Businesses can post pictures of their products or snapshots of company events,and followers can leave comments under the images. According to a survey run by Latergramme, the best times to post on Instagram is 2 a.m. and 5 p.m. The 2 a.m. slot catches the late night teen and young adult crowd who may be up late with school assignments, while the 5 p.m. slot grabs the working users who may be finishing up or done with their work day.

(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/25/get-instagram-likes_n_6751614.html)

Most Instagram users view content pretty regularly throughout the week with Wednesday being the most popular day, and Monday being the least popular day, by a small margin.

Twitter

Most Twitter users visit the site and engage with content before and during work or school hours. Usage drops off after the school and work day are over, at about 6pm. The best time to post and increase the likelihood of receiving retweets is between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, with 5 p.m. having the highest number of active users and retweets.

(https://neilpatel.com/blog/science-of-social-timing/)

It is important to remember that a Tweet has an average shelf life of eight hours. Therefore it would be wise to plan to post more than one tweet, the recommend amount would be at least four, and stagger them throughout the day’s optimal posting times.

Google+

Google+ has been rapidly growing as a social media platform for the past few years. With the addition of communities and interactive posts, Google+ has become a site that is greatly focused on people who wish to communicate with like minded groups. Most of the users who visit Google+ log on during the work week between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Posts made on Wednesdays at 9 a.m. are found to receive the largest amount of traffic out of the entire week.

Effective Social Media Management

As demonstrated by the above data, there is no one perfect ‘compromise time’ to post on all social media sites. Each site caters to a different demographic who will log on at different times depending on the content these sites offer. So how is an online marketer supposed to manage an effective social media posting strategy calendar? There are several tools available that do just that.

Some social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have features built into the site that allow you to schedule your post. When you post from your profile page on Facebook, a small clock icon can be found on the bottom of your post window. This opens up tabs that allow you to set a date and time for your content to post. Twitter, on the other hand, allows marketers using their Twitter’s Ad Products to schedule their organic and promoted tweets from the blue tweet button.

Another option available to online marketers is to use online social media management programs. Such as Hootsuite, Latergramme, Followerwonk, or any others to manage and schedule all of their social media content. These programs can greatly complement your social media posting strategy.

* * The Author * *

This post was authored by Elizabeth A. Beasley, Account Manager, Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc.

Elizabeth Beasley serves as a social media manager at Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc www.BeasleyDirect.com.  Elizabeth manages new client on-boarding and accounts, social media, corporate presentations, corporate website, and database maintenance. She also serves as an account manager for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California www.DMAnc.org, managing event logistics, registration and promotion. She holds a B.A. in Communications from National University.

The post How to Optimize Your Social Media Posting Strategy appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Google Ad Extensions are offered in AdWords as a set of extensions intended to make your advertising more effective by refining reach and targeting. Google ad extensions also allow extra information about your business to display with your Google ad. This extra information may provide prospects with more reasons to contact your business.

The first thing to understand about Google ad extensions is they display automatically. But, only when your ad and keywords’ Quality Score allow you to appear in the top two positions in the search results. These extensions include seller ratings, consumer ratings, social extensions, and previous visits to the business’ site. Advertisers don’t have to do anything for automated extensions to appear.

Second, some Google ad extensions do not show unless your ad has achieved a high enough Ad Rank. This allows your ad to appear high enough up on the Google search results page. You earn this spot by making sure that your keywords have a high quality score. And, you are bidding enough per click to be competitive for the first two spots on the page. We’re going to cover each of the ad extension types here, and briefly discuss how to use them.

Ad extensions are available at no additional charge beyond your cost per click. So, you may as well take advantage of them. Google is not providing these tools out of charity, of course. The more successful your pay-per-click (PPC) ad is, the more money Google makes.

Google Ad Extensions

Site Links Extension

Site Links Extensions are designed to provide additional relevant links to your website beyond the one associated with the ad. One of our clients uses Site Links to point to catalogue and product support pages. This is one of the extensions you can take advantage of, But, only if you have a high quality score and appear in the first two ad spots on the search results page. Site Links show additional resources from your website, which increases click through significantly because the user may be looking for a variety of things. Furthermore, Site Links help you to showcase more of your offerings.

Figure 1: Example of Site Links Extension

Source: Google

Location Extensions

Location Extensions are designed to boost the effectiveness of local search. This is done by tying your ad to Google Maps, making your ads more relevant to the local searcher. Type in your retail locations and Google will serve up information on these locations along with the ad when somebody is searching nearby. Location Extensions are effective at driving traffic to local stores. Store location will appear within Google Map searches and help with positioning in locally based searches.

Figure 2: Example of Location Extensions

Source: Google

Call Extensions

Call Extensions allow you to add telephone numbers to your ads on an ad-group-by-ad-group basis, allowing people to call your business directly through the ad (particularly on mobile devices because of the click-to-call function). When you have a live salesperson interacting with your prospect, it makes for a more efficient sales cycle with fewer touches.

Call Extensions also allow you to collect details on length of call, area code of the call, time of day, and which campaign is associated with each call.

App Extensions

App Extensions allow you to promote your mobile app and drive customers to the website, to GooglePlay, or to the App Store for a download (note that this works with Android, but not with the Apple Store). You can use App Extensions to start the app download immediately by taking the purchaser directly to the appropriate page on the App Store or Googleplay, accommodating impulse buys of your new app.

Review Extensions

Review Extensions display reviews with your ad (but not from all sources). The best source of reviews (from Google’s perspective) is from your Google+ page, but many major ecommerce review vendors are also accepted as legitimate sources such as BazaarVoice. (Yelp! doesn’t share reviews with Google, unfortunately.) Additionally, Review Extensions can be powerful because they provide third-party endorsement of your business. Ratings stars can boost click-through.

Callout Extensions

Callout Extensions include additional descriptive text of 25 characters in standard text ads. The Callout Extensions have some restrictions with respect to trademark requirements, depending on the preferences of the trademark owners. For instance, if you sell athletic shoes and you want the callout to say, “Lowest cost Nike shoes,” your ability to use the phrase is gated by Nike’s willingness to allow their trademarked brand to be used in that context. Google enforces by exception. If somebody complains about an ad based on trademark violation, the trademarked word or phrase is removed from the allowable keyword list.

Callout Extensions are great for short-term offers or special promos. You will need to create multiple callouts for a campaign to give Google choices. The more specific the callout, the better. Be concise; two words are better than four. Google gives the example of using “Free shipping” instead of “We offer free shipping.” When composing a Callout Extension, use normal sentence case structure. The descriptions cannot feature excessive hyperbole, all caps, or exclamation points, and cannot duplicate the ad text.

Structured Snippets.

When you activate Structured Snippets, Google will review your site and look for snippets of information that apply to various sections of your site. They automatically generate these along with your ad. You have less control here than over other Ad Extensions. You can turn it off if you don’t like what Google does, but generally Google does a good job of pulling out the key points. Structured Snippets do increase click-through rates, and they also Increase the conversion percentage once prospects arrive at your page.

Figure 3: Example of an Ad with Structured Snippets

Source: Google

Why You Should Take Advantage of Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions help to improve the visibility of your ad in various ways, and you can use more than one extension with every ad, customizing these additional functions to suit the purpose of your campaigns. The extensions often appear above the search results, rather than along the sidebar. If your ad is in competition with another ad and your ad has extensions with it that add to impact and meaningful results for the user, your ad will appear higher than your competitor’s.

Ad Extensions have demonstrated higher click-through rates than ads without extensions, increasing traffic to your site by qualified customers.

Finally, Google Ad Extensions are free. This makes them one of marketing’s rare great opportunities to improve performance without increasing expenses. Who could resist a deal like that?

* * * *

John Thyfault

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, of Beasley Direct & Online Marketing. Contact John at jthyfault@beasleydirect.com.

The post Google Ad Extensions and How To Use Them appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.