Day: June 25, 2021

How to Utilize Chatbots in Tandem With a PPC Campaign

Have you thought about incorporating the AI magic of chatbots with the wide net of a PPC ad campaign? Combining these two strategies can add a boost to your next digital marketing campaign. 

To ensure a successful PPC campaign, you have to start with the end in mind. Where do you want people to go once they’ve seen your ad and shown some interest? Do you want to make a sale or provide information?

You also need to consider what they want to learn about you and how you can help them find all the information they want.

That’s where chatbots come in. 

What Are Chatbots?

Chatbots are a type of artificial intelligence (AI) created to answer customer questions. They’re capable of answering basic or common questions, sending people to pages answering their questions, looking up orders, and more.

You can program your bot to escalate a customer to a real person if needed as well.

Most people think to look for chatbots in the lower right-hand corner of a company’s website. The button may say something like “chat now” or “support,” like the one on Imperfect Foods’ website:

Imperfect Foods chatbot support button

However, you can also set them up on Facebook Messenger and some other social media sites.

Chatbots can become very interactive, depending on the platform and the script. Also, you can check in with them however often you want and follow up with prospects when needed.

Functionalities vary widely, but however you incorporate bots, they can be a powerful, real-time player in your digital marketing strategy, buttressing your PPC campaign with interactivity and deepened brand awareness. 

5 Ways to Use Chatbots During a PPC Campaign

The great thing about adding chatbots to your PPC campaign strategy is the flexibility they bring. No matter your business, sales goals, or individual PPC campaign goals, chatbots can become your right-hand person when you can’t be there for every click-through.

Here are five things they can do to help your customers while freeing you and your team up to focus on the big picture.

1. Answer User FAQs Immediately

We’ve all seen PPC ads, and chances are you’ve clicked on at least one because it intrigued you enough to want to learn more about what was in the content you saw.

Was your curiosity satisfied immediately? Or did you have to dig for the information promised by the ad?

Save your prospective customer the trouble and have a chatbot ready to answer their questions. 

When a user clicks the PPC ad, your chatbot can appear on the page and ask if they have any questions. Through a series of scripts, you can help prospective customers learn more about you and find the products or services they need.

Going back to the Imperfect Foods example, if you’re a first-time visitor, it simply tells you to ask it a question. 

How to Use Chatbots During a PPC Campaign - Answer User FAQs Immediately

However, if you’re a returning user, it knows why you probably clicked on the chat function: You forgot your password.

How to Use Chatbots During a PPC Campaign - Imperfect Foods Example

If that’s not knowing what your audience is going to ask, I don’t know what is.

2. Forge a Connection 

People like to make a connection with real people behind a brand.

A chatbot is, by definition, a bot—not an actual person. However, even when companies tell consumers they’re talking to a bot, something fascinating tends to happen. According to Psychology Today, “When interacting with chatbots, our brain is led to believe that it is chatting with another human being.” 

Further, since they are always there, ready to help, people can feel a real personal connection with them. (So, be sure to program your bot’s voice to fit in with your brand story!)

This can improve brand awareness and encourage people to continue that connection by following you on social media or coming back to your website when they need your products or services. 

It could also help with immediate sales. Getting emotions involved in your marketing can improve your leads and conversions. 

People like feeling supported. When they come to your website and don’t have to poke around to get their questions answered and find the resources they’re looking for, they’re likely to feel better about the experience. 

3. Direct Users to the Right Landing Pages, Product Pages, or Resources

As you create your PPC campaign, the reality is you can’t guess what every person is shopping for. While you should create a targeted landing page or ensure your PPC ads take users to the right place, sometimes miscommunications between customer intent and where they land can occur.

How can you keep users from landing on your page, then immediately bouncing if they don’t see exactly what they need?

A chatbot can showcase your entire inventory or website content from any page your customer lands on.

You can use them to ask users what they’re looking for and direct them to the corresponding page or resource.

4. Learn More About Your Target Audience

PPC ad campaigns only tell you so much about who is clicking. You can gather specific metrics from analytics, but those are often demographic stats from which you would have to deduce motivations or needs.

What is your target market looking for? How can you help meet them where they are?

Why not use a chatbot to actually ask them?

In an on-brand tone, you could have your chatbot pop up with a specific question to start a conversation.

Even if a customer chooses not to buy or comes back later, that chatbot conversation can help you uncover valuable information about your target market.

As the PPC campaign continues, you can look for patterns. 

For example, HubSpot uses chatbots on their pages to ask the user what they want to do next. HubSpot employees can review those conversations later to learn about what their viewers are looking for.

hubspot chatbot builder example

5. Improve Brand Awareness

Whether your PPC campaign is introducing potential customers to your brand for the first time, debuting a new product or service, or keeping your brand at the forefront of your target market’s mind, chatbot integration can help to improve your brand awareness. 

From the first pop-up welcome or introduction message to the answers to questions, chatbots can be designed to show brand personality.

This can be as simple as just using vernacular specific to your brand and how your customers talk. If your brand is casual, perhaps a chat could start with “Howdy!” If your voice is more formal, something like “How may I assist you today?” could be more appropriate.

You can also incorporate any characters or mascots you use in your branding to be the “face” of the chatbot. Generally, people logically know they aren’t talking to a real person and are okay with that. However, it’s much more fun and feels more personal if they get to talk to a character associated with your company, thereby potentially improving their experience with your brand.

Evaluating the Success of Your PPC Chatbot Strategy

Before you can dive into the metrics and measure whether your chatbot PPC campaign is working, you need to define success for yourself. What are you trying to accomplish with this campaign?

Success metrics could include:

  • higher sales of a particular product or service
  • more visitors to your website
  • an increase in followers on a social media platform
  • additional sign-ups for your newsletter
  • heightened awareness of your brand offerings

When you know what defines success for this campaign, you can look at the right metrics to understand what’s working and what you can improve upon. 

With the PPC campaign as a whole, one of the primary data points you can look at is click-throughs. 

With chatbots, though, there is an added component: Interaction. The conversations between chatbots and users allow you to answer questions like:

  • How often are people using your chatbot? 
  • How long are the interactions?
  • What sorts of things are users searching for?
  • Which conversations turn into conversions?

The information you learn from your chatbots in your PPC campaign can help you:

  • optimize campaigns for what buyers want based on common queries
  • create content reflecting what buyers ask
  • update inventory based on what buyers are looking for

Here are two examples of how Chatfuel shares its chatbot metrics. Users can explore engagement through these dashboards. Most chatbot platforms have similar metric dashboards.  

Evaluating the Success of Your PPC Chatbot Strategy

Chatbots for PPC Campaigns FAQs

How do I get people to use my chatbot?

Your chatbot on your PPC campaign’s landing page needs to be obvious, popping up soon after a user clicks your link. To encourage interaction, program your chatbot to welcome the user and ask them a question.

What is the best chatbot platform?

The best chatbot platform for PPC campaigns is one you can seamlessly integrate onto the landing page where people click to. This varies by your needs, but HubSpot’s Chatbot Builder, ManyChat, and Chatfuel may be worth checking out.

How expensive is it to set up a chatbot?

Chatbot pricing depends on the provider and features you choose. Many offer free trials or a free basic level, with prices going up after your trial or as you add additional options.

How can I make my chatbot interesting?

Give your chatbots a personality in line with your brand. Make the bot feel like a real person, even if you’re upfront about being a bot, so the user feels connected to your brand. The bot should introduce itself, ask questions, and provide relevant information to customers as they interact. 

Chatbots Conclusion

Using chatbots in tandem with PPC campaigns can make your prospective customers feel “seen,” help them learn more about your brand, and potentially increase conversions thanks to the help they give.

Setting up a chatbot on the landing page of your PPC campaign can put your brand’s features, options, benefits, and customizations at your customers’ fingertips from the get-go.

The chatbots your PPC campaigns introduce users to can also teach you more about what your customers want. Then, you can use that data to create future digital marketing campaigns specific to their needs. 

How are you going to incorporate chatbots into your next PPC campaign?

12 Useful Open Graph Meta Tag Types for Facebook and Twitter

What You Need to Know About Open Graph Meta Tags for Total Facebook and Twitter Mastery

Marketers create a lot of content. Yes, content is king, but that king is powerless without followers.

So, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you want to reach a broader audience with your awesome new blog post?

Sharing on social media, of course. The massive audiences of sites like Facebook and Twitter make them some of the best sharing, but do you know how to optimize that outreach potential?

Open graph meta tags were designed to do just that. But what are they, why do they matter, and — most importantly — how do you use them?

What Is Open Graph and Why Was It Created?

Facebook introduced Open Graph in 2010 to promote integration between Facebook and other websites by allowing posts to become rich objects with the same functionality as other Facebook objects.

Put simply, it helps optimize Facebook posts by providing more control over how information travels from a third-party website to Facebook when a page is shared (or liked, etc.).

To make this possible, information is sent via Open Graph meta tags in the <head> part of the website’s code.

Now, other social media sites also are taking advantage of social meta tags.

Several other major platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

Why Marketers Should Care About Open Graph

Social media sites are the major drivers of most of the web’s traffic. Consequently, the ability to harness the power of social meta tags is a vital skill for today’s marketers.

Most importantly: open graph meta tags can have a massive impact on conversions and click-through rates.

Have you ever shared a link on Facebook only to find that the thumbnail was missing, or there was a totally different picture than you expected?

Knowing just a little about Open Graph tags can help you tackle these problems and improve your social media marketing.

Adding Open Graph tags to your website won’t directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media, so that means it’s worth looking into. Let’s take a look at the most important meta tags for Facebook and how to optimize them for better sharing.

Understanding Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags

Facebook has several open graph meta tag types. Let’s cover the different types, then I’ll cover how to use them.

Facebook HTML Tags open graph meta tags guide

og:title

As you might guess, this is how you define your content’s title. It serves a similar purpose as the traditional meta title tag in your code. In fact, if Facebook doesn’t find the og:title tag on your page, it uses the meta title instead.

Keep in mind that the text shown on a Facebook feed is in bold and extremely eye-catching. It must be compelling, just like a good post title.

There is no limit on the number of characters, but it’s best to stay between 60 and 90. If your title is longer than 100 characters, Facebook will truncate it to only 88!

Example:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Your eye-catching title here” />

og:url

This is how you set the canonical URL for the page you are sharing. What this means is that you define one page that all your shares will go to. It’s useful if you happen to have more than one URL for the same content (for example, using parameters). Important note: URL provided is not shown on Facebook newsfeed, only domain is visible.

Example:

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.yourdomain.com” />

og:type

This is how you describe the kind of object you are sharing: blog post, video, picture, or whatever. The list to choose from is long. Here are some examples:

Web based:

  • website
  • article
  • blog

Entertainment:

  • book
  • game
  • movie
  • food

Place:

  • city
  • country

People:

  • actor
  • author
  • politician

Business:

  • company
  • hotel
  • restaurant

You can see the full list of types here.

This tag is important if your page has a “Like” button and represents a real-life object (like a book or a movie). It determines if your content will appear in a user’s interest section of her profile in the event she “Likes” it.

In most cases, you will use the “website” value, since what you are sharing is a link to a website. In fact, if you don’t define a type, Facebook will read it as “website” by default.

Example:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />

og:description

This meta data descriptor is very similar to the meta description tag in HTML. This is where you describe your content, but instead of it showing on a search engine results page, it shows below the link title on Facebook.

Unlike a regular meta description tag, it won’t affect your SEO. (So, don’t spend too much time figuring out how to sneak in keywords.) However, it’s a good idea to make it compelling because you want people to click on it.

You are not limited to a character count, but it’s best to use around 200 letters. In some cases, depending on a link/title/domain, Facebook can display up to 300 characters, but I suggest treating anything above 200 as something extra.

Example:

<meta property=”og:description” content=”Your entertaining and descriptive copy here, if your meta description is good, use it.” />

og:image

This is the most interesting Open Graph tag for many marketers because a picture always helps content stand out. This is how you ensure that a particular thumbnail will be shown when your page is shared. It can be very helpful for your conversion rates.

Make sure you set the og:image you choose, otherwise Facebook will show something stupid like an unwanted ad banner scraped from the page, or nothing at all (as below). We definitely don’t want that!

FB no thumbnail open graph meta tags

It’s important to remember that if your page is static and you don’t use any sort of content management system (CMS) (like WordPress), you need to change the og:image manually for each of your pages.

If your website is controlled with a CMS and you installed the relevant plugin, the og:image tags are assigned automatically for each page. Look for the list of plugins further down.

The most frequently recommended resolution for an OG image is 1200 pixels x 627 pixels (1.91/1 ratio). At this size, your thumbnail will be big and stand out from the crowd. Just don’t exceed the 5MB size limit.

FB my full open graph meta tag example

If you use an image that is smaller than 400 pixels x 209 pixels, it will render as a much smaller thumbnail. It’s nowhere nearly as eye-catching.

FB little thumbnail for open graph meta tags

Keep in mind that the picture you use as an Open Graph image can be different from what you have on your page.

Why wouldn’t you leverage that opportunity to stand out even more?

For example, if your title is good, but the picture you are using is not very exciting (not an infographic or a good-looking person, etc.), consider using an image with a good line or two of copy instead (see example below).

One thing you need to remember if you do this: lace your text, or the most significant part of it, in the middle of the image. This matters because Facebook trims the sides of thumbnails.

FB thumbnail centred with text open graph meta tag

Example:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.yourdomain.com/image-name.jpg” />

Advanced Facebook Open Graph Tags

The Open Graph tags above are the ones you really need to know (og:description not so much, but it is useful). There are other, more advanced, tags you can use to provide even more in-depth specifications.

  • og:locale – defines the language, American English is the default
  • og:site_name – if the page (object) you are sharing is part of a larger network
  • og:audio or og:video – to add additional audio or video files to your object
  • fb:app_id – for linking to a Facebook application (e.g., FB Comments) with the object

Check Your Open Graph Tags

To make life easier, Facebook has created a tool called Sharing Debugger. It has two very helpful functionalities.

First, when you type in the link you want to check, it returns any errors and suggestions for OG tags, if there are any. You also can check what the og:image looks like, what your description is, and so on.

Second, it clears the Facebook cache. Imagine this: you post a link to Facebook, but then you see a mistake in the thumbnail, so you go back to your site and adjust the OG tags, and you post it again on Facebook.

Probably, nothing will happen. The thumbnail will stay the same. This is because of the cache. The Facebook Sharing Debugger will refresh the cache on your links after any adjustments, so remember to use it each time.

Facebook Object Debugger open graph meta tags

Open Graph Meta Tags for Twitter: Twitter Cards

Like Facebook’s Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards let you stand out from the crowd of tweets. They allow some additional content to be generated from your 140-character tweet.

This doesn’t show up on people’s feeds automatically, but it adds a little “View summary” button below the tweet.

Evolero 2 twitter open graph meta tag examples

When you click it:

Twitter Card Tags open graph meta tags example
Twitter Card Tags open graph meta tags example

It’s a tempting thing to click and provides a handy summary of the shared page—the Twitter Card. Surprisingly, not many sites take advantage of these tags. This is a big opportunity to make your tweets stand out in crowded Twitter feeds.

The best way to get them is to install one of the WordPress plugins. WordPress SEO by Yoast, mentioned above, does the job. If that’s not an option, ask your web developer and give him the ready-to-implement Twitter Card tags. Here’s how you’ll make them.

twitter:card

This required tag works in a similar way to og:type. It describes the type of content you are sharing. There are 7 options to choose from: summary, photo, video, product, app, gallery, and “large version” summary.

Depending on the type of content you choose, the link at the bottom of your tweet changes. You can get “View summary” for summaries, “View photo” for photos, etc. If this tag is not set, Twitter reads your link as a “Summary” by default.

Example:

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary” />

twitter:title

This basically does the same thing as its OG counterpart. You specify the title for your article that will show up in bold. It’s smart to avoid repeating the same text you have in your tweet. Make the most of the space provided and let the two pieces of copy play on each other to reinforce the message. Use up to 70 characters.

Example:

<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Your title here” />

twitter:description

Use this tag to write a descriptive lead to the page you are sharing. As with Open Graph tags, don’t focus on keywords because they won’t matter for your SEO. Create compelling copy that nicely complements your tweet and the title. Twitter limits this part to 200 characters.

Example:

<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Your 200-character description here” />

twitter:url

This sets the canonical URL for the content you are sharing. (For more information, review the description for the equivalent Facebook Open Graph tag above.)

Example:

<meta name=”twitter:url” content=”http://www.yourdomain.com” />

twitter:image

Yes, you guessed it. This is how you set the picture to go with your tweet. Twitter allows two options, a card with a smaller or a larger picture.

You decide which one you want in the type tag. If you go for the large option, make sure it has a resolution of at least 280x150px and that the file size is not more than 1MB. You can consider using the same trick as with the Facebook thumbnail: add some text to the image to boost the message.

Example:

<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.yourdomain.com /image-name.jpg” />

Request Approval from Twitter

Keep in mind that, before you can fully benefit from Twitter Cards, you need to request approval for your page from Twitter. Fortunately, this doesn’t take much time and can be done easily using their Card Validator. Once you get approval, Card Validator serves exactly the same purpose as the Facebook Sharing Debugger, allowing you to check your links before you commit.

Twitter Card Plugins

Just like with Facebook, there are plenty of plugins available for implementing Twitter Cards. Here are a few:

How to Implement Open Graph Meta Tags

How do you implement OG tags? Basically, they belong to the <head> part of your page’s HTML. If you don’t manage the code, you’ll need to ask your web developer for help. You can prepare the whole package yourself using the tips above to save his valuable time.

If you are using WordPress, just install one of the plugins that neatly implements the code for you. I like to use WordPress SEO by Yoast, but there is an official Facebook Plugin and others to choose from.

Wordpress SEO by Yoast for open graph meta tags

Here are other OG plugins/extensions/add-ons for:

Open Graph Meta Tags Conclusion

The final code for both Facebook and Twitter should look more-or-less like this:

final code screen open graph meta tags conclusion

It might seem a bit confusing, but luckily there are several tools that make the process easier — you don’t need to know how to code.

It’s surprising how few people optimize these tags. It’s worth doing because it helps you stand out and draw more clicks and views, and it can even help improve your SEO —all things that lead to more profit.

Have you implemented open graph meta tags? How has it impacted your site?

Deepnote (YC S19) is hiring to build a better data science notebook

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Paperspace (YC W15) is hiring engineers to build a modern MLOps platform

Article URL: https://www.paperspace.com/careers

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