Cornell University police and the FBI are investigating a series of threats made against the New York school’s Jewish community. The threats were posted to a website not affiliated with the university and targeted “104 West,” where the Center of Jewish Living is located on campus. One of the threats called for people to follow … Continue reading Cornell University Jewish community threatened in online posts; police, FBI investigate
Tag: online
Russia claims Putin targeted in drone assassination attempt, as videos circulate online
Russian government officials are claiming Ukrainian forces attempted to kill President Vladimir Putin with a failed drone attack.
Officials say two drones were used in the “assassination attempt” at the president’s residence within the Kremlin compound, but were disabled by Russian defense systems.
No injuries or damage to the residence was reported. Putin was seen in video and photos released Wednesday meeting with a regional governor outside Moscow.
The Kremlin called the incident a “terrorist action” and threatened retaliation.
“The Kremlin has assessed these actions as a planned terrorist act and an assassination attempt on the president on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 Parade,” RIA said.
Videos circulating online appeared to show a drone being shot down over the Kremlin, and smoke rising in Moscow.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
How to Generate More Leads Through Your Online Marketing Campaigns
Are you happy with the number of leads your marketing campaigns are generating? Or, do you wish they were a bit more effective?
If you’re serious about growing your business—whether it’s a B2B company, an e-commerce store, or a startup—increasing the number of leads should be a top priority. Setting up online campaigns is a good start, but it’s not enough. You need to optimize those marketing campaigns to squeeze every last lead from your funnel.
Are you ready to get to work? Here are seven strategies to generate leads like never before.
Why Are Leads so Crucial to Business Growth?
Two of marketers’ top priorities are generating leads and converting those leads to customers. Only increasing customer satisfaction comes close to the importance of getting new leads.
It’s no surprise that lead generation is a top priority. Without a continuous flow of new leads, sales dry up. Without sales, there’s no revenue. And without revenue, your business folds.
What’s more, most people who land on your site won’t purchase right away. You need to constantly collect leads so you can nurture them and convert them into buyers in the future.
Not just any leads will do, however. Referrals, conferences, and cold calling are all great lead generation strategies, but they aren’t enough. You also need to learn how to generate more leads from your online campaigns.
Why are advertising leads better? Using targeting you can gather better leads faster and even automate parts of the process. How do you make sure your ads are driving quality leads?
How to Generate Leads Online: 7 Strategies to Drive More Leads
If you aren’t sure how to create a lead generation campaign, I have previous articles to walk you through the process. What I’m going to do is show you how to generate leads online by improving your existing ad campaigns.
Optimize Your Landing Page
Your landing page (or squeeze page) is one of the most important elements of your online lead generation campaign. The goal is to leave the visitor with no choice but to hand over information in exchange for something valuable.
Landing pages convert better than most other ads or offers. The average conversion rate is 2.35 percent, but some have conversion rates in excess of 10 percent. If your landing page’s conversion rate isn’t pushing double digits, you should look to optimize one or more elements ASAP.
I recommend looking at your page’s copy, including its headline, first. Make sure your copy is short, sharp, and engaging. Users need to understand exactly what your product is and how it helps them within a few seconds of landing on your site. Make sure you focus on the benefits of your product to the user, not its features.
Spend more time tweaking and testing your headline than anything else. This will be the first thing a user reads and one of the biggest deciding factors in whether they continue browsing the rest of the page.
You can speed up a user’s understanding of your product by including a video on your landing page. A good chunk of your audience would rather watch a video than read your copy, which is why 76 percent of sales teams say video is key to securing more deals.
Finally, remove all distractions from your page. The layout should be as simple as possible and there’s no need for a navigation bar or links to any other pages on your site. This leaves the user with two options: close their browser window or sign up.
ConvertKit’s Creator Pass is a fantastic example of how to create a great landing page. There’s no headline navigation, the headline copy offers a clear benefit, and there’s an enticing call to action right in front of you.
Offer Real Value
Arguably the most important part of your landing page isn’t the copy, image, or CTA. It’s the piece of content, tool, or resource you offer in return for each lead’s email address.
For most brands, gated content takes the form of a PDF download, something like an ebook or a whitepaper. But it doesn’t have to be. Case studies, surveys, webinars and video series are all excellent types of gated content.
Whatever form your gated content takes, it must deliver tremendous value. Otherwise leads will leave your funnel as quickly as they entered. How do you deliver value? By solving a problem your leads have. What are their pain points? Where do they get stuck? What expertise can you leverage to make their lives a little bit easier?
Delivering value also means presenting gated content in the best way possible. Make it visually appealing, with images, videos, and other forms of multimedia content. The nicer it is for your leads to consume, the more they’ll engage with it.
Here’s an example of a non-ebook lead magnet from Leadpages:
They know their leads often struggle to create high converting pages, so they created a training course to solve that issue.
Use Automation to Nurture Leads
Collecting leads is just the first step of the process; you also need to nurture them. Only two percent of sales are made at first contact, yet most salespeople give up after the first attempt. If you automate the follow-up process, you don’t have to worry about a thing.
I recommend using email to nurture when possible. It is a great way to drip feed messages to your leads, it also generates massive ROI. According to research by the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI of email marketing is £42 for every £1 spent.
If you don’t have an email automation platform yet, check out my review of the best solutions. Then integrate your landing page’s form so every email is automatically added to your mailing list.
Next, create an automated series of emails that is sent out at regular intervals. Your goal is to take leads through each stage of the buying process—and that means providing them with the right educational content at the right time. Start by educating them about your wider industry and their general problems. A couple of emails later, you can start to focus on your product and service and how you can help.
The more emails you send, the more you can make your product the hero of the email, and the more direct you can be with the lead.
Use Chatbots to Turn Conversations Into High-Quality Leads
Your salespeople aren’t the only ones who can nurture leads. Chatbots can automate almost every part of the lead generation process. They’re incredibly effective at it, too. Over half of businesses that use AI-powered chatbots generate better quality leads.
Start by replacing forms on your landing page with a chat bot. Forms can be long-winded and rarely offer a great user experience. Chatbots make it easier for prospects to fill out their details. In some cases, users may not even be aware they’re filling out a lead form.
You can also use chatbots to respond to leads at lightning speed. Response time matters in lead generation. A study by Harvard Business Review shows businesses that respond to leads in under five minutes are 100 times more likely to convert them. With chatbots, you can automate the response process and send a message as soon as a lead fills out a form.
Finally, use chatbots to nurture and qualify leads. Chatbots can ask the same qualifying question as your salespeople to separate the wheat from the chaff. The best can be sent directly to sales, while everyone else is added to a nurturing sequence.
Drift’s chatbot is an excellent example of this. It asks a qualifying question as soon as someone lands on the site, putting them straight through to a sales rep if they’re ready.
Use Multi-Platform Campaigns
How many platforms are you using to advertise your landing page and gated content? You probably aren’t using enough.
Today’s customer journey is long. Most don’t convert to customers the first time they land on your site. The majority probably won’t sign up on your landing page, either. A recent Google study found it takes between 20 and 500 touchpoints to become a customer.
The solution is a multi-touch campaign, where your message is delivered in multiple formats across multiple channels.
Advertising on a range of channels maximizes the chances that potential customers will see and click your ad. It’s a numbers game at the end of the day. The more shots you take, the more chances you have to score.
Leverage Personalization
If you want an easy way to increase conversion rates at every stage of your online lead generation campaign, try personalization. In a survey of B2B sales and marketing professionals, over three-quarters (77 percent) said personalization made for better customer relationships, and over half (55 percent) said personalization led to higher sales conversions.
How can you add personalization into your funnels to generate leads?
Start by personalizing your ads. While Apple may have made creating hyper-personalized ads a lot harder, Google still makes it relatively easy to personalize paid search ads with dynamic ads.
Next, personalize your landing page, particularly the call to action. Research shows personalized CTAs achieve 202 percent better conversions. Marketing tools like HubSpot and Unbounce can help you create dynamic CTAs that change depending on who views them. But you could also go old school and create several different versions of your page for each ad group and personalize the copy accordingly.
Finally, build personalization into your email automation tool. Every major email marketing tool makes it easy to automatically insert the recipient’s name into the subject line and body copy, so there’s absolutely no excuse not to personalize your nurturing emails.
Target Your Ads Carefully
There’s no point wasting resources nurturing leads who will never buy your product. That’s why you need to target your lead generation ads carefully.
I’ve written extensively about how to find your target audience and identify target markets for paid campaigns, so I’m not going to cover old ground here.
I will say it’s important not to be too hasty when judging the performance of your landing page ads. When pruning and optimizing ad campaigns, don’t just judge performance based on how many people they send to your landing page that sign up. That’s a good measure, but it’s not as important as how many people actually convert into customers.
Think about it. One ad campaign could have a ridiculously high signup conversion rate of 20 percent. But if only a tiny fraction of those people make a purchase, it’s not a particularly effective ad. An ad campaign with a much lower signup conversion rate could be far more effective at generating high-quality leads.
Of course, this means you’re going to have to wait longer to collect relevant data. But the end result should be a much more targeted and effective ad campaign.
The best way to target ads effectively? Target keywords with higher buyer intent. These are search terms that indicate the user is closer to conversion.
Frequently Asked Questions About Generating More Leads
How do you build a lead generation campaign?
Start by having an objective and defining your target audience. Create a valuable piece of gated content and drive traffic to it using paid ads. Collect emails and then use email to nurture those leads.
What is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign?
A gated whitepaper is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign. Webinars can also be used as a lead generation marketing campaign to acquire leads and nurture them using video
How do I optimize my lead generation campaign?
There are several strategies to optimize lead generation campaigns. Improve your landing page copy, put your emails on autopilot, use chatbots to speed up response time, and personalize messaging.
Where should I advertise for my lead gen campaign?
Social media platforms are one of the most cost-effective places to advertise your lead generation campaign. But the important thing is to advertise wherever your target audience hangs out online.
Conclusion: Generate More Leads to Improve Marketing ROI
Improving your online marketing campaigns and optimizing how you generate leads are the keys to growing your business. But you don’t have to use all of the strategies I’ve listed all at once.
Optimizing your campaigns should be an ongoing endeavor, so pick one or two of these strategies to implement at a time. Pretty soon you’ll send your ROI skyrocketing.
Now you know how to generate leads online, which strategy will you start with first?
How to Generate More Leads Through Your Online Marketing Campaigns
Are you happy with the number of leads your marketing campaigns are generating? Or, do you wish they were a bit more effective?
If you’re serious about growing your business—whether it’s a B2B company, an e-commerce store, or a startup—increasing the number of leads should be a top priority. Setting up online campaigns is a good start, but it’s not enough. You need to optimize those marketing campaigns to squeeze every last lead from your funnel.
Are you ready to get to work? Here are seven strategies to generate leads like never before.
Why Are Leads so Crucial to Business Growth?
Two of marketers’ top priorities are generating leads and converting those leads to customers. Only increasing customer satisfaction comes close to the importance of getting new leads.
It’s no surprise that lead generation is a top priority. Without a continuous flow of new leads, sales dry up. Without sales, there’s no revenue. And without revenue, your business folds.
What’s more, most people who land on your site won’t purchase right away. You need to constantly collect leads so you can nurture them and convert them into buyers in the future.
Not just any leads will do, however. Referrals, conferences, and cold calling are all great lead generation strategies, but they aren’t enough. You also need to learn how to generate more leads from your online campaigns.
Why are advertising leads better? Using targeting you can gather better leads faster and even automate parts of the process. How do you make sure your ads are driving quality leads?
How to Generate Leads Online: 7 Strategies to Drive More Leads
If you aren’t sure how to create a lead generation campaign, I have previous articles to walk you through the process. What I’m going to do is show you how to generate leads online by improving your existing ad campaigns.
Optimize Your Landing Page
Your landing page (or squeeze page) is one of the most important elements of your online lead generation campaign. The goal is to leave the visitor with no choice but to hand over information in exchange for something valuable.
Landing pages convert better than most other ads or offers. The average conversion rate is 2.35 percent, but some have conversion rates in excess of 10 percent. If your landing page’s conversion rate isn’t pushing double digits, you should look to optimize one or more elements ASAP.
I recommend looking at your page’s copy, including its headline, first. Make sure your copy is short, sharp, and engaging. Users need to understand exactly what your product is and how it helps them within a few seconds of landing on your site. Make sure you focus on the benefits of your product to the user, not its features.
Spend more time tweaking and testing your headline than anything else. This will be the first thing a user reads and one of the biggest deciding factors in whether they continue browsing the rest of the page.
You can speed up a user’s understanding of your product by including a video on your landing page. A good chunk of your audience would rather watch a video than read your copy, which is why 76 percent of sales teams say video is key to securing more deals.
Finally, remove all distractions from your page. The layout should be as simple as possible and there’s no need for a navigation bar or links to any other pages on your site. This leaves the user with two options: close their browser window or sign up.
ConvertKit’s Creator Pass is a fantastic example of how to create a great landing page. There’s no headline navigation, the headline copy offers a clear benefit, and there’s an enticing call to action right in front of you.
Offer Real Value
Arguably the most important part of your landing page isn’t the copy, image, or CTA. It’s the piece of content, tool, or resource you offer in return for each lead’s email address.
For most brands, gated content takes the form of a PDF download, something like an ebook or a whitepaper. But it doesn’t have to be. Case studies, surveys, webinars, and video series are all excellent types of gated content.
Whatever form your gated content takes, it must deliver tremendous value. Otherwise leads will leave your funnel as quickly as they entered. How do you deliver value? By solving a problem your leads have. What are their pain points? Where do they get stuck? What expertise can you leverage to make their lives a little bit easier?
Delivering value also means presenting gated content in the best way possible. Make it visually appealing, with images, videos, and other forms of multimedia content. The nicer it is for your leads to consume, the more they’ll engage with it.
Here’s an example of a non-ebook lead magnet from Leadpages:
They know their leads often struggle to create high converting pages, so they created a training course to solve that issue.
Use Automation to Nurture Leads
Collecting leads is just the first step of the process; you also need to nurture them. Only two percent of sales are made at first contact, yet most salespeople give up after the first attempt. If you automate the follow-up process, you don’t have to worry about a thing.
I recommend using email to nurture when possible. It is a great way to drip feed messages to your leads, it also generates massive ROI. According to research by the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI of email marketing is £42 for every £1 spent.
If you don’t have an email automation platform yet, check out my review of the best solutions. Then integrate your landing page’s form so every email is automatically added to your mailing list.
Next, create an automated series of emails that is sent out at regular intervals. Your goal is to take leads through each stage of the buying process—and that means providing them with the right educational content at the right time. Start by educating them about your wider industry and their general problems. A couple of emails later, you can start to focus on your product and service and how you can help.
The more emails you send, the more you can make your product the hero of the email, and the more direct you can be with the lead.
Use Chatbots to Turn Conversations Into High-Quality Leads
Your salespeople aren’t the only ones who can nurture leads. Chatbots can automate almost every part of the lead generation process. They’re incredibly effective at it, too. Over half of businesses that use AI-powered chatbots generate better quality leads.
Start by replacing forms on your landing page with a chatbot. Forms can be long-winded and rarely offer a great user experience. Chatbots make it easier for prospects to fill out their details. In some cases, users may not even be aware they’re filling out a lead form.
You can also use chatbots to respond to leads at lightning speed. Response time matters in lead generation. A study by Harvard Business Review shows businesses that respond to leads in under five minutes are 100 times more likely to convert them. With chatbots, you can automate the response process and send a message as soon as a lead fills out a form.
Finally, use chatbots to nurture and qualify leads. Chatbots can ask the same qualifying question as your salespeople to separate the wheat from the chaff. The best can be sent directly to sales, while everyone else is added to a nurturing sequence.
Drift’s chatbot is an excellent example of this. It asks a qualifying question as soon as someone lands on the site, putting them straight through to a sales rep if they’re ready.
Use Multi-Platform Campaigns
How many platforms are you using to advertise your landing page and gated content? You probably aren’t using enough.
Today’s customer journey is long. Most don’t convert to customers the first time they land on your site. The majority probably won’t sign up on your landing page, either. A recent Google study found it takes between 20 and 500 touchpoints to become a customer.
The solution is a multi-touch campaign, where your message is delivered in multiple formats across multiple channels.
Advertising on a range of channels maximizes the chances that potential customers will see and click your ad. It’s a numbers game at the end of the day. The more shots you take, the more chances you have to score.
Leverage Personalization
If you want an easy way to increase conversion rates at every stage of your online lead generation campaign, try personalization. In a survey of B2B sales and marketing professionals, over three-quarters (77 percent) said personalization made for better customer relationships, and over half (55 percent) said personalization led to higher sales conversions.
How can you add personalization into your funnels to generate leads?
Start by personalizing your ads. While Apple may have made creating hyper-personalized ads a lot harder, Google still makes it relatively easy to personalize paid search ads with dynamic ads.
Next, personalize your landing page, particularly the call to action. Research shows personalized CTAs achieve 202 percent better conversions. Marketing tools like HubSpot and Unbounce can help you create dynamic CTAs that change depending on who views them. But you could also go old school and create several different versions of your page for each ad group and personalize the copy accordingly.
Finally, build personalization into your email automation tool. Every major email marketing tool makes it easy to automatically insert the recipient’s name into the subject line and body copy, so there’s absolutely no excuse not to personalize your nurturing emails.
Target Your Ads Carefully
There’s no point wasting resources nurturing leads who will never buy your product. That’s why you need to target your lead generation ads carefully.
I’ve written extensively about how to find your target audience and identify target markets for paid campaigns, so I’m not going to cover old ground here.
I will say it’s important not to be too hasty when judging the performance of your landing page ads. When pruning and optimizing ad campaigns, don’t just judge performance based on how many people they send to your landing page that sign up. That’s a good measure, but it’s not as important as how many people actually convert into customers.
Think about it. One ad campaign could have a ridiculously high signup conversion rate of 20 percent. But if only a tiny fraction of those people make a purchase, it’s not a particularly effective ad. An ad campaign with a much lower signup conversion rate could be far more effective at generating high-quality leads.
Of course, this means you’re going to have to wait longer to collect relevant data. But the end result should be a much more targeted and effective ad campaign.
The best way to target ads effectively? Target keywords with higher buyer intent. These are search terms that indicate the user is closer to conversion.
Frequently Asked Questions About Generating More Leads
How do you build a lead generation campaign?
Start by having an objective and defining your target audience. Create a valuable piece of gated content and drive traffic to it using paid ads. Collect emails and then use email to nurture those leads.
What is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign?
A gated whitepaper is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign. Webinars can also be used as a lead generation marketing campaign to acquire leads and nurture them using video
How do I optimize my lead generation campaign?
There are several strategies to optimize lead generation campaigns. Improve your landing page copy, put your emails on autopilot, use chatbots to speed up response time, and personalize messaging.
Where should I advertise for my lead gen campaign?
Social media platforms are one of the most cost-effective places to advertise your lead generation campaign. But the important thing is to advertise wherever your target audience hangs out online.
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “FAQPage”,
“mainEntity”: [
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “How do you build a lead generation campaign?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
Start by having an objective and defining your target audience. Create a valuable piece of gated content and drive traffic to it using paid ads. Collect emails and then use email to nurture those leads.
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
A gated whitepaper is an example of a lead generation marketing campaign. Webinars can also be used as a lead generation marketing campaign to acquire leads and nurture them using video
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “How do I optimize my lead generation campaign?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
There are several strategies to optimize lead generation campaigns. Improve your landing page copy, put your emails on autopilot, use chatbots to speed up response time, and personalize messaging.
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: ” Where should I advertise for my lead gen campaign?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
Social media platforms are one of the most cost-effective places to advertise your lead generation campaign. But the important thing is to advertise wherever your target audience hangs out online.
”
}
}
]
}
Social media platforms are one of the most cost-effective places to advertise your lead generation campaign. But the important thing is to advertise wherever your target audience hangs out online.
Conclusion: Generate More Leads to Improve Marketing ROI
Improving your online marketing campaigns and optimizing how you generate leads are the keys to growing your business. But you don’t have to use all of the strategies I’ve listed all at once.
Optimizing your campaigns should be an ongoing endeavor, so pick one or two of these strategies to implement at a time. Pretty soon you’ll send your ROI skyrocketing.
Now you know how to generate leads online, which strategy will you start with first?
How to Track the ROI of Your Online Advertising Campaigns
You just started a new AdWords campaign.
You’re trying to drive some easy, instant sales to your site.
But you quickly realize that you have no idea how to tell if those visitors are converting. No clue if you’re wasting your hard-earned budget without a return.
You’re not alone.
76% of marketers are still struggling to track the ROI of their campaigns.
Even worse is when marketers think they’re tracking the effectiveness of their campaigns, but they’re doing it in the wrong way.
So it looks and seems and feels like they’re on the right track. All while budgets get squandered, and results continue to lag.
Here’s how to get started tracking your return on online advertising campaigns.
Outline What a “Conversion” is For Your Campaign
Conversion tracking can be complex.
It’s not cut-and-dry like most people think.
The first step to tracking the return on investment for an online advertising campaign is to outline what your campaign goals are.
Are you trying to build brand awareness? Are you trying to drive e-commerce sales? Consultations? Free trials?
Depending on your goals, conversion tracking will be vastly different.
For example, a conversion for e-commerce sales is quantifiable without much extra effort.
You can tell exactly what someone bought and how much you spent to acquire that customer via ads.
But what about consultations or free trials?
When AdWords shows a conversion for your campaign, it’s not a sale.
Meaning you aren’t getting a return on investment just yet. Your bank account isn’t increasing when someone signs up for a consultation.
So those conversions don’t tell the whole story.
If you’re not tracking something quantifiable, such as items sold or likes generated to your Facebook Page, then you need to start with some basic math.
If you are trying to get consultations (or other similar conversions) that don’t have a dollar amount to tie back to, you can set up a basic equation to give them value:
(Average Closed Lead Value X Rate of Lead Close) = Per Lead Value
This simple equation will give you insight into how much a lead is worth in your business, making it easier to tie back ROI to your conversions.
Set up Google AdWords Tracking
Setting up Google AdWords conversion tracking correctly is critical for measuring your ad ROI.
It helps you track data on how your campaigns are performing and whether or not you are finding success.
To get started, open up your AdWords account and navigate to the conversions section:
Here, you can begin setting up conversion tracking elements for multiple parts of your campaigns.
From basic call data to website conversions, you have a few different options:
Depending on your campaign, you might need more than one of these elements to track conversions.
For example, if you decide to run AdWords ads with call-based extensions, you’ll want more than just website tracking.
To get started, click on the element that you need to track.
The most common one will be your website conversions, or the people who buy a product or convert on your site.
Select the tracking type and give it a name and a category to recognize it:
Next, under “Value,” you’re going to want to input some basic numbers.
Remember that equation in the section before?
If your product/service isn’t a direct sale like e-commerce, you want to set your lead value as the conversion value here.
This will give you some insight into ROI fast without having to dig through each conversion.
Once you’re ready, save the conversion tracking element, and it’s time to install your tag.
I can tell you’re already jumping for joy. Tone it down, I know it’s exciting stuff.
Now you can scroll down to the box called “Event snippet” where you can select between two options:
The most common one will be the Page Load option.
This simply means that whenever someone lands on a page, AdWords will mark it as a conversion.
So, the key here is to place this tag on the right page.
If you place it on your landing page, your conversion data won’t make sense.
You need to place it on a thank you page that a user will land on after they’ve converted.
So, if someone fills out a form somewhere on your site, they need to be directed to a thank you page. That’s where you want to place the tag.
Simply install the code into your thank you page header, and you’ll have live tracking for your campaign.
If you want to double-check your tag installation, use the Google Tag Assistant to make sure it’s installed correctly:
Voila! That’s it.
Now you can start to track the fundamentals of ROI on AdWords.
But that’s not all. This is just the first step of tracking your advertising ROI.
It’s time to go into some depth.
Setup Facebook Pixels
Facebook advertising is amazing because of all the diverse options it gives you.
The options are virtually endless. You can create campaigns to fit almost any goal you might have.
However, that’s also part of the problem. Determining exactly how likes, comments, awareness, visits, and clicks translate into new paying customers isn’t easy.
First, you need to set up tracking scripts, just like you did for AdWords.
This is the only way to start collecting the initial data on how your campaigns are performing.
To start setting up your Facebook Pixel for tracking, head to your Facebook Ads Manager and click “Pixels” under the Assets section:
Now, click the green “Set Up Pixel” button to get started:
Facebook is easy to work with because they’ve got dozens of integrations that make installation a breeze:
If you know how to install code, you can do it yourself.
If you don’t (or you’re just lazy like me), select the first option.
Once you’ve integrated, be sure to head back to the Ads Manager to make sure there’s a confirmation in the top right corner:
This pixel script will give you the basics. You’ll start to see who does what on your site (and how it all relates back to your original ad campaigns).
But you’re going to need to take it a few steps further before you can glean any ROI insight.
Let’s do it.
Take Advantage of UTM Codes
UTM codes ‘tag’ your URLs to give you extra data about where your traffic is coming from.
For example, let’s say you’re doing paid promotion with an influencer on Twitter.
They are posting a few of your blog posts every day to get you more traffic and sales.
But when you look in Google Analytics, this is all you see:
Great. This isn’t helpful because you could be running dozens of these campaigns at one time. Or your traffic could just be high and diverse.
There’s no way to pinpoint which activities or campaigns are generating those sessions. Meaning, you have no clue if your efforts are working or not.
UTM codes allow you to add tracking data like source, medium, campaign, and even keywords to your URL to properly record each visit.
For example, here’s what a completed UTM could look like:
Here’s what your data will look like inside Analytics when you start to add UTM codes:
Now, you can tell exactly how you got the traffic, why it’s coming to you, and where it’s coming from.
So, how do you set these up?
There are a few ways to go about it.
If you’re running smaller advertising campaigns and just need to track a few links, head to Google’s UTM builder:
You can use this page to fill out the desired tracking tags like campaign source, medium, name, and keywords.
You simply type the final URL that you want to track into the “Website URL” section and generate your new URL.
Use that in your next campaign to get better data in Google Analytics.
If you run tons of AdWords ads and don’t want to make new UTM codes for every landing page, there’s a shortcut.
Head to your AdWords account and navigate to your shared library.
From here, select the URL options tab from your settings:
Then, make sure that auto-tagging is enabled. Head to the “Tracking Template” and here’s where you can enter UTM information.
Enter {lpurl}, then a question mark, and then any ValueTrack parameters you want to use, separated by ampersands (&).
For example, let’s say you wanted to track the campaign it came from. You’d add a string like this:
{lpurl}?ads_cmpid={campaignid}
Doing this will enable tracking at the account level, meaning you’ll never have to set up UTM codes for each new AdWords ad you create.
Track Your Phone Calls
Now that you’re tracking basic conversion data on the top advertising networks, along with more laser-focused link tracking, it’s time to pull it all together.
Without phone call data, you’re missing out on a big piece of the puzzle.
Tons of AdWords conversions are from phone calls.
Why? When someone is going to book something like a consultation or hotel room, they often call in.
It’s easy, especially from mobile phones.
But what happens when this is all you see in AdWords?
You ain’t got nothin’ to show who converted or where in the heck they came from.
Tracking offline events is critical to success.
If you’re getting a lot of conversions from phone calls, you need to know which ones came from advertising and which were already coming from organic traffic.
Otherwise, it’s a shot in the dark as to whether you’re better off spending your dollars on SEO or PPC.
One of my favorite tools for tracking call data is CallRail.
You can set up keyword pools on your site that give each user their own tracking data.
Using dynamic number insertion, CallRail gives each user their own phone number rather than 1,000 users seeing your standard business line.
Meaning you can track each individual as they move throughout your advertising funnel.
You can see how they got to your site, the keywords that brought them to you, and the landing page they landed on.
You can record phone calls for even better conversion tracking.
If you want to tie ROI back to your advertising campaigns, you need tracking at every level.
That includes boring, old-school things like phones.
And yes, people still call businesses (as much as we hate it).
Conclusion
When you’ve started a new online advertising campaign, what’s your first step?
If it’s not setting up conversion tracking, you might be making a big mistake.
Tracking return on investment is critical to understanding how well your online campaigns are doing.
First, you need to start by outlining what a conversion means to your campaign.
Is it a direct sale via e-commerce, or is it a consultation?
The idea here is to tie your efforts directly to ROI and understand that a conversion isn’t necessarily money in your pocket.
Next, set up tracking scripts with the top advertising outlets.
You need these to collect critical data.
Be sure to take advantage of UTM codes to get insight into where your traffic is coming from.
Lastly, track your phone calls. People often forget how important call tracking is for getting an understanding of ROI.
Want to prove that your campaigns are worth it?
Clicks don’t tell you that. Neither do leads, opt-ins, or consultations. Only revenue does.
About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.
Using Ubersuggest for E-Commerce: Everything You Need to Create a Killer Online Store
Despite the growth of social selling for e-commerce, SEO keyword optimization is still crucial to long-term business success. Why? Because that’s how most customers find you.
Search traffic is responsible for 65 percent of e-commerce sessions. If you’re not optimizing for keywords, buyers won’t find you among your competitors.
SEO offers many other advantages. SEO offers many other advantages. For instance, it has a fantastic ROI when done correctly.
If you want further proof of SEO’s advantages, case study after case study shows how a few tweaks can potentially get your site to the front page of Google.
A few words of warning before I move on:
- Don’t expect results overnight. SEO can take time to yield results, but it’s a valuable investment that pays off long-term.
- Don’t let SEO overwhelm you. There are numerous areas of SEO I could discuss here, but let’s just focus on keywords for now.
Why Should E-Commerce Companies Care About SEO Keywords?
With an estimated 4.2 million e-commerce businesses in North America, there’s a ton of competition.
To stay ahead of the curve, you need to do everything possible to optimize your site, rank higher in SERPs, and increase visibility. You’ve probably guessed by now, but one of the best ways to do this is with strategically chosen keywords.
For guidance, your chosen keywords should be:
- Relevant to your product and target audience.
- Attainable in search results.
- Lucrative in terms of driving targeted, profitable traffic to your online store.
When it comes to finding keywords, you need resources to help you along the way. This is where Ubersuggest comes in.
Ubersuggest is a free tool that makes it easy to research keywords and identify which ones to target.
But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s talk about how Ubersuggest helped our e-commerce customer, Portrait Flip, improve traffic and drive ROI.
Portrait Flip is an online store that creates real portraits by real artists from customer photos around the world. Using Ubersuggest for its keyword research, the company increased its organic traffic by 70% in just two years and increased revenue by 32.33 percent over their goal.
Perhaps you think that’s unattainable. However, there’s a simple reason behind the enhanced results: you drive more relevant, organic traffic to your website by optimizing your pages by targeting the right keywords.
How to Use Ubersuggest to Create a Killer Online Store
From SEO audits and competitive analysis to monitoring results and adapting your approach, plenty goes into running a successful online store. However, there’s no need to get overwhelmed. With the right tools, creating a killer e-commerce store isn’t complicated.
Below are five steps to creating a killer online store using Ubersuggest. (link to each section)
- Create a project from your dashboard in Ubersuggest,
- Perform an SEO Audit.
- Find the right keywords to target.
- Conduct Competitive Analysis.
- Create a Backlinks Plan.
- Track Your Progress.
I’ll walk you through each step of the way.
Step #1 Create a project in Ubersuggest
If you’re new to Ubersuggest, you need to start with the basics.
Begin by registering for a free account.
Once you do that, go to the dashboard and click on “Add Your First Project.” Next, add your website URL and name.
It’s also essential to connect your project to your Google Account to see how your keyword strategy is affecting your Google presence. Here’s how to do that:
- Go to the dashboard.
- Select the project you want to connect to Google Search Console.
- Click ‘connect with Google.’
- Connect the account or select the ‘Use another account’ option.
Remember, SEO takes time, and there might be some trial and error along the way. Therefore, once you’ve set it all up, I recommend you use Ubersuggest at least once a week to:
- Check-in on your SEO progress (you can use the different weekly alerts to help you understand where to focus your efforts).
- Work through the suggestions in your dashboard.
- See what your competitors are up to and take small steps each week to compete against them.
- Find new keywords to target on your product pages (try A/B testing product pages with different keywords to see which one ranks higher).
Portrait Flip did this and achieved significant success and savings:
“We were able to create and implement a clear SEO strategy with Ubersuggest starting in January of 2020 that helped our organic traffic take off. We’ve saved thousands of dollars on paid advertising by keeping Ubersuggest at the heart of our SEO, and we’ve watched our SEO and our revenue grow exponentially, too.”
Step #2 Perform an SEO Audit.
The Ubersuggest Site Audit is the best place to start with your Keyword Strategy. When you perform this analysis, you get a general overview of your website’s SEO standing.
From here, you can understand where your website ranks in terms of industry-standard for optimal SEO health.
To perform a site audit:
- Go to the project dashboard.
- Find SEO explorer on the left side menu and select ‘SEO Analyzer.’
- Wait for the analyzer to create a report; your report sorts errors by difficulty and how fixing them impacts your SEO.
- Review your report. Pay careful attention to the ‘See All SEO Errors,’ on the associated tab.
- Click ‘What is this, and how do I fix it?’ on the associated tab.
- Once you’ve reviewed the major issues, select the ‘SEO Analyzer Overview’ option. This takes you back to the site audit main page.
- Now, you’re ready to review the second part of your audit report, which details your desktop and mobile web speed. Use the orange circular toggle, to switch between Desktop and Mobile reports.
- Fix the issues, return to the ‘SEO Analyzer’ overview, and choose the ‘recrawl’ button at the top of the page.
- Finally, review the report to see if you’ve fixed the errors or if there are any fresh ones.
Here’s how Portrait Flip used the site audit feature.
First, Portrait Flip optimized its results by focusing on the ‘Broken Link’ finder.
This helped the business understand where it was losing potential customers due to broken product links.
At first glance, this might not seem like an important issue, but broken links negatively impact your SEO and the customer experience.
Portrait Flip also found the ‘Page Load Time’ report invaluable, as the company was keen to see if any added website code was inadvertently increasing its load times.
Again, this may not seem like a significant issue. However, speed is crucial for online shopping. Ideally, you want your e-commerce store to load within two seconds. Anything above that adds to your bounce rate and customer dissatisfaction and leads to lost sales.
After fixing simple issues on the Portrait Flipw website, 98 percent of the revenue generated from its SEO and PPC efforts in 2021 came from organic search.
Step #3 Research Keywords to Target
Now, this is where the fun starts.
You can use the Ubersuggest Keyword Reports to understand which keywords to include in your content to drive relevant and lucrative traffic.
There are two main features to focus on here.
The keyword overview allows you to see how competitive a keyword is and its search volume trend over time. To narrow down your keyword choices, think of the general search terms your target audience might use when searching for a product you sell.
The keyword research feature shows you how people search for keywords related to your business and your products. It enables you to uncover valuable keywords that other competitors aren’t targeting.
How Portrait Flip uses these tools:
Content marketing is at the heart of Portrait Flip’s efforts to attract traffic to its site. For example, the business used blogging and posted regularly on its social media channels. However, these efforts weren’t driving traffic the way the company hoped.
This is where Ubersuggest proved its worth.
- The Keyword Overview report enabled Portrait Flip to find relevant keywords to focus on and that prospects use in their searches.
- Next, Portrait Flip optimized its blog posts and e-commerce product pages with new keywords.
- Finally, Portrait Flip used the Keyword Idea and Content Idea reports to help them plan out their next blog topics.
The results were exceptional.
Portrait Flip exceeded their traffic expectations in one quarter by over 27 percent—and that’s without any paid advertising. If you’re planning on using these reports, here are a couple of tips to get the most out of it them:
Find The Most Competitive Keywords
Use the ‘SEO Difficulty’ filter to help determine which keywords are more competitive than others. Be intentional in comparing this with the ‘Paid Difficulty’ feature to help decide if you should pay for Google Ads against the keywords.
NOTE: Keywords with high Paid Difficulty are usually lucrative. However, they are almost always more expensive.
Search by Location
If you want to attract a worldwide audience, search for global keywords on the ‘location’ tab. You can target your geographical search towards specific local traffic or by country. This can help you find unique keywords in different regions to target.
Step #4 Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is an essential part of any effective SEO strategy. By understanding your competitors, you can learn what techniques and keywords they’re using to rank well in search engines and replicate their successes.
Ubersuggest makes this task more manageable than ever. Just use the following tools:
- Keywords by Traffic: Go to Ubersuggest, enter the competitor domain URL, and hit “Search” to find the top keywords that the website ranks for. Note any organic keywords and monthly traffic, the domain score, and backlinks. You can also add your competitor’s URL as a project in your Ubersuggest dashboard for regular tracking.
- Backlinks Opportunities: Discover what websites are linking to your competitors and get a detailed overview of who to reach out to request links back to your site. Here’s how:
1. Enter your domain name or URL from your site into the Backlinks Opportunity tool. (Linked above).
2. Enter a competitor domain or a URL from their site.
3. Click ‘search.’
You can also use the Ubersuggest Chrome Extension for keyword analysis directly in Google search results, YouTube, AND Amazon pages for further insights.
Here’s how you’ll see the data in your SERPs:
You can also remove competitors or add them.
You’ll also see monthly search and CPC:
Here’s how to use this feature:
Create a Project for each Competitor: On the Dashboard, click “add a project” and add a few of your competitors to get a complete overview and consistent updates on your competitor’s ranking. You can easily remove competitors or add them. Here’s some more information on using Ubersuggest to spy on your competitors.
How Portrait Flip used Ubersuggest’s competitive analysis tool:
Portrait Flip monitored how its competitors were performing and what keywords they were ranking for. Specifically, the company used the Keywords by Traffic and Top Pages by Traffic reports together to get an idea of keywords they were losing out on. Using the information, Portrait Flip secured Page #1 on Google above competitors for primary keywords that drove converting traffic to their site.
Step #5 Start Tracking Your Progress
As you work on your SEO Keywords, it’s critical to be patient and track your progress over the long term.
Although you might see results with your plan in the next few weeks, as I’ve repeatedly stressed, SEO is an ongoing process and it takes time to get results. Typically, you can expect to wait a few months, so if you’re not seeing immediate progress, don’t get discouraged.
When you track your keywords, you can see which ones aren’t working and use some fresh ones to optimize your content.
Then rinse and repeat!
Keep testing and learning. A/B test different targeted keywords on product pages over time and track to see which performs best.
You can use Ubersuggest to monitor keyword performance. Here’s how:
In your Dashboard, you can view SEO progress over a specific time. Plus, you can see your progress in keyword ranking and estimated traffic value.
How Portrait Flip did this:
As they tracked their progress, they found that most of their year-to-year growth came from organic traffic, which steadily grew once they started using Ubersuggest.
Conclusion: Using Ubersuggest to Improve Your E-Commerce Store
One of the toughest tasks for e-commerce business owners is standing out from the competition. Gaining visibility, discovering the right keywords, identifying backlinking opportunities, and conducting competitive analysis are some of the most challenging tasks every online store owner faces.
Fortunately, Ubersuggest offers a solution to these common problems, allowing you to enhance your e-commerce store in key areas. This allows you to increase visibility, attract targeted prospects, and enhance conversions.
Online Advertising for Business: Creating the Perfect Plan That Gets the Customers You Want
The internet has transformed the advertising industry. Traditionally hard-to-measure channels like TV, billboards, and sponsorships are being pushed to the wayside by cheap, trackable online advertising channels like social media ads, display, and paid search ads. This shift is democratizing the industry. Even the smallest brands can compete on the same platform as multinationals if … Continue reading Online Advertising for Business: Creating the Perfect Plan That Gets the Customers You Want
Online Advertising for Business: Creating the Perfect Plan That Gets the Customers You Want
The internet has transformed the advertising industry. Traditionally hard-to-measure channels like TV, billboards, and sponsorships are being pushed to the wayside by cheap, trackable online advertising channels like social media ads, display, and paid search ads.
This shift is democratizing the industry. Even the smallest brands can compete on the same platform as multinationals if they have the right knowledge, ad creatives, and targeting. If you want to grow your business, online advertising should be the first place you start.
I’ll show you how you can do just that in this guide. You’ll learn why online advertising is so beneficial, the best online advertising channels to use and how to create an online advertising campaign from scratch.
What Is Online Advertising?
Online advertising is a hugely popular strategy, with almost two of every three small businesses using it to win new customers. Spending won’t decrease any time soon, either. Global online advertising spend is predicted to hit $646 billion by 2024, up from $378.16 billion in 2020.
Online advertising is a form of paid-for marketing that leverages internet-based channels to promote products and services. There are plenty of online advertising channels to choose from, including search engines like Google or Bing, social media platforms, and display ads, banner ads, and native ads.
Unlike traditional advertising mediums, the cost of online advertising is low. Small businesses can generate hundreds of new customers for just a couple hundred bucks a month. Online advertising is more measurable, too. Every channel can be tracked, measured, and optimized, so marketers squeeze as much ROI from their campaigns as possible.
Such are the benefits of online advertising, companies are increasingly dedicating more and more of their budget to digital channels.
As you can see in this infographic from Visual Capitalist, there have been sharp falls in newspaper and TV advertising spending, while search, social media, online video, and e-commerce spending has increased dramatically since the early 2000s.
Why Your Business Should Advertise Online
However big your business, online advertising is one of the best ways to build a brand, win new customers, and grow revenue. It has many advantages over traditional forms of advertising and other forms of online marketing, but there are four big benefits I want to highlight.
Immediate Results
When you advertise online, you don’t have to wait months, weeks, or even days to get rewarded for your efforts. Sales can happen as soon as your ads go live.
This is unlike virtually any other form of marketing—traditional or otherwise. With SEO, for instance, it takes an average of about three months for a page to rank well on Google. Social media accounts tend to grow between 9.4 percent and 16 percent every six months.
The speed at which you see results doesn’t just help you win customers and drive revenue faster, it also helps you optimize campaigns quicker. Because you get data so fast, however, you’re able to optimize your campaigns to maximize ROI much faster. What takes six months or more with SEO, takes just three months with paid ads.
This is vital because optimizing PPC campaigns can double your ROI or more. Easton Sports, for example, doubled its ROI from 400 percent to 900 percent by working with e-commerce marketing agency The Good.
Better Targeting
Forget broad, mass-market ads that aim to please everyone. Online advertising lets you drill down into your target market and know with confidence that every dollar of your budget is being spent on them. That’s the kind of targeting traditional advertising can never compete with.
Most online advertising channels offer granular targeting, allowing you to focus your efforts on a small segment of their audience. Facebook lets you customize your target audience by dozens of criteria, including:
- location
- age
- gender
- education
- job
- interests
- behavior
- connections
As a result, you don’t have to worry about wasting your advertising budget on people who aren’t interested in your product. If you have strong buyer personas, you can target them with ease. Even if you don’t have buyer personas, granular targeting makes it easy to identify profitable segments of a large audience.
Better still, online advertising allows you to reach millions of people every day. Facebook has almost three billion monthly active users. Google processes around 63,000 queries every second. No other advertising medium lets your average joe business reach audiences of this size.
Low Costs
You won’t be forking over millions in advertising fees to reach targeted audiences. Unlike traditional advertising—where it can cost over $100,000 to run a 30-second TV advert—the cost of online advertising is incredibly low.
It costs, on average, just $3 to $10 to reach 1000 people with online advertising, compared to $22 to reach 1000 people using traditional methods. While your mom and pop retailer can’t hope to afford a TV advert, they can run a successful online advertising campaign on Facebook, Google, or any other channel.
You can limit the cost of your online advertising, too. The vast majority of online ad platforms will let you set a limit on your total and budgets, so you don’t blow everything at once.
Loads of Data
The worst thing about traditional forms of advertising like print, TV, or radio is that it’s tough to work out how well your campaign performed. That’s not the case with online advertising, where most channels show you exactly how well your ads performed.
Typically, online advertising channels will show how many people saw and clicked your ad, how many sales your ad resulted in, and many, many more metrics.
This data is gold. First, it allows you to measure ROI to see whether your online advertising is delivering a return.
Second, you can use that data to optimize your campaigns and make them even more profitable. With it, you can understand why your ad performed well or poorly and what you can change to improve your ROI in the future.
Types of Online Advertising for Businesses
Below are the main types of online advertising you need to know
1. Paid Search
Paid search is one of the most important online advertising channels. The vast majority of all online interactions start with a search engine—which makes it one of the best places to target potential customers.
Google is the dominant force in paid search advertising, which is unsurprising given it currently enjoys an 85 percent global market share. Other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo also offer paid ad solutions.
Paid ads come in two models: pay per click and CPM. With pay per click, brands pay every time someone clicks on their ads. With CPM, brands pay a set cost per thousand views.
They are usually positioned at the top of search result pages, as you can see below. They may also feature at the bottom of result pages and in separate tabs, like the Shopping tab.
Paid search offers some of the best targeting available to online advertisers. Brands can target specific keywords, destinations, devices, and more. This allows them to create highly relevant ads that can return an average ROAS of 200 percent.
That comes at a cost, however. Paid search ads are some of the most expensive you can buy. The average CPC of Google Ads is between $1 and $2. Averages can rise much higher in some industries like law—where the average CPC is more than $6.
Pros:
- huge reach
- fantastic targeting
- immediate results
- high intent traffic
Cons:
- can be expensive
- not visual ads
- highly competitive
2. Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is huge. It is the second biggest digital advertising market with revenues of $153.7 billion in 2021. That’s expected to grow to $252.6 billion in 2026.
Consumers are obsessed with social media, too. Over half of the world’s population use some form of social media and the average person uses it for 2 hours and 27 minutes every day.
Every major social media platform has an advertising offering, including:
Ad formats vary depending on the platform, but the vast majority will be a form of in-feed ad. Facebook, for example, has four main ad formats.
The cost of social media ads will also vary depending on the platform. As you can see in this table by WebFX, LinkedIn and Instagram are two of the most expensive platforms with average CPCs north of $3. Facebook and Twitter tend to be the cheapest.
Pros:
- insane targeting
- wide audience reach
- effective for brand awareness and sales
- some channels have low costs
Cons:
- costs can be very high on popular channels
- a lot of competition
- can be hard to find the right platform
- Apple tracking updates may cause issues
3. Native Ads
Native ads don’t feel like they’re ads at all. Brands partner with publishers to create sponsored content that provides a lot of value to the reader while subtly promoting your business. The content is published on the partner’s site and distributed as normal. The idea is that users read the content and get value from it without feeling like they’re being sold to. It’s a win-win.
Here’s an example of a typical native ad on Fast Company. Note the small “paid content” disclaimer in the top right-hand corner.
Native ads can be very effective.
It’s been shown the softer touch of native ads can result in five to ten times higher CTRs than direct response ads. Native ads can be expensive, however. Major publications charge as much as $200,000 to get featured.
The vast majority of major publishers will offer some form of sponsored content or native ad package, making it easy for your brand to get featured in dozens of high-quality publications.
Pros:
- build trust
- appear authentic
Cons:
- high effort required
- typically smaller returns on investment
4. Display Ads
Display advertising is one of the most common forms of online advertising. In fact, it’s probably the one that came to mind when you saw the title of this article. Display ads come in many forms, including banner ads, in-content ads, side-bar ads, and popups.
Below you can see an example of a banner display ad on Digiday.
There are multiple ad platforms that brands can work with to run these ads. Popular platforms include:
- Google Display Network
- Facebook Network Ads
- Taboola
- Leadbolt
Display ads are one of the most cost-effective forms of online advertising, costing as little as $0.50 per click. There’s a trade-off, however, as display ads typically have some of the lowest CTRs of any online ad.
Pros:
- cost-effective
- widely available
- great for brand awareness
Cons:
- low CTRs
- tend to be ignored or blocked
- linked with poor UX
5. Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are much more effective than standard display ads.
That’s because consumers rarely make a purchase the first time they land on your website. When you show them the same products that previously caught their eye, they’ll be more likely to eventually make a purchase.
That’s where retargeting ads come in. This is a form of display ad that only targets people who have landed on your website and left without making a purchase.
Retargeting ads can appear on any website that shows display ads, as well as Facebook and Google. The cost of retargeting ads will depend on where they are displayed. The average cost of retargeting ads on Google, for example, is $0.66 to $1.23 per click. Display retargeting ads will be much cheaper.
Pros:
- only target people who have shown an interest in your brand
- higher CTR than display ads
Cons:
- can feel intrusive
- harder to run after privacy updates
6. Affiliate Ads
Affiliate advertising is where a brand partners with a third-party (usually a publisher or influencer) to promote its products or services. Rather than an upfront payment, third-party gets paid a commission every time they refer a customer to the brand.
Affiliate advertising is a rapidly growing market and is expected to be worth $8.2 billion in the U.S. in 2022.
The cost of affiliate marketing can vary dramatically depending on the industry you operate in and the third parties you partner with. Commission rates vary between $3 and $200 and can be as low as 1 percent per sale or as high as 60 percent.
Pros:
- only pay when you make a sale
- easy to get started
- lots of third parties and publishers
Cons:
- can be required to give away a large percentage as commission
- can be time-consuming to stay on top of affiliates.
7. Video Ads
Video ads are an increasingly popular form of video-based advertising. The most common form of video ads are YouTube ads, but other video platforms like Vimeo host ads, too.
The potential reach of video ads is huge. On YouTube alone, consumers watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. YouTube also ranks second in monthly user numbers for social network platforms and is the world’s second-largest search engine.
They are cost-effective, too. YouTube ads have an average cost-per-view between $0.01 and $0.03. It costs around $2000 to reach 100,000 users.
Pros:
- ads personalized to video topic
- multiple ad variants
- detailed targeting options
- broad target audience
Cons:
- must create a video ad
- some ads can be skipped
How to Create an Online Advertising Strategy for Your Business
The steps to create an online advertising strategy will be broadly similar regardless of your business, product, or service. You start by setting goals, defining your target audience, and assigning a budget. Next, you pick a channel and create ads. Then it’s simply a case of launching and optimizing as necessary.
Step 1: Set Goals
You should always set goals for your online advertising campaign. Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your strategy and how you measure those goals will keep you on track, increasing the likelihood of success.
One study found that 76 percent of people who wrote goals down, made a list of actions, and ran weekly progress reports achieved their goals.
Making more sales is a typical online advertising strategy goal, but it’s not the only one. Others include:
- increasing brand awareness
- getting more subscribers
- growing your social media following
Whatever your goal, make sure it follows the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) framework.
Instead of saying you want to acquire new customers with your Google Ads campaign, state that you want to acquire 1000 customers in one month by spending $5,000 on ads.
Step 2: Find Your Target Audience
With a goal in place, it’s time to decide on your target audience. Who exactly do you want to reach with your ads?
As we’ve discussed, the beauty of online advertising is that you can target an incredibly specific audience. It’s time to take advantage of that. Consider things like:
- age
- gender
- demographic
- nationality or location
- interests
Make sure you account for your goals. If you want to acquire tens of thousands of customers, you’re going to have to cast a broad net. If your aims are more modest, you can afford to be more specific.
Step 3: Assign a Budget
Assigning an appropriate budget is essential for any online advertising campaign. It will define how much you can spend and, to a lesser extent, which channels you can advertise on. I recommend basing your budget on a variety of factors, including:
- your overall marketing budget
- your product or service price
- your goals
- how long you want the campaign to last
- any previous results
You don’t want to blow your budget on one campaign. Nor do you want to assign a tiny budget if you want the campaign to run for six months.
While you should always establish a budget upfront, be prepared to be flexible with that budget. The immediacy with which you can see results is another advantage of online marketing, so you should be prepared to increase the budget if you see success.
Step 4: Pick a Channel
Now that you have a set of goals, a target audience, and a budget, you can finally decide which channel you want to advertise on. The truth is you probably already have a paid advertising channel in mind.
That’s fine, but it’s important to make sure it matches your goals, budget, and audience. Budget-wise, advertising on Google Search can be incredibly expensive for certain keywords.
The average cost per click for keywords related to the insurance industry was $20.12 in 2021, for instance. If you don’t have the appropriate budget, you’re better off choosing another channel.
Similarly, there’s no point in advertising on Google if your goal is to increase your social media following. Or advertising on Facebook if most of your customers use TikTok instead.
If it’s your first time launching an online advertising campaign, stick to one channel. It will make creating ads and setting up the campaign a lot easier. You can start to advertise on multiple paid marketing channels when you get a few campaigns under your belt.
Step 5: Create Ads and Launch Your Campaign
This step is going to vary quite a bit by your chosen paid ad channel. In the case of Google Search ads, you’ll need to write ad copy. For display ads, on the other hand, you’ll need to design an image. Whatever channel you use, the bulk of your efforts should be spent here.
For example, if you’re advertising on Google Ads, improving your Quality Score can make a huge difference. This is a measure of how relevant your ad and landing page are. It’s been found that an above-average Quality Score can result in a 50 percent discount on your cost per click. Low-Quality Scores, on the other hand, can result in you paying four times as much.
Spending time improving your ad copy can also increase your clickthrough rates, as I show in my ad copy guide.
Step 6: Optimize Your Campaign
Creating an online advertising campaign doesn’t stop once you’ve hit launch. The wealth of data that these channels provide means you can start optimizing your campaign almost immediately.
Review your ad dashboard daily after launch and look for ways to optimize your campaign. Common strategies include:
- changing your bid amounts
- changing ad run times
- adding negative keywords
- changing your copy
- changing images
- changing a new ad targeting a different segment of your audience
You can also pivot your campaign entirely if things aren’t working out. There’s no point wasting budget on a campaign that isn’t generating any return. Instead, pick another paid channel and launch a new campaign.
Note: Don’t worry if this section seems overwhelming. You can work with an online advertising agency that will handle the entire process for you.
Online Advertising Strategies for Business to Take Your Strategy to the Next Level
Launching your first online advertising campaign is just the start. Once you’ve got a few campaigns under your belt, you can start to experiment with advanced strategies like the ones below to supercharge your results.
Use Tools to Enhance Your Ad Campaigns
You don’t need to spend money on anything else apart from your budget to see results with online advertising. There are marketing tools for almost every channel that can enhance your campaign and help you generate even more ROI.
Find and utilize these tools wherever possible. My keyword research tool, Ubersuggest, is a great example of a tool that can help you improve your paid ad campaigns by getting access to high-quality keyword data. This is useful if you want to make sure you’re targeting every relevant high-value keyword in your Google PPC campaign.
Head on over to Ubersuggest and click on the keywords dropdown in the left menu bar. Enter a keyword in the “Discover new keywords” bar. For this example, I’m going to use the keyword “digital marketing agency.”
Hit search, and you’ll be served hundreds of relevant and related keyword ideas. You can export the keywords as a CSV file and add them to Google Ads immediately. Or you can filter them to make them even more relevant.
For example, say I don’t want to target any keywords with a CPC higher than $20. By clicking on the CPC filter and entering between $0 and $20, I can filter them all out.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with a tool like Ubersuggest. For more help, see my complete Ubersuggest guide.
Automate PPC Bidding
Automated bidding will feel like a lifesaver if you’re not confident in setting bids and optimizing campaigns. Google is the best-known ad platform for automated bidding, but plenty of others like Microsoft and Facebook offer some kind of automated or smart bidding service, too.
Google offers two forms of automatic bidding: a standard automated bidding service and a smart bidding service that uses machine learning to optimize for conversions. You can target five goals when using automated bidding on Google:
- Increase site visits: Google will generate as many clicks as possible.
- Increase visibility: Google will target impression share to show your ads at the top of the page.
- Maximize conversions at your CPA: Google will drive as many conversions as possible at the target Cost per Acquisition.
- Meet a target ROAS: Google will try to maximize the value of every click.
- Maximize conversion bidding: Google will try to get the most conversion value while spending all of your budget.
The benefit of automated bidding is two-fold. First, you don’t have to worry about setting the right bids and can focus instead on other parts of the campaign. Second, Google will probably do a better job of setting bids than you.
For instance, T-Mobile boosted conversions by 22 percent, decreased cost per acquisition by 27 percent, and increased conversion rate by 23 percent by switching to automated bidding on Google.
Create Hyper Personalized Ads on Facebook
Personalization should be part of every marketing strategy—and your online advertising campaign is no different. More than half of customers (60 percent) say they’re more likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.
Thankfully, Facebook makes this easy with its dynamic formats and creative solution.
When you use dynamic formats and creative, you create a personalized experience for every person who sees your ad. Facebook will automatically change certain elements of your ad to suit the user’s tastes. These elements include:
- The format: Facebook will show either the carousel or collection format.
- The description: Additional information like price and delivery information may or may not be displayed.
- The media and creatives: Dynamic video can be used to create auto-generated videos using your product catalog.
- The destination: Facebook may send people to different destinations depending on where they’re most likely to convert.
The benefits of hyper-personalized online advertising can be massive. Facebook tested the dynamic formats and creative solutions across 12 online stores and found they increased views, add-to-carts, purchases, and sales. There was also a 34 percent increase in incremental ROAS, a 10 percent improvement in lift, and a six percent decrease in cost per incremental purchase.
Use Ads to Re-Target New Customers
Most retargeting strategies focus on trying to convert consumers who have visited your site but not made a purchase. Let’s flip conventional wisdom on its head and focus on converting customers who have already bought from you.
Here’s the theory: it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. You’d be better off turning one-off customers into repeat buyers rather than converting new customers.
Retargeting ads are also the perfect vehicle for these messages. According to an IAB survey, 92 percent of marketers believe retargeting ads perform the same as or better than search, 91 percent believe they perform the same as or better than email, and 92 percent believe they perform the same as or better than other display ads.
How should you re-target customers? I recommend three strategies:
- Cross-selling: Pitch them products similar or related to the customer’s first purchase.
- Upselling: Encourage them to purchase an add-on or upgrade their account.
- Subscription: Encourage them to turn their one-off purchase into a subscription.
Experiment With Under-Utilized Platforms
I’ve got bad news for you. Everyone is advertising on Facebook. Most of your competitors are also probably advertising on Google, too. Ditto for display ads. Competitors with bigger budgets will target the same audience and the same keywords. That doesn’t bode well for you.
Better ads and more optimized campaigns are two ways to stand apart from the competition, but an easier way is to advertise on platforms where your competitors don’t.
Instead of Google, run search ads on Bing or even DuckDuckGo. Read my guide on Bing for advice on how to do it.
There are plenty of other alternative ad platforms that don’t get the love they deserve. Quora is an excellent source of engaged and highly targeted users ripe for being served great ads. Motley Fool Australia used Quora to increase leads by 111 percent and lower CPAs by 47 percent, for instance.
My guide to Quora is a great place to start.
Online Advertising for Business Frequently Asked Questions
What percent of my marketing budget should go to online advertising?
Your marketing budget should be between 2 percent and 5 percent of your revenue. The percentage of that budget you should dedicate to online advertising will depend on your other marketing strategies and your success with paid ads. The fewer other strategies you use and the more success you have, the more you can devote to online advertising.
What is considered online advertising?
Online advertising is any form of paid-for internet-based marketing. It includes PPC, social media ads, banner ads, display ads, video ads, and many other channels and formats.
What is the best type of online advertising?
There is no best type of online advertising. The best form of online advertising is the one that works best for your brand and audience, whether that’s search, social media, or something else entirely.
What types of businesses should do online advertising?
Any business with an online presence should consider online advertising. It’s cost-effective, highly measurable, and incredibly targeted, which makes it easy for any business to get started.
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “FAQPage”,
“mainEntity”: [
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What percent of my marketing budget should go to online advertising?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
Your marketing budget should be between 2 percent and 5 percent of your revenue. The percentage of that budget you should dedicate to online advertising will depend on your other marketing strategies and your success with paid ads. The fewer other strategies you use and the more success you have, the more you can devote to online advertising.
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What is considered online advertising?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
Online advertising is any form of paid-for internet-based marketing. It includes PPC, social media ads, banner ads, display ads, video ads, and many other channels and formats.
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What is the best type of online advertising?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
There is no best type of online advertising. The best form of online advertising is the one that works best for your brand and audience, whether that’s search, social media, or something else entirely.
”
}
}
, {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What types of businesses should do online advertising?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: ”
Any business with an online presence should consider online advertising. It’s cost-effective, highly measurable, and incredibly targeted, which makes it easy for any business to get started.
”
}
}
]
}
Conclusion: Online Advertising for Business
Online advertising is an incredible marketing strategy. It’s cost-effective, easy to measure, and accessible to virtually every business, big or small. I hope this article has shown you how easy it is to get started, too.
Once you’re familiar with all of the different paid marketing channels, follow my step-by-step advice to create your first online advertising campaign. Once you’re comfortable, you can start experimenting with strategies to take your online advertising campaigns to the next level.
Which channel is your favorite for online advertising?
Recurse Center (YC S10) Is Hiring an Online Facilitator (US Remote)
Article URL: https://www.recurse.com/blog/171-were-hiring-an-online-facilitator
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947249
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Is Online Sports Betting Dangerous?
Students discuss the millions of dollars being spent on legal gambling.
The post Is Online Sports Betting Dangerous? appeared first on #1 SEO FOR SMALL BUSINESSES.
The post Is Online Sports Betting Dangerous? appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.