Set Up Your Office Space for Maximum Fundability

Your Office Space is Key When it Comes to Achieving Maximum Fundability™

Did YOU know that even the way you set up your office space can make a difference? You could achieve maximum fundability™ for business financing. Or you might end up settling for little to no fundability™ and little or no financing.

The good news is that most variables surrounding your office space are well within your control.

What’s Fundability™?

Fundability™ is the ability of a business to get funding. This is everything from getting credit to business loans. Since every business needs money, it pays to enhance your fundability whenever and wherever you can. A great place to start is your office space.

Online and Offline Business Fundability™

Fundability™ matters in both the online and offline worlds. The way you set up your business will affect your ability to get money. We’ve all seen the consequences when business owners aren’t careful. Haphazard is not a good look in either of these two worlds. Let’s start with the online world.

Fundability™ in the Online World

These days, a lot of businesses start online. It may be a side hustle or a passion project. But there comes a time when you need an actual website. And it’s got to be an email address that doesn’t come from Gmail or Yahoo.

Fundability™ and Business Funding Applications

The better your fundability™ is, the better your chances for business financing. Let’s look at your online presence. That is, your email address and your website.

Business Lenders Use Online Information When Evaluating Applications

One place where lenders and vendors will be looking for your business is online. Even if they’re not checking out your online presence, they may still need to know how to order your product or service, or where to send praise or complaints. Your online presence is where they will find that information—or not.

Your Business Website

What happens if your family member or a friend built your website? Maybe that person has talent. But business websites differ from personal ones. A business website must be easy to navigate. It must answer customers’ questions.

You need more than a listing on Yelp or a Facebook page. A business website can affect your ability to get funding. But a poorly put together website that appears unprofessional will not help you with customers or potential lenders. It can even be worse than not having a website at all. Spend the time and money necessary to ensure your website is professionally designed and works well.

Styles differ. Prom photographers and construction companies differ. They have dissimilar sites and design sensibilities. But they both have Contact and About pages. And they both have information about what they do.

Business Fundability™ and Your Business Website: Details

Make sure you own your domain. It’s better than having just your domain at Wix or WordPress or the like. You can do this by buying hosting. This is through hosting companies like GoDaddy or HostGator.

Get our business credit building checklist and build business credit the fast and easy way.

Your Business Email Address

With more lending decisions going on online these days, your email address is an opportunity for your business to puts its best foot forward. Don’t squander this easy and free opportunity! General email addresses like admin@yoursite.com tend to be best.

With a general email address, if someone leaves your employ, another employee can seamlessly take over that email address. A username like admin, webmaster, or even hello is far, far better than cutiepie or the like, even if you’re in a playful industry that caters to kids. After all, your bank and banker aren’t.

Maintain Online and Offline Business Fundability™ with Better Records Congruency

Always keep your records consistent! This includes your online records. Inconsistent records will lead to a denial due to fraud because that’s how lenders interpret inconsistencies. This is a cause of denials which is in the business owner’s hands. You have the ability to change and correct this.

This means your business name, address, phone number—everything!—must look the same in these places and more:

  • Every place your business has an online presence (your website, Yelp, SoTellUs, etc.)
  • Your business’s records with Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Equifax
  • All licenses necessary to run your business
  • IRS records
  • Incorporation documents

Copy/paste this information; don’t chance it with retyping.

More Online Business Fundability™

There are some aspects of fundability™ where you should pay particular attention to what’s going on online. They include:

  • Business owners listed and listed ownership uniform
  • Business name and address uniform
  • Industry alignment
  • Company domain
  • Information uniform on all records

More Online Fundability™: Business Ownership Listings

Records consistency matters here, too. Your website should show who owns your business. And that information must be consistent. So if you call an owner Susan Johnson on your website’s About page, then you can’t put Sue Johnson on your Contact page. If your business ownership changes, you must show that here.

More Online Fundability: Business Name and Address Uniformity

Abbreviations can be your downfall here, as can punctuation like hyphens, commas, and colons. If your Contact page says your main office is on Main Street, then your About page can’t say it’s on Main St.

Decide if you want to use the word ‘and’ or an ampersand (&) or a plus sign (+). If you need something like that in your business name, then pick one and stick with it! Yes, even this will make a difference.

If your business moves, or you add subsidiaries and other locations, then you must update that information everywhere. This even means whether you use your 5-digit ZIP code, or a ZIP plus 4 code (9 digits).

More Online Fundability™: Industry Alignment

If your business is over the road trucking, then it must have that kind of listing. Pro tip: when there are several different names for your industry, like long distance trucking, try to mention those other phrases on your website.

More Online Fundability™: Company Domain

When your company domain matches your business name, it helps with fundability™. Pro tip: try to match what people will be searching for online. Here’s an example. If the word ‘brothers’ is in your company name, then determine if people will use ‘brothers’ or ‘bros’ when searching for your company online. Let’s move onto offline fundability.

Get our business credit building checklist and build business credit the fast and easy way.

Fundability™ for Your Office Space in the Offline World

Records consistency matters with setting up an office from scratch, too. So does a professional appearance. You and your location can exude fundability™, or not. Let’s start with your phone number.

Your Office Space Set Up

The best home office setup makes your business a fundable entity separate from you, the owner. One early step is to ensure your business has its own phone number and address. That doesn’t mean you must get a separate phone line, or even a separate location. You can still run your business from your home or on your computer.

Business Phone Numbers and VoIP

You can get a business phone number that will work over the internet instead of phone lines. So use a VoIP, AKA a voice over internet protocol. The phone number will forward to any phone you want it to. So you can use your personal cell phone or landline if you want. Whenever someone calls your business number, it will ring straight to you.

Business Phone Numbers and the 800 Exchange

Lenders can see an 800 Number or toll-free phone number as a sign of business credibility. Even if you’re a single owner with a home-based business, a toll-free number provides the perception that you are a bigger company. It’s easy and inexpensive to set up a virtual local phone number or a toll free 800 number.

Business Phone Numbers and a 411 Listing

Your phone number must have a listing with 411. This is a prerequisite for most credit issuers and lenders to approve you. Check your record to see if you have a listing. Make sure your information is accurate. No record? Then use ListYourself.net to get a listing.

Your Business Address and Virtual Offices

One way to exude more fundability™ is with a separate site for your business, apart from your home. A UPS box or PO box will get your business flagged as unestablished. You need a brick and mortar address. But how do you get one for not too much money?

You can use a virtual office for a business address. A virtual office is a business that offers a physical address for a fee. They sometimes they even offer mail service and live receptionist services. There are some that offer meeting spaces for those times you may need to meet a client or customer in person. But keep in mind: not every vendor will accept a virtual address.

Virtual Offices

You can often get a great city address. There can be workspaces if you need them. And you might get access to conference rooms. Some plans include receptionists. A small business does not have to look small.

Our three favorite virtual office providers are:

What if Your Area Doesn’t Have Alliance Virtual Offices, Regus, or Davinci?

You may need to improvise. Consider talking with local business owners. Find out what they do. Perhaps there are shared spaces. It might be fruitful to talk to local computer user groups too.

Get our business credit building checklist and build business credit the fast and easy way.

What if You Need or Want a Brick and Mortar Location for Your Office Space?

As they say in the real estate business, your top 3 concerns are location, location, location. For a business, you want to be where your customers are. And you want to match your location with your business, as well as possible.

Hence a luxury goods seller should be in the ritzy section of town. And the seller of athletic gear could do well with a store near a college. How does this relate to fundability™? If your location makes you more money, your business will be more fundable.

Setting Up Your Office Space for Maximum Fundability™: Takeaways

You can improve your business’s fundability™. Setting up your office space properly will go a long way. Pay attention to the details of your website, email address, phone number, and business address. And make sure your records get and stay consistent to prevent funding denials due to perceived fraud.

The post Set Up Your Office Space for Maximum Fundability appeared first on Credit Suite.

3 Effective Retargeting Strategies That Actually Work (With Examples)

Retargeting is one of the best ways to close sales that didn’t happen.

On top of that, retargeting efforts are pretty cheap compared to most types of advertising.

How do you do it? What retargeting efforts do you need to try?

Here are three examples of retargeting that actually work, how to copy them, and what you need to know about the future of retargeting.

1. Retarget Specific URL Visits

There are a lot of ways to go wrong with retargeting.

Some marketers fire up Facebook or Google Ads and run a retargeting campaign based on website visits in the past 90 days.

Although that can work, it’s not really that effective. As you probably know, I’m all about working smarter, not harder.

I love to spend as little time on a task as I can, but get the same benefits as someone who spends hours and hours on the same task.

I used to run Facebook retargeting campaigns in their Business Manager feature (now referred to as the Facebook Business Suite).

Retargeting Strategies - setting up automatic retargeting in Facebook

I’d simply retarget everyone who landed on my site.

That didn’t really work. My conversion rates were the same as my website: low.

People weren’t ready to buy yet. Why? I cast too wide of a net.

You can’t reasonably expect a 50 percent conversion rate on an audience of millions.

For example, let’s say that visitor X came to your website and read a single blog post and bounced.

Now let’s say visitor Y came to your site, read that same blog post, but then also filled out a lead-magnet form and even checked out your product and pricing page.

What’s your general website visitor retargeting offer going to be now?

If you offer a lead magnet, that won’t make sense to visitor Y. If you offer a free trial, that won’t apply to visitor X yet.

You risk sending the wrong offer to the wrong person at the wrong stage of their buyer’s journey.

So what do I recommend? Targeting users by specific actions taken on your site.

For example, check out this retargeting ad I got:

retargeting strategies - example of a Facebook retargeted ad

Notice how hyper-focused that targeting, messaging, and content are?

The ad is literally about a single product they offer.

I viewed their products, and they noticed I spent large amounts of time and frequency on their pie crust page. After all, who doesn’t love pie?

Then they used that data to target me with an ad focused on how to use their pie crusts.

They gave me an example of how their product could provide value in my life.

That’s one of the best methods of retargeting I’ve ever seen.

Why? Because people who don’t convert on your products usually experience two things:

  1. They don’t want to pay you money yet.
  2. They don’t know how your product can help them.

Jasper’s Market effectively touched on the second point in a strong way.

They communicated exactly how I could find value in the product I was already looking at.

Here’s another example of retargeting ad:

retargeting strategies - example of a facebook ad from leadpages

Again, notice how tailored the targeting is in this ad.

It was delivered to everyone who landed on a specific web page URL, rather than retargeting all site visitors.

This allowed the company to target their ad to a group of interested, potential buyers and get them back to their site.

I visited their webinar-training landing page and was immediately retargeted after not converting.

Or, how about this example from Marketo:

retargeting strategies - marketo example

I visited their content marketing e-book page to learn about cheap content creation methods.

Just a few days later, after not revisiting or converting, they reeled me in with a specific, CTA-oriented, retargeting ad based on the exact page I visited.

So the point is:

Retargeting based on specific URL visits works. It’s one of the best retargeting methods I’ve seen.

So how do you do it?

There are two platforms I recommend: Google Ads and Facebook.

For this example, we can use Facebook since it’s one of the most popular ways to run retargeting ads.

Plus, I find much greater success on Facebook over display ads on GoogleAds.

But to each their own.

To get started, open the Facebook Business Suite and create a new, custom audience. You’ll click “More Tools” then “Ad Manager” currently, but they do update their platform regularly.

Create a new ad campaign, then add your info until you get to the audience. Select “create a new custom audience.”

create a new custom audience facebook retargeting.

Custom audiences on Facebook should be your top retargeting strategy.

They allow for some of the most diverse customization options marketers can use.

You can create a new custom audience from the drop-down menu.

From the menu of custom audience options, we want to select website traffic as our marketing goal.

select source for facebook retargeting ads

This audience type will allow you to create lists of people who visited specific URLs.

For the next step, be sure to select “People who visited specific web pages.”

facebook source of retargeting ads

From here, you can get as detailed as you want.

Are you prepping for a webinar? Do you have a landing page you’re driving traffic to for a specific goal?

Do you notice that tons of people read about your product but don’t convert?

This is your time to get them back.

Remember that Jasper’s Market example? They saw that I frequently visited a specific product on their site but didn’t buy.

You can do that by adding URL pages that include that specific word.

You can further refine your Facebook retargeting ads by:

  1. device used
  2. frequency

Doing this will tell you one major thing:

The people visiting this product with high-frequency need a small push to convert.

Use an ad that shows them how to use that product. Show them the value or benefit of buying it.

Since they’ve viewed the product multiple times, you know they’re probably almost ready to buy.

Using this type of retargeting is one of the most effective ways to convert visitors.

2. Retargeting Existing Customers

You may ask, “Neil, why on Earth would I want to retarget existing customers?”

I’ll give you one simple reason: to resurrect unresponsive email subscribers who haven’t purchased in a while.

One big problem with email lists is that most of your subscribers become unresponsive at some point.

The list will experience “churn,” where new visitors join and old ones become unresponsive.

This means your email upsells aren’t even reaching your intended user.

So what do you do? Start retargeting your existing customers.

I like this strategy because it’s incredibly cheap because the ads are so relevant, which means your CTR will be high.

For example, check out this ad I got from AT&T for Small Business:

retargeting ad example att

They already know I’m a current customer who’s using their products/service.

Yet, they retargeted me anyway.

Why? Because they wanted to upsell me on new products as I was becoming unresponsive to their company email list.

Or how about this ad from American Express:

american express retargeting ad example

I’m already a customer, and they wanted me to convert by getting another credit card with them.

Are you seeing a pattern with these examples?

They focus on retargeting visitors who have previously converted or are existing customers.

Here’s one of my favorite retargeting examples of this method from ModCloth.

mod cloth retargeting strategy ad example

We miss you like crazy!

The targeting premise of this advertisement is pretty obvious.

They’re retargeting old customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while.

This kind of thing works.

Why? Because people have already converted on your products and services, meaning you risk nothing by asking them to come back.

It’s incredibly easy to set up, too.

Again, you can do this on either AdWords or Facebook, and it only takes a few minutes to set up.

To get started, head to Facebook’s Ads Manager and navigate to the audience section, then click Create an Audience.

From here, create another Custom Audience, and select Customer List.

That’s where you can upload your audience list. If a green check mark shows up, then you are good to go. If you see a yellow exclamation point, you might need to update some identifiers manually.

This will allow us to import contacts directly from MailChimp or upload an exported list of current or old customers.

The key here is to sort your customer file or email list by how old or unresponsive customers are.

If you have customers that are consistently buying from you, don’t waste money advertising to them.

Focus your efforts on customers that haven’t converted in a while or who haven’t responded to marketing emails.

This will give you another great shot at bringing them back to your products.

3. Lead-gen Ads Based on Page Engagement

If you aren’t finding success with website-based retargeting efforts, this might be your best bet.

Facebook has a powerful lead generation tool called “Lead Ads.”

These are essentially form-based ads that offer lead magnets in exchange for customer information like email address and job type.

It’s the same idea as running an e-book lead magnet on a landing page on your website, just on Facebook.

They are one of the most intuitive, natural-looking forms you can create.

Here’s an example of how they look and work:

facebook lead ads for retargeting

They’re beautiful, seamlessly integrated ads that offer a lead magnet for the customer.

And one of the best ways to run these ads is by using Facebook page engagement as a retargeting setting.

Before we jump into the how-to details, let’s look at a few of these examples and how effective they can be.

Here’s a lead generation ad from AdEspresso:

adespresso lead magent ad retargeting on facebook

When I click on the ad, I’m taken directly to a lead-gen form within Facebook.

This is incredibly effective in getting people to convert because it doesn’t force them to leave Facebook.

People don’t browse Facebook every day to see ads.

They browse it to interact with friends and family or read news articles.

So taking someone offsite is a big risk that can waste your ad spend and lower conversions.

That’s why lead ads are so successful. They don’t interrupt the process or habit of a typical Facebook user, yet they still allow them to get the lead magnet.

I’ve used these types of ads before.

facebook lead gene ads retargeting strategies

They’re great for providing a clear-cut CTA that gets people to convert.

So why should you retarget people based on Facebook page engagement?

Because you know these users are active on Facebook, which means your retargeting efforts are going to be much more successful.

These hyper-aware users are likely always checking out new brands on social media.

It only makes sense to target them with Facebook Ads.

To get started with a lead-generation ad, we first need to create an audience based on page engagement.

Create a custom audience, then choose “Facebook Page” from the list of sources:

facebook ad retargeting strategies

From here, you have a bunch of options to choose from depending on how specific you want to be in your retargeting.

facebook ad custom audience engagement

For example, you can retarget anyone who engaged with a post or ad, someone who previously clicked on a CTA, or someone who saved your page or post.

Once you’ve selected a retargeting metric, you can save this audience and head to the Facebook Ads Manager to create a new lead-gen ad.

create lead gen ad for retargeting

Select “Lead generation” as your marketing objective.

Next, select your ad format.

For this, I recommend using a single image, single video, or slideshow.

Carousels are often too complex for a simple lead-generation-focused ad.

Next, you need to edit the content and lead magnet on the ad.

facebook lead ads retargeting

This is the section where you start to create an offer or incentive for these retargeted customers to give you their email address.

For example, are you going to offer an e-book, white paper, coupon, or something else?

You need to give them a reason to fill out your form and click on the call to action.

Be sure to edit your form fields and optimize them to your needs based on that audience.

facebook retargeting ads lead gen

Be sure to limit your form questions in the next step to only grab the most important information.

You don’t want to overwhelm visitors or take up too much of their time.

The goal here is to collect leads in an easy, painless way.

Facebook questions for lead gen ad retargeting

Facebook’s page-based retargeting is one of my favorite ways to drive users back to my site or convert on lead magnets and products.

They’re often very engaged audiences who use Facebook differently than most users.

Instead of mainly using it to interact with family or friends, they actively seek out businesses on the platform.

Use this as an opportunity to convert visitors that wouldn’t convert on your site, or showed interest in your pages.

Frequently Asked Questions About Retargeting Strategies

What are some of the top retargeting strategies?

Retarget specific URL visits; retarget existing customers; and retarget leads based on-page engagement.

What is an example of retargeting?

Showing Facebook ads to someone who previously visited your website on their mobile browser.

Is remarketing worth it?

Yes, remarketing is worth the effort if you are able to execute a successful campaign. Targeting those who have interacted with your brand and come close to purchasing gives you a better chance of making a sale than by targeting an audience who has never heard of or interacted with your brand before.

Basically, you’re interacting with your leads at a later stage in the conversion funnel.

Can you run marketing and remarketing campaigns at the same time?

Yes, you can run concurrent campaigns.

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Retargeting Strategies Conclusion

Most of your website traffic simply won’t convert on the first visit. They don’t know who you are, what you do, or even how you could help them.

So they just aren’t ready, or willing, to buy your product or service yet.

Retargeting ads help bring those users back when they are closer to conversion.

Despite “banner blindness,” there are still a few ways to retarget visitors without driving them crazy.

Start by retargeting specific URL visits. This is one of the most accurate retargeting efforts you can use to convert customers.

I see it all the time on my Facebook feed and I constantly convert on them.

Next, try retargeting unresponsive, existing customers.

For example, if someone hasn’t converted in the past six months, send them a few ads to drive more sales.

Finally, conduct lead-generation ads that correspond with engagement on your site.

This will help you pull in users who are already engaged and thus more likely to be receptive to the ads.

Just remember: retargeting efforts need to be specific and hyper-focused to drive conversions.

What retargeting efforts have worked best for you?

The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Campaign Management

We’ve all seen Google Ads. Whether you call it Google AdSense, AdWords, or Ads, they’re the ads displayed in the search results on Google. Learning how to set them up is important, but learning how to manage and maintain their performance is a whole different ball game. 

In this guide, we’re pulling back the curtain and looking at what steps you’ll want to take after you have the ad set up. Whether you have a high or low-performing Google ad, you’ll want to do these things regularly.

What Is Google Ad Campaign Management?

Setting up your Google Ads campaign is an important and essential piece of the puzzle, but the work doesn’t stop there. There’s no such thing as “passive income” when running and managing Google Ads campaigns.

Those who have successful ad campaigns spend a lot of time on the backend evaluating the performance of their ads, looking at different keywords, switching up the designs and copy, and testing everything against key metrics to see how they perform. These are the necessary steps toward building a campaign that can pay you for months and even years if you hit the nail on the head.

It’s worth the work in the long run, but you need to get your Google ads campaign management right if you expect to have those types of results.

Good thing Google provides us with some simple ways to track everything in the backend. First, you can set email notifications to alert you whenever something happens with your campaign.

For example, if you want to receive alerts for possible policy violations you can do this from your Google ads account under setup and preferences. Determine what you would like to trigger an email notification. Some people only want to receive an email for critical issues while others want to stay up to date on every little detail.

Step 1: Check Current Google Ad Performance

Before you can determine what you need to change, you need to first look at your ad performance and see what’s working and what isn’t. There are five key metrics to pay attention to:

  • impressions
  • clicks
  • cost
  • conversions
  • click-through rate (CTR)

Let’s break each of these down a little more.

Impressions

An impression occurs each time your ad is displayed and seen by someone on Google. The best way to increase your impressions is to increase your campaign budget. This can push you higher on Google, thus giving you more visibility. Budget plays a role here but ad quality and relevance are ultimately the most important factors.

If Google decides that your ad isn’t relevant to the audience you’re targeting, Google won’t display your ad high enough and you will end up with low impressions and poor performance.

Clicks

This is the bread and butter of a Google ads specialist. Everyone wants more clicks. A click happens when someone sees your ad and then clicks it. Ideally, you want as many clicks as possible but if your ad isn’t getting clicks, you may want to rethink your copy or ad targeting.

Cost

Cost is the amount of money you spend, simple right? What’s more important is your “cost per click,” or CPC.

The way talented advertisers are able to scale ads is by determining how much money they need to put in to get a click or conversion. If you can determine that spending $2 on Google ads results in you making $5 for every click, it’s simple math at that point. Spend $4 and you’ll make $10, and keep building it up from there.

It’s not that simple, though. Your bid, quality score, and ad rank will impact how much you need to spend. Your bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for a click. The quality score is a rating Google provides from 1-10 based on how relevant your ad, landing page, and keywords are. The ad rank is Google’s value to determine where they will place your ad in the SERPs.

Conversions

A conversion occurs when someone takes the action you want them to take; this happens off the search engine results page and on your landing page or website. For example, if you’re running an ad for an e-commerce store and you want people to see the ad, click it, and then buy a suit on your landing page, each time someone buys the suit, that would be a conversion.

Google provides ways for us to track this using conversion tracking as discussed in the video above.

Click-Through Rate

Your CTR is the best way for Google to measure the relevance of your ad. It also allows you to determine if the ad is resonating with the audience you’ve chosen. A high click-through rate means that a lot of people are seeing the ad, clicking it, and converting. That’s a high-performing ad.

If you get a lot of impressions or clicks, but little conversions, it could mean your ad copy is good but the product or service you’re selling doesn’t align with the ad. Your CTR is a percentage based on the number of clicks and impressions.

Click-through rate = number of clicks / number of impressions x 100

The standard in most industries is five percent but you can still have success with a lower click-through rate.

Step 2: Reevaluate Your Ad Targeting

With every type of digital marketing, targeting is an important factor. You want to understand the buyer intent of your audience and if you don’t have a solid buyer persona drawn up, you’ll want to start there.

What does your ideal customer want? What do they look like? Where do they live? How much money do they make? What are their interests? What upsets them? Think about all of these things when determining your ad targeting because you need to get inside their head if you can expect them to click on your ad and convert.

Here are some examples of the metrics you can use for Google ad targeting:

  • Demographics: targeting based on location, age, gender, and devices
  • Affinity: reaching your audience using search and display networks
  • In-market: showing ads to people with a history of searching for products just like yours
  • Custom intent: choosing keywords related to the people who have engaged with similar content
  • Remarketing: targeting people who have interacted with you in the past but might not have converted

Step 3: A/B Test Ad Copy and Design

Now let’s take a look at your ad copy and design. It’s broken down into a few different segments:

  • your offer
  • your headline
  • your description
  • the URL
  • zny extensions

If any of these factors are hurting the performance of your ad, test them up against something else. The most important thing to learn is you only want to change one thing at a time. That’s the only way to figure out if that was the culprit.

For example, if you find yourself getting a lot of impressions but you’re not converting well, you might want to change the headline because it’s not enticing people to click. If you find that you’re getting a lot of clicks but little conversions, maybe your offer isn’t relevant enough.

Dynamic ads are a great way to work around this because they pull content directly from your site to ensure that the headline and description are relevant to the offer. This takes some of the thinking out of it and it’s worth testing up against a custom ad.

Step 4: Dig Into Negative Keywords

No need to complicate this: Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to display your ad for. There are many reasons why someone would do this but one of the big ones is you’re letting Google make a lot of the decisions for you. In that case, you might want to use negative keywords for things such as brand names, competitors, or other keywords that you know won’t lead to a conversion.

To add negative keywords, you’ll go into the Google ads campaign manager, select keywords, Negatives, and add the keywords to the proper ad group.

Step 5: Optimize Your Landing Pages

Remember that a big part of Google ads campaign management actually happens off the SERPs. It happens on your landing pages as well. If you have an ad that is getting a lot of impressions and clicks but you’re still not converting, chances are there is something wrong with your landing page. You’ll want to fix this quickly before Google finds out and drops your ad lower due to low relevance.

Optimizing your landing page requires you to take a look at the overall offer, the headline, structure of the page, CTA, and placement of buttons and calls to action. The best way to identify the problem is to A/B test.

If you think that you don’t have enough CTA buttons on the landing page, create a duplicate page and add a few more to see what happens. Doing so will require you to get a high-quality landing page builder and optimization tool like Unbounce and Convert.com. Convert is a great tool with A/B testing and it allows you to really pinpoint certain steps to take to improve the performance of your landing page.

Step 6: Consider Switching to Automated Bidding

When you create a Google ad, you have two choices: automated or manual bidding. Each has its pros and cons.

Automated bidding allows Google to decide how much you’ll pay per click based on a few key metrics.

  • Increase site visits: If you’re trying to increase visitors to your site, you can choose to optimize your ad based on clicks.
  • Increase visibility: Target impression share sets bids with the goal of showing your ad as high on the page as possible. You may end up getting less clicks this way, but you can quickly spread awareness.
  • More conversions: If you want more conversions on-site, you’ll optimize for your target cost-per-action. You may pay more per conversion but you’ll convert more visitors.
  • Target ROAS: If you want to meet a certain return on ad spend, you can allow Google to pay what it thinks you should based on how you value each conversion.

Keep in mind that choosing manual bidding requires you to figure this all out yourself. You won’t have the luxury of picking a “blanket” goal and having Google optimize your ad spend for you. However, manual bidding does give you more control.

Step 7: Avoid Common Google Ad Mistakes

There are a few critical Google ads mistakes that can kill your ad from the get-go. Here are a few examples:

Using the Wrong Keyword Match

We’ve all heard of keyword match: broad match, phrase match, and exact match, right? Choosing the wrong one will make it more difficult for your ad to reach your audience.

For example, broad match will display your ad when someone searches for a phrase similar to your target phrase. This can work well in the beginning when you’re experimenting and gathering data. If you don’t know a lot about your audience, you wouldn’t want to use “exact match” because you don’t have the data to back it up.

Bad Ad Copy

Your ad copy is the key to the mint essentially. If you know how to write great copy, you shouldn’t have a problem converting as long as your audience, ad match, and everything else is in place. Be sure you squeeze in every character Google allows. The goal is to make your ad stand out.

Not Having Clear Margins

Keep in mind no matter what you do, Google isn’t looking out for your finances. You’re the only one who knows what you can spend to break even or profit from your ads. If you don’t have this figured out and established ahead of time, you can end up spending way too much on ads and having to play catch up later on.

Frequently Asked Questions About Google Ads Campaign Management

What is a campaign in Google ads?

A campaign is simply a set of ad groups that share a budget, targeting, and other settings. You can have multiple ads within the campaign you’re testing.

How do I run a successful Google Ads campaign?

The best way to run a successful campaign is to try and try again. Don’t be afraid to test a lot of different factors, too. You never know what will work.

What is a good daily budget for Google Ads?

If you’re just starting out, you shouldn’t spend more than $10-$20 per day until you see how everything is performing. In the beginning, the goal is to gather data so you can optimize your ads. If you’re just starting out, you shouldn’t spend more than $10-$20 dollars per day until you see how everything is performing. Don’t expect to hit a home run right away.

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Google Ads Campaign Management Conclusion

Remember setting up your ad and hitting start is only one piece of the equation. The steps you take after that will really determine the success of your ad. You can start out with a low-performing ad but take steps to optimize, test, and change the ad, and end up with a highly successful campaign, resulting in a lot of money in your pocket. If you need help getting your ad off the ground, we can help.

What do you think is the No. 1 thing that kills a successful ad campaign?

Do Headings Really Impact Rankings?

They say in SEO you need to use headings.

Those can be H1, H2, or even H3 tags.

But do they really impact your rankings?

Sure, a lot of CMS systems put headings on each of your web pages by default. They do this with the title of the page (or blog post) and sometimes to sections within a page.

But again, the real question is, do they help with rankings?

I decided to run a fun experiment to find out if they really help.

How the experiment worked

Similar to past experiments I ran, I reached out to a portion of my email list to ask if they would like to participate. Just like how I did with the one on blog comment links and this one on link building.

4,104 of you responded wanting to participate. But unlike previous experiments, we only ran this one on websites that generated at least 100,000 visitors a month from organic search.

We picked larger sites because you can easily tell if a change had an impact on traffic. With smaller sites, external factors can more easily skew results, especially if a site only gets 100 visitors a month. One simple thing like a PR push could cause double the visitors in that case.

We also removed sites with seasonality and sites that weren’t at least 3 years old. Again, we just wanted to decrease anything skewing the results.

For example, with young sites, they tend to grow faster in organic traffic versus established sites… even when they do less SEO work because they are starting from a smaller base.

In the end, 61 sites met our requirements. It wasn’t a big number, but each site on average has 426 pages.

Now with a traditional A/B test, you would show 50% of your visitors one version and the other half a different version. But when it comes to SEO, you have to make a change and once Google indexes the change you have to compare the results to the previous 30 days.

So, with each site, we ran numerous tests at the same time to see the impact of headings. With each site, we took their web pages and split them up in 4 groups:

  • Control group – we left these pages unmodified. Whether they used headings or not, we wanted to see what happened to their organic traffic over time as it would give us another baseline to compare the results.
  • Headings – with this group, we used H1 tags for the title of the page, H2 tags for the subsections of the page, and even H3 and H4 tags if the subsections had subsections.
  • Using normal <p> text – with all of the pages in this group, we made sure they were not using headings. In addition to that, we made sure all of the font sizes were the same size.
  • Using normal <p> text and adjusting font sizes – with this group, we didn’t use headings. Instead, we made sure different parts of the text were in different font sizes. For example, the title of the page was the largest font size.

Before we dive into the results, the last thing to note is the experiment ran for 90 days. Even though we were comparing results of the pages we made the changes to using data from 30 days prior and 30 days after, keep in mind Google has to index the change, so you have to account for that as well.

Control group

The control group saw an increase in traffic of 2.89%.

As I mentioned above, no changes were made to the control group. But it shows that they naturally grew in their rankings and search traffic over time.

This wasn’t much of a shocker either as 2.89% isn’t a large
jump.

Headings

Now when I saw the results of the group that was using
headings, the results were pretty much what I expected…

As you can see from the graph above, the before and after results weren’t much of a change when you compare it to the control group. Instead of a 2.89% gain, they had a 2.72% gain.

Keep in mind some of the pages in the control group were naturally using headings and some weren’t. Again, in that group, we made no changes.

But now as we dive into the next two experiments, you’ll see
that the data gets interesting.

Using normal <p> text

What was interesting about this group is that no headings were used. And on top of that, we made sure all of the font sizes on these pages were exactly the same size.

What we saw was a decrease in traffic of 3.53%.

That doesn’t seem like a big swing, but when you compare it to the control group that’s a difference of 6.42%.

Now I wanted to see if the drop in traffic was due to the use of headings or usability. Because you have to keep in mind that when you make all of the text on the page the same size it impacts usability as well.

It makes the page less readable. And we saw that as the average time on page dropped by 12%. As for the bounce rate, we didn’t see much of a change.

Using normal <p> text and adjusting font sizes

This group didn’t use any headings but they did use different font sizes on the page to keep the pages usable (readable).

The graph shows that this group saw an increase in traffic of 2.85%.

Although headings may not be the biggest SEO factor, it does seem usability is.

When font sizes on a page are larger, it helps tell users and potentially search engines what part of a page and even which keywords are more important.

Conclusion

When you compare all 4 groups, the control had the largest gains. But it was insignificant, and you have to keep in mind that a lot of the pages in the control group also use headings. That group just had no changes.

From what the data shows, it doesn’t look like headings have a big impact on rankings.

Maybe if I ran the experiment longer the data would have shown otherwise, but my hunch tells me the data would be similar.

One thing we didn’t try was removing headings from all pages of a site or adding headings to all pages of a site that didn’t have any in the first place. If I were to re-run the experiment I would add in these 2 tests.

From what the data shows, Google does care about usability. Having different font sizes on a page helps tell the reader which elements are more important than others. It also makes the page easier to read.

Whether you make certain elements or words on the page stand
out through large font sizes or headings, it’s clear that it is a good
practice.

Now if I were you, I would still use headings because it can be useful for accessibility software that helps users navigate a page. Plus, it can potentially help with other search engines like Bing.

Plus with SEO, you aren’t going to see massive gains from one single tactic like you used to be able to. It’s about doing every little thing right. That’s why I recommend you run your site through this audit and fix every error.

So, do you use headings on your site?

The post Do Headings Really Impact Rankings? appeared first on Neil Patel.

Self-Employment Tax

Self-Employment Tax

People need to pay self-employment tax obligation is they have web profits of $400 or even more. They are numerous resources of internet profits that are utilized when figuring your self-employment tax obligation obligation. Self-employment tax obligation is the freelance person’s payment to social protection as well as Medicare tax obligations.
There are alternate techniques that can be made use of for figuring obligation of self-employment tax obligation. The Farm Optional Method as well as the NonFarm Optional Method might certify a specific to assert a bigger Earned Income Credit or Child Tax Credit. They might likewise, nevertheless, raise your self-employment tax obligation obligation.
The optimum quantity of profits based on self-employment tax obligation is presently $87,000.00 and also when figuring your modified gross earnings on Form 1040, you might subtract as much as half of your self-employment tax obligation responsibility. , if you are participant of the ministry or clergy you might ask for an exception from self-employment tax obligation from the IRS.
.
In recap, if you are independent, have web incomes of $400 or even more, and also submit an income tax return, you will certainly go through self-employment tax obligation. To get more information concerning private responsibilities, exceptions, and also different tax obligation approaches, please see the online website for IRS Forms as well as Publications at www.IRS.gov. Subject 554, Publication 517 and also 533 will certainly supply even more thorough as well as scenario certain details.

People have to pay self-employment tax obligation is they have web profits of $400 or even more. They are a number of resources of internet profits that are utilized when figuring your self-employment tax obligation responsibility. Self-employment tax obligation is the independent person’s payment to social protection as well as Medicare tax obligations. In recap, if you are freelance, have web profits of $400 or even more, and also submit a tax obligation return, you will certainly be subject to self-employment tax obligation.

The post Self-Employment Tax appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.

A Gamut Of Secured Loans

A Gamut Of Secured Loans

Protected finances are the finance that is supplied versus a safety. Lenders maintain this safety with them unless customers pay back the financing quantity.

With safeguarded finances, one can obtain the quantity varying from ₤₤ 5,000- ₤ 75000 in addition to an adaptable payment duration, differed from 5-25 years. The major benefit of protected lendings is its reasonably reduced interest rate. And also therefore, increasingly more individuals nowadays are looking for protected financings.

There are various kind of safe financings according to their use. Amongst them, some preferred fundings are as complies with:

– Secured Debt-consolidation financings: It is particularly for them that are dealing with financial obligation problems. With these car loans, they can integrate all their financial obligations right into a solitary workable financial obligation that would certainly be easier for them to pay off. Dealing with a solitary lender, rather of different lenders is additionally an included advantage with these lendings.

– Bad credit score safeguarded finances: It holds true that negative credit rating impedes one to make use any type of funding. To boost your credit rating and also appear of negative credit rating, poor credit score protected lendings are the ideal selection for you.

– Secured Wedding Loans: For a questioning wedding celebration, protected wedding event finances are the very best option that you can go with. These car loans cover all areas connected to wedding celebration, such as, getting ring, gown, design, function and more.

– Secured vacation lendings: Holidaying is necessary to vacate from ordinary uniformity. And also financings are readily available to fund for a vacation. Protected vacation finances are utilized for financing in different traveling relevant objectives, like- ticket reservation, resort expenses, dishes and also various other assorted expenditures.

– Secured service lendings: These financings are primarily offered for company objectives. Maybe establishing a brand-new company, organisation development, moneying for different organisation relevant demands, like acquiring products, paying tax obligation and also much more.

– Secured Car finances: Car disappears a high-end. Nowadays, it has actually come to be a need. Guaranteed auto loan are particularly suggested for those individuals, that wish to obtain auto loan that fit their requirements.

These financings, there are some various other kinds of safe lendings. Such as, protected residence renovation financings, safeguarded joblessness fundings and so on.

You can obtain protected car loans versus your residential property. Unnecessary to claim, obtain the quantity that is hassle-free for you to pay-off. In instance of falling short to pay back the car loan quantity, you will certainly shed your belongings on the home that you have actually made use of as security.

Lately, protected fundings have actually arrived amongst consumers. These lendings are cost-efficient instead of various other lendings, as safeguarded financings are offered at reduced rate of interest. Hence, when it involves lendings, after that protected financings are the very best choice that you can select.

Protected financings are the finance that is used versus a safety. Guaranteed auto lendings are specifically indicated for those individuals, that desire to make use of cars and truck lendings that fit their requirements.

These car loans, there are some various other kinds of protected fundings. Such as, protected residence enhancement lendings, protected joblessness car loans and so on. These car loans are cost-efficient instead than various other finances, as protected financings are offered at reduced rate of interest price.

The post A Gamut Of Secured Loans appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.