Author: Adaxa Team

SEO & PPC strategies working together for your goals

Published: 10 April 2020
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Many brands are only investing in one type of marketing at a time, PPC or SEO marketing strategies as they consider them to be separate but in reality, those two strategies can work really good together to bring full potential in the SERPs. So not to integrate into one another for a site marketing would be a big mistake.

SEO strategy is used for increasing a site’s organic traffic through search visibility and site authority. On the other hand pay-per-click (PPC) advertising seeks to generate traffic through created and targeted ads in search engines or social websites.

While they are essentially different, they both aim for similar goals. Also, SEO and PPC strategies often are dependent on eachother, feeding the other with important information for helping to improve the performance of the other one. To better understand the symbiotic relationship between these two marketing methods, let us see how they are different and how they are alike to outline how SEO and PPC feed each other’s outcomes.

SEO and PPC: The differences

SEO is process that aims to increase the quality and quantity of traffic that a site receives from search engines. There are a variety of SEO techniques for improving rankings, including content creation, technical optimization, link building and others. On the other hand, PPC advertising is a model of digital marketing where advertisers pay an amount each time an individual clicks one of their ads.

While these two tactics both go under the category of search engine marketing (SEM), there are some key differences between these two concepts.

Paid adverts appear at the top of search engine listings, above the organic rankings which are influenced by search engine optimization.

Also advertisers who generate traffic from their ads must pay for those site visits. Organic listings that obtain clicks as a result of earning visibility by utilizing SEO practices are free.

But the results generated from PPC campaigns, be it conversions, traffic, awareness or all of the above is immediate. Problem is that once the promotion ends, a site’s metrics will probably revert to pre-campaign levels. On the other hand, SEO strategies often take a while to gain momentum and businesses may not see a return on their investment for many months and even up to a year. However, once a company’s search optimization strategy begins producing results, those changes tend to be long term.

SEO and PPC: The similarities

While PPC and SEO are different in many ways, they also share some similarities. Both tactics aim to drive traffic to a website and also are often aimed at generate conversions. While one does this through paid means and the other through a process of climbing the SERPs organically, the end goal remains the same.

SEO and PPC are both keyword driven strategies. While advertisers will conduct keyword research to identify prosperous phrases to bid on and irrelevant ones to exclude through negative keyword lists, SEOs will also analyze relevant terms to understand how to optimize titles, content, technical elements and other critical on-site aspects.

So PPC and SEO can help eachother if used together to maximaze SERP coverage, while advertisers are waiting for SEO strategies to kick in, they can use PPC to get results right away and use it until SEO takes over or at least balances out the SEO gain to PPC gain.

B2B Funnel Strategy for Google Ads

Published: 7 April 2020
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Full funnel marketing strategy is great thing to have for any platform since it helps you get a better idea of how you are reaching users and on what level. It also gives you an good idea of your general sales cycle and how long it is.

Top of Funnel – Get them ready

At this lever, we are wanting to make ready the new users who haven’t interacted with your brand yet. These users typically won’t be searching for things about your brand, that is why a display campaign works pretty good. This will allow without being too aggressive, to put your ads and brand name in front of these new potential customers.  But we are not really expecting these users to convert, so to find success in these types of campaigns we will have to look at metrics that measure things like impressions, time on page and bounce rate.

Campaign Type: Display

Performance Metrics: Time on Page, Bounce Rate, Impressions

Content: Whitepapers, Blog Posts, Ebooks

Middle of Funnel – Remind

You want to remind users from the top of the funnel of your brand in this stage and also to get users who are aware of the problem they have and are already searching for the solution, and that should be your business. They maybe seen your ads before but have not converted yet on your site. In this stage, you want to run non-brand search campaigns and display remarketing campaigns and also target keywords related to your business and products. These campaigns can be measured with new user metrics and content metrics like downloads or webinar views.

Campaign Type: Non-Brand Search, Remarketing

Performance Metrics: New User Metrics, Gated Content Metrics

Content: Podcasts, Webinars, Case Study, Expert Guides

Bottom of Funnel – Adopt

At the funnel bottom you want to get the users that are aware of your brand and your products and are ready to convert, they already went through your other funnel stages and trust your brand. In this stage, you will want to run a branded search campaign and also a remarketing campaign. You want to target users searching your brand terms for branded search and audience that engaged in the middle of the funnel for remarketing. You want to look at returning users, content downloads  and conversions your account tracks like “Contact Us” or “Request A Demo”.

Campaign Type: Branded Search, Remarketing

Performance Metrics: Returning Users, Content Downloads, Etc.

Content: Consumer Reports, Competitor Comparison Pieces

3 Strategies for Display and Search advertising

Published: 6 April 2020
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There are unlimited tools at their disposal for digital marketers today, and here are three strategies to effectively combine search and display advertising for maximum results.

Cast a wide net

I fyour goal is to get more new customers but you don’t get a lot of traffic on your website, first step whould be to get more visitors. This is where programmatic display advertising comes in, it offers a scale that paid search campaigns can’t and also at a better price point. It is a good idea to increase spending on brand awareness tactics well in advance if you have a promotion coming up in order to have bigger retargeting and lookalike pools ready to go when your promotion is ready to start. So start by throwing a wide net with display ads and then continue to adjust and fix your targeting parameters as time goes by to optimize performance and find your next customer.

Retargeting

Once you have brought all these new visitors to your site, it’s time to introduce cross-platform retargeting. If you are running a paid search campaign for a product and only 15% of this paid search traffic becomes a paying customer, that leaves another 85% of the audience you already paid for who left the site without converting. Now that they have visited your site, you can use retargeting to show them a new series of ads hoping of bringing them back to your website and continue down the sales funnel. Your retargeting tactics can be simple or more complex, but the bottom line is that they will help keep the conversation going with the visitors most likely to convert down the road.

Contextual targeting

When you identify your best-performing keywords from your search campaigns, you can use that keyword list to add contextual targeting to your programmatic campaign. This strategy allows you to further refine your audience targets. If there us a specific keyword that a lot of people are searching for and is driving people to your site, you could create an contextual segment to target with display advertising.

These tactics are a good way to build awareness for your brand and products right when your visitors are actively shopping, and a great way to complement ongoing search activity. If you are already using a lot of paid search for a large part of your advertising, consider adding display, along with some targeting strategies to increase the efficiency of your campaigns and decrease your CPA.

E-commerce ad spend doubled as social distancing started

Published: 5 April 2020
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Data shows that e-commerce sites doubled their advertising budgets from mid-February and going into mid-March, as social distancing started to become the new norm for consumers and buying online. E-commerce ad spending jumped from $4.8 million the week of February 17 to $9.6 million the week of March 9. with data showing advertising spent over national TV, print and digital media, websites, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.

Earlier data showed that e-commerce sales for retailers that also physical locations saw an average revenue weekly growth rate increase of 52% and an 8.8% increase in conversion rates between January 1 and February 29. With many merchants reporting e-commerce sales exceeding rates of Black Friday and Cyber Monday levels. This spike in demand has caused supply and fulfillment challenges since China is slowly getting back to their full capacity from January but Amazon suspending their FBA resupply and receiving onyl essential items. And that will probably last for few more weeks and it could lead to slowing of investemt into e-commerce advertisment due to merchants emptying their Amazon stocks. So this spike in e-commerce spending is mostly a result of people spending more time and shopping online in combination with merchants selling their products still in stock. It is probably that starting with April the advertisment spending will go down until resupply becomes available again.

B2B Paid Strategy

Published: 4 April 2020
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B2B companies have longer customer cycles that can go from a month to six months or even a year. So it is important when making your digital B2B strategy that you are focused on that long term return rather than the short term return. Taking the time to make a year long digital strategy for B2B will pay off good in a end result. For making a good strategy you have to start by analyzing what is working against what isn’t working.

STEP 1 – Search

Sometimes there are certain location that will eat a lot of your budget but not give a good results and the best way to counter that is to devide your campaigns into different locations to keep track on what is working and what is not.

The B2B account is tracking multiple conversion events but we it is sending every campaign to the same form fill landing page. You need to break the campaign by the conversion event so that users are going for each campaign with their set of keywords. Make sure your campaigns, ad groups and keywords are very tightly themed.

Hand in hand with conversion events are the landing pages. You can’t have the same landing page for every ad group because not every person who is searching ready to fill out a form to be contacted. So you need to separate landing pages to each themed ad group.

STEP 2 – Social

B2B can work very good with social media like Facebook. You can try mirror what you were doing on search to social platforms to generate things like traffic, resource downloads or video views.

Similar to search, you can have multiple conversion actions to track. You don’t want to track just one, but all of them so you want to set up each conversion event to have a separate campaign. This can be easy way to build remarketing audiences off of people who had taken previous actions.

Not only do you want to have multiple ads, but you should have multiple ad types running. This will give the campaign plenty of resources to learn what performed good vs what didn’t perform so good.

STEP 3 – Programmatic

Programmatic is expensive however, the results on your programmatic campaigns can be significant and it can be a good client-agency relationship setting for a long run.

 

Avoiding These Mistakes to Optimize Your SEO Keyword Researching

Published: 3 April 2020
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Keywords play the important role in any type of content. Every SEO marketer considers keyword research as an major part of their job. SEO experts have agreed that keyword research is known as one of the most difficult tasks apart from content creation and link building and making wrong keyword decisions can make big losses to any website. So here are some advices that you need to keep in mind.

Mistake to Avoid While Performing Keyword Research

  • Not Paying Attention to Searcher’s Intent – It is very important to match the content with the search queries of the people to ensure that the website can retain the potential traffic. In the race of ranking the content, most people go with keywords that will not match with the query of the user.
  • Ignoring Long-tail Keywords – With long-tail keywords, they have low volume but they represent the lowest part of the funnel and when users search those keywords they know specific what they are looking for and are more prone to conversion when they find what they are looking for. By targeting the long-tail keyword you will be able to answer the exact query of the searcher.
  • Overlooking SERP – Most people are using tools for finding keywords but fail to analyze the keyword rankings. Analyze the content type which Google is ranking for a particular keyword and shape your content accordingly.
  • Oblivious to the Audience – It is crucial to understand where the audience looks for the answers to their query. People may chose Google as their search engine while others may look for the information on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.
  • Ignoring Localization – Some websites use keywords that are related to their product but still fails to drive conversions or traffic as they don’t use location specific keywords. Just having the right keyword is not always enough for driving traffic.
  • Unaware of Competitors – Many people make the common mistake of ignoring the SERP competition. In the process of keyword research, make sure that you are also analyzing the competitor’s keywords research.
  • Applying SEO Keywords after Writing the Article – To perform Search Engine Optimization on the content, keyword research must be performed first.
  • Client Picking the Search Term – A common mistake that people make is to allow the client to pick the search term.  Provide the client with keywords that will help in driving quality traffic because client might target some wrong keywords that will not help in driving conversions.
  • Concentrating on the Exact Match – This is not how you should write your content, you need to always ensure that you are writing it in a way that you will be able to explain it to someone without repeating the same words again and again. Stuffing your content with all the related keywords that they can think of will not work to gte better rankings.
  • Not Asking the Real People – Always talk to real people along with using SERP and SEO tools. Real people will tell their queries that you can use as the information and look for keywords that will help you to answer their queries.

 

Trends Caused by COVID-19 and What to Do – Part 2

Published: 2 April 2020
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When COVID-19 became pandemic in the past few weeks our lives have change.  Many small businesses have been reducing or suspending operations and are already feeling the pressure on their bottom line.

As people’s behaviors change, their search behaviors change too. We’ve already seen how COVID-19 has impacted Google Ads Results for different industries but there is plenty of room for small businesses to adjust to the challenges and we will check several trends that have emerged over recent days and weeks.

Mobile search traffic cut by nearly 25% in March

As less people is moving around and using their phones for internet surfing, there has been a noticeable decline in mobile searches as well with paid search campaigns showing a large decline in mobile search traffic.

Traffic on mobile is generally cheaper for PPC advertisers, so this shift has meaningful implications for PPC strategy in the coming weeks.

How to adapt to this new situation – Adjust your PPC campaigns for less mobile traffic

  • Revisit your device bid adjustments
  • Consider smart bidding

As more people who are searching internet shift back to desktops while spending time inside, expect to see big shifts to their performance across devices. You may have set a mobile bid adjustment earlier using relevant data at the time, but given the fast shifts in the search at this moment, it may be good checking your current device bid adjustments.  Google’s smart bidding strategies may help advertisers by working with changing data and adjusting their CPC bids in real time to match their goals. When choosing a smart bidding strategy, be sure to consider your goals and campaign budget.

As Google search traffic falls, cross-network opportunities grow

Since COVID-19 spread around the world our internet use is up nearly 50% even though the Google search time drop down. The good news is that you can still reach your prospective customers online but they are now looking in different places more.

 

As of start of March, Google search and Shopping may have taken sizable drops, but there’s still plenty of opportunity out there. Bing Search and Google search partners have remained still safe and steady places to find your customers and mostly have cheaper CPCs than Google search.

How to adapt to this new situation – Reach your audience on other networks

  • Now more than ever it’s crucial to advertise across networks
  • Include Google search partners in your campaigns
  • Dive into display and YouTube

Google search partners include many smaller search engines that are powered by Google and they make up about 10% of Google’s search reach, so consider using them in your campaigns to make up some of the lost Google.com search traffic. To use it simply check the “Include Google search partners” box in the networks tab of your campaign settings.

Now it’s easier than ever to find audience while they browse the web, scroll trough their social feeds, and watch videos online. Consider remarketing to your past customers and website visitors to bring them back to your site and keep your brand in their mind because they are often more likely to convert on their return visits.

Trends Caused by COVID-19 and What to Do – Part 1

Published: 1 April 2020
Written by Adaxa Team
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When COVID-19 became pandemic in the past few weeks our lives have change.  Many small businesses have been reducing or suspending operations and are already feeling the pressure on their bottom line.

As people’s behaviors change, their search behaviors change too. We’ve already seen how COVID-19 has impacted Google Ads Results for different industries but there is plenty of room for small businesses to adjust to the challenges and we will check several trends that have emerged over recent days and weeks.

Store visits plummets by 90% in one month

Naturally, as people started social distancing and avoid unnecessary trips, many businesses were forced to close their physical stores or limit their in-store capacity due to limited physical traffic. Advertisers began noticing a small drop off in store visits in late February. By the first week of March, store visits were down 24% and slowly as the crisis continued the past week it hit 90% down in just a time period of one month.

How to adapt to this new situation – Get your small business online

  • Design a simple website
  • Get your business on Google My Business
  • Engage your customers on social media
  • Get your products online with Google Merchant Center
  • Promote your business online

Your small business doesn’t need to have a complex website, so use some free website tool builder or pay for one and make a simple website. When you are done, create Google My Business account, you can display your business hours, address, posts, photos and reviews across Google search. Your customers expect that your business might change during this times and they’re looking for updates to confirm if you are open. So they will check social media for your activity and if you are not active there, they might think you are closed for now. Traditional retail is struggling with minimal store visits, but ecommerce is an opportunity to keep your sales coming in since interent is still doing just fine with shopping and everyone is inside in front of their tablets and screens. And to finish the circle, promote your online business with advertising like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or Facebook Ads.

COVID-19 dominates new searches

The news about the virus is spreading like a virus, exponentially and everyone is pretty much getting all news in real time. Other the past few weeks, searches containing “coronavirus” and “COVID” have certainly taken off.

But even if we look past the searches directly about the virus, the implications of our current situation are bringing people to Google with questions you don’t often see asked.

How to adapt to this new situation – Adjust your PPC campaigns for new search terms and volume

  • Review your search terms report regularly
  • Find new negative keywords before they start trending
  • Follow trending COVID-19 searches

We don’t know what will be trending tomorrow, so it is important to understand what traffic your ads are getting and add new negative keywords quickly to prevent your campaigns from reaching irrelevant searchers. All your new keywords run the risk of attracting irrelevant searches and wasting your campaign budget. Google Trends recently released a new Google Trend Coronavirus Hub, dedicated to these specific COVID-19 search trends so review the hub regularly to see how search interests are reacting to the changing news.

 

How to optimize your Facebook PPC campaign

Published: 31 March 2020
Written by Adaxa Team
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Facebook is very close second place to You Tube in terms of popularity with US audiences as the data shows, and the world-renowned social network is twice as popular as its nearest like-for-like competitor. If your business has serious ambitions on gaining more customers or going up as efficiently as possible, it is certainly worth looking at making some PPC campaigns on Facebook.

You should optimize your sales funnel

Facebook ads vs. Google ads perform somewhat differently. In the case of doing PPC advertisements with Google, audiences will be actively looking to buy the products or services you are advertising, but with Facebook, it is more likely that you will be appealing to audiences who are just browsing with little intention of making an immediate purchase and operating on smaller budgets might be a little problematic with Facebook ads. It is also good to run more campaigns in same time all with different goals which could lead to creating your own social sales funnel. Probably most purposeful funnels you could create for your Facebook PPC campaign could focus on engagement to try getting new customers in and is perhaps most effective when done through the video advertisment.

Build exposure through frequency

You can also monitor the number of times a specific user views your advertising campaign through ad frequency. This is an important metric because audiences that sees your ad repeatedly are more likely to remembers it. But it is important to leave your mark within campaigns and also be careful of not overdoing your frequency because if your ad appears too often, it will only lead to users ignoring your brand.

Make your budget go further

When you create your PPC for Facebook, you’ll be running probably few ad sets with multiple adverts within each set. To chose which ad set is more effective, it is important to look at the metrics available to see which campaign is best for accomplishing your goals. When you determinate which ad is performing best, allocate more budget towards the set, about 10-20% to steady boost without taking too many risks. When you continue to and see encouraging results, repeat the process until you notice signs of diminished returns on your investment.

Fine tune your target market

If you decide to incorporate Instagram into your ad reach, it’s reasonable to expect far greater engagement, but it is likely that you’ll see fewer comments or likes if you choose to place your ad as a Facebook page post, so remember that proper placements bring perfection to PPC campaigns. Facebook Messenger generally performs well when it comes to conversions and Audience Network placements can often increase a brand’s reach.

Get the right bidding option

Facebook uses an auction-based system when running advertising campaigns. Advertisers just need to pick the type of campaign they want to run, whether it’s based on conversions in the form of link clicks, landing page views, or certain on-site interactions.

5 Essential Things to a Successful PPC Search Ads

Published: 30 March 2020
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Lets be clear, perfect search ad does not exist. There is always space for improvement with a your PPC campaign, it is only a matter of time, money and cost. But that said there are certain things which can contribute to a search ad getting the best click through rate, while also promoting your brand.

Call to action in Title and Description

To the point, the call to action is leading web users to exactly what you want them to do to convert. If the users know what they should do, and how they should interact with your ad campaign, they are more likely convert. That said, it is a good idea to put a call to action in your title and your description. But be also keep in mind that if you use call to actions more than that, you put at risk that your search ad is forcing the message too much.

Brand or URL at the End of Title

When a user does not click your ad, it does not mean the end of the world and that you don’t benefit since it is a good idea to put your brand or URL of your company at the end of the title, such as ‘| Company.com’ for example. That will make the brand or URL more recognised with the contextual search phrase the user is searching for. And over a longer period of time you will be improving the brand awareness of your company without paying a cent.

Quantifiable Enticing Data

Put some sort of numbers in the search ad because people like numbers when comparing different things and it helps to encourage users to click onto your ad, since it gives the user a quantifiable way of comparing your search ad against the competition.

Ad Extension

Google allows you to use a range of different ad extensions in your search advert, such as site links, location, telephone numbers, ratings, reviews and more. Ad extensions are a good way to add some content and contextuality to your website, which will all encourage more web users to click it.

True URL Used

there is generally one rule to follow when it comes to choosing what URL to display in the search advert – does it work? You can choose a good looking URL, that is short and full of keywords. But you need to check out if the URL is actually leading to a place that exists and does not give you an 404 error. So always check the URL you use in PPC that it actually works.