In part two of the interview (you can see part one here) with Eric Enge of Perficient Digital, we talked about SEO and about why sometimes the advice Google gives the SEO community might not align with what one would see in the real-life SEO world. In fact, sometimes what might work for client A and B, might not work for client C — so it goes beyond “Google said this” and becomes “this is what worked for my clients.” We also spent time discussing how he approaches building out content on a website. From the content quality, to the structure of the content and then promoting that content to obtain links and shares. Finally, we discussed how he manages his client expectations around timelines with SEO and what happens when a Google update causes difficulty with a client’s goals. Here is the video interview: I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here. The post Video: Eric Enge on Google advice vs. real-world SEO experience appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qXvmhZ
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A unique selling proposition (USP) is the reason people do business with you and not someone else — a winning... The post Take 15 Minutes to Find Your Winning Difference appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/JCqNgP The post 20191030 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2osxAoA
Affiliate marketing can make you a lot of money if you’re good at it. But you’re nothing without the people who check out your site. Affiliate marketers essentially give away free information. And yet some people feel slighted when they find out you’re making money off of your recommendations. This is especially true with affiliate review sites. On top of upset customers, your affiliate’s competitor might be a risk. Competitors have sued affiliates directly for false advertising just to knock their own competitor down a notch. It’s not fair, but it’s what could happen. How do you protect yourself in
via ShoeMoney https://ift.tt/31WTfmL Typically, when I talk about video campaigns in Google Ads, I talk about TrueView in-stream ads. These are the pre-roll ads that play before or during the video a user actually intended on watching. While I recommend these ads to almost anyone interested in running ads on YouTube, TrueView video discovery ads could be a better fit in certain cases. I want to show you why discovery ads could be either a better fit for your account or even a great complement to the campaigns you are already running. Video discovery ads can capitalize on deeper intentMany video marketers may say that custom intent audiences for YouTube are the deepest form of targeting in Google Ads video campaigns to capitalize on user intent. While I LOVE custom intent audiences and use them all the time, I have to disagree with that statement. PPC marketers (again guilty of this one) talk about how search is the deepest form of intent in digital marketing. Well, people can search on YouTube too! Yes, we can use audience targets for our video discovery ads, but we can also choose to target by keywords that contextually relate to certain videos or channels. Advertisers running TrueView video discovery ads can also update their campaign settings to only show their ads on YouTube search results pages (like what you see above). This way you are only showing your discovery ads to users actively searching for videos on specific topics. You won’t get the volume like other video ad formats in Google, but your placements can be spot on a lot of the times. Discovery ads are great for advertisers with content not suitable for in-streamWith an in-stream ad, we are disrupting a user’s experience. They were not on YouTube to watch your ad. They were there to watch a music video, a cat video, a Ted talk, etc. So our in-stream ads have to be more like TV commercials. If you are using the skippable ads, you need to make sure you are capturing the user’s attention within the first five seconds otherwise they will skip your ad. With TrueView video discovery ads, the user chooses to watch your video. If they have already shown an interest in your content, you can elect to try and keep that user engaged as long as possible with longer video content. Let me explain a real scenario I had with a client this year. This client wanted to promote a video they made which was an interview with a specific celebrity. We already had our list of custom audiences about this celebrity ready as well as layers of other audiences that fit perfectly with this demographic. The decision to make this campaign a TrueView video discovery campaign was pretty clear. Why? The answer is clear for a couple of reasons.
You can see in the image above, I’m sharing the actual stats for this campaign. If these percentages were for a TrueView in-stream ad, I wouldn’t be proud of them. But remember, the video was two people sitting in chairs and talking for over half an hour. That being said we had almost 7% of users clicking on the ad watching at least eight minutes of the video. We had 1.53% of users clicking on the ad watching all 32-plus minutes. Not bad for a couple of cents per view. So if you have longer videos that won’t work for an in-stream ad, try it out as a discovery ad instead. We can use discovery ads to build your engagement audiencesWhen running TrueView in-stream ads, advertisers can add features like companion banners and call-to-action extensions to drive users to specific landing pages. With TrueView video discovery, we do not have those options. So if we can’t drive users to our landing pages directly from our discovery ads, what do we do? Remember after a user clicks on your discovery ad, they go straight to the video watch page. Hopefully, your targeting is hitting the right audience, and you are keeping those users engaged to the end. Because if a user reaches the final seconds of your video, you can set up end screens to encourage additional engagement. In the image above, I have gone ahead and added (from left to right) subscribe, best for viewer video, and playlist end screens to the end of this video. So when users get to the last twenty seconds, I can encourage them to either subscribe to my channel or watch other videos. No hard sell. All I am asking for is the continuation of these users’ attention. How does this affect PPC? Good question. In Google Ads, we can add the Earned Action columns. Google tracks when users watch additional videos, like your videos, share your videos, subscribe to your channel, and add your videos to a playlist after clicking on your video ads. Best news yet is all of these additional actions are FREE! If your videos are engaging a lot of users and building a good amount of earned actions, then you need to head to the Audience Manager in Google Ads. When you create audiences from YouTube users, you have the option to create audiences from earned action sources. (For clarification, these audiences include more than earned actions after ads but all actions. E.g. All recent subscribers not just the ones who watched an ad first). But we can take these YouTube user audiences to use for our remarketing campaigns in YouTube, Display or Search. While we may not be able to drive traffic to our landing pages, we can use video discovery ads for the top of the funnel and use those engagement audiences for next-step remarketing campaigns to guide that user further down the funnel to eventual conversion. Final PointIt’s easy to lean towards the video ad format that will give you consistent, free views, but TrueView video discovery ads are also valuable. They just take a different approach to understand the user experience and how we execute a strategy that is helpful to your business goals. TrueView video discovery ads are not meant to replace your in-stream campaigns. They are meant to be a worthy complement to capitalize on a different viewer with a different intent when consuming video content on YouTube. The post Are TrueView video discovery ads the better option for your brand? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2BTHBhW With SMX East right around the corner, it’s a great time to start the conversation that will shape my talk in November – How to Structure Your Facebook Campaigns for Success. This can surely seem a daunting undertaking. There are so many levers to potentially pull, and so much information available on the topic that it can at times be overwhelming for even the most seasoned digital marketer. However, if you’re able to keep these two things in mind, you’ll be well on your way to establishing a sound foundation to scale your social program. The first step is to simplify your account structure where possible. We all remember not too long ago when the typical Facebook account looked like this: Multiple campaigns, dozens of ad sets, with you, the advertiser, struggling to identify the little pockets of performance to scale efficiency. Today, most publishers are recommending a more simplified approach, with Facebook (and Google) taking the lead for that recommendation. At my company, 3Q Digital, we’ve tested extensively into this simplified structure and found that for most of our clients it performs with better conversion rates and lower costs. This is because when using that simplified structure, you’re reducing the likelihood that you’ll have ad sets with significant overlap (which could cause increased costs if multiple ad sets are bidding for the same user in auction). Simplifying and reducing the number of ad sets per campaign also increases the data density for each ad set, which allows the algorithm to optimize more efficiently. When shifting to this more simplified structure, you’ll essentially be paring down all potential for campaign/ad set overlap, so that you go from a structure that looks like the above, to one that more closely resembles this: The second item is something that I’m sure you’ve heard before but bears repeating – always be testing. With the numerous levers available in-platform, it’s imperative that you know the strategies that will enable stable performance for your evergreen campaigns. I’ve found that developing a roadmap to outline your test ideas, and (most importantly) to record the results, is the most straightforward way to approach this, and can be as simple as creating a G-Sheet. Some of the things to ask yourself as you’re thinking about testing can be:
Adopting an always-on mindset for testing is even more important considering a major change coming to Facebook in early 2020 – the removal of ad set budget control and the shift to Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). At 3Q Digital we’ve tested into this new feature to better prepare our clients for the change, with relatively positive results. For most clients, testing into CBO and enabling real-time budget distribution based on performance results in increased conversion volume, with similar or more efficient costs. However, because every business is different, there’s no guarantee that CBO will generate more efficiency or increase conversion volume for your account. If you haven’t already, it’s time to put it as a priority on your testing roadmap – that way you’ll be able to go into the New Year confident that you’ve figured out how to make this new feature work for your account. I hope these insights give you confidence as you’re reviewing your existing Facebook structure, or considering a structure for a brand new account. If you’d like more information or just want to chat, please check out my session at SMX East this upcoming November! More about SMXThe post Build a sound foundation to scale your Facebook campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2q7UFxd Join us in two weeks at Search Marketing Expo — SMX East — November 13-14 in NYC, for 100+ tactic-rich search marketing sessions, two new tracks devoted to agency operations and local search marketing for multi-location brands, empowering keynotes with Rand Fishkin, Google, and Microsoft Advertising, intimate training with industry experts, and invaluable networking that plugs you into a thriving community of engaging marketers. Here’s a look at what’s in store…
Pick the pass that suits your goals and budget:
We guarantee you will walk away with at least one actionable tactic that can help bring your search marketing campaigns (and your career) to a new level of success. Register now and I’ll see you in two weeks! The post You’re about to miss Search Marketing Expo appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/31SFZPP Google parent company Alphabet reported advertising revenues of $33.9 billion for the third quarter, a 21% increase from $29 billion a year ago. Overall, the company reported revenues of $40.5 billion for the quarter on Monday, an increase of 20% year-over-year, but below the $40.3 billion analysts expected. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said revenue growth was driven by mobile search, YouTube and Cloud. (We’ll have to take his word for it because Alphabet doesn’t provide revenue breakdowns for any of those segments.) Ad revenue trends. Ad revenue from Google properties (Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Play Store, Shopping) was $28.6 billion, up 19% from $24.1 billion a year ago. Google Network ad revenue was flat from the previous quarter at $5.3 billion, an increase of 9% from $4.9 billion the previous year. The primary growth drivers were Google Ad Manager and AdMob, said CFO Ruth Porat. Clicks and CPCs. Click volume on Google properties increased by 18% year-over-year and up just 1% from the second quarter of 2019. Click growth has been steadily slowing over the past three quarters as aggregated CPC declines have slowed. Porat said YouTube’s rate of click growth decelerated in each of the quarters this year. “That does continue to reflect the changes that we made in early 2018 to really improve the user and advertiser experience,” she said of the stricter rules on the videos that can carry ads put forth in January 2018. CPCs (cost-per-click) on Google properties was off by 2% from the previous year, but up 3% from the prior quarter. That’s the first positive quarter-over-quarter increase in CPCs since the first quarter of 2018, which saw a 2% increase from the fourth quarter of 2017. Network impressions increased by 12% from the prior year, but were flat compared to the prior quarter, as were network CPCs. Compared to the prior year, network CPCs were down by 3%. Smart bidding and RSA usage. Noting the use of machine learning in ad campaigns, Pichai said, “More than half of advertisers’ search spend is now optimized via full auto bidding.” In the past, Google has said 70% of advertisers use smart bidding. More than 1 million advertisers are using responsive search ads, said Pichai. BERT. Pichai also noted last week’s rollout of the BERT algorithm to Search to improve understanding of natural language queries and the results delivered on those types of queries. “It’s the biggest leap forward for search in the past five years. It’s all possible because of a new type of neural network-based technique for natural language processing called BERT, which recognizes subtle patterns in language and provides more relevant results,” said Pichai. He mostly dodged a question about BERT’s impact on advertising, saying, “Of course, a lot of times, we take the same techniques, and sometimes it maeke sense on the ads side, and down the line machine learning techniques, And we’ll deploy it there as well.” When we asked Google last week, we were told it was not being used for ads, yet. Why we should care. Executives reiterated at least twice that the company takes a long, rather than quarterly view, on the business. Mobile search and YouTube continue to be the strongest revenue drivers. Advertisers should expect to see Google continue to push machine learning into more areas of campaign management and take a “holistic approach” and automatically serving ads across multiple platforms and surfaces. There are regulatory clouds hanging over Google (and other internet giants) from both sides of the Atlantic, including antitrust and data privacy investigations. (Pichai cited the addition of Incognito Mode to Maps, which is already available in Chrome and YouTube.) For advertisers, the The post Google ad revenue growth steadies in Q3: Propelled by mobile search, YouTube appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2JxFtjT Legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz created a system of working that, before he was finished, enabled him to write nine books... The post How to Kill Writer’s Block and Become a Master Copywriter in Only 3 Hours a Day appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/31PcNJC The post 20191029 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/31UFt3N |
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