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kateruberti-ecommerce · 14 days

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Programmatic Advertising

What is the difference between programmatic and display ads?

Display Advertising: Leveraged for awareness campaigns and sold on a CPM model. There are different ad unit sizes that are standardized by a consortium – the IAB (internet advertising bureau) – and sold and served on differing websites or applications. Refers to the format in which the ads appear.

Typically, colorful banners, videos, or any form of interactive media to catch your attention.

Display ads are more commonly referred to when placing ads within one specific ad network (Google Display Network.)

Programmatic: These ads follow the same rules of the road and can be easily confused with programmatic ads and display ads; however, programmatic ads strictly apply how to the ads are specific are purchased.

Considered the “behind-the-scenes” expert, as it is a technology driven process behind the ads that decide which ads you see. The factors are based on interests, behaviors, demographics and time of day.

Unlike the Google Display Network, for programmatic ads there are multiple programs such as sell side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs), which allow advertisers to buy ad inventory across an open network of platforms.

With both programmatic and display advertising have control over the following: audience; bidding strategy; budget; creative assets; placements.

There are 3 main types of platforms:

Sell-Side Platform: Alo known as a supply-side platform, which allows publishers to sell their ads impressions to advertisers in real-time. This encompasses both DSPs and ad exchanges. They’re equipped with technology that allows publishers to set minimum prices for their inventory, choose which ads appear on their site and block certain ads from advertisers.

Video SSP Leading Companies: SpotX, Teads, SpringServe, Yahoo DSP.

Demand-Side Platform: This platform allows advertisers to purchase ad inventory across multiple platforms at once. This is where advertisers fit into this landscape. DSPs enable advertisers to manager their ad inventory bidding and target specific audiences using sophisticated data sources.

Many leading platforms, such as: Display and Video 360 (Google); The Trade Desk; Amazon Advertising; MediaMath, Zandr; LiveRamp; Adobe Advertising Cloud, StackAdapt, PubMatic, etc…

Leading DSPs for CTV Ads: Display & Video 360 (Google); OneView (Roku,) MediaMath. (It is important to chose a DSP with the features and inventor you’re looking for, as some DSPs offer self-serve advertising, while others offer both self-serve and full-managed services which is likely to larger advertisers or agencies.)

Ad Exchanges: This is how SSPs flow their ad inventory to DSPS. DSPs connect to an ad exchanger, where ad prices fluctuate based on the competitiveness of the inventory.

When looking at Programmatic: These prices are based on factors such as: which DSP you chose; your target audience and specificity; ad inventory quality; ad format; bidding strategy; the level of competitiveness and demand.

Therefore, a good rule of thumb for programmatic ad cost – the more niche your audience is, the higher CPM you’ll pay. This allows both multi-million-dollar advertisers or small businesses to fit programmatic into their advertising budget.

Now, you may be wondering what the benefits of programmatic advertising are. There are many benefits to incorporating programmatic into your marketing strategy such as large-scale audience reach; efficient and low-cost awareness; real-time data and analysis; ability to leverage first party data; opportunities for cross-device campaign strategies.

Programmatic ads are one of the most cost-effective types of advertising that exist today. Even with a small budget, your marketing dollars can go a long way toward reaching your audience and increasing awareness of your product or service.

In addition, there is real-time data and analysis, as programmatic ads rely on real-time bidding; therefore, advertisers reap the benefit of receiving near real0time data. Why does this matter? This is critical as real-time data allows for faster decisions and pivots, it puts you in proactive rather than reactive mode.

Programmatic Offers:

Real-Time Biding: Open to all advertisers and most common form, where ad auctions happen in real time. This is also known as the “open marketplace” Since this is an open marketplace, it is naturally a highly competitive and dynamic space.

Private Marketplace: An auction with a limited audience of advertisers selected by the publisher. Private marketplaces offer more control in ad placement and typically offer prime placement.

Preferred Deals: Also known as “spot buying” or “non-guaranteed premium” which is a lesser-known type of programmatic advertising where advertisers chose ad spots before they go on the private or open market. If the advertiser chooses to not buy the inventory, it can then be offered in a PMP or via RTB.

Programmatic Guaranteed: Similar to a preferred deal, there is no action bidding. Instead, the publisher and advertiser have a direct agreement on a fixed price for ad inventory, guaranteeing the advertiser a certain amount of inventory and the publisher revenue for that specific inventory.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 21 days

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Social SEO

Social Media vs. SEO: Social media management relates to posting and optimizing your content on social media networks (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.)

SEO strategy relates to make your website or content more searchable so that people looking up phrases or questions related to your products, or the industry can find your site in the results.

Social Media SEO allows a marketer to optimize their social profiles so they can better attract potential customers through search. The goal is to find the right audience for your brand, exposing them to product they could buy.

Social media management and SEO optimization are different strategies, but can be used in tandem to complement one another, accordingly, helping the marketer gain traffic from a variety of different sources. This is especially important as 42% of social media marketers in 2024 (study conducted by Hootsuite) agree that people now prefer to find brands on social media as opposed to traditional search engines.

HubSpot’s 2024 findings suggest that more consumers will buy directly from social media apps than any other channels, as 82% said they’d choose social media over a brands website, and 84% said the same compared to third-party sites (Amazon.)

This reveals that social media is not only a place to connect with friends anymore. It’s a connection spot between businesses and customers. A simple way to think about this is that on one hand, people use Google (search engine) to find an answer to a question, while on the other hand, they use social media to discover answers to questions they haven’t thought of yet. Simply – the difference between search engines and social media platforms is blurring.

The following are 10 steps to adopt to build a strategic SEO strategy:

Social Sharing Buttons on Website à The share button can be very effective if you place them strategically, for instance on blog posts. (By removing social sharing buttons on landing pages can increase CTRs by 11.90% according to a recent VWO study.)

Integrated Keyword Strategy à Take the keyword strategy you use for your website and apply it to your social media engagement where appropriate. Ensure to do research to find what keywords are the most popular for the particular social platform at hand.

Be aware of how you are creating social media messages, as how you incorporate keywords into social content can increase the reach of your messages.

Reflect on the phrases that people might use to describe your business, opt for more specific terms if there is significant competition and select keywords that align with the associations you wish to establish.

Revisit any previous SEO keyword research to incorporate relevant terms. In other words, keywords that performed well in web searches may additionally perform well on social media.

Tailor your keyword selection to suit the nuances of each social platform.

Include Links in Social Profiles à The links in social media messages – such as Tweets and Facebook status updates, are traditionally no-follow links, meaning they don’t pass SEO authority to the site they are linking to.

Incorporate Links Into Video & Presentation Content à Statistics suggest that short-form videos (IG and TikTok) have given the biggest ROI this year (36% response rate.)

Optimize Social Profiles à Think of social media profiles as extensions of your website. Just as you would optimize website pages for page titles and keywords, audit your social media profiles to make sure they mirror your website’s search engine optimization strategy.

Don’t be anonymous – always establish credibility.

Use high-quality, eye-catching images.

Add social badges to your website and email signatures to direct traffic to your profiles.

Use SEO-friendly keywords in the about section – only the first 140 characters will yield in the search results.

Verify your account with a badge to increase consumer trust with your profile.

Building Links & Social Media Reach à While inbound links are still significant, a secondary metric for marketers looking to increase search traffic should be social media reach. In order to get more people to share your content on social, you need to increase your number of followers.

Establish Relationships à Similar to sales, relationships are huge for driving inbound links and social media attention. Building relationships using social media can open opportunities for guest blog posts and other link-building opportunities.

You can also implement this by polling followers o drive engagement and responding to comments to show users there are real people behind the screen.

Nurture relationships by setting up groups/communities – for insistence, consider creating a Slack community where you can post valuable content and initiate discussions in an #annocuement channel.

Include Author Blogs/Bios à Tag them with each new piece of content produced – sharing information on social platforms can better inform the credibility of the author.

Increase Positive Mentions à Having a robust social media can create a positive relationship with your audience.

Social Media Listening Tools à Having a strong social listening system can help you understand what customers are saying about you, manage your reputation and keep an eye on competitors to better plan content.

61% of businesses currently have a social listening system in place to monitor keyword mentions.

Google reports that positive online mentions can help determine where your site is relevant in queries.

If you see content is top performing with strong engagement, don’t be afraid to recycle it or repurpose it to extend the content’s lifecycle.

Collaborate with Influencers à Influencers shape the market today, so make the most of it. You can pay them for featuring your brand; give them free products for review; co-create products or launch new lines; run giveaways together; invite them to brand’s events; establish a brand ambassador program for long-term relationships.

Teaming up with influencers is a smart way to make more people aware of your brand, connect with your audience, and drive meaningful engagement and conversions.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 21 days

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Search Engine Marketing

Paid search advertising, or SEM (Search Engine Marketing), is where companies/brands/firms pay search engines to display their ads prominently on relevant the SERP.

This strategy primarily employs pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, ensuring that businesses only pay when users click on their ads.

There are a variety of factors that influence ad placement, such as bidding on keywords – which can be described as "phrases or keywords that are related to their company, products, or services” ��– utilizing ad extensions for additional information, maintaining quality ads and landing pages and strategic keyword selection.

Other variables like search terms, time, location, competing ads and device type also play a role in determining ad placement.

There are many benefits to paid search, including the precise targeting of the desired audience through keyword research, cost-effectiveness allowing control over advertising budget allocation, and immediate, measurable results compared to other SEO strategies.

Setting up a PPC campaign involves defining location settings, selecting relevant keywords, choosing match types (exact, broad or phrase), crafting engaging ad copy, setting bids, utilizing ad extensions and launching ads.

In addition, ad rankings are determined through an auction process considering bid amounts and quality scores, where higher quality scores lead to better ad placement.

Finally, when comparing PPC with organic, while SEO may seem more cost-effective due to free clicks, it often requires significant time and resources to achieve top rankings, making PPC a more immediate option for businesses.

Google Ads, Google's advertising network, offers CPC and CPM advertising options across its search and display networks. Google is transitioning from the average position metric to new metrics, providing more nuanced insights into ad performance by considering ad placement percentages and click-through rates (CTR).

These new metrics offer advertisers deeper insights into ad performance and audience engagement, facilitating more informed decision-making in PPC campaigns.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 21 days

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Unlocking the Power of Customer Segmentation: Strategies for Effective Targeting

In general marketing practice, segmentation refers to the process of dividing a larger market into smaller groups of individuals or businesses with similar characteristics. The purpose of this practice is to allow businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to each specific group, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.

Let’s dive deeper into segmentation now.

Specifically, segmentation can be based on demographics – age, gender, income, education – psychographics – personality, lifestyle, values – behavior – purchasing habits, loyalty – and/or geographic locations. By targeting specific segments of the customer base, businesses can more effectively communicate with their audience, increase engagement and conversion rates, accordingly driving revenue.

Applying this concept to digital marketing specifically, email segmentation is the process of dividing a subscriber list into smaller groups based on the aforementioned specific criteria. By segmenting email lists, businesses can tailor their messaging and offers to the specific needs and preferences of each sub-group. By practicing email segmentation, digital marketers have the ability to target specifically, optimize user engagement and make the communication personalized, accordingly leading to higher open rates, click-through-rates and conversation rates.

Before moving into email hierarchy, what is progressive registration and how does it help digital marketers with email marketing?

Progressive Registration: Collecting additional data points, or attributes, on each subscriber at a later point in time. Progressive Registration allows you to gather more information about each person after they already subscribed to your email list, or provided some fundamental information. This could be gathered through various means, such as surveys or feedback forms. In addition, attributes refer to the specific characteristics or traits that describe each person on your email list, including demographics and personalized behavior like preferences, interests, purchase history, and previous engagement with your emails. Through collecting additional attributes on your subscribers, you are presented with an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of who they are and what they are interested in. This knowledge can accordingly help you tailor your email content and messaging to each individual's specific needs and preferences, which may lead to higher engagement and conversions.

Hierarchy of Email Elements:

Importantly, the hierarchy of elements in an email is critical to its success. To ensure your message does not get lost, ensure to place the most important information at the top of the email. There should only be one CTA in the email, and it should be strategically placed at the bottom. By utilizing this approach, the reader will be compelled to engage with the entire email, absorbing all the content, before taking action. This results in better consumption of information and increased likelihood of achieving the marketing goal.

After ensuring that your email is being both delivered to the correct audience at the right time with an attention-grabbing subject line, the content of your email must fulfill the promise made in the subject line. This is more than just the words utilized, but also the way the words are presented and the structure of the message. With this in mind, let’s walk through segmentation email best practices.

Email Best Practices:

Create Body Copy That Gets Read: To keep subscribers engaged, the body copy of the email must, once again, deliver what it promised in the subject line. To prevent truncation – the subject line will get shorter when it is too long to fit in the available space and show up as (...) – subject lines should be 65 characters or less.

The email copy should be compelling, brief and consistent with your brand. Furthermore, it should convince subscribers to act on the call to action in a short amount of time. We will dive further into this shortly.

2. Formatting: To create easy-to-read email copy, it’s critical to format the text with concise, scannable sections. Begin with a simple offer and use short paragraphs, utilize white space, bullet points, headings and a clear hierarchy to make the text digestible to read. You can also use bolded text or highlighting to emphasize important phrases.

3. Incorporating Images that Add Value: To make sure your email loads quickly and looks fabulous on mobile devices, it's critical to utilize images; however, only use images when they add value, helping convey your message better than text.

Keep image files small (under 1 MB) to avoid loading issues. Make sure to add alt text for images, so subscribers can still understand your message even if the images are blocked or unviewable.

Make sure to strike the text-to-image ratio, or the proportion of text to images in email communication. This principle serves as a guideline to ensure that emails are balanced and not overloaded with images which may negatively impact email deliverability and load times. A common recommendation for the text to image ration is to have 60% text/copy and 40% images.

4. Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design: Emails need to be designed responsibly for mobile devices, for mobile email accounts for 60% of all opens. In the next few years, this percentage is expected to grow with mobile commerce on the rise, as shoppers are comfortable brosowins and purchasing products on their phones.

Luckily, most email marketing platforms offer responsible templates that automatically optimize the email content for mobile design.

Utilizing CTAs: In emails, a call-to-action tells the reader what to do next and how to do it, usually with a link or button. As aforementioned, each email should only have one CTA to avoid confusion and it should use strong, urgent language to inspire and encourage that action.

The CTA should stand out with a noticeable button image, even contrasting colors, and be placed in an area with plenty of whitespace.

The CTA should be easily distinguishable from the surrounding text to make it clear to the reader of what action to take.

Now that we have defined 5 email best practices, how do we measure the email's performance?

Simply: What gets measured, gets managed. Measuring email performance is crucial to improving email marketing campaigns. Luckily, tracking email performance is simple and revolves around monitoring the right metrics and understanding their significance.

3 Core Email Marketing Analytics to Track:

Bounce Rate: Refers to the percentage of emails that are not delivered to the subscriber’s inbox, either due to technical errors, spam filters, or inactive email accounts. There are two different types of bounces, hard and soft. Hard bounces prevent the realm from reaching the receipt, while soft bounces allow for delivery but not inbox placement.

Hard Bounce: Occurs when the email address is incorrect/invalid.

Soft Bounce: Occurs when the receipts inbox is full.

Click-Through Rate: Refers to the percentage of subscribers who click on any link included in an email campaign, providing insight into the engagement level of the audience.

A higher CTR indicates that your email content is resonating with the audience and that the CTA is effective in encouraging them to take action.

A lower CTR is a signal that your mail content or CTA needs improvement and/or that your audience is disengaged.

Opt-Out Rate: Refers to the metric that showcases the percentage of subscribers that have opted out (or unsubscribed) from your email list. This metric is critical when measuring the success of email campaigns.

Although the ultimate goal is to focus on your own business’ metrics, it can be useful to compare your performance with other businesses to set achievable goals and improve your email marketing strategies.

Want to generate more sales? Utilize Email Receipts & Shipping Messages:

Email receipts have a significantly higher open rate (70.9%) compared to bulk marketing emails (17%). Many online businesses tend to overlook the potential of email receipts as a valuable opportunity to generate more sales. To take advantage, businesses can cross-promote or upsell by offering special deals or incentives to customers in email receipts. For example, businesses can offer free shipping on a purchase made from their website over the next 30 days or provide an offer to save 15% on the next purchase, accordingly keeping their brand and products top-of-mind for consumers.

Personalization is Key!

It is important to address email recipients by their name to make them feel valued as individual customers. For example, saying “Hi, Kate!” rather than “Hi” creates a personal connection. To properly personalize emails, it is necessary to collect subscribers’ first names when they opt-in. Although it may not always be possible to collect names for abandoned cart emails, it is recommended to personalize messages by using their name in all other situations.

Don’t Go Overboard - Exercise Restraint When Sending Emails:

It’s critical to strike a balance between following up with potential customers and being overly pushy. It is best to use your own description when deciding how frequently to send emails and to back off if you feel like you may be too persistent. As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to limit sales-focused emails to once a week or special occasions, like a sale.

Keep Track of Your Own Ecommerce Email Best Practices:

To develop the best practices for your email campaign, you must pay close attention to your business and customers’ responses. Analyze email metrics to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure to keep track of your statistics on a regular basis to ensure that you stay up to date with any necessary changes. Additionally, consider requesting feedback from your subscribers by creating an annual email survey that offers a discount or other incentive in exchange for sharing their opinion.

Use Your Ecommerce Website to Create an Email List:

To achieve success in email marketing, having a well-crafted email is not enough, as the email needs to reach the right audience; therefore, it’s essential to utilize an ecommerce site to gain subscribers. This can be done by adding an email sign-up on the homepage or using a non-intrusive pop-up window to encourage newsletter sign-ups.

Keep Branding Top-of-Mind in Emails:

Ensuring consistency in branding across all marketing channels, including email marketing, is essential. Your brand identity – which is made up of elements like logo, color, fonts, and language – must stay consistent across all platforms. When designing your email newsletters and other forms of ecommerce marketing, ensure that the design aligns with your brand guidelines. This helps customers associate your emails with your brand, developing recognition and trust.

Take Advantage of Email Automation:

Email automation enables you to prepare content ahead of time and automatically send it to a specific group of the segmented individuals when they initiate an action that triggers the pre-written response. Automating emails is a straightforward efficient approach to staying connected with subscribers.

In conclusion, email segmentation is a powerful tool in digital marketing that allows businesses to tailor their message and offers to specific groups of subscribers. Progressive registration can help marketers gather more information about each subscriber over time, which can be used to create more personalized and engaging content. The hierarchy of elements in email, such as placing the most important information at the top and the CTA at the bottom, is also critical lto the email’s success. To achieve a successful email campaign, marketers should follow email best practices such as creating body copy that gets read, formatting text for readability, incorporating images that add value, optimizing for mobile and using strong CTAs. By applying these practices and measuring key performance indicators such as click-through rates and conversation rates, businesses can optimize their email campaigns, driving better results. Overall, by utilizing email segmentation and following best practices in email design and content, businesses can increase effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns, leading to better engagements, conversions and revenue growth.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 28 days

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Metrics & Measurement

Metrics: Everyone wants them and everyone needs them. Metrics are how we observe performance and make decisions.

Digital marketing offers far more visibility in behaviors and actions. Measurements and terms such as Google Analytics, visitors, pages per visit, bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate and increasingly common.

According to Statista, the following are the primary metrics used by retailers to measure personalization initiatives and their success:

Metric: is any quantifiable, consistently defined measurement of website performance. Some examples of revelers e-commerce metrics range from conversion rate to average order value (AOV) to the cart abandonment rate. In short, metrics measure processes.

KPI: A key performance indicator that keeps track of the numbers tracked for overall growth, laddering up to business goal. These indicators are subjective, and are specific targets you want to achieve. (An example of a KPI is a $40.00 AOV)

You may be wondering - how do you measure e-commerce success? It is helpful to curate an index that summarizes your performance across selected channels.

While it depends how often you should check your metrics, checking on a weekly-basis is strategic to ensure that the state of your business is healthy. Some examples of this may include website traffic and social media engagement.

Zooming out from weekly metrics, bi-weekly metrics are best suited for larger-sample sizes that are less influences by any variations that may occur in a given week. This may include AOV, CPA and shopping cart abandonment.

When checking metrics on a monthly basis, they require a much longer data window due to traffic patterns or your own marketing patterns. These many include email clickthrough rate, multichannel engagement, reach and add-to-cart abandonment, alongside other micro-conversions.

Other metrics can be checked on a quarterly basis, which is the most strategic, at least as defined by these time periods.

In addition, understanding customer stages is very critical. Each step of the funnel has different metrics that are more relevant; however; the relative importance is defined by your personal preference, enterprise strategies and where you are in the enterprise lifecycle.

The following are likely to be the most important metrics to run a successful e-commerce store:

Impressions

Reach

Engagement

Email CTR

CPA

Organic acquisition tragic

Social engagement

Abandonment

Mico to macro conversion rates

Impressions: The number of times your ad or piece of content is presented to someone. Those impressions can occur via paid ads on third-party sites, search results, social platforms, etc…

Reach: Reach is the total number of your followers and subscribers, essentially the sum of all of those who will see your content. Reach is best improved by consistent campaigns — social media or email for example, to encourage subscribers, followers, etc…

Engagement: The intersection of your impressions and your reach, otherwise how many of your followers and subscribers (your reach) engage with your content (your impressions.)

Email CTR: How many of your subscribers who’ve received he email and opened it, click to your website.

CPA: How much you’re paying for acquiring first time customers. Your CPA can be improved by segmenting your campaigns to better target customers who will best respond to your campaigns CTAs.

Organic Acquisition Traffic: Attracting people to your site without paying for them. It is critical tot measure how many of your visitors reach the site organically, commonly available in all analytics platforms.

Conversion Metrics:

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate: Measures how many people add something to their cart but leave your site without making a purchase. This measure is vital to see if there are hitches in the site or cart process before getting to the checkout process.

Checkout Abandonment: A critical metric of how many people leave your sit without making a purchase, but only after they begin the checkout process.

Micro to Macro Conversion Rates: Small (micro) activities that lead to larger (macro) activities. They are similar to abandonment rates but can give you an opportunity to measure activities you consider essential to your funnel (ex: number of visitors who click on a product detail page or the number of visitors who opt-in as an email subscriber.)

Average Order Value: The average price your customers are paying for the items in their cart when they check out. It should be measured over time to determine how it evolves and is a critical measurement to know as it relates to measurements of marketing effectiveness.

Sales Conversion Rates: Total number of orders/sales divided by the total amount of sessions to your store. This is critical to understand to determine how much traffic is required to generate your target sales.

Retention Rates: Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retraining an existing one. The percentage of customers you maintain over a period of time. When calculating, it is critical to subtract new customers from the customer count.

Customer Lifetime Value: The total revenue an e-commerce business earns from an individual customer over time and takes into account everyone of the orders. This is an excellent metric to size up your average customer satisfaction, loyalty and a brand’s viability.

Refund & Return Rate: Returns can be a powerful driver to entice potential customers to hit “buy now” especially if there are free returns of exchanges to alleviate worries of buyers rear. Use returns and refunds as a fuel to drive your business, not burn you.

Churn Rate: Measures the turnover of your customers, or number of users lost over a given period of time.

NPS: Defined by how likely your customers would be to reefer you to others. Based on their numeric answer, customers fall into one of three categories: 1. Detractors, 2. Passives. 3. Promoters — the more promoters you have, the better your score will be.

Subscription Rate: As e-mail marketing remains high-value, knowing what percentage of your visitors have opted-in for your email lists is essential. This signals to your customers that they want to hear fro you. Unsubscribe rate is as important as new subscriptions - if you’re seeing vast swaths of users fleeing from your emails, it might be time to reconsider your approach.

Thanks for reading about the different types of digital metrics!

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 29 days

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Keywords & Google Ads

In today's blog, we're going to talk about why you need to know about keyword match types in Google Ads and how they can seriously impact the success of your campaigns. You’ll learn the lowdown on the four types of match types (broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match) and explain their ins and outs, as well as the three types of negative keyword match types. It can not be stressed enough how important it is to understand the differences between these match types and choose the right ones for your campaigns. That way, you'll get more relevant clicks and make your campaigns more cost-effective.

Let's dive right in!

What are Keyword Match Types?

Keyword match types are settings that determine the level of similarity between search queries and keywords needed to trigger an ad in Google Ads. In other words, keyword match types can help advertisers and marketers control when and where their ads appear, leading to more relevant clicks and cost-effective campaigns.

It is crucial for advertisers to choose the appropriate keywords for their Google Search campaigns. However, this effort can go to waste if they do not pay attention to keyword match types during the campaign setup phase. Keyword match types determine the relevance of the ads to the search queries and can affect the success of the campaign. Understanding the different types and their nuances can have a significant impact on the campaign's profitability.

What’s the Importance of Keyword Match Types?

Using various keyword match types in Google Ads campaigns can significantly impact their success, similar to long-tail and short-tail keywords. Without utilizing them, irrelevant search queries may trigger ads, leading to wasted ad budget. However, by effectively using match types, advertisers can control when and where their ads appear, ultimately leading to more relevant clicks and cost-effective campaigns. In summary, match types allow advertisers to define the level of similarity between search queries and their keywords necessary to trigger an ad.

Four Types of Keyword Match Types:

Google Ads has four keyword match types: broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Each type provides different levels of control and restrictiveness. There is no one "best" match type as each type has its benefits depending on the situation.

Broad Match: Default.It is the least restrictive and gives you the least amount of control.

Modified Broad Match: Appears for variations of your keyword.

Phrase Match: Sticks to queries that contain the particular phrase.

Exact Match: The most restrictive, providing the most control.

Now, let’s break each type down with more detail.

Broad Match: Broad match is a keyword match type that can trigger ads for a wide range of search queries, some of which may not be relevant. Google's Broad match modifier is no longer available, and existing BMM (broad match modifier) keywords now behave exactly as phrase match keywords. New keywords cannot be added using the legacy BMM notation.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means that your ad will only be shown to people who search for the exact phrase included in your keyword, in that specific order. Phrase match allows for words before and after the keyword and also includes close variations such as misspellings and singular or plural forms. It brings in more specific search queries and gets fewer impressions compared to modified broad matches, but makes up for it in visitor quality.

Exact Match: Exact match is the most restrictive keyword match type, as it only shows ads when the search query precisely matches the keyword or close variations with the same meaning. Google Ads initially matched search queries with exact match keywords exactly, giving advertisers perfect control but requiring manual addition of close variants. Google later expanded exact match to include close variants, reducing the list but also reducing control over ad appearance for specific search queries. Despite these changes, exact match still gives advertisers the most control over their keywords and can lead to high-quality clicks.

What is Stemming?

Stemming involves reducing a word to its stem and is crucial in natural language processing and understanding. It is also used in queries and search engines.

Can a Keyword Match Type be Negative?

Yes, negative keywords are used to prevent ads from showing up for search queries related to those keywords, and they work together with keyword match types to reduce wasted ad spend. Negative keywords also have different match types, such as negative broad match, negative phrase match, and negative exact match.

Negative Broad Match: To reduce ad spend, negative keywords are used to eliminate ads from showing up for search queries related to those keywords. Negative broad match is the most restrictive option among negative keyword match types. While it eliminates search queries that include the whole keyword phrase and its reverse versions, it still allows search queries that include parts of the phrase.

Negative Phrase Match: Negative phrase match keywords are less restrictive than negative broad match keywords. They prevent your ads from being triggered for search queries that contain the exact phrases of your keyword in the same order. Negative phrase match keywords are useful for multiple Google Shopping campaigns, but they still won't show your ad for queries that include the exact negative keyword.

Negative Exact Match: Negative exact match is the most precise type of negative keyword match, as it only eliminates search queries that contain the exact phrase, in the same order, and without any additional words. It ensures that your ad will not be displayed to searchers who use your keyword phrase in their queries. Although Google uses negative exact match as its default option, it may not be what users expect when adding negative keywords to their campaigns. This type of negative match is particularly useful if you want to avoid eliminating additional search terms that are related to your negative keyword.

So why does this matter?

Did you know your Google Ads match the Type Strategy:

To effectively create a keyword list for your search campaigns, it's important to understand the various keyword match types. Google recommends starting with broad match and negative keywords, but it's best to avoid broad match as it can lead to irrelevant search terms triggering your ads. Instead, evaluate the performance of different search queries and gradually incorporate different match types into your strategy.

To Summarize: Keyword match types play a crucial role in the success of Google Ads campaigns by controlling when and where ads appear, leading to more relevant clicks and cost-effective campaigns. Understanding the nuances of the four types - broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match - is important for advertisers to choose the appropriate keywords and match types for their campaigns. Negative keyword match types also help reduce wasted ad spend by preventing ads from showing up for search queries related to those keywords. By effectively using match types and negative keywords, advertisers can optimize their campaigns and achieve their goals. Overall, understanding and utilizing keyword match types and negative keywords in your Google Ads campaigns can lead to more effective targeting and ultimately, better return on investment (ROI).

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 month

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First-Party Cookies, Third-Party Cookies & Chocolate Chip Cookies

What will life be like in a cookie-less world?

TLDR: The end of third-party trackers limits the ability of advertisers to obtain audience data off-site and will lead to less targeted audiences than in the past. Advertisers rely heavily on third-party cookie tracking, as it provides audience and conversion data from domains that aren’t owned by the advertiser. For example, if a brand were to run ads on Bloomberg's website, it could implement third-party trackers on the ads and funnel the audience data into its audience tracking platform, even though the ad served on Bloomberg.

First-party cookie trackers differ, as they measure audience data that occurs on their owned website/landing page. Therefore, it’s crucial to implement best practices, including properly setting up attribution tags on your website, importing audience data across platforms and updating your conversion goals to align with each campaign for first-party cookie tracking to stay up to date on the latest for conversion tracking.

Now, into the nitty-gritty.

There are two different types of cookies: 1st-party cookies and 3rd-party cookies. But what’s the difference?

First Party Cookie Credentials:

Set by the publishers web server or any JavaScript loaded on the website. Some examples of this include Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.

Available to the domain that created it.

Supported by all browsers and can be blocked and/or deleted by the user.

An example of a first-party cookie is when a user signs onto a website like Amazon (e-commerce) and the web browser will send a request in a process that provides the highest level of trust that the user is directly interactive with Amazon; therefore, the browser saves this data file to the computer under the domain “amazon.com.”

Did you know that 74% of consumers believe it is important to have a personalized, online shopping experience with a brand? In the event first part cookies were blocked, a user would need to sign in every single time they visited a site and would be unable to purchase multiple items because the cart would reset after every item was added. Personally, that would not work for me, but may be good for my wallet!

Third Party Cookie Credentials:

Accessible on any website that loads the third-party server’s code.

Supported by all browsers, but many are blocking the creation of the third-party cookies by default.

Users are also taking matters into their own hands by deleting third-party cookies independently.

Third-party cookies are created by domains that are not the website that you are visiting; rather they are used for online-advertising purposes and placed on a website through adding scripts or tags. They are accessible on any website that loads the 3rd-party servers code.

They are leveraged in online advertising by adding tags to a page, which may or may not display adverts. Advertisers have the ability to track a user across differing websites they visit.

In the upcoming cookie less world – past website visitors will need be engaged with help from privacy-preserving technologies. Both industry-leaders in the marketing-tech space, Chrome and Android, have been working to build the Privacy Sandbox.

As aforementioned, Google believes a new approach to audience re-engagement is needed to enable campaigns that are both private and effective. Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Display & Video 360 has been integrating the Privacy Sandbox Protected Audience API into their platform’s backend to support re-engagement for display campaigns.

But wait – what is the Protected Audience API? It reduces the risks of fingerprinting, when data about a device is collected to identify the devices’ owner, often without the owner’s knowledge or consent.

What’s the role of AI on 3rd party cookies?

As a user, ensure to protect your results using the predictive power of Google AI. In a world with few user identifiers, this platform can help deliver relevant ads to valuable consumer targets when data is not available.

On average, advertisers who use optimized targeting on Google Display ads see upward of 50% increases in conversions as a comparable ROI; therefore, adopting optimized targeting will help you, as a marketer, find more people who are likely to convert. This accordingly allows you to expand on your consumer base, developing on your low-funnel performance goals.

In addition, in the past interest-based audience experiments with the Privacy Sandbox, Google reports that campaigns sing AI-powered solutions like optimized targeting or maximize conversions bid strategies were less impacted by the removal of the 3rd-party cookies. Marketers expect that this remains true for audience re-engagement.

With this information, what should marketers do?

Reach new or existing customers with tailored messages by activating your first-party data, as it is one of the most durable ways to re-engage with your most valuable audience. By growing your foundation of consented first-party data, you can deepen the connection with your customers and deliver relevant experiences, all while protective their privacy.

Thanks for reading! Now go have a chocolate chip cookie as a reward for your new knowledge.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 month

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PPC Marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing stands at the forefront of contemporary e-commerce tactics, offering enterprises a direct pathway to potential clients.

What is PPC?

PPC enables prominent website showcasing on the SERP for designated keywords or phrases, with charges incurred solely upon user ad clicks. When this strategy is executed correctly, notable ROI is promised by steering high-quality leads toward one's site.

Domain of PPC:

Ranging from cost-per-click (CPC) to quality score and campaign structuring, familiarity with these components empowers advertisers to devise campaigns that strike a chord with their intended audience while optimizing their advertising expenditure.

In addition, discerning the divergence between paid advertising platforms, like search engine marketing (SEM) and social media avenues, equips enterprises to tactically allocate their resources.

PPC Platforms:

Deciding on the PPC platform assumes pivotal importance in digital marketing triumphs.

Although Google Ads commands dominance owing to its expansive reach and search magnitude, alternatives such as Bing Ads and Facebook Ads proffer distinct advantages, like reduced CPC or precise targeting features.

Niche platforms like AdRoll and RevContent furnish avenues for retargeting and content amplification, augmenting the comprehensive efficacy of PPC endeavors.

So, why PPC Marketing? What are the advantages?

The advantages of PPC marketing transcend immediate outcomes, furnishing enterprises with a versatile arsenal for customer procurement and interaction.

From its cost efficiency and swift deployment to its pinpoint targeting prowess and immunity to algorithmic shifts, PPC marketing emboldens e-commerce enterprises to traverse the digital terrain with assurance.

All in all, by harnessing data insights from PPC campaigns, enterprises can further hone their SEO strategies, ensuring a well-rounded approach to online prominence and clientele acquisition.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 2 months

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AI & Email Best-Practices

AI in Marketing:

Successful brands must redefine authenticity in a world that is growing to be more artificial. It is not about who, or what, creates your content anymore; marketers must keep the content brand experience for the customer a priority.

There is a 318% increase in how much organizations plan to use Artificial Intelligence for customer support activities in 2024.

With the rise of AI — alongside other technological advancements — the social trends for e-commerce marketing have shifted.

While generative AI may be a source of hope for busy working professionals, there are great risks associated with leveraging the technology. Hootsuite’s 2024 Social Media Consumer Survey highlights that 62% of consumers say they are less likely to engage with and trust content if they know it was created by an AI application.

This may be concerning, as organizations pan to increase AI usage for editing images by 260% this year; therefore, social marketers should be wary of flocking to use this technology as targeted audiences are not embracing the machine-made content.

However, different generations have differing levels of trust toward the technology: Generation Z tends to claim they are able to differentiate human-created content versus artificially-created content, while Baby Boomers are not.

While we know the utilization of AI on social is inevitable, to thrive in this new environment marketers and brands alike must move beyond defining “real” and “authentic” based on whether something was created exclusively by a human.

Wondering how to work smarter as a marketer with AI? Follow these 3 steps to establish authenticity and transparency with your desired audience:

Know Your Audience & How They Feel About AI:

- Obtaining a deep understanding of your audience (demographics, psychographics, geographics, etc…) can help you gather insights on whether AI content marketing could be a hit or miss.

2. Delegate Strategically:

- While AI is a great helping hand, it can not fully run the job, so to speak; therefore, it’s up to you — as the marketer — to delegate with aspects of the job can be supported by AI, and which aspects need a more nuanced brain to finesse.

3. Curate AI Policies & Best Practices for Social:

- Ensure your organization is aligned on the utilization of AI. With rules and regulations in place, potential nightmares can be avoided.

Email Best Practices:

There are three differing types of e-commerce email communications: transactional emails, promotional emails and lifecycle emails.

Transactional emails include receipts and other post-purchase updates; promotional emails include sales emails with new product announcements and newsletters; Lifecycle emails are based on a customer’s behavior — example sending an abandoned cart email to customers who didn’t complete their purchase.)

Before-the-Open Elements are critical to the success of email marketing. While the content of your email is important, you must ensure that your audience will open the email in the first place; therefore, ensure to write a catchy subject line and pre-header text.

Subject Lines:

The subject line of your email holds critical importance - when deciding a subject line ensure to carefully consider word choice to make it effective. You can do so by being clear before being clever, keeping it short and switch, making it clickable, not clickbait, ask questions to serve as a hook, and A/B test where necessary to understand what subject lines are actually successful for your audience.

Leveraging tools like Google Analytics for e-commerce allows marketers to track peach purchase times, helping develop an understanding of the best time to send an email to land in the desired consumers inbox. In addition, to measure overall email performance is one of the best practices to implement, as it can aid in improving email marketing campaigns.

Keep an eye on the statistics and review the molten to make sure that you are up to date with any changes that need to be made.

Do not be afraid to ask for feedback: People love giving input - especially when it has to do with something they can benefit from.

Three Core Email Marketing Analytics:

Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that don’t make it into a subscriber’s inbox — either because of a technical error, spa filter, or a subscribers email being inactive.

CTR: The percentage of subscribers that click a link (any link) in your email.

Opt-Out Rate: The percentage of subscribers that unsubscribed from your email list.

Segmentation:

In addition, segmentation in email marketing is vital for success, enabling marketers to send ore personalized emails to the right people a the right tie, accordingly converting the specific subsection of customers. Marketers can segment by: customer type, interest in certain topics or products, location, and levels of engagement.

Body Copy:

In terms of body copy, this is where marketers can fulfill the promises made in the subject line - the body of the email should always be compelling, concise and on brand. The copy must convince subscribers to act on the prompt — or a singular , standout button image CTA — in the email. Do so by deliberating a hierarchy of information, putting the most important information upfront and going more into detail as the email progresses. You can also incorporate images that add value to help get your message across, but be mindful of the increase in email load times and potential formatting issues on mobile.

Personalization:

Another key element of successful e-commerce marketing emails is personalization: You should alway make an effort to address receipts by name to show you are thankful for their invidious business; however, ensure excursive restraint when sending emails. While it is great to follow up on missed opportunities, there is a fine line between aggressive and annoying; therefore, use your personal justest to send emails on a cadence as you see fit. As a general best practice, avoid sending more than one sales-oriented email per week, limiting your most sales-related emails to special occasions (blow out sale, or inventory reduction.)

Finally, in all email-marketing communications, ensure to abide by previously established brand identity and branding materials - the logo, colors, font, and language.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 2 months

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The Sprout Social Index Edition XIX: Breakthrough

“As social media evolves, so should your approach to measuring and conveying its business impact.”

Social media marketing grew up. Now what? The Sprout Social Index published its 19th annual report – surveying over 1,800 consumers and 900 marketers across the United States and United Kingdom – highlighting what consumers want, how to crack the customer care code and the prediction of the landscapes future.

53% of consumers say that their social media usage has been higher over the last two years; therefore, this reveals that marketers must strategically reach their desired audience/targeted consumers through these platforms: Meeting them where they are, at the right place and the right time.

Yet, it’s more than just the potential consumer hitting the follow button, as the most common reason that consumers follow a brand is to stay up to date on the latest products and services. In 2024, social media is the new shopping mall and “marketers can capitalize on this shift by creating a steady steam of content for audiences actively looking to shop their feeds.”

When publishing content, brand markers must ensure to touch on the following 5 aspects, accordingly, establishing and maintaining relationships with consumers, in turn, driving sales:

Authenticity: Do not be overly promotional with content;

Transparency: Highlight business practices and values;

Knowledge: Share information about how products are made/sourced;

Educate: Show the brand’s identity;

Feature: UGC (user-generated content) and customer testimonials.

As aforementioned, it is critical to leave a lasting impression on consumers, which can aid in two-way relationship building. So how can a marketer do this?

The most memorable brands on social respond to consumers, prioritize original content over trending topics, publish timely content, take risks with content, collaborate with content creators/influencers, and speak out on causes and news that align with their values.

Marketers can ask themselves three questions when considering consumer behavior, to crack the customer care code:

Does my brand show up on social with content to support all stages of the buyers experience?

Am I spending the right time on content creation and audience engagement? What’s the right balance?

How does my brand showcase authenticity with current and prospective customers?

As social media has amplified the importance of strong customer relationships – a single interaction between a brand and customer can make or break the relationship. As customer expectations evolve, marketers can expect the the need for quality and personalized care to increase.

In terms of personalization and care:

76% of consumers not only notice but appreciate companies that prioritize customer support.

76% of consumers values the speed in which a brand responds to their needs.

In 2023, 30% of consumers expected brands to respond on social media within the same day; while 16% expected the brand to respond within minutes.

70% of consumers expect companies to provide personalized responses to their customer service needs.

These insights highlight how companies must meet consumers where they are, with speedy and personalized customer service attention to ensure their needs are being met and they are satisfied with more than the product or service, but the relationship.

All in all, ensuring exceptional customer satisfaction ought to serve as a guiding principle for every social media initiative yet few establishments have allocated the necessary resources or established the requisite infrastructure to facilitate advanced social customer service. As marketers, in 2024, it encourages us to reflect on the following:

Where are the gaps between the tools and processes your business utilizes to support social customer care? Are there redundancies, or can the process be simplified?

Does social customer care have a clear owner within your organization today?

What new skills does your team need to curate a robust social care strategy?

Yet, you may be wondering. What is the role of artificial intelligence on creativity and authenticity?

Clayton Norman, Social Media Marketing Manager at CeriFi states: “Smart social markets are already learning AI tools and finding ways to incorporate them into their work in ways that save time and amplify the human elements they bring to their craft to make themselves even more vital to their organizations’ goals.”

81% of marketers surveyed reveal that AI has already begun to have a positive impact on their work. Leveraging AI has aided in terms of analyzing social media data, advertising and campaign targeting, content creation and scheduling, image and video generation, measurement and sentiment analysis.

In 2024 and beyond, marketers will continue to lean on AI to further make traditional marketing processes more effective and efficient; yet, the tool should be leveraged with caution, as only 20% of marketers believe AI is helping them understand consumer needs – and that is the core to successfully targeting and reaching the desired audience to yield sales.

What’s Next?

All in all, when looking toward the team structure of tomorrow, properly staffing the most dynamic channel in marketing is about more than capacity planning but leveraging social beyond marketing to touch every corner of a business. To succeed in this fashion, adaptable teams must curate adaptable strategies, composed of networks, internal functional support, audience engagement and distribution.

It is critical to frequently monitor media analytics to ensure that marketers are properly tracking engagement. Through tracking engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments,) follower growth, CTRs, website traffic, reach, impressions, conversions and lead generations, organizations can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their social media strategies and make informed decisions to optimize their marketing efforts.

In 2024, quantifying the value of social media engagement – in regard to revenue – will be marketers’ primary way of demonstrating social’s impact on business goals, leaving it up to marketers to champion their work by building internal consensus over what is being measured and how. All in all, as the social media landscape continues to evolve, it's essential to update measurement strategies accordingly. The Sprout Social Index highlights the need for authentic content and personalized customer care to engage audiences effectively. Leveraging AI tools can enhance efficiency, but maintaining a human touch is crucial for genuine connections. Success in social media marketing requires adaptable strategies and comprehensive analytics to track engagement and demonstrate business impact.

Source: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/index/

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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The Ultimate Guide to Paid Social Media: Unleashing Your Marketing Potential

Published by: Kate Ruberti

Paid social media advertising has become an essential marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. With the ability to target specific demographics and gain valuable insights into audience engagement, paid social media campaigns offer businesses an opportunity to boost brand awareness and attract potential customers. While some businesses may initially feel hesitant to invest in paid social media advertising, the benefits can far outweigh the costs when executed correctly. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the advantages of paid social media, the importance of establishing an organic presence, how to allocate a budget, and the five crucial steps to ensure a successful first-time campaign. So, let's dive into the world of paid social media advertising and discover how it can take your business to the next level.

It is important to note that although some businesses may feel intimidated by the idea of paying for social media advertising, the truth is that most marketers are now using it. Even small businesses can benefit from paid social media campaigns as they can enhance brand awareness and attract potential customers. A comprehensive guide to paid social media can provide businesses with the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully utilize it.

Let's get into the nitty-gritty.

Why is Paid Social Worth It?

Similar to email and SEO, social media serves as a marketing channel. However, relying solely on organic posting may only get you so far. By incorporating paid campaigns, businesses can ultimately support their organic efforts. Paid social media guarantees exposure and attention for your brand while algorithms can be unpredictable. In fact, many consumers discover new products through social media, making ads an effective tool to engage both new and returning customers.

Paid Social Helps Target Your Desired Audience:

Using paid social media advertising enables you to focus on your ideal customer demographic.

With advanced targeting options, you can tailor your campaigns to only reach individuals within a specific income bracket or residing in a particular location.

You can even designate campaigns for specific audiences such as existing followers, previous customers, or visitors who have left your website without making a purchase.

By defining your targeting parameters, you ensure that your ads are displayed to the individuals most likely to engage with your brand.

Paid Social Allows You to Gain Insights about Your Target Audience:

Using native social analytics falls short of expectations, but paid social uncovers profound findings.

Native Social Analytics: Built-in analytics tools provided by the utilized social platform to both track and measure various metrics (engagement, impressions, CTRs, reach, demographics, etc…)

Paid ad campaigns yield valuable insights into the essential social media metrics that drive your business.

Valuable information that can be extracted includes the types of promotions that generate the highest engagements and the demographics of your social media audience.

Additionally, comparisons can be drawn between organic and paid social media ads, providing clarity on individual ad campaign performance.

So now that we talked through some of the benefits of paid social, when is the right time to start?

While there's no definitive answer, there are a few things to ponder before launching a paid social media campaign.

First, it’s critical to have an established presence and comprehension of the social media network you intend to advertise on.

This may seem self-evident, but it can seem suspicious if a company runs ads but has a completely inactive organic page.

Establishing a presence demonstrates that you're a reputable company.

Furthermore, the opportunity to show advertisements to existing followers is a beneficial added bonus since individuals who already know you are more likely to engage.

Once you've laid the foundation for your organic presence, assign an appropriate budget to your campaigns to ensure optimal results.

Budgeting:

Allocating a budget for social media can prove challenging, as the cost of your ads will depend on various factors, such as your industry, cost-per-click (CPC), the necessary creative elements, and campaign duration. By adhering to these guidelines, you can overcome common obstacles associated with paid social media.

As a business, it is essential to commit the appropriate amount of funds to your paid campaign to achieve your desired results.

Running value campaigns that do not resonate with your target audience will not yield a significant return on investment.

It is crucial to remain committed to your goals and make the most of the targeting and visibility that paid social media can offer.

In addition, it is vital to connect your social ad campaigns to larger business initiatives, whether that's a product launch or holiday promotion, to ensure they are purposeful and effective.

In other words, running ads "just because" is not recommended.

If you're eager to start with paid advertising, there are five crucial steps to ensure a successful first-time campaign:

Select the Social Media Platform(s) that Offer the Greatest Potential Reach and Prioritize Those Where you Have an Established Audience:

It's recommended to begin with one platform to avoid spreading yourself too thin and ensure you can focus on specific goals, creatives, and ad specifications.

The exception to this is Facebook and Instagram, which share the same ad platform, but it's still advisable to proceed cautiously and avoid juggling two paid campaigns until you have a better understanding of their nuances.

Establish Goals and Desired Outcomes for your Paid Campaigns:

Before launching your social media ads, it's essential to determine your desired outcome.

Whether your objective is to boost brand recognition or generate sales and sign-ups, the decision is entirely up to you.

Look for Inspiration From Successful Campaigns:

It's highly likely that you've come across both exceptional and poor social media ads.

As a fundamental aspect of paid social media, analyzing your competitors' ads is crucial; However, it's essential to not only scrutinize those of major corporations but also smaller competitors.

When researching, avoid comparing ads of diverse industries; instead, focus on examining ads run by local businesses or cafes to gain more relevant insights.

Research Appropriate Creatives, Copy and Targeting:

Paid social campaigns require extensive preparation, but fortunately, ad platforms provide thorough guidance to beginners.

It's essential to refresh your knowledge of various aspects of the campaign, including ad specifications and sizes, call-to-action phrases, and marketing messaging.

Additionally, you must have a deep understanding of your target audience and their demographics.

Be prepared to make adjustments, especially when it comes to targeting, as you launch your initial campaigns.

Adequate research and budget allocation are crucial for optimizing your campaign's effectiveness.

Track Your Paid Efforts with Analytics:

The success of your social media campaigns can be determined by analyzing the data and metrics provided by the platforms and tools like Sprout.

Through these analytics, you can compare the performance of your organic and paid social media, calculate the ROI of your campaigns, and identify ways to improve future ones.

Having access to these reports is essential for improving your campaigns and reporting your results to your team.

Based on your campaign's performance, you can adjust your targeting and budget for the future, or focus on organic social media instead.

To Wrap Up…

Paid social media advertising is an effective way for businesses to reach and engage with their desired audience, generate leads, and increase brand awareness. Incorporating paid campaigns can support organic efforts and provide valuable insights into the essential social media metrics that drive a business; however, before launching a paid social media campaign, it is critical to have an established presence on the social media platform, understand the budgeting and targeting process, set clear goals and outcomes, and track the success of your campaign through analytics. With proper planning and execution, a comprehensive guide to paid social media can provide businesses with the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully utilize it.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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Maximizing Your Google Ads Success: Understanding Keyword Match Types

Published by: Kate Ruberti

So let's dive right in!

What are Keyword Match Types?

What’s the Importance of Keyword Match Types?

Four Types of Keyword Match Types:

Broad Match: Default.It is the least restrictive and gives you the least amount of control.

Modified Broad Match: Appears for variations of your keyword.

Phrase Match: Sticks to queries that contain the particular phrase.

Exact Match: The most restrictive, providing the most control.

Now, let’s break each type down with more detail.

Broad Match: Broad match is a keyword match type that can trigger ads for a wide range of search queries, some of which may not be relevant.

Google's Broad match modifier is no longer available, and existing BMM (broad match modifier) keywords now behave exactly as phrase match keywords. New keywords cannot be added using the legacy BMM notation.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means that your ad will only be shown to people who search for the exact phrase included in your keyword, in that specific order.

Phrase match allows for words before and after the keyword and also includes close variations such as misspellings and singular or plural forms.

It brings in more specific search queries and gets fewer impressions compared to modified broad matches, but makes up for it in visitor quality.

Exact Match: Exact match is the most restrictive keyword match type, as it only shows ads when the search query precisely matches the keyword or close variations with the same meaning.

Google Ads initially matched search queries with exact match keywords exactly, giving advertisers perfect control but requiring manual addition of close variants.

Google later expanded exact match to include close variants, reducing the list but also reducing control over ad appearance for specific search queries.

Despite these changes, exact match still gives advertisers the most control over their keywords and can lead to high-quality clicks.

What is Stemming?

Stemming involves reducing a word to its stem and is crucial in natural language processing and understanding. It is also used in queries and search engines.

Can a Keyword Match Type be Negative?

Negative Phrase Match: Negative phrase match keywords are less restrictive than negative broad match keywords.

They prevent your ads from being triggered for search queries that contain the exact phrases of your keyword in the same order.

Negative phrase match keywords are useful for multiple Google Shopping campaigns, but they still won't show your ad for queries that include the exact negative keyword.

It ensures that your ad will not be displayed to searchers who use your keyword phrase in their queries. Although Google uses negative exact match as its default option, it may not be what users expect when adding negative keywords to their campaigns.

This type of negative match is particularly useful if you want to avoid eliminating additional search terms that are related to your negative keyword.

So why does this matter?

Did you know your Google Ads match the Type Strategy:

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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Unlocking the Power of Customer Segmentation: Strategies for Effective Targeting

Published by: Kate Ruberti

Let’s talk about email segmentation. But first, what even is segmentation?

Let’s dive deeper into segmentation now.

Before moving into email hierarchy, what is progressive registration and how does it help digital marketers with email marketing?

Hierarchy of Email Elements:

Email Best Practices:

Fromatting: To create easy-to-read email copy, it’s critical to format the text with concise, scannable sections. Begin with a simple offer and use short paragraphs, utilize white space, bullet points, headings and a clear hierarchy to make the text digestible to read. You can also use bolded text or highlighting to emphasize important phrases.

Incorporating Images that Add Value: To make sure your email loads quickly and looks fabulous on mobile devices, it's critical to utilize images; however, only use images when they add value, helping convey your message better than text.

Keep image files small (under 1 MB) to avoid loading issues. Make sure to add alt text for images, so subscribers can still understand your message even if the images are blocked or unviewable.

Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design: Emails need to be designed responsibly for mobile devices, for mobile email accounts for 60% of all opens. In the next few years, this percentage is expected to grow with mobile commerce on the rise, as shoppers are comfortable brosowins and purchasing products on their phones.

Luckily, most email marketing platforms offer responsible templates that automatically optimize the email content for mobile design.

The CTA should stand out with a noticeable button image, even contrasting colors, and be placed in an area with plenty of whitespace.

The CTA should be easily distinguishable from the surrounding text to make it clear to the reader of what action to take.

Now that we have defined 5 email best practices, how do we measure the email's performance?

3 Core Email Marketing Analytics to Track:

Hard Bounce: Occurs when the email address is incorrect/invalid.

Soft Bounce: Occurs when the receipts inbox is full.

Click-Through Rate: Refers to the percentage of subscribers who click on any link included in an email campaign, providing insight into the engagement level of the audience.

A higher CTR indicates that your email content is resonating with the audience and that the CTA is effective in encouraging them to take action.

A lower CTR is a signal that your mail content or CTA needs improvement and/or that your audience is disengaged.

Want to generate more sales? Utilize Email Receipts & Shipping Messages:

Personalization is Key!

Don’t Go Overboard - Exercise Restraint When Sending Emails:

Keep Track of Your Own Ecommerce Email Best Practices:

Use Your Ecommerce Website to Create an Email List:

Keep Branding Top-of-Mind in Emails:

Take Advantage of Email Automation:

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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Mastering the Art of Email Marketing: Best Practices for E-Commerce Businesses

Published by: Kate Ruberti

Email marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing for it allows businesses and e-commerce sites to communicate directly with their target audience, build and maintain relationships and promote products or services through a cost-effective personalized channel. Furthermore, with email marketing, businesses can reach a large number of subscribers at once and measure the success of their campaigns with open rates, CTRs – or click-through rates – and additional metrics. Furthermore, email marketing can be automated and/or tailored to the specific interests and behaviors of individual subscribers, accordingly resulting in higher engagement rates and conversations.

There are three different types of email marketing: Transactional emails – including receipts and other post-purchase updates – promotion emails – including sales emails, new product announcements and newsletters – and lifecycle emails – which are based on a customer’s behavior - for example, sending a abandoned cart email to customers who did not complete their purchase.

It is important to note that before-the-open elements matter. Many digital marketers make the error of solely concentrating on the content of their marketing emails, ignoring the critical aspect of convincing their subscribers to open their email. To ensure your marketing email is effective, it is essential to focus on more than just the content. Your email must first be opened by subscribers, and this can be achieved through 3 key elements: Crafting an attention-grabbing subject line and preheader text, sending the email at an optimal time and targeting the right audience through proper segmentation of your subscriber list.

Let’s talk about the subject line of emails. As aforementioned, the subject line of an email is critical in determining whether or not subscribers will open it. Even the best email can go unnoticed i f the subject line is not compelling enough to the subscriber. As a result, businesses must give subject lines careful consideration. Fortunately, email marketers have conducted extensive research on what elements specifically make an effective subject line.

So, you must be wondering: What email subject lines actually get opened? These 5 guidelines can help you maximize your subject line.

Be Clear Before Being Clever: Both a specific and a clear subject line is absolutely critical in informing subscribers about the content of an email and should not be dependent upon vague language. Clarity is essential to ensure there is no room left for misinterpretation.

Keep it short: In order to avoid the risk of having the subject line of an email cut off, ensure to limit the character count to roughly 55-70 characters. Mobile emails services have this limitation and to ensure your message is not lost or unclear, stay within this character frame.

Clickable, not clickbait: While it’s important to have a high email open rate, it is critical to ensure you are not overselling the emails content which may mislead subscribers, accordingly moving them to unsubscribe from future emails. The value of a high open rate lies in guiding subscribers towards the CTA, or call-to-action.

Ask a Question: Research has indicated that subject lines formulated as questions have a higher tendency to capture the attention of subscribers.

A/B Test: To determine what subject lines may be the most effective for your targeted audience, conducting an A/B test is recommended. The A/B test allows you to gain insight into what content resonates with your audience.

A/B testing for an e-commerce business provides many benefits, such as providing data to inform decision-making. It is important to note that while A/B testing, the best practice is to test one variable at a time on a large enough sample size.

Now that we have the subject line down, when is the best time to send an email to reach your audience?

Determining the optimal time to send a marketing email is critical for maximizing an e-commerce businesses’ effectiveness. These businesses can use peak purchase times to identify patterns in their customers’ behavior, which will accordingly influence the digital marketing strategy. The best way to identify these peak purchasing times is through using Google Analytics; however, depending upon which type of marketing email that is being sent, there are best practices to follow. For example, if you are sending a lifecycle email that is dependent upon specific customer behaviors – like an abandoned cart email – the timing may vary based on the reason for abandonment and the strategy for recovering the order.

Through Google Analytics, e-commerce business owners have the ability to track key performance indicators or KPIs such as revenue, conversion rate and average order value. More than just these metrics, Google Analytics helps businesses understand customer behavior to improve the user experience on ecommerce websites.

Ultimately, effective email marketing requires more than just great content. To ensure that your marketing emails are successful, it is essential to focus on the before-the-open elements such as crafting an attention-grabbing subject line and preheader text, sending the email at an optimal time and targeting the right audience through proper segmentation of your subscribed list. To achieve this, businesses must follow best practices such as being clear, keeping subject lines short, avoiding clickbait, asking questions, and conducting A/B testing. Moreover, determining the optimal time to send a marketing email is crucial for e-commerce businesses to maximize their effectiveness and Google Analytics is a valuable tool for digital marketers to gain valuable insights into customer behavior to improve user experience and track key performance indicators. By implementing these key strategies in email marketing, digital markets can increase their chances of reaching their target audience, achieving higher open rates accordingly driving sales.

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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Content, Formatting, Header Tags, and Alternative Text: 4 Ways to Optimize User Performance

Published by: Kate Ruberti

Let’s talk content. But first, what even is content?

Web content, as defined by Techopedia, refers to the “textual, aural, or visual content published on a website.” In simpler terms, content is all the information that is contained in a website. While content can be easily produced, there are some regulations that must be followed in order to optimize user performance.

Produce Relevant Content.

Make sure all content is relevant to the searcher.

Readers want to attain and absorb the information they are searching for effectively and efficiently.

Start with Conclusions.

When writing, use an inverted pyramid approach.

In other words, start with the point of your writing in the first paragraph, and then expand upon it.

This allows for improved comprehension and decreased interaction costs: Searchers can quickly form a general understanding of the content, making it easier to follow further details. Moreover, users can understand the main purpose of the webpage without having to spend a lot of time reading.

One Idea Per Paragraph.

As aforementioned, web pages should be straight-forward to the point and concise.

Searchers will scan the information for what they are specifically looking for; therefore, make this process more efficient by only writing one idea in each paragraph.

Utilization of Action Words.

Include CTAs, or calls-to-action, to provide searchers and readers with actionable next steps.

Use passive voice, where the subject is acted upon; he/she receives the action expressed by the verb.

Now that we’ve got that down, the formatting, of said content, must be strategic in order to hold searcher retention.

Use a List Instead of a Paragraph. (Like This One)

Lists are easier to scan for the desired information if kept short.

Limit lists to have 7 words.

Research has proven that people can only remember 7-10 things at a time. By keeping lists short, your reader will retain the information better.

Write Short Sentences.

Sentences should be concise. Get the information across using the fewest words.

Now that we have content and formatting under our belts, let’s get into the nitty-gritty.

What are Header Tags?

Header tags are HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags that inform a browser what styling it should utilize to showcase text on a webpage.

Header tags are useful for both users and the search engines themselves.

For users, header tags provide a summary of the content they are about to ingest.

For search engines, for example, Google, header tags provide context about the content of the page, as well as the hierarchy.

Header tags are critical for SEO because they not only help search engines understand your content, but make the content more user friendly, readable and accessible for users.

Simply, header tags in print content are utilized to title or introduce the content below.

Header tags follow a hierarchy.

Example: , , , and so on.

H1 tags: Denote the most important text (main theme or tile)

H2 & H3 Tags: These tags are commonly used to denote subheadings on the webpage.

H4, H5 & H6 Tags: Utilized to provide further structure within the aforementioned subsections.

Header Tags Best Practices:

Use Header Tags to Provide Structure.

Header tags provide structure to the article.

Each tag should provide the searcher with an idea of the information they can glean from the following text.

When drafting the content, think about the main ideas you want your audience to take away, these are the header tags, and they may help you write your content outline.

Include Keywords in Header Tags.

Search engines like Google use tags to gather context for your webpage.

Include all keywords to gain the attention of the search engine, but be judicious.

First and foremost, the webpage should be readable. So first, think about optimizing the readability for your user, then optimize for Google.

Optimize for Featured Snippets.

Sometimes, header tags are an afterthought for many marketers, but they truly can make a sizable impact on chances of being featured.

Optimize your header tag to match a long-tail voice search keyword.

Long-tail voice search keywords are longer and more specific phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they are close to a point-of-purchase, or when they are using voice search.

Then, answer the direct query by placing the text within paragraph tags.

What are Meta-Descriptions?

In the simplest terms, meta description is a meta tag that provides a description of what the webpage is about.

The meta description is displayed in the SERP, beneath the title of the page.

Meta Descriptions are important for SEO because search engines like Google automatically create the descriptions independently, despite whether or not the page appeared in segmented groups.

Purpose: Meta Descriptions:

In addition to SEO, Meta descriptions can drive clicks, traffic, potential conversations and revenue by:

1. Increasing a Websites CTR in the SERP: There Is evidence that well-written meta descriptions have properly optimized a webpage for increased “website curb appeal.”

2. Traffic: In order to increase a webs CTR with proper optimization, increasing rankings can directly correlate to driving more website traffic.

3. Potential Conversions: By crafting a well-written meta description that is closely related to the topic of the page content, there may be a significant increase in conversations.

There is anecdotal evidence to support that both increased traffic and CTRs can cause Google to promote your webpage.

Let’s take a moment to highlight a key difference between meta-descriptions and SERP Snippets.

Meta-Descriptions vs. SERP Snippets:

The terms “meta description” and “search snippet” can not be used interchangeably.

Meta Descriptions: An HTML tag that you control. You can create and optimize your descriptions depending on the content displayed on the web page.

Search Snippets: The descriptions search engines showcase for your webpages.

This can either be the crafted meta description, or something completely different. Search engines like Google have control over this.

Best Practices for Meta-Descriptions:

It has been considered a standard SEO best practice for years to keep meta descriptions at around 160-165 characters maximum.

This is because descriptions within this character frame can optimize, accordingly helping avoid the truncation of the meta description in the SERPs.

As a result, this helps to avoid high bounce rates.

However; late last year, Google announced a change to the SERP snippets, taking them up to 300 characters, more than double the usual 150-165 character limits that are recommended.

MOZ conducted a study that determined that writing 300 character long meta descriptions should be observed as a new limit.

Then, Google quickly changed back to the standard word count character limit.

Research the SERPS for your Targeted Keywords

SEM Rush, Google Trends, Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool and Answer The Public are great resources for SERP & Keyword research.

Checkpoint! Feeling good? Let’s move on to Alternative Text.

What is Alternative Text?

Alt Text: The alt text describes the appearance or function of an image on a page

Alt text is read aloud by screen readers who may be visually impaired.

General Best Practices:

Using correct grammar can enhance the experience for screen reader users.

Capitalize the first letter of the sentence.

End whole sentences with a period.

Alt text supports good SEO but also works to ensure your website is ADA compliant.

ADA Compliance: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

Alt Text - Best Practices for Informative Images:

Informative images are any images that add to the context of a page.

If the content of a page would suffer if an image was removed, then that image is informative and therefore needs an alt text.

The alt text needs to describe the image as concisely as possible. As a rule of thumb: avoid writing text alternatives longer than 100 characters.

To write a good alt text consider the context of the image.

Which additional content is it supporting?

Which details are important in the image?

The alt text should match the tone of voice of the accompanying content.

Alt Text - Best Practices for Decorative Images:

While decorative images are images that serve no specific purpose – in simple terms, any information – the best practice is to use what is called the NULL alt text or empty alt text.

Alt Text - Best Practices for Images with Text:

According to the WCAG, images with text are not allowed.

WCAG: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are the main international standards for the internet.

If you can not avoid this, it is best to have the exact same text in the attribute.

Alt Text - Best Practices for Functional (Linked) Images:

Functional images are used to initiate actions rather than to convey information.

They are used in buttons, links, and other interactive elements.

The text alternative for the image should convey the action that will be initiated (the purpose of the image) rather than a description of the image.

Missing or empty alt values create significant problems for screen reader users because functional images are essential to the functionality of the content.

Screen readers will typically announce the image file name, the image URL, or the URL for the link destination, which is unlikely to help users understand the action that will be initiated by the image.

Now, you’re a pro!

#digitalmarketing #searchmarketing #new york university

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kateruberti-ecommerce · 1 year

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Hungry to be the best Digital Marketer? Let's EAT: Be experts, authoritative and trustworthy.

Published By: Kate Ruberti

In order to EAT in Digital Marketing, there are some staple rules-of-the road to abide by in order to optimize search performance on the search engine results page (SERP) and the actual web page itself. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty.

What Is This So-Called SERP?

In the simplest terms, the search engine results page, or SERP for short, is the landing page users see after entering a query into a search engine, like Google.

There are three major components that make up the SERP: Organic search results, sponsored search results (paid advertisements) and the search query.

Organic Search Results: Unpaid, or not sponsored listings that will appear on the SERP. The placement of these results is dependent upon the users specific search query, content relevance, SEO (search engine optimization) and domain authority.

SEO: The process of improving a website's visibility when being placed on the SERP.

Sponsored Search Results: Paid advertisements that take the form of a native advertising a majority of the time.

Native Ad: Paid media designed to mirror or match the content of an organic media source, seamlessly blending in on the search landing page.

Search Query: A search query can be defined as “a phrase of keyword combination users enter into search engines to find things of interest.”

For example, if you are craving ice cream and are located in New York city, your search query may be: “Best ice cream store in Soho.”

Fun Fact: Google is the most popular search engine, holding over 80% of market share.

Make sense? Let’s move on to URLs, uniform resource locators, or the website link itself.

URLs:

A URL is colloquially coined as a “reference to a web resource that specifies its location” on the network.

In simpler terms, URLs serve as the building blocks of an effective site hierarchy, accordingly passing equity through your domain and swiftly directing searchers to their desired destination on the site.

Website Hierarchy: This refers to the arrangement of pages on a website. For example, what content appears to the viewer first?

Web Domain: A domain is simply the name of the website, or the webpage's tangible presence on the internet. An example of a domain is google.com.

Having a strong URL is necessary in order to not only drive website traffic to your website, but also to gain credibility from your searchers. In simpler terms, first impressions count.

In order to have a strong URL that optimizes user performance – ensuring the searcher does not receive endless redirecting loops – it is critical to blend usability elements, accessibility factors and SEO.

Fun Fact: On August 6, 1991, the first website – therefore first URL – was introduced to the world on the World Wide Web (WWW). Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist who invented this concept, is the person to thank every time you access information in an instantaneous second with just a few clicks.

Let’s further dive into how we can optimize URLs to be easily located by searchers and navigational for users.

URL Keywords:

Everytime you launch a page on your domain, it should have a purpose. Whether this purpose is transaction, information or administrative, its reason for existing on the web should be clear at the outset to the searcher.

In order for your URL to be found by searchers who are interested in your content and or “crawlers” who may be able to easily stumble upon it, the incorporation of keywords is critical.

Keywords should be included in the URL – which is close to the root domain – to briefly showcase the purpose of the URL.

These keywords in your link must be relevant to your purpose and will tell the search engine what the SERP should display for search results.

Example: sohoicecream.com/creamery

Additional keywords that could be used for Soho Ice Cream:

Gelato, soft serve, frozen yogurt, sorbet, etc.

Building URLs to Scale:

Websites can be used for a variety of things ranging from news to education to commerce to entertainment to social networking. In addition, the content may change over a duration of time; therefore, establishing a sitewide URL that is defined and inclusive to fit the domain's purpose is crucial.

Having many subdomains can make the user-experience confusing, frustrating, and may serve as a catalyst for the searcher to leave your webpage and turn to a competitor's.

Sub-domain: A subdivision of a domain is a smaller piece of the greater domain.

Example of a strategic way to categorize your product in the URL:

https://sohoicecream.com/icecream/vanillaiicream/breyers

I know this may be the hardest part but with URLs we can not be extra. Simple, concise and clean is the best rule of thumb.

Don’t be Extra:

Simply, make sure searchers are able to understand the purpose of your page solely by looking at the URL.

In addition, don’t include prepositions or conjunctions (like “a,” “the,” etc.)

Avoid repeating the same keywords in your URL, it will make the link look clustered and/or like spam.

Summary: Best Practices

Case Sensitivity: Use all lowercase letters in your URL.

Hashes: These send users to a specific portion of the webpage.

Word Delimiters: Use hyphens/dashes (-) to separate words in your URL springs. Be wary of using underscores (_) which actually join words together.

URL Length: Stick to 55-60 characters.

Keep the URL as short as possible, without losing/hiding its purpose.

If your URL is longer than 60 characters, the search engine will truncate your URL, or shorten it, on the search results page.

You are now well on your way to not only eating ice cream, but EATing the SERP page in Digital Marketing! Bon appetit.

#digitalmarketing #seo marketing #paid media #new york university

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