Acting as your virtual assistant, automation monitors your account all hours of the day, making changes and sending you an alert when you need to take action. 

Before, automated rules meant using or coding scripts inside Google Ads. With Adzooma, these rules are set up easily with our simplified rule builder. 

And to get you started, we’ve taken the top 3 rules that every business needs to apply, showing you how to apply them in your free Adzooma account.

Broken Campaign Alert 

Get alerted if your adverts aren’t showing to customers with the Broken Campaign Alert. This gives you confidence your campaigns are all up and running and notifies you to take action if something is blocking your campaigns. 

To set this up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’. Using our rule creator, follow these steps: 

1. Give the rule a name 

First things first, let’s give this rule a name. We’ve called it the ‘Broken Campaign Alert’ here. 

If you want, you can also add a description in this box to help remind yourself what the rule does. 

2. Set the campaigns you want it to look after

On the ‘Apply To’ step, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to look after. As this rule alerts us if any of our campaigns aren’t showing, we’re going to want to set it to look after all our active campaigns. 

To do this, select ‘Campaigns from the first drop menu and ‘All active campaigns’ from the second. 

3. Create our actions 

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set what our rule checks, and what action it takes. For the Broken Campaign Alert, we want it to alert us when something is wrong. So using the drop down menus, you’ll enter the following information. 

• Action: Notify me
• Time Period: using data from Custom, 1 days of data. 

Now we have to add these AND conditions. 

• Spend = 0
• Clicks = 0 
• Impressions < 0 

This means that for this rule to notify us, the spend on your campaign needs to be 0, your clicks have to be 0, and your impressions need to be less than 0. Or, in simple terms, your campaign isn’t spending money or being shown to anyone. 

To add these conditions, press the blue ‘Add condition’ button and search for the above from the drop-down menus. 

4. Set the frequency 

Now the hard part of the rule is done, we have to set how often Adzooma should check this rule. For this rule, we’d recommend setting it to run daily at a time you’re most likely to be online. 

For this example, we’ll set it to run every day at 10am, but you’re free to choose a time that works best for you. 

With the above in place, you’re ready to go! All you need to do now is click save. 

Low Quality Score warning 

Quality Score is a number between 1 and 10 that looks at how relevant your ads are to your keywords, how many clicks they’re expected to get and what experience users will get from your website. 

Your Quality Score is a big factor in where your ads are shown and how much you have to pay for them. The better your Quality Score (i.e. closer to 10), the cheaper your ads, so it’s a big one to pay attention to. 

With this rule, you will get alerted if any of your keywords have a low Quality Score so you can take action. To set it up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ like before. 

1. Give the rule a name 

First up, the rule needs a name. We’re calling it ‘Low Quality Score Warning’ here. 

If you want to add a description to give extra context, you can enter that in the box below. 

2. Select all active keywords 

In the ‘Apply To’ stage, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to check. Because this rule is a great all-rounder, we’re going to apply it to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns. 

To do this, just select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All Active Keywords’ on the second. 

3. Create our actions 

Now it’s time to tell Adzooma what we want the rule to do. 

• Firstly, under the action, you need to select ‘Notify me’ from the drop-down menu. This will make sure you are alerted as soon as the Quality Score drops. 
• Secondly, you want to select ‘Last Week’ from the time period menu for accurate results. 

Next, it’s time to add our conditions. There’s only one thing we’re looking for in case – keywords with a Quality Score that’s 3 and under. 

• Click the blue ‘+ Add Condition’ button
• Search for Quality Score in the first box
• Select ‘Less Than Or Equal To’ in the second
• Enter 3 in the final box.  

4. Set the frequency 

At this point, we set how often we want Adzooma to check our Quality Scores, which can be as often as every 30 minutes. 

However, in this case, we’re going to set it to run every Wednesday at 11.00am, which is a day we have time dedicated to make any changes to our campaigns. 

And that’s it! Click save and you’re done. 

Pause underperforming keywords

Keywords are the foundations of your campaigns. If there’s a weak spot, the whole structure becomes a little shaky. 

With this rule, you can make sure that you’re always building on solid ground. It will identify the keywords that are affecting your performance and pause them on your behalf to save money and deliver more clicks. 

To get started, click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ as normal. 

1. Give the rule a name

Following the same drill as the other rules, your first step is to give this rule a name. We’ve called ours Pause Underperforming Keywords. It does what it says on the tin. 

If you want to add any extra information to this rule, just fill out the optional description box underneath it. 

2. Select all active keywords 

Same as the last rule, we want to apply this to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns. This gives great all-round protection to every campaign that you’re running. 

Select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All active Keywords’ on the second. 

3. Create our actions 

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set the nitty-gritty details about what we want the rule to check and the action we want it to take. 

In this case, we want it to pause any keyword that isn’t performing. To do that, we need to: 

• Choose ‘Change Status’ from the Action drop-down menu, then select pause. 
• Select ‘Custom’ in the Time Period data menu, then type in 90 days. This will give us a better scope to understand and measure your keyword performance. 

Now, we define what bad performance is for your keywords. You can customize this to suit your business, but we’d recommend the following settings to get started. 

• CTR is less than 1%
• Impressions are greater than or equal to 200
• Clicks are greater than or equal to 15

These conditions are chosen to target keywords with a bad clickthrough rate, but avoid any keywords that are new or haven’t had time to collect data yet. They need to have been seen, but not clicked. 

Use the drop-down menus to enter the above information, using the blue ‘+’ button to add a new row. 

4. Set the frequency 

Finally, we need to set how often the rule runs. 

For this rule, we’re going to set it to run every half an hour, every day of the week. That gives us 24/7 protection over our accounts. 

When this rule runs, your keyword will be paused but you’ll also be notified so you can optimize your accounts. Want to swap these keywords out with new ones? Take a look at our PPC keyword research guide for more expert tips and advice.  

Set rules in a click with Adzooma Plus 

We’ve detailed how to manually set up these rules inside Adzooma. But if you would rather set these rules in a single click, you’ll need Adzooma Plus.

With your Adzooma Plus subscription, you’ll gain access to 81 automation templates created by PPC experts, including the three above. All you need to do is find the one you want, then click apply. 

To upgrade to Adzooma Plus, login to your account and click billing from the right-hand menu. Or get in touch with our team to get a tour of what’s on offer. 

That’s all great. But if you have little to no SEO knowledge, it might sound like a pipe dream without investing in an in-house expert or an expensive agency to show you the way. And yeah, if you don’t have the time or inclination, you can turn to an agency or a consultant. 

But, we’re here to tell you that building a powerful SEO strategy can be done alone, without the need of in-depth knowledge or expensive tools. 

And to prove it, we’re going to help you create your own strategy, step-by-step, using our very own free SEO report. 

Ready to get started? 

First, let’s get your data 

The first step to any strategy is to see where you’re at right now. You need to get a measure of what your current performance is, what your weak points are and where you have the most potential for growth. 

Trying to start your strategy without this information is like starting to build a house without checking if you’re on solid ground. 

Let us get a look at your data first then. 

For this, you’re going to need to load up your SEO Performance Report. To access this, log into your Adzooma account, click reports at the top and select the SEO Performance report. 

Then, you need to enter your URL, select your target country and click the ‘Run Report’ button.

You can also enter a competitors URL here as well to compare your performance against theirs, which is a useful tool we’ll cover later in the article. 

While your SEO Report loads, you can watch this video explaining what results you’ll see in each of the sections. 

1. Find content opportunity in your keywords

The first section you’ll see in your SEO report is your keyword performance. This section will show where your website ranks for selected keywords, as well as other phrases that you might not be aware of. 

And there lies our opportunity to start building your SEO strategy on one of it’s most important cornerstones: content. 

When we say content here, we don’t mean bland blogs with keywords stuffed into them. We mean interesting, insightful blogs, videos, pages, podcasts, etc that provide value and are interesting to your target audience. 

Great content won’t just drive up your rankings, but also provide another avenue for customers to interact with your brand. 

So, let’s have a look at your top performing keywords as a base. 

Using Tetley Tea as an example, we can see from their SEO Performance Report that they’re already ranking for a lot of keywords about their infused flavours or ‘boost teas’. 

Putting those together, we could create great content for Tetley for topics such as: 

• How these teas can reduce tiredness
• What to eat and drink for your metabolism
• Health benefits of ‘super teas’ 
• And so on

If you’ve entered a competitor on your SEO Performance Report, you’ll also see the keywords your competitors are ranking for, as well as a keyword gap analysis. 

This will show you: 

• The keywords that you are ranking for, and your competitor’s aren’t. 
• The keywords you both rank for and the relative positions. 
• The keywords your competitors are ranking for, and you aren’t. 

In our SEO Performance Report, we added PG Tips as a competitor. This brought out these keywords that PG tips were ranking for, and Tetley Tea weren’t: 

• how much caffeine in pg tips tea
• how is pg tips tea decaffeinated
• pg tips newsletter
• pg tips tea decaf
• pg tips decaf tea bags
• are pg tips tea bags plastic-free
• what does pg stand for in pg tips
• pg tips complaint
• pg tips decaf tea
• pg tips cup

Although most of these keywords are branded, we can see a few topics here that PG Tips are ranking for that Tetley could use for themselves, including decaf tea. 

As well as becoming a part of your SEO strategy, these keywords could also influence great competitor PPC campaigns. For example, if Tetley were to target the ‘pg tips tea decaf’ or ‘pg tips decaf tea’ keywords, they could run an advert like this to gain some of their competitor’s organic traffic.

2. Build your keyword list out

Now you have your general topics, it’s time to build your keyword list out. 

There are a number of tools that you can use for this part, including SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Google Trends and Answer the Public. If you’ve not used a keyword tool before, you’ll want to see our guide to 18 of the best SEO keyword tools and tips. 

When you’re picking keywords here, don’t just aim for the ones with the most traffic. Generally speaking, the more traffic they receive, the harder they’ll be to rank for. So you’ll need a good mix of low-volume keywords to target for your chosen topics.

Here’s one piece of advice to follow when building out this part of your SEO strategy:

Don’t think keywords, think search intent. 

Search intent is a simple term to represent an incredibly important piece of information. Namely, when users search for something on the internet, they are doing it for a very particular reason. 

In order to serve the best content, search engines like Google categorise search intent into four different categories: 

• Informational. This is when users are after a particular piece of information. They are often questions that ask who, what, where, when or why. 
  • E.g. “Can teabags be put in a compost bin?” 
• Navigational. This is when users are after a specific webpage or location, usually for brands or websites that they’re familiar with. 
  • E.g. “Tetley customer support”
• Commercial. This is where users are interested in and researching a product, and are looking for reviews, comparisons or information about which one they should buy. 
  • E.g. “Best green tea UK”
• Transactional. This is made by people who are ready to buy a product, and tend to be ultra targeted and specific searches. 
  • E.g. “Buy Tetley Green Tea Berry Burst” 

With this in mind, you want to make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are fit for purpose. There’s no point building keywords into your strategy that don’t match up to user intent, as it doesn’t provide value to your customers and Google won’t show them. 

3. Let’s get technical 

Okay, here’s the part where most people get intimidated and drop out. But before you get spooked by technical SEO, let me reassure you that you don’t need to be a developer to build this into your SEO Strategy. 

Technical SEO involves making sure technical aspects of your website and content are easy for users to access, and easy for search engines to index. 

With your SEO Performance Report, you’ll already have the technical SEO actions you need to build into your SEO strategy. We’ve broken them down into two simple sections: 

• Your onsite SEO, which gives you recommendations to optimise specific pages on your website. 
• Your page speed, which gives you recommendations to speed up your website.  

In the Onsite SEO section, you’ll get a list of actions that you need to take, why it’s important and what you need to do to implement this action.

Everything is explained for you inside your report. For example, Tetley Tea will see this as one of their Onsite SEO actions: 

Your page https://www.tetley.co.uk/ doesn’t have a H1 heading, including this can help your SEO

When we click into it, we’ll find out that:

H1 headings help readers (and search engines) understand what your content is about. Using H1 tags to structure your page correlates with higher ranking, and therefore we recommend you use them. Normally, the H1 tag will give the reader a strong sense of what they are going to read. Above all else, it should be accurate!

We’ll also get information that H1 headings can also help you rank for a particular keyword and it’s recommended to include that keyword within the main H1 heading. In addition, you’ll also get an example so you can see how it’s done. 

The page speed section of the SEO Performance Report also offers similar information, but for actions that affect your website speed. 

They’ll also show the exact URLs, images and files that could be slowing down your website and losing you conversions, so you can go straight to fixing it. 

Armed with this information, and what actions you need to take, you can quickly fill in the technical SEO details to your SEO strategy. 

4. Create a solid backlink profile 

Last but not least, we have backlinks. 

Backlinks are a link from another website, to yours. Each link counts as a vote of confidence towards your website in the eyes of a search engine, which means that your website will start being seen as an authority figure. The more authoritative and trustworthy your website is, the better you’ll rank. 

On your SEO Performance Report, the backlink section will show you: 

• The total number of backlinks your website has
• The number of websites that link to your website
• Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website
• A list of some of your most recent backlinks and their individual quality scores. 

If you entered a competitor URL, you’ll also see all of this information in comparison to your competitor, as well as a list of some of their most recent backlinks. 

This section can be used to create a quality backlink profile in a number of ways. 

Firstly, it gives you an overview of the authority of your website and the quality of your backlinks. If your score is low, then you need to focus on gaining backlinks from more authoritative websites. 

In the backlink game, quality beats quantity here every time. 20 average backlinks could be less effective than one link from an amazing site. Think high, aim high here.

One way to check a website’s authority is by using Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) metric. Enter any URL in this tool, or install their toolbar to check DA scores on the go. Generally, websites that have a domain authority of 10 or under should be avoided and those with a score of 40 and above are your golden ticket. 

Remember those topics we created earlier? Why not create some guest posts to feature on other websites. This is a great place to gain backlinks, build relationships with people in your industry and gain additional traffic to your website.  

Secondly, you can use the recent backlinks list to take a look at which pieces of your content are already being shared – and any low scorers that you might want to avoid in the future. If you’ve got one really popular page, why not increase this success with more content that points to it? 

This will also help you build link equity. This is a fancy SEO term that basically means certain links pass value and authority. So, if you’ve got a relevant and popular page, it’s going to have more ‘link power’ than others.  

Lastly, take inspiration from your competitors. If they’re getting backlinks from websites you haven’t considered before, put them into your SEO strategy. Even better, think of similar websites that they haven’t got on their list and target them. 

Plan, action & repeat

And there you have it, how to build an SEO strategy from one report. 

Now the hard planning part is over, you just need to carry out the plan and then check in on your results. We can’t stress the importance of this part. 

You need to make sure that what you’re doing is having an impact on your business. If there are parts of it that are working better than others, you need to know so you can improve your strategy and deliver even better results. 
To keep an eye on your results, we’d recommend running your SEO Performance Report at least once a month. You’ll be able to compare your scores over time and get continuous new actions and recommendations to take your SEO efforts to the next level.

Customers of today want to be enrolled into a brand’s bigger vision. They want to know your why, and how your purpose aligns with their lives.

When you focus your marketing on authentic communication and human-to-human connection, building a personality around your brand that helps you stand out as a business that actually cares. You’ll not only increase your bottom line, you’ll create communities of loyal and passionate brand ambassadors who drive your business forward.

Approaching marketing from a place of purpose has a huge impact on all areas of your business. Read on to explore your why.

What is purpose-led marketing?

The word purpose means intention. It’s a goal, essentially, a desired outcome. Really, every business has a purpose, whether that’s to change something about their industry, make the world that little bit better or increase their profits. Purpose in itself isn’t a particularly inspiring proposition.

So, what do we mean when we talk about purpose-led marketing?

For us, purpose is about being true to a set of clearly defined values. This is the heart of your business, the north star that guides everything from the way you operate to the way you communicate.

If marketing is guiding the flow of information about a business into the world, purpose-driven marketing is ensuring that information has a meaning beyond simply selling a product or service. It is the communication of a business’ values as well as its value, and it talks directly to the values of its customers. This is what enrolls them in the brand far beyond the sale, and is the basis for Hubspot’s flywheel model.

“Today, customers are skeptical, knowledgeable, and have bigger expectations than ever before. And one of those expectations is that businesses should care about more than transactions.” – Hubspot

Rather than a typical sales funnel where potential customers come in the top and drop out the bottom (not unlike sausage meat), the flywheel attracts audiences through engaging communication, delights them with a product or service, and creates a feeling of loyalty that keeps them coming back for more. Bonus points: they bring their pals along for the ride.

Get this right and your flywheel won’t stop spinning, and a spinning flywheel means continued business growth.

Why is purpose so important in business?

According to a Forbes interview with Jeff Fromm, CMO and expert on Gen Z and millennials, “a purpose driven brand is a successful brand.” After all, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and the spirit in which you do it is more important than ever.

The 2018 Cone/Porter Novelli Purpose Study found that “78% of Americans believe companies must do more than just make money; they must positively impact society as well.” And 68% say they would be more willing to share content from purpose-driven companies.

Due to COVID-19 and the global pandemic, purpose in business matters more than ever. And this is only one part of the story. With increasing global pressures, businesses have “an opportunity, and an obligation, to engage in the urgent needs of our planet” (Mckinsey 2020).  

It’s no longer enough to talk a good talk with a set of values slapped to the wall in the staff room. Businesses need to act, and marketing can be the mouthpiece for action. When done effectively, purpose-led marketing will enrol audiences in your vision, putting a stake in the ground for a better way of doing business, all while making a much bigger impact with brand and communications.

So, is purpose-led marketing really worth it? You decide.

• 88% of consumers want to know that the brands they’re supporting have a real impact.  
• 72% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand that supports a good cause.
• 73% of consumers are willing to swap brands in order to support one that stands behind a cause they believe in.

How to make an impact with purpose-led marketing

The key to purpose-led marketing is authenticity. That means walking your talk. So, before we delve into the tactics of an effective purpose-led marketing strategy, there is one golden rule we need to be aware of. Always be consistent, transparent and back up your claims with action.

It’s not enough to tell people what they want to hear. 88% of consumers want to know the brands they are supporting have a real impact. Purpose-led brands need to be totally transparent and authentic in their marketing to show they are truly driving social change.

Here’s how to make more impact with purpose-led marketing.

1.   Know who you’re talking to

This is marketing 101, and you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t know who they’re talking to. If that’s you, you’re certainly not alone. You may have a vague idea of demographics or an avatar of your ideal customer. This isn’t enough. Purpose-led marketing requires a deep understanding of your audiences as real people with real desires and challenges.

You need to know your audiences like you know your friends. When you understand them fully, you can communicate with them in their language about the topics and values that matter most to them.

One of the best ways to understand your customers is to have conversations with them. This could be one to one, via a survey or even in a social media poll. People love to talk about themselves, so use this as an opportunity to gain some real insight into your audiences, always coming back to that all important question: “How can I help you?”.

Alternatively, social listening is a fantastic tool to get inside the world of your audiences. Hangout where they are online and take note of the sort of topics they talk most passionately about.

2.   Get clear on your values

With buy-in from your whole team, create a clearly defined set of values that encapsulate everything you stand for as a business and relate back to the values of your audience.

Try to avoid being generic. Your values are what should steer your business, and if done right, they inform absolutely every decision from the inside out.

If you feel stuck, get your team together to explore your business and what you stand for and write out every word that comes to mind. Then group these by theme until you’re left with four groups. Choose the word that best encapsulates everything in that group. Those are your four values.

3.   Use the voices of your audience to tell the story

Once you know your values, who your audience are and what they care about, you can create opportunities for them to get involved in the story. This is known as user generated content and  55% of consumers trust it over any other form of marketing.

Billie is a brand that has combined purpose and the voice of the people to create global brand fame. This is a razor company that promotes the freedom to have body hair, and they feature images of their community adorning body hair in any which way they desire.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Billie (@billie)

Their message is the opposite of the traditional approach to ad copy (ie. something is wrong with you and this product is the solution), instead Billie has forged global acclaim through celebrating all people exactly as they are. They’ve succeeded by turning advertising on its head.

4.   Make shared values the core of your communications

The reason for Billie’s success is simple. They have tapped into the values, needs and desires of their target audience. In Billie’s case this is Gen Zs who are sociopolitically forthright, tired of gender expectations and beauty standards, who will often only spend their money at companies they ethically agree with.

Billie delivers a clear, empowering and inspiring brand message. All of their marketing is audience-centric, and anyone who comes into contact with them will know immediately what they stand for, and for whom. This is not just a razor brand.

Dove is another brand who’ve had great success from being purpose-led. Their real beauty campaign came out just on the cusp of a new conversation around beauty standards, and it made a huge impact. This is not just a soap company, and rather than focusing on selling their products, Dove focuses on enrolling audiences into their mission and supporting other campaigns who are doing the same.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dove Global Channel ???? (@dove)

5.   Have a set of clearly defined messaging pillars

Once you know what your values are and what you stand for as a company, you can build these into clearly defined messaging pillars under which all content sits. Messaging pillars can be seen as the backbone of your content strategy, they are the overarching themes you talk about and each relates to one or more of your core values.

For example, purpose-led marketing is one of our messaging pillars at The Joyful, and you’ll hear us talking about it a lot in different ways with a variety of angles. This builds authority for your brand around specific subjects, creates a consistent message and gives you a really clear direction for your content.

If a proposed piece of content doesn’t fit under a messaging pillar, it doesn’t get published.

6.   Create authority around your purpose

Create more impact with your marketing by talking about your brand’s core purpose regularly and with expert insight.

This includes your own content and could also mean guesting on podcasts, writing guest blogs, offering insights to be used as quotes in articles and white papers. Wherever you choose to take your message, make sure the publication aligns to it.

You can also invite experts with a shared purpose to be interviewed on your blog, podcast or video series. Partnering with individuals or organisations who share similar values will give you more kudos, enrich your content with a variety of views and help you to reach new audiences.

Whichever tactic you use to speak about your purpose, always be consistent.

Purpose-led marketing always comes back to authentic communication

When we share purposeful messages and operate from a set of clearly defined values in business, we create an opportunity for our customers and audiences to make the world that bit better too, simply by voting with their currency. We’re not only changing the way businesses communicate in the world, we’re changing the world.

Whether you are a well-established organisation or a sole trader launching a new venture, expending the appropriate time and resources to create an achievable plan will give you and your business the clarity, confidence, and control to attain your goals.

Check out Artus Marketing on Adzooma Marketplace.

Digital marketing post-COVID

The businesses that have survived and thrived through the pandemic have been the ones that have implemented proactive rather than reactive approaches in the face of external problems. As opposed to adapting, these companies have developed resilience, retaining their new knowledge and tested strategies to equip them for similar situations in the future.

Creating a digital marketing strategy that embraces this resilient mindset will help towards futureproofing its success. However, with competition growing even fiercer online, it will also take an innovative approach to be effective. Only the biggest, boldest, and smartest examples of digital marketing are likely to cut it, providing an opportunity to forge your most creative strategy yet.

The basics of digital marketing

Search online for digital marketing strategies and you will be greeted by an abundance of different approaches. From the more traditional forms of precision planning to contemporary cloud-based constructs, knowing how to improve on your existing strategic methods or to start completely from scratch can be intimidating. 

Whether your company has a fully-fledged digital marketing team or you are going it alone, there is no right or wrong system to use. The best method is to start by identifying your key goals and come up with ways in which they might be achieved. Reflect on your past strengths and weaknesses, establish realistic targets, then try a variety of digital marketing methods to see which ones help or hinder your progress. 

Here are some of the basics of digital marketing that every business should already have in place.

1. Website, blog, and social media channels

These need to be visually engaging, kept up to date, and fully optimised to offer the best user experience. Maintaining an active online presence is crucial, and it works both ways. Your digital marketing strategy should not only include regular and original content updates but also guidance on instigating, encouraging, and maintaining communication with new and existing customers as well as colleagues and even competitors. Your online presence should mirror your business.

2. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

If you think you have already got this nailed, think again. Google regularly update their parameters to ensure more precise results for search engine users. What may have been effective on your website in the past can change literally overnight, resulting in data that no longer performs and a reduction in traffic. Focus on content and links that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), as used by Google to determine site values and rankings. You will also find plenty of SEO advice online including this blog by Artus Digital Marketing.

Another way to monitor your SEO is through Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report, which analyses your website and identifies immediate actions you can take to improve. You’ll then get a more detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas: keyword performance, onsite SEO, page speed and backlinks.

The report is available to all Adzooma users, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer. Not an Adzooma user? Sign up for free, here. 

3. Online advertising

The next step on from a successful website and active social media channels is online advertising. With its ease to set up and impressive potential for return on investment, using the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook adverts is a must in any digital marketing strategy. Try this blog on how to get started with online adverts for practical tips you can implement yourself or contact the Adzooma team for specific support with managing Google and Microsoft campaigns.

Specific strategic objectives

It is also worth keeping in mind that your digital marketing strategy should always be focused on your specific digital objectives rather than merely contributing to your wider marketing end goals. For example, you might want to find new ways to generate leads (have a look at this blog post for ideas), or you could set specific ROI targets for your online adverts.

Resilient digital strategies

During 2020, it was not enough for businesses to merely weather the storm. Being able to adjust to the constantly changing situation was one thing, but for a company to see in 2021 on a high, they needed to have developed a stronger, smarter, and sharper perspective of their aims and audiences. Growing a resilient business became the new buzzword, and the benefits are as applicable to digital marketing strategies as they are to company cultures and teams. 

While much of your latest digital marketing strategy should be specific to your current company objectives, the easiest and most obvious way to futureproof your plans is to employ this resilient approach. You need to understand what scenarios could arise, and plan ways in which you and your team will be able to overcome them (including specific details of any resources required).

Take the time to reflect on what you have learned from the previous twelve months from a purely digital marketing perspective. Evaluate each element in turn and note how or even if your company can replicate or develop these further. Including resilience building into your strategic planning now will pay dividends in the long run when it comes to strengthening your online presence.  

Understand your audience

Creating and updating a profile for your target customers will undoubtedly form a key component of your marketing strategy, but it should not be simply replicated for your digital plans. While there may be many elements of similarity to the audience you attract into your physical workspace, your online audience are likely to have different expectations and needs.

When it comes to e-commerce, many businesses find themselves appealing to completely new customers who are free from the restrictions of geography, time, and accessibility. Companies therefore need to build up detailed information about their existing and new online customers, as well as exploring any potential markets that could be tapped into in the future.

For a more direct approach to data sourcing, social media is ideal for creating opinion polls and encouraging feedback from existing and potential customers. Include links to questionnaires on your blog or in e-newsletters and offer incentives such as prizes or giveaways. You can also collect valuable analytics about your website visitors to inform your audience profiles.

Prioritise content marketing

While digital advertising continues to be incredibly effective, there has been a recent shift in online engagement that has led to a surge in the success of content marketing. Even before lockdown, internet usage had been steadily increasing with many in-person pursuits being replaced by their digital equivalents. Factor in months of enforced time at home and our online worlds have become all the more vital for communicating, learning, working and relaxing.

The difference with content marketing this time is the focus on quality. Just as Google assesses a website for its E-A-T credentials, online users are interested in sources that can provide a voice of expertise. From 2000-word blog articles and free downloadable guides to engaging webinars and professional podcasts, offering exclusive resources has become hugely beneficial to businesses.

An additional advantage is that most companies will already be well versed in digital content marketing, so it may only be a matter of extending wordcounts and demonstrating your industry knowledge to add value to your content. Take a look at these seven top content marketing ideas for inspiration.

Manage your online reputation

Regardless of the sector, type and size, every business has a brand image to build. It is an ongoing process and should feed into all the elements of company practice, including digital marketing. As we have seen time and time again, making even the smallest of mistakes online can cost a company its reputation and customers. It is therefore important for businesses to continually assess and actively manage their online reputation as part of their digital marketing strategy.

When the digital world is not only recording but often amplifying your online activity, keeping track of what you are posting and how it is being received is vital – and it works both ways. While your business should post content responsibly, you also have a duty to respond to content that concerns your company, your customers, and your sector. Negative review on Google? Send a reply. Active feed about changes in your industry? Provide an expert opinion. What you leave unsaid can often do as much damage as what you do say. 

Including a methodology for reputation management within your digital marketing strategy will help you efficiently monitor, improve, and even futureproof your digital brand image for the long-term. Contact a professional marketing agency such as Artus Digital Marketing if you need support.

Going forward with digital marketing

The challenges of 2020 have prompted businesses to be even more forward-thinking when it comes to short- and long-term strategic planning. Having found new and increasingly innovative ways to use digital technology, there is now the opportunity for businesses and professionals to reapproach online marketing with a fresh perspective.

As with any strategy, there are no guaranteed methods to futureproofing your plans. Your digital marketing objectives should be formed with the intention of amendments and improvements being made. Continue with the practices that have benefitted your business in the past, develop some of the suggestions for resilient digital strategies in this article, and ensure you are regularly measuring, analysing, and acting on your metrics.

Digital marketing is developing every single day, and part of the adventure of running a business is being along for the ride. There is no need to be an analytics expert or a coding master to make the most of your online presence. Use the resources available to you, learn from success stories, and above all be creative. For business and buyer alike, there is no greater motivator than originality.

Keyword bids are how you make sure that your allocated budget is spent on the right campaigns. It’s how you prioritise your strongest contenders and weed out your weakest performers.

And it’s much less daunting than you think. In this article, I’ll run through some of the keyword bid management options out there, going through their pros, cons and giving you advice and instructions to build your own.

What are keyword bids?

Okay, a little context and background first. Keyword bids are how much money you are willing to spend on a single click for that particular keyword.

Every time someone searches for one of your keywords, your business is entered into an auction to see which adverts are shown. Keyword bids are how far your little robot man is willing to raise the paddle for you. But don’t worry, keyword bids aren’t your overall budget.

It’s like giving a kid £20 and free reign of a sweet store. They could spend the entire budget on a single box of expensive artisan chocolate, but that means you’re putting all your money on a single gambit.

But, if you gave a kid £20 and told them not to spend more than £1 on a single item, they could come back with 3 bars mars, 8 Freddos, two-dozen lollipops, sour candy, Haribos, chocolate coins, skittles and more. Actually, I might be lying about the Freddos. It depends if the cost of them has risen past £1 yet or not.

Now before I get too snacky and off-topic, the moral here is that: setting a keyword bid allows you better control over your money and more effective use of your overall budget.

What is an effective keyword bidding strategy?

Online advertising will never be a fixed and stable cost. It’s a flexible, changing entity that requires attention, expertise and strategy to tame.

As we’ve run outlined earlier, keyword bids allow you to set a maximum cost you’re willing to pay for a particular click on a keyword. This makes sure that all your budget isn’t instantly spent on expensive clicks that might not convert for your business.

But it’s not just about avoiding expensive clicks or bidding on the cheapest options available.

An effective keyword bidding strategy is all about making sure your budget is spent on the keywords that deliver the most results at any given time. Which means that ultimately, it depends on the overall goals of your business.

• Want to get as many sales as possible? You’ll want to bid on keywords that are delivering you the most conversions.
• Want to bring cheaper leads into your business? You’ll want to bid on keywords that are delivering the best CPA.
• Want to increase brand awareness? You’ll want to bid on keywords that get the most impressions and are placed at the top of the page.

Make sure you know what your goal is first, then we can move on to the keyword bidding strategies you’ll be using.

Manual vs Smart bidding

If you’re managing your PPC using native platforms such as Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, you’ll be faced with two main keyword bidding options to begin with: manual bidding or smart bidding.

• Manual bidding is where you set your keyword bids and budgets yourself. You’ll have complete control over each keyword bid, but that does mean you’re 100% responsible for its management.
• Smart bidding is an automated bidding system that uses machine learning to alter bids on your behalf.

You can also use third party platforms or management systems, but let’s look at the two native options first.

Manual bidding: a real-time waster

Update: Google has made another move to phase out manual bidding. By July no new Broad Match Modifier (BMM) keywords can be added and by the end of 2021 BMM will no longer be served in Google Ads.

Positives first: manual bidding gives you more control over your keyword bidding than every other strategy.

If you want to use manual bidding, you’ll have to set, and change, all the keyword bids by yourself. To do this inside Google Ads, you’ll have to:

1. Click on the keyword that you want to change
2. Select the ‘Max. CPC’ collum of the table
3. Enter a new bid amount
4. Click on save

Now, that doesn’t sound a lot. But if you’ve got hundreds of campaigns and thousands of keywords, that’s going to get very tiresome, very quick. Add to that that you’ll need to do this every time you alter a bid, then, yikes. That’s a lot of hours lost.

Then, once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll need to scan the data and results to measure which keywords you should be increasing your budgets for, and which are wasting your spend.

If you want to efficiently manage your keyword bids, using manual bidding on its own is a no go from us.

Smart bidding: not always smart results

Smart bidding uses machine learning to analyse your data, then automatically adjust your keyword bids to achieve a certain goal. The goals in question are:

• Maximise Conversions, which aims to get as many conversions as possible from your budget.
• Target ROAS, which aims to achieve your target return on ad spend (ROAS) from your budget.
• Target CPA, which aims to maintain your target cost-per-action (CPA) from your budget.
• Target impression share, which sets bids to show your ad at the top of the page as often as possible.
• Enhanced CPC, which uses your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) to maximise conversions.

So, if your goal is to get as many sales as possible, you can set up the maximise conversions smart budding strategy and just let it run. On paper, that’s the perfect way to efficiently manage your keyword bids. But in reality, this option isn’t perfect.

Smart bidding uses historical and campaign data to set your bids. If you don’t have a lot of data, or if you launch new campaigns, you’re not going to get the best results. What’s more, the data they use isn’t related to your target audience. You get no control of visibility on what data is being used to make this decision, meaning that you can never really optimise the results you’re getting.

If you’re looking for a quick, ‘set and forget’ option, then you’ll be hard-pressed to do better than Smart bidding. However, if you want better results and a truly efficient way to manage your keyword bids, you’re going to want to use a different AI solution…

Maximising efficiency with AI

The best way to manage your keyword bids more effectively is through AI. And no, this doesn’t mean smart bidding.

The right combination is to use a manual bidding process to control your bids while using AI to automate the changes and how you track and monitor your results. This will give you the best possible results while saving you time that you can use to grow.

To demonstrate the power of AI, we’ll take examples from Adzooma, as it’s got all the features you need under one roof while being completely free to use. Of course, you’ll be free to use another platform or software to implement these strategies… but it will come at a monthly cost.

1. Do the bulk of the lifting with automated rules

Automated rules are the real stars of an efficient keyword bidding strategy.

If you’re not familar with them, they’re a way of setting actions that happen when a certain event happens. For example, you could set an automated rule to notify you (action) when conversions for a campaign hit 0 (event).

For keyword bids, automated rules are time-saving miracles. They allow you to apply your own strategy and conditions to each campaign as you see fit.

Let’s say that you want to maximise conversions for your campaigns. One rule you can set up is the High Volume, Low Conversion rule. This will notify you of campaigns that are getting a lot of clicks, but not a lot of conversions.

When you get this alert, you’ll be able to take a deeper look at the keywords, finding out which ones are dragging performance down or creating a new campaign for the high performers.

With automated rules, you could also:

• Set a rule where if a campaign has a conversion rate above your target, you can automatically increase the budget by 10%.
• Or you could pause keywords that have a poor CTR, saving your budget for better-performing ones.
• And so on. The power lies with you.

Discover how to create custom rules here.

With Adzooma, you can set the frequency to every 30 minutes. That means that every single half an hour, Adzooma will check your campaigns on your behalf and ensure that your keyword bids are optimised 24/7.

Even better news, you can save even more time by selecting a rule from our list of pre-made templates, all chosen by PPC experts.

You can set automated rules inside the Google or Microsoft platforms. But you won’t get any premade templates, and the rules will only fire once a day at a preset time. The best features are exclusive to Adzooma.

2. Have your account analysed for opportunities to optimise

One of the key factors to meaning keyword bids and being an excellent PPC manager is recognising and taking opportunities to optimise your campaigns.

At Adzooma, we help automate this process with personalised recommendations for your campaigns. We call them Opportunities.

Some of our Opportunities include highlighting keywords that you should increase keyword bids for, or bid adjustments you should make based on the device used or the gender/ age of your audience.

If you’re happy with the Opportunities we show, you can apply them to your account in a click, saving you from manually having to go in and make bid adjustments to your campaigns.

PPC should never work in isolation. Remember the bigger picture and make sure that all your components are working together like a well-oiled machine. That means not forgetting about factors such as Quality Score, which can have a big impact on both your rankings and your CPC.

As we uncovered in recent research with Cambridge University, landing page quality can have a big impact on your conversions. So, make sure your focus isn’t too narrow.

But don’t worry, we’ve got Opportunities for that too at Adzooma.

3. Bulk apply changes in one go

Like we mentioned earlier, manually going into each campaign to change and set keyword budgets is a real time-waster. As well as being able to set up automated changes, you need a system that allows you to view and make bulk edits in one go.

A system that we’ve got with Adzooma Management.

This is a single screen you can view all your campaigns at once, with customizable data to show the metrics that matter most to you. If you want to make any changes, just navigate to the keywords or ad groups you want to change. Then, click the pencil icon to write a new bid, or select multiple options and click the edit button at the top to apply mass changes.

Using Adzooma Management to change all these keyword bids to £8.00

Adzooma Management will also allow you to add new keywords (or negative keywords) without switching back into your Google or Microsoft accounts. That’s time saved which you can use to focus on your wider strategy.

Strategise, automate, win

Fundamentally, managing your keyword bids comes from three key steps.

1. Setting your goals and building your initial strategy.
2. Applying automated rules to run this on your behalf.
3. Monitor your results and see your successes come in.

Seems pretty simple, right?

If you’re still hungry for more, perhaps these articles will sate your appetite.

• PPC Keyword Research: How To Do It The Smart Way
• 3 Powerful PPC Automation Rules To Start 2021 Right
• Why Content Strategy Is Crucial to PPC Success: Cambridge Uni x Adzooma
• How To Create a Long-Term PPC Strategy You Can Stick To
• Applying Behavioural Economics To Businesses & PPC: An Analysis

If you’re done researching and are ready to take your PPC campaign to the next level, create your free Adzooma account today.

But that can involve different marketing channels such as paid search, organic search, or social. How do you decide who gets the credit?

With attribution modelling.

It’s a way of showing clients and stakeholders the monetary value of each marketing channel’s effectiveness and their contributions to every touchpoint in the customer journey.

But it doesn’t always work as intended.

In this guide, we’ll show you what attribution models are, the different types, how you can compare them in Google Analytics and how to use that data in conjunction with the Adzooma platform.

What are attribution models?

Attribution models are rules, or sets of rules, that determine how much conversion credit is assigned to different points in the conversion path.

They’re also great for data analysis where you can compare and contrast your performance under each model.

With Google Analytics, you can compare how different attribution models impact the valuation of your marketing channels using the Model Comparison Tool. Here’s how:

1. Make sure you’re using conversion tracking!
2. Log into Google Analytics
3. On the left sidebar, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool
4. You can compare up to 3 conversion models at a time

What are the different types of attribution models?

The 6 main type of attribution models are:

1. First Interaction – where 100% of the credit goes to the first touchpoint.
2. Linear – where each touchpoint receives an equal share of the credit.
3. Time Decay – where the touchpoint nearest in time to the conversion gets the most credit.
4. Position Based – where 40% of the credit goes to the first and last interactions, with 20% evenly distributed to touchpoints in the middle.
5. Last Non-Direct Click – where direct traffic is ignored and 100% of the credit goes to the last touchpoint before conversion.
6. Last Interaction – where 100% of the credit goes to the last touchpoint.

With models like Linear, Time Decay, and Position Based, this can be grouped under Multi-Touch Attribution as multiple channels get credit. There’s also View-Through Attribution which shows if an impression contributed to an app install.

Which attribution model is best?

There is no universal “best” attribution model. You may choose one as your primary attribution model for reporting and analysis but your best model depends on your conversion techniques, business goals or customer behaviour. That’s why the attribution model is seen as an analytical framework – it’s up to you to analyse which model is best based on the data.

What’s more, thanks to Adzooma’s integration with Google Analytics, you can use this data to vastly improve your conversions and overall campaigns.

Without a dedicated online advertising platform like Adzooma, you will have collected all this data and either:

1. Manually organise it into your PPC campaigns
2. Not have the power of machine learning to offer opportunities or automation

But with Adzooma, you can integrate all that attribution data into your workflow from one screen and minimal clicks as the platform takes care of the hard work.

But more on that later.

Benefits

Here are some key benefits of using attribution models:

1. Finding the true value of a conversion

Attribution modelling literally gives credit where it’s due.

Without understanding how a source impacts a conversion, you can not truly understand it’s value.

For example, if a PPC campaign generates a user’s introduction to your product, but the actual conversion comes via Organic a few days later, the Last Click model would only give credit to the Organic source.

This would mean that the PPC spend would not be associated with the conversion and suggest the PPC campaign was not generating conversions when it was. That’s why it’s so important to use the right model so all channels get their fair share.

2. They’re easy to implement

Models like First and Last Interaction are simple to analyse and apply.

They’re also very accurate because they evaluate the very first and very last interactions a user has and when they’ll convert.

For models like Time Decay Attribution, they get more specific by showing when a touchpoint occurred. Having time-related data can help improve when you make decisions for a campaign.

3. You can create your own custom attribution models

If you’re not happy with the default options, you can make your own in Google Analytics.

To do this, go into Google Analytics and on the left sidebar, select Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool.

When selecting a model, you have the choice of creating your own custom model or importing one from Gallery (see below)

4. Opportunities for marketing channels to work together

By displaying which channels are working well and which channels aren’t, attribution modelling can help bridge gaps between them. Perhaps paid search is doing really well while email is lagging behind—that’s an opportunity for one to help the other.

Pitfalls

Here are some pitfalls with attribution modelling to be aware of:

1. No way to track cross-device usage

With smartphones, laptops, smart TV’s, tablets and other such devices, cross-device tracking becomes an issue. You might start looking at a holiday on your phone, then switch over to your tablet to get a better look at your hotel options, before moving over to your computer to complete your purchase. Suddenly, you’ve used 3 different devices to complete a conversion and you might only capture the last one.

2. No way to track offline touchpoints

Offline touchpoints aren’t taken into consideration when it comes to attribution models.

For example, should an individual see a billboard for your product, which then leads them to search for your brand via a search engine and make a purchase, then the billboard will not be credited attribution, despite it being the very start of the conversion path.

3. Click fraud can cause problems

We briefly mentioned Multi-Touch Attribution earlier. While it has benefits in sharing credit amongst multiple channels, it can be skewed if there’s click fraud on the account.

ClickCease and PPC Protect are tools that you can use to prevent click fraud.

Read our guide on click fraud for more information.

4. No single model tells the full picture

As we said before, there isn’t a best model for conversions and that includes a best model for showing how well your conversion funnel is working.

That means you’ll need to combine multiple models and data to get a true understanding, which also means more work, reporting, and analysis.

Final touchpoints

Conversion paths aren’t as linear as they used to be. That means your campaign will have multiple touchpoints during a single conversion path and longer path to conversions. It’s the job of marketers to work with that impact on the traditional marketing funnel and find the most accurate ways to assign conversion credit to touchpoints.

Fortunately, Adzooma has a solution. In August 2020, the Adzooma platform added Google Analytics to its array of features meaning you can use your comparison data from GA to make better conversion decisions, view your Goals in the Management tab, and let Adzooma take care of the manual work.

To set up, go to the Management tab, click Link Google Analytics, authorise use of the platform with Google, and you’re done!

To learn more about Adzooma’s GA integration, read our official product update.

And remember:

• Changing your attribution models will affect the results of other source/mediums performance
• Attribution models do not consider offline touchpoints, external influences, or cross-device usage so find different ways to track these
• Make sure your conversion tracking is on and accurate!
• Add a note to your Google Ads account when changing your model to ensure that you have a note of when and why your conversion figures may change.

Here is where new ad formats from Google and Microsoft can help. Through Search and Display campaigns, you can include ad formats which can continually optimise and adjust their ad copy depending on the context.

Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads (RSA) were in beta for both Google and Microsoft until recently but are becoming more and more mainstream after significant improvements in performance seen by early adopters. Essentially, RSAs group headlines and descriptions to create an optimum combination for every search queries. Advertisers can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Then all the possible combinations are tested with the power of machine learning to discover the best performing combinations.

How to set up steller performing RSAs?

The first rule of RSAs is to treat them as a different ad type from the existing Extended Text Ads (ETAs). ETAs are limited to 2 headlines and 1 description which urges an advertiser to fully use the character limit of every asset.

With RSA there is a possibility to include up to fifteen headlines. Therefore advertisers can “afford” not to maximize the character count of every single headline. For example, you can take a whole headline only for the name of your brand.

Make sure the headlines in RSA are unique and work well together in different combinations.

For more information, read our guide on Responsive Search Ads.

Measure results like a pro

RSA performance should be measured on clicks and conversions, not on click-through rate. Moreover, if you run RSAs, they will not take traffic from your existing ETAs, but optimise for getting incremental impressions, clicks and conversions. Sometimes RSAs might have lower click-through rates (CTRs), but this is nothing to worry about. The performance metric to focus on is incremental traffic.

RSAs come with two performance reports in the Google Ads interface.  The reports help advertisers understand how the different headlines perform on their own and the most shown combinations. The asset report shows the number of impressions of different headlines. A best practice is to gradually replace headlines with the lowest impressions. The other report shows the ad combinations shown to users and which combinations had the most impressions.

Measuring & Optimising Performance in One Place

It’s important to utilise both networks where you can. Though Google holds the dominant power in the search arena, the Microsoft Audience Network still has 13.7 billion PC searches a month and reaches 63 million users that Google doesn’t. Plus Microsoft’s users are both more educated and affluent with a third of Microsoft users in the US having a household income over $100k.

Microsoft ads are also much cheaper to run in comparison to Google while the audience is more than enough for your ads to be effective, as we’ve discovered in our research. One of the pain points however is having to jump between both networks to make changes to your ads.

But that doesn’t have to be the case anymore. With free tools like Adzooma, it’s now possible to manage your full campaigns, including responsive search ads, for both Microsoft and Google in one platform, so you never have to jump between the networks again. You can add new creatives or entire campaigns, adjust budgets, and apply changes from a single screen.

You can read more about how Adzooma Management can help or sign up for free today.

Responsive Display Ads

Display advertising can be a challenge for small businesses because of the cost of making good quality creative. Every creative had to be reproduced in different sizes to fit the available inventory. Not having the right size of every banner limits the reach of a campaign. On top of that, you had to design a separate creative for different channels such as YouTube and Gmail.

Responsive Display Ads, unique to Google, come as an opportunity for advertisers who want to save time and reach more inventory. The advertiser provides the assets: Business name, long headline, logo, up to five short descriptions and headlines and up to five images. Machine learning-powered technology combines the assets together into ads which can show across the Google Display Network, including YouTube and Gmail.

One of the biggest benefits of building Responsive Display Ads is the ease of the setup. By entering the domain, Google and Microsoft ads can scan the website and extract the logo and images. Advertisers also have access to a free repository of good quality stock images for their ads.

When building RDA advertisers, see a similar ad strength score like the one for RSAs. The score measures the quantity and diversity of assets. My recommendation is not to publish ads with poor ad strength and less than two images. The more high-quality assets you provide, the better the chances of sticking a high-performing combination.

Similar to RSA asset performance reports, advertisers can see performance ratings for each asset. Advertisers can gradually replace low performing assets and double down on high-quality ones. A combination report also shows the top ad variations.

The secret to a great Responsive Display Ad is a superb image

The most important asset of a successful RDA is the image. Make sure you use an image different from the standard image ads in your display campaign. The best performing assets are clear, high-resolution photographs in a natural physical setting. Text, logo and call to action overlays are obsolete, as you add these as separate assets when building the ad. A strong visual focus which connects with the message you want to conduct is key for the success of the creative.

When it comes to the text assets try to use short and unique headlines and avoid anything too generic or salesy. Since you have a separate logo asset, there is no need to repeat the brand name in a headline. The long headline must demonstrate a unique value proposition.

This asset might be shown without description text or can run as an individual text ad. Start the descriptions with the most important information like promotions and CTAs, because sometimes these assets might be shortened on smaller screens.

Lastly, when adding your business name, stick to a conversational brand name – no Ltd. or LLC as this looks too formal.

You can choose how to structure your display ad groups – using a few RDAs per ad group, or combining RDAs with standard image ads. In any case, I would recommend adding at least one RDA per ad group.

Summary

RDAs and RSAs are a big time-saver when it comes to testing and implementing new ad copy at scale. They work great together with standard image ads and expanded text ads to unlock incremental clicks conversions, making your ads eligible to compete in new search auctions and show on more display inventory. Advertisers can ensure good brand representation by bringing in high-quality, unique and helpful text and image assets.

However, along with the rising amount of websites, the demand for a reliable host service is also increasing, that is why the question about how to make the best choice has already arisen for many website owners. 

Knowing the crucial information about the various hosting metrics will greatly help us not only to make the most beneficial choice but may also significantly increase the website performance. Here we have prepared the must-know things you should be aware of while choosing a hosting for your website. 

Taken from: https://www.websolutions.com 

Why Is It Important to Choose Hosting?

The major task of web hosting is to provide 24/7 access to your website so that visitors can easily browse it anytime and anywhere. Having chosen the right host you can remarkably facilitate your work, successfully launch, and perfectly manage your website. But if you make a wrong decision, then it comes a hard time which requires great efforts and huge investments so as to resolve all the issues on your own and, consequently, you are peering for the best option to entrust your website again. 

That is why to choose your host service on the first try, it is crucial to learn all the aspects that can have a great impact on the website performance, its efficient management and further developing progress. 

The Main Criteria for the Host Services

Adam Berry, digital director at Wingard Creative marketing agency claims that “a great hosting boils down to the 3 S’s: speed, support and security”, and we cannot refute this fact. Each of these options is essential while considering a web hosting: the speed of your host indicates the time visitors need to access your website and get the information needed, the support services are a must for great communication in case if there are any questions or problems, you will be instantly provided with professional assistance. Last but not least is the security aspect, as it is significantly important to secure your website from the third parties intersection as well as make sure the information stored at your host won’t be stolen or simply lost. 

Tips for Choosing a Right Host 

Nevertheless, there are still some points that you should also consider while making the final decision on which host is the best one for your website functioning. For this purpose, we have made a detailed list of tips that can be helpful for you while choosing the right hosting.  

Decide the Assistance You Want to Get

As we have already mentioned before, one of the core features of good hostings is customer support. Jack Johnson, the Forbes market expert suggests paying huge attention to this point as it indicates the time needed to supply efficient and speedy service in the problem resolving process. When it comes to getting professional help regarding your website, every second counts as this can greatly influence the general impression about your website and even lead to a significant drop in the audience because of some issues occurred while browsing your website. 

Taken from: https://www.teamsupport.com 

In addition, it is a good idea to peer for those who provide chat or social media visual services instead of those offering emails and support tickets. In this way, you can greatly speed up the process of getting any issue resolved. Furthermore, the expert offers to give priority to those hosting companies who provide the in-house support, because they have a better experience of the website service unlike those with the outsourced clients’ support. 

Get Known About the Server Types

As a rule, every hosting provider has various server kinds to choose from, and there are two most popular types among them: shared hosting and virtual private server hosting or VPS. Let’s make a brief comparison of their pros and cons. 

The first option is a sharing hosting environment, which implies your website is located on the same service as the other websites. It uses the same RAM, data storage, processor, and is a great choice to start from, in case if a website has just been launched and doesn’t have big data and a vast number of visitors that high-traffic websites usually need. Besides, the shared hosting price is not as high as the VPS, which is also a plus for your website. 

However, if your website or online platform needs huge traffic, we would rather recommend you to use the VPS hosting so as not to face the restrictions due to the limited resources. This hosting kind will cost more but provides a virtual private hosting environment with personal processing power, a great amount of RAM, and data storage, which is unavailable for other sites to use. Also, if used wisely, it can greatly boost the efficiency of your website. 

Consider Your Budget

It is greatly important to determine how much money you are willing to pay off for your service so as to find the most beneficial host without overpaying a lot for the unnecessary options included there. As a rule, hosting providers offer a wide range of prices available for blogs or small e-commerce platforms, and huge companies, which really facilitates the process of making your choice. Additionally, you can use a cheap web hosting comparison to find out the price and the list of services offered by a certain hosting provider so to find out the most accessible price of a service that covers all the needs. 

If your website is directed to develop a small business, it is recommended to start with a simple cloud service, and in some time extend the functionality, or adapt it to your business model in the future. That is considered to be a totally personal point decided by a website owner. 

Own Your Domain Name

The domain name is the web address that is typed by visitors when they want to go to your website. For instance, our domain is https://www.adzooma.com/ and it will directly lead the audience to our online platform. 

Nicolas Rubright, the founder of streaming music service Dozmia also points out that it is crucial to make sure of instant using your own domain, so as to manage all the SEO benefits in case if the hosting service is being changed for any reason. Additionally, it will help your audience easily find the website and not to lose it with time. 

Hosting tools

Cloudways

Focus on your business and avoid all the web hosting hassles with Cloudways. Their managed hosting guarantees unmatched performance, reliability and choice with 24/7 support that acts as your extended team, making Cloudways an ultimate choice for growing agencies and ecommerce businesses.

Kinsta

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that helps take care of all your needs regarding your website. They run their services on cutting-edge technology and have excellent customer support services.

Make a Choice

All in all, every hosting platform can provide you with various functions for your website launching and performance. Though it is not the only way to improve your website, it is still a crucial option for putting a website onto the next level of development. 

And having learned a lot about how to analyze the hosting efficiency and which criteria you should pay special attention to, it is now much clearer how to make the right choice about the host platform, which will satisfy all the requirements and perfectly fit your website operating.

It’s the 24/7 PPC virtual assistant you’ve never had. 

Fundamentally, there are two ways you can create an automated rule in Adzooma. You can:

• Choose from our library of premade templates
• Or create your own rule

Each one of our premade templates has been chosen by industry experts as their go-to rules for setting up and optimising their campaigns. They’re rules that have stood the test and have proven results in optimising campaigns, including rules such as: 

• Notify when cost per lead increases
• Pause ads with low CTR 
• Increase campaign budget 
• And more

Want to create your own rule instead? 

Follow our instructions below to see how we created our ‘high volume, low conversion’ rule. 

Creating a custom automation rule

The first steps to creating your own automation rule in Adzooma is easy. Just log into your account, click automation at the top then select the ‘New automation rule’ button. 

Here, you’ll get a pop up asking if you want to browse from our templates or create your own automation rule. 

Click the ‘Create Custom Rule’ button to get started. 

For this guide, we’ll be setting up a high volume, low conversion rule which will alert you to ad groups with conversion rates or a cost per conversion below your target goal. 

It’s great for ad groups that have underperforming keywords that are wasting your budget. 

Step 1. Give your rule a name 

The first step to create your own automation rule in Adzooma is to give it a name. This is so you can quickly find it in your list of rules and understand what action you need to take when it fires. 

We’re going to give this rule the name of high volume, low conversion. 

You can also add a description if you want to, which can serve as a good reminder of what it does.  For this rule, we added the description of: 

‘An alert for high spend ad groups with conversion rates/or cost per conversion that’s below target’. 

Once you’re ready, click the ‘next’ button to progress onto the next step. 

Step 2: Select where your rule applies to

On the ‘Apply To’ step, you’ll select what parts of your campaigns you want the rule to apply to. This can be at the campaign, ad group,  keyword or advert level. 

For this rule, we want to apply it to all our active ad groups. So, from the first drop-down menu we’ll select ad groups, and from the second we’ll pick ‘all active ad groups’. 

If you wanted to apply this rule to specific ad groups, click the ‘Selected ad groups option’. From there, you’ll get a pop-up menu allowing you to pick which ad groups from your campaigns that you want to apply this rule to. 

Once you’re ready, click ‘next’. 

Step 3: Set your conditions

This is the core of your automation rule. During this step, you’ll select what action you want Adzooma to take and when this rule will fire. 

For this rule, we want to be notified of low conversions so we can go into the ad group and discover which keywords are underperforming. So, we’ll select the ‘notify me’ option from the first drop-down menu. 

Second, we need to select the time period of data that you want Adzooma to check. For this rule, we’re going to use data from the past month. 

Once you’ve set your action, you can add your conditions. Conditions are specific events that need to happen before your rule takes place, such as your cost-per-click increasing to £5. 

Some rules, such as pausing campaigns on a certain date, won’t require any conditions. In that case, you can go straight to the next step to choose the date it will run instead. 

For the high impressions, low conversions rule, we’re going to set some And/Or conditions. 

• And conditions mean all of the conditions have to be met for a rule to fire. 
• Or conditions allow you to create automation rules that will fire when just one of your conditions are met. 

You can read more about how they work here.

First, we’re going to add an AND condition. 

Underneath conditions, select the ‘+ Add condition’ button. Then we’re going to enter the ‘spend is more than £200’ condition. 

This rule will make sure that our rule only fires for ad groups that have significant spend behind them. If you’re following along, you can set the spend to any amount that suits your campaigns. 

We’re going to add another AND condition to this rule. To do this, we click the blue ‘+’ button to the left of your first condition. 

And groups are Blue in Adzooma. Or groups are orange. It’s simple colour coding to help make it easier. 

Using the same process, we’re going to add the condition ‘clicks are more than 100’. This condition is important to set for a low conversion rule to make sure that enough data is gathered before Adzooma takes action. 

Without this condition, campaigns that have just launched with 0 clicks and 0 conversions would be flagged as poor converters. 

Now, we’re going to add our final And condition. This means that in order for this rule to fire, all three of these conditions must be met. 

The third condition we’re going to add is that ‘conversions are more than, or equal to, 2’. Again, this condition is there to ensure that rules aren’t fired prematurely and that we’ve had enough time to collect accurate data. 

Now it’s time to add some Or conditions. 

To add an Or condition, click the orange ‘Create an OR group’ button. This will open up a separate subcategory within your existing And group. 

Now, we add the condition ‘conversion rate is less than 2.5%’. Again, if you want to enter different numbers for your rule, feel free to do so. 

To add the second Or condition, press the orange ‘+’ button to the left of your rule. 

Finally, enter the final condition ‘if cost per conversion is greater than, or equal to £40’. 

So, in order for this rule to notify you, every single one of these bullets has to happen. 

• Your spend must be more than £200
• Your clicks must be more than 100
• Your conversions must be more than, or equal to 2 
• Your conversion rate is less than 2.5% OR your cost per conversion is more than or equal to £40. 

Think of them like checkboxes. Adzooma will keep checking whether or not it’s happened. If they’ve all been ticked, we’ll take action. 

Step 4: Choose the frequency

The frequency stage is about selecting how often you want Adzooma to check to see if your conditions have been met.

For this rule, we’re going to choose to run it every day at 8.00 am ready for us to start our working day. 

Adzooma supports one-off rules at certain dates, or multiple times within a day for it to run. Coming soon, we’ll also have the option to check to see if your rule has fired every half-hour. 

Step 4: Select who gets notified 

By default, the account owner will always be notified when a rule runs. For better management, you can notify as many or little teammates as you want by selecting their names in the drop-down menu. 

Don’t have any teammates on Adzooma yet? You can add as many as you want by going to the teams page in your menu. From this page, you’ll also be able to control what permissions they have and assign them certain accounts to better keep track of their workloads. 

Step 5: Hit save

Now you’ve entered all the details, it’s time to hit save and apply it to your account. 

At the bottom of this page, you’ll notice a toggle. Clicking this will change the rule’s status from active to paused. So if you want to create a rule but don’t want to turn it on just yet, click this toggle before you hit save. 

And that’s it. At any time, you can go back into this menu and edit your rule front he automation screen. 

Making manual processes easy 

Automated rules might look complicated, but once applied they will eliminate your manual processes and free up valuable hours that you can use to focus on the bigger picture. 

If you can create this rule by following our steps, you can create anything inside Adzooma. 

And of course, if you would rather see what the experts have already created, take a look at our library of premade templates instead. 

Just log into your account to get started. 

So in this article, we will show you how to use analytics to improve lead conversions, with the help of some of the best analytics tools available.

Lead generation: statistics

1. 61% of marketers say that the traffic generation and attraction of potential customers is the main problem.
2. Content marketing is a lead generation tactic for 88% of B2B marketers [PDF].
3. Converting leads into customers is a top priority for 74% of companies.
4. Marketing automation to potential visitors attracts 451% more customers.
5. Landing page tests are used by only 17% of marketers as a tool to increase conversion rates.

Increase lead generation with Google Analytics

It is the world’s largest e-commerce metrics analysis tool. Provides a lot of information about the target audience. For example, habits, behaviours, and browsing history.

Getting started with Google Analytics is easy. You need to register an account, get a tracking ID and add it to the site. This will ensure that the data is sent. The identifier is added by inserting a code into each page of the site (the <head> tag is added).

Some metrics that can be learned from Google Analytics and where to find them (in bold and italic):

1. New User Conversion – the number of people who buy on their first visit. Tracking and analysis will help you determine which marketing channels are attracting quality users. Traffic Sources -> All Traffic -> Channels
2. Price per action. Shows how much money a company spends to bring a user to a conversion. Includes the price of interaction at different points. We recommend segmenting the received data. The CPA of regular and new customers varies.
3. Output. Improve conversions by eliminating the reasons for leaving the site. Exit page analysis will reveal weaknesses in the funnel. Behavior -> Site Content -> Exit Pages
4. Goals. Identify the ones, that users want to complete and track the path to them. It is recommended that you create goals that are not directly related to purchases. Better to tie them to, for example, shipping tools or sizing charts. Here you can also find out the conversion rate of the goal and then increase it through small site improvements. Conversions -> Goals -> Overview
5. Search. It considers the queries that users enter into the search bar of a resource. To improve results and quickly get users to the desired product, it is worth creating fix proposals. Behavior -> Site Search -> Searches
6. The length of the path to conversion. A lot of time passes between the first interaction with the company and the fulfillment of the goal. By reducing it, you make the customer journey shorter. This is valuable. Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels -> Time to Conversion

Read: The 6 Best Lead Gen Strategies for Startups

5 analytics tools to improve lead generation

The most effective activities are achieved through a good understanding of the target audience. The more you know about the priorities, desires and preferences of your customers, the easier it is for you to offer them the corresponding benefits.

We decided to help you to save time. To do this, we have selected the best services that analyse various indicators and are suitable for any marketing activity.

1. Lead Forensics

The program allows you to track the behaviour of site visitors comprehensively. Gives an understanding of what content the audience values. Collects information about visitors. In particular, IP address, contact and demographic information.

Each interaction session forms a “trace”. Receiving the visitor’s IP address, the program gives information about who exactly visited the site. You don’t even need to fill out a request form for this. From that moment when a visitor enters the site, the program determines the IP address, further linking actions to a specific guest.

2. Hotjar

The software analyzes user behavior, but it is much more detailed than the previous tool. Also provides feedback. It is a great addition to web analytics data.

Hotjar is good at visualizing user behavior. In particular, through heatmaps showing clicks and actions. Supplemented with surveys and session recordings, they provide insight into how and for what purposes the audience uses the site.

Program tools:

1. Heatmaps. The longer and more often you interact with a specific page / section of the site, the brighter they are displayed.
2. Entries. You see, the entire user session so you can easily fix the flaws. Perhaps some button is not working. Also, sometimes the content on the page may not display correctly. Maybe it’s the UX. Now there is nothing to make assumptions about. The entire session, from the moment you enter the site until you close the tab, is visible in the recording.
3. Polls, feedback forms and reports. A simple tool that demonstrates the benefits that a person receives from visiting a site. It shows where engagement is dropping. Provides an opportunity to correct shortcomings by making such pages more useful and interesting.

The program is easy to configure. Integrates with Google Tag Manager. Easy installation allows it to be hosted on almost any platform including Shopify stores.

Read: 10 Free CRO Tools To Use In 2020

3. Leadfeeder

An excellent assistant for companies operating in the B2B market. It is a sales tool. Allows you to find out about the companies visiting the site, as well as the products they are looking for. Identifies the organization precisely. The tool integrates with your Google Analytics to provide company identification. It can also connect to CRM and email components to provide additional information and improve the management process.

Visitors are tracked through:

• Google Analytics
• offline tracking codes.

In the first case, it connects to your site’s Google Analytics. After that, it is possible to generate network reports. The companies that visited the resource are indicated in them. The service also provides additional information that appears on your control panel.

For the second method, the program generates offline tracking codes for site visitors. Determine the IP addresses of the visitors. Such a small detail opens up wide possibilities of types and methods of company search for a guaranteed and correct identification. The program also uses additional databases.

Leadfeeder will tell you:

• how the visitor found the site;
• location of the client;
• which pages of the site were viewed;
• contact information for communication.

This information can help you to understand and research your target audience better. Data is powerful. In particular, the information can be used to develop marketing activities, generate leads and direct sales.

4. SE Ranking

A great tool that allows you to find the keys to get leads. It will delight you with a friendly interface and efficiency. You can use it to find keywords that meet the goals of your advertising campaign and business and will also lead you to deals. Thanks to the multifunctionality of the service, you can not only receive orders but also evaluate your effectiveness. You will be one step ahead of the competition with it. The work algorithm is:

1. Identify the main players in the market using the competitor research tool.

2. Find and analyze your competitor’s paid keywords with the tool. Filter and remove “free” (those that suggest something free), irrelevant keywords and queries that don’t match your geolocation.

3. Choose the most relevant and profitable keywords (the ones with the best CPC metrics).
4. Study SEO keywords and remove unnecessary ones.
5. Cluster your SEO keywords.
6. Create a pivot table of intersections of SEO keys and PPC keys. See which clusters were involved.
7. Use the resulting clusters in your work.

5. Google Optimize

This tool will be useful for companies that are already generating traffic but want to increase conversions. The service allows for A/B and multi-channel interface testing. Provides information about the behaviour of visitors. If you don’t know where to place a button or how to make a background, then Google Optimize will be very useful.

Opportunities:

1. A/B/N testing. Allows you to create several variants of one page and determine the most effective one to achieve your goals.
2. Testing related to forwarding. In this case, the behaviour of visitors on individual pages is tracked. Each is identified with a unique URL.
3. Multivariate testing. The number of tracked pages is represented by several sections of the site at once.

Conclusion

A business doesn’t exist without clients. For the success, promotion and growth of a company, you need a following in the form of loyal customers. At the same time, few marketers pay due attention to analytics. Although it demonstrates real customer preferences.

We have selected the lightest and most effective lead generation analytics tools. We hope they will help you to improve your results. Get to know your customers, and then there will be no problems with lead generation, conversion, or other tasks.