Google Marketing

A More Private Web Can Help Businesses Grow

17 December 2020 by

Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They support great content and services from a diverse range of creators and publishers. They help companies of all sizes reach customers more efficiently than ever before. 

Yet people’s expectations for the collection and use of data are changing, which means the web as we know it—free, open and ad-supported—is changing, too. Internet platforms, web browsers and ad-blocking features are promising more privacy by blocking common technologies like cookies. This takes a toll on the funds that content creators, newsrooms, web developers and videographers depend on to support their work. It also means that companies that rely on these technologies must respect the demand for a more private web in order for the web itself to remain dynamic and vibrant over the long term. 

We strongly believe that advertising and privacy can coexist. Helping businesses adapt to a privacy-safe web isn’t just good business practice—if done right, and done collaboratively, it can be an engine for economic recovery and growth.

The importance of online advertising 

When you see ads online, they’re usually placed with the support of widely available tools, often called ad technology or “ad tech,” that help companies get the most out of the money they spend on ads. Google competes with a range of companies large and small to provide these tools to the platforms, publishers, and advertisers that need them. 

All this competition drives us to innovate and improve our tools. Millions of publishers use Google advertising services to help make the digital advertising process easy and effective, and publishers retain about 70 percent of the revenue that’s generated (and for many, it’s even more). We’re constantly working to help them earn more: In 2019, we made nearly 80 product improvements aimed at improving publisher revenue, which generated revenue increases of more than 9 percent in total for publishers using Google Ad Manager.

What cookies do 

Much of online advertising makes use of a basic, widely available technology called cookies, which are part of the basic architecture of the web. They help with things like measuring the effectiveness of a company’s ad campaign or enabling a particular advertiser to reach the consumers it wants to reach.

However, cookies were conceived for an earlier era. It’s clear from privacy laws in Europe and around the world that citizens and governments want a greater understanding of how they work and more control over their use. And efforts by platforms, browsers and ad-blocking companies are already putting new limits on them.

In this changing landscape, the funds that web publishers rely on to support their operations are increasingly at risk. For example, an analysis of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager customers found that when third-party cookies are disabled, publishers receive on average 52 percent less programmatic ad revenue. Like others, Google also uses third-party cookies for ads we serve on other sites (for example, Google Ad Manager and AdSense) so Google will also be affected as the industry moves away from cookies.

The Privacy Sandbox 

The question today is whether the web can keep people’s information safe and private while also supporting the advertising that keeps so much of the web free. 

That’s why, as part of a larger initiative with the web standards community called the “Privacy Sandbox,” the engineers behind Google’s browser, Chrome, are working on ways to underpin a healthy, ad-supported web without third-party cookies. Privacy Sandbox aims to provide space for experimentation and input from technologists, businesses, publishers, regulators and more. Among the proposals being tested are privacy-safe ways to do things like predict and protect against fraud, properly measure if an ad campaign has “worked,” and find the right audience for an ad. One such proposal, Federated Learning of Cohorts, uses machine learning algorithms that run on individual devices to model groups of people by their browsing behaviors without creating individual ad profiles at all.

Coming up with these new technologies involves complicated trade-offs, but we believe that the decision to phase out support for third-party cookies is the right thing for privacy and the industry as a whole. That’s why we’re working with the industry in forums like the W3C, and are in active discussions with independent authorities, such as the Competition and Markets Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, to help us find the best approach. 

Responsible use of data

We’re committed to having privacy-preserving mechanisms in place that address the industry’s critical needs before discontinuing support for third-party cookies. We think this will not only promote business growth for numerous companies, but could also increase competition in the sector overall by making it a healthier place to advertise and grow while still meeting consumers’ expectations.

Alongside our efforts to promote privacy, we’re increasing transparency on the data we use, and are investing in products to help people and businesses to understand, protect, move and benefit from data in new ways. 

Protecting people’s personal data doesn’t have to be at odds with business growth. By focusing on the people who use our products and investing in new technologies to connect advertisers and publishers with users safely, we can create more value and promote a thriving future on the web—for everyone.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Greater Controls For Sensitive Ad Topics In Your Ad Settings

10 December 2020 by

Building tools that provide transparency and control has always been a top priority for us, and over the years, we’ve empowered people to shape their ads experience through user controls. We’ve launched About this ad, which explains why a specific ad is being shown, and Ad Settings, which allows people to control how ads are personalized or even opt out of personalized ads altogether at an account level.

We’ve heard feedback that some people would prefer to limit ads in certain categories like alcohol, so today, we’re launching a new control in Ad Settings, enabling people to see fewer alcohol ads, with gambling as an additional option. 

We’ve long had features like Mute this ad, where people can indicate which ads they’d rather not see. These controls live alongside our policies which determine when and where gambling and alcohol ads can be shown per local laws (e.g. age restrictions). This new feature is an extra step, putting choice in the user’s hands and enabling you to further control your ad experience. With a click of a button, you can choose to see fewer gambling and alcohol ads. It is also reversible; should you change your mind, you can click to see such ads again. 

This feature will roll out in Ad Settings gradually, beginning with YouTube Ads in the US, and we aim to introduce this for Google Ads and YouTube globally in early 2021. Countries with legal restrictions against serving gambling and alcohol ads will not see any change in their policies.

Many of the advertisers we work with are also invested in respecting people’s choices and cultural differences when it comes to the ads they see. For this initiative, we’ve been working with the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking (IARD) and its members, the leading beer, wine and spirits producers, taking into account their expertise on standards for responsible alcohol advertising and marketing—and we’re pleased to have their support.

“IARD’s engagement with Google means users of the platform, starting with YouTube, will have the option to see fewer alcohol ads. Our members are determined to give people greater control over whether they see alcohol-related marketing online. Respecting these personal preferences and recognizing differences in culture requires sensitivity and action, that’s why we hope this partnership is the start of a bigger movement.” – Henry Ashworth, President and CEO of the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking

 “As a responsible producer and member of IARD, we are determined to set and deliver new and robust standards of marketing responsibility. This significant new feature is a very important development for our sector, and it will have a meaningful impact for people around the world as it is rolled out across Google’s platform.”- Albert Baladi, CEO Beam Suntory and Chair of the IARD

We believe this new feature is an important step in user choice and control. We’ll continue to improve our controls; and as our products and people’s expectations of them evolve, so will the features we make available to personalize ad experiences.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Local Marketing | Web Marketing

How To Capture Emails From Restaurant Customers

2 December 2020 by
Email Opt In Strategy

You know you need to market your restaurant.

After more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, your restaurant likely struggling to stay in business.

>> Sometimes a bit of humor helps in times like these.

Across the country, businesses closed temporarily. Now, as the country re-opens, you probably want to leverage every available marketing technology and strategy to herd as many customers as the law will allow you to into your doors.

To get more people into your restaurant and keep them coming back, you need to market your restaurant. One unique method of doing that is email marketing.

This method is unique for restaurants because it is a challenge to obtain an email address while the customer sits in your café. They have their mobile phone with them and in the relaxed environment of a meal out, rarely will they want to stop their meal to load your website on a browser. You might get their cell phone number pretty easily, but emails present a challenge.

 How can you capture your restaurant customers’ email addresses?

A few options exist for collecting email addresses. When we say “automatically,” we do not mean illicitly. Collecting email addresses always requires an ask. You can ask online or offline. Here are a few ideas for getting the important information surrounding the “@”.

Place an empty fishbowl next to the cash register.

Label the bowl as a collector spot for business cards. If you want to encourage many business cards, offer to draw for a free lunch once per week. You will only be out the cost of one meal, but you will encourage many business cards to get dumped into the bowl. At the end of each week, draw the card that wins and contact that person with their gift certificate. Then, empty the bowl and enter all of the names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers into a database or Excel spreadsheet. Post the name of the week’s winner on the front of the bowl, so people can see why they would want to drop their business card into the bowl. When your winner comes in, take a picture of them dining and post it, too. This could be your first email newsletter.

Ask your customers to text their email addresses.

Customers more freely share their email addresses when sitting at their computer, but pretty rarely have a computer with them when dining out. Some restaurants have had luck asking customers to text their email addresses to the establishment. For example, Elephant Bar set up a short code of 73757 to make it quicker to dial them. Customers can text their shortcode with the word “rewards” followed by their email address to join their rewards program. This method gets the restaurant two important pieces of data — the email address and the cell phone number.

Ask on your website via a reservations form.

You might doubt that restaurant patrons visit websites, but they do. You can encourage them to visit yours more often by offering specials or coupons that you only post there or by setting up an automated reservation system. The latter frees up your personnel from needing to answer the phones to make reservations. Patrons can visit the website to make reservations. You solve the problems of overbooking and bad handwriting, too. The reservation system only offers as many tables as you have, and you can set the reservation times. Your form prompts the patron for their email address to send a confirmation email. You can also offer to send a reminder of the reservation on the day of the meal.

Collect emails from your Facebook page.

Set up a Facebook page and advertise it using the quite reasonably priced Facebook ads. Offer an app for ordering through the Facebook page and prompt your visitors to share their email. You can send a confirmation of the order immediately and use the email in perpetuity, or until they opt out. Once you build your email list, you can improve your ad reach by using custom audiences.

Use a website email collector form.

Regardless of all the fancy stuff, you do with apps and reservation systems, you also need the straightforward method of a simple form. Using a company like JotForm lets you easily set up a responsive design form that collects just the customers’ names and email addresses. You can handily serve this up when customers visit you by offering free Wi-Fi.

Use ZenReach to serve an ad featuring the email collector form.

Programs like ZenReach let you market via WiFi. When a customer enters your Wi-Fi zone and signs on, you get the opportunity to serve them a sign-on page. Request their email address as part of the sign-on or ask for it as “payment” for using the free Wi-Fi. You can also use ZenReach to serve ads and capture leads using an email prompt. This program uses your Wi-Fi and the consumer’s device ID similar to the way a website uses a cookie. When the customer returns to your restaurant and signs on again, ZenReach recognizes them.

Using Your New Email List

Building your list just gets you started. Once you have it put together, you also need to use it. Put it to good use by sending a once per week newsletter that offers helpful content. You might include a recipe or contest news. Featuring biographies on your staff lets customers get to know the chef, bartender, servers, etc. You can personalize your ads and promotions via email, too. While radio, TV, and even direct mail cost money, you can put together an email list for free and use it for the same zero cost.

Remember to segment your email marketing on top of personalizing the emails. Business diners have different needs than date night diners. Those who order online should get different offers than those who come in to dine.

Offer a coupon for something free on their birthday. Now that you have their emails, you can build a real professional relationship with your customers and that gets you valuable word of mouth advertising.

Analytics Marketing | PPC Marketing | Web Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Ways to Make Remarketing Work for Your Small Business

22 November 2020 by
Ways to Make Remarketing Work for Your Small Business

When it comes to a marketing budget, every dollar is precious, especially for small businesses, and you need to squeeze as much mileage out of each marketing tactic as possible. That is why the concept of remarketing makes so much sense.

Although marketers would love to be able to just drive prospects to a website or retail location, where they make an immediate purchase, the real outcome is that this scenario seldom comes true. Some people do use their mobile devices to make immediate purchases (think food or gasoline), but most must be nurtured and communicated to several times to make the impression that tilts the buying scale in your favor.

Let’s say you spend a considerable amount of money on your online marketing strategy, and meet with a certain amount of success. Remarketing is a way to connect with those people who ALREADY took notice of your business, interacted in some way, or possibly even visited your website. This marketing tactic allows you to strategically position follow up advertisements in front of these audiences, reminding them of your brand.

You might have experienced remarketing when you searched for something online, and saw a promotion for that very same product come up in your Facebook feed or Google results.

If you need some convincing statistics about the power of remarketing, consider the following:

  • One ad is not enough: Only 2% of visitors make a purchase on their first visit to a website. Cart abandonment rates are incredibly high, especially on mobile devices. Remarketing offers the possibility of getting a second chance with that other 98%.
  • Conversion rates increase over time: WordStream reveals that the more prospects see an ad, the more likely they are to buy. Sometimes they might not really notice your ad, or your timing could be off. But, the more they see what you offer, the more likely you are to catch their attention.
  • People ENJOY reminders: Would you be surprised to find out that 25% of visitors actually enjoy seeing a remarketing reminder? If they liked something enough to research it once, the chances are they had interest, but were not yet fully motivated to buy.

Common Remarketing Mistakes and How to Correct Them

Although it might seem easy enough to just say that you want to remarket to people who have interacted in some way with your business online, setting up remarketing is not easy. It requires following several holy grails of technical manuals, and there are dozens of ways to make mistakes which compound quickly.

Here are some of the biggest missteps, and tips to make your remarketing more effective:

  • Set Up Your Remarketing: If you have ever heard that “there is never enough time to do something right the first time, but always enough time to do it over,” you have already learned an important lesson about remarketing – set it up right! Google takes you through a step-by-step remarketing set-up process. Set up an audience source, tag your website for remarketing, create a data source, and use Tag Manager to confirm that a global site tag has been placed on every page of your website.
  • Choose Your Audience Wisely: Setting up your audience lists will help you define which audiences see your ads across Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, and the Google Display Network through remarketing campaigns. Choose website visitors, your customer list, similar audience, app users, and callers, or a custom combination to specify who you want to see your ads. The audience you choose depends on the type of ad you will run. Don’t try to accomplish too much with one ad. It can be confusing to your audience, and will be next to impossible to track. On the other hand, though, you do need an audience that is large enough to generate trackable results, so don’t exclude every possible demographic just to save a few dollars.
  • Remarket to Those You Already Know: You only have a passing acquaintance with some people – they visited your website once, or clicked on a YouTube video. But, with others there is a more “intimate” relationship. They are on your e-newsletter list, gave you an email address to download an e-book or white paper, or maybe even made a purchase. Perhaps they got all the way to the shopping cart stage, without taking the final buying action. These are people that are not what you might consider “regular” customers yet. You want to have specific remarketing efforts for this audience to remind them of why they like your business, and motivate them to take another action. This is also where the concept of the “similar” audience is useful – if it works well for your current associations, then it will probably work for those who are in similar demographic groups, too.
  • Think About the Length of Your Remarketing Campaign. You could believe you want a particular remarketing campaign to last about 30 days, but some buying decisions need longer periods of time than that. You might want a sales promotion to run a week or two, and a restaurant can probably get by with a shorter timeframe, but a car dealership might have to go out to two months to meet their buyers’ thought process. You want to have enough visibility during the timeframe when a prospect is most likely to revisit their purchase options.
  • Don’t Go Overboard: There is a limit to how much any prospect, even a very interested one, wants to hear from you. Use frequency capping to limit the number of times your remarketing ads appear to the same person over a given time period.
  • Pay Attention to All Your Online Marketing: Although it might feel like your remarketing strategy should be able to practically run itself, you do want to check on it regularly to make sure it is generating the results you expect. Look for areas you can improve on, and also those that might need to be rethought completely. Keep an eye on those people who do convert, to determine how you want to reach out to them in upcoming remarketing efforts. And don’t focus so much on the remarketing that you forget to revisit your primary online marketing strategy, as that is what is driving the initial results you count on for remarketing.
  • Watch the Audience Overlap: You want to try to maintain control over the amount of information each of your specific audiences will receive from you. Too much and they might get annoyed; too little and they could lose interest. Think about what you are saying to each audience, how long your campaign will last, and figure out whether they are getting other overlapping remarketing messages from your business.
  • Measure and Measure Again: You want to get a good ROI with any marketing strategy, and that includes your remarketing efforts. Take advantage of Google Analytics to gain insights on pages visited, session length, and traffic sources, in order to improve results.

Finally – BE INTERESTING! You might have made it perfectly through the set-up and audience selection parts, but you still need to have an ad that is interesting. Use quality images and captivating content to grab your audience’s attention and make them give your business a second thought. You’ll want to do some testing of various versions of your ad, to make sure you hit on the exact combination that works.

This focused on the concept of remarketing with Google, but Facebook also has a very similar process (they call it re-targeting) for helping people rediscover what they really love about your business. The point is that you want your online marketing to work its very best for your small business. Building on strategies you already have in place through remarketing can help take those efforts to the next level.

Google Marketing

Audio Ads On YouTube Expand Reach And Grow Brand Awareness

17 November 2020 by

Whether it’s to squeeze in a living room workout before dinner, catch up on a podcast or listen to a virtual concert on a Friday night, people are increasingly turning to YouTube as they spend more time at home. 

To help you tailor your media and creative approach to the different ways consumers are engaging with YouTube, we’re introducing audio ads, our first ad format designed to connect your brand with audiences in engaged and ambient listening on YouTube. Audio ads, currently in beta, help you efficiently expand reach and grow brand awareness with audio-based creative and the same measurement, audience and brand safety features as your video campaigns.  

Reach more music fans

Music has always played an important role in culture and everyday lives. It’s a reliable way for you to capture an audience engaging with content they love, but for most brands, it’s untapped on YouTube. With music video streaming at an all time high on YouTube—more than 50 percent of logged-in viewers who consume music content in a day consume more than 10 minutes of music content—we’re introducing new solutions for your brand to be seen, heard and recognized alongside music content.1 

In addition to audio ads, we’re also launching dynamic music lineups, dedicated groups of music-focused channels across popular genres such as Latin music, K-pop, hip-hop and Top 100, as well as moods or interests like fitness, so you can easily reach music fans globally and drive results for your business. Music lineups and audio ads make it possible to be there, at scale, whether YouTube is being watched front and center or playing as the backdrop to daily life.

Amp up your brand message

Audio ads are characterized by creatives where the audio soundtrack plays the starring role in delivering your message. The visual component is typically a still image or simple animation. 

In our months of alpha testing, we found that more than 75 percent of measured audio ad campaigns on YouTube drove a significant lift in brand awareness.2

One of our early testers, Shutterfly, used audio ads to influence purchase consideration among interested shoppers, driving above benchmark lifts of 14 percent lift in ad recall and 2 percent lift in favorability among their target audience.

Find success with audio ads

When you’re preparing your audio ads campaign, keep in mind that audio should play the leading role. Think: If I close my eyes, I can still clearly understand what this ad is about. Be clear and specific with your message and pick a friendly, authentic voice to deliver it. If you aren’t sure what creative to use, you can use Video experiments to run a test and get results quickly and at no extra cost. 

Audio ads are available in beta via auction on Google Ads and Display & Video 360 on a CPM basis with the same audience targeting options, bidding strategies and Brand Lift measurement capabilities as your YouTube video campaigns. Using both video and audio ads together, you can reach more people, consuming content they love, with the ad format that’s best suited for their unique YouTube experience. 

To learn more about audio ads on YouTube, visit the Help Center or speak to your Google representative. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Goodbye Google Webmasters, Hello Google Search Central

11 November 2020 by

The history behind Google Webmasters

Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word “webmaster” was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They’re more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few “webmasters”.

We’re changing our name

In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there’s not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites. To focus more on the topic that we talk about (Google Search), we’re changing our name from “Google Webmasters Central” to “Google Search Central”, both on our websites and on social media. Our goal is still the same; we aim to help people improve the visibility of their website on Google Search.The change will happen on most platforms in the next couple days.

Centralizing help information to one site

To help people learn how to improve their website’s visibility on Google Search, we’re also consolidating our help documentation and blogs to one site.

Moving forward, the Search Console Help Center will contain only documentation related to using Search Console. It’s also still the home of our help forum, newly renamed from “Webmasters Help Community” to “Google Search Central Community“. The information related to how Google Search works, crawling and indexing, Search guidelines, and other Search-related topics are moving to our new site, which previously focused only on web developer documentation. The content move will happen over the next few days.

We will continue to create content for anyone who wants their websites to show up on Google Search, whether you’re just getting started with SEO or you’re an experienced web professional.

Consolidating the blogs

The blog that you’re reading right now is also moving to our main site. However, we will wait one week to allow subscribers to read this last post on the old platform. Moving this blog, including our other 13 localized blogs, to one place brings the following benefits:

  • More discovery of related content (help documentation, localized blogs, event information, on one site)
  • Easier to switch between languages (no longer have to find the localized blog URL)
  • Better platform allows us to maintain content, localize blog post more easily, and format posts consistently

Going forward, all archived and new blog posts will appear on developers.google.com/search/blog. You don’t need to take any action in order to keep getting updates from us; we will redirect the current set of RSS and email subscribers to the new blog URL.

Googlebot mascot gets a refresh

Our Googlebot mascot is also getting an upgrade. Googlebot’s days of wandering the web solo come to a close as a new sidekick joins Googlebot in crawling the internet.

When we first met this curious critter, we wondered, “Is it really a spider?” After some observation, we noticed this spider bot hybrid can jump great distances and sees best when surrounded by green light. We think Googlebot’s new best friend is a spider from the genus Phidippus, though it seems to also have bot-like characteristics. Googlebot’s been trying out new nicknames for the little spider bot, but they haven’t settled on anything yet. Maybe you can help?

As parting words, update your bookmarks and if you have any questions or comments, you can find us on Twitter and in our Google Search Central Help Community

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Blog Marketing | Email Marketing | Web Marketing

Top 10 Reasons To Use Google Workspace For Email

5 November 2020 by
Workspace for email

It is estimated that Google has a solid lock on the market share of email open rates with a whopping open email rate of 26 percent. This might have something to do with the element of Google’s longevity, having been around since 2004 and home to 1.2 billion users. It also has a lot to do with the product that they offer.

Today, Google is no longer just a free gmail account that you can check from anywhere. It’s a solution for business that has outperformed any other free email or suite solution on the market.

One tool that Google offers now is Google Workspace.

Learn the top 10 benefits of using Google Workspace right here, and streamline your business today.

1. Customized Workspace

Google Workspace is so appealing to so many businesses today because it completely customizes your work life and the life of everyone that you work with, in minutes. Google Workspace allows you to create an instant brand.  Gone are the days of sending pitches, bids, or sales calls under the email@gmail.com look. That just doesn’t feel professional, does it?

Google has recognized this need for an easy to use fully integrated and fully customized workspace. So they have developed this tool that allows you to create your own brand using email, without having to work with a dedicated server company. An email domain that corresponds with the name of your company or organization allows you to look more professional in minutes.

2. Increases Productivity

Productivity improves when you are on email. Google Workspace puts everything you need at your fingertips. You don’t need to keep 25 windows from different apps and software suites open at the same time. Open up Google, access your Drive, your Images, your Sheets, everything, with just a few clicks. Share, plan, produce, with one Workspace at your fingertips.

3. Store it All Here

Google Workspace not only offers a customized brand for your email domain, but it offers you the opportunity to use a completely scalable interface. This allows you to tailor your own storage space to exactly what you need. You can do this using general Gmail, but with a branded domain on your email account, you will never be scrolling through emails looking for that work document in between your pet food order again. Everything is stored in one place. Keep your business here, and the rest of your life elsewhere.

4. Log in Anywhere

One of the reasons Google has amassed billions of users is that it has made itself available as a web-based email that can be checked anywhere. If you are in Florida one day and Florence the next, you can check your email using a device in any country in the world. Google makes logging in simple and fast with one sign-in. 

5. Never Miss a Thing

Along with having a branded email, Google Workspace will sync everything you need with your branded domain to ensure you never miss a thing. Google Workspace allows you to both sync your gmail.com email with your Workspace email so that you don’t have to check multiple accounts multiple times. At the same time, sync your Calendar to make sure that you never miss a thing. You won’t miss anything, and your employees won’t either. When they submit a personal day request, for example, you’ll get it instantly. Not only will you get that benefit, but so will they.

6. Communicate to Everyone Seamlessly

Communicating to the team simultaneously is something you can do with gmail.com, but it will just take more time. If you need to tell people that you are out of the office or are arranging a meeting, you can do so in just a few clicks and the time it takes you to set up the meeting or send the email.

7. Instant Access to Business Solutions

Using Google Workspace allows you to seamlessly integrate branded business needs, but it also provides you with a few more business solutions than the gmail.com service does. Along with Google Workspace and a branded email solution, you get Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Keep, a notes application that can handle almost any file you sent it to.

Google Workspace gives you instant access. While you may get most of these features using gmail.com, you won’t get them all. If you have a business need, Google has developed a business solution in Google Workspace.

8. It’s Affordable

Google Workspace plans begin at approximately $6 a month per user, which is one of the biggest reasons that it is so popular today. You won’t get an email on a dedicated server for less money than that. The higher-tier programs run at $12 a month and that gives you more storage. Still more affordable than a dedicated server.

9. No Ads Email

The one disadvantage of a free email server is the constant ads. When you pay a few dollars a month for an email server, you lose that entirely. Gone are the days where you see ads showing up in your emails that match something you typed about yesterday. You are now working from a branded Workspace without the distractions of ads.

10. Supported by Every Operating System

When you have a dedicated server hosting your emails, you still need to be sure your employees can meet succinctly in a remote space, or collaborate in a way that is seamless. This gets clunky when you have both PC and Mac employees. You don’t need to worry if your Google-based applications are going to be supported by your employees. You’re all working on the same cloud now, and Google Docs or Google Sheets in a Google Meet can all be viewed easily without a single complaint from anybody.

Switch to Google Workspace Today

For just a few dollars a month you can switch to Google Workspace and help everybody improve their productivity today. You’ll get instant access to fully integrated and fully scalable solutions that offer more of everything, for very little.

Switch today and see the difference. It’s not a solution you have to stick with if you don’t like it.

Google Marketing

Make Every Marketing Dollar Count With Attribution And Lift Measurement

12 October 2020 by

Understanding how each media touchpoint contributes to your goals can mean the difference between marketing that drives business growth and marketing that fails to deliver. To make every dollar count, you need tools that help you learn how people are responding to your ads, so you can take action to improve your results.

Today, we’re announcing improvements to Attribution in Google Ads including coverage for YouTube ads and a significant expansion in the availability of data-driven attribution. We’re also sharing updates to our lift measurement solutions including a new way to measure incremental conversions and an accelerated time frame so you get results even faster.

Measure more of your Google media

Attribution in Google Ads helps you understand the paths people take to complete conversions. It awards credit for conversions to different ads, clicks, and factors along the way, so you can focus your investments on the media having the biggest impact on results.

Earlier this year, we launched a new look for attribution reports to help you get important insights faster. And with more people turning to YouTube as we spend more time at home, we added YouTube to attribution reports, to help you better understand the role video plays in your customer’s path to purchase.

fuboTV, a live TV streaming platform that includes sports, news, network television and movies, used attribution reports to understand how customers interact with their YouTube and Search ads before converting. They saw that for every conversion YouTube drove directly, it assisted 2 more conversions on Search. “These insights helped us see the full value of video. This enabled us to start thinking about YouTube and Search media in one view and take into account blended cost-per-acquisition goals that more accurately reflect the total impact of our ads at driving conversions,” said Antonio Armenino, Search and Display Lead at fuboTV.

YouTube ads in attribution reports is now in beta. Eligible advertisers will be able to opt-in within the Measurement > Attribution section of Google Ads to see YouTube ads in the Top Paths, Assisted Conversions and Path Metrics reports, alongside Search and Shopping ads. And to give advertisers a more holistic view of Google media, we’re also adding Display ads to attribution reports in the coming months.

Data-driven attribution is now available to more advertisers

Data-driven attribution (DDA) is a type of attribution model that uses Google’s machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each ad interaction along the consumer journey. Trained on and validated against incrementality experiments, data-driven attribution gives credit based on the incremental impact of your ads. It continuously analyzes unique conversion patterns, comparing the paths of customers who completed a desired action against those who did not, to determine the most effective touchpoints for each business. DDA is our recommended attribution model because the constantly updating, machine learning-based approach ensures you are always getting accurate results that account for the latest changes in consumer behavior.

DDA requires a certain volume of data in order for us to build a precise model, but to make DDA available to more advertisers, we’re lowering the data requirements for eligibility. With this change, each conversion action in your Google Ads account that has at least 3,000 ad interactions and at least 300 conversions within 30 days will be eligible for DDA. This is possible due to ongoing improvements to the machine learning algorithms we use to train data-driven attribution models, so we can do more with less data without sacrificing precision.

Use full-funnel lift measurement to validate and implement findings

Attribution is best for day-to-day, always-on measurement and is effective for setting ad budgets and informing bid strategies on a campaign or channel level. Businesses that are prepared to move beyond DDA can use randomized controlled experiments—also known as incrementality or lift—to set channel-level budgets or to optimize future campaigns.

For years, marketers have used Brand Lift and Search Lift to measure the impact of YouTube ads on perceptions and behaviors throughout the consumer journey, from brand awareness to purchase intent, and lift in organic searches on Google and YouTube. Today, we’re announcing that Conversion Lift is now available in beta. Conversion Lift measures the impact of your YouTube ads on driving user actions, such as website visits, sign ups, purchases and other types of conversions.

Each of Google’s lift measurement tools use best-in-class methodology to ensure accuracy and precision, and that no additional costs are incurred to run these experiments. In addition to delivering accurate, full-funnel measurement, we’re making changes to our lift measurement tools so you get results even faster.

For Brand Lift, we recently launched accelerated flights so you can get the brand perception metrics you care about sooner, with the ability to re-measure over time. We’re also reporting Search Lift and Conversion Lift results as soon as they become available, with flexible study durations and integrated daily reporting, so you can see changes more frequently and over time. Last, you can now run Brand Lift, Search Lift and Conversion Lift measurement on the same campaign, so you can get fast, actionable results across the entire consumer journey.

Fiverr, one of the world’s largest marketplaces for freelance services, wanted to drive both consideration and website engagement. They ran YouTube ads to reach audiences throughout the funnel, and used Brand Lift, Search Lift and Conversion Lift to measure full-funnel impact. They saw that their first test delivered strong relative lift, with a 10 percent lift in consideration, 62 percent lift in searches on Google and YouTube, and 30 percent lift in new users. “We received excellent insights from this campaign. Now that we’ve seen success in reaching first-time users throughout the funnel, our next step is to develop messaging for user retention,” said Tal Moravkin, Creative Manager at Fiverr.

We look forward to seeing these insights help you understand how people interact with your marketing throughout the consumer journey. Looking ahead, we’re working to bring more channels and formats into attribution and lift measurement, so you can get better insights to make every marketing dollar count.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Get Your Business Ready For What Comes Next

6 October 2020 by

Advertising Week is an event I look forward to every year—it brings global thought leaders together to find new ways we can use technology to solve business challenges. Over the past few months, I’ve had a chance to meet virtually with many of you to learn how COVID-19 is impacting your business and how partners like Google can help. I’ve been inspired by how you’re supporting your local communities and re-imagining ways to run your business. 

You’ve also shared great ideas for how we can build better solutions that help you grow your business online. Today at Advertising Week, I’m excited to share innovations that will give you new insights about changing consumer behavior and help you meet customer demand in real time through automation.

Get insights tailored for your business

Consumer behavior is constantly changing, and the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of that change. For example, Kettlebell Kings saw a surge in interest for home fitness products when communities began sheltering in place. By meeting this demand from customers, the team processed more sales in one day than they typically would have over the course of months! For Zazzle, an online marketplace for customized products, exploring search trends allowed them to identify rising categories like puzzles and outdoor games as people looked for activities to do at home. By investing in these categories, Zazzle was able to deliver on customer needs and improve campaign performance. 

These businesses are proving how important it is to stay ahead of shifts in consumer behavior in order to drive continued growth. That’s why we’re introducing the new Insights page in Google Ads to give you custom insights specific to your business. We’re rolling out the beta in the coming months and will add new information over time—including audience and forecasting insights. 

The Insights page will feature a trends section that shows current and emerging search demand for the products or services most relevant to your business. For example, an outdoor retailer can quickly take notice of rising demand for tents as consumers gear up for more outdoor adventures. And a vacation rental company might see a growing trend for cabins. Explore these trends to uncover opportunities for categories you already promote in your campaigns—as well as for new, related areas you could tap into.

You can deep dive into a trend to understand which queries consumers are searching for or the geographic locations where demand is growing the most. These trends are aggregated and anonymized across many queries and can’t be tied to any individual user. Also use the integration with recommendations to easily activate keyword, budget and bidding optimizations in a few steps. You can apply these learnings to unlock new business opportunities, like new product areas to pivot into or future promotions to highlight. 

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Keep up with consumer demand and take action in real time

Insights help you keep a finger on the pulse of changing consumer demand, and automation makes it possible to act on it in real time. To bring the full value of automation to more businesses, we’re introducing Performance Max campaigns, a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.

Google Ads currently offers fully-automated campaigns for app marketers, retailers, and businesses with physical locations to drive results across Google’s surfaces. Performance Max campaigns will build on learnings from those campaigns to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives. They’ll deliver four main benefits:

1. Customer reach: Performance Max campaigns will complement your keyword-based Search campaigns, and be the most complete solution to help you drive conversions and revenue by unifying Google’s ad inventory.

2. Performance towards your business goals: Over time, you’ll be able to choose from multiple marketing objectives like online sales, new customer acquisition, and offline sales. For the first time, you’ll also be able to drive new leads across Google from one campaign. Machine learning will automatically optimize for your most valuable customers across channels. 

A new goals-first setup makes it easier to fully define your conversion goals. For example, if your objective is to generate leads, you can make sure you’re capturing both form submissions and phone calls as goals.

3. New reporting and insights: Get a deeper understanding of how machine learning is working for your business, such as which audiences and creative asset combinations are performing the best. Performance Max campaigns will also be included in the new Insights page to help you understand what’s driving changes in your performance.

4. New campaign inputs: While automation helps you drive better results, your expertise and knowledge of your business can improve how machine learning performs. Speed up the campaign learning process by specifying which audiences are most likely to convert. Combine these inputs with value rules to indicate which conversions are worth the most to your business based on characteristics like audience, location and device.

We’re still in the early stages of testing Performance Max campaigns and will invite more advertisers to join the beta next year. You should continue to use existing campaign types to meet your business goals during this important holiday season.

Reach more viewers and inspire action

As people spend more time at home, video streaming is a key area where a “new normal” is emerging.  On YouTube in particular, over 2 billion people globally are gravitating towards timely content to stay entertained, keep up with current events, and learn new skills. In the coming weeks, Video action campaigns will expand to all advertisers to help you drive more conversions from video and inspire action across YouTube and Google video partners.

People are also watching YouTube in more ways than before—for example in the U.S., over 100 million people watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their TV screen each month. Given this boom in TV viewership, we’ll continue exploring ways your ads can appear with Video action campaigns and test direct-response video ads on new surfaces like connected TVs over the next year.

Even as the world around us continues to change, our commitment to you remains the same: we’re here to help businesses of all sizes grow online and get ready for what comes next. To learn more about our latest product innovations, watch the full Advertising Week keynote.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Blog Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

10 Best Facebook Marketing Ideas

3 October 2020 by
Facebook Marketing Ideas

Great Facebook marketing is not a one size fits all approach, but one piece of strategy advice I give all my clients is that social media marketing must be an integral component of your web marketing campaign.

Social media is the better, faster way to reach customers because social media sites have become the newspapers, backyard fences, and water coolers of our daily life.

At the top of our social media communication list is Facebook marketing.

Here are few shocking Facebook marketing statistics to illustrate the importance of including Facebook in your marketing mix:

  • Facebook Monthly Active Users: Facebook monthly active users totaled 2.80 billion as of December 31, 2020. This represents an increase of 12% year-over-year.
  • Leading Social Media Engagement Platform: eMarketer reports that Facebook is the leading social platform and business marketplace. It reaches 59% of social media users, and is projected to continue its domination at least through 2024. Interestingly enough, the pandemic renewed curiosity about Facebook’s outreach capabilities.
  • Great for Small Business Marketing: There must be some pretty strong reasons over 200 million small businesses from around the world include Facebook tools as part of their marketing strategy.

What this means is that your business needs top-notch Facebook marketing to achieve its goals in this highly-competitive, attention-grabbing medium. You can use Facebook marketing to share business information, increase your online presence, build your audience, and connect with prospects and customers.

I created an easy-to-understand Facebook marketing infographic which you can download here.

Best Facebook Marketing Ideas

What is Facebook Marketing?

Facebook marketing offers a variety of highly targeted paid advertisements and organic posts which help your business put its products and services in front of a targeted audience.

A slew of ad formats is available, including video, image, carousel, collection, slideshow and lead generation.

Start by establishing a goal, then define your target audience, upload your images and content, set a duration, and set your budget.

If needed, Facebook will create a personalized ad plan focused on your goal.

Below are some useful ideas for your next Facebook marketing campaign:

  1. Target an Insanely Specific Audience: You might think you know your audience but is “people over 35 who live within 25 miles of my business” really helpful? Hone in and drill down to those people who have the best opportunity of becoming customers. Would you be shocked to find out that about 85% of Facebook advertisements are targeted by country instead of a specific location? And only about 45% of these advertisements use Interest Targeting! Facebook has targeting options for location, behavior, demographics, connections and interests that deliver your ads to people who will love your business.
  2. Run a Simple Contest to Boost Engagement: A contest is a great way to attract attention and introduce your business to potential new customers. In one example a start-up with no marketing budget generated some 30,000 new likes over six weeks using a simple Facebook contest. Align the prize with your brand, follow all of Facebook’s rules for promotions, and make sure it is a true, legal contest.
  3. Create Short, Enticing Video Posts: Videos get all the attention these days. In 2018, 54% of consumers said they wanted more video content from brands or businesses they support. And that was before COVID kept everybody inside using social media for a year! Video ads have high click-through rates, and Facebook helps you reach your audience with videos created using photos and footage you already have, or with a selection of free stock images.
  4. Use Eye Contact in Your Images to Direct Attention: Eye contact draws viewers into your photo and creates a bond. It demonstrates that your brand is open and willing to look viewers “in the eye.” Cornell University research showed that eye contact, even with an inanimate object such as the Trix cereal rabbit, produces a powerful, subconscious sense of connection.
  5. Post Adorable Images of Puppies: Puppies just make people feel good – who can resist those adorable puppy eyes? Android’s “Friends Furever” commercial showing unlikely animal pairings has been watched and shared more than 22 million times. Heck, even the gecko commercials have been watched over 25 million times, more than any other car insurance company!
  6. Target the Leads You Already Have on Facebook: Use lead ads to encourage people to contact your business for more information. Make it easy and user-friendly, especially for your mobile-savvy prospects. Lead ads allow viewers to request specific information, and they help you capture customer details for later targeting. Facebook lead ads can be used to collect newsletter sign-ups, follow-up calls, price estimates, and other business information.
  7. Clone Your Main Revenue-Generating Audience: If you really know your customer base, and simply want to expand it, find more people exactly like them by creating a lookalike audience. Here Facebook works to match the people in your existing audience to profiles of potential prospects from its database of over 1.1 billion people.
  8. Humanize Your Brand with Fun Employee Photos: If you want to make an instant connection, employee photos can add a nice “face” to your business. Don’t just use headshots of smiling people standing in front of your building or logo, though. Use fun photos of your team in action, helping customers, or just running a good business others want to know, but make sure you have signed permission to do so.
  9. Only Pay to Promote Your Best Content: You can use your Facebook stream to share different information about your business to an existing audience at no cost, but you should only pay to promote your best content to a bigger audience. Use the metrics at your disposal to identify your top-performing content, and then take advantage of Facebook’s highly specific audience-targeting to boost your top posts with a paid promotion.
  10. Use Emojis in Your Facebook Marketing: Have a little fun, and add some of today’s quirky emojis to your Facebook marketing. Most millennials believe emojis communicate thoughts and feelings better than words do. You will even see better engagement and a higher click-through rate on the same ads with and without them.

Energize your Facebook marketing results with Search Engine Pros, a full-service, multi-touch online marketing services agency. Call 800-605-4988 or schedule a consultation and learn how the experts at SEP can incorporate these ideas into your marketing strategy!

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