Reputation Marketing | Web Marketing

How I Learned to Sleep Better

1 October 2020 by
Better Sleep With Better Sleep Tips

When I first started having sleep problems, I did some research and found a few surprising statistics:

  • Amount of Sleep Needed: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the following amounts of sleep per night:
    • 0–3 months: 14–17 hours
    • 4–12 months: 12–16 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
    • 1–2 years: 11–14 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
    • 3–5 years: 10–13 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
    • 6–12 years: 9–12 hours per 24 hours
    • 13–18 years: 8–10 hours per 24 hours
    • 18–60 years: 7 or more hours per night
    • 61–64 years: 7–9 hours
    • 65 years and older: 7–8 hours
  • Sleep Problems: The American Sleep Association (ASA) reports that 50-70 million adults in the United States have some type of sleep disorder.
  • Lack of Sleep Interrupts Our Lifestyles: 37.9% of the ASA survey respondents said they unintentionally fell asleep during the day at least once in the preceding month.
  • Lack of Sleep is Unsafe: 4.7% reported nodding off or falling asleep while driving at least once in the preceding month. Drowsy driving was found to be responsible for 1,550 fatalities and 40,000 nonfatal injuries annually in the United States.
  • Lack of Sleep Can Be Deadly: 100,000 deaths occur each year in American hospitals due to medical errors; sleep deprivation has been shown to make a significant contribution to these figures.

The sleep-challenged may not be alone, but that doesn’t make us feel any better. As children, we could fall asleep so easily – sometimes right at the dinner table! And, now, it is just such a nightly drama. Whether it’s due to stress, medical conditions, or poor sleep habits, more and more adults are sick and tired of being tired!

Follow Your Dreams : )

What are the benefits of a good night’s sleep?

Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important things you can do for your health. It gives your body time to repair itself. Good sleep helps the body rebuild muscles, keeps your senses sharp, and maintains healthy skin. Sleep also allows your body to rest and recover for the next day. Its many benefits include: 

  • Improved memory and learning: When you are asleep, the brain does its mental housekeeping. When you get enough sleep, you can more easily recall vital facts and experiences.
  • Improved problem-solving: A problem might be gnawing at us, but the ability to just “sleep on it” can make all the difference. When we get enough sleep, we are able to look at things from a new angle and solve complex problems.
  • Improved focus and attention: The part of the brain that deals with problem-solving, decision-making, and reasoning is the same part that allows for the ability to pay attention and focus. That’s why attention wanes in the afternoon after working all morning – your brain is getting tired!
  • Improved mood: Have you ever experienced crankiness when jolted awake by your alarm clock after a lousy night’s sleep? Sleep-deprivation leads to more stress, anger, sadness, and mental exhaustion.

You will find that a good night’s sleep can make all the difference in your daily life. You will be able to handle the stresses of work with ease, be more alert, and will feel better physically as well.

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How I Improved the Quality of My Sleep

I researched a number of ways to improve my sleep, and here are some of the strategies I found:

  • Melatonin: Many people worry that it will make them feel sleepy the next day. However, a Consumer Reports survey found that only 5-10% of people said they feel sleepy the day after taking melatonin. When I first tried Melatonin, I saw only moderate improvements in my sleep quality. But it wasn’t until I started taking Melatonin with 5HTP and Rhodiola, that I began to see a big difference. This unique mixture of ingredients in one pill, significantly improved my sleep quality. The company is called Irwin Naturals, and they have an weirdly effective mixture of Melatonin, 5HTP and Rhodiola that seems to paralyze me when sleeping. This is a good thing, because it lets my body goto work and do some deep healing. There is something about this formula that really made a huge difference in my quality of sleep. It knocks me out cold. Read the reviews on amazon, and you will see what I mean.
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  • Establish Healthy Sleep Patterns: The American Sleep Apnea Association recommends setting a specific pattern for going to bed. Some of our current nighttime habits actually work against sleep.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: CBT is a multi-component approach that aims to combat the maddening symptoms of insomnia. This therapy works to restructure or break down the cycle of frustrating thoughts by identifying and altering unconscious beliefs that contribute to insomnia. The Sleep Foundation reports that 70-80% of patients with primary insomnia improve after applying the CBT technique.
  • Mattress and Bedding: The 2012 Bedroom Poll reported that 93% of people said a comfortable mattress is important to being able to get quality sleep; 78% said they are more excited to go to bed if they have fresh-smelling sheets. I bought an Original Lull Mattress, sheets, and duvet. The Lull Mattress, which is made of non-toxic materials, stays cool, bounces back, and provides solid back support.
  • Wearable Devices and Sleep Apps: According to Gartner, the market for wearable devices, which includes activity and sleep trackers, is expected to reach over $62B this year. A National Library of Medicine paper which examined the use of mobile phones for sleep tracking found that 28.2% of U.S. adults used a smartphone app to help keep track of their sleep. My personal preference is Sleep Cycle. This app analyzes and tracks your sleep, and wakes you up at the perfect time feeling rested.

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SO TRUE!

Case Studies About How to Improve Sleep Quality

Some interesting case studies about various methods to improve sleep include:

  • Exercise to Improve Sleep Quality: The findings suggest that exercise can improve sleep quality without notable adverse effects.
  • Wearable Solution from Philips: The SmartSleep tracker from Philips is a closed-loop, EEG-based system with two small sensors that detect periods of slow wave sleep and intervene with clinically proven customized audio tones to boost it in real time. 70% of users report feeling less tired during the day.
  • Sleep Positions: OnHealth found that sleeping on your side may be good for those who snore. It is also possible that sleeping on your side could help your brain clear out waste more quickly. Patients with GERD usually find it is best to sleep on their left side.

Mayo Clinic also has five suggestions to get better sleep. You have nothing to lose — only a bad night’s sleep, bags under your eyes, and one yawn after another during an important meeting. I don’t miss them, and neither will you!

Share your comments below. I’d love to hear what’s worked for you? Here’s to a deep and restful sleep tonight!

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PPC Marketing | Web Marketing

Google Ads: Automatic Bidding vs. Manual Bidding

25 September 2020 by
Google Automatic Bidding Manual Bidding

For many companies, Google Ads is an easy and effective way to promote their products and brand.

Google Ads levels the playing field for smaller companies by enabling them to advertise without laying out large sums of capital.

Recently, Google has gone even further by offering the option of allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

This is a risky gambit for many companies. If you have limited resources and a shrinking advertising budget, you may be hesitant to turn over control of your PPC campaign to an automated process.

In this blog, I’ll review several important considerations related to manual bidding versus automated bidding.

Why Companies Use Pay-Per-Click

More and more people are using the Internet to shop, communicate, and socialize. This shift in where the public spends the majority of its time has made Google—the world’s premiere search engine—an advertising giant.

What You Should Know About Manual Bidding

Manual bidding, as the phrase suggests, is the direct and on-hands management of keyword bids on Google Ads. You make all decisions about your PPC account without AI assistance.

Experience, unique market insight and expertise, and analysis of past keyword performance data can all be used to guide such decision-making. However, it should be noted that this process requires a great deal of time and effort. To get a good return on manual bidding, the people involved in it must be highly competent and have the right level of experience.

This form of bidding may be best if you have a limited budget and a small amount of consumer data. The benefits of manual bidding include:

  • Control: You can be as aggressive as you want to win bids on specific key words and phrases
  • Responsiveness: You can change your keyword bids quickly in response to new competitors and your lowest performers
  • No delays: Manual bidding changes take effect immediately

You should also be aware of the downsides of manual bidding. As your PPC account grows bigger, it will become harder to manage. You may be compelled to hire more people to monitor and manage it, which can eat away at your advertising budget. Manual bidding is also vulnerable to human errors, some of which can be quite costly.

What You Should Know About Automatic Bidding

Automatic bidding is also known as smart bidding. This form of bidding is the best option if you have large PPC accounts, a great deal of historical data, and no experts in manual bidding and no desire to hire any.

If you are a growing company or a well-established one with significant capital reserves, you may be better off letting Google AI take charge of your account.

Here are some of the specific benefits of going down this route:

  • Versatile segmentation: This involves the creation of customized subsections within your broader target audience based on their shared interests and behaviors
  • Efficiency: The AI technology will allow you to manage thousands of keywords and hundreds of ad groups at once
  • Accurate prediction models: The advanced algorithms can give you a sound foundation for decision-making by making accurate predictions about your campaigns
  • Cost-effectiveness: Your team will spend less time on monitoring your Google Ads accounts, which will free them up for more pressing business matters

While automated bidding is a highly effective way to manage your PPC campaign, in almost all cases, you should not start off with it. The smarter move is to go with manual bidding initially, test the waters, and wait until your account has a steady flow of traffic and you have reached a statistically significant number of conversions from which you can make educated decisions.

You should also be aware that any changes you make to Google Ads will take some time to implement if you are using AI. You will need to manually sync if you want the changes to take effect immediately.

If you intend to pursue automated bidding, then there are a few common strategies—which appear as settings on the account—that are worth learning about. They include:

1. Maximize conversions

This sets keyword bids to get the most conversions possible with a given budget. If you set your account to maximize conversions, the AI system will check your daily budget and determine how best to use it. You should be warned that your entire budget can be consumed if you are not careful, which is why you should carve out a stand-alone budget for this type of campaign.

2. Maximize clicks

If you configure your Google Ads campaign with this option, the top priority will be getting ad clicks. The AI system will automatically determine bids based on the likelihood of earning a click or conversion. The system will do so based on the following criteria: device, operating system, demographics, location, and time of day.

It is still possible to set bid limits with this option. However, you should be aware that excessively tight limits will restrict the number of clicks you may get.

There are real differences between manual and automatic bidding on Google Ads. If you have just established a start-up, then you should begin with manual bidding. Over time, you may decide to opt for automatic bidding. But this decision should only be made in light of your PPC budget, your business goals, and the experience and expertise of your workforce.

Youtube Marketing

Build Your Brand With YouTube: New Ways To Drive Reach And Engage Your Audience At Scale

16 September 2020 by

The digital video boom is here. As people spend more time at home and the need for relevant, fresh content is at an all-time high, the shift from linear to digital video is accelerating.

On YouTube in particular, over 2 billion people globally are gravitating toward timely content, from live entertainment like Post Malone’s livestreamed living room concerts to transformative current events like rallying cries for racial justice from creators. They are also favoring the TV screen—with watch time growing across regions. In the US for example, watch time on YouTube and YouTube TV on TV screens jumped 80 percent year over year. 

Leading brands are making the most of YouTube’s massive reach and deeply relevant content to build brand awareness, and ultimately, drive results at scale. Today, we’re sharing new ways to help advertisers achieve these goals, including expanded reach planning solutions and advanced contextual targeting—a new and better way to show up in the right contexts for your customers.

Expanded tools to drive efficient reach and fuel your awareness strategy on YouTube

More viewership and the right mix of tools to reach a growing audience means that YouTube can offer incremental reach for the same budget. In the US, our relationship with Nielsen helps advertisers find the right mix. On average, advertisers saw that shifting just 20% of spend from TV to YouTube generated a 25% increase to the total campaign reach within their target audience, lowering the cost per reach point by almost 20%, across 21 Share Shift studies we’ve commissioned from Nielsen.1 To help global marketers, we are expanding our evaluation of Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings to the UK and Italy.

When marketers include YouTube to drive efficient reach, they are seeing it pay off in real business results. Katie Haniffy, Head of Media, PepsiCo Beverages, turned to YouTube to drive scale and extend reach of Pepsi’s “Gift it Forward” Holiday campaign. The creative, starring Cardi B, celebrated the gifting mindset during the holiday season.  “We knew YouTube had to play a critical role in ‘Gift it Forward’ as it continues to deliver strong performance across the beverage portfolio. The ‘Gift it Forward’ campaign did not disappoint—YouTube drove new brand buyers during the holiday season to the unique audience we wanted to reach.”

To help you easily plan campaign strategies that take advantage of this incremental reach beyond TV, soon we are also expanding TV data in Reach Planner to more countries, including France, Spain and Vietnam.

Additionally, if you’re looking to plan YouTube with other online video partners, we’re enabling reach planning capabilities across your entire campaign in Display & Video 360 including YouTube, auction and programmatic deals. 

Use Video reach campaigns for a simpler way to buy efficient reach across ad formats. 

Since launch, we’ve seen when advertisers combine skippable in-stream ads and bumpers into one campaign optimized for unique reach, they see higher lifts in Brand Awareness than advertisers who bought either format on its own.4  Marion Carpentier, Omni Business Leader at French men’s wear brand, Jules, says “By combining multiple formats into one campaign on YouTube, we were not only able to reach incremental audiences at a more optimal frequency compared to other video partners, but were able to drive a relative brand lift of 4.9 percent.” 

A new way to show up in the right contexts for your brand

YouTube’s ability to drive mass reach means we can also deliver scale in specific contexts that matter for consumers and your brand. To make it easier to discover the content that’s best for you, today we are announcing YouTube dynamic lineups—powered by advanced contextual targeting.

Advanced contextual targeting is the next generation of content targeting on YouTube. It uses Google’s machine learning to better understand each channel on YouTube, including analysis of video imagery, sound, speech and text. 

This allows us to create lineups5 that are scalable across content based on specific topics, cultural moments or popularity. For example, in addition to home or lifestyle lineups in most markets, you can find more nuanced choices like “home and garden” and “home improvement.” This means better access to customers with unique interests and needs—all with the brand suitability controls that are most important for your business.  

It also means you’re able to drive greater impact for your brand. A recent study conducted by Google and Ipsos in the US found that video advertising based on consumer interest and intent has significantly more impact than demo—with a 32 percent higher lift in ad recall and 100 percent higher lift in purchase intent. 

Complement your audience strategy with dynamic lineups to maximize reach.

Early adopters like OMD are seeing strong results using YouTube dynamic lineups to complement their existing audience strategies. Chrissie Hanson, Global Chief Strategy Officer at OMD says, “Using lineups powered by advanced contextual targeting delivers a more relevant and empathetic understanding of audiences. This in turn serves to drive more relevant reach and efficiencies for our customers, as part of a broader program that leverages audiences and other tactics across YouTube.” 

YouTube dynamic lineups are launching on a rolling basis starting today and will be fully available by the end of September in ten markets. They are available across both Google Ads and Display & Video 360, with more countries coming soon.

From sales to ROI—deliver the results that matter

Most importantly, efficient reach and relevant ad experiences must drive not only awareness, but also business results. Across global Marketing Mix Modeling studies we’ve commissioned from Nielsen, we’ve seen YouTube deliver the bottom line results you care about.

Check out our new awareness collection—from success stories to trends

We’re sharing a new collection of resources on our Advertising Solutions Center to help you build awareness for this new world. You’ll hear first-hand perspectives from companies like PepsiCo, Domino’s and Jules, delve into trends driving YouTube viewership and learn about our newest product innovations built to better meet your awareness objectives. We’ll continue to roll out more content on the Advertising Solutions Center in the coming weeks.

We hope these latest updates will help you build your brand for today, and create resiliency for tomorrow.

Reach out to your Google sales rep to learn more about the solutions above, including best practices on campaign set-up, how to apply for the Video reach campaigns beta and how to access YouTube dynamic lineups in your market.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Youtube Marketing

Better Conversion Measurement For Video Ads On YouTube And Our Network

11 September 2020 by

From sparking an idea to helping people make that final decision, online video plays an important role in helping consumers make purchases. In fact, 70 percent of people say they bought a brand as a result of seeing it on YouTube. For advertisers, measuring video campaigns and conversions accurately has never been more important—or more complex—given all the different paths the consumer journey can take. 

That’s why we’ve been researching engaged-view conversions (EVC), a more robust non-click conversion metric. EVCs measure the conversions that take place after someone views 10 seconds or more of your skippable ad, but doesn’t click, and then converts within a set amount of days. EVCs are a more robust way to measure conversions than view-through conversions (VTCs), an industry standard that measures the conversions that take place after a person views an impression of your ad, but doesn’t click.

We’ve heard from advertisers that it can be challenging to assess the impact of video ad campaigns on conversions when you can’t compare across ad formats. That is why today we’re announcing that by the end of the year we will make engaged-view conversions a standard way of measuring conversions for TrueView skippable in-stream ads, Local campaigns and App campaigns. Our vision for the coming year is to give you more transparent reporting across both click and engaged-view conversions, aggregated and anonymously, and new configurability options for conversion measurement to make data-driven media decisions for your business.  

Engaged-view conversions are informed by incrementality studies

Our teams have run large-scale incrementality studies over the years that confirmed the causal impact of video ad campaigns were undervalued when considering clicks alone. Based on these studies, we found that most incremental conversions come from engaged users who are given the option to skip, but choose to watch your ad. In fact, over 60 percent1 of all skips on YouTube direct response in-stream video ads happen before 10 seconds. Therefore, the decision to watch 10 seconds of a skippable ad is a user choice that signals an ‘engaged-view’. When these engaged-views result in conversions within a set amount of days, engaged-view conversions are included in the conversion report.

The incrementality studies we ran also determined the default attribution window for engaged-view conversions. The default attribution window is tailored based on consumer behavior for each campaign goal and is set to three days for TrueView for action, two days for App campaigns for Install and one day for App campaigns for engagement. But you know your business best, and will be able to set the right attribution window based on your customers’ behavior and campaign goals in the coming year.

We look forward to seeing how engaged-view conversions can help you understand the value of your ads and grow your business as user behavior evolves and new viewing habits, devices and experiences become available.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Options For Retailers To Control How Their Crawled Product Information Appears On Google

21 August 2020 by

Earlier this year Google launched a new way for shoppers to find clothes, shoes and other retail products on Search in the U.S. and recently announced that free retail listings are coming to product knowledge panels on Google Search. These new types of experiences on Google Search, along with the global availability of rich results for products, enable retailers to make information about their products visible to millions of Google users, for free.

The best way for retailers and brands to participate in this experience is by annotating the product information on their websites using schema.org markup or by submitting this information directly to Google Merchant Center. Retailers can refer to our documentation to learn more about showing products for free on surfaces across Google or adding schema.org markup to a website.

While the processes above are the best way to ensure that product information will appear in this Search experience, Google may also include content that has not been marked up using schema.org or submitted through Merchant Center when the content has been crawled and is related to retail. Google does this to ensure that users see a wide variety of products from a broad group of retailers when they search for information on Google.

While we believe that this approach positively benefits the retail ecosystem, we recognize that some retailers may prefer to control how their product information appears in this experience. This can be done by using existing mechanisms for Google Search, as covered below.

Controlling your preview preferences

There are a number of ways that retailers can control what data is displayed on Google. These are consistent with changes announced last year that allow website owners and retailers specifically to provide preferences on which information from their website can be shown as a preview on Google. This is done through a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute.

Here are some ways you can implement these controls to limit your products and product data from being displayed on Google:

nosnippet robots meta tag

Using this meta tag you can specify that no snippet should be shown for this page in search results. It completely removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the page from any free listing experience.

max-snippet:[number] robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum snippet length, in characters, of a snippet for your page to be displayed on Google results. If the structured data (e.g. product name, description, price, availability) is greater than the maximum snippet length, the page will be removed from any free listing experience.

max-image-preview:[setting] robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either none, standard, or large.

data-nosnippet HTML attribute

This attribute allows you to specify a section on your webpage that should not be included in a snippet preview on Google. When applied to relevant attributes for offers (price, availability, ratings, image) removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the listing from any free listing experiences.

Additional notes on these preferences:

  • The above preferences do not apply to information supplied via schema.org markup on the page itself. The schema.org markup needs to be removed first, before these opt-out mechanisms can become active.
  • The opt-out preferences do not apply to product data submitted through Google Merchant Center, which offers specific mechanisms to opt-out products from appearing on surfaces across Google.

Use of mechanisms like nosnippet and data-nosnippet only affect the display of data and eligibility for certain experiences. Display restrictions don’t affect the ranking of these pages in Search. The exclusion of some parts of product data from display may prevent the product from being shown in rich results and other product results on Google.

We hope these options make it easier for you to maximize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. These options are available to retailers worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags.

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Blog Marketing | Facebook Marketing | Instagram Marketing | Linkedin Marketing | Next Door Marketing | Pinterest Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing | Youtube Marketing

How Do I Automate My Social Media Marketing?

19 August 2020 by
Automate My Social Media Marketing

Nearly 3.5 billion people worldwide use social media. That is almost half of the people on the planet.

No business can afford to do without a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular social media sites.

If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at a large and established company, you should leverage the power of social media to promote your brand and your product.

What is Social Media Marketing Automation?

Engaging people on social media is time-consuming. According to a recent survey, marketing teams spend 16 hours a week on tasks involving social media.

You can save your team and company time and money by installing special tools that will do the work of monitoring and managing social media.

Social media marketing automation consists of a set of tools that are designed to decrease your workload and enhance your social media marketing campaign.

The three most popular automation devices are:

  • Scheduling tools
  • Content curation tools
  • Social listening tools

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Members of your executive team have more important things to do than update your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

A scheduling tool relieves them of this burden by posting valuable content on your social media accounts automatically.

The posts will be sent out at optimal times so that you get maximum engagement with your audience.

Here are some of the more popular scheduling devices available on the market:

1. Buffer

Buffer allows you to schedule posts and tailor the content to each social media account. Buffer also has a calendar feature that allows you to review what you have already posted. This gives you the ability to organize, manage, and rearrange your posts as you like.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is known for its elegant and accessible design, which makes it easy to automate your posts. It offers a bulk scheduling option. It also gives you the ability to schedule content you see while surfing the web.

3. Sendible

There are 3 main features that stand out in this tool. First, there is a content recommendation device. If you want to send a post with a news article link, you can conduct a search by topic and it will give you a long list of trending articles to share.

Second, Sendible has a built-in CRM. The latter presents background information on anyone you interact with. This will enable you to send customized content to whomever you are in conversation with.

Third and finally, Sendible can monitor Twitter for certain keywords and phrases and send an automatic reply.

Content Curation Tools

Content curation tools allow you to easily find content that you can share with your social media followers through your posts.

According to one recent study, companies that share curated content receive 33% more clicks than those without it.

Here are a few of the top tools available on the market:

1. Feedly

This tool analyses the topics that interest you and your target audience and shows you related content. The tool comes with an AI research assistant named Leo who helps declutter the information so that you are able to share the best pieces with your followers.

2. Socialinsider

Socialinsider.io is one of the most comprehensive social media analytics and reporting tools. It is perfect for digital agencies and companies that employ digital technology extensively. You can track your company’s level of engagement on different social media pages and compare them. You can also compare these numbers with your competitors and industry benchmarks.

The site makes it easy to build a large report and to download it as a PDF and PPT file.

3. Curata

This tool will automatically search thousands of web sources to find content related to your keywords. You will then be able to approve or reject the suggestions that are to be shared on your social media sites.

Curata also allows you to edit the text and alter the images in the content that you share. You can also add notes and comments to each piece.

Social Listening Tools

These devices help you monitor all online chatter about your company and brand. They help you identify influencers who may be praising and promoting your products.

They can also inform you of any negative reviews of your products or company online.

Social listening tools provide great insight into how consumers are interacting with your company and its products in real-time.

Social listening sites will help you discern trends that drive your highest performing posts. They also help companies build better relationships with followers and identify profitable gaps in the market.

You need not track down every single comment and critique that is made about your company. You can have this done for you with social listening software.

Here are some of the sites that offer social listening solutions:

1. Mention

This tool sifts through billions of sources each day and informs you when and on what site your company’s name has appeared in conversation. You can also set up alerts that inform you when the names of your competitors are mentioned, which can help you analyze social discussions they are involved in.

Mention can be especially helpful to large companies with well-known brands.

2. Sprout Social

This social media management tool was designed with businesses in mind. The team at Social Sprout has identified 5 key pieces of information that are gained from social listening: brand health, industry insight, competitive analysis, campaign analysis, event monitoring. The software allows you to tailor your social listening experience to fit one or more of these categories.

Sprout Social also has tools that allow you to go beyond the mere mention of your company to figure out the sentiment behind it. Your company can be talked about in a positive or negative context. Sprout Social helps you determine which.

In summary, there are plenty of ways to automate your social media marketing operations. Using one or more of the sites discussed above can help your company punch above its weight.

Using social media marketing automation tools can give you deep insights into your target market and help you build better relationships with customers.

Google Marketing

Grow Your Games Business With New Ads Solutions

5 August 2020 by

Whether it’s to join the latest multiplayer craze or dive back into an old favorite, user interest in gaming worldwide continues to rise as people spend more time at home. In fact, our data shows that global searches for “best online games” between February and April were up over 100 percent compared to the same time last year.

Mobile game developers have a huge opportunity to connect with these eager players around the globe. This week at Think Games in China, we’re announcing new ways for developers to engage with the right players and maximize revenue so your team can spend more time creating awesome gaming experiences.  

Reach more of the right players for your game

In today’s crowded gaming landscape, it’s not easy to build a community and retain players over time. App campaigns for engagement were built to help you get players who’ve previously installed your game to return, with custom messages across Search, YouTube and over 1 million apps in our network. 

Available globally in September, App campaigns for engagement will soon also run in Google Play and support audiences from Google Analytics for Firebase. We’re also updating our audience management features to make it easier for you to connect with the right player segments. 

FunPlus, the developers behind the mobile strategy game King of Avalon, wanted to find ways to also get current players to come back during a mega update event. It used App campaigns for engagement to create custom messages for previous player groups who had stopped playing. This resulted in 34 percent more high-value players returning to play, as compared to other strategies it used.

To get started with App campaigns for engagement, make sure you set up deep linking and app conversion tracking, and use a supported measurement solution like Google Analytics for Firebase or one of our App Attribution Partners.  

Here are a few more features designed to help you reach players across the lifecycle of your game:  

  • App campaigns for pre-registration: Get a head start in building an excited community for your game before it launches. Learn more.
  • Maximize conversions bidding for App campaigns for installs: Drive as many installs as possible within a set budget to reach your campaign goals. Learn more.
  • Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) open beta for App campaigns for installs: Adjust your bids dynamically based on the value each user is likely to bring for your game. Available later this year to all advertisers bidding on Google Analytics for Firebase events. Learn more. 
  • Creative simplification: Simplify your creative development process by creating image ads only in 1.91:1, 1:1, and 4:5 aspect ratios. You can also crop existing image assets to these aspect ratios with our new cropping tool. Learn more.

Maximize your ad revenue

To help you get the most value from your ads, Open Bidding will be available as a beta to all AdMob developers this fall. Today, many developers rely solely on waterfall mediation, a tried-and-true way to monetize with multiple advertising sources that can be hard to set up and manage at scale. Waterfall mediation calls ad networks one at a time until one of them returns an ad. Though effective, you could be losing out on additional revenue since networks are prioritized based on historical CPMs, rather than real-time pricing.

As Google’s in-app bidding solution, Open Bidding puts participating networks in a fair real-time auction to compete for your impressions, so the winner is always the highest paying network. This means you’ll get the highest revenue available for every impression. With Open Bidding, you can find the most popular demand sources to compete for your impressions in real time. Open Bidding makes earning more even easier by eliminating the need to manually set CPMs and reducing the number of SDKs your teams need to integrate and manage. 

CookApps used Open Bidding in order to grow revenue for its match-three puzzle game Candy Blast. By switching to Open Bidding, CookApps optimized revenue across ad networks and saw a 26 percent increase in both total ad revenue and CPMs, compared to their previous waterfall mediation setup. Open Bidding also enabled teams to save time from managing multiple networks, allowing it to focus on other priorities to expand its business. 

Along with Open Bidding, we’re announcing several other solutions to simplify your setup so you can earn even more from your apps:

  • Impression-level LTV pingback: Get real-time estimates of impression values to help measure lifetime value of players across all revenue sources (iOS, Android, Unity).
  • Rewarded interstitials: Increase engagement with rewarded ads by proactively showing players in-game offers in exchange for watching a video during gameplay breaks.
  • App open beta: See up to twice as much user engagement with the improved user experience of app open ads, which now offer standardized publisher branding and simplified user tap targets.Learn more.
  • AdMob plug-in for Unity software: Create and edit ads easily in the Unity interface, letting you quickly implement ads into your Unity game with just a single line of code. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Updates On Our Work To Improve User Privacy In Digital Advertising

31 July 2020 by

Privacy is core to our work at Google, and to our vision for a thriving internet where people around the world can continue to access ad-supported content, while also feeling confident that their data is protected. But in order to get there, we must increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected—not worked around or ignored. 

Today we’re sharing updates on our work in these areas, including new tools that provide people more information about the ads they see. We’re also introducing new resources for marketers and publishers that offer guidance on how to navigate today’s privacy environment, along with real-world examples from brands and media companies who are delivering effective, privacy-forward ad experiences that use data responsibly.

Greater transparency, more control

For many years Google has offered a feature called Why this ad, where from an icon in a digital ad, users can get more information on some of the factors that were used to select the ad for them, or choose to stop seeing that ad. There are over 15 million user interactions per day with Why this ad as people seek to learn more about and control the ads they see, and we recently extended this feature to ads on connected TVs. 

Over the next few months, we’ll be making improvements to the experience with a new feature called About this ad, which will also show users the verified name of the advertiser behind each ad. About this ad will initially be available for display ads purchased through Google Ads and Display & Video 360, and we’ll bring it to other ad surfaces throughout 2021.

Our commitment to increase transparency and offer users more control goes beyond the ads Google shows. Due to the complexity of the digital ads ecosystem and the large number of entities involved, it’s typically not clear to users which companies are even involved in showing them an ad. To provide people with detailed information about all the ads they see on the web, we’re releasing a new tool called Ads Transparency Spotlight, now available to try out as an alpha extension from the Chrome Web Store. We’ll continue to improve this extension based on feedback from users, and over time we expect to offer additional disclosures about ads, as well as introduce controls. Our hope is that other technology providers will build similar transparency and control capabilities into the experiences they offer as well.

Evolving the ad-supported internet

Chrome continues to explore more privacy-forward ways for the web browser to support digital ads with the Privacy Sandbox open standards initiative. As part of the Privacy Sandbox, several proposals have been published for new APIs that would solve for use cases like ad selection, conversion measurement, and fraud protection in a way that doesn’t reveal identifying information about individual users. One of the proposed APIs, for trust tokens that could combat ad fraud by distinguishing between bots and real users, is now available for testing by developers, and more will move to live testing soon.

Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers and advertisers, Chrome plans to phase out support for third-party cookies. These proposals are being actively discussed in forums like the W3C. Our ads team is actively contributing to this dialog—as we encourage any interested party to do—and we expect to incorporate the new solutions into our products in the years ahead.

We’re also exploring a range of other approaches to improve user privacy while ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and advertisers can reach the right people for their products. For example, we support the use of advertiser and publisher first-party data (based on direct interactions with customers they have relationships with) to deliver more relevant and helpful experiences—as long as users have transparency and control over the use of that data. What is not acceptable is the use of opaque or hidden techniques that transfer data about individual users and allow them to be tracked in a covert manner, such as fingerprinting. We believe that any attempts to track people or obtain information that could identify them, without their knowledge and permission, should be blocked. We’ll continue to take a strong position against these practices.

Much of the recent conversation about improving the privacy of digital ads has been focused on the web, but there are a range of environments in which people engage with digital ads. Our technical approach and the implementation details may vary based on the unique characteristics of each, but our vision to uplevel user privacy while preserving access to free content is consistent across web, mobile app, connected TV, digital audio—and whatever the next area to emerge may be.

Guidance for advertisers and publishers

The future state of digital advertising promises new technologies, new standards, and better, more sustainable approaches, but it will take some time to get there. We recognize the unease that many in the industry feel during this period of transition. While there is certainly more change on the horizon, it’s critical that marketers and publishers do not wait to take action. 

To help you prepare, we’ve assembled a number of recommendations for marketers and publishers to consider today. From best practices for building direct relationships with your customers and managing data, to tips for evaluating your partner and vendor relationships, to actionable examples for using machine learning and the cloud, these playbooks offer practical guidance and numerous real-world examples of companies that are successfully navigating today’s changing privacy landscape. 

We’ll continue our work to move the digital ads industry towards a more privacy-forward future. In the meantime, make sure your organization is having an active discussion about privacy and that you are taking steps now to plan for what lies ahead.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Meet Your Marketing Objectives With Helpful Tools And Automation

7 July 2020 by

Consumer behaviors, habits and schedules are shifting faster than ever. Google data shows that searches have surged in the past month for sprinkler controls in the United States, mechanical puzzles in Germany, and powered hand fans in Japan. Keeping pace with these trends can be difficult, especially if the pandemic has impacted your business. 

Marketers have more work to do than ever before, and less time to do it. That’s why we’re introducing improved tools and automated solutions to help you get things done, respond to changes, and grow your business.

Finding new opportunities in a dynamic market

It’s never easy to keep up with shifts in consumer demand, and it’s especially challenging in a dynamic market. The Recommendations page is your best source for real-time, personalized guidance to adjust to these changes. With optimization score, you can prioritize the recommendations that help you discover new opportunities for your campaigns.

For example, “Keywords & Targeting” recommendations make it easy for you to find new trends that are relevant to your business. More than 16 million keyword recommendations in Google Ads are based on market trends, with new recommendations added every day. In March, consumer goods company Artnaturals noticed that demand was increasing for organic hand sanitizer and soaps. Using keyword recommendations, they were able to quickly pivot their advertising to these new trends. As a result, the brand’s monthly site traffic increased by 700 percent.

You can currently find recommendations throughout your campaigns, on the Recommendations page, and in the Google Ads mobile app. Soon, you’ll be able to see them in Google Ads Editor as well. We’ve also added support for recommendations and campaign level optimization score to the Google Ads API, and account level optimization score will be coming soon. This will make it even easier for you to review, manage and act on your recommendations at scale.

Planning with confidence

There are many new growth opportunities emerging in search due to shifts in consumer behavior. Performance Planner removes the guesswork in this process by giving you a performance plan with predicted clicks, conversions and conversion values based on different spend levels and return-on-investment targets.   

In the meal delivery sector, Cook it used Performance Planner to optimize campaign budgets and make the most of rising search interest in meal kits in March. Paired with Smart Bidding, the brand saw a 200 percent increase in conversions in just two weeks.

Starting today, you can now use Performance Planner to plan Search campaigns using shared budgets. Performance Planner is currently available for Search and Shopping campaigns, and will soon be available to Display and App campaigns.

Performance Planner is a great way to make sure your budgets are set at the right level to capture new growth opportunities on search.

Optimizing campaigns in real time

These days, marketers have to deliver on performance while dealing with limited time and resources. Smart Bidding is key to helping you balance these constraints; it can help you automatically drive more performance out of every dollar you spend while freeing up time. Over the last few months, we’ve built new Smart Bidding features based on your feedback.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create, monitor and manage your portfolio bid strategies across accounts at the manager account level. By combining campaigns from different accounts into a single portfolio, it’ll be easier to drive more performance across those accounts. As part of this update to portfolio bidding, bid strategy reports will be available for your new cross-account bid strategies. These reports give you more visibility into how your bid strategy is working via status updates, advanced performance reports, and top signals.

It’s important to provide more transparency into your bids, especially right now—so in the coming months, we’ll make explanations available for Smart Bidding campaigns. This will make it easier for you to understand what caused clicks, impressions, costs and conversions to change.

Over the rest of the year, we plan to roll out even more reporting updates to give you further insight into your automated bidding—such as limited inventory status for Maximize conversions and Target CPA, improved top signals, and conversion value estimates.

Monitoring performance to take action

In an ever-changing market, it’s important to check your performance on a regular basis. The Google Ads mobile app makes it easy for you to monitor campaigns in real time, helping you take quick action from wherever you are. We’ve been listening to your feedback and continue to invest in new features to make the app a helpful and personalized companion for your marketing efforts.

As part of that investment, we’ve launched manager accounts in the mobile app. This means you can view and manage all your Google Ads accounts in one place, on the go. With manager accounts in the app, you’re now able to:

  • Discover business-wide trends and performance insights for all your accounts on the Overview page.
  • Improve performance at scale with optimization score, and prioritize recommendations across all your accounts.
  • Manage campaigns and compare performance across your accounts.
  • Use push notifications to monitor all your accounts, wherever you are.

AGY47, an agency based in the UK, saved over two hours per week using the mobile app to check in on performance, make improvements, and keep their accounts organized on the go. As Sarah Williams, AGY47’s head of paid marketing, put it: “We never miss a beat with the Google Ads mobile app.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

New Ways To Put Your Customers First And Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

24 June 2020 by

Life looks very different now for my family than it did earlier this year. From juggling work priorities to managing distance learning for my kids, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. As we adapt, we’re relying on our phones to get things done.

How can brands lend a hand? We believe there are three key ways to put consumers at the core of your strategy: help people quickly get what they want, deliver relevant information and make it easy for your customers to take action.

Today, we’re sharing new ways to put your customers first and achieve your marketing objectives.

Help people get what they want, faster

The stakes are high on mobile. If you don’t give people what they want quickly, they’ll take their business elsewhere. In fact, we recently found that for retail sites, improving your site load time by 0.1s can help you improve conversion rates by 8 percent.

Test My Site has been an important tool for helping diagnose site speed and providing custom tips on how to make it faster. Today, we updated the tool to provide specific recommendations on how you can improve your mobile site—beyond speed—and deliver more personalized and seamless experiences. Key updates include:

  • Aligning speed metrics with Web Vitals, an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that, we believe, are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. When marketers and developers share the same definition of success, it’s easier to agree on what’s driving results.
  • Customized tips on how to make your site experience relevant and easy to use. For example, learn how to build a one-step checkout and keep customers coming back with relevant push notifications. 

To get started, visit Test My Site to see how your site is doing and download your customized report—with sections for both marketers and developers—that you can share with your team.

Deliver more engaging and helpful ad experiences 

Many marketers already use feeds in Display, Shopping and Local campaigns to quickly upload and showcase products in your ads. With more product images directly in your ad, consumers are able to easily and seamlessly find what they’re shopping for. In the coming months, we’ll roll out feeds in App campaigns globally to all customers. According to beta testing, advertisers using feeds saw, on average, 6 percent more installs from Google.com and 17 percent more in-app actions (like log-ins and purchases) on sites and apps in our network.

Wish, an e-commerce company, used feeds to display diverse products from its marketplace. Wish also enabled deferred deep linking, which gave new app users a smoother onboarding experience—from app install straight to the item they saw in the ad.

Here’s how it works: if a new user taps on a Wish ad for running shoes, she will be directed to her app store to install the Wish app. After installing and opening the app for the first time, she would automatically land on the running shoes’ product page to learn more or make a purchase.

Since adopting feeds and deferred deep linking, Wish has seen a 105 percent increase in purchases from its app at a similar CPA. “These features have made our app more discoverable and appealing to customers,” says Krishanth Kathiresan, Wish’s Head of Growth Marketing. “It’s a scalable way for us to drive more lower-funnel user engagement and, most importantly, mobile orders.”

To get started, you can reach out to your account manager to join our beta or learn more.

Make it easier for your customers to take action

Loyal customers stick with brands that make it easy for them to get things done. For customers who already have your app installed, deep linking lets them get to the relevant page in the app without having to log in or re-enter information. 

Last year at Google Marketing Live, we announced app deep linking from Search, Display and Shopping ads. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out deep linking from YouTube, Hotel, Gmail and Discovery ads. On average, deep linked ad experiences drive 2X the conversion rates.

Let’s say, your customer is watching a cooking video on YouTube and sees a discount for “2-hour grocery delivery.” Once she taps on the ad, she’s taken directly to a page in the store’s app to place an order.  

Rakuten Ichiba, a Japanese e-commerce company, found that enabling deep linking helped its loyal customers take action on ads directly in the brand’s app, resulting in 4X mobile purchases and 3X conversions. 

App deep linking introduces an important and seamless path to conversion. To give you better insight into where consumers are landing and converting from your ads, you can start to use ad destination reporting in Google Ads—available globally starting today.

For example, let’s say you’re a retailer with both a website and app. With the ad destination report, you can see in the “App deep link” row that these ads drive a higher conversion rate at a lower cost per conversion.

To get started with reporting for your app, use Google Analytics for Firebase or work with one of our App Attribution Program partners. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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