by Denae Luna | Feb 28, 2023 | Digital Marketing
Creating keyword lists for user searches that are relevant to your business can be challenging and time-consuming. Building ad creatives at scale and correctly matching them to each of your different landing pages can also be a demanding task. Did you know that Google Dynamic Search Ads can crawl through your website and create ads for you? They both generate the headlines and decide the landing pages for you.
If you’re just setting up your Google Ads strategy, check out this article here for a starter idea of how it all works: https://populationscience.com/setting-up-your-google-ads-keyword-strategy/
How Do Dynamic Google Search Ads Work?
Instead of creating an ad for each page on your site and adding keywords for each of those ads, Dynamic Search Ads uses Google’s understanding of your site to customize and target your ads.
- You specify the pages of the website, daily budget, and an ad template
- The customer enters their search term into Google search
- If you have content relevant to the search, Google dynamically generates an ad headline and destination URL to the best matching page on your site.
You only need to create the description in the template beforehand — everything else is automatic and based on the customer’s search term.
Why is SEO so important for Dynamic Search Ads?
Using Google’s web crawling technology, Dynamic Search Ads indexes your website and uses that index list to ultimately determine if a customer’s search is relevant to your business. If the search term matches the index, Dynamic Search Ads will automatically create a headline and a destination URL customized to the customer search term and will enter a dynamic search ad based on your template into the Google Ads auction.
When Google crawls the website, the headings on your site are most of what is indexed, so having those headings containing important keywords is crucial. If your headings don’t contain vital keywords for your business, Dynamic Search Ads and even organic search mechanisms for Google are going to miss out on relevant searches.
At the end of the day, automating your Google Ads through Dynamic Search using Google’s AI will be efficient and fruitful when married to a great SEO strategy. These ads deliver value for relevant searches that aren’t covered by existing keywords, complementing your keyword strategy and ensuring that you aren’t missing any relevant searches.
by Denae Luna | Feb 10, 2023 | Digital Marketing
Building an audience on social media is a great way to grow your credibility (do you take anyone seriously that has little to know following on social media?) while opening up channels beyond email for your target audience to receive important updates. Many organizations do not invest enough time in building online communities because traditional content marketing and earned media is generally a slow grind to build a robust following.
For those of you frustrated with a slow community building process we have good news. There are affordable paid media options to help you supercharge your online community growth. In this post we will focus on two platforms with huge audiences that provide simple ad units to boost your following: Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook:
In the Meta platform you will want to select Page Like Ads. These ad units largely look the same as any other ad unit that shows up within your feed, but what makes it unique is the “thumbs up” image appears making it easy for someone to like your Facebook page.
Twitter:
On Twitter you will want to select “Followers” from the campaign objectives menu in the ads setup. Just like Facebook, these ads look like any other ad in the platform, but they have a “follow” button that makes it easy for users to follow your content.
What kind of content should you use for an effective paid like/follow ad? Remember you are playing the long game with these ads. Your objective is to build a community of long term advocates, customers, etc. The most effective ads are short and to the point. Let people know why they should care to follow you.
For example, with brands, instead of focusing on your products, focus on your mission and/or brand identity. In the example from Neutral above, they are a carbon neutral dairy company, but their mission is to provide customers with carbon neutral milk that tastes good and is also good for the environment. Our paid like/follow campaign focused on the latter and was very successful in building community, quickly.
When considering how to target here are some suggestions:
- CRM Upload: Uploading your email list can accomplish two things. First, you can negative target them. This means you tell the platform you do not want to target them with ads. This tactic will allow you to save money by not targeting people you can already reach while focusing solely on adding net new followers. Second, you can create a lookalike audience of people who are similar to those that already follow you via email. This is a great place to start.
- Interest Targeting: Meta is very good at understanding their users interests based upon their in-platform browsing behavior. What is your target audience interested in? Meta will likely have an interest-based audience for you to target.
- Handle Targeting: On Twitter you have the option to target people based upon who they follow. Do you know that your audience will likely follow a certain brand, influencer, organization, etc? Add them to your targeting list.
- Geotargeting: If your organization is localized it is vital to zero in on the area(s) you serve. This will help narrow down your target audience and achieve maximum efficiency.
by Denae Luna | Feb 10, 2023 | Digital Marketing
Finding the right platform to help measure your business success is crucial. When it comes to interacting with your website and apps, Google Analytics Reports can help you better understand your customers and how they meet your demand from start to finish.
Determine Your Business Goals as it Relates to Your Site
What do you want your customers to accomplish on your website? At this point, your site should be built to support that customer journey so that a call to action easily directs them down your ideal path to the finish line.
Some examples of these business goals are:
- Making a purchase
- Signing up for a consultation
- Calling your place of business
- Getting directions to your place of business
- Signing up for an event
Using Google Events to Measure KPIs
Google measures all interactions made with your site through events. Examples of events are:
- Clicks and pageviews on your website
- Installs and opens on your app
- User engagement and conversions on either platform
A full list of recommended events can be found here. You’ll need to talk to your website developer about including these events on your website. Once you have the events set up, it takes 24 hours for them to start measuring in Google Analytics.
Now, you will need to determine your baseline for visitors and events over a period of time. By going into Admin, then Events, you are able to set certain events as conversions, which means that they are measured in a different report in Google Analytics for you. These conversions should be important events such as add to carts, or form submits and should align directly with what business goal you are trying to measure.
Next, you can go to Engagements, then Conversions to see how your conversions have performed over a period of time. You can add other parameters to this report to see, for example, the Session Default Channel Group where the conversions originated from whether it was from a paid media source Paid Search or an organic visit to your website. Organic Search.
Do you need help determining what a good conversion rate is for your business? Or where to start with setting KPIs to benchmark against? Let’s chat! Sign up for a consultation today.
by Denae Luna | Nov 4, 2022 | Digital Marketing
Your website is the hub for your clients’ business interactions; tracking those transactions is imperative for understanding what works and what doesn’t.
Ninja Forms is a plug-in frequently lauded on WordPress sites for its easy-to-use platform, but like any form plug-in, it’s difficult to notify Google Analytics when a client completes a form through Google Tag Manager. When using Ninja Forms and Google Analytics 4 (GA4), we need to track when the forms are submitted and not just when the buttons are pressed.
This step-by-step guide will help you set up your Google Tag Manager to fire tags only when your forms have been submitted, and even better, you can set up separate tags for each form.
Step 1: Create a Tag to Listen for a Form Submission Event
Now this will require a bit of code, but I have that here for you.
- Start a new tag in the tag manager by going to Tags > New > Tags Configuration > Custom HTML.
- Copy/Paste this script into the tag.
<script>
jQuery(document).ready( function() {
jQuery(document).on('nfFormSubmitResponse', function(event, response, id) {
dataLayer.push ({
'event' : 'ninjaFormSubmission',
'NFformID' : response.id
});
});
});
</script>
- Next you need to go to Triggering and have the tag fire on All Pages so that it can listen for a ninja form no matter where the user is on the site.
- Last, you’ll need to name the tag something that you are going to use later. So here I’ve named mine: ninjaFormSubmission
It should look like this when you’re done:
Step 2: Create data layer variable for the Form ID
Because we need to differentiate between which form is being submitted, we will need to create a variable in Google Tag Manager that will read the the ID from the code we just created.
- Go to Variables > User Defined Variables > New > Variable Configuration > Data Layer Variable and name it NFformID to keep it consistent.
- Leave the version as is and hit Save.
It should look like this when you’re done:
Step 3: Create a Trigger that Fires on the event we created in Step 1
This step will let you create a trigger that fires when someone submits a form, but we are going to add a stipulation so that it only fires on the form you want it to. So each trigger is form specific. IMPORTANT: You will need to repeat this step for each form.
- Go to Triggers > New > Trigger Configuration > Custom Event and we are going to add into the Event Name the name of the event we created in Step 1: ninjaFormSubmission
- Then you are going to select Some Custom Events and we are going to use the name of variable we created in Step 2 from the dropdown: NFformID. Change the middle to “equals” then in the last column you’ll need to enter the number of the id of the form you want to track. This is found in WordPress on your Ninja Forms Plugin Dashboard.
It should look like this when you’re done (with the number being your own corresponding form id):
Step 4: Create a Tag that fires on the trigger we created in Step 3
So for every trigger you created, you’ll need to create a tag. This will be how you send GA4 your event data.
- Go to Tags > New > Tags Configuration > Google Analytics: GA4 Event. Use your configuration tag that you have set up for GA4 from the drop down.
- Name your event however you would like it to show up in GA4 for as an event for later. Depending on which form you are creating a tag for, I would name it respectively.
- Next go to Triggering Configuration and add the corresponding trigger for that form that you created in Step 3.
It should look close to this when you’re done:
Step 5: Getting your results out of Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
We’ve set all of the back end up so that now we wait. GA4 is set up so that events don’t appear on your events list until they are triggered. This could be a while depending on how much traffic you get on your site. And even when they are triggered, it takes about 24 hours for them to appear on your list.
- To view your events in GA4, you’ll need to choose Configure from the left navigation menu. These will be all of the events that have been triggered in the time frame at the top.
- Be sure that it has been at least 24 hours since you know that the event has been triggered to go looking for it. You can then mark any of these form submissions as a Conversion if that meets the needs of your business goals.
Tracking all of your business goals on your site can be cumbersome and difficult to manage. GA4 and Google Tag Manager work seamlessly to deliver you events to a place where you can analyze and act on how users are interacting with your site. Having all of that data information assists with measuring your KPIs and getting solid business lead data from your website all in one place.
