Tag Archive for: Digital marketing 2020

Google Core Update December: First Insights

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Google’s December 2020 Core update was a notable change according to several data providers. The Google core update is now completely finished rolling out as of December 16, 2020 and while the December core update is not figured out completely, experts at Onimod Global wanted to share significant first insights that can be made so far based on first data.

What is a core update?

Google changes their algorithm on an almost daily basis.  A couple of times a year, they release significant changes to their core search algorithms and systems that are much more noticeable. Potentially in the past, your website may have experience a decline in traffic following a Google core update. This most likely is related to the fact that Google’s algorithms have determined that there are other pages on the web that are more relevant and helpful than yours. It can be frustrating to SEO’s to not know how Google does this.

How search works

  1. Organize content on the internet:
    As Google crawls the internet and all of the web pages that can be searched in a search engine, they organize the pages in an index. They take note of key signals on each page such as which keywords are on the page, how up to date the page is, and more.
  2. What is the meaning of the user’s search query:
    In order to know what to recommend, Google needs to understand exactly what the user means with their search query. Algorithms determine whether a query is looking for fresh, new content or not. Some words in a query may be easy for Google to decipher. This has become quite advanced with the featured snippets showing you a small graph or snippet of information that is a fast answer to a search query.
  3. What pages are the most helpful:
    Once Google understands the intent behind a query, their goal is to return web pages that are the most helpful to answer this query.

Patterns from the latest update

  1.  Google may have made changes to how they assess alternative medical topics
    According to Search Engine Land, several company sites in the medical industries have performed better after this update. It’s possible that Google may have made strides in being able to understand which of these pages are trustworthy. In the past, SEL says that a lot of alt-med content was simply discounted by Google even though it was the type of content many people were searching for.
  2. UX becoming a factor
    If you declined with this update and have a large number of ads, especially ads that interfere with a user’s ability to read the main content, it may be worth experimenting with showing fewer ads. But know that if Google did change something with this core update in regards to ads, you may need to wait until there is more data about the core update and its improvements.
  3. More attention to headings and content structure
    This allows for faster skimming, and searchers like to skim headings to determine whether an article is one with which they want to engage. One of the questions Google lists in their post on core updates is, “Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?” This is telling of the fact that this update has placed an emphasis on this type of content.

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Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full digital potential. Interested in growing digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Native Ads: Are They Worth The Hype?

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Advertising in general has become so second nature to anyone browsing the web that they almost block out anything that could be considered an ad. This means that your ad either needs to stand out enough to somehow be memorable or annoyingly shoved in a potential customer’s face. Both options are not ideal, and may potentially irritate your audience more than intrigue them.

Enter Native ads: a fairly simple yet powerful tool, and a true master in the art of camouflage. The whole purpose of native advertising is to blend in with other website content so your audience doesn’t necessarily recognize it as an advertisement.

But of course the main question is: do they work?

Answer: Yes, but it really depends on your goals and your industry.

What does a native ad look like?

Here is an example from Yahoo News of an advertisement for a SmartWatch disguised to blend in as a news article.

native ad example

Native ads can show up in several different places, and can be optimized for desktop or mobile. News sites are the most common as it’s common to blend in with other news articles.

Why are they growing in popularity every year?

Outbrain, one of the most popular native advertisement platforms, has several reasons listed.

Reason #1 is fairly straightforward, the data.

Native advertising works. Consumers look at native ads 53% more than display ads. Native ads create an 18% increase in purchase intent, and the visual engagement with native ads is the same, and even slightly higher, than the original editorial content.

Another reason for booming success is native ads combat ad fatigue. Is the frequency on your ads through the roof and your clickthrough rate shrinking by the minute? Native ads are brand exposure nestled in with editorial content, so they don’t exhaust your audience. As long as the content you provide is relevant and engaging, you will see native advertising engages the audience.

Why should you use them?

If your ads are constantly being blocked by ad blockers, native advertising will be a great place to start. A lot of advertisers are also seeing an increase in brand awareness and engagement as a result of using native ads compared to banner ads.

 

Why shouldn’t you use them?

It depends on the product, service, and industry on occasion, and it may also be the case that you shouldn’t go for native ads. It may be the case that targeting options from native ad platforms are too broad for your industry. It could also be your target audience may engage more with an advertisement truly presented as an ad and not intentionally camouflaged into a news page.

At the end of the day a native ad is a native ad. We sometimes click them if the ad creative and headline is promising enough. But at the end of the day, it’s no secret. We all know it’s an ad and we’re okay with it. We highly recommend running a pilot with a native advertising platform and testing your performance. After all, the data will drive your strategy decisions in the long run!

More from Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to help you with a holistic digital marketing strategy and optimize your native ad performance? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

The Top Instagram Updates of 2020

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Instagram is full speed ahead with the monetization of their platform and shows no signs of slowing down. But are you up to date with all of the latest and great changes that have recently come to Instagram?

To help you stay up-to-date with the latest Instagram updates that rolled out during 2020 and adjust your business to them, we put together a list of the latest updates you may not know about and how to make them work to your business’s benefit.

New Tools for Shops & Increased Checkout Rollout

Coming as no surprise, shopping features have been a huge priority for Instagram in 2020. There is now an in-app checkout feature, and creators are also allowed to tag your business’s products. This means you never have to leave the app in order to buy the new pair of sunglasses you saw on your favorite influencer. The checkout is streamlined and takes advantage of the secure and convenient Facebook Pay.

It is now also possible to open a shop directly on Instagram without connecting to a larger e-commerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce.

Live Shopping is also an upcoming Instagram update, which allows people to directly purchase items that they’re viewing from a Live in real time.

IGTV shopping is also now available! This way, when Instagram users are watching IGTV and see something they like, they can click on the product and will be directed to the retailer’s website to purchase it.

Automatic Closed Captioning on IGTV Videos

An incredible asset in general, closed captioning expands access to an even larger audience while also promoting inclusivity. Plenty of users also choose to watch a video with the sound off, which is how it typically starts on auto-play. When you upload your video, you’ll be able to choose to use “auto-generated captions” by enabling a toggle bar quickly. 
instagram updates 2020

Reels Time Upgrade From 15 to 30 Seconds

As you know Reels, or Instagram’s successfully borrowed version of TikTok, used to be only 15 seconds of content. Luckily the recording time has doubled, so with the latest update creators can record up to 30 seconds of video. TikTok videos also started up to 15 seconds long, but the company recently extended the limit to 60 seconds.

Stay tuned to see if Instagram will follow the same practice!

Contact Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to increase Instagram engagement and turn your Instagram business into a customer converting machine? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

B2B Marketing: Paid Search Edition

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Effective paid search strategies are difficult to get right. You may have problems with budget, creative content, channel decisions and more. However, one of the biggest problems marketing departments have with the effective search engine advertising is your audience. Paid search is an excellent tool to capture your leads in a fast and efficient way.

An important note on B2B in general is that the sales cycle is generally much longer. It can take up to three to six months or more to see the benefits of your strategy. Be prepared for this and to see PPC return on investment farther down the road than what you would potentially expect for B2C.

At the core of the strategy, a B2B PPC campaign is just like a B2C one. You have campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and so on, just like B2C—but the important note is to keep the market characteristics in mind.

1. Research

For really any B2B PPC situation, you’ll have to dig in and conduct some serious research to run a top-notch B2B campaign. Why, you may ask? Because even though you might understand your market inside and out, applying it to the PPC channel is a different matter, one that’s full of risk areas in terms of targeting.

The important key takeaway is even though you understand your market, be aware that Google and Bing do not. Their platform will try to match you to as many types of keywords as possible. So stay on top of your search query report and keyword research.

2. Keywords

Keyword research are essentially the same for B2B as they are for B2C. One difference, however, is the preponderance of acronym searches in B2B. Whatever your industry, find out what words the customers are using. For example, an acronym such as “GPR” gets four times the search volume of “ground penetrating radar.” It’s all about understanding the search behavior of your potential customers.

When it comes to bidding and CPCs, they can be all over the board, just as in B2C. Without a doubt, though, there’s more room for “loose” bidding when you’re talking about high-dollar items and services. In other words, B2B typically has higher profit margins, so small increases in CPC isn’t really as big of a deal.

3. Tracking & attribution

If you have any experience with B2B, you know that tracking and lead attribution is a very challenging task. Different from an e-commerce B2C strategy, a lead generation strategy will need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance. There are many ways you can track your paid search performance, Onimod Global experts prefer to use the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs. If you are unsure of how to set this up, first check out Google’s URL Builder Tool as a solid starting point.

Contact Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to completely transform your B2B strategy and skyrocket your lead generation? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Simple Steps To Improving Your Google Quality Score

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You’ve narrowed your keywords, written compelling ad text, and perfected a great landing page. But when you check your Google Ads Quality Score, it’s not performing well.

Step one. Don’t panic.

A low quality score can translate to a multitude of potential issues with the campaign, meaning there are lots of ways you can improve it. Before you start, though, it’s important to know how Google is grading you and why it’s so important. Onimod Global is here to help explain Google Ads Quality Score and how you can easily improve yours!

What is a Google Quality Score?

A google quality score is a combination of factors which describe your ads overall relevancy to the customer. From 1-10, Google grades campaigns in three areas: keywords, ads, and landing pages.  Google describes the score as “a warning light for a car’s engine.” It tells you, the driver/ad creator, that something’s wrong with your ad or website so that you are alerted to fix it. Better ad scores of course translates to better ad ranking.

Difference between Quality Score and Ad Rank

Ad Rank is Google’s version of taking into account much more campaign information to determine where your ad will show up within search engine results pages (SERP).

According to Google, they also take into account the following:

Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount, your auction-time ad quality (including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of an auction, the context of the person’s search (for example, the person’s location, device, time of the search, the nature of the search terms, the other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals and attributes), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.

Quality Score, on the other hand, is more so a tool for advertisers to use and improve your campaigns. Quality in your ads is important for everyone involved:

  • Helpful for you, because your ad budget is spent more efficiently with a more relevant ad in front of a better targeted audience who is likely to convert.
  • Helpful for the customer,because no one likes or has time to scroll through useless information irrelevant to their search query.
  • Helpful for Google, because their platform is used in good purpose and more people are likely to return to them for search queries.

Simple steps to improve your Quality Score

  1. Improve your keyword selection. Using keywords which are too broad will only lose your ad in the crowd of many others boasting the same phrase. Similarly, keywords that are too niche narrow your potential audience. Meeting somewhere in the middle guarantees a more visible ad.
  2. Increase landing page loading time. This is one tip that’s often overlooked, because you would think it’s all about your audience and ad copy. However, the quality of your landing page is just as important. Google wants to know that content loads quickly enough to hold a customer’s attention.
  3. Maintain the level of relevancy. You may notice your ad starts out strong with a solid quality score, and then takes a small tumble. This is Google signaling you to restructure your ad. Grouping ads by the target audience, keyword, and other factors improve the relevancy of the ad.

Contact Onimod Global

For more on the latest digital marketing news and information, follow Onimod Global! Our experts release the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday. To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Lookalike Audiences: Essential To Converting Customers

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Say hello to your new favorite social media paid campaigns weapon: lookalike audiences. These types of audiences are the best way to target a brand new set of people who may not have any experience with your service or product and still be very likely to convert. Talk about a digital advertising dream!

What exactly is a lookalike audience?

These are a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers. Lookalike audiences are a Facebook segmentation tool that finds users whose demographics and interests are similar to those of your existing followers.

Basically, an audience or group of people that looks like another audience or group of people. So simple, yet so effective!

For example, let’s say you have an email list of about 1,000 customers. You upload this list to Facebook, and they will create a list of people that look exactly like or similar to the email list you uploaded.

These are quite simple to create and implement, and consistently deliver high results. This makes them an extremely powerful marketing tool for efficiently finding high-converting users.

Why are these audiences important?

While you might have a good idea of your target audience, lookalike audiences will dig deep into your existing followers and user base to find their commonalities. Facebook leverages its massive database of customer data to make connections from your existing customers to your target audience. This will help you find highly-qualified users you previously wouldn’t have been able to reach.

Most importantly, this informed targeting optimizes your ad spend and lowers the cost per lead or acquisition in the process.

Extra Onimod Global tips

Lookalike audiences can be simple and straightforward, or more complex. Here’s a list of some additional information to keep in mind while creating your lookalike audience:

  • Your audience will only include people from the country/countries you select during the creation process.
  • Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order to use it as the base for a Lookalike Audience.
  • People in your source audience will be excluded from your Lookalike Audience unless you use a pixel as your source audience.
  • You can create up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from a single source audience.

Contact Onimod Global

For more on the latest digital marketing news and information, follow Onimod Global! Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday. To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

CPC vs. CPM Bidding: Best Option For Your Campaign

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A common question that Onimod Global experts are asked frequently, “How should I bid? CPM or CPC?”

Google Ads are definitely the backbone of PPC. Within Google Ads and social media advertising, there are two main types of bidding – Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM). Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) differs from CPC as your bidding is focused and paid for on the number of impressions of your advert receives instead of the number of clicks.

So which is the right type of bidding style for you and your campaign? Read more from Onimod Global experts below.

Cost Per Click (CPC) Bidding

CPC bidding is where you only pay if someone clicks on one of your ads.

Most cases, people will use CPC bidding as it is designed for the Search Network. It’s also the recommended bidding strategy when trying to drive traffic to your website and you know how much you are willing to pay on your campaign.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) Bidding

CPM bidding is the most common option for advertisers that are looking for the best option to try to increase or improve your brand visibility. There is one downside that this bidding strategy brings which is the fact that you could pay for a thousand impressions but potentially receive no clicks to your website.

However, a benefit of CPM ads are that the display network is solely judged on price so if it has the highest bid it will rank at number 1, whereas CPC bids are judged on CTR, Quality Score and other relevance factors.

Where you are going wrong

Often times you may read that if your goal is brand awareness, bid for impressions (CPM). If your goal is direct response, bid for clicks (CPC).

It doesn’t matter what your goals are; your job is to generate traffic/impression/leads/sales at lower costs and higher volumes.

Even if you’re only concerned with exposing your brand to a large audience, wouldn’t you want to get that exposure for the lowest cost possible? Along that same thought, if you’re concerned with traffic, obviously you want to secure that traffic for the lowest cost possible. You have use your bid type as a lever to effect that efficiency.

There will be times when CPM bidding is the most cost-efficient bid type to drive impressions. There will also be times that CPC bidding is the most cost-efficient bid type to drive impressions, too (although this is traditionally a bad sign about the engagement rates of your ads. Check out our blog post on improving your relevance score here).

Contact Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

How To Improve Your Facebook Relevance Score

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Improving your Facebook relevance score can help you save money and reach more consumers. However, what can you do to boost your relevance score without taking away time from your already busy schedule?

Experts at Onimod Global are here to share everything you need to know about Facebook’s relevance score and how to improve yours!

What is Facebook Relevance Score?

The Facebook Relevance Score is all about the relevance of your ad to your targeted audience. A number from 1-10 (10 is highest and one is lowest) will tell you how relevant your ad will be to your target audience. To improve your ad’s relevance score, you can work on your targeting and the ad creative.

How Does Facebook Calculate Relevance?

There are a number of factors to be considered here. However, before your ad will calculate a relevance score, your ad has to be shown 500 times. After you exceed 500, you can check your relevance score in Ad Manager or any other campaign managing software.

How to see your score in the Ad manager:

  1. Go to Facebook Ad Manager
  2. Click “Campaigns”
  3. Click “Ads”
  4. Click “Relevance Score”

Ads with high relevance scores (8+) often deliver great CPA (cost per action).  Ads with low relevance scores (4 or less) rarely generate great results, at least not for very long.

Why It Matters

The goal is actually to help all parties involved. Facebook grades ads with their relevance score system to provide advertisers with useful feedback, and more importantly, to ensure their platform isn’t cluttered with annoying irrelevant advertising. Ads with low relevance scores result in higher costs, while ads with high relevance scores are rewarded with lower costs.

So, if your ads receive a low relevance score, you need to improve it. This will not only save you money, but will also make sure your ads reach the right audience. The more attention you pay to the relevance score of your ads, the more likely your campaigns will succeed.

How You Can Improve

The good news is improving a Facebook relevance score is quite simple. Here are a few easy fixes to make sure your score is consistently high:

Be specific with targeting: Before you can target the right people, you need to figure out who, exactly, you want to see your ads. While you may think every 18-65 year old in the United States may potentially be interested in your product, Facebook won’t be interested in showing it to everyone. If you’ve never done audience research or created buyer personas before, now is the time to start.

The perfect combination of visual and copy: This may sound logical, but that doesn’t always mean it’s obvious.  Focus on improving the visual to improve your relevance score. Also, keep your copy simple and related to what you’re promoting.

Steer clear of offensive and misleading content: This may seem obvious yet again, however it is something to always keep in mind. Always follow the Facebook advertising guidelines and community standards. Besides, social media is a network of millions of people sharing stories. Remember, you want a build a brand and not a bad reputation.

Refresh your ad: This one is crucial, and probably the most common problem you will have with your relevance score. Prevent the target audience getting tired of your ad and try creating another ad creative with new content. If you keep refreshing your ad, your relevance score will continue to rise.

Contact Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

The Right Content For Each Marketing Funnel Stage

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If you want your company’s sales process to run as efficiently as possible, one of the most crucial keys to success is getting your marketing funnel – the process of converting a potential customer into a paying customer – right.

There is a lot of debate surrounding the marketing funnel — from who owns it, be it marketing or sales, to whether or not it’s still relevant to today’s consumer buying process. The answer is that the marketing funnel is exactly how you will develop any and all paid campaigns and organic traffic strategies. In fact, 87% of shoppers now begin their search on digital channels. Having the right content in the right funnel is key to gaining their attention.

What is the marketing funnel?

The idea is that, like a funnel, marketers start with a broad audience to capture as many potential leads as possible, and then slowly nurture these prospective customers through the purchasing decision. Then finally, the funnel narrows down these candidates in each stage of the funnel until they ideally follow through with a purchase.

Marketing Funnel - 3 stages

This graphic from Single Grain is an excellent representation of how a prospective customer is led down the funnel of different types of content being nurtured every step of the way until a sale is secured.

Where should you start?

Your business is going to interact with users at each and every stage of the funnel. As these leads continue to interact, you need relevant content at each level to persuade them to take that next step.

Top of the funnel should include content that will be relevant to a larger audience to make sure you are casting a wide enough net. This will allow your business to attract as many potential leads as possible.

Content to include in this phase would be: blog posts, social media updates, videos, infographics, and podcasts.

Middle of funnel content

Once you’ve attracted potential customers to your brand, you need to keep them engaged. Now is the time to keep in touch and follow up on the relationship.

Here are a few types of contents that will help keep your users engaged in order to build trust in your brand:

  • Ebooks and whitepapers
  • Reports
  • Case studies
  • Webinars
  • Quizzes and assessments
  • Email courses

You are missing out on a ton of potential in this section of the funnel if you don’t foster the relationships with these warm leads.

Bottom of funnel content

You’re so close to converting these customers! This is the funnel where you get people to really commit to your brand and make some sales. In this stage, trust is the key to success. So in this level you want to include as much personal testimony of anyone who has interacted with your brand that can provide some positive insight. Some examples of this type of content would be:

  • Testimonials
  • Demos
  • Customer stories
  • Promotions and discounts
  • Competitive comparisons

Contact Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

 

Google Brings Lead Forms To YouTube

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Google has been testing lead form ad extensions in Search campaigns since last fall.   The new feature works very similarly to lead generation ads on other platforms, where users submit their contact information in a form – to show interest in a product or service.

This extension will be available in Display campaigns later this year, Google noted in its announcement Wednesday, August 5th.

Google has expanded the field options available for collection since it initially started testing lead forms. Previously, you could collect information such as name, email, phone number and postal code. Now advertisers have the option to collect city, state, country as well as business contact information, including company name, job title, work email, work phone.

Next, you will see the options to have questions to your form based on pre-set questions set by vertical.       

One example of a question you can add could be under Real estate. An advertiser could opt to add “What price range are you looking for” to the lead form.

Some important key insights to keep in mind about lead form ad extensions from Search Engine Land:

  • Engagement with lead forms won’t be attributed to actions users subsequently take on your site.
  • They are not available to advertisers in sensitive verticals or sub-verticals.
  • Segment the performance report by “click” and “conversion type” to see lead form click and submission/conversion data.
  • Engagement with lead forms won’t show up in Analytics because users never arrive on your site.

  

Contact Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.