Idle Until Urgent — Philip Walton https://t.co/8gV5X2xexx

— St George Web Design (@stgeorgewebau) September 21, 2018

via Twitter https://twitter.com/stgeorgewebau

September 22, 2018 at 07:53AM

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One of the biggest branding mistakes that companies can make is to not pay enough attention to their tone of voice. “Voice” sounds high-minded, doesn’t it? More suited for the literary world rather than the business world? But tone of voice just refers to how you sound in your writing.

In marketing, your tone of voice can be a significant differentiator. It’s a strong advantage because a lot of companies aren’t yet thinking about it. Businesses often spend a lot of time on their logo and color palette and other things they think of as “branding”—the look and feel of their website, collateral, signage, fonts, and so on. But very few take the time to consider the branding that a unique voice can give a company.

Brand Tone Exercise

Mask the logo on your site. Do you sound different, unique—like yourself? Or do you sound like everyone else… including your competitors? Said another way: If the label fell off… would people know it was you?

Your tone of voice isn’t about what you say but, rather, how you say it. It’s the impression your brand leaves on your would-be customers or prospects. Done right, your tone of voice is truly the secret sauce in your content BBQ.

Here is how to develop your brand tone of voice:

1. Define What Makes You You

Marketers call this developing a “brand positioning statement” or sometimes a “mission statement.” Whatever you call it, the idea is to define who you are, and what makes you you.

Ask yourself a series of key questions:

• What’s unique to your business?
• What’s special about your products?
• What’s special about the way you do business?
• What’s your company culture like? Are you buttoned-up or playful?
• How do your employees relax together? Do you play beer pong in the parking lot on Friday afternoons, or do you have morning yoga sessions every Thursday?
• How do you want to be regarded by both customers and your community? Are you a trusted source for high-level insight, or a go-to source for hands-on, practical advice?

Come up with, say, three words that best define who you are. Write them down. Avoid buzzwords and clichés (like “cutting-edge” or “proactive” or “revolutionary”). I call those words blech. Instead, identify more interesting, specific descriptors that reflect who you really are, and how you want to be perceived.

2. Translate Those Words into a Style

Abstract attributes in isolation don’t mean that much. So develop some detail around them. Make them real and practical. For example, if one of your brand values is “creative”—what exactly do you mean? When and how are you creative? What are you creative about? How does your creativity help clients?

Flesh out those words with a few sentences or anecdotes.

3. Write it Down

I almost wrote “create a style guide,” but I worried I’d lose you there. The idea of a “style guide” might feel both pedantic and impenetrable to a lot of businesses—especially growing, scrappy ones who think a style guide is about as appealing as a History of  Trigonometric Functions (volumes 1-34). (Side note: Keep reading. Volume 35 is a page-turner!)

Style guide hack: Adopt a well-known style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Style Guide or (my personal favorite) the Yahoo Style Guide. Then add your own addendum to it. The benefit of doing it this way is that you’ll have the style basics covered (“email” vs. “e-mail” ) while being able to address more important things like tone. Check them out to steal ideas for inspiration.

4. Sweat the Small Stuff

Don’t think about your voice applied in only the most obvious places—like your website copy and perhaps your Facebook page. Tone of voice doesn’t apply only to those things you typically think of as “marketing.” (Everything the light touches is content, remember?)

Instead, think about how you can use your voice as a differentiator in surprising places—on your 404 page, on your email confirmation page, and on your Thank You page, About Us page, FAQ page, product descriptions, and so on.

5. Include Necessary Jargon

I used to take a hard line against jargon and insider language—I used to say, don’t use it. But lately, I’ve rethought that idea because jargon can signal a shared mindset or can convey a depth of knowledge.

Spell out what jargon and phrases your company embraces and which it does not. And, as with any writing, be sure that its use clarifies rather than gets in the way.

An Example of What Not to Do

A brief story to start: My daughter and I were at a college’s Accepted Students Day, which is basically where school administrators wine and dine prospective incoming freshmen in the hopes they’ll choose that institution out of all those a student might’ve been accepted to.

The “wine and dine” bit would be metaphorical—because there is no actual wine involved. But we did get a nice chicken sandwich and quinoa salad at lunch. The heads of various departments spoke, including Campus Security, Student Activities, and Housing. They were trying hard to make student life there sound awesome: Community! Traditions! Camaraderie! Emotional support!

The panel was in full sales mode. Campus life sounded amazing; the picture they painted was rosier than an actual rose. They were essentially highlighting the school’s best qualities to people they hoped would enroll, and the people they hoped would pay the tuition of those who enrolled.

Then came the Q&A session at the end.

One parent raised his hand and asked a specific question about the dorms.

“You said you guarantee housing for freshmen,” he said. “But what about if too many students elect to go here? I’ve heard about students crowded into small dorm rooms—where rooms intended for two suddenly have three. They call that a forced triple?”

The housing director smiled and didn’t miss a beat.

“Ah, yes,” she acknowledged. “But we call that expanded occupancy units.”

Jargon Misses the Mark

You know that record-scratch sound effect? You hear it in a movie when suddenly the momentum stops dead. That’s what happened in the room when she reframed a concept everyone understood (“forced triple”) with a buzzword phrase intended to make it sound more palatable (“expanded occupancy units”).

Maybe that jargon is the language of her academic or administrative office. But it wasn’t the language of parents or students sitting in that auditorium. In effect, it made me not trust that rosy picture they were painting overall. If she reframed the parent’s question in less vivid language to make it seem less egregious, what else was the school spinning to make it seem less terrible?

Speak, Don’t Spin

By including guidelines for what jargon is and is not permissible, you are able to set out ground rules for content creators. “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear,” political strategist and pollster Frank Luntz wrote. Frank was the guy who reframed global warming as “climate change” and the estate tax as a “death tax.”

Don’t do Frank; do you. Speak the real language of your customers, using their words, not yours. Avoid obese words.

Context Is Everything

If the administrator had been speaking to a room full of other administrators, expanded occupancy units would’ve made sense. But to parents? Not so much.

Jargon is like cholesterol, my friend Doug Kessler says: There’s a good kind and a bad kind. The good kind signals to others than you are an insider and you understand their world. The bad kind is often used when the speaker isn’t creative or smart enough to find better words. Or (worse) it’s used falsely: To elevate the speaker by making everyone else feel dumb or to obscure meaning on purpose.

Don’t Correct your Customer

Don’t use your own language or buzzwords to reframe, because it makes your customers not trust you. In other words, metaphorically speaking: if it’s a forced triple, call it a forced triple.

The point is this, more broadly: What’s your own brand voice? Does it clearly reflect what makes you you? What picture are you painting for your customers?

 

The post Ann Handley on Why Jargon Can Be Detrimental to Your Brand Voice & Tone appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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There has been one common thread in each of my customer conversations throughout the past two years, and that is the desire to deliver—and be part of—a seamless and unforgettable end-to-end customer experience. Today, we’re one step closer to making this a reality for our thousands of customers and partners worldwide.

I am thrilled to announce that Marketo has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Adobe. Adobe and Marketo both share an unwavering belief in the power of content and data to drive business results. Together we will deliver an unrivaled solution that will place customer experience and engagement at the heart of digital transformation. This announcement is a momentous occasion for Marketo, as it signals the next phase of our company’s growth.

Adobe is a visionary enterprise technology company, admired by customers around the world for the way it helps them to bring digital experiences to life. Marketo’s track record of making B2B marketers successful makes it the ideal complement to the Adobe Experience Cloud, with integrated solutions across analytics, content, personalization, advertising, and commerce.

The combination of Marketo and Adobe’s Experience Cloud will form the definitive system of engagement for B2C and B2B enterprise marketers. Marketo’s exceptional lead management, account-level data, and multi-channel marketing capabilities will combine with Adobe’s rich behavioral dataset to create the most advanced, unified view of the customer at both an individual and account level. The result will be an unprecedented level of marketing engagement, automation, and attribution power, all with a goal of delivering end-to-end, exceptional experiences for our customers, where and when they want them.

You might wonder what that means for you, our customers, partners, our amazing community of over 65,000 marketers all over the world. Make no mistake that Marketo remains deeply committed to investing in our platform to keep marketers ahead of the curve, a commitment and vision that Adobe shares. In fact, I believe that Adobe will further accelerate Marketo’s product roadmap and go-to-market execution, offering Marketo a new level of global operational scale, the ability to penetrate new verticals and geographies, and access to an impressive enterprise customer base.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 2018, but I am thrilled to share this news with you today and look forward to sharing further updates as soon as I can. In the meantime, I encourage you to read Brad Rencher’s blog, as he and the Adobe team are just as excited as I am about what’s to come.

The post Adobe to Acquire Marketo to Place Customer Experience and Engagement at the Heart of Digital Transformation appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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Do you cringe when someone says, “button color?” Do you automatically shut down when a test is recommended to you that seems like just a minor change? Today I want to encourage you to shift your mindset. What may seem like a “minor” change to you may bring $21,000 more in revenue to your company. Now it doesn’t seem so “minor,” does it?

You may hesitate testing something as simple as a color change. It could be because you don’t personally think a different color would have a significant impact. Maybe it’s because you haven’t had success with it in the past. Or is it possible you’ve just read too many negative blog posts about testing button color and you don’t want to waste your time?

I assure you, it’s not a waste of your time. Testing button color, or the color of any element on your page can be extremely rewarding—if it’s done correctly. What do I mean by this?

In the case of changing a button from red to green, let’s walk through some scenarios and determine if it’s the right or wrong way to go about testing.

• Are you testing green because you’ve read that green performs best? Wrong.
• Are you testing green because it looks better? Wrong.
• Are you testing green because your competitor is doing it? Wrong.
• Are you testing green because the main color on your site is red and it blends in? Right.
• Are you testing green because your existing color creates a negative emotion or scares users away? Right.
• Are you testing green because your existing color combination makes it difficult to read? Right.

Testing for the sake of testing likely won’t get you the results you want, but even minor or simple tests can be successful if you’ve done your research. Understanding your users’ want or need will help you test logically, therefore setting you up for success.

A Case Study

An e-commerce client sells high-end doors for homes, which naturally come with a high price tag. In addition, the more a customer chooses to customize their door, the more dollars they will spend. See the customization process as it appears on mobile and desktop devices when customers first visit these product pages:

What we noticed as we began customizing a door, specifically on mobile devices, was a very scary price tag. We’ll call this the pricing calculator because it dynamically changes your price as you work your way through the customization process. Check out the mobile and desktop screenshots below to see for yourself.

BOOM! $499.00 right out of the gate and there’s nowhere to go but up. Imagine continuing this customization process, creating a door that costs $1,000+, and having the price tag flashed in your face the entire time.

So, what’s the problem?

The color red.

In this instance, it wasn’t a problem that the price tag follows users during the customization process. In fact, this eliminates any questions users may have about how much they’ll end up spending. It all boils down to the color. Some might argue that the price tag should be, and currently is, contrasting from the rest of the branded colors. Therefore, we shouldn’t change it. However, red is said to represent violence, danger, and anger. It’s also said to increase heart rate and raise blood pressure. We don’t want this to be the experience users have as they’re trying to purchase a door. Instead, we want them to feel comfortable and secure doing so.

The Hypothesized Solution

The color blue.

The color blue is said to symbolize trust, loyalty, wisdom and confidence. It’s also said that blue produces a calming effect. This is what we want users to feel when they’re purchasing a door—especially a door that costs $1,000+.

We hypothesized that changing the pricing calculator to blue would increase overall revenue. Why? Because of the calming effect! We’re no longer going to scare users or create a sense of fear. Instead, they should feel calm and secure in their purchasing decisions. Does this make you feel more comfortable?

The Results

$21,135.27 more in revenue

16 more transactions

Over the course of two weeks, we saw phenomenal results from such a simple change.

• 46.06% increase in revenue
• 45.44% increase in revenue/visitor
• 29.17% increase in e-commerce conversion rate
• 10.29% increase in average order value
• -12.74% decrease in bounce rate
• 3.23% increase in average time on page

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter that the rest of the site is blue; it doesn’t matter that it didn’t stand out from the rest of the site. Ultimately, what matters is that it does its job. The pricing calculator is supposed create a user experience with no surprises. It’s still there for reference during the entire process, but without causing fear in users, or putting pressure on their wallets. Instead, it now acts as a friendly reminder.

The next time you have a “minor” change you’d like to test, I hope you don’t push it aside because it’s too simple, or immediately shut it down. I encourage you to dive into the reasoning behind the test: what led to this test recommendation and what’s hypothesized to come from it? Don’t miss out on $21,000 in revenue because you feared the test was too simple.

from
https://www.ppchero.com/gaining-an-increase-in-revenue-by-changing-1-color/

Have you ever noticed how a beach looks completely different after a storm? Carefully-built sand sculptures are washed away, and the shore is littered with seaweed and debris.

A similar fate awaits a brand’s search landscape following a corporate crisis. Social media profiles, positive articles, and favorable reviews could be swept away and replaced with damaging content. While some negative articles may recede with the media frenzy, others could haunt your brand’s reputation by remaining on the first page of Google.

Don’t Be an Ostrich

It’s crucial to deal with negative articles head-on rather than wait to see if they go away on their own. Damaging content appearing on the first page of your brand’s search results can impact company revenue in multiple ways.

• Sales — Potential customers looking for information about your business may be turned off by negative press.
• Business partnerships — Existing or future business relationships could be put at risk if other companies cut ties with your brand.
• Funding — Lenders may limit your business’s access to capital or charge a higher rate if they determine your business is at risk.
• Employee retention — Employee turnover and hiring expenses increase when brands develop a bad reputation.
• Market capitalization — A company’s stock price may fall as investors flee for safer investments, wiping out shareholder value.

While most crisis recovery plans involve many detailed steps, digital marketing and SEO will have the most significant impact.

Use Digital Marketing to Boost Brand Reputation

To understand why negative content dominates a brand’s search results following a crisis, and how to recover, it’s important to understand how Google works. Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of ranking signals to determine the most relevant web pages for each search query. One such signal is topical relevance.

Through repetition, search engines use topical relevance to draw connections between concepts even if they were previously unrelated. As a result, Google may start favoring content about a corporate crisis if thousands of articles were recently published connecting the brand with the event.

Here’s an example of topical relevance in action. A search for “Donald Trump” currently returns results about his presidency. Meanwhile, a search for “president” returns results about Donald Trump instead of former President Barack Obama. Although topical relevance is often problematic during negative news cycles, it can be leveraged to reinforce positive brand connections using digital marketing.

Instead, use paid content like sponsored posts and earned media like press releases to generate positive articles about your brand. Starbucks recently used this strategy to shift their brand’s narrative from racial bias training to banning plastic straws.

Reputation Management Without SEO Doesn’t Work

SEO is labor-intensive and costly so your marketing team may think you’ve lost your mind if you suggest investing SEO resources into websites you don’t own. But the hard truth is that reputation management doesn’t work without a search engine optimization component.

Publishing tons of great content is only part of the strategy; now you need to apply SEO best practices to rebuild your search landscape.

Optimize Your Social Profiles and Post Regularly

Social networks rank very well for branded search queries, but to send the right signals to Google they must be set up properly and kept active. Fill out your profiles completely, including contact information, addresses, and, most importantly, a description that mentions your company’s name. You should also link to these accounts from your website’s homepage, blogs, and other trusted sites.

Find and Promote Your Best Online Content

Hopefully, you’ve secured some excellent company mentions during your digital marketing push. Determine which mentions you want ranking on the first page of Google, then share these articles with your social channels to increase visibility and build high-quality backlinks to them. If you have any editorial say when it comes to content, ask the publisher to include your brand name in the article’s title to help improve rankings.

SEO and digital marketing are the main engines that drive an effective reputation management strategy. If you’re smart, you won’t wait until your company is in the hot seat to start implementing them, either. Taking a proactive approach to brand protection allows you to groom the best beach possible for attracting potential customers. It will also be much easier to clean up the mess after a storm.

The post Why Digital Marketing and SEO are Vital to Reputation Management appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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This year, over 400 marketers from both brands and agencies filled out the survey. Respondents represent 14 different verticals, including travel/tourism, education, healthcare, retail, technology, and finance.

 

This year’s report is especially robust. We asked a number of the same questions as in year’s past, like the impact PPC plays in marketing plans:

 

And where marketers are spending their digital dollars:

We added in some new questions too, like how marketers are feeling about brand safety, how successful Amazon ads have been for ecommerce marketers and which platforms agencies are planning to pitch their clients next year:

Another new section you’ll find is on the brand/agency relationship. We had brands rank the most important things to them when working with an agency, as well as the things they wish their agencies were better at!

Here’s a sneak peek:

 

And last, but certainly not least, we asked marketers what they want to be better at, how important attribution is to them, and what they feel the most unprepared for in the coming year.

 

Along with benchmarks and trends, we’ve tapped our team for pro tips and comments, so you’ll find some great actionable takeaways in the report as well as industry-leading stats.

Are you ready for it?

Download the State of PPC now!

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https://www.ppchero.com/new-research-the-state-of-ppc/

Growth hacking strategies can provide rapid results, but if your company can’t carry that momentum, all your efforts will be for naught.

You can’t employ growth hacking techniques if you don’t know how they’ll work in the long run. The entire point is to increase a measurable growth target—not to grow as much as possible and sort out the details later. If you don’t know your objectives, your strategy won’t create the results you desire.

A solid growth hacking plan is essential: It’s the only way to drive both immediate impact and long-term success. Your first step should be your strategic alignment, which occurs when you select the right key performance indicators in your acquisition funnel. The tactics to meet that goal come next.

This is where growth hacking really shines. It’s all about experiment-driven strategy, blending concrete goals and forward-looking tactics to create a sustainable, effective, and long-term growth hacking plan.

What Is Growth Hacking?

The origin of growth hacking was born at Dropbox when the company’s acquisition strategy was failing. The company wasn’t growing quickly enough (or raising enough money), and it was about to go out of business.

Rather than continuously throw out strategies that weren’t driving growth, Dropbox invented growth hacks. The first hacks were basically just referral strategies, but they set the stage for more complex, effective tactics down the road.

Dropbox only discovered that its original strategies were failing because it took a transparent, scientific approach to measurement. The company knew its strategy had failed because it saw major drop-off points in its acquisition funnel. When Dropbox leaders looked at the economics, they realized that no matter how much they optimized, their current course would not lead them where they wanted to go.

That’s all growth hacking is: a framework to launch high-impact, sometimes creative tactics that get you what you want—improved funnel metrics that drive commercial growth. A true growth hacker can build a strategy that leverages data-driven experiments and scalable processes to demonstrate how to meet the company’s goals over time—not just in the moment.

How to Design an Effective Growth Hacking Plan

Growth hacking strategies look different for every company. You first need to find a winning combination of market, analysis, testing, and automation that fits your unique needs. Once you identify the marketing technique that fits your company, you can turn to growth hacking to amplify its power.

Strategy Leads the Way

First, double down on the strategy. Take strategic assumptions and tactics you tested successfully and transform your tests into your control group. Now, your original targets are no longer your goals, but the baseline expectations from which your growth hacking tactics will arise.

Fortunately, growth hacking offers plenty of options for improvement. You could go after retention, using marketing techniques to create repeat customers; SEO, optimizing your web content to boost inbound traffic from search engines; or advertising, eliminating channels with poor performance and pouring more money into effective media. You could also focus on sales, viral marketing, conversions, public relations—anything that increases your KPIs is subject to growth hacking.

The key lesson is: Always continue testing. If something works, make it work better. If something falters, cut the wasted effort and direct it somewhere more productive.

Measurement as a Decision-Maker

Throughout this process, prioritize measurement. You can’t test something if you don’t know how to gauge when it works. Look to the past to gather historical performance numbers, and start asking questions. Why did one KPI grow while another faltered? Which data segmentations generated the best results? Which marketing channels were effective, and which didn’t live up to the hype?

With a firm grasp on history, move to the future. Identify the goals you want to achieve, discern how far away you are from hitting them, and determine what needs to happen to reach your ideal KPIs.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, but growth hacking strategies are designed to be flexible. As you go, ask yourself why parts of the process aren’t working as intended. Maybe you struggle to implement new strategies quickly, so you need to learn to deal with analysis paralysis. Maybe clients keep stalling on approval of creative assets—could you provide better guidelines?

When you find the winning combo, double down on it. Manage it, keep it in the market, scale it, and keep testing. Growth isn’t stagnant; it’s dynamic. As you scale, you’ll eventually hit points of diminishing returns. Before your efficiency and ROI start dropping as spend increases, start looking for the wins of tomorrow by testing frequently and adjusting as needed.

Great growth hacking plans operate in a system. When you don’t know what to do, the set of growth hacking rules you establish ahead of time can guide your decisions. Set guidelines to focus on the best opportunities (and metrics to know what those opportunities are). Establish measurements to tell you when a tactic becomes intolerably ineffective. The more you measure and plan, the better you’ll respond to changes.

Execute & Experiment

The final piece of the puzzle is execution, where you take all your analysis and strategy and put your growth hacking plan into action. Only you know what that looks like, but if you set a firm plan and measurement strategy, you’ll know when it’s right. Then, you can do it all over again, continuously experimenting and refining your way toward scalable growth.

Growth hacking might not be as attractive a phrase as it once was, but don’t let the social media scammers fool you. Growth hacking remains an effective and efficient strategy for businesses that desire rapid expansion. With the right combination of strategy, analysis, and tactics, you can accelerate your growth today without sacrificing your ability to manage that growth tomorrow.

The post Growth Hacking Promotes Rapid Development—But Can You Sustain It? appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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It seems to have flown a bit under the radar but Bing is slowly rolling out many of the fancy new automated bidding strategies that Google has been pushing as of recent.

Bing seems to be an afterthought but lately, I’ve been seeing some good success in the channel once things are tweaked. While Bing & Google are Search at the end of the day, they have their differences and it’s unfair to import your Ads campaigns into Bing and expect similar results.

My point, don’t expect these new automated strategies to perform the same as Google. It’s imperative to test the new Target CPA and Maximize Conversions bidding strategies in their unique ecosystem. Just because it has the same name doesn’t mean it’s going to perform the same!

Let’s take a closer look at what goes into these bidding strategies before jumping into both of the new options.

Platform Signals & Best Practices

Similar to Google Ads, Bing is going to take into account a number of signals to drive real-time bidding. Remember, we’re giving full control over to each platform to make bid choices in the hopes of achieving our end goal.

While both platforms use the murky “leverage unique signals” to drive their bidding decisions, Bing does offer some more specific details. Some of those signals include web browser, operating system, search query, and ad copy. Bid adjustments can be made based on time of day, day of week, location, and device.

Bing’s audience tends to skew towards desktop and Microsoft Edge (Internet Explorer) which means we likely won’t be seeing quite the breadth of information that we would be seeing on Google. That makes it a little bit easier to account for these things without automated bidding being implemented.

Note: Target CPA and Maximize Conversions are currently only available for Search; no shopping yet.

Target CPA Bidding

Very similar to Google, Target CPA bidding gives the system leeway to get conversions at whatever your Target CPA is. It is generally best practice to start with the CPA that you’ve been achieving over the last 30 days rather than your aspirational CPA goal is because it could be unattainable and you’ll likely kill off your traffic.

While I have yet to test this bidding strategy on Bing, it seems to work best on high volume campaigns that aren’t restricted by budget in the Google Ads world. This will give the system as much leeway as possible to start generating conversions.

Maximize Conversions

Just like the name suggests, this is allowing Bing to set bids with the goal of getting as many conversions as possible. There are no restrictions like “being profitable” and the goal is to get as many wins as possible.

Now that doesn’t mean things won’t be profitable but it means you’ll likely want to keep an eye on things and expect some crazy numbers the first couple weeks of testing. I would likely start with campaigns that are high priority but are limited by budget for whatever reason. This should ensure that you’re squeezing the maximum amount of performance out of that campaign.

Things to Keep in Mind

As with all things in life, there are some best practices to help ensure you’re setting yourself up for success. Bing recommends at least 15 conversions over the last 30 days to turn on these bidding strategies and the more the better. This will give the backend system more data to work with and have a better idea of who is converting.

It is also known that it takes time for the system to learn so patience Padawan. Don’t give up after a week. Bing recommends at least 2-3 weeks but likely you’ll want to give yourself a month unless this is a really high volume campaign.

One negative about these new bidding strategies is the inability to set up A/B testing like we can in Google Ads. You’re making the full switch which can add some uncertainty to any results (was it just a better/worse month in general rather than caused by bidding, etc.). Hopefully, this is something that will be rolled out on Bing in the future because it makes my willingness to test and get impactful results much appealing.

Closing Thoughts

Bing is its own animal in the world of search but they continue to make tweaks to their system and make it more inviting to advertisings to branch onto for the first time or expand their current portfolio.

As with all things, don’t give into the machines immediately and make sure you’re setting everyone up for success by following best practices and giving things time to run & learn. Because if you set yourself up for failure, it’s not really the AI’s fault now is it….

from
https://www.ppchero.com/latest-bing-ads-automated-bidding-strategies/

In this episode, we cover Amazon Product Branding, Packaging, and Trademarks How to conduct Amazon product trademark research? Do you need a trademark for an Amazon private label product? Missed an episode? See them all here. We’re covering all of this today in our seventh episode of the Million Dollar Case Study. Watch the video, keep reading and don’t forget to claim your exclusive Jungle Scout discount! Subscribe to the Million Dollar Case Study list here, so you never miss an episode!  Before you get started, if you’re not already using Jungle Scout, you’ll need to get a Jungle Scout subscription to follow along with us and complete your product research. To help you out, we’ve put together a Jungle Scout discount code that gives you more than 30% off Jungle Scout – both the Web App and Chrome Extension! Plus, you get a pretty fantastic FREE t-shirt to go with it. Welcome Back! I’m excited because today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics – creating a solid brand! This includes ensuring your product has no trademark violations.  For this episode I interviewed Suzi Hixon, a trademark attorney who was very helpful in explaining the often ... Read More

The post Million Dollar Case Study: Branding, Trademarks & Packaging appeared first on Jungle Scout: Amazon Product Research Made Easy.

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Quality Score Has been a part of Google Ads since 2005 and over the last few years, Google has released more information about what elements of your account is used to calculate your score from 1-10, with 10 being the best score. While it is important to know what your Quality Score is, it is more crucial to know if optimizing your account to improve quality score will benefit your overall results.

Quality Score Elements

There are three components Google reviews to determine your score:

• Expected Clickthrough Rate
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Experience

By using these elements Google can express how they think my ads will perform (Expected CTR), if the ad copy is congruent with the searcher’s query (Ad Relevance), and if the final destination is helpful in answering the searcher’s quest (Landing Page Experience.) If you want to learn more about what Quality Score is and how to analyze your account with scripts, Jacob Fairclough’s “How to Evaluate Adwords Quality Score Factors in Bulk” will give you a deeper dive into each element and how to pull the data. For today’s understanding, expected CTR and ad relevance are often improved by testing ad copy or pausing underperforming keywords. For Landing Page Experience, you can either test segments of your landing page to improve the user’s journey, or again test ad copy to make sure that the ad aligns with your landing page’s message.

Sifting Through Historical Data

Pulling Historical Quality Score reports can lead to some great insights about how Google interprets your ad performance, but it will also help you learn how to talk about why Quality Score isn’t a metric to optimize towards but a metric to see what you should test next.

One of my clients specializes in a type of counseling for young women, and the keywords we bid on are competitive but also are not specific to what only my client can provide. The best way our ads work is to pre-qualify the user before they click. A user may have searched for “counseling” but when our ad pops up and it says “Are You a Young Woman? – Talk to our Counselors Today”, this ad may not get a lot of clicks because it will sort out men, women who don’t need this type of counseling, or friends and family members who are trying to find options for a loved one.

Because our ad copy does a great job of pre-qualifying users, the leads that come through are mostly for our target audience (along with demographic bid modifiers for age and gender). If you look at our quality score for our Expected CTR it is a bit deceiving because it might look like we are missing the mark.

Once I look towards the Landing Page Experience, my client and I know that we are making the right calls because our Quality Score of this category is 71% above average with 3% being average. We might not have Google’s highest rating for our CTR scores, but we rather not spend the money on a click if our ad copy can tell the user that this service isn’t for you, please find another option from the ads either above or below our ad.

Provide Testing Ideas

The example above showed why the client and I don’t focus on every element of Quality Score, but we still pull reports every quarter as a health check. This client, in particular, wants to focus on people in California since the majority of their services are within this state. With this new focus, we developed new campaigns just for this state, but our ad rank was struggling compared to our Nationwide campaigns. In the example below, you will notice that in July our average Quality Score jumped to 4.75, and the reason behind this jump was testing new ad copy.

After this ad copy test, we also noticed that our impression share due to ad rank dropped as well. By pulling these type of reports, we can see why our ad rank might be lower and we can test new copy. Our Quality Score may have increased due to this test, but the purpose of the test was not to improve this metric as much as to see if we can engage more users within a geographical target.

Keyword Level Quality Score

While I take the ad recommendations for Quality Score with a grain of salt, the keyword level does tell you if Google can run your ad based on your keyword’s score. By going into Google and pulling a report you will be able to see the disbursement of your keywords. Below is a snapshot for the client mentioned above, but you can see that a majority of the enabled keywords are a 5 or above.

This report with a  list of the keywords below a 5 helps the client and myself evaluate if these keywords should be segmented into their own ad group with specialized ad copy to help boost its ranking, crank up bids to try and buy some ad rank, or if the keywords are even needed in our account.  If you are considering pausing keywords, you can create a spend disbursement table to show if you would be able to move that spend to the higher performing keywords.

Final Thoughts

Pulling Quality Score reports can benefit you and your account by giving you a guiding light on where you can optimize. While pulling these reports, understand that your specific strategy may not fall exactly in line with Google’s recommendations and your score may not be 10s across the board. By knowing the client’s business and what KPIs matter the most to your client, you will be able to sift out what part of the Quality Score and their recommendations you can use to test, or what suggestions you can leave behind.

from
https://www.ppchero.com/importance-of-google-quality-score/