As we are hunkered down and the world gets recalibrated, this is an ideal time for businesses to do some pandemic cleaning! An audit can give you a thorough checkup of your account and campaigns to help you decide what should be rinsed and repeated or simply tossed out.

What exactly is a Google Audit?

Getting another set of eyes on your account uncovers new opportunities. Our audits are focused on your business goals and making sure that your spend is giving you the absolute best return. We dig around to find where your money is spent, where results are coming from, and how it can be improved overall. Audits also uncover where ad spend is wasted and leads to new campaign ideas.

Why do I really need one?

We recently did an audit for a tech startup and uncovered keyword waste, new opportunities for conversion tracking and ad group optimization. As a result we were able to make recommendations that saved them $600/month and boost account performance, which will lower their average cost/user.

Things are also always changing with the Ads platform and the online paid search space industry in general. It’s a job in itself to stay on top of all this! As a Google Partner Agency, one of the things we benefit from is biweekly calls with our dedicated Google Rep — where we chat about our client campaigns and stay current on features, best practices, marketing trends and latest strategies. We extend this knowledge and expertise to you.

So what does an Audit include?

We pull a concise easy to understand report that includes checking your: 

• account structure and campaign settings
• micro/macro conversions
• proper use of ad extensions and bidding strategies
• identifying negative keywords
• auction insights (how you rank along your competitors)
• Analytics Integration and landing page analysis
• provide strategic recommendations and a framework for growth going forward
  
  

How long does it take to do an audit and what is the cost?

We can complete your audit  in 3 business days. Typically it cost $400 to run a report (6-10 pages) but we are offering it for $220 to do our part in supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses!

 

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The new detailed demographic segments for parental status include:

• Parents of Infants (0-1 years)
• Parents of Toddlers (1-3 years)
• Parents of Preschoolers (4-5 years)
• Parents of Grade Schoolers (6 -12 years)
• Parents of Teens (13 – 17 years)

The new detailed married status segments include:

• Single
• In a relationship
• Married

The new detailed education segments include:

• Homeowners – people who own the home or apartment they live in but may still have mortgages.
• Renters – people who are renting the home or apartment they live in.

Depending on your industry, knowing these details about prospects and being able to target (exclude) or even adjust bids for, can give advertisers a huge advantage in the auctions on your campaigns. You can test assumptions and let the data validate!

In this audience report for detailed demographics, you can see that while the data is still early, conversions are starting to show signals around certain types of education levels and homeowners over renters…

In October 2019, Google also made an announcement that it will be rolling out the two new audience targeting options for paid search advertisers — Affinity and In-Market Audiences.

It’s no secret these have been available for a while via the Google Display Network. And I suspect they’ve been working “behind the scenes” in search campaigns for years.

What has changed is that we now have the ability to either “observe” or “target” these segments in our search campaigns. As an agency, we love this for several reasons! 

1. We can better profile about which kind of users are converting (observe mode).
2. We can better optimize our campaigns by focusing (or excluding) certain audience segments that make sense. You can actually make bid adjustments for each segment you have added.

Directly from Google…

Engage people who are passionate about your products!

Consumers increasingly expect ad experiences to be useful, personal, and frictionless. That requires knowing who your audience is and understanding what they want and what they’re passionate about.  

Affinity audiences helps you raise awareness and drive consideration among people who have a strong interest in your products. For instance, let’s say you sell camping gear. To reach avid campers, you can pair an affinity audience like “Outdoor Enthusiast” with generic camping keywords. By adding this additional audience layer, you can reach people who are not only searching for camping products, but are also passionate about the great outdoors.

Reach the right people at the right time.

Whether you want to grow your sales or build your brand, it’s important to not only know who your audience is, but also where they are on their path to purchase. 

In-market audiences are a great way to reach consumers who are actively researching or comparing products and services. With the holiday season right around the corner, new seasonal event segments for in-market audiences on Search and YouTube are ideal for reaching people with timely offers.

Between Affinity and In-Market audiences, there are many interesting segments to look at. For one of our FinTech clients we are currently observing 135 various segments and you get full reports on each one. 

Here is an example of what we are seeing for performance around in-market segments, which is especially useful in understanding what lifetime events help trigger demand for their product. We can see conversions coming in for:

• People interested in purchasing consumer electronics, such as gaming consoles, cameras, and audio equipment.
• People interested in booking travel arrangements.
• People interested in purchasing or leasing a car, motorcycle, truck, or other vehicle.
• People interested in purchasing finance-related products or services.

You can make both direct and indirect assumptions about your users based on the segments provided. 

Just like detailed demographics, advertisers have the choice to either “Target” these audiences and exclusively show ads to them or add them as an “Observation” audience to see how these audiences engage with their ads. Then from there, you can adjust bids.

Have fun observing, testing, experimenting, optimizing and winning! Please share your experiences in Comments below, you’ll love to hear what is working for you.

The post Powerful NEW Audience Targets for Search Campaigns Are Here – Don’t Neglect This! appeared first on Adfluent.

Here’s the most popular insights and helpful reports we provide to our clients via in-depth conversations, Google Data Studio reports (great for visualization) or custom built dashboards and reports in GA…

Users

• How many users did I have last week or last month?
• Do users come to the site via mobile vs desktop vs tablet?
• Where are my active users located and what are the demographics?
• Which % of my users are new vs returning?

Acquisition

• What traffic sources are the biggest and most effective?
• How are my campaigns performing?

Behavior

• Which pages on my site bring the most traffic and engagement?
• What are the top landing pages (entry points on my site) and their conversion rates?
• Which events on my site are being triggered and how?
• Where do people tent to exit my site?

Conversions

• What is my conversion rate by goal type?
• What traffic sources are driving the most sales?
• What is the trend of my e-commerce conversion rate over the last 6 weeks?
• How many goal completions did I have in the top 10 States last month?
• What is my total product revenue for the last 30 days?
• What does my shopping cart behavior look like?
• How many sessions resulted in a product view, add to cart and/or checkout?
• What is my cart abandonment rate?
• What is my checkout abandonment rate?

The post Important Questions To Ask About Your Users, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions appeared first on Adfluent.

Google Analytics is the most common platform we see being used for reports. So we’ll be referencing their product for the rest of this post — but the same types of goals and events are important regardless of which platform you use).

Even though the emphasis is on sales, it’s important to measure micro conversions that happen at your store. These are actions taking place on your website by potential customers that signal interest in your products. They might not be ready to buy, but you’ve got their attention!

Here are examples that gauge interest that we see with our own clients…

• Account signups
• Newsletter signups
• Time on site (5 minutes or more)
• Viewed a product page or “add to cart”
• Live chat sessions
• Contact form submissions
• Downloading an ebook or file
• Watching a video

Micro conversions can be tracked in several ways. We can set most of these up as goals (directly or from existing events) in Google Analytics – see our post on Four Types Of Custom Google Analytics Goals You Need To Know. This way, you’ll be able to run various reports with segments for demographics, locations, devices, traffic source, campaigns or landing pages and see which goals and events are being triggered, how often and then focus more on activities that lead to sales!

We always recommend setting up all your goals, e-commerce and events in Google Analytics and then importing the key goals and transaction into your Google Ads accounts. For this to happen, simply connect Google Ads to Google Analytics (using the same Google Account). Then in Google Ads conversion tracking, you’ll see the options when importing conversions.

Note: Phone call tracking such as “calls from ads”, “call-only ads” and “calls to a phone number on your website” can only be setup in Google Ads at this time. So that data won’t be available in Google Analytics yet.

The post Tracking Important Signals: Don’t Neglect Micro-Conversions appeared first on Adfluent.

There are 19 “traction channels” available but when you are looking at paid channels to explore, search is a great place to start if you are looking for a good ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend). It’s not uncommon to see ROI over 100% and an ROAS of 250%.

Key benefits of running a Paid Search Campaign

• More control over what the users see in search results (compared to SEO).
• Get discovered when people are searching for a product or service relevant to your business (users have high intent).
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bidding means pay only when your ad gets clicked.

• It’s cost effective to help you get leads, sales and/or calls = NEW CUSTOMERS (yes you can track these conversions!).
• Start with any size budget (even $1/day).
• Tons of targeting options (age, gender, device, household income and geo location) and hundreds of additional segments.
• Measurable results with a lot of transparency.
• Valuable reports to help pinpoint success.

What does a successful Search Ads Campaign look like?

It depends on your goal, but it should be based on the key performance indicator (KPI) that matters MOST to the growth of your business. Ensure it’s something you can track and measure such as leads, downloads, calls or sales.

Often, the focus is driving sales with an ROI/ROAS goal and then optimizing a campaign off that. Both Google and Microsoft Ads have built-in tools to run a campaign with a conversion goal that works for this.

Examples of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s):

• Get an average click-through-rate of 10%.
• Get 20 valid calls or leads each month.
• Get 500 targeted new users to engage with your site.
• Have at least 50% impression share for your keywords.
• Get specific return on investment (ROI) goal of 75%.
• Get specific return on ad spend (ROAS) goal of 185%.

Tracking Important Signals

Many of our clients are focused on Direct-To-Consumer (D2C) sales and one of the things that surfaces in strategy talks is how to identify and track the right types of actions and goals on your site in order to make better business decisions. Google Analytics is the most common platform we see being used for reports, so we’ll be referencing their product for the rest of this post (but the same types of goals and events are important regardless of the platform you use).

Even though the emphasis is on sales, it’s important to measure micro conversions that happen at your store. These are actions taking place on your website by potential customers that signal interest in your products.

They might not be ready to buy yet but you’ve got their attention and they took one of these actions…

• Account signup
• Newsletter signup
• Time on site (5 minutes or more)
• Viewed a product page or “added to cart”
• Live Chat sessions
• Contact form submission
• Downloaded an ebook or file
• Watched a video
• Conducted a search on your site

Micro conversions can be tracked in several ways.

You can set most of these as goals and/or events in Google Analytics. This way, you’ll be able to run various reports with segments for demographics, locations, devices, traffic source, campaigns or landing pages and see which goals and events are being triggered, how often and then focus on activities that lead to sales.

Interested in learning more? Want a free initial consultation or audit?

Reach out to us on our contact form and we’ll be happy to give you a free audit on your campaigns. Adfluent is a Google Partner, which means we meet all the criteria (certifications, volume and best practices) and we have access to a Google Rep to make sure we have an extra set of internal eyes to maximise success.

The post Benefits of Paid Search Campaigns: Should I Throw Money Into Google Ads? appeared first on Adfluent.

Most interactions that are tracked on your site can be broken down into one of these 4 goal types:

• Destination Goals – allows you to track when visitors reach a particular page or set of pages on your website. For example, when visitors reach “thank you,” “order completed,” or “add to cart” pages.
  Setup level: easy

• Duration Goals – typically used to track heavily engaged users who spend above average time lots browsing/researching on your site. For example, you can set a goal to track how many users spend 5 minutes on your site (when the average user might be 2 minutes).
  Setup level: easy
• Page/Visit Goals – instead of tracking how much time visitors spend on your website, this goal tracks the number of pages each visitor looks at before they leave your site. This is great for measuring engagement, as the more pages a user is hitting, the more likely they are interested in your products.
  Setup level: easy
• Event Goals – allow you to track when visitors perform an action on your site such as watching a video or live chat session, downloading a file or completing a form (when designation URL doesn’t work).
  Events are found in the Behavior Report under “Events”. You’ll need to setup the actual event in GA first which requires additional event specific GA code after the action is completed. Then once the event is created you can make that event a goal. More on that here.
  Setup level: advanced

Goals (once setup in Google Analytics) will automatically appear in the conversion column and you can choose in the dropdown “all goals” or the specific goal you want details for. Note: You are currently only allowed to setup 20 different goals per view which should be enough for even the most savvy e-commerce store. 

The above goals are best for tracking non-monetary goals on your site (micro conversions). For e-commerce business, Google Analytics also offers the ability to measure revenue from all your transactions. To enable this functionality, it requires you to add e-commerce tracking code to your website and enable it in your Google Analytics e-commerce Settings.

Once this is done, e-commerce conversions, conversion rates and revenue will automatically appear in the conversion section on key reports.

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