Digital Tech Trends 2018

Technological Advances and Digital Marketing in 2018

Introduction The constant flow of technological progress means that digital marketing is always evolving to keep up. Today’s digital marketing tactics look completely different than they did five years ago – and it is likely they will look completely outdated by the time another 5 years go by. But for now, here’s how technology is currently impacting digital marketing – and what you have to do to keep up with the times. Forbes  has suggested a new term, known as Digital Marketing 4.0. The prior framework includes website traffic, email campaigns, digital advertisements, basic social media management and basic blog publishing. It only focuses on increasing visits to websites but has no focus on lead conversion and proper online lead qualification.  
  This most recent trends, though, include: Integrated Global Marketing: Inbound and outbound marketing should now be combined. In comparison to cold-calling, consider this "warm-calling." For instance, after someone reads a blog article on your website, follow it up with an email sharing more meaningful content. Omnichannel Marketing Strategy: This includes deep analytics and data mining, such as AI and machine learning. Omnichannel marketing brings a diversity in mediums when it comes to communicating your brand and value-add. Focusing only on one medium can be limiting, especially if your buyers don't exist on that channel. A Comprehensive Marketing Technology Integration: No one software tool can save the day. Marketing is not about the creative aspect alone anymore. Marketing technology infrastructure needs to be designed and integrated correctly. One social media tool alone will not save the day, nor will one CRM tool be the solution to a challenge anymore. Consider your full stack and how it can work together. Instant is the New Speed Gone are the days when web pages took 5 seconds or more to load. Technology and connection speeds have progressed to a point where everything is expected to be instantly available on-demand. To the younger generations especially, to be constantly connected to instant information is the norm. And, as they move up to fill more of the buying market, businesses will need to cater to diminishing attention spans to ensure they don’t miss out. Engage IT personnel to work on streamlining your website load speed and run frequent tests to ensure it falls within an acceptable range to avoid a high bounce rate. If you put out any content or communications, ensure they get to the point quickly to keep users engaged. Lastly, you can make use of the numerous “Live” channel features on social media to interact with your consumer base in an on-demand fashion.

Mobile Devices Take Over

According to BonsaiMediaGroup.com, with the mobile-first index due out on in early 2018, it’s no longer just competitive advantage to have a mobile-friendly, responsive site. Without the proper precautions and set up, your rankings and your business are sure to suffer. Over 60% of search is now mobile, and nearly 20% of mobile queries are voice searches, which means that your site needs to be mobile-friendly from both a search engines and a user’s perspective. Nowadays, the prevailing use of mobile devices is becoming a common trend. Search engines, social media  networks, online shopping websites, books, movies, and any sort of information are accessed with the use of smartphones, rather than desktops. Think about yourself: how often do you use your phone compared to PC? Yes, you get my point. Google is observing the rising number of mobile search enquiries since 2015, and now it is time to make changes. 2018 is announced to be a year, when Google will officially start to rank and index web pages based on mobile experience and its content, while desktop version will be a less influencing factor. You can find more information about Google Mobile Index in our article.  
    Smart phone evolution, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and ever-increasing data allowances mean that people are constantly ‘plugged in’ and ready to receive information. 65% of all digital media time is spent on mobile devices – and yet, all too often mobile optimization is overlooked as a priority. Ensure your IT personnel are well-versed with mobile optimization in terms of design, as well as functionality and always test your website on various mobile devices (of different resolutions, screen sizes, display settings, and so on) to make sure that it looks good and is easy to use. Besides your website, don’t forget to mobile optimize the other communications you put out – whether it be ads, emails, articles, and so on. Who knows – as time goes on and mobile dependency gets higher, it is possible that the new norm will be to design for mobile, then optimize for desktop. From mobile-optimized pages to tailored mobile advertising, creating dedicated mobile marketing may seem time and resource-intensive, but it is an extremely worthwhile investment in 2018.

More Reliance on Artificial Intelligence

According to Mobilebusinessinsights.com, driving digital transformation is much more than managing the creation of a minimum viable product. The solution must also have the agility to support innovation going forward.\ The MarketingScope.com states that AI was in the headlines across business disciplines in 2018, from supply chain planning and finance to production and, of course, marketing. Average daily searches for the term doubled from January to December 2017, according to Google Trends. It’s not a tool itself, but AI technology is being applied to marketing tools like ad serving to help target ads more effectively; marketing automation software to personalize content; and analytics tools to find patterns at a speed and scale humans can’t match.  
  Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing every day to better understand human behaviors, interests, and thought processes. This is a benefit to both users and marketers, as AI is able to segment large audiences based on their characteristics and show them content that is relevant. On the user side, AI acts as a filter towards the huge amount of information out there, selecting and curating an experience for each individual according to their interest and behaviors. On the side of the digital marketers, AI is used to save costs by ensuring that marketing materials are shown only to the people most likely to be interested. Thus, in all your online marketing channels, make sure you are making full use of the AI available to segment your audiences and show them the most relevant content – whether it be based on their interests or by where they are in their journey through the buying cycle. This will enable you to meet their needs in a much more relevant and engaging way – a win-win outcome!

Conclusion

The evolution of technology is changing the way we form a digital marketing strategy. This creates a growing challenge for industry professionals to keep up with evolving trends, as well as find the best way to incorporate them into their marketing plan. Inspireinfosol.com states marketing is no more people-only driven, it is equally driven by technology. Having mentioned that, we support marketing function teams with technology that will ease analytics, provides insights, implements automation, lead generation, conversion optimization and branding. With marketing you would need help in either creating a digital collateral, system integration, implementation or analytics. The recent development in the marketing technology space is to be able to find the right resources for your business, network with and execute task-driven projects. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

SEO BACKLINKING

SEO TIPS | LET’S TALK ABOUT BACKLINKING

Importance of SEO for businesses

With businesses that are ranking high organically, consumers and website visitors know that they have not just paid to be there like the businesses in the ad spots above them. They know that you are more likely to provide the solution that they are desperately searching for. Thus, SEO can be considered as one of the tools for earning customer trust and loyalty. The goal of any search engine (Google, Bing and others) is to deliver unbiased results that provide information you are looking for as quickly and as accurately as possible. In order to do this, search engines are capable of identifying all relevant information online and ranking them in order of their quality and relevance. Thousands of factors are involved when search engines rank sites in an organic search. Amazingly enough, they can analyze billions of pieces of data in as fast as a half of a second! The actions you take in order to optimize your website will have a direct effect on your SEO ranking. Components, such as H1 tags, the keywords used in your website meta description, content and keyword density, permalinks, and backlinks are some of many things that you can leverage to boost your ranking. Today we will have a closer look at backlinking and the effective strategies for your SEO activities.

What is Backlinking?

According to Scrunch, a backlink is the term used for a link that points to your website, whether it be to the homepage, a product page or another page. A backlink can come from your onsite blog, or it could be from an offsite destination, such as a blog, business directory, news website or industry resource.  
  Search engines, such as Google use search spiders to index all websites based on the quality of backlinks they have. When you build backlinks of a good quality, you drive more quality traffic to your website. As a result, you become more relevant in search queries and get higher ranking on SERPs. It is important to keep in mind that when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site.

Quality Matters

A quality backlink originates from the relevant authoritative domains in your niche. If the site linking to your website has a high Domain Authority (DA) and has similar unique content, your backlink will be good for SEO. As mentioned by Seohermit, Google wants to see links coming from high-quality sites that are associated with the outbound link given. Therefore, if you have a link from a completely unrelated site, it won’t be as valuable as a link from the related website. For instance, if you are a carpet cleaning company and you are getting links from an internet forum about TVs, something would seem wrong and ‘unnatural’ to the search engines. Why would a forum discussing TVs want to link to your carpet cleaning company? It doesn’t make sense to users and it will not make sense to the search engines either.  
  Another factor to consider is diversity. Google likes to see lots of links, but not lots of links from the same domain. For example, if a website has 1,000 incoming links, but all originate from the same domain, those links will not improve the website’s rank as much as 1,000 links from 50 domains. Diversity is the key. Google is looking for lots of links that stem from many different domains, but even still, quality will outrank quantity every time.

Important Tips to Remember

You have to give websites a good reason to link to your posts. Relevant, authoritative, engaging and most importantly, unique content forms the backdrop of all inbound linking activities. Carefully go through your current website and develop a list of your most-read content and keyword phrases that bring in the highest website traffic level. You will use these as a springboard for your upcoming backlink development efforts. Guest posts enable you to add natural backlinks to your website from a wide range of sites. It takes time to develop quality content for other sites, so acquire good writing skills before preparing guest posts. Don’t repurpose existing content or use duplicate content; that can hurt both your SEO efforts and the website you are targeting.  
  In addition, the rising trend observed in backlinking practices is the use of Q&A websites for posting. Why? Nowadays, we can clearly see that there is a significant increase in the search volume of question queries, while at the same time a slight decrease in the search volume of generic primary keywords. Search engines have essentially become answer engines. Their job is no longer resource discovery, but rather to answer users' questions. Another evidence for this phenomenon, can be found in the fact that the traffic to QA and "how to" sites has been dramatically on the rise in the last 5 year. Using Compete comparison, we can see the yearly change among some of these sites (unique visitors):  
  Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. Few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there. Google has learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a crucial element to SEO success. The last but not the least, it is important to pay attention to your anchor text. While including targeted keywords in the anchor text of links to your company website can help improve your search rankings that does not necessarily mean that you should include as many keywords as possible or place these links on sites or pages where they do not make sense. Please make sure these links are used in a way that is relevant to the content of the pages that are linking to your website, and use natural language rather than random phrases built around keywords you want to target. Besides, speed of acquisition matters. You can’t suddenly have a thousand of backlinks appearing overnight. It will make search engines suspicious. Getting a thousand backlinks can only be possible if you bought them and Google will penalize you for trying to trick them.

Conclusion

The well-thought-out SEO strategy in general, and backlinking strategy in particular, has a huge impact on the brand visibility in the online space. According to statistics, it takes 5-7 brand impressions before someone will remember your brand. SEO is a direct driver of improved visibility and impressions in the search engine results. Websites that appear higher in the search results are viewed as more trustworthy and credible. In fact 98% of all searchers choose a business that is listed on Page 1 of the results. Improved brand awareness, business credibility, customer trust and loyalty are just few out of many benefits SEO provides for your business! SEO rewards your business for your efforts at a higher rate than all traditional forms of offline advertising — the same can be said for almost all types of internet marketing. The reason is because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, i.e., it allows you to market to people when they are looking for the products and services your business provides. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with search engine optimization (SEO) ? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article! With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

SNAPCHAT VS INSTAGRAM

THE Battle of Social Media Giants | SNAPCHAT VS INSTAGRAM STORIES

Snapchat is a one-to-one and group messaging application that lets users send photo, video, and text messages that disappear after few seconds. Roughly more than 150 million people use Snapchat daily, and consumption is around 800 hours of video per second. In addition to its messaging features, Snapchat features Stories (photo or video messages that can be replayed within 24 hours), as well as Memories, which refer to saved photos, and stickers to ‘design’ messages. The app has been widely adopted, especially among teenagers and millennials, where 26% of people surveyed between the ages of 12 and 24 said they used Snapchat the most.  
  Snapchat was created in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. The app was created when they were studying at Stanford University, with Spiegel presented the app as a part of a project for his product design class. It was initially launched as Picaboo, but it was rebranded as Snapchat just a few months later. However, recently Facebook announced that Instagram Stories surpassed its competition by acquiring 250 million daily active users within a year since its launch. That's roughly 50% of Instagram's total number of daily active users accessing the application. The Stories feature, which allows users to share photos with their followers, is up to 500 million daily users. Snapchat pioneered the photo stories model and reported 191 million daily active users for the first quarter of 2018, according to Snap's most recent quarterly report.  
  In addition, 11 out of 12 top social media influencers posted more Instagram stories than on Snapchat. Here’s are infographic by Mediakix that shows the number of average stories they produce per day:  
  According to Hubspot.com, Instagram wins big-time when it comes to numbers alone. With 500 million daily active users, Instagram has an audience almost three times larger than Snapchat’s. But quantity isn’t the only thing that matters here: 45% of Snapchat users are between the ages of 18-24, and that group spends an average of 40 minutes per day on Snapchat -- which is more time than they spend on Instagram. Almost half of Snapchat users aren’t even on Instagram. If you intend to target a young demographic, Snapchat might have a more ideal audience for your business. Instagram, on the other hand, generally caters to an older demographic: 59% of all internet users between the ages of 18-29 use Instagram, and 33% of internet users between the ages of 30-49 use it. If your ideal audience is an older demographic, or if you haven’t fully established your brand and want to reach as many people as possible, Instagram might be a better long-term fit. However… In terms of filters, Snapchat is undoubtedly a leader. Although Instagram has tried to create nearly identical filters to Snapchat on Instagram Stories, Snapchat’s filters are still unbeatable and undoubtedly, more popular. Snapchat is especially unique when it comes to filter animations: if you use the dog filter on Snapchat, you don’t just look like a dog, you also move like one. Mic.com supports the perspective that Snapchat’s filters are better: “Snapchat has a lot more filter choices but Instagram offers a few of the same. For instance, the photo-sharing app has its own variation of the "flower crown" filter but it pales in comparison to Snapchat's.” Snapchat also offers augmented reality effects, something currently unmatched by Instagram. For instance, you can put dancing hot dogs in your pictures and videos of the real world.

Advertising for Businesses | Comparison

According to a new report, brands are uploading to Instagram Stories more than twice as often as they are on Snapchat. “As Instagram becomes the mainstream choice for brand Stories, Snapchat risks being niche-ified,” wrote L2 in the report. Snapchat has repeatedly stated that it's focus is on helping users maintain relationships with friends over marketing or influencer content, while Instagram, too, is adding new features that cater to greater privacy. Snapchat has been under fire from Instagram for more than a year, as the Facebook-owned app has steadily ripped off Snapchat’s features while increasing its users thanks to support and targeting tools from Facebook’s ecosystem. As regards to cost, according to Digiday.com, buyers say Instagram Stories is about $3 to $4 CPMs, and completion rates are between two and three times higher on Instagram than Snapchat. “Instagram is a more compelling story to online advertisers, because it is connected to the larger Facebook ecosystem,” said Jill Sherman, SVP of social media at DigitasLBi. “It provides a more seamless opportunity for brands”, as was mentioned in Business Insider. Snapchat has widely rolled out the Snapchat Ad Manager, with a unified dashboard for metrics, choosing objectives, targeting and mobile monitoring.  
  On the targeting front, Snapchat offers over 500 audience segments to help unlock the most value for advertisers, and also has several partnerships. It has one with Oracle Data Cloud for ad relevance based on offline purchases, for instance. At the same time, the Instagram Stories feature offers a fantastic opportunity to engage with your audience more flexibly and outsmart the ongoing changes to their algorithm. There are so many benefits to giving it a go – why not try it out for your business? Those features include the tools for drawing, placing stickers, adding augmented reality filters, etc.  
  Besides, nowadays businesses are widely taking advantage of Instagram Live feature. Awario states that If you're brave and prepared enough to go Live, you can use that to support your Stories. It is comparatively more interactive and more spontaneous. There is a big advantage to go live as your followers get notifications when that happens (unless they have turned the notifications off). You can also upload your Live Stream as an Instagram Story as soon as it's finished. You have to be prepared to go live, and if your audience is large, you have to also be prepared for almost anything. Here're some ideas for you in case you want to try one of the following ideas: (1) run a contest or invite your audience to bet on an outcome; (2) host a Q&A or AMA (Ask Me Anything); (3) cover an event or share an interesting moment; (4) host a talk show. The point of both Instagram Stories and Instagram Live is to produce raw content that feels more authentic and more personal. If your goal is to build an image of your brand that is down-to-earth, interactive, human - that's the space for you to try out. Besides, DMN also reports that Snapchat works with several measurement solution providers, like Nielsen and Millward Brown, to track metrics like viewability, reach, resonance, and reaction (i.e. sales lift). However, Velasco says it is still “very difficult” for other vendors to provide clients with Snapchat performance analytics. Instagram, however, can leverage Facebook's reporting capabilities and offer deeper insights on its followers' demographics and post/Stories engagement.

Conclusion

Social media is becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, which provides incredible benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. One of the main advantages of social media for businesses is that it enables you to interact with your potential and existing customers. Social networks provide the opportunity to start a conversation with your consumers and deliver the right marketing message to the right individual. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Social Media Marketing ? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!  

With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

SEO BACKLINKING

SEO TIPS | LET’S TALK ABOUT BACKLINKING

  Importance of SEO for businesses
With businesses that are ranking high organically, consumers and website visitors know that they have not just paid to be there like the businesses in the ad spots above them. They know that you are more likely to provide the solution that they are desperately searching for. Thus, SEO can be considered as one of the tools for earning customer trust and loyalty. The goal of any search engine (Google, Bing and others) is to deliver unbiased results that provide information you are looking for as quickly and as accurately as possible. In order to do this, search engines are capable of identifying all relevant information online and ranking them in order of their quality and relevance. Thousands of factors are involved when search engines rank sites in an organic search. Amazingly enough, they can analyze billions of pieces of data in as fast as a half of a second! The actions you take in order to optimize your website will have a direct effect on your SEO ranking. Components, such as H1 tags, the keywords used in your website meta description, content and keyword density, permalinks, and backlinks are some of many things that you can leverage to boost your ranking. Today we will have a closer look at backlinking and the effective strategies for your SEO activities.

What is Backlinking?

According to Scrunch, a backlink is the term used for a link that points to your website, whether it be to the homepage, a product page or another page. A backlink can come from your onsite blog, or it could be from an offsite destination, such as a blog, business directory, news website or industry resource.  
  Search engines, such as Google use search spiders to index all websites based on the quality of backlinks they have. When you build backlinks of a good quality, you drive more quality traffic to your website. As a result, you become more relevant in search queries and get higher ranking on SERPs. It is important to keep in mind that when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site.

Quality Matters

A quality backlink originates from the relevant authoritative domains in your niche. If the site linking to your website has a high Domain Authority (DA) and has similar unique content, your backlink will be good for SEO. As mentioned by Seohermit, Google wants to see links coming from high-quality sites that are associated with the outbound link given. Therefore, if you have a link from a completely unrelated site, it won’t be as valuable as a link from the related website. For instance, if you are a carpet cleaning company and you are getting links from an internet forum about TVs, something would seem wrong and ‘unnatural’ to the search engines. Why would a forum discussing TVs want to link to your carpet cleaning company? It doesn’t make sense to users and it will not make sense to the search engines either.  
  Another factor to consider is diversity. Google likes to see lots of links, but not lots of links from the same domain. For example, if a website has 1,000 incoming links, but all originate from the same domain, those links will not improve the website’s rank as much as 1,000 links from 50 domains. Diversity is the key. Google is looking for lots of links that stem from many different domains, but even still, quality will outrank quantity every time.

Important Tips to Remember

You have to give websites a good reason to link to your posts. Relevant, authoritative, engaging and most importantly, unique content forms the backdrop of all inbound linking activities. Carefully go through your current website and develop a list of your most-read content and keyword phrases that bring in the highest website traffic level. You will use these as a springboard for your upcoming backlink development efforts. Guest posts enable you to add natural backlinks to your website from a wide range of sites. It takes time to develop quality content for other sites, so acquire good writing skills before preparing guest posts. Don’t repurpose existing content or use duplicate content; that can hurt both your SEO efforts and the website you are targeting.  
  In addition, the rising trend observed in backlinking practices is the use of Q&A websites for posting. Why? Nowadays, we can clearly see that there is a significant increase in the search volume of question queries, while at the same time a slight decrease in the search volume of generic primary keywords. Search engines have essentially become answer engines. Their job is no longer resource discovery, but rather to answer users' questions. Another evidence for this phenomenon, can be found in the fact that the traffic to QA and "how to" sites has been dramatically on the rise in the last 5 year. Using Compete comparison, we can see the yearly change among some of these sites (unique visitors):  
  Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. Few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there. Google has learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a crucial element to SEO success. The last but not the least, it is important to pay attention to your anchor text. While including targeted keywords in the anchor text of links to your company website can help improve your search rankings that does not necessarily mean that you should include as many keywords as possible or place these links on sites or pages where they do not make sense. Please make sure these links are used in a way that is relevant to the content of the pages that are linking to your website, and use natural language rather than random phrases built around keywords you want to target. Besides, speed of acquisition matters. You can’t suddenly have a thousand of backlinks appearing overnight. It will make search engines suspicious. Getting a thousand backlinks can only be possible if you bought them and Google will penalize you for trying to trick them.

Conclusion

The well-thought-out SEO strategy in general, and backlinking strategy in particular, has a huge impact on the brand visibility in the online space. According to statistics, it takes 5-7 brand impressions before someone will remember your brand. SEO is a direct driver of improved visibility and impressions in the search engine results. Websites that appear higher in the search results are viewed as more trustworthy and credible. In fact 98% of all searchers choose a business that is listed on Page 1 of the results. Improved brand awareness, business credibility, customer trust and loyalty are just few out of many benefits SEO provides for your business! SEO rewards your business for your efforts at a higher rate than all traditional forms of offline advertising — the same can be said for almost all types of internet marketing. The reason is because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, i.e., it allows you to market to people when they are looking for the products and services your business provides. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with search engine optimization (SEO) ? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article! With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

Your perfect PPC ad

Secrets behind your perfect PPC ad text

Launching a new Google AdWords search campaign is an exhilarating process. Excitement, anxiety, fear, and hope are emotions that come to mind when a person is going to click the ‘Enable’ button on a new campaign. Undoubtedly, you will be learning from your personal experience when your first campaign starts, however, Blueninja.io is willing to help you by providing few useful tips – how to prepare successful ad text for your Google Adwords campaign!

 

Most important messaging is in headlines

Even though new 80-character description is by far the largest field in the new expanded text ads, they still command the least attention. The messaging of the two headlines of your expanded text ad are the most impactful in improving the CTR of your ads. Therefore, you need to invest sufficient effort and time to develop headlines winning the heart of your potential clients. Developing the right headlines and description requires conducting a research of keywords that are of the highest demand among your targeted audience.

Make an in-depth research

The first ingredient of the successful text ad is customer demand. If your customers are not searching for your product or service in Google, then obviously, paid AdWords search advertising is not going to work for you. So, before you get too excited about creating your very first campaign, you need to verify there is in fact search volume (appears in Google Adwords top searches) for what you’re going to offer to your targeted audience.


The tool that is essential to use is the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool. The keyword tool acts much like a thesaurus. You enter in phrases you think your prospects are searching, and Google tells you other similar, relevant phrases. Google also will tell you how often people search these phrases, how competitive the keywords are in Google AdWords, and how much it’ll cost to advertise on each keyword. All of this information will help you determine which keywords you want to use in your first campaign. Before you start using the tool, make sure the Advanced Options are set. If you’re in Malaysia, then set the Location to Malaysia and set the Language to English/Malay. The Device should default to desktops and laptops, which is what you want unless you’re targeting only mobile devices.

Keep ad copy simple

When starting with AdWords ad copy, keep it simple and direct, making it easier to go down initially—especially for bottom of the funnel queries where someone already has urgency and is expressing strong purchasing intent. The more complicated the content of your ad is, the more difficult it is to reach your targeted audience. You need to have a good knowledge of who your customers are, what they prefer and how their attention can be attracted.

Include call to action

Many advertisers forget to include a call to action in their digital marketing ad campaigns. Having a good call to action can increase your CTR and also increase your campaigns effectiveness. A user needs to know where he will be redirected, if he clicks on the advertisement link. He is already in a page full of related links that he was searching for and you are just one of them. So if you are going to take him away from this great page, you will have to make sure that he knows what he will get from your page. For instance, if a searcher is thinking of getting auto insurance, he needs to go to a destination where he can straight away get what he needs, an insurance quote. He doesn’t want to end up on a website, where they will give him insurance tips, articles etc. Below are some live examples of call to actions that some advertisers are using:


The first example on the left is an ad for auto Insurance. The call to action is very loud and clear – If you click on the ad, you will get a rate/quote in less than 8 minutes! It sounds convincing right? Now let’s look at the ad on the right, its call to action is to Book online for huge savings. Thus a searcher already has an idea (+expectation) from that website even before clicking on them.

Use numbers in your headline

 

  You’ll see numbers a lot in successful pay-per-click Google AdWords ads. They make the ads stand out visually by breaking up blocks of words/letters. They also add some specificity to the ads, in this case the $49 price, the 100% money back guarantee and the fact that the logos are 100% custom made. This lets people know exactly what they’re getting and, especially when you include a price, can reduce clicks from those who aren’t a good fit for your business.

Localize your ad text

 

 According to Dr. Nitish Singh, Associate Professor of International Business at Saint Louis University, to successfully compete in today’s global economy organizations must adapt—or localize—website and digital media content to clearly resonate with  their international audiences. “From a broad marketing perspective,” says Singh, “localization basically means adapting market offerings to best meet end-user expectations.” Expectations may vary by region and industry but they can typically be broken down into two categories: cultural and functional. Some examples of cultural content include:

• Colors, shapes, sizes, styles
• Images, icons, graphics
• Societal codes; i.e. humor, etiquette, rituals, myths, symbols
• Societal values, power, relationships, beliefs

Some examples of functional content include:

• Date and time formats, telephone numbers, contact information
• Weights, measurements, geographical references
• Language and linguistic content; product descriptions, reviews

Use relevant extensions

Here we will focus on one of the mostly-used ad extensions offered by Google Adwords ads manager, known as call extensions. Below you can see Desktop view and Mobile view of the MicrosoftStore ad with call

 

  There are a number of reasons to use call extensions as you attempt to drive more calls for your business.

• The ease of the ‘click to call’ button saves the searcher time and effort while helping businesses attract potential
• You can count calls as conversions within Google AdWords and see call reporting data when using a Google forwarding
• They make the ad stand out among others in the search engine results. Call extensions can increase clickthrough rates by 6-8%.
• They don’t cost any extra money–clicks from call extensions are billed on the same cost-per-click model as traditional ad

Few useful tips for using call extensions: If you are a local business, using both call extensions and location extensions is highly recommended. When you use both, Google will display the address from the location extension and phone number from the call extension together. Also, don’t forget to monitor performance! If using the Google forwarding number, track the performance of the call conversions and analyze the data to improve your campaigns. In the end, call extensions are a great way to boost performance. They are simple to implement and are a great way to better understand the behavior of your potential leads. If driving calls is an important goal for your business, setting up call extensions is a simple way to add value.

Conclusion

When launching your first PPC Google Adwords campaign, devote sufficient time and effort to develop an ad text that will serve as a magnet for your targeted audience. Ensure that your key messaging lies within your headlines, keeping it simple but attractive at the same time. Besides, it is important to localize your ad content to different locations if you are targeting different regions. Call to action is a helpful tool to motivate users to click on your ad. Another useful feature provided by Google Adwords is the various types of extensions, where call extensions and location extensions are the most favourite among digital marketers and SEM (search engine marketing) specialists. Are you planning to advertise your business online? Call Blueninja.io for assistance. Let us show you how Google Adwords can help your business! Our search engine opitimization (seo), search engine marketing (sem) and social media marketing (smm) services will help you to be on the first page of Google Search and social media network newsfeed! We are looking forward to meet you!