Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Jimmy Daly, the Marketing Director at Animalz, a content marketing agency.
Tune in to hear why Jimmy believes the hub-and-spoke model is the most effective for driving traffic and boosting content engagement, how Animalz uses content marketing as their main source for leads and where most companies are missing the mark with content marketing.
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Hey everyone! Today I share the mic with Dr. Darshan Shah, Founder and CEO of Next Health, a company aiming to help clients with optimization and longevity in their lives using the latest tools and technology.
Tune in to hear Dr. Shah explain what ‘brain fog’ is plus how to recognize it, how he’s planning on turning the medical model on its head and share advice on how young medical professionals can scale their businesses.
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Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Matthew Woodward, SEO expert and owner of a successful SEO blog.
Tune in to hear Matthew analyze Google’s algorithm, how his blog gets 60,000 visits a month and how he was able to more than double his click-through rate using his Google search ranking strategy.
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Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners, a strategic conversion rate optimization agency.Time-Stamped Show Notes:
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Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Tyson Quick, the CEO of Instapage, which turns your ad clicks into conversions by providing an end-to-end solution for optimizing post click experiences at scale.
Tune in to hear Tyson discuss how Instapage was founded based off a common problem they faced, how the company figured out how to improve ad conversion rates and why serving to a larger market might benefit your company.
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Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Peep Laja, founder of CXL, the knowledge leader in the optimization space.
Listen as Peep discusses how CXL began as a blog and turned into an agency, how they increased the readership of their blog to 300K per month, the secret to getting an 80% qualified leads rate, why building your email list should be top priority, and how switching from pre-recorded videos to live courses jacked up participation rates by 600%.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Peep Laja On How CXL Captures 150-200 Emails/Day & Generates 100 Agency Leads/Month TRANSCRIPT
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This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition. Most Internet marketers focus on things like blogging, SEO, AdWords or Facebook ads to drive traffic to their site. But many of them completely forget about the second biggest search engine: YouTube. If you approach it the right way, you can reap the benefits of both video marketing and higher search engine rankings, which ultimately results in more awareness at the top of the funnel.
Video is quickly emerging as one of the top mediums of choice for marketers, and with good reason—it’s easily digestible. Consider these facts:
Learn More: The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing In this post, we’ll talk about how to optimize your YouTube videos to attract more prospects at the top of the funnel by improving your SEO rankings. There are two ways you can grow your YouTube SEO. The first is by improving your search rankings within YouTube itself, and the other is by getting your YouTube video to rank high in Google.
Before you can start ranking your videos, you need to figure out which search terms you want to rank for. When searching for YouTube SEO keywords, make sure that you choose a search term that already has YouTube video results on the first page of Google. 
Some keywords, such as “Content Strategy” for example, don’t have YouTube videos that show up in the SERPs. Google provides video results for the following search terms:
By making sure that you choose a search term that actually results in YouTube videos showing up in the SERPs, you can work your way towards getting your video ranked in Google search and not just YouTube search. KeywordTool.io is a tool you can use to quickly generate YouTube-specific keyword ideas. You can search for any of the types of keywords that result in YouTube videos being displayed on the front page of Google to see what people are looking for. 
If you don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription, you can copy and paste the keywords into Google’s Keyword Planner to check your search volume. Your target keyword should get at least 300 searches per month to ensure that it gets a decent amount of searches within YouTube in addition to Google. Free Bonus Download: Get ready to receive the perfect accompaniment to YouTube SEO with this detailed guide on YouTube video advertising! Click here to download it free.
Once you find the right keywords to rank for, the next step is actually creating your video. Because YouTube users come to this platform with the purpose of watching videos, production quality becomes a lot more important. You’ll need a few key elements when it comes to producing great YouTube videos:
Learn More: How to Craft a High Converting Explainer Video Storytelling Good storytelling is what’s missing from many online videos. Some businesses believe that their services or products are too “boring” for them to be able to tell interesting stories about them on video, but with a little creativity, you’ll always be able to create interesting content for a dry product or business. Check out this 1-minute video:
Remember when you were in school? You probably had a teacher who made even the most dull subject seem captivating. It just depends on how you tell the story. Editing Editing is one the the most frustrating, time-consuming parts of video production, but it’s also the most important because this is what really separates the quality videos from the terrible videos. The process of editing can (and should) happen before you even start filming. Once you’ve written your script, you should pare down all the superfluous content that isn’t directly related to the story you want to tell. And then after the video is shot, you’ll take an even more heartless approach (because that’s what it will feel like) to cutting everything out that isn’t necessary. Besides cutting footage out, this is also where you’ll really start to put the story together through pacing, points of view, etc. You can also hire a videographer to do most of the hard work for you. Ultimately, good production quality is about making your video interesting so that more users engage with it. You can’t get a bad video to rank in Google. Composition If you really want to showcase your awesome video creation skills, learn to storyboard your idea. Obviously, the more complex your idea, the more attention you will need to pay to composition (as opposed to just filming a guy standing there talking about his product—but of course, you wouldn’t make a boring video like that, would you?). Storyboarding is a way of visualizing your video before you shoot so as not to waste time and helps you communicate your story in the most compelling way you can. To storyboard like a pro, you need to understand composition, and to understand composition, you should be familiar with the rule of thirds: This “guideline proposes that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.” When you follow these guidelines, it helps to create “more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject.” Just ask Spielberg. 
YouTube uses a few specific criteria to measure the quality of your video. This is the same criteria that’s used to rank your video. The main ones are:
You can track this data on your YouTube analytics page. 
Free Bonus Download: Get ready to receive the perfect accompaniment to YouTube SEO with this detailed guide on YouTube video advertising! Click here to download it free.
There are a few things to keep in mind when optimizing your YouTube video for the best possible SEO ranking.
Whenever you upload an image on your site, it’s usually good practice to include your focus keyword in the image tag. Similarly, when you upload your video on YouTube, you should use your keyword in the filename of the video.
According to Backlinko, the title of your video should be at least 5 words so that you can include your target keyword within a longer phrase. For example, this video called “Advanced SEO Strategy That Gets Results” targets the keywords “advanced SEO.” 
Writing good descriptions are the most important part of increasing your YouTube SEO. Read More: How To Write Blog Posts that Actually Convert Readers into Customers When you write blog posts for your site, Google can crawl through the post to gauge the content quality. But search engines can’t watch videos. That means they lean heavily on the description text to get a feel for what the video’s topic is, what it covers, and how in-depth it is. And the more that YouTube knows about your video and the keywords it covers, the better it can rank you for those keywords. Your video descriptions should be at least 200 words. Here’s an example of a 291-word description of an SEO video by Backlinko: 
This helped the video rank to number one for keywords like “infographic seo strategy.” 
Also, notice how the description above includes the link to the site at the very top. Placing your link at the top of your description helps maximize the number of clicks back to your site, which helps you get more visitors as well as grow your website SEO.
Including the right tags can also help your video rise in the rankings, although tags for YouTube videos tend to be less important than other factors like the description. When it comes to your tags, you should include a few keywords on what your video is about. These tags can help your video get discovered in YouTube’s side bar in the “related videos” section.
Link building is still important when it comes to improving your Google rankings. Encouraging your YouTube video viewers to share your video with their friends shows Google that you’re producing something that people like. Check out this short video by marketing experts Neil Patel and Eric Siu, “Link Building for Better Google Ranking“:
YouTube also uses user experience signals to rank videos within the platform and weighs them heavily. So if people subscribe to your channel after viewing your video, then chances are that you produced some quality content. Having people “like” your videos is another metric that measures user experience, although that has less significance than number of “subscribes.” Free Bonus Download: Get ready to receive the perfect accompaniment to YouTube SEO with this detailed guide on YouTube video advertising! Click here to download it free.
A great way to get more search traffic in YouTube is to group your videos into playlists. By building a keyword-rich playlist, you give YouTube a deeper level of understanding of your video. Once you have at least 10 videos on your channel, you should group them into playlists. As an example, check out how “FitnessBlender” grouped their videos: 
Learn More: Greg Smith Reveals How Thinkific Uses YouTube to Organically Drive $3-4K a Month in Additional Revenue (podcast)
The tactics for getting your video to rank high in search are pretty similar to the tactics you’d use for a blog post. Link building, connecting with the right people, and asking them to share your content, are all important. You can write blog posts on sites like Medium or answer questions on Quora, linking back to your video where appropriate. If you link to your video in response to a Quora question related to what you cover in your video, for example, you’ll be presenting your video in front of an audience that is already searching for an answer. Because you’re sharing your video with a targeted audience, it will help you get a higher retention rate on your videos and a higher subscription rate, which will help grow your rankings. You can also guest post on high-traffic sites in your niche and link back to your YouTube video within that post where appropriate. Links from high-authority sites in your field will let Google know that your video has quality content.
The biggest thing that’s different about how YouTube ranks their content compared to Google lies in the fact that search engines today can’t crawl and analyze the quality of video content. Instead, they rely on video descriptions and user engagement factors to see how well people respond to it. As the Internet gets more and more saturated with content, our ability to process everything decreases. Because of that, we respond to content that’s easily digestible, and video content is easier to digest than a long-form blog post. In fact, according to Cisco, 80% of Internet traffic will come from video by 2019. So getting your videos to rank high in both YouTube and Google is the best way to adapt to these changes. What will you add to your YouTube strategy to increase the ranking of your content? Check out the next post in this YouTube SEO series: 7 SEO Tools for Better YouTube Marketing
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
Let’s begin this post with a short marketing lesson narrated through history.
In 1774 King Frederick II of Prussia, locally known as Old Fritz, issued an order for his subjects to grow and consume potatoes. The King’s subjects, however, were prejudiced against the vegetable.
Instead of convincing them to eat potatoes, he planted a royal field of potato plants and stationed a heavy guard to protect it. The guarded field made people feel that potatoes were precious, because “anything worth guarding is worth stealing.” This led to people breaking into the field and stealing the apparently scarce spuds only to grow fields of their own and reap, sow, and consume the vegetable in abundance.
In the end, King Frederick II got his way.
Letting people know that there is only a limited amount of an object — or a limited time to get it — makes them motivated to get it because soon they won’t be able to. That’s just how the human brain functions. According to Psychology Today, “Scarcity orients the mind automatically and powerfully toward unfulfilled needs.”
Let’s explain how scarcity works for your offer. This is a pop-up promoting Single Grain’s free SEO guide in exchange for your contact details. It’s a limited time offer, and may not be available again:
This is another pop-up that offers free marketing tips in exchange for your e-mail address:
The time limit on the SEO resource lets the visitor know that it is precious. If the visitor doesn’t act now, he or she may not get this chance again. The time constraint inspires visitors to complete the form and enter Single Grain’s marketing funnel.
Using scarcity on your landing pages works to your advantage — you just need to know how to implement the principle on the pages to increase your conversions. This is exactly what we’ll do today.
Let’s begin by defining scarcity.
To understand the role of scarcity in landing page optimization, it’s important we discuss the definition from both the psychological and economics points of view.
In economics, scarcity is defined as “limitations—insufficient resources, goods, or abilities to achieve the desired ends.”
Robert Cialdini defines the principle of scarcity as the desire to want something we’re afraid we can’t have: “Fear of losing out on something can be an extremely powerful motivator.”
This is how the definition combines on your landing pages: When you convince your visitors that your offer has limitations (either in time or quantity), the fear of missing out urges them to click on the call-to-action button.
There are essentially two tactics of implementing the scarcity principle on your offer:
In the following paragraphs, we’re going to discuss how you can use both of these scarcity tactics on your landing pages to generate conversions.
Learn More: How To Create CTAs that Actually Cause Action
Steve Worchel conducted an experiment on the effect of supply and demand when rating the value of an object. Participants were shown two jars, one with ten cookies and the other with two cookies. When participants were allowed to select the cookies they wanted, it was found that the cookies in scarce supply had higher demand because they were more desirable. So, we place more value on things that are less available to us.
When it comes to landing pages, scarcity of quantity can be used by telling your visitors exactly how many discounted items are left before the stock runs out, or how many seats remain in your workshop.
Here’s a Groupon promotion that offers 70% off of thousands of Chicago deals:
The offer also specifies that there are only limited quantities available — letting the visitor know he or she must act now if he wants the discount.
An A/B test case study featured on ConversionXL reported that including scarcity on a landing page almost tripled their conversion rate.
This is variation A:
The page shows a clear discounted price, but the page doesn’t include any elements of scarcity.
Here’s variation B of the landing page:
Not only does the variation include time scarcity (urgency) by letting the visitors know how much time remains to download the bundle, but it also tracks how many bundles have been purchased, and that the bundles are almost gone. Amazon is notorious for using this tactic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
This is what the conversion rate jump looked like for variation B:
You can use scarcity of quantity in your headline, CTA button copy, body copy, and images. If you do, just make sure the quantity you showcase in your ad is the same quantity as on your landing pages.
It’s vital that you establish message match and relevancy between your ad and the corresponding landing page. If your ad headline says 20 items left in stock, your page headline should say the same.
Time is a valuable asset for all of us, so telling visitors that “time is running out” to get something that they need inspires them to make a decision faster. The e-book featured in this article gives some examples of how marketers can write landing page copy that conveys urgency, especially when you highlight the urgency with countdown timers.
We do this on Instapage’s webinar landing page:
The ticking time counter is a great way to persuade visitors that they may not get the opportunity to get this great offer again.
Merlin’s Pest Control home page also showcases urgency with copy:
Not only does the copy instill urgency by telling visitors that if they call by 1 pm, they will get same day service, but the copy next to the phone number tells the visitors to “call today.”
Urgency can be conveyed by using specific terminology such as “final chance,” “last offer” or “don’t miss out.” This is what Cosmopolitan does with their promotion e-mail and landing page.
Here’s a screenshot of the e-mail:
The e-mail subject line proclaims, “Final Notice: Cosmopolitan for $5.” And the e-mail copy follows through by confirming that this is the last chance you’ll get to purchase a 12-month subscription of the magazine for $5.
Read More: 7 Emails to Add to Your Conversion Funnel
And, here’s the landing page connected to the e-mail:
The landing page reinforces the urgency initiated in the e-mail by using words like “hurry,” “order now,” and “last chance” to motivate the visitor to convert on the CTA button.
Free trials are also a way to illustrate urgency on your landing pages. When you make visitors aware that there are just 30 days of a free trial and that they need to sign up now to sample the free account — they are more inclined to do so. The same isn’t true if you announce that your product is free forever, which is what Intercom does.
In contrast, the Moz Pro landing page tells the visitor that they can sample the tool free of charge for 30 days:
Using the word “now” on your landing pages also helps add urgency to your offer because it inspires action. Urgency can be very persuasive for time sensitive campaigns, e.g. Christmas sales or Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. You can also use urgency for special occasion sales, such as a company anniversary promotion.
Finally, Julep used urgency to promote their end-of-season sale by offering up to 85% off on their inventory. The thinking here is that since the discount is so big, that inventory will go fast — and for consumers to “act now” before it’s all gone:
Landing pages with time scarcity and urgency can be very persuasive at getting prospects to click your call-to-action button. However, when implementing scarcity, you must be honest about your offer.
Don’t create artificial scarcity. For example, if there are hundreds of seats remaining for your writing course, don’t lie to visitors that there are “just a few seats left” because when the truth comes out, your credibility will take a hit and you may lose future customers as a result.
Only promote scarce offers with scarcity and you’ll find that your visitors are ready to take advantage of what you’re offering.
This guest post was written by Fahad Muhammad, a Content Marketer at Instapage. He writes about landing page examples, marketing trends, Instapage updates, and conversion psychology on the Instapage blog. When he’s not busy hunting down landing page examples, he can be found glued to an episode of Top Gear.
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
If you are an online retail company, you should be intimately familiar with Google Shopping. Google Shopping was first released as Froogle in 2002 and was a key growth driver of Google advertising revenue before it transitioned over to its current “pay to play” model in mid 2012.
Google Shopping is one of the biggest revenue drivers for both retailers and Google. Its engaging format drives a high click-through rate and qualifies visitors before they visit your site. The advantageous above-the-fold placement grants the valuable possibility of high traffic levels.
Too bad it’s not a secret—the ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending) on these placements are lucrative, so the competition is fierce. The average cost per click has been rapidly increasing ever since its release and it’s only getting worse.
Google has also been testing a “16-pack” of Google Shopping results that will only serve to exacerbate the pain of participating in this cost per click battleground. What’s a ROAS fanatical growth marketer to do?
When CellularOutfitter.com first participated in Google Shopping ads, it was driving a fraction of revenue. As we optimized the campaign structure over hundreds of iterations, we slowly developed a Google Shopping campaign structure that was perfectly optimized for squeezing every last penny of return from your Googlebase feed.
We will outline the structure below in our plan for the Ultimate Google Shopping Restructure.
Elite performance in the Google Shopping auction starts off with the quality and cleanliness of your Googlebase feed. Google will harvest and index your feed and serve up results based on what it deems to be the most appropriate match to the user’s search query. If you have a greater volume of optimized attributes versus your competitors, this will be a key advantage in impression share, cost per click and click-through rates.
Item title: Most e-commerce companies will simply import their product titles into this column. However, savvy paid search marketers know that Google Shopping results will bold any sort of keyword matches to help users find what they are looking for. With this in mind, you can harvest your top search queries in terms of revenue or traffic contribution from your top text ad keywords and start to optimize your product titles for the best visibility and impression share.
You will reap the dual benefits of increased CTR % as users will see more bolded keywords with your title versus the competition’s as well as higher impression share % as Google gets a more exact match to the user’s search query. Optimizing your feed in descending order of revenue contribution also ensures that your business will get the best bang for your buck.
Example: We had a high revenue contribution query of “Galaxy S6 TPU cases” doing well for our text ads. We then modified one of our highest converting products to exhibit this exact keyword in the title and descriptions in order to give this SKU more visibility in the Google Shopping results.
Learn More: The Complete Guide to Gmail Ads (How We Got $.10 CPCs & Leads As Low As $7)
Item description: With the above in mind, do the same thing with your descriptions and ensure that they are keyword rich for a few of the keyword variants that are driving the highest proportion of sales. If you are doing frequent ad rotations (which you should to figure out what type of messaging resonates well with your customer base), you can also incorporate some of those learnings into your product descriptions as well.
Example: When we ran our A/B tests for thousands of ad groups we found out that the “Up to 88% off Retail Prices” gave the highest click-through rate and conversion rates. Subsequently, most of our initial ad copy now has this value proposition and we are incorporating it into our SKU descriptions.
(CTR % over time)
The Googlebase contains a multitude of optional fields, including color, product variants and product sale information. Filling these in will allow users to better narrow their search results within the Google Shopping interface as well as grant the Googlebot better information about your products.
Having these fields appropriately filled in will also give you an edge over your competitors as most retailers are too lazy to fill them in.
Make copious use of the “Google Label” fields. The Google label fields allow you to segment your Googlebase feed into different sections that you can exploit for different optimization techniques. A few use cases I would suggest are:
The default method of setting up the Googlebase feed places an inordinate amount of control in Google’s hands: they decide which SKUs show up for which search query, they decide what is served in what proportion, and you only have a few levers to pull in order to influence performance.
However, the Alpha/Beta structure allows paid search marketers to continually harvest insights about their campaigns and maximize performance while incrementally wrestling control away from Google. As a good rule of thumb, the more draconian you are about controlling your paid search traffic, the better your performance will be.
Let’s explore the Alpha/Beta structure! If we were to map it out, it would look something like this:
First, we need to create a “catch all” campaign and assign it a low bid. This campaign will simply bid on all products in the feed at the lowest acceptable bid possible in order to get a decent amount of impressions.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s pretend that you have a catalog of 500,000 clothing SKUs and you set the bid to .50 CPC. The campaign priority for this campaign will be “Low”—this campaign level setting allows Google to better make sense of how it should deliver Google Shopping traffic if there are multiple Shopping campaigns utilizing the same Googlebase feed.
The goal of this campaign is to:
For your next campaign, we’re going to utilize either your Google custom labels or the Brand/Category columns that are present in your Googlebase in order to better sculpt your traffic. We will continue to go along with our clothing store retailer analogy and start to build out campaigns that represent the next tier of keywords that might present themselves in the sales cycle. For example, a prospective customer might search the following in order to buy a pair of dress socks:
Online clothing store > online clothing store socks > dress socks > men’s dress socks > black men’s dress socks > black Spiderman men’s dress socks
The first layer should be designed to capture search queries in the upper funnel, so a campaign structure might look like this:
And so on and so forth. The categories should have the following attributes:
By adding this layer into your Google Shopping campaign structure, you are effectively sculpting your Google Shopping traffic and will earn the following benefits:
Read More: LeadPages CEO Clay Collins Talks About How To Ramp Up Your Conversion Rates (Up To 75%!) [Podcast]
As your Catch All and First Layer campaigns collect data, they will start to provide enough user-driven insights for you to flesh out the remaining, more specific layers of your Shopping campaign. The eventual goal is to create SKU-specific ad groups that are targeting one ID; this will allow you to get the most granular performance and the best shaping of search queries to SKU IDs.
Example: you decide to click on Dimensions > Search Queries in your “Category – Socks” campaign. You see masses of search queries corresponding to rough subcategories. For simplicity’s sake, let’s vastly simplify some of your findings and assume you gathered enough data for the findings to be significant and that all five groupings have large amounts of traffic:
We now have enough data to add all five subcategories to a new campaign designed for your 2nd Layer in the Alpha/Beta hierarchy. These campaigns will have their serving priority set to “Medium” and have a higher bid than the Catch All or Category campaigns. You might structure the bids this way:
By structuring the bids this way, the profitable search queries catered toward “pink socks,” “men’s socks,” etc. will be funneled toward even more specific ad groups with their own corresponding bids, bid adjustments, negative keywords and promotion text. Performance will continue to rise as the more specific subcategory ad groups continue to gather SKU specific data.
You might be asking yourself: why would we want to bid so high on women’s socks even though the ROI isn’t there? We would want to do this because:
(Wow, terrible performance! Turned out this SKU was not priced appropriately.)
Lastly, once your subcategories start to gather significant amounts of data, you will gain the ability to build the most important piece of the Alpha/Beta structure—your SKU specific campaigns. These campaigns and ad groups will be focused toward individual SKUs that drive the performance of your entire account.
You will enjoy total control over the performance of these SKUs and will be easily able to monitor their performance with a microscope. This campaign will drive highly-defined search queries that sit at the very end of the user’s purchasing funnel. It will also be easy for you to dominate impression share % for high contribution SKUs.
The campaign should have its Priority set to “High” and have the highest bids across your entire slew of Shopping campaigns. This will ensure that AdWords will always show the SKUs you want when you want.
You can build out these ad groups by proceeding to the Dimensions > Product ID breakdown tab in any of your higher hierarchy Shopping ad groups. You will see a complete breakdown of the SKUs along with their performance:
Once you export a list of your top contributors, sort them into the following categories:
As your SKU specific campaigns gather more data, you will start to exhibit dictator-like control over your Shopping campaign traffic. An ideal situation is your generalized “Alpha” campaigns consistently and efficiently directing traffic to the places in the account structure where they can best performance while serving as “miners” looking for golden nuggets—the gold nuggets are SKUs that deserve to be in their own ad group so they can be optimized for even more traffic.
As your negative keyword structure and bids start to further sharpen your traffic stream, a greater proportion of your traffic will be funneled toward the highest ROI ad groups located in your SKU specific campaigns.
In the course of running Google Shopping campaigns for years and spending millions in ad spend, we developed a few novel techniques for further improving the ROI of our Shopping campaigns.
When mining for product IDs to add to our SKU specific campaigns, there are often SKUs that lose money no matter what. Since we don’t have infinite time or the wherewithal to figure out how to make them profitable, we might want to completely exclude them from being served.
However, when excluding product IDs across hundreds of ad groups and campaigns it can be a chore to keep track of the SKUs that you don’t wish to exclude. We wound up playing a frustrating game of “whack of mole” where a SKU excluded from one campaign would simply pop up in another.
We had our developers build a special tool for us—the SKU Exclusion Tool. PPC marketers wishing to exclude a SKU would upload a list in .CSV format. Upon our nightly feed generation, those SKUs would be completely removed from our Googlebase feed. This allowed us to quickly eliminate losing SKUs with 100% certainty and saved countless ad dollars.
Mining search queries amongst all your Shopping campaigns can be a massive endeavor. With the enormous scope of search queries that can crop up in the Search Query dimension, it can be difficult to come up with negative keyword additions that would move the needle.
We found that certain unprofitable terms such as “free” would show up countless times, but they were dispersed amongst thousands of unique search terms. This made it impossible to truly determine the ROI of the word “free.”
We had our developers build a tool that would separate each word in a list of search queries into a separate entity and then pivot all of the KPIs we needed and attach it to each instance. We could then export this list into an Excel file and quickly build a negative keyword list that would save tens of thousands of dollars. The word free might appear in the export like this:
“Free” – Appeared in 15,201 search queries. Contributed 150,304 impressions, 10,521 clicks, $5,260 in ad spend, $217 in revenue.
Once we added “free” and a host of other broad/phrase match negatives to the Shopping campaign, we would immediately save tens of thousands of unprofitable ad spend per month. We would immediately reinvest these dollars in capturing more impression share for the other profitable areas of the Adwords account.
This is a new technique we just started to implement. Export your list of search queries from your Google search campaigns into one Excel file, and export another list of your Shopping campaign search queries into another.
Perform a VLOOKUP and try to find mismatches amongst the files. These represent proven opportunities that you can quickly exploit.
You might find search queries that are performing well for your Shopping campaigns that aren’t added as keywords in your Search campaigns. Adding these search queries as keywords to your Search campaigns will boost your revenue as these proven winners will now start to appear in Google’s search results with greater frequency. You will also appear for both Shopping ad results as well as Search results and capture more impression real estate.
On the other hand, you might have search queries that are performing well for Google Search but are not contributing to your Google Shopping campaigns. For example, some of the below might be huge contributors to our fictional Google Adwords Search campaigns:
If you do carry these products, this would be a great opportunity to go into your Googlebase feed and modify the title, descriptions and attributes of these products to more prominently feature the search queries in question. Once Google starts serving the right products to the right search queries, build them out into their own ad groups and spike up the bid to dominate the impressions for that particular search query tree.
With the Search and Shopping results looking more competitive by the day, aim for granular, hyper optimized to annihilate your competition. For our core search queries, we often have 4-6 products appear in the results which can take up 75-90% of the available Google Shopping impressions.
This case study is a guest post by Edwin Choi, VP of Marketing at Mobovida, a customer-driven, vertically integrated mobile accessory brand delivering fashion forward products direct to consumer.
Let us know your experience with Google Shopping Campaign in the comments section below!
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
Business owners with slow-running and poorly-optimized websites need a serious wake-up call.
Forty percent of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. In 2016, your website might as well not exist if it’s not loading quickly across all platforms, from laptops to smartphones. Fortunately, there’s a solution that can tackle this problem and improve your mobile marketing strategy.
Google recently released a new solution called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which can significantly boost your website speed and make it better optimized for mobile users.
Here’s a guide to help you get started with using AMP.
The AMP project is an open-source initiative created by Google. Its purpose is to improve the experience of mobile users.
Google first announced the new project on October 7, 2015. However, many content marketers still know very little about AMP or are not using it to their advantage. So what is the purpose of AMP, and what are its limitations?
Faster and Better-Optimized Mobile Pages
Optimizing mobile web page speed is crucial for your success. Website bounce rates are significantly higher for pages that take a long time to load. Long loading times also cause conversion rates to plummet—as much as 27% for a 1-second delay—and slow-loading pages rank much lower in the SERPS.
Higher Revenue for Publishers
One of the main purposes of the AMP Project is to allow publishers to scale their revenue. Web pages that load quickly receive more visibility, which means that publishers can earn a lot more in advertising revenue.
Eliminate Dynamic Website Features
The primary downside with AMP pages is that they only work with static content. Static content appears exactly the same every time the page is loaded.
In other words, you can’t use AMP pages for mobile web pages that use geo-targeting or content created with random number generators. This can diminish the user experience on pages that used to allow for more user interactivity.
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AMP pages are very easy to create. You just need to familiarize yourself with the three basic components, which are listed on the AMP project site, and summarized below.
AMP HTML
HTML has been the primary markup language for building websites for over 20 years. This has not changed with the introduction of AMP.
AMP HTML is the open-source code used to create AMP pages. The majority of AMP HTML code is the same as regular HTML. However, there are some special tags that are made specifically for AMP.
Here’s an example of an AMP HTML document that was published on Github:
<!doctype html>
<html ⚡>
<head>
<meta charset=”utf-8″>
<title>Sample document</title>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”./regular-html-version.html”>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,minimum-scale=1,initial-scale=1″>
<style amp-custom>
h1 {color: red}
</style>
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “NewsArticle”,
“headline”: “Article headline”,
“image”: [
“thumbnail1.jpg”
],
“datePublished”: “2015-02-05T08:00:00+08:00”
}
</script>
<script async custom-element=”amp-carousel” src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-carousel-0.1.js”></script>
<style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;-moz-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;-ms-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both}@-webkit-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-moz-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-ms-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-o-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}</style><noscript><style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:none;-moz-animation:none;-ms-animation:none;animation:none}</style></noscript>
<script async src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js”></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Sample document</h1>
<p>
Some text
<amp-img src=sample.jpg width=300 height=300></amp-img>
</p>
<amp-ad width=300 height=250
type=”a9″
data-aax_size=”300×250″
data-aax_pubname=”test123″
data-aax_src=”302″>
</amp-ad>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, the meta, script, body, link, and formatting tags are the same as standard HTML. However, some of the tags used to embed content are different, such as the image and ad tags.
AMP JS
JavaScript plays an important role in modern web design. The AMP Project provides its own open-source JavaScript code called AMP JS.
These scripts are important for increasing web page load speeds. Unfortunately, since AMP can only be used to create static pages, you won’t be able to embed third-party JavaScript in it.
AMP CDN
AMP CDN is a content delivery network built specifically for AMP pages. You don’t need to utilize it to make use of AMP pages, but it can significantly improve the performance of your pages and it allows you to cache them, making them easier to share.
Now that you understand the primary elements of AMP pages, you can start incorporating them into your site. Here’s how to get started:
Be Mindful of Your Content Limitations
Remember that many of the features you’re accustomed to using will not be available on AMP, including:
Despite these limitations, you can still find ways to make your pages engaging, and you can store locally-hosted images with HTML5.
Outline the Structure of Your AMP Pages
Start by creating an outline of your web pages. Despite the speed of AMP page loading, you should still avoid using unnecessarily large images and redundant content that can interfere with loading times.
Create AMP HTML Code
If you’re proficient writing HTML pages, you can learn to create AMP pages pretty quickly. As I said earlier, most of the code is identical to regular HTML.
I recommend following the tutorials on this page from the AMP Project website. Here’s a brief overview:
Start With a Boilerplate Page
Start by copying the code from this page. You can easily modify this page to see how it looks.
There are some key differences between traditional HTML and AMP HTML that you should know before you start editing.
Top-Level Tag
All HTML code requires a top-level tag. In traditional HTML, this is simply the <html> tag, but the top-level tag for AMP HTML is <html amp>.
First Child Tag in the <head> Tag
Make sure the first tag within the head tag is <meta charset=”utf-8″>.
Additional Tags in <head> Tag
The head tag also requires a tag that reads:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,minimum-scale=1″>.
You’ll also need to copy and paste the following:
<style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,and) 0s 1 normal both;-moz-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,and) 0s 1 normal both;-ms-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,and) 0s 1 normal both;animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,and) 0s 1 normal both}@-webkit-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-moz-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-ms-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@-o-keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}@keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}</style><noscript><style amp-boilerplate>body{-webkit-animation:none;-moz-animation:none;-ms-animation:none;animation:none}</style></noscript>
Changing Style and Formatting
Change the formatting of your AMP pages with CSS. The process is pretty much the same, except you need to use the AMP equivalent element for the <style tag>, which is <style amp-custom>. Here are some AMP styling rules to be aware of:
Acclimating to the styling differences is probably the biggest challenge you’ll deal with while building AMP pages, but you’ll get the hang of them pretty quickly.
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Embedding Images With AMP
You can’t use the standard <img> tag to embed images in AMP pages. Instead, use the AMP equivalent tag: <amp-img>. You also need to get used to using a closing tag for your image: </amp-img>.
You won’t need to be as conservative with your images since they’ll load much faster on AMP pages, but that doesn’t mean you should get carried away. They can still reduce performance if you use too many.
Preview Before Building
Of course you should always preview any web page before publishing it to the web, but this takes on particular importance when you’re just getting started creating AMP pages and learning how to get the formatting just right. Either open your page directly in the browser, or use a local server such as Apache to check your work.
You’ll also need to append the following to your link #development=1. Use Chrome DevTools Console to scan for validation errors.
AMP is revolutionizing mobile web page optimization. If you’re building a lot of static pages, then you may want to start transitioning them all to AMP. However, don’t change your dynamic pages unless you’re willing to do without some of the functionality.
Have you started using AMP pages yet? Share your experiences with them by leaving a comment below:
Images: Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube
