Perfecting the SERPs / results returned by Google for a user query on your brand name is an essential part of your digital strategy. Like many of us, you may believe Google shows accurate, consistent and positive information to prospects, investors, partners, clients, journalists, job candidates, readers, subscribers, etc. Who search your brand name. Wrong. Here is how you can take back control!
After 10 years, millions of dollars, thousands of conversions and sales, and endless blog posts that show how I nailed it and crushed my competitors (most of the time), it’s time to go in a different direction and reveal the biggest mistakes I made with Google Ads.
Looking back at my work, I’m pretty happy with the overall results. I worked for several startups in different vectors, but always managed to build a successful PPC strategy that got the company excellent results, usually higher than expected. But of course, things weren’t always perfect, and I made my share of budget-burning mistakes along the way. There are a few things I regret doing, and if I could go back in time I would definitely fix them.
Let’s face it, every digital marketer makes mistakes along the way. One of the key elements of what we do is keep testing things and see what works well for us, and improve or eliminate what’s not. What we need to do is learn from our own and our colleagues’ mistakes, so we don’t repeat them.
Keep reading to learn the biggest mistakes you too might be making with Google ads, and how to avoid them.
Let’s get started.
1. I tried using way too many keywords at once
The very first thing you always do when starting a search campaign is proper keyword research. I won’t go on and on about why and how to conduct keyword research, because that’s a subject for a post of its own. What I will share with you is the biggest mistake I made with it.
I used too many types of keywords for marketing a single product.
I made this mistake at one of the startups I was working for in the past. Our Facebook campaigns were off the charts, getting us results which were much better than expected, and at a price that was way below the industry benchmarks, but as the head of user acquisition at the company I wanted more, and I couldn’t get it with more display campaigns.
So at the same time I was putting a lot of effort into our search campaigns. I knew from the beginning that eventually Google would get us the results we were expecting, but I also knew it would take time to get there, and looking back at it, I held our search campaigns back by trying to use too many keywords at once.
The (wrong) strategy was trying to figure out which search terms were right for us, and in order to discover it I used everything I could come up with.
So why was it wrong?
Using too many keywords also meant having too many ad groups, writing too many ads, and optimizing too many landing pages, which was very time consuming, and mainly distracted me from the keywords that were really important.
It took me a while to understand that some of my campaigns holding specific types of keywords were simply not worth the effort. I discovered that some keywords that seemed relevant to what I was marketing weren’t really as effective as I expected, and no matter how much I tried to optimize them it wasn’t getting me the ROI I was aiming for. To sum it up – I gave some of my keywords way too many chances, and spent way too much time trying to optimize them.
Once I gave up on them, and focused on the keywords that were truly right for me, I was able to give them all my time and attention, and was able to really optimize them. Doing that cut my CPA on Google in half, and enabled me to allocate my entire budget over to the right campaigns and keywords.
So what I’m trying to say here, is that maybe you should choose your battles. Try to focus on the highly relevant keywords, and put your efforts into “winning” them.
2. I gave the GDN too much time and credit
There are so many good things to say about the Google display network. There are endless ways to use it and optimize it. There are so many different targeting methods and ad sizes and types to get creative with. You can have your ads appear almost anywhere across the web and reach millions of people. But honestly, it can be extremely hard to get the GDN to work well for targeting a cold audience, especially compared to other display channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
So what did I do wrong with the GDN?
Believe me, I tried everything – targeting by keywords, interests, similar audiences, affinity and what not. You name it, I tried it. I was even entitled to full support from a dedicated Google team of representatives to handle the huge budget I managed at that time, but even together we simply couldn’t make it work for a cold audience, to enlarge our audience base.
But trying all of this wasn’t the mistake. Everyone should definitely try it out, after all you never know what will work until you’ve tried it, and the fact that it doesn’t work for one brand, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for another.
What I was actually doing wrong was giving it too much credit that it would eventually work even when the CPA was so much higher than all our other marketing channels, and the quality of the users I got was so low. As I see it, I failed to understand that it’s simply not right for everyone, and it was just not a good fit for what I was advertising. I kept trying and trying to make it work, spending thousands of dollars and endless hours doing it, but I never got good results in return.
So how did I fix it?
At some point, I came to realize that I was better off giving up on trying to reach a cold audience with the Google display network, and I simply used it for retargeting only. It worked like magic. I had more time and budget to invest in all the other channels and it helped me to improve the overall results of my entire user acquisition efforts.
3. I used SKAGs right from the beginning
If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know I’m a supporter of SKAGs (single keyword ad groups). Using SKAGs allowed me to create extremely accurate ads and landing pages that perfectly matched the search terms. As you probably already know, the higher the relevancy is, the higher the CTR and conversion rates will be, and the same goes for the quality score, which means you pay less for each click, which leads to a lower CPA, and we can go on and on about it…
So, by now you might ask yourself, if I’m such a big fan of SKAGs, why do I think it was wrong to use them? Well, the answer to that is quite simple. The mistake was how I used them.
I used SKAGs too early, without having any prior data.
This is a mistake I made at one of the companies I worked for. Usually I start using SKAGs only after I have a significant amount of data, which allows to me to pick some of my top keywords and isolate them into SKAGs. This was the right thing to do, since using SKAGs requires a lot of effort in writing many accurate ads and creating specific landing pages to match them. (This is one of the reasons that SKAGs definitely aren’t the right approach for every business or account.)
But this one time, I decided to “get cute” and use SKAGs right from the beginning. I thought I was being super-smart, and would get killer results right away. So I did my keyword research and started building my campaigns and ad groups. It looked perfect. I had lots of ad groups, with highly relevant ads and completely matching landing pages. It seemed like I was building the perfect search campaign.
So how could anything go wrong?
Well, it did, very quickly! Using SKAGs right from the beginning made a mess of my account. I had too many ad groups with too many types of keywords and too many landing pages. It was almost impossible to optimize and get to the point that I really knew which keywords I needed to use, and how I should really write my ads and design my landing pages.
To summarize – without having data, I was throwing away my budget and a lot of my time on the wrong keywords. It was just too much work that didn’t pay off.
As mentioned above, I do think that SKAGs can be a good strategy, but not for everyone. It really depends on the budget you have, and the size of the team managing your account. In my case, I was the only marketing employee in the company doing everything from A to Z. Handling a SKAG campaigns with the little time I had and zero data was just too much for me to handle, and I can honestly say I chose the wrong strategy for us.
What would I do differently?
I would start off with a simpler campaign structure and have ad groups containing a bunch of keywords with the same intent, as in the example below:
google-ads-mistakes-keywords
Once I had enough data, I would separate the top keywords in terms of volume and effectiveness, and create ad groups that contained only them with all three match types, with highly relevant ads and landing pages.
4. I used too few landing pages
This one is the complete opposite of the last mistake. In the past, there was a time that I put most of my focus on grouping my keywords the right way, writing the best ads I could to improve click-through rates, obsessively optimizing my bids, and cleaning up my search term reports by adding negative keywords. But all of that didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t giving the right amount of attention to my landing pages.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I just sent all my traffic to my site’s home page (the b-i-g-g-e-s-t mistake any digital marketer could ever make!). It’s just that I didn’t have enough landing pages to completely answer what the users were searching for. I was maybe even a bit lazy about it.
What would I do differently?
Without overdoing it (as I did with SKAGs), I would make sure to create a designated landing page for every set of keywords in my account that answer the same user intent.
I’ll use Wekudo as an example. Wekudo offers a simple and automatic solution to plan office events, such as team building activities. So if a user searches for “office team building activity” he will land on a matching landing page:
But what happens if you search for “office team building”? You guessed it:
It’s really not much of a hassle and leads to better Quality Scores and conversion rates.
6. I didn’t always use the full power of ad extensions
Google ad extensions can be super powerful. They allow you to get more space on the Google search results page, add more valuable data to your ad copy, make people directly call you on their mobile phones, send users to different pages of your site, show users reviews and more.
There are a lot of reasons to use them and leverage their full power in your search campaigns. Google allows us to use them in so many ways, analyze their results and help us optimize them, so why not? Well, that’s a question I keep asking the “past me.”
My mistake with ad extensions was simply not using them enough.
It’s not that I didn’t use them, it’s just that I didn’t use them at their full power. As you probably know, you can use extensions at a campaign level or ad group level and match them to what your ad group is about.
In the past, I simply used four or five general sitelink extension, and added them at an account level. Obviously, I was wrong. What I should have done is used more types of ad extensions and make them much more accurate.
So what would I do differently?
Well, obviously, I would simply add more extensions. If I already had sitelink extensions I would add more and test them out. If my campaigns were mobile-enabled, I would add a call extension allowing a click to call straight from the ad. I would use callout extensions to highlight the benefits I offer, and… well, you get the point. I would use everything Google has to offer.
Final thoughts
As mentioned above, every digital marketer makes a few mistakes along the way. I don’t think there are many other professionals out there that are more dependent on testing, trying, and getting it wrong sometimes.
But that’s not a problem. Regardless to all the mistakes I listed above, I mostly got killer results and amazing ROI. It happened because I quickly learned from my mistakes and from reading a lot about what was working for others and what wasn’t.
I hope you’ll learn from my mistakes, and that this post will help you avoid making them in the first place.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
When I stumble upon a website with five pop-ups visible at the same time, I have only one thought on my mind: stop it! But, is this the problem of the pop-up itself or the manner in which it is delivered? In this article, you will learn seven rules that will help you create pop-ups that work.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Breaking into China’s vast online consumer market, secured behind the Great Firewall of China, may seem like an impossible undertaking. While it is challenging, this guide to establishing a web presence in the country, including best practices for SEO for its dominant search engine, Baidu, will help you in getting your digital marketing campaign underway to tap into this large and growing market.
Earlier this month, we said that you can think about optimizing for the Amazon buy box in the same way you think about optimizing content for the organic search results. Both situations involve algorithms designed to deliver shoppers (or searchers) the best experiences possible.
The crossover between ecommerce and organic search doesn’t stop there. When it comes to Amazon keyword strategy, you can once again think along the lines of SEO.
This isn’t surprising once you take a step back and recognize that—wait a minute—Amazon is a search engine. True, with a relatively low number of ranking signals, its algorithm is simpler than those of Google and Bing. Nonetheless, Amazon indexes information and uses an array of factors to determine who lands where in the product search results. Sounds like a search engine to me, pal.
In this guide, we’ll explain why keywords are important for your success as an Amazon seller. Then we’ll share four tips you can use to conduct better Amazon keyword research.
Let’s. Get. It.
What’s the deal with Amazon’s search algorithm?
First of all—rude. It has a name, you guys: A9.
Secondly, I think I got a little too excited in the intro. Yes, it’s super helpful to think of Amazon as a search engine. At the same time, though, it’s crucial to remember that Amazon is an online marketplace. It’s a place to sell stuff.
Amazon really, really wants to sell stuff.
I share this obvious information because it’s the driving factor behind A9. Amazon organizes the product search results in order to sell as much stuff as possible.
Given that, it comes as no surprise that the most relevant, high-converting products are the ones that win the top spots. A high-converting product, as you know, is one that actually convinces prospects to buy after they’ve clicked through to the product details page.
A spooky example of an Amazon product details page.
For the purposes of this blog post, we’re mostly concerned with the first adjective: relevant.
Relevant to the search query, that is. There are reasons Amazon doesn’t show you nineteenth-century porcelain dolls when you search for dog food: one, dolls are vessels for demonic spirits; two, dolls have nothing to do with dog food. Nobody wants to use a search engine that populates the results with irrelevant products.
Amazon knows this, and A9 operates accordingly.
How are Amazon keywords related to product relevance?
Uh, how are s’mores Pop-Tarts related to human health?
Exactly. Amazon keywords, like s’mores Pop-Tarts, are foundational. They’re essential. Without strong keyword practices, the products you sell on Amazon are irrelevant.
When you optimize a blog post, you optimize for a keyword. If it’s a list of 2018 holiday shopping statistics, you better make sure “holiday shopping statistics 2018” shows up in your URL, your page title, your meta description, and the like.
You do this to ensure that your blog post is considered relevant when somebody searches for information regarding holiday shopping statistics.
Optimizing an Amazon product listing is no different.
Amazon keywords and your product title
As you may have already intuited, the title of your product is pretty important to its success in the Amazon search results.
In fact, from a keyword perspective, it’s probably the most important part of your listing.
Think about your behavior as an Amazon consumer for a moment. When you search for a product, do you click on each result and carefully inspect the ins and outs of each product details page?
If you do, please be a responsible citizen and turn yourself in to the police.
Normal people look for shortcuts all the time. When shopping on Amazon, that means scanning product titles—often only the first part of product titles—in search of the one most relevant to the consumer’s needs.
Would you read the entire title?
Say it with me, folks: put your most important keywords in your product title, and put your very most important keywords at the beginning of your product title.
Brand name. Product type. Key Features. Size. Color. Quantity.
These are what consumers scan for. Make their lives easy.
Of course, you’re trying to appease the algorithm, too. Regardless of how you look at it, Amazon keywords are essential to your product titles.
One last thing: keep screen size in mind. Your product titles are going to look different depending on the device your prospect is using to browse Amazon. This is yet another reason to put your most crucial keywords first.
Amazon keywords and your product details
The product details page is your opportunity to outline all the best features and benefits of your product in a series of concise bullet points.
It’s also the place to use the keywords you couldn’t fit in the product title.
Product details optimization is important for a couple reasons. Primarily, this is a great chance to nudge the prospect closer to clicking “Add to Cart.” Your outstanding product title brought her here, and now your highly informative bullet points will secure the conversion.
Remember that product conversion rate has a huge influence on the order of Amazon search results. If you slack on your product details page, your bounce rate will go through the roof, and you’ll fall down the search results into ecommerce oblivion.
Why does your prospect need to buy your product right now? Why shouldn’t she get it from another seller? What makes your product unique? These are the questions you need to answer on the product details page.
You also need to optimize your product details page because A9 will index your keywords and use them to inform the ordering of the search results. The logic here is no different from the logic behind your product title—you’re using keywords that make your product relevant to the queries prospective customers are searching.
Amazon keywords and your seller account
Perhaps you’ve heard of “hidden keywords.” Maybe you’ve stumbled across something called “search terms.” Each is a reference to the keywords you’re permitted to enter at the backend of your Amazon seller account.
Via Seller Lift.
Basically, hidden keywords are your opportunity to give Amazon more information about your product—information that consumers won’t see. To draw a parallel to content creation, alt text allows you to give Google more information about an image to help with indexation.
A hidden keyword is a lot like alt text—but for a product rather than an image.
Let’s say you’re selling homemade bumper stickers that advocate for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Through your keyword research, you find that a good number of Amazon users search the query “bumper stickers for liberals.” You’ve dedicated your product title to your brand name, the materials you use, the dimensions of the stickers, and the quantity. You’d like to cash in on the searches for left-leaning automobile accessories, but you don’t have the space.
So, now what?
You enter the keyword “bumper stickers for liberals” into the backend of your seller account!
Keep in mind that—as of August 2018—you only have 250 characters for backend keywords per product. Avoid repeating information conveyed in your product title and bullet points, as doing so will only waste this highly valuable real estate.
To that same end: don’t use commas, semicolons, or any other punctuation to separate your backend keywords. This, like repeated information, is an unnecessary waste of characters.
Unnecessary punctuation makes this an example of bad practices. Via AMZDataStudio.
By reducing the character limit to 250, Amazon has indicated that it’s taking backend keywords more seriously. The company doesn’t want sellers stuffing the character fields with irrelevant information and competitors’ brand names. As such, if you master your backend keywords across your product catalogue, you can expect a considerable boost in the search rankings!
How do I conduct Amazon keyword research?
If the increasingly awesome Mission Impossible film series has taught us anything, it’s that going rogue pays off. If Ethan Hunt breaks protocol to save the world, it follows that you should break protocol to dominate Amazon, right?
Wrong. Ethan Hunt is a fictional action hero and under no circumstances should you emulate him in your pursuit of ecommerce success.
If you want to succeed on Amazon, you need to play by the book. And that means conducting keyword research.
The goal? To compile a comprehensive list of keywords for each product, thus maximizing the number of search queries that trigger your product listings and making your inventory as visible as possible in the Amazon search results.
Here’s how.
1. Target products that complement your product.
As you may have learned in an introductory economics course, complements are products that consumers frequently buy together.
To put it in Amazon terms: everything you see under “Frequently bought together” is a complement to the product displayed on the details page.
By targeting complements to your product—in the bullet points, in the product description, or in the hidden keywords—you make your product visible to people who aren’t directly looking for it and whose search behavior indicates that they may be interested.
In some cases, complements are intuitive. If you sell peanut butter, for example, you’re well aware that your prospects are also in the market for jelly, marshmallow fluff, and bread.
In other cases, however, you’ll have to do some research. Head to your competitors’ product details pages and see what customers are buying in tandem. That should give you a good idea of the complements you want to target.
2. Type into the Amazon search bar and look at the keyword suggestions.
When you begin to enter a search query, Amazon suggests products other consumers frequently search for.
This is a great tactic because it gives you a quick, free snapshot of how your prospects actually use Amazon. Yes, there are keyword research tools that give you tons of valuable, in-depth data—and we’ll get to those—but a lot of ‘em ain’t free.
After meticulously combing through the suggested queries (i.e., entering the type of product you sell followed by different letters of the alphabet), you’ll have yourself a strong list of initial keywords to build on.
3. Look at what you’re ranking for on Google.
If you sell on a website of your own in addition to Amazon, this one is unique to you.
Consumers are more likely to begin product searches on Amazon than on Google. To be precise, whereas 47 percent of online shoppers begin on Amazon, 35 percent begin on Google.
Often, you’ll hear this statistic with the implication that Google is the place where ecommerce businesses go to die. But, hold the phone…
35 percent! That’s millions of online shoppers. Millions of online shoppers are actively looking for products—including yours—on Google. When you think of it that way, incorporating Google into your keyword research strategy sounds like a no-brainer. And it is.
Use Search Console or a tool like SEMrush to see if your website is scoring page one results for any high-volume search queries. Then, target those queries as keywords across your Amazon product listings and seller account!
SEMrush’s organic search position data for nike.com.
This is a doubly effective strategy because it allows you to build brand (or product) awareness with the prospects who take a little longer to convert. Imagine this: a shopper begins on Google, lands on your website, and pokes around a bit. Then, a few days later, when he’s ready to make a purchase, he sees your product in the top Amazon results. Immediately recognizing it from that awesome site he browsed earlier in the week, he clicks on your product and converts!
Google and Amazon can work together to your advantage. Make it happen!
4. Use a keyword research tool.
As much as we like those homegrown strategies, it would be foolish to not incorporate some kind of keyword research tool into your approach.
Here at WordStream, we offer a rather handy keyword tool—completely free of charge. Use it to get an idea of how consumers search for a product like yours, how often they’re conducting these searches, and how much of a challenge it will be to stand out amongst your competitors. It’s a safe bet that keywords with high volume (and high value) on Google will be worthwhile to target on Amazon.
Google’s Keyword Planner is free to anyone with a Google Ads account. If you open your account and navigate to the tools drop-down menu, you’ll see Keyword Planner as an option. From there, you can search as many keywords as you please and see how frequently they’re searched on a monthly basis—as well as the intensity of the competition.
If you’d like to conduct research that’s specific to Amazon, Keyword Tool has an Amazon keyword planner. This keyword planner uses data from the Amazon autocomplete or search suggestion feature and generates a list of long-tail keywords to consider. Sellics also offers a free Amazon-specific tool called Sonar. With it, you can access a keyword’s monthly Amazon search volume as well as the related keywords and the relevant products. Thanks to the latter feature, Sonar is a not only a research tool, but a competitive research tool.
Go forth and succeed!
With the right Amazon keyword research strategy, you’ll make your products visible to more relevant, high-value prospects than ever before. Plus, thanks to well-optimized product titles and product details pages, you’ll turn that boosted visibility into clicks and conversions at an impressive rate.
And it’s a positive feedback loop, too. A good keyword research ethic yields higher visibility. Higher visibility and excellent product titles yield more clicks. More clicks and outstanding product details pages yield more conversions. More conversions yield higher search rankings, and on and on we go.
What are you waiting for? Get that magical loop of ecommerce success going today!
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Many marketers and advertisers obsess over ads: you tweak the text, carefully choose landing pages, test out CTAs, and adjust your bids regularly. Ad spending is continuously growing and shows no signs of slowing down, so this constant attention is called for. Creating focused, well thought-out ads is as necessary as ever.
Links are the touchpoint between your brand’s website and prospective customers. Even though marketers are aware of their importance, they often overlook adjusting their links to maximize impact on their advertising campaigns.
In search ads, links are eye-catching because of their color and provide marketers with the opportunity to stand out. In sponsored social posts, they can act as a strong CTA. And in every type of ad, they can provide vital insights that will inform your overall strategy.
If you want to get the most out of your advertising campaigns and make sure each ad is as impactful as possible, here are five ways to upgrade the links in your ads.
#1: Try deep links to boost app engagement and improve ROI
Deep links are a great way to improve mobile ads and bring users further down the sales funnel. These links bring prospects directly to a specific screen in an app or prompt users without the app to download it. Deep links are an effective way to boost app engagement, reduce bounces, and increase conversions.
Think about it. Advertisers spend so much time optimizing landing pages, and with the surge in mobile advertising, deep linking is the best way to engage with users who have their app downloaded.
Those who have downloaded your app are already engaged and interested in your brand. Don’t target them with ads that just lead to your website or open the homepage of your app; improve the user experience by taking them exactly where they want to go.
In their ads, marketers can call on prospects to complete a certain action – from buying products to booking requests. Then, with deep linking, they can send users directly to the relevant app page that can facilitate this. The easier it is for users to carry out this action, the more likely they are to convert.
This all adds up to a better ROI.
Note: Deep linking can be tricky and may require some backend work, so you should employ the help of your development team to set them up. Whether you want to deep link to an Android or iOS app, check out this beginner’s guide to get started.
#2: Use display URLs and site link options wisely
Choosing the right landing page is a big part of moving prospects through the sales funnel effectively. On the product pages of your website, URLs can get quite long, especially if you’re running an ecommerce site. But when composing search ads, you can choose to insert a display URL so you can present a neat link to those who see your ad.
The Google Ads’ display URL feature lets marketers choose the link to feature in their ads. This can be shorter, more comprehensive, and more appealing than the ad’s destination URL.
This feature also helps improve the aesthetics of your PPC ads. And you can use it to let users know what page the ad leads to or to feature a CTA that will entice viewers to click.
For example, if Amazon wanted to create a search for this page:
www.amazon.com/Paperwhite-High-Resolution-Display-International-Version/dp/B00QJDU3KY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535123611&sr=8-1&keywords=kindle
It could display a link like:
www.amazon.com/KindlePaperwhite
or
www.amazon.com/Buy-A-New-Kindle
The below ad from Adidas links to this extremely long URL:
www.adidas.ie/?cm_mmc=AdieSEM_Google-_-adidas-Brand-B-Exact-_-Adidas-X-X-Brand-_-%27adidas&cm_mmca1=IE&cm_mmca2=e&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9Le-yICG3QIVAbTtCh3BOgiFEAAYASAAEgIzJ_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&dclid=CJfI_9KAht0CFcym7QodjCQB6w
Display URLs are quite flexible, but they must have the same root domain as your destination URL. This is to prevent spammers featuring misleading links and tricking people into clicking through to their site.
You can also let surfers decide their journey and choose the page that is most relevant to them with Google Ads’ site link extension. This feature lets you link to several web pages in your search ads. Often, advertisers will link to key content. This is ideal if users just searched for your brand’s name.
Sitelinks can be added to all your ads or at the ad group or campaign level. They can help prospects find exactly what they are looking for and they stand out on SERPs.
#3: Set up URL tags to monitor the effectiveness of your ads
Most marketers monitor all of their marketing activities so they can see what’s most effective and confidently assign their budgets. This is no different for advertising. While most ad platforms provide analytics, using UTM tags on your URLs is useful for showing you detailed data on your ad clicks all in one place.
All of the information will show in Google Analytics, where you can compare it with other marketing campaigns and channels.
Google Ads has an auto-tagging option and, since a recent update, you can now edit this tag information without losing your ad stats. Just be aware that these tags will only work in Google Analytics. If you are using another analytics platform to track your marketing or if you want to add tags across all your advertising links, you can also add UTM parameters to your destination URLs manually or use a UTM builder.
#4: Boost click-throughs with branded links
At Rebrandly, we found that branded links can boost the CTR of links on social media by up to 39%. So if you’re promoting posts or tweets, you might want to feature a branded link. You can also use these URLs as part of your PPC ads to improve engagement too.
In Google, a high click-through rate will improve your ads’ Quality Score, and this can decrease costs.
Branded links can really help an ad or post stand out, because they are completely customizable. You can use them to create a strong CTA or an eye-catching statement.
If you do decide to try out custom links in your search ads, be sure to enter it as the main destination link, rather than the display URL. If needed, you can also change the destination of your ad’s URL without losing any stats.
#5: Route traffic depending on device, location, and other factors
HubSpot’s Smart Content will allow you to display different content depending on the user’s location, device, and many other factors.
If a user’s IP address shows they are coming from the UK, you can direct them to a landing page for your English website, or ensure the pricing is displayed in pounds. You can also set up page routing based on the UTM tags featured in the link they click on. This will mean a better user experience for visitors.
This approach to link routing can also be created with the help your development team.
Now, upgrade those links!
Although often overlooked, links can give your ads a much-needed edge. Links can increase click-through rates, improve user experience, and even boost conversions, so consider upgrading yours today.
About the author
Louisa McGrath is a content manager at Rebrandly, the link shortener empowering marketers to put their brand on their links. She can be seen blogging around Dublin city center, except on Sundays when she stays in to pore over the newspapers.