Adventure

Grade & Get Paid: Enter to Win the Great Google Getaway!

Imagine, if you will, spending an entire day on Google’s campus with unfettered access to their product and marketing experts. What kinds of questions would you ask them?

When can I incorporate YouTube lead ads into my campaigns? Why are my organic rankings in a freefall? How does CEO Sundar Pichai achieve his beard coif? Is it cream or oil?

Now, imagine getting that kind of exclusive access for FREE. No conference fees, no hotel fees, no sirloin steak fees—not even air fare. Your only responsibility? Improving your Google Ads account—which, you guessed it, is also going to save you money. Some might call that the dream. We call it the Great Google Getaway.

Run the AdWords Performance Grader from our Grade & Get Paid contest page within the next two months, and you’ll enter to win an unparalleled package of Google-sponsored spoils.

Read on to find out how to enter, and what you stand to win!

Grade & Get Paid: How Does it Work?

Before we get into what you stand to win—I know, we’ll get there shortly—let’s talk about the contest itself. Grade & Get Paid takes place over the next two months, from July 16 to September 15, and is geared toward helping businesses of all kinds improve their Google Ads account performance in that time span.

How to Enter

To enter the contest and qualify for the Great Google Getaway grand prize, all you need to do is head to our Grade & Get Paid contest page between July 16 (today) and September 15. First, you’ll be prompted to enter your email. Do that!

From there, you’ll be taken to our Free AdWords Performance Grader, where we’ll ask you to fill out some basic details about your business.

And voila! We’ll automatically sync up your Google Ads account to generate a comprehensive report on your current account performance. Our AdWords Performance Grader is secure, fast, free, and time-tested—over the years, we’ve analyzed more than $9 million in ad spend, and picked up all sorts of valuable insights along the way. We’ll use a combination of this proprietary data and your own account history to give you a detailed report. That report will look something like this:

Included in your grader report will be all the actionable insights you’ll need to make positive alterations to your Google Ads campaigns. This initial run will include an overall, aggregate score—in the form of a percentage, from 1 to 100—as well as individual, category-level scores for 11 separate categories.

Once you’re armed with your new insights, we’ll ask you to answer two questions:

What did you learn from your AdWords Performance Grader report?
After reading your report, what will you do differently in the future?

Click “Complete My Entry” and you’re off to the races!

All Entered! Now What?

From the moment you click “Complete My Entry,” you’ll have 30 days to leverage your grader report’s prescriptive advice to improve your account’s performance.

Once you hit that 30-day mark, we’ll automatically run your Google Ads account through the Performance Grader a second time and email you the results. Yep—no need to re-connect your account and manually run the grader again. We’ll do it for you!

If you’ve followed the advice laid forth within your grader report, you can expect to see some major improvements. Of course, just because your participation in the contest “technically” ends after 30 days, that doesn’t mean you should stop optimizing your Google Ads account. Continue to follow the advice in your second grader report to ensure that, regardless of whether you win the Great Google Getaway, you’re crushing your competition.

When Will I Get the News That I Won?

Woah, loving the confidence! You’ll know whether or not you won the Great Google Getaway on November 1, 2018—that’s when we’ll announce the 5 (that’s right, 5!) lucky winners.

What Will I Win?

Ok! The portion of our program you’ve all been waiting for—the spoils. If you’re one of the 5 accounts to show the greatest improvement in performance over the course of your 30 days of tinkering, you will win the following:

A 4-day, 3-night trip to Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA
Airfare, hotel, and meals will be fully compensated
A full day of learning sessions hosted by Google’s product and marketing experts
A tour of the Google’s sprawling campus
A night out on the town with your new friends from WordStream and Google
A full day of exploring all the best Mountain View has to offer
An unprecedented amount of swag
Invaluable exposure for your business on the WordStream website and blog—in case studies, and in other press opportunities related to the contest

Once again, if you’re keeping score at home—that’s a whole mess of opportunity for your business for the very nonexistent cost of improving your Google Ads performance (and, consequently, saving yourself money on ad spend).

Is Everyone Eligible?

Well, not everyone. To enter the Great Google Getaway, you must meet the following qualifications:

You’re not an existing WordStream customer
You live in the United States or Canada (excluding Quebec)
You have an “active” Google Ads account—you’ve registered ad spend in your account in the 90 days preceding your entry
Your ad spend did not exceed $50,000/month USD in that 90-day period.
You can enter more than one Google Ads account (as defined by a unique account ID), but with only one entry per unique account.
You are a member of an agency not entering the contest on behalf of a client.
That’s All She Wrote!

Still on the fence about entering? You have nothing to lose, and so much to gain! Head to our contest page today and enter to embark on the Great Google Getaway!

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How Instagram Is Transforming Into A Fully Fledged Sales Channel For Ecommerce

The Instagram interface allowed ecommerce owners to adapt their accounts into user-friendly “websites.“ In many instances, their profiles look better than the websites. Check out some Instagram ecommerce solutions which help e-store owners boost extra traffic to their website, improve customer loyalty, as well as demonstrate how creativity is vital in the era of visualization.

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Top 5 Mind-Blowing Statistics from Google Marketing Live 2018

Google Marketing Live was a smashing success this year. Google announced some seriously exciting new features coming to Google Ads; and it seemed like behind each new feature was a riveting, previously unknown statistic. The stat-dropping was so epic, in fact, that we decided to double down on our Google Marketing Live coverage and give you, our loyal readers, a post dedicated exclusively to mind-blowing Google stat-ery.  

We’ll show you 5 key statistics from Google’s keynote address, and talk a little bit about what each stat says about the new and improved Google Ads. Let’s not wait around! Here are the top 5 surprising (and incredibly useful) statistics from Google Marketing Live 2018.

1. The query “___ to avoid” has increased by 150%.

If there was a major “theme” to Google Marketing Live 2018, it was that users increasingly expect more personalized online experiences. It’s no secret that search queries have become more conversational, and that people rely more on their devices for information now than ever before; but Google’s Senior VP of Ads Sridhar Ramaswamy laid bare just how research-obsessed users are today: The query “___ to avoid” has risen by 150%, and the query “is ___ worth it” has risen by 80%.

Sridhar Ramaswamy on-stage talking search habits.

Not only are users spending copious amounts of time searching for the best products and services to buy, but they’re now using process of elimination to determine which products and services not to buy. For comparison’s sake, that’s like scrolling through the Drama section of On Demand, deciding on a movie to watch, then putting it on the backburner while you scroll through the rest of the section to cover all your bases. You’re no longer directly searching for the best movie. You’re indirectly searching for the best movie by making sure the rest of the catalogue isn’t as good.

It’s a new level of compulsion and thoroughness that demands increased attention to detail on behalf of advertisers. And with the introduction of machine-learning-inspired features like Smart Shopping and Smart Campaigns (more below), Google is looking to give advertisers the tools they need to succeed in that landscape.

2. 91% of smartphone users bought, or planned to buy something after seeing a relevant video ad.

The term “machine learning” can become pretty vacuous the more you hear it, but it’s really about understanding and adapting to user intent. And matching user search intent is about more than providing the right keyword, or the right bid; it’s about presenting your targets with relevant ads.

How big of a difference does relevance make? Quite a bit, according to Group Product Manager of Video Ads, Nicky Rettke: 91% of smartphone owners have bought, or planned to buy something after seeing a video ad they described as relevant. They also pay 3x more attention to relevant video ads.

Google’s solution to an increased need for relevance? TrueView.

TrueView offers a three-faceted approach to YouTube video ads:

TrueView for reach: Advertise to prospects who have recently searched for your products or services online with CPM (Cost-per-thousand impressions) bidding.
TrueView for action: Advertise to prospects who have recently searched for your products or services online with videos that emphasize prominent call-to-actions.
Maximize Lift bidding: Google’s new Smart Bidding strategy, which automatically adjusts bids at auction time to maximize the impact of your video ads.

TrueView is a full-funnel solution to video ads, and it offers relevance at every stage—from first action, to conversion.

3. 50% of consumers have abandoned making a purchase because the site took too long to load.

This glorious nugget of statistical goodness came courtesy of Google Ads Product Management Director, Anthony Chavez: 50% of consumers have abandoned making a purchase because the site took too long to load. Fittingly, Google announced the day prior to Marketing Live that the Speed Update—which launched in January, and which made mobile page speed a major ranking factor—had officially rolled out to all users. It’s almost like they were gearing up to unveil a sleek new feature…

Anthony Chavez, right before he dropped the MLPSS showstopper.

Enter Mobile Landing Page Speed Score—which is a mouthful, so we’ll unofficially call it MLPSS. MLPSS scores landing page speed on a ten-point scale—from “very slow” to “extremely fast”—and does so based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the relationship between page speed and potential conversion rate; and therein lies the major difference between the MLPSS and site speed measurement tools like PageSpeed Insights and Test My Site—rather than scoring page speed independently, the MLPSS takes potential ad performance into account in concert with load speed itself.

Throw in the fact that the MLPSS lives within the Google Ads UI, and is updated daily, and you have one heck of a page speed measurement tool for advertisers.

4. Nearly half of all small business owners in the United States don’t have a website.

Google Ads is hard. It’s no surprise that an overwhelming number of small business owners outsource their paid search workload to agencies, contractors, and admittedly epic PPC software companies. But imagine this: half of all small business owners in the United States don’t even have a website. You can bet your ass that the small business owners among that 50% don’t know how to run PPC campaigns; and in all likelihood, that they don’t even know what PPC is.

Google is now offering Smart Campaigns to the PPC-challenged among us. Smart Campaigns puts machine learning in the hands of small business owners, with dynamic campaigns that send search ads live in minutes. And for the website-less, Google will soon be launching brand new, totally awesome “auto-optimized landing pages” within Smart Campaigns.

Kim Spalding, GM and Product Management Director of Small Business Ads, dropping nuclear tech missiles.

Auto-optimized landing pages are, well, a lot like they sound—machine learning technology pulls products and services directly from search ads in your Smart Campaigns onto dynamically created landing pages. If you have a product you want to get online, but you don’t want to dedicate the time and resources necessary to create a slick, product-centric website, auto-optimized landing pages represent a very realistic option.

5. In any given 48-hour period, 80% of Americans are shopping online.

This one comes courtesy of Google Ads Group Product Manager, Philip McDonnell, and is sure to give managers fits—in any given period, 80% of Americans are shopping online. Given that 96% of the population is currently employed, and you have to think a lot of that time is spent in the office…well, you can do the math. People are shoppin’. And they’re shoppin’ a lot.

The good news: thanks to Google’s suit of new and updated Shopping features, advertisers now have the ability to put their products in ever more conversion-friendly spots, using ever more conversion-friendly bids. Much like TrueView’s Maximize Lift bidding technology, the shiny new Smart Shopping now supports automated bidding, too—so your bids will automatically adjust to produce your desired outcomes. And speaking of desired outcomes: Shopping now supports two new ones—store visits, and new customers.

That’s pretty much it, in terms of automation…ha! Just kidding! Smart Shopping also automates the placement process across millions of apps and websites. Wherever your ads are likely to perform best, that’s where Smart Shopping will aim to put them—making smart adjustments along the way.

Just Statistics…Don’t Go Ballistics

Gosh, stats are exciting! They’re concrete. They’re trustworthy. They have math and stuff.

Still: while it’s totally fair to be head over heels with some of the new features available within Google Ads, you should take each with a grain of salt. Machine learning has insane upside—the ability to automate workflow while creating more personalized ad experiences is a tantalizing prospect. But at the end of the day, these are machine-driven systems. Give up too much campaign control in the name of “smarts” and convenience, and you risk glossing over the finer points of both your business and ad creation. And these are the points that can drive truly low CPAs.

Happy experimenting!

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SearchCap: Google hotel ads, Bing testing icon, reviews impact ranking & more

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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A Beginners Guide to Robots.txt: Everything You Need to Know

A robots.txt file is an important and easy way to improve your websites fortunes. This tiny, simple file is attached to every website on the Internet, but most people don’t even know about it and if they do, they are unaware of its potential. Designed to work with search engines, it is an excellent way of unlocking some of those SEO signals that your website needs to perform at its very best.

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Link to my awesome content, please!

Your content may be terrific, but if you lack a smart outreach plan, you’re going to fall short, says contributor Jeremy Knauff. Here are several tactics and email templates you can use to execute a thoughtful link-building outreach campaign.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Helen Rodríguez Trías Google doodle honors physician who fought for women & children’s right to healthcare

Dr. Rodríguez Trías advocacy work earned her the Presidential Citizen Medal in 2001.

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10 Affordable, Underrated Digital Marketing Tools

Right now, there are a total 6,829 marketing technology solutions available. That’s a lot! You’ve probably heard of the giants in this space: Mailchimp, Moz, Hubspot, and the likes.

But for every major marketing tool, there’s a smaller, more nimble company ready to blow you away. And it’s these unsung heroes I’d like to focus on today.

Why?

Because more solutions mean more choice for you. And while there is nothing wrong with the big guns, these lesser-known tools often have specific advantages over the market leader:

Specific focus
Cost advantage
More intimate customer service
Willingness to listen to your specific needs and have the tool evolve accordingly

I promise: any of these 10 handpicked tools will make one aspect of your digital marketing life just that little bit easier.

Let’s dig in!

Digital Marketing Tool #1: WooRank

What is it?

WooRank is a website analysis and SEO audit tool. They extract insights and provide advice on how you can improve your website by tracking and measuring its SEO. They achieve this by using data such as keywords, rankings, search volume, traffic, visitor behavior data, and so on, straight from Google.

Why should you use it?

Losing all your hard earned traffic due to an SEO or website error is painful. But maintaining a website could be a full time job in itself. WooRank helps you by collecting useful website data and will alert you when something is wrong or could be optimized.

They also allow you to compare yourself to your competitors. They check if you’re appearing in the right search results, who’s outranking you and what sources are bringing traffic to your website.

A nice bonus feature is their Digital Marketing Checklist, which takes you by the hand and shows you step by step how to improve your on- and off-page SEO, perfect when you want your latest blogpost to turn into a success.

Pricing

Starting from 59.99$/month or 470$/year. Free trial available.

Digital Marketing Tool #2: Mailshake

What is it?

Mailshake allows you to send personalized cold emails en masse, directly from your personal email. Just upload a spreadsheet with your recipient’s name, contact info, and any other personalization fields you want to include (their blog name, a sentence about something you found on their Twitter, etc.), and you’re good to go.

Why should you use it?

No digital marketing strategy is complete without a robust email marketing strategy, and an essential element of that strategy should be cold email outreach.

You can reach out to:

People that may be interested in your product
Journalists who cover your space
Other bloggers
Influencers with large social followings

You can set automatic follow-ups if recipients don’t reply, track when they open or click in your email, and manage responses right from within the app. If cold outreach is a part of your marketing strategy (which it should be), Mailshake will save you a ton of time.

On top of that, they have a great blog with plenty of outreach tips and tricks worth checking.

Pricing

Starting from 19$/month or 17$/month if you pay annually.

Digital Marketing Tool #3: Wordable

What is it?

Wordable is a plugin that allows you to import posts and pages from Google Docs to WordPress with a few simple clicks.

Why should you use it?

Digital marketers are always in search of productivity and how they can squeeze more results out of the time they’re given.

Often, productivity gains can be found in the simplest places: where you can eliminate tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming.

In content marketing, if you’re a prolific producer, you probably spend a lot of time uploading drafts into WordPress. It’s repetitive and boring, and over the period of your writing career, it’s incredibly time wasting.

Wordable lets you skip that part of the job so you can focus on the more meaningful aspects of content creation and promotion.

With just a few clicks, you can upload Google Docs to WordPress, and they appear perfectly formatted. It’s a huge time saver if you use WordPress as your CMS.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paying plans starts at 19$/month or 195$/year.

Digital Marketing Tool #4: DrumUp

What is it?

DrumUp is a content marketing tool that doubles-up as a social media post scheduling app (for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram). The tool helps you discover content topics that your target audience would appreciate. It works as a content research and recommendation tool, schedules curated/drafted content across multiple social accounts, and provides insights about your social media strategy.

Why should you use it?

Part of any digital marketer’s job, especially in startups or SMBs, is managing all the social media accounts. This social media and content marketing tool is comparable to the likes of Buffer, Crystal.io or Post Planner, but with the ability to customize your posts.

In addition to saving time on content discovery and sharing, DrumUp also helps you maximize content reach via hashtag and @mention recommendations, native content promotion, content automation, and employee advocacy.

It can also be used to increase social media engagement by using GIFs, custom images and top performing posts from within the dashboard.

Pricing

Starting from 19$/month or 180$/year.

Digital Marketing Tool #5: Bannersnack

What is it?

Bannersnack is a cloud-based, professional banner maker with which you can create fully responsive banners that will look perfect on all screen sizes, on any device.

Why should you use it?

Bannersnack lets you design display ads in every shape or format: you can create HTML5 animations, add videos, links, or embed your own custom code.

It’s pretty intuitive to you use. You can start from scratch or choose a template, you can make your banner unique by adding animations, interactive elements, and powerful Call-To-Actions. To create one, you can drag and drop images, text buttons, and other visuals to create your perfect banner. To top it of, the banners are compatible with all major ad networks.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paying plans start from 12$/month or 84$/year.

Digital Marketing Tool #6: Rocketium

What is it?

Rocketium is a web-based platform that lets you edit videos quickly even if you have no video expertise.

Why should you use it?

A big part of today’s digital marketers workload is creating content in all its shapes and forms. We’ve covered blogging with Wordable, but more and more marketers are producing or repurposing old content into video content. And if you’re not familiar with video editing, you could end wasting a lot of time.

Rocketium solves this with a drag and drop interface and a bunch of features that take away most of the time consuming tasks of the video creation process.

For example, the auto-resizing feature allows the same video to be converted into any other size instantly without any styling tweaks. So you don’t have to spend hours recreating the same video in landscape for YouTube and desktop viewing, portrait for Snapchat and mobile viewing, and square for Facebook and social viewing.

​Pricing

Free plan available. Paying plans start at 49$/month or 190$/year.

Digital Marketing Tool #7: Cognitive SEO

What is it?

CognitiveSEO is an SEO toolbox offering core digital marketing metrics for a comprehensive analysis.

Why should you use it?

This tool is particularly interesting for the marketing or SEO agencies out there. Tools like Moz and Ahrefs offer similar functionalities, but even the lowest plan at CognitiveSEO offers multiple users, multiple sites and a white label option at a fraction of the cost.

Some if its other features are:

Complete backlinks audit
Automatic unnatural link detection
The possibility of disavowing links straight from the tool
Competitors data + comparative audits
Keyword research tool
Content optimization tool
Quick site explorer tool
Daily rankings updates
Pricing

Free trial available. Paying plans start at 99$/month or 89.10$/month if you pay annually.

Digital Marketing Tool #8: Cumul.io

What is it?

Cumul.io is a dashboarding platform in which you can easily create & share any type of KPI dashboard in minutes.

Why should you use it?

Cumul.io combines an easy drag & drop interface, with more advanced features like linking between datasets. In that way, you can really understand how your marketing actions are influencing the whole customer journey.

It’s a great tool for internal reporting: you can share the dashboards with colleagues or rotate them on a monitor in your office.

Thanks to their integration, you can perfectly use it for reporting to your end-customers as well. For example, if you’re running a marketing agency, you can add marketing performance dashboards to your portal, software or to a simple webpage. Fully white-labelled, and with a secure login per client.

Pricing

Starting from 35$/month

Digital Marketing Tool #9: Mention

What is it?

Mention is a comprehensive media monitoring tool that helps brands track the most important conversations about their brand, competitors, and industry online.

They help our customers monitor and improve their social media performance, find influencers, protect their reputation, and provide better customer care.

Why should you use it?

There’s a lot of noise on the world wide web, and with so many conversations online, it can feel impossible to keep up with it all. Media monitoring lets you collect all these mentions, to analyze when you have time.

Mention helps track online conversations as they happen, wherever they happen. No more scouring the web manually, or waiting for your weekly mentions digest.

Pricing

Starting from 29$/month

Digital Marketing Tool #10: Userlike

What is it?

Userlike is a live chat software for website and mobile support.

Why should you use it?

The combination of low effort, anonymity, and familiarity with chat makes it the preferred channel for many customers.

According to a research by Internet Retailer, 20% of consumers say live chat is their favorite way to interact with a merchant. Live chat was also relatively more popular for simple and shopping-related questions.

On top of that, the fact that live chat is on-site and real-time makes it the only channel that allows you to guide your visitors through your website. A critical question can be resolved on-site, before it puts customers off the purchase. Which could triple your conversion.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paying plans start at 32$/month (billed monthly) or 29$/month (billed annually)

So there you have it: 10 online marketing tools that will make your life just that little bit easier and allow you to do things just a little bit quicker. Do you use any lesser-known tools you can recommend? If so, how did they make your marketing life easier?

About the author

Stefan Debois is the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, an online software tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes and assessments. Passionate about the potential of technology to have meaningful online interactions with people, at scale.

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