Excluding placements in the Google Display Network (GDN) isn’t just a hygiene tactic—it’s a strategic lever for improving ROI and campaign efficiency.

GDN Placement Exclusions

Google’s AI-driven placement algorithms are continuously improving. Right now, though, they still lack the nuance to fully understand brand suitability or the nuanced goals of a specific campaign. That’s why the proactive exclusion strategies we detail below are important.

Start by considering the context in which your ads appear. Certain websites or app categories—such as mobile games with accidental clicks or sensationalist news sites—may technically deliver impressions, but they rarely contribute to meaningful engagement.

Looking at your placement reports clues you into patterns that you can take action on: high impressions with low conversions, unusual CTR spikes, or bounce-heavy traffic sources. These indicators often point to placements worth excluding.

Audience intent is crucial. Even on high-traffic, reputable sites, your ad might not belong if the user’s mindset doesn’t match your offer. For example, placing a B2B SaaS ad on a recipe blog won’t align with user expectations, regardless of the domain quality.

Brands with international campaigns should also consider cultural and legal sensitivities. Some domains or categories might be legally acceptable in one country but damaging in another.

GDN exclusions aren’t set-and-forget. They’re part of a feedback loop. Make it routine—monthly at minimum—to review your placements and performance metrics. Couple this with developing your own dynamic exclusion list, informed by your brand’s specific needs, vertical trends, and prior campaign data.

Background on the Google Display Network

With more than a million websites across the globe, the sheer size of the Google Display Network is one of the main reasons why display and retargeting campaigns are such strong marketing tools. Spanning myriad topics and interests, reaching a target audience based on what matters to them has never been easier.

A high-performing campaign leverages the Google Display Network by serving highly targeted ads to users somewhere across the mammoth network of websites and publishers. Odds are, if a user is seeing a display or retargeting ad, they are seeing it on a website in the GDN.

However, there are thousands of websites with which brands do not want to be associated. This is why it’s a good idea for advertisers to consider blocking or excluding certain websites for placements of their ads on the Google Display Network.

Why Exclude Some Websites on the GDN?

It may seem counterintuitive that blocking placements on some websites would lead to better campaign performance, but there are instances where blocking placements can be extremely beneficial. There are two main reasons why advertisers should exclude websites on the Google Display Network.

1. Spammy, Inappropriate, or Unrelated Websites

Considering how large the Internet is, it’s pretty clear that no matter what a person is interested in, there is likely a large community and hundreds of websites dedicated to that interest. This covers a gamut of topics from the very wholesome to the very “adult.”

Advertisers probably don’t have the luxury to consider and evaluate every single website on the GDN. That would take hours. But serving ads on a spammy, inappropriate website (or one that’s just not very related to your brand) can have unintended consequences. For example, say a butcher shop sets up a display campaign, and several of its ads are placed on websites whose audiences are passionate about the vegan lifestyle and animal rights. Not a great match.

2. Saving Money on the GDN

Besides avoiding placements because of a mismatch for relevancy or inappropriate misrepresentations of a brand, the big reason for blocking placements on the display network is to save money. When targeting is dialed in and a retargeting campaign is set up correctly, advertisers can reduce costs by eliminating irrelevant websites.

Say that a SaaS software company runs a display campaign but they don’t exclude a whole ton of websites geared towards teenaged and college-aged gamers. These placements eat away at the ad budget, and they don’t contribute meaningful conversions to the campaign.

By eliminating a whole slew of such websites, advertisers leveraging the GDN can ultimately get more out of their campaigns with lower costs if they refine where ads are being placed.

How to Block Placements on the GDN

Seasoned digital marketers may know about website exclusions, but they can be easily overlooked by less-experienced users of Google Ads.

At the most basic level, placements can be excluded by opening your campaign in Google Ads and clicking on the “Placements” tab. From there, hover the mouse over the top navigation and click on the “Exclusions” tab.

Once in this new area, exclusions can either be selected by website, YouTube channel and video, app, or by entire app categories.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google Ads’ exclusion tools don’t cover every website worth excluding from a campaign, and there are thousands it will miss.

Using an exclusion list can be a mighty weapon for any digital marketer working inside the Google Display Network — one you’ll want to come back to over and over again.

The Definitive Website Exclusion List (Free Resource!)

For years, Google Ads professionals have either had to resort to creating their own exclusion lists or borrowing lists of URLs from fellow marketers.

The team at Direct Online Marketing has created the exclusion list to end all exclusion lists.

This list is the culmination of our two decades as an agency running campaigns for clients in Google Ads. (To supplement our internal list, we also took every list of website exclusions we could find online and compiled it all in the above Google Sheet.)

At a stunning 70,000+ website URLs, this list is quite comprehensive as it covers such categories as dating, mobile, gaming, quizzes, sports, and more. And hey, it’s free!

Because this list can be found as a shareable Google Sheet, we encourage you to share this with anyone who would find it useful.

Notes About High-Cost, Low-Performing Categories

If you’ve taken a look at our list, you’ve probably noticed how we broke out several website categories.

High-Cost, Low-Performing – One of our categories addresses a large number of high-quality and reputable websites and publishers (such as The New York Times, CNN, etc.). We’d generally recommend excluding or considering blocking placements on some of these sites for direct advertisers. The placements may make sense if you’re using GDN just for brand awareness and reach. Because exclusions can be a good method of keeping ad costs down, blocking placements on high-quality websites can help stretch budgets a lot farther.

Key Takeaways About Google Ads Placement Exclusions

• Excluding placements on spammy, inappropriate, or unrelated websites helps maintain brand integrity.
• Advertisers can exclude placements directly in Google Ads so that ads reach their intended audience.
• Blocking select websites can improve ROI by reducing wasted spend on placements that don’t convert.
• Direct Online Marketing offers a comprehensive list of over 70,000 website URLs for exclusion.

Final Thoughts

Using the behemoth Google Display Network is how marketers are finding success with display and retargeting campaigns, but not every website is a good opportunity for advertising. By leveraging our comprehensive list of websites to exclude ad placements, advertisers can easily avoid the negatives of placing ads on inappropriate websites and reduce costs associated with their campaigns.

For those of you who share our vision in making this list the best it can be, we thank you and welcome any submissions.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 21st, 2025.

The post Google Ads Placement Exclusion List for Google Display Network (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

In this blog post, we break down the key updates, explore optimization opportunities, and look to the future of Performance Max campaigns.

Table of Contents

Here’s what this Performance Max update is about:

• Performance Max (PMax)
• Common Challenges with PMax
• PMax Updates for Greater Advertiser Control

Here’s what we’re doing with Google’s PMax updates:

• Campaign-Level Control Enhancements
• Enhanced Reporting Features

Here’s what we see for the future of Google’s PMax updates:

• Increased Advertiser Control
• Improved Transparency
• Enhanced Efficiency

Key Takeaways on Google’s Performance Max Updates

Here’s what this Performance Max update is about:

Performance Max (PMax)

PMax aims to optimize ad performance across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. This AI-powered campaign type claims to simplify cross-channel advertising by automating tasks that once were manual.

And it does make things easier. With PMax, Google’s AI suggests ad copy, keywords, and imagery based on your landing page. However, with greater AI involvement has come less visibility into and control of key targeting settings. Cue the excitement for Google’s newest PMax updates.

Common Challenges with PMax

Thus far PMax has been plagued by these downsides:

Demographic exclusions and bidding: Advertisers often couldn’t exclude specific age groups or other demographics, leading to wasted ad spend.

Keyword traffic transparency: Lack of clarity on which keywords were driving traffic and leads left advertisers guessing.

Negative targeting limitations: It has not been possible to exclude irrelevant or low-performing terms like “free” or “cheap.”

Google’s recent updates to PMax address these pain points. The result should be more control and better reporting tools in the hands of advertisers.

PMax Updates for Greater Advertiser Control

Advertisers will find themselves with a new and improved toolkit with the updates to PMax:

• Negative Keywords
  You can now input negative keywords with PMax campaigns; this allows you to cut spend on irrelevant queries and those that just don’t convert. 
• Improved Reporting
  New reports on the performance of specific assets (such as individual headlines, descriptions, and images), as well as on search themes, provides improved transparency.
• Expanded Exclusions & Customization
  Brand exclusions and URL-based targeting rules have become available, offering more flexibility to divert competitor traffic and drive people to specific groups of pages on your website.

Here’s what we’re doing with Google’s PMax updates:

Campaign-Level Control Enhancements

As a Premier Google Partner, we were able to whitelist clients into some of these features when they were in beta.  Now we’re putting the newly rolled-out capabilities of PMax to the test for our clients more broadly. 

Negative Keywords
We’re negating keywords so that ads don’t show with irrelevant terms. Specifically, we are testing the effect of negating competitor terms for clients who do not see a benefit from running on such terms. We’re also negating a client’s brand altogether from other campaigns when a branded campaign is already in place. 

It’s also a quick win to negate searches that signal little intent to actually make a purchase, like “how to” and “cheap.” This will help with our bottom-of-funnel campaign goals.

New Customer Acquisition Goals with “High-value Mode”
We’re digging into the new “high-value mode” setting, a conversion goal option that has just become available with these PMax updates. This promises to prioritize reaching users with a higher likelihood of converting, maximizing that return on ad spend (ROAS).

Brand Exclusions for Search and Shopping Ads
The ability to exclude brand terms at the campaign level for specific ad formats is a welcome addition. 

We’re testing this feature with an exterior design client to be sure their ads appear for generic searches related to their services, but not necessarily their brand name. (There’s a dedicated campaign for capturing branded traffic. Plus their SEO brings in the vast majority of their branded traffic organically to the site.)  

URL-based Rules for Better Targeting
This change to PMax essentially allows us to run dynamic search campaigns within PMax.

This tactic allows advertisers to send people to the most relevant pages on their site, while also taking advantage of Google’s AI to present users with headlines and descriptions tailored to their query right in the moment of searching.  

Upcoming Beta Features
As mentioned above, Google regularly tests new features in Google Ads, some of which eventually make it to the broader advertising public. As a Premier Partner agency of Google, we get access to these beta opportunities first. That means our clients get early access to try out the latest ad tactics from Google before their competitors.

Demographic and device targeting may be coming down the pike as beta features in PMax.

Enhanced Reporting Features

Google’s PMax updates include new reporting features. We’re jumping on these to surface insights for further optimization of campaigns. 

Search Themes
Google is beginning to paint a picture of how any search themes added to a PMax campaign are impacting performance. Previously, search themes were a black box. (Like much about PMax.)

This reporting moves toward giving advertisers the kind of control in PMax campaigns that was previously only available in Search campaigns. Being able to adjust PMax search themes is a bit like being handed a scalpel when you were working with a sledgehammer before. 

Usefulness Indicator
A new feature popping up in PMax is a measure of how useful search themes have been in driving traffic themselves, beyond the influence of the text or URL associated with a PMax campaign.

The usefulness indicator is one more lever advertisers now have to pull in PMax. This greater control means better campaign refinement.  

Granular Asset Group Metrics
Metrics by device, time of day, and conversion action are starting to appear in PMax asset groups.

We’re using this data to craft campaigns that reach people how and when they are most engaged. The more precise the PMax reporting, the more efficient we can be with ad spend for our clients. 

Here’s what we see for the future of Google’s PMax updates:

Increased Advertiser Control

We expect to see a significant increase in advertiser control and flexibility. The new PMax tools and report will empower us to fine-tune campaigns with greater precision, ensuring ads reach an engaged audience and achieve business-relevant results.

Improved Transparency

The enhanced reporting features will make PMax campaigns less of a black box and more like the transparent Search campaigns that advertisers have employed to great advantage for years. A clearer understanding of what’s driving results will empower data-driven decisions. 

Enhanced Efficiency

PMax updates that meld AI insights with human input should allow for faster, more effective account optimization. This will likely free up account managers to focus on higher-level strategy planning, rather than being continually pulled into the weeds of campaign maintenance. 

Key Takeaways on Google’s Performance Max Updates

• Google’s updates introduce negative keywords, enhanced reporting, and expanded exclusions into PMax campaigns.
• The new “high-value mode” setting prioritizes high-converting users, thereby boosting ROAS.
• Updates to URL-based targeting and search theme reporting bring the kind of customization and visibility to PMax that were once only available in Search campaigns. 
• Granular asset group metrics — including device and time-of-day insights — provider advertisers with new ways to refine campaigns for maximum engagement and efficiency.
• Further evolutions of Performance Max campaigns are likely as Google responds to advertiser demand for greater control and transparency.

The post Google’s Performance Max Updates — What You Need to Know appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads promise to simplify your online advertising efforts and maximize reach by automating various aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns. While this sounds great on paper, some businesses have encountered an irritating downside: bad-quality leads. These leads can drain your resources and time, ultimately impacting your return on investment. Let’s dive into PMax campaigns and explore how you can improve the quality of your leads from this highly touted Google Ads campaign type.

Table of Contents

• Understanding Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns
• Common Issues Leading to Bad-Quality Performance Max Leads
• Misalignment of Google Ads Targeting Settings
• Over-Reliance on Automation in PMax Campaigns
• Poorly Defined Google Ads Bidding Strategies & Conversion Goals
• Identifying When Performance Max Ads Aren’t Working
• Strategies to Improve Performance Max Lead Quality in Google Ads
• Tools & Techniques for Better Performance Max Campaigns in Google Ads
• Utilizing Advanced Analytics Tools
• A/B Testing Different Ad Creatives and Messages
• Regularly Reviewing and Optimizing Campaign Settings
• Experience the DOM Difference
• Key Takeaways

Understanding Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns are designed to streamline your advertising by combining all Google Ads channels into one comprehensive campaign. Instead of managing separate campaigns for Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover, Performance Max handles everything. This automation leverages Google’s machine learning to optimize your ads across multiple channels, aiming to achieve your conversion goals.

These campaigns offer several benefits to advertisers, including simplified management, broader reach, and the potential for better performance through Google’s vast data and machine learning capabilities. However, Performance Max might not be working right for you if you aren’t giving the campaigns the necessary scrutiny. As with anything in the data world, garbage in results in garbage out.

Common Issues Leading to Bad-Quality Performance Max Leads

Misalignment of Google Ads Targeting Settings

One of the most common culprits in PMax ad lead quality is misaligned targeting. If your targeting settings are too broad, your ads may reach an audience that is not relevant to your business. This can lead to an influx of leads that don’t convert into customers.

Over-Reliance on Automation in PMax Campaigns

While automation can save time, relying on it without regular oversight can be problematic. Automated systems may not always understand the nuances of your target audience, resulting in irrelevant traffic.

Options within PMax campaigns in Google Ads to let Google write ad copy may save advertisers time, but the ad copy that Google spins up might not be directing users to take the kinds of actions that truly matter to your business.

So take the time to review any text that PMax drafts through AI. Auto-generated ad copy is an okay play to start in creating an ad; it’s a horrible place to finish. Use Google’s AI as a writing partner in PMax.

Read about AI in Marketing: Where Machine Intelligence Meets Human Creativity

Poorly Defined Google Ads Bidding Strategies & Conversion Goals

If your bidding strategy or conversion goals are not clearly defined, Google’s machine learning might optimize for the wrong actions. For example, optimizing for clicks instead of meaningful engagements can attract users who have no intention of becoming customers.

As you start up a PMax campaign, you often need to start with a more general bidding strategy, such as aiming at impressions or clicks. You need to begin campaigns on this kind of a setting so that Google’s algorithm can get a critical mass of data from many interactions with your ads.

Once your PMax ads have made it through the learning period on an impression-based or click-based bidding strategy (usually about 2 weeks), then you can refine your bid strategy to focus on conversions or conversion value.

Skipping right to these more-focused bid strategies can lead to campaign stagnation. A PMax campaign that starts out on such a down-funnel goal may never get enough traffic for Google’s algorithm to learn what kind of people are really searching for what your business does.

Running in parallel to this concern with what bid strategy a PMax campaign is set to is selecting the appropriate Google Ads conversion goals. This requires that you examine the campaign settings to ensure that a particular PMax campaign has the right conversion goals selected.

For instance, phone calls are often a conversion goal that is present in Google Ads accounts. However, a phone call isn’t always the point, or even a useful interaction, of a campaign. You may need to define a new goal through the Google interface or through Google Tag Manager to set your PMax campaign up for success.

A poor-quality Performance Max campaign may be salvageable with a few tweaks to the bidding strategy and conversion goal.

Identifying When Performance Max Ads Aren’t Working

To determine whether you are receiving bad-quality leads from Google Performance Max, monitor these things:

• High Bounce Rates — A high bounce rate indicates that users are leaving your site quickly, suggesting that your ads are not reaching the right audience. In the context of a PPC ad, you can think of bounce rate as the ratio of clicks to conversions. If people are clicking but rarely filling out the form on your landing page or making a purchase, it may be time to test a variation.

• Low Engagement — If users are not engaging with your content, it could mean that your ads are not resonating with them. This would be reflected in people not even clicking on your ads. So if you are getting a good bit of impressions but few clicks, you should try out new PMax ad copy and images.

• Irrelevant Inquiries — Receiving inquiries that are unrelated to your products or services is a clear sign of poor lead quality. When you are inundated with inquiries that don’t show intent to buy, you can try increasing the friction in the customer journey. This may sound like an extreme option. Indeed, we usually advise removing as much friction as possible from the user journey. But when spam vastly outweighs true inquiries, and when you are paying for all those useless clicks, it’s time to make a substantial change. For instance, you can make more fields required on a contact form. You can code the email field to reject spammy domains, like @hotmail or @geocities. You can require both an email address and phone number. Making more fields required generally filters out users who aren’t serious about your product or service.

Strategies to Improve Performance Max Lead Quality in Google Ads

Fine-Tuning Audience Targeting: Refine your audience settings to ensure your ads are shown to people who are more likely to be interested in your offerings. Use detailed demographics, interests, and in-market segments to narrow down your target audience.

You can adjust these settings within the Audience Signal of PMax campaigns.

Adjusting Bidding Strategies: Review and adjust your bidding strategies to align with your business goals.

At a high level, consider whether you want to go after conversions themselves or the value they drive for your business.

Setting Clear and Precise Conversion Goals: Define specific conversion actions that matter to your business. This could be form submissions, purchases, or phone calls. Ensure these goals are accurately tracked to provide the machine learning algorithms with the right data.

Remember, you may need to complete a custom implementation of a goal through Google Tag Manager to track an action that isn’t provided within the default options in Google Ads.

Using Negative Keywords Effectively: Implement negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. This helps in filtering out traffic that is unlikely to convert.

You may be annoyed with spammy traffic to your PMax campaign at the moment. You can take learnings away from this rocky period and improve your campaign. Search queries that are coming into your PMax campaign that don’t signal the right intent and the perfect ones to negate.

Once you clear away that noise, the signal should start coming through clearly in the form of conversions with the right intent.

(Get more insights into the latest in pay-per-click advertising from the DOM blog: Top PPC Tips for Dominating Sales in 2024)

Tools & Techniques for Better Performance Max Campaigns in Google Ads

Utilizing Advanced Analytics Tools

Employ tools like Google Analytics and third-party analytics platforms to gain deeper insights into your PMax campaign performance. These tools can help you understand user behavior and refine your strategies.

For example, you can look into Google Analytics 4 to see commonalities among people who convert on your website, no matter how they found you. Then you can take that demographic information and refine your PMax ads to speak to the concerns and values of the broader group that does take action on your website.

DOM provides Google Analytics Services to surface actionable insights for your business.

A/B Testing Different Ad Creatives and Messages

Test various ad creatives and messages to see which ones resonate best with your audience in PMax campaigns. Continuous testing and optimization can lead to better results.

Try ads that call out the benefits of your products, rather than merely describing them. So pointing out that your accounting SaaS will save dozens of hours leading up to April 15th may be more effective than listing the tools that help with payroll and generating W-2s. That is, trying articulating the significance of the tool; don’t merely state what the tool is. People need to know why your product matters, what it can do for them, beyond just what it is.

Regularly Reviewing and Optimizing Campaign Settings

Make it a habit to regularly review your PMax campaign settings and performance data. Adjustments based on data-driven insights can significantly improve lead quality over time.

This might mean focusing your barber shop ads to only serve to men, should you find that women rarely convert on your ads. Or you might exclude people under 40 from your life insurance ads, if you find that the younger cohort just never takes the action your ads intend.

Experience the DOM Difference

Struggling with bad-quality leads from your Performance Max campaigns can drain your resources and impact your ROI. Identifying and fixing the weak points in your ad strategy requires expertise and a keen eye for detail.

At DOM, our seasoned professionals can help you optimize your PMax campaigns to ensure your ad spend drives the right kind of traffic. Let us provide you with a free PPC audit, analyzing your current strategy and offering tailored recommendations to enhance your lead quality.

Reach out today to unlock the full potential of your digital advertising efforts.

Key Takeaways

• Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads simplify online advertising but can result in bad-quality leads if not properly managed.
• Misaligned targeting and over-reliance on automation are common issues leading to irrelevant traffic and low-quality leads in PMax campaigns.
• Properly defining conversion goals and adjusting bidding strategies is crucial for attracting meaningful engagements and potential customers.
• Monitoring high bounce rates, low engagement, and irrelevant inquiries helps identify when Performance Max ads aren’t working effectively.
• Fine-tuning audience targeting, using negative keywords, and regularly reviewing campaign settings can significantly improve lead quality in Performance Max campaigns.

The post Are You Getting Bad-Quality Leads From Performance Max? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

• Introduction
• Evolving Trends in PPC for 2024
• Embracing the Shift to Voice and Visual Search
• The Rise of Hyper-Personalized Ads
• Mastering Keyword Strategy: Beyond the Basics
• Harnessing AI and Automation in PPC
• Creative Mastery in Ad Design
• Synergizing PPC with Other Marketing Channels
• Conclusion

It’s a new year. Some people love to make New Year’s resolutions, like going to the gym more often or eating better. But you didn’t come to this blog for lifestyle tips, so let’s get to business with what matters: your company’s bottom line. 

You absolutely do not want December to roll around again and find yourself wondering why the competition is cutting ribbons and fat bonus checks while your sales are sagging and your bottom line is flagging. 

Let’s get into it: our top tips for making your digital ad conversion dreams come true this year. 

Evolving Trends in PPC for 2024

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is like a chameleon, constantly adapting and changing colors. As we step into 2024, several key trends have emerged, redefining how we approach digital advertising. These aren’t just fleeting fads but harbingers of a new era.

Embracing the Shift to Voice and Visual Search

Search behaviors are evolving, with voice and visual searches becoming more prevalent. This shift demands a reevaluation of keyword strategies and ad formats. 

To stay ahead, consider how your target audience might use voice assistants for queries or how image recognition technology could influence their purchasing decisions.

Voice Search

When people use voice search, they tend to use longer, more conversational queries. They may also ask questions that are open-ended or difficult to phrase in a way that would yield relevant results. This means that keyword strategies for voice need to be different from traditional search.

For example, instead of targeting keywords like “buy shoes,” you might target phrases like “where can I buy running shoes?” or “what are the best running shoes?” You also need to make sure that your website is optimized for voice search by including structured data and making your content easy to understand.

Visual Search

Visual search is still in its early stages compared to other methods, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way people shop. Visual search could make it easier for people to find the products they’re looking for, and it could also help them discover new products that they might not have otherwise found.

To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to start considering how visual search can be used to reach their target audience. Our two favorite suggestions to help you accomplish that are:

1. Create high-quality images of your products and then optimize these images for visual search. 
2. Use visual search tools to track how people are finding their products, and then use this data to improve their marketing campaigns.

The Rise of Hyper-Personalized Ads

Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all advertising. 

In the past, advertisers would create a single ad campaign and then target it to as wide an audience as possible. This approach isn’t as effective as it used to be, as consumers are bombarded with advertising messages and are more likely to ignore or even block ads that are not relevant to them.

Hyper-personalization is the new gold standard in PPC. Using data analytics, AI, and machine learning, advertisers can tailor their ads to speak directly to individual needs and preferences. This makes ads more likely to be seen and clicked by potential customers.

For example, a retailer might use data analytics to track website visitor browsing history. This information can be used to create targeted ads that are tailored to the specific products that a visitor has shown interest in. At that point, AI and machine learning can also be layered on for advanced personalization. 

Hyper-personalization is not just about creating more relevant ads. It can also help to improve the user experience. When users see ads that are relevant to their interests, they are more likely to have a positive perception of the brand. This can lead to increased brand awareness and loyalty.

Mastering Keyword Strategy: Beyond the Basics

Keywords are the cornerstone of PPC, but in 2024, it’s about going beyond the basic search terms and diving into the psyche of your audience.

Think about your target audience and what they are likely to search for. 

What are their pain points? What are they looking for when they search online? 

Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can start to identify the keywords that they are likely to use.

Here’s three ways we see the best digital advertisers going beyond the basics to master their keyword strategy in 2024.

Finding the Balance

The key to effective keyword research is striking a balance between popular and niche keywords. Popular keywords are those that are searched for frequently, while niche keywords are those that are searched for less frequently but are more specific. A good keyword strategy will include a mix of both popular and niche keywords.

Popular keywords are important because they can drive a lot of traffic to your website.However, bidding to advertise your products and services for those terms is expensive and competitive – so make sure you budget for higher CPCs.. 

A better option for your campaigns may be niche keywords. 

Niche keywords are less competitive, making cost per clicks cheaper and the intent behind the search stronger.. However, niche keywords also drive less traffic. And if you get “too niche” with your keywords, the algorithms may not show any ads simply because the volume is so low.

The best approach is to find a balance between popular and niche keywords. Include the popular keywords, but make sure you are including long-tail keywords in your campaigns to be more efficient with your budget..

Predictive Keyword Analysis

Leverage predictive analytics to anticipate emerging trends and consumer

behaviors. By staying one step ahead, you can capture market segments before

your competitors even get wind of them.

Predictive analytics uses historical data to identify patterns and trends that can be used to predict future outcomes. This information can be used to make informed decisions about marketing campaigns, product development, and pricing strategies. 

By staying one step ahead of the competition, you can capture market segments that your competitors are not even aware of.

Seasonal and Real-Time Bidding

Seasonal trends and real-time events can have a significant impact on keyword performance. 

By adjusting your keyword strategy to reflect seasonal trends, you can ensure that your PPC campaigns are reaching relevant audiences and driving valuable conversions when demand is at its peak. 

You should also consider real-time events when developing your keyword strategy. For example, if there is a major news story, sporting event, or annual tradeshow happening in your industry, people are likely to search for related topics. 

By including these terms in your keyword list, you can reach potential leads and buyers who are actively looking for event information.

Harnessing AI and Automation in PPC

Automation is a critical component in modern PPC strategies. AI and machine learning can transform your campaigns, making them more efficient and have a lot more impact.

Smart Bidding Strategies

Leverage AI-driven smart bidding strategies to optimize your ad spend. These systems analyze vast amounts of data in real time, adjusting bids to maximize returns on your advertising investment.

Smart bidding strategies can also help you save money on your ad spend. By automatically adjusting bids, these systems can help you avoid overpaying for clicks that are unlikely to lead to conversions.

If you’re looking for a way to optimize your ad spend and get the most out of your advertising investment, consider using a smart bidding strategy. These systems can help you reach more qualified leads, generate more conversions, and save money on your ad spend.

Predictive Customer Insights

Use AI to gain deep insights into customer behavior and preferences. These insights enable you to craft campaigns that resonate deeply with your audience, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Automating Ad Creatives

AI can also assist in creating and testing ad creatives. By analyzing performance data, AI tools can suggest modifications to your ads, from imagery to copy, ensuring they are primed for maximum impact.

Caveat: please don’t use AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E to generate images for your ads. Those can be useful in the very earliest stages of prototyping graphical ideas for your marketing message, but they’re no replacement for an actual human artist.

Audiences are more savvy than ever and can tell when an AI has created the ad they’re seeing. They will make you look too cheap to hire an actual graphic designer, and that cheapness will permeate your entire brand. Don’t be tempted! 

Speaking of graphic design…

Creative Mastery in Ad Design

In the ocean of digital ads, only the most captivating and innovative creatives capture attention. This year, the emphasis is on creating ads that aren’t just seen – but remembered.

Storytelling Through Ads

Transform your ads into compelling narratives. A good story resonates more than any sales pitch. Incorporate elements that evoke emotions, connect with experiences, or inspire curiosity.

Designing for Multiple Formats

Embrace the diversity of ad formats, from standard banners to interactive videos. Each format offers unique opportunities to engage your audience. Ensure your message is tailored to fit its format seamlessly. 

Whether it’s a quick, impactful message for a banner or a detailed story for a video, the more formats you have available, the more impressions your brand can expect to generate.

Continual A/B Testing

You know how much we love A/B testing. 

Never settle for the first draft. Regular A/B testing of your ad creatives helps refine messages, visuals, and CTAs. This iterative process is key to discovering what truly resonates with your audience.

Synergizing PPC with Other Marketing Channels

In 2024, PPC isn’t an island but a part of a comprehensive digital marketing archipelago.

Integrated Marketing Strategies

Your PPC efforts should complement your SEO, social media, and email marketing strategies. This holistic approach ensures consistent messaging across all channels, reinforcing your brand and amplifying your reach.

Leveraging Social Media Insights

Use insights from your social media channels to inform your PPC campaigns. The engagement data from social platforms can provide valuable information on audience preferences and behaviors.

Cross-Channel Attribution

Implement cross-channel attribution models to understand how your PPC efforts contribute to the broader marketing ecosystem. This understanding helps in allocating budgets more effectively and in creating more cohesive marketing strategies.

Conclusion

Remember, dominating sales in 2024 requires more than just following trends; it demands innovation, adaptability, and a deep understanding of the evolving digital landscape. Embrace these tips, and you’re not just chasing sales – you’re building a legacy in the digital world.

Ready to take your PPC strategies to the next level? 

Direct Online Marketing is here to help you with expertise and innovative solutions. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve helped a lot of businesses just like yours clobber their digital ad conversion goals. 

Let’s make 2024 a year of unprecedented growth and success for your company. Reach out to us today.

Key Takeaways

• Adapt to Emerging Trends: Stay ahead in PPC by embracing evolving trends like voice and visual search, ensuring your campaigns resonate with current user behaviors.
• Hyper-Personalization is Key: Utilize data analytics, AI, and machine learning for hyper-personalized ad campaigns. Tailored ads increase relevance, engagement, and, ultimately, conversions.
• Advanced Keyword Strategies: Go beyond basic keywords. Balance popular and niche keywords, and use predictive analytics for capturing emerging market segments.
• Leverage AI and Automation: Employ AI-driven smart bidding and predictive customer insights to optimize ad spend and create more impactful campaigns.
• Innovate with Ad Creatives: Storytelling in ads and continual A/B testing are crucial. Design ads for multiple formats to engage audiences effectively.
• Integrate PPC with Other Channels: Enhance PPC effectiveness by aligning it with your SEO, social media, and email marketing strategies for a unified digital marketing approach.
• Stay Agile and Informed: The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Keep learning and adapting to maintain a competitive edge in PPC.
• Choose Expert Guidance: For advanced PPC strategies and implementation, consider partnering with experts like Direct Online Marketing to achieve your digital advertising goals.

The post Top PPC Tips for Dominating Sales in 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Rather than calculating investment compared to returns, this formula focuses on your ad campaign’s efficiency and effectiveness.

You want to measure impressions and brand awareness, so this process isn’t as clear-cut as straight-up sales and numbers. In this case, ROI is not the most effective formula for getting a solid gauge of your digital advertising success.

What Is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)? Why Is It Important?

ROAS is a metric that measures the success of digital advertising campaigns, which then helps guide your evaluation of advertising methods; media that is working, messages that are resonating, where to improve—and how it all adds to your bottom line.

When you understand your ROAS, you can better plan for future budgeting and refine your strategy to incorporate more of what is proven to work.

To learn more about a bidding strategy in Google Ads using Target ROAS, click here.

How Is ROAS Calculated?

Not all of us are math enthusiasts, so if math isn’t your thing you will be relieved to know that the formula for calculating ROAS is surprisingly simple: Just divide the revenue gained from your ad campaign by the dollar amount spent on that specific advertising.

How To Calculate ROAS – A Simple Guide

The following examples on how to calculate ROAS assume that you are able to manage your current advertising campaigns or that you have a digital marketing agency that will work with you and help you optimize and be transparent with data, like Direct Online Marketing.

Here’s An Example Calculation For Return On Ad Spend:

In February, Bon Voyage Travel spends $5,000 on a digital ad campaign.

• The campaign results in revenue of $15,000.
• $15,000 revenue divided by $5,000 ad spend = $3
• ROAS = $3 or a ratio of 3:1

For every dollar that Bon Voyage Travel spends on the ad campaign, the return is $3 in revenue.

What Are Some Ways You Can Improve Your ROAS?

If you’re looking to improve your ROAS metric, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1. Make sure that you’re accurately tracking all of your sales data. This includes both online and offline sales.
2. Segment your data by campaign, product, or other relevant criteria. This will help you to identify areas where you need to improve your ROAS.
3. Set realistic goals for your campaigns.
4. Test different strategies and tactics to see what works best for your business.
5. Don’t be afraid to adjust your goals as needed.

By following these tips, you can improve your ROAS metric and reach your desired level of profitability.

Don’t Forget There Are Some Hidden Costs You Can Apply To ROAS!

Getting the most accurate ROAS means ensuring your calculations are comprehensive. All of the associated costs of your ad campaign should be included, otherwise you’ll get an inaccurate result that could make your ROAS seem better than it is.

Common hidden costs that impact calculating ROAS include:

• Staff salaries
• Ad development
• Third-party vendor charges
• Affiliate commissions

There isn’t a definitive right answer when it comes to what your ideal ROAS should be. The benchmark tends to be around a 4:1 ratio, but ultimately, this depends entirely on your circumstances, your goals, and your business. Achieving your ideal ROAS takes into account your ad campaign goals and strategy, a set budget, and a focus on a targeted strategy of select advertising mediums rather than an attempt to use them all at once.

Ready for an advertising campaign that gives you the best bang for your buck? We can help with that. Our team of geniuses, strategists, and digital advertising experts are on standby, ready to create impactful advertising campaigns that sell your audiences on who you are, so you can sell your products and services.

The post What Is ROAS? How is It Calculated? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Learn how to setup and utilize Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion extensions below, and make sure you utilize this paid search advertising add on this holiday season as you make it your best year yet.

Haven’t There Been Black Friday And Cyber Monday Promo Options In Google Ads For Years?

For years, you have been able to call out specific points about your holiday season sales using ad extensions, a far more efficient alternative to having to change your ads for each holiday you are running a special sale. Today, the application of these extensions hasn’t really changed, but the name in the Google Ads platform has evolved.

Instead of “Ad extensions,” today they are now referred to as “Promotion Extensions” or “Promotion Assets.”

New name, same general intention.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion extensions can be shown on your responsive search ads from October 15 through December 15. In the event you want to narrow down the date ranges that those ads show, you can do so in the “advanced options” section of the settings.

In previous offerings from Google, the time frame for running these extensions was much smaller, normally just the week you would typically consider these types of deals… the last week of November or first week of December.

We’ve been huge fans of using promotion extensions for our clients for years because they serve as is a great way to show what you offer alongside your traditional ad text. Promotion Extensions may not be clickable, but they definitely make your ads take up more digital real estate, which is always a good thing.

How To Setup Black Friday And Cyber Monday Promotion Extensions In Google Ads

Setting up these promotion extensions for your Google Ads is pretty simple to complete. Below is a helpful, how to guide with pictures.

Before you get started, note that setting up Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion extensions follows the same steps to complete.

1. Navigate to the “Ads & Assets” dropdown in your account dashboard, and click “Assets.”

2. Click the big blue “Plus” button at the top of your Assets list and choose the “Promotion” option.

3. Choose either the “Account”, “Campaign”, or “Ad group” level to add your promotion extension to your ads.

How do you know which is the right level to add your promotion to your ads? Here’s three easy examples to consider.

• Account: select this option if your promotion extension can be attached to every responsive search ad you are running. For instance, if your Black Friday or Cyber Monday offer is 20% off sitewide.
• Campaign: select this option if your promotion extension can be attached to a specific campaigns, but not every single campaign you have set up. For instance, if you are an auto parts retailer running a Black Friday or Cyber Monday special on accessories but not headlights.
• Ad Group: select this option if your promotion extension can be attached to specific ad groups in your campaign. Following the auto parts retailer example, adding a promotion extension to a particular ad group is the best option if your Black Friday or Cyber Monday special is on Ford parts and accessories but not Toyota parts and accessories.

4. Click the “Occasion” dropdown and select either “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday.”

Two important things to note here:

1. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just two of 35 occasions Google allows you to create a promotion extension for.
2. You can add promotions to an individual campaign. That said, any promotions will also be added to your account to be used across all of your Google Ads campaigns. This tip is so important that Google calls it out twice on the page, so make sure you pay attention.

5. After you complete the standard promotion extension form fields, don’t forget to review the URL options and Advanced options.

It’s always a good idea to give Google as much information as you can (or need) to have available for your promotions.  The “Promotions details” section pictured below is clearly visible as you scroll through. “URL options” and “Advanced options” are optional dropdowns but may provide important details for your potential customers looking to take advantage of your seasonal specials for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

6. Click “Apply” to complete and save setup of your Black Friday or Cyber Monday Promotion Extensions.

Our Favorite Black Friday And Cyber Monday Promotion Extensions Hack

Google really hit a home run by making these promotion extensions simple for advertisers. They are a quick and easy way for marketers like you to get the word out about your holiday sales without having to go back and edit hundreds of lines of ad text.

Less time wasted editing ad copy, more time spent figuring out how to make this holiday season your best year yet!

But… do you want to make your Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads even more powerful than simply adding promo extensions?

If you do (and seriously, why wouldn’t you?), publish your holiday promo extensions on ALL OF YOUR COUNTDOWN ADS. In our years of experience, leveraging these promotion extensions on these ad types together creates an amplified sense of urgency!

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a real thing. Your customers have it, and this time of year is the perfect to take advantage of it.

If you are interested in learning more about what you should be doing for success during the holiday shopping season, be sure to check out any of the following links:

• DOMinate Black Friday Webinar (available on-demand)
• 30+ SEO tips for Holiday eCommerce
• 12 Profitable Holiday Marketing Ideas To Make This Your Best Year Yet

Alternatively, if you want to make sure your holiday campaigns are ready to roll before the season gets hectic, schedule a 1:1 consultation with one of our digital marketing experts so we can create a plan to help meet and exceed your goals for this season.

The post Black Friday & Cyber Monday: The Must Use Holiday Season Promotion Extensions appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

That’s right – you’ve got about three weeks (as of this posting) to get your search ads together.

Google claims that this change will be better for advertisers because, according to Google studies, Responsive Search Ads are a high performing alternative to Expanded Text Ads. It also means advertisers will have less control over their ads.

Let’s examine the pros and cons of this change below.

What Exactly Is Changing?

Google has announced that you will no longer be able to create or edit Expanded Text Ads within standard search campaigns after June 30, 2022.

So while you will no longer be able to create them:

1. Any Expanded Text Ads that you currently have running (or create before the deadline) will continue to serve.
2. You will also maintain the ability to pause and resume Expanded Text Ads.

This change to the platform doesn’t mean your existing ads will stop running. It simply means that Responsive Search Ads will, become the primary ad type available to advertisers in paid search campaigns.

Responsive Search Ads have been available for a few years now. Before this change, it was a best practice at DOM to create ad groups composed of:

• 1 Responsive Search Ad
• 3 Expanded Text Ads

According to internal Google data, “advertisers that switch from expanded text ads to responsive search ads, using the same assets, see an average of 7% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion.”

Emphasis above was added by us for effect.

According to the Google Ads management specialists here at DOM, Responsive Search Ads generally serve more frequently than Expanded Text Ads. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that Responsive Search Ads always perform better, but it does mean that Google prefers to show Responsive Search Ads more.

Therefore, it is best to go with the flow and use the ad type that Google puts in front of people more frequently.

What Is an Expanded Text Ad (ETA) compared to a Responsive Search Ad (RSA)?

To users, these two search ad types look the same when encountered online:

It’s under the hood, on the advertiser’s end, that ETAs and RSAs differ.

Here’s the space you’ve got to work with for each ad type:

Expanded Text Ads

• 3 headlines
  • 30 characters max/headline
• 2 descriptions
  • 90 characters max/description

Responsive Search Ads

• 15 headlines
  • 30 characters max/headline
• 4 descriptions
  • 90 characters max/description

ETAs let you define 3 headlines and 2 descriptions, arranged in the order you choose.

RSAs let you define up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, which Google then takes and mixes & matches to create the specific combination of headlines and descriptions that appear in any given instance of your ad showing to a user.

Another differentiator with RSAs is the presence of the Ad Strength progress tracker.

This tracker helps you understand what other additions and features you need to include in your RSAs to maximize the likelihood of its visibility. For instance, if you were not using any ads extensions, this tool would tell you and provide you with some ideas on extensions to use.

Over time, Google’s machine learning algorithm will determine which ad combinations produce the best results for your campaign, and tailor your copy to achieve your desired results.

Pinning

Within RSAs, you can pin headlines and descriptions to a certain position. That is, you can instruct Google to show a line of text in only the position within the ad that you choose.

So if you have a headline that you always want out front & center in your ads, you can pin that headline to show only in position 1 for instance.

Same goes for your descriptions.

Pros and Cons of the End of Expanded Text Ads and the Rise of Responsive Search Ads

Con: Loss of Control

It will be harder to control what precise message users see in your ads.

The responsive nature of RSAs means that the Google algorithm will cycle through multiple headlines and descriptions to show in a given instance of your ad appearing on a SERP. You won’t know for certain what combination of text a user will be served.

Just for the sake of confirmation, it’s worth noting that this “loss of control” is specifically tailored to your ad variations and NOT the search queries you are targeting your ads to be shown for.

With ETAs, you control the singular message that your ad will always display. You write the 3 headlines and 2 descriptions, and you put them in the order you want; that’s how ETAs work.

It will be harder to A/B test the effectiveness of one message against another.

Because RTAs present a rotating combination of your headlines and descriptions, it won’t be possible to run a strict test of one ad message against another. ETAs, on the other hand, do allow for this kind of precise testing.

At DOM, we continually A/B test ad messages for our clients with ETAs. It’s a best practice of ours to disseminate well-performing messages across ads and campaigns; conversely, we swap out poor-performers and put in new messages to continue our testing.

Pro: Easier Account Management

Creating ad groups composed of a single RSA rather than multiple ETAs does make things easier in some ways.

You can spend less time creating ad groups.

Right off the bat, you only have to create one ad rather than a bunch to communicate many messages.

And you can consider adding suggestions straight from Google for more headlines and descriptions.

You can let Google do the A/B testing.

(If you’re feeling ambitious, even after June 2022 you can still A/B test one RSA against another. You’d need to provide each of the 2 RSAs a different set of headlines and descriptions, one set for the test group and one set for the control group. [And perhaps perform some prodigious pinning to make select elements static.])

If you don’t have the time to set up A/B tests of one ad against another, you can just let Google rotate through a bunch of messages and optimize your ad. The algorithm will optimize your RSA by trying to present the most enticing of your headlines and descriptions to each user, based on that user’s search history and what they’ve typed into the Google search bar.

What Does This Change To Responsive Search Ads Mean for You?

Simplified Account Management

If you don’t have the time, inclination, or people to run your own A/B tests of ad messaging, then RSAs are a boon. You can give Google some headlines and descriptions, and then sit back and relax while the algorithm tries to sort out what’s the best-performing ad copy.

Less Control

If you like to craft a precise message and deliver it to potential customers verbatim, RSAs are a bane. You’re going to have to put in more effort to present a consistent message; you’re going to have to dig into technical settings like pinning to make your ad more static.

Going with the Flow

Whether we like it or not, Google will continue to change the details of paid search advertising. Its nature is staying the same, however. At the end of the day, you still need to craft a message that compels your audience to take action. This upcoming (June 2022) adjustment by Google doesn’t change that fact.

So take the leap and embrace Responsive Search Ads. This is an ad type that Google is already favoring over Expanded Text Ads (as our experience at DOM shows us).

To get more information on this topic, check out Google’s documentation.

Here are a few more articles from the DOM blog about digital advertising that might interest you, too:

• Will AI Copywriting Replace Content Writers?
• Zero-click Searches and the Future of SEM
• How Online Marketing Helps Global Exporters Grow
• What Is a Call to Action? (Click Here to Find Out)

Unsure whether or not your campaigns are prepared for the expiration of expanded text ads? Contact us today for a free PPC consultation.

The post Google Responsive Search Ads (And Why They’re About To Be All You’ve Got) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

But deploying such an enterprise-level strategy with the intention of improving lead generation strategy requires an arduous, concentrated effort that can feel herculean if you don’t understand the complexities.

When a CMO understands that enterprise-level lead generation relies on targeting, budgets, and paid media, they can organize those moving parts into a cohesive digital marketing strategy that wins new customers and clients.

Your consumers are online. Let’s go find them.

Below you find over 3,000+ words dedicated to enterprise digital marketing strategies and solutions. In the event you are a part of an enterprise organization, you probably aren’t starting a marketing campaign from scratch. Because of that, we created the following table of contents to help navigate where you need to go to grow your digital presence with confidence and improve your marketing efforts. 

Digital Ad Strategy For Enterprise Lead Generation

• Part I: The Basic Considerations
  • The Landscape Will Change
  • Embrace Multiple Digital Marketing Strategies
• Part II: Goals
  • Create Benchmarks
  • Set Realistic Goals
  • Leverage Intelligent Goal And Event Tracking
• Part III: Budget
  • Proportional Budget Expectations
  • Compare Growth % To Marketing Budget %
• Part IV: Audience Targeting
• Part V: Types of Enterprise Digital Marketing Mediums
  • Paid Media
  • Earned Media
  • Owned Media
  • Your Strategy Will Need Them All
  • Action Items
• Part VI: Perform Marketplace Analysis
  • Who Is Your Competition?
  • What Products And Services Does Your Target Audience Already Use?
  • Understand Potential Legal Quandaries
  • Leverage Surveys
  • Use Focus Groups
• Part VII: Decide Your Brand Voice
• Part VIII: Set Up Reporting
• Part IX: Conclusion

The Basic Considerations

No matter what type of digital marketing strategy you choose, if you’re a global corporation, it will cost you. While successful earned media and viral sensations may appear to be free wins, they typically aren’t.

This is why paid media campaigns are the most popular forms of enterprise digital marketing. They’re the most reliable outlets that generate leads. When you streamline and optimize paid media campaigns, you can look to leverage viral and earned media opportunities.

It’s difficult to rely on viral campaigns and impossible to rely on them if you are doing so out of economic desires.

The Landscape Will Change

If you experience early success in paid advertising, it’s OK to pat yourself on the back. But it is not best practice to rest on your laurels enjoying the spoils of your newfound success.

The digital marketing landscape is always changing and evolving.

What was viral six months ago is dead today.

Landing pages that worked last October won’t convert leads this October.

The keyword budget from two years ago is two times the price today.

A flexible digital marketing plan creates a strategy that adapts and evolves. If you can’t evolve your strategy, your brand awareness and lead generation success will eventually lag behind the competition.

Embrace Multiple Digital Marketing Strategies

As stated prior, paid media serves to stabilize all digital marketing strategies. It’s the most reliable lead generation means. But it is not the only marketing play that grows brands.

It’s important to deploy a versatile digital marketing strategy that includes a variety of plans. Marketing by way of a one-dimensional strategy doesn’t lend itself to accelerated brand growth.

You need leads and data. You want qualified people requesting your products and services. You want to scale conversions.

Deploying the latest marketing tools or investing in a marketing platform like HubSpot or Semrush may be a great start for your organization, but that really only scratches the surface.

In order to create reliable, repeatable success, you’ll need to consider the following:

• Your goals
• Your budget
• Your audience targeting
• Your digital marketing mediums
• Your analysis of the marketplace
• Your brand voice
• Your reporting setup

Below, we go into greater detail on all of these topics.

Goals For Enterprise Digital Marketing

Whether you choose to work with an agency on your digital marketing strategies or do it yourself, you need to create a year plan. The year plan should include a variety of goals essential to driving revenue.

If you interview an online marketing agency that doesn’t suggest a long-term strategy that includes your goals, reconsider the relationship.

At an enterprise level, a long-term strategy keeps everyone’s feet to the fire. It represents internal and external accountability points.

You need to decide meaningful statistics to represent success and failure.

Here are some examples of digital marketing goals.

• Leads: How many daily, weekly, and monthly leads does your company receive?
• Lead Quality: Of those leads, how many result in sales?
• Landing Page Conversions: How many users hit your sales page, but back out? How many give you their information to request more information? How many buy directly on the page?
• Sales: How many sales do you make on a daily, weekly, and monthly frequency?

These are simply examples. Digital marketing goal measuring points can be endless in scope. It’s important to choose the goals that are most meaningful and impactful to your company.

For example, if more SEO traffic doesn’t improve sales, this means your goal of “more traffic” failed you. It means there is something missing inside the strategy funnel. But if you didn’t declare goals, you’d have a longer road to discovering the diagnosis.

Create Benchmarks

You can’t know where you’re going without knowing where you came from. If your digital marketing agency asks you for current numbers, that’s a good indication that they want to create benchmarks.

Benchmarks define a point in your digital marketing before your new strategy begins. Using the goals you defined in the section prior, they assert where your company was before the new strategy deployed.

This allows you to set reasonable, achievable goals. It sets the stage for accountability throughout all your marketing moving parts. It’s right there, in digestible statistical form. You know how many more leads you need tomorrow than you had today. You understand where sales should be next December. And so does everyone else on your team.

Set Realistic Goals

Some CMOs set ridiculously unachievable goals as a way to motivate a marketing team. Others do it because they don’t understand their marketing space enough to realize their goals are that of fantasy.

In either case, setting unrealistic goals disembodies marketing strategy from marketing labor. If no one can achieve your goals, what’s the point? That’s how your marketing team will feel. You’ll never determine authentic failures or successes because your goals misrepresent your space.

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Leverage Intelligent Goal and Event Tracking

Now that you have goals, it’s important to identify when those goal metrics are met. Often, this means tracking form submissions or link clicks. We recommend you read this Google Analytics Form Tracking guide to begin.

Goals and Events Aren’t The Same

While close in dynamics, goals and events are two different metrics. Both help you analyze how users interact with your site, but they do so in unique ways. It’s important to understand those differences and nuances.

Google Analytics distinguishes between the two inside its interface. To locate goals, you need to access the Conversions section. To locate events, you need to access the Behavior section.

What’s the main aspiration of any good business?

To make money.

This means revenue must be accounted for in a statistical way.

Goals feed events and create a user narrative.

For example, if you make money through a lead generation form on your site, you need to track events (form conversions). But that’s not the entire story. This is where events come into play. You also might want to understand the time on a landing page or how far the user scrolled into the sales pitch before either leaving the page or converting into a lead event.

Let’s explore through examples:

An event tells you when a user converts as a lead or sale. In order to view conversions in GA, you must first install a conversion pixel on the page you’re tracking. One of the popular conversion pixel deployments is on a “thank you” page that pops up once a user has submitted a form.

On the flip side, you can request that GA track that same page as a goal for scroll depth.

Here are some popular Google Analytics goals:

• Time on site
• Pages per session
• Sharing on social media
• Playing a video

There are a variety of intelligent goal tracking methods at your disposal. In the end, you want to track the user’s journey and gain an understanding as to why events fail or succeed. Did someone fill out the form but not convert during the phone call? This could indicate poor lead quality or a flat sales call method.

Goal and event tracking empowers intuition and instincts with valid supporting data. When you track goals/events, you stop guessing. Guesswork bludgeons digital marketing strategies because it lacks statistics and evidence.

Goal tracking displays cleanly inside of your Google Analytics account. It’s a quick and easy to interpret synopsis of wins and losses. But it’s also a deep dive under the hood of your sales and leads health.

Declare Value To Goals

Google Analytics allows you to decide ROI for goals. In other words, you can put in impactful monetary estimates for goal completions so that your interface assumes cash value.

Goal Flow: Where’d They Go? What Happened?

Lead funnel diagnostics only matter if you can see them. When you set up goal tracking, Google Analytics allows you to explore a Goal Flow. The Goal Flow will display where in the lead funnel users exit.

Such information is critical to increasing ROI. The data can signal what changes need to be made, and where, in order to get more users to ultimately convert.

Is your marketing paying off? You can diagnose that on the fly with Goal Flow.

Event Flow: Same Thing

Using an Event Flow in Google Analytics, you determine the general flow of a user’s engagement with the site.

Remember, events can track non-essential engagement items. With Event Goals, you can decipher where engagement falls off. For example, does time on site increase or decrease inside the Event Flow?

Goal/Event Tracking Is Essential In PPC

No matter what ads platform you choose, you must track goals and events as a way to prevent chaos and unreasonable financial losses. When an ad campaign runs in Google Ads, money spends. You need to understand why you are or aren’t making back your spend. In order to get in the black, you need to track Google Analytics goals while in the red.

In short, if your marketing team or agency isn’t tracking goals and events, that’s unlikely a good thing for your enterprise-scale business.

Budget

One of the toughest questions in digital marketing is how much should you spend. It’s often a difficult, stressful question to tangle with.

But digital marketing budgets must be prioritized. Without them, it’s difficult to hire advertising talent or acquire the services of an agency.

You need to understand how much you can spend on advertising campaigns and be profitable. Without this basic knowledge, you might become a CMO throwing dollars out the window.

Proportional Budget Expectations

In the initial phase of establishing a marketing budget, it is best to stay broad. You need to decide what portion of the company’s overall budget will make up the digital marketing spend. For some companies, that could be as high as 50%. For others, it could be on the lower side of the spectrum, nearer to 10%.

Most people will throw out “10%” as the safe response to the question.

If we break down marketing budgets by industry courtesy of Deloitte, we can see that some verticals are heavier handed in advertising spend than others.

Marketing budget disparity aside, your company needs to make decisions for itself. If you’re a SaaS company, you might consider deeper marketing budget investment.

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Compare Growth Percent To Marketing Budget Percent

Now that you have your marketing budget’s percent decided, you’ll need to establish growth percent expectations.

For example, in 2018, Google invested nearly 12% into its marketing budget. It tracked 23% YoY revenue growth. Microsoft, in the same year, invested 15% into its marketing budget but yielded a more humble 14% YoY growth.

Both Google and Microsoft posted impressive digital advertising ROI.

It’s important to establish budget goals in order to make annual financial decisions. One size will never fit all, so don’t just look at what the Jones’ are doing with their similar company.

In the end, you need to establish a budget that makes sense for your company. You also need to understand that in the realm of paid advertising, expect initial losses while you begin gaining improved insights through goal and event tracking.

Audience Targeting In Enterprise Digital Marketing

Who do you want to sell your products and services to? What’s your company’s buyer persona?

If you can’t establish a buyer persona, you’ll waste precious advertising dollars. A buyer persona is utilized during advertising campaign setups. Understanding who you market to means improved clarity into things like age, gender, and vocation.

We would suggest reading our simple guide to buyer persona guide.

Types Of Enterprise Digital Marketing Mediums

So you have a marketing budget. You understand who your targeting in terms of buyers. Goals and events are set up and functioning properly.

Now, where the heck do you begin?

Let’s look at three unique enterprise digital marketing mediums.

Paid Media

Paid media examples are Google Ads and Bing Ads, although there are numerous other platforms you can pay to generate leads for you. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook are two more popular paid media platforms for enterprise digital marketing.

Paid media is a simple concept. It means you use advertising spend to buy ads. There are a number of different types of ads to consider.

• Display: The use of banners, images, video/audio, that display on websites or apps.
• PPC: Pay per click advertising. Links that draw clicks.
• Branded: Establishes a direct connection with a consumer, but isn’t always directly linked to a sale.

With each of the above, the goal might be different. Paid media is media you pay for, it’s as simple as that.

Earned Media

Think of earned media in the same way you’d think of a publicity campaign. When a company does something that garners awareness, attention, accolades, or otherwise, it’s earned media.

These days, earned media could be anything from a sound bite on the local news to an Instagram post going viral. It all amounts to the same style of marketing.

The key to earned media is that it can’t be paid for. If you pay for an article on a news website, that’s not earned media, it’s paid media.

In order to leverage earned media, you’ll need a marketing team with experience in content marketing and/or PR. Earned media requires some daily attention, from monitoring journalist story requests and to seeing what’s trending online.

Earned media doesn’t come easy. You’ll need to do the work.

Example Cases

Back in 2014, Coke launched a “Share a Coke” campaign that branded people’s names on their cans.

Another example of earned media is roundups. News roundups feature a vertical’s best and brightest write-ups or videos. The site that gets listed earns the exposure because it presented valuable web content. But the roundup article also gets some reverse exposure because often, those linked sites promote their place in the roundup.

Owned Media

Owned media is the online property you own. Typically, the most powerful owned media comes in the form of a website property, but it can also be extended to an app or a Facebook/Instagram page. In most cases, the Facebook page feeds traffic to the website, establishing an owned media flow.

The strategies we typically find most effective for generating traffic and leads to owned media include SEO and CRO.

Owned media is hardly complicated and any enterprise business will have it.

Your Enterprise Digital Marketing Strategy Will Need Them All

If you want your business to achieve at the next level, you’ll need all your digital marketing mediums to be on point. You need to optimize and evaluate each portion of the hierarchy to make sure no stones are left unturned (or unoptimized).

All of these elements act in unison of one another, but they are all independent influencers of success and failure. Many companies make the mistake of lumping them all into one marketing bucket.

Each media type needs its own optimization and special attention.

Enterprise Digital Marketing Strategy Action Items

We’ve gone over a lot of information in this guide. At every turn, there is one common theme we can’t ignore.

Enterprise digital marketing strategy relies on a data-driven mindset.

Perform Marketplace Analysis

To begin, perform your marketplace due diligence. You might consider having an outside firm assist in this area, depending on your time constraints and budget. You need to establish a strong, viable overview of your entire market.

Who is your competition?

If you choose to hire an advertising agency, they’ll use this information to craft an appropriate strategy. Even if you consider leveraging the ad agency for this work, you should still have a solid idea of who you’re up against in the marketplace.

What products and services does your target audience already use?

This goes back to the buyer persona, but it can’t be said enough. You need to understand what your target audience is already purchasing. This helps your marketing strategy expose pain points. Pain points, once resolved, are the key to moving product.

Understand Potential Legal Quandaries

Could a simple policy change tank your successful business? We find this type of issue to exist heavily in financial and real estate marketplaces. It’s never a bad idea to have a lawyer assess your marketplace risks prior to establishing a marketing strategy. This helps you understand what obstacles might arise in the future. In those cases, you’ll already have a plan and can avoid being reactionary.

Leverage Surveys

Surveys, whether performed by your company or by a third party, can help define buyer personas and marketing strategy.

Use Focus Groups

Focus groups give instantaneous feedback over products and services. Having interested people use your product helps you fix weak points before going to market. It’s better to understand your product’s downsides before thousands of reviews hit the market.

Define Your Brand Voice

Whether it’s a new marketing director or agency, you are sure to be asked what your brand’s voice is for advertising purposes.

Often, this feels like a heavy question for a CMO. But in the end, the advertising agency simply wants to know how you want your brand represented in website copy and ad copy.

For example, is humor an OK approach for your brand?

Do you choose to avoid controversial topics such as politics?

Do you want to deploy aggressive ad copy that potentially takes jabs at the competition?

Do you want formal or informal copy?

If you are unsure, write a few ads yourself as a test. See what type of language you come up with. This can help you gauge your comfort level with your brand’s voice.

Set Up Reporting for Enterprise Digital Marketing

We went over the importance of reporting. But what good are Google Analytics events and goals if you don’t ever analyze them?

Whether you’re using an agency or an internal marketing team, make sure you get monthly reports delivered. Decide what metrics are the most meaningful to digest. You don’t want a monthly report that overwhelms. If you note a problem, you can take a deeper dive.

Your monthly report should be highly digestible and convey the status of lead quality immediately.

Conclusion On Enterprise Digital Marketing

Establishing an enterprise digital marketing plan means lots of hard work and dedication throughout your organization. You’ll need to leverage impactful data and stats to help foster a data-driven environment. Utilizing weekly or monthly reporting that’s easily digestible can help keep your finger on the pulse of success and failure. You’ll want to know when to change course and when to stay the path.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post How To Build a Digital Advertising Strategy for Enterprise-Level Lead Generation (Updated 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Simply put: it’s not easy to be in charge of kickstarting growth for treatment facilities and rehabilitation centers.

Scammers and third-party lead generators have increased the difficulty for organizations to rank their websites to be found by the 23-million-plus Americans in need of treatment. 

But the biggest Google change challenging SEO efforts for treatment facilities and rehabs isn’t the scammers…

Instead, it’s the government. 

Learn how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been impacting your ability to rank at the top of the search results. Then, get a glimpse into 12 of our top ideas to rise above SAMHSA in the search engines so you can get your growth plans off the ground.  

SAMHSA’s Impact on Digital Marketing for Addiction and Mental Health

Back in February 2018, Google rolled out a significant change to how it presents search results in the United States when users look for services and information related to substance abuse and mental health.

That change? The placement of the National Helpline page provided by SAMHSA as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

• “anxiety symptoms” — 77,500 monthly searches*
• “drug addiction” — 22,200 monthly searches*
• “signs of alcoholism” — 18,100 monthly searches*

The rise in the ranking presence of this page was exponential. According to data from SEMrush, its presence in the top 10 of Google results increased by over 1,100% in just the first month.

But that was just the beginning. Today, many of those same searches continue to show the SAMHSA National Helpline, and the number continues to grow.

For instance, as of August 2020, you can now find it listed on the first page of Google for over 89,000 terms. As a result, traffic estimates to the site have also grown by enormous leaps and bounds.

If you are responsible for confidently growing admission applications at a substance abuse or mental health facility, this change has forced you to rethink a few of your tactics. The good news is that rehab facilities like yours can respond and succeed despite this.

Get started with the extensive list we’ve created for you below.

Below, you will find 12 alternative marketing tactics – three using PPC strategies, and 9 using SEO strategies – that you can leverage quickly to compensate for SAMHSA’s ownership over the most clicked-through keyword positions in the search engines.

Our 12 Top Addiction Treatment Marketing Tactics

PPC And Digital Advertising Tactics

1. Go ‘Legit’ to Run Search Ads
2. Advertise On The ‘No. 2 Search Engine’
3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On The ‘GDN’

SEO And Content Marketing Tactics

1. Get Listed in SAMHSA’s Locator
2. Create Content For Every SERP Feature
3. Market The Map With Local SEO
4. Explore New Markets With Hyperlocal Pages
5. Review Your Past (Optimize It For The Future)
6. Capitalize On Question-Based Searches
7. Expand Upon Your Program Features
8. Blog For Your Decision-Making Audience
9. Barnacle To Top Content Publishers

1. Go ‘Legit’ and Get Approved to Run Ads In Search Engines

For a long time, Google and Bing accepted search engine advertising from rehab and mental health facilities in the same way they accepted ads from other medical service and healthcare providers. But, as the opioid crisis in the United States continued to escalate, the rules for addiction treatment centers started to change. 

Why? Because scammers started taking advantage of those in need.

To help separate the scammers from the legitimate treatment facilities, Google partnered with LegitScript to setup an independent, third-party verification system. Since then, any in-person treatment facility, crisis hotline, or support group has been required to be LegitScript certified to advertise in Google. You can learn more about the LegitScript certification process from our friends at FHE Health, a healthcare institution that delivers quality, medically integrated personalized treatment for those suffering from behavioral health disorders located in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Why LegitScript Certification For Search Ads Became A Need

In case you missed it, here’s a timeline of how the bans and reinstatements of rehab facility advertising in search engines progressed:

• September 2017: Google began restricting ads from showing for searches related to addiction treatment after it noticed that some facilities running ads did not provide a high enough quality of care to help patients recover.
• January 2018: Google followed suit in the UK as well and eventually Google extended the ban globally.
• April 2018: Google announced its partnership with LegitScript. By July, LegitScript planned to verify about 30 facilities and Google would once again reopen advertising to in-person facilities, crisis hotlines, and support groups.
• February 2019: Bing announced it would also require LegitScript certification for all addiction treatment advertisers and would no longer accept third-party lead generators. 

To be fair, there’s no doubt that running PPC campaigns in substance abuse and mental health niches is a costly marketing strategy. In addition to your monthly PPC marketing budget and associated agency fees, LegitScript requires an application fee per facility and an annual fee for verification.

With that said, search engine advertising is likely to be an ROI-positive endeavor if managed correctly. It’s also the only 100% viable option for getting a top page position for a keyword currently occupied by SAMHSA.

Plus, LegitScript certification keeps a lot of the less ethical facilities and scammers from competing for clicks and driving the costs per click higher.

Similar to becoming a listed facility in the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator from SAMHSA (more on that below), getting your facility listed will take some time, but the process is pretty simple.

If you are a representative of a facility interested in starting a LegitScript application, you can click here to submit one.

2. Advertise On YouTube, The Internet’s ‘No. 2 Search Engine’ 

If you clicked here, you were expecting this to be all about advertising on Bing, weren’t you? Or maybe one of the search engines that’s popular in international markets, like Baidu or Yandex?

Well, it’s not. Instead, you need to take a moment and think about leveraging the search opportunities provided by advertising on YouTube. A site that generates more searches on its platform than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com… COMBINED.

Added bonus: it’s also widely considered to be the no. 2 social network, making it a great place to boost your social media marketing.

While it’s not a traditional “search engine” in the way you might normally think about them, there are nearly 3 BILLION searches per month done on the site, according to data compiled by Mushroom Networks. 

That breaks down to over 1,100 searches per second. 

Although it was acquired by Google back in 2006, LegitScript certification is not required at this time to advertise on YouTube. Therefore, it can be a more attractive advertising solution for smaller facilities with cost barriers to traditional search marketing on Google and Bing.

4 YouTube Advertising Tips To Maximize The Performance Of Your Videos

While LegitScript certification isn’t required, you’re still going to need to have a commercial or video ad ready to go for a YouTube promotion. Once you have your creative completed, here are a few ideas on how to get the best performance from a YouTube campaign.

• Use the appropriate format. Here’s a quick list of which type of YouTube ad is best for your campaign, based on your goals.
  • Brand recognition: 6-second bumpers.
  • Clicks: 15-20 second pre-roll ads (bonus: they can’t be skipped).
  • Conversions: 15-20 second pre-roll ads
  • Re-purposing a TV commercial: 30-second In-Stream ads.
• Utilize closed captioning. Provide the best user experience for your viewers with accurate, verbatim transcriptions.
• Target smartly. Find your audience using the options for gender, parental status, interests, or target specific channels they are likely to watch.
• Deploy an end card. You’ve made some great content, now reinforce your brand and inspire the viewer to take their next action by directing your viewers to their next destination – a landing page, your website, or your YouTube channel page.

There are definitely some benefits YouTube can bring to your marketing efforts with a dedicated advertising budget.

In addition, leveraging YouTube can also bring benefits to your traffic and visibility through SEO and referral traffic. Interested in learning how it can help you in these areas? Check out one of these helpful links.

• How We Grew YouTube Traffic 6,800% For This Retailer
• Video Hosting: YouTube or Vimeo?
• 6 YouTube Tips To Improve Your Results

3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On Google’s Display Network

According to Google, its far-reaching Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users around the world. 

Websites. Blogs. News sites. Even Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.

All of them have an advertising opportunity available to your facility through the Google Display Network.

Depending on the business goals you have for your campaign, Google can also manage the campaign for you on autopilot. Just set your budget, upload your ads, and off you go!

But just because it sounds easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s that simple. Sure, automated bidding is handy, but it’s only as useful as the strategy you put behind it. Similar to YouTube advertising and LegitScript approved PPC advertising, you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to your targeting if you want a display campaign that will lead to conversions. 

Oh, and you’re going to want to keep your ads fresh. You ever get tired of seeing the same ads from leading brands over and over? If you answered yes, then you can assume your audiences will too. Don’t bore them to death with your creative.

With the Google Display Network, you can proceed with confidence. Just be aware that patience and persistence are going to be key in this channel if you want it to pay off. 

THIS TREATMENT CENTER
IMPROVED THEIR ADMITS BY 300%
USING DIGITAL ADS. LEARN HOW.

4. Getting Listed in SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

One of my favorite online marketing strategies comes from the adage, “…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” From some of our research into how Google presents this SERP listing for SAMHSA, the link for the National Helpline will often include a site link to SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator right underneath its meta description.

The fact is that Google favors displaying links from SAMHSA over other possible search results prominently, so getting your original content or sales-driven pages to rank above SAMHSA will be extremely difficult — almost near impossible.

However, SAMHSA has an online treatment finder, and rehab facilities can request to be added to that list of treatment providers.

How To Get Listed In The SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Getting listed in the SAMHSA services locator is a great SEO tactic for your campaign. For starters, you’re gaining a backlink from a .gov domain — one of the highest-value links you can obtain.

Need a reason beyond that? The site generates an estimated 60,000+ visits per month in the United States from Google searches alone. The high volume and highly specific type of people visiting the site and then being referred to your facility create a great source of well-qualified traffic for your site.

If you represent a newer facility, or your facility is not currently listed in SAMHSA’s locator, getting listed will take some time. Overall, though, the process is pretty simple. Here’s how it works according to the FAQ on the locator’s website:

1. You request the addition of your facility by completing the I-BHS Facility Application Form.
2. The BHSIS Project Office verifies that your facility is eligible by contacting your local representatives or SAMHSA/CBHSQ. As an alternative, you can also contact your state mental health or substance abuse agency to help with verification.
3. You receive a survey in the mail from I-BHS, complete it, and return.
4. About a month passes, and pending final approval, your facility should be good to go. Just know that they typically add new facilities on a monthly basis.

To maintain your listing, you are required to respond annually to either:

• the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), or
• the National Mental Health Services Survey (N-MHSS)

These surveys go out every March, and your facility will be required to provide updated information each year after your facility was added to the list.

5. Create Content For Every SERP Feature

If you have spent time doing searches on Google and Bing for answers to almost any question, or for information on any general topic, then you have probably been served with a featured snippet result in the past.

What’s a featured snippet? According to Google, it’s that special box at the top of the search result before the standard listings. Featured snippets include:

• a quoted block of text from a webpage in paragraph, list, or table format
• a link to the webpage the text was originally quoted from

The content is also frequently read aloud by the Google Assistant if you do a voice search. 

While that is the general description of a featured snippet straight from Google, they are just one of many top-position-snatching Google features. Google search engine results page features (SERP features) can take many different forms and shapes. In fact, according to SEMrush, there are over 20 different SERP features to keep in mind if you are using SEO as a growth strategy for your facility. 

While some of the features SEMrush monitors will not have a direct impact on an addiction treatment or mental health campaign, many of them will.

12 Actionable Ideas You Can Use To Put SERP Features To Work

6 Ideas That Are Completely Within Your Control

• Local Pack: verify your GoogleMyBusiness listing and get citations on as many of the major local directories as possible (more on this in tip no. 6) 
• Site Links: add links to your top resources and services pages in the footer of your website.
• Top Stories: Have your blog added to Google News. 
• Knowledge Panel: if your facility has a Wikipedia page, or if one of your executives is a published author, one of these may be available for you to claim. 
• Reviews: deploy schema markup in your site header files with star ratings and review counts from sources like the National Rehabs Directory, the fix, ChooseHelp, or Rehab.com.
• Twitter: publish your most valuable blog content and resources in your Twitter feed using keyword-rich hashtags at the end of each tweet. 

6 Ideas You Can Influence (But Google Controls)

• Featured Snippets: if you have a page that ranks in the top 5 of a search term with a featured snippet at the top, create a subheading that includes the keyword, then publish content that matches the featured snippet type, using the keyword phrase 2-3 times in your text. 
• People Also Ask and FAQ: answer the questions Google showcases in the People Also Ask box in an FAQ section on a top traffic page. 
• Image Pack and Image: optimize the file size and dimensions of your image files and utilize up to 100 characters of your alt tag for keyword-rich descriptions. 
• Featured Videos, Video Carousel, and Video: embed your YouTube videos on pages of your site that also rank well for terms with video carousels. 
• Instant Answer: provide calculations and short, simple to answer questions on your top-performing webpages. 
• Jobs: deploy schema markup in your site header files for the pages featuring any of your open job listings. Note that this only applies if you are hosting your job openings on your site. Platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed already do this for you.

6. Leverage Local SEO To Rank Where SAMHSA Can’t Be Featured

While SAMHSA will continue to dominate organic search results, they technically only have one physical location in Rockville, Maryland. As far as Google is concerned, SAMHSA can’t be featured in local SEO search results because they are not considered to be a provider of local treatment services. SAMHSA will always be your biggest competitor for traffic in the search engines, but one area Google is leaving open for you to own continues to be local SEO.

On desktop searches, a map listing with three facilities is included with nearly every top searched keyword phrase related to substance abuse and mental health services.

On mobile devices, the map takes over all of the SERP real estate above the fold. At a bare minimum, if you have not taken over ownership of your Google My Business listing, or verified your business with the following top local directories, opportunity is leaving you behind:

• Apple Maps
• Bing Local
• SAMHSA
• Yelp

If you already have your business confirmed on all five of the platforms listed above, you are off to a great start with maximizing your online presence in your local area. But you’ll want to take it further with local SEO as there are still as many as 22 other local directories we deem to have a “high” or “very high” citation value.

Because of the presence of the SAMHSA listing at the top of the search results, the fact that you want to reach your target audience on a local or national level will not matter – you’re going to want to leverage every ounce of opportunity local SEO has to offer. Don’t get left behind — local SEO needs to be a critical part of your drug rehab SEO strategy.

7. Go Hyperlocal

There are a lot of well-established websites in the substance abuse and mental health niche that have leveraged hyperlocal keyword searches very effectively over the years for their own addiction treatment marketing.

In fact, many of the most highly trafficked sites in this niche leverage creating a directory of treatment facilities and drug rehab centers as one of their main marketing tools to drive referrals to advertisers. Sites like SoberNation and Rehabs.com have done this for years and become so successful with this as a marketing strategy that they can now get you to pay them for traffic.

Because of how well sites like this perform in the SERPs, these types of directories can be a good source of both relevant referral traffic as well as qualified admissions leads. It can be tough to justify paying to be listed in a directory, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore these opportunities entirely.

Think of it this way — if you can justify paying to be part of your local chamber of commerce, you could probably justify paying to be listed in a directory that can help grow your admissions. Outside of becoming listed in rehab focused directories, you can also apply a hyperlocal approach to your website. If you know zip codes, names of popular suburban areas, or names of specific cities and towns within a dedicated drive radius of your facility, then you can leverage localized content to rank for some highly targeted long-tail keyword searches.

Want to go into more depth on hyperlocal digital marketing? Here’s a few blog posts worth your click. 

• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing it Right Now?
• How You Can Use Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns

8. Revise Your Past (Then Optimize It For Your Future) In Addiction Treatment Marketing

Historical optimization is the practice of updating old content on your site and improving its SEO value for the present and future. Over the past few years, this tactic has become an incredibly valuable SEO play for facilities with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find a blog post or article on your site that was published at least six months ago. Prioritize pages on your site that either:

1. Generate a lot of traffic, or
2. Convert into admission inquiries

Then refresh the content, improve the on-page SEO, add an author bio, and re-publish it with a more recent “updated” date.

Search engines reward webpages they can rely on being “there” when the crawl the internet. This tactic presents your facility with the opportunity to avoid writing about the same topics over and over again. Instead, it helps your website establish cornerstone pieces of content that will reliably provide your site with traffic from search engines. 

As an added bonus, historical optimization can help you establish your administrators and clinicians as thought leaders in the addiction and behavioral health industry.

Historical optimization in your addiction treatment marketing is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

9. Take Advantage of Question-Based Queries In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

According to research compiled by Jumpshot and analyzed by Moz in March 2017, roughly 8% of Google searches are phrased as questions. With voice search only continuing to rise in popularity, the percentage of question-based searches are sure to grow accordingly.

Do you have an FAQ page on your facility’s website?

When you publish blog content, are you writing titles and subheadings in your posts in the form of a question? Take the time to answer both common and uncommon questions. Try to compile questions you may often get from admission prospects and their families about your treatment approaches, facilities, or warning signs that a loved one needs to know. There are two major benefits to taking this approach with your addiction treatment marketing strategy:

1. You will be building trust and helping inform people who need help but are not ready to call.
2. Your site will benefit from a larger number of entry points from keyword searches, lessening the impact that SAMHSA’s top positioning will take away from search traffic to your facility.

What questions are your admissions team, or your clinical staffers, uniquely qualified to answer? Give them a laptop and have them start writing!

10. Don’t Forget About Your Program Features In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

Of the over 89,000+ keyword phrases where Google displays the SAMHSA National Helpline link in the top three results, above you will see just a small sample of the monetary worth of some of the terms, sorted by top monthly search volume estimates.* That’s a very small sampling of the data SEMrush has on rankings for the National Helpline page, but with a pretty quick glance, you will notice some trends across the keywords that Google is using to trigger this result.

• Different forms of addiction
• Someone researching reactions to substance abuse (withdrawal, side effects, etc.)
• Someone is looking to find/get help (AA, NA, rehab, etc.)

Now, in contrast to that, you may have noticed that keywords related to general program features were not in the above example. These days, no substance abuse or mental health facility is the same. Dig in to communicate what makes the approach of your recovery centers unique from other facilities.

3 Questions You Should Think About Answering In Your Content Marketing Plan For Your Rehabilitation Center

• Does your program take a mindfulness approach to relapse prevention?
• Do you leverage the outdoors as a therapy method?
• Does your staff have multiple advanced certifications or education credentials?

Whatever makes your facility stand out from the rest of the facilities out there, now is the time to capitalize on it. Make sure your site has dedicated pages related to those treatment programs and features and support those dedicated pages with press releases or blog post content. Optimize the dedicated pages for maximum search visibility by applying on-page SEO best practices and leverage link building strategies from the supporting content to heighten the importance of the dedicated pages to search engines.

With this addiction treatment marketing tactic, every page on your website can be an entry point to put you in touch with those in need of help.

11. Addiction Treatment Marketing Should Cater Content to Your Audience

In response to these developments in Google search results, a lot of digital marketing agencies are going to suggest you try to leverage content marketing strategies only with the intention of generating interest from top-tier publishers. The idea here is that getting coverage in front of a national audience should generate backlinks and a lot of impressions. The concept can also be referred to as viral marketing — because “going viral” is super easy, right?

To us, this feels like an expensive fool’s errand; unless, of course, the idea of a campaign with a large expense and little to no attributable ROI sounds like something your facility wants to try out.

Addiction treatment marketing shouldn’t be about more awareness of your facility. Instead, it should be about connecting with people who love and care for those who need your help.

5 Content Ideas To Help Establish A Better Connection With Those Who Need Your Help

Going with a “10X content” approach that will have an impact on the attention your brand receives and little else, the more sensible approach is to cater your content directly to your audience. Here are several alternatives to making “viral” content that could be better suited to get your facility highly-relevant traffic:

• Answering questions for the family members of potential admits
• Recapping research conducted in the industry that validates your approach to healing
• Sharing video testimonials from alumni who have dramatically improved their lives after release
• Providing helpful guides on niche topics related to attending a treatment facility, such as a legal term glossary
• Reviewing national and international news topics and explaining how they are directly impacting addiction and mental health treatment

For all types of people, it’s tough dealing with substance abuse and mental health. If you seek to be a resource for people by providing useful information at the right time, they will reach out when they need you the most. Don’t rely on occasional brand mentions in big publications with the hopes that people will remember you when the time is right.

12. Barnacle Your Brand To Top Ranking Content Publishers

Barnacle SEO is not a new strategy, but it can be a highly successful approach when situations like this occur. The term was coined by Will Scott of Search Influence about a decade ago and there was a must-watch Whiteboard Friday about it several years ago, too.

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for rehab centers as an addiction treatment marketing tactic is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for your gain. Ever since April 2018, ranking for the top keywords in the substance abuse and mental health space became exponentially harder due to the update of SAMHSA’s National Helpline. Now, in addition to competing with other facilities and online publishers for top keyword rankings, getting them is almost impossible because of the injection of SAMHSA.

What can you do? Create content specifically on other sites that rank for your targeted keywords. Five of our favorite target domains to leverage for this strategy include:

• Medium
• Pinterest
• Quora
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

The value of links from these domains to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, the referral traffic opportunity from all of them is great, and the frequency with which content on these sites ranks on the first page of Google results is high. While getting a Wikipedia page about your facility may be difficult, creating a profile and submitting content to all of these platforms should become a high priority online marketing strategy this year.

Closing Thoughts On Addiction Treatment Marketing Strategies

Many people are turning to Google to find answers to their troubles. With locations in Wheeling, WV, and Pittsburgh, PA, the team at DOM is well aware of the US’s opioid crisis. We are also sensitive to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” fix.

We think it’s a good thing that Google is trying to get people help when they need it from a neutral source. This is also not unfamiliar territory for Google. Back in November 2016, they made a similar change to the top of results for searches related to suicide.

But this change over the last two years does force substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities to shift. They can still use search engine marketing strategies to create opportunities for themselves. 

They just need to get more creative in order to provide care to the nearly 23 million Americans in need.

The top 12 ways we suggest facilities shift their addiction treatment marketing strategies are:

1. Become a LegitScript certified advertiser so your facility can run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
2. Extend the reach of your commercials and video content with YouTube advertising
3. Strategically tap into the near-limitless advertising opportunities in the Google Display Network 
4. Get listed in the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator
5. Find keywords you already rank well for and structure your content for Featured Snippets
6. Maximize visibility in local SEO by completing and verifying any available citations
7. Create content on your site dedicated to hyperlocal communities that are in need of your services
8. Keep top-performing pages up to date by adding more text and updating visual content every three to six months 
9. Invest time in creating a comprehensive FAQ or writing blog posts to answer common questions
10. Optimize pages on your site for rankings around the unique features of your programs
11. Create content tailored to the families and individuals struggling with these issues
12. “Barnacle” content published by your facility to top publishing platforms for better exposure

Want to check out more of our actionable ideas from our Pittsburgh marketing firm to grow confidently online in the medical and health industry? Check out some of these blog posts below.

• Google Medic: How to SEO Proof Your Site in the Trust Authority Era
• How Do People Find Answers To Health Related Questions?
• How To Optimize Your Hospital for Local Search
• Healthcare Marketing Research & Survey Results

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of the digital marketing landscape in Pittsburgh, you’ve come to the right place. Learn everything you need to know about the Pittsburgh DMA, plus a thing or two about what we’ve learned about growing your digital presence in the biggest city in the Ohio Valley (or the Paris of Appalachia).

What is the Pittsburgh Media Market?

Media markets – or Designated Market Areas (DMAs) – as we know them are largely defined by Nielsen, the company you might also know as the ratings folks. They are a marketing measurement firm that keeps track of consumer behaviors for the benefit of advertisers, media creators, broadcasters, radio stations, etc. Their defined media markets are the industry standard whenever we talk about, say, the Pittsburgh Media Market.

Mini FAQ: The Pittsburgh DMA

Data sources: Nielsen Insights, US Census Bureau QuickFacts

How Many People Are in the Pittsburgh DMA?

According to numbers provided in the 2020 Census for the counties included in the Pittsburgh DMA, the estimated population is 2.85 million people.

When Nielsen measures the population of the Pittsburgh DMA, they do not measure the population by people. Instead, they measure the number of homes. Based on data from Nielsen, Pittsburgh has about 1,166,130 homes, ranking it 26th out of their 210 defined media markets.

Which Counties Are in the Pittsburgh DMA?

There are 16 counties in total in the Pittsburgh DMA – 13 in Pennsylvania, 2 in West Virginia, and 1 in Maryland. That three state surface area covers 10,083 square miles (or, for those of you outside of the USA – 26,110 km). Other definitions of the “Pittsburgh region” extend into Ohio border counties with some sources including several Ohio counties and as far south & west as the Kentucky border and north into the extreme southwest of New York State.

Want A Map of the Pittsburgh DMA?
Grab A PDF For Your Cork Board Here.

The counties included, in alphabetical order, by state, are listed below.

• Pennsylvania
  • Allegheny
  • Armstrong
  • Beaver
  • Butler
  • Clarion
  • Fayette
  • Forest
  • Greene
  • Indiana
  • Lawrence
  • Venango
  • Washington
  • Westmoreland
• West Virginia
  • Monongalia
  • Preston
• Maryland
  • Garrett

Sure, there are other definitions of the “Pittsburgh region” that extend it into Ohio and Kentucky, or even parts of New York State. But just because these parts of the country call carbonated beverages “pop” doesn’t mean they qualify as being part of the Pittsburgh DMA. When most business professionals reference this DMA, they’re talking about the 16 county, 10,000+ square mile area we documented above.

SEO and Digital Advertising Tactics to Grow Confidently in Pittsburgh

Google Business Listing with a Defined Service Area (and Local SEO)

Formerly called Google My Business (GMB), a Google Business Listing lets you access a heaping helping

of tools that firmly establish and enhance your business’s representation on Google’s many properties. Claiming your Business Listing is just the first step–then you get to optimize it for maximum utility.

As part of the GMB claiming process, you will want to set your defined service area. As you move forward with Google Business Profile optimization, this is going to be done by naming your locations, not by setting a service area by drive distance radius.

Check out our Guide to Local SEO in 2022 for more details.

Location Web Page with Location Schema

Do you have a page on your website about Pittsburgh? If not, you should (if you want to do more business in Pittsburgh). Once you do have one, you need to optimize it.

How do you optimize it? Glad you asked. There are three steps you should follow:

Step 1: Use Structured Data

As SEO professionals, we’re bully for schema codes and structured data on websites. Google likes it, too, which is nice. And no wonder Google likes structured data: it’s a clear, concise way to tell web browsers and search engines exactly what kind of page it is.

By using the Location Schema code somewhere on your page, you can tell Google that your page is in Pittsburgh, and is relevant to people looking for businesses like yours in the region. Fun fact: it doesn’t matter where on the page that Location Schema goes, although you will typically find it inserted in the header of a page or between your <body> tags. This can also be done without being a developer if you have a plugin in a CMS like WordPress.

Check out our guide on event SEO if you want to learn more about successfully using structured data.

Step 2: Give it a Pittsburgh URL

Another thing Google likes is a clear URL structure. One of the best things you can do to hammer home that your page is in Pittsburgh is by adding “pittsburgh-pa” in the URL (or slug, as WordPress calls it).

Step 3: Mention Pittsburgh on the Page and in the Meta Descriptions

While we’re on the subject of clear and concise, let’s go over one of the best ways to communicate where your business is: by saying “we’re in Pittsburgh” with the copy you write for your Pittsburgh page.

You don’t have to write about french fries on salads or pierogies, but you should mention the city in a few key areas:

• the meta description
• the alt tags of your images
• the first paragraph
• the subheadings
• and a few times in the page copy itself

As with any keyword, don’t overdo it.

Find Out the Top Search Queries in Pittsburgh Over the Last 12 Months

See the Top Search Queries in Pittsburgh Here

Geotargeting Your Search Ads (NOT Geofencing)

Geotargeting your ads is one way to get the most digital advertising benefit from the physical location of your business without wasting money by spending on impressions or clicks that you won’t be able to serve.

If you want to target people with your ads in a designated area (say, the Pittsburgh DMA) then geotargeting is the most effective method for reaching the right people. If your service area is limited geographically, then your ads should be limited geographically, too. Facebook calls this “Location Targeting,” and other platforms may call it something else, but in today’s digital landscape every major ad platform supports some form of geotargeting.

Geofencing your ads is different than geotargeting your ads. How so? Because unlike geotargeting which allows your advertising to cover an entire service area, geofencing is meant to be used only when you want your ads to be placed around a specific business or location.

Geotargeting vs Geofencing: Why You Should (Almost) Always Choose Geotargeting

Here’s a quick example to illustrate when a regional bank may want to decide to use geotargeting or geofencing to promote its products and services:

• Geotargeting: when targeting residents of the Pittsburgh DMA regardless of where they bank
• Geofencing: when targeting residents of the Pittsburgh DMA to show compare their rates to PNC

The thing that makes geofencing so attractive as a mobile marketing strategy is the fact that you can target a customized message to a potential customer at a specific place at a very specific time. Alternatively, there are a lot of factors that can cause geofencing to be a bad use of your ad spend, including:

• Location accuracy
• Reliance on beacon technology
• Dependence on your target customers having bluetooth and GPS enabled
• Inability to have your audience see your ads in their moment of need

Despite its popularity as a marketing buzzword, geofencing often doesn’t make sense for a better targeted digital ad campaign. Instead, you will find it more effective to use behavior data from search engines or social networks with a layer of geotargeting for best results.

A Bank Rebranded.
See How We Helped Them Double Conversions.

There you have it, a whole guide to how you can make your location work for you, and how you can firmly establish yourself as a Pittsburgh-based business (and we only said “yinz” once!). You can read more about how to get local with digital marketing by reading some of these other blogs on DOM’s Pittsburgh Marketing Agency website:

• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing it Right Now?
• How You Can Use Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns
• How Local Service Ads Can Help You Connect
• 5 Local SEO Tips for Your “Happily Ever After”

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