Are you one of the many businesses that have a registered trademark on your products, services, or company name? In case you didn’t already know, Google doesn’t actually register trademarks.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to request an investigation of infringement by advertisers outside of the ones you authorize.

Listen, trademarking is an expensive and time-consuming process.

One of our many duties here at Direct Online Marketing is to address any infringement upon our clients’ trademarks in Google Ads by alerting clients to another company’s use of their trademarks in search engine results pages.

Let’s take a few minutes below to discuss the tools at hand to properly file a formal complaint against advertisers with Google when we find unauthorized trademarks in ad text.

Who Can File A Google Ads Trademark Complaint?

• The owner of the trademark
• An attorney of record listed on the trademark registration
• A representative of the trademark owner based at a parent company headquarters (think a brand manager, product marketer, or communications director)
• Someone the trademark owner has notified Google has the authorization to act on their behalf
• Other associated parties (for instance, a Google Premier Partner advertising agency)

Want a Premier Google Partner’s
help filing your trademark complaint?
Call 800.979.3177 today.

How Do You File A Google Ads Trademark Complaint?

Google makes this process pretty straightforward. Below is a four-step process for submitting a trademark complaint in Google Ads if you believe another advertiser is in violation of the Google trademark infringement policy.

1. Review The Google Advertising Policy Guidelines

Review Google’s Advertising Policies. Note that their trademark policy varies by region, so please review them closely if you feel your brand has fallen victim to this, especially in a country represented in the European Union or the European Free Trade Association.

2. Produce Proof Of Another Advertiser Misusing Your Trademark

Locate an example of where someone is misusing your trademark. If it’s a national issue, you can do this just by doing a search on google.com. If it’s a localized issue and outside of your area, you can use Ads’ Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to mimic any location.

To use this tool:

1. Click the Tools tab
2. Under Troubleshooting, click “Ad preview and diagnosis”
3. Enter your trademark term. Select location, language, device, and audience type (if necessary).
4. Press enter to create the search result preview box and scroll down.

Before you go too far through this process, it’s worth noting that a reseller and informational site that uses this information may be protected against any kind of infringement action if:

• The landing page of their ad is meant to sell the products and services that use the trademark
• The landing page is found to simply provide information or specific details related to the trademark

3. Collect Your Trademark Infringement Information In A Google Sheets Document

Create a Google Sheets doc or excel spreadsheet. This is just for your own internal use, but we find it extremely helpful.

Below is an example of kinds of information you will want to have on hand in case you need to send more information.

• Date Sent
• Date Received Reply
• Search Engine – if using different search engines
• Status: Removed or Not?
• AIMS Service Ticket or # – this will be the number to refer to when communicating with Google
• Site Owner / Search Term
• Ad Displayed (text version)
• Display URL
• Destination URL – copy the destination URL by right-clicking onto the ad’s headline
• Location (ex. Washington, DC)
• Screenshot the Ad – this is not always necessary, but helpful when Google responds asking for it (which they often do)

4. Complete The Google Ads Trademark Complaint Form

Fill out the Google Trademark Complaint form.

You will be required to fill out the form and submit for review. The form is self-explanatory, but you will need specific information in order to complete the process. Most importantly, you will need to know the following:

• Ads Account #
• Trademark owner’s name, address, phone, and email
• Countries where the term is trademarked
• Registered status (yes or no)
• Whether the trademark is on a word, design, or both
• Application or Registration #
• Your name
• Title
• Company Name
• Relationship (ex. trademark owner or advertising agency that is authorized to act on your behalf)
• Address
• Phone #
• Email

Please note, the Google complaint form is ordered differently than above. You will be asked a few additional questions, which is where the spreadsheet will then be put to good use. You will also need to describe specific details concerning the “Scope of complaint” and select either only specific advertisers or all advertisers. Once you are finished filling out the form, click submit.

Next Steps Following Your Submission Of A Trademark Infringement Complaint

A Google representative will notify you that the complaint has been received; the issue will then be investigated. You may need to provide Google with additional information such as a screenshot (as you are not able to input an image into the complaint form).

That’s it. Pretty simple and quick.

Running through this process 3 times a week allows you to stay on top of competitor ads that could potentially limit your ads from showing. Most importantly, this small task will help prevent a company from gaining value from your trademarked term.

For other options on how to respond when a competitor targets your brand name with their PPC and SEO strategies, we strongly suggest you check out our post on responding to competitors who target your brand name.

For more on trademarks and other legality related to SEO and advertising in search engines, please check out any of the following:

• Want Approval For Resellers And Partners To Use Your Trademark In Google Ads?
• Google Now In Legitimate Trouble over Trademarks
• You Can Use Competitor’s Brands in PPC, But Do You Want To?
• How SEOs Can Protect Themselves Legally

Key Takeaways on Trademark Infringement in Google Ads

• Google allows advertisers to bid on competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords; however, the use of trademarks in ad copy is restricted without authorization.
• Trademark owners can file a complaint with Google to prevent unauthorized use of their trademark in competitor ads.
• To protect your trademark, you need to have it registered in the relevant territory and provide evidence of infringement when submitting a complaint to Google.
• Monitoring your brand terms regularly is key to protecting your trademark and maintaining control over your brand visibility in search.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.

This article was updated to add additional information on May 5th, 2025.

The post How to Protect Your Brand From Trademark Infringement In Google Ads (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

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.

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.

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 passed, the bill would cause a major change in how agencies like ours and companies like yours would be able to target advertisements online. Instead of being able to use the data collected by tech companies to personalize your messages to the right customers, BSAA would limit your options to something simple, like broad location targeting.

In essence, the personalized advertising you have gotten used to in social media and search engines would be limited to a contextual advertising application, more comparable to buying a billboard on the side of the road. In other words, advertisers couldn’t target people by even the most basic demographic factors, let alone interests or habits. Suddenly the ads you see would be a lot less relevant or interesting.

BSAA would give the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general the ability to enforce this limited ad targeting. On top of that, users of the platforms would also be able to sue them for up to $5,000 in compensation per violation. This bill is part of an ongoing effort in Congress to regulate the tech industry’s position on things like the spread of misinformation and privacy of protected class information.

Regardless of the likelihood that the bill passes, the simple fact that it is even up for consideration this legislative session has spurred a lot of discussion here the last few days.

Before Moving Forward… Take A Look Back

So what could this actually mean?  Let’s start with a history lesson.

I haven’t been involved in digital advertising from the very beginning, but not too far from it.  My first year was 2001, back in the days of goto.com (the predecessor to the predecessor to Yahoo! Search Marketing) and the genesis of Google Ads (née AdWords).

Those times were exciting, living in the Old West of digital marketing and advertising.  No blueprint for any of the mechanics existed, even though the basic rules of marketing and human psychology remained.  Everyone involved was experimenting and learning what worked.

This was the Dot Com era where new startups popped up everywhere.  You might ride the waves to fortune or come to work one day and find the doors chained.  In this environment of chaos, you had really smart people doing some really innovative things…and some bad actors pushing limits amorally at best.

There were no such things as privacy concerns.  I would tell college classes complaining about how the government knew about them that they should be way more concerned about Facebook and Google who knew way more about them and – at least at the time – had sterling reputations.  Facebook had ~10,000 different data points on its average US user and advertisers could leverage most of those.

And there were separate networks doing even creepier things with data.

I am not a futurist.  I’m wrong all the time (ask my wife), but the one thing I warned colleagues about was that if the industry didn’t start regulating itself, governments would.  And that’s exactly what happened.  You’re familiar with GDPR, but so many other changes large and small have happened.

Some of these changes have been good, some bad, and many a mixed bag.  Often they have consolidated more power in the hands of the biggest players.  But the industry has no one to blame but itself for not self-regulating.

What the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act Would Mean

Cards on the table: my livelihood – and that of my family and DOM team members – all depend on digital advertising.  I’m not an unbiased source.  But I always try to view issues from as many sides as possible.

I believe the proposed changes would be disastrous.  Not just for the platforms, advertisers, and agencies, but for the general public.

A few years ago the US government started putting heat on the industry for targeting consumers in certain sectors.  At the time advertisers could target disadvantaged communities and groups with ads for housing, banking, employment, and a few other sectors – and these capabilities were absolutely exploited.

Worried about the legal ramifications, the major players did what they always do and made changes in an attempt to avoid the scythe that would split the cash cow.  The end result?  Well, some of the ways slimey advertisers exploited groups stopped – or at least were made more difficult.  Yay!

What it also did was make it much harder for legitimate businesses using information they know about their potential customers and employees to reach them in a cost effective way.  Boo.  We can tell you from first hand experience that advertising job openings and other career opportunities is much more difficult with Google and Facebook than it used to be.

The net effect: it’s harder for people and companies to find each other.  It also has larger economic implications.  When it costs more for companies and organizations to find customers and employees, they either have to cut costs from somewhere (e.g. in the value they offer) or raise pricing to hit their sales numbers.

What’s Going to Happen?

This bill is a huge overreaction to legitimate concerns. It’s wielding a giant battle-axe when a scalpel is appropriate.  (Geez – what is with my sharp weapon analogies in this post?)

Its potential is scary enough that the major players and data brokers will lobby and do a public relations push.  We’re already seeing that.  As an owner of one of Google’s top 200 partners around the world, I received an email Wednesday inviting our team to Privacy at Google On-Demand, a three-week series of webinars all about Google’s privacy efforts.

I also expect that Google et al will make more changes to their platforms, mainly in what levers advertisers can pull.  Because Google is really smart and good at what they do, they’ll continue to make advertising profitable for smart marketers.  The net effect won’t be to make Google weaker, but stronger as their moat will just get bigger and more alligator-infested to keep the competition out.

But if the government or the platforms go to the extreme?  It’s the advertisers and, yes, the consumers that will suffer.

Interested in having a conversation with me or one of our digital marketing experts on how this may impact your advertising based campaigns in search or social media? Please contact us.

Interested in diving a little bit deeper into issues related to digital marketing and privacy regulations? Check out one of these helpful resources:

• Digital Marketing and Privacy Laws: The GDPR and You
• Google’s Housing, Employment, and Credit Advertising Policies: What Do They Mean for You?
• Not Knowing The Letters “A-L-T” Could Cost You $6 Million

The post Should Advertisers And Consumers Worry About the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

That magical time of the year has come around again. Yes, it is time to make your new year’s resolutions.

To help you get started, the talented team at DOM has put together our favorites for digital marketing.

Below, we’ve compiled 14 resolutions from our team of digital marketing professionals to help you improve your campaigns in the coming year.

New Year’s Resolutions 2022: The Digital Marketing Edition

1. Spend Less $

Check Your PPC Campaigns for Broad Keywords Today

From Nikki Powley, Director of Operations

Reviewing an account for broad match keywords is one of the first things I do when completing a Google Ads account audit. They are one of the biggest offenders in the wasted spend category.

There are three keyword match types: exact, phrase, and broad. Straight broad match keywords allow ads to show for your keyword and any variation of the keyword that Google believes could be similar.

For example, you add the keyword “shoes”. Your ad could display for searches of women’s shoes, tennis shoes, or even horseshoes.

If you want to reach a larger audience, but not horse owners, utilize the fourth match type (I know I said three, but stick with me). Modified broad keywords are created by adding a + before words. This requires a user’s search phrase to include a synonym of each word in the modified broad keyword. For example, +womens +shoes allows ads to trigger for variations of women’s shoes like ladies’ shoes, but ads will not show for unrelated terms like kid’s shoes or horseshoes.

Check out 8 more of my cost-saving PPC tips!

2. Save More $

Leverage SEO For Your Top Converting Search Queries In Google Ads

From Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

If you have been running a Google Ads campaign or any other paid search campaigns, then you can review your list of top search queries in the account and use that information to customize a results-oriented SEO strategy.

Here’s an actionable step by step process:

1. Download your list of top converting search queries from your advertising campaigns
2. Sort the list by the search queries with the highest volume of conversions
3. Improve your keyword rankings in organic search for the top converting queries by optimizing
   • Page title
   • Meta description
   • Content on the page
   • Image alt tagging
4. Search the other pages of your site with an “intext” search operator in Google to uncover keyword rich link opportunities.
   • Here’s a sample search query – site:directom.com intext:”Google Ads”.
     • This search will uncover mentions of your top converting queries inside the body of content across your entire domain.
   • Adding these internal links will improve the relevance of your page for the converting keyword, and reduce the likelihood that Google will consider another page on your site to be a better result.

Historically, studies have indicated a potential lift in clicks of as much as 53% when a brand appears in the top positions of paid and organic search. While those numbers may have changed some with Google’s current layout, the opportunity is still there for the taking to improve your conversions and traffic from organic search in 2020.

Launching a new online learning course as one of your new year’s resolutions? Here’s 20 ideas I’ve curated for how to promote a training program.

3. Lose Weight

Let Go Of Keywords You Love If They Aren’t Getting You Conversions

From Leland Reed, Senior Digital Advertising Strategist

Losing weight can be tough. Letting go of bad habits that are impeding your progress is one of the hardest steps to committing to weight loss. The same can be said about making changes to your PPC account.

You thought for sure that the keyword was going to work, right? You just needed to find the perfect combination of ad text and bidding. As the days and weeks go by, the keyword is getting plenty of impressions but no clicks. You know with a little more TLC, you can make it work.

If this sounds like you, maybe it is time to let go of that keyword and start fresh. Don’t be afraid to get rid of anything in your campaigns that are not working. By cutting out poor performing keywords, you can save money and time which will allow you to try new, exciting things in your account.

Is revitalizing your Google Shopping campaigns one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s 5 ways for you to do that!

4. Travel More

Take Advantage Of Every Feature In Your Google My Business Listing

From Stephanie Mahnken, Senior Client Success Manager

Throughout the last few years, Google My Business (GMB) has really ramped up the game for local businesses, making it easier than ever for you to get in front of local customers. This is a good thing as roughly 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information! Not to mention that “near me” or “close by” searches have grown by over 900% in the last two years.

And the best part? GMB is free!

Here’s a list of just a few of the new features added to GMB in the last few years:

• Google My Business Shortnames
  • An easy to remember URL that brings users directly to your business profile
    • Makes review solicitation much easier for small business owners
• Online Ordering Now Available for Restaurants
  • Google now owns the transaction
  • Multiple food delivery partners
• Google My Business Product Editor Expands to Most Categories
  • The Product Editor is for small- and medium-sized individual businesses
  • Don’t pass up this opportunity for free Google real estate! Get Creative!
• GMB Welcome Offers
  • A great way to thank new customers for following you on Google!
• Google My Business Messaging Feature: “Request a Quote” 
  • A sure-fire attention grabber in bright blue
  • Appears on mobile and desktop SERPs

• Service Area Business Updates
  • Limit of 20 service areas
    • Can include cities, counties, states, zip codes or metropolitan areas
  • SABs using a service area radius were automatically updated to the closest named areas above
• Google My Business Marketing Kit 
  • • Create images from existing customer reviews
    • Free posters & window clings for brick & mortar businesses

While it can be time-consuming, completing and updating your listing consistently is absolutely worth the effort.

Bonus tip: Google wants to show the best possible results to its users so remember to be thorough, honest, and don’t try to add a target keyword or geographical keyword phrase to your business name if they are not part of how customers would identify you!

Want to generate more visibility locally as part of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here are 5 more local SEO tips you can learn from the pizza industry giant Papa John’s.

5. Grow Professionally

Look At Core Metrics Less And Focus On Long-Term Growth

From Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst

When you focus on increasing long-term growth rates, you are looking at the rate of change of core metrics over an extended period of time. Growth does not always mean an increase in total revenues, as that growth in revenue also depends on the size of your industry and the interest of your search queries over time.

Short-term clients should expect to see an increase in linear growth, while long-term clients can expect to see an increase in logarithmic growth.

Need to improve goal tracking on your own website as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s a simple step-by-step guide I created for Tracking Buttons Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics so you can better monitor your progress this year.

6. Keep Your Resolutions

Tidy Up Your Ads

From Ryan Norman, Digital Advertising Account Manager

Get Ready for the Sunset of ETAs in Summer 2022

Take the leap and embrace Responsive Search Ads because the old standard—Expanded Text Ads—are going away.

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.

Any Expanded Text Ads that you currently have running (or create before the deadline) will continue to serve after June 30, 2022. You will also maintain the ability to pause and resume Expanded Text Ads.

Responsive Search Ads will, therefore, become the primary ad type available to advertisers in search campaigns.

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.

Read our blog to understand why RSAs matter more than ever.

7. Learn Something New

Try Coding!

From Jim Foreman, Senior Content Specialist

The web is still where we do most of our activity on the ol’ internet, and as long as we digital marketers have to make content for it, we’re going to be doing it with our old friend HTML. It might be on version 5 now, but it’s not going anywhere. You’ll be surprised how a little snippet of code can save your day. If that’s not enough to convince you to learn HTML, check out my whole dang blog post about it.

Coding HTML is one of the easiest entry-level coding languages you can learn, and you’ll be able to see the results instantly in your browser. Who knows, it might even make you so excited about coding that you’ll start looking into other languages, like CSS or Javascript.

8. Be Creative

Create Videos To Show Off Your Business Or Brand

From Carl Zappa, Digital Advertising Account Coordinator

It’s never too late to start being creative. Make 2022 the year your business stands out with a short video that shows who you are.

Why don’t you make more than one? Show what you sell and why your product is different from the others!

Then, test TrueView videos as a part of your PPC strategy. With video advertising, you choose the audience that (might be/is) interested in your product and you decide how much you want to pay. You can run different video formats and lengths. Your video will appear on YouTube and throughout the Google Display Network.

Doing more online video advertising as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Let us help you settle the great debate between YouTube and Vimeo for your video hosting needs.

9. Enjoy Life To The Fullest

Get The Most Out Of Your PPC Campaigns With Some CRO

From Mike Criswell, Digital Advertising Strategist

This year, ensure that you are getting the most out of your PPC campaigns by doing a bit of conversion rate optimization.

A great start would be to run A/B or multivariate tests on your PPC landing pages. Test your current landing pages against as many variants as you can to ensure that your landing pages are top-notch and getting you as many conversions as possible.

Also, don’t forget that just because you get improvements with one variant does not mean that there is no better option. Always keep testing!

Just getting started with CRO but want to make this one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Check out my beginner’s guide here.

10. Become More Engaged With Clients

Gain More Best Friends

From Robbie Netz, Senior Client Success Manager

During this past year, I’ve learned it’s more important to develop meaningful relationships with people. I love the friendships we’ve built with clients, but I want to continue to help them grow. Here are some important takeaways I’ve learned:

1. Treat your client as a friend. I love getting to know what everyone does on the weekend, how their pets are, etc. It allows us to connect on a deeper level so everyone looks forward to our calls vs. “ugh, I have to go speak to that agency again.”
2. Brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas together. It’s always fun to chat about ways to meet their goals on campaigns, but even better to discuss new ideas….like TikTok!
3. Work together as if you’re in the same building. Even though we’re sometimes halfway across the globe, it’s great to use tools to work together as a team. Some of the best projects have been when we communicate via Slack or message one another back & forth in Asana.

Is improving the response of your consumers to your brand one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Click here for a comprehensive list of email marketing strategies.

11. Spread Your Wings

New Year, New Advertising Platform.

From Adriana Parra González, Digital Advertising Account Manager
If you are looking for a new tool to advertise this year, LinkedIn Advertising could be for you.

This platform works well when you are looking for other businesses to buy your service or product from you. It lets you target by job titles, company size, job function, industry, and more.

Do you have content pieces and don’t know what to do with them? What if you use that content in exchange for the lead information?

LinkedIn Advertising is growing over time and it could be a great way to capture the leads for your business in 2021.

12. Keep Your Eyes On the Prize

Conversions Matter Most

From Carla Waters, Digital Marketing Coordinator

While optimizing landing pages or blog posts for keyword targets, I often focus on the keyword by creating a new title, meta description, headers, internal links, adding semantic terms to the copy, adding FAQs throughout, and CTAs. But does this page I’m working on convert? I need to continue to ask myself this question.

This year, I want to focus on the user, their navigation path, and if I have accomplished clear next steps to create a conversion while improving the on-page SEO.

13. Trust Your Instincts, But Confirm With Data

Lose That Gut!

From Jason Ohsie, Strategy and Analysis Department Manager

The days where gut-feeling marketing dominated the competitive landscape have long since passed by the wayside. No matter your niche, if your company is relying solely on the direction of your company’s HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) without regard to a strategic, data-driven approach then your company is running at a significant disadvantage versus the top players in your respective industry.

Much like diet and exercise, a commitment to this approach requires discipline in the following ways:

• Commit to properly tracking and measuring your marketing efforts
• Understand what KPIs matter for your business
• Focus on the mission-critical aspects of your marketing efforts that drive the most impact
• Listen to both your existing customers and your biggest haters
• Be open-minded about what the data tells you

A failure to do this often manifests itself in the following ways:

1. A website redesign that looks aesthetically pleasing but has resulted in markedly lower conversion rates.
2. A sudden drop in organic traffic to your website without an understanding of why this change occurred and how much this has impacted sales.
3. Wasting ad spend on PPC campaigns that just won’t convert properly.
4. Stagnant growth or loss of market share despite an investment into marketing.
5. B2B marketing efforts that have resulted in poor lead quality.
6. Top-of-Funnel marketing efforts like blogs and webinars that fail to gain traction or engagement.
7. Poor ROI overall in digital marketing channels.

Sound familiar? A strategic approach to digital marketing that is not rooted in data can result in failure for even experienced marketing professionals. Proper benchmarking and conversion tracking, clearly defining the KPIs that actually matter for your business, rigorous testing, and the proper mentality should provide the framework for your marketing efforts.

14. Make Sure You’re Looking Your Best

Short Animations Are Excellent Attention-Grabbing Tools

From Matt Merlino, Graphic Designer

If we’ve learned anything throughout the course of the ongoing pandemic it’s that it is perfectly acceptable to sit around and do nothing in our free time. While there’s not necessarily anything wrong with staying still, we should at least try to get up and move after that streaming service continues to prod if we are “still watching.” The same can be said for your next set of creative pieces!

When creating your next set of ads, consider testing some animated HTML5 assets against some of those static ads. A subtle bit of motion is a great attention-grabbing technique to drive more clicks.

Just make sure not to go too crazy or all of that sudden movement could be painful. You’ll want to keep basic design principles in mind to refrain from cluttering your ads and hurting your conversion rates.

• Refrain from Hard-to-Read Fonts
• Construct a Strong CTA that Directly Relates to Your Imagery
• Keep Brand Colors Prominent and Consistent
• Use White (Blank) Space to Your Advantage

It may seem daunting, but you can do it! Push the text in, make the button pulse, or have some fun with the imagery. Whatever you choose to do, add that extra movement to captivate your viewers and take your next campaign to new heights.

Now Go Get Started!

This list doesn’t only include tactics you can use as a New Year’s resolution, almost all of them can be implemented today and included in your digital marketing strategy at any time of the year! You can also check out the rest of our blog for more tips and tricks. 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.

From the entire DOM team, Happy New Year and best wishes for a successful 2022!

The post New Year’s Resolutions: Digital Marketing Edition (Updated For 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The short version is this: With all the consternation lately regarding whether kids should be watching YouTube unsupervised, there’s a lot of interest in apps that parents know are safe for their little ones. Where there is consternation, there is dialogue, which means there is demand, which leads to opportunity.

Kidoodle is a network that has kid-friendly stuff on it. It’s been around awhile, and it’s based in Canada. It’s a successful venture, by any measure.

Kartoon Channel is a fancy, Hollywood-infused network with kid-friendly stuff on it. It has famous names attached to it, like Arnold Schwartzenegger. It’s much newer than Kidoodle.

They are competitors. Competition is great as long as everybody plays nice. When somebody stops playing nice, one of the options available to the participants is to file a lawsuit.

A lot happens behind the scenes of a Google Ads campaign. We don’t have access to the Google Ads account at Kartoon Network, so we don’t know what they meant to do and what they didn’t mean to do. It’s not for us to decide, it’s, apparently, up to the courts now.

But there’s still a lesson here for us as digital marketing experts. Even if everything Kartoon Channel did was completely, totally, 100% legitimate and above board and playing nice, it’s possible for a competitor’s name to pop up in your ad. Since dynamic ads are generated automatically, there might not be anybody actually looking at the ads that appear in every user’s browsers. And, let’s face it, sometimes the algorithms we use make mistakes. Even Google’s algorithms can do things we don’t necessarily want them to do.

Anyway, It doesn’t matter how it happened. Maybe Kartoon Channel used Kidoodle’s name on purpose, maybe they didn’t. Looking from the outside, we can’t know. We talked to our President, Justin Seibert, who’s been doing this stuff long enough to have seen pretty much everything. From Justin, we get these three big tips:

1. “Register your trademark with Google. They’re not likely to do anything if they don’t have one. Not only that, but once they do have it, they can automatically flag ads that try to use your trademark.”
2.  “Don’t use a competitor’s trademark in your ad copy. Sometimes, if you’re doing a comparison between services, you can do it, but even that is likely to get flagged. I would recommend against it.”
3. “If you’re thinking of running ads on a competitor’s trademark, ask yourself if it’s worth the trouble. Are you getting the most out of your money by doing that, or should you come up with a different strategy?”

For more on trademarks, competitor strategies, and other legality related to SEO and advertising in search engines, please check out any of the following:

• How to Protect Your Brand From Trademark Infringement In Google Ads
• Google Now In Legitimate Trouble over Trademarks
• Catch A Competitor Bidding And Ranking For Your Brand? Here’s Your Options.
• How SEOs Can Protect Themselves Legally

If you’d like some help figuring out all this PPC stuff, get in touch with us today.

The post You Can Use Competitor’s Brands in PPC, But Do You Want To? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

This blog post shows you how to generate a pie chart from a pivot table and then manipulate that chart to pull out performance insights.

To see how to create a pivot table to begin with, see the previous post in this series—Pivot Tables: The Unsung Hero of PPC Performance Evaluation.

Generating a Pie Chart from a Pivot Table

I’m starting from here:

To generate a pie chart, follow this path: Insert > Pie Charts > 2-­­D Pie

To show the percentages that each slice represents, let’s add data callout labels: Chart Elements > Data Labels > Data Callout

Note that the pie chart shows you whatever is the first metric in your columns. In this case, that’s Sum of Impressions in column B.

Further, the slices of the pie are displayed in the same order as the stats in the table: at 12 o’clock on the pie, you get whatever is in the top row of your first column. So here, Campaign C begins at 12 o’clock and sweeps around to nearly 9 o’clock because the Sum of Impressions for Campaign C (2,366,434) is in cell B4, which represents 75% of the total impressions for all campaigns (3,169,579).

Adjust which values are displayed in the pie chart by moving another metric into the first position in the Values on your pivot table. Here I’m looking at clicks:

Continuing this process and sorting the pivot table by the other metrics reveals a rich picture of what Campaign C contributes to the account:
75% of Impressions
75% of Clicks
34% of Conversions
8% of Cost
And the 2nd lowest Cost/conv ($11.72).

Keeping Slices in Order

To get the slices of your pie in order, sort the column of the metric you are examining in the pivot table.

See how the slices are now arranged with the largest starting at 12 o’clock and sweeping around clockwise to smaller and smaller slices.

Removing Campaigns to Narrow Analysis

It’s easy to see the relationships between the big contributors to the pie chart for a particular metric. It’s harder to understand what’s going on at the lower end when those little slices are dwarfed by comparison.

Filter out the larger pieces of the pie to see what’s going on at the lower end. For example, let’s take out Campaigns C, E, and A to see what the bottom impressing campaigns look like compared to each other.

Now we have a better sense (visually) for the proportions between the 5 lowest impressing campaigns.

Switching to Location Analysis

A delicious thing about pie charts built on pivot tables is their versatility. Simply drag a different field to the top of the Rows area to change what you are analyzing.

Now we are looking at impressions by location combined from all of our campaigns. The United States is dominating impressions with 93%. Sure, that’s clear. But how does the other 7% look if we expand it the size of the whole pie by taking out the US?

We can see that 6 countries contribute about 75% of the impressions once the US is taken out. So now we know what locations outside the US might be most fruitful to focus our marketing efforts on.

Analyzing a Single Campaign by Various Locations

On the other hand, the US is clearly going to be the focus of our efforts within this account. Getting more granular on US performance, then, is essential.

Start by de-selecting all locations and enabling just the US.

Then Expand Entire Field on the US to see how each campaign is performing in the US.

Storting the table by conversions shows that Campaigns C and G account for 75% of conversions in the US. We also see that Campaign E garnered 39.1 conversions at $5.69/conv, an even better CPA than Campaigns C and G.

What’s Your Favorite Flavor: Boysenberry, Cherry, Chart?

Whether you’re interested in a slice of location, apple, campaign, or pizza, pie charts are the thing.

I hope you’ve gotten a taste of how pie charts can help you get your eye in for evaluating what proportion of performance each campaign or location represents.

One final plug for the previous blog post in this series, which will show you how to create a pivot table to begin with—Pivot Tables: The Unsung Hero of PPC Performance Evaluation.

Check these out for more help with your PPC efforts:

• How to Pinpoint PPC Performance Changes
• Catch a Competitor Bidding and Ranking for Your Brand? Here Are Your Options
• Now It’s Free to List Your Products on Google

Analyze away!

The post Hungry for Better PPC Performance Analysis? It’s as Easy as Pie…Charts! appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

In this blog post, I’m going to take you through one approach to PPC performance analysis, an approach derived from the combined knowledge of the DOM team — that is, from multiple perspectives, from years of experience, across numerous industries.

Comparing current performance to a previous period is frequently fruitful. To improve performance, you need to find out what’s working and what’s not. (Pardon the mucosal elision.) Then you can prune poor-performing elements and nurture flourishing ones.

Campaign-level Insights

Compare week-over-week performance by various metrics

Each metric shows a different nuance of account performance. Start with the basics: impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost. Then consider what more sophisticated metrics matter to your client or industry: CTR, Avg. CPC, Conv. rate, Cost/conv, or ROAS.

At DOM, we’re fans of frequent, straightforward communication. It’s one pillar of The DOM Difference that we deliver to our clients. We report weekly about campaign performance. So that’s why I’ve selected that time range to compare in this example. The wider you expand your range, the larger the trends you can identify, of course.

A PPC account is a multifaceted, ever-changing beast. With dozens of campaigns, hundreds of ad groups, and sometimes thousands of keywords in play, it’s a challenge to separate the signal from the noise.

Once you apply your comparison dates, your stats will look like this, with the option to expand each metric (< >). The bold numbers are the regular values you’re used to seeing for each metric; they reflect the more recent of the periods you are comparing. The fainter figures in parentheses reflect the change in each stat from the earlier period to the more recent period. So here, there were 12% more conversions this week than the week before.

We are looking at account-wide performance totals and changes. This is necessary information to report, but it doesn’t mean much on its own. From the stats above, you could say that performance generally improved (with more conversions and clicks for a relatively slight increase in cost), but you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint why. We need to dig deeper.

Expand compared stats and sort for insights

Let’s look at changes in conversions.

We see here that the greatest change in conversions came in a campaign that went from 0 conversions last week to 3 conversions this week.

Note that I’ve sorted by absolute change, rather than change percentage. Looking at the percentage change for the whole account gives a clear picture of how overall performance changed. But that same metric often muddies things as you get more granular. As you can see, these top 3 campaigns all went from 0 conversions to more than 0 conversions, and thus their change percentage is recorded, rather unhelpfully, as the same for each (+?). Looking at percentage change is useful for metrics with high values; impressions, for instance, would be a better candidate for this kind of analysis.

So, we’ve identified that the campaign with the largest change during the comparison period is the campaign that went from 0 to 3 conversions, right? Not necessarily.

What the screenshot above shows is the largest positive change in conversions.

You also need to sort the change column to see the largest negative change.

Now we see that the greatest change in conversions is, in fact, the decline in conversions from 11 to 6.9.

Note that change percentage is also deceptive on the negative end. Indeed, any campaign that changes from having some conversions to not having any will show a change percentage of -100.00%. No matter how drastic the change — whether from 1 conversion to 0, or 17 to 0 — a change from something to nothing is calculated as -100.00%. That’s just how math works.

(With any analysis, it’s important to keep alert for sample bias. Check out a blog I wrote about sample bias here.)

Low hanging fruit

With just a few clicks to set up our comparison period and a few more to sort for change in conversion, we’ve identified the campaigns that have grown and declined the most.

We’ve now got two paths to follow to optimize our account. We can look into what’s going right and do more of it. And we look at the poor-performing campaigns and make changes that will hopefully improve performance; ultimately, if performance remains stagnant, we might consider pruning spend.

From here, I’m going to show you how to proceed down the negative rabbit hole. Reducing wasted spend is a tried-and-true method of streamlining PPC accounts. It is generally quick and requires little labor. You’re not reinventing the wheel; you’re just pausing things that aren’t performing and pulling back spend.

Ad Group-level Insights

Once you’ve identified a campaign that is struggling, dig deeper to the ad group level to see more precisely what part of the campaign isn’t performing.

Use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Don’t just pause an entire campaign when a downturn in performance alarms you. Instead, zero in on ad groups and then keywords to trim away only what is necessary to reduce wasted spend. You don’t want to miss out on conversions by pausing keywords and ad groups too broadly.

Take a look at the ad groups in this campaign for various kinds of mailing tubes.

This campaign is just a few days old and no ad group has converted yet, but already there is clearly one ad group that is running away with the spend. The Mailing Tubes ad group has spent the vast majority of the budget in this period, and, like the others, hasn’t converted. It’s time for some pruning.

Keyword-level Insights

An ailing ad group might not need to be excised in full; get to the bottom of things by examining the keywords. Then you can pause just the terms that aren’t performing while still running ads.

A Note on Ad Group & Keyword Organization

Structure your ad groups like this:

• Ad group name = Keyword phrase
• Keywords = 3 different match types (+modified +broad, “phrase,” [exact]) of the keyword phrase

This setup is a best practice at DOM. Organizationally, implementing this structure across accounts makes navigation easy and consistent for team members. And it aids performance analysis, as I shall now demonstrate below.

We saw above that the Mailing Tubes ad group has spent the most within this campaign. This is perhaps to be expected because Mailing Tubes is the most general way to describe the kinds of mailing products within this campaign.

In fact, I expected Mailing Tubes to be a bit too broad to run on, so I didn’t even enable the modified broad match keyword (+Mailing +Tubes) when I launched the campaign. And it’s a good thing I didn’t. As it is, the phrase match (“Mailing Tubes”) is spending nearly double the exact match ([Mailing Tubes]). So who knows how much the broad match would have spent.

We can see now that the phrase match keyword (“Mailing Tubes”) is responsible for nearly half of the total spend in this campaign (~$76 of ~$170). We can also see that the Mailing Tubes ad group is driving more than half of the impressions (~3,500 of ~6,000) and clicks (66 of 95) in this campaign.

So, I recommend we pause the phrase match (“Mailing Tubes”) and keep the exact match ([Mailing Tubes]) running. This way, we will disable the highest-spending element of this campaign, while still running on the keyword that is driving the most impressions and clicks.

Challenges

Now, of course, as days and weeks go on, just getting impressions and clicks isn’t going to cut it. If a month or two from now your campaign still doesn’t have any conversions, it’s time to consider more drastic action (unless your goal is awareness through impressions).

You may have to face some tough facts. You may not have the budget to compete for this keyword. Poor ad quality, landing page experience, and site speed may be hampering your ability to win auctions or excite users.

These are real challenges. And they are common. But because they are common, we at DOM have learned a thing or two about how to face these challenges.

How to Promote Growth After Pruning

Review search terms for new keyword opportunities

Remember, search terms are the other side of keywords. Keywords are what you, as an advertiser, bid to show an ad for; search terms are what users type into a search bar. An ad is then served to the user based on how relevant a keyword is to their search term (along with other factors). Search terms reveal what people are looking for. With this knowledge in hand, you can then craft more appealing keywords and ads.

Use broad match keyword variations to suss out long-tail keywords

When starting a campaign for a new product, we at DOM often begin with a generous assortment of keywords and variations that describe the product.

In the example with Mailing Tubes above, it might seem unwise to run on such a broad keyword as Mailing Tubes (and even more unwise to specifically run on the modified broad match variation +Mailing +Tubes). However, the insight into user intent that you can gain from search terms can be invaluable.

In casting a wide net for a few weeks or a few days keyword-wise, you are essentially getting a peek into people’s heads through their search terms. You are learning how people think about your product or similar products. So once again, you can then tailor your advertising to appeal to what people really want. It might even spark the opportunity to introduce new product lines altogether.

Limit spend on broad keywords, while still gathering user intent via search terms

If the approach that I’ve been laying out here makes sense for your business, you might even start thinking of running on broad keywords as an investment in each campaign. You might come to see the search terms as potent market research that is well-worth the expense. Manage this cost by running on them for a limited time at the start of the campaign or by placing them on a limited budget.

Here’s a quick overview of keyword strategy considering “branded” vs. “un-branded” keywords and selecting your “base” keyword phrase and then adding “modifiers” for additional keyword variations.

Refresh ad copy with search terms

Once you see how people describe the products they are looking for by examining their search terms, you can inject those terms into your ad copy. Do it in the first headline when you can. Wouldn’t you be more likely to click on an ad that spelled out exactly what you were thinking.

Test new landing pages

Perform A/B tests to see what appeals most to users. You might have one page that focuses on how your product is better on price than competitors. Another might tout your product’s durability and longevity. Another could show how your product saves the user time.

Landing pages have to close the deal. You’ve enticed a user with compelling ad copy, but your landing page has to move the user to take the action that you want them to.

Pursue SEO

If you have employed and optimized the PPC tactics described above, but still aren’t seeing the performance you would like, consider investing in SEO.

Search engine optimization encompasses an array of activities, from generating authoritative content, to garnering backlinks, to performing on-page optimization, to various species of user experience improvements. SEO is generally a longer-term endeavor than PPC. But there are things you can do that improve SEO and PPC simultaneously. Native landing pages, for instance.

If you direct PPC ads to landing pages that are a part of your website (that is, the landing pages are not hosted separately elsewhere on the web), then optimizing those landing pages is both a PPC and SEO play. In particular, improving native landing pages benefits your PPC efforts because landing page experience is one factor in your ad rank: the formula that Google uses to assign your position in an ad auction.

In short, the better your landing page experience, the less you’ll have to pay to show an ad.

From leaf to root. And back again.

In this blog post, I’ve taken you from a high-level view of account performance (conversions at the campaign level), down to a granular look at the keywords at the foundation (considering clicks and impressions). Then, I showed how studying search terms reveals user intent; these insights can be applied back up the chain in new keywords, tailored ads, better-organized ad groups, and split tests for landing pages.

In a nutshell:

• Compare performance to a previous period at the campaign level to illuminate growth and decline.
• Dig deeper to the ad groups and keywords that are the ultimate source of the change.
• Use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, to trim away what’s not working.
• Structure your ad groups and keywords to aid analysis.
• Mine search terms to discover user intent.
• Inject search terms into ad copy.
• A/B test landing pages.
• Consider SEO to foster future growth.

For more on what DOM can do for your business, check out our PPC and SEO services pages.

The post How to Pinpoint PPC Performance Changes appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Journalism 101: Never bury the lede. This is a long post, so let’s get to the meat first. I believe it’s my duty and my agency’s duty to serve the greater good. The best way we can do that right now is by sharing our digital marketing knowledge to help businesses steer through these uncertain times. We are offering that expertise in three very specific ways:

1. A strategic guide to help your decision-making process during times of volatility
2. A webinar through the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) called Digital Communications During COVID-19 crisis response
3. Digital marketing advice tailored specifically for your organization

My Philosophy for Marketing in Times of Crisis

These are scary, uncertain times. Beyond the deaths and serious health complications, many people are losing their jobs and businesses are closing—temporarily or permanently. These downturns typically lead to other societal issues because of, or in conjunction with, those losses.

I’m not a doctor, nurse, or health care professional of any type. I don’t drive delivery trucks, stock grocery stores, or service the general public with “essential” services. A sincere thank you and blessings to all of those who are keeping us going during COVID-19, many of whom don’t typically get the appreciation they deserve.

“2 Who Can and 9 Who Want To”

That’s what a very successful West Virginia high school football coach, Danny Eismond, once told my dad was necessary for a team to have a good record. In other words, to succeed you need to have some high-caliber talent and you need to get the rest of the team to buy in and give it their all. (See if you can guess which category I fell into as a 5’9”, 150-lb center.)

The numbers may skew in certain football hotbeds like Texas, Georgia, and Southern California, but the general concept remains. In any group activity, everyone has their role to play for the team to succeed as a whole.

The health professionals and workers serving the public are the “ones who can” in this analogy. Without diminishing their heroic (a word I don’t use lightly) efforts in any way, the rest of us have our own roles.

Our Role

I feel honor-bound to take care of my family and business, and to contribute to the greater good. That’s why I love what DOM has accomplished over the years and will do in the future that lies ahead.

Not only does DOM enable me to provide for my family*, but through this business we’re providing for all of our employees and their families and communities. We don’t employee thousands or even hundreds, but I’ve never been prouder than right now of employing people and affording them some stability in an otherwise chaotic world.

*A very important footnote: I wouldn’t be able to lead DOM without Kristin, my wife. She works tirelessly in support of our family, our kids, and me. I’ve been derelict in not giving Kristin enough credit. Thank you, honey. I love you.

Speaking of the team, we truly have an awesome  group. Our success is due to them and their hard work, and it’s an honor to work with each one. My respect has only grown in the last two weeks in seeing them maintain positivity, lift one another up, and still execute their work.

We continue to drive business to our clients at a time where it’s more necessary than ever for many of them. And that is what our role is: helping them, their employees, and communities. By doing so, we’re contributing to the greater economy at a time when every little bit of help is critical.

How Our Clients Are Helping

Speaking of our clients, we had a terrific all-hands call on Friday where the team shared how our clients are finding ways to help in this tense time. We are blessed to work with so many talented teams and amazing companies from all over the world.

We could easily list them all, but here are a few examples of the good clients are doing:

• Marsh Bellofram is producing parts, such as diaphragms, regulators, gauges and providing custom solutions for ventilators. This group of manufacturing companies has been serving the global industrial marketplace with reliable instrumentation for over 85 years and can truly say they’re saving lives.
• Alsana is a recovery community with five locations nationwide that focuses on total health and wellness in recovery from eating disorders and related conditions. High-stress environments can put more pressure on people who have struggled with eating disorders to relapse. Alsana’s clinics remain open and are now offering virtual intensive outpatient services, too.
• Classic Automation supports critical manufacturing processes, such as pharmaceuticals, food & beverage, pulp & paper, and utilities. The demand for many of their products has increased dramatically and their dedicated team is putting in all the effort required to keep up.
• Highlights for Children provides books, games, and activities that enrich and excite kids while they learn at home. If you have kids like we do, you know the challenge of keeping them stimulated while they are at home, especially when you are trying to get your own work done. Highlights supports a critical gap right now, especially for preschoolers and kindergartners.
• Rexnord Corporation is pledging $1 million in hygienic products to healthcare facilities, in addition to providing supplies to first responders and healthcare organizations. Additionally, Rexnord Corporation is providing critical support to communities to help alleviate the urgent needs created by COVID-19. These efforts include: leveraging their manufacturing experience as part of the Milwaukee Task Force (Mask Force), which is working on redesigning and manufacturing scalable medical-grade N95-style respirators, as well as giving enhanced financial support to food pantries.

And to reiterate: The clients that have less of a direct role in dealing with COVID-19 response are providing incredibly important work. Educating students, customizing software, recruiting talent, delivering professional services—these are just a few of the ways they deliver value to their clients. In doing so, they are employing people and providing stability to so many beyond those they directly touch.

Digital Marketing & Advertising Resources

Our mission has always been about growth: growing our team, growing our clients, and growing our communities. In tough situations, it can simply be about surviving the rough patch.

It’s our duty right now to help as many people as we can, whether or not we have a paid relationship. To that end, we’re providing the following resources for marketing in times of crisis:

A Crisis Response Guide for Digital Marketing Activities

A key in making decisions, especially during challenging times, is to eliminate variables and get to the core of the issue. By removing questions, you can gain clarity and make sound, less emotional decisions that are likely to provide the best long-term results.

To aid in that process, we’ve put together the following infographic with five different scenarios you may be facing. You’ll see tips as well as the digital marketing and advertising tactics that may make most sense to you depending on how you classify yourself.

View below or click here to download the infographic.

As a business owner, I get the stress brought on by the responsibility of keeping things going. We approached this guide first from the standpoint of understanding business concerns, then diving into how to adjust your digital marketing and advertising strategy.

Communications During COVID-19: A Webinar Series

We’re huge fans of Jason Barnhart and the entire team at PRSA, the world’s largest communications association with over 30,000 members. So I wasn’t surprised when Jason told me they were putting together a three-part webinar series about how to handle communications in the wake of COVID-19, nor that they were making it free to all, including non-members.

But I was surprised — and incredibly honored — when he asked if I’d be interested in leading a session on Digital Communications During COVID-19 on March 27th. Lisa Arledge Powell of MediaSource shared her best practices for how to navigate the quickly evolving news media during the crisis.

Over 1,500 people joined us for this webinar and we had some terrific questions. You can now listen live here.

Customized Feedback on Your Activities

We’ve put a lot of time and thought into the infographic guide as well as the webinar and hope you find them valuable.

Sometimes it’s helpful to actually talk with someone about the specifics of your situation. To aid in that regard, we are offering a free review of your current efforts with advice to navigate through these times.

I’m so concerned about this looking like we’re trying to capitalize on COVID-19, that we almost didn’t make this offer. We don’t want there to be any hesitation in utilizing our expertise during this situation, so we’re putting a process in place to ensure you won’t receive any sales pitches or future contact from us unless you specifically ask for it.

Interested in a conversation with our team about our advice for marketing in times of crisis? Here’s how it works:

1. Request a complimentary digital marketing strategy consultation.
2. A strategist from our office will arrange a 15-minute call to collect information about what you’re currently doing. You can provide access to your analytics or digital advertising platform if you desire at this time. (We’ll sign an NDA if you’d like.) We’ll set a time for a follow-up call.
3. We’ll create a record in our database where we can share notes internally. Your record will be marked as Do Not Contact.
4. We’ll review your efforts.
5. One of our experts will contact you at the arranged time to provide recommendations.

That’s it. Unless you specifically ask about engaging with us, we won’t follow up with you. Same thing goes for email — you won’t be added to our newsletter list unless you ask to sign up or do so on your own.

Note: We will schedule these marketing in times of crisis consultations on a first-come, first-served basis.

Final Thoughts on Marketing in Times of Crisis

This is a tough time for everyone and some are enduring more hardships than you know. Take all necessary precautions. Stay positive. Be kind. We’ll get through this together.

With gratitude,

Justin

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