Why Should You Link Your Google Ads Console to Google Search Console?

Um, because you’ll get more data. DUH!

By connecting Google Search Console (GSC) with Google Ads you get a snapshot glance of paid vs. organic keywords. You will get data at the Search Query and Keyword levels so you can see the incremental value of paid vs. organic terms.

This should be really great news for paid advertisers and organic search campaign leaders alike. Google’s spin is that you can see new, organic opportunities and new, paid search opportunities. Equally, you can see – in a really simple report – where you are performing well organically and make adjustments to drop paid search bids or pause keywords altogether if you’re on a limited budget. This is especially great news whether you’re doing both yourself or if you’re working in an agency that provides both PPC and SEO to the same client.

How To Create a Google Search Console Linked Account in Google Ads

• Tools Needed: Google Search Console, Google Ads Console
• Time Required: 10 minutes
• Estimated Cost: $0

Similar to linking Google Ads to Analytics, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner, and select Linked Accounts. You’ll see an option for Search Console. Follow these steps:

1. 1. Access ‘Linked accounts.’ Click on the Tools button on the top navigation of your Google Ads dashboard. Clicking this will produce a dropdown of 20 different options. Click the link titled  “Linked Accounts” under the Settings section.
   2. Select ‘Search Console’ from your list of options. Since first releasing this feature in 2013, Google has added several other options under the “Linked Accounts” heading. Search Console is one of the last options in the list, located in the 9th position of available options – fifth row, right-hand side. Click the link for ‘DETAILS’.
      
   3. Click the link titled “LINK” to launch Search Console. Pretty self-explanatory, we think.
      
   4. Enter your website address, and click “CONTINUE”. Again, we also find this step to be pretty self-explanatory. One note of caution: make sure your domain names in each account are a match. For instance, if you use https:// and www in front of your domain name in Ads, make sure you select the Search Console account with the same naming convention. You are using https, right? Of course you are.
      
   5. Voila! Your Search Console account is now linked to your Ads account. Depending on whether or not this is successful for you, you might receive one of the following results from your attempt at linking these accounts.
      
      Here is what you should see if your Search Console account was successfully linked to Google Ads.

If you have already verified ownership of your site in Google Search Console – congratulations, you’re all set!

If you haven’t claimed your site, simply click the blue link for “Claim it at Search Console.” This will direct you to Google Search Console and provide the recommended methods for verifying your site.

Need more help? Check the Google Help article here or contact a friendly DOM digital advertising specialist (link below).

The Paid & Organic Report: The Mother Lode of Google Performance Data

The Paid & Organic Report can be found under the Predefined reports tab (formerly known as the Dimensions tab). By the way, if you’re not familiar with this section of Google Ads, take some time and play around. There are so many insightful reports here.

To get to the Paid & Organic report, navigate to Basic > Paid & Organic.

Check out the screenshots below. Although the search terms and other personal information has been blurred out, below is a synopsis of what you’ll see in the paid and organic report:

“This table shows how your paid and organic results performed for every search that triggered an ad or organic listing.”

The click details and other data updates once a day and we do not believe that you can see historical data, rather it starts accruing once you link the accounts. However, our Ads reps were not certain about this at the original time of publication. Over the last five years, we have confirmed that as such :).

Key Takeaways on Connecting Google Ads to Search Console

• Linking Google Search Console with Google Ads provides valuable organic search data that can improve paid search campaign performance.
• This integration allows you to identify keywords performing well organically and adjust your paid search bids accordingly for better budget management.
• By seeing both paid and organic data side-by-side, advertisers can make more informed budget allocation and keyword bidding decisions.
• The combined data helps you understand the incremental value of running paid ads alongside organic listings for the same search queries.
• This integrated reporting reveals instances where paid ads are essential to support weak organic rankings, and where organic visibility is strong enough to recommend lowering ad spend.

Conclusion

Google keeps giving us more and more reporting features from within the Google Ads interface. You can see competitive data, analytic data, funnel data, data…..data…..data! Now there’s even more! It’s almost like Google wants you to be successful.

Hell yeah, they do! We love that they’re tying all their properties together. Instead of being an outlet mall, Google Ads has evolved into being a one-stop-shop.

If you found this article helpful, you might want to check out one of these other posts on getting the most out of Google Search Console for your SEO efforts.

• How To Make the Google Knowledge Panel Work For You
• Set Your Course In Google Search Console With International Targeting
• What are Core Web Vitals and What Should I Do About Them?

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.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 28th, 2025.

The post How To Link Google Ads To Google Search Console (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Can You Use Competitors’ Names In Google Ads? Can They Use Your Brand In Google Ads?

Branded search engine ranking positions (aka SERPs) can make or break your online presence within your market and your customers’ minds. But when you find a competitor using your brand name as part of their Google Ads or SEO campaigns, the stakes can get raised by a considerable margin.

When a user performs a search, visitors click on the first ads or organic results that seem most relevant to them.

The chances of winning that click are higher when you show up in top positions on relevant searches.

For many years brands have tried to undermine competitors’ names to rank higher and poach visitors through covert PPC and SEO tactics. When this happens, competitors getting search visibility on your brand name become a huge detriment to your sales by hijacking your brand’s reputation.

Leveraging competitor brand names via search engines is a common tactic and an issue that must be addressed to maintain both your rankings and your branding.

Savvy competitors — often with agencies behind them — combat these challenges and capitalize on the opportunity.

The Basics of Advertising and Doing SEO on Competitor Brand Names

Just to make sure we’re on the same page here, let’s take a brief second to fully define what we’re talking about.  When we talk about competitor brand names, there are a few different keyword types to pay attention to if you want a full picture of which competitors are trying to take over your brand. The three most common types are:

• Competitor’s actual business names (like Pepsico buying ads or optimizing for Coca-Cola keywords)
• Competitor’s branded products (Pepsi buying ads or optimizing pages on Sierra Mist’s site for Sprite keywords)
• Competitor’s executive names or prominent thought leader names (Walmart running ads on searches of Jeff Bezos promoting CEO Doug McMillon)

The process in search advertising works the same as bidding on any other search term.  You select the competitor term(s) you wish to bid on, set how much you’re willing to pay, and set up ads for that ad group. Voila, you can have your ad appear when someone searches for your competitors.  There’s no cost to you until and unless someone clicks on one of your ads.

In SEO, the process is also very similar. Publish a piece of content on the subject matter, optimize it for the search term, and then build backlinks to the page so that it ranks well.

Legal Questions – Is This Allowed?

It’s important to understand that leveraging a competitor’s brand name is quite common in digital marketing.

You may be thinking to yourself at the moment — is this even allowed?

Yes, yes it is.

For the most part, using such advertising tactics is OK provided you are not deceptive in your practices. This means that if you are intentionally trying to mislead searchers, you may find yourself in hot water.

You need to make sure you’re clean in your ads and other marketing materials by being upfront about who you are. And doing that well means representing specific reasons customers often prefer you over your competition. If your name, your competitor’s name, or other branded term isn’t trademarked, then there’s no issue at all as far as the search engines are concerned.

Where courts have generally upheld advertisers’ rights to advertise — non-deceptively — on competitor brand names, this is America. Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, so legal costs are a real consideration.

By the way, if you’re really into this sort of thing, check out Eric Goldman’s Technology & Law blog.  It’s the single best source on the Web for following these types of lawsuits regarding search engine marketing.

With that disclaimer and plug out of the way, let’s dive into how you can protect the reputation you’ve built against competitors trying to draft off of your brand.

Google Ads Options to Address Competitor Bidding

Campaigns explicitly created to target competitor brand searches are expensive and typically produce low numbers of conversions.

If this is happening to you, take solace in knowing that your competitor is spending some serious cash. But you still want to reclaim what is yours and reduce any adverse impacts on your brand.

When reacting to competitors running ads on your company’s or product’s name in Google Ads — and other search engines — you have some options.

Option 1: Protect Your Name by Running Ads on Your Own Name

Branded campaigns use your company’s brand name as a keyword. This play typically yields high conversions at a low cost per conversion – and the more your brand is known and trusted, the more impressive the results.

As you can see in the above example, Salesforce is running Google ads on its name, taking up the top ad position. Two competitors – Pipedrive and SugarCRM – also run on Salesforce keywords, positioning themselves as an alternative to this well-known CRM.

Searchers click on ads at the very top of a page more often than other positions. This is especially true on mobile because the visual real estate is so much smaller.  By running these ads, Salesforce ensures searchers will see its ads first before seeing alternatives.

When you run ads on your name, you have a much better chance of influencing how searchers interact with your brand in the SERPs. This way you have more control of your campaigns, and you’ll always be first in search results on your brand.

Note: Some companies don’t like to bid on their name as they think that it’s an unnecessary cost, taking away conversions from organic search – clicks they don’t have to pay for. They also feel that bidding on their name is wasting money that could go toward reaching new searchers who aren’t looking for them. But if your competition is running on your name, do you really want people looking for you to see the competition first?

Option 2: Petition Google Ads for Trademark Protection

We highly recommend trademarking your brand if you haven’t done so already. Be aware that it can take up to six months or more to receive a trademark even if you don’t face other companies with similar claims.

The significant benefit of having a valid trademark as that there’s a formal process to petition Google to disallow your competitors from using your name in their ads if you own a trademark.

They can still run on your name even if you have this trademark protection, but at least they won’t be able to use your name in the ad copy, except in very limited circumstances.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our step-by-step guide on how to protect your trademark in Google.

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

Option 3: Fight Fire with Fire

If you’re interested in going on the offensive, you can try to beat your competition at their own game and run ads on their branded terms. Just keep in mind that this tactic is prone to have the same high costs and challenges as discussed earlier.  Here’s why.

Search advertising platforms allow you, in theory, to run on almost any keyword you want, including your competitors’ names.  But in all cases, they want to make sure your keywords are relevant to your business.  Otherwise, consumers will have a harder time finding information related to their searches and the whole PPC model starts crumbling.

And since you aren’t your competitor, Google will quickly give those keywords in your account a low Quality Score.

Keywords with a low Quality Score (caused by low clickthrough rates and other metrics) will end up costing you more than average on a per click basis. If your keywords are not relevant to your brand (i.e., because they aren’t your brand), then your search advertising platform will make you pay for it. In a best-case scenario, your quality score for competitor’s brand names may peak at a 3/10.

As we mentioned earlier, these kinds of campaigns come at a high cost and a lower chance of successful conversions. However, conversions don’t have to be the goal of this play.

Going on the offensive allows you to fight fire with fire if your competitors are already deploying these tactics. It will also draw some awareness to your brand for potential new customers who only knew about your competitor.

Note: It is possible to find a competitor’s ad come up when you search your own business name even if they don’t have you in their keyword crosshairs. If you see that, it’s probably one of two scenarios:

• Search retargeting (RLSAs): If you have been to the competitor’s website, their ads may be displaying based on your website habits.
• Similar audiences for search: The competitor may have a “similar to” retargeting audience and Google’s machine learning is considering your search habits similar to those of the competitor’s website visitors.

Either way, it’s the algorithm doing what it does best!

Other Pros and Cons of Bidding on Competitor’s Brand Names

Pros

• It can work.  A lot of times people are interested in that competitor for a specific reason that won’t help you at all: trying to get hired, a vendor looking up directions, etc.  But for the consumer doing research – or maybe a current, unsatisfied client looking up a phone number, the payoff could be handsome.
• It will jerk their chain.  Double edged sword here (see Cons), but after seeing your ad on their name, internally they may devote a lot of executive resources figuring out what can be done.  Plus, some people just really, really like ticking off their competitors.
• More competition should drive up their prices to bid on their name. While this means they’ll be spending more money they could be devoting elsewhere, their Quality Scores will likely be so much higher than yours, that the additional cost may not add up to much.  Unless they weren’t advertising on their name at all before and decided to start doing so because of your ads.

Cons

• Your time.  Your competitors may call you up and chew you out about this.  Trust me, I’ve seen this time-suck happen and had advertisers flip their feelings about bidding on competitor names 180 degrees.
• Money.  They may sue you or threaten to do so.  While you could just adhere to their cease-and-desist and potentially be done with it, most companies will at least consult their attorneys about this.  And if they don’t happen to be experts in search – and virtually none are, this can get really expensive.  (BTW, we have consulted with attorneys about this in the past.  If you’re an advertiser or lawyer needing help with this, give us a shout at 800.979.3177.  We can also advise on how to broker a fair peace accord without the courts).
• They may start advertising on your name, which could send up your costs somewhat and also decrease your click throughs.

Be Careful with Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can be a great tool—until it serves up an ad with a competitor’s name who happens to spot the ad. That’s where it goes from clever automation to potential liability.

(See stats and insights from a test of keyword-insertion code in Google Ads that we conducted.)

DKI functions by automatically inserting the user’s search query into your ad text, provided that the search query matches one of your keywords and fits within character limits. This dynamic functionality can enhance ad relevance for generic terms; it becomes perilous when competitor brand names are among your keywords.

For instance, if your keyword is “Competitor Brand Alternatives” and a user searches for “Competitor Brand Product X,” your headline might read “Competitor Brand Product X,” directly featuring your competitor’s name in your ad.

Google explicitly absolves itself of responsibility for any policy violations arising from the use of DKI. (Even in cases where it was the applying a Google Recommendation that introduced DKI functionality into a campaign.) Their policy clearly states that advertisers are accountable for ensuring that their ads comply with all advertising guidelines after keywords are inserted.

The fix is simple: don’t use DKI with competitor keywords. Build static ads with deliberate messaging that highlights your differentiators.

How to Respond When Competitors Use SEO to Leverage Your Brand

Several SEO tactics can solidify your SERP positions against competitors who want to rank in organic search for your brand name, or for when potential customers seek alternatives to your brand.

Much like the Google Ads tactics listed above, you can either take a defensive route or get aggressive with your SEO keyword targeting.

Choose wisely, as this is the perfect time to heed Uncle Ben’s wisdom — because great responsibility is bestowed upon those who wield these great SEO powers.

Option 1: Ranking for “Brand Alternative” Keywords

To dampen your competitors’ efforts, consider creating a page to rank for brand alternative searches specific to your brand name. This page still aims to promote your brand as the better solution, but the idea is to optimize it with your name and “alternative” keywords to make sure it outranks your sneaky competition.

You can also supplement this tactic with content development and link building strategies targeting ‘brand alternative’ keyword phrases. Guest posts and other authored contributions optimized for brand “alternative” keywords can help take up valuable search positions. These opportunities also are good places to score a link back to the page you already created.

By leveraging these two tactics, you can fortify your brand against alternative searches that your competitor targets with their SEO efforts.

Option 2: Fighting Back with Your Own “Brand Alternative” SEO Strategies

When your competitors step up their efforts against your brand, it’s time to consider going on the offensive from an SEO perspective. Some examples include previously mentioned tactics:

• Your competitor running ads on your brand name
• Optimizing a page on their website to rank for your brand name
• Leveraging backlinks to improve their ranking for your brand name

Just like how competitors may create content on their site to rank for keywords related to your brand, you can do the same.

You can accomplish this one of two ways:

1. Optimize for “competitor” + “alternative(s)” — Here you create pages specifically designed to target search users looking for alternatives to your competitor by optimizing for their brand names and “alternative” (e.g. “picasa alternative,” “photoshop alternative,” etc.). This way, your brand will begin to show up when people go to search for their name.

Below is an example of how Lawn Doctor compares itself to several competitors.

1. Optimize for competitor weaknesses — In some cases, search users may be considering a competitor, but also seeking choices.

For example, say you are a project management software looking to position yourself against Trello, a highly recognized competitor. You could try creating content that aims to rank for keywords such as “trello issues.”

Be warned: snatching a top search engine ranking using this approach is highly unlikely without some investment in aggressive link building tactics. But, this approach will undercut your competitor in the following ways:

• They will lose long tail organic search traffic.
• Awareness of your product will increase within their customer and prospect base.
• You will convert new business opportunities from prospects who were not initially considering your brand as a solution.

Final Thoughts — Consult Your Legal Team

Please note: we recommend you consult your legal team to assess risk before trying the more aggressive tactics listed above. Keep in mind that there are times where using terms and phrases — specifically trademarked words, branded words — could have some legal implications.

What ends up happening in situations like this is that – whether mediated expensively through attorneys or done from President to President – a truce is called.  The downside is that it needs to be brokered with each competitor as it can’t be done through the search engines (other than if there’s a legitimate trademark complaint to be filed).

SERPs can make or break your brand so make sure you are taking the necessary measures toward protecting them. Starting with a great defense (owning real estate and top ads on your name) is the best offense.  Ultimately, though, it’s your brand, and only you can decide how to solidify your place in Google search.

Key Takeaways About Targeting Competitor Brand Names

• Using a competitor’s brand name is a common and permitted practice in digital marketing, barring misleading usages.
  
• Competitors using your brand name in their Google Ads or SEO campaigns can divert potential customers.
  
• Trademarking your brand name allows you to request that Google disallow competitors from using it in their ads.
  
• Optimizing content for brand alternative keywords can help prevent competitors from ranking high for your brand name.
  
• Running ads on your own name is one line of defense for your brand.
  

This article was updated to add additional information on April 7th, 2025.

Get Paid Search Advertising Services

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing and our paid search advertising services then please schedule a digital marketing consultation. Or, 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.

Need SEO or PPC services for your B2B business? Learn more about why we are The Best Digital Marketing Agency For B2B Businesses.

The post Catch A Competitor Bidding And Ranking For Your Brand? Here’s Your Options. (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The use of third-party trademarks in Google Ads campaigns is always a risky endeavor. In some cases, like when you have approved retailers or licensed resellers of your products that are encouraged to sell your product online on your behalf, setting them up with trademark approval in Google Ads can be critical to their success.

If their campaigns aren’t set up for success correctly when they launch, getting the best ROI on your approved retailer, licensed reseller, or certified partner campaigns could suffer inconvenient delays. Ensuring that your Google Ads trademarks are properly implemented and approved is critical in making sure the campaign goes off without a hitch. 

Below, we’ll talk about how to navigate approving the use of your Google Ads trademarks to third parties so they can use your legally registered names, words, and symbols in their Google Ads campaigns. If you’ve got a reseller looking to launch a campaign, this guide to trademarks in PPC advertising is a great place to start.

What You Need to Know About Google Ads Trademark Policies

Before we get started, it’s worth taking a look at Google’s Trademarks policies.  According to the policy, Google abides by local trademark laws, but also recognizes that third parties can use trademarks in certain situations, like when a reseller is describing trademarked products. Given how prevalent this type of situation is within Ecommerce, this is great information to have whether it’s your first or thousandth advertising campaign.

There are a few important overarching things to keep in mind when using third-party trademarks in your Google Ads:

1. You can’t use someone else’s trademark in your ad text unless you have their permission.
2. You can’t use someone else’s trademark in a way that would confuse people about who the ad is from.
3. You can’t use someone else’s trademark in a way that would suggest you’re endorsed or sponsored by them if you’re not.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some specific scenarios where you might need to use a third-party trademark in your Google Ads.

Getting Approval To Use Client Trademarks In Google Ads As An Advertiser

Case studies. Success stories. Use cases. Our work.

Whatever service providers call this type of content on their website, showing off their efforts is an important way to build trust and provide social proof in industries that are rampant with snake oil salesmen.

In situations where service providers want to highlight their work with a trademarked brand in their search advertising, they will need to acquire the approval of the trademark owner to use client trademarks. To avoid any sticky situations, the owner of a trademark will have to fill out and submit a 3rd Party Authorization Request on your behalf to Google.

Keep in mind that it will generally take 5-7 business days for the trademark approval in Google Ads to come through, so build that time into your planning phase if possible when launching new campaigns.

Getting Approval To Use Trademarks In Google Ads When You’re A Reseller

If you sell products or services from other companies, you’ll likely need to use their trademarks in your Google Ads. For example, let’s say you’re an online store running paid search ads in Google and Microsoft for a brand of fire protection supplies. In this case, searches for the brand name and product surpass non-branded products, so you have a higher likelihood of selling through your inventory running ads for branded terms (“zurn double check detector”) than you do running ads for non-branded terms (“backflow prevention detector”).

In this case, you’ll need to use the Zurn trademark in your ad text in order to let people know that you carry that particular product. However, you can’t use the Zurn trademark in PPC advertising in a way that would suggest you’re endorsed or sponsored by the brand.

The landing page needs to clearly provide a way to buy the Zurn fire protection supply that you’re talking about, as well as display commercial information about the product. This marks it as a reseller ad, and makes it clear that you’re not advertising for an informational site.

One thing you’re absolutely not allowed to do is use a brand’s trademark in a competitive way to sell, say, an alternative brand. This will get your ad disapproved and have possibly worse repercussions for your account’s status.

What Happens If You Get Caught Using Trademarks In Google Ads Without Approval?

If you’re caught using unauthorized trademarks in your Google Ads, the consequences can be pretty severe. The following consequences are the most common, so you may want to consider what would happen if:

1. Your ad could be disapproved
2. You could even lose your ads account entirely

More than one hefty suspension has been handed down over trademark infringement complaints in Google Ads.

So, it’s important to make sure you’re only using trademarks that you have the rights to use. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right to use a trademark in your PPC campaign, whether on Google Ads or another platform, it’s always best to err on the side of caution and get permission from the owner before using it.

What to Do When Another Company Is Using Your Trademark Without Permission

Protecting your brand is important. After all, it’s something you’ve spent countless hours building and refining and empowering, so to have a competitor or some other company out there misusing it can be absolutely infuriating.

Of course, Google has, well, a bit of a spotted history when it comes to protecting the trademarks of brands.

What Do We Do If A Company Is Using Our Trademark In Their Google Ads?

If you believe another company is using your trademark without permission in their Google Ads, you can fill out a Trademark Complaint Form.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a guarantee that the ads will be removed, but it’s worth doing if you believe your trademark is being used without permission in someone else’s ad campaign.

There are times when Google will determine that the third party complies with Google’s policy in their use of your trademark. In that case, there’s not much you can do other than to file a trademark infringement lawsuit against the advertiser.

Keep in mind that the Google Ads trademark violation policy only applies to the use of those trademarked terms within the ad copy. Branded keywords aren’t protected, and it’s perfectly okay for competitors to target your branded keywords as much as they like as long as they aren’t using your trademark in their ad creative.

To be honest, though, we don’t necessarily think it’s a great practice.

Key Considerations for Compliance with Google Trademark Policies

Understanding Google Ads’ trademark policy means going deeper than simply knowing what’s allowed on the surface. It’s about protecting brand equity while also recognizing the leeway Google gives advertisers to compete fairly. We’ve seen too many accounts trip over these distinctions—not because of bad intentions, but because they missed key nuances.

• Keywords vs. Ad Text
  Google will let you bid on trademarked keywords in most cases, but using that trademark in your actual ad copy? That’s where the guardrails go up fast—unless you’re authorized or fall into very specific exemptions.
• Resellers and Informational Sites
  These get some breathing room. But they have to be explicit: show you’re selling the trademarked product or providing genuinely helpful content. Transparency matters here, and Google’s not forgiving if you’re trying to sneak around that.
• Using a Competitor’s Name to Get Clicks
  Dangerous territory. Comparative ads are fair game, but you need to be accurate and avoid any implication of endorsement. Otherwise, you’ll get flagged—and possibly penalized.
• Landing Page Relevance
  If it doesn’t match the promise of the ad or misrepresents the brand relationship, that can trigger the same violations as your ad copy. Google isn’t just looking at what you say; they’re looking at what you deliver.

And just when you thought you’d addressed everything, policies evolve. Google’s search algorithm is constantly changing to serve up a better experience, and so, too, do Google policies change in light of novel situations and new product offerings. We keep a close eye on updates to avoid surprises—and so should anyone running serious campaigns.

Need Help Navigating Google Ads Trademark Policy?

At DOM, we have some of the brightest and most experienced Google Ads experts on the planet. After all, we didn’t get to be named one of Google’s top 3% Premier Partners without knowing our stuff.

If you’re struggling with navigating trademark approval in your Google Ads campaigns, or if you just don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing, our PPC specialists will do it for you. We’re a one-stop digital marketing shop that knows Google Ads and digital advertising best practices like the back of our hand, and we have the numbers to prove it.

Contact us today for a free consultation and learn why Direct Online Marketing is the best digital marketing agency for you.

Frequently Asked Question about Using Trademarks in Google Ads

This article was updated to add additional information on March 31st, 2025.

The post Want Approval For Resellers And Partners To Use Your Trademark In Google Ads? (March 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

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

Table of Contents

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

Understanding Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns

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

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

Common Issues Leading to Bad-Quality Performance Max Leads

Misalignment of Google Ads Targeting Settings

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

Over-Reliance on Automation in PMax Campaigns

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

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

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

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

Poorly Defined Google Ads Bidding Strategies & Conversion Goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identifying When Performance Max Ads Aren’t Working

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

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

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

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

Strategies to Improve Performance Max Lead Quality in Google Ads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools & Techniques for Better Performance Max Campaigns in Google Ads

Utilizing Advanced Analytics Tools

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

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

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

A/B Testing Different Ad Creatives and Messages

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

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

Regularly Reviewing and Optimizing Campaign Settings

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

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

Experience the DOM Difference

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

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

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

Key Takeaways

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

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

In the world of artificial intelligence, the “singularity” is when the AI becomes indistinguishable from human thinking. There have been countless science fiction books and movies written about this premise.

The Matrix, Terminator, Bladerunner.

Side note re: Bladerunner – the good one, NOT that one with Ryan Gosling. How did that movie even get made?

All these movies captured the imagination by positing the idea that A.I. might one day overtake us in the very cognitive abilities that make us human. 

So it’s not too much of a surprise that the news of Unbounce’s acquisition of Snazzy.ai in 2021 caused a ripple throughout our offices. Our content people in particular could be seen wiping sweat from their brows when they thought nobody was looking. 

When asked about it, they responded with platitudes about the human mind’s irreplaceable capacity for creative thought and so on. However, privately they worried at their desks and imagined a future where all writing was automatically generated by an electronic super mind that was totally incapable of making errors. 

For a lot of businesses and marketing professionals, such a thing would be the most welcome innovation since on-page SEO tools. Imagine having an endless source of instantly generated content to drive your marketing efforts!

Let’s take a look at this leading AI copy generator and get to the bottom of just how worried our flesh and blood content writers need to be in the face of this new technology. 

Unbounce Smart Copy: The AI Copy Generator Formerly Known As “Snazzy AI”

Snazzy.ai was a name that was heavily featured in marketing news circuits for a while, and with good reason. The AI copy generator had been used extensively by marketing professionals for things like email copy, Google Ad copy, social media posts, etc. The acquisition by Unbounce in 2021 simply elevated the buzz around its capabilities. 

Today, Unbounce Smart Copy gives users an extensive array of options for content types. Having trouble coming up with a blog idea? Unbounce Smart Copy can do that.

Need a mission statement for your brand? No problemo.

Running into a wall generating meta descriptions for your pages? Unbounce Smart Copy has you covered. 

Unbounce Smart Copy In Action

For this exercise, we’ve invented a fake company called Binko’s Space Robots. Binko’s specializes in creating hulking, gigantic Gundam-style space robots for everything from asteroid mining to intergalactic combat. 

We’re planning on running a Google Ads campaign for Binko’s, but our team is busy and doesn’t have the bandwidth to devote to writing the copy, so we’ll have to rely on Snazzy.ai’s expertise to whip something up. 

So right off the bat, we have to make a new Snazzy account. When you create an account, you fill in your company’s information. Everything you do with the tool from there is based on this initial information, so it’s not really possible to use an account to generate content for other businesses (in the free version, at least). 

For instance, upon account setup you’re asked to fill in your company description, the audience, and some brand keywords. 

For Binko’s Space Robots, we entered the description as worded above, “creating hulking, gigantic space robots etc.” For our audience, we entered space pirates, asteroid miners, space heroes and villains, and starship pilots. 

Our brand keywords are “asteroid mining,” “giant robots,” “space robots,” and “giant robot battles in space.” 

After a popup with introductory information, we’re given the full array of content creation options. Our goal was to create a Google Ads campaign, so let’s start with that. 

Here are the top three Google Ads that were generated for Binko’s Space Robots:

Binko’s Space Robots – All Hands On Deck – Join Our Space Combat League – Locally-owned Giant RobotsAsteroid Mining. Planetary Domination. Intergalactic Combat. Massive Robots. Huge Giant Robots for Sale. Our Robots Can Do It All. Grab An Asteroid and Mine it to Smithereens. Crush Your Enemies! The only company to mine for gold in space. Asteroid Mining Giant Robots

Binko’s Space Robots – Giant Robotic Mining Platforms – Asteroid Mining Robots – Welcome to the FutureSpace Robots. Giant Robots. Giant Robot Battles in Space. The Best Space Robots Available. Huge selection of space robots. Fully Modular, Customizable Robots. Battles and Mining in Deep Space. The Ultimate Asteroid Mining Game. Blast, Hover & Boost Your Way to Riches.

Binko’s Space Robots – Taming the Galaxy – Battle Intergalactic Villains – Binko’s Space RobotsOne Giant Robot, Two Giant Robots, Three Giant Robots, Four Asteroid Mining Robots. Giant Robot Battles. Planet Destroying Weapons. Binko’s Space Robots – Massive, Hulking Robots for Asteroid Mining. The Leader in Space Robot Technology.

As you can see, Smart Copy by Unbounce filled in some blanks beyond the information that we fed it. For instance, we never said anything about planetary domination, but there it is in the copy of the first ad. 

Also, each of the three ads is focusing on a different audience. The first ad seems to use language that would appeal to villains. The second is more mining focused, and the third is focused on the space hero demographic. 

Are these great ads? We think they’re pretty good. However there is the question of accuracy. In the second ad, the copy mentions that the robots are fully modular and customizable. We did not mention anything about those features, but the AI just included them. 

This is a cautionary example that shows you can’t simply plug and play with Smart Copy’s generator. Some of the results may contain inaccurate or misleading information, so they have to be studied before use. Not only can they lead to unhappy potential customers, but they can get your ads disapproved. 

In general, though, we’re really impressed by these ads. The power to generate copy in the blink of an eye is something to behold. 

The pricing structure is, well, maybe a little less impressive. 

Unbounce Smart Copy’s Pricing

Unbounce Smart Copy has a free option. The way this works is you’re given 40 credits upon account creation. Every time you generate content, you’re using a credit. Every week that you log into the account, you’re given 10 credits. 

For the most part, this freemium model is going to get you what you need without a lot of hassle, assuming you’re okay with what you get on the first or second round of content generation. 

In the Google Ads example from above, it generated 5 total ads the first time we ran it. We could run it as many times as we wanted, but every time we click that “create” button, it burns another credit. 

Additionally, the “Customize” option is locked behind the paid subscription. What this means is your topic for any generated content is going to be related to your initial profile information by default. If you want to make content focused on a related topic that isn’t exactly what you’ve filled in for your profile, you have to pay up. 

Paying up here isn’t anything to sneeze at either. By default, membership costs about $19 per month. There is an option to pay annually for only $96 a year, which works out to be $8 a month. However, if you want to take advantage of the 14-day free trial offer, it seems you’re then forced to pay the more expensive $50 monthly rate. 

Is it worth it? That depends. As a business expense, the cost is relatively light. In return, you’re saving your marketing people a lot of potential hours by letting the platform do the heavy lifting. 

If you’re an individual, however, that’s a large chunk of change any way you slice it. $300 could be anywhere from 20 to 30 pizzas you’re giving up for a more convenient content solution. More if you pay the monthly rate. 

Should You Be Worried About Unbounce Smart Copy?

We’re going to answer this one without any suspense. No, human writers shouldn’t be afraid of AI copywriting. In fact, they should be ecstatic. 

That singularity we talked about at the beginning of this article has yet to be reached. There are no cybernetic organisms from the future that are assimilating into our society on the hunt for the future leader of the human rebellion. AI is still artificial, a bare facsimile of humanity. 

What AI can provide is suggestions for long-form content based on data that can then be used to whip up amazing blog copy and product descriptions. This makes the job of a content writer easier rather than obsolete. 

We asked one of our writers and contributor to this blog, to add his thoughts, which he did:

“Chris is absolutely right. Automation is coming for all of us, eventually. The PPC side already knows what it’s like to compete with algorithms that claim to do their jobs better than they do. I think what we’ll start seeing in content marketing is a more personalized stamp, like the old days of blogging, when we would do it for fun, not SEO. Also, would an AI just randomly insert a fun Star Wars reference if you didn’t tell it to? Never tell me the odds, but I don’t think it’s very likely.”

—Jim Foreman, Senior Content Specialist

While short-form copy like Google Ads and social media ads can be generated to hit on all the relevant keywords, there’s still nothing that can replace the skills of a great writer when it comes to creating engaging content that people will read. 

If you’re looking for great content for humans to give your business a boost, Direct Online Marketing has the tools to get the job done. Our experienced team of SEO and PPC professionals will help you reach your goals. Contact us today for a free consultation.  

As a bonus, here are some Unbounce Smart Copy auto-generated DOM taglines.

DOM. We cause things to happen. 

DOM. Break the rules. Be different. 

DOM. Dominate everywhere you go.  

The post Will AI Replace Copywriters? (Our Review Of Unbounce Smart Copy) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

• I want-to-know
• I want-to-go
• I want-to-do
• I want-to-buy

Those four moment types and how to reach users have really become the basis for everything Google does with Google Ads today. Look at Discovery Ads and Performance Max. Both of those campaign types are all about reaching users when they are in one of the four moments above.

With that being said, we were skeptical of Google’s push to micro-moments for a long time. It wasn’t until we found an opportunity to capture one of those micro-moments with a client that we became true believers.

We are fortunate to work with a leading eating disorder recovery center with locations in California, Alabama, and Missouri. In 2020, they saw an explosion of raw leads from digital advertising, growing by 1,611%.

Additionally, MQLs grew at an exponential 800%.

The following year, they saw the same type of growth. Raw leads grew by 1,469% and MQLs grew by 185% in 2021. That massive jump in the number of raw leads was caused by the capture of a micro-moment within their website.

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

How We Used This ‘I Want To Do’ Micro Moment To Grow Leads For This Treatment Center

In the search query data we were seeing from Google Search campaigns, we noticed a theme of people searching for things such as “anorexia survey,” “bulimia quiz,” and “how do I know if I have an eating disorder.” This treatment center was quick to capitalize on this data and created an eating disorder survey on their website. The survey was a guide for users to discover on their own if they needed help.

The survey was there for the user in their time of need, meaning they did not leave the site for a competitor. This allowed the treatment center to get the user in their funnel, increasing the chance that they would then get a chance to help the person in need.

That survey was the catalyst for the explosion of growth in raw leads we have generated for them over the last two years. In addition to simply scaling their overall numbers, the leads generated have also been qualified, too. There is a strong correlation between their overall increase in MQL volume as well.

It was also the catalyst to getting me to truly believe in micro-moments as more than another Google buzzword that would go away with time.

As my good buddy Jim said a few months ago, get your micro-moments right, and your website can be an effective, efficient growth machine for your business.

What Pros Like You Need To Know About This Micro Moments Example

Learning from this micro moments example has completely changed the way we view tools such as a survey to draw more users into the funnel. In this example, the leads from the survey are very high funnel, but we found that focusing on lower funnel leads and trying to pull in less survey responses from advertising actually had a major impact on leads moving through the funnel from all sources, not just advertising.

At the end of the day, our job as marketers is to drive leads or sales, but it feels like we can get too focused on the bottom of the funnel, and only pay attention to form fills or sales. These ultimately move the needle, but what can we do to push more volume down the funnel to increase leads or sales?

As much as we would have hated to admit it a few years ago, the answer in a lot of cases is focusing on micro moments. Be there in the moments when your customer needs you, no matter how big or small the moment is, and you’re setting yourself up for success.

Want to get more healthcare marketing insights from our team? Check out one of the following resources or subscribe today to our twice a month digital marketing newsletter.

• Google Medic: How to SEO Proof Your Site in the Trust Authority Era
• 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth
• How do People Find Answers to Health Related Questions?
• Healthcare Marketing Research & Survey Results
• Major Cosmetic Procedure Review Site Slashes Staff By 14% Following Google Medic Update
• You Are Killing People if You Haven’t Optimized Your Hospital for Local Search!

The post A High Growth Micro Moments Marketing Example For Treatment Centers 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.

But is ZPD just a bunch of hype? Jargon? A buzzword?

To be honest, when we first heard the term being thrown around late last year, we had those same thoughts, too.

We also couldn’t help but think back to a certain IBM commercial created by Ogilvy in 2007. Press play below for a cringe-worthy walk down memory lane.

Whether you just stepped out of an innovation meeting that killed you, or you came across this term in a MarketingProfs article and feel like you need to be brought up to speed on it – don’t worry. Zero-party data is not some meaningless buzzword or an empty topic that should cause you to reference your past at all!

Instead, it’s a look at the future of customer data collection that can be used for your marketing.

So What Is Zero-Party Data?

Zero-party data is the new kid on the data collection block. The tricky thing about zero-party data is that it’s a lot like first-party data (more on that in the next section). In fact, there are people out there who don’t even think it needs its own category.

The term was coined by Forrester Research, and is officially defined as “data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, which can include preference center data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize her.”

So zero-party data is basically data that’s being willingly given to you by your customers.

An example is when a customer provides communication preferences, i.e. “Please email me special offers.” Other examples may include when users:

• Choose their interests while creating a profile on a shopping site (following authors or brands on Amazon)
• Give “thumbs up” ratings to shows and movies on streaming platforms (+1 Murder She Wrote on Peacock) with the intent of being presented other relevant suggestions

Much like first-party data, or maybe more accurately as a component of first-party data, zero-party data’s value will be heavily tied to your ability to centralize and organize it.

So what’s the significance here? Why are we talking about zero-party data so much?

Well, it just so happens that your zero and first-party data methods are about to become more significant than ever, due to the gradual decline of availability of third party data.

Before we get into all of that, let’s back up a little though and take a look at the more traditional collection methodologies – first and third-party data.

What is First-Party Data?

First-party data is essentially data that you collect yourself through your interactions with your customers. It could be demographics information, purchase history, the way they interact with your website, email engagements, support calls, customer feedback programs, etc.

It’s collected through customer purchases, support programs, and marketing programs, those sorts of things.

In terms of value and quality, first-party data is spectacular. That’s because you’re getting it straight from the customers. There aren’t any middle parties interpreting anything for you or muddying up the process. All of your first-party data is, by nature, accurate and relevant to your business.

Even better, first-party data is relatively easy to collect. As long as you make sure you’re using a central data platform to manage your data across all your sources and you follow any privacy laws in your country, your customer-related systems will naturally be collecting it and you’ll have access to it for data-driven decision making.

What is Third-Party Data?

Third-party data is acquired from data aggregators. Data aggregators take large datasets from multiple sources and compile them into a single dataset that can then be purchased for use in marketing.

For the most part, third-party data is purchased through a DSP (demand side platform) or a DMP (data management platform), but there are also a lot of third-party data marketplaces out there. Some of the more popular marketplaces are Google, Nielsen, and OnAudience.

The biggest concern with third-party data is that you simply don’t know where it came from, so you can’t be certain of its accuracy or reliability. You have all this aggregated data, but there’s no way to be sure how much it’s worth.

Also, you can’t be 100% certain that it was collected in a proper manner that followed privacy regulations. That means you have to put in some time to research your third-party data provider to make sure they’re legit.

So right off the bat it might seem like first-party data is superior to third-party, so why doesn’t everybody just use first-party data?

Well, it’s simple. First-party data gives you insights into customers who have already interacted with your brand. Third-party data gives you insights, albeit less reliable insights, into everybody else on a much larger scale. Thus, third-party data is what you can use to get more customers to interact with your brand.

All of that said, it may be a smarter move for your advertising campaigns to try to leverage your existing first party data to create campaigns to target third party potential clients and customers. Around here we commonly call those “lookalike audiences” although the different advertising platforms may call them something unique.

If you are currently leveraging third party data for your digital advertising and want to explore a better way to position your products and services to earn new customers, check out our retargeting services.

Google’s “Cookiepocalypse”

In 2020, Google announced that they plan to phase out third-party cookies in their browser, Chrome. Firefox and Safari have already taken measures to start blocking third-party tracking for the sake of privacy, but Chrome is the most used desktop browser on the planet.

What that means is that tracking user behavior is going to become a lot more difficult. Third-party data is going to possibly be less reliable and harder to come by. Maybe.

Recently, Google announced that they’re pushing their plan back to 2023, but it remains inevitable.

First and zero-party data are going to become even more valuable, and necessary, for delivering business results and making smart marketing decisions.

With Your Data, It’s Time To Stop Talking And Start Doing

Here at DOM, we believe in marketing that’s led by data. If you don’t have the data to back up your strategy, then you’re really just making a guess and hoping it will work.

Our expert data analysts aren’t the types of people that are just sitting behind a screen facilitating out of the box, value added solutions. They actually know how to find the message in your data and make it work for your business goals.

But no matter what type of data you have collected over the years – zero party, first party, or third party – your Google Analytics needs to be set up and optimized to work in tandem with your advertising campaigns.

We aren’t interested in creating some disruptive “web 3.0” solution just for the sake of doing it. Are you looking to turn your user data into a tool to produce better targeted marketing that gets results?

Great, check out our Google Analytics services or contact us to get answers to your questions about all of these data types and how they will work to solve your advertising challenges.

The post Zero-Party Data vs. First And Third-Party Data (Win Buzzword Bingo, Guaranteed!) 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

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