How to make crucial decisions regarding your retargeting budget.
Decisions, decisions, decisions; it can be difficult making the right choice when considering how to spend your remarketing budget with Facebook or Google. Where most PPC managers go wrong is the actual decision-making process. It is crucial understand what you should consider before making a decision.
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1. Consider your message - carefully crafted second chances
The whole idea of remarketing is to give advertisers a second chance to hook someone who has visited their site, but not bought anything, there may be a number of reasons for this:
The website is bland, clunky, dated, not functional - let's not get sidetracked into the importance of functional and appealing landing pages, but it is important to…
Chart of the Day: 47% of the 100,000 most popular sites now contain one or more Facebook technologies, giving Facebook unprecedented access to data and web traffic.
The results of a recent study from SimilarTech shows the scale of Facebook operation beyond its own domain, with insights on the platform's reach and exposure through the use of Facebook technologies, giving Facebook its competitive edge on audience data and referral traffic to its site.
This enormous audience reach has been achieved through the widespread popularity of the company's technologies and plugins such as ‘share buttons’ or ‘comment boxes’ on 3rd party sites which deliver traffic to Facebook and strengthens the presence of the Facebook brand across the web.
The most popular technologies from Facebook being used on the top 100k sites are Facebook Connect, followed by Facebook Social Plugin and Facebook's Like Button.
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Google starts tracking credit card transactions to assess online ads effect on online and offline sales.
Every marketing manager has always sympathized with John Wanamaker's famous phrase "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Digital marketing has helped alleviate some of the problems of attribution, by tracking of digital media. But unless someone is clicking through to purchase on your site or tracked by call they make via the site, it's very hard to attribute offline store sales to a particular online ad campaign.
But this limitation is now reduced which is BIG news for multichannel retailers. Yesterday Google announced it is now tracking consumers card transactions both online and in-store. The ability to track in-store sales is a real breakthrough in attribution, as since 92% of all US retail sales still take place in-store. Without it marketers are limited to focusing all…
Audit your marketing technology stack with the 6Cs to refine its capabilities and prove its return on investment
Do you know the stackies? They're an informal contest arranged by Scott Brinker, creator of the marketing technology vendor landscape where different companies visualise their marketing stacks in different ways. Here are the latest martech stack entries. They're presented in vastly, different ways from this superbly visual example...
to this more structured approach of the 5Cs of Martech - which looks like the inspiration for the new 6Cs of Martech featured at the end of this article.
You can audit your marketing stack against any of these ‘stackie’ entries. The structure of some of the examples like the second one prompted us to think whether there was a simple, practical way of visualising or…
You may have noticed pandas ears, butterfly crowns and nerd glasses appearing in your Instagram stories. That's because last week Instagram launched it not too dissimilar to Snapchats filters - 'Selfie filters'. The Facebook-owned app has added 8 new filters meaning you can now add cartoon-style filters before sending them to your friends.
Facebook has slowly been copying Snapchats successful features and introducing them across Instagram and facebook such as disappearing video stories and comments. It was reported that when Instagram launched Stories in August 2016 it reached 150 million daily users. That’s the same number of users that Snapchat’s whole app reportedly hit around June 2016. Snapchats users are now migrating over to Instagram as it launches new formats and features. Instagrams VP of Product, Kevin Weil, gave his perspective on coping Snapchat:
'If we're being…
5 tools for assessing your online competitors
Site audience comparison tools provide marketers with industry and competitor intelligence to help inform decisions (e.g. new markets, new content strategies). Some of these tools also provide powerful segmentation capabilities. Typically, they do this either by aggregating Internet Service Provider data, panel data or a mixture of the two.
Whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new market or wishing to understand what’s driving competitor growth, these tools can provide the relevant information to help inform key decisions. They’re often used to support business cases, helping to identify opportunities and threats in the competitor landscape. So if you are looking to map your competition, build a case for a new product line or more investment in your website, these tools can be extremely useful.
Key things to consider before purchasing and when using these tools:
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Facebook helps customers shop more seamlessly
The way we shop is changing, we are driven to buy online more than ever before. For brands, this means they need to ensure they are in front of the customer when they turn to their screens. Google describe these moments as 'micro-moments' - and stress the importance of being there at the moment the consumer needs you. Google says:
'These micro-moments are critical touchpoints within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends.'
It is crucial brands are seen at every touch point to increase the likelihood of purchase. Facebook recognised this need and offer a number of options for marketers to choose from to effectively reach their audience.
One of their more recent launches was 'Facebook Collection'. A mobile-only ad format that allows advertisers to feature videos or photos of a product in a user's news feed with the objective…
Chart of the day: Usability testing budgets have increased in 2016 compared with 2015, in an early-2017 study by Usertesting.com
Budgets are either increasing or staying the same for most respondents, budgets are only decreasing for such a small amount of respondents. This shows businesses value usability testing and the benefits user experience research brings. For industries such as market research, who are seeing reductions in budget, it's a pleasure to see user research budgets increase.
Most respondents also indicated that a change in attitude or simply no change/ no reason was leading to the budget change.
The study also found that the majority of respondents have no fixed budget (40%) for usability testing.
Source: UserTesting.com
Sample: 2,238 professionals across a number of industries who are in some way involved in user research
Recommended resource: Digital Experience Mangement Toolkit
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The emerging trends you need to integrate into your 2018 plan
We are through Q1, and top companies have the habit of starting to plan for the next year right from Q2. If you have initiated planning your marketing strategy and budget for 2018, be prepared to face questions regarding tactics you are opting to use that would go best with most of your customers. And most importantly, which tactics can result in the most efficient conversion.
[Editor's note: For an update on the latest trends, see this in-depth article covering 2018 Digital marketing trends by Dr Dave Chaffey, co-founder of Smart Insights or download our free guide to 9 megatrends which are relevant to all businesses.]
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To plan…
How to build your brand on Instagram
Great social media strategies need continuous follower growth, engagement, and actions, e.g. clicks. And Instagram just might be your best opportunity for achieving this quickly. SEO should always be an important part of your online marketing strategy. But let's face it, you're unlikely to beat the big brands with enormous budgets for a spot on page one of Google's search results anytime soon.
Source: ArthurStock
This is why social media can be a powerful ally to smaller brands when trying to grow your reach and presence online. You don't need a huge budget to still be effective, using, for instance, Facebook ads. But as powerful and inexpensive as these can be, the sad truth is that organic reach and engagement on Facebook has plateaued in recent years.
Where to Turn? Instagram.
Consider some statistics compiled by…
