Google AdWords – Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform – has recently rebranded and is now known as Google Ads

The name may have changed, but the underlying principles of the system are the same now as they were 18 years ago when AdWords was launched. You write an ad for your business, choose keywords that determine what sort of searches your ad will appear for on Google, and say how much you are willing to pay each time someone is directed to your website as a result of clicking on your ad. [si_quick_block id="121881" title="How to set up a Google Ads campaign" description="When used correctly, Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords) is an excellent way of driving potential customers to your website. Learn how to set up your first Google Ads campaign correctly."] It’s pretty easy to set up your first Google Ads campaign, but it’s also very easy to do it…

Chart of the Day: A third of marketers report open rates of 10% or less

Email marketing is an effective way for you to build brand awareness, communicate with your customers, and generate revenue. However, when your email address list sits in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands, it can be easy to settle for low open rates. After all, let’s say 16,000 people open your latest sales offer email. That almost enough to fill an NBA arena. Sure, it’s the New Orleans Pelican’s Smoothie King Centre, the smallest one in the league, but doesn’t it sound better this way? Anyway, on an industry level, 8% is below expectations. Why not tweak your message or layout and aim a little higher? Demand Metric and Return Path asked marketers to share their average open rate for bulk email sends. Let’s take a look how they answered, how you should rank your own email…

In new research by GetSocial, we look at new methods of sharing, the rise of Dark Social as a traffic source, the decay of the Facebook Feed and a surprising comparison of both (spoiler: dark social wins)

There are now 1.2 billion pages indexed on Google mentioning Dark Social. Definitions vary but they don’t escape much of what Alexis Madrigal wrote in 2012: “it shows up variously in programs as "direct" or typed/bookmarked" traffic (...) but that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone g-chatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.“ I call mainstream on the topic. Now, more than ever, marketers and audience developers must look at Dark Social. Not as a myth, something that may be happening,…

What do new chatbots look like? What role will they play in online commerce?

When do you think the first chatbot was invented? Most people would guess that it hit the market sometime around the turn-of-the-century. They would be wrong. Chatbots have actually been around for over 50 years, which is far older than the World Wide Web. Of course, the chatbots of today barely resemble their older counterparts. Newer chatbots are making a huge splash online. A new generation of these tools are going to have a profound effect on the future of UX in ecommerce and other online applications. In his post Chatbots — One of the hottest UX trend in 2017, Guobin Ng, a user experience researcher for UXarmy, states that chatbots are being used for many industries and purposes. They have been around for a while, but have really started to become popular in 2017, largely due…

Standing out from the crowd is a challenge and therefore conceiving, creating and maintaining a personal ‘brand’ gives us the opportunity to get noticed and remembered by our managers, peers and customers

For some people, the concept of ‘personal branding’ does not sit well. The idea that we are all walking, talking commodities to be packaged up and sold contradicts the notion of being independent, free and unique individuals. I believe the reality is somewhere in between. Whilst we are absolutely independent, free and unique, within the working world we are operating in a very noisy, competitive environment. Standing out from the crowd is a challenge and therefore conceiving, creating and maintaining a personal ‘brand’ gives us the opportunity to get noticed and remembered by our managers, peers and customers.

[si_guide_block id="117459" title="Download our FREE Resource – Marketing careers and skills development workbook" description="Tools and techniques to give you clarity on your future…

Chart of the Day: Which resolutions of web browsers should you target when testing new website designs?

If you have ten people in a room together, chances are high that most of them will have different device types that use a different browser and have a different screen size. This is why it is important to be aware of screen resolutions and the devices your prospects and customers are using. The quality of experience you deliver through your website can vary greatly depending on how well your design works at different resolutions. Due to the countless resolutions that exist across the same screen size, designers use viewports to help create mobile-friendly pages. Viewports are scaled down versions of resolutions that allow sites to be viewed more consistently across different devices.

The tables below show the most popular screen resolutions and viewports for both Apple and Android products:

…

Urgency messaging is a great way to raise conversions but is getting an increasingly bad rep

Getting visitors on your site and converting seems to be more difficult than ever. Consumers are indecisive, and, with more choice online than ever before, your website visitors are less likely to hang around. Creating urgency is one of the best ways to raise ecommerce conversions. In my 16 years in ecommerce, there are few techniques I’ve seen that so reliably raise sales. Urgency works by overcoming your visitors’ mental hurdles to purchasing from you. Perhaps they’re indecisive, prone to overthinking, or they just want to shop around a bit more. There are so many psychological factors at play that influence whether someone will buy from you. It is, however, a technique to be used with caution. The problem with urgency messaging is that it can come off as disingenuous or just all round scammy. At best this…

Developing a Joined Up Approach to your Social Media and Customer Communications

In this post I show how we use different tools and plugins for our different social platforms to let software services take some of the key pounding out of online publishing. Here is my summary of our process and the tools we use. We're always interested to learn about new tools or other approaches, so let us know if you have other suggestions.

The diagram shows the approach we use on Smart Insights to support content sharing across the main social networks while minimising the resource needed. We aim to publish two to three posts daily as a target, balancing advice and updates on major developments in digital marketing. These are posted to our blog and then we use tagging of topics in different categories to surface the advice in…

Chart of the Day: ‘Accurate and informative’ are most important aspects of online content

Everyone is always asking ‘what does good content look like?’ Turns out, people don’t mind what it looks like, so long as it’s accurate. A survey of over 1,000 adult consumers (for my money, the most knowledgeable of all consumers) from Adobe has shown that people put higher stock in the factual base of content than how it can be consumed, such as its simplicity or interactivity. There’s no doubt that videos and interactive landing pages can make your content memorable and shareable. They could even end up bagging your brand an awwward, being showcased as some of the internet’s most well-crafted content, but they won’t put you at the front of people’s minds when they want what has become the most valuable commodity of this century:…

A Customer Data Platform looks to fulfil that age-old promise of centralizing all the customer data, and it is looking good

Marketers know that data management is the key to data-driven marketing. Traditional methods for trying to bring customer data together into a “360 customer view”, failed to solve the complete problem. But there is a new player in town, and its called Customer Data Platform (CDP). Now it is knocking on your door. Should you let it in? [si_guide_block id="5508" title="Email marketing strategy guide" description="Use our email marketing guide to review your email marketing strategy using the best communications strategy, targeting and marketing automation."]

Bringing together customer data in a CDP

An un-siloed and full view of the customer is not a new concept. Yet the 360 customer view has always turned out to be the just out of reach for the marketer. Custom MarTech integration projects are known to be an especially…