Do you know the value of your Google Ads investment?

As marketers, we have what can feel like endless options to utilize our often limited marketing budgets.

How do you know where to invest? PPC is often a low-funnel highly-targeted place to start, but how do you justify the results you are driving? Should you be spending more? Less?

All these questions are crucial to getting the most out of your broader marketing mix. But the answer isn’t always as straightforward as it seems, even in the world of PPC where calculating your ROI is often much easier than most other digital channels (and certainly easier than more traditional marketing channels).

It sounds simple. You have Google Analytics and conversion tracking set up. So you ask yourself, “did my click result in a conversion?”

But many other questions come from this. How much is a conversion worth? How often do your conversions result in revenue? What are your margins?

These are much larger questions that we’ll save for another blog post. The one we’ll focus on here is simply, “who deserves credit for a conversion?” And that brings us to attribution.

What is Attribution?

Attribution is considered by many to be the most important marketing argument. In marketing, attribution is the action of deducing what deserves credit for a conversion. Sounds relatively straightforward, right?

However, things can get messy quickly as sales funnels get longer. For instance, what deserves credit for the conversion in this user path scenario?

Google Ads and Google Analytics both default to an attribution model called last click. So with those defaults in place, as many businesses use, 100% of the credit for the conversion above would go to a direct site visit, despite the heavy influence paid search, paid social, and display played in the nine-step path this user traveled down on their way to converting.

When you lay it out like that, it’s easy to see there are unlimited different combinations of touchpoints that could result in a conversion…so maybe last click doesn’t always fit.

Let’s take a look at the other attribution models available within Google Ads.

Attribution Models

In Google Ads, there are six different attribution models to choose from that distribute credit in different ways. I’ll go through them and discuss when you might want to use each.

Last Click

Last click attribution gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to an ad when it was the last click that led to the conversion (again, this is the default setting).

Example: This model is best used when trying to identify which channels are most responsible for bottom of the funnel deal closing.

First Click

First click gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to an ad that was the first click in a path that led to a conversion.

Example: This model is best used when trying to identify how users are introduced to your brand (new users).

Linear

Credit is distributed evenly across all clicks that the user had on their way to a conversion.

Example: This model is more useful when you are trying to understand how all your channels are playing a role in a conversion.

Time Decay

Credit is weighed by the click’s proximity to the conversion using a seven-day half-life. A click eight days before a conversion gets half the credit of a click one day before the conversion.

Example: This model is best used when trying to learn what strategies are better brand introducers and what strategies drive the most conversions.

Position-Based

Credit is distributed with 40% credit towards the first click and 40% credit towards the last clicks. The remaining 20% is spread evenly between the clicks in the middle.

Example: This model is most useful when you value brand introduction and conversion driving the most.

Data Driven

Credit is shared based on the weight of each click. Clicks that play a more significant role historically in driving conversion earn more weight. This model is specific to each advertiser’s individual conversion data.

Example: This model is the most scientific. It uses algorithms to weigh conversions, and with enough data, is most useful when trying to understand which channels are playing the largest role in driving conversions.

Each model has pros and cons inherently. So how do you pick one that is going to work for you?

Choosing an Attribution Model

In many cases, we are all so used to last click attribution that it’s hard to buck the trend and start fresh with something new, even if we know it is misrepresenting the data. We all have reports to create and people to report to.

With that in mind, it’s important to decide on a model using facts, data, and a clear understanding of your goals and expectations.

Google Analytics has a nifty tool to help.

Model Comparison Tool

In Google Analytics under Conversions > Attribution you will find the Model Comparison Tool.

This tool allows you to pit up to three different attribution models against one another for the same data set to see how your conversion data changes as you begin to consider different models.

Specifically, you can toggle the tool to just view Google Ads data.

Start with Last Interaction (i.e. last click) and start comparing different models. Check the “% change in conversion” column to begin to get a picture of how Google Ads performs differently with a different model in place. You’ll start to notice that some campaigns and strategies are affected differently by different models.

Before Making a Switch

There is a lot to consider before making the jump to a new model in Google Ads.

Consider your business goals. What are you trying to get out of Google Ads? If you are investing significant budget into Google Ads, it’s likely you are expecting conversions. But are you limiting yourself in scenarios like the one we outlined at the start?

Review your Top Conversion Paths in Google Analytics to learn what paths users are most often taking.

When you do change your attribution model in the Conversions section of Google Ads, your data will begin to shift and it will not retroactively update historical data. You’ve most likely been optimizing towards one model for some time, so make sure everyone is on the same page before switching.

Final Thoughts

Attribution is a huge question, and most of the biggest brands and highest spending advertisers struggle with it. There is very likely not a one size fits all answer to “the right” attribution model for you.

But just because the industry default has historically been last click doesn’t mean you have to continue the trend. Weigh your options, look at the data, consider your goals, and pick a model that reflects your strategies and business.

Once you settle on a new, more accurate model, you can begin collecting new data. In theory, the new data will be more representative of your goals, so you should be able to start making optimizations off it that will help improve your overall business KPIs.

The post Are You Using the Right Attribution Model in Google Ads? appeared first on Portent.

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Let’s get straight to it – yes! You need a tag manager. And the good news is no, you don’t need to be very technical or a code wiz to do it.

Saying yes to a tag management system is saying yes to saving time, saving work for your development team, increasing the ability to track useful conversions on your website, as well as the ability to solve pesky (and common) issues like cross-domain tracking.

A tag manager requires a little bit of legwork to implement, but the payoff is well worth the effort.

What is a Tag Manager Used For?

Tag management solutions are the most effective way to implement third-party code on your website. Once you’ve installed tag manager code on your site, you can add all other third-party code via your tag manager. This gives you the flexibility to change, update, and deploy code at any time.

A tag manager then sends data back to those third-party sites based on defined user actions on your website.

There are many tag management solutions available, each with their own set of pros and cons. While paid management solutions come with lots of extra bells and whistles, as a Google Partner company, we prefer Google Tag Manager. It’s free, integrates natively with many other Google products, and is equipped with integrators to platforms such as Hotjar, LinkedIn, Quora, and several others. There is also a “Custom HTML” and “Custom Image” tag option to meet any other tagging code needs, such as marketing automation platforms, and Facebook Pixels.

We’ll be using GTM in our examples today.

Benefits of a Tag Manager

While there are many benefits to a tag manager, I’ve identified some personal favorites:

Lower Dependency on the Development Team

After tag manager code is installed on your site, you have free reign of code management and implementation after that. No need to wait around for sprints, or file Jira tickets for code additions for small updates. This gives your team agility in launching or making changes to digital marketing efforts.

Increased Website Performance

Tag managers reduce the instances of additional code on the back-end of your website. It’s worth noting that any hard-coded additions to your site may result in longer load times (to which we say AH!). Long load times mean that users will not stick around and wait for your page to load, which translates to lost business. A tag management system lightens the burden of code.

Preview and Test Changes

If you’re using a tag manager to track user actions on your site such as form fills, clicks, or page views, you can launch preview mode to ensure tags and triggers are set up the way they should be. Preview testing ensures you’re only tracking what you intend to track, and allows you to catch any errors before publishing.

How Difficult is it to Implement on My Website?

Tag managers require a one-time hard code implementation to the back end of your website.

For instance, Google Tag Manager gives you two pieces of code—one to put in the <head> and one to put in the <body>. Ask your web development team to do this for you, or do it yourself if you’re savvy enough.

Your website might even include a plugin where you can place the code, and the plugin will insert the code dynamically.

Creating Tags and Triggers

Having some background knowledge of HTML is helpful when creating tags and triggers for third-party code, but not necessarily required. When you create a tag for third-party code and GTM has a native integration for that product, you may only need to input certain elements of code.

For example, let’s say you want to implement Floodlight code which tracks conversions on your website. A Floodlight tag is provided in HTML, but Google Tag Manager has a native integration that only requires you to dynamically insert three parts of the HTML code: the Advertiser ID, Group Tag String, and Activity Tag String. You can use the “?” buttons for help if you’re unsure which parts of the code that is.

It is also helpful to know what code elements to use in triggers to capture user interactions. If you’re still learning, my advice is to click around in Preview mode and see what variables are available to you when you click on them. Seeing which variables return values allows you to use them strategically to create triggers.

Which Tag Manager Should I Pick?

As I said before, there are a variety of tag management options out there. Whether you prefer a paid management solution and the support that comes with it such as Launch by Adobe, Tealium, and Signal Tag Manager, or if Google Tag manager is the right tool for you, the decision will be dependent on your business and needs. However, regardless of which solution you pick, I say: Yes to tag management!

The post Do I Need to Be Using a Tag Management Solution? appeared first on Portent.

Keywords are a seemingly inescapable aspect of the SEO world. SEO professionals (myself included) encourage clients to focus on more meaningful metrics besides the humble keyword ranking, but the fact remains that ranking well in Google for keywords with significant search volume will (usually) result in traffic to your site.

Of course, keeping track of keywords isn’t free. Whether you spend your time manually checking rankings or your money on a keyword rank tracking solution, you have to limit how many keywords you track per page and per website. So, that begs the question, “how many keywords should you track?”

Are you ready for this one? It wouldn’t be an SEO article if it didn’t have the following sentence:

“It depends.”

Start With Keyword Research

Unfortunately, keywords don’t materialize out of thin air or come to us in a vision. Even more, you can’t just assume you know what keywords people use to search and what you should be ranking for. That’s why you should always start with keyword research.

There’s plenty of information out there on how to perform keyword research successfully, but I’ll outline some of my preferred steps and best practices below.

Which Pages Rank for What?

I’m not the first Portentite to recommend starting keyword research by looking at what you already rank for. I like to go straight to Google Search Console (GSC) as soon as I get my hands on it. Despite the evidence that Search Console data is quite unreliable, it does come straight from the search giant itself, so we can’t ignore it.

Hop into your site’s GSC Performance section to see a table of queries that domain ranks for.

Conveniently, this section defaults to show which queries got your site the most clicks over the past three months. This gives you a great idea of what Google thinks your site deserves to rank for, and if you click the Pages tab, which pages are ranking.

From this starting point, go forth and research keywords! Again, I’m not going to break down that process in this post, but I can point you to a couple of great resources we already created. Our CEO, Ian Lurie, wrote this timeless guide for doing keyword research that doesn’t suck. Want more help with Search Console? How about a walkthrough from former Portentite George Freitag? Finally, check out this recent post from Senior SEO Strategist Zac Heinrichs on how to take your keyword research to the next level.

Choose Landing Pages

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank highly for, assign them to appropriate landing pages. In all likelihood, you will have already identified your target pages while performing the keyword research.

The number of target organic landing pages will directly influence the answer to our main question about the appropriate number of keywords to track.

How Many Keywords Should You Track?

You’ve decided which of your pages you want to optimize as organic landing pages, but how many keywords should you optimize each page for?

At the bare minimum, one; some pages may have a singular focus that answers only one query. It’s much more likely that you’ll want to target two or three keywords per page, even if they’re just close variations. Any more than four is a bit crowded; after all, each page only has one title tag and meta description. With a range of keywords per page determined, we can estimate how many keywords we’ll track.

1. Take the number of organic landing pages you’ve chosen
2. Multiply that number by the range of keywords per page (1-4) to get your range, or
3. Multiply the number of organic landing pages by 2.5, the average of the range.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a services site with five unique offerings and three blog posts that you want to target as landing pages. Between these pages and your homepage, you should expect to track 9-36 or about 22 keywords on average.

Of course, rules of thumb are meant to be broken. We work with a manufacturing client that offers ten unique manufacturing products. Without including their blog-focused keywords, we’re tracking 62 keywords for their site.

Other sites might not be as cut and dried. We work with a major news publishing site which often ranks 1st for extremely high-volume keywords due to their backlink profile and industry authority. We actively track over 200 keywords for them, most of which don’t directly correspond to a static landing page such as a product or service page.

Or, if you’re dealing with a site for a 20-year-old digital marketing agency run by some of the biggest nerds in the industry, you might end up with nearly 500 keywords on your tracking list so you can keep an eye on all the various blog posts you’ve published over the years.

How To Track Keyword Rankings

Although I did mention it as a possibility, you’re probably not going to want to manually track keyword rankings by doing a Google search every day (from the same machine, using a private browsing window, at the same time of day, etc.) and looking for your site.

Fortunately, there are plenty of options available for keyword tracking.

STAT

We love our Vancouver neighbo(u)rs to the north! Their robust tool allows you to set up keyword tracking for desktop and mobile, specific locations, different languages, and tons of other features. They also archive HTML snapshots of the SERPs for the keywords you track so you can see how your site and your competitors showed up in Google results.

Ahrefs

Another favorite of ours is Ahrefs, a true Swiss army knife for digital marketers. Rather than specifying which keywords you’d like to actively track, Ahrefs updates daily with all keywords that your tracked sites rank for. You may not be able to keep tabs on that ambitious keyword you’d like to rank for but never have, but it’s still incredibly comprehensive.

Google Search Console

This is a great free option, but you get what you pay for. We already saw how you can use Search Console to identify what you’re already ranking for in Google search. However, the platform only shows your average ranking for a given keyword over a period of time. That means if you spent weeks ranking 80th for a term, but suddenly jumped to 2nd, your 28-day average ranking will be in the 70s.

There are, of course, dozens of options out there; these are just the few that I recommend.

What to Watch for in Rank tracking

You’ve done your keyword research, assigned terms to target landing pages, signed up for a monthly subscription to your tool of choice… so now what? Should you sweat over every movement in the rankings, no matter how small? (No.) Should you be worried if all the keywords a single page ranks for plummet 50 positions? (Probably.)

The easiest way to stay on top of your rank changes and have peace of mind for your site(s) is to set up position change alerts. For example, STAT allows you to create custom alerts based on position movement. My most used alert is “If the number of keywords in the top-ten falls by 5%”. The difference between a first- and second-page result is significant.

Still, alerts aren’t going to catch everything. We SEO practitioners here at Portent check in on our clients’ keyword rankings at least once a week, making sure nothing has fallen precipitously and celebrating with our clients when we see a huge win.

Of course, fluctuations are to be expected. Google is notoriously capricious, and you may find your rankings undergoing a single-day jump or a back and forth oscillation.

Find Your Goldilocks Number

I’ve given you a framework for estimating how many keywords to track, but anyone in digital marketing can tell you that our rules aren’t so much set in stone as they are written in chalk until someone comes along and hoses down the sidewalk.

You may find that you prefer to track far more or far fewer keywords than I’m recommending. Maybe you don’t bother tracking rankings at all! As long as the tracking that you do is valuable to you and your client, the exact number doesn’t matter.

The post How Many Keywords Should You Be Tracking? appeared first on Portent.

Earlier this morning, while I was trying to pour hot coffee down my throat to get me going for the day, I stumbled across this Farhad Manjoo column in the New York Times. It’s titled “The global economy runs on parties you’re not invited to.” While click-worthy in its own merit, what stood out to me was the column’s subhead: “The robots may take over, but high-end schmoozing will never die.” Hmm, interesting.

What stands out to you the most in that subhead? If you answer is robots, tap yourself on the back. While it’s not the right answer, robots are dope AF, to be fair. But the thing that pops out for me is that “high-end schmoozing will never die.” Does that ring a bell?

As PR professionals, one of the most important jobs we have is building relationships, mainly with journalists. Sure, you could always reply or like a journos tweet every time they tweet something, but you’re not really building anything here. Fact is if a journalist walked by you on the street, would they know you were? Probably not, it’s going to take a whole lot more to build that relationship than liking someone’s tweet.

And this is why this column struck a chord with me. It makes perfect sense when you factor it to the PR industry. Ok fair, schmoozing is a bit of a stretch when it comes to journalists. But, in a sense, you want to take the same approach, but in a more subtle way. The goal here is simple: Be a human being.

Set yourself apart from the rest – Ready up that expense account

If you really want to build a relationship, put a face to the name. Shoot over a quick introductory email introducing yourself. Invite them out for a coffee. Take them out for drinks. Wine and dine them at a nice fancy restaurant. You have an expense account, use it.

Seriously, you’d be surprised at how well this works. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this and had journos respond with replies thanking me for an excuse to drag them out of the office. And there are the instances where you actually build long-lasting relationships. Like, I can count at least 10-15 journalists where we text message each other regularly without ever talking about clients or work.

And sure, while many of them may not accept your offer, the gesture is surely appreciated. There may be even other times where they accept your invitation and you have a great meeting and then you never hear from them again. It happens. Journalists are human too. They have their reasons.

As someone who runs a tech blog, I get a lot of pitches. And I can tell you right now that in the span of five years running it, I’ve been sent about two or three of these sort of invitations or introductory emails. So I can tell you, not a lot of PR people are doing this, which really tells me something – A lot of us are unfortunately bad at our jobs. If you really want to set yourself apart from the rest of the scrubs, again, be human.

The post If you want to be a really good PR pro, schmooze your way into relationships appeared first on The Future Buzz.

You know those blog posts that attempt to answer questions about something you’re keenly interested in, but then the first 80% of them beat around the bush until they actually provide the insights you’re looking for (if at all)?

This isn’t one of those posts. Neither you or I are interested in wasting a few minutes of your life only to be let down wishing you could get your time back.

Paid search. Google Ads. Ad Rank. You have questions. We’re going to answer them. No fluff. No bullsh*t. Here you go.

1. What Is Ad Rank?

Google defines ad rank as “a value that’s used to determine your ad position and whether your ads will show at all.” Your ad rank is the result of any given paid search auction and is compared to those of your competitors to determine if and where on the SERP your ad will show in relation to these competitors.

2. How Is Ad Rank Calculated?

According to Google, ad rank is calculated using several factors, including your maximum CPC bid amount (and whether or not that meets a minimum threshold), your auction-time quality score, the context of a user’s search, and your enabled ad extensions. Your ad rank is also recalculated each time an ad is eligible for and competes in an auction. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that an ad for one of your keywords will show up in position #1 at the top of the page for one user’s search and in a different position for another’s.

3. Can I Just Bid More to Get the Best Ad Rank in an Auction?

Not necessarily. Don’t forget about the other factors; quality and context matter! If your quality score is high and your assets (keyword, ad copy, etc.) are highly relevant, you can still wind up getting the best ad rank in an auction while bidding less than your competitors. Likewise, if your quality score is low and your assets aren’t as relevant to your user’s context (where they are in the funnel, for example), you could bid higher than all of your competitors and still not get the best ad rank.

4. How Are Ad Rank and Quality Score Related?

While your keyword quality score factors into determining ad rank for a given auction, your ad rank does not directly impact quality score as a result of that auction. Quality score is, however, determined in part by your expected click-through rate (CTR) which takes into account your historical CTR trend. That trend can be influenced by an improved ad position, which is determined by your ad rank.

I know that seems like circular logic but stick with me for a moment.

It’s common for ads that show up first at the top of the SERP to naturally have an advantage at acquiring a higher CTR. Because your positioning is determined by ad rank, that positioning can (but is not guaranteed to) help improve your CTR trend which, thereby, positively impacts your quality score. That improved quality score then directly factors into your ad rank for future auctions.

5. How Do I Improve Ad Rank?

Having a better ad rank means better visibility on the SERP. The more visible you are, the more likely someone is to click on your ad. There are a few ways to directly improve your ad rank, which all refer to the factors mentioned earlier in question 2:

• Increase your maximum CPC bids
• Improve your quality scores
• Ensure your keywords and text ads are highly relevant to the search queries which may trigger them
• Optimize ad extensions and use as many as are relevant to your account

There you have it! Hopefully, your questions have been answered, and you’re well on your way to improving your ad rank. And don’t forget to bookmark this page in case you need to reference it in the future.

The post 5 Questions About Ad Rank You Need Answers To Right Now appeared first on Portent.