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Why Value Based Bidding is “Smart Bidding”

Linda Emma on August 9, 2023

Especially for direct-to-consumer businesses, internet advertising is critical to any marketing plan. You can’t sell to your customers if you’re not where they look, search, live, breathe: online. But how do you squeeze every ounce of value out of every keyword and campaign? Value-based bidding is a good place to start. Built on machine learning, its smart bidding tactics allow you to assign value to each conversion in your sales funnel and optimize spend and actions to produce the best return on ad spend (ROAS). It’s smart bidding that produces plenty of value.

What is Value-Based Bidding?

Value-based bidding is a paid digital media strategy that connects individual bids in your campaigns to your business goals. It allows you to bid higher on the conversions that will be most valuable to your business, while conserving spend on keywords that produce poorer down-funnel results. Traditional strategies considered only the cost of a click. Lower CPCs were good; high CPCs were bad. It was a simple means to an end that may not have always produced the best results for your business.

What Are the Benefits of Value-Based Bidding?

Unlike cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, or even cost-per-acquisition bidding strategies, value-based bidding considers the bigger picture. You can home in on the products that yield you the highest profit margin and also the consumers who are likely to be return buyers.

For example, an auto dealer knows the profit margin on luxury cars beats the economy car. That’s why you’d bid higher on luxury car keywords. But you can also segment your audience and bid higher on keywords related to a particular audience. And you can consider the profit you make on vehicle financing and add related keywords to the mix. So, you bid higher on cars that are more likely to be financed since those cars are more likely to lead to a sale and you benefit from both the sale and the finance package.

Value-based bidding gives you more control of your budget and increases efficiency because you only bid on conversions that relate to your organization’s profitability. It decreases waste and improves your ROAS. And because value-based bidding is built on machine learning, it learns with time, leading to better targeting and increased visibility in front of your most valuable customers.

How to Get the Most Out of Value-Based Bidding

While Google makes value-based bidding relatively easy to set up, you won’t get the most out of it if you don’t fully share your data. Like any technology built with artificial intelligence, the more data the system has, the better the results. To get started with value-based bidding:

  • Assign Accurate Values to Each Conversion
    • Assigning accurate conversion values is the critical first step in value-based bidding and it requires a full understanding of your customer’s journey. Google uses your data to train its AI systems to determine where your most valuable customers are. Pull historical data, industry benchmarks, and anecdotal feedback from real customers. Once values are assigned, be consistent so you can track the performance of your campaigns over time. You also want to consider the lifetime value of the consumer. From the auto dealership example, consider how often your customer will buy a new car and how many family members and friends they might bring into the fold.
  • Set a Realistic ROAS Goal
    • Look at historical data and current trends to determine the profit margin you want from your ROAS. Google uses the ROAS goal you set to optimize your bids, show ads to customers most likely to convert, and bid higher for those people. As with conversion information, the more accurate your ROAS goals, the better results Google can help you achieve. Organizations that switch from targeting cost-per-acquisition to ROAS can see a 14% increase in conversion value at a similar spend. Your budget also plays a key role here; lower budgets may produce a lower ROAS.
  • Review Values and Goals Regularly
    • To get the most out of any paid digital marketing, you need to track what’s happening and be willing to adjust as needed. As your business evolves or the economic winds fluctuate, you need to confirm that your values are still accurate and that you are getting the most out of your Google Ads campaigns.

Are you using value-based bidding yet? The CloudControlMedia Platform (CCMP) has been doing this for years. Its AI core helps us align your goals with actions we take on your behalf to produce better down-funnel results—and not just on Google. CCMP works across multiple channels and even ties directly to your CRM. Learn more today.

How to Leverage AI Tools for Better PPC Campaigns

Linda Emma on July 12, 2023

Although AI is in the news every day now, artificial intelligence isn’t at all new. Alan Turing put computing and AI theory to practice in the 1940s when cracking the code of the German Enigma machines during WWII. Even in its more modern form, AI has been around for decades. Google has been developing AI for more 20 years and continues to employ it across products and platforms.

If you run ads on Google, you already use AI. But are you leveraging it to its full capabilities? Instead of relying solely on the AI-based algorithms of the search engine, embrace all the powers of AI to increase pay-per-click leads and improve down-funnel results.

Use AI to Build Your PPC Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are critical to effective marketing. How can you speak to prospective customers if you don’t truly know who they are? With AI, you can ingest thousands of relevant data points to create the most updated reality of your audience. Once you have pulled demographic, psychographic, anecdotal, and sales data, you can use a persona generator or even a free natural language processing tool like ChatGPT to actually build your customer profiles.

Conduct PPC Keyword Research with AI

AI algorithms can automate much of your keyword research, analyzing search queries, user behavior, and content trends to identify patterns and extract valuable search intent insights. AI-powered tools can crawl websites, discover keywords, and provide recommendations, eliminating manual tasks and accelerating the research process.

From that knowledge base, AI can then generate keywords that align with your users’ needs and your business goals. And because you can pull data in real time, from search and industry trends, you can populate your campaigns with the most up-to-date terminology for your offerings—what your customers actually call what you do—and push your competitors’ ads down in search.

Improve Ad Copy for PPC Campaigns

AI-powered platforms can test and optimize your ad copy and design based on performance data. By continuously analyzing and testing different ad variations, AI algorithms can be taught to dynamically adjust headlines, images, and calls to action to maximize engagement, conversion, and end results.

Discover What Your PPC Competitors Do

AI-powered tools can help you find competitors and analyze their websites, content, and keyword rankings. Check out what they’re doing and affirm you’re on the right track or unearth gaps that might be costing you leads. By examining the keywords your competitors target, you might find new insights on potentially valuable keywords. Or you can use AI for sentiment analysis to determine what searchers think of those competitors—and you.

Find Out What PPC Campaigns Yield Down-Funnel Results

AI algorithms can assess the performance and effectiveness of campaigns and keywords by analyzing metrics such as search volume, competition, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, and sales. With machine learning feedback loops, they can also help you improve your campaigns as they learn what works well and what does not. With down-funnel information at hand, you can hone the way you target your audience and personalize messaging. And by customizing your messaging based on individual user sets and where they may be in their decision-making process, AI can help to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Predict Future PPC Results

Because AI algorithms can explore large amounts of historical data, it can identify patterns, trends, and correlations to uncover valuable insights that can be used for prediction. Machine learning models can be trained to make predictions and then adapt and improve over time as they receive more data and feedback. Using regression analysis, AI can analyze the relationship between various input variables and campaign performance metrics, determine which variables are likely to influence campaign success and select them as predictors. These predictors may include factors like audience demographics, ad spend, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, average position, and keyword relevance. Use AI to predict how well your PPC campaigns will perform and plan accordingly.

Are you using AI in your PPC campaigns? Even if you didn’t realize it, you are. Google does it, but as its algorithms do more and more work for you, it’s more important than ever to have a competitive edge. What’s yours? The CloudControlMedia Platform is an AI-Driven tool that takes the guesswork out of multi-media source campaigns to produce, predict, and optimize results. Request your free demo today.

The Tightrope Walk of Ad Targeting and Privacy

Linda Emma on April 13, 2022

The best part—and some say worst—of digital advertising has always been the ability to target and track users. Advertisers have come to consider the dual measurements critical components to any digital marketing strategy. It allows them to define an audience, customize messaging to increase engagement, push users toward conversion, and then measure what works and what doesn’t. Consumers even give a general nod to the practice, with more than 40 percent saying personalized ads are important and nearly a third saying that they’re more likely to buy something attached to personalized messaging. But the downside of getting messages that appear to be made just for you is that advertisers need to know a lot about you. And they do.

Digital Ad Targeting

How much is too much?

Privacy advocates have for years decried the amount and means of data collection by digital advertisers. They have worked diligently to provide safeguards to consumers. Almost as quickly as digital ads appeared, technology to block them also came online. And with the advent of each ad blocking, anti-tracking technology and pro-privacy legislation, advertisers have hit the panic button.

Consider the EU General Data Protection Regulation of 2018. When the GDPR rules went into effect across Europe, we knew the citizen protections for personal data would wash over U.S. shores and change the way we do digital business. It did. Because the new law covered EU citizens’ data anywhere in the world, digital marketers had no choice but to step up privacy protections. And with the California Privacy Rights Act right behind its European counterpart, it was clear that digital data and tracking would have boundaries.

Both regulations came with dire warnings that proved less catastrophic than expected. The same goes for Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and App Track Transparency and Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts. The newest earth-shattering event unlikely to shatter the earth is Google’s FLEDGE or First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment. Instead of third-party cookies and group cohorts, this model intends to use your own browser to store info about you and your interests. You’ll still receive those sometimes useful, often annoying targeted ads, but no big outside corporation gets to save your data. Well, no big company outside of the browser’s owner. And in the case of Chrome, that’s Google. In case you’re wondering how Google will fare through all these privacy adoptions; it will be just fine. Because it doesn’t depend on third-party cookies—and neither does Facebook or YouTube, btw—there’s reason to believe the search giant will have even more of a stranglehold on the internet.

How To Advertise in an Age of Privacy

ad targeting

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear already, you’re not Google. On the other hand, you may want to advertise on Google, other search engines, and social media channels. But sending your messages out to the 300+ million U.S. users would be a colossal waste of money. Targeting is critical to any master plan. Here’s how to find your users, attract them to your products and services, get them to engage, and build your brand:

Embrace First-Party Data

Even if the absence of third-party cookies sends a shudder through your marketing plans, don’t forget that you already have a lot of first-party data. Or you should. Whether you track ad clicks, website visits, email opens, social media shares, content downloads, or form fills, you should already have a good idea of who your customers are, what they purchase, and how they like to be treated. Rely on the information and build upon it.

Build Relationships

Whether you sell tiny widgets or big-ticket items with a long sales funnel, don’t consider any purchase a one-off action. Your customers may not come back tomorrow for another purchase, but they might next year. And they have friends and family, maybe even children and grandchildren. Brand loyalty is often passed down to sons and daughters and while its value can be difficult to exactly pinpoint, by some accounts, it’s priceless.

To be your customers’ brand of choice, you need a real relationship with them. Like a trusted friend, you can invite them into your home, aka website; show them hospitality with discounts and promo codes; answer questions via a blog, and meet their needs with excellent products and services. And online loyalty programs and opt-in newsletters can make your customers feel special; exactly the way you want them to feel.

Create Content that Connects

Your products and services are the best you can deliver. You should be able to say the same about the content you create for your website, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, ads, emails, newsletters, videos, webinars, and whatever else might resonate with your audience. Know your audience and create content that they actually want.

Measure and Optimize

Digital marketing provides ample ways to measure what you do, see what works, and toss what doesn’t. Measurement and optimization should be continuous actions that everyone in your organization understands and embraces.

Try Something New

Google has more than a 90 percent market share of search and it changes its algorithm every single day. Be like Google. Don’t be afraid to change things up from time to time. You may not be able to get ahead of Google’s algorithm, but if you always produce top-quality content, you’re more likely to win its bots’ favor. More importantly, when you take innovative chances, you show your audience you’re a leader in your field.

Obey the Rules

Without a federal privacy law, you may need to conform to rules of individual states and nations. It’s a tall order, but critical to staying relevant online. As a general rule, you need to be fully transparent about the data you collect, including how they’re collected, processed, stored, protected, and for what purpose you use them. Especially important is with whom you’ll share the collected information. You must also grant users more control of their data. You may be required to provide them access to what you hold, the ability for them to make corrections, and even delete what you have. And you need to control how the entities you work with handle data.

If you perform any kind of digital marketing, whether through an organic website, email outreach, social media, or paid ads online, you need to honor users’ privacy while also getting the kind of results that make your efforts worth the investment. At CloudControlMedia, we understand how to push the envelope without running afoul of the cybergods who monitor the digital atmosphere. Check out our complete line of digital marketing services and contact us if you need a partner who will embrace your mission and help you achieve your goals.

~Linda Emma

How to Create College Student Personas to Increase Enrollment

Linda Emma on October 27, 2021

Creating buyer personas is a common marketing practice in private industry. It allows businesses to better understand their customers so they can define and target specific audiences for their products. And it works. More than 80 percent of companies that use qualitative buyer personas exceed their revenue goals.1 So you would think higher education would follow suit to attract new students. But less than half create student personas.2 If your school does, you’ll have a competitive edge, but the real reason colleges should create student personas is because they can help you find, engage with, and enroll more actual students.
Here’s how to get started:

student calculator

Pull Demographic Data to Create Unique Student Personas

No one knows your students as well as you do. And it’s not just because you see them every day. It’s also because for years and years, you have collected information about them. From where they’re from to where they landed after graduation, you likely have a mountain of very useful information that tells you who your students were when they enrolled and who among them were the most successful. Information like gender, age, ethnicity, income level, geographic region, and the like, are all data points about the general population of your school and its programs. Use it to begin a composite sketch.

Talk with Real People to Create Pretend Students

Data are a great starting point, but you have real people with whom you can speak. Talk to actual students—current and former. Find out why they chose your institution over another. Where are they from, what do they do? How do they/did they like their experience? Speak to people from Admissions and find out what makes someone enroll. More importantly, find out what stands in their way. Talk to whomever you can who has knowledge of your student body. From teachers and staff to administrators, they may all have insight that you don’t.

Send Out a College Student Persona Survey

Focus groups and surveys allow you to ask direct questions to fill in missing pieces. If you pull most of your data from a customer management system, you may have limited info that was created from a form fill. Send out a survey to fill in the blanks. The information can be used to learn more about your grads and also to build out new campaigns. For example, if you learn that a large population of past students are nearing a place in their careers where an advanced degree might be worthwhile, you have a whole new marketing persona to consider.

Consider the Landscape

Your students and your institution don’t live in a vacuum. You need to understand higher education, the industries for which you prepare students, and the competitive landscape. Take a look at competitor institution assets and advertising. Can you tell by what they produce who their target audiences are? Talk to employers who hire your graduates. What common characteristics do you hear about over and over again?

Create Negative Student Personas

Just as negative keywords are critical in pay-per-click campaigns to filter out traffic you don’t want, negative personas can make sure you don’t waste time, money, and resources targeting prospects that will not convert.

student faces

Sketch Your Student Persona

You’ve collected your data. Now you get to be creative. Start with the majority numbers. For example, if 65 percent of your students are male, make your first student persona a male. And if most of your students are Hispanic, make your imaginary student follow suit. Give him a name, characteristics, aspirations, and obstacles. Make him as human and believable as possible.

And then make another. And another. Ideally, you’ll have personas for each of your major programs. You wouldn’t build out identical personas for Nursing and Technology because those concentrations would attract a different kind of person. If you’re concerned that this exercise might get out of hand—it can—connect your personas around your enrollment goals. For which programs do you need more enrollments? Those are the first up for student persona development.

Get Buy-In from Others

Once you have built your student personas, it’s critical to get everyone on board to their accuracy and authenticity. These imaginary people have to feel real. From the executive team to sales, everyone needs to agree that you got it right. And if you didn’t, make changes. Add, adjust, tweak. Go back to the drawing board if you need to. Without the support of the full team, personas are not effective.

Use Your Student Personas Cross-Functionally

Now that you really, really know your audience, it’s time to speak to them with the same voice and tone across media. That means whether you build an eBook or an ad, a website or a blog post, you speak in a way that your audience understands, relates to, and wants to engage with. When you get it right, you attract the right audience and don’t waste media spend pursuing prospects who won’t enroll.

 

Are you ready for engagement that turns into action? Start with student personas. Don’t have the time to build them? We do! At CloudControlMedia, we know your students almost as well as you do. Contact us today for more information.

 

~Linda Emma

 

1Benchmarking Digital Marketing in Higher Education Report 2021
2Benchmark Buyers Survey Report 2017

What the FLoC! Are the Cookies that Advertisers Rely on Crumbling?

Linda Emma on September 15, 2021

When you think Apple, you probably think Apple Watches and TVs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or all the other i’s it counts among its products. But a small percentage of its business is actually paid advertising and Apple has recently gained some big attention for what it’s not doing in that arena: sharing user data. In the name of privacy, the company has instituted Intelligent Tracking Prevention and App Tracking Transparency and while it’s already wreaking havoc for email marketers, there’s an even scarier scenario on the digital marketing horizon. Google is expected to follow suit. The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is Google’s answer to privacy concerns and its anti-cookie measures could have a seismic impact on advertisers.

What Are 3rd Party Cookies All About?

If you’ve ever run a product search online, you’ve likely been cookied. Let’s say you’re in the market for a new kayak. You go on Google to do a bit of research. Maybe you even click on an ad at the top of the page. You close out your search without a purchase but the next time you log on, you see an ad for a kayak. And then another. And another. That darn boat is following you all over the internet, even from device to device.

That’s because an advertiser was able to put a snippet of code that gets saved to your hard drive to be recalled at a later time. This code—or cookie—can record info about your internet habits. What you search, where you buy, what ads you’ve seen, and even your location are all there for advertisers to note and use. It sounds pretty invasive, but advertisers will tell you it allows them to give you a customized experience; to satisfy your searching and purchasing needs. And Google tells its advertisers that all that data it collects create incredible targeting capabilities, which can turn into increased sales and profits.

Why Are Browsers Ditching Cookies?

In a word, privacy.

Consider the billions of dollars lost each year because of data breaches. Or identify thefts that can take years to sort out. More than 70 percent of Americans feel like they’re being tracked online and they don’t believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Now legislation across the country and the pond are in place to do a better job at protecting individual privacy. Browsers may be changing suit because they’re being forced to.

Apple calls privacy “a fundamental human right” and has now required users to opt into tracking of their unique Identifiers for Advertisers (IDFA). It’s a 180 degree turn from the past, where you only got to opt out, and it wasn’t always that easy to do. But let’s face it, Safari is no Chrome. Google’s browser is the most widely used in the world, holding more than 65 percent of the market share. When it makes the move to kill cookies, we’ll all notice. But concerns about privacy aren’t new. The UK and EU began placing cookie restrictions on websites nearly a decade ago and the EU enacted the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, considered to be the toughest privacy and security law in the world. In the U.S., California jumped on board with the California Consumer Privacy Act and lots of us digital marketers have already had to conform.

FLoC: Google’s Alternative Plan for 3rd Party Cookies

When Apple hit the brakes on 3rd party Cookies on Safari, advertisers left in droves and Apple dropped its ad prices by 60 percent. Google has no intention of suffering the same fate. The Federated Learning of Cohorts is Google’s answer to tracking that protects privacy while still giving advertisers enough user data to provide targeted marketing. Using a cohort assignment algorithm, users will be assigned a cohort ID, rather than an individual ID, based on their browsing history. The plan is to create cohort groups that are significantly large enough to mask individual identity, while still offering advertisers enough unique information to make effective targeting possible. Google is assuring us it will be a win-win.

When Will the Cookies Crumble?

Breathe easily for now. What started as a plan in 2019 hasn’t yet come to fruition. In 2020, Google said it would phase out 3rd party cookies within two years, but this summer it pushed the date to 2023. So, for now, time may be on your side.

But delay doesn’t mean deny. You need to pay attention and plan for the inevitability that your ad targeting is going to change. Google is assuring worried advertisers that FLoC will be the best of all worlds. From initial testing, it says that advertisers can expect to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.” Specific results will likely vary depending on whom you target and how well the algorithm clusters users.

Most importantly for advertisers of all types, across all browsers, apps, pages, and platforms, you need to be willing to adapt. But hasn’t that always been the case in digital marketing?

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need a digital marketing agency that pays attention to what’s going on and always has a plan to handle what’s coming next. At CloudControlMedia, we love a good puzzle. Let us figure out yours. Contact us today.

by: Linda Emma, Head of Marketing, CloudControlMedia, LLC

CRO: How Heatmaps Will Improve Enrollments

Linda Emma on March 18, 2021

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is all about inducing potential students to act once they land on your ads, website, and collateral pages. It may feel great to get visitors and clicks, but without conversions, those actions are just vanity metrics. If you want actual enrollments, integrate data from heatmaps into your CRO strategy. It will help improve conversions that matter, whether the action you hope users to take is a request for more information, a campus visit, an application start, or an enrollment.

CRO and The Enrollment Funnel

Students don’t land on your website with only your institution in mind. Whether they’re looking for a four-year home, a short-term career-training program, a certificate or an advanced degree, they’re on a search. Your job is to show them how what you do aligns with what they need. How can your website and pages grab their attention and urge them to take the action you want?

CRO Basics for Education

You’ve probably heard that search engine optimization can help you build site structure and content to ensure that you show up on search engines. CRO takes SEO a step further. Because you don’t just want to show up in a search. You want likely students to convert; to take a specific action. Small changes in the way you present content, whether that’s an ad, a landing page, your homepage, or even a blog post, can make a big difference in the results you see.

A desired action might be to have potential students fill out a form to request more information. So how can CRO help that occur? By testing various form lengths. Or choosing different colors and styles and placements of that form. Or simply changing out the call-to-action button. Those seemingly tiny tweaks can lead to higher conversions.

Heatmaps for CRO

CRO depends on data to see what works. What will work depends on how you use that data. Success generally comes when you take past experiences, recent data and good instincts and test a new approach to make educated hypotheses about how people will act. But what if you could see how they acted? Not just where they clicked, but also where they scrolled and stopped—and where they dropped off the page entirely.

That’s how heatmaps work.

The most common heatmap is solely about clicks. It tracks where and when users click, which helps tell you what they’re interested in. Let’s say they come to your blog from a promoted post on social media. Maybe they read the post to its end. Or do they click a link within? Or did your content in that post prompt them to click on a program page? Click heatmaps can help you see what works by seeing where your users click. Scroll heatmaps consider how users scroll. Do they make it to the end of the page? Do they even know that they can scroll?

But what if you could see what your users see? Where they look as they look at your pages? Eye-tracking heatmaps don’t actually follow users’ eyes, but they do follow the path of their cursors. Now you really know what they care about—and that’s CRO gold! If their attention is attracted to an image at the expense of your form, tone it down. If they interact with something at the bottom of the page, move it to the top. And if they ignore your form, fix it!

 

If you want users to convert and not bounce, CRO is vital. Find out how to add heatmapping to CRO to improve even great results. Contact the CRO experts at CloudControlMedia today.

 

~Linda Emma

10 Important Website Metrics to Measure

Linda Emma on March 3, 2021

Whether you pull up your sleeves and dive into Google Analytics, have a handy dashboard that parses data down to their core, or rely fully on an outside agency to interpret data for you, you probably understand one critical point: data matter. They are the brains of digital marketing and why it can be so effective for conversions and sales. But there are so many data points to consider, it’s often difficult to decide which metrics matter to you. If you use digital marketing to improve customer acquisition, these are the website metrics you must use to measure success:

1) Website Sessions

A mere increase in traffic to your site can be a vanity metric if that traffic isn’t tied directly to an action you took to achieve it. After all, you can have a spike in traffic that comes from developers in India and that will have no bearing whatsoever on future sales. On the other hand, if you built a marketing campaign that targets prospects with the goal of having them come to your site—and it works—that’s a metric worth noting.

2) Website Conversions

More important than mere traffic are conversions that occur once users come to you site. Are they taking the action you encouraged them to? Thanks to digital marketing metrics, you can set multiple conversion points. You might, for example, choose conversions such as a request for more information, brochure download, or the start of a sales cart. You can also create lead scoring to rank conversion actions on a path to sales. Then, those metrics can be used to create even more metrics.

3) Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the total number of conversions divided by sessions over a given time period. While conversions are important, your conversion rate can be even more telling. That’s because you can dive into the metric to see which campaign or channel is truly producing the best results. For example, let’s say you run a paid media campaign that brings 5000 sessions to your site that then result in 50 conversions. That’s a 1 percent conversion rate. Over the same time period, you also run an email campaign that brings only 1000 sessions to your site, but it results in that same 50 conversions. If you do the math, you see it has a 5 percent conversion rate. And when you consider the costs of paid media verses email marketing, the ROI of email easily wins in this example.

4) Cost per Clicks and Conversions

The ads you run through search or on a social media platform like Facebook often only cost you when someone clicks on the ad. Those costs are determined by a combination of factors including the bid you set, the competition at the very moment of the click, and your quality score. Obviously, the lower the cost, the better. Same goes for cost per conversion. Pay attention to both of these measurements and use conversion rate optimization to continually improve on even good results.

5) Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate for a pay-per-click campaign means a user comes to your landing page and takes no action; they don’t convert. It’s important to pay attention to your bounce rate as it can impact your quality score and force you to bid higher for your ads.

With organic traffic to your website, bounce rate is a little more complicated. The definition is essentially the same. A user comes to a page, takes no measurable action, and interacts with no other page on your site. Google considers that a bounce. However, in the case of a blog, the user may have come, read the post, and exited. It’s still considered a bounce even though the action you may have wanted was exactly what the user did: read the post.

6) Average Time on Page

Just like it sounds, time on page is how long a user spends on an individual page. It’s easy to see now that you’ll be combining data to build a true picture of what’s going on with your site and landing pages. In the organic example above, if a user “bounced” from your site after five minutes, you can infer that they actually read the post. On the other hand, if they bounced after a few seconds, your content likely didn’t appeal to the user.

7) Website Traffic by Sources

Where your traffic comes from is critical knowledge if you want to make the most of your marketing budget. Through analytics you can determine which sources are producing results and adjust your campaigns accordingly. For example, if you note that you receive considerable traffic from paid Facebook ads, but users don’t convert (think conversion rate), but you see traffic and conversions from LinkedIn, you’ll likely want to shift your marketing spend.

8) Mobile vs Desktop Traffic

You can see whether users are coming to you by desktop, mobile or tablet. Why does that matter? When you understand your users’ viewing habits, you can build better content. Since Google’s mobile-first initiative, you surely already use responsive design. However, if most of your users view your pages on their phones, you’ll want to be extremely concise in your copy. What do you offer potential customers? What do you want users to learn from an interaction with your company? What’s your call-to-action? Get to the point—quickly.

9) Website Traffic by Hour and Day

Similarly to understanding how users view your pages, when they view also matters. Especially with regard to your paid media budget, you don’t want to waste spend on times of the day or days of the week when users are unlikely to view your content or take action. And in some industries, you’ll also want to account for seasonality.

10) Cost per Acquisition

The end goal of your marketing efforts is to get qualified users to purchase your products or services. Link your marketing efforts to the efforts of your sales team so you understand the profile of the customers most likely to purchase —and the marketing path they took to get there. What was your investment and what’s your bottom-line marketing ROI?

 

Believe it or not these 10 metrics are only a small sampling of what you can examine when it comes to digital marketing metrics. It’s complicated! That’s why you need a digital marketing agency that has cutting-edge tools and the data scientists who make sense of it all. At CloudControlMedia, our experts in digital marketing have a long track record of success. And with the powerful CCMP platform, we can compile, analyze, and interpret the metrics, to always optimize for results. Contact us today for a free CCMP demo.

~Linda Emma

How to Leverage Lead Scoring for Higher Education

Linda Emma on February 24, 2021

Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way to determine whether that prospective student you’ve been courting would actually enroll? A way to weed out the disinterested parties from the blossoms that might truly bloom at your school? There is! When you use lead scoring for higher education, you give the admissions team prospects that are more likely to convert. Those maybes who might become yeses.

What Is Lead Scoring?

In its simplest form, lead scoring assigns a numerical value to each potential student derived from the past behaviors of enrolled students. Usually based on a scale of 100, lead scoring uses a variety of factors to determine how likely prospects are to become students. The higher the number, the more likely. But lead scoring is far from an exact science. Each institution, even each program, can and should have different criteria for what’s important. And while the magic number for one school might be 95, another university might hit admit at 78.

What Are the Benefits of Lead Scoring for Higher Education?

The work your admissions team does to help students make the right choice about your institution is incredibly valuable. So is there time. The better the leads you provide to them, the more productive use they can make of their time. But lead scoring has other benefits.

  • Higher Productivity: When your team is more efficient and productive, it also means that it doesn’t need to be as large. You have finite resources; allot them strategically.
  • Higher Conversion Rates: If the leads that make it through to admissions’ attention are more qualified, they’re more likely to convert to students—more quickly.
  • Shortened Enrollment Cycle: The more quickly you have an answer to that all-important question: will they enroll? the better you’ll be able to plan for everything else that comes in its wake. Programs, courses, staffing, even plans for potential expansion can all be more effectively considered once you know your likely enrollment numbers.
  • Enrollment Forecasting: You may not be able to replicate the success of this semester for the next but lead scoring can help you get closer to that kind of long-term planning. Moreover, if you continually tweak the lead scoring formula, always adding the data that point to success, you can make an all-out effort to stay ahead of the curve and predict the future with some level of clarity.
  • Marketing and Admissions Alignment: An oft-expressed complaint from admissions teams is that marketing sends them unqualified leads. Marketing personnel complain that admissions doesn’t share relevant information that could help them find those qualified leads. When everyone agrees on realistic lead scoring, your team will work together to help you improve your enrollment yield goals.

How to Lead Score

Start with your CRM and your current student body. If you’ve kept track—of course you have—of action and results through your CRM, you have a trove of data points from which to pull. What’s the demographic makeup of your student body? What kinds of emails to which students yield positive results? What kind of student hits unsubscribe? Gather as much information as you can to create student personas that are the best match to your institution.

Next, consider the minimum criteria for entry to your program. Often that revolves around some basic demographics. For example, if you want to enroll an MBA program, your candidates will need to be a certain age and have a bachelor’s degree. Geography will also be a consideration. Sure, you may enroll west coasters and international students, but if 80 percent of your student body is from New England, those New Englander leads are going to have a higher score than the guy from Bangladesh. And who will be able to afford the cost of tuition? These are all lead scoring factors.

The numbers you assign and the weight they’re given will depend on how many factors you consider to be important. And it’s okay if the numbers seem imprecise; not every potential student will fill every blank. However, you’ll want consensus about the scale that works. Make sure to have marketing, sales, and the higher-ups agree on how you’ll score individual leads. Also, include negative numbers. If someone stops opening emails, engaging with admissions, or following you on Facebook, they’re sending you a message; listen.

Here’s an example of one candidate’s lead score for an on-campus MBA program:

 

Job title manager or above +10
More than 10 years’ work experience +15
Lives outside 25-mile radius of campus -15
Opened email +5
Downloaded whitepaper +15
Visited application page +10
Failed to open 3 consecutive emails -10
Followed on Facebook +20
Attend admissions event +30
Total Score +80

With a score of +80, the admissions team might consider this prospect to be a likely applicant; they might also address a pain point, like living far from campus, head-on. Do you offer housing for grad students? Excellent. Offer that as the selling point it is.

Effective lead scoring for higher education can be an important marketing and admissions tool. If you’d like to learn more about how to incorporate lead scoring into an integrated marketing strategy, we’d love to work with you. Give us a call.

 

~Linda Emma

Launching a New Website: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Linda Emma on February 17, 2021

Your website is a portal into who you are and what you can do for those who cross your digital doorstep. For it to be truly effective, it needs to appeal to users and search engines alike with continually relevant content. It needs to stay fresh, provide a great user experience—and get results.

If yours doesn’t, it’s time to redesign your website. But before you jump into the deep end of the water, make sure you know how to swim. Otherwise, your traffic will sink into the depths and resuscitation efforts could take months, or even years.

Avoid these 5 common mistakes as you launch your new website:

1) Site Development: Too Little Too Late

Ask any web developer and they’ll tell you it’s critical to revamp your website every two to three years. Of course, they do. It’s how they stay in business. And while you may have actually missed the boat for timing on a new site, the truth is whether or not you need a website revamp depends on how your current site performs. If it’s sailing along well, minor tweaks and regular search engine optimization may be all you need. But if your site is out-of-date, not secure, or performing poorly, a simple patch isn’t going to work.

However, before you hire a developer or designer to build out a new site, stop and plan. Rushing to get your site immediately online can do more harm than good. Don’t opt for quick and easy templates and cookie-cutter plugins. Take the time and effort to build out a site that will get you the results you deserve.

2) Poor SEO Prep

In the excitement of setting sail, whether for a refresh or an entire rebrand, organizations sometimes forget to take a hard look at what they already have—especially from an SEO perspective. Before you scrap parts of your site because you just don’t like the way they look, make sure to conduct a full SEO audit so you know what currently works and what doesn’t.

  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of your existing site?
  • What kind of traffic do you get?
    • From where and to what pages?
  • How many pages on your site are indexed?
  • For what keywords do you rank?
    • Are they the right ones?
  • What are your top performing pages?
  • What do you hope to achieve from a new site that your current one does not?

If you don’t know where you’re starting from, how will you be able to judge the performance of a new site?

3) Technical SEO Oversight

There are some interesting websites out there that have professionally shot videos, powerful imagery, and interactive tools all over their pages. And while they may be aesthetically pleasing, users may never find them. Multiple functionalities, wasteful snippets of code, and unnecessary add-ons can render a site painstakingly slow. If you know nothing else about today’s human internet browsers, understand that they are an impatient bunch. And that pales in comparison to bots crawling site.

It’s critical that the technical aspects of your site come first. Among the components you need to consider are:

  • Hosting
  • Domain
  • Sitemap
  • Site Navigation
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Security
  • Content Management System
  • Redirects
  • Tracking

4) Old School SEO Tactics

Google changes its algorithm every day—literally. If you build content for your site using old school SEO, even a new site won’t lead to better bottom-line results. But how do you keep up with all the changes? Instead of focusing on the Google algorithm and a few magic keywords that might trigger positive results, build intuitive content. After all, Google’s just trying to give the user the most positive experience possible; you should too.

Include long-tailed keywords and varied vocabulary in well-researched, written, edited, and formatted content. Build content that is interesting, entertaining, and authentic. Instead of worrying about search engine algorithms, show concern for the people who matter to your business. What are their problems and how can you solve them? Don’t use old-school SEO devised to trick the algorithm. Google’s too smart to fall for it—and so are your users.

5) Poor Usability Design

Take a step back before you build out a new site. Analyze the performance of the existing site, pull results from analytics and heatmapping. Consider your users and brand personas and make certain that all you do on your new site aligns with who they are and how they act. Find out where and how users scroll your current site. Don’t discard good results! If your current CTAs work well, consider positioning them similarly on your new site. If your images work, find images that are similar but fresher. Don’t just throw out everything from your old site; improve it.

From a structural standpoint, you need to hit several marks. You need a properly formatted sitemap that you can submit to Google Search Console. You need optimized URLs, that concisely explain what each page is all about. You need responsive design that is mobile-friendly. And you need to test every aspect before you migrate or make your new site live.

 

If launching a new website sounds daunting, it can be. Contact the SEO and design experts at CloudControlMedia before launching a new website. We can work with anyone on your team or anyone you hire to make certain it’s smooth sailing from launch to port.

 

~Linda Emma

How to Earn Compound Interest in Digital Marketing: SEO

Linda Emma on February 5, 2021

If you’ve ever bought anything on time—car, home, an education—you know that the sticker price you agreed to is never what you wind up paying. Because of compound interest, that 25-year $300,000 condo loan you took out at 5 percent will actually cost you $526,000. Wow! Imagine if you could be on the receiving end of that kind of interest?

You can be!

Sort of.

Search engine optimization is a lot like a long-term investment strategy that produces compound interest. Start with your principle—optimized content—and eventually, you can earn interest on your interest.

How to Earn SEO Interest

Just like with any really good investment, a few factors have to be true if you’re going to yield the kind of results that add up to profits:

  • Quality
  • Consistency
  • Attention to Detail

Quality

Whatever is in your current investment portfolio, if it doesn’t start with quality companies, there isn’t much for you to build on. What does that mean for SEO? You need to start with a structurally sound website, that’s optimized for relevant topics and keywords. It needs substantive pages that contain answers to help solve users’ problems and address their needs.

One easy way to ensure you have enough content bulk is through a blog. As you build more and more content, using appropriate and relevant keywords, over time Google will recognize you as a reliable authority and pay you interest, i.e., higher rank. The higher you rank, the more likely you’ll be seen by more users. And the more users you attract, the more attention you’ll get from Google. You get the picture: one leads to another that leads to the other; it’s a snowball effect. And if you keep showing up at the top of organic search results, you’re more likely to be the answer to your future students’ queries when they’re looking for a school to attend.

Consistency

Investors who take a slow and steady approach often outperform their jackrabbit friends who chase after the next big thing that isn’t. The person who invested $10,000 in Apple just before Steve Jobs came back into the company in 1997, and allowed dividends to be reinvested, is a multi-millionaire today due to that single stock choice and a steady-as-she-goes strategy. The kid betting that GameStop would continue to rise? Not so much.

But how can you be consistent with SEO? That blog is one way. Use an editorial calendar to consistently post on the topics your users will be most interested in. And do it every week. Each and every week. As you build a library of relevant content, you attract users and backlinks, which attract more of the same. Stay the course.

Attention to Detail

Being consistent with your SEO doesn’t mean you make the investment, set it to coast and walk away. When Jobs got ousted from Apple, the stock plummeted. You need to pay attention. Just like you follow what happens in your stock portfolio, you keep a watchful eye on your SEO portfolio. It’s important to frequently look at your overall site performance. Conduct regular audits and content evaluations and measure what’s happening on your site against your competition.

And take note of industry upsets. With business stocks, that may be about what’s happening in a particular industry or the broader economy, but in SEO, it’s mostly about the Google algorithm. It literally changes every day.

When Google implemented the BERT algorithm in 2019 and then the SMITH Algorithm at the end of 2020, SEOs were left scrambling to fix their sites. But they shouldn’t need to be. At the root of all the pandas and penguins and hummingbirds and, yes, even BERT and SMITH, is the idea that Google is trying to make a computer act like a human. If you know your audience, relate to its needs and consistently produce quality content, fiercely aligned to a high set of standards, you’ll get results, which will then produce more results.

 

If you want to earn interest on your SEO investment, content our SEO team at CloudContolMedia. We know how!

 

~Linda Emma

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