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Key Points To Know For Your Digital Marketing Strategy

December 7, 2016

Without a well-planned digital marketing strategy, you can invest a significant amount of money and resources and end up with little or no return on your investment.

The problem is not with the marketing solutions themselves, as there are wide varieties available to help you build your brand, connect with customers and market at scale. A study conducted by Smart Insights shows that 47 percent of businesses are engaged in digital marketing but have no clearly defined strategic plan.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find your way through the maze of interconnected, real-time data powered Internet environment. A closer look at what it takes to see the necessity for the creation and investment of a digital marketing strategy is needed.

Making sure your marketing strategy and overall business goals are moving in the same direction is essential. Define your business goals, then create a construct that will help you reach them through digital marketing.

If your focus is on acquiring new customers, draw up a digital roadmap that will help you achieve the goal. This same thinking applies to every other part of your business plan: opening channels for new products or services and building brand awareness for specific market channels. Setting specific goals will flesh out your overall marketing strategy and work to determine your tactics, channels, messages, and who you should partner with to realize tangible, bottom line results.

Prioritize investment in technology

An outstanding customer experience is a key factor in determining the success of a digital marketing strategy. To accomplish this you need to prioritize your investment in technology, everything from marketing platforms to analytics tools. The best returns will be found when a marketing strategy is clear and dollars spent on technology translate into a positive ROI.

Determine your KPIs and data collection methods to achieve your business goal

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to accurately deciphering customer data. It is easy with modern technology to amass volumes of data on customers. But of all the data, which is the most valuable? Working within the boundaries of a strategic digital marketing plan helps to determine the most important KPIs and the best data collection methods to achieve that goal.

Digital marketing quickly becomes complex, and often the result is increasing amounts of waste and duplication of effort. It is content to create, social media accounts to manage, and customer data collection to implement, all which add to the difficulty of an already difficult job. Knowing what your specific tasks and responsibilities are can be found in the digital marketing plan, so you have a point of reference that will enable you to avoid wasted effort and duplication.

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on continually improving your performance. ROI is a key metric in determining when or if you should modify marketing strategies, and where to invest resources. A digital marketing strategy will be your guide in assessing which KPIs are the most important. According to Convince and Convert, some of the key KPIs are traffic, conversions, channel-specific traffic, and search trends. The more you know about what matters most, the more you can put the right analytics tools in the right place and create optimum data feedback loops.

Marketing technology and tools are evolving

Because data marketing tools are constantly evolving, it is important to be prepared to experiment with new approaches. Wearable technology and expanding social media platforms open the door for new technologies and approaches to be developed. Brands that are innovative stay current with new technologies and are proactive with their approach to testing out new formats and channels to see the responses from their target audience.

Digital marketing is at its best when it realizes its interdependence with the rest of the company and seeks to integrate and optimize its services. Multichannel campaigns can have their message amplified and integrate their efforts with traditional forms of advertising, achieving the results in collaboration with digital marketing.

Having a digital marketing strategy, like digital marketing itself is no longer an option for a successful company. Everything from looking for basic information about a company or product to looking for support and interacting with a business, customers are increasingly turning to a digital marketing presence.

Creating a focused campaign through the use of digital marketing tools is essential for defining your goals and avoid being pulled in too many directions. The result will be achieving your most important business objectives and a bottom line ROI that will reflect the wisdom of your digital marketing strategy.

Optimization Strategies for Search and Content Network

October 2, 2008

Site traffic from search and content network aren’t comparable in terms of click-through and conversion rate. The key difference is that users approach ads differently on content than those who search online.

The important aspect when comparing two of these users is their intent on the content or for search. It is likely that users on a site for a specific content is consuming the information and observing what he/she wants or wanted to know. For users searching with keywords in hopes to find the right content or information that is relevant to their search.

Understanding that there are differences in users’ persona, ways to optimize the ads on search and content network will be different. Let’s break down the key differences in optimization strategies for each of this network.

CONTENT NETWORK

Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR on content network will not influence your quality score. CTR is not a great indicator for measuring the success of the content network since CTR can vary widely on the content network.

Conversion Rate (CR)
CR on content network is also not a great KPI to gauge the success since the content doesn’t produce as much conversion as search network does. It is recommended to gauge “Cost per Conversion”. Google has a smart pricing feature that automatically adjusts the cost of a content network click based on its effectiveness, which is done differently from search network.
Just because I mention that these metrics are a great KPIs, it is still good to know how much your content network is performing differently from search network. So please don’t be discouraged to monitor those metrics. The content network is great for gaining exposures for your ads, so let me point out the optimization points.

Points of Optimization
Here are some great recommendations from Google.

1. Campaign Structure: Create themed ad groups – an ad group for each product or service that you’re advertising.

2. Keywords: Choose keywords that relate closely to one another and to the ads in the ad group.

3. Ads: Write clear, compelling ad text to attract users browsing content pages.

4. Content Bids: Set a separate maximum CPC for clicks that occur on the content network.

5. Position: Monitor your ad position. You can achieve maximum exposure by improving your Quality Score and selecting a competitive maximum CPC.

6. Negative Keywords: Limit how often your ads appear on content pages with irrelevant themes.

7. Site and Category Exclusion: Prevent your ads from appearing on specific sites in the content network.

I would also pay attention to seasonal trends where you could possibly rotate budgets for the content network. I’ve seen campaigns on content network perform extremely well when certain news breakout during an event and content on that specific news emerged sporadically.

SEARCH NETWORK
Points of Optimization
1. Identify your advertising goals: Your optimization strategy will depend on what your goals for search engine marketing (SEM). Is it to “gain site exposure”, “increase sales”, “gain site registrations”, etc. Depending on what the objective is, your optimization KPI could be clicks, conversions, ROI, CTR, etc.

2. Organize your account (campaign/ad group) for maximum effectiveness: You want to be very specific with each ad group containing one set of keywords and placements. Your campaign should be defined by clear topics, locations, campaign duration, language, etc. An awesome diagram that shows how an AdWords account should be structured: How is an AdWords account structured?

3. Choose relevant keywords and placements: It is very important to choose specific and relevant keywords to your ad and its landing page. This relevancy will give your ads a better chance to show up.

4. Create straightforward, targeted ads: Great call-to-action, simply and straightforward, and well-targeted ads would definitely perform well. Make sure to test different ads to optimize its performance.

5. Optimize your website for conversions: Ultimately, your website determines how well your ads convert. Take into consideration of using website optimization tools to perform A/B or multivariate testing on the landing page.

6. Track your account performance and results: Set Goal -> Track -> Measure -> Analyze -> Optimize; this is a key process that defines analytics (www.zoommetrix.com). Without tracking, you can’t analyze and optimize. You are spending money to market your business, you must measure the return on your investments.

7. Test and modify your campaigns to get the results you want: Fine tune your keywords by monitoring your KPIs (based on campaign objective). Optimizations should not be one time fix, it should be an ongoing process.

Useful link

New ways to look at search and content network statistics

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