Marketing Tips, How-To, & More!

How to Spy on Your Competitors’ Ads and SEO (Using Free Tools)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:45:07 GMT

Competitive Insights

If you’re running digital marketing campaigns, whether for your own company or for clients, one of the smartest strategic moves you can make is studying your competitors. Are they investing in Google Ads ? Are they dominating organic search ? Are they testing messaging across paid social platforms?

You don’t need access to their accounts to get meaningful insight. There are free tools that allow you to analyze competitor keywords, ad visibility, and estimated traffic. Used properly, these tools won’t give you perfect numbers, but they will give you direction. And direction is what drives better strategy.

Why Competitor Analysis Matters in Digital Marketing

Competitor research is not about copying someone else’s strategy. It’s about understanding the competitive landscape so you can make smarter decisions. When you analyze competitor SEO and paid advertising activity, you start to see patterns. You see which keywords they prioritize, whether they are leaning into brand or non-brand traffic, and whether they are investing heavily in paid acquisition.

The goal is clarity. If a competitor is aggressively bidding on high-intent keywords, that tells you something about profitability. If they rank for hundreds of long-tail search terms, that signals a strong content strategy. If they appear inactive in search but visible on social, that suggests a different acquisition model. Those patterns matter far more than exact traffic estimates.

Free Tools to Analyze Competitor SEO and Ads

Several platforms provide insight into competitor digital marketing performance. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SpyFu allow you to enter a domain and see estimated organic keywords, sample ranking pages, overlapping competitors, and even paid search terms.

Even the free versions of these platforms can provide valuable directional data. You may not get full keyword lists or precise traffic numbers, but you can quickly identify what themes a competitor is targeting and whether they are active in paid search. That alone can reshape how you approach your own SEO and PPC campaigns.

Using SpyFu to Analyze Competitor Keyword Strategy

When you enter a competitor’s website into SpyFu, you can typically see a snapshot of their organic rankings and paid keywords. This often includes examples of search terms they rank for, estimated clicks, and sometimes historical ad activity.

While the data is limited in free versions, it is enough to identify strategic focus. If you notice a competitor consistently ranking for service-based keywords, that tells you their SEO strategy is conversion-oriented. If their paid search activity centers around transactional queries, it indicates strong buyer-intent targeting. Even seeing a handful of keyword examples can reveal positioning, pricing emphasis, or niche specialization.

Understanding the Limitations of SEO Tools

It’s critical to understand that platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush do not show real analytics data. They provide estimates based on their own data models. If you compare their traffic projections with actual numbers inside Google Analytics or campaign data from Google Ads, you will often see discrepancies.

Traffic estimates can be inflated or understated. Keyword rankings may not be fully accurate. Paid ad data may lag or miss certain campaigns entirely. That does not make these tools useless—it simply means you must treat the information as directional rather than definitive.

Think of these platforms as reconnaissance tools. They help you identify movement in the market, not audit-level reporting.

Analyzing Competitor Google Ads Activity

If you want to determine whether a competitor is actively running paid search campaigns, tools like SpyFu and SEMrush can give you a preview of their paid keyword targeting and ad copy samples within Google Ads.

You can often see which keywords they are bidding on, estimated cost-per-click, and even variations of ad headlines and descriptions. This is useful for evaluating messaging and offer strategy. For example, if you notice consistent promotional language or strong call-to-action phrasing, it may indicate that they are testing aggressively and optimizing conversion rates.

It also helps you identify whether they are defending brand terms, targeting competitor keywords, or focusing on broader non-brand acquisition.

To see the actual ads that a competitor is running, you can use Google Ads Transparency Center: https://adstransparency.google.com/ . This will show you the actual text, creative, and variations of the ads that are active.

This is a great way to see possible promotions, calls-to-action, and targeting that your competitors are using in their Google Ads.

Checking for Paid Social Activity

Search is only one part of the equation. Many competitors invest heavily in paid social advertising. While SEO tools don’t always capture this accurately, you can analyze visibility on platforms like Meta Ads and TikTok through public ad libraries.

Reviewing active ad creatives can reveal a great deal about positioning. If a company is running multiple variations of the same offer, that signals structured testing. If their ads are consistent across weeks or months, that suggests they have found profitable messaging and are scaling it.

Creative consistency, frequency of updates, and offer structure all provide insight into how serious they are about paid acquisition.

What to Look for in Competitor SEO Strategy

When reviewing a competitor’s organic presence, focus less on raw traffic numbers and more on structural signals. Are they ranking for informational content or commercial intent terms? Are blog posts driving most of their visibility, or are service and product pages leading the way? Do they dominate long-tail keywords, or are they focused on high-volume head terms?

These distinctions matter because they tell you what stage of the funnel they are prioritizing. A content-heavy strategy indicates top-of-funnel acquisition. A commercial-intent focus suggests revenue-driven optimization.

The most powerful use of competitor SEO analysis is identifying keyword gaps. If competitors consistently rank for valuable terms that you are not targeting, that represents opportunity. You don’t need perfect data to see that pattern.

The Strategic Way to Use Competitor Data

The biggest mistake marketers make is obsessing over estimated traffic charts. The smarter approach is to look for patterns in behavior. Is your competitor scaling content production? Are they consistently appearing in paid search results? Are they visible across multiple platforms?

Patterns reveal strategy. Strategy reveals priorities. And priorities tell you where revenue is likely being generated.

Free competitor research tools will never replace direct analytics access, but they can absolutely give you strategic leverage. If you approach them with the right mindset—direction over perfection—you can uncover opportunities your competitors are already proving in the market.

Use the data wisely, validate your assumptions with your own testing, and let competitor analysis sharpen your decision-making rather than distract from it.

Can Google's Gemini AI Images Replace Photoshop?

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:19:35 GMT

AI image generation is making some photographers nervous about the future

Google's Gemini just launched a new AI image tool that they're calling Nano Banana. We put it through some tests to see how it compares to ChatGPT and Adobe Photoshop. Can Google's AI really replace Photoshop? Well, I can tell you that we were very, very impressed with the results.

Build a Website Using Just Text - AI Web Builder from Duda

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:12:28 GMT

Speed up website development using this new AI feature from Duda

How Duda’s AI Website Builder is Changing the Game

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere right now, and website building is no exception. Many platforms are incorporating AI tools to make it easier to design, launch, and manage websites. One of our favorite platforms, Duda , has rolled out several AI-powered tools to streamline the process. Among these, their AI Site Builder is one of the most exciting.

Why AI in Website Building?

Traditionally, setting up a new website meant manually creating pages, writing copy, and piecing together design elements. Even with templates, the process can be time-consuming. AI changes this by handling much of the upfront work - automating content gathering, structuring layouts, and generating starter copy.

For agencies and business owners, this reduces hours of repetitive setup and frees you to focus on customization, branding, and refining the final product.

Walking Through Duda’s AI Site Builder

Duda’s AI builder allows you to quickly spin up a complete website from a guided interface. You can prepare some content in advance, feed it into the system, and let AI generate a full framework for your site. From there, it’s easy to go in and adjust individual pages, tweak design elements, and personalize the messaging.

This approach takes care of the “heavy lifting” upfront - no more starting from scratch page by page.

Benefits for Agencies and Businesses

Faster Launches: Cut down the time it takes to get a website live.
Consistency: Ensure brand voice and layout stay aligned throughout the site.
Flexibility: Start with an AI-built foundation and then fully customize.
Scalability: Handle multiple projects more efficiently, especially for agencies working with many clients.

Final Thoughts

AI isn’t here to replace web designers or marketers - it’s here to amplify productivity. By letting AI handle the repetitive and time-intensive steps, you can focus on strategy, design, and results.

Duda’s AI tools are just the beginning, but they represent a shift in how websites will be built moving forward. If you’re looking to streamline your website projects, their AI Site Builder is definitely worth exploring.

Importing Non Google Ad Cost into Google Analytics

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 13:31:16 GMT

Easily compare channel performance within GA4

You may have noticed that there's a new(ish) default report in GA4 called "Non Google cost" that doesn't have any actual cost data in it. What gives?

We take a look at how you can populate this report by importing cost data from non-Google marketing channels like Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. That way you can see ad cost for all of your marketing programs, not just Google Ads , which has a native integration with GA4.

Creating a Mega Menu in Duda Editor 2.0

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:08:31 GMT

Mega Menus expand navigation and increase marketing opportunities.

Website creation and hosting platform, Duda, recently updated its new Editor 2.0 to feature easy-to-use mega menus. We take a look at how to create a mega menu, and when you should or shouldn't be using mega menus.

Campaign Reporting in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:36:18 GMT

Get more information about individual campaign performance in GA4

We get a lot of questions from folks who are confused about where to find campaign-level reporting in GA4 . In typical Google fashion, the don't make it super apparent out of the box. We look at where to find information about your marketing campaigns in GA4, as well as how to set up your UTM tracking for those campaigns.

Why Campaign Tracking Matters

Imagine pouring money into Facebook Ads, newsletters, and influencer shoutouts... only to have no clue which one brought in the most customers. That’s where campaign tracking comes in. When done right, it tells you exactly where your traffic and sales are coming from, so you can stop guessing and start optimizing.

The Basics: Where to Find Campaign Data in GA4

Head to your GA4 property and navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition . This is your campaign tracking HQ.

By default, Google shows you things like "Organic Search," "Direct," or "Paid Search." These are what GA4 calls default channel groupings . They’re auto-generated based on things like:

Where users came from
What UTM parameters (if any) are in the URL
Referring websites

Want more detail? Use the dropdown in the Traffic Acquisition report to switch to views like Source/Medium or Session Campaign .

Understanding Source, Medium & Campaign

These are the big three UTM parameters that GA4 looks for:

Source : Where the traffic came from (e.g., facebook, newsletter, google)
Medium : The type of traffic (e.g., cpc, email, referral)
Campaign : The name of the marketing effort (e.g., spring_sale_2025)

You can add even more parameters like Content (to differentiate between creatives) and Term (to track keywords), but Source, Medium, and Campaign are the must-haves.

What Are UTM Parameters?

UTM parameters are tags you add to the end of your URLs so GA4 can track where visitors are coming from.

For example:

https://yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale

GA4 reads this data and categorizes it in your reports.

How to Create UTMs (the Easy Way)

Use Google’s free Campaign URL Builder or a simple Google Sheet template to build links. Here’s what you’ll typically enter:

Website URL : https://yourwebsite.com
Source : facebook
Medium : cpc
Campaign : spring_sale
Content : video_1 (optional)

The builder will generate a URL with tracking built-in. Use that link in your ad or email.

Tips for Clean, Consistent Tracking

Use consistent naming : "email," not "e-mail" or "EmailNewsletter."
Stick to Google’s standards : GA4 expects certain terms like "cpc" for paid traffic. Deviate, and your data might land in "unassigned."
Avoid duplicate campaign names : Make them specific. Include dates or promo names like "fall_2025_discount."
Document everything : Use a shared sheet if multiple people are building UTMs.

Why Some Traffic Ends Up as "Unassigned"

"Unassigned" is GA4’s version of a shrug. It means Google couldn’t figure out where the traffic came from. Usually that happens because:

UTMs are missing or incorrectly set
The page loads before your tracking tag does
A medium like "AdWords" is used instead of "cpc" (which GA4 recognizes)

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GA4 UPDATE: Annotations are back!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:20:37 GMT

Keep track of events and campaigns that impact your reporting.

If you’ve spent any time working in Google Analytics —especially the older Universal Analytics version—you’ll remember a super handy feature called annotations. These were little notes you could add to your reports to mark important events: maybe your site went down for a day, or a new campaign launched, or you rolled out a big update.

These annotations were lifesavers when it came to making sense of sudden traffic spikes or mysterious conversion drops. “Oh right, that was the day our email campaign launched!” or “That’s when the tagging broke…” You get the idea.

Well, here’s the good news: annotations are back in GA4 —finally!

Wait…What Are Annotations Again?

Let’s back up a bit. If you’re new to GA or maybe didn’t use Universal Analytics much, annotations are basically digital sticky notes for your reports. You can record:

Marketing campaign launches
Website outages
Tracking/tagging issues
Promotions or seasonal events
Product launches
Algorithm updates
Anything else that might affect your website data

And it’s not just for solo marketers—annotations are a must-have for teams. Why? Because not everyone knows what’s going on all the time. Your SEO team might not know the email team pushed out a flash sale. Your devs might’ve fixed a bug that tanked the bounce rate. These little notes create a shared record of what happened and when.

In short: annotations help you remember why something happened, not just that it happened.

GA4 Took Them Away. But Now They're Back!

For reasons only Google knows (and isn’t sharing), annotations didn’t make the cut when they rolled out GA4. Cue the collective groan from marketers and analysts everywhere.

Sure, there were workarounds. People used Google Sheets, Notion, internal dashboards—you name it. We even did a video about how you can add annotations in Looker Studio . But none of that was as simple or as connected as the built-in feature we lost.

Now, finally, annotations are back in GA4. And they’re actually kind of nice.

Let’s walk through how to use them, and how you can make them work for your team.

How to Use Annotations in GA4

Using annotations in GA4 is easy once you know where to look. Here’s a quick step-by-step.

Step 1: Look for the Annotations Icon

Head over to your GA4 property and check out any of your main reports—like the Home report or the Traffic Acquisition report. You’ll see a small page icon with a little folded corner. That’s the annotations icon.

Good news: annotations should be available in most of your high-traffic reports. Bad news: they don’t show up in Explorations (custom reports). Yeah, we don’t get it either. Hopefully that changes soon.

Step 2: Create Your Annotation

Click that icon, and then hit “Create annotation.” You’ll be prompted to enter:

Title: Keep it short but descriptive. Example: “March Email Campaign: Sales Launch”
Description: Go into a bit more detail—what happened, what was the goal, etc.
Date or Date Range: You can choose a single date (like a one-day outage) or a range (like a two-week campaign).
Color Coding: This is where things get interesting.

Step 3: Use Color Coding for Context

Each annotation shows up as a little dot on your timeline, and that dot can be color-coded. This is your opportunity to bring order to the chaos.

Our recommendation? Come up with a standard color code for your team. Something like:

�� Red for emergencies (site outages, broken tracking)
�� Green for paid search launches
�� Blue for email campaigns
�� Yellow for SEO updates
�� Purple for offline events (TV, radio, print

Whatever your system is, keep it consistent. If you’re part of a larger team, document the color codes and naming conventions somewhere easy to find.

That way, anyone looking at reports can quickly scan the chart and say, “Oh hey, there was a red-dot outage here,” or “Looks like the blue-dot email campaign went out then.”

Where Do Annotations Show Up?

After you save an annotation, it appears directly on your chart as a small colored dot on the date (or start of the date range). Hover over it, and you'll see the title and summary.

These annotations are visible across most standard reports—including:

Home
Traffic Acquisition
Pages & Screens
Events
Conversions

You’ll be able to hover over the dot to see a snapshot of what happened. It’s a fast and easy way to get context as you scroll through your data.

Better yet, annotations are persistent —they don’t go away unless you delete them. That means they’re always there to help your future self (or teammates) understand what was happening when the numbers changed.

Why Annotations Matter (Especially for Teams)

Still wondering if annotations are worth the effort? Let’s walk through some real-world use cases.

1. Prevent Team Confusion

Ever had a team member ask, “Why did our traffic drop last week?” You dig into the data and realize—oh yeah, that was the day we switched hosting providers and the site was down for 4 hours.

Now imagine if you had just marked that with a red annotation. Boom. Question answered.

Annotations save time, reduce confusion, and make collaboration easier.

2. Help Your Future Self

When you’re analyzing trends six months from now, you’re not going to remember every campaign or hiccup. But your annotations will.

They help you build a historical roadmap of your analytics data. That’s gold when you're reporting up the chain or planning future campaigns.

3. Spot Patterns Faster

Using color coding and consistent naming conventions means you can start spotting patterns at a glance. For example, if every green-dot paid search campaign leads to a conversion spike, you know you’re doing something right.

Or if every red-dot outage leads to a long recovery period, maybe it’s time to invest in site reliability.

4. Use It as a Training Tool

If you have new team members learning your analytics setup, annotations are a great teaching tool. They can go back in time and see what happened and when—giving them better context for the metrics they’re analyzing.

What’s Missing? (C’mon Google…)

Of course, no Google rollout would be complete without a couple of “what were they thinking?” moments.

No Annotations in Explorations

GA4’s Explorations feature is where a lot of the good analysis happens—custom funnels, detailed user paths, etc. Unfortunately, annotations don’t show up there. That’s a bummer.

Hopefully Google adds support for annotations in Explorations soon. For now, you’ll just have to manually cross-reference.

No Looker Studio Integration (Yet)

As of now, annotations don’t show up in Looker Studio dashboards either. So if you’re building reports there for clients or leadership, you won’t see those helpful dots.

Will this change? Hopefully. Google’s been slow to roll out Looker Studio improvements for GA4, but we’re staying hopeful.

Final Tips for Getting the Most from Annotations

Before we wrap up, here are a few best practices to help you get the most out of annotations in GA4:

✔️ Standardize Your Naming Conventions

Decide as a team how you’ll title events. Something like:

[Channel] - [Campaign Name] - [Purpose]

Example: Email - March Spring Sale - Promo Launch

This makes it easier to sort and understand what each note means.

✔️ Set a Regular Cadence

Get into the habit of adding annotations regularly:

Weekly marketing updates
Monthly reporting recaps
Big campaign launches
Website changes or dev pushes

Make it part of your team’s workflow.

✔️ Collaborate Cross-Functionally

Encourage different departments—SEO, Paid Media, Dev, Email—to contribute annotations. The more eyes (and notes) on your analytics, the clearer your picture becomes.

✔️ Document Your Color Codes

If you’re using color coding (which you should!), put that legend somewhere easy to access—like a team wiki, project management board, or shared doc.

Annotations Are a Game Changer (Again)

After being sorely missed, annotations are back in GA4—and they’re as useful as ever. If you’re not using them yet, today’s a great day to start.

They’ll help your team:

Understand what caused changes in your data
Stay aligned across departments
Improve reporting and analysis
Save time by reducing guesswork

So go ahead—jump into your GA4 property and add your first annotation. You’ll be glad you did.

Need help with setting up GA4, Google Tag Manager, or getting your analytics strategy in shape?

Our team at Apotheca Marketing is here to help. We specialize in marketing data, implementation, and strategy—and we’d love to work with you.

Google Search Console Page Alerts Explained: Fix Indexing & SEO Issues

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:33:30 GMT

Have you received confusing alerts from Google Search Console?

Have you ever gotten one of those mysterious emails from Google Search Console that makes your stomach drop? You know the kind—"your indexing might be off," or "Google can’t index some of your pages." It sounds pretty dire, right?

You’re not alone. We’ve had plenty of clients come to us in a bit of a panic after receiving one of those alerts. They’re not sure what it means, whether it’s harming their SEO, or if it’s the start of something going seriously wrong with their site. So let’s take a closer look at what’s going on when Google sends one of those messages—and more importantly, what you should (or shouldn’t) worry about.

Welcome to Google Search Console

First things first, let’s jump into Google Search Console. Specifically, the "Pages indexing" section. This is where you’ll find a list of which pages have been successfully indexed by Google—and which haven’t. More importantly, this area gives you a breakdown of why certain pages weren’t indexed. That’s what triggers those scary emails.

Here are a few of the most common messages and what they mean:

1. Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag

If you’re running a CMS like Shopify (which the example site in the video was), this is totally normal. Many ecommerce systems auto-generate canonical tags to avoid duplicate content—especially if a product appears in multiple categories or collections.

A canonical tag tells Google, "Hey, even though this content appears in multiple places, here’s the main version." It’s like giving Google a map so it doesn’t get confused.

The key thing is to check that these canonical tags are pointing to the right URLs. If they are, there’s usually nothing to fix, even though Google might say "Validate Fix." Sometimes there’s no fix needed—just a heads-up.

2. Not Found (404)

These are more serious. A 404 means Google tried to crawl a page, and it simply wasn’t there.

This could happen for a few reasons:

A product was deleted
A page was removed without a redirect
A URL was mistyped somewhere

If you’ve got a lot of these, it can start to hurt your SEO and your users' experience. A good fix is to redirect those pages (301 redirect) to the next closest relevant page—or the homepage if needed.

But, quick tip: If a product is just temporarily out of stock, don’t redirect it. Keep the page up and say “Out of stock” instead.

3. Page with Redirect

This is another one that might not be bad at all. If you’ve intentionally set up a redirect (say from HTTP to HTTPS), this is expected.

Where it gets tricky is when you’ve got too many redirects, or redirect chains—like one redirect leading to another, and another... and so on. That slows down Google’s crawling and might strip tracking parameters from URLs.

Pro tip: Use a tool like httpstatus.io to check redirect chains and clean up old or unnecessary redirects.

4. Access Forbidden (403)

These show up when Google tries to access a page and gets blocked. Often, this is intentional—admin areas, checkout pages, backend scripts, etc.

Still, it’s worth a review. Make sure you’re not blocking something important by mistake. If your robots.txt file or server settings are too restrictive, it could impact your indexing.

5. Server Errors (5xx)

These are a big red flag. A 500-level error usually means something’s wrong with your server—it’s timing out, it’s overloaded, or a process is breaking somewhere.

While the occasional hiccup isn’t a big deal, consistent errors might mean you need better hosting, CDN support, or developer intervention.

6. Excluded by Noindex Tag

Sometimes you don’t want Google to index certain pages (like a login screen or thank-you page). That’s where the "noindex" tag comes in.

However, if you’re seeing pages here that should be indexed, it’s time to look under the hood. Maybe someone left a noindex tag on by mistake, or an SEO plugin has auto-applied rules.

7. Blocked by robots.txt

Your robots.txt file tells search engines what to crawl—and what to ignore. Shopify, for instance, auto-generates this file.

Most of the time, it's configured correctly. But mistakes happen. We’ve seen entire product catalogs blocked because of a rogue wildcard character.

If you're seeing unexpected blocks, it's worth checking with your dev team or SEO plugin settings.

8. Soft 404s

A soft 404 is Google’s way of saying, “This page exists… but there’s basically nothing on it.”

If you’ve got blank category pages, or search results pages with no results, they can trigger soft 404s.

Fixes? Either:

Add content/products to the page
Redirect it to a more relevant page

One client had thousands of these due to their search function doubling as navigation. Cleaning that up made a big difference.

9. Crawled - Currently Not Indexed

This is the most frustrating one. Google sees your page, but decides not to index it. Why?

Thin or duplicate content
Lack of authority or backlinks
Just not useful enough compared to other options

If it’s a page you do want indexed, beef up the content. Make it more helpful. Link to it from other areas of your site. Then, submit it again through the URL Inspection Tool.

Heads up: Submitting it multiple times doesn’t help. One submission is plenty—Google will get to it when they get to it.

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How to Find Missing or Duplicated GA4 Tags

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:29:00 GMT

Is your website data looking wonky?

Is your GA4 data just not looking right? Are the numbers looking overinflated? Or maybe you're missing data? One of the first steps we take when ascertaining if our data is correct, is to look for missing or duplicated tags.

We walk through how you can do that manually, as well as some free tools and plugins that can make it much easier for you.

Keyword Research for SEO & PPC Using SEMRush

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 15:55:32 GMT

Keyword research is the cornerstone of creating a successful SEO or PPC program. You need to understand what people are searching for, how competitive those keywords are, and what your competitors are ranking for. We take a look at how to use SEMRush's keyword tools to do just that.

Note: When you purchase through links on our website, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Google Analytics: How Your Traffic Data is Organized & How UTMs can Impact Unassigned

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 14:58:28 GMT

Get more from your Traffic Acquisition reports in GA4

Today, we're diving into Google Analytics to explore how traffic is grouped in the Traffic Acquisition report and how using UTM parameters can significantly influence this data. This guide is intended to clarify these concepts, helping you create more accurate reports and make more informed decisions about your digital marketing strategies.

Understanding Traffic Acquisition in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, one of the most insightful but also complex areas is the Traffic Acquisition report. This report shows where your website traffic comes from, categorized into default channels like Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search, Social, and Referral. These categories help marketers understand the effectiveness of different traffic sources.

Direct Traffic : This includes visitors who enter your website URL directly into their browser or use bookmarks. It often signifies brand strength and returning visitors.
Organic Search : Traffic coming from search engines without any paid element. This is crucial for assessing your SEO efforts.
Paid Search : This captures traffic from paid search advertising, such as Google Ads, indicating the performance of your paid search campaigns.
Social : This channel tracks visitors coming from social media platforms. It's vital for evaluating your social media strategy's impact.
Referral : Visitors who come to your site from another website via a link are categorized here, excluding major search engines and social media sites.

Understanding how Google assigns traffic to these channels involves recognizing the role of session data and the default channel grouping rules. For instance, if a user clicks on a paid search ad but the tracking isn't set up correctly, the visit might be misclassified as direct or organic search.

The Role of UTM Codes

UTM codes (Urchin Tracking Module parameters) are crucial for tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. They are URL parameters that you can attach to a custom URL to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This information gets sent back to Google Analytics, allowing you to see how various campaigns perform in terms of attracting and converting visitors.

Here’s a breakdown of the UTM parameters:

utm_source : Identifies which site sent the traffic (e.g., Google, newsletter)
utm_medium : Defines the medium used to send the traffic (e.g., email, CPC, banner)
utm_campaign : Used to specify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign (e.g., spring_sale)
utm_term : Used for paid search to note the keywords for the ad
utm_content : Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL

Creating Correct UTM Parameters

Creating accurate UTM codes is essential for ensuring that traffic is attributed to the correct source and medium in your reports. Here are some tips for creating effective UTM parameters:

Be consistent : Use lowercase for all parameters to avoid discrepancies (Google Analytics is case-sensitive).
Use clear labels : Make it easy to understand the source and campaign from the UTM parameters. Avoid vague terms so that anyone looking at the data can comprehend where it came from and why.

Practical Application

To implement UTM parameters effectively, you could create a URL for a Facebook ad campaign promoting a summer sale. It might look something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=summer_sale

This URL will then direct users to your site and simultaneously tell Google Analytics that the visitor came from a Facebook CPC ad promoting your summer sale.

Conclusion

Understanding how Google Analytics categorizes traffic and the proper use of UTM codes can drastically improve your ability to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By mastering these tools, you can ensure that your data is not only accurate but actionable. Whether you're running small campaigns or large-scale promotions, the insights gained from well-implemented analytics practices can drive your strategies towards more successful outcomes.

Google Ads + GA4 Dashboard in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:37:35 GMT

Get a better view of your PPC performance with a Looker Studio dashbaord

Managing Google Ads accounts alongside GA4 can be tricky. Data often feels scattered between platforms, with some crucial metrics missing in one and appearing only in another. This blog explores how to streamline your Google Ads and GA4 analysis using Looker Studio, a powerful reporting tool.

Why Looker Studio?

Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) integrates data from various sources, like GA4 and Google Ads, into a single dashboard. This minimizes the hassle of switching between platforms and provides a unified view of performance metrics.

Step 1: Prepare Your Data

Check Google Ads Integration in GA4

Navigate to the “Advertising” tab in GA4 for metrics like ad cost and ROAS. Ensure your accounts are linked under Admin > Product Linking > Google Ads Linking to access these metrics.

Link GA4 Data to Google Ads (Optional)

Linking ensures cross-platform data flow, but Looker Studio offers the best of both worlds in one place.

Identify Key Metrics

For GA4: Active users, sessions, and revenue.
For Google Ads: Clicks, ad cost, ROAS, impressions, and average CPC.

Step 2: Set Up Looker Studio

Create a New Report

Start with a blank report and connect data sources, such as GA4 and Google Ads.

Design the Dashboard

Add metrics like total users, clicks, and revenue.
Use filters to separate data sources (e.g., Google Ads vs. GA4).

Create Visuals

Add simple tables for metrics such as clicks, sessions, transactions, and conversion rates.
Include trend lines for revenue and cost to monitor progress over time.

Add Comparisons

Use period-over-period comparisons to track performance changes. This is especially helpful when analyzing seasonal trends or the impact of recent optimizations.

Step 3: Highlight Key Insights

Track Metrics Over Time

Use charts to visualize clicks vs. cost, cost per click, and impressions over time.
Analyze discrepancies, such as rising costs and declining clicks, to identify inefficiencies.

Focus on Campaign Performance

Build tables to display top-performing keywords and campaigns by cost, clicks, and revenue.
Highlight ad groups for detailed insights into sub-campaign effectiveness.

Monitor Conversion Rates

Calculate conversion rates directly in Looker Studio using calculated fields.

Add Annotations

Integrate annotations from Google Sheets to record key changes, such as budget updates or campaign adjustments. This adds context to performance fluctuations.

Advanced Features to Explore

Conditional Formatting : Highlight underperforming metrics with color coding.
Channel-Specific Reports : Create custom pages for specific channels like display or search.

Ready for More?

Looker Studio’s flexibility allows you to build tailored dashboards that cater to both high-level executive summaries and detailed campaign analyses. If you're unsure how to make the most of GA4, Google Ads, and Looker Studio, feel free to reach out.

Free Consultation
We’re offering a 30-minute free consultation to help you optimize your paid search programs, analytics, or dashboards. Let us help you build a data-driven strategy that works!

ChatGPT Quietly Launches Search

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:05:53 GMT

Now you can search directly from your ChatGPT dashboard.

ChatGPT has quietly launched access to its search engine functionality for paid users. Roy takes a look at where you can find it and how the search results compare to Google.

Report Annotations in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:16:46 GMT

How do you remember what happened when you're looking at your reporting?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has brought many changes, but not all of them are welcome. One of the most noticeable omissions from GA4 is the ability to add annotations directly in the interface—a feature that was incredibly useful in Universal Analytics. Annotations allowed users to document events such as site outages, campaign launches, or tagging errors, providing a quick reference point for understanding traffic anomalies.

While GA4 does offer anomaly detection, it often lacks specific insights into the causes of these anomalies. So, how can we bridge this gap? Enter Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).

The Problem: No Built-In Annotations in GA4

Annotations were a handy way to document key events directly on your analytics timeline. Without this feature in GA4, users are left to search for alternatives, such as:

Third-party tools and Chrome extensions : These can add annotation functionality but often raise concerns about data security, especially when dealing with sensitive client data.
Custom solutions : Using external tools like spreadsheets integrated with analytics reports.

While third-party apps may work, not everyone is comfortable giving them access to their GA4 data. That’s why a custom solution, such as using Google Sheets in conjunction with Looker Studio, is a reliable alternative.

The Solution: Using Google Sheets and Looker Studio

The workaround involves creating a Google Sheet to log annotations and integrating it into Looker Studio dashboards. Here’s how:

1 Set Up a Google Sheet for Annotations :

Create a sheet with columns for key details like:
Date
Event description
Channel impacted
Contributor's name
Populate this sheet with events that might influence your data (e.g., campaign launches, site outages).

2. Integrate the Sheet with Looker Studio :

In Looker Studio, add the Google Sheet as a new data source.
Use the "date" field to link annotations with the corresponding data in your dashboard.
Add a table or chart to display annotations within your reports.

3. Customize and Filter :

Apply filters to view annotations by specific marketing channels or time periods.
Blend annotation data with other metrics for a visual representation of events alongside performance data.

Why This Approach Works

Team Collaboration : A shared Google Sheet allows team members to log events, ensuring everyone has access to the same information.
Flexibility : You can structure the annotation system to suit your needs, including adding fields like "campaign type" or "priority level."
Security : No third-party tools mean your data remains within the Google ecosystem.

Limitations

This method isn’t without its challenges:

It lacks the seamless in-chart hover annotations seen in Universal Analytics.
Adding visual cues (e.g., blended charts with annotations) can be clunky and less intuitive.

However, this workaround still provides a clear reference for analyzing data trends and anomalies.

Looking Ahead

While this solution addresses the annotation gap, we’re always on the lookout for better methods. As the GA4 ecosystem evolves, new tools and updates may enhance annotation capabilities. Until then, using Google Sheets with Looker Studio is a secure and effective alternative.

Need Help with GA4 or Looker Studio?

At Apotheca Marketing, we specialize in marketing analytics, including GA4 implementations and custom Looker Studio dashboards. If you’re looking for help setting up annotations or improving your data reporting, reach out to us for a free 30-minute consultation .

Wix vs. Duda vs. WordPress: What's the Right Website Builder for You?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 17:08:34 GMT

Choosing your website platform is one of the most important decisions you can make for your company.

Choosing the platform and tools that you use to build your website is an extremely important decision. How easy is it to use? Does it have the features you need? How easy is it to maintain, scale, or expand?

We take a look at two platforms you're probably familiar with (Wix and WordPress ) and one that you may not have heard of, but is worth considering ( Duda ).

This isn't a scientific comparison, but just some of the things we've noticed when working with each of these platforms for our clients, as well as our own websites.

1. Wix: Ideal for Beginners and DIYers

Wix is a well-known website builder that has gained a massive user base due to its flexibility and user-friendliness. Here’s why Wix might be right for you:

Ease of Use: Perfect for companies just starting out. Its drag-and-drop interface allows users to create websites without coding knowledge.
Themes and Templates: Offers a vast selection of themes, although not all are highly responsive out of the box, which may require some extra adjustments for mobile optimization.
AI Capabilities: Wix’s AI assistant can help build a website quickly by asking a series of questions and generating a site skeleton.
App Market: Similar to WordPress plugins, Wix has a large app marketplace to enhance your site with forms, menus, and more.
Customization Limitations: While Wix offers great flexibility, making significant customizations can be cumbersome compared to more advanced platforms.

2. Duda: The Agency-Friendly Platform

Duda may not be as well-known as Wix, but it’s a popular choice among agencies. Here’s what sets Duda apart:

Better for Agencies: Duda’s backend is designed for managing multiple client sites, with tools for analytics and client access.
Responsive Design: Duda's themes are more responsive than Wix's, making mobile optimization more manageable.
New 2.0 Editor: The latest update offers more flexibility with layout options and design elements, such as layering and stacking content.
Dynamic Pages: Duda’s CMS capabilities allow for creating multiple pages dynamically using data from spreadsheets.
SEO Features: Built-in tools help manage SEO settings, with new AI features that automatically generate alt tags for images.
Pricing: More expensive than Wix for some features, but its hosting and lack of storage limits provide value for growing businesses.

3. WordPress: The Powerhouse with Plugins

WordPress is not a traditional website builder like Wix or Duda, but rather an open-source content management system. It’s the most popular platform worldwide, and here’s why:

Flexibility and Customization: There are thousands of themes and plugins to extend your site’s functionality.
Blogging Platform: Originally built for blogging, it remains a robust option for content-heavy sites.
Security Risks: WordPress sites are frequently targeted by hackers, and managing plugins can be a hassle, leading to potential compatibility and security issues.
Ongoing Maintenance: Requires regular updates for plugins, themes, and the core platform to avoid vulnerabilities.
Performance: While WordPress sites can be optimized for SEO, the platform’s speed often lags behind Duda and Wix, depending on the hosting and plugins used.

SEO and Performance: Why It Matters

SEO is crucial for website visibility. Platforms like Duda and Wix have built-in tools to optimize SEO settings and improve site speed. Duda’s new editor is designed with Google’s Core Web Vitals in mind, potentially providing an edge over Wix and WordPress in search rankings.

Pricing Comparison

Wix: Prices start at around $36/month for the business plan, with some storage and collaborator limitations.
Duda: Plans begin at $19/month for basic usage, with more advanced options for agencies and white labeling at $149/month.
WordPress: Costs vary widely, starting as low as $5/month for hosting, but can escalate with premium plugins and themes.

Choosing the Right Platform

Your choice will depend on factors like your budget, website management needs, and technical expertise. Here's a quick rundown:

Wix: Best for individuals or small businesses seeking an easy-to-use, DIY platform.
Duda: Ideal for agencies or businesses that manage multiple sites and need a robust, responsive design.
WordPress: Suitable for those who want maximum flexibility and don't mind dealing with frequent maintenance.

Ultimately, consider your long-term needs and the level of support and customization you desire before making a decision.

Funnel Charts for GA4 Conversion Data in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 14:30:21 GMT

Understand the user journey through the conversion funnel

Understanding the purchase journey on your website can help you understand where potential customers are dropping off, so you can better optimize the experience and improve conversion rates. Roy takes a look at how to build conversion funnel charts in Looker Studio using GA4 event data.

While we look at conversion steps that are specific to a retail store (e.g., add to cart, add payment info, etc.) this could also be used for sites that have lead, download, or registration funnels as well.

How to Use Funnel Charts in Looker Studio

If you're familiar with Google Analytics, you may have already seen funnel charts in action. These powerful tools visualize user journeys on your website, helping you identify where users drop off and where optimizations are needed. Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) now includes a funnel chart feature , making it easier than ever to analyze and improve your website's performance.

Let’s explore what funnel charts are, how they work in Looker Studio, and why they are essential for improving conversions.

What Are Funnel Charts?

A funnel chart illustrates the steps users take to complete a desired action on your website. For example:

For a retail site : Steps might include viewing a product, adding it to the cart, and completing the purchase.
For a lead generation site : It might track page visits, form submissions, and conversions.

By visualizing these steps, funnel charts help you spot where users drop off. This insight can guide improvements to your website’s user experience, content, or functionality.

Why Are Funnel Charts Important?

Funnel charts highlight areas where user engagement drops, providing actionable insights such as:

Content Optimization : Are users disengaging because of unclear messaging or poor visuals?
Experience Enhancements : Could the page layout or navigation be simplified?
Technical Fixes : Are bugs or slow load times deterring conversions?

Understanding these pain points empowers you to make targeted improvements, ultimately increasing your conversion rate.

How to Create Funnel Charts in Looker Studio

Looker Studio now makes it easy to build and customize funnel charts. Here's how to get started:

Set Up Your Data :

Prepare a dataset that includes the steps in your funnel and corresponding user counts.
Use dimensions (e.g., "Step Name") and metrics (e.g., "Users at Step") to structure your data.

Create the Funnel Chart :

In Looker Studio, add a new chart to your dashboard.
Select the funnel chart type from the chart options.
Map your dataset to the chart’s dimensions and metrics.

Customize the Chart :

Adjust the colors, labels, and layout to match your branding.
Use filters to focus on specific user segments, such as traffic from organic search or paid ads.

Analyze and Take Action :

Examine where users drop off in the funnel.
Prioritize optimizations for the steps with the highest attrition rates.

Example Use Case

Imagine running an e-commerce website where users often abandon their carts. A funnel chart could reveal that:

A large number of users view products but don’t add them to their cart.
The drop-off occurs on mobile devices more than desktops.

With this insight, you might optimize your product pages for mobile users, improve call-to-action buttons, or streamline the cart process.

Wrapping Up

Funnel charts in Looker Studio are a game-changer for anyone looking to optimize their website’s user journey. By visualizing where users drop off and taking data-driven actions, you can improve the experience, reduce friction, and boost conversions.

Need help setting up Looker Studio dashboards or funnel charts? Our team specializes in analytics and can provide a free consultation to get you started. Let’s optimize your data and turn insights into action!

New GA4 Traffic Report Graph Feature

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 19:46:05 GMT

New graph feature rolling out in GA4.

If you wanted to look at just one or two traffic sources in GA4 , it was pretty much impossible to do with using Explorations or Looker Studio . But now Google is rolling out a new feature that will make comparing traffic sources, or just looking at one source in a graph much, much easier.

This is a super new feature, so if you don't see it yet, you will as Google finishes rolling it out. But, we give you a sneak peek here.

Ecommerce Dashboard in Looker Studio using GA4 Data

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 17:21:06 GMT

How to make your GA4 Ecommerce data more consumable and shareable.

Let's be honest, GA4's reports can be difficult to use for a lot of people. In order to dive in and understand how your business is doing, it takes a lot of clicking around to different reports and using drop downs to see simple metrics like conversion rate, total revenue.

We take a look at how to use Looker Studio to create an easy dashboard that can be used by your executive and marketing teams.

SEO Rankings Dashboard in Looker Studio using GSC Data

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 20:38:01 GMT

Build more insightful dashboards for SEO using Looker Studio & GSC

Google Search Console provides a lot of great data about your keyword clicks, average position, and more. However, it doesn't provide a way to group your rankings so you can understand how many of your keywords are in the top positions, or how those change over time.

We take a look at how you can create a Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) dashboard using Google Search Console keyword data. Get ready to use some data blends, custom filters, and custom metrics.

Unlocking SEO Insights with Looker Studio and Google Search Console

In today's digital landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for improving visibility and driving traffic to websites. However, managing and interpreting the vast amount of data involved in SEO can be overwhelming. This is where tools like Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and Google Search Console (GSC) come into play, providing a powerful combination for creating insightful dashboards that can enhance your SEO strategies.

Integrating Google Search Console with Looker Studio

Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for monitoring and optimizing website performance in Google search. It provides data on search queries, site impressions, clicks, and more, which are essential for SEO analysis. Integrating this data into Looker Studio allows marketers and SEO professionals to visualize complex datasets in an easily digestible format.

Step-by-Step Integration

Access Looker Studio : Start by logging into Looker Studio with your Google account.
Create a New Report : Select ‘Blank Report’ to start fresh, or choose a template if you prefer.
Add Data Sources : Click on ‘Add Data’ and select Google Search Console from the list of Google connectors. Authenticate and grant the necessary permissions.
Choose Your Site : You’ll be prompted to select the property that represents your website in GSC.
Select the Data Type : Choose between site-level or URL-level data, depending on the granularity you need.

Once connected, the GSC data will be available to use in your Looker Studio report, allowing you to create customized visualizations.

Building an SEO Dashboard

A well-designed SEO dashboard can provide insights into your website's performance and highlight opportunities for optimization. Here’s how to leverage Looker Studio to build an effective dashboard:

1. Define Your Objectives

Begin by identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your SEO goals. Common metrics include clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position.

2. Create Visualizations

Looker Studio offers various types of charts and graphs. Use these tools to create visualizations that best represent your data:

Time Series Graphs : Track trends in clicks and impressions over time to understand seasonal impacts or the results of specific campaigns.
Bar Charts : Compare the performance of different landing pages or the effectiveness of various keywords.
Pie Charts : Visualize the distribution of traffic sources or the percentage of clicks from different countries.
Tables : Display detailed data with options to include filters for deeper analysis.

3. Use Advanced Features

Looker Studio allows for advanced functionalities that can enhance your SEO dashboard:

Blended Data : Combine data from different sources (like GSC and Google Analytics) to view comprehensive insights in a single report.
Calculated Fields : Create custom metrics specific to your SEO needs, such as custom CTR calculations or weighted averages.
Interactive Controls : Include date range selectors, drop-down lists, and filter controls to make your dashboard interactive and user-friendly.

Analyzing and Interpreting Data

With your dashboard set up, the next step is to analyze the data to make informed SEO decisions:

Identify Trends : Look for patterns or trends in your data over time. Are certain pages performing better or worse? How do changes in your SEO tactics affect your site's performance?
Monitor Keywords : Keep an eye on how your key keywords perform in terms of impressions, clicks, and position. Identify new keyword opportunities or optimize for those underperforming.
Evaluate Page Performance : Use URL-level data to understand which pages are driving traffic and which ones might need more optimization.
Adjust Strategies Based on Data : Based on your findings, adjust your SEO strategies. This might involve revising your content, enhancing your site structure, or improving on-page SEO elements like meta tags and descriptions.

Conclusion

Building an insightful SEO dashboard using Looker Studio and Google Search Console provides a visual representation of your website’s search data, making it easier to understand and optimize. By effectively integrating these tools, you can enhance your decision-making process, monitor SEO performance in real-time, and ultimately drive better results from your digital marketing efforts.

Google Analytics Launches Tag Diagnostic Tool

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 16:46:19 GMT

Inaccurate data in GA4 is unfortunately a common problem. In fact, it’s so prevalent that we typically audit our clients’ implementations before we launch SEO, PPC, or social media campaigns. Some of the common issues that we find range from missing tags, incorrect event names, missing third party tags, and more.

Tag Status

But now Google has made the auditing process a little bit easier with its recently launched tag diagnostic tool. The tag diagnostic tool will rate your current implementation, and point out possible issues. The ratings go from Excellent, Good, Needs Attention, or Urgent.

Excellent: No issues detected! Your Google tag is in top shape and fully optimized. Enjoy the peace of mind, but remember to check in regularly—status can change if new issues arise.

Good: Everything looks good! No issues detected, but there may be at least one recommendation for you to boost your tag quality.

Needs Attention: An issue has been found that needs your attention. It’s not critical, but you should address it to keep things running smoothly.

Urgent: An urgent issue has been detected with your Google tag that requires immediate action. Fix it right away to ensure accurate measurement.

If Google detects issues, it will show you a diagnostic that outlines the issues. It will also show what pages these issues exist on.

Diagnostics and Fixes

If you do have implementation or setup issues, Google will break them out for you so you can repair them.

Additional Domains Detected for Configuration: Google found one or more domains that aren't specified in your Google tag settings. To resolve this, make sure to list all the domains using the Google tag.

Config Command Out of Order: Your gtag event commands are arriving before your gtag config commands, causing potential hiccups in event processing. Ensure the config command is placed before any event commands on each page to keep things running smoothly.

Missing Conversion Linker: You have a Floodlight or Google Ads tag, but no conversion linker tag in your Google Tag Manager container. To fix this, simply add a conversion linker tag to your container.

Some of Your Pages Are Not Tagged: Certain pages on your website are missing tags, which can affect your measurement performance. Head over to the Tag Coverage Summary to locate and tag those pages. We’re seeing this issue pop up on sites that DO have tags on all of their pages. The most likely culprit is that the site is loading slowly when Google indexes it, making it think that the page is missing a tag. Obviously this points to a larger problem than just tag issues.

Other diagnostics, largely related to consent settings, are being rolled out gradually. These include things like consent is missing for EEA users, pages are missing consent, you need to update your consent settings, etc.

How to Access the Tag Diagnostic Tool

The tag diagnostic tool is available in the Google Tag sections of GA4, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads.

To find it in GA4:

Go to you Admin
Click on Data Streams
Click on your Data Stream
Scroll down to Configure Tag Settings and click on it
You’ll see your Tag Quality Rating and a link to review any issues

In Google Ads:

Go to Tools
Click on Data Manager
Click Manage next to your Google Tag connection
Clicks on “View issues” if there are tag problems

Conclusion

Google Tag Manager’s Tag Assistant is still the best way to check specific events and tags on your site, but this new feature provides a quick and easy way to make sure your data is coming through correctly. We recommend that you monitor this new tag diagnostic tool on a regular basis so you can be more confident in the quality of your website’s data.

Google Analytics Users Defined: Active Users vs. New Users vs. Returning Users

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 16:29:17 GMT

Two of the main traffic metrics that businesses look at for their website performance are sessions and users. Sessions are the number of times people come to your site during a given period, while users are the “unique” visitors to your site, who may or may not have multiple sessions.

Unfortunately, as with many things related to GA4 , the definition of “user” isn’t as straightforward as one would think, which can cause some confusion in your reporting. So let’s clear this up.

What is a “user” in GA4?

At its core, a user is a unique visitor to your website during a given time period. In GA4 this metric is called “total users”. However, just because you see “user” in a GA4 report, doesn’t mean that you can assume that GA4 is reporting on total users, like you could in the previous version of Google Analytics , Universal Analytics. In fact, the total users metric in GA4 is a bit more difficult to find than you would expect.

Active Users in GA4

In the default dashboards in GA4, when you see “Users”, that metric is actually “Active Users”. Totally not confusing, right? The way you can test this is to hover over the column name in your reports, and Google will super conveniently provide you with the definition there. You know, rather than calling the column something radical like “Active Users”.

By definition, an active user is one who has “engaged” with your site or app. That means that the user has met one or more of the following conditions:

Engagement Time : The session lasts 10 seconds or longer.
Conversion Event : The user has triggered one or more conversion events.
Page or Screen Views : The session includes two or more page views or screen views.

So in other words, Google is really focusing only on visitors to your site who didn’t “bounce” and immediately leave upon landing. That makes sense, but can be confusing if you’re using a metric like “total users” in your Looker Studio dashboards, or are comparing your data to other sources (including historical data from UA).

Total Users

As we mentioned above, “total users” includes all visitors to your site during a given time period, who logged any event, such as page view, first visit, etc. Since the “Users” metric in GA4’s dashboards is actually “active users”, finding total users can be a bit more challenging.

You can find total users by going to Engagement and then Events, where you will see a sum of total users, as well as total users by event. You can also report on Total Users in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboards.

Unlike in UA, you can’t assume that Total Users is the same as New Users plus Returning Users, which we’ll discuss below.

New Users

New Users are defined in GA4 as unique users to the site who have logged the first_open (measured on iOS apps) or first_visit (measured on websites and Android apps) event in the date range that you’ve selected. In other words, as far as GA4 can see, this user hasn’t been to your site before because a pre-existing cookie isn’t on their browser.

You can see these and other events that GA4 is tracking by going to Reports, then Engagement, and then clicking on Events. You can also go to Admin, then click on Events or Key Events under the “Data display” section. There you will event counts rather than the user data under the standard reports section.

New User metrics can be seen in the main dashboards in GA4, but you can also add this metric to other reports, such as your Acquisition reports such as Traffic Acquisition. There is also a report in the Acquisition section called User Acquisition Cohorts that focuses on New Users.

One of the shortcomings of this metric is that If a visitor has interacted with your site but is coming to your site from a different browser, computer, or device, they may appear as “new” even though they aren’t in reality.

Keep in mind that not all new users are active users, since some may “bounce” from your site. Because of this “new users” in your reports will often exceed the number of active users, but it will never be greater than total users.

Returning Users

As the name implies, Returning Users are unique users who have visited your site before. GA4 defines them as “The number of unique users who initiated at least one previous session, regardless of whether or not the previous session was an engaged session , in the specified date range.” In other words, while GA4 doesn’t show a lot of love for inactive users, it does count that inactive visit towards your status as a returning user.

You can find information about returning users in GA4’s standard reports by going to Reports, then Life cycle, then Retention.

You can also add a returning user column by customizing your report. For example, if you go to Life cycle, then Acquisition, then Traffic Acquisition, you can click on the pencil icon in the upper right (if you have the correct permissions).

After clicking on the pencil icon, click on Metrics, and then Add metric. Search for “returning users” and select it. You can now click “Apply” and then save the report.

Creating Audiences

Ok, so knowing how many people are visiting your site is great and all, but how can you use this in your marketing? You can create audiences that you can use to target your ads!

If someone has come to your site, it’s a great opportunity to retarget them if they haven’t converted. By creating an audience of returning visitors, or visitors who haven’t converted, you can create remarketing ads in Google Ads to promote specific products, services, promotions, or just remind them that they should come back and convert.

We have an in-depth video that shows you how to do this in GA4 here: https://www.apothecamarketing.com/creating-audiences-in-google-analytics-4

What Days Are Your Best for Marketing? Looker Studio & GA4 Dashboard

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:50:32 GMT

Easy Looker Studio dashboard for reporting by day of week performance.

Understanding when your customers and prospects are visiting your site, or clicking through from your ads or social media posts can help you plan your efforts and better assign your budget. We take a look at how you can create an easy dashboard in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) that identifies your best days of the week by marketing channel using GA4 data.

Need help with GA4, Looker Studio, or marketing in general? How about improving your website? Schedule a FREE 30 minute consultation with Roy and our team:

https://www.apothecamarketing.com/contact#bookacall

SEO for Small Businesses & What To Expect From Your Agency

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 17:47:23 GMT

Interview about SEO for small businesses and more!

Join us for our discussion with Thomas MacDonald, Southwest Digital Marketing, about SEO for small businesses, recent changes in SEO, and what to expect from your agency when it comes to SEO, PPC, and more.

Need help with SEO or content marketing? How about improving your website? Schedule a free 30 minute consultation with Roy and our team.

Transcript

In a recent discussion between Roy Bielewicz and Thomas MacDonald, key insights into the evolving world of SEO and digital marketing were shared. The conversation covered everything from fundamental SEO practices to the impact of recent Google algorithm changes. Here’s a summary of the key points discussed, perfect for those looking to optimize their online presence.

Roy: So Roy here from Apotheca. We're going to be talking to Thomas. Thomas, what's the name of your company again?

Thomas: Southwest Digital Marketing.

Roy: And Thomas, you guys specialize in a lot of website design and that type of stuff, right?

Thomas: That's correct. And we're moving more and more into marketing services. Basic marketing services.

Changes in SEO

Roy: Great. So, Thomas and I are getting together today to talk a little bit about SEO, some of the changes going on, and some of the best practices for developing your site, launching, replatforming, that kind of thing. So we're going to talk about a little bit of SEO, a little bit about marketing in general, and the ins and outs of agency life.

Thomas, I'm glad you could join me. A lot of people know that there have been some pretty major changes in SEO starting back in March. Google has fundamentally changed how their search results show, impacting a lot of sites that were doing really well, like blogging, recipes, and coupons.

Reddit seems to be doing really well, Forbes and some other main sites are doing really well, and a lot of other sites are being pushed down. That doesn't mean SEO is dead, though. There are still a lot of best practices that we can talk about in more detail.

Thomas: Yeah. So you guys offer a range of services. Is your bread and butter SEO? Is that what you focus on?

Roy: It's one of the big ones. We do both paid search as well as organic search. We do a lot of analytics along with that— analytics implementation , helping people get more from their analytics. We work with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and the Adobe suite of products, mainly for our enterprise clients. Especially since they switched to GA4, we've been helping a lot of clients navigate those waters. GA4 is a completely different platform with a lot of changes in data definitions and such. So, navigating the analytics waters and helping clients with that is tied in with our other services. You can't operate an SEO program or a paid search program or a social media program without good data.

The Importance of SEO for Businesses

Thomas: I guess you'll have to treat me like a golden retriever when we're talking about this stuff. I've been in the web development game for a while, but I like to hear the fundamentals again and again. My primary clients right now are bookkeepers. So, why would SEO be a good investment of marketing funds?

Roy: Well, essentially it's free, but not really free. You do have to make an investment in your ongoing SEO program, developing content, and making sure your site is optimized for SEO.

SEO has really expanded. It used to be about how you show up on Google, but it's more than that now. It's optimizing your site, content, and listings to show up in search. That could be on YouTube, optimizing your YouTube videos and content, or optimizing your directory listings for Yelp, Google Business Profiles, etc.

Even if you don't have a great website, you can still optimize for search engines to make sure you show up. It's about being active on those platforms and getting your brand out there. It's important to show up because people are actively looking for your service on search, unlike passive advertising on social media where you're hoping someone interested in your business sees your ads. In search, they're actively looking for you, much further down the funnel, ready to purchase your services.

The Scope of SEO and Marketing Services

Thomas: There's so much to talk about, isn't there? Let's talk about search in general, which is exciting to me because I enjoy the creative process. Search across different channels and the ways people are searching for things is interesting. It's fun. It's the fun part of marketing—figuring out where there's an opportunity to access folks looking for my clients in different ways.

Roy: Yeah, it's more than just search engines now. People's behavior changes over time. YouTube, for instance, is the second largest search engine. TikTok is increasingly a search engine for younger generations. They might not even go to Google; they just look on TikTok.

It's concerning because who's moderating that content? It's not necessarily the best, most accurate information. The future of search is probably going to be more dependent on AI. There's talk about ChatGPT having its own search engine, and Google is responding with their Gemini program. So, it's more than just Google now.

Choosing the Right Search Engine

Thomas: How do you choose which search engine to target for your clients?

Roy: It depends on their audience, content, and products. For retail companies, it's a combination. We do a lot of work with e-commerce companies. Google Shopping has become predominant, so making sure you show up there is crucial. People also do a lot of shopping on TikTok and Instagram. It depends on budget and products. For younger demographics, you might focus more on TikTok, but you still want to appear on Google as much as possible.

Investment in Search vs. Paid Ads

Thomas: How does the investment in search compare to running paid ads for those types of clients?

Roy: It's not necessarily about the investment. There's synergy between paid and organic ads. If you're appearing in both paid and organic search, you're more likely to get clicks in your organic listing. Paid search offers quick results, but organic search is a long game. It may take six months to a year to see results. Both running at the same time are synergistic with each other.

Strategies for Smaller Businesses

Thomas: What is the difference in the way a mid-sized business should look at SEO versus a smaller business just starting out?

Roy: The approach is similar, but it depends on budget and what they can do themselves. For smaller companies, we can provide recommendations and best practices for content development if they can't afford full services.

Larger companies with bigger budgets and internal teams have more complex programs. But best practices remain the same—develop content, ensure sitemaps work correctly, add alt tags to images, etc.

Thomas: Is it possible for mom-and-pop shops to compete with larger companies in SEO?

Roy: It's increasingly difficult, especially with recent Google changes. Nationally, it's tough to compete with Amazon or Walmart. But for local searches like "bookkeeper near me," you can compete by developing local content and optimizing Google Business Profiles.

Content Creation and AI Tools

Thomas: Content creation seems like a big opportunity. Do you see much use of AI tools for content creation?

Roy: It's possible but not recommended to rely solely on AI. It helps as a baseline but requires human editing for tone and accuracy. Google's clear that they don't want content that's just a reiteration of what's already out there. Unique content tailored to your experience is key.

The Role of Analytics

Thomas: Talk to me about the role of analytics in a team environment.

Roy: Data is exceptionally important. Ensuring clients have the right tools to leverage data is crucial. We recommend tools like BigQuery for extensive data analysis. Building dashboards in Looker Studio helps consolidate data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Search Console , providing a comprehensive overview to improve both paid and organic search efforts.

Managing Multiple Locations

Thomas: Is managing online presence for multiple locations complex?

Roy: Yes, it can be a nightmare to manage reputation and ensure correct information across multiple locations. Responding to every review, positive or negative, is crucial. For companies with multiple locations, it’s often best to have an agency help manage this to maintain professionalism and consistency.

Conclusion

Thomas: What kind of customers and clients is Apotheca looking for right now?

Roy: We work with a variety of clients, from small businesses to large enterprises. We’ve been moving more into e-commerce as it's less impacted by SEO changes. We also help clients who have had bad experiences with other agencies, offering updated best practices and strategies to adapt to changes in Google's algorithms.

Thomas: If someone wants to reach out to you for services, how can they do that?

Roy: The easiest way is through our website. They can book a free 30 minute consultation .

Three New GA4 Features: Compare, Export, Explore

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 29 May 2024 20:57:10 GMT

New features that will help speed up data analysis in GA4

Google continues to add some new features to GA4 (Google Analytics 4) . We look at the new compare feature, the export to Google Sheets (which was available previously in Google Universal Analytics), and the export to Explore feature. Each of these should save you time when digging into your online data.

The New Compare Feature

One of the most notable additions in GA4 is the new Compare feature. This allows users to compare different segments of traffic within the same report.

How to Use the Compare Feature

Accessing the Feature: Navigate to a standard report, such as the traffic acquisition report, in your analytics account. You'll notice a new icon resembling a yin-yang symbol, representing the compare feature.
Selecting Comparisons: Click on this icon to see default comparisons like users, organic traffic, and paid traffic. You can select options such as mobile and desktop traffic, and click "Apply" to see these metrics displayed in the chart and table below.
Maintaining Comparisons: These comparisons persist throughout your session but will need to be reconfigured if you log out or close your browser.
Custom Comparisons: If the default comparisons do not meet your needs, you can create custom comparisons in the admin section, provided you have the necessary access levels.

Practical Applications

Creating custom comparisons allows you to analyze specific segments, such as traffic from certain landing pages or particular audience groups. This can help inform your marketing strategies and optimize your campaigns.

Sharing Reports to Google Sheets

A long-awaited feature in GA4 is the ability to share reports directly to Google Sheets . Previously, users had to download reports and manually upload them to Google Drive.

Exporting Reports to Google Sheets

Accessing the Export Feature: In any report, click on the share icon and select "Export to Google Sheets".
Benefits: This feature simplifies the process of manipulating and analyzing data in Google Sheets, eliminating the need for multiple steps.

Exploring Reports with the New Export to Explorer Feature

GA4 has introduced a convenient way to transfer reports directly to the Explore section, allowing for more in-depth analysis.

How to Use the Export to Explorer Feature

Using the Icon: In any report, click on the new icon next to the compare feature to export the report to Explore.
Benefits: This pre-builds the report in Explore, enabling users to manipulate metrics and dimensions without starting from scratch.

Limitations and Alternatives

While Explore is useful for detailed analysis, it has limitations in visual representation. For more sophisticated visualizations, consider using Looker Studio or Tableau.

Conclusion

These new features in GA4 are designed to make your analytics processes smoother and more efficient. From comparing different traffic segments to exporting data seamlessly to Google Sheets and Explore, these updates are valuable tools for any analytics professional.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out to us at Apotheker. We offer a 30-minute free consultation to discuss your needs and how we can help you enhance your reporting and analytics capabilities.

Content Group Reporting using Looker Studio & GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 20 May 2024 20:20:28 GMT

How to Analyze Your Website Content with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio

A common question we get from our clients is, "How do you tell what content is doing well on your website?" Specifically, if you’re putting a lot of effort into writing blogs, are people really using it? Let’s dive into how to report on that using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Looker Studio.

Step 1: Using GA4 to Identify Content Performance

In your GA4 reporting , navigate to the "Engagement" section and then to "Pages and screens." These are the pages on your website that are getting clicks and visits. By default, the content grouping might be blank because you need to define your content groupings for Google to recognize them.

To set this up:

Google Tag Manager Setup:Create a new variable in Google Tag Manager (GTM).
Use Regex (Regular Expression) to define content groupings. For example, if your blog URLs contain "blogs," you can set this as a keyword in GTM to categorize all such pages under "Blogs."
Add a default value for "Other" to capture any URLs that don’t fit into predefined categories.
Linking GTM with GA4:Go to your main configuration tag in GA4 and add the content variable you just created.
Preview and debug to ensure it’s firing correctly when navigating through your website.

Step 2: Building a Looker Studio Dashboard

Once your content groupings are set in GA4, you can create a Looker Studio dashboard to visualize this data.

Create a New Dashboard: Start with a blank dashboard and connect it to your GA4 data.
Add a table to display page titles and relevant metrics like views, users, and bounce rate.
Apply a filter to only include pages containing "blogs" in the URL.
Adding Metrics: Use scorecards to display key metrics such as total views, users, sessions, and engagement rate.
Apply the same "blogs" filter to each scorecard for consistency.
SEO and Traffic Sources: Add tables to show rankings, average position, impressions, and clicks for your blog pages.
Create a table to analyze traffic sources by adding the source/medium dimension and applying the "blogs" filter.

Optimizing Your Dashboard

While the initial setup might not look attractive, the focus is on functionality. Over time, you can refine and style your dashboard to make it more visually appealing. Utilize Looker Studio’s features like date dropdowns and custom controls to enhance usability.

Conclusion

Setting up content grouping in GA4 and creating a Looker Studio dashboard allows you to analyze your website's blog performance effectively. If your URLs are not structured to easily identify content types, consider adding data layers via GTM for more accurate reporting.

If you have any questions or need help with your analytics, marketing, or creating dashboards, feel free to reach out. We offer a 30-minute free consultation to discuss your needs. Have a great day, and happy analyzing!

Need Assistance?

For personalized help with your analytics and marketing strategies, schedule a free 30-minute consultation . Leave your questions in the comments, and we’ll get back to you soon.

Duda Website Builder Tutorial

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 10 May 2024 14:53:35 GMT

Looking for an easy-to-use website builder that's not WordPress?

Duda is an easy to use website builder and CMS that doesn't require coding knowledge, or tons of plugins like WordPress . It's also a hosted platform, so you don't have to worry about hosting, SSL, CDNs, or software updates. There is a broad selection of free themes to get you started, but you can also quickly create your own unique look for your responsive website or landing pages. We take a look at how to get started with Duda.

Intro to Shopify! Start Selling Online

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 07 May 2024 14:26:58 GMT

Launching your own ecommerce website has never been easier.

Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce platforms available on the market for a reason. It's full featured, easy to use, and offers numerous built in tools that makes launching and managing your ecommerce site easier than ever. But it can be intimidating if you haven't used it before. We take a look at Shopify, some of its basic features, and setup. If you're looking to sell your products online (maybe escaping Etsy), then you can start here!

�� Resources & Links:

* Shopify Free Trial: https://bit.ly/4brp4bd

Free SEO Keyword Research Using Google Ads

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 02 May 2024 17:34:29 GMT

The keyword planner tool is an easy, free way to identify top keywords

Keyword research is fundamental to SEO. Understanding what people are searching for and the phrases they're using helps you build content that attracts people. Optimizing for keywords that get very little searches won't drive much traffic. To boost your business, understanding keyword traffic and competitiveness is essential.

The Power of Keyword Research Tools

Many tools in the market can aid in keyword research. SEMrush is a notable example. Imagine researching keywords for a site like "Soothed Snuggles," which sells weighted plush animals. Using SEMrush, you might enter "stuffed animal" and discover it has higher search volume than "plush animal." Such insights are crucial for targeting the right keywords.

SEMrush and Ahrefs: Worth the Investment?

While tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs provide valuable data, they come with a price tag. SEMrush costs around $130 a month, offering limited data if you're not subscribed. Ahrefs has similar pricing, providing five projects with six months of history. For small businesses or agencies, these costs can be prohibitive. Additionally, these tools offer estimates based on proprietary data, which might sometimes be inaccurate.

Leveraging Google for Free Keyword Research

If expensive tools aren't an option, Google provides a solution. By signing up for a free Google Ads account, you can access their keyword tools without running a campaign. Enter a credit card, but you don't have to use it unless you start advertising. Google Ads offers a treasure trove of data directly from the source of search behavior.

Exploring Google Ads Keyword Tools

With a Google Ads account, navigate to the tools section to discover new keywords. For instance, entering "stuffed animal" yields a breakdown of related keywords, their average monthly searches, and competition. Adjust settings to refine keywords, exclude irrelevant terms, and focus on your target market, such as the United States.

Advantages of Google's Keyword Data

Google's data is more accurate than estimates from paid tools. It’s based on actual search data rather than proprietary algorithms. However, it focuses on organic search volumes without providing competitive insights like SEMrush or Ahrefs. For competitive research, these tools offer detailed analysis, albeit with estimated data.

Free Keyword Research Alternatives

For a budget-friendly approach, Google Ads provides ample keyword research capabilities. Although free accounts might display broad ranges, running minimal ad campaigns can unlock more precise data. This method is significantly cheaper than paying for premium tools, while offering accurate insights into search trends and keyword volumes.

Conclusion: Optimize Your SEO Strategy

Utilizing free tools like Google Ads for keyword research can save you money and provide more accurate data. If budget allows, supplementing with SEMrush or Ahrefs can enhance your competitive research. Combining these resources enables comprehensive keyword analysis to boost your SEO strategy effectively.

Engage with Us

What tools do you use for keyword research? Share your thoughts in the comments. Stay tuned for our upcoming video on other free or inexpensive tools, including Chrome plugins and websites. For personalized assistance with your paid or organic search programs, contact us to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. Let's optimize your digital strategy together!

Contact Information:

For more details or to schedule a consultation, reach out through the comments or the description below. We’re here to help with your advertising, analytics, and SEO needs. Visit us again for more insightful videos, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Easy QR Code Tracking in Google Analytics

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:11:19 GMT

Are you tracking your QR codes?

QR codes are ubiquitous these days, appearing on menus, billboards, signs, and business cards. They're a fantastic tool for directing people to a specific landing page, website, or business review on Google. However, many companies overlook the importance of tracking these QR codes to gather valuable data. In this blog post, we'll walk you through the process of tracking QR codes using Google Analytics.

Why Track QR Codes?

Tracking QR codes allows you to see how effective your marketing campaigns are. You can determine how many people are scanning your codes and what actions they take once they reach your site. This data can help you refine your marketing strategies and improve your ROI.

Step 1: Create a UTM Tracking Code

To start, you need to add a UTM tracking code to your QR code. UTM codes are used in Google Analytics to track various parameters of your marketing campaigns. Here’s how to do it:

Go to the Google Campaign URL Builder: This tool helps you create a URL with UTM parameters.
Enter Your Website URL: Type in the URL of the landing page you want to direct users to.
Fill in the Campaign Details:

Campaign Source: This could be "QR Code" or the specific medium where the code will appear (e.g., newsletter, billboard).
Campaign Medium: Since this is not a digital ad, you might choose "print" if it’s on a billboard or sign.
Campaign Name: Name your campaign something identifiable, like "Billboard_I95".

Example URL: http://www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=qrcode&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=Billboard_I95

Step 2: Generate Your QR Code

Once you have your URL with the UTM parameters, you can generate your QR code.

Choose a QR Code Generator: There are several free QR code generators available, such as Bitly and Adobe Express.
Paste the URL: Copy the URL with the UTM parameters into the QR code generator.
Customize Your QR Code: Depending on the generator, you might have options to customize the look of your QR code (e.g., colors, shapes).
Download the QR Code: Save your QR code in a suitable format. For most uses, PNG is fine, but for large prints like billboards, you might need an SVG file.

Step 3: Track the QR Code in Google Analytics

After deploying your QR code in the wild, you can track its performance in Google Analytics.

Go to Google Analytics: Log in to your Google Analytics account.
Navigate to Reports: Go to the "Acquisition" section and select "Traffic Acquisition".
View Campaign Data: Look for your campaign name (e.g., "Billboard_I95") under the campaign section. This will show you data on how many users have visited your site through the QR code and what actions they took.

Benefits of Tracking QR Codes

By tracking your QR codes, you can gather data on:

User Engagement: See how many users scan your QR code.
User Behavior: Understand what users do after they visit your site—do they make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, etc.?
Campaign Effectiveness: Determine which marketing efforts are driving the most traffic and conversions.

Conclusion

Tracking QR codes is a simple yet powerful way to gather data on your marketing campaigns. By using UTM codes and Google Analytics, you can gain insights into user behavior and improve your marketing strategies.

If you need assistance with tracking, analytics, or any other marketing efforts, feel free to reach out to us at Path to Marketing. We offer a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your needs. Visit our website to sign up and get in touch!

�� Resources & Links:

* Bitly QR Code Generator: https://bitly.com

* Adobe Express QR Code: https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/qr-code-generator

* Google UTM Builder: https://ga-dev-tools.google/campaign-url-builder/

Intro To GA4's Explore: Get More From Your Data

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 22:52:23 GMT

Have questions that standard reports just don't answer?

GA4's standard reports don't lend themselves to answering questions. And customizing them is a bit of a pain. That's where GA4 's Explorations comes in. It will help you take a look at custom user segments, and data points, that can help you answer questions about your customers, as well as create audiences for Google Ads . It's not a great data visualization tool, but it can help you answer questions about your marketing program performance, and user behavior.

Introduction to GA4's Explorer

Hey there! If you spend some time with Google Analytics four, you've probably discovered that it's not the best visual storyteller, nor is it super easy to dive into metrics if you have certain questions. So part of GA4 a lot of people don't realize and don't use enough is the explore products. So we're going to take a look at Explorer, which can help you to answer questions and build simple reports.

Limitations of Explorer

Now I will give a caveat. Explorer is not a data visualization tool. And there are some definite limitations. We'll talk about that a little bit as we go through it. But for instance, you only have 14 months of information if you've set it to the maximum that Google lets you set it to. Otherwise, the default is two months.

So if you're trying to do year-over-year reporting, this isn't going to be the tool for you, but it will help you answer some questions. It'll help you look at your data in a little bit different way, other than what you get as the standard out-of-the-box reports in GA4. So let's go ahead and take a look at Explorer and we'll walk through it.

Navigating the Explorer Dashboard

All right. So you can see we have the explorer dashboard here in analytics you'd start out with your homepage area. And then Explorer is right here. And you click on that to explorer. We are looking at Google's default data, that it comes with its merchant store. So it's simple data. It is not real.

Types of Reports Available

In Explorer, you have out of the box a couple of different options. So you have the Freeform report which will take a look at funnel exploration which is exactly what you'd think it was. It's the funnels that you can build it to see how people are going for instance, to your shopping cart. It is path exploration, which helps to understand where people are going once they come to your site.

So if they land on a landing page, what are they doing after that? How are they behaving on the site? And then there's the segment overlap, which is super cool as well. And then the cohort exploration cohort, tells you, you know, from the first time on, the user visits, where are they dropping off? Are they doing, how long are they coming back to the site, that kind of thing.

User Lifetime Value

User lifetime. This is, you know, lifetime value. If you're an e-commerce site. So how much value does that person have during a given period of time in which they are spending? This is great information. If you're running marketing programs and you know you're spending X amount to acquire a new customer, well, how much is that customer spending over their lifetime?

Advanced Uses of Explorer

Their typical lifetime. And is it worth it losing money to acquire them or are they coming back and doing something else? There's also the template gallery. You're, that you can see use cases. So acquisition, key events, user behavior, predictive metrics, which is kind of interesting. And then also you can break it down into industries like e-commerce, gaming, etc.

Customizing Reports

These will have certain built-in bottom models for you for the template. So we're going to take a look at a couple of different ones here. Let's start with free form. This is just your standard information. It already is going to put in some stuff for you. So, let's walk through what you're seeing here so you can see that here's your date range.

You can choose that to be whatever you want to be. Yep. Basically going back only for once. But you can go back, 90 days, 12 months, 28 days, whatever to build a custom date. We'll stick with the 28. You can build out segments, and we'll dive into these a little bit more to these segments can be anything from about the user.

So where they are, their gender, their behavior, that kind of thing, but also their marketing channels where they come from. And I find that I tend to use the marketing channels more to see how, you know, not just somebody's gender or something like that, but somebody coming from paid search. What are they doing? Somebody's coming from organic.

What are they doing? How are they behaving on the site? How are they performing? As far as returning sales and that kind of stuff, that to me is very interesting and we tend to use that a lot. But you get also the information about their device devices that they're using, whether it's mobile, that kind of stuff. So these segments you can keep in here or you can create your own, we'll show you how to do that.

And the second dimensions are those, business needs that you want to report on. So again, it could be, you know, where they're coming from from a, marketing platform or where they're coming from, from a city, you geographically, you can learn more about your customer. There. And then the metrics are the data points that you want to know about these dimensions.

Conclusion

So users of accounts, transactions, revenue, that kind of stuff, those would all be your metrics. So once you have these selected you can either drag them over so you can see they have city here. You can also put in country that will change this table. And you can remove them at any point. You can also add, you know, select how many rows you want to show.

And you can also then change the columns if you want and then the metrics so they have active users. Maybe you want to add something different there. So I'm gonna remove these. They didn't start from scratch.

We Have Bad News About Your Analytics

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 21:33:01 GMT

Unfortunately, your analytics is wrong...

You’re not going to want to hear this… But your web analytics data is probably wrong.

Believe me, your boss and/or clients won’t want to hear that either. But unfortunately it’s true.

Back in the Day

Back in the ancient days of web marketing, even all the way back to the 20th century, one of the things that marketers loved about the web was that you could get very accurate information about your users, what they did on your site, where the came from, even down to personal information about who they were and their behavior.

That meant that you could get very real information about the profitability of your marketing campaigns, something that just wasn’t available in traditional marketing, like direct mail, TV, radio, and the like.

Companies would try to assign value to those campaigns through a variety of tactics, like custom phone numbers, coupon codes, catalog reference numbers, and a variety of other less-than-effective means.

But the webs? You could get definitive numbers about exactly how many people clicked on a specific campaign link and then converted. No more wasted ad dollars, right?

Well, many executives and clients think that that’s still the case, and trying to tell them that it’s not can cause some issues.

Privacy and Blockers

So why isn’t web analytics the same as it was back in the late 90s and early 2000s? Because consumers caught on to the fact that there was a creepy amount of data being recorded about their behavior. In some cases a marketer could track specific behavior, purchases, clicks, etc., to an identifiable person. And well, that’s creepy. And nobody really likes that.

So people started using things like ad blockers, and private browsers like Brave, Tor, and DuckDuckGo, which block third party cookies and tracking tools.

Then, the European Union jumped on the bandwagon and implemented GDPR, which effectively bans third party cookies and mandates that websites alert visitors to tracking cookies and allow them to opt out (among other things).

So combine ad blockers that block analytics tools, and browsers that also block analytics tools, and suddenly you have a sizable audience of folks using your website that you don’t know anything about.

But, it can’t be that many people, right? Right?

Unfortunately, for marketers at least, it is a lot of people.

An Estimated 7.7% of iPhone users browse using private mode, which blocks GA4 and other analytics tools.
iPhone has 58% of the market in the U.S.
37% of users internationally use some form of ad blocking. Though all of those don’t necessarily block Google by default. Many do however.
63% of 18-34 use ad blockers.
In the United States, about 26% of internet users had installed ad blocking software, plugins, or browsers in 2020
A study in the UK showed that 70% of UK web users actively block cookies. That means that typical analytics tools will be significantly impacted. Note: these rates do tend to be higher in European countries.

So is the end of analytics and web marketing as we know it? If we can’t depend on the numbers we’re seeing then what are we supposed to do?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was theoretically designed to address the changing landscape of digital privacy, including the rise in the use of ad blockers and the movement away from third-party cookies. This includes:

Event-Based Model: GA4 uses an event-based data model instead of relying solely on session-based data like Universal Analytics. This allows for a more flexible and granular approach to tracking user interactions, which can be beneficial in environments where cookies are blocked or limited.

Machine Learning and Modeling: GA4 heavily incorporates machine learning to fill in the gaps where data might be missing due to ad blockers or cookie restrictions. It uses advanced algorithms to model user behavior, helping to predict trends and user actions even when direct tracking is not possible.

First-Party Cookies: GA4 prioritizes the use of first-party cookies, which are generally more privacy-compliant and less likely to be blocked compared to third-party cookies. First-party cookies are set by the domain the user is visiting, making them more acceptable under privacy regulations and less likely to be targeted by ad blockers.

User Consent and Privacy Controls: GA4 is built with privacy in mind, offering more robust consent and data collection settings that align with global privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This approach ensures that data is collected in a more privacy-compliant manner, reducing the impact of ad blockers that are often used in response to privacy concerns.

Cross-Platform Tracking: GA4's improved cross-platform tracking capabilities allow for a better understanding of user behavior across different devices and platforms. This is particularly important in a landscape where users frequently switch devices, and where traditional cookie-based tracking might be less effective.

Enhanced Integration with Google's Advertising Platforms: GA4 is designed to work seamlessly with Google's advertising platforms. This integration helps in understanding the effectiveness of advertising campaigns even in environments where traditional tracking methods are less effective.

Conclusion

It's important to note that while GA4 is adapting to these changes, no analytics platform can guarantee 100% accuracy in the face of widespread use of ad blockers and the decline of third-party cookies. However, these steps represent significant advancements in maintaining the effectiveness of digital analytics in a privacy-focused world.

We’ve always encouraged clients to not view web analytics data as something it’s not: accounting data. Instead, look at it directionally. What trends are you seeing? What behaviors? If, based on your data sampling, a specific ad platform always performs better, then you can be relatively certain that that’s where you should invest your budget. Even if the numbers aren’t “exact” they will be indicative of the “truth”.

Save Time with Custom SEO Reports in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 20:55:53 GMT

Custom GA4 reports for SEO can save you time.

Getting to just organic search data in GA4 can be a bit of a pain. We take a look at how you can create reusable custom SEO reports in GA4 without having to use GA4's Explore, or delving into Looker Studio. We also add them to their own library, and show you how to publish them for easy access every time you're in GA4.

�� Resources & Links:

* Build an SEO Dashboard in Looker Studio: https://youtu.be/IQygDjnwI7Q

* SEO Analysis with ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/hPLdYIxjdoc

* Email GA4 Reports: https://youtu.be/SYO0s1EWHG4

Using 301 Redirects for Seamless Site Migration

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 19:50:55 GMT

Moving your site doesn't have to kill your organic search. But it can.

When I started my first business years ago, I was like many business owners, I looked for easy, cost effective tools and platforms to get my website up and running quickly. That may mean using an inexpensive website host, or an easy to use content management system like Wix or Squarespace. But eventually you start to outgrow these platforms. Maybe you’re transitioning to selling more products and need something that will support an expanding ecommerce business. Maybe your business website needs better monitoring and approval processes so various business units can add or edit content. Or, maybe you’re rebranding, and moving the site to a new URL.

Whatever the reason, migrating your website poses significant challenges, especially if you want to make sure you don’t lose your hard-earned organic search rankings . We’ll look at how you can change your site, without destroying your organic rankings and traffic (and maybe improve them along the way).

Understanding URL Changes

When migrating to a new content management system (CMS) or platform, one of the most significant changes you'll encounter involves your website's URL structure. Different CMSs have unique ways of structuring URLs, which can significantly impact your site's SEO. For example, while one CMS might use category-based URLs, another might prefer keyword-rich or shorter URLs. Some may allow you to use “slugs” in your URL, while others just use the name of your blog or product.

Understanding these differences is crucial for planning your migration strategy. Changing a URL without proper redirection can lead to broken links, 404 errors (page not found), and lost SEO value, not to mention a lot of frustrated potential customers or users. Therefore, mapping out how your current URLs will translate to the new structure is a critical first step.

Implementing 301 Redirects

301 redirects are the cornerstone of a successful website migration. They are permanent redirects from one URL to another that pass the majority of the link equity (or "Google juice" as we like to call it) from the old URL to the new one. Basically a 301 redirect tells Google that your content has permanently moved to the new URL (compared to a 302 redirect, which is a temporary change), and that they should send people there in the future.

Implementing 301 redirects correctly ensures that users and search engines are directed to the correct pages, thus preserving at least some of your SEO rankings . It's important to map out all existing URLs and their corresponding new URLs. This process might be tedious for large websites, but it's essential for maintaining the integrity of your SEO efforts.

Rebranding Considerations

Rebranding adds another layer of complexity to website migration. If your migration involves a change in your domain name, you'll need to update URLs to reflect this change. This scenario requires a careful approach to ensure that Google and other search engines understand that your new URLs correspond to the old ones.

Consistent use of 301 redirects is critical here, as it helps maintain your existing search rankings and visibility. The domain change also can cause some challenges with your new CMS, since some don’t accept another domain as part of their 301 system. That means you may need to do the redirect at the server, or domain-level.

Redirect Strategies

If your CMS is a roadblock to setting up 301s, there are several ways to implement redirects, including server-level and registrar-level redirects. Server-level redirects are typically managed via your web hosting service and can be set up using .htaccess files (for Apache servers) or web.config files (for Windows servers).

Registrar-level redirects, on the other hand, are managed through your domain registrar and are generally used for domain-wide redirects. The choice between these methods depends on the complexity of your website and specific requirements of your migration.

Updating Business Directories

An often overlooked aspect of website migration is updating your listings in business directories. It's crucial to update these listings with your new URLs and brand name (if applicable) to maintain consistency across the web. This step helps in preserving your online reputation and ensures that external links to your site remain valid.

Technical Implementation

The technical implementation of 301 redirects varies depending on the platform you're using. For WordPress users, several plugins can automate the process. For more custom solutions, manual coding might be required. Regardless of the method, it's essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the technical requirements to avoid common pitfalls, such as redirect loops or incorrect redirect mappings.

These generally occur when a number of 301 redirects have been set up over time for the same destination URL. This can lead to Google seeing multiple “hops” between redirects, which will impact its perception of the site experience. These multiple redirects can also create a slow page load experience for your site users. We recommend doing regular housekeeping and review of your redirects to make sure that they’re not creating loops or multiple redirects.

Monitoring Post-Migration

Post-migration monitoring is critical in identifying any issues that might arise. Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can be instrumental in tracking 404 errors and ensuring that your new pages are being indexed correctly. Regular monitoring in the weeks following the migration helps in quickly addressing any problems and minimizing their impact on your SEO.

SEO Impact

While website migration can initially impact your SEO, proper planning and execution can mitigate these effects. In some cases, a well-executed migration can even improve your SEO performance by streamlining your site structure and improving user experience. Patience is key; it can take time for search engines to re-index your site and for your SEO rankings to stabilize. Google also recommends that you keep your 301 redirects in place for at least a year so that there's time for the changes to take effect in Google’s SERPs. This will also help to ensure that links coming from other sites are reaching the correct page and not generating a 404 error for your visitors.

Conclusion

Website migration, though potentially complex, is often an essential step in the growth and evolution of your online presence. By understanding the intricacies of URL changes, implementing effective redirect strategies, and diligently monitoring post-migration, you can ensure a smooth(ish) transition. Remember, a successful migration is not just about preserving SEO but also about setting the stage for improved performance and enhanced user experience.

GA4 Beginner's Tutorial

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 17:25:45 GMT

Unlock reporting and insights using GA4

If you're like a lot of our clients, you only reluctantly started using GA4 after the Google Universal Analytics sunset last year. Because it's an entirely new platform, with a different interface, different reports, and even different metrics, you may not know where to look for the reports that you need. We take a quick walkthrough of GA4 to review the available reports , the admin, and the Explore tool.

The Hidden Secret to SEO Success: Boost Your Page Speed Today

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 15:49:23 GMT

User experience, which includes page speed, is an important signal for SEO.

Page load speeds are an important factor in how your site ranks in organic search, and how well your site visitors convert. We take a look at where you can measure and monitor your site page speeds, how this impacts your SEO, and what you can do to improve it.

Remember, if Google is bothering to show you the data (and telling you it's important), then you should probably listen!

How to Set Up GA4 Conversion Rate in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:52:36 GMT

Calculated metrics in Looker Studio are your GA4 conversion friend.

If you're using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track your website's performance, you may want to use Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) to create reports and visualize your data.

Looker Studio is a handy, free data visualization tool that allows you to connect to your GA4 data (as well as Google Ads, and other data sources) and create customized reports and dashboards. One important metric that you may want to track, which isn't readily available in GA4 is your website's conversion rate.

We'll walk you through the steps to set up conversion rates for GA4 in Data Studio.

Update: Conversion Rate is now available as a metric in Looker Studio, as either User Conversion Rate or Session Conversion Rate. However, this pre-calculated metric includes all events that have been identified as a "conversion" in GA4. For many businesses, especially retail, you'll want to continue to calculate specific conversion events as your "conversion rate". In other words, if a user registration, email signup, etc., is a "conversion" in GA4, you will probably just want to include "Transactions" since that is the typical definition of conversion rate.

1) Connect GA4 to Looker Studio

The first step to setting up conversion rates in Looker Studio is to connect your GA4 property to your dashboard. To do this, click on "Create" in the top left corner of your Looker Studio account, and select "Data Source" from the dropdown menu. From there, select "Google Analytics" as your data source. You'll then be prompted to select the appropriate GA4 property.

Once you connect Google Analytics , select the property for your report. Note: You can have multiple properties and data sources in a single dashboard. This is particularly useful if you're comparing metrics between websites, or pulling in data from other sources such as Google Search Console or Google Ads.

2) Create a Report

Once you've connected your GA4 property to Data Studio, create a new report or open an existing one .

When creating a new report, it will be populated with a default table. You can just click on it and delete if if desired.

3) Select Your Card Type

Under the "Add a chart" tab, select the format that you would like. In this case, we'll be using a scorecard to show a single specific metric, conversion rate.

4) Create Your Metrics

In the metrics section, you'll notice that conversion rate is not available as a predefined metric. Transactions and sessions, are available, however. That means that we need to create a calculated metrics.

Since conversion rate isn't available, you'll need to click on "Create Field" and create a calculated metric.

In this case, we'll want to select "Transactions" (which are orders), and divide that by "Sessions" (you can also use "Users" if you prefer to use that when calculating conversion rate).

Be sure to format your new calculated metric correctly. In the "Type" box, select "Numeric" and then choose "Percent". Then click "Apply".

5) Name Your Metric

Now that you've created your calculated metric for conversion rate, you'll want to name it so that your card has the correct label. You do that by entering a new name in the "Name" field of your calculated metric.

6) Voilà !

Now you have a card that shows your website's conversion rate using GA4 data! You can now create other calculated metrics using the same process.

10 Google Business Listing Mistakes That Impact Local SEO

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 19:55:07 GMT

Tips for improving your local SEO results.

If your business depends on local customers or clients, your Google Business Profile (formerly Google Business Listing) is incredibly important. Not only does it provide important information about your business, such as hours of operation, your address, links to your website, scheduling, photos, and a list of services, it also enables customers to review your business. This information then informs the all important “map pack”, those listings on a map that you typically see when someone searches for “[your business service] near me”.

Companies often make several common mistakes when managing their Google Business Profile, which can negatively impact how they appear in the map pack, and whether or not their vital business information appears in a search. Let’s take a look at some of the most common.

1. Incomplete or Inaccurate Information

Neglecting to fully complete or accurately maintain your Google Business Profile can have significant negative consequences for your business, particularly in terms of attracting and retaining customers, as well as impacting your local search ranking.

Providing incomplete or inaccurate details, such as wrong addresses, outdated phone numbers, or incorrect business hours, can lead to a frustrating experience for potential customers. If customers cannot reach you or find your location due to incorrect information, it can lead to lost sales opportunities and damage your reputation.

Google prioritizes the accuracy and completeness of business information in its ranking algorithms. Incomplete profiles or inaccurate details can negatively impact your search ranking, making it harder for potential customers to find your business online.

Some service businesses might consider using services like UPS mailboxes to establish a local presence, particularly if their business is home-based. However, it's important to note that Google’s guidelines require that your business location be a place where you engage with customers. Using a mailbox service as your business address can lead to your listing being suspended since it does not represent a physical location where you meet with customers.

To ensure the effectiveness of your Google Business Profile:

Regularly update your profile with accurate information, including address, contact details, business hours, and description.
Use a Real Physical Location: Ensure that your listed address represents a physical location where you either serve customers (for SABs) or have a storefront. If you have a home-based business you can still list your address, but choose to keep it hidden in your listing results.

2. Inconsistency Across Listings

Having inconsistent information across different online platforms and directories (such as varying addresses, company name, or phone numbers) can negatively impact your local SEO .

Search engines like Google aim to provide the most accurate information to users. When they encounter varying information about a business, their trust in the accuracy of that data diminishes. This mistrust can result in lower search rankings, as search engines are less likely to prominently feature a business with inconsistent information.

To avoid these pitfalls, it's essential to audit and monitor your online presence regularly. Ensure that all your business information is up-to-date and consistent across all platforms, including your website, social media profiles, and online directories. Utilize tools that help manage local listings and check for inconsistencies periodically. Remember, in the world of local SEO, accuracy and consistency are key to ensuring your business is easily and correctly found by both search engines and potential customers.

3. Ignoring Customer Reviews

Failing to respond to customer reviews, especially negative ones, can damage your reputation. Engaging with reviews, particularly negative ones, demonstrates that you are willing to address concerns and resolve issues. This builds trust with both the reviewer and potential customers reading the reviews. Ignoring them, on the other hand, can erode this trust.

And, importantly, Google uses review engagement as a factor when determining search rankings. Actively responding to reviews can help to improve your local SEO, making your business more visible in search results.

To leverage reviews effectively, it’s important to:

Monitor Reviews Regularly: Use tools to keep track of when your business receives a review so you can respond in a timely manner.
Respond Professionally: Whether the review is positive or negative, respond professionally. Thank customers for positive reviews and address any concerns raised in negative reviews diplomatically.
Take Action: If a review highlights a legitimate issue, take action to resolve it and inform the reviewer of any changes made.

4 Not Using Photos or Using Low-Quality Images

Remember that photos often provide the first impression of your business to potential customers. High-quality images can make your listing more attractive and inviting, while poor-quality photos may lead to a negative first impression, deterring potential customers.

Another important consideration is that visual content tends to engage users more effectively than text alone, so high-quality photos can capture the attention of potential customers, encouraging them to explore your listing further and ultimately, make a decision to visit your business or website.

Photos also provide an opportunity to showcase your products, services, the atmosphere of your physical location, and your team. This can help customers understand what to expect, making them more likely to choose your business over competitors.

And of course, unique photos (not stock) can also help to contribute to improving your rankings in local search results.

To make the most out of your photos:

Invest in Professional Photography: If possible, hire a professional photographer to ensure high-quality results.
Keep Photos Updated: Regularly update your photos to reflect any changes in your business, such as new products or renovations.
Use a Variety: Include a mix of photos showcasing different aspects of your business, including the exterior and interior, products, staff, and even happy customers (with their permission).
Optimize for Web: Ensure that images are optimized for the web to load quickly without compromising quality.

5 Neglecting to Post Updates or Offers

Not using the posting feature on Google Business to share updates, offers, or events can result in missed opportunities to engage with your audience and keep them informed.

Staying actively engaged with your audience is key to maintaining relevance and visibility. One often-overlooked tool in this regard is the posting feature on Google Business Profile. By neglecting to use this feature to share updates, offers, news, or events, businesses miss out on a valuable opportunity to connect with their audience and keep them informed about the latest happenings.

And keep in mind that Google's algorithms favor active and updated listings. By regularly posting updates or offers, you signal to Google that your business is active and relevant, which can positively affect your visibility in local search results.

To maximize the potential of Google Posts:

Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule: Consistency is key. Develop a schedule for posting updates to keep your audience engaged and informed.
Highlight Special Promotions and Offers: Use posts to highlight sales, special offers, or unique products and services.
Share News and Events: Keep your customers informed about any events, new product launches, or important news related to your business.
Monitor and Respond to Engagement: Pay attention to how users interact with your posts and respond to comments to foster a community feel.
Analyze Post Performance: Use Google’s insights to understand how your posts are performing and adjust your strategy accordingly.

6. Overlooking Categories and Attributes

This one is pretty straight forward, but not correctly categorizing your business or ignoring the attributes section can make your business less discoverable for specific searches relevant to your offerings.

7. Keyword Stuffing in Business Name

Adding unnecessary keywords to your business name in the listing, which is against Google’s guidelines, can lead to penalties or suspension of your listing.

The practice of keyword stuffing, specifically in the context of a Google Business Profile, refers to the inclusion of excessive or irrelevant keywords in the business name. This strategy, often employed with the intent of improving search visibility, is not only ineffective but also violates Google's guidelines and can lead to serious consequences.

Google's guidelines clearly state that the business name on your profile should reflect your business's real-world name, as used on your storefront, website, and as known to customers. Adding extra keywords that are not part of your official business name is considered misleading and manipulative.

Google actively monitors for such practices and may penalize businesses that violate these guidelines. Penalties can range from a decrease in search ranking to the suspension of the listing altogether. A suspended listing can be detrimental to your online presence and visibility, effectively cutting off a major channel of online customer acquisition.

To optimize your Google Business Profile effectively:

Use Your Actual Business Name: Ensure that the name on your profile matches the name you use in the real world.
Focus on Other SEO Best Practices: Instead of keyword stuffing, focus on other aspects of SEO, such as optimizing your business description, posting regular updates, and collecting genuine customer reviews.
Keep Information Accurate and Relevant: Make sure all information in your profile is accurate, relevant, and provides value to potential customers.

8. Buying/Incentivising Positive Reviews

It’s okay to ask for reviews, and you should be! But it’s against Google’s policies to ask for, pay for, or otherwise incentivize someone to give you positive reviews. And it’s not just Google’s policy, it is actually against the law to pay for reviews. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made it clear that paying for, incentivizing, or pressuring customers to leave positive reviews can land you legal trouble.

This includes things like:

Promising a discount in return for a five star rating
Monetary compensation for a five star rating
Discounts or money to change a rating to a higher one

9. Review Gating

Similar to buying reviews, review gating is when a company only seeks positive reviews, thus skewing the review results. In other words, only seeking reviews from people who you think will leave a positive review is review gating. And as with buying reviews, review gating is also against FTC policies as well as Google’s.

Oh, and this includes getting your friends, family, and employees to leave only positive reviews. That too is a no-no that can lead to your listing being removed.

10. Not Asking for Reviews

Just because you can pay for, or only ask for positive reviews, doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for reviews in general. Asking for honest reviews should be part of your everyday process. That can include follow up emails or messaging to customers asking for a review, signage and QR codes at your business that lead to your Google review link, cards and handouts that encourage reviews, etc.

It’s absolutely ok to ask for a review, you just can’t ask only people you think will give you positive reviews, or incentivizing the review.

Summary

Avoiding these mistakes can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your Google Business listing, improving your visibility in local searches and ultimately attracting more customers.

Compare Data in Google Search Console for Free

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 20:55:57 GMT

Google Search Console Tutorial

Google Search Console has a wealth of data that will help you to measure and optimize your SEO program . But one thing that's not easy is comparing month over month, or year over year clicks, impressions, or position. Historically you either have to download those individual date ranges, then work some Excel magic to do a comparison. Or, you need to plop down some decent money to use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs.

But we've stumbled upon an easier, and much cheaper tool to help you do these data comparisons.

* Chrome Plugin: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-search-console-dat/fkpkhpigkldfnnimijaaldpafcibaepk

* Thijs van Hal: https://thijsvanhal.nl/

Time Saving Looker Studio Hacks

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:53:32 GMT

Save time when creating or editing a Looker Studio dashboard with these tips.

Creating or tweaking a Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboard can be time consuming. So we've pulled together some of our most used hacks/tips to help speed up the process.

Maximize Productivity with GA4: How-To Schedule Email Report Exports

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 19:57:49 GMT

You had it in UA, now it's available in GA4

We take a look at Google Analytics 4 's new feature for scheduling report exports directly to email. This instructional video walks you through the straightforward process of automating report delivery, saving you time and maintaining consistent access to your latest data insights. Ideal for professionals who need to keep up with analytics efficiently, or need to share data with a wider audience.

Missing Historic Data in GA4? Learn How to Compare Universal Analytics Data in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 20:25:55 GMT

Need year-over-year reporting in GA4 but don't have the data?

If your company is like many Google Analytics users, you didn't make the migration to GA4 until the July 1 deadline was approaching. Because of that, your GA4 reports now don't have year-over-year data. And of course your executive team wants to see that data compared to current results, right?

We take a look at how you can import historic Universal Analytics, and your current GA4 data, into Looker Studio and do a year-over-year comparison. However, we do caution that UA data is not exactly the same at GA4 data. Take a look at our video below to see how they differ:

GA4 vs. Google Universal Analytics: https://youtu.be/zDyzPFCvwEQ

Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:43:59 GMT

Get to know this critical tool for improving your organic search results.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a vital tool for website owners and digital marketers aiming to enhance their site's visibility and search performance. This blog post will walk you through the key functionalities of GSC, showcasing how it integrates with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and why it's essential for effective SEO management.

Introduction to Google Search Console

Google Search Console offers a platform to monitor and optimize your website's presence in Google search results. By linking GSC with GA4, you can access crucial keyword data and performance metrics that are otherwise unavailable in GA4 alone. This integration allows you to bypass the need to navigate multiple platforms, streamlining your data analysis process.

Setting Up Google Search Console

Setting up GSC is straightforward:

Visit the Google Search Console website.
Verify your ownership of the website through your domain registrar (like GoDaddy) or through admin access in Google Analytics.
Once set up, the console provides an overview of your site’s performance, indexing status, and user experience metrics.

Key Features and Benefits

1. Site Performance Tracking

Performance Metrics: View clicks, impressions, and average positions for your pages. This data helps identify trends and optimize your site's search presence.
URL Inspection: Submit new pages for indexing and monitor existing pages. This feature is crucial for ensuring that Google recognizes updates to your site.

2. Index Management

Sitemaps Submission: Submit sitemaps to aid Google in efficiently discovering and indexing your pages.
Index Coverage: Understand why certain pages are indexed while others aren’t, helping you address and resolve issues that might be affecting your site’s visibility.

3. User Experience and Site Health

Core Web Vitals: Monitor how your site performs in terms of loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Improve these to boost your rankings.
Mobile Usability: Ensure that your site is optimized for mobile devices, enhancing the user experience and complying with Google’s mobile-first indexing policies.

4. Enhanced SEO Tools

Page Experience Insights: Gain insights into how user experience affects your site’s performance in search results.
Links Analysis: Review internal and external links to understand how they affect your site’s SEO. Despite recent changes, high-quality links remain a significant ranking factor.

Why You Need Google Search Console

If you're not using GSC, you're likely missing out on detailed keyword and indexing reports essential for refining your SEO strategy. GSC not only helps in tracking site performance but also provides tools to directly influence how Google indexes your content, which is crucial for new or smaller websites struggling with SEO.

Conclusion

Google Search Console is an indispensable tool for anyone serious about optimizing their website's search performance. Its comprehensive set of features allows for detailed analysis and proactive management of a site’s SEO health. By integrating GSC with GA4, webmasters can streamline their monitoring processes and focus on strategies that directly enhance visibility and user engagement.

For those new to GSC or looking for more detailed guidance, staying tuned for future updates and tutorials can be incredibly beneficial. Dive into Google Search Console today and start harnessing the full potential of your SEO efforts.

Build an SEO Dashboard in Looker Studio (Data Studio)

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 19:23:18 GMT

A simple SEO dashboard using Looker Studio can free you from poking around in GA4.

Pulling together your SEO reporting in GA4 can be a pain. Numerous clicks, less than spectacular data visualization can be a headache. We take a look at how to build a dynamic dashboard in Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), Google's free data visualization tool, using data from GA4 and Google Search Console.

Maximizing PPC : The Critical Role of Landing Page Experience in PPC

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 20:49:06 GMT

Landing page experience can make or break your PPC campaigns.

Did you know that Google measures the “landing page experience” (LPE) of your PPC ad landing pages , and that that measurement can dramatically impact your ad campaign cost and performance?

Landing page experience is a critical factor in determining the Quality Score of your keywords in Google Ads . Quality Score is a metric used by Google to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and ads, and it plays a significant role in determining the cost-per-click (CPC) you pay and the position of your ad on the search results page.

In other words, the worse your landing page experience, the lower your quality score . That means that each click will cost you more compared to your competitors, and can lead to lower placement of your ads.

While Landing Page Experience isn't the only factor contributing to your Quality Score, it’s often the one factor that agencies and marketers have less control over.

What Determines Landing Page Experience?

In Google Ads, the "Landing Page Experience" metric provides an estimate of how relevant and useful your website's landing page will be to users who click on your ad. While Google isn’t always transparent about how much a particular factor weighs in it’s considerations, the following can impact your overall LPE rating:

Page Relevance: The content on your landing page should be directly relevant to the keywords you're targeting and the ad copy you're using. Users should find what they expect to see when they click on your ad.

Page Loading Time: Slow page load times can negatively impact user experience. Ensure your landing pages load quickly, especially on mobile devices.

Mobile-friendliness: With the increasing number of users accessing sites via mobile, your landing page should be optimized for mobile devices. This includes responsive design, easy navigation, and quick load times on mobile.

Ease of Navigation: Your landing page should be easy to navigate. Users should be able to easily find the information they're looking for and take the desired action, whether that's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, etc.

Transparent Information: Ensure that your website is clear about the nature of your business, the products or services you offer, and any associated costs. Avoid tactics that might be considered deceptive.

Original Content: Your landing page should offer unique and valuable content to users. Avoid using generic templates with little to no original content.

Safe Browsing: Ensure that your landing page doesn't contain malicious software or engage in phishing activities. This can lead to a poor landing page experience and can even get your ads disapproved.

Trustworthiness: Your landing page should make users feel secure, especially if you're asking for personal information. This includes having a secure (HTTPS) website and clear privacy policies.

Minimal Distractions: Avoid having too many pop-ups, interstitials, or other distracting elements that can disrupt the user's experience on your landing page.

Clear Calls to Action (CTAs): Users should clearly understand what action they need to take on your landing page. Whether it's filling out a form, making a purchase, or downloading a guide, your CTAs should be clear and direct.

Where Can You Find Landing Page Experience Metrics?

One way to find the "Landing Page Experience" metric in the main reports in Google Ads, is to do the following:

Sign In to Your Google Ads Account: Navigate to Google Ads and sign in to your account.
Select the Relevant Campaign: Once you're in the dashboard, choose the campaign you're interested in, or stay at the account level to view data for all campaigns.
Go to Keywords Tab: Click on the "Keywords" tab in the left-hand navigation. This will show you a list of all keywords you're bidding on.
Columns Configuration: Above the table of keywords, you'll see a button labeled "Columns." Click on this to modify the columns you see in the table. Select "Modify columns" from the dropdown.
Add Landing Page Experience: In the "Modify columns" window, navigate to the "Quality Score" section. Here, you'll find a metric labeled "Landing page experience." Check the box next to it to add it to your table view. Click the "Apply" button to save your changes.
View the Metric: Now, you should see a new column in your keywords table labeled "Landing page experience." This column will show a status for each keyword, such as "Above average," "Average," or "Below average."

These metrics are also available in the Reports tab of Google Ads. Similar to the standard reporting, you’ll want to:

Click on “Reports” at the top of Google Ads: Click on Reports, and select “Reports” from the drop down menu. Yes, kind of repetitive, right?
Choose “Basic Ad” in the predefined reports.
In the right hand column, select “Quality score”
Then select “Landing page exp” by clicking on the plus sign next to it.
You can then save this report, add it to your dashboard, or export it.

Why Landing Page Experience Is Important

The "Landing Pages" report in Google Ads provides you with invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your landing pages from Google’s perspective. A landing page's experience isn't just a metric; it's a reflection of the user's journey after they've clicked on your ad, and it encapsulates their immediate post-click experience.

When a page is rated as having a "Below average" landing page experience, it signifies potential problems that can range from slow loading times and irrelevant content to unoptimized mobile design. Such issues can deter potential customers, leading not only to wasted ad spend but also missed opportunities for conversions. And don't forget, since LPE is part of Google 's quality score calculation, a lower ranking will drive up your per click cost, and impact your ad visibility.

However, this report isn't just about identifying problems. It also offers the opportunity to:

Prioritize Optimizations: By sorting landing pages based on their experience scores, advertisers can prioritize which pages need immediate attention and which ones can be scheduled for later review.

Improve Return on Investment (ROI): A better landing page experience often translates to higher conversion rates. Improving the experience can thus lead to a better ROI on advertising spend.

Enhance Brand Perception: First impressions matter. A user's experience on your landing page can shape their perception of your entire brand. By ensuring a positive experience, you can foster greater trust and loyalty.

Boost Organic Performance: Many factors that improve landing page experience, such as mobile optimization and page load speed, also benefit organic search performance. Thus, optimizing for ads can have a ripple effect on organic traffic.

Reduce Bounce Rate: Users are less likely to immediately leave a well-designed, relevant landing page. By improving the landing page experience, advertisers can reduce bounce rates and increase the chances of users taking the desired action.

In essence, the "Landing Pages" report isn't just a diagnostic tool—it's a roadmap. It guides advertisers on where to focus their efforts to improve the user experience, maximize the effectiveness of their ad spend, and ultimately, achieve better business outcomes. Regularly reviewing and acting on this report is pivotal for anyone serious about making the most of their Google Ads campaigns.

Why Every Marketer Needs to Know About Google Tag Manager

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:16:54 GMT

Take control of your marketing tools and analytics with Google Tag Manager.

If you've been dipping your toes into marketing analytics, you've likely come across the term " Google Tag Manager " (or GTM for short), or tag management in general. Maybe you've even wondered if it's something you should be familiar with or if it's something that sounds a bit too techy to be in your comfort zone. Fear not! We’re going to help you not only understand what GTM is, but you'll also discover why it should become an essential tool in your toolkit.

So, What Exactly is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tool from Google that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website or mobile app without having to modify the code of your site directly. This frees you from having to add these code snippets to your site’s CMS or HTML, or remove them when you’re no longer using a particular tool. It also enables you to bypass your IT or development team if you don’t have direct access or the technical know-how to make direct changes to your site.

While the most common use for GTM is deploying and customizing your analytics tags for tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), it can also be used to add “pixels” or javascript code for other tracking needs. This includes Facebook pixel tracking, Google Ads conversion tags, as well as third party tools that can be deployed on the site with a snippet of javascript code. It’s also commonly used for deploying testing tools, chat widgets, email tools, survey tools, pop-up widgets, and more.

So basically, you and your marketing team are able to have much more freedom to quickly, and accurately add and trigger the marketing tracking codes and tools you need to your website or apps without having to depend on your IT team, and the inherent coding delays, site builds, etc., that can drag on for months.

Essential for Google Analytics 4

In the good ‘ol days before the forced migration to GA4, you could deploy Google Universal Analytics on many content management platforms by just adding the account ID to the system. However, GA4 often takes considerably more effort to deploy correctly, particularly for ecommerce sites. And because it’s relatively new, many CMSs have been slow to adapt, or to offer full implementations. This is due in part to how GA4 is deployed, and the level of customization that it takes to set up custom measurement events.

The good news is that these events, and the triggers that deploy them, can be set up in GTM, and typically don’t necessitate adding more code to your site. The one caveat is that ecommerce sites need to have a data layer that pulls data from the site (e.g., sales amounts, product information, coupon codes, tax information, etc.) in order to pass that dynamic data to GA4.

What this means is that it’s relatively easy to create an event for something that the marketing team wants to track, without involving developers or IT. Want to know how many people are clicking on a specific button ? You can add that tag and trigger within minutes.

Want to know how many people click on a chat widget? How about downloading a PDF? Fill out your contact form? All of those important events can be added and tracked just using GTM.

Other Benefits of GTM

Simplicity and Speed

As we’ve mentioned above, gone are the days when you'd need to wait for a developer to manually add, remove, or modify tags on your website. With GTM, you can deploy various tags effortlessly and quickly without needing to touch the site's CMS or code. This means faster implementation of your marketing strategies and faster access to data.

Flexibility

Whether it's Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other third-party tags, GTM supports them all. You can manage multiple tags from one centralized dashboard.

Safety First

GTM comes with a built-in debugging feature. This allows you to test and ensure your tags are working correctly before they go live. Plus, with its version control feature, you can easily roll back to previous configurations if needed.

Ease of Collaboration

Working with a team? GTM allows multiple users to access the account, making collaboration smooth and efficient. You can also set up different permission levels to maintain control over who can publish changes. There is also a notation system, where each time someone publishes changes, they can explain what those changes are, what they’re for, and who did it.

Getting Started with Google Tag Manager

Starting with GTM is straightforward. Sign up for a free account ( tagmanager.google.com ), set up your container (which will hold all your tags), and you're good to go. Once your container is ready, you'll be provided with a unique code. This code needs to be added to your website, and voila! You can now manage all your tags from GTM's dashboard.

Okay, it’s not that easy to set up GA4 and some of the other customization options that are available in GTM. However, we’re adding more how-to videos on our YouTube channel that walk through this process, so be sure to check it out! (And you know, like and subscribe!)

In Conclusion

For marketers, the digital landscape can sometimes feel like a complex maze of tools, technical issues, and hurdles from developers and IT teams. However, tools like Google Tag Manager act can simplify the processes and help you deploy your measurement and marketing tools more quickly. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, integrating GTM into your workflow can make a world of difference.

Remember, it's not about working harder; it's about working smarter. And GTM is one smart tool you definitely want in your arsenal.

Introduction to Google Tag Manager

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:11:11 GMT

GTM can help you avoid website development delays, and much more!

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website or mobile app without having to modify the code. This makes it easier to integrate services like Google Analytics , Facebook Pixel, and other third-party APIs. GTM simplifies the process of adding or updating tags, offering a centralized platform to manage them all, thereby speeding up website performance and facilitating collaboration among marketing and IT teams.

How To Show Conversion Rate in Your GA4 Reports

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 20:15:12 GMT

Google has finally added conversion rate to GA4. But you have to know where to look.

For unknown reasons, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) did not have conversion rate metrics available in its standard reporting. Apparently Google has seen the error of its ways, and has finally added conversion rate. But in typical Google fashion, you have to manually add it to your reports. We take a quick look at how to do this.

How To Import GA4 Data to Google Sheets

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 18:17:35 GMT

Skip the clunky GA4 export process and import directly into Google Sheets.

Google recently released a new Google Sheets plugin, that lets you bypass the clunky GA4 reporting and exporting process. Now you can import your analytics data directly into Google Sheets. We take a look at how to set it up, and talk about some of the issues of which you should be aware.

�� Resources & Links:

GA4 Reports Builder: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/ga4_reports_builder_for_google_analytics/589269949355

How to Report on Conversion Rate in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 21:10:35 GMT

Conversion rate reporting is finally available in GA4.

So, you’ve migrated from Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and you’re exploring the reports. But no matter where you look, there’s one key metric missing. It can’t be missing, you say, I mean it was on the top of the reporting in Universal! It must be user error! Where on earth is the conversion rate?!?

You’re not going crazy. With the initial release, conversion rate was not available in GA4 . And yes, most marketers and analytics couldn’t believe this oversight on Google’s part. But, the powers-that-be at Google have heard your pleas, and have finally made conversion rate available in GA4. We’ll show you how to get to it below.

What’s Conversion Rate, Anyway?

In simple terms, conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that take a desired action. For e-commerce sites, this typically means making a purchase. But for other websites, a 'conversion' could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading an e-book, or even just filling out a contact form.

One of the nice features in GA4 is that it allows you to define what event is and isn’t a conversion on your site, based on your unique business needs. So while the typical conversion event may be a sale, or a lead form submission, maybe for your business it’s when someone watches a video, or clicks on a button. You get to determine what those conversions are. You just didn’t get to report on them easily, until recently.

Finally, There It Is!

“Wait? If GA4 now has conversion rate reporting, why am I not seeing it?”, you may ask. Great question! You’re not seeing it because in its great wisdom, Google hasn’t made it a default metric in your basic reports. You’ll have to add it manually to those reports where you want to see it…if it’s available. Let’s walk through how to do this.

Add Conversion Rate To Your Reports

In your GA4 interface, navigate to a report such as “Traffic acquisition”. Then:

Click on the pencil icon on the top right of the report. This will open your customization box (see below).
Click on "Metrics" in the report data.
Click on "Add metric"
Search for "conversion" in the dropdown, and select "Session conversion rate" .

5) Move the new metric to the order that you want it to appear in your report.

6) Click the "Save" button at the top of your report.

7) Click the "Back" link to return to your report.

8) Bask in your accomplishment and luxuriate in your new found conversion reporting.

SEO Analysis with ChatGPT: No Excel or SQL Needed!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:35:10 GMT

No need for Excel formulas, pivot tables, or SQL statements. Improve your SEO reporting and analysis.

If you're like us, we view Excel or Google Sheets as a necessary evil when it comes to analyzing and reporting on SEO and other marketing channel data. However, with ChatGPT's new Code Interpreter function, you can get in-depth analysis, charts, and much more in minutes.

Creating Audiences in Google Analytics 4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 19:58:02 GMT

Creating audiences in GA4 is a great way to get a more granular view of visitors coming to your site. You can specify a number of criteria: from what content they looked at, how they got to the site, demographics, whether they converted or not, and more. These audiences can then also be used for remarketing in Google Ads, allowing you to target just the right customers so you can increase conversions and reduce costs.

How we're using Adobe's new Generative Fill for Multifamily marketing.

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 14:26:12 GMT

Image AI has gone from "cool toy" to serious time saver with Adobe's new tools.

Tired of cars and random folks photobombing your exterior property shots? Adobe's got your back with their super cool, new generative fill AI tool (available in Photoshop Beta). It's like having a magic wand to wipe out those annoying bits from your exterior pictures.

In a snap, you can make cars and people vanish, and the smart AI will fill in the gaps with stuff that actually belongs there, like matching colors, patterns, or even pieces of the building. It's all about making your shots look neat and tidy, and more importantly, making your prospects say "wow".

And the best part? It's as easy as pie, even if you're not a Photoshop wizard. It works for interior shots as well!

Mastering Google Ads: Why Your Budget Isn't Being Fully Utilized and How to Fix It!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:52:32 GMT

Once you set a daily budget on Google Ads, all of it should be spent, right? Not always.

Setting your Google Ads budget doesn't mean that Google will stick to it. We look at some of the reasons why Google may not be spending all of your budget and what you can do about it.

Missing Data in GA4?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 17:45:26 GMT

Are you missing data in your GA4 reports? We look at some of the most common causes.

Missing data is a common problem that new users are finding in GA4 . We take a look at why some data may be missing from your reports, as well as how to rename Events in both GA4 and Google Tag Manager .

New Business Reports in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 12:36:50 GMT

Google Expands Report Options

GA4 has quietly added some new business reports, but you have to publish them before you can use them. We take a quick look at these new reports and how to add them to your navigation.

WordPress CMS Alternatives: Kentico

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:36:21 GMT

Enterprise Content Management System

We chat with Mike Rahel, founder of Refined Element, which specializes in implementing and managing the content management system Kentico. Kentico is an enterprise CMS for larger companies looking for a WordPress alternative. We chat about the features, benefits, costs, and implementation of Kentico.

Mike Rahel, Refined Element: https://refined-element.com/

GA4 and Big Data: A Game-Changing Combination for Marketing Measurement

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 09 May 2023 16:30:59 GMT

As the end of Google Universal draws near, it's crucial for marketers to prepare for the transition to GA4 - Google's latest analytics platform that offers more advanced tracking capabilities and a better understanding of user behavior.

To shed light on the benefits of GA4 and how it's revolutionizing marketing measurement, we sat down with Ken Williams, a Google Analytics expert who has been using BigQuery and big data to gain powerful insights into his clients' analytics.

In this interview, Ken shares his experience with GA4 and how it's helped his clients make data-driven decisions, enhance their marketing strategies, and achieve their business objectives. He also discusses the importance of leveraging advanced analytics tools like BigQuery to unlock the full potential of GA4 and stay ahead of the competition.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from a GA4 and analytics pro and stay ahead of the game in marketing measurement.

Ken's Info:

https://www.ken-williams.com/

https://twitter.com/KenWilly

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethcwilliams/

Link Click Tracking in GA4 using GTM: Step by Step

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 19:20:45 GMT

Track button or link clicks to better understand user behavior.

In today's digital age, businesses need to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding their customers' online behavior. One of the most important aspects of this is tracking how users interact with the links on their website. By doing this, companies can gain valuable insights into their customers' interests, habits, and preferences. In this blog post, we'll explore how to set up link click tracking using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. We'll provide a step-by-step guide to help you get started and explain the benefits of this powerful tool. So if you're looking to take your online marketing strategy to the next level, read on!

1) Setup All Clicks Trigger

In order to see what elements your site has that can be used to trigger a tag, you can either look directly in your source code by using the "inspect" in Chrome, or by creating a general trigger that works whenever someone clicks on anything on the site.

If you're using the first method, you'll see code similar to below. You'll want to look at elements of your button or link that can be used to identify that click. These are typically variables like class name, ID, text, etc.

In the screenshot below, we can see that this link (a button in this case) has a class that contains "button", and text that contains "Get Some!". When choosing a trigger, we generally recommend using the class in a case like this, since the text itself may change over time.

If you're not that comfortable looking at HTML, the other approach is the All Clicks trigger.

To set this up, go to your GTM console:

Click on the Trigger link on the left of your Workspace.
Click on the "New" button to create your trigger.
Select the "Just Links" trigger type.

Once you have selected "Just Links" as the trigger type, you'll click on the "All Link Clicks" radio button.

Once this is set, go ahead and save and then publish the new trigger. Once the new trigger is published, click on "Preview" to launch the tag assistant.

The Tag Manager Preview mode will launch a new tab with your site, which is recorded, and as well as the Tag Assistant, which will record your actions on the site.

Once the tag assistant is active on your site, click on the link or button that you want to record. This will show you details about the link/button that you will use in your modified trigger and tag to track these links.

In the example from this site, we can see that the link click has passed a CSS class for the button that contains the words "button button-primary". That's what we'll use to define out trigger for button tracking.

2) Creating the Final New Trigger

Now that we've used the "All Links" trigger that we set up to see what we can use to identify button clicks, we'll modify the "All Links" trigger to look at the specific links we want.

In this case we'll modify the name of the Trigger, and then change it to "some clicks" rather than all clicks.

Once you choose some links, now we can change the trigger for the event to Classes and then enter the name of the class (in this case "button") that we saw in the tag assistant.

Once we choose the Click Classes variable, we can choose "contains" and then enter the class variable we identified - "button".

Now, just rename the Trigger to reflect that it's specifically firing when a button clicks. Here's we've named it the very creative "Clicks - Button".

Then click "Save".

3) Create The Tag

Now that the trigger is complete, on to creating a new tag.

Click the Tags link on the left nav.
Click "New" on the right side.

Now that we're in the tag dialogue box:

Name the tag. We recommend using a consistent taxonomy that will help you understand the function of the tag and find it easily if you have a lot of tags to sort through. In the this case we called it "Clicks - Button", which we admit is very clever and super creative.
Click on the Trigger field, and select the new trigger we have just set up.

Now click on the tag field and select the tag type. In this case we want a GA4 Event.

Next, you'll want to select the GA4 configuration tag, and name the event. Again, we use a consistent taxonomy, so we can easily identify events by their type and name. Keep in mind that a number of events have recommended names that Google will need if you want this data to appear in the standard GA4 reporting.

Also, it's important to note that the event names are case sensitive. Stay consistent with your capitalization, and use underscores instead of hyphens. We find it easier to use all lowercase since that is what Google's event names use.

Events can pass parameters as well. In this case, we'll want to know what text was contained in the button, as well as what the URL was. This will help us to identify the clicks.

This is a case where Google recommends the syntax of the parameters that we're using: "link_text" and "link_url". They also have predetermined variables. Just click on the "lego" block, and select Click Text and Click URL respectively.

Save your new tag.

4) Publish Your Changes

Once you save your new tag, it's time to publish it to your site.

Click on the Publish button.
Add information about what you're publishing. This way you and others will know what was implemented and when.

5) Test Your Tag

Once your tag has been published, it's time to test it to make sure that it is being fired correctly. You have two options to do this:

Use the tag assistant like we did when we created the "All Clicks" trigger. In this case you'll launch the assistant, click on a button on the site, and make sure the tag is firing in the assistant.

You can also head over to GA4's admin and click on Debug View. This will show you close to real-time events occurring on the site.

If you've clicked on your button, and the tag is firing correctly, you should see the event show in the timeline.

Next, click on that event to see if your parameters are being passed correctly.

6) Add Custom Dimension

In order to see your new event and parameters in your GA4 dashboards, you will need to add them as a Custom Dimension.

In order to do this:

Head to your GA4 Admin
Click on Custom Dimensions
Click on the "Create custom dimensions button"
The add your new event and parameter information. Remember that this needs to exactly match what you entered in Google Tag Manager, so you'll want to check spelling, capitalization, etc.
Then click Save.

7) See the Data? Nope, You Have to Wait.

You want to go see your data right away, right? Well, sorry. As with most changes in GA4, you'll need to wait at least 24 hours before you start seeing data for this new event. And it will only show data going forward, since it's not retroactive.

But, once it does start showing, you should this in your events report. If you click on the new event name, you'll see a new report with the the data for this event. The data will be accessible via Explore reports and in Looker Studio.

The Video

How To Track Link Clicks using GTM and GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 20:55:58 GMT

Understand and measure how how users are interacting with your site.

Tracking what buttons, menu items, or links a website visitor is clicking on can tell you how they're using your website, as well as what actions they're taking. In this video we show you how to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to not only track what links people are clicking on, but how to identify them and measure them in your reporting.

Easy Marketing Channel Dashboards in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/4yAHC8MhREQ

How to Building a GA4 Conversion Dashboard in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/3UDgeJ2od5w

How to Building a GA4 Dashboard in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/SdDRZFhHS2U

SEO in GA4: Quickly Get the Data You Need

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 20:36:40 GMT

You've probably noticed that GA4's reporting and dashboard usability...leaves something to be desired.

You've probably noticed that GA4's reporting and dashboard usability...leaves something to be desired. We show you a couple of quick way to create SEO reports with or without having Google Search Console connected to the your account. Plus you can save them if you use them regularly.

Easy Marketing Channel Dashboards in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/4yAHC8MhREQ

How to Building a GA4 Conversion Dashboard in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/3UDgeJ2od5w

How to Building a GA4 Dashboard in Looker Studio:

https://youtu.be/SdDRZFhHS2U

How we USE ChatGPT (And How We DON'T)

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 14:57:36 GMT

ChatGPT & AI can help (and possibly hurt) your marketing programs

(We used ChatGPT to write this description. How did it do?)

ChatGPT is a powerful language model that can be used for a variety of applications, including marketing. In this video, we'll explore how you can leverage ChatGPT to improve your marketing efforts, as well as some things to avoid.

First, we'll cover the dos of using ChatGPT for marketing. This will include strategies for using the language model to create compelling content, such as blog posts, social media updates, and email newsletters. We'll also discuss how ChatGPT can be used to generate ideas for new marketing campaigns, or to analyze customer feedback to inform future marketing decisions.

Next, we'll explore some of the don'ts of using ChatGPT for marketing. This will include common mistakes that can lead to ineffective or even damaging marketing efforts, such as relying too heavily on ChatGPT-generated content without human oversight or failing to consider the ethical implications of using AI in marketing.

Finally, we'll wrap up with some best practices for using ChatGPT for marketing, including tips for ensuring that your content is high-quality and engaging, as well as strategies for incorporating AI into your overall marketing strategy in a responsible and effective way.

Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just getting started, this video will provide you with valuable insights into how you can use ChatGPT to take your marketing efforts to the next level. So join us and discover the dos and don'ts of using ChatGPT for marketing!

See our discussion about using ChatGPT in SEO:

https://youtu.be/eW0GYIJSQRw

Easy Marketing Channel Dashboards in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 14:32:16 GMT

Want a quick way to show individual marketing channel results in Looker Studio?

Have you ever found yourself creating individual dashboards for each of your marketing channels in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio)? If so, you know that you often have to create individual filters for each of your cards or widgets, which can be super time consuming. We take a look at a quick way to create a single dashboard that can show individual or combined channels with a just a couple clicks.

Chat GPT and SEO. Is the SEO Industry DOOMED?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 15:35:16 GMT

AI and tools like ChatGPT may change the industry as we know it.

Many in the marketing and SEO industry have been voicing concerns about AI and how it may lead to the demise of SEO and search marketing as we know it. We chat with SEO expert Chris Boggs to get his take on AI and its role in SEO.

Chris' website:

https://www.webtrafficadvisors.com/

[00:00:00] Roy: Hey everybody. Welcome to Real Marketing. Today we're going to be talking to Chris Boggs. He's the founder of Web Traffic Advisors. Chris has been involved in the digital marketing world since 2000, starting in the insurance space and then with increasingly growing leadership roles across various agencies and SEM firms.

[00:00:19] Roy: Chris founded Web Advisors in 2014 and he advises businesses and agency clients helping them to improve their SEO , paid search , and paid social media. Chris also loves creating and delivering customized team training and if you are ever attending shows, I'm sure in conferences, I'm sure you have run into Chris at some point because he is known for hitting the speaking circuit and being at the various conferences and stuff in the industry.

[00:00:46] Roy: And as a former head of SEMPO a number of years ago when that was still a thing. Chris is a well-known figure in the industry and today we're going to be picking Chris's brain about AI, Chat GPT, and other things that are taking place in the search arena and what we should be looking for and as always, Chris, it's a pleasure to talk to you. I'm glad you could join us today.

[00:01:14] Chris: Thank you, Roy. Thanks for inviting me. It's great to see you again and I'm excited to talk about this stuff. It's fresh and new and it reminds me of when you know, some of the search tools first came out to replace, Overture, and stuff like that, right?

[00:01:33] Chris: Like where we used to be working in spreadsheets and suddenly we have these things that you push a button, right? So it's a great, it's a great day to be alive, as they say, right?

[00:01:44] Roy: You know what it does remind me of that kind of nascent period of where things just happened so fast. Especially with ChatGPT and some of the AI tools right now, I feel like just in the last couple months they've had a huge impact on the industry and people are talking about 'em and some people are afraid and other people are excited but yeah, it's one, I think it's going to be revolutionary and it'll be an interesting ride for sure.

[00:02:11] Chris: It's funny you say some people are afraid and others are excited because I was recently at a conference in Austin, a pretty well-known conference, and if it's all right for me to say the name, I'm sure you can edit it out as Pubcon.

[00:02:26] Chris: But the founder Brett Tabke really took a great liking to this subject and has for a few months, and he prepared a wonderful keynote, which I'll probably allude to a few times during this conversation. One of the first things that he introduced to us when people came in literally to the conference last week in Austin, there were people that were worried like, is AI going to replace me?

[00:02:53] Chris: And he said that AI's not going to replace you, but a person who's using AI will replace you. I thought it was a great kind of summary of this whole topic. And if you're not listening to these kind of conversations and testing it or whatever, depending on your role you may be replaced for not embracing it.

[00:03:14] Roy: Yeah. It's never really no different to some extent than the onset of Photoshop back in the early days of graphic design when a lot of designers were using pen and paper and doing markup and pasteup for publishing. And then you had the revolution of Photoshop and Quirk Express and the various different tools that allowed, graphic designers and layout to do things and a lot of designers felt like they were going to be pushed out cause now there's these digital tools and I think it's a similar concept. It's no different than, having tools to assist you more and work more efficiently in certain ways.

[00:03:55] Chris: Yeah. If you're like a bricklayer or whatever, right?

[00:03:33] Chris: Like you can charge, 10 times as much because you could say you'll handle an average wreck, right? Or you can choose to use tools and do it faster and charge - there's still, I think, a means, right? For the people that don't use AI. I don't want to make that statement that I, quoted from the conference, right?

[00:04:17] Chris: My absolute, I think there's plenty of people that still love Excel and count me in that crew, right? But at the same time, it represents a great opportunity for people to I think spend time on doing stuff that they want to do, like strategy and ideation, and then once the ideas are formed, use the tools to grow those legs for you and then work with it. In summary and we're going to talk about some of that, I think.

[00:04:53] Roy: Yeah, and I also think there's two ways to look at it too. There's the production of content and then there's also how search engines work. Is chat GPT or some iteration of it going to change how Google and Bing work fundamentally? Are people going to really be clicking through to websites or are they going to be getting results of their query?

[00:05:18] Chris: Yeah and that depends on obviously the pace at which the technology gains the trust of the user. We can all go out right now and make the tool mess up. One of the first things that I did honestly on the tool was I asked it who owns Twitter, cause it was recently after Musk bought it, and it like very certain told me that it was the prior owner, and then I've seen, it get cajoled into like telling you that yes, you're right, your wife is right about three plus eight or whatever, right?

[00:05:55] Chris: I don't know if that one was real, but I've seen a lot of great examples where if you trust a tool to make major decisions for you, that's your fault. I think even with Google, if you're a sophisticated searcher, you're not going to just take the first result or the first five.

[00:06:13] Chris: You're going to take, if it's an important decision, you're going to probably want multiple feel-goods about it and that's how you should treat this. I think a good example, like, I was at first really excited about the possibility of this for like tourism entities or areas, right?

[00:06:34] Chris: Because you can say, Hey Chat GPT, make me a tour of the five best places to do across two days in such and such county. Maryland, right? Or whatever.

[00:06:45] Chris: And cause it came out and it's about out these great things. But the problem is, right? Is that it that again the databases, right? Cause certain counties and certain areas have been descended upon by more marketers that have created top 10 things to do list or whatever. So there's going to be some list that's basically the opinion of one person. There's going to be I think in a scenario like that, there could be problems too, right?

[00:07:14] Chris: Like you could count on the tool to set up a great itinerary for you, but if you don't double check it, two of the places might already be shut down, etc., etc., right? And that's again, where I think the limitations exist right now. Especially with Chat GPT three. Obviously with Chad GPT four, they're claiming it's going to be that much better, and then, Bard, obviously Google's holding off on that.

[00:07:39] Chris: Especially with things with fan answers to some of the questions it's being given. I think, it's again, you can't over expect out of the tool, what it can't deliver. You still have to, I think, use your human decision-making tree to really finalize your processes for important things. That said, if I wanted to write an article on something, if it's a medical topic, I'd want the doctor to read it over, right? But if it's a topic about French onion soup then it's different. Maybe, who knows, it can be really cool. To me, that's the opportunity is more on the creative side and helping to support that.

[00:08:29] Roy: Yeah and I think that's a great point. Is that you, a knowledgeable person is not trusting everything they see in the Google search results today. Even the Google business listings are often wrong about hours and whether a business is still active or closed or even where it's located on the map So just user beware and consumer beware, I guess is the point going to be true going forward, no matter the tool. I think there's been some, initially when Chat GPT came out, a lot of people were saying, Hey, everybody's going to write their blogs using this. Like it's going to, you're going to be able to crank out all sorts of blogs and you give it some prompts and it'll produce content.

[00:09:11] Roy: There was an initial feeling that Google was going to squash that and that AI-developed content was going to be frowned upon by Google. They've walked that back a little bit. What's your feeling about what the ultimate area, and what the result of that will be? Is Google going to have an algorithm that identifies generated content and viewed as spam? Or are they going to, join the crowd.

[00:09:42] Chris: Right now, and I'm looking, I put in like on Twitter or Facebook or something. There's a dozen good AI content detectors out there, right? So you can't expect that Google doesn't have, at least, that those type in play plus whatever else, right?

[00:10:05] Chris: I would suspect that it could become part of the algorithm, but not to get into a deep SEO discussion on content, but EGAT has to do about whether the content does have EAT. Now, the first ‘E’ think is hard or the new ‘E’ right, experience is hard to replicate with Chad GPT, and that's where the human layer I think is required.

[00:10:30] Chris: And if you could spin the content that's generated for you, you could get some good results. There were certainly some tricks that were mentioned at the conference around trying to basically launder your money with your content, right? But launder it through some tools that are able to rewrite content.

[00:10:50] Chris: And then do a couple things here and there to make it look like it couldn't have been written by a machine. cause it's not perfect, right? There's, Copy Leaks was there, they have a tool. There's a number 0GPT content at scale. Sapling, GLTR, Originality.AI is a premium tool.

[00:11:17] Chris: There's a number of like lawn tools out there already, right? So I think as an agency you want to CYA and basically establish a process where if you're going to use it as part of your content development process, which I don't think should be bad because it can as I mentioned get to scale as long as they're still a human, but it's still, you're going to have to have that conversation with your clients. I know there's a lot of different discussions going on right now about labeling content. I think there's no problem with saying but would you label your content and say part of this content was developed using Google to research the topics, right?

[00:11:59] Chris: It's almost like Google's pushing you into wanting to label it, but I personally think that's too far. Unless you plan to like, have an article written, publish it totally as is, and publish 10 per day, right? , Hopefully, if Google's got done anything right, the current panda would catch and throw it right out.

[00:12:21] Chris: So to me in a way it could represent a challenge to Google, right? Can or does it better the content? I think it's pretty easy. I'm sure you've played with it, but as you start to ask it for topics it's definitely a very, as an educated human that's seen web copy and written copy for years, it's very easy to see that it’s a pamphlet, right?

[00:12:47] Chris: Somewhat sophomore or whatever you could call it, even maybe like reading a machine. And maybe that's good. I'll give you a great use case for it. And then I'm curious as to your thoughts for this. But I had a client who is passionate and knowledgeable about the industry, but not a great writer.

[00:13:10] Chris: And so the process of editing their content for optimization was much heavier because there was also an editorial layer required, right? So what we've basically agreed with the client to test is doubling the output of the content by letting us pick the topics and write the first part.

[00:13:35] Chris: Give it a human layer, give it to them, and then they'll write it and put it in their voice. But to me, that's an example where it's the same work as we do as an agency, right? And we put human hours into investigating. And so it might come across as being non-human or anti-human, but there's still a human that's gotta prop this, right?

[00:13:55] Chris: So that's the key and you have to do that overlay of the BS detector, right? Even these machines, you have to operate them, right? So I don't think that this is at much putting human writers at risk there. I think if writers embrace this, they can increase their output. But I would caution that, if you're used to charging a certain amount of hours per piece of content, it might, the expectation might change at the agency level or at a client level in terms of how long it should take to research content and to create a relatively good list of outliers. I might get daggered by writers about that comment, but that's fine, from my opinion. Yeah, writers needs to humanize it and I'll always stand by that.

[00:14:44] Roy: And it really is, I see similarities to, cause we do the same thing. We are producing content and we help clients produce content about topics which we don't really know anything about. We're just cleaning up the copy, making it, wordsmithing it a little bit. Bringing in a little bit more professionalism to the copy because maybe the client's not a great writer or maybe we interviewed them and then we're taking a transcript or something like that.

[00:15:10] Roy: The one interesting thing that I've seen, I don't think right away, at least with what I've seen the output from Chat GPT that anybody's going to be using it effectively to write blogs. Sure. Are they going to be able to produce like a whole bunch of 'em and they're going to not look like great quality?

[00:15:27] Roy: So if you're looking for volume, you can do volume. But what I found interesting is Shopify just came out with an AI widget. For their product copy. If you're a Shopify retailer, you can put in some key terms, choose the tone of voice, whether it's professional or expert, or it gives you five or six different options.

[00:15:50] Roy: And then it'll generate a copy based off of the product category and the prompts that you gave up. It's decent product copy and individual product pages don't typically rank that well. If that can speed up the copywriting for some companies have products that are essentially the same product. It's just slightly different because it's a different color, so the copy's not going to be that different. If that can speed up the product copywriting and creation so you can at least have something that's unique, I can see that being effective

[00:16:32] Chris: A hundred percent. To me, like that's a green area where it can make a difference even though there's hundreds, dozens sometimes if you're lucky, of competitors out there with the same product essentially. If you can differentiate that page and differentiate the product copy. It'll be interesting, right?

[00:17:00] Chris: Because to me, the test then is like, how good is the link strength to those pages, right? Because really many people make those pages rank without differentiating the copy, right? Through the way that they handle their internal link and external link strength. There's some testing you could do there, definitely.

[00:17:21] Chris: That would see if that gives it, then another plus right in the eyes of the way that it's noticed; if it's useful. I think we're really, even with these machines, we're getting more and more to the point where the machines can tell whether or not it's human right. I think that once you start to get a thousand different pages that are optimized for Nike shocks that are blue and yellow shoelaces, they're going to start to look the same.

[00:17:54] Chris: So again it's going to go back to who has the better internal links, right? And that'll be it I think in an SEO sense. But like when you're looking for that blue Nike shocks with the yellow shoe license, once you land on that page, if it's within 20 bucks of what you're going to pay, are you going to read the text?

[00:18:17] Chris: I think there's a usefulness that has to come in there and not every product has that. Nike shocks is fairly cut and dry. Maybe you want a pair of snowshoes and then you gotta consider weight and type of terrain and all that. Then maybe there would be more options.

[00:18:35] Chris: So I think deciding where to invest in that kind of stuff would be the answer there. You know, it's the French onion soup, are they human? Corey deserves recency sort of thing that they, we talked about 10 years ago or something where, you know, if it's french onion soup recipe, man, how different is it going to be?

[00:18:54] Chris: That's Google's predicament with the French onion soup recipe of right. So if you're a pair of Nike shocks out there, it's going to be different unless you really figure out a way, right? Then that's maybe being some sort of a shoe store that figures out, shoes by EU, which they've all done, right?

[00:119:16] Chris: Like running versus cross-train route, but then takes it to another layer, right? And to the northeast or so on and you leverage ChatGPT to do that or help with that. Kind of, I think, what led with is that there are some tools that scripts and so forth that can help you with the prompting, I think and that's really important, right?

[00:19:40] Chris: There was a great example he gave of a riddle where the system couldn't figure out it was a riddle and didn't have the answer until he said, Hey, this is a riddle, and then it immediately said, oh, here's the answer, right? So if you know where we're at with ChatGPT three, I think will be easier as per se for maybe the less sophisticated user with four, but it's still going to require a common, like what will become what, we're all used to searching Google now or Bing, or whatever you use, you get pretty used to your types of strings and so forth. I think that's again, where the value of a tool that Chad GT is that every, whether you're a writer or a strategist for a campaign or even like an executive that needs to get an understanding of something. Like I've told a couple of executives about this tool and they've looked at and oh my God, I've been looking for the way to better explain monetization of tourism this or that.

[00:20:44] Chris: It's amazing the kind of answers that the tool gives you. Even at the executive level, if you're looking for something to simplify your life and to better understand why this score needs server boosts or all kinds of little different things like that where you may not understand something. Or that is something kids these days are talking about, even that a lot of it is pretty accurate, you gotta be careful, post 21’ right now but it's learning. I haven't tried, to be honest, I haven't tried Bing. I've read a lot about, it's supposed frailties and obvious, some pretty funny stories.

[00:21:30] Chris: But the difference between that is that it's strong AI versus weak AI; I think is the terminology used within the industry where machine learning chat G B T type stuff. It doesn't still build its own mind from that, whereas Bing’s that stronger AI that's trying to be an actual thinking entity. I'm excited to learn about that too. I do feel that inherently it's creepier obviously the stronger the strong AI side has been seen but also I think it'll be more difficult to leverage effectively from marketing day to day stuff. The stuff about the weak AI is stuff is that it is it's dependent on what you put into it.

[00:22:23] Chris: So as you get better at that, I think that no matter again, what role you're in marketing or sales or just business management or whatever, it can be very useful even in office management, right? Or figuring out an Excel-like problem, all these different things. The tool has proven to me very useful.

[00:22:45] Chris: I paid the 20 bucks a month and I really think it's a big difference too. Which it does. It is phenomenal and I only expect it to get better.

[00:22:57] Roy: And I've seen interesting iterations of the whole AI too, like I said in Shopify with the product descriptions.

[00:23:06] Roy: But I also have an email client tool for Gmail that now has a summary function and so you can actually click on the widget and it will give you, if it's a very long email, it'll summarize it for you. So from an executive perspective, if I don't feel like reading through a string of 30 emails and want to figure out what's going on, it'll do it for me. That is true. Stuff like that, obviously is an efficiency.

[00:23:32] Chris: I replied to your email about this with Chat GPT response.

[00:23:38] Roy: Yeah, that was really good. So for people watching I had invited Chris to the show and he actually used Chat GPT to create a letter in response saying that he'd be happy to come and it was quite clever. That was pretty funny and it was a well-crafted letter.

[00:23:54] Chris: Yeah. Again, and you add a little bit of your own to it or whenever it is, right? And an interesting part that came up in a different session was no one ever really updates their terms and conditions and so forth and those boring pages.

[00:24:10] Chris: But it's actually pretty interesting some of the experiments that people have done by, they can update some of that, and still you don't want that ranking or whatever, but you might as well make sure that stuff’s zipped up. And if it takes just the process of putting it through there and them saying here's recommended updates, then why not?

[00:24:30] Chris: Stuff like basic legal ease and stuff like that. You can even check in there. Again, don't take this to the bank but it's a useful tool.

[00:24:41] Roy: I've been experimenting too because coming from academia and stuff initially, and I tend to end up being in a former English major. I have been scolded in the past for writing it too high of a reading level. So for certain copy you want to aim at that sixth grade, fifth grade reading level. Unfortunately, that's more of a statement I think about our educational system. For a lot of ways, for a lot of writing you want to aim at that reading level for some of the stuff that we do.

[00:25:17] Roy: And it's, stuff like that is a good metric of am I writing at the right level? Should I scale back on some of the large words that I'm using? And can it do that for me? Can it summarize it for me at a more attainable reading? So that's useful. We've done some experiments with stuff too, just as far as like copy for Facebook ads and headlines and you can turn out 10 headline variations, but telling at the tone of voice that you want that seems pretty darn effective.

[00:25:53] Roy: Like obviously just like with any of the other stuff, you want to touch it up. What have you been experimenting with? What have you seen? Where it could be useful for you. Obviously not writing necessarily blogs, but is there stuff that you're using it for that helps to speed up your day?

[00:26:10] Chris: The same stuff. You get a banner and you're going to run it in ads, right?

[00:26:20] Chris: Whether it's Meta or potentially Facebook, or you want to create another responsive unit in Google or Bing, right? And you want to just try to further give the system options and maintain control over letting the system give you more new ads. So, I think that this is a great opportunity to help do that and help keep the system happy in a way that you're not, especially Facebook, right? Because I think that Meta you can definitely, for imagery and stuff gets staler more quickly. From a headline perspective, a hundred percent right. But I think also on the image side and I know this is where it gets into, as you and I were discussing, prior I'm a little more quirky about as it were stealing hours from artists, right? I'd rather buy stock imagery or whatever or use even free stock photos based on and then occasionally buy up with, I use Unsplash, and I occasionally buy up and you provide, but honestly, like if I'm writing an article and I want to show a bull market or a real estate investment and I want to show a…I think that it's, using some of the tools out there becomes fair place.

[00:27:56] Chris: So to me, it can help also because it would scale and improve your marketing assets and it becomes a business decision then again. And that's where artists are expensive. And so if potentially, I think one opportunity for artists to work together as it were, versus railing against, which I totally understand, it would be to like start working into your contract like if I create a base set of art and you choose to replicate it through AI, then it's going to cost you this much each time. And then that gives, I think it gives legs to the person's art. Like the person who did my logo eight years ago hasn't gotten any work out of it cause I don't do a lot of marketing or any but theoretically, like if I wanted to spin it off in AI, then I would feel fine because I already had it in agreement with my artist.

[00:28:58] Chris: So that to me would be one area to consider. That has to, I think, still shape itself out because we've seen like the power of the art side of this. And the video side, geez. You're talking 10, 15 grand to develop a decent video to use in a like a regional tourism thing. Whereas it's less considerably to use AI and that's the scary part for artists out there. I understand but this is the time where again, I feel that the human side of it and the ideation of the art, and then why not just whoever it is that created the NFTs was making a bunch of money signed. Fixtures of turtles or whatever. Why not just embrace it? And that's my opinion on that. What do you think?

[00:29:52] Roy: Yeah and I just saw an article the other day or it was talking about a photographer who took a series of photos for a company of people at the company and took a whole number of pictures of those people used that to feed into an AI tool so that he could place those people into different settings so he could say, push this person, this female model I want her in a lab coat.

[00:30:22] Roy: And it would essentially render that photo for him and very well, but he didn't take the picture, but it was based on his.

[00:30:30] Chris: That he had paid for that.

[00:30:32] Roy: Right or that he had taken and that way he's I don't have to go back there and shoot a photo again for a while. I can just, for this client, I can actually use the photos that I took previously.

[00:30:43] Chris: But the model didn't say that they were able to adjust the pictures or,

[00:30:48] Roy: Right. That there would have to be some sort of, a sign-off on the models per point that they would be able to use their image for that. Yeah, it was people that were-

[00:30:58] Chris: Sorry to cut you off but is that basically what happened or they haven't had any whip back on that on it?

[00:31:04] Roy: They were employees of the company. Yeah, it was employees of the company that he was producing these images for. But that way he could just put them in different scenarios and stuff like that.

[00:31:14] Roy: I want this person outside, or I want this person in a meeting, or working in a lab or something like that, and he didn't have to go back and take that picture because he had enough of a library of their image that he could use the AI to do that. Yeah. I don't know how.

[00:31:31] Chris: It'd be cool to develop like a background music because I know that a problem that I've seen people have, especially with YouTube, is that, they're doing some walk down the street video and somebody happened to walk by someone that's playing Madonna in the background or whatever. It aches, man video, right? So if you could create, leverage the tool to go into it and help you and I think that YouTube already does it itself, right?

[00:31:59] Chris: They like basically offer a solution but I think it'll be cool to, I think, leverage the tool in that way, potentially. To help cover your derrière from a copyright perspective. Ironically, creating music on it, say, oh no, hopefully not stealing. That would be funny if it would steal it.

[00:32:23] Roy: Or use something that you know, that a company is going to license it to you and they want to promote a certain song or something, and you could, you throw into the. . .

[00:32:33] Chris: Yeah. I'm the server and in that solution.

[0032:35] Roy: Yeah, for sure. And I think where it gets really scary is with the deep fake kind of videos. I don't know if you've ever seen that not Keanu TikTok or whatever. It's really creepy how much that actually looks like Keanu and those type of deep fakes are scary, but incredibly neat at the same time.

[00:32:57] Roy: There's one now I forget the name of it, but it will allow you to essentially choose what star you want to be so you can take a video of yourself and you can choose the face and the voice of the well-known celebrity that you want to be, and actually will do a deep fake of you as if you were that person.

[00:33:17] Chris: There's some amazing ones, right? Like Spin Rewriter, there's rewriter tools and stuff like that. The content that I saw like Brett present at Pubcon was amazing, right? This deep kind of fake stuff. Synthesia and Runway are a couple tools that are out that. The Synthesia AI avatar is the example to go look up and check out, but it's amazing.

[00:33:58] Chris: She just basically interchanges, you can type in whatever you want her to say, or him. Can pick up from hundreds of different personas, right? To deliver the message. You type it in and then while she's talking or he's talking, you could switch it from English to Spanish, and the lip movement changes and everything and it's really creepy, but it was amazing.

[00:34:21] Chris: But then on top of that, he showed like this movie scene basically that had, been developed and his prediction is that like a couple of years from now it is going to be, within a couple of years, it's going to be the first release of all AI generated movie. Again, speaking of sort of high-value talent like for a studio or whatever.

[00:34:52] Chris: If they're going to see an AI movie that's going to be just as good at with a Transformer-type theme or whatever as Transformers and cost them a fraction of what having all those actors cost, I hate to say it, but that's an area where I think that AI really it goes against artistry right across the board, I think.

[00:35:14] Chris: Writing is the, I think probably the best where writers could still be allied with it, but this is an area where really artists including actors they need to see what's coming up here. And be prepared.

[00:35:35] Roy: Even just on a small level, we use a tool called Script for editing podcasts and videos and stuff, and it will learn your voice and if you make a mistake in your video, actually…

[00:35:51] Chris: Great. So if I screw anything up, you're going to fix it for me.

[00:35:54] Roy: I could, yeah. So if I called you Randy, instead of Chris, I could literally go in and it's text, it'll transcribe your text and I could say, oh, that's where I called them, Randy, and I can say, fix this, put in Chris, and it will do it in my voice and you can't tell the difference.

[00:36:10] Chris: That's awesome.

[00:36:12] Roy: And you can do your whole sentences if you needed to. And it does sound a little mechanical like it doesn't have the emotional intonation and stuff, but some of them do. But this one in particular…

[00:36:22] Chris: It sounds like they're getting better by the day. That kind of stuff works.

[00:36:24] Roy: Yeah but for a couple of words, like you literally can't tell that it wasn't me saying it. So if I misspoke and said, it being instead of Google, I could change that and you would never know. So it's a little creepy. Very handy cause I speak all the time.

[00:36:44] Chris: Yeah, imagine Imagination Engine, I think is another tool that's out there to check out AI test Kitchen.

[00:36:53] Roy: Yeah. It's just really a burgeoning industry right now.

[00:36:58] Chris: Anthropic.com is a startup co-founded by X OpenAI employees. They've raised about 700 million in funding. They've developed an AI system similar to open AI strategy v D. that appears to improve upon the original and key ways. So I haven't checked that out yet.

[00:37:15] Roy: I'll have to check that out too.

[00:37:17] Roy: Yeah. Just going back touch on it and just real briefly, we had talked about, how some people are saying like, the whole interface of search, the search activity could change and Bing’s trying to get first to market with their version of their Chat GPT integration and kind of an intelligent search.

[00:37:38] Roy: There was some spin initially that people are like, why would Microsoft want to do that? Because it would potentially take away revenue, right? If you're giving Chat GPT results instead of clickable ads and links to websites, could it actually take away a revenue source? And there was some theorizing that Microsoft doesn't care because they just want to hurt Google's search business; that they're willing, they're not making a lot of money on it anyway. So if they can get out ahead of it, undermine Google's search business and take something of a lead, then they can figure out how to monetize it.

[00:38:20] Chris: With Google Ads.

[00:38:23] Roy: Yeah exactly. Do you see that kind of rivalry or do you think that's what they're doing or they're just trying to get some publicity out of it?

[00:38:31] Chris: I think it's there's always going to be some element of that probably in there somewhere. I think that we've seen it over the years where Microsoft has tried to take on Google so many times since Google's dominance, right? And they failed miserably with a few iterations. I think Bing has done a lot better than anything else has in the past.

[00:38:57] Chris: Their ad systems' getting better, even though it's in the back of Google. They're continuing to fight an uphill battle against them. Most people I think, are going to find that if they're trying to find a solution, if they're not doing well, searching in Google or whatever, they might jump over to Bing and try that.

[00:39:20] Chris: They might try just to try, but if they're used to the way that they get results. If it's a zero-click search, it's a zero-click search, right? I think if Bing’s going after it and Google's it's a zero-click search, we're going to lose a few of those but Google's not capitalizing on zero-click searches either.

[00:39:41] Chris: They'd much rather search an ad that has an ad or five in it personally, I think, or a search control. So to me, it's also doing it tree fall in the forest to that effect? Like the types of searches where there's no ads. I think Google could care less if someone's trying to figure out what the square root of 17 is or whatever that the Bing AI will answer quickly.

[00:40:09] Roy: Yeah. Yeah. No, I tend to agree with you and I think it's become so ingrained in our culture. It's a verb, right? To Google something. I think it would take more than just a intelligent AI search interface to upend that whole market.

[00:40:30] Chris: Unless you're willing to tell Bing, hey, pick me the blue widget I want to buy, right? You're going to use, you're going to go through and you're going to hit that transactional term by Blue Ridge eventually, and you're going to head the product you want. And I don't think that Bing can offer that within its AI.

[00:40:51] Chris: Until you've done a thousand searches with it, if you're locked in or whatever. Eventually, I'm sure it could learn what blue widget you'd pick. But if you went and decided you wanted to buy something, run an experiment, right? Go find the one you want to buy, hey, and then let AI buy one for you at Bing and see which one you end up liking more and do it at least five times so you get a decent sample.

[00:41:20] Roy: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So are you worried about where it's going or are you excited or which part of that crowd are you?

[00:41:29] Chris: I'm excited. I think I alluded to human laziness earlier. Right now, as the father of teenagers I've seen the impact this has had on productivity for some students, not my children of course, but I've heard the stories and teachers when they caught on to it and stuff like that. And it's just, again, in a way like do we get cranky and old because they have access to the internet? And we had to use encyclopedias originally?

[00:42:11] Chris: Or do we embrace it and say, this is great. You have access to information quicker, so you should be able to make a better decision. And ultimately I think that's better, right? The more tools you give someone. So I'm not scared of it because I think that, as humans will continue to master the machine learning side of it.

[00:42:29] Chris: I think the AI side is just going to keep screwing up and asking people to dump their lover and stuff like that, or whatever, it's doing weirdly over at Bing. And humans will continue getting fed up with that and until they can figure out a way to remove that sort of flippancy or whatever that you find, and I think that's why Google, this is not, I'm not an expert in this, but I've heard that's one of the reasons that they're delaying into releasing Bard is because they're worried right about the attitude side of it.

[00:43:05] Chris: And I think that's, we're all humans and our kids are humans and they're eventually going to figure out something that works with this, or they're going to stick to the weak AI versus strong AI in terms of running their daily lives or helping with their daily lives and easing their daily lives.

[00:43:25] Roy: Yeah, for sure. I think that, there's ways to use it intelligently and, hopefully, we have that way. One of the good quotes that I saw was that, keep in mind that these tools to date at least our language processing tools, and they may come back with some really good language processing and that's a little creepy and seems like it's intelligent but it's not really an intelligent tool.

[00:43:54] Roy: It's not an intellect that is processing like what should it be answering? It's just giving you, based on the data that it has, it's an algorithm at the end of the day that's saying, these are probably the best combination of words that I should put in here.

[00:44:11] Roy: It's not evaluating it for truth or whether it should say it or, that kind of stuff. It's a very good language processing tool. Very interesting result, but it's not an intellect.

[00:44:25] Chris: Well summarized. I agree. And it's, that's the difference.

[00:44:30] Roy: All right. Chris, I really appreciate you taking your time out of your day and spending some time with us. And we'll have to keep an eye on developments around this and maybe circle back and talk about this again in the near.

[00:44:46] Chris: Yes, sir. AI will summon us to speak for now.

[00:44:52] Roy: We'll just have it, plan our topic of conversation, and do some deep fakes. And I'll just do your part, put a deep fake of your face on it, and then… We'll have to really do this.

[00:45:03] Chris: That’s right. You have plenty of words. I'm sure I've said a lazy brown fox by now.

[00:45:09] Roy: Exactly. All right, sir. Thank you. And for everybody watching the video and listening to the podcast, we're going to put links to Chris's information in the description and if you haven't heard him speak or been able to follow him if you are at a conference that you know he is going to be at, I encourage you to go to one of his presentations or moderations. He's always has some good insight to share. So thanks again, Chris, for joining us and I really appreciate it.

[00:45:39] Chris: Thank you, Roy. It's been great seeing you and having a great conversation about this stuff is really exciting.

[00:45:46] Roy: All right, we'll talk to you soon.

[00:45:48] Chris: You too.

Want to DITCH Google Analytics? Alternatives to Track Your Website Performance

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 18:35:59 GMT

Unhappy with GA4 and want to look at other options? Let's talk about it.

Google's impending forced migration to GA4 is right around the corner (July 1!!!), and a lot of marketers and analysts aren't happy about it. In fact, many are considering moving away from Google Analytics all together. We chat with Jason Packer, who recently published "Google Analytics Alternatives, a Comprehensive Guide", and discuss some of the pros and cons of other analytics tools.

Jason's Book:

https://www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-alternatives/

TRANSCRIPTION:

Roy: Hey everybody. Welcome to Real Marketing. This morning we're going to be talking to Jason Packer. Jason runs Quantable Analytics. It's a small consultancy focused on growth-stage companies looking to mature their data practices. Prior to Quantable, Jason held a wide range of jobs in IT, unix, CIS admin, ISP, network tech, SEO specialist, and front-end engineer, and currently, Jason has recently published a book on Google Analytics alternatives that takes a look at 15 of the top choices in the space and how to choose between them. Which if anybody has been using Google Analytics 4, I'm sure they're ripe for looking for other products. So Jason, how are you doing? And thanks for joining us.

Jason: Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on the show.

Roy: Happy to have you. Like I said I think a lot of people right now, or especially analysts, who've been used to Google's products in the past because they're free. At least the free version that Google 360 obviously isn't free. But they got very used to a certain type of platform, and GA 4 is a significant change from what they're used to. There's a lot of bugs still. There's a lot of inconsistencies in how the data's presented and the reporting and it looks like Google is actually trying to push people towards paid services by only giving them, 14 months back data throttling Looker Studio, formerly Data Studio, so that you have to use BigQuery to store your data, which is obviously a paid tool. So I think there's a lot of industry frustration with Google right now. And this move to GA4. Are you seeing the same thing with your clients and using it yourself?

Jason: Yeah, I think a lot of the confusion and a lot of the upset comes from just the idea that it's GA 4, you think, oh, it's going to be like GA 3, but just a little different and maybe I can click a button to upgrade and instead it's really a completely different type of product.

Jason: It's, I consider it more of a product analytics product more than just a traditional web analytics product. People that are coming from using universal analytics in a history of implementing and working with that data are confused and a little frustrated. A lot of people are out there saying oh, GA 4 is a terrible product. I can't believe Google will put out something so awful and I'm not one of those people. I don't really think that GA 4 is a bad product. I think it's pretty good, or at least that it has a lot of potential to be good. But most of my frustration and a lot of my client's frustration comes from just how different it is.

Jason: If Google put out, I say a lot of times in the book, if Google put it out GA 4, they didn't call it GA 4, they called it Google product analytics and UA continued to exist, there'd be a lot of people going oh wow, this Google product analytics platform is great. I can put data straight into to BigQuery without having to pay for 360. I can better unify my mobile and my web stats. It's got a really powerful data collection method. But that's of course not what they did. I feel like most of my complaints are really about how they have been rolling it out and the fact they are discontinuing universal analytics before a lot of people are ready for them to do that.

Jason: And of course, they have given a lot of advanced notice, but still, people just aren't believing that it's actually going away.

Roy: Yeah, we've seen that where people have just ignored it and they're still, scratching and clawing and using the universal analytics and not moving over. And I agree with you. I think one of the big things that we are seeing is that it's just not as easy to get to some of the data, or it's not as intuitive, I should say, about how to get to some of the reporting and data. Or the necessity to actually build, explore reports to really get and drill down to the data that you want. That is so different from what they're used to with the universal analytics. There has definitely been some bugs that we've run into, obviously with trying to do reporting that certain metrics are not available in Looker Studio, for instance, that are available in the regular reports within GA 4.

Jason: Yeah. I agree. It isn't really just that is just different. It's also with the rollout that, it's not exactly ready. I would still consider it borderline beta because things are changing really quickly. They're adding a lot of features, a lot of changing metrics, and things like that. You'd like to see that happen before they announced the switch, right? Instead, if you're not already using GA 4 for your primary reporting at this point you're pretty far behind the curve here because, July 1st, you're not going to be able to A/B your results and be like, oh, something is wrong. Let me check on UA and see if it's a problem where the problem is. So it all just happened on a very compressed timeline. And like I said, part of that is, is Google's communicating with that but part of that is people's unwillingness to believe that things are really going to change.

Roy: Yeah, well Google does have a history of kind of changing course and doing things by surprise. I think the other issues are that there's a lot of the definitions in the data are different so you can't really compare year over year unless you already had GA 4 implemented back in July of last year or before that so that the definitions about what a session is or a user and all of those things are different. So I think that that's a little off-putting for some people.

Jason: The product is not, especially if you're dealing with like small, medium businesses which a lot of my clients are startups or people that are in the growth stage and they don't have dedicated analytics teams, and if you don't have somebody like, oh, I've got somebody on my team that knows BigQuery and is building out, these Looker dashboards that's one thing but if you're a small business and you like mostly deal with analytics in a reactive way, like you're going into to UA , oh, something, my sales are down. I wonder what's up. I'm going into UA and like doing more ad hoc analysis, and I'm not in any sort of stretch a specialist in analytics for GA 4. Just that's not necessarily the product for you and that's what I was trying to do with my book is to say move away from considering GA to be the default for everyone.

Jason: GA4 is still going to be obviously very widely used, and it's going to be a good solution for a lot of people. But I don't like the idea that that's what you install, right? You set up a website and you install GA. I would try and to encourage with my book people to say, I haven't got a website. What's the right fit for me? Just like any other tool, what's the right tech stack for me? What's the right CMS, what's the right web host, or whatever, rather than just not really thinking about the decision and going straight to GA.

Roy: No, I think that's a great point and most of our larger clients, are enterprise-size clients are using Adobe Analytics and have for years and, formerly Omniture back in the day. I think I'm dating myself by pulling that name out.

Jason: Oh, yeah, that's not too bad. I was just having a discussion, made a LinkedIn comment, talking about the Mosaic browser. So I've been around too.

Roy: A lot of our enterprise clients are in the Adobe sphere using lower of the Adobe products. Obviously, for most small to medium-sized businesses, the pricing for that is way outside what they're going to spend or would be willing to spend. What did prompt you to start looking at alternatives? Was it a need from your clients or just tired of that default for Google Analytics?

Jason: Yeah, I'd say it was a mix of things. I've definitely used a lot of these alternatives before in the past. I've used Matomo and Clicky and some of the others that I talk about for, you know, in production in the past.

Jason: So it wasn't like, there's the UA turn down and then oh, let's consider alternatives. I had been considering some of these alternatives for years. The sort of, the impetus for the book was this desire to get a sort of unbiased, deep view into what the field of options was.

Jason: Because on the one hand, there's so many options. There's hundreds and hundreds of different options, and it feels like every week there's a new one. It's not hard to build a simple, light gene alternative type product. So every week there's a new one coming out, but when I started the book, if you tried to do that research, you would really only come up with a few different types of reporting on this. You'd come up with people that are vendors talking about their, lists of here's 10 great Google Analytics alternatives. Oh, ours is number one.

Jason: But we're totally unbiased. Or people just doing it for SEO purposes where they would list, here's the top 30 GA alternatives, and they've just, they've never used any of them and they're quoting from marketing company from those sites.

Jason: I wanted the research from actually someone that actually had used the products and was independent. And I was like, okay, why not me? I can do that. So that's how the book started and it just seemed like a timely, timely subject.

Roy: Absolutely. Yeah. So talk to me about that many of those products are paid products, right? That's the appeal of Google Analytics historically is that it's a pretty highly functioning analytics tool that is free, essentially. Did you have to go pay for a lot of those tools to test them? And what was that process?

Jason: Yeah, I did. First of all, I paid for a couple of websites. I wanted to actually run, this on real websites with real user data rather than sign up. Even some of these that have trial versions that you can use with some sort of example data, that example data is not really as real or it's the best case scenario for our tool. So I wanted to run this on real websites, but I didn't want to be like, Hey, client, I'm going to install 15 different analytics tools on your site. Hope you're cool with that. I started this whole process by buying a couple of websites through Flippa, which is an online business brokerage.

Jason: I bought a couple of sites that had a decent amount of traffic. Then I bought some of these products. Some of them I used the free trial for something like Snowplow, there wasn't really, an option and it's quite expensive and it's, more of an enterprise tool. So I use the trial for that versus some of the others like Matomo and Plausible that don't have trials at all. I just paid for the product. Yeah.

Roy: What, how did, what was the selection criteria? When you were looking at say the top 15 tools? Is it just the ones that have the most kind of visibility or how did you make that selection?

Jason: Yeah and this is a good question cause this is a really important part of my process. I wanted to have a method, a rigorous methodology in order to pick these tools rather than being like, here's three that I'm familiar with. Here's three that are popular in the industry and people are talking about.

Jason: And so that's why I worked from what was most used currently. I used stats from BuiltWith and that spider the internet and say okay, here's all the sites that are using Matomo because I've detected their sensor on the page, their tracker on the page. So I started from a list of all the top ones by usage, and then I filtered it down a little bit. I excluded ones that didn't have any way for me to get into the product without going through enterprise onboarding, which didn't really make sense for me. That's why I don't include Adobe, which is the one that most people have requested that I don't have. Like, why didn't you include Tool X? Is definitely the most common feedback that I've gotten.

Jason: Even though I do include quite a few tools. There are a few like Adobe and Piano analytics that didn't have any way to get into the product other than, buying the full enterprise version and going through enterprise onboarding and things like that, which is not something I wanted to do. Then I did also exclude Yandex and Baidu cause I didn’t think it was appropriate to include those. The methodology I used is just like anything that has more than 0.1% installation base within the top 1 million websites. 0.1 doesn't sound like a lot, but you’d be surprised to some of the ones you hear people talk about frequently that don't even have that level of installation base.

Jason: I wanted to be pretty rigorous in terms of picking which ones I used. So like I didn't miss things. For example, I reviewed Chartbeat even though it's not one that you really hear people talk about because it’s kind of a niche product for the publishing industry but if you're in the publishing industry, it's like I gotta have one. I didn't see a reason to exclude it, so I included it. I talk in my review about how like this only really, this is a particular tool that's geared for the publishing industry geared for real-time analytics. If that's you, then great. Check out this product. If you're an e-commerce site, then it's totally irrelevant to you. I still consider that to be somewhat of a general tool enough to include it. But it isn't one that I would've included if I was just like, Hey, name the top 10 or 15 tools out there. Yeah. So that's basically how I picked.

Roy: What are you seeing as some of the major differences? If you use Google Analytics as the baseline that most people would be familiar with? What are some of the major differences, some of these other tools bring to the game that might be better or might even be worse than what people would be used to with Google?

Jason: Yeah. I broke things down into three different categories of products. So I broke them down into like traditional web analytics tools, things like, universal analytics and I also put Matomo and Piwik Pro in there; and these are things that like really match the page view based likethe paradigm that we're used to.

Jason: That can be like, really still good for a lot of people. There's a lot more development in product analytics and that's my second category, product analytics. That's things like Amplitude and PostHog, things that are event-based. Then the third category that I have is simplified analytics, which are things like Plausible or Fathom or CloudFlare that are like really very basic. And the thing that, I see when people talk about Google Analytics alternatives is that people say, oh, what's the best Google Analytics alternative? And there isn't really one answer for that.

Jason: There's the what's the best for your particular site and use case. And that could be like Piwik Pro if you're doing something where Universal Analytics was a good fit and you're a bigger website, that could be your best alternative and that's still very much in that, that universal analytics mold versus, if you're a small content website, if you need a like my own website for my company, it's just a few pages of content and some blog articles.

Jason: I use Plausible for that and that's a great fit because I don't need more data. So there are others, real sort of trends where what was once like, oh everybody used Webtrends. Everybody used Omniture or Urchin or GA that were all, they're all similar and now, there's, the web does so many different things and there's so many different types of tools that specialization has occurred and we've got a lot of different possible paths to go down and GA is just one of those.

Roy: I know Google has done a lot of work, especially with some of the data restrictions and laws in Europe and California and places like that. They're doing a lot of work with data modeling to try to ensure a more accurate reporting. Are you seeing that kind of investment or functionality with some of these other tools?

Jason: Yeah, I feel like that's a two-part question. The first is when you talked about regulation and the EU, like that's been interesting with the book is that it's really been much more popular in the EU even though I'm obviously based in the US and American and that's where most of my contacts are, but there are a lot more people looking to switch in the EU because of regulation. Everyone's asking oh, is Google Analytics illegal? That's a kind of hard question to give a yes-no answer for but it does mean that if you're in, under GDP or in the EU, of course then you could say that people in the US are under the GDPR as well in some ways, but it's a much bigger concern there. So the idea of using something other than Google is a bigger issue and a more pressing issue.

Jason: But as far as your specific question about modeling happening on other platforms, yes and no. Again, that's a sort of multiple paths question where you've got some of these tools that are focused on tools that don't need consent or likely don't need consent.

Jason: I hate to say it like, you don't need consent at all but something like, again I'm not talking about Plausible that it uses user agent and IP and then hashes that, and then like rotates the salt that they use for the hash every day. So there is really no concept of a recurring user beyond that one day and so they don't really need to do that kind of modeling because they're able to capture most of the data to start with. They're still subject to ad blockers, of course you can work around that but that's not as big a thing as some of the other ones where they're the ones that are cookie-based and likely do need consent.

Jason: You do see that trend, but I think Google is in the lead on that, for better or for worse. I don't love the idea of defaulting to data driven attribution within GA4. I think that's going to bite a lot of people after that switch happens and they don't realize some of these changes that have been made for them.

Jason: Even if you could, you might argue that, hey, like these modeled conversions are more accurate. Web analytics data has always been directional. We've always been missing some of the data, whether it was back in the day people didn't run JavaScript or if it was people running ad blockers.

Jason: Now it's people, those things, plus people that haven't given their consent. We've always been, it's always been directional data. It's always been missing information and so like this idea of, oh now we're modeling based on what we think the missing information is. You're introducing more complexity to something that's already pretty complex.

Jason: I would, I personal preferences to when possible use like the quote-unquote real numbers rather than the model numbers. As you're talking the model numbers or you're like this is a modeled number, but it's actually only based on some of the data anyways. You're just adding caveat on top of caveat with some of this stuff. I understand why it's being done and it is necessary I think but my preference would be instead of trying to collect more data and then modeling what you miss, try to collect less data in a way that you can collect a larger percentage of the data and use other numbers.

Roy: Yeah, for sure. I think anybody who deals with data on a regular basis is also just inherently skeptical of modeling, just when it's a black box, you don't know exactly what's going into it or what the elements are and it just doesn't smell right sometimes.

Jason: And people that have been dealing with Google Ads have been seen working with this kind of model data for a number of years now and comes up a lot.

Jason: The idea of, what is 0.2 of a conversion? What does that mean? That can be tricky and ours talk about this idea of having confidence in your data, right? Like when you know stakeholders, once they hear a certain number of caveats, then they just lose faith in the data itself which is really a problem. You want people to be able to make data-driven solutions, but in the back of their minds, if they don't understand all the why these caveats are there, then you get in a situation where they just don't trust the data. So we don't trust the data because we know how many caveats there are, but we don't trust it but yet we also know that it is true, in which ways it's true and useful. So when you have a situation where what is this? What does this modeling mean exactly? Oh well, it doesn't include people X, Y, and Z. How can this be accurate at all? And then you just give up on the whole idea of data-driven decision-making. That's really a problem.

Roy: Yep for sure. And we run into that problem too with clients and executives who if you have two analytics tools on your website, say you have Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, and they look at the numbers and try to compare them their automatic assumption is that something's broken.

Roy: It's like you have to go through that process of explaining these different definitions. They use different models, they're implemented differently.

Jason: Yea, leet me explain hyper log to you.

Roy: But that, their initial knee jerk is that this must not be accurate because they're both not the same. How do you have different reporting with tools that are on the site?

Jason: Yeah and that's something going to and continue to be a problem. I think segues into this time that we have people running multiple tools. In the day of Universal Analytics heyday, it was ubiquitous. It still is pretty ubiquitous. It was the main source of truth for a lot of places. Now, what is that? If we're running like GA4 and Amplitude and maybe something else, like they're never going to match. That's just the way it is like you say.

Jason: But how do we get teams communicating when they're not even starting from the same metrics? So they're starting from the same ideas. If the marketing team is starting from GA4 and they're looking at the way things are defined in there, and the product team is starting from Amplitude and looking at the way things are defined in there it makes communication and collaboration really hard.

Jason: It's going to really require a greater degree of education in terms of what these tools do. But then also I would hope a certain amount of trying to extend that particular tool rather than immediately jumping to another tool. And that's something I want to make clear with my book and this idea that I'm reviewing a bunch of tools. I've always been interested in tools and I think it's an interesting thing to talk about and a lot of people do but it's really more about how you use the tool and if you're running three different tools and they're all just stock installed and you got three different teams using three different tools, you're just setting yourself up for trouble versus maybe you have one tool and it can't do a hundred percent of what you want, but you've extended it and customized it for you, and all your teams are using that tool. You're just, you're going to get a better result from that and it's going to be cheaper.

Roy: What are some of the hurdles that you've seen for people that are used to or could potentially be in place for people that are used to Google Analytics and they want to explore some of these other tools, what are some of the cautions that you'd have?

Jason: It's the same as dealing with GA4, right? GA4 is so different than UA you have to really learn a lot about how each tool works at a fundamental level but again, depends on the tool, right? If you're moving from universal analytics to Piwik Pro, it's actually going to be an easier migration than UA to GA4 because it's pretty similar versus if you're moving from, a UA to Amplitude or UA to PostHog or something like that, then you know it's going to be more of a learning curve. I think that probably the biggest things I would say is related to how you get support and how you learn things.

Jason: No other alternative has the community of GA. It's so much bigger than all the others that like, there's no SEMO or Java out there for publishing great content on, a weekly basis for a tool other than GA. So if you're using one of each other tools, you're going to rely more on the vendor and that's going to mean probably that you're going to want to pay. People have to get used to the idea that analytics probably costs money. If you're paying like money for your analytics team, why aren't you paying money for your analytics tool? GA has really warped our idea of how this should work.

Jason: That something that collects billions of hits and stores data forever, of course GA doesn't store data forever but UA did, and it's free. We gotta adjust our ideas about that. Then if you're working with a vendor, a lot of the knowledge sits at that vendor but that vendor also is likely to give you better support than Google did because Google doesn't really give you any.

Roy: Support is pretty non-existent for Google products.

[00:31:17] Jason: Yeah. Even if you're paying, you get good support if you're paying for 360, you'll get support from the person that the agency that sold you it, but you won't get anything from Google. Versus if you purchase, I keep using the same examples, but if you purchase from Amplitude you're going to get good support from Amplitude. That one, in particular, has a growing community but it still has a lot less out there in terms of the recipes, the pre-built stuff, the deep dives on blog posts for particulars about that.

[00:31:59] Jason: That's not going to be around if you switch. You're going to want to pay for support, probably. You're going to want to work with an agency that has a lot of experience with that particular platform. Yeah, I guess that's probably the biggest thing.

[00:32:16] Roy: Now I know that one of the great things about GA and I think that people become dependant on is the integration with Google Tag Manager in making it easier to implement across different types of sites. Especially with GA4, that integration is really tied into being able to use Google Tag Manager (GTM).

[00:32:42] Roy: What are some options for deploying these other tools that you've used? Theoretically, you probably could use Google Tag Manager for some of the deployments but is it more of a manual process?

[00:32:54] Jason: So for all of the tests I did, I actually did deploy through GTM. Some of them I also deployed directly on the site for testing purposes and to see how it worked.

[00:33:08] Jason: But you certainly could use GTM for pretty much any of these. It doesn't have, some of these have built-in templates in GTM either pre-built or more likely in the community but a lot of them have official ones in the community that you can use. You can pretty easily deploy most of these through GTM still, you don't get a level of integration. Some of these do have their own tag managers; such as Matomo and PiwikPro have their own tag managers that you can use to deploy it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend, if you're using switching to those for example, if you're going to switch to PiwikPro and you're already using GTM and you've got a whole bunch of tags in GTM, I would recommend for those people that they stick with GTM and deploy PiwikPro through GTM rather than switching their whole tag management basis over to PiwikPro.

[00:34:18] Jason: . Versus if you don't have a whole lot in GTM, if GTM is really just your GA tags, then that makes switching over to a different tag manager a lot more reasonable. Then some of these again, like Matomo and Piwik have more and better tools available as far as things like consent management. Rather than using an external CMP, you could use one of these tools built in CMPs and have everything in the same place.

[00:34:55] Jason: Some of the others more in the product analytics space, if we're talking to something like Snowplow that's going to require more work on the instrumentation side. That can be pretty challenging to implement and I would say the same thing about many of the ones in the product analytics space.

[00:35:317] Jason: We've been talking about Amplitude and Amplitude in a situation where somebody wants to switch to Amplitude and they drop the tag on the site and then they expect data and it doesn't work that way. You've got an instrument, you've gotta build reports. It doesn't come with things out of the box.

[00:38:39] Jason: Some follower may even say even more so be prepared to do some work for instrumentation. If you were dealing with most of these product analytics ones, some of the ones do have auto-event tracking like PostHog has auto event tracking.

[00:36:03] Jason: So everything that you click on is generating an event and then you're defining which events you want to do reporting on, but there's still instrumentation work in that. Even though you're not having to define what all the events are, you're still having to say: what are the events that I want to use for my reporting.

[00:36:22] Jason: One of the things I talk about in the book that I would like to see in theory, is this idea of doing more in the data layer. Especially if you're using multiple tools. Imagine if you're using both GA4 and let's pick a different product like Heap.

[00:36:45] Jason: Then and if you want to take these events rather than instrumenting twice, you want to instrument once in the data layer and say if it's an add to cart button, your add to cart button pushes an event into the data layer. Then in your tag manager, say GTM, you pick that up and then you fire off whatever events to whatever your analytics tool is. So you're moving, you're taking that instrumentation. It's a little more work to instrument, but you're taking that instrumentation logic and you're making it more configurable. You're making it more independent of the particular implementation platform.

[00:37:34] Jason: Rather than, when we think of GA events, we might think of the GA Universal Analytics GA functions, right? GA blah, blah, blah to fire an event. I'm saying do that with data layer, pick up the event in GTM, and then fire that off to GA4 and Amplitude.

[00:37:58] Jason: I'm not sure, I haven't seen a lot of people do that. There's still different sorts of standards for the GA data layer versus Adobe's definitions. We're ways off from that but that's a way that I would like to see and the end could make your implementation more tool agnostic.

[00:38:19] Roy: Talk to me a little bit about dashboarding and reporting. One of the nice things historically with Google has been its integration with Looker Studio, formerly Data Studio. Obviously, most companies have gotten used to free dashboarding and not having to go buy something like Tableau or something like that to do their reporting and dashboards.

[00:38:45] Roy: Do most of these tools have some sort of integration with Looker or do they have a similar Looker Studio type of interface that they can build custom reporting?

[00:38:55] Jason: Kind of varies. Most of them do not. This is again an advantage that Google has, is this whole old, GMP and the Looker Studio and Looker and are ubiquitous integration everywhere. Some of the tools, like the simplified tools, don't tend to have that. If you need reporting that you're usually going to have to get it directly out of that tools dashboard itself. Some tools, some of the more commonly used ones do have integrations with Looker Studio.

[00:39:39] Jason: Some of the connectors, like you might have to buy the connectors. You might have to buy it from Supermetrics or something. But a lot of them do have those connectors. So you could continue to use Looker Studio and that's probably what I would recommend for most people.

[00:39:58] Jason: For the very simplified ones, I would just suggest just go get it directly from the dashboard cause you're probably doing more ad hoc reporting rather than creating these dashboards that bring data together from three or four different places. So it is going to be more difficult and there isn't much Homo Dash or something that's similar. There's not like a clone of that or a clone of Looker Studio. I still really want to call it Data Studio every time.

[00:40:39] Roy: I do all the time. It's taken, I've had to literally consciously make myself call it Looker Studio. Especially since the URL is still Data Studio.

[00:40:48] Jason: Oh, I thought they updated. Is this still?

[00:40:50] Roy: I don't think so.

[00:40:56] Jason: That's going to be a challenge, but depending on the tool, like if you're in Piwik Pro that's more similar to Universal Analytics, you may not necessarily be wanting to create an external dashboard. You might not need it.

[00:41:13] Jason: Versus if you're in Snowplow. Snowplow has no, there is no reporting interface. The reporting interface I think I say in the book, the reporting interface is an S2L prompt. That's a tool for somebody that's already using, Tableau or Power BI or something. Or they already have some sort of practice where they really just need the data collection part of the ecosystem.

[00:41:50] Jason: So yeah, a lot of these tools, they don't really have a big impact on the dashboarding side of things. Whatever tool you pick, you will want to check to make sure that it does have that integration since unlike live Google not everything has that integration and you aren't going to find that everywhere.

[00:42:15] Roy: Yep. All right. So I'm going to ask you a really unfair question and prefacing with it that most of these tools, some of them have very specific applications, they're not necessarily right for every company. What are your top two favorite tools that you were working with?

[00:42:32] Jason: So in the book, I label a few favorites per category. In the sort of traditional web analytics category PiwikPro is my favorite. If you've worked with Matomo, it's somewhat similar. If you've worked with UA, it will feel similar.

[00:42:57] Jason: In the simplified area, Plausible is my favorite. I mentioned them before too. I use them on my own website. There's not much to it. A lot of people talk about oh, I just switched to Fathom or Plausible or whatever. Then you really didn't need all that was in GA to start with because you went from 500 dimensions to like 10. It's a simple product, but, sometimes simple is good. I think that they've been doing a good job.

[00:43:37] Jason: In the product analytics realm, PostHog and Amplitude are my two your favorites. For different types of companies, Amplitude is more on the enterprisey side if you have a big website with a lot of different functions. Like if you have need of the product analytics thing and you've got mobile as well and you're willing to do the work and you're interested in collaboration. Like you have a whole team of analysts, then I think Amplitude is really excellent and really a high quality product.

[00:44:25] Jason: And then I like plug sorry, I like PostHog also in that category. For say, if you're a SaaS startup and you want product analytics and some other stuff as well. PostHog has other things in it like a session recording built into the platform. They call it, I think they call it like a product OS platform.

[00:44:50] Jason: It's got not just the basic web analytics and product analytics stuff, but it's also got things like the session recording and having that all under one roof. Like I mentioned before, it has auto-event capture, so you don't need to do a lot of work to set it up and tag things.

[00:45:11] Jason: It's a smaller company and it's a newer product, so that's maybe not the best fit if you're talking enterprise. But if you're like, I see that as a great tool for something in the SaaS startup that has a product and they want to track users through that product and then connect that to session capture or something like that. That could be a really good fit there.

[00:45:40] Jason: So yeah, those are probably the, I think you said name three, I named four. Don't make me pick.

[00:45:47] Roy: Right? Yeah. That's like picking a favorite child or something. Yeah. So you've mentioned your book. Where can our listeners go get it?

[00:45:57] Jason: GAalternatives.guide is the URL net.

[00:46:03] Jason: That's our redirect, my quantable.com website. It gives you the options to buy it from Amazon or buy it from Gum Road. Gum Road has the ebook and PDF versions. Then Amazon, if you want a printed copy you can also get it on for Kindle on Amazon. Yeah, that's where you can get it.

[00:46:27] Roy: And we will also link to that information in our, when we post the video on the podcast as well, so that way people can get to that. Really appreciate you taking some time today to talk to us. This is very interesting. Obviously, this is an area that's near and dear to our hearts. We're always looking at other options for our clients and for the teams that we work with and obviously, like I said, there's some frustration with GA4 right now and I think a lot of people are looking at what is out there that could work for them.

[00:46:57] Jason: Yeah. A topic, obviously, that I have a lot of interest in. So great to be able to talk a little bit about it.

[00:47:05] Roy: Well great. And like I said, thank you very much for joining us today and we'll, as you get more data and collect other information about tools, we'd love to have you back and talk about those in the future as well.

[00:47:15] Jason: Yeah. The future versions of the book where I continue to evaluate more and more by version, five, I'll be up to a hundred different options or something. I don't think so.

[00:47:24] Roy: Right, especially as the market keeps going crazy. Yeah.

[00:47:29] Jason: Sounds good.

[00:36:44] Roy: All right. See. Talk you, Jason.

HOW TO Build a GA4 CONVERSIONS Dashboard in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:16:33 GMT

Sometimes reporting on conversion data in Looker Studio is...challenging.

Have you searched in vain for things like conversion rate in Looker Studio when you're using GA4 data? Same. We take a look at how you can use calculated metrics to report on conversion rate, average order values, and metrics from specific events and marketing channels.

Are you testing to increase conversions? Should you be?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 14:13:08 GMT

A/B Testing Can Help Increase Conversion Rates. But is it right for you?

Google recently announced that it's sunsetting it's free A/B testing tool, Google Optimize. Do you care? Should you? We take a look at some of the challenges and best practices for A/B testing, why Google may be making this decision, and whether testing can really increase your conversion rates and help you business.

Build a GA4 Dashboard in Looker Studio

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:50:53 GMT

Looker Studio (Data Studio) provides better data visualization than GA4

The data visualization and usability of GA4's reporting is...not the best. You can produce much better data visualization and dashboards using Google's free dashboard and reporting tool, Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). We take a look at how you can build an executive dashboard from scratch.

Over 82% of Multifamily Websites Are Not ADA Compliant

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:52:47 GMT

The majority of apartment websites are at risk of an accessibility lawsuit

A study conducted by the team here at Apotheca shows that 82% of multifamily websites are not compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines, putting them at risk of lawsuits and legal action. Over 97% of the websites in the study are either not compliant, or at risk of non-compliance.

Apotheca’s study reviewed the homepages of hundreds of multifamily property websites from across the United States, and scanned the sites for common ADA compliance issues . “Many of the issues we found are common in other industries as well,” said Roy Bielewicz, principal at Apotheca. “Non-compliant sites are more difficult to read for people with vision impairments or disabilities, as well as website reader software. Further, they are challenging to navigate using keyboard commands for those with motor impairments.” All of these issues, he noted, are against ADA guidelines and can lead to lawsuits, in addition to limiting access for a significant portion of web users.

In 2018, the DOJ clarified that websites are considered places of public accommodation and should therefore comply with the ADA Title III. US courts refer to WCAG 2.1 AA as the accessibility standard. Since 2018, lawsuits related to ADA compliance have increased over 300%.

Websites in the multifamily industry are particularly at risk of lawsuits, since they must also comply with fair housing and equal opportunity laws that also protect people with disabilities.

“ADA compliance is something that many multifamily management companies have just recently become aware of,” said Bielewicz. “Unfortunately, some of them are becoming aware of just how serious this is because they’ve been the subject of lawsuits.

“An estimated 20% of the population has some form of disability,” Bielewicz said, “which means that the majority of multifamily sites are not as usable for this population as they could, and should be. This is a large audience segment that is not being effectively marketed to.”

The full study is available at : https://www.apothecamarketing.com/multifamily-ada-report

You're Going to NEED BigQuery with GA4 (Google Analytics)

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 20:38:13 GMT

Google Doesn't Want to Store Your Data Anymore (For Free)

GA4 is going to be the default Google Analytics version in July(!), and Google has made it increasingly clear that you're going to need to integrate its data warehousing tool, BigQuery , if you want reports that extend beyond 14 months, or if you want your Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) dashboards to feature multiple data points and widgets. We look at why and talk a little bit about BigQuery and its possible costs.

Don't risk losing your data by not being prepared for the switch over from Google Universal to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)!

GA4 Quotas:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/data/v1/quotas

Google Analytics 4 Mistakes

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:59:33 GMT

Make sure you check your GA4 implementation.

So you have GA4 implemented on your site. But did you forget anything? We take a look at some common things people forget or overlook, as well as what you can do to better prepare to switching over to GA4 once Google Universal is sunset.

More About Marketing Attribution:

https://youtu.be/sEXmGb9wCgw

GA4 versus Google Universal:

https://youtu.be/zDyzPFCvwEQ

SEO & PPC Reporting in GA4:

https://youtu.be/DsLum17oaIc

Scraping Websites with Google Sheets: Power SEO & Competitive Research Tool

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 16:00:37 GMT

You can use Google Sheets for SEO audits, competitive research, and more!

Have you ever wanted a quick, convenient, low cost way to pull content from a website? Or how about doing a quick audit for SEO, where you can look at H1 or title tags? Well, you can do all of that and more with Google Sheets!

Google Sheets has a number of functions that will allow you to import structured content from a webpage. That structured data can be anything from a title tag, meta description, H1 or H2 tag, prices, reviews, or even tables of data. We'll take a look at some of those that you'll find most useful.

IMPORTXML Function

The IMPORTXML function can pull structured data from a number of sources, including HTML, XML, CSV, TSV, and RSS feeds.

Just like any spreadsheet formula, the function itself is pretty straightforward. You'll just need:

A reference URL (or multiple URLs) from which you want to pull data or content.
And the "XPath" of the element in which the data is contained or accessible. (We'll show you what this means below.)

For instance, to scrape a page's H1 tag (or to see if it has one), you would enter the following formula:

=IMPORTXML("[a website URL]","//h1")

In the image above, you can see that instead of manually inserting a URL, we added it to the sheet and then referenced its cell in the formula. This way you can add multiple URLS and pull their respective data in as needed.

Other common XPath types that would be typical for SEO are:

Page title: //title
Page meta description: //meta[@name=’description’]/@content
Page H1: //h1
Page links: //@href

Note that when using @href, you'll only want one URL per sheet, since this will pull in all the links on the page you're referencing.

Pulling Content From a Website

We sometimes find it necessary to pull content from a client's website, that may not be easily accessible in their CMS. To avoid having to cut and paste blog articles, or product descriptions, you can use Google Sheets to pull that for you.

In this case, it will take some knowledge of HTML, but Google Chrome's Inspect tool makes this relatively painless.

In the image above, you can see that we wanted to pull the products that are listed on a page, along with their prices.

First, we need to identify how this data appears on the website.

In this case, we know that the name of the products are in a span class called "title", while the brand is, yep you guessed it, "brand". We want the product name, since there may be multiple products on this page by the same company. So we'll create the formula:

=IMPORTXML(A1,"//span[@class='title']")

This will then populate our sheet with the products on this page that have the class "title" as you can see in the image below.

Now that we have the products listed on the page, let's pull in the price.

Again, we're going to look at the page code, and we can see that there is a class for "current_price".

So we'll add this formula to our Google Sheet:

=IMPORTXML(A1,"//span[@class='current_price']")

This will pull in the prices for the products that we pulled previously. Using this method, we could potentially also list individual product pages, and pull in not only price, but SKU, product description, and product reviews by replacing the "class" variable with the appropriate data from the page.

Importing Table Data

Data scraping in Google Sheets isn't limited to just individual elements on a webpage. You can also import entire tables worth of data.

In this case, say we want to import a list of the hottest peppers from Wikipedia. We know that this is the second table on this page (through trial and error).

We would just need to create a sheet, and reference the URL, and the table number (for instance the first or second table on the page in this case).

The formula looks like this:

=IMPORTHTML(A1,"table",2)

Which gives us the data below.

Conclusion

As you can see from these examples, Google Sheet's IMPORT function is a great tool for quick audits, competitive analysis, or content imports. It can save you a ton of time and hassle, and best of all it's free!

10 Easy Ways to Recycle and Repurpose Content

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 18:36:35 GMT

Coming up with content can be fun and exciting! Some content comes easy to you; photos from an event, the latest trends, new videos or podcasts, and updates are all easy ways to produce content. However, if you’re a content creator you may know that coming up with content can sometimes be exhausting if you have writer’s block.

We’re here to show you a clever way to keep producing content even on those days where your creative juices aren’t flowing. Take a look at content that you’ve shared in the past weeks, months, or even years. Now, dust it off and recycle it!

Yes, you can easily repurpose old content to be fresh and new and ready to be reshared again!

WHAT IS CONTENT REPURPOSING?

It is. . .

Using an old blog post and updating it with new information
Creating short video clips from a podcast to share on social media
Sharing an infographic created from the data of a blog

It is not. . .

Reposting an old blog post without any kind of context on why you’re resharing it
Sharing someone else’s content on your platform

IDENTIFY CONTENT TO RECYCLE

Now you have to figure out what content will be good to recycle. Look at all your content ask yourself:

Is this content evergreen?
Does it align with a recent trend or is it still relevant?
Can I tie it to something else my business is promoting?
What is the new information or value that I will be adding to it?
Did it perform well?

REFRESH YOUR CONTENT

Repurposing content should be time saving because you are creating content from content and reusing it in the same place or elsewhere. Whether its with new sources, new data, or using the content itself as a source, you have to add some kind of new value or relevant information to the content.

Another great reason for repurposing content is that different audiences prefer different platforms. You’re able to reach more people when you widen your reach with multiple content sources. Some may prefer to watch or listen to information while others might prefer reading.

Here are some easy examples of how to repurpose content:

REPURPOSING BLOG CONTENT

If you write blogs, you can definitely take advantage of this marketing strategy. Converting text-heavy content into smaller, shorter formats is one of the easiest ways to repurposed content.

Keep in mind that most of these can be done in reverse as well, so if we say you can turn a blog into a YouTube video, you can also turn a YouTube video into a blog post.

1. Blogs to YouTube Videos
Turn “How-to” blog posts into a Youtube video. You already have the content knowledge, all you have to do is get in front of the camera. Or if you don’t feel like showing your face you can do a screen recording of the how-to process with a voiceover.

2. Blogs to Short Social Media Videos (Reels or TikToks)

Most blog posts can be repurposed into a video so don’t just limit yourself to Youtube. You can create a short video from specific key takeaways from the blog post. You can these use these short videos, whether it’s you talking in front of the camera or demonstration video, on social media as well. If you can make multiple short videos, think about making it into a series!

3. Blogs to Infographics

Another easy way to recycle content from a blog is creating an infographic from it. You can use images, icons, percentages, and graphs to demonstrate specific information from the blog. Infographics can be visually appealing and is a different way for readers to consume information.

4. Blogs to eBook or downloadable PDF

Another great option to blog posts is creating an ebook or downloadable PDF for readers. The new repurposed blog can highlight the key takeaways while the downloadable content goes in-depth into the topic. You can also think about this a downloadable presentation.

5. Blogs to Podcast

Just like making a YouTube video, but only the audio. You know the content and you have all the resources to do it. You can even use the blog post as the script or outline to keep you on topic. You can also invite guests or experts in the subject to join you in the discussion.

6. Quote Thought Leaders

If you use a quote from a thought leader or reference a fact from a specific source you can use this to create graphics that can be published on social media. Some examples can be a quote from an expert or a source, a percentage from a specific data source, or simple facts in the industry or topic. You can then tie it back to the blog post if readers want to learn more about the topic.

7. Blogs to Newsletter

Turn a blog post into a newsletter which will help bring you more traffic. Email marketing is a great way to target specific audiences that can benefit from certain topics.

REPURPOSING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

We mentioned a few examples above, but there are so many others way to utilize content for social media.

8. Repost from other social media

Yes, reposting from Twitter to Instagram or Facebook is an easy way to repurposed content! Keep in mind that you will have to add some kind of value to this. For example, screenshotting an update on Twitter and then publishing it with a little more information on Facebook.

9. Using User-Generated Content

Reposting publicly published reviews are an excellent way to repurpose content! If you are wanting to make an announcement of a product or service, having a positive review is a great way to highlight certain aspects of your business.

10. Use Old Images

It’s time to dust off those old HD photos that you probably only used once or twice. Old photos can be used as backgrounds for social media posts, infographics, flyers, emails, and videos as well.

Conclusion

Remember, content recycling should be a part of your overall strategy not your only content creation strategy. Don’t solely rely on repurposing old blog posts for new content. This should be used on the correct content and when you can to maximize your efforts. If you overuse this strategy then it might backfire.

By using some of the repurposing content examples above you will be able to cut your content creation time and reach more people.

Our Go-To Technical SEO Tool - Screaming Frog Demo

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 18:56:19 GMT

You can get a "free" audit of your site with this SEO tool.

There are a lot of SEO tools on the market, many of which are super expensive. We take a quick look at Screaming Frog, our go-to technical SEO auditing tool that is also super affordable. At least the free version is.

Transcription:

If you're like us, you've found that SEO tools can be pretty expensive and so are audits. Having a company come in and do a full assessment on your website can cost a lot of money. Not that they're not important, but there are less expensive ways to get the job done and so we're going to a take a look today at one of our favorite SEO tools that is relatively affordable if you use the free version. So hang around and we'll take a look at it.

Hey guys, Roy from Apotheca Marketing. Today we're going to a take a look at Screaming Frog . It's one of our favorite go-to tools for auditing websites for SEO as well as just technical issues. It is not inexpensive if you use the full version of it. It is a very handy tool. It's something that we always like to keep in our arsenal. It's on caliber with certain things like SEMRush or Ahrefs; those will provide more insight into what people are searching for from a keyword perspective.

Screaming Frog is going to a look at what your site is about. It's going to a look at the structure of your site, it's going to a look at errors on your site, all the way down to images and stuff like that. So we're going to a take a look at it. The reason we do recommend this is because, again, the free version, will scan up to 500 pages on your site.

For most websites, for a lot of small business websites, that might be all they need. That might be much more than their site actually entails. For retailers, you're probably going to a need something more robust but you can still at least see some of the main issues with your site. You can scan, like I said, up to 500 pages. You can also then do another scan and just look at a product page if you didn't get to the product pages. You can at least look at if that page structure has issues, because it's probably going to a be every product page on your site is going to a have the same issues so you can get a good look of what is going on on your site just using the free version.

Let's dive in and take a look at it. So as you can see here, I have this pulled up; this is the Screaming Frog Interface. Let's just take a look at a site that we work with. This does have more than 500 pages, so you're going to a see it give an error for that. So you can see it says 500 pages. It's going to a conduct the scan and you can see it has this crawl status up here. It'll show you how it's crawling and then you can see a running total of things that it's encountering. It has everything from the robust txt to html, JavaScript, CSS, images, you name it; it's got it all in here. All right, that crawl is at 50 percent or a hundred percent now. Over here you can see what it crawled and these are the individual pages. They're also in some cases JavaScript files. They could be other types of files as well.

One of the things that I find helpful is to go over here and choose what it is we want to look at. In this case, we may want to take a quick look at HTML pages. We can see the structure of the page and then if you scroll, you can actually see other information. Whether it has not found title tags. So you can see the title tags. You can see the length of the title tags so you can optimize those. You can also see the description. Meta description. All of these, obviously, are super helpful and you can very quickly kind of go down through and see, for instance, is a page missing a meta description, which we can see they are here. Those are missing. We can also see if the title tags are missing. Just from that alone, it can be super helpful to see if those basic kind of things are missing from a site.

Now over here it does have an issues tab and one of the things you can look at over here is the total numbers, but then under issues it's going to a highlight things that are either warnings or that are highly problematic; it'll kind of rank them. In this case you can see that there's some canonical issues going on. H1 tags missing. It looks like there's one of those missing and then it shows you over here the actual page that that is occurring on. So you can see like, okay, well that one might be an issue.

You can go through and look at highly problematic issues on the site very quickly. You can also look for broken links. You can look for those meta descriptions that are missing, the page titles that are missing. Again, it breaks it all out for you right here, which is super, super convenient.

Over here, you can actually then go through, and you know, obviously we showed the the HTML page stuff altogether, but here you can look at specific H1 tag. So again, I'm going to a go back to all, and this just shows for each page their H1 tag. This is helpful to also go through and take a look at potentially images that are way too large. This is a good way to scan for those. You can look at and actually filter large images that might be way too big . So you can see like this guy is 1.3 megabytes; that's a pretty large image, especially when all of these other ones are coming in much smaller.

Again, you can go through and look at, for instance, just the meta descriptions. You can see the length, make sure it's hitting the ideal length, and you can see whether they're indexable or not and all of that good kind of stuff. Site structure is also important so you can see if there's stuff on here for instance that you don't want to get indexed. You can then go through and add that to your robots txt. Just make sure that those pages are not getting indexed if it's stuff that you don't want there. The structure will tell you like what folders and categories it's seeing and whether or not they're reachable. One of the things I like to do is take a look at the images on the pages and then you can even see down here whether they have alt tags or not.

This one will tell you all the details about the image, whether it's indexible, it's size. Remember this was the big one that we saw but you can also then take a look at whether they have alt tags, so this will show you where this image has been used and whether it has alt texts. You can see for instance, this image for some reason does not have alt texts in all of its occurrences.

This is a great way to go through and look and make sure that all of your images have alt tags cause they should. We talked about that actually in a recent video about how not only is that good for SEO and important for SEO, but if you don't have basic usability and accessibility stuff like alt tags and like descriptions on your site, you could be setting yourself up for a lawsuit. We'll put a link to that in the video, in the description below. You don't want that, you don't want a lawsuit, I can guarantee you. So this is a good way to be able to go through and say, Hey, all of these images need alt tags. The other nice thing is that you can export this and so once you've gone through and kind of figured out what's going on with the site, if you want this as an an Excel spreadsheet, super easy to export.

You can do that right here and you can actually then also send that to Google Sheets if you want. We're just taking a brief look at, you know, some of the basic functionality that you get with this free version, but there is a lot more stuff that you can do with the paid version. There's a lot that we're not going to a dive into today.

For instance, you can restrict the number of product pages that it scans so that you know if they're all going to a have similar problems and you have 10,000 products or 20,000 products, you don't need to scan all of them probably. You can get a sense of what's going on with some of those pages without spending your crawl budget on that.

Again, it's one of those things that as you play around with it, you're going to a find great information about what's going on in your site. It's a quick way to do an assessment without having to spend a whole bunch of money. Again, it's not going to a tell you about keywords that people are searching for.

It's not going to a tell you about competitors’ keywords that they're using and that they're bidding on, or that they're ranking for an SEO. That's the realm of tools like SEM Rush and Ahrefs. This is really much more about your technical SEO on your website and some of the things that you can improve easily.

Again, it's free. We highly recommend Screaming Frog. We don't make any money by telling you that. We are not an affiliate or anything, but it's something that you can download and start using tomorrow and you know, see more about your.

Hey, if this was useful for you, let us know. Leave comments. What tools do you like to use for SEO and what have you found useful? Are there other tools that are free that you also like to use, or low cost? We'd love to hear about it and if you could give us a like, that would be great. And of course subscribe as we do more content like this, and we'll talk to you soon.

Are You Making These Common Marketing Analytics Mistakes?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 22:38:14 GMT

Don't let these common analytics mistakes impact your marketing programs.

Accurate data and reporting can mean the difference between a profitable business and one that's...well, not so profitable. We take a look at some of the common mistakes we see digital marketers making, and how you can improve your reporting, analysis, and tracking.

More About Vanity Metrics:

https://youtu.be/-0QL3hzGoJk

More About Marketing Attribution:

https://youtu.be/sEXmGb9wCgw

Hey guys, Roy here from Apotheca Marketing. You know, data is incredibly important to understanding how your marketing programs are working, right? Whether they're profitable, whether they're targeting the audiences that you want. They will tell you how people are using your website, but it's not the sexiest topic, right?

But it's one of the areas we see a lot of mistakes that are being made by digital marketers all the time. We want to talk about some of the things that you can do to make sure that you have the data that you need to be able to measure your programs, measure your users, and so you can make the most money profitably that you can.

So let's take a look. All right. Probably the biggest area that we see where people make mistakes with their data and leads them to making poor decisions about their marketing programs, is how their analytics is implemented. Again, this isn't the sexiest area. It's very technical, but doing a good implementation takes somebody who really knows what they're doing.

[00:01:06] Admittedly, there are content management systems and website platforms that allow you to just put your Google ID in there and it'll set up basic tracking for you. Usually, for a lot of sites, that's okay, but what it doesn't have is information about events and conversions and stuff like that out of the box.

[00:01:26] Now the other thing to keep in mind is that, that doesn't really work with Google Analytics four, which is taking the place of Universal Analytics in July of next year. So, you know, just popping some code in there and hoping that it works isn't going to do you any justice, and then you're not going to get the data that you need.

[00:01:42] So you need to make sure, from the get, that your Google Analytics is implemented correctly, or your Adobe Analytics or whatever platform you're using, that it's implemented correctly, that it's on all your pages, that it's tracking correctly, that your conversions are firing, that you're tracking the events that you want to track.

[00:02:00] Once you have that setup, you need to test it and make sure that your data is coming through correctly. Because if you don't, if you find out a month or two from now that you're missing some key metrics like shopping cart activity or something like that, you don't get it back. Once you lose that data, it's gone, and now you have a gap in your record and it makes it increasingly hard to do year-over-year comparisons or anything like that if those key metrics are missing. Even if you're sure that the implementation is correct, what we recommend is doing a regular audit; anytime someone touches the website, anytime something changes, go through and perform an audit. And again, making sure that all your pages are tagged correctly, that you're tracking the right metrics, that those conversions are coming through, all of the data is coming through correctly.

[00:02:56] The other thing that we see quite often is, and it's this, and we'll talk about it a little bit more later, but it's this idea that too many hands are in the cookie jar, right? A lot of times we'll see like somebody puts that base code onto the site and then all of a sudden their numbers are looking odd or they're doubling their traffic and it's because somebody else has come along and not realized it, or not paid attention and implemented code again, or through something like Google Tag Manager. Now what you have is you have the same Google account tracking twice and it's going to duplicate information and data. You're going to have suspiciously large traffic numbers, and incorrect data because again, it's double counting. You don't get back the real data.

[00:03:45] You just have to annotate that and realize that the data was incorrect going forward. That's why we recommend one implementation. We recommend using a tag management product like Google Tag Manager, so that you are sure that there's one instance that you're controlling and that it's the right instance.

[00:04:04] Now, there is some easy tools to use out there to make sure. One of the things that we use is the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics, Chrome plugin extensions and that will actually record all of the Google Analytics instances on your page. It'll show you whether you have GTM, it'll show you whether you have Universal Analytics or GA four, and it will show you duplicates. So it'll say like, this is on here a couple of times. So it's an invaluable tool just to make sure, you know, that you're checking that pretty regularly that somebody didn't inadvertently go and put the code on the site twice. Another thing to double-check with your implementation is how is it categorized, for instance, your marketing programs.

[00:04:47] To make sure that there's a consistent hierarchy to your UTM codes in Google, for instance, that the campaigns are called the same thing, that your ad groups are the same thing, that the sources are the same thing. Create a document, create a structure that outlines how you're going to talk about your marketing programs, and how you're going to track those because that way when you go into your reporting, you don't just have those helter skelter assortment of different campaigns. Was that a Facebook ad? Was it organic Facebook? What campaign did that fall under? Making sure that you have the taxonomy for your UTM tech and your marketing programs is super important, especially if somebody else is coming into your reporting that doesn't know anything about it, they can understand the structure.

[00:05:31] It also helps to make sure that that data is consistent over time. That you know what marketing programs you're talking about in your reporting. Same thing for products. Making sure that the products are categorized correctly, making sure that the product names are coming through correctly. That's really going to help your merchandising reporting if you're a retail company to make sure that you know you're reporting on all of those metrics consistently.

[00:05:58] So that you understand what products and categories are selling. The same thing with page names and titles and that type of stuff. Make sure that it's clear, concise, so that you can report on those easily. That it's not a jumbled mass like we do see with some clients. Unfortunately, the other thing in line with the implementations that is critical, especially for larger companies is to make sure that you’re filtering your employees out of your data. I know I've worked at companies in the past where when you log onto your computer at the office, it automatically goes to the website and you may have a call center or a customer service center that uses the website to actually walk people through trying to find stuff or to help them, or in some cases even place orders.

[00:06:44] So that’s your traffic. You're not interested in your traffic. You're interested in what your customers are doing and making sure that you've set up the correct filter to block your internal IP addresses so that you're not reporting on your inside data, your employee data, that will inflate user experiences.

[00:07:09] Sometimes it'll inflate bad things, like it'll lower your conversion rate, for instance, because they're not necessarily buying on the site, they're just landing on the pages and looking at them or whatnot. Now, the thing to be careful about here is making sure that you don't set up the wrong IP addresses.

[00:07:25] This is where it gets tricky because sometimes and we've seen this where people think that they're setting up a filter for their company's IP address. When actually their network is using an array of IP addresses or a bunch of them and you might be inadvertently blocking part of Spectrum or part of a local distributing company or something.

[00:07:52] The problem there is that you're now blocking a whole bunch of people that could be the potential customers that aren't your employees. So it's something that you want to be careful with. I would err on the side of not filtering your employees if you think there's a chance that you're going to filter real customers because you don't want to lose that data, especially if you don't have a call center.

[00:08:15] If it's not problematic for people visiting the site all the time, that's a decision that you'll have to weigh. But just realized that on the one side, it can throw off your data by showing too many visitors to the site if it's a whole bunch of employees coming. Conversely, you could be eliminating a whole bunch of customers when it's not that big a deal if you weren't blocking that information.

[00:08:37] Another thing that we see a lot is where disparate groups within a company will use different data sources and or different tools to report. It's extremely important that at the end of the day you have, especially if you're reporting, a bunch of you are consolidating reports to report to an executive team or the board or a client, that you have a single source of truth.

[00:09:04] What that means is that it's a consistent platform. It's a single platform that is measuring things the same. For instance, you may have Google Analytics installed on your website. You may also have Adobe Analytics installed, and you do not want to use one of those and then have somebody use the other, because those metrics are never going to math.

[00:09:28] Implementations of Google Analytics on the same site, if you have two different accounts, cause we've tested this, depending on how they're implemented, depending on where on the page they are, all of that stuff, you will have different metrics even between the same tool. So that is problematic. The other is that for instance, if you're reporting clicks from Google Ads or you're reporting clicks from Facebook, those are not going to match up with visits to the site.

[00:09:56] They're not going to match up to users on the site because there's inevitably going to be more clicks in that third-party system than people that actually made it and got recorded on the site. So trying to match up those numbers is never going to quite work. What you want to make sure that you're doing is that you're looking at one source of data.

[00:10:17] In line with that is having the same consistent data definitions. When people talk about traffic to the site, for instance, are they talking about users or are they talking about sessions? It's consistent definitions and setting a criteria for that to make sure that if you're working with a third-party agency, if you're working with other teams internally that you're not cross-reporting. That you're using the same definitions and the same metrics so that your reporting matches up. This particularly becomes important when you're doing things like conversion rates. If you're using conversion rates based on users, your conversion rate might seem smaller or larger, rather than if you're doing it by sessions.

[00:11:03] You have a lot more sessions than you have unique users and so you know that's going to throw off that data. Making sure that everybody on your team is using consistent definitions about what conversion rate is and what metrics they're using for traffic is going to make sure that you're all reporting apples to apples.

[00:11:21] The other thing to make sure that you're doing, depending on your marketing program, is reporting on the same attribution models. What that means is, and we have a video that we’ll link somewhere, what that means is that you want to look at how programs are getting credit for your marketing programs.

[00:11:41] What it does is it looks at different things like last click or in GA four, the default model now is an AI data-driven model that Google uses to determine which marketing program gets credit for that customer and for that sale or that lead. If your attribution is different, so for instance, some affiliate programs will use a 90-day window for attribution to give credit to an affiliate because that makes the program look better, more affiliates are more likely to get paid if it's a 90-day window. Most by default programs, most marketing programs for default, especially in Google Analytics, are 30 days. If one person is reporting on a 90-day window and another is reporting on 30, they're going to be essentially stealing data from each other. They're going to be stealing credit for those programs and it's not malicious I know. Well, maybe it is, but the numbers aren't going to match up and you need to make sure that those are the same when you're making a consideration about which marketing program is working correctly. That you're looking at those different attribution models to see, is one program working better than the other, and where should you allocate your funds.

[00:13:05] Seasonality is something that sometimes people forget about and they're reporting particularly if their data is new or if they don't have, for instance, Google Analytics four that hasn't been implemented for more than a year or something like that. People tend to focus on immediate data.

[00:13:24] So this week's performance. What we see a lot of times is you'll compare this week's performance with the prior week's performance, when in fact you should also be looking at the prior year because that's going to seasonality into consideration. You may have a drop in traffic, people might be freaking out.

[00:13:44] You may have a drop in sales, but is it a drop in sales that typically happens around this time of year? Is it something that is seasonal? Is it because of an event like a holiday or a Super Bowl, or you name it? By looking year over year, you're going to be able to understand those trends better than this myopic view of just that week that you're looking at the week prior.

[00:14:11] In line with that, you also want to make sure that you're extending your data far enough. You want to look at something more than just this week, because a drop in traffic this week, when you're only comparing that short period of time, may look dramatic but if you actually extend that data out and look at the larger view of the data, you may see that you're trending in the right direction.

[00:14:33] This is just a tiny little blip, that in a larger scheme of things doesn't even register as a drop in traffic. I've seen that where people kind of start panicking. They'll be like, oh my gosh sales are down, let's send an email. Let's do something to the marketing program and if you actually take a step back, it's like, no, this is just a normal little variation.

[00:14:54] That could be caused by weather, it could be caused by anything. That is not as dramatic as it seems when you're super focused on just that weekly or daily data. We see clients sometimes that will have an hourly chart of traffic and they'll get worked up about it. Sometimes that real-time traffic, it can be exciting but you know, if you take that step back, it may not be as big a deal as you think. We've talked about it in other videos, but reporting on vanity metrics is also something that we see a lot. Getting caught up on stuff that's not actually actionable. It could be something like, for instance, Facebook likes. Did that post get a lot of response?

[00:15:39] You know, is it trending? Is it whatever? Right. That can be great from a brand awareness perspective, but is it really actionable? You want to get your dashboards and your reporting to focus on stuff that is more actionable. What can you make decisions about? About your budget and about things that you change on the site or what you can test and not get caught up in those vanity metrics.

[00:16:04] We did a video about vanity metrics where we talked about it in a little bit more detail, so we'll put a link for that below as well. But just keep in mind that you want to try to focus on data that you can do something about. Because if you can't do anything about it, it's only interesting, it's not actionable.

[00:16:24] Analysis paralysis is something that we see with a lot of companies where you have just tons of data. You're collecting data about everything and you're tracking every possible event on a site, every click, everything that a person does; this is just a heap of data. When you have too much data that you're not looking at actually what is important for making decisions. You tend to not make decisions because you don't know where to start, and that's the paralysis part. You have so much data and so many reports that people don't know where to look. They're not actually getting an analysis of what is important.

[00:17:12] They're not seeing key metrics that are actionable. It's just a sea of data about interesting stuff. Hey, people are clicking here on the page. That's great. What does it tell me? What can I get from it? What can I glean from that to either make changes to the website or to the marketing programs? Just where they're clicking is not in and of itself important. Then there are lots of different metrics like that, that if you just have too many of them, you have a lot of, for instance, demographic detail. That's great if you know how to pull it out of the reporting and pull it out of the data and actually do something with it to analyze your art audiences and make decisions on that.

[00:17:58] Otherwise, that data's just sitting there. Nobody knows where to look at it; I've seen this where on a weekly basis, companies are producing these Excel spreadsheets that are just tab after tab after tab and it's a sea of data with just the lines and lines and rows and columns of data.

[00:18:15] You may have some charts and stuff thrown in, but it is overwhelming. What happens is people's eyes glaze over and they get that report, they don't really look at it and they don't know how to react to it and so they start ignoring it and you have data paralysis. It's where you need to have somebody that can take that distill it to what is important, and make arguments for why you don't necessarily need to spend all of your time doing reporting that nobody's looking at.

[00:18:49] Instead, doing a deep dive into the analysis to make decisions about your programs. That kind of leads into another issue that we see kind of related to data paralysis is just people not using their data. I can't tell you how many clients we have that kind of think that they have Google Analytics installed or they have another tool installed.

[00:19:13] We've had customers who have Adobe Analytics on their site and if you're familiar with Adobe Analytics, it is not an inexpensive tool. It's actually a very expensive tool and it's a great analytics platform but nobody in the company knows how to use it because maybe somebody that had championed it before had left the company or through layoffs or something like that.

[00:19:39] They don't have a team that knows how to use that tool. What happens is somebody comes in and they put Google Analytics on the site instead because that's what they're used to. They have all of this old stuff hanging out there that nobody ever looked at. They only have one tool on the site and they kind of can look at traffic and other stuff, but they don't really know what to make of it.

[00:20:04] This is where it would really help to have someone come in and create usable dashboards for you that you're going to look at on a regular basis. This is one of the reasons why we've started using, for instance, what was previously called Google Data Studio, which is now Google Looker.

[00:20:23] We use that to create dashboards for business leads and executives so that they don't have to learn a tool. They don't have to go in and learn Google Analytics and how to try to find the data that they're looking for and poke around because maybe the tool changed. This is going to become increasingly a problem if you look at Google Analytics four, which does not have a user-friendly user interface. You have to really kind of dig around to find the data that you're looking for and there are a lot of executives that just won't take the time to do that. So they're not going to look at the data.

[00:21:03] I'm sure you've experienced it too, where even if you send data to an executive, did they even look at it? They maybe glanced at it, but did they actually take time to digest it? That's usually because nobody bothered to actually analyze it. So just sending a dashboard is probably going to be overlooked. If you send a dashboard with an analysis of action items and things that you're seeing and why it's important that they look at it, you're going to get more engagement. They're going to end up using that data more and actually start a conversation about what you should be doing to make those changes. One of the things that we always like to do is, is not just lob a dashboard at somebody.

[00:21:50] We create dashboards for clients all the time in Looker that are available to them 24 hours a day and they never, ever access them unless we make an analysis point to that data, and reference it, and then maybe they'll go look. That's the way you get the conversation going and you get people using it is by pulling findings from it that is useful for it.

[00:22:17] This is just scratching the surface of some of the stuff that can go wrong or mistakes that people are making in their data and reporting. I'd love to hear from you guys. What some of the things that you run into that are challenges for you from a data perspective? In your reporting or dealing with executive teams or dealing with marketing teams and what you've done to kind of solve it.

[00:22:37] There's lots of data tools out there, there's lots of reporting tools and platforms and all of them tend to have some of the same problems with audience usage, implementation, and just consistency in definitions. Hey, if this was helpful give us a thumbs up and let us know in the comments if there's stuff that you are seeing or that you would like to see more of and hopefully we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

Is Google Data Studio Going Away?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 17:45:14 GMT

Looker Studio has replaced Google Data Studio

If you’re familiar with, or have been a user of Google’s Data Studio reporting and dashboard tool, it may have come as a bit of a surprise to you when it suddenly changed to Looker Studio on October 11, 2022!

So is Data Studio gone? What has changed? Is it still free to use?

Is Data Studio Gone?

The quick answer is no. And thank goodness! If you’re like us you’ve spent a lot, I mean, A LOT, of time building out dashboards and data integrations in Data Studio.

The brand “Data Studio” is gone, but the new Looker Studio has the same capabilities, look, and interface. In fact, right now the only change is the logo. The reports, data integrations and functionality are the same as they were previously as Data Studio. Even the URL is still the same: datastudio.google.com.

If you’re familiar with some of Google’s previous rebranding efforts, this abrupt change to Looker is par for the course (and just as clunky as other changes). Google said in its announcement, that the name change is part of its larger strategy to integrate all of its business intelligence data tools, including Looker Studio, Big Query, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Cloud SQL, etc., along with Looker (the paid version), which it acquired in 2019.

What Has Changed?

As of the writing of this blog, nothing has changed with the free version of Looker Studio . However, Google has said that it anticipates a greater integration of all of its BI tools under the Looker brand. It has also rolled out a Looker Studio Pro, which has essentially the same functionality, but is geared towards enterprise businesses that want greater control over access, and increased support.

In the near future, you will be able to add the paid Looker BI platform ( https://cloud.google.com/looker ), which is separate from Looker Studio, as a data source.

Is It Still Free to Use?

Yes. Looker Studio is free to use, just like Data Studio. As we mentioned above, there is a paid version called Looker Studio Pro, and of course the Looker by Google BI tool is also a paid enterprise data solution.

According to Google’s recent documentation, Looker Studio Pro offers more control over access and sharing of reports, and data sources. It has a new team workspaces option that allows for easy collaboration that goes beyond just sharing reports.

Start Using Looker Today!

If you haven’t explored Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio), we highly recommend that you give it a try. It’s a great way to create dynamic dashboards and reports that can include not only Google Analytics data, but date from Google Ads, other third party integrations, and even from spreadsheets.

And if you’ve tried to use the reporting and dashboard features in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll see very quickly that it makes sense to build many of these in Looker Studio, especially if you have non-analytics business users who need digestible data.

Resources:

Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio)
Looker Studio Pro
Looker (enterprise BI tool)

Is Your Site At Risk? ADA Compliance and What You Need to Know

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:34:53 GMT

Your website may be at risk for a lawsuit! Find out what you need to know about ADA accessibility compliance.

You probably know that the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) ensures that public places and businesses are accessible, but did you know that this applies to websites as well? Lawsuits for sites that don’t meet ADA best practices and requirements are on the rise. Are you vulnerable? We talk about best practices, how you can assess your website, and ensure that you don’t face an expensive suit.

Accessibility Scanning Tools

W3C Free Tools List

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

Adobe’s Color Accessibility Tool

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-contrast-analyzer

Transcription:

[Roy] [00:00:00] Hey there, this is Roy with Real Marketing, your podcast for real Marketing Tips without the fluff and today we're gonna talk about the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. You may be familiar with it, right? It's the reason businesses and public buildings have elevators and they have ramps and they're accessible to people with special needs or different needs and different mobilities. But what you may not be aware of is that ADA also impacts things like websites. We're gonna talk a little bit about that today and how it could potentially get you into legal trouble, lawsuits and what you can do to help solve that. So thanks for joining me today, Kat. Why don't you introduce us a little bit to what we're running into with some of our clients and how they're experiencing stuff with the ADA compliance?

[Kat] [00:00:49] Sure. So as you mentioned, when people think of ADA, they think of the physical. You know, handrails, elevators, ramps, but that also applies to websites, and the Department of Justice has confirmed that ADA compliance applies to websites. The main reason being is, because if a website is inaccessible, then that can exclude people just as much steps at an entrance to a physical location.

[Kat] [00:01:19] Making sure that your website is as accessible as possible to those who are visually impaired, hearing impaired or motion impaired, is critical, especially now.

[Roy] [00:01:34] Right and that accessibility is something that, I mean, if people are doing Search Engine Optimization , they're probably familiar with a lot of the accessibility that's defined by Google for optimization for their spiders and for search engines. It's, you know, making it easier for those readers to actually read a website and tell somebody that might be visually impaired what it is on the website.

[Kat] [00:02:01] The things to look for in a website particularly that you mentioned screen readers would be the alt texts, the alt tags, closed captioning in videos, labels, titles and headings.

[Kat] [00:02:15] Headings, you want to make sure that you're not just using them for font size. That heading one is an actual heading one. Heading two is heading two. If you do want to change the font size, you want to make sure to actually do a font size and not heading. What that does is that tells the screen reader exactly what information is on that webpage.

[Kat] [00:02:36] If a screen reader is going through explaining something about marketing it's gonna read the paragraph heading one, heading two, paragraph. read the entire thing. If there's an image in there, and you don't have that alt tag, it's just gonna say image.

[Roy] [00:02:59] Or the file name sometimes.

[Kat] [00:02:59] Yeah, or the file name, which is sometimes a bunch of numbers, bunch of words, and that doesn't provide the information that someone who is visually able to see that image. Someone who's visually impaired, won't be able to get that same information from the webpage. And, um, it has happened before where people have had issues with this.

[Kat] [00:03:27] They've emailed us, they've contacted them because when they're using a screen reader, it just doesn't give them the same information as it does to others. Another thing that you want to look for is color contrast. You want to make sure that your color contrast is not too high or too low. You don't want to put like a light font color on a light background.

[Kat] [00:03:52] Another thing is you don't want to use color alone to give information. A good example is if you have a button somewhere on your website and it's green and that indicates submit or go, you want to make sure that that's labeled as well because someone who's visually impaired isn't gonna know that.It's just gonna say button and that's it.

[Kat] [00:04:23] Another thing is, like I mentioned, captions on videos. Even if it is third party, YouTube or Matterport, it is your responsibility as a business if it's on your website because you're the one that's putting that information out there. You want to make sure to work with your website developer to add those, that option of closed captioning or you know, just put them on there regardless.

[Roy] [00:04:47] Yep. Oh, and going back to the color thing, I know personally I'm colorblind and so, you know, color indicators on websites are difficult for me and it's always been a huge pet peeve of mine when there's a black background and red text on it; I often can't read that. I know that I just noticed not long ago that, if anybody's ever played around with it, Adobe has a really nice color tool that lets you select color palettes. It's called color.adobe.com . They recently rolled out usability checker that will actually look at the two colors and see if they contrast enough to be used, for instance, as a banner or a button or something like that. You can just go to there, click on the tab and check to see if colors are within that usability and accessibility bandwidth. It'll tell you whether that's a good combination.

[Kat] [00:05:48]Yeah, and there's a lot of free resources out there for whoever is looking into this. I know that Accessibe has a free page scanner which that will crawl your entire web page. It is a little tedious, but it's free and what it'll do, it'll crawl the webpage that you're on and it'll tell you this heading is wrong. This image is missing an alt tag. It'll ding you for everything that you need to change and then you or your website developer can go in and have that checklist to just mark off as you complete it.

[Kat] [00:06:25] Another good one is, Userway, which is a free accessibility widget. That actually helps with visually impaired users because they can actually change the color of the background, the contrast, the font size, the font color, and make it a little bit easier for them to read. You know, in your case, maybe not have red text on a black background.

[Roy] [00:06:54] Yeah. I know that the W3 consortium, which kind of dictates some of the standards for web development, they have a number of free tools. If folks are watching this on YouTube we will have a link to some of the resources that we've mentioned in the description so you can actually go and check out some of these tools. I know that there are a couple free website auditing tools too and we'll link to those. They all do varying levels of scanning and I don't know that we can really depend on any of them at this point to catch all of the potential issues. Have you run into that?

[Kat] [00:07:17] Yes. That's one of the biggest things to remember when you're doing an ADA project is that you can never be a hundred percent compliant on the website because there's just so many things. The best way to catch those things is to just physically go through your website or to use a reliable page scanner. In the past we've used Monsido, which is a little bit more complex and provides a lot more reports and you have to pay for it.

[Kat] [00:08:08] Those tools let you see a lot of the things that can be fixed, but ultimately there's no way to be a hundred percent compliant. So what we recommend is to be at least over 85% compliant. You can do that just by the things that we mentioned; adding all tags, making sure there's close captioning, making sure that the headings are being used properly. Just little things like that. Adding that accessibility widget, that's a huge thing that anybody can do. And it's free, or you can pay for it. You can work with your website developer to find which widget works best for whatever platform your website is on.

[Roy] [00:08:57] Right, right and like I said earlier, I think that, what we're seeing for compliance with ADA is also just best practices for SEO. A lot of the stuff that Google tells you about having site hierarchy, making it readable and having alt tags and naming links and tagging those links and that type of stuff, is all best practices with the SEO.

[Roy] [00:09:18] But don't think that just because you're doing SEO that is gonna protect you from ADA. I mean, obviously if you're a site owner, a company that has people coming to your website, you want to make it as accessible to everybody as possible. I think people have historically kind of not been super concerned about that because, you know, does it appeal or is it usable by the vast majority of people?

[Roy] [00:09:50] It's a huge process and investment to make some of those changes, especially if you're working with a, for instance, a site template or theme that isn't particularly compliant or you're on a platform that it's not easy to make some of these changes. But we're finding that it, it is behooving companies to do that from a financial perspective now because they're getting sued.

[Kat] [00:10:16] Yes, and no one is safe.

[Roy] [00:10:19] Yeah. Yea and if you think that you're complacent about this, I think that once you get that letter that is telling you that they're gonna sue you, I think that suddenly ignites some interest in making sure that you are compliant.

[Kat] [00:10:12] Yes. A big lawsuit that I know when we started doing ADA projects was the Domino's lawsuit. They got sued because someone wasn't able to order a pizza online. Which is crazy because you would think that Domino’s, a multimillion company nationwide, some international, of course they would be ADA friendly, right? No. So they actually got sued and they lost that trial because someone who you had special needs couldn't, on the website, could not order a pizza alone. When they were placed, or transferred over to the call center they were placed on hold multiple times because they were using a certain type of text to speech system. Again, it wasn't easy as, you know, for you and I to just pick up the phone, say “Hey, I want to order a pepperoni large.” For them it had to be a lot more steps and that's a big thing because I think if Domino’s can get sued, it's fair game for everybody else.

[Roy] [00:11:56] Yeah and it's not, you know, I think small businesses or smaller businesses than Domino’s shouldn't be complacent either, because I think that there are more now attorneys who are aware of this that are finding clients to use for lawsuits and it's a very lucrative business to get into because a lot of sites are not compliant. A lot of them may not even be aware that they need to be compliant. And if you were a company with a decent size revenue stream you've got a big target on your back for somebody to come in and at least threatened to sue. I would imagine most of these don't actually go to court. They probably get settled out of court because going to court is extremely expensive and these lawyers know that. They know they can start the lawsuit process or threaten it, and then say, Hey, we're willing to settle for X amount. So it never goes to court, but you just had to pay a bunch of money out of pocket.

[Kat] [00:13:00] Right and for a small business, that can be, you know, it can break them because if they're not aware of the ADA policies or guidelines that they need to be following, then all of a sudden they get hit with X customer couldn't order online. Then they're not only gonna have to, if they go to trial or if they go to fight it, they're not only paying their attorney fees, but they might have to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees and just goes into a whole can of worms. Because not only that, they also have to work on their own website to make sure that it is ADA compliant.

[Roy] [00:13:40] Yeah, for sure. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of people just assume that their site is probably compliant. There are a lot of popular platforms and themes and whatnot out there, content management systems that in fact are not compliant in that the onus falls on you, as the owner of that to make sure that it is in compliance. Those businesses wash their hands of it as soon as you take over hosting and or design it or touch it and whatnot, that falls on you as the company.

[Kat] [00:14:20] Yeah, sometimes what we've seen as well is, like you just said, the template is ADA friendly, ADA compliant, so they'll give you an ADA compliant product but once you start customizing, adding those images, adding that content, adding those titles then like you said, they washed their hands and they're like that wasn't us, that's on you. That's your responsibility because you as the business are adding that content into that website.

[Roy] [00:14:53] Yeah and it's no different from SEO and in the fact that, you know, there's a balancing act between something that looks good and something that is compliant. SEO deals with that all the time; where a designer has a certain vision of the fonts that are being used and the colors that are being used and that might be the brand identity of the company but that doesn't work on the web and is not one either SEO for out friendly, or in this case ADA compliant. We see that a lot where, sure, it looks good, but it's not compliant. You need to kind of balance that out between users and looks. You mentioned alt tags and that kind of stuff and colors. What are some of the things that maybe people aren't looking for or they're not thinking about that aren't super obvious?

[Roy] [00:15:48] I think one of the least obvious one is forms, online forms. I'm sure you've seen it, whenever you type in on an online form, if you miss something or if something isn't as it should be, it'll pop up this form field is missing or it might be red. So that is actually not only for us, but that's also for those with special needs because again, the screen reader will catch that and it will tell them specifically as well as, again, we go back to the call to actions as well. The buttons on the website, some of those are missed because to us there, it's so obvious. We know green is Go red is stop, but someone who is visually impaired, they don't know that. They don't know what color it is. So again, buttons are very commonly missed because for us, again, very obvious, but to someone who's visually impaired, it's not obvious at all. So you want to make sure that every single call to action or button that has some kind of submission or links to somewhere else that you label what it is. If it's a submission form, submit. If it's a Got it. Okay. Got it. Anything that will describe what that button will do. I think another big one is that people, and it's so easy to do, is just adding an accessibility statement to your footer of your website. That will help a lot because that’s essentially just the business saying the ways that they're making their website more compliant and ADA friendly. As well as who a customer can contact if they run into any issues.

[Roy] [00:17:50] I think, like I said, it's not something that a lot of companies are necessarily aware of. I mean until we started getting clients that were actually actively getting threatened with lawsuits and that type of thing, it was kind of on the radar, but not something that we would typically think about. But it is something that I think businesses of all sizes really need to start considering and taking action on so that they're not legally liable.

[Kat] [00:18:39] And I would like to say that I saw several studies and cases that these ADA lawsuits are only on the rise because, like you mentioned, attorneys know about it and ultimately, besides the customer who is filing that lawsuit, they're the ones that are essentially gaining all that money because they're being paid. If a business does decide to take it or to fight it, they're the ones that are getting paid. Yes, it does help the customer, but ultimately it's just, for lack of better words, an ambulance chaser. Because they know large businesses like Domino's. I mean, they probably thought, Oh, the website developer has it. They should know this or other large businesses that they literally, how do I say this in a very nice way. As we started doing research on ADA and just dealing with more and more clients having the same issues, it's become very obvious that there are people who go out and look for websites with issues.

[Roy] [00:19:49] Yeah, I think a good way to put it would be there's kind of bad actor lawyers who are using this as a revenue stream rather than just as an innate activist approach of helping with disabilities. So they're not really looking to help people, it's just purely a money play.

[Roy] [00:20:10] Now that being said, obviously websites and the internet is more and more the only way you can do some things like banking and stuff like that. So obviously businesses, it makes sense for them to make it as accessible as possible so that all of their clients can use it. It really does kind of, one of the things is we started to get involved with more of the ADA compliance and lawsuits and the scanning tools and that kind of stuff is just how few agencies and web design firms and even content management systems are really good at.

[Roy] [00:20:49] You know, there's not that many people that really have a good base in this. There's a lot of companies I think that say they know or say that they've addressed it and that we've seen holes in what they've done. It's not dissimilar from people who claim to be an SEO expert and then when you really start to look into it, they really don't know that much. I think we see the same thing with the ADA compliance; is that a lot of, you know, if you just go get your website designed by a company who claims to be a web design company, they're not necessarily even familiar with this or know how they need to design the site. It might look okay, but those inexpensive web design firms that are cranking these out are probably not that concerned about it.

[Kat] [00:21:39] Yeah. They probably, like you said, they probably don't even know about it and that that's one thing, there are agencies out there that can say, Oh, we will get your website up to a hundred percent. Again, even the ADA has said for the website it is nearly impossible to reach a hundred percent because there is so many things on a website that as long as you are one, actively working towards making your website ADA friendly, and two have certain levels, which are the ones that we mentioned, which would be the double A, I think it's the 2.0 WCAG 2.0, as long as you have those, then you are in a good standing with ADA compliance. That would be the goal for any business to be at least somewhat compliant, but always actively trying to improve their website. Again, this isn't something that you can do in one day. This will take time, set up a project, task, a project list. Start with one part of the project, divide it up in two different sections, because if you do look at it as a whole, it can get overwhelming. Whereas you take it, maybe this month we're just gonna work on the alt tags. Next month we're gonna work on the captions to see what's going on there. Next week we're gonna do the titles, the headings, the html in the background. Take it one day at a time and make sure that you're not trying to get everything done in one go cause you're gonna make yourself crazy if you do that.

[Roy] [00:23:35] Yeah and especially for websites that are gigantic websites. I mean there's lots of images, there's lots of content, there’s a lot of moving parts and the code that people aren't even necessarily aware of. Depending on the platform you're on and how the website was developed and programmed there's all sorts of nuances that, one, it can take a huge amount of time and be a large project like you said, but also it could be very expensive.

[Roy] [00:24:04] I mean, you may in some cases have to redesign your website to make sure that it's compliant. Also don't take for granted or don't take some of these CMSs claims to face value because they know some of them will say that they are ADA compliant and then when you start digging into it maybe some of their stuff is, but others isn't. Like if you go with some of their newer themes or newer platforms, that kind of thing, that might be compliant, but some of the old stuff that they have available may not be.

[Kat] [00:24:43] Yeah, no, I agree with that and again, it's the defense that some website developers have is you're putting out that information, and that's what the ADA is saying and the Department of Justice is saying as well; you're putting out this information, so you're responsible for it. It's your responsibility because it's on your website and it's published by you. It just goes back to making sure or just taking your time. The best way to do it is, like I said, going through your website. One way that is a really great way to do that is just download a screen reader and use it on your website. As well as for people or users who have trouble using certain movements or using their hands and can't grab a mouse, you want to make sure that you can navigate your website thoroughly on your keyboard using the arrows up and down, left to right, enter, backspace, all of that. You want to make sure that your website can do that or that someone can do that strictly just using the keyboard and that's a big thing. Ultimately that's probably the best way to do it, to audit your website. But again, it's like you said, that can get expensive, it can get time consuming. There’s lots of different options that a business can do. Whether it's, if they just want to kind of start it out, we mentioned a few things that they can do now to just bump up their compliance percentage, or use a page scanner. So there's, there's a lot of different options.

[Roy] [00:26:40] And then you can also bring in an old person like me who says, Hey, that little tiny font that you're using is way too small for old eyes and I need better colors and that faded gray that you are using for your text doesn't have enough contrast. Thank you very much. As I squint at your website. So it's not just for Americans with disabilities. I think it's also, you know, we have an aging population and we have people with different needs. So it's always best to try to take usability as well as accessibility into consideration. Make sure you're, you know, not trading looks and design themes and not taking away from people actually being able to use your site thoroughly. And obviously, you know, we're talking about websites, but if companies are developing apps, I'm sure much of the same stuff is gonna impact app development as well.

[Kat] [00:27:45] Yeah and, you know, for a while ADA compliance was a huge gray area for websites.

[Roy] [00:27:56] Cause there was no standard, there was just it needs to be accessible. Nobody had actually gone through, the act itself doesn't define those details.

[Kat] [00:28:07] Yea, so for the longest time it was just guidelines and then I believe in 2018, that's when they hit those standards of the alt tags, so everything that we've mentioned, and I do believe that later this year, I think it's in December, they're actually gonna come out with a new, WCAG 2.2 draft. So that's something that if you have already been looking into ADA standards, that's something that you definitely want to make sure to look at next in the future. If you're already ADA compliant , it might just be a few little things here and there, but if you're not, you definitely want to start with that because 2.2 covers everything that 2.1 and 2.0 have.

[Kat] [00:28:57] You don't want to start at WCA 2.0 because then you're just gonna have to keep adding. You want to start at either 2.1 or if you're gonna start at next year, 2.2.

[Roy] [00:29:12] Great points and again for those watching on YouTube, we'll put a lot of these resources in the description and we'll also have them on our website where you can reference them for making sure that you get links to the resources that you need for making sure you're compliant. And you know, again, just to kind of reiterate, it's not something people should ignore because we are seeing an increase in our own clients getting lawsuits from this and this isn't an inexpensive proposition. So not only, you know, obviously if you've got a lawsuit pending or somebody threatening a lawsuit there's the legal fees and the court fees, but now you're forced to make these changes and you have to do it quickly. Which is gonna take more resources and take more effort and investment than if you were just kind of plugging away at this making sure that you're getting to it because now there's a time crunch. You've got a bigger target on you that people or other attorneys and their clients will if you haven't fixed it, they know.

[Kat] [00:30:23] Yes, they will. They will know. They will go back to your website in a year or two and say, oh, it's still not fixed.

[Roy] [00:30:28] And it's a big project.

[Kat] [00:30:33]Yeah. It's a big project. So definitely time management and project management is gonna be huge for anything ADA related.

[Roy] [00:30:43]Any other ADA stuff that we should be aware of?

[Kat] [00:30:48] I think that's a good summary of ADA compliance and what you can do. If you took away anything from this podcast, definitely remember easy things that you can do right now is add an accessibility statement, add an accessibility widget, and add alt tags to anything that is non text content. So images, logos, pngs, all of that. Those are three things that you can do right now to boost your compliance level.

[Roy] [00:31:23] Right. Great point and obviously if they need help or have questions our team is experienced with doing this and can help you not only do an audit, but also help you manage the project to improve your site and to make sure that your ADA compliant. We do have the experience with doing that and if people are looking for help, they can contact us at any time and we're happy to help them do that.

[Roy] [00:31:50] Kat as always, it's a pleasure talking to you. I'm glad you could join me for this. I know that this has been something you've been working on with a number of clients for a while now. Appreciate when you can share your knowledge and expertise.

[Roy] [00:32:08] Well thank you for joining me and again, if you have a website, you need to take a look at this because you are not protected. Just because you're a small company, you're definitely not protected. If you are making any kind of money because you have a bunch of targets on your back.

[Roy] [00:32:28] And another issue that we'll be talking about in the future is GDPR compliance because that is coming up and if you're not familiar with that, that is a European standard for data privacy and tracking and a lot of companies are not paying attention to that if they're US based. So we'll talk about that in the future because that can get you sued as well. Even if you don't do any marketing or anything in Europe, your website is still available in Europe. You have Europeans living in the United States, and if they are, they can sue you. There's a lot of lawyers out there that are happy to help them do that.

[Roy] 00:33:09] We'll be talking about that in the future, so stay tuned. And obviously, if you find this helpful we'd love if you give it a thumbs up and like, and obviously subscribe if you want more content like this. We are gonna be doing more like this and hopefully you find it useful and want to come back and join us.

[Roy] [00:33:30] Kat will talk to you soon. And as always, much appreciated.

[Kat] [00:33:35] All right, talk to you later. Bye.

Marketing Horror Stories

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 20:18:03 GMT

Beware: These may keep you up at night.

Halloween is fast approaching, so we take a look at some marketing horror stories that might just keep you awake at night. From marketing teams that aren't allowed to see their analytics, to a PR nightmare that has 25,000 members of an "I Hate" your company Facebook group.

Transcription:

[00:00:00] Hey! If you've been involved in marketing for any period of time, you've probably got horror stories of your own. For a little fun for Halloween, we're going to talk about horror stories that I've seen. I'm sure you've seen similar ones. Let's talk about what you shouldn't be doing in marketing and how horrific it can just be.

[00:00:28] All right, I'm going to share some of the marketing horror stories that I've seen in the past, which are a lot because I'm old. I'm sure you have some as well. Now, these examples that I'm going to give are not current clients, just so that my clients know, but they are companies I've worked with in the past; either for the companies or as a consultant.

[00:00:52] Names are not going to be mentioned. We're going to kind of use different examples that will hide the identities and protect the innocent or the guilty as it were but let's jump right in. One of the most probably dysfunctional, marketing programs I've ever been involved with was a mid-sized e-commerce company.

[00:01:18] I'm going to say that they produce as an example, plumbing supplies. That was not it but again, to protect the innocent. When I first started working with them they had a marketing team, quote-unquote, of about 10 to 15 people. It largely consisted of photographers and designers, and the only thing that these people worked on was taking products, photos of products, and then creating, manually, creating emails, and that's it.

[00:01:57] That's all they did. They had a team of over 10 people that only worked on sending out emails. The horror part of it is that nobody had any clue whether these emails were actually working. Nobody on the marketing team, and this is still crazy to me to this day, ever saw any data. Never. The owners of the company, they were the previous owners of the company, they were still running it even though the company had been sold. The owners of the company were so paranoid about anybody knowing any of their information that their own marketing team didn't know any key metrics about their email program. They were just doers, and so you had a whole team of people just sitting there.

[00:02:49] Producing emails and they didn't know whether the open rates were good. They didn't know how much revenue it was driving. They didn't know any of that information. The only task that this whole marketing team did was generate emails. It's because they had, it's always what they had done. They got to a good size as a company with just organic search and sending emails. So it was part of their process that whenever they got a new part in or a new product, they would take pictures, and then an email would go out. Now, keep that in mind. This is a company with thousands and thousands of products, and if a bolt came in, it was a new bolt for a new kind of part because it was their process they would take a photo of the bolt and then dedicate an entire email to that bolt that would then go out to a list that was kind of segmented, but not really.

[00:03:49] With no consideration of did anybody care about that bolt? That individual bolt, did it deserve a whole email? And no, nobody was thinking about it. So the email program was just awful, and these poor guys on this team were just manually creating these emails.

[00:04:11] They didn't even have a good email program. It was really antiquated to produce any kind of templates or to do any kind of dynamic emails. The whole concept of sending out a campaign that might include in it like multiple products from a category was baffling to them. They just didn't do it.

[00:04:31] It was a painful process to try to communicate that to the previous owners to help them understand that just because they were successful up to this point doing that, that there was no way that they could grow the program by just keeping to send emails because they were just hemorrhaging subscribers because they would get, in some cases, 10 emails a day.

[00:04:57] If you were on a certain specific list, you might get 10 emails, some of which were literally about a bolt. I mean, if that doesn't make you scream and kind of shake and want to sit in a corner and rock back and forth, which I think I may have done in my office a few times. So that was their email program.

[00:05:19] Now, there's many other horror stories from this company. The marketing team was not allowed to chat with each other on any kind of chat functionality like Slack or anything like that because it couldn't be monitored. They had, again, no insight into what was going on in the company.

[00:05:37] There was no idea of adding any kind of value to what they were doing. So it was pretty horrific. At the end of the day, I don't know that I need to say this, but it's kind of important for your marketing team to have access to data. And okay, maybe you don't want to let them in on all of the secrets for strategic stuff.

[00:06:01] Because if you're in a very sensitive industry or a very competitive industry, I get having some stuff that is sensitive but understanding how the program that they're supposed to be working on is working, whether it's actually driving more sales, if what the open rates are, what the subscriber rates are, what the engagement rates, all of those things that are kind of like mandatory for most marketing programs we're completely missing from this program.

[00:06:28] So if you're in a company that is not allowing the marketers to see data, flee, flee quickly. All right. Horror story number two. I worked with a client who had a build cycle for their website that they only released changes to the website quarterly, so it didn't matter what the change to the website was. If there was anything to do with the website, it had to go through a rigorous testing process, a rigorous development process, which is all good, but they would not release changes until it went through this very rigid process except every quarter.

[00:07:18] It didn't matter if something was broken, didn't matter if there was extremely important changes that would affect their business. They would not do it. This was problematic. One reason, this is a horror story and by the way, this was a major retailer. This was a major retailer of supplies and again, I won't name them, but they were big.

[00:07:44] We discovered that there was some elements in their shopping cart that was broken and it literally was costing them millions of dollars a day to not fix this. Yet, even though the code was changed, the code was fixed, the very rigid process they had of not releasing it was so bad that they lost money until the quarter rolled around and they finally released that.

[00:08:16] If you're ever in that situation again, probably not a win-win situation for you. You're going to want to not work for a company with such rigid, rigid release dates. It is one of the reasons why sometimes smaller retails can really catch up to larger BMFs of the industry, because they are nimble.

[00:08:43] You can make quick changes if you're a small retailer. You can completely change your business model overnight. You can add new products. You can do a lot of things that very large companies can't do because it literally takes them months to push stuff through. I've worked with clients who have even all their marketing programs they're all done. Six months to a year in advance. It's all scheduled. It's all scheduled on the website; the offers and the discounts, all that kind of stuff that you're seeing on the site that was done months ago. To be nimble and react to changes in the industry is often very difficult for larger retailers and companies to do because they just don't have the flexibility.

[00:09:31] Whereas a smaller retailer could definitely be nipping at their heels because they do have that flexibility. All right, another similar situation with a shopping cart and this was a large watch retailer manufacturer. A company that I knew was working on their checkout process and they had ostensibly improved the checkout process, but sales were going down.

[00:10:02] We took a look at their analytics and I specifically was involved in this project looking at their data and one of the things that we noticed was there seemed to be a lot of consistent numbers of people adding stuff to the shopping cart, but certain regions were having a higher rate of not completing their shopping process, not completing the purchase.

[00:10:29] And so we did some testing and what we found was that certain zip codes, even if it was a valid zip code, was getting kicked out of the shopping cart. It was identified as not valid so it was firing an error in the shopping cart as if it was blank or just a wrong zip code.

[00:10:46] The validation process was not working correctly for specific zip codes, it wasn't all of them. What that meant was that certain regions literally could not purchase. How this wasn't tested or found during the testing process before it was launched, I don't know. But we were able to see in the live data that if you came from zip code X, that there was physically no way you could actually purchase online.

[00:11:19] Through the art of investigative analytics, we were able to find out that the developers had essentially broken the site. That's something you never want to hear. I don't think the company was very happy. So that ended up, I think, being a bit of a horror story for all of the people involved.

[00:11:44] Another marketing horror story that we found, I was involved with a team of people that was working on a very large account and we were handling paid search. One of the people on the team, let's just say that he was using his computer for some things that were not sanctioned for computer, for company use and somehow he got hacked. So his computer was compromised. He didn't realize it. He had the passwords and access to this company's paid search program. Well, because he had that access, now the hackers had that access. So we got, received frantic phone calls from the client that their budget was being spent for paid search, which was an exceptionally large budget, was being spent in a day.

[00:12:39] It was a month's budget or something like that, gone in a day. And what we found out happened, and I can laugh now because it seems funny, but at the time it was not funny. What we found out happened is the hacker went in and decided to change the bids on the paid search program to like a thousand dollars per click.

[00:13:01] They weren't paying a thousand dollars per click, but they were paying whatever the maximum was per click. They blew through a month's budget in essentially a day and it just is a great example of why you need to be careful with your passwords. You shouldn't be opening stuff on a company computer that could put you at risk and essentially put the company at risk for a lawsuit and or losing a very valuable client. So they were not happy, rightfully so. I think that resource learned a very valuable lesson that day.

[00:13:41] I don't know if this one counts as a horror, a marketing horror story, or just an employment horror story. I was working for a company that I mentioned earlier and they had designed a new office for me and so I was meeting with my team, all of the people that were manually creating emails all day long without knowing how they worked, and I was trying to meet with my team and my computer monitor was consistently in the way of the office. I had asked if I could have the maintenance team kind of turn the desk because of the way the plugs were and all that kind of stuff. I was told by one of the maintenance team that, no, I couldn't move it or they couldn't move it for me.

[00:14:37] So I was like, well, why can't you move my desk? I mean, I literally can't see the people that are sitting across from me because of the way it's positioned. The answer was that the cameras that were installed in my office would not be able to see what I was doing on my monitor while I was working. So that was interesting. I didn't realize that there were cameras pointed at my monitor and after further inquiry, apparently, every office in the company and most people weren't aware of this; that they were all being secretly filmed and not just them, but whatever they were looking at on their monitor. Apparently, this company didn't realize that you can use software at a company to actually see what people are looking at on their computers without physical cameras. It is a bit of a violation of privacy and definitely creepy to know that that was the case. We did find that that company actually had cameras everywhere. Including in certain areas of the place that you wouldn't expect.

[00:15:52] They claimed that they weren't in the bathrooms, but there was some question as to whether that was true. That was a company that I then quickly left because if I'm sorry but if you don't have trust in your executives, much less your employees, and you need to film everything that they're doing, I don't know that I want to work there. It definitely was a horrific experience.

[00:16:18] Another example of a horror story for marketing was a company I worked with that had developed their own e-commerce system. The system was homegrown and it was built on an Access database. For those of you who may not remember Microsoft used to have Microsoft Access. It was part of your office suite of tools, just like Microsoft Word. Access was a simple database that you could run, SQL, SE, SQL queries and that type of thing on. It was an early version of more sophisticated databases. Now people might be more familiar with other databases.

[00:17:06] There's databases in the cloud. There's Google's big query. There's MyQ, which is an open-source database but at the time when they created the e-commerce system, they decided to use Access. Well, the problem with that is that Access actually has a data limit. Most people don't realize that, but so does Excel.

[00:17:32] Or at least some of the older versions of Excel had more discreet data limits. So Access could only do a certain number of records. The problem was that they had so many parts, so many transactions, that they reached their limit. They didn't know that they reached the limit and so the site crashed; their entire system crashed.

[00:17:58] Their ordering system, the website, their client database, their custom employee database. It was all built off this system and it just went kaput. There was no orders able to be taken in or processed, or fulfilled or anything until they actually created a new database and were actually able to transfer some stuff over.

[00:18:29] They lost a bunch of stuff. They lost records. They lost customer data, they lost order stuff. They lost inventory. It was one of the first true examples that I experienced of why you shouldn't, probably in this day and age, try to build your own e-commerce system. There are just so many good commerce systems on the market that are either open source or that are a SaaS models, so you don't have to worry about hosting them.

[00:19:02] They've worked out a lot of the bugs already. You know, there are very few instances I can think ofhwhere it would behoove a company to build it from the ground up. To just say, hey, you know what? We're going to ignore the last 15, 20 years of experience that some of these e-commerce companies have had, integrating other third-party products and making it just a complete commerce system, let's ignore that and just build it ourselves.

[00:19:32] That's just not a good decision and it's just going to be a lot of work and a huge investment. I have yet to see a compelling reason why you would do that. This was a great first example of that. There was all sorts of problems with this system.

[00:19:48] Inherently, like it didn't have a built-in content management system. It didn't have a lot of stuff that you would think was just easy to manage or that is out of the box for most e-commerce systems. Then obviously, if you're built on a house of sand where you know your data's going to take a dive at any point, like obviously that's problematic.

[00:20:13] That was a big dramatic loss for that company and was a great example of you probably should do some due diligence and not just stick with the systems that you have because eventually, you're going to outgrow them. Another example of a marketing horror story is, PR can really be detrimental.

[00:20:39] The one instance I'm thinking of that was just absolutely horrific is, a company I was working with, they had become known in the industry for not delivering products on time. They had an inventory and availability status on the website. So it'd say ships in two days, five in stock, stuff that we're used to seeing. You're used to seeing like, hey, this stuff is in stock, it's available. I'm going to order it. Right? It’s not rocket science.

[00:21:13] Well, those numbers were never right. So they became notorious for somebody ordering something and in some cases, even if they needed it badly, paying for expedited delivery. They might pay 50 to a hundred dollars to get it next day or two-day shipping.

[00:21:37] The company allowed them to order it. Then they would get an email in two or three days saying, hey, it's delayed. These delays then turn into months and in some cases, years. The company would not always refund the money because they would claim like, hey, it's on the way, it's already been ordered. It's coming from the warehouse.

[00:22:00] So anecdotally customers were saying, hey, I've reached out to you five, 10 times. I'm told that it's coming, that it's just going to be a couple more days and I still have not received it. So after six months of the runaround of them not receiving it, they get a little angry.

[00:22:24] Justifiably so. Well, the horror story part of this is obviously that's just not a good way to treat your customers and you lose a lot of customers that way. The horror story part of this is that people took it upon themselves to start a hate group on Facebook and usually those peter out after a while.

[00:22:51] You see that sometimes, right? Where something will rile people up and they'll start like a hashtag going around or they'll try to boycott somebody. But this company has been so consistently bad in its delivery and its execution of order delivery and management of orders and customer interaction and customer service. That the group, I just looked it’s still active and it has over 25,000 members in that Facebook group. So there's 25,000 people that took it upon themselves to join this group to talk about how much they hate this company. I don't know how you operate and I know the company had taken efforts to kind of get involved and they actually had their customer service people monitoring posts and stuff so that they could respond.

[00:23:52] I don't know if you've ever been involved in Reddit or any of those forums, but when people are angry and it's a mob kind of mentality, I feel bad for the customer service person that's actually responding to those because they hate you. No matter what response you have, no matter how professional you are, they're just going to trash you and they're going to give you a lot of hate.

[00:24:17] They tried doing that for a while. I don't know that the company is actively trying to respond to those posts anymore, but I haven't really kept up to date on it but yeah so that's a PR nightmare. It actually had made some press where in some of the industry magazines and that type of thing they actually talked about the hate and how many people actively hated this company.

[00:24:50] So that's something you never want to have happen to your company; is having your hate group have more followers than some of your active social media accounts that you're hoping to promote your company on. These are just a few of the horror stories, marketing horror stories, that come to mind.

[00:25:11] I'm sure I could think of a lot more but I would love to hear your horror stories as well. So if you have some, please send them over. If you're listening to this on a podcast, you can leave some comments, on Spotify and stuff like that and we'll try to respond to them. Obviously, if you're seeing this on YouTube, leave comments below.

[00:25:31] And if you are on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up. It helps us get our videos out there and hopefully, you'd want to subscribe cause we're going to be doing a lot more content over the next few weeks and coming months. We'd love you to take part in that. So thanks for joining and again, I would love to hear some of your horror stories as we head into Halloween and maybe share them in an upcoming video as well.

[00:25:56] So have a great one. Thanks.

7 Ways to Improve Local SEO Right Now

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 22:07:48 GMT

Local SEO is a powerful tool for any business with an online presence. 46% of all searches on Google are for a local business or local service ( Search Engine Roundtable ). If your business serves a specific area or has brick-and-mortar locations, you can enhance the local SEO to increase traffic and reach more ready-to-buy leads.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO helps you rank better in local search results. It allows you to connect with searchers in your area that are looking for a product or service that your business offers. These search terms usually include the product, business, or service with additional information about a specific location such as “Lady Gaga concerts near me” or “Lady Gaga concert in [city name].” Whereas general SEO could be “Lady Gaga concert” or “Lady Gaga tour” where the search terms aren’t focused on a specific location.

Below are five ways you can improve your Local SEO. You can use these tips as part of your online marketing strategy for SEO.

How Google determines local ranking

Per Google, local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence . A combination of these factors helps us find the best match for your search. For example, its algorithms might decide that a business that's farther away from your location is more likely to have what you're looking for than a business that's closer and therefore rank it higher in local results.

#1 Use Your Google Business Profile

Yes, we know. This is very obvious, but we want to make sure you know how important it is! One of the top factors that Google uses when ranking businesses in local search results is your Google Business Profile , formerly known as Google My Business. (You can also check out our other blog, 8 Ways to Optimize Your Google Business Listing .) Make sure that you have claimed, optimized, and are using your Google Business Profile. This is a great free resource that Google provides for you.

Verify your business via postcard or phone call
Add all your business information or as much as you can. This includes your business name, physical address, business hours, business category, phone number, and website.
Upload photos of your business. Photos can be of your brick-and-mortar location, both from the inside and outside. You can also add photos of your products or services, logo, team, and any other relevant information.
Provide additional categories that may be relevant to your business.
Share Google Posts about business updates, offers, and fresh content regularly.
Encourage your customers to share reviews online and respond to reviews.
Answer Google Questions and like the questions that have useful answers. By liking questions, this will tell Google that it’s a good question and can be pushed to the top.
List your products. You can list your best-selling products so that when your business shows up on the search results, people can see the exact products you’re offering.
Add services to your profile. Keep in mind that this feature is available to all services businesses or a business that offers services.
Set up the booking feature if you offer appointments, reservations, or anything similar.

#2 Get More Reviews

Reviews are essential for your business. Review signals also play an integral role in local search and particularly for the Google map pack. Some of the main things that Google takes into consideration are the star rating or sentiment of the reviews, keywords in the reviews, the number of reviews, how recent or often reviews are published, and if the owner is replying.

According to Google , when you reply to reviews it shows that you value your customers and their feedback. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your business visibility and increase the likelihood that a shopper will visit your location.

Work towards having a consistent flow of authentic reviews for your business. Besides your website and your Google Business Profile, focus on other online directories like Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, or any other listing that is relevant to your business’s industry. Maintaining a healthy amount of reviews and replying to them, preferably positive ones, is going to boost your business’s visibility.

#3 NAP Consistency (name, address, phone number)

One of the biggest things you want to have in your online presence is consistency. You want your business name, address and phone number, AKA NAP, to be the same in all your major online listings like your Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Bing and other online search engines or social media platforms. Any duplicate listings that are wrong or discrepancies need to be resolved to improve your local SEO.

Google takes the NAP into consideration in local search results. When you have a NAP that is crawlable HTML text and has a “Contact Us” HTML text, Google will show it better according to location-based search results.

#4 Mobile-Friendly Websites

When creating a website, make sure to keep mobile in mind. The majority of search queries come from a smartphone. 82% of people use their mobile devices for a “near me” search, according to Uberall. People will use your mobile site to look at reviews, look up the address, and find your phone number.

Your website should be easy to navigate on mobile devices and have easy-to-see click-to-call buttons. Some of the more common issues for mobile users include not being able to see the main menu correctly, images being too large, and just being difficult to navigate.

#5 Local Link Building

Link signals also play an essential role in your overall ranking. Local link building is a great opportunity to boost your Local SEO by building relevant and local links to your business website. These links let Google know that your business is legitimate and checks out. Link signals such as linking domain authority can influence the local search ranking and snack pack results.

Something to think about when link building is to focus on authority websites in your target region. These authority websites can be small local newspapers, school websites or .edu sites, chambers of commerce, local community groups, city-specific sites and directories, and other businesses. Guest posting and partnerships are also other ways to gain relevant backlinks. For example, a business might have a help page linking back to a few local resources.

#6 Optimize, Optimize, and Optimize

For content that is geo-targeted, you want to make sure that it’s optimized so it has a better chance of showing up in the “near me” searches. The more specifications you add, the better it is. This is a great opportunity to be found in search engine results pages (SERPs). The key is to find a balance between adding your business name, region/city, and what you offer without being too spammy. For example, you can add your business name to your newest blog like “this was brought to you by the team at Apotheca Marketing Agency in Tampa, FL.”

#7 Perform an Audit

This may seem obvious, but it is a crucial step in improving your local SEO. Set yourself for a quarterly audit to review your website, URLs, online listings, and content.

You want to optimize as much as possible. This includes your URL, title tags, meta descriptions, headers, body, and any other kind of content. If you're posting new blogs, that means it’s a new indexed page for your site that can be targeted in a new search phrase. For content that is geo-targeted, you want to make sure that it’s optimized so it has a better chance of showing up in the “near me” searches. The more specifications you add, the better it is. This is a great opportunity to be found on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO is not a one-time thing! It’s an ongoing process that you need to maintain and update as needed. Performing routine audits will help you understand what needs improving and what is doing really well.

Start to Improve Your Local SEO!

Using these strategies will help you improve your local SEO and help you take your SEO efforts to the next level. Although these are not all the ways to improve your local SEO it is a solid foundation of the essentials. After you implement these strategies, you will see your local SEO improve and discover new ways to get even more traffic as you become more familiar with local SEO.

Automatic Form Tracking in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 13:43:47 GMT

You can now track your website forms automatically in GA4

Automatic form tracking is now available in Google Analytics 4 . Because you don't have to mess with code, tags, custom events, or triggers in Google Tag Manager, this is easy for anyone to set up. We look at how you can do it. Note: To test if the new form tag is firing correctly on your site, you will need to open the Tag Assistant in Google Tag Manager.

Is Your Company Hung Up on Vanity Metrics?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 16:16:35 GMT

Make sure your data can help you take actions!

Are your clients or executives hung up on vanity metrics? You know, things like total followers, or website visits; metrics with no context and no clear business impact. We take a look at common vanity metrics, and why you should be focusing instead on actionable data that will help you to drive better business results.

Check Out Our Podcast!

Transcription:

[00:00:00] Hey guys, Roy here from Apotheca Marketing. Today we're going to talk about a pet peeve of mine that I always run into with reporting, especially for companies where the executives want to kind of brag. We're going to talk about vanity metrics and why you shouldn't fall prey to them and what they are, and how to kind of educate people not to be looking at them. We'll talk about it right now.

[00:00:25] What is a vanity metric? Well, a vanity metric is something that looks good on the surface and you know what I'm talking about? It's executive reports. They get these reports that are very high-level talks about things like followers, like how many Facebook followers do we have?

[00:00:42] How many followers do we have on Instagram or TikTok? It doesn't have a lot of meat. It's just a big number that shows like, hey, we can brag about the fact that we have 10,000 more followers than one of our competitors and there's a number of metrics like that. Metrics that on the surface seem important.

[00:01:03] They look good. They can show growth. You can walk into a board meeting and say, hey, our traffic has grown 50% this month but it's not really telling you anything about your business. It's just showing traffic growth or it's showing followers. One of the things we like to say is that, is the metric that you're tracking actionable or does it just look good. If it's not actionable, it's only interesting. It's interesting that your traffic grew by 50% this year. It doesn't say anything about what you're doing with your marketing programs. It doesn't say anything about your profitability. How many leads are you getting? How many sales are you getting?

[00:01:48] Is that traffic translating into real business metrics? Some of these, like I said, followers, social media followers. Yes, it's great to have more followers on social media. Of course, you want to grow your social media programs, but why do you want to grow them? You want them to eventually turn into business.

[00:02:09] You want those followers to engage with your posts, with your company, with your brand, and know more about your brand. That way when they're looking to buy something, they remember you, or they click through on one of your product links, or they click through on one of your articles or whatever it is you're featuring.

[00:02:26] The goal though, is not just to have those followers, it's to have them do something that's important to your business. For instance, if you have a very entertaining TikTok account and you get a ton of viral followers, does it actually translate into business? Because otherwise, it's just kind of fun.

[00:02:46] It's a way to get your brand out there, but if it's not translating into business, it really doesn't mean anything for you. The same thing with traffic. One of the things we see from executives all the time is like, how many people are we getting to the site? What's our traffic? How many visitors are we getting?

[00:03:02] Again, that's important because the more people you get coming to your site, the more likelihood there is that they will purchase. The problem is that, that traffic isn't necessarily traffic that you want. Is it your customer or did they see a link or a social media post that maybe's not indicative of the products or services that you sell, but it's generating a lot of traffic?

[00:03:30] A good example of this, it goes back to my early career where I worked with a B2B publishing company that had a magazine dedicated to people who manufacture intimate apparel, underwear, that type of thing, lingerie; these are the people it's geared towards, the people that actually produce these items.

[00:03:50] They're manufacturing underwear and boxers and that type of stuff. Well, they were bragging in the board meetings. They were bragging to other people in the company how they had exponentially more traffic than anybody else in the company, than any of the other magazines. And this was true. It was like a shockingly higher number than the other publications.

[00:04:16] Well, when we actually started to take a look at the analytics, we took a look at the keywords that were driving this traffic. They were chagrined when they found out what the driver of this traffic was; they were ranking exceptionally high and getting an immense amount of clickthroughs for the keyword teen panties, which obviously is not the audience they were looking for.

[00:04:42] That is not the audience they were wanting to drive. So, you know, they were taken aback by this. Their traffic was not valid traffic, at least for their business. That's not what they were intending to sell or what the audience they were trending to appeal to. Similarly, we've had clients that have, for instance, that have done their own display campaigns and were so happy.

[00:05:07] They're like, look how many clickthroughs we're getting on this display campaign, and it's sending this much traffic to our site. Well, when we take a look, the bounce rate was nearly a hundred percent and there was a huge amount of traffic coming from these display campaigns. But when we dug into it, we discovered that they were those banner ads were appearing on game apps for kids, and so kids were accidentally clicking on these banner ads.

[00:05:36] Obviously, their business was selling multimillion-dollar homes, these children playing whatever game or app is popular at the moment were not their customer. They were spending a ton of money. They were getting a huge amount of traffic for nothing and was not what they wanted. In those situations, traffic doesn't tell you anything.

[00:05:58] Is it the traffic that you want? Is it the audience that you want? Traffic can be important, but you have to look at it from where it's coming from; the segments and other information that will help make it actionable. Are you driving relevant traffic? Are you driving specific traffic to specific pages, and are they then doing something?

[00:06:24] Related to this, another similar metric that we see as a vanity metric all the time is page views. People like to brag, like hey, this month we had 50% more page views or we had a hundred thousand page views. That's great, but again, was it somebody actually looking at your content that meant you wanted to be there or were you just generating a lot of traffic from people that you weren't interested in?

[00:06:52] Or were people having to click around a lot because maybe your site's not particularly easy to find stuff and maybe they're having to click through multiple pages before they find what they're looking for? That they're just clicking and clicking and clicking. It's not necessarily a positive metric in this case because they can't find what they're looking for but you're generating a lot of page views. A similar one to that that we see sometimes is time on site. We'll see executives that are like, look, they have to be interested in our content because they spent 30 minutes on our site. That could be true, it could be that they're reading a blog.

[00:07:31] It could be they're watching some videos or they're doing some product research. Or it could be that you have a lot of people that walk away from your website and aren't actually engaging in it, or they're having a hard time finding stuff. They're spending more time on your site because they can't actually find it or they can't understand how to navigate your site.

[00:07:52] It's understanding the context of those metrics and the timeframe and the audience that's going to add value. Another metric we see that's a vanity metric a lot of times is ad impressions or even social media impressions. So X number of people have seen our ads. This is particularly the case with display advertising and banner ads; where you will focus on or executives will focus on the fact that x number of people saw this ad.

[00:08:25] All right? Maybe over the course of a month, they had 500,000 people, and 500,000 impressions on that ad. They're assuming 500,000 people saw their ad. Well, as you know, that's probably not the case because just because a banner ad has an impression, just because it loads on a page doesn't mean one, that the user actually saw it. It means that it was on that page, that it could have been at the bottom of the page. It could have been off to the side. It doesn't mean that they looked at it, and it definitely doesn't mean that they engaged with it. Obviously, if you're running an ad, you want them to engage with it.

[00:09:02] You would want them to have enough interest to actually click through on it to visit your site and to learn more information or to buy. So just that impression, doesn't mean a lot in isolation. Sure. Can it mean that people are seeing your brand, that they're seeing the brand more often and potentially engaging with it later?

[00:09:21] Yeah, it can but again, by itself, just as a metric that you're summing up how many impressions you got during a month, it doesn't really mean a lot for your business. SEO rankings are another area where people like to be able to brag about that they're first for a certain number of keywords.

[00:09:39] A lot of agencies will actually do this too. They'll actually say like, hey, we got you to first for 30 keywords that you weren't before. Well, again, that sounds good. Rank, we all know that good rankings are going to lead to more clicks, and the more clicks you have, the better but in isolation, again, those rankings don't really mean anything.

[00:10:01] Just because you're ranking for 50 or a hundred more keywords that you weren't before, are they the right keywords for your business? Are you just ranking for something that isn't really targeted towards your audience or towards your products? Are people actually clicking on those ads? The ranking in and of itself, yeah, that's nice. Is anybody clicking on it? And once they click on it, what are they doing on your site? Are they bouncing? Are they engaging with your content? Are they purchasing? That is the metric that you want to look at; is how many people are engaging with content on your site. How many are doing what you want them to do on the site? Whether it's a lead generation, whether it's a download, or whether it's a sale of an item.

[00:10:52] That rank means nothing in isolation without looking at those other pieces of information and data. Another one that isn't necessarily a vanity metric as much as it could be potentially misleading, and it's something that agencies report on in a lot, and it's ROAS; it's return on ad spend. Essentially what you're looking at is how much money did you spend versus how much revenue did you generate.

[00:11:19] If you make a two ROAS, you're making twice as much money as you spent, right? But is that truly good or profitable? An agency will oftentimes, especially with paid search, will come back and say, hey, your ROAS on this program was a two. That sounds good, but it's not profit. ROAS is just a return on ad spend.

[00:11:47] It means that you didn't spend more than you made in gross revenue and why that's important is because it's not taking into consideration cost of goods sold. It's not taking into consideration any other expenses that you may have incurred, and it's not taking into consideration the cost of actually using that ad agency.

[00:12:10] I had this argument discussion early in my career with a paid search agency that was doing work for us and they were super proud of the ROAS that they were generating for our paid search program. Well, the problem was that we were selling automotive parts, and automotive parts, especially in certain categories, have very low profitability.

[00:12:31] The margin is just not there. So we needed to have a ROAS that was significantly higher than what they were generating and even just product profitability considered if you added in their agency fees on top of it, we were losing money. While there is a value to acquiring a customer, there's an inherent value to that.

[00:12:56] You may lose money on that first purchase with a customer, but make more money with them later and that's their lifetime value. But from a pure profitability standpoint, like if you don't have a lot of returning customers, then that ROAS becomes kind of misleading. If somebody's trumpeting, you know, the ROAS that they have and saying, hey, this is, you know, it looks great.

[00:13:21] But you gotta keep in mind that it's not a return on investment. It's not profit. It's not indicative of how much money you're actually making. It just means that you're not losing money out of the gate. Okay? Like we said, you're not really wanting to track vanity metrics. I mean, those sound great, they're great to show off, but they're not really helping your business. So what do you want to do? You want to look at actionable metrics. You want to look at stuff that's going to help improve your profitability. Stuff that's going to help you target your audience. Are these metrics that you're looking at related to generating sales or leads or whatever your goal is?

[00:14:06] Is it information that is going to tell you more about how valuable your customers are or what they're looking for? All of these things are stuff that you're going to want to look at, not out of context, not just as a sum number, total something or other, but something that gives you more information.

[00:14:27] This isn't always an easy conversation to have with your executives and I don't think the executive dashboard is going to be going away anytime soon but it is an important conversation to start having. It's about the importance of metrics and how you track things in your organization and how it's digested.

[00:14:44] It always helps if, when you're providing some of this information, is to provide it in context. To say, yes we had an increase in traffic but here's our analysis of that. And that's where as a marketer or as somebody who's looking at marketing programs, that analysis is what is important. They may still want to look at that total number, but if you can provide some context for it, if you can provide more information about how it's useful to the company, then you're providing a lot more value in the long run.

[00:15:12] Give us a, like, if you found this helpful, and obviously join us and subscribe if you want to keep seeing more of this kind of information. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

Conversion Rate in GA4

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 18:35:48 GMT

Finally! Conversion Rate is available in Google Analytics 4

For some reason, Google's new analytics platform, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) does not currently have conversion rate reporting built into its standard reports. Why? It's baffling, indeed. But, recently Google has made conversion rates available in GA4's Explore reporting . We take a look at how you can include both user conversion rate and session conversion rate in your reporting.

Big League SEO - Interview with Jeff Louella

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 14:25:25 GMT

Ever wonder what SEO for The New York Times | Wirecutter looks like?

We chat with Jeff Louella, an SEO expert who has worked for some of the country’s largest agencies, and by extension numerous Fortune 500 clients. Jeff has left the agency darkside and is now Product Manager for New York Times Wirecutter. We chat about SEO for big league sites like Wirecutter, the tools they use, and what trends Jeff is seeing.

More about Jeff Louella:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefflouella/

Check Out Our Podcast!

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DKfhZILOf8mS8WdZ5PceU

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-marketing/id1642968872

Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xM2VjMWRiMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw

Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/1026249

Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/real-marketing/PC:1001026249

TRANSCRIPTION:

[Roy] Hey everybody! Welcome. Today we're talking to Jeff Louella, who's an SEO expert. Jeff's worked for a number of large agencies in the past decade-plus and by extension has also worked with quite a few Fortune 500 companies. Jeff, you're now at New York Times Wire Cutter, which a couple of people may have heard about. I don't know, you know, it's not a well-known brand or anything. So welcome Jeff, and thanks for joining me today.

[Jeff] Oh, thank you. Yeah, New York Times a little bit is a nice size brand to work on. Millions of visits a day. It's great.

[Roy] For sure, for sure and we'll talk a little bit more about that too, but give us a little insight into your background and kind of your experience with the whole world of SEO.

[Jeff] Yeah, sure. I started off back in the mid-nineties as a web designer. I kind of went to a community college and took an HTML class. Help build the school's website. From there, got hired right into the world of I guess design and development back then. If you were a designer, you were a developer too because there really weren't separate fields at that time. But once there came a good field for designers, people leaving design school to work on web design, I realized I'm not a very good designer. I could copy people’s designs, but I'm not very original; I had a whole bunch of experience doing HTML and CSS, back then there wasn't CSS; everything was table layouts. Also doing some backend using Java and things like that. Moved into that world for a while. Worked for a few different agencies out there. I was at an agency called Razor Fish as a software developer and the head of SEO came over to me one day and was like, Hey, how would you like to come over to the SEO team? After some discussions, I was like I don't want to deal with keywords, I'm more of a technical person. So that was kind of where I was born as a kind of technical engineer; they called it an SEO Engineer back then and not a technical SEO. Over the years moving to different agencies I've met up with you at an agency called Rosetta and was lucky to work with really big and awesome clients there. The team was like the biggest SEO team I've ever been on which was, there was a lot, it was amazing.

From there went to smaller agencies because I was like, I'm done with these big ones. Then realized sometimes smaller agencies, while you wear many hats, sometimes you wear too many hats. The agency I went to I was like the janitor/SEO; I would take the trash out every day out to the dumpster so we went a little too small at that point.

I happened to find a happy medium at another company we kind of shared, Search Discovery, where it was a nice size where I didn't have to take out the trash, but also small enough where you get to wear many hats.

[Roy] And work with very large companies that you wouldn't think for such a small agency.

[Jeff] That were some great clients there too; that was awesome kind of going to some of these clients' offices really made me jealous sometimes. Then Covid hit, you know, we had some downsizing and I luckily fell forward and started working for New York Times, Wire Cutter division, as a technical SEO.

Now I'm moved over more into the product management role. We're still doing technical SEO up to about a week and a half ago where I'm still a product manager, but kind of shift over to another team where we are focusing more on experience. I'm still coming at things technically, still coming at them in a way, Google first, making sure that when Google hits our pages, everything is indexable and things like that but I also get to play a little bit more now with conversions and conversion rate and actually really focus on our readers and not necessarily focusing on Google first now. That's actually been a little bit of a nice switch even though it's only been a couple of weeks.

[Roy] Well, and that's always like a fine wire to walk, right? Like the balance between is this a usable website or is it completely just for Google's purposes?

[Jeff] Yeah.

[Roy] There are trade-offs that you make with design and functionality. You know the people and companies want that really nice looking video in the background of their homepage but yeah, if it slows it to a halt, then Google's not going to index the page or the experience is bad. I think UX and SEO have always had kind of a dance going on.

[Jeff] Oh yeah, we definitely have and it was really nice being able to use those years of experience kind of working with all the other teams now and learning what I learned from some really great teams over there and just leaning a little bit on my 20-year-old design and experiences there but it's been great that way to just know that I'm kind of completing the life cycle now of just web design and development. I am still focusing on things like accessibility, which really kind of got me into SEO in the beginning because I was focusing on accessibility as a web developer. It really, really helped SEO back then and still does today. So it's one of those where we really like to focus on that. The ability right now, we’re doing pretty well but we like to be better and that's kind of where I'm in now.

[Roy] Sure. For sure. So I mean, SEO's dead though right?

[Jeff] Oh yeah.

[Roy] I mean everybody's been talking about that for years. Like every few months it's like something comes out from Google and all of a sudden everybody's like, Hey, no, SEO's a dead industry. You can't impact Google. Google's going to do whatever.

[Jeff] Yeah, it's so dead that it drives, you know, 60% of the traffic to my website.

[Roy] Right, right.

[Jeff] And that's millions of visits a day but Google, it's one of those, they are tough to deal with at times. I am lucky right now that I work for a company that focuses heavily on editorial integrity and not really coming up. . . like we're not content-farmed by any means.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Sometimes I wish we could be a little bit more of a content farm cause I want to hit so many different things that are out there but it really saves us when we have all these new updates coming out which there have been a lot recently from Google.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] I'm at a point in my career where I'm not worried. Maybe we'll see a little shift up and down but I see websites go out of business because some of these updates and it's just because they are competing against sites like Wire Cutter in the New York Times. Especially in the affiliate space where Wire Cutter plays there's a lot of junk out there and Google's trying to take it all down but every time they take something down, something new pops up.

[Roy] Yep.

[Jeff] And it is a game. So people who say SEO is dead are mistaken. They'll always be mistaken. If you can search for something, there's always going to be a way to optimize that search and there's always going to be, I actually think there's more opportunity now because you have huge search companies like Amazon. You don't think of it as a search company, but I mean when was the last time you clicked through the navigation of Amazon to find anything that you wanted? You don't; everything is done through a search on that. YouTube, some of these huge companies out there. I mean YouTube is part of Google, but there are more ways to search are app stores and things like that.

There are just way more things we can optimize. SEO I think is bigger than ever and it's one of those where you're always going to find a way to try to beat your competitor cause if you're number five or number six on a list, you can go up. So you're going to try to figure out ways of doing that and most of the time it is through content but with the larger websites you're on, there is a lot of technical debt that just piles up and over time will slow your site down, will make your site less accessible, will make it less crawlable. There are new technologies that come out that Google hasn't caught up with. There are a lot of new and old things that can actually hinder a website. There's going to need to be experts in that to be able to help that out.

[Roy] Right. For sure. Yeah and to your point, like the recent updates, we've seen a lot of the content/affiliate sites that have just bottomed out their traffic. You're talking about very large sites that are seeing 50% drops in traffic because they have too many, we're assuming, it's because they have too many affiliate links on some of the content or too many ads. It's not a good user experience.

[Jeff] Yep.

[Roy] From a technical SEO perspective, what are some of the tools that you've traditionally turned to and that you still find useful? Other than obviously your own, I know that you've dabbled in podcasts.

[Jeff] Yeah. In my toolbox, will always be Screaming Frog . Though I don't use it nearly as much as I used to and there are some reasons there but Screaming Frog is great for when we're doing site audits. When we're doing competitive audits, if you want to crawl all your competitor's sites you can just pop it into Screaming Frog. I've taken down websites with Screaming Frog, which was funny. In the agency world, I would always run screaming Frog at a high speed, and if I could take it down on like a 2013 MacBook error, imagine if there was an actual attack on your website.

[Roy] The denial service attack.

[Jeff] Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I kind of like to push that a little and use some of that in my technical recommendations. Like, Hey, maybe you need to strengthen up your site a little bit.

[Roy] Beef up your servers.

[Jeff] Yeah but it's also great because you can have it set so to extract things like your title tags and meta descriptions and other things, but they give you, I think it's 10 slots to create your own custom extractions so you can pull things in like content blocks that you might have.

We tend to have on Wire Cutter little service notes or notes on the side like we've updated this then and that; I crawl all those so I know when those change. Screaming Frog is always one of the biggest ones in there, but recently we have been subscribed to a tool called Content King, which has got bought by Conductor.

One reason I love Content King and there are other ones out there like Deep Crawl and Botify. The negative with Screaming Frog is that you have to run it from your location. Having it in a SAAS platform just means that they're always crawling. The one great thing that I find with Content King is that it's always crawling. It crawls our most important pages multiple times during the day. It looks for content and technical issues that we might say. So if something changes, blocks of content change, you can get alerts to put through it. You could set the level of those alerts. We set it up for any of our major reports or major crawls when it goes through; anything that pops up, robots, text files changed, or anything like that. It saved us a bunch of times knowing something changed that shouldn't have changed and being at such a big company, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen so you never know when something's getting changed.

[Roy] Oh, I'm sure.

[Jeff] Sometimes it’s not bad by any means, but there are other ones where maybe we didn't know. We have our content schedule and maybe other things change from there but knowing when there's a broken page or a 503 error, the quicker you know, the quicker you can fix it. If you're manually running reports every week or every two weeks just looking at audit-type of features, you might be down for two weeks and not know it.

Having a tool out there that's always checking as I said, Content King's been great for us. Deep Crawl is another; they're more technical focus but they're a great tool too. The New York Times in general, they have some tools they like to build that are, they are a company that loves to build tools, so we have some tools on our end there that crawl our site. They actually look at our traffic and tell us when we have traffic dips and things like that, that come up.

Those are the general tools that I use. There are hundreds out there, so sometimes if you're doing research, you know, there's always Semrush, Ahrefs, and Similarweb. We use a lot of those tools just for our content side of things and research and knowing, but they also have technical features now, so they can crawl your site at the same time and alert you too. Sometimes we have tools that are overlapped and then we're always going through like, do we need this tool anymore?

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] We just had a tool that looked at our core vitals every day but we now build that into our analytics reports using real-time data. We just canceled that service just because it was redundant. Things can get redundant pretty quick in, in the SEO tool world.

[Roy] For sure. Yeah, absolutely and they're expensive. If you start adding up the tools over time, you know, it adds up. From a cost perspective, they're super expensive.

[Jeff] Especially if you go to Rank Track and tracking your ranks and stuff like that. Some of those tools, being in the news industry, weekly tracking, sometimes daily tracking; like during our deal events and holiday events, doing cyber tracking every 15 minutes is optimal because you're playing with top stories, you're playing in those little areas. The more you can actually track that, the more you see when you drop off so that you can do some sort of content update or come out with some more content to fill that spot. If you waited a day, it's already over.

[Roy] Yeah, that's a great point. I mean a lot of companies don't have the ability to change rankings that quickly because, you know, they're not as, as visible as the New York Times.

[Jeff] It's news.

[Roy] Yeah, different than smaller companies.

[Jeff] Different. Same issues just at a faster pace.

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] Especially on the news side, which I'm always curious about but kind of happy I'm not over there too, is that because news is any second something pops up. News to me is just crazy because it can happen anytime during the day. You have to be ready to optimize all the time and it's such a short window from when news is news and compared to being old.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. We talked a little bit about the updates and stuff. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're regularly seeing now that could affect pretty much anybody? Like what should they be aware of that is really the big impacter right now?

[Jeff] Yeah. Recently too, I think there have been three or four major updates that have come out in the last 30 days I think. But one thing that Google's really been focusing on and it seems to be like all these updates are focused on, is just the helpful content update. Like is your content helpful to your readers or your people coming to your website?

There's been a whole bunch; I'm in more of the affiliate space. There's been at least I think five this year like product updates, product review updates, and algorithm changes that are really focusing on so much AI content out there, so much like spam, such thin content. Like did you really review a product or did you really actually have this in your hand? Or are you just copying other people's content out there?

[Roy] Is it just an excuse for a link?

[Jeff] Yeah, exactly. Google always has its core updates, which focus on a lot of things, especially the quality of the content definitely over the last six months. That's one reason in the beginning I said I don't worry as much because I know we have amazing editors on our team, but I know not everybody has that. Right?

There are really people cutting corners and taking shortcuts in their content. There's a lot of great technology out there these days that uses like machine learning and AI to help you write your content. I think that's what some of the most recent updates have been trying to target; when you just give a tool a whole bunch of keywords and they write all the articles for you and spit it out.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] It's usually not great. Though I've seen some studies that showed some of that passed these recent updates, so I'd love to know what tools those were using so that I know how to combat against them. Having more content is usually better, not always, so long as it's targeted to what you need. It just seems like there are a ton of content farms and there's always been content farms, like low level, cheap content but now it's, I think as an SEO, you don't need to farm that out anymore. You can actually farm that out the software.

It's going to only get better. We've seen how many deep fake videos like Tom Cruise deep fakes. If you can do it with video and voice, content's not far behind.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure.

[Jeff] All the misinformation that's going out there, especially in the news side of things. E-commerce, Google showing products right in Google listings and the SERPS themselves are not just 10 blue links. Hasn't been for a while but it's like you now need to have video content. You need to now have really great images that are optimized properly. You really need to have a lot of those, like whatever you see on a search results page.

If you have a local store, now you need to be in local search results and because they're just so broken up, any e-commerce, Google is now showing you tons, especially during holiday times. They might show up to like 20 products right on that page. No one's clicking into websites anymore. They're clicking straight from Google to buy it now. As an SEO person, you're like I need that traffic because I need to justify my job, and sometimes getting it up on Google means you're winning because, at the end of the day, money is what matters. You may be winning with people buying your products, but it might not look like it's coming from organic search. Maybe it's coming from paid search or just coming directly to your site from something like that.

[Roy] Yeah, so on that, what are you guys using or what do you prefer to use for tracking and analysis and the kind of data, like the impact that you're having on these programs? I know that from our perspective, coming from an analytics background, Google Analytics 4 has going to been wreaking havoc with the industry and Google's move into that. People that depend on that it's changing marketing attribution. They're using the data-driven model, which is an AI model, which is a lot different than last click. So what do you use in your every day? How do you measure and monitor?

[Jeff] Yeah. GA is part of my daily routine though the New York Times has also built their own analytics platform and that platform is getting better and more powerful. We store everything in a big query database. We're able to query from that using tools. We were using a tool called Chartio. I think they kind of stopped making Chartio. So we've switched over to a tool called Mode, but Data Studio also hooks into that and we're able to kind of create reports based off those two analytics platforms. Sometimes we put them side to side to see how different they are and they are fairly close. To the point where we rely less on Google Analytics these days.

I still love the interface of Google Analytics and digging in and doing things like that but we are in the middle of figuring out if it is worth us re-tagging our whole site and redoing the way we do analytics to move to GA4 or just sticking with our homegrown analytics tool?

Not many other companies have that decision to make. You're going to GA four because working with like Adobe Analytics or any other big ones out there, Google is really good at pushing people off of things that they don't want them on. You know, GA360 or the normal GA going up to GA4.

I haven't used GA for a ton, so it'll be interesting. I really feel for a lot of people that go through that. In SEO, some of the bigger things are our analytics, but the other end of that is rankings. We have a whole bunch of different ranking tools. The main one we use is Advanced Web Rankings because it's cheap. I don't really love it, but it's cheap and we can put tons and tons of keywords in there to track. We've also used a couple of other tools in there.

We're about to have something called Make-a-Week, which we kind of build our own tools. We have a week just to kind of go crazy and do what we want. So I am looking at building in like a news top story tracker. We have a little team that we're going to try to knock out just because, as I mentioned during holidays, tracking every 15 minutes is vital to see where we're at.

[Roy] Yep.

[Jeff] Because we do product reviews, that's when people are searching the most. Cyber week is coming up, Prime days, like any of those. Labor Day, holidays and stuff. We're always trying to compete in the top stories and news for anyone who's searching like best buy deals or best toasters or anything that has the best in front of it and it's something to do with reviews or even gift terms.

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] You know, best gifts for 13-year-old teenagers in your house or something. We're trying to land on all those pages and a lot of those will be in the news cycle during that time and they go so quick. We might only be up there for an hour, so how can we track what kind of impact we had during that hour?

We might have another post come up right after that. No tracking tool that I know on the market really tracks at that quick of a level. It's usually daily, you can get them to be hourly, but they're still not focused totally on top stories. Then sometimes we need to be that granular in the way we track our data.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. I mean, even major platforms like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, especially during the holiday season, they don't want to tell you that, but there are significant data delays and lag between reporting and that type of stuff. I mean I've experienced it on Adobe Analytics where it'll be a day behind during the peak season.

[Jeff] Especially if you're using your free tool from Google Search Console that they have. That could be three days, four days behind and some people just rely on that for their traffic. It's a great tool don't get me wrong there, but if you are searching for quicker data, GA's probably the quickest you'll get, but some of those are always delayed. You might be five or six hours delayed on that. We do have a tool called Chart Beat that we use that gives you that real-time analytics. So during those holidays, we can see our content move. I think it updates every 30 seconds or something so you can see where things are at. Chart Beat's really great for that on the fly; it's kind of like what I wished Google's analytics, real-time traffic looked like instead of just being like one page with a number.

Chart Beat definitely gives you like, are they coming in through amp? Are they mobile or desktop? Where are we seeing our spikes and where are we seeing things drop off? Which is always great to see and it's fun to watch cuz it's kind of like a dashboard and you get to see things moving around in it. It's coming from old school analytics where things might have been delayed a couple of days and doing monthly reports, to see things move every 15, 30 seconds is kind of insane to see.

[Roy] Yeah, that's a lot. It could be addictive to kinda watch them simplify the analytics.

[Jeff] Exactly.

[Roy] With the ranking stuff, I know one of the things we run into with clients is helping them understand that what they're seeing when they conduct a search is not what the tools are seeing. We see that with executives, for instance. We tell them, hey, you know, you're ranking regularly for these keywords or for these landing pages. Then they're like, well, I just did a search and I don't see it.

Do you still run into that with executive teams? I mean, maybe not as much at the New York Times, but with some of the other people.

[Jeff] Right, but we still see it, right? People have their terms they search for and depending on what it is. Google is very good at giving you results that you were probably looking for because they want that click-through on there. There could be times that I'm searching for something and I see it and you don't. It's just because I searched for that 20 times already. Even if I'm in incognito mode, my IP is still attached to that search and things like that.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Part of rankings, I tend to run my rankings in LA and New York just to kind of get the coastal separations there. I'm based in Atlanta, Georgia, so my personal search looks different than most of my team up in New York. Especially the more localized terms, right? If I'm searching for a pizza shop or anything like that, it's definitely going to give you local size terms. Surprisingly you would think like best vacuum or a term like that would not fluctuate across the states but they can.

[Roy] For sure.

[Jeff] We tend to use our one source but we also use, as I said, SEM Rush, Hrefs, and AWR, Advanced Web Rankings it's called.

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] I kind of mill them together as an average score. I avoid using search console for my rankings because I don't trust them and they give you average. If you're number one and you have one at number 30, they're going to say, you rank 15 for something and I'm like, well, no, I do rank number one. That's where I try to take my top rankings on all those tools and blend them together. They're usually very close; so if like I'm number one in one, I'm usually no further than number two in another one, especially on the first page. But as soon as you get to those second-page rankings they can fluctuate wildly but being in the news world you have your like five or six news; like CNN and Washington Post. You have your competitors that are always there and it is kind of a game of inches at that point. Moving up a couple can really be a big boost.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure, and CNN, they know you're in Atlanta,\ so they're probably trying to sabotage it.

[Jeff] Exactly. It's surprising these big news organizations since New York Times bought Wire Cutter, CNN created something called Reviewed or Underscored and then USA Today has Reviewed. There newspapers are seeing that there is a model to this and being able to spread out some of their traffic around them.

Who competitors were a couple of years ago has totally changed and you have a lot of the big guns in there now that have great editorial staff that can jump on trends. New iPhone comes out, they're on it. Live. At Apple's campus as it's going on. You're seeing a lot of that now where it used to be a lot more specialty blogs or you had people like CNET that were more electronic-based, right? Not necessarily getting into like toasters and stuff, but now they're over in that world too. It is spreading out, the competition is getting way more fierce in that space.

[Roy] And they have the budgets to actually go buy the products. To actually test them in a lab environment where it's not just theorizing how good they are.

[Jeff] Yeah and that's part of the expertise scores at Google. At Google, there's an EAT score that people talk about. It's not an official number, but it's expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. A lot of these news sites like New York Times, CNN, and others have that built into them already because they have such great staff.

There are a lot of people, a lot of websites out there that just are taking Google's reviews and saying, hey, they'd never seen the product, they never tested it. Make sure that you have the content, the supported imagery that this is actually the product in my hands, and a video of you testing it. All that stuff is very important these days in the affiliate space.

[Roy] Yeah and I've never tested it, but I know that there have been rumblings that Google will take it as a signal if you're using stock photography or photography that's readily available. If it's not your photography, not your video, that's a signal that they're using.

[Jeff] Yeah and they're able to search all that, right? They know if you're using Google images and just copying and stealing something out from them.

[Roy] What are some of the other trends that you're seeing? Stepping back even just a little bit from when you were still in the dark side of the agency world, what are, what are some of the biggest challenges you think that companies are dealing with right now that you've seen that they could or that they should be focusing on? That they may not be.

[Jeff] From the company side, the agency side of things, as you probably will know too, it's finding people is really hard these days. I think a lot of SEOs have gone solo or started their own little conglomerate of like here's three of my SEO friends and we are, maybe not a full fledge agency, but they're like a team of freelancers. I see that in the agency, people that I know on the agency level and I think it's everywhere because we have the same problem at a large company too, which is finding the right people. As I said, there's a lot that’s moved off so it's like there are fewer SEOs out there it seems. When you do find the person that you're looking for, one, you're going to be paying more, which is great for the SEO itself, but from the agency's side, that could be a little tougher. At the same time as an SEO, you're going to be expected more from that agency, right?

If you getting hired at a company, budgets could be tough coming in the next year or so. We are somewhat in a recession. I'm not going to call it a full recession yet, I'm not an economic expert but I know there are people being used.

[Roy] Money.

[Jeff] Exactly. Yeah, and you're not able to hire 30 SEOs now. You might need to wear more hats. I look at it as a great way to learn more things. I kind of got ultra-specialized in a technical SEO role by choice. That was my like little niche. Companies might not be willing to hire that niche anymore. They want someone who might be more well-rounded and looking for someone who might know a little bit about user experience or might know something, a little bit, about accessibility. Again, your specialty will still be SEO, but I always laugh cuz SEOs definitely put their nose in every part of the business. If we could sit next to the CEO and tell them how to spend stuff too; like we want more budget. You need to know almost how to manage people and know how to manage clients because they're going through some of those budget constraints too.

[Roy] Definitely.

[Jeff] There's a lot more than just knowing your SEO, I think these days that to become a really great employee for a company and SEO. To move the needle there's just so much more competition out there. There's a lot more noise. There are a lot more areas. Again, does TikTok help?

That's where a lot of people are spending their time. Kind of a funny search, I was at a liquor store the other day looking for some tequila and I was like, let me try this. I went on TikTok and typed in best tequilas. A whole bunch of review people popped up on there. I clicked the first one, he went through the top five. It was right in front of me. I picked it up. I didn't use Google for that search.

There are more ways now that we might find the things that we want and the content we want and it's not just on Google. Google still reigns supreme, don't get me wrong.

[Roy] Sure, sure.

[Jeff] I think you're going to have the ability to grow in other areas because Google is just one area where you can get your customers from. As an SEO, knowing those other areas and how you can work with each other and everyone is on the same team, High tide flutes, all boats

[Roy] Right

[Jeff] One thing at Wire Cutter, we are trying out TikTok, we are trying out everything just to see where we can get or we can reach more readers at all times. We've recently switched over to a subscription model like there are other ways to make money, Right? Subscription's one of them.

Now being in a publisher, that makes more sense than if you were just a commerce company you're not going to have a subscription of course, or any other industry. Finding different ways that we can optimize the business itself and make money is another big thing.

[Roy] For sure. Do you feel like in the smaller agency world, the boutique agency just like us, one of the things that's impacted us is that people have a sour taste in their mouth when you mention SEO.

[Jeff] Oh, yeah.

[Roy] And I think it could be one of the reasons why people aren't going into it as much because there are so many companies out there saying that they're SEO experts and they don't know what the hell they're talking about and they're actually giving you bad information or they're charging and they're not actually doing anything. They say they're doing SEO for your site, you're getting a monthly bill, and they're doing some keyword reporting. Like they're not writing content, they're not changing anything on the site. It's kind of become a black mark on the industry a little bit.

[Jeff] Right.

[Roy] I think frankly, it could be impacting the number of people that want to even get involved in it.

[Jeff] Yeah. I would agree there. I think black-hat SEOs have always been a thing, right? I've been lucky in my career where I've always had to have, at least, I would've gone down that hole if I didn't have clients that would've fired me instantly by going down some of those holes. But I totally get that where people have been burned, especially small businesses. There are a couple of companies I've gotten into some Twitter wars with. CEOs of some of those small companies that charge your local mom-and-pop shop, a thousand dollars a month, give them two blog posts and they can't do anything to their website, they can't do anything. It's a really hard market to go into. I feel bad for small boutique business owners cuz again, there you're wearing a billion hats, and being in SEO is not one thing that you’re most familiar with especially if you're running a local store or a local shop. I do agree that could just leave a bad taste in an agency's mouth but actually, as someone who's young getting into an industry, it's not a glamorous position. A lot of times if you are an artist or an author and you love the write, writing for search engines might not be in the constraint of what you really want to do.

Being on the technical side I want to try all this new software that's come out. Back in the day, we had the big thing with Ajax. Everybody was doing everything with Ajax and Google couldn't read it.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Those technologies now are commonplace and Google is getting better at them, but there's always that new technology pushing the limit that as a developer you want to try to use out, but Google still needs to catch up. I keep calling out Google, but there are other search engines out there that are definitely further behind Google. Being able to have them read websites and understand them might be a lot harder than you think.

[Roy] Yeah. I mean we're working with a client right now; they built their own website from scratch. It's an e-commerce website, which I don't recommend building from scratch.

[Jeff] Yeah.

[Roy] And Google can't read their links. It's completely not indexable and it's kind of a big problem.

[Jeff] You know, and it happens everywhere. A couple of years before I joined Wire Cutter, we had the same thing. We upgraded to React and our links were not visible. We saw a big giant dip before I was here.

I think I would've blocked that maybe before it went live but you never know. You're fighting your battles and that's actually from the SEO side is what I, moving to the in-house from the agency what I've learned is I used to write up giant reports of everything, strategies, and everything we need to do for the next six months because I have a six-month contract.

I guess I realize, being so self-centered, never knowing what that company's actually capable of implementing. What is actually on their backlogs already? Being on that side now, I have eight months' worth of work. If we brought in another agency to get something fixed up, I might not be able to get to that because I already have a backlog. There's also order to that backlog where changing something small for SEO might not be on the list compared to something large that's going to help our readers overall; there's that scale.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] As a business owner that's hiring an SEO company, having those conversations like, what can we actually accomplish? You're going to send me a million things, what can we actually get accomplished? There are SEO companies also that, yeah, they're just sending you a report, and here add these words to this page. There are tons of SEO companies that just do backlinks, and I think that's some of the negative feedback people get because that's how many times do I or you probably get too, the LinkedIn people like, hey!

I get all the time for businesses I'm not even in. Like they want to help my agency grow emails and I'm like, I don't work for an agency. Have you looked at my LinkedIn profile? I'll get you four new clients every month and I'm like, I don't get clients like that.

[Roy] I think that's the trend right now because I get probably 10 of those emails a day. Like it's amazing

[Jeff] I used to accept everybody on LinkedIn. It was like my free for all because I figured, hey, a larger network, great for that. Now I have rules, like if there's no picture, then you're definitely not getting accepted.

[Roy] Oh, for sure, for sure.

[Jeff] If you don't have any of your experience or any recommendations from people like you're not getting accepted.

[Roy] Yeah. If you're a business coach, I don't accept you

[Jeff] Exactly, but still, you go through all those lists and half of them first thing they do is they DM you and try to sell you something. I think that that hurts the industry overall because SEOs are very crafty and we can come up with different ways of marketing to you. The LinkedIn and all those profiles, you're just getting hammered, people selling you links, people trying to sell your business.

[Roy] Right, right.

[Jeff] To the point where it seems the whole industry is sketchy.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. It comes across that way definitely because one, it's not as glamorous as social media because everybody talks about TikTok and everybody talks about short-form YouTube videos and that kind of stuff. It's just not as sexy as tinkering with content and trying to figure out why those links aren't getting picked up at Google and looking at data.

[Jeff] As someone young coming into an industry that is real. You probably aren't on Google as much as you think you are. Most of them spend their time, if I look at my kids' screen time, it's like YouTube number one. They play their video games so in-game advertising is big, but hopefully not prevalent to them as much. I actually subscribe to YouTube premium. I was tired of hearing my kids listen to commercials 80% of the time.

[Roy] Sure.

[Jeff] To watch a 30-second video, you're watching two minutes of commercials. For, you know, $15 a month, I cut that off on the whole family and now they're not being marketed to. As a marketer, I love to use ad-block. I don't know. Do as I say, not as I do kind of approach.

[Roy] Yeah. I'm right there with you. I purposely will never, ever click on a banner ad. I mean, I just don't like display advertising typically for my clients. I just have an attitude about it and I will never click on them.

[Jeff] I do click on competitor's paid search all the time though.

[Roy] Well, for sure. Yeah, of course.

[Jeff] Make them pay for my click.

[Roy] That's right. Especially in certain industries where, you know, they're paying $20 or $30 for and stuff like that.

[Jeff] Oh, exactly.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure, absolutely. What do you think is, what's next, right? You've got the finger on the pulse of kind of where you see Google moving and what you see happening in the industry. What are you looking toward or planning for or concerned about?

[Jeff] Yeah, as I mentioned as a negative, all the AI content and AI stuff that's out there. It's going to get good enough, I think, where it's going to be hard to distinguish, like good and bad. I don't think it's all negative. I think it can definitely help with the content side, whether it's doing a whole bunch of analysis for you. Hey, let's look at the top 10 people for a keyword I want to rank for. What is everything they have? Give me an outline and give me content blocks possibly that I could use and that other companies are using and how do I make that my own?

I definitely think everything should go through a human before it ever goes website, but I think it's going to get good enough out there where you're just going to see companies, and you're already kind of seeing it, but they're just going to be able to spit out thousands of pages of content a day and it's going to be really hard to distinguish what's real.

The whole misinformation thing, right? That we've been going through for the last five or six years. That's all driven by humans but now if that could be driven by AI, it can get even crazier because they'll be able to hook that into bidding type of wars on social media. To be able to get you the wrong information at the right time, just to get you to get to their website, I think that is going to be a battle for some time to come.

I'm not saying that; I think there are ways to use it for good. Again, as long as it's human edited and not just fully run, I think you can use it for just the research phase of things. I think you're going to see a lot of tools bring that in.

Google's always changing. I'm not going to say they don't like SEOs because I think they do, because the more anyone focuses on your company, good or bad, I think is one that's going to be something I think Google's going to really like. At the end of the day, the scamming part and spam, they're always going to be battling. You're going to have tons of updates. You're going to have them diversifying their search results even more. Right now we have some videos, most of them are on YouTube, but with all this short-form video content like reels and TikToks and stuff like that. How do you get those into search results?

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Again when I'm searching for an answer, this is some of the battles internally I have, we have like Wikipedia-length pages of everything we've reviewed and that's great for SEO and the content that's in there. But as a searcher, sometimes I just need that 30-second clip of why do I need this and what does it look like.

[Roy] Yeah, exactly.

[Jeff] How-to content that is fix everything. I think during Covid, how long was the line at Home Depot? We had lines to get into Home Depot, right? It was everyone who was fixing up their home and because we were all at home at the time. The ability to rank for like how to fix my toilet and things like that but also now associate that great content with here's where you can buy it and this is how you're going to make money off of it. You're going to see just, I think it's really hard, but everyone says it's a year for search or a voice search. I do see it coming in there. I don't know if it's ever going to be the year for voice search, but I think being able to optimize for that right now we don't really have any data.

It's really hard to optimize if we can't have the data to read it. I think that's why it never really, it's catching on. Our kids talk to, again, we yell at Siri or Alexa all the time. Trying to figure out where are our readers or people that are looking for our content. Where are they and how can we find them?

I think kind of just the same with like cable companies. Everything went into like Comcast. Now it's all splitting out and going in again to Netflix and all the different platforms.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Hulu and stuff out there for that type of content. That's the same, I feel is happening on the web. It's always been splitting, but it's not Facebook anymore, right? I mean, it is still Facebook but I think we see that as a sinking ship sometimes.

What is the next big thing where everyone's at? Sometimes I feel like Gary V just trying to, like, who would I invest in next? In all the big things out there to know where to spend my time?

Because there are too many places and not enough people and not enough analytics to go around on a lot of those.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. No, I think that's a great point. I talk about this all the time where there are so many different places for people to go that you'll see people that are YouTube famous, that have millions and millions of followers, and I've never heard of them.

[Jeff] Mm-hmm.

[Roy] Right? Like never heard of them.

[Jeff] Yes.

[Roy] That wasn't the case 15 years ago when if somebody was famous it was because you saw him on TV and the majority of people culturally would probably know who that person is and that's just not the case anymore. You can have people that are multi-multimillionaires with 10, or 20 million followers on, on one of the channels. There are just so many different ways to get to these people and to get to the content that there's no consolidated way. So,

[Jeff] Yeah, right now I look lucky. I have kids that I follow what they do and understand a lot of those names there but as they get older, they're not going to know the youngers. There's so much information out there these days. It's so many different people, that I've recently taken up - one thing you might know about me is I have tons of hobbies - and my latest one is I'm learning disc golf, right?

[Roy] Yeah. For sure.

[Jeff] I've been following a lot of disc golf this year and disc golf really blew up during Covid because you can just spend like $30, get three discs and courses are free and they're outside and they never got shut down during Covid so it blew up, but knowing who the number one disc golf player in the world is no one else knows. Right.

[Roy] Yeah, that's very niche.

[Jeff] Exactly. Who knows, but that person makes 10 million a year playing disc off and has the following.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] But there's a million of them now, right? You know, in TikTok the people were like Charli D'Amelio, I don't even know. I just know the name. Just with all the dancing and things like that. Where there was a trend or everyone just walking around the store doing all their dances but they have a hundred million followers.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] You know any of your cable news is not getting a hundred million people every day watching their stuff.

[Roy] Mm-hmm.

[Jeff] It's like the way the influence has changed over the last couple of years and where's that going? Right. I love to say VR, I know Meta put all their money into Oculus. I love the Oculus, I love VR, but it's one of those where going out and walking a trail to me is just way more rewarding. Not a trail in the Metaverse.

[Roy] Right. Where you’re going to run into a wall.

[Jeff] Exactly. Those are fun videos to watch too.

[Roy] Yeah, For sure. All right, well, anything else that you see or that we should touch on?

[Jeff] No, not that I can think of off the top of my head. There just, again, there's so much out there that it's growing that I feel that we could probably spend two hours talking of each individual one of them.

[Roy] Sure.

[Jeff] In the Google space, just keep an eye out for everything that Google is; all the updates, they tell you what they're looking for. If you're looking at ranking in Google, there's a reason why they might not tell you what's in their update or exactly what's in the algorithm, but they're naming their updates now. It's not like the SEO industry naming them something like Panda or Florida. They're, they're actually naming them: helpful content update.

[Roy] Yep.

[Jeff] The reason why you're not ranking is cuz your content's not helpful, you know? Or something like that.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] It's really been great to see them kind of open up and become a little more transparent, even though they're not transparent at all, but at least they're giving us a warning like there's going to update coming. Before it used to be like a panic Monday, you come into work and all your rankings are down and you freak out.

[Roy] I have told people too, to keep an eye on the search console because they have a report now that shows how many videos are being indexed on your site. It's probably important, you know?

[Jeff] Yeah.

[Roy] If they show and have a report for how content shifts on your site because it's annoying and it causes missed clicks. Probably important from a technical perspective that you pay attention to shifting content, you know?

[Jeff] Yeah. Things like coed vitals, do they help SEO? I mean, if you're really bad and you get good, yes, they'll definitely help. But we're in a spot where we're just on the line. So some days we're good, some days we're not.

We're trying to get it to where we're always good but I have some issues where it's like, is it going to help me with my rankings? No. Is it going to help me with more traffic? Not right now.

Where we are trying to focus, we're trying to remove Amp, but we want to make sure we can cuz Amp, at least to my side of the business, is a huge chunk and I am sure it's even bigger on the news side because that's where all the top stories are at.

Google says that you don't need it anymore as long as you hit your core web vitals and you follow some things. It is really tough when they pushed us all that way, everyone jumped on it. Especially in the publishing world and now you say that you can take it off. It is a significant chunk of traffic that hits our Amp pages.

We are working to run some tests after this holiday season and early on in the year to just remove it totally. There have been some big news organizations that have removed it, so that is one of that I would say too, is corporate vitals are important, but they're not going to make you rank number one. But if you are in an industry like publishing and media, it is way more important because you want to get into those top stories.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. Well, great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. I appreciate it.

[Jeff] It's always good to catch up.

[Roy] As you get more involved in the usability aspect of your new role. We'll have to touch base again and see how that's impacting the business and what your involvement is there.

[Jeff] Exactly. It's still tough to not think of everything in the Google first realm on it. Right?

[Roy] Yeah, for sure.

[Jeff] First meeting I'm having, I'm like, well, Google would look at it this way and I gotta get out that way of thinking, even though Google does say focus on the user. So focus on our readers first and it should make Google happy.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. Well, again, thank you very much and we appreciate your time.

[Jeff] All right. Thank you.

[Roy] As always, I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and we'll try to get back to you.

And of course, like this, if it was helpful and subscribe and hopefully we'll see you again here soon.

Why We Don't Recommend WordPress

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 17:28:29 GMT

Sure, WordPress is super popular, but here's why we don't recommend it for our clients.

WordPress websites account for approximately 37% of all websites. But we don't recommend it for our clients, and don't use it for new sites that we build. Find out why, and what we recommend that you use instead.

Check Out Our Podcast!

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DKfhZILOf8mS8WdZ5PceU

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-marketing/id1642968872

Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xM2VjMWRiMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw

Transcription:

Today I'm going to say something a little controversial and that's that we don't recommend WordPress. I'm going to tell you why in a second.

As you know, WordPress is one of the most prolific and common website platforms in content management systems on the web it's used on thousands and thousands of websites. In fact, something like 37% of all websites are using WordPress; it's been around for a long time. There are a ton of people who know how to use it, so chances are people at your company have probably used it in the past and they know how to use it and make changes and that type of thing.

There are tons of developers out there that can help you with WordPress projects and that's one of the reasons why it's so popular. So many people use it, it's something like 60% of all content management systems. That's one of the reasons why it's popular. It's kind of self-perpetuating.

There's also a huge number of possible plugins that you can use. It's something like 55,000 plugins for WordPress that add all sorts of functionality to your website. It's got integrations with most major platforms. If there's something that you want to do with a website like scheduling or email gathering, or you name it, there's a plugin for it.

There are also tens of thousands of themes. From a look perspective, you can absolutely customize your website with just thousands of themes that are out there that will give the look and feel to start with to help you customize your site. Then from a customization standpoint, it's hugely customizable. If you have a good programmer or developer or if you know HTML and the ins and outs of CSS yourself, you can go in and customize most themes in most websites and get it exactly the way you want it and looking however your client wants it, if you're an agency. That's one of the cons as far as we're concerned with WordPress, in general, it can be difficult to use.

Takes Time to Learn and Customize WordPress

A lot of people are familiar with it, but from the outside looking in, the ramp-up time to use it is a bit more difficult than some of the other platforms out there. It doesn't have the sophisticated drag-and-drop functionality that a lot of modern platforms have.

WordPress Plugins

One of the cons that I see is, it's both a pro and a con, in the plugins. The plugins are necessary for pretty much everything in WordPress. If you want to do something as simple as take a page that exists on your website, copy it, and duplicate it, so you don't have to rebuild that page, it needs a plugin. If you want to back up your site, it needs a plugin. If you want to do pretty much anything on your site, you've got to go shop around and find a plugin. As I said, there are 55,000+ plugins, but who's developing them? You don't know. You don't know if that plugin is going to be around.

Another one of the big cons that I see, from a WordPress standpoint, is the fact that not only do you have to find plugins for everything but they're not vetted by WordPress. This means those plugins could be developed by anybody and it could be a company that goes away eventually or isn't updating its plugins to keep pace with potential security risks. Ultimately those plugins and themes that you're buying from, who knows who developed them, are a security risk to your site. They can get hacked. They can be incredibly out of date so they're not functioning correctly anymore.

WordPress Manual Updates

One of the big problems with WordPress sites is, not only do you have all of these plugins by different developers and they are a security risk, but you also have to update them. If updates are available, you're constantly having to monitor that, making sure they're updated, making sure they're not a security risk.

If one of them goes away, if the developer goes away, and they can't update it, now you have to go find another web plugin to make sure that it's working with your themes and all the other functionality. Sometimes that interdependency means that if one plugin goes away, you might have to go find a couple of others that are going to work with the new one. It causes a lot more development time and effort and management than we're willing to do for most of our clients.

To be quite honest, when we come into a lot of new projects where a client has a WordPress website, there's inevitably a huge number of plugins that are outdated. The themes are often outdated and in some cases, you have to rebuy the license so that can get costly over time. Then you're not sure that it's going to work, that the new version's going to be compatible with the website. We've seen many times where we've had to go in, try to update all those plugins, replace them and in some cases, rebuild functionality on the site, which causes a big delay when ideally you're just going in to update content. Now you're having to redesign and reimplement portions of the website.

Security Issues with WordPress

From a security standpoint, we can't minimize how vulnerable WordPress sites can be. It's largely due to not updating the platforms, but also the need for having security plugins, which a lot of other sites don't need. Stats show that something like every one in six WordPress sites has been hacked or is vulnerable to hacking. We've run into this with our clients where we've seen a site and we've come in and their site's running slow or they're getting weird security warnings and it was hacked and being used as an email server to send out Viagra emails or whatever they were sending.

WordPress says that because of its ubiquitousness, there are so many of them out there, and it makes an easy target. If you're a hacker and you're going to focus on penetrating a site, it probably makes sense to try to penetrate a WordPress site. They're going to look at those apps and vulnerabilities, they're going to want to go after sites that are the most vulnerable.

We saw a recent statistic that said that more than half a million WordPress sites were compromised by attackers in just 2021 alone. Not to spread fear and not to spread anything like that but the reality is that if you're not maintaining your site, which a lot of them are not maintained, they are a security risk.

WordPress Hidden Costs

Another benefit that a lot of people like about WordPress sites is the cost. There are a million web hosting providers out there that you can get for five, 10, $15 a month. The actual CMS itself in WordPress is free. It's open source and you can theoretically start a website for as little as $5 a month, but that's not taking into consideration the price of additional plugins if you want to buy a theme, that's well made, that's responsive, that's actually maintained by the developer. You're looking at, in some cases, a couple of hundred dollars for a theme. If you want to add SEO plugins like Yost and that type of thing, you're looking at licensing that.

The entry level for WordPress sites is relatively low. You can get a functional website for very little money. Now, as soon as you start adding the plugins and functionality and you start getting a lot of traffic, then it scales very quickly and suddenly that very low entry dollar website for $5 might be $300 a month. Then every time you need to make a change, that is a custom change, you might have to hire a developer to do it if you don't know HTML and that type of thing. That can get very expensive very quickly. From personal experience, we know that a lot of times going into a site that you didn't develop yourself, with all the various plugins and all the customizations, can take a very long time for the developer to figure out what's going on on the site and where those changes need to be made.

Making Changes Takes Time

There is a long learning curve if you're coming into a site, that's been already built and just trying to figure out what was done and what needs to be changed. Something that on another platform might take minutes, may take hours on a WordPress site just to figure out those changes. Most of the other platforms that we're going to be talking about in a second are more plug-and-place. You don't need the number of plugins and that type of stuff to maintain and manage.

Other Options

So, what are we using instead of WordPress? Well, it really depends on your business. It depends on the size of your company. It depends on the technical skills within your company. I hate to say it, but it depends.

The ones that we like particularly are those that are relatively common and easy to access for most people. Especially for eCommerce we definitely recommend, instead of going with WordPress and WooCommerce combination, doing something with Shopify . Shopify is an incredibly robust, incredibly low cost for the benefit of its e-commerce system that we'd highly recommend for most companies to use for e-commerce. Whether you're just starting out, mom-and-pop selling a few things, or whether you have thousands of products and need inventory management and that type of stuff. All of that is baked into Shopify and is extremely readily available.

Shopify is also pretty easy to use and it does require in some cases plugins and themes. The difference between Shopify and WordPress is that those plugins are all vetted by Shopify. Those themes and the plugins and the apps that you're going to buy for your store have been reviewed. They have to meet certain standards and they're most likely to be maintained on a regular basis. Those that are free from Shopify, also integrate with lots of different things which you can integrate with Facebook and integrate with Google shopping and all sorts of different platforms. Email platforms are generally free and you get a lot of functionality without having to maintain those apps and update them regularly; the platform takes care of that for you.

Another great entry-level platform is, Wix . I'm sure you've seen the ads for it; it's extremely easy to use. It's one of those drag-and-drop websites and it does get a few people to disparage it, especially in the industry. Like, “Oh, it's not a professional platform.” But it depends on your needs. If your needs are very simple and you are going to have your own company and your own people on your marketing team, updating it and developing it, and adding stuff, then you don't need to hire developers. Once the site is set up, as long as it's looking great, you can then maintain it yourself. From an entry-level standpoint, for small and medium-sized businesses that just need some basic functionality for their site, Wix is a good opportunity and a good platform to use for that.

Another one that a lot of people haven't necessarily heard of that we use for some of our clients is Duda ; it's drag-and-drop, it's extremely easy to customize, and there are not a lot of plugins but that is also a con. You can scale it to multiple sites very easily. You can copy sites very easily. From an agency perspective, we use it for very simple sites that we can copy. Say a company has three or four very similar websites that they need to use in property management or something like that. We can copy those sites and then customize them very quickly. The time between the start and finish of a project is dramatically reduced. The cost for our clients is dramatically reduced because it is so easy to use.

Again, you don't have to worry about updates. You don't have to worry about plugins. You get SSL, you get all that kind of stuff, all baked in. You don't have to worry about the hosting that's provided. All of that stuff is a potential security risk that you may have to shop around for and adjust and tweak on other platforms you don't have to do with either Wix or Duda.

Another platform that we like to use with our customers is Webflow . Webflow is not as entry-level as Wix or Duda. You can get extremely finessed with the layout, but again it is still drag-and-drop. You can make adjustments across the look and feel of it without understanding any code; it's not necessary to know the code. You don't have to do lots of plugins but there are plugins and that type of stuff theoretically available. There are integrations you can plug in as far as integrations with your email providers and stuff like that, using code insertions. There are some drawbacks as far as just the breadth of plugins that you need, but again, you don't need the plugins for just basic functionality as you do on WordPress. You can copy and paste things. You can actually back stuff up and all that stuff without needing a plugin.

These are just a few of the platforms that we use instead of WordPress. There are a million others out there and again, it all depends on your needs. It depends on how sophisticated your development team is or your marketing team. It really depends on what your business goals are. If you're an informational site, you don't necessarily want to go with Shopify. If you're a commerce site, go with Shopify.

It's a good idea to start looking at your website, sort of looking at the time it takes to maintain this potential security problem that you might be having with your site. Look at potentially migrating to another platform that will make ease of use and the ability to update your website more accessible to your marketing teams, and to the people working at your company.

There's no need in this day and age to go hire a development company or even an agency like ours to make simple changes to your website. That's something that we tell all of our clients, we don't want to tie you into a retainer agreement for us just to maintain your website; that doesn't make a lot of sense.

If it's stuff like we're writing content and there are lots of significant changes to the website on an ongoing basis then yeah, that might make sense because if we're developing new structures and designs and that kind of stuff all the time, which we do for some of our clients, then that makes sense.

But if you're just making small changes, adding blogs or updating calendars, or maybe changing things seasonally then it's really good for you to explore some of these other options that are not WordPress.

Don't Make These PPC Mistakes!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 20:45:51 GMT

Get better results from your paid search marketing campaigns!

Paid search (PPC ) can be an incredibly effective marketing channel, but it can also drain your budget while producing few conversions if done incorrectly. Roy from Apotheca Marketing looks as some of the most common issues with PPC that we see with our clients.

Have you tried paid search and felt like it just didn't work for you or your company? We're going to look at some of the top reasons paid search might not be working for you and what you can do to solve it.

Keyword Dumping & Account Structure

One of the things that we find with many paid search programs that we look at is what we call keyword dumping and what that means is that the account isn't structured correctly.

Accounts are based on campaigns, ad groups, and then the ads and keywords under that ad group. The campaigns allow you to target very specific things; whether it's demographics or segments or geography. Taking advantage of that is obviously the first good step to structuring your account. Make sure that it's targeting the right people, that if you sell products, for instance, and only in the U.S. that you're looking at only U.S. people. Or if you target nationally or internationally, to expand the targeting for that. If you do just geography-related sales, maybe just in Florida, then make sure that your ad campaigns are targeting just that area.

Within those campaigns are then ad groups and what we find is that a lot of people will take an ad group and dump a bunch of keywords in it for one ad and one landing page. That ad has a specific landing page, those keywords can have specific landing pages as well, but we find that a lot of people don't take advantage of that.

What they do is dump a bunch of keywords that may or may not be relevant. It could be because of suggestions from Google, as it was setting up the account. It could be random keywords that they threw in that might work. You'll have a lot of keywords in that account that are not specific to the landing page that they're going to or the ad content in that ad.

We had one client that had several thousand keywords in one ad group and those keywords were all over the board. What that does is, it lowers the quality score of the ad and makes it more expensive when people click through on it.

Better targeting for those ad group-level ads is going to improve the performance of your account. It's going to lower the cost per click and it's going to make sure that people are landing on a relevant landing page for the keywords that you're bidding on.

Negative Keywords

The other thing that we find that people often overlook is negative keywords. If you sell something that may be commonly confused with another product, or if it says you're bidding on a brand term, and there are other companies that use that brand, but maybe in conjunction with a different name (parts of a name or something like that), making sure that you're bidding on those negative keywords will tell Google that when people are connecting this specific search, not to show my ad.

That's important so that you're not spending money or getting impressions or getting clicks from keywords that really aren't relevant to you; seeing what people are actually searching for, are they clicking on your ads, and making sure to add those negative keywords will keep those unnecessary clicks, unnecessary cost from impacting your campaign.

Use Keywords in Ad Copy & Landing Page

We touched on it a little bit briefly, but the other thing to make sure that you're doing is that your ad copy, the words in your ad and the text you're using and your headlines and the body of your ad, they're reflecting the keywords that you're bidding on. It goes back to the idea of having more discreet ad campaigns or ad groups. That the ad groups then reflect the keywords that you're bidding on for that specific ad.

If somebody searches for a specific keyword, they see it in your headline, they see it in your body copy, and then they also see it on your landing page . It's going to tell them that that is a relevant ad, that they're in the right spot, that this is related to them. It also tells Google the same thing; if Google thinks that this is more relevant to the search that's taking place, they're more likely to show your ad and they're more likely to improve your quality score. This means that you're going to pay less per click for that ad or something that was less relevant and they're not going to charge you more for it.

Using Targeting

By making sure that you're reiterating those common keywords, it's going to impact both the user experience as well as your cost. I mentioned it in the campaign structure, but one of the things that a lot of people overlook is targeting those campaigns. Making sure that that campaign is being targeted to the right location, to the right people, and taking advantage of some of those targeting tools that come with Google.

For instance, you can look at, depending on the type of ad that you're running, you can look at income, you can look at gender, you can look at all sorts of different demographic and geographic, details that are going to more likely target your audience.

Customer Files

You can also upload or segment in Google Analytics. You can create segments; for instance, existing customers and people who've purchased on your site before. By giving Google that information like, “Hey, this is a group of people that we're interested in.” They're going to model that to say these are other people that are like the people that purchased on your site. We're going to serve that ad up for them.

Again, you may get fewer clicks and you may have a smaller audience, but your ads are going to be more effective and they're probably going to convert better; if you can convert better and keep your costs low, then you have a more profitable program.

Landing Pages

A lot of times people will completely forget about the landing page that they're sending people to. The last thing you want to do is just send everybody to your homepage, particularly if it's a longer tail or a product-specific keyword. If you are targeting a specific thing that people are looking for and you're just dumping them on your homepage, that may or may not be relevant to what they're looking for, you're going to make them have to navigate so odds are, they're going to leave your site. That's going to cost you more because they're clicking and they're landing on your homepage. They're not going to click through and search for what they were already searching for on Google. They're going to leave, which has cost you money.

Make sure that your ads and even down to the keyword level are specifically targeting the landing page that you want them to land on and that the landing page is a high-quality experience and reflects the keywords that they were searching for. The more likely the more keywords that were in the ad are in their search relevant to that landing page. Again goes to your quality score. It also goes to reaffirm to the customer that this is supposed to be worth landing on.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

Another important thing that a lot of people overlook because it can get a little complex, is setting up conversion tracking correctly in your Google Ads account. Google has an ability to put pixels on your site that will understand if people are converting and whether that's a purchase or whether it's a lead form or a download.

If you've identified that as the conversion that you are looking for, for this particular campaign, then you can make sure that Google is seeing that information. Why is that important? Because Google then takes that information, it knows to report on it and you're reporting, so you can see conversions but it's going to look at the people that are converting. It's going to say that these people, this target audience, this segment is likely to convert so let's serve this ad up to more of those people. Google's going to optimize serving your ad to those converting metrics. The more information it has to do that, the more likely you are to get a better-performing ad campaign.

Now leaving out conversion tracking, you absolutely can run ads doing that.

You can also say, “Hey, I'm just interested in clicks to the site. We just want to drive traffic or we just want to build brand.” and that's okay but it may cost you more money. If your end goal is that conversion and driving either leads or sales then you want to make sure that the conversing tracking is turned on. It can be a little complex and there's a whole process that you can do, we recommend doing it through tag manager, but it will actually tell you whether those conversion events are tracking correctly.

It is definitely worth setting up.

Panic Budgeting and Pausing

One of the things that you're going to want to avoid with any campaign that you're running is what we call panic budgeting. Whenever you start a new campaign or turn on a new ad group or add keywords or make any adjustments or changes, major changes to your campaign, Google goes into a learning phase. For instance, if you double your budget on a certain ad group or campaign, it sends Google back into a learning phase.

It has to then relearn, what is the right audience? Who are the right people to see this ad? How often should it serve it up? All of the stuff that goes into its AI. If it's a new campaign or if it's something that you just made a major change to it can take 48 hours or more, depending on the traffic to those keywords and those ads, for Google to start relearning.

What happens is people will start a new campaign and within a couple of days, they're freaking out because they're not seeing conversions. They're spending all this money and nobody's buying.

It takes time for people to buy. That is one thing that we always tell people, depending on the product that you're selling, there is a learning curve. There is there's a purchase curve where it may take several weeks or a handful of visits or more to your site before they're comfortable buying from you or before they've gone through the shopping process.

Again, if you're selling mortgages, for instance, it may take them six months before they make a decision. If you're selling pens, they're probably going to make that decision that day and there's going to be a shorter consideration curve. Keep that in mind, depending on your product that it's going to take time from when they start seeing your ads to when they start buying. Likewise, it's going to take Google some time to figure out the right audience for your ad too.

The last thing you want to be doing is going in panicking and adjusting those bids, either lowering them or pausing your ads because what happens is it sends Google back into relearning. So now, because you were panicking, it's going to then take even longer for Google to understand where it should be serving up those ads.

It's okay to be concerned. It's okay to watch your data, but we always encourage people to wait a week or two. Before making any real decisions about what their budgets are or anything else on their ads until they start to let Google learn and start to see the actual data come through.

The last thing you want to do is make changes to your ads because you're, you are feeling like they're not working. Let the data make those decisions for you. Give it time to do at least a full week before you start making dramatic changes to your ads.

Marketing Attribution

The other thing we see that sometimes leads people to believe that their ads aren't working is they're depending only on last-click attribution models . We've talked about this in other videos, but the attribution model is essentially how Google credits your ad for the sale, lead, or conversion. The default for Google Ads and for historically, for Google Universal Analytics, was last click. Whatever ad got the last click, got the credit for that sale; it didn't matter what other campaigns they clicked on, it didn't matter if they clicked on organic search and then clicked on a paid ad, whatever was the last click got the campaign credit and got the sale credit.

That's not always accurate because you're not giving credit to those other touch points that customers had. Whether that's organic, whether it's another ad, whether it's an email, whatever combination of things that people used to get to your site to finally make that sale by only giving credit to the last click, you're not seeing that entire journey and you're not giving it the correct credit for it.

What we encourage you to do is look at last click, but also look at Google's data driven model and that is the new default in GA 4. Take a look at that and you can actually look at the attribution reporting in GA 4 and compare those side by side. You can look at the data driven model along with last click and see how it changes the credit that's coming into your ads.

We've seen this on many campaigns where it looks like a campaign has driven no sales based on last click when in fact it's driving quite a bit of sales if you look at the data driven model. What that means is that it was actually part of that process, it was part of the journey that the customer took. They interacted with your ads, s those ads should be getting credit for informing them and keeping them coming back to your site. If you look at both models side by side, you can get a better idea of whether your campaigns are working or not.

Measuring ROAS and ROI

Last but not least is really understanding how you make that decision about whether your program is working or not. That means understanding really what things like ROAS and ROI are; ROAS is the return on ad spend and ROI is the return on investment. Different agencies and different companies will have various definitions for that but essentially you're looking at ROAS for how much did you spend on the ad and how much revenue did it bring in.

For companies that aren't retail companies, it's how much value was behind a certain lead or action; whether somebody signs up for an email or they download something or they fill out a form, they're capturing that customer is worth something to you. Both in Google Ads and Google Analytics, you can assign a value to that. You can say, “Hey, this typical lead is worth $50 or $100 because of the eventual business we'll get from them.”

Looking at what your ad spend is and then understanding what revenue it's generating is that ROAS model.

Where that falls down a little bit is that people aren't taking into consideration product cost or service cost. You may have, for instance, an ad group that, you know, cost you $10 and you generated $15, but how much did your product cost? If you sold a product, for instance, that only has a 20% margin, you may have lost money on that ad. While ROAS looks like it's positive, the actual return on your investment, when you factor in product or service costs may actually not be profitable.

Make sure that you have a good understanding of what those margins are so you can calculate that into your view of whether a program is profitable or not.

Don't just look at, “Hey, we got X percentage more revenue than we spent.” Again, that doesn't give you the entire picture of whether something's profitable or not. Look at the lifetime value of a customer, maybe you lost money on that initial sale, but if people tend to repeat buy from you, then it was worth acquiring that customer. You can look at acquisition costs and the lifetime value of a customer.

Those are all metrics that you should be looking at or talking to your agency or talking to your analytics team about factoring into understanding whether these programs are profitable for you or not. Again, it may have actually lost you money, the ROAS may not be great but if you acquired that customer and lifetime values are high, then having a flat or negative ROAS may actually be okay. If they're not, then you're going to want to look at the profit margins based on your product costs and service costs.

There's a lot of data that you should be looking at when you're managing your accounts. Sometimes the best thing to do is to go through your account and conduct regular audits to look at how your account is structured and whether there should be changes.

Conclusion

Google's constantly tweaking and making changes to how their ads are served and how the accounts are structured. It makes sense for you to go in and make sure that those ads are being updated on a regular basis.

Don't just launch them and let them fly then think that they're going to be okay. You want to regularly maintain them, look at how they're performing, go in and adjust as necessary, and sometimes even rebuild entire campaigns if it makes sense for you.

Google Reviews: Dealing with Negative Reviews

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 21:30:39 GMT

Google Reviews: Dealing with Negative Reviews and How to Get More Positive Reviews

In the first installment of our Real Marketing Podcast, Roy Bielewicz and Kat Flores talk about how to deal with negative Google Reviews, and how to generate more positive reviews. We take a close look at reviews for the multifamily industry, since so many of these tend to be generated by disgruntled residents or folks who were turned down.

Subscribe to our podcast:

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3QdVn2z

Apple: https://apple.co/3Bj5VJD

Website Redesign Checklist

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 14:58:38 GMT

Don't Launch Your Redesign Without Checking These First!

If you launch your site without checking some critical issues, you can risk killing your SEO and creating a terrible experience for your customers. We take a look at what you need before you push the button on your website redesign.

Are you launching a new site or maybe launching a new redesign? Are you sure you've got all the stuff covered that you need to get covered to make sure everything goes flawlessly?

We're going to go through a checklist that we like to use with our clients that looks at all the things you should be checking before you go live.

One of the primary things, when you're going live with a new site is making sure all your I’s are dotted, tees crossed, and everything's tagged correctly. That means a lot of testing before you go live. Otherwise you can go live and just see your business starting to go down the drain because you forgot to do something really important.

We're going to go through a checklist of stuff that we like to go through with our clients before all of our website redesigns and before we launch those sites. Or if they're doing it themselves, coming in and picking up the pieces of stuff that they may not have done correctly.

TAGGING

One of the most important parts that we found is to make sure that all of your tagging is correct. People get so concerned with the design of the site and the content, and all of that's really important, how the site looks, but what they're not doing is making sure that they're measuring everything correctly once the site launches.

That means going through your Google analytics or analytics tool of choice; looking at all of your tags, looking at all your Google implementation , going through and making sure you've got the pixels, everything set up correctly. That all of your pages are tracking. Once you've got that, you've got your base page views, you've got that data, you've tested it, you know that you can see the data coming through, make sure that your conversions are tracking correctly.

I'm not just talking about retail conversions, although that's extremely important, obviously for retailers, but a lot of conversions on sites might be something that's based on, for instance a thank you page. When you're redesigning that site, the name of that thank you page or its location may have changed. If that's, for instance, a lead conversion on a site, if that's what you're basing that tracking on, and that page changes, you're going to lose that measurement.

Similarly in a retail site , you want to make sure that the entire checkout process is being tagged correctly. If you've moved from one type of commerce system, to say something like Shopify, the tags might not be set up correctly. You might not be looking at the entire checkout process. You want to look at, you know, add carts and removed from carts and whether products are coming through correctly that were purchased or coupon codes that were used.

That little minutiae of tracking that you may have set up on your old site, you want to go ahead and make sure that that's working on the new site as well. A lot of times, that's events, it's IDs. One of the things we see, is if you have button clicks as a conversion or something that you're tracking, if you've changed the CSS, if you've changed the design of your site, those button IDs and CSS names may have changed. You're going to have to go through and change a lot of those conversions.

301 REDIRECTS

This is probably one of the more important ones that we see all the time with site changes. If you are moving, particularly if you're moving from one platform to another, if you're changing categorization or navigation on your site, the URLs are going to change. You need to make sure that you have 301 redirect set up and that you've mapped all of your old URLs.

In our telling Google with those 301 redirects that this is the new URL you should look at and that's important for a couple of reasons. It's important for SEO, because if you launch a site and all of those pages are different, all of the SEO links that you've built, all of those organic results that you've built over the years are broken and they're going to go away.

Google's going to discover that eventually and it's going to start not ranking you for those pages. A 301 redirect essentially tells Google, “Hey, this address of this content has permanently changed and please give the new page the Google juice that the other one had.” That way you're theoretically not losing the value of that page; it's transferring.

The other important part of that is not just from a Google perspective, but from a user perspective. Have they clicked on a link and are coming now to an error page or to no page? We've had clients that didn't redirect and it throws up all sorts of different errors in the browser.

They're not seeing your brand. It looks bad for your brand and they're probably not going to visit again. Make sure that the process is set for you, before you switch the site, to go through the site and document all of your pages and all of your images.

We use tools like Screaming Frog, which will go through and index your site much like Google would. It gets literally every URL that you have. You can get every image name and that way, when you go through the mapping process, you can export it to Excel and make it a little bit easier to go through and make those changes.

404 PAGE

Just like with the URL redirects, an extremely important thing that you don't want to forget is a 404 page. Because inevitably you're going to forget to map certain pages or something happens that is going to throw an error. That page that used to exist is not going to exist anymore. It's important that you have a custom 404 page to let people know that, “Hey, our site's still here. Here's the rest of the navigation. You can still get to our content.” Not just throw them into a black hole of an error on Chrome or whatever browser they're using that just says page not. This way it's maintaining your brand. They see the new look, they see the navigation, they can, if they want get to other content. But if you don't set up that 404 page, they're just going to see an error page and that's not great for your brand.

Most content management systems will have this baked in and will allow you to customize it. You can actually add images and content that is fitting with your brand messaging and the tone and voice that you have for your brand.

Along with the, the URL changes that, that we talked about with 301 redirects and that type of thing, there's other things for SEO that you're going to want to make sure with that new site that you're checking before it goes live. Because again, you don't want to go live with the new site and then have all of your SEO effort go by the wayside or be wasted because you didn't bring it over to the new site.

Look for consistency in URLs. One of the things we see a lot of times is that as the navigation and platform changes, URLs will change. We've seen this with a number of clients that have had developers go in and develop a new category or strings in their URLs and not be consistent. In one they might have a capital and in another they may not; it might say catalog with a capital C and catalog with a C, products with a capital P products without a capital P. That matters because Google sees those as different pages.

Google has verified that they see URLs as case sensitive. They're not going to know which page is going to give to give credit to. If it's widespread, if you're doing that all throughout the site, they may very well use up a lot of their spider allotment. They're going to be wasting time trying to figure out which is the canonical page for your products or categories or catalog and not spending the time going through that really super important content that you want them to go through. By having those mixed cases in the URL, you can throw them off.

ALT & META DATA

One of the things that you've probably spent a lot of time on is image alt tags. You want to make sure that that also gets transferred over to your new site. It's not only important for SEO , but it's also important for usability to the site.

Make sure that all of those images that are on the new site also have image alt tags. The same goes for title tags. A lot of times we see where title tags, during the transfer process, might be duplicated because it was either something that was just filled or it's the new content management system or platform that is defaulting to a title tag. Well, that title tag is extremely important.

You want to make sure that those aren't missing, that they're optimized and that they're the right title tag for your products or pages. The same thing with meta descriptions; don't just assume that your new content management system or site is going to pick up the appropriate meta description.

You're going to want to go through and catalog those from your old site and make sure that they've transferred over to the new site. That way the meta descriptions aren't missing and that way you're one step ahead of the Google spider, making sure that that content is in front of them.

Last but not least, make sure that all of the internal links that you had in your previous site get transferred as well. If somebody's copying and pasting content from the old site into a new site or taking an export from the old site into the new site, make sure that those internal links, which are extremely important for SEO, are getting copied as well.

Keep in mind that those URLs may have changed as well, so you're going to want to look for any broken links as you're going through. You don't from any customer user experience, want broken links in that internal content because that they are going to a page that used to exist on the old site. Same thing for Google. You absolutely don't want Google seeing broken links in that content.

CONCLUSION

These are just a few of the things that you should be checking with either a new site that you're building, but also very important to check with a site that's on new platform or being redesigned, something that there's been a lot of hands in there and you're changing a lot of stuff because we've seen it. We've seen customers that forgotten to do some of these steps and their organic search traffic, just absolutely plummets or people aren't checking out correctly, or they're not measuring that checkout correctly. Now they have a gap in their data where they're not showing any revenue data, or any conversion data. Even just a couple days of that can really throw off your reporting and understanding how your marketing programs are working.

Get More Reviews For Your Apartments

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:43:23 GMT

Struggling to get new reviews for your apartments? Or don’t know how to ask for a review? No worries! We’ll walk you through some great ways for your apartment community to receive more reviews fast.

Reviews play an important role in building trust and reputation. Although you may not always receive positive reviews, you can take an optimistic approach to getting reviews. Positive reviews will increase your overall rating online and are a great way to get free marketing! More importantly, you want to make sure your property is receiving reviews on a consistent basis. Consumers feel more comfortable trusting a business that has recent reviews that include positive feedback about their experience. According to a recent TripAdvisor study , 78% of customers focus on the most recent reviews.

Asking for reviews can be a little scary, but we will help make that process more manageable and less stressful. Here are some easy ways to get your residents and prospects to give you a review.

#1: Use your email signature.

Add a Leave us a review or Share your experience online text that is linked to the online listing of your choice such as Google, Yelp, etc. This will remind people of this option when you email them about tours, prices, availability, or any other follow-ups. You can link residents directly to your Google reviews by using the link that’s provided in your Google Business Listing admin.

#2: When someone is happy.

Whether it’s a resident or a prospect, if someone is in a good mood it’s a good time for them to share their experience online. Since they’ve had a positive experience, their review will most likely be positive as well. You can kindly say “Feel free to share your experience with us on Google or Facebook.” or “We’d love for you to share your experience with us online!”

If you see someone who is upset or unsatisfied, make sure to ask them what else you can do to help or try to resolve their issue.

#3 After an apartment tour.

When someone takes an apartment tour, ask for a review as soon as it’s over. Make sure to introduce the review in a casual way or whenever it fits into the conversation.

You can use some of the suggested approaches below, or in a similar way that doesn’t make the prospect feel like they have to leave a review:

If you enjoyed the tour and getting to know our apartments, we’d love for you to share it online!
Would you mind taking a minute to give us a review and let us know how your experience was?
We hope to see you soon as a resident and would appreciate any feedback you may have. Feel free to share it online as well.

#4: After move-ins (and renewals).

It’s exciting to move into a new apartment home! This excitement and good mood are great for reviews. After an easy move-in process, and once the resident has officially moved in, make sure to welcome them and ask them for a review.

Similar to asking after a tour, you want to ask them in a kind and respectful way that doesn’t make them feel forced to have to leave a review. You can also tweak the prompts below to use for residents who have recently renewed their lease:

If there’s nothing else you need from us, welcome home! Please feel free to share your experience online.
Thank you for choosing our community as your new home! We would love for you to share your experience online.
You can post pictures and share your experience with us online.
If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to reach us at the office. You’re welcome to leave us a review online and share any positive feedback you may have.

#5: After move-outs.

When a resident moves out you definitely want to know why they aren’t renewing their lease. However, if the resident isn’t necessarily leaving on good terms then you might want to skip asking for a review and jump to resolving any outstanding issues they have.

If they’re happy and everything is well, then below are some good prompts to use.

We loved having you as a resident! We would love for you to share your positive experience online.
Thank you for being a resident of our community! If you enjoyed your experience living here, please feel free to share it online.
If you haven’t already, we would love for you to share any positive feedback you may have.

#6: After a resident event.

If you recently had an event, this is a great time to ask for a review. Events are a fantastic way for residents to get to know one another and the staff.

You can use some of the questions below to ask:

Would you mind taking a quick minute to review our property?
I hope you're enjoying your time at the event. We would love to get your positive feedback and for you to share it online.
Feel free to share your experience online about our wonderful event and our community.

#7: After a completed maintenance request.

Work orders can be stressful for residents. When they are completed and resolved quickly, you get happy residents. Keep in mind that if the work order takes longer than expected, then you just want to make sure the resident is fully satisfied.

If the work order and the maintenance issue are resolved quickly, then try using the below to bring up reviews.

We’re happy we got your maintenance order completed. We welcome hearing your feedback! Feel free to leave us a review online.
If there’s anything else we can help you with, please don’t hesitate to ask. We would love for you to share your experience with us.
Let us know how we did resolving your work order.

Ask for reviews at EVERY and ALL opportunities.

Asking for reviews is not taboo! But you don’t want to specifically ask for a good or positive review. Start small in asking for reviews, don’t feel like you need to do all of these right now or in one single day.

The goal would be to make the process of asking for a review a habit for your team. The more you practice, the more confident your team will be at asking for reviews and the more reviews your property will receive.

13 SEO Myths That Can Impact Your Rankings

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 18:15:41 GMT

13 SEO Myths

Duplicate Content is Penalized
Social Media Signals Impact SEO
Paid Search Will Help Your SEO
Rank Is The Most Important Thing in SEO
SEO Is A One-Time Thing
Subdomains Are Just The Same As Subdirectories
Domain Age Impacts SEO
Longer Content Will Get Better Rankings
Google Looks At Bounce Rate For SEO
Backlinks Are Your Most Important Tactic To Improve SEO
Your URL Needs to Have Keywords
Meta Descriptions Will Impact Your Ranking
Page Design Doesn’t Impact Ranking

We all know that SEO is important to our marketing, but are you sure that you're putting the right effort and budget into the right tactics for SEO? Let’s take a look at some of the myths around SEO and how it might be affecting your business.

1 ) Duplicate Content is Penalized

One of the myths we see quite often is the idea that duplicate content on your site is going to impact your rankings because Google penalizes duplicate content.

If you have duplicate content, Google doesn't care if that content came from another site, or if you have a retail site where, through multiple means of navigating the site, different categories and different sub subsections of your site have different URLs for the same content.

While Google will not penalize you for that, what it might do is dilute the impact of backlinks to your site. So if you have third party sites that are creating links to you and to your content, they're not going to know which is the “right” URL to link to.

If those different pages get picked up in the search engine results and indexed, it can dilute the impact of those individual links since you won’t get as much traffic to a specific link or a specific listing as you would normally.

2 ) Social Media Signals Impact SEO

Another common myth that we hear is that social media is a signal to Google for how it ranks your site. The thinking goes that if you have, for instance, a really rocking Twitter or Facebook account, you have lots of followers, that Google is using that in deciding how to rank your site. Guess what? That’s not true.

Do social signals have an impact on ranking?

“Not directly, no” - John Mueller, Google

What is true, is that a large social media following can definitely drive more traffic to your site. That traffic to your site can ultimately help generate backlinks, which WILL help your SEO.

So if you have a non-existent social media presence, or if you have a great social media presence, Google isn't looking at that for rankings.

3 ) Paid Search Will Help Your SEO

One SEO myth that we hear a lot is that paid search will impact your SEO. The idea there is that if you don't have a paid search program, if you don't have a campaign running, if you're not spending money on Google, that Google's going to penalize you and not rank your site as high as someone who is paying for PPC.

And while that is very conspiratorial and sounds like that should probably be the case, Google has continually reassured the community that that is not indeed the case. The algorithm that is used to determine rankings for paid search ads is completely separate from how it's determining rankings for your organic search.

However, similarly to some of the other myths that we've heard, there is definitely an impact on your organic search when you run a paid search program. Google isn't looking at it as an indicator, but much like social media , if through paid advertising you are getting more visitors they're seeing your content and may be backlinking. The more visibility you have can ultimately impact your organic listings.

The other thing that we’ve found with some of our clients, is that when they have an organic listing AND a paid listing appear for the same search query, people are more likely to click on the organic listing because they're reassured by the fact that you're appearing several times on the page.

They're seeing that, that it's validating your content. And so that by having that paid presence, they know that your site is probably going to provide them the information that they need. That's not Google’s algorithm doing that, but it is impacting consumer behavior. So by having a paid search program, as well as appearing in organic search, you can impact how often people are clicking on your organic search links.

4 ) Rank Is The Most Important Thing in SEO

You’ve probably heard that rank is the most important thing for your SEO program. You'll see it in ads, and I'm sure you've seen emails, where a company claims they're going to get you to the first listing on Google and be number one within X number of days.

Don’t get me wrong, rank is important, for sure. There are numerous statistics and studies that have shown that where you place on the page definitely impacts how often people see you, and how much they click through. And while rank is important, measuring rank is not the key indicator for the success of your SEO program.

Why? Because rank is not absolute. As you may know, everybody sees a different search result on Google based on your search behavior, your geography, and demographics. This means that the SERP you see will be different from somebody else’s, even in your own company, even in your own house. It's all based on personalization, particularly if you’re logged in to a Google account.

If you’re not measuring rank, what you should be measuring is how many sales, or how many leads your SEO program is driving for you. What keywords are driving conversions for you? What type of content are your customers searching for? At the end of the day it’s not a competition about rank, but rather results.

5 ) SEO Is A One-Time Thing

We get this one a lot from clients who maybe aren't as familiar with SEO or some of the intricacies of it. They just know that they want to be on Google, and they “want to do some SEO” for a site launch, or a site redesign. Unfortunately, SEO is an iterative process, not just a one-off project.

Many people aren’t aware that Google changes its algorithm on a daily basis. Because of this, what may have been a best practice three months ago may actually hinder you today. Something that was a best practice a few years ago tends to become “common knowledge” or a “best practice” but in fact may actually, in some cases hurt you. That or it’s a waste of time because Google just completely ignores it anymore.

And so there's constant need to update the site from a technical perspective, there's changes to coding that will need to be done. Content should be continually refreshed, redone, and reinvigorated, all the while adding new content.

One of the most effective things that companies are finding now is that if you have a blog that's several years old, that might be out of date, is to update it: add new graphics, add new content, and add new findings to it.

6 ) Subdomains Are Just The Same As Subdirectories

The discussion about the impact of subdirectories is one that comes up regularly. Essentially there's a contention that having a subdomain is just as fine as having a subdirectory on your site. And example of this would be, subdomain (blog.yourdomain.com) versus subdirectory (www.yourdomain.com/blog).

Google and industry experts will tell you that having a subdomain is fine, that Google doesn't care about whether it's a subdomain or not, it will index it and it will pick up those pages and the content. And it may rank very well.

And that's absolutely true. What's potentially misleading about that is that Google sees a subdomain as a separate site.

That means that you need to submit it separately. You need to manage it separately, and you need to often measure it separately. And so, while Google doesn't care if it's a subdomain or a subdirectory, the subdomain will not necessarily benefit your main domain’s SEO efforts.

There are very good reasons that your business may need a subdomain. Maybe it's a different kind of content. Maybe for instance, you have recipes on yourdomain.com, or instructions, or customer service. It may be a completely separate type of content from your main domain, which is fine. It will get indexed. However, if you're hoping to give credit to your main domain, to give that, you know, powerful Google juice of building incoming links and giving credit to the main domain, then doing a subdomain is not going to help.

This is why for most cases, we recommend using a subdirectory, if that's at all possible.

7 ) Domain Age Impacts SEO

Another myth is that domain age is a factor in ranking. Google has made it pretty clear that this is not a factor in ranking; that the age of the domain in and of itself doesn't matter. You can start a brand new domain, or you can have one that's been around for 10 years and it doesn't matter.

"No. Domain age helps nothing."

John Mueller, Google

What will matter, obviously, is that the one site has been developing content for 10 years. So it's not the age of the domain itself, since Google's not necessarily going back and looking at when you registered that domain or when the site launched, it's looking at content.

It's looking at links and it's looking at all of the myriad other signals that it has, and one of those signals is not age.

8 ) Longer Content Will Get Better Rankings

A prevailing myth that has been around for some time is that longer content is better for ranking. And admittedly, we used to believe this as well, because anecdotally you do tend to see that most pages that are ranking in the top SERPs, have a significant amount of content. In fact, one study showed that having over 1500 words seemed to be the key to those top positions.

Google has made it clear, however, that just because an article is 1500 to 2000 words doesn't mean that it's going to do better than something that has a hundred words. Volume does not improve a page’s relevance or its quality. And what they're looking at instead, is the quality of the content and its relevance to the search.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that length can contribute to how useful an article is. If it's a really great article that happens to be longer, that contains useful information, research, and images, and it's not just a piece of fluff, by its nature get shared more, linked more, and thus will perform better in search.

And that leads to how correlation versus causation can be confusing in SEO. Was it ranking high just because it was long or because it was long and really high quality?

9 ) Google Looks At Bounce Rate For SEO

One of the things that a lot of companies have historically looked at as an SEO “signal” is bounce rate . Google has confirmed, however, that it does not look at Google analytics data to determine how a page ranks, so bounce rate can not be a signal. If you’re unfamiliar with bounce rate, it's determined by users coming to your site, and leaving after only looking at one page, and not clicking through to other pages.

So not only does Google not look at this for SEO, but bounce rate is being deprecated GA4.

Part of the reason for this is that websites have changed. Historically you had a website that had multiple pages that you click through, but modern sites are not only more dynamic, many don’t have truly different pages on the site. So you may be engaging for long periods of time with the site. You may be reading a lot of content. You may be watching videos and not ever actually go to a different page. You may even sign up for something or even purchase something without actually technically going to another page.

10 ) Backlinks Are Your Most Important Tactic To Improve SEO

There's a lot of companies that'll tell you that backlinks to your website are the main driver for SEO. And they'll spend a lot of time and energy trying to get those backlinks, sometimes even purchasing them.

"Links are definitely not the most important factor."

John Mueller, Google

There's also a lot of scammy and spammy businesses out there that will post backlinks on comments sections of blogs, reviews, etc. Obviously some of those tactics, not only don't help you, but they can hurt you. So having a lot of spammy links isn't a good indicator for Google.

So while backlinks are absolutely important to your SEO program, it's something that should happen organically. Which will happen because you've developed really great content, because if it's relevant people are naturally going to link to your site.

Now there's nothing wrong with actively suggesting to blogs and websites that they may be interested in your content, but Google definitely has become smart enough to know when you have a program that's out there buying links. And so one of the things they’ve done is basically say that backlinks are not the most important indicator.

It's one of many indicators that they look at, but it is not the primary driver of how you rank.

11 ) Your URL Needs to Have Keywords

Another myth that we see that is something of a residual left over to how things used to be is packing keywords in URLs.

It used to be that if your domain name had an important keyword in it, that would have a huge influence on ranking. This then evolved into packing URL strings with keywords, where people are essentially spamming the URL to make sure that they have all the relevant keywords possible.

Obviously this is no longer a best practice, and it’s not a great indicator for rank. Relevant keywords in your URLs that occur naturally can be helpful, but Google has said that is only an extremely minor factor in how they rank pages.

So if you're spending a lot of time and energy going through your site and just trying to jam all the relevant keywords into your URL strings, it's probably not worth your time.

12 ) Meta Descriptions Will Impact Your Ranking

Your meta description impacts your SEO rankings, right? Sorry, no.

I think part of this myth is a holdover from the days when Google actually looked at meta keyword data and there was an actual field for keywords in the metadata. People would just pack that field with all the keywords that they could get on the page.

Back in the early days of search before Google's algorithm became self aware and started taking over the world, that actually did have some black hat impact on your rankings. Those keyword packing days are over; Google is not going to rank your page based on the keywords that you jam into the keyword page, or into the other meta data.

However, the description meta tag is an opportunity for you to basically tell Google, “This is what the page is about. This is how we are summarizing the content of the page.”

The meta description also gives you an opportunity to show what you would like in the search results. As you know, on the search results page there is a title of the page, and then a brief description. And that's your opportunity to tell Google that you would like this to be the description. You can add some calls to action, and relevant content that can encourage clicks-through.

Google doesn't necessarily always use your meta description, but it's definitely not using it to rank your page.

13 ) Page Design Doesn’t Impact Ranking

We all know that when you redesign your site or launch a new site that there's a lot of factors that go into how Google ranks it. For instance, you want to ensure that they have 301 redirects pointing from an old URL to the new content. You want to ensure that you’ve migrated all that content from your old site into a new redesign.

“Changing the layout of your pages can affect your search results. This is something that some people work on actively as well with regards to on-page SEO. So things like figuring out how to use titles properly on a page, how to do internal linking properly, how to provide more context for the article itself.

All of this can definitely affect SEO.”

John Mueller, Google

But these alone are not enough. Google has said that even if you have all of the same URLs, and all of the same content, how you design your site can impact your ranking.

Summary

Keep in mind that this is not all of the myths that we see by any means. There are lots of myths and misinformation in the industry.

Don’t base your SEO programs on outdated old wives’ tales, nor agencies claiming to be “experts” who are promoting tactics that could negatively impact your programs. Instead, focus on growing quality content, understanding what your customers and audience are looking for, and testing changes to your site and content to see what really works. Base your efforts on real world data that you are seeing.

5 Easy Social Media Posts for Multifamily Marketers

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 20:35:28 GMT

Consistent posting of engaging content is important to grow and maintain your social media following. But sometimes it can seem like a grind to come up with new content your prospective and existing tenants will find interesting. This creative block can happen to all of us, especially if you’re a property manager with a busy schedule.

Below are some quick and easy posts that we know you’ll love! These ideas are great for increasing traffic and reach for your multifamily property.

#1 Share Floorplans

Share a specific apartment by sharing the floorplan layout or any other floorplan you currently have that may be available. This is an excellent way to display your current availability and provide specific benefits of the apartment amenities. Point out, for example, if the floorplan has a washer and dryer area, if it includes a patio, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, or even the size of the floorplan. Make sure to include a call to action (CTA) to encourage people to click on the image and interact or to reach out if they’re interested.

Including the below can also help your post perform better:

Make it a carousel post and include some photos of the apartment interior, including the living room, bedroom, or an amenity.
Instead of a photo, try a video! A video tour of the apartment can make it feel like home.
Provide contact information, such as the business phone number or email address.

#2 Spotlight Community Amenities

Let people know what makes your apartment complex unique and a great place to live. Amenities are a great selling point for some people so make sure to include why this specific amenity is important or nice to have. If the amenity solves some kind of pain point or helps the resident have a more convenient lifestyle, definitely make that point. For example, if the apartment doesn’t include a washer and dryer but your apartment complex has a laundry facility it’s important for potential residents to know that.

Think about the below when posting about a community amenity:

Pay attention to the season and weather. If you have a pool or BBQ area, they’re great for summer days and game days!
Use photos of the actual amenity or people using the amenity when possible.

#3 Share Reviews

The best kind of marketing is from happy customers, or in this case, happy residents. Take a look at your online listings like Google Business Profile or Facebook to see if there is a recent positive review or a review that includes great feedback. If the review is not published publicly, make sure to ask the person who shared the feedback if it’s okay for you to share it online. Sharing reviews is a great way to build transparency and trust with your potential residents.

Remember for this post:

Take a screenshot of the review and use that as a photo for the post.
A video testimonial can also work. Ask happy residents if they would like to share their experience living at your property the next time they stop to visit the office.

#4 Answer FAQs

This is an easy way for you to help potential residents learn more about your community. Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are an easy way to produce easy content fast. Most FAQs are asked in person or through messages so you’ll be familiar with them and most likely have the answers for them.

Don’t forget the tips below:

Reshare previously posted FAQs. It’s okay to recycle content like these because it will always be helpful.
Keep a record of the FAQs so you know which questions you have and haven’t answered

#5 Maintenance Tips

Share some wisdom with residents and potential residents about easy maintenance they can do in their apartment homes. Maintenance tips can be anything from a healthy cleaning routine, how to keep the apartment cool during the summer months, how to properly use the disposal, and so much more.

Make sure to keep the below in mind:

These should be things that a resident can do, not something that they will need to submit a maintenance request for. If they do, then make sure to include that as part of your caption. For example, a leaky faucet can cause an increase in your water bill and can be easily fixed by submitting a work order.
Get your maintenance team involved! Ask them if it’s okay to use a photo or video of them and recommendations they have for residents.
Use other resources like online articles or experts on the specific issue.

#6 Pet-Friendly Community

Everybody loves seeing a cute dog or cat pop up across their social media feed. If your community is pet-friendly make sure to let people know! Include any kind of pet-friendly amenities that are available for pet owners in your community.

For pet forward posts:

Share nearby parks dog owners can visit to play or to go for a walk.
If your community has any restrictions, make sure to either state that restrictions apply or specify any breed restrictions, weight limits, and total pet limits.
Photos are important for this type of post so if you can, try to share photos of current pets that live in the community.

Social media is a great way to share information about your property. These six post ideas are easy for property managers, or anyone, to do because you already have this information. There’s no need to research or spend hours trying to find new ideas. These are what we call easy, peasy, and lemon squeezy.

Marketing Attribution: Is It Time To Turn Off Your Ads?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 15:32:10 GMT

Marketing Attribution Is the Key

Hey, this is Roy from Apotheca. Have you ever been in the situation where you've been producing your monthly reports? You're looking at the campaigns that you're running and there's just some that aren't performing. So the pressure's there to turn those campaigns off, right? Well, that might not be the right answer and we're gonna take a look why, and it all has to do with attribution.

All right. So what is attribution and why is it important to your marketing campaigns? Well, basically in Google analytics and most other analytics tools. There's a way to give credit to your ads. And by default, historically, Google analytics gave credit to the last click on your campaign. So if you're running for instance, a paid search campaign, if that was what the customer clicked on last, that gets credit for your conversion and whether that's a retail sale or whether it's a form fill out or a download, whatever you've identified as a conversion.

And that is what gets credit. So why is that not necessarily the right model and why should you not turn off your ads? Well, let's take a little closer look at what attribution means. So in your Google analytics program, the default setting is 30 days of backward looking data and last click. And so if somebody clicked on that campaign in the last 30 days, they get credit or that campaign gets credit.

That eliminates potentially all of the other touchpoints that people contacted and interacted with in your site during their purchase process. And if you have a products or services that take a long consideration phase longer than 30 days say it's a very large purchase or it's something that. They just don't do in the spur of the moment.

There's a lot of research that goes into it. That customer may have come back to your site many times over a long period of time. Well, how do you then give credit for those interactions? And last click, like I said, it's probably not the most accurate because it's eliminating that process of getting information.

Coming back to your site. For instance, they may have seen an organic listing and clicked on that at some point because it wasn't the last click that organic listing isn't getting credit. It doesn't look like your organic program is working probably as well as it is. It's having an influence on that person's purchase.

Let's take a look at an example of what I mean by. So in Google universal, they have, this convenient conversion path report. And as you can see, it's inter conversions. You just go to multichannel funnels, overview, and scroll down. And this looks at up to four of your campaigns. And so you can see direct.

Organic referral paid search. We could, for instance, choose instead email and to see how those interact in this case, we know that paid search is a larger program. We can see the percent of conversions here that it's actually contributing. And again, this is on a last click conversion. So what you can see by this Venn diagram is that there's multiple interactions with different channels.

Most of the people are coming from direct. Most of the conversions on this last click model are coming from direct, but you can see where it overlaps paid search. In this case, this color right here, this little smaller dot, was interacted with over 102 or 102, conversions. And so if you were to say, Hey, from a last click perspective, paid search just is costing too much.

It's not really contributing to, the campaign, you know, overview. We, we want to turn off our ads or pause. Well, by doing that, you might be eliminating all of the interactions that had paid search as part of its process. So in this particular date window that we're looking at here, which is just a month, it interacted with a decent amount of sales.

So what you have to weigh is in this situation, if we turn off that campaign, depending on how much it's costing, we know it's gonna impact a certain number of sales. Do we want to, lose those sales and save that money, that is, you know, costing for that campaign. And same with these other systems you can see, like for instance, organic search, is a large driver in this sample data of, interactions from customers.

If you were to say, Hey, from a last click perspective, we're not getting a super huge amount of clicks. You can see that it is. Not the largest driver by any means. So maybe not focus on SEO efforts or be writing the content like we have been because it's a large expense. We're gonna not focus on that for a while.

Well, you can see that would eliminate, relatively large. Amount of crossover traffic that they're having, if that program went away. Okay. So let's take a look at what attribution is and what are some of the models that you can use in your reporting that may help you understand better how your programs are performing, where you wanna put your budget and put your time and effort.

So if we look at this sample report from Google's demo site, you can see they have a number of different marketing channels. And the default model here that you're comparing against is last click, which is probably what you're used to today. So let's take a look at what some of the other channels are and how that may affect your reporting.

One thing to consider, and one thing to know is that in GA four, the default. Attribution model is data driven. And so what that means is that it's Google's AI is looking at the conversions that you're getting. It's looking at your customers and it's attributing sales, revenue, and conversions to the channels that it thinks deserve it.

So it's actually breaking that. How it thinks they deserve it. It's a little bit of a black box. We don't really know how they're figuring that out, but it is their recommended method because they figure that their AI knows more about your customers and more about your business than anybody else, because it sees the data and can compare it to other like models.

And so we'll assign that data. the other is first click, which there are some advertising programs, particularly affiliate programs that do that it tends to give, or it gives credit to the first interaction that somebody had. So the first click that led them to your site during a specific period of time, it's not necessarily gonna be as accurate as last click because there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in between.

The, before they make that decision. So giving their first introductory click, it could be for instance, a very broad keyword that didn't convince them to purchase from you. So it could be you know, just a one keyword or two keyword, for instance search and Paid search they've then since narrowed that down and what eventually converted them could be something entirely different.

So understanding what introduced them to your site and then what converted is important. So giving them that first click could skew some of that data linear, as you can see here. And as you can probably guess is equally distributing. To each of the touchpoints that they've had during that period of time.

So there's no it doesn't give emphasis to any one piece of that. It breaks it out evenly across all of their touchpoints and all their channels. Position based is Giving significant allotment to the first click. So 25% of the allotment of the conversion to the first click, it then spreads out 50% of the allotment, the credit to all of the.

Intermediary clicks and then it gives another 25% to the last click. And so this is basically saying we're gonna give the two bookends, the most credit and spread in a linear fashion the intermediary touchpoints, and then finally time decay. And essentially that's saying, Hey, we know it's a journey, so we're gonna give more credit to the end of the journey, to the the.

Conversions or the interactions that took place closer to the conversion event. And so the further back you go, the less credit they go and that's time to. So let's just look at these data points, using their data driven model, which again is their recommended model. So you can see here that when you, it will change the data slightly and that when you start to look at the numbers over here is where you start to see that there's areas where those programs may have gotten too much credit under Last click or they may have gotten, you know, too little credit.

Let's take a look at another data model where we can see that a little bit better. All right. If we look at this one, this is, has a last click. and it also has the data driven and you can see in here where the numbers are starting to be pretty significantly different. So for instance, email in the data driven model gets a lot more credit than it would have in the last click model.

Similarly there's unassigned Channels that just aren't labeled organic is probably, should get more credit than it has historically in last click. Okay. Let's look at first click and you can see here that it starts to really be significantly different than the last click as you would expect.

Um, In this case, you know, organic search for instance is, would be under reported in the last click model, because it's getting a lot of the first clicks for instance. And then let's take a look at one of the other models. Let's say time decay

again. Organic is probably Should be getting more credit in this model. Then you would assume based on last click again, you see some of these numbers where referral probably shouldn't be getting as much credit. As it is, if you were to look at the time decay model, it's probably getting more credit than it should be in, in this.

So one of the important things to remember with attribution is there's no right answer to this. Like there are, depending on your business, depending on the life cycle of your customers. Depending on the types of products and you know, how quickly from interaction to purchase it is there's might be multiple models that work for you.

And the Google's data driven model, I think is probably something that you'd wanna explore it. Like I said, it is the default in GA four now, but from an attribution standpoint, It's really looking at all of them and comparing them and trying to understand the crossover between channels. If you tend to have only one source of customers, it tends to be either all organic or all paid.

Um, maybe this isn't as big a deal to you because you know that. For instance, if you're a new business and you don't have a lot of organic search traffic, it's all paid traffic. It's all coming from paid search, or it's all coming from Facebook or some other program like that. This isn't necessarily as important to you because you don't have all of these different sources of traffic.

So, you know where they're coming from, you know, that that is what's driving your business. However, if you're a mature business, if you have a lot of programs going on and you need to really understand where you're applying your budget, where you're putting your time and effort, then you wanna explore the different models to get an understanding of that crossover.

What is the customer journey? What are the channels that interacting with? And then don't eliminate those. Don't turn off those ads just as a knee jerk, because this week it looks like paid search is down. It's not converting your, maybe your Roaz isn't as good this week. And look at the bigger picture.

Look at a larger timeframe and try to understand is that for instance, paid search program actually profitable over a longer period of time. That will tell you that your customers are taking longer to make decisions. They're not making 'em right that week. They may click and come back and visit over a period of time.

So look at a larger section of data. Look at some different models to try to understand, you know, is that a profitable program for you? I hope this is helpful for you. If it was please go ahead and consider clicking like that helps our channel and stop back for more. And we'll have more videos like this in the future.

Template Responses to Use for Reviews

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:43:10 GMT

Review Responses

Getting online reviews can benefit your business in so many ways! It’s a great way for customers to share their experiences, favorite product or service, and photos as well. Whether it’s sharing a 5-star rating and a photo of their favorite dish at a restaurant or publishing a review about how the food wasn’t fresh, reviews can vary in sentiment and descriptions. 72% of customers say they use Google reviews to find businesses and 21% are more likely to leave a review after a negative experience.

Positive reviews can be a great way for your business to grow, but negative reviews aren’t great for any business. Replying to all reviews is crucial for your online reputation. Make sure that happy customers feel appreciated for sharing their reviews. For reviewers that share negative feedback such as complaints or concerns, make sure they feel heard and the business will do what it can to resolve the issue or improve. Replying to all reviews increases visibility, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.

There’s no reason not to reply to reviews. To make it easier here are some response templates to get you started. These response templates can be used as a foundation and then customized to suit the concerns of the review.

Response Formula and Best Practices

Before reading the review response templates, here are the formulas we use to draft these.

Remember, if a review is off-topic, for another business, or contains offensive content you can report the review to Google .

Positive review reply formula = Thank the reviewer for reaching out and sharing their experience + cute tidbit like “It makes our team’s day to read this” + let them know they can reach out to you for anything else.

Negative review reply formula = Apologize for the experience, if necessary + thank the reviewer for reaching out and sharing their experience + let them know you will address their concerns + ask them to reach out to your business for further assistance.

When replying remember to:

Keep your voice consistent
Switch up the review responses
Add your business contact information if necessary or the person best suited to handle the customer
Personalize each response, especially for negative reviews.

Star Only Ratings

These no-text reviews are actually more common than you think. And they’re also the easiest to reply to!

For a positive review: Thank you for your positive review! OR Thank you for your 5-star review!

For a negative review: Thank you for taking the time to leave us feedback. If there's anything we can assist you with, please feel free to reach us at (business contact number) and we will be happy to help.

Rave Reviews

Everyone’s favorite kind of reviews! These reviews make you feel so good about your business because you know they had a great experience. Make them feel appreciated by sharing the same attitude with them.

Option #1: It makes our team's day to hear this! Thank you for your kind words and positive review. Our team strives to deliver a five-star experience. As always, if there is ever anything that we can assist you with, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Option #2: Thank you for your wonderful comments. We are so happy to hear about your experience at (Business Name).

Option #3: Thank you for your amazing review of (Business name)! We appreciate your compliments to our team and are so happy you enjoyed your time with us! We can’t wait to see you again!

Vague Reviews

These reviews often include a few words that give little context to the customer's experience. The goal is to get more insight, if necessary or if it’s a bad experience.

For a positive review: Thank you for your positive feedback! We appreciate you taking the time to share your great experience with (business name).

For a negative review: Thank you for sharing your feedback. We are open to learning how we can improve our customer experience. Please give us a call at your earliest convenience and we will be happy to assist you further.

Reviews From Very Upset Customers

Remember, people are more likely to share a bad experience. The goal for reviews like this is to handle it offline, so don’t go back and forth with the angry customer online. The online response should be professional, short, and to the point. Remember, sometimes lending an ear to an upset customer can go a long way.

Option #1: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Our team is happy to assist you with this issue and would like to learn more details about it. Please contact us directly at (business contact) at your earliest convenience.

Option #2: We understand your frustrations and concerns. We sincerely apologize for any misunderstanding or miscommunication that occurred. We strive to provide a positive experience, and we appreciate your feedback. Our team would be happy to resolve any issues you are experiencing. Please contact us directly at (business contact) at your earliest convenience.

Option #3: We apologize for the experience you had - this is not how we do business. Customer feedback is very important to us; we would like the opportunity to make this right for you and learn more about your experience. Please give us a call at (business contact) and we can further assist you.

Reviews That Can Be Easily Resolved

When a review includes a small problem or one that can be easily resolved, you want to make sure to provide a solution as soon as possible. By replying quickly and providing a solution, you increase the chance of people changing their negative reviews to a positive ones.

Option #1: if you have the reviewer’s contact info: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Our team is currently working on resolving this issue for you. We will reach back out to you with an update soon.

Option #2: if you don’t have the reviewer’s contact info: We apologize for the inconvenience this issue has caused. Our team will be happy to assist you in resolving this issue. Please give us a call at (business contact) at your earliest convenience.

Option #3: We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. We are currently (offer the solution you are working on or what resolution you can offer). If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at (business contact).

Mixed review

These reviews can be somewhat negative, but can also be neutral. It can include some concerns, but overall a positive experience or vice versa.

Thank you for your feedback on ways that we can improve our service, as well as your kind remarks. If there's anything further we can assist you with, please contact us directly.

Customer who just wants to complain

We know that sometimes, negative reviews can be a little one-sided. These reviews typically involve a situation that you are already aware of and the customer didn’t like the outcome or solution so they go online to vent.

Option #1: if you already handled the best you could: Thank you for your feedback. We are always open to learning how we can improve. It is our understanding that our team has reached out to you about this. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us (business contact).

Option #2: We understand your frustrations and concerns. (Apologize if necessary). Please give us a call and our team can work with you toward the best possible solution.

Spam Or Hostile Reviews

Reviews that are spammy, clearly from a bot or a customer that’s using hostile language can all be flagged for removal so that they don’t affect your overall star rating. However, sometimes this can take time, or sometimes the reviews won’t be taken down after being submitted to the review site. If the review doesn’t get taken down, you can always reply and let people know that this is not a reliable or honest review.

Option #1: We are unable to locate you as an existing customer and your review violates (Review Site; ie Google, Yelp, etc) policies so we have flagged your review. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Option #2: not related to your business: It looks like you wanted to reach a business with a similar name to ours. We are happy to speak with you if you’d like to learn more about (Business name).

Review Response Strategy

Having a strategy for how to reply to reviews is important to maintain transparency and a good online presence. Understanding how to use our response templates is even more important. You don’t want to seem robotic or cold, so these templates should only be used as a foundation for you to build your reply. Having repetitive replies can seem like your business does not care about its customers.

Our team at Apotheca can help you understand how to build your reputation management and how to effectively reply to all kinds of reviews.

Video: GA4 SEO & PPC Reporting

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 19:26:59 GMT

GA4 SEO & PPC Reporting

Hi, this is Roy from Apotheca Marketing. If you're like us. And like a lot of our clients, you're struggling to understand some of the reports that are new in GA four. They are quite a bit different than what you might be used to in universal analytics. So we're gonna take a look at, organic search reports that you may be using today.

As well as some paid search reporting and how they're gonna differ and what to look for in GA four. So let's take a look at what you might be used to today. If we look at Google analytics demo account, this is their merchandising account, with demo data, this is the universal analytics view. For, typical SEO reporting.

We're gonna assume that you have search console, set up so that it's pulling in data. We're gonna show you a little bit later how to do that if you don't, into GA four. But you can see here, they do have the search console data set up for their universal analytics. And what that means is that you can then go in and look at queries or keywords that people are using to get to the site.

And so it shows you things like clicks, impressions, click through rate, that type of thing. What it doesn't show you is you may know is because this is pulling in from search console. It doesn't show you keyword level revenue reporting. It only shows you the click throughs from Google. If you want revenue reporting it's not at the level of keywords, but you can see, in many cases, organic reporting in this, they don't have it in this report. They just have display affiliates and other but you will see that in the acquisition overview channel, GA four, as we mentioned is quite a bit different. So if we look again at the GA four account for Google merchandising, They do not have their Google, search console integrated.

You can see that it was associated with the universal analytics and not with GA four. That is one limitation right now is that you can only associate it with one of those accounts. So we're gonna look at, a test property that we have for a Apotheca Marketing, and where we do have the search console set up.

So you can see where the keyword reporting would be. So if you go to reports under acquisition and the acquisition overview, and again, you'll notice that it's not, as apparent right here that it doesn't have like a dropdown for Google search console, like UA has and it does not have the pre-built keyword reports or landing page reports.

you can see that we do have the ability to look by users for the default channel grouping that, Google has specified. So it'll recognize organic search as in organic social. If you go down, you can see that there is a search query report here that is for organic search queries. So this is being pulled in from the Google search console.

If you expand that card, you can then see the keyword data that you would normally see in universal analytics. And you can see there's clicks, impressions, and average positions. So much of the same data that you would've seen in UA. So have to do a bit of digging to get to it, unfortunately. What you do not see as well is easy access to landing page reports.

But what you can do is filter by program and you can go to engagement pages and screens.

So these are the pages that people are looking at. It's the number of views, users, new users, et cetera, but it's not broken out by program. So you can do that by adding a filter. To create a filter, you scroll to the top and you can click add filter. Which we've done here, then you select your dimension that you want.

So, we're gonna scroll down. You can see all of these are the dimensions that you can choose. So in your various reporting, we're gonna go down to source and medium so that we can break it out. And then we're gonna see, we can have Google organic right here. And, depending on traffic to your site, you may be getting organic traffic from Bing.

You may be getting it from Yahoo. You can select those for this report. We'll select these just because they're there click apply. And as you can see, now you have a landing page report that shows traffic just from those organic searches or sources rather. So you can see all of the relevant data about views users and whatnot.

Like universal analytics, this can be exported and shared. You can share this report with other users. You can save it. You can also customize the name of the report and save that. So again, not as easy to find, necessarily as, universal analytics, but the data is there. As long as you have integrated search console, in some of the reports, you can, again, filter down.

If you wanna see revenue and you just wanna only look at organic, you can do this here and filter by the same group, similar groupings you can use source and medium, and then you can create a filter.

So we're looking at source and medium.

And you'll note the Google ads is not available note because that is not integrated on this account source and medium. And again, if we wanted to see revenue by specific organic channels, we can do that. We can look at those organic channels just as for instance, you could do, if you wanted a referral report or a social media report, you could do that as well.

And we can apply.

And you can see that it breaks that out. So now we actually have by channel the revenue. Now this, report isn't collecting revenue data. So that's why you don't see anything there. Again, this is just a, a test account for this, but, you were a retail site and you wanted to see revenue related to those individual organic channels, you can do that there.

Okay. So now let's take a look at. What you would do typically for your paid search reporting. So again, in universal analytics, you can go to the acquisition channel. You can see your paid search. Again, this is the Google demo account for universal analytics. You, they can have it revenue broken out. let's expand the state range so we can see a little bit more data.

And you can see that the revenue amount, that type of thing for paid search. Now they do have their Google ads account integrated. And so you can see their campaign data. Anyway, it is similar, but not the same. So again, you would go to, and this is the demo account for GA four. You can go to acquisition

and you can see.

The Google ads, campaign data that's being pulled in. And again, this is assuming that you have, associated your accounts with Google ads, which you should, so you can actually assign, your GA four account to Google ads account and pull this data in so that you can see the campaigns.

And so you can see they have it broken out, like what you would expect. So cost and revenue data associated with the campaigns as well. Again, you can share this as well as, customize it if you'd like, so you can do some filtering by campaign. You can do that type of thing. User acquisition and traffic acquisition, just so that you know, are a little bit different.

User acquisition is a unique user coming to the site. So they may come back multiple times and this will look at that behavior for one user, coming back potentially multiple times. Traffic acquisition is sessions. So it's gonna look at multiple sessions from multiple users. So you're gonna get some different metrics in these, but that is essentially what that is.

So it's what we, would've called in Google universal unique users. And sessions is now the traffic and user. So that is what the, the difference there. Again, these are all filterable. If. Wanna break those down by specific channels and, grouping. So, one thing I will note is when you're using some of these dropdowns, they are a bit finicky we found.

So depending on where you hover over, it may not trigger the dropdown. So you have to kind of go to the bottom. It's a strange usability issue that we've noticed, but, hopefully they work on that, but again, you can see, you can break it out. Different methods, whether it's source and medium, you can look at just source.

You can look at default channel grouping as campaigns. And you will notice that in here we have, the ad group's names and, and that type of thing as well. So that you can, break those out. Let's take a look at how to set up the Google search console. If you haven't done that for your SEO. All right.

So let's look, look at a test account that we have, and we're gonna go into the admin. And then as you can see, this is very similar to, Google universal analytics when setting up or, connecting a property, you're gonna go over under the property settings and the product links. You're gonna choose.

Search console links. and then there's nothing linked as you can see. So you're gonna go up to link search through the properties that you manage. We manage quite a few. So we're gonna search for this one in particular, noisy skull and click on that confirm and click next. Cause you can see that it linked.

Then you choose your web stream. In this case, we just have the one web stream. We have the website, we don't have an app associated. And we click next and just verifying that all of those are correct. And we're gonna click submit. and there it's created. So, , now that it's created, this is going to be data going forwards.

This is not gonna pull in historic data, just data that, , you are acquiring going forward. So you don't have that backward looking data, but it's important to do so that you can start acquiring that, , information now so that you can include that in your report. As always, if this was helpful, go ahead and like, and subscribe and we'll be doing more of these in the future.

Avoid These Facebook Ads Mistakes

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 20:45:35 GMT

Get The Most From Your Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads can be a great way to generate leads, increase exposure, engage with new customers, drive sales, and so much more! But what happens when those Facebook Ads are underperforming and you don’t know why? Or maybe you just don’t know how to get better results?

Here are some common mistakes we see that can affect the performance and results of Facebook Ads campaigns.

Using an Inefficient Account Structure

Facebook Ads Manager does its best to walk you through setting up a new campaign. This includes having a built-in hierarchical structure that organizes your account based on Campaigns > Ad sets > Ads. If you don’t set these up properly, it can be difficult to manage budgets, target audiences, segments, conversion types, or testing.

Each campaign needs to have at least one ad set and each ad set needs to have at least one ad. However, you can publish multiple ad sets and ads under the same campaign. Keep in mind that you do not want to publish as many as you can for a specific campaign, just as many as necessary.

Facebook Ads’ algorithm optimizes performance at the ad set level which means that if you have multiple ads under one ad set, the more you will have to spend to get the most from each ad. Facebook’s ad algorithm requires around 50 optimized events within one week for an ad set to leave the learning phase. When you have a small budget and multiple ads, it makes it that much harder for all your ads to leave the learning phase and perform optimally.

We recommend keeping the right ads under the right campaign. You set the objective at the campaign level, so make sure that the ads align with that goal. For example, if you have a campaign objective of “Traffic” you want all the ads under that campaign to reflect that. Under a “Traffic” campaign you wouldn’t create an ad that includes a form to sign up for a newsletter as that wouldn’t necessarily give you traffic to your website or business phone. Rather, you would need to create a new campaign with the correct conversion objective.

Another part of having a good ad account structure is to adequately name your campaign, ad sets, and ads so that you can easily identify them and keep your Ads Manager organized. We recommend using the naming method below or something similar that shows exactly what each level of the ads campaign does. Below is an example where we can see that the objective is clear in the campaign, the ad set includes the audience targeted, and the ads specify what creative is being used.

Campaign: Traffic_Summer Sale_Jan 2022

Ad Set: Lookalike_Summer Sale_Jan 2022

Ad: Photo Carousel_Summer Sale_Jan 2022

Choosing the Wrong Objective

Choosing the right campaign objective can sometimes be confusing as many of the options seem to be the same or have similar settings. That’s why it’s crucial to select the right objective for your campaign. According to Meta’s algorithm, your ads will be shown to people who will most likely complete the objective you selected.

Ads Manager goes into great effort to make the selection of the campaign objective as easy and straightforward as possible. A better way to understand how to select the right objective is to compare the Ads Manager to the sales funnel that uses top-of-funnel objectives or bottom-of-funnel objectives; top-of-funnel meaning to reach out to as large and relevant an audience as possible and bottom-of-funnel where you convert leads into customers. Using the sales funnel marketing strategy makes it easy to choose the objective that best aligns with your business goals.

With the older version of Ads Manager, comparing it to the sales funnel, that process is simplified where it’s divided into easy-to-select sections. These sections include awareness, consideration, and conversion; using the sales funnel thought process the top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel objectives will show from left to right.

The newer version of Ads Manager, the Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences ( ODAX ), uses the same layout but the categories are set up with top-of-funnel objectives at the top of the list and the bottom-of-funnel towards the end.

The next thing to remember is to set the right optimization and delivery at the ad set level. The optimization will enhance the results you are aiming for whether it’s page views, link clicks, impressions, or unique reach.

Picking the Wrong Budget Option

If you’re new to Facebook Ads Manager or not sure how much to spend on each ad set we recommend using Meta’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). It automatically manages your budget at the campaign level across ad sets to get you the overall best results. The budget is continuously distributed in real-time to ad sets with the best opportunities, throughout the course of your campaign.

However, if your ad sets have different audience sizes then CBO may not be your best option as it can spend more on the large ad sets while neglecting the smaller ones. This can result in only a small percentage of your audiences seeing your ads. For ads such as these, we recommend setting a budget at the ad set level where you have more control of how much you spend. You can choose a daily budget or a lifetime budget; a daily budget is the approximate amount that you'll spend every day. A lifetime budget is a maximum you'll spend during the lifetime of your ad set.

Reusing the Same Old Creative Formats

Using the same creatives, photos/images, or videos, can cause a decrease in results and even increase your costs. When you show the same ad, over and over again, it causes ad fatigue. You’ve probably had this happen to you too; you see an ad every week about the same product and eventually you ignore or if it gets annoying you might even remove it from your feed.

Having new and different ad creatives gives you a better understanding of what your audience likes and engages with the most. Aside from a single photo, think about using a photo carousel or a video as an ad creative.

Plus, switching up the creatives can help you improve results and use your budget better. You can duplicate an ad that has been doing well and only update the ad creative then review the results to see which ad your audience prefers. Or you can also use the A/B test in Ads Manager to compare two or more ad sets or campaigns to see which performs best for your chosen business objectives. Select the ad you want to duplicate and click on the A/B Test button then opt to make a copy of the ad and choose Creative for the variable. Now, you’re ready to run the test and see which version performs better. This will help you create better ads for the future.

Relying on Inaccurate Tracking Data

Since Apple rolled out its App Tracking Transparency framework, the reports for the ads have become slightly slower and can cause delayed analytics. We recommend reviewing ad results on different platforms not only on the Ads Manager dashboard. There are a few other options you can use to gain more insight into your ad results.

URL parameters can help you understand the effectiveness of your ads. URL parameters can be placed on ads that link to destinations off Facebook, such as your website, or on ads that promote existing Facebook posts. Insights from URL parameters can show which link people clicked to get to your ad's destination, like to your website or Facebook Page.

You can also use the Facebook Events Manager. This is a tool for tracking actions on third-party websites and apps. Events Manager shows the number of events received from your integration, such as the Meta Pixel or the Conversions API. This number may be different from Meta Ads Manager which only counts events attributed to your ads.

Facebook’s Conversions API is also a great tool for you to see your ad results. It’s designed to create a direct connection between your marketing data and the systems, such as Ads Manager or CRMs, which help optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per action, and measure results across Meta technologies.

Another great way to review more results is to use an eCommerce platform or web analytics tool you already use to compare and validate the ad results.

Conclusion

Facebook Ads Manager offers many tools so that you can create successful ads. There are many options and layers on how to optimize both the ad and ad reports. Although it may seem daunting at first if you have a clear strategy and end goal you will be able to use your budget and time effectively.

Remember, if you’re new to creating ads on Facebook don’t be afraid to try new things and use the free tools that are offered. Here’s a quick list to check while setting up your next ad campaign before you hit that publish button.

Use an account structure that is logical and easy for you to locate.
Identify the objective that best aligns with your goal; don’t forget about the sales funnel strategy!
Decide how you want to use your ad spend depending on what your objective is.
Focus on one call to action per ad; don’t overwhelm your viewers.
Make sure to use new and fresh content for your ads
Get a second opinion when it comes to your ads reports

As you continue using Facebook Ads Manager, you will become more comfortable using everything it has to offer. Plus, you’ll be able to see your ads’ performance in a more insightful way.

Video: GA4 vs. Google Universal

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 19:39:01 GMT

Google Analytics 4 vs. Google Universal

Google is sunsetting Google Universal Analytics and moving to its new measurement platform, Google Analytics 4 (GA4). We take a look at some of these differences and how may impact your reporting and measurement.

You can also read the blog here: Google Analytics 4 versus Google Universal

Supporting Links:

GA4's Dimensions and Metrics:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9143382?hl=en

GA4 Demo Accounts:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342?hl=en#accessories

Google Analytics 4 versus Google Universal

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 20:07:49 GMT

Get ready for an entirely new analytics tool.

Google’s newest version of its analytics tool, Google Analytics 4 or GA4, is not just an upgrade from the previous version of Google Universal Analytics (UA). It has a completely new interface, new reporting, and new metrics definitions - it’s essentially a new platform altogether.

Where the previous version of GA (UA) was a web measurement tool, GA4 is designed to measure different types of properties, such as web, but also apps. Because of this, a number of metrics that you may be used to are either missing, or have changed. This is one of the reasons why it’s not possible to migrate your historical data from Google Universal to GA4. Instead, you’ll need to download it or back it up using a data tool such as Google’s Big Data.

So let’s take a look at some of the differences you’ll be running into when you use GA4.

Cross-Device Calculations & Estimates

One of the unique features of GA4 is Google’s attempt to consolidate site visitors who may visit your website across devices. In other words, if a user views your site on a mobile device, then returns on a desktop to make a purchase (or various combinations of engagement), Google will use a User ID to tie those visits together. Therefore your Users metrics may seem lower in GA4, since it is theoretically not double counting user traffic coming from different devices.

Session traffic will also be estimated in GA4, based on Google’s AI. Google says, “Google Analytics 4 properties use a statistical estimate of the number of sessions that occurred on your website or app by estimating the number of unique session IDs, while Universal Analytics properties don't estimate the number of sessions. The estimates used by Google Analytics 4 properties more efficiently count sessions with high accuracy and low error rate.”

We’ll need to see over time if the claim of higher accuracy estimations actually proves to be true.

Reports

One of the first things you’ll notice about GA4 is that the reporting, particularly compared to the pre-built reports that you’ve become accustomed to in UA, is completely different. GA4 focuses more on the Explore report builder, which allows you to create custom reports. In many cases, you may want to use Google Data Studio to replicate reports that were available in UA since the GA4 interface is not particularly elegant or easy to use for the average business user.

GA4 does offer more AI-generated insights and metrics, particularly if your site generates significant traffic or sales. These reports are customized to the site, so will differ by company and property.

If you’re a retailer, you’ll note that one of the major metrics that isn’t available in GA4 is conversion rate. Under the Events > Conversions can see the number of purchases, the number of Total Users, and Event Revenue, but alas, not the calculated metric called Conversion Rate. When using Data Studio or an offline tool to calculate conversion rates, be sure to understand the difference in Users and Sessions in GA4, since this will impact your conversion rate comparisons with historic UA data.

Views

Google UA allows you to create separate “views” that pre-filter your data for each report in that view. This is most commonly used to create a view that filters employee traffic and usage of the site, so you have “customer” data and not internal testing and use data. GA4 does not have this “views” capability (though you can set up an account-wide IP filter to filter out employees). You’ll need to keep this in mind when comparing historical data from UA and any of your future reporting from GA4.

Users

Universal Analytics has two types of users: Total Users, and New Users. GA4 has three types of users: Total Users, Active Users, and New Users.

Total Users is essentially the same, and is pretty self explanatory. New Users is slightly different in GA4 since it looks at users new to your site or your app (if you’re tracking both). Active Users looks at users who have been active within a 28 day period.

If you’re comparing numbers between UA and GA4 (which we don’t recommend), you’ll note that Users in most reports in UA is actually Total Users, while GA4 uses the Active Users metric in most reports.

Sessions

Sessions in UA and GA4 are similar in that they time out after 30 minutes of inactivity. Where they differ is UA will count a visit to the site as a new session once midnight passes, while GA4 does not. Also, if a user somehow picks up new campaign parameters from an internal link on your website, UA will consider this a new session, while GA4 will not.

Engagement (No More Bounce Rate)

In UA, bounce rate was defined as a user visiting your website, and then leaving the site without viewing any other page. This has historically been used to measure how relevant a page might be for a given user, or act as a red flag for usability issues. Bounce rate has become increasingly irrelevant, however, as more sites feature “one page” or endless scrolling content.

GA4’s answer to this is to use Engagement Rate instead, which is the percentage of engaged sessions. Engaged Sessions are defined as sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, have a conversion event, or have at least two pageviews.

Conversions

One of the major changes in GA4 is that it is event based, rather than goals based. In UA, you define a goal, which could be a destination, duration, pages/session, smart goal, or a defined event. In GA4, there are only conversion events.

If you’re familiar with UA, you’ll also notice that the previous Goal categorization (Category/Action/Label) is also not available in GA4, merely a list of events.

Much like in UA, GA4 allows you to use out-of-the box events, with some that UA didn’t have (purchase, sign_up, scroll, click, first_visit, page_view, file_download, login, etc.), as well as custom-defined events. You can also trigger events based on behavior (form completion, button clicks, etc.), or via data layer triggers.

An important difference with GA4 is that basic ecommerce tracking is not available out-of-the-box. In UA, you can click a button to begin tracking basic ecommerce metrics (revenue, orders, conversion rate) in most situations. However with GA4, a data layer is necessary to capture and pass purchase data. If you have a pre-existing ecommerce implementation that uses a data layer for UA, then reuse is possible in many cases.

For smaller businesses, that means that you may need to engage a developer or agency to implement a data layer. We would anticipate that many CMSs will eventually develop their own implementation tools that will assist with this, but for the time being you’ll need additional programming assistance.

Pageviews

Pageview metrics will be relatively similar in UA and GA4. The primary difference is that GA4 does not have a Unique Pageview metric. This means that duplicate views of a page are counted across the board.

GA4 does not allow filtering, so if you do see large differences in UA and GA4 pageview metrics, this may account for some of the disparity.

Summary

We encourage you to begin testing and training your teams on GA4 as soon as possible. Google has announced that UA will be sunsetted July 2023, and because GA4 is essentially a completely new platform, this transition will not be seamless.

We will be following up with more articles and videos in the coming weeks about migrating, tagging, and working GA4. In the meantime, if you haven’t implemented GA4 on your properties, you need to do so now if you hope to have year-over-year reporting next year.

As always, if you have questions about GA4, need assistance implementing it, integrating it into your reporting, or training your teams, please reach out and we can help you .

Your Google Analytics Is Going Away!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 18:59:41 GMT

Google Universal Is Sunsetting

Google recently announced that it will be discontinuing Google Universal Analytics and moving to its new Google Analytics 4 platform (G4) on July 1, 2023. For most companies, Universal Analytics is probably what they’re using today.

Why Is This Important?

This is very important, because as of July 1, 2023, your current Google Analytics account will no longer collect data, nor will it transfer to G4. You then have six months (slightly longer if you have a paid GA account) to download historic data before it goes away completely!

In other words: In order to do year-over-year comparisons or a 12 month or greater trend in your key data points (like traffic, conversions, events, goals, or marketing performance) you will need to implement G4 before July of this year.

How Do I Know If I Have Google Universal Analytics?

If you created your Google Analytics account before October 14, 2020, then you most likely will be using Universal Analytics.

If you’re not sure when your account was created, you can check what version you’re using by looking at your Google Analytics property ID.

Universal Analytics property IDs start with UA and end with a number (UA-XXXXXXXXX-1).
Google Analytics 4 property IDs have only numbers (XXXXXXXXX).

You can find this by logging into your analytics account and going to your account or individual property.

Why Do I Care About Having YOY Data?

Being able to compare year-over-year data is critical in understanding how seasonality impacts your business, how previous marketing programs performed compared to similar programs today, how changes to your site have impacted key metrics like conversion rate, SEO, customer loyalty, etc.

Historic data trends can also show you how your customer behavior has changed over time, what content performs best, how your merchandising mix has changed, and much more!

In other words, you really, really don’t want to lose this information. By ensuring that you’re tracking a full year of data in G4 you’ll save your marketing teams a lot of time and effort in doing these comparison’s offline.

Why Is Google Changing?

Google is switching to G4 for a number of reasons. Some of the most significant are the preparations for moving to cookieless sites and advertising, new definitions about events/pages/conversions, and cross device and platform measurements (think apps, website, etc.), and addressing data controls stemming from legislation from the EU, California, and other areas.

Implementing G4

In order to implement G4, you will need to create a new G4 property in your GA account. We then recommend using Google Tag Manager to deploy your new G4 tags on your site. Events, goals, and any custom data collection that you currently have in GA Universal will need to be set up in G4, since these and historical data will not migrate with the switchover.

Remember, you can’t just create the G4 account in your analytics account and have it work out of the box. You will need to add the G4 code to your site, either manually or via a tag manager like Google Tag Manager.

This will be a bit of an issue with some CRMs, since many have a built in field that allows you to just enter your Universal Analytics account ID and skip the code implementation. These won’t work if you just use a G4 ID, at least not yet.

Be Prepared for Different Reporting

The G4 reporting interface is radically different from what you’ve become accustomed to in Universal Analytics. The reports are named differently, the metrics are different, and frankly sometimes difficult to find. We highly recommend that you spend some time getting familiar with the interface before you are forced to use it permanently.

For example, conversion rate doesn’t currently exist in G4. Seriously. You have to either pull the data offline and calculate via spreadsheet, or set up a Google Data Studio dashboard, and calculate it there.

Because the reporting is so drastically different, we have been recommending that you start creating Data Studio reports and use those, rather than dig for the data that may or may not exist in G4.

We Can Help

If implementing G4 seems overwhelming, don't worry. We can help. Contact us today for an estimate, or to learn more about how we can help with your analytics, and marketing.

Whatever you do, don't wait! Whether you use our team or internal resources, we highly recommend that you begin switching over today.

How to Easily Make a Social Media Calendar

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 20:10:23 GMT

Planning & Scheduling Your Social Media Posts

What is your goal with social media? It’s probably a combination of communicating with your existing customers or clients, and reaching new customers/clients so you can generate more revenue, right? Well, one of the best things you can do to improve your social media visibility is to post consistently.

Posting on a regular, frequent cadence increases your page’s visibility since most social algorithms will “boost” your post visibility based on algorithms that look at a combination of content, frequency, and engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.). However, we know it can sometimes feel overwhelming to create new content, particularly if you’re posting daily or several times each week. That’s where a social media calendar can come to your rescue!

A social media calendar will help you to plan and schedule content and assets (images, video, etc.), and can help you assign that content and posts to team members. A social media calendar will also save you time, let you try out new and different strategies, keep up with national holidays, plan ahead for important business events or announcements, and create fun, engaging posts. Not only does it facilitate collaboration with your team, it can provide a process to approve posts that can be published.

In this article, we will give you tips and tricks on how to easily create a social media calendar where you can create engaging content for your social media platforms.

Remember, preparation sets you up for success! Set some time aside to sit down and get your creative juices flowing.

CREATING & SHARING THE CALENDAR

There are a number of tools you can use to create your social media calendar. Be sure to use a platform or tool that you and your team are familiar with so that it doesn’t become a hurdle for use. And if you’re going to be collaborating or submitting for approval, you’ll want something that makes collaboration easy.

Excel/Google Sheets

This is the most robust one, but you can customize it however you would like. A big plus about Excel is that you can share and collaborate with other team members when you upload to your Microsoft OneDrive. Similar to OneDrive, Google Drive is an online storage cloud which houses your documents. Google Sheets is their version of Excel spreadsheets and it lets you create new Google Sheets or upload Excel spreadsheets which you can then share with your team by email or link to make collaboration an easy process.

Google Calendar

This is another great option to build your content on. You can color coordinate your content and schedule it as reminders for yourself and your team! We recommend creating a standalone calendar (and not just using your personal calendar) so multiple team members can share and add “events”. You can also use the Google Calendar as a great way to set reminders to write new content!

Templates

Another way to create a calendar is to use a template. There are so many calendar templates available online nowadays you can search for the one that really works for you. For example, Hubspot , Hootsuite , and Asana have great starter templates if you aren’t sure where or how to create your own calendar.

Social Media Scheduler

If you have an account with Hootsuite, Buffer, or any other social media scheduling service you already have a calendar created! Or if you are only using Facebook or Instagram, you can use Facebook Business Suite or Facebook Creator Studio; both of which allow you to post on both platforms and offer different views such as a calendar view or list view to see your scheduled posts.

ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT

By organizing your social media calendar you can make sure to create a balance between fun, relatable posts, seasonal and timely content, and posts promoting your services or products. For example, you can share fun content on Fridays or share inspirational quotes on a Monday and sprinkle the business information in between.

One of the amazing things about having a social media calendar is that you can always switch the topics around if you feel that you’ve been sharing too many informational or fun posts. Or if a last minute announcement or event takes priority, you can reschedule your post for another day.

The calendar below shows an example of a well balanced calendar. You want to see a variety of different categories, two to three posts a week, which are planned out for at least a couple of weeks.

Tip: Create different folders for your images and videos you can easily access to include in your posts. Label them by easy to find names like exteriors, events, special offers, etc.

WRITE POSTS

This is where the fun begins! We recommend writing the posts for the entire month ahead so that way you can set it and forget it. Although you can generally knock these out in one sitting, we recommend you take a day per category so it doesn’t become a tedious task; plus you can have plenty of posts already written for the following month. Feel free to try out different methods of writing to see what works best for you.

Tip: When writing posts keep in mind the social media channels you’ll be sharing them to. Instagram posts usually include hashtags, so a helpful tip is to have a list of common hashtags that you can easily add to any one of your posts.

Another tip: You can use one post for different social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc). You don’t necessarily need to write a unique post for each platform, simply tweak your post and schedule it.

SCHEDULE THE POSTS

Scheduling your posts is the final step to implement your social media calendar. You can either publish the post directly through the social media platforms or schedule them in advance. Keep in mind that some social media platforms do not offer a scheduling feature. For this reason we recommend that you have a social media scheduler. A social media scheduler will be able to connect to your social media platforms and let you schedule your posts in advance to many of your social media accounts (this will vary by tool).

Tip: Hootsuite , Facebook Creator Studio , and Buffer are great social media schedulers for beginners. Plus, they both offer free versions for small businesses or pages.

GATHER INSIGHTS

With a consistent posting schedule, you’ll have more time to track the performance of your social media posts. All social media platforms offer an “Insights” section where you can view and track your post and/or page’s analytics. You can also view your pages’ analytics through a social media scheduler, if you have one.

By reviewing your business insights, you are able to see how your page and your content is performing. Insights can show the growth of your page, how many people your posts have reached, the amount of clicks to your website, how many new followers you have, best time of day to post, and even sales/customer behavior trends. You can test out different types of posts, writing styles, post frequency, and times to get the most of our analytics. Through these insights, you can see what content really works for your business and what you can improve on.

CONCLUSION

Remember, preparation sets you up for success. Establish a consistent workflow for you and your team. To have a successful social media calendar you need to maintain it and plan ahead. Set reminders and deadlines to ensure that the social media calendar is being populated with new content. The main goal of a social media calendar is to give you more time so that you can focus on other aspects of your marketing strategy. Now, you won’t have to think about what to post daily or worse, forget to post! Your new social media calendar will be your new social media best friend.

What is PPC & How Does Paid Search Work?

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 15:50:22 GMT

What is PPC?

PPC is an acronym for pay-per-click, which is an advertising model that allows advertisers to pay for an ad on a platform when a user clicks on the ad. This differs from other common advertising models, like display ads, which will often be charged on a cost-per-view basis (or cost per thousand views), or placement ads, which are billed for a specific period of time with no guarantee of impressions or clicks (e.g., some magazine websites).

Individual ad platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even media sites (native platforms) may use variations of the PPC model, but most frequently when people mention PPC they’re really speaking about search engine ads (Google and Bing), and Google in particular. This is largely because of the sheer volume of searches Google sees each day, which enables it to serve up theoretically relevant ads related to those searches, and in turn gives advertisers a gigantic potential audience.

Wait, how many searches?

Ok, so when we say “sheer volume of searches” it probably helps if we put that into context. The reason Google has traditionally, and still dominates the PPC and search marketing world is because it sees some 63,000 searches per second, with over 5.6 billion searches per day!

And, it’s not just because of the traffic. PPC on Google is king because four times as many people are likely to click on a Google Ads search link (some 63%) than on other search engines. Bing comes in a paltry 6%, for instance. ( Clutch )

How PPC Works

When a person searches for a particular phrase or keyword, Google returns a page of results (SERPs, or search engine results pages) that can include a variety of information and links, including organic links, map links, images, videos, business listings, answer listings, and of course, paid ads. These ads can either be in the form of traditional text-based ads, or shopping ads.

With standard text based paid search ads, an advertiser designates the keywords and phrases that he or she would like to target, then creates associated ads within an ad group and campaign.

Google then determines what ads appear on a given search result page using a number of criteria, including the campaign’s overall budget, keyword relevance, ad score (which looks at the relevance of your ad and landing page copy, your site speed and performance, consumer behaviour on your site, etc.), which it then compares to your competitors who are bidding on the same keywords and phrases.

Historically ad positioning (who was in first, second, third place in the search results) was largely determined by advertisers bidding a maximum amount they would spend per click. Google would then “auction” to see who bid highest and had the best quality scores. This keyword-level auctioning has been deprecated (in fact, keyword ranking is no longer a metric that’s available in Google Ads) but you can still bid at this level if you choose to bid manually when setting up your campaigns. Increasingly Google encourages the use of its AI to determine positioning and placement.

Account Structure

Google Ads accounts are structured as campaigns, which then have ad groups, which contain your keywords.

Campaigns > Ad Groups > Keywords

Your campaigns can have varying types and targets, depending on your goals and needs. They can include typical text-based search campaigns, display campaigns (banner ads), shopping campaigns, and a mixture. Campaigns can focus on different target audiences and demographics, and have different budgets, giving you flexibility to tailor your ads to based on business needs.

Campaigns can then have a number of different ad groups, which we typically use to group similar keywords that relate to a specific landing page.

In other words, we may have keywords for golf clubs in one ad group, with golf balls in another, and golf shoes in yet another. This helps to ensure that the ads and the landing pages are relevant to the keywords and search intent, and have higher quality scores.

Keywords

Keywords are the core of a paid search program. Advertisers define the keywords and keyword phrases that will help to relate their ads to a consumer search query. In other words, as an advertiser, I may want to focus on the keywords “hot sauce” to target customers searching for things like “hot sauce seen on hot ones” or “the best hot sauces”.

An advertiser can adjust the precision of the search queries they would like to target by adjusting the match type of the keyword. For instance, broad matches for the term “golf” will potentially be used to target queries such as “golf pro”, “golf course”, “golf clubs for sale”, or “injuries from golf”. Using a phrase match instead of broad match, will help you to better define the type of search you’re interested in. For instance if you’re a gold retailer, you may want to make sure that the specific term contains the words “golf clubs” or “golf balls” since you’re not interested in clicks from people who have gold-related injuries.

Along with keywords, your ads are the basis of your paid search marketing efforts. A typical PPC ad will consist of headlines, body copy, a linking URL, and may also include extensions such as sublinks, a phone number, pricing information, call outs, etc. These ads appear on either the top or bottom of the SERPs, or on sites that are part of the advertising network (this is optional).

Google Ads enables (and heavily encourages) testing of ad copy, and also provides tools to develop dynamic ads that feature an assortment of headlines and body copy so that it can test which ad content and formats garner the most clicks and ideally conversions. Once Google has identified the most effective content, it will serve that ad more often.

As with keywords, Google looks at your ad copy’s relevance to a given search and will use this as part of its quality score for determining how often your ad is served for particular keywords, and how much your clicks will cost (we’ll touch on this more below).

Budgets

Budgets for your PPC ad campaign can be set at the campaign level, with maximum cost-per-click set at the ad group or keyword level. In Google Ads budgets are set to a daily maximum spend rather than a monthly cap.

It’s important to note, however, that Google gives itself relatively wide latitude on how much it “charges” you for ads. Actual ad costs can vary by as much as 30% above your “set” budget, particularly as Google’s AI learns how best to serve your ads. Generally this evens out over the course of the month and will not be much above your anticipated budget maximums.

Ad Rank

In the early days of PPC advertising, how your ad ranked was largely determined by how much you were willing to pay per keyword. Advertisers battled over who had the highest bid, down to the cent, to make sure they appeared in the coveted first or second spot on a SERP. If you bid $1 per click, but your competitor bid $1.01, they appeared first.

As with everything related to search, Google has become much more sophisticated in how it ranks ads. Ideally Google would like to show ads and search results that are the most relevant to a searcher’s intent, plus make the most money from those ad results. Remember, Google is getting paid when someone clicks on the ad, so if the ad doesn’t appear to be related to a search, it is far less likely to get clicked.

Today, Google looks at a combination of factors when determining where and when an ad shows. This includes:

Ad budget and bids
Relevance and context
Ad content (extensions, format, etc.)

Google also looks at your ad’s quality score. Your quality score is determined (we think) by a number of factors that may include:

Ad and keyword relevance to a specific search query
Click-through rate of your ad
Landing page load speeds
Landing page content relevance (does your landing page use the same content and keywords that your ad does, for instance).

Quality score will also impact how much your ads cost and how often they’re shown. If you have a poor quality score for a given ad group, your ad will be shown less no matter how much you bid. In other words, you’ll have to spend more to acquire the traffic that a higher quality ad does.

Targeting

Keywords will help you target certain searches, but Google Ads’ targeting enables you to refine your audience and prospects, so that you’re spending your budget optimally. Not only can you target by day and time, device type, and demographics (age, location, gender, income, and parental status), but you can also target by behaviour, purchase intent, and whether they’ve visited your site or purchased from you in the past. For display ads, you can also target custom audiences, life events, remarketing (people who have visited your site), customer match, and similar audience modeling.

Obviously this is extremely important if you provide regional services, or if you’re targeting very specific income levels or age groups. It also allows you to set exclusion lists, so if you absolutely don’t want to target a certain demographic, you can exclude them from seeing your ads.

Note: There are restrictions on targeting for some industries, particularly housing, finance, employment, etc. So if you’re a mortgage company or property management company, you technically won’t be able to take advantage of targeting by age, gender, etc.

Conversion

Understanding how your ad campaigns are converting is obviously important. You need to know how they’re performing and if they’re profitable. Conversion tracking can include:

Purchase of a product or service
Customer acquisition through signing up for a newsletter, download, or webinar
A phone call
Goals defined by you such as user engagement, video plays, downloads, etc.

Conversion tracking in Google Ads also has the added benefit that it helps Google’s AI optimize your ad audience, and determine what segments are more likely to convert. This means that over time Google is able to show your ad to the “right” search users.

Setting up conversion tracking for Google Ads can be just as simple as adding your Google Ads conversion ID to your site, depending on your platform and content management system, or it can be more complex if you need to add JSON data layers or create specific conversion triggers on your site. This is generally accomplished either adding code to your site, or a combination of Google Tag manager and code.

Tracking and Integration

As we mentioned above, understanding how your ads are performing, what conversions they’re driving, and how profitable they are is incredibly important to a successful campaign. If you’re a Google Analytics user, integrating Google Ads tracking is extremely simple and can be accomplished directly through your Google Analytics admin console.

By integrating your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, you will automatically see keyword-level data in your GA account without needing to manually add tracking codes to your ad URLs.

If you are using another analytics platform, you can often integrate your Google Ads data using API tools (Adobe Analytics offers this for instance), or by manually adding tracking tags to your ad URLs.

Conclusion

Obviously this is a high level look at PPC, and we will dive into more detail in subsequent posts. This should give you an overview of PPC, and how it can work for your company. PPC can sometimes get a bad rap for being expensive, and it can be very expensive in certain markets and verticals. However, it also reaches a potentially huge audience of searchers actively looking for products and services like yours, which can be much more powerful than passive marketing.

Our team has worked with PPC since its inception (yes, some of us are old), and can help you either start with search advertising for the first time, audit your existing accounts to look for opportunities to grow and improve, or manage your search marketing program from start to finish. Contact us today to learn more!

8 Ways to Optimize Your Google Business Listing

Tue, 25 May 2021 19:05:48 GMT

8 Ways to Optimize Your Google Business Listing

If you have a business that depends on local customers, then you need to have a Google My Business listing. A Google My Business listing (GMB), is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. According to Google, half of all individuals who conduct a search for a local business will visit that business within 24 hours. 78% of local mobile searches result in an in-store purchase. What’s more, about 56% of local searches are “on-the-go,” via smartphones.

Since its inception, GMB has evolved and added some really cool features that enhance your listing, help you reach new customers, provide insights and analytics, monitor your reputation/reviews, and increase your rank in local search results. A Google My Business listing is an amazing resource for businesses as it provides free SEO!

Here are four preliminary questions to know if you should get a Google My Business listing:

Do I have a business?
Does my competitor have a listing?
Do I want more customers?
Do I want free localized marketing help?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions, then you need a Google My Business listing. When you optimize your GMB listing you’re more likely to show up on mapped listings over a page that isn’t optimized. Here are eight easy ways to optimize your listing!

1. Claim Your Google My Business Listing

Too many times we have seen a business say “my business is on Google,” only to find out that all the information is wrong or outdated.

Creating or suggesting a new business on Google Maps does not automatically make you the owner. You will need to claim the business and then verify your business via phone or mailed postcard. To claim and verify your listing, you will need a Google account; we recommend you create a Gmail specifically for your business.

Once you have claimed and verified your business, you are off to a great start!

2. Complete Your Business Profile Information

This is your chance to provide customers with the most accurate information of your business. To do this, make sure to fill out all the necessary information and fields. There are quite a few, but Google My Business listings require all that information to better serve you and so that potential customers can find your business easier.

Some of the most important fields to complete are:

Business name
Phone number
Address
Website
Category
Service Area
Description
Working hours

3. Choose Multiple Categories

Categories describe your business and connect you to customers who search for the products or services you offer. Choose a primary category that describes your business as a whole, and be specific. For example, choose “Nail salon” instead of “Salon.” If the category you have in mind isn’t available, choose a more general category that still accurately describes your business.

If possible, apply a secondary category to provide better information about your business. For example, if you manage a grocery store that includes a pharmacy and deli, choose “Grocery store” as your primary category, then add “Pharmacy” and “Deli” as additional categories.

4. Add High Quality Photos

Adding photos to your Google My Business listing gives customers a glance into what products or services they can expect from your business. According to Google, businesses with photos are more likely to receive requests for driving directions to their location , as well as clicks through to their websites, than businesses that don't have photos. Remember to add photos that are high quality and don’t look pixelated; pixelated images can make your business look outdated and unprofessional.

Add different photos to highlight features of your business to attract and inform customers. For example pictures of your logo, work setting like office environment and staff, and other relevant images for customers to get to know you. We recommend adding at least three to five images to your listing.

Bonus tip: Google gives more preference for listings that don’t use stock photos. So whenever possible, use original photos of your business or team.

5. Add A Description

The business description provides a quick way for customers to get an overview of your business. Contrary to popular belief, you want to stay away from keywords, links or URLs, caps lock, and a lengthy GMB description. Include your company’s history, what sets you apart, and anything else that’s helpful for customers to know.

Here’s a good formula to follow when writing your 750 character business description on Google My Business: Tell them about your business + tell them how it will help them + tell them what to do next or include a call to action.

6. Seed Q&As

This is probably one of the most overlooked features of a GMB listing that has significant value. In the Q&A section, customers can ask questions and you, as a business, can answer those questions. The catch is that somebody else not related to your business can also answer the question. If you don’t monitor your Q&A section, it can lead to questions that are answered incorrectly by others. This can cause inaccurate information about your business and even a negative reputation.

We recommend you go to your GMB Q&As if you haven’t done this recently! Another way to prevent misinformation is to ask frequently asked questions yourself then answer them as your business; and if it’s a really common question you and multiple can “like” the question so that it will be put towards the top of the Q&A section. However, you should not add questions for promotions, advertisements, or anything similar that can be considered spammy.

If you do run into any questions that are any of the ones we mentioned or include any type of offensive language, off-topic to your business, conflict of interest, or hate speech you can report the question and Google will take it down .

Remember, Google My Business Q&A is a great resource for customers and a great way for your business to engage directly with customers.

7. Monitor Reviews

Google reviews can make or break your business. The star rating that shows up next to your business name is crucial for your online reputation. Businesses with higher reviews are shown to have higher click-through rates and engagement, and will often rank higher in the “map pack” listings.

The more positive reviews your GMB listing has, the better it is for your business, and your rankings. To gain more positive reviews your business can encourage happy customers to share their experience online!

Within your GMB admin is a quick link that you can share with clients/customers when you ask for a review. We’ve had many clients who make this a part of their regular client communications, and include this link in “thank you” or follow up emails. Keep in mind however, that it is against Google’s policies for you to solicit positive reviews. You can’t offer an incentive, discount, etc., in exchange for a positive review. If Google thinks you’ve done this they will remove your listing, which can have a significant negative impact on your business.

Just like the Q&A section, you will have to monitor your Google Reviews. It’s important to reply to all reviews within a timely manner; positive, star ratings, and especially negative reviews. Remember if a review is off-topic, for another business, or contains offensive content you can report the review to Google .

When responding to reviews here are some simple formulas you can follow. Keep in mind that these are very basic formulas and you should try to personalize the reply for each review if possible.

8. Post News/Events

You can create and share announcements, offers, new or popular items in stock, or event details directly with your customers. With Google posts your business can connect and engage with current and potential customers. Plus, you can easily keep track of how many people have viewed and interacted with your post. This will provide helpful insight so you know what people like and dislike.

If you don’t know where to start, you can repurpose social media posts from Facebook or Instagram for you Google My Business posts. Try to post relevant and useful content as you do not want to come off as spammy. Google also has a quick guide on how to make great business posts!

Conclusion

Google My Business listings can be one of the most effective marketing tools you can use, and best of all it’s free. But like anything that represents your business, you’ll want to make sure that it’s up-to-date, as complete as possible, and gets people talking about your business.

Be aware, however, that Google will turn off your listing if it suspects spam, duplicate addresses, misleading information, etc. If you would like assistance setting up your GMB listing(s), claiming it, troubleshooting, or optimizing, contact us today . Our experienced team can help you get the most from local search.

How To Crank Out More Blogs. Without Writing.

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 25 May 2021 14:20:06 GMT

How To Crank Out More Blogs. Without Writing.

New, fresh content is incredibly important to your business. Not only does it help to establish your expertise and subject matter authority with potential clients or customers, but it’s vital to a healthy search engine optimization (SEO) program. Google loves good content. And generally lots of it.

So if that’s the case, then why aren’t more businesses producing more content? In working with numerous clients over the years, we hear the same reasons for this dearth of content creation: 1) Lack of time, and 2) Writing is painful/intimidating/difficult.

Any author can tell you just how intimidating it can be to sit down in front of a blank screen and try to come up with something intelligible. Writer’s block is real, and it can be paralyzing, particularly when writing isn’t your primary job. Add to the mix that you’re trying to run a business, manage a team, and deal with the myriad distractions that come with everyday work and life, and you have a formula for content development procrastination.

So how do you get past this and start churning out awesome content? We’ve come up with a couple of approaches that seem to work for many of our clients, and for our team as well.

1) Record An Interview

Do you have a subject matter expert who just doesn’t have the time or inclination to write content and blogs? We feel ya. We’ve found that even these super busy experts have 10 to 15 minutes that they can spare. And talking is a lot easier than writing, so why not conduct a quick interview?

You can pretty quickly pull together five to 10 questions, then conduct a quick and easy interview. Be sure to record the conversation, then you can easily turn that great content into a blog or article. With some quick editing, a bit of rewriting, and you’ll have some nice content to work with. And remember, editing or reworking existing content is much, much easier than staring at a blank screen. Plus you can use quotes, and give your in-house expert some publicity and exposure.

Bonus Tip: To get more bang for your buck, tape your interview so you can get both video footage or podcast recordings, as well as transcribed content for your blog. The video/podcast can be used on your site and on social media, and the transcribed content is great fodder for Google’s spider.

2) Conduct A Roundtable

Sometimes subject matter experts aren’t the best at one-on-one interviews. Monosyllabic responses, a lack of detail, a distracted interviewee can all make this process less than ideal, and the content not so compelling. By turning an interview into a roundtable, you can often get several experts riffing with colleagues, which can make for more engaging content. This also reduces the need for pre-scripted questions.

Bonus Tip: Zoom and other meeting tools can make this easier to record. However, if you’re concerned about video quality, you can also use some great podcasting tools to ensure that you get a good recording. Not only can this then become a podcast, but the clear vocals make automated transcription a lot easier and more accurate. Less editing time means you can turn around that content more quickly.

3) Record Yourself

Talking about a topic that you’re familiar with is often much easier than staring at a blank screen. We’ve found that recording yourself talking about a topic or taking notes about something you want to write about is a great way to beat writer’s block. Your phone probably has a recorder app, and definitely has a camera, so take advantage of it if you’re in the car, or sitting at your desk between meetings.

If you have an Android, particularly a Google Pixel, Google recently upgraded the Recorder app so that it automatically (and very accurately) transcribes your recordings. You can then access these transcriptions and sound files on the web, making editing and blog creation a heck of a lot easier.

If you don’t have Google’s new recorder app, you can still use a little known transcription tool that’s hidden in Google Docs. Just open a new Google Doc, and go to Tools, and then Voice Typing (or Command + Shift + S). Click on the microphone icon and start talking. Google will transcribe as you speak. We have found that this isn’t quite as accurate as the record app, but will do in a pinch.

4. Transcribe a Previous Video or Podcast

If you’re producing videos and podcasts (you really should be by the way), don’t forget that you can transcribe these and use that as blog content. There are a number of transcription tools available on the market, and you can also use some quick cheats if you don’t want to pay for a tool. We’ve used Facebook’s transcription tool when uploading videos to FB (you can copy the transcribed content that FB uses for captions), you can play your video and let your phone record and then transcribe, or you can use the Google Doc talk-to-type tool. Just be sure to play your video/podcast loud enough for your speakers to pick it up. Admittedly, this can be a little clunky, but hey, necessity (and frugalness) are the mother of invention.

Conclusion

So what are you waiting for? You absolutely have no excuse now to not be producing some great content for your blog and website. But, if you find that these solutions are still not working for you, contact us today and we can develop a content marketing and development plan for you. Our team of content experts will work with you to create compelling and SEO friendly content for your site, social media, and more.

What Analytics Metrics Should You Be Monitoring?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Fri, 21 May 2021 14:40:05 GMT

What Analytics Metrics Should You Be Monitoring?

When was the last time you looked at your company’s website data? If you’re like many, you probably don’t with any regularity, or at all. In some cases that may be because your agency or marketing team provides reporting related to your marketing programs, and sometimes because you’re just not sure what you should be looking for.

We’ll take a look at some of the most common metrics, and talk about what you should be looking at, and what metrics aren’t that useful. Note, we’ll be using terminology that is typically associated with Google Analytics since it tends to be the most widely used analytics platforms. The concepts will be the same though, if you’re using Adobe Analytics, Kissmetrics, or some other website analytics platform.

Actionable Metrics

Before we dive into details, I’ll share one of our guiding mantras when it comes to data: If it’s not actionable, then it’s only interesting.

What’s that mean? Well, fundamentally, we ask the question “can this data be acted upon to create a better user experience, increase conversions, improve engagement, and ultimately drive more business?” If not, then why are you tracking it? Is it a vanity metric, or is it just something that’s always been tracked?

Getting caught up in unactionable data is a great way to head down the path of data paralysis . Data paralysis is when you have so much data, so many reports, that you have a hard time making sense of it and making decisions. The opposite of what you need data for.

So, with that in mind, let’s look at some of the data that you should, and maybe shouldn’t, be looking at in your website analytics tools.

Traffic/Audience

Website “traffic” or “visitors” is one of the most frequently used metrics. And while it can be an important metric, informing you about the volume of traffic that your site is receiving, it’s also something of a vanity metric.

How so? Well, it’s something agencies and marketing teams can point to to say “Hey, we’ve grown website traffic by XXX%!!!” Ok, great. Is that traffic driving conversions? Is it the right traffic? Case in point: our own site traffic. There are other companies whose names include “Apotheca”. And one of these is in the CBD/pharma field. We’ve written blogs about selling CBD products . And we’ve seen a decent amount of traffic that comes from people searching for that other company, which becomes obvious when we drill down in the search terms used to get to our site.

So, is this traffic useful to us? Is it our target audience? Should we thump our chests that traffic grew month-over-month and year-over-year. Probably not.

So as you can see, in cases like this, just looking at traffic can be misleading, because it’s not a barometer of how our marketing programs are performing and it’s definitely not leading to conversions.

Traffic also gets more confusing when people incorrectly mix and match the use of “sessions” and “users” in their reporting.

A session, as Google defines it, is: “A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.”

A user is defined as: “Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range.” That portion about the date range is the important part. Because unique users during a day is going to be a different metric than unique users for the month. We’ve encountered companies that report on users on a weekly basis. They then add those weekly users together for their monthly reporting. This is not going to be accurate, because that user may have come back multiple times over the month, artificially inflating the offline reporting.

We won’t delve into them in this article, but within audience reporting are some more advanced views, such as new versus returning users, user segments, demographics, etc. These can be important for deep dives into your user data, but we’ll look more closely at these in the future.

Behavior

Google’s Behavior Overview tab has some interesting data… Notice, it’s interesting, but not always actionable. This behavior reporting includes metrics like pageviews, unique pageviews, time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate.

Much like traffic, some companies get really caught up in time on site and pageviews. “Our users averaged 10 pageviews and stayed on the site for 20 minutes!” Sounds great, right? And it could mean that your audience is extremely engaged with your content. But it can also mean that your site is a usability nightmare and it’s extremely difficult to find what you’re looking for. Much like short visits and fewer pages may point to very targeted use of landing pages , and great usability, and a better user experience.

Viewed in isolation, these metrics don’t tell you a lot. Combined with other user behavior, like site navigation, click mapping, and A/B testing, they can definitely be useful, but we generally don’t include them in most dashboards because they don’t tell a full story, and typically aren’t actionable by themselves. (One caveat to this, however, is when you see spikes or drops in these metrics over time. If you see a sudden drop in pageviews that’s dramatically different from historical trends, it can point to a potential problem that may need further investigation.)

Of all of the main behavior metrics we typically find bounce rate is the most useful, but mostly at the individual page level. Bounce rate is defined as the rate at which users leave your site after only viewing one page. High bounce rates on landing pages can be indicative of content that isn’t what the user expected, slow load times, or poor usability. As with the other behavior metrics, it can help to indicate that something needs further investigation or testing.

We particularly like using this with landing pages for advertising, as well as SEO. A higher than normal bounce rate on these pages can help to point to the need for enhancements, refinement, or expansion, thus making our marketing more profitable.

Note: Site content, site flow, site search, and events, also fall under this category, and they can all be incredibly useful, but generally don’t make an appearance in weekly dashboards and reporting. We’ll dive into those metrics and how to use them in subsequent articles.

Acquisition

From a marketing perspective, the acquisition section of Google Analytics is extremely important. This is where you’re going to see not only traffic that is coming from your various marketing channels and campaigns, but also conversions, revenue, etc.

From a high level, you’ll want to be looking at not just the traffic that each marketing channel is driving (see traffic above), but rather the conversion metrics. For retail sites, this would be transactions, revenue, and conversion rate for each channel. For non-retailers, your conversion metrics are what you have defined (see our blog on conversions), and can have a dollar value associated with them.

We highly recommend that you take some time to integrate your Google Search Console and Google Ads data with Google Analytics, since these will make your acquisition reporting much more effective. You’ll be able to drill down into your Ads campaigns (cost, keywords, etc.), as well as your organic keyword performance.

You’ll note that on the “Overview” in acquisition, that Google buckets these campaigns automatically using it’s best guess as to where traffic and conversions should be credited. You do have some control over this in the GA admin and can define different channels. And of course, you can and should be adding UTM tracking to your campaigns so you can see more granular detail about your marketing campaigns, all the way down to the creative version.

Conversion

The conversion section of GA gives you an overview of not only direct conversions like sales, leads, etc., but also goals. Depending on your business, you may have a combination of these that are important to monitor.

While this section is a great barometer about what’s happening on your site (e.g., you can quickly see overall sales, conversion rate, leads, email signup, etc.), I would argue that it’s less actionalable than the marketing acquisition reports. BUT, when reporting to your boss, they’ll want to see these overall numbers to understand how the site is performing.

If you want more insight into the different types of conversions, check out our blog: What is Conversion?

For retailers, we find that one section of the conversion reporting is often overlooked, and that’s product performance. This report is incredibly useful for your merchandising, stock estimation, etc. You can very granularly see what products are selling, how much they’re contributing to the overall revenue, and how they impact your AOV (average order value). You can also drill down by secondary dimension and look at what marketing channels are driving these sales.

Conclusion & Some More Considerations

Ok, so we know we’re just scratching the surface with how powerful analytics can be for not only measuring, but optimizing your website’s performance. There are a couple of important considerations we’d like to point out that sometimes get overlooked when it comes to analytics data.

GA data is directional. For very large sites, some of the data in GA is sampled. That means that Google isn’t reporting on every single visitor, but modeling how many they anticipate based on past performance. You’ll need to pony up $100K per year for the paid version to get real time non-sampled data in some of the high level reporting.
GA isn’t accounting data. GA doesn’t account for cancellations, returns, refunds, etc. So that revenue number is “directional” in that it gives you a good idea about performance, but isn’t going to be the same as your accounting data.
It won’t match with other tracking. Ever. This is a common issue, and it has to do with a number of factors including where the code is fired on the site, how quickly the code loads on your site, and how each tool calculates certain metrics. But what this means is that Google Ads clicks, Facebook metrics, and certainly other analytics tools like Adobe, and Kissmetrics, will never, ever, consistently have the same visitor and other metrics that GA does. So don’t waste your time trying to figure out which is “right” or “wrong”. Choose a source of truth, and use that consistently in your reporting.
Sometimes it’s just… wrong. Glitch in the matrix, bad coding, slow pages. For whatever reason, sometimes there will be anomalies that you just can’t account for. Again, this isn’t accounting data, it’s a barometer. So don’t get too shaken up if you see data that just doesn’t look right.

If you would like help understanding your data better, getting more out of it, or making sure your analytics has been deployed properly, contact us today . Our analytics experts will provide a free consultation.

Should You Be Using Landing Pages?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Thu, 06 May 2021 21:01:26 GMT

You’ve heard the term “landing page”, right? Obviously it’s a page where you “land” people who are clicking through from a marketing campaign. But, why is it a big deal and how can it impact your marketing campaigns?

What is a landing page?

A landing page can be something as simple as an existing page on your website that you send traffic to from your marketing channels or campaigns. This could be your homepage, a product page, a service or category page… You get the idea.

The reason you’ll hear marketers talking about landing pages, however, is because leading people to a general page, particularly your homepage, isn’t particularly effective. Think about it: Your homepage will typically have lots of information, products, and even videos, much of it not necessarily related to the campaign someone clicked through on. That means that your typical visitor may get distracted, or even worse, may get frustrated because they’re not seeing relevant content related to the ad that led him or her there, and then leave your site. Not only did you not convert this visitor, but you didn’t leave them with a great impression of your brand either.

Targeted Content

Custom landing pages give you better control over the messaging and content, helping you to tie the landing page content to your marketing campaign. This can be something as simple as making sure you’re landing them on the right product, reiterating keywords and messaging that appeared in your ad, and reiterating imagery.

All of these things will make the page they land on more relevant to the ad campaign, letting them know that they landed on the right spot. This will help to reduce bounce rates (the rate that people only look at one page and then leave your site), increase content engagement, and, most importantly, increase conversions.

"We’ve seen clients increase conversion rates on campaigns by 200% to 300% by using a well-crafted landing page."

Improved Quality Score & Relevance

Reassuring a site visitor that they’ve landed on the right content is very important, and it’s also important to reassure Google (or Facebook) that the content is relevant too.

Google Ad campaigns grade the quality of both your ad content, as well as the page/site that you’re landing people on from the ad. Quality score looks at a number of on-site factors, including how relevant the content of your landing page page is to the search query that your visitor conducted, keyword phrases on the page, how quickly the page loads, and the behavior of the consumer once they land on that page. In other words, once the person lands on the site, are they engaging with your content, performing specific behaviours, or are they just bouncing?

This is important to the performance of your ad campaigns, because a higher quality score will mean that you’re paying less per click, your ads will be served more frequently, and ultimately you'll get a better return on your advertising.

Focused Behaviour

Your landing page’s ultimate goal is to convert customers, right? One conversion killer is distraction. A custom landing page can give you the option to eliminate global navigation from the page, and instead focus the user’s attention on your calls to action, messaging, and conversion points. This is particularly common in business-to-business environments, where your main goal is getting that lead form filled out rather than having the user clicking around on the site.

I would caution however, that this isn’t necessarily the right customer experience for your company, so it’s something you’ll want to test.

A/B Testing

One of the other great things about custom landing pages is that they allow you to easily conduct A/B and multivariate testing. Since the audience will only be those coming from your marketing campaign, you can be confident that you're only testing that specific audience.

What are A/B tests? Basically A/B testing allows you to swap out messages, images, calls-to-action, etc., and test how these different versions impact your conversion rate. For instance, is a certain call to action in the headline leading to higher conversion rates? Would having a man, woman, or family in the image, or a specific picture of the product or some other aspect of the creative on the page going to help people stay and convert?

Other tests might look at the color of an action button, or the placement of buttons, or the placement of the content, or the length of the content... all of these different variables that might impact people's engagement on the page can be tested. Then you can refine which landing page creative is working better and use those findings in other campaigns to try to ultimately improve your conversion rate more than you already have with just the landing page.

Creating Your Landing Page

So now that we’ve looked at some of the reasons why you want custom landing pages, how do you go about creating them? Depending on the platform you’re using, your access to quickly and conveniently make coding or design changes, and even your skill set, you can generally make those changes directly on your website by creating a new page that’s (typically) not linked from the main site. Many CMS and theme’s will have ready-made landing page templates that can make this process much easier. And, best of all, creating them yourself means they’re free.

The downside of this, depending on the platform that you're on, is that you may not have the ability to change the page layout, or navigation very easily. For larger companies, creating custom landing pages can be even more difficult since changes on the website often have to go through a full development cycle, including deployment on development and testing servers, and then eventually publication on production servers. A process that can literally take months.

Third Party Tools

Third party landing page and optimization software often has the benefit of enabling you to create custom landing pages without the need of your IT, access to your site’s CMS/HTML, coding knowledge, or third party developers. Many of the leading platforms will also give you additional tools for tracking, creating sticky banners, etc.

"Businesses using optimization software for landing pages have an average conversion increase of 30%."

One of our favorite third party landing page tools is Unbounce . It’s user-friendly, and intuitive, and has a variety of pricing options based on your needs, ranging from $80 to $300 per month. It offers unlimited landing pages at all levels, as well as popups and sticky bars, free hosting, and responsive designs.

Another landing page tool we recommend is Leadpages . It has many of the same easy-to-use features as Unbounce, but it’s prices start out lower, ranging from $37 to $321 per month.

Landing pages need to be part of your marketing strategy

Whether you’re creating your own landing pages, or using some great third party tools to do it for you, landing pages will improve the performance of your marketing campaigns. If you’re not using them today, we encourage you to give them a try and then compare your results.

And of course, if the idea of creating, optimizing, and managing landing pages seems overwhelming, we can help! We regularly design and manage landing pages and their accompanying marketing campaigns for a variety of clients. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get better results.

How to Use Social Media for Your Multifamily Properties

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 20:50:53 GMT

Social media has grown to become a vital part of any business’s marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter if your business is small and local or a well known national brand - you need social media for your business. For multifamily properties having an active social media is a great opportunity to connect with residents, increase brand awareness, and reach new renters.

Millions of people use social media every day to follow their friends and family but also to follow the brands and companies they love. Social media is a way for renters to stay connected and stay up to date with the newest property updates. Over 50% of users on Facebook are more likely to spend money on companies they follow. Over 60% of millennials use social media to stay updated on their favorite brands.

Social media can be easy even for beginners! It’s important to know the big players in social media: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In this article you will learn how each platform works and which content is best to use for each social media platform.

Best Practices

To get started with your social media strategy for multifamily you need to keep a few things in mind. These methods will help you achieve your goals by growing your following, increasing engagement, and put you in front of new prospects!

Maintain Consistency

You want to make sure your brand is consistent throughout all your social media platforms. This includes making sure that your property name, user name, and profile picture are all the same and match your property name.

Post Frequently or On a Schedule

Social media algorithms are ever-changing and one way to stay on top of this is by consistently publishing new posts. A good starting point is posting one to three times a week on each social media network. Does this sound like too much? Don’t worry! Most social media networks are now connected, like Facebook and Instagram; when you connect both your pages you are able to post on both networks at the same time. You can also look into social media schedulers, like Buffer or Hootsuite, where you can connect to each of your social media pages and post or schedule your content.

We recommend you think ahead of what you will be posting and even creating a calendar to follow. By using a social media calendar, you can schedule out your entire week or month’s worth of posts and make sure you share important deadlines, holidays, and move-in specials.

Creative Content

Everyone has their own style of writing when it comes to social media. When you’re thinking of what to post, keep it casual! Remember, social media is a place where potential renters can get to know who your property is. Don’t be afraid to use emojis and hashtags that you think are fun and match your writing.

Mix up your content by providing quality photos of the apartments, community amenities, apartment amenities, your amazing staff, resident events, local events or reshare posts from popular pages, participating in national holidays, and more. Although the goal is to connect with people who are interested in becoming a resident of your property, not every post has to push a lease. Have fun with your content! Maintain a healthy balance of promoting your apartments and fun content.

Be Helpful and Engaging

Remember, social media can be used for your prospects or residents can stay connected with you. If someone has asked a question by commenting on a post or sending a direct message, we recommend you reply within 24 hours. Answer their questions and offer to connect with them via email or phone to provide them with more information. If you are unsure of what to answer, don’t freak out! It’s okay to let them know you will have to get back to them while you do more research.

Negative reviews and comments are bound to happen, but the best thing for you to do is to acknowledge them, listen to their frustrations, be helpful and reply within a timely manner. You can even offer them to continue the conversation in private messages or a phone call. Don’t forget to always stay positive and provide the best support possible.

A Little Boost Here, A Little Boost There

One of the great things about social media is that you can actually create ads to reach more people, specifically on Facebook and Instagram. Lucky for your property, you don’t need thousands of dollars to reach a lot of people. By boosting one of your popular posts, sometimes with as little as $5 or $10, you can reach a much wider audience. Your property can grow affordably and at your own pace, specify what audience to target, and lead potential residents to apply.

Optimize Your Pages

You can easily optimize your social media accounts by completing all the sections of the profile page. This includes your profile name, profile picture, about us or business bio, cover photo, contact information, etc.

Don’t Overthink It

Keep it simple and don’t over complicate your social media strategy. You will learn as you go what your audience likes and dislikes. You want to come off as authentic and sometimes when you over edit a caption or an image it can take away from that authenticity. People love fun posts! It’s okay to share something fun, even if it’s not relating to your property, this way people can engage with your property and genuinely enjoy your posts.

What To Share on Which Platform

Although you can post the same content on all your social media accounts, it doesn’t hurt to customize each post.

Facebook

When posting as a business on Facebook, the algorithm often pushes your posts lower in people’s news feed. You need to post content that is attention grabbing and provides some kind of value to Facebook users. Try to post an image or video with every post. This will increase the visibility of your post. Don’t just post “Leasing Now!” or “Call us to apply!” Include a photo or short video of the apartments or the leasing office to that post to make it pop on the news feed. When choosing which image to post, make sure it is high quality and clear; stay away from pixelated and blurry images.

Adding a link to your post provides even more value. For example, if you are sharing information about your amenities include the website link of where they can find more information about your property’s amenities.

Resharing a relevant post from another page is also a great way to show your community involvement. This can be from local events to weather updates from the local news station or even local traffic updates.

Twitter

Twitter is a fast-paced social media platform where breaking news starts trending, live posting is a thing, and chat threads can carry a conversation from different parts of the world. When you’re sharing updates on Twitter, keep them simple and to the point as you only have 280 characters per post. We know you want to promote your apartments as much as possible, but don’t make every update on your Twitter feed about your property building. With Twitter you are able to retweet local events, local news, articles, and fun content from other Twitter users. Don’t be afraid to retweet several times a day! When creating a new update keep in mind that you can also include images and links; we do recommend that you shorten any links you share in a Twitter update.

A vital part of Twitter are the #hashtags. Hashtags allow users to easily find topics, news, brands, and become involved in conversations and hashtags. By using a relevant hashtag in your post, you will be able to reach a wider audience and even gain new followers. You can also create new hashtags to reinforce your brand and can include it on your bio as well. Feel free to add this hashtag in emails, move-in material, resident flyers, and wherever you see fit. By introducing your hashtag to your residents you encourage them to engage with you on social media and create a community!

Instagram

Instagram has grown to be one of the most loved social media networks. To promote your multifamily property on Instagram, share high-quality photos about your community. It’s a perfect way to invite people into your community, apartments, amenities, and neighborhoods. A goal to keep in mind when sharing images on Instagram is you want to show potential renters everything you have to offer and what their life can be like when they become a resident.

Just like Facebook, images you share on your Instagram feed must be high quality. If you don’t have the opportunity to take quality photos, you can repost images of people who have tagged your property; as long as you ask for their permission of course and give them photo credit.

Hashtags are also a vital part of Instagram. Unlike Twitter, you can add as many hashtags as you would like here. However, we recommend you stick to the hashtags that are relevant to your property, type of apartments, amenities, and city or neighborhood.

Instagram stories are another way to engage your followers. Share fun images of sunsets, your newest leasing specialist, or do a quick video tour of a model apartment. Include questions that are easy for people to answer about your property or ask them if they prefer one amenity to another, ask them for feedback, or share new updates.

Get Your Multifamily Social Media Started

Now that you have a good foundation and understanding of social media, get to posting! Don’t forget to have fun with social media. Think about what you or a potential resident of your property would like to see and follow on your page. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get tons of likes or followers in the beginning. The more you post the more your page will grow.

What is Conversion?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 21:09:54 GMT

What is Conversion?

We often see clients and other agencies focusing on website and marketing metrics like traffic, clicks, likes, and shares.

“Our SEO program increased traffic by 200%!” Or, “Our social media posts had over 10,000 likes!”

While these sound great, and can be important metrics to be sure, they don’t really tell the whole story about how your marketing programs are performing. Traffic is great, but is it driving more sales? Is it creating relationships? Are people engaging with your content?

What they’re not tracking, but should be, are conversions.

So, what is conversion?

Let's talk about what conversion really is. When someone comes to your website and “converts”, they’re completing a goal that you have defined, which is usually something that is demonstrably valuable to you and your business. This typically differs from just visits to your site, because those visits, without a goal, don’t really mean very much.

Think about it, you may have a marketing campaign that’s driving tons of traffic to your site. Let’s say your website sells sunglasses, and you’ve started paid search campaigns and display campaigns. You’re getting tons of traffic from these campaigns (and they’re costing you a lot of money), but when you dig into your data you discover that much of the traffic from display is coming from kids games on mobile phones. Obviously they’re not buying anything, and they’re just costing you money. So while you’re getting all sorts of traffic, it’s not the traffic you want. In a situation like this you can quickly see what marketing efforts are driving valuable traffic if you’re monitoring your conversions. (Side note: We have had clients set up their own display campaigns and have seen just this type of issue with unqualified traffic coming from apps.)

Common conversions include:

Completing a purchase
Submitting a form (contact form, lead form, registration, etc.)
Signing up for a newsletter/promotion
Creating an account
Engaging with a chat
Downloading (PDF, video, infographic, etc.)
Watching a video (and how long they watched)
Engaging with your site and content (how far they scroll, how many pages they view, return visits, add to carts, reviews, etc.)
Click-to-call
Store finder

Keep in mind that you don’t have to stick with just one conversion. We look at primary conversions (the conversion that’s most important to you, e.g., one that drives direct revenue) as well as what we call secondary or soft conversions. These are conversions that have potential value but aren’t necessarily associated with a direct dollar value, or are not your main focus, but still add value to a marketing program.

So going back to the retail example, this secondary conversion may be when somebody enters their email address and signs up for a newsletter, abandons a shopping cart after entering an email, or registers an account. While it’s not a purchase right now, that email address acquisition has measurable value because you can engage them in the future.

Similarly, for a business-to-business website, your main conversion may be acquiring a lead when someone fills out a form to download gated content, completes a contact form, or registers for an event. Your secondary conversion may be interaction with your website content, scrolling on a page, or watching a video. Again, it depends on what your goal is and what's valuable to your company.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is how you quantify conversions on your site. It’s pretty straightforward, and is calculated by taking your conversion, dividing by the number of visitors, and multiplying by 100% so that you get a percentage:

Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%

In other words, if you get 100 visitors to your site, and one makes a purchase, you have a 1.0% conversion rate.

This is particularly helpful when you want to measure the performance of specific marketing campaigns or channels, landing pages, content performance, or just have a general barometer for your site’s performance. For instance, you may have a paid search campaign that generates a 2% conversion rate, while your social media campaign only generates a 1% conversion rate. This will give you a quick indication of performance for these channels.

Keep in mind that conversion rate isn’t the entire story. A campaign may have a higher conversion rate, but if your return on investment (ROI) is lower, it may not be performing as well as the conversion rate would imply. Conversion rate is just one metric to monitor over time.

Events versus Goals versus Conversion

How Google Analytics (GA) defines conversion and certain site behaviour is worth discussing, since it can be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with using GA. In GA, an event is something that happens on the site. This can include clicks, scrolls, pageviews, video plays, purchases, email signups, etc. Not all of these events can be tracked “out of the box” when setting up GA, but will need to be added at the code level, either through HTML or using a tool like Google Tag Manager to define these events.

Once these events are defined and tracked, you can then create a Goal, which is essentially a conversion event. These goals can be tracked back to campaigns and pages, helping you to define your conversion rate. Ecommerce conversion rate is unique, and may need additional code changes to fully track. Many common ecommerce platforms have this integration built in, though not all data may be available.

Correctly defining your events, goals, and ecommerce conversion metrics is critical to understanding your campaign and website performance. Ensuring that you have “clean” data can make the difference between having a profitable or unprofitable business, so we highly recommend that you outsource these efforts to an experienced analytics and website agency (like us!).

Keep in mind that Google Ads and Facebook Ads are increasingly using conversion data to help to optimize your ad campaigns, as well as target the correct audience. By ensuring that you have conversion tracking implemented correctly, you’re helping to not only understand how your programs are performing, but helping them to perform better by using their sophisticated AI and learning tools.

Conclusion

Conversions and conversion rates are an important tool in your analytics and marketing tool box, but are by no means the only metric. Don’t fall into the trap of just looking at conversion rates to the exclusion of other performance metrics and profitability measures. But make sure that when you do monitor your conversions, that they’re accurate!

What is SEO?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:59:58 GMT

What is SEO?

The term “SEO” gets thrown around a lot in the marketing world, and rightfully so, since it’s a very important part of your marketing tool kit. But what exactly is SEO, how can you leverage it for your company, what’s with all of these companies claiming to get you top rankings?

The Fundamentals

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. Essentially, it’s the practice of improving your site’s visibility on search engines, and increasing quality traffic from search engines via organic search results.

What the Heck is Organic Search?

No, organic search has nothing to do with pesticides, Whole Foods, or cleansing. When it comes to search engines, organic or natural search refers to search engine listings or results that are not paid, but are the result of the search engine algorithm determining that the listing is relevant to a given search query. In other words, if you search for “hot sauce”, the results that are returned as a combination of paid listings (usually at the top or bottom), and unpaid listings that Google thinks are the most relevant to your search. These will include links directly to a website, and often also include image results, videos, informational snippets, and map pack listings (those “near me” listings).

SEO is Not “Advertising”

You’ll often hear companies incorrectly use the term SEO as a general term, when really they’re talking about advertising on Google. SEO is not the same as pay-per-click, or SEM (search engine marketing). Your SEO listings are “free”. So if you’d like to have your listings appear in the ad section of the Google search results (SERP), you’ll need to implement a paid search program, also generally known as PPC, or pay per click.

How Do I “Do” SEO?

At its simplest, there are two main aspects of SEO: technical SEO (your site structure and coding), and content. (And yes, that’s a major over simplification, but for the sake of this article we’ll look at those two aspects from a high level.)

Technical SEO

Technical SEO helps to ensure that Google’s spiders are able to access the content on your site, that it understands the structure and content of your site, and ensures that Google sees your site as a quality site. Important factors are things like sitemaps, image alt tags, title tags, H1 tags, and meta descriptions. Another extremely important aspect of technical SEO is your site speed and mobile friendliness. Google has moved to focusing primarily on your site’s mobile performance, and how quickly your site loads on a mobile device is a large part of how it will rank your site’s pages. To see how Google rates your site speed, visit the Google Developer tools at: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Keep in mind that Google looks at the load time of each page, so just running an analysis of your homepage will give you a quick idea of how the site is performing, but doesn’t provide a complete picture.

Technical SEO can be very complicated for novice web developers, but there are plugins for WordPress, Joomla, and other content management systems that can assist you in optimizing your site and increasing your page load times. It is possible to actually harm your rankings, however, if you’re not familiar with these tools, so it always helps to enlist an experienced expert for your technical SEO needs. And no, not every web developer or agency, no matter what they claim, are SEO experts.

Content Marketing

The second key aspect of SEO is your site’s content. When providing search results, Google tries to find the links and content that is most relevant to a search. It uses a number of factors to determine this relevance, including what it considers authoritative content. Therefore, the more relevant content that your site has on a given topic, the more likely other sites are to link to it, and the more Google views it as relevant to a search. In the past, nefarious websites would try to spam Google by stuffing pages with keywords, or creating multiple pages with essentially the same content but just changing the title and certain keywords (e.g., all the city pages that some local service providers sometimes still have, like “plumbing miami, plumbing tampa, plumbing st. pete, etc.”). Google is sophisticated enough to recognize this spam, and give preference to content that’s actually geared toward consumption by end users.

Blogs are one of the easiest ways to start populating your site with helpful, rich content. But you can also gain search engine listings with well written category pages, product pages, about us, FAQs, recipes, how to, event listings, and much more.

Off Page SEO

SEO isn’t just limited to driving traffic to your website. At the end of the day, your goal is to drive traffic, leads, sales, and revenue. Increasingly, Google makes that possible without ever leaving the search engine. One of the most effective off-page (or off-site) SEO tools, particularly for local businesses, is Google’s My Business Listing. This free listing allows you to gather reviews, post images, times, phone numbers, services, etc., and is what powers the local “map pack” that you see when searching for businesses “near me”. Much like your site, these listings can also be optimized to ensure that they rank better.

Other offsite opportunities are directories (Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.), image search, YouTube, forums, social media accounts, third party blogs (Medium, Tumblr), image sharing sites, Reddit, and more. By establishing a presence on these sites, and optimizing your content, you can help drive business even if someone doesn’t visit your site directly.

Conclusion

SEO should be a major part of your marketing strategy, no matter what industry you’re in. It’s an effective way to drive traffic to your business, and is something your internal team can readily contribute to. There are some aspects, however, that may make sense to outsource. Contact us today to discuss how we can build a custom SEO program that fits your needs and has measurable results.

Marketing CBD on Facebook & Google

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:48:52 GMT

So you’ve launched your CBD products website, and now you need to start driving traffic and sales. Normally, this would entail a combination of programs, including social media, organic search, and paid ads using PPC via Google Ads, and paid social media via Facebook and Instagram. You create super compelling and creative ads for both Google and Facebook/Instagram only to discover… that your ads are declined. What?!?

So you scour Facebook’s ad policies, and there’s no mention of CBD being restricted. Same for Google. And you can swear that you’ve seen other sites advertising these products, right? So what the… Yes, you’re right be confused. Let’s take a look at why.

What Does Facebook Restrict?

Facebook makes it pretty clear in it’s prohibited content policy that “ads must not promote the sale or use of illegal, prescription, or recreational drugs.” It also says that it will prohibit certain regulated goods which include “non-medical drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, and marijuana.” One key phrase from this policy is, “Some of these items are not regulated everywhere; however, because of the borderless nature of our community, we try to enforce our policies as consistently as possible.”

W hile this policy doesn’t specifically ban ads for CBD-related products, it’s broad enough that it can. We know that in practice, Facebook does actively disapprove CBD products, and will even go so far as to deactivate your account if you repeatedly submit CBD-related ads.

But you know that you’ve seen CBD ads, right? Facebook’s automated ad approval process is anything but accurate. It is possible to sneak through CBD ads, at least temporarily. Just because the ad was initially approved, doesn’t mean that it won’t suddenly get disapproved days, weeks, or even months later. There are also some tactics you can use to avoid disapprovals, which we’ll touch on later.

Google’s Restrictions

Much like Facebook, Google doesn’t explicitly forbid ads selling CBD products. What Google's policy does say is that it restricts dangerous products and recreational drugs.

“The following ads are not allowed: Ads for substances that alter mental state for the purposes of recreation or otherwise induce ‘highs’. Examples (non-exhaustive): Cocaine, crystal meth, heroin or other illegal opioids, marijuana, cocaine substitutes, mephedrone, ‘legal highs’.”

And while CBD doesn’t fit under the “induce highs” category, we know from practice that Google will disapprove ads (and landing pages) with CBD-related keywords. A key distinction here is that Google absolutely looks at content and keywords on your landing pages as well as your ads. So even if you craft an ad that avoids CBD terms, if you’re product page, URL, landing page, or even other sections of your site mention CBD, they can trigger a disapproval.

Google will often allow, at least temporarily, ads that feature hemp-related keywords, but since it’s an automated review process, this doesn’t always hold true. This is why you may see some ads in Google Shopping and PPC, while yours may have been disapproved.

Improve Your Chances for CBD Ad Approval

As we’ve mentioned before, the approval process for ads in both Google and Facebook are heavily automated, so many ads that should be approved may not be, and vice versa. Even after your ad is declined and you request an ad review, the policies seem to be applied unevenly, so it’s really luck of the draw getting approvals during the review process. However, there are best practices you can use to increase the odds that your ads will be approved. We do caution, however, that repeated attempts to run “banned” ads on Facebook can lead to the closure of your Business Manager account, so proceed with caution.

Remove References to CBD

We recommend removing any reference to CBD in both your ad copy as well as on your landing page/product page. In some cases this may mean creating a specific landing page for your ad campaign, since you probably don’t typically want to remove CBD terms from pages being spidered for organic search. Instead of “CBD” you can experiment with hemp-related keywords (though these too are sometimes restricted), or euphemisms for CBD such as “all natural remedies,” “plant-based products,” “herbal remedy,” etc.

Create a “Gated” Landing Page

In the event that your ads are still being rejected even after removing CBD references, you may want to test using a landing page that has no links to the rest of your website. This will help to keep Google and Facebook spiders from exploring the rest of the site where “restricted” terms may still exist. Once the ad(s) have been approved, you can experiment with adding links to this page to see if that impacts the ad’s approval. We’d recommend waiting several days before attempting to add these links, however.

Using a third-party landing page tool such as Unbounce, Instapage, or even MailChimp make this process easier if your website isn’t geared toward unlinked pages. These tools will help you create pages that don’t have your default navigation and footers, which will automatically contain links to the rest of your site.

Other Marketing Options

Obviously, paid ads on Google and Facebook are a great way to quickly generate traffic and sales to your site. However, if you find that your ads are consistently being rejected, there are other channels for driving traffic. Frankly, even if your ads are accepted, you should be exploring a multi-channel approach that includes some of the following:

Organic Search

While Google is restrictive in what it allows in it’s paid ads, organic search is not as regulated. If you search for any “cbd” terms, you’ll see a plethora of organic results for both retailers and blogs related to the CBD industry. This approach takes time, and calls for the development of quality content (blogs, articles, video, etc.), but the upside is considerable. We highly recommend a content strategy that includes new blogs and articles on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Organic Social Media

As with Google, Facebook and Instagram advertising can be restrictive, but organic posts aren’t as limited. As with organic search, we recommend developing a regular content strategy that includes daily, relevant posts to your social media. If you already have a content strategy in place for blogs and video, then you now have an abundance of potential posts for your social media too.

Much like organic search, this approach does take time and effort. Due to Facebook’s algorithm, many of your followers won’t necessarily see your posts, so it behooves you to post often and encourage post interaction (likes, comments, etc.), since this will help to improve your post visibility.

Influencer Marketing

Paying influencers to help promote your products is another way to circumvent some of the ad restrictions on Instagram, and is also a way to reach audiences on other social platforms such as TikTok, SnapChat, etc. You can also experiment with sending samples of your products to bloggers in exchange for products reviews or mentions. Influencer marketing has its challenges, and can be expensive, so use this approach cautiously.

Native Advertising

Google’s display advertising network is extensive, but not all sites are limited to using just Google’s distribution for banner ads. Many publishers or blogs use proprietary or third party distribution outside of the Google empire to generate ad revenue. Tools like Outbrain, Taboola, AdRoll, and Triplelift can help you reach thousands of publishers.

Public Relations

Don’t forget traditional, old school marketing techniques like press releases. Local blogs and newspapers are alway hungry for content. Along with your content strategy, you should incorporate efforts to convey your story to local media outlets such as newspapers and TV, as well as industry publications, and blogs.

Marketing CBD and hemp products definitely has unique challenges, and often necessitates using unconventional approaches. And adds a layer of effort, work, and skills that you may not have. Apotheca’s team of experienced marketing professionals can help you create programs that will drive traffic and sales for your CBD business.

Shopify Now Allows CBD & Hemp Products

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:19:38 GMT

CBD (cannabidiol) and hemp-related products are a booming industry, only recently becoming “legal” in the U.S. CBD oil has become ubiquitous at smoke shops, gift stores, markets, festivals, and some gas stations, and has found its way into everything from skin care products, to shampoo, snacks, candy, hot sauce, and beverages like tea, soda, and smoothies.

So, what is CBD and why the controversy? Cannabidiol, CBD, is a phytocannabinoid found in cannabis plants. Unlike marijuana’s infamous THC, it won’t make you high, yet is purported to have a number of medicinal benefits, such as treating anxiety, helping to mitigate seizures, arthritis and inflammation, skin irritation and eczema, etc. Many people swear by its calming effect, and it has become popular as a pet supplement since it can purportedly calm anxious cats and dogs, or help stem negative or destructive behaviour.

Forbes recently reported that a study conducted by an investment bank estimated 2018 sales of CBD products were anywhere from $600 million to $2 billion, with an estimated growth to $16 billion by 2025. Others have estimated that the U.S. CBD marketing could be worthy as much as $20 billion by 2024. Of those surveyed by the bank, 7% said that they had used CBD, and 20% said that they had tried CBD beverages.

Those rates of growth are incredible, particularly when you consider the legal gray area CBD has historically inhabited. CBD is currently legal according to the Federal government, however, CDB is still technically illegal in some states, and the FDA continues to view CBD as an illegal food additive (largely because it is still untested or approved). Because of this, many ecommerce platforms and credit card processors have refused to support sales of these products.

How are some retailers coping?

Some retailers have tried to skirt the restrictions of ecommerce platforms and traditional payment processors like PayPal, and most major credit cards, by using various alternative payment options like bitcoin, money transfer, or high-risk payment processors, many of which are typically associated with porn websites.

Historically, commerce platforms like Shopify have revoked access to their own credit card payment processing, Shopify Payments, if they have found that a retailer is selling CBD or hemp related products, and some platforms will ban certain businesses altogether.

Now Shopify Has Entered the Fray

Shopify announced that it is now possible to support CBD product sales. With some significant caveats:

Submission of Attestation

Once you’ve decided that you want to sell CBD and related products, you must review and submit Shopify’s “Attestation for the SAles of Hemp and Hemp-Derived Products”, which essentially verifies that you’re aware of the laws surrounding the sale of hemp products, that they don’t contain more than 0.3% THC (the stuff in marijuana that actually gets you high), and a number of other legal compliances. In other words, Shopify is putting the onus on the merchant to make sure they’re following local and federal laws.

You Can’t Use Shopify Payments

There are a number of business types that are allowed to have Shopify stores, but aren’t allowed to use Shopify’s proprietary Shopify Payments for credit card purchases. These include businesses like gambling, adult content or services (porn, massage parlours, dating sites, fetish gear), or regulated products like tobacco, e-cigarettes, weapons, and - unfortunately - marijuana or hemp-related products (see the full list here).

Instead, you will need to use a third party payment processor that does allow CBD transactions. However, you must apply to use these products, and they generally charge higher transaction and charge-back fees than your typical payment gateway. Currently, DigiPay and eMerchant Brokers are Shopify’s recommended CBD payment processors, however there are others on the market that may also work. The application process for CBD transactions is more involved than most third party processors, and your rates will vary depending on a number of factors.

When searching for third party gateways, just be sure that they integrate with Shopify, before committing. You can find a full list of payment providers that are integrated with Shopify here: https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways/united-states

Not All States Are Included

State laws related to hemp and hemp-related products like CBD vary drastically, and are quickly evolving. Currently, the following states are supported for sales via Shopify: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

It is important to note, that laws in your state may restrict certain types of CBD or hemp-related products. Shopify recommends checking with an attorney before selling these products on Shopify. Oh, and you’ll also need to understand the laws of the states that you’re shipping to. Just because a certain product is legal or approved in your state, doesn’t mean it will be in another location.

Shipping Carriers May Vary

Some shipping carriers may also restrict certain hemp-related products, so you’ll need to be sure to check with your carriers about their rules. However, once you’ve verified that you can ship with a specific carrier, you can still purchase your shipping through Shopify Shipping.

In March 2019, the USPS clarified that it is legal to ship hemp and hemp-based products:

“Hemp and hemp-based products, including cannabidiol (CBD) with the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration of such hemp (or its derivatives) not exceeding a 0.3 percent limit are permitted to be mailed only when:

The mailer complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws (such as the Agricultural Act of 2014 and the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018) pertaining to hemp production, processing, distribution, and sales; and
The mailer retains records establishing compliance with such laws, including laboratory test results, licenses, or compliance reports, for no less than 2 years after the date of mailing.”

Using Shopify’s POS

Using Shopify’s POS app and tools is super handy if you regularly do shows, booths, or have a physical location for your store. However, just like with your online store, you won’t be able to use Shopify Payment when selling in person. This means that if you’re using the POS, you’ll also need to use an external credit card terminal from your payment gateway provider.

So Is CBD Ecommerce For You?

Many entrepreneurs are excited to enter the hemp and hemp-based product market and ride the potential wave of growth. However, even though Shopify and some other ecommerce platforms are now explicitly allowing CBD sales, these businesses have their risks.

If you’re interested in launching a CBD site, be sure to speak with an attorney. Once you do, contact Apotheca, and we can help with the site setup, marketing plan and execution, and ongoing promotion. Contact us today to learn more!

5 Top Free Apps for Your Shopify Store

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:17:01 GMT

One of the benefits of using Shopify as your ecommerce platform is the shear number of powerful apps that extend Shopify’s already robust capabilities. And we’re talking about thousands of apps, from those that will help improve your site’s SEO, to apps that will help with shipping and fulfillment, to apps that help integrate your store with other tools. They run the gamut from marketing, accounting, integrations, customer service, and much more. Pricing also runs the gamut, with some apps that are completely free, and others that run from just a few dollars per month, to hundreds of dollars per month.

If you’re already using Shopify, or just getting started with a new store, there are five free apps that we recommend for most of our clients. To get the functionality of some of these free apps on other ecommerce platforms, you could literally pay thousands of dollars per month. Just one of the reasons we love Shopify and Shopify ecosystem.

1. Product Reviews by Shopify

We probably don’t need to tell you how important product reviews are for any ecommerce site. They improve SEO, improve conversion, and help to engage your customers. What’s not to like? Well, usually the price tag, which includes the licensing and the implementation costs, which can both be pretty steep. How steep? Well, depending on your platform and the vendor you use, the monthly cost of products like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews can run as much as $1,000 per month or more. And that's after the thousand to tens of thousands you may spend to implement the reviews on some ecommerce platforms (I'm looking at you Mozu/Kibo.).

Now, admittedly, these enterprise tools offer lots of features, but if you’re looking for a review tool that automatically integrates with Shopify’s backend, is easy to implement and customize, and offers imports, exports, and bulk actions, you can’t wrong with this free app developed by Shopify.

2. Google Shopping by Shopify

One of the most effective ways to market your products is through Google Shopping. (Not familiar with Google Shopping yet? We’ll be posting a blog shortly that goes into more detail.) The Google Shopping by Shopify integrates your product database with Google’s Merchant Center. The interface enables you to manage the categories, descriptions, UPC codes, and other data that the merchant center requires.

Okay, so why is this so great? Some third party vendors will charge a minimum of $1,000 per month. Much like product reviews, these tools come with a lot of bells and whistles, but aside from the cost they usually necessitate API integration and setup, which can add considerable to the monthly fees you’re already paying. In comparison, the Shopify app is free to use (ad costs are managed through Adwords), and integrates seamlessly with your Shopify admin.

3. MailChimp for Shopify

MailChimp may not be your first choice for an email service provider (ESP), but its partnership and subsequent integration with Shopify makes it a great choice. One example of this is the MailChimp for Shopify app, which integrates your Shopify site and admin with your MailChimp account.

This integration synchronizes your list and purchase data, enables marketing automation (abandoned cart reminders, drip marketing, post purchase follow up, new customer welcome, etc.), showcases product recommendations, track and segment customers based on purchase history, and easy creation of product campaigns directly from your product database.

Needless to say, this type of automated integration and automation would take considerable development time and costs on other ecommerce platforms, and with other ESPs.

4. Order Printer

A decent looking packing slip or invoice might not seem like a big deal, but the out-of-the-box order printing on Shopify isn’t the best looking. And let’s be honest, the more professional your packaging and packaging slips, the more customers will take you seriously. This free app is customizable, and allows for bulk printing. It can also be used in conjunction with Shopify Shipping to print shipping labels for the US and Canada.

5. Intuit Quickbooks Online Integration

Many, many businesses use Quickbooks to manage their accounting, so having a way to easily integrate online sales can save a lot of time and hassle. The Intuit Quickbooks Online Integration allows you to synchronize your Shopify orders with Quickbooks automatically. This includes orders, refunds, payouts, and fees. Each order will automatically include individual line items, including shipping and taxes. If you’re already using Quickbooks, why not use this free tool to integrate your account? You’ll thank yourself come April.

Oh, and by the way, the screenshots for this blog are from Doc Hotties , a hot sauce website that we designed and manage.

What are your favorite Shopify apps? Let us know in the comments below.

Video: SEO Snake Oil

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:40:57 GMT

Today we're going to be talking about something that I like to call snake oil SEO. I'm sure you're familiar with it, whether you've seen these guys on Facebook, or you've seen ads where they're promising that you're going to get the top of the page on your search engine results by doing certain tactics that on the surface seem okay, but when you really start digging into it are either outdated or just don't have the impact.

We've run into this with our own clients where we see them on a retainer with a company and they're paying $500, $600, $1000, $2000 dollars a month for SEO services, and what they're really getting is an initial set up, where a company will come in and say do landing pages for each of the communities that a company provides their service for. And so you have 20, 30 landing pages that have essentially the same copy with different city names on them and that’s pretty much the only tactic they've done for you.

In many cases they'll submit you to directories, and they'll submit to Yelp, and maybe even set up a very basic Google business listing for you. And that's good (although the city pages are debatable because some of that is going to be duplicate content), but then they walk away and they're charging you this monthly fee or charging our clients a monthly fee, when they're not doing anything. So you're just paying them an ongoing basis and they may provide monthly reporting, they may say hey here's how you've improved over time and we're taking the credit for it even though after that initial setup all they've done is provide reporting. They've done nothing else for you.

So what we have to talk to our clients about and what you should be aware of is what are these companies really doing for you on a monthly basis? At a minimum they should be providing a certain set of services, and we're going to talk about those services today.

So what are the things your SEO agency should be doing for you at a minimum? They're making sure that your site is searchable by Google and what that means is that Google spiders can come in and easily access the content that's on your site. They're making sure that all of the technical stuff is set up correctly for your site, like the robots.txt files, that you have sitemaps, that you have a hierarchy on your site, that you don't have duplicate content. All of the technical aspects that make sure that the content is getting into Google's hands.

The first thing that they should be doing is to make sure that your site is spiderable, that Google gets to the content; if they're not doing that they're not doing their job. Now, there are some companies that will use plugins to do that, and that's fine. If you have a WordPress site and they're using something like Yoast or a tool like that, that helps to optimize your site, then they're doing their job. They're helping you set that up it's something that maybe you aren't going to do yourself.

There's other things they can be doing as well, like helping you to optimize your images, helping you compress them make sure that your site is loading quickly; all of the technical work for optimizing your site.

The second thing that's really important that your agency agency should be doing with you is helping you build out your content. So if you're paying a retainer to this company and they're not doing the technical work on a monthly basis, they're not doing submissions on a monthly basis, then they need to be helping you develop content for your site and that could come in the shape of blogs, if you have a retail site it may be product descriptions, or category level descriptions; but it's content that's gonna expand upon what Google is spidering it gives them fresh keywords and fresh content for users to make your site compelling and and usable. Those are all things that should be an ongoing process, it's not going to happen overnight and that's something that a retainer should address.

Okay, so if they're not doing the technical implementation, and they're not doing content, a third thing they could potentially be doing for you is building links to your site. And this is an area that could also be dangerous for you because building those links can be very blackhat if they're using paid sites or if they're using scammy directories, or spammy websites that have no real domain value. Part of that building of links should be going after blogs in your industry and seeing if they would be willing to read or link to content on your site that's usable or relevant, it might be products that you're linking to, etc.

Fourth, they really should be monitoring what's happening with your site and making recommendations, not just showing you a dashboard, not showing you where they think you should be ranking, but actually doing a competitive analysis and see where your competitors are ranking and for what keywords. Who are linking to your competitors? What's working in your industry? Where are areas that you can optimize and expand on that are going to get you a lot of bang for your buck? Maybe you can't compete with broad keywords; they should be telling you that type of thing. Maybe they should be looking for long tail keywords that you can easily build content around or focus on.

If your agency has only ever talked to you about your strategy during the initial consultation and then they're just sending you a bill every month, along with maybe some reports and dashboards, they're not doing anything for you, and you're getting snake oil. They're not doing the work that they should be doing. Don't sign a contract that's just vague SEO services; have them outline exactly what they're going to be doing for you on a monthly basis, exactly what the impact that's going to have, and make them prove their value.

If you feel like you're just getting snake oil, instead of a true SEO program , contact us today and we'll conduct a free evaluation. Contact us at info@apothecadigital.com .

Get Ready for Your Website Project!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:37:05 GMT

We design a lot of websites for clients of all sizes, from big retail sites, to informational sites for small businesses. Unfortunately, more often than not, there’s delay in getting everything we need to build the site. While we do most of the heavy lifting for these projects, from coding to design, to copywriting and testing, our client teams still need to be involved to make a project successful. Here are some things to think about and prepare before you launch your next (or your first) website project.

What is the Goal?

It’s not uncommon for clients to approach us to discuss launching a new website or redesigning an existing site because they know that “they need a website”, but they don’t have any clearly thought out goals for the site. Drive more leads? Sell more, but of what? Build your brand? What message are you conveying? These are questions you should be asking. Once you have a clear idea of what your ultimate goal(s) is, you can better measure whether the new site is performing, and how it might be better optimized.

Who Owns the Project?

There’s an old saying that the platypus was designed by committee. Don’t let your site become a platypus. In other words, make sure that you have one person who can be the direct liaison with your web development team, someone who has decision making power and can help to coordinate efforts within your company on a day-to-day basis. Requests for approval, requests for assets, and reminders that come from a third party are easy to ignore, which can cause a website project to grind to a halt.

Images & Photography

If you need photos of your team, do you already have the or will they need to be taken? Who’s going to do that? Likewise, if you need imagery for headers, banners, backgrounds, products, locations, etc., do they exist or do they need to be developed? Will stock images work, and if so have you budgeted for them? The longer the web development and web design teams have to wait for those images, the further behind your project will be. You may also incur unforeseen costs and delays if your agency has to produce those assets for you.

Content & Copy

A new site, or a newly updated site, is chock full of copy. From headlines, to calls-to-action, to page headers, to intro copy for contact us forms, to the about us page, to... well, you get the idea. An important question before launching a site project, is who will be developing all of that copy? Do you have internal copywriters who will ensure that the voice and identity are consistent throughout the site? Have you budgeted to have your agency do this for you? If current copy exists, has it been optimized for SEO?

Domain Name?

This seems obvious, but unfortunately it’s all too common for companies to not have control of their domain name. In some cases, the previous agency, web designer, or hosting provider registered the URL. If that person is MIA or has a bone to pick with your company, well, it could be bad news. We’ve had more than one client who has had to either register a new domain or seek legal action to gain control of their URL. In one case, a retailer had her domain turned off by a former developer because he hadn’t paid the bill. And that leads us to...

Analytics & Marketing Accounts

Much like domain registration, it’s all too common for clients to realize at the last minute that they don’t actually have access or ownership of key accounts like Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, because a previous employee or agency set them up and are now out of the picture. Obviously if you want to integrate the tracking codes for analytics or remarketing, you’ll administrative access to these accounts. Seriously, right now, run out and do some housekeeping and make sure you not only have access, but that you’ve shut off access for former employees or agencies. Go ahead, we’ll wait right here.

Testing

And last, but not least, you need to plan to have you and your entire team test the site. Don’t just depend on your development team. Ideally, your developers will have a thorough testing process, with an error log so everyone can record anything they find. If they don’t, don’t let that stop you from creating one yourself. A shared Google Doc can serve just as well. Test everything, from every menu link, every page link, to every form or email link. Click on images to make sure they lead where you want, and use the site search. If you have a retail site, add products to the cart and test the full checkout experience. Make sure triggered emails are working correctly, that accounts are being saved, and that customer information is captured correctly. And don’t forget to conduct all of these tests on your phones, and on different browsers.

So are you ready to start that new website project? Contact us today to talk about how we can not only design, develop, and launch your new site, but how we can help get you ready for the project. Don’t forget that we offer the full range of services to make your site a success, from photography, to copywriting, to strategy, and more.

Page Speed Improvements: Image Size & SEO

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:29:12 GMT

Search engine optimization can sometimes be daunting, and a little overwhelming, especially for people who aren’t “technical”, and don’t market for a living. You can sometimes see eyes start to glaze-over when terms like “alt”, “meta”, and “canonical” get thrown around in a planning session. But not everything involved in SEO is technical, and there’s a lot that you can do to optimize your site, without the need for an agency or an SEO expert.

You’ve probably heard that site speed is an increasingly important factor in organic search rankings. Google has not only made it clear that this is a “signal” used by its algorithm, but they’ve provided several tools that you can use to measure your site speed and the health of your site (more on that later). You may have also heard a lot of technical mumbo jumbo about Gzip compression, minifying CSS and JavaScript, removing render-blocking JS… Did we lose you yet?

Sure, all of those things are important. Very important. And you’ll want to engage an SEO expert to help with those. But what can someone who’s not very technical do to help with site speed, you ask? Well one of the largest offenders when it comes to slowing down how quickly a given page loads are all of the beautiful images that you’re using for your header, your product images, your blog images, etc. Just one of those images can easily surpass 1MB, so when you add three, four, or five of those images to a page, you’re quickly surpassing Google’s recommended maximum page size of 5MB.

How Big Is It?

There are a number of ways to determine how slowly your site is loading, or how large your images are. A couple of the best ways to monitor your site’s load speed are:

For individual images, you can check manually, by looking at the file size if you download it to your computer, or by using any of a number of Chrome plugins, which will also provide information about total file size.

Compression Options

Many designers will already compress images, particularly JPEGs, using Adobe Photoshop’s built in compression tool. The problem with depending solely on this tool is that as you reduce the quality slider and thus the image file size, you… well, you reduce the quality.

For instance, a standard JPEG that is 1529 x 1147 pixels, at a standard 72 dpi, is 1MB when saved at the maximum quality setting. That’s a pretty standard ratio for an image out-of-camera, and not too unusual for a hero image on a homepage.

Most designers know that that size is pretty large for a website, and the common tactic is to reduce the quality slider. If you were to take the quality to 6, it would reduce the size of the image (in this case to 204KB), which is a significant size reduction. However, by reducing the quality, you’re adding pixelation, sometimes banding, and even color shifts in your image. Not a great option for a featured image.

However, if you use a compression tool, you can strip unneeded metadata from your image, without impacting the quality. In this scenario, we took the same image, compressed it using TinyJPG/TinyPNG, and ended up with a file that was 187KB, which is smaller than the image produced by lowering the quality slider, but without noticeably impacting the image.

There are a number of free compression tools available, some of which will compress PNG and JPEG images slightly better than others. We use a paid version of TinyJPG/TinyPNG because it has a handy Photoshop plugin. In no particular order, here are a few you may want to try:

Summary

Ok, so going back and compressing images for an already existing website can be kind of a time suck. And depending on the size of your site, particularly for retail sites, it can more than just a time suck, but a major investment in resources. But is it worth it? It most definitely is. Reducing the size of your images has a huge impact on your page load speeds, which impacts not only your user experience, but your organic search rankings. And of all the tactics for improving SEO, it’s one of the most approachable for the average SEO layperson. It doesn’t take expensive tools, it doesn’t need specific know-how, and hey, it’s something that would be a great project for an intern, at least on a small scale.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your site’s performance and rankings, contact us today!

Don't Let Your Agency Hold You Hostage!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:23:25 GMT

We’ve seen it time and time again across industries as diverse as mortgages, insurance, legal, and chiropractic. A company or agency with expertise in your industry offers to build you a website for “free”, or using canned templates, as part of a software suite or marketing services retainer. They wax poetic about how they design professional sites that are customizable and SEO-friendly. They then boast the long list of customers they have so you think, “Well, they must be good, right?” Slow down. Don’t get too excited. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Probably Not Great for Marketing

The truth is, they aren’t providing you much value. Marketing tactics are continually evolving, and SEO in particular is constantly changing as Google updates its algorithm on a regular basis. Therefore, it takes a company that focuses on your specific needs, your market, and that has the knowledge to steer you in the right direction and help you adapt your strategy as needed in the future.

These software creators (where websites are not their core competency) and even companies that bill themselves as agencies (in other words, they should know better) sometimes build sites that are slow, not mobile-optimized or simply lack the professional design and functionality of a modern site. Basically, they are working from an outdated, limited template that isn’t personalized to your needs or appealing to the search engines. In the end, these sites turn off Google and your prospective customers.

Original Content? Yeah, Not So Much.

In order to sweeten the deal, theses companies sometimes offer free blog content because you know, that’s good for SEO. While it’s true that blogs can really help you improve your organic search rankings, what these companies don’t tell you is that they are sending the same, syndicated content to companies like yours all around the country. Oh, and they probably “personalize” it, by dumping in some local sounding keywords based on where you’re located so you can “rank” for local search listings. If you didn’t know, Google is not a fan of duplicate content, and it’s sophisticated enough to recognize what percentage of your content is a duplicate. So not only will you not get the SEO rankings you’d like from this content, but you’ll probably get dinged for having it. You heard that correctly, the syndicated, unoriginal content that they feed to your site is actually doing you more harm than good!

Page Limits

Many of these canned sites will have limits on how many pages your site can have, how much traffic they can receive, or how many images you can post. All of these can hamstring your marketing efforts, since they limit your ability to add landing pages for marketing programs, or expand your content as your services expand.

They may also restrict things like: contact forms, employee access to the admin, reports, and more.

But Wait, There’s More

If those issues weren’t bad enough, what’s even more concerning, however, is that these companies basically hold your site hostage. Want to make some aesthetic changes? Sorry, they won’t give you access to the code, so you’re stuck with the few changes their inferior content management system or your limited service agreement allows. Or you have to pay lots of money for them to make the changes for you. They call even the most basic edits “customization” to justify the hefty price tag.

Want to access your Google Analytics data so you can measure campaign performance? They give you the runaround for months until you finally give up.

Did you just fire that agency for poor performance? Holy cow, you’ve been kicked off your own social media accounts!

You want access to your Google My Business listings after your agency went under? Good luck convincing Google to hand over ownership to you.

Want to point your URL to a new website we’ve designed for you? It’s not so easy when you discover that a third party company has your URL in their account and won’t give you access.

We’re not just speaking in hypotheticals here. These are situations we’ve actually come across when working with clients’ sites. It’s your site. It’s your data. You should have access to all of it. No exceptions! When a company builds you a site or manages your marketing, make sure you have full admin access to:

Domain name registration
The website’s content management system
Google Analytics
Google My Business Listings
Paid search accounts
Social media accounts
Email accounts (both ESPs and work emails)
Digital assets such as images, data, content, etc.

Free Usually Isn’t Inexpensive

The old saying is true, you get what you pay for. If you don’t want to be stuck with a site that’s more of a hindrance than a help to your marketing efforts, work with a reputable agency that’s on top of Google’s policies and best practices, as well as the latest design trends. Make sure that it’s in your contract that you own your site, even if you part ways with the website creator, and that you can make changes to it on your own. Don’t let another company control you and your marketing program

Shopify Nixes MailChimp!

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:21:28 GMT

For most small to medium retailers using Shopify , MailChimp has historically been an easy-to-use, low-cost option for email campaigns and automation because of its seamless integration with the platform. You could easily populate email campaigns with your best selling products, it could pull product and pricing directly from your Shopify catalog, and you could easily deploy abandoned cart emails, or trigger emails based on a customer’s order history. But not any longer.

That integration is coming to an end and many retailers are scrambling to find another solution. On March 22, MailChimp and Shopify announced that the MailChimp app’s integration with Shopify was ending, and that Shopify quickly removed the MailChimp app from its store, announcing that it would no longer support it after May 12, 2019.

Why did this happen?

Well, according to Shopify, MailChimp was not making data it collected from Shopify customers available to Shopify merchants. Specifically, Shopify posted that "Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences. As a result, our merchants, other apps, and partner ecosystem can’t reliably serve their customers or comply with privacy legislation." In other words, if a customer opts out in MailChimp, you weren’t able to easily use that information to inform other apps that might also be sending email, which could create CAN-SPAM issues for a merchant.

Now What?

So does this mean you can no longer use MailChimp on Shopify? Not at all. There are several apps that can help you continue to integrate your Shopify store with MailChimp. One of the most popular, in part because it’s free, is ShopSync . Zapier and Automate.io also can help integrate MailChimp, however they have fewer features and have a monthly fee ( https://mailchimp.com/help/shopify-workarounds/ ). Any of these are an option if you want to avoid the hassle of switching away from MailChimp to a new ESP. Shopify merchants will need to install these apps, migrate their MailChimp info to them, and then remove the existing MailChimp app.

Of course you can still also manually upload your customer data to MailChimp, as well as add the MailChimp code to trigger popups and signup forms. We recommend these as only stop-gap measures, however, until you find another solution for a more fully functioning integration.

Other ESPs

The other option for merchants is to migrate away from MailChimp entirely. There are a number of affordable email service providers that can provide much, if not more, of the functionality and integration that MailChimp historically provided. Personally, we’re fans of Listrak, though it does tend to be on the pricey side, and may be more than a small to medium size merchant might need.

Shopify has provided an informative comparison of other ESPs it recommends, including features and pricing: https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Apps/Mailchimp-alternatives-and-integration-apps/m-p/500290?ref=apotheca

Don’t Be Overwhelmed

If you don’t know where to start with a migration, app installation, or choosing a new email platform, don’t panic! We regularly help clients select, migrate, and implement email platforms and programs. We can help to recreate your triggered email campaigns, migrate your list and customer information, as well as get you up and running. We’re also a Shopify partner, so we know your Shopify platform, and can customize your themes or setup as necessary.

3 Easy Tools to Manage a Chaotic Workplace

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 18:22:17 GMT

Keeping up with the barrage of emails we get everyday has, for many of us, become a full-time job in an of itself. Especially when you work in a client-facing type of role, missing just one email could mean real problems on your project. I have a few cool tools that I use to make life so much easier and now, I go to sleep peacefully each night with an empty inbox and happy clients.

Google Inbox

Google and I have a very tumultuous relationship. When it’s good, it’s awesome and when it’s bad, I come dangerously close chucking my too-expensive-to-replace laptop through my office window. Anyway, inbox is one of the things they’ve done right. For each business email, it’s $10 per user per month, much better than Outlook. No longer do you have to sift through emails to remember what you have to do. Here’s how it works. Let’s say I email you a question. Normally, I would have to set a to-do list item, mark my calendar, affix a sticky note to my monitor or whatever to remember to follow-up if you didn’t get back to me. I could ponder the deeper meaning around why you didn’t get back to me, but this isn’t a psychology article. Anywho, now I can simply send the message, hit snooze for when I want to be reminded again, and the email disappears from my inbox, only to reappear at the date and time I set. It’s a nice way to keep you inbox nice and tidy, while staying on top of all of the nagging tasks that pop up day in and day out.

Another cool tool is the pin feature. With Google’s conversation layout, all emails in a string get lumped together. It’s good for keeping track of an ongoing conversation, but it gets quite cumbersome when the email string gets too long. (I think my record is 108 messages back and forth on one topic!) The pin feature is neat because it allows you to put a little note, reminder, or summary of the email string so when it pops back into your inbox, you know what the heck it was about! You might think you’ll remember, but trust me, you won’t! It’s worth the extra five seconds it takes to summarize the conversation.

Trello

There are tons of project management tools out there, but Trello is one of the better ones. It’s super flexible and can be used for everything from wedding planning to managing a site redesign. We obviously use it for the latter.

In Trello, you can create boards and in every board, you can create different categories or steps in a process - to do, doing and done, for example. Then under each category, you can put a card that contains everything about a specific task, such as comments, to-do lists, files, deadlines, etc. No more sorting through email to find comments, approvals, etc. You can manage a project right from Trello, keeping everything all in one place. In fact, if you simply add an @ before a Trello user’s name, you can keep all conversations related to a project track in Trello and users will get an email notifying them of the comment. They can then reply to the comment from their email and it will be recorded in Trello.

As you make progress on a card, you simply drag it through the process. I can’t tell you how fulfilling it is to move a card to Done! What’s even better is that it has a great mobile app so you can keep up with your project on-the-go. Oh and the basic version is free! Bonus!

Slack

Ever need an answer quickly, so you send email high priority and then….nuthin? Our inboxes are so full that even important emails can easily be missed. That’s where Slack comes in handy. Another free tool, it’s like AIM on steroids. You can create different “channels” for topics or projects and add the appropriate team members. Obviously, you can also direct message people for one-to-one conversations. Slack makes it really easy to share files, (it even integrates with Google drive), tag specific people in a conversation for more immediate responses, and of course, share a joke or two with your colleagues to make the day a little brighter. We’ve definitely seen how the real-time conversations that Slack enables keep projects moving swiftly.

Keeping all of our projects straight can be a challenge in a corporate world where more and more is demanded of us. There’s a phrase I heard from the DuckTales cartoon when I was a kid and it has always stuck with me, “Work smarter, not harder.” (Don’t judge, Scrooge McDuck is a beast!) We love being able to do more for our clients with less time!

How Not to Manage an Email Program: A Cautionary Tale

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 18:16:37 GMT

Here's a hint: Your entire marketing team should not be dedicated to only producing emails.

I recently had the opportunity to do an in-depth assessment of the marketing program at a mid-size ecommerce company, which we’ll call “Joe’s Java” to protect the innocent. One of the company's primary marketing tactics, email, jumped out at me as fairly unique.

Now, Joe’s has seen steady growth since it started more than a decade ago, so the concern at the company was more about how to continue to grow without significant change, rather than what they could improve to drive exponential growth. That, and the recent sale of the company, have led the company leadership to believe that the tactics they’re employing are by their very nature, right for the company, without looking at supporting data around program performance (i.e., the company sold, so it must be working). This is a common misconception of executives who are trying to transition from “shoot-from-the hip” entrepreneurial to data driven professional marketing programs. In many cases, the leadership at these companies has often managed each marketing program hands-on, guided by gut rather than delegating marketing decisions to subject matter experts who rely on data. In the case of Joe’s, we’ll look at why the “we’ve always done it this way” approach is costing them significant amounts of money.

The Current Program

Joe’s current email program grew on the premise that each new product brought into the company catalogue should have a highly designed email dedicated to promoting that product, and only that product. That’s not necessarily a fundamentally bad idea, but becomes more unmanageable when a company, like Joe’s, begins onboarding literally hundreds of new products each month. It also becomes an issue when some of those products are, let’s say, less than compelling (e.g., generic replacement filters for a coffee maker). One can see how dedicating an email per product quickly becomes unscalable. But wait, there’s more...

Added to that mix, is the fact that Joe’s doesn’t segment emails, or dynamically produce email content. Instead, “segmentation” is accomplished manually by the IT department each day, and involves the brand of coffee that a customer has identified as their preferred brand at some point in the past.

So why is this is a big deal? Well, in the case of Joe’s, it’s means having a double digit team of full time designers and photographers dedicated to manually producing dozens of unique, heavily designed emails per day. That’s right, more than 10 full time resources cranking out multiple manual campaigns that have only minimal segmentation, and potentially no relevance to the customer. On top of that, because the leadership at Joe's has taken a "more must be better" approach to marketing and product selection, customers are receiving upwards of seven or more emails per week, some of which will contain products they may have just purchased, or have no relevance to them.

“ Email marketing can be a powerful tool for increasing increasing repeat sales, ensuring customer loyalty, re-activating dormant customers, and improving customer perception of your brand. For Joe's, a myopic approach to email (and marketing in general) is having the opposite effect.”

It Did What?

Now, that could theoretically make sense if the email program was performing well, right? Maybe. But in this case, it was performing well below industry averages. Joe’s heavily staffed email program is accounting for a small fraction of the company’s online revenue, with conversion rates lower than its acquisition channels.

In its recent white paper, "Email Benchmarks and Trends", email service provider Listrak (www.listrak.com) shows that among its retail clients, email typically accounts for 25% of digital channel revenue, with a conversion rate of 3.69%! Obviously Joe’s email program is far, far from performing at these levels.

Now, in comparison, Joe’s paid media program accounts for nearly a third of the company’s revenue, but is managed part-time by a consultant. That program has over double the conversion rate and a higher ROI than the email program. You read that right, a part-time consultant is producing higher conversion rates, revenue and profits using an acquisition channel, compared to over a dozen full time employees cranking out hundreds of emails a week targeting existing customers.

So what about opt-outs and spam, a savvy email marketing expert might ask? They’re high. Very high. Almost to the point of negating the overall growth of the email list by the acquisition of new customers.

What Steps Should Joe’s Take?

What Joe’s really needs, is a better overall strategy about how it wants to market to its customer base, and what email should really be used for. New product messaging can be very important, but is just one type of messaging. Understanding list segmentation, customer buying behavior, personas, RFM (recency frequency monetary) mix, etc., will help Joe’s to improve customer loyalty, email relevance, and ultimately the lifetime value of the customer’s its acquiring.

Testing, both email content and creative, as well as email landing pages, is also lacking from Joe's program. By making this part of every email campaign, Joe's can expect to see a considerable boost in effectiveness and conversion.

Joe’s should also look at dynamic tools to reduce the manual labor of producing emails, while making the content more relevant to the recipient. Adding triggered emails and automated drip campaigns will also offset the blast-only program that is in place today.

Key Takeaways

Unfortunately, even after seeing the data and the assessment, Joe’s chose to continue its email program as is, largely due to a fear of rocking the boat and a reticence to embrace new technologies. With the size of Joe’s list and its potential revenue from email, that means Joe’s is leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table, and further investing in an email infrastructure and staffing model that’s unsustainable and unscalable. A key point here is that companies like Joe's should not get caught up in “process” or what's worked in the past. Because email has traditionally been one of Joe’s only marketing efforts, the executive team fears making changes to a program that they perceive is “working” when in fact it’s negatively impacting customer lifetime value, brand perception and list size.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for increasing increasing repeat sales, ensuring customer loyalty, re-activating dormant customers, and improving customer perception of your brand. For Joe's, a myopic approach to email (and marketing in general) is having the opposite effect.

Are You Being Misled About ROI?

roy@apothecadigital.com (Roy Bielewicz) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 18:08:08 GMT

Are you getting the full view of how your marketing programs are performing?

One of the compelling reasons digital marketing and advertising has had such explosive growth over the last decade, is largely because it’s measurable to exceptionally granular, if not “big-brotherish” levels. Companies now have unprecedented amounts of data to measure the engagement, success and profitability of their marketing campaigns and tactics. And yet, many companies and agencies still struggle to measure true profitability and return on investment (ROI). Don’t believe me? Review the data that your agency is giving you.

Do you get reports on engagement, and little else? Ouch. What sort of engagement? Do they know what you do or sell? Are they coming to your site and immediately leaving? Are they searching your site because they were led to the wrong landing page and can’t find what they’re looking for? How is this impacting your revenue? If you’re not sure, then you don’t have a clear understanding of your ROI.

Much like following a recipe, there needs to be the right mix of ingredients (not too much or too little) added at the right time for ROI measurements to be accurate and meaningful.

Is your agency only reporting on cost per click (CPC)? That doesn’t tell you anything other than how much you’re spending. It gives you no insight into how much revenue the program is generating, much less if it’s profitable or not. If this is all you’re getting, you need to have a serious conversation with your rep (and probably start RFPing for a new one).

“ Is your agency only reporting on cost per click (CPC)? That doesn’t tell you anything other than how much you’re spending.”

If you’re getting more than CPC, are you only ROAS? If yes, then they’re not reporting on ROI. Seriously. They’re not the same, no matter how confidently your account manager says they are.

Why? What’s the difference? ROAS, or “return on ad spend,” shows revenue related to only one expense metric, the cost of your ad(s). So, while a positive ROAS is an essential ingredient to the ROI recipe, it isn’t the full recipe. It’s like measuring the amount of flour in a cake, but not taking into consideration the cost or volume of the other necessary ingredients like eggs and salt.

So, what are some of the other measurement ingredients that your agency should be showing you? Well, the most obvious is the one they don’t want you to think about on a regular basis: how much you’re paying them. No agency wants to remind you on a daily or weekly basis, how much it’s costing you to have them manage your ads, pull together Power Points, or how much it costs for five associates, an account manager and a project manager to jump on a call each week to discuss the “health” of your program.

Not that those services aren’t important. They are. But they impact the profitability of your advertising programs, often just as much as the cost of placing your ads. What’s this mean for your ROI? If the cost of your ads, plus the agency fees you’re paying don’t add up to a positive number in relation to your program revenue, your ROI is burned.