How to Reduce Exposure to Your Increasing Ad Cost

If you want to reduce your Ad Spend, you must read this….

It is critically important to generate leads from your website, but do you know how to do this effectively? Read on to discover how to utilise your website efficiently to start getting quality leads.

 

Amazon, Facebook and Google are just some of the eCommerce and service businesses that realise the benefit of collecting user data, not just pixel data, to retarget visitors to their sites.

By now you understand that all the major companies know more about us than our mothers do; where we like to eat, drink, what we like to wear and where we buy those clothes from etc. If you ever have ever visited any of these websites, then chances are, you are on their email database, or in other words – a buyers list.

 

Why do I need an email database?

An email database of buyers and prospects is absolutely critical to online businesses.

Put simply, the job of the website is to create sales opportunities for your business. So, if your website does not have the ability to gather an email database of potential clients, then it is not working effectively for you.

Imagine having a shop and 100 people walk in and out. Now imagine only three people buy a product from you and the other 97 people leave and don’t give you any contact information. You won’t be able to send them offers or keep in touch to remind them to come back and make a purchase in the future. Just think about how many opportunities you would be missing out on.

So, given that 97% of people that come to your website will not make contact on that visit, you need to have something in place to ensure that there are no missed opportunities. In order to make your website an effective sales tool, you must have a system in place that allows the visitor to do something without committing too much information, such as allowing the visitor to download certain guides, etc.

 

How do I create an email database?

In order to start collecting information for your email database you need to evaluate what value you can provide to the visitor. This can be anything from:

  • PDF guides
  • A video series
  • A webinar
  • Whitepaper reports

The visitor would essentially download one of the above in exchange for their name and email address. This then allows you to easily follow the visitor up, whilst they get value from the downloads.

 

How does this help my Ads?

If you are running Ads at the moment, be sure to create a lead magnet on your page, so visitors to the website can give you their best email address to contact them. This way you can retarget these leads without spending money on Ads to push towards email sales.

Once you create a lead magnet, you then gain the ability to build your email database where you can contact potential clients or take them further down your sales process. This works for both B2B and B2C industries, so it is essential for any type of business.

 

To turn your campaigns into a sales-making machine, speak to us today. Book a call here or call the office on 01543 495752.

What you need to know about Google’s Page Experience update

Google has recently released information about a new page experience metric that they are going to be including in their algorithms from 2021.

This may potentially only be a small update, however, we would like to inform our clients and businesses about this change now, so you can bear it in mind for the future.

Read below to find out how this may affect your business in 2021.

What are Core Web Vitals?

To be able to understand a little more, we need to dive a little deeper into core web vitals.

Core web vitals include metrics such as:

  • User metrics
  • Page load times
  • Page interactivity

You can now split the core web vitals into three areas.

Although there are many more ranking/algorithm factors, the three listed below are key to improving the page experience.

These are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Let’s look at them in more detail.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the loading performance.

It looks at how long it takes to load the largest content element in a user’s viewport (when everything becomes visible on your screen on a desktop or mobile.)

According to Google, a decent LCP should be within the region of 2.5 seconds. Anything over 4 seconds requires looking into, to make improvements.

Common issues include:

  • Slow servers
  • CSS or JavaScript issues
  • Application issues or resources to your websites, and Google Fonts or font awesome

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) optimal performance metric

First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity with your website.

When a webpage loads, this is the first user interaction, compared to when the browser can respond to that action.

According to Google, a good first input delay should be around 100ms. Anything over 300ms you should be looking into improvements.

First-Input-Delay-FID-optimal-performace-metric

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability.

If an element moves on the page and creates a bad user experience, then the CLS is taken into account. This then increases or decreases the LCS accordingly.

An example of this could be the size of a video or an image (usually missing width and height dimensions) or if a button loads in the top half of the viewport and then moves/jumps to the bottom half. The CLS calculates these errors and adjusts the experience score.

According to Google, good CLS should be anywhere between 0.1 seconds and 0.25 seconds for a decent experience. Anything over this takes longer to load and offers a poor user experience.

Cumulative Layout Shift optimal performance metric

UPDATED 20TH AUGUST 2020 – This week, we have discovered that part of Google’s update will include a ‘fast page’ label that websites will be assigned if they provide a good user experience.

If a website meets the Core Web Vitals benchmarks for LCP, FID and CLS, users will see the badge of honour when they long-press on any link within the Chrome mobile browser for android.

Want to know how your website can be awarded the ‘fast page’ label? Read on…

How will Google Page Experience affect my website?

Your website is an extension of your company. Google is helping you make a good first impression and offer a good user experience with this implementation.

We know there are over 200 ranking algorithms that Google uses, making updates daily, some very small which we never really see and then some of the major ones like The Google Bert update.

Firstly, we advise that you ensure your website is:

  • Mobile-friendly – Is your website responsive?
  • Secure (https enabled) – If you’ve got an online shop and your website is unsecure, it could lead to potential issues
  • Free of any intrusive popup ads that are annoying to the user

With the Google Page Experience update due to roll out in 2021, Google has advised they will offer at least six months’ notice before they implement it into its algorithms, so webmasters have plenty of time to adjust.

What we can do to help

The Marketing People are not here to scaremonger, we are always here to help and offer advice.

We recommend that you run an audit on your website which we can offer free of charge – just click here for the free site audit.

We also recommend to:

  • Keep your website up-to-date – Content is king, so its important that you provide updated, relevant information
  • Blog regularly – Give your visitors regular updates and information that they want to see
  • Make sure the content is relevant to your business/industry
  • Keep building and growing great content

Conclusion

In relation to Google’s Page Experience update, we recommend that you take the following steps, to ensure your business isn’t negatively impacted.

  1. Take advantage of our free website audit. Make sure that you constantly update any issues, using search console and any SEO related software.
  2. Review your Google Analytics and ensure that pages with a high bounce rate are reviewed and content for these pages is checked.
  3. Make sure all your content is up-to-date and relevant.

If you start working towards making these changes now, then these core web vitals should be easy to manage and maintain. It will give you a good platform for its implementation, and a sound base to improve your Google rankings and website.

If you would like to talk to us about implementing these changes to your website, please call on 01543 495752 and we’d be happy to help.

Posted in SEO

Why Your Ads Aren’t Working & How to Fix Them…

We are regularly asked by business owners to review their current ads and advise them on ways to improve the results of their campaigns.  We always come across the same issues. In this short blog post, we will be discussing the most common issues we see with Google Ads, and how you can fix them to get a ROI.

  • Demand

Are there enough people looking for your service or product? You can’t just assume that people will need your product/service, you need to do your research.

Some ad campaigns are created to test certain ideas, which is great, but without doing any research you won’t know:

  • What keywords to use
  • What search volume similar products have
  • How many competitors you will have

Before we begin any campaign, we look at the broader business and its goals, and your target customer.

We work out the value of each client/customer and if it’s over, say £50, and people are looking for the solution, we go deeper. To get a review from our Expert Team, schedule a call here.

  • Keyword Research

Most people use broad match type within their targeting, but we will always look at Phrase or Exact Match.

This means that people will need to type those exact words into a search engine in order for your ad to appear, so you can target your ideal customers more effectively.

  • Bidding

Are you bidding enough for your ad to show? Don’t be afraid to spend your money in order to get potential enquiries.

  • Landing Pages

What website are you sending people to after they click your ad? Are you sending them to your home page?

It would be far more beneficial to send people to a designated web page that is separate to the normal website, or a subpage on the site. This page should allow you to get their contact information or, alternatively, drive them to call you.

Essentially, you need to control the flow of traffic; you do not want someone to get lost or distracted on your website after you have paid for them to visit it.

  • Remarketing

Are you running remarketing? Without remarketing you only get one bite of the cherry.

All you need to do is put a remarketing code on to your site, which enables you to follow people around the internet, for free. You will only pay if that person clicks back to your website, giving you the second, third or fourth bite of the cherry.

  • Multi-Step Approach

We often see a disconnect between an ad and the website; not just visually but in the tone of the text. You need to have a multi-step approach to your ads.

If you’re getting 0 clicks, then you need to have another look at the ad text. If you are getting clicks but no enquiries, then you need to have another look at the website experience.

If you have any further question or would like help from our team of experts then schedule a free 15 minute call with us today.