UNIT I: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Building an online community

An online community is a group of people who interact with each other on an online platform. These communities
can range from the 1+ billion-person Instagram community to a 10-person community of coffee lovers that rates
artisan cafes in their city through a private Facebook group.
There’s a huge range in how an online community can scale, and understanding what type of online community is
the most beneficial for your brand is the first step in building your own community.
Branded communities.
This type of community is the opposite of a public social network. You’ll need to provide more than an email
address and password to get inside of the community. Imagine SOHO house, or a private members club, but online.
You’ll need the right credentials (experience, common interests, location, etc.) to have access to the community even
if it’s on a public social media platform.
Public social networks.
Think Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, even Vine (RIP) was a massive online community. Public social
networks are online communities that only require someone to have an account to be part of the community. There
aren’t many guidelines or restrictions when it comes to who gets to be part of this type of community.
Advantages
Increase engagement.
Online communities can boost your engagement in several ways. If you’re the blogger we wrote about earlier who
has grown a substantial following on Instagram, having your community tag you in their Instagram story to share a
daily win, how they’re using a product, etc., boosts your engagement. You can also have people comment on your
Instagram posts, post in your Facebook group, reply to your tweet, etc.
Product feedback.
Similar product complaints or questions in your online community should never be passed over. While they are great
for reducing your support costs, they’re even better at improving your product in exactly the way that your customers
want.
Don’t let these complaints and questions get lost take note of them and put them on your “Product Improvement
Notes” to-do list.
Reduce support costs.
Inside your online community, look for patterns about the before-state of your customers as well as their after-state.
Their after-state comes once your product has solved their problem. Your goal after-state for your customers and the
actual after-state may differ if your customers are running into issues with your products.
Your online community can not only be used to answer questions that customers might have, but can also be used to
see what reoccurring issues customers are having and fix them. This will reduce the number of tickets coming into
your customer support team.
Get to know your customers.
You can also use this megaphone to understand the before-and-after state of your customers. You’ll notice patterns
in the way they describe their problems that you can use to improve your copy. This makes the copy more relatable
to your customer's avatar and shows them that this product is the one they’re looking for.
Drive product innovation.
Your customers are the best people to tell you what product improvements need to be made. They can tell you what
they love, what they hate, and what they never use. Your online forum is a megaphone for your customers as to what
you can do to improve your product for them.
Public community:
 Facebook
 Twitter
 LinkedIn
 YouTube
 G2 Crowd
 GetApp
 Quora
 Discourse
 Glassdoor
 Slack
Building Process
1. Choose a platform for your community.
There are two types of forums: one revolving around shared interests and the other that is more informational in
nature.
With a shared-interest forum, you’re bringing together people who happen to be interested in a common topic where
they can explore and connect with each other on a larger range of topics. Collaboration between members is key
here.
Informational forums are largely used when you want to create a space for the community to search for and share
content related to your product, service, or designated topic in one location.
Once you’ve identified the use case and the type of engagement you’re after (i.e., customer support operations or
brand loyalty), you’ll want to start looking at detailed features that would support your community goals. These can
range from:
 Deeper analytics
 Ease of use and good user interface
 Customer support
 Platform flexibility
 Integrations
 Mobile
2. Develop a launch framework.
When determining what business problem you want to resolve with your community, consider the following.
Are you looking to:
 Increase your customer satisfaction ratings?
 Decrease costs related to customer support?
 Increase demand of your product/service?
 Identify and mobilize influencers and advocates?
 Increase collaboration?
Knowing these answers will make it easier for you to identify why you are launching your online community and
help you align its purpose to your intended goals.
3. Identify key internal stakeholders for the community.
After determining the need for forming your community, your next step is to identify your company’s stakeholders.
You can consider three categories of stakeholders:
1. Those who will be managing the community. For external-facing communities, this group of stakeholders
may include the community manager, marketing department, and/or customer support. The stakeholders may
vary greatly for internal communities.
2. Those who will be impacted by the community. If your community is external facing, marketing is generally
involved because the answers you are seeking will have the most impact on them. If there is feedback from the
community regarding product improvements, product management may also be involved.
3. Upper management. This stakeholder is the person who is responsible for the community and all that are
affected by it. Usually, an executive could be an operations manager or a CMO who oversees all digital
experiences.
Another way to go about identifying stakeholders is to lump the role of the community manager along with the social
media management role. Your marketing team, operations department, customer service, or perhaps a specially
created department may be put in charge of the community launch. In this instance, each department is likely to put
focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) that are meaningful to them.
Marketing KPIs
 Market share
 Customer sentiment
 Mobilizing influencers and advocates
 NPS: Net Promoter Score
Operations
 Operational efficiency
 Reducing support costs
Customer Service
 CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score
 NPS
Product Management
 Product testing
 Market research
 Beta testing
 Customer feedback
Typically, only one person will be tasked with the community launch. However, by leveraging resources and other
talent within your company, your launch can be less stressful and more successful.
4. Set up your community.
Making a decision on what platform to use for your community is the first step. If you are launching the community
on your own or taking a team approach, you will want to make sure that you or your team are familiar with the
software you will be using. This is a good opportunity to play with a demo or go through some hands-on training.
After you and your team have a good understanding of the software you’ll be using, you can move on to making
some setup decisions. These include:
 Keeping your community pre-launch private. You do not want outsiders having access to your community until
you are ready, so make sure to enable your privacy settings.
 Displaying a list of recent discussions for the forum on the “homepage view.” New members or first time
visitors may be more apt to join in the discussion if they see what is trending in your community.
 Creating your initial categories. Remember, your initial category list is not carved in stone and you should avoid
creating too many categories at the start. Keep it simple and let your categories evolve. This will help keep a
handle on discussion noise.
 Reviewing the sign-up process for members. The easier the process is, the more likely people will want to sign
up for your community. You should consider a setting up a single sign-on (SSO). It is also important to thoroughly
test your sign-up process before the pre-launch.
 Defining the roles of your staff and members. Decide what roles will be included within your community, such
as moderators or super members. Consider who on your staff will be the community’s admin, moderators, or
community manager.
 Assigning permissions for roles. You will need to assign and test permission to the roles you create. For
example, you may restrict new accounts from posting pictures or links.
 Deciding which features will be enabled. This includes plug-ins, add-ons, and other features that are integrated
into your online forum. Some features may not be needed right away, but others may be crucial to getting your
team the data they need.
 Setting up gamification. Start thinking about the perks you want to reward your members with. This could be
badges or other types of recognition for different achievements, such as being a beta-tester.
 Implementing your theme. You will want to tie your forum into your brand. Do not settle for impersonal default
settings. For example, utilize your company’s color scheme and add other personal touches.
 Configuring spam controls. Take advantage of your software’s spam controls. Test the controls against a
baseline of your trusted users. Adjust the settings as needed if you find that valid content is being labeled as spam.
 Setting up outgoing email. Decide what email address will be used for forum notifications. Review your
welcome and registration emails to make sure they say what you want.
 Testing. You need to test everything before over and over until you are happy with all the parts of your forum. As
you get closer to launch-time, your testing should become more stringent. Consider all types of probably scenarios
and prepare yourself beforehand that not everything will be perfect. Get ready to decide on a launch date.
5. Begin a soft launch.
Once you are satisfied with the workings on your community, it is time to get ready for a soft launch. The purpose of
a soft launch is to get your community ready for your full and public launch.
A great example of a soft launch is from BigFish Games with the introduction of their new game: Dungeon Boss.
While preparing for the launch, they placed their app in the Apple Canada store and drove users to their community
forum in a closed and private environment. They got a lot of customer feedback, some of which was incorporated
into the Dungeon Boss game title. Consequently, when they launched worldwide, it became one of their most
downloaded games.
Your soft launch should occur in three stages:
1. Preparing for the Soft-Launch
At this point, your community should be ready to be launched. All test content has been removed and any known
issues have been fixed or have been scheduled to be fixed. It is time to pre-populate your community with quality
content that will spark discussion and make good use of your existing content. Start off with at least 10 discussions
using your existing material. Recruit your colleagues to get the ball rolling with these discussions. Tone is important,
so you will want to set the right tone before moving on to the internal soft-launch.
2. Internal Soft-Launch
The purpose of the internal soft-launch is to identify problems using trusted people from your organization,
colleagues, and friends before your forum goes public. While they are trying out your community, they can provide
you with valuable feedback and report errors they find before moving to the full launch. This phase will allow your
moderators an opportunity to learn how to use the tools that will be used in your forum. Any training deficiencies
should be addressed and additional training provided if needed. Request feedback from your internal users. Then, set
a deadline to move to the next phase: your public soft-launch.
3. Public Soft-Launch
This launch should be limited to a select audience that you will encourage to give you feedback on your new
community forum. To form this group, try requesting volunteers from trusted customers, creating a banner on your
website, or including a mention of it in your company newsletter.
During your public soft-launch, address the following questions:
 Who should you include in this group?
 What problems do you want to solve while in this beta stage?
 What is needed to transition the community to live status
 What is your hard deadline to take your community to fully live?
Your goals should include:
 Getting the public involved
 Refining your community
 Receiving feedback
 Ensuring that your moderators and team are comfortable with the platform
6. Promote your community.
Once you have your date set, it’s time to get the word out to your target audience. The best way to do this is to take
advantage of your existing presence online. Promote your launch all over your website, through email
communications, and by having your sales team and customer service reps tell your existing and potential customers
about the launch.
Here are some more tips that will help you drive the first 100 members to your community:
 Invite your contacts. No, it’s not always fun to bombard your family members, friends, or professional contacts
about something you’re working on … but it works.
 Discuss with everyone and anyone. Get in the habit of talking to people everywhere you go, especially if your
community is centered around a broad product or service that has value for many people.
 Enlist the help of new members through gamification. Ask your growing, early group to help you broaden the
network by inviting their friends, colleagues, and digital connections. You can encourage this through contests
or reward systems integrated into your platform.
 Partner with influencers. Collaborating with a related and complementary company can be an effective way to
promote your new community and welcome new members who like both products and services
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your
customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you’re not speaking directly to your
audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you’re missing out! Great
marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and
even driving leads and sales.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although
the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming
more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools,
enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of
stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential
employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the
management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope (e.g. more active or passive use) and the
establishment of a firm’s desired social media “culture” and “tone.”
When using social media marketing, firms can allow customers and Internet users to post user-generated content
(e.g., online comments, product reviews, etc.), also known as “earned media,” rather than use marketer-prepared
advertising copy.

Strategies
There are two basic strategies for using social media as a marketing tool:
Passive approach
Social media can be a useful source of market information and a way to hear customer perspectives. Blogs, content
communities, and forums are platforms where individuals share their reviews and recommendations of brands,
products, and services. Businesses are able to tap and analyze the customer voices and feedback generated in social
media for marketing purposes; in this sense the social media is a relatively inexpensive source of market intelligence
which can be used by marketers and managers to track and respond to consumer-identified problems and detect
market opportunities. For example, the Internet erupted with videos and pictures of iPhone 6 “bend test” which
showed that the coveted phone could be bent by hand pressure. The so-called “bend gate” controversy created
confusion amongst customers who had waited months for the launch of the latest rendition of the iPhone. However,
Apple promptly issued a statement saying that the problem was extremely rare and that the company had taken
several steps to make the mobile device’s case stronger and robust. Unlike traditional market research methods such
as surveys, focus groups, and data mining which are time-consuming and costly, and which take weeks or even
months to analyze, marketers can use social media to obtain ‘live’ or “real time” information about consumer
behavior and viewpoints on a company’s brand or products. This can be useful in the highly dynamic, competitive,
fast-paced and global marketplace of the 2010s.
Active approach
Social media can be used not only as public relations and direct marketing tools, but also as communication channels
targeting very specific audiences with social media influencers and social media personalities as effective customer
engagement tools This tactic is widely known as influencer marketing. Influencer marketing allows brands the
opportunity to reach their target audience in a more genuine, authentic way via a special group of selected
influencers advertising their product or service. In fact, brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer
marketing by 2022, per Business Insider Intelligence estimates, based on Mediakix data.
Technologies predating social media, such as broadcast TV and newspapers can also provide advertisers with a fairly
targeted audience, given that an ad placed during a sports game broadcast or in the sports section of a newspaper is
likely to be read by sports fans. However, social media websites can target niche markets even more precisely. Using
digital tools such as Google AdSense, advertisers can target their ads to very specific demographics, such as people
who are interested in social entrepreneurship, political activism associated with a particular political party, or video
gaming. Google AdSense does this by looking for keywords in social media user’s online posts and comments. It
would be hard for a TV station or paper-based newspaper to provide ads that are this targeted (though not impossible,
as can be seen with “special issue” sections on niche issues, which newspapers can use to sell targeted ads).
Social networks are, in many cases, viewed as a great tool for avoiding costly market research. They are known for
providing a short, fast, and direct way to reach an audience through a person who is widely known. For example, an
athlete who gets endorsed by a sporting goods company also brings their support base of millions of people who are
interested in what they do or how they play and now they want to be a part of this athlete through their endorsements
with that particular company. At one point consumers would visit stores to view their products with famous athletes,
but now you can view a famous athlete’s, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, latest apparel online with the click of a button.
He advertises them to you directly through his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.
Facebook and LinkedIn are leading social media platforms where users can hyper-target their ads. Hypertargeting not
only uses public profile information but also information users submit but hide from others. There are several
examples of firms initiating some form of online dialog with the public to foster relations with customers. According
to Constantinides, Lorenzo and Gómez Borja (2008) “Business executives like Jonathan Swartz, President and CEO
of Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Computers, and McDonald’s Vice President Bob Langert post
regularly in their CEO blogs, encouraging customers to interact and freely express their feelings, ideas, suggestions,
or remarks about their postings, the company or its products”. Using customer influencers (for example popular
bloggers) can be a very efficient and cost-effective method to launch new products or services Among the political
leaders in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the highest number of followers at 40 million, and President
Donald Trump ranks second with 25 million followers. Modi employed social media platforms to circumvent
traditional media channels to reach out to the young and urban population of India which is estimated to be 200
million.

Engagement
Engagement with the social web means that customers and stakeholders are active participants rather than passive
viewers. An example of these are consumer advocacy groups and groups that criticize companies (e.g., lobby groups
or advocacy organizations). Social media use in a business or political context allows all consumers/citizens to
express and share an opinion about a company’s products, services, business practices, or a government’s actions.
Each participating customer, non-customer, or citizen who is participating online via social media becomes a part of
the marketing department (or a challenge to the marketing effort) as other customers read their positive or negative
comments or reviews. Getting consumers, potential consumers or citizens to be engaged online is fundamental to
successful social media marketing. With the advent of social media marketing, it has become increasingly important
to gain customer interest in products and services. This can eventually be translated into buying behavior, or voting
and donating behavior in a political context. New online marketing concepts of engagement and loyalty have
emerged which aim to build customer participation and brand reputation.
Engagement in social media for the purpose of a social media strategy is divided into two parts. The first is
proactive, regular posting of new online content. This can be seen through digital photos, digital videos, text, and
conversations. It is also represented through sharing of content and information from others via weblinks. The
second part is reactive conversations with social media users responding to those who reach out to your social media
profiles through commenting or messaging.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. We’ve created a list of the four
most beneficial reasons to consider.
Increase Brand Awareness
In 2018, there were over 3.2 billion people on social media globally. Due to the sheer amount of people on social
media, you can see why ensuring your business is sharing content related to your products as well as details about
your company via a platform or two has the potential to help you improve brand awareness.
In fact, social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagement
includes things like comments, likes, shares, and re-posts. Social media also helps you increase brand awareness by
directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio,
and posts.
Generate Leads and Boost Conversions
 Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost
conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by
following your account.
 Create contests for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
 Include links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
 Host live videos to make announcements about products and provide updates or details about exciting news at
your company.
 Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
Sell your products through your social profiles. For example, you can enable Facebook’s Shop Section or
Instagram’s Shopping feature on your profiles. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on products
you’ve shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size. Then, visitors can easily proceed to
checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.
Foster Relationships with Customers
By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you’ll be able to build lasting relationships between
them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and
comments, and providing them with any help they may need.
You can also ask your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you
build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.

Learn from Competitors

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors, whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics,
the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.
Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you
decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach. Lastly, reviewing the social accounts
of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

Marketing and building a presence on Facebook

Facebook marketing refers to creating and actively using a Facebook page as a communications channel to maintain
contact with and attract customers. Facebook actively provides for this, allowing users to create individual profiles or
business pages for companies, organizations, or any group attempting to develop a fan base for a product, service, or
brand.
Facebook as a platform for growing your business:
 Has global coverage. Over 1,5 billion users visit Facebook daily. About 2,3 billion every month. More than 7
million active companies create ads for this massive audience.
 Offers highly targeted paid ads. With Facebook Ads, you can tailor your promotions to a specific audience
based on gender, age, location, job, interests any demographic or behavioral data, which users willingly share with
Facebook.
 Makes organic reach possible. If you don’t have resources to utilize Facebook Ads, build relationships
organically by sharing materials that bring value to people on your Facebook page. Your posts will show up in the
newsfeed, though the high level of competition will make it harder to build an audience naturally.
 Allows integrations with other marketing channels. Facebook marketing is not a single isolated system. You
can combine it with other marketing channels, like email marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing,
and Facebook Messenger ads, to develop a promotion mix that will increase your brand outreach.
Featuring nearly a billion potential customers, every business should be using Facebook. It is at least as essential as
having a business web page and actually much easier to create. Whether you represent a big brand or a small
business employing only a handful of people, you can bet that some portion of your customers are already on
Facebook. Commonly, Facebook marketing is used by:
 Food, electronics, home goods, restaurants, nearly any kind of brand can be promoted through Facebook,
turning passive customers into active fans who follow news of promotions and developments, and who share
with their own friends.
 Local businesses. Whether a business is family-owned, or a franchise of a larger company, a Facebook page
can be used to turn a local customer base into a fan base that more commonly visits your store.
 Musicians, celebrities, authors, syndicated columnists anybody who makes their money through being
known wants to be known by as many people as they can on Facebook.
 Non-profit organizations. Charities, political groups, and public service campaigns can all leverage the
natural sharing capabilities of Facebook.
Internet Marketing Managers
 Promote company engagement with social media, including Facebook
 Coordinate Internet marketing campaigns, including Facebook, Twitter, company blogs and websites, and
affiliate programs
 Establish goals and metrics for marketing efforts through Facebook, and evaluate success
 Assign and monitor teams to create content for the company’s Facebook page
Advertising and Promotional Managers
 Develop promotional videos and other content that can be posted to a company website, and shared through
Facebook
 Create advertising slogans to represent products and brands
 Manage specific promotional assignments, such as conducting an online contest for Facebook fans
 Advertise internally as well as externally, so that a company’s employees are more likely to become a part of
the company’s Facebook fan base
Public Relations Managers
 Write short-form press releases to post to a company’s Facebook page
 Identify trending attitudes towards a company, and craft messages to respond
 Develop spotlight stories for particular people or products within the company, which can be shared on the
company Facebook page, among other places
 Develop a narrative for the company
Benefits
 Precise targeting. You already know that Facebook allows users to deeply segment their audience but let’s
take a closer look at the options available. Within demographic targeting, you can select an audience with a
particular income, education level, life events, relationship status, or job. You can look for customers, taking
into account their interests, such as their preferred entertainment, sports, hobbies, and shopping habits. Also,
you can reach clients based on purchase behaviors, intent, device usage, etc.
 Increased website traffic. With this platform, you can drive your audience directly to your website.
Moreover, these people will be higher quality leads than users who land on your site organically because
they already know your company. Hence, you have more credibility in their minds. Encourage your
 followers to visit your site to find out more about your products. Besides, when linking to a site, Facebook
generates a full-size image if your site page has one. So, it will attract many users’ attention and help you
boost website traffic.
 Variety of ad formats. Facebook provides businesses with excellent opportunities that allow them to
showcase their products from the best angles. Ads on this platform include both text and visual formats. You
can boost your post by turning it into an ad, produce stories to show your behind-the-scenes, make a
slideshow of your new collection, use carousel ads to demonstrate up to 10 products linking to the
corresponding pages, etc.
 Customer support. A lot of people prefer to connect with a brand via social media. Phone calls have
become a thing of the past. Create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to communicate with users based on
their popular queries keywords. They can include “price,” “delivery,” “payment options,” “purchase,”
“book,” etc. You only need to develop a scenario based on users’ FAQs and write the answers. Your chatbot
will imitate the real conversation. As a result, your support team will have time for more complicated issues
and you can automate routine tasks.
 Positive impact on SEO. Some marketers claim that social media influences search rankings. It’s believed
that robots take into account your data in the About section while ranking. Moreover, your social media
engagement contributes a lot. Shares, likes, and comments tell Google that people are interested in your
brand and engage with it. Although there is no exact proof, it isn’t superfluous either.
Marketing and building a presence on Twitter
A Twitter marketing strategy is a plan centered around creating, publishing, and distributing content for your buyer
personas, audience, and followers through the social media platform. The goal of this type of strategy is to attract
new followers and leads, boost conversions, improve brand recognition, and increase sales.
Creating a Twitter marketing strategy will require you to follow the same steps you would if you were creating any
other social media marketing strategy.
 Research your buyer personas and audience
 Create unique and engaging content
 Organize a schedule for your posts
 Analyze your impact and results

1. Customize and brand your profile.

When someone looks at your company’s Twitter profile, you want them to automatically know it’s yours. Meaning
you should customize and brand your Twitter profile with your logo, colors, and any other recognizable and
memorable details you want to incorporate. There are a few locations in which you can customize your profile.
 Handle: Your Twitter handle is your username (for example, our handle is @hubspot) this should include your
company’s name so your followers, customers, and fans can easily search and find you on the platform. You
create your Twitter handle when you sign up for an account.
 Header: The header on your Twitter profile is your background image. You might choose to create a unique image
for your header, use your logo, or another branded image.
 Profile picture: Your Twitter profile picture represents your company’s every move, interaction, post, and tweet on
the platform. It’s the image that sits above your bio and might include a picture of your logo, company’s initials,
or CEO.
 Bio: A Twitter bio provides everyone who visits your profile with a brief synopsis of what they’re about to see in
160 characters or less. It might include your mission statement, a blurb about what your company does, or
something humorous and engaging.
 Website URL: Beneath your profile picture and bio, there’s a location where you can include your URL to direct
traffic straight to your website.
 Birthday: In the same location as your URL, you can insert your company’s birthday or the day when the company
was founded, so your audience gets to know your business on a more personal level.
2. Create Twitter Lists.
A Twitter List which any user has the ability to create and view is an organized group of Twitter accounts you’ve
selected and put together in specific categories. For example, at HubSpot, lists include Leadership Experts, Top
Marketing Experts, Top Business Podcasters, and more. When you open a Twitter List, you only see tweets posted
by the accounts on the list.
Twitter Lists are great if you want to follow only specific accounts. You might segment your lists into groups such as
business inspiration, competitors, and target audience so you’re able to easily review their posts, interactions, and
content.
3. Host a Twitter Chat.
You can schedule and host a Twitter chat to engage your followers, discuss a topic, create a sense of community, and
ask your audience for their opinions or input on something you’re working on.
To host a Twitter Chat (or TweetChat), you’ll need to choose a topic, set a time and date for the chat to occur, and
create a hashtag for the chat. You can share this information with your followers in a tweet, on your website, in your
Twitter bio, and wherever else you choose.
4. Advertise on Twitter.
Advertising through Twitter is a great way to reach your audience. This will make your tweets easily discoverable by
thousands of people, helping you increase your influence and following. You can do this through promoted tweets or
Twitter Ads.
Promoted Tweets
Promoted tweets make your tweets appear in the Twitter streams or Twitter search results of specific users. This is a
great option for anyone looking to get more people on a specific webpage. Your business will pay a monthly fee as
long as you’re promoting a tweet.
Twitter will put your promoted tweets in a daily campaign targeting the type of audience you want to reach as
previously indicated in your settings. All Twitter users have the ability to interact and engage with Twitter Ads the
same way they would with your organic content.

Twitter Ads
Twitter Ads is a great option if you’re using different types of tweets to achieve one goal for your business. It’s ideal
if you’re looking to grow your base of followers and brand awareness significantly through the platform.
Your business can decide between different objectives when it comes to your Twitter ads including app installs,
video views, and website conversions, as well as audience targeting for your campaigns. This decision will impact
the price you’ll need to pay to run your ad.
Drive traffic to your website.
Twitter can help you direct traffic to your website there are a number of ways to include your website’s URL on your
profile as well as add links to your web pages and blogs in your tweets. Here are some ways you can use the platform
to direct traffic to your website to help you increase your conversions and sales.
 Add your website URL beneath your bio on your Twitter profile.
 Incorporate links to your website in your tweets.
 Retweet any content that includes direct links to your website and/ or blogs other people have shared.
 Embed tweets on your website with a Twitter Timeline.
 Set up Twitter Ads to drive users to a specific landing page on your site.
6. Use Twitter Moments.
Twitter Moments are collections of tweets about a specific topic or event. They’re like a “best of” collection of
tweets regarding your topic of choice. For example, Twitter’s Moments section includes “Today”, “News”,
“Entertainment”, and “Fun.”
7. Get verified on Twitter.
You might choose to apply to get your Twitter profile verified depending on the size of your company and your
industry. Twitter states they typically only accept requests for account verification if you’re in “music, acting,
fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas.” If Twitter
accepts your application and verifies your profile, a badge with a blue checkmark inside of it will appear next to your
handle. This symbolizes an authentic account.
Marketing
 Use keyword targeting in your Twitter Ads
 Implement hashtags
 Organize a content sharing schedule
 Create a Twitter campaign
 Write a strong profile bio
 Use images and videos
 Interact with your followers
 Share media mentions
 Keep an eye on your competitors’ Twitter accounts
 Focus on followers’ interests and needs when creating content
 Promote your events
 Check your direct messages regularly
 Keep track of your analytics

Employer branding on LinkedIn

Being one of the best professional networks, LinkedIn is a hub of job seekers and potential hires. You can post your
job opportunities to find the best talent, source potential candidates, as well as build your professional network.
In addition to this, you can leverage LinkedIn to present your company as the best place to work for your potential
hires. You can speak about your company culture with the help of photos, videos or gifs. You can also share blog
posts written by your employees on your Linked In page and showcase your talented team and rich company values
to your potential candidates.
A strong employer branding helps you in delivering the right message to your target candidates. With the help of
your recruiting team, you can plan out your employer's value proposition and take the required steps for effective
recruitment marketing. You can depict to your potential hires how it is to work for your company and help them in
making an informed decision.
Whether it is your company website or your career website or social media platform like LinkedIn, your employer
brand speaks for your organization. Building your employer brand on LinkedIn should be an ongoing activity. Read
this blog to learn how to build your employer brand on LinkedIn.
Best Employer Branding Examples on LinkedIn
Many companies today have successfully implemented the right employer branding strategies to build their employer
brand and attract the right talent. In this blog, you will find the best examples of companies who are doing their best
to strengthen their employer branding on LinkedIn.
1. Canva
Canva simplified the complex process of designing professional images with their easy-to-use online designing tool.
It offers you thousands of design templates to simplify the task of designing images for you.
Canva’s LinkedIn Page is as engaging and interesting as their careers site. They are making the best use of their
LinkedIn page to showcase their company culture and attract the best talent for their jobs. In addition to having a
dedicated section to jobs, their LinkedIn page also has a section showcasing life at Canva HQ. This certainly boosts
their employer branding efforts by a great deal.
Canva’s LinkedIn page offers a glimpse of their work environment, company culture and what they have in store for
their employees. Firstly, they share informative blogs about interview tips, resume writing, personal branding and
much more. Secondly, they give the authorship of their blog to their employees and ask them to share their
experience working at Canva.
In addition to sharing the news about the company’s achievements and festivity wishes, Canva has adopted a new
way of promoting their job openings. They share an amazing video along with their job openings on LinkedIn. These
job ads certainly make Canva stand out and boost their employer branding.
2. Spreetail
Spreetail is a successful eCommerce website delivering a great shopping experience to their customers. They deal
with selling products for the styling and redecorating of homes and gardens.
Spreetail’s Career Page gives us visual proof about how much they value their employees. Employee happiness and
satisfaction is something that Spreetail does really well. They give prospective job seekers a glimpse of how it is to
work for them.
As we all know, LinkedIn is one of the best professional networks to find the top talent for your roles. Spreetail
leverages their LinkedIn page to advertise their job openings. They craft their job ads with clear and concise job
descriptions speaking about the role and responsibilities in simple language.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot helps businesses simplify their sales and marketing efforts with a host of tools like search engine
optimization tools, content management tools, social media marketing tools, and a Sales CRM.
The hiring team leverages the company’s LinkedIn page effectively to promote themselves as an employer of choice.
Their employer branding strategies are fresh, creative and innovative. The HubSpot Team speaks about their
company culture, the work-life as well as glimpses of their office environment on their LinkedIn page.
Just the way they have shared their culture code on their website, their LinkedIn page also has a short presentation of
their company culture. They also showcase some engaging blogs written by the team as well as employee
testimonials.
4. Slack
Slack is an instant messaging and file sharing platform that helps teams collaborate with each other seamlessly.
Founded in the year 2009, Slack Technologies designed and developed Slack so that ambitious teams could work
together.
Slack is an equal opportunity employer and believes in having a diverse workplace employing talented individuals
from various backgrounds and experiences. The Slack Team is making the best use of its LinkedIn page to build
their employer brand.
5. Zappos
Zappos.com is a leading eCommerce company selling apparel and footwear from thousands of brands online.
Located in Las Vegas, Zappos has been growing since its inception in 1999. Currently, the Zappos family consists of
approximately 1500 Zapponians.
Zappos.com is slaying at their employer branding efforts. Through their company’s LinkedIn page, Zapponians walk
us through their brand, their company culture, and their beliefs. The lively office environment, the perks they offer
and the amiable team make Zappos an employer of choice.
Zappos LinkedIn page is constantly updated with fresh content that boosts its employer brand by a great deal. In
addition to sharing their active job openings, Zappos takes efforts to post pictures of their latest outings and events.
Their LinkedIn page also mentions about their company culture in pictorial representations. Zapponians use quirky
and funny captions in their posts which reflects their fun work environment and talented team.
Process
1. Update your Linkedin company page
When is the last time you took a look at the content on your Linkedin company page? Does it reflect your company’s
mission or values? Are you proactively promoting the right content? Is it up to date? Answering these questions is
the first step to leveraging Linkedin for your employer brand.
Data from Hootsuite shows that complete company pages receive 2X more visitors than those that are incomplete.
This means something as simple as reviewing and updating your profile can give a quick boost to your employer
brand.
 2. Diversify your content
It’s important to keep a consistent tone to build your employer brand, but remember to diversify your content. On
Linkedin, you can post updates, photos, videos and more. Be sure to use a diverse mix of content formats to keep
your audience engaged. Linkedin is also a great place to display employee-generated content (EGC). Starbucks
prioritizes ECG specifically with the #tobeapartner campaign which highlights their employee experience.
3. Share company culture content
People on Linkedin want to know about your business. It’s the perfect place to highlight your mission, employees,
and culture. Instead of strictly using ads alone to promote your company, you can create content that gives users an
inside look at your business. This increases the likelihood of organic engagement.
One company that does this well is Zendesk. When you visit their Linkedin page, you’ll see a great mix of business
content and company culture content. The feed includes photos from charity events, meetings, and even holiday
parties. They also use a branded hashtag to group these posts and make them easy to find on the platform.
4. Use sponsored content
Posting sponsored content is another way to boost your presence fast. It allows you to get your message in front of a
targeted audience and ensure that you get more eyes on a post. However, you shouldn’t treat sponsored content the
same way you treat other types of ads. You can use sponsored content on Linkedin to stand out and help your
business reach specific goals.

5. Create a seamless candidate experience

Linkedin is likely the first place many candidates will go to when they want to learn about your business. Having
great content on your page and on Linkedin contributes to building a strong brand.
6. Encourage employee advocacy
Remember, your employees’ individual Linkedin profiles also contribute to your employer brand. If your employees
are active and have a complete profile, it shows that they’re engaged at work. This can make your company more
attractive to potential employees and have a positive impact on company culture. All of these can help you build a
strong presence on the platform.
6.Facebook advertising overview
Reasons why Facebook Advertising is hugely exciting for marketers:
Audience size: Facebook now boasts over 1.13 billion daily active users on 1.03 billion of which access the social
network via mobile devices.
 Attention: People spend a lot of time on social networks. The average user spends about 50 minutes just on
Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger every day.
 Organic reach decline: Organic reach on Facebook has been in decline for a few years now and has almost hit
zero. If you want to break through now, Facebook is all but a pay-to-play network.
 Targeting: The targeting options within Facebook Ads is incredible. Business can target users with by location,
demographics, age, gender, interests, behavior, and much more.
Social media targeting
Social media targeting is a form of online advertising that focuses on social media. Retailers can use this type of
advertising and take advantage of the users’ demographics, location, interests, and so forth and target their ads
accordingly.
Some of the available targeting options include:
 Location
 Education
 Work
 Financial status
 Generation
 Parental status
 Ethnicity
  Languages
 Connections to specific Facebook pages
 Behaviours
Types of Facebook ads
Image ads
These simple ads are a great way to get started with Facebook paid advertising. You can create one with just a few
clicks by boosting an existing post with an image from your Facebook Page.
Image ads may be simple, but that doesn’t mean they have to be boring.
Video ads
Video ads can run in the News Feed and Stories, or they can appear as in-stream ads in longer Facebook videos.
Video ads can show your team or your product in action, like this quick demo video ad from IKEA.

Poll ads
This mobile-only Facebook ad format incorporates an interactive component by adding a two-option poll to an image
or video ad. You can add a separate link for each poll choice.
Both you and those who answer will see the tally of responses to each poll option.
Carousel ads
A carousel ad uses up to 10 images or videos to showcase your product or service.
You can use this format to highlight different benefits of one product, several different products or even use all the
photos together to create one large panorama image.
Slideshow ads
Slideshow ads offer an easy way to create short video ads from a collection of still photos, text, or existing video
clips.
Slideshow ads have eye-catching motion, just like videos, but use five times less data. So, they load well even for
people on slow internet connections. They’re an easy, low-impact way to draw attention.
Collection ads
These Facebook paid ads, which are offered only for mobile devices, allow you to showcase five images or videos
that customers can click to buy a product or service.
Collection ads pair with Instant Experiences (more on those below) and allow people to buy your products without
ever leaving Facebook. This makes online shopping easy when people are on-the-go.
Instant Experience ads
Instant Experience ads used to be called Canvas. They’re a full-screen ad format that loads 15 times faster than a
mobile website outside of Facebook.
Lead ads
Lead ads are only available for mobile devices. That’s because they’re specifically designed to make it easy for
people to give you their contact information without a lot of typing.
They’re great for collecting newsletter subscriptions, signing someone up for a trial of your product or allowing
people to ask for more information from you. Several automakers have successfully used them to encourage test
drives.
Dynamic ads
Dynamic ads allow you to promote targeted products to the customers most likely to be interested in them.
For instance, say someone has visited a product page or placed a product in their shopping cart on your website, but
then abandoned the purchase. With dynamic ads, you can advertise that specific product in their Facebook feed.
This reminds the potential customer to complete the purchase, and can be a very effective Facebook marketing
strategy.
Messenger ads
Facebook Messenger ads give you access to the 1.3 billion people who use Messenger every month. When creating
your ad, simply choose Messenger as the desired placement. You also need to select Facebook feed.
Stories ads
Mobile phones are meant to be held vertically. Stories ads are a mobile-only full-screen vertical video format that
allows you to maximize screen real estate without expecting viewers to turn their screen.
Augmented reality ads
Augmented reality ads use features like filters and animation to allow people to interact with your brand.
For example, the filter could help users see what a shade of lipstick would look like on their lips, or how a pair of
glasses might fit their face.

Pros
 Campaigns are easy to track
 Immediate influx of traffic
 Complete control over your daily budget and maximum Cost-per-click
 Instant return on investment (You can easily define a cost per conversion and understand what your profit is)
 More targeting options, including, towns, regions, age, likes/interests, income bracket, and other
demographics
 Easier to set up than Google AdWords
 The ability to reach people early on in the buying process, before they are aware of their need, while
capturing those who are aware of the need in a subtle way
 You can use images and videos to capture the interest of your target market, helping you to sell your
products and services
 CPC is relatively cheap, depending on your industry (On average, no more than $0.61 per click)
Cons
 There is no option to target your ads at certain times within the day or on certain days of the week unless you
choose a lifetime budget
 If set up and managed incorrectly, it can be costly, but less so than Google AdWords
 Depending on your target market, the majority of the large potential audience can be irrelevant (For instance,
we would not recommend Facebook Advertising if someone only served or supplied their products and
services to one town)
 Most suitable for those operating in B2C markets
 Reaching people too early in the buying cycle could potentially reduce your goal conversion rate
How Facebook ads work
Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:
The campaign houses all of your assets.
 Ad sets. If you’re targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you’ll need an individual ad set
for each.
 Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy,
images, etc.
As an advertiser on Facebook, you can choose the audiences you want for your ads. We offer tools that help you
reach people based on traits and categories, like:
 Where they live
 Demographics: Like age, gender and more
 Interests: Like shopping, gadgets and more
 Behaviors: Like shopper profiles and offline interests
When people are on Facebook, they may see your ad in News Feed the personal stream of updates from their friends,
family and things they care about. Since your ads reach people based on who they are and their interests, they’ll be
more relevant to the people who see them.
This is a fairly straightforward process and involves the following four steps:
 Set Up Facebook Business Manager. First, you create a Facebook page for your business. From there you
can create a Business Manager account that allows you to run ads for that page. To start go to the home page
for Business Manager and click “Create Account” Then log in using the email and password you used to set
up your business page account.
 Install the Facebook Pixel. Go to your website and install the Facebook pixel that allows Facebook to
identify people who visited your website, create custom audiences comprised of those visitors, and then
show ads to them.
 Create Audiences to target users. This tool allows you to create and save audiences that are most relevant to
your brand. Go back into Business Manager and select the “Audiences” option from the assets column.
 Create a Facebook Ad from a Facebook post. Now you can try it out. First decide what you want to
accomplish do you want more clicks, sales, video views, or leads?
How each tool works is essential to shaping your campaign.
 The Plan section contains tools that help you learn things about your audience and give you creative ideas
for running your ads. With the Audience Insights tool, you can find out a lot of information about different
audiences on Facebook.
 Create and Manage. Here you find tools for creating your ad and managing your campaigns.
 Measure and Report. When you want to analyze how your ads are performing, check out the tools in the
Measure and Report section. For example, here you can create those custom conversions to track whether
ads are meeting your business goals.
 This section gives you quick and easy access to key assets that you’ve used to build your ads, including
audiences that you’ve saved for ad targeting, images you’ve used, your Facebook pixel, and more.
 The settings area is where all of your account information is stored. Go here to update payment information,
your email, and so on.
How to Get Started with Facebook Ads
Ad transparency is important for figuring out the algorithm. The ability for any user to see exactly what ads a
Facebook page or Twitter account is running is particularly useful for marketers and businesses. There are three key
ways that marketers can leverage this information to their advantage:
 Research competitor campaigns and consumer markets. Seeing all the ad campaigns your competitors are
running is invaluable as you consider your own campaign. Visit their landing pages and assess their call to
action. What special offers are they running? How long are their videos? Are they trying to attract clicks,
drive purchases, or just create awareness?
 Get inspiration for using new ad features. New ad features roll out all the time on Facebook and Twitter.
Look to major brands like Home Depot, Target, or Airbnb to see how they’re using new ad features; it’s a
good way to see what each feature does and how it works without investing your first dollar.
 Share active campaigns with customers and prospects. Because users can engage with the ads in the same
way they would if the ad appeared in their news feed, customers and prospects now have an opportunity to
begin a purchase or a signup they might have missed out on.
Strategies
 Provide free content to warm up your audience. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to
differentiate your business and warm up cold audiences. Provide free valuable content that entertains,
educates, or inspires your ideal customer. You could use videos, lead magnets (guides, checklists, coupons,
etc.), or blog posts, for example.
 Engage people on your email list. Delivering your message via your Facebook ads and email marketing is
twice as effective. Customers will see your message in their inbox and when they browse Facebook.
 Retarget website visitors. If you install the Facebook pixel on your website, you can target people who have
recently visited your site.
Currently, Facebook says it has over 800 million users in the Marketplace. The plus of Facebook Marketplace is that
it’s where people are actively looking for a specific good, which means you have immediate access to an audience
that is looking for you.

 Create a campaign objective. Marketplace offers five objectives: reach, traffic, conversions, catalog sales,
and video views. Once you pick one you can give your campaign a name.
 Choose placement. Where do you want the ad to appear? Scroll down to the Placements section and pick the
settings.
 Create a video ad. In the Ad Creation section, you can upload images as well as a video. Videos tend to
outperform static images in Marketplace, so that might be your best option.
 Analyze placement results. Check out how your ad is performing in comparison to other placements. You
can do this by filtering your ad reports by selecting “Placement” from the Breakdown drop-down menu.
Targeting
Several experts suggest that Facebook Ads acts purely as a tool to generate demand and spark interest. Generally, we
don’t check Facebook with the same intention as browsing on Amazon, Ebay or other similar sites. We probably go
to the latter with a clear intention to buy or at least find out more information about a specific product that we
already have in mind.
Concerning targeting, possibilities on Facebook are pretty unrivalled. You have the option to narrow down your
audience based on demographic variables, including:
 Age
 location
 gender
 spoken languages
 relationship status
You can even choose your advertising audiences based on their level of education, field of profession, and occasion-
based information like:
 Birthday month
 expecting parents
 engaged for 1 year
 expats, and many more
Bidding & performance
Similar to Google Ads and other advertising platforms, Facebook operates a real-time digital auction. However,
Facebook auctions evaluate advertisements slightly differently – based on their competitive value.
Unlike other advertising platforms, this is not solely made up of the maximum amount you are willing to bid, but
also the intrinsic value of the ad: level of engagement that the ad attracts, user experience (for example, likes,
comments, negative feedback ). For example, should you bid €3 to have your ad shown at your chosen placement,
the magical and mysterious algorithms of Facebook Ads then weigh your ad’s relevance against other competing ads
and organic content. The more relevant your ad is to your target audience, the less you need to bid for its delivery.
How do you know if your ad is performing well?
Start with establishing what your goal with Facebook advertising is. Is it purely to maximise the number of clicks
and landing page views? Alternatively, is your aim more concrete, and you want people to take a particular action
once they get directed to your landing page?
Your next step once you have delineated your goal is to instruct Facebook Ads to begin optimising to deliver your
adverts to people who are more likely to take the required action.
Once you have set up your campaign accordingly, the ad will then enter the learning phase, that does precisely what
it says on the tin – Facebook uses its algorithms to learn whom to show your ads, to maximise your chosen results.
Ad delivery during the learning phase usually is more expensive; however, it should normalise after reaching circa
50 conversions (i.e. your desired actions taken by Facebook users).
If you are only starting with Facebook Ads, you must know some basic terms, that help you evaluate your ads’
performance:
 Impressions: The number of times your ad gets delivered to a Facebook user for the first time
 Reach: The number of people that your ad has been delivered to on Facebook
 Clicks: The number of times your ad has been clicked on
 CTR or Click Through Rate: This is the percentage of clicks on your ad out of all the impressions it has received
 CPC or Cost per Click: The average cost that you have paid for each click
 CPA or Cost per Acquisition/Action: Average cost per whichever action you have defined as a conversion. This
can be a newsletter signup, website purchase.
 Frequency: The average number of times that your ad was shown to a Facebook user
Attribution: Different marketing-related steps that a user takes before making a purchase
How to Create Facebook ads
step 1: Select Your Campaign Objective
Now, on Facebook you can choose from a handful of campaign objectives that match your advertising goals. For
example, if you are looking to drive traffic to a physical location you would use “Local Awareness”. If you’re
driving traffic to a website, you want to use “Conversions”.
Here’s the complete list of Facebook campaign objectives available:
 Brand awareness
 Local awareness
 Reach
 Traffic
 Engagement
 App installs
 Video views
 Lead generation
 Conversions
 Product catalog sales
 Store traffic
 Messages
Step 2: Give Your Ad Campaign a Name
After we have decided our campaign type, let’s give our campaign a name. This may seem like a fairly simple step,
but it is actually very important to adopt useful naming conventions for your campaigns when you start with
Facebook advertising so you can easily organize your campaigns as you scale and run more of them. It also sets you
up for hyper-efficient reporting later on when it comes time to analyze your results.
For example, you should always include the date range the campaign will be running in your campaign name.
Depending on whether you are advertising for your own business or for clients, you can add more elements in your
campaign name:
 Client name/ website
 Target Audience/ Location
 Custom Audiences
 Creative Type ( Video? Carousel?)
 Facebook Page, etc
Step 3: Set Up the Audience Targeting
Facebook offers a lot of powerful ways to target audiences, and we’ll talk more at length about creating these
different audience types in Chapter 6. The next step is where you will create your adsets, or audiences.
If we think back to the last chapter, you should recall your main ads manager screen has a campaigns tab, adsets tab
and an ads tab.
The ads and adsets are contained within your campaign, with the ads containing a specific combination of creative
and an adset containing a specific audience and budget.We’ll discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 7 when we
review budgets, but for now let’s focus on building our audience.
In this phase of your campaign setup, you have two options:
 Create a new Facebook target audience
 Use a Saved Audience
Step 4: Set Up Your Ad Placement
By default, Facebook will have “automatic placements” selected which can include Facebook, Instagram and
Audience Network, but generally will use the placements optimized to give you best results. You can also choose to
edit your placements if you have some data on what placement works best for you.
The full list of placements are:
Facebook
 Feed
 Instant Articles
 In-stream videos
 Right column
 Marketplace
 Stories
Instagram
 Feed
 Stories
Audience Network
 Native, banner and interstitial
 In-stream videos
 Rewarded videos
Messenger
 Inbox
 Sponsored messages
How to select your Facebook ad placements?
If you’re setting up your first campaign, we recommend that you use the Automatic Placements.
However, if you’re trying to get people convert on your website and it’s difficult to navigate on mobile, de-select the
Mobile Newsfeed, Instagram and Audience Network placements.
Here are the ad placements recommended by Facebook for every campaign objective:
 Brand awareness: Facebook and Instagram
 Engagement: Facebook and Instagram
 Video views: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network
 App installs: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network
 Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement): Facebook and Audience Network
 Product catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network
 Conversions: Facebook and Audience Network
Step 5: Set Up Your Campaign Budget and Bidding
Your Facebook ad budget and bidding options are such important topics, that we’ve devoted the entire Chapter 7 to
it.
Step 6: Set Up Your Facebook Ads
The actual ads are what users on Facebook will see, and you want them to look good. This is the final step of your
campaign creation process, You can select your preferred Facebook ad type and insert your ad images and copy.
There are two options here: you can either select an existing Facebook Page post or create new ads:
Marketing and Monetizing on YouTube
YouTube marketing is often overlooked by social media marketers. Some think YouTube counts as a social media
network. Others see it as more of an online video platform.
Either way, there are countless marketing opportunities on YouTube, especially if your audience is on the platform
and your competitors aren’t. YouTube counts two billion logged in monthly users worldwide, and ranks as the most
widely used online platform among U.S. adults.
So, in that sense, whether or not YouTube meets social network criteria is irrelevant. It’s more popular than all of
them. But with more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, effective YouTube marketing is easier said
than done.
Fortunately, we’ve put together this 10-step YouTube marketing strategy to get you started. Learn how to optimize
your channel, grow subscriptions, and expand your reach with YouTube ads and influencer partnerships.
YouTube marketing tools for business
YouTube Audio Library
Just about every successful YouTube video is backtracked with music and sound effects. But that doesn’t mean all
songs and sounds are free to use. Avoid infringing on copyright by sourcing directly from YouTube’s free audio
library.
Hootsuite
YouTube’s platform includes built-in scheduling and analytics tools. But if you manage multiple social media
channels or work with a team, Hootsuite takes a lot of work out of the workflow.
With a central dashboard, it’s easy to keep track of content calendars and assign tasks to different team members.
Schedule videos for YouTube and your other social networks simultaneously, and see how your YouTube marketing
fits into your broader social media strategy.
Want to save even more time? You can also moderate comments on your YouTube videos from the Hootsuite
dashboard.
Canva
Create channel and video art with pre-sized templates from Canva. This tool offers access to an expansive stock
photo library, and features that allow for full customization and branding. The best part is you don’t have to sweat
the specs. Canva takes care of that for you. Bonus: the app can be integrated into the Hootsuite dashboard.
Channelview
Channelview and its companion tool Channelview Insights monitor up to 10 different YouTube channels. This is
ideal for YouTube marketers who manage multiple clients, or for brands that have multiple channels for different
verticals. Channelview lets you streamline your workflow and measure your YouTube marketing efforts across the
board. Get the full picture on how your YouTube channels work in tandem so you can refine playlists and boost
subscribers.

Mentionlytics
Hook Mentionlytics up to your Hootsuite dashboard and start tracking every mention of your brand on YouTube.
With this tool, you can keep tabs of videos created about your brand, comments that mention you, and more. Show
your appreciation for positive comments, and show up for negative feedback, too. Customers appreciate it when
companies take their feedback seriously.
10 Step YouTube marketing strategy
Step 1. Create a YouTube channel for business
Start by opening a Brand Account on Google.
You can create a YouTube channel with your regular Google account, but if you do, only you can access it. Plus, the
account will be under your name and depending on your settings, may connect viewers to your personal email
address.
With a Brand Account, multiple authorized users can log in simultaneously. Even if you don’t need this right now,
it’s a good option to keep available as your business grows. With a Brand Account, you can also open and manage
multiple YouTube channels.
Step 2. Learn about your audience
If you’re just starting out on YouTube, set aside some time to learn about YouTube demographics.
This includes quantitative data, like where the majority of users live (nearly 15% of site traffic comes from the U.S.),
predominant age range (81% of 15–25 year-olds ), and viewing preferences (70% of watchtime is on mobile). If your
audience skews younger, it might be worth noting that Gen Z viewers are most likely to search for short-form
content.
Step 3. Research your competition
Next up: Competitive analysis. Like any platform, YouTube is a competitive space. By conducting an audit of
competitors, you can see how your channel measures up and identify opportunities.
Identify competitors
Start by identifying three to five competitors. If you’re not sure, try Google Ads’ free Keyword Planner to see which
companies rank for keywords associated with your brand. Or see what channels appear in searches on YouTube for
the same keywords. (After hitting Search, filter results by Channel.)
Record key metrics such as subscriber counts and viewership stats so you can use them as benchmarks for your
channel. Look at titles and descriptions to see what keywords they use. Read the comments on these videos to see
what people are saying. Chances are their audience will overlap with yours.
Conduct a SWOT
Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats presented by each
competitor. This is a good framework for spotting what’s working and not working, and where you can carve out a
niche with your YouTube channel.
Pro tip: Make sure your competitors aren’t serving ads on your videos! If they are, it’s possible to block them in
Google’s ad manager. More on that here.
Step 4. Learn from your favourite channels
Scroll through your subscriptions and your YouTube history. As you do, take note of the techniques and formats that
hold your attention. What keeps you coming back to these channels? How do the most popular channels drive views,
subscriptions, and engagement?
Step 5. Optimize your videos to get views
YouTube is a video search engine. Like Google which happens to own YouTube videos results are ranked by titles,
keywords, descriptions, and other factors. Then there’s the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which determines
70% of what people watch.

Optimize your videos so that they stand the best chance to show up in search results and get more views. We’ve
created a detailed guide on how to get views on YouTube. But here are a few SEO pointers to start with:
Write a strong title
The title is one of the primary signals YouTube’s algorithm and viewers look at to evaluate your video.
Include relevant keywords. Check what words people use to find your channel in Traffic Sources in YouTube
Analytics. Take a look at Google Trends and Google Ads’ Keyword Planner, too. See if any of these popular search
terms can be added to your title.
But avoid clickbait. False advertising typically leads to lower retention, which in turn leads to lower ranking. If the
keywords you find don’t match your topic, dig a little deeper in your keyword research. Focus on the topic and
content.
Write a keyword-rich description
Prioritize the first few lines of your description to provide a brief summary of your video topic. As early as possible,
plug in the keywords you’ve zeroed in on. Try not to sound too spammy. Write in coherent, natural-sounding
sentences.
YouTube shows roughly 300 characters (about three lines) above the Show More button users need to click on to see
your full description. This is where you should add more context for your video. For example, if you feature several
products, provide links to them.
Add cards, end screens, bumper ads, and watermarks
Cards, end screens, bumper ads, and watermarks are clickable CTAs you can add to your YouTube videos. These
elements help your videos drive actions and keep people on your channel.
Here’s a rundown of your different options:
Cards: Small, transparent CTAs that expand when clicked. Up to five can be used per video to direct viewers to your
website, fundraiser, playlist, and more.
End screens: Up to four clickable frames that appear in the last 5-20 seconds. Use them to promote related content,
your website, subscriptions, etc.
Bumper ads: Unskippable six-second video ads appearing at the start or end of a video.
Watermarks: Custom subscribe buttons visible only to non-subscribers. To add them to your videos, follow
YouTube’s instructions.
Step 6. Upload and schedule your videos
Now that you’ve created and optimized your videos, it’s time to schedule them for publication.
For most 18-34 year olds, YouTube has replaced traditional network television. But it hasn’t necessarily replaced
expectations. People still expect videos, especially webisodes and series, to be available on a reliable schedule.
Check your channel analytics to see if there’s a day or hour that tends to have a high amount of viewership and
engagement. Once you’ve pinpointed the best time to post, aim to publish regularly within this window.
Step 7. Optimize your channel to attract followers
Make it easier for people to find and follow you on YouTube by optimizing your channel. Here are a few ways to
prime your account for search, views, and follows.
Complete your YouTube profile
If you haven’t yet, add finishing touches to your YouTube profile. Fill out or add some polish to the following areas:
Channel description: In the “about” tab of your profile, provide a keyword-rich overview of what people can expect
when they subscribe to your channel. Include links to your website and social accounts here, too.
Channel icon: Upload a high-res version of your logo.
Channel art: Use this banner space to welcome viewers to your channel. This area is a good place to promote your
channel schedule, or an upcoming exhibit, product launch, or service. Master channel art and nab free templates with
this guide.
You can also add a list of featured channels to your profile. Feature your other own YouTube channels, or give
subscribers easy access to other YouTube resources they might be interested in. By doing this, you align your brand
with complimentary companies and add value to your page.
Add social media links to your banner
Your YouTube banner is a prime place to add a few key links. Use this area to link to your website, other social
channels, or even an auto-subscribe prompt. Put what matters most to your company upfront.
Create a channel trailer
Just like a movie trailer, your YouTube channel trailer is an opportunity to preview your channel. Channel trailers
auto-play when an unsubscribed visitor lands on your page. So, it’s best to assume they’re new to your page, and
possibly your brand.
Step 8. Try YouTube advertising
YouTube advertising can be an effective way to expand your reach beyond your channel. Looking to grow your
channel? Target an audience you think might be interested in your content.
Want to promote your brand, an event, or a new product? YouTube ads are good for that, too. People are three times
more likely to pay attention to online video ads versus TV ads.
YouTube ads are available in these four categories:
 Skippable in-stream ads
 Non-skippable in-stream ads (including bumper ads)
 Video discovery ads (formerly known as in-display ads)
 Non-video ads (i.e., overlays and banners)
For more info on YouTube’s ad formats and how to use them, check out our detailed guide to YouTube advertising.
Step 9. Try working with an influencer
One of the best ways to showcase your brand and reach a wider audience on YouTube is by working with an
influencer.
According to Google, 60% of YouTube subscribers are more likely to follow shopping advice from their favourite
creator over their favourite TV movie personality. Why? It’s often a lot easier to relate to creators. With the right
partnership, creators can transfer that reliability and trust to your brand.
When it comes to these partnerships, let the influencer do the talking. The more control you try to exert over the
partnership, the more you’ll impact the influencer’s brand. This makes the whole effort less genuine and their
followers will see it from a mile away.
Step 10. Analyze and adapt
With your YouTube channel up and running, it’s time to start measuring your success. And failures. Getting
YouTube marketing right involves testing and experimenting. Not everything will work, and that’s okay as long as
you learn from it.
Use YouTube Analytics to monitor the growth of your channel and track the performance of your videos. When you
publish a new video, keep an eye on:
 Significant changes in subscriber count
 New or changing audience demographics
 Video playback locations and traffic sources
 Device reports (mobile, desktop, smart TVs, etc.)
Monetization
 Advertising revenue: Get ad revenue from display, overlay, and video ads.
 Channel memberships: Your members make recurring monthly payments in exchange for special perks
that you offer.
 Merch shelf: Your fans can browse and buy official branded merchandise that’s showcased on your watch
pages.
 Super Chat & Super Stickers: Your fans pay to get their messages highlighted in chat streams.
 YouTube Premium Revenue: Get part of a YouTube Premium subscriber’s subscription fee when they
watch your content.
Qualify for YouTube Monetization
First, to qualify for monetization, your channel has to have at least 4,000 hours of public watch time within the last
year and at least 1,000 subscribers. This policy went into effect at the beginning of 2018 and is another way for
YouTube to prioritize watch time.
3 Easy Steps to Enable Monetization on YouTube
You’ve reached the required number of subscribers and watch hours, and you’ve checked your channel for red flags
now what? It’s time to learn how to enable monetization on YouTube.
 Click on YouTube Studio in the dropdown after you click on your icon in the top right corner of the screen.
 Once you’re in YouTube Studio, find the Channel menu on the left-hand side of your screen, and click on
Monetization.
  Finally, in the Monetization window, click Start.
Customize your YouTube Channel
Channel Trailer
Your channel trailer offers a preview of your channel so viewers can learn more and subscribe. By default, ads won’t
show on your channel trailer, unless your video contains third-party claimed content. If the viewer is already
subscribed to your channel, they’ll see your featured video.
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization and then Layout.
 Under Video spotlight, click ADD and select a video for your channel trailer.
 Click Publish.
Customize your channel
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization.
 Use the tabs to customize your channel:
Layout: Use this tab to organize your channel trailer, featured video, and channel sections.
Branding: Use this tab to update your profile picture, banner image, and video watermark.
Basic info: Use this tab to customize your channel name, description, and site links.
Featured video for Subscriber
You can highlight your video or any video on YouTube for your subscribers to watch when they visit your channel
homepage.
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization and then Layout.
 Under Video spotlight, click ADD and select a video to feature.
 Click Publish

Create a section
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization and then Layout.
 At the bottom, click ADD SECTION.
 Use the Down arrow to select your content.
 Videos: Choose to highlight posted videos.
 Popular uploads: Choose to highlight your live, past, and upcoming live streams.
 Playlists: Choose to highlight single, created, and multiple playlists.
 Channels: Choose to highlight subscriptions and featured channels.
 Click Publish.
Edit a section
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization and then Layout.
 At the bottom, Click Options on the section you want to edit and select Edit section contents.
 In the edit screen, change the content of the section.
 Click Publish.
Reorder sections on your channel
 Sign in to YouTube Studio.
 From the left menu, select Customization and then Layout.
 At the bottom, click the vertical bar on the section you want to move, then drag-and-drop to reorder.
  Click Publish.
Video optimization on YouTube
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new
channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your
overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform
does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
 Capture more attention
 Garner better integration with social media content
 Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
 Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create
engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
 Targeting your videos: Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
 Optimizing your videos: Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
 Promoting your videos: Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your
videos.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch
your videos before exiting.

The Audience Retention report analyses:

 Average view duration for all videos on your channel
 Top videos or channels listed by watch time
 Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
 Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
 Video comments
 Subscribers after watching a video
 Video shares
 Click-through rate
 Thumbs up/Thumbs down
The most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
 Watch time
 Channel authority
 Positive sentiment & engagement
 Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic
research.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking
for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
 Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
 Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
 Will they be happy with what they find?
 And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome
features:
 Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
 Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
 Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
 Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of
appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Strategies
1. Rename your video file using a target keyword.
Just like you would when optimizing written content, you’ll use an SEO tool to first identify keywords you’d like
your video to focus on (you can browse popular YouTube SEO tools below these tips, or just click that link earlier in
this sentence).

2. Insert your keyword naturally in the video title.

When we search for videos, one of the first things that our eyes are drawn to is the title. That’s often what determines
whether or not the viewer will click to watch your video, so the title should not only be compelling, but also clear
and concise.
Although your keyword plays a big part in your video title, it also helps if the title closely matches what the viewer is
searching for. Research conducted by Backlinko found that videos with an exact keyword match in the title have
only a slight advantage over those that don’t.
3. Optimize your video description.
First things first: According to Google, the official character limit for YouTube video descriptions is 1,000
characters. And while it’s okay to use all of that space, remember that your viewer most likely came here to watch a
video, not to read an essay.
If you do choose to write a longer description, keep in mind that YouTube only displays the first two or three lines of
text that amounts to about 100 characters. After that point, viewers have to click “show more” to see the full
description. That’s why we suggest front-loading the description with the most important information, like CTAs or
crucial links.
4. Tag your video with popular keywords that relate to your topic.
YouTube’s official Creator Academy suggests using tags to let viewers know what your video is about. But you’re
not just informing your viewers you’re, also informing YouTube itself. Dean explains that the platform uses tags “to
understand the content and context of your video.”
That way, YouTube figures out how to associate your video with similar videos, which can broaden your content’s
reach. But choose your tags wisely. Don’t use an irrelevant tag because you think it’ll get you more views in fact,
Google might penalize you for that. And similar to your description, lead with the most important keywords,
including a good mix of those that are common and more long-tail (as in, those that answer a question like “how do
I?”).
5. Categorize your video.
Once you upload a video, you can categorize it under “Advanced settings.” Choosing a category is another way to
group your video with similar content on YouTube, so it winds up in different playlists and gains exposure to more
viewers who identify with your audience.
It might not be as simple as it looks. In fact, YouTube’s Creator Academy suggests marketers go through a
comprehensive process to determine which category each video belongs in. It’s helpful, the guide writes, “to think
about what is working well for each category” you’re considering by answering questions like:
 Who are the top creators within the category? What are they known for and what do they do well?
  Are there any patterns between the audiences of similar channels within a given category?
 Do the videos within a similar category have share qualities like production value, length, or format?
6. Upload a custom thumbnail image for your video’s result link.
Your video thumbnail is the main image viewers see when scrolling through a list of video results. Along with the
video’s title, that thumbnail sends a signal to the viewer about the video’s content, so it can impact the number of
clicks and views your video receives.
7. Use an SRT File to add subtitles & closed captions.
Like much of the other text we’ve discussed here, subtitles and closed captions can boost YouTube search
optimization by highlighting important keywords.
In order to add subtitles or closed captions to your video, you’ll have to upload a supported text transcript or timed
subtitles file. For the former, you can also directly enter transcript text for a video so that it auto-syncs with the
video.
Adding subtitles follows a similar process, however, you can limit the amount of text you want displayed. For either,
head to your video manager then click on “Videos” under “Video Manager.” Find the video you want to add subtitles
or closed captioning to, and click the drop-down arrow next to the edit button. Then, choose “Subtitles/CC.” You can
then select how you’d like to add subtitles or closed captioning.
8. Add Cards and End Screens to increase your YouTube channel’s viewership.
Cards
When you’re watching a video, have you ever seen a small white, circular icon with an “i” in the center appear in the
corner, or a translucent bar of text asking you to subscribe? Those are Cards, which Creator Academy describes as
“pre formatted notifications that appear on desktop and mobile which you can set up to promote your brand and
other videos on your channel.”
You can add up to five cards to a single video, and there are six types:
 Channel cards that direct viewers to another channel.
 Donation cards to encourage fundraising on behalf of U.S. nonprofit organizations.
 Fan funding to ask your viewers to help support the creation of your video content.
 Link cards, which direct viewers to an external site, approved crowdfunding platform, or an approved
merchandise selling platform.
 Poll cards, which pose a question to viewers and allow them to vote for a response.
 Video or playlist cards, which link to other YouTube content of this kind.
End screens display similar information as cards, but as you may have guessed, they don’t display until a video is
over, and are a bit more visually detailed in nature.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube analytics allow you to measure the success of your YouTube marketing efforts. You can use them to
monitor your progress toward achieving specific goals like growing subscribers or increasing video views, and
identify what works and what flops.
Marketers can track just about everything from the YouTube Studio dashboard, from YouTube channel analytics
right down to real-time video metrics. But just because you can track everything, doesn’t mean you should.
Especially if you don’t know how to translate raw data into meaningful information.
YouTube metrics
YouTube analytics tools let you measure just about everything. But it’s not enough to simply record numbers. We
breakdown what each YouTube metric measures, why it matters, and how it fits into your overall performance
outlook.
YouTube channel metrics
Chart your overall channel performance, identify average trends, and get a snapshot of what works best with these
YouTube channel metrics.
Subscribers: The number of people who have subscribed to your YouTube channel. From the overview section of
the YouTube analytics dashboard, you can see how many subscribers you’ve gained over a selected period. Hover
over (or tap) the icon to see how this figure compares to your typical subscriber growth.
Realtime views: The number of views your last published videos have received in the past 48 hours. This metric is a
good way to track the performance of a YouTube Live or YouTube Premiere or recently published video.
Top videos: A snapshot of your top performing videos based on views, over a given period. By adjusting the
timeframe, you can identify your all-time best performing videos. Or, opt for a shorter time period to see if certain
videos have resurfaced.
Channel Views: The number of views your channel amassed over a given time period. Beside this metric, hover
over (or tap) the icon to see how it compares to the average amount of views your channel receives.
Channel Watch time: The total amount of time, in hours, people have spent watching videos on your channel over a
given period. You can also compare this stat to your average watch time, by hovering over or tapping the icon.

Audience metrics
Use YouTube audience metrics to understand who watches your videos. Use these insights to inform your content
and community management strategies.
Unique viewers: An estimate of the total number of people who watched your videos over a given period. Unlike
channel views, this metric does not include multiple views from the same person.
Average views per viewer: An average of the number of times a viewer watched videos on your channel. This
metric includes both views of multiple videos, and multiple views of the same video.
When your viewers are on YouTube: A bar chart that displays the days and times most of your viewers are on the
platform. Use this info to schedule uploads at optimal times. If you have an active Community Tab, make sure an
admin is available to create posts and respond to comments at this time.
Audience demographics: Take into consideration the age, gender, and location of your audience on YouTube. This
information can help you plan content geared toward viewers, or create content for a segment your current audience
is missing. Look also to see if viewers are using subtitles, and what languages are most used, so you can
accommodate accordingly.
YouTube discovery metrics
How good is your YouTube SEO? Learn how people are discovering your videos, on and off YouTube, and adjust
your promotion, algorithm, and keyword use accordingly.
Impressions and CTR: An impression is recorded each time someone sees the thumbnail for your video. The
Impressions click-through rate measures the percentage of people who clicked on the thumbnail to view your video.
A high click-through rate is a good indication your thumbnail and keywords are effective. But you’ll need to check
watch time and average view duration stats to see if your video seals the deal.
Bonus: Download the free 30-day plan to grow your YouTube following fast, a daily workbook of challenges that
will help you kick start your Youtube channel growth and track your success. Get real results after one month.
Tip: Look for similarities between videos that have high or low click-through rates. Do they have anything in
common?
Traffic sources: See where and how people are finding your videos. YouTube traffic sources include search, browse
features, playlists, and suggested videos—all of which are powered to varying degrees by the YouTube algorithm.
Other sources include Direct URL or External. Click on each source to see a breakdown and drill down further. If
you were expecting to see more traffic, consider these tips to promote your channel.
Tip: See if people watched your video on YouTube or embedded on a website. Go to the Reach tab and click
Advanced Mode. From there, click the More dropdown menu below the date, and select Playback Locations.
Top YouTube search terms: Under Traffic Source: YouTube Search, you can see the top search terms that led
people to your videos. This should give you a good indication of whether your SEO strategy is effective or needs to
be tweaked in some areas. If a video is searched for often, consider adding it to a playlist to help people discover
your related content.
YouTube video metrics
Whether a big production or a no-frills live stream, it’s worthwhile to track individual YouTube video metrics. When
you click on a video, you’ll land on a similar dashboard with Overview, Reach, Engagement, Audience, and
Revenue tabs only all the data pertains to the video in question.
Views: The number of times your video has been watched, including repeat views from the same person.
Video subscribers: The number of people who subscribed after watching your video. This metric provides one of
the strongest indications that your content is connected with viewers. On the flip side, you can also see the number of
subscribers lost with a certain video, too.
Watch time: The cumulative amount of time people have spent watching your video (or videos). Click See More to
have a look at how this figure changes over time. Has your watch time been consistent since you published the video,
or are there spikes you can correlate to specific events?
Audience retention: See how far people made it through your video. The audience retention report provides you
with an average view duration. It also shows you where the views drop off. Notice a big dip? Watch your video to try
to understand why people may have left around a specific mark.
Tip: Retention will always gradually decline, so focus on abrupt drops. If you see peaks, they indicate viewers are
re-watching certain parts of your video.
YouTube engagement metrics
See how and what people are engaging with on your channel. On desktop, engagement metrics can be found under
the Engagement tab. On mobile, tap on the Interactive Content tab.
Likes and dislikes: While often considered vanity metrics, likes and dislikes can give you a sense of what people
think about your video. If a video receives a lot of dislikes, set aside some time to read the comments and analyze
people’s sentiments. Comments are another form of engagement, and can be an invaluable source of qualitative data.
Tip: Under the Watch Time chart on desktop, click See More to see how many times your video has been shared.
Card and end screen reports: If you’ve added interactive content to your videos, these reports will give you an idea
of the elements that work best. Have a look at your Top cards and Top end screen element types overall. To see how
often people clicked on a card or end screen of a specific video, look at Clicks per card shown and End screen
element click rate.
Find definitions for specific card and end screen metrics here.
Top playlists: See what playlists are in high rotation. Track your most popular playlists, total views, average view
duration, and watch time. Take a look at Playlist starts and Playlist exit rate for more detail on engagement. To
improve overall retention, YouTube suggests putting the videos with the highest retention upfront.
Tip: Add relevant popular videos from other creators to your playlists to improve discover-ability and retention. See
what playlists your videos have been added to in traffic sources.
The Overview tab shows you key metrics for your channel. The main graph shows watch time, views, and
subscribers. If you’re in the YouTube Partner Program, you’ll also see your estimated revenue over the last 28 days.
In this tab you’ll also see 4 reports:
 Top videos: Your videos ranked by views.
 Realtime activity: Your performance over the last 48 hours or 60 minutes.
 Latest videos: Your performance from your 10 latest videos.
 Typical performance: A comparison of your latest video to your channel’s typical performance.
Reach
The Reach tab shows you your music’s overall reach. The main graph shows how many people saw an impression of
your videos or videos containing all or most of your song across YouTube, and how many people then clicked
through to watch the videos.
In this tab you’ll also see reports for:
 Traffic source types: Where viewers found the videos on YouTube.
 Top external sources: Traffic from websites and apps that have the YouTube video embedded or linked to.
 Impressions and how they led to watch time: How many people saw the video on YouTube and who then
went on to watch the video.
 Top YouTube search terms: Search terms that led viewers to the videos.

Engagement
The Engagement tab shows you what your viewers are watching. The main graph shows you the total number of
watch minutes, and, on average, how long viewers spent watching one of the videos.
In this tab you’ll also see cards for:
 Top videos and playlists: Videos and playlists featuring your music with the most watch time over the last 28
days.
 Top cards and end screens: Your top cards and end screens over the last 28 days.
Audience
The Audience tab shows you who’s watching. The main graph shows your returning & new viewers, unique viewers,
and subscribers.
In this tab you’ll also see reports for:
 Top geographies: Your audience by geography. Data is based on IP address.
 Top subtitle/CC languages: Your audience by subtitled language. Data is based on usage of subtitles/CC.
 Age and gender: Your audience by age and gender. Data is based on signed in viewers across all devices.
 When your viewers are on YouTube: Your audience’s online activity across your channel and all of
YouTube. Data is based on your viewers across all devices in the last 28 days.
 Other videos your audience watched: Your audience’s online activity outside of your channel. Data is based
on your viewers across all devices in the last 7 days.
 Other channels your audience watched: Your audience’s online activity across other channels on YouTube.
Data is based on your viewers across all devices in the last 28 days.
Revenue
The Revenue tab is only available to creators in the YouTube Partner Program and will show data only for videos
uploaded by you.
The Revenue tab helps you track your earnings on YouTube. The main graph shows how much you’re estimated to
earn, the number of videos that are monetized, and your estimated average gross revenue per thousand plays.
In this tab you’ll also see reports for:
 Monthly estimated revenue: How much your channel has earned in the last 6 months. For ongoing months
and months without finalized payments, revenue is estimated and subject to change.
 Top-earning videos: Videos with the highest estimated revenue for the time period.
 Revenue sources: How you’re making money with YouTube.
 Ad types: The format of the ad and its buying platform. This breakdown is only available for YouTube ad
revenue and impression-based metrics.
  Transaction revenue: Estimated net revenue from transactions, such as paid content and Super Chat,
deducting any partner charged refunds for the selected date range and region.

UNIT II: SEO FOUNDATION & STRATEGIES:

Understanding SEO, Keyword Strategy
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section,
also known as the organic listings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to
show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
 Ensure these search engines understand who you are and what you offer.
 Convince them that you are the most credible option for their users.
 Make your content deliverable.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed
individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other
optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search
results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for
any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.
Search Engine Optimization brings you the most precious traffic (also known as organic traffic), which is “free”
when a search engine shows your content to its users in the organic part of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page),
you do not pay for the ranking. When the user clicks on the result and visits your site, you do not pay Google for a
visit. And that briefly describes what is SEO used for.
Keywords
Keyword strategies are essential to developing winning search engine marketing campaigns. Your keyword strategy
should involve selecting high-performing keywords that drive relevant traffic to your business. Choosing the right
keywords for advertising can make all the difference in your campaigns, determining how well your advertisements
rank on Google and other search engine platforms.
The best keyword strategies rely on highly relevant keywords, which are keywords that relate closely to your
business or are associated with your industry.
Once you know the keywords you want to bid on, the next step in your keyword strategy involves crafting text ads
that incorporate your keywords. When visitors click on your ads in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you pay
the amount that you’ve bid on the keyword. This process is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
In SEO, we often refer to ‘keywords’ this is slightly misleading. ‘Search queries’ is a much better term. We are not
looking at individual words; we are looking at combinations of words that express a problem or a question.
Appropriate format for its users
Relevant: Google aims to match the best answer to the question it has understood. That is relevancy in a nutshell.
Trustworthy: Google wants to send its users to content from a source it is confident will satisfy its user a credible
brand or person it trusts.
Consumable: This is an awful word, and I apologize, but Google wants to send its users to the kind of content they
want to engage with, in a format they can consume.
Keyword Strategy
A keyword strategy contains every decision you take based upon your findings in your keyword research project,
whether it’s about the content you’re planning to write or how you are going to track the results in Analytics.
Keyword strategy is about how you want to target those keywords, now and in the future.
Looking at data
Of course, analyzing data plays a big role in the success of your keyword strategy. Both before and after, Google
Analytics provides invaluable insights into the performance of your site. Even Google Search Console can give a lot
of stuff to think about and opportunities to pursue.

Looking at the search engines itself

Of course, while looking at your competitors, you’ll often use search engines to see how they are doing. Doing these
types of searches can give you great insights into the strategy of your competitors. It also gives you a very good feel
of what happens when you type in your main focus keyphrase. What’s the on-screen real estate like? Are there
featured snippets you could target? Are there other types of rich results? Is there a local pack?
In some markets, if you track developments over time, you might see that search engines are increasingly giving
answers that lead to no-click searches. Always keep an eye on search engines, but don’t go obsessing about every
little algorithm update.
Looking at words
Words are at the center of everything. By doing keyword research, you should get great insights into the words
people use to find what they are looking for. Now, you need to produce user-oriented content that fits their intent and
goals perfectly.
Looking at competition
While writing up your keyword strategy, you need to take a good look at your competitors. What are they doing?
How well are they ranking for terms you’d like to attack? What kind of content do they have? Are there ways for you
to improve on that? Have you thought about looking at the long tail?
Looking at yourself
A good keyword strategy starts with looking at yourself and your business. What are you doing and why? What are
your goals? What’s your uniqueness in this world? What is the message you want to send? How’s your branding?
Why would anyone want to visit your site? Better insights lead to a better understanding of what you want to achieve
as to not waste resources. There’s no use focusing on the wrong things.
Looking at search intent
After you’ve fleshed out your uniqueness, it’s time to look at how. Search intent is the why behind the search that
should lead to your site. Do you know your audience? Are people only looking for information or are they willing to
buy stuff as well? Are there ways for you to target specific intents with focused content to influence this?
Targeting
Checking your analytics regularly to keep track of your SEO performance is incredibly important, but can’t have
performance without content tailored to the specific needs and goals of your strategy. If you’ve ran through all the
steps and did a thorough keyword research, you should have an idea of what you should target and how you should
do that. You can use these insights to create the content you need to make a success of your strategy. There’s a lot
you can do:
 Make landing pages
 Create specific types of content for the different search intents
 Maybe make specific content to get featured snippets
 Or maybe voice search is something that might fit your strategy
 apps
 Video
 Update your keyword strategy
On the way, there’s a lot that can happen and your keyword strategy should take that into account. Regularly re-
evaluate your keyword strategy. Have there been significant changes in the world around you that need to be
assessed? It might be that your users’ language changed or that a new competitor is gobbling up market share. Keep
an eye on things and adjust where necessary.

Content Optimization, Long-term Content Planning

Content Optimization
Essentially, content optimization, or SEO (search engine optimization), is the process of optimizing your content to
make sure that it’s more visible through the web. Search engine robots will rank highly optimized content higher on
a search engine page than non-optimized content. Optimizing a website involves many nuanced details, and search
engine robots are weighing everything from content to HTML to backlinks.
It’s important to note that Google is responsible for the majority of the search engine traffic in the world. This may
vary from one industry to another, but it’s likely that Google is the dominant player in the search results that your
business or website would want to show up in, but the best practices outlined in this guide will help you to position
your site and its content to rank in other search engines, as well.
Beginners can improve their search engine ranking by referring to the following:
 Write Great Content: While content alone isn’t everything, it is a big part of the picture, and great content
can dramatically improve your chances of a great SEO ranking. When writing content, make sure it’s
relatable to the user/reader, is original, and is written for your website and your purposes. Since you know
your business better than anyone, writing content that describes your product, your services, or your business
updates should buy right up your alley.
 Keep New Content Coming: Another tip for optimizing your content is to be constantly posting new
content. Search engine robots love new content, and your readers will, too.
 Use Headings: Another thing that search engines love is big text, so make sure you use headings and
subheadings in your writing and make sure you make the text larger or bolded. Another tip: use keywords
within the heading, which will kill two birds with one stone.
 Optimize the Text: You can optimize existing text simply by adding a few key content optimization
devices. Title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs are all a great way to get your content
noticed by search engines.
 Optimize Images: People love images, and consumers often spend as much time searching for photos as
they do text. As such, make sure you’re up to speed by optimizing all images within your content. Add alt
tags, which serve as alternate text; use image tags, which are the words that show up when a user scrolls over
an image; and make sure the file size of your images has been adjusted properly to ensure that all images
load and view properly.
 Optimize Videos: Like images, great headings, and other graphics or bold colors, videos grab the readers’
attention and help to keep them hooked. If you don’t have your own videos to upload, you can use websites
such as YouTube to find great clips that can be embedded into your site. As always, use good keywords in
your videos’ title, descriptions, and tags; share videos on social media sites; and use a video as a call to
action or another way to drive sales.
 Stop Writing for Search Engines: Believe it or not, most search engine robots can tell when you’re writing
content specifically for search engine optimization and not for the user, which hurts your ranking. Instead of
focusing exclusively on keywords, over-linking, or creating content that’s low quality just for the purpose of
publishing, relax, take a breath, and back-off from over optimizing. Focusing on content that is natural
sounding and useful will get you a long way, and then optimizing after that by doing the things mentioned
above is key.
 Use Social Media: If you posted your blog to Facebook or Twitter once and then gave up on it, you’re not
doing your best to optimize your page. Social media is very important when it comes to content
optimization, and simply posting a link isn’t enough. Rather, build relationships with relevant users and
 connections through social media sites, share other users’ content too, provide feedback, and use your social
media site for more than just posting.
 Keep it Clean: Finally, know that a search engine won’t publish anything that’s hard to find or illegal to
post. As such, make sure you keep your code clean and organized, using HTML and CSS layouts, which
help search engines, find your content efficiently. Additionally, know that anything illegal (unlawful use of
copyrighted content) won’t be published. For best results, use your own content, and be creative to avoid
raising any red flags.
Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, but at a high level:
 Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information relevant to the searcher’s query.
 Google’s algorithm determines relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating
(algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, based on the keywords
it contains and other factors (known as “ranking signals”).
 Google determines “quality” by a number of means, but a site’s link profile – the number and quality of
other websites that link to a page and site as a whole is among the most important.
Key Factor
 Search Volume: The first factor to consider is how many people are actually searching for a given keyword.
The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the potential audience you stand to reach.
Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through
search.
 Relevance: A term may be frequently searched for, but that does not necessarily mean that it is relevant to
your prospects. Keyword relevance, or the connection between content on a site and the user’s search query,
is a crucial ranking signal.
 Competition: Keywords with higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic, but competition
for premium positioning in the search engine results pages can be intense.
Key element
Title Tags
While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even
punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to
rank for in your pages is still valuable. And the single most impactful place you can put your keyword is your page’s
title tag.
Meta Descriptions
While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element
that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad
copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always
show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can
greatly increase traffic.
Body Content
The actual content of your page itself is, of course, very important. Different types of pages will have different
“jobs” your cornerstone content asset that you want lots of folks to link to needs to be very different than your
support content that you want to make sure your users find and get an answer from quickly. That said, Google has
been increasingly favoring certain types of content, and as you build out any of the pages on your site, there are a
few things to keep in mind:
 Thick & Unique Content: There is no magic number in terms of word count, and if you have a few pages
of content on your site with a handful to a couple hundred words you won’t be falling out of Google’s good
graces, but in general recent Panda updates in particular favor longer, unique content. If you have a large number
(think thousands) of extremely short (50-200 words of content) pages or lots of duplicated content where nothing
changes but the page’s title tag and say a line of text, that could get you in trouble. Look at the entirety of your
site: are a large percentage of your pages thin, duplicated and low value? If so, try to identify a way to “thicken”
those pages, or check your analytics to see how much traffic they’re getting, and simply exclude them (using a
noindex meta tag) from search results to keep from having it appear to Google that you’re trying to flood their
index with lots of low value pages in an attempt to have them rank.
  Engagement”: Google is increasingly weighting engagement and user experience metrics more heavily.
You can impact this by making sure your content answers the questions searchers are asking so that they’re likely
to stay on your page and engage with your content. Make sure your pages load quickly and don’t have design
elements (such as overly aggressive ads above the content) that would be likely to turn searchers off and send
them away.
 “Sharability”: Not every single piece of content on your site will be linked to and shared hundreds of times.
But in the same way you want to be careful of not rolling out large quantities of pages that have thin content,
you want to consider who would be likely to share and link to new pages you’re creating on your site before
you roll them out. Having large quantities of pages that aren’t likely to be shared or linked to doesn’t
position those pages to rank well in search results, and doesn’t help to create a good picture of your site as a
whole for search engines, either.
Alt Attributes
How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how
much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to
provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get
deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful
from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity outside of your content to help search
engines understand what your page is about.
URL Structure
Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in
reports using a segmented, logical URL structure), and a share ability standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are
easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many
keywords as possible; create a short, descriptive URL.
Schema & Markup
Finally, once you have all of the standard on-page elements taken care of, you can consider going a step further and
better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize schema) to understand your page.
Schema markup does not make your page show up higher in search results (it’s not a ranking factor, currently). It
does give your listing some additional “real estate” in the search results, the way ad extensions do for your AdWords
ads.
Link building Strategies
A solid link building strategy is key for reaching SEO success. There are many different approaches you can take
towards SEO link building, and we’ve organized an assortment of various link building techniques to help you with
your SEO strategy.
Link building, simply put, is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. All marketers and
business owners should be interested in building links to drive referral traffic and increase their site’s authority.
Improve your link building strategy with these link building tips and tricks. Read through and follow these guides
and you’ll have a full-fledged link building campaign up and running in no time.
Link building is important because it is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages.
Google notes that:
“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to
their pages.”
Imagine that we own a site promoting wind turbine equipment that we sell. We’re competing with another wind
turbine equipment manufacturer. One of the ranking factors Google will look at in determining how to rank our
respective pages is link popularity.
Steps.
 Set up a project by entering your domain.
 Add up to 10 keywords that you want to rank for.
 Add up to 10 competitors to look up the best backlink prospects for your website.
 Find prospects. Set up a strategy for each one and carry it out.
 Reach out to the website owner within the Link Building tool interface.
 Track your success.
Simple Link Building Strategies:
There are a number of link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours:
 Content Creation & Promotion: Create compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally
want to reference and link to, and tell people about it. You have to spread the word before you can expect
anyone to find your content and link to it!
 Reviews & Mentions: Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as
popular bloggers or people with a large social media following.
 Links from Friends & Partners: Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site.
Remember that relevance matters; links from sites that are in the same general industry or niche as your site
will have more value than links from random, unrelated sites.
Step 1: Get to know your audience
If you want your audience to grow, you need to find out how to expand your audience or how to find a new
audience. You should, therefore, know two things: who is my audience right now and what does my ideal audience
looks like. At Yoast.com for example, we started out with an audience mainly consisting of (web) developers, but we
aspired to reach an audience consisting of a more general group of WordPress users (whilst keeping our initial
developer’s audience). We adapted our content to this new group of people, but in order to reach these ‘new’
audiences, links from other websites to our new (less nerdy) content were also important. You should do some
research in order to get to know your audience.
Step 2: Make a list of websites that appeal to your desired audience
If you have a clear picture of your present and desired audience in mind, you can make a list of websites that could
possibly help you in reaching your new audience. Find those websites that already appeal to your desired audience.
Links from these websites could help you to reach your new audience.
Step 3: Write amazing content
In order to get other websites to link to your content, your content simply has to be amazing. And more importantly,
it should appeal to the audience you’re aspiring to make your readers or buyers. Make sure your pieces and articles
are well structured and nicely written.
Step 4: Match content to websites
If you have written an awesome blog post, you should dive into the list you made as part of your growth strategy
(step 2). Choose sites from that list that could possibly link to the article you have written. If you have a long tail
keyword approach (writing about small and niche subjects) the number of websites that will be fit to link to your
blog post will be small.
Make an effort to find those websites that really fit the specific topic of your blog post or article. These websites will
probably be very willing to link, as your blog post really fits their content. More importantly, visitors that will come
to your website following that link will really be interested in the topic of your article (making chances of conversion
and recurring visits much higher).
Step 5: Reach out
If you’ve really put an effort in both writing content as well as finding websites that fit the content of your article,
you should contact the website you would like to link to your site. Tell them about the content or product and ask
them to write about it and link to it. Most people will be happy to write about your product if this means they’ll
receive it for free! You can use email, but in many cases, Twitter or even a phone call is a great way to contact
people as well. Make sure to reach out in a personal way, never send out automated emails.
Step 6: Use social media
If your content is original and well structured, you’ll be able to reach new audiences (and get links) by using social
media as well. Make sure you tweet about your blog, perhaps send some tweets to specific persons of whom you
think they may like your article. Facebook is also a great way to get exposure for your articles (maybe… even
promote it a bit?). And as many people like, tweet and share your articles, you’re bound to receive some more links
as well.
There are a few key factors to consider:
 Anchor Text: One of the most important things search engines take into account in ranking a page is the
actual text a linking page uses to talk about your content. So, if someone links to our Good Guys Wind
Turbine Parts site with the text “wind turbine parts”, that will help us to rank highly for that keyword phrase,
whereas if they had simply used text like “Good Guys LLC” to link to our site, we wouldn’t enjoy the same
ranking advantage for the phrase “wind turbine parts”.
 Quality of the Linking Page: Another factor taken into account is the quality of the page that is sending the
link; search engines allow links from high-quality, trusted pages to count more in boosting rankings than
questionable pages and sites.
 Page the Link is Aimed at: Many times, when people talk about your site they’ll link to the home page.
This makes it difficult for individual pages to achieve high rankings (because it’s so difficult for them to
generate their own link equity).
Interlinking your pages in a few easy steps:
 Keyword Research for Link Building: First, you need to utilize a keyword research tool to have numerous
keywords suggested to you that are both relevant and popular.
 Assign Keywords to Content: Next, you have to group your keywords strategically, creating a search-
friendly information architecture.
 Link Pages Using Targeted Anchor Text: The final step is to apply your keyword research to intelligent
inter-linking; you do this by linking to content using the keywords you’ve discovered.
Measuring SEO effectiveness
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your web pages and content to rank high on a search
engine. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or
services. This is why SEO is also the practice of attracting quality traffic to your website.
Whether you’re a freelance photographer or party supplier developing an e-commerce site, having a digital presence
is an essential component of your inbound marketing strategy. Hence, implementing an effective SEO strategy is a
strong start to boosting your website’s visibility, growing your organic traffic, and attracting new customers.

Measure SEO Success

It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive to determine how successful your SEO campaign has been in hindsight if
you never established any goals before the campaign started. Remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; if your
company set a goal to improve organic traffic by 5% year over year, allocated the appropriate resources towards
attaining that goal, and then achieved an organic traffic increase of 10%, you could view this campaign as extremely
successful. However, if the goal had been to double organic traffic, the campaign would be perceived as a complete
failure. For this reason, your SEO goals should be well established before the campaign truly begins. Without
establishing these goals, you will have no baseline to grow from. Determining how much of your marketing budget
should be allocated to online marketing is also nearly impossible without proper goals in place, meaning you have a
very good chance at either under spending or overspending, neither of which are good for business.
On the other hand, not every company will find it simple to so readily define these goals, especially if we’re talking
about a startup company or even an existing business attempting to adapt to an increasingly digital world with no
idea where to begin. If that is the case, I would strongly recommend scheduling a consultation with a professional
SEO agency that should be able to walk you through the basics. For a reasonable price, a reputable SEO company
can perform an audit of your website, identify preexisting weaknesses in your website, analyze your competition and
provide you with a high-level overview of what you’d be up against. They will also be able to use their expertise to
help you create realistic goals based on data and research.
There are a number of things to look at when gauging the success of your SEO campaign. To make informed
decisions, you must be armed with data about your website, which can be achieved by connecting your website to an
analytics software. Google Analytics is the most popular analytics software for websites since it is free and plenty
powerful for most applications.
While analyzing each and every source of traffic certainly has it’s role in crafting your SEO campaigns, for the
purposes of learning how to evaluate your campaign in this article, we will be focusing mainly on organic statistics.
In the digital marketing world, organic search results are the results that the search engine has listed due to relevancy
to a user’s query, not due to “inorganic” reasons such as paid placement. The word “organic” has transformed into a
digital marketing industry adjective, which indicates that you are discussing “free” search traffic from the search
engines, mainly Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Analytical Data
Organic Search Traffic
One of the most important metrics of your website is how many users visit your site. Track your organic search
traffic monthly and make sure that overall it is increasing. You may have some drops once in awhile due to
seasonality and other variables, but it is important that in general you see an upward trend in organic search traffic to
your site. You can view this data in an number of ways, including graphically.
Organic Revenue
If you are dealing with ecommerce SEO and have properly implemented ecommerce tracking, you will have access
to your organic revenue data, meaning revenue your site earned strictly from organic visits to your site. Of course,
you want to make sure that revenue is increasing month to month and year to year, but don’t be discouraged by
occasional dip here and there from things like seasonality. When you notice a dip that you lack an explanation for,
it’s time to dig deeper into your data.
Bounce Rate
A website’s bounce rate is essentially the percentage of visitors who leave your site after only viewing one page.
These users often “bounce” back to the search results page to find something they deem more relevant to their query.
A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing as it could simply mean that users have immediately found the
information they were looking for on the page they landed on and left. More often, however, a high bounce rate is an
indication that your visitors are not seeing what they had hoped to see when clicking on your result, and that is a
problem. This could mean that you are not targeting the right keywords, that your site doesn’t look “legitimate”, or
that some other factors are at play preventing the visitor from engaging with your website.

e-Commerce Conversion Rate

Your ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visits to your website that resulted in an ecommerce
transaction. In Google Analytics, you can hone in by traffic source to see your organic ecommerce conversion rate,
which will help you understand if your organic traffic is actually converting to a sale. A good ecommerce conversion
rate is hard to define, as in some industries even converting 1% of your visitors into a sale or lead could be
considered terrific. Make sure that your organic ecommerce conversion rate is at least always staying the same or
slightly improving, and analyze your checkout funnels for drop offs to determine what might be preventing your
users from making a purchase. Sometimes, it can be as simple as adding some trust badges to your store to make
users feel more confident their transaction is secure.
Time on Page by Visitors
Another important metric you can view in Google Analytics is the amount of time your visitors are spending on your
pages. This is especially important on your organic landing pages as these are the pages your organic visitors will see
first. This statistic is really beneficial for understanding the searching intent of your visitors and how you might
improve upon that. If users are arriving to a landing page and quickly navigating to another section of your website,
you may want to make it easier for them to find what they are looking for. The goal is to make your website as user-
friendly as possible.
Goal
Google Analytics allows you to define “goals” on your website, and then track their completion. Practically any
action a user could take while on your website could be setup as a goal, from clicking an element on your site to
submitting a contact form to making a purchase. You can also implement more abstract goals such as a user spending
a predetermined amount of time on a given page. Some of the more sophisticated goals may require a bit of
Javascript help from your front end developers.
Percent of Total Traffic That Comes from Organic Search
The larger the percentage of your total traffic that comes from organic, the more you are relying on organic search to
drive traffic to your site. Typically, we aim to have as high a percentage of traffic come from organic, as this traffic
is “free” once you have earned the rankings. Pay attention to how much of your site comes from organic and if you
notice this percentage starting to drop, you may need to rethink your SEO strategy. Of course, other sources of traffic
are very important too, and a shrinking organic traffic percentage may just mean you’ve been paying more attention
to Social Media traffic or Pay-Per-Click traffic. Either way, you should always have a good idea of what percentage
of your total traffic is coming from organic search.
Pages Per Visitor
The more pages a visitor views after arriving at your site, the more engaging your site is. At its core, Google aims to
serve people with the most relevant and useful websites that offer value that cannot be found elsewhere, or at least
cannot be found easily. Looking at this statistic from an organic standpoint may tell you that you are targeting the
right users or users who ultimately don’t have interest in your website after arrival. On the other hand, your visitors
may be interested in your content, but your site may not be user-friendly enough. Remember, data is objective but
your interpretations are subjective. Be sure to dig deep enough to find causation in your data, not just correlation.
Returning vs. New Users
new vs returning visitors to measure seo success The amount of visitors that return to your website can help you to
understand how engaging your website is and whether or not users are identifying with your brand. Even if you
convert 100% of your visitors, if none of them return to convert again in the future, you are losing out a big time
source of revenue! Ideally, your visitors won’t just make a sale, they will share their purchase on social media, post
links in online forums like Reddit, and return to make another purchase.
Crawl Errors
Search engines rely on automated programs that “crawl” your website in order to add it to their index. No matter
how great your website is, if Google and the other search engines can’t understand your website, your rankings will
suffer. Fortunately, Google provides a function in their Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) that allows you
to check for crawling errors, and it will tell you if it is having difficulty crawling any of your pages. If you have
thousands of crawl issues showing up in Search console, odds are have some other glaring SEO problems. Here is a
list of common crawl errors and how to fix them.
Traffic By Device Type
With mobile ecommerce stats showing that more and more users are accessing the web without conventional desktop
computers, it’s more important than ever to be paying attention to which devices users are using to access your
website. These days, the majority of online traffic comes from mobile devices, which is why it is important to know
what devices your visitors use to make sure you are delivering the most user-friendly view of your site to each
visitor. You can check to see how “mobile-friendly” your website is with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page.
Phone Tracking
You’re not getting a clear picture of your SEO campaign results unless you’re tracking phone calls from your site.
This is especially true for lead generation sites and is more important for some industries than others. Depending on
the industry, up to 100% of your leads can arrive via phone calls! Without call tracking implemented, you will have
very little insight as to how they found you.
Call tracking provides you with customer data and information that enables you to make more informed strategic
decisions and focus your efforts on the traffic sources that work for you. Some call tracking services are more robust
than others, but the majority of them will allow you to see the traffic source that drove the call, the duration of the
call, the search query that the customer used to find your site, and other relevant information.
Keyword Volume
Are you targeting keywords that are actually searched frequently? Ranking on the first page for hundreds of terms
that nobody searches for is worthless. Imagine your business sells dogs, cats, monkeys, unicorns and lizard. All other
things equal, it would be wise to focus your efforts on “dogs”, since it gets the most search volume. However, we
know that all things are not equal and profit margins on unicorns are just outrageous these days.
Keyword Relevance & Search Intent
Are the keywords that you are targeting relevant to your audience? Is there a clear search intent that you are
delivering what the searcher is most likely searching for? For example, if your website sells unicorns, ranking for
“free unicorns” is not nearly as beneficial as ranking for “unicorns for sale”. Still, a fraction of those looking for free
unicorns may be persuaded into buying some, so don’t completely write those keywords off.
Keyword Quantity
Of course, we want relevant keywords that are searched frequently ,but we also want a lot of them! Each month, you
should track the amount of keywords that are ranking #1 overall, how many are on the first page of the results, as
well as the second and third pages. Look for increases in these numbers each month and avoid losing rankings on
keywords that have already proven successful sources of qualified traffic. Each keyword that your site ranks for will
result in an increase in organic traffic, so as long as they are relevant to your operations, the more keywords the
merrier.
Domain Quantity
How many separate domains link back to your site is an indication of how trustworthy you are. Generally speaking,
the more domains that link to your site, the better.
Domain Quality
Links from CNN.com are likely more valuable than links from TommysAwesomeBlog.com, since CNN.com has a
very strong backlink profile of its own. The quality of a domain is assessed by the search engine by using a number
of metrics, including backlink profile, age of domain, and a lot of other factors.
Domain Relevancy
It’s not just the amount of domains and their quality that matters, but relevancy as well. Google’s search algorithm is
capable of making many different types of associations. If you sell spaceships, a link from NASA.gov is much more
beneficial than one from the NSA.gov. .
Page Quality
Similar to domain quality, but on a page basis. If your links are coming from “low quality” page(s) on strong
domain(s), it will not have as big an impact as if it was coming from a high quality page on the same domain.

Anchor Text
With the recent iterations of Google’s penguin algorithm, the anchor text ratio of a websites backlink profile has
become a huge point of importance for maintaining the overall “health” of your website. The short and simple
explanation is that your website should have as natural of a backlink profile as possible, including the anchor text of
those links. If you look at any big brand website, you will see a very natural distribution of the anchor text being
used in inbound links.
SEO for E-commerce
e-commerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
When people search for products that you sell, you want to rank as highly as possible so you get more traffic.
You can get traffic from paid search, but SEO costs much less. Plus, ad blockers and ad blindness can reduce the
effectiveness of paid search, so you’ll want to optimize for search regardless.
e-commerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, meta data, internal link structure,
and navigational structure for search and user experience. Each product you sell should have a dedicated page
designed to draw traffic from search engines.
However, you don’t want to forget about static, non-product-oriented pages on your site, such as the following:
 Homepage
 About page
 A.Q. page
 Blog articles
 Help center answers
 Contact page
The best ecommerce SEO strategy includes:
 Keyword research to find the types of keywords customers are searching.
 Site architecture based on your keyword research.
 On-Page SEO through strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content.
 Technical SEO to help ensure search engines can crawl your site efficiently.
 Local SEO to help drive local organic traffic (if you have a brick and mortar).
 Content marketing to drive additional organic visitors.
 Link Building to help improve the authority of your website.
 Measuring SEO Success with tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.
Strategy
 Prioritize pages: Which pages on your site get the most traffic? Start with them. Additionally, if you want
people to focus on a specific or flagship product, optimize for that product first.
 Create a workflow: SEO requires you to meet lots of specific requirements. Choosing keywords, adding
meta data, naming your images correctly, adding image alternate attributes, and incorporating related
keywords all fall under this category.
 Check out the competition: Your ecommerce SEO strategy should be designed to outwit the competition.
Look at your top competitors’ sites and check out their SEO efforts. Identify ways to make yours better.
 Follow through with CRO: Conversion rate optimization (CRO) should follow SEO. We’ll talk about that
more later on.
Analyze the Keyword Search Volume, CPC, and User Intent
Before you use a keyword, do some research on it. Know how often people search for it (keyword search volume),
how competitive it is in the paid advertising space (cost-per-click, or CPC), and what people are looking for when
they use that keyword.
Search volume tells you how much interest a particular keyword inspires in consumers. A high search volume
indicates greater popularity, which means you’ll get more active searches for that keyword.
CPC tells you how much people pay per click when they buy advertising based on a specific keyword. A high CPC
indicates increased competition. If your target keyword is extremely competitive, consider finding a long-tail
alternative.
Finally, user intent describes what people want to find when they type a specific keyword into Google’s search bar.
Let’s say, for instance, that someone types “shower” and hits Enter.
Focus on Homepage SEO
The homepage is typically where most businesses focus their SEO budget and energy. While it is definitely one of
the top pages of your website to optimize, it is by no means the only one you should focus on.
That said, you do want to optimize your homepage well. The key things you want to add and optimize are include
the following.
Homepage Title Tag
The SEO title tag is one of the most important element of on-site search optimization. It should include your
business name along with the main keyword phrase you are targeting. You should write this title tag in less than 70
characters and in a way that is appealing to search visitors, as they will see it in search results.
Homepage Meta Description
While this is not important as far as keyword rankings, the meta description for your homepage is a 160-character
description of your business that will also show up in search beneath the title tag. Write it in a way that encourages
people to want to visit your website.
Homepage Content
The content on your homepage should help visitors learn more about your business and the products you have to
offer in a clear and concise way. Avoid overloading visitors with too much information. Consider featuring your top
few products on the homepage and your unique selling proposition.
Cluttered homepages can confuse visitors as well as search engines. For instances, maybe you sell products in many
different categories. Google will struggle to identify what you sell and who you’re targeting with your products, so
get specific about what your site offers.
Simplify Your Site Architecture
As you are adding products and categories to your store, remember that site architecture plays an important role in
search optimization. Particularly, you want to have a distinct hierarchy of navigation, from your homepage to
product categories to the products listed within them.
Search engine bots will discover your pages and products on your website based on a clear internal linking structure
that is easy to follow and not too deep.
The rule of thumb for search engines and visitors is to make sure people can reach everything within three clicks.
From the homepage, they should only have to make a maximum of three clicks to get to any product on your
website.
Internal Linking
Internal links serve two main purposes:
 Boosting e-commerce SEO by showing how pages are related to one another
 Increasing time on site by encouraging visitors to further explore your site
Linking to related products or to information-rich blog articles can help improve ecommerce SEO and make your
site more tempting for deep dives.
Optimize Product Pages
Product pages are the lifeblood of your business, so you will want to focus a lot of your energy on optimizing them.
Many ecommerce store owners simply write a few lines of text about each product and throw up an image or video.
You need more information on your product pages so Google can find them. Here are the specific things you want to
work on.
Product Name
The name of your product is important. In most cases, it’s also used in the SEO title and URL of your product page.
This is why you may want to consider adding a common search term or keyword phrase to your products.
For example, if you are selling T-shirts, be sure to include “T-shirt” or “tee” in the product name. That way, the
keyword also ends up in the SEO title and URL.
Image Optimization
Images are an important part of your product page. Stand in your customer’s shoes for a moment. Are you more
likely to buy a product from a site that clearly depicts the product from as many angles as possible, from a site that
has no image at all, or from one that is small and illegible?
Not only are images important for your customers, but they are important for search optimization.
Video
Help your customer feel more confident about their purchases by also adding video to your product page. The video
can be basic information about your product (like a commercial), a how-to video on ways to use the product to get
results, or testimonials from people who have used the product.
Publishing videos offsite on networks like YouTube can be a great way to attract and educate potential customers
about your products.
Customer Reviews
Reviews are another way to boost customer confidence in your product, so if you have a good product, be sure to
allow them.
Bad reviews aren’t always a bad thing either. Think about it – if you have a higher-priced item that has great
reviews, and a lower-priced item with so-so reviews, then people will be more likely to choose the higher priced
item, resulting in greater sales for your business.
FAQ Content
Do people ask questions about your products? Of course they do. Having product-specific FAQ content on your
product pages is a key to conversions.
If customers have questions that you don’t answer, they’ll go somewhere else to find those answers and likely buy
from the source that answers the questions.
Having a general FAQ page on your website is also a good idea. Answering basic questions about your website’s
security, shipping, and return policies can increase buyer confidence, leading to more sales.
Use Responsive Design
Reduce Page Load Speed
Page load speed is also a ranking signal, both for desktop and mobile. The faster your pages load, the better Google
will rank you.
Create Backlinks for e-commerce SEO
Backlinks are another ranking signal Google uses to determine where your pages belong in the SERPs. The more
backlinks you have from high-quality sites, the more authoritative your site becomes.
Building backlinks for ecommerce sites doesn’t have to be difficult. Guest posting on blogs related to your niche is
one easy, white-hat way to build links. Simply email the owners of the blogs you’re interested in and offer them
three or more ideas for potential guest posts.
Local Search, Mobile SEO
Local Search
In computer science, local search is a heuristic method for solving computationally hard optimization problems.
Local search can be used on problems that can be formulated as finding a solution maximizing a criterion among a
number of candidate solutions. Local search algorithms move from solution to solution in the space of candidate
solutions (the search space) by applying local changes, until a solution deemed optimal is found or a time bound is
elapsed.
Local search algorithms are widely applied to numerous hard computational problems, including problems from
computer science (particularly artificial intelligence), mathematics, operations research, engineering, and bio
informatics. Examples of local search algorithms are WalkSAT, the 2-opt algorithm for the Traveling Salesman
Problem and the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.
Local search marketing is anything you do on the web to promote a physical business that makes face-to-face contact
with its customers. It applies to both single-location small and medium businesses (SMBs), national enterprise
brands, and chains. If a company meets with its customers directly either through a storefront or service area it’s
termed a “local business” and a unique set of techniques and skills can be used to increase its visibility on the
Internet. This may also be referred to as “local SEO,” or local search engine optimization.
Far from being a one-and-done form of marketing, good local SEO builds upon a base of clear business information,
using an array of marketing practices to transform an unknown brand into a local household word.
Guideline compliance
The way you conceptualize and market your type of local business will be based on the Guidelines for Representing
Your Business On Google. Your Google My Business listing is the most important listing you build for your
company; failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in ranking failures and even listing takedowns. To
play it smart, you must be able to see your business the way Google does and follow the appropriate guidelines.
Site authority
Your website can accrue some authority simply by virtue of its age, but you can actively pursue authority by earning
links and mentions of your business from quality, relevant sources. Beware of links from low-quality sources or
schemes that attempt to inflate link count with no concern for relevance. Industry surveys indicate that the quality
and authority of the links you earn have a major impact on your local search rankings.
Site quality
If your website loads quickly, has a sensible structure, renders properly on all devices, features high-quality content,
is free of malware or other malicious elements, and is easy for people to use, you’re meeting basic quality goals. No
amount of marketing can make up for poor UX (user experience) on your website.
Site optimization
The search engine optimization (SEO) of your website aims to increase your organic (non-paid) search engine
visibility via both technical and creative means. This Beginner’s Guide to SEO breaks down the elements for you.
You must also understand that local SEO consists of everything traditional SEO does, plus geography. In other
words, local business websites don’t just focus on keywords about products, services, and topics; they also highly
feature terms relevant to the cities in which the business serves.
NAP consistency
“NAP” is the common acronym for “name, address, phone number.” These three pieces of data make up the core of
your business information in the world of local search. You’ll also sometimes see this written as NAP+W, with the
“W” standing for your website URL. In order for consumers and search engines to trust the data they find across the
web about your business, you must make every effort to ensure that its NAP+W is consistent on your website and on
all third-party platforms where your business is listed or mentioned.
NAP breadth
A core task of local SEO involves helping your NAP spread across the Internet. Much of this work hinges on
building structured citations (local business listings) on important platforms like Google My Business, Facebook,
Bing, Yelp, Superpages, etc. You can also build important citations on popular niche directories that relate
specifically to your geography or industry. The breadth of your NAP can grow as your business earns unstructured
citations/mentions on social platforms, blogs, news sites, and other resources. The number of both structured and
unstructured citations you earn is believed to have a positive impact on local search rankings, as search engines find
your business widely referenced around the web. You can do all of this work manually, or use convenient tools that
automate structured citation building and active location data management for you.
Review acquisition
Reviews may be the most influential Internet factor for any local business. It’s estimated that 92% of consumers read
online reviews and 68% state that positive reviews influence their feelings of trust in a business.
Every local business needs a strategy for encouraging customers to leave reviews on a variety of platforms. Your job
is to know the guidelines of each platform so that you don’t break rules, and to devote significant resources to this
vital area of marketing. The number of reviews you earn can directly impact local search rankings, while the positive
and negative sentiments in those reviews can directly impact conversions and earnings. Throughout the life of your
business, you’ll be seeking to earn a wide array of positive reviews.
Publishing strategy
The moment any local business steps onto the web, it becomes a publisher. Your communications with consumers
may include the basic text content of your website, a blog, video or image content, owner responses to reviews, and
social media participation. Everything you publish should engage customers and expose them to your brand. Search
engines not only measure content quality, but also the way in which users interact with content, meaning the content
you produce should result in high levels of user engagement. Plus, your high-quality content may be shared by your
industry and consumer base, further promoting your business. You must devote time and creativity into developing
and executing a publishing strategy, for as long as your company is in business.
Competitive edge
The three bottom tiers of our pyramid are fundamental tasks in a typical local SEO campaign. In a competitive
industry/geography, your competitors are experts when it comes to these core areas. You must look beyond the
basics if you want to stand out from the pack.
Gaining a competitive edge in a crowded market requires a unique effort for each business, based on discovering
opportunities your rivals haven’t yet explored.
Benefits of local SEO
As we’ve just established, when you’re a local business, whether that’s an auto shop in Boise, Idaho, a restaurant in
Jacksonville, Florida, or a furniture store in Houston, Texas, local SEO plays a crucial role in generating customers
and conversions.
In this current climate of online shopping and retail giants, I imagine that local business owners can feel unmotivated
to compete against the likes of Walmart and Amazon for positions in search results.
Fortunately for you, local SEO is here to help. Local SEO favors smaller businesses over the likes of Amazon
anyday!
Investing in local SEO is your chance to get found by local consumers who are ready and willing to invest in your
business instead.
Both Google itself and the shopping public recognize the value of local businesses. In fact, Google has a specific set
of local ranking factors that it uses as a measure to determine whether or not your business is geographically relevant
to a user performing a ‘near me’ search (we’ll cover this in more detail a little later on).
That means you don’t have to worry about competing against large international corporations to get your local
business in front of relevant nearby consumers.
Research conducted by Access concluded that proximity matters to local consumers a great deal, with more than
92% traveling just 20 minutes or less to purchase their day-to-day essentials. For any size business, that should be
reason enough to invest in local SEO.
Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO refers to the search engine optimization of websites combined with flawless viewing on mobile devices,
such as smartphones and tablets. Thanks to the increasing boom of portable devices, webmasters should be highly
concerned with their mobile SEO plan. After all, more than 50% of Internet users now report surfing websites
through their mobile devices daily. Google is already favouring mobile friendly sites.
First and foremost, according to Google, mobile websites typically run on one out of three different configurations:
 Responsive Web Design
 Dynamic Serving
 Separate URLs

Responsive Web Design

When you use responsive web design, your mobile site will have the same HTML code and content for the same
URL regardless of the user’s chosen device. You’ll simply use the meta name=”viewport” tag within your site’s
source course to help the Internet browser identify how they should adjust the content. Then, the display settings will
change to fit each visitor’s unique screen size.
Benefits of RWD
Responsive web design is very popular among SEO experts everywhere, and it’s even recommended by Google
itself. You should definitely consider responsive design because:
 It’s easy to share content from a single URL.
 Google can easily index your single URL for higher search engine rankings.
 You’ll find it convenient to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
 This design avoids common SEO and formatting mistakes.
 There won’t be much additional setup time.
 Googlebot will use less resources and make crawling more efficient.
 Users won’t have to deal with redirects, which offers shorter page download times.
Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving configurations are designed to have the server respond with different HTML and CSS code on the
same URL depending on the user’s device. For this, you’ll need to properly use the Vary HTTP header to signal
changes based on the user-agent’s page requests. Valid headers tell the browser how to display the content and help
Googlebot discover that your website has mobile-optimized content much faster.
Separate URLs
As the name suggests, this setup configuration involves having different URLs for your website to successfully
display your content on different mobile devices. Each URL is equipped with a different HTML code for every
respective screen size.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a
publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.
Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines (such as Google Ads, Amazon Advertising, and
Microsoft Advertising, formerly Bing Ads). With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases
relevant to their target market and pay when ads (text-based search ads or shopping ads that are a combination of
images and text) are clicked. In contrast, content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a
bidding system. PPC display advertisements, also known as banner ads, are shown on web sites with related content
that have agreed to show ads and are typically not pay-per-click advertising. Social networks such as Facebook,
LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter have also adopted pay-per-click as one of their advertising models. The amount
advertisers pay depends on the publisher and is usually driven by two major factors: quality of the ad, and the
maximum bid the advertiser is willing to pay per click. The higher the quality of the ad, the lower the cost per click
is charged and vice versa.
However, websites can offer PPC ads. Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword
query matches an advertiser’s keyword list that has been added in different ad groups, or when a content site displays
relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to, above, or
beneath organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.
The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and others have implemented
automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads
is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits
organically.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a
search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
For example, if we bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google
results page.
Every time our ad is clicked, sending a visitor to our website, we have to pay the search engine a small fee. When
PPC is working correctly, the fee is trivial, because the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. In other words,
if we pay $3 for a click, but the click results in a $300 sale, then we’ve made a hefty profit.
A lot goes into building a winning PPC campaign, from researching and selecting the right keywords, to organizing
those keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimized for
conversions. Search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click
campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks. If your ads and landing pages are useful and satisfying to users,
Google charges you less per click, leading to higher profits for your business. So, if you want to start using a PPC,
it’s important to learn how to do it right.
A PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads.
There are different types of PPC ads, but one of the most common types is the paid search ad. These ads appear
when people search for things online using a search engine like Google, especially when they are performing
commercial searches, meaning that they’re looking for something to buy. This could be anything from a mobile
search (someone looking for “pizza near me” on their phone) to a local service search (someone looking for a dentist
or a plumber in their area) to someone shopping for a gift (“Mother’s Day flowers”) or a high-end item like
enterprise software. All of these searches trigger pay-per-click ads.
In pay-per-click advertising, businesses running ads are only charged when a user actually clicks on their ad, hence
the name “pay-per-click.”
Other forms of PPC advertising include display advertising (typically, serving banner ads) and re-marketing.
Purpose
Pay-per-click, along with cost per impression (CPM) and cost per order, are used to assess the cost-effectiveness and
profitability of internet marketing and drive the cost of running an advertisement campaign as low as possible while
retaining set goals. In Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM), the advertiser only pays for every 1000 impressions of
the ad. Pay-per-click (PPC) has an advantage over cost per impression in that it conveys information about how
effective the advertising was. Clicks are a way to measure attention and interest; if the main purpose of an ad is to
generate a click, or more specifically, drive traffic to a destination, then pay-per-click is the preferred metric. The
quality and placement of the advertisement will affect click through rates and the resulting total pay-per-click cost.
Flat-rate PPC
In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In
many cases, the publisher has a rate card that lists the pay-per-click (PPC) within different areas of their website or
network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more
valuable visitors having a higher PPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors. However, in many cases,
advertisers can negotiate lower rates, especially when committing to a long-term or high-value contract.
The flat-rate model is particularly common to comparison shopping engines, which typically publish rate cards.
However, these rates are sometimes minimal, and advertisers can pay more for greater visibility. These sites are
usually neatly compartmentalized into product or service categories, allowing a high degree of targeting by
advertisers. In many cases, the entire core content of these sites is paid ads.
Bid-based PPC
The advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a
publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that
he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The
auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a
search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. All bids for the keyword that target the searcher’s Geo-
location, the day and time of the search, etc. are then compared and the winner determined. In situations where there
are multiple ad spots, a common occurrence on SERPs, there can be multiple winners whose positions on the page
are influenced by the amount each has bid. The bid and Quality Score are used to give each advertiser’s advert an ad
rank.
The ad with the highest ad rank shows up first. The predominant three match types for both Google and Bing are
Broad, Exact and Phrase Match. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer the Broad Match Modifier type which differs
from broad match in that the keyword must contain the actual keyword terms in any order and doesn’t include
relevant variations of the terms.
As its name implies, the Ad Auction is a bidding system. This means that advertisers must bid on the terms they
want to “trigger,” or display, their ads. These terms are known as keywords.
Say, for example, that your business specializes in camping equipment. A user wanting to purchase a new tent,
sleeping bag, or portable stove might enter the keyword “camping equipment” into a search engine to find retailers
offering these items.
Getting started with Google Adwords
Learn a few basic terms
 Keywords: These are the words or phrases that people type into Google Search, which trigger your ad to
appear. When setting up an ad campaign, you’ll pick a list of keywords that you think people might search for
when they want what you have to offer (and don’t worry: we can help).
 Bid: This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. (Since, with Google
Ads, you don’t pay to show up only when someone clicks on your ad to visit your site or call you.)
 Quality Score: This metric tells you how relevant your keywords are to your ad and to your landing page (i.e.
the web page where people will be taken when they click your ad). A good Quality Score can lower your bid
costs and improve your ad rank in the search results.
 Ad Rank: This metric helps determine where your ad will show up, relative to other ads, when it’s triggered to
appear on Google. Your rank is determined using your bid, your Quality Score, and other factors.
 CPC (cost-per-click): The actual amount you pay when someone clicks on your ad. (You don’t necessarily pay
your entire bid price for every click that just sets up a range of possible costs-per-click you might pay.)
 Conversion: A conversion takes place when someone who has clicked your ad goes on to take another action
you’ve designated as important like, making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or calling you.
Organize your account
How do you set your account up for success from the beginning? Start by breaking down your products or services
into categories, and basing your account structure on those. (One good option is to mirror the structure you already
use on your website.)
There are two levels of organization within a Google Ads account: campaigns (the higher level) and ad groups (the
lower level you can have multiple ad groups in each campaign). Think about campaigns as representing larger
categories in your business, and ad groups as representing smaller, more specific sets of products or services. For
instance, if you run a craft supply store, you might create these campaigns and ad groups:
Campaign 1: Knitting and sewing
 Ad Group 1: Yarn
 Ad Group 2: Needles and hoops
 Ad Group 3: Fabric and embroidery thread
Campaign 2: Kids’ crafts
 Ad Group 1: Paint and markers
 Ad Group 2: Glitter and glue
 Ad Group 3: Craft kits
Creating separate campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keyword lists for your products helps keep your ads relevant,
making sure that someone who’s looking for “glitter glue,” for example, doesn’t accidentally see your ad for
“embroidery thread” and think you don’t have what they need.
The more focused and specific your ads are, the more people you can reach who are interested in exactly what you
have to offer.
Set your budget
With Google Ads, you control how much you spend using two different settings: your daily budget and your bids.
Your budget is the amount you want to spend on each campaign per day. Your bid is the amount you’re willing to
spend on a keyword if someone searches for that term and then clicks your ad.
When you’re first starting out, it can be a good idea to spread your overall budget (i.e. the amount you want to pay
for your whole account) evenly across your campaigns, until you get an idea which one work best for your business.
But in general, you should set different campaign budgets and bid amounts based on your business goals. For
example, if you want to draw shoppers to your “kids crafts” products one month, you should consider setting a
higher budget for that campaign, and lowering the budget for another, less important one. You can change your
budget and bids any time, so if something isn’t working, you can adjust to meet your needs.
Pick your keywords
The goal when picking keywords is to choose terms that you think people will search for when they’re looking
online for what you offer. In addition, you want your keywords to be as relevant as possible to the ad they trigger and
to the landing page people will arrive at if they click that ad.
To help you get started, Google Ads comes with a free tool called the Keyword Planner, which can generate a
sample list of keywords for your campaigns. (We recommend reviewing the list of suggestions and only using the
ones that make sense for you.) The Keyword Planner can also help you estimate how much to bid on a particular
keyword, so your ad shows up in search results this can give you an idea about whether certain keywords are too
expensive for you to bid on, and which will fit within your budget. In general, the more competitive a keyword is,
the more it will cost to bid on. When you’re first starting out, you may want to avoid high-competition keywords, so
you don’t spend your whole budget on just a few clicks. Sticking with low-to-medium cost keywords can still get
you a lot of exposure, and also help you test out how your campaigns are working.
Set your keyword match types
“Keyword match type” is a setting in Google Ads that lets you further refine when your ad will show up on Google.
There are five options:
Broad Match:
The “broad match” setting shows your ad for searches that contain your keywords in any order, and for related terms.
This option shows your ad in the broadest variety of searches, and is the default setting for all campaigns.
Broad Match Modifier:
This setting allows you to specify that certain words in your broad-match keyword must show up in a user’s search
to trigger your ad. So, if your keyword is “high fiber wool yarn” and you wanted to make sure “wool” and “yarn”
were always present in a search, you could ensure that by adding a plus sign (+) before those words. So, your broad
match modifier keyword would be: high fiber +wool +yarn.
Phrase Match:
This option shows your ad for searches that contain your exact keyword, or for searches that contain your exact
keyword plus words before or after it. (I.e. if your keyword is “wool yarn” you might also show up for “fine wool
yarn” or “wool yarn for sale near me.”) To choose this option, you should add quotation marks around any
keywords, i.e. “wool yarn”.
Exact Match:
When you choose exact match, your ad will only show if someone searches for the exact word or phrase you choose.
For this option, put brackets around your keyword, i.e.: [wool yarn].
Negative Match:
This match option allows you to exclude undesirable words or phrases from triggering your ad, weeding out
irrelevant traffic. For instance, if you only sell high-end yarn, you might want to exclude words like “bargain” or
“cheap.” You can do so by putting a minus sign in front of the words you don’t want to show up for, i.e.: -cheap, -
bargain.

Set your landing pages

Your landing page is where potential customers arrive after clicking on your ad. Choosing a page that’s relevant to
your ad and keywords can help people find what they’re looking for more quickly: so, if your ad is promoting a sale
on yarn, choose a landing page where that yarn is prominently featured, instead of just sending people to your
website’s home page.
Decide which devices to show up on
Do your ideal customers search on a desktop, mobile device, or both? Are you more interested in reaching shoppers
when they’re out and about, or people who want to make an immediate online purchase? As you set up your Google
Ads account, consider which types of customers you want to connect with (and more importantly, the types of
devices those customers use), so you can reach them. For instance, if you run a car repair shop and want to attract
customers when they’re nearby and needing help, consider showing your ads only on mobile devices.
Write your ads
Your ad is the first impression many people will have of your business, so make sure it communicates that you have
what they need. This is easiest when the ad actually contains the keywords people search for — which you can
accomplish by breaking your campaign out into clear ad groups, and writing unique ads for each (a yarn-promoting
ad for your yarn keywords, and a craft-promoting ad for your craft supplies, for example). This will make your ads
more relevant to potential customers, and also possibly increase your Quality Score.
It’s also a good idea to include a “call to action” in your ad: a clear, concise message that tells the reader what you’d
like them to do after seeing your ad. Phrases like “shop now” or “learn more” can entice people to click on your ad,
for example.
Finally, before you post your ad, look over it one last time to check for spelling or grammar errors.
Connect your account to Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free way to get even more insights into how people interact with your ads and website. You
don’t have to use Analytics to use Google Ads, though, so feel free to skip to the next step if you prefer.
While Google Ads can tell you how many people click on your ads, integrating Google Ads and Analytics lets you
keep an eye on what those people do once they reach your website. For example, if people arrive at your site but then
immediately click away, your ad might not be reaching the right people after all or you might be taking them to to
wrong area of your site. These insights can help you better organize your ads, and possibly get more out of your
marketing budget.
Hit go and check back in
Good work! You’re ready to activate your campaigns and see how they perform. Remember to check back in
frequently to keep an eye on which ads and keywords are bringing you the most clicks and conversions. Over time,
you should start to see which strategies are helping you meet your goals, and which still need tweaking.
Source: https://ads.google.com/home/resources/how-to-setup-googleads-a-checklist/
Advertising Tracking
Ad tracking, also known as post-testing or ad effectiveness tracking, is in-market research that monitors a brand’s
performance including, brand and advertising awareness, product trial and usage, and attitudes about the brand
versus their competition.
Depending on the speed of the purchase cycle in the category, tracking can be done continuously (a few interviews
every week) or it can be “pulsed,” with interviews conducted in widely spaced waves (ex. every three or six months).
Interviews can either be conducted with separate, matched samples of consumers, or with a single (longitudinal)
panel that is interviewed over time.
Since the researcher has information on when the ads launched, the length of each advertising flight, the money
spent, and when the interviews were conducted, the results of ad tracking can provide information on the effects of
advertising.
Purpose
The purpose of ad tracking is generally to provide a measure of the combined effect of the media weight or spending
level, the effectiveness of the media buy or targeting, and the quality of the advertising execution or creative.
Advertisers use the results of ad tracking to estimate the return on investment (ROI) of advertising, and to refine
advertising plans. Sometimes, tracking data are used to provide inputs to Marketing Mix Models which marketing
science statisticians build to estimate the role of advertising, as compared to pricing, distribution and other
marketplace variables on sales of the brand.
Methodology
Today, most ad tracking studies are conducted via the Internet. Some ad tracking studies are conducted continuously
and others are conducted at specific points in time (typically before the advertising appears in market, and then again
after the advertising has been running for some period of time). The two approaches use different types of analyses,
although both start by measuring advertising awareness. Typically, the respondent is either shown a brief portion of a
commercial or a few memorable still images from the TV ad. Other media typically are cued using either branded or
de-branded visual of the ad. Then, respondents answer three significant questions.
 Do you recognize this ad? (recognition measure)
 Please type in the sponsor of this ad. (unaided awareness measure)
 Please choose from the following list, the sponsor of this ad. (aided awareness measure)
The continuous tracking design analyzes advertising awareness over time, in relation to ad spending; separately, this
design tracks brand awareness, and then develops indices of effectiveness based on the strength of the correlations
between ad spending and brand awareness.
The most popular alternate approach to the continuous tracking design is the Communicants System longitudinal
design, in which the same people are interviewed at two points in time. Changes in brand measures (for example,
brand purchasing and future purchase intentions) exhibited among those who have seen the advertising are compared
to the changes in brand measures that occurred among those unaware of advertising. By means of this method, the
researchers can isolate those marketplace changes that were produced by advertising versus those that would have
occurred without advertising.
Internet tracking
There are several different tools to track online ads: banner ads, ppc ads, pop-up ads, and other types. Several online
advertising companies, such as Google offer their own ad tracking service (Google Analytics) in order to effectively
use their service to generate a positive ROI. Third-party ad tracking services are commonly used by affiliate
marketers. Affiliate marketers are frequently unable to have access to the order page and therefore are unable to use a
3rd-party tool. Many different companies have created tools to effectively track their commissions in order to
optimize their profit potential. The information provided will show the marketer which advertising methods are
generating income and which are not and allows him to effectively allocate his budget.
Why use conversion tracking
 See which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns are best at driving valuable customer activity.
 Understand your return on investment (ROI) and make better informed decisions about your ad spend.
 Use Smart Bidding strategies (such as Maximize Conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS) that
automatically optimize your campaigns according to your business goals.
 See how many customers may be interacting with your ads on one device or browser and converting on
another. You can view cross-device, cross-browser, and other conversion data in your “All conversions”
reporting column.
Website actions: Purchases, sign-ups, and other actions that customers complete on your website.
Phone calls: Calls directly from your ads, calls to a phone number on your website, and clicks on a phone number
on your mobile website.
App installs and in-app actions: Installs of your Android or iOS mobile apps, and purchases or other activity
within those apps.
Import: Customer activity that begins online but finishes offline, such as when a customer clicks an ad and submits
a contact form online, and later signs a contract in your office.
Local actions: Actions that are counted whenever people interact with an ad that’s specific to a physical location or
store.
The conversion tracking process works a little differently for each conversion source, but for each type besides
offline conversions, it tends to fall into one of these categories:
 You add a conversion tracking tag, or code snippet, to your website or mobile app code. When a customer
clicks on your ad from Google Search or selected Google Display Network sites, or when they view your
video ad, a temporary cookie is placed on their computer or mobile device. When they complete the action
you defined, our system recognizes the cookie (through the code snippet you added), and we record a
conversion.
  Some kinds of conversion tracking don’t require a tag. For example, to track phone calls from call
extensions or call-only ads, you use a Google forwarding number to track when the call came from one of
your ads, and to track details like call duration, call start and end time, and caller area code. Also, app
downloads and in-app purchases from Google Play, and local actions will automatically be recorded as
conversions, and no tracking code is needed.
Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, you can see data on conversions for your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and
keywords. Viewing this data in your reports can help you understand how your advertising helps you achieve
important goals for your business.
Security and privacy for website tracking
Google’s security standards are strict. Google Ads only collects data on pages where you have deployed the
associated tags.
Please ensure you’re providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data you collect on your
websites, and getting consent for that collection where legally required.
Key Google Ad-words Strategies
Types of research to do:
 Keyword Research: Use keyword tools to find the most relevant keywords people are typing into the search
engines to find your product/service/company. Plan to spend at least a few hours on this…it’s the foundation of
your campaign.
 Competitive Research: Study the companies bidding on these keywords in AdWords. See who consistently is
ranking at or near the top of the rankings. Note their ad copy and offers. Visit their websites. Sign up for their
mailing lists. Purchase their products.
 Research Your Audience: Where are customers buying and reviewing products/services/businesses like yours
online? Read their reviews. What do they love/hate about your competition? What are the deep needs/desires
they’re looking to fulfill? What emotions are they expressing? While researching them, look for great quotes
you can use for ad copy.
Ad copy should:
 Be highly relevant to the keywords they’re being displayed for (including the exact terms when possible)
 Stand out from the competition with different offers, benefits, etc.
 Reflect the messaging/offer on your landing page(s).
Remarketing with Google
Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows
you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus
helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.
Benefits
Whether you’re looking to drive sales activity, increase registrations, or promote awareness of your brand, re
marketing can be a strategic component of your advertising. Below are a few benefits of using remarketing:
 Prompt reach/Well-timed targeting: You can show your ads to people who’ve previously interacted with your
business right when they’re searching elsewhere and are more likely to make a purchase. You can also help
customers find you by showing them your ads when they are actively looking for your business on Google Search.
 Focused advertising: You can create remarketing lists to advertise for specific cases. For example, you may
create a remarketing list targeted for people who added something to their shopping cart but didn’t complete a
transaction.
 Large-scale reach: You can reach people on your remarketing lists across their devices as they browse over 2
million websites and mobile apps.
 Efficient pricing: You can create high-performance remarketing campaigns with automated bidding. Real-time
bidding calculates the optimal bid for the person viewing your ad, helping you win the ad auction with the best
possible price. There’s no extra cost to use Google’s auction.
 Easy ad creation: Produce text, image, and video ads for free with Ad gallery. Combine a dynamic remarketing
campaign with Ad gallery layouts to scale beautiful ads across all of your products or services.
 Campaign statistics: You’ll have reports of how your campaigns are performing, where your ads are showing,
and what price you’re paying.
Ways to remarket with Google Ads
 Standard remarketing: Show ads to your past visitors as they browse sites and apps on the Display Network. Learn
more
 Dynamic remarketing: Boost your results with dynamic remarketing, which takes remarketing to the next level
with ads that include products or services that people viewed on your website or app. Learn more
 Remarketing lists for search ads: Show ads to your past visitors as they do follow-up searches for what they need
on Google, after leaving your website. Learn more
 Video remarketing: Show ads to people who have interacted with your videos or YouTube channel as they use
YouTube and browse Display Network videos, websites, and apps. Learn more
 Customer list remarketing: With Customer match, you can upload lists of contact information that your customers
have given you. When those people are signed into Google, you can show them ads across different Google
products.
Instructions
 Sign in to your Google Ads account.
 Click Campaigns from the page menu.
 Click the plus button to create a new campaign.
 Choose your campaign goal among the options for “Goals”.
 Select Display as the campaign type. From the “Campaign type” section, select Display Network.
 Name your campaign and specify locations, languages, bidding, and budget.
 Your selections in the “Targeting” section is where dynamic remarketing comes in. Then create your Display ads
 Click Create campaign
Advertising Budget and ROI tips
One of the most important components of a marketing campaign is to evaluate its performance and impact and profit
so that it can be determined whether or not your marketing efforts are actually helping the company. The insights
gained through the process can be used to drive future, data-driven strategies for smarter decision-making.
Marketing ROI is the practice of attributing profit and revenue growth to the impact of marketing initiatives.
By calculating marketing ROI, organizations can measure the degree to which marketing efforts either holistically,
or on a campaign-basis, contribute to revenue growth. Typically, marketing ROI is used to justify marketing spend
and budget allocation for ongoing and future campaigns and initiatives.
Distribute Marketing Budgets
Across online and offline channels, there’s a myriad of possible marketing mix combinations. However, any
combination of campaign initiatives require funding. That’s why understanding which online and offline efforts
drive the most revenue is a must for properly distributing the marketing budget.
Measure Campaign Success and Establish Baselines
A crucial part of any successful marketing team is the ability to measure campaign success and establish baselines
that can serve as a reference for future efforts. With this in mind, accurately measuring ROI helps marketers do both.
By understanding the impact of individual campaigns on overall revenue growth, marketers can better identify the
right mix of offline and online campaign efforts. Moreover, measuring ROI consistently allows marketers to
establish baselines to quickly gauge their success and adjust efforts in order to maximize impact.
Competitive Analysis
Tracking the marketing ROI of competitors allows marketers to accurately understand how their organization is
performing within their specific industry. For example, marketers tracking publicly available financial data can
estimate the ROI of competitors and adjust baselines to reflect these estimates helping to keep efforts consistently
competitive.
How to Calculate Marketing ROI Using a Formula
While there are several different ways to calculate marketing ROI, the core formula used to understand marketing
impact at a high-level is relatively straightforward:
Marketing ROI = (Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost
It’s important to note, however, that this formula makes the assumption that all sales growth is tied to marketing
efforts. In order to generate a more realistic view of marketing impact and ROI, marketers should account for organic
sales.
Marketing ROI =(Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost
When leveraging marketing ROI formulas, it’s also important to understand the total ROI marketing efforts have
generated. Be aware that definitions for an actionable “return” can vary based on the marketing team’s strategy and
campaign efforts, as well as general overhead related to campaign implementation.
 Total Revenue: By looking at the total revenue generated from a particular campaign, marketers can gain a clear
holistic overview of their efforts. Accounting for total revenue when measuring marketing ROI is ideal for
strategic media planning, budget allocation and overall marketing impact.
 Gross Profit: Tying in gross profit helps marketers understand the total revenue marketing efforts generate in
relation to the cost of production or delivery of goods and services. To do this, marketers should add the following
to their marketing ROI formula: = (Total revenue – cost of goods to deliver a product).
 Net Profit: Diving deeper, marketers can calculate the impact of their marketing efforts toward net profit by
adding the following to their formula: = (Gross profit – additional expenses).
It’s important to consistently define what profit/expenditures and overall ROI your team will account for across
marketing ROI measurement efforts. Consider including the following:
 Overhead and internal expenses
 Agency fees
 Media buys
 Creative
Marketers can also calculate ROI through customer lifetime value (CLV), which sheds light on the value of each
individual customer relationship with a brand. This formula helps assess long-term ROI across the consumer’s life
cycle. To do this, marketers can use the following formula:
Customer Lifetime Value = (Retention Rate)/ (1 + Discount Rate/ Retention Rate)
Branded
Some Google Ads users are hesitant to bid on branded terms because it’s unlikely that a searcher who converts after
clicking a branded ad is a true “first touch.” Conversions have to be couched in the fact that those searching for your
company name may very well have already visited the site. That doesn’t mean branded terms aren’t valuable in
terms of ROI. Your Quality Score will be maxed out. Volume / competition probably aren’t high compared to top of
funnel terms.
Top of funnel
These are your research-based terms. Since ROI will be lower here than in branded or bottom of funnel campaigns,
you’re going to want to keep a close eye on what’s working and what isn’t. Flexibility is key here: if a top of funnel
term is leading to conversions, then go for it. On the other hand, don’t just spend money to spend money: odds are,
variations of the keywords you’re bidding on here exist that convert better for less. Fish those out of your search
queries and watch ROI skyrocket.
Competitor
Bidding on competitor terms can be a disaster in terms of ROI. The terms are expensive. Your copy is probably
irrelevant, comparatively speaking. There is, however, a hack that lets you improve (or in some cases, simply create)
ROI while bidding on competitor terms. To maximize your return on competitor keywords, use RLSA. But instead
of increasing bids, use your remarketing lists to ensure you’re only bidding on competitor terms when prospects who
have visited your site are searching for them (you can do this by selecting “target and bid” instead of the default “bid
only” option). This indicates that they’re shopping around: present an offer that cannot be refused and these oft
useless campaigns can pay major dividends.
B2B Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing is the process of bringing previous visitors back to your website to finish the conversion
process, otherwise known in B2B as filling out a form. Research shows remarketing converts up to 50%
traffic, while search campaigns convert roughly 2%.
The perks of remarketing include:
 Sustaining brand awareness (while they are looking at your competitors), in effect, generating leads
 Nurturing leads by keeping potential customers engaged
 Recapturing lost leads
Steps:
Create remarketing lists for every stage of your sales funnel
The first thing you need to do for your B2B remarketing strategy is to map out your sales funnels.
Hopefully, you’ve already done this and created PPC campaigns for each stage of your sales funnel to
address user needs as they change along the consumer journey.
Create separate remarketing landing pages
Now that you know what kind of campaigns you’re going to be creating, it’s time to think about landing
pages and you’re not going to send users to the same page they visited first time around.
Create remarketing lists for your email subscribers
You might like to think a user counts as a lead once they sign up to your newsletter or download some of
your content, but how many of these “leads” are turning into paying customers?
To maximise your email marketing efforts, you’ll also want to create remarketing lists for your email
subscribers. Here are a few examples of the sort of lists you might create:
 Users who visited your webinar sign-up page but didn’t sign up
 Webinar sign-ups who didn’t attend
 Webinar sign-ups who attended but didn’t convert
 Webinar attendees who converted but haven’t made a second purchase
These are just four examples of remarketing campaigns you can create to boost the performance of a
webinar strategy, for each stage of the lead generation process. You’re going to want to think like this for
all of your lead generation strategies.

Reach new audiences with Customer Match & Lookalike Audiences

Google and Facebook’s advertising platforms both offer similar features that allow you to take your email
marketing lists and use them to target new users who display similar online interests and behaviours.
Take a look at Customer Match on Google Ads and Lookalike Audiences on Facebook Ads both of which
can turn your email lists into entirely new PPC leads.
Maximize email sign-ups with multi-step forms
As you can see by this stage, a strong B2B remarketing strategy is heavily integrated with your email
marketing efforts and this means you need to maximize email sign-ups to get the best results.
Move B2B leads along your sales funnels (using remarketing lists)
We’ve already looked at using remarketing lists to target users at various stages of the consumer journey
but now it’s time to look at the real magic of remarketing lists: guiding users along every stage of your
sales funnel and turning them into paying customers.
Post-purchase remarketing
Forester research tells us it costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than it does to turn an existing one
into a repeat buyer. You’ve already invested time and money into getting your existing customers on
board, too, so it only makes sense to maximize your ROI from your existing customer base.
It doesn’t matter what line of business you’re in, there are plenty of opportunities to turn first-time buyers
into loyal customers:
 Cross-selling: Related products relevant to a customer’s first purchase.
 Up-selling: Upgrading from the free version to a paid version of your software platform.
 Renewing: Contractual or subscription-based products/services when the initial contract period is up.
 Re-buying: Purchasing the same product or service again at the end of its life-cycle – eg: a new phone or website
redesign.
 Re-inviting: Reaching out to previous customers who have left or stopped buying from you.
 Loyalty campaigns: Reaching out to customers with rewards to build stronger relationships.
Content remarketing
This is one of the most overlooked remarketing lead gen strategies around, which is a crime considering
how capable it is for B2B brands.
All that time and money you’re investing in creating blog content is falling short of its full potential unless
you’re targeting your readers with remarketing campaigns encouraging them to sign up to your lead gen
content (webinars, eBooks, digital downloads, etc.)
Limited offer remarketing campaigns
When your PPC traffic doesn’t convert at the first opportunity, it normally means one of two things: you’re
simply not offering what they want or there’s something relatively small preventing them from making the
commitment.
Keep your remarketing campaigns GD-PR-compliant
It wouldn’t be right to talk about remarketing for B2B lead generation in 2019 without mentioning GDPR.
You don’t need to let the European regulations get in the way of your remarketing efforts but it is
important to understand your obligations.