Digital Marketing

Upping CPC Bids to Goog’s Recs: Yea? Nea?

Should You Increase Your CPC Bids to Google’s Recommendations?

SPICY NUGGET

If that’s your ‘Hail Mary’ move to get more leads, it will generally give disastrous results and you’ll have to revert the change.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

We receive many questions from our PPC clients and from prospects asking us to help them understand their pay-per-click campaigns better. Here is one of them: “This campaign has the best ROI but many of the keywords are below first page bid. Shouldn’t we increase the CPC bids to match Google’s recommendations?”

PPC manager expressing surprise and doubt are raising CPC bids

So, obviously, the client is looking at Google’s recommendations (Spoiler alert: they want you to spend more) and suddenly has doubts as to the CPC bid level.

As it turns out in this particular case, the bid recommendations weren’t even that high. But in some industries, Google recommends bidding $40-$75 per click. Big G’s recommendations for attorneys and insurers reach into the hundreds of dollars… per click!

When you know that personal injury attorneys typically turn down 90% of the “injury cases” coming to them for a first free consultation, you do the math.

Attorney sweating profusely and wiping his forehead - vintage illustration

CPC and ROI

In all of our campaigns, we set our cost-per-click bids based on a number of factors, including cost/lead and ROI. If we increase bids and get worse or equal results, we lower them again.

When the overall ROI of a campaign is good, increasing CPC bids will almost always decrease ROI.

Let’s do some basic math:

Say a campaign has a 3.0x ROI, and we increase the bid from $4 to $12 (i.e. 300% increase) to follow Google’s recs. We may get more leads and even more sales. But unless the conversion rate increases, the ROI would drop from 3.0x to 1.0x because it’s not a linear increase in clicks, leads and sales.

In order to maintain a 3.0x ROI while increasing our bids by 300%, we would also have to get a 300% increase in conversion rates. This could very well prove to be impossible, especially if conversion rates are already really high.

Typically, increasing the CPC bid actually results in a decrease in the conversion rate, twice impacting your cost-per-lead.

pop-art Illustration of 2 ladies realizing higher CPC and lower conversion rate double impact the ROI

This ain’t just theory.

Many times, I have willy-nilly tried increasing CPC bids in high-ROI campaigns based on Google’s recommendations…

I generally do it out of desperation after hitting my head against a wall to get more leads. And I generally revert the changes a week or two later when the results prove to be disastrous.

So what do I do?

I manage bids by increasing the CPC bid based on the cost/conversion of the keyword, relative to the average cost/lead of that campaign.

- If the cost/conversion of the keyword is much lower than the rest of the campaign, I increase the CPCs proportionately — up to $0.25-$0.50 above Google’s bid recommendation.

- If the cost/conversion of a specific keyword is considerably higher than average, I lower the bid.

I compare the cost/conversion of the keyword to the average for that specific campaign: if a campaign generates a good ROI, I will tolerate a higher-than-average cost/conversion compared to the rest of the account.

pop art illustration of a businessman taking notes on a computer

Final comments

Keywords do very often show up on the first page, getting impressions and clicks, despite Google warning you “below first page bid”. “Impressions” and “impression share” metrics are your indicators for that.

If you are a client of ours, and you see a keyword getting no impressions in your campaign, it is almost always because of one or two factors: (1) the search volume is low; (2) at some point the keyword was spending money but generated no conversions. Then we cut the CPCs down into oblivion.

What Focus For Your Google Ads Campaign?

What’s the Biggest Question our Clients Have When Launching a Google Ads Campaign?

SPICY NUGGET

The focus of your concerns as far as digital advertising must depend on the stage of growth your business is at.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

In this video, Adam is being interviewed by Howard Wolpoff, of DailyAdFriend.com, a digital marketing information platform focusing on interviewing pro marketers to share tips and information with business owners.

The interview focuses on the genesis of Eden Ads, and the most major question our clients have in mind when they prepare to launch a product or service offer on Google Ads.

The video starts with a short introduction of how Eden Ads was formed, and the professional experience of our CEO, Adam Sene, in the world of digital advertising.

TRANSCRIPT:

“Howard Wolpoff: Welcome back to Marketing Champions here on Daily Ad Brief. I’m Howard Wolpoff, your host. Again, we’re talking about marketing around the country with great marketers, and today we are in Clearwater, Florida. We’re talking to Adam Sene at Eden Ads. Adam, welcome to our conversation today.

Adam Sene: Thank you. Thank you for rolling me.

Howard Wolpoff: Well, we want to learn more about you and you obviously have been involved in marketing for a while. Why don’t you tell us how you got started?

Adam Sene: I’ve been in marketing for about 11 years. Prior to that, I actually was touring the country in a band and it was a rough time. It was in the middle of the recession and when things didn’t work out there, I took on a job for a company that was doing direct mail. They had an agency that was doing their online ads, and I saw an opportunity. If I learn this, I could probably take it over, and that’s where it sort of began. I’ve been doing then, ads for 11 years since. For much of that time, I did it as a freelancer for many different verticals, whether it was health, ecommerce, health products, supplements, etc, lead generation for B2B, and just ran the full gamut.

And then started this agency, Eden Ads, officially January 2020 last year. Some of our clients carried over from prior to that, but officially the start date was January 10, 2020, which I have to say it was not a great time to start a business because a few months later is when the pandemic started. So, we had to learn to pivot and deal with a major worldwide event, and I think emerged out the other end. It’s still going, but our coming out the other side, all the more strong for it, and that’s the history of today.

We specialize primarily on ads online, being Google Ads, Facebook ads, but we also in there, add additional services that are needed in order to supplement that like landing pages and websites, design, et cetera, and we do a splash of SEO in there as well. That’s who I am and what my company is and where it came from.

Howard Wolpoff: Well, life is definitely about timing and lots of people had interesting timing with, whether the start or different periods of their businesses, because of COVID. Just glad to see that you’re stronger as we are at this point of the process. When you’re working with a client and you’re getting started, what are the biggest questions they have about getting their message out there and why they’re there for you to be helping them?

Adam Sene: Well, it really is going to vary from client to client. You get people at all different stages in their business, whether they’re well established and far along and already successful, or whether they’re just a brand new startup and they just ordered some inventory for a product that they want to start a business around. It really depends on that stage of where they’re at in their business, the questions that they’re going to ask. Someone earlier along is going to be having more concern about their branding and their direction and what they should do. Whereas, further along guys, they’re going to have a good amount of that dialed in, and they’re going to be more interested in the more technical questions in terms of, where can we reduce wasted budget? How can we improve the ROAS on the budget that we have?

You’ll get guys who are at a stage where… This has happened a few times, you get a client that basically has gone through a handful of agencies and all they’re looking to do is scale. They’re spending X number of dollars a month. They’re happy with the returns that they’re get getting, but they’ve been trying to double it for a long period of time and gone through agencies that have only been able to increase the ad spend, but haven’t been able to increase the revenues proportionally alongside it. Like I said, different phases and really where they’re at is going to determine the type of questions they’ll have.

Howard Wolpoff: It shows just where different companies have been. Again, you mentioned the experience of different agencies and trying to find that right sweet spot for them with the revenue level that they’re going to be, and it’s good that you’ve had this varying experience throughout your career to guide them and put them in the right direction and get their businesses seeing the results. It’s great that you’re able to share this with us and we really appreciate you joining us today.

Adam Sene: Yeah, of course. My pleasure.

Howard Wolpoff: Thank you all for joining us as well. Adam really tells a great story through what he is sharing with us, through the information he has on his website, the type of business that he works with, and really the right way to get their message out there, and the results that they’re looking for. You can learn more on Daily Ad Brief, but go out and have a great rest of today, and we’ll see you next time on Marketing Champions.”

Direct link to the interview

There is way more to be done with your Facebook ads to ensure you get a good ROAS on any monies you spend on Facebook, but this will be the topic of other videos. Reach out to us at Eden Ads if your Amazon sales numbers aren’t up to snuff: we’ll have a conversation to understand where you are coming from, and how we can help you. Call us at (813) 940-5699.

FB Direct Marketing to boost Amazon Sales-featured

In Amazon sales, digital marketing, Facebook Ads

Setting up Facebook Ads to Boost Amazon Sales

How to Set Up Facebook Ads to Boost Amazon Sales

SPICY NUGGET
You can sell anything to Amazon buyers from an ad in Facebook… Even uranium cubes as I show in this video. Just kidding.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

In this video, Adam is being interviewed by Curtis Johnson, President of ManageByStats, a tech company that built a software platform for Amazon Sellers, to provide functions that are not provided well by Amazon or other services.

The interview focuses on the basics of setting up Direct Marketing Campaigns on Facebook to boost Amazon sales.

The video starts with a short introduction of its purpose, with a brief review of the landing page specifically set up for the demo. This is a demonstration of the steps involved in setting up the campaign in the Facebook Business Account Manager: Adam and Curtis do not expound on how to set up the Business Account Manager, it is assumed that the viewer has one already, and there are plenty of videos around to teach anyone to set up a basic set-up.

Here is the list of timestamps, to enable you to slide to any area of specific interest to your operations:

00:00 Introduction
01:45 Presentation of the Demo Landing Page
02:23 Setting up Facebook Business Manager Account
02:52 Business Settings in the Business Manager
03:43 Creating a “Custom Audience” in Facebook
04:03 Why create a Column for Customer Value?
04:50 Uploading Customer List & Naming Audience
05:10 Mapping data from List to Business Manager
07:49 Setting up your Campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager
08:46 Setting up the targeting for your Ads Set
11:13 Creating your ad
12:28 Tip on media crop for Stories
14:08 Completing the ad set (text, buttons, target URL)
15:17 Wrapping up

In conversion rate optimization, CRO, GUI, GUI optimization, website optimization

GUI Optimization for Better Conversions

Optimizing Your Graphical User Interface – Case Study

SPICY NUGGET
Designers like cool widgets. These can hinder GUI optimization, however. In the end, your site serves the purpose of your visitor, not the purpose of your designer.
— Phil Chavanne, Snr SEO Consultant

During this user experience session, we cover our interaction with the home page of the Accenture website, a beautiful site that presents a couple of issues with the optimization of the Graphic User Interface.

We downloaded the site and started our journey, scrolling down the home page, first using the scroll bar, then the mouse wheel.

At first the scroll down motion is smooth and predictable. At some point however, we enter a wide section of negative space, with some sort of a greater-than symbol.

As we continue to roll the mouse wheel, the scrolling down motion stops, and the V expands on the screen.

Our discovery experience is interrupted. There is no way to bypass the animation, we have to let it play to the end. The mouse wheel doesn’t bring us down the page anymore, the man-machine interface has switched function.

At the end of the animation, we reach another area with an edge-to-edge photo; and the same animation but reverted: the scroll down motion stops, and we are forced to go along with the animation until it reaches its conclusion.

Now we back our way up using the mouse, and we meet the same issues. We have to obey the will of the web designer and play the animations till they end, before we are allowed to continue our quest for information.

Observations on User Experience

All this happens in a matter of seconds, but during this time, our user experience has been subjected to 2 bothersome events:

(a) An unpredictable interruption in the operation of the mouse wheel;

(b) We were forced to obey the web designer’s will, instead of going on with our own discovery journey.

In our opinion, this design feature violates a couple of well-proven GUI rules.

3 Well-Proven GUI OPTIMIZATION Rules

- A user interface must remain predictable and consistent. A mouse wheel is designed to scroll up and down a screen. When it stops working as predicted, its regular operation seems disabled, and this leads our mind to wonder if something is broken in the man-machine linkage.

- Visitors are on your website to discover information, not to dwell on how cool your design is. When you invert these priorities, you impose your will on their intent

This is the case of sliders with layers of textual information which force users to wait for the next layer to display. Your will, not theirs.

If they can, they will bypass these sliders, and you will lose an opportunity to provide them the information for which they can to your website in the first place. GUI optimization seeks to help your visitors accomplish the purpose for which they came to your site.

- Do not interrupt the discovery journey of your visitors. Offer them options, crossroads, places of choice, but keep the flow going. No one likes to be interrupted.

We love things flowing smoothly. We dislike unwanted, unpredictable events that disrupt our activities.

In Conclusion

This is a great website. But violating these GUI optimization rules does not serve the purpose of the website. Using this animation serves more the purpose of the designer than the purpose of the visitor.

In graphical user interface, GUI, mobile first design, mobile first websites, website design ergonomics

Mobile First Websites: Graphical User Interface (GUI)

SPICY NUGGET
A “responsive” replica of your desktop site is a sorry excuse for a mobile site. ‘Mobile First’ sites are purpose-built… or they don’t generate the leads and sales you need.
— Phil Chavanne, Snr SEO Consultant

In Part I of this series about mobile-optimized sites (“Mobile First sites”), we alluded to the rules mobile sites must conform to in order to find grace in the eyes of Google. In Part II, we looked at the need for speed as browsing and searching happen increasingly on mobile devices, and consumers prefer speedy sites.

In this new part, we’ll discuss how the design (GUI) of a mobile site contributes to its usability, the quality of a user’s experience, and beyond, its conversion rates.

Graphical User Interface & Responsiveness

Anyone who lived on the web longer than in the last 10 years will remember the clunky mobile interface of websites made only for desktop. Web designers didn’t anticipate the mobile revolution and were slow to catch up with it. iPhone was “something for Apple apps”. In the late part of the first decade of the new millennium, Flash was still at the top of what could be done with a website, and with the advent of broadband, the canons of web design favored screen-wide images, animated text over hero shots, and video served from regular hosting servers.

As a result of the design trends of the times, mobile users were saddled with websites that had to be resized with 2 fingers, and constantly re-centered with 1 finger to be read in the viewport of an iPhone 4. Loading times were horrendously long, unless you were browsing an old site hard-coded in HTML. But then again, the look and “mobile-readiness” of these sites were questionable, at best.

By 2010, it had become obvious that mobile users’ experience was crying for a long-overdue change. And then, just like that, the next revolution in design happened.

WordPress theme creators started to code themes to be resized on a mobile screen to keep them legible, and avoid the “2-finger spread” and the “1-finger drag”. The responsiveness discontinuity started with these 2 imperatives: keep the text legible by keeping the font size as was set for desktop, and organize the design elements always visible in the mobile viewport without forcing users to drag the design back to center.

Mobile First Sites and Graphical User Interface (GUI) Issues with Finger Motions

The verticalization of design was a complete innovation for the industry, and so was the advent of WYSIWYG page builders. The new capacity of WordPress to recalibrate the front-end to make it display in a legible format, coupled with its ease of use and its document management capability, imposed it as the obvious replacement for the best site builder software of the mid-2000s, Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

For web designers, the new slew of responsive WordPress themes was a killer sales tool. Local business websites started to look awesome again, and thanks to a vibrant developer community, WordPress quickly expanded its already predominant market share, dwarfing all the other content management systems combined. Drupal and Joomla didn’t even stand a chance.

The discontinuity stopped there, however, at “mobile responsiveness”.

Responsiveness: Useful… but incomplete

In fact, responsiveness as both a coding and design concept has not much evolved since its early days. Mobile-responsive themes adapt to more screen sizes and more devices than in 2012. New plugins have been developed to make building a WordPress mobile site even easier.

In 2015 Google came out with AMP, a development framework designed to speed up mobile sites. AMP HTML was a rudimentary language, with a limited number of expressions, difficult to implement with a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI). It took years to mature, and caused a lot of grief in the web design community. Its birth and maturation take place in the stream of incremental changes aiming at sculpting the web for mobile browsing.

Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP logo 400px

As imperfect as their approach to the new mobile web paradigm has been, Google has played a critical role in moving the developer community forward towards better mobile sites. By way of example, Google’s engineers have kept offering testing tools to the community, to validate their code. Google adopted WebPageTest.org to offer practical diagnostic solutions to bottlenecks and code optimization issues.

From “mobile responsiveness”, Google gradually transitioned to “mobile friendliness”. The Google Search Console is the testing framework in which this evolution is taking place.

User interface issues

Inevitably, the quest for better mobile usability led designers, developers, WordPress theme creators, and Google engineers to work on the GUI of mobile sites.

Using a smart phone in many different situations

Mobile browsing occurs in a variety of situations that have little in common with the environment in which desktop browsing usually happen. Think about it: where and how you do consult your smart phone?

- In your car, quickly, at the red light (hopefully)
- Out in the street, night and day (when a glaring sun reflects off your screen and blinds you)
- With and without your readers (if you are 40+)
- At the office, between 2 tasks (surreptitiously, as The Man doesn’t like it)
- With your baby in your arms (who’s the focus of your attention?)
- At the restaurant, in a fully lit or a dark intimate setting (ah, those pesky neon lights reflecting off your screen)
- On motorcycle handlebars, glance by glance, to follow map directions (high vibrations and traffic dangers don’t make for comfy reading)
- Under the rain, looking for directions (trying to protect your expensive iPhone from the shower)
- Etc…

In all these situations, at least 3 external constraints impact your visual experience:

- Lighting conditions
- Speed of visual interaction
- Situational stress

These constraints will translate into a set of specific design issues:

- Is there enough contrast between the design elements to allow a quick read in all type of lighting?
- Are the design elements big enough that they can be read at a glance, with and without readers?
- Are the design elements well-differentiated and their individual function recognizable at a glance through color coding?
- Are the design elements grouped by functional types that are easy to understand?

Mobile First Website - Graphic User Interface

Likewise, because the conditions under which you search and browse on a mobile device can be less-than-ideal, the ergonomics of a mobile website will affect the quality of your interaction with it.

The set of external hindrances at play comprises:

- Small viewport size (until they invent the holographic phone)
- Interactivity tools (fingers + voice + stylus, vs. mouse pointer)
- Situational stress

From this set of hindrances arises a new set of graphic user interface issues:

- Is there enough space between the elements of design to enable a clumsier interaction? (Your fingers are not as accurate as a mouse)
- Is there too much space between the elements of design to enable quick decision-making without forcing you to move the site up and down? (Value-destructive interaction)
- Are design elements big enough to enable a simple interaction? (Don’t you hate those extra-small buttons?)
- Are design elements quick to respond to interaction? (Or do you need to tap twice to get a response from the site?)
- Are design elements uselessly “floating” in the viewport? (Forcing you to re-center them left and right in a wasteful interaction)
- Does the general page design create “reflows” forcing you to wait to interact with the site or even impeding your interaction? (E.g. bothersome ads that change the position of design elements)
- Does the design give you a visual feedback of your interaction? (E.g. color change when tapping on an element, audible or haptic signals)

In the past couple of years, the Google Search Console has started to integrate programmatic tools designed to send you alerts (“mobile usability issues“) about perceived design flaws of your mobile site.

Google Search Console Alert on GUI issue

These alerts are not always accurate (far from it), but they call your attention to potential design hindrances that may impact user experience. Since Google never wastes a good opportunity to threaten you with de-ranking (“We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search“), it’s a good rule of thumb to login to the Search Console and have a look at what their programmatic tool has to say.

This effort takes place in the framework of the “mobile-friendly” site, a design step-up from the “mobile responsive” site.

Mobile-friendly sites

“Mobile-friendly” is an expression coined by Big G a couple years ago to designate websites that comply with a set of guidelines:

The task-oriented approach is the core of Google’s user interface design guidelines. The goal of your design is to help visitors accomplish their purpose in the shortest time possible, with the minimum number of steps, and with the greatest ease. All this in a format that is consistent across platforms. Measure and optimize.

In this approach we find commonalities with the philosophy of “lean manufacturing” pioneered by Toyota: measure and optimize your process to consume the least possible materials and energy (incl. human labor), eliminate re-work (or waste, “muda” in Japanese), bring in your materials and subsystems only as you need them, and detect/remedy quality issues as they happen (to avoid more “muda“).

Google’s approach to mobile-friendly sites is holistic in nature: align all elements of your system under a single goal of serving your customers well. Anything that does not concur to this objective is to be removed from the system.

One of the key concept behind the making of a mobile-friendly site is the hierarchization of information. As Google puts it:

“Making a mobile site requires prioritization. Start by working out what the most important and common tasks are for your customers on mobile.”

Information hierarchy

The fundamental differences in browsing experience between desktop sites and mobile sites make it necessary for web designers to organize the information presented to visitors in a different way.

The design concept dubbed “responsiveness” never included information hierarchy. Based on our experience, only web designers close to their local clients actually observed they could not show on a mobile site all that they could show on a desktop.

When local users shop for a plumber, an HVAC company or a restaurant, they typically have 5+ options to choose from within a 10 mile radius, and way more in a big city. They don’t like wasting time in navigating a complicated site.

Complex website navigation bad information hierarchy model

On the other side of the ledger, local businesses can’t afford wasting leads. They are keenly aware of the calls they get, and they watch their pennies: if their website doesn’t generate business, they are quick to fire their web team. This explains why local web designers are usually a step ahead of Google insofar as the best way to present important information first. There are “the quick”, and then there are “the dead”.

Some of the issues that need to be planned out when designing a mobile site:

- What services do people most often look for when they need a plumber? An HVAC company? A mechanic? How to display these services on a mobile site so they can be accessed with 1 single click?
- Do visitors expect to find specials and coupons on a site they visit? If so, where to present them?
- What do visitors have to do to find your phone number and call? Do they have to go up and down the home page trying to locate your number? Or do you show it so obviously that no one could miss the call button?
- It is important or not to display a map with your business on it? Should this map be interactive?

All these issues relate to the hierarchy of information presented on the site. What to present, where to present it, how to present it.

Information hierarchization involves making choices in the way core information is presented, or omitted, or moved to the bottom of the menu.

In other words, it is counter-productive to show on a mobile site everything you show on a desktop site, and in the same order. Your visitors will leave in droves before they even interact twice with your mobile site.

As designers, we have to be careful to not misinterpret Google’s concern with “skinny” mobile content. Google states: “Don’t get caught in the trap of only creating a mobile-formatted site that doesn’t provide the full functionality [of the desktop site].” Yes, Google will penalize skinny content. But they won’t penalize a site because its mobile menu is organized differently from its desktop menu. However, if your desktop site has a blog, this blog’s better be present on your mobile site.

Mobile-First sites are mobile-optimized

Google does not instruct designers as to where and how the information should be presented on a mobile site. Each client has different needs, and this is the designer’s job to define these needs correctly, and hierarchize information according to a workable model. The model just has to work for end-customers AND for Google.

This is the reason why we believe Google’s concept of “mobile-friendly sites” falls a tad short of what really needs to be done on a mobile site to make it efficient for both users and search engines.

At Eden Ads, we have pushed the mobile-friendly concept a bit further, to create mobile-optimized sites:

- Optimized information hierarchy
- Optimized ergonomics & graphical user interface
- Optimized speed
- Optimized schema mark-up for local search
- Optimized page tagging for search engines
- Optimized conversions

The process through which we go to design an optimized mobile size requires studying your business with you, defining what your visitors expect, what your customers buy, what offers are necessary to clinch a deal, etc.

The philosophy of Mobile First is not an after-thought, but a carefully prepared planning process
that will make your mobile site a great weapon in your lead generation arsenal.

Don’t build a mobile replica of your desktop site. That won’t generate the leads and sales you need.

Free independent evaluation

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency in Tampa, FL. Our team offers qualified local businesses a unique opportunity to have their website and digital marketing/advertising campaigns fully evaluated under multiple aspects:

- ROI of Google Ads campaigns
- Finding where you waste money in your Google Ads campaigns
- ROI of Facebook campaigns
- Search engine position checks on your 2 or 3 main keywords
- General SEO-readiness
- Adequacy of mobile design
- Google speed scoring of your mobile website

This free independent evaluation can reveal weaknesses that hurt your site and prevent it to get to the top of search results. It can also highlights design issues blocking it from converting more visitors into leads. Call our web consultants today at (813) 940-5699 to request a free independent evaluation, and discuss your most pressing needs.

If you’re want results, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at (813) 940-5699 or make contact with our team via our secure online form.

Eden-Ads Facebook marketing Tampa featured thumb

In digital marketing, Facebook Ads

Digital Marketing: Key Benefits of Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads: Legit Digital Marketing Tools

SPICY NUGGET
Facebook Ads will significantly help grow your business. The Facebook Ads Manager tool is not intuitive however, and it takes skill and diligent testing to make it lucrative.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

As a Facebook user, you’ve probably experienced seeing ads on your personal feed that were annoying or not appropriate for you, right? Yet, you kept on seeing them. They just won’t go away, and herein lies one of the key benefits of Facebook ads: they work. (When they are targeted correctly.)

If you’ve ever felt annoyed by an ad, you can safely assume that you were not the right target for the company placing the ad.

On the other hand, if you‘ve ever searched online for a product you wanted (say, a new Trek Bicycle) only to later see an ad offering you a great discount on Trek Bicycles the next time you visit Facebook, you probably wouldn’t have the same reaction as above. In fact, you might be be quite pleased. That’s just part of the magic of a correctly targeted Facebook ad in a digital marketing campaign.

But… Facebook Ads Didn’t Work For Us!

If you’re a business owner or a marketing manager and you aren’t using Facebook Ads, you might want to re-think this approach. (Read on and we’ll explore the main benefits of Facebook ads as compared to other ad platforms.)

If you’ve tried Facebook Ads and were underwhelmed by the results or stopped because they “didn’t work,” there’s a good reason why they didn’t work—and it’s probably not because your target audience isn’t on Facebook.

For most businesses, a good percentage of their buyers use Facebook. Some niche industries may find better success using a different ad platform, which is something our Ad Specialists will determine in our initial discussions with you. However, if your business has an obvious demographic available on Facebook and ads aren’t working, then we can safely assume the ads were not done correctly.

Facebook ads especially are an ever-changing nuance of digital marketing which require professional strategy and execution. For best results, use a marketing pro and don’t go it alone.

Finally, Facebook Ads are not the same as using the “Boost Post” button on a post you create on your business page. For a truly effective campaign, a trained FB Ads Specialist must use the Facebook Business Manager platform to create ads targeted towards a precise audience with results in mind.

Target Your Exact Audience

Facebook provides comprehensive audience targeting—better than Google Ads. You can target user personal interests, user demographics such as age bracket and location, behavior, connections and language. A savvy Facebook ads marketer can even target your competitors’ followers.

Pro Tip: The Facebook Business Manager platform enables you to refine your targeting so that you can eliminate Facebook users who are not in your target market. This ensures that your Facebook Ads are placed only in front of users who are potential customers and ultimately saves advertising dollars while ensuring higher quality leads.

Reach More of Your Target Market Than with Organic Facebook Posts

The unfortunate truth about your Facebook Business or Fan page is that only a small percentage of your followers will ever see what you post on it.

The [always changing, never predictable] Facebook algorithms determine the visibility of your page amongst your followers. Recent implementations caused significant decreases in business pages’ visibility as Facebook moved towards a news feed which prioritized posts from friends and family and reduced business page posts to a less frequent rotation.

In simple English, this means that if you want to make use of Facebook as a tool for new leads, customers or even just a larger fan base, the most effective way to do so is by using Paid Facebook Ads. Lest we forget, Facebook is a for-profit organization after all.

The good news is that by using the Business Manager platform effectively you can get a solid return on your ad dollars, and the Eden Ads team averages 4-7 times the return on ad spend (ROAS) for our Facebook Ad clients.

Remarket to People Who Have Already Interacted with Your Brand

Remarketing (aka retargeting) is a smart and lucrative way of reaching your target audience. The reason this digital marketing technique works so well is because interested users who have visited your website in the past (and did not become customers) will see your ad again as a reminder of their initial interest.

It’s estimated that 3 out of 4 website visitors that go through the steps to place items they intend to buy in their shopping carts, fail to purchase.

Through the use of remarketing you can re-target those “lost customers” and rekindle their interest in your services or products. According to a recent remarketing study, website visitors who are re-targeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. This tackles the issue of website and digital cart abandonment once and for all.

Target correctly with inexpensive conversions

Facebook’s CTR (click-through-rate) is steadily increasing because of refinements to their advanced advertising tools. Because of these constant improvements to targeting capabilities, professional digital marketers can effectively target audiences and do so at a low cost.

With the small amount you pay Facebook to run ads and target only the people you want, you’re spending very little to get a great ROI from your ad spend. It can feel expensive in the initial stages of setting up Facebook Ads while your campaign manager is doing testing. This is unavoidable and you should account for this testing period when setting your ad budget.

Facebook‘s plat de résistance: the “Lookalike Audiences”

After you’ve used Facebook Ads with some success and determined the best target audience that actually converts, you can begin to replicate that success by targeting people who are very similar matches to them by using a Facebook technique known as “lookalike audiences.” This feature allows you to take a custom audience and use Facebook to find similar people who are most likely to purchase from you.

The size and targeting options are very specific to ensure that your lookalike audiences accurately reflects the target market that is already converting using your ads.

3 More Reasons to Love Facebook Ads

Your buyers are frequently on Facebook, plain and simple. According to BroadbandSearch, the average person spends about 2½ hours daily on social media, a large part of which is Facebook. A dynamic and visual platform full of rich behavioral data and metrics, Facebook is fantastic place to invest your ad dollars.

You can profitably scale your Facebook Ads by reaching more potential buyers than you ever could organically. Once you’ve tested and established the ads that convert most profitably, you simply invest more money into them and keep using them as long as they are producing a profit. In this way, you can keep growing your customer base much easier than with almost any other advertising platform.

Finally, Facebook is a fantastic tool for building your brand and gaining customer loyalty. For this reason, many companies use Facebook pages to create a sense of belonging to a community for their followers. These pages create the opportunity for real engagement with customers and prospects; this in turn cultivates positive brand image, greater customer loyalty and SuperFans. This activity leads to business growth, higher customer retention, and even more sales.

Ready to Set Your Marketing on Fire?

The most important of all the benefits of Facebook Ads is that they will significantly help grow your business. The Facebook Ads Manager tool is not intuitive, however, and it takes skill and diligent testing to make it lucrative. This process can be vastly accelerated if you lean on a digital marketing pro that has blazed this trail.

If you’re ready to grow your business and get real results with Facebook Ads, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at 727-325-6471 or send us an inquiry via our secure online form.

In digital marketing, google adwords, online advertising

Why Your Business Should Use Google Ads

5 Reasons to Sow With Google Ads
(Get Ready to Reap)

SPICY NUGGET
Google Ads are one of the greatest marketing and advertising tools available to you today. (Yeah, we’re fans.)
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

A Google Ads account in the hands of a dedicated expert is a ferocious tool that will reap in customers from the online battlefield known as the competitive marketplace. In other words, it works very well if you know what you’re doing. “But, will Google Ads work for me?” you ask.

They will work for your business if it meets these criteria:

Your customers go online.
Keywords relevant to your business are searched for online.
Some of your competitors or companies with similar offerings use it.

If You’re Not using Google Ads, You’re Making a Big Mistake

There are a few reasons why your business, no matter the size or its current phase of growth, would benefit from Google AdWords.

1) AdWords gets much faster results than SEO (organic traffic takes much longer to build).

SEO and Google Ads are both search engine marketing strategies that generate traffic to your site. SEO is organic, Google Ads are paid; but hiring an SEO team (it’s one of our digital marketing services) to get you those organic rankings can be costly, and it is slow. Google Ad campaigns, expertly designed, will work much faster to get you top rankings in Google’s pages when people search for your services and products.

You can also monitor very accurately what you’re paying for and getting with Google Ads — you can’t track your results as precisely as that with SEO.

2) Surprising to many, Google Ads often converts to more leads/sales than organic traffic.

As reported by HubSpot:

a) The top 3 paid advertising spots get 46% of the clicks on the page. The top three links on a search engine results page (SERP) capture almost half of all traffic for that keyword. This data supports the PPC method as it involves buying ad space at the top of the SERPs.

b) Businesses make, on average, $3 in revenue for every $1.60 they spend on AdWords. PPC is a relatively inexpensive way to experiment, and there is a solid average ROI for investing in paid search ads.

c) PPC Ads can boost brand awareness by 80%.

d) Google’s algorithm updates don’t affect PPC. While not a stat per se, a big benefit of PPC is that it’s immune to Google’s changing ranking algorithms. In 2018, Google reported that they had updated their algorithm 3,234 times! If you’re using SEO, you have to adjust many factors on and outside of your website to match updated algorithm requirements.

e) 63% of people reported that they would click on a Google Ad. A high click-through rate (CTR) is the goal driving both PPC and SEO, and if the majority of surveyed consumers report that they would click into a paid search ad, it is a compelling statistic for investing in PPC.

f) 75% say it’s easier to find what they’re looking for from paid ads. The reason the top search results in Page 1 gets the vast majority of clicks is due to a combination of ease of use and finding what you are looking for. Bidding on target keywords through PPC accomplishes both needs: Paid Ads are easy to find at the top of the page, and they bring the right answer to the question of the searcher.

3) Google Ads are Scalable.

One of the most difficult things to do in marketing is to create lead sources that can scale — that means that you don’t have to 10X your ad spend to 10X your leads. Google Ads is very scalable. When you create a Google Ads campaign that converts with a good ROI, you don’t have to limit your ad spend for that campaign. You can increase your PPC ad spend… and your profits will increase in proportion to the higher budget.

4) Reconnect with past website visitors.

This is what’s known as remarketing (or retargeting). Google Ads provide the capability to reconnect with your past website visitors who didn’t convert on your site, abandon a shopping cart, peruse the site but don’t download anything, etc. With remarketing, your business can continue to show the visitor your offerings through targeted ads directed at them.

This is a great way to pinpoint the people who are interested in what you offer without the need for them to navigate your website — you target your Google Ad message precisely, and send the people who click on it to a specific landing page that gets your message across clearly (without anything else to distract them).

Remarketing can produce a very high ROI. These targeted ads provide a second chance to convert those ‘could-have-been’ customers into paying customers.

5) Increase your brand awareness.

In addition to increasing traffic and conversions on your website, Google Ads are a compelling way to tell people about your brand. It’s been reported that paid search ads lift top-of-mind awareness by an average of 6.6%.

Ready to Kick Off a Google Ads Campaign?

If you’re not yet convinced to try Google Ads, you should speak with a trained Google Ads Consultant on our team who can evaluate your website and offerings, answer your questions and help you determine an advertising strategy that’s right for you, your brand and the products and services you offer.

Digital Marketing Quiz:
5′ To Get a Free Visibility Makeover

Take our Digital Marketing Quiz
Get Your Visibility Makeover Plan for Free!

Take 5 minutes to do Eden Ads’ Digital Marketing Quiz! Your answers will help determine where your business is at visibility-wise, and we’ll craft your custom Visibility Makeover Plan. Free of charge. Yes.

Eden Ads is not your garden-variety digital marketing agency. We are a team of young, passionate, result-oriented marketers, with a wide diversity of careers and experience.

Take the Quiz, then check out our profiles. If you like what you see, just call us and share your most pressing business issue with us: it could be advertising campaigns that are not panning out. Leads that don’t come in fast and furious. Your website doesn’t show anywhere near your competitors in Google. You have traffic but visitors don’t buy what you have.

Any problem can be broken down into its component parts and find the right remedies.

This Quiz and Visibility Makeover Plan is a free service we offer all business owners — whether you’re a client of ours or not. There is no cost and no obligation: feel free to share the love with as many fellow business owners as you’d like.

The Team at Eden Ads
(813) 940-5699

Eden Ads | Digital Marketing Agency

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In landing pages

Best Landing Pages Do THIS (Duh!)…

Spicy Nugget: ANATOMY OF GREAT LANDING PAGES

“Remember: You have 2 seconds with your customer—don’t blow it.”

Adam A. Sene, CEO

Here’s the hard, bitter truth about landing pages—short is sweet, and if you’re one of those people who love a 12,000-word landing page then, I’m sorry, we can’t be friends.

(No, but really.)

We live in a world where e-commerce thrives, so I’ll just ask you: How many times have you bought a bathing suit from China or a jar of gummy supplements from a landing page that had endless content?

No. You usually click through and the opportunity to buy is either right there or, if it isn’t and things are too complicated, you just left. Am I right?

Advertising is inherently rude, and the internet is inherently bored and impatient. Don’t let your ego or your inner Mr. Polite get in the way and let you think that fancy words and long descriptions belong first. You have 2 seconds. Tell the person what you want them to do! Go ahead, say it!! Now!!! ‘Buy My Damn Product!’

This is a law, not an opinion or a philosophy. This is hard-earned user experience data from years of testing, lost money a little blood and quite a bit of sweat.

For the guy who has no time, the best landing page produce CONVERSIONS. (Duh.)

For the guy who has a little more time, let’s start by covering our basics on what makes “the best landing pages” the actual best, shall we?

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a web page, usually belonging to or associated with a complete website belonging to a brand (but not always), whose sole job it is to convert a visitor or customer into a lead or sale without other navigation to other website pages.

How should it be designed?

Though there are varying opinions as to length, calls to action, aesthetic, etc., the overarching fact is that these pages should be as simple and easy to follow as possible, as these are the ones PROVEN to convert leads or purchases. The option to buy or submit a form or call (whatever the most desired action would be for that page) should be immediately visible above the fold on all devices.

Anything else?

Well yes, since you asked. The over-arching idea should be that within 1-2 seconds of “landing” on the page, the visitor knows exactly what product/service is being sold, what he is expected to do on that page and how to do it.

Landing Page Priorities

Priority #1: Above all priorities when developing this type of page, your first and foremost goal is to appeal the impulse shopper and make sure they have a quick and easy way to convert.

Hold your horses there, self-righteous SEO people. (That was a joke.) Of course you can add more content and satisfy the more shrewd shopper by providing additional content, keywords, photos or whatever you want—just put it below the fold.

The internet is full of busy people who only have time to SCAN the internet’s mere 1.7 billion websites. People that will spend the time to read about your product/service are few and far between. They typically arrived on your site directly, via a referral or organically.

Traffic from ads is fleeting and impulsive. You interrupted whatever it was that they were doing (browsing Facebook, watching a video, etc.) with your ad, and now you have only a few seconds to make an impression. Hurry up, jeez!

Other landing page contents may run something like this, in order of their importance:

Attractive image visually showing that the viewer is in the right place. If you’re selling something, an image of your product should be immediately visible. Other images that positively reinforce your product/service can be used too. If you’re a lawn service, show a beautiful lawn. If you’re selling lotion, you may show an image with a woman with nice skin and a container of the lotion you’re selling.

1. A headline reaffirming that they’re in the right place. E.g. “Perfectly Maintained Lawns,” or “Amazing Moisturizer for Beautiful Skin.”

2. A crystal clear call-to-action: e.g. Purchase, Add to Cart, Buy Now, Sign Up, Get Started, Free Samples, Get a Consultation, etc.

3. A brief description of the product/service.

4. A few bullet points of benefits or “pain points” that are addressed by the product/service, such as:

Weekly and bi-weekly mowing plans
Includes our 100% non-toxic grass treatment
Hassle free, dependable service

5. More stuff that builds trust, i.e. positive reviews, accolades, certifications, badges, trust symbols, endorsements, past clients, etc.

6. Everything else that can be used to satisfy the more shrewd shoppers, i.e. active ingredients, detailed descriptions, company history, etc.

Watch What the Titans Are Doing

The world’s largest brands spend thousands and thousands of dollars and countless man hours analyzing user experience data and doing testing of their digital assets to gauge performance. So, if you sell products online, look at what the biggest online retailers are doing. What do Apple, Nike, Amazon and Walmart do?

If you’re selling subscriptions, what do the biggest subscription services do? Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, etc. All of this will chalk up to vital research and survey data you should take into consideration.

With regard to your competitors, unless they are obviously many times more successful than you, who cares what they’re doing? And even when they are more successful, take your observations with a grain of salt. The fact that they’re doing something doesn’t tell you that it’s working. It might just tell you that some corporate leech is playing company politics and trying to please a suit by being adventurous with their nephew’s idea. (Probably a true story.)

The latest spin-the-wheel popup may be a thing of the past in a few months. Go ahead and test it if it pleases you, but remember that longevity and sustained campaigns tell you more about your competitor’s performance than does the simple fact of what they’re doing that you think looks cool.

Landing Pages for eCommerce vs. Lead Generation

For e-commerce, a well-designed product page is usually a sufficient landing page.

For sales pages geared towards lead generation, minimal-to-no navigation should be present on the page to avoid directing traffic to other pages that are less likely to convert. In other words, remove your main menu from the top to keep Wandering Wanda from leaving your page and instead floating onto your Blog or Company Bios page (where there ain’t nothin’ good happening!)

Lead gen pages typically can benefit from a live chat option as well. Adding Facebook Messenger to your site is free and a great way to capture leads in real time.

Here are a few examples of landing pages that don’t suck. See if you can spot why we like them!

Need Help With Your Landing Pages?

A sizable chunk of Eden Ads’ team consists of seasoned web developers, writers, data analysts and user experience (UX) experts whose combined experience across makes us uniquely qualified to help you create a landing page that looks sharp, fits the aesthetic you’re going for and, above all, CONVERTS. Connect with us online or give us a call at (813) 940-5699!

Boosting Posts on Facebook: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Spicy Nugget: Boosting Facebook Posts?

“Boosting posts on Facebook? Don’t do it.”
-Adam A. Sene, CEO

Is it worth anything boosting your Facebook posts? If you’re a scanner and you just want to get the gist and get on with your day, here’s what you need to know:

The Good: Boosting is convenient and easy especially for those who aren’t particularly Facebook marketing savvy. It’s a pretty affordable self-service option to get more eyeballs and some more engagement on something you’ve posted from your page.

(If you’re reading this and are thinking, “Yeah! That sounds like me!” please just stop reading here and contact us immediately.)

The Bad: You get what you pay for in marketing, and boosting posts on Facebook doesn’t result in any real, measurable business objectives (like sales, conversions or clicks to your website).

The Ugly: Boosting posts is not an advertising strategy. If you really want your advertising dollars to go far, Facebook post boosting will be a total waste.

In a Nutshell: If Likes and Comments are valuable to you, go for it. Wait—no, don’t go for it! Call us instead! We’ll get you those things and MORE with the budget you have. Expert use of Facebook’s Ads Manager tool offers way more customization than boosting posts, so you get the engagement and visibility you crave while ALSO getting sales, conversion, and traffic to your site by people who have a strong intent to purchase or, at the very least, a likelihood of being interested in your product.

If you’re a reader and you want to know more, let’s dig deeper into questions surrounding whether boosting posts on Facebook is worth it—starting with what it actually does.

So, What Does “Boosting Posts” on Facebook Actually Do?

If you have a Facebook page for your business, you’ll see the “Boost Post” button available to you as the page’s manager on every single post you do. At the time of this writing, when you click that button you are met with 3 options for choosing a “Goal” in setting up your boosted post:

To allow Facebook to choose the goal for you based on your page activity and settings,
Get more engagement (reactions, comments and shares), or
Get more messages.

You set the budget and how many days you’d like to boost that post for. You can even choose a few basic targeting parameters and voila! Hit publish, and you’re done.

After doing this, you’re likely to see more:

Comments
Post reactions
Post shares
Page follows

And you’re likely to see fewer:

Website visits
Product sales
Signups, downloads or conversions

While you might get increased site traffic or a couple extra sales or sign-ups as a byproduct of boosting, it’s important to note that this is not really the primary goal of Facebook post boosting.

Boosting Posts vs Running Ads on Facebook

The purpose of boosting posts is to increase a few vanity metrics for your brand—i.e. the ones that make you look good (like impressions, likes, comments, etc.) but which do not really allow you to make future decisions about your business or help your business to grow in any real, measurable way.

Further, it’s vital to note that the way Facebook will successfully execute a boosted post is to optimize itself by showing it to people who have a higher likelihood to like/comment/react over their likelihood to click a link. And remember, just because someone is commenting doesn’t mean they’re likely to be a good fit for your business. It could be a troll, your mom or just someone who is super active on Facebook.

Using the Ads Manager, your content can be targeted in a 1,000 different ways that actually spark brand growth (and, thus, your vanity metrics), sales, conversions and subscribers, AND give you measurable insights you can act on as a business owner.

Should I Boost Posts AND Advertise with Facebook Business?

If you’re still here, the last section may have led you to this question—would it make sense to do both, Facebook ads and post boosting? It’s a fair question. Short answer: Maybe!

As a strategy, doing both may make sense if you…

Have it in your budget to focus on boosting posts while you run ads
Boost a post that really aligns with your overall business and marketing strategy
Share some content that is super valuable for your community to specifically see and engagement (such as news or an important update)
Just want to get more out of the organic content you’re sharing, and already get a ton of sales through other marketing strategy on and offline.
Don’t care about sales, conversions, website traffic or any other measurable business and marketing objectives.

But EVEN IF those things are true, save yourself some money! Optimize your marketing strategy by chatting with a Marketing Consultant, outlining your goals and discussing what the best options would be to get you where you want to be.

You Guys Just Want Me to Run Ads ‘Cause You’re an Advertising Agency, Right?

Nah, not our style. Of course we’d love for you to become our client, but the potential within Facebook advertising is just too great for you not to at least become aware of it before making the decision to boost posts. The Ads Manager tool within the Facebook Business platform is a beast in the hands of an expert.

Facebook Advertising is an unprecedented opportunity for business owners. With a community just shy of 2 million users that you can target content, sales and ads to based on age, gender, location, relationship status, past purchase behavior, past web searches, engagement with other similar brands, and so on, and so on, and so on…

That’s something you just can’t do with post boosting.

Is There Ever a Case Where Boosting Would Make Sense?

Well, no, but sure! It’s:

Good for testing
Perhaps a good option for lower budget situations
Good for those who “just don’t have time” to work out a deeper marketing strategy but want to keep wheels turning a little bit

Boosting Posts on Facebook: The Short Story

It’s easy to boost posts on Facebook. It’s right there! It’s built to be a convenient self-service promotion opportunity, and it really is so easy your 12-year-old could do it for you. But you’ll always get what you pay for in marketing, and this is no exception.

There are far, far more in-depth advertising options available in the Business.Facebook.com platform that actually enable real business objectives to be achieved (i.e.: views, conversions, sales, newsletter signups, site traffic, etc.) that Facebook Post Boosting gives you none of.

Feel like talking with a real human about your marketing goals? We’re here! Let’s do this.

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