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Facebook Pixel
Marketers who are placing Facebook Ads for their business should take advantage of the remarketing capabilities of Facebook Pixel. Simply put, when a user places the Facebook Pixel on their website’s landing page, they can capture information about the users that clicked on their ad and didn’t buy! This information can help to further define your audience and improve future ads.Additionally, the price of the item you are selling can also be captured by the pixel to help determine the ROI of the advertisement. For more tips and tricks regarding social media advertising, subscribe to our newsletter.
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Nov 04 2017 
Measuring ROI of Social Media Campaigns
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding how to Measure a Social Media Marketing Campaign. Your boss may even have asked you what the ROI was for the money spent. Unlike Google Adwords which are targeted to potential customers when they are ready to buy a product like you have to offer, Social Media Campaigns cannot be evaluated directly by immediate sells or leads. However, that does not mean that they fail to be a factor in gaining new clients and ultimately growing your business.In fact, social media has become a critical factor that Google uses to rank your website for Quality Score and User Experience which both affect your search results. Starting back in 2012 with the Penguin Algorithm updates, inbound links took less of a role in search ranking and was replaced by social media footprint. That really aligns with the intent of social media which is interacting with your audience by giving them useful information regarding their businesses. This information serves to promote the reputation of your company at the same time.
Better metrics for a Social Media Campaign might be Engagement, Number of Shares and Increased Followers of your Facebook Business Page. In today’s fast-paced instant messaging life, a potential client’s time is the best gift of all. So if you continuously provide content of value to a business owner and they begin to follow what you are saying, the conversation eventually pulls them into your leads funnel when they or someone they know have a need for one of the services you provide. That is truly how social media can work for your business to eventually drive traffic to your websites and increase your bottom-line!
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Nov 02 2017 
Google’s Quality Score
I had a client this week wanting assistance with a Google AdWords account. They had implemented a variable ad with different titles and keywords pertinent to their campaign. The ads were running continuously and charging for impressions. Analysing the Quality Score for each Variable, showed that only one variation had a score over 7. This means the ad was running continuously even during the night at a higher than normal price due to the lower quality scores.The solution we proposed was to develop separate landing pages for each keywords being targeted to more closely tie the Landing Page to the Ad. Additionally, the advertised times were narrowed to specific daytime slots that had shown interaction with an increased daily bid. The result was a vastly improved campaign performing as intended to get more tickets sold for the event.
Remember, when running an Ad Words Campaign, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and forget about the important stuff that matters to Google! Check your Quality Scores on all your Campaigns to maximize dollars and improve your results!
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Free Preliminary SEO Analysis
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a clue how well your website is performing when potential customers search for your services. In fact, the whole concept of website optimization is somewhat of a mystery. To find out for sure how your site is performing and what you need to do about it, sign up for our new SEO Analysis!
This service is absolutely FREE to you, so why wonder, Know! To sign-up, click on the button below!
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Sep 25 2017 
Using Social Flow to Measure Engagement
The diagram above illustrates one of the nice ways Google Analytics can be used to view the Value of traffic from a Social Media Campaign. This graphic shows the different Social Sources and the behavior of users when they visit your website. Each section shows the path a user took through your website when they left and how many pages they visited and in what order they visited them. This information can be used in a number of ways to improve your potential client’s user experience with your brand.
First of all, the traffic comparison of your different social media accounts will show you Which Platforms are feeding you the Most Traffic. This is useful for adjusting your campaigns to the areas where you have the largest audience. Secondly, it shows where the user exited your website. If several people exit on the same page, then you may need to look at rebuilding that page or doing an A/B comparison of a different version of that page to see if users stay on longer.
Additionally, the page path can tell you something about your user’s objective for coming to your website. Which information is most valuable to them will probably be viewed First or Second in the flow. The number of pages visited tells you something about customer engagement. The more pages, the more engaged the user is with your brand. A large number of exists after the first page tells you something about the Landing Page not matching the Advertisement. In this case, you should experiment with new Landing Pages to find one that will perform better.
Your Landing Page can also be the Conversion Page. If the objective of the Ad is to get the user to Make a Purchase or Ask for a Quote the instructions should be clear and easy! It’s also very important to search engines especially Google, that the Landing Page match the Advertisement. In fact, Google may refuse to post your ad if the Landing Page is drastically different than the Advertisement!
For More Online Marketing Tips, subscribe to our Newsletter or Blog Feed Below!
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Facebook Penalizing Low-Quality Website Links
Beginning on May 10th and continuing for the remainder of May, Facebook is modifying its algorithm to penalize a ‘poor customer experience’. They define a ‘Poor Customer Experience’ as websites or landing pages with little substantive content, large numbers of paid advertisements, and/or malicious ads. In order to determine whether your website is considered to have this definition, they are using Artificial Intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared with links have these characteristics. If they do, the post will show up lower in people’s news feeds and you may not even be able to place a Facebook ad at all!This initiative is stemming from the social media giant’s desire to provide a good user experience to its users. As the largest and most widely used Social Media Company, their impact on advertising results of small businesses is huge. Their message seems to be, if you are small, don’t act that way by posting spam like content and advertisements on your website or landing pages. Small businesses would do well to heed the warning!
Custom Websites to Go has been in business for 12yrs, helping address the digital marketing needs of small businesses! We are happy to visit with you about any concerns you have with regard to marketing and advertising your business!
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Shared Hosting Problems
The proliferation of WordPress as an easy to use platform has created a whole other layer of problems for the user. Because WordPress is easy to use, it is also easy to hack. If you haven’t had this happen to you yet, you definitely will at some point in the future. Shared hosting is like sharing an apartment where you share common space with your neighbors. It is one size and you cannot customize anything which means you can’t add software to assist in securing your site. It also lacks privacy which is where the problem comes in for WordPress sites. The single size with no customization and lack of privacy makes your website more prone to being hacked.WordPress sites need to be hardened to prevent attack, which means that best practices should be followed in maintaining the website and locking it down. As an open source platform, the main software that runs WordPress is always being updated when vulnerabilities are discovered. That means, the software needs to be updated to the latest versions. Plug-ins are additional software programs that add functionality to the main WordPress website. They also have frequent updates which are needed for security of the website. Updates are frequently missed in the shared hosting solution due to lack of diligence or knowledge of the user.
There are 2 potential solutions to this, VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated Hosting. VPS Hosting is advantageous to Shared Hosting, because you have control of the server and what resources will be provided. You can set the size of memory and use of resources for each account. Although the websites are still sharing the same server, they can be configured for security and best use. This is a great solution for businesses that are small to medium in size without heavy user traffic. A website with a great deal of traffic will require a Dedicated Server where the website has its own server and resources.
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Social Media and a National Election
Can social media really influence action? You may have asked yourself that at one time or another. Using social media is really convenient for connecting with friends and colleagues, but does it really influence people’s actions? A recent flip-flop of two members of the Electoral College in Texas away from the Republican nominee explain that some of his tweets showed he was not really trying to unite the country! The question is, if other members of the Electoral College follow suit and he fails to get the number of votes necessary to win the election, then the presidential race could be forced into a runoff situation.
Generally, I tell my clients to avoid talking about politics or religion on social media because these two are highly charged, emotional topics that can serve to alienate half of your audience. The candidate of the winning Republican Party has yet a higher charge than that! Anything he says must be carefully weighed to prevent offending others, a challenge Mr. Trump will need to master going forward in his presidency. Once in office, I am sure his public relations staff will instruct him in such matters and perhaps handle the majority of his tweets for him. It will be interesting to watch this issue unfold on the national stage! -
Dec 08 2016 
Search-Optimization Tips
Organic optimization of your website or SEO, is an iterative process. Businesses need to have a process in place for continuously monitoring the results and adjusting their strategies. Search engines alter their algorithms on an ongoing basis. We can’t always know the exact combinations being used, but some things we definitely know.- They are interested in good relevant content for their users.
- They want to make it easy for users to locate the information they are seeking.
- They also want to make money!
Those few clues provide a wealth of information regarding the processes we use in helping our clients dominate their search categories. Long-tailed key phrases are used to direct traffic that is specific to the client’s business. This makes for more qualified leads coming from the web for their services. We also help our clients to locate worthwhile bulletin boards or websites that can provide relevant inbound links to their website. These are just two of the techniques used in addition to on-page optimization that are provided.
We need a 6 month commitment from our clients as the process takes about that length of time to start seeing results. A successful optimization strategy does not stop there. The process needs to continue in order to sustain ranking. I tell clients to think of it as a marathon, not a sprint and to develop an ongoing process of evaluating and adjusting their strategies.
For more information on optimizing your business website, call us or drop us a line!
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