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Paid ads have sucked since the dawn of the internet, at least for you on the receiving end of said ads. The businesses behind the ads have enjoyed an incredible acceleration in the ability to target and retargeted their ads cheaper than ever. With a cultural shift towards attention to privacy, companies like Apple & Google have taken steps to make it harder for third parties to advertise as accurately as they once did. This regression in data collection has caused a number of large companies to reevaluate their ad dollars on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and in response, these platforms are making it more expensive to reach the ideal client to make up for lost revenue.  Changes to the PPC and Social Ad Space in 2021 Some giants in the space have taken measures to make these retargeting efforts more difficult in 2021, leading to an increase in these costs as well as a number of court cases. The most notable moves are Apple’s iOS 14 and 15 updates and Google announcing that the Google Chrome Browser will go cookieless (later retracted but still possibly in the works). iOS 14/15 When iOS 14 went live Facebook released the following statement… “Apple has released changes with iOS 14 that impact how we receive and process conversion events from tools like the Facebook pixel. Businesses that advertise mobile apps, as well as those that optimize, target, and report on web conversion events from any of our business tools may be affected. Specifically, Apple requires that apps in the App Store that engage in what Apple defines as "tracking" to show a prompt on iOS 14.5 or later devices, in accordance with their AppTrackingTransparency framework. Apple’s policy prohibits certain data collection and sharing unless people opt into tracking on iOS 14.5 or later devices via the prompt. As a result, ads personalization and performance reporting may be limited for both app and web conversion events.” Read the rest here. What Facebook is saying here is that the pop up that asks users if they want to be tracked on iOS 14+ devices will lower the effectiveness of their ad tracking and as a result, reporting for conversions and events on the web are far more limited. These limits reduce transparency between marketing teams and their counterparts and have often ended up in a move of those marketing dollars to mediums who are progressing their tracking instead of regressing. Google Going Cookieless Earlier this year Google announced… “(Our) intent to remove support for third-party cookies, and why we’ve been working with the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers. Even so, we continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products. We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.” Read the rest here. In March of this year this announcement was made, in June it was postponed until 2023. Google claims a number of reasons for this delay, much to the appreciation of marketers in the short term, but the writing is on the wall for all businesses that plan to advertise online and on social media…you will need to develop other methods of retargeting and tracking your users across the web. Where We Are Headed in 2022 With companies leaving social media platforms in droves, that marketing budget needs to be reassigned elsewhere. Below are three of the most invasive, organic marketing tactics of 2022 being initiated by small and large businesses alike. Paid ad alternatives SEOSEO is the practice of optimizing your website for search engines to show your site as an option more frequently. Search Engine Optimization can be just as expensive as paid ads if you don’t have a plan. If your SEO plan includes long tail keywords with low competition, you may be able to write one really great piece of content, build some backlinks to that content, and have it rank at the top of a relevant search for a long time to come. SEO is competition based and if you can find a sentence or a longer string of words your clients search for often with the intent to convert you can save a ton in ad budget. SEO also has a ton of benefit because internet users are becoming more savvy and less likely to click on the paid ads. Network Marketing Network marketing is no longer finding your local BNI chapter and visiting a couple times a year. Post COVID network marketing has seen exponential acceptance of Zoom calls, webinars, and other networking that does not require a handshake. Finding webinars you can speak at gets you in front of more qualified leads than any other type of low budget marketing and with low cost design platforms like Canva readily available, presenting yourself as an authority in the space is easier than ever. Joining associations within your industry is also an easy way to meet other business owners just as hungry as you are and looking to collaborate. InfluencerInfluencer marketing has gone the way of ppc in 2021 becoming more and more expensive for less and less of a guaranteed return. This is usually the result of a poor influencer selection. Not all influencers have to be glamorous either. If you are a local electrician, your best influencer can be the local real estate agent and part of your marketing budget can be spent taking them out to dinner once a quarter. Influencer selection should be completely based around the answer to the question “where do my customers go before they make a decision to choose my product or services”. Unless you are a large e-commerce brand the last metric you should be worried about is follower count. Why Choose SEO Over Paid Ads in The New Year  Paid ads won’t be getting cheaper anytime soon on the traditional online advertising platforms of the 2010’s. With every company looking to leverage blockchain and the metaverse we could see the majority of ad budgets move there but even that is years away. In the meantime, the number one place to discover unknown information is Google and other search engines and the most effective way to advertise where the most people go is by ranking in the organic listing for valuable search terms. Not to mention these users stay longer, are more engaged, and convert more frequently than paid user.
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 Google Analytics is a complex collection of data that an inexperienced eye can easily get lost in. When looking at the Source/Medium of the traffic sources to your website, Google Analytics breaks the data up into three sections which are Acquisitions, Behavior, and Conversions. Most business owners and C levels care about the Conversions however, in this article we are going to dive into the 2 broader and perhaps harder to decipher categories. Acquisition Metrics are things like the number of users, number of new users, and number of sessions to start. Behavior Metrics are focused on the user once on the site, including things like bounce rate, page session, and average session duration. Both of these groups of metrics are relevant for different types of SEO campaigns and are particularly important if you are trying to understand your own SEO. Keep reading and we will break them down piece by piece. When Should You Care About Acquisition Metrics? Users, New Users, and Sessions are the 3 standard metrics provided in this section.
These are top of funnel metrics and should be looked at through a top of funnel lens. Particularly true in e-commerce business models, not every user is a customer but every customer is a user, and this is important to remember. Bringing more users, but seeing a decline in Behavior and Conversion metrics, could be an indication that you are bringing the wrong type of user to the site. Acquisition metrics are an area you want to see continuous growth in, but if Behavior and Conversions are not on similar upward trends you may need to revisit your content strategy. Tip: Take a look at the Geo section in Google Analytics under “Audience”. You’ll want to monitor where your traffic is coming from and trends that relate to the searchers geographic region. If you are a local business and your content is attracting users from states or even countries away this could be a reason you see better Acquisition numbers than Behavior and Conversion.  When Should You Care About Behavior Metrics? Bounce Rate, Page/Session, and Ave. Session Duration are the 3 standard metrics provided in this section.
These metrics are at the heart of good SEO and becoming more and more important ranking factors. And this is a fairly easy conclusion to draw. If users are showing quality behavior metrics like high time on page or pages visited per session, then the user must be receiving some sort of value from your site and Google will reward you by showing your site more frequently to qualified users. Behavior metrics are clearly the next logical step in tracking Traffic Sources. First, you acquire the user, then you track that user as they move around your site, if you are able to attract enough eyes, and provide a quality experience worth staying, you should have some nice conversion metrics to show the decision makers. Tip: Consider adding a tool to your site that tracks your users' cursors anonymously. You will be able to view a heatmap of where people click and this makes for very clear A/B testing. Try things like different contact form or call to action placements and see how your users interact with the page. After a few tests you should feel very confident in creating a template that others in your business can use to push out optimized content worry free with a page layout that works.  Scratching the Surface of Google Analytics Traffic Sources is a fraction of the data offered by Google Analytics. It is a great place to simply make sure things aren’t on fire but finding the cause of poor SEO results requires much deeper digging. In my next two posts I will discuss How to Identify the Underlying Causes of Poor Acquisition and Behavior Metrics through other tabs on the Google Analytic Dashboard.
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AuthorAll blogs are written by our incredible staff here at Mad Mango Marketing. Your Connecticut SEO, App Development, and Online Advertising experts. Archives
January 2022
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