4 Reasons Why You Should Advertise on Facebook

Facebook Ads are a great way to get your business in front of new prospects. In today’s article, we’re giving you 4 reasons to consider using Facebook Ads for your business.

1,230,000,000.

That's how many active daily users are on Facebook.

Digital marketing has drastically changed over the last decade. Ten years ago, Facebook had just switched from being a platform reserved for college students to a platform that everyone could access. The profile pages looked completely different and "Newsfeeds" and "Timelines" didn't exist.

Fast-forward to today. Not only does Facebook now use algorithms to filter what they think you'll find most interesting, they also feature opportunities for businesses to use the platform as a way to advertise to users.

If you're still unsure about why investing in Facebook Ads is a good place to spend your marketing dollars, read below for the four main reasons they can be a smart investment for your business.

1. Everyone is on Facebook

With 1.23 billion daily users and 1.86 billion monthly users, Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world. Which means that Facebook Advertising creates an extremely valuable opportunity for businesses to get in front of prospective clients who are on Facebook.

While other social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat have gained popularity over the years, Facebook is still the king when it comes to social media. In fact, Facebook has more than double the amount of adult online users than any of the other platforms.

The other key thing to consider about Facebook users is that they span across all age groups. While the most popular age group on Facebook is 18-29 year olds with an 88% user rate, the drop off is minimal for older age groups.

In 2016, 84% of 30-40 year-olds and 72% of 50-64 year-olds used Facebook. Even the 65+ age group still came in at 62% usership.

The bottom line is any type of customer you might want to attract is on Facebook. Which means you can harness its popularity for your advertising.

2. Facebook Ads Can Be Laser Targeted

The challenge with having access to so many users is making sure your ads get in front of your target customers.

Luckily, Facebook advertising allows you to be highly targeted with the audience your ad will be in front of. You can use the following targeting options:

• Demographics that can be broken down by age, gender, geographical location, etc.
• Interests based on what the user likes, shares, clicks on, comments on, as well as the apps he/she uses
• Behaviors based on activity on Facebook, as well as 3rd party partner data from Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. This includes purchase activity, device usage, and travel preferences.
• Key pages visited on your website (aka retargeting)
• Lists of email subscribers or customers in your database

You can even ask Facebook to find other similar users, called Lookalike audiences, after you create an audience using the options above.

The specificity of Facebook's targeting capabilities paired with the amount of information they can gather on their user's interests makes it a great option for advertising.

3. With Facebook Ads You Can Set Clear Goals

There are two general types of Facebook Ads you can run and each type achieves a different goal for your business.

With Engagement Ads, the goal of your campaign is to engage your audience by encouraging them to take action and interact with your post. The focus of these ads is to help get information out about your business and grow and nurture your audience. This also helps you learn about the messaging and content your audience connects with and can inform the future ads you create. With these posts, you may not even realize they are an ad at first because they're meant to blend in with the typical organic posts you interact with.

With Direct Response Ads the goal of your campaign is about driving leads and sales. These ads will have an offer and a call to action to "sign up" or "call now" or "click here." The offer and call to action are two critical components to successful direct response advertising. These are great if you're trying to sell a specific product or offer a new deal.

First, determine why you're running the ad campaign (exposure vs. response) and then you can use Facebook's goal setting options to ensure you achieve that goal.

4. Facebook Ads are Easy to Track

Tracking the success of any ad campaign is extremely important. It allows you to measure the number of leads and sales generated directly from your Facebook ad campaign.

The process to set up Facebook conversion tracking is simple and similar to other ad networks.

The first step is copying your unique tracking pixel and adding that to every single page of your website.

Once that's complete, you have two options for tracking conversions:

1. Track custom conversions using a webpage URL. For example, if you want to track demo sign ups, then you would copy the demo sign up thank you page URL and tell Facebook to track that page as a conversion.
   
   
2. Event tracking using Event codes. This is a bit technical because you’ll need to copy a line of JavaScript and paste it at the end of the pixel code (before the </script>) on the webpage you want to track. For example, if you want to track demo sign ups, then you would copy the Lead Event code, which “fbq(‘track’, ‘Lead’);” Then you would paste that code right before the </script> of your pixel code on the demo sign up thank you page.

If those steps seem advanced, then there’s also the option to email the code and directions to your developer. For most websites, this should be an easy, pain-free process. :)

The 6 Most Important Google Analytics Reports for Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you probably know that you need to use Google Analytics to figure out if your website is succeeding at attracting and engaging visitors. You’ve heard about Google Analytics at conferences, networking meetings, and marketing workshops for businesses like yours.

You probably signed up for Google Analytics and embedded its code into your website. For most business owners, it’s difficult to know what to look for in all of that data. So, you’re then left with the question: Now what?

That’s why, I’ve compiled a list of what Google Analytics reports you need to look at, how to access them, and what to do with the information once you review them. 

Traffic Acquisition Report

Ideally, the traffic to your website will grow over time. You can track this by using the default Google Analytics graph when you log in to see how many visitors your website received today, this week, or last month.

As important as this is, it’s more important to know where your traffic comes from so you can optimize that traffic. If a traffic source is underperforming, you can spend time fixing it. If most of your traffic comes from one place, is there a way to generate even more traffic from this source? How can you diversify?

You can find out where your website traffic comes from by going to Acquisition > Overview. For a more detailed look into what external sites bring traffic to your site, go to Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Referrals.

Source/Medium Report

If you’re investing your marketing dollars by paying for advertisements or SEO services, then you want to know what’s working. This way, you can stop paying for services that don’t work and spend more on those that do.

The Source/Medium report will give you the information you need to determine what’s working for your business, and what needs to be adjusted. This report details the "source" of your traffic (think search engines or Facebook or a Referring website) and what medium, or type of traffic, such as organic search, paid search, or referral from another website. To find this report, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

Use this report to determine which sources of traffic are generating leads and sales so you can make an informed decision about how to best adjust your marketing budget.

Mobile Performance Report

In August of 2016 Google reported that over 60% of searches were conducted on mobile. Google processes roughly 3.5 billion searches per day, that’s a lot of mobile searching and it means that you need to make sure that your mobile website is optimized for users.

Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview to see how much traffic you're getting from mobile devices, how long that traffic is staying on the site, how many pages that traffic is visiting, and how that traffic is converting into leads and sales.

SEO Reports

The Search Engine Optimization reports give you information about how people are reaching your site through Google’s search results. There are three types of SEO reports- Queries Reports, Landing Pages Reports, and Geographical Summaries reports.

• Queries reports show which Google searches resulted in the most impressions for your website. You can also see how many of those impressions resulted in clicks, which will tell you your organic search click-through rate.
  
  
• Landing Pages reports show which pages of your site are showing up in Google’s search results. This helps you to identify which webpages are ranked well and which pages need a little more work.
  
  
• Geographical Summaries reports provide general SEO metrics from different countries. This is helpful to see if your SEO traffic is coming from relevant locations.

Keep in mind that these reports only include information about SEO so they won’t tell you anything about your paid advertising campaigns, social media, or information from other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. To generate your SEO traffic reports, go to Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries and select an appropriate date range. It’s important to note that these reports can only pull data from the past 90 days. Then click the Landing pages report or the Geographical report links.

Google AdWords Traffic Reports

If you’re not advertising in Google AdWords, then you don’t need this report.

For everyone else, I recommend checking your Google AdWords Traffic reports in addition to the reports provided within AdWords. That’s because the reports in Analytics have extra information that provide insight into your visitors’ behavior on your website after clicking on your ads.

The default setting in Google Analytics for your AdWords report shows both your ad clicks and your bounce rate (how often people leave your site after viewing just one page). This information can be used to evaluate different ad copy to see which ads are driving more engaged visitors.

To generate an AdWords Traffic report, go to Acquisition > AdWords > Campaigns and select the appropriate date range.

Social Media Reports

Social Media offers a great opportunity to generate traffic to your website and therefore leads for your business. However, keeping up a strong social media campaign can be very time consuming. Thankfully, Google Analytics provides several reports that can help you track and optimize your social media marketing efforts.

You can see how visitors from all social channels interact with your website, or you can focus on trends and statistics from specific channels such as Facebook or Twitter. These reports will also show you conversions from social media.

To generate the Network Referrals social media report, go to Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals. This report will quickly show you which social networks are bringing people to your site. You can also see which of your pages are being shared most often on social media sites.

Conclusion

Setting up Google Analytics for your business’s website is an important step forward. However, it’s only half the battle. By running the reports listed above, you’ll get valuable insight into what’s working on your website and what needs improvement.

5 Reasons to Invest in SEO

5 Reasons Why SEO Is a Great Investment
for Your Business

Is SEO still necessary?

Every year, this is one of the most commonly debated questions in the digital marketing world. And every year, the answer remains the same -- yes, SEO is necessary.

In fact, not only is SEO necessary for your business, it's one of the greatest investments that you can make.

You can think of SEO like investing money in a 401K for your business -- it's money that will gain value over time and remain in your account. Similarly, by investing in SEO you create long-term value for your website that will continue to accrue over time.

Here are 5 reasons you should start investing in SEO now. 

1. SEO works.

This is a fairly straightforward reason, but it's completely true. As of today, Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day. With that kind search volume there's no debating that ranking in Google's search results offers a valuable opportunity to get more traffic to your business's website.

This is very important because traffic equals leads and leads turn into sales.

By investing in SEO and raising your rankings in Google you'll send more traffic to your website which can generate to more leads and sales for your business.

2. Because of mobile, SEO is becoming even more important for small businesses.

Gone are the days where people needed to wait until they got home and in front of a computer to look something up online. With mobile searches now surpassing desktop, more people than ever are doing research on the go. This is great for small businesses because it means that people are searching for things at the exact time that they need them and are ready to make a purchase.

For example, let's say someone is on a business trip in your area and walking around town when they decide they're in the mood for a coffee. All this person has to do is type "coffee shop near me" into their mobile browser and they'll find all of the local results. For a smaller local coffee shop, this creates an opportunity to rank in their area over big-name coffee shops like Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. That means people can find not only find them online, but also find them on foot in real-time.

By investing in Local SEO you're putting your small business on the radar of people who are your ideal customers and are ready to make a purchasing decision quickly.

3. Higher search engine rankings gives your business credibility.

What do you do when you're considering making a purchase online or in-store? For most people, the answer is research.

Most web users -- as high as 80% in some studies -- look past paid ads and focus solely on organic search results. That means that when someone is doing research for a product or service, they are much more likely to be pre-sold on your business if you rank highly in Google's organic search results. Plus, in order for you to rank highly, your website will have relevant content, which will help to drive sales once someone clicks through to your site

Having a high ranking means that Google and other searchers have found your website relevant. This builds trust and authority for your business and give consumers a positive feeling towards your business before they even start searching around your site.

4. Rankings can change fast, and your competition knows it.

SEO is an ongoing process and the more you invest in it, the greater it will be. This is a good thing on many levels.

If your website is already ranking highly in search results that's great -- but it means you need to continue to invest in SEO in order to stay there. With everyone vying for those top spots, your competitors are going to invest in SEO, and if they do and you don't, they can start to outrank you.

If you're not currently ranking highly in search results, you still have an opportunity to rise up. By investing in a sound SEO strategy and using smart tactics, you may be able to start outranking your competition and driving more traffic to your website.

Ranking #1 is a constant race to the finish line, and whoever trains the hardest and runs the fastest will get there first.

5. SEO is not going anywhere.

Consumers used to learn about products through advertisements on the radio, television and in print ads. People also used to make purchasing decisions in stores and look for service providers in the phone books.

While some people may long to go back to those "simpler" days, the reality is it's not going to happen.

Online shopping and searching is not only here to stay, it's going to keep growing and evolving and with that means SEO will continue to change as well. It's important to start investing now so you set your business up for success in the future.