What are Expanded Text Ads?

Brands now have twice as much space to advertise than before. Marketers have been trained to remember 25-35-35 for Google ads. This is a big change, moving to a 35-35-80 structure, with 70 characters allotted to the ad headline. The headline is split into two lines with a dash separating Headline one and Headline two.

With The Good Comes The Bad (Maybe)

Bigger sometimes means better, but in this case it isn’t better for everyone. In Google’s world you need to earn better and that is measured by quality score. More text allowances mean an ad could take up more pixel height on a screen.  In today’s mobile-first environment ads with a low quality score may not even be relevant on a mobile device.

It’s time to test your campaigns to ensure your quality score is as good as it can be.  This will help you out exponentially when Google requires brands to transition fully to expanded text ads.

When should brands start using Expanded Text Ads?

Google hasn’t made it mandatory to switch your ads over yet, but you will benefit from switching them now. Early testing is always better, and you would be taking advantage of this time frame while still having your standard (and successful) text ads running.

The bottom line is that marketers will need to test winning combinations for larger ad spaces over time.  Taking a proactive approach means extra attention from searchers now and a better quality score down the road while the competition gets up to speed.

What is my deadline?

Google will allow marketers to edit existing and create new standard text ads until January 31, 2017. After that they plan to continue to serve your standard text ads in search queries.  As of now there is no official date of when you MUST switch over to the new expanded ad format.

This is just one of many rollouts Google has planned for the near future.  Stay on your toes and in the loop by subscribing to our blog.

“I swam with a whale shark. I am brave. Even when I don’t feel brave, I remember that I jumped in the water with a whale shark. First time snorkeling, I’m in Puerto Rico on a boat with my cousin and these guys, in retrospect it wasn’t a very professional operation if you know what I mean. These were just some local guys who had a boat and charged money to take tourists fishing and snorkeling. The guys saw some tuna so they grabbed their fishing poles and started fishing. And then one of the guys shouts “whale shark!” and suddenly everybody jumped into the water except for me. That’s not the reaction you would expect to that, right? So I’m alone in this boat while everyone else is in the water and I decide that it must be something cool and I wasn’t going to miss this, so I jumped in the water. Do you know how big a whale shark is? It’s the biggest fish in the ocean. Incredible. I’m in the water and I see it coming up out of the sea, the most huge huge huge mouth opens to take all the water and plankton in, it was amazing. The scuba divers were swimming right up to it and touching it…we did not touch the whale shark. Just being in the vicinity was enough. I had only been snorkeling for an hour! I was afraid to see sea turtles! I just wanted to see pretty little fish and I ended up next to a whale shark. I never watched Shark Week so I didn’t know it wouldn’t eat me, it would have been nice if they told me that. I carry a photo of that day in my padfolio and whenever I’m feeling a bit beat-down I look at it and it reminds me of the kind of person I am. I am brave. Swimming with a whale shark brave.”

Added in June, the Buy It Now option is a welcome addition to Pinterest by those who are using it for business.

One of the best parts about this new feature is how easy it is for businesses. All you have to do is enable it on your account and that’s it! Payment is processed through Apple Pay or with a credit card and Pinterest doesn’t take a cut of your sale. You still handle shipping and customer service as if someone made their purchase on your website.

A surprising fact, although 80% of Pinterest users are women, men are actually more likely to utilize the Buy It Now feature because women pin items as a wish list rather than to purchase. What does this mean for you? If you’re a company that sells products online that are targeted to men, there has never been a better time for you to get on Pinterest!

Buy It On Pinterest is currently available for US users who use Pinterest on their iPhones, iPads and Android devices. With 100 million active users this service is open to roughly 75 million people. Buyable Pins are not intrusive to the Pinterest user and they will help businesses to close a sale when a user has the impulse to make the purchase.

How Does It Work?

The service adds a blue price to your item and that’s how users will know something can be purchased on Pinterest. If the item in question comes in multiple colors or sizes users can also swipe left and right to view other variations.

If your business would like to list items for sale using Pinterest you will need to be working with one of the five ecommerce platforms they are integrated with: BigCommerce, Demandware, IBM Commerce, Magento or Shopify.

Apparel has been the most used category so far and it’s a perfect fit(see what I did there?!), but other brands have great potential for this new feature as well! One of our clients has an online storefront with energy efficient home products that would be a great fit as many people plan home renovations with the help of Pinterest.

Want to learn more about adding an ecommerce plugin to your website? wedü can help!

Verizon is the biggest wireless company in the country, holding 35.2% of the market share. This acquisition allows them to break into the revenue generating digital advertising world on a new level.  They will no longer lack the platform to leverage their large audience. Buying Yahoo gives them access to a nearly twenty-year-old search advertising technology – a platform that has been built to serve consumers ads at the right time and in the right context. This knowledge means new layers of targeting for brands on a new, highly utilized network.

The Birth Of A New Ad Platform

A new ad platform will emerge here. We anticipate that Verizon will leverage their millions of mobile subscribers and serve them ads using the technology Yahoo has perfected over time. This will be a competitor platform to the biggest names in tech:  Google and Facebook.  The competitive advantage for Verizon lies in their access to consumer buying and surfing patterns, data usage, location – the list goes on.

Directly competing with Google and Facebook for brands’ digital advertising dollars will be no easy task. But they have a leg up on both of them. Think of a consumer as a tenant in a building. Verizon owns the building and because of that they can control what their tenants see.  That means customized content and advertising in line with the unique targeting variables they have access to (and the blocking out of competitor network content if they so choose).

Verizon has not launched their plan for activating the new network but brands can bank on the ability to target customers’ on their phones through text messaging, while using an app or searching within the app store. The sky is the limit with the interface. Imagine receiving a push-notification when you’re within a block of a restaurant that you’ve eaten at within the last week, offering you a free appetizer just for coming down. Would you think about going there?

This is where the power lies for brands once Verizon announces their plan.  Can we get closer to real-time offers to potential customers without them having to use an app? That answer should be yes.

Put On Your Ad Block

There is one thing that still needs to play out. Apple blocks ads within Safari on mobile phones making it tricky to reach Apple’s app users. This user-first approach is the cornerstone of Apple’s business and it’s worked (they own 23% of the market share for mobile operating systems).

Will this acquisition spark Apple to further enhance their ad blocking or will we see cooperation between Verizon and Apple? Other apps, like Google and Facebook, still have in-app advertisements that consumers can see.  It will be tough to say what might happen, but it will be fun to watch if the gloves come off.

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There are soft bounces and hard bounces. Soft bounces are less worrisome and won’t impact your marketing program too much. Picture a dodge ball, when you throw it at a wall it comes back to you and it likely didn’t do any damage to the wall; that is just like a soft bounce. Now picture throwing a bowling ball at the wall, you will have a hole in the wall causing some significant damage; that is just like a hard bounce.

The lower your bounce rate the better your email performance. Generally speaking you wouldn’t want a bounce rate higher than 2% as this can cause for deliverability issues. When someone leaves a company their email address no longer exists, an email sent to that address would be considered a hard bounce. Situations like this can happen often which is why you can allow for a 2% maximum bounce rate, but if it is more than that chances are servers have blocked you.

What causes a soft bounce?

– The recipients mail box is full

– The server is temporary offline

– Email message size is too large (try to keep it under 100kb)

All of these reasons are from temporary issues, which means next time you email them they will most likely receive the email from you.

What causes a hard bounce?

– Email address does not exist

– Domain name does not exist

– Server has blocked delivery from you

These reasons are final, meaning if a domain doesn’t exist then your email will never get to them. If you have emails going to wedo.com instead of wedu.com then these will come back as a hard bounce since wedo.com is a non-existent domain. If your company is new to email marketing you have to let servers get to know your IP address.

Here is an example of what is normal to see for bounce rates:

If you have 3,000 subscribers on your email list that use aol.com email addresses and one day, out of nowhere, you email them all within minutes, AOL’s server will see this as spam and block you. You can reach out to the company and they will remove you from being blocked, but you will have to throttle your emails. Throttling is the process of sending out an email over a long period of time; 100 emails every hour until all emails have been sent.

Each email marketing platform handles soft bounces differently. For example ExactTarget will send a soft bounce to a recipient 288 times over three days, if all attempts are unsuccessful than that recipient is considered a hard bounce. MailChimp however will let an email address hit seven soft bounces from seven different email campaigns before they are considered a hard bounce.

ExactTarget will send to a hard bounce email address only three times, after that they are marked as undeliverable and will not get an email from you again unless you update their information. MailChimp will remove a hard bounce email address immediately from your list.

How can bounces hurt you?

Your email has a reputation, high bounce rates can cause you to be blacklisted. Being blacklisted has the potential to completely destroy your email marketing. If you are blacklisted then how will you reach your customers? You can only throw so many bowling balls at your wall before your landlord kicks you out for all the holes you left.

Tips to avoid high bounce rates:

– Keep your email list clean

– Confirm that you aren’t sending to hard bounced emails

– Look into soft bounces and check to make sure your email isn’t too large

– Make sure you are only emailing people who have subscribed to your email

– Check to see if most of your bounces are for a certain email server such as aol.com or yahoo.com; if so then reach out to them and ask them to allow your emails to be sent

Now that we have shared our email bounce advice with you, why don’t you sign up for our email marketing to get more great advice like this? Sign up here!

“Throughout my marketing career I’ve done a lot of work for the State of New Hampshire. I grew up here but working on these accounts, having the state as a client, I mean that’s where I really learned all about everything New Hampshire has to offer and the bigger picture. So now when I’m planning our trips, I never even think about the surrounding states. I’ve gotten this appreciation for sticking around the Merrimack Valley, or heading up to the White Mountains or Monadnock or whatever, because I know what it does for the state…..vacationing here, buying local…because for a long time, one way or another, I’ve been promoting that every day, so that’s what I do. If we have a weekend where we can get away I’m probably not going to drive to Maine or Vermont, I almost never vacation in those other states.”

Well, this acquisition is not just a big deal, it is a HUGE deal. From a digital marketing perspective this is a game changer. Google Adwords has always dominated pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Google will be rolling out new features to allow advertisers to take advantage of all the information they have on users to help better target ads. How in the world can Bing (a Microsoft product) compete with this? Let’s be honest, Bing isn’t really the popular kid in town and Microsoft hasn’t done too much to help the situation; until now. Microsoft buying LinkedIn will introduce a whole new aspect to digital ads.

What Microsoft Promises:

– Access to businesses and professionals’ demographics
– Targeting beyond keywords
– Ad targeting based on job roles
– More relevant ads based on industry targeting
– Ads shown beyond Bing.com; ie. Microsoft Office Suites
– More relevant impressions
– Stronger conversions

LinkedIn’s sole purpose is for professionals to connect with each other and with businesses. LinkedIn members share their professional interests, job history and businesses they are interested in. This is a gold mine of information that B2B advertisers have only been able to utilize through the platform itself. Not anymore!

Google provides a large audience for advertising, they have a great display network and they are the best place for B2C companies to advertise, especially with the Google Shopping platform. But Microsoft, knew what Google didn’t have and they came up with a plan to beat them to it – B2B digital advertising.

The acquisition won’t be finalized until the end of the year, so until then we will have to keep dreaming and imagining the tools that will hopefully be at our fingertips. At some point we will be able to run a PPC ad and target it to our ideal industry and people in roles that we want to reach. Imagine if you are looking to target Marketing Mangers, Bing will be able to help you do that with all of the data they are collecting from LinkedIn.

What will the capabilities be? No one knows for sure. Microsoft has some very lofty dreams, but our main concern at this point is all about the PPC world. Will these ads appear in Bing and LinkedIn? Will they allow targeting within the Microsoft product suites like Outlook and Word? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, this can be an extremely powerful tool for B2B advertisers. We cannot wait to see what the future holds for this industry.

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The reality is that there is no right answer when it comes to who should handle your social media because every brand is going to have a different answer. As a professional who has been working in this field for my entire career, I can help educate you on who you need involved to make up a good social media team and where you choose to take those people from is up to you.

There are three main roles that need to be filled.

Strategist:

‘What are your business goals?’ should be the first question a good social media strategist will ask you. Some agencies handle your social media as a separate commodity with its own goals and objectives, but if those goals and objectives aren’t tied to your business goals there is no point to even being on social media. Here’s a tip, if your agency tells you that their goal is for each Facebook post to get 100 likes you should dump them yesterday.

The strategist can come in many different forms. Here at wedü your accounts team and your digital team are both involved in strategy. Accounts knows what your business goals are and digital knows what’s available to make it happen. Together we strategize organic and paid social strategies because a really great social strategy includes both.

Creatives:

Our creative, digital, accounts and tech teams are all involved when it comes to creative because even the most intricate strategy will fail if you have lackluster creative. Creative in the case of social media is all forms of content: Facebook post copy, Twitter poll copy, infographics, blog posts, Instagram images, storyboards for YouTube videos, sweepstakes setup, etc.

At wedü we have clients that we do all of the above for. We also have clients that use in-house resources for Facebook posts and we strategize and design graphics to go with them. No matter which scenario you fall into it, make sure everyone is on the same page. If your in-house graphic artist is creating an infographic, let your outreach team know so they can start prepping to get it going viral!

Community Managers:

This is a title that has only existed for the last five or six years. A community manager manages all of your online communities: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, Snap Chat feed, etc. At wedü we have members of our digital team that take on the role of community managers for our clients, but we also have clients who respond directly.

The most important job of a community manager is to answer consumer concerns in a timely and knowledgeable manner. Taking the time to train someone to be knowledgeable of your brand will be key to the success of your community management.

So what’s next?

The bottom line is that you need a social media team to be successful and whether you choose for that team to come from different agencies, freelancers or in-house employees, you need to do what works best for your brand. Reach out today to find out how wedü can help grow your social media and meet your business goals.

Some brands are wildly successful in captivating an audience early on, but then the business fails to maintain that market lead. The original flash of consumer attraction could be due to a great innovation that was first to market, an acquisition of the market through promotional or financial incentives, or simply because they are the best available at the time.

A History of Failure

It’s easy to identify businesses that had a captive audience, , but then lost the race. Simply think about the following brands:

Blackberry and their rise to fame for instant email. Innovation drove the original success, and brand loyalty gave the company years of life support. Heck, for a long time, people resisted the iPhone conversion because of the non-push element of email.

Then there was Internet Explorer. How fast did Microsoft’s audience run away from this internet browser when the market presented options? This is a great example of a strong brand with weak brand loyalty and a weak product. Limited consumer options with an essentially free offering drove the original success. Going a bit further into history of browsers, we could even talk about Netscape Navigator’s rise and fall.

Brands are not just representations of the business, product or service. They are the relationship with consumers. They are essential to current and ongoing success.

Reflect on your Business and your Brand

Do you have a brand that people resent? Here’s an easy example of a poor brand, but a successful business. There is a local gym in my hometown which is arguably the best gym. It has indoor and outdoor pools, great workout spaces, several classes, several racquet sports facilities, and on the surface you would think it’s a great place. An accurate description may be, it’s not the greatest place, but it is the best place. It is the best place for the region, but the membership won’t be loyal if a better choice enters the market.

This business chooses to invest the least amount possible into its member services, which are the cornerstone of the relationship with the customer. Resentment builds  in the first 100 paces of entering this gym. First, it opens early in the morning, but the hours aren’t all that great. The employees will see a line forming outside, but still refuse to open the door until the clock ticks the exact hour. Then, amplifying the negative effect of refusing to just open the doors, there’s a line to scan in,,. created by dated check-in technology. You continue walking the halls to the locker rooms. You would expect that if you had to wait to enter the building the TVs would be on, the music would be driving a great vibe, and staff would be bustling to prepare for the important clients entering. But, no. You enter a locker room which occasionally could have a more inviting aroma. You proceed to the workout room where equipment has not been neatly organized, the weights not evenly distributed among the machines, and there is no staff on hand taking these steps.  It would be easy to continue sharing the experience right up to the end of a workout session with no towel service, the cheapest body wash and shampoo products, etc. But you get the idea. The business is running a great business. The brand is failing miserably at creating loyalty.

The business doesn’t currently have to do any more than it does, because it’s still the best in the area. That ‘attitude’ is what the brand says to the members. It creates resentment. If Equinox is reading this article, they should investigate my hometown. The demo and sociographics are perfect for them.

Brands are much more than the name on the door. They are the relationship the business has with their consumers. The product or service is what brings them together. The brand is what keeps them together.

Just this week, Google hosted their Performance Summit and streamed it live for marketers all around the world. While the seminar focused on Google Adwords and Analytics the main message was clear – Google is proceeding forward with a “mobile-first” attitude. This is important for paid search and advertising, but it is also impacts SEO.

The spider bot is on the crawl

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. It is no longer viewed as a luxury, it is now a necessity. Google’s spider bot will be crawling all sites to see if they meet mobile-friendly standards. If your site meets the standards and your content is strong then your site will be able to rank organically in mobile search results.

If your website is not mobile-friendly then the spider bot will deem it a poor user experience. In 2015 Google rolled out the “mobile-friendly” text next to results in organic search when a user was on their phone. However, the algorithm wasn’t very strict and Google has recently adjusted that.

If your website is mobile-friendly then don’t worry. However, for those sites that aren’t…well it is time for you to make the upgrade. Mobile searches are increasing every day and if you don’t have a mobile site for your visitors to use, then Google won’t share your website.

Is your site mobile-friendly?

Just because your website was mobile-friendly 5 years ago does not mean it meets the current standards. Not sure if your website counts as mobile-friendly? Well, Google was nice enough to provide a free tool that will tell you.

If you want to rank organically you have to meet Google’s mobile-friendly standards:

• Avoid hosting unplayable videos that might require a flash plug-in
• Provide a strong search experience for your mobile site; make sure your search bar and results function with ease
• Give Google access to crawl your JavaScript, CSS and image files
• Ensure mobile redirects are set up properly; just as you would do for a desktop website
• Avoid pop-ups that can block content for viewers
• Make font size big enough that it can be seen on a 5-inch screen
• Leave space between touch elements
• Set images to render and resize based on the screen size; you don’t want your content to be wider than the screen

What do you do if your site isn’t mobile-friendly?

Don’t panic! If you don’t have a team of developers to help achieve a mobile-friendly site then wedü can help!