Youtech

What Google Antitrust Case Means for Business

The first and most relevant thing in this context is the Google search engine. Google has a variety of other products, but the search engine makes up about 85 percent of Google’s revenue. It’s also the area where Google has the biggest monopoly. According to recent statistics, Google has 90 percent of search share in the United States and 95 percent worldwide.

That’s crazy to think about, considering that Google has a lesser percentage in China since it’s banned there (Baidu is China’s biggest search engine). Nonetheless, Google has 95 percent search share worldwide.

What does this mean?

1) More Traffic

I want to read you a recent tweet. This came from Google Search Liaison, which is a great account to follow on Twitter if you’re interested at all in Google search. They release a lot of information to the public through this account, and again, that’s Google Search Liaison. This tweet came out on June 6th and says:  

“Have you ever done a search and gotten many listings all from the same site in the top results? We’ve heard your feedback about this and wanting more variety. A new change now launching in Google search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results…”

“This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search…”

There’s a little bit more to that. You can check out the full series of tweets if you’re interested.

The rest of it is not as important, but as far as what this could mean—especially for local businesses—is that you could potentially get more clicks to your site than previously. Google is already responding to this antitrust case. They don’t want to get hit with anything big from the Department of Justice, so they’re taking some action already.

By limiting sites to two spots on the search engine results page, that will free up space for local businesses quite a bit. Right now, I’m sure if you search, “best marketing agencies in Naperville, Illinois,” you’ll see Yelp probably within the first four results. That’s going to change. Yelp will no longer be the first four results. You’ll have a much better chance of ranking.

Obviously, it’s hard to compete with Yelp. They have a ton of authority. That’s always a difficult one and a lot of our local clients ask us about that. But if they’re limited to two spots, this frees up some real estate, and we’ve got some room to compete now—which is great!

2) More Visible Credit

The other thing is the rich listings that show on the search engine results page. Oftentimes, you’ll search for a knowledge panel, or something like that, to find the site in which the result pulls from. Google doesn’t really do a great job of citing their sources when pulling information and putting it directly on the search engine results page.

Happy Wednesday, guys!

Mike Norris here.

I’m going to talk to you today about feedback loops, which are an essential part of marketing. If you’re still doing the same marketing tactics that you were doing one to three years ago—and you haven’t changed them—you need to take a second look. A great way to do so would be with feedback loops, which you should implement with any new campaign going forward.

What’s a Feedback Loop?

Instead of just taking a marketing tactic, setting it in place, letting it ride out into the sunset, and gathering up the results at the end—feedback loops essentially set checkpoints throughout, so that you can look at the data you’re gathering, then make tweaks to it.  Any good performance measurement process revolves around setting standards from the onset.

1) Specify Your Goals

What you want to do is (and this kind of relates to our last video where we talked about SMART goals) specify what your goals are overall before you start after that. Specify this data to draw meaningful conclusions. Identify exactly what those metrics are going to be. Let’s say you need a cost per conversion of twenty dollars. If you’re hitting something that’s fifty dollars, then you have the data that you need to draw a meaningful conclusion and take action.

2) Accrue the Data

Accrue that data, set it in motion, allow the data to come in.

3) Evaluate the Data

Evaluate the data as planned on your timeline—don’t do it sooner. If you set something in action and a day or two goes by and you’re not getting the results you want—wait a little longer. Your sales cycle is probably longer than that. Your campaigns—if you’re running anything that’s automated—are going to take a little bit of time for the AI to catch up. It takes time for it to learn.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Set an exact amount of time (two weeks, one month, two months, etc.) in which you’re going to look at all the data and reassess, and stick to that timeline.

Specify the data you need.

Accrue that data.

Evaluate that data as planned.

Last but not least…

4) Take Action

Specify what kind of actions you’re going to take before you even get started.

“If this happens, then we’re going to do this…”—that’s how you should look at it. Set up those “if-then” situations beforehand. I know it takes a little bit more time on the initial side, but that way everyone is on the exact same page.

“Hey, we’re seeing this. This is how we’re going to combat that problem…”

Then you go ahead and put that back in motion. You run the feedback loop again. Get those results from the test that you ran and go ahead and do it again. Continuously do that. Over time what you’re going to get is a well-oiled machine that’s much more efficient, spends your money more effectively, and ultimately brings you a better ROI and profits at the end of the day. That’s how you use feedback loops in your marketing.

It’s an essential piece. Make sure you’re doing it.

Happy Wednesday!

Maximize Your PPC Campaigns

What’s going on, guys! Happy Wednesday.

Today we’re going to talk about dedicated landing pages — more importantly, the importance of dedicated landing pages. A lot of people who run ads run two landing pages already, so many of you already know this. But there are still people out there who run ads directly to their website’s homepage or won’t go after specific conversion actions… and there’s a problem with that.

So, let’s talk about the importance of dedicated landing pages.

Target Audience

Landing pages are highly targeted. If you think about it, when people see your ad, usually you’re promoting one thing, right? You’re not going to promote everything that you do. For instance, at Youtech, we offer a variety of different services. We’re not going to put every single one of those services on our landing page. That would be a terrible ad — no one would ever read all that. No one cares about every single thing that we have to offer.

Target the correct people with your ad. We want to target those looking for SEO with an SEO ad. Then we send them to a page on our website that talks all about SEO. The reason for this is to minimize distractions. Our home page, for example, has all the different kinds of services that we offer. It’s not geared towards one specific thing, so they might not find the information they’re looking for. They’ll say, “Oh, these people aren’t really specialized in SEO and that’s what I really wanted, so I’m not really going to go with them.”

Minimize Distractions

Make sure you’re highly targeted and then minimize distractions on the page. Once people are there, you don’t want them navigating to other sections of the site, getting lost, and not being able to come back. Oftentimes, it’s a good move to remove the navbar in your landing page as well. Some sites keep the navbar, other sites minimize it. It depends on what you’re selling. I’ve seen it be really beneficial both ways, but it depends on how much information is needed.

Hey guys! Happy Wednesday. Mike Norris here.

I’m going to talk to you today about Quality Score. A couple of videos back, we did an intro on the learning phase for pay-per-click advertising, which starts off every new campaign when using an automated bidding strategy.

Now, I want to discuss Quality Score.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score follows a campaign over time versus the learning phase that just happens when you make a major change or start a new campaign. One of the things you’ll want to optimize as you run through your PPC account over time are those Quality Scores. I’ve got a PPC account here in front of me. As you can see from this column on the right, these are our Quality Scores.

Each keyword you have within your ad groups has its own Quality Score. You’re not going to have a Quality Score for an ad group or campaign as a whole—that will not happen. Instead, within your keywords tab on the left, you’ll be able to see your Quality Score for each given keyword.

Quality Score Ranking: One is bad. Ten is Extraordinary.

It’s out of ten. One is bad. Zero, bad. Ten is extraordinary—It’s very good. I have never seen anyone hit ten for anything other than their brand name. I’ve seen a lot of nines. Nines are great, but ten is very very very difficult to achieve.

Generally speaking, if you’ve got a six, seven—or depending on the keyword, five isn’t too bad—those are generally really good. When you get down to that one to three range, that’s when you want to start improving those keywords.

The Three Subcategories of Your Quality Score

Quality Score breaks down within Adwords here in three different categories. Look at these categories so you know what to improve in order to raise your Quality Score. I’ll show you how to do that. Right here, you’re going click on “Columns” and “Modify columns”.

Improve Your Site Speed, Improve UX

What’s up, guys! Happy Wednesday. I’m Mike Norris.

Today, we’re going to talk about compressing and resizing images to improve your website speed. This is extremely important.

Potential Customers Have No Time to Waste

No matter how you’re driving traffic to your website, whether it’s through SEO, PPC, social media, email — it doesn’t matter. If your website takes over three seconds to load, more than 50% of people will hit the back button before your page even loads. This is something we’ve seen with one of our clients. They had a website — a very highly trafficked site. We rebuilt them a new website completely, new back-end and everything, and their website traffic (especially organic) doubled and tripled within one month’s time, which is absolutely insane.

So just think of all the hits they were missing out on prior to doing that.

Compress Your Images in Just a Few Steps

One of the things I want to show you is a way that you can really quickly and easily compress images in WordPress. Most of the websites we build are in WordPress. That’s why I’m showing you here. There are other similar plugins, depending on what CMS you use, but WordPress is widely used. One of the things that people typically do is go to Google Pagespeed Insights. It’s a free tool.

What’s the Difference Between A/B Testing and Personalization?

Mike: I’d imagine! Alright, let’s jump right into it. What’s the difference between A/B Testing and Personalization? I think people use the terms kind of interchangeably sometimes and there is a pretty stark difference.

Charles: That’s a good question! When you think about A/B testing, A/B testing is the concept of basically having a scientific methodology for experimenting — whether it’s on your site, mobile app, email, whatever it may be — for your different marketing campaigns. This started many years ago. There were a lot of great books (I’m butchering the name now). Can it Be Tested?… and if you think about what it was, it’s really about letting statistics determine what exchanged should happen, what banner should be changed, or what type of content should be changed.

Now, it’s obviously something that’s critical, but it’s also been commoditized over the years. When you think about Personalization, it’s kind of that next evolution of the A/B testing methodology, which is part of A/B testing. But it’s obviously not exactly the same thing. Basically, when we think about it, here at Dynamic Yield, we kind of blend the two together.

What it means is that when you’re thinking about launching a Personalization campaign, what essentially you’re going to be doing is create a hypothesis for a segment or a type of visitor — basically a unique set of customers or prospects that you want to target with a specific message based on the way they were behaving, based on what you know about them. So when you launch these campaigns, it’s essentially A/B testing that’s more fine-tuned and deep in terms of how you’re setting up that campaign.

Instead of saying, “Hey we’re A/B testing everybody…” We’re actually testing different segments and visitors differently with different types of messaging and letting the algorithms kind of take over and deliver a personalized experience.

How Youtech Grew UrbanMatter to an Online Sensation

Mike Norris: What going on guys?! Happy Wednesday, I’m Mike Norris. I’ve got Kali Cramer with us from UrbanMatter today, and were going to talk to you about how we built a website. We went from zero to 2.4 million visitors per year in five years.

Kali Cramer: Oh yeah!

Mike: Yeah, and the website is UrbanMatter. It’s a media company in Chicago, but I’ll let Kali tell you a little bit more about UrbanMatter and her role in UrbanMatter.

Kali: Hey guys what’s up! So yeah, UrbanMatter… we are Chicago’s premier media company that kind of tells you everything that there is to do downtown. So, we specialize in bars and restaurants, events, festivals, theatre, music- pretty much anything you can think of.

The best events to do- we got the inside scoop. So, we have a website, and we worked pretty closely with Youtech on building it. You know, 5 years ago we were kind of just a small media company, and now we are bringing in about 2.4 million users a year.

So, it’s definitely grown a lot in the past five years and we’re just going to tell you a little bit about how we did that!

Mike: Yeah, it’s funny to see the trajectory- so this is my favorite project! I’m sorry for all of our clients who are watching this- it’s just super fun to work with a media company and be able to write articles and share in the traction we get because 2.4 million annual users is incredible!

I mean, it’s phenomenal and to see it come from literally zero and to work on it day one where you know, we bought the UR- it was originally called chicagogenie.com, when we purchased that domain. We built the social media accounts, I personally built them and we had zero followers. You know, I invited my mom, my grandma- and then you know you go on and we write articles and we see our friends and family sharing them without any idea that we had a part in that, you know, years down the road! So, that’s been exceptional.

What Role Does IT Play in Marketing?

Mike Norris: What’s going on guys, happy Wednesday! It’s Mike Norris here to talk to you today about the importance of IT in marketing and for that I have brought my good friend Frank Sarnelli who is our senior network administrator here at Youtech! Or, as we call him, ITelder on Slack! It was previously ITninja but he has since upgraded- so congrats on your new role!

Why don’t you give us a little bit of an overview of your domain, your realm, everything that you take control of here so all the viewers kind of know what to expect.

Overview of the Network Administrator Role

Frank Sarnelli: Yeah, sure! Hey guys. So, I mostly maintain all of the computers here obviously. Internally, anyone whoever has a problem or has a question they come ask me for help. Outside of that, I also maintain all of our clients’ websites that we host on our servers and if they host elsewhere, you know, if they need support with anything I can always hop on the call with them and take care of their issues.

Keeping things secure in house, any automation that needs to be done for redundant processes or any way to streamline our business flows. I’m the person to talk to.

Mike: Anything breaks, I go to Frank basically! So does everyone else! So, let’s talk marketing. Obviously, marketing is such a broad subject, but the IT side of marketing I think often gets overlooked and one of the most important things that we’ve come to find through our experience with our clients is site speed, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Start Driving More Traffic To Your Website

Site Speed

Frank: Yeah, site speed is massively important. The biggest factor with that is going to be the content that gets downloaded to your browser, so if your website has a ton of images on it or even loads videos sometimes- there are some tools out there you can use to shrink those files down.

Like, compression for images- or there’s one that we use in-house personally called Smoosh which is part of a suite, and outside of trying to bring the content down you need to also shrink up your Javascript files an your CSS files and lots of times that does get overlooked because they are so small from the start.

But, every little bit you could squeeze out of it matters. Outside of that, the other thing that can really help with the site speed is caching.

Caching, in general, means every time you request the page. So, you go to youtechagency.com it’s going to ask to grab all those assets, pull all those images, run all the code that needs to run to put everything together to build the page and download it to your browser.

Well, if nothing’s changing on the homepage you know it’s always loading the same images, always running the same code, it doesn’t need to do that every time. So, what your server will do is just grab a static version of that page and grab that file instead of running the code over and over again so it really saves on your server resources and since everything is pre-built and ready to rock it just downloads it directly to your browser.

Amazon & PPC Advertising in 2020

Mike: What's going on guys this is Mike Norris I'm here today with Tarik Rahman, our Director of Paid Advertising at Youtech and we are going to talk to you about Amazon ads. Tarik why don’t you say hi to everybody.

Tarik: How’s it going, guys? I’m here finally.

Mike: Yeah this has been a long time coming. Tarik and I have actually been talking about this and I kept scheduling it for the wrong time and he was nice enough to not come down on me for that so thank you. Anyway, Amazon ads are the topic at hand today. Many people run Google ads. It's extremely common. Facebook ads are extremely common. Amazon ads not so much really, and there's probably a little bit of a barrier to entry, we think at least. I want to flip it over to Tarik to kind of give everyone a little bit of a summary on Amazon ads. He's certified in Amazon so he is the expert.

Tarik: Yeah totally! So you know what you just said Norris, a lot of people obviously gravitate towards Google because it's the number one search engine out there but I think you know there's a lot of similarities with Google and Amazon. I think Amazon kind of tailors to people that have e-com sites or are selling products versus services so I think that's kind of where Amazon sets themselves apart from Google.

Obviously Google has Google Shopping ads but I think throughout the day or throughout your day or throughout your week, how many times you hear people say “oh yeah I just ordered that off Amazon” or “oh I'm going to go look on Amazon” and it's on there so the opportunity to get in front of those right people that are ready to purchase your products, Amazon is just kind of a no-brainer.

Mike: Yeah and I'll be honest I do that all the time. I know where Google partners here I hope our Google team isn’t watching. I'm sorry, we love you, we really do but if there's a product I'm buying it on Amazon. Free one-day shipping? I'm all over that! Plus I watched Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime and that's a pretty good show.

When it comes to advertising though, and you kind of touched on this Tarik - I think Google and Facebook have a clear advantage over Amazon when it comes to services. Amazon is all product-oriented so if you don't sell a product this video is probably not for you. Maybe it is to the extent that we're telling you that you shouldn't run Amazon ads. Outside of that, it really is product oriented. So in what situations do you think Tarik, would it be good for someone to run Amazon ads? What kind of companies? What kind of products?

Refine Your Brand with Technology

COVID-19 has shifted marketing in pronounced ways. Businesses across the globe are dialing back on marketing efforts to focus internally on the security of their company. While this may seem wise and cost-effective, now is not the time to leave your prospects and customers alone.

More than ever, technology is a crucial part of your company. Technology gives you access to consumers in the comfort of their homes. It’s what’s keeping you connected to your audience. Most importantly, technology can be used to refine your brand’s voice and improve your business.

Keep Your Business Together

Technology is the thread that goes through the fabric of your company. In many ways, technology has a lot to do with how your business operates. Whether you own a restaurant establishment or B2B service, technology no doubt integrates with your business strategy, personnel management, operation efficiencies, and form of communication.

Inevitably, the quality of your technology matches the quality of your company. If your technology is insufficient, your brand may reflect that. However, if you have a seamless technology system, your company may follow suit. Technology keeps your business together at the seams and allows you to operate efficiently.

Keep Your Audience Informed

Transparency is perhaps the most critical trait your business should have, especially during this time. Not only is transparency a good ethical sense, but it’s also good business sense.

Take initiative with emails and other forms of communication to convey to your customers how you’re handling business during this pandemic. But also, go beyond that. Take the time to connect with consumers in a considerate, authentic manner. Sympathize with your customers, check in on them, provide consumers with additional resources. Let them know you’re here for them. This goes a long way in making your business successful. And when your business resumes back to a normal schedule, your customers will remember these acts of kindness.

Keep Customers Engaged

More than ever, thousands of people are at home—thousands of your consumers and potential prospects, all with significantly less to do. They’re eager to engage.

When it comes to sales, rejection is inevitable. Cold calls can be grueling. Generally, sales reps get told “no” more in a week than people get told in an entire year. However, rejection is a vital part of sales.

Rejection is unavoidable, and sometimes, outright exhausting. But there are ways to improve your sales experience—and it starts with the person on the other line. Feeling discouraged by your sales lately? Let’s take a look at some sales tips every rep should know.

Prospects are People

The prospect on the other end of the line is a person, and people like to engage. They value meaningful connections and they most certainly don’t like to waste time. Remember: Everyone likes to buy things; But people don’t like to be sold on things. You want to make it so your prospect feels like it’s their idea.

When making a cold call or meeting in person with a potential lead, approach the conversation by selling them the same way you would want to be sold on something. Talk to them the same way you would like to be talked to. Your prospects are just like you, and the last thing they want is for someone to talk at them.

The Worst a Prospect Can Say is No

Yes, this is pretty explanatory, but sometimes we need to hear it. As a sales rep, we may feel absolutely terrified about rejection, or more so, failure. During childhood, remember when you wanted to see a Friday night movie with friends or get those cool pair of shoes at the mall? You may have been too afraid to ask at first, but nevertheless, you mustered up the courage and did it. And guess what happened? Most times, you were told no, but on the other hand, you were surprised with a few yeses also.

Don’t miss out on potential leads because you’re afraid of the turnout. At worst, you could be told “no”. You could be hung up on, and mostly, that’s it. So what is there to fear? As a sales rep, always put your best foot forward. You may be surprised where this confidence leads you.

Don’t Manipulate Your Prospects’ Emotions

This goes along with the epiphany that prospects are people. In the end, your goal isn’t to prey on your prospects by manipulating their emotions; Instead, your goal is to deliver prospects a quality product that’s beneficial to their lives.

Many sales professionals believe that tugging on their prospects’ hearts and influencing them to respond emotionally is the best approach. However, that’s not the case. Present logic to your clients, not emotional, ingenuine pitches. When selling to a prospect, answer the question: Does this product logically make sense for their business, lifestyle, or finances?

Every website succeeds or fails on two things: Attracting visitors (the cheese) and Converting visitors (the mousetrap). If you don’t have goals set up in Google Analytics, you have no idea how effective your mousetrap is. In the marketing world, it’s impossible to understand the fabric of your business and marketing pursuits without digging deep into Google Analytics.

You wouldn’t play basketball without a scoreboard, right? Knowing what works and what does not work for your website is crucial in pivoting your business to success. Let’s take a look at Google Analytics fundamentals to remember, starting with setting goals.

Set Up Goals

One of the biggest missed opportunities starts with failing to set up your Google Analytics goals. How do you know where your form submissions are coming from? How do you know which of your articles is turning the maximum percentage of visitors into subscribers? Or if your CTA is effective?

Setting up your goals in Google Analytics is absolutely essential to know what channels drive your business and its conversion rates. This also helps to identify areas of improvement and eliminate functions that cause confusion for your users. Before continuing any further, make sure to set up your goals. Most importantly, create precise objectives that tailor to your business specifically. This initiative will give you the insight needed to improve your business.

Know Conversion Rate for Each Traffic Source

Everyone should know their conversion rate. Better yet, know the conversion rate for each one of your traffic sources. Create a Data Studio dashboard that accurately highlights the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business. Data Studio is a perfect resource for bringing all your data into a single view. For the dashboard, you can build any kind of marketing report tailored to your specific needs or even use a template to help get started.

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