Category: Marketing

Currently, there are six different Google Ads attribution models to choose from.

For those unfamiliar with attribution modeling, this can be a headache, to say the least.

Attribution modeling can help you better understand how, when, and why people converted on your ads on Google.

But choosing the wrong Google Ads Attribution Model can leave you with confusing, inaccurate data that can impact your future campaign success.

So, what kind of Google Ads attribution models are there? Which is best for a given goal? And… what are they in the first place? 🤔

That’s what we are here to answer.

Let’s dive into the Google Ads world of attribution modeling.

What are Google Ads Attribution Models? Why Does it Matter?

Attribution models in Google Ads aren’t unique to Google Ads alone.

In fact, Google Analytics has them too. Just about any analytics platform has different attribution modeling.

As a definition according to Google, attribution modeling is: “the rule, or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touchpoints in conversion paths.”

Simple enough right?

In even simpler terms: Attribution modeling is telling your analytics which channel or keyword to give credit for the sale/conversion.

So, why does any of this matter? Can’t we just say it was keyword X or channel Z that drove the sale?

Well, not really. It’s not that simple anymore, not in the era of inbound digital marketing.

It takes 7-13+ “touches,” otherwise known as engagements, with your business for a lead to convert.

This means that they could have visited your Instagram, your Twitter, your website, your landing page, your email, your remarketing ad, your RLSA, and more, all within the span of a month.

Now, do you start to see the problem?

Simply saying “oh yeah it was the twitter post that converted them” is just flat out wrong. Was it really the twitter post, or was it a combination of multiple channels, or a few in particular?

Attribution modeling seeks to give clearer data on what channels played the most important roles in converting a given prospect.

Now that you understand attribution models, what they are, and why they are important, let’s take a look at the current six you can choose from and select the best one for your Google Ads campaign goals.

A word of caution before we get onto the attribution models – with the myriad of different modeling choices and the ever-changing tech requirements involved, getting started can be daunting.

As we continue the path through a privacy-forward future, getting the measurement basics down is essential for all savvy marketers. Luckily, our partners at Google are giving our readers the chance to learn the secrets of measurement and attribution straight from…

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We’re told time and time again, producing high quality content is one of the highest value activities you can do for your business. Yet, the question remains, what does high quality content actually mean and how do you measure it?

With content marketing, it can be easy to get lost in the noise and miss what matters.  For this article, let’s consider just two metrics—an engagement metric—social shares and an SEO metric—keyword rank.

Shares are often considered a ‘vanity metric’ in the sense they don’t always directly help a business generate more revenue.

But shares are also significant in the fact that it shows that someone found your content valuable enough to share. Being mentioned by an industry thought leader can put your brand or business on the map for example.

On the other hand, optimizing your content for ranking takes time to start seeing results and can and it can be challenging to outrank your competition. 

In an ideal world, your content would rank well and get lots of social shares. But given marketers are often limited on time and resources, which should you prioritize if you have to choose? I asked 18 digital marketing experts and content creators to find out. 

But first the pros and cons of each approach.

Pros and cons of Shared Content Optimization (SCO)

Pros

• A share is a leading indicator that your audience found the piece of content valuable enough to share. The more shares a piece of content gets, the higher the chance of it ‘going viral.
• A share also suggests your reader agrees with or finds your content though-provoking. 45 percent of US adults shared an opinion piece they agreed with on social media.
• Content that gets shared, also generally suggests the content was interesting, fun, or even just engaging. This can often signal you’re creating content that connects with your readers and target audience. 

• Shared content is immediately public material and can lead to an immediate bump in traffic.
• Oftentimes, shared content includes commentary or other additional insight you can use to gain audience insights and leverage user generated content (UGC).

Cons

• Not all shares are created equal, and shares can often be misleading. It’s often difficult to measure the true ROI from social shares directly. 
• 6 in 10 people only read headlines before sharing, this means that quantity of shares may not always reflect content value.
• Organic reach for many social media platforms is declining, making it more difficult for content to get seen organically. 

• Social media is subject to changes in algorithms, updates and features. These affect content visibility and are many times out businesses control. 
• Social media posts are time-sensitive. For example, you have to post at a certain period to get maximum engagement. Generally posts have a short shelf life.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Pros

• With well ranking content you’ll generally continue to see ROI for a long period of time.
• When you rank for buyer intent or longer tail keywords, you attract people who potentially need the kind…

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Agencies looking to grow have traditionally relied on fostering strategic relationships to land deals and increase sales. Cold email and referrals have often been quite effective. 

But through my work with dozens of agencies, it’s clear outbound alone is no longer enough. The most successful agencies are beginning to invest more time and money in content marketing to establish expertise in their industry and, more importantly, generate inbound appointments.

In this article, I’ll outline how to create an agency content strategy that fuels your business development efforts and generates the optimal kind of organic traffic.

Mining your clients for pain-points, success, and topic ideas

When starting out, many agencies blog about topics directly related to their offering. This is great if you’re creating success stories, but less so if you’re writing about high-level, tactical fluff. It’s unlikely your ideal client is interested in a generic “5 ways to produce better ads.”

Many agencies invest as little time and energy as possible into their content efforts.

But the problem is, creating a content strategy that attracts your ideal client means understanding what matters to them. It involves putting in the work.

I’ve found that interviewing your existing clients is one of the best ways to create valuable content for your ideal audience.

Customer interviews allow you to uncover:

1. Why they decided to do business with you;
2. Why they love working with you;
3. What other challenges they have in their business;
4. Where they go for new information.

While keyword research matters, your clients are a rich source of insight for your optimal content strategy. Your customers can provide you with pain-points to write about, as well as success stories to attract new clients. 

The same goes for your sales conversations; why did new leads seek you out, and what objections do you hear during the sales process?

Digging deep into your client’s responses is the bedrock for an effective content strategy. At Grizzle, we couple these qualitative insights with data-driven research—here’s our 3 step process. 

1. Collect data sources for quantitative insights

Data sources include the publications, competitors, influencers, podcasts, and communities that your audience engages with the most. Uncovering popular articles and conversations will show you what people are most interested in, which is useful for “seeding” your content research.

Using a tool like SparkToro, you can uncover the channels and influencers that your audience is most engaged with. For example, let’s say you offer digital transformation services, and your ideal client is looking to modernize their digital experience:

Here are some initial sources uncovered by this search:

• Websites like Econsultancy and McKinsey that publish content on digital transformation
• Niche influencers and social profiles like Adaptive Path (using the “hidden gems” filter in SparkToro)
• Podcasts by brands like CMOTalk and the Cognizant Podcast.

You can use these sources to identify patterns of the content they’re publishing consistently. For example, certain publications are talking about modernizing legacy…

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How Marketers are Staying Up-to-Date in the Era of the iOS 14 Update | DigitalMarketer How Marketers are Staying Up-to-Date in the Era of the iOS 14 Update | DigitalMarketer
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The DigitalMarketer Podcast | Episode 154: The Holistic Approach to Marketing with Mark de Grasse, CEO of MegaMad Websites The DigitalMarketer Podcast | Episode 154: The Holistic Approach to Marketing with Mark de Grasse, CEO of MegaMad Websites
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Account-based marketing plays a critical role in the growth of many businesses across a variety of industries. However, many marketers often rely on ABM when it may not be the best fit. In addition, what worked for account-based marketing even just a few months ago, may not be the most optimal strategy for marketing today. 

In this article, we’ll explore how account-based marketing has changed over the years and whether or not it should be your focus. We’ll also explore in detail the many factors you need to consider to do ABM right. 

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) isn’t new

While reading a book called “No Forms, No Cold Calls & No Spam” by Latané Conant, I came to the realization that many vendors try to position ABM as a $40,000 technology stack problem. 

The book dedicates quite a few pages to the ‘customer-centric stack’ and argues that because you’re now able to know when someone is in the market for a solution like yours [via IP lookup or 1st or 3rd party intent data], you don’t need to “spam” them. 

Here’s the irony though— even though potential customers may be in the market for a solution like yours, you still need to deploy the traditional sales/marketing strategies to convince them to make a purchase. 

While it is true that technology has enabled us to create more personalized & relevant experiences for prospects & allowed us to target people in very specific ways, it can also quickly approach the point of diminishing returns.

The marketing industry, like most industries, like to invent new terms to recycle old concepts. And in the case ABM, that’s exactly what has happened. Account-Based Marketing has in fact been around since the 1940s. When sales made a list of logos they wanted to sell, or the list of ‘dream customers’ to close. In those days we just called it sales. 

The concept remains the same today with modern ABM—we want to sell to a list of ‘dream customers’ more commonly referred to as target accounts. 

So what’s the difference between sales and account-based marketing? Technology has both enabled us and added needless complexity to the process.

Dave says it best (who ran ABM at Marketo & Bizible)

ABM is outbound with marketing support

What is account based marketing? 

At the core—ABM is smart outbound. 

Marketers use different ‘signals’ to determine which prospect is in-market for a solution. ABM is the process of trying to determine which accounts fit your ICP & are currently in the market based on a variety of factors, such as visiting certain websites or heavily involved in researching for solutions.

The book, “No Forms, No Cold Calls & No Spam” does not explicitly say it but, the signals you capture during AMB feed into an outbound email sequence or ads to get someone to your website and fill out a form.  

The fact that a prospect is in-market for a solution like yours does not by any means imply or guarantee they…

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As digital marketers, content is a critical part of everything we do. And while analyzing and refreshing content may take a lot of time and effort, the results for generating more traffic and improving SEO are clear. 

With the many things that go into creating content, such as competitor research, outreach and technical aspects of content, improving older content frequently takes a back seat—which in most cases, is a costly mistake. 

In this article, I’ll share how to use TF-IDF optimization to help you streamline your content process and make your old content better so you can rank higher and attract more leads.  

What is TF-IDF? 

While using the TF-IDF technique isn’t exclusive to the world of SEO, Moz defines it best:

TF-IDF stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency. It’s a text analysis technique that Google uses as a ranking factor — it signifies how important a word or phrase is to a document in a corpus (i.e. a blog on the internet). When used for SEO-purposes, it helps you look beyond keywords and into relevant content that can reach your audience.

On the surface, the formula may appear quite complex. So, let’s take a look at how to break things down in relation to content. 

TF = (Number of times a term appears in a document) / (Total number of terms in the document)

For example, let’s assume that the term “log cabin” in a document of 100 words shows 12 times. 

Your TF = 12/100=  0.12

With TF, we have solved the first part to count how many times the term “log cabin” is showing on our document.  The score of 0.12 represents the density of this term.

Now, we want to know how this term compares with rivals. We can calculate the IDF to obtain the comparison result, by dividing the number of documents the term appears in by the total number of documents in search results:

IDF = log_e(Total number of documents / Number of documents with term in it) 

Let’s put the second part of this formula to use. Say that from 1,000,000 results, some are mentioning “log cabin” and the number count is 409,000 times.

Now let’s solve the logarithm:

IDF(log cabin) = log_e(1,000,000/ 409,000 with term log cabin in it)= 0.38

With that, we now have the density and the importance. 

TF*IDF = Term Frequency times Inverse Document Frequency= 0.12 * 0.38= 0.046

Then you have also a result of your own TF*IDF. For the word “log cabin”, you have 0.017 while your rivals average is 0.046, which is higher than you.

The data gives you an indication that the term ‘log cabin’ is a common denominator in content that is ranking highly. 

Is TF-IDF just keyword stuffing?

If you’ve been involved with SEO for some time, you’re likely aware of the concept of keyword stuffing, that is, the process of adding keywords as much as possible to help your chances of ranking higher. 

This thing is, keywords density was…

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Perpetual Traffic | Episode 308: Spending Too Much on Your Customer Acquisition? Here Are 4 Steps to Lower Your CPA | DigitalMarketer Perpetual Traffic | Episode 308: Spending Too Much on Your Customer Acquisition? Here Are 4 Steps to Lower Your CPA | DigitalMarketer
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Like everything in the digital world, traditional prospecting is undergoing a big transformation. Picking up a phone and cold calling (or emailing) is just not as effective as it once was—you need to be smarter both when it comes to which users you’re engaging and what kinds of messages you’re using.

This second point is especially interesting: the types of messages you send can have a big effect on your outreach results. In today’s article, we’ll focus on one specific type of prospecting message and its uses—video.

Why video prospecting?

Bottom Line: If you’re not using video for sales prospecting, you’re potentially missing out. Video can be a great way to create an amazing customer experience and help you stand out from the noise. This guide will show you how.

In both inbound and outbound prospecting, you can use all kinds of content to get your leads’ attention. So, why are we focusing specifically on video?

First of all, video seems to be on the rise: it’s the medium that best attracts people’s time and attention. What’s more, current trends indicate that it might become even more popular in the future, given the fact that it’s more popular among younger audiences. 

Interestingly, we soon might see a drop in email marketing since it’s becoming less popular in the 18 to 24 group.

At Bonjoro, we have also seen our clients achieve some amazing results with video prospecting—one of them boosted their trial conversion rates by 29% with simple “welcome” videos.

While we’re clearly strong proponents of video content marketing, we also don’t advise using it for all prospects, in each stage of the funnel. The way you execute your prospecting strategy matters as much as the type of content you use.

For example, you wouldn’t want to send a demo video of your platform to a cold lead that doesn’t have a clue about who you are and what your product does. Video like any other marketing tactic needs to be used in the right situations. 

Getting started with video prospecting

While it may be tempting to run off and start sending videos to every one of your customers or prospects, sending an outreach video is the last step in a complex strategy that starts.

As most good strategies often do—effective video prospecting, starts with the user. Don’t skip ahead. 

Collect user data

The first step in the process is getting to know your users (website visitors, social media followers, current customers, etc.) that will be the perfect target audience for your prospecting campaign.

When it comes to collecting user data, we’ve found that nothing beats Google Analytics.

The analytics platform from Google allows you to collect demographic data (age, gender location) as well as behavioral data (which pages they visit and how long they stay on them) on your audience. You can use the latter to launch a retargeting campaign that…

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