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Claim your address on Google Maps

November 9, 2018

Google Maps is one important way your audience will find you. Whether they are navigating to your physical address or not, the Google Maps widget on search results pages is some valuable real estate that you can claim ownership of. Once you’ve verified your ownership of an address, you can edit the information that is shown, upload nice pictures, and respond to any reviews that might have been left (especially if they were negative).

Claiming an address is fairly straight-forward, but it may take one to two weeks because it involves receiving a postcard via snail mail. To start:

Go to https://www.google.com/business/
Log in with the Google Account you want to manage your business with
Enter the name of your business
Depending on whether your business is already list on Google or not, you can either select it from an existing entry, or elect to create a new one.
Enter all of the requested information from address to service area to contact information
Finish and request a verification

When the postcard arrives, you’ll need to enter the code in the same interface and the the ownership of the Google My Business address will be complete!

Analytics

UTM Parameters for Facebook Ads

October 19, 2018

If you run Facebook Ads, metrics like impressions, clicks, and landing page views interest you. Each metric, available inside Facebook Ads Manager console, contributes to evaluating the effectiveness of your campaign. That information drives future optimizations to make the best use of your advertising dollars. However, there is one question those metrics cannot answer:

Once the user arrived on your site – what did they do next?

Tracking User Behavior on your Website

Just because you drove 100 people to your landing page does not mean you made 100 sales. What’s more important is how many people engaged with your site, clicked to read more, or completed a goal defined inside Google Analytics. It’s entirely possible that while one campaign seemingly outperformed another in Facebook metrics, the less-clicked ad brought more conversions. No one metric tells the entire story, so it’s important to evaluate all metrics together for the entire length of the customer journey.

Luckily, there is a way to link the two systems so you can follow users from click to session. Look for UTM Parameters – or URL Parameters in Facebook. Each campaign provides an option at the bottom marked “optional.” However, to do things right, this is absolutely mandatory. Click on Build a URL Parameter and you’ll get a window like this:

Facebook UTM Parameters

You can customize each of the fields for tracking in Google Analytics. Recommended values are:

Tell where the user came from with Campaign Source.
Example: facebook
Tell what form of content brought them with Campaign Medium.
Example: ads
Separate out individual campaigns with Campaign Name.
Example: spring-2020-promotion
Designate multiple variants with Campaign Content.
Example: red-background

Save yourself a headache in the future, and force everything to lowercase with dashes in place of spaces. Google Analytics tracks any variation in UTM Parameters separately (including capitalized letters). Then, set up a segment inside Google Analytics for these users. Track the behavior of anyone who clicked your ad on your website and determine the true effectiveness of a campaign from start to finish! If you need help setting up campaign tracking in Facebook, contact us today.

Social Media

Facebook Business Manager Account Conversions

September 30, 2018

If you run a small business or nonprofit, chances are you’ve already explored or even realized the benefits of a presence on Facebook. You can create a Facebook Page for your organization, assign multiple administrators, and start sharing posts and collecting followers. If you’ve made it that far, congratulations! Leveraging social connections is a great way to extend the reach of your charity. If you’re ready to take it to the next level, however, you’re going to need a Facebook Business Manager account.

Advanced Permissions

A Facebook Business Manager account is set up under the business entity – so your personal Facebook account won’t be the sole owner. There are advanced user permissioning options in a business account as well. So everyone who once administrated your Facebook Page can continue to do so uninterrupted. But you might want to give different users different levels of permission, and you can control that through Business Manager. You can also grant Partners access to your page, which is helpful when an agency is employed. You can grant (or revoke) Partner status without explicitly giving individuals from the Partner agency personal access.

Business Ad Account

You will also get a Business Ad Account. If you’ve take advantage of the Boost Post option in Facebook, you’re already half way there. A Business Ad Account gives you more information and control over your boosts. But it also opens up a whole new world of advertising options. You can set up, run, monitor, and report on official ad campaigns – big or small. You can create a Facebook Pixel to embed in your website so your ads can see what the visitors Facebook sent you did on your website – and how to optimize the delivery for better results automatically.

Integrated Facebook/Instagram

Another benefit is advertising across both Facebook and Instagram. Don’t have an Instagram account? No problem! With a Facebook Business Manager account, you can still advertise on Instagram. Or if you do have an Instagram account for your organization, you can link it to your Facebook Business Manager account and incorporate it into your ad strategy and metric reports.

Advantages for Nonprofits

Lastly, if you are a certified 501(c)(3) charity or nonprofit, you can set up your account as such. This allows you to host fundraising events directly from posts, boost, or ads. You can also allow others to fundraise on your behalf. You might have seen this trend recently where individuals will set up a fundraising target for their birthday or other event, and Facebook will report on the progress to their goal. At the end of such a fundraiser, all the proceeds go directly to the nonprofit – FREE of fees!

If you’re ready to incorporate Facebook and/or Instagram ads into your overall digital marketing strategy, start by converting your existing assets into a Facebook Business Account (https://business.facebook.com). If you need help with this conversion or want some help developing a campaign strategy and execution, contact Dijon Marketing today.

Search Engines

The importance of 301 Permanent Redirects

September 11, 2018

It’s inevitable. Eventually, some how, for some reason, your pages are going to move or change names. You might reorganize your site structure. You might migrate to a new domain. Or you might just rename a blog name to something snappier for better SEO. Whatever the reason, any time you change a URL, the old link will break and present a 404: Page Not Found error.

Reasons 404 errors are a problem

First and foremost, it can be disruptive to your users. Even if you update all of your navigation, they might have bookmarks. Errors appear when visitors click on old bookmarks or emailed links.
There may be a plethora of links back to the page you just moved. You may or may not ever know about them. Anyone on the internet can link back to your site (and that’s a very good thing). It could be an old tweet or Facebook post someone will reference years from now.
Google’s bots crawl and evaluate those links to see how valuable your site is. Every backlink is a vote in favor of your domain being high quality. However, they ignore and delete any link that leads to a 404.
If your page has Pagerank mojo that’s gotten you onto Page 1 of Google a 404 will remove it from Google’s index. Restoring that prestige can be difficult and time consuming.

How to avoid problems with 404s

Luckily there is a way to avoid these calamities when you’ve moved content. It is a 301 Permanent Redirect. (Note: You don’t need to fully understand the different kinds of redirects. Just remember that ONLY a 301 will give you the benefits you seek.) A 301 redirect will redirect all of your users to their desired content at the new location instantly and seamlessly. Don’t worry if the bookmarked link is out-of-date. They arrive at the new location. They won’t even realize they’ve been forwarded. It will also redirect all of Google’s bots so they can continue to crawl and value your content. It signals to Google to update the address they’ve stored in their index. The new page is associated with the old. This carries almost all of your previous SEO link juice with it … almost.

The truth is, the worst thing you can possibly do for SEO is move content. Before you embark on reorganizations or migrations, ensure it’s for a good reason that truly benefits you or your users. If there’s not a really good reason to move content, DON’T. However, if you must, then a 301 redirect will be your best friend. Not sure how to implement 301 redirects or accidentally tarnished your SEO in a migration? Contact us for help!

Analytics

Set Destination Goals in Google Analytics

August 26, 2018

Google Analytics comes with many features out of the box that will give you added insight into your website performance, visitor profiles, and campaign effectiveness. You may find that over time, there are limits to what the built in metrics can tell you and you’re ready to do some configurations of your own. Knowing how many people come to your site is the first step. The next is knowing what they do. The way to monitor this is through conversion goals.

The simplest goal to set up is around a destination – how many of your users visited a specific page … like a donation page, or a donation thank-you page.

To set up a new destination goal, you must first be an admin of your Google Analytics account. Go to the admin view by clicking the gear icon in the lower left of your analytics view. This brings up a menu about Accounts, Properties, and Views. Goals are specific to a single view. Ensure you use your master data view if multiple views exist. Click on the “Goals” icon with the flag in the menu.

Steps to Set Up a New Goal

Choose “New Goal.”
Use a template to set up the new goal
Name the goal something easy to identify, “User visited Donate Page” for example
Choose Destination for the Type
Choose “Equals to” and paste in the URL of the destination page to track
If each visit contributes a monetary value, enter it, otherwise leave the value blank
If your goal includes visiting several pages in order, define them in the funnel interface. Then monitor drop-off points in your conversion goals.
Click Verify Goal to test to see how many visitors in the past 7 days would have been considered a successful conversion.
Save the goal to begin tracking your users.

Keep in mind that goals are not backwards compatible, meaning they will only start logging conversions upon creation. They will not look back at past visits to retroactively inform you of which visitors would have completed this goal had it existed. Let it run for a few days and then check back to see your success rates.

Once you have some goals set up you can start to trace it back to individual visits to see if certain types of traffic convert better than others. Maybe one campaign gets 10X as much traffic, but 1/10th of the conversions. You’d benefit putting more attention to the campaign you previously thought under-performed the others. Goal conversion tracking is the natural next step in analytics tracking and will give you more mature insights into your visitors, website performance, and campaign effectiveness.

Best Practices

The Importance of Domain Registration Auto-Renew

August 7, 2018

Do you own a branded web domain to represent your organization or small business?

Are you sure?

It happens more often than expected, but domain registrations do expire. There are lots of reasons why your domain wouldn’t automatically renew. First, you might have no set it up to do so. In fact, you may not have set it up at all. If you’ve used a third party service to set up your web presence, and then severed ties, your domain could be at risk of expiring.

Risks of an expired domain

The main problem with an expired domain is that poachers exist that will scoop it up. They monitor and watch for expired domains and grab them as soon as they become available. They figure (rightly so), if anyone has ever used that domain, it is inherently more valuable than any other. Maybe you let it expire by accident and it will be critical to your business to get it back. They can charge exorbitant prices to return your domain to you. Once you’ve let your registration slip and someone else has paid for it, there is little you can do besides paying the “ransom” … or choosing a new domain.

What can you do about it?

The best thing you can do is to set your domain up with an auto-renewal setting. Most domains cost somewhere in the ballpark of $12/year. So, it’s not usually the cost that is a factor, just the set up. If you’ve severed ties with a design agency, ask them to transfer your domain to your own ownership. There are numerous domain registration companies that have step by step instructions on how to transfer domain ownership between entities. Once you own your domain, verify the configuration is set for auto-renewal. Then, rest easy knowing auto-pilot will take care of the $12 annual charge. Ensure any contracts explicitly state your domain ownership. Do this even if an agency bought it on your behalf and maintains your web presence.

Best Practices

Adding GSuite Gmail to your domain

July 28, 2018

Once you’ve purchased a domain to represent your brand, organization, or small business, you’re going to want to associate an email service with it. One of the big benefits of owning your own domain is that you appear more professional by not emailing customers from an address “@gmail.com.” There are many ways to accomplish this, most hosting services or domain providers will try to sell you theirs, but for simplicity, ease of use, and familiarity, nothing beats Gmail.

But how do you get a Gmail address without it being @gmail.com?

Good news: it’s easy! It’s called GSuite from Google and creating your first email address takes only minutes. Check out the pricing and plans available at https://gsuite.google.com/. Pricing is basically $5 per month per user. However, you typically don’t need to start with too many users. You can create a single user with multiple aliases for things like “info,” “sales,” or “support.”

Once you’ve signed up for the service, you need to verify ownership of your domain. This will be done by uploading a text record (TXT) to your DNS server. Whichever domain registration service you used will have an option to add records to your DNS. Google will give you the exact text to paste in, and then will be able to verify your ownership. After that, they’ll give you another record to upload called a mail exchanger record (MX). Again, it’s a cut and paste from Google and within minutes your email is up and working.

You can associate multiple Google accounts on a single mobile device, switching seamlessly between them on your Gmail mobile app. GSuite also comes with a host of other benefits like file storage/sharing, contacts, and calendars that can be shared across users. As your business or organization grows, you can add new users ad hoc.

Even though the process is simple, it can be intimidating if you’ve never worked with DNS before. Contact us to help you get your email up and running so you can connect with new contacts in a professional and polished manner, through your very own branded email account!

Google Ads

Knowing your Conversion Funnel

July 3, 2018

Knowing your AdWords marketing conversion funnel can help you forecast new volunteers or donations for your charitable organization. It can also help you identify if there are any issues along the funnel that you can focus on and fix. Doing so is a fairly simple equation, but first you need to know each step in your conversion funnel.

Conversion Funnel Stage Definitions

Impressions – the number of times your ad showed to a user searching on Google
Clicks – the number of times your ad the user clicked to arrive on your website (not exactly the same as a visit, but close enough for big picture)
Engagements – the number of times a user completed a goal on the website. This depends on what you are tracking in your Google Analytics, but could be anything from visiting the donation page to clicking through to learn more.
Conversions – the end goal. In this and many cases, that represents a successfully completed donation through the website.

Here is an example of a real conversion funnel from a client last month. Obviously, your ads will not get clicked every time they are shown. Google AdWords will report this for your account, or for specific campaigns and ads – even down to the keyword level. Compliance regulations dictate that you must maintain at least a 5% click-through ratio (CTR) for participation in the Google Grants program. Likewise, every time as user clicks your ad, they won’t necessarily engage with the website. You can also monitor Bounce Rate in your Google Analytics to see what percentage of users leave the site immediately after the page loads. Finally, not every visitor who engages with your site will ultimately leave a donation. You can pull the numbers for each step from Adwords and/or Google Analytics and calculate the percentage of users that proceed through each level of the funnel.

How to use funnel data

You can use this information to estimate how many donations you are likely to receive based on the top of the funnel. With these conversion numbers, you would not mathematically expect a single donation until at least 3556 impressions had been earned. Even with 100,000 impressions, the number of donations would only calculate out to 14.

You can also monitor the conversion rates between each rung of the funnel.

Unusually low percentage of clicks – investigate your ad copy, keyword sets, and targeting options.
Very low level of engagement – redesign landing pages and evaluate body copy.
Low conversion rate – test your user experience to be sure there is no friction discouraging donations.

If everything looks healthy, you can put all of your efforts into growing your total number of impressions. The more you put into the top of the funnel, the more you can expect to get out! Need some your conversion funnel analyzed and optimized? Call us today!

Search Engines

Metadata Description can increase CTR

June 14, 2018

What is a metadata description? It’s a blurb about your page that tells a user what it is about, what they will expect to find, or what you want them to do when they arrive. Google often displays Metadata descriptions on the search results page just below your HTML Title. Here’s an example from the homepage of Dijon Marketing today:

Here, we’ve explicitly set the metadata description to read, “Dijon Marketing specializes in digital marketing for registered 501(c)(3) charities – hosting, domain registration, email, web design, SEO, PPC, and more!”

How Metadata Descriptions Impact Search

In doing so, we hope that users who are searching related queries will see this description and want to learn more about the digital marketing offers we have. You’ll notice in this example, the words “Dijon Marketing” are in bold. That’s because the Google query used to pull up this result was “Dijon Marketing.” Google highlights where your query shows up in the results. This additional formatting helps you determine which result is most relevant to you at this exact moment.

If we had searched “domain registration” or “digital marketing for registered 501(c)(3) charities,” these terms might be highlighted in the metadata description. Keyword: might. Something else might happen when you alter the query to test your site’s performance on Google. The metadata description can change entirely. Google reserves the right to interrogate your page and try to find the best blurb it can compared to the user’s exact query. It might grab the first sentence of a paragraph, a heading, or piece together its own description from content on your page. In general, that’s a good thing! It can help people who don’t know your brand yet discover you and click through to your site.

The ultimate goal of the metadata description is to increase the click-through ratio, or CTR, to your site. Calculate CTR by taking the number of times someone clicked on your site divided by the number of times you were shown as a result.

Best Practices for Writing Metadata Descriptions

Always manually populate the metadata description. Don’t rely on auto-generated or leave the field blank.
Think about the description as an advertisement, an enticement, or a call to action.
Place the most important or impactful language towards the front
While Google has played with the length of characters they will show (from 160 to 320 back to 160), aim for around 160 characters. If you run on a bit long, Google will truncate you in the display and all that hard work after the “…” will be for naught.
That said, a good description is better than a short one, so don’t fuss too much over exact character counts.

Need help identifying the right keywords, verbiage, and content for your metadata description and beyond? Contact us!

Search Engines

Knowledge Tiles: Use Quick Answer to Jump to Page…

June 3, 2018

It may be difficult for a brand new company or organization to make it to Page 1 of Google results quickly for generic, high-volume search terms. The best thing to do to get there is to write quality content, network your website for high quality backlinks, and wait. However, there is one method that may get you to the top of Page 1, even before organic results, without spending months building authority or spending money or grant dollars on AdWords advertisements. This is known as Quick Answer Knowledge Tiles.

What is a Quick Answer Knowledge Tile?

You might have seen these before without really knowing what they are. It is when Google attempts to answer the users query directly within the search results page, without requiring a click-through to view the content natively. This is probably due to the rise in voice-activated digital assistants. They pull answers to your questions from Google results, when providing you a link would be worthless. Here’s an example below for the query, “How do I write off a charitable donation?”

While authoritative content correlates more often to knowledge tiles, consideration does not require a rank of #1 organically. Google is constantly testing which content works best and shifting around who gets what spot.

Get Highlighted as a Quick Answer

They key here is that you are directly answering a specific question. Make a few pages that address questions or common inquiries around your charities or organizations that users might be searching. Use Keyword Planner or Google Trends to find high volume questions. Then test getting your content into a Knowledge Tile. It’s a departure from your usual content creation activities to think – What will people ask about my areas of expertise? How can I answer them directly and succinctly, in a list format or otherwise?

Give it a try, and see if you leap-frog your competition above organic results on the Google search results page. It can be a big boost, especially if your paid advertisement from a Google Grant appears directly above it. You will quickly own the results page and appear as a trusted expert on the topic. Try it today! How can we help?