Google Analytics 4 was launched rather quietly two months ago, considering the complete sea change it will be for marketers, webmasters and analysts alike.

Without much fanfare, Google announced Google Analytics 4 - an analytics package that rewrites online data stories for over 54% of all websites on the internet, according to w3techs.com.

GA4 incorporates a new data model, new backend, new interface, new tagging, and many new tools. 

It also comes with a new name, yet it appears Google spent little time on that, simply choosing the in vogue naming convention of numbering the latest version - think iPhone 12, PS5 or the Tesla Model 3.

Historic change 

So yes, GA4 is the 4th version of the software. And the first to use an events-based data model.

Considering Google Analytics is only 15 years old, it has come a long way from the purchase of Urchin Analytics on 14th November 2005, followed by Classic Analytics in April 2011 and then by Universal Analytics in October 2012. 

Speaking of Urchin Analytics: One of Aira’s clients, Latona’s, recently had a brilliant chat with Scott Crosby, one of the founders of Urchin Analytics before it became Google Analytics. Have a listen here.

These three versions worked off the same hits-based model, focusing on server hits and translating that into the traditional pageviews, sessions, and engagement factors we’ve been over-analysing for years. 

Eight years later, Google haven’t just updated the platform, they have completely reimagined it with an events-based model.

This is an important distinction - with a new data model focused on events, the interface and reporting tools also put events front and centre, helping users of the platform focus on and get better data on macro conversion performance over the old micro conversions setup, with the likes of pageviews, sessions times and bounce rates. 

So not only will we all have to get to grips with a brand new system, we will have to reimagine our own analysis, turning our attention to the bigger picture - the customer-centric interactions that truly drive business objectives. 

• From pageview counts to events per page focus - pageviews are a vanity metric. We should focus on the interactions on each page instead to see how effective the website is. 
• From sessions to engaged sessions - instead of focusing on the number of overall sessions, we should focus on engaged users as they are the users that matter.
• From broad segments to specific audiences based on engagements with the site. 

Here are some introductory insights as to what the new platform holds for users moving forward. 

So what is GA4?

GA4 takes Analytics of old and merges its seamlessly with Firebase (for apps) so you have a one stop shop for all your online analytics needs

And there have been changes. A lot of changes. I’ve been using Google Analytics daily for over 12 years, and my first look at GA4 was eye opening, and I’ve only just scratched the surface of all the changes and new features. 

Here’s some of the coolest changes I’ve seen so far!

• New interface: Gone is the old style interface based on the ABC reporting model of Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions, to a far more interactive dashboard style focused on the customer journey to and through your website or app.
  

  From the old graph and metrics style:

  
  

To the new interactive, customer-centric dashboard style:

This single change will be felt most by regular users who like certain reports and metrics, many of which have been replaced for this new age of analytics.

Good riddance bounce rate! But that's not all, here are some missing elements I’ve found (or not as the case may be): Details below accurate as of 4th January 2021.

Bounce Rate	Removed
Conversion Rate	TBC
Page load times	Removed
Average session duration	Replaced with average engagement time
Google Ads, GSC & social report sections	TBC

Automatic measurement: GA4 is geared up towards automation and ease of use. Google has simplified the set-up further by including a range of event types as automatically collected via the GA4 data streams.

Now pageviews, scroll tracking, outbound clicks, site searches, video tracking and file downloads are all included as standard!

That leads me to the far simpler setup needed to get rolling with GA4....

GA4 setup: GA can be complicated for less experienced analytics users to set up, but not so with GA4. If you use Google Tag Manager, you can add one simple configuration tag and bam, you’re straight into a magical world of events-based data goodness.

Debugging view: And with a new GTM preview mode and the debugging view in GA4, you can ensure your setup is working correctly, both simply and quickly. This feature will be even more useful when you look to create more advanced events setups. 

Real Time: This has been beefed up to provide more metrics and data points so you can get a better view of current website usage. This could be crucial for the identification of issues during key periods such as Black Friday sales or new product launches for ecommerce websites. 

Speed and sampling: GA4 is fast! Like Usain Bolt fast compared to the plodding middle aged weekend jogger that Google Analytics can be when surfacing chunky amounts of data. 

Gone are the days of the loading bar crawling along as GA grabs a hefty chunk of data that ends up being sampled.

Sampled data in GA4 is no more - you will get all of the data from your site or app as collected as the new model does away with sampling for all standard reports. 

Conversions: Strictly speaking conversions are no more - it's all events. But you can convert selected events into conversions and these are far more flexible compared to Analytics of old. Instead of a limit of 20 conversions total per view in GA, you can now have up to 30 slots per property, and these can be turned on and off, with off goals not counting towards your limit of conversions. (Sidenote - views are no more! But let's not get bogged down here.)

That’s great for seasonal or campaign-based goals. 

Events are more prominent in GA4 but have changed too! Gone is the previous setup of the Event, Event Category, Event Action and Event Label. In are event_name, and up to 20! event_parameters.

Audience Builder: Delving in a little further to some of the new features, we can see that the traditional segments of past versions have been replaced by audiences. You can build any audience, including audiences representative of your buyer personas, using a combination of dimensions and metrics as you could with segments but you can now go much further. 

These audiences can be used with all features and the data shared across reports. So you could build audiences such as users who completed checkout within five minutes and use that to compare against users who entered checkout but didn’t complete. 

Pathing reports: behaviour and event flows have been merged into this feature, Which gives you a clear visual representation of the customer journey to a completed action. 

Coupled with the ability of going into minute detail, GA4 goes a step further and shows this journey back to front you can see all the steps a site visitor took to get to the event, from the event. This is immensely useful to understand performance and work out the most effective paths to success. 

Funnel reports: have been improved massively with on the fly data capabilities so you can analyse any website journey element instantly and understand how effective your site is at getting users to complete a goal action. 

Projections: Saving the best new feature for last - GA4 will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide you with a range of projections - from traffic, to audiences most likely to convert. That information can be shared with other channels but the potential here is huge. 

Imagine being able to target users as an ecommerce company, based on their behaviour and the endless benefits possible - from better targeted advertising to greater stock control. 

This (if it works! Still a big if) could close the customer journey flywheel for marketers, by providing data on all elements of a user lifecycle and allowing you to harness the power of AI and machine learning to continually improve your site, app and marketing campaigns so they convert time and time again. 

Again the above features are just the tip of the iceberg, and I wanted to give you insight into why GA4 is going to be a complete sea change in Analytics. I haven’t even touched upon cross-device reporting and GA4 being ‘futureproof’ in terms of cookies and data protection - that’ll wait for the follow-up blog... 

The next steps

You may be reading this thinking ‘great, where do we sign up?’ Well, it is recommended to proceed with caution! Don’t rush to move over to GA4. 

Why? Well the platform is still under heavy development - things are likely to be unstable as Google continues to work on the product, hence the quieter launch!

We can also see that elements such as ecommerce tracking, products and filters are not fully integrated yet. 

Crucial too, it seems the interface still only has a basic reporting function - more elements are being rolled out week after week. Many account linking elements are also missing, such as the Google Search Console integration, which is not there yet and Google Ads reporting was only rolled out a couple of weeks ago. 

Coupled with that and the fact it is a shiny new toy, there is understandably little support documentation out there. It would be like trying to build a Lego Death Star model with no instructions - not impossible but very, very difficult indeed. 

Oh and for those who use Google Data Studio to report, the data connector with GA4 is very limited still. 

Aira’s approach - dual tagging

Ok, so maybe we shouldn’t jump on board right away, but we can dual tag. 

GA4 can be tagged simultaneously with your current setup (with just the addition of one GTM tag!) and you can explore the new platform, safe in the knowledge that your precious data is being collected ready for when GA4 is ready to take over the analytics world.

This approach is exactly what Google suggested at launch: 

‘The new Google Analytics is now the default experience for new properties and is where we’re investing in future improvements. We know there are capabilities many marketers need before fully replacing their existing Analytics setup, so we encourage you to create a new Google Analytics 4 property (previously called an App + Web property) alongside your existing properties. This will allow you to start gathering data and benefit from the latest innovations as they become available while keeping your current implementation intact. 

Vidhya Srinivasan - Google Analytics’ Big Boss 

Note for those of you who are setting up Analytics for a brand new website - GA4 is now the default platform so you won’t be able to wait. Hey, at least you’ll be seen as trendsetters (and we’re here to help!). 

So there you have it, like a ship captain who can see a perfect storm of data brilliance brewing on the horizon, get yourself ready for GA4 - a complete and utter sea change to how you have collected and reported on your online marketing data. It will be worth the wait. 

If you have any questions on GA4 or would like to know more about a future rollout, please email me at brendan.gilbert@aira.net, get in touch with the Aira team or find us on Twitter to chat analytics, SEO and digital marketing.

2020 was my second Copywriting Conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect from this year’s necessarily virtual event, after experiencing last year’s in the Brutalist splendour of London’s Barbican Centre. 

Surely it couldn’t be as engaging through my 13-inch screen as it was in an auditorium of other writers and creatives. Surely it would be just a bit more, well, crap.

But of course it wasn’t. It was a day packed with practicable advice and insight on everything from writing microcopy to fascinations. But it also covered issues of social justice and mental health, and made attendees ask ourselves whether what we’re doing is actually contributing to a better world. Whoah, heavy. But this resonated with me, and judging by the event’s chat panel, with a lot of other people too.

It was a packed schedule and I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow narrative of the whole day. It was attended by hundreds of writers so a bunch of people will probably have done that already. 

Everything was useful, but I want to focus on a few personal highlights - the bits that stayed with me after I shut my laptop and on that Friday afternoon and raised my first beer to the weekend (then had to promptly put the beer down to stop my small kids from killing each other/their grandma/a cat). 

 

The power of simplicity

I knew from the title of this talk that I’d like it. When I first started writing as a (largely unpaid) journalist I thought you had to use big words and flowery imagery and prose peppered with metaphor and symbolism. 

Then I learned you don’t. And you shouldn’t. This is especially true for copywriting, where the whole point is to clearly and succinctly convey a message. Though all writing benefits from clarity and simplicity - just ask Hemingway (he has his own app so he must’ve known what he was talking about!).

Robyn Collinge, who was the sole copywriter at WeTransfer for a long time and developed their tone of voice, is on board with simplicity. She had some great tips to share too:

1. Write how you speak

Don’t write how you think you should write, write how you speak. For example, don’t write ‘view images’ if you mean ‘see images’. 

This goes for blog posts and web copy but also stuff like terms of service and contracts. They don’t have to be incomprehensible, jargon-filled joy saps, and wouldn’t it be better if people understood what they were signing? This is especially important when you’re writing about complex products or services. Robyn recommends you get to the core of what you want to say, and just say that.

2. Know your audience

This means know who you’re writing for - the buyer personas and ideal customer profiles you’re targeting. But it also means knowing when users on your site need you and when they don’t. When a joke would work - such as a funny 404 message - and when it really wouldn’t. Robyn gave the example of someone not being able to download their files on WeTransfer. In this situation their message is ‘Having trouble downloading your files? We know it’s frustrating but hang in there and we’ll get things back up and running as soon as we can.’  

3. Be unexpected

Standing out is always important in copywriting and Robyn discussed various ways to do this. Humour and self-deprecation usually go down well, and writers, don’t be afraid to break the rules from time to time, as WeTransfer did with this email header: ‘WeTransfer Pro just go Pro-er’. Is it grammatically wrong? Yes. Does it work? Also yes.

 

Diversity in storytelling

Natalie Narh is a social content creative at Ogilvy UK and vice chair of Ogilvy Roots, a network dedicated to championing greater cultural and ethnic diversity within Ogilvy UK and the wider creative industry. She has other impressive credentials too which you can check out on her Twitter.

Natalie spoke about the importance of diversity in storytelling, in copywriting, advertising, marketing and the wider world. She also talked about how creatives can help. 

Content - What am I saying?

Are you clear about the message you’re conveying? Will your audience understand your intention or could they perceive your work in a different way? (See PureGym’s jaw-droppingly misguided ‘12 Years of Slave’ workout, intended to celebrate Black History Month!) 

Obviously there are subtler cases of intention and perception not connecting and Natalie suggests we consider what allusions we might be making and what connections our words could create to avoid creating offensive or inappropriate content.

Cultural opportunities

Natalie and her team look at briefs and discuss opportunities for cultural representation. She says asking yourself ‘Is there a chance for more cultural representation here?’ is a great way to remain open to opportunities to represent a more diverse audience.

Relatability - Is this my story to tell?

Are you writing about an experience that you haven’t lived? Especially when related to race it’s vital for the writer to have direct insight into what they’re talking about, Natalie explains. So if you’re not the right person to write it, then find someone who is.

Research - Are my insights actually informed?

Again this comes down to life experience and whether you’re the right person for the job. You might be a top researcher, but when it comes down to it, would it be more appropriate for someone with direct insights to work on this brief?

Red flags

Am I making society better by publishing this piece of work? Does it have the potential to really offend or even oppress someone? And is there someone I can ask to sense-check this? Natalie recommends we ask ourselves these questions before clicking publish, to gauge whether what we’re putting out into the world should really be out there.

 

Managing perfectionism

Honor Clement-Hayes is brand manager at Ticker Insurance and an award-winning marketer. Her talk was about how to produce good copy without being paralysed by the pursuit of perfectionism. According to Honor, you can get great results without punishing yourself. Nice!

Perfectionism is about fear of losing control, Honor tells us. It can manifest as procrastination or obsessing over details. And anything based in fear has a negative impact on our mental health and on our bodies, due to the release of stress hormones such as cortisol.

There are three types of perfectionism, Honor explains:

1. Self-orientated perfectionism - ‘I don’t think I’m good enough’

This means beating yourself up and holding yourself to impossible standards in pursuit of something always out of reach.

2. Other-oriented perfectionism - ‘I don’t think you’re good enough’

This means holding other people to impossible standards. You’ll often see this behavior from bullying bosses.

3. Socially-prescribed perfectionism - ‘They don’t think I’m good enough’

AKA imposter syndrome. Chasing society’s expectations, or those you imagine society having, which Honor says we often imagine to be so much higher than they really are.

Don't try to be perfect, Honor tells us, just do what you gotta do. Good enough work (in our own minds) is usually more than good enough for our company or client, and good enough work beats a blank page (and a writer jangling with paralysing self doubt). 

Honor has some other tips for getting shit done without having a horrible time:

• Work with joy & be resilient

You might find you do better work by creating less from fear and more from joy. And resilience means believing in your work and being willing to push back if bosses or clients want to chop your stuff into pieces, which you know would make it less effective. Have faith that you know what you’re talking about.

• Treat yourself kindly

Key to resilience and good mental health is being kind to yourself. Look out for things that trigger your fear responses, be prepared to make mistakes and know that you can’t get better without the odd failure.  

• Treat yourself as a business

Establish processes, such as creating evaluation documents, building just a couple of sets of edits into quotes and having trusted colleagues you can go to for sense-checks and advice. 

• Treat yourself

Invest in understanding your mind and how you tick (Honor recommends a number of books including ‘How to Be Human’, a great book (I’m currently reading) on life and mindfulness by Ruby Wax, with a neuroscientist and a Buddhist monk). You should also enjoy your creative practice, Honor says, and make sure you have a hobby. Joy and self-worth need to come from more than one place, so extra-curricular activities are a must. 

So...

As I said there was loads more great stuff shared at the conference - for instance the formidable Jane Evans on women remaining visible in advertising as they age (more here), and Eddie Shleyner on writing fascinations. But I’m no stenographer and if you want to know exactly what goes down you’ll have to buy tickets to the next event. Soz. 

But I will say that the Copywriting Conference 2020 was genuinely inspiring and motivating. Our work can be a joyful thing, and it can have a positive impact. In her talk Natalie Narh said ‘Society is a reflection of what we put out there', so we have a responsibility to make it good.

 

From November 2020 Googlebot is supporting crawling over HTTP/2. Initially this will be for ‘select sites’, with a plan to gradually increase its coverage.

But what exactly is HTTP/2, what are its benefits and how can you implement it on your website?

What is HTTP/2?

Most servers are currently configured to HTTP/1.1, which has been used for the last 20 years or so. HTTP/1.1 only allows you to make single server requests, one at a time, meaning that the client has to make multiple requests for resources in order to successfully render the page, which can take a lot of time if there are a lot of resources.

There are two types of HTTP server requests, GET and POST. GET requests are usually used to request information from the server to the browser (like a web page or an image). POST requests are usually used for more secure requests such as receiving a form submission from a contact form.

HTTP/2, also known as ‘h2’, allows you to make multiple requests for different file types, such as html, jpeg, css, js, etc.

According to Google:

‘it's the next major version of HTTP...HTTP/2 is much more robust, efficient, and faster than its predecessor, due to its architecture and the features it implements for clients (for example, your browser) and servers.’

Benefits of using HTTP/2

Search Engine Land has called HTTP/2 ‘one of the greatest advancements in web technology in the past 20 years’. 

And there are some pretty significant benefits to consider, which you can see briefly outlined here:

• HTTP/2 reduces the number of requests to the server, reducing the resources a server needs to use
• It reduces load time, so offers a better user experience and the SEO benefits that entails
• It reduces latency (the time it takes for a network connection to open over a distance - one of the main issues affecting web speed and a major reason for Google to develop HTTP/2) 
• It enables much more efficient crawling for websites and saves crawl budget

How to implement HTTP/2

If your server supports HTTP/2 and Google already crawls a lot from your website, you might be eligible for a connection upgrade already, without having to do anything. 

But if you want to make sure you can take advantage of the expected benefits of HTTP/2, you’ll need to ensure the following:

• Your website is already on the HTTPS protocol. If not you will need to move from HTTP to HTTPS
• Your web server is able to support HTTP/2
• Your server is configured to use HTTP/2 

This post from Cloudflare details lots of ways to check whether your site supports HTTP/2. 

It’s also worth noting though that Google have said they will not be crawling every HTTP/2-enabled site over h2, if there is ‘little to no benefit...for example those with limited qps’ (queries-per-second).

Summary

HTTP/2 will be with us very soon, and although Google state there’s ‘no explicit drawback’ to remaining on HTTP/1.1, the benefits mentioned above suggest that it’s well worth getting on board and moving to HTTP/2 now, so that your site can be in the best position to embrace this next step in the evolution of web technology.

Further Reading

Introduction to HTTP/2 - Google

An introduction to HTTP/2 for SEOs - Distilled

HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2: What's the Difference? - DigitalOcean

Why Everyone Should Be Moving to HTTP/2 - Search Engine Land

Tools for debugging, testing and using HTTP/2 - Cloudflare

I like to look at websites and online brands the same as I do humans…

You wouldn’t go out for dinner with a randomer you just met on the dodgy side of town (well you might do, but each to their own), so why would you commit to purchasing or trusting information from a website you’ve just heard of that popped up on a weird Instagram sponsored post?

Becoming a trustworthy person and website takes both time and effort, and I’m going to try and explain how to build trust online on your own website, or a client website, while building links!

Make sure your content and information is valuable

Making sure your website has valuable information and interesting content is key to success when building authority online. If it doesn’t cover the basics of what your company does and sells, then Google - and humans - won’t look at it as a legitimate site.

Take Aira’s website, for example - you land on the page and you know exactly what we do and who we are. When you move through to the blog you start to get an understanding of what we specialise in and why we do what we do - essentially, we’re selling ourselves and sharing information and content that is valuable to the user.

Once the basics are covered, such as a decent blog, you can start to get a little more creative - what about ideating and doing research, analysing data and then generating content to create a story that sparks conversation?

This can be anything from interactive in-depth research to a simple top 10 blog post or listicle (you can read more about ideation here). What matters at this point is that you’re generating content that is both interesting and valuable to your customer/audience.

Share with the right people to build authority

Once you’ve generated the content with a designer or developer, it’s important to do something with it. You wouldn’t make a meal and leave it sitting on the side and not eat it? So don’t spend all of your time and effort generating ideas, pulling together data and writing copy to just leave it sitting on the site.

You now need to get this story into a press release and send it to the right journalists to build some juicy links in order to gain authority online.

Easier said than done…

I’m going to take you through the steps us digital PRs follow at Aira in order to make sure we’re approaching the right journalists with our stories and therefore generating links.

1) Nail your stories and angles

Take some time to really analyse the content you’re generating to establish the interesting hooks and stories that are in it.

Take this content, for example. When analysing this we could see far more angles than we originally thought.

The obvious one: ‘The most tranquil villages and towns in the UK’, but there were also angles such as: ‘Top staycation destinations in the UK’ and ‘Best mini-moon destinations’, meaning that our story was relevant to various sectors of the press

2. Build more than just a media list

Media lists in PR are 101 - everyone builds them, they’re a pretty standard practice if you work in the industry. But, this is probably the most important part of building your authority online and generating links.

You have to make sure you’re going to the right people who, a) are going to want to cover your story, and b) are the best people to approach.

For example, a freelancer may write for a big top-tier publication, such as the Independent and they may look as if they’d be interested in featuring your story, but it doesn’t mean they are the best person to approach - a freelancer then has to pitch the story to the editor/PoC at the publication and it could be a long waiting game.

It’s better to approach the key contact at the news outlet - such as an editor or even the newsdesk (it does work!!)

Here are just a few simple steps to building a media list:

• Establish sectors of the press you want to approach: nationals, lifestyle, regionals, HR etc
• Then fill in the key publications within those sectors that would feature a similar topic to yours - tools such as Vuelio and Gorkana are great for this, but even just a manual Google search can find a new site you haven’t seen before
• Once you’ve done this, a manual search on said sites is key - go to the search bar of the publication and search for the topic of your story. For example, ‘holiday destinations in the UK’ or ‘top TikTok accounts’ and manually look through the types of journalists that are already talking about your topics, and add them to your list
• Now it’s time for the media databases to do their thing - head on over to the likes of Gorkana, Vuelio or Roxhill to find the journalist’s email address and details. If you’re struggling, do a quick search on Twitter or drop them a DM
• At this point, you should have the bulk of your media list, but you still need to do the most important bit (and actually it doesn’t matter if you do this at the start or end of building your list) - pop some of your competitors’ campaigns into the likes of Ahrefs, Buzzsumo and Majestic to see if they’ve gained any coverage from journalists that aren’t already on your list

3. Sell your story during outreach

Sometimes looked at as the easiest part - in outreach essentially you’re just sending an email. But it needs to be super succinct and clear. Here are a few tips to follow:

• Create a subject line that you can envisage as a headline
• Sell the story within the first few sentences of the pitch email
• Provide the key stats and angles that specific journalist needs - for example, if you’re pitching to a Scottish regional, make sure they have specific data for their readership
• Give them absolutely everything they need to feature the story - images, data, press release
• If you don’t hear back, give them a few days before you follow up with them - remember they’re just a human with busy inboxes and life pressures, too

Gaining results to build authority

After the above process has taken place, it should hopefully lead to some juicy coverage and links across a variety of the sites you’ve pitched into, meaning that they trust the research, knowledge and information from your content.

From generating links on other trusted top-tier sites, your website can gain traffic from people who trust them as a source. This, alongside a mixture of other digital marketing and SEO tactics, can boost domain authority and lead to an increase in rankings.

Before we delve into what an inbound marketing campaign should look like, we should briefly cover what inbound marketing is.

Inbound marketing attracts potential customers by offering relevant content, allowing them to understand and solve their problems throughout the buyer’s journey. 

Inbound marketing is different from outbound marketing, which is more traditional and seeks to interrupt potential customers, rather than ensuring you are found by the people who are already searching or shopping for your product or service (see our inbound vs outbound marketing blog for further insight).

An overarching inbound marketing strategy is usually divided into separate inbound marketing campaigns. HubSpot defines inbound marketing campaigns as ‘concentrated efforts that align your marketing channels around a single message and goal’, through a promoted content offer relevant to your potential customer. But what should an inbound marketing campaign look like?

Planning an inbound marketing campaign

An inbound marketing campaign is a content-driven activity. The main goal is to attract new leads to your business by providing them with the information they want.

In order to devise a successful inbound marketing campaign, you will need to complete some key planning tasks including setting goals or KPIs, understanding the buyer persona you are targeting, and creating a content strategy.

Goals

Firstly you need to outline your goals or KPIs for this campaign, to ensure your campaigns are measurable and focused on driving results. Using SMART goals you are able to create Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals. 

To help you create your own SMART goals, take a look at the points below, in this case for growing blog traffic:

1. Is your wording specific enough? Example: ‘We want to increase the volume of traffic to our blog by targeting two different buyer personas in four blog posts per month

2. Are your goals measurable? Example: We’re aiming for a 5% traffic increase 

3. Are your goals attainable? Example: Blog traffic went up 3% last month after increasing posts published from two to three 

4. Are your goals relevant? Example: By targeting our buyer personas and posting more frequently, we’ll not only generate more traffic but we’ll also be providing more relevant content to our audience 

5. What is the timescale? Example: By October 2020 we will see a 5% increase in traffic

Buyer persona

You need to identify which of your buyer personas you will be targeting through your inbound marketing campaign. A buyer persona is a projection of your ideal customer, based on data about your current customers and your industry. Using buyer personas has many benefits, including making it easier to create useful content to help improve the quality of your leads, and know which to qualify. 

If you haven’t yet developed your buyer personas you can learn more in our post, What is a Buyer Persona?

Content strategy 

To help structure your content within your inbound marketing campaign and allow your target audience to make a well-informed decision, you will need to revert back to your content strategy in order to attract your buyer persona, by creating content at the relevant stage of the buyer’s journey in order to engage them.

If you don’t yet have a content strategy, including core topics, subtopics and monthly search volume data, then visit HubSpot’s guide on How to Develop a Content Strategy before you get started. 

Setting up your inbound marketing campaign

Now you know your campaign goals, you have your content offer and you know who you’re targeting, you can set up your campaign.

A CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce will allow you to manage your campaigns, nurture your leads and measure your campaign performance.

Here are the steps you could follow to create your campaign:

1. Create your content offer - as well as ensuring your content is relevant to your buyer persona, you can also create smart content that will allow you to deliver the right information to your audience, depending on their buyer persona and/or factors including location and behaviour. Make sure to structure your content using H1s and H2s and test your content offer and continue to optimise it.

2. Calls to action - you need to ensure your content offer has clear CTAs which link back to your goals and KPIs, e.g. ‘book a demo’ or ‘contact us’. You can also use smart CTAs to ensure relevance.

3. Landing page creation - create your landing page to capture information from potential customers. By filling in a form, your potential customer will be able to download content offers such as ebooks, whitepapers and free demos.

4. Use forms - not all content needs to be gated, however forms will allow you to collect valuable information on your visitors, and by using dynamic fields in forms you will be able to qualify them, with lead-scoring metrics such as company size. This will help align sales and marketing processes too.

5. Segmentation - as your campaign gathers more information about your leads, make sure you segment and effectively manage your contacts. You can do this by building targeted lists and lead scoring. You can also build smart content to nurture your customers through the funnel with marketing automation.

6. Automation - build emails in advance and set up workflows to trigger once a form is submitted. This helps to ensure leads are followed up, by automatically sending them more relevant content, which continues to push them through the buyer’s journey. You can also use automation to improve internal processes - for qualifying leads from your campaign, for example.

7. Campaign promotion - through your content strategy you will know where your prospects spend their time online,, enabling you to deliver your audience the right content at the right time to hit your goals. Promotion could be in the form of email marketing, paid media, or SEO to generate organic traffic. Our blog post on 17 Essential Inbound Marketing Tactics dives deeper into this.

8. Feedback - getting feedback from your customers and leads on your campaign will allow you to continue to develop your inbound marketing strategies and continue to delight your customers.

9. Report on your results - using Google Analytics or CRM reporting tools helps you accurately report on what has and hasn’t worked in your campaign, and also identify improvements. 

In summary, an inbound marketing campaign needs to be planned carefully in order to hit KPIs and deliver results. 

By delivering the right content at the right time, in the right place, you will be able to attract, engage and delight your prospects and customers, gather valuable lead-scoring information to pass to the sales team, and as a result, grow your business. 

By reporting on your results you will gain valuable insights and key learnings that you can use to continue to optimise your campaigns.

Anyone working in paid media will no doubt be familiar with new campaign formats and advertising features sneaking into the platforms with no notice. Sometimes these are small settings, other times they can entirely flip the best way to drive results on its head.

Being a Facebook marketing partner we love to see how much Facebook drives advertising automation and finding new and better ways to offer users relevant content, and advertisers business goal-focussed results. Such as Facebook automated ads. But what are Facebook automated ads exactly?

It's a way to create a ‘custom advertising plan’ for your business which will then in turn create ads that will run on an ongoing basis.

We now live in a world of marketing automation with Smart Bidding being a core component of PPC. What are these ads though and more importantly, do they work?

I went through the process for our ad account out to illustrate the process, so, let’s get into it.

TLDR: It’s like a better boosted post, which allows you to quickly use page content such as images from organic posts and existing audiences within your ad manager account, to create ads that Facebook will ‘over time help you adjust settings for better performance’.

Log into Business Manager and go to your page, click notifications and then you should see the get started button on the left hand side of the screen.

When you get started, you navigate through a couple of screens where Facebook asks you some questions: which ad account you would like to use and more broadly about your business and goals, in order to get set up.

The options available seem pretty reasonable; we didn’t really fall into one perfectly but I selected the ‘Online’ option and chucked in our URL.

At the next screen, you get your ‘custom plan’ from Facebook. This is interesting. There is a bit of information around suggested budget, call to action and estimated daily traffic metrics, such as clicks and impressions.

The ‘Shop Now’ button recommendation seemed a little off for our particular business at this stage, however, this was only step 1 of 4.

At stage 2, you are taken to a preview screen where images have been pulled from your organic page posts. Here you have a number of customisation options and settings to work with. This seems really familiar as it’s very close to how the ad creation screen in ad manager looks.

The image editing stuff was particularly extensive; you can replace or edit the images that have been imported, you can even add stuff like filters, text and stickers! PS, look at that face! Rolo ftw

Once you have your images sorted, you can do most of the things you would (and should) usually do on ad manager, such as create headlines for the ads, write ad copy, enter a final URL (make sure you add URL parameters so you can see your campaign traffic in GA), and customise the CTA button…see ya ‘Shop Now’!

Next up is probably the most important part – audience. This is really interesting; by default ‘Automated ads’ wants to target your website visitors and lookalike audience based on them.

I had some really amazing results with this combination over Black Friday and cyber week, with campaigns for a client where there wasn’t any purchase event data to use for the lookalike data source, as it was a brand new site.

You can choose other audiences as well. Selecting custom audiences allows you to select from your library of custom audiences within the ad account you selected at the beginning.

Along with this, you can also use saved audiences and/or create a new audience.

For me this is really cool - targeting is something that really falls down with boosted posts a lot of the time.

With your audience defined you have some budget suggestions, you can select your Pixel and review the campaign that is about to launch.

Something again really cool (I know I’m sad to find this stuff so exciting), Facebook offers to send you updates via Messenger on how your ads are doing and tips to improve them.

Conclusion

Facebook automated ads are good. This is a quicker way to get something running than creating a campaign in ad manager, and there’s enough customisation to get the key things worked in, such as URL parameters and targeted audiences, with a relatively small amount of knowledge needed.

I’ve had gripes with boosted posts and this is more of a halfway house between a full-on campaign and a boost. If you’re a small business or a business new to paid social advertising, this should be taken advantage of.

Let’s face it, if I’d just ticked yes to all of the default options and written ad copy, this would be a well targeted campaign using custom and lookalike audiences, with suggestions directly from Facebook on how to optimise…not too shabby!

Some of this would be due to the existing setup of audiences and the Pixel, for example though, so it probably needs a degree of understanding of Facebook ads to get the account set up first.

	Tools	Time	Skill Level
Ad Manager Campaign	Advanced	High	Advanced
Automated Ads	Moderate	Moderate	Moderate
Boosted Post	Basic	Low	Basic

If you have any questions about Facebook Automated Ads, or more broadly about paid media, why not drop us a line?

If you’re like most business owners and are using Facebook to communicate with your prospective and existing customers, you may well have heard of Business Manager.

Sure, you can manage your Page and run some basic ads just from your personal account, but there’s a whole lot more on offer. Business Manager offers a huge range of additional features, insights and tools all in one place

Who’s it for?

If you have a Page for your company currently and perhaps occasionally boost your posts to extend your reach, now is the perfect time to migrate to Business Manager and unlock a ton of additional Facebook advertising tools, Page insights and be able to manage your comments and messages away from the distraction of your personal account.

In this guide, we will talk you through how to set up a Facebook Business Manager account, link your Page, create an ad account and how to then allocate permissions to your team (or an agency like Aira ).

Business Manager

You will need to use your personal Facebook account to confirm your identity. Once this has been done, notifications and emails can sit away from your personal newsfeed, leaving you free to scroll and watch as many cat videos as you can find.

Ideally, you will be the Page owner to do this initial setup, as it will mean the Page can be linked without needing to request access.

So head over to business.facebook.com and click ‘Create an Account’. You will first be asked to enter a name for your business and then your own name and company email address (this is where notifications regarding your Pages, ad campaigns etc. and billing will be sent).

Adding your Page

Congratulations! You now have a Business Manager account. That was fairly easy, wasn’t it?

Let’s get your Page (or Pages) added so we can start making use of these new tools and features.

Anyone who has admin access to your Page currently will still do so once you have transferred it to Business Manager.

• You should be seeing a screen something similar to the one just below here. There are three panels: Page, Advert account and People. Click ‘Add Page’ in the first panel.

• You will be given three new options: Add a Page You Own, Request Access and Create a New Page. We are going to assume you are the Page owner for this guide, so click ‘Add Page’ in the first panel.

• Now, you are able to search for your Page by typing out the page name, or you can open your Page in another tab in your browser, copy the URL and paste it into the search bar. Once you have found your page, click ‘Add Page’.

Once you return to the Business Manager home screen, you will now see your page under a ‘Pages’ heading. It’s worth noting at this point you can add multiple Pages to a Business Manager account. To add more Pages that you own, just repeat the same steps.

Let’s say you have five nationwide branches, each with a separate Facebook Page – you can add them all into your Business Manager account and then allow access to employees to also create posts, see insights, and respond to users quickly and easily from one place.

You can also now manage your Instagram comments and direct messages from within your Page here, providing you link the account to Business Manager.

Just click the Page you need to work on and you will be taken to the familiar looking admin side of your Page. See your notifications, reply to comments as your business, create posts and much more.

Creating an ad account

Now your Page(s) are in your Business Manager account, the next thing to do is set up an ad account so you are ready to start running paid media campaigns. You can create up to five ad accounts per Business Manager account and request access to any other existing accounts you work on.

Creating an ad account is worth doing now, even if you don’t plan to start running campaigns just yet, so it’s set up for when you are ready.

Note: If you already have an ad account, you can transfer this over to your new Business Manager account, which is easy enough to do - just follow guided steps in the account.

• If you need to, navigate back to the Business Manager homepage by clicking the Facebook icon in the top left-hand corner of the page.

• You will see a second panel (next to where you added your page in the last section) - ‘Advert account’. Click the blue ‘Add Advert Account’ button.
  

• You will see three new options open again. As mentioned, this part of the setup is for people without an advert account, so click the ‘Create Advert Account’ button in the third panel under ‘Create a new advert account’.

• Give your advert account a name, select the business the advert account will be advertising on behalf of, select your timezone and finally your currency for billing.
  
• The next step will allow you to give access to this advert account. There are various different tiers of access you can give. Click ‘Skip’ for now as we will cover this later in the guide.

The account is now set up! You won’t be able to run any campaigns just yet though, so let’s sort that before we go any further.

Billing

To run campaigns with your shiny new ad account you will need to add some billing information.

In the top left corner of Business Manager you will see a burger icon. Click this and a drop-down box will appear.

Click on ‘Billing’, click ‘Add Payment Method’ and enter your payment details.

With a valid payment method linked, you are now ready to use your ad account to run campaigns and grow your business!  

Adding people

Now you have a Business Manager account, your company’s Page is linked and you have an advert account ready to run campaigns.

The final thing we are going to look at is how to give people permissions. You will no doubt have in-house members of staff who need to work on your Pages and/or Advert account, so let’s give them access to your Business Manager.

• Head back to your Business Manager home page and click the third and final panel - ‘People’. Click the ‘Add People’ button.
• The first set of permissions are for the Business Manager account. Enter the person’s company email address and select their permission level.

• The second set of permissions are for Pages. There are various tiers of permissions available - if you’re unsure check out what they all mean on Facebook here.
• The third set of permissions are for advert accounts. Similarly to Pages, there are various tiers of permissions available - if you are unsure check out what they all mean on Facebook here.
• The fourth set of permissions are for Product Catalogs, which you won’t have at this stage (and might not need anyway), so click ‘Skip’.

This person now has access to everything you wanted them to have access to and an email will be sent to them inviting them to use your Business Manager. You can add further people or adjust permission levels in your settings any time.

What’s next?

Now that you have your main assets set up you can start to explore some of the more advanced features of Facebook advertising, such as adding a Pixel to your website so that you can retarget visitors and track conversions such as purchases or leads.

Doing this means that you’ll be able to use conversion campaigns to drive business goals, create lookalike audiences of your existing customers to find more in-market opportunities, and also exclude people who have converted from your campaigns to save wasted ad spend and keep relevance high.

Having a Business Manager account will also allow you to do other cool stuff like create a catalogue and run product ads if you’re an ecommerce business, tag your products in posts and much, much more.

You’ll also see in the settings tab (if you click the cogwheel in the top right corner) you can assign access to everything in your account to a paid media agency partner, which makes life really easy when it comes to outsourcing your paid social activity.

Conclusion

You’ve now no doubt got plenty of new tools and features to explore - I haven’t covered everything, but I have covered the key parts you will need to drive business growth.

Want to know more about Facebook ads? Why not get in touch and see what else we can do for you? I want to speak to you, you rock.

We’ve got a problem. 

Here’s what Digital PR and SEO Twitter has to say about our campaigns and posts…

“Digital PR is getting f***king ridiculous”

@WolfofBaldStreet 

That’s not the only thing content marketers, digital PRs and SEOs are saying; others have called people in our community attention seeking and discussed the pressures of posting our best work all the time in lengthy threads on a Saturday morning when we could all be snoozing or having a cup of tea. 

But, you know what? I’m guilty. 

I’ve used Twitter as a platform for congratulating my team and sharing how proud of them I am. I’ve used Twitter to shout about campaign wins and link numbers for clients. I’ve used Twitter as a marketing tool to communicate with brands and potential sales leads. And I didn’t stop there… 

I stood on the MozCon 2019 stage and walked you through how to create campaigns that go viral and generate hundreds of top tier links using the Digital PR Newsroom strategy, and whilst there’s nothing wrong with what I did on that stage or what I was saying on Twitter, the challenge we have is that I wasn’t showing you the full picture and what the reality of digital PR and link building can be like.

Showing you the full picture

A year on from MozCon 2019, and whilst on the virtual stage of MozCon 2020, I want to show you the full picture and this starts with breaking down our creative campaigns into three pillars, including:

1. Huge wins - campaigns that go above and beyond link targets

2. Huge fails - campaigns that generate little to no links

3. Steady performers - our everyday campaigns that secure a good amount of links

This second visual shows how we talk about the three creative campaign types, with a big focus on (over)sharing the wins:

The final visual below shows what our day to days look like as content marketers, digital PRs and link builders. You can see that the majority of the campaigns we’re working on fall into the ‘steady performers’ category, which generate a good amount of high quality, relevant links, which in turn have a positive impact on traffic and rankings. 

We’re going to face a number of challenges as an industry if we don’t celebrate those steady performers and talk about our learnings from campaign failures. If we focus on our wins and only our wins, we are at risk of: 

• Giving the impression that we don’t have campaign fails 
• Putting too much pressure on ourselves that every campaign must go viral 
• Normalising the idea every campaign needs to get 100+ links to be good 
• Setting unrealistic expectations and KPIs with stakeholders and clients 
• Making others feel like getting 5, 10 or 20 links isn’t good 

We know steady performing campaigns can drive real successes for clients and ultimately impact important SEO KPIs, such as traffic and rankings. Can you think of one you’ve worked on? Of course you can.

It’s also very important to acknowledge as a community that we are used to focusing on the wins because link building and digital PR are hard, and we know that there is an element of risk as you plough budgets and resourcing into creating assets that may not generate the results you want. 

We’ve seen trends emerge for the kinds of formats and creative that do well and generate links in this space, from static infographics in 2009 through to Instagrammable maps in 2017 and ‘the best job ever’ stunts in 2019. This is likely to continue into 2021 as video takes over, and beyond into 2022 where we could be seeing virtual reality become a tactic used in digital PR campaigns.

With good reason, we are guilty of rinsing and repeating and we can do better. 

Step 1 - The truth about digital PR lies in accepting failures 

The first step in showing you the full picture is talking about campaign failures, accepting them and learning from them, so there’s no better time than right now to walk you through one of Aira’s most memorable ones. 

Going back to our rinse and repeat point; who remembers these maps? 

Let’s rewind to circa 2017 when we launched this campaign for a leading car parking brand in the UK. The map details the top selling car model in almost every country around the world, and the format of not being able to read things easily on the map tied into the fun nature of the campaign. 

But, these really do pose a few challenges from a QA process perspective, especially with really busy sections like this: 

Can anyone see what the mistake was? I’ll make it a little easier to spot:

What’s more was that we launched this campaign and even managed to secure coverage with ‘Honk Kong’ in full view. Luckily, we had an understanding client who helped us fix things quickly and the campaign went on to secure more than 80 links, which made everything worth it. I’ll still have sleepless nights over Honk Kong though. 

The more we talk about our learnings or ‘huge fails’, the better we will be at our discipline and we shouldn’t be worried about talking openly about them to clients or prospective clients too. 

Some of the best pitch processes we’ve taken part in have been where stakeholders have said ‘Talk me through a campaign struggle or fail and how you bounced back’, and that’s music to our ears. It shows the brand has an understanding of what we do and promotes honesty in the partnership from day one. 

We even won a recent pitch off the back of being open and transparent with our campaign struggles and previous experiences! 

Step 2 - The truth about digital PR; what is normal?

Earlier this year Aira launched the State of Link Building Report 2020  which details the findings of a survey launched out to more than 350 professionals across the SEO industry. We wanted to get their views on where we’re at right now when it comes to building links. We then received insights on the results from over 15 industry experts.

One of the main questions that gave us insight to what normal looks like when it comes to link building results following a campaign launch was ‘Have you ever had a campaign that received the following number of links?”. Here are the results:

You can see the majority of digital PR campaigns launched secure between 1-19 links and there’s nothing viral about those numbers. 

It’s a similar story for Aira’s results. In 12 months, we launched 138 content driven marketing campaigns securing more than 5000 pieces of coverage featuring 2,381 followed links. That’s an average of 17 links per campaign (shout out to the steady performers here!) and whilst some campaigns did secure 100+s, others didn’t. Instead we may have only got a handful of high quality, relevant links but that’s okay because we knew they’d make a difference. 

Ultimately, the link numbers mean nothing if they’re not tied back to real traffic and keyword rankings though, so it’s really important to make that connection and show value. Here’s an example... 

We built 47 links across 5 campaigns with technical SEO and keyword research in a 12 month period and doubled sessions which no doubt has impacted revenue. 

No doubt, this has had a positive impact on revenue and the client even confirmed it by saying lovely things like:

“[Aira have] consistently provided great guidance on setting targets, communicating their progress and helping us grow as a company”.

Again, these results have come from 'steady-performing’ digital PR campaigns. 

Step 3 - The truth about digital PR; learning from steady performers

The team and I were in a session with Creative Content Consultant, Mark Johnstone, when he helped us create the ‘Content Evaluation Matrix’ to analyse the success of our work. Mark headed up the team at Distilled so has a lot of experience in our field and you can follow his new project Content Hubble here. 

We used this matrix to plot our campaigns and reveal trends to make us better at content-driven link building. One of the first trends we spotted was that in the top right hand corner in the ‘successful’ and ‘not complex’ box was that maps were really great at delivering results. Guess how many we launchd that year for one client? A huge 12 out of a total of 18 campaigns.

These trends allowed us to uncover secrets and continue to build on successes, but we were focusing on the wins, and only the wins at first which brings us back to this visual: 

What we should have spent time looking back over was the ‘not successful’ and ‘complex’ box to establish running themes that we needed to avoid in our strategies moving forward. If we had done that, we’d have saved ourselves from overcomplicating things - we got far too experimental with design and it cost us links. 

We also overlooked the central part of the matrix, which would have uncovered the recipe for success for our ‘steady-performing’ campaigns and would have allowed us to celebrate these more. 

When we eventually got round to taking our eyes off the huge wins and focused on the other sections of the matrix, we uncovered valuable trends such as that evergreen campaigns with multiple data points work well for consistent results. 

We took this forward into our strategy for one particular client, TravelSim, and you can see in this case study where we built around 40-50 links from two campaigns, that it paid off looking at the ‘steady performers' in the middle of this matrix. It helped us get a 95% increase in organic traffic and 63% increase in organic revenue. Did someone say you need a ‘viral’ number of links for these kind of results? 

You can find a template of the Content Evaluation Matrix’ here. 

Summary

Digital PR is hard. 

You’ll experience huge wins with campaigns that fly, huge fails with creative that doesn’t get any traction at all, and you may forget to celebrate the steady performers as part of your day-to-day work. 

It’s important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality and when times get challenging with your campaigns, or you're stuck in a rut, it’s important to remember the following: 

1. Take the ‘viral’ pressure off, start talking more about ‘steady performers’ and fails; 

2. Realise that ‘steady performers’ can consistently impact weighty SEO KPIs;

3. Use the Success Matrix to review campaigns and catch trends early.

Today, I hope I’ve shown you the full picture. 

You can find my MozCon 2020 deck here. 

 

I started my new role as a digital PR executive at Aira just one week before lockdown (great timing I know). When I got the call to say that I would be starting my new position at home, my immediate thought was ‘Uh oh’.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to settle in properly and that I wouldn’t feel like a proper team member - would I even know what on earth to do? But Slack and Zoom are wonderful things and whilst it hasn’t come without its challenges, I’ve learned a huge amount in this time.

Here are some of the challenges I’ve faced and key things I’ve learned in my first three months working remotely at Aira:

Organisation is key

Everyone who’s ever worked in an agency will know that organisation is key to staying on top of your to-do list. The main thing that I have learnt in my first three months at Aira is to plan my day, every day.

I thought I was an organised person until I started at Aira - I’d worked in an agency previously but never as a ‘proper employee’, and as an intern I always felt I got the non-essential jobs. Now that I’m a proper employee, I get all the good stuff, which means that I have to prioritise tasks on a daily basis to make sure everything is done on time.

Mapping out my day into hours really works and helps me focus, as I know I only have an hour or so to do that certain task.

Outreach in the morning

In some roles, you can tick off your to-do list in any order you like, but as a digital PR, a little more thought has to go into it. Outreaching in the morning may sound like an obvious thing to some, but to me it was a revelation.

At first, I was outreaching to journalists in the afternoons and even just before I was about to ‘go home’, and I wouldn’t see any replies until the morning.

Outreaching in the morning means you have all day to reply to journalists if they come back to you, instead of rushing out a response that might cost you an all-important link. Sending pitches out in the morning is not only good for to-do lists, but also for the journalist. Journalists want stories before their morning meetings - so it’s beneficial for both parties to get in there early.

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get links straight away

As soon as I sent my first pitch to a journalist, I expected links to just roll on in (even though I’ve had experience in link building and know this isn’t always how it works). I was slightly disappointed when links were coming in for everyone else, and not for me. I had to remember, it’s a hard time for everyone - journalists included, which can mean links are harder to come by. When I did get my first link though, it was even better because it meant I was definitely doing something right.

Lockdown challenges

While I feel I have adapted well to working from home in a new role, there have been some challenges. In a company of around 40, I have only met a handful of people in real life. Again, Slack and Zoom are my best friends, and I often forget that I am talking to people I have never met before.

The group chat fear is real - I didn’t realise it was a thing until I got it. Sending a message and notification to upwards of 40 people that I haven’t met? No thanks. This might sound like a minor thing, but when you start at a new company, you need to ask a lot of questions, so it was a challenge I needed to get over quickly.

I found that it was a fine balance of making sure I wasn’t sending too many messages and bombarding people, while making sure I got the help I needed for daily tasks. But the culture at Aira has meant that as time has gone on, I’ve been encouraged to ask more questions and ask for support when I need it. When it comes to the bigger, full-agency Slack chats, I do send the occasional GIF for somebody’s birthday - baby steps.

Upsides of working from home

Starting a new role anywhere can be daunting enough, let alone starting remotely. The main aspect of this that I’ve enjoyed has been getting to do things at my own pace. I was able to re-read my induction document multiple times so I knew what I was meant to be doing for each video call meeting and introduction. It also meant that I was able to let people know when I was ready, and I was able to fully digest the information before going onto another call. In the usual office setting, I might have felt pressured to be ready straight away.

I’m also still very much enjoying waking up 30 minutes before I start work - I’ve already forgotten what I normally do before work each morning pre-lockdown!

And…I have visited the office a grand total of 4 times - twice for my interviews, once on my first day for a couple of hours for my induction, and once to get my office chair. It’s my ‘fun’ go-to fact when I catch up with someone who asks about my new role.

Opportunity to grow

From the very start, it was clear that I would have the opportunity to progress in my career at Aira. With colleagues speaking at virtual conferences, internal training sessions and monthly reviews, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many opportunities there are to grow, both professionally and personally. It’s one of the many reasons I’m so grateful for my role at Aira and why I wanted to join in the first place.

Back to the office

The first three months have flown by and, surprisingly, I haven’t missed working in an office. I haven’t experienced the Aira office properly yet and so I’m looking forward to when we’re able to be there together. I’ll finally be able to meet my colleagues who I’ve been working with for the last three, nearly four months and most importantly, meet Paddy’s dog Rolo.

Any seasoned marketer, especially those working in paid media, will be familiar with the retargeting funnel model. 

You can re-engage those users who visited your website and get them to come back to sign up or purchase a product - which is extremely important in this age of the modern shopper, who will search around for the best deal.

From a PPC perspective this is great news! If you’re paying for those clicks, you want to be able to ensure that as many of those potential customers who have clicked and have accrued your business a cost, convert, one way or another.

However, is there more that we can do in other areas? 

A recent article published by WordStream shows that the average CTR for a Google Ads search campaign in 2020 is 4.62% (across all industries).

So hold on?! 

What happened to the other 96% (approximately) of users who searched for a keyword you targeted? Either they saw an ad from one of your Google Ads campaigns and didn’t click, or your ad didn’t show at all? 

96% of users who see one of your ads, potentially, never make it into the retargeting funnel. 

This is important because we know these users are in-market for the products or services you offer based on the fact that they are actively searching for them.

Enter custom intent audiences.

What are custom intent audiences?

Custom intent audiences allow you to re-engage the ones who got away, so to speak, and drive action, effectively retargeting ad viewers who never made it onto your website.

According to Google ‘85% of people who use Google Search are also on YouTube’, which is great news as YouTube is a primary network where you can reach this audience format.

Pretty legit right? I think the idea of this is amazing and offers a really qualified level of user as an audience to use in a display format campaign, minimising risk when it comes into these channels being perceived, ordinarily, as top of funnel type placements. 

Knowing that these users have already actively searched for your product or service means that you can be assured they are not a ‘cold’ or ‘upper funnel’ audience, so messaging and creative can focus around your product’s features/benefits and USPs with a direct CTA, such as ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Sign Up’.

The lookback window for when a user will have searched for a particular keyword is seven days, so you know that an ad should still be pretty relevant. 

Creating a custom intent audience

Creating these audiences is very straightforward. Simply create a new audience and select custom intent as your audience type.

From here, add at least 50 keywords to use within the custom intent audience. We recommend taking those that are your best converting/performing from your existing search campaigns.

We’ve been trialling these audiences primarily in the Discovery ads campaign format for our clients. 

The results

This is new territory for us in terms of an audience format, alongside Discovery ads being a very new campaign format at the time of writing this blog post.

That being said though, initial findings look good, so it certainly seems to prove that the model works.

For one of our B2C lead gen clients we can see that we’re getting conversions at on average a £7.18 lower CPA from this audience in Discovery than we are with generic non-brand keyword-based search campaigns.

In summary, custom intent audiences seem like a great way to add some really cost-efficient, incremental conversion volume. After all, reaching users that we know have a reasonable degree of intent outside of search also means less competition. 

I think that we can certainly expect this to become a key part of any multi-channel paid media strategy as we move forward.