• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

What Say The Experts

Product recommendations by people in the know!

  • Creative
    • Video Editing
  • Ecommerce
  • Marketing + Sales
    • Email Marketing
    • Search Engine Marketing
    • Social Media Marketing
    • CRM
  • Office
    • Remote Work
  • Websites
    • Web Design + Development
    • WordPress
  • About
  • Contact

Archives for July 2020

How to Improve Email Deliverability Rates: Expert Advice + Strategies

by Chris Herbert | Last Updated May 25, 2021

How to Improve Email Deliverability Rates

Much is made of email marketing’s reputation for being a marketing channel that can deliver BIG in terms of ROI, but there’s one thing that can quickly turn dollars into despair. Oh you know we’re talking about email deliverability. If your emails aren’t landing in the inbox they’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot! Poor deliverability means even though you’re investing time and money, a significant proportion of your subscribers don’t hear a peep from you, most likely feeling a little abandoned, and that isn’t any way to nurture a relationship!

But it’s not all doom and gloom. If your email deliverability rates are low, don’t throw the towel in just yet. There ARE lots of things you can do to remedy this. A remarkable number of things that are under your control in fact. And to help take you on that journey from email doldrums to inbox bliss, we spoke to 24 experts who have decades of combined experience in this area, to get their thoughts on the steps you need to take to increase email deliverability.

Now it’s up to you. We’ve sought out the world-class advice for you, now you need to put it into practice. So scroll down the page and start learning about the changes you need to make to your email marketing program to get more of your emails hitting the target.

If you’ve used any of the email deliverability tips shared in this article, we’d love to hear about the results you achieved in the comments section!

Strategies to Improve Deliverability

How to Increase Email Deliverability in 2021: 24 Experts Weigh In

“Which strategy will improve my email deliverability?” is probably a thought you have quite often if you run an email marketing program, and below you’ll find a top-level overview of all of the strategies that were shared in the making of this post. There’s no push-button secret shortcut that will improve your email deliverability rates without any effort, but if you implement the advice shared by these experts, you’ll see gains in time.

  1. Reengage or Disengage
  2. Implement Real-Time Email Verification on All Subscription Forms
  3. Seedlist Testing – Why It Is Important
  4. Mind Your Canaries: Know Your Early Warning Signs and How to Monitor Them
  5. Differentiate Your Message Types By Sending IP and From Address
  6. Implement BIMI
  7. Know What the Best Practices Say
  8. Email Authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
  9. Deliverability Doesn’t Care About Your Business Model
  10. Opt-Down and Reduce Cadence to Users As They Age
  11. Send LESS Email
  12. Improve Engagement
  13. Setting Clear Expectations for New Subscribers
  14. Build a Welcome Series
  15. Email List Management is Key
  16. Monitor Both Your Campaigns and Your Reputation
  17. Inboxing – Constantly Warm Up Your Sending Domain and IP Address
  18. Proper Data Management
  19. 3 Incorrect Beliefs that Could Seriously Damage Your Email Deliverability
  20. Build the Trust You Need to Deliver an Email
  21. Avoid Big List Syndrome
  22. DO NOT BUY EMAIL LISTS!
  23. Segment Your Email List
  24. Be Ethical and Protect Your Inbox Reputation

Other Articles You May Find Useful:

  • Best Email Marketing Software for Small Business? 104 Pros Vote
  • How to Increase Your Email Open Rate: 42 Pros Offer Expert Advice
  • Best Email Marketing Books: What Do The Pros Recommend You Read?
  • How to Build an Email List: 75 Experts Share Their Secrets
  • All Email Marketing Resources

What the Experts Said: Email Deliverability Tips Explained

This section is where we’re hiding all the game-changing advice, where our experts explain their tips in greater detail for you. There’s so much value in what they’ve shared. I learned tons about email deliverability by reading through each tip, and I’m 100% sure you will too!

If there’s one tip that catches your eye, you can skip right to it by using the handy filters below.

{"filter_mode":"masonry"}
  • All
  • Do Not Buy Email Lists!
  • Real-Time Email Verification
  • Improve Engagement
  • Mind Your Canaries
  • Segment Your Email List
  • Send LESS Email
  • Opt-Down/Reduce Cadence
  • Data Management
  • Inboxing
  • Change Sending IP and From Address
  • Set Clear Expectations
  • Protect Inbox Reputation
  • Reengage or Disengage
  • Build Trust
  • Big List Syndrome
  • BIMI
  • Your Business Model is Irrelevant
  • Seedlist Testing
  • Monitor Campaigns + Reputation
  • List Management
  • 3 Incorrect Beliefs
  • Know the Best Practices
  • Build Welcome Series
  • SPF + DKIM + DMARC

Anthony Mitchell

Director of Deliverability at InboxSys, formally known as Mailmike. I’ve been working in the domain of Email Deliverability for over a decade now, which in the past has included ESPs such as emailvision (now Actito/Smartfocus), eCircle (now Mapp), and Adobe. I strive for the highest standards in Email Deliverability for our customers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wizanthonymitchell/

  • Seedlist Testing – Why It Is Important

    – “An E-Mail seed is an email address created with analytical purpose only. Basically, the test email addresses you use for split A/B testing can be considered E-Mail seeds. You send an E-Mail to your test-address, to see if the subjectline looks good, if the content is okay and if and why the message was delivered to the E-Mail inbox, or not. Since manual A/B testing does not scale well, it’s recommended to use seedlist tools.

    A Seedlist is a list with multiple seeds. Most typically, a seedlist contains various ISP seeds from various commercial ISPs plus a trigger seed, usually an address ending with something like “@app.inboxeverytime.com”.

    The single trigger seed is used to receive and analyse content, authentication and mail headers.
    The various ISP seeds are used to check to which folder (Inbox, Junk, etc.) this specific message and this specific address at this specific ISP was delivered. Typically ISP seeds contains email addresses from major international ISPs such as Gmail, Outlook & Verizon Media (Yahoo & AOL) plus other providers that are relevant to the region that is being targeted in your email marketing campaign.

    ISP seeds have quite similar characteristics to spamtraps: By default, ISP seeds addresses do not open or click in any email. A good further read on how to exclude seed-generated clicks from your campaign analytics can be found under this link.

    How Does It Work?

    There are two kinds of purposes for seedlist tests:

    • Testing to prevent issues. This is done by analysing the message content, authentication and header and by observing trends in inbox placement before a campaign is sent out.
    • Testing to detect, reproduce and solve existing issues, usually done during or after the sending of a campaign.

    The trigger seed helps to collate the information we have about a campaign and the entire seed list collectively. Once your email marketing campaign is setup and ready to be pushed live:

    • Send a test first to the entire seed list.
    • Sit back, and watch the results come in.
    • Analyse the seed list results, for technical checks and Inbox placement rates.

    During this process the trigger seed does most of the leg work, so to speak. The accumulated report allows for a full analysis of the whole email already in a matter of seconds. The reference seed checks the mail headers to ensure all is well with domain authentication, domain alignment and checks your body content, IP Address reputation and identifies what can be improved. That’s what you essentially really want to know before sending the campaign.

    Now we’ve got that out of the way. The other, various seed addresses (major ISPs) have no other purpose but to show you where your email has landed, which is only moderately interesting for senders with organically grown data.

    Inbox Placement
    Click to Enlarge

    What are the Advantages?

    Email marketing changes quickly, ISPs update their policies often, to change with new Industry Standards. It’s a great way to test what works! Any insight prior to going live can be advantageous, such as:

    • Domain configuration / E-Mail authentication
    • Mailserver setup
    • IP-warmup metrics and evolvement
    • Content quality
    • Which mail-stream (i.e. marketing emails, transactional) is performing better
    • Which ISP you face delivery challenges to and check for folder placement
    • IP Address & domain reputation: Blocklists and spamfilters

    And with the right interface, it saves you a lot of time testing.

    Known Challenges

    Certain providers look closely at user engagement on an email account level. A full explanation would be sufficient content for another blog. Luckily, I have already written a blog about this subject in the past. When ISPs decide their actions on a per mailbox level, results for individual mailboxes are likely not to match your seedlist tesing ISP results. There is no (serious) way to implement those user based engagement metrics in a seedlist test. Instead, it’s better to look at the data from a bird’s eye perspective by observing trends. It’s neither scalable, nor necessary to see every detail. If many users show negative engagement metrics on a user-level, you are very likely to see the accumulated effect of that in your clean, unengaged ISP seeds. That way, it is possible to see what providers think of the overall setup and where you deliver by default.

    Excessive testing to ISP seeds can also be damaging to your sender reputation, especially when you target seedlists with hundreds of seeds for every ISP worldwide. This is due to the fact that seeds do not engage with your email, it can be perceived you are sending to a large, inactive list.

    Tip 1 – Test Before

    Prevention can save your life, even if every test appears to be successful. It could, for example, happen, that a DNS administrator accidentally removes, let’s say, a DKIM record. This would be a once in a lifetime incident that could seriously damage the result of your campaign, or even your whole reputation. Through persistent testing any issue could be tackled before any damage can be done.

    When issues are flagged, it’s a good idea to preventively fix them, even when they don’t appear to cause problems (aka. Junk folder delivery) at this very moment. The decision made by ISPs to put an E-Mail in the inbox or not is based on more than one factor. If the mentioned issue does not accumulate to problems today, it may accumulate to problems tomorrow.

    Tip 2 – Test During & After

    When you launch your campaign, always include a seed list and try to distribute the seeds evenly through your list. When sending to a large list of unengaged contacts, the result may worsen over time. This is where ISP seeds have the most relevancy. ISP seeds are a great way to observe trends within a campaign and at a global level. Important is again, to respond to each and every indicator before it can become a problem.

    Tip 3 – Custom Seeds

    To prevent sender reputation loss by excessive testing, it’s always a good idea to limit the seeds in your seedlist to the ISPs that are important to your marketing strategy.

    It’s an obligatory exercise to find out which seeds are important to your email marketing strategy. This information can be found by simply analysing your database to see the domain distribution of your database. Your seedlist should reflect the ISPs and ratios used. This way, the campaign volume covers up for the negative effects of testing.

    If you have the option to use your own E-mail addresses in an automated seeding process, it even becomes possible to fake a certain user engagement per mailbox for analytical purposes. Note, however, that faking things is expensive and not “smart” per se.

    Tip 4 – Automate!

    A manual split A/B test is a lot of work. Automated seedlist tools help a lot, but you still need to spend time before and after each and every campaign to look at a test result. With an API for seedlist testing, it’s possible to automate the full, round process. Before sending a campaign, the seedlist is requested, mails are sent out, the result is collected and – if everything is alright – the campaign is being sent. The other way ’round, campaigns can be blocked from being sent in case of critical issues and alerts can be used to inform the responsible person.

    Conclusion

    If you really want to measure the success of your campaign(s), send one seed list test before and one test during each campaign. Keep it simple, automate and respond to flags in order to improve ROI for your email marketing campaigns.

    See-d you later.”

Vytis Marčiulionis

After a short period in web hosting support and abuse detection at the start of my career, now I provide daily assistance to email marketers that face email deliverability issues. Currently I am part of a team that is looking after approximately 10,000,000,000 emails sent on a monthly basis.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vytis-mar%C4%8Diulionis-b452415b/

  • Know What the Best Practices Say

    – “Know the best practices! When you know what the best practices are, you will be better placed to realize where you may have stepped out of line and what exactly you can fix to earn the favour of mailbox providers. And there is always something to fix, mainly because the email industry is very fluid and keeps changing constantly.

    Here is where I recommend to start.”

    • https://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/MarketingFAQs
    • https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/document/M3AAWG_Senders_BCP_Ver3-2015-02.pdf
    • https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/m3aawg-sendingdomains10102019nk-2.pdf
    • https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/policies.aspx
    • https://download.microsoft.com/download/e/3/3/e3397e7c-17a6-497d-9693-78f80be272fb/enhance_deliver.pdf
    • https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en
    • https://postmaster.verizonmedia.com/
    • https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137

Gene Gusman

Gene Gusman is Director of Deliverability Operations, North America for Cheetah Digital. He is a technologist with over twenty years of experience in marketing and publishing technology. He leads the optimization efforts of the messaging infrastructure for deliverability while helping clients to get their messages to the inboxes of their customers.
http://www.cheetahdigital.com

  • Reengage or Disengage

    – “These days, one of the primary factors influencing email inbox placement is engagement. Even if you are doing all the right things in terms of permission, authentication, frequency and content, if your subscribers are not opening, clicking, responding, or otherwise engaging with your emails, then deliverability will suffer.

    Sometimes people change their interests, change their minds, or simply get tired of the same thing. If that is happening with your email campaign, get their attention and find out what they do want. When someone has not interacted with any of your messages in a while, it’s time to change the conversation.

    Maybe they are just not responding to the current subject matter, so change the email subject line and pre-header to include a call to action. The subject line and pre-header are your only line of communication until they open the email. And, since they have not been interacting, lower the frequency of sending.

    Don’t wait until a subscriber has not engaged for six months before changing your message. It is not uncommon for an audience to open and click less frequently with time. When you see this happening, try offering an incentive or some new and special content to rekindle interest in the program.

    Consider creating a segment of your email list that was previously active, but not within the past 3 to 6 months (the time period could vary with your program). Send these subscribers a different message before they lose interest entirely. If they have not engaged within the past 6 to 12 months (depending upon your program), they now require a concerted reengagement effort and should be placed in a segment outside of the primary mailing list. If they still do not interact after some weeks (once again, the period could vary with your program), you should send a request to reconfirm their permission. If one or two of these are unsuccessful the address should be deactivated.

    A list with too many inactive email addresses can damage your sender reputation and negatively impact email deliverability. As the mailbox provider focus on engagement has increased, they may also look at the percentage of the addresses that are engaged as a factor in determining inbox placement. It is therefore important to incorporate an activity-based segmentation strategy so that it is integrated rather than an occasional task. Review your program to help determine the appropriate time periods for each segment. Email addresses that have passed through the phases of decreasing activity, have been given a chance to re-confirm their permission and have failed to do so should be removed from your list. DISENGAGE!”

Scot Berggren

Email Marketing and Deliverability expert with several years of in-depth experience. Passionate about solving deliverability problems for senders, providing detailed guidance on best practices and potential factors affecting reputation.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotberggren

  • Segment Your Email List

    – “While there may be times sending to an entire list is warranted (updated Privacy Policy), you’ll likely see better email deliverability results when your email is segmented.

    There are several ways in which a sender can segment for campaigns, but here are a few.

    First, if you are seeing a drop in performance due to fewer emails delivered to the inbox, try sending to just those on your list that have engaged (opened/clicked) recently to help improve the IP/domain reputation. As you begin seeing an improvement, slowly expand the reach until you find your sweet spot. Some of the major ISPs pay close attention to who is engaging with your email to determine whether it gets delivered to the inbox or junk folder.

    Second, if you have a preference center be sure you are following the choices recipients checked. Some on your list may prefer to receive emails once a week versus daily or a digest of emails at a specified time. If your emails include multiple categories, such as different women’s and men’s items, only send to the subscribers’ preference. This will not only limit recipient complaints, but also help with subscriber fatigue. Honoring what your subscribers signed up for and allowing them to update their preferences goes a long way to building trust.

    Other ways to segment are by purchase history and amount spent. For those who have made a recent purchase, look at following up with complementary items or be proactive about when their item(s) may be running out and it’s time to reorder. Regarding amount spent, is there a way to treat your top customers differently with non-monetary invites or events versus sending a discount offer to those who haven’t bought in some time?

    One thing to think about is be sure to not over segment or you might find your email lists become too small and aren’t useful anymore.”

André Goermer

Recognized as a resourceful and intuitive leader, I offer over 15 years of diversified experience in the advancement of professional services programs within the digital industry. I have been leveraged as a trusted business partner capable of positioning clients for growth and profitability through the management of targeted digital strategies.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andregoermer/

  • Email Authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

    – “Internet Service Providers (Microsoft, Verizon, Gmail & more) across the globe have the goal to protect their recipients/customers from Spam and mostly from Phishing attacks. Brands have the objective to land with their marketing campaigns in the recipient’s inbox. One of many methods to distinguish between an email marketing campaign from a brand and a phishing email is the verification of the sender.

    SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three acronyms with which email marketers will have to get more familiar in order to prevent email phishers from using a brand to spam or domain spoof, as well as being informed about phishing attempts through alert notifications.

    Instead of drowning in jargon, let’s visit an analogy to explain the concepts of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The SPF record is a “document” that contains the name of the only authorized “virtual postman” – let’s call him Pat – who is in charge of delivering an email marketing campaign to the recipient. If done this way, the recipient will accept the message without batting an eye.

    Sometimes Pat is sick at home and has to delegate the message delivery to his colleague, Jess. Most recipients will be suspicious of Jess, as they don’t know her. In this case, a forwarded email will lose the SPF features of the initial sender. However, with the help of the DKIM, Jess will also be able to deliver the message, because it will be properly signed by the original sender.

    The DMARC dog, thanks to his good sense of smell, knows if the postman and his mail are fraudulent. He will start barking in order to alert the recipient about the upcoming scam danger. However, this smart DMARC dog can be also trained to let the postman pass through safely or, on the flipside, be trained to eat his mail.

    This trio of SPF, DKIM and DMARC has now become a global standard, which means that your message can be properly delivered into the highly coveted email inbox. Almost all Internet Service Providers accept this type of safety measure.

    1. SPF = Sender Policy Framework

    When the recipient’s server receives the email, it compares the sender’s IP Address and the IP Address in the DNS and, if both are the same, it accepts the message and delivers it to the inbox. Otherwise, it returns a message by stating “Error 550 – Message rejected because SPF check failed” or delivers the message to the junk folder.

    2. DKIM = DomainKeys Identified Mail

    DKIM is usually a 1024- or 2048-bit encrypted key that must be coupled with the sender domain, used to fight email spoofing. Upon receiving the email from the recipient’s server, it verifies whether the key, published in the email header, belongs to the one related to the sender domain. If not, they assume that the email has been intercepted by third parties and modified.

    As for the SPF, DKIM implementation requires publication in the DNS area with the public key and signature visible in the message header.

    To reiterate, the possible results of the record check can be:

    • Pass: the signature received matches with the public key
    • Fail: the signature received is not related to the public key of the sending domain, which means that the message has been modified somehow.

    Further possible errors could be Softfail, Neutral, None, Permerrorand Temperror. Obviously, only the Pass status is to be considered as a record correctly entered.

    3. DMARC = Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance

    By publishing a DNS record, you will receive an alert from the Internet Service Provider who does support DMARC whenever a domain that is not properly configured (doesn’t pass the SPF and DKIM validation) is used as sender. This way you know when, who, and how, your identity is used on the web.

    In terms of Email authentication, using SPF, DKIM and DMARC is the best response to email spoofing.”

Josh Nason

Josh has been in the email space for more than 10 years and has worked for email service providers, agencies, and been a client himself.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshnason/

  • Avoid Big List Syndrome

    – “Great email deliverability always starts with sending emails to those who opted in/want to receive those emails, but another common misfire is what I call “big list syndrome” — when marketing likes to tout their email list size.

    The problem? A healthy chunk of those big lists likely haven’t engaged in quite some time, resulting in lower than expected inbox placement rates due to low engagement levels.

    We always recommend cutting off email recipients that haven’t opened in more than two years and pushing them to a re-engagement campaign. From there, senders can likely cut down even more depending on what the stats tell them (ex. how soon someone unsubscribed following signup).

    By cutting down on inactive recipients, senders can get a more realistic idea of their active email list and why and when recipients are dropping off. That also can become beneficial following the cleanup as you can get a better sense of how your active users are responding to your email campaigns, especially if open percentage is a key metric.

    Keeping continually tight email marketing lists is an easy way for senders to increase engagement and cut out the fat.”

Varun Srinivas

I have over 8 years of experience in email deliverability and have worked with many ESPs and senders of all shapes and size. I enjoy solving deliverability challenges and help marketers send better emails. In my current role as a Director of Email Deliverability and Compliance for Maropost, I provide our senders(customers) consultation, strategic deliverability guidance and actionable insights to achieve higher levels of deliverability.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/srinivasvarun/

  • Setting Clear Expectations for New Subscribers

    – “The quickest way for an angry & impulsive subscriber to stop receiving emails is to open and click the “Mark as spam” button. This often happens if it is unclear to your subscribers what they are signing up for and when they’ll receive your emails. The subscriber acquisition process is not just about adding another address to ‘the list’, it is about setting expectations up front about the email program and the value it provides.

    Here are some best practices, to establish trust and retain subscribers (+ in turn improve email deliverability):

    • Use the subscribe landing page to explain email programs to subscribers.
    • Outline objectives and subsequent incentives to the subscriber.
    • Always be clear about mailing frequencies, be it once a week, twice or even daily.
    • Mention the sender name and from email address that will be used.
    • Share sample content to the subscribers from the get-go. This will prepare them as to what to expect.
    • Always be ‘TRANSPARENT’ about your business practices.

    Morning Brew’s welcome email, confirming your subscription and telling subscribers that they can expect to receive news Monday to Saturday is a perfect example ensuring that the subscribers know what to expect.

    New subscriber Expectation

    Setting clear expectations at the beginning of the sign-up process reduces the risk of spam complaints or unsubscribes, thereby helping build trust with your subscribers.”

Karen Balle

Karen has been in email for over 20 years. She has been heavily involved in the evolution of email and deliverability. Her current focuses are deciphering the complexities of deliverability and helping to keep email accessible to companies and non-profit organizations of all sizes.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-balle-9294701/

  • Mind Your Canaries: Know Your Early Warning Signs and How to Monitor Them

    – “Reputation is a function of engagement over time. It’s obvious when you start seeing blocks that there is a reputation problem but there are warning signs, or canaries, before blocks ever happen. Knowing what your canaries are can help you avoid blocks or minimize the impact of blocks when they do happen.

    First, track any major changes to your email program in a spreadsheet or other easily searchable database. Since reputation is a function over time, blocking rarely happens immediately. It’s more likely that you’ll start seeing changes 2 weeks to 2 months later. Major changes include, but are not limited to, adding new list sources, rebranding, changing your mailing patterns or significant changes to content. When you start seeing problems, refer to this list to see which changes could be the root cause. Whenever possible, when you make a significant change, create a corresponding roll-back plan or a plan to alter how you’re using the data to make it easier to reverse potential reputation damage.

    The easiest and perhaps best way for an experienced email deliverability consultant to monitor your canaries is to monitor your block bounces. If you don’t have access to your blocks and a person who is knowledgeable about their meaning, you should use other signals like extending sending times or blocks at mailbox providers who are more prone to block more quickly instead. It’s also important to look at trends for your engagement metrics for your top 5-10 mailbox providers over the last three months. A slow decline in open and click rates, or an increase in unsub and complaint rates are other early warning signs. Not all ESPs provide per-domain reporting, so you may need to create multiple segmented sends or implement creative use of A/B testing to get per-domain reporting.

    If you’re sending B2C email, monitoring send times; getting reporting for non-global domains like Comcast, Cox, and RoadRunner; and monitoring engagement over time by domain for your top five to ten domains are going to be your biggest canaries.

    Keep an especially close eye on delivery times to Verizon Media Group (AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon). They have a series of traffic shaping temporary rejections that often preface a block. If mail to VMG is exceeding four to eight hours, it’s time to start rolling back some of your more recent changes. These traffic shaping temporary rejections are often your earliest warning sign. Microsoft also uses traffic shaping, but it’s less common that VMG.

    The global mail providers – Gmail, Microsoft (outlook.com and hotmail.com), and Yahoo – are the biggest portion of most senders’ lists. Oftentimes, the early warnings are blocks happening at non-global domains like Comcast, Cox, and RoadRunner, and will start experiencing problems before the big three. Some ESPs allow you to pull reports based on domain. If your ESP doesn’t, you can segregate each send into two or more parts to separate the big three from your remaining domains. While engagement metrics won’t be identical, they should be similar across all parts and should be consistent over time.

    Trends across multiple months are also important to keep track of for the big three. Gmail gives much less warning than other mailbox providers and is harder to resolve. Any immediate drop in open rates of more than 1% is cause for concern. Strive to maintain open rates above 12% for the big three. You also want to monitor open, click, unsub, and complaint rates over time. Optimally, open and click rates remain above 15% and 4% respectively, while complaints and unsub rates stay under 0.08% and 0.1% respectively. When you detect a worsening of engagement metrics, refer to your recent changes document. Find the change(s) that happened before your decline and start working to roll back that change or make adjustments to how you’re handling that data.

    Note, Gmail does not send feedback loops, or complaints, unless a send has a very high complaint rate. Other mailbox providers send copies of most complaints to your ESP, which allows your ESP to suppress those subscribers and provide you with a complaint rate. Complaints must be under 0.08% to stay in the safe zone.

    If you’re sending B2B email, there’s less warning before blocking, but there are two service providers that serve as early warnings – Mimecast and Barracuda. If these bounces are not available through your ESP’s reporting, you can use an MX lookup service like MXToolbox, xnnd.com, or Wise Tools – https://tools.wordtothewise.com/dns. Input the domain of the blocked email addresses (the part after the @) into the MX lookup box and submit the query. Look to see if the result includes barracudanetworks.com or mimecast.com.”

    MXToolbox
    MXToolbox

    xnnd.com
    xnnd.com

    WiseTools
    WiseTools

    Sample Barracuda Results
    Sample Barracuda Results

Przemysław Kuciel

Email deliverability is more than just a job for me - it is my passion. I am fortunate enough to love what I do - helping businesses make it through the competitive email world.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkuciel/

  • Build the Trust You Need to Deliver an Email

    – “Imagine that you are hosting a huge party, and the whole world is invited. Crazy, huh? Well that’s how it is to be an email provider.

    Despite having security doing a great job by checking IDs (in this case SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) they can’t be sure that all guests will behave properly.

    Finally, after a mandatory verification process they let you pass.

    The lights hit your eyes, and in this very moment you acknowledge that you’ve gained a huge amount of trust.

    Now, it is up to you. Will you start to build the trust you need to stay in the world-wide email party, or will you waste your opportunity and get kicked out for misbehaving (getting blocked). It is hard to get back into this splendid email party after getting kicked out – the hosts do not often give second chances.

    But when you decide to be your best self in there, a huge world of opportunity opens. You are trusted. You are allowed to the special room out there, reserved just for trusted people – the Inbox.”

Zack Aab

Zack Aab is the Senior Deliverability Strategist at Trendline Interactive. His responsibilities include deliverability audits and consulting for enterprise clients and ESPs, as well as data privacy and legal compliance implementation.
https://www.trendlineinteractive.com

  • Opt-Down and Reduce Cadence to Users As They Age

    – “Unless a user is very active, the longer it’s been since they opted in, the greater probability that they are sending negative signals to their mailbox provider.

    Offer an “opt-down” to re-engage and even if they don’t request the opt-down steadily reduce the frequency that they receive messages.

    This allows them to convert if they become interested later while reducing the frequency and therefore impact of the negative signals they are sending to their provider, as well as reducing the likelihood they get sick of you and unsubscribe or complain.”

Kevin Hopkinson

Kevin has a deep history with email marketing and deliverability; particularly in the political action theatre, having raised more than $10 million in online donations for clients. He has more than 12 years of experience in professional delivery services and getting email to the inbox.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsprofile/

  • Proper Data Management

    – “I’d estimate that about half of all email deliverability conversations I’ve ever had, in some way or another, morph into a conversation about data management. It’s the elephant in the room that many people don’t understand is hurting them the most, and that’s what I will gently touch on here.

    Always make sure you have a program setup that naturally churns emails out of your production for good after X number of sends/days with no engagement. Just look at it as a cost of doing business if you purchased the email list, because it’s not necessarily those folks who are buying and sending emails that are the problem like most will allude. It’s all of those senders who are ignorant to the fact that delivering the same email into perpetuity is not a good marketing strategy.

    With that said, one of the worst data management strategies out there is when email marketers demand email quotas in their list counts. Now that is a practice that became obsolete the exact same day it was thought up. The end result is always years of sending to emails that will never engage; emails that are doing more harm than good by staying on the list. Keeping unengaged users on an email list for years on end is like holding up a big sign that says to the filters “I don’t care!”. Folks implementing strategies like that should do a list hygiene scrub and take a gander at their Recycled trap metric.

    That said, email providers and filters are incredibly sophisticated nowadays; and they are particularly good at how they are able to track sender reputation. The data you’re pushing through their systems tells them everything they need to know about you as a sender. In fact, their AI probably has ways to match data points that we can’t even think of. They are able to bucket every single email attempt at their users, which also happen to be their most important asset. Without the email user, ISPs cannot harvest engagement data and present them relevant advertisements. Their mission is clear – to protect those users at all costs. So please manage your data accordingly.”

Siva Devaki

Siva Devaki is the co-founder of MassMailer. Siva’s background in CRM and his passion for software products led him to build MassMailer. MassMailer is now a popular native email app for Salesforce CRM. Originally from India, Siva lived in California for 19 years before moving to Hawaii two years ago.
http://massmailer.io

  • Inboxing – Constantly Warm Up Your Sending Domain and IP Address

    – “There could be hundreds of reasons why your e-mails are going to spam, and most aren’t your fault. If your domain reputation or IP Address reputation is poor, your emails will go into the spam folder without any doubt. Inboxing is a technique that fixes that by creating positive activity from your domain / sending IP, raising your e-mail reputation significantly. The process is done entirely in the background. You will see a significant difference that actual e-mails will start getting delivered and opened.

    You can use your DNS provider and the email service provider. It is always easy to start with a fresh new domain in case your existing domain already has a bad reputation even though it is possible to repair your current domain provided it is repairable. Sometimes you can contact the respective organizations that have listed your domain in the blacklists and provide valid reasons to remove your domain from the blacklists. Once it has been removed from the blacklists, you can start repairing using the Inboxing service. If it is completely not possible to get the domain out of blacklists, then it is advisable to start fresh by using a new domain.

    The Inboxing process is quite simple to understand. In the background, the regular emails are sent in volume to the seeded list worldwide to various ISPs from your domain and the IP address. The positive engagement is created between the sender and the seeded email list inboxes daily and makes sure no emails are in the spam folder. This ensures a 100% delivery rate and a higher open and response rate.

    The following are the steps to get started:

    • Identify a service provider for Inboxing (I’m biased, but I’d try massmailer.io)
    • Go with your existing domain if it is not blacklisted or purchase a new domain.
      • If your existing domain is blacklisted, contact the respective organizations to remove the domain from the blacklists.
      • If you are purchasing a new domain, you can either choose to host it using any hosting provider or check with your Inboxing service provider if they can host it for you.
    • Create an email inbox that will be used as the sender for Inboxing. You need to provide this to the Inboxing service provider.
    • If you have an email service provider that you are using to send emails, find out the SMTP login details for the same and provide it to your Inboxing service provider.
    • If you already have a dedicated IP address, which you want to warm-up, that will work as well or your Inboxing service provider can also assign a dedicated IP address to send the emails.
    • You will make any changes necessary to your DNS settings based on the suggestions made by the Inboxing service provider.
    • Once the settings are made, your Inboxing service provider will start the warm-up process of the domain and the IP address.
    • It will take 1-2 weeks to warm-up a domain and the IP address after which you should be able to send emails.
    • Inboxing is a continuous warm-up of your domain and the IP address that happens in parallel to your regular email sending.
    • You will be able to see an improvement in the delivery rate, open rate, and response rate due to the Inboxing process.

    The Inboxing technique is simple yet powerful to improve your email deliverability rate.”

Thibault Sarlat

Email deliverability Consultant by day, teacher and trainer by the evening, Spam Fighter at night. Sharing is caring.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thibaultsarlat/

  • 3 Incorrect Beliefs that Could Seriously Damage Your Email Deliverability

    – “I can remember it like it was yesterday. My mentor explaining to me that email deliverability is the ability for an email message to get to its intended target without any modification.

    Simply put, a message is either delivered (be it to the spam folder), or it is bounced. Sending and delivering one personal email message to Aunt Lily is a piece of cake. Sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of bulk messages in a matter of minutes to the same ISPs is another story. Why ? Because ISPs fight Spam. That is a good thing. You just don’t want your campaigns to fall victim of that raging war. So, since the other experts are putting forward the do’s, I’ll take the don’ts.

    There are many rules and best practices that experienced professionals in the email marketing industry will tell you to follow. Blogs are filled with top ten lists of what you should do. Hell, I even wrote some myself, and I always enjoy reading new ones. Lots of these lists are very good, useful and properly rooted in the realities of our field.

    Part of my consulting experience has shown me that senders don’t always follow what you advise them to do, even if they know perfectly that it is for their own good. Many times, I’ve met senders that need to be told what the bad moves are to realize the risks they are taking. That is why I have chosen to tell you which ways of thinking or which moves will surely make your program fail.

    No clicks

    Remember that an email marketing program starts when you gather your future recipients’ emails and ends up with all the form that churn can take (unsubscription, spam complaint, hard bounce, long term disengagement, etc.).

    In between is a daily battle to make your messages relevant, interesting, and expected. The right message, to the right person, at the right time and on the right channel. Easy to say, right?

    So here is a list of the 3 wrong beliefs that could seriously sour your email marketing programs:

    1 – The bigger (the DB), the better

    A bigger database

    Size doesn’t matter. The biggest ears don’t make you the best listener. Have you ever tried to put a cost on managing useless, unengaged contacts? Start by not subscribing them. Most of the time, the bigger the DB, the more bitter the results.

    You must make the effort to ensure that the people who are entering your email marketing programs are doing so Freely, Easily and Willingly. Call it F.E.W. if it helps. Make sure that each of these adverbs apply. Do not be satisfied with 2 out of 3.

    That means not only do you have to enlighten your soon to be subscribers at the point of registration, but to make a solemn promise, and live by your word. These are the happy F.E.W. after all. No sneaky wording, no opt out, no double negation, no funky business here. See it as wedding vows. It may not last your whole life, but you must live by the promise you made for as long as the relationship lasts. So, make it simple, and make it true.

    Technically, this means that Double Opt In is your best friend here because nothing can show willingness and prove freedom of choice more than the 2 clicks needed. While you are at it, if Captcha is not mandatory, it is highly recommended. It’s the best defence against unwanted and dangerous contacts entering your database.

    Half empty glass people will tell you that doing so you will lose many contacts compared to Simple Opt In. Of course. So what? Good riddance! How much do you think unengaged email addresses are worth?

    Be smart and get rid of all subscribers that come from the same IP Address, the same day. It doesn’t make sense unless they are working at the same company and are sharing the same infrastructures. Don’t rush into sending them the first lot of marketing content. There are so many automated checks that can be done almost in real time. Not caring and acting on that can have you blacklisted in a blink of an eye. Preventing is preferable to curing.

    2 – The more I send, the more I earn

    The more I send, the more I earn

    Wrong! It’s not a linear relationship at all. Long gone are the golden days of mass email marketing when all messages landed (at that time no one really cared where they landed anyway). Attention is scarce. Engagement is king. ISPs are masters of their own domains. Their wishes have become unwritten laws. I mean you are knocking on their doors. They are defending their castle and they make it their mission to keep their users and customers happy with the filtering they provide. How can you please the ISPs then? Segmentation.

    Even daily deal sites should have some sort of segmentation to avoid overusing the trust they were given. For retailers, it’s even more important that they cherish and cuddle up to their most engaged contacts for as long as it lasts.

    If your new contacts are not all Double Opt In (they rarely are), do not assume that freshly gathered contacts are necessarily engaged ones. Have them all pass through a nicely built welcome/activation program. Not just one email. A real sequence works better because not everything can be said in one message. Do not bombard them right away with your marketing content. Be patient and subtle and earn their trust right from the start. The most precious gift you can give them is to care for who they are and what they want.

    If you are not sure, ask. The best welcome programs I’ve encountered were set up like a small poll.

    Today, major ESPs can gather as much data as you can imagine. They include a DMP and Engagement Data Platform. So feed the beast, make it gather valuable information and you will for sure end up with actionable insights.

    ESPs save all click and open related information. So, there is no good reason to not include engagement criteria in your most commonly addressed segment. Not caring to define what is an « engaged » contact in your business could easily be your downfall. It’s the number one rule for the ISPs: Target Active Contacts (T.A.C.). Ignore it at your own risk, but do not complain when your inbox delivery rates drop or even your open rates plummet to the ground.

    For the less engaged, or the disengaged contacts, use automated reactivation programs. They will be the best investment of your time at that point in the customer lifecycle. Their indifference to your messages is a sign that they lost interest at one time or that you lost focus on their expectations, or both. The sooner you realize it and act on it, the better. Trying to rekindle the flame is not easy though. Don’t wait too long. If they are well thought out and built, no one should not open or click any of your messages for more than a few weeks.

    3 – Keep them forever

    keep hold of your email subscribers

    When people are no longer interested in your content, it shows. Rates drop. So, after a time, let them leave. Hell, make it easy. After having done all that is technically possible, email marketing wise (outside of full-blown reactivation harassment of course), you have to make it easy for unengaged contacts to leave. Never hide your unsubscription link. Put it both at the bottom and at the top of all your emails. Test it regularly. Make sure it’s working and that the process is simple to follow.

    You do not want the recipients to find that spam complaint button appealing. The only acceptable diversion from that path is to set a preference centre or a poll form between the unsubscribe link and the actual unsubscription. You may be able to keep a few in, with lighter marketing pressure, but in any case, try to learn why they are leaving. Just as you wanted to learn about them when they got in, you should learn why they want to go out. But don’t sit on that information. Use it to cross-reference that reason with the source or time or marketing operation they were subscribed to. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn about your « providers » practices that way. Maybe their « gold » vein has dried up and you can move to better lands.

    Keep in mind that abandoned email addresses can be turned into recycled spam traps. Try to always address any subscribed contacts at least three times per year, regardless of their engagement status. But at the same time, you must apply a rule for unengaged email addresses to be unsubscribed or discarded after too many attempts at reactivating them.

    Conclusion

    I’ve tried to focus your attention on the three major moments of the customer lifecycle: gathering consent, retention send outs, disengagement/churn. I’m sure other authors have described in more detail precise moments of that cycle and brought to your attention precise solutions to apply. Keep in mind that a sender reputation is more easily damaged than built and maintained, and that your patient efforts can easily be ruined and will likely cost you a lot of time, effort, money and not so fun discussions with your team. Remember, when in doubt, ask your email deliverability support contact, and in the meantime try your best and…”

    Engage email subscribers

Lauren Meyer

Lauren brings 15 years of experience in email to her role as EVP of Product Marketing & Brand Strategy for SocketLabs, with a heavy focus on deliverability and anti-abuse. She is a vocal advocate for following industry best practices and having a proactive, data-driven approach to optimizing email performance and the larger customer experience.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-meyer-3958b84/

  • Implement Real-Time Email Verification on All Subscription Forms

    – “We all know that email addresses are marketing gold.

    It’s commonly mentioned that email has an ROI of 42:1. That’s a return of $42 for every $1 that you spend on email marketing.

    That is four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.

    And research shows that it’s 5x less expensive to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one.

    So once your potential new customer has finally reached the point where they are actually willing to give you their email address, the last thing you want to do is collect incorrect information from them.

    Normally that kind of mistake leads to a hard bounce, or potentially the address could be a typo spam trap. Both of those have a negative impact on email eliverability.

    In a world where competition is tight, studies show that 95% of visitors will come to your website or physical location only once, and never return again.

    That means you have only one chance to collect their email address.

    By implementing real-time email verification on all subscription forms, marketers are able to verify email addresses in real-time at the point-of-capture, and can even prevent the user from hitting ‘Submit’ until they have entered a valid email address.

    Real-Time Email Verification

    This allows companies to not only reduce their hard bounce rate, but also to avoid missed connections with potential new leads, and build a larger and more qualified email list, which will inevitably lead to more revenue for the company.

    It’s unlikely that unsuccessful subscribers will realize they fat-fingered their own address and come back to sign up again if your welcome email never arrives in their inbox.

    Implementing real-time email verification on all of your subscription forms can ensure the email addresses you’re collecting are valid, and that your content will arrive in their inboxes as expected.”

Brett Schenker

Brett has worked in the digital space for 15 years and email deliverability for over 10. Focused primarily on nonprofits and political organizations, he's become the expert in that space on the subject.
https://brettschenker.com/

  • Email List Management is Key

    – “I find list management is the key to getting good email deliverability today. Email service providers are looking for engagement as a key metric. That means they want to see opens, responses, and forwarding of email. People fall off of email lists and lose interest over time which means that without proper management, you’ll just get more of these “inactive” email addresses on your list, decreasing deliverability rates.

    While the specific needs for every sender will vary, the place I start with those who need help is figuring out what domains you’re having issues with. I look at the open rates at the domain level and see which ones are performing below the average rate for the list.

    For these domains, I’ll then target differently, sending to people who have opened an email in the past 30 days as an example. You’re criteria will vary for that. Then, it’s sending to that segment and seeing if the open rates improve (not the percent, the actual number of opens) and let it keep improving over time.

    You’re sending positive metrics that way to the email providers which they like to see.

    Doing this I’ve seen open rates go from single digits to over 50% with more opens than ever before even though they’re sending to fewer individuals.

    From there, it becomes a math problem maximizing the amount of emails you send to a domain versus what the open rates are.”

Mike Hillyer

Founder of EmailNinjas, Mike has been working in the email industry since 2006 and advises senders on infrastructure, deliverability, and strategy.
http://emailninjas.com

  • DO NOT BUY EMAIL LISTS!

    – “You may get approached about buying lists, but it’s the worst possible thing you can do. It’s tempting to think that you could potentially gain thousands of new people to reach with your message, but what you’re really getting is a minefield of spam traps, honeypots, and people who never asked for your message.

    Buying an email list is the quickest and best way to get blacklisted not only by the mailbox providers, but by the Email Service Providers (ESPs) who scan uploaded lists to try and catch list purchasers before they can start sending emails and ruin the ESP’s reputation.

    Did your boss hand you a purchased email list and ask you to get on it? Rather than send them email, use the list to generate lookalike audiences in other channels, craft a compelling and relevant ad copy, and point clicks at a landing page that encourages them to sign up for your email list. Now you have a clean list of recipients who actively signed up for your content and a safe way to expand your email marketing footprint.”

José Ramón García Layos

I have 20 years of hands-on experience on the Internet developing businesses, building and leading e-commerce projects to success. A few years ago, I stumbled upon email deliverability, a nearly unknown area at the time, which fascinated me and that has driven my career as of then.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrglayos/

  • Monitor Both Your Campaigns and Your Reputation

    – “Monitoring your campaigns is paramount when it comes to understanding if your email deliverability is in a good health. Except for some odd exceptions (mainly Russian ISPs), it’s quite difficult to know what your inbox placement is like (meaning how many emails you’re sending are landing into your subscriber’s inbox), so monitoring your campaigns the right way and the reputation of your IPs and subdomains where available can provide you with a pretty accurate picture of how your program is performing. That way you’ll be able to pinpoint any scenarios where your emails may be landing in the spam folder or getting blocked.

    You should ensure you pay attention to:

    #Open Rates

    This is the most popular metric and, even though you shouldn’t judge your email marketing program just by looking at them, they will give you a clear understanding of whether something may be off. This is the reason it’s important to look into open rates broken down by recipient domain. This way, you can count on:

    • Aggregated data over time that will indicate you how each ISP usually performs, their trends, ranges and natural peaks and valleys.
    • A clear picture across your entire database, because by breaking down open rates by domain, you’ll ensure a problem with a particular ISP won’t get lost in the big picture / other ISPs with more presence in your database.

    Usually open rates will follow a trend and that trend will be the same across each ISP. In order to pinpoint an email deliverability issue, look for things that stand out in that trend, mainly steep decreases in opens that would indicate either emails being filtered to the spam folder or bouncing back because of a problem (that you should be able to identify by looking at the bounce message).

    #Click Through Open Rate (CTOR)

    While many email marketers look at click through (CTR, clicks/deliveries), CTOR (clicks/opens) will precisely tell you how relevant, engaging and actionable the content of your email was. And to increase the magic of this metric further still: if you observe a lower open rate alongside a spike in the CTOR, that’s a clear indication a portion of your emails landed into the spam folder, while the most engaged users (these who not only opened but clicked) still got them into the inbox.

    #Reputation with the ISPs

    Some ISPs will provide you with information about your current IPs’ and subdomains’ reputation, which you then can use as a data point to infer inbox placement. The most common ones are:

    • Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) – You can enroll your IPs and you’ll get daily info (with a 24 hr delay) about their reputation. Each IP Address will have a color, which will point you to any issues and to the amount of emails that are expected to land in the inbox: green (>90% emails delivered landed in the inbox), yellow (between 10% and 90% in spam) and red (>90% emails into the spam folder). Just create an Outlook account or log in with an existing one at https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds, go to “Request access” and follow the instructions.
    • Google Postmaster Site – Here you can enrol your sender domain(s) and you’ll get daily data (with a 48 hr delay) about their reputation. Each subdomain will have high/medium/low/bad reputation, which will give you an idea of how many emails are sent to the inbox by Gmail. Just create a Gmail account or log in with an existing one at postmaster.google.com, click on the “+” symbol and follow the instructions.
    • Mail.ru Postmaster – Very useful if you send emails in Russia, the Mail.ru postmaster site provides with an incredible amount of information to senders:
      • Engagement – Know how many people are reading your mailings and how many delete them without opening them.
      • Complaint rates – Know how many subscribers have marked your mailings as spam.
      • Delivery rates – Stay informed on the progress of the mailing process: how many emails have already been sent and delivered, how many were marked as spam or were blocked. This is very uncommon among ISPs, so it’s a very valuable piece of information.
    • Yandex Postmaster – Same as Mail.ru, the Yandex postmaster provides with an incredible amount of information to senders:
      • Engagement – Know how many people are reading your mailings and how many delete them without opening them, how many read and still have them in the inbox and how many are unread and still in inbox.
      • Complaint Rates – Know how many subscribers have marked your mailings as spam.
      • Delivery Rates – Stay informed on the progress of the mailing process: how many emails have already been sent and delivered, how many were marked as spam or were blocked. This is very uncommon among ISPs so it’s a very valuable piece of information.
      • Yandex will provide hints on ways to improve the engagement of the users based on the data they provide.

    By putting all of these pieces together you’ll be able to pinpoint most of the email deliverability issues you may be having and start troubleshooting them to get your messages back into the inbox!”

Anna Ward

I've managed mailservers and lead deliverability teams for ESPs for the past 6 years, working in email deliverability and compliance for over 9 years. My work is all about increasing performance, minimizing risk, and establishing the most trusted reputation with ISPs and mailbox providers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annagraceward/

  • Differentiate Your Message Types By Sending IP and From Address

    – “Every business has different types of messages they send — login-related transactional messages, purchase confirmations, automated content marketing series, monthly newsletters, legal notices, etc. Since each of these messages has a different vulnerability, if you’re sending them all from the same IP Address and domains, you’re putting *all* your mail at risk when something goes awry with just *one* type of message.

    For example, if a form on your website gets hacked, your promotional messages could also see excessive bounces and blacklistings as receivers try to block the abuse. If your email marketing team accidentally sends to the wrong list, complaints and poor engagement could quickly result in poor email deliverability for transactional messages too.

    Differentiating your message types by sending IP and From address whenever possible creates separate sending reputations the receiver can rely on. That protects your messages against widespread email deliverability issues when small problems inevitably surface (it also makes identifying those problems much easier!). At the very least, I recommend my clients use different subdomains for transactional and bulk/broadcast messages to better monitor their sender reputations and keep them healthy.”

Henry Gutierrez

Henry has 14 years of experience in email marketing, with a specific focus on deliverability. At Bluecore, he's currently helping maximize deliverability and ROI for some of the top retail brands in the country.
https://www.bluecore.com/

  • Send LESS Email

    – “There’s a lot to focus on when improving email deliverability but the most common recommendation is to reduce volume. It is also by far the most unpopular. Aggressive volumes will result in sending emails to unengaged subscribers, spam traps or receiving high spam complaints, which will all affect reputation and inbox placement. Before giving tips on how to reduce volume it’s best to understand how less can be more, and more can be less.

    More is Less

    Below is a situation encountered years ago where the sender became more aggressive with the size of their unengaged subscribers and frequency.

    inbox placement and volume
    open count and volume

    Volume and inbox placement show an inverse relationship, affecting the amount of opens. As email tripled in volume, the amount of opens dropped by three times the previous amount. Below is the average amount of opens by daily volume:

    open counts by daily volume

    It’s clear there is an adverse effect when giving into the temptation of increasing volume. Less consistently gives this program more. More opens and more money, by far.

    Reducing Volume Intelligently

    Some points to consider when reducing volume to improve email deliverability:

    • Identify Level of Urgency – Is there an important sending date coming up? In some cases a sender can bounce back to 100% inbox placement in just a few days if aggressive enough.
    • Identify the Damage – Are emails being completely blocked or heavily filtered? Also it’s important to identify where the problem is so that the list size/frequency is only reduced with subscribers at problematic mailbox providers.
    • Reducing Frequency – This is usually the least painful way to reduce volume. Start by reducing frequency to the lesser engaged subscribers. This should cause minimal impact to ROI since those subscribers aren’t engaging with emails anyways. Never count out that reducing frequency across the board may also be a solution.
    • Reducing Email List Size – Sometimes it needs to be done. The higher the composition of unengaged subscribers, the higher the likelihood of encountering issues. The ideal engagement level for a size depends on factors such as content, frequency, vertical, acquisition, etc. Most successful senders email subscribers that have opened or clicked a message from anywhere between the last six months to the past year.

    Sample Approaches

    • Aggressive – A sender had 90%+ of emails going to the Gmail spam folder. Decided to send an email to those who opened or clicked a message in the last 10 days. Gmail inbox went to 100% after 3 days, but a cautious increase continued until a breaking point was found where inbox filtering started to occur again.
    • Cautious – A sender had a 70% inbox placement rate for Gmail and reducing list size was a tough pitch. Reduced email list size to those that opened or clicked in the past 1.5 years, from two years. Sender then also reduced frequency for those that had not opened or clicked in the past year to 1.5 years. Inbox placement for Gmail peaked at 85% two weeks after changes.

    As with everything, measure efforts with every data point possible. Never rule out sending less as a solution to email deliverability issues, which more importantly can increase opens and ROI.”

Dan Oshinsky

Dan runs Inbox Collective, a consultancy that helps news organizations and non-profits with email strategy. He’s also the creator of Not a Newsletter, a monthly briefing about how to send better email. He previously worked as the Director of Newsletters at both The New Yorker and BuzzFeed.
http://notanewsletter.com/

  • Build a Welcome Series

    – “A welcome series is crucial in the first 30 days after a reader signs up for your newsletter. A great series establishes a relationship with the reader, builds trust, and guides them through the next steps on their journey. But they’re also so important for email deliverability. These emails open at a much higher rate than your newsletters or regular email correspondence, and every time a reader engages with an email, it improves your brand’s standing with inbox providers like Gmail. By driving that early engagement with your readers, it’s going to help you stay out of the spam folder.

    In that first welcome email, make sure you introduce yourself and set the expectations for readers: What they’ll get and when they can expect to hear from you. But don’t stop with just a single welcome email. Make sure that over the course of the first month, you send a series of emails to help readers get to know you, your team, and your brand, and help them get the most out of their relationship with you. The more they engage, the more it should help improve your email deliverability over the long term.”

Jennifer Nespola Lantz

Director of Deliverability at Zeta. I've been in the email world since 2005 and have gone from coding email to production management to the wonderful world of email deliverability. In a former life, I was a media planner, which has given me a rounded perspective on customer communications, regardless of medium.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-nespola-lantz-b688774

  • Improve Engagement

    – “There are many nuances to deliverability and why email goes where it goes. When approaching any email deliverability issue, there are some basic items that need to be in place before any other strategy is employed otherwise you may be met with diminished impact or no effect at all. These basics include the infrastructure and MTAs follow best practices, authentication is set up correctly and passing, the sender employs sound data collection practices (and there are many), and the sender is mailing wanted and expected mail to OPTED IN individuals. Once those items are reviewed and checked off, then one of the best ways to address an email deliverability issue can be summarized in one word, engagement. Use it, love it, live by it.

    UNDERSTANDING THE VIEW

    I love analogies so when I think about ISP filtering, I think of it as if it were an event promoter. Each event can be measured by a multitude of factors that determine if it was successful enough to promote again. Customer activity is the most direct and impactful signal about how it was received. If an event triggers a thunderous applause, you’ve got yourself a hit, even if there were issues such as lighting, some boos, dull moments along the way, or a delayed start. If you hand an ISP a stadium full of 60,000 people and only 600 are clapping, the performance going on inside that venue will feel a little lackluster and, frankly, a terrible entertainment experience that does not warrant being repeated. However, move that performance to an auditorium that seats 700 and 600 people applaud, it makes a much bigger impact. This is the goal. Frame how the ISPs view what they are receiving. In some cases, it comes with the necessity to reduce the number of people you are sending to (I’ll get to that in just a sec), but the impact on what will happen to your mail is much greater. Once you build a positive sender reputation, then you can start to develop larger venues, so long as that also grows the enthusiastic audience in the same proportion.

    REFRAMING THE PICTURE

    To reestablish or build your sender reputation, start by restricting your list to customers that have engaged with the email within the last 3 months (30 days for more dire circumstances). This will naturally improve the quality of the audience. Customers that look for your mail, move it, open it, click it, star it, add a reminder, reply to it, forward it, etc. are your most valuable asset. They are the ones that will attend your next event. The only thing the unengaged customers are doing for your sender reputation is reaffirming to the ISP that the filtering was right and your performance was a dud. Removing them leaves you with a larger group of people that are telling the ISP that the filtering to the inbox is indeed what they want. And bonus! It also will weed out spam traps that may be hiding in your email list. The higher quality list and the better metrics are huge signals to the ISPs that there is value in what you are sending.

    Once in place, let that new selection sit. ISPs need a history long enough to help adjust their algorithms before sender reputation and inboxing will follow. This period of time is your way of telling the ISP that your customers “Like me, they really like me!”. During this time, keep an eye on any automated email campaigns that may also be contributing to the negative metrics. Those should also be capped if so or potentially paused and set aside for review. In some cases, reputation could take 3-4 weeks before you’ll see a change. I had one client experiencing sender reputation issues and we implemented engagement restrictions on 2 of the 3 sends per week from an open mailing that was sent 3 times per week. After this sat for about a month, the MOM open rate increased 3 percentage points and the number of customers opening by 43%.

    MOVING FORWARD

    In life and in email, it’s easier to ruin reputation than it is to rebuild it so don’t expect fast changes or a quick build back to ‘normal’. As you start to see your open rate and your sender reputation return to normal after the first 3-4 weeks with the new targeting, begin your expansion. When you are ready, move from 3 months to 4, then 5, then 6. Give it at least 2-3 weeks between each subsequent jump. You can sometimes jump more aggressively, but that really depends on your business and how much your email deliverability was impacted. As you start to go beyond 6 months, you’ll want to tread more carefully. Some clients will have a sweet spot of 6 months, some 9, and some 12. Once you get reestablished, your targeting can also lean on metrics from other sources, like purchase data, website activity, etc.

    For each expansion, factor in volume changes as well. If you are sitting at a lower volume due to the restrictions, you’ll want to make sure your expansion doesn’t spike volumes or dilute the metrics with an influx of unengaged customers or spike complaints, and so on. Otherwise, you’ll be at square one again. Portion out the expanded audience over a couple of launches. It allows you to ramp up the volume, manage the audience makeup, and temper complaints from those that may have been sitting for a while. I like to break up the audience so jumps are around 10% at a time. In some respect and views, this is a very conservative approach. I prefer this though because by doing it this way, it allows me time to monitor and see if there is anything else impacting the mailings. Flexibility in rebuilding what was lost is very important. Pull back when you see a backslide, push forward when you are doing well.

    For the long term health of your program, you may not get back to business-as-usual, but an altered version of it. I see the most success when there is an engagement cap in place, generally 12 months or less. Again, there is value in the lesser/unengaged population, but if you are going to reach out to them, be strategic. It should not be a part of your everyday operations. At some point reengagement series and repermission series should come in to permanently weed out those that have moved on from the relationship. Reengagement series could start as early as 3 months, repermission as early as 6 months, but this is all dependent upon the business, service/product lifecycle, etc.

    Lastly, while you are working through remediating your email deliverability issues, I would also recommend a self-discovery session to review the mailing program. What is going out? Is it relevant? Is it timely? Is it too much? Too little? What can you do to keep your core email list as engaged as possible to minimize attrition? What drove the issue to begin with? And ultimately are you connected with your customer? If your mail is wanted, expected, and timely, email deliverability issues often fade away.”

Alison Gootee

Alison Gootee is a deliverability nerd with over 5 years of experience in the email space. Her motto is, "everything in excess, except for email!"
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisongootee/

  • Deliverability Doesn’t Care About Your Business Model

    – “In my time handling an abuse desk for an ESP, one frequent refrain I heard was, “But you just don’t understand our business model!” This would be followed by an explanation as to why spamming people is integral to the sender’s business. Believe it or not, email deliverability requirements are the same across all industries and businesses: send emails people want and expect, nothing more or less.

    If your business model necessitates sending unsolicited email (also known as spam!), that also results in conversions of some kind, then your business is untenable. There is no legitimate business that can experience high email deliverability while simultaneously sending spam–they are mutually exclusive. Forced opt-in? Spam. Scraped data? Spam. Industry contact list? Spam. Even if you KNOW the audience will be interested in your product if they could just see an email about it? Still spam, I’m sorry. Any time you send mail to recipients who didn’t ask for it, they will unsubscribe, mark the mail as spam, or –yikes– report you to your ESP.

    Any time you send emails to an audience obtained through unsavory means, you also run the risk of hitting spam traps; those inscrutable email addresses that can get you blocked and/or blacklisted. Since spam traps are indistinguishable from regular email addresses and receive mail without bouncing, even a list validated by a cleaning service won’t be able to suss them out. If you value email deliverability, then the (very real) threat of having your mail blocked likely outweighs the (very imagined) benefits of spamming an audience of people in the hope that some of them will be so elated about your offerings that they’ll overlook the inbox intrusion and purchase anyway.

    If you’re still thinking, “Okay but you really don’t seem to understand my business. We need to reach out to cold email lists in order to build our list!”, then ask yourself these questions:

    • When’s the last time you purchased something from an email you didn’t sign up for?
    • Do you have a good impression of the brands who send you spam?
    • If these truly are promising prospects, then why make a bad first impression?
    Email reputation extends beyond just the inbox and the spam folder–it translates directly into your brand reputation and influences how people view you, your customers, and your products. That means that unless you’re the CEO of Spamming, Inc., and your objective is to send the most spam, your business model is irrelevant.”

Toshi Onishi

Messaging specialist based in APAC with over 10 years of experience
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonishi/

  • Implement BIMI

    – “BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. It is a new standard that allows senders with good reputation an easier opportunity to get your logo displayed next to your message in the inbox. BIMI not only improves your visibility and brand awareness, it’s also designed to prevent fraud and support email deliverability.

    A recent study by Verizon Media on its Yahoo Mail BIMI beta program showed that there was an average 10% increase in open rates for email messages that had brand logos on them. And while BIMI is still a pilot program which only Verizon supports, Gmail has indicated they will start trialing BIMI sometime this year so it is reasonable to assume more mailbox providers will most likely follow suit in supporting this new standard.

    So how do we implement BIMI? This can be done in 3 simple steps:

    1. Publish and set appropriate DMARC tag status
    2. Create and Publish the BIMI image
    3. Establish a good sender reputation by following email deliverability best practices

    Publish and Set Appropriate DMARC Tag Status

    DMARC is an authentication method built on top of existing email authentication mechanisms. However, one of the features is the ability to publish what policy you want the mailbox providers to apply when your email fails DMARC authentication and alignment checks. This is shown in the “p=” tag within the DMARC record and it applies to your primary domain, as well as all the subdomains unless a “sp=” tag is used with a different value.

    To qualify for BIMI, this “p=” tag needs to be set to either “quarantine” or “reject”. However, as all organisations have different email infrastructure, consult your hosting provider or whoever that manages your DNS to set this up as some additional work will most likely be needed.

    ​Create and Publish the BIMI Image

    ​​​​To be used in association with BIMI, the logo must be formatted in a way to be readily recognizable as associated with the brand, easily displayed at various resolutions, and include characteristics that support verification and security. Specifically:

    1. T​he logo must be square
    2. The logo must be saved as a version of the Scaled Vector Graphic (SVG) format as defined by the SVG Tiny 1.2 profile published by the W3C in 2008.
    3. The logo cannot include anything else such as tags, external links, secondary Word Marks, unregistered marks etc.

    ​​​​Once your BIMI logo has been created, it needs to be stored at a HTTPS location. Make sure you note down this HTTPS path, then contact your hosting provider or whoever that manages your DNS to publish the BIMI record and map it to the HTTPS path.

    ​Establish a Good Sender Reputation by Following Email Deliverability Best Practices

    ​​​​One of the aspects of BIMI is that the mailbox providers can determine at their discretion whether to display the sender’s logo or not. In order to have the sender’s logo published, they require that the sender comply with email deliverability best practices and establish a good sender reputation.

    If you know your mailbox provider supports BIMI, then you can test by sending to a test account at that mailbox provider. If you see your BIMI logo (the SVG file you uploaded), then congratulations!, you are authenticating correctly and have been considered as a trusted sender by that mailbox provider.

    ​​If you don’t see any changes, then continue following email deliverability best practices to improve your sender reputation. Mailbox providers are continuously reviewing and, if they determine you to be a sender with a good reputation, it will only be a matter of time before you will see your logo next to your messages.”

Aleksandrs Vilums

Aleksandrs is an email deliverability consultant and email industry services product manager. Since 2010, he has helped ESP, SMTP, CRM services, and marketing agencies with solutions for a better quality of email delivery.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandrs-vilums-78514957/

  • Be Ethical and Protect Your Inbox Reputation

    – “There are a few best practices I would advise you to follow if you want to improve your email deliverability.

    1. Think About Your Email Deliverability Reputation Score!

    When email users open their mailbox, users have a chance to give reputation credit to email senders or take it away. This is done with functions that mail services provide to email users. When email users either mark or move an email message to spam/junk, delete unread messages or unsubscribe, they take away sender reputation credit. But when email users open, forward, reply to an email, categorize it, mark it as important, add the contact to the address book or move an email message from the spam/junk folder to the inbox, it gives reputation credit to the email sender. If sender reputation credit is high, senders have a better chance to deliver email messages into the inbox. And of course, email delivery speed is also better with a higher sender reputation score.

    2. Keep Your Email Recipients Happy!

    Before you send an email message to your recipients, think about the value that they will get and how your recipients could react. Is the email subject line interesting to them? Will they notice it and open your email? If the answer is yes, think about whether your content provides value, especially if your email recipients are receiving your email message for the first time. If these things all seem to be in order, do you expect some of your email recipients could mark your message as spam? If yes, think about why? What do you want to send your recipients and how often should they receive your emails? Even if the email recipients didn’t remember where and how they joined your email list, if your message is interesting, the email recipients could continue to open your next email messages.

    3. Check Your Email Delivery Quality Before You Send an Email Message to the Full List!

    You have an email list, you have content and your “from details” are set up for your email campaigns. Before you send an email message to all of your recipients, check if your content gets delivered into the inbox for your @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @outlook.com mailboxes. If your test was delivered and landed in junk/spam folders then something is wrong and must be resolved before your message gets sent out to the full list and affects your delivery reputation. Sometimes problems could be with the service that you’re using to send out messages, so you could ask the service provider for help, but in my experience in most cases the problems are with content, sender reputation or sender settings. If you cannot resolve the problem yourself, you can ask email deliverability specialists/consultants for help.

    4. Use Email Delivery Reputation Monitoring Tools!

    If your average open rate is below industry standards (or clicks to your pages from messages 7-10x less than your industry average), you must use reputation monitoring tools for your company to check if your sender reputation is good enough to deliver your emails into the inbox. One of the free and easy to use tools that I recommend is postmaster.google.com.”

Filed Under: Email Marketing

How to Optimize Your Landing Pages for Google Ads Campaigns

by Chris Herbert | Last Updated October 15, 2021

Google Ads Landing Page Optimization_

If you’re using Google Ads to drive traffic to your products or services, you want to make the biggest return on your investment possible. Whether that return is signing on new clients or pulling in product sales that make the cash register go ka-ching (what a great sound!), the goal is the same…to get your target audience to take action while spending as little as you can. That’s just good business, right?!

And one of the absolute fundamentals if you want to achieve that is getting your landing page “on the money.” That’s because it’s right at the heart of it all, so can either make or break your campaign. So you could kind of say knowing how to properly optimize landing pages for Google Ads is pretty important.

But just how do you go about doing that? Well to figure that out, I got in touch with 41 paid traffic pros, who are in the trenches living this stuff day-in, day-out, and they were kind enough to share a whole bunch of different ideas on how you can optimize your landing pages and enjoy better results with Google Ads.

Anyway, enough of my waffle. I would urge you to scroll down the page and dig into the good stuff. This article is chock full of golden insights that should get those cogs turning. And remember, take action! Great advice is only useful if you do something with it! And if you’re overwhelmed by the number of tips we’ve compiled; don’t be. Just take a deep breath, bookmark the article and try one thing at a time. You can always come back for more 🙂

Have you used any of these tips? We’d love to hear all about the results you achieved. Do tell us in the comments section at the end of the article.

How to Optimize Landing Pages for Google Ads_

Google Ads Landing Page Optimization: 41 Great Ideas

Landing page optimization for Google Ads got you in a tizzy? No sweat, we’ve got your back and we’re armed with plenty of suggestions. Here’s an overview of all of the different optimization tips that were shared. Have a read, pick a few out and get testing!

  1. Make Your Landing Page Trustworthy
  2. Test Multi-Step Forms to Get MORE Leads While Still Gathering More Information to Get Better QUALITY Leads 
  3. If It’s Not on Your Landing Page, It’s Not True
  4. Match Your Message to the Intent of the Search, Not Just the Keyword
  5. Import Landing Page Data Into Google Ads from Google Analytics
  6. Track Changes and Tests Using Notes Feature
  7. Measure Crucial Events with Google Tag Manager
  8. Test a Sticky Header/Footer and Include Your Primary CTA Button
  9. Messaging to Explain vs Messaging to Convert
  10. Improve Load Speed
  11. Configure Your Landing Page Specifically for Paid Traffic
  12. Test New Landing Pages Using Google Experiment
  13. Integrate Tracking with your CRM to Carry Data Through the Sales Cycle
  14. Test, Test, Test
  15. Consistent Wording Between Ads and Landing Pages
  16. Focus on Relevance
  17. Utilise Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Relevance at Scale
  18. Test a Quiz or Messenger Bot Style Landing Page
  19. Master the Process and Keep Track of Learnings
  20. Less is More – Reduce Waste
  21. Location Matters When It Matters, Which Is Always
  22. Get Third-Party Feedback on the Content and Usability of Your Landing Page Before Going Live
  23. Analyze Your Search Terms Report
  24. Making Money with Google Ads Using Static and Dynamic Conversion Tracking
  25. Bundle Related Products/Services to Increase Customer Value
  26. Simple User Interface/Navigation
  27. Deliver Different Experiences During the Conversion Cycle
  28. People Scan First, Then Read. Draw People Onto Your Page and Give Them a Reason to Read More to Convert
  29. Keep On-Page SEO Best Practices in Mind
  30. How to Use Ad Rank to Identify that Your Landing Page is Letting You Down
  31. They Didn’t Convert? What You Can Do About That
  32. Focus on 1 Conversion Goal
  33. Dedicated Landing Page for Mobile Users
  34. Use the C/E/A Methodology
  35. Different Goals Should Deliver Different Goal Values
  36. Highlight Your Key Selling Points
  37. Craft the Perfect Offer
  38. Keep your Call to Action (CTA) Above the Fold
  39. Think of it as Your Virtual Shopfront
  40. Less Navigation + Strong CTA
  41. Split Test Big Ideas

Other Articles You May Find Useful:

  • Best Landing Page Builder: 63 Paid Traffic Experts Vote
  • 7 Game-changing Lessons I Learned From Optimising 400+ Google Ads Landing Pages
  • All Search Engine Marketing Resources

What the Experts Said: A Journey to Better Optimized Landing Pages

In this section we’ve published each of our expert tips in full. They’re packed with real-world, highly actionable advice. If implemented, these ideas should help you optimize your landing pages and improve the conversion rates on your Google Ads campaigns in no time.

You can skip to a specific tip by using the filters below.

{"filter_mode":"masonry"}
  • All
  • Use Ad Rank
  • 1 Conversion Goal
  • Consistent Wording
  • Message to Convert
  • Quiz/Messenger Bot LP
  • C/E/A Methodology
  • Dynamic Keyword Insertion
  • Test Multi-Step Forms
  • Goal Values
  • Track Changes and Tests
  • Focus on Relevance
  • Master the Process
  • Your Virtual Shopfront
  • CTA Above Fold
  • Dedicated Landing Page for Mobile
  • Get 3rd-Party Feedback
  • Split Test Big Ideas
  • Less is More
  • Sticky Header/Footer + CTA
  • Integrate Tracking with CRM
  • They Didn’t Convert?
  • Different Experiences During Conversion Cycle
  • Highlight Key Selling Points
  • Location Matters
  • Google Tag Manager
  • Test - Test - Test
  • On-Page SEO Best Practices
  • Importing Data from Google Analytics
  • Bundle Related Products/Services
  • Make Company Stand Out - Quickly
  • Simple User Interface
  • Less Navigation + Strong CTA
  • Make Your Landing Page Trustworthy
  • Improve Load Speed
  • Search Terms Report
  • Conversion Tracking
  • The Perfect Offer
  • Test Using Google Experiments
  • Match Message to Intent of Search
  • Configured Specifically for Paid Traffic
  • Not True If Not on Landing Page

Barrie Smith

Results-driven Freelance PPC Specialist with 15 years' experience working with both B2C and B2B clients, delivering integrated digital marketing campaigns with a track record of success.
https://www.barrie-smith.com

  • Test, Test, Test

    – “You’re paying for every click so optimise everything to make the user convert.

    Firstly, define your goals/KPIs first and make sure your tracking is setup correctly. A lot of novice PPC consultants simply track sales, but the PPC expert tracks a wide range of metrics – revenue per click, per keyword etc. Make sure you’re an expert with Google Analytics and Tag Manager.

    In an ideal Google Ads campaign, your product or service keywords will be separated into their own Ad Groups, allowing you to dedicate your Ad Copy to the query and directing them to the appropriate landing page. Optimising your landing page isn’t just about sending users to the correct page – you can still have the correct page, but badly optimised.

    Having the freedom to create landing pages specifically for PPC campaigns is a dream. This allows you to build pages to drive more leads or sales through your paid campaign by cutting out a lot of the distractions on the page and pointing the users in the direction of your call to action. Ultimately, raising your ROI.

    Split test your landing pages – no matter how much of an expert you are, you cannot beat real data. So continuously testing your landing pages to improve the conversion rate is of huge importance. If you have a CPA of $100 with a 1% conversion rate for example, just think of the savings you can make by increasing that to 2% or 3%.

    Don’t overlook the content of the page. You want to use this to convert your users. Test different headlines, different call to actions, different product descriptions; test everything. With Google offering free split testing there is really no excuse not to:

    https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/this-is-not-a-test-google-optimize-now-free-for-everyone

    Having control over your landing pages also allows you to optimise your them to improve your Google Ads Quality Score. This can make a significant difference in the price you pay per click. By having an ‘Above Average’ landing page compared to Google scoring it ‘Below Average’ results in better rankings and lower costs per click.”

Melanie Gray

Melanie Gray is the owner and Google Ads Strategist at The Ad Factory. She manages over $200,000 in advertising spend each month and works with international clients such as The Daily Edited, Nimble Activewear, Brooks Running and Diesel. She has over 8 years of experience delivering successful and profitable campaigns for clients.
https://www.theadfactory.com.au/

  • Importing Landing Page Data Into Google Ads from Google Analytics

    – “As we split test different campaigns, ads, keywords, landing pages etc. it is important that we gather as much information as possible to determine what is working.

    One tip that allows you to see this information directly in the Google Ads interface, is to import Google Analytics data. By linking your accounts and importing data, you will be able to see the following metrics directly in Google Ads:

    • Bounce Rate
    • Pages/Session
    • Avg. Session Duration
    • % of new sessions

    You will be able to see this information for each individual keyword or ad copy, providing insight into what’s working well and what’s not. Here are the steps to implement this:

    1. Set up Google Analytics (if not already) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en
    2. In Google Ads, select Tools & Settings > Linked Accounts > Google Analytics (Details)
    3. Importing Landing Page Data Into Google Ads from Google Analytics
      Click to Enlarge

      Importing Landing Page Data Into Google Ads from Google Analytics x2
      Click to Enlarge

    4. Locate your Google Analytics account in the list
    5. Select “Link”
    6. Hover over the pencil icon in the View column
    7. Select import site metrics and save.
    8. Link Google Analytics with Google Ads
      Click to Enlarge
    9. Go back to your Google Ads campaign and/or ad group view
    10. Select Columns > Modify Columns
    11. There should be a new option for Google Analytics (you may have to wait 1-2 minutes for the new link to go through). Select all columns you want to add. We suggest all!
    12. Google Ads Campaign Columns
      Click to Enlarge

    You will then be able to analyse different ad copy and keywords for their bounce rates, and time spent on page, showing you further valuable information about how the user is interacting with your landing page after they’ve clicked on your ad.”

Oliver Ewbank

Oliver Ewbank is an award winning paid media specialist based in London. His digital insights have been featured in a variety of publications, including BBC News, PPC Hero, Wordstream, SEMrush & Virgin Entrepreneur. A guest speaker at Google, Oliver has run paid media projects for eBay, Koozai & Feefo.
https://www.reeyap.com/

  • Focus on Relevance

    – “When it comes to optimizing a landing page for Google Ads its vital that you consider Quality Score. Quality Score is metric from one to ten and it impacts your Ad Rank and Cost Per Click. Put simply, the higher your Quality Score the more often your ad will show and the cheaper your CPC will be.

    Page speed is obviously important but I would also make sure you focus on relevance.

    If you’re bidding on the search query [cheap flights to Barcelona] make sure this term is featured in the Header once and once or twice in the body copy. It’s also worth using relevant images with appropriate alt descriptions.

    Increasing the relevance of the landing page will increase conversions and earn you a good Quality Score.

    If you’re working with big budgets on large campaigns it’s worth creating landing pages directly relevant to each query you are bidding on. You can do this at large scale using the Unbounce Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) feature.”

    https://documentation.unbounce.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661004-Working-with-Dynamic-Text-Replacement

Navah Hopkins

Navah Hopkins is the Director of Paid Media at Hennessey Digital, an integrated digital marketing agency helping our customers own their markets via PPC, SEO, CRO, PR, and Content. Throughout her career, Navah has made a point to give back and loves sharing lessons learned on the international speaking circuit as well as local universities. She is a frequent contributor to SEJ, SEMrush, and WordStream blogs/webinars.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/navahhopkins/

  • Configured Specifically for Paid Traffic

    – “It’s vital your paid landing page is set-up for paid traffic, and not bogged down by content walls that serve SEO strategies. SEO and PPC can work together really well, and one of the ways they can empower each other is to share search query data without landing pages.

    A paid landing page should be transactional in focus, making it easy to complete the desired action (call/form-fill/purchase).

    By setting up separate pages for paid traffic, you’ll have more control over attribution, strategy, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).”

Amy Hebdon

Amy Hebdon has been managing SEM accounts professionally since 2004. She is the founder of the Google Partner agency Paid Search Magic, which provides both full-service management and training to digital marketers. She also co-hosts the free facebook group Google Ads for Savvy Digital Marketers.
http://paidsearchmagic.com

  • If It’s Not on Your Landing Page, It’s Not True

    – “If I’m your ideal prospect, I need your landing page to meet my expectations before I’m willing to take action. This is true whether the expectations were explicitly set by your ad, or they exist silently unchecked in my head.

    Let’s say you sell blenders, and I want to buy a dishwasher safe blender. If your landing page doesn’t tell me your blender’s dishwasher safe, then in my mind it’s not – and I’m going to look elsewhere. If I bounce, that means you spent the money on acquiring the click, but didn’t make it back on the conversion.

    Now that was a small example, easily fixed by just including a feature of your product. But it’s just as important with intangibles – things that matter to your audience on a deep level.

    Study your prospects and customers. Interview them. Research how they describe their problems in their own words. Find out what matters to them, and build your landing page to address their needs and concerns.

    You also want to make sure that everything in your ad – every feature, offer, value proposition, benefit, differentiator and promise – is supported on your landing page.

    With expanded ad copy, dynamic keyword insertion, and multiple ad extensions that can live at any level in the account… it becomes really difficult to track what details your visitors are seeing in the first place.

    Don’t include anything in your ads that isn’t backed by your landing page, and don’t expect your prospects to do the work of extra research to learn more about your offers than you were willing to tell them.

    If there’s something they need to know before they’re ready to buy – whether it’s a feature, a benefit, a result, a risk-reversal, assurance, or an explanation – remember, if it’s not on your landing page, it’s not true in the mind of your customer.”

Flavia Abma

After finishing my International Business studies in Germany in 2001, I started working in online marketing for an online travel agency in 2002. I've been working in search engine marketing ever since, with clients of all sizes and from all kinds of different industries.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/flavia-abma-a3b3ab8/

  • Think of it as Your Virtual Shopfront

    – “When creating a landing page for Google Ads, think of it as your virtual shopfront.

    What makes potential customers enter your shop? What’s displayed in your shop window? Is it well lit, bright and friendly? Are the products displayed in an appealing way? Are the prices clearly visible? Is your shop name easy to read? Is it easy to access your shop?

    While the right copy and the right amount of copy are very important too, so is the layout and design of a page. Your shopfront – or landing page – is what users see first. And based on this first – visual – impression, a user will either stay and enter the shop and explore, or leave and take a look into your competitor’s shop window.”

Mirena Boycheva

Mirena has over 6 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in pay-per click channels. She manages her own PPC agency working predominantly with SMEs. Building strategies based on her clients' goals, she helps them to increase not only their website visits, but their business as a whole.
http://www.leadvertisingsolutions.com

  • Simple User Interface/Navigation

    – “Creating a one-of-a-kind website is something you might think is a great idea! Having tons of buttons, many calls to action, blocks of text, different colours, a menu that comes up in a special way and drop-down menus at different levels, hidden sections… It will definitely distinguish you from the competition, right?

    You do not want to copy anyone else, you would rather spend more time and money to have a customised website created for your own brand to make it as detailed as possible, as interactive as possible, etc. This would generate you many sales, you would think…

    The truth is that the more your website differentiates itself from other websites, the more lost your visitor might feel. There are best practices for creating user navigation, which will lead the user straight to their goal in as few clicks as possible.

    It is important to take into account the way average user thinks and the way they are used to finding the information they need on any website. Every little change might make the user feel lost and this means they will drop off your site.

    Of course, you should try to keep people on your site and make them explore further. You can create a variety of links to inspire the user and make them curious about what great offer they might find behind every button. However, you need to make sure that there is an easy way back or an easy way for them to navigate to the place you want them to. If you’re selling stuff, you don’t just want visitors interested in reading your blog, you want them to buy. So make sure all your paths end up there. The user should never be more than 3 clicks away from the end-goal. You can still use nice fonts, colours, images, videos, form designs. However, do that keeping in mind that no matter how pretty your lead form is, what is most important is that users can find it.

    People are used to finding certain types of information in specific places on a website. For example, if they were interested in the delivery options or payment methods, they would look in the website navigation menu, on the product page or the website footer. You need to make sure you have that information covered in all three places.

    If you are not sure whether you have built an easy to understand flow of steps to conversion, you can check Google analytics. You can see how many pages users visit on average before leaving your site. Alternatively, you could check on which step or landing page users leave your site. Then you can change the navigation flow. If the users end up on your testimonials page and then leave, then you might want to update that one or even remove it to see if that changes their behaviour. If you have too many fields to fill out on your lead form, that could harm your conversion rate.

    To conclude, you can add as much content and as many links to your website as you wish, but limit the number of clicks required from entering the site to the conversion to the absolute minimum necessary.”

Natasha Ahmed

Natasha Ahmed is an Ex Googler and 12+ year PPC expert. After serving in Director roles at global PPC agencies on Fortune 50 accounts, Natasha now runs a boutique paid media agency serving B2B technology clients in growth mode.
http://www.flowstaqppc.com

  • Integrate Tracking with your CRM to Carry Data Through the Sales Cycle

    – “If you’re using paid media to capture leads for a nurture campaign or sales team, integrate your PPC tracking and other paid media tracking with your CRM customer data.

    Each CRM customer profile should include the channel, keyword and campaign that the user originated from (at a minimum). This gives your agency visibility into the channels, campaigns, and keywords that actually generated revenue and in turn, the power to optimize your campaigns towards better lead quality and boost your actual ROI.

    Some CRM’s offer seamless integration (Zoho, Salesforce). Others require a workaround with UTM parameters. If you’re looking into CRM’s, add this feature to your list of considerations.”

Reece Groves

7+ Years Experience in PPC Advertising. Get More Customers by Maximising Google, Facebook & Microsoft Ads with Conversion Optimised Websites & Landing Pages
https://www.linkedin.com/in/reecegroves/

  • Test Multi-Step Forms to Get MORE Leads While Still Gathering More Information to Get Better QUALITY Leads

    – “Everyone always wants hot leads that fall into their lap who beg to hand over their money to you.

    But that’s not always possible.

    But PPC managers have vast amounts of data so they can test quickly (a lot of the time). They soon become useful as part of the conversion rate optimisations effort when a/b testing things fast.

    If you have more than 5 form fields, test splitting them up into multiple steps, BUT not on separate pages, that slows down the experience (only fractionally but it matters). You can get an idea of what I mean when I talk about multi-step forms, from form builder tools like these:

    • https://leadgenapp.io/
    • https://leadformly.com/

    ..or the multi-step form I built here for a home heating & renewable installation company, here:

    • https://greenerenergygroup.co.uk/survey/

    Take note of how effortless it is to finish and the use of clickable images rather than checkboxes with text next to them

    Why does splitting form fields up work?

    In a word, psychology.

    Start with a simple question, like, if you’re an architect, for example, or how many bedrooms does your property have?

    Once people start something they have a higher propensity to want to finish it – you know that satisfying feeling of completing something? That’s what is at play, but as long as it’s effortless. You can always add fun to it with flourishes of funny/brand copy and images as long as it is not overbearing & doesn’t distract from the goal.

    On the other hand, if you have a long-form with 6+ fields & you’re asking for personal information, it may come across as daunting and people may not even start to fill it in.

    Leave some of the most complicated or personable information at the end or even split up email/postcode in a previous step when applicable before going in for more information to increase chances of at least getting some contactable information like how we have done on the previous example.

    Leave a splash of the “trust factor” & social proof in the way of testimonials & accreditations/certifications, so they stay with them throughout the form filling process. Then last but not least, always create a separate thank-you page redirect. As this gives reassurance, visitors have completed the form and is an opportunity for you to encourage people to follow you on socials or download resources of yours in the meantime while you get back to them.”

    Test Multi-Step Forms to Get MORE Leads

Jeremy Templer

You don’t know anything about paid search marketing until you get your hands dirty — and SureFire Search’s Jeremy Templer gets his hands dirty. He’s worked in search for over 20 years, helping advertisers beat their KPIs while also testing new ideas and opportunities.
https://www.surefiresearch.com

  • They Didn’t Convert? What You Can Do About That

    – “Should you do remarketing? Yes, but make sure your conversion rate is up to scratch first.

    Your ad and landing page are two sides of the same coin; both play a critical role in getting conversions.

    You know this: you’ve got everything in sync, and you’ve followed up on the other recommendations in this article. But if your conversion rates are still underwhelming, don’t jump straight into remarketing.

    Most advertisers don’t give remarketing a second thought. They think that merely presenting their offer over and over will get them more conversions.

    Yes, you should remind non-converters what they’re missing out on (but only those interested enough to have spent quality time on your page). And yes, with repeat ad impressions you should see an increase in conversions.

    But before you flip the remarketing switch, dig deeper to find out why they didn’t convert in the first place.

    Put yourself in the shoes of your would-be customer. Compare your competitors’ offers with yours. Spot check your landing page. And double-check your analytics reports to make sure that everything is working as expected.

    If your conversion rates are a problem, you should do what you can to improve them before you get to remarketing. You’ll increase your chances of winning over returning visitors gracious enough to give you a second chance.

    Yes, an incentive (a discount or additional bonus) can help sway the fence-sitters who didn’t see enough value in your original offer. But that alone is unlikely to change your conversion rates from subterranean to stellar.

    So, remarketing? Yes, but check you have the basics right first.

    Make sure you haven’t skipped over any of the expert recommendations in this article. Then let’s look at what else might be going on.

    Tracking issues: Check for significant disparities between click and session numbers. Make sure that UTM referral code is not being overwritten: page redirects, missing analytics code, on-page elements with UTM tracking, and payment gateways are usually to blame.

    Technical issues: Look closely at your analytics reports. Are conversion rates worse for some devices, browsers or operating systems? Are page load times up to scratch? Turn to session tracking software like HotJar, SessionCam and Clicktale to see exactly where the problems are.

    Competitor offers: Does yours stack up? See who else comes up in Google paid and organic results. If you checked before writing your ads, check again. Alert competitors and newcomers may have matched or undercut your offer, and now they’re converting the visitors you couldn’t. Any amount of remarketing is not going to change that unless you can respond.

    Search queries: Your keyword list may look good, but what about the actual search queries triggering your ads? Often the sheer volume of unique queries means that search query reports don’t get the attention they deserve. But you don’t have to work through them row-by-tedious-row. Look for any common but irrelevant themes, and add related terms to your negative keyword list.

    Poor placement: In the same way that irrelevant search queries can kill a search campaign, low quality websites, apps, and YouTube channels can undermine display ad performance. Be selective — this is why you have a placement exclusion list.

    Credibility: Yes, your page may be oozing with social proof (you’ve got testimonials, third party reviews, and high-fives from your recent customers). But make sure everything is plausible, and bold assertions are substantiated elsewhere in your copy.

    And don’t stop there. Sometimes it’s the little things that undermine people’s trust, stopping them from converting. That includes poorly written copy littered with typos and spelling errors. Cheesy stock images. And calls-to-action that fail to address concerns as to what happens next.

    Your value proposition: Is it obvious what you’re offering? Make sure you’ve described your product or service in language that your customers use, not in your own marketing jargon.

    Not every solution can be unique (but if yours is in some way that’s important to your customers, then say so).

    Are you addressing a common problem that your target audience has? If it’s a new or niche product, are you making clear what problem it solves? Your target audience might not be aware they have a problem.

    And try to make sure that your most important selling points appear above-the-fold.

    Your conversion funnel: If dropout is high once people start checkout, look for obstacles in the process. Forms that ask for too much (or too sensitive) information or where the expected input is not obvious. If payment options are limited, shipping fees high and delivery times too long or your return policy too vague.

    Your analytics will highlight where you have the problem, but session tracking software (or user testing) will unearth why there’s a problem.

    Pricing options: If you think that the issue is your price, then you’ve not convinced people you offer enough value. Check to see what competitors are doing, and what you can say that makes your offer stand out in comparison. But also, don’t be afraid to test different price points. And, if your product or service allows it, present 2-3 prices for different options (too many and you’ll make it too hard to choose). Make sure it’s easy to compare what you get (and don’t get) for each option.

    Checked everything? Done everything? And now your conversion rates have improved?

    Then, yes, by all means. Remarketing.”

Scott Salwolke

I've been doing online marketing since 2004 with my specialty being Google Ads Campaigns. My focus is on search campaigns and I work as both a consultant or as an ads manager. I specialize in working with service providers and B2B companies.
https://www.adhocmarketing.com

  • People Scan First, Then Read. Draw People Onto Your Page and Give Them a Reason to Read More to Convert.

    – “People clicked on your ad because something about it attracted their attention. Now that they’ve landed on your site you have to keep their attention.

    If what you do or are offering is simple to understand, then you might only need a paragraph or two. If your product is more complex or your business more competitive, however, you might need a lot more content.

    There is nothing wrong with longer copy if that is what it takes. Unfortunately, if all they see are blocks of text their eyes are likely to glaze over and they will hit the back button.

    No matter the length of the page, you most likely will have to draw them in first.

    It is easy to say people don’t read anymore, but when they’re searching for information on a business, product, or service they’re often in a hurry. To capture their attention, you need to give them information they can grasp just by skimming your page.

    There are several ways to capture their attention and provide relevant information in bite-size pieces. What you want to highlight is the pain they are feeling, the benefits of your products or services, or the experience of your company.

    Headlines and subheads automatically stand out on a page. Many sites simply have a single headline that they haven’t put too much thought into.

    Use headlines throughout a page to break up the content into different sections. They should briefly summarize what is to follow and why it’s important.

    Adding subheads can help to provide crucial information. These are smaller headlines that appear just above or below the headline. Subheads should focus on a benefit they will find in that content.

    Put in the time necessary to create headlines that are compelling.

    Bullet points are another way to convey important information. Typically, you have 3-5 elements listed. Keep the lines as short as you can, although varying up their length can be effective.

    Your list should either focus on what makes your business stand out from the competition or the benefits of your products or service.

    Use bolded text in sentences, even in lists, to highlight specific benefits or facts. When determining what information to bold, focus on the elements that are unique to your business or product.

    Another place to use bolded text is in your testimonials. Highlighting something unique or specific they said about your business. Anything to differentiate yourself from the competition.

    Remember that your bolding needs to make sense on its own even if it is not a complete sentence.

    In the example below I’d argue the bolded text is being misused and doesn’t make sense out of context. Instead of highlighting “get max money,” it would be better to highlight “know the value of your claim.”

    And does being a real auto accident attorney separate you from the competition?!

    Bolded text on Google Ads landing page

    In the second example below, bolded text is put to better use. And the bullet lists provide a strong overview of what clients can expect with their services.

    bolding text on a landing page for google ads

    I’d suggest their list would have been even more effective had certain elements of the list been bolded as well. They could have bolded “immediate financial relief” or “secure the medical treatment you need,” for example.

    One thing to notice in the example is that they’ve used captions for their photo. Captions and text on a graphic are another way to relate information.

    Although the goal is to make your page more accessible when you have a lot of content, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t edit your copy as much as possible. Edit it down as much as you can, then incorporate these suggestions.

    The goal of your work should be to either convince the reader to take an action or at the very least read more.

    You only have a short amount of time to capture their attention and keep them on your site or take some sort of action. Anything you can do to make your business or what you offer to stand out, the better.”

Justin Weyant

Justin is an Senior Consultant at WordStream, who has analyzed thousands of paid search and paid social campaigns. He has helped SMBs improve their ROI for 4 and a half years.
https://www.wordstream.com/

  • Analyze Your Search Terms Report

    – “The first step in determining how to optimize your landing pages for Google Ads is to analyze your Search Terms report in your ad account. If you sort your search terms by impressions, you can look for trends in the most commonly searched terms that your ads are showing up for. Your landing pages need to match your market demand, so you should create landing pages that are relevant to the trends that you notice. You may already have relevant landing pages on your website, so you can direct users to those pages if that’s the case. However, you should create new landing pages when you find search terms that are relevant to your services, but you don’t have a specific, relevant landing page for that search.

    For example, if you are a general contractor, your customers come to you for a wide range of projects. Someone looking for window replacements should go to a landing page about windows, and someone looking for roof repairs should go to a landing page about roofs. Businesses get higher Quality Scores and Conversion Rates when they create landing pages that are relevant to a specific location (ex. town,county,state), service (ex. criminal defense, corporate law, family law), or intent (ex. discount, 24/hour, free shipping). Additionally, you should consider creating a competitor comparison landing page if you notice users are looking for your competitors a lot! That way you can convince them why they should use you instead of the brand they are searching for.”

Chris & Alicia Whitbread

Chris & his wife Alicia take a personalised approach to Google Ads management. They are an affordable Google Partner agency that delivers big results for their clients & specialise in scaling ecommerce businesses.
http://www.theadsmanager.com.au

  • Deliver Different Experiences During the Conversion Cycle

    – “In Google Ads you can use custom-combination lists to build sets of conditions from existing remarketing lists (including the Remarketing Audiences you create in Analytics), and then display your remarketing ads to users who meet those conditions.

    You can use this feature to show ads to users at different periods of their conversion path – Example: 1-7 Days, 8-10 Days, 11-14 Days.

    For each of these remarketing ads, you can deliver a customised landing page with different offers or messages to encourage the user to convert. And hey – Don’t be lazy! Split test those CTA’s!”

Johannes Klupfel

Johannes is the founder and director of Cloud Clicks, a digital advertising agency in Australia. He's been growing businesses using Google and Facebook Ads since 2009. He likes to read, travel and spend time with his family.
http://cloudclicks.com.au

  • Split Test Big Ideas

    – “When it comes to optimizing landing pages for Google Ads, there are a million things you could be doing. Split testing is the obvious choice. For starters though, make sure that your landing page is loading blazing fast. Ideally, it should load in 2-3 seconds or less. There is no use in split testing anything if you lose the majority of your website visitors before the page is fully loaded.

    I prefer to use a third-party platform like Unbounce to host landing pages for myself and my clients. Another good option is clickfunnels. Unbounce allows me to split test my landing page and provides fast hosting, plus a few other bits and pieces that I like. When doing any split test, test only one thing at a time. For example, test the headline, test a completely different copy or offer. Test an image or a layout. Test a different colour scheme. Don’t get bogged down testing tiny changes like the colour of a button. Yes, I’ve heard the stories of a button colour change increasing conversion rate by 140%. It rarely happens though, so focus on big tests first and keep improving your conversion rate. If you test too many things at a time, you won’t know what made the difference.”

Justice Ekhaguere

ROI Focused Paid Media Manager with 3 years experience in the SaaS & Ecommerce space.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justice-ekhaguere-5157a739/

  • Test a Quiz or Messenger Bot Style Landing Page

    – “Oftentimes the best online marketers, are actually offline marketers.

    Offline Marketers are great at analyzing conversion issues because they have firsthand experience into how people actually react to things in real life.

    So when you start to consider how you can improve your landing page, ask yourself if what you’re doing online would make sense to do offline?

    For example, if we were trying to sell cars and someone walked into our dealership… would we jump on them and try to show them our best deals and latest models??

    No, a seasoned salesman would qualify the prospect to see what they’re intentions were… do they want to buy now? or just look? etc

    Key insight: The salesman wouldn’t qualify you by having you fill out an application right away. He would most likely start a conversation and figure out how to best help you.

    In that conversation, he would most likely get all the information he would have gotten on an application without the friction as well.

    How does this translate into google landing pages?

    If you allow people to qualify themselves to you before asking them to fill out an application, you’re more likely to get them to invest into your sales process.

    As they get more invested, you get more information on them without as much resistance.

    How can this be implemented?

    There are a few ways to go about this:

    1. You can build a messenger bot that asks people questions in a fun and conversational manner… and send people to that instead of a traditional landing page. Popular platforms include manychat.com, chatfuel.com, and mobilemonkey.com.
    2. You can create an online quiz experience as opposed to the traditional landing page using a platform like typeform.com. I’ve seen a lot of nutrition and supplement companies use this method on their landing pages with great success.

      Here are a few for reference:

      – https://ketocycle.diet/
      – https://usaf.yourketo.diet/
      – https://simpleketosystem.com/

    The theory behind why this experience works comes from Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence.

    The Theory is called Commit and Consistency.

    Essentially, if you can get someone to take a small action, they’re much more likely to take the another bigger action. The goal is to slow play them to your intended goal, instead of going for it right away.

    Now go and test it out for yourselves!”

Adam Mackay

A face to face solution selling professional, Adam has adapted 15 years of sales skills to the world of Search Advertising to help his clients 'sell' their key benefits, & provide the best solutions to their customers.
http://www.adwordswork.com

  • Highlight Your Key Selling Points

    – “When people are searching for something, whether it be using Google Search, Bing (or even the Yellow Pages!), they all have something in common:

    They all want the best solution for them, at the specific point in time that they are searching.

    When they search, they are going to be provided with a bigger range of options than they have ever seen previously. The ease of online advertising means that you now have more competitors going after that customer than ever before.

    This makes it more important than ever to ensure that when someone does click your Ad, and arrives on your Landing Page, that they are provided with a genuine point of difference. Your Landing Page needs to sell the reason why they should take the next step with you – and not one of your competitors.

    All too often, businesses and ad agencies look at the competition, and try to replicate what they are saying. This results in websites and Landing Pages from every advertiser saying the same things as each other: “best service” or “most experienced” or “locally owned.”

    Not only are these statements boring platitudes that offer nothing to a prospective customer – they are also the same things your prospective customer is going to read in the Ads and Landing Pages of your competitors. If they see the same thing from every advertiser, how are they supposed to choose?

    This is where it becomes crucial to highlight very early on in your Landing Page content the specific benefits, selling points, and competitive advantages your business has to offer to your prospective customer. They need to understand what’s in it for them – why should they take the next step and enquire or buy with you?

    Don’t just follow what your competitors are doing and saying – and don’t say anything that can’t be proven. If you say “we have the best customer service” and believe that its a key selling point, then you better be able to back it up with strong evidence and prove how your customer service is different to, or better than, your competitors.

    The people who visit your Landing Pages are still people. Write your Landing Page to speak to them, in the same way you would speak to them face to face. It’s all too easy for them to just hit the ‘back’ button and keep on searching, if you can’t give them a reason to work with you.”

Mate Hernadi

Mate has around 10 years of online marketing experience with a focus on PPC, Analytics, and Automation. He leads a team of PPC experts as Head of PPC. He prefers strategy these days but also loves a nice little growth hack.
https://evolutagency.com/

  • Match Your Message to the Intent of the Search, Not Just the Keyword.

    – “Context above all. Already your keyword research should be based on a thorough thinking about your marketing funnel. According to that, you have to differentiate between multiple types of stages: Unaware, Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, and Most Aware.

    schwartz five levels of awareness

    These categories reflect the main stages of your funnel, and basically mirror the intent of your potential customers at those stages.

    When you have the segmented keyword research, you have to consider your landing page. You have to satisfy Google so it recognizes your content as relevant, and rewards you with an ‘above average’ landing page experience. At the same time, you have to pay attention to where your potential customers expect to get after clicking on your ad.

    Try to match these expectations with an adequate copy style, message, and offer.

    Some keywords are broad or difficult to categorize, so if you are not sure which funnel level they belong to, try split testing the page with messages addressing the different stages.”

Thomas Jaskov

Thomas Jaskov is a senior SEO Expert and Google Ads (AdWords) consultant at Jaskov Consult ApS
https://jaskovconsult.dk/en/

  • Less is More – Reduce Waste

    – “If your goal is to better optimize your landing pages for Google Ads, you really need to think in terms of web usability and conversion rate optimization. If you don’t know so much about these topics, you can start with reading a great book called “Don’t Make Me Think” written by Steve Krug.

    Then try to imagine this scenario:

    1. John wants to buy 10 red roses for his girlfriend
    2. He does a search on Google for “buy red roses”
    3. He then clicks on your Google ad
    4. John arives on your landing page… On your landing page, there are 100 different flower types. 99 of those flowers are not red roses. One of them is “red roses”…

    Unfortunately John, doesn’t have the patience (or time) to look at all the products on your landing page, so he leaves.

    Your bounce rate goes up, this signals to Google, that the user didn’t find, what he was looking for, and your Google Ads Quality Score goes down.

    This was just one example of you giving too much. And if you know a little about “Lean” and “Six Sigma”, you would know, that the 99 products, which weren’t the red roses on your landing page, would be considered “waste”.

    What you really want to do is to minimize the amount of waste on your landing page, and give your visitors exactly what they are looking for, so they have a higher chance of achieving their desired outcome.

    • If your visitor searches for “red roses”, then give them red roses.
    • If your visitors are looking for “red flowers”, then give them red roses, red tulips, red dahlias etc.
    • If your visitors are looking for “flowers”, then give them roses, tulips, dahlias etc.

    A common mistake when designing landing pages is that there is too much waste on the landing page. That’s not good for conversion rates, and it is not good for your Google Ads Quality Score. You need to remove as much waste as possible. Less waste is more sales… less is more!”

Dan Rospedzihowski

Head of PPC at Dark Horse with 10+ years of experience managing some of the UK's largest PPC & Paid Social accounts
http://darkhorse.co

  • Measure Crucial Events with Google Tag Manager

    – “Visually appealing and navigable landing pages lead to a well optimised, user friendly experience. Get all of those combinations right and you can reap the rewards of profitability!

    Here I’ll be highlighting some of the most important KPIs to optimise towards, enabling you to get the most out of your ad spend. There are many analytics tools to choose from but I’ll be guiding you on one of the most important of those, Google Tag Manager (GTM).

    Introduction to GTM:

    GTM works in conjunction with Google Analytics (GA), which is widely known to be one of the most effective and free eCommerce reporting tools. GA sends event data (events are just another word for goals or actions completed by a user on your landing page) which can then appear in your Google Ads account. Having this data link to your Google Ads account offers the ability to optimise with maximum effectiveness as it means everything sits under one roof, giving you visibility on all key metrics. This helps to save you time and achieve the best possible performance.

    How Does GTM Work?:

    • GTM gathers event data specific to each channel or campaign
    • This is sent directly to Google Analytics
    • Google Analytics sends that data directly to Google Ads
    • All the data is viewable in Google Ads

    Getting Started:

    To get started, you’ll need to install the GTM code (container snippet) on the pages which you’d like to track. Here’s a link to the full support guide:

    https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6103696?hl=en

    If you’re using WordPress, Shopify or other templated platforms like Wix, Squarespace or Unbounce you can find guides quite easily online.

    Top 5 Tags/Events:

    This is the most important part where I’ll explain what events are, why to use them and provide links on how to install.

    Form Submissions:

    Most landing pages are geared towards form submissions and these are typically the most important goal to measure. These should be tagged individually as sometimes there may be more than one way to capture user data. Typical examples of these goals are: leads, call backs, quotes etc.

    Button Clicks:

    Landing page best practice guides would usually steer you down the path towards only focusing on one main call to action (CTA). If you do offer multiple CTAs on the same page it’s important to tag these separately to ensure you can measure the impact your optimisations may have on the different goals. If one is performing much better than the other, consider removing the lower performing CTA in a split test scenario. Another reason may be to understand individual campaign or keyword level performance within your ad account.

    It’s common to see variations in user journeys based on different keywords or campaign entry points. For example, upper funnel queries may result in button A performing better than button B. This type of scenario may lead to new landing pages being built for different keyword groups.

    Call Tracking:

    Often overlooked or set up incorrectly, call tracking enables the advertiser to see how many calls were made by users who clicked on your ad. This works by dynamically changing the number on a landing page to a ‘google forwarding number’ without any extra cost. Call details can then be tracked without interfering with the user experience and can be localised to minimise any performance issues. You’ll be able to see the duration and volume of calls which will give you valuable insights into call quality.

    To test this you can use the standard method via the Google Tag Assistant tool. If you’d like to see it in real time, you could do so at the expense of a click on an ad so make sure you choose the keyword wisely to save on cost! More information on call tracking here:

    https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6095883?hl=en-GB

    Scroll Depth:

    This handy metric can tell you how far a user has scrolled down a particular web page and is one of my favourite secondary KPIs to measure. Secondary KPIs can help to decipher why primary objectives are not being met. It’s also a good alternative to the time on site metric as users can often leave web pages open which can skew the data (you can adjust the idle limit for avg session duration if this is a problem you’re having).

    Scroll depth tracking can be configured towards the percentages that you wish to measure. If it’s crucial for you to know how many users scroll 15% down the page, that’s easy to set up. You can choose the pages which you wish to measure too so that it doesn’t fire across your whole website. With the correct information, this can be a really powerful optimisation goal!

    More info and how to install here:

    https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/7679218?hl=en

    Custom Events:

    This feature demonstrates the versatility of GTM as a powerful goal tracking tool and is able to tag almost everything else you might wish to report on. You can tag a wide variety of events from mouseovers to combinations of goals, some of which may not be within the standard event list. These may need some developer work to create customised scripts. There’s a great blog which will help with your overall understanding here:

    https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/google-tag-manager-custom-event-trigger/”

Kaspars Brencans

PPC without CRO is like a wedding without music!
https://bestppc.marketing

  • Bundle Related Products/Services to Increase Customer Value

    – “When your target audience is reaching your landing page… are they looking only for that 1 thing/service that they originally typed into Google, or, is it only one of the things they actually need?

    As a prime example to explain what I mean – we have a cleaning company as a client in Ohio. We originally crafted landing pages for each of the services they offer. While the landing page was converting, after reviewing the lead info – about 80% of the inquiries were interested whether the company offers other types of cleaning services as well.

    From there – we ended up creating a “general” landing page where we simply outlined the company’s info; yet, we included a flyer that they have been using for years IRL with promos on different special offers (house cleaning, carpet cleaning, chimney sweep, etc. at discounted rates) – and that was probably the best decision we ever made for that client.

    Our conversion rates increased by roughly 22% and the average customer value skyrocketed to nearly 3x of what it was originally by simply adding more services that are not relevant to the original search, yet, can be bundled & that has been absolutely killing it since.”

Billy Robinson

Google Ads Lead Generation Expert
http://www.synq.com.au

  • Use the C/E/A Methodology

    – “This stands for Confirm/Engage/Act. Basically if the search query is health insurance for women, then when the user lands on your landing page, in the top left corner, she should see an image of a woman – yes you can gender target your campaigns in Google Ads too. She should also see the phrase she just typed “health insurance for women” as well – that’s your “C” for Confirmation Zone.

    Next, moving from left to right, top to bottom, you should show some content that explains why your business is the best place for a woman to get her health insurance. Awards, user reviews, stats & more are ideal here. This is your “E” for engagement zone.

    Finally, to the right side, but above the fold is your “A” for Action zone. This is where your desired call to action should be present. A common action is “Get a quote” or “Book a consultation” etc.

    This sequence is in order of how the user’s eye naturally moves across the page, from left to right, top to bottom. It provides the things the user needs to see in order to be most likely to take action.”

David Rothwell

David Rothwell is a 15 years expert with Google Ads and the author of 'The Google Ads Bible for eCommerce'. His upcoming book, training, and support program "Clicks to Money - Making Google Ads Pay (No Agency Needed)" will be the new must-have for every business owner who hates paying Google.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrothwellgoogleads/

  • Making Money with Google Ads Using Static and Dynamic Conversion Tracking

    – “The purpose of your business is to make money. The biggest problem with Google Ads is not knowing if you are making any money. That’s like putting money into a slot machine and never getting any back. So why do so many advertisers on Google still gamble like this?

    Even after fifteen years of client campaign management, I still see the same mistake which makes management, optimization, and scale of Google Ads campaigns impossible – not knowing how much money you’re making and your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

    ROAS is the amount of money your campaigns made, divided by the cost. Anything less than 1.00 (break-even) means you are losing money, unless your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) brings you repeat purchases. You want to get to break-even as fast as possible so you can begin to optimise and scale your campaigns to save wasted money, and make more money.

    Your ROAS is positive, you are now running a profit center where you want to spend as much money as Google can take off you, instead of a cost center with limited budgets. Imagine putting money into that slot machine and always getting more back than you put in? How much money would you put in it? All of it, until it stopped taking it or your bank account couldn’t hold any more.

    Google Ads - Limited Budget
    Limited budgets means you are running Google Ads as a cost center, not a profit center

    Google Ads - Profit Centre
    When Google Ads is a profit center, your daily budget is “Please take more money Google”

    Does this mean we would spend that outrageous amount of money? No! Because there are not an unlimited amount of people looking, or clicks, for any industry. But when your campaigns are a profit center, you want your ads to reach as many people as possible, as often as possible, for maximum clicks, conversion opportunities, sales and revenue.

    Google Ads is Math

    So how do we figure out our ROAS?

    It’s actually simple math. Here’s the equation:

    ROAS = (Revenue / Cost per Click) * Conversion Rate %

    Where Revenue = (Average Order Value*Customer Lifetime Value)

    Every Google advertiser knows their Cost per Click. But what many don’t know is their revenue and their conversion rate of visitors (clicks) to money. This is why conversion tracking is so important. Without it you cannot know two of the three critical numbers to calculate your ROAS:

    1. Cost per click
    2. Revenue (money you got paid)
    3. Conversion Rate (how many visitors to your page paid you)

    If you are paying an agency to run your campaigns and they cannot tell you your ROAS, they are getting paid even when you are not.

    Google Ads - ROAS calculation
    You can calculate your ROAS with a simple spreadsheet (red means losing money)

    The key to ROAS – Conversion Tracking

    Conversion tracking is quite simple to set up, and can track sales, bookings, leads, or anything else of interest. It can also track actual purchases and money for ecommerce merchants and digital product businesses who get an online transaction or shopping cart payment.

    The biggest challenge for service-based businesses is when tracking leads. I have spoken to many business owners who actually have no idea what the value of their leads is. You have to know the value of the lead, in other words, the conversion rate of the lead to money, and how much money you will be paid. Complex multi-step sales processes really need a Customer Relationship Management tool, or CRM (e.g. Salesforce), which is beyond the scope of this article.

    Business is Numbers

    Service businesses can still use average order values though. One client who ran an airport transfer service simply averaged out all his seat booking prices at £90. We tracked his booking conversions and because we only ever spent less than £5 to get them (for ten years running, during which time he continually grew his business by 15x) we were getting a ROAS of almost 20x. That’s 2,000 %.

    For every £1 he spent on ads, he got £20 back. The slot machine again. That business owner was so successful he bought out two competitors and sold his business to an international company. All because of Google Ads, with over 1,000 campaigns running in 33 countries worldwide.

    Google Ads - Service Business ROAS
    Service business with an ROAS (ROI) of 1,944%

    “Prescription Without Diagnosis is Malpractice”

    If you get leads, you usually have to make contact with that person anyway. So that’s effectively an appointment. Instead of leads, take online self-service appointment bookings instead.

    You want to diagnose and disqualify unsuitable prospects who may not have the problem you solve, the money to pay for it and other factors. You also want to pre-sell your solution to appropriate prospects ready to have a serious sales conversation during the appointment, with a high probability of converting them to the sale and getting paid.

    Say you’re a consultant or coach selling your time. If your average order value is an hour of your time for £200, and your close rate to payment is 30% then the lead is worth £60. If you spend anything less than £60 per lead, you are making money. Then all you need is a full calendar …

    Follow the Money

    Conversion tracking is all based on cookies (small bits of code placed on the device following the ad click). Tracking fails if users block or clean cookies, or change devices which cookies don’t follow. Google Ads cookies can last up to 90 days.

    You have to place conversion tracking code on the page you want people to finally reach which has a known revenue value, like a booking or purchase conversion thank you page. This page has to be on the same domain as the rest of your website, so if you’re using a hosted platform like Kartra make sure you preserve the domain across all pages. Cross-domain tracking is not supported.

    Tracking works down to the keyword and ad level, allowing converting ads and keywords to be optimised and scaled.

    1. Google user types a search
    2. Your ad may display (an impression)
    3. You may get a click (clickthrough rate)
    4. User device is cookied
    5. If the visitor reaches your final thank you page the cookie on their device matches the tracking code and a conversion is tracked, including the revenue value if so configured

    Google Ads Audits Without Money are Pointless

    Along with limited budgets as above, not turning conversion tracking on and configuring it correctly is a “smoking gun” that your campaigns are a cost center, not a profit center. It’s the commonest problem, and the first thing I check when doing an account audit. Every agency out there will offer you a free campaign audit but unless you can see the essential “money metrics” of sales, revenue and ROAS there’s no point. Although there are campaign best practices, you will not know what to do unless you are guided by the money you’re making.

    Google Ads - Airline Conversions FAIL
    Fail! This airline’s conversions were multiple counted showing ridiculous numbers

    How to Setup Conversion Tracking

    1. Click Tools and Settings and select Conversions

    Google Ads - Click Tools and Settings and select Conversions

    2. Click the +Conversions box

    Google Ads - Click the +Conversions box

    3. Select website conversions

    Google Ads - Select website conversions

    4. We’re going to use book appointment for this example

    Google Ads - book appointment

    The category you use will depend on what you sell, who buys it, how much you charge, how you get paid, how often, what platforms you use for bookings, online payments, shopping cart purchases etc.

    Remember, instead of leads, use self-service online appointments. The platform you use e.g. Calendly.com will need to be able to integrate with Google Ads conversion tracking. There are many to choose from in Capterra.com. Make sure the one you choose plays nicely with Google Ads (not Google Analytics) because not all of them do.

    5. Give it a name

    Google Ads - Give it a conversion name

    6. For appointments and leads, use the same value and £1 or an average order value

    Google Ads - For appointments and leads, use the same value and £1 or an average order value_

    Refer to the consultant example above to determine this number.

    If you sell digital or physical products and take online payment or shopping cart orders, use different values for each conversion. You will also need to adapt the code to capture the revenue value (dynamic conversion tracking), and this varies depending on what technology your website is built with. There are help files to guide you. Some shopping carts e.g. Shopify make this easy with direct integration.

    7. For leads and bookings, count one conversion

    Google Ads - For leads and bookings, count one conversion_

    For digital and physical sales with an online transaction or purchase, select every conversion.

    8. Select 90 days conversion window

    Google Ads - Select 90 days conversion window_

    Believe it or not, sales can still come in all the way up to 90 days after the ad click.

    9. Accept the other defaults but disable Enhanced CPC

    Google Ads - Accept the other defaults but disable Enhanced CPC_

    10. Install the tag, following the installation and configuration instructions

    Google Ads - Install the tag, following the installation and configuration instructions_

    11. Make sure you install both snippets correctly

    Google Ads - Make sure you install both snippets correctly_

    12. You’re done

    Google Ads - You are Done

    13. Tracking is in place ready to be tested

    Google Ads - Tracking is in place ready to be tested

    14. In the campaign overview, select columns for conversions

    Google Ads - In the campaign overview, select columns for conversions

    The columns of data you need to see are not set visible by default, so you have to enable them. You need conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate, value per conversion, total conversion value, and conversion value / cost (ROAS).

    Testing the Tracking

    Before spending money on live campaigns, it’s essential to test the tracking setup is working. You will need to make a test lead, booking or purchase on your own website. Sometimes a cost-effective way to do this is to use your own brand name in [exact match] as a keyword. Note: if Google considers this a low search volume keyword your ad may not show. In which case choose another, more general one. You will have to pay the click cost for the test.

    With digital or physical products make sure there is a cost for the item (not free) so you can be sure of tracking the actual revenue value. Target your campaign to your own location, then:

    1. Search your chosen keyword until your ad shows
    2. Clickthrough on it
    3. Complete your sales, booking or lead process
    4. Arrive at the thank you page (on the same domain, remember)

    As soon as you have seen your ad and clicked through on it, you can pause the test campaign. Tracking is not real-time so it may be a few hours until it shows. If it doesn’t show up, the implementation will need to be re-checked following all Google’s help links as relevant to your website technology.

    Google Ads - Conversion is Showing
    Success! Our conversion is showing

    Google Ads - Webinar Bookings
    This is for a webinar booking

    Here we have a count of one, 90 days window, repeat rate of 1.04, 25 bookings with a value of 25.

    Google Ads - ecommerce store tracking revenue (purchases) value
    This is for an ecommerce store tracking revenue (purchases) value

    Here we’re counting purchases, count of every, all conversions and their revenue value.

    Congratulations! You are now ready to run live campaigns and track your ROAS down to product, service, location, device, network, campaign, ad group, keyword, ad, and landing page level. Now you know what’s making you money, you are ready to increase your bids and budgets to achieve your financial goals. You will also be able to save wasted ad spend and make more money safely.

    And with sufficient conversion tracking data over time, automated bid management can make campaigns run reliably with no manual bid management needed, sometimes for long periods of time like months or even years – with no agency needed.

    The top four most common mistakes I see people make with their Google Ads landing pages:

    1. Not tracking conversions
    2. Not knowing their Average Order Value (AOV)
    3. Not knowing their page conversion rate %
    4. Not knowing their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)”

Freddy Heppell

Freddy is a Digital Account Manager at Repeat Digital, based in Nottingham. He helps businesses generate more leads and sales from their pay-per-click marketing, specialising in Google Ads.
https://www.repeatdigital.com/

  • Make Your Landing Page Trustworthy

    – “Gaining the trust of your visitors is paramount when optimising your landing page to encourage conversions.

    Unless you have the power of a strong brand, you need to develop trust with your users to encourage them to take the desired outcome on your landing page.

    In order to make your landing pages trustworthy, there are a number of things you can do.

    First off, you can share more information about your company. This can be done by adding a small ‘About’ section on your landing page, using images of your employees to portray who you are, where you’re based and what you do.

    Then, add social proof, a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book, Influence. There are many ways you can leverage this psychological trigger. The most effective forms are testimonials from happy customers, ratings and reviews, and case studies. It is important to note that these should not be clickable, so to encourage a conversion on the landing page your user has been sent to.

    This landing page from “Webtrends Optimize” includes a testimonial from a customer, along with four case studies emphasising successful KPI increases for their customers.

    Webtrends Optimize
    Click to Enlarge

    Finally, add at least one “trust element”. This can be any kind of security badge, guarantee, or membership of a trusted organisation such as the ICO, that lets them know the information they are about to share with you is safe.”

Jeenfer Wilson

Jeenfer is the founder and CEO of Verrunt, a digital marketing agency that specializes in setting up and managing effective Google Ads campaigns for local businesses.
https://verrunt.com

  • Focus on 1 Conversion Goal

    – “When you spend dollars on a click from Google Ads, the usual mindset is to get as much revenue from that particular click. I have seen landing pages that promote a free e-book, also promote the business and in addition to providing a free demo of the product. While this school of thought might look harmless, most landing pages built with this objective end up counter-productive. Let me explain why.

    With a multitude of options available, people’s attention span is too low. If they gave you a chance by clicking on your ad, give them what they want right away.

    If you promised a free-ebook in the ad, just give them the e-book. Mention only about your e-book and nothing else. Of course, you can give them as much detail as possible about your awesome e-book, but don’t talk about how awesome your business or product is; no, not yet. Once you get the lead, you will have a lot of time and channels to do that.

    Every landing page should have one and only one goal.

    I’d even say even if the goal is one, give the visitor only 1 choice. Let me explain that a bit.

    Consider you are a local moving company and you process both form inquiries and leads, I’d strongly recommend using only one of the channels. If you want the user to pick up his phone and give you a call, only add your phone number as buttons. Don’t add your form anywhere on the page. Persuade them to give you a call. That’s everything the landing page should do.

    But what if you believe form inquiries also might do well? Do an A/B test. Keep all design elements the same and instead of the call button use a form that asks the visitors to fill the form to get a free quote. Channel 50% of the traffic to this version and run the test till you get statistically significant data to decide the winner.

    This is exactly what we have done for one of our clients who had this dilemma.

    Split Test Landing Page
    Click to Enlarge

    It’s still early days, but I believe I brought home the point.

    But there is still an option to let the visitor know more about your business or your product. Any guesses? The THANK YOU page. You have already got what you wanted and so has the visitor. Now you can nudge the visitor closer to what you offer without pissing him off.

    So, to summarise 1 landing page = 1 conversion goal and 1 way to attain them.”

Eric Farmer

Eric lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with his family and is currently the Director of Paid Media at BestCompany. He has been doing PPC since 2008 and he self-taught himself Google Adwords.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericdfarmer/

  • Less Navigation + Strong CTA

    – “There is a time and place for lengthy, wordy website pages where visitors can navigate your website at will. Your PPC lander is not this place. Since you’re paying hard-earned money for every visit to these pages, you need a conversion rate that gives you a solid ROAS (return on ad spend).

    You can hold your visitors hands down the conversion path without them even really knowing it. This is the balance you’re looking for: not too pushy, but minimal choices that guide visitors to convert.

    So what exactly am I referring to? Well, it can be a lot of things, so I’ll give you my top 3 tips:

    1. If you can’t code the landing page to your needs, use a third-party service that specifically helps you create PPC landing pages in just a few hours (I’ve had great success with unbounce and instapages).
    2. Remove the nav bar. This gives visitors way too many options to get distracted and lose their way. You want to keep them on the page you paid money to get them to!
    3. Include one, very clear and visible CTA (call to action) that lets visitors know exactly what they are committing to.

    Overall, in my experience, the more honest and transparent you are, the more you will be trusted and the more your landing page will convert. Good luck!”

Vincent Tobiaz

Worked in Web Design since 1998, and in 2005 ventured into WordPress, SEO/PPC/Social Digital Marketing experiences. Throughout his career has worked with everything from small businesses to Fortune 500s such as Verizon, AT&T, Citi & AARP.
https://www.seosmooth.com/

  • Keep On-Page SEO Best Practices in Mind

    – “It is no secret that Google will scan your landing page to see how relevant it is to the searcher’s query. Based on that relevance and other factors Google will assign your landing page a score. The higher the score, the better your chances are at beating out the competition in search results.

    In my experience, using SEO best practices for landing pages will increase the landing page score that Google gives your page. This means that focusing on things like load time, a secure website, and AMP pages are all very important. BUT what a lot of people don’t focus on are the other bits of on-page SEO best practices like:

    • Adding ALT tags (that match your targeted keywords) to the images on the page
    • Focusing on user experience and how easy your landing page is to navigate
    • Adding a meta description that matches your targeted keywords

    If you keep on-page SEO best practices in mind when creating a landing page for your Google ads, it will give you the extra edge over the competition that you might need to beat them out in search results.”

Roy Steves

Originally a web developer, eventually the VP of Digital Marketing for Leslie’s Pool Supplies, and now founder of SEM agency StatBid, Roy’s path centers on using math to improve eCommerce operations. His team specializes in paid search for DtC and retail eCommerce companies, focusing on efficiency and consistency of performance.
https://www.statbid.com/

  • Track Changes and Tests Using Notes Feature

    – “If there’s one small thing (so small, most people totally overlook it) that can make a huge difference, it’s keeping track of the changes you’re making and tests you’re running with the Notes feature in Google Ads.

    If you’re making big moves, be sure to drop notes into your Google Ads campaign to indicate what you did, and why. It’s a lot like the Annotations in Analytics, but you can add date-specific notes to either individual campaigns, or to the account itself. With the date of the change within your date range, click on the chart to “Add Note”.

    Add Note to Google Ads

    Then, add some details for the person managing this in the future (especially if it’s you!).

    Google Ads Add Note

    Little gray boxes will appear under the timeline, which reveal the notes for that day when clicked:

    Google Ads Notes Feature

    Whether it’s a month from now, or a year from now, you’ll be thankful that you’d stashed that context somewhere, so that you can quickly make sense of what might be driving changes in performance.

    I certainly notice the absence of Notes when I’m trying to make sense of a new account, or one I haven’t looked at in a while. When a campaign suddenly changed behavior in the past, a well placed Note can be a life saver!”

Steven Hammer

Steve Hammer is the President and co-Founder of RankHammer, the 2015 US search awards small agency of the year. Steve is a sought after speaker on the subjects of search marketing, PPC and analytics. In particular, he has been noted as a leader in AdWords Scripts and Google Tag Manager.
http://www.rankhammer.com

  • Consistent Wording Between Ads and Landing Pages

    – “You want to sound like a broken record when you’re making a landing page for your ads. If you use a phrase in the ad, use the exact same one on the landing page. Don’t worry about boring the audience. If you call yourself the greatest solution, don’t call yourself the best on the landing page. It needs to be that level of matching.

    Remarkable consistency pays off because the user doesn’t need to think if they’re in the right place. Something caught their attention in the ad, so if you don’t use the same thing on the landing page there’s a good chance they might get confused. Think of it like a pop song. The hook that gets you in the first part needs to be around for the rest of the song.”

Patrick Jongbloed

Patrick Jongbloed has worked in search marketing for over 7 years now and currently looks after Digital Marketing & Business Intelligence at e-Careers, a Ed Tech company focusing on professional qualifications.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjongbloed/

  • Master the Process and Keep Track of Learnings

    – “Landing Page Optimization for any business can be an exciting project. Who’d have thought that changing the colour of a button doubles conversion rate or that using “Purchase here” vs. “Buy now” really doesn’t work? And that’s exactly why it is not enough to just learn and apply the individual tactics and tips that you’ll find on this page. You also need to have a solid process and way of storing your conclusions in one central place.

    See, sometimes you’ll test a hypothesis and you’ll be right. But frequently, you’re going to be wrong and you’ve learned something surprising about human behaviour. It is precisely those times you are wrong that tend to give you the most valuable insights. But what happens if in 6 months, a new member of your team looks at your landing page and says, “Why is that button round? Surely it would do much better if it were square? Let’s change it”, and they go and undo all your rounds of testing.

    Unfortunately, in larger companies and agencies, this happens all the time. New members of the team or even experienced people with solid assumptions, see something that doesn’t make sense to them and “improve” it. Don’t get me wrong – these are the kind of people you want to work with! People should always take initiative and put their thoughts forward. But it has to be done in a logical and accountable fashion.

    So what’s the solution here? After all, new colleagues can’t read your mind and can’t possibly know what you did 6 months ago. It gets even worse when you think of the loss of knowledge when you eventually move on to another company. Because of that, you want to have a really easy document to keep track of any tests you’ve done and insights you’ve had. Here is an easy example on Google Sheets which you can look at.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tudRDHpLw_DI_Dd5AJAtj0VT7FDxogNF5AEzvu_J7Xc/edit?usp=sharing

    You can make a copy and alter it to fit your purposes.”

Anton Hoelstad

Digital Marketing Consultant & Google Ads Specialist
https://antonhoelstad.dk/

  • Different Goals Should Deliver Different Goal Values

    – “When you have the option to add goals that you track for a given website, consider the option of assigning each of these different values, so that you can prioritize their value in your digital marketing efforts.

    For example, if you have goals like newsletter signup, request for quotation and using the contact form – each of these actions has very different values for the company.

    A newsletter signup could be worth 50$, whereas the “request for quotation” could be worth much, much more. These values can be added easily to the tracking, and afterwards your reporting is a lot more nuanced, and you know which keywords delivers the highest value – not most conversions at the best CPA.

    This gives you the option to switch bidding tactics to focus on ROAS (or at least value), instead of CPA.

    Remember to calculate a value, and not just use your gut feeling. What a lead is worth to you requires that you know the average value of a new customer, and the conversion rate from lead to paying customer.”

Matt Isaac

Matt Isaac is a Google Ads expert and founder of SimpleDigital.net.au. Since 2010, he has advised over 1,000 SME's and trained hundreds of staff from leading Australian and international marketing agencies. Today, he is one of Australia's most sought after SEM experts, trusted by Australia's best brands & marketing professionals.
http://simpledigital.net.au

  • Craft the Perfect Offer

    – “The most critical element of landing page design has nothing to do with the landing page itself. It is not the design, the copy, the page speed, the images – it is the offer.

    With the right offer, even the most bland and ordinary landing page will convert like crazy.

    With the wrong offer, then it doesn’t matter how good your landing page is, it will fail.

    If you are creating a landing page you should be spending at least 80% of your time crafting the perfect offer that is irresistible to your target audience.

    Here is how we generate a list off different offers, refine them and then road test them to end up with 1-2 different offers for our landing page that we can be extremely confident in.

    1. Define the target audience

    Hopefully you are already very clear on who you are targeting. If, not, take some time to answer the following questions:

    • Who are we targeting?
    • What problems are they trying to solve?
    • What stage are they at in the buyer journey?
    • What are their pain points?
    • What objections could they have related to your product/service category?
    • What could trigger them to take action now?

    Describe this in as much detail as you can.

    2. What do they need right now?

    The purpose of a landing page is to get a visitor to take action right now. When paying for Google Ad clicks we want to make every click count. This step is about trying to think about what could trigger them to take action now.

    Asking a visitor to buy your full product or service offering on the first visit is unlikely to elicit the desired response as this type of purchase decision generally requires time, research and multiple interactions.

    Instead of asking them to buy everything on the first go, create an offer that gives them a quick win and progresses them to the next stage of readiness to buy your main offering.

    Based on their current stage in the buyer decision making process you might offer the following:

    • Problem Recognition – Checklist that helps them to understand the extent of the issue or problem
    • Information search – Questionnaire that helps them to get a customised solution based on their circumstances
    • Evaluating alternatives – Price / feature comparisons
    • Purchase decision – Reassurance and social proof

    3. What can we offer?

    There are an almost endless number of forms that your offer can take. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

    • Calculator
    • Short course
    • Demonstration
    • Webinar
    • Checklist
    • Buyers guide
    • Case studies
    • Trial

    What we are looking for are offers with high perceived value to your target audience but low cost to the business. If an offer requires too much cost or development time then you can rule it out for the moment.

    Keep going until you have a list of 5 – 10 different ideas that you can implement with minimal effort.

    4. How irresistible is that offer to our audience?

    Revisit each of the offers through the lens of your target audience and specifically where they are in the buyer journey. Ask yourself the following questions about each offer you have listed in the previous step:

    • Does this offer address pain points or objections?
    • Does this offer solve a problem for them?
    • Does this offer put them in a better position or give them a quick win?
    • Is this offer timely and relevant to where my audience is currently at in the buyer decision making process?
    • Does the offer encourage them to take action now?

    Ideally you will end up with about 3-4 of the top offers that are a good fit for your audience.

    5. Test the top 3-4 offers

    This may seem counter intuitive in a recommendation about Google Ads but Facebook ads are actually a great way to test your offer.

    Facebook’s audience targeting is far more advanced than Google’s and allows us to pinpoint our target audience quickly, easily and cheaply, particularly using audience lists. It is also a lot cheaper than testing on the fly with Google because you can capture leads without the need for a landing page and all within the Facebook platform.

    Here is how you do it:

    • Upload a customer list to Facebook to create a custom audience
    • Create ads targeting your custom audience or a similar audience
    • Use your various offers as the ad copy
    • Use lead ads to capture the contact details of anyone who is interested in the offer

    Run this campaign until you have either a clear winning offer or 1-2 standouts which you can split test with the landing page.

    6. Plan the landing page

    You should now be ready to craft your landing page with a battle tested offer.”

Bruce Chant

Bruce has over 13 years' experience in digital marketing. In recent times he was Account Director of one of Australia's largest & most awarded Digital Marketing agencies, before returning to work for himself. Bruce still gets a buzz out of driving real results for real businesses.
https://digitaldynamic.com.au

  • Messaging to Explain vs Messaging to Convert

    – “No matter your service or product or niche or goal, there is no substitute for great copy.

    Most web copy is beige at best, and rarely is it focused on converting the user effectively.

    The most common trap is to believe we just need to get all the right information across to the user AND THEN they will convert. Information is not the issue, persuasion is.

    • Start with a problem. Human minds are drawn to wanting to see that resolved
    • Stop telling the user about yourself, and engage with them by describing their pain point
    • Once you’ve identified the problem, be laser sharp with how YOU can help them
    • Create tension – draw the user down the page
    • Take out Adverbs & adjectives (bring focus), use Pro-nouns (be relatable)
    • Delete. Remove unnecessary words.

    Use this type of structure for your landing page which will see your ability to convert improve dramatically:

    1. Headline statement – say what you do. Be VERY clear. Avoid vague buzzwords that say nothing!
    2. Strong Call to Action – give users something to accept or reject. Add it in the Top RIGHT making use of the eye’s natural Z pattern. AND add in middle of the header.
    3. Failure – Tell me what will happen if I don’t take action. Present the cost of NOT buying.
    4. Success – Tell me what life looks like if I do buy. Show results.
    5. The Way Forward – Spell out the way forward. Breakdown the process of doing business with you.”

Steven Kwan

Steven is the Lead Generation Guy. Through his years of experience, he has focused on the channel that has made the biggest impact to his clients bottom line - Google Ads. His aim is to educate other on how to harness the worlds most effective marketing tool so that everyone can achieve success in their business.
https://leadgenguy.co.uk

  • Keep your Call to Action (CTA) Above the Fold

    – “My one recommendation to anyone who is using Google Ads is to create the main call to action (CTA) above the fold.

    What does ‘above the fold’ mean?

    Well, before the invention of the Internet, one of the main ways for people to get information was through newspapers. Newspapers use to be folded in half, with the main headline facing on top to capture people’s attention. This is ‘above the fold’ of the newspaper.

    This translated to online with the expansion of the internet and ‘above the fold’ now means the top section of your website where people instantly land on your site.

    So take a look at these real life examples:

    Above the Fold 1
    Example #1

    CTA Not Above the Fold
    Example #2

    Both landing pages look great.

    Professionally designed.

    Colourful.

    However, one has their main call to action bang in the middle of the screen, where people can see it (example #1).

    It can’t be missed.

    Whereas with the other landing page (example #2), you need to scroll down and actually look for a call to action.

    People do not want to do extra work, especially sifting through text to find out what to do next.

    They don’t have the time…

    So make it easy for people to take action.

    Have one main call to action.

    Stick it so its one of the first things they’ll see when they land on your page.

    Make it visible.

    Make it actionable.

    If you’re doing Google Ads right, you’ll get enquiries.”

Adrian Stephenson

A seasoned PPCer with bags of practical business experience outside the world of marketing. I don’t claim to know everything – does anyone? – but finding answers by continual perseverance is what attracted me to this industry. A bit like the annoying child who only knows the word ‘why’!
http://www.doneforyouppc.co.uk

  • Get Third-Party Feedback on the Content and Usability of Your Landing Page Before Going Live

    – “Just because you completely understand your landing page doesn’t mean that the rest of the world will.Everybody is different and will see things from their own perspective. This means that your perfectly worded (in your opinion) copy could be misinterpreted.
    After all, it’s widely accepted that the ‘general public’ lacks common sense, so if there’s a way to get it wrong, they will find it.

    Also bear in mind that website visitors tend to be short on patience and will literally scan-read your page to decide whether it solves their problem.

    Consequently, and particularly on mobile, you only have a few seconds to win over your visitors.

    So, rather than relying 100% on your own judgement, get some extra eyeballs to check out the landing page.

    In the perfect world you might run it past three or four people from your target market, but in our somewhat imperfect society, a selection of diverse volunteers would be fine.

    You want them to answer three questions:

    1. What do I do next? – you’re looking to get them to take action. Whether that’s to pick up the phone, fill out a form, or make a purchase, it needs to be obvious what to do and how they need to do it.
    2. How long does it take to work out what the page is about (i.e. the product or service on offer)? – if they can’t figure it out in a few seconds you’ve got your design wrong. Avoid choices if possible, or anything else which requires a decision to be made.
    3. What would stop you from taking any action? – anything from poor punctuation/grammar to political incorrectness can sow negative seeds. Make sure your page is squeaky clean. You don’t want fence-sitters either, so make sure that the benefits are clearly displayed.

    In summary, you need to have a landing page that a 9-year old could understand and comfortably make it through to the next step in your sales funnel.”

Vincent Iachetta Jr

Vincent Iachetta Jr. is the founder and President of Peppermonkey Media. Having more than a decade of expertise in digital media, Iachetta develops high-quality marketing and advertising strategies that deliver around-the-clock real ROI for small businesses in local markets across the U.S.
https://www.peppermonkeymedia.com/

ul class=”fa-ul”>


  • Location Matters When It Matters, Which Is Always

    – “A little story…It’s lunch time. You’re starving with a side of hangry and that trail mix bar you grabbed after another late-night with a late start whirlwind out of the apartment wasn’t enough to feed a gerbil let alone provide adequate fuel to power you through a grueling day of crunching numbers and answering phone calls from pissed off clients.

    At the exact moment the pixels in your phone shine 12:00 pm you excitedly snatch your phone like an ancient hunter out in the unforgiving wilderness grasping for his bow and ask it “Hey Google, find me the best pizza place in NYC that delivers”. You can almost taste the fresh crispy, sauce covered mozzarella goodness as you anxiously await the .5 seconds it takes for Google to return you the search results page.

    Google Ads Location Matters

    You really want to take your time to read reviews and look at the gooey galleries of pizza porn but the beast in your belly forces you to smash the first result that looked somewhat relevant enough.

    The website page is only partially rendered while your finger hovers over where you somehow instinctively know the menu will be but unknowingly your efforts are in vain.

    Content and structure reveals itself and you frantically search and skim the page to get to the goods. You notice a title so you pause and stop to read. It says “Voted Best Pizza Place Chicago” 🙁 Bounce rate 100%

    How Do You Prevent This Pathetic Modern Day Failed Food Hunt?

    If you are building or have built a local campaign that is targeting users specifically looking for a product or service in a specific area like a town, city, county or state then make sure you double down on communicating that on the landing page.

    If you have multiple locations break them out into their own campaigns, with their own relevant landing page about the location.

    “But Vini, we’re targeting SOOOOOOO many different goes with 1000’s of geo-modified keywords. What are we to do?”

    Google Ads Location Options

    Easy, time consuming AF but not difficult. Stop overcomplicating the campaign and think about who you are targeting and where they are looking for what you have to offer them, and try to group them. If it can be broken out by county or metro area then do that to start. Separate the campaigns and create landing pages for each.

    If you really went full on Merlin on your campaign with expert level geo wizardry that is forbidden to even whisper the smallest details of and I could never understand the god-like complexities and immaculate conversion rates and CPC’s that you have conjured…….then consider Dynamic Geo-Insertion. But that’s a tale for another day. Godspeed.”

  • Selina Gough

    I have worked within the digital marketing space in 5 different Australian agencies, helping medium to enterprise businesses align their goals with their digital marketing strategies. My core capability is within Paid Media where I have become a specialist in Google Ads and Social Media Marketing, managing substantial budgets within the Australian and International markets to achieve my clients' measurement of success.
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/selinagough/

    • How to Use Ad Rank to Identify that Your Landing Page is Letting You Down

      – “Ad Rank is one of the biggest limitations to a Google Ads campaign but weirdly one of the least analysed. When reviewing Search Impression share, there are two limitations that can stand in the way of an advertiser; Budget limitations and Ad Rank.

      Ad Rank is a mysterious score that is the combination of a campaign’s Quality Score and Bid. If your campaign is poorly structured, naturally you’ll lose Search IS. If your campaign is structured perfectly but you’re not bidding nearly anywhere where you need to be, then you’ll lose IS.

      If you’re finding that your ad rank is low, then there is a simple way to analyse whether it’s due to your landing page. Simply pull up a campaign’s columns for expected CTR, landing page experience and ad relevance. You’ll find on a keyword level which areas are lacking the most and you’ll be able to isolate the keywords that have a low landing page experience. I typically use a google sheet to import this data and automatically highlight which keywords require the most improvement.

      How to Use Ad Rank to Identify that Your Landing Page is Letting You Down
      Click to Enlarge

      Once these keywords are isolated, then cross-reference the landing page in correlation with both Keywords and Search Terms. It’s important to check for both types of terms as these are vital for quality score metrics and landing page relevancy to an ad.”

    Athena Pham

    Working with leading B2B Mid-Market and Enterprise clients, restaurant powerhouses, influencers, and local businesses. These opportunities have allowed me to generate personalized marketing plans that are aggressive in breaking through competitive markets while developing a successful relationship with businesses.
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/athena-pham-dm/

    • Dedicated Landing Page for Mobile Users

      – “Ever come across a landing page that’s clearly NOT optimized for mobile users? Here are some examples of landing pages that don’t have an optimized user experience.

      Bad Landing Page for Mobile Users Examples
      Long forms on mobile…no!

      Bad Landing Page for Mobile Users Examples x2
      Text heavy landing pages don’t convert well on mobile

      Forms are already dreadful to fill out on desktop but when you’re requesting invasive questions on mobile, you’ll find significant drop offs and not many form fills. If this sounds like your mobile landing page, A/B test a shorter form with only the necessary questions and see which variant converts higher.

      In the second example, you’ll find a text heavy landing page. With the attention span we have today and the nature of mobile users, we’re not likely to read all that text but instead, bounce, and look at your competitors. To prevent this from happening, try creating a simple yet to the point headline and subhead. Watch your conversions skyrocket.

      Another tactic here would be adding a mobile friendly description under the Call To Action ‘Download Free Report’. Since users associate PDF downloads as an action only taken on desktop, this may deter visitors from filling out your form. Try adding text below the CTA, ‘Mobile-Friendly PDF’. This will let users know the download can be easily downloaded on mobile.

      Now here are some companies that have mobile users in mind:

      Drift
      Drift

      hulu
      hulu

      Drift does a great job in preempting users for what they can expect – ‘No credit card required’. This is a major plus for users to sign up instantly because of the no hassle Unique Value Proposition. And getting users to your mobile page is already a challenge but they put the icing on the cake with a bright CTA button that holds your attention. Well done Drift!

      Moving onto Hulu, they do a great job with keeping the important information and CTA above the fold. Scroll depth is an issue on mobile and desktop so we want to make sure we put forth the main points that drive the user to take action immediately. The last point I’d make is they hone in on imagery for the user, which is key for the product they’re selling – TV and movies online. Showing their most popular or current films will compel users to sign up and start streaming.”

    John Williamson

    John Williamson is the Director of Paid Search at Gild Group. He is an analytical and entrepreneurial-minded data nerd, SEO/SEM expert, usability enthusiast, coffee addict, Redditor, Boglehead, and Oxford comma advocate. He is passionate about delighting users and customers through ethical, intuitive, human-centered, confidence-inspiring design and engagement.
    https://www.theoptimizingblog.com/

    • Improve Load Speed

      – “My single tip for a Google Ads landing page is to focus on improving page load speed. Working on page load speed is an often forgotten and under-utilized tactic when it comes to PPC and digital marketing in general. Many site owners may not realize that landing page experience is a big factor in one’s Google Ads Quality Score, and that page load speed is a factor in that landing page experience. A higher Quality Score means lower ad costs and better ad placements.

      Page load speed has become an increasingly important factor over the years, both as an organic ranking factor and as it applies to Google Ads Quality Score. It has also been empirically shown that users are more likely to convert and less likely to bounce from a quick-loading page. Modern users expect a fast page load; if yours takes more than a few seconds, they’re likely clicking the “Back” button to move on to your competitor.

      Here are 9 things you can do today to improve your website’s load speed:

      1. Pick a solid web host. A good hosting platform and whether or not you’re on shared or dedicated servers can make a world of difference for your load speed. Server response time has a huge impact.
      2. Enable compression. This should be a simple setting with the host or you can implement it manually in your htaccess file on an Apache server. The application itself is usually Gzip.
      3. Minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML. Minifying simply refers to reducing the file size of these things and removing extra spaces, commas, etc. There are plugins available for this, depending on your CMS.
      4. Enable caching. Browsers “cache” pages, essentially saving a copy in flash memory to retrieve quicker in the future. You can safely cache stylesheets, images, etc. that won’t change very often.
      5. Use a CDN. A Content Delivery Network serves your content from a server closest to the end user, reducing latency.
      6. Compress images. Smaller image file sizes mean quicker load times. You can usually compress images without it being visible to the human eye.
      7. Reduce unnecessary redirects. These hog resources.
      8. Defer Javascript loading. You can usually safely defer scripts, having them load in the footer of the page rather than the header, so that the page load doesn’t have to wait for those scripts.
      9. Delete unnecessary plugins and unused code. This regular housekeeping eliminates the unnecessary use of resources.”

    Tam Doan

    Optimization Manager at Four15 Digital
    https://www.four15digital.com/

    • Test New Landing Pages Using Google Experiments

      – “Make sure to test new landing pages using Google experiments instead of just swapping out the URLs. You can use other programs to do a landing page test, however they may not have access to 1st party data like Google does – which is why using Google for LP testing is more effective.

      In order to set up an experiment, you must start by creating a “Draft” of an existing campaign. Using this draft you’ve created, go ahead and swap out all the final URL’s to point to the new landing page. Once the URL’s are all updated, navigate to “Campaign Experiments” and click on the “+” to select the draft you set up to run as an experiment. Configure this experiment to your liking, then click “Save” in order to start running your experiment.

      Any results that show statistical significance will be denoted with a blue asterisk next to it, like so:”

      Test new landing pages using Google experiments

    Elliot Sheen

    Co-Founder of fully specialised Google Partner PPC agency
    https://bind.media

    • Utilise Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Relevance at Scale

      – “Creating landing pages that are relevant to all of the keywords you’re actively targeting within Google Ads can be resource intensive, time consuming and in some cases very costly.

      Fortunately there are some strategies you can deploy to make your core landing pages more relevant to individual keywords at scale – Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

      You’re likely familiar with Dynamic Keyword Insertion within Google Ads when it comes to writing ads, passing the keyword a search term matched to as part of the ad copy itself. But why stop there? By implementing dynamic keywords insertion onto your landing pages your can solidify your business as the most relevant offering, improve conversion rates and boost quality score.

      The best part is you can implement this yourself using free tools, regardless of the CMS your website is built in!

      DKI Using Google Optimize

      Part of Google’s Marketing Platform, Optimize allows you to personalise and test website changes backed with the fantastic data and reporting Google is known for.

      Within Google Optimize you have the ability to run custom Javascript that can be used to dynamically replace text on your page, be that headlines or other content, based on parameters available within the Ad’s final URL.

      DKI SAAS

      You can generate your own custom Javascript for dynamic keyword insertion here:

      https://bind.media/cro/google-optimize-dki/

      We’ve implemented this on our own homepage for users who find us via one of our Free Data Studio Dashboards, see it in action:

      https://bind.media/?src=datastudio

      Landing Page Builder Tools

      Many of the leading landing page builders have this functionality built in. Unbounce for example offers a solution out-the-box which can be applied to any text elements on your landing page.

      Unbounce DKI

      Unbounce for example offers a solution out-the-box which can be applied to any text elements on your landing page.

      To achieve this within Unbounce you simply need to highlight the text you’d like to make dynamic and select action > Dynamic text.

      This will present the menu that allows you to specify the URL parameter that is being passed and how the text should be styled.

      DKI Button

      Getting Your Keyword in Your URL

      Google offers a solution to pass a whole host of data to the Final URL of ads dynamically using ValueTrack parameters.

      https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6305348

      By utilising the {keyword} ValueTrack parameter we can pass the keyword the search matched to through to the URL which can then be used by your DKI method of choice. It’s important you have an effective account structure in place that is directing traffic to the appropriate keywords, particularly as ‘Close Variant’ matching is only increasing!

      Top Tips For Dynamic Content Success

      1. As with everything performance marketing, test test test. Don’t implement dynamic keyword insertion willy nillilly (yes that’s a technical term) and assume it will improve your performance.
      2. Check how your content is appearing – As we’re making changes dynamically and at scale, it makes sense to check the experience is nothing short of amazing across all of your variants. As a minimum, test the shortest and longest versions of the text you’re changing to ensure the formatting on point.
      3. Get creative with personalization – Inserting a keyword isn’t your only option. You could make a page specific to industries, location, time of day, the weather if you wanted to or even provide estimated delivery times based on the user’s location! With the free tools and APIs that are available nowadays you can get extremely creative with how you personalize your website to boost conversion rates.”

    Cody Jensen

    Cody Jensen is the Founder & CEO of Searchbloom – an award-winning Search Engine Marketing firm named an inaugural member of the prestigious Clutch 1000 list.
    https://www.searchbloom.com/

    • Test a Sticky Header/Footer and Include Your Primary CTA Button

      – “We’ve found tremendous increases in conversion rates by adding a sticky header or footer on your landing pages with your primary CTA incorporated. Having a sticky header/footer can be impactful on both desktop and mobile, but we’ve seen the most substantial increases in mobile conversion rates. Take a look at these screenshots to get an idea of what I mean:

      Primary CTA in Sticky Header
      Primary CTA in Sticky Header #1

      Primary CTA in Sticky Header 2
      Primary CTA in Sticky Header #2

      Notice how I have scrolled down the page a bit, but the primary CTA is still easily accessible? Here’s an example of the same thing but now it’s a sticky footer with the primary CTA:

      Primary CTA in Sticky Footer

      No matter where the user is in their journey, and no matter what value proposition encourages them to take action, the user always has a clear and easy way to take the next step and convert.”

          
     
    Single Image/Video
    Carousel Posts
    Stories
    IGTV
    Reels
    Native Tool
    Official Instagram Partner Native Tool
    Free Plan
    Paid Plans From $15/Mo Always Free From $49/Mo From $99/Mo From $7/Mo
    [table “21” not found /]

    Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing

    Recent Posts

    • Why Use Shopify? 26 Pros Share Their Thoughts
    • Best CRM for Small Business? (We Asked 41 Industry Pros)
    • Best Instagram Scheduler? What 83 Instagram Marketing Experts Say
    • Best Shopify Themes? We Asked 58 Experts What They Think
    • The Best Ecommerce Books? (27 Ecom Pros Share Their Favorites)

    Recent Comments

    • John Ratnakar Nalli on The Best Professional Video Editing Software? Here’s What 116 Pro Editors Said
    • Justin Rains on Best Ecommerce Platform for Small Business? Here’s What 78 Industry Pros Think
    • Eric McRoy on Running a Company Remotely: 25 Experts Tips to Set Your Business Up for Success
    • Chris Herbert on Best WordPress Page Builder? 85 WP Pros Have Their Say
    • Chris Herbert on Best WordPress Page Builder? 85 WP Pros Have Their Say

    Archives

    • July 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • November 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • October 2019
    • July 2019
    • May 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • December 2018
    • October 2018
    • June 2018

    Categories

    • CRM
    • Ecommerce
    • Email Marketing
    • Remote Work
    • Search Engine Marketing
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Software
    • Video Editing
    • Web Design/Development
    • WordPress

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org

    Purchase the Genesis Framework

    All of our themes are designed for the Genesis Framework. You'll need to purchase Genesis in order to use our themes.

    Purchase Genesis →

    Become an Appfinite Affiliate!

    Looking to earn some money? Join our Affiliate program and earn 35% of every sale you refer.

    Join Now →

    Recent Posts

    • Why Use Shopify? 26 Pros Share Their Thoughts
    • Best CRM for Small Business? (We Asked 41 Industry Pros)
    • Best Instagram Scheduler? What 83 Instagram Marketing Experts Say
    • Best Shopify Themes? We Asked 58 Experts What They Think
    • The Best Ecommerce Books? (27 Ecom Pros Share Their Favorites)

    About WhatSayTheExperts

    We provide recommendations based on the opinions and knowledge of industry experts.

    Want to Get Involved?

    If you'd like to contribute to WSTE, don't hesitate to get in touch. We don't bite!

    Connect With Us!

    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Cookie Policy
    • Privacy Policy

    Copyright © 2018 - 2021 · WhatSayTheExperts.com, All Rights Reserved.

    Cookie Use

    Visits to this website are tracked anonymously using cookies. To confirm you acknowledge and are happy with this, click the button to close this box, or go to our privacy policy to find out more.