Blog | Page 5 of 12 | Dijon Marketing

Home » Blog

Google Ads Keyword Match Types Explained

June 30, 2021

Inside a Google Ads campaign, not all keywords are treated the same. There are multiple different match types to choose from. These choices have changed in recent years, so it may be time for a refresher. Understanding the pros and cons of each can help you get the most out of your ad campaign, while keeping things organized, simplified, and easy to maintain.

Broad Match

Broad match is the most lenient match type available. Basically anything even remotely close or related to your keywords is considered a match and include you in the ad auction. No special syntax or markup is required to use broad match keywords. Just type them in a list and you’re done.

The thing to be careful of is matching too broadly and running up a big tab or running out of budget dollars too early. It is best to have longer phrases in broad match to get the best intent matching. Something like hats alone might be too broad as it would match not just on hats, but caps, headgear, fascinators, etc.

The best thing about broad match is that you can do more with fewer keywords. Instead of a list of hundreds of keywords each with their own metrics and performance, you can consolidate it all into a single keyword. It’s easy to evaluate, pause, or edit. You do sacrifice a little bit of granularity but that’s often an acceptable trade-off. Typically broad match pairs with some negative keywords to narrow the focus enough to not be wasteful.

Phrase Match

Phrase match is pretty self explanatory. Any phrase surrounded by quotation marks is considered a single term. Rather than matching on each word independently, it will require the full intent of the phrase to match. Something like “women’s hats” may match “women’s fashion”, but not “men’s fedoras.”

These reduce the number of matches, but each match better aligns to your target audience’s intent. You can test using the same phrase with or without quotes to give you broad match and phrase match variants and see which one performs best. Even though the phrase element is more restrictive, it still does not require an exact match. But there is a syntax for that.

Exact Match

Exact match uses square brackets in the keyword syntax. [Dallas Golf Fundraiser] is an example. That requires the searcher included that exact phrase in their keywords keywords before it triggered the ad. This is a very restrictive form of ad and I typically only use it for brand terms, like [Dijon Marketing]. Typically when someone is using your brand they will type it exactly, and close matches may not be relevant. These typically appear sparingly in your account as they will have way fewer matches and may not ever match at all.

Negative Keywords

Last, you can create lists of negative keywords. If a user’s search contains these words, your ad will NOT show. If you are advertising for a construction company that sells triple-pane windows, you may need to add a negative keyword for Microsoft so you don’t waste your budget on users looking for office software. The best way to find terms you need to negate is to monitor your Searched Terms report. If you see any irrelevant or harmful searches in there, you can pop over to your negative keywords list and make sure that search never triggers your ad again.

The best mix of keywords includes a mix of match types. And every situation is different, but if you’ve only ever explored broad match, try out a few of the other match types and see if your ads perform better than before.

Best Practices

Consistent Branding Through Hex Color Codes

June 15, 2021

Let’s say you created an awesome logo. Something like this:

The color palette used in your logo can inform the entire brand story from websites to print materials to PowerPoint presentations. You could approximate the colors by eye, but the key to doing it right is knowing your hex color codes. Take a look at Hex color codes explained for info on what a color code is. Here we’ll talk about how to use them.

In the awesome logo above, we have three colors:

Yellow #FFD400
Purple #7F3B96
Pink #E9529D

These three codes should now be part of your brand book. They should be shared with all employees who might be making banners for an event or ordering T-shirts for your volunteers. Getting the color exactly right will tie together your brand even tighter.

In Microsoft Office products like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, you can choose custom font and background colors. In the color dialogue, choose More Colors > Custom. There you’ll have the option to choose a color, input RGB values, or paste the hex codes from your brand book.

You can save them as templates and distribute them to your team to help everyone stay on brand.

Best Practices

What is progressive profiling?

May 28, 2021

Progressive profiling is a method for building a robust and complete customer database. You may want to know lots of different bits of info about user, customer, donor, or volunteer. Examples are email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, interests, open schedule times, and more.

Imagine the first touch point you have with an organization. You like their message and would like to stay in touch. So you click to join their mailing list. Only, before you can click “submit” you have to fill out 2 pages of information about yourself. What’s the most likely outcome of that scenario? Your users will give up halfway through the process and you’ll miss out on a new email recipient. This could be considered friction in the process. Asking for too much data up front will result in you getting no data at all.

The only thing you need to know in order to add someone to your mailing list is their email address. If they are willing to give it, then take it and move on. You can then progressively profile them for the remaining information.

In order to sign up for an open volunteer position they need to provide their first and last name associated with their email address.
The first time they log into your Volunteer Management software, a pop up asks them for their cell phone number.
Send an email 3 weeks after they’ve signed up asking them to populate their physical address to receive snail mail.

The basic idea is to take what you can get. Require only what is absolutely necessary. And never miss an opportunity to ask for more while making it easy to add just one additional piece of data at each touch point. What you’ll find by asking for less is … you get more!

Email Marketing

Email Marketing Automation vs. a Mailing List

May 10, 2021

You might have set yourself up with an email mailing list. Your visitors and supporters can sign up and now you have a fast, easy, and effective way to bulk contact them. But are you taking your email capabilities as far as they can go? Do you know the difference between true email marketing automation and a mailing list?

What’s a mailing list?

Some popular email platforms you might have heard of are Constant Contact or MailChimp. They allow users to quickly and easily sign up to be a recipient of your outbound emails. Users can even sometimes progressively add to their profiles over time. That may give you access to names, physical addresses, and things like topics of interest. Users can also easily opt out of receiving future emails at any time.

Once you’ve got a decently large mailing list, you can reach the masses with the click of a button. If you rely solely on social media posts, ever changing algorithms interfere with your reach. If you try to use paid advertising to expand, you can find yourself with big bills and not much to show for it. But email is a guaranteed direct line to your self-identified engaged audience. There’s a reason that spam email is so prevalent even to this day – email works!

How is Marketing Automation different?

Even with all of that, you may not be utilizing your email lists to their full potential. For that you need marketing automation. First, check out How to get started with email marketing and Maintaining an email marketing editorial calendar.

Marketing automation segments your audience into far more different groups than you can manually manipulate. You can use metadata to build audience lists on the fly and send different emails to each different type of recipient. That’s the main idea – it’s not just one email sent to every list member at the same time. Different emails to different users at different times will maximize the impact of your email list. Here are some examples:

Send a series of welcome emails after a new user signs up to receive emails from your organization. The first one should arrive immediately and the others can be spaced out after that.
Remind users who have visited your website but not made a donation yet that your fundraising campaign is still active.
Thank users who have donated in the past 30 days and promote your recurring donation options.
Send 5 emails in a chain of spotlights on your most successful programs, but only send each one one week after the previous email has been opened and read.
Send a customized birthday or service anniversary to each individual recipient. If integrated to your Volunteer Management software, milestone volunteer hours can be celebrated with no interaction from you.
Re-engage users if they haven’t opened an email or visited your site or volunteered in person for over 6 months. Everyone gets busy and the occasional reminder can be really effective.

With some preparation and a little technical know-how, you can get even more out of your valuable list of emails with less effort than manual email campaigns!

Analytics

What are render-blocking resources?

April 24, 2021

If you’ve run a speed test on your website, you may find that one of the biggest contributors to slow load speed are render-blocking resources. But what are render-blocking resources? And more importantly, how can you minimize them to help speed up your website’s load times?

Which resources block rendering?

Any file that needs to load, but does so before the page has finished rendering is render-blocking. Rendering just means that the page becomes visible and is ready for interaction with menus and links. If the site is busy downloading a file before it begins to paint the picture of the final website, then that produces a poor user experience. Our attention span has become so short that even a load time of a few seconds can feel like an eternity.

Imagine you are preparing to bake a pie using a recipe. If the first step of that recipe says, “Refer to Chapter 2 for a basic pie crust,” then you must leave the recipe to go read the reference. While you are doing that, the recipe will not progress. But it may be a critical step to the finished product. If you skip the step you’ll have a pie tin full of filling. If you wait until the end of the recipe, you’ll have the crust sitting on top of the filling. So it’s not always guaranteed that render-blocking resources are unnecessary.

What can you do to mitigate the impact?

Evaluate each file that is being loaded. In many cases, the render-blocking files are not even used by the finished page. In this case, it’s an obvious benefit to remove the files. If you’re using WordPress, a lot of plugins will come with their own CSS style sheets or JavaScript files. Even if you deactivate a plugin, it may not remove all of the files from the page load. Determine which plugins can be removed, and deactivate and delete them.

In some cases, render-blocking content is absolutely necessary. In that case, all you can do is try to keep the number o files to a minimum. You can also “minimize” the files, which removes all white space, comments, and makes certain functions and loops use fewer characters. Reducing the kB size of the file will make it download faster.

You can also keep the files just as they are, but load them last. Moving certain file references from the header to the footer means the whole page will load first, and only after it is almost entirely finished will it load the footer. Depending on the file, this may be perfectly acceptable. Your page could take 20 seconds to fully load, but if all of the visual and interactive elements are available after 1 second, then your load speeds are good.

Check out the blog on Measuring load speeds with Google PageSpeed Insights to see if render-blocking resources are a problem for your site. Faster load speeds can not only delight your users, but can have indirect benefits like better SEO ranking.

Best Practices

Measure load speeds with Google PageSpeed Insights

April 4, 2021

Load speeds for your website are an important metric to be aware of. The most obvious impact of a slow site is frustrated users – especially on mobile devices. However, it can also create a technical debt that can be difficult to overcome. Search engine crawlers aren’t going to wait around for your site to load so they can crawl and index it. That will indirectly impact your SEO ranking and could lead to less organic traffic over time.

Be aware of site load speeds

There are two free tools from Google that can tell you about your site’s load speeds: Google Analytics and Google PageSpeed Insights. I like to start in Google Analytics, because you can see aggregate data over time for each and every page of your site. It might be that you have a fast home page, but a very slow blog archive. Google Analytics will also link directly to PageSpeed Insights suggestions.

Navigate using the left-hand main menu to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings. Here you can look for any problem child in your entire site and start your focus there. First, the average load time for all pages is show at the top of the chart. Then each page is assigned a bar chart for its deviation from the average. The red bars show the slower page and what percentage above average they took to load. This is accumulated for all users over a period of time, so may not perfectly represent a single load experience you may have had.

Average Page Load Time compared to site average

Get more detailed data on load speeds

The menu item just after “Page Timings” is “Speed Suggestions.” If you’ve determined that you have a page with a load speed problem, this is the next place to go to view suggestions. The link for suggestions will actually take you to a new window loaded with PageSpeed Insights. So you could skip right to there from the beginning if you already know you have some slow pages. Here you will see more detailed information about some timing measurements.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) – how long it takes your site to go from a blank screen to the user seeing something
First Input Delay (FID) – any delay between a user interacting with an element, say clicking a button, and the page being ready to respond
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – basically how long it takes your site to look good and as if its finished loading (even if maybe it’s still doing some work in the background)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – how much do items move around on the page as they are being loaded

There may be no problems with the perception of your load speed, and often times, perception is reality. Take a look at these advanced measurements and look forward to another blog describing some common problems and things you can do to speed things up!

Graphic Design

Where to find good stock photos

March 17, 2021

Stock photos may have a negative connotation, but for me, they’re an important part of web design. I have a mantra I tell to each of my clients before we begin designing a website. “You don’t need a GREAT website. You need a GOOD website with GREAT images.”

It’s not that I’m trying to tell them or myself short. What I mean is that most modern WordPress templates take care of all of your technical requirements. They are mostly well optimized for SEO and responsive to mobile and different screen sizes. There really is no good reason today to design a website from scratch. Instead, your time is better spent looking for great images to fill in the placeholders in the template.

The best photos are from your organization, showing your services, and highlighting the people you serve. But if you’re just starting out you may not have a large media library to choose from and will need to resort to stock photos. As good stewards of digital data, we should avoid (intentionally or unintentionally) violating a copyright on a photo. That’s where license free photos come in handy. Photographers upload their stock imagery to different websites and grant you permission to download them, use them on your website, and edit them as you see fit. Some may ask for donations in return.

Four great websites for stock photos

Pexels – This was the first stock image website I found and used. And you will see many of the images there as featured photos on my blog posts.
Unsplash – As I started to blog about the same topics again and again, I started looking for variety in images and topics to choose from, and that’s when I found Unsplash.
Pixabay – Nowadays I search all three of these sites to find just the right image to portray the emotion I’m going for. You can use them for anything from print to web to social.
Vice Media – This last example fills a niche that other stock photo sites typically do not. They host images of gender fluid, non-binary, trans or queer people. If you are trying to reach this audience, it is a great place to find a few stock images that are more inclusive.

Take these websites for a spin and use them without losing sleep about a copyright infringement. From PowerPoint decks to social media posts, sometimes it’s just too much to rely solely on photos you and your organization have taken. Happy hunting!

Analytics

5 Mobile Apps to help monitor your digital marketing

February 27, 2021

Gone are the days of being chained to your desk in order to run effective social media and digital marketing campaigns. Almost everything can be done from your phone on the go! Below are five mobile apps that will assist you in staying up to date on your success.

Google Analytics

If your tracking parameters are all set up properly, then monitoring multiple campaign sources can be done from a single analytics platform. Google Analytics is free and the most common. The app has all of the data easily accessible in a mobile format as well as fantastic features like plain English querying of data.

Google My Business

Easily update your operating hours or any other information on the fly. Get notified in real time whenever someone leaves a review of your business. You should respond to every review, but especially negative reviews. Enable messenger and respond with anyone who might be trying to locate or contact you directly from Google search results.

Google Ads

All of your Google Ads campaigns are easily accessible from this mobile app. Switch between campaigns, Ad Groups, and individual ads to see their performance over time Add new keyword ideas or edit headlines and descriptions.

HootSuite

In Benefits of a Social Media Management Tool, I talked about HootSuite being a good aggregator for social media management. Their mobile app can be used in conjunction with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you can make edits to your scheduled posts and see what campaigns are active without having to open multiple apps. You can easily create new posts too if inspiration hits you while on the go.

Facebook Business Suite

If you are running social media advertising campaigns across Facebook and Instagram (or just looking to boost a few posts) then Facebook Business Suite will give you access to all of your campaign data. You can create new campaigns and track information like impressions and clicks from your mobile device. You can also enable or disable certain campaigns if you need to make a quick change due to overspending or other urgent reason.

Best Practices

Anchor Text: Good, Better, and Best Examples

February 9, 2021

Anchor text is an important and often overlooked aspect of SEO onsite optimization. Understanding the role it plays in crawling evaluations can help you eke out incrementally better performance.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text refers to the words you click on when clicking a hyperlink on a website. Traditionally they are blue and underlined. While it may seem like a technical necessity, there is an art and a strategy to selecting text. The more you can tell your visitor about where they will go when they click the link, the better. Think about anchor text as a keyword, and a link as a vote in favor of the destination URL to rank for that keyword.

Examples of good, better, and best

For our good example, we’ll make a link that is merely functional. It takes you from the page you are currently on to where you want to go.

To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here: https://www.dijonmarketing.com/blog/what-is-lorem-ipsum/

In the above example, the raw URL is not terrible since the URL has been well optimized for SEO and easily tells you the content of the link.
Still, it would be better to define some anchor text and hide the big, long URL. It can help with formatting as well not trying to cram that big long string onto a single line.

To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here.

That is much more compact and visually appealing. However, it is a little bit old school. When the internet was brand new and navigation wasn’t intuitive, it gave the user a directive of what to do. But it tells them nothing about what they will find.
The best anchor text in this scenario would tell the user what they will discover, as well as give directives to crawlers about the most valuable content available for a set of keywords.

Continue reading to learn more about Lorem Ipsum.

In today’s web, users can be trusted to know what a hyperlink looks like and to be able to decipher clickable text, so the words “click here” don’t need to appear.

You can see the evolution from good to better to best. If you discipline yourself to stop and think before every link is added to your website, you will see a benefit in your SEO performance. It’s a lot easier to do it right the first time than to go back and correct everything. Next time you see a good or better example, you’ll know how to make it best!

Graphic Design

What is Lorem Ipsum?

January 22, 2021

You may have seen the term Lorem Ipsum around the internet (or at ye olde print shoppe). You can even see on my Twitter bio I facetiously claim to speak Lorem Ipsum. But what is it? Is it a real language? Why does it even exist in the first place?

Is Lorem Ipsum a language?

Lorem Ipsum is not, strictly speaking, a language. It is based on Latin, and certainly some of the words could be directly translated. But it is not intended to mean anything or relay any information.

It can be a fun activity to pop sections of Lorem Ipsum into Google Translate. For example:

ipsum dolor sit amet

Translates to:

the pain itself is to be loved

Poetic.

Why does Lorem Ipsum exist?

Lorem Ipsum exists because it looks like real text. When designing a page layout, whether digitally or physically, it is helpful to have some text where paragraphs are meant to go. But you almost never have the finished text to test.

It can also be distracting to the viewer if real text is used. Your eyes instinctively focus on the copy and subconsciously read the lines. Rather than looking at the white space, balance, layout, or design, you focus instead on the text. Real text is distracting enough. Silly placeholder text is even worse.

That’s where Lorem Ipsum comes in. It occupies the same space using roughly the same letters, word lengths, sentence structure, and cadence. But it’s completely unreadable, so your eyes are not distracted by its presence. Take this paragraph for example:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam congue a elit a rutrum. Cras vestibulum dapibus quam non auctor. Donec gravida tempor pulvinar. Nam id efficitur arcu. Suspendisse congue eu sem vel luctus. Suspendisse ut justo aliquam, suscipit purus et, pharetra justo. Aenean faucibus orci non sodales scelerisque. Nullam dignissim efficitur dui vel bibendum. Nulla facilisi. Integer laoreet quis purus dapibus euismod. Praesent eget leo a libero semper elementum nec sit amet est.

Pleasing in its composition, but mostly utter nonsense.

Where to get Lorem Ipsum?

One thing you may notice about Lorem Ipsum is that it’s consistent. It always stars with the same words and has remain unchanged since around the 1500s. So where is everyone getting it?

The good news is, these days there are plenty of generators available online. My favorite is at Lipsum.com. Here you can specify how many paragraphs, words, or bytes of text you need. Click a button, copy/paste, and you can move on to more important aspects of your design. The ease of this beats even the fastest gibberish typer, so I will use it exclusively for any design activities. Give it a try on your next layout and feel in on the secret of Lorem Ipsum!