Direct Placement Blog

At the start of 2013, Instagram reported having 90 million users. This number has increased dramatically since that time, reporting in at 800 million in September of 2017. The majority of these users are younger, with 41% being under the age of 24. This high number of users has launched the photo sharing service into one of the most popular social media platforms currently in use. The platform is highly popular because it is highly visual in nature. Users can take, edit, and share photos or videos and interact with content from other users. Because users go into the platform expecting to be engaged by videos and photos, visual advertisements tend to perform well on Instagram. Users expect to see content on their feed involving photos of coffee, food, products in use, people doing exciting things, etc., which means they are more willing to interact with it while in this platform. The advertising tools on Instagram are the same as the ones available on Facebook . This means an a

When thinking about what kinds of extensions you want to have applied to your ads, call extensions are important to keep in mind. Call extensions are useful because they make your phone number readily available in your ad without the ad being disapproved. If you try to place a phone number somewhere else in your ad, it could be disapproved for violating Google Best Practices . But, extensions allow the phone number to appear either alongside your ad’s display URL on a desktop or as a clickable call button on mobile devices. By including this information directly in the ad, you make it even easier for potential customers to contact you about your business immediately. Plus, call extensions are free to set up and when they are clicked they cost the same as a regular click to your ad. This means you can start directing more calls to your business without having to spend a lot of time or money. These extensions also have a call tracking function. When call tracking is enabled, AdWord

In the world, there are more than 3.7 billion internet users. 52.21% of the internet traffic generated by those users is currently occurring on mobile devices. This is an increase from the 42.16% occurring on mobile the previous year. The increase is a trend that has been tracked for the last several years and has finally tipped over the 50% mark. According to Forrester’s recent 2018 mobile predictions report, this trend is likely to continue. Forbes recently published an article in response to that report which made a number of predictions for mobile’s role in 2018. In the article , Forbes predicts that this development in mobile traffic could mean that mobile devices are beginning to take on the role as the “Core to digital ecosystems” going into 2018. Because over half of online traffic is now mobile, one of the predictions Forbes makes in their article is that many companies will need to focus on developing their websites, apps and technologies to provide excellent mobile expe

Whenever we search for something on a major search engine like Google or Bing, organic and paid search results appear on our screens next to each other. We’ve all seen the different formats that appear. Organic search results tend to be fairly standard in form and provide a two-part headline, URL, and some content from the website. On the other hand, paid search ad formats vary a little more. Sometimes, paid ads look just like an organic result with the small “Ad” label next to the URL operating as the only thing designating it as a paid result. But, sometimes other things appear in the ad along with the ad text called ad extensions. Ad extensions add extra information to your ad, expanding its size and usefulness. Information commonly provided by extensions can range from a phone number, link to a page within your site, a list of the services you provide, or more. Although ad extensions won’t appear alongside your ad every time the ad is shown, they will show when the ad’s rank

Twitter announced on November 8, 2017 that it has launched a new public ‘Promote Mode,’ a beta version of the company’s first subscription ads product. Promote Mode is designed to be simple and easy for growing business’ and/or people who are new to Twitter by automatically promoting your business’ normal Twitter activity for a flat fee of $99/Month. This is exciting news for anyone looking to advertise on Twitter because it means you do not necessarily need to run a complete advertising campaign on Twitter to start getting your business and brand noticed. Instead, you can simply produce Tweets, updates, and other content on your Twitter profile and Twitter Promote Mode will automatically promote some of that content to a larger audience. The metrics on your promoted reach versus your organic reach will be accessible on your Twitter profile, making it easy to see the benefits of the mode immediately. According to the announcement, one of the profiles in the mode’s pilot program

Often, a Search Engine Marketing campaign focuses mainly on creating ads that have the best CTR . Impressions, clicks, and average positions are all tracked and analyzed as the deciding factors on whether or not the campaign has been successful and lucrative for your business. While it is always important to create and study your ads to ensure they are getting views and clicks to your website, programs like AdWords and Bing Ads provide conversion tracking features that are just as important to analyzing the success of a campaign. A conversion is what is recorded when someone clicks on your advertisement and then completes a purchase, phone call, contact form submission, etc. with your business. The specific action the user is required to take can even be determined by you depending on what would be most important for your business, so the campaign can continue to be customized according to your goals. By using the conversion tracking features provided in programs like AdWords and

Since its founding on February 4, 2004, Facebook’s popularity has increased exponentially across the world. Now with a reported 1.2 billion people using Facebook every day, it has become a normal part of life to see people using their downtime to scroll through their Facebook feed or visit various Facebook pages on their phones, tablets, or laptops. It is so popular to spend time on Facebook and related sites each day, Facebook or Instagram use takes up a reported average of 1 out of every 5 minutes someone in the US spends on a mobile device. Because this many people spend so much time on Facebook in a variety of formats each day, Facebook marketing has also become a popular way to gain new business and raise brand awareness, particularly during the holiday season when many people are spending even more time on their accounts sharing pictures and holiday memories or keeping track of their friends and family. Advertising on Facebook provides businesses with a lot of tools which a

Pay Per Click Advertising is a form of digital marketing where you only pay for your advertising when your ad is clicked. This makes it so that you don’t pay for every impression your digital ads get, but rather how much traffic they are actually generating for your website. One of the most common forms of PPC advertising is Search Engine Marketing where ads are placed along on a search engine results page next to organic listings when certain keywords are searched. With SEM, you don’t have to hope your website listing organically appears high enough in search engine results to get clicks, you can ensure your ads are on the front page of the search results where they are most likely to be clicked. When your ad is clicked, it can take the potential customer directly to a specific landing page within your website that you can choose as the one that most directly relates to the keyword instead of just your website’s home page, which helps increase the likelihood of them becoming ac

With over 40,000 searches occurring on Google alone each second, Search Engine Marketing is a great way to ensure your business’ advertising will be seen by a large number of people who are already looking for related information. By placing your advertisements on the first page of potential customers’ search results, it is easy to direct more traffic to your website through clicks on those ads. But, when sending traffic to your website, the home page of your website might not provide the best possible landing page experience for your keywords. A landing page is the place on your website a potential customer is directed to after they click on your ad. It can be any of the pages on your website ranging from the contact us page to the page for a particular product or service you offer. When reviewing your ads, advertising programs like AdWords and Bing Ads look at your landing pages and decide how quickly and easily the page provides the information that your potential customer was

Google AdWords is an online advertising program that allows you to target the audience you want for your digital advertising by using Search Engine Marketing , Display Advertising , App advertising and more. Google originally launched AdWords in 2000 with only 350 advertisers, but the program has since grown exponentially and become the industry leader. Now, Google is constantly updating the program to provide more features and options for advertisers and it results in billions of dollars of revenue for Google every year. AdWords operates on a pay-per-click basis that allows you to control how much your advertising efforts cost and where you would like to focus that money by allowing you to set maximum budgets for campaigns, ad groups, and even clicks. Using AdWords allows advertisers to create multiple different campaigns targeting different audiences in specific locations, demographics, ages, etc. depending on what might work best for their business. Because AdWords operates onl

In the world of digital marketing, the difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing can often be difficult to determine. They both seem to involve search engines, keywords, and increasing a business’ presence online. But, while the terms seem similar and closely related, they involve drastically different processes and create much different results. SEO relies on the search algorithm designed to rank and decide which organic website listings appear in search engine results pages for certain searches. SEO is a long term kind of optimization that focuses on creating and maintaining your business’ website content, HTML, etc. so that the algorithm assigns it the best ranking and positions possible for specific terms. This means that getting your website seen using SEO involves a lot of website updating and waiting over a long period of time to see if your efforts actually pull more traffic to your website and business. SEM can get your business seen in a

The term ‘search engine’ is one that can often be thrown around in a variety of contexts ranging from casual, everyday conversation to computer programmer instruction manuals. Although it is one just about everybody has probably heard more times than they can count, it is also one that hardly ever gets defined. So, what is a search engine? A search engine is a piece of software used to find specific pieces of information by using keywords and phrases to search a database of stored information. If a piece of information in the database corresponds with the keyword entered, it will be displayed in a list of other results that also correspond with that keyword. This list is most often called a search engine results page, which can extend into multiple pages if there are that many results for a keyword. Most of the time, when someone is referencing a search engine they are referring to one of the main search engines like Google or Bing, which is used to find information on the world w

In Search Engine Marketing, a Quality Score is the number that Bing Ads or Google AdWords assigns an advertisement after is has been created and reviewed by the advertising program. The components that make up a quality score are the ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR . When AdWords or Bing Ads review your ad, they take all of those components into consideration, estimate how well that ad is likely to perform in auction, and then assign the ad a number on a 1-10 scale. In order for your ad to receive a higher Quality Score on this scale, the ad text needs to be relevant to both your keyword and landing page. In addition to being relevant to your keyword and ad text, your ad landing page needs to be easy to navigate and fall in line with Google or Bing’s policies. Google or Bing will also use past user activity and compare your ad to other people’s ads on your keyword to estimate how likely your ad is to receive a click once it’s shown. It is important to note

In Digital Marketing, a Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is an important statistic for determining the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, but what is a CTR? A CTR is a percentage calculated using the Impressions on an ad and the number of those people who actually clicked on the ad. The CTR of an advertisement or campaign is found by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions and then multiplying it by 100. This statistic is important when evaluating advertising campaigns because it can help you determine several different things about your campaigns and advertisements, like how effective your ads are and how often they are being shown. Typically, a higher CTR means that potential customers found your ad relevant to the search term they used while a lower CTR means your ads might need to be updated to seem more relevant to your keywords and/or website. Although it is generally correct to think ‘the higher the CTR the better’ and optimize your ads and campaigns acco

In Search Engine Marketing , a number of different terms can often be thrown around without much explanation. ‘Impressions’ tends to be one of those terms even though its definition in the digital marketing world can be different than it is in other contexts. When advertisers talk about how many impressions an ad or campaign is getting, they are not referring to the ad’s indentations in a mold or celebrity-mimicking stand-up routine. Instead, they are talking about how many people saw their ads. You can imagine the use of the word as the same as someone telling you, “This is the number of people your ads made an impression on,” when they are reporting on the visibility of your ads or campaigns. This means an impression is recorded when your ad is placed within search results in Paid Search campaigns or appears on a website or other viewing platform in Display Advertising. It is important to note that this term is only in reference to people who have seen your ads. The digital mar

What is Google Best Practices? The Google Best Practices series is the guide for how to most effectively optimize advertisements in Search Engine Marketing on Google AdWords. It consists of a series of instructions for how to enhance specific parts of SEM strategy, which have been based off of data collected and verified by the people involved with building AdWords . These instructions are broken down into six main categories: Find New Customers, Show The Right Message, Optimize To Full Value, Re-engage Customers, Feature Your Products, and Work More Effectively. Each category is filled with tips covering every aspect of advertising on AdWords ranging from Dynamic Search to Mobile Users to Bidding Strategies. Although having this much information about optimization and strategy compiled in one place does make the Google Best Practices series an incredible resource for advertising online, if you don’t have much experience with AdWords or SEM in general, it might seem like an overw

What’s the difference between Paid Search Ads and Display Ads? In digital marketing, two strategies to get advertisements in front of and interacting with potential clients are often discussed: Display Advertising and Paid Search Advertising. Without any more information about these two kinds of advertising, the difference between them might be confusing. However, they are unique from each other in a few specific ways. While they are both forms of digital advertising designed to drive traffic to your website (which can be tracked through the impressions, click through rates, and conversion rates on ads and advertising campaigns) the advertising formats differ in placement and appearance. Paid Search Advertising works within popular search engines to make it so that your text-based ads appear within search results for specific keywords, typically at the top, bottom, or side of the page. Advertisers pay for specific keywords and then bid for placement on the page. Display Advertisin

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of digital advertising that allows businesses to pay to place advertisements within the results for search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. The advertisements can be placed in a number of locations within the search results—at the top, bottom, and side of each page—depending on the keywords selected and amounts paid by the business. The ad placement can potentially increase visibility and business for advertisers when an internet user searches a related keyword or phrase. For example, if an internet user searches for a keyword and a company’s advertisement is one of, if not the, first thing that pops up in the search results, it increases the likelihood that the user will click on and interact with the company’s website and services. As of April 13, 2017, a daily average of 6,586,013,574 internet searches were made worldwide, according to the Smart Insights Search Engine Statistics 2017 webpage. Of these daily 6,586,013,574 interne

Ever since the platform’s founding in 2006, Twitter (or Twttr at the time) has been a popular form of social media throughout the world. It gained popularity quickly and became a multi-billion-dollar platform with over 100 million active users in just a few years. But, when compared to the hundreds of millions of new active users Twitter gained between 2010 and 2014, the company has been experiencing a much smaller growth rate in the last few years. Reports state that Twitter only gained about 30 million new active users between the start of 2015 and the end of 2017. It has been speculated that this struggle to increase the number of active users on the platform has been due, in part, to the its relatively complicated format. Newer social media platforms like Snapchat (created in 2011), Instagram (created in 2010), and Pinterest (created in 2010), are thought to be easier to navigate. Plus, the focus of these newer platforms is on the almost instantaneous sharing of videos, image