As I was auditing yet another Google ad account at my agency Digital Street, one of the biggest and most common mistakes that popped up once again was no negative keyword list or negative keywords added to any of the campaigns.

The ad account in question is spending $1500 a day i.e., around $45000 per month. I’ve audited 1000s of Google ad accounts and this one mistake annoys me to the hilt.

You Must Be Wondering, Why? What’s the Big Deal?

Let me explain.

First things first, let’s define what negative keywords are. Simply put, they’re words or phrases that you add to your Google Ads campaign to tell Google which search terms you don’t want your ads to appear for.

By excluding these keywords, you can save money, improve your click-through rate, and increase your conversion rate. 

For example, let’s say you own an online shoe store that sells high-end designer shoes. You might want to bid on keywords like “designer shoes,” “luxury shoes,” and “high-end shoes” to attract potential customers who are specifically looking for your products.

However, you probably don’t want your ads to show up for search terms like “cheap shoes” or “discount shoes,” since those searchers are unlikely to be interested in your expensive products. In this case, you would add “cheap” and “discount” as negative keywords to your campaign.

Now, Why Are Negative Keywords So Important?

Well, let me break it down for you.

By eliminating irrelevant clicks and focusing on high-intent searchers, you’re likely to see a higher click-through rate (CTR), a lower cost per click (CPC), and a higher conversion rate. That means you get more bang for your buck and achieve better results from your Google Ads campaigns.

And who doesn’t want that?

So, How Do You Create An Effective Negative Keyword List?

Here are some steps to follow:

Are You Ready to Master Social Media?

Become a Certified Social Media Specialist and learn the newest strategies (by social platform) to draw organic traffic to your social media sites.

Click here

• Step 1: Start with a brainstorming session. Think about the types of search terms that would be irrelevant or low-intent for your business. There are certain words such as ‘free’, ‘reviews’, ‘cheap’ that we always exclude across all our accounts.
• Step 2: Use Google Ads’ Search Terms Report to see which search terms are triggering your ads. This report shows you the actual search terms that people are using to find your ads and can help you identify any irrelevant or low-intent search terms that you might have missed. At my agency Digital Street AU, we mine search terms every 48 hours. It’s part of our optimizing the ad campaigns process.
• Step 3: Add Negative Keywords to Your Campaign. Once you have your list of negative keywords, you can add them to your campaign by going to the “Negative keywords” tab in your Google Ads account.
• Step 4: Refine Your List Over Time. Remember, creating an effective negative keyword list is an ongoing process. Keep track of your campaign’s performance and adjust your negative keyword list accordingly.

In conclusion, negative keywords are a powerful tool that can help you save money, improve your ad performance, and achieve better results from your Google Ads campaigns. So, don’t neglect them!

Take the time to create an effective negative keyword list and watch your Return on ad spend (ROAS) soar.

Until next time, keep optimizing!

The post Don’t Waste Your Google Ad Spend: How Negative Keyword Lists Can Improve Your Google Ads Campaigns appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There’s one thing that every business owner has in common: they want their business to succeed.

It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in, what product they sell, or what problem they solve. Every business owner wants to rise to the top…

…But how?

Most people know what success feels like… but what does success look like?

Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t have to be super complicated to figure out. Because, although success could look slightly different depending on what you do, almost every business can track success with one thing: the right metrics.

It’s a methodology for tracking growth that Monique Morrison, Co-Founder of Jeronamo Digital Solutions and a DigitalMarketer ELITE Coach, uses for her clients every day. She spoke at her recent DigitalMarketer workshop about the power of metrics, and how to use them to project and achieve growth for your business.

Why High-Level Success Metrics Are Important

Using the right metrics to track how your business is doing is a surefire way to tell if you’re growing your business. They’re trackable, concrete, easy to understand, and they take the guess work out of the process.

You can track where you are right now and how that compares to this time last month or last year. And, most importantly, you can use those numbers to project what success will look like a year later.

When we map out what went right and what went wrong with our business, looking to the past is great. But none of it matters unless we figure out how to take what we learned from the past and apply it to the future. Tracking the right metrics gives you the milestones and checkpoints your need to hit by helping you evaluate exactly what you were able to do in the past.

Reliable ways to quantify success can’t be undervalued. In an evolving business world where you are always looking for an edge on your competition, it can often be better to look inside instead of outside. Tracking your success metrics allows you to bring something concrete to the table when you are figuring out what worked really well and what didn’t work so well at all.

And the best part is you don’t have to spend a dime to track your own metrics. It only takes time and a little bit of effort.

What Metrics Matter

Truthfully, there are lots of metrics that could matter for your business.

But there are some general metrics that are helpful for every business to keep track of. But that also largely depends on if you’re a project/service-based business or an ecommerce/retail business.

Project and Service-Based business will need to track:

• Revenue month-by-month
• Sales count month-by-month
• Lead conversion rate
• No-show/cancellation rate
• Landing page conversion rate
• Average cost per click and click-through rate

Ecommerce and retail businesses will need to track:

• Revenue month-by-month
• Sales count month-by-month
• Unique visitors by month
• Average ad cost per click and click-through rate

These are the stats that matter the most for your business, because they are the ones that will give you the bird’s-eye view of when things are going right. These metrics are very broad, and account for a culmination of all of the work that you’re doing. Which means they all translate to whether there is money trickling into your business’s bank account.

Let’s do a deep dive as to why these stats are important.

Revenue Month-by-Month

Revenue month-by-month is the metric that every business should be tracking, regardless of industry or niche, to measure and project growth. It’s literally the number that tells you how much money is flowing into your business, and one that you definitely already have your eye on. Without tacking it, you’re going to be underprepared to do even basic business analysis.

There is only one part of this metric that could use explanation: the timespan. Although some companies may elect to do a formal evaluation of their revenue on a yearly basis, monthly evaluation is more effective. That way you can see the way your revenue fluctuates with different promotions or marketing strategies, and then you can learn how to analyze and adapt those strategies in a timely manner.

If you try to track it on a weekly basis, you’re going to risk overreacting to inconsequential shifts. And the last thing you want to do is drive yourself insane.

Monthly tracking is the way to go. As for finding those numbers, you need to look no further than your books or your bank statements. If you have a designated accountant, ask them. It’s that simple, but it really is important.

Sales Count Month-by-Month

Similar to revenue, this is important for every business to track. Your sales count lets you see the how many sales you’re making and the money you’re bringing in, but it also adds important context to your revenue number.

That’s because this metric is analyzing the number of sales, not the amount of money. It’ll allow you to look at your revenue and understand if you’re converting a bunch of small sales, or a few really high-dollar sales. That will let you analyze the kind of audience you need to be targeting, letting you optimize your marketing plan.

You can also use it to find the customers giving you those high-dollar sales, so you can send them an exclusive deal as a little thank you.

To find this number, you can look in your ecommerce platforms or keep a manual count if you’re a brick and mortar business.

Average Ad Cost per Click And Click-Through Rate

Both of these metrics will let you gauge the effectiveness of your online advertisements. It tracks not only the amount of money you’re paying to have them seen, but also how often people actually click and interact with them. It’s important because digital advertising is one of the cornerstones of any great marketing strategy and knowing how to optimize your ads is essential to achieving growth.

To find these numbers, look no further than the platforms that you’re advertising on. Facebook and Google, as well as any other platform that you may be on, will provide these statistics for you. All you have to know is what they mean.

Unique Visitors by Month

Tracking unique visitors is an important task for ecommerce businesses because their business is entirely online. It’s the same reason brick-and-mortar businesses like to keep track of how many people are coming in and out of the store. If you can’t get people through the (virtual) door, you’re never going to have a chance to sell anything.

Knowing your unique visitor count can also help you gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and SEO, as well as the persuasiveness of your landing and product pages. If people aren’t visiting your website, then you know there’s probably changes that you can make to help generate more traffic and, in turn, more sales. If your number of visitors is high but your sales are low, then you’ll know that your advertising and outreach aren’t the problem.

You can find this statistic on the dashboard of your website, as well as through Google Analytics and even some of your advertising platforms.  

Lead Conversion Rate and No-Show/Cancellation Rate

Although these stats are different, they’re also one in the same—mainly because it’s easy to track them both at the same time.

For project and service-based industries, a large portion of your job is lead generation. Your goal is to create leads and then convert them into customers, and these statistics will help you determine exactly that. Are you turning leads into customers?

Of course, you want your lead conversion rate to be high and your cancellation rate to be low. But it’s important to keep track of both because it will paint the most complete picture.

By comparing them side by side, you’re going to be able to see the rate in which you convert. Then you can use that to project roughly how many new clients you can expect to get over any given period of time doing what you’re doing. Then you can have a baseline when you try new things to raise that lead conversion rate.

As for finding this data, you can find it in your Google Analytics or turn to your CRM software. Anywhere you track or organize potential clients, you can track how effective your lead generation (and closure) is.

Wrap-Up

Remember that these stats are important because they not only show what all you’ve been able to accomplish, but they also let you project what you’ll be able to accomplish in the future.

And having a good idea of where your business is going is one of the most powerful tools you can have.

Numbers don’t lie—that’s why metrics are your business’s best friend. They take all of the guessing out of growth and tell you exactly how well your business is doing. And as you can see from the metrics above, there are all sorts of numbers that tell you helpful things about your business.

Then you can use all those numbers to paint a completely honest picture of your business.

And once you have that, you can start to make changes that you need to achieve growth. Then, you can see if you were able to do it by simply comparing your current numbers to your previous numbers.

It really is that simple, but it’s also really that powerful. You can impact your business’s success in real time, all by taking the time to figure out what success actually looks like. And although that includes money in your bank account, metrics show you that success goes so much further than that.

Track metrics and take control of your business. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

The post The Metrics that Matter for Your Business (And Where to Find Them) appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

…when you know which noodles stick, it isn’t all that messy.

In the world of email marketing, we call wall-sticking noodles “triggers.” And they work because humans are all hardwired the same way. When you push on certain persuasion buttons in the brain, you can get readers to perform the actions you’re hoping for with your copy.

The 4 triggers to increase email click-through rate are:

• Gain
• Logic
• Fear
• Scarcity

These principles of persuasion can be applied ANYwhere you want your customers to take action.

Think about the last time you made a big decision. I guarantee it had something to do with:

• What you could gain…
• Your desire to maintain consistency with your previous decisions, based on deductive reasoning…
• A fear of what would happen if you didn’t make that decision…
• A ticking clock…

…or some combination of the four.

Let’s break each of these emotional triggers down one by one…

Emotional Trigger #1: Gain

At any given moment, we all want to gain something. What that something is depends on the moment. 
Sometimes we want to gain the knowledge of why our email open rate decreased by 10% this week. Other times we want to gain a burrito bowl. 

It really depends on the moment.

In the moment that someone is reading your email, you want to ask:

What will they gain if they click on this link?

That’s what your reader is wondering and you need to answer it. Your email copy should make a promise that clicking on the link in the email will deliver a specific gain.

That promise might be obvious or subtle.

For example, Joe Polish outlines the gain of clicking on the video link in his email not once, but twice (we highlighted it in yellow below).

First, he identifies if the person reading it is interested in the gain he’s offering, “…does creating that value sometimes get in the way of your health, or in the way of the relationships that are most important to you?”. 

Whoever sees this gain and has an emotionally triggered response to say “yes” in their mind is going to keep reading.

Then, he goes for the click-through close, “…lead a sustainable, creative life and never have to choose between ‘thriving’ and actually achieving your business goals.”

On top of adding the social proof of Arianna Huffington giving the advice, Joe is painting the beautiful picture of a life spent in creative pursuits without tanking your health and relationships.

Joe is showing his readers looking for this type of guidance they have a lot to gain from clicking on that link.

GET CERTIFIED. Discover the proven plan for effortless, automated email marketing. Click Here

Emotional Trigger #2: Logic

It’s true. People buy for emotional reasons—but they justify the purchase with logic.

If you’ve appealed successfully to a buyer’s emotional side, it’s time to give them something practical to justify the purchase.

Use statistics, odds, comparisons, expert opinions and other practical facts to encourage email clicks.
For example Trends by The Hustle uses this copy to get people to click-through and subscribe for their $1 trial.

The logic is that all of this information cost attendees of Hustle Con. $600, but it will only cost you $1. 
Pretty logical, right? 

Casper, Away, and Twitch are 9+ figure businesses. Being able to see what their founders talked about at Hustle Con. seems like a no brainer for somebody interested in a business newsletter and community.
This justifies the $1 trial offer. If the reader used the $599 they saved from not going to Hustle Con. and just signing up for this trial, they’d be able to buy 80 burrito bowls.

And that’s bulletproof logic.

Emotional Trigger #3: Fear

With the right audience and the right promise, you can get outstanding click-through rates when you push on a reader’s fear button.

This sounds scarier than it really is. You don’t need to go full Parasite on people, you just need to convince them if they don’t click on this link something they don’t want to happen might happen.
For example, Canva does a great job of this. When you initially read this email, you may think, did DigitalMarketer really just tell me this copy is creating fear?

This is why Canva did a great job. Without many realizing, they’re evoking the fear that if you don’t click on the turquoise button you won’t know what design trends are emerging in content and you’ll get left behind.

A business owner is going to see their social media engagement dropping, their emails getting less clicks, and their website not converting. 

A graphic designer is going to imagine an email from a client saying the graphic they designed didn’t perform the way it used to.

That’s scary—and that’s what makes it clickable.

Emotional Trigger #4: Scarcity

If the reader feels there is no urgency to take action on your campaign or product launch NOW, often they won’t do it. You might be offering gain, logic, and fear…but if you don’t put a time limit on it they’ll just tell themselves, “I’ll get to it later.”

If you want to increase click-throughs on your email in your email marketing strategy, you need to communicate that what you have for them is limited in some way.

Health insurance providers in the USA have mastered scarcity. They’ve opened enrollment for health insurance into just a few months at the end of each year, pushing the scarcity of the time remaining to get health coverage. 

Take a look at this email from Health Insurance Marketplace.

Notice how they show the reader they still have 2 more steps to complete before April 15th to get coverage. This pushes the scarcity of time (there’s a deadline AND two steps left to complete!) and makes the reader feel a lot more motivated to prioritize clicking on the Finish Enrolling button.

Related Articles

• How Standardizing Your Sales Process Boosts Overall Conversion

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 2

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 1

Mixing and Matching Emotional Triggers

These persuasion buttons don’t cancel each other out. If you push on the gain trigger, you can still catch people with a logic trigger, and follow up with a scarcity trigger.

And this is exactly what you want to do.

Your subscribers haven’t banded together to decide that on Monday’s they feel logical, on Tuesday’s they prefer a little scarcity, and on Wednesday’s they need to know what’s in it for them.

Your emails are meeting readers where they are. 

Some are going to be really happy when they read your email. Others might feel overwhelmed. And some might feel like they don’t actually need what you’re selling them.

That’s why you want to meet your customer avatar where they are in that moment.
Happy readers are going to feel excited to learn that you have something for them to gain, and in turn make them even happier. 

Overwhelmed readers can be extremely inspired by scarcity. 

And the readers who aren’t totally convinced need some logic to show them why this is a good solution/answer for their problem or question.

By mixing and matching emotional triggers, you can personalize batch emails a bit more.

For example, an email could be structured like:

1. Gain Section
2. Gain CTA
3. Gain trigger segue into Logic Section
4. Logic CTA
5. Logic trigger into Fear Section
6. Fear CTA

Would we be a digital marketing education platform if we didn’t say TEST at least once in this article?
Once you’ve decided the best flow of pushing on these emotional triggers, you want to test it.

TEST, TEST, TEST.

Experiment with the order in which you push these buttons. Try GAIN > FEAR > LOGIC > SCARCITY. Then, switch it up and test FEAR > LOGIC > GAIN > SCARCITY.

Also, experiment with emails that focus on a single emotional trigger and others that combine more than one.

For example, a single sentence in your email might touch on gain, logic and scarcity.  It might read like this:

Until midnight tonight [SCARCITY] and for less than it costs to fill up your gas tank [LOGIC] you can learn how to negotiate thousands of dollars off of your next car purchase. [GAIN]

The same sentence could be tested using fear instead of gain,

Until midnight tonight [SCARCITY] and for less than it costs to fill up your gas tank [LOGIC] you can learn to stop a used car salesman from ripping you off. [FEAR]

And that’s how you get the click.

Find your emotional triggers and then mix them together to create the perfect email campaign.

The post Increase Email Click-Through Rate with These 4 Emotional Triggers appeared first on DigitalMarketer.