Brand Awareness - Instagram

Follow the listed steps to drive sales and promote your brand in Instagram

1. Set Up Your Optimized Business Instagram Account.
2. Include a Link to Boost Traffic to Your Site.
3. Include an Informative and Interesting Bio That Hooks Followers.
4. Create Popular Instagram Posts That Users Want to Follow.
5. Promote Your Products with Creative, Professional Photos.
6. Size Your Photos for Professional Quality.
7. Use Instagram’s Editing Tools to Stand Out.
8. Create Unique Lifestyle Photos That Capture Your Brand Culture.
9. Offer Promotions and Exclusive Announcements to Followers.
10. Promote Events on Instagram and Share Exclusive Insider Access.
11. Include Hashtags to Widen Your Discoverability.
12. Share Your Followers’ Tagged Photos on Your Own Profile.

Youtube removes Ads from Non-Advertiser friendly videos

YouTube is now notifying publishers directly when removing monetization from videos that are not considered to be advertiser-friendly. This policy has been in place for some time, the difference now is that YouTube is being more transparent when taking action against videos that violate the policy.

Here are the policies that publishers must abide by in order to monetize their content with YouTube advertising. If you want to run YouTube ads, you must refrain from publishing:

• Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity or sexual humor
• Violence, include display of serious injury and event related to violent extremism
• Inappropriate language, including harassment, swearing, and vulgar language
• Promotion of drugs, regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items
• Controversial or sensitive subject and event, including subject related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown.

Linkedin Ads

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service.

To create a campaign, you’ll first need the following:

• A LinkedIn account
• Basic understanding of your audience
• Ad copy
• Video (optional)

Sponsored updates are a great way to get your message directly onto a user’s home feed. The offering is comparable to sponsored content on Facebook, and it is a good tool to use to amplify your content. For example, if you have a great story, interview or other piece of content, you can post it through your company’s LinkedIn account and then make it a sponsored update. 

To create an ad we need to fill in a few fields:

• Campaign Name: Create a name for your campaign. I recommend following any naming conventions you use on other platforms.
• Ad Language: Select the language for your ad.
• Media Type:  Select either a basic advertisement that follows the traditional format, or a video ad that includes a play button on the image.
• Ad Destination:  This will allow you to link your ad to either a LinkedIn profile page or an external URL. If you are driving traffic to your website, I highly recommend that you tag your URLs so that you can measure the engagement and quality of traffic in your analytics platform. 
• Ad Design:  Create your headline and description. Note that LinkedIn is a bit limited in this regard. The headline has a 25-character limit, and the description cannot exceed 75 characters (2 lines). You can also add your imagery here. Note that as you edit your ads, a thumbnail preview appears on the right side. 
• Ad Variations:  LinkedIn allows you to create multiple variations of ads. For each ad, you can choose either an external URL or a page on LinkedIn. Note that the choice of location does not affect the price — it costs just as much to send traffic to external pages as it does to send it to internal pages. Also, keep in mind that LinkedIn advertising is push advertising, not pull. That means that your audience is not actively looking for your product or service, so you have to work harder to make sure your ad stands out and captures the user’s attention.

Google Search Console - AMP Notifications

Google has been messaging webmasters and site owners through the Google Search Console message center about adopting AMP.The message says “Create AMP pages to be shown in Google Search for” your site.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are HTML pages that are optimized to load fast on mobile devices. 

Difference between Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimized

Difference between Search Engine Friendly (SEF) and Search Engine Optimized (SEO)

• SEF is One-and-Done. SEO is Ongoing.
• SEF Focuses on Site Construction. SEO Focuses on Site Messaging.
• SEF Ensures All Pages have Unique Content. SEO Optimizes Content for Rankings and Conversions.
• SEF Uses Title and Description Tags. SEO Optimizes Title and Description Tags to Get Clicks.
• SEF Implements Readable URLs. SEO Implements URLs That Follow the Navigation Paths.
• SEF Employs Canonical Tags to Prevent Duplicate Content Issues. SEO Helps You Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues Altogether.
• SEF Adheres to Current Algorithmic Guidelines. SEO Adheres to Algorithmic Guidelines of the Future.
  

Verizon Buys Yahoo

Verizon Buys Yahoo!: In Position to Become Third Largest Ad Network

It’s official—Verizon announced that it will acquire Yahoo!’s core business for $4.83 billion.

This news comes just one year after Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 billion, making it the second time Verizon has snatched up the remnants of a once-thriving Internet company.

Now, the telecommunications leader hopes to combine Yahoo! and AOL to form an online powerhouse.

Google Adwords - Imported Call Conversion

Google announced that advertisers can now import their call conversion data into AdWords starting today - well, it is rolling out over the next few weeks.Google explains "by importing call conversion information into AdWords, you can track when phone calls lead to sales or other valuable customer actions." True.

It requires Google forwarding numbers to work and if you have that then you are set.

(1) You set up a conversion action in AdWords that tracks when customer calls come from your ads, or from a customer who clicked your ad and then called from a number on your website.

(2) Separately, you keep track of your sales calls, recording details like the caller’s phone number and the time and length of the call, and when those calls lead to a sale (or whatever conversion action you want to track). You probably already track this information through a customer relationship management system (CRM).

(3) You upload a file containing this information about your conversion calls into AdWords. AdWords then matches the call info in your file with the calls tracked through your AdWords conversion action.

(4) You can now see which of your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords are leading to calls that include sales or other conversions.