Study: Most Americans Permanently Changing Brands During Pandemic 45 percent of U.S. consumers have switched at least one brand preference during the global heath crisis, and some 62 percent believe that their brand change will become permanent — two of several items of interest to digital marketers in recently-released survey data. MediaPostHow microsegmenting boosts B2B conversion rates Micro-segmentation helps both B2B sellers and customers, with better conversion rates and more relevant customer experiences, with some 68 percent of B2B buyers noting that it's important for vendors to present relevant content throughout the buying cycle without having to rely on salespeople, according to recently-released Forrester report data. Digital Commerce 360Gartner Identifies Five Technologies to Drive More Agile and Scalable Advertising Capabilities for Marketers The digital advertising trends having the most impact on the industry have been outlined in Gartner's latest annual Hype Cycle for Digital Advertising 2020 report, showing the rise of Advanced Supply-Side Bidding (ASSB), Identity Resolution (IDR) and other areas of interest to digital marketers. MarTech SeriesFacebook Releases New Web Collage App via its Experimental NPE Team Facebook's New Product Experimentation (NPE) test-bed team has launched an experimental image display app called E.gg, offering a throwback look for modern photo collages that could eventually bring marketers new visual display opportunities, the social media giant recently announced. Social Media TodayWhat Types of Content Generate Leads That Convert? Marketers generate the most lead conversions by utilizing online content that incorporates video, which was seen as the most effective format by 41 percent of marketers, followed by webinars at 36 percent, and original research at 36 percent, topping the list of newly-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. MarketingChartsLinkedIn Provides More Tips for Virtual Events in New Guide Book Microsoft-owned LinkedIn (client) has published new insight into using its LinkedIn Live and Events features, including marketing survey data showing that some 69 percent of marketers find it challenging to make the move to virtual events, the firm recently announced in conjunction with the launch of its second-ever events guide. Social Media TodayInfographic: Consumers Want to See More Brands in the Esports Realm Today's consumers would like to find more brands including e-sports in their campaign efforts, with 72 percent saying that would like to see brands that are savvy enough to use the medium's fast-paced conversation. The gaming industry is the most dominant media channel for Gen Z and millennials, and is expected to top $1.5 billion in brand spending, according to recently-released infographic data. AdweekZenith: Global Ad Spend Projected To Drop 9.1% This Year Overall global advertising spending for 2020 is expected to fall by 9.1 percent, while digital ad spend is forecast to see only a 2 percent decrease, with digital accounting for more than half of global ad spend, according to recently-released Zenith report data. MediaPostFacebook Tests New Page Design Which De-Emphasizes Like Counts Facebook has begun testing pages that don't include page like buttons, instead placing focus on having users follow pages. The expanded test, which has been limited to certain public figures, has now also been implemented for some business pages, the firm recently announced. Social Media TodayHow COVID-19 Is Affecting the B2B Exhibition Industry 73 percent of B2B event organizers have had to cancel a physical event because of the pandemic, and 81 percent have begun providing virtual alternatives, according to recently-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. MarketingProfsON THE LIGHTER SIDE: A lighthearted look at “multicultural marketing” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist Street Artists Reimagine Classic Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt for AR-Enabled Murals — AdweekTOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
TopRank Marketing — Is B2B Influencer Marketing Effective During A Crisis? — Tribal Impact
TopRank Marketing — 33 of the Best Social Media Marketing Blogs of 2020 — HubSpot
Joshua Nite — Shake Up Your Business Strategies with These Community Suggestions — Small Business Trends
Lee Odden — C-Suite Marketing Episode 5: Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing [Podcast] — ITSMA / SoundCloud
Have you come across your own favorite B2B content marketing or digital advertising stories from the past week of news? Please let us know in the comments below. Thanks for joining us, and please return again next Friday for another collection of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don't miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.
Maturing anemail marketingprogram means getting closer to customers and giving them what they want rather than what marketers might think they want. It involves gaining an understanding of:
To Shayer’s view, maturing an email marketing program involves nurturing existing clients and gaining new ones by demonstrating the value a brand can bring to their organizations as well as connecting various systems. When Protiviti expanded globally, it connectedOracle Eloqua, its CRM, and webinar provider in order to gain better insight into customer behavior across multiple channels and not just in email. These insights then informed their digital marketing campaigns as how to better convey the value Protiviti presents to clients.
Whom you should email and whom you shouldn’t
One of the first things to mature their email program that Shayer’s team did was look at how similar organizations performed with emails in order to set benchmarks. Next, they divided their segments into people who had engaged with them and those who hadn’t. They then began tracking those metrics and using that data to show marketing leads whom they should be emailing and whom they shouldn’t.
This helped with not just email metrics, but also because emailing people who don’t respond can hurt a business’s online brand and overall email deliverability. Instead, marketers should try to target people that care and respond.
As a part of this, Shayer’s team partnered with the analytics team to look at the data and gain a better understanding of what really drives the customer and why they might or might not respond to an email. To this end, the analytics team built integrated dashboards to help mature the marketing team’s understanding of their customers and their email behavior.
The most important steps along the way
Shayer felt that three steps contributed greatly to her business’s email marketing maturity:
Relationship building
Education
Communication
The marketing team partnering with the analytics team served as a prime example of relationship building. However, email marketing maturity calls for multiple teams from across the organization to work together. Shayer had to work with IT on various system integrations. Given she was working with people outside of marketing, she sought to help them understand what they should be focused on when sending emails, such as targeting those who would respond. She also helped people understand how to useOracle Eloquaand its marketing automaton to build out campaigns.
Shayer’s team held email production meetings every week to keep everyone updated on what was going on, looked at their messaging to see if there was any overlap in campaigns, and determined if everything fit together.
In order to help with understanding all of this, Shayer and her team put together slide decks about such topics as:
Segmentation and how to adjust email campaigns based on customer behavior (send more, send less, send at different times, different content, etc.)
Shayer’s team also hosted workshops to help their colleagues understand how to put a good email together, what is good subject line, and what a good CTA is and where it should go.
Going forward
With their email marketing program maturing, Shayer is looking forward to testing out new personas and improving the customer journey where appropriate based upon the data. She hopes that her organization’s relationships with its customers can only deepen thanks to their email marketing.
Empathy is more than a buzzword. It’s not a box to be checked, or an added finishing touch for content. If B2B marketers want to successfully engage human audiences and break free from the deluge of irrelevant messages swirling around today’s customers, empathy needs to be at the center of all strategic initiatives from start to finish.
What Does Empathy Mean in B2B Marketing?
Empathy is defined simply as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But I’m not sure that characterization fully does it justice in the context of modern marketing. I rather like the way Zen Media CEO Shama Hyder described empathy in the better creative teamwork guide we helped our clients at monday.com put together: “Empathy is critical. It's much more than just having an understanding of what someone else's challenges might be. Part of it is that you have to give up being a control freak. As leaders, we should really look at the big picture and ask ourselves, is this necessary? Or is this just politicking, or someone trying to make it seem like it has to be done this way because it's the way they prefer?” Shama was speaking from the perspective of a business leader trying to get on the same page as their team, but it applies just as well to marketing endeavors. The critical first step in developing empathy is disconnecting from our own ingrained perceptions and assumptions. Only then can we truly understand and support the audiences we want to reach. Too often, empathy in marketing tends to be a bit narrow and self-centered (which is contradictory to the very concept itself). We often seek to understand only the challenges and pain points that drive interest in what we’re selling. Looking beyond this scope is necessary to build strong relationships founded on trust, especially now. “What you are creating, marketing and ultimately selling is but one piece of your customer’s life as a human on Earth. One very small piece,” said Mary Beech, principal at MRB Brand Consulting and former CMO of Kate Spade, in an AMA article on empathy in marketing. “And if we aren’t keeping in mind their full journey, including their emotional, mental, social and physical needs — as well as the challenges and joys they are facing — we cannot do our jobs well.” As Brian Solis wrote at Forbes recently, the need for empathetic customer experiences is greater than ever in the age of COVID-19 disruption. People have so much going on in their lives, and are facing so many unprecedented difficulties, that a myopic brand-centric focus is all the more untenable. “Traditional marketing will no longer have the same effect moving forward,” he argues. “If anything, it will negatively affect customer relationships rather than enhance them.” Agreed. So, let’s find a better way.
Engaging with True Empathy in the New Era of Marketing
Imagine if it was possible to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with each one of your customers and potential customers. You’d gain first-hand insight into their worldviews, their challenges, their hopes and dreams. Sadly, it’s not possible. You don’t have the time, nor do your customers. (Although I do recommend making a habit of engaging in direct, candid conversations with them when possible.) To make empathy scalable, marketers need to take advantage of all the tools at their disposal. This largely requires using data to connect the dots. “It’s critical for marketers to have a real-time 360 view and understanding of a customer’s full journey, at every stage, from discovery to engagement to retention and loyalty to advocacy,” Solis wrote at Forbes. Here are some suggestions for obtaining such a view: Use empathy-mapping. This practice, explained in a helpful primer from Nielsen Norman Group, involves creating a visualization of attitudes and behaviors to guide decision-making. Empathy-mapping originated in the world of UX design, but given how much user experience and customer experience now overlap, it’s becoming a powerful tool for marketers.
Coordinate and integrate your organizational efforts. Every customer-facing function in a company — marketing, sales, customer service — sees the customer from a different perspective. Seek ways to bring all these perspectives together into one centralized, holistic view. Per Solis: “Cross-functional collaboration is a mandate. As such, integration will become the new standard and will quickly become table stakes as every company rushes in this direction.” Tap into meaningful influencer relationships. Influencers can play a key role in empathetic marketing because they have relationships and perspectives extending beyond our brand ecosystems. If they align with your audience, influencers can bring unique insight and connect at deeper levels. Turning influencer engagements from mechanical to meaningful is essential to accomplishing this. Incidentally, Mr. Solis recently partnered with TopRank Marketing on the first-ever State of B2B Influencer Marketing report, in which our friend Ann Handley summarizes the impact quite well: “You could call yourself a good parent or a world-class marketer or an empathetic friend ... but any of those things would carry more weight coming from your child, customer, or BFF. So it is with integrating influencer content: It's a direct line to building trust and customer confidence.” Research and engage with topics that matter to your customers outside of their jobs. Given the connotations of B2B, it’s all too easy to isolate our customer research around what they do professionally. But these are human beings with lives outside of work. To drive powerful engagement, marketers should search for the cross-sections between their brand’s purpose and values, and what matters to their customers. A good example of this is found in the IBM THINK Blog, which is “dedicated to chronicling the fast-moving world of cognitive computing” and covers many important societal topics. (Recent focuses include a post on gender pronouns and a corporate environmental report.)
Examples of Empathetic B2B Marketing
Who’s getting it right and paving the way for a more empathy-driven approach to engaging B2B audiences? Here are a few examples:
It goes without saying that the video-conferencing service Zoom stumbled into a massive business opportunity with the dramatic pivot to remote work this year. The company could simply try to cash in and maximize that opportunity, but instead, they’re doubling down on building trust. Zoom’s CEO Eric S. Yuan recently wrote about his roots in China in articulating his organization’s support for this embattled region of the world, noting that Zoom is providing expanded features for free accounts and offering accessible resources and education. He also made the company’s tools free to K-12 schools (a potentially lucrative customer base) in March.
Seeing human faces brings an instantly relatable element to any B2B campaign. That’s why Microsoft’s Story Labs microsite, which frames some of the company’s initiatives and guiding principles around real people and their stories, is so effective.
Let Empathy Guide Your B2B Marketing Strategy
In order to walk in someone else’s shoes, you first need to untie and remove your own. Making empathy a core strategic pillar requires marketers to take a step back, disconnect from their ingrained perceptions and assumptions, and get fully in tune with the people they serve. Only then can we create the type of relevant and personalized experiences that drive deep and long-lasting brand engagement. For more tips that will help your business-oriented content strike notes of genuine empathy, read Josh Nite’s blog post on 5 Ways to Humanize B2B Marketing.
Are you using the latest search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help with your content marketing efforts? Don't worry, as we’ve got you covered with a look at some of the most helpful SEO tools to help you refine and augment your content marketing plans. Sorting through lists of the seemingly endless number of available SEO tools can be frustrating as well as a hit and miss proposition, however we’ve put this collection together so that you can skip the search and get right into SEO tools you can use today to help you create amazing content marketing stories. Let’s jump in with our collection of fresh SEO tools to boost your content marketing experiences.
1 — Google Lighthouse
Google’s own Lighthouse tool — an open-source project — offers a simple way to check a number of basic SEO-related issues that every website should consider. Among its auditing functions are tools specifically focusing on performance, SEO, accessibility, and progressive web apps, and it's also capable of examining webpages requiring authentication. The tool can be run standalone, from the web, in Google's Chrome DevTools, or incorporated into continuous integration systems, and its Lighthouse Viewer allows viewing and sharing of analysis data online.
2 — Botify SEO Platform
There are numerous powerful SEO platforms that each look to be as close to a one-stop-shop as possible for marketers and brands to gain reliable and relevant search insight, and squarely in this category is enterprise SEO suite company Botify. Botify offers a vast array of SEO analysis, data crawling intelligence and indexing metrics tools, all while working to make this complex information both easy to understand and act on, as Google’s Martin Splitt recently touched on in a live video conversation.
3 — Bing URL Submissions Plugin for WordPress
B2B marketers in WordPress environments recently got access to an open-source plug-in from Bing Webmaster Tools, automating the submission of new site content to the Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing URL Submissions Plugin in a feature-rich plug-in that can also be customized via Bing’s API for incorporation into other content management systems.
4 — Schema.org
Google and other search engine firms prefer that businesses use schema markup for structured data in the format set forth and maintained by the Schema.org organization, which is especially important today as features including Google’s Knowledge Graphs rely in part on this simple yet often-overlooked element, as Michal Pecánek recently examined for Ahrefs.
5 — WebPagetest
Another free tool frequently used by savvy search industry professionals is WebPagetest, allowing webmasters and technically-proficient marketers to run a variety of tests including content type breakdowns, page speed data and others providing helpful information. The data from WebPagetest can be used to troubleshoot website slowness issues, as Barry Schwartz recently outlined in “Google: How To Diagnose Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Slowness.”
Smart SEO Tools To Make You A Knowledge Builder
via GIPHY We hope you’ve found at least a few new-to-you SEO content marketing tools among those we’ve taken a look at here, and that you’ll find them useful as you create new campaigns that are using the soundest practices of SEO, and that they'll also help build your own team’s knowledge. We have a multi-year history of highlighting helpful marketing tools, and here are a few of the other most recent articles we’ve published on the subject:
Cross-channel marketingmeans meeting customers where they are at on the channel they prefer, be it email, social, mobile, or display. Customers expect you to keep up with them when they cross from channel to channel or device from device. Consider that:
It all begins by empathizing with your customers, and your customer data can tell you who they are and where they are located. It should also indicate their pain points, the channels they prefer, and the devices they use. With the data, you can put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself: how can you help with what problems they are experiencing? How can you make their jobs easier?
2)Consistency across channels
Customers expect a seamless, consistent experience across all channels. Any disjointedness or difficulties migrating from one channel or device to another gives them the chance to quit the experience. Data can show at what points on the customer journey customers are dropping off and where you can improve.
3) Relevant, valuable content
Your customer data will dictate how you cancraft contentacross different touchpoints that is interesting, relevant, engaging, and valuable. Make it worth a customer’s while to go on a channel and carry onto another by creating content that matches their preferences and needs.
4) Personalization across channels
The experience across all touchpoints needs to be personalized as much as possible to a customer’s preferences, as shown by the data. This includes reaching out to them on their channel of choice, with a message frequency they prefer, and with information they find valuable and relevant.
5) The ability to track behaviors across channels and gather new customer data
Keeping track of customer behavior across channels will provide insights into what customers want and prefer. The more data you can gather, the better you can personalize the touchpoints along a customer journey.
6) Use analytics and testing to optimize
A/B and multivariate testingprovide insights into what is working and what isn’t and how you can tweak and revise.
Neal Schaffer is a leader in helping educate executives and professionals on social media as well as in implementing successful social media strategies for businesses. CEO of the social media agency PDCA Social, social media educator at Rutgers University and the Irish Management Institute, social media keynote speaker who has spoken at hundreds of events on four continents, and author of three social media books, Neal is a true innovator and influencer in digital and social media marketing.
Questions I ask Neal Schaffer:
How do you define influence?
Is there influencer marketing outside of social media today?
Is podcasting interviews influencer marketing?
How do you find the right influencers for your business?
What you’ll learn if you give a listen:
The definition of nano influencer
How much more powerful leveraging influencers can be than posting digitally
How to leverage influencer interviews in marketing
How to create a program to kickstart an influencer marketing campaign
And when you understand your audience better you can target them in a smarter way, and get more bang for your buck from your paid campaigns on Facebook and Google.
Both Facebook and Google refer to these user interactions as Events. They allow you to track them using a tracking code installed on your website.
What Are Events
Events are user interactions that don’t involve loading another page on your website.
In ecommerce, the prime example of an event is Add to Cart.
Another event can be filling out a field in a form. As opposed to form completion that usually triggers a Thank You page, filling out one or more fields without submission – referred to as ‘form abandonment’ – can be recorded as an event.
More examples of events are: watching a video, clicking on mailto email address link, downloading media (such as PDFs).
If a visitor watched a video on your website, it demonstrates an interest in your offering.
Basically, any user interaction on your website can contribute to better understanding the user level of engagement with your brand, and the intent on moving down the funnel.
In ecommerce, even if a visitor did not complete a purchase, the abandoned cart shows a high purchase intent. Something has prevented the visitor from completing the purchase, but such a visitor is definitely worth your attention.
By tracking events you’ll be able to make a more focused offer to this user in your paid campaigns.
How? By injecting the events tracking data into your paid campaigns and using this data for more precise targeting and optimized offering.
Think about it – if you can group together all the visitors who watched a certain video and set up a customized campaign for them that reference what they saw in the video, wouldn’t that make for a far more effective campaign than a generic awareness message?
It sure will.
So that’s exactly what we’ll go through in this article: how to use event tracking to get more out of your ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.
How to Set Up Events on Your Website
With both Facebook and Google, you’ll need to use code for setting up events on your website.
Yes, unfortunate but true.
Setting up events isn’t the most complex coding task, but since you are dealing with your website code any mistake can cause havoc. So this task needs to be handled by your development team.
Events Set Up Using Facebook Pixel
Standard events on Facebook include:
View content
Search
Add to cart
Add to wishlist
Initiate checkout
Add payment info
Make purchase
Lead
Complete registration
First you need to verify that you already have the Facebook Pixel code embedded in the header code of every page of your website, between the <head> and <head> tags. If you don’t, first go ahead and insert the base Pixel code.
Next, select the event that you wish to track for a specific page from Facebook’s list of events. Let’s say Add to Cart event, which looks like this: fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’);
Paste the Add to Cart event code above the </script> tag.
Here’s how it should look:
Source: Facebook
Your header code
Your base Facebook Pixel code (the ID number is unique to every website)
The specific event code
You’ll need to repeat this on every page you want to track an event or a few events, for each page inserting the relevant event code.
For event tracking in Google Analytics you’ll need to create custom code snippets for every event.
The code is then added to the link code of the item or action you want to track so when the item is clicked it will be displayed as an event in Google Analytics.
The event code is made of four elements – two required elements and two optional elements:
Category (required) – defines a group of actions you want to track
Action (required) – the type of action you want to track
Label (optional) – for your monitoring convenience, stating what’s the event is about
Value (optional) – assigning a numeric value to the event; can be monetary value, or just a scale
The basic structure of an event code looks like this:
All this event data needs to be injected into your paid campaigns in order to optimize them but before we get into that, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.
Code.
Dealing with code isn’t ideal for marketers. It’s just not our forte.
It holds us back since constant optimization is one of the core principles of online marketing.
And when you need your development team for every act of optimization, well, it’s not ideal.
So is there a better way to track events on your website? Apparently there is.
There’s a tool called Oribi that offers exactly that – no code event tracking.
Oribi tracks every interaction on your website, page views and button clicks, automatically. It collects all this data and makes it all available to you. Even when you make changes to your website, like adding a page or changing buttons, events are updated dynamically. As said, all of this is done without any code business on your behalf.
Here’s how event tracking looks in Oribi:
The value here is apparent. You don’t need to decide which events to track, and you don’t need your development team to track it for you. Everything is tracked for you. You just need to follow the data.
Using Event Data to Optimize Your Paid Campaigns
Now let’s see how to use all this event data, that you collected so diligently, to better segment and optimize your paid campaigns, and get more return on your ad spend.
There are two main objectives for tracking event data:
Internal – being able to analyze how visitors are interacting with your website and from that optimizing the UX (user experience) on your website
External – exporting the data to your paid campaigns to better segment them – group together audiences according to their place in the funnel and specific interests in order to deliver more relevant messages
Let’s look again at the Add to Cart event. As mentioned, adding an item to a cart shows a high purchase intent. These visitors, even if didn’t complete the purchase, declared their interest in your product.
They are ‘worth your efforts’ to continue and court them in the hope they will complete a purchase in the future.
But they are all different, and you can understand that based on the item, or items, they chose.
If you could, for example, group together all those visitors who added a shirt and then group together those who added a pair of shoes – wouldn’t your paid campaigns for these two distinct groups be so much more valuable?
Not to mention you could segment them to men and women.
You’ll be able to deliver a highly relevant message, or offering, in your ads.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as segmentation and optimization of your paid campaigns that can be achieved with event tracking.
Two Main Use Cases for Ad Campaign Optimization Based on Event Tracking
Both Facebook and Google offer very strong optimization capabilities for their ad campaigns.
There are two objectives for this:
Ability to segment your audience in order to deliver a highly relevant message (the more segmented the audience is, the more relevant your message can be)
Ability to reach new audiences that are also relevant to your offering
Let’s look at how these objectives are achieved through specific features in Facebook and Google ad campaigns.
Facebook’s Retargeting and Google’s Remarketing
The simplest way to explain the Retargeting / Remarketing feature is this:
When you visit a website a tracking cookie is installed on your browser – yes, that’s the famous cookies message you now see everywhere. After you leave the website you begin to see display ads of that website. This must be familiar to basically anyone.
This is the retargeting / remarketing feature. To show you ads of the website you visited on other websites.
The ads can be general, just a reminder of the brand. But they can be more than that. What if they related directly to the content you read on that website? Would that make a bigger impact? Of course it would.
Let’s say you browsed a vacation apartments website. You looked at apartments in Lisbon, but didn’t make a reservation. A couple of days later, while scrolling down your Facebook feed, you all of a sudden see an ad that says “Still thinking about Lisbon?”
Now that’s powerful. It will stop your scrolling. It will make you think about Lisbon again. If you clicked the ad, it would take you back straight to the Lisbon section of that vacation apartments website.
So by tracking events – in this case browsing a specific page – you are able to deliver highly targeted, super relevant, and hopefully mighty engaging ads to audience that already demonstrated interest in your offering.
Facebook’s Lookalike Audience and Google’s Similar Audience
The simplest way to explain the Lookalike / Similar Audience feature is this:
Based on your audience attributes, Facebook and Google are able to target similar people and show them your ads.
Behind this simple explanation there is a highly complex algorithm able to locate people with similar interests, demographic, location and professional background.
Facebook and Google are able to do this thanks to the vast amounts of data they have on their users.
Let’s say you track a video as an event. The video is a top-of-the-funnel content that explains the benefits of using the app you are offering. Website visitors who watched the video are ‘recorded’.
You can define the visitors who watched the video as a specific ‘audience’ in Facebook or Google Analytics.
Then, what the algorithm does is find similarities between the visitors who watched the video and based on these similarities it can show your ads to other people – people who never watched the video – but share the same similarities with your audience.
This is an incredible tool to expand your potential audience and reach people that are likely to be interested in your offering. In marketing jargon, we are talking about high-quality leads in order to get more value on your ad spend.
Connecting the Dots – Events, Audience, and Targeting
So, you might be thinking, this all sounds great. I’m very impressed with both Facebook and Google and how they can help me refine and optimize my ad campaigns – but how do I make all this happen?
You’re right to be asking. Making this ad magic happen requires a lot of setup, tying together the various elements we discussed here – events, audiences and targeting.
Let’s see how it’s done.
The first part of the chain are the events. We’ve already covered how to set them up, both on Facebook and Google Analytics.
Remember – how you define an event is crucial for the success of the campaign, either retargeting / remarketing or lookalike / similar audience, you’ll run based on this event.
Once you have the events set up, it’s time to connect them to your ad campaign. In this context, ‘connect’ means enabling Facebook / Google to use the data collected from the event tracking to optimize the ad campaign.
In Facebook
Let’s start with the easier of the two.
Once you inserted the event tracking code to the various pages of your website, the events data is available for you on your Ads Manager.
As opposed to Google where you need to first import the event data from Google Analytics to Google Ads (we’ll get to how to do it in a sec) in Facebook this import action is taken care for you.
Still, you’ll need to locate this data. Here’s how:
Log in to Ads Manager and click the Pixels tab
On the left, choose Data sources, it will take you to your pixel
Now you’ll see a general breakdown of your events
Events received is the total number of events recorded by the pixel
Top events lists the highest performing events
Activity shows number of events recorded per day for the past week
Click on the Details button
Here you can see the actual breakdown of events, by volume and date. You can segment the visitors based on their actions, as we discussed before, or use the different segmentation for Lookalike audience creation.
Since you are already in Facebook Ads Manager, all the information is available for campaign targeting and optimization.
In Google
It’s a two-step process. First you need to define the events in Google Analytics, and then import them into Google Ads.
Define the event in Google Analytics
In your Analytics account, click the Admin tab in the bottom left corner
Next, click the Goals tab
Select “+New Goal”
Choose the “Custom” option
Name your goal
Select “Event” option
Now you’ll need to refer to the four elements you defined in the event code you had inserted for the specific event. This: onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”
The Goal you’re creating will have a specific box for each value. It looks like this:
The text you are entering here must be identical to the text in the code. If it won’t, the event won’t be recorded.
You’ll need to repeat the process above with every event you’re tracking.
Import the event into Google Ads
In your Google Ads account, click the Tools tab at the top navigation bar
Select “Conversions” from the dropdown menu
On the left side of the page, click “Google Analytics”
You’ll see a list of all the goals you defined in Analytics
Select the ones you want to import
Click “Import”
And… you’re done.
Yes, the events you track on your website are finally ‘available’ for segmenting your remarketing campaigns and creating similar audiences.
It was a long way to get here, but it is sure worth it.
One more thing though.
Remember way, way back at the beginning of the article when I mentioned Oribi, that tracks all the events on your website automatically without you needing to touch any code?
Well, they also import all these events, to both Facebook Ads Manager and Google Ads, in the same automated, no code way.
Conclusion
Event tracking provides you with valuable data on your website visitors, such as level of intent, specific interests and place in funnel.
Such valuable data must be collected, since it helps you better understand your audience.
We could have stopped here, as the above present enough value on its own. But there’s more.
This valuable data can also utilized for the optimization of your paid ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.
You can, and should, use event data to deliver highly relevant and effective retargeting / remarketing ads to segmented audiences who have already visited your website.
You should also use event data as the base for creating lookalike / similar audiences for ad campaigns targeting potential audiences who have not yet visited your website.
By optimizing your paid ad campaigns with event data you’ll be able to better engage users, increase your conversion rate and get more of your ad spend, meaning, you’ll pay less for more clicks.
With all this reasoning, there can be only one conclusion, right?
Infographic: Consumers Want to See More Brands in the Esports Realm Today's consumers would like to find more brands including e-sports in their campaign efforts, with 72 percent saying that would like to see brands that are savvy enough to use the medium's fast-paced conversation. The gaming industry is the most dominant media channel for Gen Z and millennials, and is expected to top $1.5 billion in brand spending, according to recently-released infographic data. Adweek Zenith: Global Ad Spend Projected To Drop 9.1% This Year Overall global advertising spending for 2020 is expected to fall by 9.1 percent, while digital ad spend is forecast to see only a 2 percent decrease, with digital accounting for more than half of global ad spend, according to recently-released Zenith report data. MediaPost Facebook Tests New Page Design Which De-Emphasizes Like Counts Facebook has begun testing pages that don't include page like buttons, instead placing focus on having users follow pages. The expanded test, which has been limited to certain public figures, has now also been implemented for some business pages, the firm recently announced. Social Media Today How COVID-19 Is Affecting the B2B Exhibition Industry 73 percent of B2B event organizers have had to cancel a physical event because of the pandemic, and 81 percent have begun providing virtual alternatives, according to recently-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. MarketingProfs ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: 
A lighthearted look at “multicultural marketing” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist Street Artists Reimagine Classic Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt for AR-Enabled Murals — Adweek TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Google’s own 
There are numerous powerful SEO platforms that each look to be as close to a one-stop-shop as possible for marketers and brands to gain reliable and relevant search insight, and squarely in this category is enterprise SEO suite company 
B2B marketers in WordPress environments recently got access to an open-source plug-in from Bing Webmaster Tools, automating the submission of new site content to the Microsoft’s Bing search engine. 
Google and other search engine firms prefer that businesses use schema markup for structured data in the format set forth and maintained by the 
Another free tool frequently used by savvy search industry professionals is 
In this episode of the 
