How To Run Instagram Ads To Your Profile. What's up everybody, Paul Hickey here with your data-driven daily tip. So I've shown you before how to create ads on Instagram using Facebook Ads manager, but one question is - how do you create ads on Instagram to drive users to your Instagram profile? That's a little bit different.   Let's jump right into it.  So in Facebook ads manager, let's just recap, you can run any kind of ad in ads manager.   Typically like a traffic ad for, example and you can go and under the placements section and toggle from automatic placements to manual placements and run ads for your business on Instagram.  These placements include the Instagram feed, the Instagram explorer feature, and of course Instagram stories.   Well what these allow you to do is link to a URL.  That's different than running an ad to your profile - your Instagram profile.  Let me break this down: so it would be the equivalent of like a Facebook page promotion where you're running a Facebook ad to try to get more likes, right?  Instagram, through Facebook Ads manager, doesn't have the ability to run a promotion to get you more Instagram followers, but if you have a business account on Instagram, you will be able to run a promotion of a post.   You can promote a post to drive people to your Instagram profile. So let me show you how this works. So you have a post that you want to use as your ad creative.   You click promote, and then it says where to send people.   Now you can send people to your website, your DM or your profile so I'm gonna select profile and then you can set up audiences within your Instagram app as long as you are a business account just like you can set up audiences in your Facebook Ads manager.   So I've done that.  Here I'm going to use the small business websites audience and you can set a budget, so you can run a test campaign. $30 over six days. It'll tell you your estimated reach. We love the data behind that.   And then you review your promotion, again your destination is your Instagram profile and you can test and see if this gets you more followers!

First of all, I apologize for the poor audio quality on this video. I thought I had my headphone mic on, but it picked up my computer mic. I was unwilling to record it on this occasion. Sorry. Hopefully you can still get value from this post.  I digress. Google Ads is likely far more powerful than you think. :)  It used to be about "grabbing the remarketing tag" and putting it on your website, so that you can create an audience of website visitors and target them specifically with ads.  And of course, that can still happen, and this video shows you the basic steps to grab the tag and put it on your WordPress website.  However, Google Ads Audience Manager just isn't talked about enough in the digital marketing world. Creating remarketing lists is one aspect, while another is simply marketing to custom audiences.  For example, you can run ads to affinity groups and interest groups, such as avid marathon runners, readers of mystery novels, adults that buy online courses to further their education, fruit flavored soda drinks and more.  This is called a Custom Affinity Audience. And they're managed under Google Audience Manager, the same place that you manage your remarketing audiences.  Remarketing audiences are different. For example, you can build an audience of users that have visited your homepage in the last 30 days. That's basic, but can be effective nonetheless.  Additionally, you can build an audience of people that have not only visited your homepage, but also clicked on about us, and a specific product and added that product to their cart.  And you can do anything in between.  What does "create an audience" mean? It means Google tracks the users browser cookies, and when they take the path of one of your custom remarketing audiences, they are entered into a group that you can then run specific ad messaging to on Google and the Google Partner Network.  Now, there's also Audience Placements on Google Ads, which I talk about more in this post - https://datadriven.design/how-to-put-your-ads-exactly-where-you-want-them-how-to-use-placements-in-google-ads-data-driven-daily-tip-229/

There are many reasons for marketers and business owners to share access to their Google Ads account, and now Google Ads has made it easier than ever. You don’t even really need a Google Ads Manager (formerly Master Client Center) account anymore to safely share access to your account. You may just want an analyst to take a look for you, but not be able to actually make changes. Or, you may want to automate an email report to an executive in your company. And, of course, it’s super common for businesses to hire outside help from freelancers or agencies. Whatever your reason for sharing access to your Google Ads Account, you can safely do it very easily now. Just log into your account, then navigate to Tools and Settings in the top right, then in the second column from the right called “Setup” click on Account Access. You’ll see a blue circle with a plus sign in it. Click that. From there, it’s pretty straightforward to add the email address (it has to be associated with a Google Account) of the person you want to add. Select the permissions you want them to had, and boom, you’re done.

Tricky little Facebook Business Manager. Where do the invites go when you try to add someone as an admin to your Facebook Business Page or Facebook Ads Account?   Nowhere!  This trick helps you invite people, then immediately go add them.  Check it out, and happy marketing!

Every single second of time is super important to small business owners and marketers. I mean, especially with content marketers like me telling people to create multiple pieces of content per day for social media to help grow their audiences.  I love this time-saving tip that can be found within the YouTube Studio Channel Settings that allows content creators to essentially pre-load tags, descriptions and other video settings.  This way, when you're uploading you're new, awesome video to YouTube, you can change around your description and tags rather than write them from scratch each time.  Every second counts, marketers and small business owners!

As a web developer and digital strategist, I've worked with hundreds of businesses over the last 15 years, and just about every single one has either asked me about Google Ads or paid me to run a campaign for them or show them how to set up a campaign.  Up until about 2017 it was super complicated, then Google innovated and started drastically improving a product they called Google Adwords Express.  My content archive at Data Driven Design proves I am a HUGE proponent of Google Adwords Express for any kind of small business just dipping their toes into the Digital Marketing waters.

Business Owners and Marketers, are you struggling trying to find how to create a marketing friendly Facebook URL?  You should be able to get a really clean one with your business name in it and not have to use long ones with dashes and numbers and Facebook initially gives you.

When it comes to Facebook Business Manager, Instagram Business Accounts vs. Personal Accounts and more, there is a lot to know, and a lot of details “under the hood” that Business Owners and Marketers need to be aware of. At times, it can get very frustrating and overwhelming to try and hook things up correctly between the two platforms. Particularly, Facebook Business Manager being one of the more convoluted digital marketing tools I’ve ever used. Granted, it is free, so I’m not complaining, but I digress. The point is that business owners and marketers really only should care / only do care about the following things, which are EXACTLY what this video shows you how to do: – Be able to connect your Instagram Business Account To Your Facebook Business Manager Account so you can run Instagram Ads via your Facebook Ads account. – Swap your IG personal account to an Instagram Business Account so that you can advertise via the IG app AND – Connect IG and FB so that you can post from IG and have it go directly to your Facebook Business Page. This is particularly useful for IGTV video uploads that you can send directly to your Facebook Business Page. Thanks for reading, watching and listening, and have a great day! KEEP MARKETING! Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC and founder of Nashville Voice Conference, has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 15 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing, Email Marketing and most recently, Voice App Design and Development – Alexa Skills and Google Actions. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

I've used WordPress for almost 15 years now, and I've never seen the frequency of random "Sorry, That Page Doesn't Exist" errors that I've seen in the last few weeks. Clients have emailed in one-by-one, after the recent core upgrade to PHP 7.4. Well, at least that's the only correlation I can see between these errors. I could be wrong on the cause, but I know the fix! And that's the most important thing. It's definitely not as scary as the error itself. Trust me. It actually only takes a few seconds. First, go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard and confirm your page(s) weren't deleted. Then, go to Settings - Permalinks and click Save. That's right. Don't change anything, just click "Save." Your pages should reappear upon refreshing.  You're welcome. :)

Hello WordPress Content Managers, Content Marketers and yes, that means you too Business Owners! Are you frustrated by the fact that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media outlets don't always show the correct featured image when you embed/post a link from your WordPress website?  Believe me, I've seen some get really messy.  Don't worry, I've got the solution for you.  First of all, all WordPress website pages and posts have something called the Featured Image. It's located on the far right hand side of the page, as my video explains. If your theme isn't having any issues showing the OG: Image tag (open graph image tag) to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., then your website should be showing exactly what you put in this featured image spot as the embedded image with your social media post.  Also, as my video explains, it should be pulling the SEO Title and Meta Description from your Yoast SEO plug-in and showing that as the Title and Description of your post under your featured image as you make your post.  If this isn't working, don't worry, the next thing to try is called the "Social" settings in Yoast SEO. As the video above walks you through, you can toggle over to the Social tab in Yoast, and try to put in a Facebook and Twitter Title, Description and Image.  What this is trying to do is properly set the OG: image tag in the source code of your WordPress site, overriding the Featured Image setting.  However, you may be watching / reading this because you already tried these things! Don't worry. I have a fix.  Believe it or not, you need to create a Facebook App for your WordPress site. But it's super easy and quick.  Just go into your Yoast SEO Social Settings and click the Facebook Tab. Then go to Developers.Facebook.com and create an app. The video walks you through this step.  Once your website cache clears (typically 24 hours depending on which host you use, and faster if you use GoDaddy or WPEngine - each of which give you the ability to clear cache with one click from your WP Admin Dashboard), the OG:image settings should reset.  You should then use both the Facebook Sharing Debugger Tool and the LinkedIn Post Inspector Tool to preview what your posts will look like as you embed links from your WordPress website into social media.  Just like other updates to your site, it may take some time and refreshing to get the results you want, but once you've gone through this level of troubleshooting and fixed it, you shouldn't have to do it again.   Special thanks to some great resources out there that helped me along the way:  JOOBI.org and CompeteThemes.com.