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The title slide is wrong on this video folks, it is Data Driven Daily Tip #324, and we're talking Facebook Offline Events with Casey Carroll of Action Ad Agency. In addition to the alliteration in our company name, Casey and I have a lot in common. As you can see from the Steve Largent jersey hanging in the background, he is also an NFL fan (Seattle Seahawks to be exact), and he knows Facebook Ads like no other. In fact, he specializes only in Facebook Ads. In this podcast, we talk about Facebook Offline Events, the Facebook Attribution Tool, what the minimum monthly budget should be for any business looking to run Facebook Ads, and much, much more. Thanks to Casey for being a part of the Data Driven Daily Tip Show. So let's get right into it... What Exactly Are Facebook Offline Events? Let's say you have a physical location where you do business. Like a retail store, convenience store, coffee/drink franchise, or car dealership, for example, and you may or may not have a way of collecting customer information, like a loyalty program, or a point of sale system (all businesses have this by the way). Facebook Offline Events actually allow you to retroactively upload lists of customers that have purchased from you, and get real data around which Facebook Ads you've run that they have seen. Let me explain this again. You can run Facebook Ads, and then track exactly which creative, imagery, headlines, body copy, calls to action, etc. drove the most actual sales at your offline store. You do this by having us or your digital agency, set up Facebook Offline Events. Or, you can do it yourself with a little help from this article. In this podcast, Casey and I also talk about the Facebook Attribution Tool. What Is The Facebook Attribution Tool? Attribution is something I've written quite a lot about related to Google Adwords, but now Facebook has made their Attribution Tool available to marketers.  Essentially the Facebook Attribution Tool is a way of understanding which of your ads are driving action, but it allows you to assign conversion credit to marketing touchpoints along the consumer journey, on and off Facebook, to understand what's really driving your business outcomes. It also allows you to track conversion paths that happen across multiple devices and easily view performance by channel – paid or organic – and publisher to see what's driving your conversions.

What is a Google Action? A Google Action is a way to make Google Assistant smarter. It's something you can search and add to your Google Assistant App, Google Home, Google Home Mini, Google Hub and more. As a user, you can just ask Google for information, similar to the way you can ask Amazon's Alexa via Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show and any other Alexa Enabled Devices. A Google Action is a voice-based application, just like an Alexa Skill. As a developer / digital agency, we can create these voice based apps to help businesses build a presence on Alexa and "dominate" search on Google Home. The data is showing that more and more users are getting their information from voice assistants and smart speakers, meaning we're leading the charge and getting businesses there. In this Data Driven Daily Tip, I demonstrate how to take a voice-based app that has already been published as an Alexa Skill, and submit / publish it to the Google Actions Console using Voiceflow, so it can be added on Google Assistant, Google Home and Google Hub users.

What is Alexa For Business? It's not a phrase I'm using to try to encourage businesses to use Alexa, it's an actual service offering from Amazon. Similarly to the way that IT departments have managed company-issued computers and mobile devices, organizations can now distribute and manage company-issued Alexa-enabled devices as well as create Private Alexa Skills. This episode walks you through how to set up Alexa For Business for your organization.  Things you need: 1. An AWS (Amazon Web Services) account 2. That's it. 3. If you want to deploy, manage Private Alexa Skills, you'll also need an Alexa Developer Account. Things you can do with Alexa For Business include: 1. Manage Meeting Rooms 2. Have Alexa enabled devices on your desk 3. Ask private skills to read you information from the company intranet, conduct voice-enabled new employee trainings or sales trainings, or even just ask when a meeting room is available or "what building does Sally work in?" Alexa for Business is all about making your organization more efficient and effective. For more on voice-enabling applications and creating more productive employees, click here. For more on using Alexa in meeting rooms, click here. For more on Alexa for Business Blueprints, click here. For more on Creating and Publishing Private Skills, click here. And please know that Data Driven Design certainly provides all of these services for our clients. For a free consultation, click here.

I decided to run Google Adsense ads on Data Driven Design. First of all because we're publishing so much content on our site (1-2 new pieces per day), so technically we're a publisher in addition to being a digital agency. Secondly, because as a leading web design and development company, we need to stay up to date with all of the new changes to Google Adsense so that we can implement it properly for our clients. Recently, while logging into my Adsense account, I realized that there was a critical message at the top. It read - Earnings at risk - One or more of your sites does not have an ads.txt file. Fix this now to avoid severe impact to your revenue. What? No email warning, and my "revenue" might be impacted, that's not good! This video walks you through what steps I decided to take to attempt to resolve this matter. All publishers should listed and read this documentation... Declare authorized sellers with ads.txt  Ensure your ads.txt files can be crawled

Voice User Interface Design is so new. It's so hard to think through every scenario of what a user might want to say to Alexa or Google Home, which is why this particular use case I think is a good one to share with you all. I recently built an Alexa Skill using Voiceflow, which allows you to map out your entire conversation with Alexa. So for example, my Alexa Skill is to let attendees of the Nashville Voice Conference know about their roles and responsibilities at the conference. At one point, after you identify who you are, if you're a featured facilitator, it asks you about if you'd like to know about Parking, Timing or your specific event preparation. One of the featured facilitators used the Skill and told me it didn't work, because he had tried all variations he could think of using "my specific event preparation".... Turns out, I hadn't accounted for the word "specific" in my synonyms in Voiceflow. So, it was an easy fix. I anticipate much of Voice User Interface Design (VUI) being like this.

We build 99% of our websites in WordPress. There's just very rarely no reason not to. It's the most "non-technical content-management friendly" platform available, and it doesn't have the brick walls that SquareSpace does or the Theme Limitations that Shopify has. And, security should never be an excuse with WordPress. You can lock it down and get a good webhost, and you'll be all set. But one annoying thing is comment spam on blog posts. Every WordPress site, regardless of how many blog posts it has, will surely get comment spam. The good news is that the spam won't be visible to your audience, but it will go to your email inbox if you're the site admin, and it will just be well, flat out annoying. This simple video shows you how to turn off WordPress comment alerts. :)

Mailchimp is an amazing platform. It continues to evolve every day. My prediction is that it becomes one of the top overall marketing platforms and even CRMs on the world in the next 5-10 years. As a result, I have a ton of Mailchimp content at www.DataDriven.Design But I digress. Today's Data Driven Daily Tip is How To Create A Segment In Mailchimp. The reason you'd want to do this would be because Mailchimp doesn't let you "exclude a tag" ... Tags are a way of organizing your audience within one list, so that you don't need to duplicate the same user onto multiple lists in your audience. It's super smart, but when you go to send a campaign, you can only INCLUDE users that have a particular tag, for example - if I wanted to send an email to all attendees of the Nashville Voice Conference, that's easy. I just select that tag when I'm starting my campaign. But if I want to send a blast out to my entire Audience but EXCLUDE people who have already signed up for the conference, I have to create a segment. This video walks you through how to get that done. :)

This video / podcast / Alexa Flash Briefing with my guy Will Acuff, co-founder of Corner To Corner, is a perfect example of how Small Business Owners and Marketers need to be creating multiple pieces of content out of one simple business conversation. By watching this 23 minute video clip, you can see that the following pieces of content are being created by Will and I. 1. a blog for me 2. a vlog for me 3. a podcast for me 4. an Alexa Flash Briefing for Will (none of the above using anything other than a laptop computer) 5. a podcast for Will 6. a blog for Will 7. a vlog for Will 8. a promotional video for Will All small business owners stuck on what to talk about or how to create content for your business, take a page out of Will’s book. Just jump on a Zoom Conference with another business owner you respect, and record it.  KEEP MARKETING! Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via Podcasting, building Alexa Skills, SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

Business Owners, IT Professionals and Entrepreneurs - what is Gmail Confidential Mode? You may have received an email from Google / GSuite lately regarding Confidential Mode.  The subject is - [Action Required] Gmail Confidential Mode launching default ON for your domain The body reads: What do I need to know? When Gmail messages are sent in confidential mode, it helps protect from unauthorized access and recipients don’t have the option to forward, copy, print, or download their content or attachments. Senders can also set an expiration date for messages sent with confidential mode and revoke access to them at any time. What does this mean for my organization? From June 25, your users will have the option to send emails with confidential mode, unless you disable this feature. As an administrator, you can determine whether your users can use confidential mode by selecting from the following setting options: Disable: This option prevents users in your domain from sending emails with confidential mode. Enable now (beta): This option will enable confidential mode, which is currently in beta. However, the feature will remain enabled when it enters into general availability on June 25, 2019. Enable when the feature is in general availability: This is the default option and will enable confidential mode when this feature becomes generally available on June 25, 2019. What do I need to do? Please ensure that you select the appropriate option in the Admin console for your organization before June 25, 2019. You can find this setting in the Admin console by navigating to Apps - G Suite - Settings for Gmail - User settings If you do not take action before June 25, your domain will automatically have confidential mode turned on for your users, meaning that users will have the option to send emails with confidential mode. My contacts and our clients at Data Driven Design have a history of getting confused by messages like this from Google / GSuite - and rightfully so. The most recent example is what happened with Google Groups. Well, I try to stay ahead of these things and help you, answering your questions before you even have them, so here goes. Please watch the video / listen and let me know if this helps!

Data Driven Daily Tip 316 - The data shows that WordPress is the number one most used content management system in the world, according to Wappalyzer. :) Yoast SEO is a plug-in that has more than 5 million active installations. That means this video blog post is worth my time. :) Many businesses will have this problem with WordPress, Yoast SEO and Google Search Console. It's a weird quirk in one of the latest releases of Yoast (Yoast has multiple release updates weekly - and we keep all of our webhosting clients on the most current version). When you submit a sitemap via Yoast SEO, the Category and Tag URLs aren't indexing properly, and are causing a coverage error in Google Search Console. The fix, is super easy. Listen. And you're welcome. :)