The new Google Ads platform is pretty sweet. I'm big into it, and as I continue to dive in, there will be more and more content on how businesses can use it to grow their revenue. However, as you can imagine, in order to truly track the effectiveness of ad campaigns and make real data driven decisions, all conversion tracking has to be set up properly. One of the things we want to be able to do is run video ads on YouTube, and we want these ads to send traffic to our websites, but also generate leads and purchases on our site. In order to track the leads and purchases part, we need to set up Google Ads Conversion Tracking Properly. Like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, it's just one more code snippet, but it can be done either via WordPress, or via Google Tag Manager (instructions here on how to set up Tag Manager and create tags). This episode tells you what you need to know about setting up conversion tracking in Google Ads and integrating it via WordPress or Google Tag Manager. Below are some screenshots of what this looks like.

How To Automate Your Website Email Form Submissions Into Your Marketing Lists (Using WordPress, Gravity Forms & Mailchimp) Data Driven Daily Tip #214. Why have I been wasting my time copying and pasting email addresses into Mailchimp lately? We've had people signing up for events and presentations that we do around Nashville, and I receive them through the backend of our website. For some reason I've been copying and pasting them in from the emails I've been getting into our Mailchimp account. I know full well that I have the tools, set-up and skills to automate this process and save myself 30 minutes or so every day. Alright, I'm finally doing it. I'm finally using WordPress, Gravity Forms and Mailchimp to automate this for myself, just like we do for our clients all the time. This video shows you how it's done. Whew, now I'll get a ton of time back in my week. The relentless pursuit of productivity continues.

You may be frustrated by past Google Adwords Campaigns not working. It could be because you were missing a tiny yet critical element - linking your Google Adwords Campaigns with Google Analytics. Now that Adwords has changed to Google Ads, it's become even more critical that this step get done for any business running Google Ads. When you link the two platforms, you can optimize Google Ads campaigns for conversions, not clicks. This is preferred, because you can define a "conversion" as whatever you want it to be in Google Analytics. It could be an eCommerce transaction, an "add to cart," or a lead generation form submission, email opt-in, or even something like a button click or a specific amount of time on a page (let's say 2x the average, for example). With Ads/Analytics account linking, Google's algorithm will then show your ads to people more likely to not just "click your ad," but go to your website and actually do what you want them to do. Reason #1 to link Google Ads and Google Analytics is to spend your money wisely. Reason #2 to link accounts is so that you can see Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration, % of New Visits, and Pages per Visit from Analytics directly in your Google Ads views. This is helpful when making data driven marketing decisions within Google Ads. Reason #3 to link accounts is to get a full Business Intelligence Dashboard right within Google Analytics. Account linking sends Google Ads data to Google Analytics, so that you can compare your Google Ads campaigns against other marketing efforts like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, SEO efforts, Email Marketing and more. Additional reasons to link accounts can be found here, and the above video walks you through exactly how to get this done.

This episode talks about how to link Google Analytics with Google Webmaster Tools (now known as search console) and what additional data marketers can get from performing this action.

How To Set Proper Location Targets & Exclude Locations In New Google Ads: Data Driven Daily Tip #211 - It's super frustrating to run Google Ads, spending your time and hard earned money as a small business owner or emerging brand marketer only to find that most of your traffic is coming from the absolutely wrong Geo-Location. Are you paying for clicks that will definitely not benefit you? Targeting Your Geolocation In Google Ads Isn't Enough! You need to watch this video to ensure you understand the intricacies of how to not only target your geolocation in Google ads, but how to implement location exclusions properly. The new Google Ads is here, and a lot about the platform is intuitive, but not this piece. Thanks to the readers / viewers / listeners who wrote in to request this Data Driven Daily Tip! How To Properly Implement Location Exclusions In Google Ads From Google: How to exclude individual areas: Setting up location exclusions is very similar to setting up location targeting—just enter the name of the area that you'd like to exclude. To exclude areas within the locations you've selected: From the page menu on the left, click Campaigns. Click the name of the campaign you wish to edit. Click Settings. Expand the “Locations” section from the settings menu. There are two ways you can exclude a location: Search for the area that you'd like to exclude in the search box and click Exclude. Click Advanced search, search for the Location you'd like to exclude, and click Exclude. Click Saveafter excluding the location. Click Save to save your settings. Your excluded locations will appear under the heading "Excluded locations." If you select "Show locations on map," your excluded locations will also appear with a red outline on the map.

Data Driven Daily Tip #210 - We're redesigning our logo. We can't decide which logo to pick between the final two options. This is obviously a very important decision for our company and we've gathered feedback and input internally and gone through a couple rounds of strategic revisions to get to this point. Sound familiar? Well, instead of simply using our opinions, since we believe in Data Over Opinions, we're going to get a couple key data points. One, is going to be a Facebook Poll, and we'll possibly run an Ad or two to get some additional feedback. But the real interesting data point will be how people actually interact with our website based on which logo is shown. This means, we're going to run an A/B Test on our website, using Google Optimize. Optimize will serve our current (Original) logo to one-third of the web users that hit DataDriven.Design, serve new logo option 1, which we're calling "Pixel D" to another third of our web users, and serve new logo option 2, which we're calling "Smooth DD" to the other third of our web users. This will be done randomly, and this video shows the step-by-step process of how to use Google Optimize to set up an experiment. It walks you through how to not only create variants, but also how to set up objectives so that you get key data to make your decision. A/B Testing like this should be done to a certain extent on every website, testing colors, imagery, calls to action and more. We always recommend only doing one A/B test at a time per page, and running the test for at least a week to a month (depending on how much web traffic your site gets) before looking at the data to declare a winner.

This podcast episode documents the long but rewarding process of installing Google Optimize into your website so that you can run awesome experiments and get real data to optimize your website, and not guess or use opinions. This is also known as A/B Testing. While there are several third party tools that allow non-web developers and content managers and digital marketers to set up website experiments, such as Optimizely, Hotjar, VWO and Crazyegg, we are electing to use Google Optimize for it's easy integration with the rest of the Google Suite of tools, like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, which reminds me, before we get started, you'll need the following. 1. Google Analytics Installed On Your Website (Click here for How To Install Google Analytics) 2. Google Tag Manager Installed On Your Website (Click here for How To Install Google Tag Manager On Your Website). 3. Some knowledge of how to create a Google Tag Manager Tag and Trigger (Click here for a great piece on how to create a Google Tag Manager Tag and Trigger). We will definitely have more content on how to read your experiment result reporting and make data driven decisions based on those reports, but for now, you're off and running with Google Optimize installed on your website.

Data Driven Daily Tip 208: This video gives a solid overview of the Custom Report functionality in Facebook Ads Manager. Why is this important? 1. If you're a small business owner, this should be your easy, go-to tool to compare the data across all of your Facebook Ads and Campaigns to see not only which are performing best, but also, which Times of Day are working best, which Days of Week are working best, which Audience Segments are cheapest to acquire as new customers and on and on. 2. If you're a strategist or analysts at a digital agency, or a marketing director or VP of Marketing, you can easily examine this key data to make data driven next marketing decisions. 3. If you're a software developer, you can pull down CSV files and create easy pivot tables / interactive reports to impress your co-workers and clients. You're welcome. :)

B2B Marketing Series: Why Can't I Find Certain "Employers" or "Companies" In Facebook Ads Manager? Data Driven Daily Tip 207 B2B Marketing is not that much different from eCommerce Marketing, really, from a tactical perspective that is. Facebook Ads is the best example of a platform that is tailor made for doing both very effectively. Our Facebook Ads eCommerce Series gets into that in detail. But every once in a while, a specific scenario pops up that is solely for B2B Marketers. Recently, I reported that Facebook Ads has reinstated the Employer Targeting Feature. But a great question recently came in from a reader: "Hi Paul, I don't wish to take up too much of your time, but have read an article of yours and have a question. I am trying to target music industry people on Facebook and in the 'Employers' section, companies such as Polydor, Universal Music, Sony Music etc do not appear whereas other types of companies do. Any reason for that? Thanks very much" Great point. It's actually not that easy to find ALL of the Employers you want to target with an ad. -This is because Facebook Removed 3 million "terms" / "employers" due to their "Community Guidelines" and has been adding them back slowly but surely. -The good news is, I've found some tactics that will still help B2B marketers do what they're looking to do. The video above explains, as well as the brief explanation below. 1. When Creating Your Ad, go to Detailed Targeting. Click "Browse" 2. Select "Demographics" > scroll down to "Work" then > "Employers" Start typing in "Sony Music" - notice it doesn't show, but when you stop at "Sony Mus" - then "Sony Music and Entertainment" shows. So the search is awkward. Boom, add it. Once you add it, click suggestions and you'll see a TON more similar "Employers" show, in this case "Atlantic Records," "Interscope Records," and more. The more you add, the better your suggestions get. Add / Remove, Add / Remove until you've built your audience. On the Polydor Records example, you'll notice that they don't ever show under Employers, which means they were removed, per above and not added back yet, but building an audience of Job Title + Interest > Polydor Records (which exists) can still build you a very targeted ad likely to hit your audience (although not as exact). Same thing with "Universal Music," which shows under Interests but in much more granular categories, like Universal Music Nashville and Universal Music Motown, etc.

Data Driven Daily Tip #206 - There's nothing quite like finding out that Wednesday is the best day of the week for your business to run Facebook Ads, because you're paying one quarter of the price for link clicks on that day than other days. Or finding out that you're paying half the cost for Males age 35-44 to like your page vs. Females age 35-44 to like your page. It's super silly not to ALWAYS USE DATA to drive your next marketing actions. That's why we constantly practice what we preach and show marketers and business owners how to do it also. Facebook Ads is a super robust platform, which is why we're continuing our Facebook Ads eCommerce Series by calling out the top hidden tips we, as true practitioners of the platform, are constantly finding. This video shows you how to use Facebook Ads Manager to find "Performance" which you can use to sort by Time, Delivery and Action categories to analyze your data in a plethora of ways. This is the easy part. The hard part is mastering the artform of actually turning the insights into "next marketing actions." Watch the video, but keep in mind this can also be done at the Ad Set and Individual Ad level if you want to get super-granular. :) Happy eCommerce Marketing.