Sports Card Strategy Show

It's not every day you find watershed improvements in your web data that you can immediately attribute back to 1-3 simple action items you recently took on your website, but since we're constantly tweaking and testing, it just happened to us, and we feel the need to share it with you right away. Now, to many of you already familiar with the impact of Page Speed Load Time on SEO Rankings (which goes along with Optimization for Mobile Web), this won't come as a surprise. But, in our true style, we don't just believe all we read. We test, we analyze and we make data driven decisions. So, here's what we did to improve our website's engagement levels by 95% OVERNIGHT. 1. We eliminated some unneeded content on our long scroll homepage. Data showed us originally that the wide format, long scroll homepage was most effective to lower bounce rate, increase pages per visit and average session duration, all of which increase conversions, but when content isn't being looked at our clicked on (insights we gained from heatmapping data), it needs to go. Seriously. It needs to go because getting rid of it minimizes the amount of images and words that the webpage needs to load, and increases the Page Speed Load Time, which keeps search engines, and most importantly, VISITORS, happy and engaged. 2. We changed a hero image with words at the top of our homepage to JUST WORDS. We got rid of the image. The image wasn't relevant anymore to our business, and we didn't have a replacement, so we said "screw it, let's see if this works," - well it has, to the tune of a 95% better bounce rate. Now, we've also recommended moving background imagery based on data. Moving background imagery takes up far more bandwidth than even imagery, so this may seem counterintuitive based on other blog posts and reports, but remember, data has to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Every website is different, loads a different amount of content, main navigation items, images, and has a different target audience. However, regardless of vertical, we know that if your website is loading slowly or has a high bounce rate, implementing #2 on our list will help. 3. We removed a "preloader." A "preloader" is a fancy graphic that shows before the page loads. We are immediately going to all of our clients with preloaders and sending them this post. This is typically something easy to turn off. It's one more thing that the server doesn't have to load (making the page load faster), and as we all know, every split second that a user has to wait in order to see what they came for increases the chances that they'll bounce. Not only have the web engagement numbers been extremely more positive since these changes, but even more leads have come through our website forms, which is what we all need, right?

Business owners and CEOs have asked me for years (more than a decade), how they can get to the top of Google Search Engine Results pages for keywords related to their business, services and products. This is constantly changing, but through practitioner-ship and analyzing data (a fancy way of saying trial and error), I have data driven proof that says two things are working extremely well in achieving the goal that all SEO Companies and all businesses strive for: 1. Creating content every day. Here's how. 2. Posting every day on a verified Google My Business Listing. 3. Posting content every day on a YouTube Channel. Listen in for the details.

If Facebook Ads aren't working for your Service Based business, then you're doing it wrong. Period. We've been running Lead Generation ads for our clients with Service Based businesses, targeting their exact audience based on Facebook Job Title Targeting, and it's working. There's a specific type of ad in Facebook that's actually called a Lead Generation Ad. This is working better than running a traditional ad and expecting the user to click through to a landing page to submit their information via the "old fashioned Hubspot way" for example. Why? Because the data shows more and more Facebook users are on their mobile devices, and simply will not wait for web pages to load that take them outside the Facebook App to external websites. Gone are the days of expecting the user to click through to a landing page, although you should still build them and test the traditional ads against these lead gen ads, just to be sure! This episode walks you through how to create a lead generation ad in Facebook.

Let's say you're planning a family vacation. You've obviously searched on Google countless times for cruise lines, hotels in Orlando, or even attractions in Jacksonville. Then, when taking a break from your vacation planning, have you ever watched a YouTube video, say on how to fix your car, how to unclog your sink, or even simply watched Football highlights or EllenTube? Stay with me. If not, let's just say for the sake of this blog post that you have. So in all of this internet activity, have you noticed that you've started to see ads for family vacation destinations that have NOTHING to do with Football highlights, or unclogging your sink? In other words, your Google Search History is now being reflected in your YouTube video leisure time. Google owns both platforms, and has figured out a way to make this extremely effective marketing happen. In happens within Google Ads (the new Google Adwords) and it allows you to run video ads on YouTube in any number of ways.

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.