When it comes to digital marketing, nobody does it better than Google and this is one of the vibrant courses that Google provides globally for free. So, we have simplified few instances from Google Garage for you so that you can get a step-by-step analysis. Let's get started.
So in the last blog, I have discussed the following
If you haven't read my previous blog, go and check out Google Digital Marketing- Part III
So let's get started with new elements and a detailed explanation.
Managing successful email campaigns
Hello. There's a lot to manage when running an email campaign. Today you'll learn strategies to set yourself up for success. You can improve your campaigns by testing your emails, creating relevant campaign landing pages, and measuring the success of all your hard work. First, let's discuss how you can use something we call A/B testing to get more people to open your emails and click through to your website. A/B testing is when you create two versions of an email to see which one performs better. You can use this technique to test different email approaches. Let's say you're sending an email announcing a new product, but you're not sure what subject line to use. You can send half of your customer's version A of the subject line and the other half of version B, then look at which email had the higher open rates. That is the measure of how many people open your emails compared to how many emails were delivered. Whichever version had the highest open rates wins? You can use A/B testing to test different subject lines, frequency, content, and images. You could try sending emails on Tuesdays and Saturdays or try sending emails weekly and monthly. See what your audience seems to prefer and then adjust. Keep in mind that you don't want to overwhelm people by sending them too many emails.
You should always provide the option for people to receive fewer emails such as a monthly digest. That way they don't unsubscribe, simply because they want to hear from you less often. Be sure to choose or create specific landing pages for your email campaigns. A landing page is the first page a person sees when they arrive at your website. That way when a person clicks a link within the email they'll land on a relevant webpage. You wouldn't want someone to click a link to learn about a specific product and end up on your homepage, right? Your email campaigns will be more successful if you send visitors directly to the page they want to see, so they can learn about the product and maybe even buy it. Lastly, remember that people will read your emails on mobiles, tablets, laptops, and desktops. That means your email landing pages need to work well across all of those devices. Just like any type of online marketing email marketing is easy to measure. Email services usually include analytics tools, so that you can track and measure how well your campaigns are doing. The reports can show you interesting data like open rates, which can help you learn which subject lines are most compelling. You can see which content drives people to visit your site by looking at the click-through rate when people click on a link within the email. And finally, be sure to use web analytics to figure out what people are doing on your website after they click on your emails. As always you should be looking for opportunities to improve the website experience for email visitors. Let's review. You can regularly improve your email campaigns by testing different versions, creating relevant landing pages, and using analytics to see what's working best. These tips will set you up for success and help you understand the value of your email marketing campaigns.
Measuring success in email marketing
When it comes to managing the success of your email campaigns, understanding your audience's behavior is essential. In this lesson, we'll explore the benefits associated with understanding email performance, as well as cover common metrics that can provide insights to help you optimize future campaigns. First, let’s look at why utilizing email metrics can be a powerful addition to your marketing toolbox. Let’s say you own a pet supply shop and have gathered a strong email marketing list made up of interested customers. Using the analytics from your email platform, you can discover the number of people clicking from your email to your website, or how many complete any call to actions you’ve set, such as making an online purchase using a discount code. This type of informed decision-making can lead to greater conversion rates, and help you refine any future campaigns for success. So the benefits of reviewing email metrics are clear. But what story, or insights, can these individual metrics tell you? Let’s take a look at five useful email marketing metrics: An email campaign Open Rate is simply the ratio of people who’ve actively opened the email vs. the total number of people who received it. This is useful for understanding the effectiveness of your email subject line. For example, if a subject line of ‘Things We Love About Our Pets’ receives a higher open rate than an email titled ‘Discounts and Offers on Pet Food’, this tells you your audience favors emails that give them insight into life as a pet owner, rather than promotional content. Once you know how many people opened the email, take a look at the Click Through Rate, or CTR. This offers a top-level view of the success of the individual email campaign and gives you the percentage of people that clicked on links to your website from every email that was opened. The Click-to-Open Rate takes into account the total number of clicks vs emails that were actually opened. This gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement because if they opened your email and went on to click a link, you clearly did something right! Another useful metric is Conversion Rate. Say you have a free pet grooming workshop coming up that you advertised in your email.
The conversion rate would show how many people you sent the email to, compared to the number of people who actually ended up registering for the event. Sometimes, when you send emails they ‘bounce’ back. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to subscribers and were sent back. There are two kinds of bounces to be aware of: Soft Bounces: These are rejected due to a full inbox or size limit restriction on your audience's email server. Hard Bounces: Your emails are blocked or the address you are using is incorrect. A breakdown of hard bounces per email campaign can show you which email addresses to remove, saving you time and effort for your next campaign. Looking at the metrics and the story they tell will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t. the next step is to adjust any future campaigns accordingly, whether that be to refine the subject lines, review the type of content published, or clean up your subscriber's list. We’ve now covered some valuable email metrics that will help you uncover useful insights from your marketing campaigns. Take the time to review the metrics from the last email you sent - what story do these metrics tell you?
Search engine basics
hey let's talk through some of the histories behind search engines will explain how search engines have changed business and tell you why they're a great place to market your business okay so where do search engines come from one of the earliest search engines was a program called Archie which debuted in 1990. and it allowed people to access and search filenames which were basically the names of webpages but Archie couldn't tell you what was on those web pages fast forward a few decades and search engines like Google Bing Yahoo ask.com AOL Baidu and Yandex have all come a pretty long way these search engines use incredibly sophisticated computer programs to sort through a massive number of webpages most search engines basically work in the same way when a person wants to find something they type in a word or a phrase this is called a search query. then the search engine compares that query to its catalog of webpages pulling out the best matches to show the searcher these are displayed on a search results page a search engines goal is to create the most relevant list of results possible to help the searchers find what they're looking for the results page will mainly show links to websites.
but you might also see stuff like local business listings items for sale adverts images maps videos and lots more so how does this all apply to you well let's imagine you own a coffee shop in the Cotswolds someone goes online and searches for coffee shop Cotswolds great they're looking for a business just like you this is a perfect opportunity to appear on the search results page in the same way if you're a technician who repairs an air conditioning unit or a local takeaway ready to deliver dinner you want to show up when people search for words and phrases related to your business why because the words entered into the search engine indicate that the searcher is interested in your products and services right now now you can see why search is so great it's a way to target people who are already looking for you many marketers will also tell you that search is essential to their online marketing strategy and the numbers back this up now this doesn't mean you should ignore other ways of advertising online your plan can and should include lots of different ways to promote your business like social media email marketing and display advertising but if you're a business interested in promoting products and services online being on search is a pretty safe bet you
How Search engines work
Hi there. Let's discover more about how search engines work. We'll give you the basics of how search engines find web pages, what they do with the pages they find, and how they decide what results to show. When you're using a search engine to find the closest coffee shop, you're probably not thinking about the technology behind it all. But later you might wonder how did that search engine do that? How did it sort through the entire Internet so quickly and choose the result you saw on the page? Each search engine uses its own software program, but they all work in a similar way. They all perform three basic tasks. First, they examine the content they learn about and have permission to see; that's called crawling. Second, they categorize each piece of content; that's called indexing. And, third, they decide which content is most useful to the searchers; that's called ranking. Let's take a closer look at how these work. Search engines crawl the internet to discover content, like web pages, images, and videos. Each search engine uses computer programs to make its way through the pages. These are known as crawlers, spiders, or bots, which is short for robot. The bots hop from page to page by following links to other pages.
These bots never stop. Their sole purpose is to visit and revisit pages, looking for new links and new content to include in the index. Indexing is the second part of the process. The index is a gigantic list of all the web pages and content found by the bots. The search engine uses this index as a source of information displayed on the search results pages, but not everything the bot finds makes it onto a search engine's index. Search engines may find multiple copies of the exact same piece of the content located on different websites. Is that even possible? Well, here's an example. Imagine you're not searching for a coffee shop but a coffee maker. You might notice that the top-of-the-line Coffee King 2000 has the same word-for-word description on the websites of many major retailers. The description might have been provided by the manufacturer, but now the search engine has a decision to make as to which version to keep in the index. There's no need for hundreds of duplicates so it's unlikely that every page will be added. So what if you own a website that's selling coffee makers? You're likely better off writing your own description of the Coffee King 2000. Makes sense? Right, that covers crawling and indexing, which just leaves us with ranking. Think about what happens after you type in a search. The search engine compares the words and phrases to its index and looks for matching results. But what if it brings up hundreds of millions of matching results? This is where its next important task kicks in: ranking. The way search engines rank pages is top secret. It's kind of their special source. There are literally hundreds of ways search engines determine rank, including things like words on the page, the number of other websites linking to it, and the freshness of the content. But no matter what formula they use to determine rank, the goal remains the same to try and connect the searcher with what they are looking for. Say you've read about an Australian-style cappuccino called a flat white, and you want to try it. If you search for "flat white coffee near me," the search engine will show you nearby shops selling the drink because your search indicated your location. You might even see a map to help you find them. So just to remind you, search engines are constantly working to scour the web for content, organize it and then display the most relevant results to searchers. Understanding how this process works can come in really useful to your business. as you try to climb higher in those important search results.
How search engines see the web
Hello there! Now, we're going to look at how search engines see webpages. Let's go over how search engines understand what's on a web page which parts of the web page specifically help them and how you can make your pages more visible to search engines. In simple terms when you ask a search engine to find something it looks through a huge list of previously indexed pages called the Index. And pulls out relevant results based on what you're looking for. Pages make it into the index only after the search engine has determined what they're about. That way it can file them in exactly the right place amongst other pages and find them the next time a search relates to their content. By knowing how a search engine decides what a page is about you can optimize your pages to make sure they show up in search results of the people looking for websites just like yours. Let's say you own a coffee shop and you've got a website to promote it. But when a search engine looks at the same page in addition to seeing what you see on your screen it also sees the code behind it, called HTML. Specific parts of this code help the search engine understand what the web page is all about and knowing which parts are important can help you optimize your site. The first part is the title of the page in the code. In this example, you can see the title in the tab at the top: Cotswolds Coffee Shop. The search engine sees the title enclosed in a piece of code. This is called the title tag. Many websites can be edited using tools that handle all of the HTML codings for you. That's called a content management system or CMS.
If you use a CMS to make changes to your website there's probably a place you can add this title to. You can help the search engine index your page properly by making sure your page title accurately describes its content. That way it can show up in relevant searches. The next thing you want to think about is the text of the page. Think about who you want to visit your page and what words they're using to describe your products and services. Did they talk about fair trade coffee? Maybe they use the term cappuccino instead of macchiato. These are probably the terms they're also using to search. Try to speak the language of your customers when you're writing your content because this can help ensure that they'll find your pages when they search. Finally, let's talk about the page images. Search engines won't see those enticing photos of your coffee creations in the same way we do, which is a shame. But, what they will see is the code behind it. To help search engines identify the image give it a descriptive name. For example, image.jpeg is not a great filename for search engines. So you could try something that describes exactly what's in the picture like iced-peppermint-mocha.jpg. You can even take it one step further by adding alternative text in the code with your image. This is known as an alt tag and it describes the image. This is useful for people using web browsers that don't display images or for people with visual impairments who use software to listen to the content of the web pages. Again, if you use a content management system to update your website there's probably a place you can add an alt tag to. So remember, use descriptive unique titles for each page on your site. Write for your customers. But remember to include important words and phrases that can help search engines understand what your pages are all about. And don't forget to name image files with descriptive words and include alternative text. Together all of these tips can help search engines understand your pages and put them in front of people that matter: your potential customers.
