Google Shopping Ads are one of the most powerful tools available in your business’s online advertising arsenal. These Shopping Ads are easy to set up and offer companies an opportunity to drive low-cost and high-volume traffic to their sites and mobile shopping apps.

The online traffic being directed to your site is driven by the Google Search function and offers potential consumers a chance to click on your links related to their searches. Google is the most commonly used search tool on the Internet, accounting for over 200 million users a month and over 90% of the market share.

The reality is that there is no better online traffic to direct at your online business. Additionally, Google Shopping Ads appear on all online platforms and mobile devices. This allows companies to benefit from diverse online traffic sources and boost their online visibility with minimal resources. More importantly, these benefits extend to all types and sizes of online businesses.

So, how do Google Shopping Ads work and why should you consider using these digital marketing tools for your online enterprise?

It would be hard to answer these questions in totality without knowing the location, industry, expectations and current online sales strategies of your business. However, there are undeniable benefits to using Google’s Shopping Ads for any business and we will explore why those are worth the investment.

Defining Your Goals

Google Shopping Ads are one of many online advertising and analytics tools that Google provides. Having access to Google Ad services allows companies to design and implement high-traffic, low-cost digital marketing strategies that help to boost your product sales and visibility online. These ads allow your potential customers to see your products on their search results and clickthrough directly to your site.

The information provided by Google’s search data, analytics and insights can help you identify your business’s target markets, online traffic sources, most popular products and nearest competitors. Understanding where and how your customers find your products helps you prioritise those traffic sources. Using this information, you can define your sales goals more clearly and design marketing strategies that help you reach them.

Combine Your Shopping Campaign and Marketing Strategy

The first step in utilising Google Shopping Ads is to make sure your products are appearing at the top of appropriate Google searches. By incorporating relevant keywords, attractive images and accessible product links into your digital marketing strategy, you have an opportunity interact with a potential customer, seconds after they searched for a particular item.

The trick is making your products relevant to the most online searches, available to the most online traffic and desirable to the most users, possible. By incorporating a Google Shopping Ads campaign into your larger digital marketing strategy, businesses have the opportunity to benefit directly from the brand exposure and online visibility that you build from smart advertising campaigns.

List Your Products While Driving Online Traffic

The goal of a Google Shopping Ads campaign is to drive targeted traffic from Google searches to your website. Yes, you want to sell as many of your products as you can, but the biggest benefit of a user clicking on your product is that they are taken directly to your site and can explore all of what you offer.

Customers that enjoy your products will get to know your business and visit your site more frequently. Google Shopping Ads give businesses the chance to list all of their products online and relate them to all relevant Google searches, but the introduction of that user to your site could make turn them into a returning customer.

Boost Online Promotions and Shopping Campaigns

As we have discussed, driving traffic to your business’s site is the best way to grow your online sales potential. Online businesses know that the more clicks and hits your site is getting, the greater your sales opportunities. There are a variety of digital marketing strategies that are used to boost sales, such as app-only deals, seasonal sales and online discounts.

Google Shopping Ads make those online promotions and shopping campaigns more effective than ever before. If your company is running a promotion, it is likely to be on particular products, departments, platforms or times, but all you need is someone to visit your site. If a customer clicks on one promotional item that appears at the top of their search results, it invites them to explore what else your site has to offer.

Focusing on E-Commerce

In recent years, we have learned that e-commerce, online shopping and door-to-door deliveries are only growing. Companies that do some, most or all of their sales through a website or app, need to be investing in smart digital marketing strategies and online advertising tools. Online sales and analytics tools help identify target markets, get products in front of them and make those products more accessible.

Google Shopping Ads is one of those online tools that could help almost any type of e-commerce business. They could be the missing ingredients that optimise your digital marketing efforts and sales potential. If you are looking to boost online sales, increase site traffic and gain insights into your customer base, you should consider trying Google Shopping Ads and other Google Ads services.

Cognite Marketing offers expertise in the field of digital marketing and have extensive experience working with a variety of Google’s online analytics and advertising tools. Take your company’s digital marketing to the next level and contact Cognite Marketing today.

The post How Do Google Shopping Ads Help Businesses Boost Online Traffic and Sales? appeared first on Cognite Marketing.

Incorporating Google Alerts into your online marketing strategy will help your business gather market intelligence and inform you every time your brand is mentioned online. In fact, you can set up multiple alerts to track anything relating to your business or industry at large, by inputting specific keywords.

Whether you want to monitor your mentions, your competitor’s digital activity or the latest, emerging trends in your industry; Google Alerts can give you the insights you need to your grow your brand’s online presence and visibility.

Why You Should Start Using Google Alerts

By identifying your target market and listening to your audience, companies can begin to build a strategy for improving their brand exposure and online presence. Google Alerts provides businesses with in-depth analytics and real-time insights about what your customers are talking about online.

Businesses that are cultivating the conversation surrounding their brand are able to inform the public about their products or services more easily, turning potential customers into buying ones. By monitoring industry trends online, you’re given the opportunity to get out ahead of new or emerging market trends. Your company can become more agile and adaptable; able to change marketing or sales strategies more quickly and effectively.

You Can Monitor Anything with Google Alerts

It’s true, you can monitor anything and everything that occurs on the Internet. While it’s quick and easy to set dozens of Google Alerts, you need to limit those tracking terms to what’s useful and relevant. The goal is to only track information that can help you grow your brand or business. There are three key categories that should be used to create the most effective alerts:

Brand Activity

Monitoring the conversation around your brand will help you determine what clients or customers are saying about your business and the sentiment surrounding your brand. Positive or negative, all feedback gives you the chance to improve an aspect of your digital marketing by measuring your public reputation. Use the positive feedback to drive interactions and market your brand and use the negative feedback to correct errors and improve your online communication.

Competition Activity

The same way that you can gain insights into the performance and online activity of your business, you can monitor the same information about your competitors. You can see what’s working and what’s not in your industry. Their strategies and techniques could help influence your online marketing strategy and avoid some of their mistakes.

Industry Trends

The most informed businesses will always have an advantage over their competition. Use Google Alerts to track general trends, new opportunities, attitude changes and market activity within your industry. Get to know your target market, learn about industry shifts and follow news about your clients, to ensure your business is in the know.

Setting Up Google Alerts for Your Business

Here are the basic steps for setting up Google Alerts for you or your business:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/alerts
2. Enter any search term(s) that you’d like to track. A results preview will give you suggestions on what terms are useful.
3. Below the search box, select “show options”. There, you can choose how often you’d like to receive these alerts. It can be daily, weekly or as it happens.
4. Choose the ideal source types you want to monitor, for example: news, blogs, video, social media posts, forums or finance. You can either opt for the “automatic” selection or refine your alerts to specific media types.
5. Choose your language and region.
6. Filter your results by selecting “all results” or “only the best results”.
7. Specify your delivery email address.
8. Finally, select “Create alert.”

Don’t worry about entering too many or too few search terms, or choosing the right media sources, this can all be edited at a later stage. Separate each search term with a comma if you’re entering multiple terms and put quotation marks around your queries if your keywords need to be in a specific order.

Start by tracking your company, blog or product’s names and include keywords or jargon that are related to your industry. You can also search for common misspellings of your industry jargon or company name. Consider what types of information you’re receiving and set notifications to the appropriate frequency, such as making industry trends a weekly alert and your company’s name a daily alert.

Using the Results

All of these alerts are setup to help you learn about your brand’s reputation and gain insights into your company’s online presence. Monitor social media, reviews sites, blogs and forums to identify where and how your brand’s being spoken about. As important is ensuring that your business is accessible from those mentions, whether you’re linked or unlinked.

If there are individuals, groups or websites mentioning you or your products, make sure they are linking to your site. If not, engage on the post so as to increase your visibility and make your site more accessible to more people. Having more links to your site online, will boost your Google Ranking and improve your SEO optimisation.

If your company is posting regular content, you have to monitor when your newly published content is being indexed by Google. You can do this by setting up a Google Alert for the title of an article, link to a post or URL for your site’s online content. Online content creation’s one of the most important parts of modern business, but it’s as important that all of your content’s being seen and shared.

The Final Alert

Don’t overuse the Google Alert tool, as your inbox may be overwhelmed with notifications of who’s saying what, where. By cultivating a careful and curated set of Google Alert keywords and search terms, you have the opportunity to keep track of your industry and brand’s online activity, easily.

It’s not just about what is being said online about your brand, but how many people are saying it and if your target market agrees with those sentiments. Don’t wait to gain the invaluable insights and actionable data made available through Google Alerts.

Find out how we can take your brand’s digital marketing to the next level, contact Cognite Marketing to book your free strategy consultation.

The post Use Google Alerts to Monitor Your Brand’s Mentions Online appeared first on Cognite Marketing.

Why should you open a Google My Listing account?

Many businesses are now moving their marketing efforts online, which is a good thing, not only does it make your business easier to find, but with Online directors such as Google My Business you can reach more potential clients.

Benefits of having a My Google Listing account

• Show up on Google Map searches – By simply completing the verification steps and entering all the relevant business information your store will pop up on local store searches also.

• Show up on Google’s local 3-pack – The best part about being in the local 3-pack is that your business will show where your business is located in google maps and they also show up before organic results which could greatly increase your businesses visibility.

• Earn Trust From customers  – Google got multiple verification steps to follow to verify your business Google creates a trust worth environment that users can rely on. Your business benefits every time it pops up on local business automatically creating trust between the potential customer and your business.

• Star Ratings to boost your appeal – With My Business listings people are able to review your company and leave comments for other to see, it could be compliments or areas you might need to improve on.
• Increase traffic Sales – Having a Business account listing can really help boost your traffic, just having a listing and showing up in Google searches are as much as 70% more likely to attract location visit from browsing potentials.

• Rank higher in Results – The more Google likes your business, the more you are more likely to rank higher in Google search results, you can achieve this by consistency & accurate information.

Benefits to using Google My Business chat

Even though this is still a fairly new feature to Google and is not available to all users, it is only available on desktop, mobile browsers and search apps on android, limiting some of the audience, however the app seems very promising.

A few scenarios that the Business chat would work best in

• Business owners that don’t have staff to answer calls & don’t want their voicemails blown up
• Emergency services that don’t have the convenience of answering phone calls like roadside assistance
• Businesses/Dealerships that are looking to shift from email declining leads
• If you are looking to get out more on online local searches if you not getting a lot of leads

How to make the most out of Google Messaging

Some tips on how you can maximize your click-to-message on your Google My Business chat feature:

• Stick with a cellphone number to receive text messages, try avoiding using apps like Google Allo & Android preview messages.
• Set up a clear schedule on who is responsible for answering your customer leads if many people are operating in your business development.
• If your business isn’t equipped to answering messages after-hours switch off the feature to avoid losing potential clients.
• Try avoiding asking for private information, try drive the conversations to a secure email or phone call
• Write down common questions and your answers in a memo on your phone, that way it will make it easier for you to copy and paste for quick responses to potential clients.

Best ways to communicate with your client on Google Business listing

• Avoid sharing or requesting sensitive information during a chat like credit card information, login credentials, passports or identification documents.
• Slow response times or unreasonable response times to customers,
• Don’t send irrelevant information to clients or unwanted messages to users who have contacted you for example unwanted information on a product or services they never asked about, or repeated messaging with no response. Avoid long message with excessive use of emoticons & URLs
• Do not make false statements about your identity and say you someone you not such as falsely claiming to be an authorized person of a company when you not.
• Conversations should be strictly about product or services that you offer avoiding any inappropriate content like threatening, explicit content or violent videos etc.
• The chat should be used for quality conversations between business owners & potential clients, do not use this platform for phishing scams

Conclusion

Google’s search results are becoming more and more popular by the day, with private messaging, related questions, and even results appearing in the search suggest drop down menu. The benefits Google My Business affords local businesses are only growing. Set up your Google Listings account to get your business known and also to gain customers trust.

The post Find out how to chat directly with your Google My Business visitors appeared first on Cognite Marketing.

Google My Business is an easy to use tool to help get visibility for local businesses and organisations. Business owners can register their business on Google My Business for free. Using this tool, they can manage their online presence for Google Search and Google Maps. Verifying your profile on Google My Business will give you an added advantage because potential clients automatically have a certain amount of trust for Google, and by extension, they trust verified businesses suggested by Google.

An Additional Channel to be discovered on Google

If you are serious about your online presence, then you probably have a website and a Facebook page. You might also have a twitter account or a YouTube account. Google My Business is probably the most important platform you should consider to boost your online visibility. The more Google knows about your business, the more they will think that you are a trustworthy source of information. This means that you will rank higher than normal in Google searches.

Allows for Geographic Discoverability

The world is a lot more technologically focused these days. People are now looking at Google to guide them when they need to make a buying decision. Potential customers search online for everything from where to buy pizza to where they should get their car serviced. 46% of online searchers choose a business that is local to them and 50% are more likely to make a purchase. By using Google My Business, you are getting to opportunity to have your business shown to people in your area who are looking for your product or service.

Benefits of Google My Business?

Besides the obvious benefit of getting your business noticed by more people, there are a few nifty features. Once you have verified your business on Google My Business, you will be able to add products to your profile and you can add ‘limited time only’ specials. There is also a direct messaging function and a place for your existing clients to leave reviews.

Add Products

Using this feature, you can display all your most popular products right inside the Google search results page. It shows an image, title, and price. The more content you add to your Google My Business profile, the more relevant you become and because of this, your online content will rank higher in organic searches.

Add Specials

A major component to ranking high in Google is to make sure you constantly keep your content updated and relevant. Adding specials to your profile not only tells Google that you are keeping things up to date, but it also encourages people to check back regularly to see what is new

Direct Messaging Function

Allow people the option to chat with you (or a designated customer relations operator) to find out more information about your products or services. This not only connects you directly to customers looking to purchase, but it gives them a personal service which will make them more likely to use your company.

Customer Reviews

Reviews are the most important thing for anyone making a buying decision. People want to see that others have used your product service and they thought it was worth the money they spent. This feature not only allows people to put good reviews, but it also allows you the opportunity to respond to people who leave bad reviews. This shows people that you value good service and that you are not only interested in making a sale.

It’s Free

The most important part for any business owner is knowing the cost of a service. The fact that it’s free means that there are no excuses to not join Google My Business right now.

Let Cognite assist you with setting up your Google My Business Profile today!

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