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COVID-19: Credits for Google Ads for Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new $800+ million commitment to support small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), health organizations and governments, and health workers on the frontline of this COVID-19 pandemic. See announcement.

This support includes:

“$340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs with active accounts over the past year. Credit notifications will appear in their Google Ads accounts and can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across our advertising platforms. We hope it will help to alleviate some of the cost of staying in touch with their customers.”

Google search ads are a huge part of our business and therefore we are keeping up to date on the latest information on how to benefit from this Google credit. To date, Google has posted an FAQ page which includes this answer to “How and when will eligible customers receive the ad credits?”

“Small and medium businesses worldwide that have been active advertisers since the beginning of 2019 will be informed in the coming months through notifications within their Google Ads account.”

We will contact each qualifying client when credits become available to discuss how to integrate the credits into your budget. We are not sure where the line will be drawn or what criteria Google will use to distinguish between medium and large businesses as the credits are for small/medium businesses and not large businesses.

Facebook Ads

Facebook pledged credits for small businesses.  See details.

Facebook is offering $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries where we operate. We’ll share more details as they become available.

 

Videos

Retiring our Videos Page

A lot has happened since we shot these videos 4 years ago. We have been very busy since that time with work for our clients and have not put any time into adding updated videos. With all the restrictions due to COVID-19 my email box has been less active this week and I have more time for housekeeping. It is time to remove the videos page from our menu and to work on updating our website.

See our YouTube Channel to access the videos for old times’ sake.

 

 

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Website for album of music inspired by Antarctica

Just finished designing and developing the website for long time client Valmar Kurol and his collaborator Michael Stibor for their new album inspired by Antarctica. Check out their site: https://www.symphonyantarctica.com

They wrote:
“So I just checked out the website. I LOVE it! It’s so great. I love how interactive it is. And I love that you put the music right there on the website, and then divided it by movement. You did a superb job!” – Michael Stibor

“Great web site presentation of the CD and its story. It looks very clean, crisp and elegant. The music samples and corresponding track notes are convenient to play and read. Thanks for making this so free of clutter.” – Valmar Kurol

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ArtistsInspire Grants Website Launch

Implementing this web strategy was a collaboration between Christie Huff (Lead Consultant – ELAN’s Arts & Education Initiatives), Denis Piquette (Chemin Robinson Consulting) and Red Carpet Web Promotion. ArtistsInspire Grants  provide support to Quebec’s English-speaking Communities by connecting artists with schools to facilitate hands-on creative experiences, funded the Government of Canada’s Action Plan for Official Languages. ELAN and LEARN are collaborating to promote and support the ArtistsInspire Grants program.

Red Carpet Web Promotion and Chemin Robinson Consulting developed he web strategy from start to finish within a very short timeframe, including creating the name “ArtistsInspire Grants”, the logo, the website, email campaigns and more.  The website launched May 23, 2019.  Have a look here: www.artistsinspire.ca. The website includes a login for schools to apply for multiple-year grants as well as a login for approved artists to create and edit their profiles.  See the artists profiles here: https://artistsinspire.ca/artists/.

Thanks to everyone who worked on this project to make it a success!

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SEO Ranking Factors Analyzed

It has been a while since I’ve seen a big switch in factors that affect search engine ranking. SEMRush has released a report based on the scope of 600,000+ keywords, in order analyze the importance of ranking factors.  The results are that the number of direct website visits to your site is the most important factor!  So basically sites that already have a lot of traffic from people typing the URL in the address bar will rank higher in results. This is hard to take for someone trying to improve ranking by adjusting the website – as it is not an on-site factor.  But it makes sense that Google would show the most popular sites at the top.

Other factors that score higher than total referring domains are:

  1. Time on site
  2. Pages per session
  3. Bounce rate

So if your site is engaging and people spend more time on it you also stand to benefit with a higher ranking.

The take away from this is that anything that could increase your direct visits will also increase your visits from organic search  because more direct visits will increase your position in search results.

See the report here: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

Ranking Factors Analyzed

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Call to Action in Video Ads

If video ads in Facebook and YouTube are part of your marketing mix, here are some tips on how to edit the end of your ad.

 

Facebook Video Ads

After the video ad ends, Facebook overlays a call to action in the middle of your video.  One can choose the call to action text and link in the video ad settings.  So for the last frame be sure not to have anything important in the centre of the frame.  I suggest putting your logo and any text that you want to include (like a slogan) at the top or bottom.  Keep the end short as the call to action from Facebook only appears after the video ends, so there is no point lingering on a long end frame making the user have to wait to click.

YouTube Ads

Youtube has many options for videos, this is a general tip for ads that users can click on to visit a URL. it is important to have a call to action and you can even write “click here” as part of your call to action to let users know what action to take.  I recommend keeping this ending of your video with your logo and call to action for at least 4 seconds.

 

Let me know if you have any comment or other tips based on your experience.

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Fastbase Webleads for Google Analytics

There is a new service for finding out the company name, contact name and email address and other information of website visitors. It is an add-on to Google analytics offered by Fastbase.com.  There is a free trial which lists leads to your site for the last 12 months.  Here is the pricing page: https://analytics.fastbase.com/Pricing. The catch is that you have to login to your Google Analytics account and share your Analytics data with Fastbase. I do not know how they will monetize on having this data but it is valuable so I am sure they will do well!

I did a test for one of my clients and downloaded a list of 728 leads with a date range of 12 months. this is out of a total of 27,543 users to the site over the same date range. It remains to be tested to see if these leads are any good, but it could be a powerful tool for B2B websites. An extension on remarketing: rather than just showing ads to people who have been on your site you can actually contact them by email, phone or mail.

Out of the 728 leads, 623 had email addresses. I ran this list through zerobounce.com to get an idea of how many of the emails are valid (it is processing,  I will include an update in comments.) It might be interesting to send out an email blast to this list to see what kind of interest you get.

Please leave comments if you have tried this service, have feedback or are interested in receiving these lead reports.