According to Revealbot's live calculator, the average CPC for Facebook (cost-per-click) currently stands at $0.97 for all campaigns.

We calculate that number from the monthly CPC between February 2021 and February 2022. Facebook Ads are currently trending toward a cheaper rate when compared to recent months as of writing this article.

The question is - is the average cost of Facebook Ads worthwhile in the increasingly competitive digital marketing space?

Below, we'll dive into how Facebook Ads cost is calculated, what rates you can expect for your business industry, and whether or not you should look elsewhere for your PPC campaigns. Finally, we'll provide you with tips as to how you can refine your campaigns to improve your CPL (cost-per-lead) and get the most out of your advertisements.

Facebook Ads Cost - How to Calculate Your Campaign Cost?

Though Facebook isn't keen to provide any hard numbers on costs for industries, they do clearly define how you can calculate the cost.

Of course, their reasoning for omitting hard numbers is because you technically can control your costs through smart use of your Facebook Ads account tools. Careful targeting and smart bidding strategies can certainly lower your overall campaign costs if you know what you're doing.

However, your ad costs are effectively defined by:

• The overall amount spent on the campaign
• Cost of each result you get from the campaign

Technically, you could spend the minimum limit of $1 per day, but you shouldn't expect to get significant results with such a limited budget. The other factor is how many qualified leads you obtain as a result of your total spending.

But, you're not here for theoretical. You want hard numbers. Thankfully, sites like HubSpot offer a basic calculator you can use to estimate your potential costs. However, you'll need an existing campaign history to get a better idea of how your CPC ads typically perform.

Utilizing an experienced marketing fulfillment team can also help you keep costs lower than the industry average. If you need a bit of help in getting a better ROI out of your campaigns, check out DashClicks' Facebook Ads reseller service for more information.

Average CPC of Facebook Ads by Platform

For a more in-depth look at specific Facebook Ads cost by industry, we turn to a study by Wordstream. As of the latest update in February 2022, the breakdown of the average CPC looks like this:

• Apparel – $0.45
• Auto – $2.24
• B2B – $2.52
• Beauty – $1.81
• Customer Services – $3.08
• Education – $1.06
• Employment & Job Training – $2.72
• Finance & Insurance – $3.77
• Fitness – $1.90
• Home Improvement – $2.93
• Healthcare – $1.32
• Industrial Services – $2.14
• Legal – $1.32
• Real Estate – $1.81
• Retail – $0.70
• Technology – $1.27
• Travel & Hospitality – $0.63

These trends make sense with industries like apparel, retail, and tech likely having the widest appeal to the most users due to the necessity and low purchasing costs. Meanwhile, industries with higher barriers to entry such as home improvement, auto, and B2B will typically cost more per click and impression.

Average CPC by Advertising Platform

Next, let’s take a look at estimates of how much you could expect to pay for your PPC ads on competing advertising platforms.

• Instagram – $1.32
• Google Search Ads – $2.69
• Google Display Ads – $0.63
• Twitter – $0.38
• YouTube – $3.21
• LinkedIn – $5.26

These averages are taken from the latest available studies ranging from 2021 to the current month. As we can see, Facebook’s current average CPC remains superior to virtually every advertising platform except Twitter Ads and Google Display Ads.

However, dollars and cents only tell a portion of the story. When examining the potential CPC you can expect to pay when using an advertising platform, you also need to consider the audience and the reach that’s available to you when introducing a new advertising campaign.

Let’s cross-examine this data with recent user counts for each platform. These numbers (in millions) come from an October 2021 study courtesy of Statista.

• Facebook – 2,895 (though, this number is expected to exceed 3 billion in 2022)
• YouTube – 2,291
• Instagram – 1,393
• Twitter – 436

Not included in this study is LinkedIn, which is expected to reach 66.8 million monthly users in 2022. Of course, Google is playing a different ballgame as a world-renowned search engine and accounts for a staggering 92% of search traffic.

While platforms like YouTube and Instagram still feature a higher average CPC or CPV (cost-per-view), you also need to consider the tremendous reach potential it offers over a competitor such as Twitter or LinkedIn. While those platforms most certainly still have their place in paid advertising, there’s a reason why more popular platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads are such a mainstay for digital marketers.

Are Facebook Ads Worth it in 2022?

The cost of Facebook Ads is steadily increasing. The average CPC in February of 2020 rested at roughly $0.84, while the average CPC this time last year was about $0.93. As PPC ads become more expensive and are expected to steadily increase further by year's end, are Facebook Ads worth it?

The answer is still a resounding yes.

As far as social media platforms go, Facebook is effectively untouchable when it comes to a global userbase. Their monthly user account is expected to rise year-over-year until at least 2025. While the cost of Facebook Ads is subtly increasing each year, so too is the size of potential audiences around the world.

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Businesses and marketers are aware of this, and this is most certainly the source of rising costs. As the Facebook Ads platform becomes more saturated with competition, you can expect bidding costs to increase accordingly.

A more important figure than the total userbase is the percentage of users that make up the young adult to the middle age range of 25-34. This is Facebook's largest demographic and accounts for almost 32% of its userbase with the 18-24 and 35-44 groups close behind.

Why does this matter? Because this age group represents the largest working-class, and, therefore, the individuals most likely to purchase products that you advertise. Instagram features similar metrics with 31% of users falling between 25-34 and 31% between ages 18-24. However, the dropoff in younger and older age groups is significant, making the platform a bit less viable for certain industries.

With the evidence before us, no other platform offers the level of reach and purchase potential as Facebook. Of course, if you can afford video ads, YouTube also continues to reign supreme as the number one video platform. However, Facebook suggests that their video player is effective, accounting for nearly half of user activity on their platform.

With the potential reach, ease of entry, and complete platform of tools for advertisers, using Facebook for your PPC campaigns remains an obvious choice.

How Do I Deal with Increasing PPC Costs?

While Facebook remains a marketer's PPC platform of choice, the steadily rising costs might not be so insignificant for some companies. For this reason, you'll need to bolster your campaign strategies if you want to avoid overspending and keep costs low, particularly if you're in an industry with higher acquisition costs.

The good news is that rising CPC costs do not necessarily mean you need to drastically increase your ad budget to reach your campaign goals. Instead, we need to closely analyze the latest trends we're seeing with paid ads to determine what prompts users to click more frequently.

Here are some vital tips to keep in mind when creating or updating an existing campaign.

1. Get Up Close and Personal

With the Facebook platform becoming more saturated, general, surface-level advertisements are less effective than ever.

Consider the user's perspective: if a homeowner sees ten generic landscaping ads when looking at their timeline, there's no particular motivation to click on any one of them. You might see it as a 1/10 chance that they'll click yours, but the truth is that it's even less if no offer that speaks personally to their situation. That's an inefficient way to go about displaying your ads.

Instead, you want to take advantage of the data Facebook automatically gathers from the campaign to continuously refine your targeting and hyperfocus your new ads. You need to examine which groups show the highest level of engagement with your ads and make the effort to speak to those people personally.

While the initial reach can be helpful, it won't amount to much if you don't use that data to further segment your audience into carefully selected groups. In other words, it's not only who might be interested in your brand, but what specific products or services would speak to them directly. Understand the audience, identify their pain points, and deliver the ad that's tailor-made for them.

2. If You're Not Tracking with Facebook Pixel - Get Started Immediately

The Facebook Pixel is a short line of code that you can add to any webpage for better visitor tracking. When someone clicks on your ad, the Pixel can immediately begin to gather data regarding their age, employment status, interests, income level, and much more. It then compiles all of this data for you to use to create more personalized ads as discussed above.

The Facebook Pixel is essentially mandatory for any landing page or sales funnel. Not only does it give data about the user, it can explain the behaviors of users who visit your web page.

Are users spending time on your page only to abandon the sign-up form? You may need to spice up your offer.

Are they getting past initial sign-up only to abandon the process mid-checkout? You need to tighten up that last sell to ensure that users are motivated to seal the deal.

Typically, the businesses that are overspending on Facebook are the ones who are either failing to utilize tracking tools or failing to make proper use of the valuable data that is gathered. It's not an easy or quick process, but your work is never wasted. The more work you put into understanding your audience now will pay off for future ad groups and future campaigns down the line.

3. Nurture Existing Audiences

Much of this article has emphasized the cost and difficulty associated with new customer acquisition. Studies say that it can cost as much as five times more to acquire new customers than to keep an existing one.

However, there's no getting around this fact. A business that can't afford to bring in new customers is a business doomed to fail. This statistic alone doesn't tell the whole story, however. While it's expensive to get new customers to convert, that cost is ideally an investment in much more than a one-time purchase.

For this reason, you want to utilize your Facebook Ads for remarketing as well as for new customer acquisition. It makes sense that if someone is already a customer, then you already have the data you need to help build future conversions. However, you shouldn't assume that a customer will simply buy again, but should actively nurture them and help them discover new offers that appeal to them.

Have you ever clicked on an ad, added an item to a cart, and then left the site because you couldn't decide? You've likely received automated marketing emails designed to nurture you and convince you to make the purchase. This is an excellent example of highly-personalized targeting that's nurturing someone who's already completed several conversion goals. This type of attention to detail is what helps businesses gain even more value out of every new acquisition.

Other examples of effective nurturing strategies might include email lists or getting users to follow you on your regularly-updated social media accounts. These communications might feature your latest promo, but they can also provide free value to the customer in the way of quality content that keeps the relationship feeling personal.

4. Embrace the Video Future

It's a bit of a misnomer to call it the future as the importance of video is already upon us. Earlier in this article, Facebook already reported that video playback accounts for nearly half of the time spent on their website. Another study from Wyzowl purports that 86% of marketers are now utilizing video as a primary tool in their marketing strategies.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth exponentially more. A short, well-produced video can communicate more about your brand and your offer in an ad than an entire page of copy. Users are also more likely to sit through a short clip rather than carefully read important text in your sales funnel.

Video production is also more accessible than ever. Your everyday iPhone is now capable of shooting high-quality video and sound without much effort at all. Upload it to your computer, trim the fat, add in some personal branding, and you have a video ready to go for your next PPC ad. You'll earn more clicks, a better conversion rate, and get e out of your campaign when compared to traditional media channels.

Conclusion - Facebook Ads Are Still the Way to Go!

Facebook Ads costs are increasing year-over-year. While you can expect peaks and valleys, you can expect the average CPC to go up in your industry as a result of more advertisers joining up each day.

However, no other platform on the internet offers more global reach nor targets high-purchasing demographics as effectively as Facebook does. Furthermore, even with the rising costs, the average CPC and CPA for a customer on this platform is still lower than virtually every other social media platform.

With that said, with costs expected to rise and challenge smaller businesses, there are still ways to utilize your ad budget effectively. Take advantage of Facebook's tracking and targeting tools to create highly-specific, personalized ads for each segment of your audience. Additionally,Ā make as much of an effort, if not more, to nurture existing customers as you do to acquire new ones.

So long as you put the time and effort into creating the right strategy for your audience, you can continue to remain competitive on Facebook despite the rising costs. Doing so is necessary as few other platforms offer marketers better advantages to date.

Paid search ads are arguably the most powerful way to increase brand awareness and improve your CTR. However, ads require careful keyword research and targeting to connect with the right audiences. Choosing ineffective keywords can result in lost resources that hinder your overall business goals.

That's where dynamic search ads come into play.

Below, we'll help you better understand how to define dynamic search ads, the pros, and cons of using them, and how you can start running your first campaign today.

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

Dynamic search ads are a type of search ad that Google automatically creates based upon the content that already exists on a landing page. After crawling your web page, it then compares your advertised content to other relevant content online. With all of this gathered information, Google can then dynamically generate new headlines in an effort to target new keywords and audiences.

If there are keywords you didn't consider targeting, or if your current content isn't effectively targeting certain terms, DSAs can help you cover all the bases. If your DSAs are able to attract new, high-quality traffic with new keywords or headlines, it can help guide future ad creation and campaign efforts down the line.

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Dynamic Search Ads - The Pros and Cons

Before you hastily dive into your Google Ads account settings, it's important to consider the benefits and drawbacks before making alterations. First, let's take a look at the big positives in regard to why you'll want to consider using DSAs moving forward.

Pro 1 - More Comprehensive Keyword Coverage

Even with the help of SEO keyword research tools like SEMRush or Moz, there are often limitations to what we can achieve. In our efforts to choose smart, highly-targeted keywords, we often overlook relevant keywords that require some outside the box thinking. Further still, your keyword search results likely omit lower-traffic terms in an effort to increase your CTR.

Google's search crawler often knows better.

By turning on DSAs, you effectively have an automated smart tool constantly scanning the web for content related to yours. It's able to rapidly process a tremendous amount of data, look at how those keywords perform and make alterations based on its discoveries instantly. It's like having an expert double- and triple-check your work at all times.

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This is valuable as it can also help you discover lesser-used keywords that happen to show stronger buyer behaviors overall. Even if a term doesn't necessarily have a high search volume, those actually using the term might be your key to gaining higher conversions. This can make these dynamically-discovered keywords more valuable overall.

Pro 2 - Dynamic Ad Targets

Standard search ads base all of their targetings on your chosen keywords. Dynamic search ads have several alternate targeting settings that can help you find new users without entering new keywords.

A. Your Entire Site

One dynamic targeting setting is to utilize the content found throughout your entire site. Google then automatically generates new keyword ideas and headlines based upon any relevant content it finds throughout the domain.

B. Specific Pages on the Site

Using your entire domain might not be ideal for your chosen ad campaign. Instead, you can choose to highlight specific pages on your site that may have content that's relevant to your offer. Select this targeting option to generate new content based upon specific pages.

C. Automatic Categories

Finally, Google can automatically generate a list of categories based upon the content found on your page(s). You can then select as many categories as you'd like from the list to use for further dynamic targeting.

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Pro 3 - Simplified Ad Creation

Finally, ad creation and management can be greatly simplified by turning on dynamic search ads. While your team will still need to do the bulk of the work and create a great foundation, you can automatically generate sexy, new headlines without any effort.

The new keyword and headline generation can also assist with providing motivation for future ads as your campaign progresses. This makes the overall ad management process easier and far more time-efficient if you've got a busy schedule and limited resources.

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With the positives out of the way, let's consider some of the ways that dynamic search ads might adversely affect you and your campaign depending on the circumstances.

Con 1 - Dynamic Search Ads Require Impeccable SEO

Dynamic content generation is contingent upon the content that already exists on the site. If there's too little content, or if that content is poorly written or optimized, then DSAs won't be very helpful.

If you already understand the importance of SEO for your website rankings, then this should not be much of a concern. However, if you're a smaller business that needs to prioritize its marketing resources, you may not have the bandwidth to emphasize both paid ads and SEO.

In other words, DSAs are not a guaranteed solution for every type of company. You'll need to take a look at your overall marketing strategy before you even consider turning DSAs on.

Con 2 - Low-Quality Keywords Might Eat Up Your Budget

While dynamic search ads can potentially generate awesome new keyword ideas that generate clicks, the inverse can also happen. Some of those new search terms may not generate enough volume or conversions to truly be worthwhile when it comes to your limited budget. As a result, those DSAs can actually take away from funds that would be better used elsewhere.

This is particularly important if you're not consistently on top of your DSAs and implementing new negative keywords. Whether you're finding your DSAs to be an improvement or not, you need to be on top of new queries and implement the correct negatives. This will reduce the number of low-quality clicks you get on one of your ads.

Con 3 - Less Control Over the Copy

This con can be mild or fairly severe depending on your company's industry. When you turn on DSAs, you're rendering a lot of creative control over to Google automation. This has the potential to create several issues if you're not highly engaged in selecting the correct ad targets.

First, there is the potential for the auto-generated headlines to not match the actual ad copy. Needless to say, this is a significant issue. However, it's also rare for Google to actually generate any headlines that do not match the body, especially if the content is high-quality and SEO-optimized.

Second, auto-generated text can be an issue if there are specific rules and regulations to what you can and cannot include in copy for your industry. This would apply to businesses in medical, legal drugs, gambling, education, or financial services.

How to Set Up a Dynamic Search Ads Campaign?

With the pros and cons of DSAs in mind, you might decide that it's worth trying out this feature for your new campaign. The good news is that setting up a DSA campaign is extremely simple and requires most of the same steps as a normal ad campaign.

Go through the standard process that you would when creating and establishing a PPC campaign. At the bottom of your Google Ads settings where you establish start/end dates and your ad schedule, you will see a setting for Dynamic Search Ads. You will need to click this dropdown to start setting up the parameters for your DSAs.

You will first need to select the domain you wish to use. This should auto-populate based upon your current settings, but you can edit the URL here if necessary.

Then, you'll need to select a targeting source for the campaign. You can select to use Google's index of your site, URLs from your page feed, or a combination of both. After you make your selection, save and continue to proceed to set up your ad groups, which should now read as dynamic.

This is where you will select the dynamic ad targets we discussed earlier in the article. Remember, you can select your entire site, select specific URLs, or select one or more categories that are auto-generated by Google. You'll want to use the knowledge gained from this article to carefully choose the right targeting option for your DSAs. Avoid using any pages that have no relevance to the campaign content or goals.

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Finally, you'll arrive at a page showing your ads with the new, dynamically-generated headlines. Because you rendered control to Google with the DSA option, you will not be able to edit these. Afterwards, you simply need to save your ads and publish to get started.

Additional Tips for Your Dynamic Search Ads Campaign

You can further improve the quality of your DSA campaign and headlines by taking a few added measures.

First and foremost, you should ensure that each page of your website, particularly the ones being sourced for targeting, feature best SEO practices. This includes providing high-quality content with proper formatting and page layouts such as using the correct header tags and descriptions. Also, be sure to create attractive, informative meta descriptions for each page. Google states that it uses this content in headline generation.

Second, take advantage of dynamic exclusions in the ad group settings. Properly segmenting your audiences is essential for improving performance, and this continues with DSAs. You can set up dynamic exclusions on an ad-by-ad basis or for the entire ad group. Try to target specific groups with each ad group as opposed to targeting everyone all at once. The more refined your targeting is, the better quality your traffic will be for the campaign.

Finally, always take advantage of Google's AI-driven smart bidding feature. This allows you to set a goal for the campaign and Google will automatically strive to meet it. It also helps you avoid overspending on underperforming keywords that are not worthwhile.

Dynamic search ads can be highly impactful for the right business and the right campaign. Consider your industry and campaign needs before making the decision to experiment with dynamic search ads. Then, invest the time in choosing the correct dynamic ad targets to get the best results. Correct use of this feature could elevate your PPC campaigns to the next level.

It's every company's goal to dominate search engine results pages. The problem is that competitive industries make this easier said than done. That's why we lean on paid ad campaigns.

However, don't fall into the trap of burning up your ad budget needlessly. You need to know what will improve your ad quality score and ad relevance to get the best results.

Here are 5 SEM hacks you can use to improve your ad campaigns immediately.

Hack #1 - Perform Better Keyword Research

Keywords are the bedrock of search engine marketing. When a user types your keyword into the search bar, there's a chance that your page will appear depending on its quality and relevance.

Amateurs will make the mistake of simply targeting high-volume keywords without considering other important factors. This will result in your ads getting ignored even if you technically are outbidding the competitor.

For this reason, you need to rethink your keyword research strategy before publishing your latest advertisements. Consider the following ideas when reviewing a list of recommended terms or phrases with your favorite keyword research tool such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz Keyword Explorer.

What is the User's Search Intent?

Every keyword implies a particular search intent. The type of intent generally falls into one of three categories:

• Navigational – The user is looking to go to a website or page. Examples might include “Amazon,” or “DashClicks login.”
• Informational – The user is looking to learn about a topic or acquire information. Examples typically include question words such as “how,” “what,” or “why.”
• Transactional – The user is likely looking to make a purchase. They’re using keywords to target specific products or services such as “best,” “affordable,” or “purchase.”

When researching keywords, think about how a keyword you're considering fits into one of these categories. Compare this to the type of content you're including in your ad campaign. If your campaign is to promote an offer for a specific product, transactional keywords better align your ads with user intent and improve ad relevance.

On the other hand, using an informational keyword might get you initial clicks, but it ultimately doesn't serve the user. This leads to a higher bounce rate and will prompt Google to omit your result even if you're paying a solid value for that keyword. The clicks you do get will likely do little more than waste your budget as those users simply aren't ready to buy.

Your ad campaign doesn't necessarily need to be transactional, however. Promoting informational content about your products or brand is a great way to increase awareness and nurture an audience. Be thoughtful about the keywords you select, even if they do not have the highest search volume.

Don't Forget About Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are terms you can enter to prevent your ads from displaying to users entering unrelated keywords. This is crucial when the keywords you're ranking for as just broad enough to inadvertently attract uninterested audiences.

For example, let's say that a wedding planning business is running ads using the keyword event planner. Technically, a wedding planner is an event planner, but event planner as a keyword can attract users that have zero interest in wedding planning. People use event planners for all types of gatherings and celebrations.

For this reason, you may want to add negative keywords for birthday event planning, private event planning,  etc. This will ensure that any user who uses those negative terms, or any combination of those words, will not see your ad. It's simply a more effective way of targeting your campaign and gaining a more qualified audience.

Don't Forget About Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are long, highly-specific keywords that typically have a low search volume. The last attribute is typically a reason that many will avoid using a long-tail keyword. This is a mistake.

While these keywords do generate fewer clicks, the quality of those clicks is typically much higher. Jewelry is a very broad, vague keyword, but affordable wedding anniversary diamond jewelry targets a highly-specific user. The user that goes out of their way to use that long-tail keyword demonstrates a much higher motivation to engage with your ads and convert.

Long-tail keywords are also highly affordable due to their low volume, meaning that there is little risk. However, when used effectively, that can make a positive impact on your ad campaign results and improve ad quality score.

Hack #2 - Always Research Direct Competitors

Competitor research goes hand-in-hand with keyword research, whether it be for your paid ad campaigns or for organic website content. Even if you curate excellent content that is worthy of a high ad score, your ads still might not get featured if a bidding war ensues.

This is particularly important if you're a smaller business without much SEO history. You can always expect there to be bigger businesses with much larger ad spend budgets than you can currently afford. The last thing you want to do is overpay for keywords and decimate your marketing budget before it actually generates any results.

Instead of always going head-to-head with direct competitors, research their keyword usage and look for opportunities to exploit their mistakes. Most SEO and keyword research software will allow you to quickly research top keywords used by the domain and page you enter. You can use this to come up with new angles to improve ad rank without facing as much direct competition.

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As you begin to improve your page rankings and online presence, you can revise your keywords strategies to incorporate more competitive keywords. Always keep an eye on the CPC (cost-per-click) of keywords over time and leap when the opportunity arises.

Hack #3 - Always A/B Test

Never expect the first draft of your ad to be a smashing success. There's always the possibility, but there's a greater chance that some aspect of your campaign can be improved. In fact, you should naturally look to create new ads and revise old ones as your campaign gathers valuable data from your targeted audience.

The most effective way to determine what parts of your ad campaign work well is to run A/B tests. This allows you to simultaneously run two versions of a similar ad while experimenting with changes to the design or copy.

Furthermore, Google Ads will automatically divert users to the higher-performing version of your ad and landing page once it gathers enough useful data. You can then use this information to determine what aspects of your campaign are grabbing your audience and what you might be able to do to further refine future ads and improve your ad rank.

A significant part of what makes an ad campaign successful is gathering as much useful data about your audience as possible and making use of it. There's no real effective way to do this without A/B testing your ads and landing pages. You can set an ad to turn off after a period if it underperforms, and you'll never need to worry about burning up your budget on a failed experiment.

Hack #4 - Use Automatic Ad Rotation

While setting Google Ads to automatically, you can choose to override this setting to automatically rotate all the ads in a set for equal viewing. While the former strategy can help you focus on the better ad, a regular rotation can potentially provide a better analysis of your entire campaign.

The A/B optimize setting will always display the ad that receives more clicks. More clicks typically mean that Google is going to improve your ad quality score and ad rank. However, as we discussed with keyword intent, more clicks do not always mean that you're earning high-quality impressions. Let's look at an example:

• Ad A - 3,000 Clicks - 600 conversions = 20% conversion rate
• Ad B - 1,000 Clicks - 300 conversions = 30% conversion rate

While this is a bit of a crude example, you can see what we're emphasizing here. While Google might technically give Ad B a lower quality score due to the lower clicks, we can see that it technically was more valuable thanks to its higher conversion rate. More conversions from fewer clicks also mean that we were able to obtain a much better ROI for our campaign efforts.

This creates a dilemma for even experienced paid ads managers. The answer typically lies in the overall goal for the campaign as well as the resources you have available to refine and optimize your ads. Defaulting to the higher click count is a safer bet as it will improve your Quality Score, while still maximizing the use of your ad budget.

However, taking advantage of ad rotation at the right times can be your ticket to establishing a killer marketing campaign. When you obtain more raw data and effectively make use of the knowledge, you have the potential to deliver superior ads than you might otherwise with the alternative method.

Hack #5 - Always Monitor Your Quality Score

As mentioned several times throughout this article, your ad quality score is significant for maximizing your ad campaign efforts.

Google automatically gives every ad you publish an ongoing Quality Score that measures the following:

• Expected clickthrough rate (based upon historical impressions for exact keyword searches)
• Ad relevance (our discussion on keyword and user intent)
• Landing page experience (the value that your landing page brings to the user)

Anyone can access their Quality Score through their Google Ads account and navigate to the Keywords section.

The reason for emphasizing the Quality Score section is that it is your most powerful barometer for gauging the effectiveness of a given advertisement.

Is your ad relevance score low? You likely need to revisit your keyword research and target better keywords with your ads.

Is your landing page experience score low? You may need to A/B test versions of the landing page to determine what's hurting the user experience. The fix may be as simple as coming up with a better call-to-action or there may be more severe issues with the overall design.

Your Quality Score can improve or degrade with time as Google gathers more information from users and learns more about your campaign. However, it's in your best interest to use your score to guide your future campaign behaviors. Without effective analytic analysis, you can expect to waste a lot of time and effort, especially in competitive industries.

To learn some effective tips on how to use your Quality Score to improve ad rank and improve ad relevance, check out this excellent article courtesy of Google.

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Conclusion - Paid Ads Require Care and Investment

In many ways, running a paid ad campaign has never been easier and more accessible for businesses. Tedious, painstaking tasks are now entirely automated through the digital advertising platform. With that said, amassing all of this valuable consumer data will amount to very little unless you invest the time and care in managing your campaign effectively.

Revisit your keyword research, keep an eye on competitors, and take advantage of the automation tools available within the platform. Finally, keep up-to-date with your ad quality score for suggestions on actions you can take to improve your campaign immediately. Doing so will help you to avoid unnecessary ad spending and help you maximize your ROI.

SEO is one of the number one factors that determine the success of a website. We utilize content blogs to boost our SEO strategies and rank for keywords relevant to our offerings.

While your agency already knows the power of SEO and content, you need to perform regular technical SEO audits for your client's blogs. Doing so ensures that the website is free of problematic errors that hinder the user experience and negatively impact search rankings.

In this article, we'll review what goes into technical SEO, how to perform a technical SEO audit, and how often you should provide one for your client's blog.

What is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is a process of diagnosing a website's health regarding your quest to improve organic rankings. The auditor will use a variety of tools to crawl existing web pages, verify the sitemap, and look for errors related to navigation, page loading speed, and user-friendliness.

Performing a technical SEO audit regularly is essential as Google's algorithm is always changing. That means that you'll want to implement minor or major changes to your SEO strategy depending on the severity of algorithm updates. Website health issues can also pop up over time as you make changes to existing pages or add new ones to the site navigation.

How Often Should You Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

The frequency of your technical SEO audits depends largely on the size of your client's website. Smaller websites with a more condensed blog can get by with a comprehensive audit once every six months. As the blog grows and the website expands, you may want to consider completing tasks on your technical SEO audit checklist once every three months.

The reason for this is that the larger the client's website is, the more possibilities there are to encounter new SEO-related errors that can impact performance. The more errors you discover through your audit, the more time it takes to properly address each one.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

With the purpose of a technical SEO audit fresh in your mind, let's take a look at what we specifically need to accomplish to perform a successful audit of your client's blog.

1. Crawl the Entire Website

Though your main focus is the blog, it will benefit you to crawl the entire website at the same time.

In case you're unfamiliar, web crawling is the process of navigating or crawling a website, downloading the information, and indexing it on the world wide web. Software used to crawl a website is generally referred to as a web crawler or a spider.

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Crawling a website will not only assist you with the above actions but will also inform you of notable errors found on the website. It may also highlight areas for optimization that can further improve the site's user experience and discoverability. This is the primary reason that every technical SEO audit should begin with a fresh crawl.

However, you should be aware that Google only offers the domain a limited crawl budget each month. Google's spider bot will perform a crawl of your website naturally over time, but additional crawl requests will use up the budget. How much of your budget it uses depends on the number of pages you request it to crawl.

You can minimize the use of your crawl budget by disallowing crawler access on certain pages. For example, while websites require a Privacy Policy page, you won't be trying to rank for this page. Therefore, you can exclude it from the crawl request entirely. Because you are specifically trying to audit your client's blog, you may choose to exclude all pages from the crawl except for blog-related pages.

With a fresh diagnosis of the website's health on hand, you now have a list of actionable errors you can present to the client and the team for future SEO recommendations.

2. Set Up a Website Mirror for Testing Changes

Though setting up a mirror of the client's website is not a necessity, it can be useful for several reasons. A mirror site is an identical replica of the site hosted on the client's domain. Because the mirror site is not being visited, crawled, or indexed, you are free to test your SEO optimizations without fear.

Secondly, it allows you to experiment with changes and optimizations without taking the primary website offline for an extended period.

However, if you choose to utilize a mirror site, you need to be wary of how this can affect the site's SEO. If Google happens to crawl two identical versions of the same site, it will greatly impair the domain authority due to all of the duplicate content.

You can combat this in two ways. The first is to always utilize the appropriate canonical tags on the client's website. Using these tags will help you designate the primary version of the site so that Google's crawler understands the difference between the two. It will prevent the crawler from navigating the mirror site so that you don't use up the client's crawl budget.

The alternative is to disallow crawling of any pages you're working on in the site's Robots.txt file. The Robots.txt effectively tells the crawler which pages to crawl and which to avoid according to your set parameters. Then, after you've tested and implemented your changes, you can once again allow crawling of those pages once more.

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3. Review the XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a file that informs web crawlers of the most important pages found on a client's website. Not only can you highlight specific pages, but you'll also be helping the crawler understand the site's overall structure. This is especially important as you add more blog pages and increase the website size.

According to Google, a sitemap is limited to 50MB in size and must not contain more than 50,000 URLs. While these guidelines likely won't impact you or any of your clients, it's important to keep them in mind when planning your map.

You want to make sure that the sitemap is constantly updated with new website pages. Each time you make additions to the client's blog, you'll want to incorporate those URLs into the map, especially if no other internal links are pointing to those pages.

To get an inventory of errors found within the client's sitemap, you'll want to use Google Search Console. This tool is a godsend for your SEO and will assist with crawl requests, site health reports, and metrics regarding site performance.

You're going to be looking for common errors such as unexpected 404-page responses, 401 unauthorized requests, or pages being blocked by robots.txt. If your sitemap has too many errors, the crawler will eventually abandon the crawl altogether.

4. Perform a Link-Building Audit

This step will go hand-in-hand with your sitemap review. Google Search Console will also report any broken links found on any of the client's web pages. This applies to both internal links throughout the site and external links pointing to other domains.

Broken links that lead to 404s not only negatively impact the site's SEO but can cause the search crawler to abandon the crawl. These types of errors can be indicators that you need to update your site with the appropriate redirect protocols or eliminate the link. If you have any outdated links pointing to external sources, you'll want to update those links with the correct URL or find an alternate source for your information.

Finally, you'll want to do a separate audit of your collected backlinks. A backlink refers to any links located on other domains that point back to your domain. You can perform a backlink audit by using tools such as SEMRush and Ahrefs. If you have any backlinks from low-quality domains, you'll need to reach out to the webmaster and request the removal of the link.

Alternatively, you can submit a disavow request directly to Google by following the instructions they provide here.

5. Monitor Page Response Codes

The status of your web pages is another step that somewhat coincides with the previous steps. As you scanned for errors in your sitemap and Google Search Console, you were likely made aware of page response errors found on the website.

A page response error occurs when a user's browser requests the server, but the request is unable to be properly addressed. The origin of the page response error depends upon the type of error that occurs.

The most common type of page response error you're likely to encounter is a 404 - page not found error. This occurs when the user is attempting to access a page on the website no longer exists. It can also occur if the user follows a link with an inaccurately-entered URL. To remedy these, you'll need to eliminate deleted pages from the sitemap and update any broken links found on existing pages.

You can also alleviate page response errors by effectively utilizing 301 and 302 redirects respectively. A 301 response will redirect a user from a dead URL to an updated one permanently. Likewise, you can utilize a 302 redirect for temporary page moves.

Understanding page response errors allows you to understand how to remedy them. Thankfully, these types of errors are relatively simple to fix and can make a difference in improving your client's website health.

6. Check for Page Load Speed Errors

Fast page loading speeds are crucial in two ways. First, a slow loading speed is known to drastically increase your bounce rate. According to Pingdom, the average load time for a page is 3.21 seconds. As soon as you jump to 5 seconds, the bounce rate is a staggering 38%.

Secondly, that increased bounce rate and poor UX will also count against the site as a ranking factor. Google values page speed in providing a better experience to its users and will consider loading times when ranking the site against competitors.

Because of this, Google provides us with its PageSpeed Insights tool to check up on our latest website speeds for both desktop and mobile. Use this tool when conducting your technical SEO audit to look for website health errors that are negatively impacting your loading speeds.

7. Don't Forget About the Mobile User Experience

More users than ever are utilizing their phones for their browsing experiences. Google notices this and agrees that the mobile user experience is essential for a quality website. That's why they rolled out an update back in 2015 that would boost the ranking of mobile-friendly pages.

For this reason, you'll want to scrutinize the mobile design of the website in addition to the desktop version. Tools like Google Search Console should identify key areas for improvement, but you can also turn to Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to learn more about the website.

Numerous factors can negatively impact the website's mobile UX. Not only will these tests pinpoint the problems, but they will also provide a recommended course of action. Common issues that impact mobile speeds are a lack of image optimizations, lack of a mobile-first website layout, and failure to optimize scripts for mobile hardware.

Most modern CMS platforms provide built-in features that allow you to tailor the website design to both desktop and mobile experiences simultaneously. Be diligent in examining all versions of the website before committing to any changes that might impair your UX on other versions.

8. Check Daily Site Activity Metrics in Google Analytics

Google Analytics assists website owners in tracking daily statistics and creating customized reports regarding user behavior. If your client does not already have their site tagged by Google Analytics, this will be an excellent place for you to start.

As you begin to gather user data, you'll receive valuable metrics for your audit including daily visits, bounce rate, and average session duration. You'll even be able to visualize what channels people are using to access the domain.

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These metrics can help you better explain the quality of the website to your client. If a particular blog article is getting clicks, but also features a high bounce rate and low session duration, it's a red flag that the content or layout is not up to snuff. So long as these metrics continue to remain low, the client's site ranking will continue to fall despite any other technical SEO changes you may implement during the same period.

You'll want to gather this GA data and present it in the context of an actionable plan. If you see that certain types of blog articles are generating more traction, you'll want to illustrate the importance of gearing the blog toward what the audience likes. You can also look for opportunities to start implementing an effective link-building strategy within the blog to help more users move from article to article.

9. Review Structured Data

Structured data is a type of language that helps Google better understand the type of content found on a web page. The most common type of structure data used by SEO experts is schema markup. This is a type of code implemented within the website's HTML to qualify sections of content.

Schema markup can give a huge boost to your SEO as it takes the guesswork out of Googlebot's job. Without the markup language, the crawler is left to examine the on-page content and do its best to determine what the content is and how it relates to other content on the site. When using the markup, the crawler immediately reads the tag, understands the content, and indexes it correctly.

However, when used incorrectly, schema markup can further confuse search engine crawlers. In your audit, you'll want to scan for errors in the markup language and create a plan to either fix the page and/or expand upon the existing markup code where applicable.

Presenting Your Technical SEO Audit Findings

If you follow this technical SEO audit checklist, you'll have a significant amount of information regarding the client's website at your disposal. Your job now will be to present these findings in the context of improving the site and present an actionable plan. You'll want to highlight the benefits of executing the plan along with a timeline to expect results.

After your SEO experts tackle the client's website and blog, you should execute one more website crawl. Ideally, you will now have a significantly improved website report to share with your client. These positive changes may produce some instant results, but will also help to boost blog rankings over time.

However, be aware of additional errors that might pop up following any major website changes. This is not uncommon and the client's site might require some additional care even after the major changes go live.

SEO is an ongoing process and your website will require ongoing attention as search algorithms continue to evolve. That's why using a checklist like this to guide your technical SEO audits on a regular schedule is the best way to improve a site's organic traffic and rankings. The healthier your client's website is, the more conversions they'll obtain, and the happier they will be.

If you want to retain clients for the long term, you need to confidently display the digital marketing metrics and KPIs that translate to results.

Contrary to what you may think, a quick boom in website traffic, the account follows, or page views isn't going to cut it.

At the end of the day, your clients care about acquiring high-quality customers and improving their bottom line. To that end, you need to create actual results to build a reputation that stands the test of time.

If you want to start convincing your clients to stay on board, start taking a closer examination of these 5 important digital marketing metrics now.

5 Important Digital Marketing Metrics to Show Your Client

When you measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, quality often scores over quantity. In the reports, a client is not interested in several irrelevant indicators. What matters most are the metrics that clearly show where you are and what you still need to achieve.To figure it out, we have compiled five important digital marketing metrics for different types of campaigns:-

1. Traffic to Quality Lead Ratio

Traffic is a valuable metric for any business online. If your website is your virtual storefront, then your traffic equates to getting new customers in the door to browse your offerings.

However, traffic alone is sometimes considered a vanity metric. A vanity metric is a digital marketing metric that can indicate great performance but ultimately tells you very little about your progress toward a goal.

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For example, if a business sets an arbitrary goal of acquiring 1,000 new customers from an ad campaign, page traffic tells you little about your performance. This metric simply tells you that people are visiting, but not what they actions they are taking whenever they visit your landing page or website.

Make no mistake - improving your client's online traffic significantly is something that you should share and highlight. The issue arises whenever you are not simultaneously seeing improvements in conversions, page session duration, or revenue as a result of this traffic. Your client will quickly realize that these numbers matter very little if they are getting a quality ROI.

Instead, you want to highlight to the client how much of this new traffic is high-quality. You can demonstrate this by revealing how many of these users become leads. You can highlight this by comparing the traffic increase to conversion metrics such as follows, subscribers, form submissions, or calls.

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In other words, quality is always better than quantity. If you gain 1,000 new leads out of 10,000 visits, you have a lead ratio of 10%. Compare this to 100,000 new website visitors, but only 1,000 leads, which equates to 1%. That's a lot of wasted budget and effort reaching users that are not interested in your client's offerings.

2. Conversions

Continuing from the head above, tracking conversions is crucial for demonstrating the value of your digital marketing efforts. A conversion is the result of a website visitor completing an action on your page that happens to be one of your goals. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to earn more subscribers, then any new subscriber can be considered a conversion.

Common conversion goals are purchases, submitting a form, subscribing, sharing, following, or downloading/installing a file or app.

Whenever you set up custom goals for your campaign, you are better able to gather important digital marketing metrics that better tell the story. Instead of simply using a general traffic boost as the highlight of your presentation, you can support your metrics with those sexy conversion rates. Doing so provides undeniable proof that the client's advertising budget is being put to excellent use.

The types of conversions you'll want to show your client depends upon their immediate business goals. If the primary goal for the previous and coming months is to boost brand awareness, you may want to highlight an increase in subscribers, follows, or shares. An increase in views of a specific page or time spent on that page may also help you and your client to understand user intent.

Likewise, if the primary goal is to gain direct sales from a sale or promotion, you need the purchase conversions to back up your efforts. Failure to produce these conversion metrics will not only leave you exposed but will serve as a clear indicator that your campaign requires additional testing and improvements to get the job done.

3. Engagement

Engagement is crucial for illustrating to clients what types of actions users are taking regarding their content. You can identify engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, follows, or even an increase in page session duration.

Engagement is valuable as it demonstrates that your marketing efforts work. On the flip side, a lack of engagement typically leads to an increase in bounce rate - quick page visits that result in no action whatsoever. Not only is a high bounce rate indicative of poor creatives, but it's also something that Google can and will hold against a site when it comes to SEO and search rankings.

You should utilize this important digital marketing metric as a measuring stick for your digital marketing efforts. Regularly A/B test ads, website pages, and social posts to determine which images or copy yields improved engagement. An increase in engagement naturally improves the amount of organic traffic your client receives, which, in turn, can further boost conversions and sales.

An increase in organic results means gaining brand awareness and increasing revenue without spending additional funds. Ultimately, this may well be the best digital marketing campaign metric you can show to a client to demonstrate an impressive ROI.

4. Revenue by Channel

Revenue refers to the amount of money gained by utilizing digital marketing tactics for a business on a specific channel. You should not confuse this with profit, which is what's left from the revenue stream after deducting expenses.

A channel refers to any platform used to implement your digital marketing tactics for a client. Examples of digital marketing channels include paid search, SEO, social media, or content marketing. You can further qualify a digital marketing channel by individual platforms (i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, or LinkedIn).

You owe it to yourself and clients to demonstrate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by channel. While previous metrics such as conversions and engagement are important, the client's bottom line is what will ultimately have the final say in whether or not utilizing a channel is a worthwhile pursuit.

If a digital marketing channel produces a healthy revenue stream, then it's likely a no-brainer to keep improving your efforts there. If the client's brand is performing exceptionally well, you may even choose to double down. Inversely, a revenue stream that costs more than it's worth will indicate that the channel requires more love and care. It may be in the client's best interest to abandon certain channels altogether in some instances.

The important thing to focus on is your agency's actions regarding the revenue earned through a marketing channel. Every client loves to see a smashing success. However, taking the initiative to pull back on underperforming channels and prevent unnecessary budget spending can also go a long way in solidifying the trust and partnership between your agency and the client.

5. Lifetime Customer Value

If there's one thing each of these digital marketing metrics has in common, it's that each highlights the importance of gaining more for less. That's why the final important KPI we're featuring is the lifetime customer value (LCV).

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To better understand LCV, you'll first need to understand a few metrics that go into the formula.

Every customer has an average purchase value (APV). This refers to the value of all of their purchases from a business within a period. Similarly, they also have an average purchase frequency (APF), which is their number of purchases in a period compared to total purchases.

You can then determine the customer's overall value by multiplying your APV by the APF. Now that you know the approximate value of a customer, you can compare this data to the lifespan of the customer. This provides you with a customer lifetime value that you can use to better understand your ROI on a customer-by-customer basis.

While this may sound slightly complex, it's fairly straightforward. Let's say that your agency spends $200 on Facebook Ads to acquire a new customer. During that customer's lifespan, they make two purchases for a total value of $100. You effectively lost money when bargaining for that customer's business. On the other hand, if you acquire a loyal customer who completes ten purchases at a value of $500, you've now made money back and then some.

The takeaway here is being able to demonstrate that your digital marketing efforts do not simply result in one-off purchases. Such events can be classified as churn, and are generally indicative of unsatisfied or underwhelmed customers. The goal should always be to cultivate an engaged and loyal following from the conversions that you acquire. You achieve this not only from the initial point of contact but through an ongoing nurturing process.

The higher your average lifetime customer value, the more profit that awaits your client. Furthermore, a higher LCV also indicates that customers are happy with the product or service. Content customers boost your marketing efforts by providing social proof and boosting your organic traffic. The resulting snowball effect is how your agency creates a sustainable foundation for your service and will create a client for life.

Show Clients These 5 Digital Marketing Metrics to be Successful

Businesses outsource their marketing efforts to agencies like yours for a reason. They either lack the knowledge, the skills, or the time to effectively give their marketing channels the attention they deserve.

They're actively looking for you to succeed and looking for data they can trust. So long as you can provide them with high-quality metrics that indicate progress and care, they're generally willing to let you do what you must on their behalf. That means you'll have more time to cultivate a following and build better campaigns so long as you work to maintain their confidence.

You can do this successfully by regularly reporting on these 5 key digital marketing metrics. All of these not only show an increase in visitors, but also show that those visitors are interested, engaged, and willing to spend money on a product or service that they like. It's not always about maximizing attention, but getting attention from those that truly count.

Every business wants to ally with an agency that produces customers that are happy and ready to buy. By using these metrics to guide your marketing efforts, you'll be able to build long-lasting client relationships that set your agency up for long-term success.

What skills do you need for digital marketing?

The answer is primarily contingent upon your desired marketing role within a company or agency. While many marketing positions tend to require overlapping skills, you will benefit from learning and mastering the talents that are intrinsic to that station.

Let's analyze the key positions in a marketing team and determine the best skills for digital marketing you can acquire to give yourself an advantage over rival applicants.

Digital Marketing Skills You Need by Marketing Position

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers are the individuals responsible for creating and managing advertising campaigns online. They are the experts that oversee the company's Facebook, Google, and Bing ads as well as manage the monthly campaign budget. Paid media marketers are invaluable as they're the ones that make your advertising dollars work and can help even small businesses gain attention in paid search.

Here are some of the skills you'll need if you want to succeed in PPC advertising:

1. Graphic Design Skills

Several aspects go into creating a high-quality paid advertisement, but graphic design is one of the more important skills you'll need to grab the user's attention. You don't need to necessarily be a master at this - that's why there are dedicated graphic designers - but a sufficient level of knowledge in using tools like Photoshop or Canva will go a long way.

Having the ability to rapidly respond to company or client requests and provide several ad creatives for the same ad will automatically help you stand out from others with the same job title. The more knowledge you have to bolster ad creatives on your own, the more effective your campaigns will be overall.

2. Copywriting

Strong writing ability is a skill that's fairly essential in every aspect of digital marketing. Content is king and being able to deliver your message effectively and succinctly is key. While you won't need to outline and write 3,000+ word articles, you'll still want to make sure those ad copy lines pack a punch. For some, creating great paid ad copy can prove to be more of a challenge as you need to communicate more with less.

Armed with the knowledge of what makes great copy, you'll be able to identify writing mistakes that lower ad quality and hurt your conversion rate. You'll be able to create several copy alternatives for similar ads to provide your company and client with equally effective options.

3. Ad Account Management

This skill is one of the most crucial for a paid media marketer and it is mandatory. While Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and the like contain similar features and functionality, they each require active participation and knowledge to make effective use of its tools.

More importantly, these platforms frequently make updates to their platform and the terms of use for businesses. This gets even trickier if you work for an agency and are responsible for creating and managing campaigns as a partner on behalf of a third party. It will be your responsibility to actively stay on top of the rules and regulations of a platform to guide your clients effectively through the process. It will also help to avoid inadvertent mistakes that can result in the takedown of paid ads or a suspension of the account.

4. Webpage Design

You've done the heavy lifting and created an engaging ad that earned the click from a new lead. However, you now need to provide them with a powerful landing page that can secure the lead's contact information. This is why having a decent level of web design can bolster your paid ad campaign efforts.

Fortunately, much of this is alleviated as numerous platforms allow you to build elegant landing pages with very little coding or IT knowledge. However, understanding the aspects that make up an effective landing page design will allow you to create a seamless transition between the ad and the final destination. Otherwise, you're simply generating some traffic without delivering any tangible results.

5. Mastery of Marketing Statistics

Digital marketing is entirely driven by data and metrics gathered from every customer interaction. However, it's not enough to simply understand what a metric represents. You need the working knowledge to understand how those statistics factor into your bottom line so that you can use that knowledge to guide your campaign efforts as they progress.

Content Marketers

1. High-quality Writing Capabilities

Content marketers generate leads and sales with their words. Few things are as immediately off-putting as a website or landing page copy that's grammatically incorrect, improperly formatted, and filled with blatant errors. Technical marketing knowledge will amount to little for content writers if they are unable to translate those ideas into engaging material.

Writing for marketing is also much different than writing an essay or a novel. The presentation of your words is highly dependent upon the audience you're attempting to reach.

2. Communication / Understanding of the Audience

This second skill builds off the back of the prior one. A major component in being able to create effective copy is to be able to quickly identify and understand the target audience. In short, you don't want to write the same way for an everyday plumbing service as you would for a doctor working in specialized medicine. The success of your content depends upon the tone, vocabulary, and delivery just as much as the actual message.

The better you are at asking the right questions of clients and nailing down the demographics you're trying to reach, the better you will fare in the copywriting world.

3. SEO

A strong marketing team will feature dedicated search engine, optimization specialists. They ensure that websites rank well by diagnosing webpage health issues, building links between relevant content, and effectively mapping target keywords for each new page. For this reason, an SEO may supply content writers with guidelines or preliminary research to guide the writing process.

Because these aspects of SEO are so essential for high-performing copy, you would do well to gain a solid understanding of SEO principles. You'll have a greater understanding of what search engines like Google look for in content so that you can pinpoint the best result in the first couple of drafts and avoid unnecessary rewrites.

4. Diverse Content Writing Experience

There are several types of content writing in marketing, but the two you may be most concerned about are informational content and promotional content. Having knowledge and experience in working with both of these will make you a more well-rounded asset to your team.

Informational content is the type of material that you'll often see posted to a website's blog to improve rankings. Users are encouraged to subscribe or follow this type of content which educates or serves the user without overtly calling them to spend their money with the brand. Your focus is to generate brand recognition, build traffic numbers, and provide a worthwhile experience when visiting the site.

Conversely, promotional content requires a different approach. You're attempting to sell either the brand or a specific product to a very specific group of individuals. You'll need the ability to dissect the ideal customer's pain points and leverage them into your copy.

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Both are very different approaches, but equally necessary to build a strong digital marketing strategy.

5. Script Writing

While text-based content will always have its place in organic search, more companies are turning to new media such as infographics, custom images, or videos for their content. Video, in particular, is hugely effective at driving conversion rates and can easily replace a landing page worth of content when done correctly.

For this reason, you'll want to sharpen your writing skills for yet another type of format. Writing for a script that someone will read aloud requires some finesse and understanding of what makes for a natural way of speaking. Being able to translate your copy ideas for a vocal vehicle is yet another skill that will make you an invaluable asset to your team.

SEO

1. Excellent Research Skills

Marketing research makes up a significant component of an SEO's role. You'll be spending hours researching the most effective keywords to implement. You'll then need to determine how to map them throughout the site as well as what type of content will best support the goal of ranking for that word or phrase.

You'll also be regularly researching the competitor's SEO strategies. You will want to remain aware of the top-ranking sites in your niche, assess what's working for them, and be able to use this knowledge to imitate where necessary and differentiate your brand wherever you can.

Finally, Google is known to regularly revise and change its search algorithm, making your job an ever-evolving one. Being able to effectively research and uncover the best SEO practices is crucial even when Google won't provide a definitive answer.

2. Data Analysis

Equally important to your research, you'll need to be able to review the data and ask the right questions once you start putting your SEO efforts into action. Even effective SEO strategies can take weeks or months to take effect for a new site, so it is imperative to diagnose issues early and get yourself on the correct path.

You'll need to be comfortable in regularly analyzing where you stand in rankings, fluctuations in traffic, and be able to pinpoint what's causing success or failure quickly with your chosen SEO strategy if you want your brand to have a chance in duking it out with the top-ranking competitors.

3. Web Design and Coding

While you by no means need to be a web dev expert, you'll need to understand the principles of page design and how it impacts a site's SEO value. While you won't be responsible for making major design changes, you'll want to identify and remedy common presentation errors and look for ways to improve the user experience where you can.

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Furthermore, SEO-specific aspects of web design such as metadata and schema markup will be your responsibility. While these are not overly complicated tasks, they do require some basic HTML knowledge to implement correctly.

4. Knowledge and Experience with Third-Party SEO Tools

Thankfully, an SEO's job is not performed blindly. There are countless recommended tools that an SEO should have in their arsenal including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Google Trends. Beyond these obvious recommendations, countless tools serve as keyword planners, link-building assistants, and mobile optimization helpers.

Experienced SEOs are all going to have their preferred program for getting the best results. It benefits an SEO to remain up-to-date and aware of the latest technology and make the best choice as to what tools can best bolster your SEO strategy. Familiarity with a powerful platform can greatly expedite keyword research and help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

5. Content Marketing

As discussed among our skills for the content marketing role, SEO and content are undeniably intertwined. While high-quality SEO offers far more than the copy on a page, that same text serves as the vehicle for providing a strong UX and ensuring that your pages rank for the correct keywords.

While you may not be creating this content yourself as an SEO, having a strong knowledge of what makes great content will make you a better asset to your team. You can not only ensure that articles work in the right direction but can greatly expedite the time it takes for a copywriter to complete a piece by arming them with solid SEO research before they begin.

Of course, it's always beneficial to have content marketing skills firsthand, so that you can always help out and deliver great content to coincide with your SEO efforts at any time.

Social Media Managers

1. Knowledge of Social Platforms and Audiences

Perhaps no one has a harder time gaining the respect they deserve than social media marketing managers. Too many brands find it acceptable to simply post whatever comes to mind on any social media timeline and then question why they aren't getting results.

Successful social media marketing requires extensive knowledge of the platforms you use. Each website tends to feature different demographics that can vary greatly by age, gender, geographic location, and income levels. Furthermore, the way those users communicate can also vary greatly either by deliberate choice or due to platform restrictions (i.e. Twitter's character limit).

You'll need to be someone who's in the know when it comes to the tricks and trades of fostering engagement on each platform. It's no small feat and you'll be juggling your efforts across multiple websites at all times.

2. Impeccable Communication Skills

You need to be a social butterfly to succeed on social media (it's in the name). Simply creating a customized account for your brand and posting any old content throughout the day is going to result in one thing - zero engagement.

What truly generates those coveted likes and shares is actively pursuing new connections with your target audience and fellow industry members. That doesn't mean mindlessly promoting your business or products. Users are looking for genuine interactions and will be able to sniff out anything that's not immediately.

You need to truly embrace your role as the voice of your brand and start getting social. You'll want to think about the people you're interacting with and come up with creative ways to incorporate your brand into conversations in a way that speaks to people personally.

3. Copywriting

The importance of content marketing reveals itself once more. Though social media content tends to be short and sweet when compared to blog articles, it's equally important for grabbing attention and inviting users to join the conversation. It's arguably more important than ever to be able to create content that actively incentivizes users to participate.

However, knowledge of social platforms can help you instantly make your copy more dynamic. Experts will be able to not simply post, but effectively utilize popular features such as Instagram Reels, Facebook groups, or various third-party media creation tools. Social media managers are less concerned about dumping loads of information, but packing a punch in a short, concise message.

4. Customer Service

Due to the conversational nature of social media, you can and should expect to use your brand's accounts to provide customer support. Not only will users frequently message you directly, but they will also comfortably see fit to tag your brand with any messages - positive or negative as they deem fit.

For this reason, an exceptional social media manager will not only be able to identify these scenarios but carefully navigate these encounters. Successful interactions can not only remedy a poor experience a customer had, but can also boost brand integrity by offering social proof to all other users that might witness your public interactions.

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5. Project Management and Planning Skills

Effective social media strategies do not work in isolation. Instead, an effective social media manager will be tuned in to what other departments are working on regarding content and devise a strategy that helps all departments succeed.

For example, your SEO team decides to pursue keywords directly related to a major industry event. Then, your content writing team moves quickly to create engaging material that's valuable to your audience and supports those ranking efforts.

Rather than allow these events to happen separately, a social media manager will have strong project management skills to coordinate scheduling for these types of events alongside their regularly scheduled postings. This not only applies to industry events, but can apply to company-wide promotions, holidays, and topics that start trending naturally on various social media platforms.

Strong social media management requires a proactive approach, not a reactive one. With a content calendar in place, you then have more agility when it comes to those times when you simply must pivot and react to the tumultuous landscape that is social media.

Arm Yourself with the Best Digital Marketing Skills for Your Position

Digital marketing will likely always be a viable career choice and it only continues to evolve with technology. However, that same viability makes this field a highly competitive one, so you need to sharpen your skills to stand out and help your company get the results it requires from you.

Not only should you take away the five skills you need based on your desired marketing position, but you should take additional care to acquire those valuable crossover skills that are consistently required everywhere.

Lastly, understand that what you learn today can become quickly outdated a month from now. To truly be the best marketer in your role, you need to actively participate in the industry, stay up-to-date with the latest changes and occurrences, and work toward where the marketing industry is going, not where it's at. Otherwise, you'll find yourself becoming stagnant and falling behind those who are gunning for your ideal marketing role.