Tips for Reaching Digital Marketing Benchmarks

Here’s our latest roundup of digital marketing tips.

SEM: Google Maps ad traffic steadily growing

Recent Google updates are evidence of the company’s growing focus on local markets, and the strategy has extended to Google Maps. Local ads derived from location extensions populated in Maps feature a “Get location details” click type.

Client takeaway: On phones, brick-and-mortar brands saw “Get location details” clicks contribute to about five percent of brand traffic. Ads on Maps are classified as coming from Google and are less likely to convert, so online conversion will likely suffer and CPC may go up.

Suggested implementation: If possible, take advantage of in-store conversion and visit tracking available through Google and other third parties to link those conversions with online clicks.

SEO: Increasing SEO traffic by updating and “thickening” your old blog posts

Your best-performing evergreen content isn’t going to continue performing if it’s never updated. Grab that low-hanging fruit and implement a few SEO-boosting hacks to bring that content to the forefront again.

Client takeaway: Updating your top two older posts that contributed 10–20 percent of your traffic (and even 25–50 posts that make up another 75–80 percent) could yield a 15–30 percent increase in traffic.

Suggested implementation: Update the “last updated” timestamp; clean up and update links to fresher versions or publications; add new subsections; include new research and insights; update title tags; add a “popular posts” widget; promote updated content on social and do some outreach.

Social media marketing: Facebook Ads benchmarks by industry

More than two million advertisers have started using Facebook in the past two years. Facebook has plenty of options for targeting ads, but performance differs across industries. How do you know if you’re hitting your Facebook ad benchmark?

Client takeaway: The average CTR for Facebook ads across all industries is 0.90 percent. Average CPC is $1.72. Facebook ads generally see a 9.21 percent conversion rate. The average CPA across industries is $18.68.

Suggested implementation: Check out the benchmarks for average CTR, CPC, CVR, and CPA for your industry.

Video: YouTube to offer third-party brand safety tools following revolt by marketers

Big brands like Verizon, AT&T, and PepsiCo don’t want to pay for their ads showing on violent or offensive content, so YouTube is finally taking strides with third-party brand-safety vendors to comply and stop the spread of fake news and hate speech.

Client takeaway: Companies like DoubleVerify hope to provide better brand safety tools, though their plan for implementation isn’t clear yet. Google says the solution will be an integration and not an API.

Suggested implementation: No action items yet. Wait to see what Google and DoubleVerify come up with.

Writing: Unpacking the copywriting process

A copywriter’s life is one of demand-and-produce, in which a love for crafting words doesn’t always balance with the quick-turn pressure of advertising. Learn from one talented copywriter about how to dial in your writing to create polished copy.

Client takeaway: A three-step approach to writing and refining copy before editing can not only speed up the production timeline, but also provide other workable drafts, help you hone your craft, and free you up to capitalize on lingual liberties.

Suggested implementation: Are all of your writers working the same way? Of course not, and they won’t. But the more tools and processes made available to enhance their writing benefits their time and others’.