Digital Marketing Mondays

In last week's episode, we covered the topic of if SEO was still relevant in 2022. The short answer was yes. As promised at the end of last week's podcast, we will continue the discussion. SEO strategies and trends are often dictated by the current state of Google search, and Google has changed greatly over the years. These changes have been driven partially by weeding out spam content and in part by the emergence of new devices and competitors. Competition fuels Google's need to maintain its status as the best resource for finding anything online. To be the best resource, they need to understand search intent and get the most useful information in front of its users as quickly as possible. With this general philosophy, we've seen Google search evolve to include shopping carousels, maps, videos, and rich snippets like FAQs. Google advertising initiatives also play into changes to SEO strategy. Google's ongoing efforts to increase the number of sponsored results with organic results have influenced layout changes within search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn affects SEO. Organic results have slowly moved down the SERPs, with more ads appearing at the top of the page. Google's goals can be summarized as increasing ad revenue while maintaining its reputation as the best resource online. Nefarious SEO tactics that used to work like excessive backlinking and content scraping not only don't work anymore but actually hurt your rankings in 2022. The amount of spam created through bad practices created a bad user experience. This, if not corrected, would have cost Google many users. In general, anything that negatively impacts user experience is now penalized, including technical issues such as site speed and lackluster hosting. Google maximizes the visibility of accessible and helpful content. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss SEO strategies that work in 2022 and old techniques that should be left in the past. Resources: https://gtmetrix.com/

SEO was the biggest topic in the early days of digital marketing. It existed before Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) was first introduced and co-existed with PPC for many years. As is true with everything, we can expect continuous changes in regard to SEO, and much has changed since the nineties. The types of devices people are searching on have grown to include everything from phones to TVs. Search is becoming local to devices, meaning people have access to native search features directly as we see with various Apple devices. With native search, there is no need to go to a search engine to try to find information. The users of search engines are also becoming more educated on how to find the results they want, with the current trend being to end search queries with "Reddit" to find more authentic content. Google search result pages have also been populated with an increasing number of ad placements over the years. What does all of this change mean for SEO's relevance? In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin discuss the factors affecting SEO in 2022 and if SEO should play into your marketing strategies in today's marketing landscape.

There is no longer talk of a pending recession - the recession has arrived. With its arrival, it brought about hiring freezes, layoffs, rising interest rates, and companies attempting to minimize their overhead. As more and more companies become reactive to the situation, it is clear this will have an impact on the marketing industry and the marketers that make it up. As companies lay off talent, hiring would become easier if it were not for the economic raincloud over the country. Companies are still advertising but doing so with great caution and consideration in regard to their ad budgets. Eventually, we may see a change in the cost per click (CPC) due to potential changes caused by this recession. As with any disruption, companies and marketers alike will need to pivot and implement strategies that will allow for success in difficult times. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss how digital marketing is being affected by the recession, speculate on what the next few months may look like for the marketing industry, and discuss strategies for navigating what's to come.

There is an evergreen rule in SEO: Content is king. With Google's Helpful Content algorithm update, this is truer than ever. In the early days of search engines, the exploitation of simple algorithms was the driving factor behind spammy results. These dark times were ended by Google's commitment to making sure the most useful content would be returned to those searching on its platform. The 2012 Penguin algorithm update was a turning point in the battle against black hat SEO tactics. It incentivized marketers, content creators, and business owners to create quality web content and punished poor backlink practices, which in turn improved user experience. The benefits to its users have a clear overlap with its earnings. The more frequently people use and trust Google for getting the information they seek, the more they earn through advertising. The Helpful Content update continues the trend of increasing quality content that is easily accessible online. While it's unlikely this update will increase Google's revenue in any meaningful way, it should enhance Google's dominance in the search market by further distancing itself from its competitors. By maintaining its reputation as the number 1 search engine, Google is protecting its future. With all of this said, the question remains: How will the Helpful Content Update affect site rankings? In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss Google's latest core search algorithm update and who should be concerned with the potential of their sites dropping out of top positions in SERP.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (S.673) aims to create a model of monetization for publishers for when their content is taken by search engines. Recently, the Amy Klobuchar sponsored senate bill has been making headlines again after recent revisions. While the bill covers print, broadcast, and digital news companies, as a digital marketing agency we have our attention on how this will affect search results and digital advertising. Google and other search engines, as well as some of the big platforms like Facebook, all aggregate news. This gives them a nearly endless source of great content that they can monetize through advertising. In recent years Google has made changes that aims to keep you on their platform rather than taking you to a publisher's web site. While this is great for Google, and is arguably a better user experience, many search queries that would have driven advertising dollars to smaller publishers have been lost to rich results and other Google search features. Bill S.673 would make sure smaller publishers are getting paid too. If this bill passes, don't expect the effects to stop with Google. Facebook and TikTok have also implemented nefarious tactics to keep users on their platforms. It is said that they hired psychologists to figure out how they can hack the brain. Their goal was allegedly to elicit more dopamine release in order to keep people on their platforms longer. This has also made headlines and would likely get a similar treatment. This could be the start of long overdue change that will create a level playing field online. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin explain the potential effects the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (S.673) will have on advertising and Google.

Aside from on its App Store, Apple has not offered advertising on its platforms and products. This could change: leading up to Apple's big event on September 7th, rumors have leaked indicating Apple is about to launch advertising within their other applications. Intentional or not, their fight against third-party data has had significant impacts on advertising and analytics platforms including Facebook and Google. Apple has hired some of the top search and advertising platform talent recently, including a high-level exec from the Google Ads team. This move was shrouded in mystery at the time, but their motives are becoming clearer as the rumor mill has begun to run in overdrive. It's expected that Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, Apple Maps, and Apple TV will begin to allow ad placements. All of this will be achieved using first-party data only to not violate their own tracking policies. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin discusses the rumors surrounding the future of Apple ads and how this will affect the digital marketing landscape.

RFP or "Request for Proposal" is a process where companies or organizations open requests for bids to complete a project. This practice is not new, and like many old ideas, the RFP process may not work for everyone. When a project has a finite result, like the construction of a new building, using an RFP process makes perfect sense. However, an RFP will do little to qualify potential candidates when your project requires or could benefit from creative and critical thinking. This begs the question: how should you go about selecting the best digital marketing agency to work with for your projects? In marketing, clients do not have the same goals and needs. Your campaigns, content, and reporting should be tailored by your agency to your unique needs. Your agency should also offer opportunities for continuous improvement. The RFP process can highlight skill and cost, but it will likely fail at doing much more. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin dive into why the RFP process alone will not help you find the right agency to partner with and what you should do to find the best match.

In last week's episode, we discussed how digital advertising platforms such as Google Ads are already implementing and relying on machine learning. The reach of AI in digital marketing does not stop with ads. As companies reluctantly become less dependent on third-party data, they are turning to machine learning to fill the data void. AI can help us perceive visitor behaviors and interests clearer without breaching privacy expectations. Pioneering uncharted frontiers has historically brought great rewards. Equally so, it has brought great risks and dangers. This can be observed in the digital marketing industry when large tech platforms create new ways for businesses to target and engage their customers. Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is being sued in a class action lawsuit for Meta Pixel's role in helping marketers target visitors of medical sites. Meta has also released a new chat AI they call "BlenderBot 3." This chatbot can discuss almost any topic. The more users engage with Meta's latest AI the better the model will be trained. BenderBot appears to have views we think its creators would disagree with, including its view on Mark Zuckerberg. At this point, nearly all marketing companies are implementing and experimenting with machine learning in some capacity, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, and HubSpot. With much uncertainty on where this will all lead, a few things are certain: more lawsuits, increased reliance on AI, and the realization that it is becoming increasingly challenging to control how your ads and messaging are presented in the public light. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the growing role AI will have in the marketing industry and what you need to understand to make sure you have the most control over where and how your ads are being displayed.

The Matrix, The Terminator, and Google Ads have one thing in common: AI that can both help and harm you depending on the situation. Many advertising platforms in recent years have become more aggressive regarding automatic recommendations powered by machine learning. These suggestions ideally should help your campaigns, but in most instances they don't. Smaller suggestions can be effective: platforms might tell you to remove an underperforming keyword or remove a negative keyword that prevents ads from showing for your main keywords. Despite our experience with invasive suggestions being useless at best, they should not be completely ignored. The ultimate goal of the machine learning behind these recommendations is to produce better results. Though infrequent, on occasion automated suggestions do find optimization opportunities. In many ways, platform representatives are not so different. Most of the time they echo the AI auto-recommendations, though this is not true with all reps. It is important to know how to distinguish good advice from bad advice while navigating the potential social pressures that may make you want to agree with a rep regardless of the story your data tells. Unlike auto recommendations, there are several unique benefits that reps provide, including access to inside information. It's important to remember your goals and the goals of the advertising platforms may not align. You (or your digital advertising agency) are ultimately responsible for getting the most return on your ad budget. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss how to navigate recommendations from advertising platform AI and representatives to best optimize your campaigns.

Google is indisputably one of the best options for online advertising. With billions of monthly searches, it is an invaluable tool in our arsenal to help clients reach their potential customers. The amount of marketing data they currently have (and continue to collect) allows for fantastic targeting. While search ads work well for most, they're not the correct choice for every scenario. Despite how well Google works for advertisers, for many years we've wished competition would emerge. Our wish may have just been granted. While many new ads platforms have surfaced in recent years, Microsoft stands out as one of Google's most fearsome competitors. In Q1 of 2022, Microsoft acquired Xandr, a move that is beginning to bear fruit. Xandr is a digital advertising platform developed by AT&T for the sole purpose of ad placements in streaming media. Netflix recently partnered with Microsoft over Google and Comcast to deliver ads on their platform. They have recently had a declining customer base, and a free account tier funded by Microsoft ads may be the life raft they need. Microsoft isn't the only company gunning for Google. With new platforms available, it is important to consider first-party vs third-party data, potential issues with attribution, and how your business plans to adapt to deliver new ad formats such as video. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss why Microsoft partnering with Netflix is a big deal and what you need to consider when exploring competitors of Google Ads.

We are a data-driven agency. As such, we believe that all data, good and bad, must be reported on. More importantly, we believe that reporting needs to be actionable (as we discussed in episode 33). In our experience, too many agencies serve their clients fluff reports where all graphs are up and to the right. While it is important and satisfying to measure what has gone well, it is often more effective to identify areas of poor performance. This allows your agency to tell a complete story of your marketing initiatives and adjust your strategy as needed, keeping what is working while improving areas where the campaigns struggle. Canned reports and hand-selecting positive results provide little actionable insight. Digging deeper reveals opportunities to better reach your goals. It is these opportunities that help drive continuous improvement. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the likelihood that you're missing opportunities to improve the performance of your ads and organic rankings, especially when everything seems too good in the reports you are getting from your agency. They also go over what you need to do to ensure you are getting the insights you need from your data.

With the pending recession of 2022 right around the corner, now is the time to think about your marketing campaigns and where your money is going. Many companies run fluff campaigns that produce nothing quantifiable; it is essential to actively collect data that is accurate & current to combat waste. This data will be the foundation on which you can make decisions going forward. It's a great time to review your data, determine which campaigns are unnecessary, and decide whether it makes sense to end them or make changes. This is not to say, however, that you should stop marketing and hold onto your money. Doing so will guarantee you have no new traffic through paid campaigns, and this fear response may very well squeeze the cash flow out of your business. One of the biggest benefits our clients get by working with our agency is that we've been around for over two decades. This will not be the first recession that we navigate for ourselves and for our clients. We've found that with fewer people are advertising, the cost per click is likely to drop. What many people see as an issue can also be viewed as a huge opportunity with the right perspective and experience. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the upcoming recession, its effects on digital marketing, and what you should consider for your ad campaigns moving forward.

In advertising days of yore, marketing and sales teams didn't play well together, data wasn't actionable, and the systems to store customers' data were hardly more efficient than an address book. Over time, the simple databases used to collect and retain prospect and client data evolved into what we know today as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. As CRM systems matured, the relationships between data did as well. Features that enabled leads to be associated with companies, lists, opportunities, and more became standard across all reputable CRMs. Clever marketers saw an opportunity to benefit the bottom line by further leveraging this data. This gave birth to marketing automation platforms. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin discuss origins and functions of modern CRM and marketing automation systems, as well as the role they will play in the future where the likes of Google and Facebook are no longer collecting 3rd party data. Related Blog Posts: What's the Difference between Marketing Automation and CRM? How Marketing Automation Can Enhance Your Business Should Your Business Use a CRM?

All digital marketers agree that data collection is critical to measuring the success of any marketing effort. Data from your ad campaigns, SEO efforts, and traffic from your website visitors will help you better understand what's going on. If this is where you stop, you are missing a big opportunity to use your data to make impactful improvements. The purpose of collecting data should be to tell a story about the results of your efforts. This story should be used to make your data actionable. Reports are too often littered with an overwhelming number of metrics that show performance but do little in terms of helping discover areas for improvement. Focusing on the key metrics that are able to indicate what is going well and what can be improved will not only simplify your reporting but will enable you to make continuous improvements to your campaigns. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin discuss how to make your data actionable and why that will benefit both the marketer and client.

These days, everyone is trying to collect as much data as possible. User privacy efforts have shaken the marketing world, and the dust surrounding the impacts this will have on regulations for data collection has yet to settle. While it's clear that more data than ever is being collected, many companies do not quite understand how to use that data. Reporting on high-level metrics is useful, but many are missing the opportunity to reveal insights through actionable reporting. Before taking action, it is important to verify your data, compare it internally against various periods, measure it against globally accepted benchmarks, and understand the context of the data in your organization. Once you understand the story around your data, you can proceed to create a strategy to improve performance. Making changes to how you target, which platforms you are advertising with, testing ad copies, and improving landing pages for better conversion, if done properly, can help any campaign. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the best ways to utilize your organization's data to effectively make changes and continuously improve your ad campaign's performance.

Bidding on your competitor's brand keywords can have benefits, though it can also create turmoil. One of the issues that could arise is that, if they notice, competitors could retaliate by bidding on your brand's keywords. This poses an interesting question, should you bid on your own brand's keywords? The challenge in answering this question is that not all situations are the same. Deciding if this strategy is right for you requires some analysis of your ad budget, competitors' campaigns, and your goals to weigh the potential value that could be gained. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin continue the discussion about bidding on brand keywords. Understanding when bidding on your own brand keywords can make a positive impact and when it would be a complete waste of your campaign's budget will help you decide if this strategy is right for your organization.

Most of our clients at Market Vantage offer products or services that are considered 'highly considered purchases'. This creates the need for prospecting and advertising that is different than for companies that thrive on impulse purchases. When marketing a product or service that is carefully thought about, a carefully crafted buyer's journey and detailed buyer personas are necessary for success. The goal is not to just interrupt the flow and get content in front of a potential buyer, but rather to create content for each persona at each part of their buyer's journey. You may notice fewer clicks and impressions, but you will see an increase in MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and sales as our methods are more effective and focused. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the right way to market highly considered purchases and dive into the tools and methods you'll need to get the end results you are hoping to achieve.

Bidding on competitor brand keywords sounds like a great way to steal market share. On the surface it's a no-brainer, but if you dig deeper you'll find things aren't so simple. The intention of a search query has a big impact on which result will be relevant to a searcher. Are they simply trying to log into a bank account and using voice search to pull up their bank's website on Google, or are they researching which bank to open an account with? Another potential of sponsoring your competition's brand is that they might retaliate and begin targeting your brand. In additional to all of this, Google Ads has a metric called quality score that directly affects your cost per click. If you target less relevant keywords, the costs for your campaign will likely increase as a result of a lower quality score. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin debate when, if ever, it is appropriate to target your competitor's brand keywords in your paid marketing campaigns. The results might surprise you and change how you plan keywords on your next paid campaign.

PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX - everything Elon Musk touches turns to gold. At this point, it's not news that Elon Musk will, at least temporarily, take the reins at Twitter after his nearly hostile takeover of the company. However, it's worth examining the future of Twitter as an ads platform now that arguably the world's most successful CEO could shortly be performing a massive overhaul of the company. By taking Twitter private, he will not only assume a leadership role but he will have absolute authority to make any change he deems necessary. He has already announced the planned removal of all bots on the platform and intends to implement more advanced user verification. These changes alone will have a massive impact of ad performance. In the past, Twitter has not been as effective at targeting an audience as Facebook or Google, but we think it is safe to assume this will not be the case for long. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin discuss the potential future of Twitter as an ads platform along with several things you can do now to get ready for the inevitable business model changes to come.

In recent years, organic traffic has become secondary to paid traffic as Google's business model continuously shifts towards a pay to play model to maximize their revenue. Does this mean organic results have gone by the wayside? Absolutely not. Organic search rankings are especially critical for people in the early stages of researching a topic or product that interests them. If your company ranks well, it creates the opportunity to become viewed as a trusted source. Conversions become much easier once your brand has established itself as a trusted authority in your industry. Google has released several updates that weighs a website's performance when ranking potential results. The Mobile First Indexing and Core Web Vitals updates introduced the need for performant mobile sites with a heavy focus on usability and speed. A poorly performing website is bound to create many lost opportunities. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss easy to execute but often overlooked site optimizations to help you improve your site's performance which in turn will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts. Access our free website grader tool here: https://lp.marketvantage.com/free-website-grader

Google has a challenge most companies would love to have. They have over 4 billion users and are likely close to the most users the market will allow. How does a company with no room to gain users increase its revenue? The upcoming PaLM (pathway language model) search update could help Google address this very issue. PaLM will have a significant impact on Google's ability to translate sites from English into many other languages with greater accuracy than ever before. Translated search results will be returned directly on SERPs. This means Google's existing users will be able to get translated answers to their questions without leaving the search result pages. Though the results will be cited, the incentive to click a result may actually decrease as Google better delivers answers directly to users. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the impact this update will have on marketers, affects it will have on click through rate, and potential improvements to Google's translation services.

What use do you have for a 15 page report on your digital marketing initiatives? Not much. All reputable marketing agencies will provide reports on the state of your marketing on a regular basis. The point many agencies miss is that clients have no clue what to do with most of this data. The real benefit of a report is not metrics and numbers, but the insights and guidance an agency can provide based on and alongside your data. If your agency is not providing insights and actionable items from your data, you are being kept in the dark. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss why data insights matter more that the data itself and how so many agencies miss the opportunity to truly inform their clients on the state of their digital marketing campaigns.

Google announced this week that it will be sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA), also referred to as Google Analytics 3 (GA3), on July 1st, 2023. It will be replaced with the currently released Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which promises to change the advertising process using AI. Historically, we marketers have concluded that Google's AI is far from perfect. In reality, the death of UA means less detailed reporting, less access to data, and more reliance on Google for insights. This slap in the face from Google also comes with an expiration date for all UA implementations of analytics. Starting July 1st, 2023, no further data will be collected from GA3 accounts, including page hits. This forced change to the new platform will reverberate through many online industries. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss this major change in depth and outline some high-priority tasks you'll want to complete before Universal Analytics is retired.

Facebook (Meta) has begun to restrict targeting certain categories (such as health causes and politics) within their advertising platforms. This affects not only Facebook but also Instagram and WhatsApp, which they also own. Now in a position no corporation wants to be in, Meta is in the process of performing damage control on their reputation and public image. Reacting to pressure from groups like Apple and the governments of various countries, they are playing catch up regarding their user data privacy policies. While this is great for users, marketers will face unique challenges as a direct result of this new direction. How the change impacts agencies and businesses will vary based on their industry, goals, and strategy. It also means that for the first time, many will look towards smaller platforms like Reddit and Pinterest that rely on their own first-party data. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin and Hans discuss the challenges and opportunities that Facebook's changing ad policies are creating.

Google's biggest strength is that it holds the most market share in the search industry. This is also its biggest challenge. How does a company increase its revenue when its userbase is so vast it is unlikely to grow in a significant way? Google's answer to this is to increase the number of ads they display on search engine result pages. While this may be better for Google, it may not be better for businesses. Organic results are pushed down, potentially below the fold, with Google now showing up to 5 ads at the top of the page. The question many are asking is how will this affect their SEO and PPC strategy moving forwards. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Devin and Hans discuss the challenges that Google's decision to place more ads on SERPs is creating and how you can best navigate this change.

It's hard to not notice Facebook (Meta) is having some big issues these past few weeks in February. The company has lost billions of dollars, active daily users are stagnating, and the momentum of their eCommerce offerings has slowed. Undeniably there are some big red flags for the platform overall. To add to the trouble, TikTok is ever-growing and Apple is applying pressure with its tracking transparency initiative which is affecting how companies target their audiences online. Many businesses and marketers are asking if they should continue to advertise on Facebook or if they should spend their budget elsewhere. The answer may surprise you as a loss for Facebook is not a loss for everyone around them. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Devin breaks down all of the issues Facebook is having and explains how this changes how you need to think about Facebook for your advertising campaigns.

Sponsoring your brand or trademark as a keyword in paid search might seem like a great strategy to beat out your competition. Over the years, we have seen this strategy work for some clients, but for others, we have witnessed it hurt the bottom line. Flipping this technique on its head by sponsoring branded keywords belonging to your competition may seem like a great way to take over some of their market share in your industry, but this can create its own problems and even trigger a keyword bidding war where the only winner is Google. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss how to determine when it is appropriate to sponsor branded keywords and how to avoid situations where you would waste your ad spend or instigate competitors to go on the offense.

A few months ago Google introduced its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposal as its answer to cookieless tracking. This past week, Google announced FLoC would be replaced with a new proposal, Topics API. While it was clear from the beginning replacing cookies would be a challenge, this new proposal brings to light Google's struggle to solve the problem of collecting user data while maintaining their privacy. In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin and Hans discuss what effects Topics API will have on the marketing industry and how it will impact your ability to target audiences in the future.

AT&T developed the digital advertising platform Xandr to improve ad buying opportunities across streaming media. It was recently announced that the Microsoft acquisition of Xandr has been approved and is under regulatory review before being finalized. Microsoft previously acquired LinkedIn and has generated much revenue through ad sales on the platform. While Bing offers ad placements, it does not have the volume to compete against the likes of Google and Facebook alone. Acquiring Xandr is a logical move as it will increase Microsoft's ad real estate, strengthening its placement opportunities. With data from LinkedIn, Bing, and Xandr along with the vast number of platforms on which ads can now be offered through Microsoft, it is likely that they will take a huge chunk away from the duopoly on advertising that is Google and Facebook. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss what effects Microsoft's acquisition of Xandr will have on advertising and its potential to disrupt the industry.

Reporting is critical in marketing. While there are many services both paid and free to help you create custom reports for your clients, we found Databox's features and workflow beat out every other reporting service we've tried to date. Databox integrates with many data sources including social media platforms, CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, SEO software and services such as SEMrush, and many more! Being able to merge data sets from Google Search Console and Google Analytics with so many other platforms and quickly generate easy to digest reports from the latest data sets has alleviated the heavy lifting from our workload and lets us spend more time on helping clients make strategic decisions. While Google Data Studio does an adequate job, marketers are looking for more systematic ways to evaluate all marketing information coming in and act on decisions in close to real time. The limitations in creating custom reports and presentations in Google Data Studio became a bottleneck, and Databox was our solution. In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss the shortcomings of Google Data Studio and talk over the additional tools Databox offers that appeal to them as digital marketing experts.

Attribution in marketing is key to quantifying success and driving effective decision-making. Finance departments, CEOs, and others within companies are asking marketers to better justify marketing costs leading to increased importance in analyzing what leads to each sale. Tracking the click before a conversion can be misleading and leave marketing efforts without credit. We see this often with organic lift. Paid ads and other traffic sources such as an effective PR campaign help improve organic rankings and lead to sales, but their indirect effects can often be overlooked. Learn more about attribution in this week's Digital Marketing Mondays as Devin and Hans dive into an overview on attribution and the halo effect that other marketing efforts will have on organic rankings. Need more marketing help? Check out: https://marketvantage.com/blog/ Get the latest updates on digital marketing trends and tips

The Metaverse has become a topic you cannot escape from. Is this really a transformative event which will impact how the internet is used forever? The short answer is yes. This metamorphosis ushers in a new era of internet; web 3.0. We are witnessing the emergence of an internet where people experience cultivated content from within. Marketer, content creator, or business, the question remains the same. How does this affect me and what should I do moving forward? In this week's Digital Marketing Monday Devin Littlefield will go down the rabbit hole to explore what is heading our way from a marketing and business standpoint. The Metaverse will play a pivotal role in multichannel marketing and offer marketers deeper insight into an individual's interests. Identity will play a role in the virtual world, but it will also grant marketers more data points revealing deeper interests of an individual and allow for better targeting for campaigns. Companies are quickly investing time and funds into exploring the Metaverse in fear of missing the next big thing. Whether you are a B2B or B2C business, you need to understand the impact this will have on marketing, sales, and customer relations. While there is much speculation one thing is for sure: great opportunities lie ahead. Watch the episode to learn what to expect in the near future! Need more marketing help? Check out: https://marketvantage.com/blog/ Get the latest updates on digital marketing trends and tips

Data privacy and changes to 3rd party data collection will pose some challenges for marketers in 2022. Large vendors including Google and Meta (Facebook) are following suit with Apple's focus on shielding user data from the wild web. With all of this attention on the subject, it is likely federal regulations will be put in place during 2022 to help set and enforce new legal guidelines. This will have an effect throughout the entire marketing world, including 3rd party marketing tool service providers like HubSpot. As an agency, we've seen companies trending in this direction for some time. Join Devin Littlefield and Hans Riemer in this week's episode of 'Digital Marketing Mondays' to learn what you need to know about the upcoming changes and how to best prepare for them.

Hans and Devin discuss the trends and strategies that will help businesses plan for effective marketing in 2022.

Is the advice from almost twenty years ago still as effective today after many changes to Google's algorithm?

Hans and Devin discuss key points from HubSpot's Inbound 2021.

Hans and Devin discuss Google's upcoming MUM algorithm update and explain what you need to know.

Hans and Devin describe Google's upcoming changes to their search ads and help listeners prepare for the shift to responsive advertising.

Hans and Devin describe what 500 errors are and explain how they can spin out of control and destroy your search ranking.

Hans and Devin discuss Apple's upcoming iOS 15 update, the changes being made to how marketers will be able to collect user data, and how email marketers can best prepare for the shift.

In this episode, Hans and Devin discuss Google's decision to shutter their Expanded Text Ads in favor of more automation initiatives.

Hans and Devin look at Facebook's recent statement about new privacy policies in light of shifting industry standards and previous changes by companies like Apple and Google.

In this episode, Hans and Devin explore Google's decision to allow ads from advertisers in the United States to be shown in sanctioned countries like Iran and North Korea.

Hans and Devin discuss the pros and cons of advertising on Facebook, a giant in decline.

This week, Hans and Devin dive into the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on digital advertising and its future repercussions.

In this episode, Hans and Devin discuss Google's decision to delay their removal of cookies from the Chrome browser.