Direct marketing provider Cheetah Digital announced that it has acquired data solutions firm, Wayin Inc. Wayin specializes in data acquisition technology that allows marketers to create interactive quizzes, questionnaires and games while collecting first-and so-called “zero-party” data from consumers who opt-in to participate. Coined by Forrester, zero-party data refers to information that is actively provided by users rather than inferred.

Why we should care

As consumers become increasingly wary of handing over their personal data to brands, Wayin’s technology gives marketers the opportunity to create digital experiences that deliver value to the consumer in exchange for their data. Since zero-party data is proactively provided by the consumer, the solution could enable digital marketers in the Cheetah Digital ecosystem to stay in compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations while creating more opportunities for advanced personalization. 

“Marketers have never faced a tougher challenge than they do today. Consumers are demanding personalized experiences, global consumer privacy regulations mount, trust in and effectiveness of third-party sources deteriorates, and CEOs demand greater efficiency of their marketing spend. Smart marketers are turning to zero- and first-party data, to not only be compliant and build customer trust, but deliver exceptional brand experiences,” said Sameer Kazi, CEO, Cheetah Digital.

Wayin’s enterprise platform joins the Cheetah Marketing Suite and Cheetah Loyalty platform.

More on the news:

• Marketers can expect to be able to create and execute campaigns and experiences across any digital channel to generate consumer data.
• Data generated from Wayin’s interactive experiences will flow into Cheetah Loyalty or Cheetah Digital Marketing suite, allowing marketers to target leads with triggered, personalized messaging based on users’ self-reported data. 

There’s always more content to write. 

Sometimes that can be encouraging, even exhilarating. You’ve got plenty of space for all your ideas, and countless opportunities to engage with potential customers and to build a stronger relationship with existing ones.

But producing a constant stream of content can be exhausting.

You’ll find yourself running out of ideas and running out of steam. And at that point, it can be really difficult to keep creating high-quality content on a regular basis.

Even if you’re in a position to hire someone to help, you’ll still need to have a fair amount of involvement in content production – supplying ideas and outlines, at the very least.

So how can you keep up with all the content you need to produce? Before we dig into some specific tips, let’s take a look at how much you actually need to create.

How frequently should you post on your blog and your social media accounts?

There are no rules here different blogs do different things, often within the same industry. In the content marketing world, for instance:

• Smart Blogger posts (very in-depth) pieces once a week
• Copyblogger publishes three or four posts a week
• Content Marketing Institute posts one piece each weekday

As a rough guideline, you’ll probably want to aim for at least one weekly post, one daily Facebook and/or Instagram post, and three or more posts a day on fast-moving networks like Twitter. (According to Louise Myers, the “general consensus” is that anything from three to 30 Tweets per day is fine.

So how do you keep up with this level of content, week after week?

How to create great content without burning out

Here are nine ways to keep up your content production without getting to the point of feeling so burned out that you simply give up.

You can use these as a step by step process, or you can pick and choose ideas that’ll make your existing process go more smoothly.

1. Decide how often you’ll post content

While there’s no “right” answer to how often to post content, there’s definitely a “wrong” one. Posting content whenever you feel like it, at wildly varying frequencies.

It’s best – for you and for your audience – to have a consistent posting schedule, both on your blog and on social networks. That might mean, for instance, two blog posts each week, one Facebook post each day (more may be counter-productive), and five Twitter posts each day.

While you might vary your schedule a little, having a clear idea of what to aim for makes it much more likely that you’ll write and publish regular posts.

2. Come up with a suitable pattern for your content

With social media, in particular, it’s helpful to “pattern” your content. This is also a useful practice for blog posts, especially if you post twice a week or more on your blog.

Rather than starting with a blank page when it comes to generating ideas, you can have a pre-set “pattern” for the content you’re going to create.

For instance, if you’re writing five Twitter posts each day, you might decide to have:

• Two posts linking to other people’s great content
• One post linking to your most recent piece of content
• One post linking to a piece of content from your archive
• One post that asks a question or prompts a discussion

3. Brainstorm lots of ideas

Simply coming up with ideas for content can take a lot of time. Instead of sitting down and staring at a blank page, try “batching” the idea generation process: set aside time once every week or two to come up with a whole list of ideas.

Some great ways to find content ideas include:

• Common search terms within your industry: this is part of keyword research and as well as being a useful SEO tool, it’s great for idea-generation.
• Questions that you frequently get asked by potential customers.
• Problems that you faced when you were starting out in your industry.
• Other people’s content – could you create something that tackles a topic in more depth, or from a different angle?
• Your own content: can you go back to an old blog post and update it, or take some social media posts and weave them into a piece for your blog?
• Asking influencers for their contributions – this might be in the form of a quote or two from one person, or a “round-up” post with quotes from lots of different experts.

4. Outline longer pieces of content

With short posts on Twitter and Facebook, you probably don’t need an outline – just a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.

For blog posts, though, you’ll find it’s much faster to write when you’ve got a solid outline in place, especially if you’re producing long-form content. Again, it’s often a good idea to “batch produce” your outlines, by picking four or so ideas and outlining all those posts at once.

That way, when it’s time to write those posts, a lot of the hard work is already done. Plus, if you outline several posts in a single session, you’ll find it much easier to create links between them.

5. Write several short pieces of content at once

Instead of opening up HootSuite (or your favorite social media management tool or app) every single time you want to send a tweet or create a post, write lots of posts ahead of time.

You might want to queue up a week’s worth of posts all at once. Buffer is a great tool for this, allowing you to schedule posts to go out at any time you want – making it easier to reach potential clients in other timezones or those on unusual schedules.

6. Set aside focused time for longer pieces

Creating content requires a lot of focus – it’s not something you can easily do while you’re fielding phone calls or responding to emails every few minutes.

Block out periods of time (ideally two hours long) in advance, where you can shut your office door, ignore your email, and let calls go to voicemail.

6. Set aside focused time for longer pieces

While you may have no choice but to self-edit your content, if it’s possible, get an editor involved. This might be someone already on your team, or a freelancer external to your company.

A good editor will go far beyond correcting spelling mistakes and grammatical slips. They’ll help to ensure your content is well structured, that it flows smoothly, and that it’s as engaging as possible.

8. Have an assistant format and upload your content

If you’re uploading all your own posts on your blog and social media, you’ll be spending time finding images, selecting categories, adding hashtags, including links, and so on.

While these tasks are an important part of the content creation process, they don’t need to be done by you. Delegate as much of the repetitive work as possible to an assistant so that you can free up more time to write or design the content itself.

9. Get ahead and take time off

If content creation is starting to feel like a treadmill that you can’t get off, then you’re probably heading for burnout. Plan your schedule so you can get ahead, perhaps by creating an extra piece or two of content each week.

That way, you can take a week off from content creation occasionally (plus, you’ll also be covered for any unexpected events, like a particularly busy period, or illness).

10. Repurpose your existing content

There may well be excellent blog posts in your archive that rarely get read, and your social media posts will almost certainly only gather fleeting attention.

Instead of always coming up with fresh ideas and creating new pieces from scratch, how about reusing some of your existing content? That might be as simple as writing an updated version of a blog post, and republishing it – or it could involve something more involved like turning a series of tweets into a blog post, or turning a post into an infographic.

Valuable, high-quality content is great for your business, your potential and existing customers, and your SEO. By trying some or all of the tips above, you can keep up the flow of content, without burning out.

If you have a tip for creating lots of great content, consistently, feel free to share it with us in the comments below.

Joe Williams is the founder of Tribe SEO. He can be found on Twitter at @joetheseo.

Related reading

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How to create unique articles that encompass major on-page SEO elements, and touch the reader? A streamlined process, key benefits, and screenshots listed.

I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to define common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations.

Join us at MarTech®, September 16-18 in Boston, for an unrivaled conference experience featuring 55+ sessions and keynotes, 60+ real-world experts, hundreds of martech solutions, AI-powered networking, and the actionable tactics you need to overcome the universal challenges of modern marketing:

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• Looking for the right solution? Efficiently evaluate 100+ martech solutions in the Expo Hall. See how those solutions are producing results with case studies and comprehensive tutorials in The Discover MarTech Theater and Solutions Track.
• Does your boss need convincing? Return to the office loaded with presentations, data, and evidence from successful brands that will support and validate your initiatives and strategies.
• Need a deep dive on a specific topic? Choose from any of the 8 expert-led workshops on topics including agile marketing, SEO operations, building marketing teams, and evaluating solutions. Check out the complete list of pre-conference workshops.

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See you in Boston 🙂

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

HTTP is the standard protocol defining how information passes between your visitor’s browser and the server hosting your site and HTTP status codes are your handy way of knowing exactly what is happening within that process.

For web marketers, it’s well worth the effort to get familiar with these status codes. By understanding your site’s backend activity you can recognize errors that demand attention and find opportunities to help improve (or at least not hinder) your SEO efforts.

A quick HTTP status code overview

HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers. The first number indicates which of the five categories each belongs to. The categories refer to either a type of request or type of error, as follows:

1xx status codes: Information request

Status codes beginning with a “1” communicate that a server is processing information, but has not yet completed the request.

2xx status codes: Success 

These status codes indicate that a requested information transfer was successfully completed. For marketers seeking to improve SEO, these codes mean that no action is required, everything is working correctly.

3xx status codes: Redirection

These redirect codes communicate that your visitor requested information that was not available at the targeted address.

4xx status codes: Client error

These codes signal that the client (the browser accessing the site) has encountered an error when trying to receive server information.

5xx status codes: Server error

5xx codes point to server-side errors, the client request was issue-free and yet the server could not finish the transfer.

Six HTTP status codes that are arguably most critical to SEO

While there are more than 60 HTTP status codes to be aware of, some are more relevant from an SEO perspective than others.

The following six status codes are especially important to understand and watch out for.

1) 404 – Not found

A 404 page not found error is perhaps the most commonly known HTTP status code and can signal to marketers that a page is failing to deliver content to visitors.

The server cannot return information because the resource or URL doesn’t exist. Landing at a 404 page is detrimental to SEO because unavailable content leads to a bad experience for both your audience and the search engine crawlers that are so critical to your SEO success. To address these errors, ensure that any 404 pages utilize a 301 redirect to reach an available and relevant page.

2) 301 – Moved permanently

You’ll recognize this code as the prescribed solution to the 404 errors just mentioned – a 301 status code means that the requested resource or URL has been permanently redirected somewhere else. This code is a valuable tool for sending visitors to relevant content that is available on the site.

Marketers can and should set up 301 redirects for pages that are no longer available so that their audience lands on useful content instead of error pages. The 301 code gives search engines the message to update their index for the page.

3) 302 – Found

Similar to code 301, code 302 is another type of useful redirect to know. However, this one is temporary rather than permanent. A 302 code directs browsers to a new URL, ensuring that visitors reach relevant content – but stops short of instructing search engines to update the page index.

4) 307 – Temporary redirect

This code offers a more specific redirect method than the 302 code and has the browser perform the redirect instead of the server. This is useful for sites served on HTTPS that are on an HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) preload list.

Side note: If you are running an HTTP site, it’s definitely in your best interest to migrate to HTTPS.

Thus, using codes 301, 302, and 307, marketers can optimize SEO by closely controlling search engine crawlers’ understanding of what content exists, and how they ought to crawl and index that content.

5) 503 – Service unavailable

This error indicates that the server cannot process a request due to a temporary technical issue. The 503 code informs search engines that processing was stopped on purpose and tells the search engine not to de-index the page (as it would when seeing other server errors). However, if the 503 error isn’t resolved over a long period of time, search engines can begin to view it as a permanent error that warrants deindexing. Therefore, marketers should address 503 errors as rapidly as possible to avoid deindexing of the unavailable page and the negative impact on SEO that would come hand-in-hand with that scenario.

6) 410 – Gone

This dramatic-sounding code means that a resource or URL is unavailable because it was deleted on purpose and was not redirected. When search engines see a 410, they will remove the page from the index instead of redirecting. Marketers should be sure to properly correct any page issues or implement effective redirects so that visitors arrive at content pertinent to their search needs.

By at least understanding the most relevant HTTP status codes and properly addressing website fixes that can make or break SEO success – marketers can help ensure their sites function smoothly and offer the intended experiences for both search engines and potential customers.

Kim Kosaka is Director of Marketing at Alexa.com.

Related reading

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Feedback has never been so business-critical as it is today. We live and work in an era of unprecedented global transparency, digital experience-sharing, and a desire to be heard. In this environment, feedback is constantly surfacing about your company, your products, and the experiences you do or don’t deliver. This is happening whether you like it or not, across channels, and around the clock. We refer to this as the feedback economy.

Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and they keep going up. The feedback economy has changed how people make decisions – which means it’s changing our roles as marketers. I recently gave a talk on using customer feedback to supercharge your marketing. Afterward, I asked the audience to give me feedback on what I got right and what people wanted to learn more about. In response to my survey, I saw that marketers want to tap into the power of customer feedback, but often struggle to integrate it into their organizations in a meaningful way. Two comments, in particular, caught my eye:

• “This reaches across the entire organization – who owns it? How do you get buy-in across the entire organization so that the customer perspective is not solely just to improve our position but better serve the customer’s?”
• “I still struggle with the responsible parties… As a product marketer, I worry that ALL of these things are my responsibility! How do I take these suggestions and disseminate them across the whole organization?”

When we convened a set of business leaders in London last quarter to discuss how to navigate the feedback economy, we explored this uncertainty a little more. We asked: “Which department in your organization is ultimately responsible for gathering feedback throughout the customer lifecycle?” The top answer was customer success, with 33% of the votes. Marketing was second with 16% and strategy was third with 13%.

But almost a quarter (23%) of the leaders in attendance told us customer feedback was owned by a different department, and the reality is that ownership is dispersed for many organizations. It’s empowering to think that all of our departments feel responsible for collecting and acting on customer feedback – but it can also lead to confusion, dropped balls and a disjointed experience for customers if you don’t think seamlessly across the lifecycle.

If we truly want to empower everyone at our organizations to tap into the power of customer feedback, it requires putting the right infrastructure and guardrails in place. Here are five tactical tips you can implement to strengthen how your organization collects and operationalizes feedback.

Tip #1: Create a culture of curiosity

We’re all awash in data. We know how people are finding us, who is clicking on what, and when customers are most active. But to really understand customers, you need to go beyond collecting metrics to uncover the “why” behind those clicks and scrolls. Your first step to operationalizing feedback in a meaningful way should be to encourage employees to get curious about what customers are thinking and feeling. Curiosity is a prerequisite for success in the feedback economy.

Tip #2: Let your data flow

Instead of worrying about who should “own” customer feedback, make sure the feedback can flow to where it needs to be to have an impact. Select survey software that integrates with your existing systems of record (Salesforce, Tableau, Outlook, Slack, Power BI, IBM Watson, Marketo, Eloqua and more). Piping data directly into these tools means your team will have access to valuable customer feedback – and therefore much richer context – where and when they need to make decisions.

Tip #3: Enable anyone to easily (and safely) deploy a survey

Now that your infrastructure is ready to funnel feedback data into key systems of record, it’s time to democratize access to survey software so every team can listen to customers. Help them be successful by setting the appropriate guardrails, for instance by providing templates or recommended questions. And make the impact visible by encouraging company leaders to bake customer feedback into daily, weekly or quarterly dashboards and goals check-ins.

Tip #4: Distinguish between ‘one-and-done’ and ongoing surveys

One-and-done surveys – like a pricing or packaging-related survey prior to a product launch – can be great. But sometimes you’ll want to measure feedback longitudinally, to get a sense of change over time. For instance, we run a semi-annual brand tracker across SurveyMonkey’s top global markets to keep a close eye on how we are trending relative to competitors. Educate employees on when they should be thinking one-and-done versus long term so they can take a programmatic approach to the feedback they collect.

Tip #5: Make survey results visible

Present the results of feedback surveys at all-hands meetings, highlight them in product development presentations, and talk about them in your press releases. Push your teams to talk about the implications. What needs to change in light of the feedback? Showing that you’re focused on the needs of your customers doesn’t just help improve customer experience, it can increase employee retention, too. Our research shows that 83% of employees who perceive that their company has high customer satisfaction think they’ll be at their job in two years. When employees think their company has low customer satisfaction, that number drops to just 56 percent. Show your team how invested you are in customer feedback, and it could pay off in some surprising ways.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Signed-in Chrome users can now use payment methods that are saved to their Google accounts during the checkout process, Google announced this week via the Chromium Blog. This feature is available on all devices that run the Chrome browser and wherever Google Pay is accepted. 

Why we should care

This feature will auto-fill payment info associated with a user’s Google account meaning that payment method is available across Chrome-enabled devices so long as the user is signed in.  

Google has been working to reduce friction for users to complete e-commerce transactions for several years, particularly on mobile. Its Shopping Actions already enables users to pay for products directly from Shopping ads using Google’s own checkout cart and the payment information saved in their Google accounts. This feature in Chrome could help increase the number of users who save their payment information with Google — and eventually increase the likelihood they’ll convert on Shopping Actions-enabled ads.

More on the news

• When completing a transaction, Chrome will offer to show credit cards saved to a user’s Google account. The user then selects the desired card and verifies the CVC number.
• During the transaction, users can also add a new credit card to their accounts.
• Chrome sync does not have to be turned on to use this feature. 

Gmail turned 15 earlier this year — and with it, the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) feature is now a year old. AMP functionality was built to allow brands to be more creative with their email marketing strategies, offering increased opportunities for more engaging, interactive and streamlined experiences for Gmail users.

With AMP, marketers can code emails that allow Gmail subscribers to interact with email content without leaving Gmail to improve the email experience. The benefits of this are extensive. The functionality at its finest could enable marketers to build interactive content to stay relevant and reduce friction in the purchase process and ultimately increase conversions.

However, many of the concerns I noted when AMP was first released a year ago still remain and many marketers caution against using AMP. It’s easy to understand why.

Stringent coding guidelines for AMP mean that HTTML/CSS tactics will not work — you’ll need to use a separate MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions) type for any email with AMP support. With AMP coding less flexible than traditional HTTML/CSS, it may take longer for your in-house team to embrace the feature. In addition, the switch to AMP entails more time in the quality assurance and testing process for each email you send out.

In short, incorporating AMP into your email strategy is no simple endeavor. And marketers might initially balk at investing the time and money in a tactic that will only affect a certain segment of their audience: Gmail users. But remember, Gmail continues to surge in market share — up 25% YOY. In fact, Gmail is now the top email client across devices as of this post. So despite its difficulties, AMP is worth a look given the potential for your brand.

How much? That remains to be seen, but AMP is ripe for testing.  Start experimenting with low-risk use cases that are relevant to the subscribers in your industry to determine if it’s worth the level of effort. At the very minimum, as an early adopter you’ll reap the benefits of standing out in an already crowded inbox piquing your subscriber’s interest.

Test these low-risk AMP use cases

Now that AMP for Gmail has had some time to evolve, the pros outweigh the cons. Not only do Gmail users make up a large percentage of most marketers’ subscribers, but also the feature allows for marketers to get more creative with their emails, ultimately improving the customer experience and boosting engagement.  Here are some specific, low-risk ways email marketers can use AMP for Gmail:

Use the carousel feature to highlight products: Using AMP’s carousel feature, retailers can showcase multiple images of products and create more engaging experiences personalized to each user. With the carousel, marketers have the power to provide subscribers with more information along with a more interactive experience directly within Gmail. This increases the fun aspect of design and allows subscribers to conduct more research prior to leaving Gmail. Since this feature has already proven popular on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s easy to see the appeal for email across a range of industries. Travel and retail industries seem most ripe for this feature.

Allow customers to access info in real-time: Travel brands like airlines and hotels benefit from AMP’s ability to incorporate live real-time feeds of available rooms or plane tickets directly within an email. Using an AMP-supported email, consumers can choose dates and compare rates without leaving to go to your website. This minimizes the friction in the process and discourages customers from checking out your competitors or even purchasing your own tickets from third-party sites (which limits the data you can collect from them). Retail brands can incorporate a similar real-time content strategy as hot products go out of stock, offers change, or content becomes irrelevant due to the subscriber’s current location. 

Enable interactive forms for sign-ups, applications and more: AMP allows you to gain more information than ever from your customers since they can interact directly within your messages. Financial services companies, for instance, can use forms to allow customers to apply for loans, credit cards, or refer friends to credit cards. Or, why not use it to survey customers about their preferences about anything from the products you’re selling to their general interests?

While these are just a few use cases, AMP features are versatile and powerful — and in the end, they could become another tool for improving the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy and ultimately making your subscribers lives better.

Same as always, what works for one audience won’t work for another so if you use AMP be sure to A/B test and keep track of the additional time you’ve invested to measure the worth. If it turns out to be another Google+, well you’ll know pretty quick not to waste your money and time. But if it works, that time and investment will have you ahead of the pack reaping the rewards for quarters to come.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

When consumers need to find the right product, service or storefront for their needs, they grab their phone, jump on their laptop, or just say, Hey Siri, Hey Alexa, and Hey Cortana. Search results immediately populate their screen and they skim, select, learn, and go.

To win at the game of search, your small or medium-sized business needs to be present online, discoverable and well-matched to the specific needs of consumers. Easier said than done, right?

If you want to quickly reach a targeted audience, drive the right kind of traffic towards your website, and develop a marketing strategy that works alongside your SEO efforts, pay per click (PPC) advertising is a great option. When consumers perform high commercial intent searches, meaning they’re online with the intent to buy a specific product, paid ads get 65% of all clicks. It’s a very effective way to get your products front and center on the search page. Both Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) and Google Ads offer pretty intuitive platforms when it comes to the account set-up and refinement, but if you’re not a marketing expert (and even if you are) you’re going to need a little help sometimes.

As a small business, you may not have time to really dig into PPC advertising, but you still care about building a campaign that works for you and for your potential customers. Or, maybe you have a strong handle on PPC, but you’re wondering what you could be doing better. Both these scenarios, and many more, could be helped by reaching out to your Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads customer support center or setting up an appointment with a PPC coach.

A coach? Yes, a coach. Really, try it. Working with PPC customer support at Microsoft Advertising, for example, can help your business get the right advice, employ the right tactics, and simply streamline the process, so you aren’t emerging from a PPC rabbit hole feeling frustrated and upset. That’s no fun and can be easily remedied. Here are five common concerns and how customer support can help small businesses like yours with their PPC campaigns.

“I have no idea how to get started.”

Sometimes when people jump into the world of PPC advertising, the process begins easily enough, but issues tend to pop up. Maybe you aren’t sure about how to establish a budget or conduct important keyword research. That’s ok, nobody expects you to be an expert right out of the gate.

Onboarding specialists are part of customer support and work with small businesses to set up your PPC ad account from scratch, create your first set of ads, research keywords, set a budget, and assist you with competitive bids. They view the entire process as a team effort and are genuinely interested in understanding your business goals and objectives. Then they help you design a PPC campaign to meet them.

“I can’t figure out why my campaigns aren’t performing.”

Coaches and customer support specialists can provide visibility on what is and isn’t working by showing businesses how to generate and understand a variety of performance reports. With over 30 different types of reports available, selecting and analyzing them on your own can be a little overwhelming at first, simply due to the sheer volume of data at our fingertips. Working with a coach can help provide clarity, and together you can identify relevant strategies and innovations that have a positive impact on your campaigns. In other words, they can help you figure out what all the data means and how to use it to your advantage.

If you’ve been using PPC advertising for quite a while, coaches can support your campaign by introducing you to the latest features and tools you may not know about. Sometimes we get into a routine and performance plateaus but talking to an expert for 15 minutes can totally refresh your PPC perspective and provide you with valuable insight and ideas.

“I’m afraid I’ll look like an idiot if I can’t figure this out on my own.”

Managing PPC campaigns is a learned skill, but it might not be something that comes naturally to you. A coach’s job isn’t to do everything for you, but to educate you on how to improve campaign performances on your own. Customer support can help business owners get familiar with PPC tools, processes and resources that help you successfully manage your ads without external support. The goal is to empower businesses with the know-how, competence, and confidence to handle their campaigns like a pro and troubleshoot any issues that come up. Learning, in and of itself, represents a measurement of success and makes the next PPC campaign easier to set up, more profitable, and effective.

“I don’t think customer support will understand anything about my business and it’s too much of a hassle. I just have to figure this out on my own.”

The whole point of customer support is to take the time to understand your industry and your business goals, that’s the only way to provide meaningful and targeted guidance. Coaches treat you like a partner and pro-actively offer strategic direction and the right tools to increase your PPC efficiency. They meet you at your level of expertise and build up from there, no matter your budget or your business. You need to be willing to share your story and reflectively consider what you want to get out of your various campaigns, but rest assured, if you’re willing to put in the time, it will most definitely not be wasted.

“I’m not sure I’m managing my campaign correctly and spend too much time worrying about it.”

This is a big one, especially for businesses that aren’t familiar with paid search. Your time is spent worrying that you’re doing it wrong instead of learning how to do it right. This is where working with a coach can really help because they provide you with peace of mind. Peace of mind in the information you’re using, your level of comfort and familiarity with the platform, and the belief that you are fully capable of making changes that improve your business’s visibility and lead conversions.

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In an effort to provide advertisers with more accurate and granular ad targeting options in Display & Video 360, Google will be launching a revamped experience for environment and position targeting settings on August 26, 2019.

The changeswill include updated targeting settings when creating or editing items individually or in bulk, updated dimensions in Reporting and a new version of Structured Data Files (SDF) to support the targeting overhaul.

While the same targeting options will continue to exist, they will appear with the new targeting controls come August.

By August 26, advertisers running campaigns in DV360 can expect to see the following:

Updated environment targeting will be focused on web- or app-serving environments. The device- and position-related options will be relocated from environment targeting to a different targeting control panel.

A new position targeting setting will group togetherall controls related to an ad’s position on a screen or in content in a new position targeting control. The position-related settings that will be moved to position targeting include Viewability, Video, and Audio targeting. Even with the new grouping, all of the targeting options will still function the same as before.

Reporting changes to values in the Environment dimension will reflect the new environment targeting setting. All existing values will be re-routed to the new values, including historical data. For advertisers running scheduled reports, the reports will not change in terms of delivery and will also reflect the new values for the Environment dimension. However, scheduled reports will no longer include the new Position in Content dimension.

A new version (v5) of Structured Data Files will launch in tandem with the August 26 update and will include fields to enable advertisers to retrieve and set the new targeting options. Once the new SDF goes live, older versions will not work if updating fields for environment- or position-related targeting options, but will still function as normal for all other fields.

Why we should care. Google said that the existing options were built to meet the needs of advertisers running display ads on desktop and mobile web. With the changes, advertisers will be able to “target their ads explicitly based on environment (app or web) and position (on screen or in content).”

Once the changes are implemented, advertisers will be able to serve ads with a greater level of confidence across these newer contexts.

For now, if you’re currently running ads in DV360, Google strongly recommends you familiarize yourself with the new targeting settings and data structures in order to adjust to the new workflows come August.