One of the most intriguing developments is the rise of user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like Reddit surpassing articles written by established experts in search rankings.

This begs the question: why is this happening, and what does it mean for searchers?

User experience reigns supreme

According to Google’s search quality guidelines, user experience is paramount. Content that is relevant, engaging, and addresses the searcher’s intent has a higher chance of ranking well, regardless of the author’s credentials.

A Google Search Quality Analyst emphasizes this point: “There’s nothing special about authorship per se. It’s about the content, and the content could be coming from a random person or a very important person.”

This quote highlights Google’s move away from authorship as a ranking factor and towards a more content-centric approach.

The Power of User-Generated Content & Real-world Experience

Reddit fosters a unique environment where users with first-hand knowledge share their experiences and insights.

This is particularly valuable for product-related searches.

Users might provide real-world usage experiences that resonate more with searchers than articles written by experts who may not have used the product themselves. As Reddit thrives on UGC, much of it comes from people with real-world experience. They’re sharing their successes and failures, and this type of content can be very valuable to searchers.

Credibility and depth: The expert’s edge

However, Reddit content isn’t without its drawbacks. While it can be a treasure trove of valuable insights, it often lacks the credibility and depth of well-researched articles written by established experts.

Can a 30-word Reddit comment be better than a 2,000-word in-depth review by a credible industry expert with videos, product images, and screenshots that demonstrate first-hand experience?

Authorship signals

John Mueller, a Google Search Liaison, reinforces this point: “Authorship markup is not a strong signal on its own.” This further emphasises Google’s move towards a more content-focused ranking strategy, suggesting that in-depth analysis and professional expertise still hold value.

He also says, “As we can see, Reddit, popular for anonymous use, ranks much higher than many other websites. This means that content from anonymous users is acceptable. Can I conclude that a blog without any ‘about’ page or ‘author profile’ can also perform as well?”

Although we have yet to see definite proof, it gives hope that relatively lesser-known businesses and writers can still find their place on the top of SERPs with high-quality and informative content that caters to search intent.

Navigating The New User-Generated Content Landscape Requires a Balanced Approach

So, how can searchers navigate this evolving content landscape? The answer depends on the specific search intent.

• Quick Tips and Real-World Insights: For quick tips and insights from real users, Reddit can be a goldmine. Users can find solutions to common problems, discover new products based on user recommendations, and get a sense of the general sentiment toward a particular product or service.
• In-Depth Analysis and Professional Expertise: However, for in-depth analysis, backed by research and professional experience, articles written by established experts remain a valuable resource. These articles offer a comprehensive understanding of a topic, explore various perspectives, and provide guidance based on proven methods and best practices.

The ideal scenario is a search landscape where both Reddit content and expert articles coexist, providing searchers with a diverse range of high-quality information to suit their specific needs.

And this is what content marketers and SEOs need to understand if they are succeed in this new era of Google search.

Takeaways for content marketers and SEOs

The rise of Reddit content presents a valuable opportunity for content marketers and SEOs to improve their search results.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Focus on User Intent: Prioritize creating content that addresses the specific needs and questions of your target audience. Conduct thorough keyword research to understand user search queries and tailor your content accordingly.
• Embrace User-Generated Content: Encourage user engagement on your platforms. Consider incorporating user reviews, testimonials, and forum discussions into your content strategy. This can provide valuable real-world insights and enhance the credibility of your content.
• Maintain Expertise: Balance user-generated content with high-quality content from established industry experts. Invest in creating in-depth guides, white papers, and research-driven pieces that showcase your brand’s expertise and authority on the topic.

By implementing these strategies, content marketers and SEOs can create a well-rounded content ecosystem that caters to both the user experience and search engine algorithms, ultimately leading to improved search visibility and audience engagement.

The post Reddit User-Generated Content vs. Expert articles: How is Search evolving? appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

The best part is that content is useful — in some way, shape, or form — in almost every aspect of your business.

In this blog post, we take a look at how online content can benefit your business and what you can do to ensure it happens.

1. Brand awareness and authority

High-quality content helps increase brand awareness and authority. 

By regularly publishing informative content that online users search for, find, and benefit from is the cornerstone of modern-day content marketing. It not only establishes you as the authority in your niche, but it also helps with more conversions and conversion rates down the road.

In addition, if you manage to get ranked in the first position on the SERPs for important keyword phrases, the credibility of your business can grow tenfold.

For example, if you have a website that offers account software solutions and appears on the number one search position for the keyword “best accounting software”, it will be incredibly beneficial for your brand authority, awareness, and credibility.

What to do: Invest in an SEO-driven content strategy that focuses on high-quality, informative content. Shortlist the most important keyword phrases and aim to rank your web pages in the number one position for those keywords.

2. Leveraging social media platforms

Without high-quality content, you wouldn’t be able to tap into social media. 

First, there are so many social media websites now (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), and social media requires a steady stream of content to keep engagement high.

If done properly, social media can be a huge source of additional traffic and leads — but it all starts with content that is optimized for social media engagement.

What to do: Leverage your existing content for social media posts. This may include quotes, statistics, content sharing, images, etc. In addition, create new content that is specifically optimized for social media. Monitor analytics to see what type of content performs the best and double down on that.

3. Prospects nurturing via email marketing campaigns

Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that their job is done when a website converts or becomes a lead.

That is not the end. In some ways, that is only the beginning of the journey.

You may still need to nurture those leads and guide them through the sales funnel with a robust email marketing campaign. In addition, existing customers also need marketing emails for retention and cross-sell or up-sell purposes.

What to do: Dedicated a portion of your content calendar to email marketing campaigns. You can also leverage your existing content to nurture leads and customers at specific stages of the funnel, e.g., customer case studies when a prospect is at the bottom of the funnel and ready to make a purchase decision.

4. Tapping into multiple mediums

As we discussed earlier, existing content can be used to power social media content marketing efforts. 

But that is not the only use case. There are many more mediums and platforms that you can use your content to generate new sources of traffic and leads.

What to do: Take inventory of your content and explore how it can be repurposed — for videos, infographics, guest posts, e-books, guides, landing pages, ads, A/B tests, etc.

5. Minimizing operational expenses and replacing paid ads

At the end of the day, it is all about ROI or return on investment. If you are strategic about it, content can benefit your business by saving a lot of money in the long run.

SEO-driven content helps you build a steady stream of free traffic coming from search engines. That does not require active participation from you — except for only a little bit of upkeep to ensure your pages are fresh, up-to-date, and properly linked.

Compare that with, say, paid search ads (SEM) — you stop receiving traffic as soon as you stop paying for ads.

SEO-driven content can help you minimize that operational expenditure of constantly bidding for keywords.

What to do: Identify a list of high-CPC keywords that are profitable for your business and that you bid on. Create a content strategy for ranking on the number one SERP spot for those keywords organically. When you do reach the #1 position on the SERPs, you will be in a position to stop buying ads for that keyword.

The post How content benefits your business (and what to do) appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

As you can tell, a large percentage of businesses might be using content marketing without any documented strategy. 

That is just one of the many reasons why so many online businesses fail — especially at content marketing. Because they do not know what they are doing. Furthermore, merely having a documented content strategy isn’t enough. That content strategy also needs to be effective.

But what makes a content strategy effective and successful?

In this blog post, we are going to take a look at seven things that help make a content strategy successful.

1. Focus on short- and long-term goals

A content strategy should be an extension of your overall marketing and business plan. It does not work in isolation — but in tandem with the overall business strategy.

That’s why it is crucial that your content strategy focuses on overall marketing and business short-term and long-term goals.

For example, if your business goal is to penetrate a different market segment, is your content strategy doing enough to further that goal? If not, it is not an effective and successful content strategy.

2. A practical content calendar

No content strategy is complete without a working content calendar. After all, the execution of your content strategy completely depends on it.

A good content calendar is ambitious but realistic and practical. It is also very comprehensive and contains every bit of important information, e.g., due date, publish date, current statuses, content promotion dates, content refresh dates, etc.

Note that the content calendar isn’t supposed to be only limited to your blog content. Instead, it should encompass everything related to content, e.g., commercial page refreshes, email marketing campaigns, public-facing white papers, guest posts, internal communication content, newsletters, gated and ungated ebooks, etc.

3. Clear and succinct content guidelines

What are the content guidelines that writers and editors are supposed to follow?

Without clear content guidelines, your content team won’t be truly productive and effective. The goal is to automate processes and minimize friction — for example, eliminate multiple feedback rounds. 

That’s not really possible without content guidelines.

4.  A website that is built for content and readers

No matter how good your content strategy is, if your website isn’t built for content and content consumption, you will have a hard time getting the desired results.

Does your website have a good product or service? Is it reader-friendly? Does it load fast enough? Does it have a good website design? Is it built for conversions?

The efficacy and success of a content strategy depend on all these factors and more.

5. Content promotion and marketing plans

Remember that a content strategy isn’t just about content creation. It is also about content promotion and marketing.

A lot of blogs and businesses do not publish dozens of blog posts every month. Instead, they rely on fewer but higher-quality blog posts — maybe even once per month. Once that post is live, their focus is primarily on promoting that content, ensuring its longevity and a stronger link profile. 

It won’t help if 90 percent of your content pieces do not find their audience. Therefore, make sure your content strategy equally accounts for an effective content marketing plan.

6. A content strategy that doesn’t stop at conversions

A content strategy that stops at the first conversion point is not an effective content strategy. Your job doesn’t end there.

A good content strategy continues to play a key role after a user has converted into an MQL. It helps them become an SQL and a paying customer. 

After they become a customer, content continues playing a key role in ensuring they are retained as a customer. Moreover, you can also use content to upsell and cross-sell — all of which help increase the ROI.

7. Analytics and performance measurement

The last part of the puzzle is, of course, performance measurement.

You won’t know if your content strategy is working or not unless you successfully measure every single detail.

Tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce can help track how your content performs — especially in the context of the overall marketing and business goals.

Conclusion

Any business can create and have a content marketing strategy, but it won’t necessarily be successful — especially if it does not cover these aforementioned areas.

Make sure that your content marketing strategy does.

Let us know if you have any questions. And good luck!

The post What Makes a Successful Content Strategy Successful? appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Over the next few months, Facebook will be updating its news feed to provide Facebook users more relevant content. To achieve that goal, Facebook is gathering feedback from users.

The end result will be based on four different signals driven by user feedback.

Those four signals are:

1. Is this post inspirational?

Who doesn’t like more inspirational and uplifting content on their Facebook news feed — especially in these trying times.

One part of the feedback survey will ask people if they found posts inspirational. Based on that feedback, Facebook will recognize posts as inspirational, and that signal will be incorporated and considered for future news feed rankings. 

2. Is this post interesting?

To keep engagement high, it is important for Facebook to show highly relevant content to its users. After all, no one engages with content that they are not interested in.

So Facebook is planning to ask people if they are interested in certain topics and if they would like to see more posts on their news feed about those topics.

Based on that feedback, Facebook will be able to rank and prioritize content in users’ news feeds.

Posts that are more interesting to users will appear closer to the top. Moreover, we can also expect more posts around those topics that users mark as interesting.

3. Do you want to see less of these posts?

Facebook wants to know which posts are not interesting to the majority of people so it can deprioritize them in the news feed rankings.

This feedback will be gathered by how people react to certain posts. For example, a post will be deprioritized if it gets lots of angry reactions.

4. Do you want to hide this post?

Facebook users can hide posts that they do not like, but Facebook is making it even easier to do so.

This will also serve as a ranking signal to improve the news feed experience.

Here is what Facebook said about this feedback process:

“While a post’s engagement — or how often people like it, comment on it, or share it — can be a helpful indicator that it’s interesting to people, this survey-driven approach, which largely occurs outside the immediate reaction to a post, gives a more complete picture of the types of posts people find most valuable and what kind of content detracts from their News Feed experience.”

This news feed rankings will be adjusted over the next few months, based on the feedback Facebook receives from users.

The post How Facebook is improving its news feed ranking appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

During this challenging time, we are offering local businesses free digital marketing advice.

Please get in touch with us via our contact form and read through our short guide below for more information.

How To Market Your Business During The Corona Virus COVID-19 Outbreak 2020

Amidst the panic and mayhem surrounding the current corona virus outbreak, a unique opportunity for your business awaits.

As the economy is hit and restricted movement of the population is likely to continue for weeks to come, now is still the time to invest in the future of your business.

• The use of social media and Google to find products and services is up.
• Consumer online activity is on the rise.
• Data published on eMarketer shows an increase in usage of mobile apps, social media and search of around 20% in China. The same behaviour is expected in the UK.

Through the use of digital marketing you can reach your customers, wherever they are, at a time when they need you most.

Marketing In A Downturn

When a recession or epidemic hits, marketing is typically one of the first activities businesses are tempted to stop to save costs.

This is a mistake.

Research from Harvard Business School categorically refutes this idea, and explains that your business’ brand will emerge from the downturn weaker and less profitable if you chose to do so.

When competitors are cutting back, improve your market share and benefit from a greater return on investment at lower cost by investing in marketing.

Building and maintaining a brand that consumers recognise and trust is one of the best ways to reduce risk when the economy takes a turn for the worst.

So, while some of your competitors stop working, take advantage of the opportunity to invest in your business and come out the other side better for it.

What Strategies To Use:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google Ads

With online search demand considerably higher than normal across a number of industries, and the fact that 93% of all online experiences start from a search engine, make sure your site is fully optimised from a SEO point of view.

Your business needs maximum exposure at this time.

Be sure that your website has all the fundamental technical SEO best practices in place and that you have an up-to-date list of the most in-demand keyword phrases in your sector.

Create new and specific webpages for any special offers or promotions you are running during the course of the outbreak and keep your blog up-to-date with news and information that your customers will find useful at this time.

Some businesses – where person-to-person contact is impossible to avoid – will see demand fall over the coming weeks, but making sure you have a SEO plan in place – and actioned now. This will enable you to take advantage of the demand that will no doubt be higher than usual come the end of COVID-19.

Altering Your Business Proposition

In such cases, can your proposition be altered slightly to cater for the needs of consumers right now?

Barbershops could partition hair cutting stations and provide a dedicated sink for customers to use on entry and on exit to wash their hands.

Face-to-face sales meetings can be rescheduled to take place on Zoom or Skype.

Online catalogues can be created and promoted on your website and sent out to prospective clients via email.

B2C sales can be promoted online only.

Restaurants can revert to only selling take-aways.

Gyms and personal trainers can offer online coaching.

Social Media

With households across the globe quarantined and all non-essential travel off the cards, make sure your brand is appearing in front of your ideal customer profile across all relevant social media channels. Nomura analysts reported that in China smart phone app usage has rocketed, especially for social media channels.

Produce new content and promotions that will entice engagement with your brand’s social accounts. The trick to successful advertising during a downturn lies in consumer psychology and emotion.

The coronavirus has caused an undercurrent of fear, worry, and stress across the globe. By tapping into and appealing to the emotional side of consumers you have a better chance of connecting with and persuading them.

Research from AdWeek shows that advertising campaigns that focus on emotional engagement tend to be more profitable than campaigns that focus on rational logical messaging.

Therefore create video, guides, infographics, memes and blog posts using emotive language and offers to build your brand and promote your products. Good-will and compassion will go a long way in the coming weeks.

Use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter’s advertising platforms to push your content into the newsfeed of your target demographic. Don’t rely only on organic social media newsfeed reach. You need to “pay to play” on social media platforms.

If you are going down to organic reach route, make sure to take part in trending hashtags such as #StayHomeChallenge #COVID19, #StaySafeStayHome, #UKLockDown, #CoronaVirusOutbreak.

Content Marketing

Even if most people are not spending, they would still be consuming information — as it is generally free to do so.

During recession, you can double down on content creation. This will give you a short-term and long-term advantage.

With high-quality and regular content, you will be able to increase your brand awareness, authority, and fans. Later, it would be easier to convert these people into paying customers.

Because of higher engagement and more high-quality content, you may even rank higher in the search engine results pages. This will give you a lot more traffic that you could convert at no additional cost, which will keep your income steady and offer an excellent ROI.

Focus On Customer Retention

Customer retention is always important for a business. However, during a downturn, customer retention becomes extremely important for the survival of the business.

Acquiring new customers costs more than nurturing and keeping existing ones. Operating cost is a huge and decisive factor for most decisions in recession. That is why your primary focus should be keeping your existing customers happy.

Some tips for effective customer retention include:

• Great after-sales customer support and service.
• Depending on the size of your customer and the nature of your business, see if you can dedicate account executives to big customers.
• Creating a loyalty program and rewarding existing customers.
• Establishing a closely-knit community of customers.
• Thanking your customers whenever possible.

Identify The Different Types of Consumers

During recessions, customers usually fall into the following four groups:

• The first group is hit the hardest and stops all types of spending.
• The second group is less confident about the short-term but relatively more confident about the long-term.
• The third group feels relatively secure. Although they become a bit more cautious, they still buy products.
• The fourth group is the one that is not affected by recession and continues to live as usual.

By identifying your customers into different groups and making unique strategies for each one — depending on each group’s percentage in your business — you will be able to optimise your marketing and revenue more efficiently and effectively.

How To Get Started

During these unusual and testing times, we’d be delighted to provide struggling businesses free SEO keyword research services, plus advice and recommendations for social media advertising. Please reach out to us today for more information.

Recession can be a difficult period for most consumers and businesses. However, there are still ways to market effectively.

The tips mentioned in this article should be remembered — especially in times as uncertain as ours today.

Wishing you all health, happiness and prosperity at this time.

Josh Hamit

The post How To Market Your Business During The Corona Virus COVID-19 Outbreak 2020 appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

A particularly interesting feature is that users will be able to interact with the video (ad) with familiar YouTube player controls. They could:

• Preview the live stream
• Watch the ad in full screen
• Control the sound volume
• Use the mute functionality
• And exit when they are done to continue using the website

The familiarity with how users interact with video ad content and control the entire experience may play a key role in increasing engagement and the click-through rate.

Google mentioned that the rising popularity of live events and video content paved the way for this new ad format. According to Google:

“Increasingly, people are tuning in to live events like concerts, sports, and shows through live streams. Brands are noticing this shift and are investing in live stream content through sponsorships and their own branded content. We know it takes a lot of time and resources to build these assets, and we want to make it easier to get more out of your live stream investment.”

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Questions about the cost of these ads

Not many details were shared about the cost of these ads and how advertisers would be charged.

At this stage, it is assumed that advertisers will only have to pay for the ad unit because live streaming is free on YouTube. However, we do not know if advertisers would be charged the same amount if a user watches the entire or abandon it only after a few seconds.

Questions like these will continue to go unanswered until Google gives further clarification or the ad format is rolled out more widely.

What else?

Apart from introducing this new ad format, Google has also announced Swirl — a new and immersive display format that allows you to showcase your product in 3D. This enables users to rotate your product and inspect it from every angle.

If you want to learn more about Swirl or the YouTube live stream video ads, check out this official announcement by Google.

The post Advertisers can now promote YouTube live streams as Google display ads appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

In fact, it is even more difficult for small businesses as they do not have the budget and resources that a big corporation may have.

The good news, however, is that even small businesses can compete with large companies when it comes to SEO and online marketing. It would require more efforts and a better strategy, but it is possible.

In this blog post, we are going to share some tips that will help small businesses achieve more success on the web.

1. Solve problems

As we mentioned earlier, small businesses usually do not have the same resources as some of the big companies have. It means that they cannot spend too much money on advertisements, retargeting campaigns, and content creation.

How do they survive and mar themselves as an authority then?

The easiest way is to start by solving problems.

Make it your #1 priority — whenever you’re running any marketing campaign, targeting a keyword, or creating a piece of content. If you are not solving an important problem through it, drop the idea.

Understand your customers, identify what they want and what their problems are, and then try to solve those problems with the content you create.

When you start doing it every time, you will significantly improve your chances of success, more sales, more traffic, and a better search engine rankings.

2. Basic SEO structure and issues

When we are talking about better search engine rankings, it is crucial to mention the importance of basic SEO structure and issues.

While you are creating great content and solving real problems for your potential customers, your website will suffer in the SERPs if you are making basic SEO mistakes.

For example, you need to optimize for title tags, meta descriptions, primary keywords, LSI keywords, links, etc.

Apart from basic SEO issues, you should also pay attention to more advanced issues, e.g., website loading speed, mobile optimization, broken links, user engagement rate, duplicate content, canonical tags, etc.

Make sure that you have the right SEO foundation.

3. Optimizing for conversions

Small businesses have limited resources. If you want to stay competitive and efficient, you need to utilize every pageview and potential customer that lands on your website.

Optimizing your website and web pages for conversions and lead generation is a great way to ensure that you are not losing valuable traffic. To do that, review your sales funnel and identify areas where there is any leakage.

Google Analytics is a great tool to create a sales funnel, identify leakages and fix them.

4. Google My Business

If you are a local small business, you must optimize Google My Business. We’re assuming that at this stage that you would have already set up a GMB account and verified it. If not, that should be your first step.

But your job doesn’t end at creating and verifying your account. GMB should be your focal point. Add as many images and videos as you can, garner lots of positive reviews, regularly update your GMB listing to inform your users what’s happening with your business, post new content and announcements via Google Posts, and just be active on GMB. Respond to reviews, answer questions, and give your potential customers another platform to reach out to you.

5. Competitor analysis

Being a small business owner, you cannot afford to test each and everything on your own. You can’t test ideas, keywords, marketing campaigns, and different social channels to see what’s working and what’s not.

This is where competitor analysis comes into play.

Identify your direct competitors. The top 5-10 businesses top pop up in the SERPs when people search for the primary keywords you are targeting are your true direct competitors.

Shortlist them and see what they are doing. Analyze the keywords that they are targeting; identify their most popular web pages; spot their backlink source. Also, spy on their social media channels and identify the websites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest) that have been most profitable for them.

There are so many things you can do.

The idea is to identify what your competitors are doing (successfully) and doing it better than them.

With this strategy, you won’t have to test everything on your own. You can leverage what your competitors have already tried, and take it from there.

What’s next?

There are, of course, so many other things that you can do to improve the search engine rankings of your small business website. However, the five tips mentioned above should allow you to survive and compete with other businesses — often with big marketing budgets than you.

Related articles

• Local SEO Guide
• Local Business Social Media Strategy

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Essex SEO Agency | Kent SEO Agency | Sussex SEO Agency | Surrey SEO Agency

The post 5 SEO and online marketing tips for small businesses appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Ever since Facebook started Facebook Stories, online marketers and Facebook advertisers suspected that ads are coming.

However, Facebook has been suspiciously quiet about the success of Facebook Stories ever since it was first introduced in March 2017. But the possibility of including ads in Facebook Stories never seemed too much of a far cry.

Now, the time is here. Facebook has finally started including ads in Facebook Stories.

Facebook Stories now receive a total of 150 million daily viewers. When Instagram reached up to 150 million daily viewers five months after launching Stories, they also started ads in Instagram Stories.

The ads in question are short video clips ranging from 5 to 15 seconds. Facebook users have the ability to skip the ads by tapping through to the next story.

At the moment, during the testing process at least, the ads are only being used for brand awareness and creating more exposure for the business. There is no call-to-action and, therefore, no option for clicking a link or button. Those features are, however, planned by Facebook and will be released in the next few months.

Apart from these features, Facebook also plans to provide advertisers and businesses with more detailed metrics on the performance of Facebook Stories. Those metrics are expected to help determine the importance of running ads in Facebook Stories. For online advertisers, the metrics will prove essential in determining whether or not to run ads in Stories.

We’ll keep you posted when Facebook decides to release more stuff about ads in Facebook Stories. Until then, stay tuned.

The post Facebook introduces ads in Facebook Stories appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

With the latest Google AdWords Reach Planner, advertisers will be able to build more effective media plans on YouTube. It’s a welcome addition to Google AdWords.

In addition to YouTube ads, the Reach Planner tool will also forecast ad performance across Google’s video partners. In other words, you will be able to get unique reach for all video formats, all audiences, and across all the different devices.

There are three major aspects of using the new Reach Planner tool.

With the addition of Reach Planner to Google AdWords, advertisers will be able to:

• Define their perfect target audience
• Find the right product mix for the given campaign objectives.
• See the forecasted reach, frequency, and other key metrics for your selected audience.

 
The ‘Product mix’ is an interesting feature, which will help advertisers with finding the perfect mix of products, based on their plan’s budget as well as the available ad formats. In other words, Reach Planner will suggest advertisers the perfect combination of ad products based on the budget, ad preferences, and marketing objectives.

“For instance, if you want to maximize reach to drive awareness, and have short creative assets, Reach Planner will recommend the right allocation of spend between TrueView in-stream and Bumpers to achieve that goal,” Google states.

YouTube ads are expected to produce great results at profitable rate, but sometimes — because of a lack of information and insights — advertisers fail at it. With the introduction of Reach Planner — and the various features this new addition has to offer — it will be much simpler and transparent for online advertisers to run profitable YouTube ad campaigns.

For more information on Reach Planner, visit Google’s landing page.

The post Google AdWords now forecasts reach and frequency for YouTube ads appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

According to the latest announcement, Instagram advertisers will now be able to display multiple pieces of media in a carousel-style format — this is something that Instagram advertisers weren’t able to do previously.

As you know, Instagram Stories ads were limited to either one photo or one video. However, as per the latest announcement, advertisers will be able to display up to three photos or three videos or a combination of both, e.g., two photos and one video.

Moreover, users will able to go through, swipe back and forth or pause any moment in the Instagram Stories. This would be very similar to how you see Instagram Stories by any of your Instagram contacts.

What do Instagram Carousel Ads mean for advertisers?

It means a whole lot of new opportunities. They can use photos, videos, or a combination of both to display even more content than before. They can decide to show a video in three parts, or they can also decide to do a slideshow that highlights three different product features.

There are many companies that explain their product or services in three steps. Brands can now also use Instagram Stories to explain how their product or service works.

As mentioned earlier, the opportunities will be endless depending on how you want to use this new feature.

When will this new feature be available to the general public?

At the moment, Carousel Stories ads are being rolled out to a select group of Instagram advertisers — Renault, Coca-Cola, Paramount, etc. Since Instagram is also learning how users engage with this new feature and use it to promote their brand, you can say it is in kind of a beta phase.

There will be a further announcement when this feature is made publicly available to a wider group of audience.

The post Instagram Feature Carousel Ads in Stories appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.