MARKETING
Announcing the Local SEO Certification from Moz Academy
The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
43% of people tasked with marketing local businesses say there just aren’t enough resources available to teach them local SEO. Today, Moz is debuting our Local SEO Certification program to fulfill this need. With this well-organized, engaging video course, you can learn at your own pace, take an exam, and earn a certificate and LinkedIn badge as proof of your achievement.
As a contributor to the development of this new Moz Academy educational opportunity, I recommend it to:
-
Enterprises and agencies that need to solidify or increase their local SEO skills to contribute to company growth.
-
SEOs who need to advance their careers by expanding into the rapidly-growing world of local SEO.
-
Local SEOs who want confirmation that they are current in best practices, or to dispel some of the worries of all-too-common imposter syndrome.
-
Local business owners who know their companies can’t reach full potential without great local search marketing.
The Moz Academy Local SEO Certification covers all of the following material in an approachable, enjoyable five-part video series, led and presented by Moz’s Senior Learning and Development Specialist, Meghan Pahinui.
What will you learn?
Part 1 — Map Your Route: Understand the Fundamentals
No matter where you are in your SEO journey, it’s essential to understand how the foundational elements relate to local SEO. You’ll learn the cornerstones of local SEO, and how you should prepare when jumping into any local SEO strategy.
Part 2 — Look Both Ways: Understand Your Competition & Where You Stand
In Part 2, you’ll learn all about the concept of local search marketing, which segues into a method for creating a list of target keywords for your business. You’ll perform a preliminary location data audit for your business, and compare it to your competitors to get a better idea of how you stack up.
Part 3 — Start Your Journey: Establish a Business in the Local Space
There are a variety of citations that you or a customer may encounter for your business, and it’s important to know what they are, the differences between them, and how you can leverage them for your business! You’ll learn about the local search ecosystem, and how information moves throughout this complex environment. We’ll also discuss what a Google Business Profile is, why it’s important, and how it impacts visibility, then walk you through the setup.
Part 4 — Ask for Directions: Reputation Management & Community Engagement
Your engagement with the community and your customer base, as well as their engagement with you, starts with creating a strategy for reputation management. You’ll learn all about what reputation management is, its impact on your business, and a solid plan for building a strong and sustainable online presence. We’ll talk about customer reviews, customer service, and social media, as well as how you can build localized content and links.
Part 5 — On the Road Again: Ongoing Maintenance & How to Measure Success
You’ll start Part 5 with learning all about the ongoing tasks you can expect to perform to keep your local SEO strategy in tip-top shape. We’ll discuss a few of the bumps you may hit with Google Business Profile, and dive into the most common propagation issues you may encounter, and how to manage them effectively and efficiently. Finally, you’ll learn how to measure success, and implement changes to your business’s local SEO plan!
By the end of this course, you will be well-prepared to begin analyzing local businesses and marketing them online. Once you’ve completed your 5 hours and 45 minutes of training, you will have the opportunity to take an exam to earn your certificate and LinkedIn badge to display your accomplishment to professional peers, employers, and potential clients.
Why take this course?
If you’re wondering how learning about local SEO will benefit you, consider that over the past two decades, Google has increasingly hitched its star to the local component of its offerings. Their local business listing index is unparalleled, their review corpus has surpassed Yelp’s, and they are steadily weaving local businesses into their powerful visual and shopping interfaces.
Meanwhile, local businesses dominate commerce in terms of sheer numbers: 80% of discretionary spending occurs within 20 miles of home, and the public is now deeply habituated to using the Internet to facilitate this spending. Instead of missing out on all of this activity, you will gain a passkey to it with this modest investment in education, focused on what has arguably become the area of SEO with both the greatest growth potential and the strongest staying power. It’s a safe and smart bet.
Education is always good, in itself, but here, you’ll have the chance to take bright, lively, enjoyable lessons that you can immediately begin applying to your daily work, building out the skill set you bring to employers, teams, and clients because you’ve developed your confidence in local SEO. Purchase your course today and enjoy real progress along your personal local search journey!
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
You must be logged in to post a comment Login