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Best Practices to Increase Brand Reputation

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Best Practices to Increase Brand Reputation

Traditional, conventional display marketing is out; programmatic advertising is in. 

Certainly, the evidence from digital ad spend points that way, and it makes sense. It’s an even more effective tool that lets you accomplish your advertising goals without breaking the bank.

Programmatic advertising, after all, works by putting hyper-specific data about your target consumers to work to create hyper-targeted ad campaigns that ultimately yield a higher ROI. 

Programmatic marketing is a particularly effective tool for marketers in the B2B sector—businesses who don’t need to ask: What is a fixed VoIP phone number, for example—because the target audience is typically much smaller, and thus ideal for this data-driven approach. 

In this article, we’ll set out six programmatic advertising best practices that build brand reputation and produce results.

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Let’s dive in!

What is programmatic advertising? 

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital advertising on a publisher’s website or app, where you eke out your digital ad space in real-time.

Automation, in general, is a process that saves businesses time and money. And while in traditional advertising, marketers typically cast a wide net and target everyone who visits a website, programmatic advertising uses data to target a specific audience rather than the location. 

When customers interact with DSPs (demand-side platforms) such as mobile apps, video, or CTVs (connected TVs), advertisers bid for impressions targeted to users based on hyper-specific data points around demographics, cookie data, and information about online behavior. 

So, brands can target subsets of individuals and, as a result, improve their messaging and advertising. Programmatic advertising thus finetunes the media buying process, all in the time it takes for a web page to load. 

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Want to actually live up to the mantra to get your message in front of the right people at the right time? 

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Let’s get into six best practices for effective programmatic advertising.

  1. Plan and set goals

If you’re thinking of using programmatic ads to boost efficiency and improve your brand, start as you mean to go on. Do your homework, devise goals, and give plenty of thought to executing a creative strategy. 

Stating the obvious, sure, but worth reiterating. Clarity on your performance goals—what counts as a successful strategy and how you’ll measure your performance—will underpin your entire campaign. 

Here are a few common goals that programmatic advertising can help you with:

  • Building brand awareness
  • Reaching and targeting new audiences
  • Keeping existing customers and targeting them better
  • Driving higher ROI
  • Improving ad visibility
  • Limiting ad spend.  

Programmatic advertising allows marketers to benefit by combining the power of automation, data, and creativity to get more from their display ad performance. When we suggest getting creative—we’re talking cold email masterclass creative—we mean both in the design of the display ad and the way marketers can ingeniously target and retarget customers. 

Marketers can make ads more relevant based on several factors, such as location, device, demographics, and even the weather. And creatively adjust their ads to deliver that killer message. 

You can create campaigns that align with your goals by choosing between or combining the following display media to hit the right note:

Banner ads help raise your brand awareness and reach a broad audience. They engage customers from the top of the funnel, which keeps your brand top of mind and allows you to grab users’ attention before they’ve even become aware of your product.

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Best Practices to Increase Brand Reputation

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Video ads can be used in campaigns to introduce sound and movement, and enhance the stories you tell to win your audience’s attention. The benefit of using video ads is in driving awareness of your brand.

Native ads are editorial-style advertisements, carefully blended in website content to have a natural, unobtrusive feel. As such, they’re effective in generating high-quality targeted traffic for your site.

In-app ads are notable for their solid click-through rates. These ads can be a good way of driving new users to your mobile app through paid mobile user acquisition and various related marketing activities. 

2. Target better

With the ability to target your audience, you can highly optimize a programmatic media campaign and, most importantly, get more bang from your media budget. 

The key is dividing your traditional audience into specific subsets or segments according to preconceived criteria. 

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Tailoring ads and displaying them to target audiences in your DSP can help you minimize wasted ad budget on the wrong audience.

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And reaching those individuals most likely to be interested in your products and services with relevant, creative, and customized content is your surest bet to turn users into converts. 

A data-driven approach to figuring out the ideal iterations of a given ad is the way to go, and machine learning tools can help allow you to get the right messaging to the right individuals. 

For example, algorithms can determine the most effective location to place the ad, be it a big platform such as Facebook or a more specialized site with a higher concentration of targeted users. 

3. Choose your DSP thoughtfully

Choose a platform that works within your ad spend. You bid to get displayed on a DSP once you’ve launched your campaign, which involves competing with other advertisers for ad inventory through an automated bidding system.

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With a head-spinning array of variables to consider when choosing the right platform, some brands opt to partner with tech experts who can help you get the most of the platform features. 

Some things to look out for in each platform: 

  • Their targeting options
  • The quality of its interface 
  • Tech support when you face technical difficulties
  • The amount of inventory each makes available
  • Whether they support the top creative ad formats mentioned above and allow you to engage in different deals for inventory options. 

4. Go with a data-driven strategy

There are three types of data you can use to target the right customers with the right messages. 

First-party data is free, and arguably your most valuable data since it’s information collected directly from your audience. It includes information about their online behavior, interests, and activities on your site and apps. 

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You can also gather this data from CRMs, survey results, and customer feedback, and use it to make predictions and deliver the kind of personalized content that attracts new customers.

Second-party data is, basically, the first-party data you purchase from another source on a private marketplace.

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Third-party data is information pulled from various sources by big data aggregators. While not exclusive, as competitors can also access it, it can work well in combination with your own first-party data to enrich your insights and help you reach a broader audience. 

While the pandemic spotlighted the costs of remote working for staff—worker visibility, for example—it also drove companies to look to incorporate AI into their marketing strategy to keep their expenses down.

With the imminent end of third-party cookies, that trend will surely accelerate as marketers are tasked with finding the most efficient ways to reach audiences. 

5. Join up advertising data with analytics data 

The best way to optimize your audience targeting is to connect your advertising data with your analytics. Your analytics not only inform which users you target, but they also yield invaluable insight about when to target individuals and audiences along the customer journey.

By running ads that resonate with users where and when you find them in the conversion funnel, you can create the kind of content and ads that make their mark and build your brand. 

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Take B2B ad campaigns where the target audience of key decision-makers is rather specialized and tech-savvy—unlikely to have to ask: “What is cloud PBX?”, for instance. They’re extremely well suited to the nimbleness of a programmatic marketing approach. 

On top of that, connecting your data sources to deliver more relevant ads that add value for your audience also allows you to exclude users from specific programmatic campaigns and saves you from wasting media spend on misplaced ads.

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Choose a capable DSP, and programmatic marketing helps establish a single source of truth for monitoring and measuring your marketing performance. And it supports you in integrating your programmatic buying into your overall marketing efforts. 

With a constantly shifting digital landscape, you must cash in on rich real-time feedback insights that will inform your experiments. 

Working with the right partner and tools lets you develop attribution models that provide a granular understanding of what’s working across different touchpoints and what’s not. 

6. Implement frequency caps 

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A simple, specific trick to getting the most out of your programmatic performance is implementing frequency caps. 

These allow you to control how many impressions specific users see per month, week, or hour. 

Integrating your data with your analytics platform lets you exclude specific users across your channels from seeing duplicate ads. That simultaneously prevents you from, again, squandering valuable programmatic media spend while turning off users with redundant ads that actually decrease the chance that they’ll convert. 

Fail to add value, and your customers can quickly grow frustrated. This can be hugely detrimental to the reputation of your brand. Particularly in contrast to competitors that purvey fresh, engaging, and relevant content every time.

Experiment and test your outcomes with frequency capping. 

Over to you

Consumers are already numb to digital ads, but programmatic advertising can deliver fresher content in more engaging ways, provided you do it well. 

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In allowing for the continuous optimization of KPIs throughout the buyer journey, it can help you better allocate your ad spend and improve the unique reach of your marketing efforts. 

And when you add value, avoid annoying duplication, and make people’s lives simpler, you build your brand reputation.




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11 Actionable Ways to Build Client Relationships That Last

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11 Actionable Ways to Build Client Relationships That Last

Some agencies manage to build a steady client base that strengthens over the years, while others ride roller coasters and eventually close up shop. What’s the difference? Client relationships. Strong client relations make for greater success with projects and campaigns, loyal clients who stay with you longer and refer new clients, and a better reputation for your brand. Even better, they make everyday work more enjoyable for all.

So what makes for a strong client relationship? The same traits that define any good relationship: awareness, communication, empathy, dependability, accountability, honesty, and the list goes on.

In this post, I’ve compiled 11 ways your agency can demonstrate the above and more to achieve the best possible outcomes for you and your clients. I’d say happy endings, but good relationships don’t really end.

Table of contents

Why are client relationships important?

It’s easy to skim over the importance of creating a strong relationship with your clients—you know you have to do it. But when you dig into how it helps your agency grow, you can be more strategic about it.

Reduces churn

It can be 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. You also have a much higher probability of selling a new agreement to a current client than closing a deal with a new one.

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A strong client relationship helps you weather rough patches and identify clients who are at risk of leaving. Both will help you reduce customer churn.

Increases referrals

Customer referrals are an extremely important source of new clients for your agency. That’s because referred customers are more likely to buy, are more loyal, and spend more on average than non-referred customers.

When you have a strong relationship with your clients, you can ask them to give reviews and refer other businesses. That’s especially helpful if your agency serves a niche industry where everyone knows everyone else.

Provides opportunities to learn

Have you ever wanted to know how a new regulation would affect your clients? Or how to best sell a service like PPC? When you have a rock-solid relationship with your clients, you can ask them.

It takes time to build that sort of comfort, but when you do, your best clients become your agency’s de facto advisers.

📣 Learn how 300 marketing agencies manage services, pricing, and challenges in our State of the Digital Marketing Agency report.

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How do you build client relationships that last?

In the following list, you’ll find actionable ways to improve client satisfaction and build mutually beneficial partnerships, with input from PPC agency experts like Mark Irvine, Francine Rodriguez, Akvile DeFazio, and Susie Marino.

1. Gather “hard” and “soft” information

A strong agency-client relationship starts before the client even becomes one. You know that you need as much information as possible about your client to come up with a winning proposal. But the solution you come up with isn’t going to establish a meaningful connection between you and your potential client. It’s how you present that solution with respect to both the business’s goals and the personalities and values of the team you’ll be working with.

This means collecting “hard” information like:

  • Products and services they offer
  • Target audience and the end-users of their product or service
  • Top three competitors
  • Prioritized list of goals and challenges
  • Strategies that have worked and not worked in the past
  • Software are they currently using
  • Budget

But also “soft” information like:

  • What they define as success
  • Their future hopes or anticipations, like scaling, adding on new offerings, etc.
  • The company’s mission, beliefs, and values, and unique selling proposition
  • What makes them different from their competitors
  • Hobbies, interests, and preferences of the individuals you’ll be working with

strengthen client relationships emotional vs logical intelligence

Think with both sides of your brain when gathering information about your client.

Building emotional intelligence about the team you’ll be working with will help you to make communication more personalized as you move through these initial phases of your journey together.

Side note: Be prepared to answer their questions too! Even their non-PPC questions.

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2. Internalize that information

This is the information you’ll be not only including in your proposal, but applying throughout your actual execution and ongoing communication with your client. Take the time to really internalize it so that it shines through organically in everything you do.

  • Gather the information in person (or video): Body language and facial expressions tell a lot. Take note of what gets them excited (and not so excited). Also, be sure to send out a list of the questions you’ll be asking far in advance so the client can have time to think about answers and produce follow-up questions.
  • Iterate back: As you listen, iterate back to your client what you have interpreted so you can make sure you’re crystal clear on the information you’re receiving. Remember, incorporating the tiniest details into your proposal and execution is what will give your clients confidence that you truly understand their needs.
  • Templatize: Have an internal templated document where you can collect all of the information you’ve gathered in one place. This gives every team member something to continually refer back to, and the uniformity makes it easier to internalize.

3. Go above and beyond with your proposal

    From a project standpoint, your proposal shows what you’re going to do to achieve your client’s goals. From a relationship standpoint, it’s your opportunity to reinforce, once again, that you have a deep understanding of your client—both the business and its team members. Speak to both the client’s business goals as well as the more personal pain points and desires of its employees.

    To do this, think in terms of “what,” “why,” and “so that.”

    • The what refers to what you’ll be doing from a process standpoint.
    • The why ties the process to one of the business’s specific goals.
    • The “so that” speaks to the pain point it will address for the business’s team members.

    For example, we’d like to ramp up ad spending in the latter half of the month to drive more signups so that your sales team isn’t scrounging for leads. Just be sure to use the language that your clients used in the initial information-gathering process.

    This strengthens that partnership feel. You’re not just looking to achieve goals, you care about the individuals impacted by them.

    how to strengthen marketing agency client relationship with a winning proposalhow to strengthen marketing agency client relationship with a winning proposal

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    4. Have an onboarding process

    This is one of our customer retention strategies as well. Once you get started, there will be more points of contact added to the roster for both sides. A streamlined onboarding process will set the stage for the clear communication and seamless execution needed for a strong and long-lasting client relationship to form. During this process, you may want to:

    • Mail them a welcome kit: Send along some giveaways like branded swag, a greeting card, and additional goodies based on the more personal information you’ve collected.
    • Take care of housekeeping: Make sure each of you has the access needed for tools, accounts, and dashboards.
    • Have a kickoff meeting: This is to ensure everything is lined up for perfect execution. You’ve also become pretty familiar with one another at this point. This is a good time to have a more informal atmosphere.

    🛑 Free guide >>> The 6 Absolute Best Strategies to Grow Your Digital Marketing Agency

    5. Treat clients like partners

    Treating your client like a business will make your relationship purely transactional (i.e., no relationship at all). Treating them like family leaves too much room for miscommunications and unmet expectations.

    Treating your clients like partners, on the other hand, sets the stage for a healthy mix of personal, purposeful, and transactional encounters where both your and your client’s identities are preserved, and each of you supplies the essential ingredients for success.

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    • Embrace the truth: Remember that at the end of the day, both of you are businesses that want to make money. There’s no need to skirt around that. They need your service to generate revenue, and you need their continued business to generate yours.
    • Maintain structure with some fluidity: Keep deliverables clear and stick to the intended plan as much as possible, but always leave the door open for input and feedback.
    • Let them in: While some of your tools and processes may be proprietary, give them access to dashboards and data when possible. Let them in on (non-confidential) tidbits about your agency that “outsiders” wouldn’t know. Their earning your trust is just as important as you earning theirs.
    • Stay honest: This means giving pushback on your client’s desires or requests that may not be best for long-term success (wants vs needs). A good partnership is not one where both parties constantly agree; it’s one where the two parties come together with different perspectives to bring to the table, resulting in better output than either one could have achieved on their own.

    6. Be proactive rather than reactive

      Akvile DeFazio, President of AKvertise, makes this a priority with clients.

      Her team makes sure to proactively:

      • Share ideas and propose new campaign strategies.
      • Forewarn about upcoming platform changes and any action required.
      • Educate the client to empower them further.

      “This shows care and builds trust, and our clients share that they appreciate our diligent proactivity,” she says. “When we work with clients, we aim to be a seamless extension of their team and genuinely embed ourselves as so. When they win, we win, and proactive communication is the key to success for all.”

      7. Be empathetic rather than defensive

      This recommendation from Mark Irvine, Director of PPC at Search Labs Digital, ties back to the partnership mentality in tip #5. The scenario here is that your agency is doing great work. Performance metrics continue to climb. But the client is upset. They aren’t seeing new business come in.

      “A wrong response here is to dig your heels in,” Mark says. “Telling them that their business is doing fine is at best tone-deaf. Instead, let them talk it out and listen to them. This may even lead them to discover the problem is in their other marketing or sales teams.”

      If this ends up being the case, Irvine recommends that you take yourself out of the problem to prevent it from becoming an “us versus them” situation. Take the approach of teaming up together to come up with a solution. Use language like:

      • “I see what you’re talking about.”
      • “This is a valid concern.”
      • “That really is frustrating, we’re glad you brought this up with us.”
      • “Let’s make a plan to review this and report back with some solutions to remedy this.”

      Position yourself as a partner in their campaigns. Value their feedback. Even if you’re an expert, allowing them to work with you will help build a long, trusting relationship.

      “And remember,” Mark adds, “if you dismiss or fight their concerns, there’s an agency sales rep somewhere else who will be happy to listen to them vent about you all day.”

      8. Establish structure around communication

      Brett McHale, founder of Empiric Marketing, LLC, provides some great tips around communication and setting boundaries:

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      Stay away from being “always available

      Being always available, whether through Slack or other forms of direct communication, blurs the ever-important work-life balance. It can also distract you away from other clients.

      Hold regular meetings with actionable takeaways

      Instead, establish weekly or bi-weekly meetings to check in, review performance, and answer questions. “I always have some takeaway or action item from those meetings,” Brett says. “This keeps me accountable, and when I deliver on things that I say I’m going to do, it helps build trust with the client.”

      Use email and instant messaging

      Brett says, “Email can be very robotic, and I try not to be too professional or polished all the time. Communicating with clients directly via a messenger helps to build rapport and have a more laid back ‘human-to-human’ relationship.”

      He suggests designating instant messaging for urgent matters and email otherwise. This cuts out the back-and-forth emailing and also reassures your clients that while you may not always be available, you will never leave them hanging.

      how to strengthen relationships with clients the seven c's of effective communicationhow to strengthen relationships with clients the seven c's of effective communication

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      9. Share your concerns early

      This suggestion from Mark Irvine is particularly relevant to the many changes happening in the advertising realm lately. The scenario here is that your client has big plans and aspirations, and you want to say yes to everything they want. But in the back of your mind, you’re not sure if they can create that audience in Google or build that campaign on Bing. You’re unsure of how the new iOS updates will impact their Facebook targeting.

      “Don’t nod, say yes, and then stress,” Mark says. “You lose trust with your client if you say you can do something and then can’t, even if that’s not your fault.”

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      Instead, show your expertise by sharing your concerns. Practice saying:

      • “That’s a really good idea. I know that some ad policies might come into play as we explore it, so let me double-check those first.”
      • “This new change could pose some challenges to us. I’ll keep an eye on it as it changes over the coming days.”
      • “It’s tough to say what this means for us yet, but I wanted to make sure we all knew about it in advance.”

      If you really have to put your foot down, try something like:

      “We agree that this is a great idea, but we can’t in good conscience proceed with it until we know that it won’t cost you in the long run.”

      Be transparent and ask them for their trust. Most of the time, you’ll come out as the person who helped them navigate through uncertainty, and they won’t forget that.

      10. Embrace small talk

      Small talk often gets a bad rap, but Susie Marino, WordStream’s Senior Content Marketing Specialist and former Customer Success Specialist, has found that it actually helps with building strong client relationships.

      “I know it can feel cringey or uncomfortable at first, but just go for it,” she says. “You’d be surprised at how receptive clients are. Next thing you know, you’ve got a great rapport going, and the banter at the beginning of meetings becomes more meaningful.”

      “People love to talk about themselves, and clients are no different,” Susie adds. “When you ask them about how that home garden is coming along, they’ll be pleasantly surprised. These conversations reveal how much you truly care.“

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      Clients are people who like to work with real people who also have personalities and personal lives. If you don’t show a touch of personality with small talk, it will be harder to stay connected and to demonstrate your genuine care, outside of campaigns and metrics.

      11. Establish quarterly business reviews

      Francine Rodriguez, former Senior Manager of Customer Success at WordStream, believes that quarterly business reviews are essential for client retention.

      “I think all agencies get into a cycle of monthly reporting and proving that deliverables were completed,” she says. “It is important to take that step back once a quarter and have a focused conversation on high-level strategy.”

      The QBR allows the agency and the customer to reflect on new goals, the efficiency of strategies taken in the past, and what needs to pivot for the future.

      It is also a time to allow your customer to provide insight into how their business goals are changing and perhaps what strategies outside of the agency’s scope they are also planning in the near future. Having that dedicated time to talk without existing action items on the table is a great way to strengthen the relationship, create trust, and become better partners.

      It may also lead to surprising discoveries, where an agency could find opportunities to upsell its customers into new services. If your agency is doing QBRs now and your conversations don’t look any different from your regular monthly check-ins, it is time to change the format!”

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      Start cultivating strong relationships with your clients today

      Strong agency-client relationships are built on virtues like trust, reliability, transparency, and personability, and they result in greater outcomes for everyone involved. If you find that you’re lacking in productivity, loyalty, or the overall feel of harmony with your clients, see if you can adopt or improve any of these strategies for your agency:

      1. Gather “hard” and “soft” information about your client
      2. Internalize that information
      3. Go above and beyond with your proposal
      4. Have an onboarding process
      5. Treat clients like partners
      6. Be proactive rather than reactive
      7. Be empathetic rather than defensive
      8. Establish structure around communication
      9. Share your concerns early
      10. Embrace the small talk
      11. Have quarterly business reviews

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Google change the meaning of “Top Ads”

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Google change the meaning of “Top Ads”

What is Top Ads in world of Google? well it’s changed. Today Ginny Martin, Ads Product Liaison at Google shared a subtle but potential significant change of definition of Top Ads. If your deep in the detail of paid search campaigns on Google this is the kind of tweak that’s easy to miss.

Now Google’s documentation reads;

Google change the meaning of Top Ads

Top ads are adjacent to the top organic search results. Top ads are generally above the top organic results, although top ads may show below the top organic results on certain queries. Placement of top ads is dynamic and may change based on the user’s search.

Google’s official documentation

Ginny clarified on LinkedIn that this is a definitional change (as ads can appear above the organic result or below for certain queries) and doesn’t affect how performance metrics are calculated. And that the definition update clarifies that top ads may show below the organic results for certain queries. Although, for most queries, ads will continue to appear at the top of search results.

Why make the change? Anthony Higman suggested it might be due to the change in how some ads are being presented like in the screenshot below and the general shift towards more SGE on the SERPs and the consequences that change in user experience might have on ad placement. And does seem part of increased amount of experimentation on where ads appear on search engine results pages.

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1711605382 993 Google change the meaning of Top Ads1711605382 993 Google change the meaning of Top Ads



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Dynamic UTM parameters for LinkedIn ads are here!

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A simple graphical illustration of a road with a directional sign pointing to the right against a blue sky background

Praise be. For LinkedIn have just announced the arrival of Dynamic UTM parameters.

A simple graphical illustration of a road with a directional sign pointing to the right against a blue sky background

This is big news because manually configuring the campaign UTM tracking for each URL you use within a campaign can be is a cumbersome, convoluted, time-consuming process. It’s also one which can occasionally (or, let’s be honest, more than occasionally) lead to errors.

Dynamic UTMs automate the process and will mean you only have to get it right once. That’s because you’ll create your parameters once per campaign, instead of countless times.

How they say dynamic UTM parameters work

Marketers – only one time per campaign – will add a dynamic UTM parameter to their campaign and then we’ll automatically pull in the account, campaign and/or creative name into the destination URL so it can be picked up by analytics tools, allowing marketers to more easily analyze results.

If you’re not seeing dynamic UTM tracking within your LinkedIn ad campaigns already, you will soon. They’ll be rolled out globally by the end of this month.

As you’ve almost certainly been deploying dynamic UTMs across your Facebook and Google Ads campaigns for years, it is indeed about time.

But as the famous Chinese proverb goes:

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“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”



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