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The Definitive Search Campaign QA Checklist

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If there’s a box that can be checked, I’m in! I have a checklist for just about everything, including a checklist for my checklists. There’s something very satisfying about ticking off all of the boxes and knowing you’ve covered all your bases. If you can’t already tell, we here at Hanapin love a good checklist. We also love a well-built search campaign. So here to give you the warm, gooey feeling of a completed checklist and make sure your search campaigns are up to snuff is the definitive search campaign QA checklist:

Campaign Setup

Ad Rotation

Are you testing ad copy? Maybe ad rotation should be set to rotate indefinitely. Want the best ad to show every time? Set your rotation to optimize. 

Network

Be sure to disable display for search campaigns. If you feel it’s appropriate for your account, enable search partners, even if it’s just to see how it performs. 

Budget

Are your budgets appropriate for your campaign? Make sure your budget is allocated efficiently and makes sense in comparison to your other campaigns. If you have monthly spend goals, do your campaign budgets align with that goal? In general, we like to play by the 70/20/10 rule. 70% of your budget should go toward strategies you know will work, 20% to strategies you’re pretty sure will work, and 10% to trying something completely new. 

Bidding

What’s your bidding strategy? Are you bidding manually or are you using an automated bidding strategy? If you’re using an automated bidding strategy, ensure it aligns with your campaign goals. Use this guide if you’re not sure how to decide.

Conversion Settings and Tracking

Choose the conversion actions that align best with your campaign’s goals. You can set conversions at either the account level or the campaign level. To ensure that your conversions are set up and your Google tag is firing correctly, navigate to the page where your Google tag should be attached, open and enable your Google tag assistant, and refresh the page. If you need more help setting up and trouble-shooting conversion tracking, check out our whitepaper.

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Automated Rules

Set up automated rules to avoid overspending or to pause promotional ads. 

Ad Schedule

Does your ad schedule make sense for your account? If you’re limited by budget, you might want to confine ads only to times when you know users are more likely to convert. 

Language

Are you speaking the same language as your customers? If you provide products or services to people across different countries or multiple languages, create separate campaigns for each language. 

Location

If you’re not selling it there, don’t advertise there. Make sure your location settings align with your campaign strategy.

Audiences

What kind of users should be seeing your ads? You can choose to target and bid on specific audiences or simply set audiences to observation to see how they perform before setting bid modifiers. Audiences can be set at either the campaign or ad group level, so double-check that they’re set up in a way that aligns with your goals for the campaign. Don’t forget to set “all visitors” as an observation audience in case you want to set up remarketing later.

Demographics & Device

If you feel confident you know what kind of users and devices are most valuable to you, make sure you have bid modifiers in place. If you’re not quite sure, leave out the modifiers for now and come back later to see how things are performing.

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Structure

Naming Conventions

Does a campaign, by any other naming convention, smell as sweet? Make sure your naming conventions align with the rest of your account, and if you don’t have a consistent naming convention across your account, for shame! Learn why they’re so important here and then implement them!

Ad Groups 

Does your ad group structure make sense in this campaign? If appropriate, have you broken them out by match type? 

Keywords

Are the keywords within each ad group tightly themed and relevant? Ensure the match types of the keywords fits with your ad group and that any modified broad keywords have the necessary “+”. 

Negative Keywords

Make sure you add any relevant negative keyword lists to the campaign. If you think there might be cross-pollination between campaigns, add the appropriate negatives to ensure you’re funneling users to the correct place. Don’t forget about embedded negatives if ad groups are segmented by match type. 

Ads & Creative

Ad Copy

Spellcheck, spellcheck, spellcheck! It’s so easy to push that little button but oh so common to see typos in ad copy. And don’t forget about good grammar. Make your former English teachers proud. 

Ad Variation

We recommend at least 2-3 ETAs and 1 RSA in each ad group. Take this opportunity to test different ad variations and see which performs better.

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Ad URLs & Tracking

Verify that your URLs are working properly, direct users to the correct landing page, and have relevant tracking codes attached. Ensure the correct UTM or 3rd-party parameters are attached if you’re not using auto-tagging.

Verify Approval

Add a calendar reminder to come back and ensure your ads have been approved. If you’ve added labels to your ads, you can create automated rules to enable or pause ads on a desired date. (Labels also help you to pull quick reports). 

Ad Extensions

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions allow you to take up more space on the SERP and highlight different sections of your website. Google requires a minimum of 2 sitelink extensions but can show up to a maximum of 8.

Structured Snippets

Structured snippets allow you to highlight specific products, brands, and services. We recommend adding multiple sets of structured snippets to allow you to highlight more aspects of your business and increase the likelihood that the relevant snippet appears alongside your ad.

Callout Extensions

Callout extensions promote specific benefits for shoppers, like 24/7 customer service or free shipping & returns. We recommend 4 per ad group and ensuring they’re not repeating the same information contained in your ads and other extensions.

Call Extensions

Call extensions allow users to easily contact your business. If call extensions are relevant for your account, keep in mind that vanity numbers, premium numbers, and fax numbers won’t be approved for call extensions. Don’t forget to set call extensions to show only when your business can take calls.

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Location Extensions

Location extensions can help you drive foot traffic to your business. These extensions can include the distance to the user’s location, the business’s street address, a clickable call button, and access to a details page for information like business hours. Keep in mind that location extensions can shoe on Google Maps, Google Display Network, or Youtube Ads.

Price Extensions

Price extensions are a great way to highlight the prices of your products and services. Price extensions can be updated without resetting their performance statistics, but you will need to ensure you keep them up to date.

Promotion Extensions

Promotion extensions are great for highlighting special offers. Be sure to double-check that you’ve correctly set the start and end dates for both the display and extension scheduling sections.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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