Danielle Strouther – Adzooma

The Average Cost of UK Marketing Agencies

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:55:00 +0000

There’s not a set cost for an agency in the UK, which means you’re never sure what price tag to expect.

And, when you’re quoted a price it makes it harder to question if you’re overpaying for your service, or getting a bargain. It’s one that you can only really work out when the results start coming in, but even then it’s difficult knowing if you can get the same results for cheaper elsewhere.

Not knowing the price can also make it hard to factor into your budget when deciding whether or not it will be worth the cost for your business.

So, to make this easier, we’ve done the research and found the average cost of agencies in the UK, split into different services. This data was gathered from a range of freely available sources and online pricing information, as well as confidential submissions from various UK based agencies and clients.

Note: these are just averages and don’t take into account the hours or particular offerings that an agency might offer.

This is what we found (click the image for the full-sized version).

Click the arrow to reveal the full data table.

How To Apply The Top 3 Essential Automation Rules For Every Business

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 13:19:20 +0000

PPC automation is the secret weapon that businesses need to get better results from their campaigns.

Acting as your virtual assistant, automation monitors your account all hours of the day, making changes and sending you an alert when you need to take action.

Before, automated rules meant using or coding scripts inside Google Ads. With Adzooma, these rules are set up easily with our simplified rule builder.

And to get you started, we’ve taken the top 3 rules that every business needs to apply, showing you how to apply them in your free Adzooma account.

Broken Campaign Alert

Get alerted if your adverts aren’t showing to customers with the Broken Campaign Alert. This gives you confidence your campaigns are all up and running and notifies you to take action if something is blocking your campaigns.

To set this up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’. Using our rule creator, follow these steps:

Give the rule a name

First things first, let’s give this rule a name. We’ve called it the ‘Broken Campaign Alert’ here.

If you want, you can also add a description in this box to help remind yourself what the rule does.

Set the campaigns you want it to look after

On the ‘Apply To’ step, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to look after. As this rule alerts us if any of our campaigns aren’t showing, we’re going to want to set it to look after all our active campaigns.

To do this, select ‘Campaigns from the first drop menu and ‘All active campaigns’ from the second.

Create our actions

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set what our rule checks, and what action it takes. For the Broken Campaign Alert, we want it to alert us when something is wrong. So using the drop down menus, you’ll enter the following information.

Action: Notify me
Time Period: using data from Custom, 1 days of data.

Now we have to add these AND conditions.

Spend = 0
Clicks = 0
Impressions < 0

This means that for this rule to notify us, the spend on your campaign needs to be 0, your clicks have to be 0, and your impressions need to be less than 0. Or, in simple terms, your campaign isn’t spending money or being shown to anyone.

To add these conditions, press the blue ‘Add condition’ button and search for the above from the drop-down menus.

Set the frequency

Now the hard part of the rule is done, we have to set how often Adzooma should check this rule. For this rule, we’d recommend setting it to run daily at a time you’re most likely to be online.

For this example, we’ll set it to run every day at 10am, but you’re free to choose a time that works best for you.

With the above in place, you’re ready to go! All you need to do now is click save.

Low Quality Score warning

Quality Score is a number between 1 and 10 that looks at how relevant your ads are to your keywords, how many clicks they’re expected to get and what experience users will get from your website.

Your Quality Score is a big factor in where your ads are shown and how much you have to pay for them. The better your Quality Score (i.e. closer to 10), the cheaper your ads, so it’s a big one to pay attention to.

With this rule, you will get alerted if any of your keywords have a low Quality Score so you can take action. To set it up, you’ll need to click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ like before.

Give the rule a name

First up, the rule needs a name. We’re calling it ‘Low Quality Score Warning’ here.

If you want to add a description to give extra context, you can enter that in the box below.

Select all active keywords

In the ‘Apply To’ stage, you can select which campaigns you want the rule to check. Because this rule is a great all-rounder, we’re going to apply it to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns.

To do this, just select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All Active Keywords’ on the second.

Create our actions

Now it’s time to tell Adzooma what we want the rule to do.

Firstly, under the action, you need to select ‘Notify me’ from the drop-down menu. This will make sure you are alerted as soon as the Quality Score drops.
Secondly, you want to select ‘Last Week’ from the time period menu for accurate results.

Next, it’s time to add our conditions. There’s only one thing we’re looking for in case – keywords with a Quality Score that’s 3 and under.

Click the blue ‘+ Add Condition’ button
Search for Quality Score in the first box
Select ‘Less Than Or Equal To’ in the second
Enter 3 in the final box.

Set the frequency

At this point, we set how often we want Adzooma to check our Quality Scores, which can be as often as every 30 minutes.

However, in this case, we’re going to set it to run every Wednesday at 11.00am, which is a day we have time dedicated to make any changes to our campaigns.

And that’s it! Click save and you’re done.

Pause underperforming keywords

Keywords are the foundations of your campaigns. If there’s a weak spot, the whole structure becomes a little shaky.

With this rule, you can make sure that you’re always building on solid ground. It will identify the keywords that are affecting your performance and pause them on your behalf to save money and deliver more clicks.

To get started, click ‘New Automation Rule’ from the Automation tab, then click ‘Create Custom Rule’ as normal.

Give the rule a name

Following the same drill as the other rules, your first step is to give this rule a name. We’ve called ours Pause Underperforming Keywords. It does what it says on the tin.

If you want to add any extra information to this rule, just fill out the optional description box underneath it.

Select all active keywords

Same as the last rule, we want to apply this to any active keyword that you are running in all your campaigns. This gives great all-round protection to every campaign that you’re running.

Select ‘Keywords’ on the first drop-down menu and ‘All active Keywords’ on the second.

Create our actions

In the ‘Conditions’ stage, we set the nitty-gritty details about what we want the rule to check and the action we want it to take.

In this case, we want it to pause any keyword that isn’t performing. To do that, we need to:

Choose ‘Change Status’ from the Action drop-down menu, then select pause.
Select ‘Custom’ in the Time Period data menu, then type in 90 days. This will give us a better scope to understand and measure your keyword performance.

Now, we define what bad performance is for your keywords. You can customize this to suit your business, but we’d recommend the following settings to get started.

CTR is less than 1%
Impressions are greater than or equal to 200
Clicks are greater than or equal to 15

These conditions are chosen to target keywords with a bad clickthrough rate, but avoid any keywords that are new or haven’t had time to collect data yet. They need to have been seen, but not clicked.

Use the drop-down menus to enter the above information, using the blue ‘+’ button to add a new row.

Set the frequency

Finally, we need to set how often the rule runs.

For this rule, we’re going to set it to run every half an hour, every day of the week. That gives us 24/7 protection over our accounts.

When this rule runs, your keyword will be paused but you’ll also be notified so you can optimize your accounts. Want to swap these keywords out with new ones? Take a look at our PPC keyword research guide for more expert tips and advice.

Set rules in a click with Adzooma Plus

We’ve detailed how to manually set up these rules inside Adzooma. But if you would rather set these rules in a single click, you’ll need Adzooma Plus.

With your Adzooma Plus subscription, you’ll gain access to 81 automation templates created by PPC experts, including the three above. All you need to do is find the one you want, then click apply.

To upgrade to Adzooma Plus, login to your account and click billing from the right-hand menu. Or get in touch with our team to get a tour of what’s on offer.

Reach New Audiences In Less Time With AdSync

Danielle Strouther — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 13:00:36 +0000

Time is the enemy of great PPC campaigns.

If you’re managing both Google and Microsoft campaigns, you’ll know the headache of optimizing one and then painstakingly having to replicate your work over to the other account.

And if you’re just using Google, you’re missing out on new audiences, improved results, and a better reach because you just don’t have the time to set up and manage both accounts. Until now.

Thanks to AdSync by Adzooma, you can reach new audiences while saving time.

This brand new feature imports your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Ads – and keeps them updated. Any improvements to your campaigns, including adding new keywords, adjusting for better ad copy, etc, will be automatically copied over to the same campaigns on Microsoft. That’s two advertising accounts managed at once.

And if you’re new to Microsoft, we’ll also give you $125 free ad spend to get started.

Same campaigns, different advertising accounts

Our new AdSync feature allows you to import your campaigns into Microsoft advertising in a few easy steps. With it, you can:

Import every campaign in your account, or just select your best ones.
Adjust bids and budgets, allowing you to reduce or increase your budget for Microsoft.
Edit the status of your campaigns, so you can pause them until you’ve done the final checks.

Optimizations automatically synced to Microsoft

Two birds, one stone. With AdSync, every change you make to your Google campaigns is copied over to Microsoft.

Whatever optimizations, new keywords, ad copy or alterations you make, we’ll copy them. And don’t worry – if you’ve altered your bid or budget for Microsoft we’ll keep this up to date as well.

If you’re spending £500 on a Google campaign and set up a decrease in budget of 10%, your Microsoft campaign will be £450. If you update your Google budget to £1000, we’ll change your Microsoft one to £900, making sure you always spend 10% less.

Every change is covered in AdSync, so you can manage two campaigns at once.

Why sync your campaigns to Microsoft?

Microsoft Advertising may not have the biggest share of the global search market. But like most underdogs, it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Ignoring Microsoft is like owning a gas station and not offering diesel because you already sell petrol.

Put plainly, Microsoft reaches 63 million users that Google doesn’t, giving you access to a whole new audience that would have just been forgotten about. What’s more, because there’s less competition, you’ll also get cheaper clicks, giving you a better return on your investment.

And in case you think that’s too good to be true, we ran these tests on our own campaigns. Overall, we found that:

Cost Per Click on Google was an average of £5.15 compared to Microsoft’s £1.17.
Comparing 44 randomly selected keywords, the average CPC for Google is £11.76 while Microsoft is £2.06.

With AdSync by Adzooma, you get access to these amazing results and cost savings without having to manually manage your Microsoft campaigns.

New to Microsoft? Get $125 free ad spend.

We’re proud to offer all new customers $125 in extra advertising when you spend $25.

That’s $150 of advertising, for $25.

To claim your free spend, you just need to:

Sign up to Microsoft using this link
Add $25 of credit to your account

Once done, you’ll have $150 of spend to use on your first Microsoft campaigns. And with AdSync by Adzooma, you’ll be able to synchronize your Google campaigns over for hands-free campaign management.

Turn on Adzooma Adsync today

Ready to double your advertising success?

Just click on the AdSync banner from your accounts page. Then, just follow the 4 step instructions to get your Adsync setup and running.

During this setup, you’ll select which campaigns you want to sync and any adjustments in your budget or bids. If you missed a campaign or want to link to more than one account, just follow the same process as many times as you need. There’s no limit.

Once done, just sit back and manage your campaigns as normal. We’ll copy all the changes over and ensure your Microsoft campaigns are running as smoothly as your Google ones.

And remember, if you’re new to Microsoft Advertising, you can get $125 of free advertising spend by signing up today.

Build Client Campaigns In Seconds With Revolutionary New Feature

Danielle Strouther — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 09:25:11 +0000

How long does it take for you to create new client campaigns?

With all the keyword research, copy creation and manually building out ad groups, you’re looking at 4 hours, or even longer. Well, not anymore.

With Adzooma’s new feature, the Proposal Builder, the whole process will take seconds with their automatic campaign builder and onboarding tool. That’s a saving of half a day per client.

Onboard new clients in seconds with the Proposal Builder

The Proposal Builder is Adzooma’s new feature that will change the way agencies and freelancers onboard clients and build campaigns. Instead of manually inputting and building all the elements yourself, our system will automatically build campaigns for you.

You provide us with a few client details, such as their name, website, location and industry.
We’ll instantly create ready to publish Google Search, Google Display or Microsoft Display campaigns.

Your new campaign will include:

Call and Site Link Extensions, automatically pulled from your client’s website.
A professionally built campaign, with filled out ad groups, keywords, adverts and negative keywords.
Advert previews to see the finished result of your campaign.

Want to add your personal touch? No problem. You can edit or add to any part of the campaign with a click of a button. The whole process is so quick, you can create complete campaigns while on an introductory phone call.

It’s everything you need to scale your business and make low-spend clients profitable.

Include your own fees for accurate projections

The Proposal Builder doesn’t just create new client campaigns. It also shows you the projected results for the campaign depending on the budget that you set.

What’s better, you can also set your own fees as part of this calculator, including both fixed amounts and variable rates. You’ll see how many clicks and impressions your clients will get for their spend, with a breakdown of their advertising budget and fees.

Advertising account creation for your newest clients

If your client is ready to go, you can set the campaign live in a single click by hitting the ‘Publish’ button.

If they don’t have an advertising account, you can make one inside of Adzooma – and their first campaign will already be live and waiting.

What’s more, you can also manage their account using Adzooma’s free advertising platform for results-driven optimization suggestions, time-saving automated rules and more. Create in seconds, publish in a click and manage weekly in Adzooma.

Unlimited draft campaigns in every plan

With every Proposal Builder subscription, you’ll get unlimited draft proposals for free. That means you can add as many prospective clients and campaigns that you want.

Use it as part of your lead generation, to prospect new clients or even create show existing clients the success they could be having on another PPC channel. Create as many as you want – our plans are based on how many campaigns you want to publish.

Need something bespoke? Custom plans are available on request. Speak to our team to build your perfect solution.

Ready to upgrade?

Just log into your Adzooma account and click ‘Proposal Builder’ from the top navigation bar to choose your plan.

Or, head to billing in your right hand menu to manage the Proposal Builder and Adzooma Plus plans in one place.

“Adzooma Can Easily Save You Five Hours A Week”: An Interview With PPC Machine CEO

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 10:44:12 +0000

Recently, we were lucky enough to have a chat with David Miles, CEO of The PPC Machine.

The PPC Machine is a digital marketing consultancy, that works with mortgage brokers and financial advisors to help them generate more of their own leads using Google Ads.

Offering more than just PPC management, David provides education and training to his clients, helping them learn about all things PPC, email marketing, lead generation and more. And the tool that David uses, and recommends his clients use, for PPC management?

You got it, it’s Adzooma.

“I see it as a good safety net”

Working with Google Ads since 2003, and training hundreds of businesses himself, it’s clear that David knows a thing or two about PPC.

So, what is it about Adzooma that David likes?

“Regardless of how long you’ve been using pay per click, there’s a hell of a lot of things to do and to keep an eye on and to be checking and optimising on a daily or weekly basis. And what I like about Adzooma is that it’s able to automate quite a number of things for you.

“For example, rather than having to check all the time whether I’m in danger of going over a monthly budget for an account, you can have the automation to make sure that that doesn’t happen, but if you do it shuts everything down.

“And I see it as well as quite a good backstop if there’s something I’ve forgotten to check myself, then the performance reports are going to flag that up and say you’ve missed this.

“I see Adzooma as a good safety net for some of that human error that can inevitably creep in when you’re trying to do lots of things at once.”

We’re sure that’s something every business can appreciate.

“It’s worth way more than saving an hour”

Depending on the size of your campaigns and the number of clients, David says that “Adzooma can easily save you five hours a week”.

But it’s not about the time that Adzooma saves by applying optimisations, “it’s that avoidance of missing things as well”, David continues.

“Adzooma is also helping you avoid missing something important, or helping you spot an opportunity that you wouldn’t have spotted otherwise. In a way, that’s worth more than saving an hour of your time”.

The time saved can then be put to better use “for coming up with new ad copy, or coming up with ideas for things you can change on a landing page”.

“You’ve got one person trying to basically do what they actually were trained to do, which is give mortgage advice or sell pensions or whatever it is, and yet they’re also expected to be the head of marketing as well.

“It’s so, so easy to forget to look at your Ads campaigns or any other aspect of your marketing so I think having that the backstop is always more important there. Having that kind of virtual assistant in the background that keeps your eye on things when you’re not there is helpful”.

“Adzooma’s recommendations are much better than Google’s”

David compares Adzooma to a safety net, which is a great expression. At Adzooma, we’ve always believed in giving users the tools and information they need to grow their business and succeed with their advertising.

One of these tools is our personalised optimisation recommendations, called Opportunities. Scanning your account, whether it’s a spelling mistake that has slipped through the cracks or pausing keywords that aren’t performing as well.

When we asked David about these recommendations, he said that they were much better than Google’s own.

“The danger with any kind of automation is if you just blindly accept everything,” David warned. Although the data might be recommending one thing, it’s up to you to have that final judgement to evaluate the decision as, “at the end of the day you can never override a human’s intelligence and knowledge of their own campaigns”.

Talking about Google recommendations, he explains that “a large percentage of them I tend to ignore because I know if I implement them, it’s going to make the performance worse, or it’s going to put more money in Google’s pocket than in mine or the client’s.

“It’s definitely better to have a third party recommendation rather than what Google Ads recommends because they’re always going to have a conflict of interest”.

Using Adzooma removes that conflict of interest. We’ve got nothing to gain if you increase spend or apply optimisations. We just want you to get the best from your campaigns, and will only suggest the best recommendations to help you achieve that.

In addition, David remarks that because Adzooma’s recommendations are so easy to apply, “you can scale things more and you can probably get more junior people to do stuff that would otherwise have to be done by someone with more experience”, allowing people to save even more time while upskilling their staff.

How does Adzooma stack up to competitors?

With over a decade in the PPC industry, we asked David how Adzooma compared to other PPC tools and software out there.

Alongside Adzooma, only Opteo earned his attention, which David said was better at recommended bid adjustments, as they triggered more frequently in Opteo than they did in Adzooma.

However, David said he preferred the reporting and the automation within Adzooma, stating that it had the edge when it came to usability and presenting the information. And one of the biggest selling points – Adzooma is free.

“It’s $99 a month minimum for Opteo. So, there’s obviously a big difference between that and no cost at all”.

Perhaps that’s why David refers his clients to Adzooma to manage their PPC campaigns.

We’ve loved speaking to David, and look forward to having more chats with our customers. If you want to hear what others had to say about Adzooma, take a look at:

Why Digital Marketing Manager Alejandra Perdomo calls Adzooma a “phenomenal platform”
How freelancer Phil Bacon achieved an 1100% ROAS with Adzooma
How PPC Agency owner Phil Byrne uses Adzooma to streamline his business’ workflow
The story of how Joshua Ivars Medina saves at least one day a week with Adzooma.

Until next time.

Adzooma Expands Into Digital Marketing With New SEO Report

Danielle Strouther — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:07:38 +0000

The Adzooma mission is a simple one: to make online advertising easier and accessible to all.

And it’s fair to say we’ve done that. After all, Adzooma is the best free PPC platform on the market, packed with time-saving features, one-click optimisations and the fastest and most intelligent automation system on the market.

This is just the beginning. We’re going to continue to upgrade and innovate our PPC offering and expand our horizons. Today, we’re taking our first step into the wider digital marketing world with the launch of a brand new SEO Performance Report.

Why SEO?

Let’s take a step back to basics:

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising.
SEO: Search engine optimization.

PPC and SEO are different sides of the same marketing coin. Both strategies will get your business noticed on search engines at the right moment. PPC gives an instant, paid-for results, while SEO is the slower, ‘free’ option.

But PPC and SEO aren’t in competition with each other. They work together, hand-in-hand.

If keywords are getting a lot of clicks for your PPC campaigns, it shows what users might engage with the most for your organic strategy.
Similarly, if your pages are ranking for particular keywords, you can set up PPC campaigns to capitalize on that success.
SEO optimised pages help improve your Quality Score, helping your PPC campaigns rank higher.

That’s why we’ve chosen SEO as the first report and marketing feature to be included in the Adzooma platform. It’s a massive step for us and wouldn’t have been possible without our partnership with Hike SEO.

Want to brush up your SEO knowledge? Check out this guide to SEO and how it works here.

The new SEO Performance Report

Adzooma’s SEO Performance report will analyse your website and identify immediate actions you can take to improve.

Like our PPC Performance Report, you’ll get an overall score out of 100. The closer to 100 you are, the better optimised your website is. You’ll then get a more detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas.

1. Keyword performance

This section will show where your website ranks for selected keywords, as well as other phrases that you might not be aware of. It will tell you information such as:

How many keywords you rank #1 for
How many of your keywords rank in the Top 3 and Top 10
The total number of keywords your website ranks for
An estimate of your monthly traffic
The top 25 keywords that you rank for

The section is designed to be an overview of where you’re at now. It’s designed to give you an insight on what keywords are resonating with your audience – and site content that you can improve. After all, the higher you rank, the more traffic you’re likely to get.

In addition, this section might also spark some ideas for your PPC campaigns, which you can action and build straight away in Adzooma Management.

2. Onsite SEO

This is where the SEO Performance Report starts to get into the more technical side of SEO with recommendations to optimise specific pages on your website. Don’t worry though, every suggestion is fully explained with easy changes that you can action straight away.

This section will check factors such as:

Title tags, which summarise to the search engines what the page is about and entice customers to click on your link on the results page.
Meta descriptions, which is the copy that search engines use to describe your page in the results.
Redirects, which ensure that users land on the right page and don’t see 404 errors if the content has been moved or removed from your website.
Noindex tags, which tell search engines to ignore a page and prevents it from appearing in the results.
And much more.

For every recommendation, we’ll tell you exactly why it’s been suggested, what it does and how you can implement the change straight away. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of SEO to achieve results here.

Find more onsite SEO tips in this guide to improving on-page and off-page SEO.

3. Page Speed

As the name suggests, this section checks the page speed of your website. Slow website’s lower user experience, meaning that search engines will penalise your website and lower your rankings.

Page speed isn’t just important for SEO though. The longer a page takes to load, the more users you’ll lose. That means less conversions, less sales and less profit.

This section won’t just test the speed of your website, but also list actions you can take to prevent anything slowing down your website.

4. Backlinks

Backlinks are the bread and butter of the SEO world. They are links from another website to yours, which act as a vote of confidence in the eyes of search engines. If another high-quality website is linking to yours, search engines see it as a personal recommendation that your website is trustworthy, significantly impacting your rankings.

In this section, you’ll see:

The total number of backlinks your website has
The number of websites that link to your website
Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website

You’ll also see a list of some of your backlinks, showing what pages people are linking to. This information is an essential part of forming a backlink strategy.

Compare your performance to your competitors

The SEO Performance Report gives you the option to add a competitor’s URL to your report, allowing you to measure your performance against theirs. See areas that you’re doing well, where they might be taking the lead and identity opportunities to improve.

Our keyword gap analysis is a great competitive feature of the SEO Performance Report. Located in the Keyword Performance section, this will show you:

The keywords that you are ranking for, and your competitor’s aren’t.
The keywords you both rank for and the relative positions.
The keywords your competitors are ranking for, and you aren’t.

Use it to add keywords into your strategy that you might be missing out on, or start building PPC campaigns based on the keywords that they’re missing out on.

You might want to also look at our guide for keyword ranking for extra tips and advice.

How to get your SEO Performance Report

The basic SEO Performance Report is free to access for all Adzooma users.

Just login to your account and click Reports at the top. Then, click the SEO Performance Report from the list to get started.

To run the report, you’ll have to enter your own URL (and your competitor’s URL to run a competitors report) and click ‘Run Report’. Your results and recommendations will start loading below.

You can run a maximum of 3 reports per week, which will be shown at the top of the page. If you’re looking for more, you can upgrade this to 100 reports a week as an exclusive Adzooma add-on. Upgrading your SEO Report will also unlock:

100 keywords analysed, instead of 25.
Full historical reporting, instead of the past 30 days.
The ability to download your report as a PDF, or share to clients in a click.

All details about this add-on can be found inside the Adzooma platform. For now, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer.

Not an Adzooma user?

You’ll need to sign up and connect your advertising accounts to access this feature. This is completely free and gives you access to a whole suite of additional reports, intelligent automation rules that run every 30 minutes, one-click optimizations and so much more.

Create your free account here.

How To Build A Powerful SEO Strategy With One Report

Danielle Strouther — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:07:18 +0000

An SEO strategy is a plan designed to improve your organic search rankings, increase your organic traffic and ultimately increase your conversions.

That’s all great. But if you have little to no SEO knowledge, it might sound like a pipe dream without investing in an in-house expert or an expensive agency to show you the way. And yeah, if you don’t have the time or inclination, you can turn to an agency or a consultant.

But, we’re here to tell you that building a powerful SEO strategy can be done alone, without the need of in-depth knowledge or expensive tools.

And to prove it, we’re going to help you create your own strategy, step-by-step, using our very own free SEO report.

Ready to get started?

First, let’s get your data

The first step to any strategy is to see where you’re at right now. You need to get a measure of what your current performance is, what your weak points are and where you have the most potential for growth.

Trying to start your strategy without this information is like starting to build a house without checking if you’re on solid ground.

Let us get a look at your data first then.

For this, you’re going to need to load up your SEO Performance Report. To access this, log into your Adzooma account, click reports at the top and select the SEO Performance report.

Then, you need to enter your URL, select your target country and click the ‘Run Report’ button.

You can also enter a competitors URL here as well to compare your performance against theirs, which is a useful tool we’ll cover later in the article.

While your SEO Report loads, you can watch this video explaining what results you’ll see in each of the sections.

1. Find content opportunity in your keywords

The first section you’ll see in your SEO report is your keyword performance. This section will show where your website ranks for selected keywords, as well as other phrases that you might not be aware of.

And there lies our opportunity to start building your SEO strategy on one of it’s most important cornerstones: content.

When we say content here, we don’t mean bland blogs with keywords stuffed into them. We mean interesting, insightful blogs, videos, pages, podcasts, etc that provide value and are interesting to your target audience.

Great content won’t just drive up your rankings, but also provide another avenue for customers to interact with your brand.

So, let’s have a look at your top performing keywords as a base.

Using Tetley Tea as an example, we can see from their SEO Performance Report that they’re already ranking for a lot of keywords about their infused flavours or ‘boost teas’.

Putting those together, we could create great content for Tetley for topics such as:

How these teas can reduce tiredness
What to eat and drink for your metabolism
Health benefits of ‘super teas’
And so on

If you’ve entered a competitor on your SEO Performance Report, you’ll also see the keywords your competitors are ranking for, as well as a keyword gap analysis.

This will show you:

The keywords that you are ranking for, and your competitor’s aren’t.
The keywords you both rank for and the relative positions.
The keywords your competitors are ranking for, and you aren’t.

In our SEO Performance Report, we added PG Tips as a competitor. This brought out these keywords that PG tips were ranking for, and Tetley Tea weren’t:

how much caffeine in pg tips tea
how is pg tips tea decaffeinated
pg tips newsletter
pg tips tea decaf
pg tips decaf tea bags
are pg tips tea bags plastic-free
what does pg stand for in pg tips
pg tips complaint
pg tips decaf tea
pg tips cup

Although most of these keywords are branded, we can see a few topics here that PG Tips are ranking for that Tetley could use for themselves, including decaf tea.

As well as becoming a part of your SEO strategy, these keywords could also influence great competitor PPC campaigns. For example, if Tetley were to target the ‘pg tips tea decaf’ or ‘pg tips decaf tea’ keywords, they could run an advert like this to gain some of their competitor’s organic traffic.

2. Build your keyword list out

Now you have your general topics, it’s time to build your keyword list out.

There are a number of tools that you can use for this part, including SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Google Trends and Answer the Public. If you’ve not used a keyword tool before, you’ll want to see our guide to 18 of the best SEO keyword tools and tips.

When you’re picking keywords here, don’t just aim for the ones with the most traffic. Generally speaking, the more traffic they receive, the harder they’ll be to rank for. So you’ll need a good mix of low-volume keywords to target for your chosen topics.

Here’s one piece of advice to follow when building out this part of your SEO strategy:

Don’t think keywords, think search intent.

Search intent is a simple term to represent an incredibly important piece of information. Namely, when users search for something on the internet, they are doing it for a very particular reason.

In order to serve the best content, search engines like Google categorise search intent into four different categories:

Informational. This is when users are after a particular piece of information. They are often questions that ask who, what, where, when or why.
- E.g. “Can teabags be put in a compost bin?”
Navigational. This is when users are after a specific webpage or location, usually for brands or websites that they’re familiar with.
- E.g. “Tetley customer support”
Commercial. This is where users are interested in and researching a product, and are looking for reviews, comparisons or information about which one they should buy.
- E.g. “Best green tea UK”
Transactional. This is made by people who are ready to buy a product, and tend to be ultra targeted and specific searches.
- E.g. “Buy Tetley Green Tea Berry Burst”

With this in mind, you want to make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are fit for purpose. There’s no point building keywords into your strategy that don’t match up to user intent, as it doesn’t provide value to your customers and Google won’t show them.

3. Let’s get technical

Okay, here’s the part where most people get intimidated and drop out. But before you get spooked by technical SEO, let me reassure you that you don’t need to be a developer to build this into your SEO Strategy.

Technical SEO involves making sure technical aspects of your website and content are easy for users to access, and easy for search engines to index.

With your SEO Performance Report, you’ll already have the technical SEO actions you need to build into your SEO strategy. We’ve broken them down into two simple sections:

Your onsite SEO, which gives you recommendations to optimise specific pages on your website.
Your page speed, which gives you recommendations to speed up your website.

In the Onsite SEO section, you’ll get a list of actions that you need to take, why it’s important and what you need to do to implement this action.

Everything is explained for you inside your report. For example, Tetley Tea will see this as one of their Onsite SEO actions:

Your page https://www.tetley.co.uk/ doesn’t have a H1 heading, including this can help your SEO

When we click into it, we’ll find out that:

H1 headings help readers (and search engines) understand what your content is about. Using H1 tags to structure your page correlates with higher ranking, and therefore we recommend you use them. Normally, the H1 tag will give the reader a strong sense of what they are going to read. Above all else, it should be accurate!

We’ll also get information that H1 headings can also help you rank for a particular keyword and it’s recommended to include that keyword within the main H1 heading. In addition, you’ll also get an example so you can see how it’s done.

The page speed section of the SEO Performance Report also offers similar information, but for actions that affect your website speed.

They’ll also show the exact URLs, images and files that could be slowing down your website and losing you conversions, so you can go straight to fixing it.

Armed with this information, and what actions you need to take, you can quickly fill in the technical SEO details to your SEO strategy.

4. Create a solid backlink profile

Last but not least, we have backlinks.

Backlinks are a link from another website, to yours. Each link counts as a vote of confidence towards your website in the eyes of a search engine, which means that your website will start being seen as an authority figure. The more authoritative and trustworthy your website is, the better you’ll rank.

On your SEO Performance Report, the backlink section will show you:

The total number of backlinks your website has
The number of websites that link to your website
Your website authority, which is a score out of 10 to measure the quality & quantity of backlinks to your website
A list of some of your most recent backlinks and their individual quality scores.

If you entered a competitor URL, you’ll also see all of this information in comparison to your competitor, as well as a list of some of their most recent backlinks.

This section can be used to create a quality backlink profile in a number of ways.

Firstly, it gives you an overview of the authority of your website and the quality of your backlinks. If your score is low, then you need to focus on gaining backlinks from more authoritative websites.

In the backlink game, quality beats quantity here every time. 20 average backlinks could be less effective than one link from an amazing site. Think high, aim high here.

One way to check a website’s authority is by using Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) metric. Enter any URL in this tool, or install their toolbar to check DA scores on the go. Generally, websites that have a domain authority of 10 or under should be avoided and those with a score of 40 and above are your golden ticket.

Remember those topics we created earlier? Why not create some guest posts to feature on other websites. This is a great place to gain backlinks, build relationships with people in your industry and gain additional traffic to your website.

Secondly, you can use the recent backlinks list to take a look at which pieces of your content are already being shared – and any low scorers that you might want to avoid in the future. If you’ve got one really popular page, why not increase this success with more content that points to it?

This will also help you build link equity. This is a fancy SEO term that basically means certain links pass value and authority. So, if you’ve got a relevant and popular page, it’s going to have more ‘link power’ than others.

Lastly, take inspiration from your competitors. If they’re getting backlinks from websites you haven’t considered before, put them into your SEO strategy. Even better, think of similar websites that they haven’t got on their list and target them.

Plan, action & repeat

And there you have it, how to build an SEO strategy from one report.

Now the hard planning part is over, you just need to carry out the plan and then check in on your results. We can’t stress the importance of this part.

You need to make sure that what you’re doing is having an impact on your business. If there are parts of it that are working better than others, you need to know so you can improve your strategy and deliver even better results.
To keep an eye on your results, we’d recommend running your SEO Performance Report at least once a month. You’ll be able to compare your scores over time and get continuous new actions and recommendations to take your SEO efforts to the next level.

“Adzooma Is A Phenomenal Platform”: An Interview With Digital Marketing Manager Alejandra Perdomo

Danielle Strouther — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 14:30:00 +0000

Online advertising can make or break a small e-commerce business.

Every decision and second can count, which is why we had a chat with Digital Marketing Manager Alejandra Perdomo about her campaign success.

With 8 years experience, Alejandra has worked at a variety of different companies across the United States, including small family owned firms and big fortune 500 companies managing everything from CPC affiliate marketing, social content team influencers and SEO.

Currently, Alejandra is working at Flooret, a small flooring business based in San Diego, CA, offering premium vinyl floors at factory-direct prices to give customers the greatest quality for the lowest cost.

To help manage the e-commerce campaigns at Flooret, Alejandra turned to Adzooma to save her time and increase her returns.

“I needed to make efficient and smart decisions as quick as possible”

“It’s all hands on deck!” explains Alejandra when describing her current role. In order to make her campaigns run smoothly, she “needed as much resources to help me to be able to analyze and pull intelligence to be able to make efficient and smart decisions as quick as possible.”

There are two stand out features that have become part of Alejandra’s workflow: our flagship Opportunities and the PPC Performance Report.

Speaking of Opportunities, Alejandra says that they “just pull in everything and says hey here’s an opportunity that you might be missing out on, for instance yesterday just recommended a device bid adjustment. And it’s just such an easy click of a button.”

“And I love that then you guys will also review it and say okay that was a good decision or let’s maybe tweak this a little bit more. So, it’s awesome.

“I’m definitely [using Opportunites] at least once a week at a minimum. Sometimes twice a week just to make sure that I’m not missing out on any other suggested Opportunities.”

“It’s a really quick and easy snapshot”

Talking about the PPC Performance Report, Alejandra says she uses it to make sure “that I’m checking all the boxes and whenever things are kind of more in the red and don’t seem to be performing the best that they can to be leaning on your guys’ recommendations on what optimizations that could be making.”

Paired with our new PPC Performance score widgets, Alejandra praises them as “a really quick and easy snapshot to be able to see okay. You know, we’re passing seven [checks]. We have four warnings and to be able to have a quick jump over to see what changes need to be done.”

That’s the kind of time-saving we’re mad about at Adzooma. Talking about how much time she saves, Alejandra says that she recently made some optimizations that the Adzooma platform predicted would save her two hours a day.

“In just kind of reviewing the data going back and forth and, you know, trying to decide whether it’s a good idea to make a change or not. I think it’s pretty accurate, it would have taken me about two hours.” That’s not bad for one set of optimizations.

So what’s she doing with the spare time?

“We are a small startup company and so there’s always opportunities and things that we can be spending time improving our website, improving our SEO, improving our content, improving our campaign strategy of how we’re kind of communicating with potential clients and putting them into the pipeline. So all those little elements are necessary to be able to really get a good marketing strategy put in place and so it’s all piece of a pie.”

“I feel like I can trust Adzooma”

Every single optimization suggestion inside Adzooma is based on data and designed to get the best results from your campaigns.

Alejandra praised our suggestions, stating: “I mean, I feel like I can trust Adzooma a lot more where I can lean on them and be able to make sure that I am getting the right suggested recommendations whereas with Google, you can always have in the back of your head ‘Are you just trying to get more money?’

“With the help of Adzooma, I feel like I have a team backing me to make educated decisions to build a strong campaign.

“I envision myself leaning on Adzooma a little bit more with Microsoft as well,” Alejandra remarks.

Alajandra’s advice to other business

Adzooma is “Definitely worth a shot. I mean you have absolutely nothing to lose, it’s a phenomenal platform that can really be able to save you time and resources, evaluate what is performing and what is not performing and giving you the right suggestions.”

As well as asking about Alejandra’s success, we also asked her how we could improve Adzooma. It’s why we love talking to customers like Alejandra, freelancer Phil Bacon, PPC agency owner Phil Byrne and e-commerce owner Joshua Ivars Medina.

“Amazon is a big area where I have been struggling and spending so many hours,” Alejandra responds. “They have a terrible interface and we’re actually working with another company trying to, you know, alleviate how bad their interfaces and even then just still a hassle.

“If you guys have any ideas around Amazon that’d be pretty cool”.
Amazon ads would definitely be one to keep your eyes open for. But in the meantime, you can use Adzooma for all of your Google, Facebook and Microsoft needs by signing up for free here.

Is Amazon Killing Or Saving Small Businesses?

Danielle Strouther — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 16:39:28 +0000

Every month, more than 197 million people visit Amazon – more than the entire population of Russia.

To say that Amazon is a huge company is a gross understatement.

They are a global powerhouse operating in more than 16 marketplaces worldwide, with over 100 million Prime users signed up to the website. Last year, they generated more than $230 billion in revenue, making CEO Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. (Until Bill Gates took back the throne a few days ago).

You don’t get this big without breaking some eggs. And Amazon is not without criticism.

Part of Amazon’s growth relied on the premise of a mutually beneficial relationship between them and small businesses. They provide a platform and audience, you supply the products.

But with big names like Nike ending their relationships with the platform, you have to wonder: does this work anymore?

Should you trust this global company to help your business and not crush you on their warpath to take over more of the market?

A marketplace of their own

Amazon didn’t start off with the intent of becoming a marketplace. They were an online bookseller in Seattle, packing and distributing the books themselves at a local post office.

But rather than sit still, Amazon’s success relies on seeing a gap and utilising their strengths. That’s their secret. They had faster delivery. Faster checkouts by patenting the ‘1-click checkout’ in 1999. Why should they limit themselves to books when they can ship and sell everything using their system?

It’s their ethos of being “fast”.

The same ethos which seems responsible for the unjust treatment of their own employees.

To be faster than everyone else, their employees are expected to pick up an item every 8 seconds. Every move is monitored, including their bathroom breaks. And, as a warehouse employee told The New Yorker:

“I’ve seen people who aren’t even thirty years old get injuries they’re going to have for the rest of their lives, but whenever we ask for the speed of work or the repetitive motions to be changed we’re told it’s not going to happen”

The article detailed one injury, where 22-year old Safiyo Mohamed tore an intervertebral disk in her back bending over to pick up a box. The pain from this injury will be with her forever. Mohamed claims Amazon did not care at all, saying “if you can’t work all the time, you are nothing to them”.

Mohamed continued, stating:

“How am I going to have a baby when I can’t pick him up, when I’m worried about being pregnant? I’m so angry. Amazon doesn’t want humans, they want robots. I will have this forever because of them. They don’t care at all.”

That’s a bad sign. How can you trust a company to look after your business if they can’t take care of their own employees?

It’s an ethical decision that should not be overlooked.

Sadly, most business decisions don’t come down to whether something is good or bad. Mostly because there is no clear binary. There are shades of grey in everything. As much as people will boo the company down for the treatment of their employees, others will praise them for providing jobs to over 647,000 people.

On average, they add 337 workers a day.

Amazon’s massive growth to accommodate one of the biggest businesses in the world. In April 2019, Amazon had 119,928,851 products listed on their site. There’s no other company in the world that can compete with this.

But these products aren’t all from Amazon. They cannot, under any circumstances, produce and market to that scale. It’s just not feasible. In fact, over half of all Amazon sales come from third-party sellers.

They’ve built a market place and need you to be the venders. But that might not mean that you’ll get much out of this relationship.

Fulfilled by Amazon

Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) is the company’s scheme for small businesses to sell on Amazon. In exchange for a monthly fee of $40, companies can list their goods on the website.

In addition, Amazon will also take care of storing, packing and shipping.

“FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) was a game-changer for my business. When I switched to FBA entirely, my sales increased by over 300%. I encourage any small business owner to try FBA out. Any business can make it work for them, and once you try it, you’ll love it!”
Tara Reid – The Introvert Coach

Having Amazon behind you isn’t like an ordinary reseller. At the start of the article, we told you that millions of people, equivalent to the entire population of Russia, visit the website every month.

If your company is on that website, you’ve got access to product exposure like never before.

But it’s not just about exposure. It’s about trust.

89% of buyers are more likely to buy products from Amazon [PDF] than any other e-commerce site. That’s because they know Amazon. They trust them, they know exactly how it works and they’ve ordered there before.

If you’re listed on Amazon, you’ve already got the backing and trust of its users.

For a lot of businesses, this equates to more sales and profit. In fact, Andrew Tjernlund of Tjernlund Services got in touch with us to say that FBA has become the largest part of his manufacturing business, earning them annual 8-figure sales from the platform.

Taking care of the logistics

“Amazon’s fulfilment is not only quick and easy, but it is way cheaper than anything else I have seen. I can purchase shipping through them cheaper than I can by going to the post office, PLUS they warehouse my inventory and handle returns.”
Jason VanDevere – Goal Crazy Planners

FBA doesn’t just give you more exposure. It handles all of the logistics for you.

Amazon, as Kerry Mellin states, Amazon “does nearly all the legwork for us”.

Your product will be stored in their warehouses, clearing up space for you. When an item sells, they’ll package it and deliver it through their own shipping service. Thanks to negotiating deals with the key players in the distribution industry, this is far cheaper and quicker than normal shipping costs.

This means you’ll save time and effort shipping your items while getting a cheaper rate. That’s a no brainer.

What’s the catch of FBA?

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Amazon needs your products to fill their website, but that’s not the only advantage to them.

Your data is.

Don’t worry, they’re not mining for personal data about your company. Instead, they’re using you for market research.

Every business that signs up to FBA is a giant experiment to find out what sells. Market research is a breeze when you are in control of the entire market. They have access to every single figure and piece of data. They know what sells and what doesn’t – so when they want to release their own product, they can pretty much guarantee that it will work. It’s the same way Netflix go about curating content.

If you do well on Amazon, there’s a danger that they will launch their own version that will knock you completely out of the water.

This happened with an aluminium curved laptop stand by Rain Design, which was an unexpected best-seller. Until Amazon released an identical design for half the price, which caused their sales to plummet.

In 2006, Williams-Sonoma sold a unique chair called the Orb. Surprise surprise, Amazon launched their own version also called the Orb, which landed them a lawsuit from Williams-Sonoma.

The controversies have launched an EU investigation this year into whether Amazon is using this data to unfairly promote their own goods in anti-competitive conduct.

Cheaper counterfeits can win

Any marketplace faces competition. You’re never going to be able to sell uncontested.

Despite investing millions on anti-counterfeiting software, Amazon has a big problem with counterfeit products selling on their platform.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that thousands of products on the website “have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labelled or are banned by federal regulators”. Worryingly, these products include children’s toys that have dangerous levels of lead.

But it’s not just the presence of these sellers that’s the problem. It’s that Amazon’s algorithm is set up to help them win, by valuing low prices highly in their algorithm. This is great for customers looking for a cheap bargain. For sellers, this means you’re trusting a platform who’s algorithm could cause cheaper counterfeits to rank better than you.

Birkenstock is a great example of this. Their customer support system was flooded with people complaining about their shoes, all of which had been purchased from counterfeit sellers on Amazon.

When they asked about the counterfeits, Amazon simply replied that they “couldn’t divulge private information”. What a nice way to avoid responsibility. Unluckily for Birkenstock, this wasn’t the worst part.

Not only were they losing business due to counterfeits, but Amazon had also started buying enormous numbers of stock to resell on their own site. By the time Birkenstock discovered this, Amazon already had over a year’s worth of stock in their own private stores.

This gave them the power to destroy their brand by selling their product however they wished. It was a lose-lose situation for Birkenstock.

Price is a big factor in their algorithms, but it’s not the sole way it’s calculated. Factors like user views, shipping and seller rating also play a role here. But don’t put it past counterfeit companies to submit fake reviews and try other cheap tricks to fool the system.

Some companies are even paying $10,000 a month to illicitly trick their way to the top of the system. Although most small businesses don’t have that kind of money, it’s worth bearing in mind that you’re not contributing to a completely fair marketplace.

The playing field isn’t even. It’s up to you if you want to enter the jungle.

Tackling the competition with PPC ads

There is another way that you can make your product stand out on Amazon. That’s using their PPC ads.

If you’re used to using PPC on other platforms like Google, you’ll be in for a little shock with Amazon. They are different from any other platform you’ve used before and will get some getting used to.

For those that are new to Amazon PPC, you can advertise in the following ways:

Amazon’s own SERPs. These ads will show as products either at the top of the results or in between entries depending on the device.
Headlines. These are three or more products that appear in their own banner ads at the top of the page, accompanied by some text for extra advertising real estate.
Product pages. These appear on the product pages themselves, usually in a “sponsored products related to this item” box.
Off-site marketing. Like Google Ads have the display network, Amazon also has a way of advertising their products on banners on different websites.
Email newsletters. Now, this one is a nice bonus that no one else offers. Amazon generates emails for their customers and sometimes throw in a few targeted sponsors inside.

It’s a lot of options, with big potential to increase your sales. In fact, with just one simple search, users can be exposed to dozens of different product ads.

For example, let’s search for hot water bottles.

At the top, the headline adverts were for ThermaCare pain relief, who were properly bidding on the search based on the assumption that people with muscle injuries are likely to sooth it with hot water bottles.

At the top of the results, 4 sponsored SERP ads were positioned at the top of the product list.

These ads copy the exact style of the rest of the results and are impossible to discern bar the small “Sponsored” text underneath the ads. They are done in such a way to appear that they are naturally at the top of the algorithm, allowing sellers a way of battling the counterfeits.

At the bottom of the search results page, there was another row of sponsored products that are designed to look just like the listings above. But with their own row, they are more obvious advertisements than the SERP ads.

In terms of product exposure, you can’t really go wrong with Amazon PPC.

And some small businesses have profited greatly from it, finding better ROI than other platforms. At a talk at the BrightonSEO conference, Prabhat Shah revealed that some of their clients were actually moving 50-60% of their allocated Google Ads budget to Amazon because of the success they’ve had.

Don’t get too comfortable yet.

These are the good points, now let’s have a look at the bad.

Is PPC more hassle than it’s worth?

Let’s not beat around the bush here. Amazon’s PPC system is difficult to use and set up, especially if you’re new to the PPC world.

For some small businesses, this skill cap bars you from getting a return that’s worth it.

“I used Amazon’s PPC service for a few months and didn’t find that it helped much. Our budget was around $200/week. That amounted to a few extra sales but barely enough to justify using the program. I would not recommend it based on my experience.”
Mike Greig – NinjaBudgeter

If you’re willing to put in the effort to learn it, there’s no reason why you can’t profit. Like Jeff Moriarty tells us:

“With Amazon PPC, we wasted a lot of money in the beginning, because we didn’t quite know how to use it. But after researching online, we were able to make it work. And it helps. We see about 40% of our sales coming from the Amazon PPC program.”

Part of the Amazon PPC learning curve is understanding how important competitor bidding is.

PPC doesn’t just give you a chance to make your advert stand out. It also gives people a chance to essentially steal potential customers directly from the competition in a way that’s not possible on other platforms.

Amazon allows you to run ads on specific product pages. As well as more rows of Sponsored products at the bottom of the listing, you can also see an ad underneath the description like the following:

Wow. That’s a bold move. You can attract customers who are one click away from buying from a competitor to your product instead.

Heavy competition isn’t the word for some searches. It’s a cut-throat scene.

Both a help and a hinderance

“They don’t have great worker conditions, to put it mildly, but they’re hardly as bad as the fashion or mining industries. Their logistics infrastructure is the best in the world, and they’ve got one of the best tech solution offerings in the world in AWS, thanks to their internal SOA engineering culture. Are there things they should do better? Sure. Veting[sic] all marketplace sellers, human customer support and lots of it, and greater focus on reviews and listing manipulation would be lovely. But I’d say they’re a net benefit to business specifically, and the world more generally.”
Pete Watson-Wailes – Tough & Competent

As this article has proven, there’s no easy “good or bad” answer when it comes to Amazon. I can’t just circle an option and move on.

If you’re wondering if Amazon is good for small businesses, the really awful answer is that it depends. Sorry. It feels like a cop-out, but it’s true.

For some small businesses, Amazon is a fantastic way to gain exposure, increase your sales and get a much-needed boost to your profits. For others, it’s just not worth it.

But there’s not a clear conscious on which small businesses can benefit from Amazon. For John Moss, it depends on the type of product you’re selling. Anything that was bespoke or made to order would not survive on the website.

But using Amazon for their standard samples or test goods, they found that their “available product lines sell much faster when offered via FBA than by means of direct shipping”.

For Christopher Nelson, success is based just on size, as he states “unless you have a massive budget, I don’t see how Amazon is an effective small business selling site”.

Amazon has the power to either save or kill your business. You can only really know for sure if you try it.

If you need a hand with selling on Amazon, check out Jungle Scout – your all in one platform for selling on Amazon. They can help you grow your business, start selling and explore agency and brand solutions.

A necessary evil

Out of curiosity, I posted a simple poll on Twitter to get a general consensus of how people feel towards Amazon. The most common answer? That they are a necessary evil. And I think that sums a lot of feelings up pretty nicely.

Particularly paired with this quote from Calloway Cook of Illuminate Labs, which nicely echoed the feelings of lots of similar businesses.

“Amazon is a necessary channel for eCommerce businesses that sell exclusively online, but they can be very frustrating to work with. Once you sign up for a Professional Seller account, which costs $40/month, you get assigned an Amazon rep. In my experience (I’ve dealt with two), the Amazon reps take an extremely long time to respond to your questions. I’ve sent my Amazon reps troubleshooting questions that took them over a week to respond to.

“Selling on Amazon is still absolutely worth it for our business, since the vast majority of our market buys on Amazon. I just wish they took small businesses more seriously.”

And that’s the key problem, isn’t it? Amazon needs small businesses, but they’re at a size of unprecedented growth that they don’t need to take small businesses seriously. They call the shots.

You either play along or make do without them.

An unmoderated platform that will spiral out of control

Amazon is the biggest online marketplace in the world. But their size is something that will cause their downfall.

They let almost anybody in. If you’ve got a product, you can sell and advertise on Amazon. It’s free for all, with only one clear winner: Amazon.

There’s not enough of a moderating process for sellers, which is why the platform is ripe with counterfeits. There’s not enough help and support for sellers either. If you’ve got a problem, Amazon just doesn’t care enough. It’s not big enough to impact them in the grand scheme of things.

They just want to continue their growth.

It’s not just Amazon, the online retailer. It’s Amazon, the suppliers of Kindle and home of the Ebook. It’s Amazon, land of the voice assistants where Alexa is queen, ready to answer your questions. It’s Amazon, with its streaming service and growing film studio.

But that might be their downfall.

There’s only so much growth before you can collapse. You can’t monopolise and dominate every market out there. There will be a point of no return. And if small businesses decide they no longer need Amazon, this could trigger their end.

Only time will tell.

Adzooma vs Google Ads: What’s The Difference?

Danielle Strouther — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:27:00 +0000

When you say the term ‘PPC advertising’ there’s one platform that immediately springs into mind: Google Ads.

Google has 70% market share of search engines, making it one of the most lucrative and tempting platforms to advertise on. And, if done right, you can achieve an incredible return on investment that will practically double your profits. In fact, Google themselves promote that businesses can make on average $2 for every $1 spent.

It’s all about effective advertising management. To do this, you don’t just need Google Ads. You need Adzooma, the all in one platform to save you time, achieve better results and scale your business.

Why? Because we have more features and tools than the Google Ads platform alone can offer, such as advanced time-saving automation and one click optimisation opportunities. And we’re going to go through each and every one for you in this blog.

Partnered with Google for better ads management

We’re not competing with Google. We work with them to give you the best advertising management platform possible.

Google has been by our side since the very beginning. Partners since 2015, Google saw our vision to make online advertising easier and more accessible for all businesses. So, they invited us to join their Accelerator Program and work alongside their development team to make Adzooma the best Google Ads management platform you’ll ever use.

We are pleased to have Adzooma on board as a Google Partner. Adzooma has demonstrated the product knowledge, technical expertise and drive to help their customers build online success through Google Ads.
Adrian Blockus – Head of Channel Sales, Google UK & Ireland

With our continued partnership, we’ll be the first to know of any updates or changes and have them ready in the Adzooma platform for you.
You can find out more details about our partnership with Google here.

More intuitive for better time saving

One of the very first things that sets Adzooma apart from Google Ads is that it’s easier to use. Everything inside this platform was designed by those that have used Google Ads for years, but wanted easier, quicker and more intuitive ways of accessing their data and applying optimisations.

Adzooma is that answer. It takes away the complexity of Google Ads, while leaving in the functionality that you need, in easier to find places.

Rather than trying to find the tool or data through Google’s navigation menu, page menu, subpage menu, top bar, or table toolbar (yes, all of these are on a single page), every feature is listed in your top navigation.

For example, instead of having separate screens for your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads, Adzooma combines them all into one, single Management screen.

Here, you’ll see key data for all your campaigns, including impressions, clicks, conversions, cost and more. You can customise the metrics and the date range, meaning that the data you want to see will always be displayed first.

You can drill down to any level you want by clicking on the arrow.

Adzooma Management is more than just looking at your campaigns. It’s how you can make quick edits and adjustments without having to navigate through numerous Google Ads menus.

If you want to change a budget for a particular campaign or a keyword bid, you just have to click the edit icon and enter your new budget.
If you want to make mass changes, just select the campaigns, ad groups, keywords or ads in question and click the ‘edit’ button at the top to make quick changes.
If you want to pause or enable campaigns, just click the status toggle.
If you want to add new keywords, adverts, ad groups or more, just click the ‘+’ button.

See your performance data, make optimisations and add new adverts or campaigns all from a single screen. That’s a more intuitive Google Ads.

Automatic ad groups with the campaign builder

Adzooma Management is where you can view and edit all of your Google Ads campaigns, at any level, from a single screen.

It’s also the home of the Adzooma campaign builder, which allows you to create full Google Ads search campaigns, or add keywords, adverts, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), ad groups or more to your existing campaigns, without having to navigate to the right screen inside Google Ads.

It’s simple to operate, and has less steps than Google’s, which means less time spent on new campaigns and more time gained to apply optimisations and scale your business.

The Adzooma campaign builder has another exciting feature that Google Ads doesn’t: you can automatically create ad groups based on keyword match types.

3 fully formed ad groups, from one keyword list.

To do this, just select ‘Match type’ at the top of the ad group builder and enter your keywords into the field. When you’re ready, we’ll automatically separate them out into different ad groups based on keyword match type.

One-click optimisation Opportunities

Google Ads have a recommendation system that will send you suggestions to optimise and get more out of your campaigns. Instead of recommendations, Adzooma has Opportunities. Don’t worry, there are more differences than just the name.

First, let’s talk about Google. There are different types of recommendations that Google offer, including:

Ads and extensions, which include suggestions to add extensions to ads, try out different headline variations, or to use optimise ad rotation settings.
Automated campaigns, which suggest that you should run Google’s own smart campaigns or automated bidding.
Bidding and budgets, which mostly suggest smart bidding targets, but also offer some suggestions when to raise budgets to keep ads running on your busiest days.
Keywords and targeting, which can identify poorly converting keywords or suggest other match types or negative keywords to add.

Repairs, which aim to fix issues in your account such as making sure your campaigns are structured correctly, tracking is set up and enabled or any other certification issues you might have.

Google also gives you ad suggestions, which are created by analysing your adverts to see which ones are performing best, then giving you variations to try against them. Over time, you’ll get up with a host of tested and continually improving campaigns to drive up your ROI.

One thing you’ll see pretty quickly with Google Ads suggestions is that 90% of them are built to guide users into smart bidding. If you’re already using this, there’s not a lot else in store for you.

What’s more, Google’s suggestions will always want you to spend more. After all, it’s how they make money. However, at Adzooma, we care about you getting the best return back from your campaigns, so we’ll also give you suggestions when you can save money by cutting back wasted spend. In fact, it’s one of our core categories.

Alongside wasted spend, we also have Opportunities to help Improve Performance, Opportunities to make sure you’re following Best Practices and Opportunities to ensure that your Account Structure is as good as it can be.

Each Opportunity will have two options: details or ignore. If you press details, you’ll be given a detailed explanation of why it’s important and how it can affect your account. If you want to apply it, click the ‘add to queue’ button. When you’re ready, hit ‘apply all’ Opportunities in the queue to action all these changes in a single click.

If you click ignore on an Opportunity, our platform will use this information to get smarter over time, making sure we only send you relevant Opportunities that you’ll want to action.

We don’t just explain why we’ve generated this opportunity, we also give you estimated figures showing you how many impressions, clicks, conversions it could generate you, as well as how much money and time you’ve saved.

In addition, we also offer Opportunities that Google Ads does not, such as:

Bid adjustments based on device, gender or age
Stop targeting non-performing age ranges or genders
Check low performing landing pages or fix broken links
Remove modified negative keywords
Fix spelling mistakes
And more

Occasionally, we’ll also have a special partner deal for you in there too, like claiming cashback on all your Google Ads spend with Revolut.

Automated rules every 30 minutes, not every day

Automated rules are the PPC assistant you’ve always wanted. They’re there to provide around the clock optimisation, time-saving automatic actions and custom alerts of important changes.

With rules, you can adjust budgets, pause poor-performing keywords or get custom alerts when it’s time to take action, saving you hours of manually monitoring the data.

You can create automated rules in both Google Ads and Adzooma. To create rules in Google Ads, you need to click ‘Tools and Billing’ in the top navigation, then select Rules from the Bulk Actions menu. Once there, you’ll need to click the + button and select from a rather wide range of options of where your rule applies, before you even get to the editing menu.

We’ve made this simpler at Adzooma. To create a rule, just click Automation at the top and the ‘New Automation Rule’ button. There, you can choose a template (which we’ll cover below) or create your own custom rule. All rules are created using 5 steps – with detailed explanations all the way through if you need it.

Whatever rule you want to make, you can do it from this one, simple creator.

When it comes to automation, Adzooma’s feature is more advanced than Google’s by offering:

Rules that run every 30 minutes, not every day. This gives you greater control and enables you to make impactful changes at the right time to increase your success.
And/Or conditions, which allow you to create intelligent rules that will run on multiple metrics, for example if a campaign has more than 50 conversions OR if it has a CPA of less than £5.
Select which teammates you want to be notified when a rule fires, without having to manually import their email address.

Simply put, Adzooma’s automated rules are smarter, faster and more efficient than Google Ads, helping you save time and scale.

For more information on creating your own automated rules, you can follow our step by step guide on creating a custom ‘high volume, low conversion’ rule here.

Templated rules to get you started quickly

New to automated rules or just looking for a quick way to apply them to your account?

Adzooma also has an entire library of premade rules that you can apply to your account in a few clicks. Each rule was created by PPC experts as the go-to rules that have been proven to increase performance, save time and improve their ROI.

To see our rules, head to Automation and click ‘New Automation Rule’. Then, select ‘Choose Templates’ to be taken to our library of 28 premade rules that you can apply to your account.

When you’ve found one you like, just click on it, choose what campaigns you want to apply it to, how often you want it to run and click save. You can make any edits and customisations to these rules as you want – they’re your starting point for you to make them your own.

Want to know more about our templates? Find out our five most popular automation rules and why they’re used here.

Intelligent reporting to prioritise your workload

The key to great campaigns is data.

Without data, you wouldn’t know what’s working, what needs your attention and what you can do to improve your results. The good news is that Google Ads is rife with data and offers dozens of premade reports that you can click and access at any time.

The bad news? Selecting the right report can be a navigational nightmare. And by just giving you the raw data, you still need to spend time crunching the numbers before identifying where you need to take action.

Google’s reports are just past this menu

Adzooma does reporting differently.

We offer 7 predefined reports to remove the hours of data analysis and number crunching, so you can prioritise your workload.

Our flagship one is the PPC Performance Report. Analysing your Google Ads account, the PPC Performance report gives you an overall score out of 100 with a breakdown of how optimised your account is. The closer to 100 you are, the better optimised your ads are.

Underneath the score, you’ll find cards showing you where you can improve and the actions you can take right now. To make things even easier, you can also click to action these changes inside Adzooma, taking you from reporting to optimisation in seconds.

That means you’ll spend less time finding problems and more time fixing them.

Google Ads do offer a custom report feature, but this is very limited. You get to choose the type of table or chart that you want, then select the metrics that you want to appear in it. That’s it.

In comparison, Adzooma’s customisable reports give you so much more freedom and options. You can have as many pages, graphs, charts and data as you want. Add your own images and text and show off your success with clients or shareholders.

Whatever you need, just click it and Adzooma will add in the data. What’s more, every report will automatically update with the latest figures, giving you 100% accurate reports you can rely on.

Manage your Microsoft and Facebook ads simultaneously

Adzooma isn’t just for Google Ads.

You add as many Google, Facebook and Microsoft accounts as you want.

When you log into Adzooma, you’ll be able to see top level data and PPC performance scores for your accounts, letting you prioritise which account needs your attention first. It’s your secret weapon to managing multiple accounts on the go.

Want to know more?

Ready to transform your Google Ads management with Adzooma?