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Jun 2, 2020 Politics. It’s a touchy subject to bring up around the proverbial water cooler, right? But as digital marketers, we can’t let it be. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admit that President Trump has forced social media and its uses into the forefront of the political scene. Even those “unsavvy” baby boomers hear all about the daily Tweets, social media posts and the scandals surrounding the last presidential election. It’s crazy to think just how large an impact social media has had on our past and potentially our future elections. There’s just no getting around it. The Spending Boom But why should we want to? Overall political ad spending has topped the $1 BILLION mark ($1.34 billion) reports eMarketer on Feb 16th of this year. This election cycle’s political ad spend is more than three times the amount spent during the last presidential cycle. Presidential candidates have spent more than $796.8 million on Facebook, while $243.7 million went to Google. Bloomberg has outspent all other candidates combined since joining the race in November by more than $10 million dollars. This year, Google and Facebook have served up 2 billion Bloomberg ads, which works out to 30,000 a minute. (Washington Post, 2/19) In the past year, Trump shelled out $14 million for Google ads (with more than $1 million of that spent in a single week of September after House Democrats announced the impeachment inquiry) and over $25 million worth of Facebook ads. Billionaire investor Tom Steyer was a big spender with $13.4 million and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg comes in third at $9.3 million. After spending big on digital ads to kick-start his campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden has fallen behind his Democratic primary opponents in the digital ad race. (OpenSecrets.org, Nov, 2019) This is big money here, people. And although the lion’s share is spent on Facebook and Google, there’s plenty of advertising dollars to go around. Bottom line is: There is Money. To. Be. Made. But you have to know how to navigate through the restrictions and strategies available to make your candidate’s campaign a success – be it on a national or local level. Spending levels by candidate (Statista – Jan 5, 2019-Feb 1, 2020) Traditional Political Advertising Still Reigns Supreme Historically local television still will see a major windfall from political advertising as it has in the past, and according to Forbes magazine (Brad Adgate, Sept 3, 2019) Kantar Media CMAG group estimates that political ads for the 2020 election could reach $6 billion. Others predict spending could reach $10 BILLION, which is almost 60% more than the estimate from just 4 years ago. According to a poll created by Borrell Associates and cited by the Wall Street Journal, 2020 presidential candidates were projected to spend $2.90 billion on digital and online ads. In 2016, presidential candidates spent $1.40 billion and in 2012 presidential candidates spent $160 million. That’s a huuuuge growth in digital ad spend. The History Of Politics And Marketing You may think that the shift to political advertising is the first major “technology shift” to affect the outcome of an election. So before we go any further, there is a story that needs to be shared to illustrate that this has indeed happened in the past. The impact of technology on political campaigns is not a new concept! In 1950, only 11 percent of American homes had television; by 1960, the number had jumped to 88 percent. An estimated seventy million Americans, about two-thirds of the electorate, watched the first debate on September 26th. Young, handsome presidential candidate John F. Kennedy took the time to meet with the producers of the debate to review the camera placement and the look and feel of the set. President Nixon was unable to take advantage of this opportunity due to a medical injury. Kennedy chose his wardrobe carefully to stand out against the television set background. Nixon wore a gray suit and appeared to blend in with the background. JFK spoke directly to the camera and the television viewers. Nixon appeared to be responding directly to Kennedy. Interestingly enough, viewers who watched reportedly felt that Kennedy won the debate, while viewers who were only able to listen to the debate on radio sided with Nixon. Many think this first strong encounter on the television screen shaped the debates and election to come. President Kennedy embraced and took advantage of the new technology at hand to enhance his campaign and go on to win the 1960 Presidential election. Of course, this is an oversimplified view of the election process, but there is no doubt that technology had an impact on the campaign – just as digital marketing plays an important role and impacts our campaigns today. Just as JFK embraced TV back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, so must every candidate at every level embrace the use of digital marketing to enhance their campaign – or risk getting left behind. Television wasn’t the first major impact on political advertising, and our current version of digital marketing is surely not the last. Now, let’s get back to 2020 and the restrictions and strategies you’ll need to know about in this upcoming election year. How Social Media Platforms Are Cracking Down On Political Ads The FEC (Federal Election Commission) clearly outlines the requirements in political advertising, including print and TV ads. The rules and disclaimer requirements are very specific. However, the digital arena is an ever-changing environment where changes by one platform put pressure on another platform to follow suit with restrictions and changes. As it stands now, here are new restrictions to worry about that may not affect your non-political digital marketing campaigns. Facebook announced that its policy would be to not fact-check content posted by politicians, whether paid or organic. A recent eMarketer study seems to indicate that a majority of potential voters think that political ads should be banned. Last month, Google, which of course also owns YouTube, and has always restricted granular microtargeting of election ads, announced that it would limit certain types of political ad targeting, but made no change in allowing politicians to run false ads. It’s against their policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it’s a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, they’re clarifying ads policies and adding examples to show how policies prohibit things like “deep fakes” (doctored and manipulated media), misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process (Google). Google says it would allow political advertisers to use only three types of audience targeting when buying media: age, gender, and location down to the ZIP code level. The normally valuable tool “Customer Match” (where campaigns can upload a list of prospective voters’ emails or phone numbers and then have that “matched” with their online profiles) will no longer be available to political candidates. Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align Google’s approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion. Twitter, who came in third in line of where the dollars are being spent, announced that it will no longer run political ads. It has since backtracked somewhat on it’s position, but restrictions remain. The platform still plans to allow certain groups to advertise on what they consider to be political issues — but only so long as they do not advocate for or against political or legislative outcomes. This is likely to create enforcement challenges and cause confusion for groups seeking to educate the public about issues. (CNN) Facebook has come under fire for not doing more to regulate it’s political ads. Amazon, Bing, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitch and TikTok’s policies include significant restrictions or complete bans on political advertising. Just last week Spotify announced that it will no longer sell political ads starting early next year. But even those platforms haven’t completely stopped candidates and groups from exploiting loopholes to promote political messages. And there are voices on both sides of the table battling over whether these platforms have done enough or too much which restricts our rights to freedom of speech. What Restrictions Mean It’s an ongoing battle that does not look to be resolved any time soon. But we as digital marketers need to stay on top of these actions to ensure that we can run the ads that we need to run on the platforms where we want to spend our budget. Many argue that the restrictions imposed on social media allow the candidates with higher budgets an unfair advantage since they can afford the high cost of TV spend while pushing out candidates who are taking advantage of the more affordable digital marketing routes. It’s a constant struggle for all platforms to restrict ads while at the same time providing transparency to the user. Google says they are expanding the coverage of our election advertising transparency to include U.S. state-level candidates and officeholders, ballot measures, and ads that mention federal or state political parties so that all of those ads will now be searchable and viewable as well. As each platform continues to refine its policies, pressure on the rest of the platforms is high to uphold restrictions as well. There are likely more changes to come in the upcoming months. Either way, we as digital marketing experts follow these changes and trends and will help you determine where and how you can provide a successful political campaign for your candidate. Digital Marketing Political Campaign Strategy In 2020 We need to be smart and strategic in selling our political ad campaigns. For instance, if Republicans are looking to pull in the older demographic, Facebook may be the platform to turn to. Facebook users 45-54 spend more time on the site than any other age group. Even across the same platform, political advertising strategies vary widely – with some candidates trying to reach an older demographic and some targeting the younger voters. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, for instance, targets a younger and more male audience. Reports indicate that Vice President Joe Biden does just the opposite – ⅔ of his audience are women and a large majority of those seeing his ads were born before 1975. “Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, more or less, splits the difference between them. She has targeted a Facebook audience that more closely mirrors the projected universe of likely Democratic primary voters in 2020: more women than men (though not by as much as Mr. Biden), leaning older more than younger (but again, not by as much as Mr. Biden).” (NY Times, Oct 14, 2019). As with any other advertising campaign know your goals, determine your strategy and go after a very targeted audience. But there are many other platforms and mediums to take advantage of to reach your targeted audience and each of those serves a very important purchase in the consumer journey of choosing a candidate. By all means, take advantage of the power of social media as most candidates do – target your audience, create look-a-like campaigns, use the many features FB and Instagram now have to offer to reach your desired demographic, but don’t be boxed in by the social-only strategy! Digital strategists describe three phases of online advertising in campaigns. The first is acquiring new donors and supporters. The second is persuading undecided voters. The third is getting people out to vote. (NY Times) We can correlate these phases to what we at Conduit Digital so often refer back to as our digital marketing solutions funnel. We return to this approach because it’s been proven to work time and again. Politics And The Marketing Funnel At the top of the digital marketing funnel your campaign will be focused on acquiring new donors and supporters (those out there still doing their research to decide who to put their money behind). After you get them to donate to your campaign, you want to feed that large audience pool down the funnel toward your specific candidate and then get them out to vote. This can be done through a series of different marketing tactics or a combination in order to hit your target audience from all angles. Engagement is just as important here as it is in other types of conversion campaigns. If the user does not identify with any candidate or party after reading your messages, chances are they won’t take the time out of their busy day to do additional research or get themselves to the polls to vote. Politics And OTT With the rise in TV costs, savvy advertisers will jump on the Over-The-Top (OTT) bandwagon as a new approach to reach their targeted audience. OTT has skyrocketed in popularity as an excellent complement to or coordinated with a television campaign. It will only continue to grow more popular as 5G begins rolling out. It’s a way to reach the cord cutters of all ages while they are watching their chosen programs on the big screen. Don’t let your potential candidates overlook this important digital channel! Politics And Programmatic Pair this top of the funnel product with an Audience Targeting display and pre-roll campaign. Those display ads are a close cousin to those pesky yard and roadway signs that the candidates always forget to take away after the election. We’ve all seen them. 20 signs with the same candidate’s name within the space of 25 feet. Annoying and invasive as they may seem to be, the frequency ensures that you know that candidate’s name come time to cast your vote at the polls. And you may just go home and go online to do a little more research about those candidates. Display advertising can give your candidate that same frequency approach with even some real estate on the ads to include a web address and slogan. You can reach candidates who are reading relevant content on their phone or at home/work on their desktop computer. And then….if you draw them to your site, retarget them again to reiterate your strong campaign message! Event targeting (political rallies, debates, conventions and the like) is a perfect opportunity to gather a pool of potential voters to reach at a later date closer to election day. You may even be able to pull constituents away from competing candidates by putting a geo-fence around their event location! Politics and PPC Although this is counter-intuitive to a normal digital campaign strategy, Pay Per Click may be an option at the Top of the Political digital funnel. We normally think of PPC as a conversion driver at the end of the consumer journey. In the political environment, we want the support and donations (conversions) to come in at the beginning of the campaign so that the campaign can continue to the next stage! Now is when you want to run “Ads” for your candidate that solicit political donations. You’ll want to drive potential supporters to a strong website or landing page where they can immediately donate or continue down the research stage, where, with additional strong Calls To Action, they can then donate after learning the strengths of the candidate or party in question. Here’s an example of Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders putting that strategy into action: Note the multiple calls to action – Join the Campaign or Donate Today. Within an ad, there are multiple opportunities to click to donate. There’s a catchy Description line (“unlike Trump, we don’t have billionaires funding our campaign. But we do have you.”) If I was an “undecided” or a non-Trump supporter, I might just click in to learn more about this alternative candidate. The importance of a strong web or landing page plays into this strategy, so it should be noted that you’ll want to make sure the site is user friendly, quick to load, has valuable content at a 15-year-old reading level, and plenty of Call To Action buttons in the right places. If Form Fills are included, keep them above the fold and make them short – including only information that is necessary! Politics And Social Media Now, as you bring potential voters down the political advertising funnel, we again know that social media is a strong platform for those who have expressed interest and are in the consideration phase. You can use the powers of social media targeting to create a custom audience to show your message to! But again, there are so many more options to reach those middle-of-the-funnel undecided voters! In addition to social content and paid social media on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like there is a very popular and very effective tool – YouTube! Politics And Video Advertising Harness the power of the largest streaming website in the world! More and more YouTube is becoming a “search engine.” (SEO for YouTube is not far off in the future!) Especially if you have a candidate with a strong visual presence, why not take advantage of the lesson learned from the JFK campaign? A strong video can tip an undecided voter in your favor. Here’s an opportunity for the undecided voter to get to know your candidate on a more personal level – see them smile, shaking hands with constituents, speaking to a hometown crowd! Even with the recent restrictions, YouTube can still target users based on age, gender and geography. Make sure to include your important visuals and identify your party or candidate in the first 5 seconds of the video! Keep in mind that for videos that are shorter than 30 seconds – your client is only paying for completed views! A few seconds of free advertising is never a bad thing! Don’t overlook the power of video! Middle of the funnel – persuading undecided voters (those showing interest and consideration for a particular candidate or party). Politics And Email Marketing If you have email, there’s a good chance that you check it every day. And so does your target audience! Consider this fact: according to Statista, in 2019, there are 293.6 billion emails sent every day and only 24% of people in the US never check their emails during vacations in 2018. Personalized, targeted emails utilizing engaging, and captivating creative can reach your candidate’s very targeted audience. Send an email to those affiliated with your candidate’s party or, better yet, target those younger demographic potential voters who have not yet declared themselves! They could become followers for life for the cost of the price of chewing gum. Now that so many of us ready email via smartphone – according to Campaign Monitor – up to 85% of us – email marketing remains a very powerful platform choice. What It Means For Your Agency We now have potential voters who know your candidate’s name from the Audience Targeting ads, perhaps reinforced via a strong video OTT or YouTube ad. Maybe you even were interested enough to make a small donation or volunteer some time! Now we are in the home stretch! We need to get the voters to the polls to elect your candidate. We need that final conversion goal to be met! Driving traffic to the website and landing pages is still key. What we want to change up now is our messaging! The research phase is drawing to a close, and now we want to be the candidate that can convince our constituents to get out to the polls and vote! Strong, consistent messaging is key. Depending on the scope of the campaign, a local candidate can even hone in on dynamic ads which will assist voters in knowing where the polling places are in their area (and naturally recommend voting for your candidate!) This is the time for frequency across all platforms and multiple screens with your Get Out and Vote! message. This may be the time to double down on your Facebook or Instagram advertising or to increase the frequency of your YouTube and OTT videos. These are just some of the potential ways to reach potential donors, supporters, and voters. Although due to increased pressure from outside sources many platforms are continuing to change restrictions on political ads, there are still solid targeting options to reach your desired audience of voters. Using the features and strengths of each type of advertising – from Audience Targeting to PPC – we can assist you to formulate a full funnel digital solution that will meet your candidate’s needs. Do their strengths lie in their spoken content? Physical presence? Campaigns high in video content may be your answer. Does your content have strong written content on important social issues? Focus on your website or strong engaging, content on your Facebook page. Looking to primarily solicit donations and support? Lead generation type social campaigns and Pay Per Click may be your answers. A careful mix can bring you success at all stops along the digital funnel as long as your candidates budget is carefully managed. Soon your election year may mean that voters and potential voters are texted messages about candidates and mass texts may be sent on election day to get us out to the polls. When you wake up for your morning coffee on election day, your Google Home or Alexa device may remind you to get out and vote and, based on your cross device search behavior, may even recommend a candidate or two for you! When you get in your car or stop at a stoplight that’s been geofenced, maybe you’ll receive and ad right on your dashboard. Maybe…when you turn on the biggest screen in your house, a hologram of a political wannabe comes into your living room to talk to you about the issues that are important to you! Who knows what the next big technology shift will be? As digital marketers, we’ll be at the forefront of delivering these new and personalized messages. When all is said and done and another election night is in the books, it will be interesting to assess the data to see how digital marketing had an impact on the 2020 election – at a national AND local level. Our impact is important – it may affect generations to come! At the very least, the current buzz in the media will perhaps make voters carefully consider the messages they are receiving and perhaps even drive them to do a little more research before committing to a party or candidate. But one thing is for sure – whether it’s helping your agency to grab a piece of the pie at the national or regional level, or helping a local school board member to get elected – a digital marketing campaign has become a necessity for success and Conduit Digital is here to help! How We Can Help At Conduit Digital, we have our pulse on the digital marketing environment, and with our analyst’s vast experience in the media industry, we understand the political environment and how to bring results for your candidates! We have internal data to guide us in all of our campaign decisions, and with 24/7 reporting, you’ll be able to see those optimizations made to your campaigns as they are made throughout the month. There are more regulations and more pitfalls to watch out for based on public outcry and privacy and security concerns begin to scrutinize and monitor political advertising and we will be here to guide your agency and your clients every step of the way! Let us be your watchdog to ensure that your ads will not be restricted or disapproved due to the ever-increasing regulations; we will ensure that your ads have the desired impact on the audience your candidate is trying to reach! Your agency’s client success is our number one mission! Call to discover how Conduit’s White Label Digital Marketing Services can increase your revenue, increase your client retention, reduce your costs, and grow your agency!

Aug 28, 2020 Before you can make money selling Programmatic Display advertising, a good starting point is reading our Ultimate Guide To Programmatic & Native Display. It quite literally is “the ultimate guide” that will provide you with the confidence and ammo to sell Programmatic efficiently, effectively, and correctly. Great – now  that you’ve read that, we can help put you on the right path to making money selling Programmatic Advertising with these key tools. When you use programmatic display advertising in your marketing strategy, you not only will increase your ROI but it will also help increase your client portfolio. Benefits to Using Display Ads When you are advertising for your client’s business, it’s important to keep three main factors: visual appeal to grab attention, target location, and the ads messaging. This is why display advertising has become so popular in recent years. With display advertising, you are able to deliver a visually pleasing powerful message, that gets in front of the target demographic. So what more could you want? Other benefits to using display advertising include: Visually Appealing Built Brand Awareness Effective Targeting Increase Brand Visibility Ad Retargeting Capabilities Collect More Consumer Data Understand How Programmatic Display Can Achieve Your Client’s Goals Programmatic Display is an essential tool for driving brand awareness and obtaining significant reach across highly targeted audiences. It allows your client’s brand to have access to 99% of the internet’s ad-servable inventory which helps reach their target users at the right place and right time. Sounds like a pretty powerful tool, right? It can be, but it’s often sold incorrectly. This can be prevented simply by understanding what your client is trying to achieve for their brand as well as knowing the fundamentals of what programmatic display can do. For instance, say your client is a private gym owner who’s looking to drive awareness about her grand opening to fitness enthusiasts in the area. Programmatic Display is the perfect solution for this! Through the use of first & third-party data segments, geo-fencing, search keyword targeting, whitelisting sports/fitness websites, and website retargeting, you could deliver a top-notch programmatic solution that reaches your client’s ideal market whether they’re at a competitor’s gym or browsing the latest health trends online. Know That It’s the Foundation Of Successful Campaigns Programmatic Display is like apple pie – it’s great by itself, but once you add ice cream, it’s 10x better. The ice cream to the Programmatic apple pie is any intent-based product, like Paid Search. The benefits of both are truly amplified when paired together to make a multi-product solution for your client. Referencing the same hypothetical gym owner client in the section above, imagine that their goal is to increase form fills for a free trial week on their website. Programmatic Display isn’t going to achieve this goal as effectively as it could without the addition of an intent-based product. That’s because it’s a top-of-the-funnel solution designed to bring brand awareness rather than drive bottom-of-the-funnel users to convert (i.e. fill out a form, make a phone call, etc.). In the example above, the solution would be to run a conversion-driver product like Paid Search alongside a Programmatic Display campaign. Programmatic Display would assist with conversions by nurturing potential leads at the top-of-the-funnel like retargeting interested users who visit the website. Due to the awareness and brand recognition that this product brings, users are more likely to make an intent-based search, click on the Paid Search ad, and fill out the free week trial form (i.e. convert). Be Transparent With Your Client The nature of the Programmatic world sometimes allows for some sketchy players. Clients want to know where their money is being spent, and rightfully so. Separate yourself from the pack with transparent reporting for your client. Provide things like domain-level metrics so they can see exactly where their ads are being served, conversion reporting, audience performance, demographic insights, and ad performance. This will lead to trust from the client as well as establish credibility for your agency. Moreover, by providing tangible results that can be translated to your client’s positive ROI, they will be more likely to increase their investment and/or expand the campaign to multiple locations or focus areas. Embrace the World Beyond CTR We all know that the industry standard for measuring Programmatic Display campaigns is by click-through-rate (CTR), but it’s important to know that CTR alone should not define success. Clicks don’t provide the whole story (what happened after the click?) and they don’t necessarily mean a quality user (CMG Solutions). Some things you should look for to prove positive Programmatic Display campaign results: An Increase in Direct Traffic Programmatic Display campaigns are meant to drive more brand awareness, so an increase in direct traffic upon going live isn’t coincidental! Conversions Yes, we said this product isn’t best for driving conversions like form fills and phone calls, but that doesn’t mean it can’t. These types of conversions demonstrate a highly engaged user, but you could also track page view conversions to show user behavior. This can provide some visibility into what your audience is most drawn to on your site and could even help make the case for an additional campaign. Maybe users are really engaged with the Employment Opportunities page? Recommend a Recruiting campaign! Foot Traffic Attribution Geo-Fencing allows your client to have insight into how their campaign is performing via offline conversions. By drawing virtual fences around brick-and-mortar locations that your client’s ideal audience frequently visits, and by fencing their location as the conversion zone, a Programmatic Display campaign has the ability to track visits from these users to your client’s location! This makes for a strong case of proving positive ROI. So while it’s okay to use as a benchmark for your ad quality (is your messaging clear/engaging?) or keyword strategy, proving value beyond the click is key for getting your client to invest more in Programmatic Display with you. Conclusion Programmatic Display sells itself if its capabilities match the client’s goals. When you’re making money by maintaining customer satisfaction & providing proof of positive results that translate to their ROI, it’s easy to see why using display advertising is the right choice.

Jul 22, 2020 Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) as it is also referred to, is a common and effective channel within digital marketing. Many people within the digital space understand that PPC is a great way to drive conversions and leads for your clients by leveraging the bottom-of-the-funnel targeting capabilities that are available. However, many digital advertisers do not either have the experience or the man-power to offer the set up and management of PPC campaigns to their clients. If this is the situation that you find yourself in, then you will most definitely benefit from learning about white-labelled PPC solutions. After reading this article, you will hopefully be more well versed in: What is White-Labeled PPC Reseller vs A True White-Label Partnership Benefits of White Label PPC The White Label Process What Is White-Label PPC? White-Label PPC is a process in which one agency leverages PPC management services from another agency, but offers these services to their clients under their brand name. Essentially, white-label solutions allow for the agency seeking out the services to do one thing: scale. Let’s dive into PPC a little more. Pay-Per-Click marketing leverages search engines like Google and Bing to serve ads that are listed above the organic search results. Within the account, marketers create ads consisting of headlines and descriptions that users click on to get brought to the client’s landing page. To dictate who sees these ads, marketers include what keywords users can search for in the search bar, which is what makes PPC such a great bottom-of-the-funnel marketing channel. You can essentially determine what ad copy gets served to a user who is searching for a specific keyword. When you incorporate other key tips and industry secrets to your campaign build, you will be able to create better ads than your competitors. As previously mentioned, white-labeled PPC services allow the agency buying these services to scale their business without making modifications under their own roof. This allows the agency to continue working within the marketing channels that they manage best and specialize in while adding in PPC to offer a more robust digital suite to their clients. PPC is one of the most powerful channels in terms of driving conversions, and pairing this with other products will bolster the campaign’s purchasing funnel. If an agency does not offer in-house PPC, partnering with the right white-label agency will only extend your offering and results for clients. Now you may be asking: What is the right white-label agency for me? White Label PPC Partnership vs. Reselling PPC Within the digital space, agencies looking to leverage services offered by another agency have options of how to go about doing so. You may have heard of reseller programs and full-service white label ppc partnerships and how they are similar in many aspects, but it is very important to know the difference between the two when deciding what avenue your agency is looking to take. A true, full-service, white label paid search partnership will essentially work as an extension of your agency. Partnerships can be customized to fulfill a multitude of needs within campaign set up, ongoing management and optimization, as well as reporting, client relations, and new client acquisition. All aspects would be white-labeled, or rebranded to your agency, meaning that you clients would be of the understanding that all of the work is being done under your roof. A PPC reseller is more specifically involved in running PPC campaigns across platforms like Google and Bing for agencies that do not offer PPC in-house, or are looking to scale more without taking on the cost of increasing their man power. While signing on with a reseller, your agency will still be tasked with the client relationship side of the business. You would not be able to leverage a reseller for client prospecting, proposals, reporting, or strategic guidance. Obviously the set up of an agency and what they offer is always different, which makes understanding what type of partnership to make very important. Benefits Of A White Label PPC Partnership If your agency is really looking to scale, then singing on for a white-label partnership might be in your best interest. While no additional work will need to be done by your agency, you can make your product suite more robust without the hassle of building the product offering, ramping up expertise or hiring new employees, and creating sales collateral to acquire new clients in a space that you are less familiar in. By essentially flipping on a switch, your agency will be able to bypass the headaches and time required to formulate a new PPC offering from scratch and ramping up expertise on the ins and outs of highly competitive search engines like Google and Bing. Your partner will have you covered here, and the margin agreed upon will generally outweigh the overhead cost of creating your own solution. With the right agency partner, you can be confident that your clients get great results from experts running your campaigns on Google and Bing along with strategic guidance that will negate client churn. White-label partnerships are generally as collaborative as you would like to make them. This means that your team will always have a say in what service areas you’d ideally like your client’s campaign to focus on as well as the specific ad copy and keywords to achieve this. This also means that transparency should never be a worry. This relationship will not be treated as a sign-up-and-hand-over-the-keys scenario. Your team will be able to preview the campaign specifics prior to launch, and influence the optimizations throughout the life of the campaign. Sticking with negating churn, your partnership will be a true extension of your agency, meaning that you will always be in a symbiotic relationship: when one side wins, the other does as well! Simply because of this, you can be confident that all facets of out-sourced operations are carried out with two goals in mind: driving new business and expanding existing business for your agency. Finally, and most simply, this new relationship will be an added revenue stream for your agency. At the agreed-upon management fee or margin, you can generate additional revenue from existing clients and new clients looking to run search ads on Google and Bing. Join A White-Label Program That Will Change Your Company If you feel that a white-label ppc partner is the solution that your agency would benefit from, we are confident that you have come to the right place. Conduit Digital has been helping agencies open doors for 7 years across 95 Nielsen markets. Aside from offering expertly-certified PPC services, Conduit Digital offers a range of white-labeled ppc solutions that will help scale your business in the areas that you do not currently offer, and a full service team that will stand with you in every step of your process. We aim to make things as collaborative as possible, as our main goal is to help grow your business.

Sep 3, 2020 OTT Advertising is a form of advertising that enables you to serve ads on an internet-based, non-skippable, and immersive content format. Advertising on OTT platforms allows advertisers to engage with a unique audience that is committed to the content it is consuming. As one of the fastest-growing digital products of the past 5 years, there is an incredible opportunity for your agency to sell OTT Advertising. In this guide, we are going to break down everything you need to know about OTT and how to make money selling OTT Advertising. What IS OTT? OTT stands for Over-the-Top Television, which originally referred to the devices that go “over” a cable box to provide the user access to TV content such as Roku or AppleTV. In OTT channels, content is delivered via the internet rather than through a traditional cable/broadcast provider. A connected TV, also called CTV, is a television or connected device with an internet connection and a UI that enables users to access OTT content through applications. Is OTT content delivered to all devices, or just to the TV screen? This should be an easy question right? Well, believe it or not, the digital marketing industry is fairly split on how to actually define ott. 50% of people believe OTT is “streaming video that appears on any screen (TV, Mobile, Desktop, Tablet) other than live TV. 48% of people believe OTT is “streaming video that appears on a TV screen other than live TV” At Conduit Digital, we believe the latter and have aligned ourselves with the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) by defining OTT as “Video content transported from a video provider to a connected device over the Internet outside the closed networks of telecom and cable providers.” To put it simply, we define OTT as Video content, delivered via a connected device, to the Television Screen We chose to include the Television screen in our definition as we believe this clarifies the value prop of OTT and focuses on it’s biggest strength… harnessing the power of the largest screen in the house! OTT Ads OTT advertising is an internet-based, non-skippable, immersive content format where advertising is delivered directly to viewers over the internet through streaming video services or devices, such as smart or connected TVs. OTT has the ability to run on multiple devices ranging from Smart TVs, gaming consoles, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV to Chromecast giving advertisers the ability to reach their target audience no matter where they consume content. But reaching your target audience is just half the battle, it is of the utmost importance to put a high-quality advertisement in front of your audience. To ensure your ad is quality make sure to include your brand’s logo and provide your ad in multiple different lengths to ensure you are not missing quality users because of inventory availability. Make sure to include the website and phone number of the business and have a clear message on what the product or service is you are promoting. When it comes to running on specific inventory, like Hulu, for example, it is also important to check if they have their own specific creative requirements.  This can often be the case, and could potentially be limiting your ads from serving even though they may not have any issue serving to open exchange inventory! Growth of OTT OTT has seen a tremendous amount of growth from its inception in the early 2010s. According to emarketer in 2017, there were 153M OTT subscribers 55.7% of internet users growing to 170.1M (60.8%) in 2018, and 181.5M (63.9%) in 2019. Growing over 18% from 2017 to 2019 and is expected to reach a market size value of $332.52 billion by 2025 (Allied Market Research). With more and more people “cutting the cord” and migrating away from traditional television OTT is leading the way to be the new norm for users to consume content. Users want to consume the content they want when they want and before OTT there wasn’t a viable option for them to do so until the emergence of OTT. With the growing costs of cable network bundles and the set lineup for content users are seeing more and more benefits to cutting the cord and controlling their own content. Backing this is the mass flooding of the OTT network from some of the largest entertainment companies in the world. According to TechRadar Netflix still leads the way as the top streaming service with 182.8 million subscribers, followed by Amazon Prime Video with an estimated 112 million subscribers in the US, Disney+  surpassing 50 million, Hulu with 30 million. We have already seen the likes of YouTube TV, HBO Now, Sling TV, Crunchyroll, Apple TV, and Crackle round out the top 10 streaming services. With the emergence of Comcast launching Peacock and others like Quibi and HBO Max already entering the market, there are more and more options for users to consume content. The Biggest Benefits of OTT Advertising With the emergence of OTT Advertising as a major digital marketing platform, you may be wondering to yourself, “What does it have to do with my agency?” There is an amazing opportunity for your agency to sell OTT Advertising. Here are some of the biggest benefits for your agency to sell OTT Advertising. Big Screen Viewing When users are enjoying the content they want via an OTT device they are most likely watching on the biggest screen they have in the house, their television. This is a substantial benefit to OTT advertising, usually, people are consuming content on their televisions with others. Giving your single impression multiple sets of eyeballs increases your brand’s exposure and ability to reach more unique users while influencing drive, recall, engagement, consideration, and influence purchasing behavior. Audience Targeting With OTT you have the unique ability to target audiences that have already shown an interest in your brand, products, and services that traditional television advertising just simply cannot provide. With the ability to target users based on their behaviors and interest it is almost guaranteed you are reaching your target audience every time your Ad is shown on the big screen. Brand Exposure When you use the full power of OTT to gain brand exposure your single commercial is most likely being viewed by multiple sets of eyeballs but you are only charged on a 1-to-1 rate. According to studies by IAB, OTT has an estimated 1.94 co-viewing rate compared to traditional linear TV with a 1.86 co-viewing rate. With OTT you get maximum brand exposure for your advertising dollars. Pairs Perfectly With Traditional TV Advertising Why not pair OTT with your traditional television advertising media plan? If you are running your commercials on traditional television and not on OTT platforms simultaneously then you are missing a huge audience that your traditional television ads could be missing. OTTs audience targeting capabilities and its power to maximize your brand’s exposure to those target audiences is a huge asset to any agency and it’s clients. Pairing OTT and its highly engaged audiences with traditional television advertising only helps create more brand exposure while increasing brand recognition and recall. Users on OTT platforms are more engaged with the content they are consuming rather than most watching traditional television and this is proven by OTT’s outstanding video completion rate (VCR) of 97% according to Forbes. This means users are not switching programs due to advertising they are sitting and engaging with these ads because they chose the content they wanted to consume making them more invested, pair that with traditional television advertising now when a user sees your ad again on traditional television you just created a connection through brand recall. Targeting Capabilities of OTT One of the biggest differences between Traditional Television and OTT is the targeting capabilities. Below, you can find all the ways OTT campaigns are able to target users and hone in on only the most relevant of audiences. With nearly 60% of Americans ‘cutting the cord’ and replacing traditional TV with OTT, finding ways to take advantage of all of these capabilities is becoming more important every day! Geographic Targeting Geographic targeting is one of the most advanced location-based advertising techniques for targeting users based on a specific and sought after geographic area. This offers you the ability to accurately geo-target potential customers across connected and streaming platforms. This enables you to capture your audience’s location within a country, media market, city, state, zip code, and/or radius requested. Streaming Service & TV Application Whitelists At Conduit Digital, our OTT team has put in countless hours finding the right Streaming Services and TV Applications to serve your client’s ads on. The team has identified over 1,000 domains to only serve where relevant audiences will see your clients’ ads while also driving great performance. These whitelists can be layered with other targeting tactics to combine for some really advanced targeting. Site Retargeting Is there a more ideal user to target than someone that has previously shown interest in your client by visiting their website? Did you know that 96% of users who visit a webpage will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale? Well, by utilizing Site Retargeting, OTT is able to serve ads to these users who have previously visited the client’s website! Email Retargeting Email Retargeting is a powerful way to reach an audience that is interested in your client’s industry! OTT campaigns have the ability to create custom audiences of users based on their subscriptions and newsletter emails they receive. Purchase Receipt Retargeting Just like Email Retargeting, Purchase Receipt targeting uses emails that users receive to build a custom audience. The difference, however, is these users have received receipts after purchasing something online. For example, if someone just received an email receipt for a dog collar, they could be categorized within a ‘dog owners’ audience. Search Behavioral Search Behavioral targeting allows for custom audience creation based on a list of keywords that are relevant to your client’s campaign. Behavioral targeting enables advertisers to combine the effectiveness of search with the brand impact and reach of OTT targeting. Point of Interest (Geo-Fencing) Point of Interest (POI) targeting, sometimes called Geo-Fencing, utilizes multiple data sources to pinpoint a user’s exact whereabouts, allowing clients to target competitors’ locations and other relevant physical locations where their target audience may frequently visit. POI targeting can also be coupled with foot traffic attribution, so your clients will know how many times someone visits their business after viewing an ad! At Conduit Digital, we found that users who were served one of our clients’ ads after visiting a brick and mortar location were about 3 times more likely to convert than those who visited the same targeted locations but were not served an ad! Demographic & Interest/Affinity OTT campaigns are able to reach users based on their demographic and psychographic affiliations utilizing first and third party data. In terms of demographics, your clients’ ads can be targeted towards people based on things like their age, gender, income, education, and marital status. This can be paired with the ability to target user’s interests, like coffee drinkers, fitness enthusiasts, and musical instrument buyers to really put the ads in front of the most relevant audiences! In-Market or Intent Intent targeting can be utilized to target users who have shown behaviors putting to them in-the-market to buy a specific product. This is a great opportunity to target users who may be searching on competitors’ websites or doing research on which specific brand they should spend their money on. Dayparting While it is important to always try to reach the right audience, it is just as important to reach that audience at the right time. With dayparting, your OTT campaign will have the capability to serve your clients’ ads during the time of day users are at their most engaged. Application Diversity The success of OTT as a revenue-generating platform for both content creators and advertisers has seen an explosion of OTT platforms. Here are a few of the OTT platforms that Conduit Digital has seen incredible success serving our clients’ ads on. PlutoTV Pluto TV is a FREE internet-based streaming service. Pluto TV has become one of the most popular OTT applications in the market with 22 million active users as of December 2019. Pluto TV generates revenue through OTT advertising in between programming, keeping their more than 250 channels free of charge making it a very popular option for cord-cutters and everyone alike. Xumo Xumo is a free live and on-demand streaming service with over 190 channels for users to consume their content of choice. Xumo reports having 5.5 million monthly active users watching popular channels such as NBC News Now, ABC News Live, Newsy, and Bloomberg TV. Tubi Tubi TV is a free, ad-supported streaming service, with advertisements shown during commercial breaks between programming. It is the largest independently-owned video service in the United States since Pluto TV’s acquisition by Viacom. As of June 2020, Tubi TV offers more than 20,000 films and TV series with deals from major content creators such as NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, and Warner Brothers. Tubi has over 25 million monthly active users watching 163 million hours in December 2019, up 160% year-over-year. Sling TV Sling TV is a subscription-based streaming service with advertisements shown in between programming. Since Sling’s debut in February 2015, it has 2.59 million users in the United States with over 50 networks such as ESPN, TNT, and AMC available. Hulu Hulu, which was recently acquired by the Walt Disney Company, is a subscription-based OTT streaming service, providing live television programs as well as on-demand. In the second quarter of 2020, The Walt Disney Company reported that Hulu had 32.1 million paid subscribers, up from 25.2 million in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal year. Hulu offers upwards of 60 live channels as well as their full library of content. AT&T tv Now AT&T tv Now, formerly Directv Now, is a family of streaming multichannel television services offered in the United States by AT&T. With over 1 million subscribers, providing a range of over 60 channels for users to consume their content of choice showing advertisements in between programming. Learn Why OTT Is The Perfect Extension Of Traditional TV Advertising Reporting Capabilities Over-the-Top Television is a top-of-the-funnel product and specializes in creating brand awareness. Measuring the total reach for an OTT campaign is not an easy task, but there are multiple ways to report on the full performance of a campaign. Transparency is key here, as you will want to see all the nitty-gritty metrics and everything your ad dollars have paid for! Important OTT Reporting Metrics The first thing that should be on every report would have to be exactly what your money is paying for: impressions and completed views. Please note, these two things are not the same thing. The number of impressions is exactly how many times your ad was served to a consumer. A completed view is exactly what it sounds like: how many times an impression was watched to completion. From these two metrics, your report should calculate the most important OTT KPI: video completion rate, or VCR. VCR is square one for understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of your [OTT] campaign. VCR is a measurement of the rate at which your digital video impressions play to 100%. By reporting on the percentage of impressions that were watched all the way to the end, you will be able to get a good idea of exactly how much reach or brand awareness your OTT campaign has resulted in. “High VCRs result in more time spent with your message and a lower cost-per-view.” Hyper-Targeted Audiences On top of the overall campaign performance, it is important to also have specific targeting level metrics. OTT has a variety of ways to target different audiences, so it is important to see how many impressions might be allocated to targeting a certain demographic or to see the VCR driven by targeting users who are in-market for your client’s industry. Another important thing to be included in all OTT reporting is a list of domains that your ads are serving. This list will allow you to see all the different streaming services or tv applications that are serving ads for your campaign. This should also include the number of impressions as well as the VCR by domain. The domain list is extremely important to know as it is very easy to serve impressions to pre-roll inventory instead of OTT, which is a completely different way to serve ads. A pure CTV OTT campaign should produce a VCR of at least 90%, so if your campaign is lower, take a look at what domains it is serving on. What To See. What NOT To See While it’s important to know what you should be seeing in your OTT reports, it is also important to know what you shouldn’t. If you are running an OTT campaign that is driving clicks, you may be spending money on something that you didn’t want. OTT ads are not clickable, so any amount of clicks means your ads have been serving on non-OTT inventory. Some OTT reporting will include the device types that your campaign has been serving on. This could include CTV, desktop, mobile, or tablet. Again, as stated earlier, OTT is simply described as ‘video content, delivered via a connected device, to the Television Screen.’ If your reporting includes impressions served to different devices, make sure the majority is spent on CTV. People watching OTT on CTV are much more engaged and drive a higher VCR. Also, a high impression share on the other devices could mean your OTT campaign is a blend of OTT and pre-roll. Lastly, but certainly not least, OTT reporting should always include daily impression delivery, as well as hourly delivery. It is important to see that your campaign is not taking any days off. A well-oiled OTT campaign should be delivering a steady number of impressions each day, while also avoiding times where users are likely to be less engaged. By utilizing dayparting, your OTT campaign should avoid certain times of the day, like between midnight and 6 am. This will help your campaign avoid serving to users who have fallen asleep. Why Should My Agency Sell OTT Advertising? Why Would My Client Buy It? OTT, CTV, and Internet TV are popular buzzwords in the digital advertising world, and rightfully so. Based on the significant video advertising shift towards OTT Television, agencies are missing more than just the boat if they are not including it within their product suite. At Conduit Digital we like to call it “Tra-Digital” because OTT is the perfect extension of traditional advertising but with the power of digital targeting. The explosion of 170 million OTT users was led by streaming on Smart TVs and devices like Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast, and Apple TV that allow them to access television content for free through the internet. Powerful OTT applications like Pluto TV, ABC News, Sling TV, ESPN, and NFL allow viewers more live TV and on-demand content than they can possibly consume. When it comes to brand awareness, OTT is king. CTV delivers commercials with an average Video Completion Rate of more than 90% and those ads are non-skippable! High video completion rates mean high engagement and relevance. Here are our Top 4 reasons to add OTT and CTV to your digital advertising lineup and why your clients would be smart to utilize it: 1.  Large-Screen Advertising Connected TV advertisers are able to target the largest screen by household giving advertisers the capability of targeting audiences with a great likelihood of reaching multiple viewers at once when factoring in co-viewing. According to IAB, most platforms are watched with others, with a rate of ~65% watching together as opposed to only ~35% watching alone, with up to 76% of OTT users watching with other people! 2. Superior Targeting Capabilities Whether it’s targeting users based on their online behaviors, demographics, or physical location, there is no doubt that targeting your specific audience is much easier than traditional TV. As explained in the Targeting Capabilities section, there are multiple ways to find potential customers on the internet and serve them an ad at the right time. 3. Live and Dynamic Reporting Be transparent with your clients. Conduit campaigns come with advanced reporting capabilities giving agencies and advertisers data on delivery by day, application by keywords and helps to inform other marketing plans. VCR and Domain transparency allows clients to see the percentage of their commercials that are being watched from start to finish and what streaming services or TV apps their ads are served on. CTV advertising offers an industry VCR rate of more than 90% and is exceptional for advertisers looking to improve brand awareness and reach. 4. Fast Growing Audiences In 2019 IAB reported there are now over 97 million homes that have a CTV, equating to over 75% of all homes in the USA, surpassing cable TV households (89 million). A study by Roku shows that 31% of the US population are cord-cutters or cord-nevers. With this, Roku predicts that this number could double to a total of 60 million households by 2024. They also explain that 82% of cord-cutters are happy with their decision to cut the cord in favor of streaming services and OTT providers. People are very quickly realizing that OTT is the future of the television space, and it is important for the advertisers to follow! Learn How OTT Is Going To Skyrocket With The Roll Out of 5G OTT Trends OTT advertising is the fastest growing digital marketing product. In fact, the data suggests that it will only keep growing. Here are some important trends currently happening in Over-the-Top marketing: 61% of Americans own a Smart TV (or CTV) 52% of Americans use OTT services For viewers between the ages of 18-34, OTT usage is over 65% The average OTT customer owns up to three OTT devices they can use to watch OTT content and subscribe to different services People spend more time watching OTT content than they do driving a car or talking to friends and family As OTT services gain more and more popularity, this presents grim news for cable, satellite, and broadcast providers/advertisers. Cord-cutting millenials are supplanting aging baby-boomers as the primary consumer target. In fact: Millennials who subscribe to at least one OTT service watch more than twice as much OTT content as they do live TV. The top content that people want is movies, followed by scripted TV shows. Live news and sports, thought to be the killer app keeping broadcast and cable alive, rank #3 and #4 respectively across all demographics. Fewer than 40% of Millenial OTT users plan to keep their cable package. The amount of cord-cutters is rising exponentially. Nearly ⅔ of cord-cutters are more like “cord burners;” they say that cutting cable has noticeably improved their life and there is nothing a cable company can do to lure them back into having a bundle. It is no lie that OTT audiences are growing at an awesome rate, however, some people may argue that most of these users just subscribe to Netflix and never even see any ads. According to IAB, 73% of adults 18+ who typically watch streaming video say they watch ad-supported OTT video, AND on top of that 45% of adults 18+ who typically watch streaming video say they watch ad-supported OTT video MOST out of streaming videos. So while Netflix may be king at the moment, people are still watching ad-supported OTT. How A White Label OTT Advertising Partner Can Help Your Agency Make More Money From rapid audience growth to enhanced targeting capabilities, OTT is a raw, but still very powerful brand awareness generator. People seem to be flocking to different streaming platforms to catch the latest binge-worthy series, while also showing great engagement with the ads presented in front of them. As the user base moves from traditional TV towards a more modern OTT-filled solution, will your clients be more progressive and start reaching an audience that has proven to show effectiveness? If you have decided that white-labeling your OTT advertising services is right for your agency, it is important to understand what to look for in a white label partner. Ultimately, the agency you choose to provide you with white-label digital services has to align with your vision and goals for your company. With a vast sea of potential partners on the market, which white-label provider is right for you? Conclusion In an ever-changing world, OTT has shown to be no different. From rapid audience growth to enhanced targeting capabilities, OTT is a raw, but still very powerful brand awareness generator. People seem to be flocking to different streaming platforms to catch the latest binge-worthy series, while also showing great engagement with the ads presented in front of them. As the user base moves from traditional TV towards a more modern OTT-filled solution, will your clients be more progressive and start reaching an audience that has proven to show effectiveness?

May 31, 2023 Come July 1, 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will supersede Universal Analytics (UA) as the standard analytics platform offered by Google. UA will disappear shortly after, and with it, valuable data that many marketers have relied on for previous campaigns. That is unless you take the steps now to prepare for the migration. To prepare for GA4’s arrival, we are going to cover exactly what you need to know to ensure a smooth migration. First, let’s talk about why the best day to implement GA4 was yesterday but today is a very close second. Why is It Important to Activate GA4 ASAP? GA4 does not have historical data. Therefore, this should be treated as a fresh start or a much-needed refresher for accounts. Your insight and analysis are only as good as the data you have. Ensuring your data is clean, tangible, and functional is crucial. For some accounts, the UA property has been set up for years. It has seen many iterations of changes from new websites, new marketing channels, and revised priorities and goals - some of which are no longer relevant. Think about it. If you moved into a brand new home, would you take the bag of slimy lettuce from the back of your fridge that you swore up and down you’d make a salad out of a month ago to your new home? We’re hoping you’re shaking your head no. So treat your new GA4 property in the same way and clean up your events! While UA accounts will eventually disappear, there is still time to configure your migration. To help marketers currently using UA, Google has offered an automatic migration to allow current accounts to maintain data continuity. However, it’s not a perfect science, and Google even recommends that you configure your GA4 account manually. Opt Out of Automatic Migration To ensure that you can maintain a continuous level of measurement prior to the July 1st deadline, Google has been automatically opting IN all accounts by default to be automatically migrated to GA4. This would copy over applicable Universal Analytics configurations unless you opt out of this service. Google themselves strongly recommends not relying on this auto-migration, but rather configuring your GA4 manually. The two primary reasons for this being: Not all UA configurations have obvious GA4 counterparts The automated process may not make the same choices you would - causing things to get missed, removed, or no longer be relevant. If you have already created a GA4 property, the auto-migration will copy over any configurations from UA that you have not marked as ‘completed’ in your GA4 Setup Assistant panel, unless you opt out. If you opt out, the toggle in UA should be gray to the left. You are opted in if your toggle is blue to the right. If it is gray to the right, that means you do not have the permission to edit this setting. Important Reminder: Auto Migration is done at the property level. Meaning, if you have multiple properties within your UA Account, you will need to opt OUT of every applicable property you do NOT want migrated. What if I didn’t opt out in time? Google has already begun creating these automatic GA4 properties for those that are opted IN. An easy way to tell if this has been done for you is if you see this red header in your GA4 property. If you want to manually configure your GA4 settings OR Google automatically created a property you did not want to migrate, follow these steps: 1. In your UA property, click Admin (lower left) 2. In the Property (middle) column, click GA4 Setup Assistant. 3. Under Connected Property, click Disconnect 4. Navigate to the GA4 property that was disconnected, click Admin (lower left) 5. Under Property, navigate to Property Settings (second option) 6. Select Move to Trash Can in the upper right a. Note: you cannot delete this GA4 property if it is still connected to UA. You must disconnect the properties first b. Also, be sure you are deleting the property not the account. 7. Confirm. Do I Still Need to Opt Out if I Already Created a GA4 Account? This will depend per account. Some accounts will prefer to manually configure all settings - in this case you will still want to opt OUT in UA. If you are looking for some, but not all configutations to be automatically copied over, you will want to continue to be opted IN and follow these steps: In your GA4 property, navigate to Admin (lower left) In the Property (middle) column, click GA4 Setup Assistant. It's the first option. Mark the configurations that you don’t want copied over as complete Click the arrow to the right of the configuration Mark as Complete Repeat step 3 as necessary for each configuration If you have created your GA4 account already and want some configurations are auto-migrated, be sure the two accounts are linked. You can do this by Navigating to the UA property, under Admin > Property Settings > GA4 Setup Assistant In the I want to connect to an existing Google Analytics 4 property section, select the Google Analytics 4 property that maps to your Universal Analytics property. Click Connect properties. All information regarding how this auto-migration process works can be found here. Please note, it is recommended to manually configure your GA4 property. There’s Still Time to Beat the GA4 Clock - Let’s Get to Work! When you’re in the middle of navigating the neverending chaos that comes with every digital channel always seeming to update their platforms at once, it can be tough to know the right direction to take. With the timed sunsetting of UA, the urgency only magnifies. Instead of waiting for the inevitable, take charge of your clients’ data destiny and set them up the right way before July 1. To ensure a smooth transition, you can also ask your partner for help. For you, we may be that partner. At Conduit Digital, we serve as the elite white label digital ad operations solution for established and successful local ad agencies in North America. Lean on our team of Google Analytics experts to assist you in navigating to GA4 while also setting up your client’s organic and paid digital campaigns to reach new levels of performance you never thought possible before. To learn more about how we can assist your agency, schedule a quick call with us today.

Nov 11, 2022 During this year’s Web Summit in Portugal, advertising icon Martin Sorrell predicted that 2023 will prove a difficult year for advertisers and marketers. With many global events affecting international economic relations and tech giants like Meta experiencing financial downturns in late 2022, the evidence can create some white-knuckle stress for agencies. While we are not in the business of financial or political sector commentary, it can’t be ignored that happenings in these spaces can affect clients’ businesses which, in turn, affects your agency. In a period that could create a recession or have consumers holding onto more of their money instead of spending it, agency leaders need to discover new strategies to communicate their immense value to their local markets. Thankfully, Sorrell didn’t just finish his talk by saying that 2023 appears challenging for advertisers and marketers. He also followed up with some suggestions for navigating what might become a trying twelve months ahead. Advertising Strategies for 2023 Speaking to AdWeek at Web Summit, Sorrell said that the path forward in times of recession is focusing on performance, activation, measurement, media mix, and return on investment. How can we translate these pillars to an agency’s day-to-day operations, though? Let’s break them down one by one. Performance Transparent proof of performance is essential for agencies to build their reputation, continue landing new accounts, expand existing ones, and ultimately scale. When you can provide your client with tangible evidence of results from their investment in your services, that increases their confidence in their decision to partner with you in growing their own business. If a client is feeling the financial strain of a recession, they will likely not be willing to spend on digital campaigns that are not producing results that help them generate more revenue. Keeping this in mind, agencies must provide hard data that explains how their campaigns are benefitting the client’s business as well as contextual insights to explain the why behind it. Measurement Measurement involves tracking the right metrics to gauge a campaign’s performance by assigning the appropriate value to them. Once your team has outlined the goals for the campaign, are you gathering all of the proper data? Beyond your client’s stated advertising goals, think of any that might also add value to their campaign. Present them to the client, communicate any potential budget adjustments they might require, and determine if they are doable or if they should be the focus of a separate campaign in the future. Performance and measurement represent two different sides of one coin. For a campaign to best perform, the right metrics need to be collected and carefully analyzed. With this information in hand, you can make more informed decisions on future optimizations, adjustments, and strategic pivots to work toward your client’s goals. Activation Activation refers to marketing a business’s product, service, or brand to a target audience. In the traditional sense, this could take the form of an in-store event or an appearance at an industry trade show. Since digital does not involve an in-person element other than the audience member physically using the device the ad was served on, how can you incorporate activation into a digital campaign? With a digital campaign, you can track a wide range of offline behaviors that can be measured to gauge campaign performance. For example, with Google Ads and Analytics, offline conversions can be tracked if someone had visited your client’s store within a certain period of time after viewing an ad. The digital promotion they received inspired that individual to visit the store in person. For digital activation to succeed, the audience member must interact with your client’s business as a result of experiencing the ad. Beyond in-store visits, other ways to reach them can also include conversion-optimized landing pages, surveys, contact form fills, and other similar actions that require manual input. Media Mix A media mix strategy combines all of the possible digital and traditional channels that someone could reach your client’s business and engage with them further. Offering a single service or a narrow range of solutions will limit their reach to desirable audiences and also create a gap in offerings between your agency and local competitors. Campaigns that adopt a holistic approach to digital advertising and marketing can capture a greater share of qualified audiences. For example, if your client is an online outdoor sporting goods retailer that wants to promote a special on fishing rods, you could reach a wide range of potential shoppers with a media mix strategy that includes: Paid search – to insert shopping ads directly Google search results for users that have indicated an interest in fishing by their online behavior. SEO – to drive qualified organic traffic to content on the client’s websites consisting of users that want to know more about fishing and fishing gear. Paid social – to inject an in-app shoppable ad into a qualified user’s feed that showcases the fishing gear that your client is offering a promotion for. Programmatic advertising – to insert dynamic image and video ads directly in front of viewers while they’re consuming their favorite content related to fishing or outdoor recreation. Organic social content – to engage with the store’s followers that want to stay up to date on the latest releases and learn more about fishing gear. All of these channels can then direct users to your client’s website where they can quickly browse and purchase products that interest them. If one of these were omitted, an entire customer base could remain unaware of the incredible discount your client is offering. Return On Investment Lastly, but far from least important, ROI matters for clients who are investing hard-earned revenue back into their digital campaigns. Are they earning more than they’ve spent on your services? Reporting provides the transparent performance data needed to gauge whether a campaign is performing exceedingly well, as expected, or underperforming. If the results are underdelivering from an ROI perspective, this can create a productive discussion with the client where you could introduce a new strategy, revisit one that may have been previously rejected, or optimize the current campaign further to move users further along the conversion path. Putting it All Together Now that you know Martin Sorrell’s pillars for marketing in 2023, how can you achieve them at your own agency? Many agencies today are still experiencing many of the same struggles that they did in 2019 when the world hit pause. From hiring and retaining qualified talent to expanding services and developing new business, it can seem difficult to hit all of these five pillars simultaneously without at least one of them on the back burner more than the others. To distill everything above into a few simple takeaways, here are some principles to keep in mind when strategizing for the year ahead: 1. Double down on performance for your clients and prove it with reporting 2. Make sure you are tracking the right metrics that are necessary to support performance 3. Prioritize the ad experience for your campaigns and optimize them to encourage conversions from audiences 4. Offer the most complete suite of services possible to attract new clients and retain and expand existing ones 5. Prioritize ROI and/or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) as the chief goal for your client’s campaigns If you are concerned about how your agency can hit these objectives in 2023, it may be time to consider joining forces with a performance partner. At Conduit Digital, we partner exclusively with successful and established agencies throughout North America to equip them with a full suite of digital marketing services managed 100% in the U.S. by a team of certified expert analysts. We bring the performance, hands-on implementation, industry best practices, and 24/7 live reports that you need to stabilize your internal operations and say “yes” to better opportunities with confidence. To learn more about what a Conduit Partnership looks like, schedule a 20-minute call today.

Jun 19, 2020 If you are sharing content across social media on behalf of a business and pinning your success on whether you go viral and not on social media ROI, chances are you will be deeply disappointed. Asking clients to invest in time-consuming creative and expensive videos is not a responsible request unless you have a clear plan for how to connect that creative with the right audience and convert their interest into results. You can balance campaigns that are focused on new customer acquisition by infusing creative into the mix that invites prospects further down the funnel and elevates conversion rates. By expanding your scope beyond brand awareness campaigns, you can also increase your agency billings with creative that is more directly attached to results. What Is the ROI of Social Media? ROI stands for “return on investment” and is key to securing buy-in and budget for your social media strategy. Using this will allow you to know whats working and whats not, in order to shift your focus and better allocate resources to what is. In general, social media ROI refers to the sum of all of social media actions that generate value. Its important to know the ROI of your social campaign because if you don’t measure the success of your actions, you wont know whats working. How is Social Media ROI Calculated? Learning how to calculate ROI can open many doors for you and your agency. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great for building your business’s online presence but lack the capabilities for measuring actions, costs and results. Before you calculate ROI, you need to know your campaign goals and KPI’s. Knowing what your goals are will help you focus on what you want to measure. Once we know what the client’s goals are, how do you measure ROI? If you were measuring ROI by revenue, for example, you could use this simple formula: Revenue/Investment(work hours, ad budget, etc) X 100= social media ROI (represented as a percentage). So, if you made $1,000 in revenue from social media on a $500 investment, your profit is $500 (remember: profit = revenue – investment). And then your calculation would be: $500 profit / $500 investment X 100 = 100% return on your investment. There isn’t one set formula when calculating return on investment, so you can use these other common social ROI formulas for your agency. So now that you know how to calculate ROI for your social media campaigns, how to you make sure to deliver on those campaigns? Although there is no cookie-cutter template for social success, below are tactics our social media team executes when creating a complete social strategy. These tips will help you create a campaign that is measurable and delivers a return on investment for your clients. Personalized Retargeting The easiest people to convert into a sale are those that have already expressed an interest. With retargeting ads, you can reach people that visited specific pages on a website and invite them back to learn more or to complete a purchase. If you are investing in expensive paid search ads or utilizing programmatic to generate traffic, you can elevate conversions for those campaigns by directing personalized retargeting ads to consumers across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. These relevant social ads can invite consumers back to your website to generate a lead or complete a sale. For those that are running TV buys, which will either spike your Google searches or drive more direct traffic to your website, you can create content that invites people back to buy after they do their initial research. With the ability to segment retargeting ads and create social experiences that are tailored to specific age groups, genders, interests or other attributes, you can deliver personalized remarketing ads that are unique to every service or product that a consumer looked at on a website. Since these retargeting creatives can pay off dividends every day throughout the year, you can justify the increased creative costs by delivering results whenever a new customer is ready to buy. Custom Audiences Are King Facebook advertising is unbelievably powerful. One of the best tactics to consider building creative campaigns around is Custom Audiences. If you have a database of leads that have been generated, warranty registrations, email lists, or a CRM full of people that have already made a purchase, you can deliver tailored ads to those audiences. Since most social media services require an email and phone number to sign up, the lists you have can be matched with an account so that you can deliver a custom ad. By running social media targeting ads to people that have already expressed an interest by filling out a lead form or have already bought before, you can drive more sales for your clients. With micro creative campaigns that are personalized to specific lists and segments within, you can drive more repeat business and convert leads into transactions. You can also utilize Custom Audiences with Facebook to retarget people that watched your video or engaged with your content, which opens up endless opportunities to build upon your brand awareness campaigns. If you start off your social campaign with a shiny new commercial, you can follow-up with a sequence of ads that further educate consumers on your offering and guide them toward taking action. You can also narrow the focus to target people that watched all of the video, as well as apply layers of demographic and psychographic data to narrow your focus to those most likely to buy. If you find that women, age 18-24, have a higher rate of conversion, you can narrow your focus to people that watched your video and fall into that demographic bracket. Social advertising is profoundly powerful by itself, and when combined with first-party data you can unlock unparalleled opportunities to deliver personalized advertising experiences. Lookalike Audiences Existing customers have unique attributes that extend far beyond age groups, genders, and generic interests. By tapping into Lookalike Audiences, which is one of the best advertising tactics to deploy across Facebook and Instagram, you can reach people that are similar to your followers. With algorithms and machine learning mechanisms that are able to dive deep into the unique interests and behaviors of an existing clientele, these platforms can gain a deep understanding of what makes this audience unique and find people that act in a similar fashion. Which audience you decide to replicate is also important. You might not want to simply reach people that are similar to your followers, you might want to reach people that are similar to people that have actually bought from you before. By combining Lookalike Audiences with Custom Audiences, you can reach those that are just like your customers. Focusing on the people that are most likely to buy will help expand the scope of success with your social campaign. Always Be Iterating With Split Testing Many creative shops bill by the deliverable or by the hour, whether that be banners created or videos produced, and split testing is the greatest thing that happened for many creatives. With social advertising campaigns, the most important thing you can do is create multiple versions of the same ad in order to enhance performance. Unlike TV where you just have one spot and hope it works out, with social advertising you can test different images, various videos, and sets of conversion-oriented copy to see which ones inspire the highest conversion rates. Although your instincts will likely be correct as to which one will drive the best results, you can add scientific methods of testing to confirm those suspicions with real audiences. By testing your campaigns to see which creatives yield the best results, you can see what works and optimize your efforts to deliver the best results possible for your clients. Maximize Your Social Return With the unlimited possibilities available today within the social media ecosystem, the need for a large quantity of high-quality creative is only increasing. When you no longer have to worry about producing creative that speaks to everyone, you can focus on designing personalized brand experiences that speak to the individual. By implementing advanced targeting, retargeting, Custom Audiences, and constantly refining your approach, you can prove that your creative delivers measurable social media ROI.

Jun 25, 2020 When you think of social media, what you use it for, and what it was originally intended for, what comes to mind? I bet it isn’t advertising (although, some would argue that is exactly what it was intended for)… It is most likely social media engagement, meaningful connections, and people. That is, after all, why it’s called “social” media. While engagement is important for many people on social media, is it the same for agencies trying to deliver on a client’s campaign? As advertisers, should we measure the success of a campaign based solely on the engagement our ads receive? What Is Considered Engagement On Social Media? Social media engagement can be classified as measuring the amount of public likes, comments and reactions a post receives. Engagement has long been measured as a metric used to determine a campaigns performance. As we progress further into the digital age, the way we look at metrics and campaign performance changes. Now, many advertisers do not use engagement as a metric for success because the amount of likes a post receives does not directly correlate to the number of sales. With that being said, should you even focus on the engagement levels your post receives? How Important is Engagement on Social Media? No matter what the goal of your campaign is, engagement will always be important, just not necessarily in the way you may think. Its an inescapable truth that consumers are paying attention to their social media accounts for as long as 2 hours a day. Social media is more than just the number of likes you have on your Facebook page, although it does play into how your brand will be perceived by other online. Having social media accounts offers social proof that your brand exists and is legitimate. If someone visits your page and sees high number of followers, likes and comments, thats the same validation to a consumer that a celebrity endorsement would make. Social Media engagement also offers more of a marketing reach with fewer dollars. Just think of a recent video you saw online that amassed a bunch of views. Some videos receive millions of views at a time and for advertisers, reaching that large of an audience would be very costly. But thanks to social media, you can increase brand awareness fairly easily and for a relatively cheap price depending on the content. If just one person shares it, it can reach everyone in their network, and if someone in that network shares it, it continues to spread. Social Advertising Is Evolving As social has evolved, brands have discovered the infinite possibilities it offers. The brands that excel at social media understand that, yes while it is essential for advertising, it is also a channel for two-way communication. A direct outlet to connect first hand with customers, while providing an opportunity to humanize their brand. Research shows that customers prefer social care as their top choice for customer care. If they are unhappy about something, they can tweet at or message you right away. If they are ecstatic about something, they can rave about your product/service to their friends and family. Conversely, if a brand is not there to catch a complaint and resolve it, a consumer can drag their good name through the mud, we see this all the time, especially in the service industry (hello Facebook township groups!) How Engagement Helps Brands By engaging with customers on social, brands can listen to what their target audience is saying straight from the source. What are their needs, wants, and interests? How can they help solve their consumers’ problems, or how can they improve their service or products? So why do brands, on average, take 10 hours to respond to a customer when they complain on social media? “As soon as customers decide to engage with your business on social media, they’re essentially putting trust into your brand to solve their problem.” By not engaging, you’re not only telling your audience that you’re not present, but that you don’t want to provide additional avenues for communication. Why Some Advertisers Are Against Engagement On the other side of this conversation, industry leaders, and Facebook itself argue that engagement has practically zero correlation to ROI and business objectives. There are many reasons for this, but the one that consistently comes to my mind is that not everyone who is on social, reading content and scrolling, is engaging with the material. Regardless if the social media content was targeted and personalized for that specific audience, some people do not engage with content as much as you would hope. I like to call them lurkers, but that is probably not the politically correct term. Social media engagement should not be the only metric used to determine the success of your campaign. If you really want to increase your social media ROI, there are a few others ways to do so. Mark Schaefer puts it plain and simple in his blog Social Media Engagement is a Lousy Metric, “To be clear, nearly everyone who hires me is a fan of some form of my content — this blog, The Marketing Companion podcast, my marketing books. But almost no one has ever engaged with me on social media. The strangers are the ones who are sending me the paychecks.” What this statement tells us, is that engagement, while not a business strategy by itself, can be a very important piece of the puzzle in the big picture. As marketers, we should be trying all efforts to boost our overall business goals, engagement included! How can social engagement contribute to our success? Some examples of goals that engagement can aid are; customer or client acquisition, brand awareness, recruiting, and B2B relationship development. Thinking of Engagement Objectively If we think of engagement in terms of our objective, it can help us hone in on where we put our efforts. Liking, commenting on, and responding to every single engagement can be daunting. Knowing which interaction would be most valuable to the big picture can give a clearer vision, as well as save us from wasting resources, time and money. Have a game plan. Which type of actions and comments would be the most valuable to your business? Some things to consider when you begin to build an engagement plan are: Where are you seeing the most engagement? On which platforms? You need to be where your audience is, not where you want them to be. Be real with the amount of time and level of engagement your business can sustain. If you are doing it on your own, how much time in your day can be spent engaging before it hinders your real work? What is your industry, how conversational are you, and how would that affect how much time is spent engaging? Will you need to hire someone, or will you have a dedicated time block each day? For example, if you are a ski resort, you probably have a ton of engagement. As opposed to a personal injury lawyer who may not have as much social engagement for obvious reasons. The debate is hot and clients are consistently inquiring how likes, comments, and shares relate to their business. What are your thoughts on social media engagement? Are we wasting our time on engagement or missing out on tremendous opportunities?

Aug 22, 2023 In the agency world, there are few worse feelings than hitting a plateau or having to tell a client “no” when they ask for specific services, but your current scope is holding you back from fulfilling them. As we’ve said many times before in previous articles, if you cannot offer a digital marketing service that your client is asking for, chances are another agency can and will. After reading that, you might think, “I’d love to offer every agency service under the sun, but there’s just not enough talent or resources in my market to make it happen.” That’s fair, and it’s not an uncommon issue that we discuss in the hundreds of conversations with agency leaders that we talk to each year. Frankly, as difficult as it can be to find the right clients, it can be similarly challenging to hire the right talent or access the necessary resources to provide a service that your client keeps mentioning at their last few account check-in calls with your team. This boils down to two major obstacles that your agency might be facing when it comes to the scope of marketing services you can offer to your clients: lack of capabilities and inexperience. So, how can you overcome these without overstretching your in-house resources? There are three possible paths forward, and we’ll break them down for you in a good, better, best format so you can decide which one makes the most sense for your agency. Good: A Software Platform Look online and you’ll find no shortage of software companies claiming that their solutions are what your agency needs to elevate your client services to the next level. Some of them are handy in a pinch, and they offer a wide range of capabilities. As much promise as a platform might offer, they do not come without their drawbacks. Platforms could be limited in their own scope of marketing capabilities, and they do often require some pre-existing expertise in a specific area to maximize their value. Without that expert overseeing the use of the platform, are you also able to guarantee the quality of its work? While it might seem like an opportunity to scale your service offerings, trusting in software alone can also create massive risk when it comes to delivering something of quality that your client will be satisfied with. For example, if you’re using a generative AI tool like ChatGPT to tackle your content marketing, can you be confident in what it’s producing if you do not already have a skilled copywriter on hand to quality-check its work? Platforms are best utilized when an expert is using them, which can become a challenge if you’re lacking that expertise in-house. Learn More: How to Use AI Content Generation Better: A Vendor In the scope of marketing, a vendor is someone who provides a third-party service for your agency in exchange for a fee. Oftentimes, these individuals possess expertise in a single channel and will deliver a specific set of services. Look at a platform like Fiverr. These are filled with vendors offering to provide you with a specific lists of tasks in exchange for their listed price. Vendors may be a suitable alternative to an in-house hire, as it will not necessarily matter where they are located. You will not have to go through the same hiring process and you will not have to furnish any costs beyond what is mutually agreed upon. However, vendor costs can add up, and if you’re using multiple vendors for multiple channels, stabilizing these expenses and unifying your strategy becomes more difficult. It’s like constantly trying to catch multiple fish with your bare hands instead of using a net. Lastly, vendor quality can be tricky to gauge. A vendor is only obligated to fulfill the specific terms of their work agreement with you. If you need additional support or services, this could result in more expenses that can quickly eat at your margins. When you’re looking for help, you’re looking for someone to assist you in maintaining your profitability, not threatening it. Best: A White Label Partner In the context of digital marketing, a white label partner refers to an agency that provides a holistic suite of services to another agency. Essentially, it’s like hiring another ad operations team to support your own, adding your own markup to their services, and keeping everything under your own brand. Partnership contrasts with using a software platform or single-channel vendor, where the services are typically more specialized and might not be as easily rebranded or integrated into a broader service offering. Here are some reasons why hiring a white label digital marketing partner might be considered better for your agency’s scope challenges: Comprehensive Service Offering: White label partners typically offer a range of digital marketing services like SEO, paid search, paid social, and programmatic advertising. This allows agencies to provide full-service solutions to their clients without needing to specialize in each area themselves. Cost-Effectiveness: Developing expertise in every aspect of digital marketing would be time-consuming and expensive for a local ad agency. By outsourcing these services to a white label partner, you can offer these services without having to invest in the hiring and development of in-house expertise. Customization and Flexibility: White label services can be tailored to fit the specific needs and branding of your clients. This level of customization might be harder to achieve with a specialized software platform or single-channel vendor. Quality Assurance: White label partners often have expertise in various aspects of digital marketing and can provide quality assurance on the services offered. This can enhance your agency’s reputation and ability to establish credibility with your clients. Time to Market: Partnering with a white label provider enables quicker delivery of comprehensive solutions, since your agency doesn't have to develop each service from scratch. This is especially valuable if you to quickly meet the varied demands of different clients. Scalability: White label providers are usually equipped to handle a range of client sizes and needs, allowing you to scale offerings up or down based on demand without significant adjustments to your own processes or infrastructure. Consistency: Using a single white label partner for various services ensures a uniform approach and quality across different channels and strategies. This might be harder to achieve when working with different single-channel vendors or specialized software platforms. Client Relationships: By outsourcing to a white label partner, you can focus more on building and maintaining relationships with clients, understanding their needs, and acting as a strategic partner rather than being bogged down with the technical details of implementation. Competitive Edge: Offering a wide range of services under one umbrella can give your agency a competitive edge in you market. It allows you to be a one-stop-shop for your clients, increasing client retention and attracting new business. When you compare the three options we’ve outlined, there really is no question that a white label partner is the best solution for any agency that needs to scale but feels impeded by scope. Upon activating your partnership, your agency becomes truly unleashed to deliver at a higher level and land and expand new business - all backed by the confidence that there are experts ready to deliver on your campaigns for your clients. How to Find the Right White Label Partner for Your Agency Not all white label digital marketing partners are the same, and you shouldn’t automatically join forces with the first one you encounter. Take the time to vet a few different white label digital marketing agencies to determine which one fits best with your existing operations. As you’re considering your options here are some factors to keep in mind: Can the partner meet your needs? Clarify what services you want to offer, the target markets, budget constraints, and any specific technology or skill requirements. Does the partner have the expertise and experience you’re looking for? Ask to speak with members of their team that specialize in services you’re interested in, look at their case studies, and request a demo with them to learn as much as you can about their capabilities. Where does the partner source their work? Is their work offshored or outsourced to another provider after you sign with them? Is the partner compatible with your brand? Consider whether the partner's style, culture, and approach align with your brand values and the way you want to work. How do they communicate? Communication matters as much as performance. Ask them about how they handle communication between their team and your agency. Can they maintain confidentiality? You may not want to have your partnership disclosed. Ask them what steps they take to maintain confidentiality and if they’re willing sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) if you want an extra layer of assurance. Are they scalable? Consider whether the partner can scale their services up or down to match your growth and adapt to changes in demand. Can I afford their work? Ask them for a quote or estimate for how much their partnership would cost you to maintain to determine whether it’s the right fit for your agency. These questions are examples of ones you can use to gauge the right white label for your agency. You can also develop questions that relate directly to your specific business model to determine if the potential partner is the right fit from a process, tech, or performance standpoint to determine whether or not you want to move forward. Learn More: 5 Signs Your Agency is Ready for Partnership Work with the Elite White Label Partner for North American Agencies At Conduit Digital, we’re the proud partner of some of the highest-performing ad agencies in all of North America. With 17 channels provided to your agency through a single solution, all implemented 100% in the U.S., you can confidently say “yes” to better opportunities without worrying about limitations on in-house scope or expertise. To learn more about how you can overcome scope challenges at your agency with a Conduit Agency Partnership, let’s talk.

Limiting your agency’s services might seem like a way to hone expertise, but it can severely impact client retention. While many agencies believe specialization is their strength, and it very well could be, it can also push some clients away. If you’re leading an agency and find your client list thinning or stagnating, it's time to reassess. A restricted scope can be a major weakness. Today, we’ll be diving into how a limited scope of solutions could be impacting client retention and what you can do about it. Clients Want Adaptability Clients’ needs change. Whether this can be chalked up to seasonal variations, industry shifts, or personal preference, any digital strategy can become “here today, gone tomorrow” in an instant. Let’s use marketing in the cannabis industry as an example. As cannabis becomes more widely legalized in the United States at the medical and recreational levels, more digital platforms are altering their policies. This enables more businesses operating in the cannabis industry to invest their marketing budget in different avenues. If a new opportunity in the industry reveals itself and all of your cannabis client’s competitors are flocking to it, but you don’t have the means to deliver in-house, what do you do? If you say “No, we do not offer services on that platform,” do you run the risk of losing their business with your agency? Clients that stay with an agency long-term do so because there is a great deal of trust established. Within that trust, from the client's perspective, comes a confidence that the agency they work with can evolve and adapt to address their needs and introduce innovative ideas that drive performance. Your Competitors Are Broadening Their Scope Every agency has another agency they compete with to some degree. Oftentimes, this boils down to two or more agencies that operate in the same geographic area or industry niche where a client pool is limited to an extent. If your agency concentrates primarily on serving regional clients and there’s another agency on the other side of the county doing the same, that would be your direct competitor. Are your competitors broadening their scope of services while you continue to double down on what you are most comfortable with? There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing your core competencies, but at the end of the day, clients want what they want. At Conduit Digital, we’ve said this more than once in the past. If your client asks for a specific service that you cannot or will not provide, there’s a good chance that they could start seeking out another agency that can and will do what they ask. You’ve Lost Opportunities to Upsell Your Clients Ultimately, a broader scope of solutions gives you the ability to upsell clients on an ongoing basis. As you’re upselling, this naturally lengthens the timeline of the account relationship, and you become the go-to resource for your clients when they want to broaden their marketing and advertising investments. This not only benefits your clients’ ability to better market themselves, but it also grants your agency the opportunity to maximize your revenue-earning potential per account. To put it simply, if you are earning a few hundred or a few thousand more dollars per client each month, that starts to add up. That becomes operating capital that you can invest in scaling your agency on an ongoing basis while you’re also boosting your reputation and credibility with both current and potential clients. How Can You Broaden Your Agency’s Scope? Unfortunately, no legitimate or sustainable method for hacking your way to a broader scope exists. If it did, you should be wary of what it promises and ultimately delivers. Rather than broadening your scope quickly, we suggest doing so purposefully, strategically, and deliberately. In other words, doing it in a way that leads to sustainable scalability for your agency. Here are some potential ways to do so: Hiring New In-House Talent The first option that most will consider is hiring new talent in-house. While this method grants you ultimate control, it can take a bit of time and result in additional financial overhead. You have to first find the right person, which could take multiple rounds of interviews with a long list of candidates. Then, you have to onboard them to your agency’s processes and infrastructure. Lastly, you have to spend additional dollars on benefits, payroll, equipment, and other costs that may be associated with bringing in someone in-house. We’re not saying that you should never hire an in-house team member again. What we are saying, though, is that if you do want to wait to onboard someone or the financial overhead doesn’t make sense for you right now, those are factors to consider. Building a Vendor Network It’s not uncommon for an agency to seek out vendors that can help them quickly and efficiently provide services for their clients in a fee-for-service model. While vendors have their usefulness in a pinch, they can be limited in their scope, their prices can vary wildly, and their quality can be difficult to gauge. For most, as long as the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed on their work agreements, they will not provide services beyond what they’re explicitly contracted for. Beyond this, vendor pricing can spike at any moment. If a freelancer that you work with starts building a reputation and generating more business for themselves outside of your agency, their time then becomes more valuable. They may unpredictably increase their rates beyond what you can afford, and you risk losing access to them. These are just some of the headaches that come with managing multiple vendors in a siloed environment where communication and collaboration becomes more difficult. While they may be helpful to start, growing a vendor network in the 2020s may prove more difficult than beneficial. Using New Marketing Tools Have you thought about filling gaps in your scope of services through different software platforms? Sure, there are many out there pitching agencies at any given opportunity. They promise that you can fulfill an entire channel’s worth of services by using their tools. In most cases, that sounds too good to be true. Platform expenses can add up, and if you do not already have someone in-house with a degree of expertise in the digital channel the software is designed to serve, you may not be maximizing its value or performance potential. Or course, we’d be leaving a giant elephant in the room unaddressed if we didn’t mention artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Google Performance Max. While AI can help cut down some of the labor-intensive tasks, these are not all-in-one solutions that remove the need for human expertise. AI needs to be used responsibly through the filter of a skilled marketer. The Best Solution: White Label Agency Partnership A white label agency partnership is when one agency provides services or products that another agency can rebrand and sell as their own. Rather than expanding your team in-house, you’re extending it with another team of channel experts that can help you fulfill evolving client needs so that you can retain them for longer. For example, if your agency specializes in SEO and Google Ads, but you are noticing clients asking more for TikTok advertising, you do not have to spend hours crash-coursing on TikTok advertising. Instead, you can use your partner’s white label TikTok ads to meet your client’s needs, rebrand them as your own service, and make a predictable profit on top of the platform and service fees. However, not all white label partners are the same, and you should not just go with the first one you find online. With this in mind, there are a few objective questions you should consider when you’re reviewing your options: Where is the white label partner based? Are they based in an area where there is a wealth of marketing talent available (i.e., major cities). Does the white label partner offshore or outsource their work? Or, do they do it all in-house? Does the white label partner have a comprehensive suite of service? The white label partner should be able to meet your needs now and have the infrastructure in place to support future requirements for your campaigns. How does the white label partner communicate? Are they easy to get along with, and do they provide you with the digital tools you need to reach them effectively? Do they offer reports, and what do they look like? Ask to see a sample report from a potential partner to see if they provide the data and insights you need to prove performance to your clients. Does their pricing feel more like an expense or an investment? If you can afford the pricing of your white label partner, it will feel more like a wise investment rather than an ongoing expense. Be sure to ask them for their rate card! Work with North America’s Elite White Label Partner At Conduit Digital, we openly admit that we are not the perfect fit or everyone, such as startup agencies that are still building their businesses. Like your agency, we value retention, and we’d rather the partnership be the right one and one that’s built for long-term scalability. With 18 different channels, fully managed in the U.S. by channel-specific teams of expert analysts, we give your agency the means to say “yes” to better opportunities as well as expand and strengthen your current accounts. If you own or lead an established, performance-minded agency and also value client retention, schedule a call with us today.

As an agency leader, you’re likely always considering new ways to expand your offerings to your clients, enhance campaign performance, and continue striving to be better today than you were the day before. We’ve been there, and we respect the mindset. If your search for the next mode of leveling up your agency has led you to consider a white label partnership with an agency like ours at Conduit Digital, you’re likely (and understandably) wondering if you can create a pricing model that works for your business goals. Of course, when you entrust some or all of a client’s work to a partner, cost does come into play. White label pricing is designed for scalability. Instead of managing multiple vendors with their own price points or hiring and training in-house team members that also require additional overhead, white label digital marketing agencies give you a single payment channel to expand your in-house capabilities so that you can stabilize costs, bandwidth, and capacity to focus more on what you love about running your agency. If you’re wondering how to create a predictable pricing model to integrate white label services into your agency’s day-to-day operations, this guide is for you. Today, we’ll cover everything you need to know to ensure that your pricing remains predictable and scalable when you join forces with the right white label solution. First Steps: White Label Digital Marketing Pricing Models White label digital marketing refers to services where a company provides digital marketing solutions (like Conduit) that another business (like your agency) can brand and sell as their own. In turn, this allows your agency to keep greater control over brand continuity and the information that you present to your client. Essentially, think of it like hiring another agency to support your own. Each white label provider will price their services differently, but they generally fall into five distinct categories that include: Monthly Retainer: This is usually used to maintain constant access to the white label agency for reporting, dashboards, communication channels, and all of the other infrastructure that underlies the rest of the partnership. Typically, most agencies will pay this out of pocket as part of theirregular monthly expenses. Management Fees: These are most common for campaigns like white label Facebook ads, TikTok, or Google Search. The white label charges a sliding-scale fee that can be marked up or down from the client’s budget. Wholesale CPM: Wholesale cost-per-mile (CPM) pricing is the cost that the agency pays for every one thousand impressions or views in a programmatic advertising campaign. Your agency then marks up above the wholesale price. Custom-Scope: Custom-scoped campaigns are most commonly used for organic campaigns like white label SEO or social content management. The pricing is determined through an audit process and leaves room for your agency to determine the right markup when billing your clients. A La Carte: These are typically one-off deliverables that an agency can purchase for a fixed price. They can range from items like sales support documents to one-off pieces of creative work like a landing page design or blog post. Unlike the others above, this type of payment is not intended to be ongoing. As an example, for a management fee-based service, let’s use a white label Google Search campaign. Your client wants to invest $10,000 on a paid search campaign, and your agency charges a 20% management fee. You then create a revenue share model where you pay your white label partner $1,299 for elite-level media buying, and your agency would make $701, typically used for front-end monthly client services. Most of these pricing models can vary based on overall budget size and volume. Be sure to use your white label partner’s rate card as a financial lifeline when pricing new campaigns for your client. Can You Afford the Pricing? The next step beyond understanding the pricing models is to see how they’ll translate to your agency’s actual finances. If you are interested in a specific white label agency, ask them to provide you with their rate card if they do not already have it on their website. The rate card provides a complete picture of the pricing and what it will look like for your campaign. From there, you can run the numbers yourself or consult with your financial department to determine the costs of launching a campaign across any channel that your partner offers. It also never hurts to communicate your desired spend per campaign with your white label agency ahead of submitting an insertion order. They have priced out countless campaigns and can help you determine what it would look like for your agency to markup their services to your clients. For instance, at Conduit, we perform an Agency Alignment Assessment to make sure a potential partnership can work financially. This also enables us to create transparency and guidance for how you can create a predictable pricing model using a white label partner. Making a Predictable Pricing Model Start by Finding the Right White Label Partner Before you can build a pricing model around white label digital marketing services, you need to find the right white label partner that truly enables your agency to scale. As you’re considering your options, keep the following traits in mind: Transparency - How transparent is the white label agency about their services, deliverables, pricing, and personnel before you book a discovery call with them? In-House Performance - Look for a white label that does not further offshore or outsource the work that you have outsourced to them. Proof of Performance - Does the white label team have any case studies or success stories they can share with your agency to show how they’ve performed on campaigns in the past? Geographic Similarity - Look for a team that shares relative geographic similarity to your own. For example, if you’re in North America, select one also based in North America. Scope of Solutions - Does the white label partner have the digital channels you need right now, as well as ones that you could expand into as you scale? Agency Deliverables - Does the white label partner provide you with deliverables that make managing your accounts easier, like in-depth reports or sales support materials? Communication Style - Do you communicate well with the white label partner’s team? As you’re narrowing your list of potential partners, keep the above in mind. Not every white label is the right fit for every agency, and vice-versa. As our CEO, Tim Burke, says, “Finding the right white label partner isn’t speed-dating.” Determine the Channels You Want to White Label Some agencies prefer to white label one or two channels while others might outsource a significant amount of digital campaign work to their partner. In turn, this will also affect the types of pricing models that you will be working within. From there, gather the rate information by referencing your white label agency’s rate card for each channel that you are going to utilize their team for. You can start to piece together a foundational framework for how you onboard new campaigns for your white label team. Create Standardized Client-Facing Pricing Models Creating client-facing pricing can be a delicate task that requires transparency, clarity, and the ability to convey the value of your services. Here are some tips for effectively presenting pricing to clients: Clearly Define Services: Provide a clear breakdown of the services included in each pricing tier. Clients should have a precise understanding of what they are paying for. Highlight Value: Emphasize the value your services provide. Explain how your solutions can solve their problems, meet their goals, or improve their business. Help clients see the possible return on investment (ROI) they can expect. Use Simple Language: Avoid technical jargon or complex terminology. Explain pricing in simple, plain language that clients can easily understand. Offer Multiple Options: Present clients with different pricing options or packages. This allows them to choose a plan that best suits their needs and budget. Anchor Pricing: Use anchor pricing to influence perception. Present a higher-priced option first, followed by the option you want clients to choose. This can make the latter seem like a better deal. Tiered Pricing: Consider tiered pricing with clear differentiators between tiers. Clients can then choose the level of service that aligns with their requirements. But Also Prepare for Clients that Don’t Fit the Mold While many clients will certainly appreciate the predictability of your own tiered pricing structure, there will be others who have larger and/more more complex needs that cannot fit within the models you create. For example, you may land a whale of a new client with a budget that far exceeds the majority of your entire client roster. In these cases, use your white label agency’s rate card to create custom-priced campaigns that will be designed to deliver maximum performance for the client’s investment. Build Better White Label Pricing with a Conduit Partnership If you’re looking to make your costs more predictable at your agency, and avoid financial surprises, let’s talk. At Conduit, we partner with North America’s most established and successful local agencies to deliver elite performance and operational excellence through a single partnership that grants your agency access to 17 channels managed by elite U.S.-based analysts. Schedule your call with us today to learn more about how Conduit can help your agency scale!

Jun 7, 2023 Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents the largest and most significant change to the Google Analytics platform to date. Beyond establishing Events as a primary metric at the forefront of GA4’s capabilities, the shift has upended much of what agencies have thought they’ve known about analytics for years and has introduced a necessary paradigm shift. On July 1, 2023, GA4 will officially replace Google’s previous Universal Analytics model as the standard analytics system offered by the tech giant. Universal Analytics will cease collecting new data and account owners will have a period of time to save the historical data before it is fully sunset and access is no longer possible. We’re here. GA4 is happening and the shift will occur before you realize. Fortunately, this does not create a cause for panic. With some strategy, careful planning, and making the most of the time available, you can ensure a smooth transition from UA to GA4 and maintain a seamless continuity across your campaigns. That’s why we assembled our latest eBook: The Ultimate Guide to GA4 for Agencies View and Download Our Latest eBook for Free Here What’s Inside A Concise Yet Comprehensive Preview of GA4 Learn everything about the major changes that GA4 is introducing. After reading this eBook, you’ll know exactly what the most notable shifts are to the platform so that you can prepare to adjust your own measurement and reporting practices accordingly. The Big Shift to Event-Based Data Collection Why is GA4 treating Events as its primary metric? Why does that matter, and why is it a better way to measure performance? In this section, we’ll dive deep into Events and how to put them into the right context for your clients. Notable User Interface (UI) Improvements with GA4 Along with a shift in how data is collected and measured, GA4 has also introduced new updates to improve the functionality and efficiency of its UI along with notable visual updates. Get a full preview of these updates and what they entail before you make the shift. Changes to Dimensions and Metrics How have dimensions and metrics changed with the introduction of GA4? We dive deep here to show you the significance behind these changes and which ones are worth paying the most attention to. What You Can Do to Prepare Right Now July 1 is not far from now. This section includes a practical guide to prepare for the Google-wide implementation of GA4 with confidence that you are fully ready for the big move. Prepare Your Clients with an Original GA4 Adopter Since GA4 was first introduced in late 2020, our Ad Operations Team at Conduit Digital has been an early GA4 adopter and has integrated this new system into the core of our measurement and reporting processes for our agency partners’ clients. Along with implementing campaigns across 17 different channels at the highest levels to the most complete multi-channel reporting processes possible, we give your agency the confidence to say “yes” to better opportunities knowing that you have the communication and performance infrastructure to take that next step towards scaling. To learn more about how we can assist your agency in the GA4 era, schedule a call with us today.