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May 19, 2021 Digital marketing agencies are the frontline of the economy. Driving successful campaigns produces measurable benefits for your clients and helps them sustain and grow their businesses.  However, it’s no secret that the past year has left a devastating impact on various sectors of the global economy. Restrictions placed on business owners as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted revenues and limited resources. This resulted in many businesses closing or reducing external expenses.  Agencies feel this pain, too. Can a client afford to continue running their campaigns? Will they be able to renew their contract? These questions can keep anyone up at night.  Fortunately, humans are resilient creatures. We find ways to move forward. As COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available and more businesses are gradually reopening, we are seeing signs of economic recovery in many sectors. As of May 2021, trends are showing that layoffs have dropped, hiring rates are increasing, and unemployment claims have steeply declined.  In a recent interview with Velocitize’s Andy North, Conduit Digital CEO Tim Burke spoke about scaling your agency in a turbulent economy. Check out his full interview below:  Tim Burke’s Tips for Scaling Your Agency  Prefer to read about these tips rather than watch a video? We have you covered:  Reduce Expenses without Reducing Quality  Agency owners can reduce expenses without sacrificing the quality of their work. Three key ways to do this include:  Streamline your arsenal of digital tools. Quality always trumps quantity and reduces the number of platforms you’re paying monthly fees to.  Standardize your pricing for each service. This can help you forecast revenues directly based on quotes you send to clients.  Adopt airtight processes for your digital products. This streamlines the workflow and allows your team to better manage their time.  Create a More Predictable Business Model  The agency industry moves at lightning speeds. A day’s schedule can change by the hour and clients often reach out with urgent needs at a moment’s notice.  By adopting a streamlined, airtight process structure, you can create a more predictable business model. Support this with transparent and proactive communication so that everyone knows what needs to be done now and what priorities are coming next.  Use sophisticated project management software to help thread your operations together. At Conduit, we highly recommend Teamwork. We use their platform for everything from tracking time to client communications and sharing important campaign files.  Offer a Complete Suite of Digital Solutions  Offering comprehensive digital marketing services both draws new clients in and expands those you’ve already landed. If your agency cannot scale to meet your client’s changing needs, they may start to look for someone else who can and will.  Lean Into Purpose-Driven Marketing The digital ecosystem bombards audiences with countless ads and organic content. To cut through the boilerplate noise, your campaigns need to lead with purpose and value. Make your mission meaningful to your clients and tell their authentic stories through campaigns. When authenticity resonates, consumers will react.  Support Your Internal Team with a Digital Fulfillment Partner Many agencies excel at a handful of core competencies. For example, your team might dominate social media and paid search campaigns but struggle with SEO or programmatic video advertising.  Partnering with a digital fulfillment provider can successfully run these campaigns for you. This results in more satisfied clients and gives your in-house team the ability to double down on their strongest skill sets.  If you’re interested in a digital fulfillment solution, we invite you to view our partnership page and reach out if you have any questions about how we can help you scale.

Aug 16, 2021 Helping Agencies Scale to New Summits Introducing Project Denali When you picture a successful agency, what do you see? Proving you’re the best agency in the market. Landing and expanding a longstanding client roster. Offering the most complete and innovative suite of digital solutions. Deploying the highest-performing team to manage your clients’ campaigns. You see your agency at the top of the summit. However, on the way to reach your destination, as the slope becomes rockier, the path can seem less clear. For you to reach that summit, it takes drive, planning, and grit. This requires having the right expertise, tools, and resources to not only help you get there but also get through the obstacles along the path. The Conduit Digital Team shares that drive and vision with you. That’s what we and our agency network are all about: Reaching the summit and gearing up to climb to the next one. That’s why we’re proud to introduce you to Project Denali.   What is Project Denali? Over the past year, we have spoken with nearly 1,000 agency leaders about their pain points on their journey towards scalability. We’ve taken that feedback, digested it, and used it to refine our product offering, processes, and reporting capabilities to drive a better partner experience. Literally thousands of combined hours later, our team has built new infrastructure to help you reach where you want to go more effectively. We decided to name this initiative Project Denali after Mount Denali – the highest mountain peak in the United States. This best reflects our shared vision to help your agency reach new heights and continue to scale from there. By offering world-class products and services, backed by refined processes and enhanced reporting, we believe this will effectively support this goal. World-changing brands like Apple, Google, and Amazon do not settle for “good enough,” and neither do we. We will never stop innovating or improving what we can do to offer your agency a better experience as our partner.  How We Made it Happen The Most Complete Product Suite for Today’s Clients As part of launching Project Denali, we are excited to offer two new products in addition to our existing suite of digital solutions: Programmatic Audio and our new Landing Page Library. Want to reach listeners on digital audio channels like podcasts, music streaming services, and internet radio? We’ll ensure that your ads are reaching audiences on podcasts relevant to your client’s industry by leveraging advanced targeting tactics you’ve come to expect from other programmatic campaigns. From location to online behavior, demographic data, and beyond, we can align your campaign execution with intended end goals seamlessly. Our Landing Page Library features a broad range of dynamic landing page layouts, designed in-house by our Catalyst Creative Team. Each one can be customized and completely white-labeled to your client’s business. Want us to write the copy for the page? We can do that too! With a more engaging landing page that prioritizes user experience, you can ensure that your campaigns are better communicating the unique value of your client’s business to drive the key performance actions that you measure success by. Also in the new creative library we have ready to use examples for not only landing pages, but also display and social ad templates to complete and support your holistic campaigns. More Seamless Campaign Onboarding We’re just as excited to launch your campaign as you are. From your initial insertion order with Conduit to onboarding more clients in the future, we have improved this process to ensure everyone is better aligned at launch. Engineering Campaigns from KPA’s Rather than operating from a perspective of what your client’s campaign “should” do, we are building campaigns to meet your client’s specific business goals. We will begin with the end in mind and build a roadmap that drives audiences toward their intended outcome. You tell us what your client wants to accomplish, and we’ll custom-build a campaign that supports it. Enhanced Data Reporting and Transparency Our signature 24/7 Live Reports have received a major overhaul as part of Project Denali. We have improved our internal processes so that our analysts can provide you with more data and insights than ever before. This will allow you to more easily and thoroughly track granular performance metrics tied to your client’s specific business goals with real-time commentary from our expert product analysts with an updated user interface design for an optimal experience. Project Denali is Here. Let’s Get Started. Project Denali is our new standard for continuing to innovate, and we are excited to roll it out across all of our agency partnerships. To learn more about what we can bring to your own agency, visit our partnership page or schedule your agency growth call today.

Mar 24, 2023 The Ultimate Primer for the Google Analytics 4 Paradigm Shift This month, Google revealed that they will be replacing Universal Analytics and Universal Analytics 360 products with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) starting in mid-2023. Because digital marketers like ourselves consume data as a vital nutrient, this presents a significant paradigm shift in the way that campaigns are launched, monitored, optimized, and reported on. For agency leaders, we cannot stress enough the importance of being ahead of major platform updates like these. If or when a client asks about the new GA4 rollout, you can establish greater authority and trust with them if you are already prepared to brief them on the coming changes and what to expect from them. To help you provide your clients with the information they need, we’ve put together this GA4 primer to help you more easily understand what changes are approaching over the next year. We’re going to cover: What is Google Analytics 4 anyway? What makes GA4 unique? How to prepare your agency and clients for GA4 Prefer to skip the read? Start equipping your agency to deliver high-performance campaigns on Google products before these updates and book a 20-minute call with us at your convenience: So, What is Google Analytics 4 Anyway? Google Analytics 4 was designed to address today’s measurement and reporting needs for digital campaigns on Google platforms. According to Google themselves, the Universal Analytics products were designed for an era where desktop sessions dominated and third-party cookies drove the majority of tracking strategies. As we move to a cookieless digital era and mobile search continues to outpace desktop devices, the Universal Analytics framework becomes less relevant and less useful by the hour. What Makes GA 4 Unique? According to Google’s announcement, several key differences that GA4 will bring include: Cross-Platform, Event-Based Data GA4 provides advertisers with a holistic picture of the customer journey using event-based measurement to present data across platforms and multiple sessions. For example, if your client operates a website and a mobile app, your agency can use GA4 data to identify any disconnects in the user experience. From there, you can perform optimizations to one or both properties to improve the funnel and increase conversion rates for desired key performance actions (KPAs). Data-Driven Attribution The new Google Analytics framework will leverage data-based attribution to provide advertisers with a comprehensive view of cross-platform customer behavior. Attribution will credit more than just the user’s most recent clicks for more intelligent optimization insights and opportunities. The data can also be ported into Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform so that you can maintain continuity across the tools that you use to manage these campaigns. Cookieless Tracking Instead of relying on third-party cookies, GA4 will generate more sophisticated first-party data with deeper insights than previous cookie-based models. Your agency will be able to generate greater performance and reporting capabilities directly from Google itself. Better User Privacy In an effort to minimize the gathering and storage of user data, GA4 will not store IP address information. For advertisers that serve clients with heavy privacy restrictions (i.e., medical practices) or for brands that do not want to risk compromising user data, this proves an advantageous feature. Google campaigns can now foster greater trust between advertisers and audiences with a mutual assurance that IP addresses remain anonymous. Maximum Data Value GA4 leverages Google’s industry-leading machine learning capabilities to offer predictive insights into audience behavior and likely conversion activity. This gives your team the necessary information to prioritize specific audiences and double-down on serving ads to those who are most likely to engage. Advertiser-Specific Customization With GA4, the structure of your Google Analytics account can be fully customized to satisfy your agency’s data policies. For example, if you or your client wish to restrict access to certain information from other external partners, this can easily be done directly from the platform. How to Prepare Your Agency and Clients for GA4 Get Your Team on the Same Page Now that you’ve been briefed on GA4, share this information with the rest of your team – especially those that serve your clients using Google products. Campaigns like SEO , Paid Search , Programmatic Display , and YouTube Advertising will be among those most impacted by these updates. As your team interacts with your clients, they will have the necessary knowledge to provide more complete and thorough answers to any questions or concerns that arise ahead of the Google-wide rollout. Install GA4 ASAP To maximize the most value from GA4, you should implement it across all of your clients’ Analytics accounts as soon as possible. The data that GA4 collects only starts generating after installation, so if you want to start seeing year-over-year data for most of 2022, install it now.  Save Your Clients’ Historical UA Data With the Google-wide July 1, 2023 rollout of GA4, no new data will populate in Universal Analytics. It will be fully sunset after at least 6 months following this, and afterward, you will not be able to access its data any longer. 360 Universal Analytics properties will be able to still take advantage of a one-time processing extension that ends in July 2024. To save your clients’ historical data, you will have to export it before GA4 becomes the permanent and only analytics solution. Simply migrating UA to GA4 is not possible . They do not use similar data models, so merging them will not be something that you should plan for. The fastest and least-complicated way to save your UA data is to: 1. Open the UA report that you want to save 2. Add any customizations that you need to, such as geographical region 3. Click “Export” in the upper-right-hand corner to begin the process 4. Select the type of file format that you prefer. These include PDF, Google Sheets, XLSV, and CSV Keep in mind that you can only apply two dimensions when exporting historical UA data and that it may be samples rather than a full readout of every single metric. If a green check symbol is visible on the report, this will indicate that no sampling occurred. Share This Information with Your Clients Gatekeeping does the opposite of fostering trust with clients. Let them know that GA4 is coming and that they can expect: Better data collection and attribution for Google campaigns Advertiser-specific customization Increased user privacy for greater brand credibility and audience trust More valuable data for your campaigns By sharing this information with your clients ahead of the rollout, you can establish greater authority and credibility with your accounts. This positions your agency and your team as true experts on the Google campaigns that your clients entrust your business to manage for them. Revamp Your Measurement and Reporting Processes Ahead of Time The best time to prepare your measurement and reporting processes for GA4 is yesterday, but now also works. Thankfully, GA4 is already available to any and all advertisers, so you can start building your new reporting infrastructure as well as familiarize yourself with its user features before it becomes the set-in-stone standard. Deliver Better Performance with a White Label Google Premier Partner If you are looking to deliver true performance at scalable volumes for your client, it may be time to enlist a partner’s help. Look for a white label digital marketing partner that holds a Google Premier Partner designation, meaning their team is certified at the highest levels to drive elite performance for your client’s campaign. Say “Yes” To Better Opportunities with a White Label Partnership Today At Conduit Digital, we enable your agency to say “yes” to better opportunities of any scope by equipping your team with a holistic product suite , access to a team of Google Premier Partner analysts, and 24/7 live reporting – all tied together with single point of contact communication. If you are ready to dominate a GA4 world, schedule your 20-minute call with us today.  This article was originally written on March 16, 2022 and updated on March 24, 2023.

Jun 7, 2021 Over the past month, the world finally feels like it has reopened in significant ways. Fans are back in the stands. Demand for agency services continues to grow. People are looking to actively engage in the economy once more. Agencies are facing a line-in-the-sand moment. Clients are seeking to double-down on digital campaigns, and with that, comes a greater opportunity for scale. After speaking with over 400 agency owners this past year, our CEO, Tim Burke, has noticed a consistent pain point. As clients are looking to ramp up their campaigns, many agencies are struggling to staff their businesses with the right people to meet these demands. As the economy recovers, qualified candidates are hired at record paces. Others have not chosen to re-enter the workforce just yet. Though we’re seeing light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, the light still feels just beyond an arm’s reach in many parts of the world. This raises a critical question. During such a flashpoint moment, how can agencies scale to meet demand? Tim, Rob, and TCB Discuss Agency Scalability in Our Latest Video:  Don’t want to watch a video? Keep reading! People. Process. Partnerships. Investing in the right people, airtight processes, and strengthening partnerships can equip agencies with the foundation needed to dominate campaigns in this digital frontier. Balancing each one effectively will result in a greater return on investment for both your agency and your clients. Let’s Start with People A demand for agencies is a demand for people. As Tim puts it in the video, “Your agency is the people that work there.” Right now, the challenge is not only finding the right people, but also finding enough of them. With hiring challenges at the forefront of almost every industry, agencies need to staff ahead of the volume coming around the curve. We see this on the client side as well. At Conduit, we have noticed many clients are bucking tradition and gearing up for running digital recruitment campaigns. Where hiring initiatives were originally reactive, many businesses are adopting an innovative and proactive approach. Now, more recruitment ads are running on non-traditional platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. Process Prepares for Scale As your agency gears up to scale, you need to have an airtight process structure in place. When you land new clients or expand existing ones, you can add new campaigns into your operations with little-to-no friction. This means that, once the order comes through, you can fulfill it with confidence. How do you know if your current process can meet demands for scale? The mindset we share with our Conduit agencies is to say “work backwards from the desired result and GPS the most efficient way there”. Look internally and identify opportunities to streamline and fortify. Are there any unnecessary steps that can be removed? Do some need to be added or modified? Ask your team for their input and work to tighten these aspects of your operations to ready yourself for volume. As the old business saying goes, time is money. When you implement efficient processes, you position yourself for more profitable scalability. How can you activate a more efficient process structure at your agency? It starts with time tracking. Integrate a non-cumbersome time tracking methodology so that your team leaders can review elements of your processes consistently and make appropriate course corrections as needed. Digital Performance Partnership Takes Care of the Rest So far, we’ve established that your agency requires enough of the right people and a “work backwards from an effective outcome” process in order to scale. What happens, though, when you’re short-staffed or cannot add certain services in-house that your clients are demanding? The answer is simple: Create true partnerships. We understand this might sound self-serving because we are digital performance partners with agencies throughout the US and Canada. Did you know, however, that we have our own partners as well? Whenever we incorporate a new platform into our operations, we turn them into partners. We cultivate relationships with their teams and ensure we have the support and insight from them that we need to deliver for clients. This is where a digital performance partnership comes in. At Conduit Digital, we partner with agencies. It’s what we do and we love doing it. In our daily talks with agency leaders, we hear some consistent reasons behind why they’re looking for a digital performance partner. Some of these reasons include: Changing landscape – The ever-changing digital marketing landscape is near impossible for small, localized teams to stay on top of in isolation.  Ongoing training – Hiring and training a top-performing team takes years. Even then, finding enough of the right people can become a challenge. When you need a turnkey solution, a partnership connects you with a team of other skilled professionals. Specialization – Hiring a few “digital generalists” used to be the industry standard. Today, we live in a specialist’s world, and having a team of specialists to cover every digital service is not always doable for many agencies.  Scope – Agencies need both deep and broad teams. Tactics such as  SEO , OTT , PPC , Social and Display can all impact a client funnel. They require dedicated specialists to analyze and optimize performance across your client’s campaigns.  A true white label digital performance partnership can help you fill the skill gap and expand client campaigns profitably. This gives your agency differentiation where simple platforms cannot. It also allows your agency to pursue clients at a much larger scope and scale than with an in-house team alone. How do you determine the right digital partnership for your agency, though? Begin with the end in mind and visualize what a successful partnership looks like for your business. Vet potential partners as if they were an internal employee and ensure they align with your strategic goals. We do this at Conduit with our own partners. We closely vet platforms, turn the ones we use into true partners, and double down on them. Whether this is making the most of Teamwork, Google, Hubspot, or any other of our many strategic alliances, we believe having a partner in your corner gives you a greater secret weapon than any simple platform ever could. If you are looking for a digital performance partnership please don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Conduit, we help successful agencies scale. Visit our partnership page to learn more and see if we are the right fit to help you grow your agency.

Aug 19, 2022 Since Google AdWords launched in 2000, paid search (also known as pay-per-click or “PPC”) campaigns have remained a staple of digital marketing, and for good reason! These ads are designed to connect people with valuable products, services, and resources that align with the needs behind their searches. Are you looking to start or improve paid search advertising at your agency? If so, you should familiarize yourself with some of the most essential core concepts behind the product. That’s where we come in. Today, we’re going to break down some of the top 10 most essential core concepts of paid search marketing. If you need to add paid search to your own product offering and want to start it off with a team of experts, you can skip reading and book a 20-minute call with us today: Need Help with Paid Search Now? 1. Ad Formats Major paid search platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising offer multiple ad formats to best suit your client’s goals. For example, Google offers multiple ad formats, such as: Responsive Search Ads: Text ads that can conform to the specific dimensions of a screen or window for a better user experience. They contain a clickable headline and a description and can be enhanced with extensions. Product Shopping Ads: Feature a product’s image, a description, and a link to the product page along with customizable extensions. Local Service Ads: Advertise a business’s services to their local demographic when relevant search terms are entered by the user. Call-Only Ads: A phone number is provided in the ad for convenient calling and you can also click through to the website. For Microsoft campaigns, you can also create Audience Ads within the Microsoft Audience Network to serve impressions beyond the search engine results page (SERP). 2. Budget Pacing Pacing refers to the concentration of a client’s budget spread out over a specific period of time. For example, if you are spending over 50% of a monthly budget during the first week, you are over-pacing the campaign. Conversely, under-pacing may be only spending 30% of the ad budget by week 3. How you spread out the budget depends on the nature of the client’s business and their goals for the campaign. For ongoing, month-over-month advertising campaigns, having a budget that is spread evenly across a full 30 or 31-day period would be considered ideal pacing in most cases. There can be some exceptions to this rule, however. For example, if your client traditionally receives the most business during the beginning of the month, you may decide to over-pace at those times or even under-pace if you prefer to spend more during periods where traffic and conversion are lower. 3. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) The cost-per-click or “CPC” metric refers to how much it actually costs for a user to click on your search ad. For keywords that more businesses are competing for, as well as ones that are highly targeted to a distinct niche, the CPC is typically higher. This does not mean that you cannot allocate some of your client’s paid search budget towards higher CPC keywords. In most cases, having a mix of both high and low-CPC keywords can prove an effective strategy for any business or industry. A CPC model works excellently for clients that want to increase their sales. You are only paying once a user clicks through to your landing page where they can then convert into a lead or customer. 4. The Search Terms Report Once a user clicks on your ad, the Search Terms Report enables the analyst to see what other searches they have performed in Google or Microsoft. This incredibly valuable data provides insights into the exact queries that are leading to conversions and those that are not. In turn, this information can be leveraged to double down on what is working best and what is underperforming. 5. Key Performance Action (KPA) Key performance actions (KPAs) refer to specific actions that users take when interacting with your client’s campaign assets, such as ads themselves or their associated landing pages. Unlike key performance indicators, which are static metrics used to measure the success of a campaign, KPAs account for all actions taken that could tell a more complete story. By implementing a KPA-driven strategy, you can more accurately optimize your campaign to match how your client’s ideal audience interacts with their business. For example, if the audience is clicking to call the phone number on the landing page more than filling out a form, you may want to suggest revising the form on the page or adding Call-Only Ads to their Google arsenal. 6. Keyword Competition Keyword competition means how difficult a keyword is to rank for. This concept can be applied to both organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid campaigns. In the context of paid campaigns, the competition rating indicates how many advertisers are all bidding for the same keyword. While some of these keywords may be worthwhile depending on your client’s business model, you can also apply some basic keyword research to discover alternatives with lower competition ratings which also often feature a lower CPC or CPM. 7. Landing Pages The landing page is the destination on the other side of the ad headline. This can be an organic page on your client’s website or one that was specifically constructed and designed for the campaign itself. A successful landing page, at its most basic level, should contain an attention-grabbing headline above the fold along with a form or clickable button that the user can interact with. Below the fold, focus on highlighting some of the essential customer benefits of your client’s product or service. Landing page copy should focus on the customer benefit, read concisely, and include statements that inspire users to take the next step. These elements will move them from visitors to leads or customers by providing an excellent and convenient experience. 8. Long-Tail Keywords Long-tail keywords refer to highly specific search terms designed to target qualified users. Rather than allocating a local doctor’s office’s budget toward the general keyword “doctors office”, you could include one with a “long tail” like “doctors office in Ocean County NJ”. To find the right long-tail keywords for your client, start using a seed keyword like “doctors office”. From there, you can see what other similar terms are being searched for using a tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner along with valuable additional insights like CPC data. 9. Negative Keywords In a paid search campaign, negative keywords are keyphrases that you add to your account which prevent your ad from being triggered by those terms. For example, if you’re selling women’s shoes, you might add “men” as a negative keyword so that your ad doesn’t show up when someone searches for “men’s shoes.” Why would you want to do this? Primarily, serving ads for irrelevant queries can waste budget if someone clicks on them and immediately bounces because it is not aligned with what they are searching for. Someone searching for men’s shoes will not find ads for women’s shoes beneficial and will likely not click on the ad. Excluding negative keywords helps to protect the quality of the keywords that you are bidding on and maintain a more desirable click-through-rate (CTR). The lower your CTR, the lower your “expected CTR” is also, which can impact the quality score, which can also increase your required bid amount to remain competitive within an auction. 10. Search Intent A keyword’s search intent refers to what a person is actually looking for when they perform a search. It’s the reason behind why they opened up that new browser window or tab in the first place. We want to show up in searches when we’re relevant and likely to be useful to the searcher. So, let’s say someone searches for “pencils.” Their search intent might be to buy some pencils, learn how to sharpen pencils, find out which type of pencil is best for drawing, or a million of other possibilities. As an advertiser, it’s our job to figure out which one of those possibilities our product or service can help with and target our ads accordingly. Search intent is just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s an important one. If we understand what people are really looking for, we can be there for them with exactly what they need. Here, long-tail keywords can also play an instrumental role. If you are managing a budget for a local office supply store, a term like “buy bulk pencils near me” reflects a commercial intent for someone looking to purchase a large amount of pencils. Meanwhile, “what is a mechanical pencil?” reflects an informational intent for someone looking to understand more information about that topic but may not be ready to purchase one. Elevate Your Client’s Paid Search Marketing Performance with a White Label Partner At Conduit Digital, we partner with successful agencies to provide 100% North America-based white label PPC solutions for your clients. With each campaign directly managed in-house by a certified expert analyst, we equip your team with the ability to say “yes” to better opportunities. Whether you need to expand capacity, integrate a service to your internal offering, or you need to scale profitably, we are ready to partner with you. Schedule a 20-minute call today to see if your agency is ready for the power of partnership.

Oct 6, 2022 As a digital marketing agency leader, you understand the importance of continuous growth to sustain a successful business. Having a steady pipeline of new prospective clients and a long-term plan for building an ad operations team each play critical roles in an upward trajectory. What does that look like to you? Perhaps you want to establish a boutique agency with a small but dedicated team and a solid foothold in a niche that you’re passionate about. Conversely, you might prefer to become the largest and most sought-after agency in your local market. There is no “right” or “wrong” end goal for your agency. Ultimately, you control its destiny. However, there are still some universal pain points that agency leaders face when scaling upwards to accomplish what they have set out to achieve. At Conduit, we speak with hundreds of agency leaders like yourself each year. Based on these conversations, we’ve distilled 4 common pain points associated with growing agencies, and we’re going to break them down in-depth here. We’ll also offer our tips for overcoming them.  Need help with growing your agency right now? Schedule a 20-minute call: 4 Common Pains with Agency Growth 1. Stabilizing Capacity Does it ever feel like you are one account away from under or overutilizing your team? For example, if you lost one client tomorrow, would your team suddenly feel like its one or two people too large? Building a team for a high-capacity client roster requires an effective business development strategy to support it. Without a steady influx of new leads that could turn into potential new accounts for your agency, you may start to feel the capacity squeeze sooner rather than later. 2. Hiring and Growing a Team Similarly, if you need to grow your team, you might find that hiring in your market proves difficult. Traditionally, a large majority of digital marketing talent is located within large metropolitan areas or in communities that are home to large universities. Still, that does not mean that you can open an agency in New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago, and expect an endless roster of candidates to fill your vacancies. Where more remote areas may have a smaller pool of candidates, the larger metros pose the opposite challenge of a more competitive job market with more opportunities for talented individuals to launch or continue their career. It can feel like either finding a needle in a haystack or a constant bidding war to attract and retain the talent that you need to grow your agency. Beyond struggles with hiring the right team, retaining them also proves another challenge. It may feel like that the team becomes more difficult to manage as it grows or you are experiencing high turnover once someone has received training to go elsewhere. No one wants to feel like their agency is nothing but a stepping stone. You have real, tangible goals that you want to achieve, and building an engaged team that shares your vision likely complements these objectives. 3. A Limited Suite of Services Alongside capacity and hiring challenges, a limited suite of services can often become the Achilles heel for many agencies; especially ones in highly competitive markets. If you do not have a team that has the bandwidth or expertise to land and expand new accounts, this can quickly become a roadblock. As we have said many times before: If your client asks for a service that you do not provide, they often seek out a competitor that can and will fulfill what they’ve asked for. While you might absolutely dominate paid search and programmatic campaigns, if the client wants SEO and TikTok, they will find an agency to provide them with SEO and TikTok. Continuously investigating, testing, and expanding your service offering will allow you to create a more diverse team with a wider range of strengths to serve your clients. This also can help to more effectively streamline your internal capacity and bandwidth and create lanes where your team is made of specialists in specific product categories. When many agency leaders arrive at this point, one of the first reactions is to seek out vendors that can help expand their services for a fee. However, with vendors, they can quickly become expensive, only operate in specific silos, and it will soon feel like you need to hire another person just to manage these relationships and ensure they produce at a level of quality you’re satisfied with. 4. Utilization of Your Team Lastly, whether you have a team that operates over or under capacity, any agency can become bogged down with tactical work. When you want to serve as your client’s strategic partner, many of the day-to-day operational tasks can quickly consume valuable business hours. When agency leaders have more free time and are spending less time in the digital weeds, they can use that bandwidth for growing and strengthening their business. This can include building better client relationships, focusing on the health of your internal team, and finally carving out enough time to take that vacation you’ve wanted to go on for the past 3 years. Growing your agency requires a massive investment of time, effort, and capital to launch in its early stages. At some point, returning to a more stable work-life balance probably sounds like the preferred way to live. When you are able to stay afloat and continue growing with the right infrastructure supporting you, you will find that you do not need to sacrifice nearly as much of your personal time to operate a successful agency.  Get help with these pain points now: The Solution to Growing Your Agency: White Label Partnership Before you decide this is an ad and stop reading, hear us out. We know that we’re a white label digital marketing agency, and that this may sound self-promotional at first. However, we believe that finding the right partner for your agency is not speed-dating. Deciding to entrust your client’s campaigns to an external team is a major investment of trust, and you should treat it as such. We aren’t attempting to bait-and-switch you with some puff piece about how amazing we are (though we are fans of our work). Instead, we just want to provide some space here to offer some more information on how a white label partner can benefit your agency in general. If you decide that you want to schedule a call with us after reading this, great! We’ll have a link for you at the end, but until then, we’ll do our best to keep it even-keeled. With what we just said above in mind, we want to highlight how, in general, a white label partnership can help your agency address and overcome many of the pain points we mentioned previously. If you want to learn more about how a partnership differs from a platform or vendor, check out our Ultimate Guide to White Label Digital Marketing . So, now that you’ve learned more about white label, let’s talk about how a partner can assist you in overcoming your pain points on your journey toward sustainable agency growth. 1. Stabilize Your Capacity and Expenses Partnerships typically involve a monthly fee along with a percentage-based service fee for managing digital campaigns. This allows you to scale your spend upwards and downwards as your client roster evolves and strategies pivot. Your team remains stabilized and you always have a team ready to assist you with any overflow that could compromise your internal bandwidth. 2. Immediate Access to an Expert Team White label partners build their reputations on expertise and performance. Look for a partner that’s made of highly certified analysts so that you can ensure that your partner has vetted and trained their own team to meet the standards for quality that you would expect from your own in-house ad operations. 3. Become the Most Complete Agency Overnight A distinguishing feature of a white label partner compared to a platform or vendor is that they offer a holistic suite of digital marketing services that you can integrate into your agency’s offering. Overnight, you can become the most complete agency in your local market or target industry. If a client wants to launch a campaign that you do not offer in-house, you can confidently tell them “yes” to this new opportunity. 4. Get More of Your Time Back Essentially, joining forces with a white label partner is like hiring an entire team instead of a single individual. This removes much of the hiring, training, mentoring, and operational oversight involved with a large in-house team and you will only need to manage a single source for all of your external ad operations instead of multiple vendors. Instead, you can spend more time doing what you love about running your agency (and maybe finally take that vacation). Is Partnership the Right Fit for Growing Your Agency? While there are multiple paths that you could pursue toward growing your agency, we believe that partnership provides the most complete and scalable solution from a single source. You do not have to keep the ship afloat in isolation. In fact, you do not have to “keep the ship afloat” at all. With the infrastructure that your partner provides, you can continue growing and building a stronger client base that supports your short and long-term goals. If you’re interested in exploring opportunities with a white label partner, we would love to speak with you more about how we could help your agency scale. At Conduit, we provide a complete suite of white label services from our headquarters in New Jersey with a team of U.S.-based, certified analysts to enable you to say “yes” to whatever opportunity arises next. Your accounts, data, and clients all stay yours – we just help you serve them better. To learn more, schedule a quick 20-minute call today.

May 12, 2021 Apple’s recent iOS 14.5 update shook the advertising world by allowing app users to opt-out of cross-platform tracking. The update proved a success as it currently boasts a 96% user adoption rate . In an effort to better protect user privacy, the technology titan created what looked like a panic-button situation for digital marketers and advertisers.  Does this mean that the sky is falling?  We highly recommend taking a deep breath and putting down your keyboard. Stop Googling “new career options for advertisers,” because the show is far from over. In this week’s video, our Director of Ad Operations, Rob Burke, met with John, Jay, and Kwasi for a follow-up from last week’s video where we first discussed the update’s impact on the industry. Check out part 2 here: What Does iOS 14.5 Mean for Agencies?  Mostly, iOS 14.5 presents agencies with new challenges for reporting campaign performance and tracking conversions. For example, if a Facebook ad campaign’s intended goal is to generate form fills on your client’s website, a user who has opted out of tracking cannot be tracked by Facebook once they’ve left the app to complete the conversion.  So, what are some key takeaways for agency leaders?  First-Party Data is the New Standard Advertisers will have to lean more heavily on platforms’ first-party data for targeting. With this change, we can also expect digital platforms to expand their in-app tracking capabilities. This means that campaign managers will have to examine specific platforms in-depth and tailor strategies to their specific user bases.  Analyzing Data Will Require a More Complete Picture Analysts will have to examine performance data across multiple platforms and build a narrative based on their insights. If a client’s website is still generating a similar amount of conversions prior to iOS 14.5, despite the tracking data remaining unavailable, you can infer that the campaign is still performing at a similar level post-update.  Holistic Solutions Will Be a Necessity, Not a Luxury Implementing a holistic suite of services to drive performance for your client will be the new standard. Without cross-platform tracking, it will be better to put more digital eggs in more baskets rather than doubling down on a single or small handful of key tactics.  Organic Content Can Help Support Paid Content Quality organic content must be factored into a client’s strategy going forward. Sharing links to conversion-driving pages on the client’s site, interacting with their followers, responding to reviews, and other similar tactics will help support paid campaigns while they are undergoing a complete paradigm shift.  How Should Agencies Communicate These Changes to Clients? Be Transparent and Proactive  The first and simplest way to position yourself ahead of the changes to your data reporting is to communicate these changes to your clients as soon as possible. Offer a transparent explanation of how the 14.5 update will affect metrics in the short term and that a current data report may not tell the full story.  Prepare to See More Numbers in the Red  Because many data-harvesting apps like social media platforms will lose their ability to cross-track iOS users, this will show what seems to be a decline in campaign performance. However, as we mentioned, this will be telling an incomplete story.  To help show the true value of your campaigns, gather as much information as you can through multiple sources. For example, if the numbers are red on your data report, but the amount of conversions have not changed significantly, this would indicate that your strategy is still delivering desired results.  Offer a More Complete Suite of Solutions If your client becomes concerned about campaign performance, be ready to offer alternative solutions. If they are only running a Facebook campaign, you could recommend that they try other tactics like paid search , display advertising, or targeted email to reach similar audiences through other channels. You could also offer organic solutions like SEO or social media content if the client does not want to increase their ad budget.  Are You Ready to Navigate an iOS 14.5 World?  Increased data privacy has landed and it will remain a longstanding trend. This will require agencies to shift how they approach data analysis and reporting for future campaigns.  As we said at the beginning, the sky isn’t falling. Instead, the way we deliver better experiences to our clients is evolving. With iOS 14.5’s arrival, are you ready to navigate this transformed digital landscape? To equip your in-house team with a more comprehensive suite of solutions, schedule your 20-minute call with us today to learn about how our products can help you continue to scale.

Dec 29, 2021 Remove Marketing Performance Roadblocks and Enable Better Opportunities in the New Year As the leader of a digital agency, you might be looking for new ways to scale your business in 2022 while everyone else is deciding on which new gym to join in January. After a chaotic 2021 for many, you likely have identified a few pain points that emerged during the past 12 months. These might include: Trying to hire the right people to expand your capacity Making efforts to round out your suite of services Trying to de-silo your communications internally and externally Finding a better way to report on your campaign performance Missing out on white-whale account opportunities With a new Q1 on its way, make a resolution for your agency to enable greater opportunities with confidence. With the right support system in place, you can start addressing these marketing performance roadblocks and removing them from impeding your mission to scale. Marketing Performance Roadblocks to Remove in the New Year Limited Product Suite Simply put: A limited scope of services puts agencies at a competitive disadvantage in an effort to land and expand accounts. Today’s clients expect a complete suite of solutions from agencies. Saying “we can’t do that” or “we don’t do that” can quickly motivate even the longest-tenured clients on your roster to start considering other options from competitors that can and will meet these needs. Siloed Communications Communicating in siloes cuts directly against marketing performance. Without unified internal and external communications processes, aligning on campaign goals and implementation becomes increasingly more difficult. Performance Reporting Woes Accessing campaign performance data is the easy part. Putting it into the proper context to make future decisions, however, requires more advanced insights. When a client receives their data reports, not being able to answer a question like “so what does this all mean?” can impact confidence and trust in the account relationship. Difficulty Fulfilling Campaign Needs at a High Level Limited hiring success has affected nearly every industry in the United States this past year. This places capacity strain on your existing team and can create bandwidth challenges when trying to land new accounts and expand campaign opportunities with existing clients. Having to Say “No” to Major Opportunities Ultimately, the challenges listed above can culminate in missed opportunities for your agency. When you’re at or over capacity and it doesn’t feel like you have the support you need, the focus can quickly shift from diving deeper to just trying to tread water in place. Agencies experience failure when they’re isolated. Without the right support system in place to withstand these pain points, even the most successful businesses can falter.  How the Right White Label Digital Marketing Solution Can Help Eliminate These Obstacles What is White Label? White label digital marketing products allow your agency to add services to your offering through a trusted external team, all branded under your agency. This results in the ability to offer a more complete suite of solutions to your clients without needing to take on the additional overhead associated with adding internal hires. The Three Types of White Label Not all white label solutions operate equally. They are most often divided into three main categories: platform, vendor, and partner. 1. White label platform – Heavily software-based, limited customization, and few resources for support 2. White label vendor – Highly transactional, limited to no involvement after receiving a deliverable, difficult to gauge quality, and narrow scope of services 3. White label partner – Completely and equally involved in campaign design, implementation, optimization, and reporting across a full product suite; a true extension to your in-house agency team What We Believe True White Label Partnership Looks Like: At Conduit, we define ourselves as a white label digital performance partner . What does this mean? It means we offer the agencies that we work with a complete solution that includes: Full product suite Custom Live Reports with analyst insights Complete in-house implementation Sales support resources Single point-of-contact communication Seamless onboarding Fulfillment at unlimited scope and scale Enable Better Opportunities Through a Digital Performance Partnership When your agency aligns with the right white label partner, you can experience a multitude of benefits, such as: Round Out Your Product Suite with Certified Analysts The idea of trusting your client’s campaigns to an external team might raise some initial hesitations. That’s completely understandable. If you are used to tightly controlling everything internally, you should take time to vet the credentials of your potential partner. Look for a partner that offers services managed by a team of analysts that are certified at high levels in their respective specialties. For example, if you are interested in adding white label PPC to your agency suite, consider partners that can provide you with a Google and Microsoft-certified analyst team. This ensures that these individuals have been independently verified as true experts in their respective product categories. Consolidate Your Campaign Communications Under a Single Point of Contact Communicating in siloes results in far more chaos than any level of productivity. When you’re positioning your agency to scale, having a unified communications channel ensures that everyone can access important campaign information from a single point-of-reference and remain in lockstep while driving performance for your client. We believe successful digital campaigns are built on two foundations: communication and performance. Without proper communication, it becomes impossible to prove the value of performance. Conversely, when communication is siloed, analysts do not have the necessary information to implement a campaign that meets or exceeds performance expectations. However, when both are working synergistically, the potential becomes limitless. Fulfill Campaigns at Scalable Volumes White label partnerships are designed to help your team scale, not further constrain your capabilities. When searching for the right partner, look for one that shares your immense vision for true high-performance campaigns. Activate 100% US-Based Implementation A premium white label partner should offer full in-house implementation without offshoring or outsourcing your campaign operations. You are paying for a tangible result that drives real performance for your client, and a middleman service posing as a partner cannot meet these requirements. Solve Performance Reporting Challenges As we mentioned above, the “why” behind the data matters more than raw numbers. A partner’s team of analysts should be able to provide your agency with these insights so that your team and your client can make more informed campaign decisions in the proper context. At Conduit, we designed our own custom live reports where our analysts add real insights and log optimizations on a monthly basis. This provides your agency team with the means to offer complete, contextual answers to your clients when it comes time to check in on campaign progress. Resolve Hiring Issues In our conversations with hundreds of agency leaders over the past year, one major pain point has remained consistent: hiring. Despite the wealth of job openings online, it seems like qualified candidates have all but vanished in even the most competitive markets. A white label partner integrates its team with your own. Acting as a true extension, you can trust that certified analysts are managing your campaign operations at the level of quality your client expects and deserves. Lean on a True Solution for Account Overflow As with hiring, account overflow can place equal or greater strain on your agency’s ability to scale. When there are too many clients and not enough people to serve them at a level that meets your standards, a “spread-thin” environment can decimate morale and create further pain points in communication, performance, or both. Fortunately, a white label partner provides you with an additional solution for managing overflow. When a new potential client opportunity arises, or an existing one wants to expand their account, you do not have to worry about how you will “make it all fit” into your current operations. Set Yourself Up for Sales Success When we defined the three types of white label providers, we discussed how vendors and platforms often do not provide your agency with sales support resources. If you are looking to resell digital services that your agency does not fulfill in-house, a partnership can provide you with the materials you need to speak to the value of these products at an expert level. When equipped with the right information, you can inspire your client’s confidence in expanding their account with you into new marketing channels. Make a Resolution to Say “Yes” to Better Opportunities in the New Year With the right white label partner, you have an expert team in your corner when the next white-whale client approaches your agency. Instead of wondering how you can “make it work” with your internal capacity, you can instead confidently say “yes” and continue to scale. As a white-label digital performance partner, our team at Conduit enables your agency to say “yes” to those can’t-miss opportunities. If you are making a resolution to scale in the new year, contact us today to learn more about white label partnership.

Oct 7, 2020 Recently, leading industry publication AdWeek named our parent company, Traffic Builders, as the second-fastest growing digital marketing agency in the world! What’s even more impressive?  We advanced from number twenty-one to number two within the span of a year.   First and foremost, we couldn’t have made this possible without immense support from our team and partners. We want to thank everyone who helped us reach such a mindblowing milestone!  This growth was supercharged by Conduit’s ability to elevate agencies’ white label marketing capabilities at unrivaled scale. Thanks to our global partners that have helped us grow, Conduit has grown from an idea to a full-on white label marketing laboratory engineered to produce on-time, on-budget deliverables that don’t compromise on quality.  Because Conduit is the agency for your agency, though, we want to share with you what it took to become one of the fastest growing digital marketing agency groups in the world. We hope that you can take some insight from our playbook and apply it to your own business.  We Became the Second Fastest Growing Digital Marketing Agency by Committing to Quality  If you’re unfamiliar with how white label marketing works, we serve as an extension of your in-house team. You can sell our products to your clients under your own brand and we fulfill the deliverables.  Adding our services to your portfolio allows you to grow your agency at scale without taking on overhead associated with adding new members to your internal team. For example, if you wanted to add programmatic video services to your arsenal of solutions, but you don’t want to hire someone to handle it, we can fulfill those requirements for your client on your behalf.  How White Label Digital Marketing Works with Conduit  White label services are at the forefront of digital innovation. Because of this, there are many players trying to get in on the trend – and fast.  Many basic white label providers claim to be a true extension of your in-house team. In reality, they flip your projects to large overseas conglomerates. This affects your turnaround time, the quality of the finished product, and impacts your and your clients’ bottom lines.  Rather than act as a middleman reseller, Conduit Digital handles all operations from our innovative headquarters in New Jersey. Each member of our 30+ person team is an established professional with a rich history of client success and manually vetted by our leadership.  Building a team of true industry rockstars allows us to deliver a better product with a quicker turnaround time. This enables us to deliver true enterprise-level white label services for client projects of all sizes and scope. In the end, you and your client see a tangible difference. Maintaining a high standard for quality is essential. We built our business on it, and you should, too.  Offering Services Agencies Want…But Struggle to Incorporate No two agencies are alike. One may specialize in social media marketing , for example, but the  other has gained a reputation for PPC .  Expanding an agency’s scope of services can be a daunting task. If you have invested so much into social and have limited SEO experience, you may be hesitant to hire an SEO specialist if you do not have the expertise to properly oversee these projects.  That’s where Conduit Digital comes in.  The truth is that leaving gaps in your service inventory can leave you vulnerable to losing potential clients. If you do not offer SEO and that is the client’s primary need, they may instead opt to contract with another organization to solve their problems.  Conduit was founded to bridge these exact sort of gaps for our agency partners. We allow you to extend your services in an instant through a premium turnkey solution. This way, our team can begin serving you immediately without you having to worry about learning a new skill and/or hiring and onboarding another in-house employee.  Staying Ahead of the Curve  We invest countless hours manually vetting apps and staying on top of the latest marketing trends. Safe to say, do a great deal of reading and app testing at Conduit HQ.  Conduit became one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies due to our obsession with forecasting trends and adopting them early. For example, we were one of the first white label providers to master and offer OTT advertising .  To many, the OTT revolution happened gradually…and then suddenly. That wasn’t the case for us. While this new trend was gaining steam, the Conduit team was already knee-deep in testing OTT platforms, vetting each one’s advertising potential.  Staying ahead and on top of emerging digital trends allows us to provide the most premium scalable service possible to our agency partners. Our goal is to always say “absolutely” when asked if we can provide digital services you need.  Do You Want to Become One of the Fastest Growing Digital Marketing Agencies Too? Let’s Get Working!  Simply put: the fastest way to grow your agency is partnering with a white label provider. Conduit Digital gives you the means to accelerate your growth in convenient turnkey fashion.  Want to learn more about how we can help you meet your business goals? Schedule an Agency Growth Call anytime and we’ll be happy to show you.

Dec 8, 2021 SEO ROI Goes Well Beyond Pure Traffic Numbers Search engine optimization encompasses a broad range of tactics to increase organic visitor traffic to your client’s website. By implementing a two-pronged strategy of great content and technical optimization, you can improve the quality of your website, which contributes to greater SEO ROI. How SEO ROI Differs from Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) No Ad Expenditure Unlike digital advertising solutions like paid search and paid social , SEO does not require an active ad expenditure as part of the campaign. Instead of looking at ad spend versus results, determining SEO ROI involves considering a number of different factors that go beyond a money-in, money-out perspective. Greater Focus on Your Client’s Website Digital advertising campaigns are designed to point back to a specific landing page on your client’s website. Unlike this strategy, SEO focuses on the entire website from its technical health to its front-facing user value. Long-Form Content is King Advertising campaigns leverage brief, effective copy to quickly point target audiences to a landing page. SEO content strategies often involve pieces of content with word counts above 500 per deliverable. The more desirable the keywords you’re competing for, the longer the content will likely have to be. Intended for Steady Growth Over Time Advertising campaigns are often designed with specific time windows in mind. For example, a holiday shopping campaign usually starts in late October or early November and ends around December 26. Conversely, SEO strategies are intended to improve your client’s website over a longer period of time on an ongoing basis. These campaigns tend to start generating more noticeable improvements in organic traffic after the first 3-6 months, depending on the initial health of the website. What’s Hurting Your Client’s SEO ROI Search engine algorithms like Google crawl through your client’s website and analyze a variety of features to determine the value of the user experience you’re providing. If these bots detect certain technical red flags, they will penalize your client’s site with lower organic rankings. Some common pain points often found on websites include: Slow Load Times Search engines pride themselves on providing their uses with quick answers to their questions. When a website takes too long to load, this does not contribute to the quickness that a person, and therefore the search engine algorithm, expects. Thin Content The less content on a page, the less information your client is providing about a product, service, or topic related to their industry. If a competitor has longer content about their similar offerings, they will usually receive a higher search position than your client. When a search algorithm sees thin content on a page, it figures that it offers little to no helpful information. Depending on the amount of code on the page, algorithms can also flag it for not having a proportional amount of text. Toxic Backlinks Search engines account for the links that your client’s website accumulates. If there are too many coming from spammy websites, these are considered low-authority. When too many toxic sites are linking back to your client’s pages, this can generate a penalty in organic rankings and, by extension, harm visibility and traffic potential. Inefficient Website Design Website design plays an important role in a client’s SEO performance potential. For those that implement a highly visual aesthetic on their site, this can often result in a large amount of third-party code. This increases the network payload, slows load times, and can cause your content to appear thinner by default. When a search engine algorithm looks at your client’s website, it doesn’t view it as a human does. We see eye-catching images, sleek branding, and products or services that we might consider purchasing. Artificial intelligence views these as the code that is used to display them and factors this into ranking decisions. Missing Important Technical Elements Pages that are missing technical elements like one H1 heading per page and meta descriptions are depriving themselves of organic performance opportunities. As with keywords, these elements help “clue in” an algorithm as to what your page is about. Keyword Mistakes You cannot have a conversation about SEO without discussing keywords and keyword strategies. Keywords are the driving force behind any successful SEO service. While keywords tell search engines what your content is about, they can be misused. This will also contribute to less-than-desirable organic rankings. Some common ways that an improper keyword strategy can hurt your SEO ROI include: Keyword stuffing (overusing) Focusing on the same keyword across multiple pages Not using keyword at all Using keywords that don’t match target audience members’ search intent Lack of Directory Listings Listing your client’s website across industry-relevant online directories helps build their presence across other authoritative websites. These play an instrumental role in driving higher amounts of organic referral traffic. For example, if your client is a local restaurant, they should be on Yelp. Similarly, a counseling practice should list its practitioners on Psychology Today. When an audience member is looking to move from consideration to decision, these listings can play a major role in influencing their actions. The 7 Pillars of SEO ROI An All-Encompassing Audit Every successful SEO campaign should start with an exhaustive audit of the client’s website and cover all aspects from content to granular technical and UX details. This provides the SEO analysts servicing their campaign with a holistic “lay of the land” to create a strategy that addresses specific pain points. Technical Health is SEO Wealth As an SEO campaign proceeds, analysts should perform optimizations on the client’s website to reduce the number of technical errors. Over time, this reduces major roadblocks toward achieving higher organic rankings. When your client asks how their SEO campaign is performing, you can look at the report and tell them that specific technical pain points have been addressed and eliminated. Building Better Backlinks Disavowing spammy backlinks and replacing them with new, high-authority ones will increase search algorithms’ perception of your client’s website. As you accumulate a better link portfolio, you can identify this as a key return on investment. Content Quality is King SEO content is the vehicle that drives multiple aspects of your SEO strategy. From integrating keywords to providing rich copy and lengthening text on a page, these tactics all help expand your client’s reach. Beyond this, also focusing on the quality and context of the content will further increase its relevance to your target user base and the search engines that are providing them with the information they’re seeking. The Right Keyword Opportunities Matching relevant, high-volume keywords with the right search intent will better position the content on your website in front of those that are looking for it. Determining the best keywords for your client’s website, and then performing actions to optimize for them should start with the audit phase and continue steadily over time. Desirable Directory Listings As we mentioned above, a great portfolio of desired directory listings is a major funnel for referral traffic. When you optimize your client’s presence across the right directories, you can point to a likely increase in organic referral traffic as a significant return. Holistic, Transparent Reporting Transparent reports of your SEO campaign compile your efforts into a single resource to demonstrate ROI. These reports should be transparent, offer human insights to add context to the data and touch on specific actions that moved the needle forward for your client’s website performance. Drive Better SEO ROI With a White Label Partnership At Conduit, we partner with successful agencies to provide premium white label fulfillment solutions for their clients, including SEO. Our in-house team of certified expert analysts, 24/7 Live Reports, and competitive content strategies allow you to say “yes” to better opportunities for current and future clients. To start scaling your agency higher and generate a better SEO ROI for your clients, contact us today to learn more about white label partnership.

May 29, 2020 Conduit Digital has consistently created incredible results for our clients and their campaigns. Communicating effectively with your clients, as well as internally, is a key factor in creating a successful client experience. Do you want to know the secrets to effective communication? It may be easier than you think! Our Director of Client Experience Tim C. Burke, Director of Products Rob Burke, Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate, and Social Advertising Manager John Smithson sat down to discuss how effective communication has enabled us to become one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world. How To Communicate Effectively There are many different ways to communicate effectively with your clients. In fact, here are some of the top ways our Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate communicates with clients: Be Positive Coming off in a positive way opens the door for positive communication. Approaching a problem positively is how your clients will listen and be engaged. Many times when you are communicating, especially through a message, what you are trying to say may be misinterpreted. Remember The Client’s Goals The intent behind every decision always comes back to their initial goals . Remembering their goals will give you insight into what the client is trying to say, and the message they are trying to get across. When you offer a full suite of products, it can be hard to remember the client’s overall goals as well as their goals for each product. Keeping these goals in mind when communicating with the client will help you to execute those results better, as well as provide optimizations and insights that better align with those goals. Anticipate Your Client’s Needs When you understand the client’s goals, it becomes easier to anticipate their needs and wants. Understand the intent behind the client’s message and anticipate what their follow up message will be. Doing this helps prepare your agency for what the client will say next. Simply responding to the client’s questions is ok communication. Anticipating what they are going to say next and being prepared for that will greatly increase the client’s trust in you. “Good Communication Is Like Dancing” They say that it takes two to tango. Communication is a lot like that. You need to know where your client is going to go next. This will help you to save time not only in your communication with the client, but internally as well. You will be able to address multiple concerns in one message, saving you a headache down the road. Communication can go in so many different ways, especially with all the ways we can communicate today. Once goals are established, it comes down to actionable next steps. One way to do this is to always iterate back to the client what they asked for in the first place. This helps frame the conversation around a topic that is familiar to the client and helps to get all parties on the same page. By reiterating the client’s concerns, your agency can avoid miscommunication issues later on. It also makes it easier to ensure that any actionable next steps are actually getting done. Don’t let your next steps remain in limbo because the client didn’t understand the communication. Internal Communications Having effective internal communication is key when it comes to properly executing campaigns. From the Ad-Ops side, having a defined and repeatable process is super important. Often times, analysts have to explain technical things in laymen’s terms. This means the analyst has to be well-versed in the data, be able to pull out notable insights, and be able to effectively relay these insights to the client experience team. This all starts with a process. Some of the most successful companies in the world such as McDonald’s or Ford were built on processes that helped them to be more efficient than their competitors. The same is true for modern digital agencies. At Conduit Digital, we take advantage of internal communication platforms such as Teamwork and Slack. The Customer Experience Team maximizes every ounce of the Teamwork Platform to make sure we’re the Leaders of Proactive Communication! In fact, we use this revolutionary platform for: Client Communication Creative Asset Library Form Storage Client Milestones And everything else regarding your client’s campaign! Transparency Is Key Just as it is increasingly important to be transparent about your clients’ performance and data, being able to effectively communicate these results with your clients will help you to gain far more credibility than your competitors. It is important to ensure your outbound and internal communications are not only effective, but actually help you to gain. When it comes to client communication, transparency is one of, if not the biggest, factor. However, it is not just data transparency, but also transparency in deadlines, results, and deliverables. Having a dedicated client experience team has enabled us here at Conduit Digital to bridge the gap between client expectations and agency performance. Our in-house team enables us to effectively and accurately lay out exactly what kind of deliverables they are paying for, how our services affect client ROI, and what campaign performance results to expect. One of the ways we remain transparent and open with our clients and their end-clients is through our revolutionary Live Reporting. Our completely transparent Live Report is updated 24/7 with the essential data and KPIs your clients need to see. We do this so that our Agency Partners and their clients are always clear on goals, expectations, and performance. We even write a campaign narrative to explain the insights from our analysts! By offering a similar live data report, you can be sure that you are always on the same page and are built for success . Live Report Example What Not To Do Gone are the days of unclear deliverables and weeks going by without client engagement. If your agency is not putting a priority on client communication, you will fall behind your competitors. Only by creating clear internal processes and prioritizing internal communication will you be able to communicate effectively with your clients. Develop a repeatable process and you will be able to scale your agency. Conclusion Closing the disconnect between client expectation and performance will be a key factor for any successful agency in 2020. It is more important now than ever to ensure you have the team and infrastructure in place to properly execute effective communication not only with your clients, but within your company as well. Conduit Digital works with thousands of clients every single month and we know from trial and error and experience that having a client communication process that works is one of the keys to successful client communication.

Apr 16, 2020 BigQuery is Google’s serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse. This large-scaled data bank was designed to make a data analyst’s job more productive with unmatched price-performances. Simply put, BigQuery is where Google gives analysts a place to store and manage petabytes of data without the hassle of managing the infrastructure. In today’s age managing an onsite data warehouse is very challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. Google saw the impending issue of big data and how it would impact businesses and the way they use data for analytics and insights. Thanks to Google this has cut time and my personal stress in half. Instead of buying multimillion-dollar servers that would need to be upgraded as demands, Google increased by scaling out and buying a lot of cheaper servers. This now would be Google’s mission of figuring out a way to make them work together to meet demands. One would say Google scaled out and not up. And when it came time to scale more, the company bought a few more machines, instead of having to upgrade the multimillion-dollar server. This helped Google create a high-performance, cost-effective, data warehouse for pretty much anyone that has and more importantly needs to analyze data. How It Works Google BigQuery is a cloud- based , fully managed, serverless enterprise data warehouse that supports analytics over petabyte-scale data. It delivers high-speed analysis of large datasets without requiring investments in onsite infrastructure or database administrators. The most impressive and unique feature BigQuery has is its ability to scale up and down depending on the need of each query, it will add and remove computing power as well as storage resources as required. This is how BigQuery can run queries on terabytes of data in seconds. Let us take a step back and define what a query exactly is. A query is simply a question. When one types a search term or terms into Google they are running a “search query” the keywords are sent to the search engine and are processed using an algorithm that retrieves related results from the search index. The results of the query appear on a search engine results page. When it comes to BigQuery one would run a database query, the database stores data in a structured format. When one runs their query they are essentially doing the same as when they type in search terms in Google, the query runs scouring the structured data finding what is needed and returning it in the form of pictorials, graphs or complex data manipulations. Google BigQuery is a part of the Google Cloud Platform and works in harmony, but both are not required for the other. BigQuery is designed to help expedite the analysis of big data. While ultimately eliminating storage as well as overhead costs. This then also eliminates the complex nature of maintaining onsite hardware and administrative resources. Below is a list of some of the advantages BigQuery has to offer according to Enterprise Strategy Group. Time To Value Users can get their data warehouse environment online quickly and easily, without requiring expert-level system and database administration skills by eliminating the infrastructure and reducing the management (known as “No-Ops” or “Zero-Ops”). Simplicity Complete all major tasks related to data warehouse analytics through an intuitive interface without the hassle of managing the infrastructure. Scalability Scale up to petabytes or down to kilobytes depending on your size, performance, and cost requirements. Speed Ingest, query, and export PB-sized datasets with impressive speeds using the Google Cloud Platform as the underlying cloud infrastructure. Reliability Ensure always-on availability and constant uptime running on the Google Cloud Platform with geo-replication across Google data centers. Security Protect and control access to encrypted projects and datasets through Google’s cloud-wide identity and access management (IAM). Cost Optimization Predict costs with transparent flat rate and/or pay-as-you-go pricing, and contain costs through the use of project and user resource quotas. Bigquery is Self-Scaling Google BigQuery is self-scaling, which means it identifies the resources required for each query to finish quickly and efficiently and provides those resources to meet the demand. Once the demand has been met and the workload completed, it will reallocate the resources that were required to finish the task quickly and efficiently to other projects and other users who need it at that moment. This is how BigQuery successfully runs queries on massive amounts of data. Both in transferring data in and in processing that data for results, BigQuery is capable of delivering immense speeds even at petabyte scales. For enhanced data durability, BigQuery provides high availability and reliability through geographic replication that is completely transparent to its users, and without the requirement to obtain the physical resources and space to house it all. Google BigQuery enables organizations to combat the cost and complexity challenges that come with building and maintaining a fast, scalable, and reliable big data infrastructure. By utilizing Google BigQuery’s cloud-based approach, the time and cost traditionally dedicated to protecting data and guaranteeing the time needed for computing is drastically reduced. Best Practices For Controlling Costs Now, Google’s BigQuery gives not one, but all the necessary tools to make it what they need. Only pay for the storage and compute resources used, thanks to BigQuery’s serverless architecture. BigQuery’s separation of storage and computing makes it easy to scale independently and endlessly on demand, resulting in low-cost, economical storage. BigQuery can lower the total cost of ownership by 56%–88%. One can analyze up to 1 TB of data and store 10 GB of data for free each month. But if someone is not paying close attention to the way they are running their queries they could incur costs not expected. This is because of BigQuery charges based on the size of the queries one runs. If one needs to run a query that only needs to pull from, let us say, 10 columns or rows, and they run a full query on all the columns or rows, they will be incurring the costs of running a full query on all of their data in that table. If one has terabytes of data this query could cost them a pretty penny. This is when setting up tables based on queries frequently run will save money in the long run. This is where we put the time and effort into creating tables with fewer columns for queries we run frequently for reporting. By doing so, every time we are reporting we are only using the exact number of columns (data) we need to complete the job. What Google Recommends Not pulling in any excess columns causing increased costs. Going off only querying the columns of data one needs, Google recommends to not use the SELECT * option when running their queries. Using SELECT * is the most expensive way to query data. When one uses SELECT *, BigQuery does a full scan of every column in the table. Now one can still use the SELECT * option when running a query, Google recommends using SELECT * EXCEPT to exclude one or more columns from the results. This will allow the analyst to select only the columns they need to query helping control costs. Personally, we would not recommend using the SELECT * option when running queries in the event one mistakenly misses columns they wanted to exclude from the query. For this reason as previously mentioned, we have taken the time out to create destination tables which we can sort by date ranges to only query the data we absolutely need to. In addition to the ability to create destination tables to control costs, BigQuery has an awesome feature that allows analysts to price their queries before running them. According to Google, queries are billed according to the number of bytes read. To estimate costs before running a query: View the query validator in the Cloud Console or the classic web UI Use the Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator Perform a dry run by using the: –dry_run flag in the CL dryRun parameter when submitting a query job using the API BigQuery also has the ability to use the maximum bytes billed setting to limit query costs. This can limit the number of bytes billed for a query using. One can accomplish this by using the maximum bytes billed setting. When setting maximum bytes billed, if the query will read bytes beyond the limit, the query fails without incurring a charge. If a query fails because of the maximum bytes billed setting, an error like the following is returned: Error: Query exceeded limit for bytes billed: 1000000. 10485760 or higher required. How Bigquery Has Helped Conduit Here at Conduit, we were faced with a similar issue Google was when they set out on their journey to create BigQuery. We hit a point where we needed our reports to be smoother and faster, and find a solution that could handle all our data from our 1,500 monthly clients. This was not an easy feat, we needed a solution that was simplistic, reliable, affordable and not limited in its scaling and speed capabilities. After months of researching, we narrowed our search down to BigQuery. For us, BigQuery had time to value ratio we could not match with other applications, let alone when we compared it to our previous process. At one point in time, we were pulling our client data into reports via Google and Excel sheets. This did not just pose an issue for us in its scaling capabilities when we hit a certain amount of data, it was as slow as molasses. BigQuery solved that issue for us, with its pretty much limitless scaling capabilities as well as its ability to process petabytes of data in seconds! Simplicity Simplicity was another factor we valued heavily. We needed something we could get a grasp on and manage in house, helping us control costs and manipulate our data in a way we wanted. BigQuery provides us with the infrastructure to not only store our data but transform it utilizing queries so that we can connect our data sources in as lightweight of a way as possible. Helping us control costs in the long run. Scalability Touching back on our need for scalability, with 1,500 clients monthly and most clients running multiple campaigns with us we were in need of an application that could scale with our tremendous growth. BigQuery was designed with that in mind, having virtually no limitations on scalability with the combination of its low costs is a great price point for analytics data. Speed We were not just looking for a solution that was simple and had massive potential for scalability it also needed to be blazing fast to give us the ability to have real time reporting. BigQuery’s serverless infrastructure provides us with the speeds we need to accomplish all of our reporting needs. The infrastructure provided by BigQuery would be unreachable for most companies. Access to that type of computing power is not common and would cost companies an unfathomable amount of money to accomplish (a bit of an exaggeration but you get the point). With BigQuery’s capability to run a 4.06TB query in roughly 24 seconds, our search for a solution that had the speed capabilities we required ended there. Reliability Reliability also played a massive role in our search. The need for a reliable infrastructure to eliminate the need for our own was top of mind. BigQuery provided us with exactly that. According to Google, this is exactly how they accomplish their unmatched reliability, “BigQuery has a geographically diverse team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who monitor the service 24/7 for outages, performance degradation, latency, and failures. SREs track the service against internal SLOs, which are often much stricter than public SLAs. We are also able to help customers research not-so-obvious SQL issues. The BigQuery team works behind the scenes to help ensure that you get the most current software stack running on fantastic infrastructure. To that end, we may seamlessly migrate your queries to a different data center (while of course respecting the dataset location constraints you’ve set, e.g., if you’ve asked that it remains in Europe). This means that your BigQuery queries may run in one data center in your region in the morning, and in another data center in the afternoon, as we roll out a new version of Dremel, upgrade networking or hardware or implement a new compression algorithm.” Protection Simplicity, speed, and reliability were not all we were looking for; we needed security above all. With over 1,500 clients and all the data that comes with that volume, we needed to make sure our clients were protected. BigQuery makes this possible by encrypting projects and datasets through Google’s cloud-wide identity and access management (IAM). Conclusion When it boils down to it all, cost is the overall deciding factor. Not only saving you money but also time. BigQuerys transparent pricing allows us to easily calculate and forecast costs based on the number of reports we create and the queries we run. On top of that, BigQuery allows 1 TB of data and store 10 GB of data for free each month. Making the switch was a no brainer. With all of this, we hope to have brought some light to your current and stressful process. If you are looking for a White-Label Digital Solution to help you lighten the load and make your current process more streamlined and stress-free, contact Conduit Digital. We have the tools, knowledge, and expertise to bring your clients’ digital campaigns to the next level. See how Partnership with Conduit can help grow your agency to the moon.