Monthly Industry Roundup: May 2019

Location3 News: We’re always cognizant of the proper work-life balance here at Location3. Whether it’s traveling to San Francisco for Google Marketing Live or hitting the slopes at Arapahoe Basin for Location3 Ski Day, our team brings the appropriate enthusiasm.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN FRANCHISE DIGITAL MARKETING?

Location3 Brings Unique Approach to Multi-Location Clients

Perhaps nobody can give a better perspective on the Location3 approach as Founder and Chairman Andrew Beckman. He recently sat down with Carmen Rane Hudson of Grade.us to discuss how Location3 tailors its services for each client in order to create a true partnership. This interview is loaded with insight – from the client-agency relationship to the most important digital strategies for multi-location businesses. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Carmen: Do you have any success stories you feel comfortable sharing with me? Perhaps a time when you tried something unique and got positive results?

Andrew: Sure!

In our LOCALACT platform, we pull in reviews and Q&A from Google.

It is a pretty common thing for people to know they should be looking at the reviews and not just responding to them, but taking what they learn from their reviews to heart.

Some of the things we’ve been doing from a data perspective is going through and trying to gain insight into what the actual sentiment is. Doing some sentiment analysis of reviews to to say, okay, where do the issues lie? Not just with a specific location, but the business as a whole.

We try to help make the business better. We try to create better functions from corporate all the way down. Maybe the corporate processes aren’t aligned with what people are expecting or what not. So it’s not always only the fault of the franchisee.

In one instance, we were able to pull review sentiment out of our platform for a company that has over 1,000 locations.

They were able to identify some issues they had. They owned them. They said,

“Hey, we are changing some policies we have regarding this type of engagement with our customers. You guys have let us know about it, we’re doing something to fix it.”

They updated all of their content in their local pages, and in their business profiles, to speak to the things that were showing up within the reviews.

Within 2 or 3 months, we started seeing more positive reviews coming through.

We were still doing a lot with responding to reviews and whatnot, but as we started seeing that content change, that content shift to speak to issues that were being brought up across the internet, not just in Google reviews, we just started seeing more positive engagement.

And visibility, we saw a slight increase. However, we saw a much bigger increase in clicks and calls.

So clicks to the website, and calls directly from Google My Business listings. They were pretty significant.

Read the full post here.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PAID MEDIA?

Google Marketing Live: Google to Monetize Discover Feed

Last year, Google introduced Discover, a home page feed that delivers user-specific relevant content to mobile devices.

At Google Marketing Live, Google introduced Discovery ads, a new ad type that allows advertisers to place native ads in Google Discover feeds, YouTube home feeds, and Gmail.

A Discovery campaign targets users based on internal Google data. More specifically, data that gauges user interest, location, and affinity qualities in addition to user behavior across Google properties.

Performance reporting is tied to overarching Discovery campaigns – not the individual channels (Discover, YouTube, Gmail) that make up a campaign. That will make it more difficult to optimize campaigns, but Discovery ads and campaigns are an intriguing option that we will be testing in the near future.

Performance Planner Now Available in Google Ads

Performance Planner is a new tool within Google Ads. Originally known as Budget Planner, the updated tool offers advertisers projections based on campaign history and auction data, which is then confirmed through machine learning. Projections can be used to more efficiently allocate budgets for Google Ads campaigns based on ROI, customized KPIs, seasonality, and previous campaigns.

This is a planning tool, but if it proves to be accurate, it could be an important resource for advertisers who want to responsibly showcase to clients the relationship between incremental spend and lead volume. For Location3, that means our customer success team will be able to provide franchisees with more accurate performance projections based on the size of allocated budget.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LOCAL SEO?