Awareness and concern about privacy have been steadily increasing and users are actively taking steps to reduce the amount of data they share online. In light of this, most major tech players have also announced/implemented steps to restrict third-party cookies thereby restricting data collections and user tracking on their platforms.

1. Towards a third-party cookie-less world
2. Not entirely a cookie-less world
3. The impact of losing third party cookies
4. What can marketers do in a cookie-less world
5. Will Google Analytics work without cookies?
6. Privacy Sandbox – Google’s response to cookie-less future

Towards a Third Party Cookie-Less World

• Safari and Firefox have been working towards blocking 3rd party cookies since 2013. In 2019, Firefox started blocking all known tracking cookies. In 2021, with the launch of Firefox 86, they brought in Total Cookie Protection that confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
• In 2020, Safari started fully blocking 3rd party cookies
• Early 2020, Google announced that within 2 years they will stop support for third-party cookies
• iOS 14.5 and later, will prompt iPhone and iPad users to choose if they would like to share their data with apps that monitor their behavior and share that data with third parties. This necessarily means that iPhone users can now stop advertisers from following their digital lives.

Not Entirely a Cookie-Less World

It is only the third-party cookies that are going to get depreciated – that is cookies that do not belong to the website’s domain you are surfing but the ones that are dropped in your machine by ad servers, trackers, etc. For example, if a user is browsing website example.com – a cookie from that domain is considered a first-party cookie but the Facebook tracking cookie that is dropped on the user’s browser by example.com is considered a third-party cookie.

First-party cookies will still work and with third-party cookies gone, advertisers will have to be more dependent on first-party data. Businesses will now need to have a first-party data strategy that allows them to gather as much information from their own domain as possible and to leverage that data to provide a customized user journey.

I believe businesses are still going to buy or share data from trusted partners but there will be a lot more focus and effort to ensure customer consent is being honored.

The Impact of Losing Third Party Cookies

The impact from the loss of third-party cookies will be felt across the digital marketing ecosystem – the consumers, the advertisers, the ad tech players, all of them. There are two key areas that will be impacted by the loss of third-party cookies – ad targeting and measurement.

For Consumers

• Consumers will have more control over the data they share with businesses
• They are likely to see more irrelevant ads, as advertisers will not be able to personalize ( except for the ones who have first-party data)

For Ad Tech Players

• Ad Tech players will need to change their standard tactics of collecting user data on advertiser’s websites for performance tracking and targeting. In their current state, these functionalities are third-party cookie-dependent
• Ad tech players will lose their ability to target people at an individual level
• DSPs will now need to rethink their positioning which typically emphasizes the availability of differentiated use of third-party data for targeting, against the huge first-party audience data that Google or FB has

For Advertisers

• The end of third-party cookies will lead to fewer opportunities for ad personalization
• Behavioral targeting and Ad retargeting will have a serious impact
• The loss of cross-platform frequency capping could result in ad fatigue/oversaturation for the audience.
• Most third-party audiences (data collected via third-party cookies) will diminish in size due to cookie expiry, and eventually be too small to use.

Analytics & Measurement

• Marketing KPI’s will be severely affected, for example, with third-party cookies gone, most view-through conversion data will disappear for your display campaigns
• Cross channel attribution, Multi-touch attribution, Audience reporting will get impacted

What Can Marketers Do in a Cookie-Less World

1. Improve First-Party Data Collection

Now that third-party cookies are no longer going to be available, as an advertiser, you will be primarily dependent on first-party data. Establish proper and thorough data capturing mechanisms that are compliant and get data about users who have already engaged with your brand. Building up first-party data takes time, and to use the data effectively across most platforms you will need a certain volume – so get started!

2. Recheck and Refine Cookie Consent Management

With GDPR and CCPA in play, most websites today already have some sort of cookie consent management system. It’s time you take a closer look at that and if you are one of the very few who don’t have a cookie consent management system, you should get one in place right away. This is important to make sure your first-party data is fully compliant with regulations and future-proof. Make this an opportunity to increase trust with your website visitors, clearly communicating to them about how you process and protect their data

3. Leverage Second Party Data from Media Giants and Publishers

Media giants like Google and Facebook will continue to provide aggregated audience data on their advertising/media buying platforms. While losing third-party cookie data will hurt them a bit in terms of tracking, targeting, and ability to retarget, they will still continue to have a lot of audience data through all the logged-in users across their platforms and products. This is rich audience data available for free – don’t undermine it.

Most of the major publishers also have their own first-party data that you as an advertiser can use in case of direct buys or private auctions on programmatic platforms.

4. Third-Party Cookies Are Gone – Third-Party Data Might Still Be There

As we get used to not having third-party cookies, it doesn’t necessarily mean that third-party data is lost forever. There are cleaner ways to collect third-party data – there are already firms like Experian, VisualDNA, etc who collect and build third-party audience data without the use of cookies. I strongly believe we will see a lot of innovative offerings in that space.

5. Rethink your web analytics/measurement setup

In a cookie-less world, ad performance measurement is going to get far more complicated than where it is – even in the current setup it is not perfect. The loss of third-party cookies will add to the problem in several ways including cross-device tracking and attribution. Refer to the section below on how Google Analytics is getting ready for the cookie-less world.

6. Take a closer look at your MarTech stack

Your current Martech stack might have several tools that are reliant on third-party cookies – figure out what happens when the cookies are gone, how are your Martech partners getting ready for the cookie-less world?

Recheck on your data ownership, ensure you have full control of your data, not just in terms of usage but also in terms of access and portability, so if you happen to change any of your tools or agency, you are not losing your hard-earned first-party data.

Will Google Analytics Work Without Cookies?

Google Analytics is the most widely-used web analytics application across the world with almost 70% market share and I thought this is probably one of the basic questions most marketers would have in mind.

Today Google Analytics works by setting cookies on a user’s browser when they visit a website that uses the platform. The loss of third-party cookies definitely poses a challenge to Google Analytics, but Google has already addressed this.

GA4 was introduced as a completely new solution focussed on privacy, that can work with or without cookies. Google plans to fill in data gaps in GA4 using machine learning and statistical modeling as the world becomes more and more cookie-less.

While GA4 is the default option offered by Google today, Universal Analytics is still available and Google recommends running both in parallel. GA4 might fill in some gaps in user behavior that are caused by users not accepting cookies.

Also, another way to keep using Universal Analytics is to do a server-side implementation of Google Analytics, where the analytics cookies are served from your own domain (subdomain), thereby making them first-party cookies.

In a server-side setup, you necessarily create an endpoint in a server environment that you own, which acts as a sort of a proxy between the hits sent from browsers and devices and the actual endpoints to which the hits are collected. For the ones more technically inclined, please review this article by the amazing Simo Ahava.

Privacy Sandbox – Google’s Response to Cookieless Future

Google has now created the Privacy Sandbox and pitching it as a solution for ad targeting and tracking as it goes on to kill the third-party cookies on Chrome. In a cookieless world, Google’s Privacy Sandbox will replace cookies with web browser APIs and these will set the standards for ad targeting and measurement while also helping with ad fraud prevention. The APIs will provide aggregate data on attribution and conversion that could be valuable. Google’s Privacy Sandbox will rely on anonymized signals within a person’s Chrome browser. While the world is still waiting to get access to Privacy Sandbox and get a feel of it, here are a few APIs that are likely to have the most impact in the ad tech world –

FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts

This definitely piqued the interest of the advertisers. FLoC will rely on the browsing habits of groups of similar people (cohorts) which will then be used in Google’s ad platforms for advertisers to use for Interest-based targeting. The idea of FLoC relies on placing individuals in large groups of users with similar browsing histories so the advertisers are able to target based on the interest, without compromising on the individual’s privacy.

Topics

While it started with FLoC, Google has now stopped FLoC and has declared that it is the Topics API that will enable interest-based ad serving. The topics API does three things – maps websites to the topic of interest, calculates the top topics for a user based on their recent browsing history, provides an API to share topics currently of interest to the user, so they can be shown ads as per their interest You can find more here.

Attribution Reporting / Conversion Measurement

The conversion measurement API would allow advertisers to measure ad click conversion and ad performance without third-party cookies. However, it is to be seen how it pans out for more complex situations like multi-touch attribution or if an advertiser is working with multiple reporting partners.

Trust Tokens

This API could be extremely powerful in preventing ad fraud. The Trust Token API allows a website to pass on a limited amount of information about the user without breaching the user’s privacy, which is then used by other websites to validate if the user is a real one or a bot. Simply put, once a website identifies a user to be trustworthy based on their activity (completion of a transaction, long-term account usage, etc), they issue a token to the user’s web browser. When the user accesses another website, it can then check the web browser for tokens from an issuer it trusts, and then redeem tokens as necessary.

While the Privacy Sandbox looks like an exciting and promising solution, it is not until the end of this year or early 2023 that it will be available for users. Here you can see a full timeline for the project. With the involvement of the WWW Consortium, this Privacy Sandbox could lead to open web standards that could be adopted by other browsers. It would also be interesting to see if Google would restrict its own ad products to the same aggregated user data in the Privacy Sandbox or if Google platforms get privileged access to more granular user data.

The loss of third-party cookies is sure to bring in major disruption to the current digital marketing/advertising ecosystem. It is going to take its own time for the turmoil to settle and for the ecosystem to stabilize considering all the changes that are going to come across ad products, targeting, and measurement. As marketers, let’s get ready to adjust our strategies, rethink our playbooks, reevaluate our channels and measurement as we get used to emerging standards of consumer privacy norms.

Here’s to a new beginning in the cookieless world!

The post Marketing in a Cookie-Less World – Are You Ready? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I recently came across a report on “State of Spend” – an analysis of B2B marketing investment in this new normal with data from several enterprise marketing teams. This marketing investment benchmark report has been put together by Allocadia based on actual data on how their B2B clients have been investing their marketing budgets in this current market scenario. Here are some interesting facts from the report –

An Overall Cut in Marketing Budget

56% of the companies surveyed lost more than 10% of their over marketing budget.

15% lost more than 30% of their program spend

Events – The Biggest Loser

Not really a surprise here.

Event spend plummeted by 46% from Q1 to Q2 of 2020.

There’s an 85% correlation between decreases in event spend and decreases in overall marketing spend, meaning every time a marketing team saw a cut in the overall budget, chances are that the event budget took the largest cut.

However, when looking at the forecasted spends, it seems marketers have not given up on events completely.

From Q2 to Q3 there is a 24% increase in forecasted event spend.

This could be because we are hopeful of things getting normal or marketers are doubling down on virtual and hybrid events, webinars etc. (If you are looking for a good webinar platform, check out Demio, a really user-friendly and value for money webinar platform with advanced features)

Digital Advertising Sees the Upside

As events spend decreased, digital programs and advertising saw a clear increase in spending.

28% of the companies had a more than 30% increase in ad spend Q1 Vs Q2.

There’s also a huge increase in forecasted ad spend for all sizes of companies from Q2 to Q3. Quiet possible that companies used Q2 to test new channels and advertising programs and use Q3 to scale the ones that perform.

Want to find out how your competitors are spending on ads? Try this!

Demand Gen Programs Get More Budget Compared to Brand Campaigns

During a pandemic situation it is normal to think that brands will spend more money on awareness so that when the market is ready to buy, they have a strong brand recall with the buyers. However, in reality, brands cut down on their awareness spend and PR initiatives while increasing spend and focus on demand gen activities.

Demand Programs Increase More than 20% while Awareness Programs Drop

Overall, direct marketing increased from Q1 to Q2 by 23%

This clearly indicates that brands are renewing their focus on expanded email nurture programs, telemarketing initiatives, ABM efforts, and other demand gen programs.

Content Marketing Programs See an Increase in Spend

As marketers, particularly B2B brands continue to spend more on their demand gen programs, content marketing gets a shot in the arm.

Overall there was a 12% increase in content marketing spend from Q1 to Q2, with a further 8% increase forecasted for Q3

39% of companies had more than a 20% increase in their content marketing spend.

The growth in content marketing can probably be directly attributed to the growth in demand programs and digital advertising.

This year is indeed different and while these numbers are interesting I don’t think these can serve as a benchmark for the post-COVID world. Some of these trends will likely continue while others will turn on their head as the situation gets back to normal. If you are interested in more details, you can download and read the full report on Allocadia’s website.

Allocadia provides best-in-class money management capabilities for marketers and gives them the confidence to know where to invest their next dollar. Its award-winning marketing performance management platform enables marketers to plan strategically, invest with purpose, measure the performance of their activities, and ultimately maximize marketing’s impact on the business.

The post The Impact of COVID-19 on B2B Marketing Budget appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Even simpler things like keyword research now need advanced tools that can dig deeper and help identify the long-tail keywords that can actually work. Head terms thrown out by most free tools are not really of much use anymore.

Link building is another area where SEO tools have always been prominent. There are loads of them, free and paid but the paid tools are miles ahead in terms of how they can help analyze your current backlinks, explore new link opportunities, identify toxic links, and several other functionalities.

Overall, a powerful paid SEO tool can make your life a lot easier if you are seriously into SEO.

A Trend in SEO Tools

Another recent trend that I have observed across various SEO tools is the way they are expanding their capability to become more of a suite of tools, rather than a specialized focus on a certain area. SEMRush is probably the biggest example of this, where a simple SEO tool has now expanded to be a one-point solution for all digital marketing needs. AHREF which was also initially launched as a tool specializing in backlink analysis and opportunity has now expanded with other tools like site analysis, content explorer etc. This is an encouraging trend as it takes away the need for investing in multiple tools and also gives an opportunity to have an integrated view of the site across various aspects.

Let’s look at some of the top SEO tools in 2022

SEMRush

SEMRush is much more than an SEO tool. It is a one-in-all suite of tools that caters not just to your SEO needs but across all aspects of your digital marketing needs.

As an SEO tool, SEMRush offers a comprehensive SEO Audit tool, keyword ranking tracker, backlink tracker. It also has a content analyzer tool that can analyze your content for SEO. The Keyword magic tool in SEMRush is particularly useful in identifying otherwise invisible keywords. The content recommendation tool helps identify new topics for creating content, the tool also helps uncover questions around your seed keywords, which could be very useful for content creation.

Besides the SEO tools, SEMRush also offers social media monitoring and posting tool within the same suite.

Also, SEMRush uncovers competitive intelligence about SEO as well as paid search. You can literally dig into competitors’ ad keywords, ad copies, landing pages. Comparing competitor data across various aspects of digital marketing helps you identify new opportunities and help you step up your game.

SEMRush gives you access to the world’s largest database of 20 billion keywords, 310 million ads and 17 billion URLs crawled per day.

SEMRush offers a completely free trial for 7 days, the packages start at $119/month.

Recommend Reading: Comparative review of SEMRush, SpyFu, KeyworSpy and Ispionage
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AHREFS

Ahrefs is another highly popular SEO toolset that provides comprehensive SEO intelligence. While the tool initially gained popularity for its prowess with backlink analysis, Ahrefs today offers extensive SEO analysis with granular data.

Ahrefs backlink index gets updated every 15 minutes and the crawler processes over 8 billion pages a day, which speaks volumes about the tech behind the tool.

Ahref also includes a Content Explorer that shows the most shared content on a particular topic, there is also a Keyword Explorer that helps identify new keywords with traffic volume.

The tool also provides some bit of competitive intelligence about competitor backlinks etc. however SEMRush does a far better job at that aspect.

Ahref package starts at $99, you can also pay $7 for a 7-day trial.

Majestic SEO

An out-and-out SEO tool specializing in link data, probably the most powerful one. Majestic takes pride in having the greatest link index database.

You can run a thorough audit of your backlinks including the usual indicators like anchor text, referring domains, IP, etc.

Where Majestic differentiates itself against other SEO tools that provide link data is in the Link Graph and Link Profile that it provides. Link Graph shows the network around your best links, and Link Profile maps the Trust Flow and Citation flow of direct links. It also provides a backlink history that shows the number of links discovered every day. Majestic also provides a very useful Topical trust flow that categorizes your links into topics and gives an indication of the trust flow to your domain for each topic.

Majestic SEO packages start at GBP 40.

Moz Pro

Another excellent and classical SEO tool – rather a toolset. If you are looking for a complete SEO tool, Moz Pro will fit the bill.

Moz Pro offers a solid keyword research tool that helps you uncover various keywords and keyword combinations that you can target. They have a detailed site audit tool built-in. Also, there are several other very useful SEO features like rank tracking and on-page optimization tools.

Moz Pro, like any other good SEO tool, also provides a backlink analysis tool that provides useful metrics about your existing backlinks, anchor text, etc.

MozPro packages start at $99/month

While the four tools mentioned above are clearly the most powerful ones there is no dearth of good quality SEO tools today and every SEO have their own favorite. As I work across SEO, Paid Search, and various other aspects of digital marketing, I find SEMRush to be the best value for money.

The post Top 4 SEO Tools You Should Consider in 2022 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

For example, for distributed marketing teams that need to collaborate across locations or even just while working at home, applications such as Zoom are irreplaceable. Tools like Canva are a lifesaver when it comes to creating content with all the images, templates, and features they offer. Similarly, SEMRush is another tool that I personally swear by when it comes to all my competitive research for SEO, SEM campaigns. They also have a pretty powerful content research tool and social media management tool in the suite.

Here’s an infographic from Salesforce Quip that shows a bunch of marketing tools and apps that are must-have for marketers.

The post Must Have Productivity Apps for a Marketing Department appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Once the enormity of these numbers hits you, you realize how social media has become such an essential part of how businesses operate today. The 21st century marketing rules are simple: if you want to survive and flourish, in a sea of brands and companies, you need to up your social media marketing game.

Social media helps increase your reach to potential customers while helping you better connect with your existing customer base. Additionally, it’s a vital means of increasing ROI and brand awareness. The consequence of all this? Increased sales and leads, every business’s dream.

Facebook and Instagram being two of the most widely used platforms, they become the obvious choice when it comes to advertising your business. Further, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and the integrated option to run your Facebook and Instagram ads from the Facebook ads interface makes it even easier for businesses to run their ad campaigns.

Having said that, there are definitive reasons for businesses to compare Instagram vs. Facebook ads both in terms of understanding the nature of the platform, compare the audience reach, ad types, cost of advertisement on the platforms, and more.

Instagram vs. Facebook for Business

While both are greatly used for advertising your business, the set of features that each of these offers are quite different from each other.

Being the older of the two platforms, Facebook wins when it comes to having a greater number of users (a whopping .13 billion daily active users as compared to Instagram’s 500 million monthly active users). With a tag line of “Be Connected,” Facebook does a hell of a job at connecting businesses to their respective customer bases.

Instagram, on the other hand, goes by the motto “ Capture and Share the World’s Moments.” True to this, its focus revolves around image and video sharing.

Instagram vs. Facebook: Which is better for Brand Engagement

The most significant advantage Instagram has over Facebook in terms of marketing is that Instagram has a significantly higher user engagement rate as compared to Facebook.

According to Ecommerce CEO, about 68% of Instagram users engage with brands regularly, while for Facebook, this value is only a measly 32%.

Looking at these numbers, you would expect to get more views, shares, and comments when posting on Instagram rather than on Facebook, right? However, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Because Facebook does so great with videos, video ads posted there to get more views than those posted on Instagram. Meanwhile, pictures on Instagram fare far better than those on Facebook.

Choose Between Facebook or Instagram Based on Your Target Audience

An important factor that goes into deciding what social media you should use to promote and advertise your brand is the demographic you’re targeting. We all have at least one grandparent that uses Facebook, but I doubt you know of any old people.

If your brand is targeted towards a younger demographic, say generation Z and millennials, then your best bet would be Instagram. Known for its youthful image, Instagram’s user base is mainly composed of users under the age of 30, and that too predominantly in the 13-17 year age bracket.

Facebook, on the other hand, caters to an older demographic, the most prominent of which are millennials and baby boomers. The good thing about this is that these generations are more well off than younger users. Therefore, they are more likely to carry through with a purchase.

Instagram Ads vs Facebook Ads

As expected from a platform that’s as well developed as it is, Facebook offers users the option of choosing from the following different types of ads.

Facebook Ad types

Video Ads: These are pretty self-explanatory—they allow you to showcase your product in video format.

Image Ads: these include one captivating picture of your product or service, along with a persuasive caption and usually a link to buy the product.

Collection Ads: A cover image or video followed by a few product photos.

Carousel Ads: this interactive format allows you to showcase up to 10 images (or videos) in a single post, each with its own link.

Slideshow Ads: Using a slide show of photos, you create a video-like ad, which use combines the elements of motion, sound, and text to maximize engagement.

Facebook Instant Experiences/Canvas Ads: one of the most immersive formats on Facebook, Canvas ads allow for a full-screen experience with a mobile-optimized ad that shows all your relevant advertisement data in one place.

Lead Generation Ads: These ads allow businesses to gather user information via a form.

Instagram Ad Types

Instagram, on the other hand, offers more limited types of ads, but if used correctly, these too can lead to high conversion rates.

Photo Ads: These are the regular images that allow you to showcase your products.

Video Ads: These are ads in the video format. A big limitation, though, is that ads can only be up to 60 seconds. So there is an increased pressure to captivate viewers within a minute.

Carousel Ads: These can contain a maximum of 10 images or videos, with each picture/video being linked to the relevant page on your website.

Stories Ads: Now, this is where Instagram truly shines. Stories ads feature full-screen pictures or videos that users can go through by simply tapping them. They give brands a huge capacity for showcasing their creativity and are highly versatile in getting engagement.

Compare Instagram vs. Facebook Advertising Cost

Nothing worthwhile ever comes free, especially not something that you get to reap such huge benefits from. The same is the case with social media advertisements. However, your final cost will also be affected by other variables like

• Ad objective
• Bidding type and amount
• Audience
• Ad quality
• Your industry

You can use ADCostly for getting an estimation of the cost of an advertisement campaign. The tool contains massive data collected from various ad campaigns. You can easily determine the approximated cost of ad campaigns. The tool supports Facebook and all its direct advertising channels such as Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

As you can see from the above screenshot of the dashboard, we’re in the “ADCOST” tab of ADCostly. You can see different filters here, let’s have an understanding of them.

Network: This is the main advertising platform that will be used for cost estimation. Facebook is the network that ADCostly currently supports. However, the availability of the option for the selection of network is surely there to select other networks too, which may be added in the tool later.

Publisher: A publisher is basically an advertising channel related to the selected network. E.g if we take “Google” as a network, the channels can be display, search, shopping, Youtube, and Admob etc. So, in the present case, the direct advertising channels of Facebook include the Facebook app itself, Instagram, Audience network, and messenger.

Category: A category here indicates the type of products that one is going to advertise. You can select gaming apps, non-gaming apps, eCom, B2B Lead generation, web, and page. One thing that is very important here is that for a good estimation of AdCost, you should select your proper category instead of selecting all.

Advanced: This filter covers ad placement, targeting country, and CTA (Call To Action). There are tons of available options in all of these filters, which are enough to get you a more precise estimation of cost. This filter and its subfilters play a very important role in building a perfect strategy.

Date: The date filter is there to select the date range or the number of days. You can select either specific number of days mentioned or you can select a range of days.

After you’ve selected the filters according to your criteria, you can see the results in the form of graphs and charts. Thus, you can add those estimated values of cost per click, click-through rate, and cost per mille in your strategy from this data.

The Top Campaign section of this tool contains data of the best advertising campaigns. All the filters are the same here as mentioned before. This data fetched from this massive database can be used in crafting a great advertising strategy.

ADCostly can be used to check which placement is better and which advertising channel can help in this. If the tool shows more conversions via Instagram in your niche, then you should go for it and vice versa for other publishing channels of Facebook.

We hope that this article has helped you in understanding the value that you can add to your strategy by estimating the approximate cost and understanding the difference between the two platforms.

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One of the key challenges of being a digital marketing professional is to keep your self updated with the ever-changing landscape and probably one of the most enjoyable ways of doing this is to attend some industry conference with great speakers.

While I have attended marketing events across the world, this year SEMRush has brought an awesome event to India. The SEMRush Marketing Show is scheduled for 5th of December in Bangalore and you get to listen to some top industry experts like Larry Kim, Purna Virji and Aleyda Solis.

And of course, besides the content, this is also a great opportunity to network with fellow marketers. If you have not registered for the event yet, you can do it here.

The post SEMRush Brings It’s First Digital Marketing Conference to India appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I did a post on SEO jokes long back and the post still continues to get a lot of traffic. Most of them are classic timeless SEO jokes, but while reading them today, I felt I should do a new version with some updated, modern SEO Jokes. Jokes are best when they are relevant and new; when people can relate to them easily, hence this collection of modern funny SEO jokes.

To be honest it is very difficult to track back the actual source of the SEO jokes as many of them has been published across multiple websites. I have collected these funny SEO jokes from across multiple websites, but to add a drop to the ocean, I have also added one of my original SEO joke that you will not find anywhere else – till someone else copies it :p

I have also included some PPC jokes in this and collating some jokes on general marketing jokes but that’s for another post. For now, enjoy these SEO jokes.

The original SEO joke

How does an SEO get a divorce? They Disavow

New & Funny SEO Jokes

The local church emailed earlier… They wanted us to see if we can improve their Conversion Rates.

The England international football team got in touch. They need more goals set up… And don’t want penalties.

What did the victim say to the SEO stalker? Nofollow!

How does @Google decide who to hit hardest with Penguin updates? – Flipper Coin!

What do the Penguins @Google use to catch their fish? – Link Bait!

What do you get if you cross a Penguin and a Panda? A Ranking Problem!!

Why have all Penguins been left out of the Antarctic world cup team? Because they cause too many penalties!

Knock Knock SEO Jokes

Knock knock. Who’s there? No one because all of your rankings have gone!

Other Funny SEO Jokes

An SEO couple had twins – for the first time they were happy with duplicate content

Why do SEOs love the farmer’s market? .Lots of organic content.

Why did the SEO cross the road in a blindfold? – To get hit with traffic

What’s common between an SEO and Chiropractor? They both fix bad backlinks

What do you call an SEO Expert who sells vans? – Danny SellAVan

The hotel put me on room number 404. I searched and searched but could never find it.

Coffee.com was struggling with its SEO, we found they had a problem with the Caffeine update.

Received an urgent call from an online business – they wanted guaranteed search engine ranking for their new website in a month’s time. I said not a problem; in fact, I will also throw in a Unicorn for free.

What’s the difference between SEO and a Thesaurus?

Nothing, none, nada, squat, zip, zilch, diddly, zippo…

Your son tells you he wants to go play in the sandbox, you tell him it doesn’t exist.
And if he does play in it you’re afraid you won’t see him for the next 12 months

What is a black hat SEOs favourite food: SPAM

A SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, public house, tavern, Irish pub, pub, watering hole to drink alcohol, wine, beer, whisky, liquor…

You know you are desperate for an answer when – you look at the second page of Google

You are only as strong as your weakest link

Funny SEO Pick Up Lines

Hey girl, watch out for penguin, you are over-optimized for “Gorgeous”

Hey girl, you make my heart flutter like a hummingbird

Hey girl, I would like to be the authority in your niche

PPC Jokes / Paid Search Jokes

How do you get people to notice you online? You have to really make an impression.

What do religion and paid search advertisers have in common? They really want people to convert.

What do you call a landing page in a tropical island? A destination URL

What’s a pirates favourite PPC Metric? CTRrrrrrrrr

The local Chiropractor are using a few PPC ideas in their pricing structure. Cost per Click is one idea…

If you have other funny SEO jokes to share, leave them in the comments and don’t forget to check out the 30 SEO Jokes I posted earlier.

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With every passing day, running campaigns on Google Ads / Adwords is becoming crazy expensive with increasing CPC, and more and more advertisers coming onto the platform, and intensifying competition. However, as a digital marketer, particularly, if you are a performance marketer, you cannot run without Google Ads, given the immense reach and potential the platform offers. But what you can do is work on your campaign to improve Google Adwords ROI for every dollar you spend.

The operating premise of a successful Adwords campaign is to acquire the maximum number of leads/sales/revenue at the lowest possible cost and if you manage to do that you will get a Positive ROI on your Adwords. In this blog, we are going to talk about X ways that are sure to boost your Google Ads campaign and improve your Google Adwords ROI.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of ROI – ROI is the abbreviation for Return on Investment and while I plan to do a much more detailed post on the nuances of calculating the Adwords ROI, for now, let’s stick to the simple formula  –

ROI= ((Revenue-Spend)/Spend)*100

ROI is expressed as a percentage.

So if you spend $100 on ad campaigns and generate a revenue of $500, your ROI is –

((500-100)/100)*100=400%

Now, let’s get on to the specific strategies on how to improve your Adwords ROI.

Analyze your search terms report

The search terms report is probably one of your biggest assets in improving campaign performance. The search terms report is a list of search terms that users have used in actual searches on Google, that triggered your ad to show on the search network.

To access your search terms report, go to the Keywords link in your left-hand navigation in the Adwords console, select the keyword for which you want to view the search terms, and then click “Search Terms” at the top of the page. This will display the search terms for those selected keywords along with relevant stats for each one of them. You can also use the download button on the top-right to export the data into Excel.

Now let’s look at how the search terms report can help you improve your Adwords ROI. There are actually two ways this can benefit you.

Negative Keywords to Avoid Wasted Spend

Keywords are those that advertisers bid on, and search terms are the actual words or phrases users type into Google. When you will look into the search terms report, you will often come across terms that are completely irrelevant and you are paying for every click you get on them. For example, if you have the keyword “web development” ( phrase match) in your keyword list, it can trigger ads for search terms like ‘web development jobs’ – in this case you know the user is clearly looking for a job and not a prospective client.

It should be a standard practice to look at your search terms to identify such irrelevant search terms and at them to your negative keywords list. A very basic exercise but this can save you a ton of money, directly improving your Adwords ROI.

Identify and Add High Converting Search Terms

The search terms report will also help you identify some terms that are more commonly used by users and are also giving you conversions. For example, the “web development” keyword might also trigger a search term, ‘Magento web development for e-commerce’ and you notice that your key skill is Magento, you are getting a lot of conversions from this. What do you do? You should be adding such high-converting search terms in your campaign as Exact Match. This will ensure you get a better impression share at a relatively lower CPC for the term. More conversions, lesser cost.

Misspellings & Typos – Low-Cost Conversions Improve ROI

Let’s face it, typos happen with everyone – to the extent, 10% of all search queries are misspelled! While we target all possible keywords one thing that we often miss out on is typos and misspellings. The competition for misspelled keywords is much lesser making it easier to get visibility with minimal bids. Because there are very few people bidding for those misspellings and typos, the CPC on those terms is often much lesser than the correctly spelled keywords, whereas there is no difference in the user’s intent.

Using these misspellings and typos, will likely get you very few clicks but the best part is that these clicks could come really cheap and with as strong an intent as the original keyword – oftentimes delivering conversions.

Google does offer the “close variant” option by default, so you’re already accounting for misspellings, singular or plural forms, acronyms, abbreviations, and stemming (“getting a phone charger” instead of “get a phone charger”) but having them included in your ad group as exact or phrase in most cases gives you better control and more clicks at reduced CPC.

Here’s a tool to find misspelled and typos for your keywords.

Improve Ad Relevance with Dynamic Keyword Insertion – DKI

More relevant ads => Better Click through, Better Quality Score => Lower CPC, Better Conversion(possibly) => Improved ROI

Using Dynamic keyword insertion can significantly improve ad relevance and consequentially improve your Adwords ROI. When users see their exact search terms in the ad they are more likely to click. Improved CTR, can directly improve your Quality Score and reduce your CPC. The lower cost would directly lead to improved ROI on your Adwords spend.

If you are not familiar with DKI, here’s a quick refresher on how DKI works –

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is an advanced feature that dynamically inserts a keyword from your ad group that matches the real search query into your ad copy in real-time. Your ads will automatically match what the user is looking for, making them more relevant.

Let’s say you create Google Ads for your earphones business and you want to use DKI for the ad headline ( you can also use it in the ad description lines).

While creating the ad you must include the following code:

Headline: Buy {KeyWord: earphones} today!

Now see what happens when users are searching online to buy earphones:

Search Query: waterproof earphones

Your Ad Headline: Buy waterproof earphones today!

Search Query: earphones with mic

Your Ad headline: Buy earphones with mic today!

These ads resonate much better with your customers as compared to a generic ad like, “Buy earphones today”.

However, note that if the search term is too long, the word after the colon will be inserted ({KeyWord: earphones}) (the character limit for headlines is 30). Also, if the searched term is not an available keyword from your ad group, the word after the colon shows as the default.

Qualify Users Through Your Ads – Improve ROI by Lowering Spend

When you are running your Google Ads campaign with a focus on improving your ROI, you need to be clear about one thing – you just don’t need clicks, you need clicks that convert. Getting too many clicks mean higher cost, so it is important that you know how to reduce unwanted clicks, which reduces your cost and improves your ROI.

The way you write your ads can actually help you filter out unwanted clicks, thereby reducing your overall ad spend. Often times you will have some qualifying criteria for your leads/ prospects. You should try to work this into your ad copies. For example; you are an SEO consultant but you require a minimum monthly fee of $500 to take up any contract. If your ad says, ‘Expert SEO Service’ it is likely to attract clicks from anyone who is looking for SEO services, but if your ad says “SEO Services From $500”, prospects who do not have the minimal budget of $500 are most likely not going to click – saving you a bunch of money in wasted clicks.

Such filtering through ad copies can be done based on various parameters, like cost, location, specificity of service, or any other qualifying criteria that you would use for your business. Also, more specific ads, help set the user’s expectations right, which in turn improves conversion. Now, this combined effect of reducing unwanted clicks and increased conversion rate will directly result in improved ROI for your Adwords spend.

Single Keyword Ad Groups – SKAG

Your account and campaign structure also affect the campaign performance and can have a direct impact on the ROI of the campaign. Single Keyword Ad Group ( SKAG) is one of the most powerful Adwords strategies that can deliver multiple benefits, all of which culminate into improved ROI on the overall Adwords campaign spend.

SKAG, as the name suggests, is a strategy where you use a single keyword in each ad group. SKAG as a topic should ideally be a post in itself as the benefits are multifold and the technicalities should also be understood in full.

At an overview level, SKAG would involve creating ad groups with a single keyword and including multiple match types of the same keyword. It is advisable to include Modified Broad Match, Phrase, and Exact match. The Modified Broad Match and the Phrase match help to capture the different search terms arising from the keywords, however, because we are just using one keyword the terms are still relevant and closely related. Also, using SKAG ensures that your ads are highly relevant to search terms – it necessarily creates an opportunity to write ads that are closely related to the keywords.

Now how does SKAG exactly help in improving Adwords ROI?

If SKAG is implemented right, there are multifold benefits –

• You will have better control over where your ads show up – for which keywords they show up and where they don’t. Reduce wasted spend.
• You will have stronger control over which ad shows up for which search terms/ keywords. Increased ad relevance results in higher CTR.
• Higher CTR and increased ad relevance result in improved quality score. Improved Quality Score translates to better Ad rank / Lower CPC.

While writing this, I feel that I should definitely do a much more detailed post on SKAG. But to summarize, the use of SKAG results in cost savings while improving the quality of traffic received through ad campaigns ad this clearly helps improve conversions.

Location Targeting

Location targeting is one of the most common targeting features used by almost every advertiser, then why am I talking about it here? Well, there are a couple of features that you can use to improve your campaign performance and also save money on wasted clicks.

Radius Targeting

This is a common feature and has been there forever and this can do wonders for your conversion rate. There are multiple cases where this can be used. Particularly if you are a business where clients walk into your establishment, Radius targeting is definitely your friend. Though it depends on the nature of the business, how famous it is, and various other factors, most walk-in type businesses get their customers from their surrounding area, and doing a location targeting around your business address gets you the customers that are most likely to convert. Higher conversions = Improved ROI.

Location Options

While you choose your location targeting, Google also offers location targeting options, which are hidden just below and by default you are opted in to “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations (recommended)” – which is also Google recommended option. But like many other Google recommendations, it increases your clicks and consequentially ad spends but not necessarily conversions. With this option on, a person who might not be in your target area will still see your ad if he shows interest in your target area. What can you do? Instead of the recommended approach, select the next option, “people in your targeted locations” – and once you do that your ads will show only to people who are physically present in your target locations. This reduces a lot of wasted clicks and spending coming from people whom Google think is interested in your ads but might not be in the location to do business with you. Reduced wasted clicks and spends = improved ROI.

Shoot up Conversions with RLSA – Ad ROI Improves

RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) is an extremely powerful feature that allows you to target search ads to users who have previously visited your site. While retargeting o the display network is also powerful, retargeting on the search network (RLSA) can actually put your conversion rate on steroids, if done right.

Remarketing ads give your business a second chance to convert customers who are already aware of your business. The combined effect of the users’ high intent with their familiarity with your brand and offering creates a very potent situation for increased conversions.

Here are some RLSA tactics that are a surefire way to bring back customers:

1. Optimize bid adjustments for existing keywords for retargeted users only. Here just add the remarketing list to the existing search campaign and adjust bids for each list. Paying a tad bit higher for this audience makes complete sense as this traffic is likely to convert at a much higher rate.
2. While using RLSA, it is advisable to also bid on broad keywords. This helps your ads to get visibility with the users even if they are not searching for your exact keyword but something related and relevant. Even bid on your competitor names and similar product names.
3. If your RLSA lists are well segmented based on user behavior ( which product pages they have visited, what have they done on your website, etc), you can actually have them on separate campaigns and ensure that the ads served are customized to appeal to those specific segments. This will not only improve CTR but also can improve the chances of conversion.

Using RLSA effectively can significantly boost your conversion rate and lower cost per conversion, consequentially improving your Google Ads ROI.

Mine your competitors

There are a couple of things that you should do to take advantage of your competitors.

1. Advertise on your Competitor Brand Names: You cannot include their brand name in your ads as per Google’s guidelines but you can definitely have them in your keyword list. This will land your ads directly in front of users looking for your competitor, and if you’re persuasive enough you have a fair chance of eating a slice of your competitor’s pie. Now, why is this part of the ROI strategy? Competitor brand names are often not excessively competitive, you can get clicks and conversions at a reasonably low cost.
2. Consider Competitive Intelligence: Use a tool like SEMRush to look into competitor details. You can actually see all your competitor’s keywords, ad copies, and landing pages. Make sure you go through them in detail and this can expose a lot of hidden opportunities for more clicks and conversions. You can get a free trial of SEMRush here.

You can read this SEMRush review on how to get detailed competitive intelligence using the tool.

Improving Landing Page Improves Ad ROI

Increasing your Conversion Rate is one of the most effective ways to increase your Adwords ROI. While all the above pointers mentioned earlier help to reduce wasted clicks, get low-cost clicks, improve conversion rate, etc, all of which result in increased ROI for ad spend, they were all part of campaign management. However, a well-optimized landing page can also help increase your conversion rate dramatically, resulting in improved ROI for the campaign. While most campaign managers optimize their landing pages, here is one tip that will help you further.

Using a little scripting you can actually customize your landing page to show the exact keyword and related content to what the user has searched for. How does it help? Well, for a starter when the user finds the exact term they searched for after they have clicked through to an ad, they are likely to be more engaged, and the chance of conversion increases. Also, these customized landing pages create a lot more synergy between the search term, the ad, and the landing page content, which also results in improved quality score. This further helps with lowering costs and improving ad ranks.

In summary, if you are looking to improve your Adwords ROI, you should focus on a few key objectives –

Reduce Cost

• By removing wasted clicks
• Getting Clicks at lower cost
• Improving quality score

Increase Conversions

• Better targeting
• Focus on conversion optimization

If there are other tactics that you think can help to improve your Adwords ROI, feel free to leave a comment and share your views.

The post 9 Ways to Improve Google Adwords ROI appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I actually wrote a summarized version of this on Quora but then thought of doing a more detailed comparison of Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO in this blog. Spyfu or SEMRush – it is a common question for many search marketing professionals, both are great tools, and choosing the right option isn’t easy. In this blog post, we are however considering the tool only from an SEO perspective and that makes the scope considerably easier. SEMRush is clearly the best when it comes to SEO, and I will explain why.

Spyfu offers some SEO features similar to SEMRush that are mostly linked to competitive intelligence. You would be able to –

• Keep track of your competitor’s SEO rankings
• Track your SEO Rankings
• Keep track of competitor’s SEO keywords
• Group keywords into groups for better planning your SEO campaign
• Check competitor’s SEO backlinks

However, the fact is SEMRush does all of these and a lot more that can really take your SEO to the next level.

Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO Keyword Research & Intelligence

With SEMRush, one of the key proposition is the depth of keyword research that the tool offers. There are loads of keyword research tools in the market but SEMRush is really good at it. With SEMRush, you can

• Find your competitor’s keywords and their SEO rankings (similar to Spyfu)
• You can initiate a keyword research from a seed keyword
• Keyword magic tool: This is really cool. This not only shows you a list of keywords but the keywords are already grouped by seed words ( similar to Spyfu’s keyword grouping). Besides, there are a bunch of filters available for you to easily identify the right keywords you want to target from the long list it produces on your seed word. You can filter by word count, match type, keyword difficulty, SERP features and more. Also, another feature in the keyword magic tool is the “Questions” – where the tool identifies specific Questions that are being searched in Google for your keywords. And of course, you can export all these data to excel for further analysis and making decisions.
• Keyword Difficulty Tool: This helps you identify the relative difficulty of the keywords as well as provides details on the keyword trend as well as the SERP features available on that keyword.

Other articles on Spyfu vs SEMRush for Keyword Research

What Keywords are my competitors using

SEMRush Review Best Keyword Research Tool

Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO Backlink Research

Besides keyword research, another important aspect of SEO are backlinks and SEMRush does an awesome job at Backlink research as well.

Backlink Analytics & Audit Tool: Just by entering the domain you can have a very detailed link audit and analytics report, which not only shows the number of links but also detailed analytics by domains, IPs, TLDs, backlink type (image, text, etc) follow-nofollow, by country, anchor text, etc

And remember this tool is not just for your domain but you can and should use it on your competitor domains to get all the relevant intelligence.

Link Building Tool: This is a complete tool that would help you identify the right link targets for your website. Once the targets are identified and selected the tool also helps to get detailed information about the website you’re viewing and the people affiliated with it. You can see contact information, social web information, links to your website, and initiate contact right from there.

Toxic Score: SEMRush has something called toxic score which basically identifies which of the links are toxic, harmful to your website. The higher the score the more toxic is the link. Once you have run a backlink audit on your site you can see the toxic links easily and there is a very easy workflow to add this toxic link to a disavow file and then submit to Google.

SEMRush for SEO Content Optimization

Besides keyword research and backlinks, the other key piece in any SEO strategy is content and content is even more crucial today as it becomes increasingly difficult to build links. SEMRush provides a lot of help in this whereas Spyfu does not provide any support on content.

SEO Content Template: The way this works is that you enter your keyword and the geography you want to target, you can also specify if you want to customize the content for specific device (e.g, desktop or mobile) and the tool analyses the top 10 content ranking for that keyword and gives recommendation on how your content should be. The recommendation they provide is pretty detailed including semantically related words, backlinks, readability, text length, use of heading tags as well as a detailed list of all the links so you can review the content manually if you would like.

SEO Writing Assistant: Not sure if they have launched this tool commercially yet but this is available on Product Hunt. I do a lot of my writing on Google doc and I love the fact that this is available as a plugin to Google doc.

The plugin connects to the SEO content template that you have created inside SEMRush and then as you write the content, it evaluates and provides recommendation based on the template. You will find a lot of helpful info using this SEO writing assistant plugin including Ease of reading, displayed as a readability score, word count, other recommended keywords that you should cover besides your core keyword and also an overall score on how your content stands against benchmarking. This definitely helps a lot with optimizing SEO content.

If you have already written a piece of content, you can still create an SEO Content Template in SEMRush and then use this SEO Writing assistant to evaluate and optimize it.

Topic Research Tool: One of the common problems faced by content marketers is to keep producing interesting content that is relevant to your business as well as interesting to your audience. SEMRush’s topic research tool is another great tool – you enter your target keyword and the tool will generate a wide range of content ideas around your keyword. The content ideas are basically content that has been published on the web about your keywords as well as a diversified range of topics on recommended keywords that can greatly improve your organic traffic. The tool provides Top ten headlines that have the most links on the topic as well as top 10 questions on the topic. And it also has a mindmap for topics that can be ideal to come up with new content ideas.

Other SEO Tools in SEMRush

Besides the above-mentioned tools, SEMRush has a bunch of other SEO tools that are equally helpful.

SEMRush On Page SEO Checker: This is a little more extensive than the typical on-page SEO tools. You will need to add the page you want to analyse, enter the keywords and go through a few other setup steps for the project. Once the project is set up and ready you will get a very detailed report comprising of technical SEO ideas, SERP feature ideas, Semantic Ideas, content ideas and a bunch of other info. You can also get some UX improvement ideas if you have connected your Google Analytics with SEMRush. It also provides an estimation of how much your traffic can improve if you implement all the recommended features.

Position Tracking: You can enter the keywords that you would like to track for your domain and the SEMRush will keep the rank tracking for your domain. What I like about SEMRush’s rank tracking capabilities is that you can view your current rankings as well as previous ranking and the change in ranking. It also tells you the SERP feature available for the keyword and which URL in your website is ranking for that keyword.

SEMRush Sensor: This is a unique feature in SEMRush. This indicates the volatility in SERP and you can narrow this down by verticals, filter by geography or device. This could be useful to keep a track of which sites suffered/ gained the most during a Google Update as well as you can refer back to the volatility score if you see a sudden drop or surge in search engine traffic for your website.

Spyfu vs SEMRush Competitive Intelligence – SEO Competitive Analysis

SEMRush is obviously known for the competitive intelligence it provides and that is where the main competition is with Spyfu – whether SEMRush or Spyfu provides better SEO competitive intelligence. As explained above, in general, SEMRush is way more powerful for SEO compared to Spyfu. In terms of competitive intelligence both Spyfu and SEMRush provides some competitive intelligence and analysis of competitor’s keywords and backlinks though I found SEMRush to be relatively better.

Spyfu allows comparison of three domains whereas SEMRush allows comparison of up to 5 domains.

Keyword Gap: The keyword gap tool allows you to compare up to 5 domains based on their keywords ( organic keywords, paid keywords and even PLA keywords) and you can look at the data as either unique keywords for any of the domains or common keywords amongst the domains or even a full list of all keywords across your domains based on your needs. For each of the keywords, you will also get to see the domains rankings as well as a bunch of other related data for the keywords.

Backlink Gap: This allows you to compare backlinks up to 5 websites. The tool lists all the links across all the competing sites along with the Authority Score of the respective links. It also shows which link is for which website and also if a link is present across multiple websites.

SEMRush is a great tool for SEO and provides a host of other competitive intelligence and though this discussion is specifically about SEO, I must mention that SEMRush is a complete tool that can support you across paid search, social media and your complete digital marketing needs. Spyfu is a good tool but if you are asking me to make a choice between Spyfu vs SEMRush, I would any day pick SEMRush as a much better and complete SEO tool.

Also read: Comparison of Spyfu vs SEMRush vs KeywordSpy vs Ispionage

The post Spyfu vs SEMRush : Which is the Better Tool for SEO appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics application that is used across the world. It is used both by individuals and small companies to large Fortune 500 brands. As per this study in 2015, almost 70% of Fortune 500 used Google Analytics as their web analytics platform. If you are one of those millions of Google Analytics users and you are in Europe or deal with clients/ visitors from EU, you need to ensure that you are GDPR compliant.

While we love to rely on Google and think that they will take care of everything for proper GDPR compliance there are few things that you need to do too.

At a very broad level GDPR asks you not to collect and process any personal data without the consent of the data subject (user). Now before you tell me that Google Analytics data is anonymized and aggregated, let me show you couple of personal data points that could be captured in Google Analytics and put you on the wrong side of GDPR.

• Google Analytics captures IP addresses which is considered as Personal Data under GDPR
• Also, if you are passing any PII through your URLs ( typically happens when you are using GET method to submit form data or you are trying to personalize user experience) you might end up with URLs looking like www.yourdomain.com/?name=x&email=abc@gmail.com . Now all these URLs are captured in Google analytics and you are necessarily sharing this PII with Google. This is against Google’s T&C as well as could mean serious trouble for you from GDPR perspective.

So how to make Google Analytics GDPR Compliant

Anonymize IP Address
Google Analytics does provide you an option to anonymize IP addresses. If done properly Google will anonymize the users IP address while still in memory and the data will be written to disc for processing only after the IP addresses have been anonymized. If you are interested in the technical details, you can read the technical explanation here.

How to Anonymize IP Address in Google Analytics for GDPR Compliance

This again will depend on the version of Google analytics code you are using. There are three versions that most people are using. You are either using universal analytics using ANALYTICS.JS or GA.JS or the latest GTAG.JS.

Anonymize IP for analytics.js

<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i[‘GoogleAnalyticsObject’]=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,’script’,’//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js’,’ga’);
ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXXX-X’, ‘auto’);
ga(‘set’, ‘anonymizeIp’, true);
ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
</script>

Your analytics code probably looks like the one given above. Look at the highlighted line. You need to add that one line of code to anonymize IP address and it is important that the line is set before the ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’); line.

Anonymize IP for gtag.js

This is the latest Google analytics code and if you are already using gtag.js, you can follow the below process to anonymize IP for GDPR compliance.

In your gtag code you will notice the following line –

gtag(‘config’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-XX’);

This needs to be replaced with

gtag(‘config’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-XX’, { ‘anonymize_ip’: true });

Anonymize IP for ga.js

In case you are still using the old ga.js Google analytics library, you can try using the below code. Note the line highlighted, you will need to add that to the script.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
// Old Script
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-XX’]);
_gaq.push([‘_gat._anonymizeIp’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
( function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

How to Remove Personal Data from Google Analytics for GDPR Compliance

Now let’s talk about how to remove the personal data that we might send to Google through URL parameters. It is not just important for GDPR compliance but it is also important for ensuring that you are compliant with Google Analytics’ terms of service.

You should ideally try to remove any PII right at the collection level of Google analytics and this requires some coding skills. Two excellent solutions for this has been given below and you can use any one of them that works for you.

Simo Ahava’s Solution to Removing PII from GA

Brian Clifton’s Solution to redact PII from GA

If you have anonymized all IP addresses and are not capturing any PII in Google analytics, you should be ok with GDPR compliance.

If you are a marketer like me and looking to ensure proper GDPR compliance across your marketing function, you can refer to this GDPR Checklist for Marketers Infographic.

This is not a legal advise about GDPR and if you have any doubts or concern, please consult with a legal professional.

The post GDPR Compliance for Google Analytics : How To appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.