It’s that time again: the new year, when everyone is hurrying to crush their #fitnessgoals before that resolution gusto wears out. We’re all about making positive changes, but you deserve more than another gym membership you won’t use after March.

That’s why this year, we recommend turning your focus to another kind of fitness: the health of your company’s Google Ads account. Your ads are no different than your body; they need a little attention now and then if they’re going to perform at their best. Here are a few small exercises you can use to whip your Google Ads into shape.

Today’s marketers have plenty of sophisticated and innovative digital platforms at their disposal to spread their messages: social media, Google ads, landing pages, and more. Yet one of the most important channels isn’t that new at all — in fact, it’s been around since the seventies.

New marketing channels come and go, but email remains one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. Email is often considered more effective than social media, and usually boasts very high ROI as well. Email is typically cheaper than print media and easier to initiate than advertising campaigns. Other channels may be more valuable if you’re hoping to drive engagement or create buzz, but when it comes to reigniting interest or moving leads down the sales funnel, email is king.

If a sold home is the ultimate destination in the long buyer journey people take when buying a home, landing pages are often the vehicle that starts the journey. A landing page is an independent page on your website, void of any navigation or links to social media, that is devoted solely to capturing leads. It should quickly and clearly get across who you are and what you have to offer.

Keep in mind that visitors coming to you from Google Adwords or any other media might be learning about your brand for the very first time. The copy, imagery, CTAs, and forms on these pages should be chosen to provide enough information about your homes to make the visitor want to know more.

Here’s a quick exercise for you: can you draw the McDonald’s logo from memory? How about Apple's or Adidas's? Maybe you wouldn’t nail every element, but you’d probably get pretty close, right?

Are you an “Empty-nester Evelyn” or more of a “Young Professional Pete?” Chances are, you fit into one or more groups used by marketing teams to differentiate and segment messaging called “buyer personas.” We’re all for celebrating the unique in people, but when it comes to marketing, if your messaging is trying to speak to everyone, you’ll likely end up speaking directly to no one.

You need to research and define the similarities of your target audience to create distinct categories, then personify them so that your marketing department or agency can create messaging that resonates with each category.

Buyer personas are detailed sketches of your most likely and/or best customers that help unify messaging across different platforms. Personas illustrate what your target audience values, where they’re likely to be, and what kind of content they take in. They refine and polish your campaigns and branding, ensuring that your money is spent on the right platforms and messages.

Did you know you can actually rank better than #1? For certain queries, Google will show a “featured snippet” above the search results.

What’s a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a section extracted from your web page enhanced to draw user attention on the Google results page. When Google recognizes that a query asks a question, it displays a top result as the featured snippet in the search results.

Featured snippets are not part of the traditional knowledge graph — they are a special way of displaying the information from a single site. The site that earns a featured snippet, based on Google’s assessment that it is the best answer for a question, whether explicit or implicit, gets to rank in “position 0” and have its content and URL displayed above the rest of the traditional organic search results.

What types of featured snippets are available?

There are a few different types, including:

• Paragraph
• List
• Table
• Chart or graph
• Image

The webpage’s title and URL can also be a featured snippet. The type of snippet that appears often depends on the nature of the question asked and the nature of the answer.

Most of us are addicted to Facebook and don't want to leave the app once we're in it, thanks to its brilliant UX. This can pose an issue for advertisers who are trying to collect leads.

Thankfully, Facebook created "lead ads" to solve that problem! Lead ads allow advertisers to collect information from prospects within the Facebook platform, instead of sending them to a landing page. If well executed, lead ads are a cost-effective and ROI-focused strategy to generate more potential leads.

We test Facebook lead ads on a regular basis, and here are 10 findings that, on average, measurably improve results.

Google has a new site testing tool that shows page speed in a different light.

New research from Google has shown that up to 50% of users can leave a site in the time it takes the home page to load. 

To drive this point home, Google has created a new mobile testing tool to give you an estimate of the number of users your website may be losing while the page loads.

They also give a benchmark of your site tested against other sites in your industry (though "industries" are very broadly defined). 

This tool is Google's way of reiterating how important it is to improve page speed. This affects SEO of course, but the primary concern should be overall usability and conversion rates. If users are bouncing from your website, they may be bouncing from your paid marketing efforts, causing you to waste money, lose leads and, more importantly, lose sales. 

As more and more online traffic shifts to mobile, Google is going to increasingly emphasize speed. All web developers and SEOs are going to have to become experts at making sites run faster. 

Here at Neon, we've been experiencing the age-old digital marketing agency dilemma: lively client rosters and plenty of work to do means your own marketing gets placed on the back burner.

Every day, we utilize marketing strategies and tactics that very few other agencies use, and we even reinvent the wheel sometimes! We thought we would start documenting these approaches so others can learn from our internal thought-leadership.

Each one of our team members is a "guru" in his or her own right, so you will be hearing from all of us at times. Read on to see the topics we'll cover and the people you'll hear from!

Pop quiz: when was the last time someone changed your PPC ad copy? If it’s been more than a month there’s a good chance some of your ad campaigns are in trouble.

Neglecting your PPC ads is a costly mistake that can rob not only your campaigns of effectiveness, but your pocket book by paying too much per click over time. When this happens, you’ll start to lose some of the business you are currently generating with the help of these important campaigns.

There are several reasons for this: