Whether you’re an SEO specialist or digital marketing manager, you know that online campaigns are measured by one thing: results. But without sufficient data, you’re essentially running them blind. Google Analytics illuminates some key insights. Still, it alone can leave businesses with blind spots. Tagging in some help from Google Tag Manager (GTM) broadens your view, giving you a fuller picture of how users are interacting with your site.

Want to know how a visitor arrived on your site or what outbound clicks they made while browsing? GTM will track any and all activity you outline. The best part is that you don’t have to be a programmer or web developer to implement tags or make important tracking modifications to your site. It leaves your source code intact, freeing the dev team to focus on more complex projects.

For a small snippet of code, there’s a lot of available info. This post covers the basics so marketers can feel confident enough to start working with Google Tag Manager.

Tracking with GTM

Tags collect site information across numerous verticals. Have an activity you want to isolate? Once the container code is added to your pages, you simply use Google Tag Manager’s user-friendly interface to add or make edits from the web.

Use it to track tangible results about your digital marketing campaigns on key metrics like:

• scroll tracking
• form submissions
• conversions
• heat mapping
• remarketing
• file downloads

It’s worth noting that GTM is also universal. Though the Google product works seamlessly with services like Adwords, it also plays well with third party tags from sites like Twitter or Crazy Egg.

Setting up Google Tag Manager

Ready to make tracking codes work for you? Follow these steps to better measure the results of your digital marketing efforts:

1. Log in to the Google Tag Manager page – tagmanager.google.com. (First, make sure you’re signed in to your Google Analytics account if you have one.)
2. Set up your account name (usually your company name).
3. Pick and name your container (web vs mobile vs AMP, etc).
4. Check the service agreement and “create.”

At this point, you may need a developer to help you implement two pieces of script to every page of your site. It’s a good idea to have them help remove any existing tags from your site’s source code and add any customized tags outside the GTM tag templates while they’re at it.

Next, spend a little time learning about triggers and variables in GTM’s help section. It also covers more advanced features like Data Layers and debugging options.

Help with GTM

In the beginning, you’re likely to have questions or issues within GTM. Fortunately, many of the most common conundrums are covered in popular Google forums. Online communities are full of developers who are full of best practices and receptive to requests for help.

Can’t wait two or more weeks for a developer to get to your JavaScript task or help you track the results of your most recent survey? With Google Tag Manager, you don’t have to.

Need help setting up GTM on your site? Tag us in.

Small business owners spend their days wearing multiple hats. One moment you’re sending invoices as accounts receivable, the next you’re approving employee time off as HR. The burden of doing it all on your own can leave little room for managing your brand online.

You know online marketing is mandatory, but the overwhelm is real. Whether you’re using Instagram to increase your digital footprint or Google to boost your search marketing results, these four free social media marketing tools will help grow your online presence, freeing you up to head your other one (wo)man departments.

1. Awario

Monitoring your social media accounts every minute of the day is a tall order, even for massive marketing teams with limitless budgets. Awario lets you listen in on keyword and brand mentions across all your key social media platforms.

These include conversations with and without the #hashtags and provide a portal to reply to users directly without even logging into IG.

Awario takes it a step further, sorting mentions by follower counts so those with the highest number of followers appear first. They’ll even go as far as show you brand-relevant accounts to develop your influencer marketing strategy.

2. Planoly

Planning, scheduling, and publishing your Instagram posts just got a lot easier. With this app, you can manage and edit your posts to perfection, then send them out into the world from your desktop or mobile phone without ever leaving the Planoly platform.

You can create photo blocks and stagger your posts to make your feed cohesive. They’ll help you see which pics look best grouped together so you can pack the most punch to each post. Schedule out a week or month in advance, for a set-it-and-forget-it style approach to the ‘gram.

3. Add Your Business to Google My Business

As a Dallas SEO Agency turned Digital Marketing Firm, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Google My Business as part of our prescribed online marketing suite.

To increase your website traffic, you need a complete business listing profile both on and off Google My Business. The search engines crawl and return all variety of data, including that which they find on social media. Just another reason to make sure your information is accurate and up-to-date.

Start by making sure you’re a verified business, and complete all the listing information. Even small changes like seasonal hours or events you offer should be kept current so they’ll be more likely to show up in the Google Information Panel and beyond.

For more information, see Google’s official Google My Business page. Need some help getting set up? We can help.

4. InShot

Video marketing is a content trend that’s expanding by the day. Whether you want to post to your Instagram stories or simply need a video editing tool that’s easy to learn – not to mention effective – InShot is the app for the job. It can clean up your photos and piece together your social media videos to help engage users through visual storytelling. You can splice videos together, add your logo, layer music, crop or blur your background – anything you need to make your video marketing strategy pop.

You may be a Jack or Jane of all trades, but no successful small business does it alone. Employ these free social media tools to help grow your brand online without adding extra time commitments.

Globe Runner, an Addison, Texas-based digital marketing agency that doubles as a local art gallery, is celebrating the coming of spring with a new quarterly exhibit. For the last few years, the two-time Addy award-winning firm has used its available wall space to highlight artists in the community, offering residents and visitors a shot of culture. This quarter’s talents are esteemed artists Dylan Eakin and Rita Hendricks.

In addition to their ineffable artistic eye, these creatives are also generous, teaming with Globe Runner to give back $600 to Operation Kindness, North Texas’s original & largest no-kill animal care and adoption center.

Globe Runner’s Spring Artist Exhibition

Last Thursday, April 26^th, Head to Head opened at Gallery 550. The gala was one part cocktail party, one part charity event. It was an evening of refreshments, music, and original art that culminated with one lucky family taking home some seriously adorable raffle winnings.

L to R: Eric McGehearty, Raffle Winners, Hendricks, and Amber, Operation Kindness Rep

Above are the winners of a personal pet portrait lovingly crafted by Hendricks. In total, more than $600 in donations from this season’s gala raffle were accepted by Amber from Operation Kindness.

Globe Runner founder and art supporter, Eric McGehearty, warmly introduced both artists then invited guests to marvel at Eakin’s extremely detailed human pencil portraits and Hendricks’ watercolors pet portraits.

As always, Globe Runner is pleased to host these important works and trust the members of our Addison community were as moved as we were by the display.

To see more photos of the event, keep scrolling!

Both artists will be on display at the Globe Runner offices until roughly Fall 2018 when the next rotation is displayed.

Looking Back at Our Previous Exhibition

This past November, Globe Runner held an exhibition for our previous artist: Gary Perrone.

About Globe Runner

Globe Runner is an Addison, Texas-based search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing and digital advertising agency. It has over 60 local, national and international B2C and B2B clients in consumer-packaged goods (CPG), beauty, credit repair, fashion, healthcare, home and interiors, jewelry, legal services and sports. Globe Runner sits on the boards of the Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) and the Social Media Club of Dallas (SMC Dallas). The agency’s staff and work have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and AdWeek. They are also proud winners of two prestigious American Advertising Awards.

Does your brand have a voice search strategy? With the rise of platforms such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, voice search has never been more important.

Building a house starts with a solid foundation. Building a website starts with a secure web hosting platform. Just like invisible cracks in your home’s structure could lead to eventual collapse, left unsupported by a host, your website could suffer the same fate. The truth is, sites can’t just look pretty. They need the technical chops to prevent issues that could take you offline. A secure hosted site can also help you handle all that incoming web traffic from youreffective digital marketing campaignsThe trick is to understand which type of hosting environment is best for your business.

What is a web host?

These are providers with secure servers who store your website’s files and databases. When potential customers come browsing, hosts send information their way as they click through your landing pages. Web hosting services charge based on a monthly or annual basis. Each plan specifies a certain amount of data storage that includes information transfers, software, etc. Companies offer different hardware capabilities. Taking the time to understand your company needs and the nuances of each plan is key to succeeding online.

Website Hosting Types

Not only do you have individual plans to choose from, but you also have varying types of website hosting altogether. Below we offer a simplified breakdown of the most common environments to help you understand what your options are.

When one server hosts many sites at once on the same IP address, it’s known as shared hosting. Some of these hosted environments number into the thousands. Pros include affordability, especially if your operation is on the smaller side. However, your site is dependent on all the other websites and apps running well. This means one crashed site could divert resources and negatively impact your own.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

If you like the idea of having your own server, but prefer someone else manages it, this option with dynamically scalable hardware resources might be for you. With a VPS system, a portion of a larger server’s resources will be allocated to you, insulating your site from the loads of others. You’ll have less processing power and memory than a full cabinet, but you’ll still be covered if your website experiences unexpectedly high traffic.

Dedicated Server

If you want full use of a solely dedicated server, you’ll have access to all the processing power and memory the cabinet can offer. Understand that this means the entire platform, from OS (operating system) to a web server, is yours to manage.
Small businesses without a dedicated IT team usually opt for another hosting environment.

Managed Hosting

Think VPS or dedicated hosting platforms, but with an additional layer of support. They’re configured to maintain your site by conducting updates, managing speeds, and overseeing security on your behalf that are specialized at hosting your specific type of application(s) ie., WordPress.They can be expensive and also limit the types and sizes of files you can add to your site, a double edge sword.

Cloud Hosting

Instead of storing your website data on just one server, it’s duplicated and hosted on numerous servers located in different parts of the world. As internet browsers search for information on your site, the server that’s closest sends the page info. Speed is a huge benefit here. It’s also said to mitigate outages. The downside is that it can be complicated to understand and expensive to employ.

Our Recommendation

The internet is a big place, but one hosting company, WordPress, powers about 29% of it. The reason? Their open source platform offers businesses clean, enticing web architecture and makes it simple for owners or their chosen digital marketing agencies to update their sites as needed. Even though SSL and most hosting providers provide a secure storage solution for your sensitive data, we recommend choosing a WordPress-exclusive hosting environment or Managed WordPress Host. Both specialize in WP websites, integrate seamlessly, and perform better than other options we’ve found.

Need help building your web’s home? Make contact and our team of web development experts will gladly put on their hard hats and get to work.

Should your website have live chat on it? There are many pros to having this feature enabled. So many transactions can be made or broken by being responsive and swift to help your customers with any questions or comments they may have.

As an advertising agency, we get this question a lot. The most common answer to our Dallas clients is, “depends on your business.” Different industries, product types, target markets, and B2B or B2C brands all perform differently across different mediums.

In truth, we also believe a print advertising vs digital marketing mindset is a mistake. And though the demand for digital is high, you ultimately want to advertise where your audience is. Sometimes this constitutes a multi-channel marketing approach. Other times, it’s best to concentrate your efforts on a particular platform.

As we’ll see, both digital and traditional advertising have strong points and weak spots. Let’s unpack some pros and cons of each so you can make informed choices about your business marketing strategy.

Digital Advertising Advantages

Investing in social media advertising or PPC campaigns certainly has its perks. No wonder it’s officially outpaced TV, with digital ad spend soaring to more than $209 billion in 2017. But what makes it so great?

• It’s measurable and malleable. You know who’s viewing your ad and you can make changes based on the data.
• It’s cost-effective. You determine your budget based on who you want to reach. With pay-per-click campaigns, you also don’t pay unless there’s interest.
• It’s wide-reaching. Billions of users access their social media accounts every day. Getting your ad in front of them can help fill your sales funnel.
• It’s targetable. You start by setting parameters on demographics like gender, income, age, interests, hobbies, etc. Ads are then shown to a focused group of your most likely potential customers.
• It can increase conversion rates. Search marketing can help businesses gain more leads and increase conversions as users are specifically typing queries that are aligned with your brand.

Digital Advertising Challenges

If digital advertising is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, they sort of are. That’s part of the problem. According to Adweek, 88% of businesses use it to advertise their brand. How does this impact digital campaigns?

• Digital marketing content can be quickly scanned and forgotten about.
• Readers are becoming better at tuning out ads.
• Users have increasingly short attention spans.
• Digital banner ads and native content are often associated with spam.
• The more competitive your industry’s keywords, the more you’ll pay.
• You must constantly educate yourself and your staff about algorithm changes and best practices to keep from falling behind the competition.

Traditional Advertising Pluses

Traditional ads in print, radio, and to a lesser degree, television are highly trusted, especially among older demographics. Generally speaking, they also qualify as more memorable than digital media.

• Readers sit with traditional ad mediums longer with more focus than digital.
• Information recall is higher.
• You can localize it to particular communities or neighborhoods.
• Print ads and direct mail campaigns can target leads over the long-term.
• Believability is high.

Traditional Advertising Obstacles

Radio ads, newspaper blurbs, and mailers have their limits depending on your target audience. (Hence the explosion of digital marketing campaigns.)

• It can take a while to gather results or feedback.
• You can’t be sure your messages are aimed at the right audience.
• Readers might be less inclined to take extra steps like calling or visiting your website.
• Changing or updating ads can be difficult and expensive.
• CPM (cost per exposure) rates could be extremely high.

To recap, we feel strongly that successful campaigns are ultimately those that are well-timed, well-planned, and well-executed. Whether they’re disseminated by the internet or a more traditional method depends on the particulars of your business.

Want some help figuring out which media mixes will drive sales? Let’s strategize together.