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As technologies powering location-based ad targeting become more advanced, marketers are looking at geofencing ad platforms as a way to complement or even substitute traditional digital ad platforms, such as Google Ads.

While both geofencing platforms and traditional paid media channels offer location-aware marketing options, they differ in levels of granularity, the layering of audience targeting, the technologies that drive the two platforms and results they can produce.

Based on our firsthand experience running campaigns on both platforms, this blog will walk through a detailed comparison and the results we achieved.

 

Geofencing vs Geotargeting –

 

Semantics matter, especially in the marketing world, where words can mean completely different things in terms of what’s truly being offered, its value, and what to expect from the offer. To make sure we are on the same page, let’s define geofencing and how it is different from geotargeting—as these two terms are often used interchangeably.

Geofencing involves the creation of a virtual boundary, i.e., a “fence” around a specific geographic area using GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi, or cellular data and then targeting individuals based on their visitation to these geofenced locations. Some common targeting options includes:

  • Capability to display an ad when a device enters or exits this boundary, aka on-premise targeting 
  • Capability to target users (via their mobile devices) that have previously visited a geofenced location 
  • Capability to target neighborhoods that show high visitation frequency to a particular store or location, aka neighborhood targeting 
  • Finally, geofencing platforms can also provide geotargeting, which simply means delivering ads to people in a certain zipcode, city, state of country, irrespective of whether they have entered or exited a fence.

In that sense, geofencing ad platforms offer geotargeting options but go beyond to also offer a broader range of location-based geofenced targeting.

For the sake of this article, I will be focusing on Ground Truth, a geofencing ads platform that I have experience in and compare it to Google Ads, a traditional paid media channel.

Let’s start by understanding differences in technologies, audience targeting (beyond location parameters) and cost structure. Then we will dive into performances and end with platform recommendations.

 

Technologies, Audiences & Cost

 

Technologies Powering Ad Targeting – 

Ground Truth employs proprietary “Blueprints” technology to create polygon mapping of  physical spaces with high accuracy, allowing for multi-level geofencing: in-store, on-lot, and retail area. This permits advertisers to target physical locations with accuracy. 

How granular can you go once you’ve drawn a polygon fence? Well you can laser target with a minimum of 0.1 mile or 528 feet around a geocode. This level of granularity is what allows you to choose if you want to target people in-store, on-lot, or even the parking lot. 

This is a big deal! Imagine if you are a coffee shop and you want to attract coffee drinkers who are in the parking lot of a competitor coffee shop. You can offer them discounts and incentivize them to come to your coffee shop instead!

Google Ads, on the other hand, offers geotargeting largely through radius targeting and existing geographic locations like cities or zip codes. Capable of wide targeting, it is less intensely targeted than GroundTruth’s POI-level mapping.

Winner: Ground Truth as it offers very granular targeting of geofenced locations in addition to geotargeting options.

 

Layering in Audience Targeting –

 

Ground Truth offers improved audience targeting by layering in location targeting along 

behavioral audiences that combine visitation patterns with demographic data to create segments like “Luxury Shoppers” or “Fast Food Diners.” The platform also allows for custom segments based on individual campaign goals.

Bear in mind that Ground Truth does not permit targeting of sensitive audience segments including targeting based on health, race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs etc.

One notable difference between the two platforms is in the permissiveness or openness of each platform toward targeting audiences. Google Ads offers more relaxed audience layering, such as on the basis of inferred interests and tendencies that tend to coincide with sensitive subjects such as health conditions, political beliefs, or cultural membership — although these are not labeled as such. We presume this is because Google Ads relies heavily on machine learning and cross-channel signals to classify interests — not direct self-identification. In contrast, Ground Truth relies completely on visitation data that are subject to stricter privacy controls around mobile location signals.

Winner: Google as they have billions of real-time intent signals through their proprietary systems. This combined with probabilistic modeling provides Google with unparalleled audience data.

 

Cost Structure:

 

Ground Truth offers two bid types, cost per click (CPC) and cost per mile (CPM, which translates into cost per thousand impressions) with two optimization strategies: maximize delivery & maximize clicks. 

In terms of bid type, they suggest a minimum CPM of $3.5, but for short-flight campaigns or event-based campaigns, they suggest a CPM of $10-15. For video campaigns, the minimum CPM is $8 and for OTT & CTV platforms, the minimum spend is $25 and for streaming audio ads (say, on a podcast), the minimum spend if $19.

Google bid types also include CPC and CPM, but their optimization options are broader and include not just delivery or click optimization, but conversion, conversion value and target return on ad spend (tROAS) optimizations as well.

Winner: Google. The reason why Google wins this round is because of their conversion and revenue optimization focus that leads to better conversions and revenue generation.

 

Media Type:

 

Ground Truth offers a much wider range of devices to display their ads, including web (web & app), desktops, Connected TVs (CTVs that refer to devices that can connect to the internet and stream digital content, like smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming sticks, like Roku, Fire & Stick), Audio streaming, and OTT platforms.

Google Ads, also offers the ability to render ads on search, display, Gmail, video channels like YouTube, Discover & Maps, they do not offer the wider range of media types that Ground Truth offers. 

Note: Google also offers CTV, OTT & audio streaming ads through its separate DV360 platform. For our comparison purposes, we are limiting our analysis to the Google Ads platform only.

Winner: Ground Truth. The wide media type choice makes Ground truth the winner here. The caveat being that Google also offers wider media types but you would have to use its DV 360 ad platform to expand your media type options.

 

How Did the Two Compare in Terms of Performance?

 

We recently ran campaigns to drive foot traffic to our client’s thrift stores and here is the performance snapshot

Impressions & Clicks: Ground Truth drove 4,819 clicks on 335,000 impression compared to 1,920 clicks on 311,941 impressions on Google for a comparable budget.

Store Visits: Google easily took the prize here with 183 store visits compared to ~15 visits generated by Ground Truth.

The vastly superior campaign performance on Google needs to be taken in with a grain of salt.

While both campaigns had similar budgets, the wide difference in attributed store visits likely reflects methodology differences in tracking versus campaign performance. 

Google Ads has the benefit of vast device coverage and probabilistic modeling based on user behavior across Google services. GroundTruth, by contrast, uses stricter location-based criteria, which can result in fewer — but potentially more accurate — visit attributions.

Let’s discuss these one-by-one:

Vast number of Real-time signals – Google capitalizes on its own vast network of Android OS users whose location history is turned on by default. It also uses a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and Google Maps data from users logged into their Google accounts. Ground truth, in contrast, uses mobile location signals gathered from SDKs within 3rd-party apps and often requires opt-in location permissions via those apps.

Strict Visits vs Inferred Visits – To further hone in on the difference in performance, Google Ads visitation criteria is modeled and inferred, whereas Ground Truth visits are more conservative, but high confidence. 

As a result of the difference in attribution models, Google may attribute more visits — even if some are probabilistic — because of its expansive data and modeling.

Attribution Window –  Google is likely to apply a longer attribution window (e.g., 30 days post-click or post-view). Ground Truth is likely to apply shorter attribution windows and more restrictive visit validation rules (e.g., 7-day window, presence verification).

Such differences in timeframe and underlying logic can significantly affect visit counts.

 

Conclusion

 

Both platforms offer highly advanced location-based targeting to help you reach your objectives. The right choice ultimately depends on your campaign goals, budget flexibility, and how precisely you want to target or measure results.

If you seek to gain most from laser-targeting individuals within physical boundaries of a location— like a competitor’s storefront or an event venue, — geofencing is the way to go. The location granularity and precision of geofencing platforms make it an easy win. 

If you want to layer in rich behavioral data, such as audience interests, affinity, or intent to make a purchase, both platforms offer some very solid and relevant choices, but Google Ads offers broader audience reach and greater flexibility in terms of sensitive interests. 

Finally, if you are interested in running conversion- or revenue-driven campaigns. Google’s massive data ecosystem and superior attribution modeling also give it an edge for optimizing performance at scale.

In conclusion, the most effective strategy may not be choosing one over the other — but testing both. Blending geofencing’s spatial accuracy with Google’s audience intelligence will unlock powerful synergies that allow you to reach the right people, at the right location, with the right message.

Looking to explore the best marketing mix for your business? Contact Webtage, a results-driven digital advertising agency recognized for excellence and repeatedly exceeding client expectations with 6x–10x campaign ROI.

Exploring Pros & Cons of Geofencing vs Google Ads Geotargeting? Here’s How the Two Compared For Us

Posted on May 21, 2025 - 6:19 AM by
Geofencing vs Google Ads Geotargeting

As technologies powering location-based ad targeting become more advanced, marketers are looking at geofencing ad platforms as a way to complement or even substitute traditional digital ad platforms, such as Google Ads.

While both geofencing platforms and traditional paid media channels offer location-aware marketing options, they differ in levels of granularity, the layering of audience targeting, the technologies that drive the two platforms and results they can produce.

Based on our firsthand experience running campaigns on both platforms, this blog will walk through a detailed comparison and the results we achieved.

 

Geofencing vs Geotargeting –

 

Semantics matter, especially in the marketing world, where words can mean completely different things in terms of what’s truly being offered, its value, and what to expect from the offer. To make sure we are on the same page, let’s define geofencing and how it is different from geotargeting—as these two terms are often used interchangeably.

Geofencing involves the creation of a virtual boundary, i.e., a “fence” around a specific geographic area using GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi, or cellular data and then targeting individuals based on their visitation to these geofenced locations. Some common targeting options includes:

  • Capability to display an ad when a device enters or exits this boundary, aka on-premise targeting 
  • Capability to target users (via their mobile devices) that have previously visited a geofenced location 
  • Capability to target neighborhoods that show high visitation frequency to a particular store or location, aka neighborhood targeting 
  • Finally, geofencing platforms can also provide geotargeting, which simply means delivering ads to people in a certain zipcode, city, state of country, irrespective of whether they have entered or exited a fence.

In that sense, geofencing ad platforms offer geotargeting options but go beyond to also offer a broader range of location-based geofenced targeting.

For the sake of this article, I will be focusing on Ground Truth, a geofencing ads platform that I have experience in and compare it to Google Ads, a traditional paid media channel.

Let’s start by understanding differences in technologies, audience targeting (beyond location parameters) and cost structure. Then we will dive into performances and end with platform recommendations.

 

Technologies, Audiences & Cost

 

Technologies Powering Ad Targeting – 

Ground Truth employs proprietary “Blueprints” technology to create polygon mapping of  physical spaces with high accuracy, allowing for multi-level geofencing: in-store, on-lot, and retail area. This permits advertisers to target physical locations with accuracy. 

How granular can you go once you’ve drawn a polygon fence? Well you can laser target with a minimum of 0.1 mile or 528 feet around a geocode. This level of granularity is what allows you to choose if you want to target people in-store, on-lot, or even the parking lot. 

This is a big deal! Imagine if you are a coffee shop and you want to attract coffee drinkers who are in the parking lot of a competitor coffee shop. You can offer them discounts and incentivize them to come to your coffee shop instead!

Google Ads, on the other hand, offers geotargeting largely through radius targeting and existing geographic locations like cities or zip codes. Capable of wide targeting, it is less intensely targeted than GroundTruth’s POI-level mapping.

Winner: Ground Truth as it offers very granular targeting of geofenced locations in addition to geotargeting options.

 

Layering in Audience Targeting –

 

Ground Truth offers improved audience targeting by layering in location targeting along 

behavioral audiences that combine visitation patterns with demographic data to create segments like “Luxury Shoppers” or “Fast Food Diners.” The platform also allows for custom segments based on individual campaign goals.

Bear in mind that Ground Truth does not permit targeting of sensitive audience segments including targeting based on health, race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs etc.

One notable difference between the two platforms is in the permissiveness or openness of each platform toward targeting audiences. Google Ads offers more relaxed audience layering, such as on the basis of inferred interests and tendencies that tend to coincide with sensitive subjects such as health conditions, political beliefs, or cultural membership — although these are not labeled as such. We presume this is because Google Ads relies heavily on machine learning and cross-channel signals to classify interests — not direct self-identification. In contrast, Ground Truth relies completely on visitation data that are subject to stricter privacy controls around mobile location signals.

Winner: Google as they have billions of real-time intent signals through their proprietary systems. This combined with probabilistic modeling provides Google with unparalleled audience data.

 

Cost Structure:

 

Ground Truth offers two bid types, cost per click (CPC) and cost per mile (CPM, which translates into cost per thousand impressions) with two optimization strategies: maximize delivery & maximize clicks. 

In terms of bid type, they suggest a minimum CPM of $3.5, but for short-flight campaigns or event-based campaigns, they suggest a CPM of $10-15. For video campaigns, the minimum CPM is $8 and for OTT & CTV platforms, the minimum spend is $25 and for streaming audio ads (say, on a podcast), the minimum spend if $19.

Google bid types also include CPC and CPM, but their optimization options are broader and include not just delivery or click optimization, but conversion, conversion value and target return on ad spend (tROAS) optimizations as well.

Winner: Google. The reason why Google wins this round is because of their conversion and revenue optimization focus that leads to better conversions and revenue generation.

 

Media Type:

 

Ground Truth offers a much wider range of devices to display their ads, including web (web & app), desktops, Connected TVs (CTVs that refer to devices that can connect to the internet and stream digital content, like smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming sticks, like Roku, Fire & Stick), Audio streaming, and OTT platforms.

Google Ads, also offers the ability to render ads on search, display, Gmail, video channels like YouTube, Discover & Maps, they do not offer the wider range of media types that Ground Truth offers. 

Note: Google also offers CTV, OTT & audio streaming ads through its separate DV360 platform. For our comparison purposes, we are limiting our analysis to the Google Ads platform only.

Winner: Ground Truth. The wide media type choice makes Ground truth the winner here. The caveat being that Google also offers wider media types but you would have to use its DV 360 ad platform to expand your media type options.

 

How Did the Two Compare in Terms of Performance?

 

We recently ran campaigns to drive foot traffic to our client’s thrift stores and here is the performance snapshot

Impressions & Clicks: Ground Truth drove 4,819 clicks on 335,000 impression compared to 1,920 clicks on 311,941 impressions on Google for a comparable budget.

Store Visits: Google easily took the prize here with 183 store visits compared to ~15 visits generated by Ground Truth.

The vastly superior campaign performance on Google needs to be taken in with a grain of salt.

While both campaigns had similar budgets, the wide difference in attributed store visits likely reflects methodology differences in tracking versus campaign performance. 

Google Ads has the benefit of vast device coverage and probabilistic modeling based on user behavior across Google services. GroundTruth, by contrast, uses stricter location-based criteria, which can result in fewer — but potentially more accurate — visit attributions.

Let’s discuss these one-by-one:

Vast number of Real-time signals – Google capitalizes on its own vast network of Android OS users whose location history is turned on by default. It also uses a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and Google Maps data from users logged into their Google accounts. Ground truth, in contrast, uses mobile location signals gathered from SDKs within 3rd-party apps and often requires opt-in location permissions via those apps.

Strict Visits vs Inferred Visits – To further hone in on the difference in performance, Google Ads visitation criteria is modeled and inferred, whereas Ground Truth visits are more conservative, but high confidence. 

As a result of the difference in attribution models, Google may attribute more visits — even if some are probabilistic — because of its expansive data and modeling.

Attribution Window –  Google is likely to apply a longer attribution window (e.g., 30 days post-click or post-view). Ground Truth is likely to apply shorter attribution windows and more restrictive visit validation rules (e.g., 7-day window, presence verification).

Such differences in timeframe and underlying logic can significantly affect visit counts.

 

Conclusion

 

Both platforms offer highly advanced location-based targeting to help you reach your objectives. The right choice ultimately depends on your campaign goals, budget flexibility, and how precisely you want to target or measure results.

If you seek to gain most from laser-targeting individuals within physical boundaries of a location— like a competitor’s storefront or an event venue, — geofencing is the way to go. The location granularity and precision of geofencing platforms make it an easy win. 

If you want to layer in rich behavioral data, such as audience interests, affinity, or intent to make a purchase, both platforms offer some very solid and relevant choices, but Google Ads offers broader audience reach and greater flexibility in terms of sensitive interests. 

Finally, if you are interested in running conversion- or revenue-driven campaigns. Google’s massive data ecosystem and superior attribution modeling also give it an edge for optimizing performance at scale.

In conclusion, the most effective strategy may not be choosing one over the other — but testing both. Blending geofencing’s spatial accuracy with Google’s audience intelligence will unlock powerful synergies that allow you to reach the right people, at the right location, with the right message.

Looking to explore the best marketing mix for your business? Contact Webtage, a results-driven digital advertising agency recognized for excellence and repeatedly exceeding client expectations with 6x–10x campaign ROI.

SEO vs. Paid Ads: Where Digital Marketing Agencies Are Investing in 2025

Posted on May 9, 2025 - 11:28 AM by

For over a decade, digital marketing has wrestled with the question of which is more effective in generating return on marketing investment: SEO or paid ads? While SEO is most effective in bringing long-term, compounding traffic at lower costs, paid ads offer quick visibility and laser-focused targeting. 

The tradeoff between quick wins and sustainable growth has become even more strategic in 2025.  This is AI-driven search and privacy-focus is leading to rapid search volatility, technological shifts, and rising costs. Marketers need to approach marketing mix much more strategically, keeping in mind increased efficiencies combined with increased resource investment to offer continued ROI on marketing spend.

Read on to learn about:

  1. The latest trends shaping SEO and Paid Ads in 2025
  2. Where agencies are shifting their budgets, and why
  3. How smart agencies are blending both strategies for maximum impact

So whether you are exploring SEO & paid advertising for your own business or if you are a digital marketer refining your marketing mix, this article will help you stay ahead of the rules of search visibility—and how to win in 2025.

The Age-old Debate: A Recap

First, let’s do a recap on the age-old debate between SEO and Paid Search Ads. SEO is lower cost & sustainable with long-term returns. Paid advertising brings almost immediate search visibility but has higher ongoing spend more because in addition to paying for advertising services, you also need to pay for media buys. 

SEO is evergreen or at least brings longer lasting results even if you were to pause SEO activities – not recommended though as sooner or later, depending on how competitive your organic search market is, your organic visibility will start to suffer. Paid ads, on the other hand, will completely eliminate you from search results the minute you decide to pause your campaigns.

Finally, attributions are much more easily available with paid advertising, when compared to SEO due to pixels & UTMs which allow very precise attributions. SEO also allows for aggregate attributions, but you run into an issue if you want very granular attributions due to privacy issues.

The State of SEO in 2025

Here are the biggest drivers of SEO strategies in 2025:

AI Overview: Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), aka AI Overview is bringing generative AI capabilities into search. Generative AI is poised to change the way search engines work and is the biggest search technology breakthrough in 25 years! 

Google says: “With new breakthroughs in generative AI, we’re again reimagining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search could answer, and transform the way information is organized, to help you sort through and make sense of what’s out there.”

Google is not the only search engine experimenting with gen AI in search models. The new Bing, powered by ChatGPT, is already in business. Facebook, a digital media giant, although not technically a search engine, is also experimenting heavily with AI with its rollout of Meta AI. And if you have done a search on Facebook or Instagram, you have probably come across Meta AI. Meta’s AI is getting remarkably good at understanding user intent and content quality through behavioral signals. 

Zero Click Searches: Personally, I find AI Overviews incredibly convenient for informational searches—I rarely click through to a website unless I want more detail.  This behavior aligns with broader user trends; a 2024 study by Spark Toro & Datos found that approximately 58.5% of Google searches in the U.S. result in zero clicks, meaning users find the information they need without visiting any external sites .

However, transactional or commercial keywords are a different story. People may still scan AI overview to see recommendations but they would click on the recommendations to complete a transaction, fill a lead form, make an ecommerce purchase, watch a video, or call a business. This is also backed by data. Notably, AI overviews predominantly appear for informational queries; a study by Workshop Digital revealed that 80% of keywords triggering AI overviews are informational in nature, while transactional and commercial keywords are less likely to generate such summaries .

Experience Expertise Authority & Trustworthiness (E.E.A.T.): Google’s emphasis on E.E.A.T. remains foundational—especially for health, finance, or other “Your Life or Your Money” (YMYL) topics. This is not a new phenomenon. The first time Google unveiled this update was in 2018. However, as AI Overview has become the overarching lens through which much of the open web is accessed, E.E.A.T. has become even more critical for search visibility.

In my personal experience, our SEO clients, in industries as diverse as health, B2B or home services, establish experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness through deep, informative backed clear authority signals—such as references to trustworthy sources, author’s credibility, reviews and engagement.

Now that we’ve established that SEO in 2025 demands better and more, how does one then gain visibility on search engines?

For Google: Our strategy has centered on a mix of comprehensive, authoritative content  combined with simple, easy to follow content that directly answers user queries.

For Meta: We prioritize content that drives meaningful engagement and social interaction.

The State of Paid Ads in 2025

Just like AI-led paradigm shifts in SEO, paid ads are evolving to meet new privacy standards and are offering AI-driven targeting & ad optimizations for improved performance. 

Privacy Standards: Google Ads is leading with enhanced Consent Mode v2 and cookieless audience modeling, fundamentally reshaping how conversions are tracked. Similarly programmatic platforms are shifting toward contextual targeting and privacy-compliant identity solutions like UID 2.0 as third-party cookies fade out. Facebook / Meta Ads are offering Conversion API solutions to adapt to iOS Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) limitations. LinkedIn Ads are also leveraging first-party data and engagement retargeting to improve ROI.

Rising Cost Per Click: Cost per click (CPC) is going up in nearly all major ad platforms in 2025 because of a combination of factors: increased competition, more and more marketers entering the digital space, diminished tracking accuracy due to privacy policies, and greater utilization of AI-driven bidding strategies that prioritize conversions over cost savings. 

While some verticals—healthcare, legal, and B2B—have more dramatic growth due to higher customer value and stricter compliance regulations, the trend in general is quite ubiquitous. This rising CPC does not necessarily translate to declining ROI but does raise the bar of campaign efficiency. 

This means, marketers must now optimize more heavily—streamlining target audiences, optimizing landing page conversion, and leveraging first-party data—to gain or boost profitability. As CPCs rise, there is less margin for error, and strategy execution and tracking are more important than ever.

Role of AI in audience targeting, creative generation, and budget optimization: 

In 2025, AI has become a fundamental element of pay-per-click ad strategies, impacting how campaigns are built, tuned, and amplified. To target audiences in a privacy-first world, publishers like Google and Meta are leveraging AI to model user behavior —making use of contextual cues, first-party data, and predictive analytics to connect high-intent audiences even without third-party cookies. 

Creatively, AI technology now generates and proves ad tests in real-time so that advertisers can instantly understand what performs well across formats and platforms. 

Budget optimization is automated as well, with AI adjusting spend dynamically among channels, audiences, and creatives based on performance signals. 

The result: smarter, faster decision-making with less waste and higher ROI—especially critical in an era of rising costs and shrinking attribution windows.

 

Where Agencies Are Shifting Their Budgets, And Why

In 2025, digital agencies are making increasingly strategic choices about how to divide marketing budgets between SEO and paid media, driven by evolving AI technologies, client goals, competitive index, and industry-specific key performance indicators. In a study published by Digital World Institute, in 2025:

  • 89% of digital marketers incorporate both SEO and PPC into their overall marketing strategies.
  • 60% of small businesses prioritize SEO over PPC due to tighter marketing budgets.
  • 42% of mid-sized companies allocate budgets equally between SEO and PPC efforts.
  • 76% of enterprise-level companies run at least three different PPC campaigns alongside dedicated SEO teams.

It is important to note that this ratio shifts radically depending on client type and objectives. At Webtage—-a Google-Partner digital marketing agency in Naperville, that offers SEO Services and paid advertising to its clients—we observe that small enterprises often lean toward SEO, particularly when their target audience requires upfront research to identify a trustworthy provider. On the other hand, businesses targeting high-intent, ready-to-convert searches typically prioritize PPC for immediate results. When budget allows, a hybrid approach combining both SEO and PPC tends to deliver the best outcomes.

Here Are The Industry Budget Trends That We Are Seeing

E-commerce: Paid-heavy—especially Google Shopping, Meta Ads, and TikTok—for immediate conversions, but most brands invest in SEO on product and category pages to reduce dependence on paid traffic.

Healthcare: SEO reigns supreme due to E-E-A-T requirements and regulatory restrictions on ad copy, though paid search and display are still utilized heavily for awareness and appointment-driving campaigns.

B2B: Balanced investments—SEO for thought leadership and organic lead generation; LinkedIn and Google Ads for targeted demand capture and remarketing.

Nonprofits: Lean toward SEO and organic/paid social. However, many nonprofits are leaning into strategic use of paid campaigns for seasonal giving campaigns.

When Agencies Choose SEO, Paid, or Both

Agency leaders favor SEO for clients requiring sustainable long-term growth, increased organic visibility, and authority establishment—especially in verticals like healthcare, where trust and compliance are essential. Paid media, on the other hand, is the preference for lead generation at scale, promotional campaigns, and rapidly expanding reach. Paid media campaigns, especially when combined with a cross channel approach, bring exceptional results to our clients in healthcare, B2B, professional services & much more.

Hybrid strategies are the new normal for a majority of agencies as they seek to capture both short-term demand and long-term search intent while managing risk across channels.

In 2025, however, the debate between SEO and paid advertising isn’t a simple trade-off between short-term return and long-term sustainability. It’s an issue of strategic resource planning that reflects the evolving digital landscape—where AI, privacy regulations, and shifting consumer behavior demand a more advanced approach. Success lies in selecting the right mix of strategies to deliver client goals, be adaptable to change, and demonstrate measurable ROI. For digital agencies, the issue is not choosing between SEO or ads—it’s about how and when to utilize both to their utmost potential.

 At Webtage, we lean heavily on marketing analytics, attribution modeling and lifetime value prediction increasingly to inform clients on best strategies they invest budgets across channels based on both short-term goals and long-term growth opportunities. We are also investing in keeping up with privacy-first attribution technologies to ensure we can continue to monitor campaign performance without losing sight of the returns on investment.

Curious about which marketing mix is optimal for your business? Contact us at www.webtage.com

Winning in a First-Party Data World: The Future of Marketing in a Privacy-First Era

Posted on March 7, 2025 - 10:17 PM by

If you have dabbled in digital marketing, you have likely come across the growth of first-party data collection protocols and the eventual end of reliance on third-party data sources, especially those stored on third-party cookies. What do these protocols mean and how can you, as a marketer, work around them?

This article will take a look at first-party data vs third-party data environments, implications of third-party cookie deprecation, and how two largest ad platforms, Facebook and Google are offering work around solutions.

First Party vs Third Party Marketing Data

In simple terms, third-party data involves gathering user information indirectly from external sources rather than directly from your customers. Here are some common examples:

Website Tracking Tools

  • Cookies & Tracking Pixels – Pixels added to your website may drop ‘cookies’ on your browser, so your web activity can be tracked by the third-party platforms that dropped cookies on your device/browser.
  • Third-Party JavaScript Tags: Embedded scripts from platforms like Google Tag Manager that allow vendors to track behavior on websites.

Mobile SDKs (Software Development Kits)

  • Apps integrate third-party SDKs from companies, such as Facebook Audience Network, which collect user data like location, device info, and app activity. Ever see ‘Do You Want to Allow this App to Track Your Activity?’ Yup, that’s your smartphone limiting how much data your apps can collect without your permission. 

Data Brokers / Partnership Data Sharing

  • You may decide to purchase data from companies like Acxiom or  Experian that collect consumer data from various online and offline sources.
  • You may partner with third parties to exchange or license anonymized customer data for marketing purposes.

Survey & Panel Data

  • Market research companies like Nielsen or YouGov collect consumer preferences through surveys and provide that data to businesses.

In contrast, first-party environments depend on collecting data from your owned channel with user consent. Some examples of first-party data collection include:

Direct Newsletter Programs

  • Instead of tracking users across websites, companies using subscriber behavior data to understand their users

Customer Portals & Native Apps

  • Businesses using authenticated environments to better target compared to cookie-based tracking
  • Brands with native apps are maintaining 85% of their targeting capabilities despite cookie deprecation

Consent Management

  • Companies implement consent solutions that directly ask their customers about their willingness to share data with the company’s website they are visiting as well as their willingness to share their data with third party who may have cookies on the website. 

Same domain web tracking

  • By setting up a server side tagging container on a cloud provider of choice, companies can establish an intermediary between their website and third party analytics and marketing platforms.

This intermediary between the website and third party platforms allows for the collection of user data, with consent, as a subdomain of the primary domain.

Deprecation of Third Party Cookies & Intelligent Tracking Prevention

In light of rising concerns about privacy, in general, and growing legal protection offered to safeguarding personally identifiable solutions, many leading tech companies, including Apple and Google, have committed to their privacy-first solutions.

Apple devices and browsers now prevent third-party cookies and mobile SDKs from tracking user activity without their consent. Worth mentioning are Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)—a privacy feature built into Safari browser that helps protect users from being tracked across different websites without their permission. Its counterpart can be found in App Tracking Transparency (ATT) for mobile apps, which acts as the mobile equivalent of ITP for Apple devices.

Similarly, Google has implemented the Privacy Sandbox that utilizes privacy-first technologies and phasing out of third-party tracker cookies to support a move towards user privacy protection. To learn more about what these technologies are, visit Google’s Privacy Sandbox overview.

How are major Ad Platforms Reacting to Privacy-First Data Environments?

Facebook’s Conversion API (CAPI) and Google Ads’ Enhanced Conversions provide marketers with advanced tools to effectively manage and utilize first-party data. These solutions are designed to optimize marketing campaigns, enhance audience targeting, and improve conversion tracking, especially in a landscape where third-party cookies are being phased out.

Let’s focus on how these solutions bypass the traditional third-party data collection.

Facebook CAPI allows businesses to send web events (like purchases, sign-ups, etc.) directly from their server to Facebook’s servers. This bypasses browser limitations and ad blockers, ensuring that tracking remains intact.

Google Enhanced Conversions works a bit differently to bypass third-party data collection. When a user interacts with an ad and completes a conversion action (like making a purchase or signing up), Google Ads Enhanced Conversions can capture the first-party data provided by the However, before sending this data back to Google, it is encrypted to ensure that the user’s privacy is maintained. This means that only anonymous, encrypted data is shared, complying with data protection regulations.

We will discuss details on both these solutions in upcoming blogs, but for now, let’s take a look at how these solutions work to 

  1. First-Party Data Utilization: Both Facebook CAPI and Google Ads Enhanced Conversions focus on harnessing first-party data—data collected directly from users. By using this data, marketers can create tailored advertising experiences that resonate with their target audience.
  2. Improved Tracking and Attribution: Usage of these tools allows for more accurate tracking of user interactions and conversions across platforms. This leads to better attribution of marketing efforts, enabling marketers to understand the complete customer journey and the effectiveness of their campaigns.
  3. Privacy Compliance: With increasing scrutiny on data privacy, both solutions are built to comply with regulations. Marketers can leverage first-party data while ensuring they are respecting user privacy and data protection laws. In the case of Facebook CAPI, data first reaches the organization’s servers before being sent to Facebook’s servers. In the case of Google, user data is fully encrypted to protect user data from reaching third-party platforms.
  4. Enhanced Targeting Capabilities: By integrating first-party data into advertising strategies, marketers can create more precise audience segments. This allows for improved targeting of ads, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
  5. Optimized Campaign Performance: With better data insights and tracking, marketers can continually refine their campaigns. They can analyze which strategies are working and adjust their tactics in real-time to maximize ROI.

Future-Proofing Marketing in a Privacy-Driven Landscape

By effectively utilizing tools like Facebook CAPI and Google Ads Enhanced Conversions, marketers can thrive in a first-party data environment, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant in their advertising efforts.

To learn how to implement Facebook CAPI and Enhanced Ecommerce, please visit webtage.com/analytics or contact us at info@webtage.com

 

Top Marketing Analytics Tools for 2025

Posted on January 28, 2025 - 7:58 PM by

As the landscape for marketing continues to evolve, the ability to be able to access, use, and interpret data becomes ever more important. As we start 2025, it becomes even more necessary to derive useful insights from data that can be turned into action, this increases the demand for sophisticated analytics tools. Understanding which marketing analytics tools will be useful is crucial, especially for small businesses looking to improve their marketing strategies. In this article we will explore the top analytics tools to use in 2025 offering insights into how they can be leveraged to improve marketing outcomes.

Leading Marketing Analytics Tools for 2025

In 2025, several analytics tools are poised to be at the forefront of marketing, offering advanced features that cater to the nuanced needs of businesses. Below we will take a look at the most promising tools that small business owners should consider integrating into their marketing arsenal.

Server-side Google Tag Manager (GTM)

Although Google Tag Manager is not an analytics platform but a tagging platform that houses all web, app & marketing tracking tags, scripts and tracking in one place, I would be amiss if I do not include GTM in the list of top leading marketing analytics tools for 2025. 

Why? Because as we move towards a world of first-party cookies, privacy compliance & deeper insights into user journey, campaign attributions and performance data, a server-side Google Tag Manager could be your launch pad for achieving all of those goals.

First-Party Data 

A server-side GTM allows you to set cookies directly from your server that shares a common domain with your website, thus bypassing bypassing the impact of browser restrictions on third-party cookies, such as the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) on Safari browsers or Enhanced Tracking Prevention (ETP) on Firefox.

Additionally, with a server-side GTM, you can also serve scripts, such as gtm.js or gtag.js directly from your server, bypassing third-party scripts, firming up your set-up for first party data tracking.

Compliance

As web, app & marketing data passes through your own servers, you have much greater control over first-party data. You maintain complete ownership & control, thus making it easier to manage and process sensitive data. For instance, server-side GTM allows you to filter, mask, or redact sensitive protected health information (PHI) before sending it to external platforms, in order to reduce HIPAA compliance risks. Similarly, personally identifiable information (PII) can be filtered, hashed or redacted for compliance purposes in other industries.

In addition, since all data is stored, processed, and managed in a controlled environment, the server-side container provides a controlled environment to monitor and document how sensitive data is processed, stored, and shared. This allows for auditable data pipelines. 

Campaign Attribution & Conversion Tracking

Server-side containers collect first-party data, thus helping to bypass browser-based ad blockers that typically prevent third-party scripts and cookies from running and storing user data. 

This has led to growth of Conversion API Integrations, such as Meta’s Conversion API or Google Ads Enhanced Conversions that work seamlessly with server-side GTM in improving attribution by sending post-cookie data from the server.

Finally, since the server handles data, it minimizes discrepancies caused by browser-level issues like cookie loss or JavaScript errors.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the latest iteration of Google Analytics is designed to provide a more detailed and comprehensive view of user behavior across devices, enhanced privacy features, enhanced event-based data models and advanced machine learning for improved insights. GA4’s enhanced metrics such as their predictive metrics and their increased integration with Google ads to create more effective marketing and personalization. 

Privacy-Centric Measurement

A key advantage of GA4 is its focus on privacy-centric measurement, which is important because it aligns with evolving data privacy regulations. GA4, for instance, allows you to redact email & query parameters thus preventing sending of user details, such as emails, user ids and any other personally identifiable information (PII) to Google. 

Another key privacy feature in GA4 is the ability to turn off Google Signals, which is Google’s data that it gathers from Google users who have opted for ad personalization. By disabling Google Signals on your website, you can further anonymize individual users from being identified on your website.

Machine Learning Capabilities

GA4’s machine learning capabilities also offer the ability to predict user behavior. Predictive analytics can be used to create custom audiences, such as Likely 7-day Purchases, Predicted 28-day Top Spenders etc. These audiences can then be used in a retargeting campaign and/or web personalization, such as personalized product recommendations, to drive higher engagements, revenue, campaign optimizations, inventory management & more.

However, remember that in order to utilize GA4’s predictive audiences, you must have at least 1000 positive (purchasers) and negative (churned) users/day to drive the predictive modeling capabilities of GA4.

Enhanced Integration with Google Ads

The integration of GA4 with Google ads allows businesses to streamline their marketing efforts, ensuring consistency across platforms. For instance, you can now create conversions in Google Ads by importing events from GA4. Since this data from this can inform ad placement and messaging, it allows for more accurate targeting. By aligning analytics with advertising, businesses can create marketing strategies that are cohesive and resonate with their target audience, leading to improved ROI and more effective use of marketing resources.

HubSpot Analytics

HubSpot Analytics is part of HubSpot’s comprehensive marketing, sales & CRM platform, providing a strong set of tools for tracking and analyzing marketing, sales, and customer service data. For businesses, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface and integration capabilities make it an attractive option for those seeking to consolidate their marketing efforts. For companies already running inbound marketing campaigns, HubSpot analytics is a non-brainer.

Comprehensive Data Integration

HubSpot’s integration with its CRM platform allows data to flow smoothly across marketing, sales, and customer departments. This ensures that all teams in the company have access to the same data, which can further encourage collaboration and create more alignment. This consistent data causes a unified view of customer interactions, in which businesses can deliver consistent and personal experiences. This is key to building customer relationships that are strong and that drive repeat business. 

Deep User Journey Analytics

By centralizing user data cross web, email, social media, CRM & calls, the entire user journey, including brand engagement and conversions are available in one window. This allows for identifying critical touchpoints that drive conversions, improving marketing campaign effectiveness, improving sales, and providing clear return on investments.

Customizable Dashboards

HubSpot’s advanced reporting features allow for the creation of dashboards that are customizable, this can provide businesses a holistic view of metrics on performance. They are able to be tailored to present data relevant to specific teams. By highlighting key metrics and trends, these customizable dashboards facilitate data-driven decision-making. This enables businesses to focus on improving their marketing strategies and achieve their marketing objectives. 

Tableau 

If you are looking for best-in-class visualizations, Tableau, renowned for its powerful data visualization capabilities, should be your first choice for incredible insights in data that can be quite complex. Tableau’s intuitive interface allows users to create interactive dashboards that provide a clear, visual representation of data, which helps to facilitate more informed decision-making. 

Though Tableau requires specialized skills and, therefore, a steeper learning curve, it handles large datasets efficiently, processes complex calculations, and builds top notch dashboards.

Data Visualization Excellence

Tableau’s strength lies in its ability to transform complex data into visuals that are easy to understand. These visuals allow for stakeholders to make informed decisions by making it easier to grasp insights and trends. It also helps bridge the gap between business leaders and technical teams, this helps encourage collaboration between the teams. By presenting data in a digestible format, Tableau ensures all members of an organization can access these insights. 

Broad Data Source Connectivity

Tableau offers the ability to connect to a wide range of data sources, from SQL databases to cloud platforms like Snowflake, allowing for comprehensive analysis of marketing, sales, and operational data. This connectivity ensures that businesses have a complete view of their operations, by which they make holistic business decisions. By integrating data from multiple sources, Tableau provides a single source of truth that can inform strategic planning and execution. This comprehensive approach enhances the accuracy and reliability of business insights.

Collaborative Features

Tableau’s collaborative features also allow teams to share their insights and collaborate on data-driven strategies. This collaboration is essential for aligning cross-functional teams and ensuring that everyone is working towards common goals. By fostering a culture of collaboration, Tableau helps businesses create a more cohesive approach to marketing and operations. 

Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Salesforce Einstein Analytics is a cloud-based platform that basically uses AI to create analytics insights that can predict future trends and actionable insights. This can help B2B markets who can use Einstein Analytics to better understand customer behavior and predict any new trends that might occur. 

AI-Driven Predictive Analytics

Einstein Analytics’ capabilities allow for businesses to be able to uncover any hidden patterns in behavior and predict outcomes with great accuracy. These analytics give businesses a competitive advantage by allowing them to anticipate any new changes and adapt based on these changes. This allows businesses to reduce the time and effort required for data analysis, this can give businesses the ability to use resources for strategic initiatives, making the operation more efficient. 

Unified Customer View

Businesses can gain a unified view of customer interactions and enhance their marketing strategies by integrating Einstein Analytics with Salesforce’s CRM. This ensures that data on customers is all centralized and this in turn facilitates more effective targeting and personalization. Centralizing this data enables businesses to deliver consistent experiences across all channels, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is key for long-term relationships and driving growth.

Actionable Insights

Einstein Analytics provides actionable insights that empower businesses to make informed decisions and drive growth. These insights are derived from data analysis that ensures that strategies are based on accurate and up-to-date information. By focusing on actionable insights, Einstein Analytics helps businesses move beyond only collecting data to executing on them. This focus ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with business goals and deliver measurable results.

Conclusion

Marketing analytics tools have now become a necessity for businesses. In the age of privacy-centered data collection, predictive analytics, and laser-focused attribution models, businesses will struggle to compete if they do not have access to data and metrics that could provide valuable insight for businesses. As we look towards 2025 and beyond, the role of analytics in marketing will only continue to grow. By investing in the right tools and strategies,businesses will have the ability to drive more innovation and growth. 

How to Use Affordable SEO Services To Skyrocket Your Website’s Traffic in 2025

Posted on November 22, 2024 - 4:47 PM by

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to improve online visibility, specifically on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The main goal of working on SEO is to create high quality web content that will be chosen by search engines to display on top pages of search results as a way to answer search queries of users.

By increasing visibility, you can increase traffic to your website and your business is likely to increase by gaining new customers as a result (Michigan Tech). The challenge here has to do with affordability. Many different types of SEO strategies are expensive, and people wonder if any types of SEO strategies that are less expensive are worth it in the first place. However, there are many affordable SEO solutions and they are impactful themselves. In this article, we will show how affordable SEO solutions can lead to significant traffic growth for your website. 

1. Why Affordable SEO is Crucial for Small and Medium Businesses

Even if you are a small or a medium business, there are many benefits for investing in an SEO strategy. Whether it be time or money or both you choose to invest, SEO is a long-term game and can bring in tremendous return on investment (ROI). It is always better to start SEO early instead of waiting. Your competition that may have already implemented an SEO strategy might forge ahead of you if you fail to do so. 

There is a common objection to investing in SEO early – why not focus on digital advertising and PPC? PPC at first makes sense as it brings immediate results, is easier to understand and master as the rules and algorithms are more easy to predict compared to many complex interrelated factors in SEO and there is no fear of updates such as a new Google update. However, there are many advantages to SEO that push it over the edge. It is free to do yourself. With PPC, you have to pay per click. You can also learn as you go, you don’t need to ace it the first try, you can keep trying to improve visibility by using social backlinks, directories, valuable guest posts, citations and optimizing your website and learning from the process. While the short term results may not be there, there are tremendous longevity and cost benefits to reap if your SEO strategy is successful. Once you have created a solid SEO strategy, these results can end up lasting for years. 

There are many affordable SEO solutions for small and medium sized businesses. For content marketing, there’s sites such as Reddit which are free to use. For link building, there are many free social backlink sites to upload backlinks, there is also posting guest blogs on various websites in order to garner attention. Point being, there are many affordable SEO strategies that you can take that will yield results. 

2. Key Elements of Affordable SEO Services That Drive Traffic

There are various aspects about affordable SEO services that are important to understand and capitalize on in order to help drive traffic. 

These key elements are: on-page content optimization, technical SEO, and link building. 

On-page content optimization is a strategy in which you optimize the content on your own website in order to increase visibility and drive traffic. One element to look at in keyword research, you can search which search terms are the most popular and then use those specific keywords in articles or any type of content on your website. Optimizing meta tags, headers, internal links, image alt texts, etc, are all important here. Creating high-quality blog content with many keywords is also an important component of on-page SEO. High quality content entails having content that is accessible, easy to understand, and provides value to the reader, and having high quality content impacts how search engines view your website (OnTheMap). 

Technical SEO is a strategy in which you optimize the technical aspects of your website. This means making changes to technical aspects of a website such as its coding or its architecture (MichiganTech). The main point of this is to make it easier for search spiders to crawl and index your page. It can also fix any issues preventing them from searching your website. One component of technical SEO is improving page speed. Search engines such as Google factor the speed with which your page loads, this is because faster loading speed improves a visitor’s experience. 

Link Building is another strategy in which you build backlinks to your website and post them on various sites. These sites can be social bookmarking sites, where you make a post with a keyword that has a hyperlink to your website, or it can be using directories such as Google Business Profile. There are many social bookmarking sites and directories that are free. 

3. Affordable SEO Tactics That Deliver Quick Results in 2024

There are various tactics one can take that can deliver affordable results when it comes to Local SEO. 

Claim Google Business Profile & Optimize it – There are many affordable strategies one can take such as using Google Business Profile (GBP), earlier known as Google My Business. It is a powerful medium that allows businesses to create and manage their listing for Google searches. The first step is to claim your profile if you haven’t already done so. If no profile exists, create one and optimize it for search ranking by completing all sections, including services with accurate and pertinent descriptions, generating reviews and by adding content (verbiage and images) to your GBP.

Ranking on GBP is difficult, especially if you are a new business and do not have enough website authority in the eyes of Google. However it can be done in various ways such as posting a blog in the local newspaper. Social media posts can also help with local search results, especially Facebook. Including the specific keyword in the title and the description is a way of optimizing social media posts. 

Generate High Quality Content – Having a well-planned content strategy can help increase organic traffic. Types of content could be a blog, a video, or an infographic. A crucial part of this strategy entails keyword research; what are people looking up? What specifically are they typing? What are they looking to get out of these search results? Using these keywords as a guiding pillar for your content will then help increase search visibility since it will contain information that directly answers searcher’s intent, thereby gaining 

Use Effective Target Keywords – Long-Tail Keywords are keywords that are more niche and specific. Sometimes, especially for small businesses, it is difficult to gain visibility for general keywords such as “food” or “furniture”, therefore using long-tail keywords can help you start to gain visibility for any specific products or services that you have. Long-tail keywords also tend to be less competitive to rank for compared to highly competitive ‘short-head’ keywords. Keep in mind that you need a large number of long-tail keywords as the monthly search volume (MSV) for long-tail searches may be limited.

Devote Your Budget to Working with an Expert Technical SEO & Backlink Generation Company – For most businesses that do not have an internal SEO team, it is extremely challenging to find the time and resources to work on the two critical pillars of SEO: authoritative backlink creation and optimizing the technical aspects of the website. 

Backlinks from relevant websites serve as a powerful endorsement for your own site. When these authoritative sources link to you, it signals to Google and other search engines that your content is credible and valuable. This endorsement plays a crucial role in how search engines assess your website’s authority and relevance, ultimately influencing your position in search engine rankings. Researching and reaching out to website admins can be a tedious but highly rewarding task when you are able to land a high quality link back to your website. This is a highly specialized skill as it’s not just a question of finding and getting links from third-party sites. You should know which types of backlinks would be most beneficial for your business. What percentage of those links need to be follow vs no-follow links? What percentage of citations vs guest posts links do you need to create? What should be the domain type of the link etc.

Similarly, technical SEO is a highly specialized skill that involves creating user-friendly navigation, a laser-focused attention to creating unique and relevant content, generating an accurate sitemap, making sure it’s updated regularly and canonical URLs added. It also involves implementing structured data to help search engines understand content on the website and display any additional information, such as reviews etc. in a relevant fashion. 

If you’re aiming to boost your business’s ROI through an effective SEO campaign but lack a specialized in-house team, partnering with an expert SEO agency is the smartest move you can make. They can deliver sustainable and rapid results tailored to your needs. To maximize your investment and keep costs manageable, consider supplying high-quality, SEO-optimized content to your agency. This collaboration will enhance your campaign’s effectiveness and ensure that you get the most out of your efforts.

4. How Affordable SEO Services Improve User Experience (UX)

Improving user experience, as stated before, is a great way for your website to be ranked high on search engines. Certain ways to improve user experience on your website would be to name certain pages logically since users will use them to figure out what the pages contain, making it easy for visitors to see when they are on your sites, and making a search box (BrightEdge). 

Mobile Optimization is also important. Mobile-first indexing is becoming more popular since over 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Making your website accessible on a mobile device becomes all the more important. 

Reducing bounce rate is also important. In order to keep people’s attention and have them stay on your website, top quality content that is relevant is crucial in order to increase retention. Improving bounce rates signals to search engines that your content is of high quality and is engaging (AI). 

5. Tracking Success: How to Measure Traffic Growth from Affordable SEO

A key indicator of traffic growth is to measure organic traffic. Organic traffic is an important indicator since it shows how many find your website or content through searches on search engines instead of paid advertisements. This shows how well your website is perceived by search engines as it pertains to content relevant to search engine questions (Indeed). 

As discussed before, bounce rate is also an important indicator since it can show whether or not your website is able to keep viewers there for significant periods of time, indicating the quality and relevance of your content, which in turn is a signal to search engines whether or not your business deserves to be ranked. 

Conversion rate is also important because it shows that not only are people visiting your website, but actually taking steps to buy your product or service, which is a good indicator of SEO (Conductor). 

There are affordable tools you can use in order to track your SEO performance such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, etc. These tools will give you a picture of your SEO progress and at which areas you may be lagging in. By taking a look at the data, you can switch your strategy up by focusing on different aspects of SEO. Perhaps you see that one of your keywords is getting a lot of traction; it could be a local SEO keyword. In that situation you might want to start focusing on more local SEO keywords. That is just one example, but the main point stands, looking at the data gives you a good indication on what your strategy should be. 

7. Choosing the Right Affordable SEO Service Provider

Choosing the right affordable SEO service provider is also incredibly important since it could be the difference between business growth and business decline. There are various aspects to look at when considering an SEO provider. 

Looking at case studies of the providers provides a good indicator of the quality of their work, looking at their past work and looking at the results may give you a good idea on how they will perform for you. 

Reviews is another indicator, previous customer satisfaction is another aspect to look at which is similar to looking at case studies, were the customers satisfied with the results that the provider brought? These are important questions you must ask before choosing any specific provider. 

Experience is another indicator. Obviously there can be start-up companies that are very much capable of providing excellent services, however, the amount of time a business has been in operation is a good indicator of how good their services will be. The more experienced a business usually means a higher quality service. 

There are also red flags to watch out for when selecting a provider. 

If they have vague plans, that is not a good sign, a good company would generally give a very specific strategy, detailing long and short-term goals. 

A lack of previous clients is another red flag, companies may have no clients or they may have a client list that is confidential, in the case of confidentiality, the most likely reason for this would be that their previous clients were not satisfied with the work. 

When considering choosing to do SEO yourself or hire a provider, there many variables to take into account:

  • Time: Time is an important variable, implementing an SEO strategy takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, if you are a company that needs to focus on other aspects of the business, it is perhaps best to work with a provider.
  • Expertise: Having a lack of expertise on SEO and how to implement it is another issue. If a business lacks this expertise, then trying to implement a strategy on their own will likely yield little results and take up a lot of their time. 
  • Budget: Budget is also important since it obviously costs money to hire a provider, however there is a balance to be made and an investment made right now may yield long-term results in the future that outweigh the current costs. 

Conclusion

As we have seen, having an affordable SEO strategy can provide tremendous benefits, especially to small and medium-sized businesses. Focusing on increasing online presence is becoming more important and increasing your ranking on search engines is a sure fire way to increase the popularity of your business. Whether it be a local or national SEO focus, focusing on important elements such as quality content, easy-to-use website, popular keywords, etc, are important in order to optimize your SEO. When looking at SEO service providers, it is important to look at aspects such as experience, customer reviews, and case studies. It is also important to notice red flags such as if they make vague promises or have clients that are “confidential”. 

If you are looking for affordable seo services, feel free to contact Webtage, a premiere digital marketing agency in Naperville that provides the best SEO service in the Chicagoland area for expanding your search visibility. 

 

SEO in 2025 – How to Maximize Search Visibility, Organic Traffic & Returns on Investment

Posted on August 29, 2024 - 3:41 AM by

SEO is changing rapidly with evolution in generative AI, evolving algorithms & new search features that are propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users. In such times, what should your SEO agency be doing to get you high page visibility?

While affordable SEO services are an important consideration for most businesses looking to boost their search visibility, you should look for an SEO agency that is ready to adapt to search changes in search engine optimization.

How will Generative AI Impact SEO in 2025?

AI Overviews –

AI Overviews, earlier known as search generative experiences or SGE, is one such big change due to search results being triggered by generative search. 

We have now seen how Google Search produces an AI overview to provide an AI-generated summary at the top of the search page for many searches. For instance, if I type in ‘transactional or commercial search keywords and zero click searches’ and I see an AI overview right on top, which gives me a pretty good overview of the impact of AI Overview on transactional or commercial keywords:

Notice how there are ‘links cards’ to the right which allow users to dig deeper into the topic. These are the websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, which is one piece of search real estate that websites can aim to occupy. More on this later.

An important note here; AI overview in its current form is new, but Google’s attempt to provide relevant and summarized information has existed for a long time, in the form of People Also Ask (PAA), featured snippets, and Knowledge Graphs.

These are all attempts to show the most relevant and useful information in search results and AI Overview is another feature that is propelled by Generative AI. One big difference between these other features and AI Overview is that AI Overview is getting SEO teams flustered over the potential zero click searches, which we will discuss next.

Zero click Searches – 

A much-feared implication of AI overview in the SEO community is that people will reduce the number of clicks to websites in response to the AI-generated overview as the overview will provide a concise and useful answer to the user’s query, thereby reducing the need for open web clicks.

In reality, how has this panned out?

Well, a well-sourced study by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has found that about 69.1% of Google searches resulted in zero clicks to the open web (meaning, web platforms beyond Google.com). For more information, caveats and data limitations, visit Spark Toro’s blog on zero click searches: 

While this appears apocalyptic, in reality there are nuances that we as SEO experts need to be aware of. 

  • Zero click searches will likely affect top-funnel or informational / educational searches.
  • For transactional or commercial searches, most will click to an open web click. This is because users have a purchase intent and would need to click to a website in order to initiate the purchase or gather more information.
  • While AI Overview provides a summary that is intended to meet the search intent of the user, it also provides link cards which allow users to dig deeper into the topic by clicking through to the open web.
  • Not all users will be satisfied with the AI overview and some will go into deeper searches. IN SparkToro’s study, we see 21.4% of users went on to another  search.
  • Finally, as SEO professionals, our aim should be to develop content that can get featured in search features other than organic (website) listing. Getting content impressions on AI overview, link cards, featured snippets, knowledge graphs or PAA boxes are all ways to improve brand recognition and increasing market share.

Should I Be Thinking of CHERP? 

CHERP or chat experience results page/position is the new kid on the block. CHERP refers to getting mentions on chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot or many of the gen AI chatbots on the market. 

With regards to Google search, CHERP is synonymous with AI Overview. The question we are asking is how can we get mentioned in AI Overview (or other CHERPs) if our audience is searching for us?

Or, if we are not visible in the chat experience results page, where are we appearing in search results? We know that for local searches, 42% of searches click on a local pack result, which is the 3-pack Google Maps result. If you are a local business that is relying purely on organic SERP optimization, you have to consider that 50% of Google users click on their results within 9 seconds of searching. 

Which means that if AI Overview, Local Service Ads, Paid Ads and Local 3-pack are dominating the top 50% of search real estate, how likely are users to click on your website link if it’s placed down below in the premium real estate of SERPs? Remember, only 9% of Google searchers make it to the bottom of the first page of the search results. 

This means, for SEO in 2025, it is not enough to appear on page 1 of search results, At the very least, if you are a local business, you have to aim for the local 3-pack, which means optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) and aiming for the coveted top 3 positions in organic search results.

How to Navigate the New SEO Space in 2025?

As Generative AI changes the nature of search results and as Google updates its algorithms to be more meaningful and useful for searchers’ intent, what can an SEO agency do to play in the new landscape?

  1. A good foundational content strategy – A good current SEO base will be your defensive strategy in 2025. This means authoritative content that projects experience, expertise, authority, & trustworthiness (E.E.A.T.) should still be your foundational strategy! Good content allows helps you in multiple ways, including:
    1. Good content allows your article or multimedia to be indexed by search engines and drive high value traffic to your website or channel. At Webtage, we have seen at least one-third of our organic traffic generated through high-quality informational blogs that we create that bring together our E.E.A.T. as trustworthy & dependable digital marketing partners for our clients.
    2. Great content also helps build great backlinks from authoritative sources in your industry. In 2025, go beyond creating non contextualized backlinks from generic content sites. Instead, use great content that reflects principles of E.E.A.T. to reach out to high authority niche content sites. These backlinks appear to be naturally placed in a piece of content that is authoritative, trustworthy and denotes expertise, which makes these links much more valuable for your organic SERPs.
    3. The more often you create and publish good content on your website, the more frequently search bots will crawl your website and this will increase the chances of your content being shown on search results.
    4. Good content that is useful for your audience also increases the chances of higher engagement rates and lower bounce rates. The longer your visitors spend time on your website, the more likely your website will rank as an authoritative source of information and higher up in search results
  1. Content that is easy to digest, aligned to user intent, and displays first-person experiences – aka ranch-style SEO content– AI Overview, in particular and CHERPs in general, favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information on a page in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

Second, instead of creating a skyscraper SEO strategy that relies on deep, in-depth pillar content, generative AI favors ranch style SEO that breaks down comprehensive pillar content into digestible bits of information that is mapped to varying search intent of a user’s journey. 

Third, a critical component of ranch style SEO strategy is creating content that conveys first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful. This is exactly the kind of content that chatbots cannot spit out. And this is the type of content that you should aim to produce in 2025 that will likely get included in AI Overview, link cards, and other SERP features.

The days of spitting out large volumes of shallow content or AI-generated content is long gone. Even Google’s recent Useful Content update prioritizes websites with content that serve people’s needs and penalizes content that is produced primarily for ranking high on search engines.

  1. Aim for SERP Features – A related offense strategy, that is relevant not only for AI Overview but also other SERP features, such as featured snippets and PAA boxes is the creation of content mapped to user intent, careful selection of keywords,  and developing high authority backlinks to appear as search feature. 

To aim for featured snippets or PAA boxes, for instance, use a tool such as SEMrush’s keyword magic tool to filter most relevant keywords for your business that have associated featured snippets of PAA appearing in search results.

Once you have the keywords narrowed down, focus on creating content that precisely and concisely answers questions being asked in SERP features. AIOSEO suggests “includes simple elements like using question-based heading tags immediately followed by an answer containing the keyword in the question.” Other suggestions include answering those questions as short and concise paragraphs, creating a list of steps in the form of how-to tutorials, compressing large amounts of data as tables, and adding table of content to your posts and pages that allow for easy to generate list-style featured snippet or PAA answers.

Finally, think about adding schema markups, also known as structured data, to your webpages, especially those pages with frequently-asked questions, user-generatetd content, such as reviews, how-to content pieces and product and service details. These allow search engines to better understand your content and context to allow for better generation of SERP features.

SEO in 2025 will mean more competition and more work for Visibility, Traffic & ROI

While affordability remains an important factor in a company’s decision while selecting SEO vendors, remember in 2025, you want an SEO agency that is ready to unlearn many facets of SEO over the years. No longer a numbers game, the SEO of the future will in many ways support the foundations of good SEO along with the quality and relevance of your content that needs to be concise and easily digestible for your users.

Also important is creative ways of content creation that would increase the chances of getting featured on SERP features through list-style, clear, concise and super organized text.

This means your SEO agency has to stay ahead of the curve and explore creative ways to get you featured prominently on the highly-competitive real estate of search results. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing partner with a relentless focus on excellence and a proven track record of success, Webtage is the trusted partner of choice for businesses seeking to dominate their digital landscape and achieve unparalleled growth through SEO. Contact us at 630-277-9521 today!

Seven Best Practices for B2B Lead Generation Campaigns in 2025

Posted on August 15, 2024 - 4:56 PM by

A key B2B marketing goal is to generate a pipeline of qualified leads that can then be handed over to sales to be followed upon. Other marketing goals are brand awareness & reputation building, customer upsell & cross sell, and building brand advocates – this completes the lifecycle revenue marketing model. More on this later.

As a B2B Advertising Agency in Chicago, our B2B lead generation is usually done through a two-pronged strategy: an inbound, content-led strategy or an B2B outbound search or social media advertising, including account-based campaigns. This article will focus on one such outbound strategy: Google Search Ads.

The Power of B2B Lead Generation with Proven Google Ads Strategies

Google Ads is an excellent outbound strategy that works well to drive sales qualified traffic, assuming you have a well-positioned & credible brand and a clear set of solutions that you can either demo or provide a quote for (the two scenarios will dictate the clear call to action in your Google Ads). 

Let’s start with the well established best practices of B2B lead generation through Google Ads

Create Your B2B Lead Generation Google Ads Strategy

B2B sales cycles are long, ranging from an average of 2 months to 6 months & more. B2B buyers go through stages of awareness, consideration and decision making. Google Ads can work well to target buyers when they are still in their awareness stage. Marketing can target buyers through advertising content-led informative pieces such as white papers and industry trend write-ups. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who consume top-of-the-funnel content pieces can then be nurtured deeper into the funnel through marketing automation and drip marketing.

However, for sales qualified lead generation, it is best to target mid-funnel and bottom-funnel buyers who are actively looking for solutions and are in the process of shortlisting candidates for their final decision making. This is the sweet spot that you can target via Google Ads.

You can create clear calls to action to drive demo, consultations or requests for quotes.

Identify Your Ideal B2B Customer with Precise Targeting

Before you look into targeting on Google Ads platform, you should create buyer profiles. In order to do so, list your customers characteristics , including geographies you are targeting, their things they like (interests), things they value (value system), job profiles (targeted job titles, industries, company revenue range etc.), and demographics (age, sex, marital status, presence of children, etc.).

Based on your buyer profile, you can now set targeting options on Google Ads. Google Ads allow for rich targeting options, including locations, audience targeting via inbuilt Google Segments (such as affinity or in-market audiences) or search-term intent segments. You can also upload customer lists or create retargeting lists based on criteria you set and develop similar audience segments to make your targeting laser sharp (more on this later).

Assuming you have identified the best keywords for your campaigns, define your campaigns and ad groups strategically aligned with your business goals. Remember, similar solutions or products typically should be placed under one campaign unless you want to allocate different budgets or goals (for instance, Solution A advertised in two different locations), in which case you may want to create separate campaigns for each location. Once you create campaigns, you can use ad groups within each campaign with common themes or targets to control bid strategies, placements, audience targeting etc.

Do Your Keyword Research & Add Negative Keywords Diligently

Just like identifying ‘high-traction’ keywords that signal commercial or transactional intent for SEO, B2B Google ad campaigns’ success also rests on identifying mid-funnel commercial or transactional keywords. If you are targeting top funnel audiences, you may also decide to include informational- or educational-intent keywords.

Google ads allow for broad match keywords, phrase match keywords or exact-match keywords. When starting with a brand new ad campaign, it may be worthwhile to start with broad match campaigns if you want to cast a wider net. As you collect more data on search keywords, you may want to switch to or add phrase match keywords. Remember, you may want phrase match or exact match keywords to increase the probability of a good match but the volume for those keywords may be low or the cost per click may be higher.

B2B lead generation via Google Ads requires very tight monitoring of keywords in the initial phases to ensure you are neither paying for irrelevant clicks nor do you want to pay exorbitant prices for keywords that spiral your ad budget out of control.

We find adding negative keywords is an especially important step, especially if you’re starting out with broad match keywords. Mixing in broad match keywords with phrase match or even exact match keywords over time is a great strategy that brings in the greatest ROI as that casts the widest net but also builds high-intent keywords through phrase and exact match. However, regular monitoring is a must anytime you work with broad match keywords.

Crafting Irresistible B2B Ad Copy, Offers & Landing Pages

As a B2B marketer, you know the importance of standing out in a crowded landscape. Your ad copy and offers need to be compelling enough to capture the attention of your target audience and inspire them to take action. But how do you achieve that?

The key lies in understanding your buyers’ pain points and crafting a value proposition that speaks directly to their needs. Your ad copy should clearly communicate the unique benefits of your product or service, while your offers should provide tangible value that your prospects can’t resist.

Whether it’s an informative lead magnet, a limited-time discount, or a free consultation, your B2B offers must be tailored to your audience and designed to drive conversions. By focusing on the specific challenges your buyers face and how your solutions can solve them, you can create ad copy and offers that are truly irresistible.

Add Ad Assets

Are you looking for an easy way to improve your Adwords performance? We highly encourage you to consider ad extensions to improve your ad performance. Ad assets (previously known as extensions) are hyperlinks you see below the main text ad. Having visible and relevant hyperlinks along with the main ad is likely to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).

Amongst the ad assets we recommend for B2B lead generation ads are:

  1. Sitelink – Sitelink ad extensions are hyperlinks that are deep linked to relevant pages on your website. You could consider adding sitelink extensions to your product/service specific landing pages, for example.
  2. Callout – Callout extensions allow you to display additional text along with your ad that highlights what makes your business unique. Note that callouts are set up at the account level and are not clickable.
  3. Call – This is a must for your on-the-go mobile audience! By enabling the call extension, you are allowing users to simply click on your phone number displayed in the ad, reducing the number of clicks required for conversion.
  4. Price – If you offer competitive pricing, you may want to use price extensions to display those under your ads for differentiation and improved conversions.
  5. Promo – If you are running promotions or discounts, you may want to use these extensions to highlight them in your ads. You can select dates to show these extensions and use either flat rate or percentage discounts.
  6. Lead Form – Lead forms are especially useful for B2B lead generation as they eliminate the need for a click to your landing pages. Users can provide required information directly through Google Ads.

There are other ad assets provided by Google Ads, such as location, seller ratings, app, image, affiliate locations and structured snippet assets that can also use, if they make sense for your business.

Optimizing Your B2B Google Ads Bidding for Maximum Conversions

Now that you’ve created your ad strategy, defined your buyer profiles, researched and refined your high traction keywords and created outstanding ad, offers and landing pages,the next step is to define your bidding strategy.

Most B2B lead generation campaigns benefit from maximize conversion, maximize conversion value, or Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) bidding strategies. 

A word of caution here – do not set a maximize cost per click (CPC), a maximize cost per acquisition (CPA) or a target ROAS percentage without collecting 6-12 weeks of data. We have seen that low CPCs, in an attempt to control ad budgets, can generate low-quality leads. Similarly setting very low cost per acquisition can also skew the results towards low-quality B2B leads.

 

Leverage Retargeting Ads to Nurture B2B Leads

It’s a well-known marketing rule that a prospect needs at least seven touch points before they will consider your call to action and act upon it. For B2B sales, you may require even more touch points than that. In addition, there may be multiple decision makers that you need to convince in  order to drive a consideration or a sale.

This is where retargeting platforms come in handy. Consider setting up retargeting lists of website visitors who have exhibited an interest in your services or product on Google Ads, LinkedIn or even Facebook / Instagram.

You can target not only the visitors to your website through more personalized ads on other platforms, but you can also build a lookalike audience segment and target similar profiles through targeted ads. 

The multiple touchpoints will only strengthen your chances of being considered as a vendor for the solutions your prospects are looking for.

Conclusion: Dominate Your B2B Market with the Power of Google Ads

If you’re serious about growing your B2B business, you can’t afford to ignore the power of Google Ads. By leveraging the unparalleled reach and targeting capabilities of this platform, you’ll be able to connect with your ideal customers at the exact moment they’re searching for your products or services.

Crafting a high-performing B2B Google Ads strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience, their pain points, and the buyer’s journey. But when executed correctly, it can deliver a consistent flow of qualified leads and skyrocket your revenue.

You can use other social media ad platforms complimentary to Google Ads to run retargeting campaigns. However, Google Ads is one of the most powerful outbound campaign platform that we have seen in driving sales qualified B2B leads, if executed well.  

Dominate your industry and reach new heights of success with the help of this proven digital marketing powerhouse.

Contact Webtage, a premiere B2B brand and performance marketing agency in Chicagoland to discuss your B2B sales pipeline generation needs.

 

How to Choose an SEO Agency that will Provide Solid & Sustainable Results

Posted on August 6, 2024 - 1:24 AM by

Ever since the rise of the internet and search engines, companies have looked to expand into the online market by increasing their visibility on the internet. One of the most effective ways of increasing visibility online is having a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategy that puts your company and its work at the top of search engines. Therefore, it is important to hire an SEO agency that can provide solid and sustainable results. 

The web & digital marketing industry is an unregulated industry and clients are unable to differentiate effectively between vendors. As an SEO agency with 12 years of experience, we have unfortunately seen many ‘black-hat SEO techniques’ being adopted that bring clients sub-optimal and unsustainable results. These include poor quality, automated, paid backlinking strategy, chat GPT-generated website content and poor user experience. Usually, these services are offered at dirt-cheap prices and many clients fall for these scammy practices since it’s hard to differentiate a good SEO partner from a scammy one.

So how should you go about choosing an SEO partner? 

There are three pillars of a successful SEO strategy and a reputable SEO agency should particularly focus on technical SEO, superior content generation, and solid backlinking. Let’s go through these one-by-one.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the functional aspects of a website in order to increase visibility online. This is about creating a good user experience for your website. Why does user experience matter? The main reason for this is that visitors will engage better and spend more time on your website. This tells Google that the website is useful for the visitor and hence your website ranks higher on Google’s algorithm. 

A good SEO agency will look for three things in particular to focus on: Largest Contentful Paint(LCP), this measures the loading speed of your website, Interaction to the Next Paint(INP), which measures how interactive your website is to user interactions such as downloads or add to carts, and Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS), which measures how visually stable your website is. 

A good SEO agency must also have certain strategies for creating great user experience. Some of the strategies they would look at would be:

Good Load Speed:

An example of a good user experience would be to have the website load quickly instead of it taking time to load. Having a website that takes a while to load on a mobile device or computer could potentially lead to website abandonment and lead to lower engagement. All of this would hurt your search engine rankings. 

A word of caution here – be careful of low-performance SEO companies which use page speed as a hook to grab clients. Page speed alone is not enough to vet an SEO partner. Let’s proceed.

Mobile Friendly Site:

Having a website that is also able to fit and operate on a small screen is increasingly important for good SEO. With a large percentage of mobile traffic originating from mobile devices, this step is key to rank high on the search algorithm for Google. 

Use Breadcrumb Navigation:

Having breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of where they are within a specific website. It increases the chance of your content being discovered, reduces bounce rate, and improves engagement with the website’s content. 

Use a Solid On-page keyword strategy:

Each page should have 1-2  primary focus keyphrases that it is optimized for along with 5-10 Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, that are conceptually related to the primary keywords. Mapping your target keywords to pages on your website through this strategy is immensely useful in ranking n search engines. Ensure all target keywords are efficiently mapped to pages and there are no keyword cannibalization, that is, two or more pages are not competing for the same keywords. 

Superior Content Generation

This is perhaps the most obvious quality to look for in an SEO agency – do they create great content that will be favorable to people online? However, this warrants a further look.

What are some of the ways in which a good SEO agency goes about creating high quality content?

Creating Relevant Content:

Creating content that is relevant will be more appealing to users. This starts with having some expertise on the topic or being able to do deep research. Then, it helps to research what topics are already written about online and find any topics people haven’t talked about. If the topic being written about is relevant, then you can dive deep into the content and have contextual material to make an article or a video. 

Satisfy User Intent:

Google is capable of categorizing content based on what the content is about. It can be classified as people, organizations, concepts, etc. Using these classifications, Google then separates them into one of four categories: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. This is important for content creation because the specific key words used in articles and the content purpose should be aligned so that when the user searches the key word, the content of the article matches what the user wanted to read about.

Create Original Content:

An agency’s commitment to using original content for articles is key to high SEO. In the age of ChatGPT, high quality content that is taken from an individual’s perspective and expertise is highly valuable these days. 

While ChatGPT can be used, we believe it should mainly be used to create outlines, generate ideas & summarize existing literature on the topic.

Solid Backlinking

Backlinking is incredibly important in order to get high search engine rankings. Having these backlinks exist on other websites are a signal to Google and other search engines about the authority and relevance of your website and how highly your website should rank on their search engines.

Finding High Authority Websites for Backlinking:

Finding high authority websites to put in backlinks can be of great help to a website. Tools such as SEMrush help in this endeavor. SEMrush has a backlink audit tool which helps you identify high quality websites. When you identify what websites you want to have backlinks on, there is a wide variety of ways you can have backlinks on the website such as through guest blogs, forum interactions, etc. This strategy is difficult as it involves contacting the owners of the website and requesting to create any content that can have backlinks on them. 

This is one of the primary differentiators between a reputable SEO company which spends the time and effort to generate valuable backlinks and backs those backlinks with superior content vs a low-quality SEO company that builds hundreds of backlinks each month but automates the process and relies on creating backlinks from a limited set of domains.

Local Citations:

Finding niche and local directories and posting backlinks on there is an effective strategy for local businesses. Having backlinks on various local and niche directories help improve local SEO. They also help build implicit endorsements if these backlinks are on directories such as Google Business Profile or Bing Places, search engines consider sites like these quite valuable. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing company in Naperville that can provide great results for your website, talk to Webtage, a premiere digital marketing agency in Naperville that provides the best SEO service in Naperville for expanding your search visibility. 

SEO Agency in Naperville

A Quick Guide To Get You Started With A New Brand Identity

Posted on June 3, 2024 - 10:39 AM by

First impressions and lasting impressions are crucial in the online world where consumers are flooded with more information that they can take in. Your brand is your organization’s first impression. However,  how do you plan for an effective and authentic brand? Brand identity development, if not well thought through, can be fraught with misunderstandings, conflicts, and cost & time overruns.

The problem occurs because brand development is personal to people in your organization and that can mean different things to different people. Advance preparation can help both clients and vendors develop a common understanding of brand design objectives & constraints. It will also lower your risk for running into a time and cost overrun.

This questionnaire will help all parties involved understand your vision for the brand and plan the overall effort required for a confusion- and conflict-free delivery.

Whether you are planning an extensive overhaul of your brand or small updates , take the time to answer the questions in the checklist and start off your brand design/redesign project on the right foot.

    What is 2 + 4 ?

    About the Author

    A believer in hype-free and performance driven digital strategies, Snigdha’s endeavor is to get your brand established and your business grow. She is passionate about research, design and analytics and works non-stop and meticulously to make sure that your brand stands out from the rest.

    Snigdha’s background is in research design, industry research, content creation, and qualitative and quantitative research (including web-based and phone survey methods and focus group discussions). She is a highly qualified professional in the areas of digital marketing strategy design, SEO, content creation, and social media marketing. Most recently she has grown a client’s online presence from zero to 25% online leads within 3-6 months; moved client website to the #1 & #2 spots on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for all major keywords; and generated online leads accounting for 25% – 30% of all leads for that client.

    Contact her at snigdha@webtage.com

    Brand Agency in Naperville

    Server Side Tag Management & HIPAA Compliance

    Posted on February 27, 2024 - 4:35 PM by

    A recent statement issued by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services, significantly expanded what’s considered Protected health Information (PHI). 

    Most importantly, this directive puts direct onus on a covered entity under HIPAA to take measures to protect PHI from getting shared with third-party analytics and marketing platforms by way of on-line tracking codes commonly added to healthcare websites.

    What are these expanded PHIs and how does server side tag management help support compliance while simultaneously making useful data available to marketing platforms that are essential for healthcare organizations’ growth?

    Simply put, according to the new directive:

    • OCR now extends HIPAA protections to any online visitor who visits a healthcare website, not just a patient or a person known to your healthcare organization. 
    • If this visitor conducts any website pages that contain healthcare conditions, treatments or provider research, that signal could be included in the website’s URL.
    • The URL with health specific data along with the visitors’ IP address could now point to a past, current or future health concern of a potentially identifiable individual.

    So any data that may link an individual with a past, present or future health or healthcare or health payment is now PHI. Importantly, this PHI is most likely being shared unencrypted with your third party analytics or marketing providers, such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn, DoubleClick and more, unless measures are taken to prevent it.

    Server-Side Tag Management as a Solution to HIPAA Requirements

    Server side tag management has emerged as a robust solution that can create a HIPAA compliant solution when implemented correctly. 

    To reiterate this important point, server side tag management is not HIPAA compliant out-of-the box. It needs customizations to make it compliant while also passing on useful data events to third party analytics and marketing platforms.

    What is server side tag management?

    To explain in simple terms, most data collected by your healthcare website is sent directly to analytics and marketing platforms via online tracking code installed on your website. For instance, ePHI is probably being sent directly to Google Analytics servers or Meta servers or any other analytics or marketing platforms you are currently using.

    By setting up an a server side container on your cloud provider of choice, you now become an intermediary between your website (often referred to as a client) and your third party analytics and marketing platforms.

    Since you own this container and the server, you can now to three things to keep your ePHI data out of unwanted places:

    1. You control all data streams that originate from your website.
    2. You can cleanse and de-identify any ePHI that originates from your website
    3. You can send clean data to third party analytics and marketing platforms while keeping it useful enough to allow for campaigns and attributions to continue being useful.

    Customizations in Server Side Tag Management to Allow for HIPAA Compliance

    First-Party Data Collection & Data Control – Data collected by your server side setup allows for “first-party” data collection, making it more secure and efficient. 

    Since your website visitors’ sessions-specific data is now sent to your own server, as opposed to third-party vendors’ servers, it provides more protection against data leaks, compared to client side tracking.

    With the phasing out of third-party cookies by most major browsers, data collection will need to be rearchitected to depend on first party data collection. Server-side tagging provisions for more secure first-party data collection by enabling server-managed cookies and client identification that are less prone to hacks.

    Finally, because all data streams are not collected by your server endpoint, you can have total control over data tracking, transformations and enrichment before it is sent to your analytics and marketing vendors.

    Data Transformations & Enrichments – Let’s consider the HIPAA identifiers that are the greatest causes of concern for HIPAA compliance purposes. 

    There are two types of identifiers, when mapped together, have the potential to connect an individual website visitor with a past, current or future health condition:

    1. A personal identifier, such as an IP address which technically can map to a specific network (it is not a device identifier but for HIPAA compliance purposes, IP is considered an identifier). Other personal identifiers could be a user id (if your website allows for patients to login, for instance, and you have enabled the collection of logged in users via ‘user_id’), device ID, especially when paired with an IP address, and sometimes geographical location, including city, state, latitude and longitude.
    2. Health information – The second type of identifiers are URLs that may contain static components of healthcare condition, treatment or payment for healthcare. As an example, if the url has the following structure: https://www.domainname.com/type2-diabetes-treatment-plans, technically, the URL has health information attached and when linked with a personally identifiable information, such as an IP address, violates HIPAA as it links a health condition (past, present or future) with a potentially identifiable individual.

    In addition to static components of URLs, there may be dynamic components that may be passed from your web browser to your server container (in a server side setup) that may contain very transparent individual identifiable information, such as email addresses, names, etc. 

    A server side setup allows for encryption for both components of PHI identifiers. However, complete encryption of this data may make your analytics and marketing campaigns unattributable and useless.

    For instance, if you hash (a type of data encryption) the IP address of your website visitor, you lose all tracking of city or regional level data. Thus, you will be unable to analyze where your website visits, events and conversions are coming from – and that’s a big hit when it comes to geo-specific marketing campaigns.

    Similarly, if you are running a retargeting campaign based on an audience profile that shows interest in a specific healthcare service, by hashing the page location, page path and page title of the page visited, you have rendered the retargeting campaign useless.

    Server-side tagging however, allows for data transformations and enrichments that extend beyond simple hashing. 

    Custom Activations – We create advanced custom audience insights based on PHI data streams received from web browsers. The custom data insights are then stripped of PHI and activated to be sent to third party vendors that allow us to continue marketing campaigns as envisioned but still keep ePHI out of outbound data streams.

    For instance, to enable Facebook conversions tracking in a compliant fashion, we create custom conversion events on our client server container with non health specific conversion names. These conversion data events are sent to our secure server container, where we strip the event data of any ePHI by hashing all health information identifiers, such as page location, page title and page path. We then forward this stream to Facebook with a Facebook id, ip address and the conversion event but without any associated health information.

    Similar solutions can be designed for other commonly-used marketing platforms, including Google Ads, and analytics platforms such as Google Analytics 4. 

    Based on need, server side containers also allow for parsing information into database warehousing tools, such as Big Query, where data can be cleansed of PHI and sent as outward streams to third party platforms for marketing purposes.

    A data warehouse can also be utilized for internal retention of data for custom data insights and enrichments. 

    Conclusion

    The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) along with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services has issued warnings to several health care systems over the use of online tracking technologies in 2023. The healthcare analytics & compliance community expects the first set of enforcement actions related to online tracking to begin in 2024. This will intensify a series of class action lawsuits and settlements around sharing of protected health information with advertising platforms, such as Meta & Google, by at least 21 hospital, health systems and technology companies.

    In light of rising concerns about privacy, in general, and protection of health information, in particular, server-side tagging offers a robust solution.

    Contact our analytics team at Webtage to start a conversation about making your MarTech HIPAA compliant.