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They say, “a pen is mightier than a sword.”
Well, I have another exciting perspective. How about “a picture is worth 1,000 words?”
I trust your analytical skills are above average.
The former statement is more subjective, while the latter is more quantifiable.
Well, this is not to say that pens are less intimidating than images. The first thing that pops into your mind is probably a painting you saw at a local museum. It may be a horrific accident that’s deeply ingrained into your subconscious.
How about a funny image of a person you’ve always held in high esteem?
Remember the former US president, Bill Clinton, facing the whole world with unheard confidence and dismissing the entire Monica Lewinsky debacle with a simple sentence, “I did not have sexual relations with that ‘woman’?”
At least that’s how a majority of us remember Bill Clinton’s cheating scandal. The key giveaway is that visual content speaks louder than words and (numbers).
The human brain is hardwired for images and other forms of visual content. As an SMB, you need a marketing analytics app that provides you with insightful visualization of your ad campaigns.
Stick with me to discover the importance of visualization of brand data. You’ll gain in-depth insights enriched with both psychological and biological perspectives.
Why is data visualization important to small and medium-size digital marketers?
Reflect on your school days, when some of your elementary school tutors first exposed you to the mind maps. Why were some teachers more interesting than others? Were there subjects you understood more than others?
Chances are subjects you understood most were taught by teachers who used a smart combination of storytelling and visual content.
Let me give you a short exercise, ready?
Take a pen and a paper and try to describe the map of China using nothing but words. Why do you think Infographics have a higher clickthrough rate (CTR)? Simple Infographics can turn monotonous literature into emotionally appealing and highly engaging content.
Humans are always preoccupied with universal issues, such as romance, money, the need for recognition, and self-preservation. It would take a significant amount of effort to attract the mind of today’s population.
Why?
For starters, there are millions of content creators out there, including you. The picture you posted on Instagram about last weekend’s fishing expedition is a form of user-generated content.
Research shows that visual content is powerful in breaking up the issues preoccupying your target audience’s mind.
Have you ever asked yourself why children’s storybooks are full of pictures and fewer texts?
The mind of children is an EASY prey for content laden with interesting and highly engaging images. Visual images have a powerful effect on the biological makeup of the human brain.
Why?
Visual content straightforwardly tells the whole story. Storytelling is a fantastic way of establishing an emotional connection with your readers.
Try narrating an interesting story in your local bar and witness sudden attention. Now imagine using relevant images to deliver the story home.
If you won’t get a free drink by the end of the night, probably you’re not a good storyteller. As a digital marketer, one of your strongest attributes should be the ability to tell a story.
Have you ever heard that sight is a natural sense closely associated with human memory?
It’s easy to recall visual information more than written text. Why do you think the majority of people seldom read the terms and conditions clauses? It’s boring to read long pieces of literature. Pictures are known to evoke positive emotional responses, such as smiles and positive attitudes.
Do you tie a positive vibe on the product or service you’re selling?
Recent researches show that the human brain can process visual content over 500,000 times faster than texts.
You’re seldom rewarded with a second chance when you mess up the first impression. The key giveaway is that images convey vast amounts of information than words and numbers.
Try to read 10 paragraphs of texts with no visual content.
What are the odds that you’ll finish reading the content?
Assume you have a website that’s well optimized to attract organic traffic. However, your articles and posts are long prose with no engaging visual content and subheadings.
How would your bounce rate look like?
No one has time to scroll through uninteresting web content. You have a maximum of 2-seconds to attract the attention of your prospect.
A website that’s well organized into relevant subheadings and engaging visual information is likely to increase your Quality Score in Google Ads.
A spreadsheet is an application with rows and columns to do the following:
(a) Sort
(b) Organize
(c) Arrange data efficiently
Spreadsheet apps are very useful to digital marketers due to their ability to calculate values using inbuilt formulas. Some of the popular softwares in the market include Libre, MS Excel, Google Sheets, OpenOffice, and iWork Numbers.
However, Excel is regarded as a free tool because it comes as part of the Microsoft suite. Google Sheets is completely free provided you have a Gmail account.
Excel is a spreadsheet application developed and published by Microsoft.
Unlike the word processing app, it organizes data in columns and rows. Each cell can accommodate different forms of data, such as texts and numbers. Excel can analyze marketing data and generate visual insights using its inbuilt charts.
For example, you could create an Excel spreadsheet that calculates a monthly budget, tracks expenses, or interactively sorts data.
Each of the rows, columns, and cells can be modified in many ways, such as adding background color or changing the size and font of the data.
Other dimensions have to be crafted manually to gain in-depth insight about your digital marketing campaigns.
Google Sheets is a free, web-based spreadsheet application. The app is also available on Android, Windows, iOS, and BlackBerry platforms. The spreadsheet allows users to edit, organize, and analyze different types of information. Most importantly, it allows collaboration.
Multiple users can edit and format files in real-time. Changes made on the Google sheet are trackable by a revision directory.
One of the key features of Google Sheets is its collaborative attribute. A single document can be opened and edited by multiple users simultaneously and in real-time. Users can track changes made by other collaborators.
Did I mention that all changes are automatically saved on Google servers?
The web-based spreadsheet supports offline editing. You can edit your documents without internet connection. There’s a Chrome extension for offline editing for PC users.
Smart device users have an option of either Android or iOS version to access offline editing service. A survey conducted recently discovered that over 69% of digital marketers use free data visualization apps to manage their ad campaigns.
The major WEAKNESS of free visualization apps, such as Google Spreadsheet is that they only answer the ‘what’ question.
Conversely, paid marketing analytics tools provide in-depth insights by diving deeper into more questions, such as ‘what else’, ‘how much’, and most importantly ‘why’.
A smart data visualization tool uses both qualitative and quantitative sets of data to provide a comprehensive analysis of the following:
Any additional insight generated by a data visualization app can help you optimize your ad campaign for more revenue, clicks, and impressions.
You can use the information to correct lost impressions or even exploit profitable opportunities ahead of time.
Product intelligence is an in-depth analysis of your offerings using parameters, such as competition. Essentially, you want to know how your brand offering stacks up within your niche market. Most businesses accomplish the aforementioned by doing the following:
(a) Issuing product surveys
(b) Polling the customers
(c) Requesting for feedback after a sale engagement.
You need a smart and intelligent visualization app to paint an accurate picture of the market’s perception towards your product.
Good data visualization app should correctly report about your customers. People’s tastes are constantly evolving due to complex socioeconomic factors, such as fads.
What trending products are they buying?
Why is the search pattern varying in certain periods?
Which ad campaigns are profitable and why?
Are your marketing campaigns aligned with the current trends in your niche market?
AI-driven data visualization tools can help you identify the crucial aspects of your prospects’ journey that need improvement.
Where are your users struggling on their path to purchase?
With a smart chart tool, it becomes EASIER to display your brand message to targeted users. Data visualization paints a picture of where the majority of traffic is coming from and at what cost per unit.
For instance, you’re running parallel PPC campaigns in both Facebook and Google. You’re desperate to know the ad platform aligned with your business’ goals.
What’s your solution?
You need a visualization app that instantly maps your campaign data using real-time charts to produce accurate insights into the best and worst performers.
You’re able to see vital attributes that would easily go unnoticed.
Let’s analyze the chart on the screenshot below for deeper understanding.
You don’t want to miss this, especially if you’re an SMB.
The blue line represents impressions. The grey curve depicts clicks. The X-axis (orange vertical scale) represents conversions of a PPC campaign.
On 05/01, the PPC campaign recorded 0 conversions, 411 clicks, and 4,141 impressions. On 05/04, the campaign registered an improvement. There were 7.74 conversions, 1,256 clicks, and 12,312 impressions.
How easy was it?
Visual representation of data uncovers interesting cause-effect relationships among variables in your digital ad campaigns.
Let’s revisit our earlier analysis.
What could have resulted in the sudden growth of conversion, clicks and impression after the fourth day of the campaign?
What do you need to maximize to continue getting positive outcomes?
Data visualization answers the questions above as fast as the former 100-meter world champion, Usain Bolt. It is literally impossible to make sense of a data set without some form of visualization, especially if you work with large data sets.
As a small and medium-sized business owner, you need a tool that maximizes your profits and eliminates waste. More so, you need a cost-friendly tool that answers in-depth questions, such as ‘why’, ‘when’, and ‘what else’.
What do you do with the vast amounts of data generated by your pay per click campaigns?
Do you know that data is the lifeblood of today’s digital marketing?
You need a data visualization application that possesses the following qualities to save you time and cut ad costs.
A huge chunk of visualization tools in the market require some form of programming skills.
Who has time to code and optimize ad campaigns profitably at the same time?
Coding implies switching back-and-forth between a chart and a text editor interface. Essentially, you need a tool with a friendly user interface (UI) to improve your personalized experience (UX).
Aside from traditional statistical charts (line, bar, scatter, etc.), there should be an expansive library of charts aligned with your paid search campaign.
There’re new charts that don’t exist in the industry yet and are aligned with marketing analytics, such as Sankey and Adjacent Bar charts. The aforementioned charts are vital in generating accurate keyword insights and other significant PPC metrics.
Tweaking labels, color schemes, and other attributes should be incredibly EASY.
Tools aligned with SMBs should grant you the ability to customize your own templates for recurring tasks.
Research shows that most SMBs are heavy users of pivot tables – a tabular technique found in spreadsheets and reporting tools.
Visual pivoting replaces tabular presentation with charts. A smart chart app should support engaging visual reporting.
Traditional visualization tools lack significant analytic capabilities, which is a backbone of any ad campaign.
Conversely, AI-driven data visualization tools support insightful analysis for effective and accurate reporting.
Data visualization technology is today’s disruption in the digital marketing industry. It uncovers the true effect of your marketing dollars across all channels.
As search engine marketer (SEM), you can leverage the application maximally to enjoy the following benefits:
You don’t realize yet, but in the next few seconds, you’re going to learn about a data visualization tool for SMBs that’s trending in most digital marketing and analytics forums.
There’s a revolutionary and intelligent analytic library called ChartExpo that gives you the sales intelligence needed to develop a winning strategy.
By using ChartExpo for your data visualization needs, it becomes EASY to get access to all the information needed for fantastic pipeline management, forecast planning, and increased revenue. You can easily evaluate the performance metrics to ensure you have resources in place for upcoming opportunities.
It’s very possible to monitor sales activities or calls to action (CTA) that deliver the greatest impact. For many users, the most commonly used output format for reporting is Excel spreadsheet.
Why not run your reports directly in Excel?
With most other data visualization apps the aforementioned fact isn’t an option. ChartExpo provides an add-In for Excel and Google sheets that allows you to do just that!
Manually analyzing data requires coding and endless clicking through spreadsheets. ChartExpo for Excel add-in makes it simple to gain insights from numbers.
Earlier on, we explored the importance of visual content in small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).
Data visualization is a smarter way to make sense of the data generated by your pay per click campaigns.
Simon, a PPC manager, is running a brand awareness campaign on two different social media channels.
He gets a call from one of his clients regarding ad campaigns’ status in a brief but informative manner. He consolidates all the data generated by the ad campaigns into a Google spreadsheet.
What happens?
Simon goes a mile extra and uses relevant visual charts to communicate the paid search campaign’s vital signs.
Simon’s client is very impressed by the accuracy and brief visual presentation. What he doesn’t know is that Simon is using a highly intelligent ChartExpo to filter noise and communicate what engagingly matters to him.
Samantha runs an ad agency. Her client wants to know the status of two metrics: cost per click (CPC) and clickthrough rate (CTR). She proceeds and pulls all the campaign data for analysis and visual reporting.
Samantha is smart enough to know visual content is more appealing to the human brain than mere numbers. She uses ChartExpo to answer questions, such as:
How well did the keyword perform?
The chart above displays a direct relationship between search terms and the average cost per click. Keyword 8 has a higher CTR and a relatively lower CPC. This implies that the search terms are optimized to match intent effectively.
Conversely, keyword 7 has the lowest CTR (2.9%) and a sizable CPC ($3.32).
This is one of those situations where you ask many ‘whys.’ It’s also a chance to review your search terms and ad copy for misalignment.
Like I said earlier, the human brain is designed to digest visual content more easily than texts and numbers. Besides, a picture is worth a thousand words. Visual analytics is one of the most overlooked areas by emerging SMBs.
Are you accessing all those in-depth and actionable insights your data is trying to whisper into your ears?
It’s very easy to miss out on mini insights, such as the implicit relationship between metrics. Besides, they may be the bridge to your success. Small and medium-sized brands (SMBs) need a smart data visualization that is affordable and easy-to-use (friendly UI).
Spreadsheet apps, such as MS Excel, are handy to digital marketers due to their ability to calculate values using inbuilt formulas. However, they seldom answer insightful questions, such as ‘why.’
What’s the solution?
ChartExpo is an AI-driven data visualization app that gives you the ability to grasp the insights hidden in your numbers instantly. Besides, it’s designed for a busy marketer. It’s affordable to SMBs and provides seamless integration with Google Sheets and Excel.
You have nothing to lose when you try ChartExpo and everything to gain in your digital ad campaigns.
What are you doing with the vast amounts of information generated by your digital ad campaigns?
What tools are you using to derive actionable insights from your data?
How inexpensive are they?
If you’re yet to answer the questions above, including the latter one, check this out.
PPCexpo holds your hand throughout your PPC journey.
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PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
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