Are you delving into the world of website migrations? Maybe you’re specifically focusing on how to preserve your SEO during a Shopify website migration? Whether you're a business owner exploring the perks of an ecommerce venture or a brand looking to revamp your digital presence, this guide will unravel the essentials for a smooth transition that keeps your SEO intact.
So, what exactly is a website migration? Imagine it as a digital makeover; a process of moving your website from one location to another, often involving changes in design, structure, and even content. As ecommerce experts, we recommend Shopify, an ecommerce platform that offers unparalleled perks for your online store. But why do clients opt for a website migration?
Brands evolve, trends shift, and businesses grow. A website migration can be triggered by a spectrum of reasons, including:
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A successful website migration involves an orchestra of skilled players, each with their unique specialty:
Here's a quick checklist to ensure your website makeover doesn't leave your SEO efforts in the dust:
A website migration might sound daunting, but with the right team and approach, it's a stride towards an improved digital presence. Shopify's allure combined with a strategic migration plan will not only transform your website but also preserve and enhance your SEO efforts.
A smooth migration doesn't just ensure your website's success— it paves the way for your business to thrive in the dynamic digital landscape. So, whether you're diving into Shopify for the first time or giving your brand a facelift, consider a website migration. It’s a step towards a digital journey that's as exciting as it is rewarding.
We have a long-standing relationship with Bernardo 1946, partnering to drive success on their digital marketing channels with excellent results and ROI. We recently revamped their email marketing channel—read on to see how we knocked it out of the park!
In less than 3 months, we increased Bernardo’s email campaign-driven revenue by 106%! The brand was looking for an email strategy to increase engagement and revenue within Klaviyo. By designing an email system that reflected their sophisticated, timeless brand and leveraged thoughtful subscriber segmentation, we built an immersive ecommerce experience that benefits both the consumer and the brand.
We developed a multi-channel paid media strategy around seasonality, allowing us to deliver a return on ad spend close to 1,000% even in historically slower months. Bernardo needed to stand out in an overwhelmingly crowded footwear market, drawing attention to the quality and craftsmanship of its heritage brand while also appealing to modern digital shoppers. The brand was also hoping to drive consistent seasonal revenue, with a focus on conversions for both iconic best-sellers and newer footwear designs.
Impressed? We are too! To browse our services, see our certifications, and learn more about how our work can help take your brand to the next level, click here.
On July 1st, 2023, Google Analytics 4 will officially become the go-to source for recording and analyzing your website’s performance. Below, our Marketing Operations Analyst lays out everything you’ll need to know when you start using your new GA4 property after Google makes the change.
One of the biggest changes coming with GA4 is the move from UA’s session-based tracking to event-based tracking. If you said “HUH?!” after reading that sentence, you’re not the only one! Allow us to elaborate:
Universal Analytics uses a measurement model that focuses on sessions and pageviews, and other distinct “hit types”. In Google Analytics 4, every interaction with your website or app is categorizes as an “event”:
For this reason, it’s better to rethink your data collection approach as you migrate to GA4 (as opposed to porting your existing event structure straight from UA). We take a deeper dive into this in the “Events” section below, so keep reading for more!
You’re probably used to understanding your website traffic performance by navigating to “Channel Reports” in Universal Analytics: Acquisition >>> All Traffic >> Channel Reports. There, you’d dive into users, sessions, bounce rate, and overall channel performance.
In GA4, with the new interface and terminology, you will now navigate to Life Cycle >>> Acquisition >>> Traffic Acquisition Report:
Unlike in UA, GA4 does not allow the creation of Custom Channel Groupings. *GASP!* This means you’ll need to change how you’re interpreting your data to use GA4’s Default Channel Grouping. If this one hurts a little, never fear: we expect that Google will make accelerated enhancements to their GA4 product to offer more of the custom UA features we all know and love. Custom Channel Grouping is one of the important features used to make sure unassigned or “Other” categories would not catch important sources of traffic that should have been assigned to a different channel.
When you look at “Users” in a GA4 property, you’ll notice that the number does not match the number of users you may be seeing in your UA property. Turn off the alarm bells folks—that difference is actually intentional. Here’s why:
GA4 has done away with the “Bounce Rate” metric, and has instead introduced a “User Engagement” metric that includes the number of engaged sessions along with average engagement time per session. GA4 defines an engaged session as one that “lasts 10 seconds or longer, has 1 or more conversion events, or has 2 or more page or screen views.” If a user doesn’t meet that criteria, the session is considered a bounce.
In order to get detailed reports about user engagement with your website and content in GA4, you will need to get used to the interface and use the editing functions to land a report that you want to see. For instance, if you want to see how engaged your organic visitors are, you could further edit and filter your traffic acquisition to look like the below report:
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As we mentioned earlier, GA4 focuses on Events, which are actions that visitors take on your website. By default, GA4 tracks and records the following events:
In addition to these, GA4 also allows you to track “enhanced events”, which will need to be manually enabled within your GA4 environment:
Once all events are set up and dialed in, you can dive into GA4’s reporting on those events by navigating to: Life Cycle >>> Engagement >>> Events to get a full picture of how users are interacting with your website:
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Last, but CERTAINLY not least—in fact, it’s perhaps the most important change coming with GA4: The Conversions Report!
“Conversions” in GA4 are essentially the equal of “Goals” in UA: they’re the actions taken by visitors on your website that align with your business goals and objectives. These metrics can provide insight into whether or not your marketing efforts have been successful. A user purchasing from your store is considered as valuable to your business as a user subscribing to your newsletter, so both are counted as “conversions” in Google’s new analytics approach. Conversions will have a dedicated report in GA4, which you can find under Life Cycle >>> Engagement >>> Conversions.
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While GA4 will automatically track a couple of conversions, these are mostly specific to web apps, so lead gen and ecommerce sites still need to be sure conversion events are defined and tracked properly in the new property.
Remember, the sooner you migrate from UA to GA4, the better! Migrating before the deadline will give your new GA4 property enough time to gather data in parallel with your existing UA property. Plus, your team will have time to get used to all the brand new interface, reporting, and terminology that comes along with the upgrade. If you haven’t migrated your Universal Analytics property to GA4 yet, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! Fill out our GA4 Migration Form today to get your inquiry started.
WOW, that’s a lot of information! Want more? Subscribe to our newsletter to hear updates about the GA4 migration and get digital marketing tips and more from the Good & Gold team.
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for tracking website performance and user behavior, providing valuable insights into how users interact with your website. On July 1st, 2023, Google Analytics 4 will replace Universal Analytics. This means that after July 1st, Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data, and Google will force a property migration if you haven’t proactively made the switch. But NEVER FEAR, Good & Gold is here with answers to your most pressing questions about the change and why you should make it. We’re here to help your business migrate from Universal Analytics to GA4!
With the migration to GA4, Google is making a significant shift in its approach to its data model, cookies, and privacy implications:
UA is built on a session-based data model, with goals measured by sessions rather than users. For example, if a user watches three videos in one session, UA only counts this as one “conversion”. With GA4, Google shifts to an event-based data model, which means that in our previous example, each of the three video plays count as a “conversion”.
Cookies and data privacy are challenges that Google is also addressing with the transition to GA4. As data privacy concerns arise, more and more users want to opt out of sharing their data, and as they do, the UA analytics model can no longer report on website users and traffic as accurately as before. GA4 is designed to fill these collected data gaps using machine learning and other adjacent protocols called “blended data”. It’s also designed to rely on first-party cookies, keeping user data private as they move from website to website.
Well, ya kinda HAVE to. Google will force the upgrade on July 1 if it’s not already been made. But aside from the fact that it’s required, here are five great reasons to upgrade from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 today:
This new version of Google Analytics isn’t just a platform change or OS upgrade, it’s a whole new system. GA4’s advanced machine learning capabilities and cross-device tracking will provide you with a complete picture of your customers' journeys, allowing you to optimize your website for maximum engagement and conversion. With GA4, you'll gain powerful insights that will help you make informed decisions about your website and digital marketing efforts. In addition to the data collection model change we outlined earlier, GA4 has improved key pain points:
If you snooze on the migration and simply don’t perform it, Google will upgrade to GA4 for you. While the automated upgrade might work for smaller businesses with simple analytics set ups, businesses with robust custom tracking and any unique configuration will likely see their analytics properties breaking, leading to gaps in data collection and missed opportunities in analysis and privacy protection.
To ensure your unique business goals and objectives are properly migrated from your Universal Analytics environment to your new GA4 set-up, you’ll need to prioritize this upgrade well before July 1st. Depending on how complex your tracking needs to be, this switch can take up a month to properly configure and complete, so DEF don’t delay! Here are five basic steps to get you started:
Need some help? We’ve got your back. Ask us about our GA4 Migration Services and get the process started today! With our extensive knowledge, Good & Gold can seamlessly migrate clients to GA4, ensuring your digital marketing efforts are optimized for success!
If you haven’t noticed already, Web3 has permeated discussions about the current state of the internet. While it’s true that we are still in the early days, how it is already affecting and will continue to affect digital marketing is becoming increasingly clear, and we’re at the point where it is already having a noticeable impact.
But first, let’s start with the basics:
Web 3 is, at its core, the theory that the internet will evolve away from centralized, tightly controlled platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon) towards a decentralized model that better incentivizes and rewards creators while expanding ownership to a broader base of users.
Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with the ideas that formed the current incarnation of the Web, describes it as the Semantic Web, “not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better-enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
When discussing decentralization, we’re referring to anywhere you can eliminate a middleman. Perhaps you’d like to be your own bank or make money directly from content that you create without having to go through somebody else’s centralized platform.
You may have heard the term Web3 referred to as “the same as blockchain or crypto”. While it’s true that one vision of Web3 is heavily centered on those technologies, they only play a part in the full tech stack of the next generation of the internet:
Artificial Intelligence is generally a blanket term for technology that allows machines to act, learn, and communicate as people do. Machine learning is a path towards that, but needs a lot of help from us to achieve its goals. That’s where Large Language Models come in,, like ChatGPT, BERT, and the various models of Hugging Face.
These models need to be trained by people. You do this each time you use ChatGPT or give DALL-E a prompt. Ultimately these models learn from us and are a reflection of our communal feedback.
In the future these models will help guide the way toward a decentralized web by reducing the need for human moderation and intervention, significantly reducing costs, and increasing the efficiency of everything from safely using social media platforms to giving medical advice to searching for new recipes.
First, let’s talk blockchain and crypto. While it’s a small part of Web3, it’s had an outsized presence over the past few years. NFTs in particular are already changing advertising:
Non-Fungible Tokens are still in their “toy phase”, and while most people still think of them as silly jpeg, we’re just scratching the surface of what these will become. Ultimately they’ll represent any digital representation of a real-world item that needs confirmation of its authenticity or benefits from being able to be transferred or traded quickly.
Some examples:
However, for most brands, the more immediate benefits of Web3 come from two areas:
The no-code/low-code movement takes out much of the need for traditional developers and aims to enable non-coders to develop applications without the need to filter their goals through developers and programmers. Squarespace and Webflow are all excellent examples of this that you can use today!
Meanwhile, platforms like bubble and weweb will allow businesses and marketing agencies to develop full-scale applications from scratch without code. Some examples:
Many digital marketers have already been using machine learning in their day-to-day without realizing it. Google Ads’ optimization and performance campaigns work via machine learning. Additionally,, if you’ve ever used Grammarly to help improve your copywriting, that’s based on machine learning too!
Some additional great examples of tools that can help bring your efforts to the next level include:
Ultimately, Web3 in all of its forms will change the way that we create and interact with the internet and with each other, but these advances, just like the applications and platforms we use today, are tools that need your creativity and passion to get the most out of!
So, what to do with all this knowledge? At Good & Gold, we’re developing effective ways for our team to leverage these powerful new tools across all our digital marketing services. We’re also keeping a close eye on the line between staying relatable, creative, and human, and using these tools to increase efficiency and accuracy in our work. In short, we’re doing the heavy lifting so your brand can benefit from this exciting digital future organically and gracefully.
When facing an impending recession and changes in customer spending habits, the best two digital marketing channels to focus your efforts and budget on are SEO and Email Marketing. Working with a professional team (like us!) can help to drive great results when your budget is under more pressure than ever.
Content Authority
Curate fantastic, high-quality content that positions your brand as an expert in your industry, then present it concisely, relevantly, and consistently. Reference authoritative sources with links, and submit backlink requests to increase your content’s authority and value in the SERPs.
Content Diversification
Creating authoritative content isn’t the last stop on your 2023 digital marketing journey. How that content is presented is also something to consider. Sure, throw that wonderful content up on your blog, but in 2023 it will also be important to develop content for other sections of your website. Including copy on your product pages, incorporating infographics and video on your website and social channels, experimenting with content length and voice, and even creating audio content will be key.
Machine Learning/AI
In 2023, we can expect to see AI take a central role in digital marketing, and especially SEO. Machine learning will help with understanding user intent through search queries, personalization, and even voice search (more on that just below). It can also be leveraged to hone in on trending topics in your industry, help choose what to write about in your content strategy, and save time on technical SEO work like keyword research, internal linking, and content optimization.
Voice Search Optimization
Voice search has become a popular way to navigate the web (shout out to Siri, Alexa, and “OK, Google…”). This means incorporating voice search strategy into your SEO in 2023 is a must! Think about it like this: people who type a query into a search bar and people who ask Siri questions are trying to get to your content in two very different ways. Understanding your customers and their device behavior is key here, as well as focusing on a conversational keyword strategy, creating content tailored for different customer personas, and using Schema Markup to provide additional context.
Brand Storytelling
It’s really, really easy to think of email primarily as a selling tool, and yes, it is GREAT for that, but it’s also the number one place outside of your website that you have the most control over your content and what you share. In 2023, focusing on telling your brand story and increasing customer loyalty via your email program will be key to your digital marketing strategy. This goes beyond copy to imagery, email design, personalization, and more.
Email Automation & Segmentation
Email automation and segmentation are becoming more and more of a best practice rather than a trend, and in 2023 will be a major engine for growth in the digital marketing world. If you’ve already got the basics set up, it’s time to get creative, and the possibilities are almost endless, especially when you combine the power of email automation with robust and thoughtful segmentation of your subscriber audience.
Interactive Emails
We’re all familiar with the “static” experience of email marketing, where content is buttoned up and delivered to subscribers with the goal of sharing information and getting subscribers onto your website to engage and/or make a purchase. With interactive emails, however, we’ll see users submitting information or seeing the latest data, for example, without leaving their inbox—and ROI from your email channel will climb along with this new trend!
Return Customers vs New Customer Acquisition
Appealing to new customers is a surefire way to expand your customer base and reach, but in 2023, we may see more ROI from nurturing return customers and rewarding customer loyalty in your digital marketing strategy. The most effective way to do this is through your email program, or by developing a loyalty rewards program!
Ready to dive into 2023 digital marketing strategy and brainstorm how to capitalize on these digital marketing trends? Let’s talk!
Paid Media Trends
Digital Design Trends
Cheers to 2022 🥂
We’re making spirits bright this holiday season with our favorite cocktail (and mocktail) recipes! Pour yourself a drink (or two) and cozy up with our rockin’ holiday playlist and favorite gift recommendations.
See you in 2023!!! 👋 Until then, enjoy our holiday playlist on Spotify:
We hope you enjoy our Holiday Playlist on Spotify—pairs perfectly with any one of these cocktails, by the way! Wishing you a bright holiday season and a sparkling new year!
Bonne Année
Back in the days of Don Draper & co., there were really only three main marketing channels: print, radio, and eventually television. Simple enough, right? With the rise of digital marketing, however, the marketing channel possibilities seem endless! Here, we’ve focused on breaking down digital marketing channels, all of which can be leveraged together to create the omnichannel marketing strategy of your dreams!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Once you’ve got a website in place, SEO is the first marketing channel to hone. Customers find your site because of SEO. Keyword research, incorporating those keywords into your website content, and following SEO best practices to shore up your site’s authority are the basic foundations of this marketing channel, but there’s so much more this often-undervalued channel can do for your brand and your marketing strategy!
Paid Media / Paid Social
The ultimate “spend money to make money” marketing channel, paid media is a surefire way to expose your brand to potential customers that aren’t already searching for you or what you offer. It’s also great for retargeting customers who need a few more touchpoints before making a purchase. No matter the platform (Google, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, etc…), paid media tactics almost always garner instant results—if you’re willing to invest.
If you’re looking to move the needle quickly, this is the digital marketing channel for you.
Email Marketing
Apart from your website, email marketing is the main “owned” digital marketing channel you can leverage for your business. You have full control of the content published on this channel and who it goes out to (as long as they’ve opted in). Depending on the platform you choose to house your email program, you can leverage email campaigns, automation, segmentation, and even SMS messaging to reach your subscribers. You can also create custom email templates that reflect your brand look and feel—one of the best and most customized ways to draw subscribers into your world!
Referral & Loyalty
Word-of-mouth marketing for the 21st century! Referral & Loyalty programs and marketing help you develop a community around your brand by focusing on the relationship with your existing customers, rewarding them for returning, telling their friends, and making repeat purchases.
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Feels like a lot to take in, huh? Luckily, we’re experts in these channels, and in leveraging their strengths to create multichannel and omnichannel marketing strategies! Click here to learn more about our service offerings and how we can help your business excel in 2023. And keep reading to understand more about what, exactly, omnichannel marketing is and how it differs from multichannel marketing!
Multichannel marketing is a product-centric marketing strategy (as opposed to a customer-centric strategy). Utizing multiple marketing channels like the ones we’ve delved into above, multichannel marketing positions your brand and/or product and appeals to audiences in multiple arenas of the digital marketing world. If you’re currently advertising on more than one channel, you’re already engaging in multichannel marketing!
While this is absolutely an effective marketing strategy, Good & Gold believes that the real, sustainable, and scalable marketing power lies in omnichannel marketing. This digital marketing approach centers your customers by creating a wholistic strategy across all your marketing channels, breaking down the customer experience and keeping it top of mind in every step of the sales funnel.
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Managing these strategies and channels can become complicated, especially if your business is small, or you’re wanting to focus your internal team’s time and resources in other areas. That’s where we come in! The omnichannel marketing experts here at Good & Gold can help you with everything from strategy to content creation to implementation and performance monitoring. Get in touch with us today, and let’s get started on your 2023 omnichannel marketing strategy!
Creating stand-out holiday designs for marketing can be a challenge during the busiest time of year for ecommerce, so our team put together some graphic design inspiration and handy tips to help get your creative wheels turning!
For this teaser-style ad, Ikea uses a minimalist design with lots of empty space and simple copy, along with a tiny fir tree branch to signify that anticipation for the holiday season is growing. Well-executed design that sparks intrigue and interest while remaining familiar and eye-catching.
Now is the time to get your gift guides out into the world! We particularly love this multi-product, grid-style layout which gives a clear idea of the brand’s offerings and a glimpse of how the products look.
HOT TIP: Creating curated seasonal collections on your website works hand-in-hand with this design approach and allows you to sending shoppers exactly where they need to go!
We love the use of dark colors in this email. It still feels like the holidays to shoppers, and works for brands that like to lean into a darker asthetic (instead of the usual bright red to indicate the holidays). The pink accents offer another variation on that bright red we’re used to seeing, and the dark green layered over an even darker background gives a modern look to the campaign. Using familiar holiday ornament shapes as masks for the product images takes this design to the next level and insures the products themselves stand out.
Gift cards are standard offerings when it comes to marketing for the holidays, especially with the tried-and-true “last minute gift” approach. You can, however, make your ads (and the gift cards themselves) feel extra special and precious by leveraging a high-resolution mock-up of the card itself. Add highlights and shadows to make the ad feel more tactile for shoppers.
Lean into the season with your photo shoots by dropping your products into wintry situations. RXBAR does a great job at featuring clearly seasonal content while keeping the focus on their products.
HOT TIP: Choose product colors strategically to play into the holiday designs for marketing!
Good Pair Days staging their wine products with wrapping paper is doing the trick! The brand’s colors are fresh and light, and they pull in a holiday focus by using the wrapping paper. This approach works well for pre-holiday ads, or for brands wanting a more subtle vibe in their marketing for the holidays.
Using product shots staged with holiday decor is a classic and always fun approach to holiday designs for marketing.
HOT TIP: Incorporating a monochrome color scheme for the background elements allows your products to stand out and feel festive without the design feeling too crowded.
Vintage never goes out of style. Classic holiday shapes and illustrations give a homey, nostalgic feel to any campaign. Plus, it’s easy to sneak fun typography and patterns into artwork like this, giving even more opportunity for festive flair!
Don’t underestimate the power of good copy and simple design. Scrub your vocabulary for a common thread between your slogan and popular holiday phrases. Clever copywriting opens the door to a memorable, brilliantly simple campaign.
We’re seeing lots of big companies staging their products to represent a classic Christmas shape or character. This is a good way to pull your audience in by getting them to pause and take time to understand the dual purpose of the design. We think this is a fun exercise that could be achievable with any product!
Get creative and use an unexpected medium! Giving ordinary brand elements a festive twist is the perfect way to spruce up your brand’s marketing for the holidays. Here, McDonalds used twinkly lights to illustrate their classic menu items, enmeshing the spirit of the holidays with their already recognizable brand.
Brands that aren’t into focusing on the holiday season can buck tradition while still capitalizing on the big shopping days with unique imagery and copy.
Go with a wintry theme. Icy, blustery imagery implies the onset of winter without a specific holiday focus.
HOT TIP: Cool blues, silvers, and deep midnight hues are a great way to change up your designs without hitting shoppers over the head with the “holiday” of it all!
Get graphic! Bright colors, cheeky slogans and fun illustrations can wink at the holidays without any of the (jingle) bells and whistles.
At Good & Gold, we begin each new client conversation with a 360° audit of their marketing efforts, giving them a sense of what’s working and what’s not, where the weak points lurk, and where the opportunities lie. As we do that, we see patterns emerge—businesses have common gaps in their digital marketing strategies, all of which are relatively easy to patch with effective solutions.
As we look ahead to Q4 and its requisite expectations and frenzy, we find it's helpful to take a fresh look at your marketing channels to address those gaps and weak points heading into the new year. Here's our go-to checklist to get your marketing tactics in tip-top shape.
When's the last time you redesigned your standard email templates? Does each one use standard font styles, contain clear calls to action, high-resolution imagery, and active URLs? Are your emails performing at industry benchmarks or higher? If not, it’s time to give those templates fresh eyes, and make sure they’re optimized for engagement. This is also a great time to check in on your email automations. Do you have your 4 basic email automations set up? Are they performing well? It’s a good idea to check in on your automations regularly, and update your imagery, language, and workflows to suit your evolving brand and audience. You might also follow our guide to updating your A/B testing strategy, to make sure you’re learning and optimizing over time. Finally, with an onslaught of holiday messaging coming, this is a great time to refresh email consent and make sure your audience is active and engaged.
In the world of digital marketing, a website’s attention to user experience (UX) is paramount to a business’s success.To help us assess the websites we work with, we’ve developed a helpful UX checklist for e-commerce websites that helps us to identify potential issues to investigate. Use this to evaluate your own website and determine what high-priority updates need to be tackled.
If you’re like most businesses on the internet, you’re wondering whether you might have an SEO problem. You feel like you should be ranking higher for certain organic searches, and you feel like your traffic should be growing a little faster—but you’re not exactly sure what’s normal. Now is the time to stop wondering and check the pulse of your website by running a simple SEO audit. This will help give you a sense of where you stand, and how much help you need. Start by following our handy list of 5 ways to check your website’s SEO.
If you're updating copy on your website and want to make sure it's optimized for organic search, read our guide to SEO copywriting with a human touch.
This time of year, it's imperative that your Google Shopping campaigns are up and running smoothly. Google Shopping campaigns allow you to land at the top of the page within very valuable real estate, with a visual representation of your product for high-intent searches—i.e. people who are in the market for your particular product. Since launching in 2012, Google Shopping has rapidly become the single most effective way to sell retail products via paid search, and we’ve helped clients yield returns of up to 600% on the platform. Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns take it a step further, supplementing classic Google Shopping ads with results based on predicted user intent.
Finally, Google's latest campaign type, Performance Max, could improve your conversions by up to 11%, and is worth a close look. Here's how we've been using it and what we've learned.
Let’s assume you’ve covered your paid media basics: you’ve got goals and benchmarks in place, you’re doing some retargeting, and you’re chugging along with search and social marketing. It’s time to take it to the next level. First, consider implementing dynamic display ads, which have a 9% higher click through rate and a 37% higher conversion rate than traditional static banners. Consider additional paid media channels, like TikTok, which allows you to run custom ad catalogs of products to vast audience segments—in addition to the rocketship of organic potential. Finally, take a close look at your paid social media strategy—are you following our 7 tips for boosting your reach and engagement?
If you sell products that customers purchase more than once, we highly recommend launching a great rewards program, with both loyalty and referral elements. Developing a strong community around your brand will allow your business to grow sustainably through repeat customers and their networks, and rewards programs are great for increasing customer retention, building loyalty, and growing your business organically. Learn more about our approach and consider launching your program in time for the holidays!
Do you find yourself scrambling to create or clean up content, with no real sense of the bigger picture, or how this content is affecting your business? You’re not alone. Yes, the content you create should feel authentic, helpful, on-brand, and delightful...but it should also create measurable engagement and provide actionable data. Follow our guide to developing your content strategy to fine-tune your system and see how you measure up.
Keeping your audience both engaged and compliant is one of the most important keys to a successful email marketing program. Doing so ensures you’re reaching people that are interested to hear (and purchase) from you. There are three main steps to maintaining a compliant and engaged audience:
Re-engagement should happen continuously, but the exact timing will depend on your audience size, email campaign cadence, and outside factors. In this article, we’ll go over best practices for these three very important steps!
When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very strict privacy and security law passed by the European Union, was announced, marketers everywhere scrambled to ensure they were compliant. Soon after, California followed suit with the California Consumer Privacy Act (‘CCPA’), which is a similar regulation to GDPR. It’s rare, but now that we know how to refresh consent, we’re prepared for if anything similar happens in the future.
It’s recommended to regularly check-in on marketing regulations changes so you aren’t stuck flat on your feet when a change in consent regulations does happen.
Depending on the specific standards you are subject to, like the GDPR, the exact steps you need to take will vary. You may need to send a re-permission campaign (getting people to give their consent again), maintain a double opt-in standard, or store information securely. You’ll want to check the laws that are relevant to your audience, which depends on factors like your industry and where in the world your customers are making purchases from.
Taking these steps is important not only because it’s the law, but because at the end of the day, you want to ensure you’re targeting people who are interested in hearing from you and doing business with you. This is essential to using email as a relationship-strengthening tool with your audiences instead of it becoming a nuisance.
Unengaged audience members drag your KPIs down – it’s a simple fact. Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to, you guessed it, re-engage your unengaged audience members. Here are a few key guidelines we follow when running these campaigns for our clients:
Keep It Simple:
Grab Attention:
Send Only to Un-Engaged Members:
There are a few ways to go about this, and your platform is a great place to start. At Good & Gold, we use MailChimp and Klaviyo, both of which have great templates for creating an email and a relevant segment as a jumping off point.
Your final step will be to archive (or “sunset”) users that don’t engage, even after you send that super-enticing last campaign. Those who do not interact with emails for a prolonged period of time are unlikely to start engaging again and will drag down your KPIs, so it’s best to part ways on good terms! Some platforms have this worked into the automated flow, and some require a manual process – you’ll want to check with your specific platform for their recommended best practices on how to do this.
Remember, staying compliant and maintaining an engaged audience results in a happy audience that’s more likely to make purchases – and that means a happy marketing team and a growing business! It’s a win-win…win!
LESS by Andrew Sean Greer
CEO and Co-Founder Carrie is already engrossed in this hilarious tale of a struggling novelist who literally runs from his problems by traveling the world to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding. Perfect Summer Read, raise your hand!
WHEN WE WERE BIRDS by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
A mythic love story set in Trinidad and Tobago, our email specialist Beth bought this book for the cover and has fallen in love with the characters, the setting, and the story since she cracked it open!
WILDWOOD by Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
Got kiddos you’re looking to entertain? Senior Production Manager Amanda is reading this Portland staple to her littles. Written and illustrated by husband and wife team Colin Meloy (of Decemberists fame) and acclaimed illustrator Carson Ellis, this captivating story follows young Prue and her friend Curtis as they uncover a secret world hidden in Forest Park while trying to save her baby brother.
KIMETSU NO YAIBA: Demon Slayer, Volume 1 by Koyoharu Gotouge
Our SEO specialist Josh is making his way through this manga series about a young man whose life gets turned upside down when demons murder his family and possess his little sister. There are 23 volumes in this series so far, which should last you AT LEAST until the end of summer 😜
YOUR NEXT FIVE MOVES: Master the Art of Business Strategy by Patrick Bet-David
Searching for a more serious-minded read for this summer? Our paid media specialist Parker has got you covered! Whether you’re looking to read or listen to this practical and effective guide to achieving your professional goals, this book is a must for strategists and entrepreneurs alike.
In the world of digital marketing, a website’s attention to user experience (UX) is paramount to a business’s success. At Good & Gold, not only do we design, develop, and optimize websites, but we implement cross-channel strategies that drive substantial traffic to those websites. Before that effort can really pay off, it’s essential for us to ensure that our clients’ websites are high-functioning and easy to navigate, with compelling content, scannable shopping pages, and streamlined checkout processes.
To help us assess the websites we work with, we’ve developed a helpful UX checklist for e-commerce websites that helps us to identify potential issues to investigate. While the checklist below can’t replace a full and focused UX audit, it’s a great place to start when evaluating your own website and searching for the root of any performance issues.
And there you have it! While there are several elements that contribute to user experience, these tips should help you create an engaging, navigable, and focused website. And of course, if you need our help reviewing and optimizing your existing website, or designing and developing a brand-new website, we’d be happy to talk. Get in touch!
With Pride Month coming to a close this week, we chatted with our CEO & Co-Founder Carrie and got to know not just her wonderful queer self, but her thoughts on bringing Pride into the workplace all year long.
It’s amazing how having kiddos changes my answer! What I would have said 6 years ago would've been a bit more fun and spicy 😜. Today, I celebrate Pride by supporting my LGBTQ+ local businesses in the month of June (and all year, really), making a point to wear my Loud and Proud gear (very colorful month), donating to local LGBTQ+ nonprofits, attending Pride, heading to a Thorns game, and gathering with my community to love and celebrate each other.
“Caribbean Queen” by Billy Ocean—every time I hear it, sunglasses appear on my face, the windows automatically start rolling down, and strangers give me those ’80s dancing shoulders we all know…you know the ones, right?!
🧘📿🚴♂️👶🎶💡🚙☕️🧑💻📧📞🗓🧮👂+🗣✅💦🌵🤝👩🚒🥗🔮📈 🚪🏃♀️💨 👶 🌚🥂🌝
It’s a toss-up between new client discovery and creating company culture and direction. Working with prospective clients in the discovery phase is a lot of fun—I love learning the ins and outs of all kinds of businesses, finding opportunities, and making connections. But on the other hand, defining a company’s evolving culture and direction is exciting and rewarding. We have been so lucky to work with talented people who are curious, intelligent, and engaged, so working to create opportunities for our team while expanding Good & Gold has been an unexpected joy.
I think the best way to create inclusion is to create a safe place for everyone. We start our weekly department meeting with sharing two emotions—this allows us to really “see” each other and understand what our peers are feeling and going through. While this may not be specific to LGBTQ+, it’s about relationships, being safe and human, and respecting each other. This is a great baseline for diversity and inclusion to grow.
Most importantly, we make sure that everyone feels safe, welcomed, supported, and seen here at Good & Gold. We make sure our onboarding process and approach to culture supports all different people, backgrounds, and experience. We also list pronouns in our email signatures, which helps signal that everyone here is encouraged to be authentically who they are. Our policies and benefits are inclusive, and I make an effort to be open and proud in our recruitment to signal this is a safe place for Queer folx.
As a Red-Tailed Hawk, I’m both free-spirited and loyal—I try to make things better, big or small. I’m courageous and upbeat, with mental and spiritual awareness and a thirst for higher knowledge.
Keanu Reeves, hands down. It’s the equivalent of bringing the messiah, a poet, and a genius all wrapped up into one!
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If you are about to sign a contract with a client or a new employee (or basically anything you are excited about),never—I repeat, never say a thing about the "signed deal” until it is actually signed. Something will most certainly go wrong if you do!
Oof! Don't play along with jokes or comments at your expense. This is something I faced and did not navigate well because when I entered the workforce, being gay was still not widely accepted. Try to be yourself and if you feel comfortable, open up about who you are so folks know and can honor you. Be safe but bold…time’s up!
Times are feeling pretty tough right now for lots of marginalized communities. With Roe v. Wade overturned, I’m feeling devastated about women’s fundamental rights overall, and thinking a lot about what this ruling means for marriage equality and other established freedoms. As a mother of two young children, it’s all feeling pretty heavy. I’m in a moment where I’m navigating through some sadness and grief—but let me tell you, I’m planning to emerge on the other side ready to fight like hell for what I believe in.
I’d first check with a physicist on the velocity impact with the idea of flying over music festivals and schools to unload on folks that would love/appreciate a dose of jelly beans and joy.
If it came back that doing this would be extremely dangerous, I would probably fill up a pool and allow people to jump in for the ol “swim and chew." 🤪
Here at Good & Gold, we’re pretty awesome...but we're very aware we can always get more awesomerer. Check out our recommended “lifestyle improvement” reads for all your self-betterment needs!
HOW TO BE AN ANTI-RACIST by Ibram X. Kendi
Essential reading and always worth revisiting.
FUCK HAPPINESS: How Women Are Ditching the Cult of Positivity and Choosing Radical Joy by Ariel Gore
An illuminating look at the business of happiness, what it does and doesn’t mean for whom, and how we can all have a more empowered relationship with the pursuit of joy in our lives.
THE POWER OF HABIT: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
We all have habits, right? But have you ever wondered WHY? This guy can tell you ALL ABOUT IT, and give you pointers on how to crack the code for changing habits in lasting ways!
DIGITAL MINIMALISM: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Speaking of habits…you already Markie Kondo-ed your house, but have you Cal Newport-ed your personal technology yet?
DARE TO LEAD: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown
This is basically G&G’s operating manual. Essential reading for anyone looking to bring more vulnerability, candor, and humanity into their daily lives, at work or elsewhere!
It’s National Poetry Month and WE ARE HERE FOR IT! Gather round for Good & Gold’s favorite poets and poems, and check out our own attempts at group poetry while you’re at it 😉.
A poem we love:
If You Are Over Staying Woke
Hear Morgan read this poem here.
Recommended collection:
THERE ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAN BEYONCE
A poem we love:
Essay on Craft
Hear Ocean read this poem here.
Recommended collection:
A poem we love:
Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation
Hear (and see!) Natalie Diaz read this poem here.
Recommended collection:
A poem we love:
poem in praise of menstruation
Hear Lucille read this poem here.
Recommended collection:
A poem we love:
Night and the River
Hear Mary read this poem here.
Recommended collection:
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Here at Good & Gold, we’ve carved out a nice space for ourselves in the food and beverage space by helping the folks at beloved Northwest companies like Stumptown, Evoke, Olympia Provisions, and others elevate their digital marketing.
With this experience in hand, we’ve got plenty of practical tips for marketers promoting food items, wine, coffee, or other delectables online. Let’s head to the main course!
We always start by evaluating how each digital channel ladders up to the business goals of our food and beverage clients before making recommendations. Is there an email or social strategy in place? If so, how do they support the on-page experience once someone reaches a website?
When improving your digital marketing strategy as a food and beverage brand, it's important to know how each channel works independently, but more importantly, how it integrates with the other channels.
For example, a subscriber who receives a newsletter needs to receive messaging and branding consistent with what they experience on a website. Alternatively, a social post promoting a sale should fit within the rest of your digital marketing strategy to offer familiarity and a seamless experience.
You can still embrace social media cues, use email best practices, and leverage other platform-specific techniques—but you should apply them knowing how they work together to elevate your food and beverage branding.
If you’re a digital marketer in the food or beverage industries, email automations should be central to your strategy. Automated flows like a welcome series produce 4x the open rates and 10x better click rates than other emails, and 50% of people who click an abandoned cart email convert. Automating emails also saves you time.
If you’re not sure where to get started, here’s our recommendation for essential automations to set up right now:
Our partnership with Sinegal Estate found us designing an email strategy that included newsletters and automations inspired by the elegance of their winery and website. By perfecting the cross-channel experience, we increased email revenue by 137% and transactions over email by 192%.
Digital marketing in the food or beverage industries is competitive, which can make it difficult to rank for organic search results. This is where Search Engine Marketing (SEM) channels like Google Ads can significantly boost your strategy.
We use SEM to help iconic brands like Stumptown expand their digital reach through targeted ads and on-brand creative. With our strategy in place, Stumptown saw improvements in key metrics across the board, including 622% total Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) and a 40% decrease in cost per acquisition.
We know SEM is one of the more demanding digital marketing channels to master, so we answered your questions here to make things easier.
Currently, 77% of internet users read blogs and 57% of marketers say they’ve gained customers by blogging. If you’re not ready for SEM or paid media, start a blog that focuses on SEO topics that offer your customers value.
Remember that your products themselves tell a story and offer your customers value. If you’re a digital marketer in the food and beverage industry who doesn’t know where to start, just pour your heart out about your products!
For example, we work with a winery called Evoke that runs an excellent SEO-friendly blog. We like their blog because they serve content that balances product highlights with storytelling and essential keywords. In turn, they rank well and offer their customers valuable content that improves their lives.
As content nerds, we love brainstorming blog topics that rank on the first page of Google. If you need SEO help or simply want a fresh idea for a blog, let’s talk.
Video has become a massive part of most digital strategies across every industry, with 80% of marketers reporting that adding motion increased sales.
Let's return to our dear friends at Stumptown for a minute and look at how they used video to increase brand awareness and push product sales. In one example, they uploaded a video to YouTube explaining How to Brew Coffee in an AeroPress.
We like this video because it's search-friendly, it's a great example of evergreen content, and its selling points are primarily organic. Many others clearly liked it too—the video has over a million views.
We recently talked about why outdoor brands should promote their values, including a stat reporting that 60% of people started prioritizing environmentally friendly or more moral purchases during the pandemic. Are these kinds of compelling values part of your brand story? Promote those values online over social media, email, or on your website—people want to vote with their dollar.
The time has come for Google to launch a new advertising product, and it’s one we’re very excited to present to our clients—Performance Max has arrived!
So, what is Performance Max? Well...it’s a little complicated. But here’s the simplest overview we can muster: Performance Max allows you to create a single, goal-based campaign that is deployed across all of Google’s channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Essentially, you provide the objective, the creative assets, and the Audience Signals, and Google’s automation and machine learning handles the rest. The goal? To dynamically deliver the right ad to the right people on the right channel at the right time.
As a new product with a new algorithm, we like to give it plenty of runway to gather learnings. Therefore, we’re rolling this channel out to our clients slowly and deliberately. But Google’s internal study of Performance Max shows that most campaigns see an increase of at least 11% more conversions at the same CPA, and we're excited about the potential for quickly reaching clients’ target audiences.
So, are you ready to learn how Performance Max works? Let’s get to it.
Performance Max ads generally focus on traffic, engagement, and conversions, giving you the opportunity to work toward the following campaign objectives:
While it is more of an “all in one” solution, there are campaign goals that are outside of what you would look to accomplish with Performance Max:
Although Google doesn’t allow us to optimize toward brand consideration or awareness objectives specifically under Performance Max, Google has made sure to make this campaign type an extremely viable and multifaceted option.
For us, Performance Max is the initial all-in-one approach for new accounts to give us a solid performance baseline across Display, Shopping, Youtube, Search, and Gmail. Although it does include Search as a feature, it will not outperform single Search campaigns and they are to be used in concert.
If you are already running these campaign types, odds are that you will be adding to your data sets that measure how people have interacted with your business. This includes, but is not limited to:
This will help new campaigns get off on the right foot, especially in this transition. We can expect an initial learning phase with Performance Max that will be slightly different for every account and depend on many factors including products, industry, and prior data accrued in the account.
We use Performance Max as the pivot from Smart Shopping and Local Search, although there are times when we can’t fully extend the performance in terms of RoAS and CPA because the campaign is both conversion and awareness based.
In a case like this, we would use a combination of segmented Standard Shopping and Performance Max to achieve the most desirable results. That leads us to the assets we can and can’t use.
That’s a lot of content, right? Google uses the algorithms we know and love from crowd favorites like Local Search, Smart Display, and Smart Shopping to show people the kind of assets it needs across different devices.
Google has introduced Audience Signals alongside Performance Max, which allows us to target audiences tailored to a business. When creating an Audience Signal, we can look at data related to how people interacted with your business and get info on Demographics, In-market Audiences, and Affinity Audiences.
Performance Max uses Signals to find new audiences to target with Google Insights and can market to audiences across different platforms—it’s great.
For example: imagine we’re selling coffee. We would use Affinity Audiences and demographics to target past purchasers, product viewers, general site visitors , and target interests like Coffee, Coffee & Tea Shops, and Organic Coffee from In-Market Audiences and Coffee Shop Regulars.
We're also excited to see how well Performance Max optimizes toward New Customer Acquisition (available in the coming months). While we hate to see some of our favorite great Google products leave, we’re always excited to see new digital tools coming our way!
New to Performance Max or simply want to nerd out about digital marketing? Contact us and let’s get down to business!
We’ve been working in a fully remote or hybrid remote environment here at Good & Gold since day one (#humblebrag), so we’ve learned a thing or two over the years. First, the truth is that “working from home” looks different for everyone, so not all these tips and tricks will work for every team or every worker. But we’ve embraced a few key best practices that we think can make a difference for any business that is planning to make remote work work for the long-haul.
A chat platform is a no-brainer for remote work. But if your Slack workspace is a loosely organized free-for-all of chatter, then it’s more of a liability than a benefit. To help control the unnecessary noise and distractions, we recommend keeping the following in mind:
Segment your channels. You might benefit from more channels than you think! Rather than one “general” channel, segment by department or project or whatever makes sense for your company. This also makes it easier to go back and find previous conversations and helps reduce unnecessary noise.
Set a status. Most chat platforms allow you to set a status to notify others if you’re available or away from your computer. It’s easy to tell at a glance if someone is available or at lunch or out sick.
Embrace the fun! In the absence of water cooler hangs and coffee chats, Slack can also be a great place for non-work related banter and building camaraderie. We have a variety of “fun” channels, which team members can easily mute if they are too distracting. A few of our favorites we think you should try:
Check your integrations. In this day and age, most platforms integrate with other platforms pretty seamlessly. In our case for example, we integrate Slack with our project management software, Asana, to get real-time notifications when tasks are completed or team members need help.
Be clear about what it’s for—and what it’s not for. Having clear guidelines around how communication channels should be used is key. It’s easier said than done! For example, you might decide that urgent issues should be resolved on Slack because they get too easily lost. Instead you might decide that any urgent issues that need to be addressed immediately should be communicated via email, or on a video call. Set up guidelines that work best for your company, just make sure those expectations are clear.
In a similar vein to your chat platform, a trusty project management system is a must for remote work, but consistent guidelines are essential. To make sure your chosen platform operates like the well-honed tool it should be, create a set of conventions or guidelines for how your company uses your project management software that anyone on your team can reference.
Here at G&G, we live and die by Asana, and our “Asana Conventions” include everything from a detailed breakdown of task settings, how to use custom fields, expectations around due dates and timelines, and much more. We then make sure team members can ask questions or provide feedback if any of our conventions aren’t working so we can stay flexible. These conventions also serve as a great training tool for onboarding new employees!
Having a templated system for submitting requests and creative briefs can be a giant time-saver in a remote workplace. We leverage Asana’s forms feature for everything from creative briefs for paid media campaigns to website bug reports to detailed analytics requests.
Providing team members with a pre-made form makes it easy for them to request what they need while ensuring that project managers gather the information they need to keep the work moving forward. If you have an automated way to do this (via a project management software or something similar), all the better. But even if you can’t automate it, having easy-to-use templates and a clear system for submissions is a great place to start.
The systems above are great when your team has a clear idea of what needs to happen. But what if you don’t? What if a question, request, or idea requires more ideation and out-of-the-box thinking? For those situations, we created a standard framework for problem-solving that helps get us started on the right path. We call this “Solution Architecture,” and it can be used for solving all kinds of problems—essentially, it ensures that we have a clear, shared understanding goals, and that the right people are designing the right solutions for the right problems.
This could look a variety of different ways depending on your team and business, but our approach pulls from three existing frameworks:
We may not know the solution to every problem, but with our Solution Architecture framework, we always know where to start!
There are so many tools that are great for getting work done in a remote world, but they can also lead to being constantly available and “at work.” You can’t shut your office door in an online environment! Sometimes, you have to fake it. We’ve embraced “blocked time” as a means of getting work done amidst the distractions of remote work technology.
Plan in advance: put blocked time on your calendar to hold yourself accountable and to let team members know that you won’t be available. Then shut it down. Turn off your notifications, silence your phone, and close out your inbox to ensure you have uninterrupted focus time to get work done. Most importantly, it works for Good & Gold because we’ve created a culture of respect around blocked time. We all benefit from uninterrupted time to dig deep into solving a difficult problem or power through a long task list. Enjoy that sweet, sweet productive silence!
History, especially American History, is mostly told by and starring straight white men, but they weren’t the only ones around (obviously). Time to focus on some of the stories you maybe haven’t heard yet: women’s!! In honor of Women’s History Month, check out Good & Gold’s list of reads focused on ladies and their impact throughout history!
HOOD FEMINISM: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
TASTE MAKERS: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen
GIRLY DRINKS: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara
BODIES OF SUBVERSION: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo by Margot Mifflin
WANDERERS: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews
THE WOMEN’S HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD: How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years by Rosalind Miles
