
We’ve Got A New Project: Welcome to OmniDigital
As we continue to build out the Digital Ninja Club, we are also now working on a new SEO Niche Site: OminDigital We’ll have a more thorough release on the project plans, but for now, enjoy!

re-Blogged | Agency Talk: EPISODE 206 | Scaling is All About Culture With Gary Vaynerchuk
Working with Conduit Digital, we have the inside track to all of their latest projects, and they are well on their way to having a successful Podcast, in Agency Talk, and we wanted to highlight one of their recent interviews, with none other than Gary V himself. For Episode 6 of Agency Talk Season 2, Marcus and Tim spoke with Gary Vaynerchuk, an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and Internet personality.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Is Coming, What To Expect!
If you haven’t heard by now, Universal Analytics (UA) from Google Analytics, will be going away as of July 1st, 2023, and replaced by GA4. What does this mean? Well, for now, not much, other than you need to start preparing yourself (and your website) for the change. Understand what’s going to happen Until July 1, 2023, you can continue to use and collect new data in your Universal Analytics properties. After July 1, 2023, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in your Universal Analytics property for at least six months. We know your data is important to you, and we strongly encourage you to export your historical reports during this time. Our friends over at Conduit Digital wrote a great piece outlining some of the changes and how to prepare for the change(s) in the months to come. We’ll get into more in-depth information in forthcoming blogs, but for now, check out what Measure School has to say about it, below.

ProTip: Instapage Form Submission Tracking for Google Tag Manager
In a recent article, we discussed the Landing Page Platform, Instapage, and how it can benefit you in your Digital Marketing portfolio. Recently, we ran into an issue with one of our pages not tracking the Form Submissions correctly in Google Tag Manager. We found that it was possible to get a false-positive submission if someone clicked the Submit Button, before completely filling out the form. While this may be a rare occurrence, it was still something we wanted to address and correct. Note: this is for tracking the built-in forms that are part of Instapage, not any third-party forms that may be used separately from Instapage. 1) To start, you will create a standard Tag in GTM to track a Form Submission, but you will update the Trigger that fires that Tag, with the info below. Implement your Google Tag Manager container ID on your landing page. Implementation guide available here. 2) You will need to install a snippet of code into your Instapage settings. This is done inside each page, not a Global Setting. With this code snippet on your landing page, you will be able to create custom events and triggers within Google Tag Manager that fire upon a form submission. NOTE: You will need to edit the trigger configuration in your GTM tag: The information should look like this: H/T: Instapage Support Doc

How To: Whitelist Email Addresses In Gmail
Have you ever had somebody say they sent you an email, but you never got it, or you ended up finding it in Spam/Junk? Yeah, it happens to all of us. So, what can you do about it? Well, there is the process of ‘Whitelisting’ an email, so that it doesn’t end up in Spam. Let’s take a look at what you need to do, to always receive those very important emails. In this scenario, we will be showing you how to set up a Whitelist Filter in Gmail. 1) Login to Gmail, click on the gear icon and select “Settings”: 2) Select “Filters and blocked addresses”: 3) Scroll past all your existing filters and select “Create a new filter”: 4) Add the email address that you want to whitelist to the “From” field. Here we added admin@reporting.ninja to make sure that we never miss a ‘dashboard’ alert: 5) Check the “Never send to spam” box and click “Create Filter”. The email address will now be whitelisted! Whitelisting A Whole Domain In ‘Step 4’ we whitelisted a single email address. It’s also possible to whitelist all emails from a domain. By adding @reporting.ninja to the “From” field instead of admin@reporting.ninja we would whitelist every email address belonging to reporting.ninja. Whitelisting Multiple Email Addresses To whitelist more than one email address simply add each email address separated by the pipe symbol. For example, “admin@reporting.ninja | info@reporting.ninja”. The pipe symbol is a vertical bar ‘|’ that can be added with shift and backslash on most keyboards.

Intro to Google Analytics & Tag Manager
We recently did a tech training for our team at Traffic Builders on the basics of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. While the Ad-Ops products are the meat and potatoes of our services, all of the data and metrics usually comes back to being able to track the performance of those products, and for that, we use Analytics and Tag Manager. Here’s a link to our Slide/Deck, and some quick snippets are outlined below. Google Analytics Access – Account / Property / View Create New Account Create New Property Google Tag Manager Access – Account / Container Create New Container Add Tag(s) Installation Into WordPress Admin Level User Access Using the GTM Plugin Google Tag Assistant / View Source Inside GA, there are 3 main parts, the Account, Properties, and Views. The Account is the Primary ‘bucket’ that all Properties will be managed under, while the Property is the Website or asset you will be monitoring. A View is a specific set of criteria to track certain performance metrics, etc. Google Tag Manager has a similar setup, in that it has the Account which manages all of the Containers which are what tracks the Website or asset, similar to the Property in GA. The primary purpose of GTM is to be able to add and manage any/all of your 3rd-party resources in one platform, instead of individually loading that code onto your website. You can also create Tags that have the ability to ‘Fire’ based on a specific event or Trigger, for example, sending Pageview data to GA, or firing your Facebook Pixel when a visitor lands on a certain page. Once you have created your Analytics Property and added the UA ID to GTM, now you need to get GTM into your website. There are many ways to do this, either by placing code into the HTML of the site, or using a Plugin (if using WordPress let’s say) to make it super simple to get GTM added to your site. Login to your website and navigate to the Plugins section of the website. Click on ‘Add New’, and then search for ‘google tag manager’, Click Install, and then Activate. Click the Link to enter your GTM ID and then Save. It’s really that simple Google Tag Assistant / View Source Once you have added the GTM Plugin and saved your ID, using Google Tag Assistant, we can now see that both GTM and the GA UA ID we added to GTM are both showing on the website. Another way to check to see if the GTM has been added to the site is to ‘View Source’ and look for it in the HTML Code. You can either right click and click View Page Source, or press CTRL-U on your keyboard. So, that’s a wrap on another article. We will be doing additional training sessions in the future. Stay tuned…

InstaPage – What Is It, and Why Should I Use It?
As websites have evolved, in their design, and more importantly, purpose, the creation of Landing Pages has become a key part of Digital Marketing. Using your existing website to build a landing page has both its Pros & Cons. While it is convenient to just build another page on your existing site, there can be downsides to doing so, in both design and function. There are many other dedicated platforms out there that specialize in creating landing pages, one of which is Instapage, which we have been using for some time now, and today, we’ll give you a basic intro to it and how it works. As Instapage says on their website, ‘Our Vision‘ In the near future, every potential customer will get a personalized post-click landing page after engaging with an online advertisement. Today less than 4% of ad clicks turn into conversions. With an average customer conversion rate of 16%, we’re already making this a reality. Simply put, a Landing Page is solely designed to drive targeted users to a destination with one (or more) specific purpose, like a Form Fill, or Click to Call (Call to Action / CTA), etc. It is not necessarily meant for general non-targeted traffic, rather a visitor that will benefit from your product or service, and has a greater chance of converting that CTA, based on the landing page design and function. Instapage has a great built-in page builder, which offers many features that other platforms don’t have. What makes our landing page builder better? The best user-experience by far The only landing page builder with built-in collaboration Built in Instablocks® and global blocks for scale Over 500+ layouts built and tested for conversion Near instant page loads with or without AMP Having the ability to design your page for both desktop and mobile, and the addition of over 500 layouts ready to build, we find that Instapage is a great tool to have in our arsenal when we need to create a landing page for our clients.

What’s the Difference Between Domain, Hosting, DNS and All That Other Stuff I Don’t Understand…
In one of our recent articles, “The Anatomy of A Website“, we discussed the basic components of what makes a website tick. The backend is built on the WordPress Core along with Themes and Plugins. Once you are ready to publish your site, you will need to have a few additional items in order to get your new site online. Today, we will discuss what those items are and how they all work together. When you visit a website, you navigate to it via a browser such as Chrome, or Bing, to what is called a Domain, or URL. In our case, the domain is https://digitalninja.club/. A website is stored, or served, from a Hosting platform that is made up of networks of servers and other equipment that ‘serves’ the content of your website to your visitors, via the domain name and DNS (Domain Name System). You can think of it this way, the Domain is the address of your house. Hosting is the actual location of your house, and DNS are the directions to your house, from literally anywhere in the world. Now, where it gets a little confusing, is where and how all of these things are managed. In its most basic sense, a Domain is separate and different than hosting. A Domain is purchased and managed through a Domain Registrar. Hosting is provided by a Web Hosting Company, and DNS can be managed within either of those based on the needs of the website, and/or the owner of the domain, for purposes of things like email or other services provided separately from hosting a website. Companies like GoDaddy, SiteGround and many others can be both a Registrar and Web Host, and the products (Domain & Hosting) are managed separately inside your account. For example, we use GoDaddy as our Domain Registrar and SiteGround as our Web Host. Because of this, we need to set the domains that are in GoDaddy to ‘point’ to our servers in SiteGround by setting either the Name Servers or A Record (IP Address). In some cases, Domains are managed within the same account as your hosting, and in that case, your Domain is usually set up to ‘point’ to your hosting automatically. When a Domain is pointed via Name Servers, the Domain Registrar is no longer responsible for, or able to manage the DNS, and will now rely on the settings within the Host Zone of where the website is hosted. If a Domain DNS needs to be managed within the Domain Registrar, we will typically set up the pointing, or redirect via an A Record edit, which will only point to the location of the server, for purposes of serving the website. The Host Zone will have no effect on any DNS Settings and all DNS will be managed through the Domain Registrar. This is an effective way to keep all current DNS settings accurate when launching a new website, or if services like email are already in place for the Domain. There are a few additional components, that we won’t get into just yet. They are MX Records, which manage and direct how email is routed, CNAME redirects, TXT Records among others. These are a little more in-depth and deserve a separate article of their own. Our team at Traffic Builders can help you get your new business or brand online and in front of visitors looking to learn more about what you do. If you want to learn more about what we do, follow our Blog here at the DigyNinjy, or our Social Media pages on Facebook and Twitter.

WordPress 102 – The Basics, and a Little More…
We’ll be setting up a basic WordPress tutorial session this Wednesday 11/14/18 for anyone interested in learning a little more about the basics of WordPress and how to navigate the backend, make basic edits and update blog posts and other features typically involved in SEO management of a website. Name Welcome to Wordpress - 102 Level If you would like to participate, please fill out the form below to help us prepare for our next session. Your Current Level of Wordpress Experience * Basic Intermediate Advanced Already a Ninja I'd Like to Learn About: * Questions/Comments: *

The Anatomy of A Website
web·site: a location connected to the Internet that maintains one or more pages on the World Wide Web. A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com. Today roughly 380 new websites are created every minute across the World. (Wiki) At Traffic Builders, we build most, if not all of our websites with WordPress. “WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, and online stores. Used by more than 60 million websites, including 30.6% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2018, WordPress is the most popular website management system in use. (Wiki)” Any WordPress website needs to have the WordPress architecture installed. Next, the Theme is what builds the foundation of what the website will look like and finally Plugins help the website run and perform in ways that are beyond the standard installation of the Theme. Websites are built on three main types of coding: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When designing a new website, there are three main content areas that need to be considered. Every page of the website will have both a Header and Footer, that will usually have the same content in both, on all pages. The body of the page can be specifically edited on each page, to allow for unique content for both the Home Page as well as all of the internal pages. The Home Page will typically have a more custom look, in that there will be a wider variety of content and calls-to-action, that help bring the user in and drive them into other pages. The internal pages will usually have larger blocks of ‘relevant content’ and images on a specific topic. This not only helps the user learn more about your business/brand but is also used by search engines to index the website in its’ vast network of pages, on sites like Google.com. Relevant Content can be defined as content that is specific to both the brand and/or service as well as any location-specific information that would make that page stand out for users searching that topic in that area. While most people will only ever see the ‘Live’ side of a website, there is actually a whole backend, or admin section of the website that runs the website and controls how everything works, looks and feels. Once logged into the admin area, you have access to all of the pages, posts, media files and more, that are inside the website. This is where you would upload and update your Logo image, the website title, navigation menus, footer content and more. Websites can range from mild to wild, and basic to extreme. It takes time to create and launch a new website, but our team at Traffic Builders can help you get your new business or brand online and in front of visitors looking to learn more about what you do. If you want to learn more about what we do, follow our Blog here at the DigyNinjy, or our Social Media pages on Facebook and Twitter.

Entrepreneur and Influencer, Gary Vaynerchuk, Set to Deliver Keynote Address at Conduit Digital
GaryVee to make a Rare Agency Keynote at Conduit Digital’s HQ about the State of Digital Agency Business in 2020! Tuesday, November 26th, 2019@12:00pm EST The State of Digital Agency Business in 2020 from Conduit Digital Marketing on Vimeo.

Traffic Builders “What Is A Driver?”
Traffic Builders Gives Your Agency Immediate Best In Market Digital Capability! Traffic Builders has teams of certified digital experts specific to each of our products. With a complete “state of the industry” product suite, a proven, volume tested system of on-boarding, communication, state of the industry reporting and a passionate team of digital marketers we are the digital agency that allows you to focus on building your agency.

the Dojo: Welcome to the Digital Ninja Club
Do you have what it takes to become a Digital Ninja? We are here to provide advanced insight into anything and everything ‘Digital’. If you are here to listen & learn, or want to contribute, we will help you gain that valuable insight and get you on your way towards earning your ‘Black’ Belt at our Dojo. nin·ja “a person who excels in a particular skill or activity.” A ninja (忍者) or shinobi (忍び) was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan. The functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, assassination and guerrilla warfare. Their covert methods of waging irregular warfare were deemed dishonorable and beneath the samurai, who observed strict rules about honor and combat. The shinobi proper, a specially trained group of spies and mercenaries, appeared in the 15th century during the Sengoku period, but antecedents may have existed as early as the 12th century. (Wiki) As you continue towards your Master Rank, we will provide you with your Category Belts, ranging from Yellow, all the way up to Black. Think you have what it takes? Stay tuned for some important announcements coming shortly…