Synapse Announces Exciting Client Offer: Free Puppies for All New Clients!

Boston, MA – April 1, 2025 – Synapse, a leading performance marketing agency, has just announced an unexpected and heartwarming offer: they’re giving away free puppies to all new clients!  Starting April 1^st, the agency is taking customer care to the next level with an unprecedented move to combine top-tier marketing services with puppy love.

“We believe that good marketing is all about building connections – and what better way to build a stronger bond than through the unconditional love of a puppy?” said Paul Benson, co-founder of Synapse. “Whether it’s brainstorming sessions, budget projections or deep-dive analyses, we know that the right puppy can add that extra spark to your team’s energy and creativity.”

A Winning Partnership for Pets and Performance

For every new client who signs up for Synapse services, the agency will deliver an adorable puppy directly to their office or home. “We’ve always wanted to bring more than just digital marketing expertise to the table,” said Benson. “This offer isn’t just about new clients; it’s about forging relationships that last, while making sure our clients have a little extra love and happiness to share with their teams. Let’s face it, who doesn’t need a puppy to brighten their day, especially when tackling big marketing challenges?”

The Fine (Puppy) Print

The promotion is open to new clients who sign a minimum 6-month contract with Synapse, and the puppies will be delivered on a first-come, first-served basis.  The offer includes a range of puppy breeds that will be selected based on office size, team culture, and client preferences. Synapse is also offering a free puppy “starter kit,” including chew toys, training tips, and a puppy-safe office space guide.

A Marketing First

“This initiative marks a significant milestone for Synapse,” added Benson. “While our clients have always come to us for results-driven strategies, now they’ll have a puppy companion to keep them energized. It’s a win-win situation.”

Synapse encourages all businesses, from startups to large corporations, to take advantage of this unique promotion. After all, a successful marketing strategy is only as strong as the team behind it – and with a little help from a furry friend, it’s sure to be a lot stronger.

This promotion is part of Synapse’s ongoing efforts to innovate and create fun, unexpected experiences for its clients. It is, however, April Fools!

Note: This announcement is a part of our April Fools’ Day festivities and we cannot technically give away free puppies to businesses. That said, keep an eye out for a related announcement on April 2^nd!

About Synapse

Located in Boston, Massachusetts, Synapse is a rapidly growing performance marketing firm with core competencies in paid search advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, conversion optimization and analytics. Our mission is to build a more data-centric, client-focused performance marketing firm by leveraging advanced data analysis techniques and statistics.

7 Excel Formulas to Make Paid Search Easier

In the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, digital marketers are constantly managing data, optimizing ad copy, and creating reports.

The Evolution of Google Ads Match Types

How to Export Google Analytics Data to BigQuery

Google has announced that Universal Analytics will be sunsetting on July 1, 2023.  Per their website, “On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer process data.” On top of the challenge of learning an entirely new analytics platform in GA4, digital marketers are also facing the daunting prospect of losing their historical Universal Analytics data.  Google states:

• 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.

While the exact data deletion date is not yet announced, Google is encouraging advertisers to take action and export their historical data in anticipation of this date.

The “exporting” process is unfortunately easier said than done. Google recommends exporting data in Excel/CSV files, but when we tried to do that for our clients, we quickly realized that that process would not be feasible.  Specifically, we ran into the following issues:

• To pull unsampled data for multiple years, we had to run hundreds of smaller reports and stitch them together.
• Attempting to stitch together hundreds of reports took significant time (too much time to complete), and it ultimately crashed Excel and exceeded Google Sheets’ data limits.
• Most exported data for long date ranges was sampled, making it highly inaccurate.

Ideally, we’d be able to export and download our historical Universal Analytics data directly to Google’s cloud-based data warehouse, BigQuery.  Unfortunately, only paid GA360 accounts have API access to BigQuery (this will become a standard GA feature in GA4), so in standard analytics, data needs to first be extracted into some other type of file format like CSV, TSV or Excel before it can be uploaded to Google BigQuery.  That leaves us right back where we started and facing the issues listed above.

Terrified at the prospect of losing all of our hard-earned data, we’ve spent the last six months working to develop a solution that can export accurate and complete data to Google BigQuery in automated fashion.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Analytics Data Extractor (ADE), which:

• Accurately backs-up 5 years of data with no-sampling and 100% data accuracy.
• Archives and store data in a cloud-based database (Google BigQuery).
• Links archived historical GA3 data directly to Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), where both pre-formatted and custom reports (with Excel exports) will be available.

For more information on how to back-up your Google Analytics data and store it in BigQuery, visit our Analytics Data Extractor website here!

 

 

How to Avoid Sampling When Exporting Universal Analytics Data

Synopsis: Options are limited if you’re looking to avoid sampling when exporting your historical universal analytics data in preparation of the migration to GA4.  Our new tool, the Analytics Data Extractor (ADE), reliably and accurately extracts, stores and visualizes your historical Universal Analytics data and prevents your data from being lost.  Learn how you can back-up 5 years (or more) of accurate, completely unsampled data today!

What is Sampling in Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics, sampling is the process of selecting a subset of data from a larger set of data for analysis. This is done to speed up processing time and to reduce the amount of data that needs to be analyzed.

For example, if you have a website with millions of pageviews per month and you want to analyze user behavior on a specific page, Google Analytics may only sample a percentage of the total pageviews for that page. This allows the data to be processed more quickly, but it also means that the analysis is based on a smaller sample size and may not be as accurate as analyzing the entire dataset. In our agency’s experience, even a nominal amount of sampling can lead to significant discrepancies between the reported and actual data sets.

By default, Google Analytics will use sampling when analyzing large datasets, but you can adjust the sampling rate to get more accurate results. This is particularly important if you’re analyzing smaller subsets of data, such as specific user segments or conversion paths, where sampling can have a bigger impact on the accuracy of your analysis. To adjust the sampling rate, you can use the Sampling Level option in the report settings, but keep in mind, this option is only available in the Google Analytics interface.  It’s not an option that is available when exporting data to Excel, and that brings us to a much bigger issue facing digital marketers in 2023.

Sampling and the GA4 Migration

Google’s Universal Analytics will stop collecting data on July 1, 2023, and data will be permanently removed following the close of 2023 (the exact deletion date is TBD). Google is currently urging customers to export historical reports to prevent permanently losing their data.  

Unless you’re a GA360 customer, Google suggests manually downloading your GA data via Excel/CSV.  This is problematic because:

• To pull unsampled data for multiple years, you would need to run hundreds of smaller reports and stitch them together.
• Attempting to stitch together hundreds of reports would take significant time, and it will ultimately crash Excel and exceed Google Sheets’ data limits.
• Most exported data for long date ranges will be sampled, making it highly inaccurate.

How to Avoid Data Sampling?

To combat this issue, we’ve spent the last six months trying to develop a solution to back-up historical Universal Analytics data while automatically avoiding sampling.  We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Analytics Data Extractor (ADE), which:

• Accurately backs-up 5 years of data with no-sampling and 100% data accuracy.
• Archives and store data in a cloud-based database (Google BigQuery).
• Links archived historical GA3 data directly to Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), where both pre-formatted and custom reports (with Excel exports) will be available.

Historical Universal Analytics data will be safely preserved and fully accessible through GDS for a large number of custom queries and entirely customizable date ranges.  The extraction process can be initiated as soon as you’ve made the switch to use GA4 as your primary reporting platform.  We estimate that most advertisers will be doing that in the April – June time period, and we are currently offering reservations to secure a date for the backup process. We have 5 critical data sets we’ve identified that will be backed up for 5 years, and additional custom data sets (up to 6 dimensions and 10 metrics per data set) can be extracted for an additional fee.

Learn more about how to avoid data sampling while exporting your historical universal analytics data at extractor.synapsesem.com.

 

 

 

How to Use Impression Share to Project PPC Budget

PPC advertising budgets can be one of the most difficult tasks for marketers to figure out as there are many factors affecting this decision. But don’t worry, Synapse is here to help. While it may seem daunting, there are a number of valuable (yet often overlooked) metrics that can be instrumental in figuring out the optimal advertising budget based on your business and your goals. These include impression share and impression share lost due to budget:

• Impression share: The impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
• Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of time that your ads were not shown on the Search Network due to insufficient budget.

Using these key metrics, we can project out PPC budgets based on your goals, to ensure your advertising efforts are effective and efficient. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help get you started:

Determine Your Advertising Goals

Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads? Your advertising goals will help you determine how much you should be spending on advertising each month. Answering these questions can help determine how aggressive you want to be with your budgets.

Gather All Relevant Data

Pull the following data from the “Campaigns” tab (make sure to add any columns that are not already showing) for the last complete month of data to ensure you are using the most up-to-date statistics for your projection.

• Search Lost IS (Budget)
• Search Lost IS (Rank)
• Search Impression Share
• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Avg CPC
• Cost

Adjust Data to Create Average Monthly Numbers

Each month has a different number of days, and seeing that we are projecting an average month of budget, we need to proportionally adjust the data to create a true monthly projection. This applies to impressions, clicks, and cost:

       Ex. (Impressions divided by number of days in the month) multiplied by 30.4 (average number of days in a month)

Calculate Actual Impression Numbers

In order to figure out the amount of spend needed to capture impressions lost due to low budgets, we need to figure out the actual number of eligible impressions:

       Total Eligible Impressions = Impressions divided by Search Impression Share

       Search Lost IS budget number = Search Lost IS Budget Percentage multiplied by Total Impressions Eligible For

       Search Lost IS Rank number = Search Lost IS Rank Percentage multiplied by Total Impressions Eligible For 

Calculate Uncapped Spend

Now we are ready to create projections based on the total number of eligible impressions:

       Total Impressions Uncapped Budget = Impressions divided by Total Impressions Eligible For

Now that we have calculated these metrics, we can get a much clearer picture of how increasing the budget will impact performance. Your final inputs should look something like this:

From here, we can create monthly projections to see how increasing impression share through budget increases will impact clicks, conversions, and revenue:

In this example, we can see impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, customers, and revenue all increase by 50%. While the actual numbers increase, the metrics (CTR, CPC, CVR, etc.) stay the same. In reality, the actual numbers would likely not all increase at the exact same rate, but the purpose of this exercise is to provide an estimate of how increasing budget and impression share will affect overall performance.

Warning

One method of calculation to beware of is adding the percentage of impression share lost due to budget back to your current impressions. For example, if your campaign received 1000 impressions last month at a 50% impression share and you lost 25% due to budget, it may seem logical to take 25% of 1000 (250) and add that to your total impressions (1000+250=1250). This method is incorrect as it bases the Lost IS (Budget) number on impressions you received, not total eligible impressions. If you received 1000 impressions at a 50% impression share, that means you were eligible for 2000 total impressions. Therefore, the Lost IS (Budget) of 25% actually comes out to 500 lost impressions. So, if you add back the 500 lost impressions to the 1000 impressions you received, you can project to receive 1500 impressions by increasing your budget.

Conclusion

Understanding the metrics of impression share and impression share lost due to budget can be crucial in projecting PPC budgets and optimizing advertising efforts. By following the steps outlined in this guide, marketers can gather all relevant data, calculate actual impression share numbers, and ultimately create projections based on the total number of eligible impressions. Marketers can use these metrics to estimate how increasing budget and impression share will affect overall performance. By doing so, they can make informed decisions about advertising spend and achieve their advertising goals.

Contact us at paul@synapsesem.com if you’d like to subscribe to the Synapse SEM newsletter, or to learn more about our evolving search engine marketing services.

The 2023 Guide: How to Choose the Right Performance Marketing Agency

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2023 Agency Guide

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HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PERFORMANCE MARKETING AGENCY

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Get the ultimate list of questions to ask potential performance marketing partners during the evaluation/RFP process. This guide covers important topics such as:

• Whether you should work with a specialized agency or an integrated agency
• How to get the agency’s best resources on your account
• How to negotiate management fees
• The importance of industry experience
• The importance of the firm’s technical capabilities, particularly for B2B tech and other lead gen companies
• How to leverage references to better evaluate (and potentially eliminate) potential partners
• Whether a larger agency or smaller agency is a better fit
• How to evaluate the agency’s client services capabilities and fit
• How many hours the agency will be allocating to your account each month, and the breakdown of that time

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Download our 2023 Guide: How to Choose the Right Performance Marketing Agency and get the most important questions and our POV on each!

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