HBT Digital

HBT Digital We make ad spend actually work. Vision

Be the most dedicated digital marketing agency with unprecedented service and results.

The Why

HBT Digital Consulting loves to create strategic digital marketing campaigns that deliver outstanding results for our clients! By being a trusted partner in collaboration, we can help businesses succeed in this crowded marketplace. When our clients succeed, HBT Digital wins, and then we pay-it-forward by serving nonprofit organizations through awareness campaigns and charitable drives. We do what we do to help businesses and the community thrive!

ChatGPT ads are new and moving fast, and we tested them early with $400 of our own money.Back in June 2026 we could not ...
09/04/2026

ChatGPT ads are new and moving fast, and we tested them early with $400 of our own money.

Back in June 2026 we could not set a goal that chased leads. So we ran traffic ads across Pennsylvania. The campaign was shown 7,977 times and picked up 50 clicks. No leads were recorded. We paused it within a month.

That is not a failed platform. It is a young one. OpenAI has been adding the missing parts since. Custom lists of people to reach. A way to tie leads back to ads. An ads manager you run from a chat. The newest came September 3, 2026.

If you test again, keep it small and count the leads.

https://hbtdigital.com

A fundamental CRM automation fits in three sentences.A new contact is created. The automation reads the UTM, the label o...
09/03/2026

A fundamental CRM automation fits in three sentences.

A new contact is created. The automation reads the UTM, the label on the link they clicked, naming the campaign that sent them. If that new contact came from an ad, the follow-up runs itself.

The nurture starts: welcome emails that say who you are, how you help, what your customers say. An opportunity is created in the pipeline and assigned to the right person, while the lead is still warm.

No sticky note. No calling them back Monday.

Open your CRM and check the newest lead for UTM tagging. If there is none, your ads and your CRM are not tracking and attributing properly.

https://hbtdigital.com

Your keyword is not the search.Every keyword you run has a match type. It decides how different a search can be and stil...
09/02/2026

Your keyword is not the search.

Every keyword you run has a match type. It decides how different a search can be and still show your ad.

Exact is the narrowest. Phrase is wider. Broad is widest, and Google decides what counts as related.

We pulled ninety days of live campaign data. Only 19 of 254 keywords were set to broad, which is 7.5 percent of the list. Those 19 took 39 percent of all impressions.

Google says broad match should run with Smart Bidding. That is its tool for setting your bids for you.

Open your search terms report. Look at what your broad keywords actually matched. Give it thirty to sixty days of spend, then cut the ones buying searches you do not want.

https://hbtdigital.com

Google can now show your ad with no keyword behind it.Until this month your ads needed a keyword to match a search. Camp...
09/01/2026

Google can now show your ad with no keyword behind it.

Until this month your ads needed a keyword to match a search. Campaigns running campaign level broad match, or letting Google write extra headlines, now upgrade to AI Max. It can match searches with no keyword at all, and it can write headline text of its own.

You get reach your keyword list would have missed. You also get searches that have nothing to do with your business.

Google announced it in April, and says the upgrades begin this month: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/dsa-upgrade-to-ai-max-2026/

Open your search terms report and read what you actually paid for. Are there any phrases that shouldn't be there?

When did you last look at yours?

Your Google Ads can play on a television. Most owners have no idea whether theirs do.Nielsen puts YouTube at 13.8 percen...
08/31/2026

Your Google Ads can play on a television. Most owners have no idea whether theirs do.

Nielsen puts YouTube at 13.8 percent of all TV watch time in May, the largest share of television of any distributor, three months running. The audience moved to the set.

Google treats a TV screen as its own device, next to mobile, desktop and tablet. Its own documentation puts TV screens in Display and Video campaigns, and describes them as smart TVs, game consoles and streaming sticks.

Ninety days of live campaign data says the same thing. Almost a third of the impressions we measured landed on a TV screen, 97 percent of those from video campaigns, for 4.1 percent of the spend.

Google reports that Demand Gen campaigns including TV screens average 7 percent more conversions at the same return. There is also a TV screen bid adjustment if you want it dialed down.

Open your device report and find out.

https://hbtdigital.com

08/28/2026

We are not smarter than anyone else. We just check more.

Three of the things we look at in a Google Ads account: networks, conversion goals, audiences. Each one decides where your budget goes, and all three are set before anyone writes an ad.

None of them are hidden. You can check all three in about ten minutes.

And three is a small part of it. The full audit keeps going: negative keywords, bidding targets, and how the account is split by age and location, and what the spend is actually buying.

If you would rather we did it, we run a free video audit of your Google Ads account and send you the recording.

https://marketing.hbtdigital.com/googleadsvideoaudit

Eight of every ten paid clicks we looked at last quarter came from a phone.We pulled ninety days of live campaign data. ...
08/27/2026

Eight of every ten paid clicks we looked at last quarter came from a phone.

We pulled ninety days of live campaign data. 11,330 of 13,913 clicks came from a phone. And of the people who got in touch, nine in ten did it by calling.

There is a reason, and it is not that desktops stopped working. Search campaigns bid into an auction where most of the searching already happens on a phone. On Meta, Stories and Reels barely exist anywhere but a phone.

One awareness campaign in the same ninety days spent $4,489.81. Thirty-two cents of that reached a desktop.

It is not a rule either. One advertiser we looked at sells to other businesses, and it runs the other way. Eighty-seven percent of its spend lands on desktop, because its buyers are at a desk when they look.

So spend ten minutes on this. Open your own landing page on a phone. Time how long it takes to load, find the phone number, and fill in the form. That is the page you are paying to send people to.

hbtdigital.com

08/26/2026

Your ads run every hour of the day. Somebody answers the phone for about nine of them.

Google runs your ads around the clock unless you tell it not to. Most businesses answer during working hours. So every evening there is a window where you pay for attention you cannot pick up.

In a 2025 CallRail survey of 1,000 people, 82% said they would call a competitor if a business did not answer.

Before you switch the evening off, be careful. That is the last move, not the first. Some of that demand is real and you are just missing it.

Open your reporting, break it down by hour, and find the hour your results drop. Then ask whether that hour is about your buyers or about your office.

Check your own hours: hbtdigital.com

08/25/2026

Starbucks brought back the Pumpkin Spice Latte today, and the timing is the interesting part.

For the first 26 weeks of 2025, US search interest in it never rose above 3 out of 100. Then it rose sharply and peaked in the week of August 24, the same week it went on sale. It never got back to that level all year. Fall did not begin until September 22.

The high point of the year came before fall did.

The audience was quiet for six months. Starbucks was not. They announced this year's return on August 3, 22 days before launch, and one Starbucks ad still listed as active on Meta today began running on June 17.

If you wait for your season to arrive before you advertise, the peak is behind you.

Worth checking when your own season really starts, before you set the budget.

Data: Google Trends, US, weekly relative index. Dates: Starbucks newsroom and Meta Ad Library.

Facebook reached 45% more people than Instagram, on 12% of the spend.One law firm. One budget. One awareness campaign, a...
08/24/2026

Facebook reached 45% more people than Instagram, on 12% of the spend.

One law firm. One budget. One awareness campaign, and Meta chose the split. Over ninety days Facebook took $559 and reached 186,306 people. Instagram took $3,930 and reached 128,336.

Meta did not get this wrong. We told it to chase ad recall lift, which is how many people remember seeing the ad. Not clicks. So it bought against that goal, not against the cheapest click.

Cost per click ran the same way. Ours was $0.70 on Facebook against $2.46 on Instagram.

Most owners never see any of this, because the report they open shows one number for the whole campaign.

In Ads Manager, open the campaign, then Breakdown, then Placement.

hbtdigital.com

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