Invest Smart: An Essential Guide to Cloud Services and CDN Bandwidth Choice

Why is a digital marketing agency worried about Cloud services or CDN? Does is impact our clients?

The short answer is: ABSOLUTELY. 

How?

Here are a few key reasons:

1. Performance and User Experience: A CDN can greatly improve website load times by caching content worldwide, ensuring that users can access the website quickly, no matter their location. This can significantly enhance the user experience, reduce bounce rates, and lead to better engagement and conversion rates - all key metrics in digital marketing.

2. SEO Benefits: Speed and performance also play into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google factor site speed into their ranking algorithms. Therefore, faster site speeds, enabled by CDNs, can contribute to better SEO outcomes.

3. Scalability: Cloud services and CDNs can help a website scale during high-traffic periods. For a digital marketing campaign that generates a lot of interest, this scalability can prevent the website from crashing, ensuring all visitors can access the site when they want to.

4. Security: CDNs can provide added security measures, such as protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Cloud services typically also offer robust security measures. Security is a major concern in an era where data breaches can cause significant reputational damage (and financial losses).

4. Cost-effectiveness: Cloud services operate on a pay-as-you-go model, which can be more cost-effective than traditional hosting, especially when traffic levels fluctuate. Similarly, CDNs can be more affordable than trying to build out similar functionality in-house.

5. Innovation and Agility: Cloud services enable faster deployment of new applications, updates, and innovations. They can also make leveraging data, AI, and other advanced tools easier. This agility can give digital marketers an edge in a rapidly-evolving landscape.

6. Data management and Analytics: Cloud services often have powerful data management and analytics tools. Given the crucial role of data in digital marketing, managing and analyzing large data sets efficiently can offer significant advantages.

By understanding and leveraging the benefits of cloud services and CDNs, a digital marketing agency can provide superior service to its clients, potentially leading to better outcomes in their marketing efforts.

The cloud is the most secure place to store your business’s data and sensitive information. Many business owners do not know this and, as a consequence, choose antiquated, non-secure storage methods like physical hard drives. When you store your data on an insecure device like a physical hard drive, you are putting it at risk of theft, loss, and corruption. These things can be devastating for your business and can ruin your reputation, not to mention result in fines being issued against you by your industry regulator.

If you have never heard of the cloud before, the term refers to exclusively online storage databases used by private and corporate individuals and entities. Anybody can use the cloud. The best thing about it is that these databases can be accessed remotely, from anywhere. If you are interested in investing in cloud storage for your business, you need to invest smartly. If you have never heard of the cloud or had to invest in it before, you won’t know how to do that. This post will simplify it for you so you can use your money sensibly.

Finding Fast Servers

If you want to use the cloud, you must find fast servers. Using anything less than perfect is a bad idea. The faster your server is, the better. You should check out fees for CDN services though as CDN bandwidth has a strong connection to cloud speed. You’ll have to pay more for faster servers.

A good way to tell whether or not a server is fast is to read its reviews, or rather, the reviews of the company offering it to you. Individual servers are of course, not going to have reviews. The distributor’s reviews should be publicly available, however and easy to find. Always check out your chosen company’s star rating too.

The faster your cloud server moves, the easier it’ll be for you to store and then access sensitive information. If you are not able to access your business's data quickly then you will not be able to make decisions quickly either. A lot of businesses have to rely on customer data to make decisions. Limited access to one's data due to slow server speeds can have a damaging effect for this reason. 

CodeDesign is the leading digital marketing agency in Lisbon Portugal.

Prioritising Online Security

You must always consider online security when working with your business's data. Unfortunately, fraud is more prevalent than ever on the Internet today. If you do not take steps to protect your business's data, it could end up falling into the hands of criminal gangs.

Criminal gangs regularly target businesses to steal customer information. They do this because customer information contains information like bank details or passport numbers which can be very easily used for fraud. If you do not protect people's data then you could get into a lot of trouble.

When you store data on physical storage devices, there is always a risk that they can be stolen or corrupted and you could lose access to all of the data you have built up in your database. If data is stolen from you then you could get yourself into a lot of trouble. This is because industry regulators do not take very kindly to businesses that do not protect their data.

If an industry regulator finds out that data was stolen from your business, they could issue fines and penalties. The cloud is very hard for hackers to get into, making it the perfect place to store your data. Most industry regulators now require businesses to store data on the cloud as it is highly secure, and things like two-factor authentication can be enabled, adding further security.

Consider Server Costs

Cost is something else that you need to think about. Unless your business was already extremely successful then it is highly likely everything you do is done with budgets and savings in mind. You need to think about the cost of the server that you are going to lease. Server costs range from reasonably affordable to extremely expensive. It depends on the package that you want.

If you are on a budget and need to save money, you should buy the smallest package you can. The smaller the package is (i.e., packages without much memory), the cheaper it’ll be. You can always scale up your data usage later on, but this will be covered in the next section.

If you're unsure which package is right for you, get in touch with the company from which you plan to lease a cloud server. The company you plan on working with should be able to give you a comprehensive list of all the packages they offer and provide detailed and personalized information. You can do this via e-mail or your chosen company’s live chat. Read this complete guide on digital marketing funnel and then choose the right digital marketing channel for your business.

Stagger Your Usage

Finally, stagger your usage. As mentioned in the previous section rather than investing in a costly and large cloud storage package, buy one that is a little cheaper and a little smaller. By buying a smaller package you won't have to worry as much about spending money and will also be able to scale up if needed.

Buying more data than you need is silly. Data packages become very expensive the larger they get. Buying a small cloud server is the best way to start as you can figure out how much you need and then either increase or reduce according to what you learn.

Bear in mind that if you open a cloud server and hold onto it for a while, the company you have bought it from will likely give you good deals and offers on larger packages. You might get better deals on larger packages if you hold onto smaller ones for longer, in other words.

Cloud storage is the best way to keep your business’s data safe. Ensure that you consider the things listed here so you can get the best deal. Ensure the package you buy is the right size for your business and the right price. 

Check these Amazon FBA tips to grow your business and see how optimising your Amazon listing could help you grow. 

CDN for SEO purposes

Here is clear case where we have great results. 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can play a significant role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) due to the following reasons:

1. Page Load Speeds: Page load speed is a crucial ranking factor for search engines like Google. CDNs can dramatically decrease page load times by storing copies of your site's content on servers located around the world, allowing users to access the site from a server close to them, thereby reducing load times.

2. Reducing Bounce Rates: Faster websites tend to have lower bounce rates as users are likelier to stay on and engage with sites that load quickly. This engagement sends positive signals to search engines about the relevance and quality of your site, which can help to boost SEO.

3. Downtime Prevention: If your website experiences high traffic, it can sometimes lead to server overload and website downtime. This isn't good for SEO because frequent downtime can negatively impact your site's ranking. CDNs distribute the traffic load among multiple servers, reducing the risk of downtime.

4. Handling Bot Traffic: CDNs can distinguish between real human traffic and bot traffic, which helps in reducing server load and potential downtime. This is particularly important because search engines may downgrade rankings if they detect too much bot traffic.

5. Website Security: Security is a critical factor for SEO. CDNs can provide additional security measures like DDoS protection, securing your website from harmful attacks that could take your website down or impact its performance. Websites with proper security measures are seen more favorably by search engines.

6. Duplicate Content Issue: CDNs can help manage the issue of duplicate content across different site versions (such as http and https, or www and non-www versions). This is important as duplicate content can negatively impact your SEO.

7. Mobile Performance: With the majority of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, your site's performance on mobile is a significant SEO factor. CDNs optimize content delivery for mobile devices, improving user experience and boosting SEO.

Read this guide on E-commerce supply chain and voice search optimization.

By improving site performance and security, a CDN can positively impact various factors that search engines consider when ranking websites, thus improving SEO.

CDN for Social Media purposes

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) can significantly enhance the delivery and performance of social media content in several ways:

- Improved Loading Speeds: CDNs cache content at various global locations, reducing the distance the data needs to travel to reach the end-user. This improves load times, making images, videos, and other types of content on social media platforms load faster, regardless of where the user is located.

- Scalability during Traffic Spikes: Social media content can go viral unexpectedly, leading to sudden surges in traffic. CDNs are designed to handle these traffic spikes efficiently, ensuring that the sudden increase in demand doesn't lead to server crashes or slow load times.

- Quality of Experience: CDNs often have optimization capabilities for different types of content and devices. This means that whether a user is accessing content on a mobile device, a desktop, or a smart TV, the CDN can optimize the delivery for the best possible quality. For social media, where user experience is key, this is a huge advantage.

- Video Streaming: Many CDNs offer streaming services that can handle live and on-demand video, a type of content that's increasingly important on social media. CDNs ensure that videos are delivered smoothly, without buffering issues, and in the right format for the user's device.

- Content Protection: CDNs can provide added layers of security for your content. This includes access controls (so that only authorized users can access certain content), encryption, and protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

CDN for Tracking accurate data 

The implementation of Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with a CDN doesn't differ too much from a standard implementation. The CDN serves your content, including your site's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and media files, to visitors faster. However, the JavaScript for GTM and GA4 typically still needs to be added to your site's HTML.

Here's a step-by-step process for how you might go about implementing GTM and GA4:

- Create a Google Tag Manager Account and Container: Visit the Google Tag Manager homepage and sign up for a new account. As part of this process, you'll create a new container, which is where your tags will be stored.

- Add GTM Code to Your Website: Once you've created a container, GTM will provide you with two pieces of JavaScript code. One of these should be placed as high in the  of your website as possible, and the other immediately after the opening  tag. If you're using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, there are plugins available that can help you add these codes to your site.

- Create a Google Analytics 4 Property: Go to your Google Analytics account and create a new GA4 property.

- Set Up GA4 Configuration Tag in GTM: Back in GTM, you'll create a new GA4 configuration tag. To do this, you'll need the Measurement ID from the GA4 property you just created. In GTM, you'll choose to create a new tag, select GA4 Configuration as the tag type, and input your Measurement ID. You'll also need to set up a triggering event for this tag. For basic site tracking, you'll typically want to choose the All Pages trigger, which means the tag will fire on every page of your site.

 -Publish Changes in GTM: Once your tags are set up in GTM, you'll need to submit your changes to make them live. You can preview your changes before doing this to make sure everything is working as expected.

- Test Your Implementation: After implementing GTM and GA4 on your site, it's important to test the setup to ensure the tags are firing as expected. You can use tools like Google Tag Assistant or the Preview mode in GTM to do this.

The CDN doesn't interact directly with GTM or GA4; instead, it serves the site content, including the GTM and GA4 code, to your site's visitors. So as long as the GTM code is properly added to your site's HTML, your CDN should serve it just like any other part of your site.

If you have doubts on how to implement GA4 reach out to us.

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