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UGC 101: Guide to User-Generated Content Marketing

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What is the fabulous and extraordinary thing that is UGC? No, it’s not the latest clog variation of UGG boots - it’s none other than user-generated content!

Today we’re looking at different kinds of user generated content, examples of user-generated content, where to find it, how to use it, and more!

What is User Generated Content?

A user generated content definition: UGC is anything on the web that users have a hand in making. Most of the photos, videos, and posts you see on the web are pieces of user generated content. Basically, UGC is anything not made by a brand, though brands do leverage user-generated content for ranking.

Different Kinds of User Generated Content

The variations of UGC are endless. Some major kinds include:

  • Blog comments
  • Facebook comments or posts
  • Reviews
  • User generated videos
  • User generated blog posts
  • Forums
  • Podcasts

Some popular streams of UGC involve collaboration between a brand and a user. Take for example, the Christmas Jib Jab “Elf Yourself” videos that tend to re-emerge every holiday season. Jib Jab let users upload photos of friends and family member’s faces, which are then pasted onto Jib Jab’s animated dancing elves. In the example video below, one users uploaded Harry Potter characters for an special Hogwarts-ian Elf Yourself video.

These videos have been hugely successful - Jib Jab provides the tech and tools while users bring their unique creative flair to the table, creating custom UGC that people LOVE to share.

User Generated Content Examples: How Brands Can Repurpose UGC

In a previous Facebook advertising post, we showed how several brands are doing a great job of repurposing user generated content for their own benefit, sharing brand-inspired fan art and customer testimonials across various social networks. Here we’re highlighting a few of our favorite user generated content examples once again.

This eloquent endorsement posted by a Twitter fan was taken by Dominoes and then pasted over an image, creating a new visual piece of UGC that could then be shared on Facebook (and other networks).

facebook user gen content

M&Ms likes to do a Fan Pic Friday, in which a UGC piece is shared on various social networks. This is another great example of a user generated content marketing strategy that capitalizes on users’ creativity.

user generated content by fans

Starbucks also posts fan generated content every so often - people love their coffee, and Starbucks isn’t afraid to share user generated content that shows off how beloved they are.

fan created content

GoPro is another brand that has done a fantastic job of utilizing fan generated content. GoPro will often share and promote impressive customer-created videos on their YouTube channel.

 

All this user generated content marketing has meant tremendous things for GoPro. As GoPro videos become increasingly more popular, more users get excited at the idea of making their own mini-films for their own five minutes of fame. Those users naturally go out and buy a GoPro before creating even more unique UGC videos, which in turn promote the GoPro brand and increase sales. It’s a marketers dream cycle!

Reviews are another form of user-generated content that can easily be re-formatted for different mediums. A stellar Amazon review might do a lot of good repositioned on your website.

UGC reviews

Big Barker Dog Beds make smart use of Amazon reviews on their website.

Make the most of your user generated genius - you’re letting your fans do the work for you. When you have a popular brand that generates fan attention, the user generated content that rolls in is immensely valuable. Why? Well for one, there are some pretty creative people out there who find fun and innovative news ways to talk about your product or brand. Ways you may never dream of. The creative culture of user generated content is quite impressive - even the big buck marketing teams would be hard pressed to compete with the creativity of fans.

user generated content marketing examples

The work of a mad man

There are dozens of ways user generated content can be repurposed across various web identities - an Instagram post tagging your business can be shared on Pinterest! A shout out on Twitter can become a Facebook testimonial. The possibilities are endless. Don’t let your UGC go to waste - make the most of it!

Where to Find User Generated Content

Maybe you’re getting excited now about all that high class, super UGC ripe for the taking. But where to find it?  There’s all sorts of user generated content sites across the web, but it helps to know where to look. Some UGC powerhouses included…

Devianart

Devianart is the #1 spot for blossoming artists of the world to show off their wares. Every kind of art imaginable can be found on this online haven for the artistically inclined (from fabric design and computer generated art, to 3D modeling, drawing, and more).

user generated content sites

Flickr

As one of the few (if not the only) photo-hosting sites giving away a whole terabyte of space for free, Flickr has a lot of users posting their photography work. If you see something you love and want to use, reach out to a user and ask.

user generated content on flickr

Don’t feel like panhandling for photos? Alternatively, search Flickr via Creative Commons for photos that can be used for free in exchange for attribution. These photos can also be found by conducting an Advanced Search in Flickr, and checking of the Creative Commons-licensed only option at the bottom.

creative commons UGC

Reddit

Reddit presents a heap of UGC in the form of images, forum discussions, and comments. If you’re looking for authentic user generated content, you’ll likely find all sorts of stuff on “the front page of the internet.”

user generated content reddit

Facebook

Where there are users, there is user generated content. And boy howdy, there are tons of folks on Facebook! The semi-recently updated Facebook search tool can help you find discussions revolving around your brand.

user gen content facebook

It becomes pretty easy to find user generated photos and posts about your brand with a quick Facebook search. Try it out and reap the rewards.

where to find user generated content

Twitter

Twitter is a hot spot for discovering conversation surrounding your brand. Just hashify your business and see what’s the buzz! The Advanced Search feature is also useful for finding what people are saying about a topic during a given time frame. You can even embed relevant tweets right into your content.

twitter user generated content

using twitter for user generated content

YouTube

YouTube is home to the crown jewel of user generated content - video of course! The King Kong of content, video can captivate and hold the attention of viewers much longer than text or photos.

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding Taco Bell’s new breakfast menu (oh man, the 1st world in which we live), and sure enough, when I search “taco bell,” on YouTube, quite a few user generated video reviews pop up.

user generated video content

Assuming they have good things to say about you, user generated video reviews can be prime UGC to show off and repurpose for your business. Video user endorsements can carry tremendous word-of-mouth power, all the more mighty because you’re seeing the real people who recommend your product, making their opinion exponentially more trustworthy. Text reviews on the other hand, while still very valuable forms of UGC, can be mistrusted by skeptical users who see the reviews as potentially artificial. The Internet’s trust factor when it comes to quoting individuals has been seriously damaged.

UGC

In case the hilarity of this image sails over your head - it’s a quote from Yoda (Star Wars), attributed to Dumbledore (Harry Potter), with an image of Gandalf (Lord of the Rings). For optimal misquotation, the link to this image should say “My favorite Star Trek quote.”

Pinterest

Pinterest is another great source for user generated content. People just love posting pics on Pinterest - especially food pics. Again, search your brand and wander through pins to see if anything juicy shows up.

user generated content marketing

Instagram

Instagram has become the #1 spot for mobile photo-sharing fans. There’s a ton of great UGC on here, and it’s a great spot to host a contest or giveaway in order to obtain user generated content (more on that strategy later).

I recommend using GramFeed to search through Instagram photos - it’s a handy little site that lets you search through instagram posts by topic or hashtag.

where to find UGC

Amazon Reviews (& Other Reviews Sites)

As discussed with regards to YouTube videos, reviews are great for swaying the opinions of hesitant buyers. Scour popular review sites for shining endorsements of your biz - try searching through Amazon customer reviews or Yelp reviews for starters, as that’s where the majority of online evals take place.

UGC review content

People take online reviews quite seriously (although there are tons of hilarious funny Amazon reviews out there as well) and put a lot of thought and consideration into their evaluations. Use the good ones to your advantage!

No Brand UGC? No Problem - Go a Bit Broader

The best user generated content is content that relates directly to your brand. That tailored fan content works for you on so many levels - it serves as a word-of-mouth endorsement, helps with brand development, and engages with audiences on their level. Basically, personalized user generated content is just the best - it’s the bee’s knees!

UGC bees

Adorable bee from cartoonist Gemma Correll

But sometimes the “best” just isn’t attainable, in which case, the next best will do just fine. If you have a tough time getting your hands on specific brand-related UGC, fear not! Instead, seek out user generated content that is related to your industry. For example, if you sell mountain hiking gear, you might be interested in user generated content from outdoor junkies. Look for photos, blog posts, gear reviews, or videos from campers.

user gen content

Goal Zero sells portable solar panels for charging goods on the go, but they’ll often share UGC that will interest their audiences, such as a guest post about fly fishing.

Of course, whenever sharing user-generated content, it’s important to give credit where it is due; be sure to call out those awesome content creators for sharing their experiences.

Want Custom User Gen Content? Just Ask For It!

Sometimes, getting what you’re after is a simple as saying, “please.” You’ll be rolling in UGC in no time if you organize a contest that require a piece of user-generated content as a submission.

Take for example, a current Pillsbury contest asking fans to submit by posting a photo to Instagram of their brightest and boldest baked goods.

getting content by users

It’s a simple concept, but bakers from all over are more than happy to oblige, and the user generated content has been steadily coming in.

creative culture of user gen content

Contests are often used to build brand awareness and reach, but involving user-generated content adds a huge bonus element, as the brand earns a collection of great fan crafted content that can be implemented for different purposes and on different mediums for years to come.

Winning photos can be curated into a blog post (which fans will doubtlessly share for self-promotion sake), posted on Pinterest, tweeted on Facebook, and so much more. What’s not to love?

Communal Blogs

Another way to get user-generated content is to host a communal blog or forum.

For example, YouMoz is a communal posting space where community members can share their own blog posts and content on Moz. Members vote on the posts with a thumbs up or down – if the article gets enough positive votes, the post is promoted to the main blog. Online community-oriented sites like this are great for building community and serve as a smart source of high-quality user-generated content.

user generated content websites

User Generate Content Blues? Fake it ‘Till You Make it

Still having a hard time getting your hands on UGC? Try creating your own! OK, it won’t really be user-generated content if you’re making it yourself, but you can replicate the user-generated style that will likely appeal to users over more blatant branded advertising.

User generated content statistics from Crowdtap show that Millennials consider UGC 20% more influential and 35% more memorable that branded messages. They also are 50% more likely to find UGC trustworthy as opposed to branded advertising. So even if your marketing content isn’t authentically user-generated, that style of marketing will appeal much more to younger audiences than classic branded marketing. 

It’s unclear if this photo posted on Starbuck’s Facebook page is fan-crafted or the company’s creation, but regardless it has the style and concept (pop-culture oriented) of a UGC piece. Naturally this got a TON of likes and shares online. Nothing hits quite as hard as nostalgia.

faking user generated content

We’ve made a pretty strong case for user generated content. If you’re not foaming at the mouth for that home grown UGC by now, you’d best re-read this post! Your quest for fantastic user generated content may take you to some strange places, but as long as you come up with some UGC spoils, it’ll surely be worth the ride.

Do you have a piece of user generated content that did a ton of good for your business? Share your experience in the comment section below!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.


Want to Increase Your Conversion Rates? Here's How to Triple Them

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We recently held a massively popular webinar packed with techniques guaranteed to triple your AdWords click-through rates, and we got a lot of people asking for help with the next logical step: boosting conversions. Once you've earned the click and have a visitor on your site, how do you most effectively convince them to sign up for your offer or purchase your product? Raising CTR’s is great, but raising conversions is even better.

Our next free webinar (THIS THURSDAY, March 6) will teach you just that: amazing – yet perfectly achievable – strategies to increase your conversion rates by three times or more. In Unbelievable Discoveries to 3x Your Conversion Rates, we're going to dive deep into tactics and features of the best converting campaigns in the market, with a replicable process to help you achieve the same.

We have hundreds of millions of ad spend at our disposal and have researched conversion rates extensively. And what I found amongst a vast array of conversion rates ranging all the way from zero to 99% blew me away.

Are You Really Optimizing for Conversions, or Just Going Through the Motions?

"But I'm already awesome at converting, Larry!"

Based on what we’ve seen across tens of thousands of campaigns, very few PPC marketers can say this. You're probably doing alright. You might even be a little above average, and that's great! 

how to improve conversion rates

The thing is this: average conversion rates in PPC are actually not that awesome. Striving to be just a little bit better than not so good is like choosing the sirloin over the flank steak, while completely ignoring the filet mignon on the menu. You can do so much better.

Conventional landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization (CRO) says you need to try out different colors, fonts, images, layouts and copy to find the sweet spot for your audience. This is really basic, small fry stuff, though. This is where you'll see 2%-5% improvements, which is nice, but certainly not a game changer.

In our analysis, we discovered that some companies are getting 2x, 3x, or even 6x the conversion rates of similar companies within their industries.  Basically, they're outpacing their competitors in conversions by double digits. Now, are you really awesome at conversion rate optimization? Really, really awesome?

What the Top Marketers Are Doing with CRO That You're Not

Here's another thing that might surprise you about these incredibly effective, top converting marketers: they're not necessarily the ones with the biggest spend and the most time on their hands. In fact, it's easy to get sucked into the myth that unless you're working on CRO full-time, you can't possibly compete with the big guys.

increase conversion rateThat's completely wrong and backwards. In fact, just a few hours spent wisely on smarter conversion rate optimization is far more effective than five or ten times longer spent on the kinds of basic, menial optimization tasks that will get you only moderate increases (and even then, only if you really keep on top of it).

Digging deeper into our research, we were able to identify common traits and tactics that will help you replicate the successes of these top-converting PPC campaigns.

In this webinar, I’ll share those 3 insane ways to get 3x improvement in conversion rates.

You'll see just where your competitors are at and what you are up against, with conversion rate benchmarks across ten major industries. Believe me, the opportunity to surpass the rest of your field is massive.

Stop Wasting Your Time on the Same CRO Methods Everyone Else is Using: Learn How to Really Improve Your Conversion Rates

Average tactics and strategy will only ever earn you average results – if you're listening to the same advice and optimizing the same way as everyone else, you have absolutely no edge on your competitors.

It's time to stop going through the motions and get busy with informed, strategic conversion rate experiments that will send you to the top of the pack, into the realm of the highest converting companies in your industry.

It is possible; the best converting campaigns aren't just getting lucky. They have employed a process that systematically uncovers and then capitalizes on conversion opportunities – a process you're going to learn with me.

Are you ready? Join us this Thursday, March 6 at 1:00pm EST. Register now to secure your spot!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

The 10 Best PPC Tips from My Inbound.org AMA (Ask Me Anything)

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I recently had the opportunity to be the subject of an AMA (Ask Me Anything) at Inbound.org and was blown away by the response. Not only were there a ton of questions, but they were really, really good!

These questions led to a lot of great discussion and advice on PPC and AdWords, in particular. But in case you don’t want to dig through the whole thing, here are my top 10 best PPC tips from the Q&A.

1. What's the greatest, but most underused, opportunity in AdWords?

PPC TipsQ. Kyle Petzinger asked, "What would you say is the single largest, mostly unused opportunity that AdWords advertisers can take advantage of? I realize this is pretty open-ended, but feel free to just spit out the first 'OMG DO THIS. WHY IS NO ONE DOING THIS' thought that comes to mind. Thanks a ton in advance! Love your work!"

A. Remarketing. Lot of companies are slow to adopt it. Possibly because the Google Content Network used to be a joke and got burned. But it's gotten a lot better and we're using it like crazy. I can't think of a reason why content marketers shouldn't be investing in remarketing. Also check out my top 10 AdWords features of 2013.

2. What are your best PPC tips for a brand new paid search advertiser?

Q. Dejeesh Dev asked, "What is your advice for a newbie paid advertiser?" 

A. The types of businesses that do great on paid search are those where people know what they're looking for but not where to get it. Hard-to-find specialty items (e.g. industrial-sized air conditioners, etc.) or services with decent margins or the possibility of repeat business (dentists, for example) are the best.

Most of the PPC accounts out there are run by lazy account managers. A small amount of work every week (tweaking your keywords, bids, landing pages, ad copy, etc.) would put you ahead of 99% of them.

3. What is the best defense against click fraud and wasted spend?

Q. Kevin Scarselli asked, "What's the best defense against click fraud and wasting ad spend on competitor clicks? I manage legal PPC campaigns, mostly for mass torts that can have CPC's upwards of $100. And I truly believe a large portion of ad spend goes to unrecognized invalid clicks -- mostly other lawyers/legal marketers checking out other landing pages, but more than average click fraud too from competition as well. We could lose thousands a day in just unrecognized invalid clicks... any tips on how to combat this?"

A. Google lets you block 50 IP addresses, so if you have a few IP addresses that appear to be doing bad stuff, you can block those from seeing your ad. Another idea would be to use remarketing lists for search advertising (RLSA). For example, I could decide to show search ads only to people who visited my blog in the last week. This would cut down on a lot of the fraudulent clicks since people who click would have had to have visited my blog in the last week.

4. How much impact do PLAs have on e-commerce campaigns?

Q. Vinny LaBarbera asked, "How significant of an impact (on average) have you seen PLAs make on e-commerce campaigns?"

A. PLAs are HUGE. Consumers are now seeing +80% of the above-the-fold SERP space dominated by ads for commercial searches.

Google Shopping Ads

What you might not know is that the fancy Product Listing Ads you see are commercial intent-sucking monsters and are stealing all the conversions from both the organic and non-PLA search results. PLAs are especially compelling with their images, descriptions and pricing info. Organic clicks still win when you're talking about all queries in general, but for those high intent, commercial keywords, ads are getting over 64% of clicks. People are actively looking for rich, detailed information in search when they're ready to buy and PLAs are the ticket for getting in front of them. [Note that Product Listing Ads are eventually being switched over to Shopping Campaigns.]

5. What do you say to all of us churning out "safe" ad copy?

Q. This question came from Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land: "You're known for your position that QS matters, and you've also presented on writing ‘Unicorn’ out of the box ad copy to get better click-through rates. Ad headlines and copy are nearly identical on the SERPs because people are nervous QS will suffer if the keyword isn't in there at least once, twice, three times. What do you say to all of us churning out 'safe' ad copy?"

A. In AdWords, it's incredibly difficult to see the forest for the trees. You know that your CTR is 2%, or your conversion rate 5%, but what you dont see how great it could be, since Google doesn't tell you how other accounts are doing.  It's really hard to get a sense of where you stand competitively. I'm in a unique position in that I've looked at over $10 billion in AdWords spend across over 100k accounts, and what I found is that there is a big difference between the top 10%, or 5%, or 1% of accounts vs. the average or below-average accounts. There is a huge advantage in being remarkable and Quality Score is a big piece of that puzzle.

Your CPCs can be 600% less than another advertiser bidding on the exact same keyword. Your CPAs can be 80% less than another advertiser doing something very similar to you. The only way to see this is to step outside your comfort zone and try out insanely great ads and insanely great landing pages/offers. Safe ad copy generally tends to only generate average or slightly above average results.

Top PPC Tips

We've looked into the habits of the average AdWords advertiser before and let me tell you, the bar is pretty low. If you want to reach that top 10% or even top 1%, it's completely possible with a solid understanding of Quality Score optimization, better offers/ad creative and smart account management.

6. What are the best PPC resources out there?

Q. Marco Nobili asked, "What are the best resources about PPC/AdWords to know as much as you know (except experience)?"

A. I'd say if you don't know PPC/AdWords yourself, the people who are working in it daily and sharing their PPC tips and expertise are your best bet! WordStream Blog, PPC University, and PPC Hero are great resources. Also, try asking questions using the hashtag #PPCchat on Twitter. Lot of smart SEMs hang out there.

7. How is Google coping with the shift to mobile?

Q. Moz's Dr. Pete asked, "How do you think Google is going to cope, from an ad revenue and format perspective, to our shift to mobile? 'Enhanced' campaigns made it clear they see this shift as a real threat, and they're designing more and more with a mobile-first philosophy. Do you think their $60B advertising juggernaut is in real danger?"

A. Google has placed many bets on mobile and I think they'll do great. We're actually finding that calls from mobile devices are worth 3x more than clicks to a website (since the intent is stronger on mobile, people are looking to buy something right at that moment). Most businesses haven't figured this out yet since it's hard to measure, but when they do, I think mobile CPCs could go up! [Google’s recent announcements around app marketing and better mobile measurement just reinforce this.]

8. What are the biggest mistakes PPC agencies make in early days?

Q. Michael Erikson asked, "What are some of the biggest mistakes PPC agencies make in the first 3 years?"

A. The biggest is failure to understand churn and the impact of client churn on their financials. The second biggest mistake is closely related – the failure to adopt strategies and tactics to reduce client churn.

9. Should you outsource or handle PPC in-house?

Q. Alexander McGregor asked, "Would you advise a small business (under 200 employees) to run their own PPC programs or would you advise them to outsource?"

A. Depends on your budget. Obviously it doesn't make sense to hire a dedicated in-house person to manage a $2k / month budget and it would be very difficult to find an agency willing to take on such a small account. Conversely if you were spending millions on paid search per month, I'd think that you'd want to bring that in-house. I don't think the number of people in a company really matters in terms of making this decision.

10. What skills translate over well from the PPC world to social ads?

Q. Inbound.org's Dharmesh Shah asked, "We're seeing increasing interest in the social ads space (primarily Facebook and Twitter). What skills do you think translate over well from the PPC world?"

A. In general (and sorry for generalizing here; I'm not saying this is always the case), PPCs are super data-oriented and obsessed with key metrics like cost per conversion and return on ad spend. I think that's a super-valuable skill that is much needed in the social ads space. 

Want More PPC Tips? Ask Me More Stuff!

If you missed the AMA, drop your big PPC question in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them here or in a future post!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

WordStream's Best of the Month (& Happy 5-Year Anniversary to Me!)

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This past Sunday marked my five-year work anniversary at WordStream. I know that sounds like a long time, but young ones, five years goes by really fast when you’re on the wrong side of 30. I’ve now been working remotely (from the Mile High City) for longer than I worked in the Boston office, which, due to the telescopic nature of time, seems impossible. The math checks out though. (See also “reminiscence bump.”)

Reminiscence Bump

Via Wikipedia

But enough math – let’s talk search marketing! (Which might possibly involve some math.) Here are our top 10 11 most popular blog posts of the month:

1. The 9 Best Email Subject Line Styles to Increase Your Open Rates– This post from the last day of March is going strong! Check out Meg’s tips for crafting must-open emails – should you personalize? How does punctuation figure in? Includes lots of real-world examples.

2. Today’s Big Google AdWords Announcement: What It Means for You– Google announced 10+ new AdWords features on April 22. Here’s the low-down and what they announced and how the changes will affect your account.

3. Gmail Shortcuts, Tips, and Tricks: Latest Secrets for Hacking Your Email– More great tips from Meg, this time on how get around your Gmail inbox more efficiently.

4. Rumors of 'Not Provided' In AdWords Unfounded: Paid Search Query Data Is Not Dead– There was a big ol’ kerfuffle earlier this month when rumors started flying that Google was going to stop giving AdWords advertisers access to the search queries that triggered their ad clicks – essentially a “not provided” apocalypse on the paid search side. The rumors were much exaggerated, and here Larry clears up what actually happened.

5. If People Don't Link to Porn Sites, How Does Google Rank Porn?– When Matt Cutts said in a Webmaster video that people don’t link to porn sites, that got me wondering: How does PageRank work for porn?

6. Why Google AdWords Certification Doesn't Matter– Caleb Hutchings stirred the pot by claiming that AdWords certification doesn’t mean much – check out the great discussion in the comments!

7. Huge Google Keyword Planner Updates: Now with Mobile/Contextual/Trend Data– Google has been talking up the importance of “user context” for a while now – and they have finally updated the Keyword Planner to help advertisers get more contextual insight into their keywords. Check out the new features.

8. Do AdWords Shopping Campaigns Work?– Pretty soon all advertisers will need to switch from PLA’s over to Shopping Campaigns. The good news? They’re a runaway hit!

9. Google Goes After Facebook, Expands Post Ads to All Advertisers– Google+ Post Ads are now available to anyone with at least 1,000 followers. Learn what +Post ads offer and how to set them up.

10. AdWords Dynamic Parameters: A Sneaky Way to Double Your CTR– If you work an industry where the details in your text ads are always changing (for example, if your ads include the current price of gold), dynamic parameters can double your CTR and make your life way easier in the process.

11. Funny Amazon Reviews: The Top 10 Funniest Reviews on Amazon– And let’s end with a bonus fun post. Meg identified all the most hilarious user reviews on Amazon so you don’t have to. But read at your own risk!

See you in May!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Brand Mentions Are the New Links?

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Over at Moz, Simon Penson just wrote an interesting post about a “Panda Patent” which may shed light on how Google will rank sites in the future, “using a ratio of links and mentions, or ‘implied links.’” With penalties flying and the value of the almighty link coming into question, could Google be looking for new signals of authority? We think so, but are brand mentions the answer?

The relevant part of the patent is this:

The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). A link for a group of resources is an incoming link to a resource in the group, i.e., a link having a resource in the group as its target. Links for the group can include express links, implied links, or both. An express link, e.g., a hyperlink, is a link that is included in a source resource that a user can follow to navigate to a target resource. An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.

“Express links” versus “implied links”? Am I the only one who thinks this is a very strange kind of back-pedaling? I’ve got a couple of questions for Google:

Why didn’t they focus on mentions in the first place?

The fact that Google is calling brand mentions or citations “implied links” shows how wedded they are to the idea that links are everything. No, a mention isn’t an “implied link,” it’s a mention – people mention stuff and link to stuff for different (though sometimes overlapping) reasons.

Generally, you link because you believe the reader will get some benefit from visiting the page in question – because it contains further information or value that isn’t contained on your own site. You might mention a person/site/brand for any number of other reasons – possibly to give them credit for something, or just because you like them, or perhaps because you hate them.

mentions are the new links

Even if they’re talking shit, at least they’re talking about you.

I can see the ratio of links to brand mentions being a useful signal – for example if a site has tons of links but very few mentions, that might by a sign of a spammy site. The funny thing is, you don’t need fancy technology to measure brand mentions. This is pretty easy stuff*. So why has Google always emphasized the value of links over mentions? They just figured out that brand mentions are a sign of popularity? I know patents take a while to process, but this seems like it should have been built in from the get-go. What gives?

*Actually, it’s only easy if your brand name is unique. For example, I’m the only Elisa Gabbert in the world, as far as I know, but there’s more than one Larry Kim. This is the advantage that links have over mentions; domains are unique, while names and brands are not. I’m not sure if Google’s usual handling of synonyms in search is enough to overcome the synonym problem in brand monitoring.

Aren’t mentions at least as gameable as links?

It seems even easier to game a system based on mentions rather than links. Mention-building could be as scalable as link-building:

  • You can buy brand mentions
  • You can get brand mentions through guest posting (and you don’t have to worry about over- or under-optimized anchor text)
  • You can score a bunch of brand mentions through “linkbait” like infographics (mention-bait!)

So … what’s the difference here? Wouldn’t the “mention graph” eventually be as corrupt as the link graph? If Google has trouble distinguishing natural versus unnatural links, how will they distinguish between natural and unnatural brand mentions? (BRB, adding Brand Mention Optimization to my LinkedIn profile.)

Since big brands already have a lot of citations and smaller sites may have focused on links rather than a broader strategy of content quality and PR, they’ll have catching up to do, so this could buy Google some time. I don’t see it as a definitive spam-killer over the long run.

Google Still Needs a Better Satisfaction Index

A mention-to-link ratio might be a good patch for the holes in the link graph, but I think Google will eventually need to move to a very different system for judging site authority and popularity (not, as Matt Cutts notes, exactly the same thing). This system might be something more like the Quality Score system it uses for ad ranking, where user engagement trumps all.

Still, in the near term, this is an interesting development in the ongoing saga of the link. The question is, what took Google so long?

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Debunking AdWords Dogma: Why You Shouldn’t Bid to Position (& Other Myths that Make No Sense)

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I need to be in position 1! I need to be ahead of my competitors! I need to show up all the time for this keyword! I need to be in the top 3 or I won’t be seen! Wrong, wrong, wrong, and, yes, wrong.

Too many marketers and business owners react emotionally to AdWords. Oddly enough, they have the data available to make accurate decisions, but they let their egos get in the way. Bidding to a specific position in AdWords is B.S. There, I said it (AdWords gurus freak out…now). But…I have data to back it up.

Your average position is a dependent variable. Here’s why – your conversion rate is not influenced by any of AdWords’ metrics. Your click-through rate, average position, impression share, quality score etc. have no influence on your conversion rate. None. So what does this tell us? Your average positions need to be determined by your conversion rates and CPA goals and nothing else. You can’t predetermine the output of the equation before solving the problem. In other words, bidding to position is an anecdotal guess, and why guess when you can be empirical? Time to debunk these myths with actual data.

bid to position myth

Myth: I need to be in position 1!

To be blunt, I hate this. My first question is, why? I understand this logic for your brand terms where your ROAS is 1000%, sure, you want to own that position. Aside from that, you should only own the top position if it is maximizing your profit. Period. There’s no other reason to own it, unless your whole initiative is for branding, but I’d advise against that, as there are much better branding options. If you’re limited by budget, you’ll actually get more clicks within your budget by bidding down, and if you’re not limited by budget, and you don’t have a killer ROI, then you are just letting your ego get in the way of your business sense.

Let’s walk through an example and data to illustrate. We’ll use a basic lead generation example, as e-commerce adds additional layers of complexity that I’ll address later.

If you’re a car insurance broker in Boston, you should have a determined cost per acquisition goal to satisfy your business objectives. Let’s use $100 per lead. You then need to look at your current conversion rate in your AdWords account and use that as a starting point, say 5%. Next, you will use this information to determine your Max CPC. Use this formula: Max CPA x Conversion Rate = Max CPC, $100 x 5% = $5. If you have enough data, you can, and should, determine this at the keyword level. From here, your ad rank is determined by this formula: Max CPC x Quality Score = Ad Rank

So what does this tell us about ad rank? First, let’s look at the variables that affect ad rank in order of our ability to control them:

  1. Ad Extensions – Easiest to control and implement (negligible effect)
  2. Max CPC – Easy to control and implement, just a little more complex
  3. Quality Score – Moderate ability to control (CTR, Landing Pages, etc.), takes time, a number of different variables beyond control
  4. Competition – No Control

But again, these are all the variables that determine the ad position, not the other way around. So what this really tells us is that we need to control what is within our control, and your ad position will be the output not the input. Targeting a certain position without considering these factors is nothing but a bad guess.

For e-commerce, there are whole host of other variables at play. But still, at the most fundamental level, the Max CPC formula still holds true. However, you will need to determine target CPAs based on another set of variables before arriving to the basic formula. These variables include, but are not limited to – Product Margin, Average Order Value, Return On Ad Spend, Lifetime Value, Landing Pages (Check out www.youshouldtestthat.com via Chris Goward @chrisgoward at ClickZ NYC). This perhaps is a topic for version 2 of this post, but these variables only further my point.

Now, my point would be false if in fact the claims I’ve heard countless times about ad rank were true, but they aren’t. You do not convert clicks more in position 3 because “people read these ads” and, no, you aren’t proving you’re the best in position 1, and enticing people by “beating” your competition. The truth is that there is no correlation between ad rank and conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the same in position 1 as is in position 3.

In the regression below, you can see that average conversion rate remains flat regardless of average position, R squared = 0.002, suggesting no correlation.

conversion rate vs ad position

Of course, being in low positions will cause your volume to be limited, but you need to look at other factors beyond your bid before you decide to push up in position. What then can you control? Your offer, landing pages, price, the UX of your site, quality score (to an extent), and seasonality are good places to start. You need to get these factors under control before you go after top positions, not the other way around. If you’re aggressive and willing to accept a higher CPA to test, then sure, go for it to collect data, but if you have a strict CPA goal that leads you to profitability, you simply can’t play in a position that is out of your price range if you want to hit your goals.

Myth: I need to show up all the time for this keyword!

This same argument then holds true for impression share. To illustrate this point, let’s revisit our previous example. We’ve determined that our Max CPC can only be $5 based on our target CPA and conversion rate. Car insurance brokers in Boston often see an average CPC of $40+. Your $5 Max CPC bid will likely gain you <10% impression share, meaning you’ll be lucky to grab a click a day.

So what is the solution here? Bid up to first page? No. Be seen in the top 3? No. You may be tempted to push your impression share higher, as you’re currently losing 90% of your potential impressions due to ad rank (i.e. your competition). As John Gagnon (Bing Ads Evangelist @jmgagnon) shared at the ClickZ conference in NYC, if you see “% Lost due to bid” in Bing or in Google’s language “Impression Share lost due to ad rank,” your bid might not be high enough to even enter the auctions you want to be in. What John said makes total sense. My challenge to marketers then is not can you pay to be in the game, but rather, is your offer even good enough to be in the game? Increasing your impression share won’t improve your conversion rate. So, throwing money at your bids to attract more volume will only cause you to close your business doors before ever being competitive. In this regression, we see no correlation between conversion rate and impression share.

conversion rate vs impression share

Myth: I need to be in the top 3 or I won’t be seen!

Two things are important here. First, people click on ads below position 3. A client of mine had 43,000 clicks last month in average position 4.4. Second, average position doesn’t mean you’re always in that specific position. There can actually be high variance here, and your positioning may actually look something like this for an average position of 3.

adwords myths

Yes, your volume begins to drop as your average position declines, but if you’re in a big volume space (e.g. travel), you can get the volume you need. If you’re in a low volume space (e.g. local dentist), a low position may only drive a handful of clicks a day. But again, you need to get your offer right unless you just want to burn your cash.

So what’s the big takeaway? Don’t bid to position, bid to profitability. Stop listening to your ego and the AdWords gurus, and start listening to what your data tells you. 

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Looking Back at ClickZ Live 2014

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It’s been almost a month since my colleague Tony Testaverde and I made the short trip to New York City for the ClickZ Live conference. For those unfamiliar with the event, ClickZ Live was formerly known as SES Conference and Expo and is one of the preeminent gatherings for online marketers with big-name keynote speakers and industry thought leaders in virtually every panel.

I haven’t had the chance to attend many conferences before, so I was really looking forward to meeting other search practitioners and learning from the great lineup of speakers. Plus, the venue totally rocked and the NIT champion Minnesota Golden Gophers were staying there as well (the championship game was held at Madison Square Garden on the last day of the conference).

Because we’re more interested in the search space at WordStream, and because the sessions have been coveredextensively, I won’t reflect on the keynote presentations themselves, but needless to say, both Randi Zuckerberg and Andy Beal were great.

Day One

After Randi Zuckerberg formally kicked off the conference, I had a chance to scope out the various presentation formats being used at the conference. In the exhibition hall there were numerous booths for sponsors like Bing Ads and iProspect, and there was also a small presentation area and a cool glass space that Google put together for the “Learn with Google” sessions that occurred over the course of the first two days.

Testing was one of the big themes of the first day for me as I attended a theater presentation on “Split Testing Your Way to Conversions.” I think as marketers we can all agree that testing is crucial to building a successful campaign, but sometimes, we get too focused on the optimizing the campaigns that we’re running without paying enough attention to the overall user experience.

According to Erin Everhart at 352 Inc., you can retain 68% more customers on your site with better UX and increase your overall traffic by 120%. Who wouldn’t want numbers like that?

“I think the biggest thing is just talking to your users,” Erin said, speaking about how small businesses can begin to understand whether they have a UX or design problem that could be hurting sales. “I usually recommend starting with the product or service that makes the most money for you. If you can make a small incremental change to a page where you’re selling your highest-selling product, and it gives you 10% more, it’s going to mean more for your business than if you work on something that’s going to be a lower priority for you.”

Another nifty example that Erin pointed out in her session is that while we often focus lots of energy on our SERP position, we overlook what we can do to optimize the text of our SERP listing. Optimizing this text can be much easier than improving your ranking and can yield big benefits.

If Erin left any doubts about the value of testing (she didn’t), Chris Goward made it impossible for anyone to ignore the value of testing in his panel titled “From Landing to Converting: Driving Your Prospects to Purchase.”

Chris is the CEO and Founder of WiderFunnel, a company that helps large organizations optimize their marketing to get more conversions. In his presentation, Chris showed a number of different A/B tests to the audience (of seasoned marketers) and asked them to predict the winner. In each case, one of the tests employed a “best practice” and invariably attracted the vast majority of the votes. Interestingly, the results of the tests proved us wrong every time. Chris’s point wasn’t that we should avoid these “best practices,” but rather that general rules don’t work in every situation and we can only know that by testing.

After he was finished messing with our heads, Chris continued to talk about the value of continuous testing and argued that if you test enough, you can continually iterate your web design and never actually “redesign” your website.

The other big theme I encountered during day one was the rise of display advertising and remarketing. There was a lively panel titled “Remarketing and Behavioral Ads: What’s New?” and I also spent a while at the experts’ roundtable discussing this subject. In fact, remarketing turned out to be one of the hottest topics of conversation for the entire convention, as advertisers and agencies are trying to understand how they can leverage the increasingly available data surrounding the display network to access ad space that was previously only available to the biggest industry players.

In the panel, Andrew Goodman and Christopher Hansen dropped some serious knowledge on the audience. Some of the key takeaways for me were:

  • If you bid higher, you will get access to different inventory. Don't be afraid to bid high and then try bidding down.
  • If your Google remarketing is failing it’s probably time to refine your audience definition.
  • The “3 Rs” of remarketing are Respect, Relevance and Recency.

Perhaps the most important message for all of us to keep in mind is that remarketing is a great way to move your audience from aware but not engaged, to engaged (and it’s great at doing that) but it isn’t a panacea because it doesn’t drive new traffic on its own. In that sense, remarketing is more about leveraging your existing assets (the audience of people who have visited your site) rather than developing new assets that you can do through traditional search, targeted display and organic means.

The day finished off with a cool cocktail reception and a crazy party at night, including a performance from ClickZ’s own band, the Click-Zees!

Day 2

On the second day of the conference, I got my first taste of the “Learn with Google” series of presentations as Nicole Premo dove headfirst into Shopping Campaigns and Mobile Product Listing Ads. Anyone who has been to one of Nicole’s live hangouts knows that she knows just about everything there is to know about Shopping Campaigns. In the session, Nicole officially announced that all PLAs would be migrating to Shopping Campaigns by the end of the summer.

Nicole also walked the audience through the benefits of Shopping Campaigns over PLAs, including:

  • Advanced Reporting.
  • Competitive Landscape Data.
  • Better UX (more like a retail store) so that you can spend less time managing your Product Ads and more time optimizing them.

One thing that Nicole cautioned against was using too many negative keywords with your Shopping Campaigns, as the algorithms in these campaigns is different and negative keywords may stop all of your Product Ads from displaying. I found this recommendation particularly alarming, because as most PPC marketers know, it’s important to use negatives to keep your spend in check and ensure that Google only displays your ad on relevant searches. While I would advocate for the continued use of negatives once you migrate to Shopping Campaigns, it will be important to keep a close eye on your traffic.

The impact of the Shopping Campaign announcement could be felt throughout the conference that day. In the panel on “Mastering PPC,” John Lee of Clix Marketing noted that had changed his presentation on the fly to incorporate the change!

The remainder of the panel was a potpourri of assorted PPC advice, with topics ranging from the value of call extensions to a change in how Bing Ads reports search queries (they now report queries even if they don’t have a click!). In addition to John Lee, John Gagnon from Bing Ads reflected on the recent release of Product Ads for Bing (they will likely move from the side of the SERP to the top once their usage increases). John also talked about the differences in user behavior across devices. According to him, 70% of desktop queries are acted on within a month, while on mobile, 70% are acted on within an hour!

Day 3

While things were starting to wind down by the third day of the conference (the awesome exhibition hall was taken down), there were still some great PPC-related panels that I was super excited to attend. However, to whet my appetite, I started off the day by attending a talk by Bryan Eisenberg on the performance secrets of Amazon.

Bryan’s presentation was captivating as he delved into many of the (amazing) things that Amazon does to stay ahead of the curve. At the heart of Amazon’s domination (30% of all ecommerce goes through Amazon!) is the company’s never-ending desire to continue learning about its customers. To that end, they test like very few other companies out there.

According to Bryan, Amazon changes the prices of its products roughly every six minutes, and they aren’t afraid to test the impact of big changes rather than just running small variations. One important thing to note though is that Amazon won’t test flippantly – every test that occurs above the fold on a product page requires the approval of Jeff Bezos himself!

Amazon also puts its money where its mouth is in terms of investing in innovation. How can traditional retailers like Barnes & Noble hope to compete when Amazon’s R&D budget ($6.5 billion) is nearly as big as Barnes & Noble’s REVENUE ($6.8 billion)?

So, in summary, if you want to win like Amazon, all you have to do is maintain an unwavering focus on the customer, test like crazy and invest $6.5 billion in R&D. Sounds easy enough to me!

As I made my way over to the panel titled “Work Smarter Not Harder: Campaign Automation to Drive Extreme Results,” I was excited to shift gears back to PPC.  While all of the panels were extremely informative and entertaining, Steve Hammer’s presentation was by far the most engaging (at least for those of us nerds who grew up during the 1980s), as it was a non-stop reference to classic video games.

During his talk, Steve showed the audience how to identify actions that can easily be automated (spoiler alert – it’s any repeatable action in which you can define the metric, the target, and the action you want to take), and even delved into some of his own code for creating AdWords Scripts, which can be used to automate certain tasks or allow you to make changes based on external data like the weather or stock prices.

Steve also made a point of noting that while automation is great, “automation can’t fix bad.” In other words, you need to make sure that your business model is ready to scale. Perhaps Kye Mou of Marin Software summed it up best when he quoted Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

The final panel I attended ended things off with a WordStream-themed bang. It was titled “How to Implement a Winning PPC Auditing Framework” and was moderated by the indomitable John Lee. While WordStream wasn’t on the panel, Courtney Herda and Jon Kagan leveraged lots of data that we’ve published (include link to infographic here) to help attendees understand the value in running a PPC audit. Over the course of their presentation, Cortney and Jon walked through a thorough list of items to review, including your account structure, common settings, keywords, ad copy, extensions and landing pages.

While they didn’t have time to delve too deeply into best practices for each area of the audit, a couple interesting recommendations that they had were:

  • If you advertise on the Bing Partner Network, you should review the referring domains from the Partner Network every other week (Bing will allows domain parking sites in its Partner Network).
  • If you separate ad groups by match type, make sure to cross-pollinate negatives and check your Search Query Report frequently so that traffic is directed appropriately.
  • Regularly evaluate your ad copy and adapt any ads that show on mobile devices by using phrases like “from your phone” or “call for…”

At the end of the panel, Tony and I packed up and bade a fond farewell to the Big Apple.

The ClickZ Live conference was packed with tons of big-name speakers and I enjoyed the various forums for learning. I highly recommend it for all online marketers whose responsibilities stretch over PPC, display, SEO and content marketing. If you’re feeling jealous of our experience, check out the ClickZ Live website for information on upcoming conferences in cities around the world including Toronto, Shanghai, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Chicago.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Test Shows First Evidence of Google Testing Quality Score for Organic Search

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Rand Fishkin just published the results of a test he did to see if query and click-through data might affect search rankings. To run the test, he asked his Twitter followers to search the term “imec lab” and click on the Moz result. He did not link to the post in his tweet:

Rand writes:

A blog post I’d published last week ranked number 7 in Google US results (incognito/logged-out, without regional geographic bias), the same as it had a week prior just after I wrote it (sadly, I forgot to take a screenshot last week when I first looked at the ranking). After noting the position and taking a screenshot, I sent this tweet

Over the next few hours, people on Twitter took action, and responded back. And then something fascinating happened:

I’d estimate between 175-250 people likely saw the tweet and took action (though it’s hard to know that number for certain). The blog post itself  received 228 visits from Google on April 30th, and I’d guess that the majority of these came from the tweet. To compare, on April 29th (the prior day), traffic from Google search accounted for a mere 7 visits to the page.

By the time I checked again (at 9:01pm Pacific), I saw the same thing folks on Twitter were reporting. The page in question had moved up to the 1st position (at least in non-personalized, non-region-specific US results).

This is just one test and it’s certainly possible the move in rank was due to some coincidence or confounding variable. But if not, this is evidence that Google is already testing (or already using, in low-volume/long-tail query spaces with a dearth of link data) click-through data in its organic search ranking algorithm.

In case you haven’t seen me riding this hobby horse, I’ve been posting a series of (highly speculative) articles on the potential future of the Google ranking algorithm:

  • First, there was the business with Google claiming guest-blogging is dead, which led to the idea that …
  • Google has realized the link is dying as a valid signal of authority; we (Larry and I) predicted organic search would move to a model more like Ad Rank in paid search, based on click-through rate and other user engagement data.
  • Then Matt Cutts admitted in a webmaster video that Google has tried versions of the algorithm without links. (He added that they don't work great..."for now.")
  • Then I asked a bunch of search experts, including Rand and some die-hard link-builders, to predict the future of PageRank and linking. Most were pretty conservative in their predictions, e.g. no big changes in the next 3 to 5 years.
  • Then I leaped on another off-hand comment in a webmaster video, when Cutts said that people don’t like to porn sites (even though they’re very popular!). I took this as more evidence that Google already has versions of the ranking algorithm that don’t depend heavily on links.
  • Yesterday, I responded to a Moz post suggesting that brand mentions might replace or supplement links. (Could be a patch on the link problem, but not a spam-killer IMO.)

I’m excited about this new development, though of course it’s too early to say that Google is already using a Quality Score—type algo for organic search. (Remember that Quality Score is mostly about beating your expected click-through rate based on your position.) What do you think? Is it plausible?

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.


Did Google's 'Not Provided' Decision Slow Down Brand Bidders?

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By now, nearly everyone in the paid search industry has heard about Google’s decision to stop passing query data in its referring ad URLs. After an initial panic, many of us were brought back to our senses by some well-reasoned posts from industry experts. Among them was WordStream’s own Larry Kim, who explained very clearly that search query data isn’t dead. Advertisers will still be able to pull this information from the Search Terms Report and through third-party platforms that use the AdWords API.

Figuring Out Who Was Impacted by Google’s Policy Change

So if the impact is pretty minimal for most advertisers, where are the effects being felt? After asking ourselves this question, we developed some criteria to evaluate whether an advertiser’s campaigns would be significantly hampered by the recent changes. Our list quickly narrowed as we hypothesized. After all, why would an advertiser specifically need the search query data to be held in the referring ad URL? Wouldn’t a tool like the Search Terms Report or a third-party platform such as WordStream meet their needs?

Below are the basic indicators that we ultimately identified. To feel a major effect from this decision, an advertiser would have to be:

  1. Targeting a wide range of keywords in each campaign - most likely by broad matching and using Dynamic Keyword Insertion to increase the relevance of their ads.
  2. Spinning content on their landing page - by passing the query string from the referring ad URL.
  3. Running many different campaigns - otherwise, it would be pretty easy to modify the match types within a single campaign.

In other words, exactly the kind of behavior you might expect from brand bidders.

Wait, What Is Brand Bidding?

Before jumping into this post, I should probably clarify my terms. “Brand bidding” may sound like I’m talking about an advertiser placing PPC ads on keywords related to its trademark (for example, Nike bidding on search terms like “Nike” or “Nike shoes” on Google). However, while this is a valuable topic and has even been covered right here at WordStream, it’s not what I’m referring to.

I’m using “brand bidding” to describe situations where an advertiser other than the brand is placing ads on that brand’s trademarked terms. For example, if Puma were placing ads when people searched for “Nike,” I’d say that Puma is brand bidding. Similarly, if a coupon site places ads on “Nike discount,” the coupon site is brand bidding.

Here’s a more visual example of brand bidders targeting AllState. I’ve marked AllState’s own ad in green, and the two brand bidders in red:

what is brand bidding

In this case, the two brand bidders are actually marketing partners of AllState. They may be allowed to do this, or they may not. I don’t personally know for sure. Sometimes brands will allow select partners to bid on their brand so that they can block out competitors on the SERP. However, in many other cases, brand bidders can harm your own PPC campaigns. They can divert traffic to their own sites and even increase your Cost-per-Click, ultimately making you pay more for fewer visits.

I could certainly go into more detail, but I think that should be plenty for our purposes here. Just remember that brand bidders are the other advertisers who show up when people search for a particular brand.

So, What Does Brand Bidding Have to Do with ‘Not Provided’?

Okay, we’ve detailed some criteria above. We know a little bit about what type of advertiser we’re looking at: someone who’s running a bunch of broad campaigns that pull query strings onto landing pages and probably use DKI. What does this have to do with brand bidding?

Well, over time BrandVerity has become quite familiar with certain advertisers who seem to meet our criteria above. In particular, we typically find Comparison Shopping Engines, or CSEs, running ads that appear to pass along query strings to their respective landing pages. These CSEs’ ads reproduce searches on their own sites, taking the user’s original search terms and placing them into the search box on the comparison shopping engine’s own landing page. Let’s walk through a quick example to illustrate the setup.

comparison shopping engine

The sequence above goes like this:

  1. User searches for “adidas shoes” on Google
  2. PriceGrabber places an ad featuring “Adidas Shoes” in the title
  3. PriceGrabber’s landing page features a search for “adidas shoes”

We see the same string move from place to place, ultimately ending up on PriceGrabber’s landing page. So, how did it get there? Our suspicion was that PriceGrabber and other CSEs were taking advantage of Google’s search query parameter and passing it through to their landing pages. This would explain the prevalence of CSE ads that we find recasting searches on their own sites. Plus, it would also meet our original criteria for advertisers that would be heavily impacted by Google’s changes. By making a before/after comparison of comparison shopping engines’ ads, we could start to see whether their campaigns were truly affected.

Were CSEs Actually Passing Query Strings?

Once we had our hypothesis it was time to start testing. To determine the impact of Google’s change, first we’d need to know what the CSEs had been doing in the past. Fortunately, some of our monitoring turned up a relatively continuous stream of CSE ads dating back to December of 2013. Within that data set, we focused on a subset of 12 popular CSEs.

So, what did we find? Let’s start by revisiting the PriceGrabber example from above. That particular ad was placed on March 30, 2014 (before the new restrictions came into play. You can see that the query string was still present in the referring ad URL:

Here we have an ad that could benefit from passing along the query string (higher landing page relevance) and had the chance to do so. That’s motive and opportunity—but what about the means? It sure looks like it’s passing along the query string, but we can’t confirm anything quite yet. The missing evidence can be found in a number of ways, but one key indicator here would be match type. If the advertiser were using exact match, there would be no reason to pull the search query from the referring URL. The advertiser would already know it! Depending on how the campaign was set up, you could either A) “hard-code” a specific Ad Group to lead to a landing page that searches for “adidas shoes”, or B) use the ValueTrack keyword parameter to pull “adidas shoes” onto the landing page.

If we look at the PriceGrabber example a bit closer, here’s what we see in the landing page URL:

brand bidders

There we have it: exact match. With that setup, PriceGrabber can easily pull in the search query through the {keyword} ValueTrack parameter. We actually see them doing exactly that in the string above. So, in this particular example, the trail ends here. The CSE seems to be pulling the query string through alternative means.

What If CSEs Had Already Changed Their Tactics?

Of course, it’s worth remembering that our example above occurred only a week and a half before Google rolled out the update. Perhaps some of their more prominent advertisers had already been notified of the changes. Let’s look further back and see if we can find anything different. Here’s another example from PriceGrabber, this time targeting the merchant Genius Chargers:

Brand Bidding Examples

Again, things start to look like they’re lining up. The comparison shopping engine plants branded keyword in the headline, then copies the search over to their own site. Seems as though the ad might be passing the query string through. But I didn’t have to look much longer to find evidence to the contrary. Fortunately, since I started looking at an even larger time window, I had a larger pool of ads to analyze. I was quickly able to see that this particular ad had actually been triggered by multiple keywords. Here’s a BrandVerity screenshot showing exactly which keywords it appeared on:

Brand Bidding for Keywords

Each of those 6 keywords on the left resulted in the same PriceGrabber ad. The same copy. The same landing page. The same search query on that landing page. From that evidence, we can see that PriceGrabber could not have been passing query strings in this case either. Otherwise, the search on the landing page would have varied instead of consistently showing “Genius Chargers” in the search box. Furthermore, after looking through the landing page URLs more closely, it seems that PriceGrabber was simply running the same static ad and broad matching it on an array of searches.

What about Other Advertisers?

I’ve deliberately focused on a specific advertiser to make this piece as clear as possible. But you may be wondering about the others. After all, one advertiser’s results won’t necessarily speak for all the others. So, what did we notice across our set of data?

After analyzing ads from a dozen different CSEs, we were able to find evidence from each of them to suggest that they were not passing search queries in their ads. We looked for signals similar to the ones we discussed in the PriceGrabber examples above, focusing on ads placed before Google’s policy change. While we couldn’t find a counterexample for every last combination of advertiser and keyword, we believe that the counterexamples we did find are strong indicators of how a given advertiser’s AdWords account is set up. In other words, even if we only found evidence to prove that Sale-Fire was not passing query strings on Adidas keywords, it’s still a good bet that Sale-Fire wasn’t passing query strings on Nike keywords either.

We also made sure to look into some advertisers other than CSEs. In particular, we wanted to check on search arbitragers (for a quick background, check out this post from Flying Cork Media). Interestingly, although we selected some of the most notorious arbitragers in paid search, we found that they were not passing search query data either.

The Takeaway for Brands

Based on our findings here, it seems that brand bidding will stay relatively constant. I hate to be the bearer of this somewhat bad news, but there’s no compelling evidence to suggest that Google’s recent policy change will have any effect to deter brand bidders’ campaigns. For now, it looks like everything will be status quo.

However, please remember that our study was limited to a specific set of brands, keywords, and advertisers. It’s very possible that other CSEs were doing things differently—or that these same CSEs were advertising differently on different sets of keywords. Over the next few months, it would certainly be interesting if any of you experience CPC drops on your branded keywords—or anything else that might indicate a decrease in brand bidding. If you happen to notice any new trends, I’d love to hear about them!

This post comes from Sam Engel of BrandVerity. Sam is BrandVerity’s Marketing Manager, and enjoys exploring the trademark and brand issues that come up in paid search.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Come and Work with WordStream – a Cook Associates ‘Up-and-Coming’ Employer!

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I don’t know about you, but after six years of headlines telling us how badly the economy is doing, I’ve just about had enough of the doom and gloom. How about some good news for a change?

According to Cook Associates, Inc., an executive search firm with offices in Boston, Chicago and New York City, the job markets here in the Hub and the Big Apple are on the mend after enduring a nasty slump during the second half of last year.

Even better news is that WordStream was named one of Boston’s “up-and-coming” employers after enjoying one of our strongest quarters ever in Q1 2014 and bringing more than 20 new staff members on board – myself included!

In its Q1 Digital Jobs Index, Cook revealed that hiring was up 2.2% during the first quarter of 2014 in Boston and 4.6% in New York City.

In Boston, 200 internet and digital media companies added 375 jobs in Q1. In New York City, 376 companies added 1,700 jobs (just this once, we’ll let the bitter Boston/New York sporting rivalries slide on account of all the new jobs being created and the fact that its Friday and all).

Boston Q1 Job Growth

Boston’s top company in terms of headcount gained in Q1 was Wayfair (who, coincidentally, have offices in the same building as WordStream – no wonder the lines for the elevator are so long first thing in the morning), with Care.com, Amazon, HubSpot and Google rounding out the top 5.

Aside from WordStream, other up-and-coming Boston-based companies mentioned in the list include mobile app marketing company Localytics, inbound real estate marketing firm Placester, hyperlocal social app CO Everywhere, and quantitative internet marketing firm AdHarmonics.

New York City Q1 Job Growth

Google emerged as the leader in terms of new Q1 hires in the Big Apple, with Amazon, Facebook, Yelp and Spotify close behind in the top 5.

Notable mentions in New York’s up-and-coming category include handmade ecommerce marketplace Etsy, website-building platform SquareSpace, ethical eyewear retailer Warby Parker, and real-time information discovery service Dataminr.

Got What It Takes to Work with WordStream?

Come and work with us! We’re an active bunch.

WordStream has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, and everything we’ve accomplished is a result of the hard work and dedication of our people. We’re growing rapidly, and are always on the lookout for talented individuals who want to work with us in our mission to help businesses of all sizes leverage the power of paid search.

We’re currently hiring for a range of positions, from sales and marketing to UX and software engineering:

  • Product Manager
  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Front-End Software Engineer
  • Senior UX Designer
  • Customer Success Specialist
  • Inside Sales Representative
  • Business Development Representative
  • Paid Search Strategist
  • Customer Success Account Executive
  • Customer Marketing Specialist
  • Customer Success Associate – International Client Focused

To apply for one of these positions, check out our jobs page, and if you’ve got what it takes, come and grow with WordStream. We can’t wait to hear from you!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

What Is Long-Form Content and Why Does It Work?

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Ask two content marketers about long-form content and you’ll likely get two completely different responses. The first might say that long-form content is a gamble, given audiences’ supposedly miniscule attention spans. The other might say that producing longer articles is an excellent way to engage with readers and offer them genuine value and a rewarding experience.

Which of these content marketers is right? Yep, you guessed it – the long-form content evangelist. Why? Let’s find out.

Table of contents

What Is Long-Form Content?

It might seem obvious, but there are many different definitions of what long-form content truly is. Some people consider articles longer than 700 words to be long-form, whereas others think that articles have to be in excess of 1,800 words to be considered long-form. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that long-form content refers to articles of around 1,200 words or longer.

Despite what some content marketers might think, many readers crave meatier articles – and publishers are delivering. For instance, business news site Quartz refuses to publish articles in the typically news-friendly 500-800 word range, because Kevin Delaney, Quartz’s Editor-in-Chief, believes that too many sites adhere religiously to this format. Delaney even developed a model (known as the Quartz Curve) based on article length that forms the basis of the publication’s approach to content:

Why Does Long-Form Content Work?

We used to be skeptics, too. Our average piece of content was around 1,000 words or fewer. We focused heavily on SEO, including keyword optimization. The only problem with this strategy? We were getting a lot of search traffic, but not a lot of return traffic, direct traffic, or brand searches, and our user engagement metrics – stuff like bounce rate and time on site – were pretty low.

So we switched up our tactics a bit and started incorporating more long-form articles into our content strategy. The goal was to increase user engagement– and it worked extraordinarily well.

As you can see in the figure above, the average visit duration for our blog rose steadily from late 2012 – around the time we started producing long-form content. Of course, there are several other factors that contributed to this rise, including better content promotion, but creating longer, more in-depth content that provides tons of value to our audience has been a very successful part of our content strategy; one that resulted in tripling our average time on site from 1:33 to 4:35.

In fact, some of our longest posts have been our most successful. For example: Our most popular post of the past year, “Find Your Old Tweets: How to See Your First (Worst?) Tweet,” clocked in at over 2,300 words. It’s been viewed over 100,000 times just in the past few months, with average time on page of almost 8 minutes!

Long-form content can also have a positive impact on a page’s rank in the SERPs. In the figure below from serpIQ, you can see that the top-ranked content is around 2,450 words – definitely not light reading!

Long-form content isn’t just rewarded by the search engines – it also resonates with readers.

Blog platform Medium compiled data on its most successful articles by measuring the average time on page in relation to post length and the amount of time it takes the average reader to finish the post. Based on this data, the ideal blog post takes seven minutes to read and is around 1,600 words long:

Content length can also be determined by the subject matter. Marketing blog ViperChill put together some data on the average word length of a random sampling of blog posts categorized by industry, which makes for interesting reading:

5 Examples of Excellent Long-Form Content

So, now we’re (roughly) on the same page, let’s dive into what great long-form content looks like. Most of the frequently cited long-form content out there tends to be journalism (think the image-rich features you can see in The New York Times), but these examples show how brands and marketers can use this type of content to their advantage, generating traffic, leads, and brand value.

1. IBM – ‘Memphis P.D. Case Study’

“Big Data” has become one of the tech sector’s most beloved (and frequently abused) buzzwords. Although everyone and their grandmother seems to be “into” big data, few people can provide a solid example of how large-scale data analysis can actually be used. IBM, one of the major players in big data, realized this and set out to show, not tell, how big data can make people’s lives better in a case study focusing on the Memphis police department.

Rather than waxing lyrical about its impressive technology, or bombarding the reader with technical specifications, IBM took an alternative approach by telling a story; in this case, the struggles experienced by Larry Godwin, Director of Police Services for the Memphis P.D (PDF).

Just as effective PPC ads appeal to prospective customers’ desire to solve problems, the IBM case study outlines Godwin’s difficulties in fighting crime in light of a dwindling budget, rising crime rates and an increasingly cynical populace, before explaining how the application of IBM’s predictive analysis technology helped the Memphis P.D. become more effective by identifying areas in which criminal activity was more concentrated – but not necessarily related in a way that officers may have been able to piece together.

Why It Works

IBM understood that producing a bland, corporate puff piece wouldn’t win them any customers or pique people’s curiosity about predictive data analysis. Most people don’t care about how the technology works– they’re more interested in what it does. By showing how its technology had a direct impact on the lives of Memphis citizens, IBM highlights the potential of predictive analytics and grounds the story in the lives and struggles of real people.

2. Chevrolet – ‘100 Years of Icons’

Some of the best examples of long-form content come from brands. Case in point, Chevrolet’s “100 Years of Icons,” a journey through time with one of America’s most instantly recognizable brands.

Beginning in 1914 with the Royal Mail Roadster, the article chronicles not only the development of new automotive technologies during the past century, but also the unique position the Chevrolet brand occupies in American culture. The piece features striking images of Chevy’s most iconic vehicles to accompany the surprisingly modest copy, including photos of classic models like the El Camino, Camaro and Corvette.

Why It Works

This example is particularly clever, as it not only provides gearheads with lots of information about the specifications of each vehicle (including horsepower, the number of cylinders each engine had and the sticker value at the time of release), it also reinforces the concept of longevity – not just of the Chevrolet brand, but of the manufacturer’s individual vehicles. By taking the reader on a journey through the brand’s history, Chevrolet appeals to consumers’ desire for a reliable and stylish car in an entertaining and informative way.

3. Patagonia – ‘Climbing in Iceland with Loki the Deceiver’

Patagonia is one brand that really “gets” long-form content.

Although Patagonia is essentially just another activewear apparel brand, its content strategy sets it apart from its competitors. Posts like this example perfectly demonstrate how providing interesting long-form content can be genuinely compelling and a great way to build a brand.

In “Climbing in Iceland with Loki the Deceiver,” Kitty Calhoun, proprietor of women’s ice and rock climbing organization Chicks Climb, tells the story of how she and three other climbers embarked on an adventure to the heart of the Icelandic wilderness. The post reads like a professional travelogue, and is accompanied by photos taken by Calhoun and her traveling companions, each revealing a glimpse of Iceland’s grandeur and mystery to the reader.

Far from a self-indulgent tale of a glamorous winter sports expedition, Calhoun’s post reveals the difficulties she and her fellow climbers experienced during their trip, including brutal weather conditions, dangerous climbs and the trepidation that comes with braving the unknown – all classic ingredients of a compelling story.

Why It Works

Patagonia knows that creating an immersive experience for the reader is an excellent way to establish credibility and appeal to their ideal customer’s sense of adventure. This post doesn’t try to sell anything; not once is Patagonia’s apparel even mentioned. What this post accomplishes is showing readers how Patagonia customers live their lives; it appeals to their competitive spirit and desire to tackle exciting new challenges. The post itself also happens to be a fascinating read, even if you’re not an outdoor sports enthusiast.

Even the author’s bio makes a statement. Calhoun is referred to as a “Patagonia ambassador,” reinforcing the idea that Calhoun (and others like her) are bold explorers who stand behind the quality of Patagonia’s products – not just people who buy down winter jackets.

4. Quick Sprout – ‘The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking’

Neil Patel, founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, knows a thing or two about how to launch and grow startups. In our fourth example of long-form content, Patel and co-author Bronson Taylor essentially give away everything they know about growth hacking.

This eBook is divided into 10 chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of growth hacking. Available as an online resource or downloadable PDF, this guide covers a range of topics in great depth, from pull/push tactics and the growth hacker funnel to driving engagement and user retention. The guide doesn’t just explain what these concepts involve – it provides actionable examples of how readers can apply these techniques to their own ventures, making it a remarkably useful resource.

Why It Works

Patel and Bronson made a conscious decision to share their knowledge freely. They could have easily placed the downloadable guide behind a web form to generate leads– but they didn’t. This simple act makes the guide tremendously accessible, an important consideration for content producers.

As one of the lengthiest of our examples of long-form content, this guide also demonstrates that Patel and Bronson also gave a great deal of thought to their content’s ideal format. They didn’t hamstring themselves by forcing everything into a blog post, or cutting corners to reduce its overall length. Instead, they chose to give the content as much room as it needed – something many content marketers neglect to do.

Finally, both Patel and Bronson are experts in their field. This lends the content an air of authority, and further establishes them as thought leaders in the startup world. 

5. Airbnb – ‘2012 Annual Report’

Few pieces of corporate collateral are as dull as the annual report. However, Airbnb decided to take a fresh approach to showcasing the company’s impressive growth by making an interactive annual report that shows even the blandest corporate documents can be transformed into exciting and compelling long-form content.

At first glance, Airbnb’s annual report doesn’t look like long-form content. Delve a little deeper, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a treasure-trove of fascinating data about the company’s expansion.

In addition to information that investors would want to see, Airbnb’s annual report also features real stories from people who have used the service, including travelers and hosts. Audio files and images of Airbnb users telling their own stories are embedded directly into the page, allowing readers to scroll through the company’s growth from 2012 to 2013 and experience how guests and hosts alike have benefited from the remarkable cultural exchanges made possible by Airbnb.

Why It Works

The success of this piece of long-form content lies solely in how Airbnb’s creative team made a traditionally boring document into an interactive story of growth. Visually, the report is bright, engaging and presents a great deal of information in an easily understandable way, but it doesn’t skimp on the hard data that an annual report needs to have, either.

The inclusion of user stories provides a much-needed human element to the report – for a business centered around people and travel, a list of statistics (no matter how impressive) just wasn’t going to cut it. Airbnb decided to show investors how people’s lives have been changed by the service, not just tell them.

Hopefully this post has given you some ideas for your own content projects, and why long-form content should be an integral part of your content strategy.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Matt Cutts Says Yes, Links Will Inevitably Lose Value Over Time

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In the latest Webmaster video, Matt Cutts answers a question that could have come from me (but actually came from someone named Leah in New York):

Google changed the search engine market in the '90s by evaluating a website's backlinks instead of just the content ... Updates like Panda and Penguin show a shift in importance towards content. Will backlinks lose their importance?

There have been some arguments – notably from Russ Jones in the comments on this post (extrapolated on by Rand Fishkin in a recent Whiteboard Friday) – that links will actually increase in value over time.

In the below video, Matt Cutts says the opposite is true. It’s not around the corner, but Google will eventually put less emphasis on links– not, however, purely because of link spam, but because links to a site aren’t the best measure of the value of a single page for a given search.

Let’s walk through what he actually says in response to her question.

Cutts:"Inevitably what we're trying to do [as a search engine] is figure out how an expert user would say, this particular page matched their information needs."

Translation: Google wants to provide the best “answer” to the user’s “question” (whether or not the search query is technically a question). In a perfect world, the algorithm would be able to deliver that answer as well as an expert (or all-knowing god) in that field.

Cutts: "Sometimes backlinks matter for that; it's helpful to find out what the reputation of a site or a page is."

Translation: Historically, Google has depended heavily on reputation and authority when it comes to ranking pages – i.e., the New York Times can rank for whatever it wants. Sometimes backlinks matter in determining reputation, he says. They’re “helpful” – not the be-all, end-all.

Cutts: "But for the most part, people care about the quality of the content on that particular page, the one that they landed on."

Translation: To be a great search engine, Google needs to know what people really want when they want it. There’s a difference between authority and popularity, and for some searches, popularity matters more. And links aren’t necessarily the best way to measure popularity. (The NYT isn’t always going to have the best story.)

Cutts: "So I think over time, backlinks will become a little less important."

Translation: Cutts is admitting that links aren’t necessarily the best way to find the best “answer” for every search question. Or, even if links are the best measure we have now, they’re not the best possible measure. If Google wants to stay #1, they’ll have to change and get better.

Remember when we talked about porn? People don’t link to porn sites; they don’t have “authority” in the Googley sense. So how do they rank porn? And what other verticals might be porn-like, as it were? In other words, in what areas of search would people care less about reputation and authority? Cutts seems to be admitting that reputation isn’t that important to the average user, but the relevance of the content is.

Then Cutts says that Author Rank is helpful for identifying experts in a field, but …

Cutts: "Even if we don't know who actually wrote something, Google is getting better and better at understanding actual language. So one of the big areas we're investing in is trying to figure out how to do [something] more like a Star Trek computer, so conversational search: the sort of search where you can talk to a machine and it will understand you, so you're not just using keywords."

Translation: Google wants to get better at understanding what users want so it can be better at delivering that. His example is that if someone searches “how tall is Justin Bieber,” then immediately afterwards, “when was he born,” Google should know that “he” refers to Justin Bieber.

Sounds great (if not exactly Star Trek level), but unfortunately it seems like this is getting worse before it gets better. Google has gotten really bad at answering long-tail search queries. For example, the other day I googled “ten books that might be poetry,” looking for a particular article by that name. I didn’t use quotes because I wasn’t sure if I had the title exactly right, and I didn’t know if the number was written out or not.

backlinks will lose value in google

As it turns out, I had the title right, but Google ignored half the words in my query and just returned a bunch of random articles that included the words “ten,” “books,” and “poetry” – the article I was looking for was many pages deep into the index. I had to refine the query to include the author’s name to get it on the first page. (I only remembered the author’s name because it was me.) If we still need links, maybe it’s because Google is still so bad at conversational search.

Cutts: "As we get better at understanding who wrote something and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably over time, there will be a little less emphasis on links."

Translation: Again, the idea here is that the best way to find the right answer for a given question is to fully understand both the question and the answer. Reputation will always matter, but not as much as the content of the page and whether or not it’s the best answer.

Cutts: "For the next few years, we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and of sites."

Translation: Google still needs links because they haven’t figured all this stuff out yet. But note that he said “for the next few years” – not the next decade. That means linkless search (or much-less-link-dependent search) isn’t too far off.

Note, also, that there’s an opportunity here for the “next Google.” A smaller, more agile company, one that isn’t so wedded to links, could come along and figure out conversational search before Google, and that would change everything.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Yahoo Gemini: Complete Guide to Yahoo's Mobile & Native Advertising Offering

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Yahoo's Gemini marketplace for mobile and native ads launched in February and is now the default audience option in the Yahoo self-serve advertising manager. But what is Gemini and how does it work?

what is yahoo gemini

Yahoo Ad Manager launched in January as a simplified platform for advertisers to buy and manage native ad products like Stream Ads, Image Ads and sponsored Tumblr posts. Gemini was added to leverage the power of mobile and native advertising together; their native ads are optimized for tablet and mobile devices.

Yahoo Gemini powers native ads that put sponsored brand content in front of Yahoo's 400 million monthly users in contextually relevant ways.

But First…Why Native Ads?

If you're not yet familiar with the format, native advertising is the increasingly popular method of reaching audiences with contextual messaging that appears alongside – or in-stream with – editorial content. Some describe it as a subset of content marketing; others as content's "sponsored twin."

yahoo gemini native ad network

Whatever your definition, native advertising has proven incredibly effective, especially against more traditional web advertising formats. A Sharethrough study, for example, found that people were 25% more likely to look at native ads than banner ads and viewed them 53% more frequently. Participants in that study were also more likely to share native ads with their contacts and demonstrated greater purchase intent after viewing them, compared to other types of ads. In the U.S., almost three-quarters of publishers already offer native advertising on their sites.

In their presentation Yahoo Gemini Vision & Impact, Yahoo shares a number of other stats on native advertising:

  • Perceived effectiveness is fueling marketer investment in native ads, up from $1.4B in 2012 to $3.1B in 2014.
  • Only 4% of marketers say they're completely satisfied with their mobile ad campaigns.
  • 95% of digital advertising pros buy mobile ads.
  • Investment in native ads is expected to rise to $5B a year by 2017.

Despite their omnipresence and enthusiasm among advertisers, 85% of consumers have never even heard of native ads.  The FTC has been clear in their position on clearly marketing native advertisements as such, yet only 79% of advertisers understand that native content must be identified as advertisements. Clearly, it's a format with opportunity, yet there is much to be learned.

What Is Yahoo Gemini?

Yahoo's Gemini offering helps advertisers reach mobile consumers in a contextually relevant, effective way: through native ads tailored for mobile. It's a marketplace worth considering; Yahoo has more than 430 million monthly mobile users who average 104 minutes per month.

Where Google consolidated desktop and tablet paid search with the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns, Yahoo is offering advertisers the ability to manage mobile and tablet ads from a separate interface with Gemini. This is an opportunity to get more granular with your search strategy.

yahoo gemini

Image from Yahoo

Gemini advertisers have targeting options including geotargeting, broad and exact match, and negative keywords. They plan to offer sitelink, location and call extensions; phrase match; day parting; and device, language, radius and operating system targeting in the future.

Currently, Yahoo is in the process of rolling the ads out to greater audience segments. In March, just 1% of mobile search traffic would see Gemini ads, though they planned to increase in April and beyond. Yahoo plans to have all accounts migrated and set up in Gemini by April 30.

Yahoo's native ads appear on the Yahoo homepage and in the following Yahoo products: Mail, Mobile Search, News, Sports, Finance, Celebrity, Movies, TV, Music, Travel, Homes, Autos and My Yahoo. Ads automatically adapt to the device type, whether computer, mobile or tablet.

How Does Gemini Work With Bing Ads?

It doesn't. Currently, Bing Ads campaigns are incompatible with Gemini, which is proprietary to Yahoo and built on a separate codebase.

Bing offered this explanation of the impact of Yahoo Gemini on Bing Ads:

"Bing Ads provides search ads on all devices, including mobile devices, across Bing and Yahoo search results pages, as well as our network of partner sites. Only a portion of search ads on Yahoo’s mobile search pages will be provided by Yahoo Gemini instead of Bing Ads. Bing Ads remains the only platform for purchasing mobile search ads on Bing and its network of partner sites and also delivers search ads on the highest performing mobile search placements (i.e., topmost on page) for web searches on Yahoo’s mobile search pages."

In case that wasn't clear, Bing's FAQ page on Gemini also says,

"Bing Ads is the only unified platform for advertisers to manage paid search advertising across all devices including PC, tablet and mobile devices, in order to achieve scale across the entire Yahoo Bing Network."

According to Adotas, Gemini ads will appear on more partner sites over time, while Yahoo will work to create parity between Yahoo Search Ads and Bing Ads.

How Do You Create Ads & Campaigns in Yahoo Gemini?

1.Start by signing in to the Yahoo Ad Manager. If you don't yet have an account, you can easily create one, or log in using your Google or Facebook account.

2.Click 'Campaigns,' then 'Create a Campaign.'

yahoo gemini campaigns

3.Create your ad. For each ad, you'll need:

  • An ad title of up to 50 characters.
  • An ad description of up to 150 characters.
  • Your landing page URL.
  • Your company name, up to 25 characters.
  • Your display URL.
  • An image – for text ads, Yahoo recommends that you use a high-quality image with an 82x82 or 1:1 ratio. For image ads, you can either link to an image or click the camera icon to upload one. Yahoo recommends that images for image ads are 1073 pixels wide by 715 pixels high.

Yahoo Gemini Ads

You'll be able to preview your ad on the right as you create it. Once you've added the information above, click the checkbox to indicate whether or not you want to use the ad information for additional ads.

Click Save Ad to save it in the My Created Ads section of your dashboard.

4.Define your audience. Start by clicking on Advanced Settings, Suggest keywords and 'Modify' as indicated below, to see all of the options available to you.

yahoo gemini help

Now, it's going to look more like this:

Yahoo Gemini Audience

In addition to targeting people in specific locations (country, state, city or DMA), you can indicate areas where you don't want your ads to show.

Yahoo will warn you that Yahoo Gemini native ads and mobile search ads give you maximum reach, but if you want to turn one or the other off for some reason, the option is there.

5.Set your bids. By default, Yahoo allows you to set your maximum cost per click – that is, the maximum you are willing to pay for each click. However, if you look to the far right, there is an option for Advanced pricing.

Yahoo Gemini Budget

If you open advanced pricing, you'll have the option to set different maximums for Yahoo native and Yahoo mobile search ad formats.

Yahoo Gemini Advanced Settings

You can then set a daily budget, or a budget for the life of the campaign. Choose to run ads immediately, or set a start and end date.

6. Name and save or start your campaign.

Gemini Campaign

7. Set up payments. Before you can start your first ad campaign, you need to fund your account.

You'll need to add a minimum of $25.00 to your Yahoo advertiser account. On the first page of the set up payment section of the site, Yahoo has Autoload set as the default option; basically, it tops up your account by withdrawing from your credit card or bank account when your balance is below 10% of the reload amount you indicated.

If you don't want to use Autoload, make sure you turn this off.

Yahoo Gemini Electronic Payment

Follow the prompts to fund your account.

Yahoo Gemini Reporting Options

From the Reporting screen, you can access reports for your campaigns, ad groups (Mobile Search), ads, and keywords (Mobile Search).

However, there's also a 7-Day Performance Report available within the Campaigns tab. This report will show you:

  • The number of times your ads were shown to users.
  • The number of times users have clicked on your ads.
  • The install-click rate is the number of installs divided by the number of clicks you received. It indicates how often users install your app after they clicked through the ads. Try comparing it to the install-impression rate to see how effective you ads are overall.
  • The amount you have spent for the user actions that you have achieved. Please note that this should be used as guidance only as the amount you are charged may differ.
  • The average cost per click is the average amount you have paid for each click. Compare trends by selecting between the two drop-downs.

In the Reporting tab, information is stored for 90 days and includes impressions, clicks and CTRs broken down by:

  • Campaigns
  • Ad Groups - Migrated Mobile Search Only
  • Ads
  • Keywords - Mobile Search Only

Note, these reports are not real-time; there is an 8-hour lag between impressions and reporting in the interface.

Scheduling & Exporting Reports

You can set up automatic reports using the Schedule button in the Reporting tab. Choose to have daily or weekly CSV reports sent to your email.

You can export a report any time by clicking Export within the Reporting tab, selecting CSV, and either opening the .zip file or saving it to your computer.

Bid Landscape Reports

The Bid Landscape report is available in the Reporting tab by clicking Bid Landscape. This is a graph that shows you how changing your bid changes the number of clicks and impressions you would have received over a given timeframe. It's designed to help you optimize your bidding strategy by projecting the effect of variances in your bids.

Good-to-Know Tips on Yahoo Gemini

Here are a few tips/facts that will help you better navigate the Yahoo Ad Manager and work with their native ad offerings:

  • Yahoo recommends that you have fewer than 100 active ad creative at any given time, but there's no actual limit.
  • The Yahoo native ads platform is compatible with IE 9 or higher, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
  • You can have multiple accounts associated with the same Yahoo ID and toggle between accounts.
  • You can use Manage Users to create new user profiles and assign levels of administrative privileges to them.
  • You can delete items in bulk from the main table for paused campaigns, ad groups (Mobile Search), ads, and keywords (Mobile Search).

Yahoo Gemini Apps

Yahoo Gemini, designed to offer advertisers a unified marketplace for mobile search and native advertising, is available now through the self-serve Yahoo Ad Manager. New ad formats, placements and platform features will be released as the service evolves.

Are you going to give Yahoo Gemini a shot? Share your thoughts or experience with it in the comments!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Google AdWords Scripts for My Client Center Out of Beta

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AdWords scripts for My Client Center (MCC) are now out of beta. Google mentioned this during an AdWords API workshop I attended yesterday but only just made a formal announcement. This is big news for agencies, who have been asking for the ability to run scripts across an entire MCC for a while. Previously, you could only run scripts at the account level. This is a powerful feature for automating account management.

AdWords Scripts out of beta

Introduced just a few months ago on March 11, AdWords scripts for MCC allows larger advertisers to manage changes to accounts at scale by hosting all scripts within the account and applying changes to up to 50 accounts simultaneously.

Previously, you could set up a script to run on each account in the MCC. Now you can write one script that iterates over all of your clients. Whether you have multiple accounts within one business or are an agency managing multiple clients, these scripts can make quicker work of repetitive tasks like making basic changes across accounts.

Agencies can also use this to view performance across several accounts. For example, if an agency has a client with multiple AdWords accounts, they can write a script to sum the data from each of the client’s accounts and create a report.

Once you have access, you'll be able to see a new link in your MCC dashboard called "Scripts." Inside, you'll notice it appears much the same as existing AdWords scripts.

AdWords Scripts for My Client Center

The MccApp class in AdWords scripts is the root object of the MCC API – it exposes methods for fetching and selecting accounts.

AccountSelector allows you to select accounts by limiting the number of accounts retrieved using the withlimit method, or by customer IDs using the withIDs method. You can also work on multiple clients at once with the ExecuteinParallel method, which executes a function based on the functionName on each account that the AccountSelector matches.

You can iterate through the selected accounts by using the AccountIterator's hasNext and next methods. The select method allows you to change the execution method to a client account, if needed.

MCC Scripts

You can learn more about the commands and generating reports in the Google Developers help resource.

AdWords scripts for My Client Center are definitely worth giving a shot. You can accomplish all of these tasks with the AdWords API, of course, but this is far more user-friendly (especially for less tech-savvy marketers) and massively reduces your time investment.

Have you had a chance to try out AdWords scripts in MCC? Have you been looking forward to this feature?

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

The Mega Collection of SEO Expert Advice: Best of the Reddit SEO AMAs

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If you're at all familiar with Reddit, you know about their AMA series, AKA, Ask Me Anything. Superstars from Obama to Rob Delaney have done AMA's, committing to answer questions from anyone and everyone who shows up to submit a question. And in recent months, a number of top SEO's have been doing Ask Me Anything sessions in the SEO subreddit (r/bigSEO).

reddit seo amas

Today, we’re bringing you the best of the best: hand-picked advice from the top SEO experts who took to Reddit to share their wisdom in the AMA series.

Our panel of SEO experts answered myriad questions posted on Reddit, which we’ve sorted into the following categories for your convenience:

Without further ado, let’s meet our panel of Reddit SEO experts!

About the SEO Gurus

Joe Hall, Senior Marketing Analyst for Internet Marketing Ninjas

Joe Hall has dabbled in everything online, from AdSense to ebook publishing. He’s built and sold 2 businesses within the last 7 years, and now spends his days working on enterprise level SEO projects with Internet Marketing Ninjas. Joe prescribes to his “Postmodern SEO” philosophy, which you can read about here.

Twitter: @joehall

Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents, Owner of SEO By the Sea Blog

Bill Slawski has been working on the web since 1996, writing about search-related patents first on forums, then on his own blog, SEO by the Sea. Bill currently is the Director of Search Marketing at GoFishDigital, but has also spent years working in Delaware’s highest level trial court as a legal and technical administrator.

Twitter: @bill_slawski

Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

Dr. Pete is a cognitive psychologist, reluctant entrepreneur, coder, content marketer, Star Wars expert, and general ne’erdoweller.

Twitter: @dr_pete

Brian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

From Thailand to Spain, hotels to cafes, Brian Dean maintains his SEO businesses from around the world. His company Backlinko, launched in 2012, is now a top 50 small business blog (according to Technorati).

Twitter: @Backlinko

AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert of Ghergich & Co.

AJ Ghergich is living his dream of owning his own boutique agency, where he exemplifies his passion for creating and promoting awesome visual assets. He’s also a Twitter legend because of his highly-coveted handle, @SEO.

Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

Ross Hudgens, founder of the Siege Media content marketing agency in San Diego, considers himself an accidental entrepreneur with a background in content promotion and link building.

Twitter: @rosshudgens

Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

Jason Acidre is co-founder and CEO of Xight Interactive, an online marketing agency based in the Philippines. He’s known in the SEO industry as the author of the KaiserTheSage SEO blog. Before Jason got into SEO, he was a pro Counterstrike gamer, playing in national-level tournaments.

Twitter: @jasonacidre

Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

Rand Fishkin, the self-proclaimed “Wizard of Moz,” is the co-author and co-founder of Inbound.org, Moz, and the Art of SEO.

Twitter: @randfish

Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools

Jon Henshaw, co-founder of Raven Tools, has been involved with web development and Internet strategy since 1995. He speaks at many online marketing conferences such as PubCon, SMX, SearchFest, SES, and others.

Twitter: @RavenJon

Social Signals

SEO social signals

Q. There's been a lot of talk about Google's (and other engines') use(s) of social signals. As it relates to Google, what social signals do you actually think they are utilizing to influence results, not just ranking of results?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. Google is definitely using social signals from Google+ in private results (a much better name than "Search Plus Your World" because it helps stave off concerns about privacy). Google+ does have strong roots in the social mail app developed by Grouptivity, and there's an acquired Grouptivity patent that talks in depth about how social sharing signals might be used to help rank private results - Page Ranking System Employing User Sharing Data. I wrote about those in [this SEO by the Sea article.] 

There's no clear sign that Google is using social signals in logged-out search or non-private results. But, my belief is that Google will likely use something like the User Rank and Credential Scores that appear to have been first developed for Google's World Wide Q&A type sites, code named Confucius, as described in the patent application: Ranking User Generated Web Content.

Like the score described in the Agent Rank patents (there were three, counting two continuation patents), a reputation score would be based on different topics, so the same person could be considered an expert on SEO, an expert on wines, and a novice when it came to scuba diving.

These reputation scores, as described by Agent Rank, would be difficult to get higher, and easy to go lower in.

I detailed how contributiveness and authority scores might be based on quality signals in posts and responses to posts in a blog post about that patent.

So the quality of your actual interactions with other people at a source such as Google+ could potentially play a large role in ranking signals that Google might use to influence those results. I don't believe that Google is using some kind of author rank or agent rank at this point in time, but hopefully it's going to be used sometime soon.

 

Q. What are some good tactics you have utilized for promoting content that play off the synergy between social media and SEO? For generating links?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. We use social in just about ALL of our outreach. Tools I love to use are Followerwonk, Topsy and Buzzsumo. I mainly use those tools to find influencers related to the content I am promoting.

  • Followerwonk is great for finding overall thought leaders. Just insert your keywords and sort by Social Authority.
  • Topsy is great for finding people who have recently shared very similar content. What we do is find popular articles with lots of social shares that are recent and related to our topic. We use sites like Topsy to find the influencers who shared the article. The odds are if they are sharing very similar content they will like our pitch.
  • BuzzSumo is new but I really like it. It is similar to Topsy but also has a really robust influencers section.

 

Q. What are your thoughts on the recent semi-scandal re: fake Facebook likes? Should organizations be paying for Facebook ads?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A.  Ethics aside for now, for me it's just practicality and taking a long-term view. Fake is fake. Sure, buying likes may give you a short-term boost, and that has real benefits (let's not kid ourselves), but what about long-term? The benefits fade, you could get kicked off entirely, and frankly, you look like an ass to your prospective customers. I'm not a fan of building illusions to impress ourselves - a real business builds assets that last, IMO.

I think social is going to evolve quickly, too, so these games are pretty short-lived. Play if you want, but you'll be playing a new game every month. I've built content 2-3 years ago that still gets traffic when I'm asleep - that's why I believe in the long game.

 

Q. What do you think of Matt Cutts saying they don’t use signals from Facebook and Twitter to rank web pages? I've seen countless anecdotal accounts and even a post you made on SEMRush a few months ago that directly contradicts his stance. Is he lying to keep SEO social spam at a minimum? Or do they really not matter?

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A. I've never been a big believer in social signals. That's actually one of the reasons I wrote that SEMRush post. I wanted to see if there was any evidence that social signals made a difference.

I don't think he's lying. I just think that Google has run into a ton of issues with social signals, including:

Spam: As you pointed out, anyone with half a brain can order 1,000 tweets from Fiverr right now. Google's spent millions of dollars to figure out links. They don't have that level of sophistication with social signals. Why would they switch from a metric that's hard to game (links) to one that's incredibly easy to game (social shares)?

Access: Facebook blocks Googlebot tomorrow. Then what? What about all work Google put into integrating FB likes into the algo? It's probably harder to undo a ranking signal than add one. They also have issues accessing Twitter.

Quality Signal: It takes 2 second to tweet out a blog post. But it takes REAL effort to add a link. Knowing that, links are a BETTER indicator of quality today than they ever were.

Non-social content: Not all content that's good gets shared on social media. I know that I'm not going to share an article I just read about hemorrhoids. But I might link to that article from my health site.

Disavows, removals etc.: What happens when a site you link to starts to suck? You delete the link, right? Well you can't "un-signal" a social signal.

Local SEO

local SEO

 

Q. I'd like to know what you think are best practices for local SEO. Let's assume that you have a new client with a regional business. The market is medium competitive (most results on the first page for "their product their location" searches are PR2-PR3). They have a brand new site - nothing done SEO wise. What steps would you take and why?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. I am by no means a Local SEO Guru but here are some steps I would take.

  • A. Make sure you nail the on page SEO including local keyword modifiers of course.
  • B. Implement Schema local tags as well as anything other relevant schema tags.
  • C. Work on getting local reviews to your Google local page as well as relevant sites like Yelp etc.
  • D. Make sure you are in all the right local directories and getting as many links/citations as possible - use tools like Local Citation Finder and don't forget niche (quality) directories and local chamber of commerce type pages.

Start creating and promoting linkable (visual) assets so your site gains backlinks.

Obviously I am answering this pretty broadly but just trying to give you an idea of where I would start. You can't even start on page optimization without doing keyword research first. I use SEM Rush a ton in the early phase of the game. I like to download all of the competitor's organic but especially paid keywords.

This can lead to keywords you maybe are not thinking of in the early stages.

 

Q. How to you utilize content marketing for a LOCAL business outside of creating content about LOCAL things? For example - NOT a guide to local places/events resources. Let's say it's a dentist in Philadelphia...what kind of content should he be creating/promoting and what is the goal of such content?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A.  Well, frankly, I would never rule out local things. The most thought-provoking SEO talk I've seen was probably when Dr. Mike (@chiropractic) basically landed in Florida 3 days before BlueGlass and proceeded to collect dozens of content ideas of local interest. It was, frankly, embarrassing, because in 3 days, he did what most people complain about for years and never do. There's always a local angle, if you approach it with curiosity. For any local business, you can't ignore that ecosystem.

The other approach is expertise, though. What's his niche? What does he know that other people don't? He doesn't have to be the world's top specialist, but there's something he's got a handle on that can be of benefit. I think that's tougher, though, overall - because the whole world is a lot bigger than just the local ecosystem.

Frankly, don't overlook the basics, either. It's amazing how many local sites don't have the simplest stuff, like hours, directions, etc., and fail to convert what little traffic they get. Build a decent FAQ - I know it sounds lame, but it matters to his patients. Address their fears of dentistry - why is he different, and how will he make their experience as positive as possible? You don't have to attract the whole world - just the right few people and build word-of-mouth momentum.

 

Q. What would you recommend for starting local SEO on a small budget? I'm new to SEO and am looking to grow my local business to higher positions in the search results. What kind of content and link building works well for local?

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A.  The first thing I'd do is choose your keywords VERY carefully. Think of EVERY keyword that potential customers might type into Google, including both local (dentist London) and non-local (dentist).

See what types of results come up in Google. Are they 100% organic? Mostly Google Places/Google+ Local? Both? Once you know that you can start to develop a plan. If you find that the results are mostly Google+ Local, you definitely want to focus on citations and Local SEO, which is a bit different than "normal" SEO.

Either way, you'll want to do a lot of the same types of things: producing content that generates links. I also recommend checking out this local SEO guide.

 

Q. If you had a local client from Toronto, let us assume it’s a storage rental. Please put forward your suggestions. 

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. I'd probably implement these:

  • Build citations, that's for sure.
  • Lead generation-oriented link building. This is mostly done by monitoring discussions from the web that pertain to the product that your client is selling (like continuously tracking forum threads, Q&As, blog discussions, etc... where people ask about storage rentals). You can also search for discussions that are already ranking on search results, and be able to contribute on these threads, since they'll most-likely show up when your client's target customers start researching about storage rentals.
  • Create more top-of-the-funnel content (like lists, how to, curated content, etc...) not just for links, but also to establish rankings for long tails that may eventually help capture more leads.
  • se the skyscraper technique. Identify the competitors' top informational and most linked pages, and make a better one. Then reach out to those who have linked to them in the past. You can also create content around the most frequently searched queries in that space, and check the competitors' content targeting those queries.
  • Invest on a slick mobile version of the site (or responsive).

 

Q. What are your recommendations for site structure as it pertains to service based companies with only one location, but many service areas? Do you recommend that these sites put the locations in the footer or create a folder structure, where they all go into a bucket, which would mean more clicks for the user.

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. It depends a lot on scope, but be really careful, because the footer-based approach running to geo-targeted pages got hit hard by some of the Panda updates and is definitely risky. Focus on your core service areas and, as best you can, write original content for each one. There's way too much spun geo-content. Do not link to all of them in the footer or make a page that's just a list of 1,000 cities that you theoretically service - even if it's 100% true, it's just going to look thin to Google.

I think it's absolutely fine to have landing pages that are finely geo-targeted for PPC, but if that's the case, NOINDEX them. They'll have limited value for organic search. If it were me, I'd probably start with large regions and build up some original content for those pages, branching out from there. Google is not kind to sites trying to rank locally without locations, so you have to tread with caution.

Of course, you can have all the pages you want for actual visitors - I'm just speaking in terms of what I'd let Google crawl and index.

Link Building

SEO link building advice

Q. What are some actionable, definable tips for acquiring links that drive traffic?

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. In my experience, the links that are really valuable and able to constantly send qualified traffic are links that are contextual and coming from Moz-like sites. They also come from pages you've created on sites that can easily rank for the long-tail keywords that you're also targeting (like YouTube and Slideshare).

The most actionable advice that I can really give when it comes to getting these types of links is to work your way up (not an easy route, but for long term campaigns, it's definitely the way to go). The best way to get into these kinds of websites is to really prove that you have something that their readers would really want.

Which I think is a better way when setting up link building campaigns, as you'd first need to start with the content assets that should be up and running on the client's website - before you can actually get to pitch the top blogs in that industry. It's a win/win in the long run, knowing that these assets will eventually be able to attract links from other sites that you weren't even targeting in the first place.

 

Q. I know it varies per industry, but what types of link building would you do for a larger ecommerce site that isn't a household brand?

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. As for building links, these are the things that I'd be implementing more:

LB1. Building more links pointing to the site's important categories (most profitable ones, and those that the client would want to drive more traffic to). Well, there are so many tactics to choose from when building links to categories, such as:

  • Guest blogging (targeting niche blogs that are focused on the categories you're working on).
  • Getting links from resources pages.
  • Press releases (whenever there's a new product being released under a certain category).
  • Getting sitewide links from blogs (through sponsorships - but using the nofollow tag, or building microsites that can continuously generate traffic).

LB2. Blogger outreach for product reviews. If your client is open to giving away few of their products to be sent out to bloggers for reviews, then that'd be one of the best options.

LB3. Invite guest bloggers to the ecommerce's blog section, to absorb followers/readers from them, and most of the time, these bloggers will link to the guest blogs they've submitted to your site, so that'd enhance the amount of deep links the site is getting (then you can just pass through some of the value from these natural links through internally linking the blog posts to the site's important categories).

 

Q. What are your go-to tactics for getting links? (ex. guest posting, broken link building, paid, directories etc.)

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. Here are my go-to tactics:

  • Continuous content development = more content, more traffic, more chances to attract natural links
  • Linker outreach = directly promoting my content to people who have linked/shared the competitors' similar content (higher link acquisition rate, since they have a history of linking to a content covering the same topic).
  • Scaling reverse engineering = tracking where the competitors are getting links/mentions on a daily/weekly basis. Then understand how/why they are getting these links (if it's possible to replicate, then do so). I also expand this approach by finding other sites similar to the ones who are linking to my competitors (to take a step ahead).
  • Building traffic generators = this one's my favorite. I just build pages from domains that have high search share, so that the pages/links I acquire from them can continuously drive traffic to my site. The methods that can be used in this type of link building are becoming a regular content contributor on the top blogs in the client's industry (and submitting content to these blogs twice or thrice a month), and distributing content on digital content platforms like Youtube, Slideshare, etc... - since pages from these sites can easily rank on search results.

I've actually written a post about these tactics recently, you can check it out here.  

 

Q. What's your favorite link building method today?

Answered by Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools

A. Creating free tools or compelling interactive content coupled with awareness via social media. Takes longer and costs more, but works almost every time. It's also the least risky and has the greatest ROI long-term.

 

Q. What are your current go-to tactics for link building?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A.

Step 1: Create a quality visual asset.

Step 2: Prior to launch, find a high level site to launch the asset with.

Step 3: Create a very specific and DEEP outreach list to compliment your launch partner.

Step 4: Use paid social media distribution to get your asset in front of the right audience.

Step 5: Rinse & Repeat.

PS. Infographics still work amazingly if you do them right.

 

Q. What tools to you use to keep your outreach efforts organized? Gdoc spreadsheets? Raven's CRM?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. We are pretty addicted to Google dive and Google spreadsheets. I love dropbox but the integration with spreadsheets and such makes it so nice to just be in the Google Ecosystem.

We are constantly looking for new ways to keep organized. We use insightly for a lot of task management. I also personally really like Asana. I used to use Raven but have not in a while. May be time to circle back around to them. In the end our process is so custom that sometimes spreadsheets are easier.

I do not miss emailing around the same damn spreadsheet 10 times on a project lol. Love updating is a God send.

Content Marketing

SEO content marketing

Q. "Content Marketing" is beginning to take over as the popular venacular for "link building" at most search agencies, but I feel that it's still harder than ever to define, much less quantify. What's content marketing mean to you, and how would you recommend it be integrated into a core SEO practice?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A.  A very early example of content marketing that I was involved in, almost completely by accident - when I was an in-house SEO back in the late 90s/early 2000s, we decided to add a currency converter to the services site I was working on because a lot of our clients were in different countries, and we thought it would help them.

We chose a free currency converter, and while it worked well, it was difficult for most people to set up. Looking through log files for the site one day, I noticed that a number of other ecommerce sites on the Web were linking to the currency converter page, rather than setting up one of their own. I reduced the language on the converter itself that referred to our business, and increased the branding on the rest of the page to tout our services, including a call to action.

Content marketing is creating something that other people will find interesting, engaging and/or useful to help attract attention, links, and awareness. The changes I made didn't cost us any customers and may have landed a few new ones. The Google Toolbar was out in its first version in 2000, and the currency converter page had a PageRank of 6, while the home page of the site had a PageRank of 5, so it was earning external links to the site.

 

Q. Do you work with content calendars? If so, how and do you have any tips regarding them?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. We end up creating so much content for clients that we pretty much have to have an editorial calendar. Right now we use Insightly a lot and in the past I have used and loved Asana. I know many in the SEO community are in love with Trello as well.

Pretty much you just need to find what works for you and get an editorial calendar going.

 

Q. As a content marketing agency, how do you find/approach potential clients?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. By doing content marketing ourselves. We actually don't post nearly as much as I'd hope (because we've been so busy), but there's no doubt that the best way to get clients is to show that you can create content yourselves and have success with it. We still get most of our clients today from our content marketing efforts 1-3 years ago - things like blog posts, sharing on Twitter, and speaking at events. And, of course, referrals from doing good work.

Show diversity of content types, different skills in design, development, and copy, and you'll be a company that people would want to hire for content marketing.

 

Q. Is creating linkbait-ey interactive games and interactive infographics, or #RCS stuff like the "How do tech companies make money" piece by SEER Interactive still a viable part of a company's bag of tricks? If so, where does it fit in? In your content marketing for boring industries you talked about GE integrating graphics on their product pages, but are independent graphical pieces still good?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. I think any truly RCS stuff is definitely worth including in the bag of tricks. I loved this grid by Distilled - it shows all the different types of content a business can make, including the random one-off stuff that's "bigger". I'm into investing in big stuff myself like our checklist and our embed code generator. We're actually working on another big tool right now as well.

These fit nicely into a content calendar and make a site truly interesting - where you know that you should stay tuned in because they are going to keep you on your toes and bring it with something unexpected and super valuable from time to time.

To address your question specifically, I think infographics are definitely still worth doing - they just have to be good. I tell our team that our infographics should be 100x better as an infographic than they would be as a text post. If that's true, we should build that visualization. If not, we're doing some weird SEO play that we shouldn't be.

I constantly look to /r/infographics/ for inspiration, as everything that's upvoted there is going to be a truly great infographic that was built to be a helpful visualization, not just an SEO play.

 

Q. Why do you think so many companies are hesitant to invest in content marketing?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. Because it's incredibly hard to get moving on. Old school SEO blocking and tackling was something you could get a lot of traction with by hiring an agency off-site to do guest posts and not mess up your on-site work. Content marketing is building a staff, establishing a strategy, designing a beautiful site - the costs are quite huge, especially in the short run.

Also, there is a premonition to stick with what works. Many people in the SEO industry have done SEO their whole lives and are really incapable of seeing through the weeds to notice that things have changed. SEO is what they've done and they're not going to pivot (well) until they're put out of business. It is really tough and ballsy to do something new when you've done something your whole life - this is why people never move, never quit the jobs they hate, and etc. The same concepts apply to a branding/skills shift.

That said, I think that there are lots of companies investing in content marketing today, and that number might now be greater than the ones that aren't. People know now that it's what required after having it pounded into them for the past 3-4 years - and also seeing their traffic and revenue decrease.

 

Q.  With the world in full panic mode around link building at the moment, what are some ways you manage expectations of clients when they're worried that some content piece you've created does naturally generate links?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. I would create secondary KPIs. One of the biggest mistakes I'm seeing companies make (that I've also been guilty of) is not creating a marketing flywheel from the start.

If the content you build adds new subscribers, followers, likes etc, that's an asset that can be utilized in the future, and also likely be a positive signal to the search engines. If you're taking one-off approaches with every single piece of content you build, I think that's a really risky strategy and one that will not give you the long-term assets to be dominant in your space. Repeat to yourself: build a flywheel, build a flywheel, build a flywheel. More reading here from Rand Fishkin.

 

Q. What are some of your favorite paid content promotion channels (outbrain, nrelate, etc.) Any you've tried and would avoid in the future?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. I love StumbleUpon right now, it's such an easy way to get 20k visitors for about $20 if you target it right. The best way to do that is demographically slice the content piece you've built, for example, you have the opportunity to target by age group, location, and interest - that's incredibly powerful if you do any kind of market research.

Facebook is the next best option, boosting content and/or doing demographic targeting is another powerful segmentation option that's super powerful for any marketer. Any time you can segment like you can on FB/StumbleUpon, there's no way to not have a lot of success as long as you have good content. Facebook is going to be a lot more expensive though.

I haven't tested Outbrain and nrelate to the extent that I'd like - really most of the studies I've heard thus far seem mixed as to whether or not they're worth using extensively, at least for the purposes of what most of us are doing for SEO benefit.

 

Q. How do you come up with the right content ideas?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. I lean on the experts. There are certain sites that have similarities to our clients - commercial, investing in content, somewhat similar verticals - that can be referred to as inspiration for our own ideas. The good thing about content marketing overkill is there's a TON of content to learn from, and most of the ideas can be ported to other areas with no loss in success.

 

Q. How much journalist outreach do you use to get traction for your content pieces?

Answered by Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

A. Depends on the piece, but overall, a ton. We'll only do journalist outreach if we feel our content is a "study" or somehow newsworthy and not casual content.

Journalist outreach takes a bit longer as we feel like we need to customize it more, but it's definitely worth it because they are a great place to get the piece snowballing for additional coverage.

 

Q. How do you come up with the right content ideas for a website?

 Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. I don't know if I'd use the word "right" - I've come up with the wrong content plenty of times, and that's how you learn. Best advice I can give is - do the work. The difference between bad, good, and great content isn't the topic, IMO - it's the work, the research, and the story. There are only so many stories in the world, so bust your ass and find a new way to tell it.

 

Q. What tips do you have for the distribution/promotion phase and how important is it to a piece of content's success?

Answered by Brian Dean, Founder of the SEO blog Backlinko.com

A. Promotion isn't just important...it's an absolute must.

Most blogs fail for two reasons: 1. Not publishing epic stuff/publishing too often 2. Not promoting the stuff that they publish.

Here are a few practical strategies for promoting your next piece of amazing content (if it's not amazing, this won't work).

Know how you're going to promote it before you publish. I can't emphasize this enough. If you hit publish and then say "now what?", you need to change your approach. In fact, I'm at the point now where I choose content based on who I'll promote it to. For example, the next piece of content at Backlinko was inspired by the fact that there is/were a lot of outreach opportunities around that topic.

Find out where your target audience hangs out and become a respected member of that community. Forums are a goldmine because a) they usually have thousands of targeted people and b) it's the perfect place to showcase your expertise and provide value. Then, when you have something worthy of sharing, you'll have a small army of supporters to help you get the word out.

Email outreach like a boss. BuzzStream is great for this. Find 100+ people in your space who would be genuinely interested in your content and shoot them an email to give them a heads up. Don't ask them to share it, just say "I thought you'd like it because..."

 

Q. My question has to do more with supplementing a "Content is King" SEO strategy with techniques such as blog post submissions, blog commenting, article submissions, forum postings, high PR blogroll and other direct link placements, and the occasional "web 2.0" linkwheel services which would include squidoo lenses, blogspots and such.

When I was doing SEO for a start-up I founded a few years ago, I had a ton of success with the above techniques -- however I've heard whispers that these are no longer viable linkbuilding strategies. I'm wondering from your professional experience if building links in the same way as was common a few years ago has any impact on supplementing a great CiK strategy or if it is a waste of time. And if it is a waste of time, what the hell are the article-spinning, link-wheel submitting SEOs of days past doing now?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. Good question. I think the issue is that anything that is super easy to scale will end up being in Google's crosshairs. If you can outsource the project to someone overseas who does not really know you business or your niche and they can just got at..building links etc.

If that is the case you a probably doing something that will eventually get popped by Google. That is why I really do not advocate doing things like link wheels and such.

Lastly, all the fake SEO experts just became fake Content Marketing experts ;)

 

Q. I was going to give you grief about coining the "the Skyscraper technique" as a redundant term but you justified it quite well at point 17 on your SEO techniques article.

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A. You're right: that's one of the reasons I HIGHLY recommend coining terms whenever you come up with something new (or a twist on something that already exists). It's something that Ramit Sethi does really well (check out The Briefcase Technique video). The Briefcase Technique is really just getting your shit together before going to a meeting. But the phrase makes it memorable and establishes him as an authority. Branding FTW!

Guest Blogging

guest blogging SEO

Q.  Part of me thinks that Google and Matt Cutts release information or decrees just to affect the SEO community in an effort to "level the playing field" so that people who simply go around guest blogging aren't reaping tons of undue ranking benefits.

Could any of this simply be a big scare tactic? Propaganda? Do they really have the ability to determine what is spammy guest blogging and what is legitimate? Kind of like when your 3rd grade teacher stands in front of the class and says "we know who did it and if they don't come forward they're going to be in even bigger trouble."

Answered by Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

A. There's probably a little bit from column A) and a little from column B). I don't think Google is going to be perfect at shutting down all the value from every guest post. But they might indeed start doing a lot more manual penalizations, and they might have some pretty good algorithms for shutting down much of the value guest post links pass (you'd be shocked how amazing machine learning is - toss a few hundred thousand examples of guest posts you don't want to count in with Google's database of factors and out pops an awful good-looking detection algo).

But, yeah, the messaging is helpful, too. It puts marketers on notive and helps bring awareness so that if you get hit in the next few months/year, at least Google can say they warned you.

 

Q. Let's talk regular contributions to blogs, something you recommend quite a bit. Are you only pitching blogs that have already accepted other regular contributors to (or even one-off guest bloggers)? Or are you also pitching blogs that you don't see any outsiders writing for? And how do you stand out from the crowd when pitching these blogs? Or are you just playing a numbers game with conversions (no shame in that)?

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. Regular contributions - I have so many approaches to this. Like finding easy targets, you can start with those who have already linked to you in the past or have tweeted your post(s), these blogs are easier to target and get accepted, because they already know the caliber of your content (so when pitching to them, you can just start off by thanking them for linking/sharing your content, then eventually ask if they're looking for regular columnists, etc...).

Or you can also start with those who are really accepting contributors - just to build a content portfolio around the niche of your client (and to build authorship points as well, if you're using personas).

Though as for this method, we have stricter metrics, such as at least DA 40+, high SE traffic price (SEMRush metric) - to ensure that their pages have the ability to rank better for long tail keywords, Alexa (optional).

The way we use this method has evolved over the past year. Before we didn’t really pay much attention to the amount of contributors the site was getting each month (ex: community sites like Yourtango.com, Biggerpockets.com, etc...). But now, I mostly filter the prospects out based on the engagement of the content (amount of shares, avg. links per post) - though it's understandable that these metrics aren't applicable to some verticals. So that's why we heavily rely on Domain Authority and traffic price.

Standing out when pitching would really require a solid sample (preferably content published on the client's site - to effectively demonstrate expertise).

 

Q. What are your thoughts on guest blogging now with the recent blog post from Matt Cutts?

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A. Good question.

Guest blogging is like any other SEO strategy right now: you either have to go super black hat or pearly white hat. It's grey hat stuff that gets you into trouble.

Here's what I mean: If you're going to do guest posting for SEO, you need to post on sites that either a) don't say you're the author or b) allow you to use a pen name. Publishing as "Clayton" and linking to "ClaytonsZenGardens.com" will get found out and devalued eventually. It's going to be at least 2 years before they can truly get to the bottom of it algorithmically, but you always want to be ahead of the curve.

So that's the black hat approach: guest posting anonymously ("Ghost Posting") and dropping a contextual link back to your site. That kind of thing will pass a manual review. The only downside is that the types of sites that allow that sort of stuff aren't that great. But you get a contextual link. So it's a balance.

The other side of things is the "I'm just going to guest blog to get traffic to my site" approach. That's kind of where I'm at with guest blogging right now. I think that contextual links in these type of quality guest posts will always help a little bit. But I'm not willing to risk it. So I only guest post on sites that will help generate traffic to my site.

The grey hats that think they're doing the right thing are the ones that get blindsided by updates. And it's the same with people that outsourced guest posting and have 100s of links in author bios right now. It's only a matter of time before those links get devalued or (less likely) penalized.

General SEO

general seo advice

Q. If you were trying to build something like Expedia or RapGenius, how would you get the required SEO rankings without resorting to black hat techniques?

Answered by Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

A. Re Expedia/Rapgenius - check out what folks like http://oyster.com or http://maptia.com have done/are doing. They're building value, community, content, and press without worrying too much about Google & SEO. I think that's the way I'd approach it, too. I'd try to build my brand without SEO and then get SEO as a side benefit of my brand growing. Tactics like social, content, community, branding, video, etc. would be my primary methods. Incidentally, I think that's what Google wants, too.

I'm certainly not saying "don't do SEO." You can and should use your SEO knowledge to enhance the value you get from every aspect of this - the content you create, the community you build, the social sharing, etc. But the kind of active "link building focused" SEO that doesn't actually add any value to the business, the brand, the site, or your visitors/customers isn't interesting to me (and I think Google's trying hard to kill it - I'd hate to be on the other side of that).

Re: link building, check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building - there's literally hundreds of tactics that still work great!

 

Q. I've recently started working SEO on a fresh ecommerece website. I want to know your suggestion how to proceed further with SEO in a right way? I mean On Page and Off Page Optimization techniques.

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. For a fresh ecommerce website, here are the things that I would focus on implementing:

  • Make sure that search engines aren't indexing pages that wouldn't be useful to searchers (duplicates, poor content pages, internal site search results). Compare the amount of pages from the site's XML sitemap to the pages that have already been indexed by Google. Identify the URL parameters that the site has (via WMT) and see if those parameters are being indexed. Then just block access to them via robots.txt or by using the noindex tag.
  • Build more internal links to the site's key pages (product and category-level). If the site has a blog section, that'd be a perfect place to build more thematic internal links (to pass of authority/ranking ability to them).
  • Build incoming links to the site's important categories, so once you build up the authority of the site's categories, they can just flow the PageRank down to the product pages under them. And you'll have better chances of ranking for both short and long-tail search queries.
  • Start implementing structured data (schemas). They'll be very useful in the future.
  • Find 3 - 5 authority blogs in your client's space, and try to become a regular contributor/columnist (like submitting content twice or thrice a month). Creating signals through this approach (instead of guest blogging to hundreds of blogs) is definitely more efficient/realistic and a better combination with the continuous on-site changes that you'll be implementing on the site.
  • Use mention.net or fresh web explorer, and monitor where your competitors are getting mentions/links on a daily/weekly basis. That'll be a good head start in understanding your competitors' marketing activities (don't just copy them, beat them on their own game if possible).
  • Invest on relationships and strategic content partnerships. Invite guest bloggers or regular columnists for your client's blog, so you can also absorb their followers (your client's target customers).

 

Q. What is the biggest SEO mistake you see people make when setting up an online store?

Answered by Joe Hall of Internet Marketing Ninjas

A. The biggest mistake I see way to often is not controlling faceted navigation. Maile Ohye (@maileohye) from Google actually wrote a really great piece about this not long ago. She does a much better job explaining it in her post than I could in this tiny comment box.

 

Q. If you could only list 1 thing, what would you say has been the biggest change in how you approach SEO in the past decade?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. The technical audits that I do these days have been getting a lot longer, and include things like a review of site speed and other technical elements, but in many ways there's a lot of similarity between what I do now and what I've done in the past.

I believe in a holistic approach to SEO that considers the usability of a site, improving conversions based upon site objectives, getting a good sense of who the audience members of a site might be and designing a thoughtful information architecture for a site. I've been proactive in terms of avoiding site structure problems, and approach link building with a preference towards creating things to attract links rather than trying to build them.

Biggest change though is probably how much a lot of what I do involves coaching clients in terms of being authentic on the Web, and representing themselves well. Not so much an SEO strategy as much as it is a broader marketing strategy.

 

Q. What are your thoughts on SEO, UX and to some extent PR converging into one large discipline? Do you think businesses in the future will take all 3 into consideration?

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A. Absolutely. I'd just throw content production/promotion in there too. My feeling is that the future of SEO is going to be to get the most search engine value out of the stuff your company is already doing. The idea that you can just "do SEO" right now is just insane. But that doesn't stop people from selling SEO like it's still 2010.

I first started taking on clients in 2010. I was a total spamaholic. I didn't care what they sold or what type of content they had on their site. It didn't matter. I'd just send out some nonsense press release or buy some links from a forum and watch them climb the first page.

Today, the game has changed in a BIG way. It's actually one of the reason I don't take on SEO client anymore: I don't even know how I'd "do SEO" for them without having a hand in everything else they do (content, UX, PR, customer service, outreach, relationship-building).

 

Q. What is the best way to find patterns programmatically?

Answered by Joe Hall of Internet Marketing Ninjas

A.

1) Pull your data - this can be backlinks, or even crawl results from screamingfrog. Save data into a spread sheet or database.

2) Make a list of your "footprints" that you need to identify. Anchor text, URL structures, ectra.

3) Sort the data/parse the data based on the footprints.

4) Look for anomalies. So if you see a large chunk of links pointing to a product page, then cross reference those links with an anchor text sort, and volia you have found your first manipulative link pattern.

This is all pretty basic, and can get WAY more complex, but the simple steps above are what I use.

 

Q. What's the most common problem you see on websites when conducting a site audit?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. If you had asked me this question last year, I might say setting up canonical link elements for series of pagination pages so that they used the first page in the series as the canonical link element for all pages in that series. It felt like this was something I was seeing at least once a week for 3-4 months (but I was looking at a lot of sites).

I've been looking at less ecommerce sites this year, and many more sites that use WordPress as a CMS, and that happens much less frequently on those.

Issues around site speed, including image files that are much too large, a lack of textual compression, and a need for longer caching in visitor's browsers are still pretty common though there are some plug-ins that can help for WordPress sites.

 

Q. What are the biggest misconceptions you have head from other authorities/experts regarding Hummingbird? I understand much is speculation in regards to which patents are applicable. I've heard a lot of discrepancies between people, and I have my own opinions, but it's difficult to disseminate beyond a basic level. Much misinformation.

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. There was some interesting speculation going on about Hummingbird on the Thursday that it was announced. I was absolutely convinced that it involved a series of patents that I had been writing about, and had almost done a Google On-Air Hangout on one of them with Max Minzer. Except that I thought the topic, query re-writing based upon synonyms or substitute terms identified through co-occurrence of words in search results for those terms, might be a little too much for most listeners. Who knew how fun that would have been, to be doing a Google On-Air hangout about Hummingbird while Google was announcing Hummingbird. :)

Instead we did a hangout on "marketing your SEO services," which I had suggested as an alternative to the query re-writing topic, which I had guessed might not have interested a lot of viewers. It wasn't until after the hangout ended that someone tweeted me a question on what I thought about Hummingbird, and how it was related to schema.org. What the heck was a Hummingbird?

I Googled it, and found the announcement from Amit Singhal, and Danny Sullivan's posts on it, which I'm guessing were likely from press releases sent to him early under embargo. One of those was a "Frequently Asked Questions" about Hummingbird, even though no one really had any time yet to ask any questions. :)

Danny's FAQ included this example:

”What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

The patent I was looking at included an example query of "What is the best place to find and eat Chicago deep dish style pizza?"

It explained that it might find "restaurant" to be a synonym for "place" in that query based upon synonym/substitution rules and upon the context of the rest of the query, such as the inclusion of the words "eat" and "pizza." Restaurant was a good substitute based upon a confidence level associated with eating and with pizza.

People wrote blog posts about how Hummingbird was tied to the knowledge base, since the (long) announcement included a lot of information about the knowledge base. People wrote that people should fill their pages with answers to questions, since Hummingbird was about answering questions. A few more people asked me how large a role "schema.org" was involved in Hummingbird, because that's what they associate with semantic search. But, the patent I wrote about did use a semantic approach without using schema.

So Amit Singhal announces Hummingbird starting around minute 32 in this video:

And he tells us that it works best in answering complex and conversational long queries.

The patent was one of a number that described a different approach to treating probabilities between queries and search results and clicks upon search results, and measuring the quality of results based upon things like long clicks upon some search results. I had started writing posts about those in August, and covered at least 4 that showed a subtle but very real difference in how Google was treating search. Were they something that Google had implemented? The Google 15th anniversary announcement of Hummingbird seemed to say that they were.

Google has a wide range of patents involving synonyms and their use by Google, but the example in the FAQ, and Amit's announcement seemed to say that this new approach to probabilities based upon different search entities was at the heart of Hummingbird.

 

Q. What change of behavior in clients you observed or found changed from past to present?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. I remember asking a client in 2005 if it would be possible to get log files for their site, so that I could look at see what kind of site searches were happening on their site, and what kinds of referrals they were getting to their site. They were stumped, but worked with their IT guys to get some to me.

Now it's much more common for people to have Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools set up on their sites, and to often initiate access to those for you by asking what account you wanted added to them. There's definitely more knowledge and a higher level of sophistication in clients when they come to their web properties and to understanding a need for a view of analytics.

I do think a lot of clients are more educated about the Web and about things like SEO than were in the past, but that might be the people I work with these days.

I'm seeing more willingness on the part of clients to adopt and use a CMS such as WordPress rather than to insist on a proprietary software for their web sites. They recognize the ease of maintenance and being able to update and add plug-ins, and seem to like that a lot.

There's still a hesitation on the part of some to put themselves out as a personality shared with potential clients and customers and vendors, but there's a growing recognition of the value of being involved with others in social networks and conversations about their businesses and their communities. I think this is a healthy growth.

 

Q. How do you explain what you do to people who are non-technical (like older relatives)?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. It really doesn't matter - no matter what you say, you either (a) work for Google, or (b) design websites. Either way, they're surprised you can feed your kids. I tend to say something like "I build systems to study Google and see how it changes" and then their pacemakers shut down out of boredom. Edit: My parents don't have pacemakers, and my dad was a nuclear engineer in the US Navy, so none of this is actually true.

Learning SEO Advice

learning seo

Q. I am still in my first year of SEO & Content Marketing and think I have the general basics down. I want to take my knowledge to the next level but am having a hard time figuring out how to do that since I have been self-educating. My question is-What resources/tools/whatever did you use to learn about this industry and how do you still stay on top of it now?

Answered by Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

A. Back when I was learning, we didn't have nearly the resources available that we do today. A few things I really like for diving into SEO/inbound/content marketing:

How I stay on top of it now - I read (and skim) a lot! Social media helps - I can scroll through my Twitter and G+ feeds and by following a good set of folks, make sure I know what's going on. It also helps that I have to teach and give a lot of forward-looking presentations. That forces me to know a lot about the field even if it doesn't pertain specifically to Moz.

 

Q. Any advice for aspiring SEO / online marketers? You built your name from scratch. Your advice would be really helpful.

Answered by Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

A. I believe that there's no single path in this industry, and what have worked for me, may not necessarily mean it could work for others. But the things that I would really want to share to the ones who're still new and trying to build their name in the SEO industry:

  • Never stop learning and testing! It's an ever-evolving field, so it's really important to keep yourself updated. And it's also vital to learn more about the other aspects of online marketing, not just SEO.
  • Don't just follow other people's advice, test on your own! Experience is always the best teacher.
  • Write! Writing/blogging about the things that you're continuously learning is the best way to remember them.
  • Always challenge yourself.

 

Q. What advice do you have for kids today interested in going into SEO or digital marketing? What should they learn, do and study?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. Even though the industry is evolving, there's still plenty of room for self-starters. Obviously, I value education, but I think SEO is still a word where you have to get your hands in and just do something. Build a site and get it indexed and ranking. Learn the hard way. Write a crawler. Learn XPath if you like (you won't regret it). Just do something, even if it seems ill-advised. The best code is ill-advised.

 

Q. What would you recommend for someone new to SEO to really get into it and learn about what makes for good SEO and how to go about doing it?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. Build a site, and learn the hard way. Obviously, I love Moz and the Beginner's Guide and Q&A, etc., but it's like learning to code. If you just start typing code out of a book (like I did) or you take a few CodeAcademy courses with no project or skin in the game, you'll get bored. Create something that matters to you, and you'll care if you rank and if you succeed or fail. That makes all the difference to learning, IMO.

 

Q. If you could give advice to someone starting SEO in 2014, what would it be?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

Build a site and get it to rank. It's not just about learning by doing, but you've got to have some skin in the game. Ranking your own site is a labor of love, and you'll learn. Ranking a client's site can feel like a chore in the beginning.

 

Q. What advice(s) you will you give to young entrepreneurs who are starting with zero or shoestring marketing budget. After building it, where they should focus to do online marketing and to get first 20+ paying customers?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. The first 20 have to be hunted, like wildebeests. Find them where they graze - in person, online, in forums, who cares. If you can, make sure those 20 are zealots - the early adopters who will spread your message far and wide. Learn their ways, and live among them. Sorry, I've had a lot of caffeine.

For me, it meant forums and blogs, not for do-follow links, but for getting to know people who were also just starting out. We "grew up" together, and those friends became the influencers. Don't chase the "A-list" (whatever that is) and don't underestimate anyone.

Finally, be relevant. We all want to appeal to everyone, but that ends in a muddy message that resonates with no one. Pick a niche of your audience and appeal to them hard-core. Go out with a well-defined narrow offering, get people to love it, and then expand. It's against all of our natures to define ourselves, but if you can target a narrow audience with a laser-focused message, you'll get attention and you'll connect. You can always expand.

 

Q. What do you perceive as being the greatest skill gap currently in our industry? What would you recommend people become a wizard with to increase their perceived value in the industry?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. I think technical SEO skills are starting to wane, and for big sites, they're essential. You need to know how a site gets crawled and indexed and what can stand in the way. When I see a question like "I think I got hit by Penguin/Panda/MayDay/Frogger" and then the whole site is blocked in robots.txt (yes, even in 2014), I die a little inside.

I also think we've got to be mindful of CRO. Ultimately, the goal is to sell something, in most cases, and marketing should be part of that funnel. If we're getting traffic that doesn't deliver, than what's the point?

SEO Predictions

seo search predictions

Q. Search in 2016, what does it look like in your mind?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. I don't see any diminished need for search or SEO, but there's clearly an evolution going on that will be focused more upon mobile devices, and upon social and real time results.

The writing is also on the wall that Google will be searching for additional revenue models focused on hardware. I can also see Apple getting more into search, especially as providing maps and local search results leads them along that path.

 

Q. What do you see as the future of data gathering from Google itself, since getting it from Google directly is unreliable and scraping it through a third party is getting more difficult?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. I'm a bit careful with the S-word, for obvious reasons, but yeah, let's not kid ourselves - either you're calling Google pages or you're paying for data from someone that does, because that's the only way to do it.

It's difficult - I think Google is public, essentially, and I think they need accountability, so I do what I do, but I don't do it blindly or without considering the ethics or impact. MozCast is a relatively small experiment, and most of it is my fault, but in the broader world of SEO tools, it gets a lot trickier. If Google were more transparent about data and it wasn't such a black box, I'd be ok with that. Unfortunately, I don't really see that happening as they pass the $60B mark and have more and more pressure to keep ad revenues up.

I think, over time, we're going to have to get past ranking data - Google will evolve beyond "pure" organic, and we need to be mindful of the impact of traffic, not just the raw numbers. Plus, frankly, we need to diversify beyond Google, for our own survival. Moz preaches content, and yet we haven't supported content in our tools as well as we should - we're working hard to address that. For now, ranking is part of the puzzle - a problem Google created for themselves, I'd say - and people need that data, but we also need to think to the future and life beyond ranking.

 

Q. With more device-based search (Glass, Google Now, etc.) and more focus on Google being the content publisher, what do you think us SEOs are going to be recommending in the future?

Answered by Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

A. I think already see a trend of Google designing search around mobile and Glass first and desktop second. Google is going to become more card-like and less structured - they'll provide the combination of answers that fit the environment you're searching in, and that's going to mean we have to raise our games.

I think we have to think beyond ranking, honestly. Organic, as it stands now, is going to evolve radically in the next five years, IMO. We have to treat ranking as a consequence. If you focus on ranking first, but don't build anything behind it, and the rules change, then you lose. If you build things that drive ranking, drive social, etc., then even if the rules change, you still have that core value proposition. Ultimately, you have to make things people want.

 

Q. What kind of impact do you think "Okay Google" voice search is going to have on SEO, if any?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. It could be quite substantial.

A Pew Internet Life report told us that recently told us that 78% of all teens had a cell phone, and the growth in adults who connect to the internet by phone has been reported in many places as growing substantially as well.

The "OK Google" voice search can be used on Desktop computers as well as mobile computers. One of the main reasons that Google provided to explain their Hummingbird update was that it would help aid in conversational queries where someone ask for information in question format rather than as a short string or list of words like they might type into a search engine.

They may also ask a series of questions where they expect information from one query to be carried over to the next, such as "how old is Barack Obama," and then "how old is his wife?"

Google being able to adequately address longer and more complex queries, and being able to carry over information from one query to the next, goes beyond the simple keyword matching approaches and behaviors we've seen from Google in the past.

I did write about the patent "Synonym identification based on co-occurring terms" and how it describes a process that can be helpful in better understanding synonyms that might be substituted in some queries based on the context of other terms within the same query.

Google has been writing about how they might find and use synonyms for some terms in a query for over a decade using a number of different approaches, but this was the first one I can recall that then looked at the context of the whole query to see if there was a high enough level of confidence in that substitution to use it for the query.

The patent shows an approach to natural language processing that's a little more advanced than what we've seen in most of those other patents involving synonyms. It's not yet the Star Trek computer of Google Head of Search Quality Amit Singhal's dreams.

 

Q. In 10yrs; Will link building remain relevant? What's the next big internet thing you see happening (e.g Google, Facebook)?

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. It really depends on how you define link building really. I am not so concerned with what search engines will value in the future. The reason for this is that I know that no matter what they will always value really cool content. So if you can create great content that is highly visual (this is the key) and promote it you will be fine.

How a search engine evolves will not really matter for you...maybe in the future you will be going for social shares more than links but in the end it won't matter. Popular content will always give off the right signals. So my advice is to create great content (of course lol) but to get REALLY good at content promotion. Once you do that you are set for the future.

 

Q. With all this, will SEO even exist in 5 years (except technical)?

Answered by Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

A. I cannot see any future in which SEO dies in the next 5 years. The job of crafting a brand people want to share, earning amplification, building community, choosing keyword terms/phrases/concepts, optimizing content and landing pages and the funnel - these will be core to SEO and to marketing overall for a long time to come.

Search Spam & Black Hat SEO

spam black hat seo

Q. Sometimes I will see in OSE that my competitors are getting dofollow links from banner ads. These ads are usually not run by ad networks, but are basically linked jpgs set up on blogs or small business websites. Often these pages have excellent page authority and the link will rank among my competitors' best in OSE. Is Google smart enough to know that a 120x600 linked image is probably an advertisement? Or are these links truly passing a lot of authority? Google's webmaster guidelines aside, would/should buying more advertisements to get these links be a legitimate strategy?

Answered by Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

A. Yeah, there's a lot of this still out there. My sense is that Google is clearly discounting some of this, but not all of it. However, if you're paying for those banners and hoping for SEO benefit, it's probably not going to work long term (so make sure to buy based on the value of the visibility, not the link).

Those blogs also do get in trouble sometimes with Google (and lose their rankings) if they don't put nofollow on those links. The West Seattle Blog had that happen, and they clearly had no idea what nofollow even was (sad situation).

 

Q. What sort of black hat techniques, if any, do you use? Do you utilize private blog networks? Thanks again.

Answered by AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert

A. Honestly none. A single infographic will typically net me 30 to 100 unique root domains linking in for example so I just do not need to do anything else.

The logic is...why cheat when you can just win straight up and not have to worry at night that it could all crumble.

PageRank & Algorithm Changes

page rank and algorithm changes

Q. Have you seen any changes to Google's Algorithms that received little notice or no official announcement?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. We've been told repeatedly that Google has been changing and updating its ranking algorithms an average of at least 500 times a year for the past few year, so this definitely happens close to twice a day, where Google makes changes to their algorithm with little notice and no official announcement….At some point, Google's PageRank went through a transformation (probably more than once) that wasn't accompanied by an announcement, so that the amount of weight that they might pass along (PageRank, Hypertext Relevance, etc.) might be different based upon features associated with them. I wrote about one patent describing such changes and called it "The Reasonable Surfer Patent,". While we did get some statements from Matt Cutts that there are some links that probably don't pass along as much weight as others on pages, we never received official announcements or notice about the change, and I'm not sure that we should have….

Patents are not official notices or announcements of changes to Google's algorithms, and yet if I wasn't paying attention to them, I wouldn't be aware of many of the things that they've been trying to do.

 

Q. With all you know about their patents and where they are headed: Are links dead? Is their value to ranking dropping? Is social the next big signal? Where does keyword research fit into the knowledge graph and intent based search?

Answered by Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents

A. The more you look at patents, the quicker you realize that there are multiple paths the search engines are following, and more than one algorithm they might be experimenting with at any one time.

We were told by Matt Cutts recently that Google had experimented with a version of their index that didn't include links, and that it didn't provide results that were very good. I'd say that inspite of some of the problems, we won't see things like PageRank or hypertext relevance disappear very soon.

I first wrote about Agent Rank in 2007 over at Search Engine Land, and I've been waiting ever since for some kind of reputation scoring to influence search results. At this point, it does look like we will see that happen, but will likely have to wait for Google to figure out how to better attribute sites to specific authors or creators.

Regarding keyword research, I still think it's very important to have an idea of the language that people who are potentially your clients and the audience you talk about use when they search for and try to find the services and goods and information that you provide on your website. Google has filed for patents that focus upon topic-based search and better understanding the categories that websites and queries might fit into which can play a role in intent based search, but I wouldn't recommend too many changes to keyword research.

With the knowledge graph, it can help having an understanding of the different ways that Google might treat named entities, and extract information from the Web about them, and their related attributes, and that probably should augment any keyword research that you do.

 

Q. In light of comments by the likes of AJ Kohn (about the death of authorship, at least in its current form) and the seemingly slow uptake, in what form do you see it moving forward, if at all?

Answered byBrian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

A. I see Authorship as another way for Google to hedge their bets against ranking absolute crap.

Because the algorithm is so heavily link-based, they've slowly incorporated non-link ranking signals into it. It's easy to game links alone. But gaming links AND social signals, UX signals, brand signals and authorship is more trouble than it's worth.

It's unlikely that someone trying to rank for "best poker bonus" is going to have Authorship set up. And if he does, he's not likely to contribute to other sites in that space. So that site may get beat out someday by another site with a similar link profile AND Authorship signals.

That being said, I'd be shocked if authorship contributed more than 5% to the algorithm in the next decade. Google's crushing it and doesn't need to overhaul the algorithm (and if they made it heavily Authorship-based, people would just game that).

 

More From the Gurus

Read the full Reddit AMAs from today’s post on Reddit.

Joe Hall, Senior Marketing Analyst for Internet Marketing Ninjas

Read the full Joe Hall AMA on Reddit.

 

Bill Slawski, Expert on Google Patents, Owner of SEO By the Sea Blog

Read the whole Bill Slawski AMA on Reddit.

 

Dr. Pete, Marketing Scientist at Moz

Read Dr. Pete’s entire AMA on Reddit.

 

Brian Dean, Founder of the SEO Blog Backlinko

Read the entire Reddit AMA with Brian Dean.

 

 AJ Ghergich: SEO, Link Building, & Content Marketing Expert of Ghergich & Co.

Read the full Reddit AMA with AJ Ghergich.

 

Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media

Read the entire Ross Hudgens AMA on Reddit.

 

Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage

Read the entire Reddit AMA with Jason Acidre.

 

Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz

Read the entire SEO AMA with Rand Fishkin on Reddit.

 

Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools

Read the full Jon Henshaw AMA on Reddit.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.


New Enterprise Google AdWords Features Boost Efficiency & Scale for Big Spenders

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A few weeks ago, Google announced major changes and updates to the AdWords platform, several of them designed to improve efficiency and scale for enterprise-class search marketers.

Google wants to make life easier for companies with massive campaigns – for those who are spending hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars on AdWords. Enterprise-level PPC marketers face unique challenges, given the complexity and sheer size of their campaigns.

These new features were designed to increase efficiency, help brands scale their campaigns and make insights more accessible and useful. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into the new tools available to enterprise AdWords clients.

Bulk Actions: Making AdWords Less "Complicated"

In the new features announcement a few weeks back, VP of Products Jerry Dischler said, "Many of you have told us that working with AdWords is just too complicated and that often, you have to use offline tools, AdWords Editor or spreadsheets in order to deliver a large number of campaigns." With bulk editing of campaigns, extensions and settings, he said, you'll be able to do this within AdWords.

Bulk Editing in AdWords

Enterprise marketers may need to upload thousands of campaigns at once – for a holiday promotion, for example.  The new bulk actions feature allows them to do so with just a few clicks, within the AdWords interface. It automates the process of setting location targeting and ad rotation settings across campaigns, as well.

Remember, bulk editing is one of the top two reasons people use AdWords Editor. This seems to be yet another sign that AdWords Editor is on its way out the door.

Automated Bid Management

New bid management features seem once again designed to make third-party AdWords management platforms obsolete. According to Dischler, “Our goal in Automated Bidding is to bring an enterprise class solution to every advertiser, directly within AdWords… we want to deliver state of the art bidding, once only available in third party tools, to all advertisers in AdWords.”

Kenshoo and Marin are two examples of robust third-party platforms with bidding solutions. I think their enterprise SEM platforms add a ton of value, particularly in the cross-platform nature of their solutions. Google isn't likely to offer cross-platform support, but they do seem to be chipping away at other third-party tool features.

The two new AdWords bidding strategies pertain to the Flexible Bid strategies framework, which came out last year.

automated bid management

First, advertisers will now have the ability to automate bids, in order to maximize the number of conversions. The new Max Conversions strategy is not based on setting a CPA goal the way the Conversion Optimizer is. Rather, Google automates the process of trying to get you the most conversions.

Second, advertisers will now be able to automate bids to maximize revenue in much the same way.

Advanced, Multi-Dimensional Reporting

Search marketers spend a ton of time in spreadsheets analyzing, looking for opportunities and attempting to better understand the mass of data available to them. Unfortunately, a lot of time is wasted trying to simply get data into the spreadsheet – if you're doing this as often as enterprise marketers, it gets tedious quickly.

Google's new reporting solutions allow for the types of analysis we do in Excel, including data visualizations. Now, you can simply drag and drop various attributes and metrics into a table, much as you can with pivot tables in Excel. You can use this to create line charts, bar graphs or pie charts just as you would in Excel.

adwords vs excel

In fact, I found this a very interesting and telling quote, from Paul Feng, Director of Product Management, AdWords: “We know you spend a lot of your time in spreadsheets, trying to understand your data. But we also know that you spend a lot of time trying to get your data into that spreadsheet.” Gee, you would almost think Google doesn't want you to have to use a Microsoft product anymore.

It's also multi-dimensional, so you can group and subgroup data in any way you want by simply dragging and dropping attributes (as seen below). The key advantage here is that because you're within the AdWords platform, you have access to live AdWords data. You don't have to waste time doing data exports and imports.

adwords enterprise

Another benefit is that you can make real-time changes in your report without having to re-download the data and go through the entire process again. Data exploration is simplified.

Drafts & Experiments: A Real-Time AdWords Lab

This is the last feature Google announced and it's a great one. It's hard to anticipate the effect of potential changes in your AdWords account. You can experiment and try to forecast the impact of bidding strategy changes and other changes, but it's very difficult to accurately project.

adwords for enterprises

Drafts and experiments allows you to turn your entire account into a lab. In draft mode, you can stage and test changes using your own real-time data. Instead of seeing how a change might affect your campaign, you can see how it actually does affect it using a real slice of your traffic, with campaign experiments. If you're ready to commit, simply implement the change and go back to regular mode.

Finally – Tools Befitting Enterprise-Class Needs Within AdWords

Google is working hard to better automate AdWords tasks and further enable marketers to see the value of their efforts. These new functions and features enable enterprise-class companies to make better decisions based on real world data – and to track, measure and evaluate the impact of those decisions.

Google will be rolling out these new features gradually in the coming months, so hang tight. If you're not seeing them yet, they're on the way!

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Guide to Getting Your Customer Churn Rate in the Zone

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Whatever you call it – defection, attrition, turnover – customer churn is a painful reality that all businesses have to deal with. Even the largest and most successful companies suffer from customer churn, and understanding what causes formerly loyal customers to abandon ship is crucial to lasting, sustainable business growth.

In today’s post, we’re going to look at what customer churn is, what constitutes a “good” churn rate, and ways you can stop your customers turning their backs on you forever.

Art installation by Tim Etchells

What is Customer Churn?

Client churn is when existing customers stop doing business with you. This can mean different things depending on the nature of your business. Examples include:

  • Cancelation of a subscription
  • Closure of an account
  • Non-renewal of a contract or service agreement
  • Consumer decision to shop at another store/use another service provider

Before you can figure out what your churn rate is, you need to decide how you’re going to quantify actions such as those above and agree on what defines customer attrition for your business. Once you’ve done this, you can hit the books and do the math.

Calculating Customer Churn

You can measure client churn in one or more of the following ways:

  • Total number of customers lost during a specific period
  • Percentage of customers lost during a specific period
  • Recurring business value lost
  • Percentage of recurring value lost

Let’s look at this example from Churn-Rate.com, in which your company has 100 subscribers at the beginning of the month:

You could also choose to calculate your churn rate based on how many subscribers you had at the end of the month, rather than the beginning:

You can also calculate customer churn based on revenue. Businesses that take this approach typically use monthly reoccurring revenue (MRR) as a baseline figure. Now bear with me, because the math gets a little more complicated when calculating client churn using MRR.

In the following example, a company had $500,000 of MRR at the beginning of the month, and $450,000 at the end. Now, let’s say that the company brought in $65,000 from existing customers who purchased upgrades that same month. The churn calculation looks like this:

As you can see, the churn rate is negative – meaning that the company actually ended up making money despite the $50,000 loss in MRR. This is known as negative churn.

However you choose to calculate it, customer churn hurts – a lot. So grab your Kleenex, wipe away those tears, and let’s look at “good” churn rates and how you can lower yours.

What Is a ‘Good’ Customer Churn Rate?

In an ideal world (one in which customers never complained, cats and dogs lived together in peace and harmony, and nobody ever posted “Game of Thrones” spoilers on Facebook), the perfect client churn rate would be zero.

Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. No matter how excellent your service is or great your products are, you will lose customers. This doesn’t mean you can’t achieve and maintain a “good” churn rate – or, at least, one that’s acceptable. But what is a good churn rate, anyway? Well, that depends on your industry.

Some sectors have significantly higher rates of customer attrition than others. However, it’s difficult pinning down average customer churn rates by industry because, for some reason, most companies aren’t too keen to broadcast how many customers they lose on a regular basis. Weird.

Image © Bethesda Softworks

However, there is some data out there that can give you a better idea of what you can expect in certain sectors:

  • American credit card companies typically have customer churn rates of around 20%
  • European cellular carriers experience churn of between 20-38%
  • Certain American telcos, such as Verizon, have reported very low churn rates – like 0.84% in Q2 2012
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies usually report client churn rates of between 5-7%
  • Many retail banks have churn rates of between 20-25%
  • In 2003, the churn rate of daily newspaper subscriptions in the U.S. was 58%

Customer churn rates that could be considered fantastic for one business might be atrocious for another. Why? Because not all business models are the same, and even companies with similar business models might define churn differently.

Let’s say your business operates on a subscription model. How long are your subscription contracts? How much does the lifetime value of a typical customer change in relation to the length of their contract? How long does it take to recoup the initial costs of customer acquisition and for the account to become profitable? On average, how many new customers do you attract per month? These are all questions that will affect what client churn rate you should be aiming for.

Ways to Reduce Customer Churn

So, now that you’ve got a rough idea of a churn rate that’s acceptable for your business, how do you reduce client churn? By going the extra mile, right from the start.

Make a Great First Impression

Customers are less likely to look around for something better if you blow them away from the very first moment they encounter your business.

Josh Ledgard, co-founder of KickoffLabs, says that the first five minutes with a new customer are paramount. If someone sees immediate results when using a product or service for the first time, they’re significantly less likely to look for opportunities to churn because they believe that they could be even more successful as time goes on.

The better a customer’s first experience, the stronger their commitment and buy-in will be – and the chances of them churning further down the road will be lower.

Consistently Exceed Customers’ Expectations

Failing to deliver on a promise is one of the fastest ways to lose a customer, and many companies say that dissatisfaction and unmet expectations are among the top reasons for client churn. It’s not enough for you to just make a great first impression – you also have to consistently meet your customers’ expectations and exceed them whenever possible.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you start meeting and exceeding your customers’ expectations when they’re already a full-fledged user of your products or service, but the process begins much earlier than that – specifically, with your sales team during the very first call. Don’t let reps who are trying to meet their monthly quota oversell your business or make promises you can’t keep, or you’ll find it very difficult (or impossible) to meet your customers’ expectations, never mind exceed them.

Be honest about what your customers can expect, and consistently deliver what you promise.

Provide Awesome Customer Service

This one should go without saying, but if you’ve ever spent half an hour listening to hold muzak waiting for a disinterested, incompetent customer service rep to “assist you,” you’ll know that some companies simply don’t put enough effort into customer service.

Image © Scott Adams

A recent survey by Zendesk revealed precisely what drives people crazy about customer service. Some key takeaways:

  • 42% of respondents said repeating their problem to multiple reps was the most frustrating aspect of dealing with customer service departments
  • 35% of consumers stop doing business with a company altogether after a single negative customer service experience
  • 16% of irate customers will vent their frustrations on social media sites following a negative interaction (a figure that seems very low to me) – but only 8% will do the same to praise good customer service
  • 60% of consumers are strongly influenced by comments about companies on social media sites

Something else to consider is being proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to customer service. Don’t wait for customers to come after you with burning torches and pitchforks; make sure you have an outreach initiative in place to check in with customers long before problems arise.

Remember – it’s much cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.

Listen Carefully to What Your Customers Tell You

Some business owners think that nobody knows their business better than they do, but they’re wrong – their customers do. Listening carefully to feedback from customers is one of the best ways to identify those who may be at risk of jumping ship.

For example, if a customer threatens to close their account because your service costs too much, they might actually mean that they haven’t had time to fully explore the product, resulting in a misconception about its true value. Then again, it could mean that you really are charging too much.

Whatever your customers tell you, try to really listen to what they’re saying. Think about how sales professionals overcome prospects’ objections – many people throw up “smokescreen” objections that may not necessarily be legitimate concerns, simply because they dislike being “sold to.” Be ready to help make your customers’ lives easier with real solutions based on what they’re actually saying, not what you think they’re saying.

Of course, in some cases, you’ll have little choice but to…

Let Some Customers Churn

This is another concept that some business owners find difficult to wrap their head around, but sometimes, you just have to let customers go.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore client churn rates, be content to provide poor service, or adopt a revolving-door policy when it comes to customer acquisition. It does mean, however, that you should know when to give up and let a customer walk. How do you know when it’s time to break up with a customer? By looking at the situation with profitability in mind.

Let’s say you identify a group of customers who are at risk of turning to a competitor. You immediately reach out to them and offer a generous incentive to stay, right? Wrong. First, you should figure out if the at-risk customers are even worth saving.

This concept is utterly alien to many businesses, because they mistakenly assume that all customers are equally valuable. Sure, this may be the case for some companies, but most businesses have a core group of customers who spend more, evangelize about their products on social media, and stay with the business longer. However, even the most loyal customer can still defect to another company if they feel their needs are not being met or that they’re being taken for granted. This is why these are the customers who are worth spending time and money to retain.

Sunil Gupta, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, says that in addition to determining customers’ churn probability, businesses should also calculate:

  • How much they spend
  • The likelihood that they will respond positively to a retention incentive offer
  • How much this offer will cost the business in terms of overhead or lost revenue

According to Gupta, businesses should only reach out to at-risk customers once they have all this information. Don’t settle for merely reducing client churn rates – focus on reducing churn and maximizing profits. You can read more about how to do this in “Managing Churn to Maximize Profits,” a research paper that Gupta co-authored with Aurélie Lemmens of the Tilburg School of Economics and Management.

Identify Why Customers Cancel, Then Fix It

Remember all that math we did earlier to calculate churn rates? Well, although you need to know what your churn rate is, you also need to know why customers stop doing business with you.

A lot of businesses fail at this because it involves asking some uncomfortable questions and admitting that they’re not actually awesome at everything after all. However, identifying the most common causes of abandonment – and acting on them to improve things – can be a great way to reduce customer churn rates.

Make sure you give customers plenty of opportunities to tell you why they’re leaving. This could be a (brief) survey, a multiple-choice question, a comment field in a “We’ll miss you!” email – anything. Just make sure you can figure out why you’re losing customers, then take steps to tackle the most frequent reasons people are abandoning you.

Well, that just about wraps it up for today’s post. Hopefully you can apply some of these tips to your business. Unless you have a churn rate of zero, of course, in which case power to you (your pants appear to be on fire).

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Google Maps Favors Businesses That Get Clicked On More

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When consumers are searching for local business information, it makes sense that so long as your business listing information is correct, your business will show on the map when the search includes your physical location and product/service … right?

Not necessarily. Julie Bacchini from Neptune Moon shared an interesting blog post (aptly titled “This is Why People Hate Google”) last week that highlights factors outside of a company's physical address that may influence how and when your business listing will appear in local searches.

She started looking into the issue on behalf of a client who has had trouble getting their business listing to come up in local, relevant searches. In fact, according to Bacchini, the business appears on page two in Google's search results when people search for the name of the town in which the business is located and the primary service they offer.

So what's going on here? Maybe it's a super competitive market for that particular service. Not so, says Bacchini, who has been in contact with the Google Local Support Team over the last three months about this particular client's issue. Other businesses, located farther away from the centre of the town being searched, are appearing in Map results – yet the physically closer business with the same service offering is not appearing.

Weird, right?

Bacchini points to this response received from the Google Local Support Team as evidence that Google Maps are no longer an empirical tool.

"…our search technology might decide that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer."

She wrote,

"According to the Local Support person I spoke with (who was not unsympathetic to my loud questions and general incredulity) get this – the reason my client is not showing up at the top of the map listings for the town they are literally in the center of is because the Google Maps algorithm is deeming other businesses as more relevant because, among other factors, they have been clicked on more. My head nearly exploded when she said that. It would be funny if nonsense like this was not actually putting small or local businesses out of business."

Did you know relevance was being measured by clicks in local search results as displayed on Google Maps? I bet this will come as a surprise to a lot of local marketers.

As Bacchini said, the impact for small businesses may be crippling. How can you get more clicks and therefore demonstrate your relevance to Google if they won't display your listing in the first place?

And is it really a better user experience if an algorithm is attempting to determine where they should shop, based not on factual business listings but popularity, distance be damned?

CTR on Google Maps

Elisa Gabbert wasn’t surprised. “They don’t view the map as an objective tool,” she said, “They view it as an extension of the SERP. The SERP is always algorithm-driven.”

This just reinforces the idea that for Google, click-through rate is everything and is the best measure they now have for relevance. We know they already use expected CTR to help determine your ad position, and they may use it to determine organic rankings for certain queries too – how do you feel about them using CTR to determine whether you show up at all in Google Maps?

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Gender Bias in Online Marketing: Data Shows Women Are Undervalued by 21%

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Does the internet marketing industry have a gender bias problem? It’s something that’s been talked about before, but too often, those discussions are based almost entirely on speculation, a general sense that women are getting the short end of the stick. And the problem with speculation is that it’s easy to dismiss.

Moz’s recent industry salary survey provided some interesting data; they found that women in online marketing are paid less than their male counterparts, even at the same levels of education and experience. This sparked some really great discussion, but again, some may assume men just get the better jobs because of greater ability, better performance, or more ambition. But is this really the case?

I recently ran across some internal data that really surprised me. I believe it proves that gender bias in our industry is not only real, but measurable. Let’s take a look at the data and talk about what it means and what we can do about it.

Measuring Gender Bias In the Search Marketing Industry

At WordStream, we’re always analyzing data to figure out how to do better. We regularly conduct a 90-day customer satisfaction survey. One of the questions on this survey is, rate your satisfaction level with your client service representative, on a scale of 1-4 (4 = Excellent, 1= Poor).

Last month, we reviewed the responses from all clients who completed the survey in 2014 so far. Then we segmented the data by the customer service representative to get a sense of who our top performing reps are. Here’s what the data looked like (I’ve removed the names of the customer service reps):

gender bias in marketing

I was totally blown away by the results. The mean satisfaction score across all reps, for this time slice and segment of clients, was 3.11. Almost all the men had scores above this group average, and all the women had scores below the group average. Further, the male client service rep with the lowest score still did better on the survey than the female client service rep with the higest score. What the heck?! There’s no interspersion of males and females in the ranking order – all the men came out on top, followed by all the women.

Spider sense tingling. This can’t be right. I would expect to see a mix of some men and women client service reps with scores above the mean, as well as a mix below the mean.

I suspected gender bias at play here. Either that, or all men are better search marketing client sevice managers than women – which seemed a bit dubious. But how to prove it?

Are Men Better Search Marketers than Women?

This is search marketing. Unlike a lot of fields, we can quantify pretty much everything. If men truly are better than women at search engine marketing, then you would expect the accounts that are co-managed/supported by our male client service reps to be doing way better than those being co-managed by the female reps. (Our reps don’t fully manage these accounts, they just provide support and recommendations. It’s up to the owners to do most of the work.)

But how do you measure the success of an AdWords account? That’s when the light bulb went on. We just so happen to have this thing called the AdWords Grader. (Apologies in advance for plugging our own tool here; I promise that’s not what this post is about, it just made it easier for us to analyze the data.) The Grader is a free tool that benchmarks the health/achievement of your AdWords account in a comprehensive way. It analyzes dozens of objective metrics in your account, like click-through rates, conversion rates, Quality Scores, account activity, and use of best practices like conversion tracking and negative keywords. It then benchmarks your level of achievement versus other companies in the same industry as you, with similar budgets (so little guys don’t have to compete with big guys). You then get a percentile score, corresponding to your ranking within your peer group (i.e., a score of 47% means you are beating 47% of other advertisers who are in your industry and are of similar size, and conversely 53% of those advertisers are doing better than you). It’s a lot like Zillow, where you can compare prices for houses in a particular neighborhood and with similar characteristics – the comparisons are valid because you’re comparing like to like.

My idea was to run our AdWords Grader against all of the client accounts from the survey, then figure out if those supported by men fared any better than those supported by women. Since the Grader evaluates accounts consistently and objectively, I knew we wouldn’t be taking either the rep or the account owner at their word on how good the account was doing.

News Flash: Women Are Actually Better at SEM than Men [Data]

We analyzed the AdWords Grader scores of all the accounts for customers who took part in the survey, then split up the accounts supported by men vs. those supported by women. Here’s what that data ended up looking like:

gender bias in search marketing

The AdWords accounts supported by women at WordStream received Grader scores that were on average, 9 points higher than those managed by men! That's right, the software accounts supported by our female reps had a higher overall AdWords performance score than those supported by male reps. (It is, of course, ultimately up to the clients to do the work.) But despite the fact that their clients had slightly better quantitative results, the women still scored lower on subjective customer satisfaction.

Of course, this doesn’t actually mean that women are inherently better than men at managing paid search accounts, but it may mean they have to work harder just to be seen as equals, or even almost as good.

The Worst Gender Discrimination Happens in the Middle

As we were gathering the account performance data, I was surprised by some of the disparity I was seeing.

For example, take a look at this account. It’s doing amazing!

  • Average Quality Score of 7.7/10!
  • Account average CTR of 13.3%
  • Tons of account activity in last 30 and 90 days!
  • Insanely great ads and landing pages!

It scores a 99%. That means that out of 100 accounts, in the same industry and within the similar spend range (in this case approximately $2.7k/month), this account is in the 99% percentile. Seems pretty excellent to me, but this account is co-managed/supported by a woman client service rep, who got just a 3/4 customer satisfaction rating.

That’s just an outlier though. When we looked at all the data together, an uglier picture emerged.

For this part of the analysis, I enlisted the help of our resident data scientist, Mark Irvine, who helped explain what was happening.

Mark broke up our clients into quintiles (i.e., five buckets of equal size, based on their AdWords Grader scores) – and this revealed two alarming findings:

quantifying gender bias

First, female account reps received lower scores then male client service reps regardless of the customer's level of achievement. There’s essentially no winning for the women here.

Second, and more concerning, is that the gap in male and female client service rep score in the middle and 2nd quintiles is almost a full point! Despite those few early outliers, clients at the very top and the very bottom have, on average, predictably good or bad ratings for their rep, and the difference between genders isn’t as bad. However, for this middle tier of clients – clients whose performance is average or slightly below the average in this pool – the scores are uniquely bipolar. These clients give male client service reps their highest ratings, while giving female client service reps their worst ratings.

My take on this phenomenon is that discrimination in our field is of the subtle, pernicious variety - there's no overt sign on the door that says women need not apply - that would be too obvious. Rather, the strongest bias occurred in the "average performing accounts" in our pool of advertisers (i.e. accounts that were neither failing badly, nor succeeding wildly). For these "average performing" accounts, it would seem that that men client service managers more often than not, receive the benefit of the doubt where as women client service managers are far less likely to get a pass.

Women May Be More Susceptible to Gender Bias than Men

We also wanted to know if both male and female clients were impacted by the gender bias we were seeing, or if this was a case of just men putting down women. We can do this kind of analysis, because we know the gender of the client doing the rating. Again, the results were shocking.

The gender bias was actually more dramatic among female clients, who scored female reps by an average of .82 points lower than they would male reps (compared to .43 lower score by male clients). Is it possible female clients are even more demanding of female search marketing reps?

gender gap data

It’s also worth noting that the male client service reps scored considerably higher with their female clients.

Client Service Rep Tenure Doesn’t Matter

Mark took a look to see if there could be other signals at play here which could explain the gender bias we were seeing. The most obvious thing was to look at was the experience level of the client service representative at WordStream.

For example, what if the women client service reps were less experienced than the male client service reps, in terms of number of months on the job – could that explain their lower scores? Here’s what Mark found:

gender bias in customer satisfaction

The research clearly showed that men were favored over women across all levels of experience and seniority. In other words, seniority had no effect on the scores, and experience doesn't explain the discrepancy in scores.

The 21% Gender Valuation Gap: How Much Are Women Undervalued?

Based on our analysis, we believe there's a 21% gender worth gap in the search marketing industry – in other words, women are, on average, viewed as 21% less valuable than their male peers, regardless of experience and other performance metrics.

Getting dinged on a customer satisfaction score is just one example of how this Gender Valuation Gap might play out. I could see this bias having effects in many other areas. For example a 21% handicap might give the man the edge in terms of:

  • Getting a job interview
  • Being hired for the job
  • Getting the raise and/or promotion
  • Getting accepted or being invited to speak at a search marketing conference

And so on and so on. Over time, it compounds and adds up to a lot more men at the top and in high-visibility roles in our industry, even if they started with the same level of ability.

It’s also worth noting that the 21% Gender Valuation Gap aligns remarkably well with the 19.7% average gender pay gap that Moz identified in their recent search industry survey:

gender pay gap

Are female search marketers actually worth less, or is an underlying sexism affecting their perceived value by the rest of the industry? Our research points to the latter.

How Does Gender Bias Affect Morale?

We asked our female client service reps the following questions to get a sense of how this bias might affect them, if they were conscious of it at all:

  1. The data shows that men get higher customer satisfaction scores across the board than women, though men are not delivering better results than women. (In fact, the accounts supported by women had better results.) Why do you think that is?
  2. Were you surprised by your score? How did it make you feel? Does it affect your ability to do your job well?
  3. Have you ever felt that you were discriminated against because of your gender? Can you name an example?
  4. Do you notice any difference in how your male and female clients treat you?
  5. We suspect that gender bias is a pervasive problem in search marketing. How do you think we can address these issues?

I was a little surprised that some of the women on our Customer Success team seemed quick to blame themselves. For example, in response to Question 1, one said:

Often women tend to be more gentle, speak in higher pitched voices, and may not always exude confidence the way a male does. By nature men have deeper pitched voices which I believe leads them to sound more confident, and women sometimes need to work on this. I’m constantly working on my tone and trying to shift towards more definitive language.

The same issue was echoed by another woman on staff:

I think this has a lot to do with the way that men carry themselves and a varying sense of confidence (or perceived confidence) between men and women. The perception is sometimes that men know more simply because they sound more confident … I think men in general are better at just telling people what they want to hear rather than working with them in a more sympathetic manner. 

Both women note that men often sound more confident than women – it’s unclear if they actually are more confident. But this may just be a stereotype with no basis in reality. Another rep told me:

I’ve had numerous situations where clients have asked for a second opinion on the advice that I’ve given them. When this happens, I always ask [redacted] or [redacted] to get on the phone and make the exact same recommendation that I’ve been making. Usually, they are quick to accept it coming from a guy.

So this rep is completely confident in her opinions – her clients just want to hear them coming from a man’s mouth. Since women are born with different vocal cords, it’s hardly fair to judge their confidence levels or the authority of their advice based on the pitch of their voice. It’s probably not that deep voices naturally sound more authoritative, but that we’re all biased toward men, so we’ve learned to “read” deep voices as more trustworthy. (In other words, if men had higher voices, we’d trust higher voices more.)

I know some readers will question whether it’s possible that our male reps are just easier to work with than our female reps, regardless of the performance they’re delivering. But this bias comes before the clients have even met the reps. One rep told us, in response the question “Have you ever felt that you were discriminated against because of your gender?”:

100% yes—by both female and male clients. I’ve actually had cases in which new clients unabashedly have requested new reps specifically because they feel more comfortable working with a male strategist. 

In more heartening news, everyone agreed that “awareness is key” and studies like this are a great first step to fixing the problem. One rep said, “Continuing to educate people on gender bias in the workplace will bring attention to the fact that gender bias IS still indeed a problem that needs to be addressed.” Another said, “Once people start to acknowledge that there is a problem, they will be more cognizant of making non-biased decisions (one would hope…).”

Another:

I think the only real way to address gender bias in any industry is to keep talking about it and keep proving that women are just as capable of excelling in paid search. Case studies, data, valuable information all coming from women is only going to further prove that there should not be any separation between reps of different genders. It’s certainly not something that will be fixed overnight, but as women continue to see success and high performance it will help to make people more aware of what’s going on. Similarly, highlighting women and showing their success will probably give us more confidence, which seems to be a huge factor in how others perceive us.   

Nobody said they were deeply disturbed or offended by the data. The fact that most everyone took the valuation gap in stride may explain why it’s so persistent – it’s subtle enough for most people to ignore.  Or, as Kristen Yerardi, our VP of Customer Success, pointed out, maybe it’s just so commonplace cross-industry that women learn how to deal with it as a matter of course. She said:

In 2014, the American Enterprise Institute studied White House salaries. The median annual salary for women in the White House was $65k, while the same for men was $73.7k. That’s a 13% difference in salary. Whether you like Obama or not, he’s vocal about fixing this issue. Even a President who want to help is starting out with a gap so large, he seemingly can’t overcome it. How can any corporation or government agency close that gap realistically?

What Can We Do To Fix the Gender Bias Issue?

I don’t really know. It’s a complicated issue. The way I look at it, as a founder of an internet marketing company, you can approach the problem from the top down or from the bottom up of your organization.

Can we do better when it comes to hiring? Look at your internet marketing staff – is it 50/50 men/women or way out of balance, more like 80/20? If it’s the latter, you should probably do something about that. As my colleague Elisa Gabbert recently said, “If you’re in a hiring role, examine the hiring process – do you tend to screen out more women? Could you be judging their resumes more harshly? Could your job descriptions even reveal a bias, which might dissuade women from applying?” Addressing these issues could help even the numbers out of the gates. This isn’t “affirmative action” – you don’t need to hire women who are worse at the job than men. What we need to do is question whether we’re overvaluing men that aren’t truly more qualified.

Can industry leaders nurture women within their companies? The 21% Gender Valuation Gap means that men will on average, catch more “lucky breaks” within their career than women. This becomes huge if you keep compounding it over time. So, one of my personal goals is to spend time working with the female staff to help them land a few opportunities of their own. For example, perhaps it could be helping review pitches to land more prominent external-facing gigs. The numbers show they’re doing as well or better than their male colleagues when it comes to managing campaigns, so I’m not suggesting that we need to “save” them or do their work for them. But if gender bias is real, it means we probably (as men) already have an advantage, and we can use it to promote women in our companies. (Or maybe we just need to make sure we’re not standing in their way?)

I’m not saying I’m above any of these problems, and I’m not suggesting others aren’t doing enough either. I’m also not suggesting that our clients have done something wrong. Quite the opposite. I think we’re all complicit here. It’s a systemic problem that manifests in many different subtle, often unconscious ways.

But the first step toward changing things is recognizing there’s a problem, so I wanted to share the data that we discovered in a transparent way. You can draw your own conclusions, but I urge you not to brush them off as flawed or inconsequential. For me, the key takeaway here is that gender bias in search is real and that it impacts us all. I’ve always suspected that this was the case, but didn’t have concrete evidence on how it impacts our collective psyche until now.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my colleague Elisa and many others in the industry, including Jen Lopez, Lisa Barone, and Megan Williams to name a few, for writing about the issues of gender bias and discrimination in online marketing. Had they not called these issues to my attention repeatedly, I would have never even known to investigate it. Also thanks to Mark Irvine for all the deep data analysis work, Miranda Miller for the input, and Kristen Yerardi for her support in exploring this topic.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Google Study Reveals What Local Mobile Searchers Want to See in Your Ads

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What are on-the-go consumers looking for when they're using mobile devices to perform searches with local intent? Four out of five local searchers want the ads they see to be customized to their city, zip code or immediate surroundings, for one.

They're also looking for information they can act on immediately. Fifty percent of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, according to new research by Ipsos MediaCT and Purchased, commissioned by Google.

Their study took place online in January 2014 and explored consumer behavior across nine different verticals including Auto, CPG, Retail and Finance. Each of the 4,500 study participants completed a vertical-specific online survey. In order to participate, they had to be at least 18 years of age, conduct smartphone searches at least a few times per week, and had purchased in at least one of the nine verticals in the previous six months.

These insights can help you tweak your local search ads to better align with what consumers expect of advertisers when they're on the go.

What Local Mobile Searchers Need to Take the Next Step

When it comes to mobile ads, searchers definitely prefer to see – and act on – ads with local intent. More than 60% of respondents indicated they had used on-location information, such as an address or phone number, in an ad. Researchers also found that 18% of local searches on a smartphone lead to a purchase within a day, versus just 7% of searches lacking local intent.

And just what are they looking for?

Smartphone searchers seeking localized information are most often looking for business hours, directions to a local store and the physical address of the store. When you're advertising to a local audience, are you including this information?

Local mobile searchers use search most often for inspiration, when they're on the go and suddenly realize they need to make a purchase. Other reasons for mobile search with local intent include research before purchase, and information seeking at time of purchase and post-purchase.

Perhaps surprisingly, mobile searchers use their device to find local information most often when they're at home, where you might assume a desktop device might be available. Other places where local mobile searches commonly happen include in transit, in-store, and in the workplace.

Among their other findings:

  • 30% of consumers said they would buy in-store rather than online if they knew they were close to a store – and 35% if they knew they could get the product quickly.
  • The majority of mobile searches – 56% – have local intent.
  • 72% of consumers who searched for local information on a smartphone visited a store within 5 miles.
  • Over half of in-store searches have local intent.
  • 15% of in-store activities involve conducting smartphone searches about a product or for comparison shopping.
  • 67% of smartphone users want the ads they see customized to their city or zip code.
  • 61% of smartphone users want the ads they see customized to their immediate surroundings.
  • 68% of local searchers use "get directions" or the call button in ads and 78% believe having the local address in an ad is important.

[RELATED:Google Maps Favors Businesses That Get Clicked On More]

Key Takeaways:

  • Local searchers show high intent, convert at a high rate, and expect that advertisers will provide them the information needed to take the next step. If you're not already using ad extensions like click-to-call that enable searchers to quickly and easily get in touch or find your store, you're missing a huge opportunity.
  • Consumers want to see information about their immediate surroundings, or at least within a few miles. Use radius bidding to reach consumers near your location and build an attribution model for local searches. Use location extensions and location bid adjustments to target specific cities or zip codes.
  • Make sure your locations are in Google Places and verify your product availability, address and directions as they appear to smartphone searchers.

Image credits: Google Think

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

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