What do WordStream, Google and the White House have in common? We’re all championing small businesses this week, as Small Business Week 2014 is in full swing!

In partnership with the Small Business Administration, a series of events, workshops and Q&A sessions are taking place in cities across the country (and at tech companies such as Microsoft and Twitter) to provide proprietors of small businesses with the support, advice and resources they need to thrive.

Small Business Statistics

Small businesses are a big deal. According to the Small Business Administration, small businesses make up:

• 99.7% of U.S. employer firms
• 64% of net new private sector jobs
• 49.2% of private sector employment
• 46% of private sector output
• 43% of high-tech employment
• 98% of firms exporting goods overseas
• 33% of the country’s total export value

Small Business Week has been observed in the U.S. since 1963, and since the inaugural event, the Small Business Administration has helped millions of small business owners make their dreams a reality. On Friday, entrepreneurs from across the nation will gather in Washington, D.C., to see who will be named the Small Business Person of the Year 2014. Until the lucky winner is announced, let’s take a look at how paid search can be a highly effective tool for small business owners.

Sharing Success Stories with Google

WordStream works with small businesses in virtually every industry, and we know the struggles faced by millions of entrepreneurs around the world. As a Google Partner, Google invited our CEO Ralph Folz to its Mountain View, California, headquarters along with Kristi Anderson, VP of Marketing for GetOutfitted.com, for a special Google Hangout focusing on how paid search can really pay off for small businesses.

In the Hangout, Ralph and Kristi spoke with Sher Khan, a Strategic Partner Manager at Google, about how WordStream and GetOutfitted.com began to work together when Kristi won our $25,000 Marketing Makeover competition last October. Kristi explained how running the WordStream AdWords Performance Grader Plus revealed crucial areas of her AdWords account that needed urgent improvement, and the steps she took following the competition.

Before working with WordStream, Kristi struggled to get to grips with AdWords – especially as someone working for a small business (GetOutfitted.com has just two full-time employees and two interns). Many proprietors and marketers in small businesses simply don’t have the time, money or resources to figure out paid search, which leads many to believe that PPC simply isn’t for them. However, as Kristi’s experiences demonstrated, you don’t need a vast monthly advertising budget to win with AdWords, but you might need some guidance.

If you want to get the most out of your AdWords account, Ralph advised running WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader Plus to identify areas in which you can take immediate action to improve the ROI of your paid search efforts. Check out the video to hear Ralph’s other tips on how to win with AdWords and help your small business succeed.

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.

I recently learned six Google Analytics tips that literally changed the way I use the software. Until just last week, I only used Google Analytics casually. I’d log in, poke around a little bit, then leave with only a vague idea of what was going on with our traffic. In other words, I was barely scratching the surface of what was possible.

We recently did an all-day intensive Google Analytics training session, which showed me a ton of features that I wasn’t using and didn’t even know about.

Before the training, I was pretty much just using Google Analytics to check daily and weekly blog traffic trends. However, the features I’m going to share with you allow me to see:

• Detailed visitor demographic data and how the behavior of certain types of users can be tracked against “typical” visitors
• How our traffic aligns with our goals, and how visitors actually progress through our goal funnels
• Our conversion paths, and the (often convoluted) route that visitors take from first action to conversion
• Unusual traffic patterns and the underlying reasons for sudden shifts
• How traffic trends compare to previous time periods

In this post, I’ll pass that knowledge on to you! Here are six Google Analytics tips you need to know about – right now.

1. Use Audience Data When Creating Custom Visitor Segments

Hopefully, you’re already using custom segments to classify your visitors by various demographic data, such as age, gender, and location. However, if you’re not drawing on the data in the Audience reporting views to help you create your custom visitor segments, you’re missing out on a wealth of information about how specific users are interacting with your site. Needless to say, I had no idea I could even do this until recently, which is what makes the first of my Google Analytics tips my personal favorite.

First, navigate to the Interests Overview within the Audience reporting section (Audience > Interests > Overview). This will present you with a broad view of the other three Interests reports: Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments and Other Categories, as seen in the figure below.

Based on this data, we know that almost 8% of visitors across all sessions are identified as “technophiles” – individuals with a strong interest in technology. We can also see that almost 5% of visitors in the In-Market Segment either work or are interested in Financial/Investment Services.

We’re starting to get a better idea of who our typical visitor is, but we’re going to go deeper before we create our custom segment. Next, we’re going to look at Age and Gender data by selecting these reports from the Demographics section of the Audience reports (Audience > Demographics):

This data tells us that a majority of our visitors are between the ages of 25-34, and the graph below shows that many more men visit our site than women (not exactly surprising, considering the gender bias in search):

So, after a little digging, we know that many of our visitors are:

• Male
• 25-34 years old
• Have a strong interest in technology
• Work in financial or investment services

How to Create Custom Segments in Google Analytics

Armed with this data, we can create a custom visitor segment that we can track against goals (more on this shortly). To do this, we need to go back to Audience reporting and click on the downward-facing chevron to the left of “All Sessions”:

Next, we’ll create our custom segment based on the demographic data above. For the sake of this example, we’ll also include data from the Other Category report within Interests Overview, which in our case, was Arts & Entertainment/TV & Video/Online Video:

Now all you have to do is name your custom segment and save it. Alternatively, you can test this advanced custom segment to get a better idea of how many visitors fall within these parameters.

This segment can now be measured against other visitor traffic to gain insight into how certain types of visitors behave in comparison to one another, rather than forcing you to make do with a broad overview of all pageviews or sessions.

It’s worth noting that depending on your sampling size, specified date range and the number of advanced segments you’re already using, this process can take a while (or even fail outright), so you might have to go back and make some adjustments before your custom segment will save correctly.

BONUS GOOGLE ANALYTICS TIP: Once you’ve created your custom segment, you can further refine it by including the date of these visitors’ first session by specific date range. This cool feature was only introduced within the past month or so, and it allows you to further refine how you track certain visitors. This can be incredibly useful for remarketing campaigns.

2. Assign a Monetary Value to Goals

The second of my Google Analytics tips relates to goals. You should definitely be setting goals in Google Analytics. If you aren’t, you’re basically just looking at relatively useless metrics such as pageviews and time on site. However, you shouldn’t just be setting goals – you should also be assigning them a monetary value.

Let’s take a look at a sample Goal Flow report from WordStream’s Google Analytics account.

As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward. For this particular goal, we get a majority of our traffic from Google, with strong direct traffic coming in as our second-largest source. If you’re unfamiliar with Goal Flow reports, the red areas to the right of the second and third stages of the goal funnel steps are known as “funnel exits” – visitors who failed to perform the action we want them to at a given stage, which is to sign up for a free trial in this example.

So, why should you assign a monetary value to your Goal Flow? Because until you assign a monetary value to your goal flow, it’s impossible to gauge how much money you’re losing on every lost lead that exits the funnel.

Ever notice the “Page Value” metric in your traffic score card? This is where you’ll see the financial value of a page in relation to its goal value and the position it occupies in your conversion paths. If you haven’t assigned a value to your goals, these values will be zero.

Let’s say you assign a goal a value of $25. It’s important to note that the values displayed in this column won’t just be $25 or $0 – the page’s role in assisted conversions is also weighted in the Page Value column, meaning these values will vary depending on the page in question and its role in one or more conversion paths.

How to Assign Values to Goals in Google Analytics

To assign a value to a goal, navigate to the Admin section of Google Analytics (accessible from the top menu) and click “Goals”:

You’ll now be presented with a list of your goals. When you click on one, you’ll see an interface within which you can specify the monetary value you want to assign to the goal.

The precise value of a goal will vary depending on several factors, but it’s generally advisable to underestimate how much a goal is worth. Until you get a better idea of what each conversion is worth to you in financial terms, stick to a lowball estimate.

By estimating the worth of a lead, and assigning this value to each goal, you can start to see (in real financial terms) how much money you could be losing with your existing goal flow. This could, in turn, prompt you to start thinking about whether your goal funnel is optimized enough. Do you need to add more steps? Provide additional navigation to enable users to revisit previous sections of the funnel more easily? Remove something simple that’s harming your conversion rate? These are all questions that could arise from placing a dollar value on each goal.

3. Examine Your Top Conversion Paths

Unfortunately, visitors to your site don’t always behave the way you want them to. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if prospective customers saw your ads, visited your site and ultimately made a purchase – all in a single sitting? Well, it rarely works like that, which is why understanding your conversion paths is so important – especially in today’s advertising landscape, where people rarely complete a purchase on one device, never mind in one session.

Image © Peter Andrew

In addition to illustrating how your visitors are actually converting (as opposed to how you think they’re converting), examining your top conversion paths in Google Analytics provides a fascinating glimpse into user behavior – and the often-complex route many visitors take from first action to the ultimate conversion.

How to Examine Conversion Paths in Google Analytics

To look at these visitor journeys, go to the Top Conversion Paths section of the Conversions reports (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths). Here, you’ll see the top 10 conversion paths by default, with options to extend the number of rows being displayed.

In this example, you can see that the most effective conversion paths are pretty standard (two direct visits, an organic search leading to a display ad, three direct visits etc.), but some other conversion paths are a little more unorthodox. Two display ads? A direct search leading to a display ad? Two organic searches?

You also have the option to display the top conversion paths by MCF Channel Grouping Path and map these results against Keyword (Or Source/Medium) Path, which can reveal additional insights into how each of your channels is working:

Damn you, (not provided)!

4. Set Up Intelligence Events

It’s important to keep a close eye on your site’s performance on a regular basis, but chances are good that you won’t see huge deviations from one day to the next. What about those weird anomalies that make you do a double-take, though? Those huge spikes (or drops) in traffic that defy explanation? This is when Intelligence Events come into play.

Intelligence Events is a feature in Google Analytics that allows you to set custom parameters to monitor for unusual site activity and send alerts to designated account managers. For example, a 200% increase in traffic on a given day would be considered unusual, and as such Google Analytics would record the data surrounding this event and alert you to it.

Now, you might think that you’d notice such a large increase in traffic purely by monitoring your usual metrics, but this might not necessarily be the case. Let’s take a look at a recent example we came across.

On Saturday, April 19, we received an Intelligence Event alert that notified us of a 216% increase in traffic to a specific page. The alert also provided us with data about the origin of much of the traffic (in this case, California), as well as the associated metric (one of our conversion goals). This kind of a spike should stick out like a sore thumb, right? That’s what we thought. However, we were wrong.

As you can see in the figure above, overall traffic for that day seemed low – certainly nothing out of the ordinary for a Saturday, when our traffic tends to trend lower than weekdays. Had we relied on a cursory glance of our Pageviews report, we would have had no idea that we received more than 200% more traffic to that page, and this spike would have slipped under the radar completely unnoticed.

How to Set Up Custom Intelligence Event Notifications in Google Analytics

By default, Google Analytics will notify you of unusual site activity – including the type of anomaly in the example above. However, don’t rely on Google to tell you when something important happens. Instead, set up your own Intelligence Events.

First, open the Intelligence Events reporting section, and select the “Custom Alerts” tab from the menu on the right. Then, select “Manage Custom Alerts.”

Next, click the red button labeled “+ New Alert.” This will present you with the interface where you’ll create your custom Intelligence Events.

Here, you’ll specify a range of parameters that will trigger custom Intelligence Events notifications. As you can see, you can customize the views to which the alert conditions will apply, the time period, and how notifications are sent – either by email (to one or more specified addresses) or email and SMS text alerts (note that SMS alerts are only available to Google Analytics users with United States-based cell numbers).

Next, you need to state what conditions must be met for the alert to be triggered. First, set the traffic conditions and the site usage parameters (images condensed for illustrative purposes):

Next, set the general conditions that must be met from the drop-down menu to the right:

Now, simply name your custom alert, save it, and you’re all done!

5. Compare Historical Traffic Trends

Many Google Analytics users only concern themselves with current traffic trends, but identifying patterns based on previous traffic can yield valuable insights into how traffic can change over time. One of the best ways to investigate this data is by using the Compare to Previous Period tool in the date range dialog box:

Once you’ve specified the desired date range (and the previous period to compare it to), you can apply this filter to see how your traffic stacks up from one time period to another – in this case, from April 12 to May 12, and March 12 to April 11 (the previous period):

Notice how the valleys of one plotted line (April 12-May 12 in blue) correspond quite closely to the peaks of the second plotted line (March 12-April 11 in orange) and vice versa? This is caused by disparities in the days of the week specified when comparing recent traffic data against a previous date range.

How to Specify Custom Date Ranges in Google Analytics

For example, if you were to apply this filter to a weekly view, you might think that a Monday-Sunday week view would mirror the previous period exactly – but it doesn’t. Instead, Google Analytics defaults to the number of days in the specified period, not to the corresponding days of the previous week. Let’s take a look at this in action:

The first date range is Monday, May 5 to Friday, May 9. This spans the full five-day business week for this specified period. However, when we select “Compare to Previous Period,” Google Analytics pulls data from the five-day period immediately preceding the first date range, not the previous five-day work week– meaning the data included in the graph is actually comparing completely different days of the week, resulting in the (misleading) graph below:

However, if we make sure we specify a custom date range (in which the days of the week match perfectly), we’ll see that the two graphs are virtually identical. Note that to accomplish this, you’ll need to enter the desired date range manually in the relevant fields, rather than clicking on a start day and letting Analytics fill in the blanks:

As you can see, there is still some slight variation between the traffic – but nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly nothing like the significant variance we saw in the misleading graph above.

6. Add Annotations to Your Reports

The last (but by no means least) of my Google Analytics tips has to do with good housekeeping. Maybe you’re not the only person responsible for keeping an eye on your Google Analytics account. If this is the case, you’ll need some sort of way to keep tabs on why things happened and when. Was a media mention the reason for a huge spike in traffic? Did a slump coincide with a less-than-successful email campaign? Whatever you need to remember in Analytics, annotations can help.

Annotations are simple notes that can be added to an Analytics reporting graph to explain rises or falls in traffic, make other account managers aware of promotional campaigns that launched on a given day, and just about anything else you want to make note of directly within Analytics.

Annotations appear as speech bubble icons along the bottom of an Analytics graph. In the figure above, notice how many of the peaks in our Pageviews graph have accompanying annotations.

How to Add Annotations in Google Analytics

To actually read annotations, simply click on the downward arrow tab icon immediately beneath the graph. You’ll see a list of all annotations made within the specified time period, as well as information about who created the annotation and their email address. Annotations can be set to “Public” or “Private,” allowing you to control who sees what. To create a new annotation, simply click “Create new annotation” on the right above existing annotation authors’ email addresses:

Tame Your Traffic

Whew! That brings us to the end of our top 6 list of Google Analytics tips. If you aren’t already, I’d strongly recommend using these techniques to gain greater insight into your traffic, conversion funnel, and how your visitors are behaving on your site.

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.

Prospective customers can be a fickle bunch. They rarely do what we want them to, they behave in all sorts of crazy, unexpected ways, and – worst of all – sometimes they don’t even listen to us.

However, it’s not hard to see why consumers have become largely indifferent to most marketing techniques. After all, the average American consumer spends 11 hours per day using or engaging with digital media and is exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of ads every single day. Is it any wonder why many consumers are hard to reach?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. In our upcoming webinar, “The ‘Happy Juice’ Principle: Marketing that Captures and Converts,” WordStream and renowned marketing expert Perry Marshall will show you how to leverage the “happy juice” principle to break through your audience’s indifference using tactics that resonate with prospects and drive real results.

This exclusive webinar will take place on Monday, May 19 at 4 p.m. EST (8 p.m. UTC). Register now!

In the one-hour webinar, Perry will explain the tenets of the happy juice principle and how they can be used to forge stronger connections with your audience. WordStream’s Director of Marketing Amber Stevens will join Perry to show you examples of the happy juice principle in action and how you can capture more leads and convert them to sales.

During the webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Write paid search ads with killer click-through rates
• Craft emails with sky-high open rates
• Produce engaging blog posts that encourage social sharing and comments
• … and much more!

Register now for the free webinar and break through the barrier of indifference and make a real connection with your prospects!

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.

Confession: I’m a content marketing manager who hates most content. It’s all so boring! It’s true in the consumer world – as Choire Sicha, co-founder of The Awl, just said in an interview for The Atlantic:

I opened up my Digg reader the other day, because I was on blogging duty at work, and everything was so duplicative of each other. I was like, yeah, okay, there’s that piece of news filtering through all these different websites, all the same things… no wonder I don’t go to them.

And the same is true in the business-to-business world. Over 90% of B2B companies do content marketing– but 90% of that content marketing is redundant crap, e.g. “5 Ways to Do Blah Blah the Same Way as Everyone Else.” Publishing blog posts like this is basically cargo-cult marketing; it’s trying to make a phone call with a banana phone. Content marketing doesn't work if nobody cares.

Confession #2: We did some of this ourselves in the past – going through the motions, publishing received wisdom just to get a blog post up. At some point, we decided that wasn’t good enough, and we raised our standards. The results were undeniable: We've more than doubled site traffic year over year and grew more than 30% just in the last quarter. Perhaps more exciting, we’ve seen a huge uptick in brand mentions and word-of-mouth referrals.

This shift in our content strategy involved a few moving parts:

• More long-form content– I’d estimate that the length of our average blog post increased by 30-50%. Conventional wisdom used to be that people like shorter content on the web, but we’ve found the opposite to be true: longer, meatier content gets more traffic and better engagement.
• Better content promotion– We started thinking about our promotion strategy before we even created the content. We worked harder to build media/influencer relationships. We used Twitter more for pitching. We leveraged remarketing. (Etc.)
• A commitment to standing out– There’s so much noise out there. Most content is noise. I wanted us to be the signal. We’ve made contrarian opinions part of our brand, and it’s helped us stand out when every other blog is saying the same thing.

In this post, I’ll explain why contrarian content marketing works, share some tips for generating contrarian ideas, and share three examples of contrarian content that hit all of our target “awesomeness” metrics and then some (plus a few caveats at the end).

Why Contrarian Content Does So Well

When you say something counter to received wisdom, people pay attention. It’s the “one of these things is not like the other” principle.

Image via SamahR

This works in every vertical, no matter how boring. (Hey, let’s be honest – PPC is pretty boring in the grand scheme!) Marketers often wonder, how can I create engaging content when I work in this boring industry? The truth is, the people who work in your industry don’t find it boring. You’re trying to hit a nerve with them, not the general population. As long as your content speaks to what matters to them, it won’t be boring.

Controversial ideas have a huge ripple effect because people take an interest – clicking, reading, commenting, and often sharing – whether or not they agree. That's because it tends to hit people's emotional triggers, like surprise and anger.

Image via Buffer

Accordingly, contrarian content earns attention and boosts all your engagement metrics, getting more:

• Traffic – Unexpected ideas are click magnets. This includes high return traffic – people come back to read the comments!
• Social shares – When something is making the rounds, a lot of people share even if they don’t read the post. That’s still good for you: the more people who see the link, the more people are exposed to your brand.
• Email shares – “OMG, check this out!”
• Comments– Controversial topics always have higher comment counts, plus the comments are much more compelling than a string of people saying “Nice post.”
• Links– Expect round-up links as well as response articles – people may refute or build on your argument.

As a bonus, since contrarian opinions tend to get your content in front of new audiences that weren’t familiar with you before, it’s often a way to expand your reach, get new email subscribers and blog readers, even trigger a chain of more first actions and conversions on your website.

How to Come Up with Differentiating Ideas

The best way to stand out in a crowded, redundant space is to say something different. But how do you actually come up with those ideas?

Our approach is to monitor trending topics and look for opportunities to inject a strong opinion, using real/internal/branded data and insight wherever possible. The trick is, you have to actually believe what you’re saying. I don’t encourage you to lie or invent contrary opinions just to get attention and links! Your audience will catch on quickly and then you’ll be the victim of Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome.

News Scanning Tools

Here are a few ways to stay on top of trending stories:

• Twitter– Follow influencers in your space and spend a little time every day doing a news scan there. It’ll be obvious when everyone is talking about the same thing – no hashtags required.
• News aggregators– In our industry, Inbound.org is a good indicator of what stories are earning attention from your peers. See also Reddit, Y Combinator, etc.

• Email subscriptions– Again, using search marketing as an example, you can subscribe to newsletters like the Search Cap and the Moz Top 10 to see what stories and topics are having an impact.
• Google Alerts – Subscribe to get alerts when topics you cover are getting notice in the news.
• Google Trends – This tool also could surface interesting trends to write about, depending on how niche-y your industry is.

Appoint a News Scan Point Person

Another tactic we’ve employed internally is naming a point person to do a near-daily news scan. This way, everyone in your marketing department or company doesn’t need to divert time and resources to looking for stories to pounce on. Someone on the content team can be responsible for scanning the news and sending out a digest-style email to stakeholders with interesting stories.

The 4 Criteria for a Content-Worthy Controversy

Obviously, you can’t expect to create contrarian content in response to every trending story. It’s unlikely that you’ll disagree with everyone else all the time, and if you did, well, that would look weird, and you should probably hide it. So you’ll need to pick your battles.

How often you can afford to do a big content push depends on your business size and budget, but in general, ask these four questions to decide if a story is worth your time:

1. Does the story/topic resonate with people in your industry? Does it have legs?
2. Is the story one-sided? Is there apparent consensus?
3. Do you disagree with what everyone else is saying? Do you believe there’s more to the story?
4. Do you have a unique perspective, something to offer that others can’t or haven’t yet? Can you use internal data to your advantage? (See all the yummy data porn in our post called "Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Is Wrong.")

If you answer yes to all four questions (especially #4!), you’ve got an excellent candidate for a contrarian content piece.

Examples: What Contrarian Content Marketing Looks Like

As I mentioned, we’ve seen a lot of success with our contrarian content pieces in the past year or so. In this section I’ll show you a couple of examples of contrarian content projects that got great results for us, including:

a) how we got the idea,

b) how we planned it,

c) how we executed the content,

d) how we promoted it, and

e) the awesome results.

Example 1: "Dear eBay, Your Ads Don't Work Because They Suck"

The idea for this story came about through our former appointed news scan person. (Hi, Victor Pan!) A story was making the rounds about eBay deciding that paid search wasn’t a worthwhile channel for them. They released a full-on academic study and paper, which got picked up by Harvard Business Review and lots of other spots.

Naturally, the mainstream news media was eating it up: From their perspective, it was kind of a contrarian story: Corporate behemoth does what other corporate behemoths don’t! Plus, they love covering what big brands are doing.

But once all the news outlets were running with the same angle (i.e. “PPC doesn’t work”), that became the standard, boring line. It opened up an opportunity for a new contrarian opinion. This was a golden ticket for us because:

• It was getting mainstream attention – hence, lots of reach.
• It was completely relevant to our blog and business.

It also met that all-important fourth criteria for us – since we’ve been in the PPC space for years, we knew there was more to the story than eBay and the news media was reporting. Namely, that eBay has always been a laughing stock in the paid search community. That’s because their ads suck! They are notorious for overusing broad match, underusing negative keyword filters, and misusing dynamic keyword insertion.

So we quickly wrote up an article (timeliness is key when newsjacking), complete with examples, saying the exact opposite of what eBay’s report was claiming – no, we said, the problem isn’t AdWords, the problem is you.

But we didn’t stop there. We also:

• Pitched it to industry sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Small Biz Trends.
• Pitched it to the bigger media outlets that ran the original story.
• And generally promoted it like crazy.

It was a big hit, probably not just because of the contrarian angle, but because it was funny too.

Example 2: Toward a Linkless SEO: The SEO Link Is Dying. Here's What Might Replace It

It’s been an extremely flux-y year so far in search marketing, especially when it comes to linkbuilding. Things really got heated when Matt Cutts announced that guest blogging was dead, and rose to a fever pitch when Google penalized a well-known guest blogging network that need hardly be named.

From my perspective, a lot of people in the search community were reacting the same way, along the lines of “Oh well, we knew this was coming, it’s a shame they made an example of one network, but linkbuilding is here to stay either way.” I basically agreed – on the scale of now and the near future. But I also saw this penalty as different in scope from other spam-fighting measures on Google’s part. Guest-posting had always been considered white-hat in the past – a great way for people to get not just attention, but links too. And suddenly, Google was calling takebacks, saying “Nope, never mind, you can guest-blog, but not for links anymore.” I saw this as an admission that Google has realized links are losing value as a measure of true authority/popularity. Hence, there was an opportunity to zoom out and do some bigger-picture, longer-term thinking.

So I wrote up a kind of “think piece” about how the link is atrophying, plus some predictions about what Google might secretly be cooking up to replace it.

Again, it was a hit – even though, of course, not everyone agreed with it. Remember, as long as you’re really writing stuff you’ve thought about and care about (and it’s not just empty clickbait), contrarian opinions are interesting even to naysayers. For example, AJ Kohn (definitely one of those influencers I’m always trying to influence) tweeted the article even though he vocally disagreed that links are losing value.

In addition to promoting it through all the relevant channels, we also planned on a series of follow-up articles to keep the attention momentum going, including:

• Matt Cutts Confirms That Google Has Tried Search Without Links– An offhand comment in a Webmaster Video lent some credence to my theory that Google is already working on link-free, or less link-dependent, versions of the algo.
• The Future of PageRank: 13 Experts on the Dwindling Value of the Link– I asked industry badasses like Dr. Pete and Rae Hoffman where they thought the algorithm was heading with respect to links. Thanks to all the “real insight from REAL experts” (as Nick Eubanks said<3), this one did even better than the original piece. (Russ Jones left a long comment with his own opposing theory, and his comment ended up getting mentioned in a Whiteboard Friday at Moz.)
• If People Don't Link to Porn Sites, How Does Google Rank Porn?– Another one inspired by one of Cutts’ Webmaster Videos, and more speculation around how Google handles ranking when links don’t apply or don’t provide enough information to deliver the best results.

The only problem with a series of contrarian articles is that the original naysayers will probably continue to naysay (and potentially get increasingly annoyed). For the most part, so what? However, if you find yourself in a less-than-friendly debate as a result of your content marketing efforts, by all means continue reading.

The Dark Side of Contrarian Content Marketing

Before I bid you adieu, a quick note on the risks involved here. Contrarianism isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. The reason that most people tend to take the same side on an issue is that there’s safety in numbers. Go against popular opinion and you will probably piss some people off.

With that in mind, here’s my advice for taking advantage of the opportunities in contrarian content marketing without creating a PR nightmare:

Watch your tone– You can disagree with people in a civil way. Don’t call anybody stupid. Be assured without being arrogant. Back up your claims.

Respond to disagreement respectfully– If people get vehement or angry in your social streams or your comment field, stay cool in your own responses. Chances are it’s not worth burning bridges over.

Apologize when necessary– When colleagues you respect are genuinely offended, you probably went too far. Get some perspective and issue apologies when and where they’re due. But remember, it’s better to anticipate and prepare for disagreement from the outset, than to bloviate blindly and then have to clean up the mess later.

I don’t expect everyone who reads this post to start acting on it – everyone can’t be contrarian, by definition! But those who do are going to start kicking ass in their industries and creating content that people actually want to read, share, and talk about: a huge win for brand building.

Now go forth and stir the pot.

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.

Here at WordStream, our team of consultants analyzes thousands of PPC accounts. While our customers’ pain points tend to vary, many of their issues can be tracked back to one major misstep—their campaigns are set to run on both the Search and Display Networks simultaneously.

99% of the time, this practice will wreak havoc on a PPC account. The main problem is, these networks target users in two completely different scenarios. Not to mention, since metrics across each network are combined, it is challenging to assess how each is performing, and it eliminates the option to segment one’s budget by network.

Quite frankly, applying the same strategy to both networks is like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole…it just doesn’t work. If you have any campaigns opted into both networks, save yourself from future pain and agony and start separating them. In today’s post, we’ll do a deep dive outlining the components of each of these networks and examine what types of advertisers should be utilizing them.

A Quick Note on Search Network with Display Select (SNDS)

Before we delve into the intricacies of each network, I want to address one caveat to this rule, which is Google’s recent innovation, Search Network with Display Select (SNDS). If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you may remember a post from a few weeks ago, complete with a Google video broadcast (featuring our in-house celebrity, Rich Griffin!), touting the benefits of this new, hybrid campaign model. SNDS allows advertisers to opt their search campaigns into the GDN in a limited fashion. Essentially, AdWords claims that it will use “improved signals and methods of predicting where your ads are likely to perform best” to ensure that display ads are only shown in locations that are highly relevant to the advertisers’ “ideal” user.

As Rich mentions in his Google hangout video, this setting is reminiscent of Enhanced Campaigns, whereby AdWords pushes advertisers to expand their reach and appeal to a broader range of customers. For less-than-savvy PPCers, or advertisers who have limited time to dedicate to account management, this low-effort option may feel like a godsend. That said, it comes at a price. In shifting to this model, you are sacrificing significant control over GDN performance and putting a great deal of faith in Google. For advertisers who have the time to do so, we highly recommend sticking with the traditional best practice of managing the Search and Display Networks through separate campaigns.

When to Use the Google Search Network

Running ads on the Search Network is the most common, well-known form of PPC advertising. With this network selection, your ads will be eligible to appear on Google SERPs. If you want to expand your reach, you can extend your targeting to include “search partners,” a group comprised of smaller search engines, such as AOL.

This advertising format is incredibly effective because it targets an active searcher, who is on a mission to find something. As you can see in the example above, the searcher is looking for a plumber in Virginia. Upon submitting the query, both paid ads (highlighted in the red boxes) and organic listings appear. Sure, the plumbers could rely on their organic (read: free) listings, but chance are, they will be more successful if they run ads on the Search Network. Not only are paid ads more robust, but they allow the plumbers to include extensions with additional links, phone numbers and addresses. Since the Search Network connects advertisers to people actively looking for their products, search campaigns typically drive more conversions than display campaigns.

You should be running a Search Network campaign if:

• You’re working with a limited budget: In general, when clients are restricted to a small budget, we recommend starting with the Search Network. This format is more likely to drive direct conversions, making it easier to measure and justify your PPC efforts. Once you’ve mastered Search, it may be advisable to expand to the Display Network, which can boost visibility, leading to an uptick in search volume for your business.

• You sell an “emergency” product: If your product or service offering is something that users look for on a when-needed basis (plumbers, locksmiths, electricians, etc.), you should be advertising on the Search Network. For these industries, it is imperative that your ad appears when the searcher is in need of your services.

When to Use the Google Display Network (GDN)

In addition to traditional search advertising, Google also gives advertisers the opportunity to place their ads on a variety of sites across the internet. This collection of websites, which ranges from blogs to news sites and even YouTube, is referred to as the Google Display Network (GDN). According to Google, the GDN includes over 2 million sites that reach over 90% of global internet users. Given the expansiveness of this network, it is incredibly appealing to advertisers who are looking to expand their online presence.

When users are on the GDN, they may not necessarily be in “shopping mode.” Instead, they are going about their daily internet activities—catching up on news, reading blog posts, watching video clips, etc. In order to gain traction on the GDN, your ads must attract the users’ attention and entice them enough to click through to your site, leaving the content that they were originally engaged with. Accomplishing this is no easy feat—even with top-notch ad creative, it’s tough to draw users to click on ads while they are perusing the Display Network.

But don’t write the GDN off yet—while clicks may be scarce, ad space on the network is plentiful. It is the ideal space to promote brand awareness and its vast reach is appealing to advertisers who are looking to broaden their fan bases. By increasing your brand’s visibility, you may reap more clicks on organic listings or see an uptick in brand-specific searches. These clicks are also less costly than clicks on the search network.

You should be running a Display Network campaign if:

• You want to familiarize people with your brand: Many advertisers leverage the Display Network to promote brand awareness. Since the GDN is so expansive, it offers many opportunities for advertisers to connect with their audiences. Don’t worry—this doesn’t mean you’ll be “shooting in the dark” with your display ads. AdWords provides a variety of targeting options, ranging from managed placements (specific sites selected by the advertiser) to website groupings based on audience characteristics and more. By appearing on reputable sites that are popular amongst your target audience, you can quickly familiarize these people with your brand.

• You have a lengthy sales process: If you sell a product or service that consumers are not likely to purchase immediately, you need to ensure that your brand stays top-of-mind for prospects as they consider making a purchase. To do this, we recommend utilizing remarketing, through the GDN. This strategy allows you to show ads to anyone who has visited your site in the past, encouraging them to return and convert. For example, a friend of mine spent some time on the Tiffany’s website a few months ago, as he was considering proposing to his girlfriend and wanted to price out ring options. After visiting the site, he was added to Tiffany’s remarketing list and was inundated with their engagement ring ads as he perused the internet. The jeweler did such a good job of re-engaging with him that he took the plunge and bought a ring much sooner than originally planned!

• You have a sexy product: Since the GDN allows advertisers to display image ads, it is ideal for advertisers who sell luxury products whose ads are enticing to the eye. Since display advertising relies largely on distraction, it’s helpful to have an appealing product to promote. Take the ad down below, for example. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t give that a second glance!

• You have compelling video collateral: If you’ve already invested significant time and energy on bad-ass video collateral, why not put it to good use? YouTube attracts hoards of traffic (upwards of 1 billion views per day), meaning the advertising potential is huge. Plus, given the popularity of YouTube advertising, Google has made it increasingly easy for advertisers to establish video campaigns (especially for those who can leverage existing creative). This can be an incredibly powerful way to connect with your target audience. People are more likely to engage with video content than text or image ads and, with Google’s TrueView option, you only pay for users who demonstrate a true interest in your video (by watching it for 30 seconds or more).

Utilizing a Dual-Network Strategy

In reading the descriptions above, you may have noted that your company would benefit from both the Search and the Display Networks. We advise many advertisers to run campaigns for both, when budget permits.

However, to truly reap the benefits of each network, do your due diligence and break them into separate, network-specific campaigns. From a strategic standpoint, this will allow you to craft your messaging based on the scenario in which your audience is viewing your ad. From a more logistical standpoint, this segmentation is critical. Not only does it allow you to set specific budgets and bids per network, but it will keep your data “clean” and help you to make more impactful optimizations.

Let’s take click-through rate, for example. Ads on the Display Network typically garner lower CTRs than their Search Network counterparts (which comes as no surprise, given the context in which they are shown). If the campaigns are not segmented, the CTR data can be severely skewed, making it challenging to analyze performance.

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 Glass: What began as an experiment in the notoriously secretive Google X research and development lab soon became the future of wearable technology. Google recently opened up its Glass Explorer pilot program to the general public, meaning yes, anyone (with $1500 to spare) can buy one! But many people remain unaware of what Google Glass can really do.

First, for all you hardware nerds out there, let’s take a look at Glass’ “tech specs” (sorry, couldn’t resist):

• 12GB of usable memory (16GB Flash total)
• 802. 11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity
• 5 megapixel camera
• 720p video resolution

In this post, we’re going to explore five creative ways you can use Google Glass – and tell you how you can win your very own Google Glass headset (for free!) in WordStream’s new Grade and Get Paid Google Glass Sweepstakes. If you already know you want one, scroll down!

1. Break Down the Language Barrier

Ever wanted to take a vacation to an exotic destination overseas, but been put off by the language barrier? Well, with Glass, you can translate both spoken and written words on the fly.

Glass can translate printed words in a range of foreign languages, such as signage, making it easy for Explorers to make sense of their surroundings.

Similarly, third-party Glass apps such as UniSpeech provide translations of spoken words in near real-time, enabling Explorers to understand people who don’t speak their language.

Although these technologies are still relatively nascent, Google is aggressively pursuing its dream of providing users with the “Star Trek” computer, and natural language processing applications such as universal translation are an exciting development for keen travelers.

2. Go on a Field Trip

One of the best parts about traveling is discovering the rich wealth of fascinating facts about new places. However, exploring on your own can lead to missed opportunities, but who wants to wander around with a tour guide? Well, with Glass, you can embark on your own adventures with virtual insider tips from people who know your destination inside and out with Field Trip.

This augmented reality app provides Explorers with everything they need to know about their next vacation destination. Field Trip aggregates hundreds of articles, news stories, historical information, interactive tour guides and hidden gems to provide you with a glimpse into the real history of thousands of places. Everything from facts about a city’s architecture and landmarks to tips on the best local restaurants and must-see attractions is overlaid across your vision through the Glass interface, allowing you to explore the world in fascinating new ways.

3. Perfect Your Swing or Beat Your All-Time Best

I only run if I’m being chased, but apparently, there are people who like to run for fun. Weird. Anyway, if you’re into fitness, Glass can be an invaluable way to track your progress, push yourself to the limit, and even work on your handicap.

Several Glass apps are available for fitness and sports fanatics. One of the most interesting is SwingByte, an app that allows you to improve your golf game through analysis of your performance. The app monitors your stance, swing, power and a range of other metrics to provide you with a detailed report on your technique, as well as course and weather conditions. Looks like you’ll need a better excuse if you end up in a sand trap.

Of course, golf isn’t for everyone. Fortunately, there are plenty of other ways you can use Glass as a virtual personal trainer. Apps such as Strava Cycle allow cyclists to set time trials for themselves, challenge friends to races, and track their performance along their favorite routes. Similarly, LynxFit functions as a personal training app that allows fitness enthusiasts to benchmark their performance, set goals and track their progress, try out new exercise regimens and more.

4. Experiment in the Kitchen

Cooking can be a lot of fun, but if you’re trying to follow a recipe while your hands are covered in various ingredients, turning the pages of a cookbook or using a cooking app can be problematic. Fortunately, Glass can help.

With the AllTheCooks app, Glass effectively becomes a head-mounted cookbook with interactive instructions on how to prepare a wide range of dishes. You can also search for new variants on classic meals and share your favorites with your friends and family.

Fortunately, AllTheCooks allows you to search for new recipes using Glass’ voice recognition technology, eliminating the need to touch the device altogether.

5. Conquer Your Commute

Okay, so our last example of ways you can use Google Glass isn’t exactly creative as such, but it’s likely to be one of the most common (and useful) ways that Glass will improve your life.

Glass is fully compatible with Google Now’s predictive search technology. Frequently compared to Apple’s Siri, Google Now is actually a much more capable and diverse virtual assistant program that allows Google to provide you with timely, relevant information as and when you need it. This is exceptionally handy for commuters who need up-to-the-second information about traffic conditions, road accidents, weather and anything else that could help them avoid sitting in gridlock for two hours.

With full Google Maps integration, Google Now’s real-time data can be used to plot alternate routes to avoid traffic congestion, plan more optimized paths between two places, and much more. Oh, and it can provide you with instantaneous updates on the score for the big game, so you don’t need to actively search for updates online.

Win a Google Glass with WordStream!

Okay, so now you know how you can use Google Glass, enter WordStream’s Grade and Get Paid Google Glass Sweepstakes to win your own!

All you have to do for a chance to win is run our AdWords Performance Grader Plus on your AdWords account – that’s it! In less than 60 seconds, you’ll be provided with detailed data on how to improve the performance of your AdWords account AND be entered into the Grade and Get Paid Google Glass Sweepstakes to win a Google Glass headset (valued at more than $1,500)!

The sweepstakes is open until 12 a.m. EST on June 21, 2014, so enter now!

Disclaimer: In the interest of full disclosure (and to appease our legal team), we have to tell you that this sweepstakes competition is only open to residents of the U.S. and Canada (excluding Quebec – sorry guys). We also have to tell you to read the full list of eligibility rules and requirements, which can be found here.

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.

Poor eBay – they're having a pretty bad day. Thanks to Google’s roll-out of Panda 4.0 and the Payday Loan 2.0 update, eBay is suffering a massive loss in organic traffic and rankings. Adding insult to injury, they had to ask all users to change their passwords after a database hack.

Matt Cutts kicked off the SEO hysteria yesterday as he often does, with a tweet:

First released in 2011, Panda is a component of the organic search ranking algorithm designed to weed out low-quality sites, or those with "thin content." In its initial release, Panda affected approximately 12% of all search queries – by March 2013, Google had refreshed Panda 25 times, making it a constant source of aggravation in SEO circles.

This update is particularly worrisome for webmasters, given that Google had stopped announcing Panda updates/refreshes. At SMX West in March last year, Cutts said Panda would become a rolling, monthly update. Since he actually announced Panda 4.0, this seems to signal a major change to the algorithm – more than just a data refresh.

Cutts' tweet just an hour after he announced Panda 4.0 confirmed something SEOs had speculated about over the weekend – Google had also started rolling out an update to their Payday Loan algorithm, making it version 2.0.

Payday, first launched in June 2013, is unrelated to Panda or Penguin and targets particularly spammy queries. In the video announcement of that update, Cutts mentioned payday loans and pornography queries as two places they intended to sharpen their focus.

eBay’s Supposed Shift from AdWords to SEO

Last year, eBay published a paper on a "large-scale field experiment" they'd conducted that supposedly conclusively proved that "brand-keyword ads have no short-term benefits, and that returns from all other keywords are a fraction of conventional estimates." In short, the gist was that AdWords doesn’t work for companies as big as eBay, and paid search is only marginally useful for acquiring new customers. You can read more about their findings and methodology in this summary at Harvard Business Review.

As I pointed out at the time, eBay's failure to make paid search work for them had nothing to do with AdWords and everything to do with their poorly managed campaigns and atrocious misuse of AdWords features like Dynamic Keyword Insertion:

eBay's asleep-at-the-switch AdWords management style not only made them look stupid to searchers – those irrelevant ads also cost a brand a ton of money. Their failure to implement even the most basic of paid search best practices, like using negative keywords so you're not appearing in queries for vomit, made their research completely unreliable.

The implication of this report was that eBay was going to drop AdWords as a channel and focus its efforts on organic search engine optimization.

So how did that work out for them?

eBay Gets Slammed by Panda 4.0

Harvard Business Review predicted that Amazon, Walgreens and other major internet retailers would soon follow eBay's lead and ditch AdWords. If you’re doing SEO, you get that prime SERP placement for free, right?

Here's the problem: In SEO, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and eBay is learning this in spades today. It looks like their “strategy” revolved around “doorway pages” and thin content – exactly the kind of search spam that Google has been trying to eradicate from the SERPs.

Dr. Pete at Moz has already taken an early look into eBay's organic rankings, in light of the confirmation of the two Google updates confirmed/announced yesterday.

Oh noes! The main eBay subdomain has fallen completely out of the 'Big 10,'Moz's list of the ten domains with the most real estate in the top 10. It's a huge drop, considering the historical data available.

Moz’s data is showing that eBay lost around 75% of their terms from page one. They regularly crawl around 10k “head terms” – higher volume keywords.

What I’m seeing in my own research is that they’re not even ranking competitively on 80% of their non-branded “long tail keyword searches” (millions of more specific keyword searches) anymore:

The preceding figure illustrates for a random sampling of non-branded, long tail keywords eBay was previously targeting, 80% of them are no longer on the first page, despite relatively low competition for these highly targeted keywords.

Why eBay Got Hit: Thin Content, Doorway Pages

When you search for specific products and see an organic search result, chances are, it's leading you to a doorway page – pages on eBay with very little content, like this one:

The actual product listing pages consistently have three features:

• eBay’s own, internal search results
• Ads – text ads, display ads and PLAs
• Internal links to other product results pages

They're also employing aggressive internal linking on super-long-tail keywords in their footers:

You can continue to refine your query within eBay, following search results pages, internal links and ads, and drilling down into specific products, but you aren't going to find much content on the way.

I’m surprised that Google has allowed these shenanigans to go on for so long - especially now that they have product listing ads that offer a better experience for this kind of thing:

By knocking eBay's product listings pages out of the organic rankings, Google is forcing eBay to use product ads to stay in front of those searchers seeking information about specific types of products.

It would be easy to say that profit is the sole motive here, but this is actually good for users too. eBay’s “strategy” of pushing out millions of doorway and internal site search pages was spam by anyone’s definition. For commercial queries, Google shopping ads offer the most useful customer experience.

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.

You already know that highly optimized landing pages are crucial to the success of any paid search campaign. However, even the best landing pages don’t have conversion rates of 100%. Why? Well, because people are unpredictable, and sometimes, consumer behavior defies all logic – frequently due to cognitive biases.

In today’s post, we’re going to examine what cognitive bias is, look at several examples of these behaviors in action, and outline how you can overcome (or at least account for) them with your landing pages.

What is Cognitive Bias?

Cognitive biases are ways of thinking about and perceiving the world that may not necessarily reflect reality. We may think we experience the world around us with perfect objectivity, but this is rarely (if ever) the case. Each and every one of us sees things differently based on our preconceptions, past experiences, and environmental or social factors, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the way we think or feel about something is truly representative of reality.

Simply put, cognitive biases are the distortions of reality through which we view the world.

How to Overcome Cognitive Biases with Landing Pages

So, now we know that we’re all completely irrational, let’s look at some of the most common cognitive biases in action and what you can do to mitigate their impact on your paid search campaigns. Before we go any further, it’s worth noting that there is no single definitive “list” of cognitive biases. Since the term was coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the early 1970s, more than 100 separate cognitive biases have been identified, and psychologists continue to explore new behaviors that could be classified as cognitive biases. For marketers trying to get a grip on consumer behavior, this isn’t great news.

Obviously, covering how to account for all known cognitive biases with landing pages is impractical for the purposes of this post. We will, however, look at a few of the most common and how you can try to account for them with well-crafted landing pages.

1. Confirmation Bias

One of the most common cognitive biases is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is when a person looks for and interprets information (be it news stories, statistical data or the opinions of others) that backs up an assumption or theory they already have. For example, if you presented someone with hard evidence that gender bias exists, and they are already convinced that it doesn't, they're much more likely to dismiss the evidence rather than reconsider your opinion.

Common characteristics of confirmation bias include:

• An unwillingness to accept the validity of evidence that defies the person’s previously held beliefs
• Placing greater weight or emphasis on “facts” that appeal to the person’s underlying assumptions, to the exclusion of contradictory evidence
• Actively seeking out information that “proves” the person’s point
• Selective (and often incorrect) recollection of events, facts or statistics

Mainstream news outlets are often guilty of manipulating viewers’ confirmation bias (Fox News is an excellent example of this). As a result, people don’t choose one media outlet over another because of its impartiality or journalistic integrity – they watch the same news channels regularly because their programming appeals to the viewer’s preconceived ideas and opinions.

How Can You Overcome Confirmation Bias on Your Landing Page?

If you’re trying to compensate for confirmation bias when selling to customers, you’ll have to make your prospects doubt the strength of their beliefs. One way to accomplish this by including testimonials from formerly skeptical customers.

Reach out to your current clients and ask them if they weren’t entirely sold on your product or service to begin with, then ask them to provide details about how they came around. Include specific details, such as concerns about pricing, tempting offers from your competitors, and anything else that could dissuade biased customers from converting.

Resist the temptation to badmouth your competitors – this is unlikely to have the desired effect. By resorting to the marketing equivalent of a political smear campaign, you’re positioning yourself in a negative way, which could actually reinforce the very bias you’re trying to overcome.

Another tactic you can use to overcome confirmation bias is by offering a zero-hassle, no-strings-attached money-back guarantee. Online identity theft prevention service LifeLock does this incredibly well with its $1 million guarantee.

Realizing that some customers might be negatively biased about the effectiveness of identity theft prevention services, LifeLock goes one step further than the competition by offering up to $1 million in legal assistance, private investigation services and anything else you need in the event your identity is compromised while subscribed to the service. This not only offers customers a considerable financial safety net, it also speaks volumes about LifeLock’s confidence in its services.

2. Anchoring Effect

Sometimes referred to as the “relativity trap” or “focalism,” the anchoring effect is when consumers focus on a single aspect of a product or service to the exclusion of all other considerations. For many consumers, price is the most important part of the decision-making process, often understandably so.

People experiencing the anchoring effect often:

• Ignore the potential benefits of a product or service in favor of focusing solely on price
• Comparison shop more extensively than other consumers
• Actively seek out money-saving deals such as coupons, sales or other incentives
• Respond well to flexible pricing structures

Many businesses actively exploit the psychology behind anchoring, particularly restaurants. By including a wide range of dishes at varying prices (some very expensive, some much more affordable), they manipulate most customers’ tendency to choose the mid-priced option. People do this because they tend to fixate on the relative savings or difference in price between two options, not the actual prices themselves.

Although the anchoring effect can present unique challenges to marketers hoping to overcome cognitive biases with their landing pages, it’s a double-edged sword – since prospects experiencing the anchoring effect are only focused on one thing, it’s easier to address and deal with their primary objection.

How Can You Overcome the Anchoring Effect on Your Landing Page?

Firstly, let’s say that, for the sake of example, that your prospects are indeed solely focused on pricing. Now we’ve established what obstacle you have to overcome with your landing pages, let’s take a look at how you can actually do it.

Firstly, be as open and transparent about your pricing as possible. That not only means actually including pricing information on your site, but putting it on your landing pages, too. Don’t make a prospect hunt for pricing details – the longer you make them wait (or work), the less likely they are to trust your business. Be upfront, and put your prices right out in the open.

Also, be completely honest with your pricing – include all surcharges, fees, taxes and anything else that could drive up the price. We’ve all been in situations where we “agree” with ourselves to buy something while under the impression it costs one amount, only to be unpleasantly surprised when the price rises due to hidden costs (major airlines, anyone?).

Chicago-based branding agency Caliber exemplifies these principles very well. Unlike many similar agencies that hide their pricing behind “free consultations” and other smokescreens, Caliber openly displays its rate card on its site – and even admits that it doesn’t work with just anyone. As a one-two punch, Caliber also displays a customer testimonial alongside its pricing information – a shrewd move.

3. Ambiguity Effect

Although they might not realize it, many consumers experience some degree of the ambiguity effect, a cognitive bias first identified by Daniel Ellsberg (one of the key figures in the Pentagon Papers scandal) in the early 1970s.

This cognitive bias can be best summarized as the decision to favor a choice with a known outcome, rather than “take a chance” on a choice with unknown probabilities. From a psychological standpoint, the ambiguity effect is closely related to risk aversion.

Common characteristics of the ambiguity effect include:

• A tendency to favor decisions with familiar outcomes
• Reluctance to try new things
• Limited ability to recognize long-term benefits of “riskier” decisions when weighed against the marginal gains resulting from “safer” choices 

For example, many investors choose to put their money in “safer” investments such as government bonds, as the perceived return on investment is relatively certain due to bonds’ strength and safety as an investment vehicle. Stocks and shares, on the other hand, often result in significantly higher ROI, but many investors shy away from these investments due to the unknown (or ambiguous) outcome of this type of investment strategy.

Artwork © Jack Hagley

From a consumer perspective, the ambiguity effect can be a powerful motivator when it comes to customer loyalty. Even if a consumer is dissatisfied with a service provider, the perceived risks of switching to another company are often greater than the potential gains of making the switch.

How Can You Overcome the Ambiguity Effect on Your Landing Pages?

To some extent, all businesses have to overcome the ambiguity effect when attempting to entice certain customers, especially startups and very new businesses that do not have an established reputation.

One way to overcome this cognitive bias is by borrowing techniques from great FAQs and incorporating them into your landing pages. This has to be done carefully, as too much text could harm your conversion rates. However, by including some skilfully worded questions and answers into your landing page copy, you could fill the gaps in your prospects’ knowledge about your product or service and make your offers seem more appealing.

An excellent example of this principle in action is a landing page for Unbounce’s landing page conversion course. It presents a summary of information about the course in a conversational way (“What’s in the course?”), goes into greater depth about each of the course modules, and includes information on the type of people who will benefit from taking it.

The page’s copy makes the time commitment necessary to complete the course abundantly clear, further reducing ambiguity about the amount of effort involved. It also includes a simple form and strong call to action (essential for increasing conversion rates), clear directional cues, and a clean, appealing design.

4. Bandwagon Effect

This cognitive bias is closely related to a psychological phenomenon known as herd mentality. Individuals experiencing the bandwagon effect place much greater value on decisions that are likely to conform to current trends or please individuals within their existing (or desired) peer group. From a consumer perspective, this can be summarized as making purchasing decisions out of a desire to have and be seen with “the next big thing,” or to increase their perceived social status by owning a particular product.

Characteristics of the bandwagon effect (from a consumer perspective) include:

• A tendency to overlook product specifications in favor of design/aesthetics
• A willingness to spend significantly more on branded goods
• A strong desire to “fit in” with demographics seen as stylish/trend-setting
• Often very loyal to a handful of recognizable brands
• Significantly more likely to evangelize about brands/companies through social channels

The bandwagon effect is such a common cognitive bias because of people’s deep-seated need to conform and fit in. Many consumers’ devotion to Apple products is a great example of the bandwagon effect in action. Apple has the kind of following that many businesses are envious of, and through skilful marketing campaigns and very clever branding, Apple manages to manipulate consumer behavior like few other companies – resulting in overwhelming demand for the next iPhone or iPad, and the perception that choosing Apple products is a lifestyle choice, not merely buying a new phone or tablet.

How Can You Overcome the Bandwagon Effect on Your Landing Pages?

If your business operates in a highly competitive or crowded market, the key to overcoming the bandwagon effect is how you frame your product or service. In fact, you may want to view the bandwagon effect as a state of mind you can capitalize on, rather than an obstacle.

Imagery is incredibly important when it comes to promoting your goods or services. Again, using Apple as an example, the marketing materials for the iPhone don’t just focus on what it does (though features are important) – they promote an ideal; that the iPhone is far more than just a smartphone, it’s an indispensable part of your modern digital life. With this in mind, use stylish imagery to promote your products on your landing pages, and heavily emphasize how your goods will enrich the lives of your customers. For instance, the landing page for the iPhone 5S leads visitors to a page with a video titled “Powerful”:

In the video, young, attractive people use their iPhones to perform a range of tasks that, in all likelihood, most iPhone users would never bother with (such as using an app as an amp controller for an electric guitar and the phone itself as a virtual violin as part of an art installation), but that’s not what makes this marketing so brilliant. The secret to this video’s success is that it sells the lifestyles of the people in the video – it manipulates consumers’ desire to be cool, to be in a band, to embark on an exciting road trip to a far-away place. In short, it sells an idealized life that buying an iPhone can help consumers attain.

Of course, it’s difficult for some businesses to effectively emulate Apple’s marketing efforts. However, the principles can be applied to virtually any company, with a little creativity. Take Boston-based clothing e-commerce site Ministry of Supply, for example:

Ministry of Supply makes and sells high-end dress shirts and other clothing made from “phase change” materials – fabrics that store or release heat depending on the body temperature of the wearer. These fabrics are also used by NASA in its spacesuits for astronauts. This unique selling proposition, combined with the site’s effortlessly stylish imagery, appeals to their ideal customer’s desire for hip clothes that most people haven’t heard about. These concepts are also applied to Ministry of Supply’s social media presence, resulting in strong brand consistency and high community engagement among its customers – just like Apple.

Admittedly, Ministry of Supply is missing some opportunities to increase conversions as their PPC ads lead directly to their homepage instead of a dedicated landing page, but the same principles used by Apple to exploit the bandwagon effect are being used in a highly effective way by this small business.

5. Status Quo Bias

Many psychologists agree that cognitive biases are based on survival instincts. Our fifth and final example, status quo bias, is a prime example of how our need for stability and routine can influence our behavior.

Status quo bias is a preference for things to stay relatively unchanged. Individuals experiencing status quo bias often perceive any deviation from the “usual” as negative or a loss, resulting in a strong aversion to change. For marketers, customers with status quo bias can be a real challenge.

Individuals experiencing status quo bias are often:

• Hesitant to try new products or services out of a fear of loss resulting from change
• More resistant to traditional sales techniques
• Inadvertently loyal, even to brands offering inferior service

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when selling to a prospect with status quo bias is the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. People with this cognitive bias may be extraordinarily reluctant to part with their current service provider – even if they’re unhappy as a customer – simply because they don’t want to disrupt the status quo. However, if someone with status quo bias has clicked on one of your ads and ended up on a landing page, you’re already part-way toward overcoming their fears and converting them. All you have to do is present them with at least one compelling reason to leave their comfort zone.

How Can You Overcome Status Quo Bias on Your Landing Pages?

In his best-selling book, “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords,” marketing expert Perry Marshall explains that writing ad copy that promotes a feature of your product is a mistake. According to Perry, people don’t care about what your product does – they want to know how it will solve their problems. Highlighting the emotional payoff in your ads can convince even the most hesitant prospect to click, and this principle can also be applied to your landing pages.

If you want to overcome status quo bias with your landing pages, you’ll need to focus heavily on the benefits of your product or service. Remember, if a potential customer has already clicked on your ad, then they do want to explore the possibility of using your product or service, even if they may be hesitant to embrace change. Similarly to the FAQ approach in our ambiguity effect example, use language that can directly answer any questions your prospects might have during their first experience with your company. This spares them the effort of having to seek out additional information once they reach your landing page – a crucial step for people with status quo bias, as any obstacle (no matter how seemingly minor) could be perceived as a loss and dissuade them from converting.

One company that accomplishes this very well is small-business project management software platform Basecamp:

Everything about this page is friendly and accessible, from the layout to the language. As in our anchoring effect example, the pricing information is made clearly available from the outset (including Basecamp’s highest pricing tier) which helps to establish trust through transparency, and there are several frequently asked questions provided to enable prospective customers to learn about Basecamp and take action without leaving the landing page.

Of course, these are just a handful of the various cognitive biases your prospects may experience, and it’s impossible to account for all of them. However, it’s worth bearing consumer psychology in mind when making landing pages, as even subtle changes can have a big impact on your conversion rates. Hopefully this post has given you some food for thought.

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 attention auction” is a phrase that has stuck in my head since I first read it earlier this year, on AJ Kohn’s blog Blind Five-Year-Old. The idea is that we’re all competing for a finite amount of attention, and it’s a zero-sum game. If people are paying attention to your competitor, they can’t pay attention to you at the same time.

Another term for the same basic idea is “attention economics” – in an attention economy, attention is treated as a scarce commodity. We’ve got access to more information than ever before, but no more time or attention to give.

The concept is pretty key for us content marketers. When you publish new content, you’re putting a bid into the attention auction. And not everybody can win.

Here at WordStream, we put a lot of thought and planning into our content projects. Some of them work, and some of them don’t. Why? As much as we’d like to believe we’ve nailed the process down, it’s not always obvious.

So how do you win the attention auction? We’ve espoused a bunch of theories and provided a lot of examples of stuff that has worked for us, including:

• Better content promotion
• More long-form content
• Unique, contrarian content
• Just generally GREAT CONTENT

But even when we follow our own advice and seemingly do everything right, sometimes we just don’t win. Why, God, WHY?!!

I’ve been thinking about this stuff, and I’ve arrived at two hard truths about the attention economy:

1. Attention is to some extent random
2. Eventually you hit the attention ceiling

I’ll talk about both of these hard truths in a little more detail below.

What Wins the Attention Auction is Sometimes Random

To state the obvious, and reference The Smiths, some blog posts do better than others. This graphic speaks volumes:

Our top 50 blog posts (ever) do as well as all the other blog posts combined (over a thousand of them).

Try as we might to develop repeatable processes to ensure that almost everything we publish does amazing, it just doesn’t work that way. All the key metrics trend up over time, so we keep hitting new highs, but there are always relative hits and relative duds.

Effort vs. Attention

For example, we recently released the results of an internal study that, we believe, provided concrete evidence of gender bias in the online marketing industry. We put a ton of time and effort into this article. A TON. It was a group effort involving multiple people from multiple departments.

Now, it’s really important to note here that we weren’t looking for traffic for traffic’s sake. We wanted a lot of people to read it because we believe it’s an issue that deserves a lot of attention – one that’s bigger than just marketing. The gender bias issue comes up again and again, but there’s a lack of hard data to reference in the debate, particularly when it comes to our industry. So personally, as a vocal feminist, I really wanted the piece to do well and find plenty of sympathetic readers.

Did it? Well, kind of. The response was incredibly positive – many people told us the article was fascinating and thanked us profusely for the transparency and the effort. A huge percentage of people who read the post went on to share it. It got some great media coverage, including coverage in spots outside the tiny filter bubble of search marketing. That was really rewarding. So it wasn’t a “failure” by any stretch.

But the traffic numbers weren’t stellar compared to our most recent hit: this post on the Panda 4.0 update and how it affected eBay surpassed it in page views in less than 24 hours. That’s right – a post we spent weeks on and promoted the crap out of has fewer total page views than the Panda post got in just a day. (At this point, it’s not even close.) The Panda post was a quick reaction to some big industry news; we did put some analysis and time into it, but not nearly as much as we did for the gender bias study. Regardless, it’s the one that won the attention auction.

However, it’s not just about whether your article touches on a hot trending topic – we write about big industry news all the time, and it doesn’t always strike a nerve. Along the same lines, sometimes the articles that win the attention auction are evergreen topics that have nothing to do with anything in the news. You think you can predict the winners, but the attention auction has randomness built in.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this phenomenon. Gianluca Fiorelli tweeted last week:

You write a post saying that Google is broken and obtain fantagillions shares. Write a better post about strategy and people say "Meh!". Bah

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) May 22, 2014

Yep. Been there my friend. Aleyda Solis has noticed it too:

@gfiorelli1 I think it's relatively common ... it happens to me too :) the one I invest most time in doesn't perform as I expect.

— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) May 22, 2014

In the attention economy, attention doesn’t always go to the most “deserving” articles or the ones you put the most effort into. It’s not purely random, of course, but there’s a butterfly effect that introduces unresolvable unpredictability.

The Attention Ceiling: Sorry, But People Will Eventually Get Sick of You

The randomness of the attention economy isn’t the only barrier to your success as a content marketer. I’ve also noticed a phenomenon I’ll call “the attention ceiling.” What this means is that even if you publish five totally amazing blog posts in a week, probably only one or two of them will be runaway hits. In other words, you can’t earn all the attention all the time because people just don’t want to pay attention to you all the time.

We published two posts this week, aside from the Panda post, that I thought had the potential to be hits. They were well-thought-out articles with really interesting angles and lots of actionable advice. Neither one of them had nearly the same impact as the Panda post, though we promoted them all equally. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him click.

But this isn’t all bad. If you find yourself hitting the attention ceiling from time to time, it’s probably a good thing. When people or companies blow up stupid-huge and are everywhere all the time, it’s a dangerous position. Sometimes it seems like you’re killing it and winning every auction, and then everyone gets sick of you all at once.

This seems to be what happened to Groupon and what is now happening to Upworthy – they hit upon a winning formula, but it only lasted for so long before the big collective UGH. Once your formula is recognizable as a formula, the magic is gone.

Image via The Bachelors Brand

So Where Are My Actionable Takeaways?!

Sorry, but this post isn’t really about actionable takeaways. It’s more about setting expectations.

Rand Fishkin did a great slide deck recently about setting expectations around content marketing. First of all, great content usually doesn’t lead immediately to leads or sales. It’s a more meandering process:

It works this way if you give people time to grow to love you for your content and then come to you as a customer when they’re ready. When it doesn’t work, it’s often because people give up too soon.

Rand says that his wife Geraldine’s blog, The Everywhereist, never broke 100 visits a day for two years. Then she had a couple of posts that got some attention, but traffic fell back down shortly afterward. Luckily, she kept plugging:

So here are the takeaways for content marketers working in an attention economy:

• If you have a hit, try to reproduce it, and fail, don’t give up– even people at the very top of their game experience relative wins and relative losses. Attention comes in waves.
• Anticipate and plan for the attention wave– if you’ve got five awesome pieces of content planned for June, don’t front-load them all in the first week. Spread the love and you'll give your best stuff a better chance to succeed.

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.

With so much traffic being driven these days via social media, it’s important to implement designated social media landing pages as part of your marketing strategy. Remember, folks who click your ads and links from social media sites are valuable visitors – they’ve actively engaged with your brand on a social network. In fact, J. Crew found that:

“customers who engage with us via our social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram) generally spend approximately 2x more than the average J.Crew customer”

Twice as much is a pretty big deal! So roll out the red carpet, and don’t you dare just send your social fans to the homepage.

Many of the same rules that are used with PPC landing pages apply to social media landing pages as well, the core essentials being:

• Landing page content mirrors ad content (for text and images)
• Clear value prop and call to action
• Keep text simple and concise
• Consider where the visitor is coming from

That last point is where the situation really changes for social media landing pages, and it’s a major deviation to consider. Your social media landing pages need to cater to the unique needs and mindset of someone coming from a social network.

The best way to learn is through examples, so let’s go!

Feel free to jump ahead to:

• Facebook Landing Pages
• Twitter Landing Pages
• Pinterest Landing Pages
• LinkedIn Landing Pages
• More Landing Page Resources

Facebook Landing Pages

We’ll start with the most obvious social network – Facebook. A lot of businesses pour advertising dollars into Facebook, but based on the examples I’ve seen, many still don’t seem to be doing Facebook advertising the way it needs to be done.

Let’s start things off by looking at a Facebook ad and landing page by JibJab.

Clicking the ad takes us to…

This is a pretty good landing page. We’re taken right where we belong, and the sample video featuring the empty face explains the offer concept without the need of extra text.

What Works:

• Minimal text as the page’s video explains the insert-your-face video concept (even just the thumbnail before playing the image shows the empty face, so users can understand the concept without even playing the video).
• Bright green button with a “make your own” call to action.
• Good related content – while it’s not always recommended to promote other offers on a landing page, the idea works well here and gets visitors excited about making additional JibJab videos.

What Needs Work:

• While it’s great that the Facebook ad text is being recycled in the landing page text field, I’d like to see the Facebook ad headline, Add Your Face to “Happy” repeated as well. It’s another element to solidly the connection between the ad and landing page, and it also serves as more interesting copy than the “Dances” “Happy” or “video” headline and sub-headlines.
• The “tags” section seems unnecessary, and is probably an element that should be hidden and just used for site structure and filtering. Instead, this space could be used for some social proof elements (such as: 4,327 people have made themselves “Happy!” Are you next?).

Grade: B

Next we have a Facebook ad by Health Line First, with the ad text “providing information that is usually hard to find.” Not very helpful, but they earn a few points for being mysterious.

 Clicking the link, we’re taken to their Facebook page.

What Works:

• Not much. At least they have a profile picture.

What Needs Work:

• Their Facebook page doesn’t give us any details explaining what the company is all about – just that same ad text that now seems more silly than mysterious. We see their logo again, although it remains unclear what the number 7 has to do with Health Line First. They haven’t even bothered to add a cover photo. This is pretty much as bad as it gets – a terrible ad followed by a terrible landing page.

Grade: F

Next we have a social media landing page example that comes from The Honest Company, beginning with this Facebook ad.

Which takes us to this Facebook landing page…

What Works:

• A short form field with a bright button and relevant button text (the “order your trial” is much more appropriate for the offer than a simple “submit”).
• Great use of color– the color pallet is very nice, and the orange button on the blue form background naturally draws attention to the button and its connected offer.
• Ideally it’d be great to see the same photo from the ad repeated here on the landing page, but here we’re getting the next best thing – a very similar photo that continues the feel of the first. The ad photo and the landing page photo seem to go hand in hand, using similar lighting and colors.

What Needs Work:

• Where is the offer from the Facebook ad? As a visitor we’re pretty disoriented. Sure, we see the offer for a free trial, but the ad we clicked was offering two free sample kits – a very different offer than this vague “free trial” which we are told nothing about. This is a huge problem and I’d take a guess than this social media landing page is receiving very few conversions due to the conflict and confusion between the Facebook ad offer and the landing page we see here.

Grade: C

This page could have scored higher, but we docked points for the misaligned offers.

Next we have a Facebook ad from Lumo.

What Works:

• The scarcity element is a smart way to push visitors into a purchasing decision (19 unites left).
• The social proof elements, albeit small, are a smart inclusion (16,000 unites pre-ordered).
• Using video is a great way to explain more about a product.

What Needs Work:

• The overall design feels a bit off and there is a lot of wasted space. I would choose one powerful product photo and ditch the white on white photos, in which the product is barely visible against the white background.
• We really need some basic bullet points. The video is great, but it shouldn’t be mandatory for understanding your product. The video should be a bonus way to learn more, not be relied on as a crutch for transmitting details. Remember, you only have 8 seconds before users decide to stay on or leave your page! There absolutely needs to be solid info above the fold.
• While I appreciate the scarcity element on this page, the bar is confusing – is it a visual element to accompany the scarcity number? If so, a meter showing a low value should be orange or red, but certainly not green, which implies that unites are plentiful. I’d recommend just scrapping the bar as it seems unnecessary.
• Make those social proof points larger! If you have awesome numbers, show them off with style.

If we scroll down below the fold, we’ll see some additional info.

I would love to see those trust signals moved above the fold, and maybe the mini-illustrations as well. Visually this section is a lot more powerful than what currently sits above the fold.

There is a big trend these days to have a minimalist homepage featuring one powerful image, and while there are certain advantages to that style, it has major pitfalls and won’t work for everyone.

As a new and inventive product, Lumo can’t successfully use a minimalist page style because they really need to dedicate space to explaining their original product and concept behind it. Many landing pages fall victim to this ultra-minimalist trend, and it’s important to understand why it won’t always work, despite being a popular style. In discussing landing page best practices, we often say that you want to avoid a landing page that is very text-heavy, but going the opposite direction, with almost zero explanation, is just as dangerous.

Grade: C

Next we have a Facebook ad and landing page for Downy Wrinkle Releaser.

Right away it’s clear that this ad has a lack of intent. It’s stating what the Wrinkle Release product does, but where is the offer? The call-to-action? Let’s see what the landing page looks like…

This social media landing page is actually its own Facebook tab as part of Downy’s larger Facebook page. Creating custom Facebook tabs is a popular technique for running contests or special promotions. However, this one is quite problematic.

What Works:

• The scarcity element of the countdown clock is a nice way to remind visitors that they have a limited time to enter the contest.

What Needs Work:

• This offer – a promotional video contest – feels totally random. There wasno mention of any kind of contest in the Facebook ad. Why didn’t the ad include a “enter our video content to win a free vacation” call-to-action? This whole situation doesn’t make any sense.
• I think we can assume that the main point of this page is to get visitors to enter the Downy contest. Then why are the entry instructions so tiny? It’s way too easy to ignore them. Text size is a main method of disclosing which sections of text are more important than others. In this case, the contest instructions are the smallest type on the page, leading the visitor to quickly gloss over them. Instead we see the voting instructions in a larger text, even though getting visitors to vote is not the main goal of the page. This text is also largely unnecessary – you don’t need to tell people to click on a video in order to watch it.
• The contest entry problems are exacerbated by the entry button, whose color and text matches the non-clickable submissions header below. This makes the button at first glance appear to be another non-interactive header element. That’s definitely no bueno.
• We’ve really torn this page apart already, but there’s one more thing that needs calling out, and that’s the lack of entries. This poor contest has no existing entries. Who knows why – maybe this is the first day of the contest. However, having that filtering system makes the lack of entries seem all the more pathetic, especially coupled with the huge expanse of white space. How to remedy this? Don’t include the voting section at all until there are at least a handful of entries, or at least move the submissions below the fold and use more space to promote entering the contest in the first place! At the very least, include a sample video or even a Downy promo video so that space doesn’t look so darn empty and sad.

Grade: D+

The Facebook ad and landing page offer don’t match at all, and even if they did match, the landing page would still be in need of way too much renovation to earn a passing grade.

Unfortunately our Facebook landing page examples aren’t scoring very well. I feel a bit like a jerk for picking apart so many problem pages, but honestly, there just aren’t many people doing a good job with social media landing pages. Let’s move on to Twitter landing pages, where hopefully things will improve.

Twitter Landing Pages

With Twitter landing pages, you’ll want to match that Twitter mindset – quick, clever, and to the point. Most links shared on Twitter are articles and blog posts, so the idea of having a designated Twitter landing page won’t always apply. However, as Oli Gardner of Unbounce notes, Twitter visitor intent can be pretty specific when it comes to your Twitter profile link.

If a Twitter user is clicking the link embedded in your personal Twitter profile, chances are they’re looking to learn more about you and your web identity. Create a tailored page specifically with these visitors in mind. Include a welcome message calling out the fact that the visitor came from Twitter, a mini-bio reminiscent of an About Me page, as well as links to your other social media profiles. You also might consider including links or references to your most popular blog posts/content – show off a little.

A great example comes from blogger Darren Rowse.

What Works:

Note how right off the bat, Darren’s headline includes his Twitter @username. The first line directly connects with the visitor’s point of entry with the line “Thanks for clicking the URL in my Twitter profile…” Below these sections he talks about his ProBlogger Twitter account and what followers can expect to see him tweeting about. Darren also mentions his book and how to connect with him via other social sites.

What Needs Work:

One could argue that the page is on the lengthy side, but it’s broken up with several headings, so not much to complain about here.

Grade: A

Next let’s look at another kind of Twitter landing page that looks more like the other social media landing pages we’ve looked at, via paid Twitter ads directing the user to a guide or resource. Take this example from HootSuite.

What Works:

• HootSuite’s pretty big on content marketing, so it’s no surprise that their social media landing pages look good. The bulleted points make the text easy to scan, and the trust signals in the lower right corner boost visitors’ confidence.

What Needs Work:

• Ideally the form would be shorter, and the “submit” button would have more appropriate text. In this case, even “download” might be more enticing than “submit.” After all, the visitor isn’t excited to submit their information to you, they’re excited to download their guide. Landing pages should always focus on the offer and the wants of the visitor.

Grade: B

Next we have SendGrid.

What Works:

• SendGrid is following a lot of landing pages best practices, with the smart inclusion of bullet points, images (even a mini guide image like the one here is a huge improvement over nothing), and trust signals.
• The form button’s bright orange color stands out nicely against the blue background (contrast is key), and the “Start Reading” button text, along with the mini-image inside the button, is a nice touch.

What Needs Work:

• The “6 kickass emails that leverage marketing” from the Twitter post aren’t mentioned anywhere on the page. If we’re really customizing this page as a Twitter landing page, let’s re-use that eye-catching tweet text in the offer description.
• The main headline really shouldn’t be on more than two lines.

Grade: B

That initial tweet was so grabbing – don’t throw it away when it could add further value on the landing page.

Pinterest Landing Pages

Official Pinterest ads are on the horizon and looking pretty darn pricey. However, plenty of businesses use Pinterest for marketing purposes without dishing out the big bucks, and these are the kinds of pins and landing pages we will be looking at today.

So what should be included in the perfect Pinterest landing page? Well, Pinterest is an image-heavy site, so you’ll certainly want some powerful visual elements included on your Pinterest landing page. Also keep your audience in mind – Pinterest users are predominantly female, making up 80% of the user-base.

Let’s take a look at some examples of Pinterest pages, starting with this lovely necklace from Stuff 4 Multiples.

The pin takes us to an order landing page.

What Works:

• These are great looking images, and the on-neck image helps show the length of the chain.
• The savings discount and sale marker add buying enticement.

What Needs Work:

• So… how do I order this necklace? The biggest problem with this page is that the order option is below the fold (under Choose Options). This is a major foul – the order button is the very last page element you’d ever want to hide below the fold. It’s the point of the page after all!
• I’d recommend moving the email, review, and question options further down on the page, especially if it means making more room for the order button.

Grade: C-

The below the fold order options is what drove this landing page into the ground.

Let’s go to another Pinterest ad example from Human.

This Pinterest post takes us to…

What Works:

• Everything is pretty clear cut here – it’s your standard online apparel page with a nice bright “Add to Cart” button.
• I like that they have the same shirt design shown on different clothing styles underneath the main photo. These “you also might like” recommendations work here because they are extensions of what we’re already seeing, not just random gateways to other pages that might drive us away from a purchase.
• The inclusion of social proof via buttons is a nice touch, although I might consider ditching the lesser known “Fancy” and “Wanelo” buttons.

What Needs Work:

• There are a few things we don’t need – the search tags aren’t necessary and sizing options could be hidden behind a link.
• The elephant in the room is the bright green “What’s your favorite color?” banner. Is it an ad? A link to another page? It’s very distracting and strange. There’s already an option to see more styles & colors in the link above, so there’s no need for this huge green banner.

Grade: B-

LinkedIn Landing Pages

LinkedIn ads and landing pages aren’t as popular as they are with Facebook, but as the #1 professional social networking site that’s always growing, they can’t be overlooked. Since LinkedIn is a more professional setting, your LinkedIn landing pages should match with a sophisticated design and professional feel.

Let’s go ahead and check out some LinkedIn landing page examples.

This LinkedIn sponsored post by CallidusCloud offers a free guide on marketing automation.

What Works:

• The design on this page mirrors the feel of LinkedIn– clean, crisp, professional.
• The image featured on this page matches the image shown on the LinkedIn ad.

What Needs Work

• The form button used here is unattractive, and the “get it now” text feels uninspired – I think some A/B testing could go a long way here!
• The text on this page could benefit from some variety withcolor or bolded text.
• I’d suggest working a bit with that form headline. Even changing the form headline to “Download the free marketing guide” might be preferable. It should always be obvious to the visitor what they are about to download.

Grade: B

And finally, one more landing page example from All Covered:

What Works:

• This guide image looks great and matches the ad image. The bullet points are strategically used to break down the main topics the guide will cover.
• Using the color red for the sub-heading establishes its importance – bold text or powerful text colors helps readers interpret your information hierarchy (aka which lines of text are more important than others).

What Needs Work:

• The form is too long– remember to only ask for what you really need. Can more intimate details like the phone number be fished for on the “thank you” page? Asking for too much information can increase your drop-off rate to nearly 70%, so consider if getting those digits is really worth the loss. Do you really need the Company Name AND Website URL? One will inevitability give you the other, so don’t bug the visitor by asking for both when it’s not essential.
• Many lines of text break onto second lines when they shouldn’t – it makes the page feel messy. I would shorten the red header so it rests on one line, and then make the image a bit smaller so that the bullet points each take up only one line, rather than two.

Grade: B-

We’ve Got a Ways to Go With Social Media Landing Pages

Lots of bad grades were dished out during this social media landing page evaluation – clearly marketers are still learning when it comes to creating custom social media landing pages for relevant ads. Let’s hope that you score better – use the lessons we’ve learned today to surpass your predecessors.

Want to learn more about landing pages? Check out…

• 24 Tips for Creating Great Landing Pages
• WordStream’s Free Landing Page Grader Tool
• More Landing Page Examples

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.

Ask Me Anythings, or AMAs, have long been a popular conversation format on Reddit. More recently, they've really taken off on Inbound.org, giving marketers of all stripes the opportunity to pick the brains of industry influencers and thought leaders.

Annie Cushing, Brian Clark, Avinash Kaushik and other thought leaders in our industry have participated in AMAs on Inbound over the last 18 months. Typically, it's announced a few days ahead of time and participants come back over several days to answer questions from the community. The content tends to be laser-focused and super-high-quality – they don't go as off-track as you might see on Reddit, probably due in large part to the fact it's a niche site and the audience tend to be well-versed in the basics.

Not a lot of questions like “Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?”

Here are some of the most valuable content marketing tips and tricks to come out of the Inbound AMAs, from the generous industry leaders who have given us a chance to ask them just about anything. (Also check out Larry Kim's best PPC tips from his own Inbound.org AMA and our collection of the best SEO tips from Reddit AMAs.)

What Works Today in Content Marketing?

When you're just starting out

Choose who you want to reach, and find out everything you can about them. Their problems and desires. The topics that relate to those problems and desires. The language they use when searching Google and social media for those topics. Who else is serving the needs of these people, both with content and with products and services. This is where you always start.

- Brian Clark, CEO of CopyBlogger Media

On the value of content

A piece of content is worth a lot. A year ago or so, we actually came up with a formula: A guest post would give us around 100 signups in the lifetime of the article. We have a 2% conversion from free to paid for Buffer. So that means 2 people will pay. Our lifetime value for a paying user is around $250. So a piece of content was around $500. We don't use that anymore, but just as an example along which lines we are thinking. Rand Fishkin taught me that content isn't for direct signups – it's to create loyalty, branding and familiarity. That's very much an idea I've come around to. So I would rather pay you consistently up front, and have you as a writer create awesome content every week, then always charge per result!

- Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer

Why most content is still crap

As long as people see content as a means to an end (getting higher rankings and distracting people so you sell more stuff) instead of part of the end itself (building strong relationships and an enduring audience who will ALWAYS buy your stuff) it'll stay this way. 

- Ian Lurie, CEO of Portent

On SEO copywriting

What we call SEO copywriting is actually reflecting the language of the audience back at them (when done correctly). This has been the secret to effective copywriting in general for decades before search engines. The key is to quit worry about gaming an algorithm (that's getting more "person like" all the time) and focus on the language of the audience in order to connect with them, first and foremost.

- Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Do long single-page sales pages actually convert?

Long-form stuff definitely works. But not for complex stuff – it is usually consumer-focused and impulse-buy. It is not against best-practice. It is actually in a long and battle-tested tradition of direct response copywriting. The stuff has been around for many decades with people like Eugene Schwartz. I wouldn't use it for expensive B2B stuff though.

- Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners and Chair of Conversion Conference

Long-form stuff works!

Different Types of Content: Where to Focus Your Efforts

On when to use infographics

I love infographics IF – and only if – they're done well. I think infographics have been abused and have gotten a bad rap as a result. But when we're analyzing data from thousands of advertisers and looking at billions in spend, charts are boring. Infographics can really help break down complex issues and visually demonstrate concepts if they're done right. 

- Larry Kim, CTO at WordStream Inc.

The downside of visuals

People misunderstand the power of visuals. Basically they distract the visitor and make it hard for them to prioritize. There is a hierarchy – motion, visuals, text – and stuff at the higher levels will prevent the visitor on focusing on more subtle stuff at the lower levels. So cut back on the motion and the window-dressing – boring works.

- Tim Ash, Sitetuners

On using content for e-commerce

To most e-commerce sites, content feels almost like a distraction. They're there to sell products, and can't make a good, data-verified connection between content and sales. So content gets shunted off to the blog, separated from the products, which of course reduces the impact, and makes it seem more like a distraction. Woot.com does the best job by far. Appsumo is purely information stuff but I love their tone and style. Amazon is clearly in the lead when it comes to using user-generated content.

-Ian Lurie, Portent

Effective Content Creation Tips & Tactics

On getting better at content creation

Remember high school English? That's where you learned how to write (or, you were supposed to—heh). And you learned from doing it over and over again. So in terms of getting really good at producing amazing content:

1. Figure out (research, analytics, what's got you all excited) what you want to focus on.
2. Make an editorial calendar for yourself.
3. Set aside writing time for yourself. Honor it.
4. DO IT. Over and over. Ask for feedback. That's it.

- Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic CEO

On the writing process

In general, I write in a 2-step process. The first step, normally in the morning starting at 6:30 is the sourcing process. I find lots of research studies on a topic. Write a few sub-headings and basically make a big mess in a word document. I intentionally jot down lots of things that don't flow well. This helps me to break the "blank page" syndrome. I do this for around 1 hour or so. Then I go and do other tasks. Then in the afternoon, around 3-4 pm I get back to the post. The great thing is that my brain has by then normally made sense of all the different sections. I then edit and write the actual content in a concise form. In this 2nd phase I'm very focused on the actual wording, the flow and ordering all the research I've collected. I then publish that post next thing in the morning after doing a few final tweaks, like adding images, and so on.

- Leo Widrich, Buffer

On repurposing content

Reworking content – something I've been thinking about a lot recently – because I think that I've been too guilty of always moving onto the next thing rather than seeing all the different ways that a piece can be repurposed. A few top tips:

1. Focus heavily on design (this is my favourite article on the importance of design recently).
2. Think about channels – so for B2B I love repurposing things as blog posts / articles, slide decks, videos, emails etc.
3. Incorporate feedback *explicitly* - i.e. reference the person who gave the feedback – this is a form of ego-bait and it's worked really well for me in the past.

- Will Critchlow, co-founder of Distilled

Referral Candy repurposes curated content for infographics, like this one

On passion

Don't pump content. Pump out passion. Passion comes from two things: 1. What you are knowledgeable about and 2. What you love. Big companies stink at both. They are not knowledgeable about local unique situations, people, issues. They are not passionate about it because they don't live where you live. They have to be generic and passionless. Exploit that. Only write about what comes from the intersection of #1 and #2.  Sure, you are not going to outrank Mr. Humungo. But slowly but surely you will build a local and relevant audience and in the end it is not about attracting 1 million people, it is about attracting the 1,000 that are in your area that want to give you money.

- Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google

On getting people invested in content creation

If you can go to people and say, look, you've told us about the time constraints of your job, we know you're hesitant to commit to anything, but here is an editorial calendar that takes into account your time limitations, and here's the kind of support we can offer you during the process ... and here is WHY we want you to create this content ... then you have a solid business case that also seems manageable to the individual.

- Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

On influencing influencers

The key is to start producing content that is useful and interesting to your target audience.  You have to give them a reason to come to your website. Without that, outreach to influencers isn't going to be effective. In terms of finding influencers, you can use a tool like SEOmoz's FollowerWonk – or even Twitter search.

- Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot

Promoting Awesome Content

5 principles for content promotion 

1. Spend at least as much time on planning as you do on the actual promotion. 
2. Broaden the list of people you reach out to by segmenting your "content market."
3. Leverage easier to acquire links to help get the more difficult ones.
4. Engage in your community prior to outreach.
5. Automate low-value tasks (finding contact info, collecting metrics, etc.).

- Paul May, CEO of BuzzStream

On the best inbound strategies for start-ups

Strategically, I believe that start-ups should be building permission assets – groups of people who are excited to hear what they have to say (tactically, I'm a big fan of email marketing). The best ways of building those groups is typically some combination of activity (content production, community management) and channel (search, social).

- Will Critchlow, Distilled

On finding promotable topics

Go to followerwonk and look at the word cloud of the all the followers of the biggest player in your space and then use those keywords to build co-relevant content ideas. Push the content at their followers through outreach and ads. Build the site so that it rewards profile creation, newsletter signups and follows. Keep the conversation going through the relevant social channels and continue to push out shareworthy content. Your community will grow.

- Mike King, ipullrank.com

On email promotion

I. Love. Email marketing! Check out this post that compiles everything I could possibly share with you about it – Email Marketing Campaign Analysis, Metrics, Best Practices. If you are not thinking about the transformative nature of mobile on email consumption and engagement, you are making a BIG MISTAKE. 

- Avinash Kaushik, Google

Developing a position statement

Make sure you have a really well thought out positioning statement. This should summarize very succinctly the sets of feelings that you want to engender among your target customer. Having this will not only position you in the customer's mind, it will help you focus your efforts.  Here's the template that I use for a positioning statement:

1. For (target segment)
2. Who wants (problem to solve)
3. The (solution name) provides (solution to the problem)
4. Unlike (primary competitor)
5. The (solution name) (primary differentiator).

The key is making this very short...that focuses you and makes it really clear why you're the right solution. Developing this first will help drive your content strategy and promotion strategy. 

- Paul May, BuzzStream

Measuring the Effects of Content Marketing

What metrics can you trust?

There's a hierarchy of metrics that can be measured. The "best" metric is raw "dollars in the door" (getting customers). If you can't measure customers, measure leads (which is a proxy for future customers). From there, the further out you get (using proxies for future leads/customers), the more dubious the metric. The motivation behind measurement is to figure out what is working and what is not. Most of the time, we measure things that we think are indicative of the thing we actually want. Because often, it's hard to measure the thing we actually want.

- Dharmesh Shaw, HubSpot

Dwell time

For sites like my blog (or my BFF Thomas'most excellent fantastic must read by any digital person site) a very large percentage of people will just come to read the latest post or one post to solve a specific problem. Dwell tells you what that engagement looks like because all web analytics tools stink (natively) at capturing time for single page view visits. I use the data to figure out what content is causing people stay and read. Is there a dwell time that leads to higher conversation rate. Is it correlated to social sharing. Does page speed cause higher or lower dwell time. And at least in some cases to see if dwell time causes me to make more repeat visits (and money!).

- Avinash Kaushik, Google

On monitoring and analyzing advanced analytics metrics

Aside from forensic data dives, webmasters should only spend their time monitoring key performance indicators (metrics on 'roids) that they care about. So for one webmaster, this might be just the basics. For another, they might be a brick and mortar who only cares about traffic from their sales regions, let's just say. That will require a custom report using some advanced(ish) metrics.  But I also think that when it comes to analytics, a reporting dashboard should be created that pulls in the data they need (preferably using the GA API), and then formatted in a way that helps key decision makers see what they need to effortlessly. But all too often marketers don't automate this process and do the same repetitive tasks week after week, month after month.

- Annie Cushing, Annielytics

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.

If you’ve been attending WordStream’s recent webinars (or reading the blog), you already know some of the secrets to hacking AdWords – like how Quality Score is really calculated, and the secrets behind “unicorn” ads with super-high click-through rates.

Now it’s time to learn our best A/B testing hacks – the changes, big and small, that can help you drive way more leads (not just clicks) though PPC, without giving Google more of your sweet, sweet cash.

In our next webinar, “7 Powerful A/B Tests That Drive More Leads from Paid Search,” WordStream will team up with Optimizely to reveal the secrets of A/B testing that will help you drive more leads from paid search.

Join WordStream and Optimizely on Wednesday, June 4, 2014 at 1 p.m. EST (5 p.m. UTC) – register now!

WordStream’s testing and web optimization expert Toni Pace will show you how to leverage each stage of the funnel to increase your lead volume. Toni will be joined by Ryan Lillis, a Conversion Optimization Strategist at Optimizely, who will explain how to test each level of the funnel, as well as how to increase visitors to your site AND increase your conversion rates with the same number of clicks.

As if that weren’t enough, during this hour-long webinar, you’ll also learn how to:

• Maximize the effectiveness of your A/B tests
• Optimize ad copy and offers to improve conversions
• Apply the principles of conversion flow to your landing page design process
• … And much more!

To illustrate these principles, Toni and Ryan will walk you through seven real examples to demonstrate how effective A/B testing can be. After the webinar, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the paid search lead gen funnel, and come away with actionable steps that you can apply to your PPC advertising campaigns that will result in more leads for the same budget.

Register for “7 Powerful A/B Tests That Drive More Leads From Paid Search” today to reserve 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.

One word dominated search marketing in May – “panda.” Obviously we’re not talking about the adorable, endangered animal, but rather the fourth update to the Google algorithm that laid waste to crappy sites across the web and struck terror into the hearts of webmasters the world over.

These pandas want to rock ‘n roll all night AND party every day.

Of course, the Panda 4 update wasn’t the only thing people were talking about this month. Let’s see what else was going on and take a look at this month’s top posts.

1. Panda 4.0: Why EBay Just Lost 80% Of Its Organic Rankings– Even if you’re not familiar with the term “schadenfreude,” eBay’s recent misfortune at the hands of Google is a perfect example. Check out this post to see why Google slapped eBay so hard, courtesy of some data analysis by our own Larry Kim.

2. Gender Bias in Online Marketing: Data Shows Women Are Undervalued by 21%– Every journalist worth their salt knows that sometimes, a hunch can quickly grow into a hot story. Larry discovered this recently and decided to investigate gender bias in the paid search industry – a study that revealed some startling (and depressing) results.

3. 6 Google Analytics Tips for Business Insight Way Beyond Traffic– In this post, I outline six tools you need to start using in Google Analytics. Sure, you’re probably already using one or two of them, but what about the rest?

4. Debunking AdWords Dogma: Why You Shouldn’t Bid to Position (& Other Myths That Make No Sense)– In this post, Paid Search Strategist Tony Testaverde dispels some of PPC’s most stubbornly enduring myths with hard data – which, incidentally, is WordStream’s favorite kind of data.

5. What Is Long-Form Content and Why Does It Work?– Long-form has become something of a hot topic among content marketers, but some people still have a lot of questions about this kind of content. In this post, I explain what long-form content is, what makes it so effective, and dissect five examples of outstanding long-form content.

6. The Mega Collection of SEO Expert Advice: Best of the Reddit SEO AMAs– Although Inbound.org has become increasingly popular with SEOs seeking to pick the brains of the industry’s most respected experts, Reddit’s Expert SEO subreddit remains perennially popular. In this post, Megan rounds up some rock-solid advice from Reddit AMAs by some of the biggest names in the business.

7. Search vs. Display: Which AdWords Network Should You Use?– In this post, Customer Success Manager Erin Sagin provides you with a detailed explanation of when you should use the Google Search Network, and when the Google Display Network is the right choice.

8. 5 Cognitive Biases & How to Overcome Them on Your Landing Pages– Marketers need to understand consumer behavior better than most professionals, but getting inside your prospects’ head isn’t always so easy. In this post, I explain how to overcome (or at least account for) five of the most common cognitive biases with your landing pages.

9. Contrarian Content Marketing: How to Zig When Everyone Else Zags– Sometimes it’s fun to be deliberately contrarian, but going against the grain can also be a remarkably effective content strategy. Don’t believe me? Then read Elisa’s post about why agreeing with everyone else is stupid, lazy and ineffective. Then, as Elisa suggests, “go forth and stir the pot.”

10. 21 Expert Content Marketing Tips from the Best Inbound.org AMAs– May was a big month for AMA highlights, and we just couldn’t ignore the veritable gold mine of advice at Inbound.org. In our final post for this month’s Best Of round-up, Miranda plumbs the depths of Inbound.org’s most popular AMAs to deliver you some excellent content marketing tips from some of the industry’s best and brightest.

See you in June!

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.

How well do you know your audience? If your messaging just isn't connecting, resonating or converting to its full potential, you haven't yet tapped into that elusive marketing sweet spot. Marketers strive to provide the best possible experience to their audience, but reaching that pinnacle of customer connectedness doesn't happen by accident.

Small business guru and Google AdWords expert Perry Marshall joined us recently for a fun and information-packed webinar on what he calls “the Happy Juice Principle.” We often look to Perry for inspiration and copy strategy and were struck by his unique approach to content creation, lead capture and conversion. It all started with our team reading this post on Perry's blog – at first, we laughed (happy juice?!), but the underlying principle quickly became apparent.

Today, I'll share with you Perry's approach to crafting more compelling, better converting marketing content across all of your channels. You'll learn how to find your own Happy Juice and inject it in all of your marketing efforts, aided by real-world examples of it in action.

What Is the Happy Juice Principle?

In his post, Perry shared three techniques used by Rich Jacobs to boost email open rates and conversions. As we discussed these tactics, we realized just how deeply Rich understood his audience of busy attorneys – their schedules, time constraints, how they take in and remember information and more. These insights were incredibly powerful; he has people opening and revisiting his email messages five to ten times!

Of course, you don't inherently know just what it is your audience wants and needs that will generate this level of interest. It has to be learned. Happy Juice goes beyond simple A/B testing, however, and delves into the needs, wants and intent of your audience. It's the advanced, meaningful insight at the intersection of optimization testing and persona mapping.

In a nutshell, the Happy Juice Principle is the best possible understanding of who your audience really is, so you can create an experience that provides value for both the audience and your business.

It's just as important to understand what the Happy Juice Principle is not: it’s not testing various page elements like Buy buttons against one another, or other simple A/B tests. Those are great, but you have to move beyond these simple tests to get long-lasting, meaningful results that drive double- or even triple-digit improvements in conversion rate.

"It trumps the A/B stuff by light years," Perry told our audience. "If you're really squirting happy juice into their brain, it doesn't matter if you have a red or a white button. They'll happily write you a check and stick it in the mail."

Why You NEED Happy Juice in Your Sales & Marketing Content

We consider ourselves pretty fortunate at WordStream, in that we have access to great tools that help us perform and analyze tests and optimize our marketing content.

However, even small businesses can get on board with the Happy Juice culture. It’s one of constant testing and a commitment to continually learning more about your audience.

What is the value of all of this brainstorming and testing? In our case:

• We've grown our website visitors YoY by 116%
• We're generating twice as many qualified leads for sales
• This has contributed to hockey stick revenue growth for our company.

Do you like sales and profits? Positive ROI? Then you need Happy Juice.

Getting Started – Mapping Your Buyer

The vast majority of your customers will never, ever be like the lawyers who click Rich's emails 10 times. Most people are non-responsive, so how do you figure out what really trips their trigger?

Perry recommends a simple survey that can be applied at any point in the customer journey to provide the basis for in-the-moment messaging:

1. What's the most important thing I can help you with that I haven't addressed so far?
2. How difficult has it been for you to find an answer or solution elsewhere?
3. Why, specifically, would getting this answer or solution be important to you – how would it change your life?

You can use this in email, via web forms, etc. He shared an example of what this might look like:

Throw out all of the 'not at all difficult' and 'somewhat difficult responses' and ignore them. If it wasn't difficult for them to solve the problem, they've probably already solved it. Take what's left – those people who said it was very difficult to find a solution – and throw out the short answers. You're left with the long answers. These people are in pain. They have a desperate desire to be happy! They've told you all about their problem, what's bugging them, what they're trying to solve – and they're giving you the language you can use to give back to them what they're asking for.

Just doing this one simple survey can help you drastically reduce your failure rate, Perry said. It gives you a whole bucket of messaging to test.

You can use this strategy anywhere, at any time, he said, so long as you apply the insights back to your messaging at that point in the customer journey. It might help you reconnect with people who abandoned the cart. It could help you acquire new customers. Whatever your goal, you need to reach out to people in that particular stage and use the intelligence gleaned to better convert other prospects at that point.

Information collection is ongoing, though. Tools like audience insights in Google Analytics can tell you quite a bit about who you are talking to and what they're interested in.

If you don't know these basic pieces of information – what the problem is, what is preventing them from solving it, and how your solution will affect your audience – you have no solid ground from which to create messaging.

Learning to Test Smarter with Out-of-the-Box Ad Strategies

Perry shared a number of unconventional ad strategies that helped brands create messaging that drove massive sales.

Celebrity Endorsement

This one simple ad outperformed everything else the company tested by far and helped them become a million dollar company.

Of course, celebrity endorsement isn't new. You might think it's too expensive for your brand, making it unattainable. In this case, smart outreach resulted in Oprah featuring the product on her website. The company was then able to confirm that Beyonce used their product and reached out for her permission to share that fact. You might not be able to get Oprah and Beyonce, but you can tap into your notable and influential client base and use that to drive must-have messaging.

Famous Phrases

Well-known phrases can act as emotional triggers for people. We use catchphrases and famous quotes in everyday speech, yet few brands are using them in their advertising.

The Dirty Harry quote is instantly recognizable and elicits an emotional response in the reader. They know this! It's a memory – they know how it makes them feel. It's different and interesting, give it a try.

Onomatopoeia – Words That Imitate Sounds

How can you add sound to a plain text ad or email? Easy:

You can instantly grab attention with auditory words; they enable you to paint an audible picture for your reader.

Sight, Sound & Motion

You can combine sight, sound and motion for even greater effect:

You can actually picture what's happening here and it's so much more powerful than the usual boring, dry ad copy.

Metaphors

Metaphors are a powerful linguistic tool. This can help you tap into emotion by getting your prospect to consider a best/worst case scenario.

But my industry is boring…

No, it's not.

Even professional markets are highly emotional, Perry reminded viewers. People get in heated arguments, even in office environments. Discover the problem, dig into the emotion, and find language to tap into triggering it. Try some things you've never done before. Most people don't even begin to explore all of the potential ideas they could put out there and it all starts with brainstorming around your advanced understanding of your audience.

Perry's words of wisdom here are worth remembering: No one can stop you from being more clever than your opponent but you.

Applying Happy Juice to Paid Search

Perry shared an example from one of his courses, where a rock climbing school wanted to improve their AdWords strategy.

The company was seeing 4-6% click-through rates and wanted to improve. As Perry led the school owner through exercises to find that Happy Juice, they realized that what people were looking for wasn’t rock climbing courses – they were looking to escape their boring jobs.

Now, an ad for a rock climbing course and an ad that offers an opportunity to escape your corporate hell look very different! So if the problem people wanted to solve was a new, adventurous career opportunity, why were all of the school's ads the same boring "Rock Climbing School, Take a course in rock climbing" ads?

They rewrote the ads from a completely different perspective. Here were the results – check out those CTRs!

You have to go beyond telling people what you do. That's boring and average and it doesn’t work. Instead, use emotional copy to show people you can help them do what they want to do.

This isn't super time-consuming stuff. But it is a shift in your mindset and the culture of your marketing team. If you don't know if you're hitting your customers' Happy Juice spot yet, you're probably not. You'll know it by the amazing results.

Here’s another example: by simply using the Search Query report in Google AdWords, we found that people were using very specific phrasing when trying to find tools to help with keyword research.

Adjusting our copy to reflect that intent drove our CTR up by 34%!

Landing Pages Need Happy Juice, Too

We applied this principle to our AdWords Grader landing page, as well. It used to look like this:

Now, there was a lot going on there. Conversion rates weren't bad by any means, but we felt there was room for improvement.

We used phone outreach, online surveys and a demo at trade shows to better understand what the obstacles were for people considering signing up.

The issues we identified through these discussions and insights from our audience told us to:

• Reduce the amount of information for people to consider
• Reduce friction and improve the flow of the page
• Add security language and build trust
• Include an example of the report
• Break up the experience, asking only for the email first and adding next steps further along in the process

The changes were substantial:

Changing the flow of the page by injecting Happy Juice based on audience feedback enabled us to increase leads by 86%!

Happy Juice in Content & Inbound Marketing

Our blog is one powerful tool in our marketing arsenal. We hold our blog to a "Standard of Awesomeness" and have a goal for each piece of content – that it is viewed, shared and commented on at a certain level.

Of course, you could churn out content all day long and it wouldn't do anything to drive business – enter Happy Juice. Keyword research, competitive research, social insights and more help us better understand exactly what it is our audience needs and what problems we can help them solve.

Recently, this research showed us there was a need for an article about AdChoices. As Larry Kim put it, it’s a “monster keyword” with tons of volume. Our customer success rep Erin Sagan did a fantastic job of creating a long blog post tutorial for marketers who wanted to learn more about AdChoices, yet it wasn't getting the traffic we expected when it published.

Turns out this was due to a misalignment of intent. Content Marketing Manager Elisa Gabbert dug deeper and found that a lot of searchers were actually looking for help removing AdChoices. The problem people were trying to solve wasn't being answered by our content. Another section was added to address this intent, at the point at which you see the red arrow:

Now, it's getting hundreds of views a day and ranks #2 for the term “adchoices,” thanks to the Happy Juice injected by a better understanding of the problem.

Email Marketing Happy Juice

We serve both agencies and advertisers, who have very different needs and priorities. When a new lead comes into our database, we send a Welcome email to introduce ourselves. We had a decent open rate, but further testing showed us that a one-size-fits-all solution wasn't working.

We broke it down into two Welcome emails, one each for advertisers and agencies. Subject line testing showed us that what each group responded to was totally different. We created email content to better address the needs of each group.

We were able to get close to a 50% open rate and a 76% improvement in click-through rate by better understanding what each of these two distinct groups were looking to solve.

Key Takeaways

The Happy Juice Principle is a unique approach to marketing content that always puts the needs and wants of your audience first. There's great value in understanding the emotional triggers of your target market across email, content marketing and paid search. Remember:

• To optimize for organic search, you have to understand intent– check out the competition and make sure your content aligns with your audience goals.
• With paid search, integrate online and offline research to improve the customer experience and brainstorm messaging that reflects their intent and desires.
• Get personal in your email campaigns and never underestimate the power of a great subject line!
• Get into the heads of your audience and map their buyer profiles. Understand their intentions and how your offering solves their problem.
• Write lots of headlines and copy, then test, test, test!
• Crawl if you have to. You don't need to run today. Don't be intimidated – just get started.

Want to see the whole webinar? Check it out below:

Amber Stevens is the Director of Marketing at WordStream.

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.

Hurrah! A visitor has come to your site and completed a conversion – whether it be a white paper download, a webinar signup, or a purchase order, you should be feeling pretty good.

Don’t pat yourself on the back yet though – you need a thank you page, and it can’t just be any hodgepodge mess that’s thrown up by the nearest website lackey. In order to get the most out of your coveted converted user,you need a stellar thank you page.

What is a "thank you page"?

Your website's thank you page is where users are taken after completing a desired conversion. Often a website thank you page features – big surprise – a “thank you” message in response to a visitor’s order/download. A great thank you page has more than just that though…

Yes, You Need a Thank You Page!

Why do you need a thank you page at all? First of all, it’s the polite thing to do, and you don’t look like a scruffy rapscallion to me. But more importantly, the thank you page serves as a method to continue your interaction with a user.

A visitor who has just accepted an offer from you is incredibly valuable – suddenly you have a qualified lead on your hands that, with some gentle guidance, could become a devoted fan, maybe even a full-fledged customer. Don’t let this opportunity go to waste – instead, use your thank you page to goad the user into further engagement with your brand. Heck, you may even get an additional conversion out of the deal!

9 Thank You Page Best Practices

Learn how to make the most of your thank you page with these thank you page best practices.

1. Confirm the conversion.

The first thing you should do on a thank you page is confirm the offer the visitor has taken advantage of.

For example, Thank you for signing up for our How to Hypnotize Your Dog 101 Webinar – you’re confirming that the user has been signed up for their specific, chosen webinar.

An appropriate Sylvia comic from Bad Girl Chats

If there’s a piece of content to download, put in the download button with bright, eye-catching colors. If you’re mailing a piece of content to the user, let them know that the offer is on its way. One clever strategy by LeadPages suggests following the conversion confirmation with a message that encourages the visitor to read more information about their offer, something along the lines of:

Your guide to dog hypnosis will be sent to your Inbox soon. In the mean time, we recommend reading the pages below to get the most out of your free guide.

The secret is… it’s a sales page! Ideally, a modified sales page that combines information about the guide with whatever you’re trying to up-sell. Pretty sneaky sis. You’re using the free offer thank you page to guide users towards a possible purchase.

2. Post Related Content.

Based on what kind of whitepaper or guide your visitor has just requested, you should have a pretty good idea what kind of content interests them.

Thebest thank you pages work to get visitors excited about other offers or pages on their site, rather than let the lead drop off. So insert videos, infographics, blog posts – whatever your visitor will enjoy. This strategy is famously implemented by Amazon in their “you also might be interested in” pages following a purchase. Take a hint from the pro playbook!

3. Use social media buttons.

Getting visitors to follow you on social media via your website thank you page is another smart strategy, and a great way to further build your relationship.

You could simply have social media buttons present, but instead why not go one step further and spell out for visitors why they should follow you. For example: Learn more insider advice about training your dog by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

4. Bring-a-friend.

Ask visitors to share the offer with friends and family. While these kinds of actions sometimes seem too obvious to iterate, visitors won’t take an action that you don’t request.

They’ve already shown that they consider your offer to be valuable, so there’s a good chance they’d be willing to email, tweet, or post your offer on Facebook via the thank you page. Ask them to share immediately on the thank you page while it’s still fresh in their minds and they’re excited about the offer.

5. Show off with some social proof.

The visitor may have already completed a conversion, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t reassure them a bit with some social proof via testimonials or number dropping on your website thank you pages.

Testimonial from Social Sprout

Remember, this first action could lead to bigger things down the road (a visitor can start off downloading a white paper one day, signup for your free trial the next week, and become a paying customer in no time). You always want to be building your reputation and trust in the mind of potential clients.

6. Encourage them to create an account.

This tip applies mostly to ecommerce thank you pages. As an ecommerce site, getting customers to create an account is huge goal. The problem is, forcing potential customers to create an account prior can cause 30% of users to abandon their cart! Instead, give the option to create an account after the sale – incentivize with promises of future promo codes, easy order tracking, etc.

7. Push a promotion.

Did a customer just purchase a photo book? Why not offer a coupon for 50% off a custom calendar on the thank you page? Or remind them that your Summer Sale is here, and that for a limited time, all photo gifts come with free shipping!

Promo from Sierra Trading Post 

It doesn’t have to be Black Friday, but your promo offer should make the customer feel special in some way. Include a time limit so that users actually pay attention to your offer, rather than tossing it into the “maybe later” bin of the Memory Palace. Offer a limited time special offer for favorite friends or a free gift just for you. Make your customers feel like the delicate, beautiful snowflakes of unique perfection that they are.

8. Provide an opt-in for your email newsletter.

If users are taking you up on an offer, they clearly consider you a trustworthy, reliable source of information ( at least some degree – you don’t hand out your email address to any old Tom, Dick, or Harry Potter on the street).

You know they like you, but do they like you like you? They might – and you don’t even need to pluck daisies to find out – just ask them to subscribe to your newsletter! With a powerful newsletter system in place, you’ll be turning those fresh-faced converters into quality customers before you know it. Don’t forget to include why your newsletter is awesome, aka the best tips and tricks for hypnotizing your dog, delivered to your inbox every week.

9. Send an auto-responder email.

Sending out an auto-responder email following a conversion action is another great way to further capitalize on your new relationship with a user. Many businesses repurpose thank you pages for websites into email form for auto-responders. You’re dangling the same carrots, but delivering them directly to the Inbox!

Thank You Page Examples: Live in the Wild

What better way to learn about great thank you pages than to see them in action? We’re checking out the best thank you pages, and some not-so-stellar ones, below.

Our first website thank you page example comes from Punchbowl. This thank you page follows a form which allows the visitor to download a free white paper.

Punchbowl is doing a great job here, especially with the images.

• The thank you page confirms the offer through both text and image, reassuring the visitor.
• While the page automatically begins the white paper download, there’s also a link in case the initial download fails.
• Punchbowl uses the thank you page to encourage visitors to follow them on social media via Twitter and LinkedIn, using images to hold the visitor’s attention. They also explicitly explain why you should follow them on social media, and provide an easy access link to follow.
• In addition to the social media pushes, Punchbowl suggests thank you page converters check out their blog to further demonstrate their industry knowledge.

Next up is a thank you page from Emergen-C following the completion of a free sample offer.

This energy supplement provider has a pretty lackluster thank you page. Here’s why:

• Emergen-C offers “thanks” and confirms they’ve received my request, but they aren’t very specific. They’d be better off with something along the lines of “Thanks, your free sample is on its way!”
• They suggest liking them on Facebook, which is something at least. But why not link to multiple social media sites?
• There’s lots of wasted empty spacehere where we could be seeing photos of the most popular Emergen-C products, user testimonials, or promo codes.

Here, Hubspot shows us what great thank you pages look like.

• Hubspot confirms the specific offer I’m after, and even throws in some personalization.
• They’ve made it easy to share this resourcethrough e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Hubspot is using this extra space on the thank you page to encourage visitors to sign up for their free trial, with emphasis on the fact that no credit card is needed (pro tip for more sign-ups).
• Even better, the visitor doesn’t even have to go to another page – HubSpot provides the free trial form right on the free offer thank you page. They’ve also auto-inserted the information I already provided for the free offer, making it super easy to sign-up for their free trial without a second thought.

This Cherishables page is an example of an e-commerce thank you page (or in this case, also an order confirmation page), confirming the order I placed for a free custom Father’s Day card. It could be much better.

• Order is confirmed via text and image, which is good.
• There’s really nothing else happening on this page besides the order confirmation. There are buttons to Print, Shop More, or Feedback, but these are boring and un-enticing buttons.
• I’d suggest collapsing the order details and putting them behind a View Invoice or View Order Details button. After all, I just completed the order, I don’t need a detailed play-by-play reminder of what I bought.
• Instead, use this space to promote top selling cards. Or, since Cherishables already knows I like promo codes (I used one for this card order), why not offer me another code to encourage a second purchase? For example, “As a special gift, we’re offering you 50% off your next birthday card!” Someone always has a birthday – maybe this message reminds me that I need to order a card for a friend.

Yogi goes with a thank you pop-up message rather than an all-out thank you page.

• The offer is confirmed, with the thank-you message telling me my tea sample will arrive within in a few weeks.
• I’m given a few other options, but neither link seems very enticing. I certainly don’t just want to go to the Yogi Homepage.
• The option to Send Your Own Well-Wish might work, but the button isn’t very clickable at the moment. We really need some bright colors or an image to get excited about.

An actual thank you page, as opposed to this thank you message, would provide much more space for additional offers or incentives. This pop-up just doesn’t do the trick.

How do you use space on your thank you pages? What seems to work? What doesn’t? Share your experience 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.

Do you know the etymology of the word “cliché”? It’s a printer’s term – back when printers had to physically arrange letters together to form words and paragraphs and pages, they would sometimes arrange common strings of letters or words together on a single plate to facilitate printing those sequences more efficiently. This was also known as a “stereotype block.”

You can see how both “cliché” and “stereotype” evolved into metaphors. In the same way that using clichés made things easier for printers, clichés make things easier for writers. Reaching for a common, familiar phrase is a shortcut to communicating something close to what you mean. It’s harder and it takes longer to express yourself in fresh language that is also clear.

We’re all lazy and we’re all guilty of using clichés in our writing. It’s easy to get away with because people spend even less time reading our content than we do writing it. They skip and skim – you could even argue that using clichés makes it easier for readers to scan your content. The familiar is easier to process – clichés are already “cached” in the brain’s servers.

So what’s the problem? The problem is: Overuse drains phrases of meaning. Those who do take the time to read your articles sentence by sentence will find them hackneyed and trite. Write for your best readers – the smart and attentive ones – not your worst readers.

As a poet, I’ve avoided all forms of cliché for years. Oh, the shame you felt when a professor in a workshop called out a line in your poem as a cliché: “Starlings are always wheeling!” “Ice cubes are always clinking!” A good friend recently judged a poetry contest and sent me a hilarious list of words and topics that have crossed into poetry cliché territory in 2014:

As marketers, I think we should strive to be almost as cliché-avoidant as good poets. Here’s a starter list of marketing clichés to ban from your content.

Content Is King

Probably the absolute #1 most overused phrase in search marketing (with the possible exception of “SEO is dead”). It’s supposed to mean “content is the most important thing,” but it’s turned into one of those thought-terminating clichés that make people’s eyes glaze over and brains shut down. And it’s arguably not even true – in fact, “content is king” was named multiple times in this round-up of bad SEO advice.

You know it’s a cliché when there are stock images about it

Think Outside the Box

Ah, the meta cliché – people use “think outside the box” to mean “don’t be a walking cliché.” And yet … you just said “Think outside the box”!! The chefs are always saying this on Chopped, which drives me nuts, but hey, their knife skills are better than ours. Us content people should know better.

Keep Calm and Carry On

In “Keep Calm and Carry On” we have a visual cliché – you don’t even need to use these five words to be taking part in it. Some genius even managed to combine two clichés from this list into one meme:

As they say, “Le sigh”

This shit peaked in 2012, guys. It’s over.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About X But Were Afraid to Ask

Someone on Inbound.org went on a rant about “Ultimate Guides” a while back. (I couldn’t even find it on the site because there are so many submitted articles with “ultimate guide” in the title!) I too hate formulaic headlines, but the “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About X But Were Afraid to Ask”* formula is the one that most annoys me. See also “What You Can Learn About X from Y” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About X.”

*Some of you all are probably too young to know the reference. It comes from a 1969 sex manual, which Woody Allen adapted into an extremely bizarre film in 1972. So every time you use this headline formula you’re unwittingly making your readers picture Woody Allen in this costume:

Always Be Testing

Traditionally accompanied with an image of Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross. (Don't feel too bad, we've done it too.)

Take X to the Next Level

I'm all about leveling up when I'm playing Super Mario, not that I've done so in the past ~25 years.

But can we all just agree to stop saying "take your blah-blah to the next level"? When I read this phrase, I always hear it in one of those obnoxious male voiceover voices. SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!

Google Quietly Launches …

This one is more of a tech journalism cliché. I see it all the time:

The implication is that GOOG is doing something sneaky, that the quietly launched feature in question is part of Google’s big conspiracy to steal all your money and take over the universe. The thing is, Google literally launches multiple features per week across all its products. So obviously most of those launches are quiet. (That doesn’t mean it’s not a conspiracy though.)

What marketing clichés make your skin crawl? (Oh you know I had to end this post with a cliché…)

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.

Bing Ads plans to roll out two changes to its device targeting options: first, they will combine PCs and tablets into a single device, then eliminate mobile device targeting.

The upcoming changes were driven by users basically telling Bing, "We want you to be more like AdWords," according to the blog post announcement. While Bing Ads still offered the flexibility of device targeting, it made it difficult for some to manage cross-channel tools.

Yes, this latest announcement is a far cry from Bing's April 2013 assurances, when they said Enhanced Campaigns are a bad idea. At the time, they assured advertisers then that they would not follow Google's lead by bundling desktop and tablet targeting. So much for that.

However, their user feedback seems to indicate this change in direction is needed, so kudos to them for listening to their advertisers. Here's what's changing:

Tablets & Desktops to be Combined in September 2014

The first change will reduce the number of targeting options available to advertisers to just two: desktop or mobile. Having both bid modifiers in enhanced campaigns and the ability to target tablets, desktops/laptops and mobiles made the system too complex, they said.

As a result, desktops, laptops and tablets will be rolled into one targeting option. It will look like this:

The Bing Ads team notes that advertisers will still be able to make bid adjustments to their tablet bids. In addition, Bing is updating the allowable bid modifiers for tablet targeting – in September, the allowable bid modifier for tablets will range from +300% to -20%.

In an email, the Bing Ads team said they are advising advertisers to prepare for traffic from tablets and consider this information in their bidding strategies.

Mobile Device Targeting to be Eliminated Next Year

Bing plans to "unify" management of device targeting across campaigns by ditching mobile device targeting in favor of bid modifiers. This will, they say, result in complete compatibility between AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns when the changes roll out in 2015.

Bing also plans to launch app promotion ads (see Google’s version here), which will download apps with a single ad click. They will only appear to users on devices where the app can be installed and are meant to replace OS-specific targeting.

Get Ready for It…

Bing Ads made this announcement wayyyy in advance so you would have plenty of time to prepare. Here's what to do:

1. Make sure your site works well on tablets– you're going to start seeing that traffic when PC and tablet targeting are combined.
2. Start moving your dedicated mobile campaigns to unified campaigns using bid modifiers. You might as well get used to it now, before the forced migration kicks in.
3. In the API, specify tablet and desktop together in the DeviceOSTarget object so you can specify your bid adjustments for tablet.

How do you feel about the upcoming Bing Ads targeting changes?

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.

eBay has just released the final version of a study claiming that paid search ads have “no measurable benefit.” This is not really new news; we heard about the preliminary results last year, and pretty much everyone in search marketing had a good hearty laugh – because eBay has long been known for its embarrassingly crappy ad strategy.

The study is done now, and while it’s not completely terrible, it’s definitely misleading, as well as confusing in terms of what this says about eBay’s marketing strategy. In this post I’d like to go over a few points worth rebutting, especially when it comes to trying to apply these findings to the average Google advertiser out there.

It’s Not the Channel, It’s How You Use it

First and foremost, it’s not so much about the channel (paid search) but rather, how you use it. The strategy of carpet bombing Google search results pages by bidding on 100 million keywords with ads using lazy dynamic keyword insertion results in low click-through rates, which results in low Quality Scores, which results in poor ad positioning and very high click costs (as much as 400% more expensive).

eBay would be better off being a bit more picky on where they show their ads. We covered this last year. Overuse of DKI and underuse of negative keywords gives you ads like this:

Organic vs. Paid Search

A big piece of the findings had to do with the question of whether paid search ads cannibalize traffic and sales from organic search. According to The Guardian, the report claims:

They stopped advertising entirely on non-branded search terms to 30% of the US for a period of 60 days, and found that it had "a very small and statistically insignificant effect on sales… on average, US consumers do not shop more on eBay when they are exposed to paid search ads."

This idea that an advertiser can just capture those customers via organic search was never really applicable to your average advertiser, and now is probably no longer applicable to eBay either – since they appear to have been hit with a manual penalty and/or Panda 4.0 due to the thin content issues that we highlighted last month.

Image via Moz

As a reminder, Google dinged eBay for aggressive use of doorway pages and internal footer linking to get rankings on a wide array of long-tail terms with spammy, low-quality pages. After the update rolled out, I estimate that eBay had lost 80% of its non-branded organic rankings. So it’s unclear how they’ll maintain their business with organic search alone.

New Visitors vs. Existing Visitors

eBay’s report talked a lot about the value of showing ads for new visitors vs. existing users. eBay found that ads shown to existing customers were less valuable than ads shown to new visitors.

@larrykim You can set up a "New Users" condition in 1 list as an Exclude option, combined with other lists. #ppcchatpic.twitter.com/kz6zSPC6Fp

— James Svoboda (@Realicity) June 5, 2014

I view this as more of a campaign strategy issue (a lack of strategy, in this case) since there are ways to exclude certain audiences in your paid search campaigns:

Alternatively, you could show existing visitors your ads but set the bids much lower if they produce less ROI. This seems like an obvious solution to this finding, rather than concluding that everything in paid search is broken. eBay should look into things like RLSA, custom audiences, and other bidding and targeting options that refine the audience and improve ROI.

The Value of Bidding on Brand Terms

eBay’s report also claims that branded keyword search terms don’t provide incremental sales/traffic. Now, I think there is definitely some truth to this. But what they fail to mention is that because branded searches get such high average click-through rates, they get super high Quality Scores at a very low cost per click. Often these ads cost just pennies per click, and easily cost 50-80% less than the non-branded terms in the account.

So the cost for the bidding on brand terms is very low (relatively speaking), and there are good reasons to do so. For example, WordStream runs ads on our branded searches because:

• It lets us customize the appearance of our search listings, including sitelinks to drive users to specific offers we’d like to promote.

• It fends off competing ads on your trademark terms (i.e. defensive tactics). It’s a small incremental uplift in visits, as the study shows, but at least those clicks aren’t going to your competitors.
• Having branded terms in your account usually lifts the average click through rate of your overall account which gives your whole account a boost in terms of Quality Score. average.

So What the Heck is Going on at eBay?

Overall I’m a little confused about eBay’s search strategy. On one hand they’re saying paid search doesn’t work. But earlier this year, they were cited as being a top spender on PLA’s. It’s like they’re not really communicating with each other internally, and they don’t appear to be knowledgeable about the latest AdWords targeting features (which is a real shame with budgets this big). Frankly, I also question eBay’s motives in putting out such a study – Google and eBay are kind of known to be frenemies. And large companies don’t usually share their internal SEM strategies, for obvious reasons.

At the very least, I’d be super skeptical of trying to apply these study results to other companies that don’t have as big a brand as eBay. Ironically, eBay’s business was built to a large extent via search marketing over the last decade – but using outdated tactics that aren’t helping it anymore.

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.

With all the recent advances in targeting offered in Google AdWords, I thought it made sense to take a deeper look at one of the AdWords features that has almost become old hat to PPC marketers at this point. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a tool that is often overlooked in the sea of new features and betas that Google continues to churn out, but this staple feature can make a drastic and immediate improvement to your paid search account performance. 

Google defines Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as “an advanced AdWords feature that dynamically updates your ad text to include one of your keywords that matches a customer's search terms.” PPC marketers know it as putting those funny little brackets and the word “KeyWord” into the ad copy so that the search term will show up within the body of the ad.

For example, if I use the headline: “Buy {Keyword:New Sneakers}” in an ad and someone searches a keyword I am bidding on, that specific search term (“blue sneakers” or “men’s sneakers” etc.) could appear in the headline of the ad. If the term is too long for the character limit, my default phrase “New Sneakers” will appear instead.

As I said before, DKI is so ingrained in the mindset of most digital marketers that it’s easy to lose sight of how important it can be for increasing click-through-rate, traffic, and conversions. A recent experience with a client who was dead set against DKI showed me what a valuable tool it is and the impact it can have. 

Case Study: What Happens When You Turn off Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

My client was convinced that dynamic keyword insertion was bringing in illegitimate traffic and, despite my protests, insisted that its use was responsible for lead conversions that were unrelated to their business. Rather than upset the client, I did a little experiment and paused all the ads that used any instance of dynamic keyword insertion.

As soon as I paused these ads, I noticed a dramatic drop in account performance.

In the 20 days that we did not employ DKI:

• Clicks decreased by 48%
• Click-through rate dropped by 38%
• Conversions plummeted by 70% (compared to the previous period)

The logic is fairly simple: conversions dropped because a vital step of the conversion process has been removed. If you aren’t getting clicks to the site, how can you generate conversions? Dynamic keyword insertion is known to increase clicks because it forces your ad to reflect back to the user exactly what they are looking for, word for word.

With this evidence I was able to convince my client to revert back to the previous ad copy, using DKI, and make a few other adjustments to improve lead quality. In the 20 days after we reverted to the previous copy, the results were equally astounding:

• Impressions remained relatively flat (actually down 6%)
• Clicks improved by 55%
• CTR increased by 45%
• Conversions jumped by a whopping 228%

After seeing such beneficial results, I then began to look at some of my other accounts and find creative ways to expand use of DKI. So far, the results have been positive.

Best Practices for Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Some quick notes on making the most of DKI:

• Be conscious of character limits. You have 25 characters in the headline and 35 in the body lines of your ad. Make sure your terms will fit within those constraints.
• Pay attention to capitalization. Best practice dictates that we capitalize each term in a headline to maximize CTR. However, there may be times that you do not want every term capitalized. Capitalizing the K or W in Keyword will determine the formatting of your phrase capitalization. (More on how capitalization for DKI works here.)
• DKI can be very effective, but doesn’t make sense in every instance. A clear example of this is bidding on competitors’ branded terms– Walmart wouldn’t want the brand name “Target” showing up in its ads because of DKI.
• While DKI is most commonly used in the headline or body of an ad, it can also be applied to the display URL of an ad. I have noticed particularly strong results when placing the script in the Headline or body in combination with the URL. This gives the ad an increased relevance to the search term that will make it stand out to the user.
• When using DKI in the URL, be aware that things such as spaces and special characters will not appear and can make your URL look flawed.
• Use the ad preview tool in the AdWords interface for an advance peek at how your ad copy will display in the SERPs.

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.

Is your business blog tanking? Have you wasted hours upon hours creating what you thought was out-of-this world content while attempting to attract visitors and maybe even grab conversions via your business blog? Lift your somber spirit out of the rain because you have come to the right place! Blogging is not rocket-science, but many of you are missing small but crucial things that will drastically improve the readership of your business blog.

Image via Evil Erin

Back in college my roommates and I attempted to throw a party one Friday night. The turnout was simply pathetic, which we blamed on the competing parties occurring in the same townhouse block as ours. A month later we were determined to prove our past party performance wrong. We spent time creating a compelling Facebook invitation full of witty banter and entertaining photos while highlighting some major draws such as free beverages and pizza (no college kid can resist either). Aside from Facebook, we used word-of-mouth marketing to get people enthused about our party. If I do say so myself, the turnout was phenomenal.

You may be wondering what this anecdote has to do with your business blog – well, the point is that even if you have great content, your target audience is not going to join the party or read your blog if it is not presented and executed in an enticing manner.

So let’s dive into the 3 mistakes your business blog is making, and how to fix them today:

Mistake #1: Your Blog Posting Schedule Is Inconsistent

Have you ever stumbled upon a great blog only to return a few days later to no new posts? It is discouraging and might deter you from visiting again. I have even come across a few blogs that post several times for a few weeks, and then there is a steep drop-off like the blogger fell off a cliff and failed to find a replacement. Before you start barking at me that “Creating great content is time consuming,” I have several solutions to this problem.

Utilize multiple authors across your organization.

WordStream has seen great success with this method, with approximately 50 authors across our 100-person company who work in several areas of the business, including customer service, sales, product, and marketing. Believe it or not, my day-to-day job is not to write blog posts for WordStream, but rather something that I add on as an additional task.

Of course you will need a great editor and also a strategy for convincing employees to contribute. So where to start? Here are a few actionable tips to encourage employees to contribute:

• Schedule a short, persuasive meetingwith each team to outline the new blogging participation opportunity.
• Highlight the benefits of blogging, especially if your businesses brand is well-known and/or growing rapidly. Authorship improves one’s personal brand and professional portfolio – having great content on your resume is a draw for recruiters, which can help accelerate your career to new levels. It can also help you get speaking opportunities at industry conferences.
• Implement a reward strategy. Our marketing team at WordStream treats employees on the customer success team who write three posts per quarter with a fun outing – for example a Red Sox game or night out bowling. You could also provide a prize (cough, cough CASH prize) for the writers whose blogs posts perform the best in terms of traffic, engagement, etc. People are much more motivated to act if they’re tempted with a potential reward.

Schedule time each week to dedicate to blogging

Do you have time to watch the Bachelorette every Monday? Or Modern Family on Wednesdays? This is all the time you need to dedicate to blogging each week. It’s that simple. Block off a small period of time each week to focus on blogging and only blogging. Tuck your iPhone deep into your desk drawer or even remove yourself from the distracting office environment by grabbing a conference room or utilizing a nearby library and just type away. Blogging is much less daunting when you realize it is essentially just writing down what you know. It’s shocking how much you can accomplish when distractions are removed.

Have a running list of content ideas

Always be thinking, reading, and writing down your ideas even if it is just on a post-it in your cube or in the notes section of your phone. Once you’ve got new ideas jotted down, add them to a shared document so other authors within your company can cover them if your schedule is jam packed – as stated above, take advantage of your resources i.e. your co-workers! Figuring out what to write about is so much easier than you think, for instance…

Write about what you know

If you drag yourself out of bed and slave away at your desk on five out of the seven weekdays, you must know something. Knowledge is power – share it.

Answer a question

If you work with clients, write a blog post answering a question you receive frequently. Often I will come up with blog ideas just by eavesdropping on the colleagues who border my cubicle. If people are asking as question, you may as well answer it in a spunky sharable blog post – this will save you time in the long run. Instead of writing that long email explaining how to set up conversion tracking in the future, just send along a link to the post you already wrote!

Follow industry news and blogs and re-purpose with a twist

Browse through some influential industry bloggers or news stories and take your own twist on the update. WordStream authors do this all the time for example in January Elisa Gabbert caused quite a stir when stating her prediction on link building’s future and reacting to Matt Cutts’ claim that guest blogging is dead. Not only were several shares and over 54 comments received but also the conversion continued through follow-up articles and additional coverage.

Don’t be afraid to get involved in industry dialogue

For example in PPC Matthew Umbro runs a #PPCChat conversation weekly where questions are tweeted out and respondents engage in an interactive live chat through Twitter every Tuesday for an hour. These conversations often lead to blog posts since ideas and information are being exchanged by industry experts.

Mistake #2: Your Business Blog is a Visual Nightmare

Your blog has no images, is disorganized, and downright ugly. Yikes! Wouldn’t you say it’s time for an extreme makeover, blog edition?

Have at least one compelling and relevant image in each post.

“Your goal isn’t just to add eye candy, though that’s probably a good thing,” says entrepreneur Neil Patel. “Your goal is to add strategic images that help your readers and enhance your content.” I think Neil hits the nail on the head because seriously, how uncompelling and unattractive is online content without an image or video for further engagement and context? It is an immediate turnoff to see a huge block of text that isn’t broken up visually. Once that image pulls you in, it also needs to complement the text so the two elements work together to create a memorable experience.

Charity: Water, a non-profit with the mission to bring clean and safe water to every person in the word, does a remarkable job with the image/text combo in each post. Check out this recent post introducing their new interns. Each picture has personality and is relevant, and they wrap up with a lovely group photograph of the whole gang. Case in point, the images draw me into the article, while providing relevancy and additional context to the copy in the post.

Keep your blog organized and easy to navigate

If your blog is just a never-ending page of posts this is far from user-friendly; visitors will likely become frustrated when they cannot easily navigate to the area they are looking to focus on. Your blog should be organized so readers are able to home in on areas of interest.

For example, try providing a sidebar with clickable links to various sections or dividing the posts between tabs on various topics or products that are relevant to your target audience. Evernote does an excellent job at this, providing four separate tabs including – Latest, News, Tips & Stories, and At Work – this allows readers to easily navigate to the section that interests them. Evernote also provides a search bar to search for topics of interest, as well as a section that provides recommended posts for you.

Think simple, attractive, and easy to navigate when it comes to site design: According to a Mashable article by Erica Swallow, “Web design is one of the most important factors in creating a blog that is user-friendly and visually appealing. Corporate blogs are notorious for lacking in design.”

Squarespace is another company that excels at site design. The design is not only visually appealing, it has one of the best overall user experiences I’ve seen among business blogs. I’d estimate that about 80% of business blogs look fairly similar – a bland page of blog text with branded company logos, and possibly a pixilated image here and there. Squarespace takes readership experience to a whole new level, with unique blog navigation, but at the same time providing a clear and simple experience. Each post is introduced with a compelling and relevant image (hitting on my last point), and the overall experience is pleasant.

I also love how Squarespace encourages reader participation in each post via a call-to-action to react on Twitter – see the example below, incorporated in their Brooklyn celebration post.

Mistake #3: You Don’t Have Social Media Share Buttons

Your content NEEDS to be shareable. According to a report from BI Intelligence, “Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, a higher time-spend than any other major Internet activity, including email.” If that’s not a wake-up call it should be! Think about it: If your target audience is spending the largest chunk of their time on Facebook and Twitter each day, they’re not going to find your blog unless it’s being promoted on these sites. Including these share buttons will ensure your blog is actually gaining some traction on social.

If people are indeed sharing your content, then these social buttons also give upfront proof that your posts are worthy of reading. When visiting a blog post that has 400+ shares across various social networks, I’m immediately impressed and confident that the post is worth my time.

My point is that including share buttons is an easy way to:

• Promote your content for free, and
• Provide social validation for each post

If you are not sure how to add social media share or follow buttons to your blog, check out Hubspot’s Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Creating Social Media Buttons.

Key Takeaways

So are you ready to turn your blog from a complete nightmare into an overnight success? Well, OK, it might not be overnight, but applying these tips will give you some much needed blog cred. As a recap remember to:

1. Utilize the expertise of your co-workers to keep posting consistent, and always be brainstorming new blog ideas.
2. Dedicate time to making your blog attractive! That means relevant images, easy navigation, and clear organization throughout.
3. Ensure your posts are sharable! Social media is a HUGE source of referral traffic, so take advantage of spreading your content through this ever-growing channel.

I’m curious to know:

What techniques do you utilize to ensure your blog is attractive?

What are the best business blogging tips you’ve ever heard? What are the worst?

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.