The hall is still too hot, but it’s been another good day of presentations with a slightly slower overall pace. Here’s the day one Search Love review if you missed it.

Excuses: Please excuse the lack of checking these posts (they’re posted on the day) and my lack of en-dashes today and yesterday; the Chromebook can’t do them (at least easily). It makes me sad. Also apologies for the terrible picture.

Building a brand with online video – @philnottingham (Distilled)

Video success has sometimes been recorded by impressions, but impressions aren’t really making an ‘impression’ on anybody.

A good video brand needs style (recognisable), content (that’s different), distribution (to get to the right people) and measurement (to see how well it does). Phil’s big message is to play around a bit with video! Always consider your:

• Style: performers that reflect the personality of the business (don’t use stock!). perspective (first person, second person etc), palate (colours, tone and restrictions), personality (use the language of your audience – know which of ‘the big five personality traits’ your user is).
• Content: What works on TV might not work on YouTube. You need to tell a great story – but how? You need customer insight (use Google Trends, Tubular for ‘videos users also watched’), competitor insight (Unruly Analytics is like SearchMetrics for YouTube), and ‘product truth’ (what people think about you: SurveyMonkey, Google Consumer Surveys).
• Distribution: You need to be on YouTube – simple as that. It also needs to be shareable, but things don’t ‘just go viral’. Everything needs a massive push at the start, but paid distribution is not a shortcut (although it can help to amplify). You can also do some competitor research to see who shared other videos and outreach to them. How do you know if it’s going to be shared? Well you can pay shed loads for tools or just read up on sharing psychology. You could also use UnrulyActivate to push videos out to bloggers etc. If you’re running pre-roll YouTube ads, grab users with surprises, subvert expectations and use your knowledge of your audience to target placements. Phil says if you don’t have a YouTube strategy then you don’t have a full SEO strategy.
• Measurement: Phil says report on active metrics like share rate (views divided by shares) or ‘engaged views’. Also measure assisted conversions, which tracks if somebody eventually ended up purchasing or signing up through other channels e.g. remarketing. Remember that last-touch attribution doesn’t work for branding and branding videos; you’ll need to use another model and at least consider first touch. Phil’s also not too keen on measuring how much of a video has been viewed, as the ‘impression’ can be made at any point.

Rich snippets were discussed in the Q&A: they’ve been largely removed now, so YouTube has to be considered more strategically.

Grammar nazi review: Inconsistent capitalisation and a lack of full stops let Phil down a little. Otherwise a typically energetic and captivating performance.

 

Mobile analytics – @justincutroni (Google)

Data is the cornerstone of our marketing efforts: we’re OK at tracking the mobile web, but Justin asks whether we will move towards HTML5 or apps? How do we measure app use? What about people moving between the mobile web and apps? Mobile is tailoring the experience for the information about the user at that point in time (so using location, camera etc.).

Unfortunately app data is split between the Apple App Store and Google Play.

As with all marketing, you need to have a plan! Set objectives: generate app installs, encourage in-app purchases, and keep users engaged. Then set KPIs against them, and segment the data you’ve collected.

Segmentation is key, as you need to identify groups and move them towards defined goals. App stores also collect some demographic information, so don’t forget to use that. In terms of improving the returns from existing users, you can target users using on-phone messaging systems and cross-app advertising.

SDKs (software development kits) are what’s used to gather app data generally, but you can actually use Tag Manager for apps. That’s pretty great; we’re fans of Tag Manager at Attacat. On mobile users are defined by a user ID, and this is far more accurate and reliable compared to cookies. This is generally anonymised and passed to the advertiser.

In apps you need to use events to track interactions, and it can be a lot of work. Don’t let the developer guide this process as you need to source meaningful data. It’s quite hard to track app installations, as you drive people to a store that you’ve very little control over, but Google Analytics and Play Store developer accounts tie up quite nicely.

If you want to learn more about app analytics, try Google’s upcoming app analytics training academy!

Grammar nazi review: Next to no text, so no issues. Justin was an excellent presenter and I’m a bit of a fan.

 

Putting the X into content – @mollyflatt (1000 Heads)

A lighter diversion in this conference, but a little light on value for my money. The overall message was that consumers are becoming content addicts; we’re pretty fed up with it but we’re hooked. Marketers are just ‘content pushers’, feeding an addiction with crap content – content without content.

What can we do about it? Start thinking ‘context marketing’ and targeting influencers, as content is less important than the social action it performs. Content should generate a response and get users to ‘feel’ something, and to do this you need to understand the needs of your audience at a particular moment in time and be useful. Focus on generating emotion.

Good social and content marketing is understanding that the content produced by users is much more important than what you produce to get the conversation going. Try reading the book ‘Contagious’. Although it’s probably a risk reading it on the train with the current Ebola scare…

Grammar nazi review: Said ‘recreate’ with a short vowel once, which was quite weird. Consistent use of full stops, but there were a couple of typos and some inconsistent capitalisation. A chirpy presentation that seemed to me, ironically, light on actionable content.

 

Turbocharging your WordPress – @jonoalderson (LinkDex)

A “chaotic list of tips”, interrupted by a fire alarm and building clear-out, tied together by the theme that we should care about technical SEO. Technical SEO is not on-page optimisation – it’s server configuration, scripting languages, site speed and more. I’d suggest reading the slides if you’re interested in this talk.

Why should we care? Well page load speed is a ranking factor and can massively impact revenue; schema, canonical and Href lang markup can have massive impacts, 301s and site errors can ruin your site and search presence. So, sort out your page speed using any number of the tools available. Unfortunately, developers hate understanding it and fixing it…

Jono identified seven distinct technical SEO areas that are being, somewhat terrifyingly, left behind, followed by a list of WP plugins and third-party services that cover most of the things that need doing. What about Yoast? It’s great, but it can be dangerous: you can miss errors and stop you thinking about the ins-and-outs of technical SEO.

• Hosting: Go for a VPS, or consider supported services. You can also play around in the CPanel and WHM interface.
• Custom error pages, security holes, unnecessary templates and author pages.
• Theme performance: use W3 Total Cache – it’s great.
• Redirection: use the ‘Redirection’ plugin, as it shows you how often redirections are requested.
• Security: use iThemes Security.
• Server location: it matters. Use a CDN like CloudFlare. Also by putting things on subdomains you can load more things in parallel, and this can be set up in CloudFlare. Also you can use established CDNs to serve things like jQuery.
• Minification: use WordPress Minify.
• Secure server: It’s apparently really easy to migrate to SSL. Change to protocol-relative (e.g. //example.com/file/). You can also do SSL through CloudFlare! You can also do a cPanel database query to find old links that need updating.
• Media: pay attention to the details, and don’t upload huge files! Remember that Photoshop is bad at exporting well-compressed jpegs. Try specifying different images for different browser widths to reduce load.
• First-bite: the first connection is key.

Phew, there are too many tips and my fingers hurt…just look at the slides (I’ll insert them here when they’re available). Also did you know tomorrow is both cat day and internet day? Check out daysoftheyear.com, Jono’s site.

Grammar nazi review: Noticed one ampersand where he should have just put ‘and’ and a typo, but maybe one of the best over the two days and I can’t nitpick given he did a fantastic job after being interrupted.

 

What black boxes can tell us about the future of search – @kelvinnewman (Rough Agenda)

Kelvin thinks he’s getting worse at understanding what Google wants.

He talked about evolving circuits to solve problems, and how they’ve evolved in ways that we can’t reverse engineer or totally explain, and a flash-crash in the US stock market. The lesson is that incredibly complex algorithms can react in strange ways in the real world and in combination with other algorithms.

And this takes us to search: Google’s algorithm is incredibly complex and works within a complex and chaotic system, and Kelvin suggests that Google is actually a machine-learning company. Google therefore cannot know how an algorithm update is going to react when let loose in the wild, wild world, and neither can we.

Just because SEO studies of the algorithm are interesting, it doesn’t mean they’re useful. It seemed to me his message for SEOs is: don’t try to reverse engineer the algorithm, just “do what you do” as a good search marketer.

There are a few books for your reading list: The Signal and the Noise, Flash Boys and (oddly) Jurassic Park.

Grammar nazi review: Punctuation but seemingly random initial capitals? Typos? Horrid use of ampersands? Incorrect punctuation inside a bracket? Aarghhh. I love a good semi-colon but I’m afraid it was used incorrectly multiple times. Typographically it was …’eclectic’. I’d say stick to the all caps – sorry Kelvin. Overall, an engaging theory-based presentation.

 

Girlguiding social strategies – Jo Kerr (@Girlguiding)

A bit of a change of tack from Girlguiding, which was interesting for me as my partner @AlexEdits volunteers for them. They’ve developed a new digital strategy to involve the girls, enable and champion the Girlguiding story, and Jo talked us through some of the elements of including persona development and understanding the attitudes and opinions of their target audiences. Actually speaking to their audience was emphasised as a big part of the organisation’s success.

Jo also stressed the importance of social media for transmitting messages and connecting emotionally with users.

Grammar nazi review: No notable issues as it was mostly screengrabs. Jo was a good speaker but clear, focused insights were somewhat lacking for what is a knowledgeable audience.

 

Content: embrace your inner geek – @mattbeswick (Hidden Pixel)

Matt is a geek, but he thinks he’s a fake geek. He’s not a coder or a developer; he just hacks things together. He’s still not averse to including a fair amount of code in his presentation though!

He wants us to remember that the specific tools might not matter, but thinking about what you can do to automate your processes, get cool stuff and move towards becoming a brand.

Unique data is great for outreach! Surveys help to gather together interesting data stories, with story being the key word. Matt recommends using Google Consumer Surveys, although OnePoll is more respected by mainstream media. Get your data and pull out what are the interesting findings that creatives can then work their magic on.

Matt talked about scraping and APIs – both are very useful to know about and it’s well worth knowing how to form API requests.

Getting this information for one data point is OK, but getting it for loads is where is gets interesting. You can pull out Twitter follower data and see the sites of influential users in an instant. You can also work out the sites that they’re sharing or reading. It’s something that Richard Baxter talked about at MozCon last year so it’s something I’m very familiar with, but it’s a great tip to remember.

With APIs like SEMRush you can see what keywords your competitors are bidding on, and using URLprofiler you can even automatically take screengrabs.

But let’s talk about links. Use MajesticSEO API, grab the links, filter by those linking to competitors and boom you’ve got a lot of solid link prospects. Perhaps use TextWise and spider the web for relevant sites about particular topics.

Grammar nazi review: Oh my God I hate initial caps on every word. Please don’t do it. Please don’t also sometimes do it and sometimes not, as that’s even worse. Some appropriate hyphenation was nice to see as a saving grace. A good speaker and an interesting topic.

 

Running promotional campaigns – @iainhaywood

A competition requires skill, a giveaway requires no skill to win. This is where we start this run-through of competitions.

There are three golden rules to remember:

• There is more than one type of entrant: one is primarily interested in winning, while another is primarily interested in your brand and vertical. The latter are the dudes you want.
• It’s not a magic bullet: it won’t drastically impact your revenue.
• Incentivisation totally changes the nature of intent: they’re doing something because there’s a prize at the end of it.

What are competitions good for? Email and other data opt-ins, social media, coverage, basket value increase, SEO etc. By getting value in more than one way you have a better chance of getting a decent return on investment.

Treat the running of competitions like a PR exercise, not a linkbuilding one, and go for quality. If you’re partnering with third parties make sure you get all the opt-ins (or social shares) as well as the hosting organisation. You (hopefully) also get a link. For a first-party competition, include incentives for sharing as this can help to promote the competition without your ongoing input.

Convey trust by having a ‘technical’ competition entry: something that clearly tracks the entry so the user knows their entry is properly considered. Iain suggested tools like RaffleCopter. If you’re running a Twitter competition, use something like TwitterDraw. If you’re considering running a voting competition, then don’t. It’s apparently too prone to being manipulated and can end badly.

OK so you want entry volume? Look for competition communities, forums, competition bloggers and influencers. Don’t forget to promote your competition with display advertising if you’ve the budget.

Unsurprisingly the prize makes a huge difference: if it’s ‘transformative-level’ then you’re on to a winner. Then get some famous judges of some. Craft your competition around “What would the Daily Mail write about?” and that will give the PRs/journos something inane to cling to. Iain says get yourself a media partner: basically a big name you can hang off. Just ask them to be a sponsor, and when they say “No” say “How about being our official media partner instead?”. Easy.

Watch out to ensure you’re compliant in whatever country you’re running a competition. UK is quite soft apparently, but specify what countries/areas can enter and check the data protection act (CAP code section eight). Be careful of automated entry services and other fraud methods, and try to cover for it in your T&Cs.

There were many tips suggested, and one SEO one to sooth the attended masses was to host the competition closest to the key page (e.g. homepage) you’re looking to optimise for. Finally, for prizes make the equivalent cash value clear and don’t offer tickets!

Grammar nazi review: Full stops were in short supply but the (seemingly typical) inconsistent use of capitalisation wasn’t. Double spaces after full stops drive me insane – do you mistakenly think you’re using a typewriter? Interesting trouser/shirt combo but a nice presentation.

 

Cracking the SEO code for 2015 – @randfish (Moz)

• Searchers and search engines are demanding more from us / websites: 47% of consumers expect load speed <2 seconds, users ‘bounce’ away from poor content, and there are now human quality raters. What used to work probably won’t work in the future.
• We’re moving from keyword matching to topic association: Google has improved its understanding, but has our content improved alongside?
• Domain-level keyword connections are more important: it’s becoming about supporting the brand rather targeting the keyword. The issue is that if you’re not a brand, Google is likely to screw you at some point for your SEO tactics.
• Some referral/keyword data is still available: but it’s only useful for high-traffic sites (and brands?) who are spending shed-loads of money.

Keyword research

Instead of using keyword research tools, search the web (news, images, video, buzzsumo), collect together concepts and topics, and aggregate into a new keyword list. Instead of grouping keywords by ability to rank, group by overlap in searcher intent. Instead of creating pages by keyword, produce pages for search intents. Instead of worrying about keyword cannibalisation, make more content on those themes to build domain relevance.

Google’s keyword tool has search volume data but will only show it for the high commercial intent keywords; it won’t show you volume and suggestions unless you enter the exact keywords you want to see.

You need to build a site’s association with a topic or range of topics.

Linkbuilding is now link earning

Remember it’s about building a relationship in order to get a link eventually. Social, email, comments: all can lead to the building of a relationship where a link follows. Consider that the ‘top-rated’ guys will get approaches all the time, so consider approaching the nice, fat middle ground and they’re likely to be a lot more malleable to your intentions. Try GoConspire if you’ve got a good range of contacts, as it’ll tell you how you could get connected to them. Advertising also leads to a relationship: if you’ve been working with a site for a while you can develop it into a ‘front of mind’ relationship.

There’s also a suggestion that domain-relevance may be build by a brand’s proximity to keywords across the web.

Content should be one-of-a-kind, relevant, helpful, uniquely valuable, likely to spread and have a great UX. The issue we face today is that there’s massive growth in content output, but 95% is still getting no shares or links. The ‘useful’ content is not keeping pace.

Imitate campaigns that worked and get insights from tools like BuzzSumo. Generally text performs worse than visual content, which in turns performs worse than interactive content. Finally, consider paid amplification as it can help any piece of content.

We only have some much time and money, so how do where choose where to invest? Unfortunately, the easier something is to measure the less opportunity there is. Rand explained how ‘serendipity’ and chance is hard to track and attribute but can lead to big results, so the only way to scale this approach is to increase the number of potential opportunities for it. If you’re uniquely good at one thing, over-invest and pump as much as you can into it. A higher barrier to entry mean greater opportunity.

Grammar nazi review: What’s that you say? More inconsistent and every-word capitalisation? You guessed it. I also spied an ampersand out of place mid-sentence. He gets away with it as he’s a fantastic speaker.

 

Phew; a packed schedule and a very warm presentation room for SearchLove today. Some great speakers and some surprisingly good food, but 9am till 6pm of presentations does require sustenance and sugar to get you through…

The repeated messages were: delight your users, use data to understand your market, and think mobile first.

As I’m an annoying critic of everything (it’s not big-headed; I know what I do is probably riddled with mistakes) I couldn’t help but grade the presentations for their grammar and overall performance. Feel free to pick holes in my hastily uploaded and not-at-all-spell-checked notes in return – I’d love to hear your comments.

Existential crisis management – @hannah_bo_bannah

SEO is still not dead, apparently, but it’s now involving a lot more brand building. Problem: there’s a lot of brand apathy. “Customers would not care if 92% of brands ceased to exist” – building a brand is tough, but doing it on SEO retainer budgets is even harder!

A company is not a brand. A brand ‘places indelibly’ – it leaves a lasting impression. That’s what you’re looking to do (and it should be favourable!). So SEOs are helping companies to make their brands meaningful.

Three meaningful things brands do:

1. Find opportunities to delight customers. That means actually responding to and interacting with your audience, but don’t cross the line of acceptable informality and edginess! Is it higher risk, higher reward though?
2. Give people the opportunity to define themselves to others – basically trying to shape another person’s impression of ‘me’. Brands can give opportunities for this, and create things that help people look good by sharing.
3. Stand for something beyond their products and services – taking a stand that could even hurt your business can create a lasting impression.

Hannah showed a nice ad from Nike that captured a few of the points. Is it so easy if you don’t have Nike-level budgets? Hannah accepts that it’s more about giving creative teams the freedom to run with concepts and potentially take risks.

Distilled spend at least 60 hours manually outreaching and promoting content. That’s another reminder that it’s never just about the content; it’s got to get out to the right audiences.

Grammar nazi review: Far too many ampersands for my liking, and used ‘inferred’ when she meant ‘implied’. Overall a fair performance.

 

The Landing Page Manifesto – @OliGardner (Unbounce)

Landing page optimisation is about designed post-click experiences that people want to take part in. If online is a hotdog eating competition, optimisation is making hotdogs easier to eat.

Think about attention ratios: how many things/messages are there on the page that can be done/clicked? Get that attention ratio down to 1:1 – the thing you want them to do.

DO:

• Keep the conversion ‘scent’ on everything. Maintain messages, branding and headline topics – it’s context for the user.
• Embrace ‘friction’ (forces that oppose an action). Design experiences to acquire your ideal customer.
• Use ‘go’ words – they place positive thoughts that aid conversion. Basically say things that people want.
• Be obvious. Less can be more – fewer testimonials, for example, can be more likely to be read; higher believability.
• Be obvious with design. Use directional cues (basically like arrows) – tell people where to go. Test contrast for calls-to-action (CTAs).
• Never start a marketing campaign without a dedicated landing page.

DON’T:

• Design like wikipedia – we’re interested in design for conversions not information! “Stop being useful”.
• Don’t dump your company problems on users – like CAPTCHAs for spam protection.
• Don’t use image sliders.
• Don’t use language that’s confusing/not clear for your audience. Tip: try removing the design of your landing page and read it with only the text content. “What is this page about?” – ask some people on usabilityhub. Then “What would happen when you click on the button” and “Is this credible/trustworthy?”.
• Don’t put bad thoughts in people’s heads – if you mention “We’ll never spam” then people are suddenly thinking about spam! They’re stop words.
• Don’t bullshit – if testimonials are real/true, then don’t use them. Social proof can be bullshit, as it’s subjective to each user.
• Don’t use crappy CTA text – it should be ‘I want to ____’.

Clarity beats cleverness almost all the time.

Grammar nazi review: Very stylistic with few words, so dodged any potential issues.

 

Becoming a digital superhero – Ade Lewis (Teapot Creative)

Why do some online marketers go home happy every day with happy clients, even if they have less knowledge?

Happy clients mean you go home happy too. The message is get shit done.

Ade says try to understand your clients. Know them, then get them to like and trust you to get more referral recommendations! Helps you avoid taking on ‘problem’ clients (apparently hairy truckers named Dave are to be avoided).

Don’t continue to work for toxic, time-sink clients. Sack them to get back your profitability and job satisfaction.

• Copy stuff: use RSS feeds and tag stuff up some you can find interesting ideas when you need them.
• Learn from others: Don’t get stuck in a way of doing things. Learn from the success of others.
• Do a competitor content audit: Crawl best competitors, run through URLprofiler and collect data about their best content (shares and links). Also run it through Topsy to see who’s influential that’s shared it.

He really pushed that we should start delivering real change for clients by getting shit done; he suggests that’s what makes you a digital superhero. I just end up thinking of a pixelated superman to be honest.

To help with getting stuff done, remove your personal distractions and then learn to focus. Track your time so you can ensure you’re doing your job – not somebody else’s – and the stuff you enjoy.

Ade really pushed some cool tools from linkprofiler. It’s a great tool but it felt quite pushy and almost like a sales pitch for linkprofiler (he admitted that he’s pals with the owners).

Grammar nazi review: Erratic formatting and initial capitals, added to incorrect use of apostrophes, was off-putting. The flow of the talk was a little hard to follow.

 

Are you Google Analytics reports pretty little liars? – @AnnieCushing (Annielytics)

Be careful of ‘nebulous user data’

An Analytics ‘user’ report is actually on ‘clients’ – it can’t track across platforms or clients used by the same person e.g. at work and at home, or on mobile on the bus.

These metrics are a steaming pile of bull:

• Users (unique visitors)
• New users
• Days since last session
• % new sessions
• Count of sessions
• User type (new vs returning)

If a CEO actually believes those metrics, then you could be held accountable for placing trust in this reporting.

GA userID was released to address this issue and track users across multiple devices, however it’s clear that very few sites will really be able to take advantage of this (because you need users to be logged in, a CRM-attributed ID of some sort, a new Analytics view etc). I don’t think we can be too harsh on Google for this, as in all honesty tracking across devices is extremely hard. If you do implement it, however, you’ll see unique visitors shrink significantly and only see data from logged-in users.

Don’t ignore logged-in users

Use custom variables or custom dimensions to track these VIPs – stalk them!

Some things custom dimensions are good for:

• Add customer id as a dimension to see what they do on-site. Find out the most valuable users then segment them and email market to them specially with promotions etc.
• Track logged in users
• Content success by author
• Content success by page category
• Content success by publication date
• Performance by gender, age etc.
• Membership level
• Number of help articles viewed
• Complaints

Missing metrics that matter

Bring in your own custom metrics and data. People want to see their actual profits from the website. Try importing:

• marketing email opens
• goods costs
• profit
• margin
• population in your target metros/cities

Basically if it’s data that’s out in the world somewhere, you can grab it / scrape it and put it in Analytics.

What does the company care about? Make sure you’re reporting on it!

Heck, an airline could take data directly from their check-in kiosk and put it into Analytics to see how their flyers behave and market to them specifically. Nice eh?

Campaign tagging

Labels matter! Think about your campaign tagging (medium, source, campaign etc). It’s so important to get medium correct; otherwise it will ruin a whole load of reports. Use the Google standards – so if you’re paying for it mark it as ‘cpc’.

Don’t ever put tagging on internal links, obviously. That’s madness.

Third-party services

Yes they add cool functionality, but they will often destroy your data or steal it, never to return. Don’t end up giving all your purchase data to PayPal or some other service.

So, either a) keep people on your site or b) set up decent cross-domain tracking. Hopefully you’re fairly familiar with cross-domain tracking, but making sure it’s set up correctly can sometimes be tricky. Also remember to set up autoLink, as this will help Google Analytics work correctly on its own.

KissMetrics is pretty well set up in Annie’s opinion, as it isn’t dependent on logging in for userIDs.

Grammar nazi review: Mostly charts (well we are talking about data) and no issues, but there were some nice examples of correct hyphenation. Good work. Annie is a very engaging, passionate speaker so top marks (but don’t surprise her – she hates that).

 

Measurement behind integration marketing strategies – Mackenzie Fogelson

No online marketing works in isolation.

People want a shortcut to building a market-leading brand, but…there isn’t one. Real marketing takes longer, but gets you there with the correct foundation. However, you never get a few years! People want results now, so you’ve got to show value all the way along.

Integrated is building a better, real business, from the inside out, and helping to improve the whole business. It builds real relationships and community, and that then leads to revenue. What’s the core message that applies to the real target audience?

Build a better business > attract a stronger community > grow your audience/brand

Integrated marketing has to be based on your overall organisation goals – create a strategy from those. Then what tactics and deliverables come from this? Then analyse, critique and repeat (Mackenzie recommends 90 day cycles).

You can’t always directly measure everything that you do, and because of this you must always start with the goals. These can be:

1. visionary
2. business/brand
3. campaign

Break the visionary goals down into your campaign, or action, goals.

Measurement is tricky, as everything is working together. There are so many metrics that they can’t map to the tactics being used. You need to communicate the power of integration and how it drives results as a whole. Look at year-on-year or over long-term time periods, and emphasise the progress that the business and brand has made. Choose your KPIs well: how do you tell them how their brand has improved? Social media engagement, returning visitors. Easy relationship building metrics just don’t exist godammit! Focus on your key targets, as that relates directly to your business goals.

Helps avoid “We don’t rank for X” or “We want more social followers”. These comments don’t relate directly to agreed goals, so can be ignored for now and considered as a bi-product of the integrated activity.

Don’t measure (or at least don’t focus on) anything that doesn’t lead to actions or changes. Move issues to a worksheet or workflow (something like Google Docs) and allocate so that nothing is missed in the short term. Does it need to be addressed in a 90-day timeframe? Does it align with their goals? Do these actions justify an increase in budget?

Grammar nazi review: Fonts and styles meant capitalisation was all over the place, but it was stylistic so she easily got away with it.

Marketing in your sleep – Will Reynolds

Will helped us learn from his screwups. Better his than ours eh?

He says don’t be a slave to the content calendar, and regularly posting crap. Content doesn’t have to be flashy and overdesigned – users want “the answer”. They want unique insight. So, ask your customers (or audience) what they want; what they want answered.

To be lazy in your marketing, do one thing really well.

Sometimes doing one thing well can have big benefits far in excess of links, as it leads to ongoing traffic generation from a relatively small initial investment. You could get the same impact as the initial spike over and over again while not doing any work!

Big content is a barrier to entry – @dr_pete. So that’s the way to differentiate and distance you from your competitors; but it hurts when it fails. How do you know if something’s working or not? When do you abandon it if it’s not working?

• Do I have a good data set?
• Is this problem worth solving?
• Can I use it daily?
• Was it over-designed?

Will says give yourself a 20% ‘oops’ budget that covers any ‘oh my lord this didn’t work’ moments.

Don’t think about sales funnels; think about frustrations. Try inspectlet, as it can make analytics more visual, video-based and understandable. You can even see pinch-and-zoom from mobile! There’s a hesitation report for form analytics, so it’ll tell you which boxes people are having trouble with.

A note: don’t leave money on the table because you’re chasing links. Get business! Get revenue! Any links and brand benefits are just a bonus, and give you that nice long-tail ‘doing your job while you’re asleep’ effect.

Expert tip: You can target people with ads in gmail who are with your competitors, if you know your competitor’s email title! You could target them with retargeting and ads after a long delay window when they’re fed up with their current supplier.

Expert tip 2: Try advertising against people searching ‘cancel X service’ queries. Then also serve them display ads on sites and pages that rank for these queries! You could even improve the displayed offer in retargeting the longer they go without signing up.

Grammar nazi report: No notable issues from Will; he’s a smooth performer and very engaging.

 

Data driven SEO – @dsottimano (Distilled)

Meaningful SEO data is hard to come by and sure as heck Google isn’t going to give it to us. What we consider good is not what Google considers good, and they’re very vague about what they want to see.

The thing is that trust factors vary from user to user, and ‘best practice’ doesn’t really mean much. Every instance needs testing.

Some tools

• SEMrush: get screenshots of historical SERPs, which is pretty useful for researching ‘blips’.
• NerdyData: search by = source code from across the web.
• Peek by LinkRisk: see the risk of domains before you play with them.
• Delimit: does something with CSVs – I missed the point. Sorry!
• Import.io: an great, easy-to-use scraper.
• Scrapy Cloud: an incredibly fast scraper.

Predictive analytics

Dave asked why we, as people, are analysing huge amounts of machine data. Can we get machines to do it for us? Can we predict things like how successful a blog post might be by machine analysing data? Turns out we can’t at the moment; it’s incredibly hard. And complicated.

So he suggests using bigml, which he used to analyse some of his blog posts. He found that low word count meant a crappy post, but none of the other data was amazing or gave direct insight (by his own admission). It did, however, show a lot of potential for understanding what ‘great content’ actually is. Machine learning could be the future.

We should all start by labelling our content, so that at a later date we can properly analyse it. That’s a good tip – start using your meta keywords (that don’t do anything for SEO anyways) to tag your output.

Bin best practice – test it instead. Prove it with data or it didn’t happen.

Grammar nazi report: Pretty simple and minimalist slides from Dave so little opportunity for error, but there were one or two capitalisation and punctuation mishaps. He occasionally used ‘less’ when he should have said ‘fewer’. Overall pretty strong.

 

Bulletproofing local SEO in 2015 – David Mimh

Google’s vision of mobile and their desired user journey is very different to the standard marketer’s approach. To Google it’s moving towards predictive search (based on location, habits) and then push other mobile experiences such as payment and reviewing businesses.Display of knowledge graph results is also becoming visual to suit people on the move (and wearing Google Glass?).

So how do online marketers report on success when everybody sees different results and lots of people will never even leave Google? What’s your metric when you’ve no visitors to your website? We all need to start thinking about this changing search world.

The US pigeon update was discussed; it’s basically a tweak to the way local is ranked and considered. Most notably it reduced the number of seven-result ‘map packs’ in Google searches, and Google has gotten better at associating queries with relevant local brands. Google has also gotten better at identifying where you’re searching for and results are now more based upon the company’s distance from the searcher rather than the centroid (city/town centre). Directories also (somewhat unjustly) appear to be doing better as the algorithm favours these and bigger brands.

• Click-through rate is becoming a more important factor in local.
• Consider site architecture (traditional directory structure to location pages, potentially through a store locator), fully build out a page for each store (name, address, phone, answer top questions asked by customers at each branch).
• Manage structured data and consistent citations (use the major local data providers – search for ‘local search ecosystem).
• Get reviews! They increase click-through and massively increase trust to note but two reasons. Google+ but also the directories and review sites that rank well in your vertical.
• Ensure you’ve got great photos on your business page (especially if you’re a restaurant).
• Stick to big brands – be a ‘barnacle’ and optimise listings on directory sites that might outrank you. Build links to a Yelp profile for example.

Grammar nazi review: Kept it visual, so bullet dodged! He certainly knows his stuff about local and that shone through.

 

The threat of mobile – Will Critchlow

Desktop search volumes are falling. Will asks: are we doomed as SEOs?

Well mobile growth is fairly startling; the scale of the growth of Android is vast even compared to something monumental like the iPod. This year there will be more mobile searches than desktop, and it’s starting to cannibalise desktop search. The problem is that conversion rates seem low on mobile, and we’re not very good at measuring mobile traffic. Multiple screens/devices? We can’t really track that. We, as online marketers, need to embrace mobile.

Apart from making your site responsive/mobile-friendly, what else can we do?

Email marketing: email marketing is now largely mobile marketing, as huge numbers of emails are opened via mobile.

Content marketing: it looks like mobile consumption of content could hit 50% in some cases pretty soon, and a lot of that is due to massive mobile growth on Facebook. Facebook use on mobile will soon rise past 50% of sessions. So, content should be made ‘mobile first’ – build content for the mobile audience primarily. “Don’t build differently; build different things”.

Expert tip: There’s a new bit in Chrome ‘inspect element’ – click on the little mobile phone and you can emulate different devices and networks. That’s actually incredibly useful to quickly see how content appears on mobile.

Ignoring mobile is so dangerous for content marketing and virality. If you’re eliminating half of your audience the chances of achieving a ‘snowball effect’ is massively reduced. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot: build different things that think about mobile first. Google has even revealed that it develops mobile first and rolls out to desktop subsequently.

A worry is that app search is decades behind – there’s no long-tail and it’s mostly ‘branded’ searches. Instead it’s seemingly becoming integrated into regular Google search in various guises. Want to rank an app? Don’t forget the following:

• Get basic app indexing (enable deep links – so a search result can open directly into an app)
• Map those deep links in app pages to equivalent normal site pages (using rel=alternate, schema.org, xml sitemap) – remember the first click must be free i.e. a user must be able to see the page without being logged in.
• Use Google’s tool to test ‘how would this open using an app?’

It seems like the app indexing API is using user activity to rank; that’s interesting and one to keep an eye on, as we’re close to Android ranking apps you have installed much higher.

We’re moving past mobile however; soon everything will have a URL. Everything in life (the internet of things) can be a Google card; an entity on the internet. How do we deal with this? A question for another day it seems…

Grammar nazi review: I suppose using all-CAPS reduces that chance for errors, but there was still the standard inconsistent punctuation typical of presentations. Nothing offensive, and his overall performance was very good as always.

Collecting email addresses, and more importantly segmenting email addresses, should in all likelihood be one of your primary goals as a business operator. But “Why?” you ask, “Why must I spend all this time sorting email addresses when, as a human, I am naturally lazy?”

1. They’re already your customers

You could have thousands of customers, sitting there twiddling their thumbs effectively waiting for you to sell them things. If you’ve got their email you can keep in front of their eyes and in the front of their mind, offering them products or services they’re interested in until they buy again…and again…

2. Segment and sell

Do you know which of your customers are interested in that new product you’ve just sourced? No? Well if you’ve collected emails and effectively segmented them according to purchasing history, demographics and content consumption then you have a pretty good idea who will love the product and encourage them to buy it. Segment and you can sell people what they want, when they want it.

3. It’s easy to set up and go

No, you don’t have to phone up everybody and ask them to give you their email address. Simply set up email collection prompts across the content you’re producing (email collection is likely to be a primary KPI of your content production) that pump emails directly into your email provider, and use marketing automation tools to automatically ask for and segment emails. Once it’s setup you just let in run and see your email list bulge!

 

4. You can target them on Facebook and other sites!

Did you know you can connect your email provider and lists (Mailchimp, ConstantContact etc.) directly to Facebook and some other social and content platforms and serve ads or promoted content to them? Using their email details you can connect to their social profile and promote yourself and your services while they’re browsing their newsfeed. Using email-based remarketing you can gain visibility far outside of just emails!

5. Sweet mother of Mary you can target people like them on Facebook!

It doesn’t stop at just remarketing to the people in your email lists; the amazing demographic targeting that Facebook have been steadily working on means you can target ads or promoted content to ‘lookalike’ audience who are similar to your existing customers or subscribers. Facebook is basically doing a huge chunk of the marketing work for you and is letting your advertise directly to the closest demographics to your known existing customers. Feel the power!

 

You Need To Be On Google Shopping

Hands up if your business is currently on Google Shopping? Now, hands up if you have a data feed in the Google Merchant Center? (Hint, if you raised your hand the first time, it should still be raised). Now how about all of you who have a data feed but aren’t advertising on Google Shopping? Is the last time you thought about this when Google Shopping was called Froogle? Who takes care of your data feed?

If you’re expecting your products to show up automatically, you may be sorely disappointed to hear that free product results on Google are long since dead and gone. In fact, they were phased out last year, and if that’s the last time you talked to your developer about your data feed, you may have been out of the Shopping Results for a good long while.

Google Shopping is now a key part of nearly every e-commerce PPC account. Products with this ad type sell like hotcakes.

Just look at that bold black pricing. Those crisp, clean images. It’s a delicious temptation. How could you not click on that?! And people do – all day long. I’ve had people tell me when I tell them that I manage ads on Google that “they never click on those” or they “always click the third result down because [they] know it won’t be an ad”. But the fact is, paid shopping can bring in a significant portion of revenue for a PPC account.

Let’s take a look at those waffle iron ads again, but taking in everything above the fold on the results page.

88% of those search results are paid, and 29% are Shopping results. The companies ranking top in the Shopping results have healthy data feeds in the Google Merchant Center. So I’ll ask again – who takes care of your data feed?

A Healthy Feed Is A Visible Feed

You may find yourself in the position of having a feed and running shopping ads, but not being able to see your results on the search page. In fact, it’s a common query; “where are my ads??”

Firstly, try not to actually search for your ads on Google. It seems counter-intuitive, but if you constantly search your own brand/products, Google will stop showing them after a while because you end up never clicking on those ads. Use the Google Preview Tool instead.

Secondly, the quality of your data feed has a HUGE impact on where you rank in Shopping results. Your data feed is essentially your keyword list and if you haven’t built it correctly, you’re fighting a losing battle. We wrote last year on creating your feed and Google has a whole heap of info on feed specifications. The trouble is, so many of these specifications are “recommended” rather than “required”. This is a trap. Recommended attributes should be seen as required. The more Google knows about your products, the easier it is for them to match them up to a search query and display your ad. Don’t be caught out.

A Healthy Feed Is An Optimised Feed

Some accounts have a fairly good feed and their Shopping campaigns return a good amount of revenue within their target range. But good is all it will ever be because their data feed has been fleshed out but not optimised.

In August 2014, Google will be retiring the product listing ad type within regular search campaigns and all Google Shopping advertisers will need to switch to the “Shopping Campaign” ad type. This is highly interesting for anyone managing an AdWords account but understandably duller than dishwater for those who don’t. All it really means is this: your data feed just got even more important.

Shopping campaigns allow for segmentation by brand, product category, product type, condition, item id, and custom labels. If, for the sake of ease, all your products have been labelled with the same brand and product category with no information on the following attributes you may find it very difficult to optimise the performance of your Shopping campaign. You would be limiting yourself to setting the same bid for a £5 kitchen whisk as you would for a £200 waffle maker. It just doesn’t make sense and will result in a poorly optimised campaign.

A Healthy Feed Is Possible

Whether everything I’ve said has gone straight over your head or if it’s terrified you into thinking your products are going to suddenly drop off the face of the Google Shopping universe, it sounds like you might need some genuine Attacat advice on where to go next. Get in touch to see how we can help!

I recently attended the March New Media Breakfast and had the opportunity to listen to FatBuzz’s Gordon White talk content marketing and engagement strategies. I left with my content marketing knowledge refreshed and my head full of creative content ideas and reminders – which I thought I’d write down and share before they dissolve. Getting inspired about content again has spurred me to start writing a series of blog posts dedicated to content marketing strategies, hints and tips.

So let me introduce you to part 1 so we can get the conversation started.

 

Tools are just that, tools

Whichever social media platforms you are using, not using or planning to get around to using, I have a thought for you (and I think it’s a rather freeing one) and my thought is, don’t get hung up on the details. My advice would be to see and use these social platforms as tools, employing them as you see fit. Thing is, these platforms are evolving constantly and the constant emergence of new and initiative players in the market means that nothing can or will stay the same for very long.

Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep up to date with such changes as best you can, yes, yes you should. However remind yourself that the important thing is the “who” and the “why” of your content marketing strategy rather than the tool you use. The “who” being whose story are you telling and the “why” being why do you want to tell it. Once these two are nailed down it matters little what social media updates come your way, you’ll find a way of talking to the right people. The important thing is your story and getting it out there one way or another.

 

Humans are nosy

Okay not all humans, but many humans, okay me. I’m nosy so I’ll speak for myself but I know I’m not alone. When it comes to companies and brands I am passionate about or I see as aspirational I like to follow them on social media. I do this because I want to know more about them and get closer to whatever it is I admire and like about them. There is more thirst for knowledge of brands and companies than ever, people want to feel part of companies they care about and not to mention cooler by proxy. As Gordon White said, you are “invisible” if you aren’t creating content and the nosy of us would agree.

So tell your story because we all know you have one. Use your story, show what goes on behind the scenes and let them see how it all works. Share where you’ve come from or your inspiration along the way. Use content to give your followers more to know and love about you – don’t be invisible.

 

Two worlds one stone

During the discussions, Gordon White talked us through a case study in which he and his team identified creative content ideas for a company they had come in contact with. I shall name no names.. but who’s the nosy one now? The list they’d come up with was endless and full of interesting and engaging content ideas which would keep the company busy (content-wise) for 6 months at least.

Gordon then reveals that lo and behold…all of these ideas had been taken straight from the physical company magazine! So why hadn’t they thought to take this existing (and rich!) physical content and squeeze more engagement and return from it virtually? The moral of the story here is don’t overlook your existing content, it has required effort and creativity to create so if it’s already there, use it. Engage two worlds, the physical and virtual, with one stone.

 

Hey, it’s not all about you

One thing nobody likes is people who go on and on and on about themselves. No “how are you?” No “Or what’s going on with you?” It’s all me, me, me. So while your nosy followers who like you want to hear about you, don’t be boring and self obsessed. Be that cool friend instead that says “hey, have you heard about this new thing that is nothing to do with us, I thought of you and I know you’d love it.” Share other things, news, stories, products, ideas with your followers that you think they might be interested in. Share buying advice, hints and tips even if it means directing attention elsewhere and praising other companies.

It may or may not relate directly to your bottom line but I don’t know about you but I like helpful people and I’m more likely to give my money to them, now or in the future. Sharing the love with other companies also means that you have the opportunity to extend your reach and tap into a new audience.

 

 

So whether your business is a local cafe around the corner or a huge conglomerate with a widely recognised brand, I really do think the pointers within this series are applicable to most and more importantly useful if you’ve hit a content marketing brick wall. We always love to hear what you think, so don’t be shy! Share your thoughts, let us know if there are any content marketing areas you’d like to hear more about.

Tweet @Attacat_Lara for more about our conversations with content.

The ASSC (The Association of Scotland’s Self Caterers) Conference on 5th November at Murrayfield’s last speaker of the day was Satyan Joshi – Industry Manager at Google UK. This was a talk I was really looking forward to and it did not disappoint… packed full of interesting numbers and facts here are a few of the points I picked up.

5 Stages of Travel

Google have created this framework setting out the ways that people now plan for and experience travel.

1. Dreaming

Ahhhhh Barbados, Bali, Berlin – it is pretty much doing this, we are constantly exposed to others traveling through them sharing their experiences (see stage 4) that we can only get a bit jealous and dream ourselves.

2. Researching

All this dreaming leads onto being inspired to have a look yourself. For instance Satyan explained when the TV show Benidorm was on air people become inspired and search traffic for the destination went up. Search has become massively fragmented – people research around and look at more sources and sites than ever before, until they finally settle on the site they make their booking with – I’ll talk about this later…

3. Booking

This is where the stages of travel used to end in the ‘olden days’. Once you had booked all that was left was to head off with bikini in bag.

4. Experiencing

Now in the modern age with access to online everywhere, people are having experiences that they share online, all the time. Where as before you would never have known what peoples experiences in the airport lounge were (unless really dramatic), now you do – you know what their view is that moment, you know that the man sitting next to them chews his crisps too loudly and where they are going way before they get there or get back and show you the pictures over tea and cake.

KLM’s Surprises Campaign was hugely successful and used social media to surprise passengers who were travelling on their flights. Flight attendants browsed Twitter and Foursqaure looking for people who were saying they were taking a KLM flight, then using the information that passenger provided about themselves on their social media bought them a small surprise. They gave out 40 gifts and news of the campaign spread like crazy generating one million impressions on the KLM twitter feed. This great video shows more:

5. Sharing

This stage actually goes through every part of the process. People want and need validation, they want recommendations of where to go, what they should do when they get there, where they should stay, what airport they should fly into when booking – and they ask online at every stage.

How things have changed

Booking a trip used to be much simpler than it is now… a quick visit to a travel agent, a discussion with the family and then you book. Sure, you can still do it this way but now you might get on the bus in the morning and have a look on your phone for some ideas, on your lunch break take a browse around on your desktop for some good deals or go out and grab a brochure from the travel agent, in the evening you might be at home on your laptop and have a look around some different websites for validation, later on when in bed maybe have a look at a few videos of the destination. People now use maps to back up where they will be staying and reviews to validate the booking – people will always trust reviews from real people, and some people because of this may trust booking from a real person, so might even after all this online research actually return to the travel agent for the real booking.

So I think it is easy to conclude that a modern online travel consumers journey is a complex and time consuming one!

Some numbers

• People usually book around 73 days before their actual holiday
• On average people make around 17 research sessions before booking – check and see if you are getting lots of mobile visits, if you are make sure your site is optimised for mobile, or people will just leave!
• On average people will visit the site 3 times before booking
• Leisure is an emotive industry – people want to get it right so there is a 2.19 hour total research time.
• 83% of people when they first search for travel accommodation look for non branded terms e.g. ‘family friendly cottage in St Andrews’
• Video tells a million words – 60% of leisure travelers have used video to help them decide on a destination

The smartphone traveler

The average person looks at their phone 150 times per day, there was few laughs at this at the conference but I can definitely be accused of this, constantly prodding my phone – just in case… Satyan brought up a point that you can easily leave the house in the morning having left your wedding ring at home and thing ‘ohhh i’ll get it tonight’, but leave your phone at home? You’ll go back!

But in terms of travel, 26% of UK travelers have searched for their plans on a smartphone, but only 12% actually purchased on their phone. 34% of travelers access social media every day while travelling, 86% share photos while travelling (well you have to show others that turquoise sea and perfect tan before it fades huh!?), and 81% of smartphone users in the UK have looked for local info when travelling – so cash in on this and share your knowledge with them!

Google for travel research

As I said, Satyan Joshi  is an Industry Manager at Google UK, so of course was going to show us some interesting new bits and bobs from Google, the best bit of what he showed us was the flight information in maps which I had no idea was there (I clearly don’t spend enough time in Maps). You put in your travel information and it shows you how long the flight will be and who flies the route:

He also showed us the Google Map photo tours and how to see tourist hot-spots from where people are uploading photos – a great way to explore your destination before you book.

So a massive thanks to ASSC and Satyan for a great day and talk. I left with a notebook full of interesting bits of info to mull over and and things to muck around with – looking forward to next years conference!

If you haven’t already, here’s five reasons why your business should start taking notice of Pinterest. And slowcoaches, don’t you dare think it… Pinterest is not just a cool way for girls to collect pretty images of cupcakes, shoes and all things frilly. I’m not just talking to those selling shoes and dresses here. Ok, ok there are A LOT of shoes and dresses on Pinterest. And don’t think I am unaware of the gender dynamic with around 70%-80% of the total 70+ million Pinterest users being made up of recipe and design loving, crafty ladies. My point is, for many business which could be using this social avenue for branding and marketing purposes, Pinterest remains a profound and girly mystery.

However, if you have read anything about Pinterest lately, you’ll know that it isn’t budging – not an inch! You’ll also know that Pinterest is only getting bigger and more important in the business sphere. So perhaps it is time for a little demystifying for those businesses feeling rather reluctant and a little pin-shy.

How it works

Pinterest is an image based social network platform where users can create and manage their own theme-based image collections. It allows users to save images (known as pins) and categorise them on their own personal pin boards. Users can also follow other users’ boards which they like or are inspired by. Aside from cupcakes and fashion, other popular image categories include travel, cars, food, film, humour, home design, sports and art. Users can search pins and boards by keyword or category and accounts can be linked to Facebook and Twitter allowing images to be shared to and from these platforms.

And because I’m not pretending Pinterest isn’t an amazing space for women, here is an example of my own unashamedly feminine pins below.

It all starts with a pin

Users can upload a pin or save other user’s pins to one of their own boards using the “Pin It” button. Content can also be found on websites outside of Pinterest and uploaded to an individual’s board via the “Pin It” bookmarklet which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser. Any pin on Pinterest can be repinned, and all pins link back to their original source.

Once discovered Pinterest urges exploration and can become quite (ok very) addictive. This new addiction takes hold without warning and before you know it you’re sharing.. well everything! If you are a pin-shy business new to all of this you might want to take a look see, perhaps you have been discovered already. Here’s how to check – simply open up a new browser and paste this in –

www.pinterest.source/attacat.co.uk (replacing attacat with your own website of course.)

Reason 1: Reach a broader audience

After its launched in 2010, Pinterest has been described as one of the fastest growing websites ever with approximately 200,000 downloads per day of its iPhone app and more than 4 million daily visitors. In March of this year Pinterest gained almost 50 million users, roughly double its traffic a year earlier, not bad. All of these eyes (spending on average 14 minutes per day) makes Pinterest a fantastic branding tool that can help generate additional traffic and brand awareness. In fact, Pinterest generates more referral traffic than YouTube, Google, LinkedIn and Reddit combined. A recent study by Piquora also showed the superior relevancy of “pinned” content. The study found that the average tweet remains useful for a matter of minutes but the average pin can remain clickworthy for months. Now who could argue with some free brand exposure and more traffic to your website?

Reason 2: Allow your fans to do your marketing for you

Regardless of what your business sells or offers, images are a provocative way to showcase your brand and generate interest and engagement. Pinterest gives brands a great platform to do just this and when your content engages people, they will share (repin) it, helping your brands content spread. In fact 80% of pins are re-pinned which means that your brand has a pretty good chance of reaching additional would-be customers, ones you might not have been able to reach otherwise. “Pins” have been described as the new language of fan engagement and getting users to use this language to speak about your business could mean pinners doing your marketing for you. Millions of people look to Pinterest to connect with users who share common interests, so having a loyal base of fans on Pinterest who openly adore your products can provide new customers with all the social proof and reassurance they need.

Reason 3: Humanise your business

Pinterest’s popularity has often been put down to its simplicity. It is a positive place where users can share their lifestyle aspirations and dreams. Images are an excellent way of communicating with others and you don’t even need to speak the same language. It is an old cliche that a picture speaks a thousand words, but what better way to demonstrate the passion behind your business. I’ve often heard of Pinterest as a convincing way to humanise a business and doing this is now more important than ever as people care where and who their products are coming from. By sharing photos of what inspires the people and dreams behind a business, a user can appreciate the business on a more personal level. Expressing a business in this way facilitates the careful establishment of that all-important two-way customer relationship.

Reason 4: Tap into what your audience cares about

If you’re in business, you’ll know you can never lose sight of what your customers want and if you do, there will be someone else ready to give them exactly that. However, in reality, knowing and keeping up to date with what your customers want is a really fine art mastered by few. Using Pinterest is in many ways a consumer’s way of telling the world what they would like to buy. Pinterest is like the online equivalent of dog-earring or cutting out images of fancied products in a magazine. The difference is Pinterest is always accessible and is completely personalised with each board telling a hand-written story about what that person cares about. Pins hold such potential for customer insight, they can open up a door to your very own, constantly up-to date world of customer research.

As you may have gathered, Reasons 1-4 equate to your last and most important reason to pin.

Reason 5: Sales, sales sales 

Every day, millions of people use Pinterest to explore their interests and users don’t just like to pin, they like to spend. Pinterest is centered around the social discovery of objects, not friends. Therefore Pinterest naturally lends itself to e-commerce because, well it seems obvious, this is a channel where consumers go to find things they want to have. Pinterest is evolving. It is now transforming into a true e-commerce opponent in the social stakes. “Rich Pins,” a featured introduced in May, now allows users to post detailed information about an item, such as the originating image site or product purchase information. “Promoted Pins” are paid placements which appear within Pinterest’s search results and category feeds. These pins are designed to promote items that match user’s interests and gives brands a chance to make a user’s virtual wish list a reality by advertising in the right places.

Unsurprising then that Pinterest grabs around 41% of e-commerce traffic (remember it is still growing) and then compare that to Facebook at 37%. The average social shopper (that is, a shopper who discovers an item on a social platform and continues to the original website to buy it) spends an average of £40 to £50 when coming from Facebook, but spends more like £90 to £110 when coming from Pinterest. Another interesting fact is that 41% of pinner’s engage in reverse show-rooming. This describes pinner’s who discover a product on Pinterest but end up purchasing those products in a physical shop.

What are you waiting for? Get Pinning!

With all this in mind, having your brand/products present on Pinterest in the run up to the Christmas e-commerce madness is looking like a really good idea. Not only is Pinterest the ideal place for users to make their own Christmas gift list, it is also a clever way for them to choose the perfect gift for someone else. Why, they only have to take a peek at a loved-one’s pin board! It’s probably safe to say that not every pin will result in a sale and images without any thought or strategy are unlikely to work. Building and maintaining an authentic brand presence on Pinterest requires time and patience in content curation – but reasons 1-5 should have twisted your arm a little to see Pinterest as valuable to building awareness and customer relationships for your brand. Whether or not the Pinterest gender dynamic shifts at all, there is just so much obvious potential for e-commerce and advertising. So Pinterest may not for be right for every business but as Pinterest grows, and it will, this presence can only help in generating results down the road.

Join Pinterest as a Business here.

Download Pinterets’ “How to Guide” here.

Learn how to make your website pinner-friendly here.

See, I told you there was more to Pinterest than cute photos of cupcakes, fashion and cats! …Although, that doesn’t mean you have to pretend that you don’t enjoy the cute photos of cupcakes, fashion and cats.

RUN FOR THE HILLS PEOPLE! Google has changed its algorithm in what’s been called the biggest update to its search procedures in more than a decade.

While you’ll no doubt be able to find commentary pieces explaining how you’ll have to overhaul your SEO efforts or that it’s the death of keywords (the equivalent of the Daily Mail’s nonsense sensationalist headlines), in reality it’s just the next step in Google’s plan to return the most relevant results by properly understanding what you want to find out.

To summarise, the Hummingbird algorithm update:[symple_spacing size=”10px”]

1. Came in about a month ago

   If you weren’t worried a month ago when it actually changed then don’t be worried now!
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2. Wants to understand what you’re trying to find out
   

   It’s been said that search engines want to become ‘answer engines’, either showing you the answer to your query within the search or the best resource to find it out straight away. To do this it needs to understand your actual meaning, so this update improves Google’s ‘semantic search’ understanding. It can predict what you’re trying to find out and provide related information alongside results, and link queries in a row so that if you ask “How big is it” it knows you’re talking about the Eiffel Tower search you did before and not something rude.
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3. Aims to keep you on Google

   If Google can find you the answer to your search without leaving Google, that’s all the better for them. They want you staying on Google, using their services, clicking their ads…
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4. Gets listening and mobile

   All this is designed to work better with mobile and voice search, so that Google is your choice for information on the move.
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5. Still means SEO = providing value

   In essence the aim of really good SEO work doesn’t change – you need to identify and understand your target audience and efficiently provide exceptionally valuable online content that is connected to your service (some of the basics of entrepreneurial marketing). From that comes links and traffic and rankings. The bits and bobs might alter a little, but if you’re not doing this  main bit then the bits and bobs don’t matter so much anyway.

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Volatile

Google is pushing out update after update to its algorithms at the moment, and in my opinion it’s been the most volatile year or so in the history of Google for ranking fluctuations. My advice is to not get hung up on ‘algorithm chasing’ and instead concentrate on the bigger picture – making your site relevant and interesting to the needs of your audience, and then promoting the heck out of it!

Hey, it works for our clients…

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If you want to know the full ins-and-outs of Hummingbird feel free to read SearchEngineLand’s Hummingbird FAQ.

Google has announced another AdWords update in the form of Impression Share data at the keyword level. So what does it mean? Well for one, it means even more data and performance metric columns to get your head around but it also offers more detailed competitive insight into your AdWords account. Whether you are already optimising with impression share data or whether you haven’t considered using it at all – there is no such thing as too much data (if you can stomach it!) nor too much competitive insight when it comes to your AdWords account.

If you are not already using Impression Share (IS) data the new AdWords update hype has probably been lost on you. I’ll catch you up.

What is Keyword Level Impression Share Anyway?

Impression Share (IS) is the percentage of impressions your ads actually received divided by the estimated number of impressions that you could have/were eligible to receive.  Eligibility is based on your current ads’ targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, and Quality Scores. To estimate impression share Google analyses the ad auctions where your ad was shown or when it participated in an auction and failed to show. Therefore Impression Share data enables you to identify potential opportunities to get more impressions and clicks.

Search and Display Impression Share data had been previously available at the Campaign and Ad Group level only. However AdWords latest update means that Search Impression Share data is now available at the individual keyword level – this data is not yet available on the Display network. So when it comes to your search Impression Share data you can stop the guesswork and see just how effectively your individual keywords are competing. Herein lies the hype.

 

Locating your Keyword Level Impression Share Data

So how can this data be used to improve your Adwords account’s performance? The first step of course is to locate this data. Within the AdWords interface choose the “Keywords” tab then the “Columns” tab to customise your columns. From here you can add the various Impression Share columns, found within “Competitive Metrics,” to your reports and view them in your interface. Here you will see the three columns that give you your Impression Share data.

Impression Share (IS) – As discussed, this will give you the Impression Share for each keyword.

Lost IS (Rank) – This column shows the percentage of impressions you were eligible for that were lost due to being out ranked by your competitors.

Exact Match IS – This column estimates Impression Share data as if your keywords were set to Exact Match. This can give you an idea of how much potential there is to gain more impressions by using Exact Match keywords.

You may be wondering where Lost IS (Budget) is? Unfortunately this metric is not available at the keyword level… yet. It seems Google wouldn’t want to spoil us.

 

Analysing your Keyword’s Impression Share

An impression share of 100% is setting our expectations rather high indeed. It is unlikely your ad will ever show for all possible impressions all of the time. Still, we should try to get as high a percentage of Impression Share as possible. Of course what is and isn’t possible is very different for two accounts with different budgets and in different markets. No two accounts are exactly the same, with differing goals, priorities and benchmarks for success, you can analyse this data and come up with a completely different conclusion as you might with the same data in your own account.

However, by using this example I hope to give you an idea of how Impression Share data can be used to identify opportunities and areas for improvement. Using the figures from above, the account has been based on a small Lead-Gen business for which most of the PPC traffic is driven by a handful of core term keywords.

 

The Impression Share for a core term keyword is around 68%

• On first glance this Impression Share percentage seems reasonable enough (baring in mind this is a high traffic modified broad keyword) but shows that around 1/3rd of the auctions this keyword is eligible for either aren’t relevant enough to us for the ad to show, or our bids aren’t competitive enough for this keyword. The small business in my example operates within a very competitive and saturated online market, therefore a 68% Impression Share for this core keyword is pretty positive.

• However I’d like to know what this missing 1/3rd is. Maybe some of it isn’t actually relevant to us and should be blocked with negative keywords. By reviewing the search queries that triggered the keyword we can add negative keywords which could work to reduce this 1/3rd.

The Exact Match impression share is very high at 97%

• A high Exact Match Impression share shows that the keyword is showing an ad for just about every time a user searches for the exact terms in the keyword.

• If this percentage was low then the bid or Quality Score must be far too low to remain competitive. A low Exact Match Impression Share is a very bad sign!

The Impression Share lost due to rank is around 23%

• The Impression Share lost due to rank is relatively low. As discussed the small business in my account operates in a highly competitive market, therefore this relatively small percentage is acceptable.

• However, if you wanted to improve your Impression Share lost due to rank you might want to increase your bids and improve your Quality Score. Doing this will help your keyword to rank higher and this may help you take back some of those impressions from your competitors. When increasing your bids you should monitor how your other key performance metrics like Cost Per Action and Ad Spend Revenue are affected. Only raise your bids if there’s room within your margins to do so – the real progress will be made by looking into your search queries and improving your click through rate, and therefore Quality Score.

 

Whether you are a small business or a huge corporate giant, Impression Share data at the keyword level can be used to help you increase your exposure and improve core keyword competitiveness. This data is particularly useful for the big spenders with tonnes of visitors coming to their website through one keyword. Equally a small business which relies on five or ten core keywords to drive the majority of their revenue or leads could see great results from investigating with these new metrics. Larger companies tend to have more resources at their disposal, this means they can afford to spend the time required to analyse keyword level Impression Share data in minute detail. When it comes to the smaller companies who want maximum return with limited time, I would recommend focusing on the core revenue and lead generating keyword areas where missing impressions will be the most worthwhile to chase.