In the run-up to Black Friday and the holiday shopping season, retailers are competing like crazy to attract the eyeballs of as many paying consumers as possible through paid search advertising. But how well is it paying off? To find out, search intelligence platform Adthena has analyzed the paid search landscape in the run-up to Black Friday 2017, indexing more than 15,000 ads and 214 million impressions across 161 sellers of consumer electronics. The study, shared exclusively with Search Engine Watch, was conducted between November 1st and 13th 2017, and sheds some light on the kinds of PPC ad subjects and messaging that are getting the best response from consumers ahead of the holidays. iPhone dominates mobile… on mobileIn a not-so-surprising discovery, product ads containing the term “iPhone” out-performed other types of consumer goods – particularly on mobile. Paid search ads with “iPhone” pulled in 8.88% of all impressions on desktop, and gained a hefty 14.89% of all impressions on mobile. “Phone” was the second-best-performing product ad keyword, with 4.61% of impressions on desktop and 11.55% on mobile, followed by “TV”, which pulled in 3.54% of desktop impressions and 4.22% of mobile impressions. When it came to the messaging that performed best in Black Friday PPC ads, deal-related ad copy featuring the word “save” was the clear winner, driving close to a fifth (18.79%) of impressions on desktop, and more than a quarter (27.47%) on mobile. “% off” was the next-best-performing deal messaging on desktop, with 10.03% of impressions, while on mobile, “discount” came in second place at 9.03%. “Sale” took 5.6% of impressions on desktop, while “% off” won third place on mobile with 3.91%. Ashley Fletcher, Director of Product Marketing at Adthena, says that these differences in the data prove just how vital the language used in ad copy is to the overall success of a paid search ad. “We can see in the analyzed data that phrase ‘Save’ delivered huge impression share on both desktop and mobile, in comparison to ‘Discount’ or ‘% off’,” he said. “Making this single change in an advertiser’s ad text copy can make all the difference in having a winning search strategy for this fiercely competitive time of year. “The devil is in the detail, and marginal gains mean success.” If you’re wondering what kind of discount is the most effective at attracting consumer attention, well, surprise surprise, it’s a big one. Offers for “70% off” gathered the most impressions PPC ad on both desktop (6.89%) and mobile (1.31%). “30% off” was the next-most-popular discount, though it attracted less than 1% of overall impressions on both desktop (0.84%) and mobile (0.35%). In third place was “40% off”, with 0.58% of impressions on desktop, and 0.23% on mobile. Black Friday outpaces Cyber Monday, Amazon pushes AmazonIn spite of the juggernaut rise of online shopping, Black Friday still carries more weight than its newer, online-focused sibling, Cyber Monday – even in the electronics industry. According to the data from Adthena, “Black Friday” pulled in 2.99% of all PPC ad impressions on desktop (with 2.41% on mobile), while “Cyber Monday” managed only a paltry 0.12% of all impressions on desktop (0.09% on mobile). Meanwhile, Amazon is taking advantage of one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year to push its Prime memberships. Across 71,414 Amazon ads with a total of 78,097,823 impressions, the top two-performing phrases by an overwhelming margin were “Amazon”, which took 98.32% of impressions on desktop and 99.79% on mobile, and “Prime”, which attracted 84.71% of impressions on desktop and 97.64% on mobile. This was bad news for ads with more generic terms like “Shop” or “Low prices”, which attracted just 10.27% of impressions on desktop and 1.79% on mobile (“Shop”) and 8.37% of impressions on desktop and 0.44% on mobile (“Low prices”), respectively. What do the figures from the study tell us about the types of product searches and purchases that people are carrying out on desktop versus on mobile? Although there is some variation in the messaging that seems to resonate with users on desktop compared to mobile – mobile users are keen to “Save” but evidently don’t want to “Shop” for “Low prices” – the same leaders tend to emerge across devices, which Fletcher believes demonstrates that shopper behavior is generally device-agnostic, with consumers carrying out their product searches across multiple channels. “In many instances, mobile is driving higher impression share than desktop, such as with the top performing product ads,” he says. “This tells us that many shoppers are doing their gift browsing on mobile, but desktop still perhaps remains a key part of the path to conversion.” What can marketers take away from these findings that will help them get the best possible visibility for their PPC ads in the run-up to Black Friday? Fletcher says that actionable insights from data are the key to success in a rapidly shifting landscape. “Marketers must understand how campaigns are performing and adjust accordingly as quickly as possible,” he says. “Being able to monitor what their competition is doing and changing on a daily basis will have a great impact on their PPC campaigns. “Today’s marketer wants daily insights into an auction that’s changing rapidly. If a marketer sees that a competitor is pushing 70% discounts and garnering a majority of market share, they can quickly adjust their own strategy in order to continue to remain competitive and capture the audience.” from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/22/how-to-get-the-best-visibility-for-your-ppc-ads-in-the-run-up-to-black-friday/
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According to Hochman Consultants (2017), the average cost of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is increasing – with the average cost-per-click in 2016 being nearly double that of 2013. When you consider the fact that Google processes over 2.3 million searches per minute (Business Insider, 2016), this is hardly surprising. But what can marketers do to ensure that they can attract customers on this increasingly competitive channel, while avoiding these burgeoning costs? In my previous two articles, I looked at how to stop Google AdWords campaigns from failing by using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to gain a holistic overview of customer behavior, and how data-driven attribution with a CDP can supercharge your paid search. In this article, I’ll outline five ways that a Customer Data Platform can improve your AdWords performance and ROI by keeping costs down and attracting new business. Content produced in partnership with Fospha. 1. Data accuracyMany businesses continue to struggle with optimizing their keyword bids. The simple reason for this is the fact that, regardless of how modern and advanced your bid management platform is, inputting inaccurate data can hinder success – and be costly to your business. A Customer Data Platform gathers, integrates and centralizes customer data from various sources to give marketers more control of, and visibility over, their data. This data-driven approach stitches together the customer journey, and uses attribution to accurately assign credit to various marketing channels based on their importance in the path to conversion. Without this true view of their data, businesses are missing the accurate value of their different channels. They also risk making poor decisions about which marketing channels are beneficial, and which are not, which might result in budget being taken away from a channel which has a huge role in the path to conversion. With more accurate data, Customer Data Platforms are able to highlight the true value of keywords – allowing your business to pinpoint high and low performing keywords and campaigns, and optimize their spend on paid search. For instance, with a more accurate data source, Fospha were able to help a client identify that 50% of their keywords weren’t contributing to any conversions. Check out the full case study here. 2. OptimizeManual bid management can be a laborious task, but with the help of a bid management platform to automate the process, this becomes a quick, effortless and efficient process. The next step lies in super-charging the capabilities of this platform. And the answer lies in an accurate data source. Combining the power of the Customer Data Platform to discover high and low performing keywords across all channels through this data, with the automation of a bid management platform, enables spend on poorly performing keywords to be quickly reallocated – resulting in an improvement in ROI. 3. Real-time accessUnlike most other Customer Data Platforms, Fospha facilitates real-time interactions for bidding, helping reduce and eliminate the amount of wasted clicks on incorrect audiences. A Customer Data Platform integrates seamlessly with bid management platforms like Kenshoo and Marin to support these real-time interactions, such as bidding on ad clicks. Real-time access through a Customer Data Platform also enables marketers to automate their bid management through advanced machine learning. 4. PersonalizationMarketers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of moving away from keyword-based marketing, and towards audience-based marketing. However, they can go one step further – making a move towards people-based marketing. This is no less of a necessity with your bidding strategies. Understanding your audience is crucial, and by utilizing a data-driven attribution model, a Customer Data Platform provides you with a granular understanding of a single customer. From here, you are able to use your data to optimize your targeting and increase conversions by offering more relevant content to your customers. In addition to this, keyword performance is largely dependent on types of devices used. It is important to boost keywords that do better on mobile and to suppress those that do not. Marin found that by adjusting bids for mobile, their clients enjoyed 10% higher CTR and 2.5% lower CPC than those that failed to do so. A Customer Data Platform is able to detect these optimized conditions and adjust your bid management strategy accordingly. 5. Bidding strategiesDefining your bidding strategy can drastically improve the performance of your paid search campaigns. However, in order to reach a truly optimized level, different keywords, audiences and goals will require different bidding strategies. A Customer Data Platform gives you a granular view of all your marketing channels to ensure the strategy deployed is custom to each specific need.
Content produced in partnership with Fospha. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/21/how-a-customer-data-platform-can-improve-adwords-performance/ Constantly changing consumer behaviors and the demand for more personalized, meaningful experiences have retailers facing huge challenges this year. Competition in the SERPs is stiff, but winning the click is still no guarantee that the consumer is invested in your shopping experience. More than half of retailers (source: Soasta.com) have a bounce rate greater than 40%, and just one second in increased page load time can have a 50% impact on your mobile bounce rate. Today’s consumer has zero patience for a poor online experience and will pull the trigger instantly if your brand can’t deliver. The holidays provide plenty of opportunities to create more personalized content and provide smart content and intelligent experiences both in-store and online. How can you best get in position this holiday season to not only be found, but to engage and delight consumers all the way through, from search to checkout? Below, I share some tips to help marketers in the coming weeks to get their SEO and content in shape for the holidays (and beyond). Smart holiday shoppingThe holiday shopping season provides a great opportunity for marketers to get smarter about the way they develop and promote content. As SEO and content marketing disciplines converge, the need for smart content has become mission critical. Smart content is discoverable, optimized from the point of creation, and ready to be activated across channels and devices, making it both profitable and measurable. New research (disclosure – carried out by my company, BrightEdge) shows that ecommerce behavior changes dramatically on major shopping days Black Friday and Cyber Monday. On these days, conversion spikes. Interestingly, online conversion rates increase across desktop, tablet and mobile increase from Thanksgiving to Black Friday and into Cyber Monday. Going into the holiday season, it is good to know that:
When it comes down to making that final decision, consumers still like to see what they’re buying, and all of the information surrounding it, on a larger screen. It is important to note though that our data suggests an earlier holiday shopping season, too, and that consumers were making their big purchase on Thanksgiving and then using discounts to buy things they would have purchased already but with big discounts. Hence the higher conversion rates for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Read the full report (ungated) for more findings from our research. As you get ready for the holiday shopping season, make sure that you:
Maximize your organic presence throughout the holiday seasonSchema markup helps you structure your on-page data in a way that it can be better understood by search engines. As we all know, Google’s #1 goal is to provide searchers the best answers to their needs. Schema helps you show Google all of the ways in which your site content is the best answer for relevant queries. Schema can help you win extra visibility in the SERPs, too, with expanded results and extra features like Google’s Quick Answers box. It can help you add compelling content like ratings and other rich information that convince searchers to convert to site visitors. At the very least, check these off your list in your pre-holidays marketing prep:
Supplement your SEO strategy and deliver a relevant holiday shopping experienceYour PPC and SEO budgets shouldn’t be pitted against one another during holiday season, each fighting it out for their share of the pie. Organic search drives 51 percent of all visits to B2B and B2C websites, and it is important to use PPC to support your SEO efforts; to fill in the gaps in organic coverage and further your conversion opportunities for specific time sensitive promotions. Ad extensions can give your ads greater functionality and more visibility, while targeting options like dayparting and device targeting reduce waste and get you in front of your ideal audiences when it matters most. And remember, when it comes to site visits, desktop dominates on Cyber Monday, mobile on Black Friday, and tablets on Thanksgiving Day. These insights can help you tailor your ads and bids to the most receptive audiences on each major shopping day this season. How else can you improve your PPC game in time for the holidays?
Optimize for experience to improve conversionYour number one priority in conversion optimization this holiday season has to be mapping your content to the customer journey, then aligning this to the days that matter most for revenue. It’s not all about Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday; Thanksgiving Day might actually be your best day for revenue generation. Run through this checklist in the holidays lead-up to turn more of your lookers into buyers:
The holiday shopping season provides great opportunities to create more personalized content and provide intelligent experiences both at the store and online. To maximize performance, marketers need to focus on understanding and creating smart content and shopping experiences to attract, engage and convert customers at the right time and on the right device. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/20/smart-shopping-season-checklists-mobile-and-desktop-content-and-seo/ Black Friday kicks off a shopping season that lasts through Christmas each year, with online retailers vying for the profitable attention of consumers. With spending expected to rise by 47% this year, competition will be fierce. SEO can make a significant ecommerce contribution; some final tweaks can make the difference between rising to the top of results and languishing at the bottom of page one. The holiday season begins in earnest for ecommerce companies with the Black Friday weekend, bookended by Black Friday (November 24) and Cyber Monday (November 27). Black Friday (the day retailers traditionally go ‘into the black’ due to the bumper sales) follows Thanksgiving in the US and kicks off a spending spree that typically continues through the Christmas period. The digital revolution has facilitated huge growth in spending worldwide, even spawning the online-focused Cyber Monday counterpart to satiate consumers’ desire to pick up a bargain. Although dwarfed by China’s equivalent, known as ‘Singles Day’, which recently posted $12 billion in sales on Alibaba alone within just 2 hours, Black Friday holds particular significance for retailers in the US and beyond. For context, the following statistics should paint a clear picture of the importance of this period for online stores:
Brands have been planning for the holidays for a long time already, so the focus will now turn to any last-minute changes that can help tempt consumers to their site and provide a seamless transaction experience when they get there. SEO is quite rightly considered a long-term investment and strategies take time to come into effect, but some fine-tuning can still reap dividends in the immediate short term. The tips below are intended to give ecommerce sites an SEO performance boost – just in time for the holiday period. Focus on keyword groups with a high ROIAll brands are aiming to maximize revenues over the holidays, which leads to an increase in activity as their marketing strategies kick into action. Search demand patterns change too, as consumers seek inspiration across a range of digital media. This opens opens up new opportunities; search results are affected by these forces and they change in response to the surrounding stimuli. Intelligent targeting of the right queries at the right moments can see brands move into top positions and capitalize on demand peaks. Historical data from Google Trends or Keyword Planner can highlight the types of queries that tend to increase around this time of year. Typically, modifiers including ‘best’, ‘gift’, ‘deals’, or ‘cheap’ will be popular with shoppers on the lookout for the right present. There’s nothing revolutionary about that, but adding these terms to basic SEO elements like internal links, title tags and meta descriptions can make all the difference. Our guide to advanced keyword research is a great place to start this process, as it helps marketers to isolate short-term opportunities and strategize accordingly. Use existing landing pages for high-volume termsIt helps if you are using an authoritative page to target profitable queries at the most competitive time of year. With only a couple of weeks until Black Friday, it would be a pretty tall order to launch a brand new page and rank in positions 1-3 for the most important terms, And yet, many brands do exactly this every year. Rather than having one static Black Friday page and another for Cyber Monday that can be updated every year, they launch a new page every time the holidays roll round. After all, the trend is predictable; we know searches for [black friday] are about to take off: The retailers that make the most of this will have had a Black Friday page in place for years already, which benefits from the backlinks that have been sent to the site every year. Small updates, such as adding the year 2017 into the copy and title tag, will help the page gain relevance for this year’s searches. Once the holidays pass, update the content to move shoppers to more relevant deals and allow the page to accrue SEO value until next year. Add new content to cover new SEO opportunitiesThere are less obvious trends to make use of, too. Recent analysis of BrightEdge data by Eugene Feygin revealed a very significant increase in the number of rich snippets returned for ecommerce queries over the past year. In fact, the research found that there has been an increase in the number of rich snippets of over 26% within the last five months. Unsurprisingly, Amazon has benefited to a greater degree than most: But the same opportunity exists for all retailers. Given the prominence that is afforded the these quick answers, in what has come to be known as ‘position zero’, it seems too great a prize to ignore. The question, then, is how to format content to increase its likelihood of being pulled programmatically as a rich snippet. There are no black-and-white rules to this, but there are steps we can take to help our chances. For example, using Schema.org mark-up to provide Google with structured data about product features or prices will help greatly, and tools like Moz Keyword Explorer can help identify popular questions. Repurpose old content to create gift guidesAccording to Google’s trend report from 2016, more than 70 percent of digital shoppers started their holiday shopping without something particular in mind that they wanted to buy. The search journey doesn’t end when someone clicks through to a website, of course. With user engagement factors continuing to play a pivotal role in SEO successes, we need to understand the consumer’s intent and match that up to the experience they receive when they land on the site. Walmart provides a good example of how this can be achieved. They have a range of gift guides, which are categorized by the type of gift the consumer is thinking of, and also for whom they are planning to buy. It is possible to go further still, through segmentation of content by the consumer’s level of certainty about the product they want to buy. The site can ask these questions to use as prompts to personalize the experience, with live chatbots playing an ever greater role in this area. This must be complemented by an oft-overlooked aspect of ecommerce SEO: optimization of internal search. A report by Visualsoft found that 17% of UK retailers do not pay attention to the effectiveness of their internal search engine, but this should be taken into account by all ecommerce sites. To do so means making use of autocomplete searches, product recommendations based on search history, and personalized results. These points require the refinement and adaptation of existing assets for most brands, so they can still be considered quick win activities for the holidays. Optimize for speedBack in 2012, Amazon calculated that just one second of slowdown in page load speed costs them $1.6 billion in lost sales, a number that can only have grown in the intervening years. The aforementioned report from Visualsoft made blunt a point of which we are all aware: when providing a great ecommerce experience, speed matters. It also highlighted how far a lot of online retailers are from meeting the benchmarks expected of them by their customers: Source: Visualsoft In addition, new research from BrightEdge (full report here) has highlighted the peak traffic days across devices: This data shows that while mobile traffic peaks on Thanksgiving, it is desktop that takes the lion’s share of visits on Cyber Monday. Moreover, BrightEdge’s research found that desktop takes 67% of overall conversions in the holiday season, as its traffic converts at a significantly higher rate than mobile visits. Marketers need to be in prime position to move these consumers through to their intended transaction, as they research on one device and come back to convert on another. Therefore, if there is only one area of on-site experience that SEOs can contribute towards, it should be page load speed. Improved speed can help rankings directly, but it is also a proven way to improve conversion rates on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The road to achieving this will depend on the website in question, but some best practices would be:
Optimize mixed media assetsIt stands to reason that with so many shoppers seeking inspiration, images and videos are essential components of an SEO strategy for the holidays. At the last minute, brands are likely to have their media strategies set in stone, but SEO can always help to attract more traffic to these assets. As such, we should be thinking about optimization for search engines like Pinterest and YouTube, and not just Google and Bing. That said, Google’s universal results provide an excellent opportunity to draw more traffic if images and videos are optimized for the right queries. Therefore, SEO research for the holiday season should aim to identify the keyword categories and types for which images and videos are returned in the SERPs. Keyword tools like BrightEdge and SEMrush provide a way to do this at scale, helping marketers to evaluate the best areas to apply their efforts. Take lessons from other digital marketing channelsWith such limited time left to test SEO changes, retailers should look to paid media channels to find quick, substantial lessons to apply to organic search. PPC ad copy can be a goldmine for these insights, as is reveals the triggers most likely to appeal to consumers when they are searching. Take the best-performing ad copy variations from paid search and incorporate these into SEO messaging to draw a higher click-through rate. Recent research into social media ad performance also found that informal, conversational language works best. People tend to be in a different mindset when on social media compared to search, which is driven by their underlying intent and the different natures of the platforms. However, this tone of voice could still be worth testing within PPC ads to see if it helps brands stand out and connect. That said, we need to bear in mind that consumers don’t think in terms of SEO, PPC, or social media when they are shopping for gifts. They move between these channels and expect a consistent tone in their interactions with a brand. SEOs should look to broader consumer surveys to understand the role their channel can play to ensure that this consistency is achieved. One such study from Astound Commerce asked, “Which of the following will most likely prompt you to visit a retailer online this holiday season?” Consumers, who were prompted to select all of the responses that applied to them, revealed just how many factors can potentially come into play: This is a complex set of interconnected communications, but there are a few clear takeaways for SEO. For example, promotions are a key driver of traffic, so we should add any relevant deals into on-page copy and meta tags. Make sure your servers are readyThe SEO team at any retailer has important responsibilities on the technical side of things over the holidays. If all goes to plan, there should be a significant surge in the number of visitors to the site over a short period of time, which can play havoc with servers. Downtime is particularly disastrous at this time of year, so take steps to prepare. It is worth visiting the site’s error logs to see if there is anything you can fix in advance of the traffic increase, and make sure you have a dedicated point of contact on stand-by if any issues should arise over the holiday season. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/17/black-friday-seo-last-minute-tips-for-the-holiday-season/ Probably the single best video to watch to understand the power of Google & Facebook (or even most of the major problems across society) is this following video about pleasure versus happiness. In constantly seeking pleasure we forego happiness. The "feed" based central aggregation networks are just like slot machines in your pocket: variable reward circuitry which self-optimizes around exploiting your flaws to eat as much attention as possible. The above is not an accident. It is, rather, as intended:
Using machine learning to drive rankings is ultimately an exercise in confirmation bias:
Excellent work Google in using your featured snippets to help make the world more absolutist, polarized & toxic. The central network operators not only attempt to manipulate people at the emotional level, but the layout of the interface also sets default user patterns. Most users tend to focus their attention on the left side of the page: "if we were to slice a maximized page down the middle, 80% of the fixations fell on the left half of the screen (even more than our previous finding of 69%). The remaining 20% of fixations were on the right half of the screen." This behavior is even more prevalent on search results pages: "On SERPs, almost all fixations (94%) fell on the left side of the page, and 60% those fixations can be isolated to the leftmost 400px." On mobile, obviously, the attention is focused on what is above the fold. That which is below the fold sort of doesn't even exist for a large subset of the population. Outside of a few central monopoly attention merchant players, the ad-based web is dying. Mashable has raised about $46 million in VC funding over the past 4 years. And they just sold for about $50 million. Breaking even is about as good as it gets in a web controlled by the Google / Facebook duopoly. :D Other hopeful unicorn media startups appear to have peaked as well. That BuzzFeed IPO is on hold: "Some BuzzFeed investors have become worried about the company’s performance and rising costs for expansions in areas like news and entertainment. Those frustrations were aired at a board meeting in recent weeks, in which directors took management to task, the people familiar with the situation said." Google's Chrome web browser will soon have an ad blocker baked into it. Of course the central networks opt out of applying this feature to themselves. Facebook makes serious coin by blocking ad blockers. Google pays Adblock Plus to unblock ads on Google.com & boy are there a lot of ads there.
Format your pages like Google does their search results and they will tell you it is a piss poor user experience & a form of spam - whacking you with a penalty for it. Of course Google isn't the only search engine doing this. Mix in ads with a double listing and sometimes there will only be 1 website listed above the fold. I've even seen some Bing search results where organic results have a "Web" label on them - which is conveniently larger than the ad label that is on ads. That is in addition to other tricks like... lots of ad extensions that push organics below the fold on anything with the slightest commercial intent As bad as either of the above looks in terms of ad load or result diversity on the desktop, it is only worse on mobile. On mobile devices organic search results can be so hard to find that people ask questions like "Are there any search engines where you don't have to literally scroll to see a result that isn't an advertisement?" The answer is yes. But other than that, it is slim pickings. In an online ecosystem where virtually every innovation is copied or deemed spam, sustainable publishing only works if your business model is different than the central network operators. Not only is there the aggressive horizontal ad layer for anything with a hint of commercial intent, but now the scrape layer which was first applied to travel is being spread across other categories like ecommerce.
The more of your content Google can scrape-n-displace in the search results the less reason there is to visit your website & the more ad-heavy Google can make their interface because they shagged the content from your site. Simply look at the market caps of the big tech monopolies vs companies in adjacent markets. The aggregate trend is expressed in the stock price. And it is further expressed in the inability for the unicorn media companies to go public. As big as Snapchat & Twitter are, nobody who invested in either IPO is sitting on a winner today. Google is outraged anyone might question the numbers & if the current set up is reasonable:
Sure it is not the ad revenues they are stealing. Rather it is the content. Either by scraping, or by ranking proprietary formats (AMP) above other higher quality content which is not published using the proprietary format & then later attaching crappier & crappier deals to the (faux) "open source" proprietary content format. As Google grabs the content & cuts the content creator off from the audience while attaching conditions, Google's PR hacks will tell you they want you to click through to the source:
except they are the ones adding extra duplicative layers which make it harder to do. Google keeps extracting content from publishers & eating the value chain. Some publishers have tried to offset this by putting more ads on their own site while also getting further distribution by adopting the proprietary AMP format. Those who realized AMP was garbage in terms of monetization viewed it as a way to offer teasers to drive users to their websites. The partial story approach is getting killed though. Either you give Google everything, or they want nothing. That is, after all, how monopolies negotiate - ultimatums. Those who don't give Google their full content will soon receive manual action penalty notifications
The value of news content is not zero. Being the go-to resource for those sorts of "no money here" news topics also enables Google to be the go-to resource for searches for [auto insurance quote] and other highly commercial search terms where Google might make $50 or $100 per click. Every month Google announces new ad features. Economics drive everything in publishing. But you have to see how one market position enables another. Google & Facebook are not strong in China, so Toutiao - the top news app in China - is valued at about $20 billion. Now that Yahoo! has been acquired by Verizon, they've decided to shut down their news app. Unprofitable segments are worth more as a write off than as an ongoing concern. Look for Verizon to further take AIM at shutting down additional parts of AOL & Yahoo. Firefox recently updated to make its underlying rendering engine faster & more stable. As part of the upgrade they killed off many third party extensions, including ours. We plan to update them soon (a few days perhaps), but those who need the extensions working today may want to install something like (Comodo Dragon (or another browser based on the prior Firefox core) & install our extensions in that web browser. As another part of the most recent Firefox update, Firefox dumped Yahoo! Search for Google search as their default search engine in a new multiyear deal where financial terms were not disclosed. Yahoo! certainly deserved to lose that deal. First, they signed a contract with Mozilla containing a change-of-ownership poison pill where Mozilla would still make $375 million a year from them even if they dump Yahoo!. Given what Yahoo! sold for this amounts to about 10% of the company price for the next couple years. Second, Yahoo! overpaid for the Firefox distribution deal to where they had to make their user experience even more awful to try to get the numbers to back out. Here is a navigational search result on Yahoo! where the requested site only appears in the right rail knowledge graph. The "organic" result set has been removed. There's a Yahoo! News insert, a Yahoo Local insert, an ad inviting you to download Firefox (bet that has since been removed!), other search suggestions, and then graphical ads to try to get you to find office furniture or other irrelevant stuff. Here is how awful those sorts of search results are: Yahoo! was so embarrassed at the lack of quality of their result set that they put their logo at the upper right edge of the page. So now they'll be losing a million a day for a few years based on Marissa Mayer's fantastic Firefox deal. And search is just another vertical they made irrelevant. When they outsourced many verticals & then finally shut down most of the remaining ones, they only left a few key ones:
And for the key verticals they kept, they have pages like the following, which look like a diet version of eHow Every day they send users away to other sites with deeper content. And eventually people find one they like (like TheAthletic or Dunc'd On) & then Yahoo! stops being a habit. Meanwhile many people get their broader general news from Facebook, Google shifted their search app to include news, Apple offers a great news app, the default new tab on Microsoft Edge browser lists a localize news feed. Any of those is a superior user experience to Yahoo!. It is hard to see what Yahoo!'s role is going forward. Other than the user email accounts (& whatever legal liabilities are associated with the chronic user account hacking incidents), it is hard to see what Verizon bought in Yahoo!.
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from http://www.seobook.com/up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a As an SEO expert at your company – maybe the SEO expert – you may find yourself needing to persuade executives to invest more in your company’s SEO practices. Championing SEO means successfully selling the right company leaders on the benefits, demonstrating the effectiveness and wisdom of your specific SEO strategy, and, more often than not, including a few convincing facts about why it will make them look good. Here are four practices you should use to your advantage when trying to win executive support for your SEO proposals: 1) Understand your executive audience before you even step in the roomWhen you enter the executive meeting to present your SEO plan, know exactly what you’re getting into. Is this a group discussion, or are you going in one-on-one? What will keep the attention of this particular individual or group, and what are the expectations for this meeting on the other side of the table? In presenting your plan, it’s important to tell executives everything they need to know in order to say yes. This means explaining the very specific goals that your SEO proposal will help the business achieve. Clearly explain any costs and risks as well, so that executives have the information to make a fully informed decision. Remember that they may even have to sell what you’re proposing at the level above them. If it’s possible to tailor what your asking for and how you present it to align well with current budgeting and company strategy, do so. Overall, try to hand executives the ready-made case they need to fully convince both themselves and others how a greater investment in SEO will positively affect the bottom line. 2) Prepare a presentation that’s focused, powerful, and to the pointTake the time to practice and refine your presentation, focusing on a tight collection of points that you want – and need – to make. It also doesn’t hurt to use a few tricks from the advertising world, from plain old flattery to the bandwagon approach. Make it clear that a proper focus on SEO is what smart companies are doing to succeed, and that this focus will serve to increase exposure for the tremendous work being done by creative and other teams. Also explain how “everyone else is doing it,” especially through presenting information that highlights where competitors have superior SEO practices and are beating your company in search rankings. A little competitive spirit and FOMO can help put the push for SEO in perspective and get executives animated about how your company can respond – a response plan you ought to have ready as well. 3) Stick to terminology your audience can understandRemember that the executives in your audience probably don’t understand SEO terminology at an expert level. That said, you shouldn’t hesitate to provide specific examples and information that will help draw them in; just be sure to avoid SEO jargon with which non-experts aren’t familiar. For example, you may want to talk about metadata and KPIs, but your audience may need a bit of guidance to navigate these terms. You can accomplish this with rephrasing, such as changing metadata to “how searchers view your result on the search engine results page”, and KPIs to “specific data points that matter.” 4) Present those specific data points that matterWhen weaving the narrative you present to executives as to how an investment in SEO will achieve intended results for your company, ensure that they take it as more than a fairy tale: ground everything in actual data. From an internal execution standpoint, this means getting specific with the costs, personnel, and bandwidth required. It also means setting target goals the potential visibility and profit your company’s SEO efforts will deliver. Don’t be afraid to dive into the real metrics that your proposal has been crafted to improve. This will likely include specific information like customer acquisition cost (CAC), the marketing percentage of CAC, the ratio of customer lifetime value to CAC, the time to payback the CAC, and the marketing originated/influenced customer percentages. If your presentation can convincingly demonstrate how your SEO efforts will return favorable numbers for these metrics, there’s a good chance that executives would be smart to listen to you – and that they will. Kevin Gamache is Search Strategist at Wire Stone, a digital marketing agency part of Accenture Interactive. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/16/heres-how-to-get-executives-excited-about-seo/ The battle between those who specialize in certain marketing practices is prevalent throughout the industry. Individuals, departments and indeed agencies are all involved. After all, they are often competing for the same budget, beating their chests and promoting their own channel as the most valuable. It is understandable. We all need to make a living. But in reality they should all be working together to deliver economies of scale. Fully integrated campaigns can deliver far better results than the sum of its component parts. SEO and social media would at first appear to be very different practices, especially when taking into account paid social advertising. However, there are significant SEO benefits to be gained from utilizing social media advertising as both an outreach platform and also as an analytics platform. Let’s jump straight into it. We are assuming a certain level of knowledge when it comes social media advertising. For those not ‘in the know’, you can be pretty darn specific in regards to your demographics when advertising on major platforms such as Facebook. Make the most of your contentFor years now content has been one of the major focal points of SEO campaigns, giving birth to potentially the most irritating and overused saying in SEO: “Content is King”! Jayson Demers noted back in 2015 that SEO is now synonymous with content marketing and that as a result SEO teams are investing heavily in content creation. Let’s assume you are doing all the right things. You have a solid grasp of your buyer personas and inbound funnels. You have thoroughly researched content opportunities within your specific market, using this research to help influence your strategy. You’re also ensuring that your on-site optimization for each article is top notch so that you attract that ever growing portion of traffic from long tail keywords. This is great, genuinely it is. Although are you missing a trick by not integrating additional marketing channels into your content strategy? Email is awesome at disseminating content to both prospective and current clients, but what of social media advertising? To paint an industry with an awfully large brush, content creation is sometimes too heavily focused on gaining traffic directly from search engines due to the user intent associated with those actively searching, and the fact that often this is what the client is basing payment of their invoice on! However, taking a quick step back, if this content is aligned to your conversion funnel then surely getting in front of as many eyes as possible (via other channels) should therefore still have a significant benefit. SEO teams can utilize social media advertising platforms to push this content to users that fall within their buyer persona profiles which should ultimately produce conversions (it may require a few more touch points, but you get the point). Of course the advertising spend would have to be included in your cost per acquisition calculations but hopefully the following points show how you can use social media advertising to make your investment into content pay a higher rate of dividends. Keep them coming backInbound marketing often works best through multiple touch points during the buyer’s journey. If your traffic is converting to customers directly from a single piece of content then that’s awesome, good for you! For the rest of the world that aren’t unicorns we need to keep our readers coming back in order to help them find their way down our own sales funnels. Re-targeting the traffic to your website via social media with awesome content is one such tactic to keep your traffic returning. Use retargeting tools on social media to maintain your touch points with users, building brand authority and trust. Some friendly persuasionSometimes people just need a little nudge. Ultimately you don’t want people clicking on your retargeting posts, consuming your content and then leaving time and time again. That can be a costly ego boost. Eventually you want them to convert! Assess how your content strategy aligns with your sales funnel. Do you have set pieces of content that lead on from one another which will help you become more specific with your retargeting? Does this pathway eventually lead to a conversion? Your conversions may not be in monetary form. They may involve the user providing some additional contact information in order to download a brochure or them signing up to a free trial. Whatever that conversion looks like, don’t be afraid to ask the question. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. When the time is right, your social retargeting campaigns should include conversion related posts that relate to said individual’s status in your sales funnel. We all love a good linkWe covered the benefits that social media provide for a link building campaign in a recent article, so jump over there for a deeper look. Suffice to say that again, if you are investing heavily in content, then why not use social media to spread the net even wider and potentially earn links? Paul Shapiro had an interesting tactic for Marketing Land of targeting employees at specific publishing companies as a link building tactic! Gain analytics insights!When it comes to analytics tools for SEO, data from the website and SEO specific platforms steal the limelight. The likes of Google Analytics, Search Console and those offered by Moz, SEMrush and Majestic may be the first ones off the tongue but we should also be using analytics gained from other channels in our decisions. You guessed it, social media advertising can be particularly useful in this respect. In fact, you don’t even need to be using social advertising to get these insights but the specific demographic targeting within social advertising should help provide a higher level of actionable data. Understanding how to drive clicksIn much the same way as Google Adwords, via Facebook Insights or other social media analytics tools, you can view your click-through rate per post. Whilst this is also influenced by other factors such as time of post, engagement or demographic targeting, you can also draw insights into what content is proving most popular with your audience.
This type of data can be used to influence your content strategy, even if it is as simple as creating article titles that increase click through rates. Just starting out?Some content pieces can be spectacularly well researched and written but receive far less traffic than expected. There are additional factors that will dictate the ability of your website’s content to rank in search engines including the overall authority of your website, the link profile of that article or load speed. More often than not a lack of traffic will mean that the analytics associated with that content piece becomes less reliable, subsequently preventing you from really fine tuning your content strategy. Social media advertising can be incredibly valuable in driving ‘pay per play’ traffic to your content and therefore allowing you to capture that all important data. It doesn’t need to be specific to your content either. Conversion rate optimization is an important part of any digital marketing campaign so you can also capitalize on social traffic to help identify opportunities within your website’s user flow. So there you have it. Yet another reason to make sure that your social media and SEO teams are working together. Of course, you don’t need to try to implement of the above points at once – in fact we would advise taking them one step at a time. The most important point? Move away from marketing channels operating within their own silo. Integrate your marketing, share data, use content across multiple channels and collaborate to increase your results across the board! from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/13/a-search-marketers-guide-to-using-paid-social-media/ This is Part 2 of my blog series on crafting and executing killer demand gen strategies. In Part 1, I discussed building out various personas to target, as well as how to craft the right creative. Now let’s chat through how to actually target these personas! Both Google Display Network and Facebook have great audience targeting capabilities that allow you to get in front of your target audiences and the personas you have built out. Full disclosure: I was planning to wrap the GDN and Facebook together for this post, but both have so many features that they warrant their own edition. So let’s dive into how to target your personas and audiences on the GDN, and save Facebook for Part 3. Keyword contextual targeting (KCT)Keyword contextual targeting is where you bid on keywords and Google will match you to pages relevant to your terms. You’ll notice two options when it comes to KCT:
My recommendation is to start off with Content, because you know exactly what you are getting into; don’t give Google control right away and make it hard to understand true performance. Content will have a lot less reach, but you have full visibility into things. As you begin seeing results, you can always adjust accordingly. My general recommendation is to start off with your top 10-15 performing search terms – and then, of course, layer on demographic age and gender information so you are getting in front of the most relevant eyes. Additionally, think about the personas you developed. In Part 1, I gave the example of a persona that loved celebrity fashion and gossip; building terms around those interests to get onto those pages is another way to get in front of the right eyes. Custom Affinity AudiencesWith Custom Affinity Audiences, you can input domains and Google will look at the types of users visiting those domains – makeup, demographics, topics of sites they visit, etc. Then Google crafts an audience similar to those users, which you can target. With Custom Affinity Audiences, I recommend creating different audiences to target based off of:
In-Market AudiencesWith In-Market Audiences, Google identifies people who are actively shopping for certain products and services. This is pretty clear-cut – choose In-Market Audiences relevant to your business. Don’t forget to leverage the audience insights that Google gave you when developing your personas; those typically showcase other products/services that your core audience is typically in market for! Refine your targeting to get closer to your target personasFor both KCT and In-Market Audiences, I recommend that you further refine your targeting by applying demographic layering onto those campaigns to get closer to your target personas. (With Custom Affinity Audiences, Google already incorporates demographic information from the data they pull as they analyze the audiences visiting the sites you enter.) The above strategies are well worth testing out as you look to get in front of the right eyes and scale your business. In part 3, we’ll dive into Facebook and how to best leverage its advanced targeting capabilities to get in front of your personas and target market! from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/14/killer-demand-gen-strategy-part-2-google-display-network-targeting/ In today’s marketing climate, data is key. Indeed, more data is generated in a 24-hour period than ever before, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created daily across the globe (IBM, 2017). The challenge lies in being able to harness this data to optimize marketing activities. After all, without an understanding of what your customers are doing, it is almost impossible to increase conversions and ROI. One of the key channels for marketers is paid search. Indeed, this is rapidly becoming the most powerful digital marketing channel, with over 2.3 million searches occurring per day. With all these interactions, marketers are paying a premium to get their brand, reflected in the fact that pay-per-click advertising costs are sky rocketing. Marketers can gain visibility on their paid search activities, and overcome the rising cost of customer acquisition and retention in this channel, by taking control of their customer data. In my previous article on how to stop Google AdWords campaigns from failing, I looked at how businesses can use a Customer Data Platform to gain a holistic overview of customer conversion, and properly attribute the role of each keyword in the conversion path. In this article, I’ll expand on how data-driven attribution and the use of a Customer Data Platform can supercharge your paid search activities. Content produced in partnership with Fospha. Step 1: IntegrateThe key challenge of the rise in multi-channel and multi-device customer journeys is the fact that businesses store this multitude of data in disparate silos, as illustrated in Figure 1. The result? No unified view of the customer journey, and no understanding of how they are interacting with various marketing channels and campaigns. Businesses must therefore look to integrate their various data sources, using a Customer Data Platform, to provide this granular single customer view. As well as integrating customer data, a Customer Data Platform will stitch data together, and link typically anonymised data with known identifiers. In doing so, multiple visits – across numerous sessions, channels and devices – are linked to one individual, so marketers can begin to understand who specific customers are, where they came from, what they viewed, and how they interacted with marketing channels on their path to purchase. Once this view is in place, marketers are better equipped to understand the role of specific marketing channels – in this instance, paid search activities – in relation to customer conversions, as they have a full view of where customers interacted with their business before purchase. Step 2: AttributeOnce your customer data is integrated and providing a clearer picture of what your customers are doing, marketers must then look to accurately attribute the role of their paid search channels in customer conversions. For this, a data-driven attribution model – defined as ‘accurately assigning value to each digital channel marketing touchpoint across the complete user journey’ – is key. This model uses advanced algorithmic modelling to help marketers understand the real value and cost associated with each of their marketing touchpoints. With these insights, you can identify where marketing activity in a particular channel plays little to no role in driving conversions. Marketers can then drill down into their paid search channel, to understand which individual keywords are leading to these conversions. With this in-depth view, and the granular data source from the Customer Data Platform, marketers gain a much more comprehensive understanding of which keywords are a drain on resources, and which are bringing in high ROI. With this knowledge, they can redistribute spend to help accelerate growth without a drop in leads. Step 3: OperationalizeOnce marketers have access to these insights, the final step in supercharging their paid search activities is being able to operationalize at scale and in real-time. A Customer Data Platform can integrate directly with bid management platforms – which are already great at optimizing and automating PPC campaigns – to boost their efforts. The granular understanding of keyword performance, derived through the Customer Data Platform’s rich data and attribution modelling layer, is pushed directly into a bid management platform, like Kenshoo or Marin, to automatically optimize the algorithms that inform their bidding. This data-driven approach, executed in an automated and frictionless way, helps marketers optimize their paid search channel at scale. Once you have taken these steps to optimize your paid search channels, you can use your Customer Data Platform to tackle other priority channels – to reduce costs and boost ROI – simply by integrating that data source into your Customer Data Platform and applying the same data-driven attribution modelling. Content produced in partnership with Fospha. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/14/how-to-use-your-data-to-supercharge-paid-search/ Young children are using the internet to search and find content more than they ever have before—but we can all understand some of the trade-offs that come with this technological advancement. Typical search engines (think Google, Bing, etc.) do not default to kid-friendly settings, and it takes a lot of adult monitoring to make sure that nothing is appearing and getting clicked on that isn’t age-appropriate. Luckily in recent years, more and more safe search engines for kids have been emerging. Today we are going to talk about four of the most popular safe and kid friendly search engines, and why they should be on your radar if you are a parent, teacher, or child development professional. 1. KiddleKiddle.co is a “safe visual search engine for kids” developed by Google. It has all of the power and resources of Google, with all of the safe search filters that parents and educators need. In addition to traditional web and image searches, they also have “Kimages” or popular kid images, and “Kpedia”, a kid’s version of Wikipedia. In addition, there is also a video search feature, a news search feature, and resources for parents and educators. The bottom toolbar also has more information on kids’ safe search and keyword blocking, making the platform a very transparent and understandable alternative search option. What is really awesome about platforms like Kiddle is that there are very different approaches to how content is displayed, depending on the word. For example, typing in the word “boob” will give kids this error message: We can understand how this is limiting (what if a kid is genuinely curious about body parts in a scientific or sociological way?) However, as pointed out by Mashable, not all terms have this “oops, try again” landing page. In fact, when the word “transgender” is searched there are definitions, “kids of trans” resources, and other helpful information for kids that may have first hand experience with transgender communities, or may just be genuinely curious about the term and people who identify as trans. 2. Wacky SafeThe Microsoft version of a kid-oriented safe search engine is called Wacky Safe, and it comes in the form of an app that is specially made for PCs and Android phones. I’m sure you will not be surprised to find out that it is rated E for everyone. It claims to provide an “ultra-safe” environment so that parents and educators can be worry-free about children surfing the web. As with other safe search sites for kids it blocks inappropriate content and images, uses strict keyword filtering, and allows for searching of information that is “kid-friendly.” The app also blocks and filters harmful websites that would typically be blocked by parental controls. 3. KidRexKidRex has to be one of my favorites—if for no other reason than because the home page contains a wonderfully drawn image of a T-rex. This search engine, which is also powered by Google, is an independent organization that claims to be kid-centric with their “safe search for kids, by kids slogan.” The organization (a division of Brent Media) was founded in 2016, and as you would expect, it addresses all of the parent/educator concerns that are associated with children searching online. 4. Safe Search KidsYou may think you’re experiencing deja vu at this point, but here is yet another available safe search engine that is geared toward kids and utilizes the power of…you guessed it…Google! (Seriously, can any company come out swinging and outshine Google in this area?). Safe Search Kids is a download that is also available as an app, and can deliver filtered search results when your kids use the internet. This search tool automatically activates Google Safe Search—and ultimately helps to keep kids from landing on websites that contain inappropriate content. Some extra considerationsIt is fantastic that these tools are available and that there are increasingly more ways for parents, educators, and child development professionals to be proactive in what their kids are seeing online. With that said, these search engines are not foolproof (ever) and there are some things to consider as a parent or educator who is letting their children absorb all of the wonderful information that is available online. Blocking out keywords could potentially block out useful or educational contentThere is no good solution to this, but by hyper-filtering the internet, you could also be filtering and screening out some valuable and educational information. Think human reproduction, cultural genocide, or other historical events that could easily be erased from a G-Rated search. Ultimately, there is no replacement for parents and educators supervising and teaching children how to use the internet. These tools can help, but they are not the ONLY solution to enhance children’s experience online. Who is hand-picking?Safe search that is geared towards children has always had to answer the question: who picks the inappropriate keywords? Who decides what content is child-friendly? It should be no surprise that not all parents agree on what is appropriate, let alone different cultures, religions, and other social positions. In other words, what Google or other search engines feel is appropriate or inappropriate does not necessarily capture every parent’s wishes. This makes it all the more important for parents and educators to continue to be proactive, even with these powerful tools. While these tools are incredibly powerful and can allow children to be much more curious and independent online, there is really no substitution for parent and teacher involvement when it comes to learning about the internet and the power of search engines. By teaching kids HOW search engines work, what they can do, and the kind of content that is fully at their fingertips, kids can feel empowered to research and learn in ways they never had imagined! What are your thoughts on these safe search engines for kids? Have you tried any as a parent or teacher? Let us know in the comments section below! Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer for NoRiskSEO, a full service SEO agency, and a contributor to SEW. You can connect with Amanda on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out her services at amandadisilvestro.com. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/11/13/4-safe-search-engines-for-kids/ |
ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Gillian 32 from Calgary, Canada. I am working as social media expert and have helped many clients with their social media marketing. Archives
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