SearchCap: Google AdWords hack, SEO ROI & more

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• True performance baselines & ROI for SEO without attribution modeling
  May 31, 2016 by Chris Liversidge

  How do you determine your SEO program’s real performance, discounting the effects of seasonality, paid search spending or any other external factors? Columnist Chris Liversidge lays out a step-by-step process for reaching a reliable ROI calculation.

• 3 Google AdWords hacks to drive high-quality leads
  May 31, 2016 by Todd Saunders

  You might think you know AdWords, but do you know the most efficient way to get great performance? Columnist Todd Saunders shares three road-tested techniques.

• 7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know
  May 30, 2016 by Khalid Saleh

  You may be using Google Analytics, but are you using it to its full potential? Contributor Khalid Saleh lays out 7 key reports with which every marketer should be familiar.

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Official: Instagram will tell brands how many times their organic posts are shown
• 7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know
• Share conversions and remarketing lists across paid search accounts
• Brand queries: the AdWords performance illusion
• Marketo goes private so it can concentrate on its platform’s future
• The 7 habits of highly effective digital marketers: agile skill sets
• Efficiency and arbitrage: two strategies to own performance marketing
• MarTech Today: Survata’s segment-targeted surveys, Oracle loses Java case & Google app for iOS gets AMP’d
• Report: Ad blocking users more than double in a year to almost 420 million globally
• Demystifying the display advertising landscape
• [WATCH] ML Live #15: Big AdWords/PPC news from Google, Twitter changes its 140 limit & more
• Facebook plans to close LiveRail ad exchange to focus on Audience Network
• Amazon’s EchoSim lets anyone talk to its voice assistant, Alexa

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

• French finance minister rules out Google tax deal, more firms could be targeted, Reuters
• Memorial Day From Google, Bing, Dogpile & Others, Search Engine Roundtable

Local & Maps

• Google Earth Imagery Update: LaPlace tornado, Google Earth Blog
• Google Notice For Photos Are Missing From Your Listing On Google, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Now Displays Indoor Map, Store Inventory, Return Policies, Coupons & More, Search Engine Roundtable
• Meet Terrapattern, Google Earth’s Missing Search Engine, The New Yorker

Link Building

• Do you want to find hubs of authority within your industry? (Infographic), Majestic Blog

Searching

• Google Is Asking For Feedback About Design & Speed Of Search, serptests.com
• Answer: What’s in common?, SearchReSearch
• Tor switches to DuckDuckGo search results by default, TechCrunch

SEO

• Does Google Value AJAX Content Less Than Static HTML Content?, thesempost.com
• Google Lists Both Mobile Friendly Testing Tools In Search Results, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Showing Promotion Schema In Rich Snippets?, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Keyword-Rich Domain Names Positively Affect Search Click-Through Results, Between the Dots
• Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition, Moz

SEM / Paid Search

• Google’s ad ban puts payday lenders on the defensive, usatoday.com
• How Is Voice Search Going To Change The World Of Advertisers?, Certified Knowledge

The post SearchCap: Google AdWords hack, SEO ROI & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.

True performance baselines & ROI for SEO without attribution modeling

It’s an old trope of the Search Engine Optimization industry that SEO is the channel with the greatest return of any online marketing channel. But, given Google’s increased ability to identify and penalize sites employing poor-quality link-building practices, my experience in the new business trenches with QueryClick (my employer) tells me that many agencies today are failing to deliver return for their clients. And, in some cases, they report fantastic ROI figures despite presiding over declining organic traffic!

If you oversee SEO and want to get a true picture of your (or your agency’s) real return on investment improvement, what criteria do you need to use? Though this is a seemingly simple question, it’s a very important one to ask because SEO truly can — and should — be at the very core of your online marketing strategy.

So, what is my baseline?

Again, a seemingly simple question with an obvious answer: year-on-year improvement in revenue from the channel (independent of any attribution model). But let’s analyze what needs to come into the spotlight when building this baseline.

• Industry seasonality
  • Adjust for one-off trend items. For example, smartphone retail traffic is affected hugely by Apple’s iPhone release cycle, even if you’re looking at the upgrade halo effect or refurbishment market impact. Equally, insurance markets, FMCG markets and luxury brand markets all have easily identifiable one-off trends you can account for and remove from your forecast baseline.
  • Adjust for the expected external events that influence your category. Fashion is hugely affected by weather, for example, and if you know you’re in for early heat waves and disrupted winterwear demand in your target markets (Hello, 2016!), then make an assessment and adjustment. Make sure you record a note about this adjustment in your numbers, however (See below).
• Offline brand activity/paid media
  • Adjust for (and annotate in your web analytics package) any spends across your paid media channels, including TV and radio, outdoor display, promoted posts, paid social and general paid search trends (See also much further below). You’re looking to remove year-on-previous-year variation.
• Earned & owned media
  • As above, annotate and adjust for year-on-year variance in spends and discount values for earned and owned, for example, store discounting, promotional activity/aggressive online discounting, rewards for reviews (Make sure you are not doing this in 2016, BTW) and so on.
  • Bear in mind we are looking for year-on-year variation. We have to start somewhere, so if you haven’t gone through this exercise before, take the previous year as your standard to start from, unless you have good reason not to (big data gaps, multiple new territories, changing from free to paid SAAS, removal of free delivery and so on). You may have to insert some manual adjustments here; this is perfectly acceptable, as rational thought and an attempt to be comprehensive and fair is the key here, not splitting the difference on minor variation.
• Market trend impact
  • Are you in a growth market? If so, adjust to exactly counterweight this influence based on your accepted industry growth (revenue or spend industry figures). Same for declining markets. If you’re affected by this item, your business will already know what these figures are. If you don’t know, ask your finance folks.
• Keyphrase trend impact
  • This is interesting, as it assumes intent, and as such, it does not make my list for adjustable components. For example, say you happen to be on trend for the fashion fad of the year (gold lamé baggy trousers, say), is it fair to remove that from your baseline? Well, I’d argue if you have stormed the SERPs with awesome rankings for that term, and fashion follows your farsighted decision, then you should reap the benefit of that. After all, if you don’t, you’d then have to remove the decline in traffic for previously popular terms. You’re not trying to remove the effect of strategic decisions from your SEO performance calculations. This is about removing external, unearned influences.
• Historic trend impact
  • This is simply taking a view of the “state of play” performance of the site based on a two- or three-year historic view and including this as part of your baseline against which performance improvement and ROI calculation are measured. This is important, as it allows assessment of your improvement over and above your “status quo” activity. You could argue that this is an overly harsh view to take: in essence, you are obliging better performance before any ROI calculation because you are taking the previous year’s performance improvement away from your upcoming year calculations. But if there is to be any purpose to your ROI metric beyond comparing it to a third-party performance (and that would be better done by comparing flat revenue growth, or not at all, if you aren’t performing full attribution analysis), then you should consider this improvement on the status quo to be the very key to what you’re trying to achieve. To allow leeway, call ROI that’s calculated using this approach “Incremental ROI,” and also calculate unadjusted ROI to allow for context. Performing this calculation requires forecasting forward the expected performance given the historic data in a statistically significant way. We use ARIMA modeling at QueryClick, which has proven very effective.

This defines an ARIMA(p,d,q) process with drift δ/(1−Σφi)… but you don’t need to know that. Apply a data scientist to R and automate this part.

Keep all your adjustments available and clear in your baseline, and pull in the R data from your ARIMA calculation. In Excel, for example, instead of stacking up all of the above, keep the modifiers for each item separate — I like to run a separate tab — and place your modifiers in month-by-month grids, adjusting up and down by percentage rates based on the absolute difference and total volume affected. If you keep it all in a separate sheet, you can review and assess against the reality and include commentary when you set out your baseline.

If you are applying this adjustment historically (and I strongly recommend you do, even if you are going through this process for new campaign planning and to secure budget), take the same approach and place confidence rates (zero to 100 percent) against each item. These can be set to 100 percent for items you are certain affected the baseline (stuff in the past, say). For example, in the UK, we have had four consecutive “hottest months ever” this year. If your data covers this period, you have a 100 percent modifier to your early/late sales impact rate (itself a percentage).

If there is a level of doubt about a modifier you insert, try to use modifiers that are widely accepted in the business category or industry, and, where none exist, take a moderate view and use that year’s data to assess if the modifier needs to change next year. This narrative continuity, and declaration of “known unknowns” will engender confidence in your baseline stability and remove subjective influence — allowing you to take an objective view of performance over and above this baseline.

Also, annotation within your web analytics package is a best practice to ensure any segmentation and subsequent data export can take your data in context and allow adjustment.

Attributing value within an attribution model

Attribution is, itself, an in-depth post, so, other than asking you to think deeply about Avinash Kaushik’s excellent primer, let’s restrict ourselves to the most pertinent and independently measurable facet of attribution as it relates to SEO year-on-year performance: How much has SERP overlap affected SEO channel traffic capture year-on-year?

Answering this requires us to adjust for spend variation in paid search over the year, and also to deal with the old issue of brand and non-brand conversion impact. In short, brand typically converts at a higher rate on last-click attribution models, which then takes revenue (unfairly) away from other channels which contributed to the brand search in the first place.

Another way to think about this issue is that the time to convert is lower for brand traffic compared to non-brand, and so traffic via non-brand appears “harder to convert.”

For our SEO baseline, we can account for this by simply adjusting to:

• overall paid search spend adjustment (Again, we adjust month-on-month by a percentage rate based on variance with the same month for the previous year.); and
• brand vs. non-brand split.

The importance of the first of these items is self-evident. Increased paid listings where once there were only organic for your brand will impact organic traffic (regardless of any incremental halo effect where both exist) and should be removed from our baseline measurement for fairness in the same manner as the previous items. The second is less evident.

The theory it models is: if SEO is to drive new business (as opposed to cannibalizing other channels), and if we are trying to measure growth, then increases in non-brand traffic should be critical and weighted up.

Therefore, in determining our baseline, we should weight-up the value of non-brand traffic and depress the impact of any brand increases. This further limits the impact of external factors and rewards the capture of highly valuable new business that would not otherwise have engaged if our ranking had not existed.

Adding this into your baseline requires an understanding of the brand versus non-brand split in your paid and organic data, which I described in my previous article on building lightweight attribution models for paid and organic media mix analysis.

Returning the “true” ROI

At this stage, we have normalized for many of the unearned components that contribute to the performance of any metric assessed from organic search. Obviously, to calculate ROI, you will need a value for Revenue (or Net Revenue). Taking a historic view, we can assess the previous year’s Net Revenue from our normalized baseline: this is the “R” in our ROI calculation and should be used for the calculation.

If you are managing an internal team, you must decide how much to weight up the influence of increased generic performance to counterweight the stark reduction of trend performance you are removing with all the above normalization With a new or growing team, you may want to down-weight the trend performance as encouragement for future performance. With a more experienced team, you could be more stringent and allow for more “carryover” performance from the previous year.

Regardless of your decision, you now have the tools and a solid methodology for why you are calculating ROI figures that will allow you to interact more meaningfully with the rest of the business. Normalizing SEO ROI enables you to to be closer to the measurement protocols used with other business activities.

The post True performance baselines & ROI for SEO without attribution modeling appeared first on Search Engine Land.

3 Google AdWords hacks to drive high-quality leads

You already know that Google AdWords can be an important tool for scaling your business, even if you’re new to PPC marketing. If that’s something you didn’t know, beware of the spoiler to follow: Google AdWords can be an important tool for scaling your business. 

The problem for most advertisers is that AdWords can be expensive. Every dollar you spend paying for clicks is a dollar you can’t allocate to other areas of your business, so it’s vital to make each one count.

Today, I’m going to walk you through three Google AdWords hacks to help you drive high-quality leads and ensure that every dollar you spend is well spent.

These are hacks that I used with almost all of my clients during my time at Google and now employ with all our customers at AdHawk. They have been very successful for these clients and will help you save some serious time and money.

Let’s dig in!

Google AdWords hack #1: the only way to bulk-modify broad match modified keywords

One AdWords feature I consistently see advertisers struggle with is keyword match types. There’s a lot of bad information on the internet about what match types advertisers should be using exclusively. The truth is that each one has a time and a place, but I’m going to focus on two of my favorites today: broad match modified keywords and phrase match keywords.

I subscribe to the Goldilocks way of thinking for the keywords match types I use most often. Broad match keywords can trigger too much irrelevant traffic. Exact match keywords can severely limit the number of eyeballs on your ads. Broad match modified and phrase match keywords, however, are just right.

(If you need a refresher on the differences between keyword match types, check out this great piece by Josh Dreller.)

Broad match modified and phrase match keywords strike the perfect balance between reaching the largest audience possible and still maintaining some control over the type of user your ads are being served to. This is incredibly important if you’re looking to stretch every dollar you spend on AdWords.

The last thing you want is for your ads to be triggered for irrelevant traffic and result in clicks. Those customers will likely never convert, and you’re probably better off flushing your money down an AdWords-shaped toilet.

Phrase match keywords are pretty simple to enable. All you have to do is head to the “Keywords” section of your campaign, check the box next to the keywords you want to turn into phrase match keywords, click “Edit,” click “Change match types,” make sure the form says “From broad match, to phrase match,” and BOOM! You’re done.

Broad match modified keywords, on the other hand, are a little bit trickier to modify in bulk. As of the publish date of this post, the only way to move your broad match keywords to broad match modified keywords is to edit in a “+” to each of the keywords you want to change one by one. That is, unless, you follow my simple Google AdWords hack. It’s a simple two-part process to get this up and running:

Part 1 — Find and replace

• Navigate to the “Keywords” section of your Google AdWords campaign.
• Check the boxes to the left of the keywords you want to change from broad match to broad match modified.
• Click “Edit” and then “Change keyword text.”
• Keep the “Action” section “Find and replace.”
• In the “Find text” field, put your cursor in the box and click the space bar once. (You’re telling Google to find all your spaces.)
• In the “Replace with” field, put your cursor in the box, click the space bar once, and add a plus sign (+). (Google AdWords uses the plus sign to indicate which keywords are broad match modified keywords.)
• Click “Make changes.”

Part 2 — Append text

• With all the keywords from above still selected, click “Edit,” and then “Change keyword text.”
• Change the “Action” to “Append text.”
• Add a plus sign (+) in the “Append text” field.
• Click “Before existing text.”
• Click “Make changes.”

It may seem like a lot of steps, but I promise it will save hours of your time (especially if you have large keyword lists). Make sure to review the keywords that were modified and remove any plus signs from filler keywords terms (like “the” and “an”) and from any individual keyword terms you don’t want to be broad match modified.

Google AdWords hack #2: mastering Quality Score with the “One Per” Rule

Just uttering the phrase “Quality Score” can strike fear in the hearts of Google AdWords advertisers. What is it? How does it work? What can I do to make it better? I get these questions all the time, and my response to them is always, “Follow the ‘One Per’ Rule.”

As the name suggests, the One Per Rule requires you to limit the number of keywords per Ad Group to 1. It may sound a little crazy and counterintuitive, but there is a method behind the madness.

Limiting yourself to one keyword per ad group ensures that your keyword is tied closely to your ad text and the text on your landing page. This tells Google that your relevancy is through the roof, therefore awarding you a high Quality Score. It’s easily my favorite Google AdWords hack.

This isn’t a technique to use with every keyword, however. Only employ the “One Per” Rule on your top-performing keywords. Here’s how to get it going:

• Step 1 — Research. Select the Campaign you want to optimize and locate your five to 10 top-performing keywords across Ad Groups. If you’re looking to optimize conversions, choose the keywords that are most successful in generating that result. Or, if you want to optimize cost per conversion or cost per click, choose those top keywords. Every keyword you choose should be competitive when it comes to click-through rate (one percent and above).

• Step 2 — Create one AdGroup per keyword. Create an Ad Group for each of your top-performing keywords. If you have five top keywords, you should also have five Ad Groups. Keep things organized by using each individual keyword as the name of the AdGroup.

• Step 3 — Ensure your ad text is relevant. One of the keys to ensuring the “One Per” Rule is effective is sprinkling the keyword throughout the ad text. The keyword in your Ad Group will appear multiple times in your ad text and again on your landing page.

Quality Scores tend to be higher when the keyword appears in the ad headline, description and display URL. If one of my top-performing keywords is “women’s hats,” the structure of my ad should be similar to the one shown below:

• Step 4 — Optimize your landing page. The final step in the “One Per” Rule is simple: Ensure the keyword appears somewhere on your landing page.

Thinking about Quality Score as numbers between one and 10 makes it easy to forget why it’s really important — it’s Google’s way to determine how you as an advertiser create a good user experience by matching your ad to its message, its destination and what you are offering the consumer. Following the “One Per” Rule puts you in a position to check each one of those boxes and makes your life a little easier along the way.

Google AdWords hack #3: enabling call-only campaigns

Phone calls are the lifeblood for lots of businesses leveraging Google AdWords. It’s important to note that there are tons of opportunities to take advantage of. A recent study by BIA/Kelsey estimates that “annual calls to businesses from smartphones will reach 162 billion by 2019.” That’s billion with a B.

If you’re an advertiser who’s looking to maximize the number of phone calls you get from AdWords, you need to make sure to create a clear path for your potential customers to pick up the phone and give you a ring.

This can be difficult when you’re accustomed to guiding them through the normal AdWords flow of clicking on your ad and landing on your website. There are lots of distractions in those two simple steps that could keep your customers from doing what you really want them to do.

The best way to avoid all distractions is to encourage your customers to call you directly from your ad, and the best way to do that is through setting up a call-only campaign.

via Google

Google’s call-only campaign type is designed to only serve ads on mobile devices that are able to make phone calls. Instead of the traditional “click to website” flow, call-only campaigns prominently show your business phone number and a “click to call” button.

via Google

This means each click you pay for could equal a phone call to your business. It also means you have more opportunity to get creative with your ad copy. Action-oriented phrases like “schedule a call today” or “call a local expert now” will encourage customers to take action directly from the ad text.

Getting up and running with a call-only campaign is pretty simple if you follow the instructions below:

• Click the red “+Campaign” button.
• Select “Search Network only” from the drop-down menu.
• Select the “Call-only” radio button on the right.
• Fill out the remaining information regarding the campaigns settings.
• Click the “Save and continue” button.
• Fill in the information to create your call-only ad. Make sure to include action-oriented phrases, and enable a Google forwarding phone number if you want to track phone calls (We highly recommend this).
• Click “Save ad group.”

Final thoughts

With these three Google AdWords hacks, you can keep your accounts lean, precisely targeted and better optimized to drive high-quality leads. I’m always looking for new Google AdWords hacks to experiment with. If you have a good one, feel free to share it in Search Engine Land’s social media channels.

The post 3 Google AdWords hacks to drive high-quality leads appeared first on Search Engine Land.

7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know

For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its conversion measurement capabilities.

After all, this is the tool that tells you whether your efforts are actually translating into results.

Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. There is far too much data and too few easy-to-follow dashboards to sort it out.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of seven custom and standard reports you can use right away to get better insight into your marketing performance.

1. Mobile Performance Report

You know this already: ours is a mobile-first world. The total number of mobile users now exceeds the total number of desktop users…

…and mobile e-commerce is nearly 30% of all e-commerce in the US.

In fact, mobile is so important now that Google even penalizes the websites that are not mobile-friendly.

For marketers, knowing how their sites perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and winning over customers.

The mobile performance report shows you how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.

You can even segment the report further to see which mobile devices/browsers customers are using to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poorly on some devices.

Accessing this report is easy – just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview

This will show you how your site does on different platforms:

You can add more dimensions here as you see fit. Take careful note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see whether your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.

2. Traffic Acquisition Report

Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? That guest post you published earlier — is it generating any traffic to your website? How about your SEO strategy? Is it actually working?

The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many marketers, this will be their first step in the reporting process.

This is a standard report, so you can find it by going to Acquisition -> Overview.

This will give you a quick breakdown of your traffic sources.

Of particular insight here is the “Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages visitors used to enter your site.

3. Content Efficiency Report

Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find that tracking it is getting a little overwhelming?

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this exact problem.

This report tracks entrances, pageviews, bounces and goal completions to help you answer questions like:

• Which content is engaging your audience the most?
• What type of content (images, videos, gifs, infographics, reviews) performs best with your readers?
• Which content converts readers into customers?
• Which content is shared most by your users?

Here’s a quick overview from Avinash himself:

You can get a more detailed explanation of the report here. To grab a copy for yourself, check this link (you’ll need to log into Google Analytics first).

4. Keyword Analysis Report

Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, ever since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, your organic traffic keyword report has mostly shown this:

However, you can still gain a ton of insight about your visitors by tracking the performance of unencrypted keywords.

This report created by eConsultancy analyzes the most popular (and available) incoming keywords to your site. It shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each keyword.

Use this data to figure out what keywords are working best for you, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals, and what keywords you need to optimize for in the future.

5. New vs. Returning Visitors

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Usually, the metrics for new and returning visitors are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stick around longer and have lower bounce rates.

 

6. Landing Pages Report

Your users will enter your site from all sorts of pages. Some will type in your homepage URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter feed.

This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they first enter your site. Based on data from this report, you can figure out how users are interacting with your site.

For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high bounce rate pages more engaging.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages

7. Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors that don’t take any action and leave from the same page they landed on.

“Exit Rate” measures the percentage of your visitors that browse more than one page on your site before leaving.

This report compares the bounce rate vs. exit rate for different pages on your site.

You can find it by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:

Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.

This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar, etc.).

Over to you

Google Analytics is essential analytics tool for any marketer, but making the most of it can be challenging. By using a mixture of pre-created custom reports and standard reports, you can gain valuable insight into your users.

Google Analytics’ Solutions Gallery is particularly useful for someone new to analytics. Here, you can import expert-created reports into your Analytics account to build powerful dashboards quickly. You can also use these reports as guides to help you understand this incredible tool better.

The post 7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SearchCap: Google iOS app, food and brand queries & more

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google App for iOS gets AMP content & sports highlights in Now cards
  May 27, 2016 by Amy Gesenhues

  Google says today’s improvements for its IOS app with save users a combined 6.5 million hours this year.

• Google now displays image thumbnails next to search snippets for food-related queries
  May 27, 2016 by Barry Schwartz

  Now when you do food-related searches on Google, you may see image thumbnails right in the snippets.

• What content strategists need to know about SEO
  May 27, 2016 by Digital Marketing Depot

  Today’s algorithms want great content. Unique, high-quality content is valuable to search engines in a way that is now translating into better search rankings, which is big news for content marketers. What exactly do content strategists need to know about SEO, and why? In “The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Content Marketers,” Contently teams up […]

• Brand queries: the AdWords performance illusion
  May 27, 2016 by Tim Mayer

  If your AdWords optimization efforts are focused toward terms and ads you credit with last-click conversions, you’re not alone. But columnist Tim Mayer contends you’re being shortsighted.

• Share conversions and remarketing lists across paid search accounts
  May 27, 2016 by Amy Bishop

  Managing multiple search accounts for a single domain doesn’t have to mean juggling tons of conversion and remarketing tags. Contributor Amy Bishop shares steps to seamlessly share data across accounts without cluttering your website’s code with duplicative tags.

• Search in Pics: Google Dance Tokyo, gBrau beer & a pink penguin engineer
  May 27, 2016 by Barry Schwartz

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Google pink penguin Android figurine: Source: Google+ Google Dance Tokyo: Source: Twitter Google Zurich rock-climbing wall […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Survata offers first online surveys targeted at second- and third-party user segments
• How to deliver a true cross-channel experience
• The future of voice-related SEO for local business
• The 5 strangest search terms in 2,000+ AdWords accounts
• Well played, Google: Advertisers (finally) get more device bidding controls
• Android users open 2x more notifications, but iOS users much faster to open — [Report]
• New Twitter features can boost brand engagement
• What marketers need to know about the rate of technology obsolescence
• Pew Research: 62 percent of US adults get news from social media
• Stop fearing failure and be brave in your content marketing program
• MarTech Today: The fading Windows Phone, the top payment processors & the Flash Apocalypse
• Facebook expands Audience Network reach beyond just its users — to everyone
• Google wins its Java case against Oracle (again), saves billions in fees — for now

Search News From Around The Web:

Local & Maps

• Google Local Image Photos – Let’s Link Anywhere but Your Site, Mike Blumenthal

Link Building

• Ask Yoast: can backlinks from one site hurt my rankings?, Yoast

Searching

• Rich Cards Show for Courses and Top Recipes, Rank Ranger

SEO

• Everything You Need to Know About Google Assist and Google Home for SEO and Marketing, Ignite Visibility
• Kayak Seeks SEO Help From Google’s John Mueller, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM / Paid Search

• Announcing v201605 of the AdWords API, Google Ads Developer Blog

Search Marketing

• Video: Google Trillions Of Searches, AdWords Updates, Algorithm Changes & Hiring, Search Engine Roundtable

The post SearchCap: Google iOS app, food and brand queries & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google App for iOS gets AMP content & sports highlights in Now cards

What content strategists need to know about SEO

Today’s algorithms want great content. Unique, high-quality content is valuable to search engines in a way that is now translating into better search rankings, which is big news for content marketers.

What exactly do content strategists need to know about SEO, and why? In “The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Content Marketers,” Contently teams up with some top SEO minds to explore exactly that.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download this MarTech white paper.

The post What content strategists need to know about SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Brand queries: the AdWords performance illusion

Experienced marketers know that where high-consideration purchases are concerned, it’s normal for customer journeys and purchase cycles to take weeks, or even months.

But many AdWords practitioners still look at each search session as the entire relationship with a user when looking at performance reporting.

These sessions are then analyzed and translated into bidding strategies and also influence campaign budget allocations. As a result, the sessions that are most highly valued are the ones that typically start with a brand query and are closer to the conversion event than shopper discovery sessions that are typically initiated with a generic category or generic product query.

To grow a healthy sales pipeline, it is essential for marketers to work the top of the funnel and spur introduction to the brand. This is how wise marketers feed volume to the bottom of the funnel, where the conversion events happen.

Targeting shoppers in the research phase involves testing generic keywords and category term keywords to discover which ones provide assists to the conversions that happen later on in the customer journey.

As an industry, we have become myopic with our AdWords strategies and are focused on optimizing a single event — typically last click — for a positive outcome instead of optimizing the customer relationship across multiple touch points for more sales and revenue over the longer term.

Conduct an AdWords audit

Are your own AdWords campaigns falling into the brand comfort zone? Your first step in figuring this out is to audit your campaigns. As you review, ask yourself these questions:

• Are your ad groups set up in a way that lets you separate and compare your branded and non-branded ad group spend and performance?
• What percentage of your AdWords campaigns spend is brand versus non-brand keywords?

If the answer to the first question is no, adjust your account structure to ensure branded terms and non-branded terms are not intermingled in the same ad groups.

Once this is complete, you should determine the level of incremental lift that the brand terms are providing. You can accomplish this by turning off the brand term ad groups in AdWords for a week and see the loss in AdWords revenue and the gain in Natural Search revenue.

This will give you a sense of what amount of additional revenue you would be getting from natural search results if you didn’t bid on this keyword. Then, use this information to determine how much you should be discounting the revenue in your ROI or ROAS calculation.

This discount will vary by industry and brand, but the most important thing here is to implement some sort of discount so you can balance your AdWords spend optimally throughout the purchase cycle.

Rebalancing your keyword portfolio

Once you have taken a discount percentage (for this example, we’ll use 30 percent), you can now look at the performance of your branded and unbranded ad groups with and without the discount.

This will give us a fresh look at how our AdWords campaign is performing and how we might rebalance our bids and the AdWords spend across our campaigns.

Rebalancing will optimize our campaign towards investing ad spend in capturing incremental sales and a bigger revenue pie, rather than the comfortable and myopic view of looking at and optimizing solely toward metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

When fine-tuning the campaign, look at these factors:

• Review brand terms one by one.
• Analyze the Search Console report called “Search Analytic Report.”
• Discover the click and CTR differential between when the brand terms were being bidded on and not bidded on.
• Turn off keywords where the ads are not providing significant incremental clicks and value.

Reinvesting in incremental sales

Now that you’ve optimized your campaigns, you are ready to move some of the saved budget and reinvest it into keywords at the beginning of the purchase journey.

It is important for brands to be top of mind for users when they are shopping, so that when they get closer to their purchase, they include your brand with the product in their query, rather than that of your competitor. Brand also plays a large factor in both paid and organic search click-through rate (CTR); users tend to click on results where a recognized brand appears in the title or the URL.

To increase the likelihood of searchers typing in searches that include your brand, you must bid on generic terms earlier in the funnel. This is when shoppers are learning the brands that are relevant to their purchase consideration set.

Display advertising, content marketing and social advertising can also be a great way to ensure that your brand has top-of-mind association with a particular category or product/service. The increase in your CTR on your ads will have the positive second-order effect of increasing your AdWords Quality Score, reducing your costs of search advertising and increasing revenue later on in the purchase journey.

When you acknowledge the performance illusion of branded keywords, you have a chance to adjust your campaigns for true performance. You’ll see the long-term rewards are worth the effort.

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Share conversions and remarketing lists across paid search accounts

At some point or another, anyone handling paid search at an agency has likely managed a client that had multiple accounts. Before concerns are raised at the idea of double-serving, let me explain that there are a lot of different legitimate reasons for why and how this can happen, none of which promote double-serving or are meant to game the system.

Here are some of the scenarios that could cause a client to go this route:

• separated search and display accounts;
• an account for each different product;
• a brand account and a non-brand account; or
• accounts for different geographies.

These accounts aren’t built to compete with each other; they are just used to organize large accounts with a lot of campaigns.

There are pros and cons of splitting things into multiple accounts — a discussion of which could be its own post — but one of the previous cons was that it required you to place a ton of tags. Luckily, that’s not the case nowadays.

Thankfully, the engines have made it easier to share tags across accounts so that you don’t have to place duplicative tags from each account in order to pull in data. In this column, I’ll explain how to accomplish this.

What can you share?

You can share remarketing lists and conversion data across accounts, as opposed to setting up multiple tags to build lists and track conversions in each different account.

How to implement

The implementation process is different in Google and Bing –- and Google offers a few different options — so let’s walk through each separately.

Sharing data in Bing

Sharing conversions and audience lists in Bing is pretty straightforward if the accounts are in the same customer ID (CID).

When you set up your conversion event or audience, the last question in the setup form asks whether you’d like the conversion or audience to be shared among other accounts. If you don’t want this, you simply click the radio button by the account. If you do, you click “Across all accounts.”

By “All accounts,” it means any accounts that are housed within the same CID — not the entire Account Summary (Bing’s terminology for its answer to AdWords’ My Client Center).

When you set up your tags, you need to know whether you intend them to be used by a single account or to be shared across all accounts, because once the tags are created, that setting cannot be changed. In order to change it, you’d have to create a new tag and start from scratch.

Setting up lists and conversions to be shared from a Google AdWords Manager account

If you are creating a new My Client Center (MCC) with new accounts, the easiest thing to do is to create these data points at the MCC level, as opposed to creating them for each account.

To do this, follow these instructions:

1. Set up your MCC with the Accounts that will utilize the data.
2. Go to the “Accounts” tab in the MCC, and then choose “Audiences.” Set up the Remarketing tag the same way that you would for any Google account. You’ll use this tag as opposed to setting up different remarketing tags for each account.
3. Create your lists just as you normally would.
4. Make sure that your accounts are set up to share lists by going back to the “Accounts” section within the MCC and then selecting the Admin tab. Choose the accounts that should share remarketing lists.
5. Click Edit and choose “Remarketing account” > “Change to this manager.”

Setting up conversions at the MCC level is an equally simple process:

1. Just go to the “Conversion actions” section within your MCC and place the conversion tag.
2. Set up conversions as you normally would.
3. Go back to the “Accounts” section within the MCC, and then go to the Admin tab. Select any accounts that you would like to utilize the conversion actions that are set up at the MCC level.
4. Then click “Edit” and choose “Conversion account” > “Change to this manager.”

Note: It sometimes takes awhile for lists and conversions to show up in the account after you set them up, so don’t panic.

Sharing existing conversion and audiences between client accounts

If you already have remarketing lists set up in an account, then you probably don’t want to start over –- especially if you’re working with a website that only rolls out changes (aka new tags) one or two times per month. Once you already have an audience built up, you just want to use it, right?

Sharing data from one account to another is pretty easy in AdWords if you know what you are doing. It isn’t nearly as intuitive as in Bing, though, if you don’t know what you are looking for.

If you’ve already set up remarketing lists in one account that you’d like to share with other new or existing accounts, you can do so by following these steps:

1. Go to the MCC in which the accounts are contained. If you don’t already have these accounts in an MCC, you’ll need to put them in one.
2. Go to “Accounts,” and then click the Admin tab.
3. Select the accounts that you’d like to share or receive lists. Then click the “Edit” drop-down and choose the “Change to this manager” option under “Remarketing account.”
4. Go into the account that you plan to share lists from. Go into the Account Access page within Account Settings. Toward the bottom of the page, you’ll see a request to opt this account into sharing lists. Change the “Remarketing list sharing” option to “ON.”
5. Go back to the MCC. Within the MCC, go to the Audiences section (on the left-hand panel) and choose “Share lists” under “Existing lists.”
6. Add lists to the sharing pool by choosing the account that you want to share lists from.
7. Select the lists and click “Share.”

Bonus: Importing data from Google Analytics

In addition to sharing lists across AdWords accounts, you can also import Google Analytics data with ease. There are a lot of benefits to creating goals and remarketing lists in Google Analytics and then importing them into other channels.

For one, you can create hyper-segmented audiences with all of the data that you have at your fingertips. Likewise with conversions, Google Analytics offers a lot of options for setting up goals. An added benefit of Google Analytics goal-tracking, of course, is that it allows you to track performance across all channels with one consistent attribution model.

In addition, you can access Google Analytics lists from multiple accounts without having to place additional pixels. As if that’s not enough, Google took an extra measure last November to make it even easier to import data from Google Analytics to multiple client accounts.

With this change, you can link Google Analytics directly to your AdWords MCC using the setup wizard in AdWords within the account settings section.

This process allows you to link the MCC to Google Analytics, as opposed to linking your AdWords accounts to Analytics one by one. This is useful if you want all of the accounts in the MCC to be linked to the same Analytics Property (or properties). With this feature, you can pull in remarketing lists and goals one time for the whole MCC, as opposed to importing them one by one in each account.

If your accounts are in an MCC with other accounts, you can put them in a sub-MCC to make this work. Otherwise, you can choose to link multiple AdWords accounts to Analytics at one time, as opposed to linking the whole MCC.  You can find instructions for linking options, here.

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Search in Pics: Google Dance Tokyo, gBrau beer & a pink penguin engineer

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

Google pink penguin Android figurine:

Source: Google+

Google Dance Tokyo:

Source: Twitter

Google Zurich rock-climbing wall with Android climbing holds:

Source: Google+

Google I/O sunscreen packets:

Source: Google+

gBrau, custom beer for Google Munich:

Source: Twitter

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Google now displays image thumbnails next to search snippets for food related queries

Google is now displaying image thumbnails in the main web search results page when you search for food related queries. It seems most searchers are now seeing this now, something Google has tested one way another for months now.

I do not think it is related to the new rich cards feature that is available for recipes and movies. It seems that this works on non-recipe web sites as well, without the structured markup.

Here are pictures of how it looks for various food related queries on both desktop and mobile Google results:

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