Paul Fletcher said Microsoft is at the ready to replace Google Search with Bing in Australia, while Treasury pointed to the existence of codes in the dairy and sugar industries as justification for pushing forward with the Media Bargaining Code.
Google last month threatened to pull its search engine from Australia if the Media Bargaining Code in its current form were to become law, but the prime minister and his army of ministers have said they are confident the likes of Microsoft could swoop in to fill the void if Google does in fact exit the market.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday said Prime Minister Scott Morrison had spoken with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the opportunities for Bing in a Google-less Australia, and during his address to the National Press Club on Monday, the prime minister said Microsoft is pretty confident that Bing is a sufficient alternative.
Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts Paul Fletcher joined the Bing support team, telling ABC News 24 that in the event Google leaves, he expects to see investment from other players in the local market.
“We know that big tech companies make these threats from time to time, they don’t always follow through,” he said of Google’s potential departure.
“This is a potential commercial opportunity for other providers of search.”
Fletcher was asked if Bing was a sufficient alternative for Google.
“I don’t hold myself out to be somebody providing product ratings and clearly Google has a much bigger market share in the Australian market than Bing,” he said. “But what is clear by the meeting initiated by Microsoft … is they’re very significantly interested in the market opportunity in Australia should Google wish to withdraw its presence in Australia.
“There will be a strong market response.”
While Fletcher was hesitant to answer if Google would follow through on its threat, he did say companies operating in Australia needed to abide by Australian rules and regulations.
“Ultimately at the end of the day, if you want to do business in Australia, you need to comply with the laws of the sovereign government of Australia — that’s not a particularly radical proposition,” Fletcher continued.
“What we’ve seen in other areas where we’ve introduced laws that initially have been resisted by global technology businesses is that ultimately they have complied.”
With the Media Bargaining Code in December passing the lower house, the Bill is before a Senate Committee debating its future. The committee on Monday afternoon heard from Treasury’s Markets Group Deputy Secretary, Meghan Quinn.
She was asked if Treasury has looked at the implications of a Google-less Australia.
“We’ve looked at the possibility of the actions as stated by the parties, what the implications might be in a general sense, but exactly what they will do, more analysis is needed,” she said.
“It’s a little hard to think about worst case scenario — it depends a bit on what that looks like.”
Quinn and her fellow government representatives refused to answer if Bing or DuckDuckGo were sufficient alternatives to Google.
In justifying the decision to draft a code, Quinn pointed to other sectors that have competition law codes in place, such as in franchising, food and grocery, dairy, sugar, and horticulture.
“Many of the elements of the code before the committee are similar in intent to those found in these other codes … some include arbitration models,” she said.
“One of the interesting things is the actual provision of a code in itself changes the market dynamics, without the code necessarily being invoked.
“We’ve seen that for example in the sugar industry, the existence of the code and the existing of the elements of mandatory arbitration have actually driven commercial outcomes without the arbitration mechanisms being sparked.”
Treasury was asked about where the federal government spends its media and advertising budget, with ALP Senator Alex Gallacher arguing that the government has in fact been complicit in defunding traditional media organisations by moving to other methods of advertising.
“If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, are we trying to save the Titanic that’s sinking?” he asked.
Nikki Baird, vice president of retail innovation at Aptos, says the longer the pandemic lasts, the harder it will be to change consumer preferences.
Following a better-than-expected holiday shopping season driven by robust online sales, retailers and brands are trying to figure out how to keep the momentum going. Here, Nikki Baird, vice president of retail innovation at Aptos, discusses trends that emerged during the pandemic, and what brands and retailers should consider in the year ahead.
WWD: How has the customer’s shopping journey changed this past year?
Nikki Baird: It has been a rough ride for shoppers, between safety and health, economic uncertainty, and changing restrictions and rules to follow. Consumers went online in unprecedented numbers this past year as nonessential stores closed for lockdowns and essential retailers ran out of everything. Consumers have stayed for the convenience. They broke loyalty with long-time brands that they could no longer find and tried new retailers that offered them contactless conveniences.
To say it has been disruptive would be an understatement. But there are bright spots to be found: consumers might’ve shifted from work clothes to sweatpants, but [they continue to need and buy sweatpants]. And while they couldn’t go out into the world the way they wanted to, they haven’t done too badly in bringing the world home to them through home cooking and investments in home goods.
The real question is how many of these shifts will stick around when the pandemic is over. One thing to keep in mind — the longer it takes, the harder it will be to break new habits.
WWD: As COVID-19 further drives online sales and greater demand for curb side pickup and buy online, pick up in store, what do retailers and brands need to do to create a seamless shopping experience?
N.B.: My best advice: over-communicate! And make it easy for the consumer to find someone to help if things go wrong. Everyone does a reasonable job planning the happy path, but no one spends enough time trying to imagine where things will go wrong. It’s frustrating to go to a website to order and not be sure whether they do curb side pickup, or, to arrive to the parking lot and not know where to go, or to end up waiting for 20 minutes not knowing whether someone is working on your order or whether you need to call them — and there is no number to be found anywhere.
Nikki Baird Devon McKenna
Tell people how it works when they order (BOPIS or BOPAC [buy online, pick up curb side]), tell them in the confirmation email, tell them when their order is ready, tell them on the signage when they get there, and remind them of their options on the receipt for next time. Everyone does it differently, and consumers are confused.
Don’t forget that the person looking for the pickup sign may very well be a driver who has to keep their eyes on the road, too — which could make the one tiny sign at the parking lot entrance totally insufficient. Put yourself in your shopper’s shoes and experience it for yourself!
WWD: How has the in-store experience changed? What do customers expect?
N.B.: The in-store experience of today is not going to be the in-store experience that will exist after the pandemic. Retailers and consumers both still need stores; consumers find value in going to stores, even if it’s only for the entertainment value. Right now, consumers expect to know the rules of engagement, to stay as safe as possible, and to touch as little as possible. In my personal shopping experience, many consumers also want to feel they’re doing their part in keeping employees as safe as possible, too.
The only thing I will add here is that while there will be a period of uncertainty as we transition through to achieving herd immunity, once we exit that, consumers will certainly still expect good hygiene and will have new expectations of cleanliness when it comes to things like payment devices.
However, I don’t think that will translate into continuing to want store experiences that are over-indexed on convenience to the detriment of entertainment and browsing and just gathering with friends.
WWD: And what should brands and retailers do to improve the experience?
N.B.: Whether consumers are ready or not, we see retailers looking to invest in more mobile experiences. Mobile for employees so that they don’t have to serve a long line at a cash wrap, and mobile for consumers like consumer mobile scan and go from their own mobile devices. I think both of those are investments that will not go away once the extreme need for convenience and safety dissipates.
And at this point in the pandemic, those are the most sensible investments to make — they improve on consumer expectations today but are also likely to continue to do so even after the pandemic is over.
Some agency clients aren’t able to address important questions their marketing partners need answered in order to devise the best strategy to meet their needs. Luckily, analytics tools can help agencies uncover illuminating data points that clients can’t provide up front.
The key to informing a strategy that will achieve a client’s marketing goals is to identify which specific types of data you’re looking for before diving into the analysis. Below, experts from Forbes Agency Council share 11 of the most valuable pieces of information you can glean by analysing your clients’ Google Analytics.
1. What Attracts Versus Repels
As communications experts, we love reviewing Google Analytics to better understand how customers are engaging with a brand and what’s attracting them versus repelling them. This establishes information that allows us to develop more compelling content strategies. You’re able to see the level of leads coming from media relations and placed articles, which is a strong indicator of campaign success. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
2. The Client’s Audience
At the end of the day, the most valuable element of successful marketing is understanding the consumer. Google Analytics can provide some insight into a client’s audience. Combining this with other data sets and marrying the research with strategic analysis can inform an insight-driven marketing strategy. This can inspire consumer targeting, creative, media and more. – Marc Becker, The Tangent Agency
3. ROI On Marketing Investments
No matter what, you want to make sure that you are getting ROI on any marketing investment. Even if your Google Analytics are telling a positive story, if you aren’t getting actual ROI, there is data that either is not accurate or needs to be looked at holistically. There should always be a system of checks and balances, and all touch points should be telling the same story. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
4. Return On Ad Spend Performance
The most important piece of data you can glean from Google Analytics is the ROAS performance of your clients’ media buying across the various websites they are advertising on. By tracking where the users are coming from and tracking their activity on your clients’ sites, you can determine their ROAS. You can then shift media investment to the top-performing websites. – Dennis Cook, Gamut. Smart Media from Cox.
5. The Source Of Relevant Traffic
Analysing their clients’ Google Analytics allows agencies to see where relevant traffic is coming from, identify trends and target opportunities. Additionally, optimizing your campaigns based on the data feedback will lead to higher conversion rates. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC
6. Time On Page
Time on page is the most important Google Analytics statistic. Once you get traffic to your site, do they stay? What content do they consume? How much mindshare do they give you? What pages are sticky and not transactional? Time on page tells you what prospects value and where they give your ideas credence. Know this, and you’ll know your audience. – Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group
7. Where Viewers Leave The Website
The pages where viewers are leaving the client’s website at abnormally high rates is where to focus. By finding out what pages are causing website viewers to drop off the most, clients can analyze these pages and make necessary adjustments to better grab the attention of future visitors. – Stefan Pollack, The Pollack Group
8. Behaviour Flow
Behaviour Flow is still my favourite feature offered by Google Analytics. Studying the flow of the visitors and the path they take while interacting with a website helps business owners understand what a page means to the customer. This information helps business owners understand how to prioritize and optimize pages to offer visitors a better user experience. – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
9. Goal Conversion Data
Google Analytics can be overwhelming, so a great place to start is by looking at a client’s goal conversions (the number of visitors that took the action your client intended for them to take). This one area can give quick insight into how and why a website was built, as well as whether or not the site is performing the way it’s meant to. If goals have not yet been set up, this is a great opportunity to start a conversation with your client about short- and long-term objectives. – Carey Kirkpatrick, CKP
10. The Most Popular Content
Simply looking at your website’s most popular content can tell you if that website really serves your target customer. All too often, content serves another purpose or user. My agency’s example is that the bio I wrote for our vice president was the most popular piece of content, which proved that web visitors came to copy that bio rather than to hire our agency. – Jim Caruso, M1PR, Inc. d/b/a MediaFirst PR – Atlanta
11. Device Usage
One often overlooked piece of data in Google Analytics is device usage. All clients basically have two websites: a desktop site and a mobile site. Understanding what visitors are doing on both sites is critical, especially when it comes to advertising and landing pages. – T. Maxwell, eMaximize
The pharmacy was an old, calcified institution when Eric Kinariwala developed a digital, delivery-based business model. Then he needed to give it a personality.
Your mom.
That’s whom Eric Kinariwala wants his online pharmacy, Capsule, to feel like.
“Everybody needs some looking after sometimes,” Kinariwala says on Inc.’s What I Know podcast. “That’s what we’ve really built the whole business around.”
He says if your mother were a pharmacist, and you were her only patient, she would make sure you knew how to take your medication. You could text her with questions. She’d make sure you got the best price. She’d make sure you never ran out. And of course, she’d bring it right to your door. “Digitizing that idea has always been the driving force of the consumer experience and the brand and what we set out to do in the early days,” Kinariwala says.
A former analyst at Bain Capital and Perry Capital, Kinariwala launched Capsule in 2016, after he had had trouble picking up sinus medication from his local pharmacy. He imagined simplifying the pharmacy interaction for consumers and doctors simultaneously by building a tech platform and prescription-delivery infrastructure. When he dug in, he found an industry that hadn’t budged much in 50 years in the United States.
In his research, Kinariwala found consumers weren’t the only ones with obvious pain points: Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and drug companies all had difficulties in communicating with pharmacies. He set out to rebuild the system from the ground up. But he didn’t forget about his initial inspiration, the consumer experience.
A brand can look and feel friendly–have the right fonts, say–but that’s really a small part of your customers’ perception of your brand, Kinariwala says. You cannot forget the human interactions. He adds: “Every interaction that we have with our customers, whether that’s in person with the messenger dropping off their medications, whether that’s how someone responds to your text message, whether that’s how someone answers your question on the phone, whether that’s what the app feels like–you should feel looked after and cared for and loved.”
Jeremy McGilvrey Gives Tips for How Small Business Owners Can Grow Their Customer Base with Email Marketin
If you’re among those who think that email marketing is past its prime, then think again. Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is still one of the most successful digital marketing strategies used by companies such as Amazon and HubSpot.
Statistics have revealed email marketing is a lot more successful than SEO, paid search (PPC), social media marketing, and affiliate marketing.
Many successful small business owners use email marketing to grow their customer base. You can either choose to outsource your email marketing or select a staff member to execute it for you.
With the right techniques and the correct use of the data, you can achieve success with email marketing. Let’s dive into some tried and tested email marketing strategies.
I’ll also discuss how these methods can drive leads to your small business.
Some businesses are unable to succeed with email marketing because of their lack of segmentation. Segmentation allows businesses to put different customers and prospects into different categories and send email messages that are tailored to their subscribers. When you segment your email list you exponentially increase your odds at succeeding with email marketing.
Segmentation can provide benefits of email marketing as it allows you to create more targeted campaigns for audiences in different phases of their consumer cycle.
According to HubSpot, segmentation works wonders as email marketing KPIs work better when segmented.
Let’s look at an example to understand this better. An email with the same subject line and the same content sent to two different groups (different consumer cycle phases) will result in different outcomes. That is why it is important to segment your mailing list and then create email marketing campaigns that target each list individually to get better results.
Personalized Messages
For a consumer named Tom, an email starting with Hey customer and an email with Hey Tom is going to resonate differently. A carefully curated email will give the consumer the right impression. Make them feel that you care about them and that they aren’t receiving randomly generated emails.
Amazon uses this strategy, and the success of the company is in itself is evidence of the success of personalized messaging.
According to Experian marketing services, personalized emails have a 6X higher transaction rate, but 70% of brands fail to use them. This is where many businesses don’t properly gauge the importance of personalized email and gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Additional research I discovered stated personalized emails can result in a higher ROI, up to $20 for every $1 invested. As I’ve mentioned above, the most basic yet easy route to email personalization is to address the reader by their given name. You can request the first name in your opt-ins to gain this information and start doing something that 70% of the brands aren’t – using personalized emails.
Automated Email Campaigns
With a high number of subscribers to your mailing list, automation becomes a necessity. Knowing when to automate your email campaigns is going to give you an edge over others. The most basic form of automated emails are confirmation emails or welcome or thank you emails.
These are also more commonly known as trigger emails. Interestingly, research shows that trigger emails perform much better than traditional emails. These emails have higher open-rates when compared with conventional emails. Forrester reports that trigger emails-based email marketing strategies can generate 4 times more revenue and 18 times more profit.
I’ve shared some strategies that can be useful for creating effective email marketing campaigns. Now, let’s further solidify those strategies by stating the benefits of email marketing.
Email is still one of the most commonly used platforms of communication. Did you know that during the year 2020 alone, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day?
Add in the fact that there will be 4.3 billion email users in 2023. This staggering growth can be communicated as a growing benefit of email marketing as well.
Low Costs
One of the benefits of email marketing is its low costs. You don’t have to pay a premium to have your message appear on a billboard or in a magazine.
All you have to do is invest in software that will automate your emails and track and analyze the data gathered. However, the cost would be significantly less when compared with traditional marketing.
Effective and Easy Communication
Email marketing is your self-curated platform to communicate with your audience and engage with them.
This communication can also result in your targeted audience getting closer to your brand and becoming more loyal. It’s an easy way for your audience to keep in touch with you and stay updated with your latest updates and offers.
Targeted Messaging To the Right Audience
A good email marketing solution is a timely one. And with email marketing, not only can you reach your targeted audience with a personalized message but also target them at the right time.
Segmentation, as mentioned above, can prove to be beneficial in targeting the right audience. Add in the right timing, and your email marketing strategy is fool-proof.
Revenue Generation
The bottom-line of all marketing campaigns is to generate revenue for your company. Email marketing does that, and with lower costs. Add an excellent copywriter to your team and see your call to action resulting in significant revenue for your brand.
According to marketing week – for Virgin Airlines – email marketing was the second largest revenue driver for them after PPC.
Self-Promotion
Promotion is not an easy feat to achieve. That is why brands have to come with unique and new ways to keep promoting themselves. But self-promotion can easily be a part of an email marketing strategy.
It is undoubtedly a tried and tested method of reminding consumers of your presence. And with email marketing, you have a low-cost platform to do so.
Source : Jeremy Mcgilvrey Digital Marketing Services
The Covid-19 pandemic altered the global workplace. As people turned to remote operation, many suddenly had more time on their hands with commutes eliminated and various errands no longer necessary. Wise people took those opportunities to learn new skills and get ahead in their professional development — and Entrepreneur readers were among the wisest.
That’s why we’ve compiled the top 20 skills in 2020 based on total enrollment in courses from the Entrepreneur Store. It’s not too late to follow their lead and learn those same skills in 2021.
1. SQL
SQL is one of the most in-demand skill sets for both technical and non-technical professionals. With SQL, you can organize and manage data extremely effectively and use it to make drawing business insights significantly easier. The Ultimate SQL Bootcamp gives you nine courses for one low price.
Microsoft Excel is one of the most ubiquitous office programs in the world. But while most people know how to do some basic calculations and organization, few fully understand what Excel can do. Learn how to use Excel to perform incredible business insights, automate your workflow, and more.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website without paying a pretty penny. With The Pro Google SEO & SERP Certification Bundle, you’ll learn how to overhaul your website to rank at the top of Google search results. That’s a huge boost for your sites.
JavaScript is the backbone of the internet. It’s used in the vast majority of websites and is essential for any aspiring web developer. You can learn it in one basic course.
Data rules everything in business, but it’s only as effective as the people interpreting it. That’s where Data Analysts come in. Here, you’ll learn how to expertly analyze and visualize data to identify opportunities and communicate your findings.
Accounting can be difficult and time consuming, which is why most entrepreneurs pay thousands of dollars for somebody else to do it. But QuickBooks, the world’s top accounting software, takes a lot of the headaches out of your accounting. Learn how to use it in this bundle.
The Adobe Creative Cloud is the top software suite for design professionals. In this bundle, you’ll get up to speed with Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and more top creative tools. Whether you’re building a website or editing video, you’ll know what to do.
Python is the first language that many coders choose to learn. That’s because it’s relatively straightforward and is extremely flexible, used in everything from websites to video games. Get an extensive introduction to this language in The Absolute Python Programming Certification Bundle.
In a troubled economy, efficiency is everything. That’s where project managers come in. In this bundle, you’ll learn some of the top project methodologies on the market today, including Scrum, Agile, and PMP.
Everybody’s got something to say. Make sure you have an audience in 2021 by learning how to start a podcast. From the equipment you’ll need to hosting and marketing your podcast, this bundle has you covered.
Maybe you prefer the video medium to audio. YouTube continues to be an awesome platform for getting your message heard, whether you’re an individual or a company. Learning how to create video content that sells is an important skill for 2021 and beyond.
The pandemic wreaked havoc on many people’s finances. More than ever, people need qualified financial consultants to help them manage and grow their wealth. In this bundle, you’ll get on track to become a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
For many people, the pandemic became an opportune time to go back to school. You may not have the money lying around to go get an MBA, but you can take this extensive course led by award-winning business school professor, Chris Haroun. It’s the next best thing.
While the stock market took a major hit at the beginning of the pandemic, the real estate market has remained relatively strong. Real estate has always been a worthwhile investment, but even more so today as housing prices skyrocket across the country. Learn how to make smart investments in this bundle.
In a supersaturated marketplace, it’s important to ensure your brand’s message is cutting through the noise. That means having an effective, cohesive brand across platforms. In this bundle, you’ll explore blogging, copywriting, social media, and design secrets that will help your brand stand out.
The fear of public speaking — glossophobia — impacts nearly 73 percent of people worldwide. That’s an astounding number, so if you count yourself among them, now is a great time to work on your public speaking skills. This bundle can help.
Bitcoin surged this year as people sought out alternative forms of investment after the stock market crashed. The modern age is filled with financial technology, including blockchain and cryptocurrency, that can change the way you invest. Explore some of the newest developments in The Ultimate FinTech & Blockchain Bootcamp Bundle.
Google Analytics is one of the best tools available for analyzing your website traffic. If you can’t understand what’s happening on your site, you can’t improve it, which is why learning GA is so valuable.
Learning a new language can help you navigate a foreign country, certainly, but it’s also been shown to increase your memory and cognition skills. Babbel is the world’s top-grossing language learning software because it makes learning a new language simple and accessible for everybody. Get it for more than half off for a very limited time.
2020 was an excellent time to start a side hustle. If you’re thinking of starting one in 2021, consider earning passive income through dropshipping. Tools like Fulfillment By Amazon (Amazon FBA) make it easy to private label and sell products online without ever holding any inventory.
Last November, Moz VP Product, Rob Ousbey, gave a presentation at Web Con 2020 on the evolution of SEO, and we’re sharing it with you today! Rob draws on his years of research experience in the industry to discuss how SEO has changed, and what that means for your strategies.
Editor’s Note: Rob mentions a promo in the video that has since expired, but you can still get a free month of Moz Pro + free walkthrough here!
Video Transcription
Hello, everyone. Thank you for that introduction. I very much appreciate it, and it’s wonderful to be with all of you here today. I’m Rob Ousbey from Moz.
Real quick, I was going to share my screen here and say that my gift to you for coming to the session today is this link. This won’t just get you a free month of Moz Pro, but everybody who signs up can get a free walkthrough with an SEO expert to help you get started. I’ll put this link up again at the end of the session. But if you’re interested in SEO or using a tool suite to help you, then Moz might be the toolset that can help.
Also, if you want to learn more about SEO, come join me on Twitter. I am @RobOusbey, and it would be wonderful to chat to you over there.
One reason I put my bio up here is because I’ve not been at Moz for all that long. I just started about a year ago. Before that, I was at Distilled, which is an international digital marketing agency, and I ran the Seattle office there for over a decade. I mention that because I want to share with you today examples of what I discovered when I was doing my client work. I want to share the research that my team members did when we were in your shoes.
A troubling story
So I wanted to kick off with an experience that stuck in my mind. Like I say, I’ve been doing this professionally for about 12 or 13 years, and back when I started, SEO was certainly more straightforward, if not getting easier.
People like my friend Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, used to do correlation studies that would discover what factors seem to correlate with rankings, and we’d publish these kinds of reports. This was the top ranking factors for 2005. And back then, they were broadly split between factors that assessed whether a page was relevant for a particular term and those that asked whether a site was authoritative. A lot of that relevance came from the use of keywords on a page, and the authority was judged by the number of links to the site. So we would help companies by doing good SEO. We’d put keywords on a page and build a bunch of links.
And I want to tell you a story about one of our clients. This is from just a couple of years ago, but it definitely stuck in my head. We were doing a lot of content creation for this client. We created some really informative pages and some really fun pages that would go viral and take over the Internet, and all of this earned them a lot of links. And this was the result of our efforts — a consistent, steady growth in the number of domains linking to that site. We had an incredible impact for them.
And here’s the graph of how many keywords they had when they ranked on the first page. This is fantastic. They ranked for a lot of keywords. And finally, here’s the graph of organic traffic to the site. Amazing.
But if you looked a little closer, you notice something that is a bit troubling. We never stopped acquiring links. In fact, a lot of the content we produced is so evergreen that even content built two or three years ago is still gathering new links every single week. But the number of keywords we have ranking in the top 10 went up and up and then stopped growing. And not surprisingly, the same trend is there in organic search traffic as well. What appears to have happened here is that we got strong enough to get on the front page with these keywords, to be a player in the industry, but after that, just building more links to the site didn’t help it rank for more keywords and it didn’t help it get any more search traffic.
SEO fundamentals
It seems like all the SEO fundamentals that we’ve learned about, keywords and links and technical SEO still apply and they’re still necessary to help you become a player in a particular industry. But after that, there are other factors that you need to focus on.
Now this evolution of SEO into new factors has been an accelerating process. My colleague at Moz, Dr. Pete Meyers has been tracking and collecting a lot of data about this. Last year, Google made close to 4,000 improvements to their results, and that’s the result of running something like 45,000 different experiments.
Pete has also been tracking how much the search results change every day. Blue is really stable results. Orange is a lot of changes. And so if you felt like your rankings for your site are getting more volatile than ever, you’re not wrong. When we hit 2017, we saw more changes to the results every day than we ever had before.
Now the way that Google’s algorithms used to be updated was by a bunch of people in a room making decisions. In fact, it was this bunch of people in this room. They decided what factors to dial up or down to create the best results.
Google’s goal: portal to the Internet
But what does this mean? What does it mean to make the best results? Well, we should think about what Google’s real goal is. They want to be your portal to the Internet. They want your web experience to begin with a Google search, and you’ll continue to do that if they make you satisfied with the results you see and the pages you click on. If they send you to the perfect web page for your query, that’s a satisfying experience that reflects well on Google. If they send you to page that’s a bad experience, it reflects poorly on them.
So it’s interesting to ask, “How would Google avoid doing that, and what would be a bad user experience?” Well, there are some obvious things, like if you arrive on a page that installs malware or a virus on your computer, or you arrive at a product page where everything is out of stock, or you go to a website that’s really slow or full of adverts. These are the pages Google does not want to include in their results.
And they’ve always been good at measuring these things pretty directly. More than 10 years ago they were testing how fast sites are and then using that to inform their rankings. If they spot malware or viruses on a site, they’ll temporarily remove it from the search results.
But they also tried more opinion-based measures. For a while, they were running surveys to ask people: Are you satisfied with these results? This was how they knew if their algorithm was working to get people what they wanted, to give them a good experience.
But the Google way of doing this is to try and do it at massive scale and hopefully to do it in the background, where users don’t have to answer a survey pop-up like this. And doing this in the background, doing it at huge scale has been more and more possible, firstly because of how much data Google has.
Click through rates
So I want to take a look at some of the kinds of things they might be looking at. Here’s an example of something they may want to do. Let’s consider the average click-through rate for every ranking position in the search results. Imagine that Google knows that 30% of people click on the first result and 22% click on number two and 5% click on number six and so on. They have a good understanding of these averages. But then for a particular keyword, let’s say they notice number six is getting 12% of the clicks. Something is going on there. What is happening? Well, whatever the reason why this is, Google could be better satisfying its users if that result was higher up in the rankings. Whoever is ranking at number six is what people want. Maybe they should rank higher.
“Pogo sticking”
Here’s another example. This is what we call pogo sticking. A user does a search and then clicks on a result, and then after a couple seconds looking at the page, they realize they don’t like it, so they click the back button and they select a different result. But let’s say they don’t like that one either, so they click back and they select a third result, and now they stay here and they use that site. Imagine a lot of people did the same thing. Well, if we were Google, when we saw this happening, it would be a pretty strong indicator that the third result is what’s actually satisfying users. That’s actually a good result for this query, and it probably deserves to be ranking much higher up.
User satisfaction: refinement
There’s even an extension of this where users pogo stick around the SERPs, and then they decide they can’t find anything to do with what they wanted. So they refine their search. They try typing something else, and then they find what they want on a different query. If too many people are not satisfied by any of the results on the first page, it’s probably a sign to make a pretty serious change to that SERP or to nudge people to do this other query instead.
Google’s evolution with Machine Learning
And doing this kind of huge analysis on a massive scale is something that was made much easier with the advent of machine learning. Now for a long time the folks in charge of the search results at Google were very reluctant to incorporate any machine learning into their work. It was something they did not want to do. But then Google appointed a new head of search, and they chose someone who had spent their career at Google promoting machine learning and its opportunities. So now they’ve moved towards doing that. In fact, Wired magazine described Google as remaking themselves as a “machine learning first” company.
What we’re seeing now
So this is where I want to move from my conjecture about what they could do into giving some examples and evidence of all of this for you. And I want to talk about two particular modern ranking factors that we have evidence for and that if you’re doing SEO or digital marketing or working on a website you can start considering today.
User signals
Firstly, I talked about the way that users interact with the results, what are they clicking on, how are they engaging with pages they find. So let’s dive into that.
A lot of this research comes from my former colleague, Tom Capper. We worked at Distilled together, but he’s also a Moz Associate, and a lot of this has been published on the Moz Blog.
User engagement
Let’s imagine you start on Google. You type in your query, and here’s the results. Here’s page one of results. Here’s page two of results. Not going to worry much about what happens after that because no one tends to click through further than page two.
Now let’s think about how much data Google has about the way people interact with those search results. On the front page, they see lots going on. There are lots of clicks. They can see patterns. They can see trends. They can see what people spend time on or what they pogo stick back from. On the second page and beyond, there’s very little user engagement happening. No one is going there, so there’s not many clicks and not much data that Google can use.
So when we look at what factors seem to correlate with rankings, here’s what we see. On page two, there is some correlation between the number of links a site has and where it ranks. That’s kind of what we expected. That’s what SEOs have been preaching for the last decade or more. But when we get to the bottom of page one, there’s a weaker correlation with links. And at the top of page 1, there’s almost no correlation between the number of links you have and the position you rank in.
Now we do see that the folks on page one have more links than the sites on page two. You do need the SEO basics to get you ranking on the first page in the first place. We talk about this as the consideration set. Google will consider you for the first page of results if you have good enough SEO and if you have enough links.
But what we can take away from this is that when all that user data exists, when Google know where you’re clicking, how people are engaging with sites, they will use those user metrics as a ranking factor. And then in situations where there isn’t much user data, the rankings might be more determined by link metrics, and that’s why deeper in the results we see links being a more highly correlated factor.
In a similar way, we can look at the whole keyword space, from the very popular head terms in green to the long tail terms in red that are very rarely searched for. Head terms have a lot of people searching for them, so Google has a lot of user data to make an assessment about where people are clicking. For long tail terms, they might only get a couple of searches every month, they just don’t have that much data.
And again, what we see is that the popular, competitive terms, where there’s lots of searching happening, Google seems to be giving better rankings to sites with better engagement. For long tail terms, where they don’t have that data, the rankings are more based on link strength. And there have been plenty of studies that bear this out.
Larry Kim found a relationship between high click-through rates and better rankings. Brian Dean found a relationship between more engagement with a page and better rankings. And Searchmetrics found that time on site correlated with rankings better than any on-page factor.
Contemporary SEO
And even though Google keeps a tight lid on this, they won’t admit to exactly what they’re doing, and they don’t describe their algorithms in detail, there are occasionally insights that we get to see.
A couple of years ago, journalists from CNBC had the chance to sit in on a Google meeting where they were discussing changes to the algorithm. One interesting part of this article was when Googlers talked about the things they were optimizing for when they were designing a new feature on the results page. They were looking at this new type of result they’d added, and they were testing how many people clicked on it but then bounced back to the results, which they considered a bad sign. So this idea of pogo sticking came up once again.
If that was something that they were monitoring in the SERPs, we should be able to see examples of it. We should be able to see the sites where people pogo stick don’t do so well in SEO, which is why I’m always interested when I find a page that has, for whatever reason, it has a bad experience.
User metrics as a ranking factor
So here’s a site that lists movie trivia for any movie you might be interested in. It’s so full of ads and pop-ups that you can barely see any of the content on the page. It’s completely overrun with adverts. So if my hypothesis was correct, we’d see this site losing search visibility, and in fact that’s exactly what happened to them. Since their peak in 2014, the search visibility for the site has gone down and down and down.
Here’s another example. This is a weird search. It’s for a particular chemical that you buy if you were making face creams and lotions and that kind of thing. So let’s have a look at some of the results here. I think this first result is the manufacturer’s page with information about the chemical. The second is an industrial chemical research site. It has all the data sheets, all the safety sheets on it. The third is a site where you can buy the chemical itself.
And then here’s another result from a marketplace site. I’ve blurred out their name because I don’t want to be unfair to them. But when you click through on the result, this is what you get, an immediate blocker. It’s asking you to either log in or register, and there’s no way I want to complete this form. I’m going to hit the back button right away. Google had listed nine other pages that I’m going to look at before I even consider handing over all my data and creating an account here.
Now if my theory is right, as soon as they put this registration wall up, visitors would have started bouncing. Google would have noticed, and their search visibility would have suffered.
And that’s exactly what we see. This was a fast-growing startup, getting lots of press coverage, earning lots of links. But their search traffic responded very poorly and very quickly once that registration wall was in place. The bottom graph is organic traffic, and it just drops precipitously.
Here’s my final example of this, Forbes. It’s a 100-year-old publishing brand. They’ve been online for over 20 years. And when you land on a page, this is the kind of thing you see for an article. Now I don’t begrudge advertising on a page. They need to make some money. And there’s only one banner ad here. I was actually pleasantly surprised by that.
But I’m baffled by their decision to include a video documentary in the corner about a totally different topic. Like I came to read this article and you gave me this unrelated video.
And then suddenly this slides into view to make absolutely sure that I didn’t miss the other ad that it had in the sidebar. And then the video, that I didn’t want any way about an unrelated topic, starts playing a pre-roll ad. Meanwhile their browser alert thing pops up, and then the video — about the unrelated topic that I didn’t want in the first place — starts playing. So I’m trying to read and I scroll away from all this clutter on the page. But then the video — about an unrelated topic that I didn’t want in the first place — pins itself down here and follows me down the page. What is going on? And then there’s more sidebar ads for good measure.
And I want to say that if my theory is right, people will be bouncing away from Forbes. People will avoid clicking on Forbes in the first place, and they will be losing search traffic. But I also know that they are a powerhouse. So let’s have a look at what the data said.
I grabbed their link profile, and people will not stop linking to Forbes. They’re earning links from 700 new domains every single day. This is unstoppable. But here’s their organic search visibility. Forbes is down 35% year-on-year. I think this is pretty validating.
At this point, I’m confident saying that Google has too much data about how people engage with the search results and with websites for you to ignore this. If your site is a bad experience, why would Google let you in the top results to begin with and why would they keep you there?
What can you do?
So what can you do about this? Where can you start? Well, you can go to Google Search Console and take a look through the click-through rates for your pages when they appear in search. And in your analytics package, GA or whatever else, you can see the bounce rate for visitors landing on your pages, particularly those coming from search. So look for themes, look for trends. Find out if there are pages or sections of your site that people don’t like clicking on when they appear in the results. Find out if there are pages that when people land on them, they bounce right away. Either of those are bad signs and it could be letting you down in the results.
You can also qualitatively take a critical look at your site or get a third party or someone else to do this. Think about the experience that people have when they arrive. Are there too many adverts? Is there a frustrating registration wall? These things can hurt you, and they might need a closer look.
Brand signals
Okay, so we talked about those user signals. But the other area I want to look at is what I talk about as brand signals. Brand can apply to a company or a person. And when I think about the idea being a brand, I think about how well-known the company is and how well-liked they are. These are some questions that signal you have a strong brand, that people have heard of you, people are looking for you, people would recommend you.
And this second one sounds like something SEOs know how to research. When we say people are looking for you, it sounds like we’re just talking about search volume. How many times every month are people typing your brand name into Google?
Again, my colleague, Tom Capper did some research about this that’s published on the Moz Blog. He looked at this problem and said, “Okay. Well, then let’s see if the number of people searching for a brand has any correlation to how well they rank.” And then there’s a load of math and a long story that led to this conclusion, that branded search volume did correlate with rankings. This is in blue. In fact, it correlated more strongly with rankings than Domain Authority does, so that’s the measure that shows you the link strength of a website.
So think about this. We’ve worried about links for two decades, but actually something around brand strength and maybe branded search volume seems to correlate better.
For data geeks, here’s a way of using the R-squared calculation to answer the question, “How much does this explain the rankings?” Again, what you need to know here is that branded search volume explained more of the rankings than anything else.
So we’ve been preaching about this for a while, and then literally two days ago I saw this tweet. A team in the UK was asking about controversial SEO opinions. And the SEO manager for Ticketmaster came out and said this. He believes that when Google sees people searching for your brand name alongside a query, they start ranking you higher for the non-branded terms. And I don’t think this is controversial. And in fact, one of the replies to this was from Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz. He also now believes that the brand signals are more powerful than what links and keywords can do.
What can you do?
So what can you do about this? Well, first you have to realize that any investment you make in brand building, whether that’s through PR activities or through like traditional advertising, is good business to do anyway. But it now has twice the value because of its impact on SEO, because those activities will get people looking for you, following you, sharing your brand. If you work for a billion-dollar company, you should make sure that your SEO and PR teams are well-connected and well-aligned and talking together. If you don’t work for a billion-dollar company, I’ve got two small, interesting examples for you.
Example: AdaFruit
First I want to call out this site, AdaFruit.com. They sell electronic components. There are many, many sites on the web that sell similar products. Not only do they have great product pages with good quality images and helpful descriptions, but I can also look at a product like this and then I can click through to get ideas for things I can build with it. This is some LED lights that you can chain together. And here’s an idea for a paper craft glowing crystal you can build with them. Here’s the wiring diagram I’d need for that project plus some code I can use to make it more interactive. It’s only an $8 product, but I know that this site will make it easy for me to get started and to get value from making this purchase.
They go even further and have a pretty impressive AdaFruit channel on YouTube. They’ve got 350,000 subscribers. Here’s the videos, for instance, that they publish every week walking you through all the new products that they’ve recently added to the site.
The CEO does a hands-on demo telling you about everything they have in stock. And then they have other collections of videos, like their women in hardware series that reaches an audience that’s been typically underserved in this space.
AdaFruit made a significant investment in content for their own channels, and it paid off with some brand authority, but brand trust and brand engagement as well.
Example: Investor Junkie
But I want to show you one other example here from arguably a much less exciting industry and someone who couldn’t invest so much in content. This is InvestorJunkie.com, a site that does reviews of financial services and products. And when I was working at the agency, we worked with this site and specifically with its founder, Larry. Larry was an expert in personal finance and particularly in personal investments. And this was his solo project. He blogged on the site and used his expertise. But as the site grew, he hired some contractors as well as our agency, and they created a lot of great content for the site, which really helped with SEO. But to make a significant impact on brand strength, we had to get the word out in front of loads of people who didn’t already know about him.
So we took Larry’s expertise and we offered him as a guest to podcasts, a lot of podcasts, and they loved having him on as a guest. Suddenly Larry was able to provide his expertise to huge new audiences, and he was able to get the Investor Junkie brand and their message in front of lots of people who had never heard of the site before.
But better still, this had a compounding effect, because people who are interested in these topics typically don’t just subscribe to one of these podcasts. They subscribe to a bunch of them. And so if they hear about Larry and Investor Junkie once, they might never think about it again. But if he shows up in their feed two or three or four times over the course of a few months, they’ll start to form a new association with the brand, maybe trusting him more, maybe seeking out the site.
And as an aside, there’s one other thing I love about podcasts, which is that if you’re creating a blog post, that can take hours and hours of work. If you’re creating a conference presentation, it can take days or weeks of work. If you’re a guest on a 30-minute podcast, it literally takes you about 30 minutes. You log on, you talk to a host, and then your part of the work is done.
So this can get you in front of a new audience. It gets people looking for you, which Google will notice. But it has even more SEO value as well, because every podcast typically has a page like this with show notes. It’s a page that Google can index, a page that Google can understand. And Google can see the signals of trust. It can see your brand being mentioned. It can see the links back to your site as well. I obviously can’t speak highly enough of podcasts for PR, for brand awareness, and even for SEO.
Did this help Larry and the Investor Junkie team? Yeah. This obviously wasn’t the extent of their SEO strategy. But everything they did contributed to them getting great rankings for a variety of competitive terms, and it helped them rank up against much bigger sites with much bigger teams and much bigger budgets. And that story actually came to an end just about two years ago, because the site was finally acquired for $6 million, which is not bad for a solo founder who was just busy building his own brand.
In summary
All right. I’ll wrap up with some of these thoughts. Google has been evolving. They’ve now been able to collect so much more data about the way people interact with the search results and other pages, and they’re now using machine learning to process all of that so they can better assess: Are we giving people a good user experience? Are the sites that we’re ranking the ones that satisfy people’s queries? The game of SEO has changed.
Now when you’re starting out, all the basics still apply. Come to Moz, read the Beginner’s Guide, do great technical SEO, do great keyword research, do great link building. Those are still necessary to be considered to become a player in your industry to help get you near the first page for any terms you want to target.
But when you’re trying to move up the front page, when you’re trying to establish yourself much further and become a much bigger brand, we’re not seeing a lot of correlation between things like links and getting into the very top rankings for any particular term. Instead, think about the good game that Google is playing. They want to make sure that when someone clicks on a result, they stay there. They don’t want to see this pogo sticking. They don’t want to see the link and the title that people want to click on sitting down at number six. So target their KPIs. Think about how you can help Google by making sure that your results are the ones people want to click on. Make sure that when people click on your results, that’s the page that they stay on.
But ultimately, you will never lose out if you improve your brand authority and engagement with your content. These are just good things to do for business. A stronger brand, content, and a website that people want to spend time on is hugely important and pays dividends. But now it’s all doubly important because it also has this massive impact on your SEO.
In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Jo Cameron — Moz’s Learning Team Manager — dives into the process of addressing and capitalizing on traffic spikes, including how to determine where traffic is coming from and what to do with the increased attention. Enjoy!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I’m going to be talking through the journey that you embark upon when you notice a sudden change in traffic to a particular page on your site. In our case, this was a sudden and consistent increase, which may on the face of it look great.
You may perceive that this is exactly what you and your clients have been striving for. But as we know, traffic funnelling into your site isn’t the end of the story. You’re also going to want that traffic to convert. But also, when something like this happens, there can be other lessons that you can learn and potentially apply to other pages and areas of your site.
I’m Jo. I’m the Learning Team Manager here at Moz. We create all the course material that you’ll see on the Moz Academy. This is where you can advance your SEO education and earn your SEO Essentials Certification. We also write the documentation for how to use the Moz tools, and this is where our story begins.
What’s driving the spike?
Over the summer, we noticed a fairly drastic increase in visitors to a particular MozBar help page. We wanted to go beyond trying to understand why we’re getting that traffic and turn this into an opportunity to support our company goals.
So when you see something like this happen, your first question might reasonably be: Why? Why are we getting this traffic? What has changed? What has caused this? And also, what do we already know from the metrics we’re collecting?
What do we know?
On the Moz Learning Team, we track top-level metrics monthly, including unique visitors. We also collect visitor sentiment through the “Feedback” button on the page. And we also collect reporting every month in our Moz Pro campaign, using Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer as handy research tools in our toolkit.
So first of all, we had a dig into the monthly metrics on a more granular level. We looked at the cadence of the traffic in Google Analytics to see if this was a sudden spike or a consistent trend over time.
Now before you can be totally confident in the quality of your Google Analytics data, you may want to clear up and filter that data. You can learn all about this in the SEO Essentials Certification. With this course, we take you through our SEO methodology, which helps you to approach SEO strategically. This is made up of five sections: research, audit, optimize, amplify, and iterate. Reporting sits in the fifth section of the methodology, which is iterate. Within that, we break it down into awareness metrics, on-site activity, and the all important conversions. The lessons in the SEO Essentials Certification take you through this in much more detail, and you can download the SEO report card when you purchase this course.
So back to what we saw in Google Analytics, we noticed an upward trend that also reflected the pattern followed by our previous traffic trends. We saw these scallop shapes, which nicely line up with the weekdays and the weekends. You may be used to seeing a different shape depending on your industry.
We also looked at referral data in Google Analytics and compared this to what we saw before the spike. We also looked at how traffic was entering and exiting that page through Google Analytics, and we had a dig around in Google Trends to see if we could identify any related topics taking off. I’m tracking the help section of the moz.com domain in my Moz Pro campaign, and I have this connected to Google Analytics. This pulls in the overall visits and landing pages. This is the data that you’ll see in the acquisition section of Google Analytics.
So while my team is focused primarily on one area of moz.com, this gives me an idea of where this page sits as a percentage of search traffic in relation to other landing pages.
Now this is where it all starts to come together. Under the rankings tab in my Moz Pro campaign, I can now see the landing page data cross-referenced with my tracked keywords and their rankings. So I can also see search volume and estimated visits for each tracked keyword. We also entered the MozBar URL into Keyword Explorer to review the ranking keywords for that URL, and then added these keywords to my existing campaign to track them over time.
We know that SEO and SEO reporting is iterative. So by building out your tracked keywords in this way, this will help you to fill in the blanks as to which keywords are sending traffic to your site.
We also saw some interesting data from the “Visitor Satisfaction” button. This is the thumbs up or thumbs down option that you can select on this page and generally indicates if the content was helpful or not.
We saw that there were a lot more people responding that this content was indeed helpful. So this is not only positive for my team and I, but it’s also informative. It gave us a really good idea that the content on this page was generally matching the intent of the visitors. So we looked at all of this together, and we drew some conclusions.
It didn’t seem like this visitor traffic was coming from one particular source or campaign that we could reasonably attribute this to. It looked like it was reflecting our previous traffic trends, just a lot more of it. So it’s probably quite important now to explain a bit more about the page that we are investigating.
The page is about MozBar. It’s an overview of how to use our free Chrome extension. Now it would also be remiss of me not to mention the fact that we have had a massive shift this year in terms of changes to our lives and businesses due to COVID-19, which has had a massive impact on how people spend their time, how businesses are run, and many, many other areas of our lives.
So after we looked at data for that page, in addition to all the other reporting metrics, we took a step back and we thought, “Well, what is this page about, and how has this shift impacted demand for these types of tools?” Because of these two things, nothing else really standing out as a flag to indicate a single event and this global change, we started to lean towards this being part of an increase in demand for free tools.
MozBar is a free extension that sits at the top of your Chrome browser, and it displays link metrics for your pages that you visit on the web. It’s also got some other handy features, like the ability to highlight different types of links, so it can show you internal or external links on a page, and to check your on-page elements, and so on. So with all of this information we collected, we’re now circling around understanding what caused this.
What do we do with the traffic?
The trick for us wasn’t just to figure out why this was happening or why it happened, but to turn this into some kind of positive action. So what we decided to do was to test driving traffic directly from these pages or this particular page to our key Moz initiatives. So this would be our personalized, one-to-one walkthroughs of the Moz Pro tool and the Moz Pro free trial.
This was a quick edit for my team. We could add those in there fairly quickly to test this out. We already know that this page is doing a stand-up job of helping people to understand how to use MozBar, so let’s see if they are interested in our other SEO tools. We added length to this page to help people identify what to do next once they’ve given MozBar a go.
And what we found out was that we are indeed seeing people taking us up on this offer, and they are clicking through to have a chat with our excellent Onboarding Team and also to check out the Moz Pro 30-day free trial. So with this relatively small amount of effort from my team we’ve now started to collect data on visitor behaviour that can better inform future decisions and future projects.
The social media content calendar is the crux of every social media marketer’s strategy. When done well, content brings your audience closer to your brand, demonstrates your brand’s personality and most importantly, supports your goals.
But what really drives your KPIs?
What is it that your audience feels when they come across your content that then converts to a like, a share or a link click? Why do they feel that?
And how can you continue developing fresh content that replicates success?
You can find the answers to those questions in your social media data. However, according to the Sprout Social Index™, only 49% of marketers are using data to create social media content.
Reporting on social data is not just about understanding whether you reached your goals and learning what worked or didn’t. On a deeper level, data analysis and reporting are about spinning insights into creative social media content that resonates with your audience more deeply and gives you a competitive advantage.
Keep reading to learn how to create content for social media marketing and supercharge your strategy using data as your inspiration.
1. Determining what worked and what didn’t is all relative
Content should always be aligned to a specific goal. If you’re creating content just because an idea seems fun, that could work out, but what’s your objective? At what stage of the marketing funnel does that content fall?
Ground your content strategy with intention and measurable objectives. Without those, it’s going to be awfully hard to know what data to look for that will show you if that content “worked.”
Create more effective social media content by first making sure you know which KPIs are the right ones. That way when you report back on content performance, you can hone in on the essential data, understand what happened and investigate why.
If you need a little help with content ideas or deciding on your KPIs for each stage of the funnel, check out our social media metrics map!
2. Identify top-performing posts by goal
The starting point for your content inspiration should be your top-performing content and as we’ve already pointed out, success is all relative to your goals. With analytics tools like Sprout Social, you can view performance data post-by-post, sort by KPIs and efficiently determine which content to create more of.
Let’s say you’re launching a new and improved product or service. Look back at your last product launch and past product content performance on social. Here’s how you might break down your evaluation of that content:
Goal: Drive conversion
Social KPIs: Link clicks and click-through rate
Analysis of top-performing content:
Evaluate the factors that contributed to your audience engaging and driving those KPIs.
Did you use snappy CTAs or were they more direct?
What accompanying creative assets did you use and how might they have influenced your audience’s actions?
Did you try something new with your content format or stick with a tried-and-true method?
If you can at least hypothesize the answers and establish patterns, you can apply your insights, build a flexible content framework and replicate your success.
3. Analyze your low-performing posts
It’s easy to focus on success, but it’s equally important to know which kinds of content might repel your audience. Continuing to spin your wheels on content that has little-to-no value for your audience is a lose-lose situation. In fact, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand due to irrelevant content.
If you want to be best in class, examine what is not working and diagnose why. Was a CTA missing? Is the content feel off-brand or irrelevant? Has your audience seen the content before? Was the platform the right place for this content type?
If you have a single post in a month that doesn’t perform to your standard, that doesn’t mean you should immediately throw that content out altogether. Instead, look for patterns over time, just as you would for successful posts.
Concerned about content performance plateaus? Use this checklist to jumpstart your content strategy and bounce back.
In a social media management tool like Sprout, you can retroactively add tags to your posts. This can help you keep track of the posts and content types that continue to underperform. Then, you can analyze that tag data to find commonalities that point to low performance and determine which content to discontinue.
4. Always look at engagement and sentiment
Engagement metrics aren’t always an indication that you met a goal, but they do indicate quite a bit about your audience and how to create social media content for them. Consumers revere brands that know how to engage their audience as best in class on social, according to the Sprout Social Index™. But going a layer deeper, sentiment, feelings and emotions are what drive a person’s reaction to your content.
Social is a really important tool for our organization and Sprout has helped us gain a much better understanding of who our audience is and what they are looking for from us. Being able to publish content in a way that is responsive to when and why our audience is engaging with the content has improved our engagement metrics.
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Darcy Young Director of Social Media, Teach for America
On some platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, people can choose different reactions beyond the traditional “like,” which can give you a better idea of how and why the post resonated. Sometimes, people will even tell you what they like, so always check the comment section.
Engagement rates speak to the relevance of your content and track how actively involved with your content your audience is. If you have a smaller audience, relevance is especially important in building brand awareness and affinity.
5. Get inspiration from Google Analytics data
For 52% of social marketers, increasing web traffic is their top goal. Link clicks are a good indication that your content is driving traffic, but Google Analytics can help you dig deeper and inspire new social content.
With GA, you can see a breakdown of each web page’s pageviews, traffic referrals, conversions, page value and more. If there are high-value pages that you haven’t shared on social, use what you know about your audience and the kind of content they engage with to develop social posts around that page.
Collaborate with your other marketing colleagues outside of social to determine which web pages, blog content, webinars and other published marketing content to promote. Then, when you’re ready to publish your content, add UTM tracking to every URL you share. That way, you can track results in GA, report back to other stakeholders and refine your content as necessary.
6. Tap into brand-relevant conversations
Instead of solely using best practices or performance to formulate your ideas, use social listening data as well. Social listening can help you find relevant trends, themes and topics that are resonating with your target audience right now and ripe for content inspiration.
Sprout’s Listening and Reporting features have enabled us to dig into our content and topics in much greater detail than before, which helps us identify key hashtags, influencers, trends, and metrics in a comprehensive way.
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Aida Ruilova Director of Brand Research, Analytics & Insights, Teach for America
In Sprout’s Listening tool, users can use Topic Templates to create and continually monitor conversations and perceptions about your brand, products, industry and more even. Once you’ve set up your Topics, filters and keywords can help you get into more granular details that will help you create engaging social media content.
Let’s say you’ve set up a Topic around brand health and you notice that positive sentiment on Twitter has increased over the past few months. You can add a positive sentiment filter to hone in on the messages driving that up-tick and investigate what exactly it is that’s tickling people’s fancy. Then, use the insights you gather from those conversations to build content that continues to dial up the positivity.
Or, maybe you notice that there are recurring questions and misconceptions about the kinds of products or services you offer. That might indicate that you need to develop more educational content to fill your audience’s knowledge gaps.
The ability to explore individual topics like brand health, coronavirus, school fall plans and have Sprout provide key data in an easily digestible format (that’s also easy to share internally) has helped us present data more regularly and efficiently.
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Aida Ruilova Director of Brand Research, Analytics & Insights, Teach for America
7. Look at competitor data
To stand out from your competition, first you have to understand them and know how you stack up. Listening can help here as well.
Set up a competitive analysis topic in your listening tool to find major keywords, content themes and hashtags in conversations about your competitors. With the option to filter by competitor, content type and sentiment in Sprout, you can determine what content resonates among your shared audiences, find customer pain points that future content can solve and discover new opportunities to differentiate your content and brand.
Stay connected and stay agile
Your audience’s tastes are not fixed, and neither is your audience. You can always count on them to change. But if you stay connected to your audience and continue to follow social data, you can continually find ways to create more inspired and successful content.
There’s more you can do with your data. Download this guide to learn about 40 different ways to use social media data that you might have overlooked.
Lauren Cover is a Content Specialist at Sprout Social where she writes to empower brands and equip social media professionals with tools for success. Her specialties outside of work include serenading her dogs, devouring buffalo wings and dad jokes. Read all articles
If you struggle with blog monetization, here’s a look at 5 lessons learned from profitable bloggers on how to treat your blog like a business.
In the last few weeks, I have had some interesting interviews with two six-figure bloggers about why the majority of aspiring content creators struggle to monetize their blogs.
The blame is often centred on the current state of blogging with increased competition, but when I talked to these bloggers they insisted that competition wasn’t the main problem. In fact, both bloggers monetized their blogs in different ways, and both came to the same conclusion.
Instead, they suggested that bloggers who struggle to make money often don’t know how to treat their blog like a business.
If you struggle with blog monetization, here’s a look at 5 lessons learned from profitable bloggers on treating a blog like a business and how you can do it too.
1. Get a clear understanding of your value proposition
One of the most important parts of owning a business is providing your target audience with something they value (i.e., value creation).
It doesn’t matter if you are just getting started or have been blogging for a while. Take some time to consider the value your blog will provide to a specific audience.
Unsure where to start?
Here are a few questions to consider:
Why does your blog exist?
Who should know about your blog?
Why should they care about your content?
What end-result should people have after reading your content?
If you already have a blog try to find out what posts get the most engagement and what type of comments are people leaving on your posts.
You’ll be working the other way around but in some cases that can be even more effective than deciding what type of content you’re going to make and looking for your target audience after that.
2. Develop a blog monetization strategy
Start to treat your blog like a business as early as possible and decide how you’re going to earn money from blogging. The method you use to make money online will influence what kind of content you’ll create.
For example, some bloggers focus primarily on making money with affiliate marketing. While affiliate marketing blogs might provide lifestyle and educational content on their website the primary focus is to create and share product reviews that link to affiliate offers.
On the other hand, if you promote self-made products then reviewing other people’s products might not be the most effective way to make money from your blog.
Each monetization strategy works best when bloggers focus on a specific type of content. Learn about blog monetization methods and create content that complements that method.
3. Build a brand people can trust
Without credibility, people won’t easily part with their money in exchange for your services or products. This is why it’s important to build a brand that people can trust.
However, there is a common misconception about brand building that I’d like to address. Building a brand is so much more than a logo, font, and colours of your blog (i.e., brand identity or the visible elements of a brand). It’s also deciding what you stand for, what you want to be known for, and communicating that through your content.
Visible brand elements, like a logo and colours, do play a factor in branding because they help people identify your work, but it’s the combination of that and the communication of your values through content that shapes a brand.
4. Create measurable business goals and an action plan
Aimlessly blogging isn’t going to get you anywhere if you want to turn your blog into a business. You’ll need to set some goals to make significant progress.
In the book, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, author Mark McCormack references a 1979 Harvard study where MBA’s were asked “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” Their responses
84% didn’t have specific goals
13% did have goals but the didn’t have it clear on paper
3% had set clear goals and created a plan to achieve them
In 1989 the group was interviewed again. The study found that the 13% who did have goals earned on average double that of the 84% that did not. The 3% who had set clear goals and created a plan, earned on average 10 times as much as the other 97%.
There’s a clear outcome for those who set clear goals and those who don’t. Goals will give you a clear direction, motivate you, and keep you on track.
It’s important to know how to create meaningful goals that will grow your blog. Start with the S.M.A.R.T. method. After you set goals, map out the steps needed to achieve them, create a schedule based on these steps, and stick to it.
5. Reinvest blog earnings
Like any other business it’s important to reinvest. Don’t be cheap and balk at spending money on your blog. The “cheap” mindset can leave bloggers wandering in circles with progress toward their end goals nowhere in sight.
The moment you start investing money into your blog, new opportunities to make money will open up. For example, you can start investing money in audience research tools, quality website themes, email marketing services, and more tools designed to increase the quality and growth of your blog.
You’ll notice the moment you start to scale your blogging business new tasks will follow. Plan ahead and decide how you’ll organize a team to prevent burnout and give you more headspace to develop growth strategies and run a profitable blogging business.
Rogier Ramon Giersthove is a blogger, podcaster, and Youtuber based in The Netherlands. In 2018, he founded Real Digital Success an initiative that wants to give a realistic look at what it takes to make money online.
