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10 Questions With David McIntosh

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By Ken Yeung

Tenor’s chief executive explains why we’re fond of GIFs, how he wants to capitalize on it, and ways visual communication has changed.

What is it about animated GIFs, those image files that oftentimes make it easier to convey what we’re trying to say versus typing it out? They’re everywhere, from being plastered across social networks to our emails and messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp. A big part of the proliferation of GIFs is thanks to a company called Tenor, formerly Riffsy. It has helped make embedding GIFs naturally into our conversations. But it’s much more than a form of expression, which Tenor’s chief executive David McIntosh has shared with me in the past.

While some might think that the insert of a GIF into a conversation is funny, it’s usage highlights its sociological impact. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is something that after more than five years, Tenor wishes to capitalize on. Prior to its acquisition by Google, it made moves into helping brands monetize GIF usage, seeking to establish what McIntosh believed would be the emotional graph.

More than a year under Google ownership, I caught up with McIntosh to find out how things are progressing, whether its new parent has impacted the roadmap, understand why GIFs have taken off, and what’s next for Tenor. Our conversation is this week’s “10 Questions”.

What drew you to focus on GIFs and how has this file type become quite dominant in how we communicate across the web, text, messaging apps, and in the workplace?

When we started Tenor, GIFs had existed on the web for more than 20 years but they were very hard to use in mobile messaging. You had to leave your messenger, open your browser, Google for a GIF, click through a bunch of links and then switch back to your messenger — which often took several minutes!

In the fall of 2014, Tenor launched GIF Keyboard which made it easier to search and share GIFs inside messengers. We then natively integrated Tenor’s GIF search engine into popular messengers and communication apps such as Twitter, Samsung Keyboard, Facebook, Discord, and many more. Fast forward five years later and hundreds of millions of people use Tenor to find the perfect GIF to visually communicate what’s on their mind.

As mobile messaging continues to grow, people are looking for ways to better communicate and express themselves beyond simple text. It’s hard to convey tone over text, and text is cumbersome to input on our phone. Tenor’s key strategy is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the perfect GIF to express exactly what’s on their mind. Communication is a universal human need and my co-founders and I were drawn to building a service that has the potential to help every mobile user around the world better communicate.

In 2017, Tenor debuted its first ad product and real-time analytics tool for brands. Two years later, how has that been going and are there plans for Tenor to release additional offerings for brands to capitalize on GIFs?

We’re seeing growing demand from brands to market their products in the mobile messaging context through GIFs, and we’re continuing to invest in products for our brand and media partners.

How should brands and advertisers be approaching using GIFs to reach their audience? Some have embraced it such as Dominos, but others like the NFL in 2016 came out against GIFs at one point during games. What advice would you give brands considering getting into the GIF game without making it seem like it’s forced and assuages fears that their product will become the next meme?

Tenor works with brands from large media companies such as Fox, NBC, and Paramount to independent creators, providing people with GIFs they’re looking for and helping these brands expand their audiences. The most successful brands on Tenor construct their GIFs to help users communicate. It’s not enough to chop up a trailer or advertisement into dozens of 2–3 seconds GIFs — a GIF must help users express themselves with a specific message or sentiment.

You told me that Tenor’s goal is to own the visual language. Why is this important and in what ways is Tenor going to do so?

Our goal is to help everyone using a mobile device better express themselves visually. Today, people send hundreds of billions of mobile messages daily, and as bandwidth speeds are increasing and bandwidth costs are decreasing, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which 10–20% of messages sent are visual — GIFs, memes, stickers, and other dynamic forms of content.

Our overarching focus is to reduce the friction to express yourself visually by providing the most relevant GIF search results for the billions of distinct queries Tenor receives across dozens of countries — the faster you find the perfect GIF the more likely you are to express yourself visually.

Your company was acquired by Google a year ago — how has this benefited Tenor in growth and are there integrations already taking place? Will we see Tenor’s technology incorporated into Google AdWords, for example, or integrated within the core Google search engine?

It’s been a very busy year! Some highlights include launching an expanded integration in Gboard, releasing an integration with Google Go, and adding a long list of new content partners. We’ve been working on a number of other initiatives that we’ll plan to share more about over the coming months!

How do you see artificial intelligence changing how we react to messages (e.g. surfacing the right GIFs without us needing to query it) or search for things visually (do tools like Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Bixby Vision impact how GIFs are discovered)?

Eliminating the need to type out a search query would dramatically reduce the friction in using Tenor to express yourself. We’re looking at a number of ways to make it even faster to find the perfect GIF.

Prior to the acquisition, Tenor was powering more than 12 billion requests every month. How has this changed since then? Any other trends you’re noticing around GIFs?

Tenor has grown significantly since the acquisition and is experiencing fast adoption around the world. For example, at the end of 2018, we shared that Tenor grew 5x in India in the preceding 18 months. As faster bandwidth is becoming more affordable and pervasive, people are looking for richer, more visual forms of expression, and Tenor has been investing in localization and search which improves the experience worldwide.

What were some challenges when you were building Tenor? How was your team able to persuade Apple, Facebook, Google to understand the power of GIFs and why it should be embedded in their conversation tools?

Tenor’s integration into messaging partners was driven by a groundswell of user demand. Tenor’s successful launch of GIF Keyboard on iOS and subsequent growth caught the eye of the industry and in the following 24 months many of the largest messengers integrated Tenor. By focusing on improving search relevance we accelerated the phenomenon — the quicker someone finds the perfect GIF, the more likely they are to share it, which then prompts their friends to search for a GIF to reply with, and so on.

As a serial entrepreneur, having started Redux in 2008 and Tenor in 2014, what lessons have you learned about starting a business and finding an idea that resonated with a large audience?

Building and scaling the right team to pursue the opportunity is crucial. As the business scales, hiring talented executives and giving them the responsibility and space to run portions of the business acts as a force multiplier for continued growth.

How has visual communication evolved and what has Tenor done to adapt to these changes?

When Tenor first launched, only a fraction of our users searched for GIFs. The majority of people used categories to browse (eg: “happy”, “nod”, “thumbs up”) because searching for an expression or sentiment was an unfamiliar experience. As users became more accustomed to expressing themselves visually they started searching for more nuanced and specific queries, and today the majority of users find a GIF to share by searching.

As Tenor invested in localization, it grew rapidly around the world and we started to see more GIFs featuring local celebrities or holidays appear in the top 100 most shared GIFs for individual markets.

We’re continuing to invest deeply in Tenor’s search product, and looking ahead we’ll continue working to make it effortless to find the perfect GIF.

—

Special thanks go out to David McIntosh for participating in this discussion. “10 Questions” is a project designed to learn more from the people in tech and how it relates to businesses. If you’d like to be interviewed, I’d love to hear from you — send me a note on Twitter (@thekenyeung), Facebook, or here on LinkedIn. You can also find this entire series shared on Flipboard and also on Medium.

Feature Image Credit: Tenor CEO David McIntosh (Photo credit: Google)

By Ken Yeung

Technology Editor at Flipboard. Journalist and marketer. Formerly with VentureBeat and The Next Web.

Sourced from Medium

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The Definitive Playbook to B2B Inbound Marketing

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By Blake Johnston

The B2B marketing landscape of 2019 is a brave new world for business – one virtually unrecognizable from years past.

If we go back to the start of the decade, concepts like content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and inbound marketing were years away from conception.

At the time, buyer demographic and behavioral data was difficult to find, marketing campaigns were more expensive to launch and harder to track, and  market pulse was tougher to discern.

All that has now changed.

Replacing the old world of B2B marketing is a new landscape that is highly favorable to creative and strategic marketers. Instead of creating big and expensive ad campaigns, marketers are creating thoughtful content that attract inbound customers.

content marketing

Generating quality inbound leads is the key to the success of B2B marketing.  Not only does it help accelerate your sales cycle – it also creates happier sales reps, and bolster revenue growth.

We developed this playbook to help you accelerate sales cycle velocity, and retain and expand its existing client base. Let’s dive in.

The Organic Inbound Marketing Playbook for B2B Companies

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The thrust of this playbook is simple: launching an inbound B2B marketing strategy does not need to be expensive.

It doesn’t require tons of money for Google AdWords and PPC. Neither does it require that you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on large-scale events and sponsorships.

However, it does require the implementation of thoughtful content that truly engages your buyer. To do this, use the nine techniques we share below to help you build recurring organic inbound traffic.

Technique #1. Dial into your target audience

Every great inbound marketing strategy starts with a perfect understanding of your target audience – your ideal client profile.

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If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience or ideal client profile (ICP), use these two simple tactics to master and understand your ICP:

  1. Make a list of your existing client base, enrich their data, and map their buyer journey.
  2. Interview your best clients and ask them about their specific use cases, needs, and experience with your product.

Phase I. Account-level research

This research starts at the account level, where you need to identify insights about the companies that buy you and start building a list of target accounts. It includes a few steps:

The Basics – Businesses often overlook tremendous value in determining their ideal customer profile by neglecting to dig deeper. Within this space, you’re only discovering topical information such as employee count, revenue, location, or industry. This is just a starting point, not where your research should end.

Account-Based Research – Here is where you determine what are key strategic priorities for the accounts you’re targeting. You’ll also want to ask questions such as: how does your solution help them achieve their goals? What can the technology stack of your target customer tell you? Account-based research gives you an extra level of targeting above and beyond company size, revenue, and industry.

Buying Triggers – Here is where you’ll want to find out about your customers: which activities inside an organization indicate your solution could be a fit for them?

For example; at OutboundView, when organizations are hiring inside salespeople, it typically means our services could be a fit. When a new VP of Sales is hired, that is a good time for our team to reach out and discuss their lead generation strategies, because they’re typically reviewing new sales processes. If we can tell a company isn’t getting any inbound traffic, that tells us that the target needs outbound marketing.

Identifying the triggers that drive organizations to buy is absolutely critical for top of funnel targeting. Finding target accounts that are showing “buying triggers” for your business should be the highest priority for your top of funnel outreach efforts.

Phase II. Buyer research

Who’s your buyer? Not ideal company – we’re talking the customer writing the checks or using your products. We think about buyer personas in two main categories: Decision Makers and Doers.

Decision Makers are the individuals focused on high-level, strategic outcomes, and are usually writing the check for your product or service.

Doers are your users focused on the day to day tactics supporting your product or service.

Why is this an important distinction? Each requires different strategies to spark interest in your product or service; but most importantly, each requires a different messaging to initiate a discussion.

Buyer personas outline the specific value proposition, thought-provoking questions, and resources needed to lead efforts toward an opportunity for each type of Doer or Decision Maker.

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Here is a simple list of steps to follow when building your buyer personas:

  1. Start small with a goal of 2-3 buyer personas.
  2. Think pain points – What makes your customer’s job difficult? Keep in mind these pain points need to be related to their overall job, not just pain points your solution solves for.
  3. Perform customer interviews and ask your buyer the tough questions, don’t just make assumptions.
  4. Make them tangible! Create bio pages for “Bill the Buyer”, ”Sally Seller” and have fun with it!
  5. Think “Personally” and “Professionally” – How does your solution help your buyer reach their goals, both personally and professionally?
  6. Create a unique value proposition for each type of persona.
  7. End with messaging – As the last step in the process, build messaging that aligns with the customer’s pain points and helps differentiate your solution.

To see who is engaging with and responding to your content, create an updated database of people who are following you on social media and subscribed to your email list.

This includes adding calls-to-actions for your blog, events, and gated content on your website to passively capture emails over time.  Then, use tools like Clearbit or DiscoverOrg to enrich the data you collect with detailed firmographic information about who your audience is and how well they fit your ideal client persona. Or, have someone curate the list for you by hand.

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Doing so will enable you to build an audience over time and get maximum return-on-investment for your publishing efforts.

This may take a little bit of work, but it will pay huge dividends in the short-term and long-term. You’ll learn which topics and personas to lock in on and focus your future efforts appropriately.

Technique #2. Create epic content in two Forms

Content creation is cheaper and easier to produce than ever.

But your time and resources are precious – so we recommend fixating content on one of two areas: thought leadership on your philosophy and storytelling about client success.

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What is thought leadership, you ask? Two things:

  • An annoyingly-named and often-abused piece of business terminology.
  • Content that explains the philosophy behind the product or service you offer.

Once you find your target audience, you should use BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find topics relevant to your buyer that have high Google search volume and a high volume of social media mentions.

Why use thought leadership? Because like Simon (Sinek) says, “The best way to inspire action is to ‘start with ‘why.’’”

Think back to Mitch and Murray’s favorite acronym: AIDA.

Lastly, recall that people buy products and services (especially expensive B2B solutions) from brands they know, like, and trust. Thought leadership builds trust and awareness and table-sets future action from your buyers.

The second type of content you should create is flywheel storytelling: telling client stories in evocative fashion by placing them on the Hero’s Journey.

In these stories, your client (note: not your product) is the hero. They are facing a challenge or obstacle to overcome, and your product aids their success.

Here, it’s important to build up your client as a subject matter expert in their field.  This means establishing their credentials, backstory, philosophy, challenges, and how they discovered your product or service.

From there, you can chart their path to success and use their words to describe your product or service’s role in getting them from A to B.

Technique #3. Package content for maximum distribution

To maximize efficiency when it comes to content creation, we recommend repurposing and repackaging content as much as possible.

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For example, you can turn a webinar with a client into a video interview on YouTube, a podcast episode, and an article that can be shared in various formats across social media.

The idea here is expediency. Rather than churning out a bunch of unique, disjointed pieces of content, you can turn one epic piece of content into a multi-purpose series of articles, videos, and podcasts.

Remember – not everyone consumes content in the same format. The beauty of this method is that you can create content in the format of best-fit for your entire audience.

To gain maximum exposure for your content, focus on the best distribution channels. For B2B, a solid email newsletter featuring valuable thought leadership, industry research, and client-led insights is a great way to connect with buyers and build trust.

We also advise supplementing email with social media posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, depending on how much time your ICP spends on those networks.

Finally, we recommend uploading video, audio, and presentation content to social media networks like YouTube, SoundCloud, and SlideShare. Optimize the content for SEO so that it can be found via search and gain the maximum visibility over time.

Technique #4. Create trust and credibility with consistent output

James Carbary has built a seven-figure business around the concept of “Content-Based Networking.”

We found similar value in the concept of leveraging content to create and enhance authentic relationships with clients and audience.

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An important best practice for this method is customer storytelling.

You should foreground your clients in your content as much as possible. Make them the heroes of articles and case studies capturing their success story with your product or service in grand detail. Explain their background, philosophy, challenges, success path, and subsequent gains from choosing you as a vendor.

From there, you should map the distribution of these stories to the audience of best-fit. If the hero in your client success story is a VP of Sales for a SaaS company, then route that story to similarly-situated prospects and clients in your sales, marketing, and client success funnel.

The bottom line is – you should always seek to route content to your audience of the best fit. Use data and well developed personas to make this happen.

Technique #5. Leverage content to build authentic relationships

Once you commit to a content-driven inbound marketing game plan, it’s important to know that you’re playing the long game.

Content publishing pays back exponentially over time. It may take months or years – but you’ll see it. Provided you commit to publishing steadily and consistently.

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Let’s say you publish 3 articles per week – and two out of three posts feature a client or a key ally in your industry. You’re setting yourself up for success.

Think of it this way – publishing 2 articles each week that cross-promote a client or peer leads to 104 goodwill relationships over the course of a year, possibly more if you publish content that features multiple clients or peers.

Content creation is a long-term investment with escalating payoffs in the form of heightened SEO, a strong database, referral-minded channel partners, and powerful press relationships.

These, in turn, lead to increased qualified lead velocity from content you’ve already created.

Technique #6. Build your brand on what others say about you

Every brand needs to cultivate reviews and testimonials that describe their value.

As Daniel Pink and HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan discuss in this must-listen podcast interview, for the first time in history your buyers have as much access to information about your company as your sellers do.

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In other words, your brand is your reputation. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what others say about you. 

Creating a committed campaign that incentivizes happy customers to review your company is an incredibly powerful, worthwhile investment in this day and age. Whether it’s Google Reviews, Yelp!, G2Crowd, or another vendor, it’s important to have your clients affirming your value publicly on the internet.

The second component to building your brand is creating clear statements of philosophy, or why you exist. This can be accomplished through published mission statements and consistent thought leadership output that dials into your purpose as a company, which we covered in Technique One.

Last and not least, always be aware of what is being said about your brand across the web and social media. This means using a powerful media monitoring tool to help you stay on top of real-time mentions.

Technique #7. Serve the entire customer lifecycle

Content should serve the entire customer lifecycle – from first touch to renewal.

This ensures maximum value from your publishing efforts and total artillery coverage for sales development, account executives, and customer support.

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Again, we look back to Technique One. The goal is to provide content with the breadth and depth to add value across as much of your audience as possible. This includes:

  • Cold prospects
  • Warm prospects
  • Lost prospects
  • New clients
  • Long-term clients
  • Lost clients

The broader the scope of impact a piece of content has, the better it serves your bottom-line. If you are only creating content designed to impact the top-of-funnel, you are vastly under-serving your audience, your company, and yourself.

Technique #8. Track and analyze the entire funnel

This technique is a critical component that should be applied to everything you do.

To get the most benefit from your content-driven inbound marketing efforts, you should use a tool to analyze what content and channels drive results.

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Invest in a marketing automation system – HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot (especially if you use Salesforce) are all great options.

Devote a few dollars to a content tracking tool like Guru to build your internal knowledge base.

Use Outreach, Cirrus Insight, or SalesLoft to send trackable content at scale and give your sales reps the ability to see what messaging, links, and attachments get prospects to respond.

Keep track of the data-driven insights these tools give you. Then triple down on what is working and fix areas that need improvement.

Technique #9. Emphasize process, details, and fundamentals

The final technique is also a ‘must apply’ for all aspects of the content-driven inbound marketing playbook.

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The key mantras here are to:

  • Create transparent, consistent workflows.
  • Strike balance between speed and quality control.

To accomplish the former, use a project management tool like Asana or Trello to keep your team on the same page. These tools will also help you strike the balance between speed and quality control.

Being detail oriented when is comes to content means doing every little action that will help you maximize SEO.

This includes adding alt titles to your images, using the proper text formatting with headers, et cetera, and using an SEO tool (we love Ahrefs) to discover the best keyword opportunities for high Google rank.

Here’s a high-performing blog post whose title was chosen specifically for its high search volume (400 per month) and low keyword difficulty (less than 5 backlinks were needed for a top search ranking).

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Going the extra mile is as simple as emailing a partner or client you feature prominently in a piece of content to:

  • Give them a heads up they are being recognized.
  • Gently ask if they can share it across their channels.

The biggest driver of content is the willingness to do these two things. Once you do, you can guarantee a sound return-on-investment in your content marketing efforts to drive inbound leads

By Blake Johnston

Sourced from Mention

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The Best Free SEO Tools to Increase Your Rankings

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By Scott McGovern

You don’t need a massive marketing budget to rank higher on Google. The best free SEO tools help you boost traffic and analyze the competition.

You don’t have to pay to boost your website’s Google rankings with these free SEO tools. Whether you want to see who’s backlinking to your site or dive deep into keyword research, these are the best free SEO tools for the thrifty, digital entrepreneur.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is a popular WordPress plugin that gives you all the basic information you need when optimizing on-page SEO. The free version of Yoast has the following important capabilities.

Choose One Keyword per Piece of Content: Yoast will tell you your keyword density, distribution, and whether or not you’re conflicting with preexisting content. This is crucial for virtually anyone with a website.

Check Readability: Though most search engine optimization discussions involve ranking for Google, it’s important to remember that how your viewers engage with your content will ultimately decide where search engines rank it.

That’s why Yoast integrated the Flesch Reading Ease Score to determine how easy is it to read your content. This goes along with the top SEO marketing trends in 2019: Content quality, not just quantity, matters for Google and readers.

Avoid Duplicate Content: Creating duplicate content is a sure way to confuse Google’s algorithms. That’s why Yoast creates canonical URLs in its free plugin.

A Favorite Plugin Among Paid and Free SEO Tools: Though the free version of Yoast offers some incredible capabilities, Yoast Premium has several features for added optimization. These include:

  • A Redirect Manager to avoid 404s
  • Internal Linking suggestions to boost your internal optimization
  • Keyword optimization for multiple keywords

However, a recent update tells you less, not more, about your keyword optimization. For instance, instead of listing exactly what percentage of your text contains the keyword, it only lets you know whether that percentage is too high, or too low.

Google Analytics

Applicable to WordPress, Shopify, or even Tumblr blogs, Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools due to its versatility. Once you’ve hooked your free account up to your websites, you can do the following:

Set Goals: These can be how many people sign up for your newsletter, track your product or any metric you think would benefit your website.

View Live Site Traffic: How many people are on your site right now? Are they on a desktop or mobile? Where are they coming from? Google Analytics will tell you all this in real time.

Create Audience Overview Reports: Google Analytics will create free reports for you on data including:

  • Sessions
  • Pageviews
  • Users
  • Bounce rates
  • Average session duration

Want to know the nitty-gritty, like which states your users are coming from, which browsers they use, their screen resolutions and their operating systems? This is one of the best free SEO tools for accessing everything you need to know about your traffic.

Paid Google Analytics for 10 Million+ Hits

If you get more than 10 million hits per month, you’re required to pay for Google Analytics 360, which costs $150,000 per year. On the upside, this comes with additional services like Google Drive Integration and 24/7 support.

Ahrefs Backlink Checker

Ahrefs, which focuses on paid software, also has a free backlink checker tool. In a matter of seconds, this software can tell you the following about any domain on the internet.

URL Rating and Domain Rating: Though Ahrefs Backlink Checker does not explain how it calculates a website’s URL Rating and Domain Rating, these figures still give you a good idea of website authority.

  • URL Rating: This number (out of 100) tells you how strong a website’s backlink profile is. It takes internal and external links into account. Generally, it correlates with a website’s Google rankings.
  • Domain Rating: This figure will tell you where a website stands in terms of link popularity.

Backlinks: Not only does it list how many sites are linking back to your domain, but it provides you with a list of the top 100 backlinks, the percentage of dofollow links and the top five anchor text used to link to the website.

The Paid Version of Ahrefs Is Comprehensive: Only in the paid version of Ahrefs can you audit your site, track keywords, generate reports, and fully understand the direction of your website’s search engine optimization. We included the paid version in our list of best SEO tools to help you rank higher in Google.

MozBar

Also on our list of best free SEO tools is the MozBar: a free extension that can give you a good idea of the site structure of any website you visit. It provides information on five main categories: on-page elements, general attributes, link metrics, markup, and HTTP status.

On-Page Elements: In the first category, the MozBar can tell you:

  • Page title
  • Meta description
  • Meta keywords
  • The H1 and H2
  • Alt-text

It provides the character count for each, as well.

Link Metrics and Other Information: The other three categories in the MozBar provide more information about how the site you’re visiting is structured, including:

  • Page load time
  • Page and domain authorities
  • Total links
  • External followed links

Much of this information requires creating a Moz account, which is also free.

Use the MozBar to Understand Other Sites: If you’re just getting started with search engine optimization, the MozBar is a great way to glimpse the back end of any website.

It does not, however, provide actionable information for your own website.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is one of the best free SEO tools, though you need to have a Google AdWords account to use it. Once you have your account set up, you can log in to Keyword Planner to access a few key functions:

Find New Keywords: This part of the tool helps you accomplish exactly that: find new keywords. Google lets you enter a URL, phrase, or keyword, for which it will generate a new list of possible keywords.

Compare Keywords: Here, you can enter a list of keywords to generate metrics about each. This part of Google’s free SEO tool generates predictions for specific keywords based on:

  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Monthly search volume
  • Ranking competition
  • Cost per click

Google Keyword Planner Now Provides Less Information: The latest update to Google Keyword Planner restricted some of its capabilities. For one, you now need an AdWords account to use it. You can no longer distinguish between your desktop and mobile audience, either.

Additionally, keep in mind that though Google Keyword Planner is among the most useful free SEO tools, it was designed for use in AdWords campaigns.

Wayback Machine

Though it may not seem it at first glance, the Wayback Machine is among the most interesting free SEO tools to use. For starters, the Wayback Machine is an archive of the internet. This means that you can see what a website looked like five, 10, 15 years ago, or more and chart how it has evolved every month since then.

Using the Wayback Machine for SEO: There are a few ways to use the Wayback Machine for optimization, especially if you’re a professional.

  • Track how a website has changed, giving you insight into why traffic is fluctuating
  • Archive what your website used to look like if you ever want to return to an earlier version after altering your site
  • Understand whether links have disappeared

In simple terms, the Wayback Machine is an impartial way to keep track of how your (or a client’s) site has evolved over time.

Screaming Frog Spider

The Screaming Frog Spider is free software that mimics how a search engine would crawl your website. Keep in mind that this process takes longer than other software on our best free SEO tools list. For beginners, Screaming Frog seems to give you an overwhelming amount of information. Here are a few things you should note first.

Redirects: This software will find every broken link within your website. Of course, it’ll be up to you to go back in and fix them.

Content Report: This program will give you information on your meta descriptions, titles, and the amount of content on each page. It will also create a content report for you, which you can export.

One of the Best Free SEO Tools for an Entire Website Overview

Screaming Frog creates a massive spreadsheet that lays out your entire site. If you know where to look, this information is actionable, but it can be overwhelming for some who could benefit from a professional service. Additionally, Screaming Frog has to be downloaded to your computer, and it is on the large side.

Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be expensive. There are free SEO tools that you can use to understand other websites’ optimization, perform keyword research, and even chart a campaign.

Whether you want to keep track of your progress after choosing your next SEO firm or start optimizing your content yourself, there are more free options than ever to increase your rankings today.

Feature Image Credit: Witthaya Prasongsin | Getty Images 

By Scott McGovern

Founder of crypto site Blocklr & Growth Nuts, an organic growth co.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Brand Ambassadors Galway

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Who we are? 

Because is a global creative experiences agency. We help brands realize their marketing ambitions through meaningful, memorable and magical live, digital and virtual experiences.

We work with a wide range of top brands across multiple sectors from around the globe.

We are expanding our Because brand ambassador team in Galway.

Who you are?

To deliver an unforgettable brand experience you need unforgettably good promotional staff. A great brand ambassador should be capable of representing exactly what a brand stands for.

You will be working on a wide range of exciting campaigns, events, festivals and much more! If you are out-going, punctual, friendly, enthusiastic, well-presented and looking for part-time work we would love to hear from you. Day, evening & weekend hours available.

Requirements

  • Full driving license with access to a car is a bonus
  • Bubbly personality, ability to approach people
  • Extremely organized
  • Punctual
  • A friendly individual who isn’t afraid to go the extra mile
  • Can work independently or as part of a team

Click HERE to apply for this job.

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Google: Get ready for bigger ads in your Search results on mobile

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Google’s new ad types will give advertisers more prominent placement across its properties.

Google has launched several new ad types that will occupy more space in its key apps on mobile screens.

The new ad types aim to boost the search firm’s mobile revenues amid investor concerns that its revenue per click growth is running out of steam.

Most of Google’s revenue growth now comes from mobile ads, but as ZDNet’s Tom Foremski wondered recently, how many ads can Google show on a mobile screen, and is it running out of places to sell and show more ads?

SEE: IT pro’s guide to the evolution and impact of 5G technology (free PDF)

Google thinks it can create more space and package its existing platforms differently with the new ad formats, Discovery Ads and Gallery ads, while Showcase Shopping ads will get new space on YouTube and the Discover feed.

Visual Discovery ads can be displayed in the YouTube feed and the Google Search app’s Discover feed, while on the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs they’re text-based. Discovery ads are launching globally later this year.

Gallery ads are a visual ad format that will displayed “at the absolute top” of the mobile Search results page.

“We’ve found that, on average, ad groups including one or more gallery ad have up to 25 percent more interactions – paid clicks or swipes – at the absolute top of the mobile Search results page,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Google Ads & Commerce.

Showcase Shopping ads already exist today, but now advertisers will be able to display them in new places, including Google Images, the Discover feed, and soon on YouTube.

Besides more space, the company’s new ad products are designed to reach users when they’re not searching for something specific but rather making discoveries while swiping through feeds, such as the YouTube home feed or the Discover feed in the Google Search apps.

SEE: Sensor’d enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

Raghavan notes that a recent Google-Ipsos study found 76 percent of consumers enjoy making unexpected discoveries when shopping. Part of this experience involves reading reviews and comparing prices online.

Discovery ads are a “new way to reach people”, offering advertisers a way to reach users across multiple products through a single Google Ads automated campaign, Raghavan said.

It’s also giving advertisers more space on Google Maps to promote a business’s location when people are planning a route or en route to a location.

As noted by Search Engine Land, this is the first time ads will appear in the Discover feed. Google claims Discover has 800 million active monthly users.

compiled-showcase-mock-updatedvox-2uawbhy-max-1000x10001.png
Google’s new ad types aim to boost the search firm’s mobile revenues.

Image: Google

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Sourced from ZDNet

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Digital Marketing – eCommerce – PPC Executive

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About House of Ireland

House of Ireland is one of Ireland’s leading retailers of Irish and international luxury giftware, crystal, clothing, jewellery, china and linen. With our flagship store on Lower Grafton St. in the centre of Dublin and travel retail stores in Dublin Airport and in Belfast City Airport, House of Ireland showcases over 200 internationally recognised brands including Waterford Crystal, Belleek, Newbridge Silverware, Barbour and Swarovski.

Digital Marketing – eCommerce – PPC Executive

We are looking for an experienced Digital Marketing executive to join our e-commerce team. You will work with a Web Developer and Front-end Digital Media Designer to grow House of Ireland’s online sales across all channels. You will work closely with our Senior Management team in terms of our overall e-commerce development.  We are looking specifically for dynamic candidates with strong PPC & SEO skills and experience who have the ability and desire to manage House of Ireland’s Digital Marketing efforts to increase online sales internationally.

Responsibilities:

  • Build online sales through House of Ireland’s website, Facebook, Amazon, Google Shopping, eBay & other 3rd-party channels.
  • Develop and implement Digital Marketing campaigns using PPC, Display Advertising, Remarketing, Google Shopping, Email, Video, SEO and Social Media Advertising (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc.).
  • Measure and report on campaign performance using Google Analytics and social media analytics.
  • Manage website content appropriately for SEO, produce ad content for PPC campaigns, develop blog content  and manage product database (images, descriptions and product findability).
  • Manage contact database and increase subscriptions through web-marketing initiatives.
  • Collaborate with Graphic Designer/Front-end Digital Media Designer and Web Developer to develop content for frequent email marketing newsletters and improve overall website performance and UX.
  • Ensure a consistent multi-channel approach between digital and in-store marketing/PR.

Skills and Experience Required:

  • Third Level Degree or Masters in Digital Marketing or a related field.
  • A Google Adwords Certificate in Search, Display and Shopping would be advantageous.
  • A minimum of 2 years experience in Digital Marketing.
  • “Hands-on” demonstrable expertise and experience in use of Digital Marketing tools, in particular: PPC, SEO tools, Google Shopping, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Webmaster Tools and eCommerce Link Building.
  • Excellent knowledge and experience of PPC advertising through Social Media and measuring impact of advertising campaign.
  • Excellent communication skills and problem-solving skills.
  • Ability to work both independently and as part of a team.

Click HERE to apply for this job.

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Entertainment Reporter

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Goss Media is looking for a full-time Entertainment Reporter to join the team.

Our ideal candidate will be a self-starter with a natural instinct for newsworthy stories and an obsession with all things showbiz.

You will need to have excellent spelling and grammar and be able to pitch original content to our editorial team.

You must have a minimum of 1 years experience in writing online, with an interest in presenting on camera.

A strong understanding of social media and social sharing is vital.

Day-to-day tasks include interviewing celebrities, pitching and writing original features, getting exclusive showbiz stories, attending events and working on our show The Daily Goss.

This is a full-time paid position, with a 12-month contract.

Click HERE to apply for this job.

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Using Google Analytics to Measure and Improve Your Content Marketing

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Sourced from usergrowth

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear about Google Analytics?

For most people it has probably something to do with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but did you know that next to that Google Analytics (GA) also holds tons of insights into how you can create better content for your business?

To save time and money for your company don’t you think it would be better if you could create better content, instead of more content?

Better content that could help you rank better for the search terms that you want to be found for? Instead of just trying to create as much content as possible hoping you eventually will rank?

There are, however, dozens of different ways to slice and dice all the information that is available in Google Analytics to come up with killer content ideas.

To help you get the most out of your valuable time and to help guide you to improve your content marketing, this post will help you set up your Google Analytics, teaches you the most common terminology you need to navigate through all the reports and help get the most out of your content marketing.

First, let’s figure out why you should be taking the time to learn and use Google Analytics for your Content Marketing.

Why is Google Analytics important for content marketing?

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It. – Peter Drucker  Click To Tweet

Management thinker Peter Drucker was right, for you to improve any parts of your business, you need to be able to measure it. And what easier way to measure using a tool that offers incredible reporting features at no cost, from a company that is already collecting vast amounts of data from your company and your customers.

By reading the numbers, Google Analytics can capture about your business and try to figure out the story they are trying to tell you is THE best way to not just make data-informed marketing decisions, but to also improve your marketing performance in general.

Let’s say for example you’ve got an idea for a piece of content. You assume that this is the kind of material your customers are waiting for after all content marketing is just solving the same problems that your product solves through media you create and promote, right?

So you do some research online, you start creating what you think is the absolute best piece of content around the subject you’ve ever seen, and you hit that publish button.

If you’re not having any forms of analytics, your story will end just there. Your piece of content is online, and you’re hoping for the best. Maybe you would see new leads coming in, but that’s it.

By using analytics (and Google Analytics is one of the best, easy and free tools available), you would not only know if that piece of content is hitting the marks, but you can also figure out the rest of the story.

What are all the individual pieces that led up to that conversion, to the people coming to your site?

It doesn’t only help you to establish your goals. It can help you to learn how to repeat the process in the most efficient ways, coming up with new content topics, maybe learning how you need to make adjustments to your content, so it does hit the mark etc.

And not only that, Google Analytics can help you answer questions like:

  • How effective are my Content Marketing efforts?
  • What are the pieces of content that are the least effective and turn visitors away?
  • Are my efforts improving over time?
  • Which types of content are most effective for converting visitors? Which types of content are most effective to build traffic?
  • What are some content topics that I’m missing out on?
  • What are some quick wins that I can implement?

You see, the better data you have the more informed decisions you can make about your content marketing strategy and how to move forward.

Implementing Google Analytics on your site

Now that you know the importance of measuring your Content Marketing efforts using Google Analytics let’s dive into the basics to help you get started.

Creating a Google Analytics account

First things first, before you can use Google Analytics you have to set up Google Analytics on your website of course.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can quickly create one for free on the Google Analytics website!

To create a Google Analytics account:

  1. Click here to go to Google Analytics. Note: If you have a Google account, and are not signed in, click Sign in. If you do not have a Google account, click Create an account.
  2. Once you have signed in to your Google account, click Access Google Analytics.
  3. Click Sign up.
  4. Fill in your Account Name, Website Name, Website URL, and select an Industry Category and Reporting Time Zone.
  5. Under Data Sharing Options, check the boxes next to the options that you want.
  6. Click Get Tracking ID.
  7. From the Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement that opens, click I Accept.
  8. Write down the Tracking ID for setup on your website.

Installing Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager

The next thing you have to do is set up Google Analytics on your website. If you’re running WordPress like us, there are three different ways to do this:

  1. Implement the Tracking ID manually in your WordPress theme (only if you know how to code, ask your developer otherwise)
  2. Use a plugin like Monster Insights to add the basic tracking functionality to your website quickly
  3. Take a little longer approach by using Google Tag Manager to implement the tracking ID.

Our preference goes to the last method.

Google Tag manager not only allows you to implement Google Analytics on your website, but it also gives an easy way to deploy and manage all other marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixel, think Facebook Pixel, Snapchat pixel, etc.) to your website without you needing a developer at all.

So head over to Google Tag Manager and signup. Next step is creating a new account by entering an account name and location. Followed by entering the name of your website as the container name and choosing web as the place to use the container.

Pretty straightforward right?

Now accept the Terms of Services of Google Tag Manager, and you’re almost good to go.

Copy the tracking snippet given to you and then most importantly the Google Tag Manager ID (looks like GTM-XXXXXXX).

Using the Google Tag Manager for WordPress plugin, you don’t need to edit any code. Just install the plugin and copy paste the Google Tag Manager ID after activating the plugin and going to the settings.

Now we need to add a tag into the Google Tag Manager, do this by pressing the “New Tag” button.

Then you need to come up with a name, so the tag is easily recognisable for future use. We suggest using “Google Analytics”, but feel free to use whatever you want.

Next step, click on the big button in the “Tag Configuration” to begin the setup. There are a lot of different tags to choose from, but the first one is for “Universal Analytics”, that is the one we want.

To not go into too many details right now, you will keep the “Tracking Type” set for “Pageview”, and then you choose “New Variable…” in the Google Analytics settings.

In the next screen, you can then enter your Tracking ID from the Google Analytics you set up earlier. Google Tag Manager asks you to name the variable for later use in other places, let’s keep that name as it is.

Next, you can click on the “Choose a trigger to make this tag fire…” button. For a basic Google Analytics implementation select “All Pages”.

The final step now to have Google Analytics working on your website and have it execute on every page is hitting the Submit Button (top right corner):

Giving your changes a version name and hit publish. When Google Tag Manager for WordPress is activated with your Google Tag Manager ID, Google Analytics will now be working on your site.

Google Analytics Terminology

Before we go any deeper, let’s first get the fundamental terminology right, this way you can better understand any reporting that Google Analytics throws at you.

What is a User within Google Analytics?

One of the first things you need to know about Google Analytics is what is considered a “user” within GA. For GA an individual that browses your website is called a user. (If you want to get real technical it is a unique browser cookie). It does not matter if a person visits your website only once, or multiple times. For example, one user can create five sessions on your site, and each session has numerous page views.

Since GA uses a unique cookie to identify this person, it means a user is stored to a browser. When someone visits your website using different browsers (on the same machine or different devices), GA will report more than one user.

If you want to identify one person over multiple devices/browsers, you need to use the User ID feature. A User ID is a way to combine sessions from a known person on your website. If you have a way to identify someone (by using an ID from your CRM system for example), you can send that ID to GA, which enables a unique set of cross-device reports. Of course, this works only accurately when you can identify a visitor’s (for example when someone is logged into your website) and won’t work for all visitors.

What are Pageviews?

A Pageview is precisely what you think it would mean, when a User views a page on your website, this will be reported as a Pageview. By default, Google Analytics orders your pages based on the most amounts of views. This helps you to identify which content of yours is viewed more than others.

What are Unique Pageviews?

The problem with Pageviews though is that if a User visits the same page multiple times within the same session, they are all counted as Pageviews. This means that when someone goes back to a previous page after consuming a particular piece of content that the original page is recorded twice as being viewed. Even if the only reason to go back was that they knew there was another link on there that they wanted to explore.

By looking at Unique Pageviews, every page is only counted once within a single session, even if it was viewed multiple times.

How are Pageviews combined into Sessions?

While Pageviews are interesting, it is always interesting to figure out how many Sessions there were on your website. When someone starts on an individual article on your blog, then moves on to the “Homepage” and afterwards to your “About Us” page to find out more information about your company, those three pages are combined into what is called a Session on your website.

So how does this compare to a User and Pageviews? When a person returns a couple of days later and visits five more pages, five more pageviews are recorded in your reporting, there is still only one User, and there are now two Sessions for that User.

What is Bounce Rate?

The Bounce Rate is another very interesting reporting that is important to know about. A Bounce Rate is the percentage of sessions that have only one single Pageview. The Bounce Rate can give you a quick overview of how your content is performing and which content or which pages deserve extra attention. After all, you want your visitors to get down the rabbit hole, consuming more and more content, so they start to see the value of your company and turn into leads.

Don’t forget to put the Bounce Rate into the context of the type of page the Bounce Rate is reporting on. For example, landing pages should have a lower Bounce Rate (because you want people to convert and move to the Thank You page), then maybe your Homepage or a Store Locator.

What is the Acquisition Report in Google Analytics

If you want to figure out how people are finding your website, you will be looking at the Acquisition reports. The Acquisition Report shows you where your visitors are coming from and gives you a report that shows the source, medium and other acquisition dimensions. You can also see traffic from social networks as well as traffic from custom campaign tags.

When you link your Google Search Console, and your Google AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account you can also get dedicated reports around paid traffic and organic traffic.

What is a Referral in Google Analytics

A bit in the same line as the Acquisition Reports are the Referral reports. When someone arrives at your website from another third-party webpage, this will be reported as a Referral. In other words, all the sites that are sending you traffic (by domain) are listed here. If you want you can drill it down to view the “Referral Path”, which gives you an overview of all the individual pages linking to your website.

What are UTM Tags

One of the essential ways you need to start tracking all your Inbound Marketing activity (all the campaigns that you’re doing on other places on the internet that will give traffic back to your website) is by using UTM tags.

You can add extra details at the end of a link your sharing (query parameters), and these additional details will then be included in your Acquisition Reports.

UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” (the company that invented them and got bought by Google, turning into Google Analytics) and they are the things you can see after a URL in your browser. These extra details are always at the end of a URL you’re sharing and include things like “utm_campaign”, “utm_source”, “utm_medium”, “utm_term”, “utm_content” and “utm_id”.

Campaign Name

The “utm_campaign” is one of the three main dimensions that make up a UTM tag (the others being utm_source and utm_medium). This helps you to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. For example: utm_campaign=spring_sale

Source

“utm_source” is the second one that is important for tagging your URL’s correctly. Source helps you to analyse how people found your website, and it tells you where the campaign is coming from. It can help for example to identify if someone clicks on a link in a newsletter “utm_source=newsletter”, search engine “utm_source=google” or any other place that you’re running a campaign. Combined with the next one “medium”, you can get even more granular insights.

Medium

The last one you need is “utm_medium”. Medium can tell you how the message was communicated to the visitor. For example “utm_medium=cpc” for a cost-per-click campaign, or “utm_medium=affiliate” for an affiliate link.

Term

The “utm_term” and “utm_content” parameters are not mandatory but if used can give you a little bit more extra insights. For example, the “utm_term” parameter is used for tracking your keywords during a paid AdWords campaign. You can also use it in your display ad campaigns to identify aspects of your audience. For example “utm_term=running+shoes”

Content

“utm_content” finally is being used when you’re running A/B tests on your ads. It is a useful metric that can pass details about the version people clicked on and as a result, can help you which version is more effective than the other. For example “utm_content=logolink” or “utm_content=textlink”

Turning Google Analytics into valuable, actionable information

Being able to collect all of this data is great, but at one point it can become a bit overwhelming.

Do you know exactly what to look for when you read analytics data? Let’s have a look into how we can get the most out of the data and turn it into valuable, actionable information.

Setting up goals for important conversions on your site.

When setting up Google Analytics for the first time, it is more than just adding the tracker on your website.

If you want to get the most out of your installation, you need to start setting up goals. Goals allow you to see how many visitors are taking action, converting into leads, subscribers and customers. You can see what sources of traffic are sending visitors that are most likely to convert, and which pages are the most convincing.

So what are Goals exactly? According to Google:

Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an ecommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. Having properly configured goals allows Analytics to provide you with critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site or app. Without this information, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns.

In other words, goals measure how and when people complete specific actions that you want them to complete.

There are four different types of goals you can use to track your content marketing results:

Setting up goals requires that your first figure out, what is essential for your business? What goal do you want your visitors to achieve on your site?

Here are a few ideas that might get you started:

  • Email list sign-ups
  • Webinar registrations
  • White paper downloads
  • Contact form completions
  • Views of a specific page

Don’t go too crazy though, Google only limits you to 20 per account, and that is for a good reason.

Every goal that you’re adding will add an extra column in a lot of reports. And to much data will make you lose sight of your main objectives. Start off with one or two, and slowly add more over time when you think they are needed.

To create a new goal, click on “Admin” in the left panel, then in the “View” column, click on Goals. Simply press the “+New Goal button“, and you’re off.

Most of your goals you want your visitors to end up on a specific destination, after all when someone converts they end up on a Thank You page and that is considered a conversion.

Creating redirects to pages like this can quickly be done within Inbound Rocket, by setting up the form type to post and going to a specific page after.

The slug of this page is the destination you need to enter as the Destination URL in your goal, and you’re all good to go.

If needed, you can create a monetary value to the conversion. For example, if you’re setting up the goal for tracking e-commerce transactions, you can specify the goal value to measure the revenue each transaction generates.

Aligning your goals across the Buyers Journey to what you can track

Understanding your customers, Buyers Journey is crucial if you want to develop strategic marketing tactics that are working. Thankfully Google Analytics offers many powerful functions to measure customer behaviour, allowing you to learn from this and respond accordingly.

The moment you start to understand how your customers are behaving and what they are looking for, you can develop the content to meet their needs at every stage of the journey.

So now that you know how to set up goals, let’s start aligning your goals with the different phases of the Buyers Journey, so you can track your entire conversion funnel.

Topics and reports to think about here are:

Awareness

  • Traffic by Channel/Medium
  • Traffic by Content Grouping
  • Traffic by Author, Topic, Word Count, Date Published

Engagement

  • Content Downloads
  • Watched Video
  • Newsletter Signups
  • Email marketing traffic
  • Retargeting Trafic

Conversion

  • Lead & Contact Forms
  • eCommerce Transaction
  • Average Order Value
  • App Downloads
  • Software Trials
  • Conversions by Content Type

Retention

  • Repeat Revenue
  • Content consumption by logged in Users
  • Product Reviews

By using the reports, Google Analytics has combined with custom Goals you can understand your potential customers or leads better and more effectively, steer them in the direction of a satisfied customer and keep them there.

Using Site Search

One of the easiest way to help your visitors on your site and to keep them on your site is by offering a search bar.

There can also be a time when your site is somehow not optimised enough, and they can’t find what they are looking for; a search bar can help them stay on your site. On top of that, it can also provide valuable insights for you.

Google Analytics can help you tap into this data through its on-site search terms report. By using this report, you can quickly review which keywords people are searching for on your site. It might be that you were targeting the complete wrong keywords and your visitors are using different keywords to describe their problems. By comparing what you were initially thinking to the search terms, they are using you can identify if you’re on the right track.

Or maybe there is a missed opportunity for some new pieces of content you can work on? After all, you know exactly what your customers are searching for, so it can identify additional content you can create that drives more traffic and builds more engagement.

When setting up correctly you can use the information to:

  • target the search result pages with specific campaigns (especially if they are converting well)
  • create better internal links so that the high-traffic pages allow to deliver more traffic to lesser performing pages
  • restructure your website to make specific content more accessible to find
  • identify topics and keywords you can use in content creation

Setting this up correctly is quite easy in Google Analytics. Like setting up goals, click on Admin in the left panel, click View Settings and then enable Site search Tracking:

Then, just below the slider, you’ll see a field to enter a Query parameter. The “query parameter” is the letter that appears in the URL to identify a search is happening. (Like the UTM tags). If you’re running WordPress, the default value is “?s=“ so the letter s is what you need to put as the query parameter. Try testing it on your website to see how the URL looks when you search for something.

The last step to do is checking the box “Strip query parameter out of URL” If you don’t select this option than Google Analytics will start to split up the same searches from different pages. For example, you will begin to see separate listings for mycomany.com/searchresultpage?s=1 and mycompany.com/searchresultpage?s=2.

When you tell GA to “strip query parameters out of URL” it will just track all those visits together as mycompany.com/searchresultpage, while still being able to see the internal searches when viewing your site search data.

After you hit save, you can start seeing the results coming in for your site in Google Analytics under “Behaviour” > “Site Search” > “Search Terms”. If no results are produced while searching on your site, those terms will be shown as no-results: keyword.

Identifying and Filtering Internal Traffic from Google Analytics

Depending on the size of your business, employees browsing your website can cause some severe issues in your Google Analytics reporting. People at your company don’t act like a typical visitor on your site, and as a result alter the metrics that are reported most of the times, like users, sessions and Pageviews.

On top of that, they affect probably the most important metrics for your organisation, the conversion rate and attribution reporting in your goals. These can directly impact budgeting, bid strategies for ads and all sorts of other business decisions.

The best thing for you to do is create a filtered view within Google Analytics so that these internal visits are not messing up your data.

The easiest way to do this is to create an IP address filter in GA. But before you can do that, you first need to figure out what your IP address is, just head over to https://www.whatismyip.com/ or do a Google search for “what is my IP address.”

Now we go to our Google Analytics, choose Admin in the left column and then from the Account column select All Filters, Then, click +Add Filter.

You can give your Filter a name like “Internal Traffic Filter”. You can leave the Filter Type as predefined, select Exclude from the Select filter type drop-down. In Select source or destination, “select traffic from the IP addresses” and finally chose “that are equal to”.

In the input box below you can then enter the IP Address you found earlier, and then the only thing left to do is to “Apply Filter to Views” section, where you select “All Website Data” and then click the Add button. Hit save, and you’re good to go.

From now on all visitors internal within your company are complete ignored.

If you still want to be able to make sure that the original data is still saved, the best thing to do before setting up a filter is to create a new view just for this filter. This way you will have the raw data and filtered data available for you. To do that,

  1. Click “Admin“, and navigate to the account and property to which you want to add the view.
  2. In the VIEW column, click the menu, then click “Create new view“.
  3. Select either Web Site or App.
  4. Enter a Name (like filtered view). (Use a specific and descriptive name, so you can easily tell what data is in this view when you see the name in a list.)
  5. Select the Reporting Time Zone. (If your Analytics account is linked to a Google AdWords account, the time zone is automatically set to your AdWords preference, and you won’t see this option.)

See which pages hold people’s attention the longest.

Probably the report that holds the most important clues about which pieces of content your visitors love is the “Average Time on Page” report. In some ways, this is a more accurate measurement of interest than the report on which pages get the most traffic. Especially if you’re running an advertisement campaign going to a specific page, or when some of your pages are ranking well and driving in a ton of organic traffic.

To see the “Average Time on Page” and rank your pages according to the time on their page, go to “Reporting” > “Behaviour”. In the expanded menu click on “Site Content” > “All Pages”.

In the column on the right you can see the different pages people are visiting and if you click on “Average Time on Page”, the list will automatically sort for you by time on page.

Other interesting sorts you can do on this page as soon as your Goal Data is starting to flow in, is sorting by Page Value. This will give you the insights into which pieces are the most interesting for your visitors and which pieces of content are in serious need of attention for some updates.

Finding slow loading page to optimise your site speed

The last reporting we want to focus on here is the reporting to identify slow loading pages. According to Google, most of the websites out there are too slow.

2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” Maile Ohye – Google

In other words, when most websites are ranking above nine-seconds, your visitors are already gone before they have even seen your content.

As of July 2018 page speed is a ranking factor in mobile search.

Thankfully using Google Analytics, you can figure out which specific pages on your site are loading the slowest and need some improvement. This information combined which pages are getting the most traffic should give you enough information to figure out which pages you need to start optimising first.

To see the site speed of individual pages, go to “Reporting” > “Behaviour”. In the expanded menu click on “Site Speed” > “Page Timings”.

This report quickly shows you all of your pages on-site, grouped by page load time. Want to know how you can improve them? Just under “Page Timings” in the left-hand menu, you can find “Speed Suggestions”, showing you some great tips to get started.

Advanced Google Analytics reporting

The final item we want to focus on is a little bit more advanced but can give you great insights into finding your most popular content based on the categories and the tags associated with them.

The way to do that is called Content Grouping. According to Google, Content Grouping is:

Content Grouping lets you, group, content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site or app, and then view and compare aggregated metrics by group name in addition to being able to drill down to the individual URL, page title, or screen name. For example, you can see the aggregated number of Pageviews for all pages in a group like Men/Shirts, and then drill in to see each URL or page title.

So how to use Content Grouping to determine your most popular content?

Using Content Grouping to determine your popular content

It all starts by navigating to Admin and then under the View column you can select “Content Grouping”. Click “+New Content Grouping” and name the first group “Post Categories”.

Under “Group by Tracking Code” click “Enable Tracking Code” and write down the number under “Select Index” (unless you’ve already done this before for something else, this should be “1”). Click “Done” and then “Save”.

Repeat the same step, only call it “Post Tags” and write down the index number (probably “2”).

Since we’ve already set up Google Tag Manager, in the beginning, to enable Google Analytics on our website, all we now have to do is head over to Google Tag Manager.

Choose your Account and click on your “Google Analytics Settings”.

Under the “variable configuration,” you click on “More Settings” > “Content Groups” > “+Add Content Group”.

Enter “1” as the “Index” and then click on the icon on the right of “Content Group”. Hit the plus sign in the top right corner for “New Variable”.

Name the variable “Post Categories” and select “Data Layer Variable” as the “Type”, enter “pageCategory” as the “Data Layer Variable Name” and click save.

Repeat these steps only this time name the variable “Post Tags” and the name for the “Data Layer Variable” is “pageAttributes”.

After that click “Continue” and select “All Pages” under “Fire On” and click “Create Tag” in case that is not selected yet.

Now we head over to your WordPress site and go to the Google Tag Manager plugin we installed earlier. Under the “Basic data” tab, make sure that both “Category list of current post/archive” and “Tags of current post” are selected.

By doing this, we store extra pieces of information in a Data Layer on your blog posts. The post categories and tags can now be used within Google Tag manager for more advanced data collection and reporting.

The final step will be to publish the changes you made in Google Tag Manager.

From now un in Google Analytics, under “Behaviour” > “Site Content” > “All Pages” you will have the option to select information from your content groupings.

In other words, you can now figure out what are the most visited content categories, and tags that you’re visitors are finding most interesting. It gives you the ability to understand how certain content is performing based on the categories and tags.

Although it is a bit of a top-level view, it can be powerful to quickly understand your top performing content. And as a result, it can help you focus on those topics that your visitors seem to love most.

Google Analytics is an enormous data wonder, and it holds lots of vital data about your website and how it is performing. Best of all, it offers all this data to you for free.
 
As you can see it all starts with a correct implementation though, and from there, there are many different ways to evaluate the performance of your content marketing.
 
Just using standard reports like the amounts of pageviews is not enough if you truly want to move your business forward.
 
If you learn what kind of questions you need to ask for your business, you can start to evaluate your content marketing efforts. 
 
After all, if you don’t measure your content marketing strategy, you don’t what is and what isn’t working.
 
How do you use Google Analytics to improve your (content) marketing strategy? Drop us a reaction in the comments below; we’d love to hear from you.

Sourced from usergrowth

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Senior Partner Marketing Manager, EMEA & LatAm

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GSIs Senior Partner Marketing Manager for EMEA – LA

Your Opportunity

The GSIs Senior Marketing Manager role for the EMEA & LatAm regions will be integral to the successful performance of Informatica marketing objectives and execution through / with GSIs and CSis. The primary charter is to increase profitable market share across all product categories by optimizing and developing measurable strategic partner marketing initiatives on this specific segment.

This role will be responsible for developing, driving and implementing partner marketing activities with GSIs and Consulting SIs. This is a “hands-on” role, acting as a point of contact between marketing, partner sales and key partners in the GSI and CSIs communities. This reports directly to the Director of Partner Marketing EMEA & LatAm and works closely with partner sales management, marketing leadership, GADs, partner operations, product marketing, finance, and partners with key external entities.

Our Ideal Candidate

Informatica is looking for an experienced, high-energized Senior Marketing Manager that will work closely with various stakeholders (Partner Sales, Global Account Directors, Field Marketing, GSIs, CSIs and Agencies) to plan and execute a lead generation marketing plan that supports the objectives of the GSIs and CSIs business across EMEA & LatAm regions.

The candidate meets each new challenge with a positive can-do attitude. Enthusiast and committed to establishing and maintaining customer satisfaction. Strong work ethic supported by the ability to define priorities, solve problems independently and a commitment to both internal and external customers. Excellent in a team environment yet feel equally at ease when tasked with self-driven jobs and resilient.

Your Responsibilities

Enable GTM strategy and partner marketing with key GSI partners (Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, Capgemini & others), and local SIs. Work with Partner Sales team and Global Account Directors to ensure joint objectives and goals Work with Global Partner marketing team to manage Joint go-to-market programs and initiatives. Joint sales and partner/customer collaterateral Create relationships across the marketing teams within Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, Capgemini Manage partner sponsorship at appropriate Informatica events such as Informatica World and related tours and summits. Design and sell sponsorship packages Organize participation in partners’ trade show and partner programs Manage partner funds and provide accurate and timely reporting Manage marketing sourced pipeline Attend partner QBRs and planning sessions Contribution to EMEA & LatAm partner MK communications.

Your Qualifications:

The right candidate has proven success in partner/channel marketing – with proven strategic development and executional experience with an emphasis on integrated partner campaign management – digital marketing, high touch, social marketing & selling – a passion for technology, and an entrepreneurial spirit that enables you to work relatively independently.

In addition, you’ll also have the following attributes and critical skills:

Enterprise software experience is preferred Focus on partner success Demonstrated strategic thinking with proven ability to flawlessly execute against tight deadlines and drive multiple projects at once Self-motivated, strong communication, project management and organizational skills Solid business acumen with a keen sense of urgency A critical enabler of the interlock between marketing, product, sales, finance and business development Combination of strong analytical and strategic thinking for insight with excellent verbal, written and interpersonal skills Ability to think through problems creatively and brainstorm multiple solutions Demonstrated success in working within an extended team environment

Desired Experience

7+ years’ experience in customer partner/referral/affiliate marketing, demand generation, or other similar marketing experiences. Experience must include working with GSIs. Bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in Marketing or Business. Previous experience in building partner marketing programs, proven track record of creating and executing highly successful marketing campaigns Savvy and proven success with integrated marketing programs—a solid marketer that can deliver powerful partner campaigns Comfortable providing a point of view on all marketing engagements with partners through a solid understanding of the partner referral ecosystem, leveraging marketing best practices and individual marketing acumen Strong business acumen, as well as strong analytical and strategic thinking abilities to draw conclusions based on data Experience with SFDC, Marketo, Tableau, and other leading marketing software, SaaS, or technology to run campaigns Strong event planning/management experience, with a focus on demand/pipeline generation Experience in managing partner development funds Up to 25% business travel required Fluent in English and preferably another European language #LI-RH1

Click HERE to apply for this job.

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