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Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions

October 11, 2018 No Comments

If you were to look inside your Google Analytics right now, chances are that a majority of the traffic on your blog comes from 2-5 blog posts.

If you have goals set up in Google Analytics, and you’re measuring product or service conversions that come directly from content, chances are that a majority of your first-click and last-click conversions also come from a few blog posts.

What’s interesting though is rarely do the posts with the highest volume of traffic, have the highest volume of conversions.

Analytics 14 — The highlighted posts are posts with a low conversion rate. These posts don’t follow one of our five frameworks below – they rank for keywords, but the keywords don’t have intent. The posts not highlighted have much higher conversion rates and the terms they’re ranking for follow one of our frameworks and do have intent. A conversion rate of .2% – .4% is what we typically consider “good” for conversions from blog post to product-related signup for most software or service businesses. Anything above that is great.

So what’s the disconnect?

It’s that head terms or high volume queries are typically the terms that target the top of funnel for your product or service – they have more people searching for them, but less of the searches have purchase intent.

On average, keywords with lower volumes are typically the terms that target the middle or bottom of the funnel – they have fewer people searching for them but higher purchase intent.

There are cases where you can go after keywords that have both high volume and have purchase intent – those are optimal, but typically there aren’t too many to target.

While many companies are focused on ranking for high-volume keywords in their content marketing because of the traffic potential, we tend to prioritize lower-volume, high intent keywords because the conversion potential is much greater than going after high volume keywords.

For example, continuing from the screenshot above, here is the 16th highest traffic article in that time period, bringing in only 1,612 pageviews in that period, but an amazing 39 product signups for this SaaS company.

Additional benefits: the lower-volume, high-intent keywords are much easier to rank for, most of your competition is focused on the high-volume instead of high intent keywords, and they tend to outperform the highly competitive keywords from a conversion perspective (the main goal).

The following strategy is specifically for B2B SaaS businesses (some of the strategies can also work for services businesses as well). Ranking for high-volume keywords may work well if your main goal is to generate traffic (ad or impression based content sites – media), newsletter or email signups (personal or email list based blogs- course sites), or any other business where top of funnel traffic is valuable. So in this article, when we say “conversions” we mean product-related signup or form fills, not an email or newsletter opt-in.

In this post, I’m going to explain how we come up with SEO-driven content ideas that generate leads and signups by not going after high volume head keywords. I’ll share some examples of frameworks that tend to do well from a conversion perspective and I’ll share some examples from blogs that we run that show why we take this approach vs. the approach that most agencies and content marketers take.

Our Keyword Strategy = Pain-Point Driven Instead of Volume-Driven SEO

Let’s say that you’re doing content marketing for a SaaS company that targets salespeople as the customer (broad target audience, I know, but it’s just for the sake of the example).

Many marketers take a keyword-first approach to content marketing.

They research some keywords that they think salespeople would be interested in and end up coming up with a keyword list that looks something like this:

Then they prioritize what keywords to target based on which keywords have the highest volume (traffic potential) and which ones are easiest to rank for (low competition).

They do this because oftentimes their metric of success is a % increase in traffic, not leads/signups growth. The why behind this is a discussion for another post :).

Then blog posts start being produced that go after these high-volume keywords and if everything works you may notice that traffic starts to increase.

But what about the leads and signups from those posts?

Oftentimes, you don’t see a measurable amount of leads and signups coming from those blog posts topics because this strategy is designed to increase traffic, but doesn’t take the intent of the searcher into account.

We think this volume-based keywords strategy for content marketing is backwards.

Instead, the approach that we use to come up with SEO-driven content ideas is inverted. We start with the intent of a buyer (the pain point of a customer), then we find keywords and topics that discuss solutions to the problem the searcher is trying to solve.

By doing SEO from a pain point first approach vs. a keyword-first approach, we can map the intent of the search to the buyer’s journey and have a better predictor of which SEO posts will generate leads and signups, instead of just measuring which posts will generate traffic.

Our Process for Coming up with SEO Topics That Drive Leads and Signups

Now that you understand the differences between going after high-volume keywords vs. pain-point driven SEO, let’s dive into our exact process for ideating topics that generate leads.

The content frameworks we’ve found are the highest converting for SEO content

Before I explain how to come up with the ideas for your own company, I think it’s important to share the frameworks we use to create high-converting SEO content.

Here are the five frameworks (or article types) that we use. Below, I’ll explain how to come up with the ideas to prioritize for each of the article types.

Comparison posts – this framework objectively compares your product or service to your top competitors. Here’s an example
Best product or service lists – this framework helps searchers discover the best products or services in the category they’re searching for. Here’s an example
Alternatives to X – this framework helps searchers discover alternatives to your competitors products. Here’s an example
Articles that talk about pricing – This framework talks about pricing of your own product or service (if you have this hidden) – you could also do this for your competitors if they’re not forward about pricing. Here’s an example from a hubspot agency
Product or Service Use Cases – this framework helps searchers figure out how to solve a problem they have and presents your product or service as a potential solution – ie. how to increase leads from content marketing (note the subtle tie-ins to SEMrush throughout the post).

Ideating on high-converting topics for SEO

Now that you know the frameworks that you should be thinking about, I want to share how you get the ideas that fit into the frameworks.

Essentially, all of the ideas should come from your prospects and your customers. If you’ve been a follower of our site for a long time, you’ll know our entire strategy starts with having a in-depth understanding of your customers. If you know your customers inside and out, you’ll be able to come up with content ideas that your competitors won’t target because they’ll be focused on traffic while you’ll be focused on helping your customers and future customers solve problems.

By knowing who your prospects/customers view as your competitors, what problems your prospects/customers think your product or service solves, what features or parts of your service your customers get the most value from, how your customers describe your product or service and the value they get from it, you should be able to come up with content ideas that convert 2x to 5x higher than other content.

Survey questions to ask to identify conversion focused SEO topics to write about

Here are some questions to ask your customers via in-person interviews, phone calls, and surveys to help you identify high intent keywords to target:

1. What was the problem you were looking to solve before stumbling across our product or service?

This question helps you identify what keywords to target when someone is researching for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves.

2. If our product/service were no longer to exist, what product/service would you use as an alternative?

This question helps you identify who your customers view as your competition.

3. How would you describe our product/service to a friend who knew nothing about us?

This question helps you identify how your customers would describe your product to a friend – maybe they describe what you do differently than you describe it – it’s important to figure this out so you can capture search volume for terms you might not be thinking of.

4. What are the top 3 benefits that you receive from our product/service?

This question helps you identify the top use cases and benefits that customers get from your product or service.

5. If you were to research our product or service, what would you search for?

This question helps you identify the terms that your customers would search for to find your product/service.

Make sure that all of these questions have open ended responses. You don’t want to lead people to an answer, you want them to share their thoughts with you. You should see a wide range of responses and then you want to prioritize responses that you get multiple times.

Once you have the answers to these questions, it’ll help you figure out the specific ideas to apply to each framework.

For example, if a majority of respondents say the biggest benefits they get from your product or service are increasing qualified leads to sales teams, increasing sales pipeline, and closing more deals, then you might want to create articles on those topics that walk people in-depth through various ways they can accomplish those things (your product or service might be one solution to their problem- you’ll need to include other valuable ones as well).

Another example, if a majority of respondents say that if your product was no longer to exist, they’d use Hubspot or Marketo, then you might want to create blog posts that compare your product to Hubspot and Marketo, and weigh the pros and cons of using your product vs. theres.

Hopefully you get how this works from here… (if not, feel free to leave a question/comment below)

Case Study: Going after long-tail high intent keywords beats out high-volume keywords

Now for some proof that this approach works.

Over the past year, we’ve been testing different frameworks across clients – narratives (stories), case studies, data posts, as well as the five frameworks above. Across multiple clients, we’ve seen these frameworks outperform some of the other content from a conversion perspective.

Because we started seeing these trends emerge, we thought we’d share the strategy with you.

The following analytics screenshot is from one of the SaaS companies we work with. This report is looking at organic traffic, the page that they landed on from organic search and the number of last-click conversions to that article.

To protect our client’s data, I’ve grayed out the URL of the article and in its place, I’ve put a description of the article.

All of the other numbers are left as is.

Now what’s important to note here is that not all organic traffic is created equal from a conversion perspective. If you look at blog post #1 and #2 here, you’ll notice that they get almost the identical level of traffic, but #2 gets far lower conversions.

This is because the blog post #2 ranks for a keyword the target audience would search for, in this case a sales related keyword, however, the post doesn’t follow one of our five frameworks and the intent of the post doesn’t tie into the need or value that the product offers.

What’s also important to note is that to help increase conversions for each of our blog posts, we use in-article CTAs that are contextual to the post.

For example, if we were to write a post about best CRM tools, the post would have a CTA that says something to the effect of “Looking for a CRM tool for your small business? Try a free trial of X tool for 30 days, free.”

Another thing to note is that the highest converting blog post also has the lowest level of traffic, but that post uses one of the highest intent frameworks: comparing competitive products. When we originally did keyword research for this comparison term, multiple the SEO tools showed zero search volume behind the long-tail keyword.

Let me repeat this point because it’s important: The post with the largest number of conversions in the screenshot below targeted a keyword that tools like Ahrefs and Moz showed as having zero search volume.

Most marketers would just move on and not write a post on this topic.

But while the traffic doesn’t compare to the rest of the posts on the list here, the post dwarfs most others from a conversion standpoint.

Now, let’s look at GA’s model comparison tool to see the top converting blog posts that we’ve produced from January 1 – August 29th, to see which of the content frameworks yield the highest amount of new trial signups, when also factoring in first-click conversions.

We can see here that the highest converting posts use the frameworks above. Only three of the top 10 posts are what we consider “top of the funnel” articles and they make up only 10% of conversions.

That’s crazy. 90% of the conversions from these top 10 articles are from one of the 5 simple high-product-intent frameworks we listed above.

What you should take away from this

We’re not saying that you should only produce SEO content that falls within those five frameworks, but what we are saying is that we’ve noticed trends across multiple clients, that when you produce pain-point driven content that use those five frameworks to target long-tail keywords, we’ve seen conversion numbers that are much higher than other content that ranks.

Therefore, we think you should prioritize producing those pieces of content before going after terms that are high volume / low competition in your category or that your target audience would potentially be interested in reading about.

Once you feel like you’ve exhausted all of the potential long-tail keywords using the five frameworks, then it makes sense to take a broader approach to finding higher volume keywords in your category and that your target audience would potentially read.

In addition, using this strategy effectively also depends how strong your domain is. If you’re just starting out with content marketing, then targeting these types of posts may not work well for you because other sites with stronger domain authority will outrank you. If that’s the case, it may make sense to focus on building your site authority first, or producing these posts, and then simultaneously focusing on building domain authority.

When it comes to conversions, as you’ll see from the last screenshot we shared above, this is not the only type of content that will generate conversions. Even stories that we’ve produced that have nothing to do with the product or service you offer, but does tie in with the category, and has helpful advice has yielded conversions. So it’s important not to only focus on these content types, but to mix in various types of content frameworks – content that targets the top of funnel, middle and bottom of the funnel.

By Benji Hyam

Sourced from Grow and Convert

In News

Google Analytics Audiences Strategy: Keep It Simple

September 19, 2018 No Comments

By Emily Rosche

In the Google Marketing Platform, Audiences are how we pass collections of users between tools – like sharing a Google Analytics audience with Google Ads, Google Display & Video 360, or Google Optimize. While there are many ways to accomplish the same objective, using simple audience definitions in Google Analytics can improve your flexibility and accuracy when remarketing to users through Google Ads.

By keeping each audience definition modular and relying on tool-specific features, you can avoid situations that waste your money and annoy users.

What is a Google Ads Audience?

Remarking audiences in Google Ads allow you to target specific users based on a set of criteria you get to define. These audiences can be created in Google Ads or they can be created in and imported from Google Analytics.

You can then use multiple audience definitions when targeting a remarketing audience in Google Ads. For example, you could create 2 separate audiences in GA. Then in Google Ads, you could target a remarketing audience that includes everyone from the first audience and excludes everyone from the second.

This post by Michael explains in detail how to set up audiences in Google Analytics and how to import them into Google Ads.

Tell Me If This Sounds Familiar

Perhaps you’ve been in this situation: 1) You’re shopping for something online. 2) You buy that thing. 3) You proceed to get bombarded by ads for that thing. A quick search shows this is not a unique problem.

How Does This Happen

Anecdotally, I think most of can recall to a time that advertising has failed – which seems particularly infuriating in digital platforms where we expect/hope there’s a greater form of the good kind of personalization. While there are many reasons why search and display advertising can fail, one particularly manageable problem is how people define the audiences they target.

There are more advanced retargeting methods for ecommerce websites, like dynamic remarketing, but let’s go through an example where we might need to remarket to someone who visited a valuable page on our site – either a service or product that we’re trying to promote.

Say you want to remarket a specific product to users who have added that product to their cart but did not purchase it. You could include all of those criteria in a single audience definition and use it to create your remarketing audience in Google Ads:

The problem arises when a user comes back and ultimately purchases the product – whether they return later that day or two weeks from now, they’re still going to be in that remarketing audience because, at one time, they abandoned that product in their cart. Meeting the criteria of the audience adds them to the audience, but purchasing the product does not remove them from the list.

BUT IT CAN – as long as you have your remarketing audience set up correctly.

Streamlining Your Audience Definitions

The solution to the audience issue can be simple: rework your audience definition into something that isn’t so specific.

You can and will have audience definitions that involve multiple criteria, but you need to think through the definition to make sure you aren’t trapping users in a remarketing loop.

To remedy the situation I’ve created above, define one audience that includes all users who added that product to their cart:

Then, create a separate audience for users who purchased that product:

When creating your remarketing audience in Google Ads, you can include all users from the add to cart audience and exclude all users that are in the transaction audience.

Voilà: a remarketing audience that automatically removes users who have purchased that product.

Every Coin Has Two Sides

There’s a second principle that we should all adopt, and this applies to almost every problem we try to solve. When we attempt to target an ad to users by creating an audience to target, we need to answer both questions: Who should see this Ad? as well as Who should not see this Ad? These questions can help guide the audience creation and setup inside of Google Ads.

This applies to other challenges as well – when we’re adding tagging to certain pages on our site or creating experiment targeting in Google Optimize, we have to answer similar questions or we’ll end overcounting our conversions or showing our experiments to too many people.

Complicated Audience Definitions are a Bad Idea, Cont.

If you aren’t convinced by the lone scenario above, we have a few more reasons complex audience definitions are a bad idea.

1. Your audiences don’t collect enough cookies to be useful.

If your audience applies to just 3 people it is way too specific. You want/need to find that balance between targeting the most appropriate groups while also collecting enough cookies.

Bigger audiences are better. Audiences with 1,000 cookies can be used anywhere. Less than that, and they can only be used in display.

2. You think you’re targeting one group of users when, really, you’re targeting this other group.

The example I’ve given above applies here. You were inadvertently keeping users who had purchased the product in that remarketing audience.

This can cause the data your collecting (or at the very least your interpretation of that data) to be incorrect. It can also waste money.

3. You end up with a million audience definitions.

If your audience definition is specific, chances are you’re going to end up with a lot of those very specific audiences.

Keep in mind: once an audience has been created, it can’t be deleted – it can only be closed.

Additional Tips

Evaluate the data before you create the audience. Set up your audience as a segment in GA first to ensure you aren’t running into any of the issues above. You can either look at the segment preview or apply that segment to your GA reports and click around to see if the data the segment is pulling in makes sense.

“I think people also try to make audiences very specific because they forget that they are able to combine it with targeting native to the tools or other dynamic elements. Dynamic attributes instead of product-level audiences help to scale. Targeting in conjunction with keyword and topic targets helps to contextualize ads.”

Stephen Kapusta

Shoutout to my colleague Stephen Kapusta for contributing to this post!

By Emily Rosche

Sourced from LunaMetrics

In News

Google to automatically verify your Google Search Console account if you are the property’s owner in Google Analytics

September 14, 2018 No Comments

By Barry Schwartz

Google is opening up Google Search Console automatically, so countless webmasters and site owners will have more access to data and important website alerts.

Google has announced that it will soon automatically verify you for a website in Search Console if you are already a verified owner of the same property in Google Analytics.

This means you don’t have to request manual verification within Google Search Console if you’ve already set up Analytics, and it streamlines the process of giving site owners access to Google Search Console.

Even more importantly, those with Google Search Console access will get emails and notifications of issues in their inboxes. These messages can include manual actions, hacks, WordPress and other CMS upgrade alerts, as well as other notifications — all aimed at helping you keep your website healthy, indexed and ranking.

Google said, “If you don’t want to be verified for Search Console, simply delete the property in Search Console.”

Google explained why Google Search Console is important and useful:

Search Console is a free tool that provides website owners with information which can be critical to performance in Google Search. Once verified, Search Console compiles reports on the website’s performance in Search, including search queries, the website’s rankings, and the number of clicks and impressions. Additionally, there’s information about a site’s indexing, the status of various implemented features on the website, as well as reports and notifications of critical issues.

Here is a screen shot showing the notification when someone is automatically verified via this method:

By Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.

Sourced from Search Engine Land

In News

Deciphering the Terminology of Google Analytics

July 6, 2018 No Comments

By Alex Mercer

Google Analytics provides a wealth of knowledge on your website – from its most visited pages, to the visitors that are browsing. It’s free, easy to set up, and essential for insights on what’s working and not working for your audience.

In order to get the most from this tool, you have to understand what you are looking at! The better you understand the terminology, the more useful Google Analytics will be for measuring the effectiveness of multiple aspects of your website – month by month and page by page – and giving you the insights needed to make improvements. Below is a glossary of essential terms for making sense of Google Analytics.Acquisition – Acquisition metrics show where your traffic is originating from, be it Google searches, social media links, or other websites.

Average Session Duration – The average visit length of time a user spends on your website at any given time. This is a key metric for measuring the effectiveness and quality of your website.

Average Time on Page – The average time that users spend viewing a page or group of pages.

Bounce Rate – A bounce is a single page website visit, and so your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits that your site has. Generally you want this number to be as low as possible, however sites with standalone pages such as blog articles tend to have lower bounce rates by nature.

Direct Traffic – Visitors that came directly to your site by typing your company website’s URL into their browser’s address bar. Direct traffic indicates how many visitors already know your company and URL.

Exit Page – The last page that someone visits before leaving your website.

Filter – A tool that allows you to include or exclude specific data in your reports. For example, you can exclude internal company traffic so that your employees are not included in the website metrics. You can also exclude known bots.

Goal Conversion – This is the completion of an activity on your site that is important to the success of your business, such as a completed sign up for your email newsletter. You must set this up first before Google will track a goal conversion.

Landing Page – The first page that someone visits when they come to your site. Often this is the homepage.

Organic Traffic – Visitors who come to your website from natural (or unpaid) search engine results.

Pages/Session – The average number of pages viewed during one visit

Pageviews – The total number of website pages viewed. For example, if one person visited your homepage and the contact page, then that would count as 2 pageviews.

Referral Traffic – Visitors that landed on your website through a link on another website, such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

Returning Visitors – Visitors that have previously visited your website.

Search Traffic – Visitors that came to your website through a search engine such as Google or Bing.

Sessions – A session is a single continual active viewing period by a visitor. If a user visits a site several times in one day, each unique visit counts as a session.

Source/Medium – Where your website traffic is coming from. This includes which websites your visitors are coming from as well as what keywords they are using to get to your website.

Unique Visitors – The number of unduplicated visitors to your website (each person only counted once).

Unique Pageviews – The number of new pages per viewing session that users have visited.Users – The number of people that have visited your site at least once during a given time period. One user could have multiple sessions, but will still be counted as a single user.

% Exit – The ratio of exits to pageviews. This indicates how often users leave page(s) compared to how many pages they view.

There you have it. Now that you understand what you’re looking at, you’ll be able to more effectively navigate Google Analytics for meaningful insights. We’ve tried to cover the primary terms you’ll encounter using Google Analytics and, hopefully, this glossary will help you make sense of your metrics a little better. We’ll be diving much deeper into website analytics and metrics on our blog in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back.

Feature Image Credit: Crazyarts / Pixabay

By Alex Mercer

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

How to Use the Google Analytics New Custom Audience Report For Better Remarketing

May 29, 2018 No Comments

By Neil Patel

On most sites, over 90% of visitors leave without converting.

That’s an estimate for all traffic to your site.

As bad as that might sound, the numbers are even worse for first-time visitors. You can expect that only 2% of your site’s visitors will convert on their first visit.

Regardless of what your goals are for your website, these statistics are a bit depressing.

It might be enough to lead you to despair. After all, if you don’t do anything to bring these visitors back, many of them will never return.

But that’s only if you don’t take any further action. Thankfully, you can take matters into your own hands to get conversions from these once-lost visitors.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is one of the best ways to avoid losing potential customers.

When you do it correctly, it can be a great way to bring users back to your site and increase the percentage of your visitors who become customers or clients.

But much like any other channel, creating an effective remarketing campaign requires careful planning and a strong understanding of your target audience.

Google Analytics has long been one of the most important places to find data to help you understand your audience. And now, Google offers even more help.

The new Custom Audiences Report in Google Analytics gives you access to in-depth information on how users respond to your campaigns and help you create even more effective remarketing ads.

If you aren’t yet using it for your remarketing, now is the time to try it out. In this post, I’ll teach you how you can use your audience data to improve your remarketing efforts.

But first, you need a basic understanding of what this report is. Let’s start there.

What is the new audiences report?

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, your first thought may be that an “audience” report is nothing new.

But it’s important to note that this new feature refers to a completely different set of data than the standard “Audience Overview” report.

If you have access to this report, you may have seen the following announcement after logging into your account over the past few weeks.

If you see this notification, you can click “See Report” to access the new audiences report.

If you don’t see this notification, you can access your data manually by selecting “Audiences” from the “Audience” tab.

If this is the first time you’re accessing the report, you’ll see another banner that provides more detail than the first.

As this pop-up explains, Google designed the new audiences report to help you “easily view how your audiences are performing and evaluate your remarketing efforts.”

However, this report will only show data if you’ve enabled demographics and interests reports and have audiences configured in your Analytics account.

So if you haven’t yet created audiences, you’ll need to do so before you can gain any value from this new report.

Fortunately, the process is fairly straightforward. In fact, you should be doing this anyway if you’re running any marketing campaigns with Google’s ad network.

How to create an audience in Google Analytics

First, it’s important to understand what the term “audience” means in the context of Google’s advertising platform.

Fortunately, it’s not all that complicated.

An audience is a group of users that you want Google Analytics to group together based on any combination of attributes that is meaningful to your business.

These attributes can be as broad or as specific as you’d like them to be.

These attributes allow advertisers to deliver custom ads in real time.

For example, if you want to create an ad campaign that targets all of your customers, you might create an audience that includes all of the users who have ever made a purchase on your site.

This would necessitate a fairly general ad, but it would give you a large pool of potential viewers.

Now, let’s say that you want to create an ad campaign with the goal of earning new customers.

In this case, you might want to create an audience segment with users who have downloaded a whitepaper on your site but have not yet made a purchase.

This way, you can focus your efforts on the visitors who don’t yet think that buying from your site is worth it. This will allow you to tailor your campaign toward convincing them.

Regardless of the exact qualifications you choose, this is an excellent way to focus your ads on the exact audience you want to reach.

And, if you’re ready to get started, you can create a new audience in either Analytics or AdWords.

In this article, we’ll focus on how audience creation works in Google Analytics.

But once you’ve created an audience, you can activate it on AdWords, too, as long as you log into the same Google account.

To get started, navigate to the “Admin” page of your Google Analytics property. Then, select “Audience Definitions” and then “Audiences.”

Next, click “+New Audience.” From here, you can choose from preconfigured audience types or create your own new audience definition.

Google’s recommended audiences make it easy to create audiences based on criteria that many marketers find important. Here are some of Google’s recommendations:

Smart List: Smart Lists use machine learning to determine which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions. It uses signals like location, referrer, session duration, and page depth to compile this list.
All Users: This type of audience includes all of your visitors with necessary advertising cookies.
New Users: This includes users who have only conducted one session on your site.
Returning Users: These users have visited your site more than once.
Users who visited a specific section of my site: These audiences include users who’ve visited specific pages or directories within your site.
Users who completed a goal conversion: These users have completed a goal on your site.
Users who completed a transaction: This type of audience is only available for e-commerce site owners. It includes all users who have made a purchase from your site.

If none of these criteria meet your needs, you can also create a new custom audience with the audience builder.

This option can take a bit longer than using one of Google’s preconfigured definitions, but it gives you much more control over which users you include in your audience.

You can determine who your audience is based on demographic information, device, behavior, date of first session, traffic sources, e-commerce actions, and more.

The criteria you use will depend on what your goals are, but it’s important to consider that you would typically want to use audiences for the purpose of remarketing.

And most remarketing campaigns center on users who visited your site but did not take the action you wanted them to take.

So whether you want to reach users who visited a specific page without converting or users who never made it to a conversion page in the first place, your audiences should reflect that goal.

Once you’ve created an audience, Analytics will populate it with up to 30 days of data and make your audiences report available within 24-48 hours.

How to use the new audiences report for your remarketing campaigns

The audiences report will give you insight into specific sets of your site’s visitors.

And that’s great!

But it’s only useful if you know what to do with that data.

So first, it’s important to understand what you can expect to learn from this report.

To put it simply, it allows you to dig into data regarding each audience’s acquisition, behavior, and conversions.

This way, you’ll be able to see how well each audience performs in comparison to other audiences and your site’s overall traffic.

And the way you respond to this data will depend on how well the specific audience you’re looking at does at moving your business closer to your goals.

Let’s look at some different scenarios of what your data can tell you about your audiences and how you can respond to that information.

Scenario 1: An audience performs well

If an audience is performing well in terms of engagement and conversions, this indicates that they’re a valuable set of users for your site.

In this case, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget to ads for those users. Or, if you aren’t yet running ads for these users, you’ll want to create ads for them.

For example, Marketo just took this approach.

Their ads were already performing well.

But, later, they defined their audience further in Google Analytics to push personalized ads through AdWords.

They saw 200% more conversions for B2C and 150% more for B2B by segmenting between two groups to create personalized ads.

If you want to see numbers like this, then follow Marketo’s example.

If an audience is performing well, don’t settle for “good enough.” When you discover that a particular audience is yielding results, it’s time to double down on your efforts to convert them.

Upping your advertising budget for them isn’t a blind risk. It’s a reasonable investment in light of real data.

You also may want to consider expanding the number of sites on which you advertise to those users to maximize your chances of bringing them back to convert.

Unfortunately, not all audiences will perform well.

Let’s look at what you can do when an audience isn’t yielding the results you want.

Scenario 2: An audience performs poorly

On the flip side, if an audience shows low engagement or conversions, this indicates that it isn’t a high-performing set of users for your site.

When you discover this, how should you respond?

You’ll either want to scale back on any ads that target this audience or spend some time editing the audience.

GarentaDAY, an auto leasing website in Turkey, developed a remarketing strategy to push special discounts to previous site visitors who did not convert.

GarentaDAY segmented their audiences by location and keyword terms for their remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

The edits they made to their audience paid off. 30% of their revenue came from the remarketing ad campaigns.

If you decide to edit an audience, it’s important to note that one of the most common issues among remarketing campaigns is that the targeting is too broad.

For example, let’s say that you created an audience that targets all of your site’s visitors over the previous month.

You might think that this is an effective way to target users before they forget your brand altogether.

But what if a large chunk of them found one blog post or piece of content via search, read it, and left?

These users likely have no intention of becoming a customer so targeting them with ads is a waste of your budget.

But revising this audience to only include users who visited a product page could eliminate the issue — and have a major impact on the overall performance of your ads.

Scenario 3: An audience is attracting users who don’t convert

Some audiences are clearly high or low performers.

But in many cases, it’s not quite that black and white.

For example, let’s say that you have a campaign that’s targeting a specific audience. This campaign is effective in attracting site traffic, but it doesn’t lead to many conversions.

In this case, you shouldn’t write off that audience entirely.

After all, those users are showing interest in what they’re seeing in your ads. They just aren’t following through on that interest.

And it’s up to you to figure out why that is.

Dig into your campaigns and look for any disconnects between your ads and the content they direct your audience to.

For example, you can look at which goals in Google Analytics are converting your audience more and then develop new ad campaigns and landing pages around those goals.

If your campaigns don’t provide this level of convenience and simplicity, you could be missing out on conversions simply because users don’t want to spend time navigating your site.

Identifying and remedying any disconnects could be the solution. It might be exactly what you need to help your high traffic numbers translate into results for your business.

Scenario 4: An audience is attracting low numbers but high conversions

On the flip side, some of your audiences may turn out to have high conversion rates but low overall numbers.

This can be extremely frustrating because it indicates that you’ve found a great set of users, but there aren’t very many of them.

Fortunately, you don’t have to limit your ad targeting to just your site’s visitors. You can also use your high-converting audiences as a starting point for creating similar audiences.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s similar audiences, this feature helps you expand campaign targeting by including users with characteristics similar to a site’s visitors.

Once you’ve identified an audience that performs well for your business, you can use this feature to target other users who haven’t yet visited your site.

This way, you can expand your campaign’s overall reach. And, as you do so, you can have confidence that the new set of users you’re reaching has the potential for a high conversion rate.

Conclusion

Bringing new users to your site is challenging.

So, when those users leave without taking action, it can be extremely frustrating.

Fortunately, remarketing makes it possible to bring them back to your site and encourage them to convert.

But achieving that goal requires strategic targeting.

You need to make sure that you’re reaching the visitors who are likely to become customers and that you’re communicating with them in a way that will make them want to return.

And with the new audiences report from Google Analytics, you can access the data you need to make informed decisions about your targeting and your campaigns.

The custom audiences report offers you detailed data about how your site visitors are responding to your conversion efforts on your site.

By digging into the behaviors that each audience takes on your site, you can see if they are performing well for your business.

Then, you can use that insight to decide how to improve your results moving forward.

You may find that you should ramp up your campaigns, adjust your targeting, alter your ads, or experiment with similar audiences. Each audience will likely necessitate that you take a different course of action.

And that’s precisely why these reports are so powerful. They’ll show you how you should respond to the audiences you set up so that your marketing efforts to them will be effective.

And if you use multiple custom audiences, you may find that you need to combine all of these actions.

But with each improvement you make, you’ll become more successful at turning lost visitors into customers for your company

Sourced from Neil Patel

He is a New York Times best selling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

In News

Step Up Your Online Marketing with These 10 Underutilized Strategies

December 14, 2017 No Comments

By Annie Pilon

There are plenty of online marketing strategies out there that most businesses already use or are at least aware of. But there are also some lesser known strategies or lessons that you might not have considered. See some of the top tips about not-so-obvious online marketing strategies from members of the online small business community below.

Don’t Fall for These Common PPC Misconceptions

When it comes to PPC advertising, it’s not always best to adhere to common practices. There are some misconceptions that have led to negatives for a lot of businesses. Pauline Jakober shares some common misconceptions about PPC advertising in this Search Engine Journal post.

Use Color to Increase Website Conversions

To make your website as effective as possible, you need to consider every single detail — and that includes the colors you choose to include in the design. In this SUCCESS Agency blog post, Mary Blackiston explains how you can use color to increase website conversions.

Take Advantage of These New Facebook Groups Features

Facebook is already a great way to connect with your community online. And now, the platform has introduced some improvements that could make your community even stronger. Mike Allton of the Social Media Hat details those features here. And BizSugar members also share thoughts on the post too.

Try These Lesser Known Online Advertising Platforms

You already know about the big name online advertising platforms like Google. But there are plenty of other options out there that small businesses can use to supplement their online advertising strategies. Susan Solovic lists three lesser known options in this post.

Take a Look at the Best SEO Strategy You’re Not Using

Link building is a common SEO practice. But there’s another layer to that strategy that many businesses overlook. For that reason, Neil Patel thinks it’s one of the best SEO strategies you’re not already using. He goes into more detail in a recent post.

Track Blog Growth with Google Analytics

Blogging is a common tactic used to grow a business. But before you can reap the benefits of blogging, you have to actually grow a successful blog. In this Basic Blog Tips post, Susan Velez offers some insights you can use to track your blog growth using Google Analytics.

Change Your Content Marketing Program in 2018

Content marketing is already a popular strategy. But if you’re not adapting to the latest trends and changing up your tactics to better serve potential customers, you could fall behind. Rachel Lindteigen of Marketing Land outlines how you can change up your content marketing program for 2018.

Use Instagram to Grow Your Business

If you’re not already using Instagram for marketing your business, you’re really missing out. In this Blogging Wizard post, Elna Cain discusses the potential benefits of the platform. You can also see commentary from the BizSugar community.

Learn How to Identify and Deal with Detractors

Brand advocates can offer lots of potential marketing value for businesses. But detractors have the opposite effect. So you need to be able to identify those detractors and learn how to minimize their impact. Ivan Widjaya elaborates in a recent SMB CEO post.

Build a Top Notch Content Marketing Team

Content marketing isn’t just a small operation anymore. If you’re still trying to manage your content strategy on your own or with one part time team member, your business could fall behind. Instead, consider the skills listed in this Content Marketing Institute post by Michele Linn when building your content marketing team.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Annie Pilon

Sourced from Small Business Trends

In News

Display Advertising

April 12, 2017 No Comments

By knightrider

Display Advertising is simply advertising on websites. It can contain various forms like contextual or graphic. Banners, images, video, rich media ads and so forth are common varieties of display ad.

The goal of display advertising is to outreach the visibility for your consumer product, increase conversions, and improve Return on Investment (ROI), and prospective traffic to your website. At its best, this banner ad sources occupy the impressions of your desired customer and facilitate the highest brand awareness.

Users all over the web spends 5% of their time researching topics of their interest and the rest 95% goes for reading or viewing contents, sharing and engaging in community treatment. This is where the display advertising network marketing comes into play.

Table Of Content

Display Ad and Display Advertising

What is Display ad

Display ads are visual contents or banner ads displayed to a user while they are surfing the web. Display ads content includes almost all visual contents, i.e., image, banner, rich media ads, video etc that we experience in publishing online business websites.

What is Display Advertising

“Display advertising refers to advertising that incorporates text,
logos and pictures or images positioned on a website or search engine.
It is different than Google’s text, or classified advertising, in that
it not only includes the brand’s message, but the business’s overall
brand”

–ISSUES INK

The concept of display advertising originates for centuries in different forms such as large billboards alongside the roads, newspaper, banners, billboards and all sorts of advertising we’re familiar with.

Over the time, up until nowadays, the forms of display advertising have been converted to flyers, ad banner, brochures, leaderboards, footboards etc. on the web platform. The revolution has allowed the advertisers to a great extent the expectance of ROI to their targeted customer group and ad placement.

Some of the major advantages of display advertising are:

You can create all types of ads – text, image, interactive and video ads,
Place those ads on online business websites that are relevant to what you’re selling
Show those ads to the masses who are likely to be most concerned
Make out and track your budget, campaigns and outcomes as you proceed

Display Ad Formats

At that place are infinite combinations of formats, sizes, and styles, letting you to blend it up. Any web document such as articles, blogs, reviews and whitepapers tends to be the ultimate destination for display ad formats. Top three display ad forms to mention are:

Rich Media ads

Rich media advertising is one of the courses of advanced web content that might consist of video streaming, or downloaded applets that moves or animates as the viewer moves their cursor. Its hover intended.

Interstitial

Interstitial ad contents are broad-screen pops up that arrives at the host’s application side within the interval of the next expected page. For example, a programming language learning app; once the user completes a certain level and waits for the immediate one.

Overlay

This is similar to interstitial though the impact is different. Overlay ads are transparent and pops out (consists an inbound link) at the fundamental of a picture (while pouring), i.e, any sponsored video on YouTube consists overlay type.

Display Advertising – Reach and Audience

Pros and Cons

Display ads are an age old technique that had continuously given million of online business websites reached by major display advertising networks. The search engine can match your ads up to websites and apps based on keywords or your own targeting preferences.

Display advertising is considered a direct and effective measure to track Key Performance Indicators (KPI) such as campaigns, customer reach, Click Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Rate (BCR), Conversion Rate (CVR) and finally Return on Investment (ROI). These factors are elaborated in the remainder part of this article.

Search vs The Display Advertising Networks

There’s a distinct difference between the terms of Search and any display ads. Search Engines target users who search for something on search pages. In contrast, think of the display network as a more passive kind of advertising. Display ads campaigns that we experience today i,e, while perusing the TechCrunch Post or skimming your favorite online business blogs, you may have noticed banners or small boxes promoting a product or service, above or aside of the articles you were reading – those are display ads.

Display Advertising Network Sources

Network sources for any Display Advertising categorized based on their customer reach ability, flexibility, performance analytical tools such KPI etc.

Google Display Network (GDN)

When we refer the terms display advertising network, that turns towards a single channel what we know as Google Display Network. This is the world’s largest display networking service provider. A recent report on GDN states that, it serves over 2 billion impressions a month, nearly 6 million a day. That’s an enormous volume, indeed.

Google Display Network delivers 4x the UK industry CTR

The Google Display Network includes three most mentionable ad service provider as:

Google Adsense Publisher Sites,
Double Click Ad exchange,
Google Sites.

According to Google, the Display Network reaches over 90% of worldwide internet users expanding across 2 million online business sites! Means, it serves over 204 million visitors each month.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange

This ad-serving company includes hundreds of premium publishers. Ad servers such DFA (DoubleClick for Advertisers) or DBM (DoubleClick Bid Manager) is employed by large, mid-sized companies or ad agencies. Unlike Adwords, DFA does not supply an inventory of ad slots. Customers as advertisers must negotiate pricing and placement in between themselves.

LinkedIn Display Network

LinkedIn Ad Display seemingly one of the largest ad services for professional network with over 433M professionals worldwide gather on LinkedIn to stay connected and informed, advance their careers, and work smarter. This makes LinkedIn the most effective platform to engage the decision-makers, influencers, and people that matter most to your online business.

Taking the pattern of an organic update, these “advertisements” are tailored to a specific audience using advanced targeting criteria to ensure they’re relevant to your stakes and needs.

LinkedIn’s ad service promises a bot-restricted, fraud-monitored environment for their advertisers.

BingAds

BingAds is second to Google in traffic volume. The downside to BingAds is: they have fewer publishers when compared to Google, making it harder to scale your campaigns. Still, BingAds is a great addition when you’ve already received your Google campaigns up and heading for the hills.

Native Ad Networks

Native Ad Networks (Outbrain, Taboola, etc) are the latest and greatest ad networks considering the current market trend. They attend to the “Recommended” and “Around the Web” ads you see on large publishers like the Huffington Post, Business Insider and Forbes. Advertisements served by Native Ad Networks look like recommended content and intelligence narratives. This means the landing pages and creative advertisers use tend to be in a different format. Mostly, large online business sites having millions of visitors use Native Ad Networks to drive traffic to other websites and earn thereby.

Display Advertising Network Tips

Defining Your Metrics

It’s crucial to clearly define what metrics you’re looking to measure in order to achieve your goals. The advice is simple, though. The best intention to reach to the most perfect match customers will be properly served once the advertiser sets a well-planned and perfectly targeted ad placement and visitors pool. Unless and otherwise, the resulting impression might mislead and there’s a possibility that the advertiser gets distracted.

Segmentize Appropriately

Market segmentation is very important. Display advertising to the current customers or visitors, market segmentation will be applicable for different audience profile with different criteria. It’s a very powerful tool because it allows custom personalization as much as possible and pinpoints specific pool of audience with relevant advertise.

Target your market based on two categories:

Contextual Targeting

Target your audience based on the web content they consume, based on their previous behavior or topics that interests them the most. This may include everything from demographics to their past behavior.

Keyword targeting

Display Advertising Networks show ads on a relevant webpage depending on the keywords prominently on the article. The keywords that your target audience search mostly.

Ad Placement

Managed placements allows you choose among numerous online business sites that you plan to cover with display ads, which is why it’s a safe bet when branching out into the display. Search Engine will focus and advertise on the online business websites that you specify them. Say assume, if you’re planning to arrange a webinar on “Photo collage creation using PhotoshopCS6”; you’d probably choose video content sharing sites like Vimeo or LiveVid that offers such webinar session on LIVE. That’s Ad Placement Targeting.

Topics Targeting

There are numerous topics that you’ll fall into the ocean, leaving no clue where to focus. No worries, search engines like Google has already done the research for you. Google specifies some 1700 topics and sub-topics that specifically cover the Google sites.

Audience targeting

You can target your audience based on Demographics such audience age, location, language and similar criteria. Secondly, targeting can also be operated based on browsing data—cookies, motivation, gaming etc. Also known ‘Interested Categories.

Remarketing

The third potential targeting can be based on Remarketing. Essentially, we’re talking about those great volumes of the audience or traffic already visited your website but didn’t convince. Your ultimate focus indulges them to make a purchase decision; once this ultimate milestone remains below par, you have to revise your plan and dive for Remarketing. You need to whirl them to attempt an action.

How Remaketing Works — How Remarketing Works!

All experts unanimously agree that Remarketing is the spot to go when it adds up to the display advertising network. Remarketing is essential when you cookie your past site visitors to succeed them around with advertisements on various sites they are surfing. The visitors you’re planning Remarketing; have already expressed a genuine interest in your business and offer your product.

Remarketing gets your trusted visitors keep engaged, replicating the comment ‘completing the whole circle of engagement.’ The majority of those reading this post has likely been successfully remarketed to.

Provide Exclusive Offers

When we talk about Remarketing, we mean repeated visitors. Providing exclusive offer tends to be a very effective strategy to accomplish it. This may include free coupon, premium membership with additional access, concession offering for a specific time period, regular feedback points to unlock extra features and so on.

Create Ads with Attention

Your ads are the only thing to create the first impression on visitors that makes the rapid judgment on whether to trust this site or not. Taking in an advert in every format is vital due to the fact that, some sites might just support one format. This may eventually affect their purchase decision and drive them to your store or lead to a successful conversion.

Guided by Budgeting

Putting up a new display campaign is all about budgets. For instance, if you have already managed a neat list of supervised placements, allocate more of your budget towards that campaign, and separate the different locations into their own ad groups. You can feed more money into the advertising groups that control the placement, providing the best Return On Investment.

Display Campaign is Equally Important as Your Search

To run a successful search campaign, monitoring and continuous improvements to your Ad display campaign is imperative to grab your most trusted visitors’ interest. You probably spend time each week evaluating your account, scraping through search query data, adjusting core keyword bids, setting new negatives, revise and restructure ad display campaigns, tuning under-performing ads, you name it. This should make no difference in the display advertising.

Placing an Ad Display Campaign at Google Display Network

Here’s a general guideline for setting up an ad display campaign on Google Display Network. The step-by-step procedures to comply:

Create a New Campaign

There are some pre-requisites to follow for setting a new campaign. Foremost, an advertiser needs to decide “What is the product or service set to promote.” Secondly, we can only call it ad placement. Deciding ‘where to place the ad to appear?’ and lastly, need to estimate the bidding quote and budgeting for the cause.

Sign in to your AdWords account at adwords.google.com.
From the Campaigns tab, click the ‘New Campaign’ button.
Do not check the Google ‘Search Box‘. Within your campaign settings- scroll to the Networks devices, and extensions section. click ‘Let Me Choose’ under Networks, and make sure that the ‘Display Network Box’ is checked and the ‘Search Network’ and ‘Partners Box’ is unchecked
If you want your ads placed automatically on partner pages related to your products, choose Relevant pages across the entire network. Or you can specify target sites yourself
Select the bidding option you prefer, then, set your campaign budget to a level you’re comfortable with.
Click Save and continue. You can travel backward and modify your settings at any time.

Source!!

Create Highly Specific Ad Groups

Here an advertiser will add an ad form such as image, text, rich media advertisements, video content. There will be an ad group tab on the GoogleAdwords.com account setup.

This is a really effective segmentation where you can get to different target audiences as Google AdWords analyzes and make a trend on its own which audience should fall under which group and niche. Different websites and niche matches up with different content types.

Target and Bid

In this section, there’s a tab named as “bidding and budget.” Set a default amount to maximize your click per ad. Advertiser will put this amount manually depending on their pre-planned budget and get the most of it. The ‘budget per day’ section also depends on it.

Create Image Ads

The last thing you need to setup a successful display campaign is relevant high resolution image. If someone is at a stake to edit or create these graphics; top search engines like Google provides with some interface that allows creating simple images with the help of some built-in templates. Of course, there’s some pre-defined size specified for ad forms (check out figure 1.1).

Position High Resolution Image for your Google Display Ad Campaign — Do not ignore the power of high resolution images for your display ad campaign

You need to have a landing page in place, before creating the campaign. This would be your lead capture page. Make sure that, there is a ‘message match’ between the creative and the landing page, otherwise the desired conversion rate may deteriorate.

Measuring the Performance of the Ad Display Campaign

If your organization intends to activate an Ad Display Campaign for advertising, it is important to understand the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that you will encounter throughout your engagement process such as Reach, Conversion Rates(CVR), Bounce Rates, Clickthrough Rates(CTR), and lastly, Return on Investment, crucial to create and track your investment portfolio of Display Marketing for your online business activities.

Reach

Reach for online business advertisements are defined by the number of people who can potentially view your online business advertisement.

A recent case study operated by Julian Bakery, a california-based company,
observed a 35% increase in conversions and a 330% increase in impressions

on the Google Display Network.

This Key Perfomance Indicators detects the volume of visits that your Dsiplay Ad Campaign managed to reach within operation period.

ClickThrough Rate (CTR)

ClickThroughRate is considered to be another criteria to measure the success of a display ad campaign. Simply, it’s the volume of visitors clicked on a certain link or the number of page views for a certain period.

Bounce Rate (BCR)

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away or drop out from a website. When a user bounces on a page advertised by a display advertisement, it indicates that the user was intrigued enough to click on the advertisement, but when they visited your site, the visitor’s expectation wasn’t met. A sites Bounce Rate can be influenced by a number of factors i.e, visitors may decide to move away from a site right from your landing getting irritated by illusive web design or service that seems not trustworthy to them.

Alternatively, there arrives another possibility when visitors leaves out from a site because their expectation of arrival wasn’t met.

Conversion rate (CVR)

It’s the ratio of visitor for any page that reached to the advertisers desired target position and made an attempt. This can be: getting registered to premium membership, add-to-cart, make a payment or customers subscribed for a newsletter.

Return on Investment (ROI)

When brands embark on display marketing, there is always a cost involved together with a goal to be reached. Return on investment is the yield or the value received in return for something spent.

Accelerate Display Advertising Performance

Look out for Top Publishers

Google Display Network is a huge source on search ads; and it offers millions of websites where you can promote products and services. Find out from Google’s Display Network’s best performers.
The SEMrush Top 30 Report shows the best performing advertisers’ sites and their text and media ads, as easily as the landing pages they’ve promoted and how many ad placements they’ve applied.

Spot New publishers

While putting up, display advertising (banner advertising) campaigns, Google’s Display Network offers different ad targeting options, including placement targeting, you can skip this step or use it to acquire control over where your display ads’ impressions located.

Google Display Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Avoid Multi-layer method

Multi-layering or Over-layering might create a deterioration in your customer reach, negative impression. It may distract the advertiser to track which of their display campaign methods worth their investment. With so many choices to select from, some advertisers decide to layer methods on top of each other – for example ad placements, fine tuned keywords, interested topics, or other factors, etc. – with misconception that this will reduce unqualified impressions and clicks.

Display advertising helps you achieve your marketing goals

What is the role of a display ad in marketing

You’d definitely want to be found your site when people search for specific keywords. The object must not be limited to but includes those users who might not be interested to buy a product right now but they accommodate your potential customer persona.

With millions of online business websites, news pages, blogs,
and Google websites like Gmail and YouTube,
the Google Display Network reaches
90% of Internet users worldwide.

–[Google Adwords]

These specialized features for targeting, keywords weight density, demographics, and Remarketing; you can encourage customers to notice your brand, consider your offerings, and take action.

The future of Display Advertising

“Interpublic’s media operations are working to automate all transactions
within the next three years. They are expanding programmatic buying into the TV arena.
Programmatic buying will be a subset of the automation movement,
but there is a need to bring the tactic to buying national and local, radio, display and most media.”

– Todd Gordon, Magna Executive Vice President

Display advertisements can be a main ingredient in a marketer’s paid advertising efforts. Developing click-worthy images help re-direct a visitor or potential customer to a landing page with relevant content about the brand or company. These ads not only can increase brand awareness, but they can engage or re-engage customers to your ad campaign and filter them into your funnel to explore the perfect match.

Conclusion

I don’t really conclude here. But, the Display Advertising Network tips provided in this article will surely lead you a head-start. This might not be the most high returning strategy that people have been looking for, yet, now is the time to put it on a roll. Patience– is what’s the key to get the best possible outcome over time. Display Advertising as one of the tools of paid advertising has surely emerged as a ‘best and effective way’ to get a steady stream of customers.

By knightrider

Sourced from SiteMatter.BIZ

In News

Counting clicks … a beginner’s guide to mastering Google Analytics

April 6, 2017 No Comments

By Nicky Hughes.

The freemium tool can provide a wealth of insight into how visitors interact with your website, but many entrepreneurs are not making the most of it

How do people find your website? How long do they stay? What is the user experience like on different devices? If you can’t answer these three questions with confidence, it’s time to start using an analytics tool or get to know the one you do use a little better.

Understanding SEO

People will arrive on your website from a range of sources, including search engines, social media and other webpages. If your visitor numbers are low, you need to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO). For the uninitiated, this is the process of optimising your site so that it ranks well in search engines.

Google, the UK’s dominate search engine, is notoriously tight-lipped about its criteria for ranking sites, but it’s believed there are at least 200 criteria considered. These include user experience (how well users are able to navigate your site and how long they stay), back links (sites that link to your site), signals from social media and how regularly content is updated.

Choosing a tool

There are a number of tools available to analyse your web traffic. Some of these are entirely free and others have advanced features that are paid for – so-called freemium models. Google Analytics (GA) is a freemium tool and one of the most popular. The free version is usually sufficient for small businesses, but it’s easy to overlook some of its many features.

Traffic breakdown

To sign up for Google Analytics account you must first have a Google email account. Once you’ve signed in, click access Google Analytics. You need to enter your information, including your website’s URL. You will then be asked to select data sharing options and to accept the tracking ID.

The tracking ID, which sends data to GA from a website, needs to be copied and pasted into your web pages, within the website code, for analytics to run.

By default, the GA dashboard gives an overview of data derived from a website. This includes how visitors have used your website over the past seven days. To the left of the main page is a menu with five main headings:

Real time – information about users currently using the site
Audience – a range of metrics about users including demographics and interests
Acquisition – data about how users arrived at a website
Behaviour – insights into how users navigate a site
Conversions – only relevant if goals have been set up

Acquisition and behaviour

Arguably the most useful features in GA are under the acquisition and behaviour tabs.

Acquisition shows you how your site acquired visitors and breaks down both organic traffic (traffic that comes to your site via unpaid search engine entries or social network posts), paid keywords (such as AdWords campaigns, where users pay for their website to appear in Google search results) and organic keywords (words used to generate free traffic on search engines).

Behaviour, on the other hand, shows you in detail how users navigate your site. This includes how many exit your site after viewing just one page (bounce rate), how long they spend on your site (average time on page), and how many pages they view(page sessions, tracked before 30 minutes of inactivity), as well as goal conversions (your goal might be getting a visitor to buy something for your website, for example, and a goal conversion would be them completing the purchase).

Find your site’s weaknesses

Under the behaviour tab is a section called behaviour flow. This shows the path visitors normally take from when they visit your site to when they exit. It can help you diagnose potential problems – you might find a lot of visitors are exiting on the same page, for example. As a result, you could shorten the page, add a call to action (such as sign up or buy now), or include more images. You can also track which pages are the most popular and which are the most effective in securing conversions (whether that’s sales, sign ups or providing contact details).

Check site speed

You want your site to load as quickly as possible – a slower site means a bad user experience and higher bounce rate. Site speed also contributes to search engine rankings. You can check your average site speed via the behaviour tab. There is also a function that offers suggestions for how you can improve speed, and another that shows how speed differs between browsers eg Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari. Ideally, you should aim for page load times of less than two seconds.

Find out what visitors are searching for

If you’ve got a search box on your site, set up site search using the tips here. This will give you access to information such as how many times the search box has been used, what terms people searched for and how many page views were generated through searches.

Device segmentation

As of May 2015, mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches. Your website should already be optimised for mobile but you can check if it is using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. Just enter your URL and the test will show screenshots of how your site looks on mobile and highlight usability issues like small font sizes.

GA can also tell you how many people are viewing, or trying to view, your site in mobile: find reports in your GA dashboard, click on audience and then mobile. This will generate a table showing a breakdown of the devices people are using to browse your site.

Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox.

By Nicky Hughes

Nicky Hughes is digital communications manager at Onespacemedia.

Sourced from The Guardian

In News

Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics

March 27, 2017 No Comments

By Annelieke van den Berg

Is it purely a visitor that hits the back button or is there more to it? And what can you tell by looking at the bounce rate of a webpage? In this post, I want to show you what it is, what it means and how you can improve your bounce rate.

What’s bounce rate?

Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website, and do completely nothing on the page they entered. So they don’t click on a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page. This means that the Google Analytics server doesn’t receive a trigger from the visitor. A user bounces when there has been no engagement with the landing page and the visit ends with a single-page visit. You can use bounce rate as a metric that indicates the quality of a webpage and/or the “quality” of your audience. By quality of your audience I mean whether the audience fits the purpose of your site.

How does Google Analytics calculate bounce rate?

According to Google bounce rate is calculated in the following way:

Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

In other words, it collects all sessions where a visitor only visited one page and divides it by all sessions.

Having a high bounce rate can mean three things:
1. The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
2. Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
3. Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.

I’ll get back to the meaning of bounce rate further below.

Bounce rate and SEO

In this post, I’m talking about bounce rate in Google Analytics. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether bounce rate is an SEO ranking factor. In my opinion, I can hardly imagine that Google takes Google Analytics’ data as a ranking factor, because if Google Analytics isn’t implemented correctly, then the data isn’t reliable. Moreover, you can easily manipulate the bounce rate.

Luckily, several Googlers say the same thing: Google doesn’t use Google Analytics’ data in their search algorithm. But, of course, you need to make sure that when people come from a search engine to your site, they don’t bounce back to the search results, since that kind of bouncing probably is a ranking factor. It might be measured in a different way though, than the bounce rate we see in Google Analytics.

From a holistic SEO perspective, you need to optimize every aspect of your site. So looking closely at your bounce rate, can help you optimize your website even further, which contributes to your SEO.

How to interpret bounce rates?

The height of your bounce rate and whether that’s a good or a bad thing, really depends on the purpose of the page. If the purpose of the page is to purely inform, then a high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing per se. Of course you’d like people to read more articles on your website, subscribe to your newsletter and so on. But when they’ve only visited a page to, for instance, read a post or find an address, then it isn’t surprising that they close the tab after they’re done reading. Mind you, also in this case, there’s no trigger sent to the Google Analytics server, thus it’s a bounce.

A clever thing to do, when you own a blog, is creating a segment that only contains ‘New visitors’. If the bounce rate amongst new visitors is high, think about how you could improve their engagement with your site. Because you do want new visitors to engage with your site.

If the purpose of a page is to actively engage with your site, then a high bounce rate is a bad thing. Let’s say you have a page that has one goal: get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. If that page has a high bounce rate, then you might need to optimize the page itself. By adding a clear call-to-action, a ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ button, for instance, you could lower that bounce rate.

But there can be other causes for a high bounce rate on a newsletter subscription page. In case you’ve lured visitors in under false pretenses, you shouldn’t be surprised when these visitors don’t engage with your page. They probably expected something else when landing on your subscription page. On the other hand, if you’ve been very clear from the start with what visitors could expect on the subscription page, a low bounce rate could say something about the quality of the visitors – they could be very motivated to get the newsletter – and not per se about the quality of the page.

Bounce rate and conversion

If you look at bounce rate from a conversion perspective, then bounce rate can be used as a metric to measure success. For instance, let’s say you’ve changed the design of your page hoping that it will convert better, then make sure to keep an eye on the bounce rate of that page. If you’re seeing an increase in bounces, the change in design you’ve made might have been the wrong change and it could explain the low conversion rate you have.

You could also check the bounce rate of your most popular pages. Which pages have a low and which pages have a high bounce rate? Compare the two, then learn from the pages with low bounce rates.

Another way of looking at your bounce rate, is from a traffic sources perspective. Which traffic sources lead to a high or a low bounce rate? Your newsletter for instance? Or a referral website that sends a lot of traffic? Can you figure out what causes this bounce rate? And if you’re running an AdWords campaign, you should keep an eye on the bounce rate of that traffic source as well.

Be careful with drawing conclusions though…

We’ve seen loads of clients with a bounce rate that was unnaturally low. All alarm bells should go off, especially if you don’t expect it, as that probably means that Google Analytics isn’t implemented correctly. There are several things that influence bounce rate, because they send a trigger to the Google Analytics server and Google Analytics falsely recognizes it as an engagement. Usually, an unnaturally low bounce rate is caused by an event that triggers the Google Analytics server. Think of pop-ups, auto-play of videos or an event you’ve implemented that fires after 1 second.

Of course, if you’ve created an event that tracks scrolling counts, then having a low bounce rate is a good thing. It shows that people actually scroll down the page and read your content.

How to lower high bounce rates?

The only way of lowering your bounce rate is by amping up the engagement on your page. In my opinion, there are two ways of looking at bounce rate. From a traffic perspective and from a page perspective.

If certain traffic sources have high bounce rates, then you need to look at the expectations of those visitors coming to your site. Let’s say you’re running an ad on another website, and most people coming to your site via that ad bounce, then you’re not making their wish come true. You’re not living up to their expectations. Review the ad you’re running and see if it matches the page you’re showing. If not, make sure the page is a logical follow-up of the ad or vice versa.

If your page lives up to the expectations of your visitors, and the page still has a high bounce rate, then you have to look at the page itself. How’s the usability of the page? Is there a call-to-action above the fold on the page? Do you have internal links that point to related pages or posts? Do you have a menu that’s easy to use? Does the page invite people to look further on your site? These are all things you need to consider when optimizing your page.

What about exit rate?

The bounce rate is frequently mistaken for the exit rate. Literally, the exit rate is the percentage of pageviews that were last in the session. It says something about users deciding to end their session on your website on that particular page. Go ogle’s support page gives some clear examples of the exit rates and bounce rates which makes the difference very clear. This comes directly from their page:

Monday: Page B > Page A > Page C > Exit
Tuesday: Page B > Exit
Wednesday: Page A > Page C > Page B > Exit
Thursday: Page C > Exit
Friday: Page B > Page C > Page A > Exit

The % Exit and Bounce Rate calculations are:

Exit Rate:
Page A: 33% (3 sessions included Page A, 1 session exited from Page A)
Page B: 50% (4 sessions included Page B, 2 sessions exited from Page B)
Page C: 50% (4 sessions included Page C, 2 sessions exited from Page C)

Bounce Rate:
Page A: 0% (one session began with Page A, but that was not a single-page session, so it has no Bounce Rate)
Page B: 33% (Bounce Rate is less than Exit Rate, because 3 sessions started with Page B, with one leading to a bounce)
Page C: 100% (one session started with Page C, and it lead to a bounce)

Conclusion

Bounce rate is a metric you can use to analyze your marketing efforts. You can use it to measure if you’re living up to your visitors’ expectations. And you can use the bounce rate to decide which pages need more attention. Meeting your visitors’ expectations and making your pages more inviting for visitors all leads to creating an awesome website. And we all know that awesome websites rank better!

By Annelieke van den Berg

Annelieke van den Berg manages the Content, SEO and Brand department at Yoast. She has her Master’s degree in Sociology and focuses on all things related to marketing. Read all about Annelieke »
View her other posts or find her on Linkedin

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