Portent Blog

Fake News Is a Marketing Feature, Not a Hack: Part 2

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 15:00:28 GMT

We live in a post-truth world, and our brains are to blame.

In November, I argued that fake news is the world’s most powerful and socially destructive marketing technique. If you haven’t read that article, I recommend at least skimming the post so we’re on the same page about what fake news is and why it’s a problem for society and marketers.

In this post, I break down the science behind why we’re so susceptible to fake news and discuss how optimized disinformation compromises our behaviors and beliefs—even in the presence of overwhelming evidence of “the truth.”

How Disinformation Hacks Our Brains

Disinformation and fake news prey on the fundamental ways our brains process information to beguile our critical thinking safeguards and dupe us into believing—and advocating for—insidious lies.

Dr. Seth M. Porter, the assistant director of digital teaching, learning, and scholarship at Princeton University, discussed how fake news affects our memory in the research collection, Fake News in an Era of Social Media: Tracking Viral Contagion. Porter argues that fake news is designed to compromise our:

Memory recall
Belief in misinformation
Decision making
Collective memory
Cultural norms

By manipulating these components of our memory and social interaction, fake news slips into our brains and social circles undetected—a virus biding its time until we unwittingly spread the disinformation to a new host.

And once we’re snared in the web of lies, even if the new host challenges our disinformation, our views rarely change—by that point, we no longer see or care about the truth.

There are several paths fake news peddlers use to hack how your brain processes learning and makes memories. In the following sections, I focus on the options that are closest related to commonplace marketing techniques.

Memory, Emotions, and Fake News

Before we move further, I want you to reflect on two memories. The first memory should be precious and elicit a strong emotional reaction, like the birth or death of a family member. The second memory should be an emotionally charged event that holds little influence in your life, like overhearing a political conversation you disagreed with or a fun event from your childhood.

Try to remember specific details about each memory: sights, colors, smells, sounds, feelings.

Now, ask yourself these three questions for each memory:

How do you know the details of the memory are accurate?
Are you positive that memory is real?
How can you test or prove your answers?

You should be able to answer all three questions relatively easily for the first scenario and with a good degree of confidence, thanks to how the hippocampus and amygdala create and store memories from novel events with a powerful emotional trigger.

The second scenario may draw more pauses depending on how long ago the event happened. You may initially be sure this memory is true despite the finer details being a bit fuzzy. After pondering the memory, there is a chance you’re left wondering if your brain manufactured the entire sequence with stimuli you’ve encountered elsewhere. The important thing in this situation is that you’re aware your memory may not be perfect.

Here’s where the power of optimized disinformation kicks into gear. If you’ve been infected with a belief from a fake news source, your brain can conjure a “memory” of an event that never happened and make it feel like a scenario one memory.

For example, in the study, False Memories for Fake News During Ireland’s Abortion Referendum, researchers performed an experiment that showed exposure to fake news and political propaganda can create false memories.

In the experiment, scientists gathered registered voters in the week preceding Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum.

The 3,140 participants read six news stories about referendum campaign events. Two of these stories were fake. During the experiment, almost half of the participants reported a memory that supports at least one fabricated news story. More than one-third of participants reported a specific, first-hand memory of the fake event.

The participants’ political biases further exacerbated the creation of false memories.

Voters who supported the referendum were more likely than people who voted against the law to “remember” a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote “no.” Likewise, “no” voters were more likely than “yes” voters to “remember” a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote “yes,” the study authors wrote.

That fabrication happens because memory plays an essential role in assessing the validity of information. When that memory is compromised, it affects how easily we believe and share fake news, Porter writes.

The Illusory Truth Effect

When a false claim is repeated often enough, people start to believe it’s true. This is called the “illusory truth effect,” and it’s the lynchpin of optimized disinformation.

The underlying power of illusory truth is that the phenomenon still affects people who disagree with the initial falsity. Because they keep seeing the phrase or hearing the claim, the lie earns fluency and begins to have a glimmer of perceived truth.

Fluency relates to how easily our brains process a claim. Repeated claims are easier to represent and comprehend, which requires less cognitive energy and feels good, Scientific American reports. Our brains take this positive feeling as a cue that the claim is true, which leads us to accept the claim the next time we hear it.

Concepts that are too preposterous for the user to consider, like telling an astronaut the world is flat, are excluded from this effect.

This phenomenon is similar to how we associate brands with positive qualities from a catchy jingle or often repeated value proposition. And like a song chorus that won’t leave your head, you only need to encounter a fake news headline once to be hooked by the illusory truth effect.

In the report, Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News, the authors exposed participants to 12 news headlines presented to look like Facebook posts. Six news headlines were factually accurate, and the others were untrue. Some of the headlines were labeled with a disputed claim warning. Users assessed the headlines and then determined if they’d share these articles on social media.

After a few unrelated tasks, users were presented with 24 news headlines. The 12 headlines they already encountered and 12 new ones. The new headlines also had an equal true/fake split, and some had the disputed information warning. Users then rated each headline for familiarity and accuracy.

The authors discovered that a single prior exposure to fake news headlines was sufficient to measurably increase subsequent perceptions of the headline’s accuracy. The increased effect was relatively small, but the headline’s trustworthiness increased again with a second exposure, compounding the perceived validity over time.

Plus, the explicit warning users saw next to fake news headlines did not abolish or significantly diminish the effectiveness of the illusory truth effect, the authors wrote.

The illusory truth effect is also in full swing for marketers.

In the study The Illusory Truth Effect: Exploring Implicit and Explicit Memory Influences on Consumer Judgments, researchers found that repeated exposure to brand or product value propositions, subliminal marketing messaging, and brand recognition techniques (slogans, jingles, etc.) improved brand product validity and trustworthiness.

One of the more interesting effects of this phenomenon, for users and marketers, is how fluency and memory modification interplay with biases to further strengthen the perceived accuracy of fake news and brand messaging.

Confirmation Bias and Cognitive Dissonance

It’s time for another moment of reflection. This is a simple exercise in confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, two factors that play enormous roles in fake news validation and marketing—particularly on social media and in organic search results.

I want you to think of two brands, one you love and one you despise. Now, answer the following three questions:

Why do you have strong positive/negative feelings associated with this brand?
Do you expect further engagement with the brand to reinforce that feeling?
What, if anything, could change your mind about the brand?

Confirmation bias is simply the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of your existing beliefs or theories. You explored this bias in steps two and three of the exercise.

Cognitive dissonance describes the moment when you’re presented with two pieces of conflicting information that can’t both be true. You must choose which piece of information is correct. The fake news warning labels on Twitter and Facebook are examples of creating a moment of cognitive dissonance.

Ideally, users will always rely on sound evidence to override their confirmation biases when they encounter cognitive dissonance. Unfortunately, research shows the opposite is true.

Based on findings from the study, Fake News on Social Media: People Believe What They Want to Believe When it Makes No Sense at All, moments of cognitive dissonance online, such as a disputed claim warning flag, won’t create an epiphany that overrides your confirmation bias. However, these encounters will slightly adjust your behavior.

In the experiment, participants read 50 fact-based news headlines and assessed if the headlines were true or false. Forty headlines were designed to be amorphous and look possibly true or false. A warning matching Facebook’s fake news flag was randomly assigned to 20 of the 40 headlines. The 10 remaining headlines were used as a control.

The study results show the warning label triggered more brain activity in participants and increased the time they spent considering the headline. However, users were still more likely to believe news headlines they wanted to be true and disregard the fake news flag. The unrelenting grip of confirmation bias, even in the face of cognitive dissonance, left users with only identifying factual headlines 44 percent of the time.

Confirmation Bias and Organic Search

Not being able to look beyond your biases and determine what information is accurate becomes an enormous social issue when users research impactful topics on search engines.

For example, a December 30th, 2020 NPR/Ipsos poll shows that 40 percent of American respondents said they believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China. (For the record, there is no evidence for this claim—scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.)

Let’s assume these “COVID hoax” believers did some type of online research before coming to their conclusions. (Based on research presented in the first article of this series, it’s more likely that users saw the information on social media and automatically assumed it is accurate.)

Based on Ahrefs data, users may have fallen prey to their confirmation bias and searched for one of the following terms:

china created coronavirus (1,100 searches/month)
china made coronavirus (600 searches/month)

Now, if the user wasn’t entirely sure they believe the unfounded conspiracy, they may have searched for one of the following terms:

did china create coronavirus (900 searches/month)
who created the coronavirus (1900 searches/month)

The search results for both options are a smattering of chaos. Here are the first-page results on December 31st, 2020 for “china created coronavirus” and “who created the coronavirus.”

As expected, the results skew toward the user’s search intent via the keywords they chose. Each first-page result has headlines that confirm or deny at least part of the user’s suspicions; however, only the open-ended question provided information from medical sources: WebMD and the National Institutes of Health.
Fortunately, in some scenarios, like this tame one, Google’s algorithms are getting better at providing results that don’t conform to a user’s confirmation bias for medium-high volume search terms. However, the distinction in result quality is still clear.

One important part of these results to acknowledge is that Google chose not to provide an answer box for these terms, which could teach users the facts upfront.

This issue begets further discussion in part three of this series, but an answer box for confirmation-bias affirming search results could be one way to use the illusory truth effect and cognitive dissonance to society’s advantage—particularly for our collective memory.

The Fake News Mind Meld

The most damning brain-altering power fake news has is to change what people believe on a wide scale, which is done by modifying our collective memory.

Collective memory indicates how groups of individuals remember the past. These memories form in small groups, such as a family vacation, and with society at large, like the details of a historical event. Although we form memories as individuals, those memories get modified over time when the event was a shared experience, Porter writes.

This change happens because of cross-cueing, a key component in collective memory that occurs when information is exchanged among group members, and the group gains a collective understanding about the topic, Porter explains. Cross-cueing benefits groups because individuals can’t understand all aspects of a shared event or experience.

This phenomenon is among the reasons word-of-mouth marketing and user reviews are so effective and important. We spread experiences with brands or products to teach others. By sharing our knowledge, the recipient benefits, and our perceived social value increases.

Unfortunately, cross-cueing also leaves groups vulnerable to distributing misinformation. This process tends to form false memories in individuals when the person is caught in an information bubble and exposed to fake information repeatedly. Eventually, their memories will change and propagate to the greater group, affecting their collective memory and beliefs, Porter states.

This effect is easily observed when tracking conspiracies on social media or observing users’ behavior habits when they only receive news from one source. A simple example is how the average Fox News viewer is less informed about factual events than somebody who doesn’t follow any news source.

Once a community’s collective memory is compromised, the ideas and values “taught” through fake news spread rapidly and become a defining pillar for that culture, thus guaranteeing the fake ideas continue to spread as the culture expands, Porter writes.

This is essentially cultural brainwashing on a wide scale, potentially sparking from a single fake news headline. And this revelation brings us to the ultimate question around online fake news and optimized disinformation: who deserves to be the arbiter of truth?

If we trust a corporate entity like Google to establish what a fact is via rich-text snippets, how can we ensure their chosen facts don’t rewrite history for a more glamorous version, similar to how textbooks in the U.S. gloss over the government’s civil rights violations and state-sponsored terrorism?

Trusting national or local governments to hold this role is out of the question.

But if we continue without an arbiter of truth, we’re stuck with an enormous percentage of the world’s population gulping down lies like tequila shots at happy hour, and believing in dangerous conspiracies peddled by people who manipulate others for wealth and power.

Sadly, our brains are not wired to identify and root out fake news designed for us and presented to us by trusted sources, like family and friends. There is not an easy solution to this quandary. More than likely, we’ll need to sew various patchwork policies, technical safeguards, and community education efforts together into a formidable quilt of truth.

What Can We Do?

With that rosy picture of doom-and-gloom painted, what can we do to protect ourselves from being duped by fake news and other forms of optimized disinformation? And, what can we do as marketers to reinforce that claims we are making about a product or brand are genuine, and the information we are providing is accurate?

Unfortunately, we aren’t Vulcans, so there isn’t a cohesive answer to the question yet, but people are devising possible solutions. I’ll discuss what those are in the final article in this series.

Until more permanent solutions are in place, we must grow our critical thinking skills. Our brains may devour fake news and disinformation, but we can fight back by piquing our curiosity about what we read and hear; and by encouraging our customers to do so. Tap into the benefits of the illusory truth effect and blast facts on repeat. However, instead of repeating value propositions or brand slogans for the sake of the effect, make sure you make it a priority to include context that provides information your audience will need to make an educated decision and share educated opinions.

After all, the best way to fight the neurological effects of fake information is by not offering it up. Don’t swindle your users with promises your product or service can’t keep.

Ultimately, we must question what we read—as citizens and consumers. Why was that article written, who wrote it, and what are their intentions? Is the content sourced from reputable experts? It’s a lot of effort to dig into everything we read—especially in the instant gratification associated with The Information Age—but that’s what a post-truth world requires of us.

Take this post, for example. Are you taking everything I wrote and argued at face value? Or are you being diligent and checking my sources and my sources’ sources? You should be. Because here’s the big question: how sure are you that you’re not being hoodwinked right now? There’s only one way to find out.

In part three of this series, I’ll explore how our current business model perpetuates fake news, and what we can do about it.

The post Fake News Is a Marketing Feature, Not a Hack: Part 2 appeared first on Portent.

How to Set up a Successful Google Ads Remarketing Campaign

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 15:00:42 GMT

Updated on January 12, 2021 to include current information and insights.

If you are running a Google Ads account, and your goal is to get your users to take a desired conversion action (i.e., purchase, sign up, phone call), you should be running a remarketing campaign.

Remarketing campaigns are a chance to re-engage visitors to your website and bring them back to convert. Remarketing campaigns allow businesses to stay connected with their target audience after they leave their website by showing them your ads on other websites they visit. Users who have already visited your website are likely to be more engaged with your brand messaging and product/service offerings. Typically, returning visitors will browse more pages and are more likely to convert. In light of this, remarketing can be an extremely powerful tool when working to increase the return on ad spend (ROAS) of your pay-per-click marketing efforts.

Remarketing campaigns target users that are in the action phase. They have already seen and clicked on your ad on the Google SERP, they have been to your website, and have shown interest and desire for your product or service. But for some reason, they left your website without taking the desired action; this is where remarketing steps in and brings them back to your website to convert.

While remarketing can be a powerful channel for digital marketers, setting up your first campaign can be challenging. To help with that, I’ve provided a step-by-step look at how to create your first Google Ads remarketing campaign.

How to Set up a Google Ads Remarketing Campaign

There are three core components of setup required to create and activate a remarketing campaign for your Google Ads account.

Create an audience to remarket to. Called a “remarketing list,” this audience is essentially a collection of users who qualify to be served your remarketing ads based on requirements you set.
Create a remarketing campaign within your Google Ads account. Creating this kind of campaign is similar to a standard campaign set up.
Create and/or upload display ads that consist of a series of text and images to your created campaign.

Let’s dive into each of these steps in more detail.

1. Create a Remarketing List in Google Ads

If this is your first time remarketing, you will need to add a remarketing tag to your website. This small snippet of code allows visitors to be tagged with a cookie, so your remarketing ads will be shown to them once off your website. Once you have this tag active, you will be able to create remarketing lists.

After logging into your Google Ads account, click “Tools & Settings” in the upper navigation bar and select “Audience manager.”

Once you are in Audience manager, make sure you are in the remarketing section under “Audience lists.” Now click the + button and select “Website visitors” from the drop-down.

Give the audience a name. I recommend the name to include the word “remarketing” and whom you are targeting from the tag (ex. Remarketing – All Visitors). Then under “List members,” select “Visitors of a page.”

Under “Visited page,” select “Match any rule group.” And below that, the first option should be “Page URL,” and then the second option should be “contains.” Enter the URL that you want to retarget, whether that is your whole website or a specific landing page. You then have the option to pre-fill your list with users who have visited your website or page in the past 30 days, or you can start with an empty list.

Under “Membership duration,” you can choose how long someone stays on this list (how many days you will remarket to them after they have visited your website). I recommend 30 days as a good length of time to remarket to someone.

Click the “Create Audience” button at the bottom of the page, and your audience has now been created.

Once your list is created and the remarketing tag is implemented on your site, an audience list size will begin to populate.

2. Create a Remarketing Campaign in Google Ads

Once your remarketing list has been created, it’s time to turn your attention to building the remarketing campaign in Google Ads.

Start by navigating to the “Campaigns” tab of your Google Ads account and click the + button and select “New campaign.”

Choose “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.” Below that, under “Select a campaign type,” choose “Display.” You will be presented with three choices for a display campaign; you want to select “Standard display campaign” and click “Continue.”

Walk through the guided process to complete your campaign setup. If you’re not sure which campaign settings to choose, check out our post on How to Build a Google Ads Account: Campaign & Network Settings.

Once you have gone through the basic campaign settings, under “Create your ad group,” give your ad group a name.

Under Audiences, click on “Browse,” and then click on “How they have interacted with your business,” and under “Website visitors,” find the audience you just created earlier and select it.

3. Create Ads for Remarketing

Before moving forward on adding your image ads into your campaign, make sure all the banner ads you have are formatted and sized within Google’s ad requirements.

You have three options to create your ads:

Responsive display ads
Upload display ads
Copy existing ads

Responsive display ads are great for anyone who doesn’t have access to a graphic designer. It’s an easy way to create display ads, and Google will retrofit your ad in most sizes for you.

Otherwise, you can upload existing banners to run them as ads. We recommend uploading a variety of different sizes, so you can get as many placements as possible. You would choose this option over responsive display ads because you want control of the appearance of your ads.

Once your ads are created or uploaded, click “Add To Ad Group.” Then click on “Create campaign.”

Please keep in mind that when adding images, Google usually puts those through a review process. During that review, your ads will not be eligible to show. Typically that review process is no more than 24 hours long.

That’s it! After creating your remarketing list, remarketing campaign, and creating and/or uploading your content, your campaign is all ready to serve ads to your target audience.

Remarketing can be an effective tool to re-engage with your existing audience. Whether your goal is sales, or sign-ups, or something else, you should be utilizing remarketing campaigns as much as you can. Now that you have learned how to create a remarketing list, set up a remarketing campaign, and create remarketing ads, you are ready to get started!

The post How to Set up a Successful Google Ads Remarketing Campaign appeared first on Portent.

Four Ways Google Analytics 4 Will Improve Your Data

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 15:00:57 GMT

In many ways, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a paradigm shift for the beloved and ubiquitous web analytics platform. Its event model is changing entirely, and there are a lot of technical details and jargon surrounding that move. But analytics and marketers want to know one thing:

What does it take to upgrade, and is upgrading worth the effort?

The short answer: Yes, it’s worth making the jump. We’ll walk you through doing that now before we give you the long answer (which is still yes, but with more details).

How Do You Set up GA4?

It’s really simple. Start by doing the following:

Go to the Admin section in your Google Analytics account.
Under Property, choose the “GA4 Setup Assistant.”

Next, you’ll want to set up a new GA4 property.

Note: Google recommends that folks keep their existing Universal Analytics (GA3) property running for the next year while the new setup accumulates data.

When you’re done, the assistant will issue you a property name and ID and you can continue the rest of the setup process.

Once you’ve completed the assistant, go into “Data Streams” to start getting data into GA4.

Look up your Web data stream that was created when you established the new GA4 property and do two things:

Copy your Measurement ID (you’ll need it in Tag Manager later).
Make sure the Enhanced Measurement toggle is on (this establishes the automated event tracking mentioned later in this post).

Next, you’ll want to open up your Google Tag Manager container and do this:

Choose Tags from the left navigation.
Select New.

The tag type you’re looking for will be “GA4 Configuration.” Paste in the Measurement ID that you copied earlier in this tutorial and choose the All Pages trigger. Click Save when you’re done.

Then publish the changes in your container and head back to Google Analytics. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should be able to visit the website and see yourself in the Realtime overview report!

Congrats! You now have a working GA4 setup.

So what was our long answer about which GA4 features make this whole exercise worthwhile? We’ll take a look at it now in four respects.

1. Automated Event Tracking

Event Tracking was arguably one of the most attractive features of GA4’s predecessors, but there was always a barrier to entry. Either you had to have a web developer install hard-coded event tracking scripts for you, or you had to know enough about Google Tag Manager to implement triggers.

Now, all you have to do is get the main GA4 data feed set up, and it automatically detects common events like button clicks, downloads, scroll depth, and video plays!

With those things magically handled just by installing GA4 on your site, you’re free to collect the learnings and derive insights immediately.

2. One-Click Goal Creation

Once you’ve got all these beautiful automated events firing in, GA4 makes it deliciously easy to turn them into goals. You go to All events and just toggle Mark as conversion on any important user actions (in this case, file downloads.)

Why create goals? For a few reasons:

If they’re meaningful user actions, Goals will allow you to calculate the conversion rate of your website.
Goals facilitate the creation of conversion funnels.
Goals also unlock special attribution reports in GA, giving you visibility into the multi-touch scenarios that lead to conversion activities.

3. Easy Audience Generation

Another can’t-do-without feature in previous iterations of GA was Segments. GA4 handles this functionality a little bit differently, referring to them as Audiences.

Thankfully, they’ve made the process of defining a new Audience very basic (even easier than building Segments, if you ask me):

Go to Audiences in the left navigation.
Click the New audience button.

From there, it allows you to select from some pre-configured audience templates or Create a custom audience.

Here you can select any dimension or metric and formulate criteria for your audience, and set a lookback window for audience membership (this comes in handy later when you want to import these audiences into Google Ads).

4. Cheap GA Data Warehousing

The last major advantage to having GA4 is being able to warehouse your Google Analytics data in a cost-effective way using BigQuery. Previously, this functionality was only available to GA360 subscribers. And at a price tag of $150K/year, it priced out small and mid-sized businesses being able to store their data effectively in a SQL-style environment.

Now, it’s only a couple of clicks away for all organizations with GA4 properties:

Under property, select BigQuery Linking.
Then click Link.

Note: This next part requires you to set up a free Sandbox account in BigQuery. New users get $300 free in cloud credits, which should last the average business a long time unless your site gets millions of users per month. Do that before you proceed to the next step.

Establishing the link between GA and BigQuery has you choose a couple steps:

The location of the server you want to house your data in.
The frequency of the data transfer (i.e., Daily, Intra-daily, or both).

Once you’re done, data will begin streaming into BigQuery within 24 hours. From there, you can query your data just like a SQL database, giving you incredible analytical flexibility and providing event-level historical data logs regardless of what Google decides to change about GA going forward.

The Evolution We’ve Been Waiting For

Any one of the four features we mentioned is worth the price of admission to GA4, but combine them, and you’ve got something really special for analysts and marketers alike. We’re excited to see where Google takes this version of their flagship analytics tool, and we hope you are too!

The post Four Ways Google Analytics 4 Will Improve Your Data appeared first on Portent.

5 SEO Best Practices for 2021

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:00:16 GMT

Normally, I’m ideologically opposed to these kinds of posts. “Best practices” can lead to checkbox thinking that constrains strategy down to an uncreative list of tasks. We don’t want to limit our creativity and accountability by turning ourselves into SEO box checkers, but we don’t want to throw all best practices into the recycling bin.

Best practices are a starting point for expertise, not a replacement for it. Following best practices is what we should do when we’re starting from zero on a project. They are training wheels of expertise.

I also don’t like these posts because they are usually the same dozen hyped-up topics that don’t apply broadly. 2017, 2018, and 2019 were all the years that voice search was to become the next big thing, but very few brands actually need to create Alexa Skills.

SEO practices shouldn’t change very much year-to-year anyway. Google still has a monopoly on web search, and things like E-A-T are a new name for what we’ve been doing all along.
Instead, this post is about how to upgrade our SEO practice in the year ahead by incorporating recent and upcoming changes in Google SEO. We want to make our SEO practice the best, not have the best boxes to check.

1. It’s Time to Think About Mobile-Only Indexing

We’ve heard the directive “think mobile first” from Google since at least 2011, but I’m certain most of us still review websites using desktop resolutions. This will have to change!

Google recently announced that starting in March 2021, mobile-first indexing will only include the mobile version of the web. Google will ignore the desktop views of our content for indexing and ranking. “M-dot” mobile sites will become the primary, not the alternative, possibly causing issues for websites that haven’t adopted responsive design.

I think this shift actually simplifies things because we no longer have to worry about the weighting of mobile and desktop content features. How mobile content renders is the only concern now. Whatever mobile Googlebot sees when they render the page is what counts.

Best Practice: When designing new websites, making mockups, auditing websites, writing H1 tags, evaluating main navigation links, and so on, we have to be in the mobile-only headspace. It’s going to be annoying at first to simulate a mobile device with our browser all the time, but we’ll have to get used to it.

2. Clearly and Directly Answer the User’s Query

The idea of “relevance” has evolved a lot over the years. Relevance in keyword search began by evaluating how well a document contained the same words as the query. This basic measure of relevance is what you might find in a library’s keyword search. Now, Google has advanced to evaluating how well passages of text in our content might answer a question, and they’re calling it “passage-based Indexing.”

In addition to the way Google already indexes our content, Google will be storing our passages of text in their index. When pages are scored for ranking, these passages are going to be incorporated into the relevance scores. This might not seem like a big deal, but Google says they expect about 7% of all queries to be affected by the change. That’s quite a lot of queries.

The technology behind how passage-based indexing will be used in ranking is probably based on BERT, and closely related to how Google identifies candidate passages for featured snippets. In other words, if our pages contain passages of text that are very “answery” for a given query, they are more likely to rank higher for that query.

In the future, Google might expand answer highlighting beyond just featured snippets.

For the search marketer, this means we have to clearly and directly answer the user’s question in our content. This is something we should have been doing the entire time. Google is now much better at detecting when we are.

As an added bonus to directly answering queries, the passages of text that help us rank with passage-based Indexing might also be used for featured snippets. If we can get into the top 10 more often with this change, we can also get the position with the highest click-through rate.

Best Practice: Clearly and directly answer the user’s query in your content. Think about what text you would use to optimize for featured snippets and incorporate that into your content briefs and content audits.

3. Render Content Quickly and Smoothly

Rendering performance is not just a ranking factor; it’s an everything factor. Every channel and each of their conversion metrics are affected by how well pages load for users. We have studies to back this up.

There are a lot of ways to measure page performance, and there are at least a dozen metrics for page speed. For a long time, organic search marketers didn’t know which ones mattered most.

Luckily, Google gave us some to optimize for in their Lighthouse reports. In 2020 the metrics were updated and are now called Core Web Vitals, and they gave us the date for when they will be incorporated into ranking: May 2021.

This report will become very important when Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor.

Google’s rollout of Core Web Vitals has been great for marketers and is hopefully an example of how updates will be launched in the future. Google has been extremely helpful and transparent with how the metrics will be implemented by telling us when the update will happen, offering several tools for measuring them in Google Search Console and Lighthouse reports, and making the data available for Core Web Vitals dashboards in Google Data Studio.

Best Practice: Do a site performance audit and get your Core Web Vitals worked out before May 2021. Websites with poor scores could get demoted, and those with high scores could get a badge in their search result snippets. We have a whole guide for optimizing site speed that will help you get started.

4. Do Digital PR to Get Better Backlinks

Articles about E-A-T often talk about on-page strategies we can use to rank higher, like having author bio boxes, cleaning up spammy user comments, and citing sources. These things are necessary to do, but I’ve seen websites struck down by recent core algorithm updates that were already doing most of those on-page best practices.

After auditing websites negatively impacted by core algorithm updates in 2019 and 2020, a pattern emerged that’s consistent with things Googlers have said about E-A-T and the patents they’ve put out. In almost every case I looked at, the biggest gap between the websites demoted by an update and their competitors that survived has been the quality of their links.

You can find the original post here. You should also follow Marie; she’s an expert on E-A-T and the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

The survivors tended to have links from some of the most trustworthy places on the web: news websites and industry-relevant websites. This leads me to think that links are a big part of recent core algorithm updates and are an overlooked part of E-A-T.

This speculation isn’t so wild. Search quality updates are about finding better ways to separate the ham from the spam using signals that indicate quality. A link from a news organization is a particularly rare signal of trust because it implies that a human editor reviewed the link and decided that it’s safe to send their users to the linked site.

In 2015, Google received a patent for a version of PageRank that ranked pages based on their link distance away from seed websites. If these seed websites included news organizations, industry blogs, and magazines that are used in a system in the same spirit as this patent, that could explain why I’ve been seeing sites with these backlinks perform well after an update.

If Google is using a system of link-based trust to favor websites with rare and high-quality backlinks, the question becomes how to obtain them. Buying links from private blog networks, or whatever the spam du jour is, won’t get us there. What we need to do is reach out to publishers, editors, and journalists with a pitch for a story; public relations, in other words.

Best Practice: Add digital PR and content promotion to your off-page SEO strategy. Links are always going to be used for determining who is worthy of ranking at the top, and search engines are only going to get more selective over time.

5. Take Control Over Snippet Descriptions

Google isn’t using our meta description tags in snippets very often. Our tags are ignored up to 71% of the time for rankings on the first page!

Google seems to think they are really good at picking excerpts of text to use instead of our hand-crafted meta descriptions. They may be for queries we weren’t targeting with our tags, but I have seen them pick some bizarre text to use instead.

This is not the best text to use on the page for a query like “best potting soil for succulents.”

Luckily, Google gave us a tool to help us compensate for the hubris built into their algorithms. Using a special attribute called data-nosnippet, we can tell Google to ignore any text in the tag and its children for the purposes of search result snippets.

Let’s suppose Google thinks the text in our footer is relevant for a mostly different query:

Google gets tripped up on dates and will pull snippets from the copyright line if the year is used in a query like “SERP preview tool 2020.”

We could help nudge Google to pick a different snippet by making our footer text ineligible for snippets. We just need to find the right tag:

Find the parent tag that contains the minimum necessary content for your data-nosnippet directive.

Best Practice: Use data-nosnippet carefully and verify its implementation. We can block a lot of irrelevant text from appearing in snippets by picking a tag that contains a lot of text, but we could also make a mistake and block the whole main content of the page.

If there isn’t a good tag to use for blocking irrelevant snippet text already on the page, wrap the target text with unstyled <span> tags and place data-nosnippet in it.

The Core of SEO Is Still the Same

No matter how many new search features and tools Google launches, the goal of web search remains the same: provide expertly produced content to answer the user’s query. This year, we’re getting some changes that make that easier to do with better site performance analytics and natural language processing. It’s also getting harder because mobile isn’t the easiest platform to work with, and the goalposts for links and site quality are moving a little further out.

The post 5 SEO Best Practices for 2021 appeared first on Portent.

How To Create a Direct Response Campaign on Twitter

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:00:52 GMT

Twitter’s Ad platform is improving with its functionality, product features, and infrastructure. They are dedicated to building their ad platform architecture for the future as they’ve seen growth in advertiser revenue.

Image courtesy of Twitter

Twitter has 166 million monetizable daily active users in the first quarter of 2020, which grew 24% year-over-year(YoY). As an advertiser, this shows that the promoted ads on Twitter are engaging with the users. Therefore, there is a possibility of investing your budget on this platform that may produce a positive return. If you are looking for opportunities to advertise on Twitter, this post will look into what a direct response campaign is, how to set them up, how to run an A/B test successfully, and incorporate UX best practices on your landing pages.

What is a Direct Response Campaign?

Let’s first begin with this question: what is a direct response campaign? Advertisers create these campaigns to encourage users to take action immediately. Direct response campaigns can include hosting webinars, enabling users to place an order, driving traffic to your site, opting in to an email list, and more! The purpose of direct response campaigns is to acquire new customers and increase revenue based on your KPI goals.

Campaign Goal Strategies

Before launching your direct response campaigns, you will need to define your KPI goals. Some questions to consider are:

What will be the cost to acquire a customer? This KPI informs you about your return on investment on this platform.
What is a “good” conversion rate? This KPI will inform you on how many users clicked on your ad and converted. If you don’t have this answer, look into your average website conversion rate as a benchmark.
How much do you want to spend to achieve your goals? To reach the right users, how much are you willing to spend to acquire a customer?

Next, establish what type of content you would like to run. There are two different strategies on Twitter that you can use:

Ongoing Evergreen Content. This long-term campaign initiative involves continuing to promote engaging content. The most important aspect of driving this strategy is to refresh your creative consistently (this depends on your audience size and the frequency) to stay relevant to your audience. Examples of targeting could be prospect or remarketing users based on keywords, Twitter conversation, customer lists, and many more.
Promotion/Event Content. This short-term campaign initiative is to drive a promotion or event to a specific audience. Examples of targeting could be prospect users based on interests in specific events (ex: Dress Your Pet Day) or reach people who tweeted, engaged, or viewed a tweet about a conversation topic. (ex: Lifestyle – Pets)

How To Create a Twitter Direct Response Campaign

Before you begin setting up your campaign, you will need to first place your conversion pixel on your website or via a third-party tracking tool to track your campaigns’ performance. This pixel will allow you to track and measure your campaigns and retarget users based on their user behaviors (e.g., visiting your site). We’ll look into a few steps below that will help you measure your campaign’s success.

Step 1: Specify Event Tracking

First, you want to specify how you want to track your events, whether it’s placing a universal website tag to track all website visitors or tracking when a user lands on a specific landing page (e.g., thank you page).

Another way to track events is to use the single event website tag to track when a user clicks on an iframe (e.g., CTA button) or an in-page submit that doesn’t lead users to a new landing page.

Step 2: Choose Your Optimization Preference and Campaign Objective(s)

Next, when choosing your campaign objective, there are three options to select from if you are driving direct-response campaigns: awareness, consideration, and conversion. If you want to drive traffic to your website, the “website clicks” campaign objective is recommended for users to complete an action on your site.

It will find users who are most likely to visit your site, plus it will optimize towards the conversion pixel if you include your optimization preference in your campaign.

If you drive traffic to your app, the recommended campaign objectives are “app installs” and “app re-engagements.” If you are unsure which app campaign objectives will deliver the best results, you can start A/B testing both objectives. Later in this blog, I will provide a few tips for driving a successful A/B test for your campaigns.

Step 3: Select Audience Types to Target

With targeting on Twitter, there are unique ways to reach your audience, unlike other social platforms. You can reach prospects, retarget users who’ve engaged with your paid or organic tweets, visited your site, and more! There are seven different targeting options for interest-audience available within the Twitter platform.

Conversation targeting
Event targeting
Tweet Engager targeting
Keyword targeting
Movies & TV targeting
Interest targeting
Follower look-alikes targeting

Image courtesy of Twitter

If you are interested in retargeting, excluding, or creating a lookalike audience of your existing customers from your CRM list, website activity, app activity, and more, there are several ways you can add your custom audiences within the Twitter platform.

Image courtesy of Twitter

Step 4: Activate Your Campaign and Let Twitter Auction Your Ad

Once your campaigns are active, Twitter places your ads in an auction and bidding against other advertisers. Twitter auctions ads based on two things:

How much an advertiser is willing to bid.
How relevant your ad is to your target audience. How likely your target audience will engage with your ad, perform an action on your ad (ex. clicking, retweeting), and whether you are continually refreshing your ad (Twitter auctions reward up-to-date content).

Twitter uses a second-price auction, where if you bid $2.00 and your competitor bids $1.50, you will only be charged $1.51 when someone clicks on your ad. Within that auction, advertisers set a bid of how much they are willing to spend. Lastly, when you are bidding, you want to match your bid to your targeting size. The narrower your audience, the more costly it will be.

Twitter Direct Response Campaign Tips

When creating a direct response ad, you want to keep these tips in mind to achieve your KPI goals:

Set a clear call-to-action. Setting clear and transparent ad messaging will be easy for the user to understand what action to take.
Avoid click-bait ads. You are paying per click, so we should avoid driving bad traffic to your site. Make sure you are not only attracting users but filling their intent as well.
Limit the # of hashtags and handles. The more cluttered your ad is, the less likely a user will be to take action.
Ad copy + creative should be relevant to your landing page. Consistency throughout your ad messaging, creative, and landing page will help a user know what to expect after clicking on an ad and encourage them to take action to achieve your KPI goals. Later in the blog, we’ll revisit UX best practices more in-depth.
Separate by the device. I found that separating your ad groups by mobile vs. desktop shows a notable difference between how desktop and mobile users behave on the same webpage. When I tested this from my B2B client, I found that mobile users drove 52% of site traffic while achieving 80% of conversions and a 1.50X less in customer acquisition cost than the average From August-November 2020.

Twitter also recommends separating mobile users vs. desktop users as mobile is a fundamentally different medium than desktop, characterized by frequent quick sessions and spur-of-the-moment spikes in purchase intent.

A/B Testing Within the Platform

To further improve your campaigns’ success, it is encouraged to start A/B testing different variables such as audiences, creative, placement, and devices to compare strategies or measure changes. Ensure that you are only changing one or two variables when you start A/B testing to understand what variable drove statistical results. Testing too many variables will prevent you from knowing exactly what is affecting your outcomes.

Here are a few examples of A/B testing you can do within Twitter:

Ad Copy Messaging

It is essential to understand that different users respond to ad messaging differently. Therefore, you cannot predict how a user will react unless you test different copy variations across your campaigns. Testing your ad copy will help you identify which ad’s messaging drives more success based on your KPI goals.

Ad Formats

Testing different ad formats within the platform will allow you to understand how your target audience responds to your promoted ads. This will also help you know which ad formats are driving the best result for your campaign. For more information, here’s an overview of the different ad formats available within the Twitter platform.

Targeting

Suppose you’re creating your first campaigns or don’t have enough historical data to find which audiences performed well. In that case, I recommend creating separate ad groups to measure the success of the different audiences you are targeting.

Create a Strong UX Landing Page Experience

It’s essential to optimize your campaigns within the platform; however, implementing off-platform optimizations will also help drive campaign success. Creating an effective and high-converting landing page will provide a better user experience. If the user has a positive experience on your site, they will be more likely to complete the action, vs. if they have a negative experience, they are more likely to abandon your site.

Here are some UX optimizations we’ve implemented for one of our B2B clients.

Value Proposition
Adding context on how your business can help users understand what they can accomplish with the product or service you are offering will reduce abandonment on your site.
Social Proof
Social Proof builds your audience’s trust, which can persuade them to complete the desired action. Lack of social proof on your landing page may negatively affect your conversion rate. In the example below, we’ve added a value proposition section to give users reasons why this brand is worthwhile compared to its competitors. We’ve also added a social proof section on the landing page under “Trusted Customers” to showcase company logos that users may recognize, which may positively affect their impression of the brand.
Form Background
When the form is similar to your background color on the site, it can be difficult for users to identify where they need to complete the action visually. In the example below, we added a distinct background to avoid the current form blending with the rest of the page and to make it easier for users to digest the information on the landing page.

These changes made a significant difference in this client’s Twitter campaign performance. Conversions increased by 10X quarter after quarter, accompanied by an 86% decrease in customer acquisition cost. Therefore, implementing UX within our social strategy helped drive a lower cost per customer acquisition, generating a higher return on investment for the Twitter platform.

If you’re interested in learning more about landing page best practices for paid media campaigns, consider reading 7 PPC Landing Page Best Practices.

Recap

As Twitter grows its user base, there are opportunities in your marketing strategy to promote your brand by creating a direct response Twitter campaign so users can immediately take action.

When creating a direct response campaign, you must add event tracking to your campaign and implement A/B tests across ad copy messaging, creative, targeting, and landing pages to measure success. Lastly, when it comes to UX, ensure that the landing page’s optimizations and design improve the user experience to improve conversion rates.

The post How To Create a Direct Response Campaign on Twitter appeared first on Portent.

Digital Marketing Trends in Education for 2021

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 15:00:18 GMT

In a relatively new industry that’s rapidly evolving, it can be daunting for recent college graduates to learn about digital marketing. Unlike many other fields of study, digital marketing has been around for only a few decades. And although the field is still relatively new, as recent events have demonstrated, the world is rapidly shifting to digital and these marketing jobs are needed more than ever before.

But this fast-paced transition can be hard to keep up with, especially for college students who are just learning about what the digital world can offer. What’s current and relevant in digital marketing one semester may completely change the next, posing a great challenge for both professors as they teach and students as they learn about the industry.

So how are future marketers preparing to enter the workforce? What and how are professors teaching? Which programs and classes are offered to help students get a feel for the digital marketing realm? We asked professors from colleges and universities throughout the nation about how they’re preparing students to enter the digital marketing field:

What marketing channels are colleges and universities focusing on?
What digital marketing topics are students learning about?
What trends are professors anticipating their students will encounter?
What advice do professors have for those entering the digital marketing field?

What Marketing Channels Are Colleges and Universities Currently Focusing On?

While many post-secondary institutions have marketing programs for students looking to step into the traditional marketing world, they vary in terms of the digital courses they provide. Some schools provide a few digital marketing classes, while others offer entire digital marketing degrees. But no matter the approach, it’s clear that the subject is becoming more and more prominent at the college level.

“I have fully immersed myself in digital marketing channels and it is my primary focus in the classes I teach. Four years ago, Strome College of Business at Old Dominion University proposed three new marketing concentrations for our program, one of which was a Digital Marketing track… Two new courses were created for this track, social media marketing and web analytics, and the department placed a course previously offered, Internet Marketing, into this track.”
– Michelle Carpenter, Senior Lecturer, Strome College of Business, Old Dominion University

“My focus is on both traditional marketing channels and digital. Students need to know the foundations and concepts that are used in both of these key marketing strategies, and how they play a role in the solutions for businesses today.”
– Andrew Burnstine, Ph.D., Associate Professor, College of Business and Management, Lynn University

“My focus is ‘Integrated Marketing Communication’ (IMC)- integrating the channels that will reach the clearly defined target. ‘Traditional’ used to be the primary way to reach the target with ‘digital’ as support. Today, digital is marketing … and ‘traditional’ is an important support.”
– Sam R. Goldstein, Instructor of Marketing and Participating Faculty, Welch College of Business & Technology, Sacred Heart University

“I have taught a dedicated digital marketing class every year since 1998. We also have an information systems major in our business school for students who want to combine our digital marketing course with more advanced technology courses.”
– Mary B. Harms, Associate Clinical Professor in Marketing, Smith School of Business

“I teach marketing strategy with a focus on social commerce, D2C startups, digital AI transformation, and ChinaTech. To be an effective university adjunct professor, you have to be current. Hence, we must make our own lesson plans… I want my students to be relevant marketers coming out of Baruch with job offers coming at them.”
– Robb Hecht, Adjunct Professor of Marketing, Baruch College

“Our standard digital marketing courses cover a variety of topics: website design, SEO, paid search, online advertising, social media, and email. At the graduate level, there is also an emphasis on digital marketing strategy. We also offer a social media marketing course both at the undergraduate and graduate level.”
– Mark Bender, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of South Florida

What Digital Marketing Topics Are College and University Students Currently Learning About?

Digital marketing embodies a wide range of channels—you’ve got everything from content and technical SEO to PPC and social media. While each marketing channel is equally important, it can be a lot for students to really grasp and put into practice as a whole when they’re limited to only a few semesters of learning. Professors have to be selective about what topics and tools they choose to teach their students within the short time they’re given each semester. Here’s what they’re teaching with the limited time they have.

“Up to date digital marketing strategies and tactics, such as SEO, User Experience (UX), and website/social media analytics, as well as launching, managing, and analyzing a real digital marketing campaign and consulting projects. These projects allow (students) to work one-on-one, with both faculty and professionals in the field to learn about and create solutions for existing businesses.”
– Andrew Burnstine, Ph.D.

“It is absolutely critical that students are able to function in today’s data-driven, technologically complex marketing world. On the one hand, students need to know how to use current tools… However, on the other hand, tools come and go, so students need to be digitally agile, so the theoretical aspects are equally important. We try to balance theory and application by giving them real-world business projects and teach them critical thinking skills in order to transcend whatever tool they happen to be using at the moment.”
– David G. Taylor, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Marketing Department Chair, Sacred Heart University

“Our program encompasses all the areas that I think students are required to learn for a successful career in DM. UX is incredibly important from a design perspective. Analytics is a really hot topic with the rise of data importance. And equally important, content development and campaign strategies for digital platforms. We want our students to hit the ground running even before graduation.”
– Gerardo Moreira, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Sacred Heart University

“Students are required to complete the first segment of Google Analytics Academy; they are also required to create a personal professional website/portfolio, they also work in teams on a semester-long project where they redesign a website and the online presence for a small business or nonprofit, we also have several guest speakers who present educational segments with followup hands-on projects for the students to complete.”
– Mary B. Harms

“Customer Journey, Social Commerce, Data Strategy, Analytics, Content Strategy, D2C product development, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Google Ads, are good topics for students to know about and become certified in. As digital certifications gain in importance, university programs must teach logical thinking along these coveted digital credentials.”
– Robb Hecht

“Right now, we ask students to consider how businesses may consider leveraging mobile and geolocation targeting for marketing purposes in a client-based semester-long project (they are also tasked with SEO, paid search, etc. recommendations for this client).”
– Mark Bender, Ph.D.

What Digital Marketing Trends Are Professors Anticipating Their Students Will Encounter?

To properly prepare students for the “real world,” professors work hard to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate the digital marketing trends their students may witness as they enter the industry. Especially over the last year, the digital realm has seen some massive shifts, and professors want to make sure their students are ready to dive in head-first and tackle similar challenges that might arise in the future.

“We are seeing a difference in the types of jobs available. More traditional marketing roles are more scarce as companies tighten their belts in this challenging economic environment. Companies are actively looking for graduates who can span the worlds of technology and business. Our vision is to produce graduates who are able to traverse these two worlds with current skills, as well as the ability to adapt as technology changes.”
– David G. Taylor, Ph.D.

“Having an online presence will become even more important for brands, there will be an increased focus on agile advertising approaches, and marketers will try to focus more on the brand experience to provide more assurance to customers. To prepare the students, we are adapting our marketing course materials almost in real time to provide them knowledge about how the industry is changing.”
– Aaron Joyal, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Daemen College

“What I think has changed is the messaging. Marketers need to understand what has shifted in the minds of their buyers, where the concerns are, what matters now that didn’t last year. As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to make sure our messages resonate. The tactics haven’t changed, but what we use them for needs to change.”
– Jerry Rackley, Executive-in-Residence, School of Marketing & International Business, Oklahoma State University

What Advice Do Professors Have for Those Entering the Digital Marketing Field?

As previously mentioned, it’s hard to fit the whole of digital marketing into a few semesters at any post-secondary school. Although professors may not have all the time they would like to get their students ready, they still offer valuable advice to students and recent graduates as they spread their wings and leave the nest.

“If you want to succeed, take on that internship and another if possible, get involved and be a leader in student organizations, and work hard on any student projects so you can build a portfolio that stands out. Build your own personal brand on LinkedIn and become proficient in key social media platforms. Follow the leaders on social media and see what they are doing. Finally, keep writing; content continues to be king. You must be an effective communicator if you are going to be successful in this industry.”
– Michelle Carpenter

“‘According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.’ ⁽¹⁾ I say this on repeat more than a scratched disk in a vinyl player and as corny and overly stated as it is, it is highly relevant in the world of DM. The best [digital] marketers are those that can quickly and effectively adapt to the ever-changing industry demands.”
– Gerardo Moreira, Ph.D.

“To become a good marketer, you need to put in the time and the effort. Classes and instruction will only take you so far; you need to get ‘hands-on’ experience as soon as you can. I’d also suggest that they read as much as they can about the field and to seek out experts in the field who make their experience available online for free. Finally, start to attend networking events as soon as you can, as in this industry (like many others), who you know can sometimes be more important than what you know.”
– Aaron Joyal, Ph.D.

“Understand all aspects of marketing: inbound marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, experiential marketing, PR, and a combination of each. Integrate them. ‘Back in the day,’ we would do mass (marketing) to reach the target. Today, we do target so they can reach out to the masses.”
– Sam R. Goldstein

“Students are pretty adept at learning the tools, technologies, and approaches of digital marketing. But many see their professional success hindered because they don’t know how to have a meaningful conversation with someone they just met. Or they don’t know how to write a great blog post. This ability to communicate well is the biggest differentiator I am seeing in the graduate pool these days.”
– Jerry Rackley

Explore Your Options

Just as the digital landscape is constantly developing, so are the teaching and learning approaches in higher education. In the current age, it’s imperative that marketers be familiar with digital tactics. Students interested in digital marketing have many options to choose from and should explore what different institutions have to offer. The world awaits you!

(1) Meggins, L. C. (1963), “Lessons from Europe for American Business,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 44(1) 3-13, at p. 4.

The post Digital Marketing Trends in Education for 2021 appeared first on Portent.

My Favorite SMX 2020 Sessions

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 15:00:37 GMT

Search Marketing Expo has become one of the leading conferences for search marketing professionals. So naturally, I was excited to attend SMX virtual this year. With more than 45 sessions on the agenda, there was plenty to learn about what the future of search looks like. Below are the top takeaways that I wanted to share.

An Epic Ads Automation Debate: RSAs vs. ETAs

Presented by: Fred Vallaeys, Co-Founder and CEO of Optmyzr, and Brad Geddes, Co-Founder Adalysis

My favorite talk of the conference came right away with Optmyzr’s Fred Vallaeys and Adalysis’ Brad Geddes, debating whether Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) or Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) reign supreme.

Here are the arguments for both:

Responsive Search Ads

On Average, RSAs outperform ETAs. Although RSAs and ETAs are equally likely to be the best format, RSAs outperformed by a larger margin.
For larger advertisers, the results are mixed. It could be the fact that larger accounts are already well optimized and RSAs offer a smaller boost. Large advertisers rely heavily on their brand in ad text and don’t need the thousands of potential variations that RSAs could generate to boost performance.

Expanded Text Ads

Google usually shows RSAs the most, regardless of data. Even if ETAs are performing significantly better, Google tends to still prefer RSAs.
Ad strength doesn’t seem to affect ad serving. It doesn’t seem to matter if the RSA is high-quality or not; Google still tends to serve them more than ETAs.
RSAs take time to optimize. But some clients don’t have that time.

While there was no “winner” in the debate, both Fred Vallaeys and Brad Geddes made excellent points about RSAs and ETAs. Both ad types have a place in your account, and for the time being, it looks like we’ll have to test them and draw our own conclusions.

Small Budget Tactics That Pack a Serious Punch

Presented by: Amalia Fowler, Director of Marketing Services at Snaptech Marketing

Working with small businesses my entire career, this talk naturally made this list. Using the five A’s of small budget marketing (based on the five D’s of dodgeball), Speaker Amalia Fowler laid the groundwork for managing and optimizing low budget accounts.

The Five A’s include:

Accept. Small budgets mean you can’t do as much as you want. Focus on working within your limits and making small optimizations within your restraints. Planning your account structure carefully sets you up for maximum success.
Adjust. Getting as granular as possible with locations, audiences, etc., will help reduce waste and maximize returns where you know they exist.
Analyze. Analyze your data and make small adjustments quickly, especially excluding anything that doesn’t lead to returns.
Adapt, and Accept (again). Google is always changing and will continually throw wrenches into your plans. Learning to adapt and accept the changing industry is required for continued success.

Emerging Channels for Digital Commerce

Presented by: Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director, Strategic Marketplace Services, Tinuiti

Tinuiti’s Senior Director of Strategic Marketplace Services and Portent alum Elizabeth Marsten showed us the future of e-commerce and the emerging players in the space. These businesses include:

Walmart Media Group

Best for brands that are in store, sellers that can be price/shipping competitive. Dependent on product category.
Problems include: retail relationships can complicate return goals, 1st price bid auction, whitelisted keywords.

Target Roundel

Best for brands that are in store, Target Plus sellers, high-competitor categories, and new to market brands.
Problems include: You could end up paying for clicks that would’ve been organic & the array of options can be paralyzing.

Instacart Advertising

Best for brands in multiple retailers or 100+ throughout the US. Retailers must also list these items with Instacart.
Problems include: overlap with other channels, can’t see breakdown by retailer, huge hiring spree of shoppers, low on out-of-the-box advertising features.

Kroger Advertising

Best for in-store brands wanting to grow or new/emerging brands.
Problems include: currently in year two of a three-year plan, launching Mirakl marketplace now to expand assortment.

Criteo

Best for in-store brands that need to amplify in their category (emerging or highly competitive) and smaller management teams that need to expand.
Problems include: confusion on the Retail Media offering vs. legacy/other Criteo offerings amongst search marketers.

Out of the talks I attended, this one was the most eye-opening. I was unaware that this many players had entered the e-commerce advertising industry at all, but Marsten’s breakdown showed that there’s an advertising space for everyone, and the digital marketing world is always expanding.

That’s a Wrap!

SMX 2020 provided an awesome opportunity to hear from some of the best in search marketing. I’m looking forward to sharing the actionable tactics and takeaways I learned to help clients drive more traffic and exceed their business goals!

The post My Favorite SMX 2020 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

Programmatic Advertising: Choosing the Right DSP for Your Business

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 18:05:18 GMT

When choosing a DSP for your programmatic campaigns, it’s crucial to select a platform that meets your marketing goals. Selecting the right DSP has a variety of factors to consider once you determine your marketing goals, and choosing the wrong one can prove detrimental to your campaigns and cost your business more money long-term.

Before I jump into how to select the right DSP for your business, let’s take a step back and quickly review what DSPs and programmatic advertising are.

What is a DSP?

A DSP, short for demand-side platform, is an advertising platform advertisers use to buy programmatic media in real-time. Programmatic advertising is the process of automated bidding and buying based on targeting parameters that you set within the platform. A DSP is made up of multiple ad exchanges that have thousands of different inventory placements to target. Furthermore, a DSP has various targeting options, and can leverage 3rd party data partners to allow advertisers to target users that make up their ideal audience.

How Do You Choose the Right DSP for Your Business?

Once you know your marketing goals and what you want to achieve from programmatic advertising, it’s time to select a DSP platform. When choosing a DSP, there are a few essential things to evaluate: inventory, technology, brand-safe functionality, reporting, costs, and overall partnership.

Inventory

The type of inventory available within the platform is the first step in determining if it’s a good fit for your business. Most DSPs may offer the same kind of inventory, but some charge a higher price to use it. Confirm the inventory available includes video, display, mobile, and tablet placements to allow you to use different ad creative to reach your audience. Asking what type of inventory they have available will help determine if the platform is a good fit for your business.

Technology

Evaluating how the DSP bids on inventory is another crucial factor in the evaluation process. Is the DSP leveraging its own technology? Is the DSP continually evolving its technology to improve targeting, bidding, and overall functionality? Answers to these questions will provide clarity into the platform and give you a baseline for comparison.

Brand-Safe Functionality

With thousands of inventory options available, that opens the door to your business displaying ads next to unsafe content. This kind of content can be mature content, sensitive or tragic content, or simply content that doesn’t align with your business. Since DSPs leverage targeting the user rather than a specific placement, the user may go to a website that doesn’t align with your product or values. While creating a blacklist of placements you don’t want to display on is important, brand-safe parameters within a DSP are just as critical. This kind of functionality will allow you to select the type of content you don’t want your brand to show up next to. If a platform doesn’t provide this option, it’s worth considering another to ensure you avoid unsafe content.

Reporting and Analytics

Accurate, real-time reports are essential components of a DSP. Depending on your marketing goals, you may need granular reporting to determine what optimizations to make. Custom report builders and reach estimates don’t come standard across all DSPs. Choosing a platform with both capabilities will set your campaigns up for success and allow for better, more accurate optimizations.

Cost

Cost is an obvious factor to evaluate before partnering with a DSP. Management and tech fees may be standard across the industry, but transparency into the rates is critical. Higher CPM or CPC without understanding where the budget is going can cost your business more long-term. While buying on a DSP has certain hard costs associated with it, the actual bids happen in real-time. Knowing how much of your spend is going towards tech, platform, and ad exchange fees will help you eliminate more costly options. Lastly, It’s important to ask each DSP about their minimum spends to make sure your business can afford to partner with them.

Platform Partnerships

While cost and overall platform performance should be the driving factors behind selecting a DSP, a commonly overlooked detail is the relationship between your business and the platform. Partnering with a platform and its people go hand-in-hand. Having a great relationship with the account representatives and analysts can make all the difference to your campaigns. Choosing a platform where its people are transparent and passionate about meeting your marketing goals will take your campaigns to the next level. Establishing and maintaining a partnership with a DSP along with buying programmatic media can be time-consuming. Alternatively, partnering with an agency that’s established a partnership with a DSP will save your business time and money.

Final Thoughts

There are a variety of factors to consider when selecting a DSP for your business. Evaluating the inventory, technology, brand-safe functionality, reporting and analytics, cost, and the partnership are all crucial to choosing the right DSP for your business. Evaluating a DSP may seem daunting, but it’s an essential step in setting your business up for success when launching programmatic advertising.

The post Programmatic Advertising: Choosing the Right DSP for Your Business appeared first on Portent.

It’s Raining Marketing: The Importance of Integrated Marketing Communications

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:00:55 GMT

Updated on December 10, 2020 to include tips to create a solid IMC strategy.

Halfway through one of my college marketing classes, I noticed a small quote on the bottom right-hand side of the whiteboard. It said, “Which raindrop caused the flood?” My teacher never referenced it once during the duration of the course. However, ten weeks later, it all made sense.

What is Integrated Marketing Communication?

There are a few definitions for integrated marketing communications, but my favorite is from the Northwestern School of Journalism: “IMC is a strategic marketing process specifically designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are unified across all channels and are centered around the customer.” Simply put, it is the principle that marketing is most effective if every marketing channel has communication that aligns with the same core brand positioning.

Like many good marketing strategies, this initially seems like a “duh” principle. Clearly, you don’t want to have marketing that makes your brand look like it has some sort of split-personality disorder like Gollum from The Hobbit. (“No, not social media! / It will cheat you, hurt you, LIE! / But, social media is our friend!”) But getting all your marketing communications aligned is trickier than you may think.

Why is Integrated Marketing Communication Important Now?

IMC is not a new concept, but it’s more important than ever, as there are now more marketing channels than ever before. Back in the ’50s, marketing campaigns relied heavily on simple traditional media channels like print, radio, and television. It didn’t take much to keep these aligned.

But now, with digital media, we have an abundance of channels ranging from digital PR to influencer marketing to the wild west: social media. Our marketing tool sheds are filled with new and effective tactics that range from broad messaging (your website’s homepage) to targeting more niche groups (via Instagram). But not only is there an abundance of new channels, there is consumption like never before. Media is hyper-accessible and consumed at much higher rates. It’s not about the morning paper or evening television; it’s about constant consumption all day.

In bigger companies, each marketing channel will have a different manager, which is all the more reason to make sure that high-level IMC strategies are in place.

What Are Some Examples of Integrated Marketing Communication?

An IMC expert once told me that when he first engages a client, he would audit their entire property. This included all of their obvious marketing channels, but also included things that they might not expect.

In the case of a restaurant, he’d visit the restaurant and bring a notepad and paper, taking note of everything from the condition of the parking lot to the personalities of the waiters. If the brand messaging of the restaurant is elegance and fresh foods, it really doesn’t help if the dumpster is viewable from the parking lot. Every little piece that contradicts your brand messaging is a step back.

Likewise, let’s take a look at a brand that seems to come up on everyone’s list as the gold standard for marketing–Apple. Apple stands for innovation, simplicity, and style. Not only do their commercials, print ads, and website all share the same design aesthetic, but they bring the same qualities to their retail stores and even their products. For example, their customer service center–the Genius Bar–is set up to be simple, easy, and effective, just like an iPad.

What’s Bad Integrated Marketing Communication?

One of the most common pitfalls for brands in terms of IMC is the use of too many tools for social media. Some brands have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp, etc., when their audience only really pays attention to one or two of those channels. What ends up happening here is that although one channel looks nice and engages in meaningful conversation, the others look like a barren wasteland that ignores their audience. Not good.

But even when you have someone concentrating specifically on your social media, they need to not only be aware of the messaging they are trying to convey, but the manner in which they are conveying that message. Sometimes, it doesn’t always go well (See Exhibit A and Exhibit B below).

Exhibit A

Here’s a post from ZzzQuil early in 2014:

And here’s one of the many responses they got:

Exhibit B

And again, what seemed like a genuine post from Gap:

And as you’d expect, it didn’t get the best response.

Another thing that sometimes brands forget about is that even though you may not be able to directly alter the messaging for external sources, you still need to be aware of it and try and shape it as best you can. This can be done by how you choose to respond to audience communication. If this is done improperly, it’s the same as having poor communication in the first place.

How Do You Develop an Integrated Marketing Strategy?

The simple answer is to start small and expand over time. Don’t try and manage too many channels and too many different messages at once. Focus on what works for you and get it right. Here are my tips for a solid initial integrated digital marketing strategy:

Create a foundation of solid, meaningful marketing goals. You should have one or two main objectives that are easily measurable and directly contribute to the success of your overall objectives. This is your north star for your entire marketing strategy. If your tactics don’t align with this, then you may need to reconsider and adjust.
Clearly define your core values and create a voice and tone guide that reflects those values. All your marketing content must align with the same voice and tone, or else it will look and feel disjointed and contribute to distrust.
Determine who your core audience is. Who are you trying to reach and what channels do they prefer to consume information on?
Create simple key messaging points for each stage of the funnel. More than anything else, what does your audience need to know at each point in their journey?
Choose the marketing channels that match your core values and are used by your audience. Start small and make sure you have at least one or two for each stage of the funnel. Start small, master them, and then expand.
Create a clear content calendar to determine a good cadence to connect with your audience. Make sure your communications for each channel are regular and are realistic for your marketing team. Don’t overcommit, and don’t ignore a channel.
Track performance and have regular business reviews to identify weak channels and possible new channels.

It’s worth noting that this is less complicated for small and medium businesses to create and execute a marketing plan. For bigger businesses where there may be many different teams that all have a stake in messaging and performance, it is vital that marketing efforts are transparent and collaborative. It’s important that product teams are able to have a voice in how they want to talk about their product individually while adjusting for the bigger picture as a brand.

TL;DR

The point of IMC is to make sure that every piece of marketing is paid attention to. If every piece is in harmony, the overall result is much more powerful, and the audience will be able to hear what your brand is trying to say. Each piece, no matter how small, shares the same responsibility in providing a strong brand identity.

So, going back to my college marketing class, which raindrop caused the flood? Each and every one of them.

The post It’s Raining Marketing: The Importance of Integrated Marketing Communications appeared first on Portent.

The Impacts of Google Ads’ Changes to Search Term Visibility

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:00:23 GMT

It’s been about three months since Google made a significant change to search term visibility in Google Ads accounts. Google updated their reporting so that only search queries generating a significant volume of impressions would be visible to advertisers.

Prior to September of this year, advertisers could download and view a full list of search queries that generated ad impressions even if a given query only generated one unique impression. These reports were many advertisers’ source for long-tail keyword mining tactics and allowed for a fully transparent view of what queries were triggering ad impressions for specific keywords in any specified match type. Now, while advertisers can still see search terms that generated a clear majority of ad impressions, visibility into those niche long-tail keywords that perform well may be limited.

When Google announced this change, they cited the desire to maintain privacy standards and protect user data. Criticism from the paid search industry immediately followed Google’s announcement. Not only were there concerns about advertisers’ decreased ability to view search query details, but the reasoning Google provided was widely decried as disingenuous. After all, if Google was seriously concerned about privacy, why let advertisers continue to see any search query data at all? Nevermind that these search queries aren’t linked with any sort of personally identifiable information anyway.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this change has been in effect for about three months now, at the time of writing this post. Alarm bells were signaled by industry professionals that this would severely affect the performance of paid search accounts. But what has the impact actually been? Has this seriously hampered advertisers’ abilities to meet their goals, or was the initial reaction to this change overblown?

What The Numbers Say

Across our paid search accounts at Portent, we’ve been limited to viewing search terms that constitute between 70% – 90% of a given account’s search network click volume in our search query reports. That means we’re no longer able to see 10% – 30% clicks’ worth of search query data. While that range is substantial, the verdict we’ve reached about this change’s impact is one of underwhelming significance.

To put it plainly: we have not noticed that much of an impact on our accounts’ performance as a result of this change or on our ability to do our jobs as paid search strategists.

Yes, it feels like this change should have had a bigger impact on us than it has. It’s in our nature as strategists to want the most amount of granular data possible to determine what’s significant and what’s not. This change has infringed upon that, and we (along with the industry) were understandably annoyed by it.

But, the truth is, Google’s advertising system has been moving away from the need for extraordinarily granular long-tail keywords for some time now. Dynamic search campaigns have become a larger part of the paid search landscape, and exact match keywords now trigger ad impressions for “close variant” search queries that, years ago, would have only been triggered by keywords in broad match type. While this change in search query reports no doubt caused headaches for advertisers who had routine or automated keyword mining optimizations running, these things just aren’t as impactful as they used to be. And that’s by Google’s design.

Google’s Real Motive

A vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. And while they want to ensure their advertising standards produce high-quality and relevant content, they don’t want to give advertisers too much control. This could ultimately suppress average click and impression costs, according to what Google thinks a “free and fair” market should look like. Their concern isn’t about protecting user privacy from ambitious advertisers; it’s about maximizing revenue and profit potential.

Limiting the amount of search queries advertisers can view is just the latest step in Google moving closer toward that monetarily-focused goal. Going forward, Google will continue making similar changes that discourage advertisers from being as efficient with their campaigns as possible but still produce high-quality ads that users find helpful and relevant (thereby continuing to garner the lion’s share of the search engine market in seeming perpetuity).

What’s next?

Don’t be surprised if Google continues along this path in the next year or two by reserving a certain volume of potential search impressions only for dynamic search campaigns (which don’t use keywords at all), cutting search query visibility further (possibly maxing out at 50% visibility), or even removing keyword-based targeting on the search network altogether. That last one is probably too drastic to attempt within the next few years, but that’s the direction Google is heading.

As paid search advertisers, we need to be prepared for this changing landscape and stay ahead of the curve. It may go against our nature as detail-oriented strategists, but we should probably stop relying so heavily on tactics like long-tail, exact match keyword expansion and lean more towards ensuring our campaigns are configured to meet Google’s newest standards of best practices. The faster we can stay up-to-speed with Google Ads’ systematic changes, the better we’ll ensure we’re producing the best results possible for our clients or our businesses.

The post The Impacts of Google Ads’ Changes to Search Term Visibility appeared first on Portent.

Form Follows Function: How to Properly Label Online Form Fields

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:00:27 GMT

When was the last time you enjoyed filling out a form? No, seriously, like really enjoyed it? I mean kicked in your roommate’s bedroom door to show them a video of a gaze of chunky adorable raccoons tearing at a grown man holding a storage container full of hotdogs kinda fun. Never?

Not surprising. Because, the role of a form isn’t to be fun. A form is a tool that collects data from a user, usually in exchange for services or additional information. A form needs to be efficient, elegant, and accessible.

Forms that meet the criteria I just laid out are more likely to see submissions (conversions). That’s because these forms will clearly request information, which limits confusion, which in turn means your users will more often than not fill in the form correctly and submit it on their first try.

Forms are a big topic where accessibility, user experience, and CRO are concerned. And while there are varying opinions on how to approach forms from each perspective, there is one tactic that is a simple starting point to an elegant, accessible form that all disciplines can agree on: proper form field labeling. When done right, label elements expand the interact-able range of your fields. When a user clicks or focuses on a label, that part of your form will gain focus. No wasted space; the labels actively assist in form completion.

However, when done incorrectly, form label elements can actually detract from the user experience, impact accessibility, and ultimately lead to decreased conversions.

Common Form Label Problems

In my experience the most common issue I find when auditing forms for accessibility is poor labeling. Labels are often hidden and “replaced” with some other aspect of a field. Here are a few examples of those replacements. Let us see how many you are guilty of…

Hiding or excluding a label and “replacing” it with the placeholder attribute on an input field.
Adding a valueless option as the first choice in a select field as a way to describe the field’s purpose instead of displaying a label. Example “What country do you live in?” or “Current level of existential dread?”
Not labeling a group of checkboxes/radio buttons, but attempting to convey the overall meaning of the group through the individual choices.

These solutions usually meet aesthetic wants or satisfy internal requests, but none are correct. There is no substitute for a field label. They are a requirement and need to be kept visible and consistent. Should you find yourself in a disagreement about displaying labels vs. not displaying them, the person on the display side of the argument is correct.

Anatomy of the Label Element

To start off, I will clarify what the label element is and how it’s used in practice.

A label is a textual element in HTML that links to a field to supply more context. The most general usage of a label serves as the title of a field, such as “first name” or “zip code.” Label usage also extends to error messages for specific fields as a way to link errors to a field so that assistive technology can easily access the error message language.

A label element is opened and closed with the <label> and </label> tag. General attributes like “ID” and “class” can be applied but labels specifically support the”‘for” attribute, which is used to link the label to a specific field. The value of the “for” attribute is the ID of the field the label is tied to. Here is all the markup it takes to do it right:

<label for=“firstNameField”>First Name</label>

<input id="firstNameField" type="text"/>

Correctly Implementing Labels in Your Forms

For some, merely discussing the issues in the previous section could be enough to correct them. For everyone still here, this section is where I will dive into how to properly label an online form.

Keep Labels Visible and Consistently Placed

Easy. Don’t hide labels and keep them in the same place. It really is that simple. The label can go above, below, or to the left side of the field; there are plenty of options to design around.

Do Not Use the Placeholder Attribute as a Label

As I mentioned in the common problems section, the placeholder attribute of a field is not a replacement for a label. Placeholders disappear when a field is changed and generally have lower visibility.

Avoid Floating Labels

I also do not recommend using floating labels. This is a design pattern where the label of the field is present, but lays over the input until the user clicks or focuses into it. The label then moves out of the way—or worse—fades out. Often, this little touch of flair causes the label’s text to shrink, and the user may not properly track the animation or change in visual state. This introduces possible points of friction and really isn’t worth the perceived oomph.

Avoid Generic Labeling

Before I go into detail about repeated labels I would like to touch on generic ones. The label attached to a field should clearly communicate the information needed to successfully complete the form. A field that requires a user’s full name is a good example of how a strong descriptive label can convey the request.

A generic label in a form will not get flagged as a WCAG failure, it is not a requirement but… I consider generic labels to be an accessibility concern because unclear communication can make access to content and services difficult. Lack of clarity creates friction, and friction repels users.

To provide an example of a generic label let’s examine a field that expects a user to supply their full name that is only labeled “name.” Name what? Name is generic and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. More context should be supplied to narrow down possibilities and instruct the user to complete the field successfully.

A better label would be “Full Name.” This can be taken further considering the purpose of the information; “Legal Name,” “Your Name,“ “First and Last Name,” or “Preferred Name” are better, more descriptive examples of a label that requests a name from a user.

I have an anecdote about generic field labeling to share. It revolves around a form that collected information for a home moving quote. An important field on the form collected the expected date of the move and was labeled, simply, “Move Date.” This crucial field was causing users to bounce from the form before submitting it.

The solution to the problem you ask? Changing the label to “Estimated Moving Date.” One small change to the label increased the completions of the form. The added context of the word “estimated” conveyed to the user that they can ask for a quote without being 100% certain of their moving date.

Avoid Repeating Labels

Something worth noting is that because a label references the ID of a field, one field could have multiple labels that reference it but a single label can only reference one field. In most cases that shouldn’t be a problem, but this is the internet which means one size doesn’t fit all.

For example, imagine a form that asks the user to list four favorite foods. It would be redundant to have four fields that each have a generic label of “favorite food,” or even more specific labels of “favorite food 1,” “favorite food 2,” and so on. If your form allowed the user to add infinite favorite foods, this would get ridiculous.

Should you find yourself in a place where you need one label to apply to multiple fields, there is a way to do that using the “aria-labelledby” attribute.

Using Aria-labelledby for Multiple Fields With the Same Label

If you are unfamiliar with ARIA I want to quickly touch on two things. First, it stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and is an additional set of markup in HTML specifically for assistive technology. Second, is a warning that ARIA has to be used correctly or it can really mess up the experience for an assistive technology user. If you don’t need to use it, then it’s best you don’t.

But now back to my example. You gotta have those “favorite food” labels! aria-labelledby is placed on the input element, and references the ID of the label that applies to the field. aria-labelledby can also tie multiple labels to a single field by putting a space between each ID.

Here is an example of aria-labelledby being applied to four text fields that all use the same label:

<label id="favFoodLabel">Favorite Foods</label>

<input type="text" aria-labelledby="favFoodLabel"/>

That’s It!

Ensuring labels are present and properly linked to fields, keeping them visible, and making sure they are clear and descriptive are some easy steps to creating good forms that allow the most amount of people to interact with them. And while I understand that Minimalism is a tempting (and popular) design philosophy, the forms you put out in the world can be aesthetically pleasing, but that goal should be secondary to functionality. You, the person reading this, likely fill out forms all the time. Search your experiences and think of how many times you needed a form to be useful and respect your time rather than fun to look at.

We also put a really nice form on this page that properly instructs you to supply your email address in return for blog updates. You should try it, for educational purposes… of course.

The post Form Follows Function: How to Properly Label Online Form Fields appeared first on Portent.

Leverage Cross-Channel Paid Media Strategy to Grow Performance

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 15:00:00 GMT

Executing a productive and cohesive paid media strategy results in two core outcomes that marketers should always be driving towards:

1. A seamless experience for the target audience.

Multiple devices. Multiple touchpoints through the buyer’s journey. An endless variety of platforms, channels, content, and ad units to consume. As ad technology progresses it’s getting easier for marketers to create a seamless experience for end-users as they absorb marketing messages.

The brands that can seamlessly take their target audience through the buyer’s journey with the right paid media marketing mix and the right messages at the right time will win out more often on customer acquisition in the end.

Achieving that seamless experience is only obtainable when a cohesive strategy runs throughout your plan for execution. Doing so effectively will not only increase conversion rates, but it will drive a higher volume of customers down the marketing funnel faster towards conversion.

2. Streamlined marketing operations.

Cohesive campaign messaging, clear performance reporting, and speed to iteration are battles marketers repeatedly fight on the back-end as they continuously work to drive value with their ad dollars.

The brands that can streamline the execution of their paid media strategy will make more accurate decisions faster and, ultimately, will get the most out of their campaign goals and advertising budget.

Strong cohesion across your paid media efforts and the team executing said strategy gives you the best chance to build a streamlined approach when managing a paid media strategy.

Why Siloed Strategies Don’t Work

The key to hitting the two desired outcomes above starts with open communication and de-siloing the teams that execute strategy. Everyone who has a hand in your paid media mix must be on the same page and should be continually working together. There is so much to gain by leveraging your paid media platforms off one another. Allowing them to be managed independently across departments in-house or multiple agencies makes it much more difficult to get the most out of your paid media efforts.

Siloed communication increases your chances of having:

Misaligned performance goals
Unreliable performance tracking, attribution, and reporting
Slower iteration on targeting, creative, and budget-optimization work
Inability to leverage cross-platform audience-sharing capabilities

The presence of anything outlined above results in an inability to hit the desired outcomes mentioned earlier.

How to Build a Cohesive Paid Media Strategy

Cohesion across your paid media efforts establishes marketers with the best opportunity to hit their desired outcomes and drive performance.

Here’s where to start building cohesion:

Target the Entire Marketing Funnel

Targeting the entire marketing funnel should be considered when designing a cohesive paid media strategy. It’s common for brands to ignore middle- and top-of-funnel strategies, foregoing longer-term investments to drive as many conversion-based actions for as cheap as possible.

For some brands, that’s fine. Oftentimes, the need to prove immediate value and ROAS dictates a heavy focus on the bottom of the marketing funnel. That focus can drive quick ROAS when done well, but brands leave money on the table by ignoring top and middle-funnel targeting.

Middle- and top-of-funnel ad campaigns drive performance metrics that don’t immediately impact the bottom line, and that can be hard for marketers to stick with. But for those that have the understanding and patience for developing top- and mid-funnel campaigns, the results can be exponential. Later on in this post, I’ll share how lower-funnel metrics can soar further when the entire funnel is targeted throughout your paid media campaigns.

Establish Clear Goals

Don’t spend a dollar until you have clear and concise goals for your ad campaigns.

Create campaign goal segments that level up to create a top-level goal for your budget.

A goal segment is established by combining a channel, platform, and funnel target combination. Each segment should have a unique set of KPIs and a specific goal for that segment.

For example, your KPIs for a campaign using paid social (channel) on Facebook (platform) targeting the top of the marketing funnel (funnel target) should look very different than KPIs for your ad campaign using the search network (channel) on Google (platform) targeting conversion-based objectives (funnel target).

By establishing appropriate goals for each campaign segment, you’ll set better expectations for each campaign’s success.

Below is a table breaking down various types of channels, platforms, and funnel targets that can be used within a goal segment.

CHANNELS	PLATFORMS	FUNNEL TARGETS
Search	Google Ads	Awareness
Display	Microsoft Ads	Interest
Programmatic	DV360	Desire
Social	Trade Desk	Action
Video	YouTube
Influencer	Facebook/Instagram
Podcasting	LinkedIn
	Gimlet
	Art19

Again, each goal segment should have a unique set of KPIs. When goal segments are accumulated for all of your campaigns, those segments add up to an encompassing goal set for your paid media strategy.

Every party accountable for executing the strategy needs to fully understand the top-level goals and goal segments they are responsible for.

Report Accurately

With your goals in hand, the execution of an accurate tracking plan is a must. Getting this wrong can be detrimental to making reliable performance iterations and optimizations once your campaigns are live.

For most online-based conversion brands, getting the basics in place is pretty straightforward. Reporting can get tricker when online-to-offline conversation paths are in play.

Establishing proper attribution modeling is crucial, especially if your campaigns target multiple stages of the funnel (as they should) or require multiple interactions before conversion where last-click attribution doesn’t appropriately communicate the value of a campaign.

How to establish the right attribution model is uniquely dependent on your business model. There is no one size fits all methodology.

Align Audience Targeting and Iterate

Marketers should cross-leverage platform capabilities, data lists, and performance metrics to further fuel campaign targeting reach across their entire paid media strategy.

Paid social platforms provide a goldmine of audience information to spur targeting for search, remarketing, or programmatically-targeted campaigns. Marketers not cross-pollinating their audiences from platform-to-platform are missing opportunities to optimize their audience targeting.

Where to start:

Create Custom and Similar Audiences with Google Ads from Facebook Campaigns

Generate audience email addresses with Facebook Leads Ads and upload them as a custom audience on Google Ads. Use that custom audience to run highly-targeted search, display, or remarketing campaigns to an already qualified segment of potential customers.

Analyze Demographic Insights from Facebook Ads to Fuel Search and Programmatic Audience Development

Facebook provides marketers with a scary amount of information when it comes to audience demographics. Break audience performance down by age, gender, occupation, household income, interests, and a host of other demographics to gain insight into which audiences respond and which don’t. Those insights should be used to build and refine search and programmatic audiences.

Observe Social Listening on Paid Social Platforms

Paid social ads present the opportunity for audiences to ask questions, give praise, and complain about what’s being promoted directly on the ad. Those interactions are gold and can be used across all of your marketing work. The benefits of analyzing and iterating on that commentary span far past executing your ad campaign, but those comments can provide valuable insights to do things like add negative keywords to your search campaigns or improve the copy on your ad landing pages.

Optimize Audience Bid Modifiers

As performance varies based on the targeted audience, utilize platform-specific bid modifiers to optimize spending for the most impactful audiences to stretch your ad dollars further.

The learning opportunities and cross-platform capabilities across the paid media landscape allow marketers to leverage this work off one another to build better audiences for their ad targeting. Open communication and de-siloing the executors of this work is vital to taking advantage of these options.

Align Creative and Iterate

As ad creative and messaging is designed to hit a singular campaign segment, that creative and messaging should be cohesive across the channels and platforms utilized within that particular campaign.

Platform-specific ad unit requirements will dictate how closely that creative can align, but marketers should strive to provide end-users with similar content throughout all touchpoints of a campaign.

A/B testing your creative within paid media provides a straightforward environment to quickly learn what creative and messaging resonates with your audience and what does not. While creative and messaging performance may vary from channel to channel, marketers should be looking across every paid media platform at how performance differs or aligns to iterate within their campaigns.

Leverage performance data on one platform to boost performance on another platform by looking at the following:

High-converting and high CTR search terms in Google Ads. Those search terms provide key insights into what searchers are actually searching for; use those terms directly in your paid social and programmatic ad copy.
Analyze high-converting and high CTR visuals, then iterate. As you build complementary visuals on display and paid social networks, iterate ad creative across all platforms based on what’s performing and what’s not.
Analyze CTAs, conversion rate, and CTR, then iterate. Your search, paid social, and programmatic ads should have a clear call to action. Find what works where and what doesn’t. Those findings should scale across your campaign creative.

Similar to leveraging these cross-channel opportunities to develop better audiences, open communication and de-siloing the executors of this work is vital to actually taking the learning from ad performance and quickly sharing winners across all of your ad campaigns.

Optimize Budget Allocation

Agility here may be where marketers can make the biggest impact when working within a streamlined, collaborative environment.

Speed here is critical, and the marketers who can reliably gain insights, see performance across the entire paid media mix, and allocate ad spend appropriately set themselves up to make the most with their ad budget.

Effectively doing this requires a clear understanding of campaign goals, reliable reporting, and the ability to move budgets quickly across platforms and channels.

The key here is de-siloing execution teams, providing the transparency and communication needed to move quickly.

Cohesive Paid Media Performance Builds on Itself

At the end of the day, brands market to reach, inform, and convert customers who are looking to fulfill a need. When that need is fulfilled, customers achieve their desired outcome. And when strategized and executed cohesively, paid media channel and platform performance builds on itself. The results can be impressive, and the brands that can leverage their audience targeting, ad creative, and budget allocation will see further growth than when efforts are siloed away from each other.

As you build a complex channel and platform mix to hit your advertising goals and cohesion grows, so will the performance of your campaigns. And when marketers target the entire funnel with cohesive messaging and leverage audience and budget insights, brands will begin to build sustainable growth for the future.

The post Leverage Cross-Channel Paid Media Strategy to Grow Performance appeared first on Portent.

Programmatic Campaign Optimization Tips and Tricks

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:00:38 GMT

With so many buttons and levers available to you within your programmatic platform, the number of optimizations you can make to improve your campaign performance can be overwhelming. That’s why it’s crucial to come up with a game plan beforehand so you don’t make too many optimizations which, in turn, limit the insights into your campaigns.

Before we go into some tips and tricks for these optimizations, let’s start with how to get the most from your campaigns before you launch. However, if you already have programmatic campaigns live, you can skip ahead to some best practices for optimization.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Programmatic Campaigns

Before launching your programmatic campaigns, there are various factors to help ensure you’re getting the most out of the platform, your creative, and your landing page, as well as the audiences you’re targeting.

Choosing the Right DSP

When evaluating what demand-side platform (DSP) is right for your business, there are several factors to consider. Those factors include cost, inventory, transparency, reporting, technology, brand-safe capabilities, and chemistry with the platform team. If you’re paying a considerable amount to reach a limited audience, your ads may not be as impactful as they could be. Lack of reporting and transparency will make it difficult to accurately analyze and make decisions to improve performance. Having up-to-date technology and brand-safe capabilities allows your business to capitalize on safe inventory with the newest bidding, targeting, and reporting technology available to you.

Lastly, it’s essential to partner with a DSP you work well with who provides meaningful recommendations. Working with people that understand your business goals while being transparent allows you to trust in the guidance they provide. This trust enables each party to hold the other accountable while working together to improve campaign performance. Hiring a digital agency to manage these relationships and campaigns will save your business time and money.

Targeting the Right Audience

After you evaluate and find the right DSP, it’s time to build out the audiences you intend to target. These audiences can be determined based on a variety of factors, and can even include your current customers. Regardless of how you build your audiences, it’s essential to include new users in addition to returning users in your targeting strategy. Having new users helps increase your brand awareness and consideration. They also help grow your website remarketing lists, which become crucial since the majority of users don’t convert on their first site visit.

When building your brand awareness, it’s about creating broader audiences that fit within your target demographics. You can make these audiences based on relevant content they’re viewing, custom site or app lists you wish to target, third-party data based on demographics and behaviors, or similar audiences based on site traffic.

Once the user is aware of your business, other targeting tactics become available to you. These tactics are deployed when the user has shown intent or consideration for you or your competitors. For example, including what your audience is actively searching for or researching allows you to bid on inventory with an ad relevant to them.

Lastly, as users visit your landing page, they’re not likely to convert on their first visit, especially if they’re in the awareness phase. That’s why remarketing audiences are a crucial part of programmatic advertising. These audiences allow you to follow the user as they browse other websites. This tactic helps keep your business top-of-mind and encourages the user to come back to your site to convert.

Strong Creative and Landing Page

Once you have the right targeting in place, you will need convincing creative and landing pages to drive users to your site and convert. Knowing what resonates with your audience and where they are in the buyer’s journey is essential to creating the right message for your users at the right time.

When putting together your creative scope, your content must include the following:

Brand logo
Clear call-to-action
Eye-catching design and copy

Your ads should fit within the ad size limit without the copy or design being overwhelming for the user. The ad should have simple messaging that lets the user know more about what your brand has to offer and what action you want them to take.

When the user clicks on your ad, it needs to direct them to a strong landing page that gets them to convert. Depending on where the user is in the purchasing process, the page should reflect information that matches their intent. If they’re in the awareness phase, having more copy-heavy content outlining your products or services works best. If the user is in the consideration phase, provide offers, value propositions, and personalization based on their needs or browsing behaviors. Remarketing to users that previously visited your site but didn’t make a purchase requires more direct copy to drive conversions. It’s recommended you show this audience the benefits of your product or services with several call-to-actions on the page that match the messaging found in the ads.

Best Practices for Optimizing Programmatic Campaigns

After you’ve selected a DSP, determined the audience you want to target, and created your ads and landing page, it’s time to launch your campaigns. Once your campaigns are live, data will begin to flow in, and you’ll want to start optimizing to drive better performance. However, there are various factors to consider before you begin this process.

Data

You have to collect enough data to make precise optimizations within your campaigns. The amount of data you receive depends on your budget and timeframe for each campaign. Optimizing too quickly before enough data is collected will limit your performance and cause your campaigns to underperform and underdeliver. When making any optimization to the creative or placement, we recommend having at least 2,000 impressions served to that specific placement or creative before considering any changes.

Cadence

You’ll need to keep in mind how often you make optimizations within your campaigns. Making too many optimizations at once will make it near impossible to determine what drove better performance. Conversely, you won’t know which optimization caused the decrease in performance either. The best practice here is to make only one optimization to a campaign per week. This cadence will allow the platform to adjust to the changes and give you enough significant insights to consider for future optimizations.

Metrics

There are several metrics to review to determine where the optimization is needed. These metrics are CTR, CPC, CPA, reach, frequency, viewability, and conversion rate. The primary metric you focus your optimizations on will depend on what your campaign goals are. A great place to start once your campaigns have enough data but are still relatively new is CTR and CPC. These metrics will allow you to remove lower-performing sites, creative, and ad exchanges from your campaigns and let more budget go towards better performing tactics.

Three Techniques for Programmatic Optimization

With so many different optimization options available to you in a programmatic platform, it may be hard to know where to start. Below are three recommended techniques to consider when optimizing.

Creative Optimizations

When looking at performance based on ad creative, it’s important to monitor the ad frequency. Showing the same ad to the same user will often result in ad fatigue and make your campaigns less impactful. Setting frequency caps within your ad groups will limit the number of times your audience sees your ads. The default cap is typically set at three times per day but can be adjusted depending on the type of audience you’re targeting. For instance, remarketing audiences are more likely to convert if the user sees the ad more frequently, versus an audience who is being introduced to your product or service for the first time. Because of this, you would want to set a higher frequency cap on a remarketing audience than you would a prospecting audience.

Another approach is to do a split test to determine what part of your ad resonates most with your audience. You can test this based on the message, imagery, CTA, or color within the ad. It’s crucial to change only one of these components during each test to determine what drives higher engagement. These tests can assist you in what creative refreshes to make to your ads to keep them new and engaging for your audience.

Placement Optimizations

The next type of optimization is based on your ad placements. Determining what site or app is driving high engagements at low costs is essential to your overall success within the platform. It’s important to take a step back and evaluate placements based on data and performance and not based on the type of website or app the ad appeared on. When you’re serving ads within a programmatic platform, your goal is to reach the user where they’re browsing online. Unless the placement is on your blacklist or the content is questionable from a brand safety standpoint, you should only evaluate it based on its overall performance.

When determining what placements to remove, focus on cost and engagement. If your CPC or CPA is high and your CTR is low, removing the site or app will allow the budget to go towards cheaper, more effective options.

Ad Exchange Optimizations

The last technique is optimizing ad exchanges. After you have enough data in the platform, you can pull reports based on ad exchange performance. Evaluating what type of ad exchanges are working helps drive better results to your overall campaigns. You can create ad groups targeting specific exchanges and to bid higher on their inventory. Building out ad groups with top-performing exchanges will elevate your campaign performance and provide more insights into targeting.

To Sum it Up

To get the most out of your DSP, you need to partner with the right platform, target the right audience, and create strong ads and landing pages for your campaigns. Before you start optimizing your campaigns, you must have enough data, set up a cadence for optimizations, and determine what metrics you want to optimize. Once you have enough data, you can begin optimizing your campaigns based on creative, placements, and ad exchanges. Using the three techniques outlined above is a great place to start to drive better performance and make your programmatic campaigns more successful.

The post Programmatic Campaign Optimization Tips and Tricks appeared first on Portent.

Study: The Readability of Your Website is Affecting Your Conversion Rates

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 15:00:55 GMT

We know that content on your website is important. It should communicate value to your visitors, adhere to Google’s standards so that it can be crawled, and rank well in the SERP. Your content is the main driving force of conversions and ultimately affects your company’s bottom line.

Is it possible that the readability of your website can impact your conversion rates? I approached one of our conversion rate optimization strategists, Whitney Norton, with this question to see what she thought.

Our hypothesis was yes, but we didn’t know to what extent. To test our theory, we used anonymized client data to evaluate the “readability” of client websites and correlated them against conversion rates. In this post, we’ll share what we found. If you’d like to nerd-out with us over stats and analysis, read on! If you’d just like actionable next steps, feel free to jump to our “Final Thoughts” at the end.

Methodology

For this study, we measured and compared two factors: a website’s readability and its conversion rate. We had a sample size of 33 client websites.

Readability

Using a website readability analyzer, we crawled individual websites to get a readability metric called the “Flesch Reading Ease” score. Scores are calculated based on an equation that measures the total number of words, the total number of sentences, and the total number of syllables. This score is determined on a scale of 0 to 100, where lower scores are more difficult to read, and higher scores are easier to read. More importantly, this means your content uses plain English. Ideally, a website score would rank between 60 and 90, which equates to a grade level between 6th and 8th grades.

Here is a breakdown of scores and how they associate with grade levels:

Flesch Reading Score Table courtesy of Wikipedia

You’ll also notice here that as grade levels go UP, Scores go DOWN. While they aim to measure a similar phenomenon, the score and school level have an inverse relationship. For example, here is the Portent website Flesch reading score:

(But wait, that score looks low – isn’t the goal between 60-90? More on this later.)

Conversion Rate

We pulled an annual average for either the primary conversion rate percentage or the e-commerce conversion rate percentage, depending on the client. For e-commerce clients, it was a purchase. For B2B clients, it was often a form submission to contact a sales team. These conversion metrics represent the main, highest-impact activity on a website. To account for the impacts of the Coronavirus on some clients, we looked at the average rate between March 2019 and March 2020 for them.

Our Process

Using the anonymized client data, we plotted the conversion rate against the Flesch Reading Ease score in a scatterplot.

We included data from domains where the entire site could be measured for both the conversion rate and the reading score, and excluded websites that were fewer than five pages where the primary intention was to be a set of landing pages for paid search ads.

The Results

When we plotted conversion rate (our dependent variable) against readability score (our independent variable), there was a positive correlation between them. However, it was not strong enough to indicate readability as a singular determining factor of whether users converted or not.

For all sites, our R² score, or “coefficient of determination,” was 0.114. This means that approximately 11% of the conversion rate is dependent on the readability score. So while it is not a majority factor based on our data, it is still a correlated factor.

E-commerce Findings

When filtering for e-commerce clients only, there was a slightly stronger correlation with an R² score of 0.131. This means that for B2C clients, around 13% of the conversion rate is dependent on the site’s readability score.

Why would these conversion rates experience a higher correlation to the reading score?

We believe it is because e-commerce purchases have faster sales cycles, and likely need to spend less time establishing and communicating expertise with their content. For example, buying clothing or booking an auto service is a lower barrier than purchasing an enterprise-level software solution.

Consumer products are also usually less costly than enterprise-level B2B products and solutions. With direct-to-consumer products at lower price points, less content needs to be written to communicate product or service value, since these are often lower-stakes purchases.

Faster decisions, lower barriers to entry, and lower-stakes purchases likely mean that users give these pages more cursory reads than their B2B counterparts. With less attention paid, readability had a greater impact on conversion rate.

B2B Findings

For B2B sites, we see a very different story with readability and conversion rates. While the overall data and e-commerce results specifically show a positive correlation between the two variables, B2B delivered an insignificant relationship between readability and conversion rates. In fact, it looks like they aren’t correlated at all:

We see a wide range of average reading scores (most fell somewhere between 20-60), and conversion rates are anywhere between <1% – 3%. I’ll also point out again here that our sample size is low. With a larger sample size, we may see a stronger correlation one way or another.

Important to note is that B2B readability scores are lower than e-commerce sites. On average, this may not be a problem. It speaks to a different side of user behavior, and the way B2B websites are used to communicate value. Typically, B2B products and services have longer lead times and are more costly. As a result, these companies need to create content that continues to communicate value and justify a more expensive purchase. Depending on the product or service, the concepts may be very sophisticated and require a higher level of comprehension to communicate that value.

As we saw earlier, the Portent.com website has an average readability score of approximately 28. As a B2B business, this may not be a nail in the coffin.

Communicating expertise and highly technical resources are likely associated with longer sentence structures and more keywords per sentence, resulting in a lower reading score, and a higher grade level score.

As a B2B business, it’s important to communicate your value at a readability score that matches the level of your audience.

Other Findings

We also found that the distribution of reading scores by page was not always a normal distribution. For example, the Portent website distribution of reading score by page looked like this:

Portent’s website histogram of readability scores by page

Based on this chart, we can see that a large number of pages fall into the 0-10 category, but the remaining pages on the website follow more of a “normal” distribution. Portent’s site features some highly technical resources, but the rest of the site features more readable content.

Here are some additional examples of readability score distributions by page:

An example of a relatively normal distribution of reading scores

An example of the majority of a site’s pages having low readability scores

Example of a staircase (non-mathematical term) histogram

These variations indicate that it’s okay for the readability score to change from page to page, depending on the purpose of the page. What may matter more are your entry and conversion pages, and the readability of those.

If We Could Do This Study Again, What Would We Do Differently?

Larger sample size. This was one of our biggest limitations of the study. With our sample size limited based on client data availability, we can make broad assumptions, but not concrete proclamations about the effect of readability and conversion rates. We are confident in the variety of clients and industries we evaluated to know that our data is not pigeon-holed into too narrow of a focus, but ideally, we would be able to evaluate a larger number of websites.

Final Thoughts

Is readability the primary factor in your conversion rates? No. Should you still pay attention to it? Yes. Even in our limited study, it accounted for as much as 13% of conversion, and that’s no small thing.

How to Get Started

When evaluating your own website’s readability, we recommend starting with a tool like Datayze to get an understanding of your site overall. If your site’s average score falls below 60, you have some work to do. To maximize your impact, start with your site’s entry points (like your home and landing pages) and conversion pages. Whenever possible, reserve highly-technical content for resource pages.

For best practices on writing more readable content, check out the tips that Brittney Urich, now a UX Designer at Amazon, gave at one of our favorite Seattle Interactive Conference sessions last month. Most importantly, she says to write for your audience and to use plain language. Her favorite resource is the Federal Guide for Using Plain Language.

Of course, if you need help, we’d love to hear from you. After all, we’re a team of nerds who spent considerable time conducting a study of how readability relates to conversion rate. We love this stuff.

The post Study: The Readability of Your Website is Affecting Your Conversion Rates appeared first on Portent.

Fake News Is a Marketing Feature, Not a Hack: Part 1

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:00:20 GMT

Truth is the arbiter of reality; a sacred, unbiased, and unwavering lens we view and understand the universe through.

At least, truth used to hold this esteemed responsibility.

In the digital world, unearthing “truth” is no longer simple or reliable. Search results, social media, legitimate and illegitimate news organizations, and paid advertising overflow with misinformation and disinformation.

This phenomenon is summed up in two words: fake news.

Fake news is the most powerful and socially destructive marketing technique in the 21st century. The fake news pandemic is global, unyielding, and we are all susceptible to its infection. Our widespread vulnerability is exactly why it’s crucial for marketers to understand why and how disinformation is created, spread, and—most importantly—combatted.

This article is the first in a three-part series about the relationship between fake news and marketing. This post lays the groundwork needed to ensure we’re all on the same page about what fake news is, why it’s a problem, and how it relates to marketing. The second article talks about how disinformation affects our brains and manipulates our behaviors. I wrap up the series by discussing how the business model perpetuates fake news and what can be done about it.

What is Fake News?

In the simplest terms, fake news is optimized disinformation.

Optimized disinformation has a veneer of legitimacy and commonly rewrites “the truth” using advertising, fabrication, manipulation, political satire, and propaganda.

Usually, this tactic is employed to manipulate the beliefs, motivations, and actions of like-minded people. The strategy is also used to sow confusion around polarizing topics, stymy constructive public discourse, and erode trust in traditional paragons of truth, like scientists, journalists, and healthcare officials. In some egregious cases, optimized disinformation is used exclusively as a marketing and money-making tool, such as the InfoWars Sandy Hook conspiracy.

Although disinformation polymorphs into many nebulous disguises with equally shadowy goals, few types of disinformation are more sinister—or more effective—than junk news, which exploded in popularity during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Because junk news is so popular and spreads effectively on social media, it is the primary type of fake news I reference most in this series.

In the research paper, Disinformation Optimised: Gaming Search Engine Algorithms to Amplify Junk News, Samantha Bradshaw, a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, defines junk news as a website that misleads people by using at least three out of the following five deceptions:

Professionalism. Junk news sources do not employ the standards and best practices of professional journalism, including information about real authors, editors, and owners.
Style. Junk news relies on emotionally driven language, ad hominem attacks, mobilizing memes, and misleading headlines.
Credibility. Junk news needs and employs false information or conspiracy theories, and sources do not post corrections.
Bias. Junk news sources are highly biased, ideologically skewed, and publish opinion pieces as news.
Counterfeit. Junk news websites mimic established news websites and reporting techniques, including fonts, branding, and content strategies.

Junk news websites that the study evaluated include InfoWars, Breitbart, Zero Hedge, CNS News, Raw Story, The Daily Caller, and The Federalist. There are also more than 450 hyper-partisan websites that often get labeled as fake news, but these groups usually peddle inflammatory misinformation rather than blatantly optimized disinformation.

Granted, at times the distinction is fairly thin. And unfortunately, Google doesn’t do a great job of distinguishing between legitimate and junk websites.

How Does Disinformation Relate to Marketing?

Disinformation campaigns maliciously leverage every nuance of the surveillance-based business model that search engines and social networks are built around.

I’ll dive into the nuts-and-bolts of this topic in the third article of this series, but here are a couple of examples until then.

First, let’s look at junk news and advertising.

In 2019, The Global Disinformation Index, a UK nonprofit that rates websites’ trustworthiness, analyzed programmatic advertising rates among 1,700 junk news websites. The analysis shows that 70 percent of these websites had programmatic advertising and earned $235 million from those ads.

Several of the household-name brands mentioned in the GDI report that inadvertently bankrolled junk news sites include Audi, Sprint, Honda, Office Max, American Airlines, Casper, and Oxford University.

Now, let’s take a gander at organic search.

In 2016, Google’s search algorithms failed miserably at providing accurate information to an extremely serious question: did the Holocaust happen? At the time, the answer was “no.”

As The Guardian reported, the top result was a link to the article, “Top 10 Reasons why the Holocaust Didn’t Happen,” published by stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi site. The algorithmic failure didn’t stop there. The third result was the article “The Holocaust Hoax; IT NEVER HAPPENED.” The fifth ranking was owned by “50 Reasons Why the Holocaust Didn’t Happen.” The seventh position was a YouTube video, “Did the Holocaust Really Happen?” And the ninth result was “Holocaust Against Jews is a Total Lie – Proof.”

Since this event sparked global outrage, Google tweaked its algorithm to change the search results and prevent similarly optimized disinformation from ranking for the term.

The algorithm changes had a noticeable effect on four junk news websites with significant organic keyword growth (InfoWars, Zero Hedge, Daily Caller, and Breitbart), the Oxford Internet Institute report shows. Since August 2017, the report states that all four top-performing domains appeared less frequently in top-positions for non-branded Google searches, based on the keywords they were optimized for.

Despite the progress, Google’s algorithms still have a long way to go.

For example, take the phrase “climate change hoax.” Ahrefs shows the phrase gets 1,000 monthly searches. As of Oct. 26, 2020, three of the top 10 results are disinformation:

31,000 Scientists Say ‘No Convincing Evidence’
Climate Change 7: How Global Warming is Both a Hoax and Legitimate Area of Study
Climate Change is a Hoax

The Consequences of Fake News

Before the 2016 election, I was naive about the insidious reach and power junk news websites and fake news have across the world. Here are the three significant consequences of fake news that we’ve seen unfold in the past few years.

Conspiracies

Pizzagate, QAnon, birtherism, climate change denial, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust denial, COVID-19 being fake … the list of new, widely-supported conspiracies is nearly endless. For years, algorithmic failures and a lack of gatekeeping at tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter perpetuated these shared delusions and allowed conspiracies to flourish.

Some companies are taking action against some conspiracy-related fake news, such as Twitter and Facebook shutting down QAnon accounts in July of 2020, but these reactionary measures are often too late.

Unfortunately, the fake news marketing tactics conspiracy pushers use have already proved successful and influenced their target audiences’ beliefs.

As an example, let’s look at how fake news marketing amplified the absurd QAnon conspiracy, which is associated with a string of violence and that the FBI labeled a domestic terrorist threat in 2019.

The conspiracy, in case you’ve remained blissfully unaware, spawned on 4chan in late 2017 and notions that Donald Trump is secretly fighting against a “deep state” cabal of cannibalistic child sex-traffickers and satanic cultists. Since its inception and rise in popularity, the conspiracy’s ideology became more malleable and adopted other popular delusions, such as promoting the lie that COVID-19 does not exist.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred the growth of QAnon exponentially. In March of 2020, membership of the largest public QAnon Facebook groups grew by 700 percent, the BBC reported in July. The report ties the popularity growth to increased internet use and more exposure to junk news and social media disinformation during quarantine.

An October report by CBS and Wired highlights how data collection techniques, marketing tools, and content recommendation algorithms from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google create a self-fulfilling prophecy and “rabbit-hole” for users who search for QAnon content, or have demographic markers that associate them with users who participate in these conspiracy groups. These systems start pushing advertisements, videos, hashtags, trending content, sponsored content from junk news sites, people to follow, and online communities that provide users with more and more conspiracy content and confirmations.

The conspiracists transformed from having a negligible amount of political power to earning enormous political capital in an extremely short amount of time.

As of September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll shows that 86 percent of Americans have at least heard of the QAnon conspiracy, compared to 65 percent in 2019. Here’s the poll’s breakdown of engagement from the two major political parties:

33 percent of Republicans believe that the QAnon theory is mostly true
23 percent of Republicans say that some parts of the QAnon conspiracy are true
13 percent of Republicans think that it is not true at all
72 percent of Democrats say the QAnon conspiracy theory is not true at all
14 percent of Americans have not heard of QAnon

These conspiracy zealots are now actively shaping the landscape of U.S. politics. There are currently 24 congressional candidates who publicly support and advocate for QAnon conspiracies and are on the ballot for House races in the 2020 election.

Election Interference

As the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections show us, election interference and widespread voter misinformation are the bread-and-butter outcomes of fake news campaigns. Enormous amounts of content have been written about this subject, so I’m not going to rehash that information or harp on it. Instead, I’ll quickly highlight just how easy voters’ behaviors make these tactics to execute.

July and September reports by The Pew Research Center show that 26 percent of U.S. adults get their news from YouTube, and 18 percent of U.S. adults say social media is their primary source for political and election news.

Of the YouTube news crowd, 23 percent get their news from independent YouTube channels, and 14 percent of these channels publish videos that are primarily dedicated to conspiracy theories.

For the traditional social media crowd, only 17 percent can answer at least eight out of nine questions correctly about foundational political knowledge, such as which party supports certain policy positions.

These statistics soften the blow for the following two highlights of the Pew reports:

Social media news consumers are 68 percent more likely than people who consume traditional media to report seeing made-up news related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Only 37 percent of social media news consumers are “very concerned” about the impact of misinformation on the 2020 election.

During the 2016 election, Twitter users shared as much “junk news” as professionally produced news about politics, the Oxford Internet Institute reports. When fake news gets in the hands of its target demographics, users are doing an excellent job at spreading the disinformation without being any the wiser.

And when fake news spreads, it does so extremely fast.

“True news, for example, took about six times as long as false news to reach 1,500 people on average—and false political news traveled faster than any other kind of false news, reaching 20,000 people almost three times as fast as other categories reached 10,000,” Vice reported in 2019.

When this false news is politically inflammatory and has the KPI of manipulating and intimidating voters, the outcome can sway elections and invalidate votes.

As NPR reported in October, “One false rumor circulated in Texas that bar codes on mail-in ballot envelopes can reveal personal information, including whether the voter is a Republican or a Democrat.” After receiving several ballots with blacked-out bar codes, Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia took to Twitter and posted a video warning voters that this could lead to their ballots being rejected.

Although the number of people who succumb to these disinformation campaigns may be the minority of voters, sometimes that’s all it takes. For example, in the 2000 presidential race, 0.01 percent of votes swung the election. In the 2016 election, 0.72 of Pennsylvania voters decided who won the state.

Radicalism

Extremists have a long history of using disinformation and propaganda to gather recruits and sway minds. But, as Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 disinformation campaign showed, the sheer reach and pinpoint user targeting of paid advertising and social media has spurred growth in these ideologies.

In the European Union’s 2019 case study, Understanding Citizens’ Vulnerabilities to Disinformation and Data-Driven Propaganda, researchers analyzed how social networks became platforms where disinformation gets spread exponentially fast. They determined that fake news, often political propaganda, would surge in popularity and then be uncritically picked-up and redistributed to an even larger audience by traditional media outlets and junk news websites.

The EU report’s findings demonstrate that today’s society is increasingly vulnerable to disinformation operations. The vulnerability stems from “information overload and distorted public perceptions produced by online platforms algorithms built for viral advertising and user engagement.”

When content creators and bad-faith actors push content that spews actionable polarization through these disinformation channels, such as the George Soros conspiracy theories or the COVID-19 disinformation infodemic, the results spread radical ideologies and behaviors to larger user groups, some of whom eventually take action. Three recent examples include:

The man who mailed pipe bombs to 16 prominent democrats
The man who tried to assassinate congressional republicans while they played baseball
14 members of an anti-government “militia” group who got arrested by the FBI for planning to kidnap and execute the governors of Michigan and Vermont

A 2019 report by PBS shows how paid advertisements, content amplification options, and more “have rejiggered the landscape of content visibility on social media websites” to inspire more radical behavior.

But how does somebody go from reading a false blog article or seeing a politically charged meme to becoming a domestic terrorist?

It’s all about how these stories are made and marketed.

How Fake News is Made

The marketing strategy behind fake news—despite being entirely unethical, dangerous, and socially destructive—is brilliantly executed.

As research from the University of Pennsylvania shows, modern fake news content is carefully designed so its target users can’t detect that the information is false. Understanding this tactic is crucial to seeing how fake news is marketed.

Analysis by the University of Pennsylvania researchers, alongside scores of others, shows that we’re too smart to be deceived by fake news designed for someone else, but most of us can be duped and manipulated by the fake news designed to deceive us as individuals.

There are a lot of psychological and physiological factors in play here. I dive into those issues in the next article. But from a marketing perspective, fake news creators essentially perform user research to build personas and craft their message individually for each group of readers. This personal message taps into their users’ passions and desires to elicit the strongest possible emotional response. From a marketing perspective, this tactic is robust audience targeting at its very worst.

In many ways, modern fake news relies on harvesting and analyzing personal information, such as user behavior data meant for advertisers or geo-location history data from cellular service networks.

Let’s take a look at how these pinpoint-accurate personas are used to create tailored, targeted, and effective disinformation campaigns on an industrial scale.

The Fake News Formula

“The first part of fake news is crafting a lie, backed up with a set of supporting arguments selected because they will convince the intended readers, not because they are true,” the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton report states.

After the lie is chosen, a big balancing act comes into play. Every fake news campaign creates a set of different lies, and each set of lies are backed up by a different set of supporting arguments. Now, both the lies and supporting arguments must be designed to convince a different group of readers. If you get the balance wrong, the wrong user group gets the disinformation and the plan is foiled.

“A fake news story sent to the wrong readers will produce a backlash, since many readers will be able to detect the false statements and deliberate misinformation in fake news designed for others,” the Wharton report argues. “They will sense the intended manipulation, and react negatively to it.”

If I were to create fake news, here’s how I could break down these strategies into an actionable process, according to the Wharton report.

I decide what I want you to believe.
I learn what your current grievances are:
What makes you furious?
What do you think has been taken from you?
What do you want to regain or retain?
I learn what you do and don’t already know, and what you do and don’t already believe.
Now, I construct an argument that explains how you were unjustly deprived of what you want. The people who took what you want away? They’re the people I want you to oppose.
My lie is carefully constructed with supporting evidence, which relies on the data that I have selected because I know it will elicit a strong emotional response.
The claims I use as evidence don’t need to be true. All I need is that you don’t know that I’m lying when you encounter the evidence.
Now you’re riled up and in an emotional state. When we’re emotionally charged, we share more on social media. And unless you fact-check my lies, which is unlikely because I know you already ideologically align with my argument, you’ve now spread my lies to other like-minded people.
The cycle continues until it reaches somebody who notices or fact-checks my lie and the “evidence” supporting it.

That’s the entire process. In many ways, this tactic is Mad Men marketing on steroids. Plus, as you probably noticed, this step-by-step technique mimics the honest and authentic marketing formulas we rely on to serve users.

And the terrifying part of this entire strategy? It’s much, much easier to design an effective lie for each target audience and then amplify it on a junk news site and social media using SEO, influencers, and paid advertising. Unfortunately, it’s significantly harder to design a compelling, easily understood counterargument that convinces the recently duped audience that they were fooled.

What Can We Do?

As marketers, our ingenuity and well-honed strategies got the world into this mess. After all, fake news creators simply reverse-engineered our marketing techniques for their nefarious goals. Fortunately, this means that we should be able to devise a solution to this problem.

Here’s my proposal: We need to sell “truth.” Truth must become a hot, desirable commodity. Make people yearn to know if information is false. Remarket fact-checking as the next lifestyle trend.

I know, this idea sounds ridiculous! But it’s possible. The first step is to learn the science behind why we are susceptible to lies and fake news, and then design a strategy to hijack those vulnerabilities for good.

I dive into the science behind why fake news is so compelling in the next article. Check back in then for all of the nerdy goodness.

The post Fake News Is a Marketing Feature, Not a Hack: Part 1 appeared first on Portent.

Getting Started With a Paid Social Media Audit

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 15:00:48 GMT

Searching online for resources to perform a social media audit will most often produce results that focus heavily on reviewing organic content, engagement, and social listening analysis (I prefer this outline from Hootsuite as a good jumping-off point). Less easy to find are the guidelines for performing a paid social media audit, which is equally—if not more—important.

At Portent, we perform social media audits (both paid and organic) for a variety of reasons. Before we start working with a new client, as a consulting service, and as a regular part of ongoing management. These audits help inform strategy and take stock of what is working in the channel as a whole, when it can be easy to get stuck reviewing performance by platform.

Performing a paid social media audit can be time-consuming, but the tools needed are simple: access to the ad accounts, pixel, and Google Analytics (or similar reporting platform). When we perform a social media audit, we always work our way through a version of this checklist:

Account Security
Analytics Infrastructure
Campaign Structure
Ad Set Structure
Audience Targeting and Exclusions
Ad Set Placements and Delivery
Ad Creative
Landing Page Review
Competitive Analysis

The above categories can provide a wealth of information and insights into your paid social media efforts. However, just as every social media strategy is different, every social media audit will be different as well. In this post, I’ll focus on four of the most important areas to audit, and how to get started.

Analytics Infrastructure

The analytics infrastructure of a social media ad account includes the account’s tangible makeup: the Facebook pixel and events, the catalog, and any connected apps.

We rely heavily on Google Tag Manager at Portent, which has the ability to view pixel changes in preview mode. If you do not currently use a tag management system, Facebook has a few features in the platform that can help to debug any errors you see across the infrastructure stack. One of those is the Facebook Test Events Tool, which allows you to click through different sections of your site to ensure events are firing.

Once you troubleshoot your existing properties, you should look for gaps in event tracking. For Facebook, we recommend adhering to the available Facebook standard events as closely as possible. If you identify gaps in your tracked events, Facebook also provides an Event Setup Tool, which allows you to create events directly from the platform. Just keep in mind that creating events this way reduces the control you have over features like pixel fire order and double-counting since you can only edit those in a tag management tool.

After reviewing the analytics infrastructure of your social media accounts, it should be free of errors and back-end discrepancies.

Campaign + Ad Set Structure

The campaign and ad set structure of the ad account should be reviewed next. For all platforms, we address the following questions:

Do campaign objectives map to end business goals?
If not, are campaigns grouped into specific touchpoints in the customer journey?
Are campaigns and ad sets structured to be free of audience overlap (both within a platform and between platforms)?
Are the campaigns structured to allow maximum automatic optimization (for example, using Facebook’s campaign budget optimization or LinkedIn’s lifetime pacing for campaign budgets)?

Manual optimization and testing will always be a part of managing an ad account. Ensuring that campaigns are structured to increase efficiency and minimize redundancy provides cleaner test results and easier optimizations. Facebook outlines this practice in its Power 5 playbook.

Landing Page Review

While not directly in the ad account, ad destination pages are an often overlooked part of a paid social media audit. We recommend analyzing landing pages in two categories:

Relevancy

When a user clicks through from an ad, they should have a seamless experience with essentially no surprises. Does the landing page map back to both the creative style and call to action in the ad creative? Is the landing page appropriate for where this user is in their customer journey? The landing page for each piece of creative in the account should be tailored for experience relevancy.

Quality

The landing page where paid traffic is sent should be of high quality. Not only will a large volume of users be visiting this page, but there is an additional investment behind getting them there. Concentrating on page speed, accessible content, and action-focused design will greatly improve the success of your ads. For those looking to convert users, we like The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design from Unbounce.

In Other Words

If you are completing your first paid social media audit, this will give you a great place to start. And as I mentioned earlier, auditing your accounts should be a regular part of your social media management efforts; we recommend reviewing this checklist in-depth at least once a quarter.

The post Getting Started With a Paid Social Media Audit appeared first on Portent.

How to Measure Google Ads Sitelink Performance

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 15:00:13 GMT

The Google Ads sitelink is one of the most powerful ad extensions an advertiser can use; they provide users with more context of what users can expect to see on your website and directly expose related pages of your site on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When used effectively as part of your search campaign strategy, sitelinks can:

Improve your presence on the SERP by taking up more ad space compared to your competitors
Increase CTR by 10-15%
Increase conversion rates by decreasing the number of steps on the path to a conversion

The ad in the top position shows all four sitelinks in their entirety

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your advertising strategy, you’ll need to evaluate as many aspects of your campaign elements as possible. By measuring sitelink performance, you can discover which sitelinks have a positive impact on campaign metrics (click-through rates, conversions) or which pages result in higher levels of user engagement (longer average session duration, more pages visited per session).

How to Measure Sitelink Performance (and Why It Is Important)

Like anything else on search and display, you must always test, evaluate, and test again! You want to make sure that you are taking users to parts of your site that add value to their online experience. Leading users to highly informative content about your product/service or even a conversion-focused landing page can increase their trust in your expertise and help decrease the number of steps in their path to conversion.

In some instances, sitelinks may not always need to be tested and updated. For example, suppose you’re a small business owner whose advertising intention is to gain as many customers as possible; your sitelinks might always be: “About Us,” “Directions,” “Request a Consultation,” “Services.”

For B2B advertisers, a sitelink strategy might not be that straightforward. While “Contact Us” might seem like a great sitelink across all campaigns, after looking at performance data, you may find out that users are less likely to click on the sitelink when attached to a non-brand campaign vs. a brand campaign. After discovering poor engagement, it will be in your best interest to test a new sitelink to improve a user’s search experience.

Where to Find Sitelink Performance Data

You can find sitelink performance data in two places: in the Google Ads platform and Google Analytics.

Google Ads

In Google Ads, you can access performance data by opening the ad extensions dashboard. The extensions view shows an aggregate of sitelink performance metrics from the top-level under “all campaigns.”
Depending on how you have implemented your sitelink strategy, you may be interested in viewing sitelink performance on a campaign or ad group basis. You can find this data by toggling “Extensions view” to “Associations view,” or you can click directly into a campaign and navigate to the ad extensions screen. Campaign names will appear when you switch to the Associations view.

Google Analytics

To find sitelink data in Google Analytics, start by selecting Acquisition from the sidebar on the left of the screen. Find Google Ads in the drop-down menu and select Sitelinks.

You can also view campaign-specific data in Google Analytics by setting your secondary dimension to Campaign and clicking on advanced. You can then filter by the campaign(s) needed for analysis.

When looking at sitelink data in Google Analytics, you may notice that the data differ compared to those in Google Ads – I’ll explain why later on in this post.

How to Measure and Report on Individual Sitelink Performance (the Right Way)

So now that you know where to find the data, which numbers should you rely on? While what you report on is dependent on your campaign goals, you need to know which numbers should be evaluated to make optimizations and recommendations.

Google Ads

Google Ads is a bit tricky in the way it presents this data. Let’s walk through an example.

The screenshot above shows three ad extensions and associated metrics for each. The first one indicates 41,604 clicks with a CTR of 8.75%. However, if you were to report those numbers, you would be grossly exaggerating the effectiveness of this sitelink.

To clarify, the 41,604 click count is the number of times an ad was clicked on when this sitelink appeared under the ad, but not the number of times a user actually clicked on this specific sitelink. To reveal this granular data, we will use the Segment function in the top right corner, and choose This Extension vs. Other.

Doing so will show segmented data for each sitelink extension.

Changing this view tells a completely different story! According to the screenshot above, when looking at the metrics for the sitelink in row 1, rather than that initial 41,604 number, we can see that users actually clicked on the sitelink only 307 times, delivering a much lower CTR of 0.06%.

Google Analytics

As mentioned above, you may have noticed that your Google Ads top-level sitelink data and Google Analytics data might differ. The data that Google Analytics provides is the segmented data we just learned how to reveal in the previous section. The screenshot below shows information for the same sitelinks ads, but this time in Google analytics.

You can see that rows three and six coincide with the segmented data from Google Ads.

What Do You Do with This Data?

At the end of the day, the way you report on sitelink performance depends on your campaign’s objectives and your expectations. If your goal is to increase overall campaign click-through rates, try replacing low CTR sitelinks and test with new ones, and then measure results. But if you’re running a sitelink for something seasonal or temporary like a promotion or a webinar, you may want to view the performance on a more granular level to see how many users converted through it (if any).

By using sitelinks effectively, you can educate stakeholders by reporting on accurate performance. By digging deeper into Google Ads and Google Analytics, you can obtain deeper insights into your sitelinks performance to make well-informed optimization decisions.

The post How to Measure Google Ads Sitelink Performance appeared first on Portent.

Why PDFs Are Detrimental to UX and SEO

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 17:10:33 GMT

It’s true; PDFs can be crawled, indexed, and even ranked by search engines. However, most PDFs lack crucial information (more on this later) that helps search engines understand what the document is about–and this negatively impacts your position in search results. Additionally, PDFs aren’t as easily accessible, as they don’t always allow the user to scan, scroll, or navigate the content with ease.

In this article, we’ll cover common pitfalls of PDF usage and help you decide if your PDF content should be converted to a stand-alone landing page instead. And if you must use a PDF, we’ll cover some best practices to keep in mind.

PDFs and Use Cases

The PDF, which stands for a “Portable Document Format,” was first developed by Adobe in 1992. Since then, PDFs grew in popularity because they allowed people to share links, buttons, form fields, audio, video, etc., regardless of the operating system on which they were viewed. In other words, PDF files were (and still are) universally accessible on Windows and Mac.

Today, PDFs are still alive and well. In most cases, PDFs are uses because of the false assumption that they’re faster and easier to create than a webpage. And while it may be easier to upload the final version of a PDF file, it still takes time to plan, design, and develop its content.

Perhaps the place where websites get into the most trouble with PDFs is the file’s ongoing maintenance. This is especially true if you’re expecting your customers to interact with the PDF content frequently (think restaurant menus or gym class schedules). Keeping track of PDF versions is a huge pain!

If someone downloads a static PDF, there’s no guarantee they’ll come back to your site to get the new version. Not to mention the time-intensive labor of redirecting any links pointing to the version that is no longer up to date.

And if you’re still not convinced of the headache, read on to learn when your PDF usage should be kept to a minimum.

Reasons to Minimize PDF Usage on Your Website

PDFs negatively impact user experience and SEO. Here’s how:

Lack of Navigation

PDFs were designed as stand-alone pages, which means that when a user navigates to a PDF, they typically lose access to the main navigation. And if they decide that the PDF they ended up at wasn’t what they were looking for, they must use the back button or go back to the website’s homepage to continue their research.

In short, PDFs make it challenging for the user to explore the content beyond the PDF file, causing frustration and ultimate abandonment of the website.

Not Mobile-Friendly

PDFs look consistent across all devices, favoring the layout that fits a desktop screen. While this may be ideal for printing, on mobile, the text is typically too small.

For mobile users, PDF files can be rather taxing, mainly because they require users to pinch to zoom before seeing the content. This is especially important to consider for users with limited fine motor skills who cannot complete the pinch-zoom action altogether.

Lack of Meta Data

While it’s possible to add or edit the metadata of a PDF document, most PDFs get published without it. If a PDF is published without optimized metadata, search engines will defer to the document title as the appropriate title tag and will likely decide on their own meta description. Although this could work in some cases–your metadata is just the right length, includes target keywords, and is written to attract clicks–in most cases, document metadata isn’t written with SEO in mind.

Sure, meta descriptions don’t always make it to the SERP results; what really matters here are your title tags. Title tags are an important ranking factor. If it’s too long, search engines will likely truncate it. And if it doesn’t clearly represent what the document is about, the user could get thrown off and not view you as a reliable source.

Information Overload

PDFs are generally text heavy–which can easily overwhelm a user looking for quick takeaways. They are typically made up of countless pages and are tricky to scan and digest.

Before adding yet another PDF document to a website, think about the user’s search intent. How much time do you anticipate the user will want to spend with your content? If it’s very visual and made to be viewed as a magazine or a brochure, a PDF format may very well be okay here. But if you’re hoping to answer frequently asked questions or product details, perhaps it makes more sense to add that information directly on the product or service page.

You never know, that hidden info could very well be what’s stopping them from purchasing from your brand!

Makes Tracking Challenging

While it’s possible to track PDF downloads in Google Analytics, our ability to understand PDF engagement beyond that is limited. Did the user read all of the 10, 20, or 40 pages of content? What elements did they engage with the most? Was it worth all of the 100+ hours you’ve spent writing, designing, and planning this piece of content? If you want answers to any of these questions, PDFs are not the route to take.

To put it simply, if it’s user engagement you’re after, stay clear of PDF files.

Internal Links Lose Value

Internal links establish the hierarchy of a website. They also help distribute page authority while allowing users to navigate the website more seamlessly from page to page. However, because PDF files are built as stand-alone pages, the path users take to get from a PDF to a webpage (and vice versa) feels disjointed. Even if internal linking best practices are followed, the flow is broken, and the value is diminished.

How to Format PDFs for Search

We get it, PDF documents are still relevant. PDFs may be hard to avoid, especially if you don’t get as much say about what gets published on a website–many websites must list large quantities of PDF files, just so they don’t get sued.

If you know that users absolutely love downloading your PDFs, it’s okay to offer them as a download–just make sure the key takeaways are also listed on the live website!

And if adding that extra info isn’t in the cards, follow these rules from Ahrefs to keep your PDFs web-optimized:

Write good content
Add an optimized title
Add an optimized description
Use a relevant filename
Include image alt attributes
Use headings

Above all else, remember to always think about the user! As long as the style in which you share your information meets their demand, you’re doing your part.

The post Why PDFs Are Detrimental to UX and SEO appeared first on Portent.

Getting Started with Google Data Studio

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:00:55 GMT

So you’re in the market for a free visualization tool, and you’ve decided on Google Data Studio. We love GDS, and use it regularly at Portent when reporting on performance to our clients.

Here are some things to know and general tips about Google’s answer to Tableau before you go headlong into creating dashboards for your whole organization.

Educational Resources

If you consider yourself a beginner, first you’ll want to get up to speed on the 101-level stuff. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel when Google has its own walkthroughs on Analytics Academy. Bookmark this post, go there and complete their Introduction to Data Studio course, and come back when you’re done.

Continued Learning

Beyond the basics, there are several companies and folks on Twitter that are great follows on Data Studio. A couple of my favorites:

Lee Hirst from Helpfullee has a bunch of dashboard templates
Bounteous is an agency that offers more hands-on training beyond Google’s Analytics Academy

Connectors

Data Studio works by bringing data together through “connectors.” Some are free and native to GDS, and others are paid, non-native community connectors created by third-parties. Getting your data into the tool gracefully will make or break any dashboarding initiatives you undertake with it.

Native Connectors

Google has a variety of connectors to its own properties, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console, BigQuery, and even Google Sheets. Those are plug-and-play with any accounts, projects, or files you have set up there.

Community Connectors

For any non-Google properties—Facebook and Microsoft Ads, for instance—you’ll need to employ “community connectors,” which often come at a cost. But compared to what you’d spend writing your own API connectors and paying for database storage, paying for a suite of connectors from Supermetrics (which runs $39/month) will seem like a steal.

Exploration

Once you have the data sources configured, the Explore section of GDS allows you to effectively stage visualizations and test different styles, dimensions, and metrics before incorporating them into a permanent dashboard.

Some visualizations I would start with are:

Time Series Chart

Nothing beats demonstrating progress on your metrics over a stretch of time. Data Studio gives you a lot of flexibility around breakdown dimensions and even adding a reference line to show if you’ve exceeded a goal.

Geo Map

If you’re visualizing a lot of localized data points, Data Studio’s integration with Google Maps can give you incredible latitude (see what I did there?) in how to surface those metrics to end-users.

Tables With Heatmaps

Sometimes all the fancy charts and graphs in the world can’t replace the easy-to-use table. GDS has recently added functionality to highlight cells in the table when they meet certain conditions.

Style Guides

After you have a few core visualizations you want to build a dashboard around, it’s important to set global styles for colors, typography, and white space so that you create reports for your organization that are on-brand and consistent in look-and-feel. A poor visual design can distract from the data and insights you hope to derive from the dashboards.

For additional tips, check out this blog post on creating an impactful marketing dashboard.

Glossaries

Users of your Data Studio reports might have questions about what the dimensions and metrics mean. So it’s important to keep those definitions built into the report and easily accessible.

Two great resources for Google Analytics terms and definitions are the Google Analytics Help Center and the LovesData Ultimate Google Analytics Glossary.

Sharing Reports

Since GDS is built on the Google Docs backbone, it allows you to share reports easily with folks in your immediate organization and stakeholders on the outside as well. You can also make certain pieces of it publicly available for things like published studies or reports.

Next Steps

Google Data Studio’s product team is one of the fastest iterating teams at Google, for my money. So if you feel like it’s missing functionality you need today, check back in a few months and it’ll probably be added. And if you really want to get obsessive about how your reports are being adopted in your organization, you can even add Google Analytics tracking to your reporting templates! There are so many ways you can evolve your dashboards in GDS once you have them built out.

The post Getting Started with Google Data Studio appeared first on Portent.

Programmatic Advertising: The Benefits of Partnering With an Agency

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 14:00:37 GMT

There are a few options when it comes to buying programmatic advertising. Brands can work in buying platforms directly, pay the platform to build and manage the campaigns, or work with a digital agency. Selecting which option is best for you will depend on a variety of factors, including budget and bandwidth, but partnering with an agency is the most cost-effective approach.

First, let’s start with an overview of programmatic advertising and how it works.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the process of automated bidding and buying available advertising inventory based on targeting parameters on a buying platform. Programmatic ads include display, native, video, out-of-home (OOH), and OTT/Connected TV ads.

Display: banner, video, or text ads in various sizes displayed across millions of different websites.
Native: text and image ads that match the environment they display on and are “native” to the website’s format.
Video: ads that are played before, during, and after video content across the web. Also known as pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll.
OOH: outdoor advertisements such as billboards, posters, and transit. Advertisers can buy digital OOH placements through programmatic platforms.
OTT/Connected TV: video ads that appear on Smart TVs within in-app streaming through an internet connection rather than broadcast TV.

How Does Programmatic Advertising Work?

Using software found within buying platforms, you’re able to set up targeting parameters and bid on inventory in real-time. These platforms use software with built-in algorithms to match advertisers to users that fit within their targeting criteria.

Platform Types

There are two main types of platforms used within the programmatic landscape. The first is on the buy-side and is called a demand-side platform (DSP). These platforms are made up of multiple ad exchanges and work with advertisers to serve ads relevant to their target audience. The second platform is on the sell-side and is called a supply-side platform (SSP). Like a DSP, these platforms use ad exchanges to work directly with publishers to manage their advertising inventory. Both platforms work together to show available inventory advertisers are bidding on in a matter of seconds.

Bidding

Using a DSP allows you to bid on inventory in real-time. This type of bid strategy is called real-time bidding (RTB). RTB allows advertisers to reach their target audience at the right time. When a user who fits the targeting criteria goes to a website, the SSP communicates with the DSP and sends it to the auction. The advertiser with the winning bid has its ad served to the user. This entire process happens in real time as the website loads-in a matter of seconds.

Targeting

Another key aspect of using a DSP is the variety of targeting options available for users at various stages of the marketing funnel. Below is an expanded list of capabilities:

Prospecting: an upper-funnel tactic used to find high-performing inventory and grow remarketing lists.
Contextual: an awareness and reach tactic used to share ads to users on contextually relevant content they’re viewing.
Custom Site/App List: an upper-funnel tactic used to display ads to users on a pre-approved list of sites and apps.
Private Marketplaces (PMPs): a mid-funnel tactic that gives advertisers access to purchase premium inventory.
Behavioral: a mid-funnel tactic used to target different audiences based on various user behaviors such as intent or interest.
Remarketing: a lower-funnel tactic used to retarget users who previously visited your website.
Demographic: target different audiences based on various demographic factors, including age, gender, and household income.
Lookalike/Similar: target lookalike/similar audiences based on current customers or recent conversions.
Hyperlocal: target users based on their real-time location.

How to Start Using Programmatic Advertising

Once you understand programmatic advertising, the next steps are choosing the right DSP to work with and dedicating a strategist to manage the campaigns.

Evaluating a DSP

There are several factors involved when choosing which DSP to use. It’s essential to find a DSP that has a large amount of inventory and targeting options available. The DSP needs to innovate its technology to stay ahead of digital trends. It’s crucial that the platform has brand-safe functionality to prevent ads from showing up alongside questionable content. Reporting will need to be evaluated against your business goals, and have the ability to connect to your API to enhance campaign performance. As with any service you partner with, you will need to evaluate costs and fees associated with the technology, targeting, and platform management.

Lastly, an undervalued factor when choosing a DSP is partnering with someone you trust. Look for account representatives that understand your business goals and are transparent with their communication and deliverables.

Dedicate a Strategist

Managing campaigns within a DSP is a full-time job. It requires daily observation, communication, and optimizations within the platforms. Hiring a dedicated strategist with experience in programmatic platforms will alleviate stress from marketing managers and allow time to be spent in other areas of your business. However, you may not have the means to hire a dedicated strategist to handle your programmatic campaigns, which is why you can benefit from partnering with an agency to create and execute your campaigns for you.

The Benefits of Partnering With an Agency for Programmatic Advertising

Partnering with a digital agency to manage and fulfill programmatic campaigns is an efficient way to save time and money for your company. Below are just some of the benefits of hiring an agency for your programmatic efforts.

Established Partnerships With DSPs

When you work with a digital agency for your programmatic campaigns, they’ve done the DSP evaluations for you. In many cases, digital agencies have vetted and partnered with multiple DSPs in recent years to determine what works well for their clients. They’ve done the hard work in advance to create efficiencies within their campaigns.

Lower Costs While Maintaining the Same Value

Since the agency owns the partnership with the DSP, the cost for you, the client, goes down. Because an agency works with multiple clients within a DSP, the tech and management fees are distributed among those using the platform. These fees are conveniently rolled up into media spend, so you won’t be surprised by the platform’s additional expenses. In summary, you’re paying a much lower cost while maintaining the same value the DSP provides.

Leveraging Expertise of a Digital Agency

Working with an agency allows you to avoid hiring a dedicated strategist in-house. The agency will save your company expenses associated with an internal team member, and you’ll have access to the agency’s dedicated strategists with years of experience buying programmatic display media.

Creating Efficiencies Through Collaboration With Search and Social Efforts

If you are already partnering with an agency for all your search and social media advertising efforts, having them manage your programmatic strategy allows them to collaborate and drive better performance across all of your digital campaigns. The team can create efficiencies through audience building and sharing, creative insights, and campaign optimizations. These efficiencies also give the agency the ability to develop in-depth reporting on all of your digital advertising campaigns, so you have a clear understanding of the health and performance of your advertising strategy as a whole.

In Short

Programmatic advertising gives businesses the ability to buy inventory across websites in real time, using a variety of tactics to reach their target audience. However, buying in a programmatic platform is a time-consuming process that typically requires a dedicated strategist to manage campaigns. Partnering with a digital agency to manage your programmatic advertising efforts will save time and money while creating efficiencies within your overall digital marketing campaigns.

The post Programmatic Advertising: The Benefits of Partnering With an Agency appeared first on Portent.