Portent Blog

Why Long-Tail Keywords Are Valuable To SEO

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:00:07 GMT

Updated on October 22, 2020, to include new information and insights.

Long-tail keywords play a huge role in SEO and digital marketing. But what are they, and how do you know long-tail from a short-tail keyword? This post will cover everything you need to know about long-tail keywords, from how to find them and why they are important, with a few tips on how to optimize for them.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

When I first heard about long-tail keywords, I assumed the term came from the number of words that make a query; however, this is not always the case. A long-tail keyword comes from search volume and specificity of a keyword, rather than the length. Long-tail keywords are search queries that typically get less search traffic but higher conversion value.

A long-tail keyword starts with a “head” or main keyword for the topic, that can split off into millions of variants, creating the long-tail keyword. These are especially common for niche markets and products.

Finding Long-Tail Keywords

When it comes to long-tail keywords, the definition still seems pretty vague. You might sit and think, “the more specific a product, the harder to find, and the fewer people that are searching for them.”

Although fewer people are searching for these specific queries, the users that are will get more out of the results than a broad term. But how do you know a short-tail keyword from a long one? In the example below, I will walk you through a situation and how to find long-tail keywords on a topic.

Example of a Long-Tail vs. a Short-Tail Keyword

Imagine being invited to a last-minute potluck. If you had more time to prep, you would make your grandma’s famous lasagna; however, you’re tight on time, and all you have is a slow cooker, cheese, and a few other ingredients. To find a recipe, there are many queries you could do.

First, you will probably start with a broad term to see all possible results and inspiration. The keyword “cheese” has over 195,000 searches a month, so you decide to give this keyword a try.

This keyword returns the definition, image, and even a local search to find cheese near you. Since you already have cheese (and know what it is), this keyword serves no use for your intent, even though it has a high search volume.

After you decide cheese isn’t going to bring you what you are looking for at this moment, you decide to get more specific and search for “cheese dip.” This keyword has a volume of 10,000, which means it is a popular term. If others are searching for this query, and since it is more specific, this keyword must work better for you than “cheese” did.

Here, Google assumes that your search intent is to find recipes and not pictures or the definition of cheese dip. The addition of the word “dip” narrows down the work and effort on your end and only provides results that will serve you best. But once you visit the top result for cheese dip, you run into a problem: the cheese dip recipe that populates requires using a stovetop, not a crockpot.

You already have your mind set on a crockpot method. And even though you found a recipe, it doesn’t mean your search is satisfied. To narrow it down even further, you decide to add some keywords that can distinguish your results from the rest. You choose to include “crockpot” and “best” to ensure only results with those two keywords get included.

From this example, here are your keywords ranked by search volume (SV) from short-tail to long-tail:

Short-tail keyword: cheese (SV: 195K)
Long-tail keyword: cheese dip (SV: 10K)
Longest-tail keyword: best crockpot cheese dip. (SV: 40)

Although “best crockpot cheese dip” only has a search volume of 40, you are left with the cream of the crop results that provide exactly what you need for this situation.

Why Do Long-Tail Keywords Matter?

Let’s go back to the search volume for each query. At first, it seems like you should dismiss keywords that do not gain a lot of traffic, but when you add them all up, they can generate as much volume as the initial head term. According to one study, Long-tail terms comprise 70% of all search queries; and have a conversion rate of 36%, while only 11.5% of users convert on the top 10% of landing pages. By going after those super specific, lower-volume keywords, you are making a presence in a niche market and taking advantage of most keywords that make up all total queries.

Although “cheese” may seem like the best query due to its high search volume, there is one other factor to consider when researching keywords: keyword difficulty. In order to determine the keyword difficulty of a search term, there are many tools that work a bit differently. Our favorite tool, Ahrefs, takes a page’s content, searcher intent, links from other sites, and Domain Authority into account in order to calculate a page’s chances of ranking for a specific keyword. The lower the keyword difficulty, the lower the competition.

Adding words such as ingredients, cooking method, and even words like “best” or “easy” allows Google to do additional scanning and only include results with these needs in mind. Therefore, the best option for your search intent is “best crockpot cheese dip” because it is going to serve more specific results and require less third party backlinks in order to show up in front of the user, which is one of the factors Ahrefs uses to compute a page’s likelihood to rank. Typically, the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site, the higher it tends to rank. When you aim for long-tail keywords, your site will be able to compete without needing as many interlinking opportunities from outside sources.

Long-tail keywords matter because they convert better. After all, the people searching for them know just what they want. And by targeting those keywords with your content, you can give them what they are looking for. As a result, all those long-tail phrases generate more revenue.

Long-tail keywords can also help you create new content for your site. If you have a blog with content that does not rank very well for significant keywords, research the variations of that topic to brainstorm what people may be looking for that belongs under that umbrella topic. Long-tail keywords can allow you to write content that will cut through the competition so you can rank within your niche.

Takeaways

To recap, long-tail keywords are important because they:

Fill user intent
Cut through competition
Get conversions, not just traffic
Can help you ideate new content

To make sure you optimize for long-tail keywords, complete keyword research, have a deep understanding of your company, products, and site, capitalize on internal linking, and make sure your website is visible to crawlers.

Getting a high ranking for ‘best crockpot cheese dip’ is far less sexy than ranking #3 for ‘cheese.’ But they work, because folks who search for them are more likely to buy/become leads, and because the vast majority of searches are long-tail.

The post Why Long-Tail Keywords Are Valuable To SEO appeared first on Portent.

Our Favorite Seattle Interactive Conference 2020 Sessions

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:00:00 GMT

The Seattle Interactive Conference took the virtual stage this year, delivering inspiring sessions that hit at the intersection of innovation, UX, design, and strategy. Members of Portent’s social media and analytics teams enjoyed two days of live and on-demand content from some of the best in the industry. Here are the top takeaways that Rommel Alcobendas, Rosalina Felipe, Whitney Norton, and Jessica Taylor wanted to share.

We’re Always Wrong: Testing Your Way to Big Ideas on Social

Presented by: Rachel Hofstetter, CMO, Chatbooks & Elise Davis, Head of Mobile and Connectivity, Facebook

You’re running an ad campaign…do you know where your results are?

This question was prompted early on in the discussion between Rachel Hofstetter and Elise Davis. Their presentation focused on a collaborative effort between the Facebook Creative Shop and Chatbooks, a company specializing in photo books, cards, and custom prints.

Chatbooks had been running campaigns on Facebook, driving great results, but were stuck, as Hofstetter put it, “optimizing into a hole.” They were choosing incremental wins like headline variations or different colored creative elements over something larger and more experimental when it came to their ad strategy.

The concerns holding them back, understandably, were related to time and financial investment.

As it turned out, the solution brought to them by Facebook’s Creative Shop was betatyping. By testing creative using multiple, lightweight prototypes vs. fully vetted, developed creative, the Chatbooks team could get results and audience input before the campaign concluded, and their budget was spent in full.

The benefits actually reduced risk for advertisers, rewarded their experimentation, and celebrated “being wrong.” If customers are always changing, why apply a “one size fits all” approach to ad creative?

After a period of creative development, Chatbooks finalized five ad concepts to use within campaigns. By leveraging existing assets to create text-driven videos, the team was able to make these unique ads in an hour and a half.

In short, their campaign was a big success. But betatyping also led the Chatbooks team to a revelation that entirely shifted the way they approached their branding and company ethos.

Because of the success of their campaign, “Designed for Kids,” Chatbooks reimagined their business structure around that concept. This meant implementing a “Toddler Guarantee” and leaning into the findings of their beta-typing test with kid-focused messaging as their North Star.

All too often, creative is an “all or nothing” variable within advertising, especially on Facebook. Clients and businesses invest heavily in a single concept and head back to the drawing board once a campaign has wrapped.

This discussion was a great reminder that testing can take many forms, and sometimes breaking the mold of the standard A/B test is required to get great results and game-changing business insights.

Creating Content for the Snapchat Generation

Presented by: Nicole Longo, Head of North America Business Marketing, Snapchat

The way that users interact on Snapchat is different from all other social platforms. Snapchat doesn’t have features such as likes or comments, which alleviates the pressure to focus on the engagement of the content that is posted. As a result, Snapchatters have the freedom to become their natural selves. In addition, the networking opportunity is not about following influencers or celebrities, but instead about building friendships, communities, and taking action on social responsibility.

Snapchat reaches “75% of users within the age of 13-34 in the US population.” As Snapchat learned how this generation engages with content, they’ve discovered themes, including values and behaviors that matter most for this demographic. When creating content on Snapchat, marketers should keep these five themes in mind.

They take social responsibility seriously. 82% of Snapchat users believe they have the personal responsibility to change the world.
They give back to their communities. The Snapchat generation cares more about their communities. 34% of Snapchat users are more likely to buy from brands that support their local community.
They nurture friendships. Their close friends influence their purchasing decisions 4X more than celebrities or influencers.
They celebrate individuality. The Snapchat generation celebrates what makes them unique. According to Gen Z Snapchatters, “be yourself” is the slogan that best defines them.
They communicate with friends in new ways. Snapchat users drive new behaviors. 75% of users say that vertical video is more personal and immersive.

Designing for Trauma

Presented by: Alain Sylvain, Founder & CEO, Sylvain Labs

During his presentation, Alain recounts the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood disaster and the psychological and sociological aftermath sociologists identified as “collective trauma” felt by the community. This collective trauma is felt throughout human history, at all scales of shared experiences, and is present and ongoing this year. One in three people has displayed clinical signs of anxiety, depression, or both since March 2020 in America alone.

What happens when everyone experiences the same trauma? Social fabric changes, and designing to cope has to evolve with it. When communities face collective trauma, two responses result:

A divisive retreat is part of that immediate response to trauma. Observed human behavior reveals that a flight-or-flight reaction will find people seeking comfort in their own safe space and community, resulting in shutting out others.
Seeking solidarity is another response found in people that experience the same trauma. Habits, behaviors, and continued shared experiences allow showing support and solidarity.

Alain continues to recognize that these coping mechanisms are only a short-term solution, or “surge,” and argues that responding to collective trauma with sustained solidarity is possible through design built on three motives:

Create Shared Languages. Build messages, symbols, and iconography that can be shared to combat a divisive retreat. Creating a shared language can help bring people together to communicate and progress.
Shaping Gathering Places. The designed experience of collective contemplation and ideas. Memorials and museums are examples of physical locations to best serve peoples’ needs for reflection and virtual communities to share ideas.
Reframe Storied Narratives. Shaping stories of a collective trauma that will allow people to witness the experience from another person’s perspective influences a stronger sense of empathy and emotional intelligence. Stories of resilience that retell the experience of trauma will help with reflection. Allow the stories of old to be told for a new audience as an opportunity to learn and understand.

Writing Inclusive Experience

Presented by: Brittney Urich, Senior Experience Designer, Ogilvy

“As UX practitioners, we have a responsibility to build human-centered experiences that are inclusive for everyone. This includes writing that can be understood by all users.”

Though it wasn’t the flashiest of sessions, that was exactly its point. Simplicity and straightforwardness resonate with users and increase conversion.

Users come to our sites to do something. In order to do it, they need the context of content. Regardless of education or reading level, our attention for digesting this content is stretched thinner than ever. Writing in plain language conveys our expertise and respects our users. This is possible—and especially important—for sites promoting highly technical products.

Urich gives five guiding principles for writing in plain language:

Write for your audience. Know their experience level and use words that are familiar to them. Use words that are precise to their discourse community, but avoid slang, idioms, and jargon.
Simplify your language. Be concise. Use pronouns appropriately; use “you,” “we,” and “I” in place of company or department names. Added bonus: this infuses humanity into your content. For guidance, visit plainlanguage.gov.
Be Actionable. Use an active voice. Write descriptive links.
Design for reading. Use clear headers and bulleted lists to allow users to find the content that is most relevant to them. Use tables for complex information and to allow for easier comparison.
Test before launch. Test your content’s readability scores with tools like readable.com. Have a member of your audience read it too.

Final Thoughts

And that’s a wrap! Those were our top takeaways from SIC 2020. We look forward to sharing what we learned with our teams and clients, and applying these ideas and strategies to our day-to-day. Hope to see you next year at SIC 2021!

The post Our Favorite Seattle Interactive Conference 2020 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

How to Hold Your Client Accountable

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 14:00:10 GMT

This is one of the hardest things to do effectively when working in an agency environment.

If your day-to-day role puts you at the table working directly with clients, learning how to hold your client accountable is a skill that is not discussed or taught as often as it should be.

By effectively holding clients accountable to the work agreed upon, agencies and their practitioners can benefit immensely. I’ll also argue that it can help clients get better results from their engagement as well. Getting this right is so important, and it’s a fine line for agency folks who are constantly under pressure from the prospect of losing a service contract.

Effectively holding your client accountable positions your agency team to do their best work, it keeps your agency financially healthy, and arguably, it actually sets your client up to achieve the best outcome from your work together.

Missing here results in your client dictating the course of your work together, an unprofitable account for your agency, and an unhappy agency team held back from properly executing on their expertise. Your client may be happy with that in the short term. Long term, nobody, including your client, will win.

With so much at stake, it’s vital to get it right.

If you’re struggling with where to start, there are a handful of places to narrow your focus. This post is all about how to set yourself up to hold your client accountable more effectively. No matter what, it’s a hard thing to do well, but it’s made easier if approached correctly. Here’s where to begin.

Know the SOW

Hopefully, you have a detailed scope of work to lean on before any work happens. As the agency, you need to know that SOW inside out. If well-written, that SOW should set you up with initial expectations and boundaries. Use that to your advantage.

Clients will push for everything they can get (and they should)! When the SOW is infringed on, you have to say something right away. ‘No’ doesn’t have to be the answer when a client asks for something that isn’t included in your SOW. If it’s a small ask, consider taking it on to build the relationship. If it’s a big ask, the answer can still be yes, adding, “but we’ll need to re-prioritize this with other work or draft an additional SOW for what you’re requesting.”

The SOW is there to protect both the agency and the client. Don’t ignore it. If your client signed up for something but wants something else, that’s fine. Talk about it, go back to your SOW, and decide the best path forward.

Your SOW is a signed acknowledgment of the agreed-upon work to reference. Don’t forget about it!

Acknowledgment of an agreement is the foundation required to better hold a client accountable. If you don’t have a specific agreement with acknowledgment from your client, good luck with any of this.

Start Firm

The best thing you can do to hold your client accountable to the work scoped is to set firm boundaries and expectations right from the very beginning.

The first 45 days of your work together are key. If you can get into a regular cadence that is in line with the SOW, you’ll set yourself up for success in the long run. If you’re consistently overservicing your client early so you can get off to a good start, plan on overservicing for the long run and losing profit margin on your work. Once you’re a few months in, the expectation is already set; reeling that back is incredibly difficult.

Document and Agree on a Work Plan

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you are; whether you’re completing small tactical project-based work or you were brought in for a multi-year consulting contract, you should build and maintain a work roadmap that is shared with the client.

Once the work is planned and expectations with delivery dates are detailed, get sign-off from your client. I’ll clarify: get sign-off from your client in writing. A shared project management system is a great place to house all of this stuff.

That sign-off is your client’s acknowledgment and agreement to the plan. Acknowledgment of your agreement in combination is key. That acknowledgment gives you a receipt. Don’t forget about it!

When plans are made, expectations are set, and agreement happens, accountability becomes much easier. Yes, plans will change. And when they do, go back to your work roadmap, prioritize appropriately, reset deadlines, and get acknowledgment and agreement.

Document and Agree on Work Dependencies

Work dependencies represent the place where clients most often miss their commitments. When not held accountable to those commitments, agencies get crunched with unrealistic times or are asked to complete their work without everything they need to get it done.

This is where I see agencies struggle the most to keep their clients accountable to their agreements.

If you’re in a professional services environment where there are no dependencies on your work from the client, you’ll be in good shape. For most of us, our work has many client dependencies built into what we do. Those dependencies could be anything from waiting on marketing collateral to be delivered so we can start our work to waiting on approval from a senior vice president or CEO to launch something.

Regardless of what dependency you need from a client to progress your work, outline the dependency, detail how it affects the rest of your work, and set a deadline for the client to follow through.

It’s crucial to get acknowledgment and agreement from the client here as well. Once you have that, you’ve got another receipt to go back to when expectations aren’t met.

The documentation of details and agreement arms you with the basis you need to push back effectively when clients don’t hold up their end of the bargain. Agencies will always have to flex, but agencies should also be prepared to push back on clients who don’t follow through appropriately.

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Saying ‘yes’ to a client is easy. Not saying anything when a client doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain is easy.

But taking that route over and over again isn’t going to get you very far. It’s really hard to step out on a limb and challenge your client. It puts agencies in a vulnerable place for so many reasons. The consultants, account managers, and agency practitioners that can do it the most effectively are also the ones that get the most out of their agency-client relationships.

Our strongest, most meaningful client relationships are the ones where we’ve been able to hold our client as accountable as well as we hold ourselves accountable.

The push and pull of a successful client-agency relationship must be a two-way street. But all too often, a needy client who is under pressure to produce results fast can run over their agency team with additional requests, delivering late on their commitments, or scrambling to change direction at the last minute. And as an agency aiming to please, it’s easy to let them, since they know they hold power in the dynamic of the relationship, right?

But when agencies can hold their clients accountable, and when those clients can take that pushback from their agencies to address any issues constructively, the promise of meaningful work is ever-present, and relationships between agencies and their clients can flourish.

Previous posts in this series:

Building Great Brand-Agency Relationships
How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals
How to Hold Your Agency Accountable

The post How to Hold Your Client Accountable appeared first on Portent.

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads Overview

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 14:00:32 GMT

Of all the available Facebook ad types, none is more apt for remarketing than the dynamic ad. While they might look like your typical single image, carousel, collection, or story ad, dynamic ads are actually powered by machine learning, using user interests, actions, and intent to serve only the most relevant products and services offered by your business. While dynamic ads, also called dynamic product ads or DPAs, can technically be leveraged at the top of the funnel, we’ll focus on ways to use these ads as a tool for retargeting users, particularly those in the e-commerce space.

If you’re diving into Facebook advertising for the first time, I’d recommend starting with our comprehensive guide to kicking off e-commerce campaigns.

Setting Up Dynamic Ads

There are several requirements for setting up dynamic ads, as detailed by Facebook. The key to effective, informed dynamic ads lies with the Facebook Pixel. If you’re advertising on Facebook, you (hopefully) have a pixel installed on your site. With the data collected by your pixel, Facebook can gather details about how users view and interact with your items for more relevant and effective dynamic ads.

Launching ads requires advertisers to set up specific pixel events, seen below.

Image courtesy of Facebook

Additionally, those events require specific parameters that allow Facebook to correlate the products on your site to those in your catalog.

Image courtesy of Facebook

A catalog is another, equally crucial component to dynamic ad set up. If you have an e-commerce site, chances are you’re using an inventory or catalog management system. Third-party platforms like Shopify, Magento, and others can be integrated with Facebook so you can seamlessly transition your catalog into the platform.

With these events set up, you can connect your pixel to a catalog and begin running dynamic ads!

Remarketing Strategies

Before you hit the ground running, though, it’s important to understand how this ad type can be utilized within your overall strategy.

We’ll take a look at an example Catalog Sales campaign and walk through some of the retargeting capabilities advertisers have access to when using dynamic product ads.

While advertisers have the option to upsell or cross-sell products from a given product set, a great place to start is retargeting based on signals like product views or adds to cart.

Depending on the amount of traffic coming to your website and the amount of data your pixel has captured, you can build out a full funnel that retargets users based on purchase intent over the course of a given time period, up to 180 days.

In most cases, a shorter remarketing window ensures you’re reaching users while they’re still interested. However, this can vary depending on your sales cycle, product cost, brand awareness, and other factors.

If you want to get even more granular, custom combinations allow you to promote a given product set to a custom audience based on how users interact with products from another product set.

From there, you can determine which types of interactions (viewed, added to cart, or purchased) during a given window you’re looking to capture.

The DPA format lends itself well to testing, and if you feel like you’ve exhausted your initial remarketing options or require more specific rules, custom combinations are a great option.

However, you don’t necessarily need dozens of different ad sets to create a cost-effective, lower-funnel campaign. At Portent, DPAs are an ad type we’ve incorporated into remarketing strategies for a variety of e-commerce clients, from big-name retail brands to niche SMBs. Across the board, we try to keep our initial approach simple and optimize retargeting windows and messaging based on where we see users dropping off.

Dynamic Product Ads in Action

Here’s a high-level overview of one of our most successful DPA strategies, which we developed with a popular outdoor retailer.

The primary remarketing campaign leveraged standard static image and carousel ads to retarget users that had visited specific product pages during a broad window of time (180 days). We saw an opportunity to launch dynamic product ads as a supplemental retargeting format, which focused more broadly on product category page visitors and users that had abandoned their carts before purchase during a more recent period (one week).

Ad frequency was a main concern for this client, who was hesitant to pursue a DPA strategy for this exact reason—this ad format is served frequently to users, and frequency metrics can creep up. With that in mind, we initially recommend a small, daily budget that gave us more control over the ad sets; we could more easily scale budget up or back depending on ad frequency and overall performance.

Within the first week of running dynamic product ads, we saw a 16.57 ROAS. The following month, the DPA campaign generated almost $400,000 in revenue and an 18x increase ROAS.
In this client’s case, the rollout of dynamic product ads was pretty straightforward, but it proved to be the perfect supplemental ad format for the existing remarketing strategy.

In Other Words

If you’re currently advertising your products on Facebook, consider incorporating dynamic ads into your own remarketing efforts. With consistent testing, you can find the approach that best aligns with your audience, products, and overall goals.

The post Facebook Dynamic Product Ads Overview appeared first on Portent.

How to Set a PPC Budget

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 14:00:28 GMT

Updated on October 8, 2020, to include new information and insights.

“What Should My PPC Budget Be?”

This is a question that we get asked a lot by businesses for a few reasons. Either they are just getting started with pay-per-click advertising for the first time, launching a new aspect of their PPC strategy, or simply reevaluating their approach to ensure they are investing correctly.

Depending on how advanced you are with tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, and digital marketing in general, the short answer may be:

Define your SMART business goals for PPC
Evaluate past performance using a simple framework like our Click-Worth Calculator
Determine your profitability requirements
Go!

But let’s take a deeper look at what that means, and review some of the fundamentals that should be informing the “right” budget for your business. That said, we aren’t going to spend much time talking about how to improve profitability here. But if you’re curious, our Building Successful PPC blog series is a good place to start.

“Am I spending too much? Not enough? Am I spending on the right platforms and in the right places? How do I know if our spending falls in line with our goals?”

What a company spends on paid advertising shouldn’t be a static number. Budgets change. Goals change. Spending changes. There isn’t a right answer. However, there can (and should) be a method behind the madness.

Let’s walk through a framework that can help shed some light on the budget question the next time it comes up for you.

Keep in mind:

There is no absolute right answer to the PPC budget question.
When making your PPC budgets, use ranges to hedge for error.
Use data from estimate tools as a guideline—not the rule.

Start With Your Goals

Before we get to the dollars and cents on how much you should spend, it’s vital to define what you’re spending for. Setting actionable, quantitative goals with a timeline for your PPC spend is a must.

If a stated goal feels vague or unattainable to you, it probably is. Use a SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to get this off the ground.

Interested in acquiring new customers? All of the customers in your market? Or can you only service a set number of new customers at one time? Does it matter how much you pay for each new customer? Is your inventory depreciating quickly (e.g., retail), so that conversions now are worth more than conversions in three months?

Determining goals for your PPC spending can go many different ways. Let’s take a look at common goals for companies engaging in paid advertising online:

ROI-focused lead generation or customer acquisition: “We want to acquire 100 new customers within the next 30 days paying no more than $50 per new customer.”
Absolute lead generation or customer acquisition growth: “We want to acquire 100 new customers within the next 30 days regardless of the cost per new customer.”
Brand awareness: “We want to show 5 million impressions to potential customers over the next 30 days.”

As a working example through this post, we’ll use The Ski Shop–a fictional e-commerce store looking to unload their outdated ski boot inventory before their new product line comes in for the upcoming season.

Using paid advertising as one source of traffic during an upcoming clearance sale, the team at The Ski Shop has determined that they need to acquire 200 new boot customers within the next 30 days before their new inventory hits the store. For simplicity, we’ll assume that they absolutely must have all merchandise gone, to avoid getting into more complicated minimum-margin calculations here.

The Ski Shop’s goal: drive 200 new customers via paid advertising regardless of cost over the next 30 days.

Determine Traffic Generation Requirements

Once you have your definable, quantitative goal with a timeline attached to it, we can move onto the next step of the budgeting process: traffic generation requirements.

Based on your goal, how much traffic do you need to drive to reach that goal within your specified timeline?

Instead of guessing, use any historical data from your analytics platform to educate your estimations.

If you have a full business cycle worth of historical PPC conversion figures, that’s your ideal place to start. If you’ve never done PPC before, are launching a new strategy with different expected conversion rates, or you haven’t been running for long enough to map out any significant seasonal changes, use your website’s overall conversion rate to get an idea of how often people are converting.

Important: if you do use overall website conversion rates to approximate at this point, bear in mind you may be reaching people at different stages of the buyer’s journey with paid traffic than you are with organic or direct traffic.

Here’s the first place where using a range of conversion rates will help cut your margin for error.

Once you have a conversion rate range that the data supports, use the formula below to generate your traffic requirement numbers:

traffic required to meet your goal = customers needed / conversion rate

Looking at The Ski Shop, traditionally, visitors entering the site through a paid advertisement convert 2.25% of the time. Based on that figure, our conversion rate range will be 2% – 2.5%. Let’s see how much traffic The Ski Shop will have to drive based on our conversion rate range to generate 200 new customers.

Low conversion rate:
traffic required to meet your goal = 200 customers / 2%
traffic required to meet your goal = 10,000

High conversion rate:
traffic required to meet your goal = 200 customers / 2.5%
traffic required to meet your goal = 8,000

The Ski Shop’s traffic requirements: based on The Ski Shop’s goal of 200 new customers and the expected conversion rate range we created after reviewing historical data, The Ski Shop will need to drive between 8,000 and 10,000 visitors over the next 30 days to reach their target.

Research CPC Cost Estimates

Now that we understand how much traffic we need to drive to reach our goal, let’s turn to the money.

Get an understanding of what you will need to pay per click for the traffic required. Again, similar to conversion rate, use a range when estimating your CPC.

There are two great places to gather information for CPC estimates:

Historical data. If you have historical data from past efforts, that will always be the best place to start. Competition and CPCs are ever-changing, but those historical numbers will typically give you a good ballpark idea of what you should expect to pay.
Your current PPC efforts in your account. If you’ve never run PPC campaigns before, or your new goals are sending you in a different direction from the historical spending in your account, Google’s Keyword Planner is another place to find CPC estimates.

To find the Keyword Planner, log into your Google Ads account, click the “Tools” tab in the top navigation, then click “Keyword Planner.”

Remember, this tool provides estimates for search volume and costs. There are many factors, like Quality Score, that will affect your Actual CPCs. That said, this is still a good place to look if you are starting from scratch and trying to understand competitiveness around specific keywords.

For The Ski Shop, here’s a look at what the Keyword Planner tells us about estimated CPCs based on the keywords they will be targeting:

The Ski Shop’s average cost per click: based on the estimates found in the Keyword Planner, The Ski Shop should set its estimated CPC range from $0.40 – $0.85.

Tying It All Together

Now that you have determined your goals, how much traffic you need to reach those goals, and the cost of that traffic, setting a budget becomes easy.

Using your traffic and average CPC estimate ranges, we can build our budget with the formula below:

traffic required X average CPC = total budget

Use that formula twice to estimate the high and low ranges:

highest traffic required X highest average CPC = highest total budget
lowest traffic required X lowest average CPC = lowest total budget

Let’s look at how this formula translates to The Ski Shop based on we’ve put together so far:

10,000 visitors X $0.85 average cost per click = $8,500
8,000 visitors X $0.40 average cost per click = $3,200

The Ski Shop’s budget range: based on our advertising goals (acquire 200 customers), traffic requirements (8,000 – 10,000 visitors), and average CPC estimates ($0.40 – $0.85), we can set The Ski Shop’s paid online advertising budget between $3,200 and $8,500 for the next 30 days.

Taking One More Step to Profitability

While working through this example with The Ski Shop, something that we did not take into account was profitability.

Understanding the value of a customer, or an average purchase value, will allow you to determine your return on ad spend (ROAS). Let’s see how with The Ski Shop, assuming their average purchase value is $250:

Expected Revenue = Average Purchase Value x New Customers Goal
Expected Revenue = $250 x 200
Expected Revenue = $50,000

ROAS = (Revenue – Ad Spend) / Ad Spend

Lowest ROAS:
ROAS = ($50,000 – $8,500) / $8,500
ROAS = 488%

Highest ROAS:
ROAS = ($50,000 – $3,200) / $3,200
ROAS: 1,460%

Put simply, a 488% ROAS on the low end means that for every dollar spent on advertising, $4.88 in revenue is generated. On the high end, a 1,460% ROAS represents $14.60 in revenue for every ad dollar spent.

Using The Ski Shop example, we had to move inventory regardless of cost. However, that’s not always the case. If you’ve got a handle on contribution margin (your overall margin per unit), ROAS becomes an even more useful tool to guide how much you can spend and still grow revenue profitably.

Key Takeaways

Setting yourself up with the ability to track these KPIs and goals is crucial. Throughout every phase of your PPC effort (planning, execution, evaluation, and refinement), keep your KPIs front and center; they should help drive every decision made throughout the process.

When working through these steps, focus on using the resources already available to you. Whether that’s historical PPC campaigns, insights from Google Analytics, or other estimating tools, pulling together meaningful data to aid your decisions will help in a big way. Additionally, creating realistic ranges for goals and likely outcomes will help cut down on unpleasant surprises.

The post How to Set a PPC Budget appeared first on Portent.

How to Hold Your Agency Accountable

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 14:00:46 GMT

Here’s to the marketers on the brand side; your marketing objectives, high hopes for the upcoming year, and budgets keep our agency world spinning.

You’d think that your contract and monthly recurring revenue would keep your agency accountable on its own. The RFP process you went through with your agency was extensive, and you were sold on the seamless, never-siloed service-suite that perfectly matched your needs executed by a team of experts with 300-something years of combined experience. The agency even had case studies that proved extensive experience in the work scoped! What could go wrong?

But six months into your work together, your expectations and the reality of it don’t align. Deadlines slip, the work that comes in misses the mark, communication stifles, and results disappoint.

While agencies are shouldered with the blame in this relationship dynamic, and while they often deserve it, the marketers who hire them also play a role in contributing to the downfall of a brand-agency relationship. At its core, this really comes down to the client setting expectations as clearly as possible. You may not have all the answers or the perfect vision, and that’s OK. After all, you hired an agency for a reason. But the closer you can get towards articulating that desired outcome, the better.

For marketers on the brand side, approach your next agency engagement with these fundamentals in mind to help create expectations to hold your agency more accountable. The more detailed you can get here, the more often your expectations will be met or even exceeded.

Demand a Detailed Scope of Work

This is the very start of clarifying your expectations. This is often the only place where detailed work expectations actually get written down. Don’t miss the chance to get your expectations included in a signed and agreed upon document.

Demand objectives, milestones, delivery dates, ownership rights, iteration rounds, and budgets detailed and clarified. It can be time-intensive, but it will save you a ton of extra work and stress down the road.

If there are lingering “what ifs?” or “what abouts?” negotiate, come to an agreement, and get them in the SOW before it’s signed.

For both you and the agency providing their services, gray areas create potential points of conflict and common places where expectations are missed.

Maintain Meaningful Engagement Objectives

I’ve covered in my previous post how to do this effectively. And if you’re able to successfully commit to and refine your desired outcomes to keep them top of mind for you and your agency over the course of your work together, this is a great way to create accountability.

Your objectives should be agreed upon by you and your agency. If you hold up your end of the bargain (we’ll get to that below) and your objectives are relevant, realistic, and measurable, you’ll be in great shape here.

Accountability is more-easily directed if both parties agreed to the desired outcome.

Share a Project Management System

Create a centralized source of truth that holds everything related to your engagement.

There’s only a bajillion project management tools on the market. Find one that works for you and the agency you’re working with. The odds are that you and your selected agency will already have a preferred PM setup. And, the odds are that they will not be the same platform. As the client, you’ll usually win out on what to use since, well, you pay the bills. The particular tool doesn’t matter. 97% of the leading tools on the market are the same; the remaining 3% doesn’t usually make a difference, but each tool needs a unique value prop.

Either way, have a shared space where everything lives. Your shared PM system should hold:

Active SOWs
Engagement objectives
Strategic roadmaps
Active task lists with accurate due dates
Completed deliverables
Performance reports
Meeting notes

The key to all of this: your shared system is only effective if used and kept up to date.

When utilized well, establishing a singular source of truth is one of the easiest ways to create points of accountability. It keeps all of your receipts as well, for when expectations are missed by your agency. Timestamped expectations are an easy thing to point to when something doesn’t meet the mark.

Be careful, though. If you set up something like this and it is not used well, the perceived source of truth will be outdated, and that can be more difficult to work with than nothing at all.

Hold Yourself Accountable

One of the best ways to hold your agency accountable is to hold yourself accountable for the work required on your end.

I won’t sit here and defend agencies to death; there is plenty of blame that rightfully goes to the agency when expectations aren’t met and they can’t hold themselves accountable. But successful brand-agency relationships require cooperation and engagement from both ends of the table.

This is magnified if the work you’re engaged in is consultative, or recommendation-based in nature. If you find yourself pulling away from an active engagement or unable to follow through on your commitments, it can throw the entire relationship off.

Agency strategists are people too! They are motivated by working with engaged clients and seeing their work come to fruition. The more often you can follow through, the more engaged your agency team will be.

Should it work that way? Probably not.

Does it work that way? Absolutely.

Up next: How Agencies Can Hold Their Clients Accountable.

Previous posts in this series:

Building Great Brand-Agency Relationships
How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals

The post How to Hold Your Agency Accountable appeared first on Portent.

Our Favorite INBOUND 2020 Sessions

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 14:00:14 GMT

INBOUND 2020 has come and gone, and this year’s virtual experience offered all of the same awesome programming this conference is known for and more. I joined Portent’s client partner team for two days of education sessions, deep dives, HubSpot best practices, and live debates on all things related to inbound marketing.

With all of the quality content we learned, it was hard to narrow down our favorites! Below are the top takeaways from INBOUND 2020 that Kyle Eliason, Kirsten Pickworth, Ann Robison, Matthew Taufa’asau, and I wanted to share.

Everybody Is Your Customer: How Ditching the Acquisition Funnel Supercharged Growth

Presented by: Julie Zhou, Sr Director of Growth AdRoll, a Division of NextRoll, Inc.

Many companies, and frankly, many of our new clients still focus on creating content about their business and deprioritize or never create the resources people actually want to read. Julie Zhou encouraged us to look beyond the acquisition funnel and decision journey focus stages when striving for growth and engagement.

AdRoll’s pivot to content marketing strengthened their customer relationships, brand awareness, and the collaboration between their sales and marketing teams. There were many moments during this session when I wished my clients were sitting beside me hearing recommendations I’ve shared before, but with the data-backed analysis and impact from Zhou.

Evaluate Relationships With Your Customers

Your company might be approaching a plateau or worse if you have low or neutral Net Promoter customer feedback scores or even unresponsiveness to your surveys. The lack of feedback or inconsistency in trends might be a greater risk than poor feedback because it alludes to no relationship or purely transactional communication with your target audience.

If you want to sustain the growth of your company and cross-selling products and solutions, strong relationships with existing customers are foundational. From those authentic relationships come product feedback, engagement, and even referrals. Rebuilding these relationships requires a change in perspective by both sales and marketing teams.

Treat Everyone Like They Are Already a Customer

This is how to get sales and marketing teams to renew their awareness of customer needs and slow the race of turning leads into money-spending customers. It sounds counter-intuitive, but taking a step back from lead scoring and transactional interactions can free up team members to build relationships with companies who might be high-value customers down the road.

Zhou argues that the funnel treats customers as a destination, and between sales and marketing, many potential customers are left behind inadvertently. However, when using a flywheel framework, you recognize that you are not in control of the customer journey: customers are at the center of everything you do, customers join on their schedule, and it’s your job to engage them. She said you shouldn’t invest any less in someone because they are not giving you money yet.

Invest in Content That Isn’t About You

Maintaining customer testimonials and product information is important, but your marketing content should be fueled by what your customer wants to learn. And especially in 2020 and through the pandemic, many potential customers need information and help, and they will remember the companies who provided it.

Continue with webinars and testimonials, but if you really want to acquire new customers, focus on exciting topics that they might consume at work or at home. And consider varying digestible content formats beyond your blog like infographics, podcasts, quick guides, or short explainer videos.

Even if you have a small marketing team, you can outsource content development to experts in your own company and your customer network and deepen relationships and brand awareness. AdRoll used this approach to increase their content production by 10X over two quarters. As a result, they saw the number of new blog visitors increase 300%, organic search traffic increase 50% month-over-month, and spend potential increase 100%.

And more importantly, the sales team started rebuilding relationships with current and potential customers by sharing helpful resources about industry trends, not products and features. That pivot led to more engagement and brand visibility.

The End of Technical SEO: How Google’s AI Forces SEO Strategies to Be More Human

Presented by: Dale Bertrand, President, Fire&Spark

“How do we get more non-branded organic traffic?” This session, led by Dale Bertrand, a search marketing and AI expert, answered this question I hear from many clients. He provided a simplified explanation of how the Google algorithm is evolving to better answer user queries and a model for how to gain visibility with a human-centered approach to SEO.

Our goal as marketers is to accelerate sales, site traffic, and organic leads. Bertrand argues that we should keep this goal in mind, but pause to consider the context of search queries and have empathy for potential customers. Why? Because Google’s AI-based search engine is using both of those factors when determining which result to rank first.

Many SEO consultants spend a significant amount of time on technical audits, guest posting, and optimizing H1 tags to improve search visibility. Although determining if technical concerns exist or are risks is valuable, technical SEO alone will not dramatically affect rankings.

Your SEO Strategy Should Involve Content AND Technical

Sometimes we forget that Google is a marketing engine too and is working on its customer engagement daily by finding the best content to match each query and aiming to delight users using their search engine. AI is used when web crawling, parsing information, evaluating content quality, and training the search engine.

The challenge with the algorithm shift—from rules-based to AI-based—is that even if we know how the algorithm works, we might not know exactly why a specific ranking decision was made and why our content was outranked. What we do know is that AI is making the search engine rank content more like a human would, with empathy and context.

This means that websites need to be optimized for the people who will engage with them, not solely the bots that will crawl them. The tried and true technical methods won’t work as well as they used to and can’t stand on their own.

Your SEO Strategy Needs a Mission

Successful brands provide value for human communities and fill information gaps for Google. Bertrand recommends that B2B and B2C brands should have an SEO mission and focus on customer engagement to:

Go beyond targeted keyword content
Create content that connects with your audience
Partner with like-minded individuals
Outreach to promote your mission, not your content
Do good in their industry and community

So what types of content are mission-driven and helpful to your audience, potential partners, and Google? Citable content like interviews, surveys, and proprietary data, even if collected informally, contains valuable information that people want to learn and share. When aligned with your brand mission, this evergreen content becomes a foundation for paid social, digital PR, and backlinks from other brands.

You Need a Human SEO Approach

Over-optimization around crawl budget and H1s is a waste of time when the KPI is organic visibility. At Bertrand’s agency, they check to see if anything is majorly wrong with the site and then quickly move on to content creation. He argued that most technical optimizations don’t move the needle on their own. The exception is large sites (>10,000 pages) and sites built on a custom CMS.

In 2020, more companies need to sell online, consumers are more sophisticated with their research and search queries before making a purchase, and Google’s AI is focusing more on search intent. As marketers, we need to adopt an approach that appeals to both customers and search engines: a human SEO approach. Bertrand provided this framework for how B2B or B2C business can become more human and mission-driven:

Empathy: Conduct customer research and real-time keyword research in addition to using SEO tools. Understand what your potential customers need and how they are searching for it right now.
Presentation: What is Google showing in the SERP? Understand the type of content you need to create – information, checklist, infographic, etc.
Engagement: Ensure that your content is relevant to the queries users are clicking from. Review metrics like time on site and bounce rate together.
Amplification: Build out organic visibility to support other channel conversion rates (i.e., social media, email, paid search, etc.) and continue the conversation around your mission.
Purpose: Reflect on how this customer engagement confirms your mission and company values.

This method allows marketers, sales, SEO, and content teams to brainstorm around content creativity as a means for building search engine authority. Build more content that supports potential customers in the researching and deciding steps in the middle of the funnel and supports connection with your mission. Your audience and visibility will start to grow, and you can then develop partnerships that will help you generate more content.

We’ve known for a while that Google’s algorithm has shifted, and we can’t predict how results will always align with search intent. What we can do is shift away from the technical optimization game and proactively build relevant, well-researched content that answers user questions.

The Definitive Guide to Content That Sells: 7 Essential Steps to Massive Results and ROI

Presented by: Marcus Sheridan, President and Partner, Marcus Sheridan International

It’s pretty apparent why Marcus Sheridan is an Inbound Favorite. I’ll be honest; I hadn’t heard of him before attending his presentation. But I’m glad I tuned in to his talk; it was refreshing and offered a lot of helpful advice for marketers searching for the right content to create. To start, he leans into the idea that content must be a sales-first initiative. Your sales staff needs to answer hard questions that a savvy consumer will have. Marcus pressed his attendees to consider how much of their marketing material would a member of their sales team reference with a customer?

Marcus argues that marketers should seek to be the Wikipedia of their niche. Sure, you’re saying, we’re doing that. But are you really? There’s a lot of marketing out there that aims to be frank and honest but rarely hits the mark. Hiding vague answers behind flowery words will upset someone who took the time to read them. Instead, build your website to sell your products’ value and differentiators by answering the questions your sales team is already fielding.

A potential customer, he says, is likely looking to answer some or all of their “Big Five” questions.

Cost

Some marketers will dance around the subject, saying cost “depends on options or services purchased.” But that answer will undoubtedly irritate your potential customer who will seek this answer out elsewhere if they have to. So be a breath of fresh air and provide at least a pricing range. You’ll save potential customers hours of research.

Problems With a Product

People want to know what they’re in for when making a purchase. If your type of product has a few known issues, let people know about them. Be the resource that honestly answered the question, so someone else doesn’t do it for you.

Comparisons (vs. Other Products)

How do you stack up against the competition? It’s a hard question to answer, especially publicly. However, if you do it right, you get to craft a little slice of how you’re perceived.

“Best Of” Lists

If your business has data on the products that require the least amount of servicing post-sale, consider letting your customers know. Consider that this is a conversation that a trained salesperson is likely already having. It might be a value discussion where Brand A is pricier and more reliable compared to Brand B. If you are the only website answering this challenging question, you bring a ton of value.

Reviews

People are looking for reviews of you and your products. It takes work to get these done right, but your customers can tell if you can get honest review profiles set up. Do this both onsite and off.

Going down the path towards greater transparency will also require greater integration between sales and marketing. Marketing must continue to keep sales involved in their decisions. In fact, your sales team should definitely be a part of your content team. They are the SMEs and will ultimately answer questions on the phone or in the field right before making a sale. Sheridan argues that there shouldn’t be separate sales and marketing material. Instead, he suggests that honest and transparent content is the greatest sales tool.

Hacking the Marketing-to-Sales Handoff: Guarantee That Sales Takes Action on Your MQLs

Presented by: Charles Elmer, Director of Sales Enablement, Bayard Bradford

Alignment between sales and marketing. It seems like a straightforward concept. Yet, according to Charles Elmer, “Research we conducted in 2018-19 showed most companies were losing 15-35% of their impact because of inherent friction in their processes.”

During his presentation, he touches on the notion that sales and marketing are often disconnected. Further, he leans into the idea that sales are the glory hounds while marketing is left out in the cold. However, he mentions that marketing isn’t strictly ‘koozies and billboards.’ Marketing plays a huge part in building out pipelines and supplying leads. Using the tech available to us as marketers, we can better illustrate how we bring value to sales.

Elmer suggests one way to better show this value is to be more present in sales meetings. If we’re merely delivering automated leads to a sales team, we’re missing an opportunity to illustrate how we got them in the first place. Use a weekly sales and marketing meeting as an opportunity to exchange knowledge and to celebrate wins. Discuss new product features in these meetings, as both teams can benefit from telling customers about them. He says to set SLA for when both teams meet. He says to then be sure to set a time when the combined groups will present to leadership.

Maximizing Google Analytics Segments

Presented by: Karen Hopper, Senior Data Strategist, M+R

Google Analytics can be, frankly, intimidating. But the insights it provides into your audiences is valuable data that a business can’t afford to not access and understand. One of the most underutilized features of GA is its Custom Segments. The question Hopper dived into was, “How do I use Google Analytics Segments to provide actionable learnings?”

Segments can easily be used for the dark side (that is, “finding” evidence to support your theories and then not testing them to prove their validity), but it can also be used for good. Creating segments can help you focus on how to evaluate user behavior—rather than user characteristics—and can help illuminate patterns. It’s worth noting that segments are not personas. But they can help us build personas by looking at different behavior profiles.

Start as you would with any scientific experiment; that is, don’t pull out your Erlenmeyer flask and start pouring in chemicals. Your 10th-grade chemistry teacher would be ashamed. Before you begin, you need to identify what the question you’re trying to answer is. For example, “What is the demographic makeup of my audience that has an average order value over $100?” Once we have our question, we can dive into the data; Audience Demographics, Behavior Flow, Cohort Analysis. We need to find some data that can help answer our question.

Now we can form our hypothesis. Start by determining how you can identify users that you want to test. How can you tell people apart? Maybe, after digging into the data, you see that those high order value users are more likely to be on a desktop than a mobile device. Maybe you suspect that millennials have less disposable income, which is why the age range of the high average order value audience is 45+. These are all ways we can use segments through GA.

Next we can build our hypothesis into a test, again by channeling our inner 10th-grade chemistry class and filling in the blanks: changing A to B will impact X because Y. Perhaps our test is, “Changing our promotional sale banner to be more mobile-friendly, will impact the average order value for Millennials because Millennials are 80% more likely to view our website on their mobile devices.” Now that’s a test. And remember, a well-crafted hypothesis will always yield learnings, even if the test doesn’t end in the results we predict. It will also help you identify the test variables.

From Customer Service to Customer Experience

Presented by: Irina Rosenblit, Director of Customer Success, and Jonathan Corbin, VP of Success, Hubspot

Here’s a fun fact: 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. If this doesn’t pique your interest about the customer experience, we’re not sure what will. Irina and Jonathan delivered an eye-opening session with tons of great information. Here are three of the five key learnings they shared.

Define the Customer Journey

We can’t understand how to improve the customer experience if we don’t understand the customer’s needs. And the first step of understanding that is to plot out the customer journey. You need to know the key goals and actions that your customers take at every stage of the process and clarify who is responsible for what. Simplify the journey so that you can centralize accountability.

Establish Success Metrics

When it comes to progress, focus on meaningful, leading metrics, not lagging indicators, such as not renewing. Establish those success metrics early on, such as engaging in webinars, adding users, or completing surveys.

Invest in People

People are at the core of everything your business does and are your most valuable asset. Make sure your team has the knowledge they need. It’s critical that your employees can not only do the job they were hired for on a functional level, but that you allow them to continue to develop skill sets that they need to grow and evolve in their career through ongoing training in topics they’re passionate about.

Big Impact, Little Resources: How to Maximize Your Video Marketing Strategy

Creating a solid video marketing strategy for your business can seem daunting and costly. The truth is, creating effective marketing videos doesn’t have to be all that scary, and often marketers overestimate the effort that needs to go into it.

The first thing to know is that you can’t ignore video usage. If you’re avoiding using video content on your site, you’re at a huge disadvantage. Americans are consuming video content like never before, and it’s only trending up. They say people consume almost 6 hours a day while reading stays under 30 minutes.

Some common myths keep marketers from producing video content:

Myth #1: Video quality and format must be consistent across your channels. The truth is that both low and high production videos have a place, and both are important.
Myth #2: Videos can just “go viral.” Although videos are more likely to go viral than text content, they need a solid distribution plan.
Myth #3: Videos have high cost and no ROI. Videos can be extremely simple as long as they remain authentic. They can be super targeted for a single audience or goal and can engage your audience quickly.
Myth #4: Video is just “capturing for posterity.” Videos can capture your audience extremely intensely; however, they tend not to be evergreen. They engage your audience in the moment.

There are many uses for video in a marketing strategy, like product videos, customer support, and testimonials. However, they can be used effectively for the unexpected like demonstrations, employee or executive profiles, and even user-generated content. Different flavors of content can coexist.

Creating and Delivering Compelling Presentations Online

Presented by: Richard Goring, Director, and Hannah Harper, Principal Consultant, BrightCarbon

With remote working at an all-time high, virtual presentations are the norm. The shifting landscape for remote communication will definitely be changed forever. So what are the challenges that we’re facing when it comes to our presentations?

Presentations are all about keeping the audience engaged. When they’re in person, you have the benefit of a live audience that can’t normally leave, doesn’t generally have multiple distractions, can participate in the presentation through questions, laughter, or applause, and the presenter has the benefit of being in the same field of view as the slides.

Online presentations, however, suffer from a tremendous amount of distractions and disadvantages. When a screen is being shared, your audience is forced to pay attention to the slide or the presenter’s face—not both. It’s almost impossible for the presenter to interact with the audience or read the room. Audience members are extremely distracted because they’re virtually hidden and have computers, phones, and other devices constantly in front of them. And then, of course, there are the technical issues like audience members forgetting to mute themselves.

So what do you do to make your presentations successful? You eliminate distractions and make your content more compelling.

Ways to eliminate distractions:

Eliminate bandwidth issues. Test your connection speed and make sure, as the presenter, that you have at least a 2.5 Mbit upload speed.
Use a room that isn’t too big or too small. Eliminate echo by having natural sound deadeners like furniture and curtains.
Have a dedicated microphone instead of just using your native laptop microphone.
Turn off your phone.
Make sure that your audience is muted unless you specifically ask them for a question. Also, if you mute yourself, don’t forget to turn it back on before you talk.
As the presenter, make sure you’re looking at the screen with your webcam and always try to be front-lit so you don’t hide in the shadows.

Ways to make your content more compelling:

Use as many visuals as possible. Visuals communicate ideas much quicker, and your audience can listen to you while looking at images much better than if they’re trying to read.
Use animation if you can. Try using morph transitions with Powerpoint for some slick animation. Also, there’s a really cool feature that allows you to use thumbnails for a table of contents and click through to different sections.
Try turning off your webcam during the slide portion of the presentation. Only use your webcam for introductions or answering questions. Your face can be distracting. It will also help mask if you’re reading from notes or a script.
Break up your content into small pieces from 5-8 minutes and then engage the audience with a poll or asking them questions. Alternatively, you can use a co-presenter for some quick banter.

10 Scientific Secrets That Make Your Content Impossible to Ignore

Presented by: Nancy Harhut, Chief Creative Officer, HBT Marketing

Nancy started her session by getting straight to the point: when people encounter marketing content, we aren’t always making rational, conscious decisions. We’re relying on automatic, instinctive responses that are hard-wired into our brains. These decision-making “shortcuts” can create quite the challenge for a marketer, whose goal is to create attention-getting, engaging content.

So as marketers, how do we circumvent these automatic responses to marketing, and deliver captivating content? According to Nancy, applying these 10 tactics will ensure content that cannot be ignored.

Choose eye-magnet words. We may write in a linear fashion, but that’s not how people read. Attract the eye of the skimmer with words like “new,” “free,” “you,” and “sneak peek.”
Use eye-catching images. Pictures were around long before the written word was. That’s why people prefer pictures to words, especially human faces that they can relate to.
Leverage urgency and exclusivity. Create demand to create desire. Think limited time offers and private memberships. If something has limited availability or is exclusive, we want it more.
Spark memories. Availability bias: people will determine the likelihood of needing something based on how easily they can recall a relevant example. Make your customers recall a time when they would have really benefited from your product or service.
Help people draw their own conclusions. Tell a story, but let your customer relate it to them. And, believe it or not, if a phrase rhymes, it works even more!
Let your customers speak for you. Trust is earned, and people will trust other people over a brand. Use social proof like testimonials and quotes.
Make savings look big and prices look small. The same part of your brain that works when you stub your toe is activated when you have to spend money. Use copy that lessens the blow.
Avoiding pain beats achieving gain. People are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss than to achieve the pleasure of gain. Tap into it with “don’t miss” CTAs and content that addresses “biggest mistakes and how to avoid them.”
Create a ripple effect. Lead up to your goal conversions. Get your customer to say “yes” to something small (like following you on social media) and build on that. Once they agree to something once, more “yeses” are likely to follow.
Bring in the experts. We are taught to respect and trust authority. Have experts promote your product or service. And, establish your own brand as an authority with things like checklists and “ultimate guides.”

B2B Trends for the Contrarian Marketer: Why to Bet Your Business on Trends That Don’t Change

Presented by: Ty Heath and Jon Lombardo, Global Leads for The B2B Institute @ LinkedIn

It’s true; most marketers are constantly wondering, “What is everyone else doing?” But according to Ty and Jon, the question we should be asking ourselves is, “What is nobody doing?”

Enter contrarian marketing. This approach focuses on ideas that oppose popular opinion, and likely go against current practice, but have been proven successful. And when you have a contrarian idea that has been proven right, you have a durable advantage. You can then build a business strategy around things that are stable in time.

Over the past five years, the B2B Institute has spent time identifying contrarian B2B marketing trends that make a difference. In this session, Ty and Jon shared the top three that they felt were the most durable and contrarian.

The War On Brand

There are two types of marketing: short-term (lead generation) and long-term (branding). We need both, and the key is finding the right balance between the two.

Short-term marketing increases sales, but the effects decay quickly. Building your brand creates value that new customer activation cannot. Brand marketing impacts long-term sales, pricing power, talent acquisition, and more. Ty cited one example of a B2B customer who ran an acquisition-only campaign that generated a 0.2% conversion rate. But when they combined sales activation and brand marketing, their conversions jumped 6Xm to 1.2%.

Approach your marketing strategy with both in mind; acquire new customers with short-term sales while simultaneously marketing your brand to impact future sales; target those out-of-market prospects so they eventually become in-market customers.

Blockbuster Marketing

If marketers want to monetize creativity, study the company that does it best: Disney, The Walt Disney Company has four creative principles we can apply to any content marketing strategy.

Big Bets. Digital marketing focuses on a “test and learn” approach, but we’re usually testing a series of small, safe bets. Big bets are risky, but they can deliver big returns.
Surprising Familiarity. Sequels and prequels make the most money. Old (good) ideas have a lot of equity built up in them. Capitalize on it!
Consistent Distinctiveness. Look like yourself, and no one else. Make sure there’s consistency in the look and feel of your content.
Total Merchandising. Take a single (again, good) idea, create different iterations, and use it across different channels.

The Death of Hyper Targeting

We’ve spent the last decade narrowly targeting tiny audiences. Ty and Jon maintain that we’ll spend the next decade broadly targeting big audiences. Account-based marketing is still relevant and will continue to work for businesses with a proven track record, a tight targeted market, and the resources to invest in ABM. However, in many cases, we’ve gone TOO hyper.

Instead, we need to focus on “relevant reach” for B2B. This allows us to capture both current and future buyers. Reach = growth. They made the case for broader targeting by identifying four common misconceptions.

We have good data. But in reality, most third-party data is inaccurate.
We have stable buying committees. But decision-makers change. Target the up-and-comers as well.
We know the future. But really, optimizations beat predictions.
Efficiencies. But the math rarely adds up.

Until Next Year

INBOUND 2020 has given us a ton of great information, tips and tricks, and insights on current and future digital marketing trends. We’re excited to apply what we’ve learned to what we do at Portent, and we’re already counting down to INBOUND 2021!

The post Our Favorite INBOUND 2020 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

Field Guide to Reporting on Core Web Vitals: Part 2

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 14:00:10 GMT

Welcome to the second installment of the Field Guide to Reporting on Web Vitals! In Part 1, we covered:

What Core Web Vitals are
Why they matter
What tools you can use to measure them

In this post, we’ll outline two out-of-the-box solutions to integrate Core Web Vitals into your reporting. To illustrate this solution, we’ll use Google Data Studio (the Portent dashboarding tool of choice).

How to Report on Core Web Vitals in Google Data Studio

We recommend two methods of pulling Core Web Vitals data into GDS to create a comprehensive and automated web vitals report: the Chrome UX GDS connector and PageSpeed Insights.

Chrome UX Reports GDS Connector

The Chrome UX Report GDS connector is a free, open-source connector. The Chrome UX report (aka CrUX) “provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.”

With this connector, we get access to:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
First Contentful Paint (FCP)

To use this connector, go to Data Studio and select “Create” at the top lefthand side, and then “Data source.”

Search for “Chrome UX Report” and it will appear at the bottom. Click into the connector.

Enter the origin URL of choice, and then click “Connect.”

This connector only accepts origin URLs like “https://www.portent.com,” and does not accept full URLs, such as “https://www.portent.com/blog.” For additional information on how to input URLs, Google has provided an excellent resource for details about the Chrome UX connector.

After you create the data source, it’s ready to use and configure in Google Data Studio.

Here is a sample slide of how we recommend visualizing and reporting on the Core Web Vitals metrics, with five reporting elements called out.

This sample slide focuses on Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The five reporting elements are what help bring context to understanding CLS, and how it is trending on our website over time:

Last Month. This is a sideways 100% stacked bar chart that displays “Poor CLS,” “Needs Improvement CLS,” and “Good CLS.” I’ve set the date range to “Last Month,” and included each metric’s percentages for clarity. You can also mouse over each individual section to get a pop-out box of the metric name and result.I’ve also color-matched these to the Search Console report, for visual continuity.
Change Over Time. This is a 100% stacked column chart, set back as far as we have available data for the metric. This timeframe will vary from metric to metric (for example, the Largest Contentful Paint metric only goes back as far as September 2019.) The data reads from left to right, with left being the earliest data available, and right being the most recent. This chart allows you to see where improvements are being made and how. The metrics here are also “Poor CLS,” “Needs Improvement CLS,” and “Good CLS.”
Device Type. While seeing Core Web Vitals as a whole is useful, it’s also critical to understand that these metrics may behave very differently on desktop, mobile, and tablets, and therefore score differently. Having a “Device” filter allows you to see where these metrics are most impacted. The “Last Month” and “Change Over Time” charts are 100% stacked charts so that they are responsive to this filter.
“Good” CLS and “Poor” CLS compared YoY. We picked the “Good” and “Poor” metrics to highlight in the scorecard, with “Last Month” as the date range, and YoY comparison data underneath. This will tell you at a glance how your website ranks and how the metric has changed compared to the previous year.
Definitions. Core Web Vitals each measure a specific aspect of a user’s experience with a web page. We’ve used this section to reiterate what that measurement is, and what is considered “Good,” “Needs Improvement,” and “Poor” as it relates to each metric.

This format is repeatable for all three Core Web Vitals metrics, and First Contentful Paint. These are the first four pages of the report:

PageSpeed Insights via the URL Embed Tool

The second data source we recommend using in this web vitals report is PageSpeed Insights. To achieve this, we have embedded PageSpeed Insights measuring “Portent.com” in the final page of our GDS report:

To embed this report in GDS, click on “Insert” in the top navigation bar, and scroll down to “URL Embed.” Draw a box on the GDS slide where you want PageSpeed Insights to appear. In our report, we’ve dedicated most of the slide to the embed box for maximum visibility and ease of use.

After placing the box, you can define the URL of the embed. Simply replace the below URL with the URL you want to measure:

“https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=portent.com”

Embedding a URL into GDS functions as if you’re on the PageSpeed Insights page, except that it’s accessible in your GDS report, supplementing the Chrome UX Web Vitals data.

While the previous month’s Chrome UX data is available beginning the second Tuesday of the month, PageSpeed Insights are available to you all the time. It gives you an instant pulse check on all metrics and how they measure in real-time.

This report aggregates mobile and desktop separately, so remember to toggle between the two and see how they compare. This report defaults to mobile first, so you’ll need to toggle to see desktop:

PageSpeed Insights also outlines specific opportunities and diagnostics to give you tangible actions to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.

Opportunities to improve Web Vitals scores

Additional page diagnostics

Benefits of Each Data Source

Using these out-of-the-box solutions, you have access to Core Web Vitals in your reporting in an automated and refreshable format.

The benefit of the Chrome UX report is being able to see trends in Web Vitals and change over time. PageSpeed Insights provides you with real-time measurement of your website and tangible action items to improve your Web Vitals scores.

Ultimately, using both sources in tandem and building a Core Web Vitals dashboard will help you get a better baseline understanding of which metrics you may need to improve, thus positioning your website for a smooth transition when Core Web Vitals become a ranking factor in the Google SERPs.

The post Field Guide to Reporting on Core Web Vitals: Part 2 appeared first on Portent.

Website Viewing Modes: Should You Respect Your Users’ Dark Intentions?

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 14:00:11 GMT

I want to say upfront that this post is ultimately an opinion piece about the role of supporting dark mode on a website, with a little bit of testing data thrown in. It’s likely you will not walk away with a firm “yes” or “no” about implementing one versus the other. As I—and the other people that assisted me on this post discovered—this topic is, excuse me, not as black and white as we assumed. There are many more angles to this discussion to be had.

That said, let’s talk about me.

I look at some form of a screen approximately 75% of my day (generous statistic), so when the dark mode craze began, I was on board. Any device that would allow it was immediately switched to dark mode. Dark mode has a direct relation to my day-to-day comfort, which makes me an advocate for it.

Light vs. Dark Is a Comfort Setting

Choosing between dark and light mode on your devices is not a required thing; overall, light mode is the default. Most people could not make the change and never notice. Regardless of the setting, apps will continue to function. Features will still be available. Life goes on.

And while I certainly accept that dark or light mode can be a style choice instead of (or in addition to) comfort, this time, I’m focusing on the comfort aspect.

One night I was lying in bed, and suddenly, I wanted to look up how to do a Norwegian purl stitch for a sweater I was working on. In the darkness, I picked up my phone and opened a browser to Google. I was immediately blinded by the sheer white luminance of the internet. As I gazed at the information-gobbling dreadnaut, my corneas were seared; I saw a vengeful god. I came up with countless other melodramatic statements to write in this post… what actually happened is that it made my eyes hurt. I quickly closed the app and decided to learn my stitch later.

I did lay in bed afterward, examining my response. Up until that point, bright white web pages were never a problem. The concept of being blasted by pure white light from your phone is not new; it was a pretty prevalent meme at one point. The problem is that while the Safari app respects my choice for darker interfaces, so much of what the app accesses is indifferent to my choices. The overwhelming sea of white that Google served up was so noticeable because my choice is respected almost everywhere else I touch within my phone. This event had a lasting effect on how I interact with the web at night. I now associate looking at web pages in dark surroundings with discomfort.

Acknowledging Choice

Ok, I had a good whine, but what does this mean for you or anyone else? I ejected on step one of a journey because of the sudden shift. No search took place through Google, and some knitting blog or knitting channel on YouTube didn’t get my attention. That blog post could have had one of your company’s ads on it. You could be targeting continental knitters on YouTube. It could have even been content created by you. I didn’t make it there because my choice was not acknowledged.

As of January 2020, every current browser of note (sorry IE11, we couldn’t fax your invite) can use the CSS media feature “prefers-color-scheme.” This feature responds to two values: light or dark. Since this is a media feature using the function matchMedia in JavaScript, it is possible to test against a user’s preferred scheme in scripts.

It is possible to acknowledge this choice for our users. The opportunity to blend into their patterns is available, and it is time to use it.

The Test

Back to the story: I couldn’t let the Norwegian purl incident go. I wanted at least some small amount of information, so here within the posts on Portent.com, I implemented a simple dark color scheme with a small test behind it. Using a simple matchMedia test in JavaScript, we tracked how many users preferred light vs. dark between May 1st, 2020 and July 31st, 2020.

For this first run, we wanted to answer two questions: “How many of our users prefer light over dark mode?” and additionally, “Does a dark mode user make it to the end of a blog post more than a light mode user?” The second question is admittedly a little silly. However, I felt it worth asking since dark mode is the opt-in side of the equation. If we accommodate a user that we assume made a specific choice, are they more engaged than someone who sits within the default range?

The answer to that second question, based on our data: No. engagement was equal. Users who prefer dark schemes completed posts 45.7% of the time, and users who prefer light came in at 45.5%. No meaningful difference there. After we concluded our tests, I found myself displeased with the question and not the data. Seeing near even scores for post completion could suggest that by respecting choice, we created an equally usable experience for either user type. However, the question also suggests that one group is more “comfortable” and therefore reads more, which cannot be verified here. More testing is required.

As for the amount of light mode page views compared to dark mode, users that prefer a light color scheme out-size dark mode users three to one (71,297 light to 15,997 dark). Completion rates are nearly even, but clearly, our dark mode audience is the smaller group. This information is useful. While I have a personal interest in honing an enjoyable dark mode experience for our readers, the ratio makes this a low priority on our roadmap at this time.

The Gray

Our test data includes a small gray area that I want to mention: a third value labeled “no preference.” Overall, we can assume that users with no preference are all light mode users, since light is the default setting. In our test, if our query did not return strictly light or dark, we labeled it “no preference.” The reason for tracking this third value is to see how many of our visitors could not signal their preference to us. Around 8,000 visits were flagged for no preference. The results were mostly crawlers, unrecognized browser agents, and legacy browser users.

Portent’s legacy browser traffic is low, around 1,200 of the no preference views that we could consider valid legacy browser users. Legacy browser users can’t tell you what they want, so technically, they are light mode users.

In the early days of prefers-color-scheme, a “no preference” value could have been returned, but that value has since been deprecated. Currently, browsers that support prefers-color-scheme will return a “light” label for every scenario that is not “dark.” Light is the default.

Oh Right, the Opinion

After being forced to hiss at my phone and scurry back into the darkness, I was looking to run an experiment that would give me results to slam down on some desk and proclaim, “We NEED to design and implement a dark color scheme.” I won’t say I got that. Light users outnumber dark three to one, which does not make a high priority case for the effort required for a dark version of Portent.com.

Ah but, I said high priority. I do think this still is a priority; these viewing modes will be with us for a while. Possibly similar to responsive design, as more users become aware of their choice they will come to expect apps and websites to accommodate them. Good design is near—if not completely—invisible. Users are making choices around the general shades that make using technology comfortable for them. Native applications are already expected to offer light and dark presentations. It is only a matter of time before sites and web applications are expected to do the same.

The post Website Viewing Modes: Should You Respect Your Users’ Dark Intentions? appeared first on Portent.

Portent’s Title Generator Tool Got an Upgrade!

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 14:00:01 GMT

Have you ever been tasked with creating a piece of content, but you can’t seem to get started?

Has the topic you’re writing about been covered a thousand times before, so you are looking for a unique angle or perspective?

Have you been staring at your screen for the last hour trying to come up with a catchy title for your blog post about socks?

A few years ago, Portent developed our Content Idea Generator to solve all of these problems and more. Simply type in your subject, and let the tool work its magic. You’ll receive (mostly) endless titles and advice for blog, podcast, or video ideas, to get the creativity flowing and take your content to the next level.

I’m happy to announce that the tool has recently received an upgrade. In addition to a fresh new look, we’ve added some new features, including:

Updated titles and content advice
The ability to save the titles you like the most for quick reference
A deep list of resources to take your content ideas even further

What are you waiting for? Check it out!

The post Portent’s Title Generator Tool Got an Upgrade! appeared first on Portent.

What Are Google Discovery Ads, and Do They Work?

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 14:00:09 GMT

Paid SEM advertisers have often resorted to Google’s Display Network for awareness campaigns designed to grow the top of the funnel. The problem many advertisers run into when doing this is that the quality of traffic can be questionable at best and dismal at worst. Some of this is to be expected when expanding advertising outside of search; you’re less likely to show an ad to someone lower down the funnel with less reliable intent signals than a search query. Your site usage metrics aren’t going to be as good as they are in your paid search campaigns. However, it can be deflating to an advertiser to browse through their display placement report and see a majority of the domains and mobile apps showing up to be irrelevant and spammy-looking.

Realizing this, Google sought a solution that would allow advertisers to use more robust, visually appealing display ad units and keep them on properties that were more likely to attract a higher-quality, or at least more reliable, user. In doing so, Google created campaigns for a new ad unit they called Discovery ads. These ad units were designed to fit a mobile-friendly environment and appear only on three apps owned by Google: Gmail, YouTube, and the Google app.

Image courtesy of Google

How Discovery Ads Work

Discovery ads work similar to responsive display ads in that you, as the advertiser, provide Google with a series of images (including your company logo), headlines, and description lines that Google then automatically rotates through to find the best-performing combinations. The difference with Discovery ads is that these ad units are designed specifically for three Google-owned mobile apps and tailored to be aesthetically congruent with them. For example, Google has more stringent image guidelines for Discovery ads meant to encourage a higher-quality standard of lifestyle and product images.

Once an ad unit is created, you can target it to your specified audiences. These audiences can be as broad and as simple as an interest target or an in-market segment Google provides for you. They can also be more complex or specific such as a remarketing list or a custom intent audience. You then finalize your other settings as you would any other campaign (location, ad schedule, etc.) and select an automated bidding strategy to use. Discovery campaigns allow you to use a pay-per-conversion model if your account has the required conversion data, which is another way to help ensure you don’t overspend on these ads in the long term.

Results You Can Expect

With every instance a Discovery campaign runs, results will be unique to any given account. However, there are three things we’ve learned to expect:

While Google does not explicitly divulge metrics by app, you can assume an overwhelming majority of impressions and clicks from these ads will come from the Gmail app.
Once a user clicks through these ads, on-site usage metrics are typically comparable or better-than-average versus other incoming traffic from display channels.
Using a remarketing list as your audience will typically give you the best chance at producing (relatively) high conversion metrics.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking to grow the top of the funnel through display advertising and have been discouraged from previous efforts using standard display ad units or tactics, give Google Discovery ads a try. They’re not going to magically solve all of your outbound marketing needs, but they’ve proven to us they can be an effective high-funnel tactic that helps drive your desired KPI results beyond just going after more cheap traffic.

The post What Are Google Discovery Ads, and Do They Work? appeared first on Portent.

How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 14:02:54 GMT

If you’re signing on with an agency, you’re hopefully entering the engagement with some kind of goal already in mind.

More traffic, more revenue, and lower cost are common places where our discovery calls begin. That’s not a bad start. But setting a meaningful goal or set of goals for an engagement is essential for both the agency being contracted and the brand hiring the agency.

When goal-setting goes right, both parties have a north star to point to as they work to set and meet expectations. When that central point of focus is absent or misaligned, you can bet that one side of the relationship will be left unfulfilled.

Both the agency and the brand must commit to meaningful goal setting for their work together. This should happen before any work begins and should be continuously refined over the entire course of a brand-agency engagement.

Here’s how to get it right.

Identify the Most Important Outcome

Marketing outcomes typically fall into three buckets:

Volume-based (like site visitors or revenue changes)
Efficiency-based (like conversation rate or cost per acquisition changes)
Functionality-based (think site migrations or usability-focused work)

Identify the single most important outcome as it relates to your engagement. The desired outcome must be relevant, realistic, and measurable. Missing any one of those pieces will strain both the work and the relationship.

The desired outcome identified must be relevant to the work scoped; alignment there is crucial. Can the work scoped actually drive the desired outcome? If the answer is ‘no,’ adjust the work scoped or your desired outcome.

When performance, budget, and turnaround time expectations don’t align, realistic outcomes slip away. It’s on both the brand and the agency to meet in the middle to align on what’s realistic. Agencies: if what you’re signing up for isn’t realistic, don’t take on the work. Stepping away or rescoping will save you a ton of time and energy.

After identifying a relevant and realistic outcome, ensure that you can measure progress accurately. Measurement difficulty varies based on the work. It can be as simple as following a linear timetable, or it can be as intricate as building proper attribution for online and offline consumers across a variety of marketing channels and devices. Either way, make sure there is a proper plan to collect and interpret data.

Creating relevant, realistic, and measurable projections will start to mold a solid top-level outcome, but setting a relative performance component clarifies the goal further. Couple your desired result with a relative parameter like:

Period over period time comparisons (YoY, QoQ, MoM)
Static checkpoints
Industry benchmarks

When the desired outcome is paired with a relative parameter, you’ve got a clear endpoint to carry the working relationship forward.

Identifying a core outcome isn’t a major feat to write home about, but we often see marketers on both the brand and agency side set and agree to irrelevant, unachievable, and unmeasurable goals. Those missteps end in relationship and engagement turmoil.

Relevant, realistic, and measurable is the key to all of it. If you can’t come to an agreement here, the relationship doesn’t stand a chance.

Identify Secondary Metrics

Secondary metrics act as indicators towards your top-level outcome.

Looking higher in the marketing funnel or towards acquisition and behavior results, as primary desired outcomes tend to be conversion-based, is a good place to find secondary metrics. Timelines as milestones serve as good checkpoints for project-based linear work.

These are the trigger points where marketers can see how their smaller wins level up to impact the larger picture. Similar to your core desired outcome, they must be relevant, realistic, and measurable.

Once you’ve set those metrics for success, think about how to build effective dashboards to tell the story.

Set a Timeline

Assign a timeline to your top-level desired outcome. Just like the outcome identified, your timeline needs to be relevant, realistic, and measurable.

The relevance and measurability is pretty straightforward here, but the timeline for the work needs to be realistic. And there must be alignment between the agency and brand on what’s realistic. Budget and turnaround times are the usual culprits that impinge on realistic expectations.

Relationships fail when partners on either end of the engagement aren’t honest about getting the work done on a realistic timeline. For each party to get the most from each other, timelines should be mutually agreed to, not dictated by a singular party.

Get Buy-in From the Top

At this point, the brand-agency partnership should be aligned with a nice, neat, top-level desired outcome, a handful of secondary checkpoints, a clear tracking plan, and a timeline for the outcome to be achieved.

It always works nicely and neatly like that, right?

Getting buy-in from top-level decision-makers is the last step before your work should kick-off. And that buy-in should come from leaders on both the agency and brand side. Priorities will always shift during the course of an engagement. But if true buy-in comes from an executive level, you’ll start your engagement in a better place.

Get sign-off on your desired outcome, timeline, and budget before any work begins.

Once that’s done, it’s time to jump in.

Report and Course-Correct

Once you’re into the engagement, all work should tie back to the primary and secondary desired outcomes and metrics.

Work roadmaps, deliverables, meetings, and reports should all focus on how the work influences the desired outcomes. When priorities shift, course-correct to what builds your outcome most effectively.

Brands and agencies working together can often lose sight of the outcome they set off to reach. Identifying that the work is shifting away from the desired outcome is crucial. When it does, make sure to go back to the top to clarify or set a new course if needed.

Over the course of an engagement, factors always change. Budgets, technology for measurement, timelines, and buy-in constantly push and pull on each other. Through that, those leading the brand and agency engagement have to stay aligned on a clear outcome. When that happens, strong brand-agency engagements can establish meaningful marketing goals, refine strategy into actionable tactics, maintain the agility to course-correct, and set themselves up in the best way to hit desired outcomes.

Up next: How Clients Can Hold Their Agencies Accountable.

The post How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals appeared first on Portent.

Building Great Brand-Agency Relationships

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 14:00:12 GMT

Brand-agency relationships thrive when both parties are ready to push each other towards a mutually agreed-upon outcome.

When built well, these relationships can flourish into truly meaningful work that both the brand and the agency are proud of.

Easy in principle. Hard to do in practice.

If you’ve been on the agency or brand side for any notable amount of time, you probably have a story about relationships eroding and unraveling quickly. Objectives get murky or completely lost. The agency can’t follow through or meet the expectations they sold their capabilities on. The client can’t follow through or meet the expectations they agreed to when the work began. Outside factors like current events, competitors, and technology dictate changes that neither party could foresee.

At Portent, when we dissect our strongest client engagements, we find a handful of shared principles that seem to be ever-present. When we look back at relationships that went sour (yes, it happens here too from time to time), we find that those same cornerstones are waning or absent.

Successful brand-agency engagements happen when:

Both parties share a mutually agreed-upon desired outcome
The client can hold the agency accountable to the work sold
The agency can hold the client accountable to the work dependencies

I’ll detail how to approach all three of these principles, so whether you are on the agency or brand side, you’ll be armed with how to set yourself up for success in your next engagement.

Up next: How to Set and Maintain Meaningful Marketing Goals.

The post Building Great Brand-Agency Relationships appeared first on Portent.

Study: How Often Google Ignores Our Meta Descriptions

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:00:38 GMT

Since search engines started using meta descriptions in their search result snippets, they’ve always had the challenge of deciding what to display when the meta description won’t work or isn’t relevant. Usually, a search engine will take an excerpt from the page when a meta description tag isn’t viable. To prevent search engines from taking bizarre excerpts from pages to make a snippet, SEO practitioners have put great attention into making sure meta descriptions are present, unique, and descriptive.

This worked great for a while. An SEO could rely on the search engines to use the meta descriptions we wrote the majority of the time, but that has been changing. In the last few years, Google has been displaying content excerpts in the snippet over meta descriptions more and more. And this is distressing for SEOs because we spend a lot of time making sure our meta descriptions are good!

So a question arises: how often does Google ignore our meta descriptions? How often is Google displaying some other text in their SERP and ignoring our hard work? Recently, Ahrefs published some original research on the topic and found that Google disregards a page’s meta description 63% of the time for pages in the top 10 results.

I thought that figure was pretty high. I believe it, but I don’t want to believe it. So, to corroborate Ahref’s research, I pitched an idea to Matthew Henry, our SEO Fellow and technical wizard: let’s do our own version of this research and see if we get a similar result. If Google is fairly consistent and both Ahrefs and we have a comparable sample of keywords, we should get roughly the same results. Isn’t replicating research the heart of the scientific method?

Methodology

Before we get into the results, we need to talk about where we got our data. We used a list of 30,000 keywords taken from our existing and previous clients with brand terms filtered out. We entered the keywords into STAT and pulled rankings for both desktop and mobile search results. Using STAT’s full HTML SERP export, Matthew scraped the display snippet descriptions from Google’s HTML after laboriously parsing Google’s wonky HTML structure.

Matthew then wrote a custom scraping script to go through each search result URL and find the first listed meta description tag. The SERP descriptions and the meta description tags were added to an SQL database and checked to see if the text Google displayed was included in the meta description tag. If the SERP snippet text wasn’t included in the meta description text, we counted it as a case of Google ignoring the meta description.

We didn’t render JavaScript, and we didn’t try to bypass clever firewalls. If we couldn’t retrieve a page or a meta description, we didn’t include it in the final data.

Results

Below are our research results, which set out to analyze both desktop and mobile meta description rewrite rates based on the following conditions:

First-page ranking
Search volume
Query length

We also took the opportunity to use this data to evaluate meta description display lengths and rewritten snippet display lengths.

First Page Rewrite Rate

We found the rewrite rate for meta descriptions on the first page to be 71% in mobile search results and 68% on desktop. In other words, we should expect Google to use our meta description tag for the snippet around 30% of the time when we rank on the first page.

This rewrite rate is a little higher than Ahref’s number (63%), and that’s not due to featured snippets being included in these figures; we took them out. This difference between our overall rewrite rates could be explained by us including more keywords that are rewritten more often. There were some dimensions with high variance in the rewrite rate, and we could have selected for those unknowingly.

The rewrite rate isn’t uniform by position, though. Here’s the rewrite rate by position for the first three pages of results.

The data includes featured snippets in the first position, so that explains the spike there. But do notice the “bump” from positions 4 to 6. Why would Google rewrite meta descriptions in those positions more than others?

I speculate that since positions 1-3 get the most click-through rate, Google might be trying to boost the relevance for 4-6 to get more clicks before users leave the page or search for something else.

The other interesting thing in this data is how the rewrite rate tends to increase with position. I’ve noticed that the results on pages 2 and 3 aren’t the most relevant query, so maybe Google is trying to pull a more relevant excerpt from the page. I think that’s plausible because the results on pages 2 and 3 might not even be targeting my query.

Rewrite Rate by Search Volume

I expected a more uniform rewrite rate over our keyword set when we bucketed them by search volume, but there is a clear trend with mobile having a higher rewrite rate.

I’m fairly confident of the relationship between search volume and rewrite rate: the higher the search volume of the keyword, the less likely Google is to rewrite the meta description. It’s not a linear relationship, though; our x-axis is log scale here.

So why do we see this relationship? I think it’s because SEOs tend to focus on writing meta descriptions for head terms more than the long-tail. If you’re ranking on the first page for a keyword with 1 million searches per month, you are likely aware of that and put significant effort into your meta description. You’re probably not hyper-focusing on the 10 searches per month terms, and they probably vary too much to even target with any one description.

What about query length? Would we also see a similar trend for queries with more characters since they tend to be long-tail queries?

Rewrite Rate by Query Length

Just like search volume, long-tail queries tend to have search result snippets that don’t use the page’s meta description.

Desktop and mobile results are very similar, with mobile having a slightly higher rate of Google ignoring the meta description. We didn’t have many queries in our data set with more than 45 characters, so we don’t know much past that.

Meta Description by Display Length

As long as we had scraped search results, we thought it would be nice to have recent numbers on meta description display limits. Even though meta description display space is limited by pixel width, targeting an ideal pixel width is difficult with meta descriptions because there is often a gap of unusable space at the end of the first row. This makes character counts easier to work with and communicate.

There are a few things going on with displayable meta description length. On desktop, displayed characters peak at 156 and then rapidly decline after 165, but also notice the other “bump” that peaks at 142 characters. There’s a similar bump on mobile too. I think that’s due to pages with a date in the snippet shortening the meta description able to be displayed.

The spike at 87 characters is caused by Synonym.com using the same meta description on every page. They must be over-represented in our keywords for them to have such a large effect.

Mobile results show a similar pattern as desktop with the two display limits that depend on the publication date’s presence in the snippet. Luckily, we’ve segmented our data by whether the snippet uses the date to see if the snippet date is causing a difference in meta description display length.

Meta Description Length With Publish Dates

Here, we’ve separated the desktop results where the meta descriptions that have the publishing date rich snippet feature from those that don’t. Side by side, there is a clear difference between the two, with fewer displayable characters when the publish date is in the snippet.

Without a date present, fully-displayable meta descriptions are going to be between 150 and 160 characters. If you’re feeling lucky, you might get away with 165 characters.

If dates are robbing us of some displayable space, what length should we aim for with pages that have dates listed, like blog posts? This chart suggests 138 to 148 characters is a safe target if we want a fully-displayable meta description on desktop with a date in the snippet.

The difference between search results with snippet dates and without on mobile is a little different than on desktop. If there is a date feature in the snippet, we can get just as many characters to display, but we’re much less likely to.

Our mobile search results show that we have less room to work with for meta descriptions than on desktop. Displayable characters for snippets without a date rich snippet feature peak at 118, and then rapidly drop off after 121. This means that a safe target character count for mobile results without a date is under around 120. That’s about 25% fewer characters than the non-date target amount for desktop. That’s significantly less room to work with!

Mobile snippets with the publish date featured snippet look a little weird. It appears that the most common snippets are going to display between at most 95 to 105 characters, but there is a smaller possibility Google will show between 112 and 126 characters. Maybe Google is allowing some mobile snippets another line of text when the date is present? Either way, content with a publish date on the page, like blog posts, don’t have a lot of guaranteed display space.

Rewritten Snippet Display Length

So how much space does Google give themselves to write a snippet description? It turns out it’s a little bit more than the space they give us.

In desktop results without the rich snippet date feature, Google’s descriptions peak at 160 characters and then rapidly decline after 167. With dates, the peak is at 147 and declines quickly after 149. Not a big difference from snippets using a meta description tag, but it would be nice if we had just as much room to write a nice description for our content.

Also, notice the frequency of snippets around 225 characters and 325 characters. Remember back in December 2017, when Google increased the meta description length to 320 characters and then rapidly changed their minds? Looks like the 320 character display limit is still there, but only for snippets Google writes.

Automated Bidding (Uses CPM)

This method uses CPM bidding and will charge you for every 1,000 impressions. In this scenario, the advertiser allows the algorithm to set bids without setting a maximum bid cost limit. Sometimes, depending on the competition, your costs can fluctuate.

Maximum CPC Bidding

This method allows advertisers to control their costs and set bid amounts to the maximum amount they are willing to spend. When selecting this method, this informs the algorithm you want to maximize click volume, and only pay when a user clicks on your ad.

Enhanced CPC Bidding

This method is only available for campaign objectives such as website visits, conversions, lead generation, or engagement. In this bidding strategy, the algorithm will deliver your ads to users who are more likely to convert based on your selected campaign objective.

Note: the only difference between maximum CPC and Enhanced CPC bidding is when choosing campaign objectives such as Website Visits, Conversions, or Lead Generation, it will optimize the objective you set for your campaigns. For example, when you set your campaign objective to Website Visits and set your bids to Enhanced CPC, the algorithm will auto-optimize your bids towards users who are more likely to click on your ad.

CPM Bidding

This method allows advertisers to control their CPM bids per 1,000 impressions, rather than having LinkedIn set your bids for you. This method is great if you want to increase product visibility and/or brand awareness with your marketing campaign.

LinkedIn Bidding Best Practices

This section will focus on tips, tricks, and when you should use each bidding strategy below. However, before we dive in, one of the key aspects of winning bid auctions is making sure that your target audience resonates with your ad creative. With that being said, a best practice is to test at least two to four ad variations (depending on your budget) to increase performance and win more auctions. Regardless of what you set your bids at, LinkedIn’s algorithm will show your highest performing ad to users. This is why it is crucial to test ad variations to avoid missed opportunities.

When to Use An Automated Bidding Strategy

A new campaign launch. If you are launching a new campaign without any historical campaign performance, Automated Bidding allows LinkedIn to bid for you according to your campaign objective and how much budget you are willing to spend based on what you set (daily, total, or lifetime).

To gain more visibility. Automated Bidding will serve ads to as many people as possible based on your forecasted audience size. Choose this method when you are looking to gain more views on your ads. As I mentioned previously, Automated Bidding charges by impressions.

Your budget is spending at least 85% daily. LinkedIn averages daily spend based on a seven-day period. With this calculation, if you’re optimizing towards an Automated Bidding method, this is a great way to determine if your budget is spending at or less than 85%.

When to Use A Cost Bidding Strategy

If you are more concerned about spending your full budget or costs, choose manual CPC/CPM bidding to control those costs.

Your audience size is less than 50K. When your campaign forecast reaches less than 50K audience members, focus on CPC or CPM bidding to control cost. When your audience size is small, costs tend to be more expensive, especially if the audience is in high demand. Therefore it is best to set a cap on bids, so your campaign costs don’t increase excessively.

Your daily budget is spending less than 85%. If you’re optimizing towards an automated bid, but your campaign is not delivering 85% of its budget, this means that the bid is not competitive enough. Based on your objective, set your bid to either Maximum CPC, Enhanced CPC, or CPM bidding to control your cost and become more competitive with your bids.

Your CPC or CPM costs are too high. If you’re using an Automated Bidding strategy and find that your costs are too high, manually setting your bids will control your costs and only drive quality traffic based on your limited budget.

To drive quality traffic. If you are more focused on driving higher-quality traffic, setting your manual CPC or CPM bids will help you control costs, and you won’t be charged any amount higher than the bid you set.

LinkedIn’s Recommended Bid

When setting cost bids for your campaigns, LinkedIn shows the recommended bid amount based on your budget and the range of bid amounts that similar advertisers are bidding on for your target audience.

If you set your bids lower than LinkedIn’s recommendation, your campaigns may underdeliver. This means that LinkedIn will show your ad to only a few members, as other advertisers will almost always outbid you. Additionally, a lower bid will mean that you will not receive enough results and data to optimize your bidding accordingly. I always suggest bidding a dollar more than the recommended bid.

In Other Words

Like advertising on any other platform, you want to choose a LinkedIn bidding method that you believe will drive better performance for your campaigns. The key to success is making sure that your bids are competitive based on the budget you set. In doing this, check your campaigns on a daily/weekly basis as costs tend to fluctuate based on the bids being placed in the auctions. Lastly, to make yourself competitive in the bid amount you set for your campaigns, remember to test ad variations, targeting the right audience, selecting the right campaign objective, and setting enough budget for your campaigns to run efficiently.

The post How to Pick the Right Bidding Strategy for Your LinkedIn Campaigns appeared first on Portent.

How to Write Meta Descriptions and Why They Matter

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:00:36 GMT

Once an author finishes a novel, the book is done, right? Wrong. Even though the bulk of the copy is complete, there are still a few additional touches before the book is finalized. In a previous post, we talked about how a title tag is similar to the cover of a book, and how it is essential for catching the user’s eye. But that is not the only variable that helps a reader choose one book over another. There is usually a block of copy on the back or inside cover that provides a short description of what’s inside. In book terms, it is called a blurb. But on the web, it’s called a meta description.

What is a Meta Description?

A meta description is a hidden bit of code that briefly summarizes the contents of a webpage. It doesn’t appear on a page itself, but shows up in front of users in the search results, underneath the title tag.

On a website, you can locate a page’s meta description by right-clicking and selecting “inspect” to view the meta description in HTML format.

Besides the brief appearance in the search results, if the meta description doesn’t show up anywhere else on the website’s page, what makes a meta description important?

Why Do Meta Descriptions Matter?

There has been a bit of controversy over whether meta descriptions do or do not affect SEO rankings. The short answer is, although title tags pull a heavyweight when it comes to ranking in Google SERPs, meta tags do not. It’s true; meta tags don’t matter to Google. However, meta tags do matter to people. Meta descriptions play a crucial role in CTR, which can help page ranking in the long run.

The title tag may make the first impression on a user, but the meta tag helps users decide which result to pursue between hundreds of similar pages. Meta descriptions tell users what a page is about, and provide a sneak peek of the content, value, and user experience.
Crafting a quality meta tag can give your visitors an accurate understanding of what to expect before visiting your page so they can choose the option that will best meet their needs.

Even if your page’s content is perfect, no one will decide to explore it if your meta tag deters them. A meta tag is a direct reflection of the customer service they will receive on your webpage. If it comes across as rude, unnatural, or unhelpful, chances are that they will assume your website will match, and choose a different option.

Meta Description Best Practices

When it comes to writing a meta description, several rules of thumb have been shown to successfully impact CTR. But at the end of the day, it is about doing what makes sense for your business, brand, goals, and users. The following best practices and examples can help you craft the best meta description for your page. The only end-all-be-all rule is the character length.

Character Length

The ideal length for a meta description is between 50-160 characters. It should be descriptive enough to highlight the main points within this character limit. The best way to check that your meta description fits within that character limit is with a SERP preview tool. This way, you can preview exactly how your meta tag will look in search results. Of course, you can go over the allotted characters, but once you hit 160, the text will be cut off and replaced with ellipses.

The two examples that follow are both results for “Portent” as a query, and both offer a definition. The only main difference between the two is that you can get the complete summary for Wiktionary, but not Wikipedia.

Although you could argue that the ellipses may make people want to read more, it will often deter people from investigating and lead them directly into a competitor’s site.

Write for People, Not Google

Now that we know Google doesn’t care about our meta descriptions, we can throw the keyword-stuffed-robotic copy and SEO rules out the window and focus on the important thing: the user.

When it comes to meta descriptions, it is essential to offer a complete and descriptive summary at first glance and welcome users into your site. It is also a chance to connect with the user on an individual level. Since the meta description is geared toward the user, don’t be afraid to make it conversational. Find ways to incorporate your brand’s personality and voice within the meta description. Here is a great example of how WIRED informs and intrigues users with their witty sense of humor within their meta description.

Make Your Meta Description Unique to Every Page

On a website, no two pages are identical, so it is important to make sure none of your meta descriptions are identical. It is best to avoid duplicate meta descriptions and write unique ones for each page to determine which page to visit.

The following image shows two of the meta descriptions for the query “Portent Seattle,” one is for the “contact” page and one for our “services” page.

Although the results are both for the same website, portent.com, the meta descriptions show you that clicking on one will lead you to a “contact us” page, where the other will educate you on the services we provide.

Ensuring each meta description is unique for each page within a site will limit the bounce rate on a page from users being misled by the meta description. Most people will hit the back button before attempting to dig around on a site to find the information they were looking for.

Make It Promotional

We now know that the meta description is valuable to the user, that it must reflect the content of a page, and be eye-catching without being spammy, all while staying at 160 characters or less. While some brands use this area to describe the content of a page, others see the meta description as real estate for promotional use. Here are a few ways to promote your content within your meta description.

Advertise

Use this space to highlight free quotes, special offers, or current promotions. Starbucks highlights the BOGO deal and provides the hours the deal is available so that all of the necessary information is in one place. Starbucks probably values a high rank and CTR, but they don’t necessarily need people to explore their website. They know that the most significant conversion is getting people in the door directly from a search.

Build Brand Awareness

Another way to use this space is to build and maintain brand awareness. Allstate uses its slogan in their meta description to connect with the user. Since the title tag explains the bulk of what the page will offer, Allstate uses their meta description to sound friendly, inviting, protected, and familiar.

Demonstrate Credibility

As you know, each brand has multiple competitors that offer similar products or services, and it can be challenging to differentiate from them in the SERPs. Geico uses its meta description to build credibility and trust.

Generate Leads

CTR is a key motive for writing a great meta description, but like Starbucks, many brands are more interested in gaining conversions than page visitors. Best Plumbing provides contact information directly in their meta tag so users can contact them without visiting the site. Oh, and they also use the promotion and credibility tactic.

Communicate Key Messages

Nordstrom could have gone with any of the above approaches for their meta description usage. They could offer their store location, contact information, or credibility statement. However, Nordstrom knows what is important to their customers, and uses their meta description to answer frequently asked questions in the retail world that often take some digging to find. Nordstrom states their free shipping and returns policy upfront in their meta description to appeal to both new and long-term customers.

Final Thoughts

Similar to picking your next book to read, it can be hard to choose which website will give you the information, value, and experience you set out to find. That’s where meta descriptions come in. And while there is no perfect way to write a meta description, and it can vary depending on each business, these examples and best practices can inspire you to craft meta descriptions that will increase traffic and convert users.

Key Takeaways:

Be descriptive
Use your meta description to promote your content
Make the most out of your allotted characters
Write for people, not Google

The post How to Write Meta Descriptions and Why They Matter appeared first on Portent.

How to Configure Goals in Google Analytics

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 14:00:56 GMT

Configuring goals in Google Analytics is the easiest way to get the most out of your reports, due to the automatic integration of conversion metrics throughout the rest of the platform. Once you’ve configured goals, you enable most of the reports under “Goals” and gain visibility into attribution under the “Multi-Channel Funnels” reports. You’re also able to quickly modify most session-level reports to drill down into their effectiveness by each individual goal.

There’s a limit of 20 goals per view, regardless of whether you’re using the free version or GA360. Considering this goal limit and its integration across reports, you’ll want to be deliberate with what you count as a goal.

When to Track On-Site Actions as Events Versus Goals in GA

Typically, it’s most useful to track indicative actions as events (ex. downloading a PDF) and your primary conversions (ex. submitting a contact form) as goals.

Events don’t always need to be related to a conversion action on your site, but they would be most helpful if they answer questions or identify commonalities towards certain objectives. For example, tracking which of your brand’s videos your users are viewing as events might allow you to identify a video that’s watched significantly more often by users who convert.

However, an action should be configured as a goal if any of these are true:

It’s the final action on the site (ex. purchase, form submission, phone call, etc.).
It’d be helpful to be able to view its conversion rate easily.
It’d be useful to easily view its conversions spliced by another dimension, such as source, device type, or city.

Another way to decide whether to create a goal for an action is to differentiate between micro and macro conversions. A micro conversion can be a smaller action that’s typically taken on the path to your final converting action—something like adding a product to a cart. A macro conversion is the primary objective of your site—making a final purchase, in this example. And here’s a good post If you’re interested in learning more about how to track the impact of micro conversions.

Configuring and Testing Goals in GA

Goals are unique by session, which means that one goal is counted per session regardless of how many times a user completes that action in that session. Keeping that in mind, you may want to set up certain actions as events to be able to view the total count versus just the unique counts that will be reported as goals.

There are three main types of goal configurations available in GA, each with their own uses and benefits.

1. Engagement-Based Goals

These goals count sessions that reach a specific threshold of on-site behavior in terms of duration or pages per session, which you have the liberty to determine.

These might be best used on very content-focused sites, such as informational sites that may not have a transactional or other final converting objective.

2. Destination Goals

A goal is counted when a user views a specific landing page. The destination page can be tracked as one of the following:

Equals to
Begins with
Regular expression

Destination goals are best used when:

There’s a confirmation that cannot be reached without a converting action that immediately precedes it. For example, it would not be ideal to set a regex that matches the Thank You page that appears immediately after a purchase and a confirmation page sent via email. In this case, a view of the confirmation page will falsely trigger a conversion as well.
The destination URL does not ever change.
Viewing steps through a goal funnel would be useful. Goal funnel visualizations are only available for destination goals and not event goals.

3. Event Goals

Goals are counted when an event is completed that matches the criteria set for event category, action, label, and/or values. Each of these conditions can be set with the same matching options as a destination goal. At least one of these conditions must be set for the goal to be tracked.

Event goals are most useful when:

Changes are common on the site. For example, changes to URLs (including the destination URL) or even on-site changes such as tweaks to element classes or form IDs.
There might be multiple criteria outside of a confirmation page. A user might reach the same Thank You page following any purchase completion, but you may want to count different product purchase types as separate events.

After deciding on the type and configuring your goal, test out your goal by selecting “Verify this Goal” at the bottom of your “Goal Details” page. This check will return an estimated conversion rate based on activity over the last seven days.

Note: the event or destination page must have been set up before testing your goal for this to return a conversion rate.

Setting Up a Google Analytics Goal Funnel

Flows through a session to the final converting action is most easily viewed through your Funnel Visualization or Goal Flow reports, both of which are configured only for destination goals.
The following funnel is an example of what’s available in the “Funnel Visualization” report under Conversions > Goals.

Note: this funnel only tracks the flow for users within the same session, and is therefore not as useful or accurate for viewing behavior through a flow for transactions that might occur over multiple days or sessions.

These visualizations are enabled and configured through the optional “Funnel” feature under your goal settings.

This feature allows you to set each step that will return the step name, total starting count, end count, and step conversion rates. Each step can be specified by a page path, which is automatically set to match the criteria used for your destination page. For instance, if your destination page is set to match by regex, so will your goal funnel pages.

The Wrap Up

Configuring goals in GA makes it really easy for you to measure the effectiveness of different marketing efforts and features on your site across the entire platform. It’s a crucial feature to take advantage of when you have solid objectives that you’re continually optimizing towards on your site.

Regardless of the types of goals you set or how you configure your funnels, I make it a best practice to set a reminder to check my goal metrics within 24 hours of publishing any changes. Pull your unique pageview or unique event count and compare that against your goals and steps within the funnel before using this data as your source of truth.

The post How to Configure Goals in Google Analytics appeared first on Portent.

Building Successful PPC: The Best Google Ad Extensions to Implement

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:00:57 GMT

Updated 8/27/20 to include new information and insights.

Google Ads offers several types of ad extensions that can be used to provide useful information to customers. This includes phone numbers, directions, additional products/services, and more.

Ad Extensions are simple to set up and do not cost anything extra. Expect a click-through rate boost when using these too. The differentiation of having them helps your ads stand out from your competitors’ and tends to entice more clicks.

In this post, we’ll explore a few of the highest performing and most popular ad extensions, their features, and how to implement them into your campaigns.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions allow advertisers to display a short list of links to internal pages of their website that customers might find useful directly in the ad. They are a great way to provide additional value to your advertising efforts.

The extra links make the ad bigger, allowing you to take up more real estate in the SERP, which in turn provides more brand exposure to your customers. Sitelinks also provide customers with additional options to get what they need from your site with fewer clicks and less work on their end.

Adding sitelinks is quick and simple. First, select a campaign, click the Ad Extensions tab and select Sitelink Extensions from the View drop-down menu.

You can create new sitelinks by clicking the +New Sitelink button. You’ll need to set up a link headline and a destination URL.

Create anywhere from two to six for each campaign; it’s a good rule of thumb to stick with an even number to ensure they format neatly.

Call Extensions

Call extensions are a great resource if your business relies on phone calls for leads. Google Ads doesn’t allow you to include phone numbers directly in ad descriptions or headlines. Thankfully, call extensions give you something better by adding an embedded, click-to-call phone number as an extension. You can also optimize call extensions by scheduling the time of the day you want to run them (i.e., only setting them to work during your business hours).

Set up is simple. First, select Call Extensions from the View drop-down menu. Then enter your business phone number and you’re done!

There is one more key feature within call extensions that we recommend setting up: Google forwarding phone numbers. This is a unique forwarding number provided by Google that allows you to track the phone calls that come from Google Ads.

The additional tracking is powerful information. The downside is that Google can tell when customers call those numbers, which means they can charge you per call (same as the cost of a click). But in our opinion, it’s worth the small investment.

Location Extensions

Location extensions allow you to list your business’s address in your ads. There are a couple of different ways you can get your address to show. If you have a Google My Business account, you can link that up so your ads will pull information directly from there. If you don’t have an account, you can manually add new addresses.

To add locations, select Locations from the View drop-down menu. If you have Google My Business, you should link your account to the campaign by clicking Addresses and selecting the correct account.

If you don’t have Google My Business (we highly recommend you do if you’re a business with a physical location), you can select Manually Entered Addresses and +New extension. From here, you can enter your business information and apply it to all the campaigns.

If entered correctly, the address should appear as it does below:

Callout Extensions

The final extension I want to cover is callout extensions. Callouts are a way to promote unique offers or additional benefits of your product or business.

Callouts can cover a wide variety of offers, whether it be an evergreen selling point (i.e., “Quality Service”) or a monetary offer (i.e., “Free Shipping”). Callouts are the easiest way to quickly and clearly show more value in your ad while also taking up more real estate on the SERP.

Adding callouts is an easy process. First, select a campaign, click the Ad Extensions tab and select Callout Extensions from the View drop-down menu.
You can then add callouts to either the account or a specific campaign. You can add as many as you want, but each callout needs to be 25 characters or less.

Final Thoughts

Ad extensions are a low effort, high payoff addition to any account that can add a ton of value to your consumers. Whether you want to get them to chat on the phone, go to a physical store, or just see that you offer free shipping, ad extensions can get that done for you.

The four that I mentioned here are easy to implement and are relevant to a majority of businesses, but there are other, less-used and more advanced ad extensions within Google Ads too. To learn more, a great resource is Google Ads Help Center.

Check out the rest of the six-part series:

PRIMER: What is PPC – Pay Per Click Marketing Explained
PART 1: Structuring Your Google Ads Account
PART 2: Understanding Campaign Settings
PART 3: Researching Keywords
PART 4: Writing Engaging Ads
PART 5: The Best Google Ads Extensions to Implement (you are here)
PART 6: Tracking Success

The post Building Successful PPC: The Best Google Ad Extensions to Implement appeared first on Portent.

An Introductory Guide to Internal Linking

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:00:15 GMT

Internal links are links that point from one page on your domain to another. They come in all shapes and sizes, but the two most common types of internal links are navigational (your menu, for example) and contextual (links within the content of your website).

Sounds simple, right? Go through your site, hyperlink a few keywords, and boom, you’re done. If only. Like literally everything else in the world, there’s more to it than that, and it begins with understanding what internal links do.

Internal Links Establish a Website’s Hierarchy and Navigation

These typically include links in the header, menu, and footer of your website, and they are more than “just a way” people navigate throughout your site. Internal links help define the path users take throughout your website and how your pieces of content are connected. The best example is an e-commerce website. The homepage links to individual categories, which contain subcategories, which link to specific items. The goal here is to make the content easily accessible to search engines through deliberate navigation.

Illustration of a link pyramid from Moz

Internal Links Help Search Engines Crawl a Site

Many tend to think of Google’s gateway to your site as the sitemap. It basically tells Google, “Hey, crawl these pages!” However, in most cases, new content on your site is not being added to the sitemap regularly, especially if you update your content frequently. So how does Google find this new content? Through internal links. Not only will your internal links help Google find the page the next time it crawls your site, but by being strategic and calculated with your internal linking, you can improve the chance of the new page ranking for targeted terms through the distribution of PageRank.

Infographic of how Google navigates the internet

Internal Links Distribute Authority

One of the biggest benefits of internal linking is the distribution of page authority throughout the rest of your site. When defining an internal linking strategy, one of the goals is to funnel authority from pages with a lot of it (i.e., pages with a lot of backlinks) to pages with a little less authority (i.e., the page you’re linking to).

A well-optimized website has lots of pages with external backlinks. These boost the domain authority of your site and help all pages to rank better. But PageRank is a renewable resource. Once a web page effectively uses PageRank for itself it can pass some of that authority along. If you’ve created a page that’s successfully garnered lots of external links, it absolutely makes sense to pass some of that hard-earned PageRank to other SEO targets.

When this authority is distributed via tactical internal linking, it can lead to improved rankings for terms related to the pages to which you’re linking.

To sum up, internal linking is a strategic and necessary aspect of SEO that helps define the architecture of your website and helps spread authority throughout your site. The former is essential for assisting Google and users alike to understand the content of your site. The latter helps establish its relevance.

The Dangers of Internal Linking

So we’ve established that internal linking is great for your SEO. It provides clear direction for the user, helps Google find the pages on your site, and distributes authority throughout your site. But, like all things related to SEO, there are some dangers when misused.

Can You Have Too Many Internal Links? Yes!

The most significant danger associated with internal linking is cannibalizing authority, or diluting the PageRank. Like all things SEO, you need to approach your strategy logically and organically. If you overuse internal linking tactics to the point where every page is littered with links to all other pages on your site (regardless of relevance), you run the risk of cannibalizing ranking authority from your relevant higher-level pages. Not every page should be a high-value landing page. You need to use the traffic and ranking data available to drive your strategy.

Over-Optimization

“Over-optimization” is incredibly easy to do if you dive into the internal linking process without a strategy behind it. Essentially, over-optimization means both keyword stuffing your anchor text in a way that feels unnatural and spammy, and linking so egregiously that their value diminishes.

Thankfully, all of these can be avoided if you just go into internal linking with a user’s mindset. What do they want? What information is most valuable to them? By keeping this at the forefront, you’ll naturally make Google happy and confer the many SEO benefits of internal linking throughout your site.

Internal Linking Best Practices

You don’t need to overthink internal linking. A well-planned website and navigation will typically lead to a fairly well-optimized site architecture, and employing some common sense can put you in a fairly good position to start. That being said, if you’re diving into a new internal linking strategy, there are some best practices you should follow.

Use Anchor Text Strategically

Anchor text can be tricky. Using too many “exact match” anchors can look unnatural and spammy (this is also true of backlinks). At the same time, not enough means you’re just leaving authority on the table. The trick is to use them organically and ensure that the reader understands what they’re getting when they click on the link.

As you can see in the image above, the anchor text is used organically in the sentence to create a relevant internal link back to our blog post on analyzing SERPs for content creation.

An example of bad anchor text? “Learn more.” “Click here.” Or linking to a page on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire using the anchor text “this post.”

Ensure the Content You’re Linking to Is Relevant

If you’re visiting a website browsing sneakers to buy, and you click on a link that says “new men’s sneakers” and you’re taken to a page on women’s casual walking shoes…well, you get the point. This also extends to the relevance of the pages themselves.

Link Deep. Deeeeeeeeeeeep

Orphaned pages suck. If users can’t find the content, neither can Google. Blog posts, resources, and one-off pages that might not have found their way into the main navigation are great for internal linking (provided they’re relevant, of course).

Link Location Matters

Where you place links on the page is important. This is due in part to the “reasonable surfer model,” a Google patent that was filed in 2004 but granted in 2010 and states:

A system generates a model based on feature data relating to different features of a link from a linking document to a linked document and user behavior data relating to navigational actions associated with the link. The system also assigns a rank to a document based on the model.

Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea has a number of great pieces written on the subject of the reasonable surfer model to help make sense of this, but the main takeaway is “the reasonable surfer model reflects the probability that someone will click on links, based upon the features related to them.” This effectively takes the randomness out of the equation, and considers elements such as “the color, the size, and the styles of fonts, the anchor text used in the links, and a number of other factors,” including link placement.

Reasonable Surfer GIF from Moz

To recap: relevant, organic links in your content? Great! Dozens of links in your footer to pages linked to nowhere else? Bad! A link to my short film that totally just dropped on Vimeo? I mean, I won’t say no…

Final Thoughts

Formulating an internal linking strategy is not a complicated process, though it does involve sifting through a lot of data and approaching things strategically. The one piece of advice I would give is this: just use common sense. Gone are the days of stuffing as many keywords as you can into your content and links. Focus on the user, and you’ll be just fine.

The post An Introductory Guide to Internal Linking appeared first on Portent.

CCPA, GDPR, and The Real Online Privacy Problem

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 14:00:32 GMT

Several states are considering online privacy legislation with attractive optics for consumers. Using catchphrases like “right to be forgotten,” these bills garner public support easily.

But the harsh reality is: Legislation like CCPA & GDPR passes the privacy buck downstream to individual businesses instead of addressing the real privacy concessions most consumers are making in signing their cell phone and ISP contracts before they ever reach an app or a web browser.

How CCPA and GDPR Create Inconsistencies in Online Privacy

These laws may seem airtight on paper. But in practice, they present significant holes and inconsistencies in privacy protection.

1. Consumers Get Little to No Privacy Benefit, Even When Companies Comply

Individual businesses, even larger enterprises, don’t have the resources to comply with these privacy laws in a timely manner, let alone with consistency for the end-users. As a result, consumers don’t always know what they’re automatically opted-in to or how to opt-out and be sure they’re truly opted-out.

2. Compliance Can Be Challenged… If You Can Afford It

Some companies don’t comply and dare the authorities to crack down on them and drag things out in court; others comply and are punished with lost data.

In the wake of GDPR, huge enterprises like British Airways and Sky News weren’t complying with the letter of the law, almost daring the EU to slap their wrist and take the lawsuit hit rather than potentially lose any data.

On the other hand, smaller businesses that can’t afford to fight the compliance issues in court are complying in full and losing large amounts of customer data as a result.

3. Compliance is Expensive, and Resources are Hard to Come By

Since the language of these laws is vague and wide-sweeping, complying can be a chore for smaller organizations without dedicated compliance officers and legal teams.

What can your brand do about it? Well, you have no choice but to comply, but we’ve created some resources for that!

We’ve written some blog posts for companies seeking to comply that provide cookie banner solutions and compare the key differences between GDPR and CCPA.

Why the Legislation Doesn’t Matter

Consumers have already signed away their rights. While companies don’t have much choice but to comply with the misguided laws, consumers should be wise to the holes in it and seek true online privacy protections.

The fine print in cell phone and ISP contracts gives large telecom companies carte blanche to sell or share customer data as they want with little or no consequences.

Last year, the Washington Post did an exposé on “forced arbitration” and how it renders a lot of privacy laws impotent in court. In it, they mentioned how companies like Verizon are able to avoid class-action lawsuits by nesting arbitration clauses in their terms and conditions. You know, the ones you sign when you buy a new device or agree to a new service contract.

In Other Words

Federal and state governments like the warm, fuzzy feelings that internet privacy legislation gives to their voting constituents. It appears that they’re doing something helpful to protect the public. But these laws are intentionally misguided, and they protect a handful of telecom companies from any culpability they have in violating their customers’ privacy.

Unless and until internet service contracts are at the center of the online privacy law discussion, there won’t be any true privacy protections for internet users.

The post CCPA, GDPR, and The Real Online Privacy Problem appeared first on Portent.

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