While it’s generally not recommended to “ judge a book by its cover,” you can certainly judge an entire website by its homepage. In other words, your homepage can either encourage or discourage someone from doing business with you.

Homepages have two primary goals:

• Communicate the site’s purpose and value proposition
• Provide top-level navigation to additional information inside the site

If you’re unsure where to start or how to evaluate the current usability of your homepage, follow these tips and best practices.

1. Introduce Yourself

The homepage is likely the first page people visit on your site, so it’s vital to not only provide information regarding who you are and what you do, but what you can help someone achieve with your product or service.

First, you want to signal to users that they arrived at the right place by including a visible logo, typically on the top left corner of the page.

Next, make your purpose clear by showcasing your value proposition. One way to do this is by featuring a tagline that succinctly emphasizes what your company offers and how you differ from competitors.

Tips:

• Make sure your value proposition and purpose are clear and avoid using vague language or jargon.
• Don’t make it all about yourself; speak toward your users’ pain points and motivations. Think of it this way: No one wants to go on a first date with someone who only talks about themselves.

Examples of Good and Bad Value Propositions

Pandadoc showcases its value proposition by clearly stating what they offer (electronic signature software) and why users need it (to improve the speed and security of documents).

However, if you saw this headline without knowing who the company is, could you take a guess as to what service or product they offer?

How about this statement?

“Lower your costs, save time, and elevate the customer experience” could probably be said by any SaaS company. While DocuSign is a well-known brand, they’re still trying to attract new users who may not know what “eSignature” means.

Using vague language becomes pure fluff and does not help users understand what sets your services apart and what you have to offer.

2. Feature the Most Important Content to Your Users

Often, I see clients feel the need to present everything available on the site for new users so that users can pick their own journey. However, this tactic often leaves users feeling overwhelmed or uncertain about what decision they should make.

Additionally, if you manage your company’s website, you probably get lots of requests from various stakeholders to feature what they feel is important to reach their users.

To drill down and evaluate what to keep and not to keep on your homepage, consider the following:

• What are most people here to do? Users typically come to your site with a goal in mind. This can be making a purchase, learning about your services or products, or seeking educational resources.
• What information do users need to achieve their goals? The information that helps users accomplish a specific task should be prioritized over everything else.

Ways to Determine What Your Users Care About

Google Analytics

• Start by looking at what pages users are visiting after your homepage. This will tell you what call-to-actions (CTAs) and navigation items users are most interested in.
• If your website has an internal search, analyze the keywords and search queries to spot themes.

Search Intent and Competitive Analysis

• If you know what search queries or keywords you’re after, you can identify common questions users are asking through rich snippets. This can help you craft messaging that directly speaks toward your users’ pain points and needs.

3. Simplify Your Hero Image

The header design is the very first thing people see on any given page; hence, it’s the most important real estate of a page. When designing your hero banner, follow minimalist design principles by leaving enough white or blank space for people to digest the information.

Follow these best practices for hero banner design:

• Avoid giving users too many options at once. Provide no more than two primary CTAs.
• Ensure your hero banner follows accessibility guidelines for readability. Pay close attention to the color contrast of text and background; the higher the contrast, the more legible the text.

Example of a Good Hero Banner

Unity Gaming has a simple yet effective hero image. Using a solid, static background draws a user’s attention to the headings and primary CTA button.

Example of a Hero Banner That Needs Improvement

La Croix’s hero banner is also the background to their site’s global navigation. This is problematic when the background image has various colors that make the navigation labels difficult to read.

4. Use Descriptive CTAs

People are more willing to engage with a website and take action if they know what the outcome of that engagement will be. To improve your UX and make your site more accessible, ensure that any CTA, link, or anchor text accurately describes the information users will expect to find upon interacting with the link.

Go ahead: Update all of the “learn more” CTAs on your homepage right now.

Additionally, assistive technology is able to find all links on a page and present them to users. When read on their own, links labeled as “Learn More” are not helpful to users.

Example of a Descriptive CTA

Example of a Vague CTA

5. Get Rid of Stock Imagery

Whenever possible, try to use original content. Showing photos of real people, product features, or services will position your brand as more authentic. Users are more likely to trust brands when they appear real. Also, stock images can often come across as duplicative and can harm the user experience when users continuously see the same type or style of image over and over.

For example, rather than using a stock image of a restaurant, Toast features an image of their software to showcase their product.

6. Ensure the Search Field Is Findable

If your site has internal search functionality, it’s essential to place it where users expect to find it. One of the most common locations for a search box is at the top right corner of your site.

Follow these best practices for designing a search box:

• Use a simple, magnifying glass icon—the more simple, the better for recognition.
• Display the full open-text field, so the search option is more noticeable.
• Include a button separate from the open-text field so users can easily identify where to click.
• Ensure the search box is on every page.
• Make the search box support longer inputs.

7. Avoid Pop-Up Windows

Out of all of the pages on a website, the homepage should be the last one you consider putting a pop-up screen on. Most users instantly dismiss pop-up screens as they automatically think they’re ads, or task-oriented users don’t want any distractions.

Once a user closes the pop-up, they can’t retrieve the information. Instead of a pop-up, place vital content for users in a place they can find it while they’re browsing through your site.

8. Go With Static Images vs. Carousels

Image carousels are distracting rather than helpful. And, designing an effective carousel is hard to accomplish. Nielsen Norman Group found that users often ignore carousels or find them excessive. Instead of using a carousel to feature multiple pieces of content, choose the most important item and make it your “hero.”(Now you can see why they call it the “hero banner.”)

When in doubt, keep it simple. Users are viewing dozens of websites a day on their phones and desktops. Every little thing that increases their effort to find what they’re looking for hinders their overall experience.

9. Iterate and Test New Ideas

Implementing good UX isn’t a one-time job. As our technologies evolve, so do our expectations and behaviors of how we wish to use them. It’s important to constantly test and iterate new ideas to leverage and validate your user research.

Making an investment to understand your users’ behavior and preferences will help you build more effective designs and provide the most useful content.

Final Thoughts Before You Redesign Your Homepage

To ensure users have a positive experience on your site, you should always have a pulse on how people engage with your homepage content.

Before saying “yes” to featuring new information, ask yourself, “Will this help users complete what they’re here to do or discover?” If the answer is clearly no, the homepage is likely not the place for it.

The post 9 Tips to Improve Your Homepage UX appeared first on Portent.

The term “landing pages” gets thrown around a lot in marketing. And for a while, when I was a newbie marketer, it felt like it could mean a million things. Sadly (or perhaps with good reason), the term still can mean a variety of things.

What Are Landing Pages?

Here’s what the term “landing pages” means:

• Any page that a user lands on to enter a website

So, any page can be a landing page if that’s where the user entered the website! Yes, it’s that simple! And also kind of complicated? Users can enter a website from numerous channels, including but not limited to:

• A paid search ad
• A paid social ad
• An organic social post
• Organic search results

As marketers, it’s our job to deliver a landing page that enhances the user experience, partly based on that target channel. If a user is taking the time to visit our website after wandering the vast wastelands of the Internet, we might as well show them a nice time.

What Are Local Landing Pages?

In the case of local SEO, a local landing page is used to enhance local visibility. It’s an opportunity for an organization to say, “Hello, users and Google! I am here, in Mesa, AZ. Please notice me in this hyper-localized context!”

If an organization has multiple locations, it needs a local landing page for each location to effectively communicate its service regions to users and search engines.

Local landing pages can be formatted in many shapes, sizes, and strategies. In my time as a local marketer, I’ve seen some pretty horrendous location pages, and I’ve also seen what it takes to make a local landing page compete in a crowded marketplace.

Here are five things you might not have known about local landing pages:

1. They Aren’t Doorway Pages

Doorway pages made SEO news way back in 2006 when BMW mentioned “used car” 40 times on a page on its German website. This sneaky “used car” page then redirected to a page with new cars. As you can guess, Google was not happy about this bad behavior and blacklisted the company from car-related search results for up to a year. Ouch.

BMW was using doorway pages, and they paid the price.

For decades the phrase “doorway pages” has been uttered with a certain sense of taboo and foreboding. It’s not the kind of phrase that is used in marketing as a compliment.

Essentially, doorway pages are spammy, keyword-stuffed pages intended to trick a search engine into ranking a site. They typically don’t have any content that qualifies them to rank, and they’re not built with the user experience in mind.

In contrast, local landing pages are developed with the user in mind. If I’m a user trying to find a local tire shop, do I really want the home page of a national brand? Or do I want a page with a center’s local address, phone number, and service information?

The difference between local landing pages and doorway pages is apparent.

In the image above, we have two local dentists. The dentist on the left has concocted a chaotic doorway page SEO scheme, wherein someone who types “toothaches” in Boise will somehow end up on an arbitrary page with a zip code. Conversely, the dentist on the right has built a localized website where they have a page for each service provided to the Boise community.

Local landing pages are a crucial part of any local SEO experience because they are designed to serve the local user, while doorway pages are intended to trap the local user in a confusing keyword-first purgatory.

2. CTA Placement Matters

Just about every local landing page serves the same type of user: someone local with an urgent need.

Think about it:

• Users who need a local HVAC company probably broke something
• Users looking for an Italian restaurant need to book their grandma’s birthday dinner
• Users in a car accident need a tow truck ASAP

So, if you build a local landing page telling users, “Hey! I’m nearby and I’m offering the thing you need!” why would you bury the opportunity for them to contact you?

Surprisingly, I’ve seen many location pages “bury the lead” and position the CTA at the end of the page like it’s some pot of gold at the end of a content rainbow. However, it turns out that local users are not leprechauns.

Users want that “gold”—the form or phone number—as soon as possible. So place it at the top of the page!

3. You Don’t Need A aot of Content

I reiterate: local users don’t have a lot of time. As we forge ahead in this mobile-only SEO landscape, it doesn’t make much sense to woo users with a 2,000-word essay about your Tempe, AZ AC repair services.

Cut to the chase. When I’m working with clients on local landing pages, I recommend 250-500 words.

A cursory check for “AC Repair Tempe” reveals the following word counts for location pages ranking #1-3 in the Local Pack:

• #1 Ranking: 233 words
• #2 Ranking: 182 words
• #3 Ranking: 195 words

“AC Repair Tempe” Landing Page Word Counts By Ranking In the Local Pack

As we can see with this totally-not-scientific check in a local market, the top-ranking local landing pages from the example above barely achieve more than 200 words. Ideally, there would be a study out there to formally correlate Word Counts on landing pages with rankings. But for now, it’s a common-sense recommendation from yours truly, sourced from my experience in building hundreds of successful local landing pages.

4. One Local Landing Page Might Not Be Enough

When I’m tasked with developing a local SEO strategy for a business with multiple locations, there’s almost always one resounding problem:

There aren’t enough local landing pages.

Companies looking to expand into new markets are often unprepared for the intricate Rubix cube that is the Local Search Microcosm.

Local Business Scenario

You’re a leading HVAC company based in Memphis, TN, and you’ve just acquired a new location in Nashville. However, opening a new store in Nashville, TN unfortunately isn’t as simple as a grand opening party with cookies and lemonade for the entire staff. There are:

• Competitors with entire websites dedicated to Nashville
• Competitors with marketing departments dedicated to ranking in Nashville
• Customers who already know about those competitors in Nashville

Nashville, TN, is a marketplace. It’s a specific community with a unique network of user intents and competitors with their own local SEO strategies. So, how do you remain competitive?

The answer is location-specific service pages.

Here we see why our new Nashville location needs multiple local landing pages for each service. If we have a competitor that has a Nashville AC Repair page, a Nashville Furnace Repair page, a Nashville Duct Cleaning page, and a Nashville Heating page, how can our single Memphis local landing page compete?

When we start to think about each location as its own microsite, we start to compete with competitors that have dedicated an entire website to that community.

5. Location Pages Can Get More Traffic Than National Service Pages

How important is local SEO to your overall marketing strategy? Well, if you’re reading this article, it’s probably more important and crucial than you think.

It comes down to this:

If employees connect with local customers in the day-to-day, then you need local landing pages. Because Google has definitely localized those SERPs.

I’ve seen organizations direct their entire strategy around a fancy national website that solidified their brand. While a pretty website is good, local content is ultimately the money-maker.

If I look at a SERP like “roof repair,” and I’m in Atlanta, GA, here’s what I see in the SERP:

SERP For “Roof Repair” In Atlanta

I didn’t include anything about my location when I typed “roof repair” into Google, but this search still triggers a Local Pack. But what happens below the Local Pack?

Below the Local Pack, we see only local pages in search results. If you are a national franchise trying to grow your local SEO presence, local landing pages should be the backbone of your overall strategy. Local landing pages contribute directly to ranking in the local pack, and they’re what will appear in search results below that.

So, don’t neglect your local landing pages! They’re probably your best opportunity to generate growth.

Takeaways

Here are a few takeaways for building and maintaining your website’s local landing pages:

Use these tips to develop a successful local landing page strategy. Or, if the intersection of content strategy, market demand, and GMB optimization seems like a lot (and yes, it is), reach out to our team about local SEO management services!

The post 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Local Landing Pages appeared first on Portent.

Updated on December 14th, 2021 to refine our GitHub auto-deploy solution.

Most of my time is dedicated to dev projects that make the lives of marketers easier: websites, apps, tools, scripts, etc. Today, however, I’m writing for web devs in an attempt to make their lives easier. And their solutions smarter. In an effort to streamline development updates to a code base in a staging or production environment, we have created an auto-deploy setup guide for any GitHub (github.com) repository.

If you’re wondering what Git is, you’re a bit behind, as it has taken over the code versioning tool for developers. If you’re not a developer, Git is still super useful as a tool that records all revisions to any file you want to track. Collaborating with some marketing colleagues and technical experts on a giant content project? Git can manage everyone’s drafts with the same great versioning control. This article has more good information about Git.

Why An Auto-Deploy Solution?

The better question is probably, “why not?” If set up correctly, it makes a developer’s life easier. There are fewer points of failure when deploying code. It saves a considerable amount of time. And, it’s slick. You’ve finished making updates to your app in your local dev environment and are ready to stage and test. You commit and push your changes to the staging branch of your Git repo. Your auto-deploy setup grabs those latest updates and deploys them on your staging site almost instantly. You test your updates. They look solid; you’re ready to deploy live. Back in your local dev environment, you merge your staging branch updates with the master (or production) branch. You commit and push your updates. Again, auto-deploy handles the rest. All you have to do is (clear the cache and) test.

Some argue that Git should not be used as a deployment tool because it does not properly handle permissions or track empty directories. But, if set up correctly with Git commands being executed by the Apache/Nginx user, it seems to be a solid solution for many applications, especially compared to other confusing and expensive deployment tools.

Marketers: you may want to stop here and just send this to your developer(s). What comes next may not make much sense.

What you will need:

• A server to host your site. Our example is a Ubuntu (Linux) server running either Apache or Nginx and PHP
• SSH access to your server with sudo/root privileges
• A GitHub.com account and repository

1. On the Web Server

Here we install and set up Git on the server. We also create an SSH key so the server can talk to GitHub without using passwords.

Install Git

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install git

If you already had Git installed, make sure it’s a relatively new version – upgrade it to the latest if need be.

git --version

Set Up Git

Next, we will configure Git. In general, these values don’t mean much, but best to make them descriptive.

git config --global user.name "[some user-name]"
git config --global user.email "[your github email]"

Create An SSH Directory for the Apache/Nginx User

You can find out what user controls the Apache or Nginx processes by looking in their respective config files. We’re using the www-data user and group in our example.

sudo mkdir /var/www/.ssh
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/.ssh/

Generate a Deploy Key for Apache/Nginx User

Next, we want to generate a deploy key that we can add to the GitHub repo. We will be using the ssh-keygen command. The command below instructs the system to create an RSA key that belongs to the www-data user. You don’t need a passphrase, so be sure to leave it blank during the process of generating the key.

sudo -Hu www-data ssh-keygen -t rsa

Once generated, print out the key and copy it to your clipboard.

sudo cat /var/www/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

2. On Your Origin (github.com)

Here we add the SSH key to the origin to allow your server to talk without passwords.

Add the SSH Key to the Repo

1. https://github.com/[githubname]/[repo]/settings/keys
2. Create a new key and name it appropriately
3. Paste the deploy key you generated on the server and save

3. On the Web Server

Now that we have the deploy key installed, we are ready to clone the repo on our web server.

Clone the Repo

Here we clone the repo into a chmodded /var/www/[site_dir] folder. Note that we switch to the www-data user before running the git clone command. This is an important step because the deploy key we generated is owned by the www-data user and it will only work for that user, even if you are on the root.

cd /var/www

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/[site_dir]

sudo su www-data

git clone git@github.com:[githubuser]/[gitrepo].git /var/www/[site_dir]
- or for branch -
git clone -b [branch_name] git@github.com:[githubuser]/[gitrepo].git /var/www/[site_dir]

exit

4. Auto-Deployment

If you’ve made it this far, you are almost ready. All the steps up to this point should have your web server properly communicating with your GitHub repo. You should be able to drill into your site directory, switch to your Apache/Nginx user (i.e., www-data), and run Git commands like you normally would. In fact, this is good practice in getting familiar with doing so in case you have to fix any conflicts, etc.

Deployment Rules

I did more research on other approaches to a Git auto-deploy solution, and found this great unassuming article. Not only did it shed more light on why git pull should not be used as a deployment tool, but the “deployment rules” section was spot on for what I was trying to ultimately accomplish. I pared down the rules to what I consider a good fit for my needs:

1. All files in the branch being deployed should be copied to the deployment directory.
2. Files that were deleted in the Git repo since the last deployment should get deleted from the deployment directory.
3. Any changes to tracked files in the deployment directory after the last deployment should be ignored when following rules one and two.
4. Untracked files in the deploy directory should be left alone.

Option 1 – Cron

If the site is password protected, a webhook won’t work. Or, if you don’t want to bother with a webhook (instructions below), you can set up a cronjob that will run pull commands as often as you’d like.

The deploy article suggests a handful of possible solutions that fulfill the deployment rules. After some trial-and-error testing, I settled on using two sequential commands:

git fetch --all

This command fetches all data from the remote without trying to merge or rebase. More on git fetch.

git checkout --force "origin/master"

This command, utilizing the “force” option, tells Git to proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. Essentially, this overwrites local changes (if any), so the local repo mirrors the remote repo, which specifically satisfies deployment rule number two. The rest of the built-in git checkout functionality satisfies the rest of our deployment rules, so all four are addressed. More on git checkout.

Using cron as our auto-deployment method, the instructions below will switch to the Apache/Nginx user (i.e., www-data), traverse to the site directory, and run the git fetch and git checkout commands — every minute.

*/1 * * * * su -s /bin/sh www-data -c 'cd /var/www/[site-dir] && git fetch --all && git checkout --force "origin/master"'

Option 2 – Webhook

Another option is setting up a webhook, which is a feature that GitHub allows for every repository. A webhook is simply a URL that GitHub will hit anytime an update is pushed to the origin. We can couple this functionality with a deployment script that will run Git commands to PULL from the origin and update your code base on your web server.

Create the Deployment Script for Your Site

Copy/paste the PHP code below and save it as ‘deploy.php’ in your site root. You will be adding this file to your repo, so you can do it in your local dev environment or on the live web server—as long as it gets added and is available at [yoursite].com/deploy.php

<?php
    /**
     * GIT DEPLOYMENT SCRIPT
     *
     * Used for automatically deploying websites via GitHub
     *
     */

    // array of commands
    $commands = array(
        'echo $PWD',
        'whoami',
        'git pull',
        'git status',
        'git submodule sync',
        'git submodule update',
        'git submodule status',
    );

    // exec commands
    $output = '';
    foreach($commands AS $command){
        $tmp = shell_exec($command);
        
        $output .= "<span style=\"color: #6BE234;\">\$</span><span style=\"color: #729FCF;\">{$command}\n</span><br />";
        $output .= htmlentities(trim($tmp)) . "\n<br /><br />";
    }
?>

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>GIT DEPLOYMENT SCRIPT</title>
</head>
<body style="background-color: #000000; color: #FFFFFF; font-weight: bold; padding: 0 10px;">
<div style="width:700px">
    <div style="float:left;width:350px;">
    <p style="color:white;">Git Deployment Script</p>
    <?php echo $output; ?>
    </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Add, commit, and push this to GitHub

git add deploy.php
git commit -m 'Adding the git deployment script'
git push

Set Up Service Hook

Now, in your GitHub.com repo settings, we will set up the webhook which will automatically call the deploy URL, thus triggering a PULL request from the server to the origin.

1. https://github.com/[githubname]/[repo]/settings/hooks
2. Click Add webhook to add a service hook
3. Enter the URL to your deployment script as the Payload URL – http://[yoursite].com/deploy.php
4. Leave the rest of the options as default. Make sure ‘Active’ is checked.
5. Click Add webhook

Ready to Go

At this point, you should be all set! You and your team can make code updates and push them to the origin, and they will automatically be pulled to your web server’s code base.

Some Notes

• Some servers may require slightly different instructions. Check out this resource: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh
• Navigate the deployment script to trigger a pull and see the output:
  • http://[yoursite].com/deploy.php (this is useful for debugging)
  • When you push to the origin (GitHub), your site will automatically ping the above url (and pull your code)

The post GitHub Auto-Deploy Setup Guide appeared first on Portent.

As the holiday season draws near, more clients and co-workers are taking some well-deserved breaks with friends and family. If you have some time to take a breath and look toward the future, you’ll want to use it to prepare your digital analytics practice for some of the inevitable changes looming next year.

1. Adopting Google Analytics 4

Back in October of 2020, Google launched the latest version of their much-relied-on analytics platform to mixed reviews. Do a quick search for “google analytics 4,” and you’ll find a “People Also Ask” section filled with things like:

• Is Google Analytics 4 better than Universal Analytics?
• Why does Google Analytics 4 suck?
• Why do I need GA4?

The digital marketing industry is notoriously change-averse, and we heard a lot of the same protests when Universal Analytics launched. While GA4 isn’t without its flaws, there are a lot of inherent advantages to using it, and a lot of early adopters are now gathering year-over-year data as I’m writing this.

We wrote a piece on how GA4 will improve your data collection earlier this year that you should revisit if you’re still on the fence about upgrading. At the very least, you should set up a GA4 property before Jan 1, 2022.

2. Embracing Server-Side Tag Management

Coupled with GA4, another technology announced in 2020 that businesses have been slow to adopt is server-side tag management. The venerable Simo Ahava wrote about it when it dropped in the middle of quarantine, explaining its advantages:

• It is better equipped to handle user privacy initiatives and to scrub accidental PII collected about the user before it’s sent to analytics platforms.
• It is better positioned to take weight off the browser and improve website performance.
• It is better situated to collect user behavior data without relying on increasingly fraught (and unpopular) first-party or third-party cookies.

Although we’ve gotten a reprieve from Google saying Chrome will continue to support third-party cookies for a while longer, server-side data collection will soon be the only reliable way to measure customer interaction with your website. Might as well get on board now before it’s an absolute necessity.

3. Collecting Micro Conversions

Back in October, we went into why measuring leading indicators to conversion is more important than you may think. Getting micro conversions chosen, set up, and gathering sufficient data before the new year is the perfect way to equip yourself to make better marketing decisions in 2022.

What do we mean when we’re talking about micro conversions? Things like:

• Navigation. Clicks on menu items and call-to-action buttons.
• Scrolling. What percentage of long-form content are people consuming?
• Downloads. Views of gated or ungated .pdf assets, for example.
• Video Views. Is your 60-second elevator pitch video landing with your audience?
• Subscribes. Building the house list could be the most important marketing activity you do.
• Outbound Clicks. How much traffic are you relaying to partners?

4. Actioning Closed-Loop Analytics

Earlier in the Spring, we talked about how closed-loop analytics was a vital component of measuring the efficacy of lead generation campaigns on social media ad buys. That’s still true, and not a lot of businesses are capitalizing on these types of CRM integrations.

If you’re looking to answer business questions like…

• Which upper-funnel marketing activities are driving downstream revenue?
• How much does it cost to generate a sales-qualified lead?
• How long does it take between the first user interaction with the website and the close of a sale?

…closed-loop analytics is the only effective way to answer those questions.

Stop the guesswork around these things and get some real data to bring back to your boss.

5. Building Dashboards

Here at Portent, our analytics team is in the middle of deciding what our new Google Data Studio template should look like. So if you’re already a client of ours, you’re covered on this point.

If you’re working in-house though, and want to design something amazing for your stakeholders, we put together a whole guide on building report templates that stand the test of time.

The process involves:

1. Surveying your stakeholders.
2. Centering reports on answering business questions (instead of just “data puking,” as Avinash Kaushik would say).
3. Building reusable components instead of entire dashboards.
4. Providing interesting context like industry benchmarks and goals.
5. Delivering reports to users when and where they need them. (Some folks require a weekly email drop, others want something interactive to slice and dice.)
6. Evolving your reports as you get more stakeholder feedback.

6. Creating Forecasts

If you haven’t already cemented your business goals and marketing budgets for next year, you’ll want to quickly forecast your primary KPIs using as much historical data as you have handy. This will yield a range of expectations for your leadership team to think about (and hopefully take action on). It will also help keep your marketing teams accountable throughout the calendar year.

In addition to the method we mentioned in that blog, lately we’ve been using a wonderful tool called Forecast Forge to automate parts of that process. Forecast Forge uses a forecasting model akin to Facebook’s Prophet algorithm, which is really good at handling seasonality in the past performance data.

Take Advantage of Analytics

Think of the next few weeks as a chance to get ahead before January plans start to get enabled and we’re all too busy to get data needs implemented. Don’t lose your opportunity to start off 2022 ahead of the curve!

The post 6 Ways to Prepare Your Digital Analytics Setup for 2022 appeared first on Portent.

In first grade, my computer class would dedicate ten minutes each day for us to draw a picture on our computers from the teacher’s example on the projector. No matter how much I tried, mine looked worse than everyone else’s. It wasn’t necessarily because I was a terrible drawer (I mean, it was first grade, we all were), but rather because I was one of the only students who was using the mouse with my non-dominant (right) hand.

I recently experienced similar frustration with a mobile app. Every time I tried to select the CTA I wanted, a different CTA would appear on the left screen where I was hovering, resulting in me firing the opposite action than I had intended. It turns out, oftentimes mobile experiences are designed with the majority of users (right-handed) in mind.

While left-handed individuals make up only ~10% of users, there are a considerable amount of other users that get neglected in the design process. However, by paying attention to usability and accessibility best practices, designers can keep unique user difficulties in mind and design better digital experiences for everyone.

Usability and Accessibility: What’s the Difference and Why Do They Matter?

Usability and accessibility are used interchangeably since they aim to improve user experience, but they actually focus on different goals. To understand where each of these comes into play, let’s run through them individually.

What Is Usability?

Usability assesses how easy it is for users to interact with an interface with few errors while limiting frustration and increasing satisfaction. A process with great usability is easy for a user to learn, adapt to, and remember.

Usability is crucial, especially for saturated industries and markets. Your business can sell the highest quality products or services, but if a user can’t locate the product, get their questions answered, or easily complete checkout, they might just settle for a lower-quality product that offers a more usable web experience. The bottom line is that the usability of a site can make or break a business.

What Is Accessibility?

Accessibility, on the other hand, is more of a “usability 2.0.” While usability aims to improve the general user experience, accessibility focuses on creating equally positive experiences for users who may experience various technological, learning, or physical disabilities. An example of an accessibility measure is creating image alt text so users with screen readers can use audio to visualize image content. Another example is providing settings to make text appear larger for users who have trouble reading small text.

No matter how relevant or engaging your content is, if your website or app isn’t intuitive for the typical user and those with disabilities, they won’t return to your site. As more businesses emphasize mobile experience optimization, you must understand how to meet all of your users’ needs to keep them happy and, as a result, meet your business goals.

Mobile Usability and Accessibility

Designing to meet users’ needs for desktop experiences is already a challenge; however, there is more to consider when designing for mobile experiences. Regarding usability, users interact differently with mobile devices than computer monitors and laptops. For example, users read content differently on a mobile device than on a desktop. Instead of reading in the typical patterns as expected on a desktop device, mobile users tend to focus on the center of their screen first.

Not only that, but users hold their mobile devices differently than they do a computer mouse or a laptop. Rather than merely reaching out and touching a computer, users treat mobile devices as an extension of their own hands, and they do so in a couple of ways. According to UX Matters, most users hold their phones in one of three ways:

• 49% of users hold it in one hand
• 36% of users use one hand to interact while cradling it in the other
• 15% of users use two hands to hold it as if they were using a small tablet

It is important to know that most users favor holding their smartphones with their dominant hand and design with these physical user behavior patterns in mind.

It is also important to question whether the two-handed users prefer to hold their device this way, or if they feel obligated to through usability issues they have faced. Users may feel compelled to use both hands due to the large size of their screen, making it heavy to hold or hard to reach certain areas.

The thumb zone in the image below shows the areas users can and can’t reach while using one hand. The green area indicates the most natural zone for users to interact with mobile pages. The yellow area showcases the area it is possible to reach but might take more effort. The red area signifies hard-to-reach areas.

A standard smartphone screen already loses a fourth of its real estate when determining where to place important information, icons, and CTAs, and it is only losing more as new versions with larger screens roll out. Below, you can see a progression of how much reachable space has decreased over time.

Since users can interact with your content on devices that drastically differ in screen size, optimizing for physical disabilities and impairments is difficult. With desktop experiences, it can be a bit more “one design fits all.” But when it comes to mobile experiences, there are more ambiguous changes to try and stay ahead of, like new sizes of screens rolling out every few years. Not only does the large screen size make it harder for users with disabilities to use, but mobile devices can also cause users to develop more mobility issues as time goes on.

How to Incorporate Usability and Accessibility in Mobile Design

So now that we know the importance of designing with all users in mind, let’s go through how to do it, with a few good and bad examples. To design for mobile, here are four best practices to follow.

1. Center Important Content

The best option for copy, CTAs, icons, or features, is to center them on the screen as much as possible. As previously mentioned, mobile users look to the center first when reading. By locating the most important copy there, users can get the information quickly at first glance.

Another reason to center important features is so users can easily reach them whether they are right- or left-handed.

Centering content doesn’t just help users find information quickly, but it also helps them convert quickly. Most businesses rely on users easily hitting that CTA button to drive a lead. If CTAs or other important icons that users will need to select are out of reach or placed on just the left or right side, it takes users more time, energy, and mental load to select them.

2. Make Important Features Reachable

Aside from centering content, critical elements should be located toward the bottom of the screen. This could include menus, important icons, CTAs, and even navigation panes.

If you have ever fumbled trying to switch your camera’s perspective or hang up a video call on Instagram, it is likely because the most important and most used icons are out of the mobile thumb zone for users, no matter what hand you use.

Instead, a better example of a usable video call design would be IOS FaceTime. The features like mute, flip, and hang up are easier to access on this interface since they are located at the bottom of the screen. This means you can quickly and easily select the options you are most likely to use without straining your reach or using two hands.

Many other businesses are adapting to users’ needs by creating bottom navigation panes and sticky menus in their mobile interface. Spotify identified that the most common user needs are to access their home screen, playlists, and search. They have included these key features at the bottom of the screen, where the settings and account information are harder to reach since they are visited less frequently.

Dusen Dusen has a sticky menu that stays at the bottom of the screen as you scroll up and down the page, so users don’t have to scroll to the top to view their main menu or view their shopping cart. This improves the ability for users to explore other pages and enter the last stage of the buyer’s funnel without having to scroll to the very top all over again.

Even Google has participated in this trend and recently added an address bar at the bottom of the page and the top, so users don’t have to strain their fingers to type in a query.

3. Test With Diverse Users

After making design decisions, it is time to test. Testing how users interact with your mobile interface can help you identify usability issues. But, to help ensure that your site is accessible, it is vital to diversify your test subjects. Make sure your group has a representation of mobility, vision, hearing, or learning disabilities. This will help catch any usability and accessibility holes missed and help your designers proactively solve them before users have to suffer. If you don’t have the option to widely diversify your test subjects, provide means for them to interact with the digital experience in different ways. For example, asking users to navigate an app or complete a task with their non-dominant hand or with more limited reachability can help identify how easy it would be for others different from them.

4. Prioritize Usability and Accessibility Over Aesthetics

One issue with mobile design (and design in general) is that oftentimes, companies will favor aesthetics over practicality. Since mobile design is becoming more prevalent and important, businesses try to be aesthetic, trendy, and different. The fact is, no matter how good a website looks to the naked eye, if it is hard to use, it doesn’t matter. Sure, a pretty website is intriguing, but it won’t gain lifetime users if there are heavy usability flaws. Ensuring that your users can interact with your site regardless of their age, mobile ability, or prior experience will stretch measures beyond an aesthetic website.

In Other Words

When it comes to designing digital experiences, a considerable portion of users’ needs are not getting met. Even if businesses and designers make waves when appealing to various users on desktop experiences, it can be harder to apply on mobile devices.

It can be difficult to proactively design with users in mind, especially if you do not experience the same challenges as others. As I discovered, just the challenges I have faced as a left-handed user have shown me how easy it is to miss certain accessibility best practices if you are not personally affected by them.

To improve usability and accessibility on mobile devices, it is important not to see your user as you see yourself. Instead, question if your design could pose risks to those with trouble reading small text, viewing certain colors, clicking small icons, and more.

By understanding your users’ unique circumstances, not only can you uncover why your bounce rates and performance metrics might have been suffering, you can design experiences that can benefit both your business and your users in the long run.

The post Designing for Mobile: Tips for Usability and Accessibility appeared first on Portent.

We get a lot of questions from our clients around how to maximize the investment in platforms that drive the best CPA, CPL, or other key KPIs and the optimal channel mix. It is understandable that when you find a platform that works, the first thought is to invest all of your ad dollars in that one top-performing channel. We try to preach channel diversification (within reason) to our clients. Thinking back to a few weeks ago when Facebook had a major outage, those that had all their advertising wrapped up in one channel suffered the most. Beyond not putting all your eggs in one basket, we see the best performance for our clients come from a well thought out cohesive paid media strategy.

What Is a Paid Media Strategy?

When our team refers to a paid media strategy, we typically mean our client’s entire paid media marketing mix. How paid social, paid search, and programmatic work together to fulfill separate parts of the marketing funnel. How specialists working within each channel collaborate to share insights and ensure that there is cohesive messaging. If your paid media channels are operating agnostically, there are likely audiences you are targeting too aggressively and others you are not reaching.

Paid Social Media Vs. PPC

Typically we think of paid search as a channel driven by user intent and paid social as a channel driven by user behavior and demographics. In reality, paid social media platforms and paid search platforms have features that can reach users in any part of the funnel. For example, Google Discovery ads are much higher in the funnel than Google search text ads. On Facebook, dynamic retargeting allows advertisers to reach users at the bottom of the funnel, showing them products that they’ve already viewed. That being said, to ensure that there is no significant overlap between channels, it’s best to treat each platform as a channel satisfying specific needs. This may mean that you aren’t using all of the platforms ‘best practices’, but you will follow the best practices needed for your specific marketing funnel. The major differences I see in the two channels are:

1. Push vs. Pull – Paid social aims to push a product or benefit to a user, while paid search aims to appeal to users who are pulling specific information from search platforms.
2. Creative capabilities – Social media is extremely visual, while paid search heavily relies on conveying specific value propositions in a few lines of text.
3. Audience targeting – while paid search has powerful keyword and intent targeting capabilities, paid social audiences are strongest from a behavioral and demographic standpoint.
4. Analytics – Because paid search and paid social typically influence different aspects of the funnel, attribution and performance analytics look different.

Benefits of Paid Social

There are many benefits to paid social. With the largest user base in the world, Facebook’s targeting and reach capabilities are unmatched. While paid social can be used as a lower-funnel marketing channel, we find the most efficiencies and opportunities in the upper funnel.

Benefits of PPC

The four distinct benefits of PPC we value are speed, precision, agility, and measurement. Combining a large user base and a high intent audience provides opportunities for high ROAS and growth.

Using Your Paid Social & PPC Together

There are many ways to use your paid social and paid search channels in a way that creates synergy. Here are a few of the most important ways to get the most out of using both simultaneously.

Cross-Channel Creative Insights

By far the most important, sharing creative insights across channels can open a door for testing and innovation. By understanding what people are searching across Google and Microsoft, paid social ads can be more relevant and engaging for your audience. Alternatively, by understanding how users respond to seeing brand content for the first time (both through clicks and comments), paid search copy can be tailored to engage new users better.

Paid Search Custom Audiences on Facebook Ads

Facebook has powerful lookalike audience capabilities, and the best way to create a top-performing lookalike is to have a strong seed audience. Audience segments can be built from specific search terms used to reach the site, and those segments can be both retargeted and used as a seed audience for a specific and powerful lookalike.

Keyword Lists for Twitter and Pinterest

Keyword research is typically completed for paid search and SEO purposes, but it can be repurposed for paid social campaigns as well. Our team regularly uses the keyword research already completed in both Pinterest and Twitter campaigns. Similar to Google, Pinterest is primarily a discovery platform. Users spend a significant portion of their time searching for specific content, and the Pinterest ad platform allows businesses to target those searches. Twitter also has keyword targeting capabilities based on terms and hashtags that users include in their tweets. In both of these instances, we directly import keyword lists to the platforms.

Attribution and Closed Loop Analytics

Attribution is by far the biggest question our clients have when evaluating the performance of a multi-channel strategy. If you don’t have a multi-touch attribution solution, there is always the risky strategy of turning off a channel (either nationally or regionally) to evaluate performance. This can take months to understand and can impact the bottom line. It’s important to ensure you have a solid understanding of how to report on assisted conversions, which attribution model is right for your business, or if you should implement a closed-loop analytics solution.

Example of PPC & Paid Social In Action

Our clients have seen significant success from a cohesive paid social and paid search strategy. In this example, our client wanted to grow their customer base by driving trial through paid social media. With low brand awareness and a high price point, users were not converting from paid social or paid search on the first touch. By focusing our social media campaigns on brand awareness and conversions in the upper funnel, we saw a 180% increase in PoP non-branded search revenue and a 41% increase in PoP SEM conversion rate within the first 12 months of implementing our strategy.

Tips For Optimizing PPC With Paid Social

A benefit to diversifying your marketing mix is one channel can learn from the other. That is especially true between PPC and Paid Social platforms. Here are a few to test.

1. Improve PPC Ad Copy by Monitoring Social Sentiment

Writing engaging PPC ad copy is crucial to the success of a campaign. When we create PPC ad copy for Google Ads, we get limited feedback. Raw numbers like CTR tell us which ad copy is resonating the best, but that can sometimes be misleading. Copy on paid social gets more direct feedback in the way of social sentiment. Monitor comments from users on social and look for opportunities to create more clarity and boost CTR for PPC.

2. Remarket to Paid Social Site Visitors

Display remarketing is very effective in many formats. Segmenting your audiences based on the content they view and their engagement with your site is a great way to improve its effectiveness even more. One of the major benefits of paid social is its upper-funnel new user acquisition capabilities. Combine that with your PPC remarketing by segmenting users based on the number of social touchpoints by tagging your ads based on the stage in the funnel. This is a great way to qualify your audience further and ensure you are investing appropriately to reach users who are engaging again and again.

3. Set Up RLSAs Using Paid Social Audiences

Similar to above, leveraging remarketing lists for search is a great way to improve spending efficiency and boost conversion. Use those same audiences as remarketing lists for search ads and ad bid modifiers. If a user has engaged with a paid social ad multiple times and is now actively searching branded or nonbranded queries that match your keywords, they are very highly qualified and worth a higher average CPC.

Conclusion

There are two things I hope you take from this post:

1. Paid channel specialists shouldn’t work in a silo. There are so many benefits to collaboration and strategy sharing.
2. Results of each paid channel also don’t happen in a silo. User behavior spans different platforms, and a culmination of those interactions contributes to the end result. If you look at paid media as a cohesive experience for a user, your performance results will reflect it.

The post Using Your Paid Social Strategy To Boost Your PPC Ads appeared first on Portent.

For B2B marketers, reaching the right users at the right companies is crucial. Sometimes, though, standard targeting parameters in platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn (heavy emphasis on Facebook) may fall short. Or maybe you’re finding that competition in your space is fierce and the cost of acquiring leads— let alone quality leads—  is way too high. Maybe you’re not even sure what a quality lead looks like yet. Feeling like you’re wasting time and ad dollars is frustrating, but that’s where Account-Based Marketing comes in.

What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

According to Gartner, Account-Based Marketing, most often referred to as ABM, is “a strategy in which a supplier targets a select group of accounts that represent significantly higher expansion or growth opportunities with tailored marketing and sales support.”

The concept isn’t new, but marketing automation and customer relationship management platforms make identifying key accounts much easier. Using first-party data to guide ABM strategy can help drive qualified leads, improve lead-to-win rates, connect the dots on attributable revenue, and improve overall ROI from paid campaigns. Plus, it helps remove the silos that so often exist between marketing and sales teams.
 

How Is ABM Different From Traditional Marketing?

While traditional marketing tactics focus on widening the funnel to acquire new prospects, ABM strategies dial in on key companies from the get-go. Instead of the standard hand-off of leads from marketing to sales that result from traditional demand generation campaigns, ABM campaigns require a coordinated effort between sales and marketing teams that starts before campaigns even launch.

The basic tenets of social media advertising are there — identify your KPIs, target the right audiences, get them engaged, measure, optimize, and repeat. With ABM campaigns, though, targeting is informed by business intelligence to identify high-priority and high-yield opportunities. Considering a single organization could have a handful of decision-makers involved in a buying decision, utilizing highly targeted ABM tactics ensures that you’re expanding your campaign reach within a single company.

ABM tactics also give advertisers the power to create truly unique ad experiences. If you know exactly who you’re targeting, you can serve personalized ads and landing pages that speak directly to users within a single organization.

If you’re curious whether your competitors are utilizing ABM tactics, they probably are. Gartner estimated that by the end of 2020, more than 70% of B2B marketers at midsize to large organizations would be piloting or launching full-scale ABM programs.

If you’re really curious, though, you can always check out the ad libraries on Facebook and LinkedIn. Ads that mention companies directly are definitely highly targeted and lean on ABM tactics to reach those users.

Key Benefits Of ABM

I’ve seen ABM campaigns drive results for the B2B clients I’ve partnered with, but I’ve also seen this type of strategy deliver some crucial learnings that hadn’t been revealed through traditional demand-gen campaigns.

In addition to some of the benefits outlined earlier, here are some of the advantages of Account-Based Marketing:

• Increased collaboration between marketing and sales teams
• Shorter sales cycles
• Streamlined customer acquisition process
• Clear and measurable ROI

Using Social Media Channels For ABM

If you’re already running lead generation efforts on paid social, you’re in a great position to develop and test an ABM strategy. As you might expect, LinkedIn is the gold standard for running ABM campaigns. Having access to targeting by seniority or job title means we can further dial in on decision-makers. That said, Facebook ads can also provide another touchpoint for target accounts. With custom audience functionality and several CRM integrations available, there’s no reason not to utilize Facebook in an ABM strategy.

Setting Up ABM on Social Media

Regardless of the platform you choose, there’s a bit of legwork required before launching an ABM campaign. Before you start developing assets and building out campaigns, get connected with your sales team. Having representation from the sales side is a huge asset when it comes to creating personas or identifying content to surface within a campaign. This is also a great time to align goals and KPIs with the full team. Without buy-in from sales (after all, they’re the ones closing the deals!), it’s easy for ABM efforts to fall flat.

Don’t forget the data, either! This is where your CRM comes in — use data on previously won deals and qualified leads to build an ideal customer profile (ICP). As an agency partner to B2B companies, we generally see our clients coming to the table with these profiles already developed. That said, if you have robust reporting to lean on, we have a huge opportunity as consultants to provide insights based on existing campaign performance and help shape future iterations of ICPs.

Finally, I’d also recommend developing a thoughtful approach to how you’re targeting key accounts. Is the focus going to be on a small handful of extremely valuable companies? Maybe you’re hoping to go after a specific industry or sector and have a larger group of contacts in mind. Alternatively, maybe you’re testing the waters with several accounts (think 50+), running some targeted messaging, and refining from there.

Whatever you choose will impact how you think about ad creative and the content you’re serving users.

In terms of setup, here are some special considerations by platform.

Facebook

For Facebook, use Custom Audiences to import a customer list that includes data like names, emails, and phone numbers of users within a target segment. Keep in mind that you may encounter lower match rates on Facebook if your list primarily includes business emails — including additional data points can help ensure you’re matching data from your CRM with users on the platform.

Alternatively, programs like HubSpot or 6Sense have direct platform integrations that allow you to port in intent data to create an audience segment. If your team pays for similar tools already, definitely look into platform integrations.

Lead ads are a great format to leverage to lower the barrier to entry for form submission. If this is an option, make sure your CRM is integrated with Facebook for ease of use.

Finally, think tactically about your approach to creative and messaging on the platform. If you find that your reach is lower due to issues with match rate, etc., determine how you can use the ad experience on Facebook to supplement ABM campaigns on LinkedIn, for example.

LinkedIn

Much like Facebook, your ability to import a .csv with hand-picked data is going to be crucial on LinkedIn, too. Depending on what you have access to in your CRM or Marketing Automation Platform, you can create a Matched Audience from a company or contact list.

Generally, company lists will be massive once they’ve finished populating, so use your ICP as a frame of reference for campaign-level targeting adjustments like Job Title or Seniority, etc.

Because LinkedIn offers company targeting, you can also rely on targeting parameters in-platform to create your ABM segments. If you go this route, just make sure you’re using your own data to inform the companies you’re selecting.

If you’re interested in creating highly personalized content, especially for a select group of valuable accounts, LinkedIn is the place for you. The targeting options mentioned above let you create a truly bespoke ad experience, so ad content that references a user’s employer or the industry they are in is fair game.

If you’re interested in laying the groundwork for Account-Based Marketing on this platform, LinkedIn published a great resource on developing ABM campaigns that covers everything from defining your objectives to aligning content to your audience.

Final Thoughts

We have a lot of data at our fingertips as B2B marketers, and sometimes it can be hard to chart a meaningful course of action when you’re bogged down by “what-ifs.” An ABM strategy can help you harness that data to drive truly meaningful results and work more effectively with internal teams.

The post How To Leverage Social Media For Account-Based Marketing (ABM) appeared first on Portent.

I’m going to start by saying your site’s content needs to be helpful to the user. Too often, content is created for the “algorithm,” but cutting corners to beat the system isn’t a sustainable strategy.

We need to stop focusing on “winning traffic” and focus on improving the quality of our traffic. For me, content is one of the essential items to improve SEO. In my opinion, the technical health of a site won’t matter if the site doesn’t have helpful content for the user.

Why Is Content Important for SEO?

You’ve probably heard this from other SEO’s, “add content,” “create more content,” as if only generating content was enough to improve your SEO performance. It’s one of the most important things to do, but often than not, it’s done wrong.

SEO isn’t about stuffing a page with everything related to one term; it’s about creating helpful content for the user. It’s so important that I’ll repeat it. It’s about creating content that is helpful to the user. Do you see how I didn’t say algorithm, or Google, or search engine? Content needs to be beneficial to the person consuming it.

A piece of content created with the user’s needs in mind will provide enough context to search engines about why that page deserves to rank for your targeted keyword. By putting the users’ needs first, we know that the page’s value will be higher than a page created to win the algorithm.

Real-World Example of Content and SEO

Imagine you find yourself owning a town, and it becomes your life’s goal to promote it and make it the best town in the world. Besides not being able to change the feculent name, you focus all your time and energy on promoting it. Everyone now recognizes the name of your town, expecting a fantastic time when they visit.

You get your first visit, and the tourists are shocked. They hate it. All your town has is a creek, a rundown motel, and a Wienerschnitzel. They were lied to; the promotions promised rafting activities, plant-based restaurants, and resort-style hospitality.

Promoting or increasing one’s SEO means nothing if when a user visits your website, they don’t find what they are looking for.

What Exactly Is ‘Content’?

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the visitor’s center in our little town, but the tours, events, and unique shops that got the visitor interested in visiting in the first place.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning:

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats. They’re both striped. They’re both showing fangs. They both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and the upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor’s desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

The First Steps To Optimize Your Content For SEO

If you’ve made it this far, you now know how important it is to have helpful content on your website. Understanding the importance of good content is a significant step in the right direction. Let’s talk about the steps to optimize existing or new content for SEO but with the user in mind (like it should always be).

1. Keyword Research

Using your favorite SEO tool (mine is Ahrefs), look for keywords relevant to your strategy. Don’t worry about search volume or difficulty. Look for keywords that align with the topics you want to write about. Remember, you want to produce good content, so it’s better to target ten good quality users than 500 users who aren’t exactly looking for what you’re going to publish.

2. Understanding Search Intent

You’ve completed keyword research, and you included small search volume keywords. Great, let’s now find the user intent behind those keywords.

User intent is about identifying what type of content a user is looking for when using a specific keyword. Here are a couple of questions to help you understand search intent:

• What do people want to do?
• How do we help them do that with our content?
• What are the questions people ask, and how do we answer them?

The best way to answer those questions is by grabbing keywords and searching for them yourself. What questions is the content you see ranking answering?

3. Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something extraordinary, getting external links follows naturally.

Internal link building is often overlooked but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations.

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how and when to build links:

• Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?
• Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?
• Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors check out this individual page?

4. Good Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant.

A good title tag summarizes the content on a page.

Additional Resources for SEO and Content Strategy

The four steps I highlighted above seem simple, but they take time. You have to consider what fits your overall organic strategy and remind yourself that you’re doing this for the right user, not for everyone on the internet. I’ve included my favorite resources from the rest of the team here at Portent that dive deeper into creating good content.

Learn SEO:

• How to Write a Great Title Tag
• How to Write Meta Descriptions
• Long-Tail Keywords Defined: Why They Are Valuable to SEO
• An Introductory Guide to Internal Linking
• How Long Should Blog Posts Be? An Analysis of Word Count Data

Learn Content Strategy:

• Best Practices of a Successful Content Manager
• The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide to Content Strategy
• How to Create Content for Every Stage of the Marketing Funnel
• How Content Readability Affects SEO and Rankings
• How to Choose a Content Hub: 6 Types and Examples

The post How to Start Optimizing Your Content for SEO appeared first on Portent.

Updated on November 4, 2021 to include new information.

For many small businesses, paid search advertising through Google Ads is a natural fit. PPC provides very tight targeting options that allow businesses to reach customers who are actively looking for their services or products. 

That said, there is still an ongoing cost to consider. Small businesses typically have tight budgets, and it’s imperative that advertisers stretch their PPC budget to get the highest return on their investment. 

There is a right and wrong way to manage PPC accounts to get the most out of your money. Let’s review our five top PPC tips for campaign success on a limited budget.

1. Have Clear Goals

As you build your strategy and campaigns, have clear goals in mind. That sounds simple, but one of the biggest mistakes we see small businesses make is building and optimizing their account in a way that isn’t moving them towards their most important goals. 

Determine what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are and stick to them. What does success look like? If you can determine what it means to be profitable with your advertising, you can backdoor your way into a specific number of leads, calls, or transactions you need to make the spending worth it. 

Once you have clear, quantifiable goals, it becomes much easier to make optimization decisions in your account.

2. Use Negative Keywords

For paid search campaigns, keywords are the primary and most important targeting. Having strong, relevant, and well-organized keywords drives your campaigns. This is more common knowledge, and Google Ads makes this clear during setup. 

More commonly ignored, though, are negative keywords. Using negative keywords effectively will help weed out some irrelevant and unrelated impressions that lead to wasteful spending.

Think about what might come up when someone searches your keywords. Are there any things your business just doesn’t do? Google your keywords and closely review the search engine results page for ideas that you can weed out to save money. Once your campaigns are live, you can also use Google’s search term reports to see what queries are triggering your ads. Review these regularly to find new negative keywords.

3. Advertise Only Where You Can Deliver

Small businesses need to be conscious of where they are spending their PPC dollars. Use location targeting to limit the regions your ads are eligible to show in.

For example, do you sell clothes but don’t ship internationally? Make sure your ads are only targeting your home country. Are you a car mechanic operating in a specific city? Then there is no need to advertise beyond the region of your service.

When determining your geo-targeting, err on the side of more narrow too. For the car mechanic, you may get business from people up to, say, 30 miles away. But does most of your business come from far away? If the majority of your business comes from people much closer, say 10 miles away, then don’t waste your limited budget reaching as far as you can. Focus on the core audience first. If the results are good, you can always expand later.

With location targeting, you can get as broad or defined as you’d like. From zip codes to countries, the possibilities are limitless.

4. Don’t “Set It and Forget It”

Think of your account as a living thing that needs to be cared for.

Once you have your campaigns built out with all the keywords and ads, you probably think your work is done, but that’s not the case; the work is just beginning.

Advertisers need to be cognizant that their account needs to be monitored frequently. For one, you are actively bidding and spending money. Things can easily get away from you if you aren’t checking in. But beyond that, you are trying to drive the best results you can and ongoing optimization is required to achieve that. The data you are collecting is valuable as you educate new optimization decisions. Review the metrics closely and tie things back to your KPIs and goals.

5. Hire a Professional

PPC management is a technical skill that takes years to master. Google and other platforms make it pretty easy to get started, and they are getting better and making management easier for those with limited time and experience. But the reality is, it’s really easy to waste money, get frustrated, assume it’s not a good fit for your business, and shut it down.

Hiring help from a trained and experienced professional will very likely save you money in the long run and help you prove the viability of this marketing tactic for the long term. Portent offers services for small businesses and so do many other companies. Research which solution is the right fit for you, and start building successful PPC strategies today!

The post 5 PPC Tips for Small Businesses on a Budget appeared first on Portent.

User behavior analytics platform Hotjar defines rage clicks as moments, “when users repeatedly click (and click and click) in a certain area or on a specific element of your website over a short period of time.” UX and web designers recognize these behaviors as signals of frustration on websites and interfaces.

Our CRO team has recently explored and put into action a way to get rage click events to appear in our Google Analytics reports, be observable Hotjar recordings, and display a survey for visitors to provide feedback on what made their user experience frustrating. We’re proud to share this guide with you and your teams to use and iterate upon!

Why Should I Care About Rage Clicks?

Without tracking rage clicks, digital marketing strategists won’t have a way to identify when a page visitor becomes frustrated and takes it out with repeated clicks and taps on their devices. Try to recall the last time you repeatedly clicked or tapped on a page due to slow loading speeds or poorly designed interactive elements. Addressing and validating frustration are crucial steps toward improving the experiences on your page for visitors, users, or customers, thus improving your goal KPIs.

For example, rage clicks can also spotlight areas on your website where an interactive element may be useful! If enough visitors are trying to click on an image or text they want to learn more about, recorded rage click events can show designers exactly where they happen. These recordings also help strategists advocate to provide an interactive info button or link to a resource that may satisfy a visitor’s curiosity along the user journey.

Where Can I See Rage Clicks Happening On My Website?

There are numerous applications marketers and designers use to record, observe, and archive rage clicks occurrences. Portent CRO has recently found success in a combination of Hotjar, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. All of these work harmoniously together to paint a clearer picture of where and how visitors to your pages are finding frustrations. As an added bonus, we’ll share how you can replicate our setup for your own research and optimizations!

Hotjar

Hotjar is a great place to start observing rage clicks as they happen on your website, and our tool of choice when integrating it with Google Analytics and Tag Manager (more on that, later!) UX designers and CRO strategists can identify rage clicks in anonymized records of visitors on websites, like the example below:

Google Analytics and Tag Manager

Analysts and strategists can rely on Google Analytics Events and Behavior reporting to highlight places on a website where actions like rage clicks happen and how often. By building custom event triggers and tags in Google Tag Manager, you can assign behaviors such as rage clicks to dimensions in your GA reporting.

How Can I Use Rage Clicks to My Advantage and Eliminate My Visitors’ Points of Frustration?

We’re going to have to get a bit technical here to show you how you can use a combination of Hotjar, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager to track and analyze your rage click custom events. Don’t worry, though. We’ll provide steps and resources to make sure this robust setup will work for you.

What Do I Need to Track Rage Clicks and Address Them?

With the following recipe for how to best track and respond to rage clicks, you can uncover these points of frustration that get in the way of user experience, customer satisfaction, and ultimately conversion rates on your pages.

Step 1: Hotjar (Plus or Business Plan)

Recording software like Hotjar all come at price tiers that enable you to record hundreds to thousands of sessions a week, but if you spring for the “Business” plan, you’ll have access to Hotjar’s native tools and filters that recognize rage clicks on the websites you manage. Once you have created your account, installing their software on your domain is outlined in Hotjar’s installation guide, or you can install Hotjar using Google Tag Manager to avoid needing a developer to hardcode it.

Step 2: Google Tag Manager and Custom HTML

Using your website domain’s Google Tag Manager account, you’ll want to start by creating a Custom HTML tag using the following code, which is available from Reflective Data:

<script>
if ( typeof(jQuery) === 'function' ) {
    jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
        jQuery.fn.extend({
            getPath: function() {
                var path, node = this;
                while (node.length) {
                    var realNode = node[0],
                        name = realNode.localName;
                    if (!name) break;
                    name = name.toLowerCase();
                    var parent = node.parent();
                    var sameTagSiblings = parent.children(name);
                    if (sameTagSiblings.length > 1) {
                        var allSiblings = parent.children();
                        var index = allSiblings.index(realNode) + 1;
                        if (index > 1) {
                            name += ':nth-child(' + index + ')';
                        }
                    }
                    path = name + (path ? '>' + path : '');
                    node = parent;
                }
                return path;
            }
        });
        // Number of rage clicks
        var no_of_clicks = 5;
        //Time interval - var time value is in seconds, for example 3 is for three seconds
        var time = 3;
        var click_events = [];
        //internal variables, referring to the number of possible clicks within a set radius of pixels
        var possible_click = 5;
        var radius = 100;
        function detectXClicks(count, interval) {
            var last = click_events.length - 1;
            var time_diff = (click_events[last].time.getTime() - click_events[last - count + 1].time.getTime()) / 1000;
            //returns false if it event period is longer than 5 sec
            if (time_diff > interval) return null;
            //check click distance
            var max_distance = 0;
            for (i = last - count + 1; i < last; i++) {
                for (j = i + 1; j <= last; j++) { var distance = Math.round(Math.sqrt(Math.pow(click_events[i].event.clientX - click_events[j].event.clientX, 2) + Math.pow(click_events[i].event.clientY - click_events[j].event.clientY, 2))); if (distance > max_distance) max_distance = distance;
                    if (distance > radius) return null;
                }
            }
            var result = {
                count: count,
                max_distance: max_distance,
                time_diff: time_diff
            }
            return result;
        }
        function removeUsedClickPoints(count) {
            click_events.splice(click_events.length - count, count);
        }
        $("body").click(function(event) {
            click_events.push({
                event: event,
                time: new Date()
            });
            //remain only required number of click events and remove left of them.
            if (click_events.length > possible_click) {
                click_events.splice(0, click_events.length - possible_click);
            }
            //detect 3 click in 5 sec
            if (click_events.length >= 3) {
                var result = detectXClicks(no_of_clicks, time);
                if (result != null) {
                    var path = $(event.target).getPath();
                    //console.log('Rage Click: ' + JSON.stringify(result));
                    dataLayer.push({
                        'event': 'rageclick',
                        'rc_element': path,
                        'rc_count': result.count,
                        'rc_max_distance': result.max_distance,
                        'rc_time_diff': result.time_diff
                    });
                    removeUsedClickPoints(3);
                }
            }
        });
    });
}
</script>

The purpose of this tag, once published, is to “listen” for rage clicks as visitors come and go throughout your website.

Next, you’ll want to set this tag’s Firing Trigger to Page Views on All Pages. Before you hit Save, your setup may look similar to this screenshot:

Something you’ll find towards the bottom of this script is a place where the name “rageclick” will be used as the event that will be pushed to the data layer. Keep this in mind for the remaining steps of the process.

Step 3: Google Tag Manager and Custom Event Trigger

In this step, we’re going to create a trigger using a Custom Event. It’s important to use the same event name from the previous step, “rageclick.”

Step 4: Google Tag Manager and Tags for GA and Hotjar

It’s time to use the Trigger created in step 3 to add to both tags for your GA and Hotjar properties.

The tag type needed for Google Analytics will depend on the version of the platform you’re using. Here are examples of what I’ve spun up for Universal Analytics and GA4:

The GA4 Event tag allows you to set a parameter for your event name, similar to Universal Analytics’ use of Label. If you’re starting out, my recommendation is to use Page URL, but you can get as granular as including a Click Element!

After you’ve added your trigger from step 3 and saved your GA tag of choice, you’ll want to create a Custom HTML tag for Hotjar. The script you’ll need for this is as follows:

<script>
  window.hj=window.hj||function(){(hj.q=hj.q||[]).push(arguments)};
  hj('event','rageclick');
</script>

Once you have that added in, your tag configuration will need your trigger from step 3 added in before hitting Save. Here’s an example of how this should look:

What Happens Next After I Set All of This Up?

Whew! Yes, that probably seemed like a lot, but you’re going to like what this will do for your Hotjar recordings and event tracking. Here’s what to expect next.

Hotjar Recordings and Event Targeting

Three major value-adds happen in your Hotjar Plus or Business accounts.

First, you’ll discover that you’ll have a new “Event” you can use when filtering recordings.

Secondly, within recordings, you’ll also see your custom “rageclick” event show up on the playback’s timeline.

The third, and my favorite, allows you to use this “rageclick” event in popover surveys. Below is an example of how one appears on a website for visitors to interact with:

Also, customizing a survey with your brand colors and messaging is easy. We made sure to include copy in this popover survey that would be appreciative and approachable the exact moment a visitor on a page exhibited rage click tendencies:

In order to create a survey that will appear upon a rage click, you should specify that it will appear at the moment the custom event is triggered in GTM, as seen below:

Make sure all of your settings are up to your needs, set the survey to Active, and save your changes. Your new Hotjar popover survey will be live on your site for your visitors to fill out in the event they want to provide feedback.

What Will I Gain From This Robust Setup?

Setting up this rage click tracking ecosystem will provide invaluable insights and feedback into where your website visitors and customers find points of frustration in their journey:

• Discover needed design changes that may have gone unnoticed in production.
• Uncover opportunities for conversion rate optimization.
• Spotlight areas to improve metrics like core web vitals.
• Provide evidence of pages and elements that need UX improvements.

Let’s Recap

Rage clicks are a kind of user behavior that should go unnoticed on your websites. By setting up a robust tracking process like the one we’ve provided, you can also earn insights, feedback, and learnings to improve your pages’ user experience, customer journey, and conversion rates. Other contributors and stakeholders in your business will value rage click tracking in order to optimize toward business goals and customer satisfaction.

The post Leverage Hotjar Surveys for Rage Click Custom Events appeared first on Portent.

Updated on October 28, 2021 to include new information.

Many businesses depend on potential customers among the local population to physically enter a specific location and spend money; restaurants and service shops are two of the most prominent examples. For many of these businesses investing in paid search ads, a typical B2C or B2B strategy just won’t do. Budgets might be extremely tight, and every penny needs to count, especially for small businesses. So, how do you execute a winning local PPC strategy when there’s such little room for error?

Well, we’ve got an answer for you, and it’s easier than you think. In this post, we’re going to cover the key elements to a successful local PPC strategy, provide a few tips on how to execute it, and show you what to expect after you execute these changes.

In Search Campaigns, Radius Targets Are Key

If you have a location in a large city or multiple locations that are in close proximity, you may find that city location targeting isn’t practical. Furthermore, using more specific targets, like zip codes, may be more of a pain than they’re worth. The good news is that there is another option: radius targets.

The single most important element to winning with local paid search is the utilization of radius targets. Instead of a predefined location target built into Google Ads already (i.e. country, city, zip code), radius targets are custom location targets defined by the advertiser, centered on a specific location.

Why are radius targets so awesome? There are two important reasons:

1. Radius targets allow for greater flexibility in where exactly your ads will show up. If the borders of a specific town, neighborhood, or zip code aren’t sufficient, radius targets can often resolve any issues you’re having with regards to location targeting.
2. The signals Google Ads uses when determining if someone is within a custom radius target often rely on physical indicators such as WiFi hotspots and GPS. When using predefined location targets, Google also refers to a user’s current and historical location data, which can limit ad impression volume.

We’ve tested this at Portent and we’ve consistently seen between 10%-15% more overall ad impressions when using radius targets versus using only predefined targets for a given physical area. You can use both of these location target types yourself; have them overlap with each other and see just how many impressions and clicks the radius target gets in addition to the standard target even as they both cover roughly the same area.

The Importance of Conversions

I cannot stress this next point enough, so I’m literally going to repeat it three times:

• Have an on-site conversion that correlates with in-store success.
• Have an on-site conversion that correlates with in-store success.
• Have an on-site conversion that correlates with in-store success.

Did you get that? Because it’s really, really important.

There needs to be some action on your website a user can take which indicates they’re likely to actually visit your physical location. This could be somebody clicking a “Get Directions” button or clicking your phone number to call you directly. Just as important, you need to be able to track these conversions accurately using your SEM platform, an Analytics platform, or a combination of both.

How else will you know the money you’re investing in PPC is actually working to drive people physically to your place of business? Trick question: you won’t.

Other Elements of a Successful Local Paid Search Strategy

Radius targets and conversions are important, but they’re not the only factors that will make or break a local PPC strategy. Here are some more things to keep in mind:

• Show ads to people in your targeted location only – The default setting in Google Ads will show ads to users in–or searching for–your targeted location(s). When it comes to utilizing a budget most efficiently, it’s safest to switch that setting over to target only users physically in your targeted location(s).
• Create a campaign template – For businesses with multiple locations, create a campaign template (or set of templates) so it can be used on a one-store-per-campaign basis. This way, you can keep your account organized, your campaigns consistent, and be able to devote specific amounts of budget toward any given location.
• Enable Location Extensions – Location Extensions in Google Ads use your Google My Business (GMB) profile data to generate your business’ address alongside your text ad and/or as sponsored pins on Google Maps. This lets users know where your business is located right on the results page versus having to look for it on your website.

The Proof

This all sounds great in theory, right? Now, here’s the proof this all actually works.

We have a couple of current, large-scale examples at Portent where we’ve proven this strategy (on top of many small business accounts). The businesses behind these examples will be anonymous, but the data is real. Here’s how two examples compared three months prior to executing this strategy versus the following three months:

Example 1

Example 2

In both cases, conversions went up, the average cost per conversion decreased, and conversion rates increased, all by noticeable margins. As a result, PPC influenced more people to physically go to these places and grow these businesses. And that, really, is the whole point to this entire post: utilize these tactics to make more money.

Additional PPC Tactics

Outside of your typical paid search campaigns, there are other tactics you should consider utilizing within Google’s product offerings. The more of these you utilize, the more visible you’ll be online, and the more likely you’ll drive new business to your location(s).

Google My Business

Creating a Google My Business (GMB) profile for your business is free and should be considered an absolute necessity. You will need an active profile to utilize location extensions within Google Ads and. You will also need an active profile to let Google know important information about your business that it can then relay to users through organic search as well as paid search. Be sure you claim your business with Google and maintain your profile accordingly.

Google Local Campaigns

Google Local Campaigns are a cross-network campaign type which is designed to reach potential customers in your vicinity through automated bidding and ad placements. Your ads from this campaign type can appear on Google search, Google Maps, YouTube, the Google Display Network, and your business profile. This campaign type requires a GMB link up with Google Ads (as do location extensions). The one drawback with this campaign type is that there is a minimum monthly spend threshold which may rule some small budget advertisers out.

Google Local Services Ads

Google Local Services Ads are a call-only ad type for local service providers that are hosted on a different platform outside of your standard Google Ads account. These ads display at the top of a results page on the search network on mobile devices. For every call generated that produces a qualified lead for your business, you are charged a certain amount depending on the industry your business is in. Successfully creating a profile requires a GMB listing along with background checks on the owner and any field workers employed by your business. Once these checks are passed, your business is eligible to generate these ads with the Google Guaranteed badge that can give you extra credibility with potential customers.

In Conclusion

Local PPC is important and can be leveraged very successfully for brands of any size. You just need to make sure you’re utilizing the key elements which make it a success. Whether you’re looking to generate more top-of-funnel brand awareness or bottom-of-funnel lead acquisition, there are any array of solutions, campaign types, and tactics at your disposal to execute a successful local PPC strategy.

The post Executing a Successful Local PPC Strategy appeared first on Portent.

If you’ve been around this blog long enough, you’ll know we’ve covered micro conversions before. For those who are new here and haven’t heard of this concept until now, welcome!

Micro conversions, simply put, are leading indicators that a potential customer is becoming more acquainted with your product or service. They are often tipping points from the consideration to purchase stages of the marketing funnel.

Choosing the right micro conversions for your business is critical for many reasons. It helps define nurture tracks and ideal customer journeys and helps create retargeting pools for folks to re-engage with your brand.

The Difference Between Micro and Macro Conversions

In order to choose the right micro conversions for your business, it’s important to understand your macro conversions first. Most businesses get this right, as it’s their reason for being. Macro conversions involve either making money from your products and services or gathering enough information for a sales-qualified lead.

Micro conversions involve the pre-sale exchange of information with the user, with or without contact information changing hands.

NOTE: We’ve talked about this distinction before using slightly different terms (i.e., primary, secondary, and tertiary conversions).

Selecting the Right Micro Conversions For Your Business

Pre-sale exchange of information can mean almost anything. So what are we really talking about here? Things like views of a key page aren’t enough. Good micro conversions signal one extra step of intent beyond arriving and reading a web page.

Let’s go through some categorized examples of micro conversions in the form of business questions they answer:

• Navigation: Menu items and call-to-action buttons are littered around websites these days. But how effective are they at driving people further down the customer journey?
• Scrolling: Long-form educational content around your vertical could take loads of effort and time to produce. Are people really scrolling at least 75% of the way down those pages?
• Downloads: Similarly, producing enough written and visual content to generate a .pdf brochure or hiring a technical writer to produce a whitepaper isn’t cheap. Do people really download gated or ungated .pdf assets?
• Video Views: Is getting a video production studio (or convincing your busy CEO) to produce a high-quality video of your product or service on display worth it? People might not be watching at least 75% of the video.
• Subscribes: Just how valuable is an email subscriber? Or somebody who signs up to get your blog posts in their inbox? Has to be better than an average visitor, right?
• Outbound Clicks: Is sending traffic out to a third-party partner creating profit for them? Do those social media profile icons in your homepage footer really get any clicks?
• Interactions: Your company just bought a pretty expensive chat or on-site marketing platform. Is interrupting your users with a pop-up discount or a bot module worth their time or yours?

Turns out, it’s really easy to measure micro-conversions like these using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. But the answers to the business questions we just covered and the insights those questions are after prove more elusive.

Real-World Examples of How Micro Conversions Signal a Higher Likelihood to Convert on Macro Conversions

This is one area we’ve never addressed in a post like this. Does measuring these micro conversions actually make you a smarter marketer?

I’m here to tell you, unequivocally: Yes!

Demos to Lead Forms

A client we’re working with right now sells a cloud software product. They produced a pretty intensive demo video that’s featured prominently on their website.

Their average conversion rate on their lead form is almost 1% site-wide.

People who watched their demo, however, converted on their lead form at over 2.5%!

Chats to Orders

Another site our parent company operates has a chat function run by live agents instead of bots.

Their site-wide conversion rate to an order is about 0.3%.

Users who talk to a chat agent convert to an order at over 1.5%!

White Papers to Lead Forms

Another one of our clients has loads of ungated product documentation on their website.

Their site-wide lead form fill rate is around 0.4%.

Users who saw their documentation were 19% more likely to convert at over 0.5%.

You’ll notice in almost all these cases, the segment of users who participated in the micro conversion not only macro-converted at a higher rate, but they were more engaged in their visits in general, spending at least 3x more time per session and viewing at least 2x more pages per session.

What can you do with this information?

First, you can invest more time and effort into the content creation that powers micro conversions.

Secondly, you can get a lot more intelligent about audience creation and budget allocation for retargeting efforts. If you know your whitepaper readers become leads far more often, you can pool those readers who haven’t converted and get more aggressive about offering them a demo, trial, or some kind of other incentive.

A Micro Conversion For Micro Conversions

Hopefully, we’ve won you over with these real-world examples.

Micro conversions aren’t just “nice-to-haves” in a digital marketing analytics plan; they’re the foundation of a good measurement strategy and having the best understanding possible of the ideal customer journey.

Listen to what your customers and prospects are doing up-funnel to build a stronger pipeline and bolster your revenue.

The post What Makes a Good Micro Conversion and Why They’re Important appeared first on Portent.

INBOUND 2021 is a wrap, and once again HubSpot didn’t disappoint. This year, I joined Portent’s client partner team for three days of exceptional programming that covered all aspects of inbound marketing.

With all of the quality content, it was hard to narrow down our favorites! Below are the top takeaways from INBOUND 2021 that Leyla Church, Kyle Eliason, Kirsten Pickworth, Ann Robison, Matthew Taufa’asau, and I wanted to share.

Email Myths Busted! What’s REALLY Working Now!

Presented by: Jay Schwedelson, President & CEO, Worldata, and Founder, Subjectline.com

The question still gets asked a lot in the marketing industry – “Is email marketing here to stay?” The overwhelming answer is yes, but it will only be effective if you’re smart about it and you adapt to newer trends. In email marketing, every little thing matters.

Arguably the most important aspect of email marketing isn’t about the email content or the CTA; it’s elements that contribute to the open rate. You can’t have your clients read all about how awesome you are if you don’t get their attention and trust.

There’s a Lot You Can Do With the Email Name

Probably the biggest trend in email marketing is personalization with the sender name. Actual people names are much more effective than brand names.

It’s worth noting that unsubscribe requests may go up, but this may not be a bad thing. Unsubscribers are generally less qualified, and it’s not worth the effort to market to everyone.

Another tip for use of sender names is to use different ‘friendly’ addresses for different purposes. It doesn’t take much time to change the display name that people see, so why not change it to something more aligned with the purpose of an email? If it’s a product update email, use something like “Portent Product Updates” as the display name. If it’s a new promotion, then use something like “Portent Promotions.” This establishes relevance immediately as well as allows for a dramatic increase in sending volume. Studies show that matching the display name more closely with the topic of the subject line offer increases open rates by over 34%.

There’s Even More You Can Do With the Subject Line

Coming up with a good subject line is almost an art form, but there’s a lot of good data to help you create a subject line that increases your open rate. Here are some great tips for a good subject line:

• Use mistake subject lines. An example of this is, “Oops, we almost forgot to tell you about our free consultation. This delights users with the fact that they might have missed a great opportunity. (It’s worth noting that this may not work in six months because users will start to consciously identify this as a tactic.)
• Use dots at the end of the headline. An example of this is “Have you seen…” or “Our sale starts in…” This creates suspense and increases open rates.
• Bookend with emojis in the subject line. There’s a misconception that emojis are juvenile, but we’re seeing these used with B2B companies like Oracle for good reason. They grab attention and can communicate visually (and as we all know, visuals like infographics convey information much faster than words).

  

• Don’t try to be too clever or funny. There’s a much bigger chance that you miss the mark, and the upside is not too valuable.
• Use words in the subject line that are known for increasing open rates. Words that convey scarcity (ex: Limited, In-Stock) will compel users to act. Also, don’t be shy of using “free” in your subject line. Some marketers consider “free” a spammy word, but if you use it well, it indicates tremendous value to the user.

  

But again, a word of caution: use these tips now before the next trends come along.

From Delighting to Promoting

Presented by: Diana Zalaquett, Principal Channel Account Consultant for HubSpot

What does every marketing team want more of, in addition to budget? Feedback. We desire to know what’s relevant to customers, how we can improve their experience, and how we can keep them engaged. And we know that if we receive that feedback, we can improve our communication and services. But are we listening for that feedback?

According to Diana, “Loyal customers grow a business faster than sales or marketing.” And in order to retain and delight existing customers, we have to uncover their top friction points and high-effort experiences that lead to churn. Seeking feedback and sharing how you’re evolving your business will build loyalty and initial trust signals with new and referred customers too.

Your Customers Want to Give You Feedback

Diana shared that 76 percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs, and 81 percent of customers said they would be willing to provide feedback if they knew it would be heard. Those facts present a few opportunities:

• We need to ask for feedback to continually uncover friction points and delight customers.
• We need to use the right type of feedback tool (Net Promoter, Customer Effort Score, etc.) to measure, understand, and respond to friction points.
• We need to illustrate for customers how their feedback is being received and prioritized.

How to Receive and Use Feedback From Your Customers

Throughout the session, Diana shared opportunities for better use of feedback frameworks. Most agencies and organizations are likely familiar with the Net Promoter Score (NPS), but other tools can provide valuable insights at different points in the customer journey.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a measurement of how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction with a company.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) helps you measure how much effort was required by your customers to get their problem solved. This method helps pinpoint the service issues that are most frustrating for customers.
• In-App Surveys are the most effective way to gather customer feedback to improve your product.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood a person will recommend your product or service. A customer is asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, “How likely are you to recommend {your business} to a friend or colleague?” The score is calculated by subtracting the % of Detractors scores (0-6) from the % of Promoters (9-10). This survey method is considered the best way to measure trends in customer satisfaction over time.

For some customers, it’s more valuable to them to know that you’re promptly responding to and implementing changes based on their feedback. First, thank your customers personally via mail or email, then report back publicly at a later date on how you’re improving your services.

The A.I.A. framework can be used to measure customer experience:

• Analyze customer satisfaction results
• Identify the rate of and reasons for churn
• Ask customers for product or feature requests

Use a Flywheel Model to Remain Customer-Focused

Many businesses, including HubSpot, have pivoted to a flywheel model instead of a funnel model for customer engagement. The benefit of the flywheel is that you speak to everyone as if they are already your customer, engaging them and delighting them from the beginning. And once you get it moving, you start attracting the right customers for your business.

80 percent of CEOs believe they deliver superior customer experience, and only 8 percent of customers agree with that sentiment. That misalignment needs to change if customers are to remain loyal and become promoters of brands.

Diana offered the following approach for teams to establish a baseline of customer feedback and get the flywheel moving:

1. Map out your customer journey. Be sure to include customer experience after purchase and all touchpoints. Pay attention to the fact that this is your customer’s journey, not your competitor’s customer journey, and it will help you reach your target audience.

2. Listen to your team. Name processes that could be improved and what customers can get frustrated with. Some of the areas that could be assessed within an organization to remove friction for teams and their customers, and improve consistency, include:

• Handoff points
• Data source/location
• Poor internal process
• Confusing communications
• “Not my problem” approach
• Customers = a number
• Manual approaches

3. Ask your customers for feedback. Use the Net Promoter Score to ask how your company is going and gain reviews of customer experience at different phases. Then conduct more targeted focus group conversations of 1:1 conversations with long-term customers to understand their loyalty, support needs, and overall experience.

4. Do something about the feedback. Start with evaluating the top friction points and focusing on low-hanging fruit opportunities. Then document and share the feedback with other internal stakeholders to get buy-in, collaborate on solutions, delegate opportunities for implementation. Examples might include revising communication channels, using AI, refining ease of use, improving convenience and responsiveness, and creating more personalization.

Ultimately, customer delight is everyone’s responsibility regardless of their job title or if they are in a customer-facing role. It’s a worthwhile investment knowing the $1.6 trillion is lost each year by businesses due to poor customer service and that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. Diana’s talk was a thoughtful reminder of the importance of feedback in retaining and growing customers that will be your brand advocates.

How to Scale Thought Leadership

Presented by: Ashley Faus, Content Strategy Lead, Atlassian

Ashley started by asking the audience to think about whom they considered a thought leader, and then offered this definition: not celebrities, not entertainers, not sports stars or other famous people, but a “thought leader” refers to any knowledge workers in your industry or vertical.

Most organizations experience a one percent/ten percent split when it comes to thought leadership. The top one percent of the company (founders, C-suite executives, etc.) are the official spokespersons and influencers for the brand. Then, the bottom ten percent are out speaking, writing, and engaging with their community, but they aren’t really official, and they aren’t necessarily tied to the brand’s efforts.

So what do you do with that middle 89%, who are interested in graduating from that ten percent to the top one percent of official thought leaders? You need a thought leadership framework.

The Thought Leadership Framework

A thought leadership framework is a key development to ensure you can scale your thought leadership efforts to respond as your industry, your organization, and your business objectives evolve. The goals of the framework accomplish the following:

• Assess your current efforts (what’s working, what’s not)
• Create a consistent and holistic plan (get everyone on the same page)
• Create a pipeline to scale (thought leader succession plan/bench strength)
• Make actionable recommendations (a path for someone becoming “official”)

Ashley emphasized that this framework will only be successful if you have a thought; if you are executing in novel ways, making improvements, or otherwise introducing something new or original. In other words, just because you are good at your job, doesn’t make you a thought leader.

Thought Leader Assessment Pillars

There are four pillars that support a successful thought leader:

Credibility: as your credibility starts to grow, you’ll go from citing your sources to eventually people citing you as a source.

Profile: start with the connections that you know, but then grow those connections until you only know 10% of them, but 90% of them know you.

Prolific: the only pillar that is completely in your control, it’s about how much you create. Start with one channel/content type but then expand.

Depth of ideas: start by codifying things that have proven to work for you and your team. But as your ideas grow, you’ll start to influence other industries.

The Approach

There are two ways you can successfully develop a thought leader. You can build a narrative in a topic area and craft it so multiple people can deliver it. Or you can build the person, by taking someone who already has traction in a topic area and shaping the story specifically for them. Either way, both rely on a successful framework:

1. Establish the narrative (what you want to talk about)
2. Determine how much depth you want to share
3. Join the conversation (identify existing influencers on this topic, the outlets where the conversation is happening, and conferences to pitch)
4. Develop your personal brand (voice and tone, signature look, personal stories you want to incorporate)
5. Set up social (audit existing channels and activity, address gaps, and develop a process/train for ongoing engagement)
6. Set up those speaking engagements (develop topics, build content, and pursue speaker coaching)

Ownership

Building and scaling thought leadership relies on ownership from a variety of teams.

However, the biggest piece of the puzzle is individual ownership. At the end of the day, if the person you are developing isn’t willing to put in the time and effort to have thoughts and share them, then they don’t really want to be a thought leader.

5G and the Tech Revolution

Presented by: Don McGuire, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

INBOUND sat down with Qualcomm’s Senior Vice President and CMO Don McGuire for a quick and dirty 30-minute interview about 5G, possible routes it can take us, and what 5G means for advertising and marketing.

So, What is 5G Anyway?

The “G” in 5G simply stands for “generation;” 5G is the fifth generation of technology standard for broadband cellular networks. At its most basic level, 5G means faster, more efficient data transmission, aka faster downloads and uploads.

Why is 5G Important?

Don McGuire broke down the importance of 5G by explaining its relationship to previous generations.

For me, 1G phones always harken back to Saved By The Bell! and Zach Morris’ comically huge cell phone. The first generation enabled us to talk, while mobile, for the first time.

You might remember 2G back in the form of the classic brick Nokia phones and the original Blackberry; 2G allowed for a short-messaging layer, aka mobile texting, for the first time.

3G brought us the advent of the first smartphones, circa the early 2000s. 4G, with its even faster data-transfer rates and lower latency, gave us video on the go in the form of Netflix and YouTube apps, uninterrupted streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora, and the rise of “smart” home products, that can connect to our phones from almost anywhere.

Now, we have 5G. It’s faster than 4G. It’s more efficient than 4G. There’s less lag and latency. And the possibilities are mind-boggling to think about. Imagine trying to explain a 4G smartphone to someone back in 2004; we couldn’t even imagine its capabilities back then. We couldn’t conceptualize what was even possible, let alone the innovation that would result from the top creative minds.

We can certainly hypothesize about what new technology prospects 5G can bring us, and McGuire himself is particularly excited about virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities, but the fact is we don’t know yet, and I’m betting on the fact that 5G will allow for things we couldn’t even dream of in 2021.

Why Should 5G Matter to Marketers?

Here’s where marketers need to pay attention to Don McGuire. 5G most likely means the best and most accessible video capabilities yet. That means if your company isn’t already investing in video advertising, demo and walkthrough videos, and other promotional video material, you’re running out of time. Companies that are prioritizing and honing their processes around video creation will leave behind businesses that refuse to or delay innovating their approach to digital marketing.

Companies need to be making efforts to stay malleable as new technology is released, because I can tell you now, your competitors will outpace you.

Trusted Content: 7 Steps to Becoming the Most Trusted Voice In Your Space

Presented by: Marcus Sheridan, IMPACT

Once again, Marcus Sheridan shows why he’s an INBOUND favorite as he discussed how you can become the WebMD or Wikipedia of your business vertical. In other words, if someone has a question about products or services in your area, where do they go for information? If someone has a question about a sore throat or a sprain, where do they go? WebMD, likely. If someone wants to know about a type of product that you sell, how can you make sure that your site becomes the trusted resource?

All Companies Say Trust is Important

Sheridan points out that, of course, companies say they want to be trusted or seen as trustworthy. However, when it comes to putting in the time, effort, and money, most companies stop far short of delivering on this promise. Further, he illustrates that most companies don’t want to stray from their industry’s usual marketing and sales formulas; they won’t say what their competitors aren’t already saying or discuss why they’re a better fit for some customers. True thought leaders or trusted resources are willing to answer the questions their customers are asking. To become that trusted voice for your customer, he suggests following these seven steps:

1. Speak openly about why you’re a good fit for some customers and a bad one for others. This one seems like it might be a hard pill to swallow for some marketers and sales teams. Why would you cut out potential customers before they even call in for a sales consultation? If you’re expensive, that’s fine. Think of Apple here; they don’t hide that their products are better and cost more. If you only serve a small geographic area, let customers know this upfront. Setting these expectations saves both you and the customer time and money.

2. Talk about pricing. As we mentioned earlier, building trust is challenging, and hiding your pricing from customers will do little to help you earn it. He reminds you: If you’re not going to talk pricing, your potential customer will find someone who will. So give them at least a range of prices. Better yet, talk about what goes into that pricing. What causes prices to go up? Why are some services cheaper?

3. Learn the skill of disarmament. Much like a hostage negotiator, Sheridan wants you to start by asking that your content consumers drop their defenses while they read on. If you can create unbiased content that talks about your industry, you’ll earn much trust. You can compare your products against others, discuss advantages/disadvantages, and allow future customers to make their own decisions. Consider removing outcomes from your unbiased articles, he notes. A “reasons to buy” title will quickly show the true motives behind an article or guide. Instead, link out to additional resources that can move them along their particular user journey.

4. Show your secret sauce. Here Marcus challenges his attendees to create videos that describe how they make their products, especially if their competitors aren’t. A company that produces engaging, sticky content such as this will easily stand out from the pack.

5. Be willing to compare without bias. Circling back on a few points above, if you’re already transparent about customer fit and pricing, you can likely also compare yourself against your main competition. For example, if your primary user persona is looking for a full-stack marketing agency that includes all the bells and whistles AND is willing to pay for it, you can call that out as you compare yourself to competitors X and Y: X is great at paid search and paid social, while Y is a solid content producer at a reasonable price.

6. Talk about those negatives people search for. If your industry or products have been around for some time, you’re likely aware of the objections sales teams are trained to overcome. Directly address these objections in your content. It’s another excellent opportunity to talk about whether your service is the right fit. Another example he provides is a retailer that talks about their most and least serviced appliances.

7. Talk about the competition. He’s not advocating negative talk here. He states that you should do so “without opinion” and “stick to the facts.” In the example he gives, he lists his direct competition and ranks their work. It’s a savvy play. By talking about his competitors by name and assuming his site is already ranking as an authority in the space, he is actually showing up for their keywords.

Take off your marketer hats for a moment, and you’ll see that these concepts make a ton of sense. As a customer, have you hard-bounced from a website that refuses to show pricing? I sure have. Could you imagine if you were researching a site that discussed how they compare against another competitor you’ve seen during your decision phase? These are the questions that customers are asking while they consider you. And if it helps, it all boils down to a mantra that is also the title of his book: They Ask, You Answer.

Lessons Learned on the Road to Success

Presented by Oprah Winfrey, Global Media Leader, Harpo Productions

INBOUND wrapped up their holistic marketing conference with a closing session that only Oprah could deliver.

Taking us on a deep dive into self-reflection, Oprah opened with candid talk about some of the lessons she has learned through ‘aha’ moments triggered by mentors and friends like Maya Angelou, Stevie Wonder, and Jerry Seinfeld. It’s clear that Oprah’s intention for her session was to peel back the layers of intention itself, or as she puts it, “Understanding the why behind the why.”

To connect the dots between her personal belief in the principle of intention and her professional success, she shared Oprah Winfrey Show moments where an intentional alignment of their mission (to uplift, enlighten, encourage and entertain) with a specific story, guest, and the audience won her an Emmy.

Oprah went on to share how intentions can work against you, explaining that the reason we make mistakes is due to the lack of clarity behind our intentions. Actively reflecting on the role that we played/or are playing in a problem, listening to the whispers from life (intuition) can help us avoid a crisis.

She explained that daily reassessing of our intentions is the sweet spot of our work and our life, “Your life has its own pattern, and your real job is to start paying attention to how life is speaking to you.”

If the first half of Oprah’s session wasn’t inspiring enough, the second half of the HubSpot hosted conversation was equally thought-provoking, leaving you with more than enough to ponder as you look ahead at your legacy in life.

Here are some of the highlights from the Q&A between HubSpot’s Laura Moran and Oprah:

Laura: How are you intentional about keeping the two worlds of professional and personal life separate or bringing them together in an intentional way?
Oprah: The principle of intention can be applied to change the trajectory of your work and personal life. “I’m intentional about creating private time and space for myself.”
Key Takeaways: Your life is yours to design. Know that you teach people how to treat you, so be intentional about your work boundaries, phone time, etc.

Laura: How do you keep yourself honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and how do you bring in the right people to support you in areas that you are not strong in?
Oprah: “That’s not a hard question if you know yourself…This is challenging for people who are not self-aware and assume they know more than they do. I embrace, celebrate, and am thrilled to be in the room with people who are much smarter than me.”
Key Takeaways: Self-reflect and take inventory of your strengths & weaknesses. Play off your strengths and celebrate the strengths of your colleagues.

Laura: How do you choose what activities, causes, or work projects to participate in?
Oprah: Evaluate the history of the cause/benefit and understand if it will have a meaningful impact. “Can I have an impact, can I say something meaningful, and can it be heard?”
Key Takeaways: Consider what is most important to you and how you want to show up in life (personally & professionally).
Reorganize your priorities based on your intentions.

Laura: How do you approach the legacy of leaving the space better than you found it?
Oprah: “Maya Angelou said, ‘People might forget what you did or said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.’ Martin Luther King said, ‘Not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great because greatness is determined by service.’ To leave the space better is to lead with compassion.”
Key Takeaway: As explained to Oprah by Maya Angelou, “Your legacy and everybody’s legacy is not the one thing you’ve done…Your legacy is every life you’ve touched.”

Final Thoughts

We left INBOUND 2021 with a ton of tips, tricks, and insights on the future of inbound marketing. We can’t wait to apply everything we learned to the work we do at Portent!

The post Our Favorite INBOUND 2021 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

It wasn’t that long ago when the web was a somewhat dangerous place. Before there were services like Google’s Safe Browsing (est. 2007), users were a lot more likely to navigate to pages with malware, hacked sites, spam, pornography, and just awful advertising. Remember the days when a page could fill your screen with endless pop-up ad windows? Users rightly became suspicious of the links they were clicking on.

The stakes are lower now, but users are still averse to risk when navigating. For the most part, the everyday risk users will suffer is navigating to an irrelevant page, an unintended page, or being unable to determine which link they should click at all. This is a problem because if users are not confident about clicking links on our pages, they aren’t going to visit many pages and ultimately not convert.

So what’s the easiest way to get users to trust our links? Write descriptive anchor text and make their purpose obvious through context. If users have a pretty good idea of what they will find on the other side of the link, they will see more pages per session and trust our brands more.

Make Internal Links Descriptive

The key to making a link descriptive is helping the user make a good prediction about what will be on the page it takes them to. Applying this idea depends on what kind of link we’re considering and what its purpose is.

Accessibility is also an important factor for descriptive linking. If a website isn’t friendly to assistive technologies, then it may not even be perceptible or navigable.

Here are a few guidelines for the most common types of links on a website:

Main Navigation

Users should be able to look at a website’s main navigation and understand the most important aspects of what the brand does and who it’s for. Making our main navigation fully descriptive can be tough to do since there is little space to work with. We can’t write essays in main navigations.

For individual pages, the link text should try to use the given space to narrow down the page’s purpose. Instead of saying “Products” or “Services,” say what types of products or services, or just list the categories of those. Atmosera does a great job at this when B2B cloud infrastructure brands are often unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t know the jargon:

Internal Navigation

Whether it’s in the main content of a page, a sidebar, or a supplemental section, some pages on a website need to act like a directory to other pages. These types of links are the most prone to using generic anchor text like “read more,” “click here,” “learn more,” etc.

Generic link text is a big problem for users relying on screen readers to navigate. If every anchor text describing the pages is “read more,” how can they distinguish between pages? For search engines, it’s a big zero as far as anchor text value is concerned. “Read more” doesn’t help describe any page.

The simple solution to this is to make something else a link, or include what the user will be learning more about. In the above screenshot, the header and subhead text in the card should be in the same link as “read more.” To a user with a screen reader, the “read more” call to action would be in the same context as the description of the linked page.

Contextual Links

When we’re writing a blog post or copy for a product page, we’ll often need to refer to another page or cite the source of a claim. The simplest way to do that is to add links to existing text that link to a page about what we’re referring to or is the source of a claim we’re making. These links should include enough text in the anchor to make the link descriptive and allow the user to infer why we’re linking to it.

In the screenshot above, Porentite Naomi Thalenberg links to the common keyword research tools she mentions in her blog post about how to create content briefs. Below, Jeremiah Bratton refers to guides about using screen readers in his intro guide to web accessibility.

Since our links should use colors that stand out from regular text, we can make calls to action stand out more, like in this example below:

Anchor Text is Also About Keyword Matching

The search engine optimization community has known about the ranking benefits of descriptive anchor text for a long time. The tactic is pretty straightforward: put a page’s target keywords in the anchor text of the links pointing to the page, and it will rank higher for those keywords. Simple!

The practice is simple enough, but what’s the theory behind it? What’s the connection between anchor text and a search query? The simplest search engines rank documents by how often the words in a query appear in their text. The easiest way to incorporate anchor text is to treat the set of all anchors as if it were part of the text in a document. That way, if the anchor text set of a page contains the words in the query a lot, it will rank highly. Seems like a pretty exploitable ranking signal, and it definitely was.

Google Search came to market back in 1998, but anchor text was identified as a reliable ranking signal earlier than that when Brin and Page were working on the BackRub project at Stanford in 1996. Other search engines could have been looking at anchor text earlier than that (Google wasn’t the first web search engine), but the earliest notable date I could find is Yahoo patenting an anchor text approach in 2002.

This means that from 1998 until 2012, when Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm, their search engine was wildly vulnerable to link spammers using manipulative keywords in anchor text. With recent changes to how they handle bad links, the risk for spammers is a lot lower than with classic Penguin. If Google doesn’t like a link, they will simply ignore it. This makes the risk of link spam the same as lighting cash on fire, and I’m seeing a lot more pages with questionable backlinks on the first page.

It must be a very valuable ranking signal to Google if they are willing to put up with so much link spam.

The First Link Priority Rule Still Works, Somewhat

Beyond Google ignoring links it doesn’t like, there is a long-standing limitation for which links will “count.” In the cases where one page links out to another page several times, only the first link will have its anchor text count toward keyword matching of the linked page.

People started calling this phenomenon the First Link Priority Rule, and Rand Fishkin wrote about it pretty well in 2008. In his article, Rand does a test with unique anchor text, which still works.

However, there is an important result of the link priority rule that will affect the way we should conduct anchor text audits: pages we link to in the main navigation will get the same anchor text on every page. Having a descriptive main navigation is very important to the keyword matching signal.

Whenever Google has been asked about the First Link Priority Rule, they usually give the same answer: only the anchor text from the first link counts, but it may not always be that way. If anchor text for keyword matching appears to work the same way since at least 2008, then what has changed?

Where Google Might Be Today Or In The Future

Google probably isn’t using link anchor text just for keyword matching in search, and probably more than the first anchor text string. They have been advancing the fields of natural language processing and machine learning for a long time now, so it’s reasonable to assume they have been applying new techniques to analyzing link text.

Google has a patent that describes a method of extracting “annotation text” from the text surrounding a link. Search Engine Journal has a good interpretation of what this specific patent is for, but Google isn’t necessarily using this method. Usually, patents are better for understanding the types of problems a search engine is trying to solve, and what their technical capabilities might be. In this case, Google wants to use the text surrounding a link to get a better idea of the linked page, which indicates they could be using ways of incorporating the context of a link into their systems.

The original purpose of looking at anchor text is to get a better idea of what a page is about and what its purpose is. Search engines could be using anchor text for determining which topics appear on a page, which locations a page is relevant to, how commercial the content is, and which entities appear.

Search engines might be interpreting the words in anchor text beyond which words they use. Neural network architectures like BERT and its descendants like MUM, map words and sentences to vector representations to better capture the meaning of that text. Since Google uses vector representations of queries in search, they might be looking at anchor text vectors in addition to content vectors to determine when a page is likely to answer a query.

In a more concrete sense, I think Google is better at determining the meaning behind links like this: “Check out our guide to the best backpacking campgrounds in Sierra National Forest.” Using just keyword matching, only “our guide” would apply to how this page is interpreted, but there’s a lot more meaning in this link:

• The page probably talks about the entities backpacking campgrounds and Sierra National Forest.
• The content is a guide and the sentence contains “best,” so it’s probably a good match for queries with informational intent.
• The sentence contains the word “best” so it’s a good match for queries with comparison intent.

If the guide appears for queries like “where to go backpacking in the Sierra Nevada,” then I would attribute it to the newer approaches Google is taking for links, rather than the classic keyword matching paradigm.

Auditing Internal Links for Anchor Text

Now that we have an idea of how search engines could be interpreting link text now and in the future, we need to review our websites.

Examining the anchor text your website uses is pretty easy with Screaming Frog. The real power is in taking its All Anchor Text bulk export and basing a pivot table on it. From there, you can see the most common anchor text for each page. Screaming Frog also identifies where on the page a link is positioned, so we can also filter by navigation, sidebar, footer, and body content locations.

1. Start by crawling your website as you normally would. When it finishes, export the All Anchor Text report.
2. In your spreadsheet application of choice, insert a new pivot table and configure the rows, values, and filters to show anchor text counts by URL.
3. Filter the pivot table down to just the URLs on your domain, then apply any other filters like link position.
4. Examine how your important landing pages have been receiving internal links. Are they descriptive? Is there a wider problem on the site with boilerplate anchor text?

After identifying problem links, put in requests to have them fixed on your website. For individual links, I suggest using a tracking sheet like the one in my post about optimizing internal PageRank. Here’s the template for my Internal Link Recommendation sheet.

Google Wants to Rank Useful Websites

After Google launched the Penguin algorithm back in 2012, there were profuse cries of “SEO is truly dead this time!” Yet here we are. What actually died was widespread abuse of a particular ranking signal. Unfortunately, what survived was the notion that the way to rank well in Google is contorting a website to unnaturally game a few ranking signals.

That view of SEO should be dead. Instead, we should be thinking about what search engines’ goals are for results: they want to identify the pages that are truly worth showing to users, and order them by how well they fit a query.

For the organic search marketer, SEO should instead mean two things:

1. Content should be valuable to users and fulfill some need
2. The purpose and value of our content should be obvious to users and search engines

This article is about the second point. Descriptive anchor text helps make purpose and value obvious.

The post Optimize Anchor Text By Making It Descriptive appeared first on Portent.

Updated on October 14, 2021 to include new information.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy. Usually, you won’t see a positive return on your content investment (ROI) until months after publication. This long gestation period is why tracking content performance is crucial. 

Choosing simple, relevant content marketing metrics is the best way to track if your content campaigns are achieving your brand’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Plus, when you start measuring performance early, it’s easier to spot what content resonates or flounders with your users. 

This post identifies 16 of Portent’s favorite content KPIs, sorts the content metrics by the goals they’re best at measuring, and tells you how to start tracking your content marketing efforts.

How to Measure Content Performance: Establishing and Setting Content Marketing KPIs

Ideally, your KPIs are composed of quantitative, relevant, and easy to calculate content metrics that can measure performance over time and across all levels of the conversion funnel.

To distinguish between relevant KPIs and metrics, we recommend following Aleksey Savkin’s rule of thumb.

Savkin recommends:

“If you are not sure if you are dealing with a KPI or a simple metric, do a simple test: imagine that you can double the value of this indicator. If you expect the performance of the business to be increased significantly, then it’s a good KPI for your business context. If not, then it is a simple metric.”

If you’re trying to set KPIs for your content, find the numbers where you really want to move the needle and use those values as metrics that matter most.

A Chart of Portent’s Favorite Content KPIs

When you’re planning your KPIs, keep the conversion funnel top of mind; you should be able to measure content performance during every step of the conversion funnel. To help you get started, here’s an illustration showing how Portent breaks down content KPIs according to the different stages of the customer journey and their overlap.

In our content marketing strategies, users are funneled through journeys that result in three goals:

• Conversion
• Reputation
• Engagement

Each goal within these journeys has a few ideal KPIs. Some KPIs can be used to measure success across more than one goal. If you’re only interested in one KPI category, use the jump links in the previous bulleted list to skip ahead.

If you want to learn more about measuring the long, messy game of content marketing then keep reading. We’ve included descriptions of all the content KPIs and how they interact with each other.

Content Metrics: Conversion KPIs

Leads

If you’re writing content that’s meant to generate leads, you should track how many leads you’re generating.

For example, if you’re debuting a new gated resource, you should measure how many new leads that resource brings in. Afterward, compare that number to the leads generated by other gated resources.

This analysis will answer some critical strategy questions:

• What are your customers looking for?
• Are your customers willing to give up their contact information to get your content?
• What kind of content generates the most qualified leads?

Transactions & Revenue

For businesses focused on driving e-commerce revenue and transactions through their website, we highly recommend Google Analytics e-commerce tracking. Within those reports, add the secondary dimension of “landing page” to see how many people purchased after touching a piece of content you produced. This metric allows you to discover what copy has the highest transaction or revenue level.

If you use revenue as a KPI, your findings will vary according to how much a customer spends. If you’re just curious about how many people eventually converted after touching your content, and you don’t care how much they wound up spending, use “transactions” instead of “revenue” as the guiding metric.

Goal Completions

If you don’t have enough transactions or revenue to see how those figures interact with your content, you can set goals inside Google Analytics that allow you to track conversions without a dollar value. You can see what URLs accomplished which goals you’ve set. A non-monetary goal might be filling out a form, making a phone call, or joining an email list.

Below is an example of what a goal completion KPI looks like.

Content Metrics: Reputation KPIs

Influencer Mentions

Did key industry influencers mention your content? Even if they didn’t link back to you, mentions help your reputation. You can measure mentions with a tool like Sparktoro, or by creating a Google Alert for mentions of your brand or a particular content campaign. It’s also beneficial to track whether those mentions are positive or negative.

Keyword Ranking

If you build a content campaign around a targeted keyword, make sure you’re tracking your success. There are a lot of tools on the market for tracking your keyword rankings, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush. Portent uses STAT, a SERP-tracking tool out of Vancouver, Canada, for most of our SEO and content development campaigns.

Here’s an example of what SERP position tracking looks like in STAT. We chose Portent’s ranking for the term, “choosing content KPIs.”

When you show up high in the SERPs, you’re building your reputation with Google, its crawlers, and potential site visitors who are browsing search results. Even if they don’t click on your page, they’ll still see it in their query results, which improves awareness.

Share of Voice

Another useful metric that STAT offers is Share of Voice (SoV). This KPI measures how visible a keyword set is on Google.

STAT says the concept follows two principles:

1. Not all rankings are equal, and higher ranks give you more Share of Voice.
2. Not all keywords are equal, and earning a keyword with higher search volume gives you more Share of Voice.

You can use SoV to determine how your content is affecting brand exposure on SERPs. It’s a great KPI to monitor if you’re launching a brand-awareness campaign or implementing a content hub project.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a complicated topic that’s usually relegated to social media, but major brands can leverage this AI technology to track the way people are talking about their content campaigns, too. Sentiment analysis measures reputation from your social media mentions. If you just launched a new educational center, for example, this metric is a useful way to keep your ear to the ground for relevant Twitter chatter.

For a deep and technical dive into sentiment analysis, we recommend this story on Yelp from Stack Overflow’s David Robinson. For something higher-level, Brandwatch is one of the oldest names in the business and offers a clear, accessible explanation.

Content Metrics: Engagement KPIs

Comments

Are people commenting on your blog post with valuable insights, questions, or feedback? If you write a blog post that gets through to people, they’ll often show it in the comments. Tracking this engagement KPI will help you learn what topics resonate with users and spark conversations.

For example, check out these comments on Ian Lurie’s blog post, The Digital Marketing Checklist: 48 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t.

People read it, considered its points, and then responded thoughtfully:

As with any robust comments section, it’s important to meaningfully engage with users, too. This interaction helps build brand loyalty and further improves the value of comments as a KPI.

Scroll Depth

If you want an easy, fast way to tell whether or not people are reading your content, look at the scroll depth of the page.

Most heat mapping programs, such as Hotjar, will provide you with scroll depth tracking. After you’ve set up tracking on the page through Google Tag Manager and the heat mapping platform, take a look at your scroll depth maps. You can see where your readers are dropping off, and how fast. A rapid drop might mean your content needs to be reworked.

Time on Page

Time on page is a similar key performance indicator to scroll depth in that it shows you how long people typically spend reading your content. Instead of being measured in pixels, however, this KPI is measured in seconds.

If you’re creating a new content strategy for your blog, your goal might be to increase the average time on page for new blog posts. Generally, the longer someone spends on your page, the more they’re engaging with your content, which means you’ve successfully earned their attention.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that time spent is related to the content length. Don’t compare the content of different types and lengths for time on page. A 2,000-word guide will probably have a much longer time on page than a 300-word blog post, but 50 percent of readers might make it all the way through that blog post versus only 10 percent who read your whole guide.

Pages Per Session

You can swap out this KPI with bounce rate if you prefer — they both tell you if readers are leaving your site after viewing your content. But bounce rate only tells you the ratio of visitors who leave versus those who keep digging deeper; the average pages per session will tell you how many pages they visit.

What’s a good rate for average pages per session? This depends entirely on your business. Generally, a site that serves to generate leads will have fewer pages per session than an e-commerce site, where users often spend time browsing product pages. If your e-commerce site doesn’t see an average rate of pages per session of three or four, you need to retool your strategy. In comparison, if a blog post on the Portent site has a rate of pages per session more than two, it’s excelling at this KPI.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation KPIs

Return Customers

Returning customers are the intersection of reputation and conversion. They know your brand, they like it, and they want more.

It’s hard to measure the impact of content on returning customers, but you can use Google Analytics to set tracking codes from the “thank you” page or log-in screen.

From here, you can see what kinds of content this group interacts with. Here are a few questions to consider when evaluating return customers:

• Do your returning customers visit your blog?
• Do they read your long form content?

If not, why?

If so, which ones are popular?

Content Metrics: Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Likes & Shares

Social media is one of the best barometers for gauging the success of your content. The more likes and shares, the better the content is performing in terms of engagement, which affects your reputation.

Social media is sensitive to many factors. If you want to measure the impact of your content based on the content’s virtues alone, promote different content pieces with the same amount of money to lookalike audiences at the same time of day. If a piece does well, throw the rest of your promotional budget behind it. And then create more content like the winning article.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most crucial KPIs for content — for many writers, they are the carrot on the other end of the stick. They are also a valuable barometer for assessing who respects or enjoys your content to the point they’re willing to recommend it to others.

As SEOs often say, every link is like a vote. When you receive unsolicited backlinks from authoritative sites, your readers are engaged, and your reputation is growing in the eyes of both readers and Google’s ranking algorithm.

Content Metrics: Engagement & Conversion KPIs

Open and Click-Through Rates

These are the KPIs for measuring conversions and engagement with email marketing campaigns. Your site’s content extends to all owned channels, and that means email, too. If you aren’t setting KPIs for your email marketing campaigns, you’re squandering one of your few opportunities to speak right into a customer’s ear.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Page Views

Without visitors, you’re not going to engage, convert, or build any kind of online reputation. The more people who view your site, the more people are engaging with your brand, and the more your reputation spreads. And the wider your reach, the more likely you’ll generate conversions.

Page views are the easiest way to measure the success of content. Unsurprisingly, they’re also the most popular. And some might even say the laziest.

Unless you’re combining page views with some other metric, you’re going to be missing a big part of the picture. What sets apart great marketers is their ability to layer a versatile yet surface-level metric like a page view with other KPIs to understand whether and how a piece of content connects with readers. A click-bait headline, for example, might generate a lot of page views, but if the content doesn’t address users’ needs, the time on page won’t be very long, the pages per session will be low, and you probably won’t get any backlinks. So use this KPI in conjunction with others.

Tying it All Together

So there you have it!

We’ve shared the 16 KPIs we look to monitor when evaluating the effectiveness of content.

As we have shown, evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts requires patience and careful planning. There is not one right way to track the success of your content — it’s all about identifying your goals, setting KPIs, and then iterating to find what works well for you.

So go on! Test and try a handful of metrics to find the right mix of what works for you.

The post 16 Best Content Marketing KPIs and Metrics in 2022 appeared first on Portent.

The value of social media has increased tremendously, and for small businesses, social media will play an increasingly crucial role in driving sales, providing customer service, and developing brand awareness. In a time when companies are struggling, social media can be a low-cost lifeline for the longevity of your business.

When working at a small business, you are probably spread very thin. We also know that social media users regularly interact with companies they are interested in or invested in. Since social media can be a free resource for your business, we highly suggest that you start investing time into your brand awareness on these applications.

Determine Your Social Media Goals

The first and most critical step in revamping your social media practices is setting feasible goals for your brand. Before you can start developing these goals, you should complete an audit of the current state of your social media presence.

Once you have established a baseline, you should begin determining what is important to you and your brand. Take a look at your overall business strategy and look for ways to adjust your current approach to better meet your objectives. Your goals can range from minor improvements like establishing a posting pattern or something more prolonged, like establishing a following or increasing consumer sales or leads on your site.

Research Which Platforms Are Right For Your Business and Brand

When you are busy running your business, the last thing you want to do is spend time on a platform that doesn’t benefit your business. Each social media platform can help your brand in different ways, and narrowing down your choice to just a select few platforms will allow you to focus your efforts. So how do you choose the most beneficial social media platform for your business?

What Channel(s) Is Your Target Audience On?

Before you can select which platforms are most appropriate for your social media strategy, you need to determine your target audience. Once you identify whom you are trying to reach, concluding which platforms that audience is on will be more straightforward. Some questions you should be asking yourself are:

• Who is your typical customer?
• How old are they, and what gender is most commonly interested?
• What are they interested in outside of your product and service?
• Are your customers usually repeat customers or first-time product buyers?

Now that your audience has been profiled and you understand your goals on social media, you can begin investing time into particular platforms.

Facebook

Facebook has 2.89 billion monthly active users, and with a massive amount of daily users, it is essential to understand the primary purpose for the average Facebook user. In the U.S., the average Facebook user is 40.5 years old and uses the platform to connect with old friends and maintain current relationships. Facebook can be a great choice if your brand is focused on an older audience or your goal is to build a dedicated following of clients, and you need a way to keep in touch with them. For your brand to be found on Facebook, you must ensure that your Facebook Business Page is public and utilize the power of images on your daily posts.

Instagram

Instagram has quickly become one of the fastest-growing applications for young adults. Instagram relies on photos and videos to connect with your audience, offering your business the chance to portray your products creatively. As a result, this platform works well for visual-based companies, like art, food, retail, beauty, and niche industries. Instagram is an extremely useful place for any size business to thrive. Small businesses have the opportunity to take advantage of its unique features like the “For You” page, hashtags, geotagging, IGTV, IG Live, and the new addition of reels. Instagram has an intricate algorithm that prioritizes profiles that use 7-10 hashtags, popular geotags, and shares relevant content using multiple features. Instagram is a necessity for any small business-to-consumer brand.

Twitter

Twitter is an excellent platform to build awareness for your brand. Twitter uses hashtags to show trending topics in the U.S. as well as your local community. Utilizing hashtags, your brand can engage in conversations with prospecting customers and participate in popular discussions. Consumer brands often use Twitter to promote events in real-time. Twitter also announced in 2019 that tweets will now appear in relevant Google search results, which can help your brand rank higher in the SERPs. Twitter gives your brand many opportunities to have direct communication with your consumers and answer questions that they may have about your products.

TikTok

As of 2021, TikTok has one billion active users worldwide. This short-form video-based application promotes “viral” content using an algorithm and hashtags similar to Instagram and incorporates music, video, and trends to share light-hearted brand messaging. Although the largest demographic of TikTok users are ages 16-24, it’s not just a trend for Gen Z. It’s one of the fastest-growing social media platforms and an advertising haven for small businesses looking to go viral from one video.

Small Businesses That Are Utilizing Organic Social Media Well

The fitness lifestyle brand Oiselle uses Instagram to fuel its mission of creating clothing for women and promoting this way of life on its page through images, hashtags, stories, and relationships with followers. When scrolling through their pictures, you are transported to a bright, judgment-free, inclusive, and simple place. Every image is full of personality, allowing viewers to imagine themselves in the product. As a small business, you can use Instagram to showcase your products in action. Demonstrating the culture and lifestyle encompassing your products will correlate positive feelings with your brand.

In 2019 Jenna Labiak, founder of The Silk Labs, put faith into a new app and posted on TikTok for the first time. Little did she know that her business would take off on that one post; it got over 600K likes and 3.5M views. Jenna experienced this success simply by taking advantage of the platform’s trends; in particular, she took part in the “small business check” to build brand awareness. From that point on, her small business grew tremendously in both followers and sales. Her profile utilizes popular sounds, trends, and hashtags and will continue to grow as the app grows in users.

Twitter relies on trending topics and relatable content. However, you first need to set yourself up for success by customizing your profile and making it look credible and memorable. The Coug is a Twitter profile for a historic restaurant and bar in Pullman, WA. The business uses its historical relevance and popularity to gain and maintain dedicated and passionate followers by promoting appealing images, GIFs, and videos along with trendy topics that resonate with its audience.

Mabel’s Labels is a high-quality label company that has done an excellent job of taking advantage of Facebook’s commerce features. The brand focuses on bright and youthful imagery to target mothers looking to organize and ease their children’s lives. Their profile uses engaging videos, photos, and Facebook live events to capture followers’ attention and features a Shop Now CTA linking viewers to their website’s homepage.

Our Favorite Social Media Tools for Small Businesses

Maintaining an effective social media presence can require a lot of effort, which can be tricky if you’re a small business with limited marketing resources. Here are a few of our favorite social media tools that can help you easily create fresh, engaging content your followers are looking for.

• Sprout Social: best overall social media management tool. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social management solution. It has the best mix of social media management and analytics to serve most SMB’s needs. Their platform offers multiple plans to fit any budget.
• Canva: Social media designer tool. Canva is a tool many digital marketers rely on for making great-looking social media images and marketing content. You can use the ready-made templates and illustrations to make your images look professional and fit your brand aesthetic with little to no effort.
• Unsplash: Free images and pictures application. Unsplash is a free stock photography site. With thousands of images at your disposal, this is a great tool to retrieve high-quality graphics at any time.
• Animoto: Creative video maker tool. Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into slideshows and customized web-based presentations.

To Wrap Up

Leveraging social media platforms as part of your marketing strategy may seem daunting if you do not approach it with a plan in place. It’s essential to engage with your audience, be active, develop new strategies, and keep up on recent trends to grow your social media presence. By understanding your audience and what platforms they use (and why), you can streamline your efforts and ensure you’re spending your time and resources building brand awareness in the right places. But remember to do your research; what works for one company might not work for another, so it is essential to understand your brand’s goals.

The post How To Grow Your Social Media Presence: Tips For Small Businesses appeared first on Portent.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Content Marketing World 2021, where I got to learn from some of the best content marketers in the industry. With more than 100 sessions, workshops, and forums presented by the brightest in the business, there was so much to learn. Here are the top takeaways I wanted to share.

How to Lower the Three Drawbridges of Content Success

Presented by: Jay Baer, Convince & Convert

In a survey conducted, 65% of B2B buyers said vendors give them too much marketing material. Yet, according to another survey conducted by Forrester, marketers anticipate a 40% increase in total marketing messages in 2021. This disconnect between marketers and buyers leads to a “moat”—customers build these moats to protect their attention.

Are your customers building a moat? Look at your engagement metrics in 2021 and compare them to that of 2019.

Here are takeaways to “get moativated” and get inside the castle via a drawbridge your customers lower:

1. The Right Message

Put the “custom” back in “customer” and customize the messages for your audience—don’t treat each customer the same. Consider where they are in the conversion funnel and use the customer’s historical engagements to tailor your marketing towards them. Did they click on a specific link in an email newsletter? Send them more of that content!

Baer recommends a “5x5x5” approach to content creation: 5 personas, 5 conversion stages, and 5 primary questions. Ask, “Is this the most useful information for this customer at this point in their journey?” Baer says that if the message isn’t “radically relevant” to the customer, the “drawbridge” will not lower.

2. The Right Messenger

“95% of millennials say their friends are the most credible source of product information.”

Baer recommends not just making content for customers but making content from customers. He used a Getty Museum social media challenge as an example where the museum encouraged its fans to recreate famous paintings using household items.

Here’s how Baer ranks the relevance of marketing messages:

• Message from customer
• Message from influencer
• Message from employee
• Message from brand

Baer suggests asking, “Can your customers see themselves in your content? Or is everything from ‘the brand’”?

3. The Right Modality

The goal should be to have different formats of content. Modality preferences are primarily determined by the customer’s generation and the customer’s lifecycle stage.

Here are some examples of how modalities might differ from the lifecycle stage:

Early-stage research:

• Listicles
• Infographics
• Blogs
• Videos

Late-stage research:

• Case studies
• Customer reviews
• Analyst reports
• ROI Calculators

Instead of “We already have a blog post on that topic,” consider similar content in different formats to satisfy the other customer preferences. “Can your customers fully self-educate through the entire funnel using the modalities they prefer?”

10 Content Strategies in 20 Minutes: What Corporate Content Creators Can Learn From Content Entrepreneurs

Presented by: Joe Pulizzi, The Tilt

Content entrepreneurship is about building an audience and then monetizing it. According to Pulizzi, content entrepreneurs are winning because they don’t have to get into politics, don’t need to wait for approvals on content, are fiercely motivated, and are creating a new business model (creator economy).

Here are Pulizzi’s takeaways for what corporate content creators can learn from content entrepreneurs:

1. Plan Your Move From Rented to Owned Channels

Content entrepreneurs are more likely to use owned channels such as email newsletters and blogs. Pulizzi used Charlotte Labee as an example—Labee started on Instagram, took her 80,000 followers, and turned them into over 50,000 email subscribers.

2. Create Multiple Revenue Sources

Pulizzi says content entrepreneurs have more than four revenue channels. Some examples of revenue channels include:

• Products
• Subscriptions
• Training
• Premium Content
• Advertising and Sponsorships
• Affiliates
• Donations

3. Train Your Team to Buy More Time for Your Projects

According to The Tilt, Pulizzi’s email newsletter and education program, it takes content entrepreneurs, on average, 26 months from launch, to support a single person from revenue.

Content marketing programs and campaigns have much shorter timelines to work with. Pulizzi recommends educating your organization on your purpose and goals and training your executives to buy more time to do that.

4. Only Publish on Social Channels Where You Can Be Remarkable

Pulizzi recommends only creating content on channels where you can be remarkable.

For example, Accidentally Wes Anderson concentrated their efforts on Instagram and then created a New York Times Best Selling book.

5. Do Better With Your Mission Statement—It’s Not About You

Your mission statement should focus on significant audience impact or an earth-shattering idea. Remember, it’s not about you!

6. Work Hard to Develop a Community

Pulizzi says that your job search days are over if you build a community instead of just an audience. For example, Bankless paid attention to the contributors of their Discord community. When they had open roles, they knew who and where to turn to (their Discord).

7. Look Into Creator Coins as Part of Your Community Initiative

Creator coins are digital currency that can be used as payment for products and services. Pulizzi believes everything will be tokenized in the future, including Starbucks Rewards. Creator coins win because it allows for more loyalty, audience rewards, and community-building.

8. Experiment With NFTs While You Still Have the Time

According to Dictionary.com, NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens — they’re “internet content that has a “record” that allows its ownership to be tracked as it is traded from person to person.” Pulizzi says that if you’re not experimenting with NFTs, you’re behind on the curve. Experiment with NFTs while you still have the time before everyone else catches on!

9. Make Your List of Content Brands and Creators to Buy

Pulizzi recommends buying defunct domains so that your brand doesn’t start with a 0 domain authority. Think about where your target audience likes to hang out and make a list of brands and domains to consider acquiring.

10. Start Working on the Plan for Your Audience to Make Money Through Your Content Program

There’s a new media model called DAO: decentralized autonomous organization. With DAOs, users make all decisions. If a project succeeds, the users make money. Pulizzi believes Web 3.0 is about building an audience, building a community, and then offering financial rewards and incentives for that community.

B2B Content: The B Doesn’t Have to Mean “Boring”

Presented by: Jonathan Crossfield

The number of downloads or clicks on whitepaper content does not indicate how helpful the content is, but rather how well you enticed people. Crossfield says, “It’s how people respond at the end that counts.”

Crossfield challenges us to rethink B2B content—it doesn’t have to be boring! Here are the takeaways from Crossfield’s session:

1. Find the Humanity

Most content lacks humanity, and so it doesn’t appeal to users on an emotional level. Stop writing about things; products and things aren’t interesting on their own—people make those things interesting. Place your writing in the real world and provide real-world examples rather than focusing on the abstracts.

2. Use a Creative Angle

Consider leaning on a highly creative analogy or metaphor and blend some fiction with fact to create a blended world. Crossfield says people will be more inclined to stay and see where it leads.

3. Mind Your Language

Your writing should be easy to read and understand. Anything that makes reading harder also makes the writing less efficient.

Crossfield says most people, including the business managers your B2B content targets, do not have a university reading level. Use reading levels to gauge readability.

4. Manage Stakeholders

Often, stakeholders can have competing opinions. Rather than argue with them, take your stakeholders on the creative journey with you—explain your decisions as you make them and invite your stakeholders to offer input. This way, the stakeholders won’t be surprised by the end-product.

That’s a Wrap!

Content Marketing World 2021 provided an awesome opportunity to hear from content marketing experts from around the world. I’m looking forward to applying the strategies and insights I learned to help my clients achieve their content marketing goals.

The post My Favorite Content Marketing World 2021 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

Updated on October 5, 2021 to include new information.

As good marketers, being able to track how effective our online and offline marketing campaigns are is extremely important to measure the success of the marketing efforts for your company. Want to know how many people click on that call-to-action button on your email that you have sent out? Or track how many people are converting from your social ads? If so, then UTM codes will be your best friend. Let us take a deeper dive into a little history of UTM, its use, and some best practices.

What Is a UTM Code and What Does It Stand For?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. “Urchin” comes from a web analytics program acquired by Google in 2005, marking GA’s beginning.

UTM codes are snippets of code appended to the end of URLs that communicate with the GA code on your website. This allows Google Analytics or any other analytics tools to track where your site originated from. Normally, we would attach a custom URL containing a source, medium, or campaign parameter.

Here is an example of what a UTM code may look like:
https://www.example.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=example-of-campaign-name

Why Are UTM Codes Important?

UTM Codes are important because they help collect data and valuable information about your website visitors to your Analytics platform. Marketing Analytics tools like Google Analytics are extremely powerful. They give us detailed information about what sources are driving the most traffic to our site and the quality of that traffic.

UTM Code tracking empowers you to make big picture decisions like which channels you should be investing in, what changes to make to the site to improve user experience, and so much more.

Simply put, without proper tracking, you are flying blind. The keyword there is “proper.” Simply having GA installed on your site isn’t enough. To get the most out of your tracking, you need to set up proper tracking parameters for all your marketing campaigns.

Getting Started With UTM Codes

Now that you have a basic understanding of UTM Codes and their usefulness to your campaigns and analytics, let’s get down to how you can implement and use them in real life.

Understanding UTM Parameters

There are five types of UTM parameters (also referred to as UTM tags/codes) that we normally use to track our campaigns: Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, Campaign ID, Campaign Name, Campaign Term, and Campaign Content.

Below are some quick definitions and examples for the 5 UTM parameters recognized on Google Analytics:

How To Create a UTM Code

If you are like me, the idea of writing custom URL parameters is not the most comforting. Luckily, Google has created a way to simply create your desired UTM Code using Google’s Campaign URL Builder. In the UTM builder, you will need to input the website URL that you would like to track and other required fields like your Campaign, Source, and Medium information into the respective boxes. Here is an example of how to fill out each section to build a UTM code:

Once you have filled in the information, the Google URL builder will automatically generate the UTM code for you that you can use immediately to track your campaigns:

You may want to build your own URL parameters in Google’s URL Builder for mobile app campaigns.

Pro-tip: These UTM-coded URLs can leave you with a long and unattractive URL. Instead, use a URL shortener like bit.ly or Google’s URL shortener to polish it off if it’s user-facing (like in a tweet):

When To Use UTM Codes

There are a plethora of uses for UTM codes. Below are some examples of when to effectively use your UTM codes:

1. A/B Testing – Whether you are A/B testing for two different ad creatives or want to know which platforms or audiences work better for your campaigns, leverage UTM parameters to compare the variables you are testing for. It is most common to test various types of sources or content, but feel free to get more creative with what you would want to test!
2. Track Offline Conversions – UTM codes are not only used for your online campaigns. You can even track offline conversions using UTM codes. For example, If you use QR codes on your printed advertisements, simply use your coded URLs to see how many people scan on your QR code and take actions on your website.
3. Evaluate Your Promotional Campaigns – Use UTM codes to determine how effective your promotions are. Add a custom utm_source value to every promotion on all of your mediums. Once promotions have ended, evaluate your campaigns from your analytics dashboard to determine the payoff of these campaigns.
4. Refine Your Marketing Strategy – Use UTM parameters to see which of your campaigns are the most effective. This will help you make wise decisions on what content or strategy to focus on and put your advertising budgets.

Google Ads Auto-Tagging Capabilities

Some platforms like Google Ads have built-in functionality to tag your URLs without any extra work with auto-tagging. With this feature, Google will automatically tag your URLs with gclid parameters in all of your Google Ads campaigns. So instead of adding UTM parameters to every single destination URL in your campaigns, put in the original ‘naked’ landing page URL without the UTM parameter. Pretty cool, huh?

To use this feature, make sure to enable auto-tagging on your Google Ads campaigns. Simply go to Google Ads > Settings > Account Settings > Enable the option for ‘Tag the URL that people click through from my ad’ as shown below.

However, while platforms like Google Ads have their own auto-tagging ability, we still need to use UTM codes to track other paid channels like Facebook or Instagram, or if we have non-Google third-party analytics to track our campaign performances.

How To Track UTM Codes In Google Analytics

Once you have placed your UTM codes in your campaign and collect more data over a period of time, you can find more information about your campaign from Google Analytics. For an overview of your acquisition channels in Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > Overview:

Your website traffic is grouped by the default channels based on how people got to your website. These channels are your “utm_medium” values that were pre-defined by Google Analytics. All other data that was not pre-defined by Google Analytics will go under “Other.”

From the data above, we can see that the Display channel is generating the most traffic.

You can also find more detailed data in other sections to see what metrics match certain UTM codes. For this, you may go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium:

Once you are on this page, you can see the list of source/medium and other corresponding metrics data associated with it. The data above shows that traffic coming from “google/cpc” generated around 4k new users, 5k new sessions, and 504 conversions. You can also use the secondary dimensions to filter for the metrics that correspond to the other UTM parameters.

UTM Tracking Tips & Best Practices

Now that you are more familiar with how to use UTM codes, here are some tips and best practices to use them properly.

1. Be Consistent With Naming Conventions for UTM Parameters

You might have more than one person working on your team to launch different types of campaigns within the same channels. Keeping a consistent name for your UTM parameters prevents you from having inaccurate data in your analytics when you try to identify trends for a certain campaign or channel. For example, some people might use “paid_social” while others use “paid-social” as their UTM parameter, even though they are from the same medium. Your Google Analytics will identify this as an entirely different source or medium due to inconsistent naming conventions, even if they are just slightly different.

2. Keep Track of Your UTM Parameters

The best way to diagnose inconsistent naming conventions is to keep track of your UTM links and parameters in a main document (e.g., Google Sheets, etc.). Documenting all of the naming conventions of your UTM parameters will help your team collect valuable data that is more accurate regardless of who makes the UTM link in your team.

3. Never Use UTM Tags for Internal Links

Now let me emphasize again. You should never use campaign tagging for internal links. UTM codes are only used to track external traffic sources coming to your website (e.g., social profiles, emails, etc.). Furthermore, UTM parameters in internal links can confuse Google Analytics or other Analytics tools, thus creating inaccurate data or tracking errors.

4. Regularly Check In on Your Reporting Dashboard

This might sound like the least important step to do, but it is probably the most crucial step to collect more accurate data for your website. Periodically check on Google Analytics or another analytics dashboard that you use to see if there are any odd codes. Even with a standardized UTM parameters list, human errors are bound to happen. Check for any mistyped UTM codes, mistagged links, or even inconsistencies between the sources or mediums of your campaigns.

Improve Your Marketing Strategies With UTM Tracking

Advanced tracking with UTM codes enables you to make insightful and more accurate decisions to grow online and offline marketing strategies. Once you can use these UTM codes, you will understand how valuable your marketing campaigns are and stop wasting your budget on ineffective ones. At Portent, we have a team of analytics experts to ensure that your UTM tracking codes are in the right order and tracked properly in your analytics dashboard. Contact us if you need any help, and don’t let your marketing efforts go to waste!

The post What Are UTM Codes and How To Use Them appeared first on Portent.