First and most obviously, sponsored product sales increase your visibility and revenue in the form of direct sales. But second, because Amazon awards better organic placement or “rank” to products or companies that have higher overall sales velocity, an aggressive and effective sponsored product strategy can literally earn you higher organic visibility to boot. I’ll say that again, selling more via paid ads on Amazon will actually increase your organic rank in their marketplace.

This is a huge difference between more traditional SEO + PPC, where search engines effectively separated Church and State. Your paid search performance on Google has absolutely no bearing on your site’s organic rank. But on Amazon, you can literally buy your way to better organic rankings through well-targeted advertising. With that in mind, let’s talk about building a killer Sponsored Product Campaign.

An Important PSA: Paid advertising is absolutely not the only thing that drives your organic rank in Amazon. To learn more about organic ranking factors on Amazon, I’d recommend this primer about marketing on Amazon in general.

Where do Sponsored Product Ads appear?

Amazon will present sponsored products in a variety of ways throughout the site. In the search results, they might show up as a separate line or visual area, highlighting title and certain item details:

As a set of products in a placement that blends paid and organic product listing results.

Or even as a full-width item:

You’ll notice all of these screenshots also show “headline search ads.” That’s actually a completely different ad type that we’ll address in a follow-up post.

Beyond showing up in Amazon’s search results, your ads are also eligible to show up on individual product pages. Those could be a complementary product, on your own product pages, or even on a competitor’s product page like the one shown below.

The bottom line is, sponsored products are everywhere on Amazon, other sellers are taking full advantage of them, and you should too.

That said, not everyone is doing it well. Take another look at the example above. This business is showing ads for vacuums on a page about a “vacuum sealed water bottle”. (Bonus points if you caught this without the prompt.)

What makes an effective Sponsored Product strategy?

If you want to get the most out of sponsored product advertising, there are few overarching things to keep in mind.

Be realistic about your budget

If you have budget limitations prioritize your products. Start with (or lean into) your top sellers or most popular items first to kick start your advertising. Build profitability and credibility before trying to sell every last thing in your inventory.

Over time, expand to your wider catalog. The end goal should be to advertise all your products and at a profitable ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale).

Campaign targeting and structure

Amazon has two different campaign types to choose from as you start: automatic campaigns and manual campaigns.

Automatic campaigns are auto targeted and do not have keywords. By using this campaign-type, you’re allowing Amazon to target your ads based on how it perceives your products (i.e. the keywords and content in your listing).

Manual campaigns by comparison have keywords with match types that you can choose, a lot more like traditional SEM or paid search marketing (PPC).

Both campaign types have pros and cons so in order to give the best coverage we typically recommend advertising or targeting each product twice if it’s valuable, once in each campaign type.

Manual campaigns give you the greatest control, so if you’re confident in your targeting and setup, these campaigns should get higher bids in general. Use these campaigns to target keywords you are confident will be high performing.

Automatic campaigns by comparison work well to cast a wide net and can be an effective way to prospect for new keywords that your audience is using to shop. As a general rule, you’ll want to bid lower in automatic campaigns. Also, be sure to use the negative keyword functionality to ensure ads are reaching as many of the right people as possible, even when you’ve more or less given the targeting reins to Amazon.

Ad group structure

In general, we recommend you give each product you’re advertising its own ad group. This allows you to better control a number of different things around your keyword targeting, negative keyword targeting, and more narrow bidding strategies. Important: this requires additional setup, so read the Negative Keywords section below.

If you have ASINs that are hyper similar, combining these products into single ad groups can make sense. But as a rule we typically see better results for our clients by separating these out to provide the ability to optimize with greater precision.

Keywords and match types

When selecting keywords for your manual campaigns, it’s unwise to simply copy your keywords from search engine marketing efforts. Instead, you should invest the time to do Amazon and shopping engine specific keyword research. Google and Amazon will very often differ in what keywords produce the best results, precisely because user or shopper intent is generally different on each. Much to Google’s concern, shoppers still tend to do a lot of early information gathering and category research on search engines, before turning to Amazon or other shopping platforms to research pricing, availability, and ultimately purchase.

Tools like MerchantWords and Seller Labs Scope are great for this kind of shopping-specific keyword research. Also, “steal” from other parts of your copy where it makes sense. For instance, if you or a co-worker have already written descriptive copy for your product listings, hopefully you did a bit of thinking and research to align that description with what people were searching. Voila!

As a general rule, avoid broad match keywords as part of your manual campaigns. More specific match types like phase and exact match will give you more control. And of course you already have that matching automatic campaign for each product set to cast the wide yet optimized net we talked about above, right?

Negative keywords

Short version: use ’em. Negative keywords are a hugely important part of an effective sponsored product campaign (or any other pay per click campaign for that matter). At the extreme, they’re your only line of defense from potentially wasted spend in automatic campaigns. And in manual campaigns, even with great initial targeting, they’re extremely helpful in proactively avoiding missteps or waste.

Important: Negative keywords are also a necessary part of the dual campaign structure strategy we’ve recommended here. If you’re intentionally targeting products twice (once in each campaign type) then all keywords in the manual campaign should be negatives for your automatic campaign. Done right, this will prevent crossover between the two campaigns, and should funnel traffic where you intended it to go.

Track progress yourself (Amazon won’t do it for you)

As of this writing, Amazon’s reporting for advertising is pretty barebones, and provides almost no historical context (they only store 90 days worth of performance data).

Create your own reports and export the data from Amazon monthly/weekly/daily. Whatever your reporting needs call for.

Yes, we realize this is a bit painful if you’re used to Google’s AdWords or Google Analytics platforms. But if you aren’t downloading reports regularly, you will lose the data.

Set very clear goals for Amazon advertising

This is marketing 101, but you need to set clear goals for products based on things like margins, revenue, etc. Having a clear understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, setting the right KPIs, and measuring that relentlessly is critical to your success.

Do you have strict ACoS goals? Conversely, would you be comfortable sinking money into a high ACoS campaign or product to increase sales velocity and ultimately your organic rank? Have a plan, goals, and clear-eyed reporting so you can pivot if you’re falling short of the initial expectation.

Conclusion

Overall, Amazon advertising isn’t particularly complex compared to the myriad settings and structures offered by other advertising platforms like AdWords (for now…). But with that lack of sophistication comes both opportunity for serious growth, as well as added competition from less educated competitors. Here’s to making sure you’re in the right group.

The post How to Build Effective Amazon Sponsored Product Campaigns appeared first on Portent.

If you’re a marketer reading this and you haven’t already created an email nurturing campaign that gets beyond simply sharing your latest content, ask yourself “why not?” And no, having a single transactional email triggered when someone submits a contact form still doesn’t count. Cleverly worded though it might be.

According to the Annuitas Group, companies that use marketing automation see a 451% increase in qualified leads. So, why would you leave money on the table? Money that you’ve likely already spent attracting people to your website?

We recently put out a longer piece on the basics of email drip campaigns, but here are some tips that can help you get started today.

Get a message out immediately

If you had someone sign up for more information on your site, why didn’t you follow-up immediately? According to this study in the Harvard business review, businesses see a lead qualification rate that is 21 times greater when a lead is contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes.

This message can be as simple as a “Welcome to the family,” or “Message Received, we’ll be in touch.” responder. Something is better than nothing, though if that something is personalized and targeted, that more the better!

Send them the information they’re looking for

It just takes a moment to sit down and think about user intent. If someone is looking for more information about Widget X or Y Service, send them some of your best material about that exact topic. You know what landing page the user submitted on, right? (You should!) The signals about intent are there and all that is stopping you from getting the right information in front of these potential customers is you.

Break it down. How many contact forms do you have? Can you segment these down into similar intent types? If you said five forms, with two of those being for sales, two that are on product or solution pages, and one that is for a general contact page, you might only have three entry tracks. If you’re comfortable starting here, build your campaigns now. If you have the time, it’s also nice to have links to landing pages for similar content. You gave your potential customer what they wanted and more. Everyone loves getting more.

Make and keep commitments to build credibility

Let your respondents know what they can expect to come next. If they have asked to be contacted, let them know when that will be and be specific. Also, manage the expectation internally. Let your sales staff know that a lead from this campaign is expecting a contact on the timeline you set.

Did your contact ask for more information about a product or solution? If you’re planning on dripping five pieces over the next month, let them know. You could say, “You’re reading piece one, about Product.” Then, “Next week, we’ll send you Piece Two, our Use Case Study.” This progression is commonly known as nurture nurturing.

Circle back. Look at those metrics. Can you improve it with a few tweaks?

Notice that we didn’t mention A/B testing above? It’s because we didn’t want to overcomplicate things, especially if your main issue is just getting started. However, once you’ve created your first few campaigns, maybe you should consider circling back. Did the open rates look bad for an email? Maybe take a peek at the title and content that appears in an inbox? Are your click rates sub-optimal? Maybe your CTA isn’t readily visible, or perhaps your hook isn’t compelling enough. Most platforms will allow you to A/B test to see what combination works best.

And that’s it. Wait, that’s it?

No, of course not. Be curious and push the envelope… if you have time. If you’re strapped for bandwidth, most platforms have training courses that can answer specific questions or can even walk you through creating a basic nurture campaign. But take it beyond the absolute basics if at all possible! You know your customers better than anyone. Let your knowledge about what they’d truly appreciate reading from you be your guide, and the rest will fall into place pretty naturally.

The post I Find Your Lack of an Email Nurture Campaign … Disturbing appeared first on Portent.

Email newsletters are a fantastic way to share highly relevant content with your audience. But they have a major problem. It’s one that affects a lot of marketers strapped for time, and that I’ll candidly admit I’ve struggled with myself. It starts harmlessly enough: telling yourself you have enough content coming out on a regular basis to stand-in for a proactively planned email nurture or drip campaign.

The problem: without taking deliberate steps to plan out your email marketing process, new subscribers and customers may only get the next email in your ongoing series, rather than getting a highly relevant message or series that gives them the information most likely to be useful and impactful, as their relationship with your brand enters this phase.

Pre-planned email marketing sequences like this are frequently referred to as “drip campaigns,” but are often called drip marketing, lifecycle emails, automated email campaign, marketing automation, or simply “auto-responders” as lazy short-hand for “I didn’t send this email myself.”

Because there’s no right or wrong way to share good information, setting up an email drip campaign might seem a little overwhelming if you’re uncomfortable with ambiguity. We’ll look at some examples, guidance on strategy and goal-setting, and ultimately walk through some useful optimization tactics.

What is an Email Drip Campaign?

Dramatic Reenactment of a Drip Email Campaign

Very simply: drip campaigns or email nurture campaigns are an automated set of emails that you’ll send based on an initial trigger, and subsequent user actions (or inaction). The automation and logic lets you stay in touch with important parts of your audience in a more relevant and scalable way.

The right information, to the right people, at the right time.

Compare that with an email program on autopilot, and you start to see the problem quickly.

The best part of an email nurture or drip campaign is that you can and should plan out the messaging and flow of the campaign in advance, and then use data to optimize the heck out of it.

Every message you send is drawn automatically from a pool or queue of already-written emails that allow you to proactively plan and improve messaging, rather than scrambling to write, schedule, and send each communication. Or worse, to idly assume that your next automated email to your whole audience will be “good enough.”

If you’ve set up your CRM and web analytics tracking correctly, you should be able to glean insights about which distinct groups are responding to certain messages, which aren’t, and ultimately why. That “why” might break down to demographic, psychographic, or behavioral cues, all of which help you form a rich picture of who a prospect is, what their interests are, and where they likely are in the buyer’s journey. You can and should use that insight to update, refine, and otherwise improve your proactively planned email drip campaigns.

Email Marketing Strategy – Start with the Big Picture

Regardless of what you’re trying to do with a drip email, like any marketing campaign in the planning stages you need to start with the desired end-state and work backwards. A “campaign strategy,” if you will. Crazy, I know, but bear with me.

Whether your goal is welcoming a new subscriber, nurturing a lead from last quarter, merchandising highly relevant products via recommendation, or renewing a paying customer, we start with that ideal end-state to clarify what we ultimately want to see happen.

Vision

Setting a vision for your campaign can be a really powerful tool for alignment. Campaign vision should be something that’s inspiring, logical, simple, and directly tied to your ideal positioning for the brand.

An example campaign vision for an email drip campaign (or any other for that matter) might be:

To teach people how to achieve healthy, beautiful skin naturally, and become a trusted all-natural skin care brand to an expanded audience.

Goal

A campaign goal should typically follow the SMART goal framework, in that it’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Continuing our example from a skin-care line, our campaign goal might read something like this:

We will move our customers in the target campaign from an average of 1.6 skin-care products per customer, to 2.0 skin-care products, increasing our total sales to this audience by $3,000,000 by December 31, 2018.

Strategy

Once you’ve identified the Goal of your email drip campaign, you’ll shift to planning out the strategic approach. The deliberate combination and coordination of activities that will move potential customers from one point of the funnel to another in order to achieve that goal. While an email drip campaign is often a component that’s leveraged within a broader digital marketing strategy, it can and should have its own clear plan and goal.

Again, continuing our example from a skin-care line, our drip campaign strategy could be:

Each offer cohort (segment) will be nurtured via a 5-part email drip campaign with the intent of converting them to purchasers and long-term customers, with messaging adjusted to match intent based on email click & on-site behavior.

Tactics

Finally, with our desired state clearly laid out, and the strategy closely aligned, we’ll specify the individual tactics that make up the strategy.

Again, because an email drip campaign is often a part of a broader digital strategy, you may find there’s not time or patience to do the level of pre-work and build consensus before getting to the tactical stage. And that’s fine, but I’d encourage you to write down your thoughts and intuitions for Vision, Goal, and Strategy before simply dropping emails into a queue.

In this case, we’ll use the following example for a high-level tactical plan:

The email list for this campaign will be built through an onsite signup page accessed through PPC and Facebook ad links, as well as subscribers who have not yet purchased broken out by region. Customers who claim or purchase the initial offer will automatically enter the drip email campaign.

Ads linking to the signup page will advertise one of two proposed initial offers:

• Offer A is a free starter kit (value $10, offer capped at 500 units)
• Offer B is a free foundation with purchases over $20 (value $10, up to 500 units)

Analyze Past Email Performance – Learn from What’s Worked

To inform a drip email campaign strategy, if at all possible take a look at past email performance to see what’s worked well with your customer base, and what might need some tweaking as you move into a new campaign with a fresh audience. Even if you’re drawing from a relatively small pool of past email campaigns or one-off sends, it’s worth taking a look to see if any trends emerge across the following categories.

Analyze Email List Composition

Is your current email list derived entirely from newsletter signups on your website? From Facebook lead generation campaigns? What messaging did these users see, and how should that tie into the information they receive from you next?

Even if your list is relatively small, plan for growth by adding additional segmentation such as: general news, special offers, product use tips, and overall lifestyle or topics ancillary to your products, to enable you to provide more targeted messaging to your customers.

Analyze Past Email Performance

Don’t just stop with your email management system here, or with Google Analytics. You should have at least two sources for information on email recipient behavior, to tease out which subject-lines, topics, and landing pages resonated with your audience to date.

If Google Analytics tracking has been inconsistent, time to head to MailChimp, OmniSend, aWeber, Klaviyo, or whatever other email marketing platform you’ve selected.

If there are gaps in your email-to-web-analytics tracking when you get under the hood, use it as a catalyst to make sure that your email system always has any web analytics integrations and options turned on by default.

Analyze Your Email Subject Lines

To do a simple analysis of your best subject line(s), look at open rates, click through rates (CTR), bounce rates, spam, and unsubscribes. There’s plenty more you can do here, but for simplicity’s sake as you start out with drip campaigns this will give you decent direction.

Consider which of your subject lines had the best open rate and see if you can spot common elements. Which of those could you replicate? What motivations or segments do these speak to?

In this case, our top three example open-rates came from emails that spoke to time-sensitive announcements. “Big news”, “Exciting news”, and “It’s a party”. Intuitively, this might speak to having an already-engaged audience, or a general propensity to try new things.

But don’t stop with open rates, which taken by itself can lead you to a different or even wrong conclusion about what your audience wants to hear.

Look for differences between open-rate winners, and CTR winners. Are you promising one thing and sharing another? Which of the topics that you’re sharing with the audience not only pique interest enough for a glance (email open), but engage them to want to click through to a promotion, article, or resource?

In our sample case above, the best CTR came from subject lines that were timely or valuable at the moment of initial send, including terms like “Voter fatigue” and “Martha Stewart.” Another strong performer referenced a video resource which may be something we’d want to test by offering similar resources. All of these offer something for the customer – an exciting experience, a video to watch, something from Martha, or a sincere, and timely appeal.

Pay Attention to Unsubscribes, Bounces and Spam

Are there topics, subjects, or other elements that you’ve sent in the past where you’ve generated a higher unsubscribe rate and more spam signals? You can’t afford to myopically focus on new additions as you build and maintain your email list. You should have a clear picture of how you’re doing at speaking to and maintaining your audience with useful, appreciated information.

A corollary: clickbait will get you attention, and potentially even more subscribers, but you can certainly burn out your list by over-using any one tactic.

Is your audience sending you signals that you can use to refine future email nurture efforts? Do they prefer a more personal tone, or less personal? Do they respond well to certain offers, but not others? Would they rather see your brand name, or more about the offer?

Analyze Past Results to Determine Best Day and Time of Day to Send Email

Is there a particular day of the week that generates your highest open rate and CTR for past emails? Again, you need to look at this for both open rate and CTR, in order to get the best possible picture.

Be sure to annotate your results with any anecdotal knowledge of what may be driving them. That might include days you’ve conditioned your audience to expect a note from you, if you send promotions on one day but resource blog posts on another, etc.

And although more and more email platforms are offering automated insight into the best time to send email, it’s a really good idea to do this analysis yourself. If for no other reason, it allows you to add the same kind of color to the analysis with what you might be doing that could skew results.

Drip Email Plan – An Example – Converting Trials to Long-term Customers

Email Content

Start With Your Values – Align With Customer Desires

If your customers value natural skin care products that are made by hand, give potential customers an introduction to the products and facets of your brand that lean into these attributes. Make the emails inclusive, supportive, and invigorating.

Bottom line: your email readers should feel part of an exclusive, or highly understood group with specific values.

What to Send in Your Email Drip Campaign – An Example

Let’s say this drip campaign is specifically for new customers who wish to try our your product. The email nurture campaign could flow through the following schedule, updated based on the actions taken by the customer as described earlier:

Email #1

Trigger – Completed sign-up

Email Content
The introductory email will be sent after the customer fills out the email sign-up page. It will confirm receipt of anything you’ve promised, and will welcome the reader to your audience or community.

Email Sent – Immediately

Email #2

Trigger – Hypothetical offer item ships

Email Content
The second email could or should send when your ERP or warehouse confirms they’ve shipped your promotional item, or first order. This email should evoke enthusiasm about the product and the brand. It should also offer some information about the product appealing to the target market.

Email Sent – On physical offer ship date

Email #3

Trigger – Scheduled Follow-Up

Email Content
A week after the product or offer is delivered, send a follow-up email reiterating the value of the products and making the reader feel more connected with the brand.

Email Sent – Offer ship date + 1 week

Email #4

Trigger – Scheduled Reorder Reminder / Product Running Low

Email Content
Let’s imagine that two to three weeks after the product is delivered, the customer would be close to running out of your sample product and assessing its value. In that critical period, an email could and should remind the customer what sets your brand apart from other products and provide a clear call to action to purchase more or different parts of your product line.

Email Sent – +2-3 weeks from Email & Trigger #3

Email #5

Trigger – Scheduled Promotion – Treat a Friend

Email Content
Three or four weeks after receiving the product, a promotional email will be sent, giving the reader the opportunity to treat a friend to a free starter kit.

Email Sent – +3-4 weeks from Email & Trigger #4

Email #6

Trigger – Scheduled Thank You + Sign Up

Email Content
Four or five weeks after receiving the product, we might reiterate some core pillars of our positioning, in the form of benefit statements from using our category. Not necessarily hammering the customer with a heavy sales message. Continuing the example, the email might provide informational support resources for the reader to take care of their skin even beyond the use of skin-care products. The email should thank the reader authentically and genuinely for their time and trial of the products, and provide a clear call to action to sign up for a regular newsletter flow.

Notice that our simple, regular newsletter hasn’t even been mentioned to this point, let alone assumed to be something the customer opted into. The permission to send this kind of regular messaging should be cultivated, asked for, and cared for.

Email Sent – +4-5 weeks from Trigger #6

Example Drip Campaign Recap

Again, the example schedule and email series here is focused on nurturing a new or trial customer to convert to a long-term, brand loyal customer. You may have other goals, a different purchase cycle, and very different brand positioning, all of which would merit significantly different content and cadence.

A Few General Best Practices for Email and Drip Campaigns

Email Subject Line Best Practices

With some exceptions, the ideal subject line should be 30-50 characters, avoid excessive punctuation, capitalization and symbols, and be both engaging and descriptive.

Email Length Best Practices

Email communications are a complement to your website, not a replacement. Meaning it’s best not to bury your key messages such as a great deal, resource title, or useful info under too much description, clarification about offers, or other fine print. Link out to your site for the details, and keep your email focused.

Paragraphs should be no longer than 4-5 lines long and followed up by bullet pointed features for easy reading.

Respect the amount of time your users have, and how much else they’ve likely received in a typical inbox.

Email Call to Action Best Practices

While it’s always a good idea to provide a contextually relevant next step, it’s not every single message that needs a high visibility eye-grabber. Especially if your email is simply a gentle reminder to, for example, make use of a trial product the customer has in their office or home.

But in general: CTAs should be clearly marked and central to the layout.

Email Opt-Out or Unsubscribe Best Practices

If you’re even considering email as part of your strategy, you should be up on the latest with CAN-SPAM compliance. An opt-out option should be included at the footer of each email. Not only is this legally required, but opt-outs actually strengthen email lists, giving better click-through numbers and more value per email.

Further Reading on Email Nurture and Drip Campaigns

I’m personally a big fan of a few resources on drip email campaigns, that do a great job with both examples and prescriptive guidance about who should be using specific types of email nurture.

Customer.io – Gives great examples of lifecycle email campaigns including who should use them

Myk Pono – Contributed a massive resource on Medium that goes over just about everything email nurture

Wishpond – Did a great long-form guide to lead nurturing, including ideas and examples.

The post What is Drip Marketing – Guide to Creating Email Nurture Campaigns appeared first on Portent.

Picture this.

You’ve just hired an SEO agency, and to kick things off they’ve just delivered a massive Excel file titled “Keyword Research”. They’re clearly excited about all of the insights that lay within, and how fundamental this is to their work with you. But you’re relatively new to SEO, and when you open the file yourself it looks like a bottomless morass of terms, a bunch of tabs with weird, seemingly similar titles, and a ton of color coding.

Meanwhile your agency (or in-house SEO) likely just spent thirty, forty, maybe even more hours, learning everything they could about the keywords, phrases, and questions people are asking about your business in search engines. They’ve filtered through thousands upon thousands of spreadsheet rows until eyes bled, and the memory of a non-pivot-table-based universe started to fade slowly away…

My hope for this article is to breathe some life, extra utility, and maybe even a little excitement into what can otherwise be a pretty dense and technical report. Sure, this baby gets referenced in lots of subsequent work where individual insights and easily-shared narrative are the norm, but there’s so much good here that it’s absolutely worth taking the time to understand the big kahuna.

And if you’re in a rush and just looking for what the heck to do next without the primer, I’d suggest skipping to the oh-so-conveniently identified Action Items under each section.

What is the point of keyword research?

Starting simple: keyword research is a process that uses a combination of tools to understand what words, phrases, questions, and topics people are searching for, around a product or service, and its related topics. This research allows us to better understand how we’ll improve organic rankings and identify opportunities for new content.

As one of the original SEO tactics, keyword research has been spammed, abused, and just about buzz-worded to death. It’s even been threatened more recently by machine learning and AI, but as an audience and marketing alignment tool it’s here to stay.

In the era of semantic search, RankBrain, and dynamic SERPs, this research can be the key to a truly successful SEO + content program or campaign.

Example: selling digital marketing agency services?? Write about “keyword research” and “SEO” if you find that people are looking for that topic with any consistency or volume. Eureka!

Any keyword research analysis worth its salt will clearly identify opportunities to optimize current pages within the site to improve search visibility. Quick wins!

After pointing out those existing opportunities, the research should uncover new keywords, topics, and questions for which your site does not currently rank. You can’t afford stop with just your own analytics data. These findings represent gaps that you can fill with evergreen pages, blog posts, or other pieces of owned content.

What is the keyword research process?

At Portent, the keyword research process to identify high-volume or high-value niche keywords for our Content and SEO strategies breaks down into four phases:

1. Find keyword opportunities by identifying current ranking phrases and pages for related terms. (“Where do you show up, and which page is getting the job done?”)
2. Research new, high-volume or high-value phrases for which the site is not currently ranking. (“Where do we have important gaps in our content?”).
3. Find questions people ask around the central terms and key ideas of your site, so you can answer the right search queries. (“What topics could we directly address with our site to increase visibility?”)
4. Find core entities, or topics, to tie opportunity phrases and new keywords into content and build authority. (“How do we make sure search engines and humans see our answers as actually relevant to the question?”)

Again, at Portent we use a handful of tools like SEMrush, Moz Keyword Explorer, and Answer the Public to generate loads of data and throw all of it into a spreadsheet. Then, through the black-magic of pivots, vlookup, conditional formulas, and formatting, we end with something that’s easier to look at, and more importantly, easier to act on by product marketing managers, web copywriters, social media teams, and so on.

Bottom line: keyword research ideally needs to be understood by everyone who’s communicating with your current and prospective customers, so that you can marshal resources for content, promote, and generally talk about your products the same way that your future customers are searching for them.

To that end, let’s move on to the specific sections of a Keyword Research Report from Portent, and what you can pull from each section in both insight and action items.

Part 1 – Keyword Opportunities

When an SEO reviews your site, they’ll invariably find search queries or phrases for which you’re already ranking. And that’s great, but what do we do with that insight?

We use this part of the analysis to find and highlight phrases for which your site could fairly easily make it to the first page of search results. Or better yet, make a jump above the fold on page one. Think of this as phrases within striking distance, which is exactly how we describe this to clients.

While a lot of the research process is defined by the digital marketing agency you choose, for my money using SEMrush to find the raw keyword opportunities, and marrying that with some good ol’ Google Analytics data for page performance is what it’s all about. (No sense in sending people to a page where visitors never take the next step. Amiright?)

The main things that we look for to identify or evaluate a potential keyword opportunity are:

• The site currently ranks between #2 and #20* for the keyword or phrase
• There are 1000 or more searches/month* for the keyword

*Note: These qualifications can and should be expanded to show a wider selection of phrases and pages if the site you’re working with doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of search volume yet.

After the broad strokes analysis, you’ll want to go through the data and make exceptions to add other phrases if:

• The site is already moving up for the keyword (capitalizing on momentum)
• Overall search volume is high enough to warrant extra effort for a term that’s below page two
• The target page has extra potential because you could link to it from other related site pages and/or can otherwise easily optimize it. More on content or topic hubs in another post.

Action items: On-page Optimization Around Keyword Opportunities

Title: Do you have a fully descriptive Title that passes the Blank Sheet of Paper Test? It should be about 65 characters long, and prominently feature the targeted keyword.

Meta Description: Do you have an enticing description of the page’s content that incorporates the targeted keyword phrase, encourages click-through, and is 300 characters or less? With all the recent changes to Google’s new SERP snippet and Meta Description length this may be an area you’ll want to brush up.

Heading Tags: The H1 heading should also include the targeted keyword, or highly relative phrase, and should act as the bridge between the Title and the page’s content.

Body Copy: Use the targeted keyword and related phrases where it makes sense. As always, don’t force it.

Image Alt: ALT attributes describe an image to visiting browsers and assistive devices. The image alts are required for accessibility guidelines and are even a minor ranking factor. Take the opportunity to fully describe the images using your targeted keyword in ways that a human could understand. (Think stock photo descriptions.)

Part 2 – New phrases and content gaps

For context, in this portion of the research your SEO is looking for phrases that make sense for your business, for which your site doesn’t currently rank. And because there are effectively no constraints here (we could rank for anything!) this phase of research is often the most complex and potentially time-consuming. So many rabbit holes to explore and threads to pull!

Your SEO will build out and expand this litany of new opportunities through several tactics that can (and really should) include:

• Thoroughly reading through your site and competing sites for context
• Using third-party tools like the Moz Keyword Explorer to look at competitor keywords and rankings
• Good old-fashioned brainstorming about what drives your customers

Action items: Content Creation

Armed with this list of brand new keywords, it’s time to figure out which parts of your site are best suited to address the topics and then get to writing.

Remember, this part of the report is about zeroing in on:

• Moderate to high-relevance phrases with high search volume
• Lots of phrases that are lexically similar to what you’re already doing (going back to the strategy of creating “topic hubs”)
• Highly relevant long tail searches that you’ve not yet addressed

Use these phrases for ideation on blog posts with your content team, creating or organizing pages into content hubs around a central topic, or any other new content pieces for the site.

Part 3 – Find the questions

Answering specific, direct questions and by extension proving that your site is useful, are some of the best ways to earn and sustain higher rankings and better search visibility. Done right, this can even include the coveted Featured Snippet or voice search answer for a given question or search phrase.

Those Featured Snippets are designed to surface the best answer to a question above all other organic results and are taken directly from a web page, along with a link to the referring page, the original page title, and the URL. They are a monster for driving traffic and building trust and authority.

The “Questions” section of a good Keyword Research analysis contains questions that are being asked by users across the web and scraped together using tools like Answer the Public.

Action Items: Content Creation and On-page Optimization

Use the Questions surfaced in your Keyword Research report for ideation on blog posts or any other new content pieces on the site. Ideally these questions should align and complement the topics surfaced in “New Phrases” or “Keyword Opportunities”.

You can use the H1 to pose the question you’re answering on the page. Then, for example, use H2s for potential People Also Ask questions throughout the page. What better way to show your relevance for a query than to answer more related questions?

An extended example:
If you’re trying to rank for topics around bicycle repair and parts, you can see how this might play out.

If we currently have decent authority and relevance for the topic “bike tires” but not “bicycle tubes” we’ll likely want content and smart interlinking around the tubes themselves. Let’s get some content up on a new or relevant page that talks about “tubeless tires”, “airless alternatives to pneumatic tires”, etc.

And for questions, we’d certainly want to include “How to replace a bicycle tube?” Or perhaps looking for long-tail opportunities, “Do tubeless tires go flat?”

Part 4 – Entities and related topicality

Entities are proper nouns or things that have risen to the level of proper nouns. Entities matter in SEO because they’re understood pretty darn well by search engines, to the point that Google and others could easily spit out a list of highly related topics.

Want to rank for searches related to a particular entity? Time to provide content around those highly related topics. Again, think “bike tires” and “bike tubes.”

Entities relevant to Portent might be Portent, Google, AdWords, PPC, and SEO. And yes, although those last two aren’t really proper nouns, humans tend to treat them that way which is a good way to think about this if you’re on the fence.

For context some of the ways that you can build and add to an entity list:

• Dust off your thinking cap again or gather some co-workers and brainstorm relevant terms that qualify as entities
• Look at schema.org: this page has a dizzying list of stuff for which Google supports schema markup. If Google has a way to declare that “this is a particular thing” that thing is clearly understood as an entity.
• Let’s get seriously nerdy: build or download your own word vector mapping tool and feed it scads of website copy from across the web to build your own entity library. Our founder Ian built his own word vector mapping tool, but this is not for the faint of heart.

Bottom line, as your SEO goes through all of the manual research and filtering and sorting in those earlier efforts, they should notice patterns and trends emerging, and be putting these into a list. Ultimately, this targeted list of entities will make up the core of your swing-for-the-fences initiatives and campaigns. Things like trying to rank highly for the incredibly broad or “head” terms that have a mountain of traffic every month.

Action Items: Schema Markup, Internal Linking, and Content Creation

Armed with this research and your clear list of entities, you can now spot opportunities to add schema markup to your site.

Schema markup provides the kind of structured data Google and Bing love and improves chances of getting nice stuff like answer boxes, which are reserved for the absolute clearest and best answers to specific queries. Additionally, clearly identified entities receive different treatment in search results, like knowledge graph panels and the like.

Content or topic hubs are another great way to build up relevance and authority for highly competitive entities. (Anyone seeing a theme here that topic hubs are a good idea?!) The strategy is to create wonderful and useful content that addresses long-tail and less competitive phrases and then link them all together so that they’re incredibly valuable to searchers.

A great rule of thumb here from some recent announcements by Google: Click-depth matters more for SEO than URL structure. Meaning providing a useful, obvious next answer to customers matters more than any fancy site directory setup.

Don’t let keyword research die!

Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to tackle every single opportunity in a keyword research report, or every suggested action item here, the absolute worst thing you can do is to let it sit idle.

Use it for quick wins and on-page optimizations. Use it for blog post brainstorms.

Use it for filling content gaps in your product descriptions. Use it to find opportunities to revive old and useful content.

Use it to spot opportunities and need for great topic or content hubs. Use it to build relevance and authority with smarter internal linking.

And if you have let that keyword research gather a little dust, it’s okay. Today’s a great day to pick it up and start afresh.

The post Keyword Research: What Do I Do with It Now?! appeared first on Portent.

• Are domain names a ranking factor?
• Should I include keywords in my domain name?
• Does the TLD (or domain extensions) affect SEO?
• Will an older domain get me better rankings?
• Do I need a domain or subdomains or subfolders?

These are all valid questions but, we can start honing in on the issues that matter most by shifting our thinking. In the current search landscape, rankings are a large part of SEO. It’s why SEOs spend countless hours analyzing keyword data, server logs, and technical best practices so that we can move one spot higher in the SERPs. However, rankings are like high school diplomas. The diploma is significant, but it’s more about the journey. Here’s the shift in thinking that we must achieve as SEOs:

“Stop focusing on the rankings. Let’s focus on the experience.”

Now let’s focus on a few general questions and best practices to keep in mind when choosing the right domain name for your business.

Do You Even Need a New Domain?

One of the first questions a business should ask if whether or not the new domain or subdomain is needed? Can the new content or product live within a subfolder on the existing site? If the new product or service like a closely related cousin to the existing business, can it live on a subdomain? Think about the various customers coming to your site would they benefit from seeing this new content on the same site or a different site? Would it create a disjointed experience? All of these questions come down to what is useful for your users. The analysis done to answer these questions should focus on user experience.

From a search engine perspective, building your site’s authority is an important factor in achieving organic success. PageRank is something that is core to Google’s ever-changing ranking algorithm. PageRank has also gone through changes but generally speaking, it is a mathematical equation that helps Google ascertain the quality and quantity of links to a webpage. This evaluation helps determine a relative score of a page’s importance and authority which is one of the many factors that Google considers when they are deciding which pages to rank over another. One way we can help increase PageRank of a site is by consolidating links under 1 domain rather than splitting those links across multiple domains.

Brand + Audience

Choose a domain name that makes sense for the brand and relatable to your main audience/user. When viewing your brand alongside other businesses in the SERPs, what name do you think will pique user interest, gain their trust and click through? Some brands focus on names that are playful or gimmicky and easy to remember. Other brands focus on names that are relatable and jibe with your products or services. Cards sorts and the analysis you did to understand your audience and user personas is extremely valuable here in providing insights to what domain name will resonate with your user base.

For example, if you had a local baby boutique (selling clothes, toys, and gear) and some of your user analysis showed that your customers were interested in:

• Supporting local mom and pop shops
• High quality, handmade toys
• Organic, natural, non-toxic products
• Unique non-big-box baby items

Some domain names you may consider are:

• seattlenaturalbaby-boutique.com
• totttchotchkes.com
• appleblossomkid.com

The problem with the first name is that it’s too generic, extremely long and also includes a special character like the hyphen.

The second domain name is catchy and fun to say. Who doesn’t like speaking Yiddish? The problem is that it’s pretty tricky to type.

And like Goldilocks, we finally find some satisfaction with final option. The name is easy to read and satisfies many of your users’ interests. Now we just need to make sure that no family of bears already owns the appleblossom.com domain.

Friendly + Descriptive URL Structures

Ultimately, what will matter more to search engines than your domain name is creating URL structures are friendly and easy to identify.

Meaning, do this ==> https://www.example.com/ovarian-cancer-research/

Do not do this ==> https://www.example.com/research/ovarian/204ka9083d54h7309asfaa257243lkd

“Friendly,” easy to understand and descriptive URLs are not only good for search engines but good or click-through rates. More users are likely to click because they understand what the page is about.

HTTPs vs. HTTP

Make sure the site is HTTPs. Even though your site may not be an e-commerce site or collect personal information via forms, https is a standard that more users are starting to expect and trust.

Blank Slate

Make sure the new domain isn’t similar to a product that is already popular. Is your new domain name a popular brand in another country? From a “common keywords” and “search competition” perspective you will have to compete with an established brand. If possible, choose a brand/domain name that is a blank slate. From a user experience standpoint, if your brand name is already commonly known, it’s better to come up with a unique name to avoid confusion. Do your due diligence and figure out if the name of your domain is the same or sounds similar to something else that is already out there. You may also find out that the domain name you are considering is also known for something that is not in line with your brand identity.

For example, we had a client who had a small e-commerce business selling clasps that hold baby pacifiers, bibs, and toys. They were considering naming their brand and domain, Claspers. Through the power of the internet, we discovered:

Male shark appendages are NOT quite the image you want your clients to think of when they are searching for a baby product.

Domain Extensions (TLDs)

Back in the day, the internet was pretty simple. Our choices were .com, .org, edu, .net, and .gov. Today, thanks to ICANN’s approval of hundreds of new TLDs, we have so many choices. Theoretically, whether your site is a .com or one of the new gTLDs, in the eyes of Google it should be equal. However, make sure the domain extension you are considering makes sense from a branding perspective and is relatable to your users. If your domain extension is not relatable to your users, you will send negative user signals to search engines.

Past Penalties & Domain Age

Another thing to consider before purchasing a domain is its history. Was it used as a parked site? Was it an active site with content that was impacted by one of Google’s quality algorithm penalties like Panda? Was the domain scraped by a malicious 3rd party site? What kind of backlinks does it currently have? Does it have backlinks from low-quality, spam, or adult-content sites?

Keywords in the Domain

In the past webmasters sought domain names that closely matched their business or service offering. They derived some benefit in organic performance, however, too many folks exploited this tactic to throw up spammy, low-quality content sites. Google launched the Exact Match Domain algorithm to penalize thin or low-quality content sites with exact match domain names. So rather than worrying about search engines when choosing a domain name, pick something that is relatable to your users and gains their trust. Find a name that will help people to choose your content in the SERPs and click through to your site.

There is so much to consider when choosing a domain name. We answered almost every question through the lens of user experience. It is good to have a firm grasp of SEO best practices when selecting a domain name but your customers’ experience and trust matter more than the analysis of “what is or is not a ranking signal.”

Conclusion

There are certainly more elements you could, and should, consider from a branding standpoint as you choose a domain. But if you’re looking for just a little more walkthrough on the SEO side, Rand Fishkin did a great Whiteboard Friday on How to Choose a Domain Name back in 2016 that’s still on-point.

Good luck, and hit us with any ponderous questions about this in the comments!

The post How To Choose a Domain Name – An SEO’s Guide appeared first on Portent.

In doing dozens of web analytics audits over the past year alone, Portent’s analytics team continues to see a lot of the same simple yet harmful mistakes again and again. Many of these issues are incredibly easy to fix. In some cases they literally involve nothing more than checking off a well-hidden box in the admin section of your platform.

Hopefully this post saves you the trouble of repeating these mistakes, or at very least helps you spot and fix these common problems in your own analytics before they come back to bite.

1. Missing Tracking Code

One of the most common problems we see with websites that have existed for any length of time is not having full analytics code coverage across the site.

This might seem like a trivial detail, but it can result in under-reporting your hard-earned traffic, blind spots in what your prospective customers are looking at before they purchase (or bounce), and failure to add great prospects to retargeting pools, to name a few.

To evaluate your site for analytics code coverage you’ve got a few options. At Portent, we use a proprietary site crawler and inventory tool as part of a broader diagnostic. You can also use a paid tool like Screaming Frog to do this site-wide analysis yourself.

Whether you’ve got your agency partner running the analysis or are using a tool: the crawler should return a list of URLs on your domain that don’t have the appropriate code or tag. In most cases, this problem is localized to specific pages that were custom-built for business or design reasons, so the fix is pretty painless.

2. No Tag Manager “Second” Code

Just as having full code coverage on your site is essential, you’ll need to take a look at whether you’re firing the correct code. In this case, we’re talking about code that needs to be deployed in both the head of your pages, as well as the body.

If you’re managing code snippets for analytics and other digital tools through Google Tag Manager (GTM), but aren’t fully comfortable with GTM we see this fairly often for a specific reason.

Pro-Tip: In the past year Google came out with changes to the Google Tag Manager tracking snippet. They’ve added a second piece code that should to be placed right after the opening body tag. The purpose of the new code is to ensure that every element in your data layer is loaded before someone leaves the page.

Bottom line, it’s a very good idea to do a check-up across any site to ensure you’re firing a complete and correct tag manager script.

3. No Analytics Code On Subdomain

For sites that use subdomains which is fairly common, mistakes or oversight in analytics coverage are so common that we’ll typically spend quite a bit of effort to get this right. Every subdomain is part of your brand, and it’s part of your customer’s lifetime interaction with your company.

Picture this: you’re running your blog, a FAQ section, a more robust knowledge base, an app or product, truly anything on a subdomain. Wouldn’t you want to know how your customers, both prospective and current, are consuming every part of your content and using your service? Whether you’re personally responsible for acquisition, minimizing churn, or anything in between, there’s a wealth of information available to every marketer by having a complete picture of how users move through every part of your site and subdomains.

Many times, this oversight in code inclusion on the subdomain is a byproduct of the content of the subdomain living outside of the CMS of the site proper.

But with how easy it is to drop a tag management container in any CMS these days there’s no excuse for silos here, people!

4. IP Address Exclude

Moving past the potentially obvious statements of “track everywhere” and “use the right analytics code”, the admin settings of your analytics are seriously important, and often incorrectly configured for one reason or another.

One of the most common mistakes we see is companies not excluding or segmenting out their own IP addresses. Simply put, you can’t afford to muddle precious customer or prospect data with your staff looking up answers, testing the new marketing campaign, etc.

Pro-Tip: Don’t forget to exclude your IP address, but remember you’ll need to exclude the IP addresses of every partner you work with. Those agency-types can get a little obsessive with visiting and testing pages repeatedly to make sure everything is working correctly.

Bonus Pro-Tip: In addition to your IP-filtered view, it’s best practice to always have a raw, unfiltered view in your analytics running as a backup, in case you get a little overzealous with the filters and need to backtrack.

5. Exclude Robots and Spiders

Staying with your admin settings: another problem we see often is failing to exclude traffic from bots and search engine “spiders” in analytics results. And yes, the picture below really is all you have to do.

While most web spiders do serve a valuable purpose, from an analytics standpoint all that this bot and spider traffic gives you is falsely inflated traffic and falsely deflated conversion stats from a bunch of computer-program-generated sessions. We have yet to see a good reason or excuse to leave these hits in your data.

6. Internal Referral Exclusion List

Another account-level setting where we often see mistakes or oversight is the Internal Referral Exclusion List.

Excluding internal domains (or self-referrals) from your site traffic reports is seriously important if it affects your business and you care about understanding who’s sending you traffic, reporting how much of your traffic mix is legitimately from outside referral clicks, etc.

This also applies to third-party payment sites if you run an e-commerce outfit that goes to a different domain during the checkout process before returning a user to your core site. You would want to exclude that payment system as an internal referral. If you skip this step the payment system will likely be adding new sessions to your Referral Traffic bucket as every buyer “returns” to your site.

Pro Tip: Although Google’s help documentation says you only need to add top-level domains to the referral exclusion list and that subdomains are automatically covered, we’ve found this isn’t consistently true. Adding subdomains just to be safe is a good idea.

7. Letting (Other) Traffic Linger

One slightly more challenging issue we see presents as some amount of traffic in the “(Other)” channel grouping. This is a problem for a few reasons, primarily that it robs you of insight about which of your channels should’ve gotten credit for those clicks, sign-ups, or sales.

The most common reason that traffic gets classified as (Other) is that it came from a campaign or ad with problems in the tracking URL, more specifically the UTMs. Not quite as easy as a button-click in your settings tragically, but still important to diagnose, locate, and fix.

Pro Tip: Most often, traffic makes it to the (Other) bucket because manually-tagged tracking URLs aren’t using the utm_medium parameter correctly. Your medium parameter should always reflect the type of traffic and not the source of traffic (i.e. utm_medium=social, not utm_medium=facebook).

Letting traffic fall to (Other) for failure to test and troubleshoot analytics tagging for ads, posts, shared articles, etc., can lead to attribution problems in that you’ll likely struggle to report the true ROI of your campaigns.

8. Smart Goals

A lot of the businesses that we do analytics audits for have Smart Goals enabled in their goal settings. Whether or not Google’s Smart Goals are a good idea for every business is still up for a bit of debate.

In essence, Smart Goals are designed to use machine learning to track micro-conversions that Google believes will eventually lead to revenue based on observed past behavior from your other visitors.

We absolutely believe in the value of using data to build predictive models that lead to tracking the metrics that ultimately matter. But that’s still no excuse to rely completely on someone else’s model, and forego building some basic, logical goals that correspond to the key events on your site. Instead, it’s better to define your own micro-conversions and set up goals in GA around those: newsletter subscriptions, ebook downloads, contact form submissions, or anything else.

And looking at the positive here, letting the engineers at Google take a crack at building you a predictive model based on past visitor behavior is pretty darn cool and very likely valuable, even if you’re not getting full visibility into the model.

9. Wrong Destination Page

One really good thing to check in an analytics audit is whether your goals are tied to the right events or (in this case) page views on your site. For instance, a mistake we find surprisingly often is that a goal will be tied to a user hitting a particular destination page, like a “thank you” page. No harm in that.

However, if the wrong destination page is specified (say, the form page itself, rather than the “thank you” page), you can go for a pretty long time without realizing there’s an issue if things pass a quick visual inspection. Again, this one just goes in the attention-to-detail bucket, but it’s a good one to double check every so often.

10. Single Goal with Different Goal Funnels

The last common mistake we’ll talk about is setting up a single destination goal with different or multiple funnels. Picture this, let’s say there’s three ways to check out on your e-commerce site:

• Guest checkout
• Registration checkout
• Returning checkout

They all wind up at the same receipt page, but you wanted to see how many people complete each of those three distinct paths. So you configure funnels around each of those pathways, but the result in GA is 3 goals showing the same exact number of conversions. Ack!

Okay, so why didn't this work??

Why doesn’t this work? Because these funnels only apply to a specific report called the Funnel Visualization report in GA. Outside of that granular report, the goal records the exact same amount of hits to the receipt page.

As a workaround, you’ll want to instead build a segment that shows sessions that include hits to guest checkout steps. Then, simply apply that segment (and similar segments around registration and returning checkout steps) to any report in the conversion section to see how many people accomplished your goal under that lens.

For more on this, Google’s got some solid documentation on Funnel Visualization vs. Goal Flow geared toward technical marketers and analytics professionals.

And there you have it!
This list of common analytics mistakes is by no means exhaustive. But if you can knock these fixes out yourself or skip the mistakes altogether you’ll be in far better shape to build a complete and confident picture of what’s working in your digital marketing program.

The post 10 Common Google Analytics Mistakes appeared first on Portent.

“Our search snippets are now shorter on average than in recent weeks, though slightly longer than before a change we made last December. There is no fixed length for snippets. Length varies based on what our systems deem to be most useful.” (Emphasis added.)

There is no fixed length for snippets.

And it’s true, according to RankRanger, the average snippet length in search results has dropped almost 70 characters from a month ago, down to 163.

What’s the difference between a search snippet and a Meta Description?

First, the Meta Description is an HTML tag on a web page that provides a brief description of that page.

A SERP snippet, or search snippet, is the flavor text below the organic blue links in search results that are sometimes taken from a page’s Meta Description.

Sample generated with Portent's SERP Preview Tool

What does Google’s new snippet length mean for SEO?

“Meta Descriptions are still important!”, is what I mutter to myself over and over as I rock back and forth, huddled under my desk.

Seriously though, they are still pretty darn important, despite being frustratingly arbitrary. Despite Google’s best attempts to slowly take this out of the hands of SEOs, if you don’t pay attention to your Meta Descriptions you can still end up with SERP snippets like:

Looking at the recent data presented by Moz’s Dr. Pete, the majority of SERP snippets are between 145 -165 so, it would be really easy to say, “Just go back to the way things were, write Meta Descriptions to 155 characters.”

But that’s not what I’m going to say.

As far as I can tell, none of the old rules apply anymore. Google may or may not use your Meta Description in the snippet and may or may not write their own snippet. So what should you do?

Well, first you should finish reading this and then read Dr. Pete’s post on How to Write Meta Descriptions in a Constantly Changing World (link below), where he lays out some really good options.

And, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:

I’m going to write meaningful and useful Meta Descriptions.

I am not going to hard stop at 155 characters, neither will I write to fill up 320 characters.

I’m going to write my Meta Description for what it is supposed to be: a concise summary of a page’s content that provides useful information to a searcher.

I will use any relevant, targeted keywords or phrases.

I will write in a way that will encourage clicks through to my pages.

And the length of those Meta Descriptions will probably be between 150-300 characters.

Because honestly, if the target keeps moving, I’m going to aim wherever I darn well please.

Further Reading:

https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/blog/seo/new-character-length-google-serp-snippets-meta-descriptions.htm
https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/996065145443893249
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-meta-descriptions-in-a-changing-world

The post Meta Descriptions are Still Important! appeared first on Portent.

In this post, we’ll share some of the awesome features AdWords has available and encourage you to experiment with any or all of these to see what works for your growing business.

Important: These features are not an alternative to building out the core of your SEM campaign using your deep understanding of real prospects and customers. There is no substitute for great topic research, and keyword research, driven by customer journey mapping, and a clear picture of what your customers care about.

Remember:

A fool with a tool is still a fool.
– Grady Booch

Smart Display

Smart Display campaigns are the “pinnacle of programmatic” as Google keeps telling us. And in terms of giving up control to Google, they may be right. These campaigns are for the Google Display Network (GDN) and are highly automated.

All you provide as the advertiser are the ideal cost per conversion (Target CPA Bid), campaign budget, and landing page or creative assets.

In exchange, Google provides auto-optimized creatives, the “right” users with the “right” bid, and coverage across the entire GDN inventory. That’s right, no more creating placements, finding audiences, and bid adjustments.

In general, this experiment will perform the best for AdWords accounts that have:

• A clear target cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
• A short conversion lag
• 100+ Search or 50+ Display conversions per month
• A remarketing tag

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are similar to Smart Display campaigns in that there’s a lot of automation straight out of the box. But instead of the Google Display Network, DSAs are shown on the Google Search Network, so this campaign type is listed under Search Network Only campaigns.

Broadly, Google uses information from your site, compares that information with search queries of your site visitors, and then creates ads (both headlines and landing pages) to best match the users it targets on your behalf. If you have concerns about how well your keywords, ad copy, and Final URL match up, this is the experiment for you.

DSAs can be set up quickly and require minimal hands-on optimization. Here’s what you’ll need to provide:

What landing pages should ads link to? (There are three options.)

• Target categories where you select sites based on ad groups
• Target all pages
• Target specific pages

Ad description lines and an optional display URL

• The headline and final URL will be dynamically generated

Other optimizations similar to standard Search campaigns

• Ad extensions
• Ad schedule
• Audiences
• Bid adjustments
• Negative keywords

Audience Targeting

There are an absolutely incredible variety of possibilities for retargeting (aka remarketing). Create an audience for customers who visited your site, clicked a link, stayed on your site for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, abandoned the checkout process, performed actions in an exact order, and multi-factored audiences. If you’re not already well on your way with retargeting, test all of these individually (using intuition to guide what makes the best sense for your buyer’s journey) to find the ideal target audience for both search and display networks.

But don’t call it good there! Once you have a great target remarketing audience, look to expand on it immediately with similar audiences or tailor that remarketing audience first to guide what would go into similar audience. Again, look to do this for both Search and Display networks since the medium will change your strategy and messaging by necessity.

Pro Tip: Note that similar audiences do have some requirements. Similar audiences for Search require 1,000 cookies with enough similarity in the original audience.

This kind of experiment or campaign can seem overwhelming but is absolutely worth testing thoroughly. For example, if you have two initial remarketing audiences based on observed behaviors on your site (say specific page views and length of time on site), and you’re advertising in both Search and Display, you’ll have eight audiences to test:

1. Remarketing audience 1 for Search
2. Remarketing audience 1 for Display
3. Remarketing audience 2 for Search
4. Remarketing audience 2 for Display
5. Similar to remarketing audience 1 for Search
6. Similar to remarketing audience 1 for Display
7. Similar to remarketing audience 2 for Search
8. Similar to remarketing audience 2 for Display

Pro-Tip: Tack on the Google-defined audiences of Affinity, In-Market, Life events, and Custom audiences for Search or Display campaigns and test the results with any applicable audience.

Last is customer match where you can upload customer information and retarget them through Search, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, or Youtube ads. Here’s a little more on how to set up customer match. Customer information ranges from email, phone number, mailing address, and advertising IDs.

Smart Bidding Strategies

If you’re on manual CPC, don’t have a lot of time to spend in AdWords, or are unsure of how to optimize, then this may be the feature experiment for you.

Smart Bidding Strategies such as Target CPA, maximize conversions, or Target ROAS gives AdWords a lot more control over optimizations and usually does a great job. Like any other AdWords feature, test to make sure it works for your account and industry. Check out Google’s knowledge base article to learn more about the goals you can use to optimize with this machine learning approach.

The main reason to switch bidding strategies is the relative difficulty and time required to keep on top of bid adjustments when you’re managing it yourself. You’re absolutely giving up some control as with many of the other features here, but you’re able to scale up campaigns faster, which may be the right trade-off for some.

For example:

Multiply the combinations together and you get 1,764 different permutations to manage for a single campaign. Add on location and ad scheduling by the hour and this can quickly get out of hand.

Experiment with Attribution Models in AdWords

We won’t get into the details of which attribution model is the best or why, but you can read a great OpEd on the perils of last-click attribution by Portent’s Analytics team lead Michael Weigand.

For Portent, and as it becomes increasingly available to more advertisers, it’s all about Google’s recommended “Data-driven” attribution model. (And yes, “Data-driven” is actually what they’ve named this ML approach to attribution.) Data-driven does require some scale at 15,000+ clicks and 600+ conversions in a month. If you’re coming up short of this, but don’t want the default last-click attribution that GA offers (good for you), the options for Linear attribution or Position-Based attribution do not.

Picking one of these 3 attribution models and using it to optimize performance often improves bottom-line KPIs whether it’s conversion quality, ROAS, or GPM by causation or LTV and retention by correlation. Again, that’s because AdWords’ default attribution model is last-click, which means whatever the user clicks last when he or she converts gets 100% of the conversion credit, which can lead to some serious problems awarding credit to other important touch-points.

Think about how you are reaching customers and pick which attribution model is best for you. You can compare attribution models in your AdWords account. Tools => Conversions => (pick a conversion) => Edit Settings => (click Attribution model to expand) => click “attribution modeling tool.”

(BONUS) A Few More Feature-Based Experiments to Try in AdWords

Ad extensions – Honestly, try them all as they’re relevant to your business. We’re especially keen on Seller Rating and Promotion extensions at the time of this writing.

Custom Columns – These are great for GPM and PM, but in truth these are more of a reporting feature than something to drive or automate the performance of the campaigns themselves.

Beta & Alpha testing programs – Contact your Google Representative to apply for Beta or Alpha programs that give additional targeting. You may be surprised at who qualifies. For example, the new Detailed Demographics gives advertisers the ability to target users by Marital Status, Home Ownership Status, Education Level, and Parental Status. We’ll wait and see how this one plays out with GDPR.

The post Grow Your PPC Revenue – AdWords Features and Experiments You Should Consider appeared first on Portent.

NOTE: This is not legal advice. We are not lawyers. It’s also not the only thing you’ll need to do to reach GDPR compliance for your business. Cookie consent is only one portion of GDPR compliance. Please consult legal counsel before implementing this solution.

Another note: This solution works for cookies fired from inside the GTM container. It won’t prevent cookie placement for those placed outside the container.

We’ve already provided some GDPR basics for marketers. This post gets a lot more tactical.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ideal cookie consent form will:

1. Detect your location and see whether you’re in the EU
2. Based on your location, display the cookie consent (or not)
3. Request cookie consent
4. If you consent, place analytics cookies as usual
5. By default, let you browse the site, but turn off analytics cookies, providing a seamless user experience
6. Oh, and since you have about 48 hours (GDPR goes into effect May 25th), require as little developer time as possible.

Ask, and ye shall receive: This step-by-step uses Google Tag Manager (GTM) to create a cookie consent banner that pops up at the bottom of your site only for EU visitors. The banner asks visitors to opt-in. If they don’t, they can still browse the site, but GTM will not fire cookies that require consent.

To set this up, you need to understand GTM and GTM configuration. When you’re done, you’ll get something like this:

See? A lovely cookie consent banner

Step 1: Sign up for an ipinfo.io account

First, you need a way to identify visitors from the European Union. IP Info provides an API to do just that.

IP Info lets you detect EU visitors

It’s free for up to 1,000 requests/day. We get more traffic than that, so we’re paying $100/month for up to 40K requests/day. Not bad.

After signup you get an API token:

Your IP Info API token. Write it down!

Copy that and hang on to it for later.

Step 2: Generate a cookie consent banner at Cookie Consent by Insites

At Cookie Consent by Insites, you can generate a Cookie Consent banner that matches the look and feel of your site.

A banner, courtesy of Cookie Consent by Insites

Link it to your privacy policy and choose the “opt-in” method under “Compliance Type.”

Set opt-in compliance

Once you have configured and styled your banner, copy the code in the box on the right-hand side and hang on to it for later.

Step 3: Configure Google Tag Manager

For this step, we’re assuming you know a bit about GTM variables, triggers, and tags work. This is where the rubber meets the road. If you aren’t sure what this all means, stop. Get your analytics nerd to help out.

Set up country lookup

Set up a Custom HTML tag with a JavaScript that will query the IP Info API and return the visitor’s Country Code.

Country Lookup Custom Tag

Use this code:

<script type="application/javascript">
  function callback(json) {
    dataLayer.push({'event': 'ipEvent', 'ipCountry': json.country});	
  }
</script>
<script type="application/javascript" src="https://ipinfo.io/?token=YOUR-TOKEN-GOES-HERE&callback=callback"></script>

Replace the YOUR-TOKEN-GOES-HERE portion with your IP Info API Token you set aside from Step 1.

Then create a data layer variable to pull the value of that Country Code.

Data layer pulls country code

Once the Country Code is available in the data layer, use a Lookup Table variable to look for each of the EU Alpha-2 Country Codes and return a “Yes” if they are in the EU and a “No” for all other Country Codes.

Lookup Table variable

That will inform a trigger called “IP Event – EU” which will show/hide the Cookie Consent banner based on location.

Show the cookie consent banner?

Add the cookie consent banner

Next, take your script from Step 2 and create a Custom HTML tag to fire that when the “IP Event – EU” trigger meets its criteria.

Custom HTML tag to fire criteria

If the visitor accepts, the banner sets a first-party cookie. Otherwise, no cookies for them.

Set a first-party cookie upon accept

We’ll also need a trigger that verifies the corresponding cookie values if the visitor accepts.

Verify cookie is in place

Once that trigger executes, we send a data layer event and trigger.

GTM data layer event and trigger

Data layer event and trigger

Here’s example code for that data layer event.

<script>
dataLayer.push({'event': 'cookieConsent'});
</script>

The “cookieConsent” Custom Event then becomes the trigger that you use to fire all tags for EU visitors.

Non-EU Visitors

Make sure this doesn’t impact any tracking you’re doing for non-EU visitors: Delay your tags to fire on Window Loaded (not Pageview), and ensure your “In The EU” variable equals “No.” That way, the Country Code process has a chance to run.

Make sure tracking works for non-EU visitors

Quality Assurance

Test! Test! Test! Test on staging or in Google Tag Manager’s preview mode:

Turning on GTM preview mode

Next, you’ll want to find a proxy service that allows you to view the preview mode URL from a server in the EU. We used Hide Me, a service that has options to proxy from Holland or Germany.

Hide Me

Be sure you test this on a mobile device and in every possible form factor. We didn’t, and our social share ribbon overlapped with the consent button. Luckily @_sebastiansimon was on the case and let us know. We’re fixing it as I write this.

Done! And A Question

That’s it! You now have a low-code cookie consent form in place.

We did grapple with one question, and we’d love your opinion: Should we display the cookie consent for everyone, regardless of location? That way if someone from the EU is, say, traveling in Canada, the would still see the form? We don’t want to litter our site with forms. We don’t want to get fined a few million Euros, either.

Questions or comments? Leave them below.

The post Set Up A GDPR Cookie Consent Form Using Google Tag Manager appeared first on Portent.

The days when PR was a handshake and a well-placed logo on a celebrity are gone. Now that we are all slaves to the search engines that run our world (mostly kidding), our brands compete in a digital landscape that is constantly changing. Sometimes it feels like going into a sword fight blindfolded.

How do you outsmart your competitors on a battlefield that Google arbitrarily controls and slants when it sees fit? The answer is with a ninja.

Outreach is the mercenary of the PR world: it’s stealthy, it’s quiet, and it’s powerful.

Whatever the reason you want to build your business’s authority on search engines—whether you’re a startup just entering the market, hitting a plateau in your SEO results, or you’re launching a new product—Outreach (think of it as digital PR) can get you seen. Even if you’re ranking on page one for key terms in the SERPs, link-building is a critical part of keeping you there. Outreach is one of the best tools to proactively drive both organic and referral traffic to your site, build domain authority, and meet your audience where they are living and engaging on the web, building brand awareness in the right places at the right time.

Outreach is not easy, though. The landscape is always changing —it takes a lot of strategy and quite a bit of chutzpah to get your foot in the door anymore, let alone to acquire a precious back-link. And the search engines are watching—

When Outreach is done wrong, penalties can cost your site dearly.

Here’s one ninja’s summary of what it takes to master Outreach:

The Three-Pronged Attack

While it is not necessary to engage in all three of these strategies, they are all powerful solutions for different reasons. Things to consider when deciding on your approach are: 1) manpower, 2) time investment (how soon do you want results), and 3) your company’s goals and needs (i.e., product launches, site rebuilds, overall authority growth, etc.)

Link Building

• WHAT: This is the bread and butter of digital Outreach. Your Outreacher would write articles for media outlets and publications on tangential topics to your industry, and link to your site content as a resource in a contextually-relevant, keyword-rich article.
• WHY: This is a natural way of earning backlinks to your site (when it’s done right). Relevant, well-written articles that link to your site as a source boost your authority in your industry. When a relevant site with a high domain authority links to you some of their link equity is passed on to you, slowly increasing your site’s ability to rank in organic search.

Digital PR

• WHAT: Your Outreacher would promote your product or website launch to relevant media outlets and journalists across the globe, or just your backyard (depending on your goals), aiming for coverage of your site or product landing page.
• WHY: This can potentially drive a lot of traffic to your site in a short amount of time, and can quickly grab the attention of a wide audience, increasing your domain authority as media outlets link to your content.

Content Promotion

• WHAT: This is a large-scale team effort. Your Outreacher creates data-driven or evergreen content (like a tool), the page is designed, copy is written, and is then published by a developer on your site. The Outreacher then promotes the piece of content as if it were a Digital PR play, promoting it to journalists and media outlets.
• WHY: Much like Digital PR, this tactic can result in referral traffic to your site in a short amount of time. Evergreen content (like a calculator or tool) can be Outreached indefinitely, and builds your authority as a thought leader in your industry, providing useful content for your site visitors. These pieces are also highly shareable. Newsworthy, data-driven content is more commonly a one-off, meant to get the attention of media for coverage across several verticals at once. Both types of promotable content build authority and increase your site’s organic search traffic.

The Skills that Pay the Bills

Like any good ninja, there is a special set of traits that every good Outreacher has in her arsenal. She is…

A Natural Salesman. Your Outreacher has mastered the elevator speech. From promoting newsworthy content, to pitching tangential content linking to your company’s site to highly discerning editors, she’s convincing. Let’s just say she could sell a ketchup popsicle to a lady wearing white gloves.

Resilient. Your Outreacher is tough as nails. Digitally knocking on doors all day, getting rejected, failing, and picking up the pieces, going back to the drawing board, repurposing dry content and starting over again. Your ninja lets failure be her fuel for greatness.

Researcher. Your Outreacher does her homework. She’s researched your competitors, analyzed where they’re getting coverage, and gone after it herself. She’s found all the journalists that are covering your industry and has dug until she found every single one of their emails. She knows your site and knows how to pitch it. She is able to dive deep into data sets and create additional content that she can promote for you.

Persistent. Your Outreacher doesn’t give up. Ever. If someone mentions your company, she’ll pursue a link. If one editor turns her down, she finds another. She follows up religiously on every email she sends.

Well-written. Since the majority of your Outreacher’s communication is by email, your Outreacher must know how to craft the perfect email. She has mastered the subject line. Her grammar and her writing skills are top-notch. In the digital battle, the email, after all, is mightier than the sword.

The Battle She Must Face

Outreach is challenging—your Outreacher has her work cut out for her. These are just some of the issues she faces:

Burnout. Being rejected for a living is not easy. The wins make it worth it, and the resilience of the Outreacher is key. She needs to be able to get back on the horse over and over again, while continuing to be innovative and responsive.

Lack of Control (Beware the Link-Stripping Editor). Once a guest post, pitch, or email is in an editor’s hands, anything can happen. With skill and good link placement, most of her relevant, contextual links will remain. But if an editor wants to strip her link and replace it with another, or just cut it out during the editing process, there is little that can be done. That being said, any good Outreacher has been known to fight for a link—en guarde!

Lack of Outreachable Content. Some websites are flat-out easier to link to than others. When content is thin, overly promotional (salesy), or doesn’t provide clear value and authority on your given subject, placing it in an article can be dicey. Editors simply don’t like linking to overtly promotional content. So if your website is thin on content, Content Strategy should come before any link-building efforts are pursued.

Time. Outreach is a major time investment. It usually takes an average of six to twelve weeks of hard work to see significant improvements in organic search traffic and keyword rankings, although with bigger, large-scale and consistent content promotion, your site can potentially see gains more quickly. As a rule, you should invest in Outreach for at least six months to a year to create the momentum necessary for success and to allow the links your outreacher builds to positively impact your site. As a wise ninja might say: It is a slow, but a fruitful endeavor.

When You Should Consider Digital Outreach for Your Business, a Summary

Outreach is a powerful marketing tool. Again, whether you’re a startup facing down well-known competitors, a veteran in the market who is starting to see a plateau in your SEO results, or somewhere in between, Outreach can take you further.

But it’s not easy. Be sure you have a team that:

• Has mastered the art of Outreach
• Has the tools to be successful
• Has the time, energy, and resiliency to go to battle for your brand hard, every day.

A final caution: Google is always watching and when Outreach is done wrong, penalties can be costly.

Go into battle well armed, my friends.

-The Portent Outreach Team

(Ninja Vanish!)

The post Outreach 101: The Essence of Ninja Marketing appeared first on Portent.