Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Another March Mozscape Index is
Live!'
Posted by carinoverturf
We're happy to announce the second Mozscape index for the month of March is now
live! Data has been refreshed across all SEOmoz applications -Open Site
Explorer, the Mozbar,PRO campaigns, and theMozscape API.
I know you're all thinking - but wait, you just launched an index last week?!
This was one of our fastest indexes to finish processing - taking only 11 days!
But processing overlapped slightly for this index and our previous March index.
However, the good news is that it just means lots of fresh data for you!
As you can see from the crawl histogram, a large volume of the data in this
index was crawled in the beginning of March and the oldest data dating back to
about the first week of February.
Here are the metrics for this latest index:
81,359,307,805 (81 billion) URLs
12,256,956,717 (12.2 billion) Subdomains
149,419,721 (149 million) Root Domains
774,927,201,776 (775 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
2.18% of all links found were nofollowed
54.51% of nofollowed links are internal
45.49% are external
Rel Canonical - 15.80% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 75 links on it
64.04 internal links on average
11.03 external links on average
And the following correlations with Google's US search results:
Page Authority - 0.35
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29
We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you're ever curious
about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also
maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/gu-leR31y80/another-march-mozscape-index-is-live
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday 29 March 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '5 Steps to Facebook Advertising -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by LaurenV
Facebook advertising has taken the marketing world by storm. But with so many
advertising options available within Facebook, how do you know where to start
the campaigns that will best support your goals and objectives?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lauren Vacarello outlines the different ad types
on Facebook and walks us through getting started with Facebook advertising. We'd
love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Video Transcription
"Hi, I'm Lauren Vacarello, the Senior Director of Online Marketing for
Salesforce.com, and today we're going to talk about 5 Steps to Facebook
Advertising. In the next 5 or 10 minutes, we'll talk about how to get started
with advertising on Facebook.
So before we really dive into it, let's talk about the different types of ads
there are on Facebook. I'm sure everyone's familiar with something that mildly
resembles this with your news feed on Facebook. There are actually three real
main types of ads on Facebook. Everything else falls under those categories.
First, there's going to be your marketplace ads. So your marketplace ads are
the ads that you're most familiar with. They're the ads on the right-hand side
of your Facebook feed. What makes these different from, say, a premium ad is
both the cost of these ads and the different options that you have. With
marketplace ads, all you're really going to get is that little, tiny image and a
little bit of copy to the right-hand side.
With your premium ads, sometimes they'll show up on the right, but they'll
also show up in the center of your Facebook page as well, with one of the big
example of premium ads being your sponsored stories. Now, sponsored stories are
a newer ad type that Facebook is really testing out right now. So you're going
to see it as part of your Facebook feed. Some people are getting a little
unhappy about seeing these larger ads in their feed, but Facebook is now a
publicly traded company and they need to make money, and to do that they need to
start selling more advertising.
The thing about premium ads that is really interesting is there are these
different types of premium ads that you can actually have. So one of the types
of premium ads is going to be video ads. That's when you'll see a video embedded
into an ad unit, lots of different copy. If you see a poll, if you see someone
pitching an event, those are all going to be part of premium ads.
One of the really cool things that Facebook is doing right now is something
called custom audiences. Think of it this way. Say you have an email list and
you have an email list of 10,000 potential customers. You can work with Facebook
to build something called a custom audience. You give them these 10,000 email
addresses. They'll match it to people's Facebook accounts, and now you're able
to build a really targeted ad campaign just to those 10,000 people that you may
have in your lead nurturing program at the same time.
What also really differentiates premium ads from marketplace ads is the cost.
Now, premium ads, you have to buy on a CPM basis. You also have to buy through a
Facebook account team. Marketplace ads, super easy, self-service, you can sign
up for them with a credit card. Anyone can advertise on marketplace ads.
Your premium ads are going to have about an $8.50 CPM. You have to talk to a
person to sell them, and in a lot of instances, you don't actually have the
control over the ads, your Facebook account team is going to have to set them up
for you.
Definite advantages, you've a lot higher response rate with your video ads.
You can do a lot more with polls and the sponsored stories in the center of the
feed. You're going to get the most interaction with those types of ads. But at
the same time, the costs are going to be anywhere from two to four times as much
as you'd pay using marketplace ads.
Then there's also something that's been getting a lot of press right now,
which is FBX or Facebook retargeting. Facebook retargeting is really
interesting, and Facebook is finally trying to start to monetize their audience
base. They've been experimenting with new ad types. Facebook retargeting is
Facebook saying, "I'm not going to try to come up with my own ad type. I'm going
to take something that works for everybody else." It's been really, really
profitable for them.
So think of it the same way that you think of retargeting. I think there's
been a recent Whiteboard Friday on retargeting. Very similar principles apply,
but instead of just retargeting people who come to your website as they browse
random places on the web, you're retargeting them as they go onto their Facebook
page. So really, really interesting possibilities there.
So now that you've had a quick primer on what the types of Facebook
advertising are, let's actually talk about how you'd use it and about getting
started with this. Before you really do any type of Facebook advertising, before
you do any advertising in general, it starts with identifying what your goals
are. So I'm going to walk you through a scenario of let's say we're going to
sell SEOmoz to small businesses using Facebook advertising.
The first thing you want to do is identify your goals. In this situation, we
want to sell SEOmoz to small businesses. Let's figure out exactly what we want
to do with those goals. Are we trying to get new people that we've never spoken
to? Are we trying to nurture existing people in the SEOmoz database, or are we
trying to go after existing SEOmoz customers to get them to buy a larger, more
expensive product?
So start by figuring out exactly what your goals are. Also identify do you
want them to buy after seeing that ad, or do you want the ad to be part of a
brand awareness play, where you're just trying to introduce your product to them
and then eventually get them to buy? Start by identifying what your goals are.
So we're going to identify our goals. Let's say we want to sell SEOmoz to new
people. Perfect. So who are we trying to sell this to? Set your targets. You
have to know your audience with this. Facebook is amazing when it comes to
targeting capabilities. With a lot of behavioral targeting on the web right now,
it's all assumptions people make. Because I go to ESPN and Golf Digest and
Harvard Business Review, then I must be a CEO of a company, and I must be a man
in between these ages.
What's really cool about Facebook is it's not assumptions that people are
making based on what actions someone may or may not be taking on the Internet.
We self-identify on social media really, really well. We tell people who we are
and what we're interested in. We tell them what school we went to. We tell them
our jobs. We tell them who we're friends with. Because we know all of that
information, it's really easy to target these people as a marketer. You're not
guessing what people are interested in. They're actually telling you what
they're interested in, and you can see what they're talking about, and that
gives Facebook incredible targeting options. Not even using Facebook
retargeting, but just through their marketplace ads and their premium ads, you
have a lot of really great options.
So let's set our targets for this scenario. Let's say SEOmoz wants to target
small businesses to buy the SEOmoz product. But not just small businesses, who
in small businesses? Do we want to target the marketing team? Do we want to
target CEOs? Do we want to target CMOs? Do we also want to think a little bit
differently and target based on what people are interested in? Great targets in
this scenario.
Facebook does something really cool and lets you target the friends of your
fans. So we're going to make the assumption if I'm a fan of SEOmoz and I'm
friends with 500 people on Facebook, the average number of friends that someone
on Facebook has, I believe, is 500. I think most people watching this probably
have more than 500 friends. So be happy you have a lot of Facebook friends, but
great for SEOmoz. We're going to target my friends and fans on Facebook because
we're going to make the assumption, if I'm a fan of SEOmoz, there's a good
chance we might want to sell to my friends, because I'm friends with like-minded
people. So the first target is going to be friends of fans.
You might be asking yourself, "Lauren, why aren't we targeting SEOmoz fans if
we want to sell SEOmoz to more people?" Well, maybe a lot of SEOmoz fans are
already customers, so you're going to need to find that out. Whether it's for
your business, SEOmoz or even for Salesforce, it's really important to know who
your fans actually are. It's as simple as doing a quick SurveyMonkey survey just
to ask your fans who they are and if they're already a customer.
So let's say we target friends of fans, we target fans. Now, small business
itself is a really big audience on Facebook. Tens of millions of people fall
into the small business audience, so you might want to narrow that down a little
bit more. Facebook gives you a lot of different clusters, which is really just a
cluster of different keywords and different interests to build a larger group of
people. So maybe it's small business, maybe we want to think differently. Think
about who these people, who your target buyer actually thinks about, who they
care about. Maybe it's small business, maybe it's people interested in marketing
or in the Internet.
The Internet is a target audience on Facebook, because I am a fan of the
Internet. Think about all of your targets and build out each individual line for
your targets. Think of it the same way if anyone's run a paid search campaign or
a display campaign. You have your account. You have campaigns, and you have ad
groups. Think of this similar to how you're going to think of your ad groups,
because if you're going doing a marketplace ad, you want to have a different
type of ad for each one of these different target audiences, really similar to
how you're going to have a different paid search ad to a different ad group.
So if you're Salesforce and we're advertising CRM and we're also advertising
customer support application, it's going to be two different ad copies. Really
similar, if you're advertising to friends of fans and to people that are
identified as interested in marketing, you need different ad copy. So start by
having different ad copy. Perfect.
The next part, you need to determine what content you're going to use, and you
need to post that content. So two different options here. Let's start with
marketplace ads. You get this little 50 x 50 image, and you get about 135
characters over here in the ad. You can treat this really similar to how you
treat, say, paid search or display and come up with different ad copies, work
with the different the stakeholders within your organization to post these.
But if you're going to do some of the premium ads and you've got this big,
sponsored story over here, this is what gets really interesting. With sponsored
story, it's going to be something you post on your company's Facebook page. So
think of this as your company's Facebook page. You post something, you want to
get that piece of content in front of a lot of people.
Let's say I am going to draw Roger really poorly right now. Let's say we've
got a great post. This is the SEOmoz page. We've got this great post with Roger
talking about all the new features that SEOmoz is coming out with. So now we
say, "Okay, here's this piece of content. This piece of content needs to almost
serve two masters." We need to make all of our fans and followers happy and show
them this content, but let's try to take this content and get it outside of the
SEOmoz audience.
So now we want to take this piece of content, and we want to get people in the
small business segment to care about this. So we can't get a new piece of copy
if we're using a sponsored story. We have to take an existing story on the
SEOmoz page, but we want to get it in front of small businesses, people in
marketing, fans, friends of fans. So you build all of your different targets,
and you choose to sponsor this story. But with this, you have less control.
So two options, but the great thing about Facebook, honestly, you want to do
both. It's not an if-then. You can use your marketplace ads to really customize
and put the custom content in front of all these audiences. But with sponsored
stories, you're taking up more real estate. You're in the center of the page,so
it's a really good way to attract people's attention. If you are using friends
of fans and advertising to friends of fans and any of these people comment, it's
going to have that little bit of the extra engagement over there. So try
sponsored stories and look into marketplace ads as well.
If you're using marketplace ads, the Facebook interface is still being
developed, so it's a little bit hard to clone ads. It's not super easy to use.
So you can end up - I will do the Salesforce pitch - using a tool like
Salesforce marketing cloud because it lets you start to clone these ads. So
instead of making 50 different ads for 50 different targets, you take one ad,
you clone it and make changes. It just helps you move a little bit more quickly.
There are lots of different options for doing that as well.
We figure out our content and we post our content. So for sponsored stories,
we put a great piece of content front and center on the page. We promote it to
all of our different fans and followers, but know that it's going to show up in
the center of their feed as an option. Also build your marketplace ad campaign
where you've got individual ads for each target.
Here's an interesting trick that people don't think about, and it's my one,
major tip for everyone. If you are doing premium content and you do have this
sponsored story over here, say you have content that you don't necessarily want
your fans and followers to see. Say you really just want to post your great
piece of content to advertise to people in marketing. You're okay if your fans
and followers see it, but it's not really for them, it's really advertising
content. You could actually backdate that story so that your fans and followers
don't really see this unless they scroll all the way back, which some of your
fans and followers might. But backdate your content so that this doesn't show up
on your main company page, but you can still use it in advertising to some of
your different audiences. So that's my one tip for you.
Once you determine and post your content, so let's say we're going to do
sponsored stories and marketplace ads. Perfect. Then the next and most important
step is testing and optimization. No one's going to get everything right on
their first try, and that's okay. You're not supposed to get everything right.
You just need to move really, really quickly, and the larger your budget, the
more quickly you should be able to test and optimize.
Now, with Facebook ads, we find out that the ads actually burn out pretty
quickly, so that if you're using a sponsored story and you're advertising to the
same audience, first of all, make sure you set up frequency caps when you work
with your Facebook team, because you don't want to show the same person an ad 15
times in the middle of their feed. That really does get kind of irritating, and
the effectiveness of your ads starts to decrease. So you don't want to do that.
So set frequency caps and also start to rotate your content, especially on the
marketplace ads on the right-hand rail. Start to rotate out the image. Start to
rotate out your copy.
Depending on how much advertising you're doing and the size of your budget, it
could be as little as two days. You might be able to get away with a week or
two. But as long as you're monitoring results, you'll start to see performance
over here. Let's say you're tracking leads. You're tracking leads, so leads
start to go up, and then they start to peak and fall off as impressions go up.
You want to find that point where your impressions are going up but your
performance is dropping. Once you reach that point, it's time to switch out your
ad because people have seen it. Anyone who's going to respond to it already has.
So make sure you know when to pull your ad copy, and that's really reporting,
doing your analysis and the whole time, what you should be doing is testing and
optimizing.
Think of it the way you think of paid search. You're advertising to friends
and fans. You don't want to just give them one ad. You want to rotate through
different titles, different images, different copy, different offers to see
what's really going to perform best, same way you're going to do this with,
let's say, a paid search campaign or a display advertising campaign. So make
sure you test and optimize. Let's say lots of testing. We like testing.
Then this is the thing that's really different with Facebook advertising.
We're going to think all the way back - and everyone will make fun of me for
making this statement - think about when TV first came out, because I was alive
when TV first came out. It's a joke. Picture when TV first came out, and people
all go home and they're sitting and watching their three channels on television.
But you have to make money, so they started putting commercials.
People hated commercials on television. People hated it, and they would
complain about commercials interrupting television. But you have to have
commercials on television or else television couldn't exist in the early days of
TV, because they needed a way to make money. Now we have cable, and you have to
pay for channels, which is a whole different model. But when TV first came out,
people hated commercials. Even when email first came out, even email now, a lot
of people really hated getting emails and were complaining about emails. It
became a little easier with email because there was the option to unsubscribe.
Now think about Facebook. We've spent years on Facebook without really having
to deal with a lot of advertising. Their right-hand rail started. This in the
middle of your feed is really just coming out. So people in general are very
taken aback by this. They're not sure what to do about ads in their feed, and
not everyone's going to like having ads in their feed, the same way not everyone
likes receiving an email from a potential company they're going to buy from, the
same way people hated commercials when television first came out.
The biggest difference with this is, because you can comment on this, you'll
start to see how much people don't like advertising. It won't necessarily be
about your product. It will be that they don't like that Facebook is offering
advertising. Facebook has to make money. They're a publicly traded company, and
they're going to try to figure out different ways they can make money. But you
need to know that this might impact your ads.
If you run a TV commercial and someone doesn't like it, there's not a lot they
can do about it. If you send an email and someone doesn't like it, they can
unsubscribe. If you run an ad and it shows up in someone's feed and they don't
like it, they can write a comment about it. If you're doing a lot of
advertising, you might start to see a lot of negative comments.
What's really fun about these is you'll also get a lot of likes. You'll get a
lot of shares, and if the content is engaging and people care about the content,
if you're advertising to SMBs or people in marketing and you're giving them
content that tells them how to help their business and really gives them useful
information, you'll get a lot of likes, and you'll get a lot of shares and
people will be really happy with it. But you can't make everyone happy, and some
people will just start to leave negative comments.
As a company, before you really launch this type of campaign, you need to
think about what you're going to do about those negative comments. Are you going
to engage with them? Are you going to respond? What's your threshold?What are
you comfortable with? If people start having a lot of negative comments about
your ad, do you pull the ad? Do you try to talk to all of these people? Do you
say, "You know what? I don't care about negative comments?" What's your
threshold?
So figure out your engagement strategy and how you're going to monitor that
before you launch the campaign. Otherwise, you'll launch all of this, you'll run
this sponsored story, you'll make tons and tons of money, hopefully, from all of
the advertising that you're doing. You'll sell shoes, you'll sell Moz licenses,
you'll be really successful, but then you'll see all these negative comments and
then suddenly maybe you won't be as successful and maybe this is a bigger deal
for your business of having all those negative comments than the potential
upside.
So think about that first and know what you're willing to deal with, what
you're comfortable with, and then what your engagement and response strategy is
before you launch. If you do that and you start off with goals, you go after
those targets, you optimize, because maybe some of these targets don't work.
Maybe people who like the Internet don't like SEOmoz. It's weird. You think they
would, but what if they don't? You have to know which lines you're willing to
get rid of, which comes from the optimization piece. If someone's not happy, if
you've got a great community team that's really engaging, you can start turning
some of those negative comments into real sales opportunities.
So that's my how to get started with Facebook advertising. A few quick steps
to go, but for anyone who's looking to try it, you can sign up for marketplace
ads with a credit card, give it a shot - a lot of times they offer a little bit
of free Facebook money - and see what happens and see what works for your
business.
Thank you, everybody. I am Lauren Vacarello. Take care."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by LaurenV
Facebook advertising has taken the marketing world by storm. But with so many
advertising options available within Facebook, how do you know where to start
the campaigns that will best support your goals and objectives?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lauren Vacarello outlines the different ad types
on Facebook and walks us through getting started with Facebook advertising. We'd
love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Video Transcription
"Hi, I'm Lauren Vacarello, the Senior Director of Online Marketing for
Salesforce.com, and today we're going to talk about 5 Steps to Facebook
Advertising. In the next 5 or 10 minutes, we'll talk about how to get started
with advertising on Facebook.
So before we really dive into it, let's talk about the different types of ads
there are on Facebook. I'm sure everyone's familiar with something that mildly
resembles this with your news feed on Facebook. There are actually three real
main types of ads on Facebook. Everything else falls under those categories.
First, there's going to be your marketplace ads. So your marketplace ads are
the ads that you're most familiar with. They're the ads on the right-hand side
of your Facebook feed. What makes these different from, say, a premium ad is
both the cost of these ads and the different options that you have. With
marketplace ads, all you're really going to get is that little, tiny image and a
little bit of copy to the right-hand side.
With your premium ads, sometimes they'll show up on the right, but they'll
also show up in the center of your Facebook page as well, with one of the big
example of premium ads being your sponsored stories. Now, sponsored stories are
a newer ad type that Facebook is really testing out right now. So you're going
to see it as part of your Facebook feed. Some people are getting a little
unhappy about seeing these larger ads in their feed, but Facebook is now a
publicly traded company and they need to make money, and to do that they need to
start selling more advertising.
The thing about premium ads that is really interesting is there are these
different types of premium ads that you can actually have. So one of the types
of premium ads is going to be video ads. That's when you'll see a video embedded
into an ad unit, lots of different copy. If you see a poll, if you see someone
pitching an event, those are all going to be part of premium ads.
One of the really cool things that Facebook is doing right now is something
called custom audiences. Think of it this way. Say you have an email list and
you have an email list of 10,000 potential customers. You can work with Facebook
to build something called a custom audience. You give them these 10,000 email
addresses. They'll match it to people's Facebook accounts, and now you're able
to build a really targeted ad campaign just to those 10,000 people that you may
have in your lead nurturing program at the same time.
What also really differentiates premium ads from marketplace ads is the cost.
Now, premium ads, you have to buy on a CPM basis. You also have to buy through a
Facebook account team. Marketplace ads, super easy, self-service, you can sign
up for them with a credit card. Anyone can advertise on marketplace ads.
Your premium ads are going to have about an $8.50 CPM. You have to talk to a
person to sell them, and in a lot of instances, you don't actually have the
control over the ads, your Facebook account team is going to have to set them up
for you.
Definite advantages, you've a lot higher response rate with your video ads.
You can do a lot more with polls and the sponsored stories in the center of the
feed. You're going to get the most interaction with those types of ads. But at
the same time, the costs are going to be anywhere from two to four times as much
as you'd pay using marketplace ads.
Then there's also something that's been getting a lot of press right now,
which is FBX or Facebook retargeting. Facebook retargeting is really
interesting, and Facebook is finally trying to start to monetize their audience
base. They've been experimenting with new ad types. Facebook retargeting is
Facebook saying, "I'm not going to try to come up with my own ad type. I'm going
to take something that works for everybody else." It's been really, really
profitable for them.
So think of it the same way that you think of retargeting. I think there's
been a recent Whiteboard Friday on retargeting. Very similar principles apply,
but instead of just retargeting people who come to your website as they browse
random places on the web, you're retargeting them as they go onto their Facebook
page. So really, really interesting possibilities there.
So now that you've had a quick primer on what the types of Facebook
advertising are, let's actually talk about how you'd use it and about getting
started with this. Before you really do any type of Facebook advertising, before
you do any advertising in general, it starts with identifying what your goals
are. So I'm going to walk you through a scenario of let's say we're going to
sell SEOmoz to small businesses using Facebook advertising.
The first thing you want to do is identify your goals. In this situation, we
want to sell SEOmoz to small businesses. Let's figure out exactly what we want
to do with those goals. Are we trying to get new people that we've never spoken
to? Are we trying to nurture existing people in the SEOmoz database, or are we
trying to go after existing SEOmoz customers to get them to buy a larger, more
expensive product?
So start by figuring out exactly what your goals are. Also identify do you
want them to buy after seeing that ad, or do you want the ad to be part of a
brand awareness play, where you're just trying to introduce your product to them
and then eventually get them to buy? Start by identifying what your goals are.
So we're going to identify our goals. Let's say we want to sell SEOmoz to new
people. Perfect. So who are we trying to sell this to? Set your targets. You
have to know your audience with this. Facebook is amazing when it comes to
targeting capabilities. With a lot of behavioral targeting on the web right now,
it's all assumptions people make. Because I go to ESPN and Golf Digest and
Harvard Business Review, then I must be a CEO of a company, and I must be a man
in between these ages.
What's really cool about Facebook is it's not assumptions that people are
making based on what actions someone may or may not be taking on the Internet.
We self-identify on social media really, really well. We tell people who we are
and what we're interested in. We tell them what school we went to. We tell them
our jobs. We tell them who we're friends with. Because we know all of that
information, it's really easy to target these people as a marketer. You're not
guessing what people are interested in. They're actually telling you what
they're interested in, and you can see what they're talking about, and that
gives Facebook incredible targeting options. Not even using Facebook
retargeting, but just through their marketplace ads and their premium ads, you
have a lot of really great options.
So let's set our targets for this scenario. Let's say SEOmoz wants to target
small businesses to buy the SEOmoz product. But not just small businesses, who
in small businesses? Do we want to target the marketing team? Do we want to
target CEOs? Do we want to target CMOs? Do we also want to think a little bit
differently and target based on what people are interested in? Great targets in
this scenario.
Facebook does something really cool and lets you target the friends of your
fans. So we're going to make the assumption if I'm a fan of SEOmoz and I'm
friends with 500 people on Facebook, the average number of friends that someone
on Facebook has, I believe, is 500. I think most people watching this probably
have more than 500 friends. So be happy you have a lot of Facebook friends, but
great for SEOmoz. We're going to target my friends and fans on Facebook because
we're going to make the assumption, if I'm a fan of SEOmoz, there's a good
chance we might want to sell to my friends, because I'm friends with like-minded
people. So the first target is going to be friends of fans.
You might be asking yourself, "Lauren, why aren't we targeting SEOmoz fans if
we want to sell SEOmoz to more people?" Well, maybe a lot of SEOmoz fans are
already customers, so you're going to need to find that out. Whether it's for
your business, SEOmoz or even for Salesforce, it's really important to know who
your fans actually are. It's as simple as doing a quick SurveyMonkey survey just
to ask your fans who they are and if they're already a customer.
So let's say we target friends of fans, we target fans. Now, small business
itself is a really big audience on Facebook. Tens of millions of people fall
into the small business audience, so you might want to narrow that down a little
bit more. Facebook gives you a lot of different clusters, which is really just a
cluster of different keywords and different interests to build a larger group of
people. So maybe it's small business, maybe we want to think differently. Think
about who these people, who your target buyer actually thinks about, who they
care about. Maybe it's small business, maybe it's people interested in marketing
or in the Internet.
The Internet is a target audience on Facebook, because I am a fan of the
Internet. Think about all of your targets and build out each individual line for
your targets. Think of it the same way if anyone's run a paid search campaign or
a display campaign. You have your account. You have campaigns, and you have ad
groups. Think of this similar to how you're going to think of your ad groups,
because if you're going doing a marketplace ad, you want to have a different
type of ad for each one of these different target audiences, really similar to
how you're going to have a different paid search ad to a different ad group.
So if you're Salesforce and we're advertising CRM and we're also advertising
customer support application, it's going to be two different ad copies. Really
similar, if you're advertising to friends of fans and to people that are
identified as interested in marketing, you need different ad copy. So start by
having different ad copy. Perfect.
The next part, you need to determine what content you're going to use, and you
need to post that content. So two different options here. Let's start with
marketplace ads. You get this little 50 x 50 image, and you get about 135
characters over here in the ad. You can treat this really similar to how you
treat, say, paid search or display and come up with different ad copies, work
with the different the stakeholders within your organization to post these.
But if you're going to do some of the premium ads and you've got this big,
sponsored story over here, this is what gets really interesting. With sponsored
story, it's going to be something you post on your company's Facebook page. So
think of this as your company's Facebook page. You post something, you want to
get that piece of content in front of a lot of people.
Let's say I am going to draw Roger really poorly right now. Let's say we've
got a great post. This is the SEOmoz page. We've got this great post with Roger
talking about all the new features that SEOmoz is coming out with. So now we
say, "Okay, here's this piece of content. This piece of content needs to almost
serve two masters." We need to make all of our fans and followers happy and show
them this content, but let's try to take this content and get it outside of the
SEOmoz audience.
So now we want to take this piece of content, and we want to get people in the
small business segment to care about this. So we can't get a new piece of copy
if we're using a sponsored story. We have to take an existing story on the
SEOmoz page, but we want to get it in front of small businesses, people in
marketing, fans, friends of fans. So you build all of your different targets,
and you choose to sponsor this story. But with this, you have less control.
So two options, but the great thing about Facebook, honestly, you want to do
both. It's not an if-then. You can use your marketplace ads to really customize
and put the custom content in front of all these audiences. But with sponsored
stories, you're taking up more real estate. You're in the center of the page,so
it's a really good way to attract people's attention. If you are using friends
of fans and advertising to friends of fans and any of these people comment, it's
going to have that little bit of the extra engagement over there. So try
sponsored stories and look into marketplace ads as well.
If you're using marketplace ads, the Facebook interface is still being
developed, so it's a little bit hard to clone ads. It's not super easy to use.
So you can end up - I will do the Salesforce pitch - using a tool like
Salesforce marketing cloud because it lets you start to clone these ads. So
instead of making 50 different ads for 50 different targets, you take one ad,
you clone it and make changes. It just helps you move a little bit more quickly.
There are lots of different options for doing that as well.
We figure out our content and we post our content. So for sponsored stories,
we put a great piece of content front and center on the page. We promote it to
all of our different fans and followers, but know that it's going to show up in
the center of their feed as an option. Also build your marketplace ad campaign
where you've got individual ads for each target.
Here's an interesting trick that people don't think about, and it's my one,
major tip for everyone. If you are doing premium content and you do have this
sponsored story over here, say you have content that you don't necessarily want
your fans and followers to see. Say you really just want to post your great
piece of content to advertise to people in marketing. You're okay if your fans
and followers see it, but it's not really for them, it's really advertising
content. You could actually backdate that story so that your fans and followers
don't really see this unless they scroll all the way back, which some of your
fans and followers might. But backdate your content so that this doesn't show up
on your main company page, but you can still use it in advertising to some of
your different audiences. So that's my one tip for you.
Once you determine and post your content, so let's say we're going to do
sponsored stories and marketplace ads. Perfect. Then the next and most important
step is testing and optimization. No one's going to get everything right on
their first try, and that's okay. You're not supposed to get everything right.
You just need to move really, really quickly, and the larger your budget, the
more quickly you should be able to test and optimize.
Now, with Facebook ads, we find out that the ads actually burn out pretty
quickly, so that if you're using a sponsored story and you're advertising to the
same audience, first of all, make sure you set up frequency caps when you work
with your Facebook team, because you don't want to show the same person an ad 15
times in the middle of their feed. That really does get kind of irritating, and
the effectiveness of your ads starts to decrease. So you don't want to do that.
So set frequency caps and also start to rotate your content, especially on the
marketplace ads on the right-hand rail. Start to rotate out the image. Start to
rotate out your copy.
Depending on how much advertising you're doing and the size of your budget, it
could be as little as two days. You might be able to get away with a week or
two. But as long as you're monitoring results, you'll start to see performance
over here. Let's say you're tracking leads. You're tracking leads, so leads
start to go up, and then they start to peak and fall off as impressions go up.
You want to find that point where your impressions are going up but your
performance is dropping. Once you reach that point, it's time to switch out your
ad because people have seen it. Anyone who's going to respond to it already has.
So make sure you know when to pull your ad copy, and that's really reporting,
doing your analysis and the whole time, what you should be doing is testing and
optimizing.
Think of it the way you think of paid search. You're advertising to friends
and fans. You don't want to just give them one ad. You want to rotate through
different titles, different images, different copy, different offers to see
what's really going to perform best, same way you're going to do this with,
let's say, a paid search campaign or a display advertising campaign. So make
sure you test and optimize. Let's say lots of testing. We like testing.
Then this is the thing that's really different with Facebook advertising.
We're going to think all the way back - and everyone will make fun of me for
making this statement - think about when TV first came out, because I was alive
when TV first came out. It's a joke. Picture when TV first came out, and people
all go home and they're sitting and watching their three channels on television.
But you have to make money, so they started putting commercials.
People hated commercials on television. People hated it, and they would
complain about commercials interrupting television. But you have to have
commercials on television or else television couldn't exist in the early days of
TV, because they needed a way to make money. Now we have cable, and you have to
pay for channels, which is a whole different model. But when TV first came out,
people hated commercials. Even when email first came out, even email now, a lot
of people really hated getting emails and were complaining about emails. It
became a little easier with email because there was the option to unsubscribe.
Now think about Facebook. We've spent years on Facebook without really having
to deal with a lot of advertising. Their right-hand rail started. This in the
middle of your feed is really just coming out. So people in general are very
taken aback by this. They're not sure what to do about ads in their feed, and
not everyone's going to like having ads in their feed, the same way not everyone
likes receiving an email from a potential company they're going to buy from, the
same way people hated commercials when television first came out.
The biggest difference with this is, because you can comment on this, you'll
start to see how much people don't like advertising. It won't necessarily be
about your product. It will be that they don't like that Facebook is offering
advertising. Facebook has to make money. They're a publicly traded company, and
they're going to try to figure out different ways they can make money. But you
need to know that this might impact your ads.
If you run a TV commercial and someone doesn't like it, there's not a lot they
can do about it. If you send an email and someone doesn't like it, they can
unsubscribe. If you run an ad and it shows up in someone's feed and they don't
like it, they can write a comment about it. If you're doing a lot of
advertising, you might start to see a lot of negative comments.
What's really fun about these is you'll also get a lot of likes. You'll get a
lot of shares, and if the content is engaging and people care about the content,
if you're advertising to SMBs or people in marketing and you're giving them
content that tells them how to help their business and really gives them useful
information, you'll get a lot of likes, and you'll get a lot of shares and
people will be really happy with it. But you can't make everyone happy, and some
people will just start to leave negative comments.
As a company, before you really launch this type of campaign, you need to
think about what you're going to do about those negative comments. Are you going
to engage with them? Are you going to respond? What's your threshold?What are
you comfortable with? If people start having a lot of negative comments about
your ad, do you pull the ad? Do you try to talk to all of these people? Do you
say, "You know what? I don't care about negative comments?" What's your
threshold?
So figure out your engagement strategy and how you're going to monitor that
before you launch the campaign. Otherwise, you'll launch all of this, you'll run
this sponsored story, you'll make tons and tons of money, hopefully, from all of
the advertising that you're doing. You'll sell shoes, you'll sell Moz licenses,
you'll be really successful, but then you'll see all these negative comments and
then suddenly maybe you won't be as successful and maybe this is a bigger deal
for your business of having all those negative comments than the potential
upside.
So think about that first and know what you're willing to deal with, what
you're comfortable with, and then what your engagement and response strategy is
before you launch. If you do that and you start off with goals, you go after
those targets, you optimize, because maybe some of these targets don't work.
Maybe people who like the Internet don't like SEOmoz. It's weird. You think they
would, but what if they don't? You have to know which lines you're willing to
get rid of, which comes from the optimization piece. If someone's not happy, if
you've got a great community team that's really engaging, you can start turning
some of those negative comments into real sales opportunities.
So that's my how to get started with Facebook advertising. A few quick steps
to go, but for anyone who's looking to try it, you can sign up for marketplace
ads with a credit card, give it a shot - a lot of times they offer a little bit
of free Facebook money - and see what happens and see what works for your
business.
Thank you, everybody. I am Lauren Vacarello. Take care."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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Thursday 28 March 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How to Live Tweet Like a Pro'
Posted by RuthBurr
Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed that I live-tweet
the conferences I go to. Extensively. Some people love it, some people hate it -
but if you want to start live-tweeting for yourself, here are some things to
keep in mind.
Why I Live Tweet
I started live tweeting events a couple of years ago, when I realized that I
was spending as much time and effort tweeting out the most relevant points of
the session I was in as I spent taking notes plus, the notes I took were less
relevant than my tweets, since I was only tweeting out the best parts!
Once I committed to live tweeting conferences, I got a lot of great, positive
feedback about it from other attendees, so I kept on going. Ive also gotten the
bulk of my followers through live tweeting; it can be a great way to build your
personal brand at conferences and get increased visibility with attendees and
speakers alike.Live tweeting doesnt just build your brand among attendees of the
conference, either. People who are trying to follow along at home via the
conference hash tag are often even bigger fans of quality live tweets.
There's a noticeable uptick in people who read my name badge and say oh, youre
Ruth Burr! at the end of a conference compared to the beginning (when they
usually just say "nice to meet you").
@ruthburr Cheers for all the tweets, they are better than my notes, and much
neater ;)
Kingsland Linassi (@kingslandlinass) March 15, 2013
A big thanks for @ruthburr for live tweeting at #LinkLoveAppreciate it! :)
Dennis Seymour (@denseymour) March 15, 2013
So that's nice.
Why You Might Not Want to Live Tweet
A few caveats before we get in to the nitty-gritty of quality live Twitter
coverage:
You will lose followers. When Im covering a conference, Im tweeting multiple
times per minute, all day. That can really blow up someones Twitter feed. I
usually encourage my followers to mute me or the conference hash tag if they
dont want to be inundated, but some people just choose to unfollow and some of
those people dont re-follow after the conference is over.
Here are my daily follow/unfollow numbers from the last 60 days, courtesy of
Followerwonk:
As you can see, I get the most new followers on days Im live tweeting, but I
get the most unfollows on those days as well. With the 31 followers I lost
during SearchFest, my 54 new followers starts to look a lot more like 23. I'm
still at a net gain of followers, but if youre not prepared to (permanently)
lose some followers (especially those who aren't in the search industry), live
tweeting may not be for you.
It takes a ton of energy. Conferences can already be really draining, between
the late nights, the "always on" networking conversations and the stress of
trying to still get some work done while youre there. Live tweeting takes a
surprising amount of energy: the bulk of your focus needs to be on the session,
not on the session + your work email + your slides for later in the day +
Facebook. Tweeting live also means that even if a session is really boring or
not at all useful to you, you cant take a nice relaxing mental break and zone
out or work on something more important.
You're reporting the news, not making it. That's something that can get lost in
translation through retweets and replies. Youre going to get clarifying
questions and dissenting opinions about things you didnt even say (or
necessarily agree with). No matter how many times you say I didnt say it, Duane
Forrester did. Id suggest asking him if you need more information, some people
are still going to get hung up on the idea that youre the one advocating a
particular position. It can get sticky.
You'll probably get rate limited. I usually end up unable to tweet for at least
an hour per conference, because the Twitter API has blocked me for tweeting too
many times in too short a period.
So! Caveats firmly in place, let's talk about:
How to Provide Value via Live Tweets
Provide as much context as you can. Take this tweet from SearchFest:
Agility: Kinect was for games 1st, ppl hacked it, MSFT provided an SDK for
ppl to build what they want @melcarson #searchfest
Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) February 22, 2013
Just adding the word Agility to the beginning of the tweet puts the entire
factoid into the context in which Mel was using it. This increases the ability
for the tweet to be read and understood outside of the context of other
conference tweets. Which brings me to:
Think about the retweet. Each piece of information you tweet needs to be able
to survive on its own, independent of the tweets that preceded or followed it.
When you get retweeted, the new audience viewing that tweet may not have seen
your other tweets on the topic: make sure that tweet will make sense to them,
too.
Numbers are gold. When someone cites a statistic in their talk, tweeting the
specific numbers they mention really increases the relevance of your tweet.
Sites that regularly post content w/video have 200-300% more new visitors
and 2x time on page - key signs of relevance @thetoddhartley #SMX
Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) March 12, 2013
Dont try to live tweet anecdotes. Speakers will often use illustrative
examples in their talks, whether theyre passing anecdotes or full-on case
studies. These can be extremely hard to live tweet. Remember to stick to the
rules above. Its OK to sum up a two-minute anecdote or case study into one or
two tweets that are focused on the point.
Capture as many URLs as you can. If someone includes a link on a slide, Ill
usually type that out first and then write the tweet context around it, in case
they change the slide before I can write it down (this is especially important
with bit.ly links). Want to go above and beyond? If someone mentions a great
article but doesnt include the link, Google the piece and provide the link
yourself. That way youre adding extra value with your tweets.
Give shout-outs. Any time someone mentions a tool, tweet that out. If you know
that companys Twitter handle, include them with an @ mention. Do the same for
people. People love hearing about new tools to use, and businesses and
individuals alike love hearing they got a shout-out in a presentation. Doing
this also gets you on the radar of people who might not even be following the
conference.
Watch the conference hash tag. In addition to tweeting out the session youre
attending, keep an eye on the tweets coming out of other sessions. When you see
a juicy, highly-retweetable tweet come out, retweet it! Now youre providing
information on other sessions, too. Speaking of which:
Use the conference hash tag and speaker handles. I usually end each conference
tweet with the speakers twitter handle and the conference hash tag. It helps
mitigate the I dont make the news, I just report it factor I mentioned earlier,
plus its important to give credit to where credits due. Most of the time Ill
just copy the speaker handle and hash tag from my first tweet and then paste
them at the end of each tweet (be careful there arent any typos when you copy,
though I spent half of Marty Weintraubs MozCon session accidentally tweeting
him as @aimcear instead of @aimclear).
One tool Ill often use for live-tweeting conferences is TweetChat. It allows
you to track just the tweets coming from one hash tag, and will automatically
add the tag to the end of every tweet you post from the tool.
Other than that, I dont use many tools for live tweeting Im usually just using
the Twitter app for Mac. I use keyboard shortcuts for new tweet and post tweet
to save a bit of time.
The last thing youll really need to be able to live tweet a full conference is
the ability to type very fast, with few mistakes, and without looking at your
hands or, necessarily, the screen. I dont have any good recommendations for
tools/programs to use to learn to type faster; I learned to type really fast by
getting in a lot of arguments with people over instant messenger in high school
and college, so you could try that. If anybody has any suggestions for programs
to hone your typing skills, Id love to see them in the comments!
Happy live tweeting everybody!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/0sd5uOQY5YQ/how-to-live-tweet-like-a-pro
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by RuthBurr
Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed that I live-tweet
the conferences I go to. Extensively. Some people love it, some people hate it -
but if you want to start live-tweeting for yourself, here are some things to
keep in mind.
Why I Live Tweet
I started live tweeting events a couple of years ago, when I realized that I
was spending as much time and effort tweeting out the most relevant points of
the session I was in as I spent taking notes plus, the notes I took were less
relevant than my tweets, since I was only tweeting out the best parts!
Once I committed to live tweeting conferences, I got a lot of great, positive
feedback about it from other attendees, so I kept on going. Ive also gotten the
bulk of my followers through live tweeting; it can be a great way to build your
personal brand at conferences and get increased visibility with attendees and
speakers alike.Live tweeting doesnt just build your brand among attendees of the
conference, either. People who are trying to follow along at home via the
conference hash tag are often even bigger fans of quality live tweets.
There's a noticeable uptick in people who read my name badge and say oh, youre
Ruth Burr! at the end of a conference compared to the beginning (when they
usually just say "nice to meet you").
@ruthburr Cheers for all the tweets, they are better than my notes, and much
neater ;)
Kingsland Linassi (@kingslandlinass) March 15, 2013
A big thanks for @ruthburr for live tweeting at #LinkLoveAppreciate it! :)
Dennis Seymour (@denseymour) March 15, 2013
So that's nice.
Why You Might Not Want to Live Tweet
A few caveats before we get in to the nitty-gritty of quality live Twitter
coverage:
You will lose followers. When Im covering a conference, Im tweeting multiple
times per minute, all day. That can really blow up someones Twitter feed. I
usually encourage my followers to mute me or the conference hash tag if they
dont want to be inundated, but some people just choose to unfollow and some of
those people dont re-follow after the conference is over.
Here are my daily follow/unfollow numbers from the last 60 days, courtesy of
Followerwonk:
As you can see, I get the most new followers on days Im live tweeting, but I
get the most unfollows on those days as well. With the 31 followers I lost
during SearchFest, my 54 new followers starts to look a lot more like 23. I'm
still at a net gain of followers, but if youre not prepared to (permanently)
lose some followers (especially those who aren't in the search industry), live
tweeting may not be for you.
It takes a ton of energy. Conferences can already be really draining, between
the late nights, the "always on" networking conversations and the stress of
trying to still get some work done while youre there. Live tweeting takes a
surprising amount of energy: the bulk of your focus needs to be on the session,
not on the session + your work email + your slides for later in the day +
Facebook. Tweeting live also means that even if a session is really boring or
not at all useful to you, you cant take a nice relaxing mental break and zone
out or work on something more important.
You're reporting the news, not making it. That's something that can get lost in
translation through retweets and replies. Youre going to get clarifying
questions and dissenting opinions about things you didnt even say (or
necessarily agree with). No matter how many times you say I didnt say it, Duane
Forrester did. Id suggest asking him if you need more information, some people
are still going to get hung up on the idea that youre the one advocating a
particular position. It can get sticky.
You'll probably get rate limited. I usually end up unable to tweet for at least
an hour per conference, because the Twitter API has blocked me for tweeting too
many times in too short a period.
So! Caveats firmly in place, let's talk about:
How to Provide Value via Live Tweets
Provide as much context as you can. Take this tweet from SearchFest:
Agility: Kinect was for games 1st, ppl hacked it, MSFT provided an SDK for
ppl to build what they want @melcarson #searchfest
Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) February 22, 2013
Just adding the word Agility to the beginning of the tweet puts the entire
factoid into the context in which Mel was using it. This increases the ability
for the tweet to be read and understood outside of the context of other
conference tweets. Which brings me to:
Think about the retweet. Each piece of information you tweet needs to be able
to survive on its own, independent of the tweets that preceded or followed it.
When you get retweeted, the new audience viewing that tweet may not have seen
your other tweets on the topic: make sure that tweet will make sense to them,
too.
Numbers are gold. When someone cites a statistic in their talk, tweeting the
specific numbers they mention really increases the relevance of your tweet.
Sites that regularly post content w/video have 200-300% more new visitors
and 2x time on page - key signs of relevance @thetoddhartley #SMX
Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) March 12, 2013
Dont try to live tweet anecdotes. Speakers will often use illustrative
examples in their talks, whether theyre passing anecdotes or full-on case
studies. These can be extremely hard to live tweet. Remember to stick to the
rules above. Its OK to sum up a two-minute anecdote or case study into one or
two tweets that are focused on the point.
Capture as many URLs as you can. If someone includes a link on a slide, Ill
usually type that out first and then write the tweet context around it, in case
they change the slide before I can write it down (this is especially important
with bit.ly links). Want to go above and beyond? If someone mentions a great
article but doesnt include the link, Google the piece and provide the link
yourself. That way youre adding extra value with your tweets.
Give shout-outs. Any time someone mentions a tool, tweet that out. If you know
that companys Twitter handle, include them with an @ mention. Do the same for
people. People love hearing about new tools to use, and businesses and
individuals alike love hearing they got a shout-out in a presentation. Doing
this also gets you on the radar of people who might not even be following the
conference.
Watch the conference hash tag. In addition to tweeting out the session youre
attending, keep an eye on the tweets coming out of other sessions. When you see
a juicy, highly-retweetable tweet come out, retweet it! Now youre providing
information on other sessions, too. Speaking of which:
Use the conference hash tag and speaker handles. I usually end each conference
tweet with the speakers twitter handle and the conference hash tag. It helps
mitigate the I dont make the news, I just report it factor I mentioned earlier,
plus its important to give credit to where credits due. Most of the time Ill
just copy the speaker handle and hash tag from my first tweet and then paste
them at the end of each tweet (be careful there arent any typos when you copy,
though I spent half of Marty Weintraubs MozCon session accidentally tweeting
him as @aimcear instead of @aimclear).
One tool Ill often use for live-tweeting conferences is TweetChat. It allows
you to track just the tweets coming from one hash tag, and will automatically
add the tag to the end of every tweet you post from the tool.
Other than that, I dont use many tools for live tweeting Im usually just using
the Twitter app for Mac. I use keyboard shortcuts for new tweet and post tweet
to save a bit of time.
The last thing youll really need to be able to live tweet a full conference is
the ability to type very fast, with few mistakes, and without looking at your
hands or, necessarily, the screen. I dont have any good recommendations for
tools/programs to use to learn to type faster; I learned to type really fast by
getting in a lot of arguments with people over instant messenger in high school
and college, so you could try that. If anybody has any suggestions for programs
to hone your typing skills, Id love to see them in the comments!
Happy live tweeting everybody!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/0sd5uOQY5YQ/how-to-live-tweet-like-a-pro
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 27 March 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Barnacle Reviews on Google+ Local'
Posted by David Mihm
Since Google+ Local was released last May, its safe to say that everyone in the
local search community -- business owners and agencies alike -- has been waiting
with bated breath for the launch of Googles rumored Business Builder dashboard.
For whatever reason, it still isnt out yet, but while youre waiting, theres no
reason you cant take advantage of the most underrated feature of Google+: the
ability to interact on Google+ as a business page. And in particular, to leave
reviews of other businesses as your business page.
Why leave reviews as a page?
Business owners, if this concept doesnt immediately make sense to you, think of
it like this: you probably go to networking events with your local chamber of
commerce, Rotary club, or your industry trade group all the time. When you go to
these events, youre likely wearing your business owner hat, rather than your
"weekend warrior" or "soccer mom" hat.
Thats essentially what this feature allows you to do: network socially with
your business owner hat on, rather than your personal hat. Just like you would
refer business to other business owners you trust and admire in these networking
environments, the idea behind page-to-page recommendations on social networking
sites works the same way.
Facebook gave its page users this functionality years ago, and many of you are
likely accustomed to leaving comments on other Facebook pages and generally
interacting with their community as their page rather than an individual
profile. You may not have known, though, that you can do the same thing on
Google+.
Why "Barnacle" reviews?
As far as I know, Search Influence's Will Scott was the pioneer of this
conceptin local search, which he defined as:
"Attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to
float by in the current."
As most of you would probably admit, it's hard work to optimize a local
business website/Plus page/etc. So why not leverage pages that arealready
visible in your marketsfor your own visibility? That's the idea behind Barnacle
SEO.
Will's original concept applied to link building to prominent Internet Yellow
Pages profiles like Yelp business pages or Yahoo Local listings to increase the
rankings of those profiles. As Facebook became more popular, he also applied the
idea to Facebook conversations on popular pages in a given community (such as
the home of your local newspaper or major/minor league sports team).
The problem is that with's Facebook's Timeline interface, comments and
conversations drop "below the fold" awfully quickly, especially on popular pages
with lots of conversations.
The results on Google+ Local pages, when done well, can yield much "stickier"
results.
Getting started: using Google+ as your page
This part is pretty easy. Simply go to http://plus.google.com and log in with
the Google Account under which you claimed your page. At the top righthand side,
you'll see a dropdown that shows the pages on which you're an admin. Simply
select the name of your page. Google will then take you to that page, and when
it does, you should see the icon of the page show up at the top righthand side
(rather than your personal profile photo).
You're now using Google+ as your business!
Getting your feet wet: reviewing friendly businesses
Going back to the Rotary club analogy, you probably already have a network of
existing businesses that you refer friends and clients to in the offline world
-- pay it forward and put your speech about why you would refer people to them
out there for the entire Internet to see.
Chances are, when they Google themselves, they'll see your business' review
right at the top of the list and might even leave YOU a review once they notice
it.
Here's an example of this in action with my friend Mike Ramsey's business.
You'll see, because he doesn't have that many reviews for his newspaper site, my
face-for-radio shows up publicly right at the top of his list.
Kicking it up a notch: finding popular businesses
OK, that was simple enough. But most of your friends aren't likely to run
tremendously popular businesses that are getting a lot of traffic from search,
let alone organic activity on Google+. You want to identify who the most popular
businesses are in your market. You probably have some idea of what they are
already, but here are some algorithmically-influenced ways to find them.
1) Perform a search for "things to do" in your market
Google is showing more and more of these carousel-style results for these
searches every day. The businesses and points of interest shown in this carousel
tend to be the ones that get the most visibility on Google+.
2) See what businesses Google recommends at maps.google.com
Visit http://maps.google.com and see who Google shows to the left of the map --
both in text and image format. Again, these are likely to be popular businesses
with lots of visibility on Google's local products.
3) See where top reviewers are going
Hat tip to my previously-mentioned friend Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing whose
team authored this excellent piece earlier this week about how to find top
reviewers on Google+ Local. Just follow the instructions in that post, and
you'll get a screen like this. Chances are, most of the places visited by top
reviewers are pretty popular.
4) See what places are popular on Foursquare
Visit foursquare.comand see what businesses are mentioned when you search for
"best nearby." These places are going to have a lot of visibility among
techies--good for a variety of reasons that I won't go into in this post.
Finishing things off: reviewing those businesses
So, the final step in the process is to leave a review of those top businesses.
I don't have any earth-shattering tips for best practices when it comes to
actually leaving a review, but I will point out that the more effort you put
into leaving a killer review, the more likely it is that effort will be
rewarded.
Why is that?Google+ sorts reviews by "Most Helpful" by default.This means that
the better your review is, the more likely it is to have staying power over time
-- which is the whole point of this exercise. You want people to gain real value
from your review and have a positive experience when they see your brand for the
first time.
Just like no one wants to talk to an incessant glad-hander or self-promoter at
a networking event, no one wants to read reviews that talk about how great their
own business is. Just imagine that you're talking to people face-to-face at one
of these events, except instead of a 1:1 interaction, it's more like a 1:100 or
a 1:1000 interaction.
Note that my business' review, though I left it over two weeks ago and haven't
asked anyone to mark it as helpful, is still ranking second out of all reviews.
Imagine the permanent "stickiness" of a review marked as helpful by even a
handful of Google+ users.
Conclusion
Obviously, this technique works best for retail- or hospitality industry
businesses, who are probably referring their guests to top attractions anyway,
and are most likely togettraffic from out-of-town guests in the process of
planning their trips.
But my guess is that (especially) in larger markets, even in-town residents are
likely to do "recovery" searches on popular destinations -- where Google is
increasingly pushing searchers towards Knowledge Graph results and popular
reviews from prominent Google+ users. Make sure your business (or your clients'
businesses) have a chance to gain this "barnacle" visibility.
In the comments, I'd love to hear if anyone has used this technique on their
own, or on behalf of their clients, and what the results have been!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/A05P8BtXvr8/barnacle-reviews-on-google-plus-local
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by David Mihm
Since Google+ Local was released last May, its safe to say that everyone in the
local search community -- business owners and agencies alike -- has been waiting
with bated breath for the launch of Googles rumored Business Builder dashboard.
For whatever reason, it still isnt out yet, but while youre waiting, theres no
reason you cant take advantage of the most underrated feature of Google+: the
ability to interact on Google+ as a business page. And in particular, to leave
reviews of other businesses as your business page.
Why leave reviews as a page?
Business owners, if this concept doesnt immediately make sense to you, think of
it like this: you probably go to networking events with your local chamber of
commerce, Rotary club, or your industry trade group all the time. When you go to
these events, youre likely wearing your business owner hat, rather than your
"weekend warrior" or "soccer mom" hat.
Thats essentially what this feature allows you to do: network socially with
your business owner hat on, rather than your personal hat. Just like you would
refer business to other business owners you trust and admire in these networking
environments, the idea behind page-to-page recommendations on social networking
sites works the same way.
Facebook gave its page users this functionality years ago, and many of you are
likely accustomed to leaving comments on other Facebook pages and generally
interacting with their community as their page rather than an individual
profile. You may not have known, though, that you can do the same thing on
Google+.
Why "Barnacle" reviews?
As far as I know, Search Influence's Will Scott was the pioneer of this
conceptin local search, which he defined as:
"Attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to
float by in the current."
As most of you would probably admit, it's hard work to optimize a local
business website/Plus page/etc. So why not leverage pages that arealready
visible in your marketsfor your own visibility? That's the idea behind Barnacle
SEO.
Will's original concept applied to link building to prominent Internet Yellow
Pages profiles like Yelp business pages or Yahoo Local listings to increase the
rankings of those profiles. As Facebook became more popular, he also applied the
idea to Facebook conversations on popular pages in a given community (such as
the home of your local newspaper or major/minor league sports team).
The problem is that with's Facebook's Timeline interface, comments and
conversations drop "below the fold" awfully quickly, especially on popular pages
with lots of conversations.
The results on Google+ Local pages, when done well, can yield much "stickier"
results.
Getting started: using Google+ as your page
This part is pretty easy. Simply go to http://plus.google.com and log in with
the Google Account under which you claimed your page. At the top righthand side,
you'll see a dropdown that shows the pages on which you're an admin. Simply
select the name of your page. Google will then take you to that page, and when
it does, you should see the icon of the page show up at the top righthand side
(rather than your personal profile photo).
You're now using Google+ as your business!
Getting your feet wet: reviewing friendly businesses
Going back to the Rotary club analogy, you probably already have a network of
existing businesses that you refer friends and clients to in the offline world
-- pay it forward and put your speech about why you would refer people to them
out there for the entire Internet to see.
Chances are, when they Google themselves, they'll see your business' review
right at the top of the list and might even leave YOU a review once they notice
it.
Here's an example of this in action with my friend Mike Ramsey's business.
You'll see, because he doesn't have that many reviews for his newspaper site, my
face-for-radio shows up publicly right at the top of his list.
Kicking it up a notch: finding popular businesses
OK, that was simple enough. But most of your friends aren't likely to run
tremendously popular businesses that are getting a lot of traffic from search,
let alone organic activity on Google+. You want to identify who the most popular
businesses are in your market. You probably have some idea of what they are
already, but here are some algorithmically-influenced ways to find them.
1) Perform a search for "things to do" in your market
Google is showing more and more of these carousel-style results for these
searches every day. The businesses and points of interest shown in this carousel
tend to be the ones that get the most visibility on Google+.
2) See what businesses Google recommends at maps.google.com
Visit http://maps.google.com and see who Google shows to the left of the map --
both in text and image format. Again, these are likely to be popular businesses
with lots of visibility on Google's local products.
3) See where top reviewers are going
Hat tip to my previously-mentioned friend Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing whose
team authored this excellent piece earlier this week about how to find top
reviewers on Google+ Local. Just follow the instructions in that post, and
you'll get a screen like this. Chances are, most of the places visited by top
reviewers are pretty popular.
4) See what places are popular on Foursquare
Visit foursquare.comand see what businesses are mentioned when you search for
"best nearby." These places are going to have a lot of visibility among
techies--good for a variety of reasons that I won't go into in this post.
Finishing things off: reviewing those businesses
So, the final step in the process is to leave a review of those top businesses.
I don't have any earth-shattering tips for best practices when it comes to
actually leaving a review, but I will point out that the more effort you put
into leaving a killer review, the more likely it is that effort will be
rewarded.
Why is that?Google+ sorts reviews by "Most Helpful" by default.This means that
the better your review is, the more likely it is to have staying power over time
-- which is the whole point of this exercise. You want people to gain real value
from your review and have a positive experience when they see your brand for the
first time.
Just like no one wants to talk to an incessant glad-hander or self-promoter at
a networking event, no one wants to read reviews that talk about how great their
own business is. Just imagine that you're talking to people face-to-face at one
of these events, except instead of a 1:1 interaction, it's more like a 1:100 or
a 1:1000 interaction.
Note that my business' review, though I left it over two weeks ago and haven't
asked anyone to mark it as helpful, is still ranking second out of all reviews.
Imagine the permanent "stickiness" of a review marked as helpful by even a
handful of Google+ users.
Conclusion
Obviously, this technique works best for retail- or hospitality industry
businesses, who are probably referring their guests to top attractions anyway,
and are most likely togettraffic from out-of-town guests in the process of
planning their trips.
But my guess is that (especially) in larger markets, even in-town residents are
likely to do "recovery" searches on popular destinations -- where Google is
increasingly pushing searchers towards Knowledge Graph results and popular
reviews from prominent Google+ users. Make sure your business (or your clients'
businesses) have a chance to gain this "barnacle" visibility.
In the comments, I'd love to hear if anyone has used this technique on their
own, or on behalf of their clients, and what the results have been!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/A05P8BtXvr8/barnacle-reviews-on-google-plus-local
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 26 March 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'SEO Finds In Your Server Log'
Posted by timresnik
I am a huge Portland Trail Blazers fan, and in the early 2000s, my favorite
player was Rasheed Wallace. He was a lightning-rod of a player, and fans either
loved or hated him. He led the league in technical fouls nearly every year he
was a Blazer; mostly because he never thought he committed any sort of foul.
Many of those said technicals came when the opposing player missed a free-throw
attempt and Sheed passionately screamed his mantra: BALL DONT LIE.
Sheed asserts that a basketball has metaphysical powers that acts as a system
of checks and balances for the integrity of the game. While this is debatable
(ok, probably not true), there is a parallel to technical SEO: marketers and
developers often commit SEO fouls when architecting a site or creating content,
but implicitly deny that anything is wrong.
As SEOs, we use all sorts of tools to glean insight into technical issues that
may be hurting us: web analytics, crawl diagnostics, and Google and Bing
Webmaster tools. All of these tools are useful, but there are undoubtedly holes
in the data. There is only one true record of how search engines, such as
Googlebot, process your website. These are web server logs. As I am sure Rasheed
Wallace would agree, logs are a powerful source of oft-underutilized data that
helps keep the integrity of your sites crawl by search engines in check.
A server log is a detailed record of every action performed by a particular
server. In the case of a web server, you can get a lot of useful information. In
fact, back in the day before free analytics (like Google Analytics) existed, it
was common to just parse and review your web logs with software like AWStats.
I initially planned on writing a single post on this subject, but as I got
going I realized that there was a lot of ground to cover. Instead, I will break
it into 2 parts, each highlighting different problems that can be found in your
web server logs:
This post: how to retrieve and parse a log file, and identifying problems
based on your servers response code (404, 302, 500, etc.).
The next post: identifying duplicate content, encouraging efficient crawling,
reviewing trends, and looking for patterns and a few bonus non-SEO related tips.
Step #1: Fetching a log file
Web server logs come in many different formats, and the retrieval method
depends on the type of server your site runs on. Apache and Microsoft IIS are
two of the most common. The examples in this post will based on an Apache log
file from SEOmoz.
If you work in a company with a Sys Admin, be really nice and ask him/her for
a log file with a days worth of data and the fields that are listed below. Id
recommend keeping the size of the file below 1 gig as the log file parser youre
using might choke up. If you have to generate the file on your own, the method
for doing so depends on how your site is hosted. Some hosting services store
them in your home directory in a folder called /logs and will drop a compressed
log file in that folder on a daily basis. Youll want to make sure to it includes
the following columns:
Host: you will use this to filter out internal traffic. In SEOmozs case,
RogerBot spends a lot of time crawling the site and needed to be removed for our
analysis.
Date: if you are analyzing multiple days this will allow you to analyze
search engine crawl rate trends by day.
Page/File: this will tell you which directory and file is being crawled and
can help pinpoint endemic issues in certain sections or with types of content.
Response code: knowing the response of the server -- the page loaded fine
(200), was not found (404), the server was down (503) -- provides invaluable
insight into inefficiencies that the crawlers may be running into.
Referrers: while this isnt necessarily useful for analyzing search bots, it
is very valuable for other traffic analysis.
User Agent: this field will tell you which search engine made the request
and without this field, a crawl analysis cannot be performed.
Apache log files by default are returned without User Agent or Referrer --
this is known as a common log file. You will need to request a combine log file.
Make your Sys Admins job a little easier (and maybe even impress) and request
the following format:
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
For Apache 1.3 you just need combined CustomLog log/acces_log combined
For those who need to manually pull the logs, you will need to create a
directive in the httpd.conf file with one of the above. A lot more detail hereon
this subject.
Step #2: Parsing a log file
You probably now have a compressed log file like mylogfile.gz and its time
to start digging in. There are myriad software products, free and paid, to
analyze and/or parse log files. My main criteria for picking one includes: the
ability to view the raw data, the ability to filter prior to parsing, and the
ability to export to CSV. I landed on Web Log Explorer
(http://www.exacttrend.com/WebLogExplorer/) and it has worked for me for several
years. I will use it along with Excel for this demonstration. Ive used AWstats
for basic analysis, but found that it does not offer the level of control and
flexibility that I need. Im sure there are several more out there that will get
the job done.
The first step is to import your file into your parsing software. Most web
log parsers will accept various formats and have a simple wizard to guide you
through the import. With the first pass of the analysis, I like to see all the
data and do not apply any filters. At this point, you can do one of two things:
prep the data in the parse and export for analysis in Excel, or do the majority
of the analysis in the parser itself. I like doing the analysis in Excel in
order to create a model for trending (Ill get into this in the follow-up post).
If you want to do a quick analysis of your logs, using the parser software is a
good option.
Import Wizard: make sure to include the parameters in the URL string. As I
will demonstrate in later posts this will help us find problematic crawl paths
and potential sources for duplicate content.
You can choose to filter the data using some basic regexbefore it is
parsed. For example, if you only wanted to analyze traffic to a particular
section of your site you could do something like:
Once you have your data loaded into the log parser, export all spider
requests and include all response codes:
Once you have exported the file to CSV and opened in Excel, here are some
steps and examples to get the data ready for pivoting into analysis and action:
1. Page/File: in our analysis we will try to expose directories that could
be problematic so we want to isolate the directory from the file. The formula I
use to do this in Excel looks something like this.
Formula: <would like to put this is a textbox of some sort>
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",C29,2)),MID(C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)),(SEARCH("/",C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)+1)))-(SEARCH("/",C29))),"no
directory")
2. User Agent: in order to limit our analysis to the search engines we
care about, we need to search this field for specific bots. In this example, Im
including Googlebot, Googlebot-Images, BingBot, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu.
Formula (yeah, its U-G-L-Y)
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot-image",H29)),"GoogleBot-Image",
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot",H29)),"GoogleBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("bing",H29)),"BingBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Yahoo",H29)),"Yahoo",
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("yandex",H29)),"yandex",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("baidu",H29)),"Baidu",
"other"))))))
Your log file is now ready for some analysis and should look something
like this:
Lets take a breather, shall we?
Step # 3: Uncover server and response code errors
The quickest way to suss out issues that search engines are having with
the crawl of your site is to look at the server response codes that are being
served. Too many 404s (page not found) can mean that precious crawl resources
are being wasted. Massive 302 redirects can point to link equity dead-ends in
your site architecture. While Google Webmaster Tools provides some information
on such errors, they do not provide a complete picture: LOGS DONT LIE.
The first step to the analysis is to generate a pivot table from your log
data. Our goal here is to isolate the spiders along with the response codes that
are being served. Select all of your data and go to Data>Pivot Table.
On the most basic level, lets see who is crawling SEOmoz on this
particular day:
There are no definitive conclusions that we can make from this data, but
there are a few things that should be noted for further analysis. First, BingBot
is crawling the site at about an 80% more clip. Why? Second, other bots account
for nearly half of the crawls. Did we miss something in our search of the User
Agent field? As for the latter, we can see from a quick glance that most of
which is accounting for other is RogerBot -- well exclude this.
Next, lets have a look at server codes for the engines that we care most
about.
Ive highlighted the areas that we will want to take a closer look.
Overall, the ratio of good to bad looks healthy, but since we live by the mantra
that every little bit helps lets try to figure out whats going on.
1. Why is Bing crawling the site at 2x that of Google? We should
investigate to see if Bing is crawling inefficiently and if there is anything we
can do to help them along or if Google is not crawling as deep as Bing and if
there is anything we can do to encourage a deeper crawl.
By isolating the pages that were successfully served (200s) to BingBot
the potential culprit is immediately apparent. Nearly 60,000 of 100,000 pages
that BingBot crawled successfully were user login redirects from a comment link.
The problem: SEOmoz is architected in such a way that if a comment
link is requested and JavaScript is not enabled it will serve a redirect (being
served as a 200 by the server) to an error page. With nearly 60% of Bings crawl
being wasted on such dead-ends, it is important that SEOmoz block the engines
from crawling.
The solution: add rel=nofollow to all comment and reply to comment
links. Typically, the ideal method for telling and engine not to crawl something
is a directive in the robots.txt file. Unfortunately, that wont work in this
scenario because the URL is being served via the JavaScript after the click.
GoogleBot is dealing with the comment links better than Bing and
avoiding them altogether. However, Google is crawling a handful of links
sucessfully that are login redirects. Take a quick look at the robots.txtand you
will see that this directory should probably be blocked.
2. The number of 302s being served to Google and Bing is acceptable,
but it doesnt hurt to review in case there are better ways for dealing with some
of edge cases. For the most part SEOmoz is using 302s for defunct blog category
architecture that redirects the user to the main blog page. They are also being
used for private message pages /message, and a robots.txt directive should
exclude these pages from being crawled at all.
3. Some of the most valuable data that you can get from your server
logs are links that are being crawled that resolve in a 404. SEOmoz has done a
good job managing these errors and does not have an alarming level of 404s. A
quick way to identify potential problems is to isolate 404s by directory. This
can be done by running a pivot table with Directory as your row label and count
of Directory in your value field. Youll get something like:
The problem: the main issue thats popping here is 90% of the 404s are
in one directory, /comments. Given the issues with BingBot and the JavaScript
driven redirect mentioned above this doesnt really come as a surprise.
The solution: the good news is that since we are already using
rel=nofollow on the comment links these 404s should also be taken care of.
Conclusion
Google and Bing Webmaster tools provide you information on crawl
errors, but in many cases they limit the data. As SEOs we should use every
source of data that is available and after all, there is only one source of data
that you can truly rely on: your own.
LOGS DONT LIE!
And for your viewing pleasure, here's a bonus clip for reading the
whole post.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/hS2lQJpw9hU/seo-finds-in-your-server-log
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by timresnik
I am a huge Portland Trail Blazers fan, and in the early 2000s, my favorite
player was Rasheed Wallace. He was a lightning-rod of a player, and fans either
loved or hated him. He led the league in technical fouls nearly every year he
was a Blazer; mostly because he never thought he committed any sort of foul.
Many of those said technicals came when the opposing player missed a free-throw
attempt and Sheed passionately screamed his mantra: BALL DONT LIE.
Sheed asserts that a basketball has metaphysical powers that acts as a system
of checks and balances for the integrity of the game. While this is debatable
(ok, probably not true), there is a parallel to technical SEO: marketers and
developers often commit SEO fouls when architecting a site or creating content,
but implicitly deny that anything is wrong.
As SEOs, we use all sorts of tools to glean insight into technical issues that
may be hurting us: web analytics, crawl diagnostics, and Google and Bing
Webmaster tools. All of these tools are useful, but there are undoubtedly holes
in the data. There is only one true record of how search engines, such as
Googlebot, process your website. These are web server logs. As I am sure Rasheed
Wallace would agree, logs are a powerful source of oft-underutilized data that
helps keep the integrity of your sites crawl by search engines in check.
A server log is a detailed record of every action performed by a particular
server. In the case of a web server, you can get a lot of useful information. In
fact, back in the day before free analytics (like Google Analytics) existed, it
was common to just parse and review your web logs with software like AWStats.
I initially planned on writing a single post on this subject, but as I got
going I realized that there was a lot of ground to cover. Instead, I will break
it into 2 parts, each highlighting different problems that can be found in your
web server logs:
This post: how to retrieve and parse a log file, and identifying problems
based on your servers response code (404, 302, 500, etc.).
The next post: identifying duplicate content, encouraging efficient crawling,
reviewing trends, and looking for patterns and a few bonus non-SEO related tips.
Step #1: Fetching a log file
Web server logs come in many different formats, and the retrieval method
depends on the type of server your site runs on. Apache and Microsoft IIS are
two of the most common. The examples in this post will based on an Apache log
file from SEOmoz.
If you work in a company with a Sys Admin, be really nice and ask him/her for
a log file with a days worth of data and the fields that are listed below. Id
recommend keeping the size of the file below 1 gig as the log file parser youre
using might choke up. If you have to generate the file on your own, the method
for doing so depends on how your site is hosted. Some hosting services store
them in your home directory in a folder called /logs and will drop a compressed
log file in that folder on a daily basis. Youll want to make sure to it includes
the following columns:
Host: you will use this to filter out internal traffic. In SEOmozs case,
RogerBot spends a lot of time crawling the site and needed to be removed for our
analysis.
Date: if you are analyzing multiple days this will allow you to analyze
search engine crawl rate trends by day.
Page/File: this will tell you which directory and file is being crawled and
can help pinpoint endemic issues in certain sections or with types of content.
Response code: knowing the response of the server -- the page loaded fine
(200), was not found (404), the server was down (503) -- provides invaluable
insight into inefficiencies that the crawlers may be running into.
Referrers: while this isnt necessarily useful for analyzing search bots, it
is very valuable for other traffic analysis.
User Agent: this field will tell you which search engine made the request
and without this field, a crawl analysis cannot be performed.
Apache log files by default are returned without User Agent or Referrer --
this is known as a common log file. You will need to request a combine log file.
Make your Sys Admins job a little easier (and maybe even impress) and request
the following format:
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
For Apache 1.3 you just need combined CustomLog log/acces_log combined
For those who need to manually pull the logs, you will need to create a
directive in the httpd.conf file with one of the above. A lot more detail hereon
this subject.
Step #2: Parsing a log file
You probably now have a compressed log file like mylogfile.gz and its time
to start digging in. There are myriad software products, free and paid, to
analyze and/or parse log files. My main criteria for picking one includes: the
ability to view the raw data, the ability to filter prior to parsing, and the
ability to export to CSV. I landed on Web Log Explorer
(http://www.exacttrend.com/WebLogExplorer/) and it has worked for me for several
years. I will use it along with Excel for this demonstration. Ive used AWstats
for basic analysis, but found that it does not offer the level of control and
flexibility that I need. Im sure there are several more out there that will get
the job done.
The first step is to import your file into your parsing software. Most web
log parsers will accept various formats and have a simple wizard to guide you
through the import. With the first pass of the analysis, I like to see all the
data and do not apply any filters. At this point, you can do one of two things:
prep the data in the parse and export for analysis in Excel, or do the majority
of the analysis in the parser itself. I like doing the analysis in Excel in
order to create a model for trending (Ill get into this in the follow-up post).
If you want to do a quick analysis of your logs, using the parser software is a
good option.
Import Wizard: make sure to include the parameters in the URL string. As I
will demonstrate in later posts this will help us find problematic crawl paths
and potential sources for duplicate content.
You can choose to filter the data using some basic regexbefore it is
parsed. For example, if you only wanted to analyze traffic to a particular
section of your site you could do something like:
Once you have your data loaded into the log parser, export all spider
requests and include all response codes:
Once you have exported the file to CSV and opened in Excel, here are some
steps and examples to get the data ready for pivoting into analysis and action:
1. Page/File: in our analysis we will try to expose directories that could
be problematic so we want to isolate the directory from the file. The formula I
use to do this in Excel looks something like this.
Formula: <would like to put this is a textbox of some sort>
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",C29,2)),MID(C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)),(SEARCH("/",C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)+1)))-(SEARCH("/",C29))),"no
directory")
2. User Agent: in order to limit our analysis to the search engines we
care about, we need to search this field for specific bots. In this example, Im
including Googlebot, Googlebot-Images, BingBot, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu.
Formula (yeah, its U-G-L-Y)
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot-image",H29)),"GoogleBot-Image",
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot",H29)),"GoogleBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("bing",H29)),"BingBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Yahoo",H29)),"Yahoo",
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("yandex",H29)),"yandex",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("baidu",H29)),"Baidu",
"other"))))))
Your log file is now ready for some analysis and should look something
like this:
Lets take a breather, shall we?
Step # 3: Uncover server and response code errors
The quickest way to suss out issues that search engines are having with
the crawl of your site is to look at the server response codes that are being
served. Too many 404s (page not found) can mean that precious crawl resources
are being wasted. Massive 302 redirects can point to link equity dead-ends in
your site architecture. While Google Webmaster Tools provides some information
on such errors, they do not provide a complete picture: LOGS DONT LIE.
The first step to the analysis is to generate a pivot table from your log
data. Our goal here is to isolate the spiders along with the response codes that
are being served. Select all of your data and go to Data>Pivot Table.
On the most basic level, lets see who is crawling SEOmoz on this
particular day:
There are no definitive conclusions that we can make from this data, but
there are a few things that should be noted for further analysis. First, BingBot
is crawling the site at about an 80% more clip. Why? Second, other bots account
for nearly half of the crawls. Did we miss something in our search of the User
Agent field? As for the latter, we can see from a quick glance that most of
which is accounting for other is RogerBot -- well exclude this.
Next, lets have a look at server codes for the engines that we care most
about.
Ive highlighted the areas that we will want to take a closer look.
Overall, the ratio of good to bad looks healthy, but since we live by the mantra
that every little bit helps lets try to figure out whats going on.
1. Why is Bing crawling the site at 2x that of Google? We should
investigate to see if Bing is crawling inefficiently and if there is anything we
can do to help them along or if Google is not crawling as deep as Bing and if
there is anything we can do to encourage a deeper crawl.
By isolating the pages that were successfully served (200s) to BingBot
the potential culprit is immediately apparent. Nearly 60,000 of 100,000 pages
that BingBot crawled successfully were user login redirects from a comment link.
The problem: SEOmoz is architected in such a way that if a comment
link is requested and JavaScript is not enabled it will serve a redirect (being
served as a 200 by the server) to an error page. With nearly 60% of Bings crawl
being wasted on such dead-ends, it is important that SEOmoz block the engines
from crawling.
The solution: add rel=nofollow to all comment and reply to comment
links. Typically, the ideal method for telling and engine not to crawl something
is a directive in the robots.txt file. Unfortunately, that wont work in this
scenario because the URL is being served via the JavaScript after the click.
GoogleBot is dealing with the comment links better than Bing and
avoiding them altogether. However, Google is crawling a handful of links
sucessfully that are login redirects. Take a quick look at the robots.txtand you
will see that this directory should probably be blocked.
2. The number of 302s being served to Google and Bing is acceptable,
but it doesnt hurt to review in case there are better ways for dealing with some
of edge cases. For the most part SEOmoz is using 302s for defunct blog category
architecture that redirects the user to the main blog page. They are also being
used for private message pages /message, and a robots.txt directive should
exclude these pages from being crawled at all.
3. Some of the most valuable data that you can get from your server
logs are links that are being crawled that resolve in a 404. SEOmoz has done a
good job managing these errors and does not have an alarming level of 404s. A
quick way to identify potential problems is to isolate 404s by directory. This
can be done by running a pivot table with Directory as your row label and count
of Directory in your value field. Youll get something like:
The problem: the main issue thats popping here is 90% of the 404s are
in one directory, /comments. Given the issues with BingBot and the JavaScript
driven redirect mentioned above this doesnt really come as a surprise.
The solution: the good news is that since we are already using
rel=nofollow on the comment links these 404s should also be taken care of.
Conclusion
Google and Bing Webmaster tools provide you information on crawl
errors, but in many cases they limit the data. As SEOs we should use every
source of data that is available and after all, there is only one source of data
that you can truly rely on: your own.
LOGS DONT LIE!
And for your viewing pleasure, here's a bonus clip for reading the
whole post.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Monday 25 March 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why Google Analytics Tagging
Matters - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by RachaelGerson
When Google Analytics doesn't know where a traffic source comes from, it
assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This
happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not
tagging our links accordingly.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on "dark social"
and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your
referrals. Take credit for the work that you're doing, and tag your links!
Video Transcription
"Hi, everyone. I'm Rachael Gerson. I'm the head of analytics at SEER
Interactive. We're a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are
growing and spreading across the world. Although we're primarily known for our
SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented
analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is
actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you
about.
My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to
it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I
read it this morning and went, "This is really good content. I'm going to share
this." And I put it out on Twitter.
She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, "Okay. Let's see
what happens." In the last 8 hours, she's gotten 74,000 page views to this one
blog post. I'm looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are
1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It's going viral.
We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through
Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we're also seeing a
lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly
doubt they're typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this
page. They're not. It's being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.
It's not a new idea, but it's a fascinating idea, and that's what I wanted to
talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if
it's good content, socially, organically.
Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It's not. It's actually really awesome and
really fun to dig into. Let's say that someone read this post earlier, and they
shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from
for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent
it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the
site, they come in as direct.
Direct is Google Analytics' version of, "We have no idea what this is, so let's
call it direct and throw it in that bucket." We know it's not direct. That's our
dark, organic social. It's spreading organically in all different ways, and
we're getting traffic because of it. It's pretty amazing.
I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I'm doing on the dark social side
because it's really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I
found they're not there yet.
Here's the problem. When we say direct it's our catchall bucket and we need to
look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we
want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can't dig into to what's
[out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can't do anything. If things aren't
tagged properly, you're not taking credit for the work that you're doing.
For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it
is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you're not getting credit for the
work that you're doing.
You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project
and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project.
You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!
What we're talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that.
It's the online version, where you're giving your credit away for the work that
you're doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your
job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your
value.
When we talk about tagging, it's using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic
social, that's really sexy. It's fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are
not sexy. They're not fun, but they're necessary. If you're not doing this,
you're wasting your time and you're wasting your money. Now that sucks.
How are you wasting your time? If you're not doing this, you're putting all
kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you're looking at what you're doing,
but your analysis is based on data that's not accurate. You're putting your time
into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think
they are. You're putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know
that your stuff's actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed
decisions to help the business and drive it forward.
Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so
you can do all the other stuff.
Let's talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we're
looking at Twitter, if you don't tag your links, things will still come in.
You'll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you'll see Twitter as
social coming in, and you'll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as
well.
If you tag your links, you're going to always know it's Twitter. You're going
to know which campaign it was. You're going to know all the information you put
into it. You're also going to be protected from the other side of it. That's
when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn't come in as Twitter
unless you've tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter
that's untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.
If you posted on TweetDeck, they're coming in as direct. By the way, I'm still
playing with all of this, and it all changes. I've played with stuff that's
changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize.
Just keep up with it all the time.
That's our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don't tag our links, they'll come
in as Facebook referral. It's nice and easy. It's clean. We know what it is. The
exception to that is if someone's trying to open a link in Facebook, they click
on the link, it doesn't load fast enough, they're probably going to click Open
in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that's a
direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.
There're also a missing piece here, and that's if you do tag this stuff, you
get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, "This is all the same
campaign. It's the same effort, same content." You can tie it together across
all these different platforms, and that helps.
We get to email. If you're putting time and money into your email marketing,
you want to take your credit for it. If you're not tagging your email, it's
usually going to come in one of two ways: One as a referral from all the
different mail things that can come in or as direct.
At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it's mail.
We can't track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some
analysis on it. If it's direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.
Paid search. It's nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our
paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they
play really well together. It's awesome. The problem is when you don't tag your
stuff. If you don't tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your
manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.
This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching
their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, "Hey, guys,
this is awesome." To which the client responded, "Oh, we forgot to tell you we
launched paid search," and the account manager discovered they weren't tagging
their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their
credit. We don't want to have that happen.
Let's say you've actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is
done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care
of. Let's look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty
often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist
that this is done immediately.
We'll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for
conversion. They're different from the rest of the site. They're a totally new
template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already
for the site, it may not be in here. If we don't have someone add it back in,
what's going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site,
they'll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics
code, but they don't know where it came from. This is going to show up as
direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can't have that happen. You
worked too hard for that credit.
I've also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the
site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them
out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM
parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they'd reset the
visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers
were giving away their credit through that.
Let's say you've got all this other stuff right. Good job. That's awesome.
There's still stuff that you can't control unfortunately. There are a lot of
things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn't. I have
a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-wrong]. If you
have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the
things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.
If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can't tell if it's search
or if it's direct. That's a problem. For me, if I'm doing an analysis and I
really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut
that out so it's not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with
that, and that's a whole other topic.
The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of
information, make sure you're doing your part. If you're sharing a link
socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it,
the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social
plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if
someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already
has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking's in
place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Now once you've done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your
URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there's nothing you messed up by
accident, you've controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind
of have to accept what's left. You know that there's stuff that you can't
account for. There's direct in there that may have been shared through a text,
through a chat, through any other thing. You don't know where it actually came
from.
First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome
analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our
data. We can trust that we're making the right decisions for our business, and
we can save our time and our money this way.
If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments
below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we'll talk
about this organic social idea."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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Matters - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by RachaelGerson
When Google Analytics doesn't know where a traffic source comes from, it
assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This
happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not
tagging our links accordingly.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on "dark social"
and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your
referrals. Take credit for the work that you're doing, and tag your links!
Video Transcription
"Hi, everyone. I'm Rachael Gerson. I'm the head of analytics at SEER
Interactive. We're a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are
growing and spreading across the world. Although we're primarily known for our
SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented
analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is
actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you
about.
My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to
it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I
read it this morning and went, "This is really good content. I'm going to share
this." And I put it out on Twitter.
She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, "Okay. Let's see
what happens." In the last 8 hours, she's gotten 74,000 page views to this one
blog post. I'm looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are
1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It's going viral.
We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through
Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we're also seeing a
lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly
doubt they're typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this
page. They're not. It's being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.
It's not a new idea, but it's a fascinating idea, and that's what I wanted to
talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if
it's good content, socially, organically.
Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It's not. It's actually really awesome and
really fun to dig into. Let's say that someone read this post earlier, and they
shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from
for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent
it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the
site, they come in as direct.
Direct is Google Analytics' version of, "We have no idea what this is, so let's
call it direct and throw it in that bucket." We know it's not direct. That's our
dark, organic social. It's spreading organically in all different ways, and
we're getting traffic because of it. It's pretty amazing.
I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I'm doing on the dark social side
because it's really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I
found they're not there yet.
Here's the problem. When we say direct it's our catchall bucket and we need to
look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we
want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can't dig into to what's
[out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can't do anything. If things aren't
tagged properly, you're not taking credit for the work that you're doing.
For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it
is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you're not getting credit for the
work that you're doing.
You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project
and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project.
You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!
What we're talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that.
It's the online version, where you're giving your credit away for the work that
you're doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your
job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your
value.
When we talk about tagging, it's using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic
social, that's really sexy. It's fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are
not sexy. They're not fun, but they're necessary. If you're not doing this,
you're wasting your time and you're wasting your money. Now that sucks.
How are you wasting your time? If you're not doing this, you're putting all
kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you're looking at what you're doing,
but your analysis is based on data that's not accurate. You're putting your time
into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think
they are. You're putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know
that your stuff's actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed
decisions to help the business and drive it forward.
Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so
you can do all the other stuff.
Let's talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we're
looking at Twitter, if you don't tag your links, things will still come in.
You'll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you'll see Twitter as
social coming in, and you'll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as
well.
If you tag your links, you're going to always know it's Twitter. You're going
to know which campaign it was. You're going to know all the information you put
into it. You're also going to be protected from the other side of it. That's
when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn't come in as Twitter
unless you've tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter
that's untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.
If you posted on TweetDeck, they're coming in as direct. By the way, I'm still
playing with all of this, and it all changes. I've played with stuff that's
changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize.
Just keep up with it all the time.
That's our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don't tag our links, they'll come
in as Facebook referral. It's nice and easy. It's clean. We know what it is. The
exception to that is if someone's trying to open a link in Facebook, they click
on the link, it doesn't load fast enough, they're probably going to click Open
in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that's a
direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.
There're also a missing piece here, and that's if you do tag this stuff, you
get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, "This is all the same
campaign. It's the same effort, same content." You can tie it together across
all these different platforms, and that helps.
We get to email. If you're putting time and money into your email marketing,
you want to take your credit for it. If you're not tagging your email, it's
usually going to come in one of two ways: One as a referral from all the
different mail things that can come in or as direct.
At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it's mail.
We can't track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some
analysis on it. If it's direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.
Paid search. It's nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our
paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they
play really well together. It's awesome. The problem is when you don't tag your
stuff. If you don't tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your
manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.
This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching
their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, "Hey, guys,
this is awesome." To which the client responded, "Oh, we forgot to tell you we
launched paid search," and the account manager discovered they weren't tagging
their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their
credit. We don't want to have that happen.
Let's say you've actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is
done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care
of. Let's look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty
often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist
that this is done immediately.
We'll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for
conversion. They're different from the rest of the site. They're a totally new
template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already
for the site, it may not be in here. If we don't have someone add it back in,
what's going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site,
they'll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics
code, but they don't know where it came from. This is going to show up as
direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can't have that happen. You
worked too hard for that credit.
I've also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the
site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them
out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM
parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they'd reset the
visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers
were giving away their credit through that.
Let's say you've got all this other stuff right. Good job. That's awesome.
There's still stuff that you can't control unfortunately. There are a lot of
things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn't. I have
a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-wrong]. If you
have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the
things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.
If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can't tell if it's search
or if it's direct. That's a problem. For me, if I'm doing an analysis and I
really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut
that out so it's not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with
that, and that's a whole other topic.
The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of
information, make sure you're doing your part. If you're sharing a link
socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it,
the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social
plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if
someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already
has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking's in
place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Now once you've done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your
URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there's nothing you messed up by
accident, you've controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind
of have to accept what's left. You know that there's stuff that you can't
account for. There's direct in there that may have been shared through a text,
through a chat, through any other thing. You don't know where it actually came
from.
First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome
analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our
data. We can trust that we're making the right decisions for our business, and
we can save our time and our money this way.
If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments
below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we'll talk
about this organic social idea."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Mathematical Ideas for Marketers'
Posted by willcritchlow
I've been hiding from my natural geekiness recently. My last few blog posts and
my most recent presentations have all been about broad marketing ideas, things
that play out well in the boardroom, and big picture "future of the industry"
stuff.
Although those topics are all well and good, sometimes I need to feed the geek.
And my geek lives on logic and maths (yes, I'm going to use the *s* throughout -
it's how we roll in the UK and that's where I studied). One of our most recent
hires in our London office is a fellow maths graduate and I've been enjoying the
little discussions and puzzles.
(The last one we worked on together: in how many number bases does the number
2013 end in a "3"? Feel free to share your answers and workings in the
comments.)
Rather than just purely geek out over pointless things, I have been casting my
mind over the ways that mathematical ideas can help us out as marketers; either
by making us better at our jobs, or by helping us understand more advanced or
abstract concepts. Obviously a post like this can only scratch the surface, so
I've designed it to link out to a bunch of resources and further reading. In
approximate ascending order of difficulty and prerequisites, here are some of my
favourite mathematical ideas for marketers:
Averaging averages
The first and simplest idea is really a correction of a common misconception.
We were talking about it here in the context of some data we were visualising
for a client. The problem goes like this:
Our client had data for average income broken down by all combinations of age,
location, and gender (details changed to protect the innocent). We wanted to get
the average income by gender.
It's tempting to think that you can do this from the data provided by averaging
all the female values and averaging all the male values, but that would be
incorrect. If the age or geographic distribution is not perfectly uniform by
gender, then we will get the wrong answer. Consider the following entirely made
up example:
Female, 25, London - Average: 30,000 (10,000 people)
Female, 26, London - Average: 31,000 (11,000 people)
It's tempting to say that the average for the whole group is 30,500. In fact,
it's 30,524 (because of the hidden variable that there are more in the second
group than the first).
You will often encounter this in marketing when presented with percentages.
Suppose you have a campaign that made 200% ROI in month one and 250% ROI in
month two. What's the ROI of the campaign to date?
Answer: anywhere in the range 200-250%. You have no idea where.
Try it out on this brainteaser hat-tip @tomanthonyseo:
If I drive at 30mph for 60 miles, how fast do I have drive the next 60 to
average 60mph for the whole trip?
Correlation coefficients
Although the mathematical background can look scary, linear regression and
correlationcoefficients represent a relatively simple concept. The idea is to
measure how closely related two variables are; think about trying to draw a
"line of best fit" through an X-Y scatter chart of the two variables.
The summary of how it works is that it finds the line through the scatter chart
that minimises the sum of the distances of the points of the scatter plot away
from the line.
The great part is that you don't even need to dig into the mathematical details
to use this technique. Excel has built in functions to help you do it - check
out this YouTube video showing how to do it:
Bayes
Thomas Bayes was a mathematician who lived in the early 1700s. The
break-through he made was to come up with a way of analysing probability
statements of the form:
"What's the probability of event A given that event B happened?"
Mathematicians write that as P(A|B).
Bayes discovered that this = P(A and B) / P(B)
In plain English, that means:
"The probability of both event A and B happening divided by the probability of
B happening."
And also that P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
Which means:
"The probability of B happening given A happened, times the probability of A
happening, divided by the probability of B happening"
Why is this important? It's critical to understanding the results of all kinds
of tests - ranging from medical trials to conversion rate. Here's a challenge
from this great explanation of Bayesian thinking:
"1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast
cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of
women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in
this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the
probability that she actually has breast cancer?"
If you want to dig deeper into the marketing implications, I really like this
article.
O(n) and o(n)
One of the things I did during my maths degree was write really bad code. My
lecturers suggested using either Pascal or C. C sounded like "real programming,"
so I chose that. It's incredibly easy to write horrible programs in C because
you manage your own memory (reminding me of this programming joke).
When you think of programs failing, you tend to think of crashes or bugs that
return the wrong answer. But one of the most common failings when you start
hacking on real world problems is writing programs that run for ever and never
give you an answer at all.
As we get easy access to more and more data, it's becoming ever easier
accidentally to write programs that would take hours, days, weeks, or even
longer to run.
Computer scientists use what is known as "big O notation" to describe the
characteristics of how long an algorithm will take to run.
Suppose you are running over a data set of "n" entries. Big O notation is the
computer scientists' way of describing how long the algorithm will run in terms
of "n."
In very rough terms, O(n^2) for example means that as the size of the dataset
grows, the algorithm run-time will grow more like the square of the size of the
dataset. For example,an O(n) algorithm on 100 things might take 100 seconds but
an O(n^2) would take 100*100 =10,000 seconds.
If you're interested in digging deeper into this concept, this is a really good
primer.
At a basic level, if you are writing data analysis programs, what I'm really
recommending here is that you spend some time thinking about how long your
program will take to run expressed in terms of the size of the dataset. Watch
out for things like nested loops or evaluations of arrays. This article shows
some simple algorithms that grow in different ways as the data size grows.
Nash equilibria
Using words like equilibria makes this sound scary, but it was explained in
layman's terms in the film A Beautiful Mind:
"Games" are defined in all kinds of formal ways, but you can think of them as
just being two people in competition, then:
"A Nash equilibrium occurs when both players cant do any better by changing
their strategies, given the likely response of their opponent."
The reason I include this bit of game theory is that it's critical to all kinds
of business and marketing success; in particular, it's huge in pricing theory.
If you want a more pop culture example of game theory, this is incredible:
Time series
Time series is the wonkish mathematical name for data on a timeline. The most
common time series data in online marketing comes from analytics.
This branch of maths covers the tools and methodologies for analysing data that
comes in this form. Much like the regression analysis functions in Excel, the
nice thing with time series analysis is that there is software and tools to
apply the hard maths for you.
One of the most direct applications of time series analysis to marketing is
decomposing analytics data into the different seasonality effects and real
underlying trends. I covered how you do this using software called R in a
presentation a few years ago - see slides 39+:
Prime numbers/RSA
OK. I'm getting a little tenuous now. It's not so much that you actually need
to know the maths behind factoring large numbers or the technical details of
public key cryptography.
What I dothink is useful to us as technical marketers is to have some idea of
how HTTPS/SSL secure connections work. The best resources I know of for this
are:
Entry-level and very readable introduction to codes and cryptography
A surprisingly accessible technical overview of SSL
Markov chains
You might have come across the concept of Markov chains in relation to
machine-generated content (this is a great overview). If you want to dive deep
into the underlying maths, this is a great primer [PDF]
The general concept of Markov chains is an interesting one - the mathematical
description is that a Markov chain is a sequence of random variables where each
variable depends only on the previous one (or, more generally, previous "n").
Google Scholar has a bunch of results for the use of Markov Chains in
marketing.
It turns out that there are a bunch of great mathematical properties of Markov
Chains. By removing any possibility of the outcome of the next step being
dependent on arbitrary inputs (allowing only the outcomes of the most recent
entries in the sequence), we get results like conditions for stationary
distributions[PDF]. A stationary distribution is one that converges to a fixed
probability distribution - i.e. one that *isn't* based on previous elements in
the sequence. This leads me neatly into my final topic:
Eigenvectors/Eigenvalues
OK. Now we're talking real maths. This is at least undergraduate stuff and
quickly gets into graduate territory.
There is a branch of maths called linear algebra. It deals with matrix and
vector computations (see MIT opencourseware if you want to dig into the
details).
To follow the rest of my analogy, all you really need to know is how to
multiply a matrix and a vector.
The result of multiplying appropriate vectors and matrices is another vector.
When that vector is a fixed (scalar) multiple of the original vector, the vector
is called an "eigenvector" of the matrix and the scalar multiplier is called an
"eigenvalue" of the matrix.
Why are we talking about matrices? And what do they have to do with stationary
distributions of Markov chains?
Well, remember PageRank?
From a mathematical perspective, there are two models of PageRank:
The random surfer model - where you imagine a web visitor who randomly clicks
on outbound links (and randomly "jumps" to another arbitrary page with a fixed
probability)
The (dominant) eigenvector of the link matrix
You'll notice that the random surfer model is a Markov model (the probability
of moving from page A to page B is dependent *only* on A).
It turns out that the eigenvector is actually the stationary distribution of
the random surfer Markov chain.
And not only that. The random jump factor? Turns out that is necessary to (a)
make sure that the Markov chain has a stationary distribution AND (b) make sure
that the link matrix has an eigenvector.
Things like this are the the things that make mathematicians excited.
I appreciate that this post has been something a bit different. Thanks for
bearing with me. I'd love to hear your geek-out tips and tricks in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/tgeCItGnfj0/mathematical-ideas-for-marketers
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by willcritchlow
I've been hiding from my natural geekiness recently. My last few blog posts and
my most recent presentations have all been about broad marketing ideas, things
that play out well in the boardroom, and big picture "future of the industry"
stuff.
Although those topics are all well and good, sometimes I need to feed the geek.
And my geek lives on logic and maths (yes, I'm going to use the *s* throughout -
it's how we roll in the UK and that's where I studied). One of our most recent
hires in our London office is a fellow maths graduate and I've been enjoying the
little discussions and puzzles.
(The last one we worked on together: in how many number bases does the number
2013 end in a "3"? Feel free to share your answers and workings in the
comments.)
Rather than just purely geek out over pointless things, I have been casting my
mind over the ways that mathematical ideas can help us out as marketers; either
by making us better at our jobs, or by helping us understand more advanced or
abstract concepts. Obviously a post like this can only scratch the surface, so
I've designed it to link out to a bunch of resources and further reading. In
approximate ascending order of difficulty and prerequisites, here are some of my
favourite mathematical ideas for marketers:
Averaging averages
The first and simplest idea is really a correction of a common misconception.
We were talking about it here in the context of some data we were visualising
for a client. The problem goes like this:
Our client had data for average income broken down by all combinations of age,
location, and gender (details changed to protect the innocent). We wanted to get
the average income by gender.
It's tempting to think that you can do this from the data provided by averaging
all the female values and averaging all the male values, but that would be
incorrect. If the age or geographic distribution is not perfectly uniform by
gender, then we will get the wrong answer. Consider the following entirely made
up example:
Female, 25, London - Average: 30,000 (10,000 people)
Female, 26, London - Average: 31,000 (11,000 people)
It's tempting to say that the average for the whole group is 30,500. In fact,
it's 30,524 (because of the hidden variable that there are more in the second
group than the first).
You will often encounter this in marketing when presented with percentages.
Suppose you have a campaign that made 200% ROI in month one and 250% ROI in
month two. What's the ROI of the campaign to date?
Answer: anywhere in the range 200-250%. You have no idea where.
Try it out on this brainteaser hat-tip @tomanthonyseo:
If I drive at 30mph for 60 miles, how fast do I have drive the next 60 to
average 60mph for the whole trip?
Correlation coefficients
Although the mathematical background can look scary, linear regression and
correlationcoefficients represent a relatively simple concept. The idea is to
measure how closely related two variables are; think about trying to draw a
"line of best fit" through an X-Y scatter chart of the two variables.
The summary of how it works is that it finds the line through the scatter chart
that minimises the sum of the distances of the points of the scatter plot away
from the line.
The great part is that you don't even need to dig into the mathematical details
to use this technique. Excel has built in functions to help you do it - check
out this YouTube video showing how to do it:
Bayes
Thomas Bayes was a mathematician who lived in the early 1700s. The
break-through he made was to come up with a way of analysing probability
statements of the form:
"What's the probability of event A given that event B happened?"
Mathematicians write that as P(A|B).
Bayes discovered that this = P(A and B) / P(B)
In plain English, that means:
"The probability of both event A and B happening divided by the probability of
B happening."
And also that P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
Which means:
"The probability of B happening given A happened, times the probability of A
happening, divided by the probability of B happening"
Why is this important? It's critical to understanding the results of all kinds
of tests - ranging from medical trials to conversion rate. Here's a challenge
from this great explanation of Bayesian thinking:
"1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast
cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of
women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in
this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the
probability that she actually has breast cancer?"
If you want to dig deeper into the marketing implications, I really like this
article.
O(n) and o(n)
One of the things I did during my maths degree was write really bad code. My
lecturers suggested using either Pascal or C. C sounded like "real programming,"
so I chose that. It's incredibly easy to write horrible programs in C because
you manage your own memory (reminding me of this programming joke).
When you think of programs failing, you tend to think of crashes or bugs that
return the wrong answer. But one of the most common failings when you start
hacking on real world problems is writing programs that run for ever and never
give you an answer at all.
As we get easy access to more and more data, it's becoming ever easier
accidentally to write programs that would take hours, days, weeks, or even
longer to run.
Computer scientists use what is known as "big O notation" to describe the
characteristics of how long an algorithm will take to run.
Suppose you are running over a data set of "n" entries. Big O notation is the
computer scientists' way of describing how long the algorithm will run in terms
of "n."
In very rough terms, O(n^2) for example means that as the size of the dataset
grows, the algorithm run-time will grow more like the square of the size of the
dataset. For example,an O(n) algorithm on 100 things might take 100 seconds but
an O(n^2) would take 100*100 =10,000 seconds.
If you're interested in digging deeper into this concept, this is a really good
primer.
At a basic level, if you are writing data analysis programs, what I'm really
recommending here is that you spend some time thinking about how long your
program will take to run expressed in terms of the size of the dataset. Watch
out for things like nested loops or evaluations of arrays. This article shows
some simple algorithms that grow in different ways as the data size grows.
Nash equilibria
Using words like equilibria makes this sound scary, but it was explained in
layman's terms in the film A Beautiful Mind:
"Games" are defined in all kinds of formal ways, but you can think of them as
just being two people in competition, then:
"A Nash equilibrium occurs when both players cant do any better by changing
their strategies, given the likely response of their opponent."
The reason I include this bit of game theory is that it's critical to all kinds
of business and marketing success; in particular, it's huge in pricing theory.
If you want a more pop culture example of game theory, this is incredible:
Time series
Time series is the wonkish mathematical name for data on a timeline. The most
common time series data in online marketing comes from analytics.
This branch of maths covers the tools and methodologies for analysing data that
comes in this form. Much like the regression analysis functions in Excel, the
nice thing with time series analysis is that there is software and tools to
apply the hard maths for you.
One of the most direct applications of time series analysis to marketing is
decomposing analytics data into the different seasonality effects and real
underlying trends. I covered how you do this using software called R in a
presentation a few years ago - see slides 39+:
Prime numbers/RSA
OK. I'm getting a little tenuous now. It's not so much that you actually need
to know the maths behind factoring large numbers or the technical details of
public key cryptography.
What I dothink is useful to us as technical marketers is to have some idea of
how HTTPS/SSL secure connections work. The best resources I know of for this
are:
Entry-level and very readable introduction to codes and cryptography
A surprisingly accessible technical overview of SSL
Markov chains
You might have come across the concept of Markov chains in relation to
machine-generated content (this is a great overview). If you want to dive deep
into the underlying maths, this is a great primer [PDF]
The general concept of Markov chains is an interesting one - the mathematical
description is that a Markov chain is a sequence of random variables where each
variable depends only on the previous one (or, more generally, previous "n").
Google Scholar has a bunch of results for the use of Markov Chains in
marketing.
It turns out that there are a bunch of great mathematical properties of Markov
Chains. By removing any possibility of the outcome of the next step being
dependent on arbitrary inputs (allowing only the outcomes of the most recent
entries in the sequence), we get results like conditions for stationary
distributions[PDF]. A stationary distribution is one that converges to a fixed
probability distribution - i.e. one that *isn't* based on previous elements in
the sequence. This leads me neatly into my final topic:
Eigenvectors/Eigenvalues
OK. Now we're talking real maths. This is at least undergraduate stuff and
quickly gets into graduate territory.
There is a branch of maths called linear algebra. It deals with matrix and
vector computations (see MIT opencourseware if you want to dig into the
details).
To follow the rest of my analogy, all you really need to know is how to
multiply a matrix and a vector.
The result of multiplying appropriate vectors and matrices is another vector.
When that vector is a fixed (scalar) multiple of the original vector, the vector
is called an "eigenvector" of the matrix and the scalar multiplier is called an
"eigenvalue" of the matrix.
Why are we talking about matrices? And what do they have to do with stationary
distributions of Markov chains?
Well, remember PageRank?
From a mathematical perspective, there are two models of PageRank:
The random surfer model - where you imagine a web visitor who randomly clicks
on outbound links (and randomly "jumps" to another arbitrary page with a fixed
probability)
The (dominant) eigenvector of the link matrix
You'll notice that the random surfer model is a Markov model (the probability
of moving from page A to page B is dependent *only* on A).
It turns out that the eigenvector is actually the stationary distribution of
the random surfer Markov chain.
And not only that. The random jump factor? Turns out that is necessary to (a)
make sure that the Markov chain has a stationary distribution AND (b) make sure
that the link matrix has an eigenvector.
Things like this are the the things that make mathematicians excited.
I appreciate that this post has been something a bit different. Thanks for
bearing with me. I'd love to hear your geek-out tips and tricks in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/tgeCItGnfj0/mathematical-ideas-for-marketers
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Attract Customers to Your
Community with Content'
Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson
Everybodys talking about content. And everybodys writing content. SEOs, social
media specialists, agencies, marketing departments, probably even your mom. And
a lot of it isnt pretty.
Hopefully, by now, you got the memo that if you want your content to grow your
business, it cant be crap.
And hopefully youre ready to do something about it.
There is a very tiny (yet very significant) theme a shift in perspective that
is important to embody when youre generating content for your website, blog, and
social media outlets (oh, and offline, too):
Its not about you.
Its just not.
Even though you may be one of your companys biggest fans, you are not your
target audience. If you want to attract customers to your brand and your
community, your content needs to reflect the fact that you understand your
customer. That youve actually thought about and considered the challenges they
face which make your product or service a necessity in their lives.
And you need to do all that without making it about you.
Try using foundational and community building content
In general, there are two types of content that you need on your website; we
call them foundational content and community building content.Foundational
content is the important stuff that permanently lives on your website. Its the
inherently self-promotional stuff that explains who you are and what you do. Its
your about page, your sales pages (products or services), and it tends to be
(but isnt always) pretty static.Foundational content is the stuff thats pretty
much impossible not to make about you because it is, in fact, about you. As a
result, in order to attract customers to your community with your foundational
content, youve got to pack it full of value.Community building content is less
about what you do and more about what you know. It usually lives on your blog,
is dynamic, and indirectly promotes your brand (and earns links). Its what
bolsters your online reputation as an expert. It builds trust, establishes
credibility, and naturally attracts people to you.Community building content is
most effective when its not self-promotional. It doesnt need to say your company
name. Instead, it needs to be completely focused on your customer and the value
that you can provide or point them towards.
Patagonia is a really great example of providing value in both types of
content. Whether its foundational or community building, they focus on the
customer, their needs, and the experience. Let's take a look at some examples.
Packing value into foundational content
In Patagonia's foundational content, they focus their message not just on how
cool their product looks or even how functional it is (though they dont hide
those things), but also on the broader concerns of their target audience.
This is an email marketing promotion that my husband just recently received
about the Encapsil Parka:
Notice how instead of just bragging about the fact that this is the best down
parka ever made (all about them), Patagonia is also going to show you what they
mean by providing value through video (all about the customer).
If you click through to the video, the content boasts how little is used to
make the jacket, something that is important to consumers who respect (and are
drawn to) the Patagonia brand. Patagonia is balancing self-promotion with
something that is useful and enhances the experience.
Even though Patagonias intention is to sell this product, they are committed to
integrating value into their foundational content so that they are serving their
customer. The page is also packed with additional videos, details, social proof,
customer testimonials, and the opportunity to live chat. All. Kinds. Of. Value.
What community building content looks like
About a week later, my husband also received this email from Patagonia:
This is Tommy. He climbs rocks for a living. Hes a Patagonia Ambassador (thats
code for bad-ass-rock-climber).
This email marketing promotion clicks through to a post on the Patagonia blog
about Tommy. Even though it lives on the Patagonia blog, it doesnt plug
Patagonia products, it doesnt even link to any associated Patagonia rock
climbing gear. Its all about Tommy, his (kind of scary) adventures, and his
drive to be a standup guy.
This is community building content (and it probably attracts a lot of links,
too). Its indirectly self-promotional. It speaks to the kind of people that
Patagonia wants to attract to their community. My guess (and presumably
Patagonias guess, too) is that people who like guys like Tommy resonate with
what Patagonia stands for as a company and they want to be a part of what theyre
doing (which means buy their products and join their community).
You can do this with a content strategy
You dont have to be a ginormous brand like Patagonia to generate the kinds of
content that will attract customers to your community. You just need to have a
content strategy that will get you from where you are to where youd like to be.
An ideal content strategy aligns the goals of your business with the
expectations of your target audience. If you want to build a thriving community
around your company, youve got to have a strategy that considers the people who
are going to be reading your content and the experience that you want them to
have.
The best place to start is with a content audit of your existing content. If
you want to attract people to your community with your content, youve got to
make it worth reading. That means over the first several months (and possibly
beyond) youre going to need to spend some time transforming what exists: improve
whats worth revising and ditch the rest.
Re-working your foundational content
When youre auditing your foundational content, pay attention to whether it has
any value or if its all about you. Certainly your content is going to be
self-promotional (it is, after all, your website), but you can communicate what
you do or sell and still be focused on the customer and their experience.
Even with your about or policy pages, you can use creative ways to improve the
experience and add more value. You should also put some thought into the
following:
Your whyâ¨
Have you figured out your why yet? Focus on your passion and what makes you
unique in your space. Why are you different from your competition? What is it
that you like to do? Get very clear about what you do well and why and then make
that what youre all about.
Your customerâ¨
Who exactly are you targeting (remember, the whole world is not your
customer)? Develop a persona around them. Get to know your semi-fictional
audience members and keep them in mind as you manipulate your content.
Their challengesâ¨
What challenges does your audience have? Define their pain points and then
make sure your content addresses them.
Where theyre coming fromâ¨
At what level in the conversion funnel might your customer be visiting this
page? In order to provide the best experience possible, your content should
reflect this.
Balance the all about me in your foundational content with the value that
better serves your customer. Instead of having a page with a couple paragraphs
of text and some bullets like this:
Supplement the textual information with things like video, blog posts, case
studies, infographics, and testimonials:
Making these simple changes can make a big difference in your lift:
Integrating value into your foundational content is really about two things:
Satisfying user intentâ¨
The purpose of your foundational content is to convert. If you dont provide
anything but a couple paragraphs that give your 30 second elevator speech, youve
just lost the opportunity for a sale. â¨
User experience
â¨Making sure that youre providing the best user experience and that
its consistent across your website, blog, and social media outlets, as well as
your offline efforts.
The more value you provide with your foundational content, the more desirable
you become, the more trust you build, the more you appeal to the person who is
on the other side of that search. Again, anything that is going to make it less
about you and more about them.
The key is to balance all of your foundational content with some community
building content and then youve won the internet.
The angle on community building content
First things first. Just because you have a blog, doesnt mean you always have
to write about the stuff you sell (remember the 80/20 rule?). Same goes for your
social media outlets. That gets old quick and can be pretty limiting in terms of
the audience you can engage. Its ok to promote your products or services on your
blog, but work to keep that to 20% of the time.
Focus on developing community building content on your blog. It's the
powerhouse that can help you reach the objectives you have for your business,
and also attract (the right) customers to your community. But again, same thing
applies: lay off the self-promotion.
Community building content can be blog posts like this one from SimpliSafe or
infographics like this one that SEOgadget lovingly created for one of their
clients:
Community building content can also be video like these tech product updates
from Grovo:
...or even more in-depth resources like this simple and free e-book from
Portent or these guides from Pippen's Plugins.
The bottom line with your community building content is that the focus needs to
be on your customer. It's not meant to directly promote your company. You want
to generate content that indirectly communicates your strengths and illustrates
your expertise and knowledge. If your customers can find alignment with what
they're searching for and the content you're providing, chances are, they will
be more inclined to not only be part of your community, but also purchase your
products and services.
Before you write your community building content, consider things like:
The goals of your (potential) customer
You know what your goals are for your business, but what about the goals of
your target audience? What are their intentions with your content?
Depth in your content
What can you help them learn or better understand? Can you change their mind
about an industry misconception or challenge their beliefs on a particular
subject?
Satisfying a need
How can you serve their needs? Can you provide advice, ideas, instructions,
suggestions, a guide? Your goal is to focus on providing quality content that
that people really want (and are searching for).
As youre creating community building content, consider following the 70/20/10
principle like Ian Lurie, Tom Cruise, and the dude from Coke do.
The basic gist is within your content strategyshould look like this:70% of your
content should be a mix of mainstream stuff (knowledge, advice, and how-to type
content); 20% goes along the same lines as the 70%, but with a little risk
taking (controversial or attempting to attract a new audience); and 10% is the
super cool stuff that may completely bomb but showcases your innovative side.
The thing about this approach is that it will help you to challenge the
direction of your community building content so that you avoid just creating the
same kind of stuff over and over (which will provide a more exciting experience
for your users). It will both satisfy your existing customers and community
members and attract new people who resonate with what youre putting out there.
Even more importantly, the 70/20/10 principle will push who you are as a
company which is really important when you're growing a community. Your
community building content needs to make a statement about your brand, showing
your community what youre capable of and what you believe in. All stuff that
will attract them to you (and keep them there).
Some final pointers
A couple (ok, three) more things to keep in mind:
There is no magic formula
â¨Its really important to have a content strategy that will assist
you in working toward goals for your business. And its also really important
that you create an execution plan that will help translate all of the stuff you
want to accomplish into actionable, chewable pieces. But keep in mind that there
is no magic number of posts that will attract customers to your business and
your community. Its the quality of your business, your content, and you.
â¨â¨As you work to develop strong content, keep in mind
that this is an ongoing process that involves constant iteration. Dont plan an
execution calendar for any longer than a few months. Let your strategy drive,
but listen to your content. Allow the freedom to be agile and change course
based on what happens when your content is actually released. â¨
Bring it back to your goalsâ¨
Allow your content to take you on unexpected journeys. Be open to new ideas,
consider the feedback youre getting in blog comments and from people who provide
input in real life. If a topic in your strategy suddenly becomes urgent, move it
up in your execution plan. Be flexible. Just always make sure that you bring it
back to your goals. â¨â¨When you ensure that your content is
always in alignment with your business objectives and what your customers need,
youre clearing the noise. Youre staying focused on producing whats important
which helps to reduce anxiety, workload, and keeps you on track.â¨
Good content is an investment in your business
â¨Quality content is an asset that builds value in your business.
Whether its a blog post, guide, whitepaper, case study, infographic, or video,
your content is going to attract people to your business and your community
(ongoing).â¨â¨
Creating content thats valuable is not always a quick and easy task. Whether
youre committing to this for your own business or youre an agency assisting a
client with content, its going to take some time.â¨â¨
Start small. Weve found with our clients that committing to two small
(quality) posts a month is a realistic frequency (but it really depends on your
goals and your strategy). If youre developing content thats more extensive like
an in-depth guide or an infographic, reduce the frequency that month. Instead of
spreading yourself thin on two, put all of your energy into one heavy hitter and
give it the attention it deserves. After all, its an investment in your
business.
Your content is meant to serve a purpose
Building and growing a community around your business can be done with an
investment in a good strategy, content, outreach, and a lot of hard work. But
keep in mind that your content isnt just meant to rank, its intended to serve a
purpose. Draw people in with your community building content, and then pack your
foundational content so full of value that making the sale is the natural next
step.
What interesting ways are you integrating value into your content, or have you
seen other companies doing? Id love for you to share your experiences in the
comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SyCu33cztag/attract-customers-to-your-community-with-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Community with Content'
Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson
Everybodys talking about content. And everybodys writing content. SEOs, social
media specialists, agencies, marketing departments, probably even your mom. And
a lot of it isnt pretty.
Hopefully, by now, you got the memo that if you want your content to grow your
business, it cant be crap.
And hopefully youre ready to do something about it.
There is a very tiny (yet very significant) theme a shift in perspective that
is important to embody when youre generating content for your website, blog, and
social media outlets (oh, and offline, too):
Its not about you.
Its just not.
Even though you may be one of your companys biggest fans, you are not your
target audience. If you want to attract customers to your brand and your
community, your content needs to reflect the fact that you understand your
customer. That youve actually thought about and considered the challenges they
face which make your product or service a necessity in their lives.
And you need to do all that without making it about you.
Try using foundational and community building content
In general, there are two types of content that you need on your website; we
call them foundational content and community building content.Foundational
content is the important stuff that permanently lives on your website. Its the
inherently self-promotional stuff that explains who you are and what you do. Its
your about page, your sales pages (products or services), and it tends to be
(but isnt always) pretty static.Foundational content is the stuff thats pretty
much impossible not to make about you because it is, in fact, about you. As a
result, in order to attract customers to your community with your foundational
content, youve got to pack it full of value.Community building content is less
about what you do and more about what you know. It usually lives on your blog,
is dynamic, and indirectly promotes your brand (and earns links). Its what
bolsters your online reputation as an expert. It builds trust, establishes
credibility, and naturally attracts people to you.Community building content is
most effective when its not self-promotional. It doesnt need to say your company
name. Instead, it needs to be completely focused on your customer and the value
that you can provide or point them towards.
Patagonia is a really great example of providing value in both types of
content. Whether its foundational or community building, they focus on the
customer, their needs, and the experience. Let's take a look at some examples.
Packing value into foundational content
In Patagonia's foundational content, they focus their message not just on how
cool their product looks or even how functional it is (though they dont hide
those things), but also on the broader concerns of their target audience.
This is an email marketing promotion that my husband just recently received
about the Encapsil Parka:
Notice how instead of just bragging about the fact that this is the best down
parka ever made (all about them), Patagonia is also going to show you what they
mean by providing value through video (all about the customer).
If you click through to the video, the content boasts how little is used to
make the jacket, something that is important to consumers who respect (and are
drawn to) the Patagonia brand. Patagonia is balancing self-promotion with
something that is useful and enhances the experience.
Even though Patagonias intention is to sell this product, they are committed to
integrating value into their foundational content so that they are serving their
customer. The page is also packed with additional videos, details, social proof,
customer testimonials, and the opportunity to live chat. All. Kinds. Of. Value.
What community building content looks like
About a week later, my husband also received this email from Patagonia:
This is Tommy. He climbs rocks for a living. Hes a Patagonia Ambassador (thats
code for bad-ass-rock-climber).
This email marketing promotion clicks through to a post on the Patagonia blog
about Tommy. Even though it lives on the Patagonia blog, it doesnt plug
Patagonia products, it doesnt even link to any associated Patagonia rock
climbing gear. Its all about Tommy, his (kind of scary) adventures, and his
drive to be a standup guy.
This is community building content (and it probably attracts a lot of links,
too). Its indirectly self-promotional. It speaks to the kind of people that
Patagonia wants to attract to their community. My guess (and presumably
Patagonias guess, too) is that people who like guys like Tommy resonate with
what Patagonia stands for as a company and they want to be a part of what theyre
doing (which means buy their products and join their community).
You can do this with a content strategy
You dont have to be a ginormous brand like Patagonia to generate the kinds of
content that will attract customers to your community. You just need to have a
content strategy that will get you from where you are to where youd like to be.
An ideal content strategy aligns the goals of your business with the
expectations of your target audience. If you want to build a thriving community
around your company, youve got to have a strategy that considers the people who
are going to be reading your content and the experience that you want them to
have.
The best place to start is with a content audit of your existing content. If
you want to attract people to your community with your content, youve got to
make it worth reading. That means over the first several months (and possibly
beyond) youre going to need to spend some time transforming what exists: improve
whats worth revising and ditch the rest.
Re-working your foundational content
When youre auditing your foundational content, pay attention to whether it has
any value or if its all about you. Certainly your content is going to be
self-promotional (it is, after all, your website), but you can communicate what
you do or sell and still be focused on the customer and their experience.
Even with your about or policy pages, you can use creative ways to improve the
experience and add more value. You should also put some thought into the
following:
Your whyâ¨
Have you figured out your why yet? Focus on your passion and what makes you
unique in your space. Why are you different from your competition? What is it
that you like to do? Get very clear about what you do well and why and then make
that what youre all about.
Your customerâ¨
Who exactly are you targeting (remember, the whole world is not your
customer)? Develop a persona around them. Get to know your semi-fictional
audience members and keep them in mind as you manipulate your content.
Their challengesâ¨
What challenges does your audience have? Define their pain points and then
make sure your content addresses them.
Where theyre coming fromâ¨
At what level in the conversion funnel might your customer be visiting this
page? In order to provide the best experience possible, your content should
reflect this.
Balance the all about me in your foundational content with the value that
better serves your customer. Instead of having a page with a couple paragraphs
of text and some bullets like this:
Supplement the textual information with things like video, blog posts, case
studies, infographics, and testimonials:
Making these simple changes can make a big difference in your lift:
Integrating value into your foundational content is really about two things:
Satisfying user intentâ¨
The purpose of your foundational content is to convert. If you dont provide
anything but a couple paragraphs that give your 30 second elevator speech, youve
just lost the opportunity for a sale. â¨
User experience
â¨Making sure that youre providing the best user experience and that
its consistent across your website, blog, and social media outlets, as well as
your offline efforts.
The more value you provide with your foundational content, the more desirable
you become, the more trust you build, the more you appeal to the person who is
on the other side of that search. Again, anything that is going to make it less
about you and more about them.
The key is to balance all of your foundational content with some community
building content and then youve won the internet.
The angle on community building content
First things first. Just because you have a blog, doesnt mean you always have
to write about the stuff you sell (remember the 80/20 rule?). Same goes for your
social media outlets. That gets old quick and can be pretty limiting in terms of
the audience you can engage. Its ok to promote your products or services on your
blog, but work to keep that to 20% of the time.
Focus on developing community building content on your blog. It's the
powerhouse that can help you reach the objectives you have for your business,
and also attract (the right) customers to your community. But again, same thing
applies: lay off the self-promotion.
Community building content can be blog posts like this one from SimpliSafe or
infographics like this one that SEOgadget lovingly created for one of their
clients:
Community building content can also be video like these tech product updates
from Grovo:
...or even more in-depth resources like this simple and free e-book from
Portent or these guides from Pippen's Plugins.
The bottom line with your community building content is that the focus needs to
be on your customer. It's not meant to directly promote your company. You want
to generate content that indirectly communicates your strengths and illustrates
your expertise and knowledge. If your customers can find alignment with what
they're searching for and the content you're providing, chances are, they will
be more inclined to not only be part of your community, but also purchase your
products and services.
Before you write your community building content, consider things like:
The goals of your (potential) customer
You know what your goals are for your business, but what about the goals of
your target audience? What are their intentions with your content?
Depth in your content
What can you help them learn or better understand? Can you change their mind
about an industry misconception or challenge their beliefs on a particular
subject?
Satisfying a need
How can you serve their needs? Can you provide advice, ideas, instructions,
suggestions, a guide? Your goal is to focus on providing quality content that
that people really want (and are searching for).
As youre creating community building content, consider following the 70/20/10
principle like Ian Lurie, Tom Cruise, and the dude from Coke do.
The basic gist is within your content strategyshould look like this:70% of your
content should be a mix of mainstream stuff (knowledge, advice, and how-to type
content); 20% goes along the same lines as the 70%, but with a little risk
taking (controversial or attempting to attract a new audience); and 10% is the
super cool stuff that may completely bomb but showcases your innovative side.
The thing about this approach is that it will help you to challenge the
direction of your community building content so that you avoid just creating the
same kind of stuff over and over (which will provide a more exciting experience
for your users). It will both satisfy your existing customers and community
members and attract new people who resonate with what youre putting out there.
Even more importantly, the 70/20/10 principle will push who you are as a
company which is really important when you're growing a community. Your
community building content needs to make a statement about your brand, showing
your community what youre capable of and what you believe in. All stuff that
will attract them to you (and keep them there).
Some final pointers
A couple (ok, three) more things to keep in mind:
There is no magic formula
â¨Its really important to have a content strategy that will assist
you in working toward goals for your business. And its also really important
that you create an execution plan that will help translate all of the stuff you
want to accomplish into actionable, chewable pieces. But keep in mind that there
is no magic number of posts that will attract customers to your business and
your community. Its the quality of your business, your content, and you.
â¨â¨As you work to develop strong content, keep in mind
that this is an ongoing process that involves constant iteration. Dont plan an
execution calendar for any longer than a few months. Let your strategy drive,
but listen to your content. Allow the freedom to be agile and change course
based on what happens when your content is actually released. â¨
Bring it back to your goalsâ¨
Allow your content to take you on unexpected journeys. Be open to new ideas,
consider the feedback youre getting in blog comments and from people who provide
input in real life. If a topic in your strategy suddenly becomes urgent, move it
up in your execution plan. Be flexible. Just always make sure that you bring it
back to your goals. â¨â¨When you ensure that your content is
always in alignment with your business objectives and what your customers need,
youre clearing the noise. Youre staying focused on producing whats important
which helps to reduce anxiety, workload, and keeps you on track.â¨
Good content is an investment in your business
â¨Quality content is an asset that builds value in your business.
Whether its a blog post, guide, whitepaper, case study, infographic, or video,
your content is going to attract people to your business and your community
(ongoing).â¨â¨
Creating content thats valuable is not always a quick and easy task. Whether
youre committing to this for your own business or youre an agency assisting a
client with content, its going to take some time.â¨â¨
Start small. Weve found with our clients that committing to two small
(quality) posts a month is a realistic frequency (but it really depends on your
goals and your strategy). If youre developing content thats more extensive like
an in-depth guide or an infographic, reduce the frequency that month. Instead of
spreading yourself thin on two, put all of your energy into one heavy hitter and
give it the attention it deserves. After all, its an investment in your
business.
Your content is meant to serve a purpose
Building and growing a community around your business can be done with an
investment in a good strategy, content, outreach, and a lot of hard work. But
keep in mind that your content isnt just meant to rank, its intended to serve a
purpose. Draw people in with your community building content, and then pack your
foundational content so full of value that making the sale is the natural next
step.
What interesting ways are you integrating value into your content, or have you
seen other companies doing? Id love for you to share your experiences in the
comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SyCu33cztag/attract-customers-to-your-community-with-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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