Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Complete Guide to
Reconversion'
Posted by TomRoberts
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
A great deal of emphasis is placed on inbound marketing and attracting new
customers. However, we should be careful not to neglect the existing clients
that we may have. These people are just as important as new customers and more
often than not can provide you with a great return of investment. We should give
our existing clients the marketing focus they deserve.
In this guide, I will look at why remarketing and reconverting your clients can
be a valuable tactic for your business, while also providing examples on how we
can do just that.
I hope you find this guide to be something a little bit different than what we
normally see on Moz and, most of all, I hope you find it useful. Id love it if
you could read through the whole post, but for those revisiting or those
strapped for time, here are a few links to jump you to each chapter:
Prelude: What Prompted the Post
Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction
Chapter 2: Don't Count Out a Discount
Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free
Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing
Chapter 5: Community is Key
Conclusion: Let's Get Out There
Prelude: What Prompted the Post
I am just a poor boy, though my storys seldom told. We dont see an awful lot of
in-house SEO perspectives here on SEOmoz and even less so from the financial
services sector, of which my current role is in. This does give me the
opportunity, however, to provide a real case study of how a company has
identified the need to get more value from the client base and how they have
done so.
Basically, our company provides a way for people to trade the financial
markets, things like equities, currency pairs and so on. We provide this service
in a number of countries across Europe, with the UK being our primary market.
The curious thing about this industry, over the last 6-12 months is that, while
we as a company have acquired new clients somewhat exponentially, the trading
volumes of those clients, effectively the amount that they have been trading,
has not seen the same amount of growth. This is something that is reported to be
affecting the industry as a whole.
There are likely a number of factors that are contributing to this. Market
volatility as a whole is at a record low, while we are also reviewing our
marketing channels to see which ones are providing the most worth to us.
However, the thing that we felt we had most control over was ensuring that our
clients were as happy as they could possibly be with us, which in turn would
extend the time period they want to trade with us and would do so with more
frequency.
This guide will aim to show what we have done as a company to help ensure our
clients are satisfied with us and want to reconvert and how these methods can
apply to a wide range of industries.
Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction
If youre trying to get people to come back to your business and reconvert, they
better have had a bloomin good experience the first time round. It goes without
saying that people will need to have a positive experience with your company to
even consider returning, regardless of whatever marketing campaign you are using
to entice them back.
Therefore, the first part of any reconversion strategy is ensuring that the
conversion the first time round is as smooth as possible. If youre working on an
ecommerce site, cart abandonment is always a hot topic and I really like Russ
Henneberrys guide on decreasing abandonment over on CrazyEgg.
The best way to know whether or not you are being well received is to have an
open dialogue with your clients. SEOmoz is a great example of this, while at ETX
Capital we always display a free contact number on our website, so that people
only have to pick up the phone to talk with us. Being readily available on
social media, particularly Twitter, is another great way to garner client
feedback. Over 30% of top brands have launched a dedicated customer service
handle and Id advise you to check out the Simply Measured case study on brands
Twitter activity.
You may also want to consider asking your clients to leave you their feedback
on external review sites, such as Review Centre. Not only do you often get
detailed feedback from people leaving reviews, your ranking here can help you
obtain rich snippets in your PPC ads. If you receive over 30 reviews for your
business and keep an average rating of 4 or more, you can have fancy, shmancy
stars appear next to your ads like these:
Oh my God its full of stars!
Finally, you definitely need to check out Joshua Unseths SEOmoz post on using
Google Analytics for a Q&A strategy. Not only is it a brilliant resource, it can
also help you discover what people are asking about your brand in Google search.
You may find some trends on your service that you can address prior to people
converting.
Chapter 2: Dont Count Out a Discount
Source: NoSweatShakespeare.com
It might seem simple, but it is often effective. Offering discounts to
returning customers is a great way to have them return and to build up a bit of
brand loyalty. I can remember in November last year that I had a mullet to rival
Billy Ray Cyrus and I decided that it was time for a smart cut. I went to Rush
salon with no intention of returning for regular cuts, as I thought it was a bit
pricey. One loyalty card stamp and two 25% off cuts later and Im already looking
forward to my next princess day!
Repeat customers very often cost less than acquiring new customers, so when
youre working out your margins and what discount you can afford to give, cost is
definitely something you will want to consider.
Implementing the discount system is something that should not be underestimated
either. For the ecommerce SEOs out there, you can find some very useful
extensions for your CMS. OpenCart is arguably one of the best CMS systems out
there right now and these three extensions may be of interest for you.
Providing physical discounts is still a very popular method as well. Providing
branded cards with a discount code is a popular trick used by Amazon, when
sending out its products (I must have had 600 worth of wine vouchers sent to me
in three months, what are they trying to say?). I have to say I am a fan of the
loyalty stamp card and Ive often wondered why more businesses do not employ an
online solution to this. For all intents and purposes, the Tesco Clubcard is a
loyalty card that stores your data online, allowing you to redeem points for
discounts perhaps this could be applicable to your business?
It looks as though that more companies are heading towards loyalty stamp apps,
if sites such as Stampfeet and Stampme are anything to go by. This could also be
a useful discount solution for you.
Gamification is not something to be underestimated either. We see a lot of
gamification in the health industry Id love to see a gym take it one step
further and have a workout leader board. When you join the gym, you would be
given a chip that logs all of your exercise on the machines. The people who run
the most miles, burn the most calories, generate the most watts and so on would
be given discounted membership for 1/3/6 months. It would offer an incentive for
people to exercise harder, which can only be a good thing, while giving the gym
some really positive PR.
Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free
The Fandom of the Oprah is plain to see
Everyone loves free stuff, am I right? But how does giving stuff away for free
translate into returning customers?
Remember, this is all about building brand loyalty and a satisfied consumer
base. If you can achieve that, not only might customers be more inclined to use
your services again, but happy customers may refer their friends to your
business as well. Repeat customers can be walking billboards for business.
Having said that, it would be wise to plan your giveaway so that you can gain
something else as well, in case the reconversions dont come. Let me use an
example of a recent contest we held on our Facebook page.
We recently offered some trading credit to our clients if they could correctly
guess the US employment report, also known as the non-farm payrolls, at the
start of the month. The ultimate aim was to reignite interest in trading and to
see an increase in trading volumes, but we knew that we could also see the
following benefits, if planned correctly:
An increase in likes on our page.
An increase in engagement on other posts.
An increase in traffic and conversions, assisted or otherwise.
Because of the potential multi-benefits, we were happy to go ahead with the
giveaway and Id recommend that people look for similar multi-level benefits
before parting with their product or service for nothing.
After contacting our existing clients by email on the day that the contest went
live, as well as previewing the contest earlier in the week via our social media
channels, we ended up seeing some great results. The likes on our page increased
substantially, analytics is reporting an increase in assisted Facebook
conversions that week and weve also been seeing some increased engagement on our
regular market updates, which is great to see. Having this open communication
with our clients allows us to keep in touch with their wants and needs.
The icing on the cake is that we have also seen increased trading volumes in
the days and weeks since the competition was launched. Without giving away too
much sensitive information, I think it would be safe to say our initial outlay
in terms of cost has been recuperated and then some.
Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing
Source: poofytoo.tumblr.com
According to the DMA 2012 conference, for every $1 spent on email marketing
$40.56 is returned (The Email Marketing Trend Slideshare from Silverpop is a
great read, if youve not seen it already). It surprises me that we dont see it
mentioned more often here, as it can be a great way of getting your clients to
reconvert.
Many of the previous tips I have mentioned in this post have been used emails
in order to generate interest, such as contacting our client base to alert them
about the Facebook contest we were running. Thats not really marketing, but it
is an indication that email is still one of the best ways to communicate with
your customers.
Email marketing is a great way of interacting with your inactive user base and
get them reconverting. There is a great CNET case study on Marketing Sherpa that
looks at how offering incentives can get people to reconvert. The key takeaways
are making sure that you:
Accurately segment your lists ie knowing what group has been inactive for
60-120 days, which clients have been inactive for 120+ and so on.
Come up with a number of engagement tactics to test.
Identify with your team what constitutes as reactivation or reconversion.
If youre using a decent CRM system, you will be able to track user activity, or
lack thereof, in a lot of detail, such as date of last login, recent
transactions etc. Using this data, you can segment your users how you want and
can judge for yourself what classifies as an inactive user, for example. We use
SalesForce for this purpose, but different size businesses may find better
solutions elsewhere, so it is worth researching. PC World has featured five
useful CRMs for small businesses in the past.
The above CNET case study makes for a great read and I think an email marketing
campaign can be taken one step further by running a Facebook custom audience
campaign. There is an excellent SEOmoz blog post on this topic that you should
definitely check out, with one of the key highlights of custom audiences being
that you can import and target people from your email list only. This obviously
relies on a person using the same email for Facebook as they did with your
website, but theres a fairly decent chance that they would have. With this level
of targeting, you can serve them relevant ads to supplement your email campaign,
without breaking the budget.
If youre looking to learn more about email marketing, the Aweber and
Deliverability blogs are great places to start, while the email marketing
whitepaper from MailChimp is a great free resource as well.
Chapter 5: Community is Key
Erm...probably not this Community
Community managers: rejoice! This chapter celebrates you and all the things
that you do.
This is arguably the most important section of the guide. Nurturing your
community is essential for reconversion, which is something that I have alluded
to throughout this guide. The better the experience a customer has with your
site, the more likely there are to return, reconvert and refer.
Remember, your community is most likely an open forum and not just the people
who have used, worked with or are associated with your online business. This
means that you need to create a positive community for people pre-conversion as
much as you need to create a positive one for post-conversion folks.
Having high quality engagements with your community is one of the most direct
ways of catering to their needs. Social media is an obvious outlet for this, but
sometimes it can be hard to work out which social media channel would be best,
both for levels of engagement and also for usability reasons. We have already
talked about how customer service handles on Twitter can offer a direct response
channel, but LinkedIn is often overlooked.
Linkedin discussion groups can be a great place to engage with your community,
whether its in your own group or joining in the discussion elsewhere. More often
than not, when youre providing and contributing to useful discussions on
LinkedIn, you are not just helping your community, but also your unaided brand
awareness. One of the most famous examples of a big brand using LinkedIn is
Hewlett Packard.
That is a summary of the HP case study provided by LinkedIn, which you can read
in full here:
http://marketing.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/LinkedIn_HPUKCaseStudy2011.pdf.
HP identified that their community and the demographic that they wanted to
target were present on LinkedIn and so created a non-branded, general small
business discussion group that allowed users to help one another out. Despite it
being non-promotional, HP saw great results as a result of unaided brand
awareness and the work that they had put into the community.
Hosting discussions such as these on LinkedIn brings with it an element of
trust, as it is being hosted on a website people can trust and they would
probably be more inclined to engage on than perhaps your own hosted forum.
Furthermore, the benefit of being able to connect with users very quickly is a
very valuable one, particularly when you bear in mind that HubSpot has reported
that LinkedIn is up to 277% more effective at lead generation than other social
networks.
It is worth noting that setting up a LinkedIn discussion group will be a
time-consuming task. Moderation and encouraging engagement can take its time, so
be sure that you can commit the human resource to the project in order to help
it be as good as you want it to be. Theres a great resource on social media
examiner on how to build a thriving LinkedIn group, while HubSpot also provides
some useful tips on how to manage groups.
Alternatively, Google+ is well on its way to matching and possibly succeeding
LinkedIn as the discussion group king. Google+ communities work very much in the
same manner as LinkedIn discussion groups, with the added benefit that they are
arguably more visible to people surfing the net. For some industries, there is
already a thriving presence on the network, with SEO being chief among them. The
Google Authorship community is probably the stand out example (and you should
definitely check it out if you have not done so already). It would be tough work
to host discussion groups on both networks with limited resources, so it is
worthwhile dipping your feet in some already existing groups in your industry to
see whether or not there is an appetite for what you want to discuss.
It is a good idea to find communities in your industry that are not based on
one of the big social media websites. There is a forum called Trade2Win that is
extremely targeted to our audience and it serves as a great resource to them. We
try to engage with our audience there as well, in order to let them know about
any of our new developments and for them to also offer feedback and ask
questions about our service. It can be a very open and frank discussion at
times, but you have to respect with communities like these that you, as a brand
rather than a consumer, are on their turf as it were, and so you should treat it
with the utmost respect. The one thing about engaging on a forum that you do not
control of is that you are potentially open to attack, with no way of removing
slander unless the forum master deems to do so. With that in mind, it is
important that you establish a clear social media policy within your
organisation before you engage, with clear rules of engagement for how to handle
certain kinds of negative engagement.
Of course, nurturing your community is not exclusively an online pursuit.
There are many great things that a business can do to connect with their
community offline. In London, where I am based, there is a relatively new
artisan bakery called Gails. Their mission statement is to not only provide the
best quality bakery products out there, but to also become integrated within
their local communities. They do this by customising what products they stock in
each store, for example in the region of Hampstead, where there is a large
Jewish community; the store stocks more rye bread goods, among others.
Gails goes one step further than this and also holds community events in each
store. Some events include book-reading clubs for their store based adjacent to
a primary school, so that families can come after school and enjoy themselves.
The Hampstead store also organises a garden party each year, where they invite
businesses that offer local produce to set up market stalls across the high
street and invite people to come and sample some tasty food. Both of these
events are not designed to generate profit, but to increase the brand awareness
of Gails and to also give back to the community that they are integrated in.
Incidentally, I dont have much need for Gails anymore, as Ive taken to making
my own bread!
Note: Pacman Onesie not obligatory
Theres method in my madness: can you imagine if Gails asked people to post
pictures of their loaves and funny bakes on their Facebook page, with the
entrants getting discounts or even free items? That would be a prime example of
a company engaging with its community online and to help them reconvert.
If youre looking for more community ideas, you should look no further than the
folks here at SEOmoz. They do a great job at engaging with their community. Just
this week I was sent this swag from the team:
The slap-wrist has brought me much joy and my office much annoyance.
Conclusion: Lets Get Out There
I hope this guide has inspired you to look at fun and engaging ways to spark
reconversion. Let your customers know you love them and theyll surely love you
back!
Id love to get some feedback from you in the comments below, as well as some
cool stories about how you have worked on reconversions and building up your
lovely communities.
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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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 30 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why SEO Is Like An RTS Game (and
why you should care)'
Posted by Jayson DeMersThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of
SEOmoz, Inc.
As...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6YNblnWKvAs/why-seo-is-like-an-rts-game
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
why you should care)'
Posted by Jayson DeMersThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of
SEOmoz, Inc.
As...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6YNblnWKvAs/why-seo-is-like-an-rts-game
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
Monday 29 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Competitor Research In An Inbound
Marketing World'
Posted by dohertyjf
We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online
marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories
and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty
nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down
starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the
past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and
affecting websites the world over.
Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk
about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make
the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a
lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing
consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different
roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations
for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our
competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify
deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they
are doing that you should also adopt for your company.
So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing
where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest
returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by
Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).
By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on
it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to
see you there! Ok, let's dive in.
Email marketing
If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an
incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In
fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:
What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website
(micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen
forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told
you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:
If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works
best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options
presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the
number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're
faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we
can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:
What time do I send my emails?
How often should I send them?
Should I invest in good design?
What kind of call to action should I include to start with?
Stalk your competitor's emails
If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that
you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails
whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how
they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject
lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen
Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested
that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so
that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing
tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to
take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet,
taking into account:
Name
Email date
Time arrived
Custom design?
Call to action
Subject line
Did I click?
Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on
their site)?
My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:
I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that
talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their
way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:
Throw Into Wordle
Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send
out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by
using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my
competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:
Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.
Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside
of blogging :-)
Content production
Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this,
everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go
beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use
it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor
analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but
possibly less accurate) fashion.
Manually
Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced
queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the
different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com
"webinar"] search, I get 14 results:
That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do
absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one
that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At
Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to
do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we
saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.
More automated
If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times
that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I
chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put
the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content
type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and
published on their site.
So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using
IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type.
If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized
to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!
Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
Social amplification
You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list,
right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.
*Whistles tune*
Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their
strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking,
it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how
often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of
others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are
creating.
Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out
their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their
tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the
influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then
decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your
content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with
solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).
Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that
share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you
can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:
This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for
you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes
the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which
is more stable) and see who the influencers are!
Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor
analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other
ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.
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/S-Mex2EuP90/competitor-research-in-an-inbound-marketing-world
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
Marketing World'
Posted by dohertyjf
We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online
marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories
and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty
nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down
starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the
past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and
affecting websites the world over.
Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk
about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make
the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a
lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing
consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different
roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations
for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our
competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify
deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they
are doing that you should also adopt for your company.
So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing
where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest
returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by
Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).
By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on
it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to
see you there! Ok, let's dive in.
Email marketing
If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an
incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In
fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:
What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website
(micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen
forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told
you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:
If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works
best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options
presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the
number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're
faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we
can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:
What time do I send my emails?
How often should I send them?
Should I invest in good design?
What kind of call to action should I include to start with?
Stalk your competitor's emails
If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that
you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails
whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how
they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject
lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen
Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested
that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so
that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing
tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to
take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet,
taking into account:
Name
Email date
Time arrived
Custom design?
Call to action
Subject line
Did I click?
Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on
their site)?
My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:
I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that
talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their
way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:
Throw Into Wordle
Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send
out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by
using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my
competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:
Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.
Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside
of blogging :-)
Content production
Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this,
everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go
beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use
it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor
analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but
possibly less accurate) fashion.
Manually
Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced
queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the
different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com
"webinar"] search, I get 14 results:
That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do
absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one
that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At
Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to
do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we
saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.
More automated
If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times
that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I
chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put
the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content
type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and
published on their site.
So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using
IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type.
If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized
to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!
Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
Social amplification
You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list,
right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.
*Whistles tune*
Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their
strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking,
it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how
often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of
others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are
creating.
Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out
their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their
tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the
influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then
decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your
content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with
solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).
Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that
share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you
can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:
This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for
you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes
the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which
is more stable) and see who the influencers are!
Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor
analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other
ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.
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
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Build Great Backlinks
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Sunday 28 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'My Warrior Forum Trojan Horse &
The Worlds Worst Email List'
Have you ever had that feeling when youre making something and youre really
excited to keep going. Where you know the process is going to be as awesome as
the end result? Thats how I feel about writing this post. I just want my fingers
to keep moving, as theres a lot of insights to [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/warrior-trojan/
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The Worlds Worst Email List'
Have you ever had that feeling when youre making something and youre really
excited to keep going. Where you know the process is going to be as awesome as
the end result? Thats how I feel about writing this post. I just want my fingers
to keep moving, as theres a lot of insights to [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/warrior-trojan/
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
Friday 26 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO
Metrics - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
As SEO continues to evolve, the metrics that indicate success continue to
change with it. However, many of our client's needs don't seem to be changing as
rapidly. With clients focused on specifics like the number of links they're
getting and weekly ranking reports, it's tough to move the needle in the right
direction for true SEO success.
How do we push other inbound channels (like search, content marketing, and
social) forward to offer a more holistic and strategic approach to inbound
marketing that our clients can get behind? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand
talks about the current broken culture of SEO metrics, and offers advice on what
we can do to fix it.
For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in
this week's video.
Video Transcription
"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week, I want to share an experience I had with you and then get to our
Whiteboard Friday topic, which is going to be all about metrics and how we
change this broken culture that we have in the SEO world that's sort of carried
over from the past.
I got to go to SMX Sydney, which was an incredible time and an amazing visit,
and I spoke there with Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, who is a well-known SEO guy
in Australia, very, very smart guy, leads an agency down there. He asked me some
questions that I think are very important and resonated with me because they're
things that I've heard from a lot of people and seen reflected in a lot of the
questions that we get all the time.
That was: "Rand, I want to do more of this broader inbound marketing. I want
to get more strategic about the way I help people with SEO. I want to get less
focused on things like the number of links I send you and your particular
ranking report for a week. But these are things that our clients care about.
When we talk specifically with clients and we pitch them on SEO, they tell us,
'Hey, look, you're not here for that. You're here to get me more links. I want
this many links and I want these rankings. I want my page rank to go up. I want
my DAPA to go up.'"
Those kinds of metrics have been ingrained as what SEO is all about, and
tragically that's not the way to be successful at our jobs. The way that we
really move the needle on search, on social, on content marketing, on any of
these inbound channels is to have a holistic and strategic focus on them, not
this little tactical, rinky-dink, "I'm going to get 50 links That's going to
move this one ranking up." We know this. We've been talking about it for a long
time here on Whiteboard Friday and across the SEO world. You can find it on
nearly every reputable SEO blog out there.
So Dan and I were chatting and I said, "Well, I think what we have to do is
take that conversation a level higher and say, 'What do you want those metrics
to accomplish? Why do you want links? Why do you want your rankings higher?'"
The answer is often, "Well, we're trying to attract more traffic and expose
people to this new branding campaign," or, "We're trying to get more people
signed up for this webinar. We're trying to get more people in our salespeople's
funnel. We're trying to convert more leads to perform these types of comparison
searches and then buy from one of our partners."
Okay, good. That is getting us all the way down from these what I call
"leading indicator metrics" down to the business KPIs. Business KPIs, the things
that indicate the performance of the business, are where we should take our
strategic initiative, our strategic lead, for any sort of online marketing
effort, whether that's SEO, whether it's PPC, advertising. I don't care what it
is that you're spending money on, it should be focused on this, centered on
this, trying to achieve these things, and then, yes, we can use metrics like
links and rankings, even something like page rank or crawl depth, as leading
indicators, performance indicators that things are maybe going the right way,
that they're not going the right way. We can compare them against our
competition, and they're fine metrics for that. We just can't focus on them as
where we take our strategy.
If the strategy is "go get me more links," I'm probably going to do some gray
or black hat SEO because very frankly, that's how you move the needle on that
one indicator. If you don't care about potentially getting banned or hurting
your brand impression or making a bad impression with the search engines and
eventually getting into trouble that kind of way, then, yeah, you're going to do
stuff that is non-ideal for your business metrics. So let's have this
conversation first.
I'm going to start down here. Business KPIs, things that I think about as
being business metrics, and these are just a sample. I don't want you to get the
idea that these are the only metrics or that these have to fit in these buckets.
But in this purple bucket down here, I have things like conversions. Conversions
might even be a marketing KPI for you, depending on what your true business
goals are. But transaction value, life time customer value, retention of those
customers and recidivism of customers, those are the business KPIs, typically,
in most organizations. They're trying to get people to the site, perform some
type of action that will lead to revenue, lead to a goal being accomplished.
Marketing KPIs, these are one step up, but not yet at that level of sort of
the SEO leading indicators. These are things like visits and traffic, tweets,
shares, +1's. Those are signals of engagement and success over social media, so
is followers and fans, and these might be in leading indicators, tweets, shares,
+1's could easily be in leading indicators rather than marketing KPIs, brand
mentions, pre-conversion action. So people, for example, visiting pages that
lead to a conversion on your site and following through that funnel that you've
got set up on your site, those are the types of marketing KPIs that the
marketing team might be reporting and that you particularly, if you're doing any
type of consulting working or if you're working in-house and trying to help move
the needle, you do want to have a dashboard that's showing you these.
Then those leading indicators, those are much more of a, "Hey, I think this is
a signal that we might be on the right path," or, "This is a test. Let's see if
moving the needle on links actually moves the needle on these other things that
we care about and these business metrics that we care about," or, "Boy, you
know, sometimes it seems like it doesn't." Sometimes it seems like other things
that we might focus on, perhaps social is really moving the needle, because
you're finding that you're having a huge brand impact that's biasing clicks in
the search results, that's moving you up in positions through usage and user
data types of algorithms, and that's really doing a much better job for you than
raw links and raw rankings.
Maybe you're expanding your portfolio of content, and that's what's moving the
needle for you. You could easily put things like content production in here. You
could put that in a leading indicator, or you could put it in a marketing KPI.
You could put content engagement, things like comments or registrations. Those
could fit into marketing KPIs. It's okay to have different things in these
different buckets. Just know what they are and make sure if you're working with
someone, that you're getting the right answers here so that you can make the
right decisions here.
Don't focus on these. If you focus on these from a strategic point of view,
your tactics are probably going to lead you in the wrong direction, and, by the
way, those of you who might be buying consulting services or hiring an in-house
SEO or an in-house marketing team and having them focus on this stuff, you're
really going to be misleading your marketers, and they're going to be focused on
the wrong kinds of things that aren't going to move the needle for the business.
They need to be up here.
Let me show you in a more precise fashion how I love to see this visualized
and illustrated, how I love to see this done. We actually do this right now at
Moz. We've got an internal tool that does some of this stuff, and then we have a
big Google docs spreadsheet that I would love to make more sophisticated, and we
probably will after we release some of the big, new things we're working on
here. But basically, there are three categories up in this leading indicators
column that I pay attention to, and those are things like I want to look at the
leading indicators, whatever they are, and compare them versus my budget and my
goals.
So I might have, okay, this was our goal, and we are +x over that goal. This
is our goal and we're -y over this goal, and this is our other goal, we've got
+c over here, compared to last year this time, Q1 2012. Q1, January 1st to April
1st of 2013, here's what we've done so far, and here's how far ahead we are of
where we were this time last year, what we performed in Q1 of last year. I like
doing this because seasonality plays a big role in many, many businesses, not
every one but many, many businesses. So comparing year over year is really
healthy for this.
Then compare versus the competition. The wonderful thing about leading
indicators, and often one of the big reasons why a lot of folks use them is
because we can compare. We can see where our competitors are ranking. We can see
what sort of links they're getting. We can see their DA and PA. Maybe we can't
see their crawl rate and depth, but those other sorts of leading indicators,
even things like tweets and shares and +1's, followers and fans, those
indicators we can put in here, and we can compare against our competition.
Once we get down a layer, and I would encourage you to have the top layer,
which we care about and it's interesting, but it's not the focus. It's just a
leading indicator. When we get to the marketing KPIs, we've got, again, budget
year over year and competition. Then when we go to the business KPIs, we almost
never can get competition, the data on what the competition's doing. So we just
have budgeting year over year. But being able to see this, being able to
visualize this, it doesn't necessarily have to be in this funnel view, but being
able to see this and compare and then to show your clients, your managers, your
team members what you're doing and how that stacks up against what the business
is trying to accomplish, this is incredibly powerful. It's so much more powerful
than saying, "I want links and rankings."
If you're hearing from folks, "I want links and rankings," please have them
watch this whiteboard video, have them leave comments, have them e-mail me. My
goodness, I don't think that this is going to be how successful SEO gets done in
the future. This is how tactical SEO was done in the past, and, unfortunately,
it's how a lot of black and gray hat SEO became the norm well, I don't want to
say "the norm" but became very popular in our world. By focusing on bigger
things, we can be smarter. We can accomplish a lot more.
All right everyone, look forward to your comments, and we will see you again
next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."
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
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/sdQ9i_1OAyM/fixing-the-broken-culture-of-seo-metrics-whiteboard-friday
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
Metrics - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
As SEO continues to evolve, the metrics that indicate success continue to
change with it. However, many of our client's needs don't seem to be changing as
rapidly. With clients focused on specifics like the number of links they're
getting and weekly ranking reports, it's tough to move the needle in the right
direction for true SEO success.
How do we push other inbound channels (like search, content marketing, and
social) forward to offer a more holistic and strategic approach to inbound
marketing that our clients can get behind? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand
talks about the current broken culture of SEO metrics, and offers advice on what
we can do to fix it.
For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in
this week's video.
Video Transcription
"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week, I want to share an experience I had with you and then get to our
Whiteboard Friday topic, which is going to be all about metrics and how we
change this broken culture that we have in the SEO world that's sort of carried
over from the past.
I got to go to SMX Sydney, which was an incredible time and an amazing visit,
and I spoke there with Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, who is a well-known SEO guy
in Australia, very, very smart guy, leads an agency down there. He asked me some
questions that I think are very important and resonated with me because they're
things that I've heard from a lot of people and seen reflected in a lot of the
questions that we get all the time.
That was: "Rand, I want to do more of this broader inbound marketing. I want
to get more strategic about the way I help people with SEO. I want to get less
focused on things like the number of links I send you and your particular
ranking report for a week. But these are things that our clients care about.
When we talk specifically with clients and we pitch them on SEO, they tell us,
'Hey, look, you're not here for that. You're here to get me more links. I want
this many links and I want these rankings. I want my page rank to go up. I want
my DAPA to go up.'"
Those kinds of metrics have been ingrained as what SEO is all about, and
tragically that's not the way to be successful at our jobs. The way that we
really move the needle on search, on social, on content marketing, on any of
these inbound channels is to have a holistic and strategic focus on them, not
this little tactical, rinky-dink, "I'm going to get 50 links That's going to
move this one ranking up." We know this. We've been talking about it for a long
time here on Whiteboard Friday and across the SEO world. You can find it on
nearly every reputable SEO blog out there.
So Dan and I were chatting and I said, "Well, I think what we have to do is
take that conversation a level higher and say, 'What do you want those metrics
to accomplish? Why do you want links? Why do you want your rankings higher?'"
The answer is often, "Well, we're trying to attract more traffic and expose
people to this new branding campaign," or, "We're trying to get more people
signed up for this webinar. We're trying to get more people in our salespeople's
funnel. We're trying to convert more leads to perform these types of comparison
searches and then buy from one of our partners."
Okay, good. That is getting us all the way down from these what I call
"leading indicator metrics" down to the business KPIs. Business KPIs, the things
that indicate the performance of the business, are where we should take our
strategic initiative, our strategic lead, for any sort of online marketing
effort, whether that's SEO, whether it's PPC, advertising. I don't care what it
is that you're spending money on, it should be focused on this, centered on
this, trying to achieve these things, and then, yes, we can use metrics like
links and rankings, even something like page rank or crawl depth, as leading
indicators, performance indicators that things are maybe going the right way,
that they're not going the right way. We can compare them against our
competition, and they're fine metrics for that. We just can't focus on them as
where we take our strategy.
If the strategy is "go get me more links," I'm probably going to do some gray
or black hat SEO because very frankly, that's how you move the needle on that
one indicator. If you don't care about potentially getting banned or hurting
your brand impression or making a bad impression with the search engines and
eventually getting into trouble that kind of way, then, yeah, you're going to do
stuff that is non-ideal for your business metrics. So let's have this
conversation first.
I'm going to start down here. Business KPIs, things that I think about as
being business metrics, and these are just a sample. I don't want you to get the
idea that these are the only metrics or that these have to fit in these buckets.
But in this purple bucket down here, I have things like conversions. Conversions
might even be a marketing KPI for you, depending on what your true business
goals are. But transaction value, life time customer value, retention of those
customers and recidivism of customers, those are the business KPIs, typically,
in most organizations. They're trying to get people to the site, perform some
type of action that will lead to revenue, lead to a goal being accomplished.
Marketing KPIs, these are one step up, but not yet at that level of sort of
the SEO leading indicators. These are things like visits and traffic, tweets,
shares, +1's. Those are signals of engagement and success over social media, so
is followers and fans, and these might be in leading indicators, tweets, shares,
+1's could easily be in leading indicators rather than marketing KPIs, brand
mentions, pre-conversion action. So people, for example, visiting pages that
lead to a conversion on your site and following through that funnel that you've
got set up on your site, those are the types of marketing KPIs that the
marketing team might be reporting and that you particularly, if you're doing any
type of consulting working or if you're working in-house and trying to help move
the needle, you do want to have a dashboard that's showing you these.
Then those leading indicators, those are much more of a, "Hey, I think this is
a signal that we might be on the right path," or, "This is a test. Let's see if
moving the needle on links actually moves the needle on these other things that
we care about and these business metrics that we care about," or, "Boy, you
know, sometimes it seems like it doesn't." Sometimes it seems like other things
that we might focus on, perhaps social is really moving the needle, because
you're finding that you're having a huge brand impact that's biasing clicks in
the search results, that's moving you up in positions through usage and user
data types of algorithms, and that's really doing a much better job for you than
raw links and raw rankings.
Maybe you're expanding your portfolio of content, and that's what's moving the
needle for you. You could easily put things like content production in here. You
could put that in a leading indicator, or you could put it in a marketing KPI.
You could put content engagement, things like comments or registrations. Those
could fit into marketing KPIs. It's okay to have different things in these
different buckets. Just know what they are and make sure if you're working with
someone, that you're getting the right answers here so that you can make the
right decisions here.
Don't focus on these. If you focus on these from a strategic point of view,
your tactics are probably going to lead you in the wrong direction, and, by the
way, those of you who might be buying consulting services or hiring an in-house
SEO or an in-house marketing team and having them focus on this stuff, you're
really going to be misleading your marketers, and they're going to be focused on
the wrong kinds of things that aren't going to move the needle for the business.
They need to be up here.
Let me show you in a more precise fashion how I love to see this visualized
and illustrated, how I love to see this done. We actually do this right now at
Moz. We've got an internal tool that does some of this stuff, and then we have a
big Google docs spreadsheet that I would love to make more sophisticated, and we
probably will after we release some of the big, new things we're working on
here. But basically, there are three categories up in this leading indicators
column that I pay attention to, and those are things like I want to look at the
leading indicators, whatever they are, and compare them versus my budget and my
goals.
So I might have, okay, this was our goal, and we are +x over that goal. This
is our goal and we're -y over this goal, and this is our other goal, we've got
+c over here, compared to last year this time, Q1 2012. Q1, January 1st to April
1st of 2013, here's what we've done so far, and here's how far ahead we are of
where we were this time last year, what we performed in Q1 of last year. I like
doing this because seasonality plays a big role in many, many businesses, not
every one but many, many businesses. So comparing year over year is really
healthy for this.
Then compare versus the competition. The wonderful thing about leading
indicators, and often one of the big reasons why a lot of folks use them is
because we can compare. We can see where our competitors are ranking. We can see
what sort of links they're getting. We can see their DA and PA. Maybe we can't
see their crawl rate and depth, but those other sorts of leading indicators,
even things like tweets and shares and +1's, followers and fans, those
indicators we can put in here, and we can compare against our competition.
Once we get down a layer, and I would encourage you to have the top layer,
which we care about and it's interesting, but it's not the focus. It's just a
leading indicator. When we get to the marketing KPIs, we've got, again, budget
year over year and competition. Then when we go to the business KPIs, we almost
never can get competition, the data on what the competition's doing. So we just
have budgeting year over year. But being able to see this, being able to
visualize this, it doesn't necessarily have to be in this funnel view, but being
able to see this and compare and then to show your clients, your managers, your
team members what you're doing and how that stacks up against what the business
is trying to accomplish, this is incredibly powerful. It's so much more powerful
than saying, "I want links and rankings."
If you're hearing from folks, "I want links and rankings," please have them
watch this whiteboard video, have them leave comments, have them e-mail me. My
goodness, I don't think that this is going to be how successful SEO gets done in
the future. This is how tactical SEO was done in the past, and, unfortunately,
it's how a lot of black and gray hat SEO became the norm well, I don't want to
say "the norm" but became very popular in our world. By focusing on bigger
things, we can be smarter. We can accomplish a lot more.
All right everyone, look forward to your comments, and we will see you again
next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."
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
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/sdQ9i_1OAyM/fixing-the-broken-culture-of-seo-metrics-whiteboard-friday
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, 'Social Authority Now Has A Free
(and generous) API'
Posted by @petebray
You read that right.Social Authoritynow has an API. And it's free. And you can
grab a ton of data (i.e. you can query for data on up to 500,000 Twitter users
per day). That's a whole lot to be excited about!
What is Social Authority?
Social Authority is our transparent, business-focused metric that measures
influential activity on Twitter. Weintroduced it a few weeks ago, and we love
how it's adding real value for our Followerwonk customers.
On of the biggest benefits of Social Authority is that it helps drive
engagement tactics; namely, who is best going to ricochet your message around
their network when you @mention them. Our score helps find those standout
prospects to engage byanalyzing your social graph, comparing your relationships
with others, and tracking your new (and lost) followers.
Social Authority also augments content strategy. We're upfront that our metric
is based on retweets. At core, we're measuring a person's activity on Twitter
(that is, the content they produce), rather than the person herself. This means
that when those with high Social Authority are producing great content, it's
usually stuff that gets noticed and retweeted. As such, finding those with high
Social Authority in your industry (and looking carefully at their tweets) offers
insight into what content works well for your audience.
Mashing it up
At Moz, we're all about giving our customers data that they can use in creative
ways for their specific purposes. And with Social Authority, it's no different.
We think that our score can be useful in all sorts of unique ways, and as a
foundation for new metrics, too.
As I've mentioned before, the key in social often comes down to this little
puzzle.Here's a quick little example.
Namely, we need to find influential people who are likely to listen!
Finding these people is often tough. Folks who are influential, pretty
obviously, have a lot of folks trying to get their attention. This means that
it's hard for you to break through with your message to them.
We've helped this situation in Followerwonk by computing an overall "engagement
rate" for a lot of the top Twitter influencers. Quite simply, on mouse over of
many users, we'll tell you that user's @mention rate (what percent of his
timeline consists of leading @mentions of others), RT rate, and URLs in tweets
rate. Those folks with 0% @mention rate... well, you're not likely to get
through to them.
How do you get around this issue? Well, here's what I do.
I create a useful comparison between competitors. I bring up the list of
followers shared by all three (because these folks are likely to be super
attuned to my message). I download the data into Excel.
This download will include the Social Authority for all users, as well as the
other engagement metrics for many users. What I like to do is the following:
Namely, I create a new column that is simply the sum of Social Authority and
percentage @contact rate. This produces a score between 1 and 200. I like to do
this because it's a simple way to find users who have both high engagement and
influence.
Of course, this is a simple example of how we use Social Authority. We're eager
to see what you come up!
But that means you need access to the data beyond just Followerwonk. Here's
where the API comes in.
Cue the API...
One of the early struggles we had at Followerwonk was the need for a large
amount of influence data. We needed influence metrics on pretty much every user
on Twitter! That data wasn't easily available, and it's one of the reasons why
we developed our own metric.
With that in mind, we want to make this data available to all. For free. And
generously.
Here's how to get started with our API:
Get your access credentials by clicking on the link in the top section of
ourSocial Authority page.
Read the docs on how to use the API.
Do a simple test to get someone's Social Authority. You can learn how here.
After that, you're all set! You can do 20,000 calls per day day, requesting up
to 25 users per call. That works out to a daily limit of 500,000 users.
Hopefully that's enough for all your needs (and if not, contact us and we can
see what we can do).
Here are some areas you might consider as you start thinking how you'd use
Social Authority:
As a low-cost alternative (or complement) for any current use of other 1 to
100 scores like Klout or PeerIndex.
As the foundation for other metrics that might use Social Authority as an
input.
As a supplement to any software that you develop that surfaces Twitter users
in any capacity.
As an Excel add-on with the ability to quickly grab scores for your own
spreadsheets.
A quick example
I've written a little Chrome extension to give an example of how to use the
API. You candownload itand play around with our API. (As I said, it's really
rough!)
Once installed, you can mouse-over any Twitter name on any other Web page. Once
you do, you'll see a small hovercard that reveals their Social Authority. In the
example below, I'm browsing theSEOmoz team page for our Help Team Leader, Aaron
Wheeler:
Notice the little blue hovercard? It reveals Aaron's Social Authority by making
an API call behind-the-scenes.
This has immediate value. As you start to browse the Web, you can quickly get
the Social Authority of any Twitter user mentioned on blogs, news articles, and
so on. It's a great way to opportunistically judge the value of any referenced
Twitter user.
Of course, this is a very basic example. (And we invite you to fork that quick
code to come up with something even better.)
We're eager to see how you'll use Social Authority, and we'd love to help you
develop even more robust applications that make use of it. To share your
feedback, please feel free to comment or to contact me directly (tweeting me
@petebray is a good way) if you'd like any help or advice.
Please let us know where you integrate, and any other changes you'd like to see
in the comments below. Cheers!
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/FylFdTTKYPI/social-authority-api
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
(and generous) API'
Posted by @petebray
You read that right.Social Authoritynow has an API. And it's free. And you can
grab a ton of data (i.e. you can query for data on up to 500,000 Twitter users
per day). That's a whole lot to be excited about!
What is Social Authority?
Social Authority is our transparent, business-focused metric that measures
influential activity on Twitter. Weintroduced it a few weeks ago, and we love
how it's adding real value for our Followerwonk customers.
On of the biggest benefits of Social Authority is that it helps drive
engagement tactics; namely, who is best going to ricochet your message around
their network when you @mention them. Our score helps find those standout
prospects to engage byanalyzing your social graph, comparing your relationships
with others, and tracking your new (and lost) followers.
Social Authority also augments content strategy. We're upfront that our metric
is based on retweets. At core, we're measuring a person's activity on Twitter
(that is, the content they produce), rather than the person herself. This means
that when those with high Social Authority are producing great content, it's
usually stuff that gets noticed and retweeted. As such, finding those with high
Social Authority in your industry (and looking carefully at their tweets) offers
insight into what content works well for your audience.
Mashing it up
At Moz, we're all about giving our customers data that they can use in creative
ways for their specific purposes. And with Social Authority, it's no different.
We think that our score can be useful in all sorts of unique ways, and as a
foundation for new metrics, too.
As I've mentioned before, the key in social often comes down to this little
puzzle.Here's a quick little example.
Namely, we need to find influential people who are likely to listen!
Finding these people is often tough. Folks who are influential, pretty
obviously, have a lot of folks trying to get their attention. This means that
it's hard for you to break through with your message to them.
We've helped this situation in Followerwonk by computing an overall "engagement
rate" for a lot of the top Twitter influencers. Quite simply, on mouse over of
many users, we'll tell you that user's @mention rate (what percent of his
timeline consists of leading @mentions of others), RT rate, and URLs in tweets
rate. Those folks with 0% @mention rate... well, you're not likely to get
through to them.
How do you get around this issue? Well, here's what I do.
I create a useful comparison between competitors. I bring up the list of
followers shared by all three (because these folks are likely to be super
attuned to my message). I download the data into Excel.
This download will include the Social Authority for all users, as well as the
other engagement metrics for many users. What I like to do is the following:
Namely, I create a new column that is simply the sum of Social Authority and
percentage @contact rate. This produces a score between 1 and 200. I like to do
this because it's a simple way to find users who have both high engagement and
influence.
Of course, this is a simple example of how we use Social Authority. We're eager
to see what you come up!
But that means you need access to the data beyond just Followerwonk. Here's
where the API comes in.
Cue the API...
One of the early struggles we had at Followerwonk was the need for a large
amount of influence data. We needed influence metrics on pretty much every user
on Twitter! That data wasn't easily available, and it's one of the reasons why
we developed our own metric.
With that in mind, we want to make this data available to all. For free. And
generously.
Here's how to get started with our API:
Get your access credentials by clicking on the link in the top section of
ourSocial Authority page.
Read the docs on how to use the API.
Do a simple test to get someone's Social Authority. You can learn how here.
After that, you're all set! You can do 20,000 calls per day day, requesting up
to 25 users per call. That works out to a daily limit of 500,000 users.
Hopefully that's enough for all your needs (and if not, contact us and we can
see what we can do).
Here are some areas you might consider as you start thinking how you'd use
Social Authority:
As a low-cost alternative (or complement) for any current use of other 1 to
100 scores like Klout or PeerIndex.
As the foundation for other metrics that might use Social Authority as an
input.
As a supplement to any software that you develop that surfaces Twitter users
in any capacity.
As an Excel add-on with the ability to quickly grab scores for your own
spreadsheets.
A quick example
I've written a little Chrome extension to give an example of how to use the
API. You candownload itand play around with our API. (As I said, it's really
rough!)
Once installed, you can mouse-over any Twitter name on any other Web page. Once
you do, you'll see a small hovercard that reveals their Social Authority. In the
example below, I'm browsing theSEOmoz team page for our Help Team Leader, Aaron
Wheeler:
Notice the little blue hovercard? It reveals Aaron's Social Authority by making
an API call behind-the-scenes.
This has immediate value. As you start to browse the Web, you can quickly get
the Social Authority of any Twitter user mentioned on blogs, news articles, and
so on. It's a great way to opportunistically judge the value of any referenced
Twitter user.
Of course, this is a very basic example. (And we invite you to fork that quick
code to come up with something even better.)
We're eager to see how you'll use Social Authority, and we'd love to help you
develop even more robust applications that make use of it. To share your
feedback, please feel free to comment or to contact me directly (tweeting me
@petebray is a good way) if you'd like any help or advice.
Please let us know where you integrate, and any other changes you'd like to see
in the comments below. Cheers!
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/FylFdTTKYPI/social-authority-api
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
Thursday 25 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Ultimate Guide to Making an
Affiliate Income from Your Blog'
A few years ago I wouldnt have written a blog post about affiliate marketing. It
all seemed too dirty. But thats changing now thanks to a few animal updates from
Google. These days its all about trust and authority you need your readers to
see your blog as an authority and you need Google [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/blog-aff-guide/
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
Affiliate Income from Your Blog'
A few years ago I wouldnt have written a blog post about affiliate marketing. It
all seemed too dirty. But thats changing now thanks to a few animal updates from
Google. These days its all about trust and authority you need your readers to
see your blog as an authority and you need Google [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/blog-aff-guide/
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 24 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Dusting The Website For Spring:
Optimization and SEO Cleaning'
Posted by scottwyden
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Spring is here, so why not put some spring cleaning actions through on your
website?
With that said, I'm going to get straight to the action items. Below is a list
of many things you can look for on your site to adjust, add or remove.
On-site dusting
The following are things that you can do on your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Authorship: Extremely important SEO action item. Google authorship's role in
your website's rankings is more important than ever. In addition to being a SEO
tactic, it also acts as a conversion tactic. You see, it is estimated that SERPs
with authorship enabled receive around 120% more clicks.
+1 button: Going along with the Google Plus topic, make sure that you have a +1
button somewhere on your pages and/or posts. Why? Well, Google's Author Rank is
using +1 data as part of ranking. So in addition to the marketing benefits of
engagement, a simple +1 can help your website rank higher for keywords.
Pinterest button: Hopefully you are on Pinterest and pinning, liking and
commenting with your customers. If not, hop on it. Then also add the Pin button
to your website's pages and/or posts. People love to pin things, so make it
easier for them.
Metadata: If you're using a WordPress theme similar to ProBlogger and
Copyblogger (they're running Genesis), then there are SEO meta settings for
every page and post on your website. I personally don't recommend using a
theme's SEO settings. In fact, I much prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast - mentioned
in this article on WordPress plugins. My reasoning for this is because in
addition to providing meta functionality, it incorporates Open Graph for social
media and a page analysis feature that is amazing.
Open Graph: I might as well move on to Open Graph since I mentioned above. Open
Graph is what lets specific titles, descriptions and images show up on websites
like Facebook and Google Plus. By using the same WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin,
you can specify your image and descriptions for each.
Site speed: How fast does your website load? Could it be faster? Use the Google
Speed Test tool to find what is slowing it down. Sometimes, simple changes can
improve your load speed. Sometimes it requires development work. I like to tell
people who if you're over a score of 70 then you're doing well, but to aim for
mid 90s. Page speed helps for SEO and for user experience, so don't overlook it
anymore. Sometimes slow site speeds can be due to shared hosting that so many
websites are using.
Broken links: Log into your Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and look at any 404
errors that show up. Fix them by creating new pages in their place or redirect
them to another page using 301 redirects. (WordPress users can use this plugin)
Index status: Are you preventing important pages from being indexed by search
engines? To find out, go to Google and do a search that looks like the
following, "site:seomoz.org". A search like that will bring up every page that
Google has indexed on the domain listed. Dr. Pete shared a fantastic article on
the SEOmoz blog that covers all the important search queries that you can
utilize to see what content is indexed. The article also has queries that can
help for guest post research.[bonus!] It's also worth mentioning that you can
also log in to your Google Webmaster Tools panel to view all the URLs indexed by
Google. Take advantage of that tool!
User experience: To keep people on your website you need to make sure that
visitors can browse it easily. As a photographer, I use a related posts plugin
that shows other photographs that viewers might be interested in. That
technique, used similarly on many major publications like Mashable and Engadget,
is a great user experience tip to keep people browsing your website.
Off-site dusting
The following are things that you can do off your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Be social: Author Rank isn't 100% confirmed yet, but it's an inevitable ranking
system that will soon be on Google, and a form of it will wind up on Bing
eventually. To sum up Author Rank; it's where Google uses a combination of their
core SEO algorithm and PageRank and combine it with the social activity around
your website. For example, your commenting on and off-site, and +1s of your
content and the content that you +1.
Guest post: Writing a guest post on websites like SEOmoz do many things for
your presence. The two most common benefits are the relationships you build in
the process and the ability to create a backlink to your website which helps
with SEO.
Final Note
Sometimes dusting your website requires a fresh look. Do some searching on
Google for business WordPress themes and find one that suits your needs and
provides that fresh look that you've always wanted. Maybe it's a Genesis theme
or something else. Either way, change can be good at times.
So grab your dust pan, an extra cup of coffee, sit down for a few hours and
start cleaning up for spring time, both on and off-site. It's spring, so start
fresh.
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/QULC-8J4Sqk/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning
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
Optimization and SEO Cleaning'
Posted by scottwyden
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Spring is here, so why not put some spring cleaning actions through on your
website?
With that said, I'm going to get straight to the action items. Below is a list
of many things you can look for on your site to adjust, add or remove.
On-site dusting
The following are things that you can do on your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Authorship: Extremely important SEO action item. Google authorship's role in
your website's rankings is more important than ever. In addition to being a SEO
tactic, it also acts as a conversion tactic. You see, it is estimated that SERPs
with authorship enabled receive around 120% more clicks.
+1 button: Going along with the Google Plus topic, make sure that you have a +1
button somewhere on your pages and/or posts. Why? Well, Google's Author Rank is
using +1 data as part of ranking. So in addition to the marketing benefits of
engagement, a simple +1 can help your website rank higher for keywords.
Pinterest button: Hopefully you are on Pinterest and pinning, liking and
commenting with your customers. If not, hop on it. Then also add the Pin button
to your website's pages and/or posts. People love to pin things, so make it
easier for them.
Metadata: If you're using a WordPress theme similar to ProBlogger and
Copyblogger (they're running Genesis), then there are SEO meta settings for
every page and post on your website. I personally don't recommend using a
theme's SEO settings. In fact, I much prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast - mentioned
in this article on WordPress plugins. My reasoning for this is because in
addition to providing meta functionality, it incorporates Open Graph for social
media and a page analysis feature that is amazing.
Open Graph: I might as well move on to Open Graph since I mentioned above. Open
Graph is what lets specific titles, descriptions and images show up on websites
like Facebook and Google Plus. By using the same WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin,
you can specify your image and descriptions for each.
Site speed: How fast does your website load? Could it be faster? Use the Google
Speed Test tool to find what is slowing it down. Sometimes, simple changes can
improve your load speed. Sometimes it requires development work. I like to tell
people who if you're over a score of 70 then you're doing well, but to aim for
mid 90s. Page speed helps for SEO and for user experience, so don't overlook it
anymore. Sometimes slow site speeds can be due to shared hosting that so many
websites are using.
Broken links: Log into your Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and look at any 404
errors that show up. Fix them by creating new pages in their place or redirect
them to another page using 301 redirects. (WordPress users can use this plugin)
Index status: Are you preventing important pages from being indexed by search
engines? To find out, go to Google and do a search that looks like the
following, "site:seomoz.org". A search like that will bring up every page that
Google has indexed on the domain listed. Dr. Pete shared a fantastic article on
the SEOmoz blog that covers all the important search queries that you can
utilize to see what content is indexed. The article also has queries that can
help for guest post research.[bonus!] It's also worth mentioning that you can
also log in to your Google Webmaster Tools panel to view all the URLs indexed by
Google. Take advantage of that tool!
User experience: To keep people on your website you need to make sure that
visitors can browse it easily. As a photographer, I use a related posts plugin
that shows other photographs that viewers might be interested in. That
technique, used similarly on many major publications like Mashable and Engadget,
is a great user experience tip to keep people browsing your website.
Off-site dusting
The following are things that you can do off your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Be social: Author Rank isn't 100% confirmed yet, but it's an inevitable ranking
system that will soon be on Google, and a form of it will wind up on Bing
eventually. To sum up Author Rank; it's where Google uses a combination of their
core SEO algorithm and PageRank and combine it with the social activity around
your website. For example, your commenting on and off-site, and +1s of your
content and the content that you +1.
Guest post: Writing a guest post on websites like SEOmoz do many things for
your presence. The two most common benefits are the relationships you build in
the process and the ability to create a backlink to your website which helps
with SEO.
Final Note
Sometimes dusting your website requires a fresh look. Do some searching on
Google for business WordPress themes and find one that suits your needs and
provides that fresh look that you've always wanted. Maybe it's a Genesis theme
or something else. Either way, change can be good at times.
So grab your dust pan, an extra cup of coffee, sit down for a few hours and
start cleaning up for spring time, both on and off-site. It's spring, so start
fresh.
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/QULC-8J4Sqk/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning
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, 'Machine Learning and Link Spam: My
Brush With Insanity'
Posted by wrttnwrd
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Know someone who thinks theyre smart? Tell them to build a machine learning
tool. If they majored in, say, History in college, within 30 minutes theyll be
curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth while humming the opening bars of
Oklahoma.
Sometimes, though, the alternative is rooting through 250,000 web pages by
hand, checking them for compliance with Googles TOS. Doing that will skip you
right past the rocking-and-humming stage, and launch you right into
writing-with-crayons-between-your-toes phase.
Those were my two choices six months ago. Several companies came to Portent
asking for help with Penguin/manual penalties. They all, for one reason or
another, had dirty link profiles.
Link analysis, the hard way. Back when I was a kid...
I did the first link profile review by hand, like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Remove obviously bad links by analyzing URLs. Face it: if a linking page is on
a domain like FreeLinksDirectory.com or ArticleSuccess.com, its gotta go.
Analyze the domain and page trustrank and trustflow. Throw out anything with a
zero, unless its on a list of whitelisted domains.
Grab thumbnails of each remaining linking page, using Python, Selenium, and
Phantomjs. You dont have to do this step, but it helps if youre going to get
help from other folks.
Get some poor bugger a faithful Portent team member to review the thumbnails,
quickly checking off whether theyre forums, blatant link spam, or something
else.
After all of that prep work, my final review still took 10+ hours of
eye-rotting agony.
There had to be a better way. I knew just enough about machine learning to
realize it had possibilities, so I dove in. After all, how hard can it be?
Machine learning: the basic concept
The concept of machine learning isnt that hard to grasp:
Take a large dataset you need to classify. It could be book titles, peoples
names, Facebook posts, or, for me, linking web pages.
Define the categories. In this case, Im looking for spam and good.
Get a collection of those items and classify them by hand. Or, if youre really
lucky, you find a collection that someone else classified for you. The Natural
Language Toolkit, for example, has a movie reviews corpus you can use for
sentiment analysis. This is your training set.
Pick the right machine learning tool (hah).
Configure it correctly (hahahahahahaha heee heeeeee sniff haa haaa sorry, Im
ok ha ha haaaaaaauuuugh).
Feed in your training set, with the features the item attributes used for
classification pre-selected. The tool will find patterns, if it can (giggle).
Use the tool to compare each item in your dataset to the training set.
The tool returns a classification of each item, plus its confidence in the
classification and, if its really cool, the features that were most critical in
that classification.
If you ignore the hysterical laughter, the process seems pretty simple. Alas,
the laughter is a dead giveaway: these seven steps are easy the same way Fly to
moon, land on moon, fly home is three easy steps.
Note: At this point, you could go ahead and use a pre-built toolset like BigML,
Datameer, or Googles Prediction API. Or, you could decide to build it all by
hand. Which is what I did. You know, because I have so much spare time. If youre
unsure, keep reading. If this story doesnt make you run, screaming, to the
pre-built tools, start coding. You have my blessings.
The ingredients: Python, NLTK, scikit-learn
I sketched out the process for IIS (Is It Spam, not Internet Information
Server) like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Use a little Python script to scrape the content of those pages.
Get the SEOmoz and MajesticSEO metrics for each linking page.
Build any additional features I wanted to use. I needed to calculate the
reading grade level and links per word, for example. I also needed to pull out
all meaningful words, and a count of those words.
Finally, compare each result to my training set.
To do all of this, I needed a programming language, some kind of natural
language processing (to figure out meaningful words, clean up HTML, etc.) and a
machine learning algorithm that I could connect to the programming language.
Im already a bit of a Python hacker (not a programmer my code makes
programmers cry), so Python was the obvious choice of programming language.
Id dabbled a little with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Its built for
Python, and would easily filter out stop words, clean up HTML, and do all the
other stuff I needed.
For my machine learning toolset, I picked a Python library called scikit-learn,
mostly because there were tutorials out there that I could actually read.
I smushed it all together using some really-not-pretty Python code, and
connected it to a MongoDB database for storage.
A word about the training set
The training set makes or breaks the model. A good training set means your
bouncing baby machine learning program has a good teacher. A bad training set
means its got Edna Krabappel.
And accuracy alone isnt enough. A training set also has to cover the full range
of possible classification scenarios. One good and one spam page arent enough.
You need hundreds or thousands to provide a nice range of possibilities.
Otherwise, the machine learning program stagger around, unable to classify items
outside the narrow training set.
Luckily, our initial hand-review reinclusion method gave us a set of
carefully-selected spam and good pages. That was our initial training set. Later
on, we dug deeper and grew the training set by running Is It Spam and
hand-verifying good and bad page results.
That worked great on Is It Spam 2.0. It didnt work so well on 1.0.
First attempt: fail
For my first version of the tool, I used a Bayesian Filter as my machine
learning tool. I figured, hey, it works for e-mail spam, why not SEO spam?
Apparently, I was already delirious at that point. Bayesian filtering works for
e-mail spam about as well as fishing with a baseball bat. It does occasionally
catch spam. It also misses a lot of it, dumps legitimate e-mail into spam
folders, and generally amuses serious spammers the world over.
But, in my madness, I forgot all about these little problems. Is It Spam 1.0
seemed pretty great at first. Initial tests showed 75% accuracy. That may not
sound great, but with accurate confidence data, it could really streamline link
profile reviews. I was the proud papa of a baby machine learning tool.
But Bayesian filters can be poisoned. If you feed the filter a training set
where 90% of the spam pages talk about weddings, its possible the tool will
begin seeing all wedding-related content as spam. Thats exactly what happened in
my case: I fed in 10,000 or so pages of spammy wedding links (we do a lot of
work in the wedding industry). On the next test run, Is It Spam decided that
anything matrimonial was spam. Accuracy fell to 50%.
Since we tend to use the tool to evaluate sites in specific verticals, this
would never work. Every test would likely poison the filter. We could build the
training set to millions of pages, but my pointy little head couldnt contemplate
the infrastructure required to handle that.
The real problem with a pure Bayesian approach is that theres really only one
feature: The content of the page. It ignores things like links, page trust and
authority.
Oops. Back to the drawing board. I sent my little AI in for counseling, and a
new brain.
Note: I wouldnt have figured this out without help from SEOmozs Dr. Pete and
Matt Peters. A hat tip doesnt seem like enough, but for now, itll have to do.
Second attempt: a qualified success
My second test used logistic regression. This machine learning model uses
numeric data, not text. So, I could feed it more features. After the first
exercise, this actually wasnt too horrific. A few hours of work got me a tool
that evaluates:
Page TrustFlow and CitationFlow (from MajesticSEO Im adding SEOmoz metrics
now)
Links per word
Page Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level
Page Flesch Kincaid reading ease
Words per page
Syllables per page
Characters per page
A few other seemingly-random bits, like images per page, misspellings, and
grammar errors
This time, the tool worked a lot better. With vertical-specific training sets,
it ran with 85%+ accuracy.
In case you're wondering, this is what victory looks like:
When I tried to use the tool for more general tests, though, my coded kid
tripped over its big, adolescent feet. Some of the funnier results:
It saw itself as spam.
It thought Rands blog was a swirling black hole of spammy despair.
False positives remain a big problem if we try to build a training set outside
a single vertical.
Disappointing. But the tool chugs along happily within verticals, so we
continue using it for that. We build a custom training set for each client, then
run the training set against the remaining links. The result is a relatively
clear report:
Results and next steps
With little IIS learning to walk, weve cut the brute-force portion of large
link profile evaluations from 30 hours to 3 hours. Not. Too. Shabby.
I tried to launch a public version of Is It Spam, but folks started using it to
do real link profile evaluations, without checking their results. That scared
the crap out of me, so I took the tool down until we cure the false positives
problem.
I think we can address the false positives issue by adding a few features to
the classification set:
Bayesian filtering: Instead of depending on a Bayesian classification as 100%
of the formula well use the Bayesian score as one more feature.
Grammar scoring: Anyone know a decent grammar testing algorithm in Python? If
so, let me know. Id love to add grammar quality as a feature.
Anchor text matters a lot. The next generation of the tool needs to score the
relevant link based on the anchor text. Is it a name (like in a byline)? Or is
it a phrase (like in a keyword-stuffed link)?
Link position may matter, too. This is another great feature that could help
with spam detection. It might lead to more false positives, though. If Is It
Spam sees a large number of spammy links in press release body copy, it may
start rating other links located in body copy as spam, too. Well test to see if
the other features are enough to help with this.
If I'm lucky, one or more of these changes may yield a tool that can evaluate
pages across different verticals. If I'm lucky.
Insights
This is by far the most challenging development project I've ever tried. I
probably wore another 10 years' enamel off my teeth in just six weeks. But it's
been productive:
When you start digging into automated page analysis and machine learning, you
learn a lot about how computers evaluate language. That's awfully relevant if
you're a 21st Century marketer.
I uncovered an interesting pattern in Google's Penguin implementation. This is
based on my fumbling about with machine learning, so take it with a grain of
salt, but have a look here.
We learned that there is no such thing as a spammy page. There are only spammy
links. One link from a particular page may be totally fine: For example, a brand
link from a press release page. Another link from that same page may be spam:
For example, a keyword-stuffed link from the same press release.
We've reduced time required for an initial link profile evaluation by a factor
of ten.
It's also been a great humility-building exercise.
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/~3/2S1MEON6pH8/machine-learning-and-link-spam-my-brush-with-insanity
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
Brush With Insanity'
Posted by wrttnwrd
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Know someone who thinks theyre smart? Tell them to build a machine learning
tool. If they majored in, say, History in college, within 30 minutes theyll be
curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth while humming the opening bars of
Oklahoma.
Sometimes, though, the alternative is rooting through 250,000 web pages by
hand, checking them for compliance with Googles TOS. Doing that will skip you
right past the rocking-and-humming stage, and launch you right into
writing-with-crayons-between-your-toes phase.
Those were my two choices six months ago. Several companies came to Portent
asking for help with Penguin/manual penalties. They all, for one reason or
another, had dirty link profiles.
Link analysis, the hard way. Back when I was a kid...
I did the first link profile review by hand, like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Remove obviously bad links by analyzing URLs. Face it: if a linking page is on
a domain like FreeLinksDirectory.com or ArticleSuccess.com, its gotta go.
Analyze the domain and page trustrank and trustflow. Throw out anything with a
zero, unless its on a list of whitelisted domains.
Grab thumbnails of each remaining linking page, using Python, Selenium, and
Phantomjs. You dont have to do this step, but it helps if youre going to get
help from other folks.
Get some poor bugger a faithful Portent team member to review the thumbnails,
quickly checking off whether theyre forums, blatant link spam, or something
else.
After all of that prep work, my final review still took 10+ hours of
eye-rotting agony.
There had to be a better way. I knew just enough about machine learning to
realize it had possibilities, so I dove in. After all, how hard can it be?
Machine learning: the basic concept
The concept of machine learning isnt that hard to grasp:
Take a large dataset you need to classify. It could be book titles, peoples
names, Facebook posts, or, for me, linking web pages.
Define the categories. In this case, Im looking for spam and good.
Get a collection of those items and classify them by hand. Or, if youre really
lucky, you find a collection that someone else classified for you. The Natural
Language Toolkit, for example, has a movie reviews corpus you can use for
sentiment analysis. This is your training set.
Pick the right machine learning tool (hah).
Configure it correctly (hahahahahahaha heee heeeeee sniff haa haaa sorry, Im
ok ha ha haaaaaaauuuugh).
Feed in your training set, with the features the item attributes used for
classification pre-selected. The tool will find patterns, if it can (giggle).
Use the tool to compare each item in your dataset to the training set.
The tool returns a classification of each item, plus its confidence in the
classification and, if its really cool, the features that were most critical in
that classification.
If you ignore the hysterical laughter, the process seems pretty simple. Alas,
the laughter is a dead giveaway: these seven steps are easy the same way Fly to
moon, land on moon, fly home is three easy steps.
Note: At this point, you could go ahead and use a pre-built toolset like BigML,
Datameer, or Googles Prediction API. Or, you could decide to build it all by
hand. Which is what I did. You know, because I have so much spare time. If youre
unsure, keep reading. If this story doesnt make you run, screaming, to the
pre-built tools, start coding. You have my blessings.
The ingredients: Python, NLTK, scikit-learn
I sketched out the process for IIS (Is It Spam, not Internet Information
Server) like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Use a little Python script to scrape the content of those pages.
Get the SEOmoz and MajesticSEO metrics for each linking page.
Build any additional features I wanted to use. I needed to calculate the
reading grade level and links per word, for example. I also needed to pull out
all meaningful words, and a count of those words.
Finally, compare each result to my training set.
To do all of this, I needed a programming language, some kind of natural
language processing (to figure out meaningful words, clean up HTML, etc.) and a
machine learning algorithm that I could connect to the programming language.
Im already a bit of a Python hacker (not a programmer my code makes
programmers cry), so Python was the obvious choice of programming language.
Id dabbled a little with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Its built for
Python, and would easily filter out stop words, clean up HTML, and do all the
other stuff I needed.
For my machine learning toolset, I picked a Python library called scikit-learn,
mostly because there were tutorials out there that I could actually read.
I smushed it all together using some really-not-pretty Python code, and
connected it to a MongoDB database for storage.
A word about the training set
The training set makes or breaks the model. A good training set means your
bouncing baby machine learning program has a good teacher. A bad training set
means its got Edna Krabappel.
And accuracy alone isnt enough. A training set also has to cover the full range
of possible classification scenarios. One good and one spam page arent enough.
You need hundreds or thousands to provide a nice range of possibilities.
Otherwise, the machine learning program stagger around, unable to classify items
outside the narrow training set.
Luckily, our initial hand-review reinclusion method gave us a set of
carefully-selected spam and good pages. That was our initial training set. Later
on, we dug deeper and grew the training set by running Is It Spam and
hand-verifying good and bad page results.
That worked great on Is It Spam 2.0. It didnt work so well on 1.0.
First attempt: fail
For my first version of the tool, I used a Bayesian Filter as my machine
learning tool. I figured, hey, it works for e-mail spam, why not SEO spam?
Apparently, I was already delirious at that point. Bayesian filtering works for
e-mail spam about as well as fishing with a baseball bat. It does occasionally
catch spam. It also misses a lot of it, dumps legitimate e-mail into spam
folders, and generally amuses serious spammers the world over.
But, in my madness, I forgot all about these little problems. Is It Spam 1.0
seemed pretty great at first. Initial tests showed 75% accuracy. That may not
sound great, but with accurate confidence data, it could really streamline link
profile reviews. I was the proud papa of a baby machine learning tool.
But Bayesian filters can be poisoned. If you feed the filter a training set
where 90% of the spam pages talk about weddings, its possible the tool will
begin seeing all wedding-related content as spam. Thats exactly what happened in
my case: I fed in 10,000 or so pages of spammy wedding links (we do a lot of
work in the wedding industry). On the next test run, Is It Spam decided that
anything matrimonial was spam. Accuracy fell to 50%.
Since we tend to use the tool to evaluate sites in specific verticals, this
would never work. Every test would likely poison the filter. We could build the
training set to millions of pages, but my pointy little head couldnt contemplate
the infrastructure required to handle that.
The real problem with a pure Bayesian approach is that theres really only one
feature: The content of the page. It ignores things like links, page trust and
authority.
Oops. Back to the drawing board. I sent my little AI in for counseling, and a
new brain.
Note: I wouldnt have figured this out without help from SEOmozs Dr. Pete and
Matt Peters. A hat tip doesnt seem like enough, but for now, itll have to do.
Second attempt: a qualified success
My second test used logistic regression. This machine learning model uses
numeric data, not text. So, I could feed it more features. After the first
exercise, this actually wasnt too horrific. A few hours of work got me a tool
that evaluates:
Page TrustFlow and CitationFlow (from MajesticSEO Im adding SEOmoz metrics
now)
Links per word
Page Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level
Page Flesch Kincaid reading ease
Words per page
Syllables per page
Characters per page
A few other seemingly-random bits, like images per page, misspellings, and
grammar errors
This time, the tool worked a lot better. With vertical-specific training sets,
it ran with 85%+ accuracy.
In case you're wondering, this is what victory looks like:
When I tried to use the tool for more general tests, though, my coded kid
tripped over its big, adolescent feet. Some of the funnier results:
It saw itself as spam.
It thought Rands blog was a swirling black hole of spammy despair.
False positives remain a big problem if we try to build a training set outside
a single vertical.
Disappointing. But the tool chugs along happily within verticals, so we
continue using it for that. We build a custom training set for each client, then
run the training set against the remaining links. The result is a relatively
clear report:
Results and next steps
With little IIS learning to walk, weve cut the brute-force portion of large
link profile evaluations from 30 hours to 3 hours. Not. Too. Shabby.
I tried to launch a public version of Is It Spam, but folks started using it to
do real link profile evaluations, without checking their results. That scared
the crap out of me, so I took the tool down until we cure the false positives
problem.
I think we can address the false positives issue by adding a few features to
the classification set:
Bayesian filtering: Instead of depending on a Bayesian classification as 100%
of the formula well use the Bayesian score as one more feature.
Grammar scoring: Anyone know a decent grammar testing algorithm in Python? If
so, let me know. Id love to add grammar quality as a feature.
Anchor text matters a lot. The next generation of the tool needs to score the
relevant link based on the anchor text. Is it a name (like in a byline)? Or is
it a phrase (like in a keyword-stuffed link)?
Link position may matter, too. This is another great feature that could help
with spam detection. It might lead to more false positives, though. If Is It
Spam sees a large number of spammy links in press release body copy, it may
start rating other links located in body copy as spam, too. Well test to see if
the other features are enough to help with this.
If I'm lucky, one or more of these changes may yield a tool that can evaluate
pages across different verticals. If I'm lucky.
Insights
This is by far the most challenging development project I've ever tried. I
probably wore another 10 years' enamel off my teeth in just six weeks. But it's
been productive:
When you start digging into automated page analysis and machine learning, you
learn a lot about how computers evaluate language. That's awfully relevant if
you're a 21st Century marketer.
I uncovered an interesting pattern in Google's Penguin implementation. This is
based on my fumbling about with machine learning, so take it with a grain of
salt, but have a look here.
We learned that there is no such thing as a spammy page. There are only spammy
links. One link from a particular page may be totally fine: For example, a brand
link from a press release page. Another link from that same page may be spam:
For example, a keyword-stuffed link from the same press release.
We've reduced time required for an initial link profile evaluation by a factor
of ten.
It's also been a great humility-building exercise.
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/~3/2S1MEON6pH8/machine-learning-and-link-spam-my-brush-with-insanity
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 23 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Transmedia Storytelling: Building
Worlds For and With Fans'
Posted by gfiorelli1
John loves Batman.
He's collected comics since he was nine years old, is proud of owning the first
edition of Gotham by Gaslight,andstill remembers the afternoons spent watching
the TV series with Adam West at home when he was a kid.
Obviously, he has seen all the movies. The Dark Knight was a masterpiece; the I
believe in Harvey Dent web campaign and the Joker counter site were pure genius,
as were all the other sites created for that movie.
The passion John has for Batman is such that he could not resist, and ended up
buying some action figures, Batman Arkham City, and the Batman Lego video games,
too.But John is especially proud of the two short stories he wrote and published
in Fan Fiction.
Seriously, John loves the universe of the Batman stories.
This universe is the consequence of the most complex and exciting expression of
our culture nowadays: Transmedia Storytelling.
What is it Transmedia Storytelling?
Henry Jenkins presented the idea of Transmedia Storytelling for the first time
in 2003 in the MIT Technology Review magazine.The idea can be defined as a story
that unfolds across multiple media outlets and platforms, and in which a portion
of the end users take an active role in the process of expansion.
Transmedia Storytelling tends to be mistaken for Cross Media, which can be
defined asone story - rather than different ones pertaining to the same
narrative universe - narrated through different media channels. Although,
nowadays the two terms are used almost as if they were synonyms.
In the same semantic galaxy, we can find concepts like:
Multiple platforms (or multi-device)
Intertextual commodity
Transmedial narrative
Transmedial worlds
The characteristics of Transmedia Storytelling
Spreadability vs. drillability
Spreadability refers to the expansion of a narrative through viral practices in
social networks and the Web.Drillability is the task of penetration into the
audience the producer develops to find the core of the fan base of his work;
those ones who will disseminate and expand the transmedia productions.
Continuity vs. multiplicity
Transmedia worlds must have a continuity across the different languages and
platforms that are used. For example, we expect Indiana Jones to behave in the
same way as in a movie as in a video game.This continuity is complemented by
multiplicity, which is the creation of seemingly incoherent narrative
experiences related to the original narrative world. The Gotham by Gaslight
comic cited before is a good example of multiplicity.
Immersion vs. extractability
Transmedia stories almost always offer to their consumer the opportunity to
immerse themselves in their worlds (an example are the games inspired by a
series or film or novel).On the other hand, the gadgets allow us to extract
elements of the story and bring them to our everyday life. A special type of
extractability is the reverse product-placement (for instance, the Duff beer of
The Simpsons).
World building
As any other form of storytelling, Transmedia Storytelling presents a narrative
world, which requires the suspension of disbelief by the user. This suspension
is more effective the more detailed the narrative world is. Details like
Sherlock Holmes playing a Stradivarius or snorting a line of cocaine are
thosegiving verisimilitude to the narrative world. Inception, somehow, described
well how the Transmedia professionals see themselves as World Building
Architects.
Seriality
Transmedia storytelling is dispersive, and by its nature tends to be serial.
The seriality is not linear, but becomes an hypertextual network.
Subjectivity
In Transmedia, the presence of multiple subjectivities is common. Therefore,
Transmedia tends to enhance the polyphony caused by the large number of
characters and stories. A classic example was Lost.
Performance
The actions of the consumers are essential as the fans are evangelists.Some of
them - like our John - give the next step and become prosumers (producer +
consumer), and do not hesitate in creating new texts and add them to further
expand the boundaries of the original narrative world. Just think what would be
Star Trek without the Trekkers.
Transmedia, which was at first a pop culture new form of storytelling
spontaneously originated in the entertainment industry, is now spread and common
in fields like journalisms and, for some years now. It's a form of branding.
This sophisticated form of marketing, which we'll call "Inbound Square," has a
rather complex creation process, such that I decided to present it in a more
"digestible" Slideshare.
Transmedia Storytelling from Gianluca Fiorelli
The Transmedia prototype: Star Wars
The Transmedia expansion of Star Wars began immediately after its premiere on
May 25, 1977. In July of the same year, Marvel published the firstStar Wars
comic, and even though the first six numbers reflected what was seen in the
movies, new situations started being presented from the seventh number onwards.
In 1978, the first novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye-a spin-off based on an
early version of the script -was published.But it wasn't until 1987, with the
commercialization of the Star Wars roleplaying game, that George Lucas created
what is known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It covers about 4,000 thousand
years of history of that "galaxy far far away" and is not public (the
Encyclopedia section of the official Star Wars site is not the same).From that
moment, the flood of products began: video games (from X-Wing to the Old
Republic MMORPG), the Director's Cut of the first trilogy, the new trilogy,
cartoons series, new comics, new novels, and even radio versions.
Star Wars is also paradigmatic of the relationship between the producer (George
Lucas) and the fans, who (from one side) have taken possession of the Star Wars
universe from the beginning,while (from the other side) George Lucas tried for a
long time to keep under strict control the expansion of the universe of the Star
Wars narrative with actions such as The Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards(here
you can see some of those fans creations).
It is humanly impossible to monitor and classify all the variants that fans
have created within the narrative universe of Star Wars, such as the stories
published on Fanfiction.com,sites like Death Star PR, Twitter bots likeYoda,
photos using the action figures, and all kinds of videos published on YouTube.
The fans have created contentranging from the staid tribute to parody itself,
like this hilarious Lego video based on the Eddie Izzard gag of the Death Star
canteen:
Transmedia Storytelling gives gigantic opportunities, which is why it can help
explain the acquisition of Lucas Films by Disney and that J.J. Abrams, creator
of now classic Transmedia example as Lost and Fringe (and director of the
revamped Star Trek movies series) was chosen as the director of the next
trilogy.
Transmedia and Hollywood
The relationship between the producer and the fans is critical to the success
of any Transmedia Storytelling strategy, and Hollywood has understood its
implications the best so far.A good, recent example is The Hunger Games movie
trilogy.
I strongly suggest you to recover the post that Bryden McGrath wrote for
Portent: 44 Ways 'The Hunger Games' Social Media Campaign Increased the Movie's
Odds of Success. What Bryden defines as a "social media campaign" really is the
"spreadability" social side of the transmedia campaign thatIgnitioncreated for
Lions Gate, the film's producer:
The Hunger Games Case Study from Ignition on Vimeo.
This campaign has just been relaunched last week, with the presentation of the
first trailer of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
This time, a new site was created in partnership with Microsoft Internet
Explorer, The Hunger Games Explorer, which works as a hub for all the sites and
social media profiles used in this transmedia experience (check the Capitol.pn
official site..., or its Google+ page).
Another great - and maybe more complete - example of Transmedia Storytelling is
that Ridley Scott and (again) Ignition created for Prometheus last year. This
video below explains (better than I can) why it was created, how it was
structured, what channels were used, and the results it obtained:
Prometheus Transmedia Campaign from Ignition on Vimeo.
I'm sure that many of you remember having seen some of the things Campfire
created for the transmedia campaign preview of the first season of Games of
Thrones on HBO.
Game of Thrones Case Study from Campfire on Vimeo.
Here's the big question: can only big major movies or tv series do transmedia?
Absolutely not.
An example is the Veronica Mars Movie Project, which two weeks agoclosed its
crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, all based on fans and social media, after
managing to accumulate $5,702,153.
Transmedia journalism
Journalism - real journalism - is storytelling. There is no discussion about
that, as it was well explained in Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers
Guide published by the Nieman Foundation.
Transmedia storytelling is the next logical step that journalism has already
done (not always perfectly).Remember that:
In transmedia, a story is narrated among different media channels and
platforms.
Prosumers actively participate in the construction of the narrative world.
Here's a more recent example about a world event that shook many people in many
countries. Do you remember how the world discovered that Osama Bin Laden was
dead? Here's how it went down:
"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) 01 maggio 2011
Not long after, when the entire Internet was discussing the news, Keith Urbhan
launched this tweet:
"So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot
damn."
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) 02 maggio 2011
Check out the postGilad Lotan wrote on Social Flow to understand the social
earthquake that tweet caused.
President Obama announced the news of the Osama Bin Laden death an hour later,
and after his announcement, it became known that many people in many countries
already knew through social media.
From that moment, the journalistic storytelling (as well as continuing in
social networks) expanded in the news portals, televisions, radios, and, of
course, the printed paper.
This event relied on transmedia, was "organic," and was unplanned (obviously),
but nontheless, it was transmedia.
Transmedia journalism, which is well explained by Kevin Moloney in is thesis
Porting Transmedia Storytelling to Journalism (2011), substantially means that
the news must generate a space, which allows the active participation of the
readers/viewers. It is not surprising, nowadays, seeing how much this
interaction between the journalists and the readers is central in the news
industry.
Transmedia journalism can take many different forms, but all must see the
reader - meant as a free citizen - as a contributor in the creation and
storytelling of news:
Great examples of Transmedia journalism can be find in sites like 18 day in
Egyptor Storify.
Transmedia branding
Do you remember the concept of Liquid Content promoted by Coca Cola? Well, that
is nothing but the Coca Cola definition of Transmedia Storytelling.
Brands have found a naturally ally for their marketing efforts in transmedia
(and crossmedia) for years. Think to the Art of Heist ARG created for the launch
of Audi 3 in the USA, to the first Old Spice campaign or, more recently, to
theDaybreak transmedia campaign created for AT&T, which shows five online
movies, two websites (you can discover the second almost in the footer of the
fist), and an app.
Another example is Dove's extremely recentReal Beauty Sketches campaign created
by Ogilvy Brasil, which cannot be defined really as transmedia, but that
showcases the transmedia spirit: narrating a story, which represents the brand's
world ("Real Beauty") to its fans (women just as they are) by using channels
likes online video, a microsite, and social networks (Facebook, especially). The
purpose was to create a public, yet intimate dialogue with the fans, and the
campaign surely obtained that objective. It did so well that it already has
originated a parody:
You can read here more about the story behind the Dove's campaign.
I can imagine the doubts you may have in your mind: a narrative world is easier
when you have a movie, a series, a book, or news, but what about my website?
What about my bolts and rolled aluminum factory?
I understand your hesitations, but the answer is that you are probably
searching in the wrong place. All brands have a story, and the basis of their
stories are in their mission pages, that you usually forget exists.
Let's take two example: REI and our own SEOmoz.
REI has created all its business, and marketing, around few very clear values:
(Image taken from How to Build SEO into Content Strategy, by Jonathon Colman)
Those values, the REI's "Why," define the narrative world of REI, which is
shared by more than five million members of the Company (REI is a cooperative).
We have a narrative world through of outdoor adventure, environmentalism, and
stewardship, along with a gigantic base of brand evangelists who not only share
what REI does (and sells), but create their own narratives inside the REI's
world. That is the base from where Transmedia Storytelling can be built, and REI
seems to be moving towards it with ideas like the REI 1440 Project, the REI
Members Stories YouTube videos. They also have a presence in Facebook, Twitter,
Pinterest, Instagram, and all their IRL events (i.e.: Learn at REI and Travel
with REI).
What about SEOmoz? Moz could do transmedia, and actually (without maybe knowing
it) it does it, because - as I told before - transmedia is the "Inbound Square."
Moz has built its story around the 6 TAGFEE Tenets;has built a community of
entusiastic people (yes, you!)around its tools and Internet marketing
philosophy; and a narrative world, which evolves thanks to the fans, both
internally (YouMoz, QA) and externally (check the Mozscape API's Gallery).
The world of fans that SEOmoz nurtures with gamification (one of the experience
principle of transmedia) and live events like MozCon, meet-ups, and MozCation is
the most transmedia campaign SEOmoz has created so far. And, finally and
importantly, Moz has Roger.
Conclusion
People have always needed stories to communicate and feel connected, and good
stories always become part of our history and our culture.
The most recognized brands have one thing in common: they all tell a story.
But something is changing. Never before have people had so many devices and
screens from which to follow a story, and now the consumers seek new experiences
and a deeper engagement. The stories are formed and followed differently than
before.
In order to be relevant for a hyper-connected generation and be present in its
life, we need:
Liquid and customizablecontent to distribute by any means available.
Different levels of depth in the story made ââfor different levels
of depth of user involvement.
A consistent message, where each piece feeds the story and the conversation
with the audience continuously.
What we need is Transmedia Storytelling, aprocess where the elements of a story
are dispensed each other through multiple distribution channels with the purpose
of creating a unified entertainment experience, where each medium really makes
its own contribution to the development of the story.
Transmedia Storytelling is a very powerful and immersive persuasion tool, a
fans-generating machine, because it creates a strong emotional connection with
the audience.It is profitable because it redefines and increases ROI, increases
impact over media, and can cause exceptional sources of income.
Transmedia Storytelling, finally, is the best and most effective way to connect
(especially) with the new generations of consumers and build a sustainable
audience around a brand, as Red Bull demonstrated.
So... are you ready to tell your story?
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/jFxY_iucbpI/transmedia-storytelling-building-worlds-for-and-with-fans
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
Worlds For and With Fans'
Posted by gfiorelli1
John loves Batman.
He's collected comics since he was nine years old, is proud of owning the first
edition of Gotham by Gaslight,andstill remembers the afternoons spent watching
the TV series with Adam West at home when he was a kid.
Obviously, he has seen all the movies. The Dark Knight was a masterpiece; the I
believe in Harvey Dent web campaign and the Joker counter site were pure genius,
as were all the other sites created for that movie.
The passion John has for Batman is such that he could not resist, and ended up
buying some action figures, Batman Arkham City, and the Batman Lego video games,
too.But John is especially proud of the two short stories he wrote and published
in Fan Fiction.
Seriously, John loves the universe of the Batman stories.
This universe is the consequence of the most complex and exciting expression of
our culture nowadays: Transmedia Storytelling.
What is it Transmedia Storytelling?
Henry Jenkins presented the idea of Transmedia Storytelling for the first time
in 2003 in the MIT Technology Review magazine.The idea can be defined as a story
that unfolds across multiple media outlets and platforms, and in which a portion
of the end users take an active role in the process of expansion.
Transmedia Storytelling tends to be mistaken for Cross Media, which can be
defined asone story - rather than different ones pertaining to the same
narrative universe - narrated through different media channels. Although,
nowadays the two terms are used almost as if they were synonyms.
In the same semantic galaxy, we can find concepts like:
Multiple platforms (or multi-device)
Intertextual commodity
Transmedial narrative
Transmedial worlds
The characteristics of Transmedia Storytelling
Spreadability vs. drillability
Spreadability refers to the expansion of a narrative through viral practices in
social networks and the Web.Drillability is the task of penetration into the
audience the producer develops to find the core of the fan base of his work;
those ones who will disseminate and expand the transmedia productions.
Continuity vs. multiplicity
Transmedia worlds must have a continuity across the different languages and
platforms that are used. For example, we expect Indiana Jones to behave in the
same way as in a movie as in a video game.This continuity is complemented by
multiplicity, which is the creation of seemingly incoherent narrative
experiences related to the original narrative world. The Gotham by Gaslight
comic cited before is a good example of multiplicity.
Immersion vs. extractability
Transmedia stories almost always offer to their consumer the opportunity to
immerse themselves in their worlds (an example are the games inspired by a
series or film or novel).On the other hand, the gadgets allow us to extract
elements of the story and bring them to our everyday life. A special type of
extractability is the reverse product-placement (for instance, the Duff beer of
The Simpsons).
World building
As any other form of storytelling, Transmedia Storytelling presents a narrative
world, which requires the suspension of disbelief by the user. This suspension
is more effective the more detailed the narrative world is. Details like
Sherlock Holmes playing a Stradivarius or snorting a line of cocaine are
thosegiving verisimilitude to the narrative world. Inception, somehow, described
well how the Transmedia professionals see themselves as World Building
Architects.
Seriality
Transmedia storytelling is dispersive, and by its nature tends to be serial.
The seriality is not linear, but becomes an hypertextual network.
Subjectivity
In Transmedia, the presence of multiple subjectivities is common. Therefore,
Transmedia tends to enhance the polyphony caused by the large number of
characters and stories. A classic example was Lost.
Performance
The actions of the consumers are essential as the fans are evangelists.Some of
them - like our John - give the next step and become prosumers (producer +
consumer), and do not hesitate in creating new texts and add them to further
expand the boundaries of the original narrative world. Just think what would be
Star Trek without the Trekkers.
Transmedia, which was at first a pop culture new form of storytelling
spontaneously originated in the entertainment industry, is now spread and common
in fields like journalisms and, for some years now. It's a form of branding.
This sophisticated form of marketing, which we'll call "Inbound Square," has a
rather complex creation process, such that I decided to present it in a more
"digestible" Slideshare.
Transmedia Storytelling from Gianluca Fiorelli
The Transmedia prototype: Star Wars
The Transmedia expansion of Star Wars began immediately after its premiere on
May 25, 1977. In July of the same year, Marvel published the firstStar Wars
comic, and even though the first six numbers reflected what was seen in the
movies, new situations started being presented from the seventh number onwards.
In 1978, the first novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye-a spin-off based on an
early version of the script -was published.But it wasn't until 1987, with the
commercialization of the Star Wars roleplaying game, that George Lucas created
what is known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It covers about 4,000 thousand
years of history of that "galaxy far far away" and is not public (the
Encyclopedia section of the official Star Wars site is not the same).From that
moment, the flood of products began: video games (from X-Wing to the Old
Republic MMORPG), the Director's Cut of the first trilogy, the new trilogy,
cartoons series, new comics, new novels, and even radio versions.
Star Wars is also paradigmatic of the relationship between the producer (George
Lucas) and the fans, who (from one side) have taken possession of the Star Wars
universe from the beginning,while (from the other side) George Lucas tried for a
long time to keep under strict control the expansion of the universe of the Star
Wars narrative with actions such as The Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards(here
you can see some of those fans creations).
It is humanly impossible to monitor and classify all the variants that fans
have created within the narrative universe of Star Wars, such as the stories
published on Fanfiction.com,sites like Death Star PR, Twitter bots likeYoda,
photos using the action figures, and all kinds of videos published on YouTube.
The fans have created contentranging from the staid tribute to parody itself,
like this hilarious Lego video based on the Eddie Izzard gag of the Death Star
canteen:
Transmedia Storytelling gives gigantic opportunities, which is why it can help
explain the acquisition of Lucas Films by Disney and that J.J. Abrams, creator
of now classic Transmedia example as Lost and Fringe (and director of the
revamped Star Trek movies series) was chosen as the director of the next
trilogy.
Transmedia and Hollywood
The relationship between the producer and the fans is critical to the success
of any Transmedia Storytelling strategy, and Hollywood has understood its
implications the best so far.A good, recent example is The Hunger Games movie
trilogy.
I strongly suggest you to recover the post that Bryden McGrath wrote for
Portent: 44 Ways 'The Hunger Games' Social Media Campaign Increased the Movie's
Odds of Success. What Bryden defines as a "social media campaign" really is the
"spreadability" social side of the transmedia campaign thatIgnitioncreated for
Lions Gate, the film's producer:
The Hunger Games Case Study from Ignition on Vimeo.
This campaign has just been relaunched last week, with the presentation of the
first trailer of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
This time, a new site was created in partnership with Microsoft Internet
Explorer, The Hunger Games Explorer, which works as a hub for all the sites and
social media profiles used in this transmedia experience (check the Capitol.pn
official site..., or its Google+ page).
Another great - and maybe more complete - example of Transmedia Storytelling is
that Ridley Scott and (again) Ignition created for Prometheus last year. This
video below explains (better than I can) why it was created, how it was
structured, what channels were used, and the results it obtained:
Prometheus Transmedia Campaign from Ignition on Vimeo.
I'm sure that many of you remember having seen some of the things Campfire
created for the transmedia campaign preview of the first season of Games of
Thrones on HBO.
Game of Thrones Case Study from Campfire on Vimeo.
Here's the big question: can only big major movies or tv series do transmedia?
Absolutely not.
An example is the Veronica Mars Movie Project, which two weeks agoclosed its
crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, all based on fans and social media, after
managing to accumulate $5,702,153.
Transmedia journalism
Journalism - real journalism - is storytelling. There is no discussion about
that, as it was well explained in Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers
Guide published by the Nieman Foundation.
Transmedia storytelling is the next logical step that journalism has already
done (not always perfectly).Remember that:
In transmedia, a story is narrated among different media channels and
platforms.
Prosumers actively participate in the construction of the narrative world.
Here's a more recent example about a world event that shook many people in many
countries. Do you remember how the world discovered that Osama Bin Laden was
dead? Here's how it went down:
"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) 01 maggio 2011
Not long after, when the entire Internet was discussing the news, Keith Urbhan
launched this tweet:
"So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot
damn."
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) 02 maggio 2011
Check out the postGilad Lotan wrote on Social Flow to understand the social
earthquake that tweet caused.
President Obama announced the news of the Osama Bin Laden death an hour later,
and after his announcement, it became known that many people in many countries
already knew through social media.
From that moment, the journalistic storytelling (as well as continuing in
social networks) expanded in the news portals, televisions, radios, and, of
course, the printed paper.
This event relied on transmedia, was "organic," and was unplanned (obviously),
but nontheless, it was transmedia.
Transmedia journalism, which is well explained by Kevin Moloney in is thesis
Porting Transmedia Storytelling to Journalism (2011), substantially means that
the news must generate a space, which allows the active participation of the
readers/viewers. It is not surprising, nowadays, seeing how much this
interaction between the journalists and the readers is central in the news
industry.
Transmedia journalism can take many different forms, but all must see the
reader - meant as a free citizen - as a contributor in the creation and
storytelling of news:
Great examples of Transmedia journalism can be find in sites like 18 day in
Egyptor Storify.
Transmedia branding
Do you remember the concept of Liquid Content promoted by Coca Cola? Well, that
is nothing but the Coca Cola definition of Transmedia Storytelling.
Brands have found a naturally ally for their marketing efforts in transmedia
(and crossmedia) for years. Think to the Art of Heist ARG created for the launch
of Audi 3 in the USA, to the first Old Spice campaign or, more recently, to
theDaybreak transmedia campaign created for AT&T, which shows five online
movies, two websites (you can discover the second almost in the footer of the
fist), and an app.
Another example is Dove's extremely recentReal Beauty Sketches campaign created
by Ogilvy Brasil, which cannot be defined really as transmedia, but that
showcases the transmedia spirit: narrating a story, which represents the brand's
world ("Real Beauty") to its fans (women just as they are) by using channels
likes online video, a microsite, and social networks (Facebook, especially). The
purpose was to create a public, yet intimate dialogue with the fans, and the
campaign surely obtained that objective. It did so well that it already has
originated a parody:
You can read here more about the story behind the Dove's campaign.
I can imagine the doubts you may have in your mind: a narrative world is easier
when you have a movie, a series, a book, or news, but what about my website?
What about my bolts and rolled aluminum factory?
I understand your hesitations, but the answer is that you are probably
searching in the wrong place. All brands have a story, and the basis of their
stories are in their mission pages, that you usually forget exists.
Let's take two example: REI and our own SEOmoz.
REI has created all its business, and marketing, around few very clear values:
(Image taken from How to Build SEO into Content Strategy, by Jonathon Colman)
Those values, the REI's "Why," define the narrative world of REI, which is
shared by more than five million members of the Company (REI is a cooperative).
We have a narrative world through of outdoor adventure, environmentalism, and
stewardship, along with a gigantic base of brand evangelists who not only share
what REI does (and sells), but create their own narratives inside the REI's
world. That is the base from where Transmedia Storytelling can be built, and REI
seems to be moving towards it with ideas like the REI 1440 Project, the REI
Members Stories YouTube videos. They also have a presence in Facebook, Twitter,
Pinterest, Instagram, and all their IRL events (i.e.: Learn at REI and Travel
with REI).
What about SEOmoz? Moz could do transmedia, and actually (without maybe knowing
it) it does it, because - as I told before - transmedia is the "Inbound Square."
Moz has built its story around the 6 TAGFEE Tenets;has built a community of
entusiastic people (yes, you!)around its tools and Internet marketing
philosophy; and a narrative world, which evolves thanks to the fans, both
internally (YouMoz, QA) and externally (check the Mozscape API's Gallery).
The world of fans that SEOmoz nurtures with gamification (one of the experience
principle of transmedia) and live events like MozCon, meet-ups, and MozCation is
the most transmedia campaign SEOmoz has created so far. And, finally and
importantly, Moz has Roger.
Conclusion
People have always needed stories to communicate and feel connected, and good
stories always become part of our history and our culture.
The most recognized brands have one thing in common: they all tell a story.
But something is changing. Never before have people had so many devices and
screens from which to follow a story, and now the consumers seek new experiences
and a deeper engagement. The stories are formed and followed differently than
before.
In order to be relevant for a hyper-connected generation and be present in its
life, we need:
Liquid and customizablecontent to distribute by any means available.
Different levels of depth in the story made ââfor different levels
of depth of user involvement.
A consistent message, where each piece feeds the story and the conversation
with the audience continuously.
What we need is Transmedia Storytelling, aprocess where the elements of a story
are dispensed each other through multiple distribution channels with the purpose
of creating a unified entertainment experience, where each medium really makes
its own contribution to the development of the story.
Transmedia Storytelling is a very powerful and immersive persuasion tool, a
fans-generating machine, because it creates a strong emotional connection with
the audience.It is profitable because it redefines and increases ROI, increases
impact over media, and can cause exceptional sources of income.
Transmedia Storytelling, finally, is the best and most effective way to connect
(especially) with the new generations of consumers and build a sustainable
audience around a brand, as Red Bull demonstrated.
So... are you ready to tell your story?
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/jFxY_iucbpI/transmedia-storytelling-building-worlds-for-and-with-fans
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
Monday 22 April 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'April Mozscape Index Is Live'
Posted by bradfriedman
Hello Mozzers, and happy Monday!
My name is Brad Friedman, Technical Lead for Mozscape, and I'm happy to
announce that we've released a brand new Mozscape index for April. You can find
fresh, new data across all of our apps. Check out Open Site Explorer, the
Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.
We've reduced our index crawl time to just eleven days for this release! Thanks
to our Big Data wizards on the processing team,Douglas VojirandMartin York, for
improving the freshness of our metrics! You can read more details on our
technical improvements in this post from February.
We started processing this index on Wednesday, April 10, so the metrics will
reflect crawl data from the end of March and the first week of April.
Here are the numbers for this latest index:
88,973,525,592 (88 billion) URLs
9,077,621,093 (9.1 billion) Subdomains
161,124,038 (161 million) Root Domains
887,067,310,285 (887 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
2.15% of all links found were nofollowed
56.0% of nofollowed links are internal
44.0% are external
Rel Canonical - 15.08% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 76 links on it
65.05 internal links
11.02 external links
And these are the correlations with Google's US search results:
Page Authority - 0.36
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29
All this delicious data! What a great way to start off the week, huh?
Follow our planned update schedule on our Mozscape calendar, and you can check
out the metrics on our previous releases here.
We're happy to answer your questions or read your feedback! Feel free to leave
your comments here on this thread, or you can reach me on Twitter
(@brad_friedman).
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/p5u8mFByeu0/april-mozscape-index-is-live
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 bradfriedman
Hello Mozzers, and happy Monday!
My name is Brad Friedman, Technical Lead for Mozscape, and I'm happy to
announce that we've released a brand new Mozscape index for April. You can find
fresh, new data across all of our apps. Check out Open Site Explorer, the
Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.
We've reduced our index crawl time to just eleven days for this release! Thanks
to our Big Data wizards on the processing team,Douglas VojirandMartin York, for
improving the freshness of our metrics! You can read more details on our
technical improvements in this post from February.
We started processing this index on Wednesday, April 10, so the metrics will
reflect crawl data from the end of March and the first week of April.
Here are the numbers for this latest index:
88,973,525,592 (88 billion) URLs
9,077,621,093 (9.1 billion) Subdomains
161,124,038 (161 million) Root Domains
887,067,310,285 (887 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
2.15% of all links found were nofollowed
56.0% of nofollowed links are internal
44.0% are external
Rel Canonical - 15.08% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 76 links on it
65.05 internal links
11.02 external links
And these are the correlations with Google's US search results:
Page Authority - 0.36
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29
All this delicious data! What a great way to start off the week, huh?
Follow our planned update schedule on our Mozscape calendar, and you can check
out the metrics on our previous releases here.
We're happy to answer your questions or read your feedback! Feel free to leave
your comments here on this thread, or you can reach me on Twitter
(@brad_friedman).
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/p5u8mFByeu0/april-mozscape-index-is-live
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, 'Measuring and Increasing the ROI
of Your Content Resources'
Posted by Mike Pantoliano
Let me cut right to the chase. Do you want to know the value of your content
marketing efforts? Want this report?
Read on and I'll tell ya!
Calculating the real ROI
With so much emphasis often put on the traffic generation potential of a good
content marketing strategy, I want to focus this post on measuring and
increasing the return on the (sometimes sneakily large) investment. Some common
goals you'll hear surrounding a content marketing strategy include generating
traffic for generic terms, increasing social shares, and developing the brand's
authority (measured by increases in branded traffic, or some other indicator).
In the right circumstances, all of these are nice metrics for the relevant
stakeholders in the organization, but they're all just proxies for measuring the
growth of a business. They're measurements of the means, not the end.
The impetus for a lot of what I'll be talking about in this post comes from
Josh Braaten's post on the Google Analytics Blog a few months ago titled "How to
Prove the Value of Content Marketing with Multi-Channel Funnels". Josh talks
practically about how to measure the business impact of traffic that first
experiences your site via a page that isn't directly selling a product or
service to a consumer. Think: the "How to get into fly-fishing" article written
by the outdoors retailer that sells fly-fishing poles, or even the "How to
measure the effectiveness of content marketing" article written by the guy
working for a company that's doing a two day kick-ass web marketing conference
in Boston on May 20th & 21st :). Indeed, these content pages aren't selling a
product or service, but they are selling the brand, the "purchase" made by the
consumer is everlasting trust; and it has a really low conversion rate.
The necessary analysis for this gets difficult because it is so rare for a user
to make the jump from discovery/informational stage to transactional stage in
one sitting. Hence the need for multi-channel analysis: we need to take a
conversion, look back at all of the interactions that have taken place leading
up to that conversion, and assign some amount of credit to those channels that
often show up toward the beginning of the conversion path. Social networks and
the content that usually ranks for generic keywords are most often found in
these early interactions. They are inherently 'openers' or 'exposers'.
So, now that we've covered the theory, let's look at measuring that ROI.
Expanding upon Josh Braaten's multi-contentfunnels
Everyone interested in what I've covered above should absolutely read Josh's
post. In it, Josh walks you through how to create a report within Google
Analytics' Multi-Channel Funnels that classifies users by the page type for
which they first interacted (based upon landing page).
Custom channel creation is a lot like creating an advanced segment in GA
The top conversions path report - seen here displaying a pretty convoluted
conversion path for one particular conversion.
I'm going to offer a slightly different direction, but they both accomplish the
goal of getting value out of our visit data. Instead of comparing content
sections against each other, let's instead compare it against our other channels
like direct, referral, organic, and paid.
Let's do a step-by-step walkthrough
Head on down to the multi-channel funnels reports.
Make a copy of the basic channel grouping template.
Include traffic based on landing page URL. Hopefully you've got your resource
center, blog, or content home on a neatly identifiable path in the URL. If you
don't, you may have to go the route of declaring page-level custom variables.
Drag it to the top. The order at which you put these channels is important
because GA will go down the line until a match is found, then stop. If we leave
our Resource Center channel at the bottom, the channels above will take a ton of
visitors first because our rules aren't mutually exclusive.
Though not completely related to this topic, I'd also suggest separating your
organic channel into branded, unbranded, and (not provided).
Because of that importance of ordering, if you put (not provided) first and
branded second, the final organic group will necessarily consist of unbranded
traffic.
You can create this segment with a neatly crafted regex of your brand name and
other branded terms.
Finally, let GA calculate things out, and voila!
What can we learn from the above?
Well, it should be pretty clear that under the traditional model of last click
analysis, our resource center is under-valued. This much is obvious by the
disparity in last click conversions and conversion value compared with assisted
conversions and conversion value. Not only that, but the "Assisted/Last Click or
Direct Conversions" ratio (6.62 in the screenshot) tells us that this content is
acting in an assist role more than any other channel we have (the higher the
number, the more likely it's an 'opener', not a 'closer' - those trend toward
zero).
When we look at assisted conversion numbers, we CANNOT say that our resource
center content is now directly responsible for $26k in revenue; that would not
be quite fair using this model. But our content did have its hand in a lot more
conversions than we may have originally assumed.
Now, as for this channel's relative contribution to the bottom line compared
with other channels, well, yes, it's still a lot smaller. But consider that this
particular website's resource center is actually quite small, especially
compared with the size of the rest of the site. Knowing how many pages are in a
resource center makes it pretty easy to apply simple math to determine what each
new page is roughly worth. Or you could choose to do deeper analysis into
specific pages or sections within. Again, I point to Josh Braaten's post for
more on that.
But at the end of the day if you know that each new page added to the resource
center has an assist in $X worth of conversions per year, justifying expansion
becomes a lot easier.
A bonus tip for content marketers
So that was measuring the ROI of a content marketing strategy. But I've
actually got a tip for increasing ROI that I'd like to share.
Our content strategies are targeted at the generic keywords that more often
than not are queries that align with the user's information-seeking intent. If
we had our way, the path would go like this:
Kitten mittens purchasing decision
A user searches "my cat's too noisy" and lands on your site's blog post "10
ways to deal with a noisy cat."
The user reads and is very happy with your content. In that content, you
suggest "kitten mittens," a product that you sell.
The seed is planted in the user's mind, and upon deciding that they're ready to
buy, the user either searches for your brand name, that post again, or the
"kitten mittens" product, all of which lead back to your site.
Nightmare scenario time: what if they searched for "kitten mittens" and you
don't rank for that term? Well, your content has done all the hard work, but
your high-ranking competitor swoops in and gets the purchase. This must be
corrected. But how?
Remarketing
It doesn't matter what remarketing tool you use (this would be super easy with
GA's remarketing tool - here I wrote a post on it!), put the user above in a
"noisy cat owner" list, and target them with "kitten mitten" ads around the web.
Thanks for reading, I hoped you learned something!
Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter, @MikeCP. Don't forget
that Distilled is running our search marketing conference, SearchLove, in Boston
on May 20th and 21st!
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/I6l-faEVzfY/measuring-and-increasing-the-roi-of-your-content-resources
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
of Your Content Resources'
Posted by Mike Pantoliano
Let me cut right to the chase. Do you want to know the value of your content
marketing efforts? Want this report?
Read on and I'll tell ya!
Calculating the real ROI
With so much emphasis often put on the traffic generation potential of a good
content marketing strategy, I want to focus this post on measuring and
increasing the return on the (sometimes sneakily large) investment. Some common
goals you'll hear surrounding a content marketing strategy include generating
traffic for generic terms, increasing social shares, and developing the brand's
authority (measured by increases in branded traffic, or some other indicator).
In the right circumstances, all of these are nice metrics for the relevant
stakeholders in the organization, but they're all just proxies for measuring the
growth of a business. They're measurements of the means, not the end.
The impetus for a lot of what I'll be talking about in this post comes from
Josh Braaten's post on the Google Analytics Blog a few months ago titled "How to
Prove the Value of Content Marketing with Multi-Channel Funnels". Josh talks
practically about how to measure the business impact of traffic that first
experiences your site via a page that isn't directly selling a product or
service to a consumer. Think: the "How to get into fly-fishing" article written
by the outdoors retailer that sells fly-fishing poles, or even the "How to
measure the effectiveness of content marketing" article written by the guy
working for a company that's doing a two day kick-ass web marketing conference
in Boston on May 20th & 21st :). Indeed, these content pages aren't selling a
product or service, but they are selling the brand, the "purchase" made by the
consumer is everlasting trust; and it has a really low conversion rate.
The necessary analysis for this gets difficult because it is so rare for a user
to make the jump from discovery/informational stage to transactional stage in
one sitting. Hence the need for multi-channel analysis: we need to take a
conversion, look back at all of the interactions that have taken place leading
up to that conversion, and assign some amount of credit to those channels that
often show up toward the beginning of the conversion path. Social networks and
the content that usually ranks for generic keywords are most often found in
these early interactions. They are inherently 'openers' or 'exposers'.
So, now that we've covered the theory, let's look at measuring that ROI.
Expanding upon Josh Braaten's multi-contentfunnels
Everyone interested in what I've covered above should absolutely read Josh's
post. In it, Josh walks you through how to create a report within Google
Analytics' Multi-Channel Funnels that classifies users by the page type for
which they first interacted (based upon landing page).
Custom channel creation is a lot like creating an advanced segment in GA
The top conversions path report - seen here displaying a pretty convoluted
conversion path for one particular conversion.
I'm going to offer a slightly different direction, but they both accomplish the
goal of getting value out of our visit data. Instead of comparing content
sections against each other, let's instead compare it against our other channels
like direct, referral, organic, and paid.
Let's do a step-by-step walkthrough
Head on down to the multi-channel funnels reports.
Make a copy of the basic channel grouping template.
Include traffic based on landing page URL. Hopefully you've got your resource
center, blog, or content home on a neatly identifiable path in the URL. If you
don't, you may have to go the route of declaring page-level custom variables.
Drag it to the top. The order at which you put these channels is important
because GA will go down the line until a match is found, then stop. If we leave
our Resource Center channel at the bottom, the channels above will take a ton of
visitors first because our rules aren't mutually exclusive.
Though not completely related to this topic, I'd also suggest separating your
organic channel into branded, unbranded, and (not provided).
Because of that importance of ordering, if you put (not provided) first and
branded second, the final organic group will necessarily consist of unbranded
traffic.
You can create this segment with a neatly crafted regex of your brand name and
other branded terms.
Finally, let GA calculate things out, and voila!
What can we learn from the above?
Well, it should be pretty clear that under the traditional model of last click
analysis, our resource center is under-valued. This much is obvious by the
disparity in last click conversions and conversion value compared with assisted
conversions and conversion value. Not only that, but the "Assisted/Last Click or
Direct Conversions" ratio (6.62 in the screenshot) tells us that this content is
acting in an assist role more than any other channel we have (the higher the
number, the more likely it's an 'opener', not a 'closer' - those trend toward
zero).
When we look at assisted conversion numbers, we CANNOT say that our resource
center content is now directly responsible for $26k in revenue; that would not
be quite fair using this model. But our content did have its hand in a lot more
conversions than we may have originally assumed.
Now, as for this channel's relative contribution to the bottom line compared
with other channels, well, yes, it's still a lot smaller. But consider that this
particular website's resource center is actually quite small, especially
compared with the size of the rest of the site. Knowing how many pages are in a
resource center makes it pretty easy to apply simple math to determine what each
new page is roughly worth. Or you could choose to do deeper analysis into
specific pages or sections within. Again, I point to Josh Braaten's post for
more on that.
But at the end of the day if you know that each new page added to the resource
center has an assist in $X worth of conversions per year, justifying expansion
becomes a lot easier.
A bonus tip for content marketers
So that was measuring the ROI of a content marketing strategy. But I've
actually got a tip for increasing ROI that I'd like to share.
Our content strategies are targeted at the generic keywords that more often
than not are queries that align with the user's information-seeking intent. If
we had our way, the path would go like this:
Kitten mittens purchasing decision
A user searches "my cat's too noisy" and lands on your site's blog post "10
ways to deal with a noisy cat."
The user reads and is very happy with your content. In that content, you
suggest "kitten mittens," a product that you sell.
The seed is planted in the user's mind, and upon deciding that they're ready to
buy, the user either searches for your brand name, that post again, or the
"kitten mittens" product, all of which lead back to your site.
Nightmare scenario time: what if they searched for "kitten mittens" and you
don't rank for that term? Well, your content has done all the hard work, but
your high-ranking competitor swoops in and gets the purchase. This must be
corrected. But how?
Remarketing
It doesn't matter what remarketing tool you use (this would be super easy with
GA's remarketing tool - here I wrote a post on it!), put the user above in a
"noisy cat owner" list, and target them with "kitten mitten" ads around the web.
Thanks for reading, I hoped you learned something!
Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter, @MikeCP. Don't forget
that Distilled is running our search marketing conference, SearchLove, in Boston
on May 20th and 21st!
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/I6l-faEVzfY/measuring-and-increasing-the-roi-of-your-content-resources
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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