3 Brilliant Ways We Built Links and Boosted Traffic For Our Clients

Link Builder?… you mean Creative Campaign Pioneer  My name is Gina and I am a link builder…. It sounds so dull doesn’t it? What it should say is ‘’my name’s Gina and I am a creative genius’…well, maybe something like that. The term ‘link builder’ really does under-estimate our work […]

The post 3 Brilliant Ways We Built Links and Boosted Traffic For Our Clients appeared first on Receptional.com.

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Google kills Right Hand Side Ads: what does this mean for marketers and users?

As we reported over the weekend, Google has removed all PPC ads from the right-hand side of the search engine results page with immediate global effect. 

There’s been a great deal of speculation on what this means for businesses, advertisers and users alike, with many postulating that the top-of-the-page paid search is going to become even more cutthroat (and expensive), organic listings will be pushed even further off the first SERP (Google will start to show four ads at the top instead of three for “highly commercial” search terms) and that Product Listing Ads will gradually take over the SERP (PLAs are still allowed on the right-hand side).

The change has already happened.

Here’s a search for ‘london hotel’ carried out two days ago…

And here is the same search today…

There are now four paid search results at the top, with nothing on the right. It looks oddly blank now, and worryingly the entire above the fold space is entirely filled with ads.

However there is one slightly positive change. There are more organic results below the fold. In fact there are nine blue links and two news stories, which is an improvement. But this is still probably a case of ‘too little too low-down’.

Google’s decision appears to be entirely commercially driven, it would be naive to think otherwise, but has Google gone too far in sacrificing its own user experience for the searcher?

Or will we eventually get to the point where the entire first SERP is filled with ads and we instinctively click straight to the second page, in the same way we skip past YouTube pre-rolls?

We asked some experts from the search community what they thought of the matter.

Thank you to Julia Logan (SEO consultant at IrishWonder.com), Kevin Gibbons (Managing Director at BlueGlass), Sam Silverwood-Cope (CMO at Pi Datametrics) and Larry Kim (Founder of Wordstream) for answering the following questions…

Why has Google decided to drop ads on the right hand side of search results? Is this a way to extract more revenue from top ads?

[Julia Logan] I would suppose so, given the eye tracking studies, and with reports of typical non-technical users hardly distinguishing between ads and organic results, this step tends to blur the line for such users even more – after all, sidebar ads stood out clearly as ads.

However, I was trying to look into the history of sidebar ads and found this article proving this is not their first attempt to ditch sidebar ads, although the previous one did not involve increasing the number of ads above the organic results.

[Kevin Gibbons] The obvious answer is revenue and I’m sure that is a big factor of course. But I think it’s likely to be a balance between this, and a more modern, perhaps centered, search experience which reflects mobile vs. desktop and tablet results. Ultimately changes like this have to be beneficial to the search experience, otherwise Google ends up chasing short-term revenue instead of long-term market share.

[Sam Silverwood-Cope] My Dad asked me the other day, “How come Google is free?” Well Dad, this is how it makes money. If some people don’t realise the top advert spots are actually advertising (like my dad), I think most are aware that the right-hand side are paid positions. Most people do not click on PPC ads for general searches.

So not content with the existing two or three adverts, plus the Google shopping results, plus any other self-promoting comparison widget they put up, Google in its wisdom, has decided to expand the real estate of PPC in the main bulk of the SERPs at the cost of an organic spot.

What does this do for organic search? What should site owners and SEOs do in response?

[Julia Logan] We could of course panic and bemoan the death of above-the-fold organic SERPs but this may not necessarily be the case. With the rise of adblockers, whatever anybody is doing with their ads can potentially become irrelevant.

Assuming the worst case scenario, site owners and SEOs should do what they have always been doing – compete against paid ads. If you rank for a commercially meaningful keyword, make sure you do everything in your power to make your organic listing stand out – metatag optimisation (yes I do realise this is 2016 now), Schema and other options suitable for your particular site. Ads will evolve, becoming more interactive and visually attractive – this means you should not be left behind.

[Kevin Gibbons] My advice is to aim high. We’ve definitely see a significant shift in first page clickthrough rates over the last couple of years especially in organic search. Ranking on page one is often not good enough anymore, every term is different – but I’d recommend that you really should be aiming top three now, otherwise there’s likely to a big drop-off in clickthrough rates.

Also, become the brand that people think of before they even get to typing a query into Google. Whether it’s paid listings, competitors, vertical search or anything else that may get in the way of potential customers visiting your site, try to make sure they get to you first and then remember who you are, so that they come straight back the next time.

[Sam Silverwood-Cope] Despite my moaning, and hankering for the good old times, I think it makes things quite interesting for SEO. The additional PPC spot is supposed to be for premium terms (for now). These terms are highly expensive per click, so it’s up to the vendor to decide whether the top spot is worth it, or whether it would be an interesting bidding war to lose and then to vie for the organic spot above the fold.

A good strategy would be to push organic and take a lower PPC position. With the right tracking tool, alerts can be used on organic positions to react accordingly for the bidding. This blended search approach will be won by the most competent, well equipped digital teams.

Does this improve or harm the user experience?

[Julia Logan] If the user’s goal is to find whatever they are looking for, the answer will largely depend on whether the AdWords algorithm is better than the organic algorithm, and also whether businesses spend money on ads thoughtlessly and run ads with poor targeting.

[Kevin Gibbons] The jury’s out on this one; the negative could be that searchers want to see the natural listings rather than too many ads at the top, and the positive could be a cleaner layout and improved experience. I have to try and look at this from a non-SEO perspective, and as much as I’d like to see the organic results as high as possible, if I’m honest I think the new layout might improve the experience.

I would add that this isn’t an overnight change and I don’t expect this to be the last experiment we see either.

[Sam Silverwood-Cope] Like a young rock band committed to making quality music and “never selling out” then chasing the mainstream buck with the third album, Google doesn’t seem to prioritise its legacy of organic quality any more.

“In Google we Trust” meant we used this superb search engine above the basic or advertised-burden competition. Too many adverts, and especially poor adverts, will eventually turn the user off. But this will only happen when there is a competent viable competitor.

And finally let’s hear from Larry Kim, who offers the following optimistic advice to Paid Search marketers…

I had a good chuckle reading some of the doomsday predictions this morning.

We did some actual analysis here and what I can tell you is that Side Ad and Bottom ads account for 14.6% of total click volume (this is looking across thousands of accounts). Keep in mind that ‘Bottom of Page Ads’ aren’t going away. So, for starters, we’re talking less than 14.6% of clicks impacted by the change.

Now, those “lost” impressions and clicks can more than be made up by A) the addition of the new fourth ad spot B) 78% of SERPS have fewer than 4 ads above the organic results – there’s plenty of room for that to go down and C) the addition of up to four ads below the organic search results. It’s like we just re-organized the naming of ad positions.

As a result, I see no impact on AdWords auction dynamics (clicks, impressions, CPCs, etc.). The only ‘loser’ is organic search which is completely gone from above the fold space on desktop for any commercial query.

There are also incremental benefits to paid search from the change, for example, now all ads can use call-out extensions, sitelink extensions, location extensions, etc., which were previously only a benefit of top-of-page ads. And the ads appear ‘more native’ which may have additional benefits.

In quantifying the impact of this, I should also add that the change is for desktop only, which accounts for less than half of searches. So we’re talking 14.6%/2 = 7.3% of queries impacted.

Basically, keep calm. This is a net positive for paid desktop search.

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Google to close its financial comparison service

Google is to shut down Google Compare, its financial comparison service, from March 23. The service will be closed in both the UK and US. 

On the face of it, the news will have competitor comparison sites jumping for joy, as Google Compare constituted a major threat to their own business models.

When Google introduced the service, there was plenty of concern from existing players in the market that it was a conflict of interest.

This was understandable, given the prominence Google affords it in some very high value searches.

According to a letter obtained by Search Engine Land, Google told Compare Partners that “the Google Compare service itself hasn’t driven the success we hoped for.”

In addition:

“…we’ve decided that focusing more intently on AdWords and future innovations will enable us to provide fresh, comprehensive answers to Google users, and to provide our financial services partners with the best return on investment.”

I asked Digital Consultant Carl Hendy for his thoughts on the news:

Why do you think Google is closing Compare?

Its a little too early to know why they shut down Google Compare and we shall probably never find the real reason why.

It would be nice to think that Google decided that it was unfair to favour its own products in the search results and pressure of ‘unfair advantage’ from various country governments resulted in Google backing down.

However the cynic in me and the coincidental timing of the new Four Adwords listings for commercial queries makes me believe that Google will financially be better off whilst at the same time keeping those large financial and travel Adwords spenders happy.

Will other insurance sites/competitors be opening the champagne today? Or will Google have other plans?

I wouldn’t open the champagne too soon. Google has a habit of misdirecting everyone.

It has collected vast amounts of data through these compare tools and I can’t see Google not monetising that data.

Everyone celebrated when Google penalised the acquisition of BeatThatQuote (a site which does not exist anymore) only for Google to then release its own comparison tools fairly soon afterwards.

In summary

The news will be welcome for some, in the short-term at least. For one thing, we may see a little more of the organic results in this vertical.

However, I imagine that Google has only made this move as it believes more can be made through ads than its own comparison service. It also avoids any scrutiny over unfair competition.

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Evolution of call tracking in a mobile first world

*Sponsored content in collaboration with Marchex. Views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect Search Engine Watch’s opinions.

If you answer your phone or want your phone to ring as a result of your marketing, in particular search engine marketing, then you’ll want to read the following interview.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Adarsh Nair, Senior Director, Search Product and Engineering at Marchex. Adarsh filled me in on the latest advances in call tracking and marketing automation that have been baked into their Call Analytics platform and specifically Marchex Search Analytics.

Kevin Lee: Why is tracking and 100% attribution at the keyword level important?

Adarsh: We hear a lot about big data and the power of data. Search is a very sophisticated media channel with hundreds of millions of keywords to bid from leading to trillions of dollars in sales. This is a big data problem. If you break it down to the basics, each keyword is a market of customers searching for something specific. And marketers have a cost to get their ad to show up in front of customers.

It is our strong belief that for the best ROI optimization, search marketers need to have the most granular data (keyword level), complete data (online and offline sale attribution) and the tools to make sense of data.

Keyword level attribution for online and offline sales is just the beginning to building a great search optimization strategy.

Why do some marketers prefer to take orders over the phone?

For industry verticals such as auto, financial services and travel, the product being sold is sometimes complex and expensive. These verticals also see a fair share of companies competing for the same customer. Getting a consumer on the phone and/or in a store increases the opportunity to convert a prospect into a customer through excellent customer service. The human connection in many cases makes the difference.

Separately, it is also important to note that we are seeing marketers responding to customer choice.

Consumers are choosing to call businesses from the web using their mobile phones. This has pushed Google, Facebook and other publishers to respond with mobile advertising formats that incorporate a click to call.

I get it. For many products, particularly those with lots of options or service offerings with many service levels it’s better to have a rep talk to a potential customer because the conversion rate to sale is higher AND the average sale price is higher. Plus you get fewer returns or customer service issues when the buyer gets the right product or service.

For many marketers, being able to attribute call conversions to search media at the keyword level results in ROI being properly stated and the PPC bid reserve price going up. Can you explain why this is important?

Having the ability to raise one’s keyword bid while maintaining a high measured ROI can facilitate higher positions for the keyword, if the competition doesn’t escalate bids.

Anyone who wants site visitors to call should be tracking phone conversions, but which industry categories are having the greatest success with your platform?

We see two key customer journey paths when it comes to calls from search. First, customers are choosing to click to call from the search ad itself. Second, customers click through to the landing page or the site, and call a number on the site. The key industry verticals for Marchex, where calls make up more than 20% of the overall conversions, are Auto, Financial services, Travel, Home Services, Telco and Cable services.

Can you provide specific examples that might shock readers as to just how big a difference call tracking can make?

One of our customers in financial services faced a challenge. Mobile CPCs were going up, leading to higher cost per acquisition (CPA), and around 40% of their total conversion came through calls. The customer had full visibility into online conversions driven from keywords, but did not have visibility into call conversions.

The lack of a complete picture that showed total conversion from a keyword caused optimization challenges and cost per acquisition remained high. Marchex Search Analytics helped the customer develop a complete picture of total conversions (online and offline) from each keyword.

With call conversion added in, the customer saw the top performing keywords change. CPAs of specific keywords dropped by more than 50%. The customer used the data to revamp their search strategy and in a three month timeframe reduced overall CPA by ~10% and drove ~15% more conversions. And this is for a company with a massive paid search budget.

In addition to simply understanding phone conversions and improving one’s PPC media optimization what other insights can one extract from calls using your platform?

In addition to calls, duration, conversions, there are three categories of data/insights that Marchex Search Analytics provides:

1) Deep call insights through machine learning: CallDNA is a Marchex technology the platform uses to provide deep insights into what happened on the call. Search marketers find a variety of uses for this data.

As an example, one of our customers in the Auto industry looks for a specific phrase in calls as it’s an indicator for future sales. Getting a sense of keywords that drive calls with the specific phrase helps our customer invest in the right keywords to drive demand. Another example is where a customer in the Telco/Cable vertical uses our platform to understand which keyword drives conversation vs. hangups/misdials. This helps the customer invest in keywords that drive the right kind of calls into their call centers.

2) Consumer touch points along the call flow: The call consumer journey is very similar to the website consumer journey. Very similar to how the website’s ease of use and responsiveness determines the consumer experience, the success of the call consumer journey is determined by how intuitive the IVR is, how responsive the agent on the phone is.

Marchex Search Analytics is able to surface the IVR input form the consumer back to the search marketer at the keyword level. Many search marketers use this feature to determine how many new customers are being driven through the call flow by tapping the ‘new customer’ IVR input at the keyword level

3) Enhanced conversion data: We also support advanced conversion data. Many platforms discuss bringing conversion counts or using a proxy for conversion like ‘calls above a certain duration’. Marchex Search Analytics partners with our customers to bring in conversion data at the keyword level that includes total sales transactions, revenue drive from those transactions, product SKUs that drove the conversion.

Are there any important things marketers should know between click to call originated calls vs. in-ad phone numbers being dialed vs. landing pages with a phone call to action?

In an increasingly mobile world, customers in industry verticals where calls are important are seeing more than 60% of their calls come from in-ad phone numbers. Customers should do the due diligence to understand if the call tracking solution they use can seamlessly provide call conversion data at the keyword level for both in-ad phone numbers (also referred to as call extensions or call only campaigns) and landing page based phone numbers.

For keyword level tracking of call from in-ad phone numbers, we advise against hacks such as mapping adgroups to single keywords. Such strategies are expensive, do not scale for enterprise customers and could have negative impact on quality score. Marchex Search Analytics works with the existing search campaign structure of our enterprise customers and we are able provide a seamless experience by pushing the new keyword level click to call data to bid optimization platforms automatically.

Finally, we are also seeing that keywords that drive calls from in-ad phone numbers typically differ from the keywords that drive calls from landing pages. Having granular attribution for calls from in-ad phone numbers and landing pages will be critical for best in class optimization strategies.

Many marketers want to know the system they pick has been around a while to be robust and stable. How long has Marchex been in the call tracking sector? What are the other reasons that marketers know and trust your system?

Marchex has been in the call tracking space for close to 10 years. Marchex is the trusted partner for Fortune 1000 enterprise brands and we are the largest call analytics provider with more than 300 million calls flowing through our systems every year. Finally, Marchex invests in product innovation and our enterprise customers choose Marchex due to cutting edge innovations such as search, display, video and site analytics for call conversions.

What else should marketers know when they evaluate call tracking solutions?

Call conversions are driven from a variety of media channels, which includes search, display, mobile video, email. While direct attribution of calls from search is important, marketers are now beginning to realize that display and mobile video are influencing call conversions in a big way. Marketers should consider a call analytics platform that has the capability to track view-through call conversions from display and mobile video and can provide cross channel attribution for call conversions.

I’m pleased to have learned a lot about call tracking from Adarsh, and I hope you, the reader learned something too and of course you can learn more here: Marchex Search Analytics.

*Sponsored content in collaboration with Marchex. Views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect Search Engine Watch’s opinions.

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Six unusual steps for a successful Twitter lead generation campaign

Do you want more qualified leads?

Twitter can generate qualified leads at a lower cost than most of the other major ad platforms. It’s true! But not if you follow Twitter’s instructions.

Why? Because Twitter’s advice for creating lead generation cards is completely wrong.

In this post, you’ll discover my unusual six-step strategy for using Twitter lead generation cards for ludicrously successful lead gen.

Please note: this article was first published on the Wordstream blog last week, and it was so darn helpful that we wanted to share it here. 

Step 1: Set up Conversion Tracking. Just do it!

This is kind of buried in the user interface, but it’s actually the most important thing you need to do. Without conversion tracking set up you’re blind.

All the major platforms, except for Twitter, have a “universal tag” – where you put in one tag on your site so you can figure out the conversions just by typing in the URL.

But on Twitter you have to create different JavaScript tags for each thank you page. Each one gets a name and you can categorize the type (download, purchase, sign-up) so that you can report on it later.

I’m blown away how many people forget this critical step. Basically you need to define a different conversion pixel for every goal completion on your site so that you can track whether everything is working.

Step 2: Choose your Twitter Ads campaign type wisely

There are six pay-per-performance campaign types, depending on your marketing objective. You specify the most you’re willing to pay for each type of campaign.

Why not just specify $0.01 as your cost per action? Well, basically if you set the bids too low, you’ll get no impressions. It’s an auction. Chances are other Twitter advertisers are willing to pay more than a penny.

The more you’re willing to pay, the more likely your ads will be shown. You have to figure out what it’s worth to you; Twitter will figure out how much quantity you’ll get for that amount.

As for the campaign types, even though tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign, they offer the absolute worst ROI. Avoid like the plague!

Why? Twitter charges per “engagement.” This includes engagements such as a person viewing your profile page, expanding your image, expanding the tweet from the tweet stream, or clicking on a hashtag. Twitter will love taking your money, but these campaigns won’t help you achieve any of your marketing objectives as you waste your budget.

What you should really be interested in paying for is website clicks, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

Step 3: adjust your Twitter Ad targeting options

At the basic level, you can simply target Twitter users by location, gender, and language.

Twitter also provides somewhat more advanced options:

These advanced targeting options include:

• Keywords: You will target specific searches or users who use with certain keywords in tweets.
• Followers: You will target accounts of people with interests similar to followers of those accounts. For example, entering @SMExaminer will target people who are likely to be interested in social media.
• Interests: You will target users interested in any categories you enter.
• Tailored audiences: This is the crown jewel of Twitter advertising. Remarketing and custom lists are so powerful. Spend here first! Tailored audiences offer the best ROI because you have certainty over who you’re targeting. People who are more familiar with your brand are more likely to buy – it’s your lowest-hanging fruit.
• TV targeting: You will target people who are interested in a specific program, TV network, or TV genre.
• Behaviors: You will target users who share specified online and offline behaviors and characteristics.
• Tweet engager: This is a brand new option – it’s kind of like remarketing for Twitter. It’s targeting people who interacted with your tweets in the last few days. If you have a business where you need to get lots of people really excited about something (like a political party trying to energize the base ahead of an election), then this can be a powerful type of targeting.
• Event targeting: You will target people who are interested in global or regional events.

Step 4: Create your ad – But DON’T use Twitter lead generation cards!

Now it’s time to create your lead gen ad. Twitter tells you to use a lead generation card. WRONG!

Never, ever use Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards for lead generation. I have run thousands of campaigns and the lead generation cards consistently lose and lose badly.

Even though it has a nice layout with customizable call-to-action buttons like “buy now” and all sorts of fancy bells and whistles, it looks more like an ad. Twitter people are allergic to advertising; when they see a Twitter ad it makes them want to click on it less!

If something looks like an ad on Twitter, users will ignore you! That means lower engagement and 2-4x higher costs.

Instead you should just attach a funny photo. Use images that have done well organically to save money.

Go nuts on the image you choose. Don’t be afraid to be a bit snarky or goofy. Use funny images or memes, even if it means going a bit off-brand. Twitter is a place where you’ll be rewarded if your brand shows it can have a bit of fun (within good taste, of course), or you’ll be ignored if you go all corporate.

And of course, use emojis to further increase engagement rates by 30%.

Step 5: Set Bids – No Automatic Bidding Allowed

Okay, first: Never ever use Twitter’s Automatic Bidding. It’s for suckers.

Automatic bidding will make sure your budget is spent very quickly. Sure, it helps you win ad auctions, but you don’t really have to or want to win every auction.

Keep in mind it’s not like search advertising where you’re bidding on rare priceless keywords that get searched on 10 times per year. This is display advertising and there are plenty of ad spots available to buy.

Always use maximum bidding. For most companies doing lead generation, it’s not the end of the world if the lead comes in tomorrow vs. today.

The only time you would use automatic bidding is if you need to promote something heavily and you need those ad impressions today (e.g., you have a 24-hour sale) or if you’re targeting a very tight audience, maybe 1,000 people. In these cases, then you do have to use auto bidding – or just bid really high.

Okay, so how the heck do you set bids? It’s seriously complicated – it’s pretty much rocket science.

You need to use The Force.

Basically, you’re trying to get as many impressions as you can for as little money as possible. If you bid too low your ads won’t show. But if you bid too high your budget will die.

When you bid too high, you’re essentially paying for premium next-day air service when usually (99% of the time) a regular postage stamp will suffice. You’re paying much more for the same clicks in order to be delivered faster.

Twitter has a tool that shows how your reach changes based on different maximum bid amounts.

Ignore! Ignore! Ignore! It’s completely wrong. Even when it says I will get no impressions, I get millions of impressions. It is just trying to get you to raise bids.

I’ve reverse-engineered the Twitter ad auction. Basically Twitter determines if your ads show or not based on your effective CPM. (Your max bid times applicable predicted engagement rate). So if your bid is $1 per click and you’re doing a click campaign using an ad that is averaging a 1% click-through rate, then your predicted effective CPM is $10.

To win more ad auctions, you have two choices: either bid more or post higher engagement stuff.

I love promoting high engagement tweets (15%+ engagement rates) with very low maximum CPCs (5-10 cents). The higher the engagement, the less you’ll need to bid for your ads to be eligible to show.

Step 6: Report. Rinse. Repeat

Your last step is to figure out how things did. You can get detailed information about exactly what happened after spending money on Twitter ads: clicks, retweets, followers, conversions, etc.

In the above campaign you can see that we were able to generate 440 downloads for just $6.50 per action. That’s extremely cost-effective compared to other marketing channels. In comparison search ads in this vertical can cost closer to $5 per click (not per download).

Delete campaigns that aren’t working. Double down on stuff that works. Repeat.

Conclusion

Twitter can be very powerful. For example, Twitter ad campaigns can deliver a great return on your investment once you master the Twitter ads quality score algorithm.

But you have to avoid the pitfalls (hello, Tweet Engagement campaigns!). When it comes to advice, Twitter can’t be trusted. Forget everything Twitter has tried to tell you about lead generation. Ignore Twitter’s ‘best practice’ advice on bidding, creative, audience targeting, campaign types … and pretty much everything else.

Instead, do Twitter lead generation my way. The RIGHT way. :)

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Which US sites lost the most amount of Google visibility in 2015?

Earlier this week, we looked at the US sites that made the biggest SEO gains in 2015, but now it’s time to find out who the losers were.

Again, a huge thank you to Juan González from Sistrix who spent his time evaluating 200 US domains to give us this exclusive research.

Here’s Juan’s insight for each of the bottom five:

1) Thefind.com

Thefind also headlined our UK losers list. When we look at the rocky landscape of Thefind.com it becomes clear that the domain managed to rush headlong into numerous Google updates, over the years. Such an erratic visibility is a sign that the page did not show the necessary quality signals where Google’s algorithms are concerned, nor did it manage to live up to users’ expectations.

The abrupt end for Thefind.com in 2015 came at the hand of Facebook, who bought the company in a bid to incorporate it into Facebook’s advertising engine.

2) Cupertino.org

Looking at Cupertino.org we see an interesting spike in January 2015. The same spike can be found for other city websites, such as lakewood.org and austintexas.org.

I spent some time digging into this and found that between 12/22/2014 and 01/16/2015 all three domains were ranking for “department of community services“, “parks department“, “community parks“, “parks and recreation department“ and “city of parks and recreation“.

Parks and Recreation is also, of course, a television sitcom, which aired its finale in February 2014.

Looking at Google Trends, US users seem to be quite interested in “parks and recreation“ from December to June. But we also notice an unusual spike for the keyword “parks in recreation“ from the middle of December 2014 to January 2015. (The final season aired from January 13, 2015 to February 24, 2015.)

Maybe because the show was ending, its fans started to search for information about Parks and Recreation and Google overreacted with the QDF (‘Query Deserves Freshness’) for this and related keywords.

3) Chow.com

The domain Chow.com now redirects to Chowhound.com, the name of the former forum for the site.

While the redirects seem to be solid, it seems as though Google does not trust the user-generated content on the new domain as much as before, leaving an overall loss of visibility of nearly 50%.

This is a little sad as Chow.com actually managed to come out of Panda quite well and even managed to gain visibility thanks to the Phantom update, before the domain name change.

4) Espnfc.com

The case of ESPNs soccer page, espnfc.com, is quite interesting.

When we look at the visibility history for espnfc.com and espnfc.us, we see a rather typical up and down which often hints at duplicate content issues. On 08/24/2015 this all changes and the espnfc.us page comes out on top.

When we look at the sourcecode of both pages we notice a canonical combined with a hreflang attribute. While the canonical always points to the .com version of the page, the <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-us” href=”http://ift.tt/1QOmg7m; /> tells Google to show the .us version in the Google.com SERPs.

This setup may come back to bite them later as it can confuse the Googlebot. As John Mueller from Google has noted:

“If the URLs are really fully equivalent, then using a rel=canonical like that is fine (eg if you have an informational page on a site, which doesn’t mention local currencies or local addresses). On the other hand, if the pages are not fully equivalent (eg different titles, currencies, addresses, etc), then I would not use a rel=canonical. The difference is very subtle and because of that, hard to implement at scale”.

5) Businessweek.com

While Businessweek did not make the top five in our UK losers list, it did get an honourable mention.

Businessweek was bought by Bloomberg back in 2009 but kept its own domain until last year, when it became part of bloomberg.com on http://ift.tt/1zuKBMP.

When we compare the visibility for Businessweek.com with the /businessweek directory on Bloomberg.com, we find that the magazine did not pass it’s visibility on to the new directory.

The reasons here are, once again, soft-404 problems when redirecting each page to the new directory. When we look at the redirects from http://ift.tt/f92jxT through URI Valet, for example, we see the first 301 redirect to http://ift.tt/212YOOn, next we get a 302 redirect from http://ift.tt/212YOOn to the start page http://ift.tt/mQLMLn, which constitutes the soft-404. That’s the problem.

Others interesting ‘losers’

Guitaretab.com

Another interesting domain on the losing side is guitaretab.com. They lost nearly all their visibility in the week of 01/04/2016. This looks like a manual de-indexing penalty as the indexed pages during this week also went down to 0.

We could speculate that the copyright removals might have played their part.

Right now, the domain is only ranking for brand keywords and not much else.

Microsoft

It also seems that Microsoft is using the same SEOs for all of their domains, as many of their service-domains show up on our losers list: Windowsphone.com, Technet.com, Msdn.com and Bing.com

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Seven excellent tips for making the most of Gmail Ads

Gmail Ads are one of the more intriguing opportunities Google has given advertisers to reach people where they spend a lot of their time online – in their inboxes.

I’ve been obsessed with mastering them lately and today I’m going to reveal what I’ve learned.

Please note, this article was originally published earlier this month on the WordStream blog.

What Are Gmail Ads?

Gmail ads target users based on the account activity of their personal Gmail accounts and appear within the Promotions tab.

Formerly known as Gmail Sponsored Promotions, they’ve been around since 2013 and finally became available to all advertisers (for the second time, no less) in 2015.

So what do we really know about these native Gmail Ads? Quite a lot now, actually.

After collecting massive amounts of data for more than a year from spending a few million dollars on this ad format, this post summarizes my top seven most exciting findings on Gmail ads and my best recommendations for making the most of this AdWords format.

Gmail Ads tip #7: Raise CTR & QUALITY SCORE!

Hi, my name is Larry Kim, and I’m obsessed with Quality Score. We’ve researched the heck out of it – for AdWords, the Google Display Network, Twitter, and Facebook.

Guess what! Quality Score absolutely exists in Gmail Ads!

Gmail Ads doesn’t actually show you the Quality Score. In search ads, you can view the keyword-level Quality Score, whereas in Gmail you can’t see it. But even though you can’t see it, a Gmail Ads Quality Score still exists.

Here’s an example, looking at the Cost Per Click vs. Click-Through Rate (email open rate) for one particular campaign:

It’s not linear, but there are clearly huge rewards for high open rates and huge penalties for low open rates. Put simply:

Higher CTR = Much Lower CPC

Lower CTR = MUCH higher CPC

You absolutely have to maximize your open rates because the Gmail Ads Quality Score will give you huge rewards. It’s the difference between $0.10 clicks vs. $1.15 clicks, based on the awesomeness or terribleness of your subject lines.

So what do we do about this? Write irresistible email subject lines, duh! But how?

Gmail Ads tip #6: Use existing email marketing campaign data

Email marketing is the most popular lead generation channel. Most companies do email marketing – 87% of them, according to a survey by Chief Marketer:

So how can you use your existing email marketing campaigns to improve your Gmail Ads?

Even if you haven’t done Gmail Ads before, you should have a library of emails you’ve sent out before and the ability to figure out whether they did well.

Log into your email marketing system (we use Marketo, but use whatever you have, whether it’s Constant Contact, HubSpot, Salesforce, or something else). Pull an email performance report. Sort by the open rate.

Will emails that have done well for you organically do well in a sponsored email ad format? It’s very likely. Sorting by open rate will reveal your unicorns. Don’t bother promoting the garbage ones because no one’s going to open them to begin with – and when they do it will cost you an arm and a leg.

I can’t share all my secrets, but our best performing email by open rate is over 40% and the subject line is: ‘Quick Question’.

You’d be crazy to not use your existing treasure trove of email subject lines when doing Gmail Ads.

Gmail Ads tip #5: Use emojis

You knew this was coming! It’s really true. Emojis increase open rates.

This is a bit crazy, but you get the idea.

Inboxes are such a competitive area to get people’s attention. Emojis really make subject lines pop – especially on mobile, where about half of email opens occur (though there is substantial variance in this figure, as it depends heavily on audience and industry).

It makes no sense not to use emojis. Almost any business in any industry can find a creative reason to include an emoji in the subject line. (OK, maybe not if you’re in an uber-serious business like a funeral home.) Otherwise, you should feel pretty confident that adding emojis to your subject line will increase open rates by around 30%.

Just make sure your emojis are topically relevant – don’t just use a smiley. If you’re advertising a doughnut shop, use a doughnut emoji; if you’re advertising a pizza special at your restaurant, include a pizza emoji.

Gmail Ads tip #4: No remarketing? Do keyword targeting!

Remarketing works so incredibly well because past browsing history is a great predictor of future commerce activities. Think about your email marketing. Even if you have a huge list of half a million opt-in emails, aren’t you better off focusing on people who have interacted with your emails sometime within the last few months? Yes! Why?

People lose interest. Some hot prospects go cold. Someone who signed up a year ago, but hasn’t opened any emails in more than six months, probably is no longer in the market for your thing now.

So how do you target people who have shown recent interest in your stuff in Gmail Ads?

Unfortunately, the most common display ad options of remarketing and ‘In Market Segments’ are not available targets within Gmail Ads and likely won’t be in the future, due to regulations around personally identifiable information related to email marketing.

BUT there is a clever trick to get around this problem. You can do keyword targeting as a substitute for remarketing.

When people enter our funnel, we send them emails as part of marketing automation drip campaigns that contain the word WordStream, which end up in their Gmail accounts. So I can target with recent interest from WordStream by targeting my own trademarks.

Why target people who are already familiar with you and in your funnel?

Well, let’s say your emails have an open rate of 15 or 20%. That means 75 to 80% of people in your funnel aren’t interacting with those emails. So there’s plenty of upside of targeting them with Gmail Ads, even if they’re already in your funnel.

Targeting people who are familiar with your brand will also increase CTR and Quality Score, thereby lower CPCs.

Gmail Ads tip #3: Go nuts with competitor keywords

Why stop at your own trademarks? Why not also target people who have recently shown interest in the things your competition sells?

In addition to targeting your own brand terms, you can also be keyword targeting your competitors’ brand terms with Gmail Ads. People who are in the market for your competitor’s products are getting emails from your competitors that mention their brand terms right now.

Targeting the trademarks of your competitors is a clever way for you to potentially steal some sales! The fact that they’re in market for a competing solution will dramatically increase Quality Score and lower CPCs.

Gmail Ads tip #2: Don’t forget deep click analytics

Open rates are obviously important, but you still need to check what people do after they open the Gmail Ad.

Google has all these Gmail-specific campaign metrics that aren’t even turned on by default! It’s critical to enable and monitor these (forwards, saves, clicks to website) to track the health of your campaigns:

Gmail Ads tip #1: Mix it pp with four different ad formats

Gmail Ads offers four different ad formats to choose from:

• Gmail image template
• Gmail single promotion template
• Gmail multi-product template
• Gmail catalog template

Use them all. You might find that different types of offers work best with different Gmail ad formats. For example, having more stuff to click on might increase the chances of people finding something interesting to click on, especially if you’re promoting products. The multi-product template ad looks similar to the marketing emails that Etsy sends out.

Notice what’s missing from the list? Customer Match

Why isn’t the new Customer Match on this list? You know, the amazing new feature that lets you target Gmail Ads based on user email addresses? Weird, right?

The reason: I’m struggling with it.

For whatever reason, even when I upload a huge list of emails, we’re having trouble accruing a large number of ad impressions. We’ve seen this on quite a few accounts. For example, we did a campaign where we uploaded a gigantic list with 100,000 email matches and we were only getting several thousand impressions. We don’t know why.

Hopefully, we’ll soon see the very promising Customer Match feature reach its full potential for advertisers.

Final thoughts on Gmail Ads

Google presents many interesting opportunities to advertisers so they can make the most of the Gmail Ads format – you can reduce costs by optimizing several aspects of your campaign, reach your own (and a new) audience, and measure post-open success.

Yet there are quite a few restrictions and limitations unique to Gmail Ads which are above and beyond the normal limitations in search ads. Hopefully we’ll see Google open up Customer Match feature a little bit more in the future and relax some of the ad policies.

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Which US sites gained the highest Google visibility in 2015?

We recently looked at the UK sites that made the biggest SEO gains in 2015, but now it’s time to cross the pond to see which US sites did the best last year.

Juan González the SEO & Country Manager at Sistrix spent a considerable amount of time last week evaluating 200 domains, and has given us an exclusive look at the top 100.

Please note, we haven’t included any adult-entertainment websites in this list – of which there were only three. Also, as there were no major Google updates in 2015, most of these problems were “home-made by the website operators.”

The insights below each domain are from Juan himself, so a massive thank you for his input.

1) Choicehotels.com

In May 2015 Choice Hotels consolidated all of its domains – comfortsuites.com, qualityinn.com, comfortinn.com and many more – into the main domain of choicehotels.com.

The redirects are sound but the only hazard may be the fact the consolidated domains still return a 200 status code when a Googlebot useragent visits. It might be a good idea for them to fix this potential cloaking problem soon.

2) Quora.com

We’ve already looked more closely at Quora in our UK review.

Basically, Quora has cornered the market when it comes to Q&A sites, and has very impressive URLs like http://ift.tt/1opLcLQ which themselves rank for almost 100 Keywords on Google:

3) Groupon.com

Groupon managed to massively build up their /coupons/stores/ directory during 2015, so that now a good 33% of the top 10 keywords for the entire domain are generated in this directory.

Looking at the top keywords for the entire domain, there are 65,338 top 100 keywords but only 2,545 top 10 keywords, so there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

4) Angieslist.com

The crowd-sourced local business review site may be massive when it comes to indexed pages (more than 30 million), though it seems that its quality is not what Google wants.

Out of more than 30 million indexed pages, we found only about 32,000 URLs in the Top 100 results, with less than 1,300 URLs making it into the Top 10.

5) Zomato.com

Again, a domain which we covered in our UK review. Zomato provides exactly the kind of information that Google looks for when it serves localised results to searchers – restaurant reviews, user ratings, photos and menus.

Much of its improved visibility was down to Zomato’s purchase of urbanspoon.com, the content of which redirected to zomato.com from June 2015.

Here’s the Top 20 US domains that increased in Google visibility in 2015:

1. choicehotels.com 397.81%
2. quora.com 394.40%
3. groupon.com 195.09%
4. angieslist.com 189.35%
5. zomato.com 185.29%
6. macmillandictionary.com 147.24%
7. etsy.com 136.76%
8. academy.com 132.74%
9. weather.com 130.98%
10. cambridge.org 129.74%
11. washingtonpost.com 123.25%
12. burlingtoncoatfactory.com 119.02%
13. wayfair.com 106.22%
14. authoritynutrition.com 103.99%
15. skyscanner.com 100.06%
16. mentalfloss.com 99.85%
17. instagram.com 98.93%
18. express.com 96.79%
19. cinemablend.com 95.22%
20. sears.com 86.87%

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Search engine bias: an analysis from the index

In a recent article right here on SEW, Christopher investigated the manipulation of UK political party autosuggest queries, but what exactly is search engine bias?

Search engine bias is the unfair skewing of results and it sits within the intermediary mechanism of search systems (see diagram below) and biases can be split into three parts:

1) Non-neutral search engine technology

Years ago studies focused exclusively on search software. Soon people realised that the user interface is of equal importance to any algorithm, as this is the view we get of the system and our successful use of it.

Now, this is where it gets even more interesting, the presentation of results influences free-thought which powers interaction. As a result, all search engines are bias because of the design and user interface.

We have two types of result inspection bias: quality and trust.

Quality bias means that the searcher will subconsciously take into account surrounding results and if they’re not relevant our behaviour can change, we may decide to retype our query or inspect a site we otherwise would not have dreamt of.

This is precisely the reason why engines have quality scores for their paid search systems, if paid results are irrelevant this can mess with organic result inspection.

For the most part search algorithms are generally very effective at presenting us with relevant results so we trust the engine, this is known as trust bias.

Personalisation through cookies and the creation of 3D cubes are used to increase relevancy.

While there are many advantages of personalisation, personalisation restricts results and is a form of search engine bias.

2) Result manipulation

Political and social bias came to the fore in 2002 when Google was temporarily blocked in China and since then, with the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, indexes and results have always been filtered to comply a little better with the law.

Let’s now take this the other way around, is search engine coverage biased along national lines?

In short, yes. Engines do not have proportional coverage of a particular group of websites or regions. But why is this? Well, country population differences and internet penetration cause unintentional bias.

Bloggers make up PageRank, a two-fold mathematical and human-centric algorithm. If a country has more bloggers they are more likely to link to fellow blogs within that country. Throw in personalisation, in which geographic location is taken into account, this further reinforces country specific blogger-linked networks.

This is why .com ccTLD’s rank more than other ccTLD’s and why many marketers and business people alike want .com domains over other ccTLD’s. This is a classic example of success-breeds-success whereby the US has the upper-hand due to the fact of it being an early adopter of the web.

3) Impartiality

Search engines may think of themselves as being objective but like any other media company, editorial judgements are made and are factored into automated operations. Engines trust certain sources more than others.

On Google, Wikipedia has been regarded as a trustworthy source. This may be because Wikipedia contains up-to-date, current and reliable information that answers a question through well-researched, referenced, thus reliable, content. As a result it often features in the top results.

If the top results do not satisfy the searcher, the search is unsuccessful. Since each unsuccessful search diminishes search engine perception, search engine bias is often towards trustworthy sources.

This is why Wikipedia will not disappear anytime soon and it also explains why Google’s quick answer boxes are at the top of results – to answer a query even quicker and to increase an engine’s performance perception.

So there you have it, our results are skewed because of search engine bias.

Biases singlehandedly have the biggest impact on results because they encompass user interface and influence over result inspection; personalisation; and finally ranking algorithms (which is part mathematical part human edited).

Please note: this particular article took into account bias from an index perspective. Another important angle to take is from a keyword perspective. Which search engines are pro-life if you type in euthanasia, for example?

Further classic studies:

• Information Retrieval from the Internet: an Evaluation of the Tools
• Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism
• Search Engine Coverage Bias: Evidence and Possible Causes

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11 reasons why your Facebook ad measurement is messed up

A recurring theme I hear among paid social pros is the measurement discrepancy between Facebook and Google Analytics.

People seem to have a really hard time matching up what’s happening with campaigns on Facebook and subsequent engagement, as measured by their analytics platform of choice (including – but not limited to – Google Analytics).

Some people go as far as claiming that this is systematic click fraud perpetrated by Facebook. This is highly unlikely, for all kinds of obvious reasons. However, there is a clear problem.

The good news is that you can do something about it.

Third party tools use different measurement techniques, so aligning two platforms perfectly is pretty much impossible. But you can get much closer.

If your data looks way off, then it’s probably linked to at least one of the following reasons. Check and doublecheck to see if you can narrow the measurement gap.

Do let me know if there are other reasons for the discrepancies in the comments section below, or if any of these things help you.

1) Your measurement window is screwy

By default Facebook sets the window to one-day after an ad was viewed, or a 28-day post-click window. If this isn’t what you want to track, then you should change your settings.

2) You’re measuring conversions on a last click basis

This isn’t how Facebook does it, so you’re measuring different things.

Facebook says:

“Third-party platforms capture conversions that resulted from a direct referral. Even if you created a campaign using URL parameters to track the link used in your ad, third parties identify those last-clicks, or linear conversions, where the user clicked an ad and immediately converted.”

Facebook aside, it’s definitely time to start attributing performance across channels, rather than focusing on the last click in the user journey.

3) You have pixel implementation issues

Perhaps your tech setup isn’t working properly? Facebook points at the following possible issues and tests to try:

1. Check whether your raw pixel fires match.
2. If you’re using conditional firing, expect a small discrepancy.
3. Check your currency, decimal places and other variables in your purchase event codes.
4. Use the Pixel Helper tool to check for duplicate pixel fires
5. Check that you’re not “pixel piggybacking on existing tag managers”.

4) You’re comparing clicks with apples

Total ‘clicks’ as reported by Facebook includes a whole bunch of stuff that you may not be aware of. You might think a click is all about the link in the ad, but you’d be wrong.

For example, as well as the links in your ads, Facebook clicks include things like expanding descriptions, clicking to read comments, page likes, as well as post likes, comments and shares. There are others too.

As such, focusing on clicks is perhaps not the best measure of direct engagement and campaign performance.

5) You’ve got cross-device tracking issues

Conversions on mobile devices aren’t always tracked by cookie-based analytics platforms. Mobile apps and browsers often refuse to cooperate with one another when it comes to cookies.

Facebook provides ‘cross-device reports’ that will help improve visibility in this area, but the likelihood is that there are always going to be issues.

6) You’ve got Google (or other) Analytics issues

It’s always worth sense checking your analytics setup whenever discrepancies show up. Is everything working as it should be? 

Sometimes a simple website change that nobody told you about can lead to a savage skewing of your numbers. Advertising is occasionally the canary in the coal mine.

7) You’re not tracking your links properly

It goes without saying that you’re probably using Google’s URL builder to help track campaigns. If you’re not, then take a look at how it works.

It’s worth adding that I share these butt ugly links on a daily basis on channels that they are not attributed to, so this is also an imperfect solution.

For example, people post links on Twitter that are often appended with 100+ characters of tracking code. This is all very well, until you see ‘medium=email’ or some other non-social campaign identifier in there.

View post on imgur.com

The starting point in the above example appears to be a daily email newsletter. The end point, as far as my click is concerned, was Twitter.

As such I’m increasingly questioning how these links are actually attributed. We need to understand how these links are shared, and to stop overstating the performance of email (and similar ‘campaign’ channels).

Supersized doses of salt are needed when tracking performance in this manner. The smartest people in the room take a wider view on attribution.

8) You’ve got a slow-ass website

If your site takes an age to power up then you’re going to lose people between the ad click and the page loading. The longer it takes, the more people will bail out.

If your analytics tags don’t fire immediately then there’s going to be a reporting discrepancy.

In addition, some users might click on an ad twice if all they see is a blank loading page the first time around (and then press the back button, and try again). Double trouble.

9) Your users are disabling JavaScript en masse

Ok, so they’re probably not, but this will account for some of the measurement gap.

A couple of years ago the GDS found that 1.1% of web users weren’t running JavaScript, either by accident or design. Since most analytics platforms use JavaScript it could account for a small discrepancy.

10) Your time settings are not in sync

You might want to check that both Facebook and your analytics platform are both set to the same time zone and reporting period.

11) You’re using filters

Analytics tools allow you to ignore certain data. Make sure that you’re not excluding a large chunk of people who engage with your advertising, whether that’s on Facebook or elsewhere.

What else is worth testing? Any other comments or suggestions?

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1TnEDpB via transformational marketing
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11 reasons why your Facebook ad measurement is messed up

A recurring theme I hear among paid social pros is the measurement discrepancy between Facebook and Google Analytics.

People seem to have a really hard time matching up what’s happening with campaigns on Facebook and subsequent engagement, as measured by their analytics platform of choice (including – but not limited to – Google Analytics).

Some people go as far as claiming that this is systematic click fraud perpetrated by Facebook. This is highly unlikely, for all kinds of obvious reasons. However, there is a clear problem.

The good news is that you can do something about it.

Third party tools use different measurement techniques, so aligning two platforms perfectly is pretty much impossible. But you can get much closer.

If your data looks way off, then it’s probably linked to at least one of the following reasons. Check and doublecheck to see if you can narrow the measurement gap.

Do let me know if there are other reasons for the discrepancies in the comments section below, or if any of these things help you.

1) Your measurement window is screwy

By default Facebook sets the window to one-day after an ad was viewed, or a 28-day post-click window. If this isn’t what you want to track, then you should change your settings.

2) You’re measuring conversions on a last click basis

This isn’t how Facebook does it, so you’re measuring different things.

Facebook says:

“Third-party platforms capture conversions that resulted from a direct referral. Even if you created a campaign using URL parameters to track the link used in your ad, third parties identify those last-clicks, or linear conversions, where the user clicked an ad and immediately converted.”

Facebook aside, it’s definitely time to start attributing performance across channels, rather than focusing on the last click in the user journey.

3) You have pixel implementation issues

Perhaps your tech setup isn’t working properly? Facebook points at the following possible issues and tests to try:

1. Check whether your raw pixel fires match.
2. If you’re using conditional firing, expect a small discrepancy.
3. Check your currency, decimal places and other variables in your purchase event codes.
4. Use the Pixel Helper tool to check for duplicate pixel fires
5. Check that you’re not “pixel piggybacking on existing tag managers”.

4) You’re comparing clicks with apples

Total ‘clicks’ as reported by Facebook includes a whole bunch of stuff that you may not be aware of. You might think a click is all about the link in the ad, but you’d be wrong.

For example, as well as the links in your ads, Facebook clicks include things like expanding descriptions, clicking to read comments, page likes, as well as post likes, comments and shares. There are others too.

As such, focusing on clicks is perhaps not the best measure of direct engagement and campaign performance.

5) You’ve got cross-device tracking issues

Conversions on mobile devices aren’t always tracked by cookie-based analytics platforms. Mobile apps and browsers often refuse to cooperate with one another when it comes to cookies.

Facebook provides ‘cross-device reports’ that will help improve visibility in this area, but the likelihood is that there are always going to be issues.

6) You’ve got Google (or other) Analytics issues

It’s always worth sense checking your analytics setup whenever discrepancies show up. Is everything working as it should be? 

Sometimes a simple website change that nobody told you about can lead to a savage skewing of your numbers. Advertising is occasionally the canary in the coal mine.

7) You’re not tracking your links properly

It goes without saying that you’re probably using Google’s URL builder to help track campaigns. If you’re not, then take a look at how it works.

It’s worth adding that I share these butt ugly links on a daily basis on channels that they are not attributed to, so this is also an imperfect solution.

For example, people post links on Twitter that are often appended with 100+ characters of tracking code. This is all very well, until you see ‘medium=email’ or some other non-social campaign identifier in there.

View post on imgur.com

The starting point in the above example appears to be a daily email newsletter. The end point, as far as my click is concerned, was Twitter.

As such I’m increasingly questioning how these links are actually attributed. We need to understand how these links are shared, and to stop overstating the performance of email (and similar ‘campaign’ channels).

Supersized doses of salt are needed when tracking performance in this manner. The smartest people in the room take a wider view on attribution.

8) You’ve got a slow-ass website

If your site takes an age to power up then you’re going to lose people between the ad click and the page loading. The longer it takes, the more people will bail out.

If your analytics tags don’t fire immediately then there’s going to be a reporting discrepancy.

In addition, some users might click on an ad twice if all they see is a blank loading page the first time around (and then press the back button, and try again). Double trouble.

9) Your users are disabling JavaScript en masse

Ok, so they’re probably not, but this will account for some of the measurement gap.

A couple of years ago the GDS found that 1.1% of web users weren’t running JavaScript, either by accident or design. Since most analytics platforms use JavaScript it could account for a small discrepancy.

10) Your time settings are not in sync

You might want to check that both Facebook and your analytics platform are both set to the same time zone and reporting period.

11) You’re using filters

Analytics tools allow you to ignore certain data. Make sure that you’re not excluding a large chunk of people who engage with your advertising, whether that’s on Facebook or elsewhere.

What else is worth testing? Any other comments or suggestions?

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1TnEDpB via transformational marketing
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How To Achieve Even Better Ad Targeting With Google Customer Match

Customer Match was released just over four months ago, giving you the capability to upload email addresses provided by your customer base. This enables you to target users across devices on the search network, YouTube and Gmail ads within Google AdWords.This makes customer match a powerful feature for businesses to […]

The post How To Achieve Even Better Ad Targeting With Google Customer Match appeared first on Receptional.com.

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Fixing 404 Error Pages with Google Analytics

There have been multiple blog posts written over the years on how to use Google Analytics to identify and fix 404 Error Pages.

I have even written one myself and it’s a common slide in many of my talks. But with the newest features that are available within Google Analytics, these blog posts are due an update.

Custom Variables vs Events

The first question is whether to capture details of the 404 Error Page within page level customisations or as an event.

My approach is to capture more information about the page using page level customisation. Since viewing a 404 Error Page is not an event, it should not be treated as one.

Google Analytics tracking

Step one in the GA tracking for Error Pages is to rename the page name to /error-page/404-error. This means all views of this page are grouped together, making them easier to identify and analysis becomes significantly easier.

There are two key pieces of information to capture on each 404 Error Page. The first is the URL of the page and the second is the referrer to the page.

Both are available as default Variables within GTM (Google Tag Manager) and so no developer support is required to capture them. The L3 Analytics approach is to capture the Page URL as a Content Grouping and the Referrer as either a Content Grouping or a Hit scoped Custom Dimension.

Previously I would have stopped at that tracking, but an Error Page view should now also be captured as a Custom Metric. It will provide an easy way to see the total number of Error Page views for the website or broken down by any session/user dimension.

Google Analytics configuration

Previously, we always recommended creating a Goal for View Error Page. It is useful to know if visitors are seeing 404 Error Pages and if this metric ever exceeds a certain value (e.g. 2%) for this to trigger an immediate action.

This should be set up as a Custom Alert within Google Analytics to notify you when visitors are experiencing an excessive number of 404 Error Pages.

To investigate the cause of 404 Error Pages, a Custom Report is required. It’s fairly simple, the report is filtered to only include data from 404 Error Pages and the dimensions are the Page URL and the Referrer.

The metrics in this example are Pageviews and Unique Pageviews (basically error counts) although you can now use the Custom Metric of Error Page Views.

There are two tabs within this Custom Report with the dimensions simply reversed in the second tab. When the report is run, it displays URLs which trigger the 404 Error Page, allowing you to click through to see the referrer to this page.

Switching to the second tab flips these two dimensions, displaying the referrers that trigger 404 Errors and allowing you to click through to view the URLs of the error pages. While this doesn’t solve everything, it allows you to identify the source of 404 Error Pages and where they are sending traffic to in error.

You could search the page source for these URLs or it might be obvious from their structure why there is a problem.

There was one occasion on which we really had to dig deep into the data to identify the cause of a 404 Error Page; have a look at our real-life example here.

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