How are beacons going to affect search marketing?

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the effects beacons and proximity marketing may have on search strategy.

(I actually work for a company that makes beacons and management software, so it’s not just me being boring).

I’ve found little doubt that it will bring some very fundamental changes to the way we reach customers, and the type of targeting and data management we’ll need to master in order to do things properly.

Although perhaps not in the way you might think…

Improving proximity results

Search Engine Watch has spoken about beacons a lot in the past, but just in case you need a refresher, a beacon is a tiny device that can transmit a signal to any Bluetooth device in range – phones, fitness bracelets, headphones, smartwatches etc.

Usually this happens through an app (although Google in particular are taking steps to remove this friction and enable direct device communication), and before the privacy police wade in, it’s all completely opt-in.

It certainly has some obvious ramifications for local search.

In the past, we’ve largely been limited to areas defined by map coordinates for localisation. These are fine for locating buildings, but not so hot once people actually enter a space.

Beacons have a big advantage here because they get that location down to an area a couple of metres across, and they allow you to transmit and receive data in realtime. If I’m standing by the apples in your supermarket, you can fire me a coupon.

I’m using that example on purpose by the way, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

Beacons don’t need to be interruptive

For marketers, there seems to be an assumption that beacons are an interruptive marketing tool.

Retail couponing is the most obvious use-case after all, but just as early ecommerce sites learned, couponing is no way to build a successful business. And as the publishing industry is learning, interruptive marketing… just isn’t very good really. People don’t like it in most cases.

As I say though, this is only an assumption. The real value of beacons is actually almost the complete opposite of interruptive.

It is in contextual interactions, which usually rely on either an active request from a user, or passive scanning and data aggregation by the person deploying the beacons.

In other words, if I visit a museum, download it’s app and enable push notifications while I’m there, then I’m actively searching for information abut my location.

If not, then I can still be monitored as an anonymous device that is moving around the museum. Once this data is collected, there is a lot of potential value. Maybe it’s time to move that Rodin statue to a more prominent position (possibly next to the gift shop).

Search will need to become hyper-relevant in an open beacon marketplace

So what does this mean for search?

Currently, a lot of local search isn’t that great. There are plenty of fine examples, but there is certainly an adoption curve, particularly for small businesses.

Do a quick search for something like ‘Bike shop, Shrewsbury’ and you can usually see which businesses have a lot of low-hanging SEO fruit that they just aren’t optimising for.

This is a missed chance, but it is usually being missed because of a lack of familiarity and time. People who are busy running a hardware store don’t often have time or money to really concentrate on good SEO.

As beacon deployment becomes more widespread (and it is going to be), this situation is going to change for the user on the ground. App networks and beacons deployed as general infrastructure in more locations mean that local optimisation is opened up to more players, with more resources. Why should our local bike store be wasting time optimising when Raleigh can be doing it for them?

Local SEO will begin to be a wider concern not for the locations themselves, but for the companies that sell through those locations. And those companies have the resources and processes available to start doing a really good job.

There is however, still a place for the location itself in all this, and that is in adding contextual value, which may not come from purely commercial campaigns.

Recently I visited Edgelands at the Barbican in London, where one of our clients has deployed beacons that guide visitors around the interesting (and slightly confusing) internal space.

The interesting thing here is that it occurs through sound, so that visitors are able to view their surroundings, rather than keeping their eyes glued to their phone screens. It adds context while keeping the visitor engaged with the physical space, rather than having the two vie for attention.

With the rise of experience stores, this is going to become a more important point of differentiation over the next few years. Customers won’t want distracting alerts and pop-ups, they’ll want something that provides a richer experience.

From the marketing side, providing these will become a way to deepen brand affinity as much as increase immediate sales.

Search is about to leave its silos behind

This makes location a strange, mixed bag for search. On one side, brands providing advertising through app networks and beacon fleets owned by third parties (in my opinion, telcos are currently best placed to handle and benefit from large scale deployment, as they already have large data networks and physical locations).

In many cases, this will be about hyper-localised PPC campaigns. On the other, locations providing realtime SEO, with a shifting set of keywords based on whatever is currently happening in-store (or in-museum, or in-restaurant for instance).

It means that we’ll have to get better at aligning our data and working out which signals really matter, and we’re going to need to get insanely good at management and targeting.

I hate to use this word, but search will need to become more holistic, and even more aligned with marketing. There’s a huge opportunity here for search marketers, customer experience, data management and more.

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17 inspirational examples of data visualization

We can all collect masses of data, but it only becomes genuinely useful when we use it to make a clear point.

This is where data visualization comes in. Showing data in context and using creativity to make that same data tell a story can truly bring the numbers to life.

There are a whole bunch of data visualization tools out there to help create your own, but here are some existing examples for inspiration.

A day in the life of Americans

This excellent visualization from Flowing data uses information from the American Time Use Survey to show what Americans are up to at any time of day.

What streaming services pay artists

This from the wonderful information is beautiful website, looks at how the major online streaming music services compare in terms of paying the musicians.

Two centuries of US immigration

This fantastic visualization from metrocosm shows the various waves of immigration into the United States from the 19th century to the present day.

US population trends over time

This gif from the Pew Research Center is a great example of how movement can be used to convey shifts and trends over time.

Why you should take the bus

The German town of Münster produced this series of images back in 1991 to encourage bus use. It’s beautifully simple showing the relative impact of the same number of people (72) on bicycles, in cars, or on a bus.

What happens in an internet minute?

This infographic from excelacom presents what happens online in 60 seconds, including:

• 150 million emails are sent.
• 1,389 Uber rides.
• 527,760 photos shared on Snapchat.
• 51,000 app downloads on Apple’s App Store.
• $203,596 in sales on Amazon.com.

US wind map

This moving visualization shows wind speed and direction in real time.

It looks great and is easy to understand, which is key to effect data visualization. This one comes from hint.fm.

Daily routines of creative people

I’ve always been pretty cynical about this ‘X things successful people do before breakfast’ stuff – as if by following this, people are suddenly going to become Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein.

However, this one from podio showing daily routines of creative people is very interesting. It won’t turn you into a great composer, but it’s a fascinating insight nonetheless.

The impact of vaccines

This is a series of visualizations from the Wall Street Journal, which shows the impact of vaccines on various infectious diseases.

It’s striking stuff, which clearly demonstrates the incredible positive impact of vaccination programs in the US.

London food hygeine

This is a great use of freely available data to provide useful information for the public.

The one million tweet map

This uses tweet data to present a geographical representation of where people tweet about topics. The example below is for ‘Brexit‘.

The fallen of WW2

This, from Neil Halloran is a cross between data visualization and documentary.

There are two versions of this. The video version you can see embedded below, and an interactive version.

People living on earth

A simple but very effective visualization of the world’s population, and the speed at which it increases.

The ultimate data dog

This, again from Information is Beautiful, uses data on the intelligence and other characteristics of dog breeds, plotting this against data on the popularity of various breeds from the American Kennel Club.

How much did band members contribute to each Beatles album? 

This from Mike Moore, shows the relative writing percentage for each Beatles album, as well as the contribution over time.

A day on the London Underground

From Will Gallia, who used data from a single day’s use of the London underground to produce this timelapse visualization.

Fish Pharm

This is from way back in 2010, and illustrates the fact that antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals are now showing up in fish tissue.

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Google’s Keyword Planner tool just became even more inaccurate

You’re probably familiar with the Keyword Planner tool, which is one of the best sources we have to spot opportunities and make the business case for an investment into paid or organic search campaigns.

One of the things it provides is guidance on the volume of searches for any given query. The numbers reported in the tool have always been somewhat vague. They are rounded up and numbers end with at least one zero. A pinch of salt has always been required when digesting the data.

It turns out that these numbers are now even more imprecise.

Jennifer Slegg spotted that Google has started to combine related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one (bigger) number.

No longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation.

As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change. No sudden jump in search queries, just an amalgamated number. Be warned.

Here are a couple of examples…

Bundling together anagrams and regional spellings

Lumping together plurals and phrases without spaces

The problem could be exacerbated by third party tools. Jennifer says:

“For those that don’t notice the change – or worse, pulling the data from tools that haven’t updated to take into account the change – this means that some advertisers and SEOs are grossly overestimating those numbers, since many tools will combine data, and there is no notification alert on the results to show that how Google calculates average monthly searches has been changed.”

So yeah, this isn’t exactly good news. In fact, I can’t think of any benefit to the end user, but Google has a history of obfuscating data, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

That said, it once again pushes the focus towards relevance and context rather than pure volume. Advertisers and content creators would do well to focus on optimising clickthrough rate and landing page performance, rather than just shotgun marketing.

Guesstimated data aside, you can use Search Console to make sense of actual performance. Map your page impressions to organic (or paid) positions and you’ll get a sense of how accurate the Keyword Planner data is for any given term.

It’s also worth remembering that there are seasonal factors at play with the reported data. Volumes shown are an approximate figure based on 12 months search data. You might get a better idea of more accurate monthly figures if you cross-reference data from with Google Trends, which will show seasonal spikes (February is a big month for flowers).

Keyword Planner replaced Google’s Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator about three years ago. Users of the old tools initially complained about missing the broad match and phrase match options. Now, they’re going to miss even more detail around keywords and data.

Proceed with caution, as ever.

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7 Definitive Do’s and Don’ts of Google AdWords Pay Per Click

Using Google AdWords or Bing Advertising can be one of the most efficient and most effective ways to drive highly targeted traffic to your websites and/or landing pages in a relatively quicker time frame than other digital marketing campaigns. However, there is a cost involved as there is with other […]

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How do people view search engine results pages?

The F-shaped pattern has been the commonly understood way in which web users browse sites and search results. 

Has user behaviour changed since then, or have perhaps the changes that Google and others have made to the presentation of search results made a difference?

An eyetracking study carried out by ConversionXL looks into this question, comparing the results with previous studies.

Here are a few key findings from the article…

The F-pattern no longer holds up

The F-pattern was something discovered during testing by Jakob Nielsen. The finding being that users read or scan pages in two horizontal movements followed by a vertical movement. Thus the F-shape.

For search results, as in the example shown on the right below (this is from 2006) we can see that the first two or three results attract most attention, while results below four or five downwards attract less interest.

Now the SERPs are different. We have more images to catch the eye in some results, as well as features like rich snippets, which stand in contrast to the more text-heavy Google results of the past.

Perhaps as a result of this ConversionXL were unable to replicate the F-shape in their tests. In the example below, the first result gets the maximum attention, with very little below the third result.

Google was right to remove right hand side ads

Google’s removal of right hand side ads earlier this year is backed up by the study.

In a nutshell, ads on the right didn’t get much attention, but ads at the top of search results did, at least until users realised they were ads (explains the green text I’d say).

Contrasts between Bing and Google

The study found a few differences in user behaviour on the two search engines:

• Users took longer before exploring below the fold on Bing. Google users began to view below the fold after around 7.1 seconds. On Bing this figure was 10.5 seconds.
•  Bing users spend more time viewing results above the fold. On Bing, users spent around 9.8 seconds compared to 7.8 on Google.
• Bing users took longer to view the first organic result. On Google, users viewed it after 3.3 seconds. On Bing this was 8.8 seconds.

In summary

I’d recommend reading the full article for more detail around the tests, but there are some interesting findings.

It seems that the f-shaped pattern may be no more, though I’d like to see other eye tracking studies before drawing that conclusion with certainty. There are so many variables – number of ads in results, images, featured snippets etc – that can effect the reading pattern.

There may well be a number of different patterns according to result types and, of course, user behaviour may change according to the intent behind the search.

One thing seems to be clear though – the top two or three results still command most attention. (This is from an Advanced Web Ranking CTR study in 2014)

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RLSA and Customer Match: using smart segmentation for big wins

So we all know about RLSA (retargeted lists for search ads) and its ability to use Customer Match, but how many of us are actually taking advantage of it?

The big problem with RLSA Customer Match is that in order for it to really have an impact on volume and performance, you need to have a very large customer list.

To be specific, leveraging RLSA with Customer Match is only worth the effort if you have a list of customers larger than 50,000.

So let’s say you do have that size database. How do you actually use RLSA with Customer Match to make the most of your re-engagement efforts? It all starts with segmentation.

We’ll go into how to do that, then explain why creating a campaign for each segment is important (TL;DR: it allows you to customize messaging and landing pages).

Segment your audience

The first step is to smartly segment out your customer list. There are a couple of ways to do so:

1. Use Average Order Value: Segmenting out audiences by high AOV, mid AOV, and low AOV helps determine which audiences tend to purchase our more expensive, luxury/premium type products and those who go after the cheaper items.
2. Use gender-specific categories: If your customers have purchased men’s clothing, accessories, or products or women’s clothing, accessories, or products, make sure your segments reflect that.
3. Segment by brands/line of product: If you have certain types of brands or lines of products, you may want to segment customers out by the brand/product line they’ve purchased.

Now that you’ve segmented your customers, you can create an RLSA campaign for each audience segmentation. Take the AOV example above. Based on that segmentation, you would create three campaigns: RLSA_HighAOV, RLSA_MidAOV, RLSA_LowAOV.

Split out segmented campaigns to get creative and destination control

Everyone knows that RLSA reaches users with high intent, which means that higher bids are appropriate; you can do that by just layering RLSA on existing campaigns and applying bid modifiers.

So why go through the hassle of creating additional campaigns for RLSA efforts?

Well, the benefit of creating them in separate campaigns is achieving complete control over creative and the post-click experience – getting the ability to tailor creative to each segment you’d like to reach.

As an example, you know that high-AOV audiences performing a relevant keyword search have purchased more luxury products, so your messaging should be more geared around quality, design, or high-end products.

On the flip side, for a lower-AOV segment, you should consider messaging more around deals, discounts, and affordability.

So you have a more tailored creative experience for each audience segment. That’s great – this can help with bringing customers back onto your site. Now it’s time to also ensure you’re sending users in each segment to the most relevant page possible.

Again, taking the AOV example, you would want to send your higher-AOV audience to a page that shows the relevant product/category they are searching for (if you have multiple pages that fit the bill, send them to the page showing more high-end items).

For lower-AOV audiences, use a relevant product page with deals and discounts – or even direct them to a sale/clearance page.

If you have a large customer list, RLSA with Customer Match is a powerful re-engagement tool – but success starts with smart segmentation.

Good luck!

Sana Ansari is the General Manager of 3Q Accelerate.

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Five brief but helpful tips for Google AdSense placement

AdSense is an advertising service provided by Google that gives webmasters a free and relatively simple way of earning money through display advertising on their site.

Of course the terrain of display advertising in the last few years has become a rocky place. With more and more people subconsciously becoming used to ignoring display and the rise of other content-led marketing methods.

However, display ads can theoretically bring in revenue if they are targeted properly and are relevant to the user, context and device.

And now that 21% of internet users globally only use their smartphone to access the internet, spurring Google to strengthen its mobile-friendly algorithm, it’s critical for all businesses to optimise their advertising for mobile.

AdSense has recently issued its own report on tips for mobile web success, and in among the general advice and lovely graphics, there are some brief tips for ad placement that you may not be aware of, so let’s take a quick look at them now.

Mobile ad placement best practice

As the report says, you should focus on creating “a flow between your content and the ad placements.” Basically your ads should feel like part of the user experience, and served when your visitors are most receptive.

The following tips are taken directly from the report…

Tip #1

When using enhanced features in text ads, decrease accidental clicks by moving the ad units a minimum of 150 pixels away from content.

Tip #2

Think about peeking your ad units above the fold for a great UX while maximizing revenue potential.

Tip #3

Potential eCPMs increase when you swap 320×50 for 320×100 ad units.

Tip #4

Anchor social links to make sharing easy.

Tip #5

Use the 300×250 ad unit for a potential increase in fill rates and eCPM.

Of course all these tips merely apply to AdSense display ads. There are many more pitfalls to be aware of when using other ad formats, especially if you use full-screen app ads on mobile sites, which you will be punished for.

And much of this is moot if you don’t have the fundamentals of mobile optimisation correct in the first place.

So your site needs to be responsive or adaptive to every screen size, the page speed needs to be fast, content should be easy to read… in fact, you should definitely read our comprehensive guide to mobile optimisation for more details.

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How to improve your CTR using Google Search Console

Last month I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use Google Search Console, covering every aspect of what is essentially a giant toolshed full of useful stuff for all webmasters to use.

It was exhaustive, and probably exhausting. Don’t read the whole thing in one sitting, just dip in and out when you come across something you’re unsure about.

While wading through Search Console’s huge amount of features, I noticed a few elements that deserved to be highlighted, not only because I had no idea they existed or were even accessible to webmasters, but also because they may be able to help raise your click-through rate (CTR) on search engine results pages (SERPs), or at the very least, show you where to improve.

The first thing you need to be aware of is this… You can see all the search queries that bring traffic to your site in Search Console.

Yeah it was a massive pain when Google encrypted your search terms Google Analytics and replaced them with the ambiguous (not provided) but at least you can still find them here…

Just go to Search Console, then click on Search Traffic>Search Analytics.

There you go, a veritable bounty of delicious search terms, keywords and traffic-generating pages.

Now here’s the really good bit…

How can I use Search Console to help improve my CTR?

As I said in my original Search Console walkthrough, here you can toggle between a variety of options, filters and date-ranges.

Here are the Impressions and CTR for my own website Methods Unsound for April 2016:

Using this simple overview, ordered by number of impressions, I can see which posts have the highest visibility, but also the ones with a relatively low CTR.

Perhaps all these pages need is a tweak of a meta-description or the addition of some structured data?

And that’s what I did. I went through every article in the top 20 with particularly low CTR compared to impressions, and I made a number of changes to them in the CMS, including using the recommendations as featured in my guide to writing meta descriptions and guide to writing title tags.

These included:

• Making sure the most important keywords for the webpage showed up in the meta description.
• Making sure the most important keywords were first in title tags.
• Rewrote meta descriptions so they were more legible and meaningful.
• Made sure the meta descriptions were as compelling and as relevant as possible.
• Made sure meta descriptions were no longer than 135 – 160 characters long
• Made sure title tags were 50-60 characters long, including spaces.
• Made sure headlines (<h1> tag) were different from the title tag.
• Removed duplicate meta descriptions and title tags.
• Used rich snippets, in the form of Schema markup, to add elements such as visible star ratings to my results.

The results

Looking at the following 30 day period’s Impressions and CTR, here’s what I achieved in making these small changes…

If you look in the two last columns you can see the CTR for both April and May, and if I’m terribly honest it hasn’t been a ‘resounding’ success, but there has been some small improvements to a few of the pages…

Page 2 saw a 0.10% increase. Page 3 saw a 0.02% increase. Page 4 had a much more impressive 4.5% increase. Page 5 had a 0.64% increase. Page 10, a 0.73% increase…

Overall, the average CTR for the site has risen from 2.7% to 3.37%, but as you should already be pointing out, this can also be attributed to wealth of other factors – seasonal changes in traffic, algorithm fluctuations, general site health – and not the general on-page improvements to a handful of posts.

Also, sadly, a few of the pages’ went down in terms of CTR, and although I could blame the fact that most of those pages are more review and news based – and therefore have a limited shelf-life – that’s not strictly true for all of them.

This is far from an exact science, and clearly I have more work to do when it comes to my own on-page improvements. And for another test such as this, it would definitely be better to make changes to more evergreen posts (i.e. anything that’s not a review, news item or a specific timed event).

But what my intention is here is to show you that using Search Console you can clearly see which of your posts are doing well in terms of visibility but poor for click-through, and that by using some basic SEO techniques, you may be able to make a difference.

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EU referendum and brexit betting: who’s winning in organic search?

With the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU coming up this week, there has obviously been a lot of debate online. 

It has also become a major online gambling event, with the value of bets set to exceed the previous biggest political event, the 2012 US election, according to a recent press release from online betting exchange Betfair.

In fact, it has now exceeded that mark, with more than £43 million in bets matched on the exchange. There’s also plenty of betting on the financial markets too, but we’ll stick to the bookmakers for this article.

While the polls predict a close outcome, the bookies are more certain that a brexit vote is unlikely. Odds of 4/1 for a leave vote seem very generous when some opinion polls put the two sides neck and neck.

One interesting aspect with a relatively unique betting event like this is the opportunity for new customer acquisition. It’s likely to attract customers who wouldn’t normally bet, and should be seen as an opportunity for the betting sites.

So which betting sites are ranking for brexit betting?

Here’s the data from Google Trends, showing the spike in search interest for terms around EU referendum betting.

We can see the spike in interest, which obviously presents an opportunity for traffic and customer acquisition for the betting sites.

Unlike seasonal SEO events like Christmas or major sports championships, this referendum is a one-off (hopefully) so strategy has to be geared towards this single event.

In the case of the EU referendum, the betting sites have had around a year to prepare for the event, though we can see that interest in betting has only really taken in the last two to three months.

According to PI Datametics, the term ‘EU referendum odds’ was searched on average 1,000 times in November 2015 and is now being searched 40,500 times a month.

We don’t have the data for June yet, but I think it’s safe to assume that we’ll be in six figures, as the spike on the chart above suggests.

Top organic search performers

The top performers (from the gambling sector) are:

1. Odds Checker
2. Paddy Power
3. Ladbrokes

All three sites rank highly for the term, and consistently too. Just compare their performance to that of their rivals:

This points to a lack of a coherent strategy around EU referendum betting. For example, Betfair has has 10 separate pages performing for this term, hindering its ability to hit a high search position.

Again, so much of this is about effective internal linking and creation of single landing pages for high value and high traffic search terms.

Clearly, with £43m matched on the exchange alone, Betfair has done well, but could it have done better with the right SEO strategy?

A missed PPC opportunity?

One final side point here – have the betting sites missed a PPC opportunity around referendum betting?

There is just one site buying ads today on the term. Given the spike we can see from Google Trends, and the high cost of customer acquisition for online betting, it seems strange that more sites aren’t using PPC to gain instant visibility here.

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How To Find The Best Bloggers and Journalists For Your Next Campaign

You have an awesome campaign idea for a client or a new project but are not quite sure where to find the right bloggers and/or journalists to target. This article will show you a few places to look for contacts as well as giving you some hints and tips for […]

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Everything you need to know about AdWords’ store visit conversions

Ecommerce sales came to more than $341 billion in 2015. That’s huge. But amazingly, 90% of sales still happen in stores, not online, according to Google.

That’s why AdWords introduced the in-store visits metric in 2014. The consumer purchase journey is now more complex than ever – and Google wanted to create a way businesses could understand how much in-store foot traffic their location-based PPC ads were driving.

Thus far, Google has measured more than 1 billion store visits. But not every business has access to this powerful metric.

At the Google Performance Summit – where Google announced Expanded Text Ads, new local search ads, and gave us a preview of the new AdWords interface – in-store conversions were one of the huge topics of conversation, and Google promised this metric would soon become more widely available to more businesses.

If you’re a local business, the combination of new Google Maps Local Search ads and in-store conversions will be an absolutely killer combination.

To get you ready, here are seven things you need to know about AdWords’ store visit conversions.

1. What are store visit conversions?

Google estimates store visit conversions by looking at phone location history to determine whether someone who clicked on your search ad ended up visiting your store. Google looks at ad clicks on all devices – smartphone, desktop, and tablet.

In-store conversion data will help you understand which ad campaigns, keywords, and devices send the most people to your store so you can optimize your account to increase ROI. It doesn’t guarantee that someone bought from you – just that they visited after clicking on one of your ads.

Google’s goal is to provide the data so you can attribute the online value of your ad spend. In less than two years, advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel, automotive, and finance industries have counted more than one billion store visits globally.

For privacy reasons, in-store conversion data is based on anonymous and aggregated data gathered from people who have Location History turned on. A conversion can’t be tied to an individual ad click or person.

Here’s Google’s official overview video on AdWords Store Visits Conversions:

2. What technology does Google use to measure store visits?

Google Maps knows the exact coordinates and borders of millions of businesses globally. That’s why the AdWords team worked with the Google Maps team to match location history for hundreds of millions of users with Maps data for more than two million businesses.

Google says they use a hybrid approach with a large number of signals in order to measure visits.

To ensure accuracy, Google also surveyed more than 5 million people to confirm they actually visited a store. Google used this information to update its algorithms and reported that its results are “99% accurate”.

3. What’s new with store visits?

At the Performance Summit, Google announced that it most recently made in-store visits available to manufacturers, like auto manufacturers, to track store visits to dealerships.

Google shared a case study on how Nissan UK has been using store visit conversion data to see which keywords and campaigns were driving people into their dealerships to buy a car and increase their ROI by 25x. They’ve used the data to map buyer journeys to reach them at key moments of the research journey.

They discovered that 6% of their mobile ad clicks resulted in a visit. This is huge, considering that the average consumer only visits a dealership twice before actually buying.

You can see more in this video AdWords posted:

4. Is Google using beacons to improve?

Google said it is starting to experiment with beacons to improve its algorithm. Google is exploring how to use Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) beacons for in-store analytics and in-store visits.

In fact, Google has a BLE beacon pilot underway that should eventually help people who operate at smaller locations and businesses by ensuring Google is getting and providing the most precise and accurate location data for the least amount of effort.

5. How many store visits are incremental?

Though most purchases happen in person at a physical location, digital channels – especially paid search – still play a huge role in the research and buying process.

Google wanted to quantify the substantial offline impact mobile search ads can have on a business. So Google ran a study of 10 top big box US retailers (including Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond) to determine how many store visits are incremental.

What Google found was that, on average, the number of incremental store visits driven by mobile search ads actually exceeded their number of online purchase conversions.

The study essentially found that these store visits otherwise never would have happened, if not for the influence of mobile search ads.

6. How can you get access to store visit conversions?

Store visits have been made available to more than 1,000 advertisers in 11 countries so far, and Google promises more will gain access soon. If you want to start tracking store visits, you can contact your account manager.

Not every business can track store visits yet – there are a few requirements. You must:

• Have multiple physical store locations in an eligible country.
• Receive “thousands” of ad clicks and “many” store visits every month.
• Link a Google My Business account to your AdWords account.
• Enable location extensions.

7. Where can you view visit conversions?

Store visit conversions will be added to the “All conversions” column in your campaign reports. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to add this column to your reports:

Store visits are available at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level and can be segmented by device. Google provides step-by-step instructions here.

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Tips And Tricks From SAScon

Now in its seventh year, SAScon is a search, analytics and social conference which takes place each June in Manchester, featuring some of Europe’s leading speakers. SEO and content marketer, Kayleigh Conway, was there this year and she picked up these nifty tips and tricks for improving your digital marketing […]

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15 data visualisation tools to help you present ideas effectively

The number of digital skills you need in order to be a functional and useful member of your organisation are increasing at a rate you might be struggling to keep up with.

As well as the ability to understand your analytics and be fully aware of basic SEO skills, you need to be able to present information and data in the clearest manner possible to members of your team and, of course, your senior management.

Luckily you don’t have to be a graphic design wizard to achieve this.

Here is a list of various free and premium visualisation tools that will help you communicate your ideas in a variety of formats, for a range of different experience levels. Hopefully you’ll pick up some impressive new skills here too.

Silk

With Silk you can publish attractive looking webpages featuring a variety of different interactive visualisations, based on your data-sets. These can exist as standalone pages, linking back to your own site for a little SEO benefit, or you can embed them wherever you like.

Sketch

Think of Sketch as a much easier to use, far more intuitive and BS-free version of Photoshop that’s also a damn sight cheaper. I’m including it here because after a recommendation from my learned friend Chris Lake, within the afternoon I had installed Sketch, messed around for a couple of hours and finished a fairly complex but crystal-clear multichannel content marketing plan. I love it.

Google Fusion Tables

Fusion Tables is a web app that allows you to gather, visualize, and share data tables.

You can filter and summarize across thousands of rows, then adapt the data to an embeddable and shareable chart, map or custom layout. Plus all your data organization is automatically saved in Google Drive.

Piktochart

I’ve recommended Piktochart so many times – as has everyone else on the internet in the business of making your data-vizs and infographics look brilliant. It’s just so easy to use and the templates help you achieve results very quickly.

Gephi

Gephi is an open-source data-viz tool for graphs and networks. It also allows for exploratory data, link and social analysis.

Easle.ly

Easle.ly possibly has the most satisfyingly meta-textual name on this list. It also has 1,000s of infographic templates at your disposal, as well as the ability to create one from scratch.

Hohli

Need a simple bar chart, line chart, venn diagram or graph rustled up in a flash, without any extra complicated bells and whistles? Hohli should have everything you need.

Gliffy

Gliffy allows you to make great looking flowcharts and diagrams, but its secret weapon is the fact it has collaboration at its core.

Infogr.am

Infogr.am has a really beautiful collection of templates for data-visualisation, possibly some of the best looking here, and it’s very easy to use.

Leaflet

With Leaflet, you can create incredible looking maps, that are fully interactive and mobile friendly, with tonnes of customisable features.

D3

D3 basically stands for data driven documents, but there is little basic about this tool. In fact, you should probably only use this one if you have some expertise already. However the results can be more than worth the work.

Bime

The analytics workspace, Bime has a great eye for stylish design, and its multi-device capabilities are impressive. Although it does come at a premium.

Chartblocks

The “world’s easiest” bar chart building app, plus also one of the nicest looking and quickest to use too.

Dygraphs

Dygraphs lets you make interactive charts which you can mouse over to highlight individual values, then click and drag to zoom-in, zoom-out or pan around.

Timeline

With Timeline you can create embeddable sequential timelines by uploading your data from a Google Spreadsheet. Each timeline is customisable and interactive, plus even though it’s open source it’s relatively easy to use for beginners.

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