Recently we shared the good news that Receptional had been nominated for the European Search Awards 2016. This week we have’ also been nominated for two MOMA Awards and The Drum Search Awards. At the MOMA Awards we will be competing for the best product/service launch on mobile for our […]
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Earlier this year, Google announced changes to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to now only show ads at the top and bottom of the search results. The changes will aim to bring the desktop experience closer to the mobile experience, although whether the number of ads shown to mobile […]
The post Google Removes Right Hand Side Bar Ads: What Does This Mean For Pay Per Click? appeared first on Receptional.com.
Facebook Live is growing in leaps and bounds. Companies that want to be on the leading edge would do well to integrate Facebook Live video into their marketing strategies. Not just content marketing, but also looking ahead into the not too distant future for how you can integrate live video into your social customer care.
Check out this fun highlight reel with several of my recent Facebook Live videos, along with golden nuggets tweeted from my live video keynote panel at Social Media Marketing World 2016 #SMMW16:
If you are extremely uncomfortable being on camera, you might consider identifying someone else on your team/in your company who is a natural on camera. And/or join your local Toastmasters or Speaking Circles to improve your comfort level in front of audiences. Plus, check out my lovely friend Jaeny Baik‘s excellent on-camera training. I’m seeing a big need for on-camera training with the popularity of live video these days!
People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live. This is because Facebook Live videos are more interesting in the moment than after the fact. ~Facebook
Whenever possible, immediately you finish your Live video, hop on to your desktop computer and edit. This feature seems to keep moving! Currently, it’s under the gray arrow at top right of the post, then click Edit Post. Previously, this would only open up the narrative area. Now, this opens up the full edit video panel.
Important areas to edit include:
Select from one of ten thumbnails, or upload your own custom one. You definitely should choose an appealing thumbnail, even though videos are always autoplay on Facebook desktop or mobile (unless a user has disabled this, but it’s a hard setting to find and most leave it enabled by default).
Add a call to action and a link. Ideally, you’ve also mentioned your call to action verbally whilst broadcasting live.
I’ve actually identified ten areas that you can edit (this is for all your videos on Facebook, whether uploaded natively or recorded Live):
#SMMW16 @MariSmith gets it. Put call to actions in your Live video so you can measure actual business results. Buttons. Links. URLs.
— Christopher Penn (@cspenn) April 19, 2016
To maximize your live video efforts, here are the specific steps I recommend:
Start out with strategic intent.
Always think about what your CTA (call to action) is going to be before going live.
Focus on being warm, personal, authentic, human.
Whether you are B2B or B2C, it’s all P2P: people to people.
Consider storyboarding your content ahead of time so you have a roadmap.
Remember to integrate your video content into your overall marketing strategy and editorial calendar.
Begin with the end in mind.
Think repurpose, repurpose, repurpose!
Download your Facebook Live HD video file.
Use an awesome video tool like Animoto in order to create a highlight reel, such as I’ve done with the video in this post above! Animoto makes it super easy to upload video clips, edit, add still images and text, select a great theme and choose from a wide variety of royalty free music.
Create a 30 second clip for Twitter.
Create a 60 second clips for Instagram.
Amplify the reach of your video content with ads (boosted posts) on Facebook and Instagram.
Consider using the audio only for a podcast (or both audio & video podcast!)
Embed your Facebook Live video (video only or include the post) in a blog post.
You might even try having an Admin on your page embed your Facebook Live video on your blog/website while you are broadcasting live. One of my fans asked me this question the other day — about whether people could watch Facebook Live as an embedded post on an external site without being logged into Facebook!
And, each time you end your Facebook Live video, be sure to go in and edit on desktop per the instructions above.
What is the future of Facebook Live?
Here are a few of my best predictions that businesses would do well to keep an eye on:
Multi person Facebook Live — will this be coming? I’m fairly sure it will, at some point! Facebook recently introduced group calling in Messenger. All the company has to do is add group video calling and the technology leap to offer multi-person Live would be next.
Facebook Live broadcast via desktop — this is a much desired feature, particularly for news anchors to be able to have a better setup than mobile phone sitting on a desk. Even with a tripod, the ability to broadcast Live via desktop–similar to Blab, or Google Hangouts, or any webinar platform–would bring another layer of awesomeness. 
Facebook Live and Messenger integration — companies could offer live video chat support to dramatically improve social customer care.
FB messenger chat bots + human interaction via live video will be unprecedented for cust service @MariSmith predicting the future #SMMW16 — business.com (@businessdotcom) April 19, 2016
That’s it!
What did I miss? Do you have any questions about optimizing Facebook Live video? What creative uses have you seen of Facebook Live video (or other live video, such as Blab, Periscope, or Google Hangout)? Please share in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you.
The post Facebook Live – Top Tips and Predictions from Mari Smith appeared first on MariSmith.com.
The bounce rate debate continues…
Bounce rates and how they affect a website’s ranking on Google has been discussed, dissected, and dismembered over and over again.
As fully transcribed on this site, a conversation between Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz, and Andrey Lipattsev, Google’s search quality senior strategist, led to a surprising discussion on click and bounce rates affecting search rankings.
Rand stated that he has recently been running a few experimental tests with various crowds of 500 to a couple thousand people.
Everyone participating was prompted to take out their cellphones, laptops, and digital what-have-yous and perform a specific search. Once the search listing appeared, he had everyone in the crowd click one of the listings at the bottom of the results page and then click away from that site. He then monitored the results over the next few days.
Rand found a whole bunch of inconsistencies. In a little more than half of the experiments, the ranking did change on the search engine results page (SERP), and in a little less than half of the experiments, the rankings did not change.
This begs the question:
Lipattsev believes that for each individual search query in the experiment, the generated interest regarding those specific searches impacts the rankings change rather than just the clicks and bounces.
He said that if a certain topic is gaining a substantial amount of searches and an increase in social media mentions, Google would pay more attention to that rather than a site getting more clicks.
Lipattsev says that it is certainly doable to determine exactly what causes a large rankings jump for an individual listing, but Internet-wide, it is much more difficult.
All this being said, what actually is a bounce rate?
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular site who navigate or “bounce” away after only viewing that individual webpage.
Usually, the term ‘bounce rate’ has a negative connotation associated with it. People think that if a visitor only visits one page and then leaves, it’s bad for business. Their logic isn’t that flawed, either. After all, a high bounce rate would indicate that a site does not have the high-quality, relevant content Google wants out of its top ranked sites.
A great Search Engine Journal article shows nine negative reasons why your website could potentially have a high bounce rate, including poor web design, incorrect keyword selection, improper links, and just bad content. It’s true that these high bounce rates can reflect poorly on a website… sometimes.
So, what gives?
Having a high bounce rate on something like a ‘contact us’ page can actually be a good thing. That’s more of a call-to-action site, where the goal of that particular page is to have the user find the contact information, and then actually contact the business. The visitor got what they came for and then left. Extra navigation around the website doesn’t really mean anything in this case.
Of course, if your site is more content-driven or offers a product or service, then your goal should be to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) and more traffic to each page.
Does Google know your bounce rate and are they using it to affect rankings? This Search Engine Roundtable article provides the short answer (which is “no”).
Many organizations don’t use Google Analytics, so Google has no way of tracking their bounce rate information. And even with the analytics that they can trace, it’s difficult to determine what they actually mean because every situation is different.
There are many factors that go into determining how long a visitor stays on a particular webpage. If a visitor remains on a site for over 20 minutes, they could be so engaged with your site’s content that they can’t even imagine leaving your wonderful webpage… or… it could mean they fell asleep at the screen because your website was so boring. It’s too difficult to tell.
If you are operating one of those websites that should have a lower bounce rate, these tips on lowering that number should be able to help. Some highlights include making sure each of your pages loads quickly, offers user-friendly navigation, avoids cluttered advertisements, and features quality content!
If bounce rates don’t affect Google’s rankings as much as you thought, you wonder how significant other ranking factors are. Well, Google recently revealed that magical information. They narrowed it down to three top ranking factor used by Google to drive search results:
It’s no shock that links and content matter, but RankBrain is still relatively new. It’s Google’s new algorithm to help determine search results (after factoring in links and content). RankBrain filters more complex searches and converts them into shorter ones, all the while maintaining the complexity of the search, thusly refining the results.
Google’s newest AI technology – and whatever other secret technologies they are working on – may resolve the never-ending debate over bounce rates, but it’s certainly going to be a difficult process.
More research is to come and Andrey believes the challenge to make bounce rate click data a strong and measurable metric is “gameable,” but Google still has a long way to go.
“If we solve it, good for us,” Andrey said, “but we’re not there yet.”
There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to SEO and all its intricacies. The greatest answer to any SEO question is always “it depends.”
You know what’s great about PPC? Even when your account is in the dumps, you can make small changes that can have a big impact on its performance and your ad spend.
And sometimes all it takes is a little bit of creativity.
So in the spirit of making small steps to improve your PPC, and building on my tips from last month, I’m going to share with you five ways you can get creative to save ad spend (and even make some money through more targeted advertising) in your PPC account.
Most PPC professionals know the usual ways to cut wasted ad spend, and hopefully you’re doing the following on a regular basis:
But, have you thought about things like:
These things can help you manage ad spend even more. Let’s look at those closer now.
Sometimes when you set up a remarketing campaign, even though you’re just targeting the US, you’ll often see traffic from other countries and it’s because they’ve been to your US website.
One of our client’s remarketing campaigns had a ton of traffic from countries outside of the US and Canada, but they’re not actually doing business in other countries, so we just excluded those.
By excluding countries outside of the U.S. and Canada, we were able to shave off a pretty penny.
Tiered bidding is one of those things that PPC pros usually have either a strong preference for, or don’t do at all. At my agency, we typically always do tiered bidding, but most of the accounts we inherit haven’t.
The gist of it is this (and here’s a good article on the nitty-gritty details): you can use multiple match types to bid on the same keywords to help control budget.
Say you use three match types: exact, phrase and broad. The idea of using tiered bidding is that you spend more money on the terms that are highly relevant. In turn, AdWords is going to give more play to the keyword type you’re willing to spend more on.
The exact match should be very targeted, whereas broad match will likely bring in some irrelevant terms. That’s why you’re going to bid lower on broad and higher on exact match, like the following example:
If you’re looking at ways to save money and focus on the more targeted traffic, you might consider this tiered bidding plan to get you there.
Ad delivery options determine how quickly you want the ad platform to use your budget each day. With AdWords, there are two settings, standard and accelerated:
At my agency, we almost always start with accelerated ad delivery with the goal of maximizing our chances of ad impressions while the demand is there.
On a few occasions, though, we’ve stepped out of our comfort zone to try standard delivery, and it can work well to save ad dollars—especially when you have a highly competitive space with a lot of search volume throughout the day.
Speaking of ad delivery, ad scheduling gets into the days and hours that an ad can show, and can help you boost conversions in a pinch.
At my agency, our go-to strategy is to deliver ads on all days at all hours (which happens to be the default setting in AdWords).
Normally with this setting, you’ll see things naturally slow down when the demand is not there. Going with the default setting tackles what happens when the outliers are looking for your services or products after hours.
For example, one of our B2B PPC clients can spend $1,000 a day Monday through Friday, and as low as $100 per day on the weekends. And they do get some leads that trickle in on Saturdays and Sundays, so why not grab those low CPA leads when possible?
Recognizing that sometimes you’ve got to tighten the belt even more, it’s simple to pause ads on weekends or during the late night and early morning hours with ad scheduling.
Google officially changed the way desktop ads display in the search results in February 2016. No longer in the right-hand side bar, ads now display above and below the organic listings (up to seven ads with three being the average for the top area).
If you’re trying to save a little cash, don’t be afraid to test by targeting a lower position on the page – like Position 4, even if that means you’re at the bottom of the page.
Early results show that Position 4 still gets play, and early tests that my agency has been performing show ad spend is way down for Position 4, but revenue is holding steady.
On the mobile side, we used to always vie for Position 1 (or else you might as well not have been on the page at all), but lately, we’ve been seeing three ads show up before the organic listings on a mobile device, so you can play with your ad position there as well, and possibly save some dollars.
Sometimes, saving on ad spend and bringing in more targeted conversions is all about creativity and being willing to test.
Ultimately it’s about using the knowledge of the business and your understanding (or the help files!) of the features available to you to come up with a system to reduce ad spend while bringing in more targeted buyers.
If you’re an automaker or car dealer, 2016 should be a good year for sales.
Intensive research conducted by my data scientist colleagues at Bing Ads shows that digital media, especially search, will be the perfect place to capture the attention of prospective petrol-heads as they venture out on their car-buying journey.
Well, interest rates as well as fuel rates are low while the consumer index, according to an IBISWorld industry report, remains high. As a result – additional disposable income and improved credit scores – demand for cars is also likely to increase. In fact, auto sales are forecast to grow through 2020, with growth peaking in 2018.
So what can car manufacturers and dealers do to ensure they make the most of this opportune time?
Here are three solid tips, to help you accelerate towards some meaningful digital connections with potential auto-shoppers:
If you’re a green car manufacturer, make sure you’re appealing to the millennials. “The Harris Poll” from Harris Interactive revealed that 57% of US millennials (18-37) would consider a traditional hybrid for their next lease or purchase. Compare that with just 43% of Baby Boomers willing to do the same.
There is one drawback – the higher price points is seen as a deterrent. Research from J.D. Power revealed that almost one in four buyers of gas-powered vehicles avoided the hybrid model due to cost.
Take action:
According to a Facebook study, only two in five shoppers have an early brand preference – in fact very few shoppers are exposed to digital ads early in the purchase process. This means there is a ripe opportunity to build brand and model awareness.
Microsoft’s internal data shows that consumers considered an average of 9.8 makes and 11.4 models prior to making their purchase decision.
PPC can be vital in this process since most shoppers will conduct their research online before visiting a dealership, according to Accenture.
Take action:
Digital ads are the most influential type of ad during the car-shopping process – more so than TV or print according to a study of U.S. car shoppers by G/O Digital. Yet the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reports that only 36% of auto marketers in the U.S. use paid search advertising.
With a quarter of car buyers reporting via a study by Nationwide that they find shopping for a car to be as stressful as preparing taxes or buying a home, effective ad copy can make a big difference.
When we think of ad copy, don’t limit yourself just to words. Car-buying is a visual process, with four in 10 searches being for images of cars. Microsoft’s internal data shows that 45% of consumers viewed more than 36.7 car images on a search engine.
Mobile devices mustn’t be ignored either. According to research by SessionM, seven in 10 smartphone users use their mobile device when shopping for a vehicle.
Here’s how the usage breaks down:
Take action:
These data-driven tips PPC tips for the auto industry compiled by data scientists from Bing Ads are sure to help you on your road to an extra-profitable 2016. Digital media, especially search, is the perfect place to insert your brand right at the start of the car-buyer research phase.
By the smart use of visual cues, demographic targeting and by paying attention to what ad copy resonates best, you’ll be well on the way to an empty car lot by the end of the year!
Feeling inspired? Share your favorite tips and ideas in the comments below.
Purna Virji is Senior Bing Ads Client Development and Training Manager at Microsoft and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.
