Bruce Clay's Blog, page 13

Super CRO Tools Session at #ConvCon

Super CRO Tools Session at #ConvCon was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Conversion Conference chair Tim Ash has invited a panel of CRO guests to talk about the tools that they depend on. The panel is comprised of Alex Harris, Angie Schottmuller and Justin Rondeau. This session was so well rated last year that they brought it back this year. You’ll learn the recommend tools that CRO pros use in their everyday life. Just think: one tool tip can pay for the whole conference!

Alex Harris’ CRO Tools He’d Take with Him on a Desert Island

Alex has been doing CRO since 2000.

Testing:

Optimizely is the testing tool he uses daily. Working with the dev team to set up tests and use these tests for long-term improvements. You can do A/B testing and multi-variate testing. You can set up goals. You can figure out how long it takes to run your tests.

Tim adds that Optimizely has been doing a big push for personalization. So the Optimizely platform isn’t just for testing; it’s going to real-time automate and personalize your content.

Usability tools:

UserTesting – it’s great to watch people go through your site, your competitor sites and Google search queries to find your site. Be careful to ensure you use the right people into your tests. For example, it might take a while to find the right users to test your site on IE. He recommends making sure your script it tailored to find these people. You don’t want to persuade people through the script you use.

Moderated user testing will get real feedback and observe reactions from ideal customers. It’s easy to do this with Skype or Screen Flow recording program. He recruits people for this kind of testing on Craigslist.

Live chat tools:

Olark is one of the easiest live chat tools. You should be talking to your customers, obviously, but for CRO, go through the transcripts in your live chat logs to understand the voice of your customer and top FAQs. In ecommerce you might see patterns of users looking for how long to ship and the return policy. You want to identify what is missing to persuade people to convert.

Intercom is a live chat tool, but also marketing automation, customer feedback and support. If someone does something on your website you can change the message based on what is going on.

Landing page and funnel tools:

Unbounce is great for landing pages and PPC campaigns and lead generation. It’s easy to customize. You can change the landing page headline to automatically match the ad headline the user clicked on.

LeadPages is very helpful to increase email opt-ins and lead generation. Aside from creating custom landing pages, you can also create lead digits – create a marketing funnel or response based on text messages. It’s easy to implement; you don’t need a development team.

Click Funnels is a new tool that just came out of beta. It’s easy-to-use funnel creation and landing page creation software.

Angie Schottmuller’s CRO Tools She Loves as Much as Star Wars

Her tools jump around to mobile, SEO and CRO.

She’d add a moderated user testing tool is GoTo Meeting. If you’re already using it for your video calls, you can add moderated user testing to its ROI. You can use it to record these calls so you can review later.

Unbounce updated their platform last Fall so that you can automatically publish to WordPress. Unbounce pages will publish in an Unbounce subdirectory and not a subdomain which is important for SEO. http://try.unbounce.com/angie/ will get you 3 months free.

Web pages are fatter and slower than they will a year ago. Please plan a way to prioritize page load time with your management and have them have performance goals. WebPageTest.org is the only tool she’s aware of that actually measures first view load time.

Social conversion/click-through tools:

Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards and WebCodeTools.com. The latter has a Twitter Card and Open Graph generator. There are WordPress plugins as well that will let you customize the image and description. The call to action or goal you’re featuring socially may also be a little different for different social sites.

Video lead gen tool:

Wistia Video Platform – She’s never met a Wistia user who wasn’t a huge fan. If you’re wondering YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo or Wistia – Wistia is the best option for conversion. (That doesn’t mean don’t also put it on YouTube.) On Wistia you get the most control. You can generate leads from Wistia, similar to SlideShare’s lead capture slide.

Tim adds to include the email ask deeper into the video so they know that it was worth it.

Visual testing tool:

Hero Shot Scorecard – We use visuals in all of our content. How are you grading your images? Not all images are hero shots.

There has to be a better way to test images if it’s not to the testing stage. She wants an image score of 7 or higher. This is going to be great for helping other people and other teams select visuals too. (Learn more about her Hero Score Card).

Bonus tip: PSDcovers.com will going to give you a 3D version of your screenshots in different devices and shapes and items!

Optimizing for phone calls:

Click-to-Call is a tactic-slash-tool. If calls are your conversion goal, optimize for it. You need a href=tel: and class=”clicktocall”. Always display hours because there’s nothing more frustrating for a user to call and find they’re calling in after hours.

Justin Rondeau’s CRO Tools He’d Be Bummed to Live Without

Qualitative tools:

Hotjar and Lucky Orange – qualitative tools that reports session recordings. You can see what people are doing. There’s a lot of time that goes into watching these recordings. Start looking for patterns. That’s how they redesigned pages, like if they found a user scrolled a long way down in order to see a product shot. Alex adds that you can view the user funnel and see where people drop off your site using Hotjar.

Know that mobile heat maps can be wonky because you’re going to be seeing lots of scrolling clicks. The survey functionality is limited. Qualitative data is essential. It’s the why. It’s giving the Tin Man a heart.

Tim adds that the advantage of looking through recordings – tracking people in the wild – is invaluable. As soon as you ask people to talk about what they’re doing as they’re doing it (like they know they’re being watched) it ruins everything.

On-site retargeting:

Optimonk and Banana Splash – I think these are pop-up tools but he describes them thusly: bootstrapped personalization with backend conditional logic rules of how to set things up. Say a user is reading a blog posts and came from Facebook. There’s some auto-event reporting. Banana Splash is what he uses for mobile. You can segment by operating system and use different designs that matches that OS. Gleam.io is what he’s used to run contests.

Tool manager:

Google Tag Manager: When you don’t have access to the code, you can start avoiding your development team and create highly-customized events. It is a steep learning curve. And it can make your site bloated.

Testing tool:

VWO is the powerful testing tool he uses. It’s easy to get personalization. He says personalization is a must. You can’t put VWO or Optimizely in Google Tag Manager.

Tim closes the session by asking the audience to share the CRO tools they use by tweeting them with the hasthags #convcon and #tools. Happy tool treasure hunting!

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Building a Company-Wide Culture of CRO Experimentation #ConvCon

Building a Company-Wide Culture of CRO Experimentation #ConvCon was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Sean Ellis, the CEO and founder of GrowthHackers, is going to talk about building a company-wide culture of experimentation. It’s a big difference in trying to change culture for a few people or a few hundred people. Dropbox was the first company Sean went into with a goal of creating a culture of growth experimentation. He spent six months as interim vice president of marketing building experimentation into the company.

Seeds of Testing Culture

Here are the steps that Sean took at Dropbox that led to an experimentation culture.

Built tracking and testing infrastructure
Shared insights (qualitative and quantitative) with team
Shared testing wins with team
Encouraged broader participation

When he left Dropbox, a replacement marketer didn’t join the Dropbox team for another 9 months, but the experimentation culture was so ingrained into the engineering team that it continued on. Today Dropbox has half a billion users.

In previous companies, Sean’s marketing and testing was siloed in safe environments, with a wall in between his experiments and the rest of the company. From these experiments he learned that growth is a company-wide effort. A lot of the powerful levers of growth sits outside of what marketing controls.

The experimenting should happen at all levels including bringing customers back who have gone away. A core growth team that manages that helps a lot. That’s what growth hacking is all about. Moving away from experimenting at the surface level and bringing it to the full funnel.

Testing drives growth. There’s no certainty about what works. Rapid testing is going to take place across all levers:

Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
Resurrection

More testing = more learning. You need the feedback loop because the more testing you run, the more you know what works in growing the business.

Of course, change is harder in established company. On the other side of the spectrum from Dropbox is Microsoft. Sean spent some time in the last few weeks at Microsoft and it’s a company going through a growth period. Different teams are at different points on the growth curve. They have a goal across the company to experiment with more frequency, and it’s going to take longer because there are a hundred thousand employees.

Experimentation culture is built on:

broad participation
transparent learning
effective process

Effective process is a loop. Build ideas backlog ➡ prioritize the backlog ➡ launch tests ➡ analyze results and start again. The best companies have a team dedicated to executing this process. At the very least you need a product manager. If the product manager doesn’t have dedicated resources (like a designer or engineer) then they will hit walls and it will be hard to hit testing tempo goals.

When you have a good team in place, then building the idea backlog becomes really important. With a backlog in place, you don’t have to be creative each week of what to test next. Use a system for prioritization; he uses the ICE (impact, confidence and ease) rating system. Choose tests to launch.

Launching tests is next. He likes to make sure that every test has a project manager assigned to make that test go out. They get tools and allocate skills needed to implement.

Analyzing results is the final step (before starting over). Ensure tracking up front for the hypothesis. Run the experiment for a sufficient period of time. Triage analysis by hypothesis first.

Example of a weekly meeting agenda:

15 min: KPI review and update focus area
10 min: Review last week’s testing sprint
15 min: Key lessons learned from analyzed tests
15 min: Select tests for this week’s sprint
5 min: Check growth of idea backlog

When you’ve gone through this process, you can focus on transparent learning. Every test leads to learning, even the tests where you “fail.” And in every case, you want the whole team to be aware of the test learnings. Proactively share the findings with the idea originator. You may want to do like TripAdvisor and share wins with an opt-in email list. Organize learning for everyone’s easy access. Getting high-fives from your coworkers as you’re going down the hall is the kind of thing that’s going to get people excited about a testing culture.

Here’s how to kick-off the company-wide growth through experimentation initiative, what Sean calls the company kick-off:

CEO tells everyone to seek opportunities for improvement and growth.
Share recent wins and insights.
Provide idea input training.
Hold pizza and beer brainstorms.

Collect ideas weekly:

Create a standard experiment doc of idea submission. You should even ask them to score their own ICE score to standardize idea input and let them think through how difficult it will be to run a test like this and the expected outcome of the test.

Provide feedback on ideas. Acknowledge all ideas. Praise favorite ideas. Notify if selected. Report back on results.

Keep it fun in the company! You can have a leader board of submitted ideas.

Key Takeaways

Share learning across the organization.
Celebrate the wins because that’s where the process gets addictive.
Empower the full team to generate ideas.
Ensure core team has process to manage inputs. If you start to collect ideas prematurely and aren’t able to execute, you won’t be able to sustain contributions to the growth process.

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4 Ridiculously Awesome Ways Search & Social Ads Magnify CRO by 3-5X #ConvCon

4 Ridiculously Awesome Ways Search & Social Ads Magnify CRO by 3-5X #ConvCon was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

You’re tuned in to Conversion Conference. Larry Kim, founder of WordStream and 2015 Search Personality of the Year, explains the situation. A diabolical villain has abducted our conversions. Our boss at the impossible mission force (IMF) is trying to frame us. Larry’s going to help us avoid danger and get the conversions BACK!

Larry’s A/B #1 Testing Epiphany: The Great A/B Test Is a Fairy Tale

He’s done this test thousands of times for hundreds of customers. The early lead disappears and the gains don’t persist over time. The reason is that the reason it worked was because it was new and exciting and then eventually it’s not exciting.

Larry’s #2 A/B Testing Epiphany: There’s a Confirmation Bias

Small changes usually result in small changes.

Larry’s #3 A/B Testing Epiphany: CRO Just Increases Quantity of Leads at the Expense of Quality (in Lead Gen)

You might have more leads but it takes more time to figure out if they’re any good.

Larry’s #4 A/B Testing Epiphany: Average Conversion Rates Are Low and Haven’t Changed Much in Years

Everyone is doing all this A/B testing, why isn’t the average going up?

What is needed are new CRO weapons and strategies.

Use PPC weapons:

In addition to the focus on landing pages, there should be an equal or greater focus on up-stream activities.

Larry will equip us with the weapons of success for this impossible mission. Larry’s background is in electrical engineering. He’s also got an impossibly adorable 2-year-old #ppckid.

Larry’s #5 Crazy PPC CRO Hack: Focus on the Click-Through Rates

Generally, the higher the click-throguh rate, the higher the conversion rate. If you can get people excited to click, you can get the conversion.

What’s the big difference between click-through rate and conversion rate? A conversion rate is biased. You must use CTR to figure out if your offer sucks or not.

How to write unicorn ads: the top 1% of ads based on CTR (like 20-40% CTR)

He built a program to detect what these ads are and what the qualities are:

Focus on keywords with HIGH commercial intent (as opposed to informational queries)
Use ad customizers to create urgency and fear of missing out (FOMO) [img]
The hack: use EMOTIONAL triggers in ad copy. The best ads aren’t written in the persona of the company. There are four voices that the ad might be written in:

the bearer of bad news
the hero/villain
the comedian
the feel-good friend

Here’s an example ad that is a unicorn:

Key takeaway: Ads CRT tell you if people are into your offers or not.

Larry’s #4 Crazy PPC CRO Hack: Remarketing on Google Display Network and Facebook Ads

Greater brand exposure dramatically increase conversion rates. Users may be less inclined to click on an ad that is following them around BUT if they do click on it, they’re highly likely to convert. With precise ad targeting, you can boost engagement rate. Refine ad targeting for specific purchasing behavior:

media
mobile device user
purchase behavior
residential profile
seasonal and events

Larry thinks demographic ad targeting in Facebook is like super remarketing. You’re targeting people who visited your site and also are in your target audience. Behold the power of super-remarketing on Facebook & Twitter:

Behavioral & Interest Targeting: they’re interested in your stuff
Remarketing: they recently checked out your stuff
Demographic Targeting: They can afford to buy your stuff

Super remarketing allows you to target a narrow audience that meets all three of the above criteria … resulting in $$$.

“Well Larry, how do I know who my target market is?” Use Facebook Audience Insights to determine target market. Upload your best customer emails and Facebook will analyze your audience for you.

Larry’s #3 Crazy PPC CRO Hack: Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Remarketing lists for search ads = Google search ads shown only to people who recently visited your site.

Target search ads only to people who recently visited your site. Users visit yoru site, get added to your remarkeitng lists. Show them customized ads when they search on Google. People familiar with your brand are 2-3x more likely to convert than people not familiar with your brand.

You can also target by email. Email audience targeting = 10X CTR vs. generically targeted keywords.

The greatest strength of RLSA is that you’re cherry-picking the awesome cheap conversions. The drawback is that you’re not targeting all the other people who aren’t familiar with your brand. How do you solve the problem of getting conversions for cheap and lots of them? Social media ads!

How advertising REALLY works:

Promote inspirational/memorable content about your brand to your target market
People see the ad, but don’t necessarily take action right away (but become biased)
Later, when the need arises, people either do a branded search for your stuff or do an un-branded search but are still biased toward clicking and buying from you.

Larry’s #2 Crazy PPC CRO Hack: Video Ads on Facebook

We like RLSA because conversions were cheap but we couldn’t reach enough people.

We want:

Strong brand recall (lots of ad impressions)
High CTR (high ad engagement)

Video ads provide both!

LovePop Cards did a video ad to remarket to people who visited their site. It’s saturated with product and color and movement and leverages emotional triggers.

Here’s Larry’s video ad targeting stack:

Larry’s #1 Crazy PPC CRO Hack: Lead Ads on Facebook

This is a new ad format that lets people sign up with stuff on mobile with one button tap. There’s only one field needed, email. What this does is eliminate the landing page — the biggest bottleneck in the funnel.

Email unlocks over 10k interests, demographics and behaviors. The email that gets sent to you is their Facebook login email which allows you infinite ad segmentations.

You have to pay money to target these people, but it’s like $3 or $4 for thousands of impressions.

Larry’s Bonus Hack: Change Your Offer in a Big Way

WordStream changed their offer from a free trial to a free AdWords performance grader. There’s big and little changes. If you only think of the on-page elements, you’re taking your current offer and finding a local maximum. It might be better to throw out your current offer and find a different, completely different offer. PPC gives you the perspective of different data to find out how your offer is resonating in the world.

There’s tons of leverage around higher in the funnel. A lot of the tools Larry shared here have only been around for 18 or 24 months. We get to adjust!

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CRO 101: This Is How It All Starts (Live from #ConvCon)

CRO 101: This Is How It All Starts (Live from #ConvCon) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Speaker Dan McGaw, founder and CEO of EffinAmazing and former director of marketing at KISSmetrics, is a serial entrepreneur and growth hacker. If you’re just getting started with conversion optimization and find all the CRO tools, techniques and competing priorities overwhelming, this session is for you. McGaw knows how to kick-start a conversion rate optimization program from the earliest stages, and in this step-by-step session he’ll show you where to start, what to test and which tools you’ll need to ensure your success. You’ll get a detailed process for setting up your analytics/tracking, identifying which optimization opportunities will give you the biggest gains, and selecting the right testing technique. What’s more, you’ll see examples of how Dan has applied these proven optimization processes in real business environments.

He’s going to get us started with CRO, including the tools you need and a plan for doing this at your organization. Who does A/B testing? Who does CRO? Who knows the difference? You’ll understand by the end of this presentation.

Where to Start with Conversion Rate Optimization

Start with Google. Look up:

How do I track data?
How do I set up an A/B test?
When do I know if the test is conclusive?

You don’t need to do anything crazy expensive. Just use search to find the answers.

1. The CRO Mindset

Not hitting your goals? Who has gone to a superior and said I missed the goal? Often, the next step is to do more advertising, throw money at the problem. But a CRO person tries to extract more value from what you have. Try to figure out how to do more with less. You’re not going to be throwing money at the problem. You’re extracting more value.

#CRO tries to extract more value from what you have. –@DanielMcGaw
Click To Tweet

Follow the Data

Data is your lifeline. You need to be using your analytics and follow your core metrics. Understand that failing is part of the game. Failing is what you’re going to do.

At his company they run 30-40 tests each week and fail 60 percent of the time. These failings are lessons. Get used to failing.

Just Let It Go

Sometimes you have to move on to a different page. A CRO person might get into a rut maximizing the home page. Next thing you know, you’re going to have poured in thousands of dollars of labor and not moved the needle. Move on. There are other pages that make you money.

2. Have a Plan

Trello is the second best project management application next to Excel. Create a backlog with Trello. Next Week, This Week and Today are three lists for tests they plan to run. Focus on the things that are going to have the most impact.

Build a Team

You don’t need to hire a specific person to do CRO. You can train your team on CRO. Don’t hire people just because they’re local; hire the best talent for the job. Search for what to ask when interviewing for a CRO team member. Then train your team. Also, hire an agency.

Choose Metrics

You need to start with your metric before you do anything. If you start with no metric, how will you know if you’re successful? You might even forget to have a metric that you test across tests, not per test.

3. Begin A/B Testing

This is not CRO. When you do A/B testing, there are many tools you may use. Optimizely is free for less than 50,000 visits. Optimizely is the Holy Grail of A/B testing. He’s going to use it for the examples in this presentation.

Add JavaScript to the site at the very top.

Find the highest trafficked pages on the site, such as blog posts with enough traffic to get statistical significance from your tests. You need to at least have some traffic.

Use the WYSIWYG editor. They tested a change of button text. If you have a mobile app, look at Branch.io for tracking downloads. With the one “Buy Now” button change, they got a 21 percent lift in conversions.

What Do You Test First?

Test buttons: Only test one element change at a time (not color, text, capitalization, etc., all at once) or you won’t know what made the difference.
Test images
Test layouts: At KISSmetrics, they tested switching the layout 30 times. Why so many times? They let tests run a very long time to get statistical significance, and he calls these “baker tests.” In the end, they found 20+ percent more conversions with the CTAs on one side compared to the other.

Tests clearly revealed where to place CTAs for best conversion.

4. CRO Uses Qualitative Data

On-page survey tools like olark, Qualaroo and Hotjar. Ask interesting open-ended questions like:

How can we help?
Are you looking for something we don’t have?
Do you need assistance?
How can we improve?
What is preventing you from purchasing?

Put these questions on the drop-off on your funnel.

CRO uses UX and usability data. UserTesting is one of the best tools out there, he says. They have a Peak program of three free tests a month. Crazy Egg (cheaper version of Hotjar) heat mapping is important for understanding where people are going on the site. A heat map can show that adding an image of a model who is actually looking at the CTA or product will improve conversions.

5. Quantitative Tools

KISSmetrics and mixpanel — these are the tools for gathering quantitative data. Then you run the tests and measure through the standard, Google Analytics.

First we need to build our funnel. KISSmetrics makes this dead simple. Create the events for your funnel.

CRO experiments show in conversion funnel reports.

In this experiment, we see the funnel reports automatically show a variation between the home page message “create free account” and “get started.” You might see more people go to Step 2 from one version, but more people end up signing up from the other version.

Starbucks lifetime customer value is $22,000. WOW! Make sure you’re measuring your lifetime customer value.

CRO in Practice

Let’s look at CRO in practice in a company like T-shirt company James Perse. Through two months of research, surveying customers with questions like “What do you do on the weekend?,” they discovered that their clients are primarily hipsters. They got a 49 percent increase in cart adds when they put a beard on their model! That’s not A/B testing. That’s true CRO — understanding customers.

Don’t Screw Up

When you’re doing conversion tests, stay focused. Only change one element at a time. Caveat: If you are a tester who has been doing this for years, you can do a “learning test” and that’s a lot of changes at a time.
Low traffic? Stick to A/B, not A/B/C tests. If you want to run a high-velocity testing process, you’re going to have the control and one variation.
Multi-variant testing (lots of changes) needs lots of traffic — like lots!
Don’t call tests too early. An A/B test needs to have statistical significance. Get Data Driven (Getdatadriven.com) is an A/B significance test.


Q & A with Dan McGaw

Can you walk us through the tools we need?

This is hard to answer because every business has specific needs.

Hotjar for surveys, polls, heat mapping and session recordings; start there and branch out.

When you use Hotjar, how do you read reporting?

With heat mapping, you’re looking for how a user goes through the site. Tip: They’ve found that staggered text and images is a conversion killer. Don’t stagger images with text because it makes it harder to read.

For session recordings, you’re trying to understand how people use the site. They’ll typically take a junior marketer to analyze. They’re also looking for bugs. They’re used to collect data to see how people are using the page.

What’s your methodology for reading through customer surveys and getting value?

It can be hard to weed through people who are just ranting. They use word clouds to analyze the data quickly and that’s part of Hotjar. He manually analyzes all the data they get and then uses the words from surveys within their web copy. For example, a cooking school website surveyed users about how they learned how to cook, and lots of people said from their mom. Now they’re changing the text throughout to say, “Learn how to cook like your mother.”

All these tools can decrease load time.

Google Tag Manager. Even with all these tools, with asynchronous loading, the page should load in a second.

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Tim Ash Presents #ConvCon: Ending the War between Branding and Direct Response

Tim Ash Presents #ConvCon: Ending the War between Branding and Direct Response was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

You’re tuned in to Conversion Conference and the opening keynote by Tim Ash, founder of SiteTuners, author of Landing Page Optimization, and organizer of this conference.

I spoke with a gentleman sitting next to me, who works at an online kayak retailer and has watched the PPC space become increasingly competitive over the last 10 years: “That’s why I’m here. Now that we have all that expensive traffic, let’s make the most of it.” — John Hoge

And that’s why I’m here reporting — to help interested digital marketers understand how to convert more site visitors.

Tim Ash is on stage to present a brand new keynote, and a topic he is very interested in: branding versus direct response.

Tim asks how many in the crowd are direct response marketers? How many are on the branding and creative side — to the latter question, not as many people raise their hands. Tim’s going to bring the DR and branding worlds together.

Right now there’s a war going on between DR and branding. Here’s his agenda:

Introduce the combatants.
Understand branding better.
Bring both sides together.

Introducing the Combatants: Direct Response vs. Branding

The direct-response view of branding:

Branding people are restrictive and shut down powerful ideas due to technicalities. Good ideas are shut down by branding people.
They’re controlling. They micro-manage and are focused on timid compliance and correctness issues. In order to get a test up, it takes months of jumping over hurdles from the branding team.
And branding people are unaccountable. What’s the ROI of brand?
Branding people are visually obsessed at the expense of clarity or functionality.
They recycle media. They insist on the same approved campaign materials across all channels.
Their favorite phrase is “That’s off brand …” This is the fastest conversation ender.

What you usually see from a brand-heavy organization is:

Who knows what to do with that? But it looks cool!

The branding people’s view of direct response people:

DR folks are ignorant of the big picture.
DR people are unprofessional — clueless clowns willing to try anything to make a dollar.
They’re unethical. They’re willing to bend or break the rules to get results.
DR folks are inconsistent and out of touch with all other campaigns.
Their favorite phrase is “Let’s test that!” like that’s the solution for everything.

So you end up with something like this:

“But that’s what tests best!”

Are either one of these sides a flattering picture? No. No wonder we hate each other. But he’ll unify this.

Understanding Each Other Better

The traditional view of branding: something you project to the world.

Tim is going to describe branding in a way for all parties to relate to.

A brand is hard to change.

Think of a brand as a big aircraft carrier. It takes an entire mile for it to turn around.

Take a look at the search result for “Comcast Sucks.” It took Google half a second to return a quarter million results for that query. It’s going to be hard to change the momentum of an established brand.

Brands are ladders and shortcuts.

Think of a toothpaste brand and you’ll think of Crest or Colgate, but there are 270 brands in your supermarket. There’s no hope of making money if you’re not the market leader. If you’re not at the top of the brand ladder, you lose. A brand is effectively a shortcut for consumers. Your subconscious makes that decision automatically and tunes out other options. You’re not even in the consideration set.

A brand is a frame.

The frame creates the context. The unconscious backgrounds frame the foreground experience. Folgers instant coffee TV commercials was a campaign where Folgers coffee instant crystals replaced the regular coffee and then patrons of very expensive, top-end restaurants were asked on hidden camera what they thought of the coffee.

But this was a lie. Folgers wasn’t the brand frame for the experience. The famous restaurant was. Brands provide the context which increases the perceived value of the product.

The American Marketing Association defines brand in a very visual way:

“A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.”

An example of a brand that has multiple strong visual associations is Marlboro cigarettes. Think tall black letters, or solid red, or lone cowboy on the range, and you know that the brand is Marlboro. The underlying mental model is rugged masculinity and independence.

So the up side of not having the brand is that even though you don’t have the power, you have the freedom to see what resonates with your audience. Most of us here are on the DR side. We’re trying to move the needle. We’re not constrained by our brand — because we don’t have a brand.

Both branding and direct response are right. And both are blind.

The Brand Lives in the Minds of Customers

“When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king.” — John Wanamaker

“Your brand is whatever your customer (or prospect) says it is.” — Groundswell

A brand is the underlying mental associations it evokes in people’s heads.

So how do we align the presentation with the brand frame? Understand which implicit goals your brand satisfies.

Here’s an example ad Tim made:

It hits these areas on the wheel of human motivation:

Does this work? Yes, because the ad and the brand frame have high congruence. This same thought experiment doesn’t work with Volvo’s logo on the example ad, which has a brand frame high on the security and discipline and autonomy areas. Did you know that Volvo has tried to sell high-performance sports coups for years but no one is buying them? It’s hard to turn that brand around.

Fighting on the Same Side: A Framework for Success

Here’s what success looks like if you unify branding and direct response.

Reality-check your brand. Go to that implicit goal chart. Think of what your brand is activating in the minds of visitors. Map the reality of your current brand frame.
Understand the unconscious motivations of your offer. What subconscious implicit motivations work for them?
Create messaging that is congruent with the brand frame.
Try different triggers to evoke the underlying brand concept. We have the freedom to experiment with different triggers.
Watch what people react to and feed it back into your brand.

Your homework is to read some books. Here are the ones he recommends:

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People by Susan Weinschenk
Brainfluence by Roger Dooley
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom
Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy by Phil Barden
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Laura Ries
Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash

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Why 45% of Social Media Strategists Say You Need Brand Advocates in Your Ranks

Why 45% of Social Media Strategists Say You Need Brand Advocates in Your Ranks was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Both loyal and enthusiastic, a brand advocate is someone who is passionate about a particular brand and is excited to tell her friends about its products or services — not because she has anything to gain, but because she truly believes her friends have everything to gain. Brand advocacy awareness takes advantage of those who champion a brand online, which can be a powerful part of a business’s overall digital marketing efforts.

How do you create a brand advocate?

By having a truly useful, high-quality product or service.
By having customer service that goes above and beyond.

The ideal brand advocate will then go forth and proclaim their love for you, not only through word of mouth, but also on social media! When we work with our content and social media services clients, we are always looking for ways to create and cultivate brand advocacy.

Brand advocates come in many forms. You’re probably familiar with YouTubers, Instagram models and mommy bloggers, but a brand advocate is anyone who writes a positive online review, posts a link to your content, mentions your brand in tweet, or snaps a photo … you get the idea. A brand advocate doesn’t need to have one million followers or a high Klout score. Brand advocates are simply real people shining a positive light on your brand.

Employee Brand Advocacy

One variety of brand advocate is your own socially engaged employee. As the name suggests, employee brand advocates are brand advocates that work for you brand. Potential clients and customers like to connect with real people advocating a brand – and when it comes to real people, who better than the men and women who make up your organization? They know it best. And they have insider knowledge and can offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of your brand.

Did you know 45 percent of social strategists report that developing an employee brand advocacy program is a top priority?

Why is employee brand advocacy important? According to research:

90 percent of consumers trust people they know when seeking purchasing advice.
53 percent B2B customers trust friends and colleagues’ purchase recommendations.

In other words, brand advocates can have a powerful influence on the purchasing decisions of their friends, family, colleagues and followers at large. What they have to say is seen as trustworthy and can have potentially more impact than what a business has to say about itself.

Two digital marketing leaders, Michael Brito and Mark Traphagen, are definitely prioritizing employee brand advocacy. Traphagen, the senior director of marketing at Stone Temple Consulting and an employee brand advocate in his own right, sums it up:

“In my experience developing your personal brand representatives from within, from existing employees, is going to have the most impact and be most effective. Your own people know your brand best and (we hope!) will have real passion for it. The advantage here is that training is minimal so content creation and social audience building can commence immediately.”

Brito, the head of U.S. digital marketing at Pulse, is currently working on a book on employee brand advocacy and recently published a robust report on the subject.

Employee Brand Storytelling: Lessons from Brand Marketers on Building and Employee Advocacy Program explores how to mobilize employees to become brand advocates. The report includes tips from digital marketing experts at leading companies including Adobe, Salesforce, Pitney Bowes, FedEx, Autodesk and Kaiser Permanente. I invited him for an interview to talk about empowering employees to become brand advocates. You can watch that interview with Brito below!

Brand Advocacy + Social Media Marketing = Winning Campaigns

Michael, Mark and I all agree: brand advocacy is a critical part of any social media marketing campaign, and well worth investing effort in. Reading Michael’s report is a great place to start learning more about the value of brand advocacy. If you’re interested in partnering with us to leverage brand advocacy in your social media marketing, and social media marketing within your overall digital marketing campaign, don’t hesitate to call us at (866) 517-1900!

Google’s Report on SEO Conduct & Webspam: Ethical SEO Help for Businesses

Google’s Report on SEO Conduct & Webspam: Ethical SEO Help for Businesses was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Your business is on the field of one of the most competitive games of all: organic search rankings. If you play by the rules, you have a chance of making your website visible to searchers and winning site visitors. If you don’t follow the rules, you have no chance of scoring those goals if there’s a referee on the field.

Search engines play the role of referee in the search engine optimization game. For business owners, this means that ethical SEO conduct can pay off. Google has a manual actions team whose job is to help keep the search results clean. They back up the algorithms (which do most of the work filtering out webspam) and review individual cases by hand. These people have the power to blow a whistle to stop misbehavior and even to bench a player who refuses to play by the rules. I like to picture them in black and white striped shirts (though I’m sure jeans and t-shirts would be closer to the truth).

While referees can be very unpopular, their words carry a lot of weight. This week Google published a report titled “How we fought webspam in 2015” chronicling what they discovered and accomplished last year. Impressively, the manual actions team sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters last year. That means webmasters were notified personally not only of a yellow flag being thrown, but also about what caused the penalty action.

Google referees may not be popular, but they help keep sites playing by the rules of SEO conduct.

From a searcher’s perspective, all of this refereeing is fantastic news. It means that if I search for “referee clothing,” I will actually see striped shirts and not spammy, unwanted junk. Touchdown!

From a business’s perspective, however, Google penalties can be livelihood-threatening realities. Since the introduction of the Panda Update in 2011 and the subsequent waves of algorithmic and manual action Google penalties, we’ve seen a rise in SEO services clients requiring penalty assessments and removals. This latest report from Google is important for online businesses to be aware of because it points to trends in webspam and identifies red-flag digital marketing tactics to avoid.

In BCI’s 20-year history, our digital marketing company has been a pioneering voice for ethical search engine optimization. Due to our methodology founded on SEO ethics, we’ve helped countless clients recover from manual and algorithmic penalties, and now eagerly await the next Penguin update to see additional penalty recovery resolutions. (Read a testimonial.)

To partner with a top-tier technical SEO agency and grow your website’s revenue-driving potential, fill out our request form or call us today.

Below I’ll explain more about how webmasters can deal with Google penalty situations. But first, here is the state of webspam, according to Google’s report.

Webspam-Fighting Highlights

It bears repeating that Google’s manual actions team sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters last year. Many “penalties” occur algorithmically and can blindside webmasters with a sudden, unexplained loss of search traffic to their sites. You’ve got to appreciate the fact that the search engine takes the time to notify this many people directly to communicate that a problem and/or penalty has occurred.

SEO Tip: You’ll find any messages sent by the manual actions team if you look in your Google Search Console account messages. So if you haven’t set up Google Search Console yet, do it now!

Hacked Sites Up by 180 Percent

Compared to the previous year, the number of sites being hacked was up by 180 percent! Google’s report identified site hacking as a top webspam trend of 2015. Here’s what being hacked means: One day, you wake up to find your nice, clean website covered with the graffiti of someone else’s spammy content. (Jump down for what to do about hacked sites.)

Thin Content Is Trending Up

Google’s manual actions team reports that “sites with thin, low quality content” are the second most commonly increasing form of webspam.

“We saw an increase in the number of sites with thin, low quality content. Such content contains little or no added value and is often scraped from other sites.”

Businesses should know that we’ve been living in the age of Google’s Panda algorithm update for several years now. What is Google Panda? Panda eats low-quality content for lunch. And Google told us earlier this year that Panda is now part of its core ranking algorithm.

SEO Advice for Businesses Facing Google Penalties

A Google manual action notice is usually terrible news for business owners. A penalized site drops in the search engine rankings, losing untold revenue from website traffic that’s no longer coming from search.

If this happens, site owners may not understand how to recover. Sometimes the issues are straightforward and, after a bit of housecleaning, the site owner can submit a Reconsideration Request to Google and be restored to good standing.

However, many sites have long-standing issues or layered penalties that require more expertise. We’ve had a number of clients come to us after struggling for a year or more to fix their own sites without regaining much ground in the SERPs. (If that’s your situation, read about our SEO penalty assessment service and let’s talk.)

But can a notification by the manual actions team be GOOD NEWS? It can be if it alerts you to a problem.

If you receive a manual action message, stay calm. It might be a penalty, but it might just be a warning. When you read the notification, here’s what you’re going to want to understand ASAP:

What problem caused the manual action?
What will it mean for my site (i.e., in terms of ranking and revenue)?
How can I fix the problem as fast as possible?

Recognizing a Hacked Site

If your website is hacked, Google’s manual actions team may be the first to notice it. Google’s webspam fighters have gotten pretty good at identifying when a site is the victim of hacking, rather than purposely trying to spam through deceptive SEO conduct. And that’s great news for webmasters.

Juan Felipe Rincon, a lead of Google’s Webmaster Outreach team, spoke on manual actions at SMX West. He explained: “Content that wasn’t put there by the legitimate site owner and website hacks account for 45 percent of manual actions.” Forty-five percent of 4.3 million manual action notices represents a HUGE number of sites victimized by hacked content.

SEO tip: If your site has been hacked and you get the news directly from Google, be thankful. It’s a diagnosis you need to hear so you can work on curing the problem. For all webmasters, Google’s recommended preventative measures can help you protect your content and keep your site safe from hackers.

Solving for Thin Content

Sites scraping content from other sites to fill their own pages is apparently happening more and more.

This is a bad practice from an ethical perspective (because it’s stealing) and also from a business perspective. The search engines can identify where content comes from, including its original source, because they know the date and location they first discovered that content. So the reward just isn’t there for the crime of scraping! But since I’m pretty sure scrapers are not reading the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog, I’ll end my rant.

Monitoring Social Media Traffic: Tricks, Tips and Tools

Monitoring Social Media Traffic: Tricks, Tips and Tools was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

#SEOchat is a weekly Twitter chat where in-the-know digital marketers across the country compare notes. Last week we hosted the chat and the hot topic was monitoring social media traffic. We discussed KPIs, paid and free tools — plus how to use this data once it’s gathered. Here’s what we learned!

Tools for Monitoring Social Traffic

Here’s the complete list of the tools that received shout-outs during SEOchat.

Hootsuite https://hootsuite.com/
Brandwatch https://www.brandwatch.com/eng/
Raven Tools https://raventools.com/
Sprout Social http://sproutsocial.com/
Audiense https://www.audiense.com/
SEMrush https://www.semrush.com/
NUVI https://www.nuvi.com/
SocialPilot http://socialpilot.co/
Buffer https://buffer.com/
Mento https://mento.io/
Iconosquare (for Instagram) http://iconosquare.com/
Adobe SiteCatalyst http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/...

Tools for Monitoring Social Referral Traffic and Conversion

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Tag Manager https://www.google.com/analytics/tag-...
Facebook Conversion Tracking https://www.facebook.com/business/a/o...
Facebook Insights https://www.facebook.com/help/3368934...
Twitter Analytics https://analytics.twitter.com/

Tools for Identifying Influencers

Zoomph https://zoomph.com/
Onalytica http://www.onalytica.com/
Followerwonk https://moz.com/followerwonk/
Simply Measured http://simplymeasured.com/
Copromote https://copromote.com/
BuzzStream http://www.buzzstream.com/
BuzzSumo http://buzzsumo.com/
Ninja Outreach https://ninjaoutreach.com/
Ahrefs https://ahrefs.com/

Social Tools for Everything Else

Tweepi http://tweepi.com/
Canva (for design) https://www.canva.com/
Pablo (for design) https://pablo.buffer.com/
Click to Tweet https://clicktotweet.com/
CoSchedule http://coschedule.com/
Meet Edgar https://meetedgar.com/
Gramblr http://gramblr.com/uploader/
TweetDeck https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
Tailwind (for Pinterest & Instagram) https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: Social Intelligence Tool Wish List

Even with all these useful tools, there are still needs that aren’t being met. Here’s what SEO-chatters are still hoping to find in a tool:

A way to schedule posts on Instagram
Accurate sentiment analysis, especially for ecommerce sites
Better reporting on Instagram and Pinterest
Integration of all social channels
History of follower count provided by all social platforms themselves
Insight into time viewers spent looking at a business’s social posts

Actions to Take Based on the Data

Here’s are some of the says digital marketers are leveraging the data they are pulling from social media monitoring and analysis.

A7: Learning what types of social content works better for which audiences. i.e. what converts on Twitter may not work for FB! #SEOchat

— Jonathan Foulds (@jonfoulds) April 21, 2016

A7 It’s impacted the timing of social posts/activity & the type of content I post on social. #SEOChat

— Clair Wyant (@KG7MAJ) April 21, 2016

A7: We’ve used industry keyword data to find audiences & events where discussed to build social ad campaigns around. #seochat

— Jannette Pazer (@sociallyclimb) April 21, 2016

A7: We’ve used social data to find our KPI benchmarks to help measure our monthly performance and optimize/troubleshoot if needed. #seochat

— Karolina Bakanovas (@karo_linab) April 21, 2016

A7: We leverage social data to help predict what content works best with our audience! It’s key to understand your audience. #seochat

— Netvantage Marketing (@netvantage) April 21, 2016

You can get a complete transcript of the chat here. Join #SEOchat every Thursday at  10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET . #SEOchat is a great opportunity to ask questions, get answers and share insights with industry leaders and the engaged digital marketing community. Read more about #SEOchat here.

Google’s Outbound Link Penalties: How to React without Overreacting

Google’s Outbound Link Penalties: How to React without Overreacting was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Penalties for links usually focus on the inbound kind. So Google’s recent spate of manual actions against websites for having “unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links” was a surprise to many. (If this is news to you, go ahead and read about it here.)

The quick version: This time, the search engine targeted sites linking out because the links looked like an attempt to boost the destination sites’ rankings in search results. Google took action by devaluing all of the linking site’s links as untrustworthy.

Granted, we saw this coming as an SEO services company that’s successfully mitigated countless penalties for clients. But here’s why this outbound link penalty shouldn’t have surprised anyone paying attention.

Warning Signs That Penalties Loomed

Just a few weeks before the penalties came down, Google noted that those receiving compensation for things such as product reviews needed to take steps to call out any links from their site to the product site, page or supplier.

In a Webmaster Blog post, Google spelled out exactly how to disclose such a relationship, when to use a nofollow tag, and so on — items that are already clearly explained in the guidelines. That was a clear warning sign that a crackdown was coming.

At a more basic level, disclosure is also covered by federal law. In the U.S., Federal Trade Commission guidelines require businesses and individuals to identify when they have been compensated for a review, whether that’s through payment or just free products, for example.

All in all, this outbound link penalty shouldn’t have caught anyone unawares.

Overreacting Can Hurt Your Website

There is simply no logic behind cutting off all link equity flowing out of your site, and we highly recommend avoiding this action.

Here’s what is surprising: the reaction of some websites to simply nofollow ALL links across their website. (For those not up on SEO lingo, “nofollowing” a link means applying a “nofollow” attribute to the link tag.)

Such a drastic move is an attempt to avoid any problem with Google in the quickest way possible.

Unfortunate reality check: By nofollowing all outbound links, webmasters simply create other issues for themselves.

In fact, when he saw this happening last week, Google’s John Mueller posted this urgent advice in a Webmaster Help Forum: “There’s absolutely no need to nofollow every link on your site!” (source: The SEM Post).

The Appropriate Reaction to a Penalty

First, check your messages in Google Search Console to find out if your site received a manual action for outbound linking. If you were penalized, the best solution is to call out things naturally. For example, wherever you’ve linked to a product you’re reviewing, you should:

Explain in the article the relationship with the company supplying the item to be reviewed.
State the circumstances (full disclosure).
Add rel=”nofollow” to links to the product supplier within the article itself. Many plugins exist for the popular CMSs to enable on-the-fly editing of nofollow on links at the article/publishing level.

Search engines see the internet as a connected entity. If you suddenly nofollow all of your outbound links, it makes your site appear reclusive. It also hurts the sites you’re linking to that are natural links, relevant to your subject matter and qualified to receive your vote of confidence.

There is simply no logic behind cutting off all link equity flowing out of your site, and we highly recommend avoiding this action.

Instead, you need to take legitimate actions to clean up the problem. There are no shortcuts here.

It will pay dividends for any website to be clear about why they are linking to other pages across the web.

Taking time to review your outbound links is good business. Over time, things change, so a page you linked to several years ago may be entirely different in its focus today.

Domains are bought, sold and expire, only to be purchased, parked and plastered with ads.

While these normal activities and link-location changes have always been factored into the search engine algorithms, it’s never too late to ensure you’re linking to — and thus sending your patrons to — quality web pages at relevant, related websites.

After you review your outbound links and nofollow the ones that are unnatural, you can submit a reconsideration request to get back into Google’s good graces.

A Sign of Penguin?

A final point to keep in mind. In the past, we’ve seen minor moves like this ahead of more major updates by Google.

Remember that Penguin we’re all waiting to be updated? We’re not willing to say definitively that this outbound link penalty action is the precursor to a Penguin refresh (as many have predicted already).

However, the fact remains that when the teams are working on one portion of the algorithm, the rest is often close at hand. There can be economies of timing when making algo updates, from the search engines’ perspective. So don’t be surprised if the refresh we’ve been waiting for is near.

Digital Marketing Keynotes from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn & Disney #SEJSummit

Digital Marketing Keynotes from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn & Disney #SEJSummit was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Search Engine Journal hosted an exclusive event limited to 150 digital marketers. The second annual SEJ Summit featured eight industry leaders from companies including Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Disney. Several key themes that emerged from the exclusive day-long event in Santa Monica:

Think of your users as humans. You’re not an SEO optimizing for a user, but a human optimizing for another human.
We live in a multiscreen world. You never know where someone will be interacting with your content. #ResponsiveDesign
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is gaining momentum and regardless of your industry you need to be ready to implement.

The last point about AMP was highlighted in a Q&A with Googler Maile Ohye. Read on to find out what she had to say about AMP and read more from all the speakers!

Googler Maile Ohye’s 3 Key Takeaways

Do something cool.
Get AMP or structured data ready.
Stay relevant.

Q & A with Maile Ohye

Where is AMP going?

Maile Ohye: I cannot disclose that. I would say if you’re wondering, just be ready in general. Start updating. Whether it’s AMP or structured data, there’s more stuff you can do to better feature it. You will get better ROI with these things. And then, when they say they’ve just rolled it out for entertainment, for example, you’re ready.

As far as markup is concerned, what other tools besides schema do you recommend?

Maile: The best place to start is the schema.org blog. Also, try data highlighter in Google Search Console.

How much importance does Google place on progressive enhancement?

Maile: Try Fetch as Google with the rendering. Anytime you use a new JavaScript framework, you can use this tool to see what we see. The progressive part isn’t about doing it for Google, but for doing it for all levels of users.

Should we stop doing responsive design websites and just do AMP?

Maile: No.

There are two methods to implement HREF lang: by page-level or XML sitemap level. Per developer tools you can use either one. Which one is more successful?

Maile: Yes. In the short term, if you have a lot of languages that you’re trying to map to, use a sitemap. For rel canonical or pagination we cut off at the head so no one can alter anything. But for sites that evolve a lot, their head is closing way sooner than their other elements. But if you do it in the sitemap you don’t have to care about what developers are doing with their code. The sitemap is more foolproof in that way, but in the long term, the sitemap is also harder to debug. Also, always check for errors in Search Console.

WordStream Founder Larry Kim’s 3 Key Takeaways

It’s a paid social world — we’re just living in it.
Don’t ever forget social media marketing.
Find your unicorns (unicorns = 100X better content)

Microsoft’s Kevin Henrikson’s 3 Key Takeaways

Have skin in the game.
ROI is everything.
You need a quota.

Ant Farm President Melissa Palazzo’s 3 Key Takeaways

Humanize the brand.
Be about the people.
Contribute to the world.

Circle Click CEO Anne Ward’s 3 Key Takeaways

Speed is king. Do the work and reap rewards.
Don’t build an app just for the sake of it.
There is no dominant platform. Always consider the myriad screens.

Googler John Brown’s 3 Key Takeaways

Prevent against ad blocking.
Focus on the user.
Write simple, compelling relevant content.


Disney Senior SEO Manager Jeff Preston’s 3 Key Takeaways

Launch your app in the Australia app store before launching it in the U.S. to see how the app fares among reviewers.
Optimize your app store description!
When you update the app, review the keywords and update those that need it!


LinkedIn Product Manager William Sears’s 3 Key Takeaways

Look at your site performance through multiple lenses.
Build a strong network of people by reading blogs, going to conferences, getting out and thinking differently.
Share your knowledge at conferences — we all have something to share.

Tweets about #SEJSummit from:BruceClayInc

Want to attend an SEJ Summit? SEJ Summit comes to Chicago on June 23 and New York City on Nov. 2! Find out more.