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Behind The Scenes With Bing #SMX

Behind The Scenes With Bing #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This SMX West 2016 Session opens with Microsoft Bing Ads Evangelist Christi Olson reminding the audience of Bing’s mission: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Alongside Bing Ads Director of Strategy Paul Apodaca and Bing Ads Account Manager Eric Couch, they’re sharing what’s new with Bing Ads.

Search advertising is changing – it’s thinking beyond the keywords into action. It’s about audience, buying, actions, feeds and automation, digital assistants and predictions and global and mobile presence. Bing is developing tools, technology and platforms to help you do what you want to do. Bing is a part of the every day.

Bing is Integral to the Windows 10 Experience

Bing is integrated into Windows, Xbox, Microsoft Office and Cortana. Note: 1.5 billion people use Windows everyday. There’s a free upgrade for one year to current users. Windows has 75% market share.

200 million+ devices use Windows 10.
20% of Bing clicks and searches are from Windows 10.
30% more Bing queries with Windows 10 vs queries.

Microsoft Edge: go from search go doing with a new tap page, quick answers, and Cortana assistance. Cortana is integrated into the search bar.

With voice search, questions phrases are more likely to be used — who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.

Bing has found more clicks via persona assistant go to brand names.

Search queries in voice search use long tail phrases, where text searches are around 1-3 words.

Adapt for voice search by:

Use questions words
Modify bids based on intent
Bid on your brand terms

In 2015, Bing’s market share has climbed to 20.90%, rising steadily year after year. In 2010, it was at 11.97%.

1 in 3 searches happens in the Bing network.

12% of search queries are new terms that haven’t been searched on Google

Bing Ad products that display in AOL search:

Ad extensions
Annotations
Ad products

The AOL audience tends to spend more than the average user, have a college education, and is comprised of more females.

New Feature Deep Dive

Internal Bing data shows that 96% of site visitors leave websites without converting. Remarketing in paid search gives you a second chance to engage with these valuable audiences.

Remarketing in paid search allows you to upsell, cross sell, drive actions that are valuable to your business and improve your ROI.

5 Steps to Getting Started with Remarketing

Tag your website
Define your audiences
Add lists to ad groups
Adjust bids
Customize ads and keywords

The UET tag has two purposes: conversion tracking and remarketing. Identify, segment and target users based on the specific stage of the buying funnel. Define your audiences based on pages visited.

Don’t forget to use the Bing Ads Keyword Planner! Keywords are the foundation to any campaign. Find and improve your campaigns with Bing-network specific data.

Looking Ahead
Bing’s Recently Released Features

Bing-powered AOL search
Inline opportunities
call-out extensions
Review extensions
Keyword Planner version 2
Bing ads for iOs and Android Updates
Cross-Partner Linking and Unlinking

To be Released by May

Inline Download Phase 1
Inline Keyword Diagnosis
Agency IQ Management
Segmentation Phase 1
Europa

To be Released Eventually

Upgraded Urls
Bing Ads Editor 11
App Install Ads
Credit Limit Recognition
Native Ads

RankBrain: What Do We Know About Google’s Machine-Learning System? #SMX

RankBrain: What Do We Know About Google’s Machine-Learning System? #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

SEO is very tactical and we always try to look behind the curtain of Google’s algorithms. So, it’s no surprise that we all want to know more about RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s machine learning system that they confirmed out of the blue in October 2015.

Speaking on RankBrain are Marcus Tober (left) and Eric Enge, pictured with moderator Danny Sullivan

In this session, we’ll learn about RankBrain via the studies done by our presenters.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Founding Editor, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)

Speakers:

Eric Enge, CEO, Stone Temple Consulting (@stonetemple)
Marcus Tober, Founder/CTO, Searchmetrics Inc. (@marcustober)

Danny Sullivan says that a few months ago, Google said, “Oh hey, by the way, we have this new thing called RankBrain and it’s the third most important signal that factors into ranking.” SEOs asked, “Can you tell us about that?” Google said no. We still want to understand it.

Marcus Tober: Machine Learning Ranks Relevance

Tober’s company Searchmetrics studied Google results to understand:

What RankBrain does
How RankBrain works
What RankBrain means for websites and SEO

He had two full-time people work for three weeks to collect the RankBrain data he is presenting here today.

Before we talk about details and key findings, it’s important to look at machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) first. So they dug through patents and papers.

ML is not AI

Machine learning is an algorithm that improves over time. Deep learning aims to bridge the gap between ML and AI and it solves more complex problems. Human-like intelligence (AI) is the end game.

Examples of ML:

The junk mail filter in your email inbox
Photo recognition, like how Facebook recognizes you in a photo
Recommendations in iTunes, Spotify and Netflix

The limits of machine learning are shown in the recent news that Google’s machine learning system beat a human in the game Go:

More than 2,500 years old
Played by 40 million people worldwide
Is Go really that hard? Well, actually yes.
There are 10^50 possible moves in a chess game.
There are 10^171 possible moves in a game of Go.
Google’s program AlphaGo beat the world champion 10–0.

Deep learning and AlphaGo:

Traditional A.I. methods, which analyze all possible positions, failed.
AlphaGo uses deep neural networks across 12 different network layers.
One neural network selects the next move to play. The other neural network predicts the winner of the game.
AlphaGo has a lot to show us about RankBrain.

There’s one project that sticks out in their research of Google patents, and that’s the work of Geoffrey Hinton:

Slide about researcher Geoffrey Hinton (click to enlarge)

Here’s Hinton’s research in a simplified nutshell. Let’s talk about thought vectors. Imagine empty space. Every word in the world has a position and a proximity to other words. Google can map queries in search in that space so you get the proximity and distance of different queries.

When a query such as “What’s the weather going to be like in California?” is searched, RankBrain can interpret it as “Weather Forecast California.” Using training data, similar query sentences (with similar results) are closely positioned.

Searches for “credit card” and “debit card” will be close to each other in space. Results scoring is where Google results rank better based on proximity. Good results, with higher relevance, have higher proximity to each other.

The Searchmetrics Study

Here was the Searchmetrics Hypothesis: Traditional ranking factors can no longer make sense for typical organic rankings. This isn’t for all queries. Google said that Google RankBrain is not used on every query. When it is used, it is the third most important ranking signal.

RankBrain concentrates on relevant content.
RankBrain uses thought vectors to map relevant results to queries.
Relevance score, then order rankings in real time.

Brief study background:

Used top 30 results for Google U.S.
Used 400K data points
Used 3 different keyword sets with no overlap: loan, ecommerce, health
The approach was to discover the ranking factors that were most important
They tried to emulate RankBrain by adding scores to understand the content relevance

In order to do this analysis, they had to remove all previous understanding of ranking factors. This includes backlinks and internal links, keyword in title, word count and interactive elements used. They cleared the slate of their presupposed ranking factors in order to get the new ranking signals.

Backlinks:

We see that for ecommerce keywords, there is a positive correlation between rankings and backlinks. However, for health and loan queries, rankings and backlinks have a negative correlation.

Internal links:

For loan queries, the average number of internal links is less than 100. For ecommerce, the average number of internal links is much higher.

Keyword in Title:

Here’s a traditional SEO optimization tactic. In this analysis, they accounted for stemming and variations.

In the loan category, only 10 percent of pages have the keyword in the title tag.

Word count and interactive elements:

For ecommerce and health, pages that are more successful have more content and more interactive elements.

Why do traditional ranking factors fail to explain these examples? If you look behind the curtains, you see that Google has changed a lot, with Hummingbird adding in machine learning.

Results of Searchmetric’s study

They emulated RankBrain and gave search results a relevance score. This score is based on how relevant a result is to a query. They found around 25 relevance ranking factors to assess relevance.

Relevance factors are different for each keyword, so Tober says they can’t provide a table of all the relevance factors.

For example, 9 out of 10 ecommerce websites have a keyword “add to cart” function above the fold. Rank #9 does not. However, it has the highest relevance score of the top 30 and that’s why it ranks.

Another example: If you search for “best bluetooth headphones” you’ll see:

See how many internal links for each result and compare their relevance scores.

And another example, for the keyword “natural detox” you’ll see the word count comparison for two results, with the higher ranking result having fewer words, fewer internal links and fewer interactive elements.

Content with a high relevance score matches user intention, is logically structured and comprehensive, offers a good user experience and deals with topics holistically. Holistic means that other topics related to the topic are covered on this page.

Key Findings

Top ranking factors are different depending on keyword set.
Relevance ranking factors dominate results across all keyword sets.
All previous examples can be explained by having a higher relevance score.
This score overpowered other ranking factors, meaning that these pages ranked highly.

Outlook for SEO

SEO is as important as ever, but it’s changing.
RankBrain is not used on all queries. For example, short/popular queries with well-known results aren’t filtered by RankBrain if your content matches user/query intent.
Relevance is crucial for good rankings, because RankBrain can detect how relevant your content is.
Make sure your content matches user/query intent.

When Google already knows the best results, RankBrain is not used. He believes RankBrain is filtering long-tail queries. Relevance is crucial for good rankings and RankBrain can detect how relevant our content is.

The Future of Search

Tober says we’re in for an abundance of redundancy. He explains that machine learning and Searchmetrics share this philosophy, which he says applies for content creation, too:

Incremental improvements through powerful data insights
Using machine and deep learning to make sense of complex data
A data-driven approach is necessary to make sense of all the redundancy online

Eric Enge: What Is RankBrain and How Does it Work

Eric had brain surgery in 2003. Does that make him a RankBrain expert? No, but his company Stone Temple Consulting did a study of Google results before and after RankBrain to see what’s changed.

Notable quote from the Bloomberg article announcement:

“RankBrain interprets language, interprets your queries, in a way that has some of the gut feeling and guessability of people.”

Google is trying to understand the true meaning of queries and do a better job of providing results that are relevant.

Some basic language analysis concepts figure in here. Take, for example, stop words. Google has traditionally stripped stop words out of a query or indexed page to simplify the language analysis.

But there are places where this practice doesn’t work. Take the query “the office” as an example. Someone wants the TV show, but Google may give results for your office. A more sophisticated language analysis might look for those two words capitalized in the middle of a sentence as a cue that this is a specific kind of “the office.”

Another example is “coach,” which sometimes refers to a brand. Google may have had to manually patch the results if they find poor engagement on SERPs for a query like this. Here’s a way as humans we might find that the Coach brand is being referenced, which Google ultimately wants to be able to recognize algorithmically:

RankBrain is trying to understand different kinds of relationships in language. On the topic of RankBrain, Gary Illyes told Enge it had to do with “being able to represent strings of text in very high-dimensional space and ‘see’ how they relate to one another.”

RankBrain gets at the context, what other words are used in the same page, same paragraph, same sentence, etc. It can notice patterns in language usage:

Along with the example of the stop word “the” affecting the query, Enge also shows how certain words were hard for Google before RankBrain:

“The” — classic stop word, but in some cases critical to phrase meaning (e.g., “The Office”)
“Graphic” — could relate to violence, language, or design (meaning determined by context)
“Without” — negatives traditionally ignored by Google, but in some cases critical to meaning of page

Example queries:

This is the example offered the the Bloomberg article.

Another troublesome example query that Gary Illyes shared in an interview with Enge: “Can you get 100% score on Super Mario without walkthrough?”

The word “without” was traditionally taken out of a query, so now the user isn’t getting the answer they were looking for. This is an example of how Google was able to improve the results with RankBrain.

Stone Temple Consulting’s Study

From their database of 500K queries, they looked for examples of queries that in June/July 205 Google didn’t understand and compared it to January 2016 results.

In the left example, you see that Google doesn’t answer the query about Ragnarok, and in the right we see that Google did answer the question.

To find queries that Google misunderstood, they removed a number of queries that either were not clear what the searcher meant, or that didn’t make sense in other ways. Here’s their end aggregate analysis:

Total Queries We Found: 163
Results Improved: 89
Results Improved (%): 54.6 percent

How did the results improve? The 89 “better results” the study found were improved in three basic ways:

39 results (43.8 percent) had an improved answer box.
2 results (2.2 percent) added maps.
48 results (53.9 percent) had improved search results pages.

RankBrain did a good job of parsing the query and instructing Google’s back-end retrieval systems to get the right results. Enge believes that Google can pass a better query not just to web results but also to featured snippets and other algorithms.

Enge shows a January 2016 SERP result of Abz Love in Wikipedia for the query “who is abs.” He explains that Google now figures out to put weighted importance on the “who is” portion of the query, even though “abs” changed the way he spells his name.

Types of improvements they found included:

Phrase interpretation improved (e.g., “YouTube Plus”)
Word interpretation improved (e.g., “weak”)
Good user query (e.g., “convert glory into an adjective”)
Poor user query (e.g., “convert into million dollars”)

Phrase interpretation and word interpretation improved. About two-thirds of the time, the user query was pretty clear to a human and Google didn’t understand, while the other third of the time, the query wasn’t clear originally.

Impact on SEO

There’s a growing importance on relevance and context in ranking. We’re seeing a shift in that direction, although he’s not sure that all of that is due to RankBrain. He doesn’t see a lot of direct impact on SEO from RankBrain right now. The biggest change happening in SEO is with content and comprehensiveness and relevance.

Summary of key SEO implications:

More obscure phrases may bring up your page.
Yes, you still need to do keyword research.
You should increase your emphasis on truly natural language.

Danny Sullivan says his takeaway is, what are you really going to do any differently? Create great content for humans, which Google will reward like they’ve always said they do.

Maximizing ROI for Twitter Ads #SMX

Maximizing ROI for Twitter Ads #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Bryan Sise, Kayt Zelley and Abishek Shrivastava — three VIPs from Twitter — share DATA-DRIVEN tips and strategies for maximizing your ROI on Twitter in this SMX West 2016 session. Let’s get to it!

Using Twitter’s Unique Data

Control studies show that promoted tweets build intent and drive conversions. Twitter found a 3.2X lift in conversion rate for people who engage with a Twitter ad vs. those that did not.

Turn everyday moments into action. Let’s say a woman is looking at her Twitter feed in a café. We know who she’s engaging with, what she’s interested in, etc. Let’s say she says she’s looking forward to her morning coffee.

As you think about mentions of the keyword coffee, what looks seemingly random is actually predictable – as you might expect on the weekdays and mornings, coffee has high frequency. But surprisingly, it also has peaks on weekend evenings. Know the patterns for your keywords

Let’s say you set up a campaign and target the keywords coffee, Peet’s, and Starbucks to target people who are thinking about coffee. Then, just seconds after the woman tweets about her love of coffee, your tweet will show up in her timeline. All of this happens live – it’s important that you’re able to capture signals like this live and connect in real time, while they’re thinking about keywords that relate to what you offer. That’s how you connect.

Twitter is your live connection to billions of signals of interest and intent. “It’s your live connection to you customer in all the places they go,” says Sise.

Performance Marketing Scenarios
Europlore

Let’s say it’s Paris in the summertime. Your business is Europlore Tours and you offer vacation packages and cultural tours in European cities. It’s March, and only 12 or your 60 slots are booked for the Paris tour. You want to fully book the Paris tour before it starts in May. Here’s how Twitter recommends leveraging ads in this scenario:

Mine everyday conversations with keyword targeting in the timeline.

When a Twitter user takes to Twitter to muse about an upcoming trip, saying “Starting to plan my family vacation. Should I go to France or Italy?” Your promoted tweet with a website card then shows up with a clear CTA to book a tour with Europlore.
Cross sell to current customers.

Use your own data (cookie ids, email addresses, phone numbers) to form a matched audience with Twitter users, and then target accordingly. Set up a campaign with that tailored audience. There, you can add additional forms of target such as device or gender.
Ensure visibility into cross-device conversions.

Use the website tag and cross-device conversion analytics. It’s very common, in this scenario with Europlore, for a user to do quick research on their phone but actually make the purchase on desktop.

Dog Star Adventure Gear

Dog Star Adventure is a retail outdoor and sporting goods online and physical store. They’re launching a new store section dedicated to climbing gear and apparel. How can they cost-effectively drive climbing gear purchases and capture market share?

Appeal to people’s passions with @username targeting.

Imagine Twitter user Sheri. She reads parenting blogs, is concerned with the environment, and likes to climb. In fact, she follows @ClimbMagazine. Dog Star can target people following @ClimbMagazine. The ad that is served can show up outside chronological order. It can also show up for users that accounts are not following.
Retarget at the product level with Dynamic Product Ads (currently in Beta).

In the most valuable minutes after a user has seen a product on your site, you can serve them an ad. Let’s say Sheri is on the Dog Star site looking at shoes. The next time she logs into Twitter, she becomes eligible to see that same product front and center on her timeline.


Increase reach and scale with the Twitter Audience Platform (currently in Beta).

Tweet Copy Best Practices

The Do’s

Convey urgency. Tweets that use urgency words have a 10% lower CPA and a 10% link click rate.
Mention percentages over dollars for discounts. Tweets that advertise percentage discounts have a 40 lower CPA than tweets that advertise dollar based discounts.
Highlight new items. Tweets with “new” have a 10% lower CPA and a 23% higher link click rate.
Pose a question. Tweets that ask a question have a 9 percent lower cost per click and a 16% higher link click rate.

The Don’ts

Don’t overuse capitals. Tweets that overuse capital letters have a 2% higher CPA and a 9% lower click rate. When you use caps people feel like you are yelling at them.
Don’t user @mentions. Tweets that mention another handle have a 6% lower click rate a 3% percent high cost per link click.

The Future of Twitter ads

People are spending more and more time on mobile. People are in a rush on mobile. They use moments of found time: between meetings, on elevators, on a train ride. Flurry data show that people who open an app more than 60 times a day has grown by 123%. People have very brief moments to experience your brand.

The world, however, is not a mobile world – it’s a multi-device world. Forrester Research shows average U.S. consumer aged 24-25 uses four devices. They switch attention across devices seamlessly. Therefore, you need to determine where they’re most likely to convert. Marketers need to take a new approach to make marketing work. Address short attention spans by turning moments into action with real-time targeting and running native ads.

Getting Started with Twitter Ads #SMX

Getting Started with Twitter Ads #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Three representatives — Vernon Wharff, Nate Wright and Kate Fauth — from Twitter take the SMX West 2016 stage to talk Twitter ads! They share their insights on meeting the challenges of advertising in a mobile world, targeting your audience, setting up your Twitter campaign and measuring your success.

Vernon Wharff (left) Nate Wright and Kate Fauth

Meeting the Challenges of Mobile

Mobile is fundamentally different than desktop – users use it in very different ways.

Mobile influences and is influenced by other activities – people want in-the-moment personalized content.
People consume mobile content in short bursts. They consume and contribute constantly.
Cross device conversion paths are the rule, not the exception.

The point? The strategies that worked on desktop aren’t always translating well to mobile. The screens are small, the users are distracted, the users are using multiple devices, the technology is different, and there are platform complexities. In order to overcome these challenges, the medium needs a new approach.

Connect in the now.
Inspire action with media rich ad units that drive specific actions.
Make conversions possible any and everywhere.

Targeting and Measurement     

It’s difficult to reach your audience online. People aren’t raising their hands to say they are interested in your service. You can use Twitter to target people on their interests.

Each day your customers are sending millions of signals via Twitter. Two unique targeting types on Twitter are keywords and interests. Interest come from the content users engage with and the people they interact with.

Keyword Targeting is a precision tool that allows you to hone in at the right time in the right context.

Let’s say Ryan is tweeting about an upcoming vacation he’s considering – if you’re someone who works for a ski resort and Ryan is tweeting about skiing, it’s a prime moment for you to reach him.

Think about your existing important keywords in your SEM campaigns – how can you leverage them on Twitter?

Match Types:

Phrase Match – words in exact order only
Broad Match – includes synonyms

Reach your customers with tailored audiences. Build tailored audiences using your data – cookie IDs, emails, phone numbers. You can expand the reach of your campaign by using a lookalike audiences. You can also extend performance with additional targeting options – geo, age, etc.

Measurement

93 percent of marketers said they would run more cross channel campaigns if they were able to more effectively measure mobile advertising performance.

The website tag is a small snippet of code that you place on your site that allows you to track conversions and remarketing to audiences of recent website visitors.

Best Practices for Tag Installation

Consider your sales cycle
Tag all pages on your site
Speed thing sup with a container
Consider how you want to remarket

Select a key conversion tag when setting up campaigns – specify what conversion is the most important. This will gear the campaign toward that key conversion event.

Customize your attribution by post engagement or by post view – it’s up to you! Nate recommends advertisers use post view.

Understand how exposure to your promoted tweets drives conversions on your site:

Volume of conversions
Cost per click
Conversion rate
Total revenue
Order quantity

Gain cross device conversion insights with the website tag.

Campaign Optimization and Setup

Plan your Campaign for Success – what do you need to see to consider this campaign a success:

Define your KPIs.
Set campaigns for auction success.
Use those KPIs to calculate your bid.
Create a testing framework with multiple campaigns. Cast a really wide net, figure out what works and then replicate those campaigns.
Test mobile and desktop in separate campaigns.

Fast Tips on Bidding

Higher performance advertisers pay less.
Bid higher when choosing narrower objectives.
Target bidding can often drive the best performance.

Optimize your Landing page

Keep copy pithy
Simple, clear CTAs
Capture lead
Use click to call
Reduce typing
Scalable vector graphics

 

How Email Marketing Is Revolutionizing Paid Search through Customer Match #SMX

How Email Marketing Is Revolutionizing Paid Search through Customer Match #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Cleo Hage takes the stage at SMX West

Cleo Hage (@theRealMissCleo), paid search strategist at Wordstream, is going to talk about the future of email marketing. Yes, this is an SEM presentation.

Email is the OG of digital marketing.

Email is cluttered.
Email is growing.
Emails aren’t going anywhere.

You log in to things, get updates and receive shipping notifications through email. Even a GOOD email campaign has a 20% open rate. And then a click-through rate of 5% on top of that. You’re left with FOMO — 80% of unopened email and 95% of lost leads.

The answer is Customer Match, the ability to upload lists of email into AdWords to create audiences for precision targeting! This is how to target individual, specific people in search ads.

It works like a remarketing list. Is it only for Gmail? Nope! All email platforms are accepted.

Customer Match for PPC

How does it work?

Emails are linked to Google IDs.
Those Google IDs are turned into a remarketing list.
It acts just like a remarketing list.

You can use them in Google search, YouTube and Gmail.

Why should I use Customer Match?

The Unicorn Scenario: You meet Larry at a conference. You upload his email into your Customer Match list. One day Larry is watching a video on YouTube. Your ad may show up on that video! Now you’re bridging the gap from in-person meeting to serving an ad and reaching that 95%!

Upload those hard-earned emails. Here’s a case study. You see a comparison of clicks, impressions, CTR, conversion rate, CPC and average position for branded terms, retargeting, and Customer Match:

Case study results showing higher ROI with Customer Match (click to enlarge)

The conversion rate of a non-targeted campaign was three times as high! Increase bids for more valuable target audience.

Treat someone you know well, someone who knows your brand, differently than a stranger, someone you’ve just met. Treating them differently includes different offers:

Use different offers to improve ROI (click to enlarge)

Let’s talk email. CPCs are cheap. Impressions are high. You’re on the top of the inbox. Gmail Ads is how you stay on top. Gmail Ads will bring you to the top. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be on here. Gmail Ads live in the AdWords UI and they are easy to set up.

Don’t forget about Similar Audiences! Shopping and YouTube are a beautiful pair. YouTube Shopping — use it. YouTube Shopping campaigns are shopping PLA overlays on YouTube Ads.

Don’t worry, Lead Gen people. There’s something for you, too.

Traditionally, Lead Gen = Can I get your number? Stop asking for their email if you already have it. You want to push them down the funnel. Serve them something different at every level of the funnel. Every stage of the funnel should be a different Customer Match list.

Are you keeping your leads engaged? Stay top of mind (hello YouTube), top of SERP and top of inbox. In-Stream Ads give you at least 5 seconds of branding for FREE because they have to watch at least 5 seconds and can then skip, in which case you don’t pay.

Remember the importance of exclusive targeting. Show them something they haven’t seen before. You’re talking to someone specific. Bid on generic terms and create different ad copy.

Doing What Matters for SEO & Google in 2016 – Googler Maile Ohye at #SMX

Doing What Matters for SEO & Google in 2016 – Googler Maile Ohye at #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Maile Ohye on stage at SMX West 2016

A favorite Googler and SMX presenter, Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google Inc. (@maileohye), explains that in 2004 and 2005, Matt Cutts used to say that search engines are chasing the user. In other words, the engine wants to serve the user first and then everything else (rankings, results pages) follow. A problem occurs when websites then chase the search engines.

An alternative view is when search engines and websites both chase the user, but this is oversimplified. Today she suggests a cultural shift to the customer, not the user.

So, we went from this:

The old approach of chasing “users”

To this:

The cultural shift of 2016 is serving customers

“Humanity fuels the new economy.” – Seth Godin

Create the extraordinary.
Take risks. We need marketers that don’t ask for permission. Progress doesn’t happen by sticking to best practices — it happens when you create new practices and then better practices emerge.
Do what matters. Don’t ask if you’re going to succeed, ask if you’re going to matter, because that’s what’s important.

Avinash Kaushik has created a new definition of conversion.

It used to be: conversion = orders / visits

Today it is: conversion = orders / visitors

It’s not about low-level clicks, sessions and page views. It’s about taking our thinking up to the person.

The offline experience is far ahead of the online world. Slice and dice the data as much as you can but remember that you’re optimizing for a local minimum.

Here’s Avinash’s new model of mapping data to customers:

Avinash Kaushik maps data to customer states. Click to enlarge.

The Ritz Carlton has a motto that we are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. They have a three-tier level of service. Expected is clean linens and hot water. Requested is providing firmer pillows when asked. Delighted is above and beyond, like sewing a button when they notice it’s loose or combing a beach for lost sunglasses before they’re asked. Meet the needs people didn’t express, which are vast.

“Life is needs in action.” – Maile’s former acting coach

“Quantified data optimization doesn’t really address underlying needs.” – Maile Ohye

You may visualize your customer but until you talk to a real customer, you don’t know what their reality is.

Your vision of your customers vs. their reality

The 2003 Google webmaster guidelines boiled down to 5 SEO instructions:

Do something cool (compelling content or service).
Include relevant keywords in your copy.
Be smart about your tags and site architecture.
Attract natural links.
Stay fresh and relevant.

These principles hold true but the bar is much higher. Add to that — “for humans, do something cool.”

Smart cars, smart watches, the Echo — all these Internet of Things devices are new and evolving. There isn’t one market or device, there are multiple. 90%  use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time. See if you can offer mobile website-only available code that works anywhere. Maybe you can come up with creative ways to estimate cross-device interactions.

Scanning is the new normal behavior. You don’t get a few sentences, you get a few words. 40% abandon if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Here are some things Google did to help customers:

Google finds areas of improvement with customer feedback. (click to enlarge)

They found people wanted new news front and center and support. See how now they start a blog post with a TL;DR instead of making it all about them?

Google updates its blog post style to be more user-centric.

Be smart about your tags and site architecture is still true today, but the tags are different now. Become AMP or structured-data ready. She gives an example of booking an appointment at a hair salon with Mio Mio Salon in San Francisco through Google because the salon has structured data markup.

How customer satisfaction aligns with lifetime customer value

How customer satisfaction aligns with lifetime customer value and Avinash Kaushik’s customer states (click to enlarge)

Here’s an example of where things are going and how to be great — think in these terms first. In May 2015, Three Birds Nest was one of the top merchants on Etsy. In an interview, the founder said:

“Etsy was a great place for me to start because the market was there.”

“I didn’t have to pay for SEO from the start.”

“We want everything we touch, that our customer sees, to be something they connect with. That goes from our photography to how we interact with customers.”

 

Beacons: Opportunities, Limitations & How Marketers Can Use Them Today #SMX

Beacons: Opportunities, Limitations & How Marketers Can Use Them Today #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Beacons – every time there’s an article or talk on them, one word comes up: explosion. Forward-thinkers and early adopters are ready for this technology to explode and today’s SMX West 2016 panelists are no exception:

Keri Danielski, Vice President of Marketing and PR, Gimbal (@keridanielski)
Greg Gifford, Director of Search & Social, DealerOn (@greggifford)
Raj Nijjer, VP, Community, Yext (@rajnijjer)

Speakers Keri Danielski, Raj Nijjer and Greg Gifford

Beacons in Action in the Automotive Industry

Greg Gifford wants to know if you are spending too much time looking at competitors who are doing cool things? Like, for example, beacons. He wants to help you use them, too.

As soon as beacons were released, auto dealers wanted to jump in – but there was a challenge. Beacons must be tied to mobile apps to wield them. So how do you get consumers to download and use an app? There’s a beacon solution that’s NOT tied to an app: Xone.

Anyone in range of the a beacon gets a message on their phone or watch … but that’s not the best part of a beacon. The real reason beacons are awesome is that location services still work even if their app isn’t on. Whenever they come within range the people are tagged and I can upload those tagged consumers in a custom audience campaign on Facebook. That audience updates automatically in real time. Want to run people who for people who were there a month ago? A year ago? Those automatically update. The goal is to serve RIDICULOUSLY targeted ads. For example, if you were in a car dealership one month ago and didn’t visit the finance department, the dealership can then serve you a Facebook ad reminding you of that car you had your eye on. If you bought a car three years ago, the dealership can now send you an upgrade offer. If you visited the service department, the dealership can deliver a service coupon, etc.

Check out Gifford’s SMX Slideshare here.

Beacons: Opportunities: Limitations and How Marketers Can Use Beacons Today

Proximity beacons and firmware engage users at micro-locations, says Keri Danielski.

Compelling Statistics on Beacons

84 percent of consumers use mobile devices whiles shopping.  You need to use that – mobile devices are a powerful tool.

“84 percent of consumers use mobile devices while shopping.” -@ChristiJOlson
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Understand and Engage Customers

Keep in mind that paths to purchase aren’t typically straight:

What is a marketer to do? Enhance the consumer experience.

Context creates superior mobile experiences. This is the beacon world:

Let’s say you’re home and you cross into a geo-fence that’s put inside your favorite retail store. There’s a beacon inside. It gives you a welcome back message or reminder to use your loyalty card or a discount. The experiences is personalized.

Then you head to a coffee shop and a beacon can speak to you, as well. You could pay with the app, avoid the line with the beacon, etc.

Then you pass by a bus stop and the bus stop serves you an ad that corresponds to the ad on the stop.

A massive adoption of beacons is underway, with big names like Apple, GameStop, Frito-Lay and Dick’s Sporting Goods getting on board. Major sports arenas have also largely adopted beacons.

Beacons: Opportunities for Marketers

“Store visits are the new KPI. Beacons allow you not only to track user activity but to bring customers back,” Raj Nijjer explains. “Beacons are the No. 1 in terms of proximity technology and software. They’re usually paired with geo-fencing.”

The retail industry is one of the biggest adopters of beacons, followed by travel, hospitality and airports. One-third of automotive business have tried beacon.

Beacons get people to engage with your products and services and give a blue-tooth enabled consumer an offer. With beacons deployed, you can offer real-time coupons and offers. It distracts the customer a little because they are looking at what you have to offer rather than pulling up an Amazon app and seeing if they have a better price.

 

How Dynamic Ads Can Supercharge Your SEM Campaigns #SMX

How Dynamic Ads Can Supercharge Your SEM Campaigns #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Are you running Dynamic Search Ads, known as DSAs? Discover the websites that are naturally going to benefit from DSAs and how to use automation rules to control DSAs. Beyond search ads, learn about DSAs for display ads and Facebook ads as well.

Moderator:

Brad Geddes, Founder, Certified Knowledge (@bgTheory)

Brad Geddes (left) with speakers Sahil Jain and John Lee

Speakers:

Sahil Jain, CEO and Co-founder, AdStage (@sahilio)
John Lee, Managing Partner, Clix Marketing (@john_a_lee)

Sahil Jain: Pros/Cons and Advanced Automation Strategies for DSAs

Jain built a cross-platform ad management tool. His agenda for this presentation:

How Dynamic Search Ads work
Who should use DSA
Pros and cons of DSA
Best practices/chacked/
Advanced automation strategies for DSAs

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

Create an ad and the headline and destination URL are created dynamically; the search engine selects them. Whatever the search query is, the engine finds the most relevant landing page and the existing query to generate the headline. You define description 1 and 2.

Setting Up DSAs

It’s a search network-only ad type. Use your base domain. Get more granular by adding a category.

Categories: You have recommendations provided to you, and you can also override them. The problem with DSAs is that they can go wild. He recommends containing them by being more specific with your categories selected.

Who Should Use DSAs?

He believes there are the big 3 website types for using DSAs:

Education
Ecommerce
Travel

Verticals that have several landing pages, large product catalogs or various categories.

Small companies with limited resources can also benefit. There is less time to set up and you can get more data faster.

Why Dynamic Search Ads

Google talks about having more than a trillion different search queries a year. There are a lot of long-tail keywords that are high converters. There is more traffic you’re not capturing. Fifteen percent (15%) of daily searches, or about 500 million queries per day, are truly unique on Google, so that’s how they use DSA as a research tool.

Pros and Cons of DSAs

Advantages of using Dynamic Search Ads:

Minimal setup time
Capture more traffic
Dynamic landing page based on the query
Uncover converting search terms

Disadvantages/cons:

More time required to optimize
Possibly more irrelevant traffic if not optimized
Less control over the destination URL
Less control over you ad’s headline

Best Practices for Successful DSA Campaigns

Negative keywords
Google Analytics
Small budgets
Ad testing

Add negative keywords — this gives you control over the beast that is DSAs. A useful tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, which is good for finding negative keywords.

Pulling your search term reports inside AdWords.

Set very small budgets for these types of campaigns: $20-$50 budget per day. The initial goal is to get data. At just about $20-$50 they can get enough confidence in the setup and other variables they can adjust.

Use Google Analytics to measure the quality of traffic: time on site, conversion/goals and conversion rate.

Add specific web pages for better precision. This is an advanced tactic that goes against the first setup recommendations he provided. This gives you kiddie bumpers, or boundaries for your DSAs.

Test, Test, Test

Test variations of your ad copy: description line 1, description line 2 and display URL.

AdWords Automated Rules

Increase bids to maximize the visibility of your ad.
Increase budgets using your cost per conversion metric.
Pause poor performing ads using CTR coupled with spend or impressions (create rule, pause ads).

Add safeguards to your automated rules:

Preview the rules.
Email every time it runs (he calls them alerts).
Only email sans action.

John Lee: How DSAs Can Supercharge Your Campaigns

Dynamic ads: an introduction. Dynamic ads are not plain text ads or boring static image ads. Inject additional content contextually based on different variables that will be covered here. Dynamic ads will likely become a factor in conversational search and the future of search.

Change the content of your ads dynamically based on keyword, website content, product/service data, real-time data and more. This applies to search, display and social ads.

Plan Ahead

Strategize the following:

Who are you targeting?
Where are you targeting them?
What is the intent or desired action?
Do you have all of the necessary accounts, tools and resources?

Accounts & Data Connections

Accounts: Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Google Merchant Center, Google Docs, etc.

Data Connections: Retargeting, ecommerce tracking, ecommerce platforms or feeds, other database/API connections, etc.

Time and Resources

Setup: Setting up DSAs can be tedious and could require resources beyond your team or skill set. For example, data feed creation and data quality control, pixel placement, coding (scripts), promotion schedules, and so forth.

Countdown Text Ads: This is a cool feature that remains hidden if you don’t know about it. You can count down anything, like 4 days before a sale ends. You can use the countdown in a headline or body copy when {=COUNTDOWN} operator is used.

Ad Customizers {=DataSetName.AttributeName}: This pulls data from a feed and into a search text ad. Data feeds are managed through Shared Library > Business Data. The operator “DataSetName” points to the data feed.

Display Ads

Dynamic display ads can be laser focused. They can change based on location and what the user is viewing on the web.

They eliminate cumbersome campaign structures, which reduces management resources. Single display ad unit accounts for a multitude of variables (via data feed) and ad sizes (ad templates).
They free up creative resource bandwidth.
“Preferred Layouts” give you options.

These are categories that Google has already thought out the data templates for each of these vertical to do dynamic display ads. Image ads, text ads (hugely important on display).

Dynamic Product Ads

For ecommerce, DPAs are the perfect marriage of retargeting and your product feed. Dynamic Product Ads are a unique campaign type, and you link your Merchant Center account. Design is automatic but fully editable.

Facebook Ads Dynamic Product Ads

One of the worst headaches of Facebook Ads is getting product feeds set up. Create a product set and then the campaign, in that order. Then associate the product set and audience. Both are chosen at the Ad Set level. Facebook has a lot of audience targeting features, but for these DPAs you don’t have access to all the audience targeting options; instead, it’s related to retargeting (where the user was already on your site).

Scripts

Scripts (which are JavaScript code) can help advertisers to:

Automate data feed creation for customizers and dynamic display ads.
Create data feeds that sync with other data points via API to apply real-time information to dynamic ads.
Create standard text ads dynamically based on real-time data.

He gives three resources for scripts:

Ad Parameterizer script: http://bit.ly/ad-parameterizer
Ad Customizers on Search Engine Land: http://bit.ly/custom-ad-sel
Free AdWords Scripts: http://www.freeadwordsscripts.com

Build a Framework for Success with Dynamic Ads from John Lee

Getting AMP’d: What You Need To Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages & Google #SMX

Getting AMP’d: What You Need To Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages & Google #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Founding Editor, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)

Speakers:

Dave Besbris, Vice President of Engineering, Google
Paul Shapiro, Organic Search Director, Catalyst (@fighto)

The three are on stage, and Danny Sullivan introduces us to our presenters by telling us that Dave goes by Bes and that Paul wrote this SEL article: “How to Get Started with Accelerated Mobile Pages.”

Dave Besbris of Google speaking at SMX West with Paul Shapiro and Danny Sullivan

Googler Dave Besbris on AMP

Dave “Bes” Besbris is our first speaker. Shapiro says Danny Sullivan told him there is a speaker dress code, so he wore his formal hoodie today.

Linkless Attribution Theater Presentation by Duane Forrester #SMX

Linkless Attribution Theater Presentation by Duane Forrester #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Duane Forrester, Vice President, Organic Search Operations at Bruce Clay, Inc., takes center stage during this theater presentation at SMX West 2016, to talk about “Linkless Attribution: Why What People Say Will Matter More Than Ever.”

Links Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

For the longest time, links were the signal that people tried hardest to optimize. This story has gone the course of manipulation and then adjusted as people wanted links in quality over quantity.

Today, the engines have to find new ways to understand what to trust. Link building today can be potentially dangerous, so obviously you want to be careful with that. Yesterday’s vote of confidence can be today’s question of integrity.

To be clear, links still are valuable. But the engines are very good at understanding if the links are poor quality or manipulative.

Links are good to provide direct traffic. Links are essentially what will get you information directly. If you get a good link on a good website, you end up in a whole new realm of traffic. That could be because you got a link in an article on The Huffington Post. That’s not going to help so much with ranking in an immediate sense. There are other clues the engines use to determine your value:

Links
Domain/page age
Freshness
Relevancy
Social signals
Traffic volume
Usefulness
History
Internal linking

Along with all this, linkless attribution is becoming more important. Do you have a strategy to gain reviews? The search engines just need to know if the tone is generally positive, negative or neutral. You’ll notice that CNN and a lot of news websites will mention you but not link to you.

Win by What People Say About You

At Bing, years ago, the search engine figured out context and sentiment of tone and how to associate mentions without a link. As the volume grows and trustworthiness of this mention is known, you’ll get a bump in rankings as a trial.

Linkless attribution is the moment someone says something about you. Trust him: search engines will notice.

“Linkless attribution is important. Trust me: search engines will notice.” –@DuaneForrester
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“PR, content, partnerships, customer service and more will come together to help you win.”