SearchCap: AdWords reports, CTR data & Google Maps ads

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: AdWords reports, CTR data & Google Maps ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

9 Ways For Marketers To Do Amazing Technical Things Without Knowing Code

As a marketer, you are always looking to do more with less. You may get the sense that technology can help you do better and you're right. Follow along as I explain exactly how you can harness this force without writing a single line of code.

1. Do A/B Split Tests and Personalization You've probably heard of all the merits of A/B split testing and of being data-driven, but how can you implement these different tests on each of your pages without consulting the tech team?

It's easy enough with solutions like Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely that allow you to drag and drop your changes across the website by simply copy and pasting a snippet of code across your website (or getting somebody technical to help you do that). Both tools allow you to customize your website for different types of visitors, and they'll allow you to run controlled experiments to see which variations of your web pages perform best.

Optimizely allows you to drag and drop different variations of your web page without any code.

2. Build Landing Pages

Maybe you don't want to optimize your website – you want to build some new pages. Maybe it's a new campaign announcing a new product launch, or maybe you're running an event you want to collect an email waiting list for. Whatever it is, you'll need a web page that describes what you're doing, a landing page. Thankfully, you don't have to build anything in HTML or CSS. You can use drag and drop editors in Unbounce or, if you're really looking to maximize conversion, marketing-based solutions like Leadpages.

3. Build Entire Websites

Don't want to stop at just building a web page? Maybe you want to look to build an entire website for a new product. Thankfully, you don't have to call a web agency to do everything for you at a high price! You can use solutions like Squarespace or Wix to build everything in your website without a line of code. And if you want to get even more customized, grab a theme from Themeforest and learn the basics of WordPress! You'll soon be building beautiful websites with layers of personalized complexity–without a line of code.

4. Scrape Links, Content and More with Python (but use with caution!)

By downloading Anaconda and using the iPython Notebook contained within, you can use Python scripts and copy + paste the outputs.

The easiest and most powerful use of this is to take links and data from other websites. Be careful though, a lot of websites will have terms of use that prohibit the use of their content. Nevertheless, it might be a good tool to use to get raw data, or to get useful links that point to certain resources. You might, for example, want to get all of the links of your competitors profiled in a certain blog post, or you might want to get all of the links of different services in a directory.

This script above will take all the links from a sample page (in this case the Wikipedia page for the Python language)

Here's the raw script you can copy + paste in Python 3.5 mode:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import requests

r = requests.get(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)”)

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text,”lxml”)

for link in soup.find_all('a'):

print(link.get('href'))

5. Send Newsletters and Automate Emails

Email is one of the most effective marketing channels out there, and the best for return on investment. If you can get people coming back by filling their inbox with valuable information, you've reached marketing nirvana.

Instead of doing all the messy work coding up HTML-rich emails, you can use the drag & drop and email list capabilities of MailChimp. If you want to automate emails a layer beyond, and take people through an in-depth series of automated emails, you could use a solution like Drip.

6. Get Data

Ever needed to take a quick look at certain data, like the demographic traits of a certain country? Need to source the latest financial data? Look no further than Quandl. You'll be able to find all sorts of data, from the average age of first marriage for women to life expectancy at birth. Best of all, you can export that data directly in Excel, stepping away from all of the code if you needed.

7. Filter Through Data

Most people think of Google Apps as a great way to collaborate with others, but they don't know about the full power of this suite of tools. Google built a way for you to add layers of functionality on top of their powerful software, allowing you to do so much more with different types of data. Best of all, you can copy + paste pre-made scripts and benefit from the effects without being technical!

Check to see if your website is online or save all tweets that match a certain hashtag to a spreadsheet. You can do that or a variety of other tasks through scripts that will save you time and money.

Use these scripts for good, not evil.

8. Building Popups and Other Interactive Elements on a Website

Sometimes, you want to add an additional layer of interactivity to a website, whether it's a popup to highlight a brand new feature, or a walkthrough that will help guide users. Thankfully, with tools like Engage and HelloBar you can add different modals or elements to your website that can help you collect emails, direct traffic elsewhere, or dictate what users should look at in a web page.

9. Dig Deeper into Websites, and See How Your Website Looks in mobile

Most people don't know about the handy Google Chrome Inspector or its equivalent Firebug on Firefox. While most of the time it is used by developers to spot errors or mock up certain changes in the code, you can use the Inspector to check into the exact URLs of images, and how your website displays on different screen sizes, from iPhones to tablets.

The responsive design tool in these inspector tools will allow you to simulate what your website looks like from device-to-device, a crucial need to see if your website is mobile-friendly. This is a factor that's critically important for websites with mobile traffic, and one that Google uses to rank webpages.

Conclusion

By harnessing technology, you'll be at the cutting-edge of digital marketing. You won't even need to learn how to code to get an awesome array of new powers. Save yourself time and money, and make sure you use your new capabilities for good!

About the Author: Roger is a digital marketer who self-taught himself to code but recognizes when code is useful and when it isn't. He manages Growth for edtech company Springboard, and will often write about new technologies at his own personal blog code(love). You can find him on Twitter.

What Does 'Mobile-Friendly Content' Really Mean?

If you're a 90's kid, you likely have fond memories of Saved by the Bell and its star, precocious Ferris Bueller type Zack Morris.

You could tell Zack was unique among the students at Bayside High. For one thing, he could stop time and address the camera directly. But more importantly, he had a cellular phone. Sure, it was the size (and probably weight) of a brick. But it wasn't connected to a landline! That big rubberized antenna didn't connect with a corded receiver nearby-it pulled connectivity out of thin air. Magical.

Fast forward to today, and kids who were born after Saved by the Bell went off the air are now entering the workforce. If they met Zack Morris, they would probably make fun of his hair, his clothes, and his giant phone.

Image via YouTube

Mobile phones aren't reserved for cool kids with time-stopping powers anymore. Whether we're old, young, or middle-aged and trapped in a nostalgia loop, smartphones are our constant companions.

It's high time for marketers to catch up with this reality. Over a year ago-an eternity in Internet time-Google announced that more searches take place on mobile devices than on computers. That fact has led Google to include mobile friendliness as part of its ranking algorithm. They know more people are on mobile than ever before. And they are invested in providing a better experience for mobile users.

Being on Google's good side isn't the only advantage to being mobile friendly, though. The only reason Google prioritizes mobile friendliness is that it's what users want. That is, it's what your audience wants.

So, how is your mobile experience? Sure, you already have responsive design, but is your content actually optimized for people to consume it on a mobile device? Or is reading your site more like trying to catch Pokémon on Zack Morris' phone?

Here's how to make different types of content more mobile-friendly.

Optimize Video Content

Video is the rising star of mobile content. Thirty-five percent of viewers watched more video last year than they did the previous year. And 36% said they watched videos that last five minutes or longer every day.

If you want your audience to spend their precious data allotment on your video, it's important to make sure the experience is a pleasant one:

• Use a service that automatically optimizes the tech stuff. Don't fiddle with bitrates and compression on your own. Go third-party with YouTube or Vimeo for a seamless user experience. If you want to host your own video, use Apple's HTTP Live Streaming. It can adjust the video quality on the fly to match bandwidth capability, just like Netflix does.


• Make sure text is readable. Mobile screens are small. Even the big ones are small. Don't make your viewer squint to see the fine print.


• Make it make sense without audio. Eighty-five percent of video on Facebook is played without sound. And even if your viewer has their headphones in, odds are they're in an environment that makes listening difficult. Try watching the video on mute to make sure it still gets your points across.

Optimize Images

Load times are a major factor in someone engaging with your content or bouncing back to the search results. So it's important that your content gets in front of them fast. At the same time, though, visual interest is another major factor in staying versus bouncing. So you have to have both a responsive site and one with visual appeal. To do that, make sure your images will load fast and look great:

• Create images in a pre-optimized format. Use a tool like Canva to create images the right size and resolution for social media and email.


• Use smart compression. You can compress .jpg files a bit without compromising their appearance. But too much compression leads to ugliness. Tinyjpg is a neat tool that compresses by reducing the color depth in ways invisible to the human eye. It's downright spooky.


• Use a tool for responsive resizing. If you have web development wizards on your side, they can help with responsive resizing from the server side. If you have to go it alone, a service like ly Display can do the heavy lifting.

Optimize Text Content

Yes, Virginia, people do still read text on mobile. It's not all videos and images and virtual-reality roller coasters. But they're reading for shorter periods of time and with much greater potential for distraction. So a wall of text will be even less effective than it is on a laptop screen. Here's how to guide a reader through your text content without losing them:

• Serve content in snack-friendly chunks. Think short sentences and short paragraphs, broken up by visual assets, video, embedded content from Vine, Instagram, or Snapchat, or at least white space.


• Use headers for navigation. Make sure readers can skim the post and get a good idea of what you're talking about. Think of the headers as the “trailer” to entice people to take in the whole post.


• Include the main points in your conclusion. If your article starts to look like a time commitment, mobile readers might just swipe to the bottom and see how it wraps up. Make sure the relevant points and call to action are waiting for them.

Mobile Friendly is People Friendly

Regardless of where they encounter your content, you want your audience to have a positive experience reading or watching it. So make sure your brand is putting its best face forward for the 50% who will encounter you first on mobile. Give them responsive video content that makes sense even if their headphones are off. Make sure your images look great, display properly, and load quickly. And make sure your text is snackable, navigable, and skimmable.

What are your top tips for creating mobile-friendly content? What did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. |
What Does 'Mobile-Friendly Content' Really Mean? | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post What Does 'Mobile-Friendly Content' Really Mean? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Google iOS app gets better listening skills for voice searches & newly added features

Hotel search results will now show expanded information around hotel amenities and gas station searches will include gas prices.

The post Google iOS app gets better listening skills for voice searches & newly added features appeared first on Search Engine Land.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The Hidden Side Effects of Using Big Data to Better Understand Your Customers

When it comes to better understanding your customers, you likely leverage every possible resource from personas to mapping the customer experience journey.  For marketers, big data is a boon – it's a gold mine of information that, to be sure, requires a bit of digging through the dirt to get to the real treasure.

Big data has been used to tout everything from customer sentiment to fraud prediction. By letting computers do what they do best, it is believed that crunching all that information can lead to some pretty significant correlations – between click streams, geographic location, and even transactional data. Tying it all together helps bring the customer service lens into even greater focus.

With that being said, however, relying too much on big data has its drawbacks.  Beyond the fact that we're just starting to understand what's out there and how it's all relatable, big data should not be looked at as a marketing or customer service panacea.  In fact, there are a lot of areas where relying too much on big data to better understand your customers can have the opposite effect, like these:

Lack of Availability

Let's say you're shopping online for a new pair of shoes. You're scrolling through pair after pair on your cell phone until you find the perfect pair. Unfortunately, they're backordered.  You want to be notified when more are in stock, but you're not sure how to do that.  You tap for customer service. You're invited to type in your question and see a list of canned solutions.  That's a bit too cumbersome so you look for a way to contact a representative.

Instead, you're asked to submit your question to a helpdesk or online community. Trying to fill out a trouble ticket, you see that the service isn't compatible with mobile. You give up in frustration. Shortly thereafter, you get an email reminding you about the item you were interested in, and asking how the company can do better.

If you're visualizing a cartoonish response of steam coming out of your ears from anger and frustration, now you can imagine the limitations that big data has.  Perhaps the only retailer to truly get a handle on big data at this level is Amazon, and they've been able to integrate unimaginable reams of data seamlessly while being able to grow and scale their company with consistency.

Amazon had to grow and scale its operations – and quickly, yet they still deliver consistently high-rated customer service thanks to big data analytics.

When the service you need isn't available, you grit your teeth for long wait times ahead, and test your patience with the poor rep that has to look up the details of the backordered product in a sea of potential choices. The point is, Big Data shouldn't just be pored over by analytics experts, but made available to everyone at every tier in the organization.

Rush to Judgment and Unrealistic Expectations

Big data is the foundation of a perilously-positioned scale. On one end, you have the camp that's rigid and inflexible. Things have always been done a certain way, and the deluge of big data isn't going to change that. These companies risk getting outmaneuvered by their more proactive competitors. They make hasty decisions that may not always be backed by data science, and then backpedal when things go south.

At the opposite end, there are those who are positively drowning in analytics. They're so swallowed up by data that they hesitate to make any decision without consulting the numbers like some kind of oracle. They shrug off their “gut feelings” or intuition because the data doesn't account for that.

There's no doubt that big data is changing the way we market, but as many industry trends go, it can easily be blown out of proportion into something it's not. People are complex, self-serving, habitual, ever-changing creatures. Trying to make sense of that is not something that can be done overnight. It requires careful planning, an understanding of the different “pools” of information the data is drawing from, and one's own understanding of their target market to fully grasp.

Otherwise you end up with complex, complicated decisions that are impossible to predict and frustrating to implement.

Data Modeling Difficulties

In order to get the most out of big data, it has to be modeled in order to bring the value it's so often associated with to customer service, which in turn trickles down to the customer. At its core, Big Data is raw, unfiltered and largely noise. It's not structured, organized or clean.  The only system currently out there with the power to tackle such large scale information is Hadoop, which has been around since the early 2000s.

Hadoop is the closest thing available to enterprise-grade big data analytics. Image source

Currently there is no user friendly, on-demand and easily implementable enterprise data modeling system. There are many ways to tackle the big data noise, however, but many data models hit common obstacles including not being able to scale accordingly or organize the data in a sensible way, and still fewer work with existing analytics platforms and CRM information.

Just having the data is no longer enough. Making it accessible and understandable to everyone is the challenge today's modeling apps have to fix.

Pure Complexity

And finally, let's face it, we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what's out there. And yet it keeps growing and growing.  Costs go down, availability of information goes up.  Despite all its lucrative potential, big data can't replace people. When insights are gleaned from data scientists, they're passed on to managers and then employees.  If there's not a process in place to better understand and leverage the information you continue to gain, it's practically worthless.

The bottom line with using big data to better understand your customers is that there's a lot of expectations of what it can or cannot do. With such a wave looming overhead, it's easy to want to stand back and wait.  But just as the internet itself was once looked at as being “just a fad”, so too is big data poised to completely change what we know about our audience.

Being able to turn this information into insight is a challenge – but one worth tackling. We all know what happens when there's a rush to implement without a goal in mind.  Knowing the issues ahead of time can help you plan out a strategy that takes all of these points into consideration as you all work together toward a common goal – making sure every customer is exceedingly satisfied, again and again.

What are Your Thoughts on Using Big Data to Better Understand Customers?

Do you think big data is still in its infancy with regard to its use in customer analytics? Or do you think we simply lack the tools and understanding to make the most of it? What tools are you currently using to make sense of the data you collect? Share your thoughts and comments with us below.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

Find Success By Putting Your Digital Advertising to the A/B Test

Testing different variations is one of the quickest ways to learn, and Digital Advertising is no exception. When you begin talking about A/B testing, many of us get nervous and all sorts of possible catastrophes begin swimming around in our heads.

But the truth is, advertising is a quickly evolving tactic, and in order to gain momentum, testing has become a necessity. Whether your advertising is social, display, native or search, the key to better results and return on investment is testing.

To help you navigate the sometimes-confusing world of digital advertising testing, we've provided some helpful resources below.

What is A/B Testing?

An A/B Test is simply a test between two variants, a control and a variation, or as Google likes to call it, an experiment. Examples might include creating two different:

• Landing Pages


• Assets


• Ads

How to Approach an A/B Split

An A/B split needs to be shown to the exact same audience, during the same times of day, same days of the week and in the same areas in order for you to have a firm grasp on which variation is truly performing better.

It's important to have a firm grasp on your data set or audience so that you can split the information and create an equitable ad deliver. You'll find that most platforms have options for testing including, Google AdWords, Analytics Experiments, Optimizely and Unbounce.

Considerations for Length & Time of Testing

In order to measure success, you need to make sure you're giving you tests enough time to run. We typically recommend running tests at a minimum of 2 weeks with most tests running for 1 month.

Volume

How much data is required for you to have statistically significant results? If your program sees low volumes (clicks, impressions, conversions), you need to run longer tests. If you have a high volume account you can call tests much faster.

Seasonality

If you have drastic peaks and lows due to seasonality, I suggest finding the middle ground for testing. I never recommend testing during a seasonal low unless you dealing with a high volume account.

Day of Week/Month Activity

Make sure that both groups have equal coverage during your peak days and weeks. Again, try to avoid running tests during your low periods, especially if you see significant swings in CTR and conv. rates.

It's also essential to make sure that your test is going to have impact. Sometimes slight copy variations and image changes aren't going to tell you much. You want to make sure the variant has a very clear goal and hypothesis. For example, by changing a button from “Download” to “Get My Guide”, I'm hoping to see a 10% lift in conversions.

What Types of Digital Advertising A/B Tests Should You Try?

When we implement digital advertising tests, they are directly tied to helping to meet program goals. Depending on the goals for your digital advertising program, we recommend launching the following types of tests:

Message Testing:

Test your messaging simple ad variations such as:

• Length of Message


• Promotional based Messaging vs. Informational Based Message vs. Benefit Messaging


• Various Ad Extensions

Changing a single word within your message normally doesn't lead to strong insights so make sure there is substantial change.

Below you'll find a couple of examples where we have tested different messaging tactics for significant engagement improvements.

Promotional Based Text Ads Driving Significantly Higher CTR's Than Benefit Messaging:

Benefit Based Text Ad Driving Significantly Higher CTR's Than Information Messaging:

Landing Page Element Testing

Testing different elements on your landing pages can lead to surprising results. Whether it's the layout, form fields or buttons, it's always important to experiment.

Below you'll see a simple button label change driving a major improvement in lead volume!

Imagery Testing

For social posts, display channel and landing pages, it is always good to test a couple of contrasting images, themes and concepts.

Especially if you have multiple audience personas, you'll want to know what type of visuals and graphics resonate best with your audience. Do you need to be straighter forward, does humor resonate with your audience, and does your audience like to see the product? Are certain concepts better for social than display? You'll discover these answers via testing.

Here's an example of a test we ran for a social campaign. #FuranceFail had a humorous twist that resonated much better with our social audience.

Make Informed Testing Decisions

Again, make sure you're testing has purpose, a hypothesis and a goal. If you've put serious thought into your A/B tests you won't be disappointed. While the outcome may not have been desired, now you know and knowledge is power.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. |
Find Success By Putting Your Digital Advertising to the A/B Test | http://www.toprankblog.com

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