Stepping Up Your Facebook Retargeting with Video

Retargeting is a pretty easy concept to understand — if someone visits your site, make sure they see your advertising on every other site they get to. Seems easy, right? But how do you know where your prospects are spending their time? And how do you control where your ads are displayed?

That’s the beauty of retargeting with Facebook! Humans are already addicted to it: according to Facebook, there are over 1.65 billion active Facebook users, and 1.51 billion of them are using the mobile app. Chances are a significant portion of your audience is sitting on their phone, tablet, or laptop liking a cute video of a dog as you’re reading this. So now the question becomes, what’s the most effective way to target these users?

Video, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

You’re already using video on your website and your YouTube channel, and maybe even as a great lead generation tool, too. But that’s not all video can do! It’s also a great vehicle for building retargeting lists.

Think about it: if someone watches your video content, they’re already an engaged lead, especially if they watch it all the way to the end. So use that to your advantage. Whether you’re using a Video Marketing Platform like Vidyard, or using YouTube annotations to build your calls-to-action, here’s how you can make this happen:

1. Building Your Retargeting List

First off, let’s talk technology. We use PerfectAudience to retarget our leads on Facebook, and we use their retargeting pixels to build our lists.

At the end of your video, you’re probably including some sort of call-to-action. Whether it’s a lead generation form or a link to another piece of relevant content, this space is the perfect place to add a retargeting pixel. This lets you build a list of people who have watched to the end of your video. Powerful stuff when it comes to serving targeted ads to the right audience on Facebook!

You can do this with YouTube annotations as well, but you have to be careful. If you’re linking people back to a landing page at the end of your video, use UTM tags and a special retargeting pixel on the landing page to build a list of folks who got there via your YouTube video. As long as you’re only using end-of-video YouTube annotations, you know everyone on this list got there because they watched your content until the end!

2. Always Remember to Exclude!

Now that you have a list of everyone who watched your video, it’s time to make sure you’re not spamming people with ads for a resource or event that they have already interacted with. Building exclusion lists is incredibly important, as nobody wants to see an ad for a guide that they’ve already downloaded!

PerfectAudience will build lists based on people who take a ‘conversion action’ and we use this to ensure we have retargeting lists for everyone who has downloaded a particular asset.

So, we take our retargeting list of people who have watched all the way to the end of our campaign video A and we take our list of people who have already filled in the form that goes with that campaign B and we subtract one from the other to get C), people who watched the video, but didn’t move through the funnel. A prime target for some retargeting ads on everyone’s favorite social network!

3. Let’s Get Social

The key to a good retargeting campaign is pretty close to the key to a good paid advertising campaign: make sure your assets are similar in branding to the page you’re driving people back to, and don’t serve your audience messaging that’s irrelevant to them.

The best part of retargeting is the ‘targeting’ part, you choose which audiences sees which ads. So now that we have our list, it’s easy to match up ads with content. Let’s take this campaign for example:

The video is clearly the star, but the video is designed as a vehicle to get viewers to download our guide. For everyone who watched the video, but didn’t interact with the form at the end, they’ll see this ad in their Facebook Feed:

Or this campaign:

Same idea – the video sets up the story, but you only learn the full lesson if you download the guide at the end. For everyone who watched, but didn’t download, they’ll see this ad in their Facebook Feed:

The best part? If you’ve already downloaded the asset, you’re automatically added to a list that keeps you from seeing these ads. The better part? We can still serve ads for other content assets to these lists. People who liked one video enough to watch it all the way to the end, may find value in a similar campaign. The possibilities are endless!

Using Video As Your Retargeting Asset

Now, the other side to this coin is retargeting people who visit your site with video ads on Facebook – and for that, you’re going to have to check out my recent webinar with BounceExchange called How to Use Video to Reach and Retarget Visitors on Facebook!

The post Stepping Up Your Facebook Retargeting with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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How Much of a Role Does Trust Play on Conversion Rates?

You wouldn’t do business with a company you didn’t trust – plain and simple. But what may be surprising is that the degree of trust we have in a company, and where that trust comes from, have a significant impact on our purchasing decisions.  How much of an impact? Let’s take a closer look, the results may surprise you.

The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer, a yearly report by which CEOs, executives and governments alike use to determine consumer confidence, was recently released, and its discoveries reveal quite a bit about how consumers build and gauge trust. More importantly, it shows who we get our information (and subsequently our trust) from, and how that reflects back upon the company and brand as a whole.

Peers are More Credible than CEOs

In what comes as a surprise to no one, we trust our peers more than CEOs when it comes to company information.  We tend to view CEOs as detached from the issues that are important to the public, and as putting profits before people. As a whole, the general public believe that CEOs are more interested in revenues than working toward the greater good, and as such, this skews our trust in them.

While our view of putting our trust in CEOs has increased from 2015 to 2016, it is still very much outpaced by other experts we rely on, including technical and academic experts, analysts and even company employees.

What’s Causing CEOs to Flounder?

What made CEOs be viewed as untrustworthy? We can chalk this up to a number of factors, both globally and societally. There’s not a single cause, but many.  The Edelman Trust Barometer asked people to rank the importance and performance of the attributes that are commonly seen as trust-building in leaders.  The results speak for themselves:

In everything from integrity to engagement, products to purpose and operations as a whole, CEOs just didn’t make the cut. Now, compare this dismal performance to ones peers, who, while not involved in the operations of the company itself, still hold significant leverage and sway over the consumer when it comes to the “Moment of Truth” – that point where many buyers will back out because of perceived concerns or risks.

What Peers Do Differently

Very few peers are involved in bringing together a sense of community or understanding. They’re not exactly brand advocates in the way a company would view them (as “ambassadors” to the brand rather than simply making an honest recommendation).  But when the buying decision is at their fingertips, peers leap into action, often addressing concerns head-on and helping their fellow person make a more informed decision that isn’t tainted with corporate chest-beating or glossy stock performance sheets.

What’s more, peers aren’t afraid to acknowledge any inherent risks in a product, unlike the corporate whitewashing campaigns that often try to portray the company in the best possible light. When was the last time you saw a company swallow their pride and admit their mistakes? Not often.

This implicit trust in our peers carries over through the media too, especially as the younger generation comes to embrace digital media over the presumably stale, old-fashioned traditional media channels like newspapers and magazines. Online-only media, which has no traditional media arm the way that news stations and other mega-conglomerates do, has surged in popularity, likely due to the fact that it isn’t owned by any major news outlet and can therefore be viewed as more trustworthy.

And even within these media channels, the influence of peers can be felt strongly. Although most TV stations are simply mouthpieces of major corporations, both search and social are viewed as more independent and honest.

So What Does This Mean for Conversion Rates?

By now you can easily see the influence that peers have on everything from recommending a company to taking action on a purchase. But how does that affect conversion rates?  It means that things like the shiny corporate announcements, big brand mergers and executive trumpeting matter very little to consumers.  They don’t build trust because consumers look at trust differently.

Customers and prospects want honesty. Ethics. Understanding. They want to feel as if they’re understood and that the company, at the very least, listens to them even if it doesn’t act on every suggestion.  It means that in order to convince and convert, you have to get down on the customer’s level and see things from their point of view. It means not being afraid to admit your weaknesses or acknowledge your mistakes.

Companies who doesn’t just strive for authenticity, but make it a permanent part of their mission and values are the ones who really resonate with and “get” customers. People can spot a fake a mile away, and a truly authentic, peer-like shopping experience can only happen when a company looks introspectively at the way they do things – from executive buy-in and support, to whole company-wide shifts in working together collaboratively toward a common goal.

All of these intangible things may irritate those of you who are proud conversion rate number crunchers. But it’s worth realizing that despite big data, split test results and analytics, there are people at the core of those numbers – people hoping they’re not forgotten.

People who are looking to their peers for answers, advice and agreement.

And the sooner you can position your company in more of a peer-like capacity rather than a top-down communication silo, the better off your conversions, and your credibility with customers, will be.

Now It’s Your Turn

Do you think peers truly hold this much influence over potential customers? Do you feel companies are taking the right steps toward creating a more one-on-one environment of mutual respect and reward or are they ignoring what their customers are saying? Share your thoughts with us in the comments 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! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

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Google’s “People Also Ask” (Related Questions): What Are They, and Why You Should Care

If you have recently put in a search term in Google, you may have noticed the results containing an expandable grid box. In this box are a series of questions involving the search term you looked for.

Each of these questions can be expanded using a drop down menu to see the answer. The answers offer a link for continued reading in the page they have been drawn from as well as invite you to search for that specific question:

As you can imagine, this offers some great information to users that want additional questions answered without hunting for them.

The boxes never come on the very top of of search results: Instead, they come further down the page inspiring the user to dig deeper.

Finding The Right Query

The related question boxes don’t show up for every search term.

More often than not, Google only creates question boxes for the most general, often searched terms. The more narrowed the search term or phrase, the less likely it will be to have question boxes.

To filter our your keyword list to only those triggering the “People also ask” box, use SERPstat, a cool keyword research tools with some innovative functionality.

To access the filter:

Click “Organic queries” -> Expand “Filters” -> Check the box “Also ask for”

Relying On Authority and Quality

Your authority is important here. Looking at the related questions sources, they tend to be drawn from the most popular results from a search. For example, if you search for [chocolate diamonds], the “related questions” box contains answers from a museum, a recognized diamond expert, and a very old diamond company.

Interestingly, these are not the ordered results of the search, but they are within the first page. So at least some of the priority seems to come from the strength of the content.

Obviously the quality of your content is going to matter a lot here, and probably more than whatever algorithm beyond quality Google uses. The more clear, well-structured and informative your content, the more sense it will make for Google to choose to use the info over other websites.

You also want to be careful of where the content is, and how it is presented. You need to have clear questions and answers in the text itself.

Notably, most pages (but not all) featured in the “related questions” box also rank in quick-answer boxes in the corresponding query.

Here is the question – answer in Google’s “People Also Ask” (Related Questions) Box:

And here’s the same page featured in the quick-answer box for that linked query:

So the two features are somehow connected.

Notice also: In the above example that company has a mini-site jump link within the search snippet taking you to the answer of the question within the page.

This one originates from on-page table of contents that works as an anchor link:

So in this case, here’s what the optimization strategy and the results looks like:

1. Write indepth content covering a number of related questions;
2. On top of the page, create a table of context, each jump-link taking you to the part of the page answering each question;
3. Enjoy additional exposure in search results:
   1. Get featured in quick-answer boxes
   2. Get featured in the “People also ask” box
   3. Get an additional mini-site link in the search snippet

Should Schema Be Included?

Rich markup may or may not be needed here. I was never able find any correlation between having Schema markup and being featured in the related question boxes.

But it doesn’t hurt, and you want to do anything possible to improve your chances of being understood by a search engine better.

We have a very handy infographic on how to use Schema.org as well as a number of free Schema generators to help you out.

Schema.org Cheatsheet from Ann Smarty

Conclusion

Using Google’s related questions have a two-pronged set of benefits. On one hand, you are going to drive organic traffic by offering up a link to more information on a topic the searcher is already looking for. On the other, you are building your site authority by being one of a few to be chosen to provide answers to those common questions.

Trying to navigate the murky waters of how this algorithm works is going to be a hit and miss process. But that is something that is going to help you with your overall marketing strategy, so you are accomplishing a few important goals here (including creating a one-stop resource, attracting links, enjoying additional exposure in SERPs).

The post Google’s “People Also Ask” (Related Questions): What Are They, and Why You Should Care appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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5 Winning Strategies for Using Human-Driven Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing requires a human touch.

According to MarketingSherpa, “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales [and] lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.”

In a world of automation, marketers tend to forget the power of human connection. It only takes a small change, like personalizing a white paper or mentioning someone’s first name in an email.

Lead nurturing is too important in your sales cycle for non-customized messaging. You want prospects to know that you value their potential business.

Ditch your robot responses. Enhance your lead nurturing campaigns with these five human-driven strategies.

1. Email That Connects

Decades ago, receiving email was an enjoyable experience. People loved hearing AOL’s “You’ve got mail!” It signaled that someone sent a message just for you.

Nowadays, your customers dread their inbox. Most of the time, it’s filled with unwanted messages and worthless subscription emails.

Give your readers something to look forward to. Wow them with content that matches their needs.

“Leads who have expressed initial interest need a general welcome and introduction to your product and industry, while others might have already reached the bottom of the funnel and are more interested in advanced content such as case studies and white papers,” writes Valerie Levin, marketing at Oktopost.

Create email campaigns that motivate users to take action. The call-to-action should be a natural next step in the buyer’s journey.

For instance, prospects in the consideration stage may want to know how your company compares to the competition. So, your team may send a comparison chart with features and benefits.

In the example below, Desk helps onboard new clients by offering a free toolkit to strengthen the relationship.

The purpose of email is further the business relationship. Your team should aim to understand the buyer’s behaviors to predict their future needs.

2. Social Selling

Sam Kusinitz, former Hubspot editorial assistant, defines social selling as the dialogue that occurs “when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects.”

Social selling isn’t anything new. Sales teams have always provided similar value at networking dinners, trade shows, and promo events.

Even though the communication channel has changed, the message should stay the same.

Focus on answering the customer’s questions and engage in conversations that offer solutions.

Train your team to nurture leads via Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. They should provide prospects with thoughtful content that educates.

With social media listening tools, like Agorapulse, you can learn more about interested buyers and their behaviors.

Who influences them? Who do they follow? What topics grab their attention?

With that qualitative data, you can spark conversations that match their concerns.

Rich Brooks, a web marketing and social media expert, provides blog consulting to his clients. In a Linkedin Group, he crafted a practical question that attracted ideal prospects and ignited a discussion.

Also, be mindful that every social media platform has unwritten etiquette rules.

For example, some people prefer not to read posts about the latest wrestling match on LinkedIn. And some desire only tidbits of information on Twitter. Respect each network’s social norms and then begin lead nurturing.

Social media is another tool to maximize your campaigns. Strive to nurture relationships through authentic interaction.

3. Real-Time Messaging

Technology has transformed the way we communicate. Back in the day, real-time communication involved people actually meeting face-to-face.

Today, businesses are taking advantage of live chat and help desk software to engage prospects online. It’s simple and drastically cut costs.

Moreover, research shows that proactive chats increase ROI by up to 105%.

With live chat, marketing and sales teams can learn about their customers’ goals and what product benefits top are must-haves.

The key is to ask prospects questions during live chat sessions. Without being intrusive, dig deep to find their real motivations.

So, after the “How can I help you?” greeting, teach your team to ask follow-up questions.

Below is a chat session between Annabelle, a Zappos agent, and a customer seeking shoes. Notice how the live chat agent asks questions to provide the customer with better service.

“The customer needs questions answered and wants more information. The live chat representative wants to help the user find what they are looking for and make their user experience as pleasant as possible,” states Jeff Mason, vice president of marketing at Velaro.

In the end, people just want help. When lead nurturing, position your team to give prospects the best service possible.

4. Conversational How-To Videos

Visual content is a powerful tool for any eCommerce business. Video can captivate audiences and quickly engage people.

But video is only effective when customers are actually interested in the topic. Don’t bore your prospective clients with video clips that possess no purpose.

Rather, develop explainer videos that give prospects more insight about your brand and product. You want people to be invested in your message.

“Great video doesn’t change the rules. A great video on your site isn’t enough. You still need permission, still need to seek remarkability, still need to create something that matters. What video represents is the chance—if you invest in it—to tell your story in a way that sticks,” writes Seth Godin, best-selling author and marketer.

The best videos are conversational. They give people an intimate perspective. You want customers to know you care.

Amazon produced a remarkable explainer video for the Echo. It’s a friendly representation of how to demonstrate the benefits of a product. Watch below.

In addition, videos aren’t a one-use tactic. Andrew Angus, Director of Revenue Operations at PlanGrid, states:

“Videos are incredibly versatile; you can post them to the social networks your leads used to find you, integrate them into blog posts, or insert them into emails. In each case, you can customize the video to provide leads and prospects with insight into different aspects of your brand, products, or services.”

Don’t just join the conversation. Use video to be the conversation.

5. Surprise & Delight Experiences

Surprise and delight is a marketing strategy that randomly selects an individual or group of people to receive a gift.

People want to feel special. Use this technique to keep prospects excited about participating in the sales process.

Here’s an example from Biotherm, a French luxury skincare company, on how they surprise and delight their Twitter followers with free samples:

The Ritz-Carlton in Bali knows how to continue to provide their customers with great experiences despite unfortunate events. A family was upset when they learned that the allergy-friendly foods for their son had spoiled on their trip.

After becoming aware of the situation, the hotel’s staff searched the town for the appropriate items. However, none was found.

The executive chef then instructed his mother-in-law in Singapore to buy the products. The Ritz-Carlton then hand-delivered the items to their guests.

Now, that’s going above and beyond service. How can you infuse this into your business?

“Make ‘surprise and delight’ the mantra of your entire company just because it is the right thing to do. The immediate ROI might not show on a spreadsheet, but the loyalty and word-of-mouth it will generate will be worth it. And besides, it’s just the right thing to do,” says Vebeka Guess, a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager.

Treat your leads like royalty. Give them a reason to engage with your brand.

Real People, Real Value

Lead nurturing centers around building relationships. And the best value requires human contact.

Customize email campaigns based on the prospect’s behavior. Use social media to gain valuable insight about your target audience. And create how-to videos that ignite conversation, not boredom.

Start winning. Use human-driven lead nurturing strategies.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Good News, Bad News, Long News: Weekly Forum Update

We bring you three types of news from our communities this week, as well as plenty of engaging discussions! Let’s start with the good news – Twitter’s character limit will be expanding… sort of. URLs and photos will no longer count against the character limit, leaving users a little more room to express themselves.

In bad news, we’ll bring you coverage from WebmasterWorld about the recent security snafu at LinkedIn. The website was hacked back in 2012, but many believed it was a small incident. Now, four years later, it looks like it was a much bigger breach. And the “long news?”

That’s the news from PEW Research that mobile readers spend more time engaged with long-form than with short-form articles. Now, let’s go in-depth!

URLs and Photos No Longer Count Towards the Character Limit on Twitter

URLs and Photos No Longer Count Towards the Character Limit on TwitterClick To Tweet

Remember a few months ago when Twitter was talking about expanding its character limit to 10,000 or more? Remember the uproar that caused? It was pretty crazy – Twitter users and market observers seemed to feel that such a huge expansion would turn Twitter into Facebook clone.

But everyone did agree – some extra characters would be nice. This is Twitter’s compromise: URLs and photos no longer count towards the 140 character limit. Still, it makes you wonder how much even a small expansion will change the way Twitter looks. What do you think?

117 Million LinkedIn Account Emails and Passwords Leaked Online

Back in 2012, LinkedIn’s database was “the victim of an unauthorized access and disclosure of some members’ passwords.” At the time, it seemed like a small hack. LinkedIn invalidated the passwords of affected users, asked them to reset, and everyone moved on. But just recently, it’s come to light that the hack was actually much bigger. Even though the passwords stolen are encrypted, hackers have supposedly cracked quite a few of them in the last 72 hours.

Users on WebmasterWorld are discussing the hack. Admin engine adds context by saying,

“It’s not just the fact that the same passwords may be used on other sites, but an e-mail address can give thieves pointers to other services, and, of course, help towards identity theft.”

Martinibuster shares a story about the relationship between security and user experience:

“I did a site audit for a company and noticed their password requirements were weak. They balked at requiring difficult to guess passwords and a minimum number of characters because they felt it was a poor user experience.”

With hackers as powerful as they are today, it seems like site owners balk at their own peril.

Longer News Articles Favored By Mobile Users

Here’s that study from the PEW Research Center, as discussed on Cre8asiteforums. The stereotype of today’s young people, and by extension of mobile users, is that everyone wants something quick and snappy. But PEW presents some evidence that contradicts that stereotype:

“Overall, our analysis of nearly 75,000 articles finds that mobile users spend more engaged time with long-form (1,000 words or more) than short-form (101-999 word) news stories – 123 seconds compared with 57…”

The study also compares Facebook and Twitter engagement. Give the studies a read and share your thoughts!

What Are “Rich Cards” in Search Console?

WebmasterWorld newbie NSikes found “Rich Cards” referenced in Search Console, “…but the links to get more information are broken.”

So, what are they? Users Andy Langton, rainborick, and engine provide some helpful blog posts from Google with more information. Basically, they’re a special kind of structured data. As the name implies, they show up as “cards” instead of the traditional snippet blocks. The example engine gives in his post is for recipes – they seem to put more emphasis on the image than on the text.

As it turns out, Rich Cards are quite new and still being tested. User Wilburforce writes that

“The scope is limited, however, and there’s no indication of when it will be extended…In my case, I can’t even test it, so including it in GSC seems a bit premature.”

Andy Langton agrees, and also wonders

“…if they’re ditching ‘structured data’ for ‘rich cards'” based on Google saying “We plan to migrate all errors from the Structured Data report into the Rich Card report.”

So could this be the future of structured data?

Weigh In: The Web And World In 10, 20, 50 Years?

Where have we come from and where are we going? That’s the big question in this Cre8asiteforums thread! Not just about the web, SEO, and advertising, but also about the “real world” and how those two spheres interact. User EGOL writes that

“Competition on the web is becoming more intense as more and more companies are spending millions per year on their online marketing efforts. As that happens, organic traffic is becoming harder to get, not only because of the competition, but also because Google is formatting the SERPs to grow their income…”

And of course, ad blockers are becoming more popular. According to EGOL,

“Anyone who stops shoveling fuel into their web engine will see their traffic and income go down.”

It’s a brutal world out there, for some! Share your thoughts about the web – or free energy, or anything futuristic that strikes your fancy – in this thread!

Are Monthly SEO Contracts A Scam?

Every now and then on SEO Chat, someone starts a topic about freelancing or how to do business as a professional. I look forward to these threads, because they present a different angle of SEO other than “how do I get to the top of Google?” Newbie muzzchat writes that, in a LinkedIn discussion group, someone told them

“We do SEO for several clients and once we do the initial work, we only need to analyze it from time to time. Any monthly contract is basically a scam.”

User Test-ok responds that,

“It really depends what one is doing. The onsite can be done quick but there’s a lot more that can be done on a monthly basis.”

ThomasHarvey writes that while they might have a point – most SEO auditing and changes can be done as a one-off –

“…What a monthly contract does offer you… over a one off payment/audit is the contact with an SEO. You can ask them whatever questions you may have, ask them their thoughts or ideas before you proceed with it.”

It seems that there are many different approaches and opinions! I always love seeing some nuance in a discussion topic.

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Using Dimensions & Segments in Google Analytics to Propel Your Content Marketing

As online marketers, we all have great web metrics at our fingertips….or do we?

Using hard facts to support business decisions requires two things: reliable data and knowing the key performance indicators of the business in an online context.

I have been using Google Analytics for 10 years (since just months after the Urchin acquisition), and I have seen some great customizations of this massively popular web metrics tool. However, it is common for organizations to not even scratch the surface of what Google Analytics can offer.

Using mere headline engagement statistics, like bounce rate, without a web metrics strategy can lead to some bad decisions.

While I’m sure some of you Kissmetrics readers are already champions of Google Analytics, in this post, I will cover some tips that might help you create your own analytical setup in A/B testing, social media, AdWords, and content marketing, as well as some of the slightly newer Google Analytics features.

So, let’s get into it.

Measure User Engagement and Transactional Revenue with A/B Testing

User engagement and transactional revenue can be measured with A/B testing.

For the free version of Google Analytics, get yourself an Optimizely account (also free – up to 50,000 monthly unique visitors) so you can build variations for A/B and multi-variate testing. You can set up a “custom dimension” integration with your Optimizely experiments within Google Analytics to view traffic sliced and diced as you please.

Once the “custom dimension” integration is set up for you, you can build custom reports within Google Analytics. Instead of navigating into Reporting, start with Customization from the top navigation.

Create a new custom report.

Then, build your report to include whatever Metric Groups you are interested in – user engagement and/or transactional data. Click on “+ add metric,” and type in your metric.

It’s key that you select the right dimension for Dimension Drilldowns and Filters and apply a regex that is the experiment ID from Optimizely.

Once you have saved your custom report, you can view the buckets of session data against the A/B tests.

This is powerful data. You can have up to 20 Google Analytics integrated tests running at any one time providing you with classic user engagement statistics as well as “the sharp end” of conversion-led data.

In the test results below, we see major improvement from enhancing the design of a shopping cart “search” function to make it more prominent. Check out how the variation wins on conversion rate:

Measure the Popularity of Web Content at a Page Level

The popularity of web content can be measured in visitors and shares. For social media gurus and content strategists, it’s great to measure key social actions at a page level.

With this information (tracked as events), you can review a blog section more effectively, understanding the visitor/share picture instantly to support the direction of future blogging or content creation. View the data within social plugins once you have everything set up.

Optimize AdWords for the Highest Quality Visits with Smart Goals

Google AdWords provides some great tracking options, including dynamic call tracking where a unique number is displayed down to the keyword level.

Introduced by Google in December 2015, Smart Goals is a useful new addition for online marketers who strive to put together the whole picture of online and offline conversions. Using machine learning, Google Analytics cleverly combines a number of technological and user metric factors to identify the highest quality visits and define them as Smart Goals.

For many e-commerce and digital managers, this is a much more straightforward way of understanding the true value of their website’s tracked sessions. Assuming you have Analytics and AdWords linked up, goal conversions can also be imported into your AdWords account to assist your paid search optimization efforts. In fact, this linkage is a prerequisite to using Smart Goals, which indicates that the primary reason for this recent addition is to assist AdWords management.

How to Set Up Smart Goals

Once Smart Goals is set up in Google Analytics, you can access it within your Google AdWords account by going to Tools > Conversions > Google Analytics.

Simply select Smart Goals, which will then allow you to optimize your AdWords performance toward the highest quality visits.

Build Remarketing Lists with Smart Goals

You can build remarketing lists (called smart lists) with Smart Goals. This could seriously improve your remarketing conversion efforts and potentially your AdWords results overall. Smart lists are built within your AdWords Shared library > Audiences and will appear along with a “lookalike” audience, which could be useful if your website is lower than 10,000 pageviews / 500 e-commerce transactions per month (the threshold for using the smart lists).

Note: your Google Analytics account and script will need to be modified for these lists to work (here’s how).

Measure Audience Engagement with Google Analytics

Google Analytics has always been an SEO’s best friend, slightly less so when Google’s move to https screened out the vast majority of organic keyword data. But, with sales, traffic, and even Google Search Console data, there is plenty to work with.

Focusing in on the Hummingbird (released 2013) and RankBrain (released 2015) algorithms makes for more progressive SEO these days.

These areas of machine learning are getting stronger at understanding the semantics and intent of search engine users. We don’t know how far along Google is in understanding user engagement, but we know Google is moving in the direction of ranking content based on reputation, content quality, and usability. So here are some nice and simple analyses to run with 2 simple segments that I’ve created and am making available to you to import into your Google Analytics account.

Low Engagement Segments – Pages per User

Analyze “low page view per user engagement” SEO traffic with this Google Analytics segment.

This basic segment looks at traffic from Google (organic) where unique pageviews are equal to or less than 1. You could run this over a time frame, like 3 months, to understand which pages are being accessed the least. Then pop into Behavior > All pages pageviews, and filter by your /blog/ directory or /products/.

If your blog area URLs do not have a distinct pattern, then you could use content grouping for this type of analysis. It’s important to weigh this segment next to something like “new users” because, over a longer date range, you can see what percentage of users were “low engagement.”

Here is an example where we examined a homepage:

Only 2.48% of users to this website’s entrances are looking at only one pageview, but the average time on page is nearly 7 minutes. This analysis would give a thumbs-up for this homepage.

Now see which pages aren’t getting the SEO love. In this example, we can see that this page has 97% of its entrances equal to or less than 1:

The website’s dwell time on average is nearly 5 minutes so we know these visits are below average, suggesting there is a problem with the relevancy of organic search terms creating the visits and/or the landing page quality. This is a basis for an interesting discussion past this point.

Generate a list and see if they’re indexed on Google with the “site:” command. If they are, see if Google’s cache date is recent or not.

Make a call as to whether you update the web page’s content, work harder in general at optimizing it, or delete off server/301 redirect to a similar page.

Bounce Rate and Low Average Session Time Segments

Look at organic search traffic that resulted in a bounce with this Google Analytics segment.

Backlinko’s recent study of 1m Google search results suggests that there is a correlation between low bounce rates and higher Google rankings. Other studies suggest that average session duration plays an important part in search ranking so why not cross-analyze by this factor, too, with this segment.

In this example, we’ve applied the 2 segments from the main “reporting” area of Google Analytics and isolated a page that has a low engagement issue. Here, 42% of users leave straightaway and 44% dwell on the page for an average of only 4 seconds.

This analyzes Google SEO traffic that is low engagement in terms of average session duration – set at 60 seconds. Needless to say, each website will have a different average session duration, so you might want to copy a segment like this and amend what you deem as a positive figure for your website. As Google’s RankBrain gets cleverer, this is the type of SEO-led web metric that is getting increasingly popular.

Looking to Move Off White Belt for Content Marketing?

Analyze your blog performance over the years. I have learned a lot in this area from Skip Besthoff, a pragmatic content marketer who has a great understanding of where the content game meets search engine optimization in a harmonious manner. There is a simple, common, but potentially crippling, pattern that the vast majority of blog traffic is driven by a tiny number of blog posts.

How many websites that have blogs actually do this type of analysis? If you’ve done it before, do you review on a frequent basis? The “meat” of such analysis can be formed on basic Behavior > All pages pageviews and then filtering web pages from there:

• For your filter, use the directory that all blogs appear within (e.g., /blog/, /news/, or /articles/).
• If the blog posts aren’t in one easily identifiable directory, this may be a bit of a blocker. In this case, you’ll want to use content grouping.

Here is an example where we filtered for any URL with “guide” in it:

…which then shows us a common picture arising out of many blogs:

Here 94% of the blog pageviews are coming from just 2 posts. On average, we see around 80% coming from 2-3 posts/articles, but this information then allowed us to focus in on the numerous pages highlighted above.

Conclusion

The beauty of web metrics is that you can translate what is important in your marketing strategy into buckets of vital data. There are lots of interesting things you can integrate within Google Analytics, but you need to prevent yourself from going around in circles not finding what you’re looking for because you didn’t determine your KPIs in the first place.

Start with your implementation plan, move on to the technical setup and requirements, and remember that you will need to continuously evaluate your setup and measurement accuracy to establish Google Analytics as a key business tool at the top level.

About the Author: Duncan Colman is Founder and Inbound Marketing Strategist at Spike Digital. Spike specialise in ecommerce & international SEO, pay-per-click advertising management and conversion rate optimisation.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1W5biSB