20210820 SEL Brief
The post 20210820 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.
“You can adjust conversion values based on characteristics like location, device, and audience. By applying a rule to these characteristics, you can adjust conversion values to align more closely with your business outcomes,” said Stephen Chang, Product Manager, Google Ads in an announcement.
This added feature means that businesses can use their inherent knowledge of what’s working in their industry to improve their conversion rates in Google Ads. For example, if advertisers know certain audiences or people in certain locations are most likely to convert, they can set a rule to multiply the conversion value for the chosen group by two.
“These rules will also be used by Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS to optimize your bids in real time. Conversion value rules will be available for Smart Bidding across Search, Shopping, and Display over the next few weeks,” wrote Chang.
Why we care. “This is a great feature addition. Love it because it allows businesses to get their intuitive/institutional knowledge into the machine learning to optimize more accurately,” tweeted Robert Brady, PPC expert at Righteous Marketing. Having this available in smart bidding also allows advertisers to tweak campaigns for their individual business goals and adjust as campaigns happen in real-time (like for sales, events, or the like).
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Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, aren’t you tired of hearing “it depends?”
After moderating so many Overtime Q&A sessions for SMX, I’ve noticed that many professionals formulate their questions something like this: relevant background information, goal, “What should I do?”
“It depends” is the preface I hear most often from our expert speakers. That’s because, while they do possess more strategic knowledge that could benefit you, they aren’t totally familiar with your situation (and that’s due to the short nature of Q&A sessions — Twitter conversations are pretty much the same, too).
Instead of having your peers spitball a few ideas (a fraction of which you’ll reject because you weren’t able to give a comprehensive overview of your predicament), I suggest that we rethink how we ask for help: Ask for what considerations you should take into account as you plan your strategy. This will help you think more critically about your business’ overall goals, how marketing fits into it and the role you, as a search professional, play when it comes to making it all work together.
George Nguyen,
Editor
Numerous reports of images not loading in Google’s Top stories carousel began surfacing on Twitter yesterday morning. We were able to replicate the issue (shown above) and the carousel shows either blank or blurred featured images, but some of the reports we’ve seen include screenshots of the carousel in which one or two of the images did successfully load. Google has confirmed that it’s a bug and is working on a fix but has not provided a timeline.
Why we care. A blurred featured image may negatively affect your clickthrough rate, so make sure to annotate your reports to reflect this oddity. In search results where just one or two images loaded successfully, the story (or stories) that didn’t load properly may receive fewer clicks. And, since the Top stories carousel is an important source of visibility and traffic for some publishers, this could also impact advertising revenue and other marketing opportunities that depend on getting a user onto your site if the bug goes unresolved for an extended period. Fortunately, Google is already working on it — we’ll continue to provide updates as they come in.
YouTube this week made two big changes to how search works on the video platform:
Why we care. If you want your videos to stand out in YouTube search, adding timestamps will now be critical. The new translation option gives your videos the opportunity to show up for an even wider global audience than before.
Red alert. “What red flags should companies be aware of when choosing an SEO agency?” asked Kim Doughty, and SEO Twitter is responding. It’s worth checking out just to ensure your own agency isn’t accidentally turning off businesses with its messaging. Our own Director of Search Content Carolyn Lyden advises that businesses steer clear of agencies that make guarantees (“Your site will rank for these keywords in X days!”), those that don’t give you admin access to your own analytics and agencies that use fine print to take ownership over your online properties/listings.
“Paid for by” label on political ads. Google is now placing “Paid for by” labels on some political ads. This transparency feature enables users to learn more about who is paying for the ad and even lets them see details such as how much the advertiser has spent. Tip of the hat to Valentin Pletzer for sharing this.
What if the secret sauce wasn’t a secret? “If Google actually gave you a detailed breakdown of exactly how their algorithm works to rank websites, don’t you think the #SEO industry would become a boring industry to work in?” Mark Preston asked. The responses run the gamut from “SEO would become boring” to deeper insights about how companies might shift their emphasis from paid to organic.
As those who run a local business may already know, negative reviews don’t even have to come from customers — they can come from people who simply attempted to engage with your business. That’s what happened to Dr. Warwick Nettle, a Sydney-based surgeon who declined a patient after consulting with her former surgeon, who cautioned him about operating on her.
“A federal court judge on Wednesday said the effect of the false posts caused ‘extreme’ damage to both the surgeon’s emotional and mental state and his prior ‘impeccable’ reputation,” The Guardian published. “His five-star Google rating dropped to 3.5 stars after the first two posts were published.”
The court fined Catherine Cruse, the scorned patient, $450,000. Unfortunately for Dr. Nettle, Cruse seems to have disappeared — she filed no defense and appeared at no hearings, despite her prolific online smear campaign that spanned eight months and various forms of content, including reviews and defamatory posts on online reputation sites.
The extent of the online abuse here is far-reaching: “A since-removed post on a third website included images falsely claiming to be results of botched surgeries by Nettle. The post also featured headshots of the surgeon with the phrases ‘the devil himself’, ‘inhumane medical care’, ‘abuse of power’ and ‘compulsive liar’ superimposed on them,” the story reads.
In the search industry, we typically discuss the cost of fake reviews (and other content that serves a similar purpose) as harming both businesses and consumers, which downplays the damage because it comes off as an abstraction. In this instance, a Sydney court has quantified the harm, and although Dr. Nettle may have a hard time getting what he’s owed, this can be seen as something of a precedent for similar cases. It also highlights the fundamental problem with online reputation sites that extort people and businesses to remove negative content about them.
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As a loan officer, know that there’s real value in creating a personal brand. Consider this: if you decide to change to another brokerage or financial institution (or go out on your own), would rather do it building your reputation from square one again, or do it with a reputation you’ve spent years refining?
That’s the value of personal branding –it’s yours, and it follows you your entire career.
Your personal brand also widens opportunities. Every meeting, connection, and happy client that engages with your personal brand is another opportunity added to your career. Building up your personal brand also increases your value as a mortgage professional. A brand that is recognizable and is seen as trustworthy commands more money.
How can you build a personal brand that lasts? That’s what this post is going to show you. Read on and bookmark this page for future reference.
If you’re on social media, you may think that you’re well on your way to building a personal brand. But if you haven’t taken the time to define your brand and create a foundation for it, all those likes and comments are in vain. Here’s what you need to do instead:
Be very clear about who you are and who you are not. What are your values? What’s your purpose? Who are you trying to reach? It’s critical that you know precisely what image you want to portray lest the public defines it for you and possibly create one that you never intended.
Creating brand awareness and associating it with mortgage services is the goal of this next phase. The more your brand becomes well-known, the easier it will be for the consumer to remember and trust it. Here are top ways to build awareness for your brand:
When we say engage with your followers, we mean doing so purposefully and actively. When someone leaves a comment, don’t just reply with, “Thank you!”. If you’ve noticed a follower liking and commenting on your posts, send a direct message. Did a website visitor fill out your contact form on your mortgage website? Activate a drip email and text campaign. Give them additional opportunities to get familiar with your brand and know what you’re all about.
Getting to this phase takes a while –we’re talking about six months to a year. Remember that we’re building a personal brand that will last the life of your career, and that takes time. But that’s okay! In this phase, you want to add more fuel to your authority and trustworthiness. Do this by offering high-quality, high-value products for free, such as ebooks, webinars, and digital mortgage tools like mortgage apps and calculators.
At LenderHomePage, we firmly believe in the power and profitability of your personal brand. That’s why we created websites templates and tools built specifically for showcasing your brand across the web. Check out our three new mortgage templates for personal branding and try it out free for 14 days. Click here to launch one in minutes!
Beginning early this morning, there have been numerous reports of images not loading in Google’s Top stories carousel (as seen below). The issue seems to affect search results globally and Google has confirmed that it’s a bug.
A problem on Google’s end. “Yeah, it looks like an issue on our side,” Google’s John Mueller tweeted regarding the issue. The company is currently working to correct the bug, Danny Sullivan, the company’s public search liaison, has confirmed.
Why we care. A blurred featured image may negatively affect your clickthrough rate, so make sure to annotate your reports to reflect this oddity. Some professionals have taken screenshots showing the Top stories carousel with just one or two images that loaded successfully, which could mean fewer clicks for the stories that didn’t show a featured image. And, since the Top stories carousel is an important source of visibility and traffic for some publishers, this could also impact advertising revenue and other marketing opportunities that depend on getting a user onto your site if the bug goes unresolved for an extended period. Fortunately, Google is already aware of the issue — we’ll continue to provide updates as they come in.
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Since inception in 2015, the Search Engine Land Awards has recognized exceptional marketers on an annual basis — showcasing their oustanding work, providing well-earned exposure in coverage and interviews, and bestowing upon them the highest honor in search.
But the road between deciding to begin an application and winning the award can be a long one. Although this year’s submission process has been significantly streamlined — it’s never been faster or easier to apply to the Search Engine Land Awards — there’s still a story that has to be told. And while the way in which you tell that story is entirely up to you, we thought we’d look back on some advice from past judges about what really wows them, what they would love to see more of, and what areas are best avoided...
Keep reading for 17 tips for creating an award-worthy submission:
What impresses the judges most:
What judges want to see more of:
What entrants need to stop doing:
The final deadline for the 2021 Search Engine Land Awards is September 3, 2021 at 11:59 pm PST. Review the categories for 2021 and begin your application here.
The post How to craft a winning Search Engine Land Awards entry: Past judges share their advice appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, and what’s the linchpin in CRO?
In his keynote at yesterday’s SMX Convert, Michael Aagaard gave us a closer look at disappointment from a neuroscientific and psychological perspective. He dug into what conversion research we can do to understand where/when our customers experience disappointment and how to mitigate that.
The key is really mapping out and managing the expectations of our customers so we can create better and more motivating conversion experiences. One example he shared was that a client was having trouble once customers got to the “enter your credit card” part of their journey. With some research, he discovered that the whole process before that stage had primed these potential customers to think that what they were getting was free. Record scratch!
Of course they weren’t converting. They were likely majorly disappointed when they learned they weren’t getting something for free after all. The whole process of delighting vs disappointing customers makes sense — people who have a great time every step of the way are obviously going to convert because you’ve made it so simple for them.
How do you improve your CRO then? One tip: go through your own funnel and figure out where the disconnects are. Remove those barriers and test, test, test!
Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content
In her hit session at yesterday’s SMX Convert, Amy Bishop, Owner and Marketing Consultant at Cultivative, schooled us on multi-channel targeting tactics to turn prospects into paying customers. Her three-step strategy includes ways to better understand your audience, how to determine their varying paths to purchase, and tips to ensure that you’re targeting them at every stage along that path.
The team here at Search Engine Land wanted to provide a meaningful way to “Celebrate the Power of Search” within the search marketing community. That’s why we created the Search Engine Land Awards program. Winning one of our 19 awards is a unique, and cost-effective way to put your organization a step ahead of its competitors and help to gain new business.
Additionally, the process of reflecting on a great year of work, its successes, and lessons learned can be a wonderful team-building exercise, and getting nominated (or better yet – winning!) has been a superb morale booster for many past recipients.
The Search Engine Land Awards are dedicated to honoring the best practices of search marketing by recognizing the consultants, agencies, in-house teams and individuals that worked to execute successful programs encompassing organic, paid, local search and more. Applications close on Sept. 3, so if you;’re thinking about applying or haven’t finished your application, get started now!
Apply here before the Sept. 3 deadline.
Want to see what previous Search Engine Land Award winners have been up to? Check it out here:
TikTok releases Creative Solutions guide for marketers. Some dos and don’ts: Do bet on uniqueness and creativity. Content with its own flair makes TikTok thrive, and is key to great results. Don’t expect that every piece of creative will contribute to a result. Don’t just replicate the same creative used on other platforms. Read the full guide here.
“I don’t really know what to make of this, but if you’re interested, for whatever reason, your favorite anonymous social media app YikYak is back in app stores in the US,” wrote Andrew Hutchinson for Social Media Examiner. “You now have another option to get a feel for what people in your local community are interested in, which could be worth taking a look at. Maybe.”
Content Marketing 101: Reach your audience in many ways. This guide from Mara Calvello with G2 emphasizes that social media is still part of a comprehensive content strategy. “Whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, or Snapchat, there are many opportunities to share your content, switch up its messaging, and get it seen.” If you’re not including social in your content plan, make sure to go back to the drawing board.
We’ve mentioned it before on Search Engine Land, but advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to personalization and privacy.
“91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations to them, and the majority of consumers feel positive (58%) about personalized ads,” Sanam Saaber reports in StreetFight. But at the same time, we’re combatting a wave of distrust from the very same consumers as they don’t completely understand how and why advertisers use their data.
With Google pushing back the FLoC implementation to 2023, Saaber reinforces what we’ve been hearing from many experts in paid search: get your ducks in a row now. If you had a testing plan for first-party data, don’t postpone it! This just gives you even more time to test it out.
The four data types are often conflated, but they’re very different in the eyes of the consumer and the law, wrote Saaber.
One of the keys to making customers feel ok with your data collection practices? Communicate what’s going on to them. Be transparent in what you’re collecting and what you’re doing with it, and give them a reason to share it:
“Too many brands provide long and unreadable privacy policies that aren’t educational. Impress customers at the start of their journey with creative and digestible content. Consumers are generally willing to share their information if they understand the benefits they’ll get in return, like personalized coupons or more relevant recommendations.”
The post The key to more conversions is to stop disappointing your customers; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.
In her hit session at today’s SMX Convert, Amy Bishop, Owner and Marketing Consultant and Cultivative, schooled us on multi-channel targeting tactics to turn prospects into paying customers. Her three-step strategy includes ways to better understand your audience, how to determine their varying paths to purchase, and tips to ensure that you’re targeting them at every stage along that path.
Just like on the SEO side, it’s critical to have your personas handy for this exercise. If you don’t have a set group of personas, Bishop included a few questions to ask yourself about your potential target audience (plus some handy sheets for B2B and B2C):
She says the best way to dig into personas is to involve other client-facing teams, as well. This includes getting with customer support, sales, customer success, and more to answer these questions about your target audience.
Along with asking these key questions, Bishop also recommends using the data you already have at your fingertips. “If you have a Facebook account, even if you’re not running ads, you have a wealth of information in Facebook audience insights,” she said. It’ll take some sorting through initially, but Bishop recommends identifying top purchaser demographics and zeroing in from there. After that, you can further segment by layering interests and other demographics and then identify specific interests to target. From there, you can monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.
Other sources of persona data that Bishop uses include the following:
Catering to your prospects means supporting their journey toward that final conversion (whatever conversion is for your organization — it isn’t always a purchase!). “A common question that I get,” said Bishop “is which channels belong where [in the funnel]. I would really caution against this line of thinking because most channels have different ways that you can reach prospects. It doesn’t have to be ‘YouTube at the top, then display, and then search.’ You can make any channel work for you depending on who your prospects are and which channels they use and which targeting options are available across all channels.”
Instead, she recommends focusing on targeting options at each stage of the funnel:
In the first stage, work on targeting options that go for potential customers who don’t know all their options yet. After that, seek options that allow you to capture prospects seeking solutions and to re-engage those who have engaged in the past. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, we want to target options to convert hot traffic to leads or sales.
Bishop maps this out in a spreadsheet asking these questions:
In order to acquire this data to answer these questions, Bishop recommends looking into the data you DO have to complete this spreadsheet:
If you’ve taken all the steps above and in Amy Bishop’s SMX Convert presentation and are still having some hiccups, here are some common mistakes she’s noticed in campaigns before.
Lack of data
“As marketers, we love to have control, so we end up making hyper-specific audience. But what happens is that we over-segment them and, even if [these small audiences have] brought conversions in the past, sometimes CPL and CPA can be pretty volatile,” said Bishop. With automation becoming more of a factor in PPC every day, platforms thrive on data. removing some of the segmentation (device, platform, etc.) can help create a larger audience. This can help give your bidding strategy a boost.
Not optimizing to a higher funnel conversion
“Even if you’re in the bottom of the funnel you can optimize to a higher in the funnel conversion,” she recommends. One of Bishop’s clients was struggling to get out of learning mode, so they tried optimizing to Add to Cart. They saw huge increases in ATC, a 91% increase in purchases, and a 155% increase in purchase value. These are all strategies worth testing for your campaigns if it makes sense.
Not testing better qualifying audiences and look-alikes
“Having any first-party data is good,” said Bishop. “That’ll only become more important as time goes on. Even better than that is putting some qualifications around it.” Analyze the behaviors of SQLs and work to find more of those by feeding those data values back into platforms.
The keys to improving your targeting are threefold, Bishop told us at SMX Convert. Really get to know your audience beyond surface persona data. Work to understand their path to purchase. And, finally, designs your campaigns around that path to purchase.
Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.
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Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, all the traffic and rankings aren’t worth a thing if they don’t help you reach those business goals.
That’s the bottom line and that’s what we’re focusing on today at SMX Convert, our single-day learning journey that dives into organic and paid search conversion optimization. Barry Schwartz and I will be moderating the organic side, where the day begins with learning how to identify top-converting queries at every stage of the customer journey, then finding out how your content marketing can be leveraged to drive the funnel as well as ways to boost visibility and conversions via your navigation and CTAs. And, we’ll cap it all off with testing your strategy for continued improvement.
On the PPC side, moderated by our own Director of Search Content Carolyn Lyden and Anu Adegbola of MindSwan, you’ll start with how to create copy that converts. Then you’ll hear about targeting tactics to help you make the most out of those new ad copy skills you just picked up. And lastly, we’ll focus on improving landing page conversions using both qualitative and quantitative data.
There’s even more value to be had if you plan on attending the community meetups, site clinics and keynotes — I’m particularly looking forward to Michael Aargard’s talk on “The psychology of disappointment: How it works, why it hurts, and why it’s so bad for conversion.” You can check out everything SMX Convert has to offer over at the agenda page. We hope to see you there!
George Nguyen
Editor
That’s not an actual button in the image above — it’s what the button to access Google’s indexing bug reporting tool looks like, and you can locate the real deal at the bottom of the URL inspection help document and indexing coverage report document.
The tool, which was announced as a pilot program back in April, enables SEOs and site owners to report an indexing issue directly to Google. It is designed for those who need further support with indexing issues outside of the Google community forums and support documentation.
When it was first announced, the company said it would be “fully available to all in the U.S. within a week or less.” Nearly four months later (certainly better late than never), it’s now accessible to all signed-in Search Console users in the U.S. Don’t forget to bookmark it and use it when you need to escalate an issue.
In the second part of his interview, Brett Bodofsky, senior paid media specialist at Elumynt, discussed some common themes among third-party PPC integrations and shared some guidance for when it comes time to pick one out.
In addition to evaluating the capabilities of the platform and the build vs. buy value, Bodofsky’s number-one piece of advice was to look for a company with a great support team: “When you’re starting with a brand new integration, you may have never used it before and you’re going to want a team to back you and help you get integrated with it,” he said, “Can you get a hold of somebody on the phone? If not, do you really want to consider them? What happens when you have a question?”
In the latter half of the conversation, Bodofsky continues to discuss third-party integrations but with respect to how they can be used to get back more control over your campaigns by layering automation onto an ECPC manual bidding strategy.
Inflation and surging COVID cases have taken a toll on consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which is informed by 500 monthly telephone interviews of people across the U.S. Since just last month, the metric has fallen by 11 points, bringing it to its lowest point since December 2011.
“Consumers have correctly reasoned that the economy’s performance will be diminished over the next several months, but the extraordinary surge in negative economic assessments also reflects an emotional response, mainly from dashed hopes that the pandemic would soon end,” Richard Curtin, director of the survey, said in the report.
When it rains, it pours: “Only 36% of respondents expect a decline in the jobless rate, down from 52% the prior month, despite record job openings,” Jordan Yadoo wrote for Bloomberg,
“Consumers also became decidedly downbeat about their income prospects. The gauge of expected personal finances fell to a seven-year low.”
Why we care. The initial vaccine rollout, combined with various stimulus initiatives, gave consumers a reason to feel optimistic and behave accordingly (read: spend more freely). That optimism seems to have peaked in April (when consumer sentiment hit a 2021 high of 88.3) and now that vaccination rates have declined and initial worries about the Delta variant have largely become a reality, people and businesses are starting to hedge their bets. This may be a sign that consumers are tightening their spending to prepare for another economic downturn, and businesses may be doing the same with their budgets, which might also affect employment rates. However, I’d like to point out Curtin’s quote, which posits that these assessments reflect “an emotional response” and “dashed hopes” — maybe it’ll be better than we expect.
The domestic B2B digital ad market grew 32.5% in 2020 and is forecasted to grow 24.9% this year to nearly $11 billion in spending, according to a July 2021 report by eMarketer. Some of that growth may be going towards influencer marketing, and for good reason — that’s the takeaway from Erika Wheless’ article for Ad Age.
“The more we test platforms like TikTok, the more we are finding good fits,” Jenni Buchbinder, director of strategic communications at QuickBooks, is quoted as saying, “These influencers are small business owners themselves, so they can speak about our product from personal experience.”
Although QuickBooks also contracts influencers on other social media platforms, it’s found more value on YouTube and TikTok because those platforms are video-first. While the company has partnered with numerous small business micro-influencers, this isn’t a throwaway campaign — it even features baseball player Alex Rodriguez.
Naturally, there are key distinctions between B2B and B2C marketing to be aware if you’re mulling over whether TikTok is right for your brand:
If you’re considering dipping your toes into B2B marketing on TikTok, it’s also good to explore hashtags to see how your (or a competing) product is being used, kind of like a live focus group. And, if you’re looking for ideas, search around for user-generated content that’s already highlighting your product and build from there.
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