The Facebook Like has a new look. The redesigned button replaces the "f" with the familiar thumbs up icon. Like counts appear within the new blue button.
The post Facebook Redesigns Like Button by @DannyNMIGoodwin appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]
How fresh is this article?
Through patent filings over the years, Google has explored many ways that it might use “freshness” as a ranking signal. Back in 2011, we published a popular Moz Blog post about these “Freshness Factors” for SEO. Following our own advice, this is a brand new update of that article.
In 2003, Google engineers filed a patent named Information retrieval based on historical data that shook the SEO world. The patent not only offered insight into the mind of Google engineers at the time, but also seemingly provided a roadmap for Google's algorithm for years to come.
In his series on the “10 most important search patents of all time,” Bill Slawski's excellent writeup shows how this patent spawned an entire family of Google child patents–the latest from October 2011.
This post doesn't attempt to describe all the ways that Google may determine freshness to rank web pages, but instead focuses on areas we may most likely influence through SEO.
Giant, great big caveat: Keep in mind that while multiple Google patent filings describe these techniques - often in great detail - we have no guarantee how Google uses them in its algorithm. While we can't be 100% certain, evidence suggests that they use at least some, and possibly many, of these techniques to rank search results.
For another take on these factors, I highly recommend reading Justin Briggs' excellent article Methods for Evaluating Freshness.
Former Google Fellow Amit Singhal once explained how “Different searches have different freshness needs.”
The implication is that Google measures all of your documents for freshness, then scores each page according to the type of search query.
Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:
Google may determine exactly which queries require fresh content by monitoring the web and their own huge warehouse of data, including:
While some queries need fresh content, other search queries may be better served by older content.
Fresh is often better, but not always. (More on this later.)
Below are ten ways Google may determine the freshness of your content. Images courtesy of my favorite graphic designer, Dawn Shepard.
Initially, a web page can be given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score may boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.
The inception date is often when Google first becomes aware of the document, such as when Googlebot first indexes a document or discovers a link to it.
"For some queries, older documents may be more favorable than newer ones. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference (in age) from the average age of the result set."
– All captions from US Patent Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update
The age of a webpage or domain isn't the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn't change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.
For example, changing a single sentence won't have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.
"Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."
In fact, Google may choose to ignore small changes completely. That's one reason why when I update a link on a page, I typically also update the text surrounding it. This way, Google may be less likely to ignore the change. Consider the following:
"In order to not update every link's freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link's freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly."
Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content.
Less important content includes:
Conversely, “important” content often means the main body text.
So simply changing out the links in your sidebar, or updating your footer copy, likely won't be considered as a signal of freshness.
"…content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA."
This brings up the issue of timestamps on a page. Some webmasters like to update timestamps regularly - sometimes in an attempt to fake freshness - but there exists conflicting evidence on how well this works. Suffice to say, the freshness signals are likely much stronger when you keep the actual page content itself fresh and updated.
Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years.
For example, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.
"For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."
Google may treat links from these pages differently as well (more on this below.) For example, a fresh “link of the day” from the Yahoo homepage may be assigned less significance than a link that remains more permanently.
Instead of revising individual pages, fresh websites often add completely new pages over time. (This is the case with most blogs.) Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.
"UA may also be determined as a function of one or more factors, such as the number of 'new' or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time. Another factor might include the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document."
Some webmasters advocate adding 20–30% new pages to your site every year. Personally, I don't believe this is necessary as long as you send other freshness signals, including keeping your content up-to-date and regularly earning new links.
Not all freshness signals are restricted to the page itself. Many external signals can also indicate freshness as well, oftentimes with powerful results.
If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you're about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh (as far as this current event goes.)
"…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison of the number or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document's score."
Be warned: an unusual increase in linking activity can also indicate spam or manipulative link building techniques. Search engines are likely to devalue such behavior. Natural link growth over time is usually the best bet.
Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.
For example, if you obtain a link off an old, static site that hasn't been updated in years, this may not pass the same level of freshness value as a link from a fresh page, i.e. the homepage of Wired. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.
"Document S may be considered fresh if n% of the links to S are fresh or if the documents containing forward links to S are considered fresh."
When Google presents a list of search results to users, the results the users choose and how much time they spend on each one can be used as an indicator of freshness and relevance.
For example, if users consistently click a search result further down the list, and they spend much more time engaged with that page than the other results, this may mean the result is more fresh and relevant.
"If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively."
You might interpret this to mean that click-through rate is a ranking factor, but that's not necessarily the case. A more nuanced interpretation might say that the increased clicks tell Google there is a hot interest in the topic, and this page - and others like it - happen to match user intent.
For a more detailed explanation of this CTR phenomenon, I highly recommend reading Eric Enge's excellent article about CTR as a ranking factor.
If the subject of a web page changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.
For example, if you buy a domain about racing cars, then change the format to content about baking, over time your new incoming anchor text will shift from cars to cookies.
In this instance, Google might determine that your site has changed so much that the old anchor text is now stale (the opposite of fresh) and devalue those older links entirely.
"The date of appearance/change of the document pointed to by the link may be a good indicator of the freshness of the anchor text based on the theory that good anchor text may go unchanged when a document gets updated if it is still relevant and good."
The lesson here is that if you update a page, don't deviate too much from the original context or you may risk losing equity from your pre-existing links.
Google understands the newest result isn't always the best. Consider a search query for “Magna Carta." An older, authoritative result may be best here.
In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.
Google's patent suggests they determine the freshness requirement for a query based on the average age of documents returned for the query.
"For some queries, documents with content that has not recently changed may be more favorable than documents with content that has recently changed. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference from the average date-of-change of the result set."
A good way to determine this is to simply Google your search term, and gauge the average inception age of the pages returned in the results. If they all appear more than a few years old, a brand-new fresh page may have a hard time competing.
The goal here shouldn't be to update your site simply for the sake of updating it and hoping for better ranking. If this is your practice, you'll likely be frustrated with a lack of results.
Instead, your goal should be to update your site in a timely manner that benefits users, with an aim of increasing clicks, user engagement, and fresh links. These are the clearest signals you can pass to Google to show that your site is fresh and deserving of high rankings.
Aside from updating older content, other best practices include:
Updating older content works amazingly well when you also earn fresh links to the content. A perfect example of this is when Geoff Kenyon updated his Technical Site Audit Checklist post on Moz. You can see the before and after results below:
Be fresh.
Be relevant.
Most important, be useful.
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A new study reveals information about the factors behind high ranking Google My Business (GMB) pages.
The post New Study Reveals Top Local SEO Ranking Factors for 2016 by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
As we become more and more reliant on our smartphones, mobile marketing becomes more critical for the modern brand. The sooner we get on the mobile marketing train, the better off we are going to be.
Certain trends have become obvious, and ignoring them puts a serious damper on our branding results. Here are mobile marketing trends that you absolutely have to pay attention to, and should consider implementing before we hit 2017.
Google has started widening their first page search results to include mobile apps for the first time. Where you would normally see ads or universal search results in the top spots, you can find Google Play and iTunes recommendations right on the first page.
They come with additional meta information, such as price and rating. If you are promoting any apps it is a great time to start upping your SEO game on those marketplaces. Of all of the trends on this list, this is the one that is probably going to have the most impact.
Apps already make up a huge chunk of mobile usage these days. Even if you don't have an app yet, it is worth making one just to take advantage of their popularity, and Google's new promo guidelines.
Traditionally mobile-only, Instagram is growing by the day, and they have been getting into the advertising game for awhile as their user base increases. Some bigger brands have been getting on board with the platform and started marketing from there, but the crowd is still pretty thin.
That makes it a great place to start setting your own ads, with great returns. Of course that means you should be putting a good amount of focus on your overall Instagram marketing strategy. If you haven't launched one, it is a good time to start.
Did you know younger consumers no longer use Facebook and Twitter? They have moved on, and mobile apps are the number one used platforms these days.
Snapchat and WhatsApp are growing in popularity, and could hold the potential for business use. It is time we kept an eye on both, and found ways to utilize the powerful network they provide.
Image: Forbes
You have to keep in mind that not all mobile marketing is going to be received via smartphones. There are several different devices you need to take into consideration, including smartwatches and tablets.
Then there are gaming platforms, smart TVs, and even smart home devices. We are living in an age where you can stream television through a smart fridge. Times are changing. Your marketing efforts need to reflect that.
Video ads are a little bit controversial right now. The data still isn't in on how effective they are, and different sources report wildly different success rates. But there is no denying that more brands are using them, including on mobile marketing.
Platforms like YouTube are especially reliant on the advertising form. You may want to consider jumping on the bandwagon and trying it for yourself.
With Facebook focusing more on “buy now” buttons, and platforms like Instagram and Pinterest really pushing the ecommerce side, we are now seeing a socialization of online consumerism.
The line between shopping cart and social media has been blurred, and it is time to take advantage of that. Not only can you begin to use social platforms for direct sales and lead building (which works great via mobile devices), but you can make your own site more social. The early, creative birds get the worms here.
Payment systems are seriously changing. Samsung has a payment platform that can be used almost anywhere, in spite of whether they are optimized for it or not.
Services like PayPal are being accepted from big names like Walmart. Smartphones have their own wallets, such as through Apple Pay. It is no longer an option to ignore these new ways to pay, because customers would rather go with a brand that offers the choice.
What can we learn from products like the FitBit? That apps are no longer accessories, they are lifestyles.
People use mobile devices to reflect and enhance the way that they live, such as through fitness apps (FitBit, MyFitnessPal), financial assistance (Mint, Mint Bills), and even smart homes (iSmartAlarm). You can promote your services by creating a lifestyle based app of your own.
Have you noticed any hot mobile trends in marketing lately? Let us know in the comments!
The post 8 Mobile Marketing Trends You Can't Ignore appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Buffer examined over 100,000 accounts to figure out how brands have been sharing to social media over the past 12 months. Here's how it broke down…
The post 3 Unusual Lessons Buffer Learned by Studying Over 16M Posts (And 100,000 Brands) on Social Media by @Ashread_ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Beacons present an opportunity for retailers to learn more about their customers, as well as for consumers to conduct even more nuanced queries.
The post 10 Ways Beacons Will Change #SEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
It's no secret that the Site Explorer has always been our pride and joy. Over the last few years, this multi-functional tool has helped millions of users get a much better understanding of their own websites, their Link Profiles or their competitors. Today we're happy to release a few new additions and we hope that…
The post Ready for some changes with the Site Explorer? appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Facebook the most mobile engagement of any platform, seeing more than 1 billion daily mobile users.
With that in mind, Facebook made four announcements at Cannes this week:
With a simple interface and a guide to Facebook and Instagram ad formats, Creative Hub is designed to make it easy for users to sample different tools and features, and work together and experiment.
For instance, there's a collaborative area for marketers to preview, evaluate and showcase their creative. There are also options to create and preview mocks on mobile, as well as create preview URLs to share with stakeholders.
Built with the guidance of several agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, McCann and Droga5, Creative Hub is currently testing and should be available to Facebook advertisers in the next few months.
We're sensing a pattern with Facebook, which initially announced its Canvas ads, immersive mobile experiences that load 10 times faster than typical mobile sites, in Cannes last year.
The product was launched globally in February and since then, people in more than 180 countries have spent about 52.5 million minutes – otherwise known as a century – viewing Canvas.
New updates will make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and learn from these ads. Canvas will have a new feed unit designed to increase engagement, while marketers will have more detailed metrics, such as clicks-per-component and dwell time (the average is about 31 seconds).
The option to create Canvases for organic page posts has already rolled out.
Audience Insights API will give advertisers better insights into the audience they're serving, using aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. Currently in beta, the feature is testing with brands like Mondelez and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and will be widely available early next year.
Mondelez used Audience Insights for Cadbury's “Taste Like Joy Feels” campaign, analyzing people's feelings toward chocolate at various times throughout the day. Brand recall was improved by 40 percent, according to Cadbury.
Another popular Facebook ad format is the slideshow, which allows businesses to create videos from static images. However, they load significantly faster than traditional videos, on account of using five times less data.
New features include the ability to create slideshow ads from mobile devices, audio and text overlay, and integration with Facebook's Pages and Shutterstock photo libraries.
That focus on video isn't to say photos aren't doing well on Facebook. Instagram announced yesterday that its user base has doubled over the past two years.
The platform now has more than 500 million monthly active users around the world, 300 million of whom use the app on a daily basis.
This is an abbreviated post, as originally featured on our sister site ClickZ.
Posted by randfish
The long tail of search can be a mysterious place to explore, often lacking the volume data that we usually rely on to guide us. But the keyword phrases you can uncover there are worth their weight in gold, often driving highly valuable traffic to your site. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand delves into core strategies you can use to make long tail keywords work in your favor, from niche-specific SEO to a bigger content strategy that catches many long tail searches in its net.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Now, for those of you who might not be familiar, there's basically a demand curve in the search engine world. Lots and lots of searchers are searching for very popular keywords in the NBA world like "NBA finals." Then we have a smaller number of folks who are searching for "basketball hoops," but it's still pretty substantial, right? Probably hundreds to thousands per month. Then maybe there are only a few dozen searches a month for something like "Miami Heat box ticket prices."
Then we get into the very long tail, where there are one, two, maybe three searches a month, or maybe not even. Maybe it's only a few searches per year for something like "retro Super Sonics customizable jersey Seattle."
Now, this is pretty tough to do keyword research anywhere in this long tail region. The long tail region is almost a mystery to us because the search engines themselves don't get enough volume to where they'd show it in a tool like AdWords or in Bing's research. Even Search Suggest or related searches will often not surface these kinds of terms and phrases. They just don't get enough volume. But for many businesses, and yours may be one of them, these keywords are actually quite valuable.
#1: I think that there's this small set of hyper-targeted, specific keyword terms and phrases that are very high value to my business. I know they're not searched for very much, maybe only a couple of times a month, maybe not even that. But when they are, if I can drive the search traffic to my website, it's hugely valuable to me, and therefore it's worth pursuing a handful of these. A handful could be half a dozen, or it could be in the small hundreds that you decide these terms are worth going after even though they have a very small number of keyword searches. Remember, if we were to build 50 landing pages targeting terms that only get one or two searches a month, we still might get a hundred or a couple hundred searches every year coming to our site that are super valuable to the business. So these terms in general, when we're doing this hyper-specific, they need to be...
#2: The second way is to have a large-scale sort of blast approach, where we're less targeted with our content, but we're covering a very wide range of keyword targets. This is what a lot of user-generated content sites, large blogs, and large content sites are doing with their work. Maybe they're doing some specific keyword targeting, but they're also kind of trying to reach this broad group of long tail keywords that might be in their niche. It tends to be the case that there's...
Now, let's start with the niche and specific. The way I'm going to think about this is I might want to build these pages - my retro Super Sonics jerseys that are customizable - with my:
A) PPC is a great way to go. You can do a broad-term PPC buy in AdWords or in Bing, and then discover these hyper-specific opportunities. So if I'm buying keywords like "customizable jerseys," I might see that, sure, most of them are for teams and sports that I've heard of, but there might be some that come to me that are very, very long tail. This is actually a reason why you might want to do those broad PPC buys for discovery purposes, even if the ROI isn't paying off inside your AdWords campaign. You look and you go, "Hey, it doesn't pay to do this broad buy, but every week we're discovering new keywords for our long tail targeting that does make it worthwhile." That can be something to pay attention to.
B) You can use some keyword research tools, just not AdWords itself, because AdWords bias is to show you more commercial terms, and it biases to show you terms and phrases that do actually have search volume. What you want to do is actually find keyword research tools that can show you keywords with zero searches, no search volume at all. So you could use something like Moz's Keyword Explorer. You could use KeywordTool.io. You could use Übersuggest. You could use some of the keyword research tools from the other providers out there, like a Searchmetrics or what have you. But all of these kinds of terms, what you want to find are those 0–10 searches keywords, because those are going to be the ones that have very, very little volume but potentially are super high-value for your specific website or business.
C) Be aware that the keyword difficulty scores may not actually be that useful in these cases. Keyword difficulty scores - this is true for Moz's keyword difficulty score and for all the other tools that do keyword difficulty - what they tend to do is they look at a search result and then they say, "How many links or how high is the domain authority and page authority or all the link metrics that point to these 10 pages?" The problem is in a set where there are very few people doing very specific keyword targeting, you could have powerful pages that are not actually optimized at all for these keywords that aren't really relevant, and therefore it might be much easier than it looks like from a keyword difficulty score to rank for those pages. So my advice is to look at the keyword targeting to spot that opportunity. If you see that none of the 10 pages actually includes all the keywords, or only one of them seems to actually serve the searcher intent for these long tail keywords, you've probably found yourself a great long tail SEO opportunity.
This is very, very different in approach. It's going to be for a different kind of website, different application. We are not targeting specific terms and phrases that we've identified. We're instead saying, "You know what? We want to have a big content strategy to own all types of long tail searches in a particular niche." That could be educational content. It could be discussion content. It could be product content, where you're supporting user-generated content, those kinds of things.
A) This approach requires a lot of scalability, and so you need something like a:
B) You don't want to fully automate this system. The worst thing you can possibly do is to take a site that has been doing well, pump out hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of pages, throw them up on the site, they're low-quality content, low uniqueness of content, and Google can hit you with something like the Panda penalty, which has happened to a lot of sites that we've seen over the years. They continue to iterate and refine that, so be very cautious. You need some human curation in order to make sure the uniqueness of content and value remain above the level you need.
C) If you're going to be doing this large-scale content creation, I highly advise you to make the content management system or the UGC submission system work in your favor. Make it do some of that hard SEO legwork for you, things like...
All right, everyone, look forward to your thoughts on long tail SEO, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Majestic are delighted to formally announce their partnership with Optimiz.me – an SEO Software that allows you to do search engine optmization by yourself, without any SEO technical knowledge. We asked Optimiz.me to tell us more about the system… Inspired by the “do it yourself” movement, this software analyses your website, and explains to you…
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All of the individual courses that make up this nanodegree are available online for no charge at udacity.com/google.
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Before Vine's popularity declined, Vine stars had transcended the platform to become actual celebrities. How has influencer marketing changed as it's grown?
Justin Bieber has 22 million YouTube subscribers. Rihanna has 21 million. Katy Perry and Eminem, 18 million apiece. These four musicians are among the most famous people on the planet, and none of them has even half the following of Felix Kjellberg.
You know, PewDiePie. The Swedish video gamer who made $12 million last year, as the most-followed person on YouTube. Though PewDiePie largely stays away from marketing (though he has partnered with Mountain Dew in the past) the same can't be said for many of his fellow social media stars-turned-actual stars.
Logan Paul, a Vine celebrity who has graced the cover of AdWeek, has worked with Verizon, Nike and Dunkin Donuts. Michelle Phan parlayed a YouTube channel about makeup tutorials into a line of cosmetics with L'Oréal. Influencer marketing has been huge for a while. How has it changed as it's gotten bigger?
Vine has traditionally been a big platform for social media influencers – Paul has nearly 4 billion loops – but its star is fading. Analyzing the Vine accounts with more than 15,000 followers, influencer marketing technology platform Markerly found that 52% of those users have left the platform. Paul hasn't posted a new Vine since April.
“I don't think there's one specific reason why, but the content is way too short,” says Sarah Ware, founder and chief executive (CEO) of Markerly, who believes Vine became so popular because it was something of a novelty in 2012. “If Vine were to be released now, it probably wouldn't be that popular because there are so many video platforms now. At the time, it was different, but it hasn't been able to keep up that momentum.”
Ware doesn't see the decline of Vine taking away from the popularity of influencer marketing. While the six-second videos were the go-to medium for many advertisers, the same influencers also have presences on other platforms with bigger, more engaged userbases. (Vine is currently ranked 135th in the App Store; Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top 10.)
In Ware's opinion, Instagram is the ultimate platform for influencer marketing. According to a recent Comcast survey, it also now has more advertisers than Twitter. It's got a young audience, but not so young that brands can't reach the coveted millennial mom demographic there. In addition, Markerly sees a distinct correlation between Instagram posts and the brands' site traffic.
“It's the place to be for product placement,” says Ware. “If I sell couches and give one to an influencer, every time she posts a picture of her kid on the couch, she's going to tag my brand.”
There's also Snapchat, which is having its moment in the sun. But it's still got some kinks, such as poor discoverability and the fact that many marketers haven't quite figured out how to navigate it.
Will McDonough, head of brand at KICK, is a fan of turning his Snapchat over to influencers. KICK is all about soccer, and this strategy keeps the media destination from being too one-dimensional.
“It's unique and it's fun.” says McDonough. “We want to be that great connector. You like soccer and you also like fashion; there's a lot of fashion in soccer. We try and find that little Venn diagram where soccer hits the rest of the world in pop culture.”
Influencer marketing is such a big thing now that many brands have specific influencer strategies.
It's also so common that McDonough likes to sometimes turn regular KICK fans into influencers, just to switch it up.
“What can we do that's going to cut through the noise? Everybody's got somebody taking over their handle,” he says. “What we try and do is, let's get a fan to do it because that's what KICK is about: the voice of the fans. We find cool fans who are good at telling stories and say, 'Hey man, go to the match and show the audience.'”
Working with influencers has also become a much more costly strategy. That Adweek story reported that Logan Paul was paid $1,000 to promote a video game on Vine three years ago; now he can make six figures for brand work.
When it comes to advertising, “costly” is relative. A Super Bowl ad can cost $5 million – so $166,000 per second – but brands keep doing it because they're in front of the largest TV audience possible.
For Ware, influencer marketing is worth it, if you go about it in a smart way – which many brands are savvy enough to do now. She said that it's common for brands to contract influencers to do a certain number of posts over a period of time, though reach often determines the price.
“If you're putting $25,000 toward Instagram, we're giving you a total reach of 5 million people,” says Ware. “You can work with a couple of really large influencers, or a ton of smaller ones. You're paying the same and you're reaching the same. It's just, how much content do you want created?
“If you're able to repurpose that content, it's really worth it,” she adds.
If these people fit naturally, they'll help the brands get a lift because ultimately, people like them. But if the influencers are bright enough stars, they can still help the brand get a lift either way because people just like them and want to see what they're doing.
Does anyone really think Kendall Jenner stops by the Estee Lauder counter at Macy's to pick up makeup? Probably not. But there are more people in the world following Jenner on Instagram than there are living in Spain, and within a day of Estee Lauder appointing her the face of the brand, its Instagram following shot up by 18%.
I'd add a note of caution. Though I'm sure many people are well-aware that these influencers are being paid by brands for endorsing their products, there are some grey areas here.
Google's recent use of manual actions around bloggers linking to products in return for freebies may have been harsh in some cases, but it illustrates the importance of clarity in advertising.
Ecommerce sales came to more than $341 billion in 2015. That's huge. But amazingly, 90% of sales still happen in stores, not online, according to Google.
That's why AdWords introduced the in-store visits metric in 2014. The consumer purchase journey is now more complex than ever – and Google wanted to create a way businesses could understand how much in-store foot traffic their location-based PPC ads were driving.
Thus far, Google has measured more than 1 billion store visits. But not every business has access to this powerful metric.
At the Google Performance Summit – where Google announced Expanded Text Ads, new local search ads, and gave us a preview of the new AdWords interface – in-store conversions were one of the huge topics of conversation, and Google promised this metric would soon become more widely available to more businesses.
If you're a local business, the combination of new Google Maps Local Search ads and in-store conversions will be an absolutely killer combination.
To get you ready, here are seven things you need to know about AdWords' store visit conversions.
Google estimates store visit conversions by looking at phone location history to determine whether someone who clicked on your search ad ended up visiting your store. Google looks at ad clicks on all devices – smartphone, desktop, and tablet.
In-store conversion data will help you understand which ad campaigns, keywords, and devices send the most people to your store so you can optimize your account to increase ROI. It doesn't guarantee that someone bought from you – just that they visited after clicking on one of your ads.
Google's goal is to provide the data so you can attribute the online value of your ad spend. In less than two years, advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel, automotive, and finance industries have counted more than one billion store visits globally.
For privacy reasons, in-store conversion data is based on anonymous and aggregated data gathered from people who have Location History turned on. A conversion can't be tied to an individual ad click or person.
Here's Google's official overview video on AdWords Store Visits Conversions:
Google Maps knows the exact coordinates and borders of millions of businesses globally. That's why the AdWords team worked with the Google Maps team to match location history for hundreds of millions of users with Maps data for more than two million businesses.
Google says they use a hybrid approach with a large number of signals in order to measure visits.
To ensure accuracy, Google also surveyed more than 5 million people to confirm they actually visited a store. Google used this information to update its algorithms and reported that its results are “99% accurate”.
At the Performance Summit, Google announced that it most recently made in-store visits available to manufacturers, like auto manufacturers, to track store visits to dealerships.
Google shared a case study on how Nissan UK has been using store visit conversion data to see which keywords and campaigns were driving people into their dealerships to buy a car and increase their ROI by 25x. They've used the data to map buyer journeys to reach them at key moments of the research journey.
They discovered that 6% of their mobile ad clicks resulted in a visit. This is huge, considering that the average consumer only visits a dealership twice before actually buying.
You can see more in this video AdWords posted:
Google said it is starting to experiment with beacons to improve its algorithm. Google is exploring how to use Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) beacons for in-store analytics and in-store visits.
In fact, Google has a BLE beacon pilot underway that should eventually help people who operate at smaller locations and businesses by ensuring Google is getting and providing the most precise and accurate location data for the least amount of effort.
Though most purchases happen in person at a physical location, digital channels – especially paid search – still play a huge role in the research and buying process.
Google wanted to quantify the substantial offline impact mobile search ads can have on a business. So Google ran a study of 10 top big box US retailers (including Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond) to determine how many store visits are incremental.
What Google found was that, on average, the number of incremental store visits driven by mobile search ads actually exceeded their number of online purchase conversions.
The study essentially found that these store visits otherwise never would have happened, if not for the influence of mobile search ads.
Store visits have been made available to more than 1,000 advertisers in 11 countries so far, and Google promises more will gain access soon. If you want to start tracking store visits, you can contact your account manager.
Not every business can track store visits yet – there are a few requirements. You must:
Store visit conversions will be added to the “All conversions” column in your campaign reports. If you haven't already, you'll need to add this column to your reports:
Store visits are available at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level and can be segmented by device. Google provides step-by-step instructions here.
Posted by serpschris
[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]
One of the biggest takeaways from SearchFest in Portland earlier this year was the rapidly rising importance of semantic search and structured data - in particular Schema.org. And while implementing Schema used to require a lot of changes to your site's markup, the JSON-LD format has created a great alternative to adding microdata to a page with minimal code.
Check out Mike Arnesen's deck from his SearchFest talk, "Understanding & Facilitating Semantic Search," for a great overview on using structured data.
What was even more exciting was the idea that you could use Google Tag Manager to insert JSON-LD into a page, allowing you to add Schema markup to your site without having to touch the site's code directly (in other words, no back and forth with the IT department).
Trouble is, while it seemed like Tag Manager would let you insert a JSON-LD snippet on the page no problem, it didn't appear to be possible to use other Tag Manager features to dynamically generate that snippet. Tag Manager lets you create variables by extracting content from the page using either CSS selectors or some basic JavaScript. These variables can then be used dynamically in your tags (check out Mike's post on semantic analysis for a good example).
So if we wanted to grab that page URL and pass it dynamically to the JSON-LD snippet, we might have tried something like this:
But that doesn't work. Bummer.
Meaning that if you wanted to use GTM to add the the BlogPosting Schema type to each of your blog posts, you would have to create a different tag and trigger (based on the URL) for each post. Not exactly scalable.
But, with a bit of experimentation, I've figured out a little bit of JavaScript magic that makes it possible to extract data from the existing content on the page and dynamically create a valid JSON-LD snippet.
The reason why our first example doesn't work is because Tag Manager replaces each variable with a little piece of JavaScript that calls a function - returning the value of whatever variable is called.
We can see this error in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:
The error is the result of Tag Manager inserting JavaScript into what should be a JSON tag - this is invalid, and so the tag fails.
However, we can use Tag Manager to insert a JavaScript tag, and have that JavaScript tag insert our JSON-LD tag.
If you're not super familiar with JavaScript, this might look pretty complicated, but it actually works the exact same way as many other tags you're probably already using (like Google Analytics, or Tag Manager itself).
Here, our Schema data is contained within the JavaScript "data" object, which we can dynamically populate with variables from Tag Manager. The snippet then creates a script tag on the page with the right type (application/ld+json), and populates the tag with our data, which we convert to JSON using the JSON.stringify function.
The purpose of this example is simply to demonstrate how the script works (dynamically swapping out the URL for the Organization Schema type wouldn't actually make much sense). So let's see how it could be used in the real world.
First, build out a complete JSON/LD Schema snippet for a single post based on the schema.org/BlogPosting specification.
There are a number of variables that will be the same between articles; for example, the publisher information. Likewise, the main image for each article has a specific size generated by WordPress that will always be the same between posts, so we can keep the height and width variables constant.
In our case, we've identified 7 variables that change between posts that we'll want to populate dynamically:
Here is our insertion script, again, that we'll use in our tag, this time with the properties swapped out for the variables we'll need to create:
I'm leaving out dateModified right now - we'll cover than in a minute.
