An Introduction to Schema.org Markup for Emails

Posted by kristihines

If you are a Gmail user, you have likely received some emails that stand out from the rest with a call to action button within the subject line.

If you've booked a flight recently, your airline may have sent you an email that includes an interactive way to view your travel plans.

Similarly, Google Inbox app users might have seen emails that look like this.

These calls to action are courtesy of Schema.org markup for email. Just like Schema.org markup for web pages helps web pages stand out in search results, Schema.org markup for emails helps certain emails stand out from the rest in your inbox.

The goal of email markup is to allow people to take action on emails as quickly and simply as possible. For marketers, there are both pros and cons of this feature. In this post, we're going to look at the email markup options currently available, who can use it, and if it's worth it.

Should you use email markup?

Email markup is currently available for Gmail email recipients only. The number of Gmail users was over 350 million in 2012. To determine whether you should use it, you shouldn't go off a three-year-old statistic, but rather a survey of your own email list or customer database.

Most email service providers (like GetResponse, shown in the example below) allow you to search your subscriber list for specific criteria. Search yours for emails containing Gmail to determine the number of Gmail addresses your emails reach.

Of course, this isn't the whole picture. There are likely more people that use Gmail for business with their own domains. So although their emails do not say Gmail, they open their emails in the Gmail web browser or app.

Another consideration for using email markup is tracking. If you rely heavily on the ability to track email opens and clicks to trigger autoresponders and other marketing automation actions, you may not want to give your subscribers the option to bypass opening your email and clicking on your link.

Once you've determined the approximate number of Gmail users you reach and whether you need the ability to track email actions, your next job is to see if you qualify to use email markup.

Register for email markup with Google

Before you can use email markup, you must register with Google. Google will check to make sure you meet email sender quality guidelines, bulk sender guidelines, and action / schema quality guidelines.

Here are some of the key guidelines you need to know. Emails must be authenticated via DKIM or SPF. The domain of your from email must match the signed-by or mailed-by header.

You must send a minimum of a hundred emails per day to Gmail users for a few weeks before applying. Google will want to see that you have a very, very low rate of spam complaints from Gmail recipients.

Bulk email guidelines include using the same IP address to send bulk mail, using the same from email address, only adding subscribers to your list that have opted in (preferably with a double opt-in or confirmation), and allowing list members to unsubscribe easily. These guidelines will not only help you get approved for use of email markup, but will also help your emails get delivered to more Gmail users without being marked as spam.

Action / schema guidelines boil down to making sure you use the appropriate action markup when possible. When an action markup is not available, or the process is more complex than can be handled inside Gmail, a go-to action should be used. Go-to actions should link directly to a page where the email recipient can complete the action as labeled on the call to action button.

An introduction to email markup actions

Actions created by email markup allow email recipients to interact with your business, product, or service within Gmail. There are currently four types of actions to choose from using email markup.

One-click actions

One-click actions are those where a task can be completed with one click within Gmail or Inbox. For example, when someone signs up for an email list, they need to confirm their subscription.

One-click actions are broken into two categories: confirm actions and save actions. The above example is a confirm action. Save actions can include adding an item to a queue or saving a coupon. Both confirm and save actions can only be interacted with once.

RSVP actions

RSVP actions allow email recipients to confirm whether they will attend an event using an invite from Google Calendar. Your email will include the event card you usually see in emails from meeting invites.

Having people confirm their attendance to your event will help ensure that they don't forget by getting it on their calendar.

Review actions

Review actions allow email recipients to add a star and comment review for your business, products, and services right from the subject line of their email in Gmail.

You can see an end-to-end example of the scripting necessary to create a review action for a restaurant to get reviews from a Gmail user's inbox to the Datastore using Python.

Go-to actions

Actions that do not fall under the above types are considered go-to actions. These are used when you need to take an email recipient to your website to complete an action that is too complex to be handled within the recipient's Gmail or Inbox app.

All of the following are examples of go-to actions that take email recipients to do things on another website.

The call to action on these can be customized, so you are not limited to just viewing orders, tracking packages, and opening discussions. You can tailor them for specific uses, such as resetting a password, reviewing questionable transactions on your credit cards, and updating payment information.

An introduction to email markup Highlights

Another use for email markup is Highlights. Highlights summarize key information from specific types of email for users of the Inbox app. For example, Highlights are used for these order confirmations to show the products ordered.

Another example is this flight reservation using Highlights to show the round-trip flights purchased.

Specifically, there are six Highlights that businesses can use. They are as follows:

• Flight reservations - Includes options for displaying basic flight confirmation information, boarding pass, check-in, update a flight, cancel a flight, and additional options. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Orders - Includes options for displaying basic order information, view order action, and order with billing details.
• Parcel deliveries - Includes options for displaying basic parcel delivery information and detailed shipping information.
• Hotel reservations - Includes options for displaying basic hotel reservation information, updating a reservation, and canceling a reservation. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Restaurant reservations - Includes options for displaying basic restaurant reservation information, updating a reservation, and canceling a reservation. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Event reservation - Includes options for basic event reminders without a ticket, event with ticket & no reserved seating, sports or music event with ticket, event with ticket & reserved seating, multiple tickets, updating an event, and canceling an event. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.

Note that while Highlights are a great feature, they only work for Gmail Inbox users. If Google continues to push Gmail users to using Inbox, this user base will grow exponentially.

Test email markup before sending

While you are waiting to be registered with Google, or prior to sending out emails with Schema.org markup, you should run some initial tests to ensure that your markup is correct. You can start by copying and pasting your code into the Email Markup Tester to check for basic errors.

You can also add email markup to emails you send from and to yourself on Gmail. It's important to test as one of the action / schema guidelines is a low failure rate and fast response for action handling. You can learn how to send test emails to yourself in this tutorial using script.google.com.

The tutorial gives you some simple code you can copy and paste as directed.

When you save and run the project as directed, you will immediately get the following result:

You can then begin to experiment with the code for the email markup you want to use.

Run your script again and again to produce new emails.

Any approved business can use the go-to actions to link the subject line of their email to any portion of their website. As you continue to experiment, think of new ways to engage your audience with email markup.

Final questions to answer

Here are some final questions you need to answer before you invest in email markup are the following.

1. Will you get more of your desired results by adding Schema.org actions to your emails? For example, if you use the review action, will you actually get more reviews for your business?
2. How much time will it take to revise your emails if / when Google standardizes email markup with Schema.org? It might pay to wait until email markup has been standardized and make the time and coding investment all at once.
3. Will email actions be supported by other email platforms in the future? Schema.org is a collaboration between Google, Bing, Microsoft, Yandex, and Yahoo. So while not guaranteed, it can be assumed that all of the major email platforms on the web could embrace email markup in the future.

If, after answering these questions, you can see a real need for email markup, then find out if you meet the guidelines set by Google to use it and register.

If your business uses email markup, be sure to share your experiences and results in the comments!

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Moz's 2014 Annual Report

Posted by SarahBird

Moz has a tradition of sharing its financials (check out 2012 and 2013 for funzies). It's an important part of TAGFEE.

Why do we do it? Moz gets it's strength from the community of marketers and entrepreneurs that support it. We celebrated 10 years of our community last October. In some ways, the purpose of this report is to give you an inside look into our company. It's one of many lenses that tell the story of Moz.

Yep. I know. It's April. I'm not proud. Better late than never, right?

I had a very long and extensive version of this post planned, something closer to last year's extravaganza. I finally had to admit to myself that I was letting the perfect become the enemy of the good (or at least the done). There was no way I could capture an entire year's worth of ups and downs—along with supporting data—in a single blog post.

Without further ado, here's the meat-and-potatoes 2014 Year In Review (and here's an infographic with more statistics for your viewing pleasure!):

Moz ended 2014 with $31.3 million in revenue. About $30 million was recurring revenue (mostly from subscriptions to Moz Pro and the API).

Here's a breakdown of all our major revenue sources:

Compared to previous years, 2014 was a much slower growth year. We knew very early that it was going to be a tough year because we started Q1 with negative growth. We worked very hard and successfully shifted the momentum back to increasingly positive quarterly growth rates. I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far. We still have a long ways to go to meet our potential, but we're on the path.

In subscription businesses, If you start the year with negative or even slow growth it is very hard to have meaningful annual growth. All things being equal, you're better off having a bad quarter in Q4 than Q1. If you get a new customer in Q1, you usually earn revenue from that customer all year. If you get a new customer in Q4, it will barely make a dent in that year, although it should set you up nicely for the following year.

We exited 2014 on a good flight path, which bodes well for 2015. We slammed right into some nasty billing system challenges in Q1 2015, but still managed to grow revenue 6.5%. Mad props to the team for shifting momentum last year and for digging into the billing system challenges we're experiencing now.

We were very successful in becoming more efficient and managing costs in 2014. Our Cost of Revenue (COR), the cost of producing what we sell, fell by 30% to $8.2 million. These savings drove our gross profit margin up from 63% in 2013 to 74%.

Our operating profit increased by 30%. Here's a breakdown of our major expenses (both operating expenses and COR):

Total operating expenses (which don't include COR) clocked in at about $29.9 million this year.

The efficiency gains positively impacted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) by pushing it up 50% year over year. In 2013, EBITDA was -$4.5 million. We improved it to -$2.1 million in 2014. We're a VC-backed startup, so this was a planned loss.

One of the most dramatic indicators of our improved efficiency in 2014 is the substantial decline in our consumption of cash.

In 2014, we spent $1.5 million in cash. This was a planned burn, and is actually very impressive for a startup. In fact, we are intentionally increasing our burn, so we don't expect EBITDA and cash burn to look as good in 2015! Hopefully, though, you will see that revenue growth rate increase.

Let's check in on some other Moz KPIs:

At the end of 2014, we reported a little over 27,000 Pro users. When billing system issues hit in Q1 2015, we discovered some weird under- and over-reporting, so the number of subscribers was adjusted down by about ~450 after we scrubbed a bunch of inactive accounts out of the database. We expect accounts to stabilize and be more reliable now that we've fixed those issues.

We launched Moz Local about a year ago. I'm amazed and thrilled that we were able to end the year managing 27,000 locations for a range of customers. We just recently took our baby steps into the UK, and we've got a bunch of great additional features planned. What an incredible launch year!

We published over 300 posts combined on the Moz Blog and YouMoz. Nearly 20,000 people left comments. Well done, team!

We continue to see good growth across many of our off-site communities, too:

Our content and social efforts are paying off with a 26% year-over-year increase in organic traffic.

The team grew to 149 people last year. We're at ~37% women, which is nowhere near where I want it to be. We have a long way to go before the team reflects the diversity of the communities around us.

Our paid, paid vacation perk is very popular with Mozzers, and why wouldn't it be? Everyone gets $3,000/year to use toward their vacations. In 2014, we spent over $420,000 to help our Mozzers take a break and get connected with matters most.

Last, but certainly not least, Mozzers continue to be generous (the 'G' in TAGFEE) and donate to the charities of their choice. In 2014, Mozzers donated $48k, and Moz added another $72k to increase the impact of their gifts. Combining those two figures, we donated $120k to causes our team members are passionate about. That's an average of $805 per employee!

Mozzers are optimists with initiative. I think that's why they are so generous with their time and money to folks in need. They believe the world can be a better place if we act to change it.

That's a wrap on 2014! A year with many ups and downs. Fortunately, Mozzers don't quit when things get hard. They embrace TAGFEE and lean into the challenge.

Revenue is growing again. We're still operating very efficiently, and TAGFEE is strong. We're heads-down executing on some big projects that customers have been clamoring for. Thank you for sticking with us, and for inspiring us to make marketing better every day.

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How Google's Evolution is Forcing Marketers to Invest in Loyal Audiences - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Given Google's recent changes to SERPs and their April 21 mobile deadline, does SEO still come first? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through tactics you can use to build a loyal audience before you need to do SEO.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.

Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting on some of the changes that Google has made that are forcing marketers to invest more and more in building loyal audiences before they do SEO. This is kind of a reverse of years past where we could use SEO as that initial channel where we attracted visits who would become our customers, our email subscribers, our social media fans and followers. All of these things have kind of switched direction.

Why move SEO later in the process?

There are some reasons why. First off, Google has for a lot of broad, head of the demand curve queries, they've taken some of the value and equity away from those with things like instant answers and Knowledge Graph, along with lots and lots of other verticals.

Knowledge Graph

I do a search for "plaid shirts" and I get this instant answer showing me what a plaid shirt looks like and a Knowledge Graph. This is a fake example. I don't think they actually do this for plaid shirts yet, but they will.

Personalization

Personalization by history, we're seeing a ton of personalization. I think history is one of the biggest influencers on personalization. Google+ still is a little bit, but your search history and what you've clicked on in the past tends to be big predictors of this. You can see this in two areas, not just in the results that Google shows, but also in what they're suggesting to you in your Search Suggest as you type.

Now, where Google is trying to predictively say, "Hey, we think you're going to want coffee right now because we see that you stepped out of your office and you live in Seattle, and you are a human being. So you must want coffee." They have these ranking signals, that are relatively new over the past few years and certainly much stronger than in years past around user and usage data, around search volume and what you searched for using quality raters and human and manual controls. Signals that are heavily correlated with brand, even if brand itself isn't necessarily a ranking factor.

Fewer results

Of course, there are fewer results now. I don't know if you guys caught this, but I thought one of the most fascinating things that Dr. Pete showed off recently in his MozCast data set was that it used to be the case that Google would show 10 results even if they had a set of images, a news result, and a local pack. Now basically these count as individual results. So you're not getting 10 results on a page. If you've got images and a couple of news things, you're getting seven results that are web results. Ten domains appear, ten big domains, powerful domains, places like Amazon and Yelp and those kinds of things, at least for U.S. search results, appear on 17% of all page one queries. There are a little fewer results to work with and more results biased to these bigger, better-known sites.

All of these things are contributing to this world in which doing SEO first and then earning loyalty through two other channels through SEO is really, really hard. It's making the value of having a loyal audience before you need to do SEO that much more valuable, which is why I figured we'd run through some of the tactics that you can use to build a loyal audience.

This is actually a question from one of our Whiteboard Friday loyal audience members. Thank you very much. Much appreciated.

How to build a loyal audience

Some tactics to build loyalty, we talked about a few of these, but creating an expectation that you can consistently deliver upon is a huge part of how loyalty is created. Humans love to form habits. Thankfully for marketers, we're terrible at breaking those habits.

Consistency

If you can form a habit, you can create a loyal member of your audience, but this is very challenging unless you deliver consistency. That consistency needs to be created through an expectation. That could be when you publish. That could be what you're going to do. That could be the format of the content that you're providing. That could be how your solution or problem or product is delivered. But it needs to create those things in order to build that loyal audience.

Reach your audience where they are

Secondly, provide your content through the channels, the apps, the accounts, the formats that your audience is already using. If I say, "Hey, in order to get Whiteboard Friday, you need to sign up for a Moz account first," the viewability of Whiteboard Friday is going to go down. If on the other hand, which we don't have this but we really should have it, there was a subscribe on iTunes and you could get each Whiteboard Friday as a podcast, gosh, that is something that many Whiteboard Friday viewers, in fact, many people in the technology and marketing worlds already have access to. Therefore it reduces the friction of subscribing to Whiteboard Friday. We might build more people into our loyal audience.

This is definitely something to think about. You need to be able to identify those channels and then be there.

Where SEO fits

I'm saying don't start with SEO as your primary web marketing tactic anymore. I think we have to build into it. These challenges are too great. Not only are they too great, I think they could be overcome today, but they are growing. All of them are growing so substantially, instant answers and Knowledge Graph are becoming a bigger and bigger part of search results. Google Now is something that Google is pushing on so incredibly hard. I think they're going to be pushing it with new devices. They're clearly pushing it with app results inside of search results. I think these ranking signals are only going to get stronger. I think there's going to be more personalization. I think every one of these you can see an up and to the right trend.

Therefore, when we do SEO, we have to think about it as, "How do I earn a loyal audience and then use their amplification to help me perform in search?" Rather than, "How do I do SEO for my website to earn visitors that I can convert into a loyal audience?" That's a new a challenge, a new paradigm for us.

Be unique and memorable

Craft a stylistically unique and memorable approach to solving your audience's problem. One of the things that I find is challenging in a lot of businesses that we talk to, that I get to interact with is that they think, "Hey, we're the best player in this field. We're the best at doing this. Therefore, we should be able to earn a great customer audience." I think this ignores why marketing exists and ignores the power that marketing has and the power of influencing human beings overall.

The best really is not necessarily enough. We are not perfectly logical creatures where we go, "Hey, I am thinking about a new social media monitoring solution. I need to watch Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram for my business. Therefore I'm going to create my criteria. I'm going to evaluate all 716 providers that are in the market today that fit my price range and those criteria. Then I'm going to choose effectively the best one. No, we're biased by the ones we've heard of, the ones our friends recommend, the ones we stumble across versus don't stumble across, the ones that have a loud voice, the ones that have a credible voice. These things bias us. Therefore, being stylistically unique and memorable have outsized power to determine whether people will become part of your loyal audience.

More isn't necessarily better

I've talked about this a few times, but I'm strongly of the opinion, especially when it comes to loyalty, that more content may actually be worse than better content. Moz publishes between 7 and 10 blog posts a week. That's a lot of content. I think there are weeks where we published 12 blog posts. For me to say this is a little odd. But the challenge here is prior to building a loyal audience. Once you have a loyal audience, you can start to expand that audience by reaching out and broadening the spectrum of content that you create, and you can afford to be a little more risk taking in that. When you are trying to build loyalty early on, you need to have that consistency of quality.

People are going to return because you keep delivering great stuff again and again. When that suffers, your audience will suffer as well. If I watch my first three Whiteboard Fridays and then the fourth one is not great, I expect to lose a ton of those viewers. But if I have tens of thousands of people who are watching Whiteboard Friday and I deliver one bad one out of twenty, maybe I have a little more room to play there.

Focus your efforts

Focus. This is a big challenge because I think a lot of us think very broadly about who we want to appeal to, the types of content we want to create, the types of marketing we want to do. This is very challenging from a loyalty perspective because passionate fans tend to congregate around very, very focused causes and very focused creators of content or focused brands or focused organizations. Its much tougher to build that passion into a group of users if you're trying to appeal to a very broad set. That's just how it is.

Don't forget engagement

Lastly, but not least, this is very tactical, but I found it extremely powerful when a brand is starting out, when a project is starting out, to engage and respond as much as possible with your customers. That could be over social channels, that could be in comments, that could be in emails, that could be directly in outreach, whatever it is. But if you see someone who you can reach out to engaging with you, replying to them, talking to them, conversing with them in some way, forming a connection is extremely powerful. It especially is important for first interactions.

I'm not going to say, "You need to respond to everything all the time, always." If you can identify, "This is the first interaction that we've had with this person," if you interact and if that interaction is positive, it can create loyalty just on its own. That's a lovely way to start scaling up from a small starting point.

All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Fractl Leveraged Content Marketing to Increase its Referral Traffic 6,718%

Posted by KelseyLibert

In October 2013, Fractl published a study on viral emotions on the Harvard Business Review. The research was picked up by several high-authority publishers, catapulted our brand's authority, increased our brand awareness, and drove dozens of qualified leads. To our expectation, we proved that our client-facing, research-driven content marketing strategy could have the same long-term impact on our own brand. Then, we were off to the races.

In early 2014, we launched a survey of more than 500 top-tier publishers. Then, we released a study analyzing 2.6 billion social shares. By November 2014, we joined forces with influencer marketing tool BuzzStream. To date, we've launched more than 10 industry research–driven marketing campaigns, earning more than 180 pickups and 45,000 social shares.

The bottom-line impact? Fractl's referral traffic grew 6,718%, its total site traffic grew 4,396%, and its contact list grew 1,900%.

Of course, this strategy wasn't launched without lessons along the way; here is what I learned:

I. Don't limit large-scale campaigns with narrow-scope ideas

Content marketing can be leveraged in every stage of the buying cycle. The biggest mistake most marketers make is choosing a single idea that is too narrow and therefore limits their reach. The second mistake marketers make is thinking that a single campaign will be the silver bullet that increases every KPI they're tracking. The third mistake they make is not developing a diverse content strategy that educates consumers in different stages of the buying cycle.

The best content marketing strategies focus on developing a long-term strategy for both on-site and off-site content with a diverse content calendar that includes a variety of campaigns to target every stage of the buying cycle:

• Viral Campaigns - The idea is tangentially related to a brand, has a broad reach, and leverages a strong emotional hook to encourage hyper-accelerated sharing and traffic.
• Conversion-Driven Campaigns - The idea is hyper-targeted to a specific audience that is ready or nearly ready to purchase.
• Awareness Campaigns - The broad-scope idea designed to increase exposure to the brand and attract and engage consumers who are at the top of the sales funnel.
• On-Site Content - The multipurpose content is designed to build the brand and engage with the target market.

When we first launched our co-branded strategy with BuzzStream, their tool was widely known as an influencer marketing CRM. Naturally, the team wanted to focus on ideas that would help educate their user base in influencer marketing tactics. Thus, the following campaigns were born:

• 21 Tips for Pitching Publishers and Writing Exceptional Subject Lines - ProBlogger
• Publisher Pet Peeves - PR Daily
• The PR Guide to Media & Blogger Personalities - Social Media Explorer

These narrow-scope ideas spoke to a highly targeted audience, allowing us to secure pickups on authoritative niche marketing blogs. However, by focusing on a narrow idea (e.g. pitching publishers), we also limited our ability to reach larger top-tier publishers who prefer to cover digital marketing as a whole (e.g. content creation and consumption).

By limiting our outreach to niche industry blogs, we also limited our ability to reach c-suite executives who were not yet aware of the benefits of influencer marketing and likely read the larger sites (e.g. Adweek) that spoke to the strategies they're currently using (e.g. traditional PR).

In January 2015, we revamped our co-branded strategy to speak to a larger audience:

• Why People Unfollow Brands on Social Media - Adweek
• The Emotion of Sound - The Next Web
• Social Popularity by Content Type - HubSpot

In doing so, we further developed our content calendar by creating conversion-driven on-site content while simultaneously leveraging our large-scope awareness campaigns to speak to a broad audience of marketers. After we had enough data to go off of, we reevaluated our co-branded marketing mix and came up with the following options for our content calendar:

Several months into our partnership, we found that our optional content mix was Option 1, which allowed us to:

1. Build one awareness campaign and one large-scope campaign, which enabled us to secure both top-tier placements and niche-industry placements
2. Offer a gated asset that created the opportunity to convert people into future costumers
3. Create on-site content that served to improve keyword rankings and offered evergreen content for people to engage with

Your content mix may be different depending on the KPIs you're hoping to achieve and how aggressive you want to be with your marketing.

PRO TIP: If you're a new brand looking for significant growth, develop an aggressive viral content strategy like Rehabs.com. If you're an established brand looking to grow loyalty and engagement, develop awareness campaigns, conversion campaigns, and an on-site content strategy like eBay.com.

II. Heavy research earns more press than knowledge curation

Now that you understand the importance of a diverse content strategy, how do you develop campaigns that earn highly coveted top-tier pickups? You give publishers what they want. When we surveyed 500 top-tier publishers, we found a whopping 39% want campaigns that feature exclusive research.

In the beginning of our co-branded strategy, we cast a wide net of ideas that centered around heavy research, data curation, and knowledge curation. As new campaigns launched, we tracked their performance by the number of pickups, domain authority, and social shares. Three months into production, we were able to analyze our results and continue to refine our strategy.

The pie chart on the right shows all of our campaigns divided into a category of heavy research, data curation, and knowledge curation. The chart on the left sorts all of our campaigns based on performance by social engagement, which has a high correlation to links. Lo and behold, our publisher survey results rung true: The level of success of our co-branded campaigns had a high correlation with heavy research–based ideas.

Takeaways

• Heavy research-based campaigns have the highest engagement and syndication, because they bring something new to the table.
• Data curation has medium engagement, because it's an even split between unearthing new findings and publishing data that might be assumed.
• Knowledge curation has the lowest engagement, because this data can become widely known as the industry ages and becomes more saturated.

So, now that we know publishers and audiences want more research, how do we give it to them?

III. Primary research can be either qualitative or quantitative, but we've found more success with quantitative research

In our publisher survey, writers wanted to see more data-driven articles, infographics, and mixed-media pieces, followed closely by data visualizations, images, videos, and interactive maps. What did publishers want the least of? Press releases, interactive projects, quizzes, flipbooks, widgets, and badges.

While articles might do well with qualitative results, most of the other top-ranked content formats require a type of data visualization that is most valuable when it features quantifiable results.

PRO TIP: Before you begin campaign production, base your ideation on the specific publishers you want your campaigns to be published on. Find out what resonates with those publishers using tools like Buzzsumo, and then pitch those ideas to those editors before you ever develop your campaign. Having publisher buy-in early on in the process guarantees a placement for your campaign, and it allows you to work with the publisher to give them exactly what they want. What better way to build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship?

Now, before you run off to generate campaign ideas, it's important to leverage certain tools to evaluate topic engagement on the sites you want to target. Some of my favorite tools include:

• BuzzSumo.com
• Inbound.org
• GrowthHackers.com
• Reddit.com/r/bigseo

When it comes to developing primary research, a survey can be one of the easiest and quickest ways to garner new data. Crowdflower.com, SurveyMonkey.com, and Amazon Mechanical Turk are some of the most popular survey tools for developing your primary research. Average survey payments range from 20–50 cents, based on the length of the survey. Always time yourself taking the survey, and then try offering 5 cents per minute.

PRO TIP: An authoritative sample size is no less than 300 respondents, though most top-tier sites prefer a sample size greater than 1,000 respondents. Submit surveys to reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor for additional hits.

If you're running a survey, the majority of your questions should have responses based on a scale, versus straight "yes/no" answers. This allows you to curate more data to analyze and achieve a more accurate response.

If you want to go the route of data curation, there are dozens of public and paid APIs that allow you to unearth data in your field. Some of our favorite data sources include:

• Google Dataset Search
• Wolfram-Alpha
• Google News
• Google Trends
• BuzzSumo
• Reddit
• U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH)
• CIA World Factbook
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• U.S. Census Bureau
• Science.gov
• National Criminal Justice Reference Service
• Google Scholar
• Microsoft Academic Search
• WorldCat Libraries
• Librarians' Internet Index

Think outside the box when coming up with your data visualizations; static infographics are quickly becoming saturated. Try a new format, like any of these examples I pulled from Fractl's portfolio:

• WebGL
• Parallax
• Motion Graphic
• Video
• Gifs
• Perspective IG
• Interactive Infographic
• Map
• Visual Article
• Flip book
• HTML5
• Animated Graph

Now that you've finalized your perfect research-based campaign, how else can you optimize it to increase your core metrics?

IV. Gated assets create a value-add and incentivize people to give you their information

When we launched our first marketing campaign, we didn't have a formal strategy for capturing our engagement and converting it in our sales funnel. While we'd get a mention for Fractl in all of our write-ups, we weren't offering any incentive for people to actually visit our website.

PRO TIP: Read our content marketing strategy guide to learn how to use SEO and content to increase your customers.

See what I did there?

Creating a white paper, eBook, list, or any other gated asset that adds value to your original research creates an incentive for people to go back to your website and continue engaging with your brand. By gating the asset, you enable your team to capture the contact's information and further nurture them in your sales funnel.

If you're conducting research, a best practice is to save at least a quarter of your findings to be featured in your gated asset. Make it explicit in your guest posts that there is more information for people to learn about if they click through. For example, below you'll see the call to action in our Contently post, which led to the gated asset for our research on 2.6 billion shares.

While you should include a call to action for your gated asset in the intro text, you should also include it on all of your graphic assets that could potentially be further syndicated without proper attribution.

Word of caution: By putting your content behind a gate, you're asking your audience to trust you with their personal information. If you betray a users trust, the damage to your brand can be severe and lasting.

Be smart about how you use gated content and what you collect:

• Beneath your form, create a subscription box that allows people to opt-in to receive your future research. Only email the people who opt in, and only email them with what they opted into.
• Get granular with your options allowing people to choose the specific research topics they want to receive from your brand.
• Email frequency and engagement are negatively correlated, so limit your number of email blasts based on individual campaign engagement and overall audience engagement.
• Collect the bare minimum information you need on your forms, such as name and email address. Then, use smart fields to collect more data from people who are consistently engaging with your brand.
• Simplify your landing page to tell the user within the first five seconds: what the offer is; the value and why they want to download it; exactly what you want them to do.

As you set up your landing pages, another thing you need to consider is optimizing the permalink structure for Google rankings. Matt Cutts says it's best to use 3–5 words in the slug of your permalink, for example:

• Bad: research.frac.tl/a-study-on-two-billion-shares-reveals-which-publishers-dominate-social-media
• Good: research.frac.tl/publisher-engagement-analysis

Since your word count is limited, you'll want to cut any superfluous words such as "and." Don't forget to do some keyword research to determine which 3–5 words you should use based on traffic data. Obviously you want to go after the words that have the largest traffic, but also evaluate for long-tail opportunities.

V. Learning which publishers drive the most qualified lead flow is critical to your success

While our coverage on the Harvard Business Review built our authority, the website's visit-to-contact-conversion ratio hovered at a low 9%. Meanwhile, targeted industry sites converted at an average rate of 25-45%, with some gold stars in the 60-90% range.

PRO TIP: While top-tier pickups expand your brand's reach and build its authority, niche marketing blogs have a higher contact conversion ratio since their audience is already primed with the benefits of content marketing.

So, how do you ensure that your publisher pickups drive brand awareness and convert leads? You develop audience personas.

Audience personas are a characterization of your businesses ideal customer. Creating these personas forces you to consider what your customers value, what they hope to achieve, what they fear, and much more. By putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you can begin to get a sense for where they get their news and which blogs they might read—allowing you to improve your pitch targeting for brand awareness and conversions.

Most people recommend creating 3-5 audience personas, which should outline an individual's:

• Job Title
• Roles
• Goals
• Challenges
• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Education
• Location
• Story
• Common objections
• Elevator pitch

You can start to create these personas by:

1. Evaluating your current customers and their differences and commonalities
2. Vetting your social media following for your average or most engaged followers
3. Assessing your past customer inquires and what made a qualified lead versus an unqualified lead
4. Discussing the ideal client with your sales team or other qualified team members

Once you have a list of your customer personas, you can begin evaluating where these people might hang out online. Use Buzzsumo's influencer tool to search for people in similar job functions to your audience personas. Then, use the "view links shared" option to get a sense of where your personas might be hanging out, too:

PRO TIP: Don't limit yourself by only developing personas for your ideal client. Developing personas for unqualified leads allows you to determine which people and publishers you want to avoid, as well.

If you want to increase your traffic, leads, and conversions, content marketing is one of the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective methods to organically earn your core metrics. What other tips do you have for leveraging content marketing for sales?

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Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

This week, Moz released a new feature that we call Spam Score, which helps you analyze your link profile and weed out the spam (check out the blog post for more info). There have been some fantastic conversations about how it works and how it should (and shouldn't) be used, and we wanted to clarify a few things to help you all make the best use of the tool.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers more detail on how the score is calculated, just what those spam flags are, and how we hope you'll benefit from using it.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.

Click on the image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat a little bit about Moz's Spam Score. Now I don't typically like to do Whiteboard Fridays specifically about a Moz project, especially when it's something that's in our toolset. But I'm making an exception because there have been so many questions and so much discussion around Spam Score and because I hope the methodology, the way we calculate things, the look at correlation and causation, when it comes to web spam, can be useful for everyone in the Moz community and everyone in the SEO community in addition to being helpful for understanding this specific tool and metric.

The 17-flag scoring system

I want to start by describing the 17 flag system. As you might know, Spam Score is shown as a score from 0 to 17. You either fire a flag or you don't. Those 17 flags you can see a list of them on the blog post, and we'll show that in there. Essentially, those flags correlate to the percentage of sites that we found with that count of flags, not those specific flags, just any count of those flags that were penalized or banned by Google. I'll show you a little bit more in the methodology.

Basically, what this means is for sites that had 0 spam flags, none of the 17 flags that we had fired, that actually meant that 99.5% of those sites were not penalized or banned, on average, in our analysis and 0.5% were. At 3 flags, 4.2% of those sites, that's actually still a huge number. That's probably in the millions of domains or subdomains that Google has potentially still banned. All the way down here with 11 flags, it's 87.3% that we did find banned. That seems pretty risky or penalized. It seems pretty risky. But 12.7% of those is still a very big number, again probably in the hundreds of thousands of unique websites that are not banned but still have these flags.

If you're looking at a specific subdomain and you're saying, "Hey, gosh, this only has 3 flags or 4 flags on it, but it's clearly been penalized by Google, Moz's score must be wrong," no, that's pretty comfortable. That should fit right into those kinds of numbers. Same thing down here. If you see a site that is not penalized but has a number of flags, that's potentially an indication that you're in that percentage of sites that we found not to be penalized.

So this is an indication of percentile risk, not a "this is absolutely spam" or "this is absolutely not spam." The only caveat is anything with, I think, more than 13 flags, we found 100% of those to have been penalized or banned. Maybe you'll find an odd outlier or two. Probably you won't.

Correlation ≠ causation

Correlation is not causation. This is something we repeat all the time here at Moz and in the SEO community. We do a lot of correlation studies around these things. I think people understand those very well in the fields of social media and in marketing in general. Certainly in psychology and electoral voting and election polling results, people understand those correlations. But for some reason in SEO we sometimes get hung up on this.

I want to be clear. Spam flags and the count of spam flags correlates with sites we saw Google penalize. That doesn't mean that any of the flags or combinations of flags actually cause the penalty. It could be that the things that are flags are not actually connected to the reasons Google might penalize something at all. Those could be totally disconnected.

We are not trying to say with the 17 flags these are causes for concern or you need to fix these. We are merely saying this feature existed on this website when we crawled it, or it had this feature, maybe it still has this feature. Therefore, we saw this count of these features that correlates to this percentile number, so we're giving you that number. That's all that the score intends to say. That's all it's trying to show. It's trying to be very transparent about that. It's not trying to say you need to fix these.

A lot of flags and features that are measured are perfectly fine things to have on a website, like no social accounts or email links. That's a totally reasonable thing to have, but it is a flag because we saw it correlate. A number in your domain name, I think it's fine if you want to have a number in your domain name. There's plenty of good domains that have a numerical character in them. That's cool.

TLD extension that happens to be used by lots of spammers, like a .info or a .cc or a number of other ones, that's also totally reasonable. Just because lots of spammers happen to use those TLD extensions doesn't mean you are necessarily spam because you use one.

Or low link diversity. Maybe you're a relatively new site. Maybe your niche is very small, so the number of folks who point to your site tends to be small, and lots of the sites that organically naturally link to you editorially happen to link to you from many of their pages, and there's not a ton of them. That will lead to low link diversity, which is a flag, but it isn't always necessarily a bad thing. It might still nudge you to try and get some more links because that will probably help you, but that doesn't mean you are spammy. It just means you fired a flag that correlated with a spam percentile.

The methodology we use

The methodology that we use, for those who are curious -- and I do think this is a methodology that might be interesting to potentially apply in other places -- is we brainstormed a large list of potential flags, a huge number. We cut that down to the ones we could actually do, because there were some that were just unfeasible for our technology team, our engineering team to do.

Then, we got a huge list, many hundreds of thousands of sites that were penalized or banned. When we say banned or penalized, what we mean is they didn't rank on page one for either their own domain name or their own brand name, the thing between the www and the .com or .net or .info or whatever it was. If you didn't rank for either your full domain name, www and the .com or Moz, that would mean we said, "Hey, you're penalized or banned."

Now you might say, "Hey, Rand, there are probably some sites that don't rank on page one for their own brand name or their own domain name, but aren't actually penalized or banned." I agree. That's a very small number. Statistically speaking, it probably is not going to be impactful on this data set. Therefore, we didn't have to control for that. We ended up not controlling for that.

Then we found which of the features that we ideated, brainstormed, actually correlated with the penalties and bans, and we created the 17 flags that you see in the product today. There are lots things that I thought were going to correlate, for example spammy-looking anchor text or poison keywords on the page, like Viagra, Cialis, Texas Hold'em online, pornography. Those things, not all of them anyway turned out to correlate well, and so they didn't make it into the 17 flags list. I hope over time we'll add more flags. That's how things worked out.

How to apply the Spam Score metric

When you're applying Spam Score, I think there are a few important things to think about. Just like domain authority, or page authority, or a metric from Majestic, or a metric from Google, or any other kind of metric that you might come up with, you should add it to your toolbox and to your metrics where you find it useful. I think playing around with spam, experimenting with it is a great thing. If you don't find it useful, just ignore it. It doesn't actually hurt your website. It's not like this information goes to Google or anything like that. They have way more sophisticated stuff to figure out things on their end.

Do not just disavow everything with seven or more flags, or eight or more flags, or nine or more flags. I think that we use the color coding to indicate 0% to 10% of these flag counts were penalized or banned, 10% to 50% were penalized or banned, or 50% or above were penalized or banned. That's why you see the green, orange, red. But you should use the count and line that up with the percentile. We do show that inside the tool as well.

Don't just take everything and disavow it all. That can get you into serious trouble. Remember what happened with Cyrus. Cyrus Shepard, Moz's head of content and SEO, he disavowed all the backlinks to its site. It took more than a year for him to rank for anything again. Google almost treated it like he was banned, not completely, but they seriously took away all of his link power and didn't let him back in, even though he changed the disavow file and all that.

Be very careful submitting disavow files. You can hurt yourself tremendously. The reason we offer it in disavow format is because many of the folks in our customer testing said that's how they wanted it so they could copy and paste, so they could easily review, so they could get it in that format and put it into their already existing disavow file. But you should not do that. You'll see a bunch of warnings if you try and generate a disavow file. You even have to edit your disavow file before you can submit it to Google, because we want to be that careful that you don't go and submit.

You should expect the Spam Score accuracy. If you're doing spam investigation, you're probably looking at spammier sites. If you're looking at a random hundred sites, you should expect that the flags would correlate with the percentages. If I look at a random hundred 4 flag Spam Score sites, 7.5% of those I would expect on average to be penalized or banned. If you are therefore seeing sites that don't fit those, they probably fit into the percentiles that were not penalized, or up here were penalized, down here weren't penalized, that kind of thing.

Hopefully, you find Spam Score useful and interesting and you add it to your toolbox. We would love to hear from you on iterations and ideas that you've got for what we can do in the future, where else you'd like to see it, and where you're finding it useful/not useful. That would be great.

Hopefully, you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday and will join us again next week. Thanks so much. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

ADDITION FROM RAND: I also urge folks to check out Marie Haynes' excellent Start-to-Finish Guide to Using Google's Disavow Tool. We're going to update the feature to link to that as well.

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Support 4.0: Using Snapchat for all of Moz's Support

Posted by Nick_Sayers

Innovation. Mobile. Community. Social. All words that come to mind when I think of Snapchat. Well, now a new word is creeping in… a word so disruptive to the Snapchat ecosphere that I’m going to bold it, then repeat it. Support. Yes, support.

Moz has always been a customer-centric company. We innovate, and you enjoy. Moz is ready to take it further than ever. Support+Snapchat is going to change how you talk to us and learn about the Moz products. Now read the following emotionally driven marketing copy to get a better sense of our new (industry-changing) means of support...

Move the needle on the go. Using Moz on the go with a desktop-based browser and have a question about Local Rankings? Just hold your phone up to your other screen and send us a snap of your issue. Make sure to shout loud enough. We love to hear you.

Why boil the ocean? This is easy. Sleek. And, dare we say, innovative. It's like chat, but it completely disappears. You just need your phone and a crippling support issue.

A team of unicorns. We've "transitioned" the zebras and horses to unemployment. We now only have unicorns. They will be blowing you away while helping with your support needs. Get ready to puke rainbows, folks.

Game-changing privacy. NSA. FBI. CIA. NYPD. Google. Illuminati. They're all watching. Feel secure that your in-depth support explanations will disappear soon after you receive them. You won't have to worry about anyone knowing that you couldn't find an export button without our help.

Don't open the kimono. Keep it clean. Unicorns are sensitive. Think of Moz's Snapchat as your sweet old grandmother's mailbox. The one those old Scholastic books she ordered for you always arrived in. Don’t tell her you didn't read them.

Now reach out. Feel the disruption in the Support Force. Send a Snapchat to moz_help. And welcome to Support 4.0.

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