8 Ways Content Marketers Can Hack Facebook Multi-Product Ads

Posted by Alan_Coleman

The trick most content marketers are missing

Creating great content is the first half of success in content marketing. Getting quality content read by, and amplified to, a relevant audience is the oft overlooked second half of success. Facebook can be a content marketer's best friend for this challenge. For reach, relevance and amplification potential, Facebook is unrivaled.

1. Reach: 1 in 6 mobile minutes on planet earth is somebody reading something on Facebook.
2. Relevance: Facebook is a lean mean interest and demo targeting machine. There is no online or offline media that owns as much juicy interest and demographic information on its audience and certainly no media has allowed advertisers to utilise this information as effectively as Facebook has.
3. Amplification: Facebook is literally built to encourage sharing. Here's the first 10 words from their mission statement: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share…", Enough said!

Because of these three digital marketing truths, if a content marketer gets their paid promotion* right on Facebook, the battle for eyeballs and amplification is already won.

For this reason it's crucial that content marketers keep a close eye on Facebook advertising innovations and seek out ways to use them in new and creative ways.

In this post I will share with you eight ways we've hacked a new Facebook ad format to deliver content marketing success.

Multi-Product Ads (MPAs)

In 2014, Facebook unveiled multi-product ads (MPAs) for US advertisers, we got them in Europe earlier this year. They allow retailers to show multiple products in a carousel-type ad unit.

They look like this:

If the user clicks on the featured product, they are guided directly to the landing page for that specific product, from where they can make a purchase.

You could say MPAs are Facebook's answer to Google Shopping.

Facebook's mistake is a content marketer's gain

I believe Facebook has misunderstood how people want to use their social network and the transaction-focused format is OK at best for selling products. People aren't really on Facebook to hit the "buy now" button. I'm a daily Facebook user and I can't recall a time this year where I have gone directly from Facebook to an e-commerce website and transacted. Can you remember a recent time when you did?

So, this isn't an innovation that removes a layer of friction from something that we are all doing online already (as the most effective innovations do). Instead, it's a bit of a "hit and hope" that, by providing this functionality, Facebook would encourage people to try to buy online in a way they never have before.

The Wolfgang crew felt the MPA format would be much more useful to marketers and users if they were leveraging Facebook for the behaviour we all demonstrate on the platform every day, guiding users to relevant content. We attempted to see if Facebook Ads Manager would accept MPAs promoting content rather than products. We plugged in the images, copy and landing pages, hit "place order", and lo and behold the ads became active. We're happy to say that the engagement rates, and more importantly the amplification rates, are fantastic!

Multi-Content Ads

We've re-invented the MPA format for multi-advertisers in multi-ways, eight ways to be exact! Here's eight MPA Hacks that have worked well for us. All eight hacks use the MPA format to promote content rather than promote products.

Hack #1: Multi-Package Ads

Our first variation wasn't a million miles away from multi-product ads; we were promoting the various packages offered by a travel operator.

By looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares (in blue below the ads) you can see the ads were a hit with Facebook users and they earned lots of free engagement and amplification.

NB: If you have selected "clicks to website" as your advertising objective, all those likes, comments and shares are free!

The ad sparked plenty of conversation amongst Facebook friends in the comments section.

Hack #2: Multi-Offer Ads

Everybody knows the Internet loves a bargain. So we decided to try another variation moving away from specific packages, focusing instead on deals for a different travel operator.

Here's how the ads looked:

These ads got valuable amplification beyond the share. In the comments section, you can see people tagging specific friends. This led to the MPAs receiving further amplification, and a very targeted and personalised form of amplification to boot.

Word of mouth referrals have been a trader's best friend since the stone age. These "personalised" word of mouth referrals en masse are a powerful marketing proposition. It's worth mentioning again that those engagements are free!

Hack #3: Multi-Locations Ads

Putting the Lo in SOLOMO.

This multi-product feed ad was hacked to promote numerous locations of a waterpark. "Where to go?" is among the first questions somebody asks when researching a holiday. In creating this top of funnel content, we can communicate with our target audience at the very beginning of their research process. A simple truth of digital marketing is: the more interactions you have with your target market on their journey to purchase, the more likely they are to seal the deal with you when it comes time to hit the "buy now" button. Starting your relationship early gives you an advantage over those competitors who are hanging around the bottom of the purchase funnel hoping to make a quick and easy conversion.

What was surprising here, was that because we expected to reach people at the very beginning of their research journey, we expected the booking enquiries to be some time away. What actually happened was these ads sparked an enquiry frenzy as Facebook users could see other people enquiring and the holidays selling out in real time.

In fact nearly all of the 35 comments on this ad were booking enquiries. This means what we were measuring as an "engagement" was actually a cold hard "conversion"! You don't need me to tell you a booking enquiry is far closer to the money than a Facebook like.

The three examples outlined so far are for travel companies. Travel is a great fit for Facebook as it sits naturally in the Facebook feed, my Facebook feed is full of envy-inducing friends' holiday pictures right now. Another interesting reason why travel is a great fit for Facebook ads is because typically there are multiple parties to a travel purchase. What happened here is the comments section actually became a very visible and measurable forum for discussion between friends and family before becoming a stampede inducing medium of enquiry.

So, stepping outside of the travel industry, how do other industries fare with hacked MPAs?

Hack #3a: Multi-Location Ads (combined with location targeting)

Location, location, location. For a property listings website, we applied location targeting and repeated our Multi-Location Ad format to advertise properties for sale to people in and around that location.

Hack #4: Multi-Big Content Ad

"The future of big content is multi platform"
– Cyrus Shepard

The same property website had produced a report and an accompanying infographic to provide their audience with unique and up-to-the-minute market information via their blog. We used the MPA format to promote the report, the infographic and the search rentals page of the website. This brought their big content piece to a larger audience via a new platform.

Hack #5: Multi-Episode Ad

This MPA hack was for an online TV player. As you can see we advertised the most recent episodes of a TV show set in a fictional Dublin police station, Red Rock.

Engagement was high, opinion was divided.

LOL.

Hack #6: Multi-People Ads

In the cosmetic surgery world, past patients' stories are valuable marketing material. Particularly when the past patients are celebrities. We recycled some previously published stories from celebrity patients using multi-people ads and targeted them to a very specific audience.

Hack #7: Multi-UGC Ads

Have you witnessed the power of user generated content (UGC) in your marketing yet? We've found interaction rates with authentic UGC images can be up to 10 fold of those of the usual stylised images. In order to encourage further UGC, we posted a number of customer's images in our Multi-UGC Ads.

The CTR on the above ads was 6% (2% is the average CTR for Facebook News feed ads according to our study). Strong CTRs earn you more traffic for your budget. Facebook's relevancy score lowers your CPC as your CTR increases.

When it comes to the conversion, UGC is a power player, we've learned that "customers attracting new customers" is a powerful acquisition tool.

Hack #8: Target past customers for amplification

"Who will support and amplify this content and why?"
– Rand Fishkin

Your happy customers Rand, that's the who and the why! Check out these Multi-Package Ads targeted to past customers via custom audiences. The Camino walkers have already told all their friends about their great trip, now allow them to share their great experiences on Facebook and connect the tour operator with their Facebook friends via a valuable word of mouth referral. Just look at the ratio of share:likes and shares:comments. Astonishingly sharable ads!

Targeting past converters in an intelligent manner is a super smart way to find an audience ready to share your content.

How will hacking Multi-Product Ads work for you?

People don't share ads, but they do share great content. So why not hack MPAs to promote your content and reap the rewards of the world's greatest content sharing machine: Facebook.

MPAs allow you to tell a richer story by allowing you to promote multiple pieces of content simultaneously. So consider which pieces of content you have that will work well as "content bundles" and who the relevant audience for each "content bundle" is.

As Hack #8 above illustrates, the big wins come when you match a smart use of the format with the clever and relevant targeting Facebook allows. We're massive fans of custom audiences so if you aren't sure where to start, I'd suggest starting there.

So ponder your upcoming content pieces, consider your older content you'd like to breathe some new life into and perhaps you could become a Facebook Ads Hacker.

I'd love to hear about your ideas for turning Multi-Product Ads into Multi-Content Ads in the comments section below.

We could even take the conversation offline at Mozcon!

Happy hacking.

---

*Yes I did say paid promotion, it's no secret that Facebook's organic reach continues to dwindle. The cold commercial reality is you need to pay to play on FB. The good news is that if you select 'website clicks' as your objective you only pay for website traffic and engagement while amplification by likes, comments, and shares are free! Those website clicks you pay for are typically substantially cheaper than Adwords, Taboola, Outbrain, Twitter or LinkedIn. How does it compare to display? It doesn't. Paying for clicks is always preferable to paying for impressions. If you are spending money on display advertising I'd urge you to fling a few spondoolas towards Facebook ads and compare results. You will be pleasantly surprised.

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The Meta Referrer Tag: An Advancement for SEO and the Internet

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

The movement to make the Internet more secure through HTTPS brings several useful advancements for webmasters. In addition to security improvements, HTTPS promises future technological advances and potential SEO benefits for marketers.

HTTPS in search results is rising. Recent MozCast data from Dr. Pete shows nearly 20% of first page Google results are now HTTPS.

Sadly, HTTPS also has its downsides.

Marketers run into their first challenge when they switch regular HTTP sites over to HTTPS. Technically challenging, the switch typically involves routing your site through a series of 301 redirects. Historically, these types of redirects are associated with a loss of link equity (thought to be around 15%) which can lead to a loss in rankings. This can offset any SEO advantage that Google claims switching.

Ross Hudgens perfectly summed it up in this tweet:

"HTTPS is a ranking factor". 301 HTTP to HTTPS. Links lose equity through 301. HTTPS gain is less than amount of equity loss. Lose traffic.
— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) June 15, 2015

Many SEOs have anecdotally shared stories of HTTPS sites performing well in Google search results (and our soon-to-be-published Ranking Factors data seems to support this.) However, the short term effect of a large migration can be hard to take. When Moz recently switched to HTTPS to provide better security to our logged-in users, we saw an 8-9% dip in our organic search traffic.

Problem number two is the subject of this post. It involves the loss of referral data. Typically, when one site sends traffic to another, information is sent that identifies the originating site as the source of traffic. This invaluable data allows people to see where their traffic is coming from, and helps spread the flow of information across the web.

SEOs have long used referrer data for a number of beneficial purposes. Oftentimes, people will link back or check out the site sending traffic when they see the referrer in their analytics data. Spammers know this works, as evidenced by the recent increase in referrer spam:

This process stops when traffic flows from an HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site. In this case, no referrer data is sent. Webmasters can't know where their traffic is coming from.

Here's how referral data to my personal site looked when Moz switched to HTTPS. I lost all visibility into where my traffic came from.

Its (not provided) all over again!

Enter the meta referrer tag

While we can't solve the ranking challenges imposed by switching a site to HTTPS, we can solve the loss of referral data, and it's actually super-simple.

Almost completely unknown to most marketers, the relatively new meta referrer tag (it's actually been around for a few years) was designed to help out in these situations.

Better yet, the tag allows you to control how your referrer information is passed.

The meta referrer tag works with most browsers to pass referrer information in a manner defined by the user. Traffic remains encrypted and all the benefits of using HTTPS remain in place, but now you can pass referrer data to all websites, even those that use HTTP.

How to use the meta referrer tag

What follows are extremely simplified instructions for using the meta referrer tag. For more in-depth understanding, we highly recommend referring to the W3C working draft of the spec.

The meta referrer tag is placed in the <head> section of your HTML, and references one of five states, which control how browsers send referrer information from your site. The five states are:

1. None: Never pass referral data

   <meta name="referrer" content="none">
   

2. None When Downgrade: Sends referrer information to secure HTTPS sites, but not insecure HTTP sites

   <meta name="referrer" content="none-when-downgrade">
   

3. Origin Only: Sends the scheme, host, and port (basically, the subdomain) stripped of the full URL as a referrer, i.e. https://moz.com/example.html would simply send https://moz.com

   <meta name="referrer" content="origin">
   

4. Origin When Cross-Origin: Sends the full URL as the referrer when the target has the same scheme, host, and port (i.e. subdomain) regardless if it's HTTP or HTTPS, while sending origin-only referral information to external sites. (note: There is a typo in the official spec. Future versions should be "origin-when-cross-origin")

   <meta name="referrer" content="origin-when-crossorigin">
   

5. Unsafe URL: Always passes the URL string as a referrer. Note if you have any sensitive information contained in your URL, this isn't the safest option. By default, URL fragments, username, and password are automatically stripped out.
   

   <meta name="referrer" content="unsafe-url">
   

The meta referrer tag in action

By clicking the link below, you can get a sense of how the meta referrer tag works.

Check Referrer

Boom!

We've set the meta referrer tag for Moz to "origin", which means when we link out to another site, we pass our scheme, host, and port. The end result is you see http://moz.com as the referrer, stripped of the full URL path (/meta-referrer-tag).

My personal site typically receives several visits per day from Moz. Here's what my analytics data looked like before and after we implemented the meta referrer tag.

For simplicity and security, most sites may want to implement the "origin" state, but there are drawbacks.

One negative side effect was that as soon as we implemented the meta referrer tag, our AdRoll analytics, which we use for retargeting, stopped working. It turns out that AdRoll uses our referrer information for analytics, but the meta referrer tag "origin" state meant that the only URL they ever saw reported was https://moz.com.

Conclusion

We love the meta referrer tag because it keeps information flowing on the Internet. It's the way the web is supposed to work!

It helps marketers and webmasters see exactly where their traffic is coming from. It encourages engagement, communication, and even linking, which can lead to improvements in SEO.

Useful links:

• Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (refers to an older spec)
• Tighter Control Over Your Referrers
• Geek guide to Direct Traffic Analysis
• W3C Referrer Policy

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Orlando SEO Experts Marketing tips (407)331-8877 For any Organization

If you have a business, you should have a website. Make sure your website works perfectly if your business is based on internet sales. This guide gives you ideas that you can use to optimize the visibility and online presence of your website.Today, a well-designed, fully-functional website is no longer reserved for just corporate companies. If you wish to obtain more clients using the Internet, then it is important that you have an effective website. In addition to having a website, you must take steps to generate traffic to the website. This article will show you just how to do that.A website is essential for businesses of all types. If you are reliant on Internet based sales for your business, then a website is a must. This article will show you how to maximize the profits and success of your business through its website.There are endless possibilities if you have a website for your business. A website is a great way to attract customers that you otherwise might not have access to. It also gives your customers the flexibility to make purchases without having to come directly to your store. In this day and age, having a website should be considered mandatory for every business. If there is anything to take away from this article, that is it. We hope following through on what you have learned helps your business grow. Whether your business success is made entirely online or you use the Internet to boost a booming offline business, every company reaps rewards with a strong web presence. An ideal website can be easily created by following the advice given to you here.If you have a business, a website is a must. If you obtain many of your sales via the internet then it is pivotal that you have a successful operating website. You can move your site up the results page and put it in front of more potential visitors by making use of the suggestions in this article.It is an advantage for all businesses to have a website. For some businesses, like those that provide services or products online, a website

The Importance of Being Different: Creating a Competitive Advantage With Your USP

Posted by TrentonGreener

"The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. Those who walk alone are likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before."

While this quote has been credited to everyone from Francis Phillip Wernig, under the pseudonym Alan Ashley-Pitt, to Einstein himself, the powerful message does not lose its substance no matter whom you choose to credit. There is a very important yet often overlooked effect of not heeding this warning. One which can be applied to all aspects of life. From love and happiness, to business and marketing, copying what your competitors are doing and failing to forge your own path can be a detrimental mistake.

While as marketers we are all acutely aware of the importance of differentiation, we've been trained for the majority of our lives to seek out the norm.

We spend the majority of our adolescent lives trying desperately not to be different. No one has ever been picked on for being too normal or not being different enough. We would beg our parents to buy us the same clothes little Jimmy or little Jamie wore. We'd want the same backpack and the same bike everyone else had. With the rise of the cell phone and later the smartphone, on hands and knees, we begged and pleaded for our parents to buy us the Razr, the StarTAC (bonus points if you didn't have to Google that one), and later the iPhone. Did we truly want these things? Yes, but not just because they were cutting edge and nifty. We desired them because the people around us had them. We didn't want to be the last to get these devices. We didn't want to be different.

Thankfully, as we mature we begin to realize the fallacy that is trying to be normal. We start to become individuals and learn to appreciate that being different is often seen as beautiful. However, while we begin to celebrate being different on a personal level, it does not always translate into our business or professional lives.

We unconsciously and naturally seek out the normal, and if we want to be different—truly different in a way that creates an advantage—we have to work for it.

The truth of the matter is, anyone can be different. In fact, we all are very different. Even identical twins with the same DNA will often have starkly different personalities. As a business, the real challenge lies in being different in a way that is relevant, valuable to your audience, and creates an advantage.

"Strong products and services are highly differentiated from all other products and services. It's that simple. It's that difficult." - Austin McGhie, Brand Is a Four Letter Word

Let's explore the example of Revel Hotel & Casino. Revel is a 70-story luxury casino in Atlantic City that was built in 2012. There is simply not another casino of the same class in Atlantic City, but there might be a reason for this. Even if you're not familiar with the city, a quick jump onto Atlantic City's tourism website reveals that of the five hero banners that rotate, not one specifically mentions gambling, but three reference the boardwalk. This is further illustrated when exploring their internal linking structure. The beaches, boardwalk, and shopping all appear before a single mention of casinos. There simply isn't as much of a market for high-end gamblers in the Atlantic City area; in the states Las Vegas serves that role. So while Revel has a unique advantage, their ability to attract customers to their resort has not resulted in profitable earnings reports. In Q2 2012, Revel had a gross operating loss of $35.177M, and in Q3 2012 that increased to $36.838M.

So you need to create a unique selling proposition (also known as unique selling point and commonly referred to as a USP), and your USP needs to be valuable to your audience and create a competitive advantage. Sounds easy enough, right? Now for the kicker. That advantage needs to be as sustainable as physically possible over the long term.

"How long will it take our competitors to duplicate our advantage?"

You really need to explore this question and the possible solutions your competitors could utilize to play catch-up or duplicate what you've done. Look no further than Google vs Bing to see this in action. No company out there is going to just give up because your USP is so much better; most will pivot or adapt in some way.

Let's look at a Seattle-area coffee company of which you may or may not be familiar. Starbucks has tried quite a few times over the years to level-up their tea game with limited success, but the markets that Starbucks has really struggled to break into are the pastry, breads, dessert, and food markets.

Other stores had more success in these markets, and they thought that high-quality teas and bakery items were the USPs that differentiated them from the Big Bad Wolf that is Starbucks. And while they were right to think that their brick house would save them from the Big Bad Wolf for some time, this fable doesn't end with the Big Bad Wolf in a boiling pot.

Never underestimate your competitor's ability to be agile, specifically when overcoming a competitive disadvantage.

If your competitor can't beat you by making a better product or service internally, they can always choose to buy someone who can.

After months of courting, on June 4th, 2012 Starbucks announced that they had come to an agreement to purchase La Boulange in order to "elevate core food offerings and build a premium, artisanal bakery brand." If you're a small-to-medium sized coffee shop and/or bakery that even indirectly competed with Starbucks, a new challenger approaches. And while those tea shops momentarily felt safe within the brick walls that guarded their USP, on the final day of that same year, the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed and blew a stack of cash all over Teavana. Making Teavana a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starbucks for the low, low price of $620M.

Sarcasm aside, this does a great job of illustrating the ability of companies—especially those with deep pockets—to be agile, and demonstrates that they often have an uncanny ability to overcome your company's competitive advantage. In seven months, Starbucks went from a minor player in these markets to having all the tools they need to dominate tea and pastries. Have you tried their raspberry pound cake? It's phenomenal.

Why does this matter to me?

Ok, we get it. We need to be different, and in a way that is relevant, valuable, defensible, and sustainable. But I'm not the CEO, or even the CMO. I cannot effect change on a company level; why does this matter to me?

I'm a firm believer that you effect change no matter what the name plate on your desk may say. Sure, you may not be able to call an all-staff meeting today and completely change the direction of your company tomorrow, but you can effect change on the parts of the business you do touch. No matter your title or area of responsibility, you need to know your company's, client's, or even a specific piece of content's USP, and you need to ensure it is applied liberally to all areas of your work.

Look at this example SERP for "Mechanics":

While yes, this search is very likely to be local-sensitive, that doesn't mean you can't stand out. Every single AdWords result, save one, has only the word "Mechanics" in the headline. (While the top of page ad is pulling description line 1 into the heading, the actual headline is still only "Mechanic.") But even the one headline that is different doesn't do a great job of illustrating the company's USP. Mechanics at home? Whose home? Mine or theirs? I'm a huge fan of Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think," and in this scenario there are too many questions I need answered before I'm willing to click through. "Mechanics; We Come To You" or even "Traveling Mechanics" illustrates this point much more clearly, and still fits within the 25-character limit for the headline.

If you're an AdWords user, no matter how big or small your monthly spend may be, take a look at your top 10-15 keywords by volume and evaluate how well you're differentiating yourself from the other brands in your industry. Test ad copy that draws attention to your USP and reap the rewards.

Now while this is simply an AdWords text ad example, the same concept can be applied universally across all of marketing.

Title tags & meta descriptions

As we alluded to above, not only do companies have USPs, but individual pieces of content can, and should, have their own USP. Use your title tag and meta description to illustrate what differentiates your piece of content from the competition and do so in a way that attracts the searcher's click. Use your USP to your advantage. If you have already established a strong brand within a specific niche, great! Now use it to your advantage. Though it's much more likely that you are competing against a strong brand, and in these scenarios ask yourself, "What makes our content different from theirs?" The answer you come up with is your content's USP. Call attention to that in your title tag and meta description, and watch the CTR climb.

I encourage you to hop into your own site's analytics and look at your top 10-15 organic landing pages and see how well you differentiate yourself. Even if you're hesitant to negatively affect your inbound gold mines by changing the title tags, run a test and change up your meta description to draw attention to your USP. In an hour's work, you just may make the change that pushes you a little further up those SERPs.

Branding

Let's break outside the world of digital marketing and look at the world of branding. Tom's Shoes competes against some heavy hitters in Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Puma just to name a few. While Tom's can't hope to compete against the marketing budgets of these companies in a fair fight, they instead chose to take what makes them different, their USP, and disseminate it every chance they get. They have labeled themselves "The One for One" company. It's in their homepage's title tag, in every piece of marketing they put out, and it smacks you in the face when you land on their site. They even use the call-to-action "Get Good Karma" throughout their site.

Now as many of us may know, partially because of the scandal it created in late 2013, Tom's is not actually a non-profit organization. No matter how you feel about the matter, this marketing strategy has created a positive effect on their bottom line. Fast Company conservatively estimated their revenues in 2013 at $250M, with many estimates being closer to the $300M mark. Not too bad of a slice of the pie when competing against the powerhouses Tom's does.

Wherever you stand on this issue, Tom's Shoes has done a phenomenal job of differentiating their brand from the big hitters in their industry.

Know your USP and disseminate it every chance you get.

This is worth repeating. Know your USP and disseminate it every chance you get, whether that be in title tags, ad copy, on-page copy, branding, or any other segment of your marketing campaigns. Online or offline, be different. And remember the quote that we started with, "The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. Those who walk alone are likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before."

The amount of marketing knowledge that can be taken from this one simple statement is astounding. Heed the words, stand out from the crowd, and you will have success.

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Creating Demand for Products, Services, and Ideas that Have Little to No Existing Search Volume - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

A lot of fantastic websites (and products, services, ideas, etc.) are in something of a pickle: The keywords they would normally think to target get next to no search volume. It can make SEO seem like a lost cause. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why that's not the case, and talks about the one extra step that'll help those organizations create the demand they want.

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 going to chat about a particularly challenging problem in the world of SEO, and that is trying to do SEO or trying to do any type of web marketing when your product, service, or idea has no search volume around it. So nobody is already looking for what you offer. It's a new thing, a new concept.

I'll use the example here of a website that I'm very fond of, but which there's virtually no search volume for, called Niice. It's Niice.co.

It's great. I searched for things in here. It brings me back all these wonderful visuals from places like Colossus and lots of design portals. I love this site. I use it all the time for inspiration, for visuals, for stuff that I might write about on blogs, for finding new artists. It's just cool. I love it. I love the discovery aspect of it, and I think it can be really great for finding artists and designers and visuals.

But when I looked at the keyword research -- and granted I didn't go deep into the keyword research, but let's imagine that I did -- I looked for things like: "visual search engine" almost no volume; "search engine for designers" almost no volume; "graphical search engine" almost no volume; "find designer visuals" nada.

So when they look at their keyword research they go, "Man, we don't even have keywords to target here really." SEO almost feels like it's not a channel of opportunity, and I think that's where many, many companies and businesses make mistakes actually, because just because you don't see keyword research around exactly around what you're offering doesn't mean that SEO can't be a great channel. It just means we have to do an extra step of work, and that's what I want to talk about today.

So I think when you encounter this type of challenge -- and granted it might not be the challenge that there's no keyword volume -- it could be a challenge in your business, for your organization, for some ideas or products that you have or are launching that there's just very little, and thus you're struggling to come up with enough volume to create the quantity of leads, or free trials, or customers that you need. This process really can work.

Key questions to start.

1) Who's the target audience?

In Niice's case, that's going to be a lot of designers. It might be people who are creating presentations. It might be those who are searching out designers or artists. It could be people seeking inspiration for all sorts of things. So they're going to figure out who that is.

From there, they can look at the job title, interests, demographics of those people, and then you can do some cool stuff where you can figure out things like, "Oh, you know what? We could do some Facebook ad targeting to those right groups to help boost their interests in our product and potentially, well, create branded search volume down the road, attract direct visitors, build brand awareness for ourselves, and potentially get some traffic to the site directly as well. If we can convert some of that traffic, well, that's fantastic."

In their case, I think Niice is ad-supported right now, so all they really need is the traffic itself. But regardless, this is that same type of process you'd use.

2) What else do they search for?

What is that target audience searching for? Knowledge, products, tools, services, people, brands, whatever it is, if you know who the audience is, you can figure out what they're searching for because they have needs. If they have a job title, if they have interests, if you have those profile features about the audience, you can figure out what else they're going to be searching for, and in this case, knowing what designers are searching for, well, that's probably relatively simplistic. The other parts of their audience might be more complex, but that one is pretty obvious.

From that, we can do content creation. We can do keyword targeting to be in front of those folks when they're doing search by creating content that may not necessarily be exactly selling our tools, but that's the idea of content marketing. We're creating content to target people higher up in the funnel before they need our product.

We can use that, too, for product and feature inspiration in the product itself. So in this case, Niice might consider creating a design pattern library or several, pulling from different places, or hiring someone to come in and build one for them and then featuring that somewhere on the site if you haven't done a search yet and then potentially trying to rank for that in the search engine, which then brings qualified visitors, the types of people who once they got exposed to Niice would be like, "Wow, this is great and it's totally free. I love it."

UX tool list, so list of tools for user experience, people on the design or UI side, maybe Photoshop tutorials, whatever it is that they feel like they're competent and capable of creating and could potentially rank for, well, now you're attracting the right audience to your site before they need your product.

3) Where do they go?

That audience, where are they going on the web? What do they do when they get there? To whom do they listen? Who are their influencers? How can we be visible in those locations? So from that I can get things like influencer targeting and outreach. I can get ad and sponsorship opportunities. I can figure out places to do partnership or guest content or business development.

In Niice's case, that might be things like sponsor or speak at design events. Maybe they could create an awards project for Dribble. So they go to Dribble, they look at what's been featured there, or they go to Colossus, or some of the other sites that they feature, and they find the best work of the week. At the end of the week, they feature the top 10 projects, and then they call out the designers who put them together.

Wow, that's terrific. Now you're getting in front of the audience whose work you're featuring, which is going to, in turn, make them amplify Niice's project and product to an audience who's likely to be in their target audience. It's sort of a win-win. That's also going to help them build links, engagement, shares, and all sorts of signals that potentially will help them with their authority, both topically and domain-wide, which then means they can rank for all the content they create, building up this wonderful engine.

4) What types of content have achieved broad or viral distribution?

I think what we can glean from this is not just inspiration for content and keyword opportunities as we can from many other kinds of content, but also sites to target, in particular sites to target with advertising, sites to target for guest posting or sponsorship, or sites to target for business development or for partnerships, site to target in an ad network, sites to target psychographically or demographically for Facebook if we want to run ads like that, potentially bidding on ads in Google when people search for that website or for that brand name in paid search.

So if you're Niice, you could think about contracting some featured artist to contribute visuals maybe for a topical news project. So something big is happening in the news or in the design community, you contract a few of the artists whose work you have featured or are featuring, or people from the communities whose work you're featuring, and say, "Hey, we might not be able to pay you a lot, but we're going to get in front of a ton of people. We're going to build exposure for you, which is something we already do, FYI, and now you've got some wonderful content that has that potential to mimic that work."

You could think about, and I love this just generally as a content marketing and SEO tactic, if you go find viral content, content that has had wide sharing success across the web from the past, say two, three, four, or five years ago, you have a great opportunity, especially if the initial creator of that content or project hasn't continued on with it, to go say, "Hey, you know what? We can do a version of that. We're going to modernize and update that for current audiences, current tastes, what's currently going on in the market. We're going to go build that, and we have a strong feeling that it's going to be successful because it's succeeded in the past."

That, I think, is a great way to get content ideas from viral content and then to potentially overtake them in the search rankings too. If something from three or five years ago, that was particularly timely then still ranks today, if you produce it, you're almost certainly going to come out on top due to Google's bias for freshness, especially around things that have timely relevance.

5) Should brand advertisement be in our consideration set?

Then last one, I like to ask about brand advertising in these cases, because when there's not search volume yet, a lot of times what you have to do is create awareness. I should change this from advertising to a brand awareness, because really there's organic ways to do it and advertising ways to do it. You can think about, "Well, where are places that we can target where we could build that awareness? Should we invest in press and public relations?" Not press releases. "Then how do we own the market?" So I think one of the keys here is starting with that name or title or keyword phrase that encapsulates what the market will call your product, service or idea.

In the case of Niice, that could be, well, visual search engines. You can imagine the press saying, "Well, visual search engines like Niice have recently blah, blah, blah." Or it could be designer search engines, or it could be graphical search engines, or it could be designer visual engines, whatever it is. You need to find what that thing is going to be and what's going to resonate.

In the case of Nest, that was the smart home. In the case of Oculus, it was virtual reality and virtual reality gaming. In the case of Tesla, it was sort of already established. There's electric cars, but they kind of own that market. If you know what those keywords are, you can own the market before it gets hot, and that's really important because that means that all of the press and PR and awareness that happens around the organic rankings for that particular keyword phrase will all be owned and controlled by you.

When you search for "smart home," Nest is going to dominate those top 10 results. When you search for "virtual reality gaming," Oculus is going to dominate those top 10. It's not necessarily dominate just on their own site, it's dominate all the press and PR articles that are about that, all of the Wikipedia page about it, etc., etc. You become the brand that's synonymous with the keyword or concept. From an SEO perspective, that's a beautiful world to live in.

So, hopefully, for those of you who are struggling around demand for your keywords, for your volume, this process can be something that's really helpful. I look forward to hearing from you in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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5 Actionable Analytics Reports for Internal Site Search

Posted by ryanwashere

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

I was furious when keyword data disappeared from Google Analytics (GA).

I mean, how could I possibly optimize a website without keyword data?!?!

It didn't take me long to realize I was overreacting. In fact, I quickly realized how trivial keyword data was.

Search engines are pretty damn good at what they do. If you properly optimize your content, people will find it with the keywords you intended. (You should set up an SEO dashboard in GA to verify your results.)

The truly valuable keywords are the ones visitors use within your site.

When mined correctly, internal terms uncover how and why users engage with content. These insights provide clear direction to improve content, SEO, and the user journey (resulting in increased conversions, leads, and sales).

In this post, I'll cover three things:

1. How to set up internal search reporting in GA
2. How to access and analyze five internal search reports in GA
3. Two client case studies using internal search data

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Prepping your analytics account

Before I get into the details, make sure you have the following set up in your GA account:

1. Exclude internal traffic (filter). You wouldn’t believe how many organizations don’t do this. This simple filter makes all the difference when it comes to data quality. Make sure your website is excluding all internal traffic (step-by-step directions: how to set up internal filters in GA.)
2. Goals, events and conversions. In order to discover user intent, we need to be able to segment reports by conversions. Make sure that your website has clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) that are represented by goals in GA (step by step directions: how to set up goals in GA.)

Supplemental reading: How to set up Google Analytics on your website

Setting up GA site search reporting

Standard GA implementation doesn’t have internal search reporting configured. In order to get the data, we need to input some information into GA manually.

Follow these steps to get it up and running:

1. Navigate to the “Admin” tab
2. Click “View Settings”
3. Go to the bottom, where you’ll find “Site Search Settings”
4. Click the button so that its setting is “On”

In order to complete the tracking, you’ll need to locate your site’s query parameter.

1. In a new browser tab, open your website
2. In your website's internal search bar, type the word "seo" and click "search"
3. You will be redirected to your website's internal search landing page
4. Look at the URL on the landing page (see screenshot below)
5. You will see your search term, along with these characters: "?", "random letter", and "="
6. The letter before the equal sign ("=") is your website’s query parameter
7. Enter this value into the appropriate box in GA
8. Click save

EXAMPLE

Search query: seo
Landing URL: http://webris.org/?s=seo
Parameter : ?s=seo
What to enter in GA: s

GA will not post-date searches. In other words, searches that took place before you set up reporting won't populate. You will only get data from searches occur going forward.

For this reason, you'll need to wait about 30 days after setting up site search tracking in GA before analyzing the site search data. Otherwise, you won't have sufficient data to conduct meaningful analysis.

Analyzing the site search data

To access your site search data, navigate to Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search in GA.

There are five reports under Site Search:

1. Overview
2. Usage
3. Search Terms
4. Pages
5. Any/All Reports (Segments)

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Report #1: Overview

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Overview
What the report tells us: Lists the high-level metrics related to your site’s internal search
Potential insights:

• Visits With Site Search, % Search Exits, and % Search Refinements: When looked at together, these metrics can tell you a lot about how visitors are finding content. If all three numbers are high, it likely means users can’t find what they‘re looking for.
• Time after Search and Average Search Depth: Conversely, if these two metrics are high, it probably means users find a lot of value in your site search.
• Overview (graph): Pay close attention to spikes and surges in internal searches. Were you running campaigns during this time? Use traffic segments to dig into causation.

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Report #2: Usage

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Usage
What the report tells us: User journeys that used site search vs. those who didn’t
Potential insights:

• Pages/Session, Average Session Duration: If the pages viewed and session duration is higher with visitors using site search, this indicates your website has the right content (i.e., users are finding the content they are searching for). Keep a close eye on these metrics and test widgets, sidebars and "suggested article" plugins to help you figure out how to improve navigation.
• Goal Completions: These are important metrics. Plain and simple, this tells us whether or not site search helps drive goal completions. If so, you may want to consider making your site search more prominent, or make it stand out with specific calls to action.
• Secondary dimension: You can add a number of dimensions to this report to get deeper insight. I like to add "Medium"—it gives you a breakdown of each traffic medium, segmented by Visits With Site Search and Visits Without Site Search.

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Report #3: Search terms

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Search Terms
What the report tells us: Lists the most used search terms with corresponding engagement metrics
Potential Insight :

• Look at each engagement metric for discrepancies between search terms. If one search term has an abnormally high % Search Exits or % of Search Refinements, then you most likely don’t have content those visitors are looking for.
• Look at the complete list of terms—are these included in your PPC and SEO keyword targeting strategies? If not, they should be. These are the terms your visitors expect to see on your site.
• Add traffic channel segments to see which channel drives the most internal searches. These terms should match up with your PPC and SEO strategies. If a visitor is using site search to refine what they’re looking for, it could mean that they didn’t find your site from the right landing page.

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Report #4: Pages

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Pages
What the report tells us: The pages users made their queries on
Potential insights:

• Overall: Looking at the overall picture of the data will show you where users are having problems finding content. Take a closer look at how your top pages are structured—can users find what they need?
• Secondary dimension: I like to layer on the “Previous Page Path” dimension. This helps create a greater context for the problems users are have navigating your site.

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Report #5: Segments

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Any/All Reports

What the report tells us: Segments add additional depth and value. I often use the following segments to drive more insights:

• Mobile traffic: Segmenting by mobile allows you to see visitors are using site search more from mobile. This can yield insights into mobile design and layout.
• Converters or Made a purchase: Is site search driving conversions or adding roadblocks?
• Organic traffic: What percentage of users that find your website through search engines need to refine their searches? The internal keyword searches are the keywords that users are really looking for when they find your site.
• Returning users: Returning users are loyal—they enjoy your content enough to return for more. Use the internal search data to find out what content you need to best serve them.

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Case Studies: Driving action from internal search

The internal site search reports described above are high-level. Sometimes it takes seeing them in action to understand how to truly apply them.

As such, I've included two case studies that show exactly how I've used internal search data to drive meaningful action.

Case study #1

Site: Pop culture publisher (online only)
Marketing channels: SEO, social, and content

Problem:

• The site drives traffic from five to eight daily blog updates about niche pop culture celebrities
• In November, traffic stagnated, and then started to decline

Research:

• The site thrives by creating content about niche celebrities, the ones few other sites write about. This gave them the monopoly on both the SERPs and avid social media fans
• Digging in further, I found social traffic was steadily declining, while organic was remaining nearly the same, month-over-month
• A full-scale content analysis was completed, finding that more and more content was being created about the same niche celebrities. This was causing diminishing returns on social and organic traffic.
• The site suffered from content exhaustion: Writers were covering the same topics over and over.
• In order to build traffic, they needed to scale efforts horizontally by creating content around new niche celebrities.

Solution:

• I consulted the Search Terms report (Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Search Terms) to see what visitors were looking for on the site
• By adding a filter for "no-results", I could see what content visitors were searching for on the site that turned up no results
• I dumped this list into Excel, and had the writers create new content based on the search terms in the report

Results:

After launch of the strategy, the site saw amazing results:

• 201.05% increase in month-over-month traffic
• 210.99% increase in month-over-month pageviews
• 3.30% increase in pages per session
• 3.15% increase in session duration
• 4.75% decrease in bounce rate

Up and to the right!

Case study #2

Site: Online travel site
Marketing channels: SEO, PPC, email, social, content, display, TV, radio, and print

Problem:

• Large spike in month-over-month internal searches on client's site, with poor metrics for actions following internal searches
• Both the search volume and search rate had nearly doubled (35,457 to 65,032; and 4.37% to 8.56%, respectively) month-over-month

Research:

• Digging in, I found traffic on-site increased by 40,000 month-over-month; when segmented, I found the increase was strictly organic traffic
• Consulted GA Landing Pages report with Organic Segment to find which pages the increase in traffic was going to
  • (Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages > Organic Segment)
• This showed that 100% of the increase in month-over-month traffic went to the home page
  • This was out of the ordinary, as 80% of organic traffic generally goes deep into the site, not to the home page

• Next, I consulted the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT, recently rebranded as Google Search Console) Search Analytics report to see what keywords were driving the increase
  • (GWT > Search Traffic > Search Analytics)

• GWT analysis showed the increase came from queries consisting of branded keywords + "giveaway" (e.g., client giveaway promotion and client giveaway)

Solution:

• I reported the findings to the client, and found out they'd been running a series of offline ads promoting a giveaway in attempts to generate email leads
  • Note: Large organizations often have employees, agencies, contractors, and consultants running for multiple efforts. It's not uncommon for efforts to operate in silos.
• The giveaway was set up on a landing page that was difficult to find unless typed in directly (e.g., clientsite.com/giveaway)
• I recommended that the client include a call-to-action on the home page that linked to the giveaway

Results:

• Sessions with search decreased by nearly 10%
• Results after search increased by 6.45%
• Search depth increased by 9.01%
• Most importantly, users were able to find the giveaway. Email leads increased by 245%!

Closing

When mined properly, internal search data will give you the information you need to greatly improve your web content, design, and search engine optimization efforts.

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