How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy

Posted by MackenzieFogelson

It's no secret that building and executing integrated marketing strategies is the responsibility of your marketing team. The problem with that is the actions of everyone in your organization affect your marketing.

Marketing isn't just what your customers see on the outside. It's what happens when they get your product home. It's the experience they have with any one person in your company at any given time and through any specific touchpoint. Whether or not you're aware, all of the individuals on every team in your organization are contributing to your marketing on a daily basis.

That being the case, it would certainly be ideal to get everyone in your company focused on and aligned with:

• Your marketing goals
• The greater good that the company is working to accomplish
• The real reasons you're different from your competition
• The value you provide your customers and community
• The customers you're working so hard to earn and keep
• The most important strategic priorities your marketing team is working to accomplish so that your company will continue to thrive

We recently built a simple tool that has been helping our clients and their teams stay focused in their marketing efforts and also hurdle communication and goal alignment challenges. We call it the Focus Canvas and I'm going to show you how to build one of your very own (you're so lucky).

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The elements of your Focus Canvas

There are 8 key elements to your Focus Canvas. In a nutshell, here's how they break down:

1. Timeframe
   How long you'll focus on the specific components you will identify in your Focus Canvas.
2. Our Meaning Beyond Money
   The higher purpose your company is meant to achieve.
3. Why We're Different
   A short list that defines the valuable characteristics unique to your company.
4. The Value We Provide
   A clearly communicated statement that helps your customers understand what you do and gives them reason to choose you over your competition.
5. What We're Trying to Accomplish
   The goals your teams (and company) are working to accomplish.
6. Who Our Customers Are
   The very specific audience groups you're working to earn and retain.
7. How We're Helping Our Customers
   The things you're doing to remain relevant in your customers' lives.
8. What's Important Now
   The most important things (up to three) that you need to focus on over the next 90 days in order to accomplish goals and move the company forward.

And here's where each of those pieces are going to fit:

What follows is a breakdown of each piece of the Focus Canvas, why it's important, some examples, and the resources necessary to develop each component of your very own.

If you wish, at this juncture, you may download your very own Focus Canvas skeleton and work through it as you read this guide.

Download your Focus Canvas

Okay, kids, let's get started.

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Building your Focus Canvas

Timeframe

Why it's important

One of the most important characteristics of your Focus Canvas is that it's meant to be a dynamic, living, and breathing thing. At the top left, you'll find a spot to place the date range for the duration in which you're focusing on the things that you've identified in your Focus Canvas.

Ideally, you will stay focused on the specific components of your Focus Canvas for 90 days at a time. Keep in mind, however, that not all of the elements will change every quarter. Some — like your meaning beyond money, your goals, and your audience groups may remain the same across many iterations of your Focus Canvas.

After you've used your Focus Canvas to drive a few strategy cycles, you can decide on your frequency for updating. Just make sure that you continue to revisit and evolve it as your company, your customers, and your strategy progresses.

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Our meaning beyond money

Why it's important

Your meaning beyond money is the cornerstone of your Focus Canvas. It's the reason your company exists. It's the higher purpose your company is serving by being in business and doing what it does every day.

Your meaning beyond money is an extremely important component to all of your marketing efforts because it's the essence of your entire brand and it's why people are attracted to your community. If this isn't something your company has defined, or isn't leveraging in your marketing, it's time to start.

Operating from your meaning beyond money provides many benefits to your company and your team. The most important is that employees are more engaged in purpose-driven companies because they know the work they do means something.

When it comes down to it, leading with meaning beyond money is what makes your company human. And the more you have the courage to be real, authentic, and genuine in everything your company does both on- and offline, the bigger the strategic advantage you'll gain over your competition.

Examples

Here are a couple of examples of how meaning beyond money can be communicated effectively through marketing:

Patagonia

Patagonia's meaning beyond money is working to be a responsible company: both socially and environmentally. They are probably one of the best examples of a company that leads with purpose, and it bleeds through everything they do, especially in their marketing.

In the recent months, Patagonia has been building an experience with their brand through an integrated campaign called "Worn Wear." With Worn Wear, you can have your Patagonia gear repaired to help it last longer—which means the people who do this are helping Patagonia leave less of a footprint on our world, living up to the higher purpose they have as an environmentally responsible company.

Patagonia lives their meaning beyond money so much so that they have been driving across country in a bio-diesel truck to spread the word. When they came through Fort Collins, I got a taste first-hand. And sure enough, they had people inside their bio-diesel truck repairing gear. Some of it wasn't even made by Patagonia. That's how deeply they believe in achieving their higher purpose (and it has helped their company to continue to be profitable).

Traveling Vineyard

Serving a very different purpose as a company than Patagonia, Traveling Vineyard is a direct selling organization that sells wine. Their meaning beyond money is to help the people who sell wine for them find more personal and professional satisfaction in their lives.

Before profit comes Traveling Vineyard's desire to support their Wine Guides in finding their passion and providing them with the resources and training necessary to build their own businesses, no matter what the bottom line looks like.

One of the ways Traveling Vineyard conveys their meaning beyond money is by telling the stories of the real people in their community and how their careers have changed their lives.

The biggest impact of a company's meaning beyond money is the fact that it doesn't have to be at scale. You can use your company as an agent for change one person at a time.

Whatever your company determines your higher purpose to be, this part of your Focus Canvas will keep your teams focused on accomplishing that greater meaning. Then it's clear to them that this needs to guide the decisions they make since they are part of a company that stands for something bigger than simply making money.

Resources

As you prepare your meaning beyond money for your Focus Canvas, these resources may help your company define what that is (or compel you to become more purpose-driven):

• Why Your Company Must be Mission-Driven - Gallup
• How to Lead with Meaning in Your Marketing - Mack Web
• Building Your Company's Vision - Harvard Business Review
• Using Focus to Build Long-Term Momentum in Marketing - Mack Web
• Mission Based Businesses - Business Insider

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Why we're different

All of the elements of your Focus Canvas are interdependent, but the next two will build on each other. The reasons that you're different will inform the value that you provide your customers.

Why it's important

It's rare that companies find themselves in markets that are not saturated by steep competition. As a result, it's imperative that you identify, and that everyone in your company understands, how to effectively communicate the reasons your company is different from your competition. Why should someone choose to be your customer? Why not just choose the other guy?

When completing this part of your Focus Canvas, list up to five unique characteristics that you know to be true only to your company (and that make you valuable and relevant to your specific customers). Be careful that you're not just listing all of the stuff that every company in your industry offers vs. what truly makes you stand out. This will also help keep your teams focused on delivering those very important promises of value.

Examples

Warby Parker

Warby Parker has many unique selling propositions (or USPs and sometimes may even be called a UVP or unique value proposition). The most noteworthy is the fact that they've disrupted the entire eyewear industry by using non-traditional methods to make glasses so that their product could be the alternative. They not only compete on price but also by giving back (for every pair you buy, they give to a pair to someone in need).

M&Ms

If you happen to like M&Ms (peanut kind, please), one of the USPs of their product is that it won't melt in your hands. Lucky for you, they made this sweet commercial about it in 1981 (and you get to re-live the magic now).

Moz

One of Moz's USPs is how they infuse their TAGFEE values into everything they do. It's become an unmistakable part of their identity which their customers know they can't get anywhere else. Same with Roger (as a mascot) and Rand (as a thought leader and approachable personality).

This is my favorite example of a USP because it's not solely functionality or product based. Many companies list technical components of their products as USPs, but that means they're continually playing the competitor catch-up game; revising their USPs every time their competitors match functionality or features.

Although you definitely want to broadcast key features that your company alone has cornered the market on, look for ways to communicate USPs that won't go out of style and also tie back into your meaning beyond money.

Resources

Here are some additional USP resources for y'all:

• How to Stand Out When You're Drowning in a Sea of Competition - Help Scout
• The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition- Fizzle
• Compare a Unique Selling Proposition to a Unique Value Proposition - Business Models for Dummies

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The value we provide

Why it's important

This spot on your Focus Canvas is for the full version of your value proposition (which is inclusive of the unique characteristics you defined in your USPs above). This will help your team properly communicate what you do and how it benefits your customers.

According to ConversionXL, your value proposition is a clear statement that:

• Explains how your product solves customers' problems or improves their situation (relevancy),
• Delivers specific benefits (quantified value),
• Tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation).

Try to keep this sucker brief at 2-3 sentences (with possibly a few USP bullet points to support).

Examples

Here's one of the value proposition examples that Peep provides from Campaign Monitor. This example makes it very easy to tell what they do, who they do it for, and how that's unique to them:

Help Scout also has some great guidance on how to create great value propositions that work well. They provide these two examples of value propositions for Stripe and Synthesis:

The biggest thing about your value proposition is that it needs to be incredibly clear and very easy to understand. Sometimes that can be easier to do on your website because you can take all the time you need to craft the perfect words, place the perfect images, and test how this affects your customers.

Where your value proposition really gets put to the test is how your employees use it in person when people ask them what they do. Your Focus Canvas is a great spot for this. Provide your team with a very brief, value-fueled elevator pitch that helps them to communicate the right things in their daily interactions with customers, colleagues, and friends.

Resources

For your convenience, here are the posts I mentioned above, plus some additional resources that will help you to build or revise your existing value proposition (that's informed by your USPs):

• Useful Value Proposition Examples (and How to Create a Good One) - ConversionXL
• Writing Value Propositions that Work - Help Scout
• How to Craft the Ultimate 60-Second Startup Pitch - Forbes
• Value Proposition Design - Strategyzer

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What we're trying to accomplish

Why it's important

When you're aligning teams, getting everyone on the same page, and working toward the visionary goal of the company, things can get messy. This requires a great deal of collaboration across channels and teams of people, all with their own agendas, goals, and expectations of results. All the more reason to use your Focus Canvas as a tool for...wait for it...focus and alignment.

Keep in mind that when you're identifying what you're trying to accomplish, your teams can have different goals, but ultimately everyone should be working toward achieving the overarching vision of the company.

Before you place your goals into your Focus Canvas, make sure you're using your meaning beyond money to inform them. Those goals will then help you build an integrated marketing strategy that determines the tools and tactics you'll use (like content, SEO, video, social, email marketing, paid channels, etc.). That way, your teams will be working on accomplishing the right things in the short term in order to reach your long-term goals.

Ultimately, everything you're producing in your marketing strategy is working toward becoming the company you're meant to be, and at the same time, connecting your community to your higher purpose and more fully to your brand.

Examples

When looking at what you're trying to accomplish, consider three categories of goals: visionary, business, and brand. Place these goals on your Focus Canvas so that you can continue to work towards these goals until you've accomplished them. As mentioned, your goals (especially visionary goals) will most likely carry over several cycles as you revise and refresh your Focus Canvas.

Visionary

Visionary goals are the longer term ones that your entire company is working toward. It's the bigger, more audacious goals that may take 2-3 years (or longer) to complete. If you're using this Focus Canvas inside of a large company, you can set a visionary goal for your team or division. Just make sure it's aligned with the greater visionary goal of the company as a whole.

If it helps, as a company, Mack Web has two visionary goals:

• Change the way companies build their brands
• Change the way marketing is measured

Ultimately we exist to help companies build better businesses, so our visionary goals are part of making this happen.

Business

Business goals are the stuff that's related to your team and company's financial goals. When identifying these goals, consider the financial benchmarks that must be accomplished in order to reach your department's, and ultimately your company's, revenue goals.

Currently, Mack Web's business goals are to:

• Diversify revenue streams (we specify actual numbers per stream internally)
• Work with responsive, purpose-driven companies
• Keep Mack Web running smoothly and profitably

Brand

Brand goals are the qualitative benchmarks that your team is held accountable for. When identifying these goals, consider questions like:

• What is your meaning beyond money?
• Who does your company really want to become?
• How does the above inform your team's goals?
• How does all of this fit into the vision of your company's brand?

Mack Web has many brand goals that we're working to accomplish:

• Help our clients feel valued
• Ensure clients are reaching their goals
• Earn long-term partnerships and mentorships
• Earn reputable speaking and blogging gigs
• Attract companies who align with our values and approach

Essentially, if Mack Web accomplishes our brand and business goals, we will be well on our way to accomplishing our visionary goals, and most importantly, realizing our higher purpose and the reason we exist as a company.

Resources

One of the ways we often get to goals (and also tactics to accomplish those goals) is by working through a visioning exercise we learned from working with the Paterson Process. Here's how that works:

Where are you today?

In the first part of this exercise, you're going to paint the picture of where your team or company stands today. Are you having a lot of conflict and roadblocks? Are you finding synergy? Are you short-handed? Do you have everything you need to be great? Are you lacking resources or training? Paint the picture, positive or negative, of your team's status as it stands today.

Where are you going?

Now you want to think about where you want your team (and company) to be in a year. In two years. In three years. What does that mountain look like that you want your team to stand on? Is everyone certified in Google Analytics? Have you reached a certain level of profitability and brand awareness? Did you develop a tool or resource for your customers? Paint the picture of that mountain that you'd like to summit. These desires will become your goals that you will categorize into visionary, business, and brand as detailed above.

How will you get there?

Lastly comes the action. How the heck are you gonna make that stuff happen? What needs to be put into place? Do you need training? Do you need to hire more people? Do you need better communication with other teams? Write down all of the things that will help your team get up your mountain. As you work to build your integrated strategy, these things will become the tactics that you execute.

Once you've worked through these exercises and worked with your team(s) to identify goals, you can place your visionary, business, and brand goals on your Focus Canvas. Next, we'll focus on your customers.

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Who our customers are

Why it's important

When you're considering how you're going to reach your goals, it's probably a good idea that everyone, not only those on your team but also in your company, knows who they're talking to. Getting to know your audience is an in-depth, ongoing process of connecting, validating, and refining so that you're continually giving your audience what they need.

When identifying who your customers are, it's important to remember that it's not everyone. Earning and retaining customers requires a great deal of bandwidth and resources from your team. If they know which audience groups are a priority, they can focus their strategy and efforts there, making it more likely that they'll accomplish goals.

Examples

If you haven't yet done so, take a long look at this slide deck from Mike King. It's got some really important stuff in it about validating personas (and not just guessing that who you've identified as personas are the people you think you're talking to).

As Mike would put it:

The entire deck is full of instructions on how to build data-driven persona that will help you verify whether these people are actually coming to your website, or other touchpoints in their experience, and whether you're giving them what they need.

Once you've identified your top three customer groups, you can place their details in your Focus Canvas (perhaps with a link to any additional context you may want to provide). Your teams can then build their strategies and focus their efforts around them.

Resources

Here are some additional resources for you that will help you identify your top three customer groups (in addition to Mike's deck):

• Actionable Data-Driven Personas for CRO - Mike King
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas - Tamara Adlin & John Pruitt
• Personas: The Art and Science of Understanding the Person Behind the Visit - Mike King

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How we're helping our customers

This part of your Focus Canvas is going to evolve as you continually work to create the resources that are relevant to your customers' lives.

What you see on your Focus Canvas skeleton are just some sample phases of a possible customer's journey. You'll want to identify what these phases are for your customers before you can decide the resources that will fulfill their needs during each phase and where you will need to provide them (on your website, on social, via email, offline, etc.).

Like personas, how you're helping your customers requires continuous effort and validation. And, with other parts of this Focus Canvas, how you're helping your customers must change based on the data you collect and the experiences you have with them.

Why it's important

When it comes down to it, your company exists to help other people; to improve their lives in some way. In order to do this, you've got to continually stay relevant in their lives. Each phase in your customer's journey is going to require a different level of support in order to earn their trust and business. Being adaptive to their needs ongoing is what will keep them with you long term.

Examples

One very simple way to help your customers is to identify each of the stages of their experience with your company, and then determine what questions you may need to answer (or resources you need to develop) during each phase. Joanna Lord has developed a very simple and effective guide that will take you through how to do this. You can then map those phases, questions, and their touchpoints in this spreadsheet, and then place the ones you're focusing on in your Focus Canvas.

If you haven't already identified customer touchpoints, then you'll want to first look at your customer's behavior phases and then determine the questions they may ask (or wouldn't have enough knowledge to ask) during those phases. It may take you a few cycles to get through all of the questions, but you can use your Focus Canvas to keep track of the ones you're focused on answering.

If you've already done this, then you can focus your team's efforts elsewhere, like developing resources your customers can download and use. Whatever the task, place it in the Focus Canvas so that you can easily communicate what the focus is at this time.

Resources

In addition to Joanna's guide, these resources will help you map your customer's journey and identify some important things that you can be doing to better serve them:

• A Quick Guide to Customer Journey Mapping - Joanna Lord
• How to Measure the User Journey with Content Groupings, Wordpress & GTM - Mike King
• The 4 Types of Customer Journey Maps - Kerry Bodine

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What's important now

Why it's important

Knowing what to focus on in order to accomplish your company's goals is probably one of the toughest parts of strategy. Within every company, no matter how big or small, there are always many things that are broken, stuff that has to get done to earn customers, and an ever-changing world to contend with.

The difficulty this presents is the temptation to do too many things at once, which will only dilute your efforts, keep you focused on nothing, and ultimately get you nowhere.

At the bottom of your Focus Canvas you'll find three spots to identify the most important things to focus on now, over the next 90 days. These are your strategic priorities; the things you need to cross off your list so that your team and company can get closer to getting up that mountain and achieving its goals.

Notice that there are only three spots on your canvas. If one of your strategic priorities is really big, you can even choose to focus on just one of them. The point is to focus. And, as you're executing your integrated strategy and shiny things start to surface, come back to your Focus Canvas, all of the elements, and especially your strategic priorities, to determine whether it's more important to take that detour or exercise some self-control and stay focused right where you are.

Examples

Right now, Mack Web has two pretty big strategic priorities that we're working through: a rebrand and the improvement of our company operating system (we're testing and implementing some holacracy components). These two things alone are plenty for us to chew on, so we're capping our strategic priorities, or what's important now, for the next 90 days on only these two things.

These things are communicated on our Focus Canvas so that when unexpected challenges arise or shiny things present themselves, we can weigh them against what we've identified as priorities and either say "no" or "not now." And, because what we're focusing on is recorded on the Focus Canvas, it helps to take the emotion out of decisions and keep us on track.

Resources

If you need a little assistance figuring out where your focus should be for the next 90 days, we've adapted an exercise we learned from the Paterson Center called Four Helpful Lists.

In a nutshell, here's how it works (if you'd like some additional guidance, this post will help you better understand how we've worked through this exercise and applied it with our team):

Start with a question

Before we break down what's most important to focus on, we start with a strategic question so that we can get to the underlying issues that need to surface (and then we can work on them). So, for example, if your team is challenged with available resources, instead of asking, "who are we going to hire next?" we would ask, "how is the team functioning?" That way, we can then go right into each of the prompts in the lists: what's right, what's wrong, what's missing, and what's confused.

Complete the four lists

Each of the four lists will help you uncover a variety of things that your team or company needs to focus on in order to accomplish your goals. The columns work this way:

1. What's right
   Always start with what's going right. Exhaust all of the positive aspects of your current situation.
2. What's wrong
   This is anything that is typically putting up roadblocks. Or it's the stuff that is taking you way off track that you probably need to consider putting on pause.
3. What's missing
   These are the opportunities you can explore, and also the things you wish you had. A lot of times we find what's missing are things like processes, systems, and resources.
4. What's confused
   This is what you'll need to get figured out in order to move forward. It's what requires additional info in certain places in order to proceed.

Once you've gone through each list, you can then map out the items that are the most important to handle in order to move the company forward. You then choose three that will become your strategic priorities for the next 90 days. Make sure the priorities you've selected match your goals and align with the other elements of your Focus Canvas.

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What's next?

As you work through building your Focus Canvas, you may have unearthed some things that have been holding your team or company back. You may have noticed some gaps in many of these simple elements. That's okay. One of your strategic priorities could be working on resolving the holes so that you know you're focusing on the right things. Just know that it could take a few months to fully develop your first Focus Canvas.

Once you've got your Focus Canvas in place, you can meet with the other teams in your company to help them understand all of these important elements. Even better, maybe those teams will be inspired to be part of building the next one, or even build one that's specific to their team but that also aligns with the focus of the marketing department.

With the awareness of what your company is here to do, who they're doing it for, and what's important to do now, you're ready to develop a strategy that aligns with all of these components. We typically build strategies that recycle and reset every 90 days (this post will help you better understand how that works). You'll want to test whatever works best for your team and company.

Final words

Not many companies work on focus because it's hard. It means you probably have to face some conflict and work through challenges with the people on your team and in your company. It can be tough at first, but putting in the effort to get your teams focused and aligned will make a huge impact on your company.

As you work on developing and integrating your Focus Canvas within your company, I'm happy to answer any additional questions you have. Please ping me in the comments below.

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How to Choose a PPC Agency

Posted by anthonycoraggio

Paid search management is a great component of your marketing to outsource or delegate to a specialist. The field moves fast, so even without other responsibilities, keeping up with campaigns on a daily basis and all the developments in the technology and market environment is very demanding. When your time is already at a premium, finding a qualified agency can make a world of difference. Here are some questions to help you choose how to resource your online advertising needs.

Where is your business going?
Is this the right way to get there?

The reason you’re looking to run PPC campaigns in the first place is because you need to achieve certain business results—but is it actually the best way to get where you need to go right now? Particularly if you’re driving a new initiative or running ads for the first time, it’s important to take a step back and make sure you’re not trying to buy a horse to win an air race, because someone will likely try to sell it to you anyway!

Some red flags to watch out for:

• Your target search niche is very small, or so new that no one’s searching for your product.
• You haven’t evaluated the competitive landscape
• Your website isn’t prepared to make effective use of the traffic you’ll be sending

It’s important to set expectations realistically. For example, if you’re trying to make a big break into the auto insurance market with a couple grand per month, you’re going to need some combination of very deep pockets and an outstanding value differentiator. On the other side of the coin, you can’t usually lean a major growth initiative on a target segment drawing only a handful of searches every month.

This can actually be a great task for an agency or experienced freelance consultant to address, but if you’re still at this stage make sure you’re being honest with yourself and them. Be ready to pivot to another channel, and make sure there’s a well reasoned backing for any promises of results you receive.

What kind of working relationship do you want?

In my experience, finding the right cultural fit is one of the most important things to consider when hiring out. Even if a deal looks good on paper, if you’re not on the same page and excited to work together, a cheaper fee or glossy list of credentials is going to lose its shine very quickly.

How do you actually plan to work?

Both sides of the table tend to start rolling out the idealism and HBR buzzwords during a request for proposals, but it ultimately works out a lot better for everyone if you keep it strictly realistic. Is your company large and methodical, or a scrappy team testing new ideas and patching holes every other hour? These situations demand very different skills and approaches from an agency to be successful, and if expectations are skewed to start, someone will wind up unhappy.

What do they need to be ready for?

Likewise, make sure to get a proper answer to this question from the agencies you’re considering. Just like in any hiring process, behavioral interviewing is going to be your friend. Need rapid responses and creative energy? Have a blunt or demanding teammate they’ll need to work with? Ask for examples of how they’ve succeeded in these kinds of situations in the past.

Are you looking for a bold experimenter or an obedient Igor?

Look for the full scope of success

Success in paid search is about much more than tweaking spreadsheets—you'll need to create a cohesive and functional user experience from end to end, and that means some serious work on landing pages, ads, conversion rate optimization, data analysis, and selling the ideas to make it all happen. Before starting a new project, ask these questions:

• What will it take to turn around new ad copy?
• What kind of input will you be getting from your agency on new or improved landing pages? Whose job will it be to get them created?
• What relationships might need to be cultivated between in-house stakeholders and external partners for the most effective communication and results when marketing messages or site changes are involved?

Don't forget to factor in your plans for SEO, either—paid search is playing on the same field, and you'll want to make sure the two are working together smoothly. If you're also looking for an SEO partner, consolidating the two to a single agency often leads to more and better collaboration.

Think long term

Last, but certainly not least, don't forget to ask where you see yourself in a year or two, and make that a part of the conversation. Are you aiming to bring the work in-house eventually, or will this stay outsourced for the foreseeable future? A good agency will be ready with a plan to help on-board or even help train a future replacement, and definitely won't hold your account or data hostage.

Scale is an important part of the long term picture too. If you're growing quickly into a rich market and could reasonably expect to double, triple, or 10x the scale of your campaigns in the near future, make sure you share your intent and find a partner who will be prepared when the time comes.

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Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Keyword Research is a very different field than it was just five years ago, and if we don't keep up with the times we might end up doing more harm than good. From the research itself to the selection and targeting process, in today's Whiteboard Friday Rand explains what has changed and what we all need to do to conduct effective keyword research today.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

What do we need to change to keep up with the changing world of keyword research?

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about keyword research, why it's changed from the last five, six years and what we need to do differently now that things have changed. So I want to talk about changing up not just the research but also the selection and targeting process.

There are three big areas that I'll cover here. There's lots more in-depth stuff, but I think we should start with these three.

1) The Adwords keyword tool hides data!

This is where almost all of us in the SEO world start and oftentimes end with our keyword research. We go to AdWords Keyword Tool, what used to be the external keyword tool and now is inside AdWords Ad Planner. We go inside that tool, and we look at the volume that's reported and we sort of record that as, well, it's not good, but it's the best we're going to do.

However, I think there are a few things to consider here. First off, that tool is hiding data. What I mean by that is not that they're not telling the truth, but they're not telling the whole truth. They're not telling nothing but the truth, because those rounded off numbers that you always see, you know that those are inaccurate. Anytime you've bought keywords, you've seen that the impression count never matches the count that you see in the AdWords tool. It's not usually massively off, but it's often off by a good degree, and the only thing it's great for is telling relative volume from one from another.

But because AdWords hides data essentially by saying like, "Hey, you're going to type in . . ." Let's say I'm going to type in "college tuition," and Google knows that a lot of people search for how to reduce college tuition, but that doesn't come up in the suggestions because it's not a commercial term, or they don't think that an advertiser who bids on that is going to do particularly well and so they don't show it in there. I'm giving an example. They might indeed show that one.

But because that data is hidden, we need to go deeper. We need to go beyond and look at things like Google Suggest and related searches, which are down at the bottom. We need to start conducting customer interviews and staff interviews, which hopefully has always been part of your brainstorming process but really needs to be now. Then you can apply that to AdWords. You can apply that to suggest and related.

The beautiful thing is once you get these tools from places like visiting forums or communities, discussion boards and seeing what terms and phrases people are using, you can collect all this stuff up, plug it back into AdWords, and now they will tell you how much volume they've got. So you take that how to lower college tuition term, you plug it into AdWords, they will show you a number, a non-zero number. They were just hiding it in the suggestions because they thought, "Hey, you probably don't want to bid on that. That won't bring you a good ROI." So you've got to be careful with that, especially when it comes to SEO kinds of keyword research.

2) Building separate pages for each term or phrase doesn't make sense

It used to be the case that we built separate pages for every single term and phrase that was in there, because we wanted to have the maximum keyword targeting that we could. So it didn't matter to us that college scholarship and university scholarships were essentially people looking for exactly the same thing, just using different terminology. We would make one page for one and one page for the other. That's not the case anymore.

Today, we need to group by the same searcher intent. If two searchers are searching for two different terms or phrases but both of them have exactly the same intent, they want the same information, they're looking for the same answers, their query is going to be resolved by the same content, we want one page to serve those, and that's changed up a little bit of how we've done keyword research and how we do selection and targeting as well.

3) Build your keyword consideration and prioritization spreadsheet with the right metrics

Everybody's got an Excel version of this, because I think there's just no awesome tool out there that everyone loves yet that kind of solves this problem for us, and Excel is very, very flexible. So we go into Excel, we put in our keyword, the volume, and then a lot of times we almost stop there. We did keyword volume and then like value to the business and then we prioritize.

What are all these new columns you're showing me, Rand? Well, here I think is how sophisticated, modern SEOs that I'm seeing in the more advanced agencies, the more advanced in-house practitioners, this is what I'm seeing them add to the keyword process.

Difficulty

A lot of folks have done this, but difficulty helps us say, "Hey, this has a lot of volume, but it's going to be tremendously hard to rank."

The difficulty score that Moz uses and attempts to calculate is a weighted average of the top 10 domain authorities. It also uses page authority, so it's kind of a weighted stack out of the two. If you're seeing very, very challenging pages, very challenging domains to get in there, it's going to be super hard to rank against them. The difficulty is high. For all of these ones it's going to be high because college and university terms are just incredibly lucrative.

That difficulty can help bias you against chasing after terms and phrases for which you are very unlikely to rank for at least early on. If you feel like, "Hey, I already have a powerful domain. I can rank for everything I want. I am the thousand pound gorilla in my space," great. Go after the difficulty of your choice, but this helps prioritize.

Opportunity

This is actually very rarely used, but I think sophisticated marketers are using it extremely intelligently. Essentially what they're saying is, "Hey, if you look at a set of search results, sometimes there are two or three ads at the top instead of just the ones on the sidebar, and that's biasing some of the click-through rate curve." Sometimes there's an instant answer or a Knowledge Graph or a news box or images or video, or all these kinds of things that search results can be marked up with, that are not just the classic 10 web results. Unfortunately, if you're building a spreadsheet like this and treating every single search result like it's just 10 blue links, well you're going to lose out. You're missing the potential opportunity and the opportunity cost that comes with ads at the top or all of these kinds of features that will bias the click-through rate curve.

So what I've seen some really smart marketers do is essentially build some kind of a framework to say, "Hey, you know what? When we see that there's a top ad and an instant answer, we're saying the opportunity if I was ranking number 1 is not 10 out of 10. I don't expect to get whatever the average traffic for the number 1 position is. I expect to get something considerably less than that. Maybe something around 60% of that, because of this instant answer and these top ads." So I'm going to mark this opportunity as a 6 out of 10.

There are 2 top ads here, so I'm giving this a 7 out of 10. This has two top ads and then it has a news block below the first position. So again, I'm going to reduce that click-through rate. I think that's going down to a 6 out of 10.

You can get more and less scientific and specific with this. Click-through rate curves are imperfect by nature because we truly can't measure exactly how those things change. However, I think smart marketers can make some good assumptions from general click-through rate data, which there are several resources out there on that to build a model like this and then include it in their keyword research.

This does mean that you have to run a query for every keyword you're thinking about, but you should be doing that anyway. You want to get a good look at who's ranking in those search results and what kind of content they're building . If you're running a keyword difficulty tool, you are already getting something like that.

Business value

This is a classic one. Business value is essentially saying, "What's it worth to us if visitors come through with this search term?" You can get that from bidding through AdWords. That's the most sort of scientific, mathematically sound way to get it. Then, of course, you can also get it through your own intuition. It's better to start with your intuition than nothing if you don't already have AdWords data or you haven't started bidding, and then you can refine your sort of estimate over time as you see search visitors visit the pages that are ranking, as you potentially buy those ads, and those kinds of things.

You can get more sophisticated around this. I think a 10 point scale is just fine. You could also use a one, two, or three there, that's also fine.

Requirements or Options

Then I don't exactly know what to call this column. I can't remember the person who've showed me theirs that had it in there. I think they called it Optional Data or Additional SERPs Data, but I'm going to call it Requirements or Options. Requirements because this is essentially saying, "Hey, if I want to rank in these search results, am I seeing that the top two or three are all video? Oh, they're all video. They're all coming from YouTube. If I want to be in there, I've got to be video."

Or something like, "Hey, I'm seeing that most of the top results have been produced or updated in the last six months. Google appears to be biasing to very fresh information here." So, for example, if I were searching for "university scholarships Cambridge 2015," well, guess what? Google probably wants to bias to show results that have been either from the official page on Cambridge's website or articles from this year about getting into that university and the scholarships that are available or offered. I saw those in two of these search results, both the college and university scholarships had a significant number of the SERPs where a fresh bump appeared to be required. You can see that a lot because the date will be shown ahead of the description, and the date will be very fresh, sometime in the last six months or a year.

Prioritization

Then finally I can build my prioritization. So based on all the data I had here, I essentially said, "Hey, you know what? These are not 1 and 2. This is actually 1A and 1B, because these are the same concepts. I'm going to build a single page to target both of those keyword phrases." I think that makes good sense. Someone who is looking for college scholarships, university scholarships, same intent.

I am giving it a slight prioritization, 1A versus 1B, and the reason I do this is because I always have one keyword phrase that I'm leaning on a little more heavily. Because Google isn't perfect around this, the search results will be a little different. I want to bias to one versus the other. In this case, my title tag, since I more targeting university over college, I might say something like college and university scholarships so that university and scholarships are nicely together, near the front of the title, that kind of thing. Then 1B, 2, 3.

This is kind of the way that modern SEOs are building a more sophisticated process with better data, more inclusive data that helps them select the right kinds of keywords and prioritize to the right ones. I'm sure you guys have built some awesome stuff. The Moz community is filled with very advanced marketers, probably plenty of you who've done even more than this.

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments. I would love to chat more about this topic, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 3

Posted by Trevor-Klein

Welcome to the third installment of our short (< 2-minute) video tutorials that help you all get the most out of Moz's tools. Each tutorial is designed to solve a use case that we regularly hear about from Moz community members—a need or problem for which you all could use a solution.

If you missed the previous roundups, you can find 'em here:

• Week 1: Reclaim links using Open Site Explorer, build links using Fresh Web Explorer, and find the best time to tweet using Followerwonk.
• Week 2: Analyze SERPs using new MozBar features, boost your rankings through on-page optimization, check your anchor text using Open Site Explorer, do keyword research with OSE and the keyword difficulty tool, and discover keyword opportunities in Moz Analytics.

Today, we've got a brand-new roundup of the most recent videos:

• How to Compare Link Metrics in Open Site Explorer
• How to Find Tweet Topics with Followerwonk
• How to Create Custom Reports in Moz Analytics
• How to Use Spam Score to Identify High-Risk Links
• How to Get Link Building Opportunities Delivered to Your Inbox

Hope you enjoy them!

Fix 1: How to Compare Link Metrics in Open Site Explorer

Not all links are created equal. In this Daily SEO Fix, Chiaryn shows you how to use Open Site Explorer to analyze and compare link metrics for up to five URLs to see which are strongest.

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Fix 2: How to Find Tweet Topics with Followerwonk

Understanding what works best for your competitors on Twitter is a great place to start when forming your own Twitter strategy. In this fix, Ellie explains how to identify strong-performing tweets from your competitors and how to use those tweets to shape your own voice and plan.

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Fix 3: How to Create Custom Reports in Moz Analytics

In this Daily SEO Fix, Kevin shows you how to create a custom report in Moz Analytics and schedule it to be delivered to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

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Fix 4: How to Use Spam Score to Identify High-Risk Links

Almost every site has a few bad links pointing to it, but lots of highly risky links can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. In this fix, Tori shows you how to use Moz’s Spam Score metric to identify spammy links.

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Fix 5: How to Get Link Building Opportunities Delivered to Your Inbox

Building high-quality links is one of the most important aspects of SEO. In this Daily SEO Fix, Erin shows you how to use Moz Analytics to set up a weekly custom report that will notify you of pages on the web that mention your site but do not include a link, so you can use this info to build more links.

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Looking for more?

We've got more videos in the previous two weeks' round-ups!

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 1

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 2

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Don't have a Pro subscription? No problem. Everything we cover in these Daily SEO Fix videos is available with a free 30-day trial.

Sounds good. Sign me up!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs)

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Content is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Whether it be content for links, conversion, education, search or any number of things. In this post I want to focus on one area—content that drives awareness of your brand.

One tangible way to measure awareness is by looking at new visitors that a piece of content attracts which is pretty easy (although not always perfect) using something like Google Analytics. There are other measures that can influence new visitors that I'm going to talk about as well:

• Social shares
• Links

Both of these can send traffic to your website, although I wouldn't assume that they correlate exactly. This should explain why.

Nonetheless, chances are that if you're creating a piece of content that is designed to create awareness, links and social shares are likely to be high up the list of objectives, just below traffic.

But where do you start? What content idea will work best?

If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend you take a look at this deck from Mark Johnstone who is one of the best people I know when it comes to explaining what makes a good idea. Follow it with this post from Hannah Smith just last week on Moz on creative content research.

In this post, I want to explain one of the processes that we use at Aira to generate content ideas for clients. It's not the only thing we do, but it gives us a massive push in the right direction, even in industries that may be tagged as "boring" or hard to understand. The reason for this is that we gather as much information as we can on what has already worked in a particular industry. We use an awesome tool called Buzzsumo to help with this, and I'm going to show you three core things:

1. How to use the Buzzsumo tool (free and paid versions)
2. How to hack together a Google Doc to automate some of the work for you and pull in additional metrics
3. How to scale it up and create a tool that does the hard lifting and adds in other magic too

This is exactly the process that we've gone through at Aira. We started using the Buzzsumo tool as it was intended, then I wanted to get a bit more from it so I played with the API, then we saw the potential and built a proper tool that scales and pulls in other data. Each time we do a content strategy for a client, we tweak the process and usually add something new. So this is a work in progress but even right now it is working well.

The process is very data-driven and we don't try to hide the fact that we're learning from what others have done. The fact is that there is a wealth of data out there ready to be used to inform our decision making and the choices we make—so we should use it.

If you're already familiar with Buzzsumo, feel free to skip to the section on using the API to see what else you can do with it.

The goals of content profiling

Before diving into Buzzsumo itself, I want to be really clear on what we're trying to achieve through this process. It can be a long process (more on speeding it up later) and you can go down a few rabbit holes before getting the insight or takeaway that you're looking for. So keep the following in mind as you step through this.

Overarching goal: Gather as much information and data as possible to feed into your brainstorming / content ideation process. So rather than just starting with a blank slate, you have lots of research behind you which can make your ideas a little bit better and allow you to make more informed choices.

This goal is important to remember because this process won't magically give you fully formed content ideas, but it will feed into that heavily and lead to better content ideas and crucially, probably make you ditch some ideas that may not be so good!

There are a few secondary goals that help set the context for what we're doing:

• Learn what is working well in your industry
• Learn what your competitors are doing well
• Learn what social networks are best for you to target

Keep these in mind as you go through this process.

Using Buzzsumo for content profiling

To make this post more useful and easier to follow, let's imagine we're working with a client in the travel space and we've been tasked with coming up with content ideas for them. They are looking to get in front of their primary audience which is mid to high-end travellers.

Now let's use Buzzsumo to try and see what is working in terms of content in this space that may appeal to this target audience.

There are two main ways for us to use Buzzsumo to find this information:

1. Keyword based search
2. Domain based search

We tend to use both types of search but it's worth mentioning that occasionally, domain based searches are limited because client competitors may not be doing that much in terms of content creation—so there isn't much for Buzzsumo to find! This is usually the exception though and even smaller websites have done some content at one point or another.

Keyword-based research using Buzzsumo

Let's start by looking at a few keyword-based searches.

One thing we need to be aware of at this point is the difference between commercial keywords and content-driven keywords. Our travel client may be targeting keywords such as:

• luxury holidays
• last minute luxury holidays
• luxury honeymoon destinations

Putting these into Buzzsumo will return some results, but the usefulness of them will not be as good as using content driven keywords such as:

• luxury travel guide
• best honeymoon destinations
• guide to getting married abroad

These keywords are non-commercial in nature and therefore, the results we get back from Buzzsumo will be for content created using these keywords and not product / service pages that list holidays. Overall, Buzzsumo does a pretty good job of filtering out pages that are 100% focused on selling products / services, but a few do slip through sometimes.

You can search Buzzsumo using quotation marks if you want to narrow down results a bit, but we'll start off broad with the following search:

I've also selected "Past Year" from the left hand side so that I stand a good chance of getting a good set of results with lots of data.

Here are what the results look like:

We can see the results ordered by total number of shares, then broken down by each of the large social networks too. You can dive into each result to view backlinks to that content and Twitter accounts that have shared that content too:

If you're using the free version of Buzzsumo, then you can continue to run searches like this and doing a deep dive into pieces of content that catch your eye. Over time, you will start to notice trends and be able to take some actions based on what you see. Here are a few that we find most useful.

Seeing which domains appear the most

After only a few searches, you will start to notice domains appearing over and over again for your keywords. Just in the one screenshot above, we can see that A Luxury Travel Blog appears twice in the top few results. The first thing you should do is make a note of this domain so you can use it to do deeper research a little later.

Secondly, the important point here is that this domain clearly has a decent size audience because of the way it is consistently getting good amounts of social shares across multiple posts. This means that this domain could be a good one for you to take a closer look at and try to build a relationship / run a campaign with them.

Uncovering influencers who you can reach out to

After a few searches and deep dives, you will also see patterns in who appears the most when you click on "View Sharers" button. You should make a note of these people and again, start looking for ways to engage with them because you know they're relevant to your niche and they are open to sharing content that you're able to create.

Find the common themes / topics of content

The final thing that we tend to try and pick up on is the themes of the content titles too. After several searches, you will start to see what typically appears in the top results for your set of keywords.

Once you've done all of this, you should have a few things in your notes:

• Ideas on what content themes perform best - you can use these to start your own ideation and brainstorming.
• A list of domains that tend to get lots of shares - you can do a deeper dive on their content (see next section) and look to build relationships with them to help you promote your future content
• A list of influencers on Twitter who tend to share relevant content - you can try to contact these people and see if they'd be open to sharing the content you create too

Now let's move from a keyword-based search to a domain-based one.

Domain-based research with Buzzsumo

In the same way that you can run keywords through Buzzsumo, you can also run domains through it and find the most shared content on that domain. This is really useful when you want to do a deeper dive into domains that kept appearing in your keyword research, as well as taking a closer look at competitors to see if they are doing anything you can learn from.

One thing to note here is that sometimes you won't get a great set of results back from Buzzsumo. This tends to happen in smaller niches or on particularly new domains where Buzzsumo may not yet have enough data to be useful.

Remember earlier that A Luxury Travel Blog kept appearing on our keyword searches? We can now take a closer look at them with a simple search:

The results look similar to a keyword search but as you can see, the results are limited to this domain:

Again, we can take a deeper dive and see what's working for this particular domain. Just a glance at these top four results alone give me two insights:

1. Posts that appear list focused / have a number of items on them appear to do well with the top three all being lists
2. The same author has written the top two posts, which means we can take a deeper look at what she is writing and try to work out why this is

We can take a closer look at her content by clicking on her name:

We can then do a bit of digging and try to find trends and insights that may help us when coming up with our own ideas. It may also turn out that she has a big social following which makes her someone you may want to engage with.

All of the above is available using the free version of Buzzsumo, which is great. The paid version lets you go a bit further in a few ways though, and given that pricing currently starts at $79 per month, I think it's a reasonable cost and achievable for most people. So I want to talk about what you can do with the paid version too. Later, we'll go a step beyond this and look at what you can do with the paid API as well.

Deep-dive content keyword analysis

When you run a standard keyword search like we did above, you need to keep an eye open for results that seem very useful, relevant, and have lots of results. When you find this, you can use Buzzsumo to do a bit deeper into this keyword and give you all sorts of useful data about the content produced around that keyword.

You can do this by using the Content Analysis report:

You run a keyword search as normal and Buzzsumo takes a little longer than usual because it's generating a much bigger report which includes a number of things. I won't go into detail on every single one here, but I will give you my favourite sections.

Average social shares by network

This tells us which networks typically generate the most social shares for content that mentions "luxury travel guide." For most B2C industries, the split between networks above is pretty normal, whereas you tend to see a much higher number for LinkedIn when it comes to B2B industries.

The interesting thing here, though, is not so much the split of shares between networks—most of us could guess that Facebook and Twitter would drive the most shares. What is interesting is the average number of shares because this can really help us get a sense of what is achievable with this particular type of content.

In the case above, we can see that, on average, a piece of content mentioning "luxury travel guide" gets about 40 Facebook likes and about 30 tweets. If your client or your boss is expecting 100,000 of each from your new piece of content, you can show them this data and it can help set their expectations a bit. The fact is that many pieces of content don't get more than a few dozen social shares, but we only see and remember the ones that get hundreds of thousands and that is where our expectation is set.

Average shares by content length

This one doesn't really drive massive insights, but I want to include it because it can be a great one for driving home a point. The point being that you can't just throw up a few hundred words of content and expect it to fly. It can happen, but for most of us, we need to invest time and resources into content creation, and long-form writing and guides can lead to lots of social shares.

Whether people read articles that they share on social is another story, but that's for another day. The message here is that typically, content that is more in-depth and detailed will get more social shares. I've seen the odd exception when doing research for clients, but generally I'll see the graph above over and over again.

Most shared domains

I really like this section of the analysis because it effectively becomes my outreach target list. Buzzsumo is telling me that when it comes to my target keywords, these are the domains that usually get the most shares. Therefore, these are exactly the domains where I want my client to be featured in some form or another. What Buzzsumo is doing here is a bit like what Richard Baxter talks about in this post on outreach where you are trying to be super targeted and not just going after random link targets.

Average shares by content type

Total honesty here—this one can be a bit hit and miss. Generally, the more broad the keyword, the better results you get in this graph. The example above isn't bad, but isn't great either. What Buzzsumo is doing here is analyzing the articles that it's crawled and trying to work out what type of content it is. In this example, they've been able to figure out what there are "How to" style articles, lists and videos related to luxury travel and it has given me the average social shares for each.

To give you a better example, here is a recent search I ran for another Aira client, I can't tell you the exact keyword but this was the result:

As you can see, there are far more content types and this gives us a good idea of what types of content can perform well. The interesting thing for this particular client was the disproportionate number of LinkedIn shares for "How to" articles which informed our research and gave us a path to go down to find out what was happening. We were able to take a closer look at this content and use this to make recommendations to the client.

There are other bits of data available in this deep dive report but typically, these are the ones I find most useful.

Deep-dive domain analysis

Just like with a basic search, you can switch out your keyword and put in a domain instead and ask Buzzsumo to do deeper analysis on it. Let's take a closer look at Lonely Planet and see what data we can get that may help with content ideas for our travel client.

We get the same set of core graphs that I've mentioned above, but the takeaways and actions can be a little different when performing domain research. Particularly if you're running a competitor through it.

The graph above shows us that Lonely Planet is driving a disproportionately high number of social shares through Facebook compared with any other platform. It would probably be wise for us to take a closer look at their Facebook page and see exactly what they are doing.

An additional graph from Buzzsumo which I didn't mention above is this one:

This is another one that can be hit and miss, but in this case, it is pretty useful because it gives us a rough idea of what topics drive the most social shares. There are a couple in there which aren't very useful such as "travel", "planet" and "us". But the rest can help inform our ideation going forward and give us angles to research a bit further.

What is interesting about the graph above is the disproportionate number of shares on Pinterest that content focused on Italy gets, it gives us a route to go down to learn more and perhaps get some insights into our content process.

You can do this kind of analysis for competitors, too, and see what content is getting the most social shares, as well as what social networks are working best for them. At Aira, we were able to show one client how well Facebook was working for a number of their competitors which led them to hire a social media person into their team who could focus on this channel and grow the brand presence with their target audience.

All of the reports above can help you with the process of coming up with content ideas, whether you use the free or paid version of Buzzsumo, you'll be able to get good insights and learn from competitors / the general industry to see what has worked before and feed it into your ideation.

Taking it a step further: Using the Buzzsumo API

Spoiler alert: If you have a Buzzsumo API key, just make a copy of this spreadsheet, input your key and all of the stuff below will magically work.

We used the above process a few times at Aira and it works well, but we wanted something a bit more powerful and quicker. It can take a while to run these reports, especially if you have lots of keywords and domains to check. I had a quick look at the Buzzsumo API and saw that it used JSON which is something I'd worked with before in Google Docs, so I decided to try to hack something together that could eventually be developed into a tool—if it worked.

For me, as a non-developer, that was a big if!

I wasn't looking to create anything fancy or scalable though, I just wanted to build something that worked and could be used as a prototype for building a "proper" tool—more on that below or you can jump ahead.

I did start off with a few simple things in my mind though—the problems I was trying to solve by using the API and not just using the app itself. Given that some development time is needed to build this tool, I need to have good reasons to invest the time. For me, I had a few good reasons:

• I wanted to run the tool for lots and lots of keywords and lots of lots of domains at the same time. Buzzsumo can do this, but you still have to type in the advanced search query. I just wanted to copy and paste keywords / domains into a single field and hit go! This is even more important to us because of the way we gather keywords and domains which is covered in the next point.
• We use an internal tool based around the SEMrush API to gather keywords from client competitors and it would be super cool and quick to pass the output from this tool straight into the Buzzsumo API.
• We have another tool that tells us who a client's true organic search competitors are, and similar to the previous point, it would be super useful to pass these competitors straight into Buzzsumo for processes and to give us lots of cool data about their content.
• We wanted to add in additional metrics that Buzzsumo doesn't give us for each URL such as Moz metrics, Majestic metrics and sentiment / demographic analysis
• Buzzsumo doesn't give you "live" numbers when it comes to social shares, so if we used the API, we could integrate with the Shared Count API to recrawl the URLs and get fresher social numbers.

These reasons were enough for me to explore the API a bit and see if it could help solve these problems.

For those of you who actually know what you're doing when it comes to coding / APIs, etc., please don't scrutinise my work too much! I'm what you'd call a copy and paste coder and I'm sure there are cleaner / more efficient ways to do what I've done. Remember that the point here is to build a prototype that could be scaled into a full tool.

You will need an API key from Buzzsumo to do any of this work and it comes with their agency plan which isn't super cheap, but is very cost effective for agencies who are doing lots of this kind of research.

Let's start with the basics of the Buzzsumo API and what you can get from it.

There are five main ways of getting data out of Buzzsumo:

1. Top content - returns the most popular content for your chosen domain or keyword
2. Top influencers - returns influencers for the topic of your choice
3. Article sharers - returns a sample of people who shared a specific article on Twitter within the first few days of it being published
4. Links shared - returns a list of links shared by an influencer of your choice
5. Average shares - returns the average number of shares for content published in the last six months from a particular domain

We're going to focus on the first one for "Top Content" as this follows on nicely from the steps I've already outlined above. I'll talk about the other options for the API in another post :)

You can view the documentation for the Top Content section of the API here. The request API looks like this:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

Let's break this down and see what is happening.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is the URL we need to access to API and the bit at the end tells Buzzsumo which of the five types of API we want to access and the format we want the data to be returned in.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This should feel familiar to you because it matches the options you get in the Buzzsumo App:

Changing this section of the string allows us to focus our research if we want to. So if we only wanted to see results where Buzzsumo has classified a piece of content as an infographic or a video, the string would look like this:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?infographic,video&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

Generally, we tend to not change this bit of the string as we want as many results back from Buzzsumo as possible.

The next part of the API call is this bit:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is where we define the domain or keyword that we want to run research for. Obviously this will change for each search you do based on what you need.

Next up in the call, we have:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This simply tells Buzzsumo how to order the results. By default, this will be set to total and the results will be ordered by the total number of social shares that a piece of content has. If you'd prefer the results to be ordered by something else, you can switch out for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

Next in the call is:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This tells Buzzsumo how far (in days) we want to go back to get data. We typically set this to 360 which is the maximum amount of time you can go back.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This tells Buzzsumo what page of results to start at, with 0 being the first page.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is where you set your unique API key which allows you to run these requests.

Integrating with Google

Now that we know what the API request looks like and what we can play with, let's look at how to pull this into Google Sheets.

Fortunately (for non-coders like me) there is a cool function in Google Sheets called =importjson. It's similar in many ways to =importxml which you may have read about before.

This function doesn't work out of the box, unfortunately, you have to go through a couple of simple steps to install a script first, but it's really easy and well explained in this blog post on Medium.

Once you've done that, you can start by performing a simple API call using the structure I've shown you above.

Simply paste the following into a cell in your Google Sheet:

=ImportJSON("http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE")

After a few seconds, you'll see something like this appear:

Yay! Data! It's amazing when stuff just works.

Once you've pulled the data in for your chosen domains or keywords, you can do whatever you want with them. At a basic level, you can simply build an API call for each of the domains and pull the results into different tabs in your Google Sheet. So you'd end up with tabs that look something like this:

From here, you can use the built in Google charts to visualise the numbers you find and compare competitors to each other.

What is more interesting, is running a single API call and getting data back for several competitors or keywords at once. To do this, you simply use an advanced search in your API call. Continuing with the same example above, we'd edit our API call so that it says this:

=ImportJSON("http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com OR wanderlust.co.uk OR cntraveller.com&result_type=total&num_days=360&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE")

The results now look like this:

What can we take from this?

Well, Lonely Planet is kicking ass because they own 19/20 of the most shared articles. The only exception is Wanderlust who appear in position 9.

We can also take all of the content titles and put them into a word cloud tool such as Wordle and get something like this:

You'll need to remove a few keywords such as the brands and common words that you'd expect, but the output can give you a good overview of the content themes being pushed out by your chosen domains or keywords.

But remember one of the problems I was trying to solve? I wanted to be able to drop in a list of keywords and competitors and have Buzzsumo fetch the data, rather than having to type it all in manually in the app.

I managed to get to the point where I could do this:

The eagle-eyed among you will notice there are a few hidden rows in this screenshot. I'll unhide them in the next screenshot so that I can show you what is going on and how you'd replicate what I've done above.

Remember I showed you how to build the API call above? I'm using Google Sheets below to build an API call and am simply using the =concatenate function to do so. In the following screenshot, I've used this function to concatenate my list of domains and keywords into the standard format for a Buzzsumo advanced search:

From here, I can use concatenate to build my API call. Cell A13 simply concatenates A8, A9 and A10. I'm know there are more technically efficient ways to do this using scripts, but as I said, I'm not a developer and I'm just trying to prove a concept here as quickly as I can.

My output is a list of the top 20 results from Buzzsumo, ordered by total shares from all three domains and two keywords. I can take this data and run whatever analysis I want on it to find what content seems to perform best in terms of social shares and feed this into my content ideation process.

Adding in live social shares

One of the goals of using the Buzzsumo API rather than the web interface was to pull in up to date social share numbers for each URL we find. Unfortunately, Buzzsumo gives us social data that isn't always up to date. They fetch social data for each URL at different intervals and generally update older URLs less than new ones.

Luckily, pulling social share data into Google Sheets is really easy.

All you need is a free API key from Shared Count and the script from this blog post on Render Positive. Make a copy of the Google Sheet from Render Positive, then follow these steps.

1) Go to Tools > Script Editor

2) Click on this option:

3) Make a copy of the script:

4) Go back to your own sheet and click Tools > Script Editor

5) Click File > New > Script file

6) Paste in the script you just copied and save the script

7) Finally, you'll need to edit this cell reference to the cell where you plan on pasting your API key from Shared Count:

That's it!

Now if you want to use the script, you just need to enter the following in the cell of your choice along with the cell reference for the URL you want social shares for. Here are the five that Buzzsumo use:

=SharedCountTwitter(A1)

=SharedCountFBTotal(A1)

=SharedCountLinkedIn(A1)

=SharedCountPinterest(A1)

=SharedCountGPlus(A1)

You'll end up with something like this:

Or, you can of course just make a copy of this spreadsheet and everything is already set up for you!

So after all of this, I ended up with a Google sheet that did the job for me and solved most of my problems with using the Buzzsumo web interface. After a couple of successful client projects using this process, we decided to build out a more powerful and scalable version of the tool. The additional bonus being that it was less likely to break than my cobbled together Google sheet!

Building out your own tool using Buzzsumo

Importing data into Google sheets is one thing, but it only takes us so far and doesn't tend to scale particularly well. To overcome that we have the option of building our own piece of software that uses the principles I've mentioned above to move things to the next level.

In this example our programming language of choice is PHP. As above, there are a few options that you pass into the API (including they keyword or domain, page number, number of days and your API key) so the overall principle is the same. Here's what we do:

Firstly, we build the Buzzsumo API call and save the URL into a variable:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?q='.$url_or_keyword.'&result_type=total&page='.$z.'&num_days='.$numdays.'&api_key='.BUZZSUMO_API_KEY;

We then use that to grab the data and store it in another variable:

$json = file_get_contents($buzzsumo_url);

Finally, we take that data and translate it:

$response = json_decode($json);

Moving on from there, we take the response and pull out the data for each URL:

foreach($results as $result) {
// Get the URL & number of social shares, and then save them into a database
}

The important bit there is that we save each of the results into a database because that means we can take a massive data set for numerous domains and keywords and then look for trends.

To show what can be done we took an example set of 7 sites that we're going to run through our profiler. The process, and results, can be seen in the video below. This is just a quick example of what can be done, with some time and imagination, you can do a lot with the Buzzsumo API and mash it up with other APIs to get a really cool data set.

As you can see, within a couple of minutes we can look at the top content for each of our chosen sites, as well as see which networks are most effective for them. We've also built in an export function that easily allows us to drop the data into Excel and do a manual analysis of the results. You may have also spotted that we've added in Moz and Majestic data which allows us to do analysis along the line of what Buzzsumo recently did in this post.

That's about it! In summary, the standard version of Buzzsumo can help you get great insights to feed into your content ideas and strategy. If you have the time and you're working across lots of clients, it's definitely worth taking a look at the paid version and making use of the API if you (like us) wanted to mash up the data with other APIs.

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Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked

Posted by Tom.Capper

In this post I'll pull apart four of the most commonly used metrics in Google Analytics, how they are collected, and why they are so easily misinterpreted.

Average Time on Page

Average time on page should be a really useful metric, particularly if you're interested in engagement with content that's all on a single page. Unfortunately, this is actually its worst use case. To understand why, you need to understand how time on page is calculated in Google Analytics:

Time on Page: Total across all pageviews of time from pageview to last engagement hit on that page (where an engagement hit is any of: next pageview, interactive event, e-commerce transaction, e-commerce item hit, or social plugin). (Source)

If there is no subsequent engagement hit, or if there is a gap between the last engagement hit on a site and leaving the site, the assumption is that no further time was spent on the site. Below are some scenarios with an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds, and their Google Analytics time on page:

Scenario	Intuitive time on page	GA time on page
0s: Pageview 10s: Social plugin 20s: Click through to next page	20s	20s
0s: Pageview 10s: Social plugin 20s: Leave site	20s	10s
0s: Pageview 20s: Leave site	20s	0s

Google doesn't want exits to influence the average time on page, because of scenarios like the third example above, where they have a time on page of 0 seconds (source). To avoid this, they use the following formula (remember that Time on Page is a total):

Average Time on Page: (Time on Page) / (Pageviews - Exits)

However, as the second example above shows, this assumption doesn't always hold. The second example feeds into the top half of the average time on page faction, but not the bottom half:

Example 2 Average Time on Page: (20s+10s+0s) / (3-2) = 30s

There are two issues here:

1. Overestimation
   Excluding exits from the second half of the average time on page equation doesn't have the desired effect when their time on page wasn't 0 seconds—note that 30s is longer than any of the individual visits. This is why average time on page can often be longer than average visit duration. Nonetheless, 30 seconds doesn't seem too far out in the above scenario (the intuitive average is 20s), but in the real world many pages have much higher exit rates than the 67% in this example, and/or much less engagement with events on page.
   
   
2. Ignored visits
   Considering only visitors who exit without an engagement hit, whether these visitors stayed for 2 seconds, 10 minutes or anything inbetween, it doesn't influence average time on page in the slightest. On many sites, a 10 minute view of a single page without interaction (e.g. a blog post) would be considered a success, but it wouldn't influence this metric.
   

Solution: Unfortunately, there isn't an easy solution to this issue. If you want to use average time on page, you just need to keep in mind how it's calculated. You could also consider setting up more engagement events on page (like a scroll event without the "nonInteraction" parameter)—this solves issue #2 above, but potentially worsens issue #1.

Site Speed

If you've used the Site Speed reports in Google Analytics in the past, you've probably noticed that the numbers can sometimes be pretty difficult to believe. This is because the way that Site Speed is tracked is extremely vulnerable to outliers—it starts with a 1% sample of your users and then takes a simple average for each metric. This means that a few extreme values (for example, the occasional user with a malware-infested computer or a questionable wifi connection) can create a very large swing in your data.

The use of an average as a metric is not in itself bad, but in an area so prone to outliers and working with such a small sample, it can lead to questionable results.

Fortunately, you can increase the sampling rate right up to 100% (or the cap of 10,000 hits per day). Depending on the size of your site, this may still only be useful for top-level data. For example, if your site gets 1,000,000 hits per day and you're interested in the performance of a new page that's receiving 100 hits per day, Google Analytics will throttle your sampling back to the 10,000 hits per day cap—1%. As such, you'll only be looking at a sample of 1 hit per day for that page.

Solution: Turn up the sampling rate. If you receive more than 10,000 hits per day, keep the sampling rate in mind when digging into less visited pages. You could also consider external tools and testing, such as Pingdom or WebPagetest.

Conversion Rate (by channel)

Obviously, conversion rate is not in itself a bad metric, but it can be rather misleading in certain reports if you don't realise that, by default, conversions are attributed using a last non-direct click attribution model.

From Google Analytics Help:

"...if a person clicks over your site from google.com, then returns as "direct" traffic to convert, Google Analytics will report 1 conversion for "google.com / organic" in All Traffic."

This means that when you're looking at conversion numbers in your acquisition reports, it's quite possible that every single number is different to what you'd expect under last click—every channel other than direct has a total that includes some conversions that occurred during direct sessions, and direct itself has conversion numbers that don't include some conversions that occurred during direct sessions.

Solution: This is just something to be aware of. If you do want to know your last-click numbers, there's always the Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution reports to help you out.

Exit Rate

Unlike some of the other metrics I've discussed here, the calculation behind exit rate is very intuitive—"for all pageviews to the page, Exit Rate is the percentage that were the last in the session." The problem with exit rate is that it's so often used as a negative metric: "Which pages had the highest exit rate? They're the problem with our site!" Sometimes this might be true: Perhaps, for example, if those pages are in the middle of a checkout funnel.

Often, however, a user will exit a site when they've found what they want. This doesn't just mean that a high exit rate is ok on informational pages like blog posts or about pages—it could also be true of product pages and other pages with a highly conversion-focused intent. Even on ecommerce sites, not every visitor has the intention of converting. They might be researching towards a later online purchase, or even planning to visit your physical store. This is particularly true if your site ranks well for long tail queries or is referenced elsewhere. In this case, an exit could be a sign that they found the information they wanted and are ready to purchase once they have the money, the need, the right device at hand or next time they're passing by your shop.

Solution: When judging a page by its exit rate, think about the various possible user intents. It could be useful to take a segment of visitors who exited on a certain page (in the Advanced tab of the new segment menu), and investigate their journey in User Flow reports, or their landing page and acquisition data.

Discussion

If you know of any other similarly misunderstood metrics, you have any questions or you have something to add to my analysis, tweet me at @THCapper or leave a comment below.

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