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Whether you’re migrating your existing online store or starting a new one, Magento is considered the ecommerce platform. In this post we are going to dive into SEO best practices to follow, looking at technical considerations and touching on content strategy. We will predominantly be concentrating on Magento Open Source.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform developed by Varien. The first beta was launched in 2007. Since then it has had a number of owners (or maybe “custodians” would be a better term) including eBay, a private equity firm and, most recently, Adobe.

It’s a beast

In 2017, four years after its initial proposed launch date, Magento 2 was released. This may sound like a long delay, but with 1.84 million lines of PHP code and 239,000 lines of JavaScript – before you even consider HTML, CSS, XML, and other entities – you can appreciate the sheer scale of the task.

Given its size, it’s not the easiest ecommerce platform to get to grips with but, when it comes to sheer grunt, there isn’t much out there that can out-punch Magento.

Migrating?

Before we start, if you are migrating from another platform then you might find our post “The site migration tool for redirecting URLs like a boss” helpful.

Is Magento SEO-friendly?

Magento has many SEO-friendly features. However, first and foremost it is an enterprise ecommerce platform that can connect (via APIs and extensions) to a whole host of the world’s most popular payment gateway, order fulfillment, stock management, and CRM systems.

However, regardless of how SEO-friendly, it is out of the box, you’ll always want to be one step ahead of your competitors, right?

Let’s get optimizing. First, start with your theme.

The biggest consideration for any theme is how it handles the main navigation. A good test is to disable CSS and JavaScript (the Web Developer toolbar makes this easy), this then enables you to view the HTML structure. The out the box product Magento offers a pretty elegant solution that uses a semantically pleasing, nested unordered list. We would suggest using a theme that doesn’t deviate too far away from this convention if you aren’t 100% sure what you should be looking for.

Another area to check is to run the theme through Google’s mobile-friendly test. With Google’s mobile-first index nearly fully rolled out, making sure your site is fully mobile-friendly is a must.

Configuration setting

Considering the power of Magento, the backend isn’t too complicated and the options are split quite intuitively. All the following settings can all be found in the “Store – Configuration”.

General – Web – URL Options – Auto redirect to base URL

Selecting “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)” will mean non-www traffic is automatically redirected to www or vice versa.

General – Web – Search Engine Optimization – Use web server rewrites

Magento’s code is based upon a variation of the MVC framework. For non-devs, in simple terms, this means templates are called via the URL structure. This doesn’t always lend itself to human or SEO-friendly URLs. Ensuring this setting is set to “yes” means Magento will tidy up the structure. For example, “storename.com/index.html/page-name” will become “storename.com/page-name”.

General – Web – Base URLs – Base URL

If you are running with an SSL certificate, which all e-commerce sites should be these days, then this should be set to the same as the Secure Base URL that is “https://sitename.com“. This will mean anyone attempting to access HTTP will be redirected to HTTPS.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Default Robots

This might seem like an obvious one, but we’ve seen development sites pushed live having a global meta robots tag with the “noindex, nofollow” value. So, ensue when going live this is changed to “index, follow”.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Edit custom instruction of the robots.txt file

This is where custom amends to the robots.txt file can be made. You can disallow any pages or directories you do not want search engines to index.

Catalog – Catalog –  Search Engine Optimization  – Use Categories Path for Product URLs

Let me use the much-coined SEO phrase – “it depends”. If this is set to “no” all products will appear in the root directory which is “storename.com/product-name”. This option is the most manageable and trouble-free setting to use, especially if your products appear in multiple categories.

When set to “yes” the URL will show the path of categories and subcategories, that is “storename.com/categry-name/product-name”.

If you are familiar with the concept of content silos and think it is a strategy you want to employ, then you will want to set this option to “yes”.

You should be aware of potential duplicate content issues though. If you are unsure then it’s really not worth the risk.

Catalog – XML sitemap

This section allows you to set frequency values and priority settings for categories, products, and CMS pages. For most applications the default values are sufficient.

In the “Generation Settings” section, you can also set the sitemap to auto-generate/update by setting “Enabled” to “Yes”. This is usually a good option with the frequency set, depending on how often you add new pages to your site.

Catalog – XML sitemap – Search Engine Submission settings –  Enable submission to Robots.txt

This will add a line to your robots.txt file informing the search engines where to find your XML sitemap. You can submit it via the Google Search Console, but a bit of automation is always good. So unless you have a specific reason not to then this should be set to “Yes”.

Site speed, the elephant in the room.

It’s no secret that Google likes a fast site, and it’s also no secret that due to the size of Magento’s code base it doesn’t have the world’s best reputation for speed. However, there are some quick wins you can make.

1. Host server

This will largely come down to your budget. Magento does run a basic shared server environment, but if you can stretch to a dedicated server then you will have so much more processing power at your fingertips

2. Caching

Magento has a sophisticated caching system that should be implemented. If you navigate to “System – Cache Management” you will want to make sure that all caches are set to “Enabled”. Often in the development stage, these can be switched off.

3. Flat catalog

By default, Magento uses the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) database system. This means that products and their attributes can be split over many tables. It’s a very flexible model but also slower when compared to a flat system. For this reason, Magento has the option to switch to using a flat catalog. The more categories, products, and attributes you have, the bigger the benefit you will see here. To enable this feature go to – “Configuration > Catalog > Storefront”. Here you will find two options, “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product”, set both of these to “Yes”.

4. Image optimization

Ensure that all images are sized no larger than they will appear at their maximum size within your responsive theme. Images should also be saved in the correct format with SVGs used for logos and graphics where possible.

5. Browser caching

This isn’t something that is an option in the backend of Magento. You’ll have to get your hands dirty by manually updating the .htaccess file. There are plenty of resources on the net that can provide guidance on this… just remember to make a backup on the .htaccess before you amend it.

6. HTTP/2

If you know, then you know. If not, it’s best to pop a support ticket into your hosting provider on how to implement this. HTTP/2 allows browsers to perform multiple requests over a single connection. With a basic Magento home page requiring around 200 requests, this is a no-brainer.

7. Extensions

It’s good practice to test your site speed before and after the installation of an extension. You can also do this retrospectively by disabling existing extensions. If you do find an extension that is causing speed problems then you will need to weigh up the benefit vs site speed cost.

Layered navigation

What is generally referred to as faceted navigation is known as layered navigation in Magento. It lets users filter down products in a category by their predefined attributes. This is a feature that users have grown to expect when navigating ecommerce sites. It’s also a feature that has given search marketers more than a few headaches over the years.

If you take as an example a category page with 20 products, and within those products, there are five colors, five sizes, and four styles. When you consider you can filter by any combination of attributes, one category page has now turned into more than 100, all with their own URL. To compound this, you can then also order the products by name, price or number, and then select where you want them ascending or descending. As these options generally also update the URL, we are now up to 600 URLs. When you consider this is just one category you can appreciate it could cause problems with indexing.

Don’t get stuck in the spider web

We have seen ecommerce sites with millions of pages needlessly indexed, due to faceted parameters, on more than one occasion. Not only does this cause issues for Google being able to figure out what are the important pages on your site are, but they can also become spider traps.

This is where search engine bots will spend so much time crawling they essentially give up on your site and go somewhere else.

Managing this issue is where search marketers earn our keep. So, how can we accomplish this in Magento?

Unfortunately, there is not a completely elegant solution that’s straight out of the box. There are extensions that you can install that do make the job a little easier or you could even write some custom code yourself with the help of user forums.

Ultimately what you are looking to achieve are any of the following solutions

• Add a canonical tag that references the non-filtered page
• Nofollow all links to filtered pages and add a “noindex” tag on the linked pages
• “Disallow” the pages in your robots.txt file

Another solution is declaring the URL parameters within Google’s Search Console. At the time of writing, you still have to do this via the old interface.

Which solution you choose, can depend upon the site. For instance, the canonical tag might be a good solution if you have only a few filterable attributes in your layered navigation, but as it still requires Google to crawl the pages to find these tags, if you have 100s of attributes it could use a large proportion of your crawl budget (even though the pages aren’t being indexed).

We have a dedicated post on faceted navigation if you would like to read more on the subject.

What next?

So you’ve got the right products at the right price, you’ve got your technical SEO sorted but so has your competition. How do you set yourself apart so you stand out in the SERPs?

Content

A solid content strategy is what we do best here at Zazzle Media. We won’t dig too deep into this subject here, as we have numerous other posts we will point you in the direction of, and it’s not a topic exclusively related to Magento. What we will do is cover some of the areas you should be looking to cover:

Functional content

You can read up on the importance of having engaging functional content here.

Category content – In the admin area navigate to – Catalog – Categories – [Category] – Content – Description

Category pages will often drive a good proportion of traffic to your site. Categorizing your catalog to align with your keyword research will be worth the time and effort and help your site realize its full potential. When generating copy for the pages, a top tip is to look at the TF*IDF using a tool such as Ryte. This will highlight any words that are over or under-optimized for our page based upon the main topic.

Product descriptions – These descriptions can be added on your mass import CSV file or by navigating to – Catalog > Products > [Product] > Content > Description in the admin area.

Try to steer clear of using descriptions provided directly from the suppliers or manufacturers, as you can bet they’ve already been used on numerous other websites. This can be a big task with larger catalogs, but set a certain amount of resources aside every month and concentrate on your most popular items to start with.

Informational content

There are various ways of publishing news/blog content on Magento. A popular solution is to integrate WordPress using the Fishpig extension. This has been around for years and there are versions for Magento 1 and 2. It allows one-click login to both platforms and lets you associate posts with specific products which is a useful feature.

This is the area where a good strategy can pay dividends. Performing a gap analysis on your top competitors is an effective way to identify quick wins. Some comprehensive informational keyword research will also highlight questions and topics users are searching for. All this information can help you put together a content calendar that should align with business focuses and seasonal trends. Considering the different stages in your sales cycle, and the questions your users might have at these points will enable you to create a comprehensive resource of information.

In summary

Developing a site on the Magento platform isn’t always the cheapest solution to launch an ecommerce website, however, on the flip side, you’ll never want for a more powerful solution or be short of advice from the vast developer community. You also should have any issue in integrating it with the product information management (PIM) tool of your choice.

With a little bit of configuration, you should also have a site that is SEO-friendly. Regardless of the platform, the output is simply a mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images and other resources. So fundamentally the same rules apply. Also, remember SEO isn’t a one-hit solution, it’s a strategy that is constantly evolving. Stand still and your competitors will catch you up and take your customers.

Mark Chisholm is an SEO Executive working within the Search & Data Team at Zazzle Media.

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This collection of social media marketing and new hire announcements is a compilation of the past week’s briefs from our daily Marketing Land newsletter. Click here to subscribe and get more news like this delivered to your inbox every morning.

Pinterest pushes auto sales. According to new data from Oracle Data Cloud, Pinterest users tend to be early adopters of new car models. Oracle’s report revealed that people on Pinterest are 28% more likely to buy a new vehicle than people who don’t use Pinterest, and 31% are more likely to buy a new SUV model. Pinterest also says it now reaches one in two adults who plan to buy a car in the next six months, based on a March ComScore Plan Metrix Audience Profile report. “People are actively using Pinterest to learn more about their car shopping options,” writes Pinterest on the company’s blog, “Over seven million people on Pinterest engage with car-related content.”

Reddit comes to the Midwest. As part of its continued effort to bring more brands to the platform, Reddit is opening an office in Chicago’s historic Merchandise Mart location. “In addition to key Chicago and Midwest-based brands, Reddit’s Chicago team has built strong relationships with the region’s leading agencies and media companies, including Starcom, Publicis, OMG, and GroupM,” writes Reddit on its Upvoted Blog. Reddit began its dive into the Chicago market in April of 2018, working with Midwest-based brands like McDonald’s, Target and KFC. The Merchandise Mart office is Reddit’s first office in Chicago. 

Instagram Story views are, literally, unreal. Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it is aware of an issue with Stories getting a high volume of views by Russian accounts — and is working to fix it. “It [Instagram] also said this inauthentic activity is not related to misinformation campaigns but is rather a new growth hacking tactic,” reports TechCrunch. The bad actors involve third parties that are paid to boost account profiles by generating inauthentic activity like watching Instagram Stories — an effort aimed at winning the account more followers. Hydrogen, a UK social media agency, called mass viewing of Instagram Stories “the new buying followers of 2019” when it noticed the trend in June. 

What time is the show? Facebook has rolled out two new ad units for movie studios: movie reminder ads and showtime ads. The movie reminder ads allow moviegoers to click an “Interested” button on a film advertisement in their News Feed for a film that hasn’t come out yet. When the movie hits theaters, users will get a notification that it is now playing, with details on showtimes and tickets. 

For films already released, the showtime movie ads include a “Get Showtimes” button within the ad that links to the Facebook Page listing where and when the movie can be seen. Available for advertisers in the U.S. and the UK, Facebook’s new ads for movie studios were beta tested by Universal Pictures, which reported a significant increase in showtime look-ups and ticket purchases after using the ads. 

Changes to Facebook Group settings. Facebook has revised its Group options to include only two settings: public and private. Previously, Group admins had access to three settings: public, closed and secret. The revised options are designed to offer more clarity around a Group’s setting and simplify the privacy model for Facebook Groups. 

“Having two privacy settings — public and private — will help make it clearer about who can find the group and see the members and posts that are part of it,” writes Facebook Product Manager Jordan Davis on the Facebook Newsroom blog. Groups that were formerly set to “secret” will now be switched to “private” and “hidden,” while Groups that were formerly set to “closed” will now be “private” but “visible.” Public Groups will remain “public” and “visible.”  

Group admins will also be able to choose whether or not a Group can be found in Search or other places on the platform. 

Quora integrates LiveRamp IdentityLink. Advertisers on Quora will now be able to add audience lists to Quora’s Ads Manager via LiveRamp IdentityLink, the same platform used to add customer audiences to the Microsoft Advertising platform. “Now, marketers can use segments from their offline records in order to activate and run ad campaigns on Quora, all in a privacy-conscious way. This should also increase match rates for targeting, exclusion, or lookalike modeling,” writes Quora Software Engineer Ryan Oshima on the Quora for Business Blog. LiveRamp is an identity resolution platform that helps brands and agencies implement people-based targeting campaigns. 

Spectacles 3: The latest version of Snap’s sunglass cameras. Snap is rolling out the latest version of its Spectacles sunglasses, wearable cameras that let you capture images and upload to Snapchat. This marks the third generation of the devices, which will begin shipping in the fall and costs $380 — up from the $200 price tag on the last version. Spectacles 3 include new 3D effects, 3D filters and 3D lenses. “It will have dual cameras to add depth and dimension to photos and videos. After uploading the content to the messaging app Snapchat, users can add new lighting, landscapes and three-dimensional effects to the images,” reports Reuters. 

Spark AR on Instagram now available to all developers. Facebook has moved Spark AR on Instagram out of closed beta, making the AR development platform available to all developers. Along with the AR platform, Facebook is launching an Effects Gallery where developers can search for new filters. “To find it, users will have to reach the end of the effects tray in the Instagram camera and click on it there. Users will also be able to see the effect being used in Instagram Stories,” writes TechCrunch reporter Lucas Matney. 

YouTube testing new appeal process. YouTube confirmed to The Verge that it is testing a new appeal process for creators who have lost monetization privileges. The pilot program will allow creators to submit a video appealing the decision in real-time, versus the current policy that enforces creators to wait 30 days before making an appeal. The videos are reviewed by YouTube team members who then, within a seven-day time period, decide whether or not monetization for the channel can be reinstated.

Facebook reportedly offering million-dollar licensing deals to news publishers. Multiple “big-name” news publishers have been approached by Facebook to sign content licensing deals, according to the Wall Street Journal. Per the report, Facebook is offering as much as $3 million a year to republish stories from the likes of ABC News, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and The Washington Post. 

In response to the Wall Street Journal report, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to CNBC the company does have plans to launch a dedicated news section later this year, but would not comment on the licensing deals: “No details to share on the WSJ report, but I can confirm we’re working on a news tab to launch this fall.” 

Reports claim Facebook’s licensing deals with publishers could last as long as three years. As part of the deal, news outlets would have control over how their stories appear on Facebook, and whether or not readers get full access to the content or only a headline with a snippet from the article.

On the Move

Karuna Rawal has been appointed CMO for the biotech startup Sustainable Bioproducts. She will serve as the company’s first CMO, reporting to CEO Thomas Jonas. In her new role, Rawal will be charged with strategic marketing and innovation initiatives that support the company’s mission to launch new alternative protein product lines. “Karuna’s acumen as a storyteller and innovator along with her deep experience in building iconic brands that connect with consumers at an emotional and purposeful level is exactly what we need for the next stages of our company’s growth,” said Jonas. Prior to joining Sustainable Bioproducts, Rawal spent time at the Publicis Groupe, leading its Arc Worldwide shopper and commerce agency, and was the chief strategy officer for Leo Burnett’s Farmhouse, the agency’s new venture and innovation group. 

The cloud data integration platform Talend named Lauren Vaccarello as its new CMO. She will lead the company’s marketing organization and oversee its branding efforts. “Lauren is a dynamic leader with a deep understanding of the software industry and proven skills at helping SaaS organizations increase revenue and retain and grow their customer base through cutting-edge marketing techniques,” said Talend CEO Mike Tuchen. Before joining Talend, Vaccarello was the vice president of marketing at Box, and has held marketing roles at AdRoll and Salesforce. In addition to her marketing leadership experience, Vaccarello has published two books focused on the marketing industry: “Complete B2B Online Marketing” and “The Retargeting Playbook.” 

GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has named Christian Juhl as its next global CEO. Juhl will take over the role on October 1, 2019. “Christian has the right combination of leadership, people and technology skills to build the modern media company, something he has demonstrated extraordinarily well at Essence,” said CEO of WPP Mark Read. Currently, Juhl serves as CEO for Essence, the digital ad agency that was acquired by WPP in 2015. Juhl will succeed Kelly Clark who currently serves as GroupM’s CEO. Clark will continue to serve as a senior advisor to WPP and GroupM following his departure as CEO. 

It’s no surprise that PPC campaigns are great for driving quick results. However, it’s not the only way paid campaigns can bring profit to digital marketers. Integrating your PPC data in your SEO strategy will help you improve your overall performance.

Your SEO strategy should be flexible to trends, algorithms, and user behavior. While it takes much time to evaluate SEO results, the PPC data allows you to predict what works and what doesn’t work. Using this information for SEO, you’ll boost your search rankings significantly. In this article, I’ll tell you how to analyze your paid campaigns to determine which keywords resulted in the most significant number of conversions and focus on these phrases to improve your SEO.

The differences between SEO and PPC keywords

Pay-per-click advertising is an easily controlled digital marketing channel that provides an opportunity to target specific audiences, countries, and the time you want your ads to show up. Due to this fact, you can use PPC reports to get useful data for improving your keyword list.

These are the major differences between collecting keywords for SEO and PPC:

• The main aim of the PPC campaign is to drive conversions. That’s why the keywords used for paid ads have high commercial intent.
• The landing page of each ad should be highly relevant to the query. Otherwise, the ads will be marked as low-quality ones, and the search engines will display them less frequently.
• You can configure your PPC campaign in the way to avoid non-target visits, for example, you can select negative keywords, exclude irrelevant audiences, and more.
• You should mind that Google Keyword Planner usually provides you with high-cost and competition keywords. It rarely suggests users high-volume but low-priced phrases.

How PPC helps your SEO

There are four major reasons you should make your PPC campaigns work together with SEO efforts:

1. Analyzing your PPC campaigns, you can identify which keywords result in conversions the most. This step will let you focus on the web pages that generate the highest revenue.
2. Paid advertising is the best way to attract your target audience. The fact people click through the highly relevant ad and find what they’re looking for on your website result in better user behavior metrics. As these visits will result in lower bounce rates and longer session durations, they’ll serve as positive signals for search robots. That’s why paid targeted traffic often has a positive impact on organic search rankings.
3. If your website is showing up both in paid and organic searches, the chances a user will click through one of the results increase. Moreover, most of the search results provide lots of special elements, including ads, featured snippets, “People also ask” box and others. If all of these elements are displayed on one page, it’s not likely someone will scroll down to your page ranking the third in organic search.
4. Some brands bid on their competitors’ branded keywords. In the result, the official website is shifting in search results. If you don’t want to lose your prospects to competition, it’s worth bidding on your branded keywords as well.

Improve your SEO keyword list analyzing your PPC campaigns

Step one: Use high-CTR keywords for SEO

In your Google Adwords reports, you can find lots of useful data for organic search optimization. First of all, it may happen that you are spending large sums on PPC to get little conversions. It usually happens when you select high CPC keywords that are searched for by people who aren’t ready to convert (have you ever heard about a sales funnel?).  Instead, you could optimize your top-of-funnel content for these high-cost keywords and eventually lead the prospects to conversions.

To identify these keywords, go to “Reports” > “Search terms”

You’ll see the list of search terms that people have used, and the ones that resulted in your ad being shown and clicked. To collect keywords that result in the highest click-through rates, under “Clicks”, select “High to Low”. The list will automatically portray keywords sorted by the number of clicks.

Now let’s look at the conversion rate of the terms that drive a number of clicks. If the clicks drive no results, it means people using these specific search terms aren’t ready to buy. But if you optimize your blog posts for these keywords, your visitors might come back soon to convert.

Step two: Analyze your competitors’ PPC campaigns

To enlarge your SEO keyword list, you can also analyze your competitors’ ads and keywords they are bidding on. Content creation isn’t only about driving traffic to your website. To be worth something to your business, your website content should attract actual leads that are likely to convert. That’s why it’s important to check the keywords your competitors’ ads are showing up for. If a competitor is spending large sums to appear in Google for a keyword, it’s definitely worth your consideration.

At this stage, you’ll need one of the all-in-one SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, Serpstat, or Moz. To illustrate the process, I’ll go with Serpstat.

There are two reports you can use for this purpose:

1. Keywords report

In the “Keyword Research > PPC Research > Keywords” section, enter your target keyword, select your country, and click on “Search”. In the report, you’ll see the list of similar keywords your top-100 competitors are bidding on along with ads showing up for these keywords. Collect the most relevant ones and add them to your SEO keyword list.

2. Ad examples report

Clicking through the “Ad examples” section, you’ll also see the keywords used in your competitors’ paid campaigns, but this time they are grouped under the specific ads. It allows you to get ready-to-use clusters of keywords relevant to different landing pages.

Keep tracking

Analyzing your PPC results to improve your SEO performance is an unconventional but very effective method. Make your PPC and SEO work together for your brand promotion and you’ll not only witness higher conversions but also get more statistical data to outrank your competitors.

Adelina Karpenkova is a Brand Specialist at Serpstat.

Related reading

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According to research, Amazon ranked first with average monthly users of about 197 million. Tools, tips, and key details for Amazon PPC management.

The industry has seen challenges that impacted businesses last year. Daniel Tannenbaum shares how brands can rank in the payday loans algorithm in 2019.

“We know Amazon and Google are big, but in reality many of us still underestimate them.” Jumpshot’s Head of Insights shares data on ecommerce market share.

Podcast mobile app usage has risen 60% since January 2018, and the sector’s growth is expected to continue as 45% of listeners said they plan on tuning into more podcasts in the future, according to a study conducted by Adobe Analytics.

Discovery and growth. The study, which combined survey information from 1,008 U.S. respondents and Comscore data comprised of 193 million monthly unique visitors to U.S. mobile apps (between January 2018 and May 2019), found that 41% of podcast discovery occurs through online sources such as blogs and articles.

The report also stated that 25% of current podcast listeners began listening to podcasts for the first time within the past six months. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents perceive podcast quality to be on the rise, with just 6% under the impression that quality is decreasing.

Who, where, what. One-third of millennials said they listen to five or more podcasts per week, accounting for the largest demographic of listeners. Slightly more than half (52%) of respondents said they tune into podcasts while working or commuting and 42% said they listen in the car. 

The four most popular genres were found to be comedy, educational, history and true crime/documentary. Video game and discussion panel podcasts were among the least popular categories.

Ad effectiveness. The majority (60%) of listeners surveyed said they looked up a service or product after hearing it advertised on a podcast, and 25% reported that they ended up making the purchase.

On the flip side, 58% of respondents said they skipped podcast ads.

Why we should care. The podcast sector’s momentum increases the viability of podcast advertising to reach a growing audience. And, with more data available from platforms like Spotify or third parties such as Nielsen, advertisers have more targeting capabilities to help them get closer to the listeners that are most likely to be interested in their products or services.

We love to help folks make awesome websites. For a while now, we’ve been answering questions from developers, site-owners, webmasters, and of course SEOs in our office hours hangouts, in the help forums, and at events. Recently, we’ve (re-)started answering your questions in a video series called #AskGoogleWebmasters on our YouTube channel. 

(At Google, behind the scenes, during the recording of one of the episodes.)

When we started with the webmaster office-hours back in 2012, we thought we’d be able to get through all questions within a few months, or perhaps a year. Well … the questions still haven’t stopped — it’s great to see such engagement when it comes to making great websites! 

To help make it a bit easier to find answers, we’ve started producing shorter videos answering individual questions. Some of the questions may seem fairly trivial to you, others don’t always have simple answers, but all of them are worth answering.

Curious about the first episodes? Check out the videos below and the playlist for all episodes!

To ask a question, just use the hashtag #AskGoogleWebmasters on Twitter. While we can’t get to all submissions, we regularly pick up the questions there to use in future episodes. We pick questions primarily about websites & websearch, which are relevant to many sites. Want to stay in the loop? Make sure to subscribe to our channel. If you’d like to discuss the questions or other important webmaster topics, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums and chat with the awesome experts there. 

Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland

If you are using Facebook’s Ads Manager, campaign budget optimization (CBO) will become mandatory for all ad campaigns as of September 1, 2019. 

If you are using an API tool like AdRules, you have until September 2020 before it is mandatory.

If you do any advertising on Facebook, you will be affected by this change. It will apply to both new and existing ad campaigns.

If you don’t want a rude awakening on September 1 when CBO activates in Ads Manager and your Facebook campaigns start to behave very differently, you need to start testing campaign budget optimization now.

While nobody likes mandatory, sudden changes, this is not all doom and gloom. There are some considerable upsides to CBO. You will have to give up some control over your campaigns after September first, but with CBO:

1. You’ll have less to manage

If you spend hours adjusting bids every week, or if you pay someone else to adjust bids every week, much of that bid optimization work will be over.

When campaign budget optimization is activated in Ads Manager, Facebook automatically shifts the ad budget to whichever ad set in a campaign is most effective. You get to control the definition of what “effective” means by specifying a goal for each campaign. Goals that are fairly late in your sales funnel, like a purchase or a download, tend to work best with CBO.

Because all that bid management work will be done by the Facebook algorithm, you may be able to hire less expensive people to manage your campaigns or have your team members work on more networks or accounts. Or, if you’ve been doing those bid edits yourself, you may find you suddenly have extra hours free every week. We recommend using those free hours to develop better creative, to study your competitors’ creative, or to set up a more efficient creative testing machine.

2. You’ll get a better return on ad spend (ROAS)

While there were some early reports of CBO not working as well as human-managed campaigns, the algorithm has gotten considerably smarter than when it first launched.

We’ve found that if a campaign is set up properly and the bids are high enough, CBO generally can get better results than a human can get.

CBO will also reduce how often your campaigns are put into “learning mode”. That means you won’t get penalized when Facebook’s algorithm reassesses your campaigns.

But you do need to give campaign budget optimization time to work. The algorithm needs about 50 conversions per ad set, per week, before it accrues enough data to ramp up your campaigns. And speaking of ramping up campaigns if you want to scale your campaigns, CBO is extremely effective. Especially if you keep feeding it new, high-quality audiences.

3. You will still be able to control spending (to an extent) with ad set spending limits

If you set a minimum spend for an ad set, Facebook will dutifully spend at least that amount. And if you set a maximum ad set spending limit, Facebook will not go over that limit.

This is a way to set a “governor” of sorts on your spending. It will force Facebook to run ad sets perhaps longer than it might otherwise have, but if you’re not quite ready to relinquish control, ad set spending limits are a way to ease into this new campaign management approach.

Those of you who also advertise with Google’s App Campaigns may have an edge already. Facebook is in some ways following Google’s lead by requiring advertisers to shift over to automated budget optimization.

You could, potentially, get around CBO by creating dozens or even hundreds of campaigns, each with on single ad set. But that would be working against the algorithm. And besides, CBO works well. There aren’t many good reasons to try to circumvent it. Especially when you use it along with other Facebook best practices and Facebook’s simplified campaign structure recommendation.

Start testing campaign budget optimization now

The benefits of CBO are proven, but you need to start testing now to see how to make it work well for your accounts. We still have a couple of months until the change in Ads Manager, but you may need to run multiple week-long tests to get the hang of this new budgeting strategy.

You may also need to shift how you’ve been defining goals. Using CBO for clicks is a waste of potential. Instead, look towards the end of the buyers’ journey. We like to optimize not just for app installs, but for specific app events like purchases. And not for just two-dollar purchases, we target people who are likely to spend $20 or more.

As you begin to test and measure CBO, don’t get too attached to the results of individual ad sets. Look at the campaign level, as this graphic illustrates:

Also, get ready to bump up your creatives. For CBO to work, it often needs several creative assets for each ad set. Including a few videos and elements for dynamic creatives helps too.

Pay close attention to your audiences, too. Many advertisers have found that CBO works best for them if they create separate campaigns for different audiences like one campaign for cold audiences and another campaign for a “warm” audience, like a retargeting audience.

Get ready for things like “The Breakdown Effect” to make your reporting look a little strange at first. “The Breakdown Effect” occurs when discount pacing (how frequently your ads show) intersects with discount bidding and makes it look like the system is overcharging you for conversions. What’s actually happening is the system is trying to find the most affordable conversions first, then it tries to find more expensive conversions.

If you do a lot of testing, this breakdown effect pattern may be familiar. It’s similar to how one cell of a test can look like a winner at first but as the data accrue, that early winner falls away and another cell is shown to perform better in the long-term.

Closing thoughts

Facebook is evolving. Everyone knows this, but the CBO change in September for Ads Manager is yet one more example of it happening again. And because Facebook’s advertising platform is evolving, advertisers have to evolve with it, too. If you’re still doing Facebook advertising like you were a year ago, you’re losing money and missing out on better ROAS.

Brian Bowman is the CEO of ConsumerAcquisition.com.

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It’s widely accepted by marketers that consumers want increasingly personalized digital experiences. And while there’s considerable survey data that appears to support that general proposition, the truth is more situational and nuanced.

Resisting personalization. A new survey of 1,100 U.S. adults in March, conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) appears to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about personalization. It found that “telling people that sharing their data will allow for a more personalized experience does not result in a greater willingness to share data.”

Overall, the survey found that consumers were using their PCs less and mobile apps more for daily and routine tasks, such as email, social media, music, content discovery and e-commerce.

But the findings about personalization are the most interesting and significant. In most instances, people seemed less willing to share information in exchange “for a personalized experience.”

Personalization offer didn’t impact openness to data sharing

Compared with 2018, people demonstrated somewhat more resistance to sharing personal data. According to ARF, “The biggest changes in respondents’ willingness to share their data from 2018 to 2019 were seen in their home address (-10 percentage points), spouse’s first and last name (-8 percentage points), personal email address (-7 percentage points), and first and last names (-6 percentage points).”

Better understanding of terms, declining trust. As evidence that audiences are becoming more sophisticated, the survey found somewhat greater understanding of terms that might appear in a hypothetical privacy policy. Overall, respondents found marketing terms such as “first party data” or “third party data” less confusing than in 2018. This slightly improved comprehension of terminology was true across groups, with Hispanics demonstrating the “clearest understanding.”

The survey also explored consumer trust in various media and institutions. Consistent with other surveys, ARF found declining levels of trust generally, though not radically so.

Americans’ trust in media and institutions

Putting aside Congress, social media and advertising are the least trusted among the various choices presented. For regular social media users, there is only a 1 point decline from 2018. However, occasional social media users’ trust was down 3 points, which is the same for general advertising.

The survey found the highest trust in “people like me.” Where might people encounter others like themselves online — social media or reviews.

Why should we care. Any single survey shouldn’t change our worldview. And this one asked relatively general questions about trust and personalization. Highly specific personal data scenarios could and likely would yield different answers.

It’s fairly clear that a kind of privacy-personalization paradox exists. So generalizations must always be qualified. People are increasingly sensitive to privacy issues but will share information when there are clear, defined benefits. Consumers also want retailers, platforms and brands to ask permission for use of their data. And, for some people, “personalization” may now be a dirty word, implying “tracking” or “surveillance.”

With the impeding implementation of CCPA and other data privacy bills making their way through state legislatures, we’re rapidly moving toward an opt-in data framework where marketers will need to ask permission to use personal data — and convincingly sell consumers on the benefits.

If you have any experience with social media monitoring platforms, you know that getting precise results may be tricky at times: Apps can show a lot of noise for brands with common names or, quite the contrary, miss some valuable data behind due to the restrictive filters.

That’s when Boolean search fits in perfectly.

Boolean search definition

In a broad sense, a Boolean search is a type of search that combines terms with operators. It’s used in social listening tools, search engines, and other apps. It lets you find precisely what you’re searching for, and exclude what you’re not. I have to mention that not all social listening tools provide Boolean capabilities, but some platforms such as Awario, SproutSocial, or Google Alerts do let you test it before starting your subscription.

Dealing with those Boolean queries may look intimidating at first if you aren’t familiar with programming. But the good news is that first of all, not everyone needs Boolean: If you’re monitoring unique keywords, you’ll be alright with a regular search mode. And secondly, mastering the basics of creating Boolean queries doesn’t require any technical background at all.

Boolean terms explained

Before creating your first query, you should get comfortable with major Boolean operators, such as “AND”, “OR”, “AND NOT” (which is sometimes used as “NOT” or just “-”).

AND

This one narrows your search to find results of both keywords or groups of keywords within one post, so the query like “Prince William” AND “Duchess Kate” will show us results where both names are mentioned:

OR

OR broadens the search to find results where any term is mentioned. This can be good for misspellings, typos, and alternatives of the same term. For example “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge” OR “Duchess Kate” will show mentions with any version of her name:

AND NOT

AND NOT lets you exclude terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. If you don’t want to get mentions about Prince William’s 37th birthday, (“Prince William” AND NOT birthday) will help you get relevant mentions:

The list of Boolean operators and their logic varies on different tools: some of them, such as Google Alerts, has a pretty basic set (which is enough in most cases though) which includes “OR”, “-”, “site”, quotation marks, and an asterisk. Others, like Brandwatch, offer advanced operators, such as “NEAR/n”, “raw”, “country”, and more.

Where and how to use Boolean?

Boolean search is applicable in multiple scenarios, but I’d love to focus more on the cases where this mode is indispensable. So below you can find the cases when a few lines of code can save you tons of time on cutting through the noise.

Save time on inputting all brand name alternatives

This is a time-saving tactic that lets you create a query using just a few lines of code instead of entering all possible brand name alternatives. Works best for three-word names or more.

Let’s say there’s a brand that’s called C.S. Johnson & Sons. This brand name can be spelled in a number of ways:

But if you have access to Boolean search, you can create the following query:

Gain control over acronyms or brands with common names

As in the previous case, you can apply the power of grouping words for searching brands with common or ambiguous names. And there are two ways of treating those cases.

First of all, you can exclude irrelevant results by adding a group of negative keywords, which are terms you don’t want to be used in your results:

Secondly, you can add some terms to be used with the brand name to ensure you find results that matter to your business.

On the screenshot above, at the top, you can find a social media handle and a website that will bring relevant results per se. They’re followed by the brand name that can be used in multiple cases, but we narrow it down to the relevant case only.

And finally, sometimes it makes perfect sense to use both “AND” and “AND NOT” operators:

This query shows only relevant results since the whole query is supported by negative terms.

Find linkless pages for link-building purposes

Boolean search lets you easily create queries that contain only mentions of a particular brand or industry and don’t have links to this brand. It works best for news articles and other web pages, so note that you’ll need a tool that monitors those sources as well:

This query will deliver all webpages that mention JIRA on the web and don’t have links to their website. So our job here is to reach out to website owners to turn those pages into backlinks.

Monitor mentions from specific regions

This technique is useful for international companies. You can set up an alert that will deliver relevant mentions to a person in charge of the company unit from a particular geographical area.

You can use the country operator to limit the search to a specific location that’s provided by social networks. And in addition to that, you can create another group of keywords that will provide search results for your keywords with location names. This way, the tool will cover mentions where people use the names of relevant locations in the text of a post.

The example above searches for mentions posted in the US as well as all the mentions where location keywords are used within a post.

Uncover dissatisfied customers

This one is great for crisis managers in a company. Boolean search lets you create queries that search for posts containing problematic terms.

To use this, you’ll need the proximity operator near/n that will let you specify the maximum distance between the name of a company and a word or phrase typically used to complain about something online:

Generate new leads

The other case where Boolean search comes in handy is lead generation. To set up a search, you’ll need to come up with a few phrases that people typically use to ask about services online, such as “I’m looking for”, “I need”, “recommend me”, and similar search queries.

By using the near/n proximity operator, you can define the distance of those phrases from your target keywords:

This query will monitor social platforms for all new posts where people search for web designers. All you need to do is interact with those posts internally from the tool (if it has the capability to do so) or externally from a social media platform.

Check texts for plagiarism

And the last one I’d like to tell you about is checking texts for copyright infringement. All you need to do is add a few pieces of content to the alert (don’t forget to quote it to search for the exact match).

The app will search for matches of those pieces on social media platforms and the web and notify you each time someone’s taking advantage of your work without permission.

Final words

Using Boolean for social media monitoring is a great way to cut through countless mentions to find those gems that let you understand your audience better and reach your social media marketing goals.

So when you shop for a social media monitoring tool, make sure it’s equipped with a Boolean search mode.

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Spotify for Podcasters, a discovery and analytics dashboard, has come out of beta, the music streaming service announced Tuesday. The platform allows podcast creators to submit their shows and view listener demographic and engagement data, such as where people start and stop playback as well as average listening time.

Building out a comprehensive platform. Earlier this year, Spotify spent $400 million to acquire podcast companies Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast. The music streaming service also inked deals for exclusive podcast content with high-profile figures such as the Obamas and comedian Amy Schumer. It was only a matter of time before the company announced strategies to monetize its podcast content, and it did so in June by allowing advertisers to target podcast listeners specifically.

Now, Spotify’s analytics dashboard enables podcast creators — and the advertisers that work with them — to access more data, such as age, gender and location of listeners, the types of music they tune into, how long they listen to particular podcast episodes and where they start and stop playback.

One of podcast advertising’s biggest criticisms — solved? “In my experience, while podcast ads can result in direct conversions, more often than not, it’s a top-of-funnel broad awareness thing,” Rebekah Bek, marketing manager at Ahrefs, told Marketing Land in our quick-start guide to podcast advertising. A lack of data, difficulties in tracking conversions and attribution have prevented podcast ads from being more widely adopted.

Some podcast networks, ad agencies and other third parties, such as Nielsen, offer listener data sourced through surveys, but that information is self-reported and not available in real time. Spotify, on the other hand, requires users to sign up for an account and can provide data on demographics and listening habits for potentially all of its users, which may yield more reliable information.

Why we should care. For marketers and advertisers, having access to a podcast audience’s demographic data may enable more precise targeting, which may make for more successful ad campaigns. Knowing an audience’s listening habits, such as average listening time, may also give advertisers a better idea of whether their ads are actually getting listened to or if they should adjust their ad placements to make the most of their budgets.

For podcast creators and brands looking into podcasts as a content marketing initiative, this audience data can offer an idea of who is listening so that they can develop content for that audience. And, because Spotify is available on iOS, Android, as a desktop app, through a browser and built into many smart speakers, there is potential for Spotify to provide even more audience segmentation data or allow advertisers to dynamically insert ads for listeners tuning in at home or on the go.

For the time being, attribution and tracking conversions for podcast ad campaigns still presents significant challenges — more audience demographics and listening data should not drown out those concerns, but they do represent a big step forward for the industry, which is forecasted to exceed $1 billion in domestic revenue in 2021.