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Technology has helped businesses in endless ways. But one of the most important benefits it offers to companies is the ability to monitor and measure success, and sequentially, plan for the future.

In the past, reporting on important metrics was a rather tricky and time-consuming task that required lots of work and careful calculations. Thanks to modern business technology and advances like AI and machine learning, it is now easier than ever to gather these data points and gauge progress.

However, this rapid advancement has led to a whole new set of problems. Although technology has made it easier to collect data, it has left us with an overwhelming amount of information, making it quite difficult to pinpoint what exactly is relevant.

Of course, the only way to determine success in any business matter is by first setting goals.

• What is most important to your business?
• Do you only care about the bottom line and increasing conversions?
• What are the components needed to make this happen – such as generating more leads and website traffic or cutting internal costs by boosting productivity?

No matter what your ultimate business goals are, the key to strategizing properly is understanding where you currently stand and how to make improvements. This can only be done with precise metric measurements and reporting.

Here are four tools that can help your company measure these important metrics easily and accurately.

1. Traffic analytics for audience identification

The only way that any marketing/promotional strategy will ever be successful is by connecting with a relevant audience. If you have no idea who you are trying to reach or have an inaccurate description of your target customers, then there is no way your methods will reach their fullest potential.

Your website is one of the best resources for audience identification and segmentation, and it can also help when it comes to determining the strategy ROI for various groups. While Google Analytics can provide general information on your website traffic’s demographics, it is better to use an analytical program that can go even deeper and provide details on your audience’s behaviors and preferences.

Finteza is a great option here because its in-depth traffic analytics software gets down to the nitty-gritty details of audience segmentation. Each link is tracked and the traffic is analyzed and categorized into understandable reports. Marketers can also use this program to track marketing links to see which audience segments are responding best to various content.
Source: Finteza

By understanding these types of behavioral metrics, marketers will have a much more stable foundation to build their strategies upon and base their targeting methods.

2. Site performance for digital monitoring

Tracking and reporting marketing campaign returns is often viewed as a tedious task, as there are many different factors that come into play.

Most marketers dread this process because it can be super time-consuming and meticulous. Furthermore, if the results are not as great as expected, it can be quite a disappointment. 55% of marketing teams agreed that determining campaign ROI was their top challenge.

Tools like Raven can be extremely helpful for measuring the performance of digital campaigns, specifically when it comes to SEO and PPC.

Source: Raven

This platform analyzes your entire website’s collection of links to track their performance and keeps the platform free from errors. It also correlates to how external link building campaigns have improved your own website’s performance in terms of backlinks, domain authority, and other KPIs.

3. Event marketing tracking for instant results

If you think tracking digital marketing metrics is tricky, what about measuring the results of real-life marketing events?

If you host webinars or attend business conferences and meetups, it can be quite difficult to track the exact results of these efforts. However, it is important to know whether these strategies are truly paying off.

You need a tool that is keeping track in real-time to see how well your efforts are going during live events or digital live streams. For example, Splash is designed to be integrated with multiple event tools and provides real-time custom data dashboards to measure ROI, evaluate progress, and assess performance.

Source: Splash

It even offers a check-in app so that you can capture attendee data, update profiles, and sync all of this information as it happens. All of this data is analyzed during and after the event, so leaders can watch the metrics change and grow.

4. Performance management for employee engagement

When you think of the key indicators of business success, you might lean towards metrics that measure external factors – like conversion rates. However, internal metrics can be quite reflective of the success of the company, too.

For example, employee engagement and productivity will have an influence on the business’s growth trajectory. If your team’s levels are slipping, the quality of their work will likely go down. This can quickly slow down sales cycles and affect customer service, and therefore, hurt the bottom line.

Tools like Trakstar can be used to streamline performance reviews and track objective feedback. This can help leaders understand which areas need improvement and support in real-time.

This program is also designed to improve productivity by offering peer-to-peer communication tools. Managers can also use the platform to remind team members of deadlines, set goals and objectives, and even recognize progress to keep engagement and morale high.

Source: Trakstar

Knowing metrics related to employee satisfaction and engagement is extremely important for effective management (and retention).

Conclusion

Thanks to emerging technology and digital tools, gathering the exact data to gauge growth and success is easier than ever before. This information can be extremely powerful and can help you maintain the trajectory for continuous growth.

Manish Dudharejia is the President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc.

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Perhaps you’ve seen digital out-of-home (OOH) media platform Firefly’s “taxi-top” screens in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles and wondered, “how can they measure a moving target?” That was my question until I spoke with Firefly Chief Analytics Officer (and former Googler) Taylan Yildiz.

Yildiz says that not only are Firefly’s screens are measurable but that the company’s targeting and attribution are highly precise and reliable. He also talked to me about the dynamic geo-targeting capabilities of the moving digital screen that neither traditional OOH nor digital (but stationary) OOH screens can match.

Helping drivers earn more money

Firefly, which launched at the end of last year and has raised more than $50 million to date (with Google parent, Alphabet, as an investor), aims to put its digital screens on top of every cab, Uber or Lyft in America. (There are more than 2 million Uber and Lyft drivers in the U.S., not accounting for overlap.) The pitch to drivers is that they can make 20% more income, passively, by mounting the screen on top of their vehicles as they drive.

One of the tactics that has greatly aided traditional billboards and other OOH advertising has been the pairing of these fixed placements with mobile-location data to match media exposures with offline consumer behaviors. Location intelligence companies can determine the mobile ad IDs that were exposed to the OOH placement and then whether those devices showed up in a store, for example, a week later.

Better control groups

In other to determine actual visitation lift, there must be both a control and exposed group. Yildiz asserts it’s almost impossible with traditional (or digital) OOH to find an unbiased control group. It’s difficult to find a control group that is close enough to the exposed group, he argues; because you have to find other commuters or pedestrians on another highway or alternative, comparable location to validate that the media exposure was truly responsible for the later consumer action.

We can debate this assertion, but Firefly says its control groups have zero bias and are identical to the exposed groups. They’re drivers or pedestrians present in the same locations immediately before and after the appearance of the vehicle with Firefly screen.

Using the control-exposed methodology, the people (ad IDs) exposed to the 8-second ad on top of the car, which cannot be skipped, can then be tracked to a store during a trailing attribution window. But they can also be tracked to a subsequent website visit or an app-store download or an online, e-commerce transaction. In other words, Firefly advertisers can run a brand awareness campaign and then measure site traffic lift as a result of that campaign.

Customers exposed to Firefly can also be retargeted on other digital media.

Targeting: commute patterns and geozones

I asked Yildiz about audience targeting. How can the company be confident about reaching specific audiences given the dynamic nature of the media? Everyone in the immediate area is going to see the ad.

He said the company uses third party data that offers predictive insights into location-based audiences and commute patterns. In addition, he says, Firefly can predict available impressions. The company says it currently serves roughly 430 million impressions per month in the cities in which it operates. That will grow as it adds new cities and more drivers.

A retailer or brand can advertise within a precise radius of its own locations or stores where its product can be purchased (like geofencing on mobile). Marketers can do conquesting in the same way by advertising around competitor stores. Firefly will turn ads on and off as cars enter or leave designated geozones.

Branding, direct response or both

Firefly is making its inventory available to the programmatic ecosystem but also sells direct to brands and marketers. Yildiz also explains Firefly will ultimately be able to target and measure ads in real-time.

As a final point, I raised to question of whether marketers should regard the platform as a direct response or branding medium? Traditional OOH is generally about branding or awareness. But the dynamic creative, retargeting and measurement capabilities Firefly offers make it potentially very appealing as a performance channel.

Of course, the answer is “both,” according to Yildiz, who says the company has the ability to sell ads on a CPA basis. However, it currently sells on CPM.

Taxi-top ads date from the 1970s. And digital ads on busses, trains and taxis have been around for some time as well. But the combination of digital OOH, programmatic inventory, dynamic geotargeting and precise measurement capabilities are something new.

Location-based ad platform inMarket is buying Thinknear from owner Telenav. Thinknear is a location-based ads and analytics provider that competes with numerous other companies in the segment.

Todd Dipaola, CEO and Founder of inMarket said in an email that the acquisition will provide inMarket clients with “best-in-class managed as well as self-service platforms.” He added, “they’ll gain access to all of Thinknear’s products such as Geotype and Geolink, as well as their location score performance tech. Notably, inMarket clients will gain access to the Thinknear self-service platform. InMarket previously did not offer self-service.

Thinknear a non-core asset. Telenav is a connected car, navigation and fleet management platform. The transfer of Telenav to inMarket received a quick mention in Telenav’s earnings release yesterday and zero discussion on the company’s earnings call, suggesting its ads business was a tiny fraction of revenue. Telenav is thus likely shedding the ads unit to focus on its core, connected cars business.

Telenav said, however, it plans to work with inMarket to offer in-car advertising to consumers through its relationships with car manufacturers. As part of the deal, the value of which was not disclosed, Telenav will gain a minority equity stake in inMarket.

The acquisition follows Foursquare’s purchase of Placed from Snap in May. InMarket told me the deal was not a response to Foursquare-Placed. However, it still suggests more consolidation may be ahead for the segment.

Too many companies that sound the same. Many companies in the location intelligence segment began life selling media but later moved into selling data and analytics exclusively. Telenav and inMarket continue to sell location-targeted media. Early on, inMarket emphasized digital-to-store analytics and in-store marketing but has broadened its offering considerably in the past five years. The company says it only works with first party location data from its SDK integrations.

There are at least 20 companies that make similar-sounding claims about using mobile-location data to target audiences and measure the offline impact of media (digital and traditional), store visitation and sometimes sales. A partial list includes Foursquare/Placed, PlaceIQ, Factual, Ubimo, Cuebiq, Blis, Skyhook, GroundTruth, Verve, Unacast, Reveal Mobile, NinthDecimal, HERE, Spatially, Pitney Bowes, Gravy, X-Mode, UberMedia and others.

Google and Facebook offer similar targeting and analytics capabilities.

A potential data reckoning ahead. The coming of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) next year may put pressure on some of these companies as third party location data becomes potentially less available and mobile operating systems give consumers more control over who can access location and how often. However, the precise impact of CCPA on location data throughout the broader programmatic ecosystem remains to be seen.

There are also wild cards such as New York’s proposed law substantially banning the transfer of location data collected within the city to third parties. Other municipalities may follow and introduce similar legislation.

Therefore, expect companies that have their own “first-party data” (via developer SDKs) to be near-term acquisition targets.

Why we should care. Putting aside the issue of data privacy (a major one), all brands and enterprise marketers should be working with location data for audience segmentation, business intelligence insights and media measurement. Unless you’re a pure e-commerce company this data is the only way to get a clear and complete picture of media efficacy and the buyer’s journey. Location data can also be utilized as the centerpiece of multi-touch attribution.

For questions to ask location intelligence companies before deciding how to proceed see How to choose a location data provider.

The world of content seems to have shifted from classic blog articles into video marketing, evident in the rise of YouTube as the second largest search engine in the world (behind Google). In this article, we’ll go over video marketing tips and some tools to get started.

YouTube started in 2005 with only a few dozen uploads and has since grown into the largest video platform with over 30 million visitors and five billion videos watched every day. On top of that, the emergence of live streaming platforms like Instagram Story, Instagram TV, Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat further prove the case.

A survey conducted by HubSpot in 2017 suggested that consumers prefer videos over any other form of content marketing. As a result of this, more and more brands are shifting their attention to video marketing. In 2019, the number of companies that use video as a marketing tool reached 87%, a significant increase from 63% in 2017, and 81% in 2018.

Source: HubSpot

What makes video marketing effective?

So, what triggers this change? For starters, we’re visual creatures. We naturally understand and connect faster while watching videos rather than reading posts. Our brains remember 95% of the information that we see in a video, while we only remember 10% of the information that we read.

Source: Wyzowl

The second reason is the popularity of smartphones. Over the last decade, people have become inseparable from this electronic device. The thing is, 75% of all video viewers on the internet are on mobile devices. More importantly, 92% of those mobile video watchers are willing to share the video with their friends. That means, if you create the right content for the right audience, your videos have a chance to go viral!

Video marketing tips to increase traffic

1.   Create an engaging thumbnail

A video’s title and thumbnail are the first things the viewers see when browsing on Google, YouTube and other websites across the internet. It represents what your video is about and the content inside it. The more interested the viewers are in your title and thumbnail, the more likely they’ll click the video.

Tips:

• Make sure that the thumbnail is a shot from your own video, don’t try to fool the audience with fake images.
• Use interesting images from later on your video as a teaser to keep the audience watching.
• Having human interaction or close up faces as thumbnails will more likely affect the viewers’ emotions.

2.   Create buzz on social media

When you’re doing a video marketing campaign, your focus should be on video sharing platforms like YouTube, as well as social media like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. On average, people spend almost two hours of their time on those platforms every single day. Sounds like a good goldmine to promote your brand, doesn’t it?

Tips:

• Post high-quality videos regularly and engage with your audience to build your brand presence.
• Optimize the use of tags on YouTube and hashtags on social media, so that your content becomes searchable.
• Reach out to influencers and other more popular brands to promote your content, in exchange for something in return.

3.   Optimize it to be SEO friendly

Social media are platforms to build your brand awareness and presence. The end goal remains to bring the audience to your website, so you can convert them into loyal paying customers. Thus, it’s important that the videos on your website are search engine friendly.

Tips:

• Provide transcription to your video, so it will appear on general Google searches.
• Optimize your video file metadata with related and user intent keywords on the video’s title and description.
• Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

4.   Make sure it’s mobile-friendly

As we mentioned before, most videos are watched on mobile devices. A survey conducted by Facebook found that people are 1.5x more likely to watch videos on a smartphone than on a computer.

Tips:

• Use responsive video players like YouTube, Vimeo, or Brightcove. Those platforms will automatically increase or reduce video quality according to the viewers’ bandwidth.
• Watch out for the text size, because a text that appears big on a TV screen will look small on a smartphone screen.
• Adjust the video playing time according to your purpose. An hour-long behind-the-scenes video is suited for YouTube, while a 60 seconds teaser is best for Instagram.

5.   Create a clear call-to-action

Make sure to include a clear call-to-action in every video that you post. Without a clear CTA, viewers will be confused and not sure of what to do next. If you want more traffic to your site, it’s your duty to make it easier for the audience to find your site.

Tips:

• Use YouTube End Screens (the last 5-20 seconds of a video) to include up to four clickable elements, you can send people to your website, your other videos, channels, or particular landing page.
• When posting on social media, include a CTA and a link that leads to your website or landing pages.

Based on the audience’s demand for more video-based content and the emergence of YouTube as the second largest website in the world, video marketing seems to be the future of content marketing.

If you want to get started with more video marketing, we made a list of 100+ video making and marketing tools, including:

• DIY Animation Tools
• Video Marketing Platforms
• Live Streaming Platforms
• Video Editing Tools
• Interactive Videos
• Sound Effects Library
• Stock Video Library
• Sound Recording Tools
• Scriptwriting Utilities

Nat McNeely is Digital Marketing Manager of Breadnbeyond, an award winning explainer video company. 

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Instagram Marketing Partner caught scraping data. Instagram has sent HYP3R, one of its former ad partners, a cease-and-desist letter after Business Insider revealed the company was scraping user data. According to Business Insider’s report, the company had taken advantage of “configuration errors and lax oversight” on Instagram’s part, making it possible to harvest a high volume of public user data that was meant to vanish after 24-hours.

An Instagram spokesperson said HYP3R’s actions were not sanctioned and violated its ad policies: “As a result, we’ve removed them from our platform. We’ve also made a product change that should help prevent other companies from scraping public location pages in this way.”

But HYP3R argues it didn’t break the rules, claiming it was accessing public data and that, “Any issue with Instagram would be resolved shortly.” Business Insider said it is unclear how much data HYP3R accessed, but the company claims it has a dataset that includes “hundreds of millions of the highest value consumers in the world.” Sources connected to HYP3R told Business Insider that more than 90% of that data was from Instagram.

Facebook’s latest move to fight ad fraud. Facebook has filed a lawsuit against LionMobi and JediMobi, two app developers accused of click injection fraud on the Facebook Audience Network ad platform. According to Jessica Romero, Facebook’s Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, the app developers created apps available via the Google Play store designed to infect users’ phones with malware that produced fake user clicks on Facebook ads.

“Our lawsuit is one of the first of its kind against this practice,” writes Romero on the Facebook Newsroom blog, “Facebook detected this fraud as part of our continuous efforts to investigate and stop abuse by app developers and any abuse of our advertising products. LionMobi and JediMobi have been banned from Audience Network and their accounts have been disabled.” Romero said the advertisers impacted by LionMobi and JediMobi’s ad fraud practices were refunded in March of this year.

Ad fraud continues to be an industry-wide problem, but platforms are paying more attention to publisher and advertiser concerns and taking actions to reduce problematic activity. Google announced this week that Google Ad Manager and AdMob, Google’s mobile ad network, will support IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt anti-fraud protocol for app publishers beginning August 27. When implemented, the app-ads.txt protocol blocks ad serving of unauthorized in-app ad inventory for publishers.

ProKarma expands offerings with latest acquisition. The digital services company ProKarma has acquired Connective DX, a digital experience agency with offices in Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts. “Together, we will expand on our end-to-end digital capabilities while defining, designing, and engineering best-in-class solutions that transform businesses and elevate the customer experience,” said ProKarma Co-Founder Vijay Ijju.

“It’s a remarkable fit between our two organizations, and I am thrilled to see the meaningful growth potential with our joint teams and clients,” said Connective DX CEO Paul Williams.

Both companies currently have their headquarters in Portland, Oregon. According to the announcement, the acquisition will help “fuel” ProKarma’s expansion into the Northeast U.S., as well as help build out ProKarma’s content and martech capabilities with the addition of Connective DX’s customer-focused solutions.

On the Move

Leo Burnett Chicago has promoted Jordan Doucette to Chief Creative Officer, reporting to the agency’s President and Chief Strategy Officer, Emma Montgomery and Leo Burnett Worldwide’s Chief Creative Officer, Liz Taylor. “Jordan’s open approach to creativity helps deliver great work from big, integrated teams and brands. She is a true partner and is the evolution of what a creative leader needs to be in today’s environment,” said Montgomery. Previously, Doucette held the role of EVP/Executive Creative Director at the agency, and was the creative lead for The Kellogg Company and Miller-Coors accounts. In her new role, she will continue as the creative lead for marquee clients and oversee the agency’s creative and production departments.

Saad Rehmani has been named Vice President of Engineering at Reddit. He is tasked with scaling the company’s engineering organization, optimizing site performance and supporting the launch of new features on the platform. “With the growth of our engineering teams in recent years, we knew we needed someone that had proven themselves in leading large teams with a focus on staying flexible and nimble. Saad has the right mix of experience to evolve and support our teams as they tackle our ambitious plans for the future,” said Reddit CTO Chris Slowe. Rehmani comes to the social platform with more than 15 years of experience leading engineering teams, most recently as the VP of Engineering for GrubHub.

Veracode, an application security testing platform, has named Elana Anderson Chief Marketing Officer. She will report to CEO Sam King and lead the technology company’s global marketing, branding and communications programs. “Elana’s success building global brands in established and emerging markets is a testament to her deep technology expertise and marketing prowess. She is a proven executive with boundless energy and innovative ideas that will help us further our mission to help our customers change the world securely and drive the next chapter of Veracode’s growth,” said King. During her career, Anderson has served as the CMO for Vidyo and SVP of Worldwide Marketing for Demandware.

Craig Stimmel, the former head of digital media and global partnerships for P&G, has been recruited by Snap to serve as its new head of brand partnerships. Based in Chicago, Stimmel will lead efforts to gain bigger budgets from Fortune 500 brands on the social platform, according to Business Insider. Stimmel was with P&G for more than eight years. During his time there, he led efforts to bring more media buying in-house and gathered first-party data from P&G’s own platforms.

Paradigm Talent Agency has named Lori Feldman as its first chief marketing officer. In her new role, Feldman will lead brand partnerships and marketing efforts for clients in the music area, as well as work on enhancing brand and partnership opportunities for the agency’s talent and literary clients. “She is an innovative thinker with vast experience working with artists and brands to create cultural moments that resonate around the world,” said Paradigm CEO Sam Gores. Before joining Paradigm, Feldman served as the executive vice president of strategic marketing for Warner Records.

Pet food company WellPet LLC has appointed Clark Reinhard as its new chief marketing officer. Clark will be charged with accelerating global growth across WellPet’s family of brands and oversee brand management, marketing, advertising and public relations for a number of the company’s product lines. “We’ve strategically invested in brands that are shaping the pet nutrition category and are putting team members in place uniquely experienced to help them flourish,” said the company’s CEO Camelle Kent. “There’s no doubt in my mind Clark will do just that for all of our brands at WellPet.” Reinhard previously led growth strategy efforts, marketing and product innovation at Ocean Spray.

Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” talks about how to set up your newly created robots.txt file.

If you are not sure how to create your own robots.txt file or are not sure what one is, head on over to our first part of this article series, “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” were you will be able to learn the ins and outs of what a robots.txt file is and how to properly set one up. Even if you have been in the SEO game for some time, the article offers a great refresher course.

How to add a robots.txt file to your site

A Robots.txt file is typically stored in the root of your website for it to be found. For example, if your site were https://www.mysite.com, your robots.txt file would be found here: https://www.mysite.com/robots.txt. By placing the file in the main folder or root directory of your site, you will then be able to control the crawling of all urls under the https://www.mysite.com domain.

It’s also important to know that a robots.txt is case sensitive, so be sure to name the file “robots.txt” and not something like Robots.txt, ROBOTS.TXT, robots.TXT, or any other variation with capital letters.

Why a robots.txt file is important

A Robots.txt is just a plain text file, but that “plain” text file is extremely important as it is used to let the search  engines know exactly where they can and cannot go on your site. This is why it is an extremely import part of your website.

Once you have added your brand new robots.txt file to your site or are simply just making updates to your current robots.txt file, it’s important to test it out to make sure that it is working the way that you want.

While there are lots of sites and different tools that you can use to test out your robots.txt file, you can still use Google’s robots.txt file tester in the old version of Search Console. Simply log in to your site’s Search Console, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on → Go to old version

Then click on Crawl → robots.txt tester

From here, you’ll be able to test your sites robots.txt file by adding the code from your file to the box and then clicking on the “test” button.

If all goes well, the red test button should now be green and should have switched to “Allowed”, once that happens, it means that your new created or modified robots.txt file is valid. You can now upload your robots.txt file to your sites root directory.

Google updates to robots.txt file standards effective Sept 1

Google recently announced that changes are coming to how Google understands some of the unsupported directives in your robots.txt file.

Effective September 1, Google will stop supporting unsupported and unpublished rules in the robots exclusion protocol. That means that Google will no longer support robots.txt files with the noindex directive listed within the file.

If you have used the noindex directive in your robots.txt file in the past to control crawling, there are a number of alternative options that you can use:

Noindex in robots meta tags: Both of these tags are supported in both the HTTP response headers and in HTML. However, the noindex directive is the most effective way to remove URLs from the index when crawling is allowed.

404 and 410 HTTP status codes

Both of these status codes mean that the page does not exist, which will drop any URLs that return this code from Google’s index once they’re crawled and processed.

Password protection

Adding password protection is a great way to block Google from seeing and crawling pages on your site or your site entirely (thinking about a dev version of the site) Hiding a page behind a login will generally remove it from Google’s index as they are not able to fill in the required information to move forward to see what’s behind the login. You can use the Subscription and paywalled content markup for that type of content, but that’s a whole other topic for another time.

Disallow in robots.txt

Search engines can only index pages that they know about (can find and crawl), so by blocking the page or pages from being crawled usually means its content won’t be indexed.  It’s important to remember that Google may still find and index those pages, by other pages linking back to them.

Search Console Remove URL tool

The search console removal tool offers a quick and easy way for you to be able to remove a URL temporarily from Google’s search results. We say temporarily because this option is only valid for about 90 days. After that, your url can again appear in Google’s search results.

To make your removal permanent, you will need to follow the steps mentioned above

• Block access to the content (requiring a password)
• Add a noindex meta tag
• Create a 404 or 410 http status code

Conclusion

Making small tweaks can sometimes have big impacts on your sites SEO and by using a robots.txt file is one of those tweaks that can make a significant difference.

Remember that your robots.txt file must be uploaded to the root of your site and must be called “robots.txt” for it to be found. This little text file is a must have for every website and adding a robots.txt file to the root folder of your site is a very simple process

I hope this article helped you learn how to add a robots.txt file to your site, as well as the importance of having one. If you want to learn more about robots.txt files and you haven’t done so already, you can read part one of this article series “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples.”

What’s your experience creating robots.txt files?

Michael McManus is Earned Media (SEO) Practice Lead at iProspect.

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American society isn’t just more diverse than it’s ever been – that diversity is now highly visible. More than ever, consumers are demanding marketing that pays attention to representation and shows the American public as it is: A huge and varied spectrum of races, bodies, genders and socioeconomic classes.

It’s understandable that some companies are struggling with these new standards – after all, things have changed rapidly in the past decade – but it’s time for anyone who’s been on the fence to start making an active attempt to create better representation in their marketing. Today, we’ll take a look at a few key questions that can help your team create respectful, inclusive and, ultimately, more effective marketing campaigns.

How is diversity defined?

First, let’s talk about what we mean by the term “diversity.” You might hear the word tossed around a lot, but what does it mean on a practical level? Diversity, as we’re going to be discussing it, is:

• Creating spaces and media that are inclusive to people of color, people with disabilities, people outside the gender binary and more.
• Acknowledging the existence of and representing these people in your marketing campaigns.
• Following established best practices for using language about race, gender, disabilities, etc.
• Avoiding harmful stereotypes and not using race, gender or disability as a punchline.

While these definitions will be helpful, it’s equally important to figure out what diversity means to your business specifically. It might mean fixing the representation in your ads when it doesn’t accurately reflect your brand’s demographics, or it might mean taking a stand on an issue that’s important to many people in your audience. For some businesses, it may even mean acknowledging harmful things that have been associated with your brand in the past and taking responsibility for them.

Why does diversity in digital marketing matter?

So, why is it so important that your digital marketing campaigns feature inclusive representation? Several different studies suggest that there are a variety of ways that diversity matters in marketing, including:

• 80 percent of marketers agree that using diverse representation in ads helps a brand’s reputation.
• Millennials and Generation Z consumers alike prefer media with diverse casts, view ads with diverse representation more favorably and are more comfortable with brands taking social stances.
• Aiming products and campaigns at previously unserved markets can create great new revenue streams, as the story of Fenty Beauty’s expanded foundation range shows.
• Diversity and representation are top drivers of engagement with content and Black millennial audiences have actively asked for more in surveys. 

Diversity in digital marketing also has a defensive side. A solid grounding in diversity principles is important for reducing costly gaffes and potential PR disasters such as Dolce & Gabbana’s ill-advised campaign featuring a Chinese woman attempting to eat various American foods with chopsticks. Saying the wrong thing can be much worse than saying nothing at all, and having a diverse staff who are empowered to candidly call out a misstep is the best way to prevent that.

How can you make your digital marketing more diverse?

Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand to wave and create “instant diversity.” Inclusion has to be grown organically from a marketing philosophy that rewards and celebrates it, and that usually requires some long-term work. Some of the diversity steps that marketers can begin taking today include:

• If diversity is like growing a flower garden, you have to prepare the soil first, so the best way is to start with your team. Diversity-centered hiring practices are a subject unto themselves, and if you haven’t yet embraced them, that’s something to work on first. If you don’t have representation on your marketing staff, your representation in your campaigns will suffer. 
• Businesses that already have a diverse team in play should remember that their minority team members aren’t there to rubber-stamp marketing materials as “certified unproblematic.” Make sure that they’re being asked to take the lead on plenty of projects, particularly ones that are aimed at a group they’re a member of. 
• Robust market research can help identify demographics your brand may have been under-serving. Try to understand the specific concerns that motivate people from different cultures and how your marketing may have been missing a beat. Using social media listening services can be a great choice for discovering how a diverse audience relates to your brand on social channels.
• Curate some customer-centered diversity by offering customers a place to upload content related to your brand, such as a YouTube channel. And if you work with social media influencers in your campaigns, you have another great opportunity to improve representation by making the effort to reach out to a demographically varied group of relevant influencers. 

Remember that these aren’t one-and-done tricks to score some easy points. It’s critical to approach diversity as a constant process rather than as an achievement. Keep a running list of improvements you’d like to make and don’t be afraid to add to it.

What mistakes can derail digital marketing diversity?

With issues as potentially sensitive as those surrounding diversity and representation, it’s no surprise that there are some important pitfalls to be aware of and avoid. Some key mistakes many brands make when they’re trying to create inclusion and diversity include:

• Using people as token representatives to pander to a certain group.
• Trying to wade into social issues that are out of your brand’s depth.
• Getting defensive (rather than listening and learning) when your marketing is criticized for lack of diversity or sensitivity.
• Using “victim/hero” language when discussing people with disabilities.
• Not aligning your message and your practice (such as publicly supporting transgender rights when the brand’s physical spaces don’t offer gender-neutral restrooms).

Representational diversity can be a fine line to walk, and it takes practice and commitment. Diversity in marketing is best created from the ground up by a team that already has a culture of inclusion in place. Without a foundational grounding in what it means to be diverse, your efforts will often fall short or backfire. That means that there’s no shortcut – only the hard but extremely rewarding work of building up your business as an inclusive institution.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Taking control of a site’s technical SEO is both an art and a science. Take it from me — a content strategist guy at heart — technical SEO requires a balance of knowledge, diligence, and grit to be proficient. And for many, it can feel both daunting and complicated undertaking such technical matters.

But as code-heavy and cumbersome as technical SEO may seem, grasping its core concepts are closely within reach for most search marketers. Yes, it helps to have HTML chops or a developer on hand to help implement scripts and such. However the idea of delivering top-tier technical SEO services shouldn’t feel as intimidating as it is for most agencies and consultants.

To help dial-in the technical side of your SEO services, I’ve shared five places to start. These steps reflect the 80/20 of technical SEO, and much of what I have adopted from my code-savvy colleagues over the past decade.

1. Verify Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console; define conversions

If you maintain any ongoing SEO engagements, it’s critical to set up Google Analytics or an equally sufficient web analytics platform. Additionally, establishing Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console will provide you with further technical SEO capabilities and information about a site’s health.

Beyond just verifying a site on these platforms, you’ll want to define some KPI’s and points of conversion. This may be as simple as tracking organic traffic and form submissions, or as advanced as setting-up five different conversion goals, such as form submissions, store purchases, PDF downloads, Facebook follows, email sign-ups, etc. In short, without any form of conversion tracking in place, you’re essentially going in blind.

Determining how you measure a site’s success is essential to delivering quality SEO services. From a technical standpoint, both Google Search Console and Analytics can provide critical insights to help you make ongoing improvements. These include crawl errors, duplicate meta data, toxic links, bounce pages, and drop-offs, to name a few.

2. Implement structured data markup

Implementing structured data markup has become an integral element to technical SEO. Having been a topic of focus for Google in recent years, more and more search marketers are embracing ways to employ structured data markup, or Schema, for their clients. In turn, many CMS platforms are now equipped with simple plugins and developer capabilities to implement Schema.

In essence, Schema is a unique form of markup that was developed to help webmasters better communicate a site’s content to search engines. By tagging certain elements of page’s content with Schema markup (i.e. Reviews, Aggregate Rating, Business Location, Person, etc.,) you help Google and other search engines better interpret and display such content to users.

With this markup in place, your site’s search visibility can improve with features like rich snippets, expanded meta descriptions, and other enhanced listings that may offer a competitive advantage. Within Google Search Console, not only can use a handy validation tool to help assess a site’s markup, but this platform will also log any errors it finds regarding structured data.

3. Regularly assess link toxicity

It should be no secret by now that poor quality links pointing to a site can hinder its ability to rank. Even more so, a site that has blatantly built links manually using keyword-stuffed anchor text is at high risk of being deindexed, or removed from Google entirely.

If you just flashed back 10 years to a time when you built a few (hundred?) sketchy links to your site, then consider assessing the site’s link toxicity. Toxic links coming from spammy sources can really ruin your credibility as a trusted site. As such, it’s important to identify and to disavow any links that may be hindering your rankings.

[Not only does the Backlink Audit Tool in SEMRush make it easy to pinpoint potentially toxic links, but also to take the necessary measures to have certain links removed or disavowed.]

If there’s one SEO variable that’s sometimes out of your control, it’s backlinks. New, spammy links can arise out of nowhere, making you ponder existential questions about the Internet. Regularly checking-in with a site’s backlinks is a critical diligence in maintaining a healthy site for your SEO clients.

4. Consistently monitor site health, speed, and performance

An industry standard tool to efficiently pinpoint technical bottlenecks for a site is GTmetrix. With this tool, you can discover key insights about a site’s speed, health, and overall performance, along with actionable recommendations on how to improve such issues.

No doubt, site speed has become a noteworthy ranking factor. It reflects Google’s mission to serve search users with the best experience possible. As such, fast-loading sites are rewarded, and slow-loading sites will likely fail to realize their full SEO potential.

In addition to GTmetrix, a couple additional tools that help improve a site’s speed and performance are Google PageSpeed Insights and Web.Dev. Similar to the recommendations offered by GTmetrix and SEMRush, these tools deliver easy-to-digest guidance backed by in-depth analysis across a number of variables.

The pagespeed improvements provided by these tools can range from compressing images to minimizing redirects and server requests. In other words, some developer experience can be helpful here.

A last core aspect of maintaining optimal site health is keeping crawl errors at a bare minimum. While actually quite simple to monitor, regularly fixing 404 errors and correcting crawl optimization issues can help level-up your technical SEO services. These capabilities are available in the Site Audit Tool from SEMRush.

[The intuitive breakdown of the Site Audit Tool’s crawl report makes fixing errors a seamless process. Users can easily find broken links, error pages, inadequate titles and meta data, and other specifics to improve site health and performance.]

5. Canonicalize pages and audit robots.txt

If there’s one issue that’s virtually unavoidable, it’s discovering multiple versions of the same page, or duplicate content. As a rather hysterical example, I once came across a site with five iterations of the same “about us” page:

• https://site.com/about-us/
• https://www.site.com/about-us/
• https://www.site.com/about-us
• https://site.com/about-us
• http://www.site.com/about-us

To a search engine, the above looks like five separate pages, all with the exact same content. This then causes confusion, or even worse, makes the site appear spammy or shallow with so much duplicate content. The fix for this is canonicalization.

Because canonical tags and duplicate content have been major topics of discussion, most plugins and CMS integrations are equipped with canonicalization capabilities to help keep your SEO dialed-in.

[In this figure, the highly-popular Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress has Canonical URL feature found under the gear icon tab. This simple functionality makes it easy to define the preferred, canonical URL for a given page.]

Similarly, the robots.txt file is a communication tool designed to specify which areas of a website should not be processed or crawled. Here, certain URLs can be disallowed, preventing search engines from crawling and indexing them. Because the Robots.txt file is often updated over time, certain directories or content on a site can be disallowed for crawl and indexation. In turn, it’s wise to audit a site’s Robots.txt file to ensure it aligns with your SEO objectives and to prevent any future conflicts from arising.

Lastly, keep in mind that not all search engine crawlers are created equal. There’s a good chance these pages would still be crawled, but it is unlikely they would be indexed. If you have URLs listed as ‘do not index’ in the robots.txt file, you can rest easy knowing anything in those URLs will not be counted as shallow or duplicate content when the search engine takes measure of your site.

Tyler Tafelsky is a Senior SEO Specialist at Captivate Search Marketing based in Atlanta, Georgia. Having been in the industry since 2009, Tyler offers vast experience in the search marketing profession, including technical SEO, content strategy, and PPC advertising. 

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Agencies are faced with a growing challenge – many of their corporate clients are transforming to agile and the ways they’ve always worked together needs to change, but how?

I’ve seen corporate marketing departments embark on their agile transformation journey, but they forget to tell their agency partners about the change. The agency becomes the last to know and it causes tremendous strain to the relationship.

The agency/client relationship needs to be re-defined when implementing an agile practice. Before you make the same mistakes that many of my clients have, here are some early conversations you can have.

Contracts need to be flexible

A traditional agency/client contract is very detailed in its scope of work. An agile team needs the ability to pivot quickly based on customer responses and if all work is a contractual obligation, this hamstrings the agile team.

Instead of a detailed scope contract, turn to a flexible working agreement. The flexible working agreement is best done in the form of a retainer. Here’s an example of what’s included:

• The goal of the engagement.
• The desired outcomes of the work.
• The people needed to do the work.
• The duration of time the agency will engage with the team.

When an agile team is formed, their goal is to have all of the necessary people to do the work from start-to-finish. However, many companies are still missing key skill-sets internally and need to engage an agency.

So on an agile team, the objective of the agreement should be to beef up some missing skills on the agile team.

The best way that agencies can work with agile teams is to bring the fulltime talent to be embedded with the team. While this may not always be possible, it is a lot more effective for the client to have a few agency team members that can be part of the team than a dozen that swoop in and out. That’s because agile is all about collaboration, teamwork and working together every day. A bunch of agency people that come in and out becomes really inefficient and disruptive to how the team is trying to work.

I worked with a team of content marketers that had some great writers but were missing development and design people on the team. By lending two people to the agile team for a six-week project, it was a win-win for everyone. The agency was able to provide fixed pricing for the needed skills on the team without locking them into specific deliverables.

The relationship becomes a partnership

We just talked about the people that do the work, but I realize that agencies also add tremendous value by helping with strategy, consumer insights and pitching concepts. These are still all great assets to an agile team, but how and when this work is performed takes on a new spin when working with an agile team.

Traditionally, agencies spend a lot of upfront time coming up with a strategy and concepts and presenting a multitude of ideas to their clients.

With agile marketing, the team typically has a product owner (often referred to as a marketing owner in the marketing department) that is responsible for strategy and prioritization of work.

So rather than ideas being pitched to the marketing owner for a reaction, the agency and the marketing owner become a collaborative pair and work through strategy together, ahead of the agile team who is responsible for implementation.

In agile marketing, the team works off of a single prioritized marketing backlog. The marketing owner should work with a single strategist from the agency to help populate the backlog. There may be others engaged from the agency behind the scenes, but to the agile team there should be one primary contact.

The goal of the prioritized marketing backlog is to have the highest value items that the team is going to work on clear and ready to go. However, the backlog really just gets into what the team will work on and some expected outcomes – it’s the team that figures out how the work gets done.

Populating the backlog happens at the beginning of any new initiative and before the team starts implementation, but it isn’t a one-and-done task. The backlog evolves throughout the engagement as the team gets real feedback from stakeholders and customers.

Agencies and companies can be fantastic partners in an agile organization as long as they work together upfront to redefine the relationship in a way that’s flexible and team-based.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.