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Facebook announced on Tuesday it has made ranking updates to its News Feed algorithm, aiming to reduce posts that contain exaggerated or sensation health claims, as well as posts that promote or attempt to sell products or services based on health-related claims.

“We know that people don’t like posts that are sensational or spammy, and misleading health content is particularly bad for our community,” wrote Facebook Product Manager Travis Yeh, “Pages should avoid posts about health that exaggerate or mislead people and posts that try to sell products using health-related claims.”

Why we should care

Marketers managing Facebook Pages for healthcare products or services should be mindful of the messaging they are using on the platform. To determine if a post should be downgraded, Facebook gave the following clarification: “We consider if a post promotes a product or service based on health-related claim — for example, promoting a medication or pill claiming to help you lose weight.”

Facebook said it is identifying phases commonly used in these types of posts to predict which may include sensational health-related claims, and then demoting such posts lower in the News Feed.

Facebook’s example offers a pretty broad measuring stick in terms of how its algorithm is downgrading posts with health-related claims. It’s safe to say any posts from Pages that include exaggerated health claims or misleading content will be moved further down the News Feed. The company said the ranking updates fall in line with its previous moves to reduce low-quality content and clickbait headlines.

More on the news

• The algorithm updates were rolled out last month.
• Facebook said it does not anticipate Pages will see any significant changes to their distribution of content within the News Feed because of this update, barring those that may be trying to use exaggerated or misleading content around health-related claims.
• In March, Facebook announced it was reducing the News Feed and Search rankings for groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations.

Google Sandbox is a commonly believed filter that’s used by Google to prevent new websites from ranking high in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It’s believed that Google uses this filter to put some restrictions on rankings for new websites.

The main idea behind it is that new websites may not be as relevant as the old ones. Moreover, some of them may even be spam.

While Google has never confirmed the existence of such a system, many SEOs believe that it exists. They claim so because they have seen such effects on websites that they are trying to rank. This is why it is extremely difficult to avoid being placed in the Google Sandbox when your domain is new.

So, does Google Sandbox still exist in 2019? If it still does, how do you avoid getting affected by it? Let’s take a deeper look into it.

The history of Google Sandbox

In 2004, a lot of SEOs found that their new websites weren’t ranking well on Google during their first few months. And this happened in spite of the best of their efforts. While their websites were easily indexed by Google, they weren’t able to rank well for even low-competition keywords. On the flip side, they were ranking well on other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.

This effect of Google Sandbox lasted for several weeks and months and it varied for each website. The idea of such a system made sense because Google aimed to provide only the most authoritative and quality content to its users. Rand Fishkin from Moz believed that SEOmoz was in Google Sandbox for about nine months. This happened in spite of having a good backlink profile.

“SEOmoz is finally Sandbox free for the first time since our move to this domain nine months ago. We aren’t alone, either. Many folks had sites escape, and I’m happy for all of them. It looks like our 12,000+ all‐natural links (never link built for this site, just link‐baited) finally paid off.”

Rand Fishkin, Co‐founder Moz

In 2014, yet again, Google Sandbox caught the interest of SEOs and marketers when they saw that their new websites weren’t able to rank easily. Now that we know a brief history of Google Sandbox and what it can do, let’s look at how it is working in 2019.

What does Google say about Google Sandbox?

Google pretty much denies the existence of this Sandbox. In fact, you can see it through many tweets by Google’s employees.

Source: Twitter

Even a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google said the same thing –

“With regards to sandbox, we don’t really have this traditional sandbox that a lot of SEOs used to be talking about in the years past. We have a number of algorithms that might look similar, but these are essentially just algorithms trying to understand how the website fits in with the rest of the websites trying to rank for those queries. […] It’s always kind of tricky in the beginning when we have a new website and we don’t quite know where we should put it.”

– John Mueller

However, the former head of webspam at Google did end up giving a few hints about it.

“My answer is not to worry that much. The difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one-year-old is really not that big at all. So as long as you’ve been around for a least a couple months, a few months, you should be able to make sure that you’re able to show up in the search results.”

– Matt Cutts

Why does a new website not rank high on Google?

Google’s experts have mentioned that they need enough data to rank a site. A new website must show its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness to Google. Additionally, it should have a good backlink profile. However, it is very unlikely that a new website can win Google’s trust within a very short period of time.

Here are a few reasons why a new website may not rank high on Google.

1. Less content

To understand your website’s relevance to a certain topic, Google needs to go through your website’s pages. If your website doesn’t have enough content on it, Google may not be able to fully understand what your website is meant for.

2. Low on backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important factors for ranking a website on Google. If your website has a weak backlink profile, Google may not rank it higher up in searches. Moreover, your website should have internal links that can allow link juice to pass through them. You might succeed in building loads of backlinks in a very short period of time but if they are not of high quality, Google may just ignore them.

You must also be very careful as rapidly grown backlink profiles may even give you penalties from Google.

3. Lesser user signals

Google may take time to analyze the behavioral data of your website visitors. For this reason, it may postpone ranking your website higher up in search results for popular keywords. It’ll observe things like click-through rate, dwell time, and bounce rate to see if your website is worthy of ranking higher up.

Now that you know why your website could be in the Google Sandbox, let’s figure out how you can get out of it quickly.

Is Google Sandbox still affecting sites in 2019?

There are many SEOs out there who claim that their website ranks high up in the search results within just a month of launching. On the other hand, there are other SEOs who believe that there is definitely some force that is stopping their websites from ranking in the search results during their first few months.

However, through our study, we found that even a new website can rank higher up in searches within a short time period. We launched our blog website in June 2018 and within just four months we managed to reach the first page of search results. As you can see in the screenshot, there is a huge fluctuation in the average position graph. This was the time when Google started collecting data about our website. You can notice from the chart that after two months, there was a consistent increase in the rankings. We got the 9.5 average position for the whole site in Google Search Console.

We also ranked a few other sites with higher volume keywords in less than six months. So, according to our research, Google Sandbox is a myth. With consistent efforts, you can rank high up in SERPs in a short duration.

What did we find during our study?

My own theory is almost the same as Google says. Google Sandbox doesn’t exist according to me. It could be possible that Google doesn’t prefer to rank new sites but it doesn’t mean that a new site can’t rank higher. Google wants to rank trusted and useful content. But for a new site, Google doesn’t have the required information to rank it. As soon as you are able to show to Google that you are genuine and trustworthy, you will start ranking higher.

I found that the ranking of a new site depends on its niche, competition, and your SEO strategy. These are the most important factors, according to me. For example, one of our sites started ranking with only social signals. It was a modeling niche site. We didn’t focus on link building for that site. We were just sharing its content on social media. In just a few weeks, keywords started ranking on the first page. Some higher competitive keywords were not ranking.

Rest of it depends upon your SEO strategy. Are you focusing on branding or rankings?

Let me explain, if you’re focusing on acquiring more links, it means you want rankings. But if you want links from top-tier high authority sites, means you are trying to build a brand. And Google loves brands. These days, Google is working for the future. SEO-friendly content and more backlinks are not enough to rank your website. You should focus on branding if you want to rank in a short time and for the long term. Try to get exposure, create online buzz, brand searches, and user satisfaction.

How to rank higher quickly?

While Google Sandbox can be annoying for new websites, there are methods you can use to get out of it quickly.

Here are a few things you can do:

1. Get your website indexed quickly

Your website may have already gone live, however, it doesn’t start aging in the eyes of Google unless it is actually indexed by it. To check if your website has been indexed by Google, you simply need to do a Google search. Just type “site:yourdomain.com” to check how many pages of your website have been indexed by Google.

If it has not been indexed yet, you need to get it done as soon as possible. To speed up the process, you can register the domain on Google Search Console and submit your XML sitemap.

2. Traffic

Getting traffic to your website is very important, especially in its early days. It is one factor that can help your website rank higher up and get out of Google Sandbox quickly. To get more visitors to your website, you should consider posting regularly in forums and groups on Facebook.

You can even try guest posting on other popular websites to drive traffic to your website and at the same time build a stronger backlink profile. You may also run ads on Facebook and other social media platforms to drive traffic.

3. Social signals

Social signals are important to gain the trust of Google because they indicate that your website is gaining popularity on social media platforms. A great way of using social signals to your advantage is that of running Facebook ads. You can publish an article on your blog and then run Facebook ads to drive traffic to it.

4. Choose long tail keywords

Google may not give you much traction for popular keywords earlier on when you are in the perceived Sandbox. However, you may be able to rank well for long tail keywords. To do this, you will first need to do keyword research and check the competition for every long tail keyword that you intend to target. You can use tools such as Ubersuggest and SEMrush to do this.

It is also a good idea to conduct competitor research and go after the keywords that they are ranking for. Using tools such as SEMrush, you can conduct competitor research by simply entering the URL of your competitor.

5. Build authority

“Google Shows Popular, Google doesn’t make you popular” – Google

Google wants authoritative, trustworthy, and user-friendly content to rank on top. As a new site, Google doesn’t know much about you because they don’t have enough data about your website.

So you should build authority and trust in the eyes of Google and users. Google will trust you if your site has good user-metrics, links, mentions from high-authority and relevant sites, and brand queries for your site. You should build more authority for your site.

6. Don’t be too aggressive

Focus on quality than quantity.

You may want to see your website high up in the SERPs. However, if you become too aggressive in promoting your website and link building, Google may see it as spam. You should try to acquire premium links for your new site. Only a few but premium links can change the picture.

Ideally, you shouldn’t build a huge number of links in a short period of time. Moreover, you should drip-feed the foundational links that you’ve built. Don’t optimize your anchor text too much, it’s preferable to keep it under-optimized. Lastly, make sure that you get good enough social signals.

It’s a good idea to give your website a slow and steady start. This will help it grow and prosper in the long run and will help in building more trust with Google. Once Google trusts you more, you can become slightly more aggressive in your link building methods.

7. Purchase an active website

One of the easiest ways of avoiding Google Sandbox is that of purchasing a website that is already active. You can do so by spending a decent sum of money on a website that has decent traffic and has been online for quite some time but has hardly any income.

Using tools such as Flippa, you can find websites which are already active and then can purchase and repurpose them to fit your requirements. Moreover, purchasing an already active website can help you figure out the power that the domain has by checking which keywords the website already ranks for.

Final thoughts

What do you think about Google Sandbox and what is the best way of getting out of the Google Sandbox? Let us know in the comments.

Harpreet Munjal is the founder of the digital marketing company, LoudGrowth. He can be found on Twitter .

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Last week the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) strongly reasserted a position it articulated last year in favor of national privacy regulation. The trade organization is also calling for preemption of current and pending state privacy laws – especially the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is set to take effect six months from today. 

National advertisers want one law. The ANA, in a June 27 letter to the FTC stated, “a national privacy law should preempt inconsistent state laws, enhance the development of a competitive level playing field for marketers and other businesses, and assure consumers that their data will be used by business only for approved non-discriminatory purposes.”

Many of the ANA’s arguments have merit (e.g., GDPR and and CCPA tend to favor large incumbents with first-party data), while others are more cynical and appear interested in preserving as much of the status quo as possible (“consumers support the data-driven advertising model that has subsidized and enabled the vast and varied content, products, and services they are able to access at little or no cost to them”). 

No federal privacy law likely before 2020. To date, multiple privacy and consumer data protection bills have been introduced in Congress by both Republicans and Democrats. However, it’s unlikely that there will be any comprehensive federal privacy legislation that gets passed before the 2020 election. That means that CCPA will take effect (the FTC can’t preempt state laws) and companies across the U.S. will be forced to contend with it as the de facto consumer privacy law of the land.

The current state of CCPA preparedness is muddled at best, according to a new survey of 345 privacy and IT professionals by IAPP and TrustArc. This is partly about the confusion surrounding the state of the law and partly exacerbated by the proliferation of vendors. There are also budget challenges and questions about who has control over privacy-related software decision-making.

Privacy vendor ranks swelling. IAPP documented roughly 50 privacy tech vendors across nine product categories in 2017. At the end of 2018, the organization identified 200 vendors across 10 product categories. And the numbers are still growing.

Source: IAPP and TrustArc, n=345 (2019)

The IAPP-TrustArc report identifies three broad categories of businesses in the market: those that are actively testing solutions today, those planning to purchase in the next year, and those not planning to purchase. Above is a chart that shows adoption by privacy product category and region. An earlier TrustArc survey found that fewer than 15% of companies were compliant with CCPA, as of May 2019.

The current IAPP-TrustArc survey identifies “Lack of budget/resources,” “getting approval” and the “immaturity of privacy tech solutions” as the top three barriers to privacy software adoption. The “need to demonstrate compliance” is the top motivator by contrast.

Private contracts, not legal exposure, will drive compliance. One vendor, Cuebiq, argues that “the need to demonstrate compliance” will drive the market. However, regulators and public officials will not be the primary parties demanding evidence of CCPA compliance. According to Cuebiq CEO Antonio Tomarchio, third-party contracts will require compliance. “Indemnification clauses in contracts from brands and agencies will demand the ability to audit data compliance under CCPA.”

Cuebiq, which also provides location analytics, offers a “Consent Management and Data Provenance (CMDP) solution,” based on blockchain. “Because data provenance is captured and easily audited,” says Tomarchio, “it offers protection for brands and agencies buying audiences.” This is only one of many privacy software solutions, as indicated, although Tomarchio says its blockchain-based approach is currently unique.

Why we should care. While there is lots of discussion of privacy compliance these days, many marketers still fantasize the whole issue will go away. It won’t. The right and pragmatic attitude is to take a “privacy forward” approach and start taking the steps outlined in this article to comply.

Even if federal legislation is passed at the 11th hour, preempting CCPA (unlikely), the measures companies have taken toward compliance today will make it that much easier to address any alternative, less strict federal framework tomorrow.

Search engines and people love the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages. Having a well-written FAQ section on your website is a great way to show online customers that you care about their experience and get you found from outside your website, directly responding to the needs of your audience and their search queries.

For good reason, voice search is becoming increasingly popular. Google reports that 20% of searches are voice related. So, it cannot be denied that people are looking for easier and faster ways to get answers to their questions.

FAQ content can drive a bunch of highly targeted traffic to your website. In many cases, business owners have to use it as a winning content marketing strategy. Here are some reasons why you should create an SEO-friendly FAQ section:

• It helps refund and customer service inquiries.
• It attracts potential customers and builds trust in your business.
• It improves your SEO rankings because Google values that your website is focused on helping people to get all the information to take an educated decision on your product.

So, if you want to get the most out of your FAQ resource, you should build it right. Here are five ways to make it both focused and comprehensive.

1. Collect relevant FAQs

Before creating your FAQ page, it’s crucial to raise the right questions to educate your online customers about your service or product and generate demand. It takes a thorough and continuous question research, a lot of planning, and a little strategic work.

If you have a support center or customer service reps – frontline employees that are always getting bombarded with questions, you can easily find out what questions your customers regularly ask. They are valuable sources of information for collecting questions and giving answers to multiple people at the same time.

To take this further, collecting customer and visitor feedback is a good practice to improve any business. Online survey tools like Survey Anyplace helps you create an online survey questionnaire, identify pain points that your target audience has, and supplement your content with unique data and insights.

Keyword research tools like SE Ranking lets you detect the most popular keywords people are using around the web. The tool uses a separate algorithm that generates the most common words in your niche questions together with search volume, traffic cost, keyword effectiveness index (KEI), and other parameters. You can easily filter and export your results so it can be saved.

Source: SE Ranking

While Google highlights a lot of insight into the most popular questions, forums like Quora or Reddit will bring up the most trending questions people are interested in at this very moment. The best way to find questions is to follow a particular category and check for new questions on a regular basis. There is also an additional benefit of making more meaningful connections out there and position yourself as a niche expert.

Check out your competitors’ FAQ pages, product reviews for items in your niche, and look closer at what they are doing, and what questions they answer that you haven’t. Have you heard these questions from your consumers before? Adopt their best experiences and improve your FAQ page.

2. Implement structured data

Adding structured data to your FAQ page is a good way to become more visually appealing in the SERP, get a higher average click-through rate, and pull ahead of your competitors in your niche. Fortunately, Google recently added support for FAQ structured data in search and Google Assistant.

By implementing this structured data, you can make your content eligible to show questions and answers directly on Google Search and the Assistant. Notice that FAQ can be used for single pages that provide official questions and answers.

You should not be confused with Q&A Page markup that is designed for sites like forums, Quora where users can submit answers to questions. You can find out more about this markup in the FAQ developer.

Here’s how it looks like in the search.

To learn more about implementation details for Google Assistant, you can visit a FAQ Action with markup.

To track any FAQ issues and search appearance, Google included a new enhancement report in Search Console. It displays all warnings, errors, and valid items related to your FAQ pages.

3.  Think visually

Sometimes a picture is a better way to explain touch concepts, grab attention, and make the learning process more fluid. Don’t limit your answers to text. Use stunning and well-designed images, graphics, illustrations or videos to add more visual appeal to your FAQ page and make it easier for visitors to receive clear answers to their questions.

For example, if you’re giving instructions for executing a specific process, or are providing details about how to use a certain feature of one of your services, images, charts, graphics, and screenshots can guide customers through it step-by-step. They simply help people break up big chunks of text and improve their comprehension.

4. Build a brilliant navigational structure

No matter how well-written your FAQ section is, it’s not going to get to your prospects if users can’t find it or even navigate it. Giving your FAQ section a structure will improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and SEO for the entire website.

If you have longer FAQ pages, many categories, and subcategories, search functionality will make it easier for users to find answers instantaneously. It keeps them from clicking through your knowledge base to find the right question. Notice that the FAQ search is distinguished from the general search option of the website. Consider this difference to shorten the number of search results and provide the right solutions for your customers.

Source: HeroThemes

It’s a good idea to divide questions into categories and lead to informative subheadings. For example, shipping, sizing, features, and other such relevant details – and in case you provide a long list of questions.

In the image given below, Pepper offers the FAQ page that is intuitively categorized and easy to navigate.

Source: Pepper

To reduce your page to a more manageable size, you can list only the questions and include links to take readers to the answers. It’s great for SEO as it drives traffic to many pages on your site and causes high spikes in page views that Google measures to decide how valuable your content is. If you want to optimize your FAQ section for search queries, this structure can be a good fit for that.

Source: Mint.com

Make short SEO-friendly URLs for each FAQ post to simply direct customers to exactly the right answer, build trust in the searcher and easily share useful information with others. Use popular social media to spread the word about your FAQ page.

5. Check analytics on a regular basis

Once you’ve created your FAQ page, you should start with the analytics of your website in order to see whether the page is getting traffic and ranking for useful keyword phrases.

Are users visiting your FAQ page or are they going by? How long do they stay? Where do they go after looking at the FAQ page? What paths are they taking? Getting these meaningful and actionable insights, you can add some minor changes or rework your page to better direct visitors to the FAQ section.

To get advanced web analytics, you can start a quick overview of a page in Finteza. The tool features full-cycle data management to find out whether your marketing campaign has reached desired targets, which channels and sources generate the highest traffic and how conversion rate can be further improved.

Source: Finteza

Checking analytics regularly will help you fine-tune your FAQ pages and other web pages within your site.

Wrapping up

Generally, an FAQ page looks like an afterthought for many websites. But if used strategically, it can give you much value in different ways, from reducing purchase anxiety to easing the burden on support teams.

What’s more, you’ll be able to educate your teams and yourself while creating a list of FAQ questions, and offer a better service or product on the go.

Are you making the most of your FAQ page? What tactic works well for your business? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

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Most marketers are equipped with copious amounts of data that help us understand our customers, create meaningful messaging that resonates with our audience and drives the business outcomes we need to achieve our goals. Marketers also have the ability to translate different trends across customers and prospects such as strong lead generation sources, common themes, objection trends and overall responses to different campaigns. But, many organizations operate in siloes, making it difficult to share these data points with the necessary people.

A solution? Establish a revenue optimization team to bring together the key internal players in your organization to improve alignment and ultimately, drive more revenue. 

Marketers and sales need to track the same goals

Thanks to the amount of valuable information accessible through our martech stacks, marketers can — and should — play a critical role in establishing a customer-centric revenue optimization team.

“Revenue optimization starts with the idea of putting the customer in the center of every interaction an enabling everyone to align around the customer to generate value in every interaction,” said Patrick Morrissey, chief marketing officer of customer revenue optimization platform, Altify. And according to Morrissey, marketers should play a critical role as part of the revenue team, and are best positioned to lead the charge. For many marketers, this requires a shift in thinking about our revenue contributions.

“From a marketing perspective, thinking about the fundamental outcomes, marketers have to start thinking of themselves as part of the revenue team,” said Morrissey. “This intersection presents an opportunity for marketers who are generally better communicators to become the translation mechanism for an entire team. Instead of tracking pipeline, marketers need to track revenue in closed/won business along with the sales team.”

The shift in mindset expands past the marketing team, however. According to Jenn DiMaria, senior manager of client services at marketing automation solution provider Digital Pi, the shift in mindset needs to be organizational. “Marketing is often viewed as a cost center, but in reality, other teams are lusting after the tools and data we have access to,” said DiMaria. “Aligning a revenue team creates opportunities for marketers to improve accessibility  to the data and help bridge gaps with other parts of the organization.” 

Marketers, get closer to the customer

Marketers tend to be far removed from any interactions with customers, but it is extremely valuable to engage face-to-face with customers. After all, marketers understand that relationship-building is key to retaining customers.  According to Morrissey, marketers need to put themselves in the shoes of the customer in order to understand their challenges.

“Marketers should focus on how we can get out of our own way and put ourselves in the shoes of the customers,” said Morrissey. “Going on the road to meet with salespeople and sit with customers will help marketers better understand the market, the broader changes in technology and fundamentally how to help customers succeed, personally and professionally.”

“Marketers need to have some real-world customer experience, explained Mary Ngai, founder of Connector42 and head of analytics and technology at RI. “Even if marketers are listening on sales calls, it can be incredibly insightful in grasping a better understanding of their needs.” Ngai also recommends that marketers attend customer site visits during ongoing projects or sales deals to increase visibility into accounts.

In addition to more face time with customers, Morrissey recommends that marketers lead internal account reviews and deal reviews with the sales and customer success teams. Regularly reviewing the accounts with members of different parts of the organization will expose different issues and areas that can be addressed by the necessary members of the revenue optimization team. Working with customer success can also bring to light what some of the daily challenges and successes the customer experiences — valuable insight for marketers as they developing retention campaigns to drive renewals. 

Leading the path to revenue optimization

Revenue optimization teams present an opportunity for marketers to leverage their communication, analytical and creative skills to improve holistic marketing efforts in coordination with other internal departments. 

“Marketers have proven that we can lead revenue optimization teams as we typically bear the brunt of the responsibility when it comes to acquiring new leads and we have to track our efforts,” said DiMaria. “Also, tools that have entered the market in the past ten years have made this possible.”

The concept of implementing a fundamental shift in thinking may seem overwhelming, but the long-term benefit is streamlined efforts across your organization and consistent communication around prospect and customer activities.

“If you think about the customer journey, we’re all trying to get a numeric view of the customer — BDRs are measured by the total number of call they make and are concerned with propensity-to-buy data,” said Morrissey. “Marketers are providing that data, creating segments and determining what funnel to put a prospect in. Then we talk about deal size or ACV, then finally we’re just an NPS score. Marketers are the ones who can best translate this into plain English, for everyone to understand.”

One of the biggest advantages of running a paid search campaign is the ability to bid on keywords that would be difficult (if not impossible) for your website to rank for organically.

The best example of this is bidding on competitors’ brand or product names. For example, if you’re in the athletic shoe/apparel industry, you’d probably want to bid on Nike or UnderArmour branded terms. So, if you’re not running any competitor focused campaigns right now, you are definitely missing out.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are five steps to set up and run a successful competitor-focused SEM campaign.

Step one: Do your research

First things first, you’ll want to go through a current list of competitors and perform preliminary keyword research on each of them, one-by-one.

Preliminary research should cover average monthly search volume, the number of relevant keyword variations, estimated keyword bids, and any potential conflicts or double-meanings – a classic example would be “Apple” the company or “apple” the fruit) within the keyword phrases you are considering targeting. This should include not only the competitors’ brand names but also all product name(s) that your company competes with directly. You’ll want to repeat this step for every competitor on the list.

Step two: Choose your competitors wisely

After going through the research portion mentioned in step one you’ll want to narrow down your list and focus on just your top three competitors. Why only three? To ensure your messaging is tightly focused around each competitor and that your key differentiators against each specific product can be clearly communicated in both the ad copy and on a custom landing page (more on landing pages in a minute). So how do you determine which three competitors to focus on?

After completing step one you should have the quantitative data needed to determine if it’s worth targeting certain keywords related to a specific competitor or product. But don’t just go off of the numbers alone. You’ll also want to account for strategic business reasons that could outweigh factors such as monthly search volume or estimated bid numbers. For example, your company is planning to launch a new product in the coming months and wants to hit the ground running.

If everything still looks good at this point then you can continue with your standard keyword research/selection process. But be sure to keep the following in mind:

• Use exact match if a brand or product name has an abnormally high average monthly search volume.
• Include all relevant brand/product name variations as well as common misspellings.
• Pay close attention to the following queries – “alternative to [your competitor]”, “[your company name] competitors”, or “[your competitor #1] vs [your competitor #2]”. You’ll likely want to include these phrases in your campaign.

Step three: Landing pages (the bread and butter)

Let’s face it, landing pages are your workhorse. They can make or break your campaign. Because of this, I always recommend creating a unique landing page for each competitor. You may be thinking, that’s going to take a lot more time, is it really worth it?

The answer is yes and the reasons are simple, relevance and context. Relevance is important because you’re going to be bidding on keywords with the intention of “stealing” traffic away from your competitors. And context is critical because if the prospect’s intention was to find out more about one of your competitors, you are steering them off their original course. This is fine but you need to make it clear how you’re adding value to their research efforts.

With this in mind, let’s go over a few specific recommendations when it comes to creating engaging competitor-focused landing pages.

First, it’s important to immediately convey that the content is all about “You vs. Specific Competitor X”. Since people are going to be actively searching for information on Competitor X, you’ll not only want to show them the info they’re most likely looking for but also how your company stacks up against said info. So, for example, by creating a basic three column table with the first column listing out the features/functions, the second showing how your company performs against that feature/function and the third how your competitor stacks up. It’s an easy, visual way to convey the focus of the page and provide the visitor with the information they were probably searching for in the first place.

Ideally, you want to make sure the content is designed to give the visitor a fair comparison of you and your specific target competitor. This is particularly true for certain queries such as, “alternative to [your competitor]”.

Step four: A/B testing from the get-go

Marketers are constantly told that they need to be doing more A/B testing. But is this overkill? Yes and no. You definitely want to be following the ABT (Always Be Testing) rule when it comes to running any digital campaign. But too much testing can eat up time and resources that could be spent on other campaigns or initiatives.

So, to help mitigate, you’ll want to take steps to streamline testing right off the bat. For example, don’t use your competitor’s name directly in the ad copy itself. Depending on your industry and level of competition this might not be an issue (local “mom & pop shops” probably haven’t trademarked their business name). However, for any decent size company, you’ll have to assume their name will be trademarked, which means your ad will get rejected for using a trademarked term. To save time it’s best to avoid using brand names in your copy.

The testing in your ad copy should focus on testing different key differentiators in relation to a specific competitor. The reason for this is simple, you won’t be able to include every single differentiator in your copy due to character count restrictions. So instead you have to focus on the most compelling ones.

Note: These differentiators should be included on the corresponding landing page as well.

Lastly, when running this kind of A/B test you’ll want to make sure to change only one element at a time. If you’re changing more than one element at a time it can be difficult to determine the true cause of any fluctuation in performance. For example, if you change headline one in an ad, you’ll want to keep description one and the CTA consistent.

Step five: Quality over quantity

Last but definitely not least, let’s talk about leads, you know, the reason we’re all running these campaigns in the first place.

Too many companies focus on the wrong thing when it comes to leads – Raw numbers. What companies really need to focus on is quality. Revolutionary, I know. But how can you assess quality?

First, start by looking at the following information – Was a work email provided? Did the prospect provide their title? If so, does it fall in line with your target audience? Does their company match your target company revenue/size/industry targets?

The answers to these questions will tell you if your campaign is on the right track, or if adjustments need to be made. They will also provide valuable context, something the raw number of new prospects generated won’t be able to.

With that said, there is still value in continuing to track and report on both, the total number of new prospects (which is quantity) as well as the number of designated “ideal fit” prospects (which is quality). Taken together, these metrics will help you to determine how successful your campaign has been.

Running a successful competitor focused paid search campaign can be tough. From the setup to the ongoing optimization and the reporting, it’s non-stop data gathering, analysis, copywriting, and A/B testing. But if you follow these five steps, it should help to streamline the process and make it easier to manage.

Related reading

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When using nontechnical techniques, sound marketing principles ultimately lead to increased web rankings. Simple techniques to adopt for Google visibility.

It’s always best to have tools and processes in place. Obviously, you don’t need anything fancy. You could start by setting up Google Alerts.

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Constant Contact announced an integration with WooCommerce is now available to merchants using both platforms. Constant Contact also revealed enhancements to its current integration with Shopify.
 
Features such as email automation, personalization, segmentation and triggered emails will be available to customers who connect their WooCommerce platform to their Constant Contact accounts.

Shopify customers can expect more personalization capabilities and a better view of customer data, including order activity and customer revenue. Additional segmentation features will also be available. Constant Contact will also provide live marketing support for its customers.

Why we should care

According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize them by name, remember their preferences and provide them with relevant offers. These integrations bring more advanced email marketing capabilities to merchants. The ability to tie together data from e-commerce platforms into the email marketing platform, if done correctly, could generate more value for smaller merchants, in particular.

“Creating a marketing strategy for e-commerce is not just about how to get more sales,” said Luca Sechi, vice president of corporate strategy at Constant Contact., “but also making the customer experience better, generating repeat business, creating brand awareness, and building lasting customer relationships.”

More on the news

• Small businesses using WooCommerce will be able to sync contacts and send automated emails to first-time customers, purchasers in the last 30 days, repeat customers and more.
• The Shopify integration will allow customers to define segments with additional data including email open and click activity and contact details such as location and birthday month.
• Constant Contact is also offering marketing support to customers by phone or online chat.