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Once you start documenting your martech stack, as we at Third Door Media did earlier this year, you realize how complex and wide-ranging the tendrils of your technologies can be. That’s why I’m so impressed by all of the companies that took on the challenge of entering this year’s Stackie Awards competition, which was sponsored by AirStack.

The Stackies seek to recognize the best visual representation of a company’s marketing technology infrastructure, and five outstanding winners got that well-deserved recognition this evening at our MarTech Conference in San Jose, where conference chair Scott Brinker announced the results of the judging. Many congratulations to the winners (in no particular order): Sargento Foods, ESRI, Juniper, Airstream and Paychex!

We’ll tell you a bit about the winners and their companies elsewhere, so here we’ll let you ooh and aah over the winning entries. Each of the images in the gallery below can be expanded with a click of the mouse or tap of the mobile screen, so you can look closely at all of the detail represented in these images. (Just hit the back button on your browser to return to the gallery.)

Paychex

Sargento Foods

Airstream

ESRI

Juniper

This article originally appeared on MarTech Today. Check it out for more martech goodness!

About The Author

Pamela Parker is Content Manager at Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.

In the first article of my luxury search marketing series, I discussed the consumer mindset in the luxury vertical. I provided insight into what motivates luxury shoppers and what drives them to purchase.

In the second article, I’ll build upon that foundation and explore how to craft SEO strategies that enable luxury marketers to maximize results in this highly competitive space.

This article’s SEO recommendations address “on-page” ranking factors. Moz defines “on-page SEO” as optimizing both the content and HTML source code of the webpage. Prioritizing on-page SEO will help luxury marketers increase their organic search visibility by (1) Improving search engine rankings, and (2) By driving traffic to their website.

Read also: 10 on-page SEO essentials: Crafting the perfect piece of content

Unfortunately, the work doesn’t stop once you have great on-page SEO. As I explained in my first article, consumers often purchase luxury goods to satisfy an emotional need. So, to truly maximize conversions, luxury marketers should deliver an emotionally fulfilling shopping experience. I’ll share some ideas on how to do this with high-quality content.

1. Understand keyword intent and get your brand in front of the right buyers

It is critical to understand the intent behind customers’ search behavior. You need to understand what they want in order to effectively optimize your website and create a solid foundation for a content strategy. Keyword research, which involves strategically analyzing intent, will enable you to understand consumers’ specific needs and how you should be targeting those searchers.

There are three basic types of search intent:

• Navigational – These searchers are looking for a website or location. For example, “Gucci,” or “Gucci.com”. Search results lead to the brand’s domain, i.e. Gucci.com.
• Informational – These searchers are looking for specific information. For example, “Chanel leather types,” “what is caviar leather?” Search results lead to web pages that provide specific information, like guides and lists about the types of Chanel leather or more detailed information about what caviar leather is.
• Transactional – These searchers are looking to take a specific action such as buy a product or book a service. For example, “buy Jimmy Choo shoes,” “where to buy gold handbags?” Search results lead to retailer websites where you can buy Jimmy Choo shoes or gold handbags.

Putting it into practice

How do you know if your website is addressing your customer’s intent? Start by evaluating your keyword targeting. Look beyond search volume and ask yourself if your keyword targeting matches the search intent. For example, if your page is informational in nature, is the term you are targeting and optimizing for consistent with an informational-based keyword search? Manually check the search results to ensure that the keyword and page you are targeting is a right fit for what’s appearing in the search results.

Read also: How to move from keyword research to intent research

2. Invest in your meta description to win the click

Although meta descriptions have not been a direct ranking factor since 2009, click-through rate can impact your website’s pages’ ability to rank. Given this, marketers need to continue to invest in meta descriptions. Although custom meta descriptions are more work (especially when you’re dealing with ecommerce sites where content frequently changes), it’s worth the effort you put in to get the click.

How do you write a stellar meta-description? Here are a few tips.

1. Prioritize your evergreen pages

Evergreen pages are those pages where the page itself stays the same, even though the content may change slightly over time. These are your main landing pages, specifically your homepage and category level pages, such as “designer collections” or “jewelry & accessories”  where most of your traffic comes from. Even if the content changes slightly, these pages will have the chance to build up equity/credibility within the search engines so make sure you nail the meta description.

2. Paint a picture

In my first article, I explained how many consumers purchase luxury goods to fulfill emotional needs. Use the meta description as an opportunity to address those needs and create an experience. You can do this with visually appealing descriptions that make great use of action verbs. Action verbs deliver important information and add impact and purpose. The click-through rate improved by almost 2% on a page my team optimized using more descriptive copy. Some examples are:

1. Take a peek at the latest handbag designs.
2. See yourself in the tropics with this collection of flowy dresses.
3. Achieve the perfect business look.
4. Get sun-kissed denim jackets, shirts, and other apparel.

3. Create urgency with your calls-to-action

In my first article, I also discussed the importance of communicating exclusivity when promoting luxury products. Use the meta description as a way to create a “fear of missing out” with your call-to-action. Some examples are:

1. Shop this limited edition today!
2. Check out our exclusive collection today!
3. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime trip!

4. Make sure it fits

Be mindful of character limits. Make sure you stay within 150 to 160 characters, otherwise your description will likely be cut off in search results. It doesn’t provide the user with a good experience when a key part of your message is missing.

5. Hire a professional copywriter

If you are struggling with writing creative and compelling descriptions, I strongly recommend working with a professional copywriter, especially for your website’s key pages. Good copywriters can add the magic touch to your meta descriptions.

Read also:

Putting it into practice

Conduct an honest assessment of your meta descriptions. Is this something you would click on for more information? Winning the click can help improve your click-through rate, and as a result, your SEO ranking position. More importantly, it can help improve your conversion rate which translates into sales and more money earned.

And don’t forget to take stock of what your competitors are doing. Are they winning the click because they are using more creative descriptions, and more enticing, urgent calls to action?

3. Create emotionally fulfilling and relevant content that reiterates the urgency

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of emotionally fulfilling content in luxury marketing. So, what exactly qualifies as emotionally fulfilling content? What type of content or shopping experience is going to trigger that dopamine hit that makes us feel good and go back for more?

In its most basic sense, emotionally fulfilling content is content that makes you feel something. Think about a story that you love. Do you remember how it felt to be totally immersed in the story? If it were a book, you couldn’t put down. Or if it were a TV show that you had to binge-watch for the entire series, you had to keep watching because you couldn’t get enough.

That’s the type of content I’m talking about. It’s content that leaves you feeling satisfied, content, and engaged. This type of content fulfills our high-level needs as we discussed in the first article. Buying that Fendi handbag, or Rolex watch, can give us the confidence we need and appeal to our sense of belonging.

We connect with stories, especially stories we can relate to. Chanel does a great job with this type of website content. I’m a Chanel brand fan and a jewelry lover, so Chanel’s 1.5, 1 Camelia. 5 Allures resonates with me. Chanel creates an experience that you can truly immerse yourself in.

Consumers aren’t the only ones who love good content

For years Google has been stressing the importance of high-quality content.  This type of content is written for the user, not the search engine, but we know that the engines tend to reward strong content with an increase search engine ranking position.

In addition to strong content, the use of urgency elements and descriptive calls-to-action are powerful ways to drive conversions. How often have you scrolled through a website to find your desired product with a “limited quantity – only three left!” label. That’s a powerful motivator that pushes consumers to drive in-the-moment purchases. Leveraging the “fear of missing out” is a powerful tactic that can be applied to products to help drive conversions. Lyst had a 17% conversion rate increase when they showed items on product pages that were selling quickly.

You can create urgency in a few different ways:

1. Quantity limitations (Only one left at this price!)
2. Time limitations (Discounted tickets until 1st April!)
3. Contextual limitations (Mother’s Day is coming, buy a gift now!)

Putting it into practice

Spend some time examining your content. Is it emotionally fulfilling and relevant enough for your customer? Is this something you would be interested in? If not, what can you do to improve it? Content that is emotionally fulfilling and relevant often tells a story and keeps your users coming back for more. Remember, Google tends to reward this type of content with increased search engine rankings.

Also, consider how you can incorporate urgency elements onto specific pages. Think in terms of quantity, time, and context.

Final thoughts

Content that’s relevant and creates an emotionally fulfilling experience for the user should be at the heart of any luxury brand’s marketing campaign. We crave this content because of the experience that it provides for us and how it makes us feel. Don’t forget about the dopamine connection!

The foundation of your SEO campaign should start with keyword intent research. It’s not just enough to target search volume alone, you must balance that with user intent. Finally, invest in your meta description by creating something that’s truly enticing that makes people want to click through, learn more about your brand, and get them to convert.

In the final article in the series, we’ll tie everything together and discuss integrating search marketing with other channels in the luxury goods industry. Stay tuned!

Jennifer Kenyon is a Director of Organic Search at Catalyst (part of GroupM). She can be found on Twitter @JennKCatalyst.

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EBay notified merchants and publishers Tuesday that it will be closing down its third-party ad network, the eBay Commerce Network (ECN), as of May 1.

Why you should care

After five years, ECN will shut down as eBay says it is turning attention to advertising solutions for the core marketplace. “As a result, we are focusing on business that complements our core marketplace and discontinuing eBay Commerce Network effective May 1st, 2019,” the company said in a statement.

“For the health of the core marketplace, eBay is making a concerted effort to shift its reliance from third-party advertising to first-party advertising,” it added

In lieu of ECN ads, merchants on eBay are encouraged to consider promoted listings, ads that appear at the top of search and product pages, and other premium ad formats on the eBay marketplace. An alternative for publishers is the the eBay Partner Network, an affiliate proposition in which content creators share links to eBay listings and get paid when they generate sales.

More on the news

• Ads will stop serving May 1. Publishers should remove ECN tags from their sites, and merchants should pay any outstanding invoices and turn off their feeds after May 1.
• Publisher and merchant accounts will be accessible until June 28. Be sure to download any reporting before that date.
•  The company reported nearly 150% revenue growth in promoted listings, with 600 thousand active sellers promoting 200 million listings in Q4 2018.
• ECN came out of eBay’s acquisition of comparison shopping site Shopping.com in 2005. The company rebranded and re-posititioned Shopping.com to ECN in 2013 as a commerce ad network. Shopping.com continued as a site within the network of publishers. Merchants could advertise across ECN with a product feed in the U.S. and international markets. ECN launched with several hundred publishers with a goal of scaling the network. It remained relatively small with some 1,000 merchants and advertisers each currently using it. It’s not clear what eBay will now do with the Shopping.com domain.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

Back in September 2018, Google launched its Dataset Search tool, an engine which focuses on delivering results of hard data sources (research, reports, graphs, tables, and others) in a more efficient manner than the one which is currently offered by Google Search.

The service promises to enable easy access to the internet’s treasure trove of data. As Google’s Natasha Noy says,

“Scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else can find the data required for their work and their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.”

For SEOs, it certainly has potential as a new research tool for creating our own informative, trustworthy, and useful content. But what of its prospects as a place to be visible, or as a ranking signal itself?

Google Dataset Search: As a research tool

As a writer who has been using Google to search for data since about a decade, I’d agree that finding hard statistics on search engines is not always massively straightforward.

Often, data which isn’t the most recent ranks better than newer research. This makes sense in an SEO sense, that which was published months or years prior has had a long time to earn authority and traffic. But usually I need the freshest stats, and even search results pointing to data on a page that has been published recently doesn’t necessarily mean that the data contained in that page is from that date.

Additionally, big publications (think news sites like the BBC) frequently rank better than the domain where the data was originally published. Again, this is unsurprising in the context of search engines. The BBC et al. have far more traffic, authority, inbound links, and changing content than most research websites, even .gov sites. But that doesn’t mean to say that the user looking for hard data wants to see BBC’s representation of that data.

Another key issue we find when researching hard data on Google concerns access to content. All too regularly, after a bit of browsing in the SERPs I find myself clicking through only to find that the report with the data I need is behind a paywall. How annoying.

On the surface, Google Dataset Search sets out to solve these issues.

A quick search for “daily weather” (Google seems keen to use this kind of .gov data to exemplify the usefulness of the tool) shows how the service differs from a typical search at Google.com.

Results rank down the left-hand side of the page with the rest of the SERP real estate given over to more information about whichever result you have highlighted (position one is default). This description portion of the page includes:

• Key URL links to landing pages
• Key dates such as the time period the data covers, when the dataset was last updated and/or when it was first published
• Who provides the data
• The license for the data
• Its relevant geolocation
• A description of what the data is

By comparison, a search for the same keyphrase on Google in incognito mode prioritizes results for weather forecasts from Accuweather, the BBC, and the Met Office. So to have a search engine which focuses on pure, recorded data, is immediately useful.

Most results (though not all) make it clear to the user as to when the data is from and what the original source is. And by virtue of the source being included in the Dataset Search SERPs, we can be quite sure that a click through to the site will provide us access to the data we need.

Google Dataset Search: As a place to increase your visibility

As detailed on Google’s launch post for the service, Dataset Search is dependent on webmasters marking up their datasets with the Schema.org vocabulary.

Broadly speaking, Schema.org is a standardized way for developers to make information on their websites easy to crawl and understandable by search engines. SEOs might be familiar with the vocabulary if they have marked up their video content or other non-text objects on their sites. For example, whether they have sought to optimize their business for local search.

There are ample guidelines and sources to assist you with dataset markup (Schema.org homepage, Schema.org dataset markup list, Google’s reference on dataset markup, and Google’s webmaster forum are all very useful). I would argue that if you are lucky enough to produce original data, it is absolutely worth considering making it crawlable and accessible for Google.

If you are thinking about it, I’d also argue that it is important to start ranking in Google Dataset Search now. Traffic to the service might not be massive currently, but the competition to start ranking well is only going to get more difficult. The more webmasters and developers see potential in the service, the more it will be used.

Additionally, dataset markup will not only benefit your ranking in Dataset Search it will also increase your visibility for relevant data-centric queries in Google too. An important point as we see tables and stats incorporated more frequently and more intuitively in elements of the SERPs such as the Knowledge Graph.

In short:

• Getting the most out of your data is straightforward to do.
• The sooner you do, the more likely you are to have a head-start on visibility in Dataset Search before your competitors.
• And it is good best-practice for visibility in increasingly data-intuitive everyday search.

Google Dataset Search: As a ranking signal

There is a good reason to believe that being indexed in Dataset Search will be a ranking signal in its own right.

Google Scholar, which indexes scholarly literature such as journals and books has been noted by Google to provide a valuable signal about the importance and prominence of a dataset.

With that in mind, it makes sense to think a dataset that is well-optimized with clear markup and is appearing in Dataset Search would send a strong signal to Google. This would signal that the respective site is a trusted authority as a source of that type of data.

Thoughts for the future

It is early days for Google Dataset Search. But for SEO, the service is already certainly showing its potential.

As a research tool, its usefulness really depends on the community of research houses who are marking up their data for the benefit of the ecosystem. I expect the number of contributors to the service will grow quickly making for a diverse and comprehensive data tool.

I also expect that the SERPs may change considerably. They certainly work better for these kinds of queries than Google’s normal search pages. But I had some bugbears. For example, which URL am I expected to click on if a search result has more than one? Can’t all results have publication dates and the time period the data covers? Could we see images of graphs/tables in the SERPs?

But when it comes to potential as a place for visibility and a ranking signal, if you are a business that collects data and research (or you are thinking about producing this type of content), now is the time to ensure your datasets are marked up with Schema.org to beat your competitors in ranking on Google Dataset Search. This dataset best practice will also stand you in good stead as Google’s main search engine gets increasingly savvy with how it presents the world’s data.

Luke Richards is a writer for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ. You can follow Luke on Twitter at .

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Slime. It’s the biggest crafting craze of 2018 and a rising video sensation. There were nearly 25 billion slime video views last year. Big box retailers are reporting glue shortages across the country.

Crafting brands are getting into the game, sponsoring content and making last minute products like sparkly glue to jump on the trend. That’s great. But, more brands need to look more deeply at trends like slime and its cousin ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). Both offer an opportunity for brands to connect to consumers in entirely new ways, on video and in real life.

Are you taking ASMR seriously?

Visually stimulating slime videos are a part of a growing category of wildly popular videos that are being labeled ASMR. These videos offer little controversy and provide consumers with a calming time-out from real life. A small set of brands like IKEA and Dove created viral ASMR videos already. Michelob went so far as to create an ASMR Superbowl commercial.

These one-off commercials are not genuine attempts to be part of the trend but rather were created as tongue-in-cheek cultural references. Similar to slime, real ASMR videos are largely the domain of influencers, and they’re banking billions of video views with long engagement times from viewers that take the content seriously.

With such a trend that is mostly new content, with an unknown amount of staying power, most brands will see bigger rewards by advertising against the content rather than creating their own. Across billions of views, slime videos average 1.5x the engagement of YouTube’s average. To do that well, brands will need to reset their approach. Influencers are not impressed with advertisers to date. This ASMR influencer even created a video to try to teach brands to tone down the volume to better assimilate with ASMR content.

The glue that binds

The different slime video types appeal to different audience segments, which is good for a host of brand categories like beauty, retail and even fitness. The influencers creating content offer deeper audience insights that can help brands select the right type of content for their target audiences, and then create a retargeting strategy to further expand their scale. Broad targeting against the latest craze can be an ad spend black hole, but, for trends such as ASMR and slime videos, a little bit of data goes a long way towards creating a strategy that sticks.

Brands often see great success buying media against influencers in the beauty and fashion space with a growing category called “Get ready with me” videos. Brands are often able to specifically identify the demographics engaging with that influencer and get a read on the universe of other content by that creator who has similar watch times and engagement within those same demographics.

Staying on top of slime

Such new and varied trends like slime or ASMR need to be watched carefully. When content views skyrocket around particular events or themes, there can be serious brand safety risks if brands try to ride the wave without adequate monitoring. A recent focus on the role of comments on YouTube shows that even innocent content can contain elements that brands will need to review and refine regularly, especially when parts of the category appeal to kids.

Trending content like slime videos will attract new content creators nearly every day, who can take the genre in new directions. These new videos are nearly always brand safe, but may not be brand suitable, and so it’s still important to keep a watchful eye. For example, Some slime videos include makeup or branded toys like Play-Doh, which an advertiser might not want to advertise against for competitive reasons.

The magic of YouTube is that brands can connect with consumers on very new content topics and themes, well before most linear and traditional digital content creators catch on. Viewers and influencers both take the category seriously. It’s time for brands to do the same.

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

About The Author

Tony Chen is CEO and Founder of Channel Factory, an award-winning ad platform which helps top global brands and agencies maximize YouTube advertising. Recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30, Tony is also an avid angel investor in e-commerce companies Trendy Butler, FabFitFun, a lifestyle subscription service, and Outreach.io, a sales technology company named by Forbes in their Next Billion Dollar Startups list in 2018.

When you ask any question in Google or search with any keyword, a special block of information may appear, which is known as a featured snippet.

This block will contain an extracted summary of the answer from a webpage, a link to that page, and most of the time, a related image. Google extracts the summary programmatically. If you can place in any particular keyword for the featured snippet, you will get special attention of the person searching about that topic. The result? More clicks, more traffic.

Here is one example of a featured snippet, from our main site weDevs.com. The competition of that long tail keyword is relatively low, and there were not many resourceful articles about this topic on the internet. So achieving this Google snippet was easy for us.

You can opt out from featured snippets (using <meta name=”googlebot” content=”nosnippet”> tag on your page). But according to Google, there is no way to mark your page with a featured snippet. It is a fully programmatic process.

In my research about Google featured snippets, I have found some interesting things about this special block of information. In this post, I will cover them. Using these insights you can get success in your featured snippet SEO.

First of all, let’s see a featured snippet.

My search query “who was Alexander the great?”

There is an image of Alexander the great in this snippet. If you click in that image you will see the image is taken from the same webpage of biography.com.

But this is not the case for every featured snippet. Sometimes the Google bot takes the picture from one site and text from another site. Look at these images below, where I have searched for two other historical figures.

If your image has related text of the search query, it may appear in the featured snippet. I have found some of these kinds of featured snippet images, one is for the keyword SEO.

The featured snippet image can come from YouTube videos, too.

Sometimes a table of facts can appear in the special information block. Here is one example of the search phrase “Ibn Khaldun quotes”.

The webpage of this snippet has a table of quick facts about historian Ibn Khaldun in an article. Googlebot grabs the information box from there.

How to get a place in the featured snippet for a particular keyword?

1. Structure your post better than your competitors for that particular keyword. You can use snippet bait for this. Snippet bait is a 40 to 60 words block of information designed to be featured on FS. This short block of information should clearly answer the question you are targeting.

2. Optimize your content for mobile search. If your site is not mobile friendly, it will be hard for you to get a place in the featured snippet.

3. Use lots of H2 and H3 tags. These will help Google bots to identify your information fast.

4. Use a table of facts for quick summarization. Summary and table of facts also useful for readers to get a quick picture of the content.

5. List a bullet point summary with 40 to 60 words. As a reader, I find it very helpful. An example from a blog post.

6.  Find competitors’ featured snippets using SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. And then in your content, write a better snippet bait.

7. Get connected with more high authority sites by linking to them. And hopefully getting links in return.

8. From all types of the snippet (paragraph, table, and list), a paragraph snippet performs better. So, spend more time to optimize your contents with little information boxes.

9. To rank for a list snippet, a step by step guide content is most suitable. Use H2/H3 subheading tags for every step name.

10.  If you want to rank for table snippet, use tables in your content with quick facts. Table structure should be simple, well formatted so that the Google bot can easily pull data from it.

11.  Increase the site loading speed. You can read more about that here, here, and here.

12. Adopt HTTPS and secure your URL.

A case study of featured snippets: Your site’s ranking doesn’t matter much

It is not about your site’s SEO ranking or how many backlinks you have.

Mostly a featured snippet depends on the quality of the content and structure of your content. If you search by “how much muscle can you gain in a week?” you will see a featured snippet from a site named aworkoutroutine.com. This bodybuilding site is defeating bodybuilding.com in featured snippets while in the actual search result, it is in the number two position.

The content of aworkoutroutine.com is well structured, very suitable for skim reading. Also it has useful information in boxes.

Besides the content of the bodybuilding.com is just a typical structured one. We can see the SEO position of these two sites from MOZ’s link explorer tool.

Bodybuilding.com

aworkoutroutline.com

Another David and Goliath story, where the underdog is defeating the stronger. So, the basic point is, well-structured content can defeat a high ranking page in Google featured snippets.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Muradul Islam is a Business Analyst at WeDevs.

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With Google and Facebook gobbling up more of the internet ad market this year, the rest of the players are left battling for a shrinking slice of the pie, according to research and consulting firm WARC’s latest Global Ad Trends report.

Duopoly’s growing share. The report has the duopoly growing its share in 2019 to command 61.4 percent of all internet ad spend, resulting in the first decline (by 7.2 percent) of the ad spend available to other online media owners. In fact, when WARC looked at all advertising expenditures, online or off, Google and Facebook will bring in 29 percent of the total — $176.4 billion.

Why you should care. The reason Google and Facebook have been so successful, according to WARC, is their development and dominance of the ad formats online marketers have found to perform most effectively: paid search and social. Additionally, the ease of use of the self-service ad buying tools offered by both companies make their products accessible to nearly every business, from the largest to the tiniest, wrote WARC data editor James McDonald.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives and challengers, however.

Enter Amazon. But their dominant positions aren’t unchallenged. Amazon this year has released a number of improvements to its ad-buying interfaces, such as improving the usability of its DSP, extending the reach of Sponsored Products, adding a rewards program tool, incorporating customer acquisition metrics and enabling dynamic bidding for Sponsored Products ads.

WARC pegs Amazon revenues from advertising at $14 billion in 2019. It’s just 13 percent of Google’s forecast $107 billion in ad revenues this year, but, just as our own Amazon advertising survey noted, WARC found 69 percent of marketers responding to its poll intended to increase their Amazon ad spending in 2019. And WARC notes that the Amazon business threatens Google’s paid search dominance the most significantly, because the retailer can easily match up advertisers with customers that are nearly ready to make a purchase.

Though smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home aren’t yet monetizing their voice search results with ads thus far, WARC notes that Amazon’s devices are used by 63 percent of smart speaker owners, many more than use Google’s version, and they also boast 15 times more Skills than Google’s platform.

Facebook Watch hasn’t broken through. WARC notes that Google’s main competitor for streaming video dollars — valued at $30 billion in 2018 and growing rapidly — is Facebook, which has sought to position Watch as a brand-safe YouTube alternative. It hasn’t yet made much headway, however.

When it comes to competition, Facebook has done a great job of hedging its bets by developing its Instagram property at a time when Edison figures suggest as many as 15 million U.S. users — most between 12 and 34 — have departed Facebook’s core platform since 2017.

About The Author

Pamela Parker is Content Manager at Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.

Most B2B marketers are already executing, or are thinking about implementing, an Account Based Marketing strategy. Today, B2B marketing is not about generating a huge volume of leads, but rather is focused on reaching specific individuals at specific target accounts. Have you thought about the content requirements associated with ABM? Here are four tips to ensure that your content development plan supports your Account Based Marketing approach.

Marketing to an account vs. an individual prospect

Shifting your focus from lead-centric to account-centric marketing starts with recognizing that you are marketing to a group of people at a specific company, not a huge pool of unrelated prospects. This is where personalized content comes in. By delivering unique, relevant content to each target account, you enhance the customer experience and improve your overall marketing results. Let’s look at content development needs based on personas, roles, website visitors, and your lead nurturing program.

Build personas for each buyer role/tier

Start by building three to five personas that represent your target account tiers (or roles) and thinking about their job needs and content requirements.  For example:

• Tier 1: buyers within your target accounts. These are your primary decision makers. Think about the challenges and opportunities associated with their job. What problems are they trying to solve? How do they make decisions? Where do they consume information?
• Tier 2: influencers within your target accounts. These people may not have purchasing authority, but they do influence the vendor selection and buying process. What do you know about the influencer’s job? What is their role relative to the buyer? What specific challenges are they addressing? How might they inform the process?
• Tier 3: known experts in your target industries. How do these people establish themselves as industry leaders? What are they talking/writing about? Where do they share ideas? How can you increase their influence?

Develop content for each persona

Engage each persona by providing specific content, delivered in a desirable format. Make sure that the content resonates with this particular role based on their unique needs, challenges and success goals.

“You need to create stories that the right people in your targeted companies would actually like to read and share.”  – Johan Sundstrand, Freya News

Content examples by persona:

• Tier I buyers, especially those in the evaluation and selection phase, are often looking for product comparisons.  This type of information can easily be delivered in a simple chart or infographic form.
• Tier II influencers might appreciate a short podcast or video focusing on their particular challenges and needs related to this solution.
• Tier III industry experts tend to gravitate to in-depth research studies such as a downloadable eBook.

Personalize content based on persona

When developing content, think in terms of appealing to both broad groups and individual people:

• Create content that is relevant to people in a specific industry
• Create content designed for all personas at a target account
• Create content for individual people within a high-priority account

Industry-oriented content. The broadest from of ABM appeals to an industry. Using industry-specific eBooks in conjunction with web personalization presents relevant content and messaging to all prospects within this target industry.

Content for buyers and influencers. The connection at the target account must be made with multiple personas at the buyer and influencer level. The content created around the personas should resonate with where the person is in the buying-cycle.

• In the awareness stage, informational content and messaging can be used.
• Moving to the interest and evaluation stage, perhaps personalize a case study or eBook by adding more examples relevant to the target account.

Individualized content. A highly personalized piece of content using a one-to-one communication method targets one or two key individuals within your highest priority ABM accounts. Specific content, such hyper-focused messaging for invitation-only events and direct mailers addressed to the individual person is key.

78% of B2B marketers report higher-quality content creation resulted in increased overall marketing success. – 2018 Content Marketing Institute survey

Personalize your website for target accounts

Don’t forget about website visitors! I urge marketers to utilize tools such as Marketo Real-Time Personalization or Optimizely which allow you to identify the company and industry of a website visitor and serve unique, relevant content. Here are two ideas:

• Many marketers display different versions of the homepage based on visitor insights. For example, when a person in the financial services sector visits your home page, they see messaging, images and content specifically related to their industry.
• Create account-specific content to feature when people from high-priority target accounts visit your site. For example, messaging, images and content are personalized with the company name and logo.

“It’s not always ‘download this’.  You don’t always want to take people to gated content. We find that case study pages with some kind of demo call-to-action work really well in ABM.” – Sangram Vajre, Terminus

Implement account nurturing with a human-touch

ABM doesn’t end with your digital efforts. Prospects at target accounts need to be engaged and nurtured over time. Old-school direct mail items can help to build relationships with leads and move them forward in the sales pipeline.

Here are three (non-digital) marketing ideas to support your ABM efforts:

• Send a recent business report or news article to your high-priority ABM contacts.
• Handwritten letters never go out of style.
• Don’t miss the opportunity to send personal invitations to local events.

Align your content strategy with ABM success

Make sure your content strategy is aligned with your buyer personas and addresses their top challenges/needs. Ensure that content is truly helpful at each phase of the customer journey and delivered in a desirable format. Customize and personalize content whenever possible, and don’t forget to utilize non-digital channels.

We’re all familiar with the popular phrase: “content is king.” This adage has never been truer than with a  highly-targeted, personalized, account-based approach to marketing.

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

About The Author

Natasha Humphrey began her career in digital marketing in 1999 and specializes in integrating digital marketing strategies and analytics for a variety of business verticals. She has spent her career on the Agency side and is currently managing paid media accounts for SmartSearch Marketing.

Does social media have an impact on your SEO? Do retweets, shares, and likes of a page actually boost that page in search engine results?

Studies like this one by HootSuite have suggested that there’s a correlation between social media shares and higher rankings. You might have noticed that yourself: content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes.

Most experts agree, though, that rankings aren’t directly affected by social signals. (And that’s what ex-Googler Matt Cutts said on the subject a few years ago, too.)

Google+, which once included the promising Authorship markup, is soon going to be shut down.

So what’s going on? Why do posts that get shared a lot also tend to be posts that rank more highly?

Social media and SEO: Correlation, not causation

While social media shares might be correlated with better rankings, that doesn’t mean that the social media shares cause better rankings.

A piece of your content could get shared thousands of times on Twitter without necessarily budging at all in Google’s search engine results.

Instead, when social media appears to be causing a boost in ranking, this is what’s happening:

• Content that gets shared a lot gets seen a lot.
• Content that gets seen a lot is more likely to get linked to from other websites.
• Those additional backlinks are the cause of the better rankings.
• The improved rankings also lead to increased social media activity.

As AJ Kohn puts it, “It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity.”

And, back in 2017, Simon Ensor suggested here on Search Engine Watch:

“We should not be worried about whether links from social media platforms are valued in the same way as a link from a high quality and highly relevant website. Instead we should look at the benefits of utilizing social media to help boost ranking signals that we know search engines care about.”

In that post, Simon took a look at the impact of link earning, co-citation and co-occurrence and brand authority and CTR – it’s well worth a read if you want to dig deeper into why social media tends to have an impact on SEO.

Here, though, I want to focus on the practicalities: what can you do to harness the power of social media?

#1: Create content that’s worth linking to

If your site has very little content, or if the content is poorly written or uninteresting, why would anyone feel moved to link to it from their site?

A common culprit here is self-promotional content: standard web pages that advertise your services or products, or tell readers all about your company. These are important for your site – but they’re not likely to get much traction on social media.

Instead of producing more of the same on your blog, focus on creating content that’s more informational and less salesy. Maybe it’s a tutorial helping readers to do something, a collection of useful tips, a well-designed infographic, or something else that people will want to share with their audience.

You don’t need to invest a lot of time in this (though if you do have the time, it’s well worth mapping out a full content marketing strategy). Simply having a couple of really good in-depth blog posts, or some interesting and useful data, can give you the opportunities to get not only lots of shares but also links from influential websites.

#2: Don’t try to build links on social media

If you’re thinking about “building links” on social media for SEO, you’re thinking about it wrong. 

Yes, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn themselves are authoritative – but links from personal accounts on those sites tend not to be.

Firstly, most links from personal accounts are “no-followed” which means that they don’t strictly pass search engine reputation.

And secondly, from a search engine perspective, even if they did pass reputation, it would likely be from the personal user and not the social media site (so it wouldn’t be worth a lot unless that user was very influential).

On top of that, links on social media tend to get buried deep into a news feed within minutes or hours – they don’t stay visible like links on websites.

Instead of approaching social media as a way to build links, then, you need to think about it as a way to build a following. That doesn’t necessarily mean going after as many people as possible, though.

#3: Build (the right) social media following

Having a huge social media following probably won’t hurt, but it may not help as much as you’d imagine, either.

Instead of focusing on the sheer quantity of people following you, think about the quality of your following.

Being followed by just 100 people can be better for SEO than 10,000 if it includes the top 5 influencers in your industry who publish content on a regular basis.

To get noticed by these people, it’s a good idea to:

• Avoid pestering them for links: take the time to build up a relationship, and you want to think in terms of (as Michael Keating puts it on Business.com) “a partnership that lasts rather than a one-off engagement”.
• Share their content. Don’t just retweet it or share it without comment, but craft your own tweet or post where you talk about how good their piece is and why people should read it. This will make far more impact on the influencer than yet another retweet.
• Help them with their link building by linking to them from your guest posts on large blogs. As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger explains, “A  few years ago now, a blogger I’d never heard of before wrote an article for a large business publication that sent me a huge amount of traffic. It definitely got them on my radar.”

If you want to harness the power of social media to – indirectly – help your SEO, try creating valuable and interesting content, building the right following on social media, and helping out your followers (without expecting anything immediately in return).

You’ll likely see that you naturally gain valuable backlinks – and that your content, and site as a whole, begin to rank better as a result.

Related reading

2018 has been transformative for the SEO industry, it’s expected to top $80 billion in spending by 2020. AI creates new engagement possibilities.

An overview of crucial keywords for social listening, how to monitor them, and how to filter out the noise to focus on the information you need.

According to a study by Backlinko, the number of domains linking to a webpage “correlated with rankings more than any other factor”.

The most important steps to focus on for your customers when trying to improve your UX for SEO. Search query, design, navigation, snippets, content, etc.

This article has been updated to reflect changes and include video ad view count information from more platforms.

Advertisers allocated a quarter of all digital ad spend — $27.8 billion — to video ads last year, according to eMarketer. video has become big business for social platforms. Twitter attributes more than half of its ad revenue to video, its fastest growing ad format. Video ads also make up half of Snapchat’s revenue, and 30 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue, eMarketer estimates.

Yet, video ad bidding and view measurement and reporting can vary widely by platform. As the market for video ads has grown, many social platforms have expanded bidding options and reporting metrics for video ads. This can all make analyzing and comparing results across platforms a challenge.

We surveyed the major social video platforms to see what counts as a view. For Facebook and Instagram, viewing just 3 seconds of a video of any length is considered a view. For YouTube Trueview ads, it’s around 30 seconds. Others have adopted the MRC standard (see below) or a kind of variation on it. Bottom line, advertisers need to be aware how each of the platforms count and charge for video ad views because they aren’t apples to apples.

A video ad view methodology by platform

The Media Rating Council (MRC) and IAB define a video ad as viewable “when at least 50 percent of the ad’s pixels are visible on a screen for at least two consecutive seconds.” Some platforms have adopted this standard, but many have not.

Here’s the rundown on how the major players count video views:

Google/YouTube: The skippable TrueView ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network count a video view when someone engaged with an ad or watches 30 seconds of a video ad, or the duration of the ad if it is shorter than 30 seconds.

Facebook and Instagram: Facebook and it’s family of apps count a video view for both in-stream and Stories ads at 3 seconds. However, advertisers can buy video ads on either a CPM basis or ThuruPlay basis. When buying on a CPM basis, an impression is counted when one pixel of the video ad comes into view. With ThruPlay, advertisers are charged when a video ad plays to 97 percent completion or up to 15 seconds, whichever comes sooner.

LinkedIn: For LinkedIn’s sponsored content, video views are counted when 50 percent of the ad is in-view for 1 second on desktop and 300 milliseconds (one-third of a second) on mobile.

Pinterest: Pinterest adopted the MRC standard of 50 percent of the ad in-view for 2 continuous seconds or more.

Reddit: Reddit defines a video view as 2 continuous seconds at 50 percent viewability, per the MRC standard. A full video view is counted after a video ad shows for 3 continuous seconds at 100 percent viewability. Advertisrs can bid on a cost-per-view (CPV) or CPM basis.

Snapchat: Snap Ads’ view criteria is 2 seconds for a video view. The platform’s video ads run full-screen with the sound on.

Twitter: Twitter adopted the MRC standard and counts a video ad view when 50 percent of the ad is in view for 2 seconds or more, or when a user engages with a video ad by clicking to expand or un-muting it.

Other metrics to consider

Many platforms show additional engagement metrics and view counts. For example, Google offers quartile watch time metrics, along with an extensive list of video ad metrics that includes click performance, engagement performance, and reach and frequency.

Facebook reports 2 second, 3 second, 10 second and ThruPlays, regardless of which bidding option you choose. It also reports watch time metrics, showing showing how often 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent or 100 percent of a video ad was watched.

Redditr reports views at 25, 50, 75 95 and 100 percent of video length at any viewability as well as the number of times a video ad was watched for 3, 5, and 10 seconds in aggregate at any viewability.

In October 2018, YouTube began counting an ‘Engagement’ to a TrueView for action ad whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds or more when using maximize conversions or target CPA bidding — down from from 30 seconds. Those ads are still charged on a CPM basis, however, when using maximize conversion or target CPA bidding strategies.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.