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The suggestion that you could have 80% of your outreach read by recipients sounds like a pipedream — an astronomical figure designed to keep people plugging away on their outbox. 

With such a small canvas of visible information in a recipient’s inbox to work with, it can feel like enticing four out of every five targets to open your email is impossible.

But if you incorporate the right approaches, then it can very much become a reality. Just to give you the heads up, here’re some results we’ve managed to get in our recent outreach campaign:

In the following article, I’ve explored the ingredients needed to get 80% of your outreach messages viewed. So perhaps you’d like to pour yourself a coffee and brace yourself for an awful lot more audience interaction in the near future — the caffeine might come in handy.

Identify your targets

There are five key factors behind achieving a high open rate in your email outreach, and the first and most important is through identifying the right recipients.

A common mistake among many outreachers is their shotgun approach to distributing emails. While scattering mail across the internet into as many inboxes that can be sourced may seem like a good, time-saving and quantitative technique, it actually wastes more time that could be better invested in finding quality recipients.

Before a successful outreach campaign, you’ll need to dedicate some time to the preparation stage. Identify who your ideal responder would be, whether it’s a client, customer, consumer or collaborator, and work on devising a list of the perfect targets that fit the description.

Through the use of opt-ins and calls-to-action, you can have an interested recipient base come to you with minimal fuss and is a sure-fire approach to sending marketing emails to those most likely to view your content. By inviting your website’s visitors to subscribe to your mailing list via an effective call-to-action placed on your homepage, you get to save time on research and effortlessly come into possession of hundreds of emails – a great outreach method for websites that are in a position to offer a product or service to thousands of people.

For outreach emails with more link-building intentions sourcing becomes more difficult. If you’ve decided to target industry professionals and influencers, then tools like Email Hunter and Voila Norbert could be the answer — these services scour the internet for the relevant email addresses behind just about any active website and can help you hit the bulls-eye when it comes to finding the right people to get in contact with.

Mastering the subject line

According to a poll conducted via Litmus, 34% of recipients believe that an email subject line is the most important factor in helping them to decide to open their mail. This means that over 1/3 of your targets for outreach will be waiting for a perfect heading before clicking on your message.

These stats illustrate how important it is to get your subject line right, and there are many schools of thought behind what’s most effective and what isn’t.

Of course, each subject line will vary depending on the type of outreach you conduct, but the best practice is to appeal to people’s curiosity, to make them believe they’ll be gaining something if they read your email – which of course they will if your campaign has been constructed well enough.

A winning subject line needs to be short, personal wherever possible, and relevant to the topics covered by your email. Sometimes being upfront can be effective, especially when it comes to outreaching savvy marketers and bloggers.

There are a few other factors that can make all the difference in making your email stand out too. Incorporating emojis into your heading may risk your content appearing puerile, but with the vast catalogue of emojis that are more serious than a winking yellow circle with a tongue sticking out, you can really add some standout imagery and colour to your title. For example, travel companies have been using holiday-themed emojis like aeroplanes and city skylines to great effect in capturing the imagination of recipients — if you can find something relevant that appeals to the aesthetics of your email, then it could be a key addition to make.

With so many individuals checking their inboxes via their smartphones, keeping your subject lines short and punchy has never been more important — make sure you get your message across in less than 50 characters.

By adding an element of urgency to your headline, recipients will feel more compelled to check its contents. You can exercise this by adding a sense of limited-time opportunity to your subject, or by inviting them to respond before a deadline — the chances are that they’ll be curious as to what’s caused the urgency and read on.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions in your subject line too — this can be seen as a way of cutting to the chase and getting your message across immediately.

Making use of your preview snippets

Many inboxes have menus that not only feature an unread email’s subject line but a snippet of text from the beginning of a message. It’s important not to neglect the opening lines of your email because this could be a key factor in whether or not it gets read or moved to the ‘junk’ folder.

Litmus has stated that 24% of recipients check the text previews of emails, so it’s worth dedicating time to.

The most important part of nailing your email opening is personalization. Make sure it begins with ‘Dear, [Name]’ or ‘Hi [Name],’ where possible – any less than this will give off the strong impression that you’re simply using templates to scatter across the web (which may well be the case, but we don’t want them to know that).

An effective use of the preview snippet is to treat it like a secondary subject line, or to summarize the email in the first line – doing so could be the deciding factor while your target’s hovering over your message in their inbox. If you’re using an email marketing software, make sure to use these two rules in every template.

Keeping your sender reputation in check

You could have compiled the best list of targeted recipients, the best subject line and opening text, all for it to be undone by a sender score that’s so low that your email drops straight into the junk folder never to be seen again.

Email providers are designed to give their users the best experience. And part of that is through whittling down any perceived junk automatically by filtering out any messages from users with a low sender score.

A sender score is calculated by prior interactions, and how many users generally open your emails. A great website to check if your current email address passes most servers’ junk filters is to consult Senderscore.org, which will let you know how your email is faring, and whether or not your messages will make it to the inboxes of your recipients.

Effective follow-ups

Don’t be afraid to follow up on your emails. It can be easy to perceive the use of follow-ups as a nuisance or spammy, but in reality, a second email tends to work wonders in getting your content noticed.

There are many reasons why recipients don’t read emails the first time around; it could’ve been received at a busy time in their day, or deleted by accident, or simply missed. Here, a follow-up offers your target a second chance to see your content and acknowledge your outreach.

Be sure to specify that your email is a follow-up – this shows that you’ve been in touch prior and clearly value the recipient’s attention. Also be sure to note when you sent your initial email for ease of reference.

While it’s worth sending more than one follow-up email to maximize your recipient’s chances to respond, we advise against mailing more than two chasers in order to limit the risk of being considered spam, or worse, being blacklisted.

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The birth of digital advertising brought with it the sophisticated use of data for audience targeting. While the cookie has served as the de facto mechanism for building audiences across desktop advertising, privacy-compliant location data now serves as the primary component of mobile audience marketing, through the use of location-based marketing strategies like geo-targeting and geo-conquesting.

However, marketers primarily focus on one component of mobile audience marketing today – reaching the right audience. There’s growing attention on attribution, a second element, which shows that online ads result in physical retail sales. There’s also a third element to successful audience marketing which receives little attention today – understanding that audience before the sale of the campaign even occurs. Marketers looking to build out mobile marketing are missing roughly two-thirds of the picture that’s available to them today.

When creating the initial concept for a campaign, we’ve seen the most successful companies use location-based analytics to inform their sales pitches and presentations before the campaign even begins. They’re using data to learn how frequently customers visit their locations to segment their audience based upon loyalty. They’re evaluating which competitive locations their audience also visits to influence that audience and increase the efficiency of their ad spend. One of the most effective use cases is agencies and sales teams using this data early in the sales cycle to help their clients visualize and understand their audience, which boosts not only their credibility but also their ability to win the business.

The second component of mobile audience marketing involves building and reaching the audience. There are numerous platforms available today that provide a black-box approach to buying very broad location-based audiences, such as Target shoppers or coffee drinkers. There is an elegant simplicity in choosing a pre-built audience, and there are always campaigns that are a great fit for this tactic.

On the flip side, if there’s one thing that Facebook and Google have proven when it comes to audience targeting; marketers absolutely love to see high degrees of transparency, flexibility and customizability as to how those audiences are made. They love taking control of the creation of the audience. Marketers that plan the most effective mobile campaigns spend a few extra minutes customizing the specific locations and date ranges that comprise their audience. They’re using the data and the visualizations they generated in the first step to increase their return-on-investment.

The last component of mobile audience marketing, and easily the most difficult, is attributing digital campaigns to in-store foot traffic and purchases. Advertisers increasingly ask for this, but there is still no holistic solution that can provide the answer. Fundamentally, this problem remains unsolved because of all of the various data silos that aren’t able to communicate with one another. The ad seen on TV can’t inform your phone or laptop that it’s also seen the ad, while the point-of-sale system or online checkout can’t notify those previous touch points to confirm the sale occurred.

Despite these challenges, true attribution will be available someday. In the meantime, marketers owe it to themselves to test multiple approaches to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. When considered from the “audience” perspective, we see companies looking to evaluate how this audience behaved after the campaign. They’re looking to answer questions like “Did the frequency of visitation increase?” “Did my foot traffic increase against my competitors with this audience?” “From which competitors am I winning market share?” Reporting that provides insight into how a campaign influenced a digital audience’s behavior in the physical world wins bonus points within marketing teams and with clients. There are also benefits to using different solutions that provide audience building, media spend, activation and attribution. By working with various companies, there is limited opportunity for bias in the results, and therefore, marketers can have more trust in the data.

The ability to reach and understand audiences across desktop advertising is mature. As mobile marketing increasingly dominates ad spend, and the use of geo-targeting strategies rises, the use cases and techniques also evolve. Mobile marketing initially adopted many of the tried-and-true approaches from the desktop ecosystem. As mobile advertising begins to mature, so does the ability for marketers to use data before, during and after campaigns. This comprehensive approach ultimately increases the effectiveness and credibility of campaigns.

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

About The Author

Brian is currently the CEO of Reveal Mobile. He was previously a GM of Microsoft’s Online Services division and has more than 20 years of technical, operational and executive management experience. Brian was co-founder and CEO of Accipiter, which was acquired by aQuantive in December of 2006 followed by the acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft in 2007.

Historically digital marketers are more concerned about attracting traffic to the site than boosting on-site conversions.

This is unfortunate because conversion optimization usually requires smaller investments and provides faster results than growing your traffic.

Here are eight ways to increase your ecommerce conversions quickly by providing better usability and smoother user experience.

1. Make your checkout process simpler

The name of the game is convenience. Don’t make it difficult for the consumer to finish a purchase. The more barriers your site throws up, the more likely it is your customers will leave the cart without completing the purchase.

According to BigCommerce’s 2019 Omni-Channel Retail Report, convenience is among the top 3 reasons U.S.  consumers across all generations chose to buy from an online store. When shopping online, millennials have become used to speed and convenience while younger generations have never known shopping without these.

You should have a simple checkout process because that’s what is expected from your site these days (and often the primary reason why they shop online anyway). For example, sites that force you to sign up before you can check out are frustrating, and many users are not willing to spend time creating an account. Remove the forced signup and provide an option to checkout out as “guest.”

Every section of your checkout process is another opportunity for the consumer to quit and walk away. Consider whether any given section is worth the chance of losing sales and if you can safely remove it. Or, if it can’t be removed, find a way to streamline the entire process. For example, include a duplicating button that allows users to make their delivery address their billing address, without entering the same information twice.

Create easy cart navigation and decrease the number of steps needed to complete the purchase. This will increase sales and profits as well as customer satisfaction.

Featured tool: Convert.com allows to easily A/B your site shopping experience to come up with the best solution for your customers. Additionally, for WordPress, here’s a detailed A/B testing tutorial.

2. Provide one-click upsells

According to ConversionXL, it is 25 times more expensive to develop new customers than it is to re-convert your current customers. You need to work to keep re-engaging your existing customers continually.

They are more valuable to you than a new visitor. Studies have shown that if you can increase your customer retention by 5%, you can increase your profits by up to 25%.

You can keep these consumers through a one-click upsell option. It convinces customers to complete an additional, unplanned-for transaction. It’s exactly how impulse shopping works in brick-and-mortar stores. They place enticing items by the register to convince you to add them to your purchase while you stand in line.

PayKickstart users have demonstrated powerful proof of concept: Many of them have seen both their average customer value and the total revenue more than double after they implemented one-click upsells:

3. Make your shopping experience mobile-friendly

Mobile shopping is continually growing. More people are using their mobile device or tablet to shop on ecommerce sites than ever before, and with the fast adoption of smartphones worldwide, the numbers will continue to go up.

Users are more likely to abandon a cart and navigate away from your site if it’s difficult to browse on a smartphone. You don’t always need to develop an expensive app, but you do need to make your website easy to read and use on a smartphone.

One powerful way to make your shopping experience mobile friendly without investing into a standalone app is to use web design platforms that support progressive web apps (PWAs) which act like native mobile apps but don’t need to be installed by your customers. According to Google, PWAs are “a new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web.”

PWAs also support many app-like functionalities that most mobile-optimized websites do not, such as push notifications, which can be especially useful for omnichannel retailers.

Duda allows agency professionals to roll out progressive web app versions of their clients’ sites with one click of a button:

4. Provide personalized shopping experience

Several studies found personalized experience is a growing ecommerce trend that shouldn’t be neglected:

• 59% of e-commerce shoppers find it easier and more engaging to shop on sites that are personalized.
• 56% of shoppers are increasingly more likely to return to a site that recommends products to them.
•  53% of shoppers believe that e-commerce retailers that offer personalized shopping provide a valuable service.

With Amazon leading the digital marketing industry, most of US consumers already expect to receive personalized treatment whenever they shop online.

Alter helps you set-up personalized shopping experience without the need to invest into an in-house solution. It works as follows:

• Visitors read content or research products like they normally would on their favorite websites and blogs
• Alter anonymously determines non-personal visitor interests based on the web pages they’re viewing (e.g. shoes, cars).
• Visitors see personalized content based on those interests to help save time on websites they visit later (marketer websites).

Some content management systems also provide for solid personalization options (which would be even easier to implement). For example, Duda allows you to personalize CTAs and special offers based on time of day, geolocation, number of visits and more:

5. Match your customers’ expectations

Many of your customers discover your products through Google search. Are your landing pages doing a good-enough job matching their expectations?

Search intent optimization is often overlooked. Yet, it’s what often determines your users’ on-page engagement. Whether they will instantly see what they expected to see determines whether they will want to stay and give your landing page a chance to convert them into buyers.

Text Optimizer is a great way to optimize your landing page copy to meet Google’s and its users’ expectations. It uses semantic analysis to extract important concepts from Google’s search results. Use these terms when crafting your landing page copy to optimize it better and engage more of your site visitors:

6. Add a sense urgency

Have you ever had a case of FOMO or fear of missing out? You’re not alone. The fear of missing out on something amazing or special or even extremely ordinary is a powerful psychological force that you can tap into.

Add a sense of urgency to your shopping cart page to develop FOMO in your costumer. This can give hesitant customers the extra push they need to complete the purchase.

Amazon uses FOMO extremely well by adding a countdown timer tied into your shipping. It tells you to buy the product in the next XX minutes to qualify for one-day shipping.

You can use this tactic by adding a timer to your cart page, or a countdown clock to the end of a sale (here’s how). You could even go simply by writing “checkout now” instead of only “checkout.”

7. Add breadcrumbs

Site navigation can be tricky. If you’ve never been on a particular website, you might struggle to find your way around after you move from the landing page.

This is especially troublesome for e-commerce sites. You need to implement clear site navigation for both SEO and  usability.

Setting up breadcrumbs throughout your pages is a simple way to help your users feel confident at each step of their journey. Make it obvious where the consumer should go and what they should click next, and you are likely to see your conversions go up.

Conversion optimization may seem overwhelming. Luckily there are tools and solutions that can make it quite doable. Before investing in attracting more traffic to your site, try implementing the tips above to get the most of those visitors you already have.

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Most of us like to believe that we’re inherently logical people, especially when it comes to purchasing decisions. However, we’re not computers. No matter how logical we try to be, emotion always influences our decisions to some extent.

Psychologists refer to these emotional factors in our decision-making processes as “cognitive biases.” Without even realizing it, we make most of our decisions based on these emotional biases and build our logical arguments for doing or buying something around justifying our emotions.

This is good news for marketers.

If you understand how cognitive biases work and how to use them in your marketing, you can make people feel like you have a better product, service or company. At that point, it almost doesn’t matter whether or not you are better; people will buy from you because that’s what feels right.

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of powerful cognitive biases you can use to make people view your products or services as superior to the competition.

The mere exposure effect

Back in the 60s, Charles Goetzinger was teaching at OSU and decided to run a social experiment on class. Before the semester started, he contacted one of the students and asked them to wear a giant black bag over their entire body during class – for the whole semester.

Now, putting aside the fact that he was actually able to convince a student to do this, this experiment resulted in some fascinating observations.

As you might expect, the initial response to the black bag was very hostile and derogative. However, as the semester progressed, people’s response to the unexplained bag softened and the student began actually to make friends.

Why? Familiarity makes us comfortable.

As humans, our brains are wired to identify potential threats. A sudden change in the ambient noise could represent an impending attack, an odd taste in your water could mean that it’s contaminated…to our brains, “new” often means “danger.”

However, if we’re around something new for a while and nothing bad happens, our brains relax. The new thing becomes part of our “normal” experience and our brains move on to evaluating other, newer unknowns for potential danger.

How to use the mere exposure effect

Unfortunately, most businesses can’t afford to spend a semester waiting for someone to get comfortable with their brand. Long-term, building familiarity with your customers is a great idea, but often you need them to buy within the next few days-to-weeks.

So, how do you use mere exposure to get people comfortable enough to buy in a reasonable time frame? Here are a few options to consider.

Retarget

When done right, retargeting is all about familiarity. There’s a reason why retargeting campaigns have a better CTR than most display campaigns. Retargeting ads remind people that they are interested in what you’re selling and help them feel comfortable buying from you.

Also, retargeting is a great way to address potential concerns your customers might have during their buyer journey. Remember, on a primal level, “new” is scary because it’s a potential threat. If you can build familiarity while decreasing the perceived threat level of doing business with you, your potential customers will feel more comfortable buying from you than anyone else.

Repurpose

Repetition and re-exposure are a fundamental part of how we learn and become comfortable with new things. This principle is just as important to an adult making a purchasing decision as it is to a kid learning how to walk.

For example, lots of myths, trends and fads get started when something goes viral on social media. People read, hear and see something so many times that it simply becomes a part of their belief system – regardless of whether what they believe is actually true.

In essence, repetition creates reality.

This principle works just as well for honest businesses as it does for fad diets. If you’ve come up with a great marketing message, why not turn it into a blog post, podcast, infographic, video, slide presentation, etc.?

Repurposing your content this way will increase the number of ways and times that people encounter your message. As a result, when they see your actual ads, they’ll instinctively resonate with your messaging – even if they don’t remember why.

Risk compensation theory

Back when the governments started really paying attention to automobile safety, Sam Peltzman discovered something interesting. Although safety features like seatbelts made people safer, the benefits of these features to the general public were lower than the government’s safety tests had predicted.

Why? The safer people felt in their cars, the more risks they took when they drove.

Again, this gets back to how our brains are wired. Every decision carries some sort of inherent risk and we are constantly trying to decide whether the risk is worth the reward.

However, this decision isn’t a matter of pure math. Our internal risk-benefit analysis isn’t based on hard data; it’s based on the perceived risks and benefits.

So, if someone is considering cutting in front of a semi and they aren’t wearing their seatbelt, the perceived risk is pretty high. If their timing is even a little bit off, they could be thrown from the car and die. But, if they think that their seatbelt will protect them, the perceived risk is a lot lower, so they’re more likely to decide that the risk of being in an accident is worth the benefit of saving a few seconds on their commute.

This same principle applies to marketing. No matter what you’re trying to get people to do, your customers will associate some level of risk with it: loss of money, loss of time, loss of privacy, etc. Your job is to increase the perceived benefits and decrease the perceived risks so that people feel safe doing what you want them to.

How to use risk compensation theory

If you do it right, people should feel like there is more risk in not following your call-to-action (CTA) than there is in following it. Essentially, this flips the risk-benefit equation on its head.

Of course, achieving that is easier said than done, but here are a few ways to maximize the perceived benefits and minimize the perceived risks of your CTA:

Use social proof

Social proof is one of the best tools in the online marketer’s toolbox. These days, people instinctively distrust marketing (after all, you’re getting paid to promote your business). However, people trust other people, so including testimonials and reviews is a great way to tilt the risk-benefit equation in your favor.

That being said, simply having testimonials or reviews isn’t enough. You need social proof that makes people feel like giving you their money, time or information is a safe bet. If the reviews you share don’t inspire confidence (or worse, feel fake), they can actually work against you.

Use someone else’s halo

A similar, but a different way to decrease perceived risk is to associate yourself with a third party your audience already trusts.

The classic example of this is getting certified for a trust seal from a third-party business. However, this tactic has been used for so long that it’s become an expectation. These days, having a trust seal might not decrease the perceived risk of doing business with you, but not having one can certainly increase it!

If you want to use someone else’s trustworthiness to build trust in your business, one of the easiest approaches is influencer marketing. Unlike testimonials – which are usually placed on your marketing materials – influencers advocate for your business to their loyal following.

Because influencers already have a high level of trust with their audience, their endorsement of your business feels far more credible and meaningful than anything you could ever say about yourself. It’s a simple, but highly effective way to use someone else’s halo to build trust in your business.

Conclusion

Honestly, the mere exposure effect and risk compensation theory are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of other cognitive biases that you can use in your marketing to encourage people to choose your business over the competition.

The trick is understanding how different cognitive biases play into the purchasing decisions of your target audience. Once you understand that, it’s usually fairly easy to influence those biases in a way that favors your business.

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

About The Author

Jacob is passionate entrepreneur on a mission to grow businesses using PPC & CRO. As the Founder & CEO of Disruptive Advertising, Jacob has developed an award-winning and world-class organization that has now helped over 2,000 businesses grow their online revenue. Connect with him on Twitter.

Social listening is a tactic that’s not unheard of. Quite a number of brands use it these days and even more consider trying it out in the near future. However, for many, the step-by-step process of social listening remains unclear.

This article aims to answer the most burning questions about social listening:

• What is a keyword?
• Which keywords should you monitor?
• How do you get relevant and comprehensive results instead of all the noise that the Internet is filled with?

What is a keyword?

As we know, social listening is a process that requires a social media listening/social media monitoring tool (e.g., Awario, Mention, Brandwatch). The first thing you do when you open the app is entering keywords to monitor.

Keywords are the words that describe best what you want to find on social media platforms and the web. A keyword can be one word (e.g. “Philips”), two words (e.g. “Aleh Barysevich”), four words (e.g. “search engine optimization tool”), etc. Each one of these examples presents one keyword. After you typed in your keyword(s), the tool will search for mentions of these keywords and collect them in a single place.

Which keywords should you monitor?

You can monitor absolutely anything. You can monitor the keywords “Brexit” or “let’s dance” or “hello, is it me you’re looking for”. However, in terms of marketing purposes, there are six main types of keywords that you are most likely to monitor. They are:

1. Brand/company
2. Competitors
3. Person
4. Campaign
5. Industry
6. URL

Now let’s go through each type together to make sure you understand the goals behind monitoring these keywords and how to get the most out of them.

1. Brand/Company

Monitoring your brand/your company is essential in most cases. While the goals of social listening can be very diverse (reputation management, brand awareness, influencer marketing, customer service), most of these goals require listening to what people say about your brand.

To make sure you don’t miss any valuable mentions, include common misspellings and abbreviations of your brand name as well.

In case your brand name is a common word (e.g. “Apple” or “Orange”) make sure to choose a tool that gives you an option to introduce “negative” keywords. These would be keywords such as “apple tree”, “apple juice”, “apple pie”. Excluding them from your search will help get mentions of Apple the brand only. Any tool that has a boolean search option will also save you from tons of such irrelevant mentions.

2. Competitors

Pick a couple of your main competitors (or even just one), and enter their brand/company name as a separate project. There’s a good reason for that: Questions and complaints directed at your competitors can be replied by your social media manager first. They could explain why your brand is better/doesn’t have specific problems that your competitor does. This is social selling, a process of finding hot leads on social media.

Most social media monitoring tools also let you compare how your brand is doing on social media against your competitor’s brand. This can be useful for tracking your progress and discovering new ideas.

For example, knowing which social networks, which locations, and what time slots get your competitor more attention could help you upgrade your social media strategy. Knowing how their campaigns, social media posts, and product releases perform could help you improve your own plans, and avoid some mishaps.

3. Person

The CEO of your company might not necessarily be the company’s face or even a public persona at all. However, if reputation management is one of your goals, monitoring mentions of the CEO are important. Their actions on social media could easily attract attention and cause a social media crisis. Also, you’ll know straight away about any publications that mention your company’s CEO.

Same, of course, goes for any other people in the company.

4. Campaign

It’s crucial to monitor marketing (and other) campaigns as well as product launches. Reactions on social media happen very quickly. Only by monitoring such events in real time, you’ll know straight away if it’s going well or not, if it’s working at all, and if there are problems that you might’ve not noticed while creating the campaign. The earlier you know how the reality is unfolding, the better. To monitor a campaign, enter its name if it has one, its slogan, and/or its hashtag as a keyword.

It’s important to understand that there are loads of marketing campaigns that have caused serious problems for the companies. Something that could’ve been avoided with social media monitoring.

5. Industry

Not in every industry can you monitor the so-called “industry keywords”. However, if you can, these are the source of endless opportunities. Most of these are in the realms of social selling, brand awareness, and influencer marketing.

For example, if your product is a productivity app, this would be your keyword “productivity app”. Include a couple of synonyms and words such as “looking for”, or “can anyone recommend” and you’ll get mentions from people that look for a product like yours. Specify the language and the location to get more relevant results.

With a social media monitoring tool that finds influencers, you can go to the list of influencers that is built around your industry keywords and choose the ones to work with.

6. URL

Monitoring your brand by excluding your brand’s URL (which is possible with a social media monitoring tool) is important for SEO purposes. It’s a big part of link-building. All you have to do is find mentions of your brand that don’t link to your brand, reach out to the author, and ask for a link. In most cases, the authors wouldn’t mind adding the link to your site.

Besides, you can monitor competitors’ URLs. This will give you a list of sources where they get links from. It’s only logical that if the author is interested in the niche and is willing to write about your competitor, they probably wouldn’t mind reviewing your product as well.

Conclusion

There’s a lot you can do with social media monitoring. All you have to do is start. Starting is the hardest part. Then, appetite, ideas, and knowledge come with eating. Hopefully, this article gave you a clear idea of where to start.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at .

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A mobile app ad fraud scheme involving banner ads being resold as premium video ad inventory on Android devices has turned up.

How the scheme worked. Using a sophisticated process, the bad actors purchased banner impressions and resold them as premium in-stream video ad inventory. To further profits, the schemers then stuffed the ad units with multiple video players.

“Instead of just one video player, multiple players are called in an attempt to pull ads in parallel from multiple sources,” said DoubleVerify, which reported the scheme. In one instance, the company found as many as eight concurrent players in one ad slot.

“Various player sizes are depicted to maximize revenue, regardless of the size of the original ad slot. Often the original ad slot is just 320 x 50 — but the players are much larger and the ad content cannot be viewed.”

The video player is also configured to remove sound and play controls so the viewer cannot stop the ad from playing.

The impact. The ad fraud scheme generated an estimated two million ad calls a day, according to DoubleVerify. The report did not include specific dollar amounts, but Asaf Greiner, CEO of Protected Media, told BuzzFeed a similar ad fraud scheme costs advertisers tens of millions of dollars per month.

Users hit by the scheme saw phone battery life and bandwidth drained because the video ads played in a forced, unstoppable loop.

DoubleVerify said the viewability rate for ads associated with this scheme was less than two-percent. The ad verification platform said it flagged the ad servers connected to the scheme and marked the connected domains as Ad Impression Fraud. It also worked with affected partners to end the source of traffic.

Why you should care. Mobile app ad fraud continues to be a problem, estimated to cost advertisers $5 billion in 2018. Mobile in-app IVT rates rose to 23 percent in the last quarter of 2018, up from 17 percent the previous quarter, according to a Pixalate report.

In October, the Coalition Against Ad Fraud released its “Definitions of Mobile Fraud Schemes” — a standardized document to define mobile ad fraud and counter any misinformation connect to fraudulent schemes or practices. Earlier this month, the IAB Tech Lab released the final version of its app-ads.txt specifications, an extension of the ads.txt file designed to support apps distributed through mobile and OTT app stores.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

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.