Why we updated Marketing Land’s newsletter (and why we think you’ll love it)

Subscribers to our daily newsletters noticed last week a dramatic change in the content we email to our audience daily. For us, it represents a shift in how we are approaching the medium, which is becoming more crowded than ever as media brands, marketers and your reply-all-abusing colleague all compete for precious attention in your inbox.

For us, it all came down to approaching our newsletters with the same goal we hold for all of our editorial products: To create great content. So that’s what we’re doing, moving away from the more traditional RSS-style, headline list format to one that tells a story from start to finish and keeps you informed whether or not you immediately click through to our website (gasp!).

Of course, we’ve got to give credit to Quartz, Morning Brew, The Skimm and others whose highly successful newsletters have shown us all why email is indeed king when you’ve got great content driven by voice, authority and age-old storytelling. But we’ve added our own flair to the approach with Marketing Land’s new daily brief.

What’s in it?

In addition to our daily recap of the news and features published by Marketing Land that makes up our daily intro, our newsletter also includes sections that highlight best practices and opinions from our community and other bits of info that we will only publish in these newsletters. They include:

Pro Tip – A daily nugget of tactical info or sage advice sourced from our roster of regular community contributors.

The Soapbox – We’re giving you 150 words to gripe, celebrate, warn, etc. Only appearing in our newsletter. Email walmeida@thirddoormedia.com if you want to stand on the soapbox.

Social/Video/Retail/Mobile Shorts – A daily section of news, notes, updates or just digital marketing quirks spotted in the wild and tied to one of these topics. Only found in the newsletter.

Indicators – A quick snapshot of data digital marketers should be paying attention to. Once again, only found in the newsletter (sense a pattern?). Got data to share? Email editors@marketingland.com to be included.

Chatter – Highlights what digital marketers are talking about in forums, at events or in epic social media threads.

Dream jobs – Not your average job board. If we see one of those jobs listed that we know any digital marketer would jump on, we’ll make sure we share it in this newsletter-only section.

On the move – Big promotions, hires and deals in marketing. Email editors@marketingland.com if you have a tip. And, yes, it’s a newsletter-only feature.

And there’s more. We’ll use occasional sections to update you on our MarTech, SMX and SMX Advanced banner events, tip you off to great webinars and white papers that we are producing, and resurface killer content from our library.

So please do check it out by subscribing below.

Get the most important digital marketing news each day. Subscribe to our daily brief.

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We realize that digital marketers are busy professionals, so we want to make sure the time you spend with Marketing Land is valuable and, most of all, helpful to you in your professions. We’re packing a lot into your newsletter to live up to that promise.

Keep us honest, though. If we’re missing something, let us know. Email me any time at hpowderly@thirddoormedia.com and let me know how we’re doing.


How to get started with data-driven attribution in Google Analytics

How to get started with Data-Driven Attribution in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is used by more than 28.8 billion websites since its inception in 2005. And many have attempted to find a ‘one size fits all’ approach as far as attribution models are concerned.

While this is admirable in and of itself, it also goes against the very nature of Google Analytics. After all, the USP of the service is to customize reports according to your requirements. So why should attribution models be any different?

What is attribution?

Before we dive in any further, however, you must understand what we mean by attribution. In Google Analytics, the term attribution can mean lots of things, from giving credit for visiting the website to completing a particular activity, from a campaign to a kind of source. Attribution is mainly used for conversions and sessions.

Data-driven attribution

Now, attribution models can be of various kinds, but the one generating a lot of buzz lately is data-driven attribution. Rather than a traditional model, this algorithmically-generated model is exclusive to customers of Google Analytics 360 which offers an easy way to provide personalized experiences to your customers. Plus, you need to meet these two parameters across a period of 28 days:

  • 400 conversions of every type with a minimum of two interactions in every conversion.
  • 10,000 paths on your site, which is akin to 10,000 site users. However, a single user can create numerous navigational paths.

The standout feature of data-driven attribution is how it considers the touch points of the users before the start of the conversion process. The Model Explorer Tool reports these touch points. The data is then reviewed.

custom data driven attribution model

The data-driven attribution model serves as a baseline model in Google Analytics, enabling you to create new personalized attribution model. Create the new data-driven attribution model to share conversion credit with multiple touch points along the path of conversion before the implementation of personalized credit rules.

Use the data-driven attribution model to analyze both, the non-conversion and conversion path information. The latter is data gathered from visitors who were not converted by your site while the former is collected from the ones who did convert. A unique aspect of the data-driven attribution model is how it changes weekly.

Why does the data-driven attribution model work?

Understand that this model offers credit to the conversions of various touch points or marketing channels according to what they contributed in the conversion process. The touch point or marketing channel that offers the most assistance receives the most amount of credit for conversions, irrespective of whether it’s the initial touch, the middle touch, or the last touch. The rest of the touches or channels receive credit as per what they contributed during the conversion process.

As the task of assigning conversion credits depends on the latest conversion information rather than the touch point positions, the attribution becomes data-driven. This not only eliminates the need to assign random conversion credit to numerous touch points or channels but also explains why the entire model is called the data-driven attribution model.

Make it a point to remember that the validity of data-driven attribution lasts for a certain period of time since the model changes along with the conversion information.

What your business needs to implement the DDA (Data-Driven Attribution) model?

Never think for a second that an algorithm-based attribution model such as this one can be implemented by every business. First, meet and maintain various strict requirements, and only then can your business handle the data-driven attribution model.

  1. Access to a Google Analytics 360 account

Unless you have a Google Premium or Google Analytics 360 account, you cannot use the data-driven attribution model.

  1. High-quality data and its availability

Always remember that your DDA model’s strength rests on the information you submit. So a poor entry will beget poor results.

Now, the problem is, most organizations might be able to download and install Google Analytics 360, but they stumble hard when it comes to figuring out how to benefit from the service.

What’s more? Even though they have the resources to hire experienced analysts, they cannot always create and maintain large volumes of quality data gathered from different data sources.

Thus, the insights received from the DDA model are likely misleading, flawed, and unusable.

  1. Compatibility of KPIs and goals

The KPIs and goals you select for your business need to align across organizations and marketing channels. Otherwise, the data-driven attribution model does not work. So, if the primary Twitter campaign target is to improve site sales, then your Facebook campaign goal should also be the same.

  1. Conversion tracking

Set goals in Google Analytics Premium to monitor conversions as well as ecommerce. Using this conversion information, Google Analytics generates the data-driven attribution for your business, irrespective of whether you are permitted to use it or not.

  1. Importance of meeting and maintaining the minimum conversion threshold

Be certain that the Google Analytics Premium view to be generated meets the minimum conversion threshold. Also, know that it doesn’t matter if your Google Analytics’ view meets the minimum conversion threshold once; it does not allow for continued DDA analysis in Google Analytics. Make sure the minimum conversion threshold is maintained.

  1. Minimum conversion threshold for every type of conversion

The Google Analytics view you’ve selected must not only meet the minimum conversion threshold for every type of conversion; it needs to be maintained as well. Each kind of conversion generates its own DDA model, and it’s always possible that the generated DDA model works for certain conversions but not all.

If you’ve implemented data-driven attribution and the generated model does not work for that conversion, then GA is going to flash a warning sign right above the attribution model reports.

image of model explorer

Valuate your organic search channel with the DDA model

Open the ‘Model Comparison Tool’. Begin a comparison between the ‘last non-direct click’ and ‘data-driven’ model and the ‘last interaction model’.

model comparison tool

It is best to select the ‘last interaction’ model as it is the basic model for Google Analytics’ multi-channel funnel reports. The ‘Last non-direct click’ works since it is the basic model for non-multi-channel funnel reports. Finally, choose the ‘data-driven’ model rather than ‘time decay’ because:

  • The former not only analyzes the details from the Google Analytics account but other linked accounts as well, such as Google Ads, Doubleclick Campaign Manager, etc.
  • The DDA model uses an algorithm to assign credit to conversions, which is more reliable than credits given through the ‘Time Decay’ attribution and/or manual conversion.

Check the column labeled ‘% change in conversions (from ‘Last Interaction’) to find ‘organic search’

report on change in conversions

Use this report to measure the percentage by which organic search conversion changed from the previous interaction model to the data-driven model. In this case, you can see that it is 22.66 percent. This means if the DDA model is used to offer organic search conversion credits, the process will yield 22.66 percent more credits. So, the last click model undervalues organic search by 22.66 percent.

Once you’re done, download the DDA model into an excel sheet by simply clicking the button marked ‘Download the full model’ to the above right side of the ‘Model explorer tool’.

Concluding remarks

Choose the data-driven attribution model in Google Analytics to implement it for your business and experience the benefits. There are lots of other attribution models available but this model is in a league of its own.

Related reading

SEO tips tools guides 2018

guide to google analytics terms

Verizon Media replaces Flurry Ads with new Verizon Ads SDK

Verizon Media is replacing Flurry Monetization and ONE Mobile SDK with a new Verizon Ads SDK.  The company says the new SDK has been designed to support “publisher SDK size and extensibility needs,” offering app developers a simplified way to access Verizon Media’s monetization opportunities.

Why you should care

The new Verizon Ads SDK aims to streamline mobile monetization efforts for publishers. Built using a “pluggable architecture” framework, the company says app developers will no longer be forced to compromise between revenue and user experience because of the SDK size, integration costs or other factors. The SDK is available for both Android and iOS.

“With the release of the Verizon Ads SDK, app developers and publishers will now have the modern tools they need to say ‘yes’ to both revenue and user experience,” reports Verizon Media in the announcement.

Verizon Ads SDK will also integrate with IAB Tech Lab Open Measurement SDK, providing viewability measurement by third-party providers. The IAB Tech Lab integration means publishers will only have to integrate a single SDK to offer advertisers viewability measurement via their preferred vendor.

More on the news

  • Verizon Media reports it is adopting the new SDK across its own properties, including Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance.
  • Last week, the company added two new native mobile ad features: one for e-commerce advertisers and another for gaming advertisers.
  • Verizon Media rebranded its company name (formerly Oath) in January, but has retained the Oath branding for its ad platform: Oath Ads Platforms.

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


Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console

Google recommends verifying all versions of a website — http, https, www, and non-www — in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console. Unfortunately, many separate listings can make it hard for webmasters to understand the full picture of how Google “sees” their domain as a whole. To make this easier, today we’re announcing “domain properties” in Search Console, a way of verifying and seeing the data from Google Search for a whole domain.

Domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. They give you a complete view of your website across Search Console, reducing the need to manually combine data. So regardless of whether you use m-dot URLs for mobile pages, or are (finally) getting the migration to HTTPS set up, Search Console will be able to help with a complete view of your site’s data with regards to how Google Search sees it.

If you already have DNS verification set up, Search Console will automatically create new domain properties for you over the next few weeks, with data over all reports. Otherwise, to add a new domain property, go to the property selector, add a new domain property, and use DNS verification.We recommend using domain properties where possible going forward.

Domain properties were built based on your feedback; thank you again for everything you’ve sent our way over the years! We hope this makes it easier to manage your site, and to get a complete overview without having to manually combine data. Should you have any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums, or leave us a comment on Twitter. And as always, you can also use the feedback feature built in to Search Console as well.

Conversation mapping: The new rules to win in search and content marketing

Conversation Mapping

Almost two-thirds of marketers now admit that digital content strategy powers their entire digital plan and yet the majority of those that use it struggle to create a mix of content ‘good enough’ to win.

That is the main finding from the second annual State of Content Marketing Survey, an annual temperature check of the UK’s top digital marketers.

In it we discover that not only is the game getting harder to win, but skill and resource shortages are holding many of you back from the results you demand.

And with an average of 23% of overall marketing budget now being attributed to content marketing it has to work.

Marketers also made clear that a very significant gap still exists between being able to create a strategy that resonates with audiences but also delivers measurable ROI. Only one in five of those that took part can confidently claim to know how to tie those two things together and more than half claim to struggle in terms of creating the type of content that will actually work.

You can dive deeper into the full survey, but this post is designed not just to share that top-level view of opinions, but instead go some way to offering a solution for those key challenges.

Overall the takeaways from the study tell us that there is a single, overriding question to fix the challenges of producing content that delivers ROI – ‘How do we create a content strategy that aligns with search growth, consistently?’

This post is designed to answer the ‘how’ element with an appreciation that designing such a digital content strategy has never been more complex and nuanced.

Where do we start?

With multiple touchpoints and a plethora of different journeys through to your product or service, there is no shame in feeling like you have no idea where to start.

And that’s a problem.

It’s an issue because of the emphasis, and rewards, now placed on the overall content experience.

It’s a challenge I’ve spent thousands of hours contemplating and the result of that thinking is captured in this post. A process focused not on content ideas, or keywords, but on the audience. I call it ‘Conversation Mapping’.

It’s a concept that borrows from the world of user experience and is designed to focus on the shift towards ‘conversational search’ and Google’s quest to solve the entire journey and follow the intent.

So, rather than thinking of the traditional ‘keyword research’ approach to designing a content strategy around what people are searching for we instead use the brainstorming process to develop and capture a number of theoretical conversations being had around our products and services.

That process can, and should, be backed by data of course.

Here’s how it works in detail…

Start with people. Always.

All marketing must start and end with people. It’s a statement I’ve made many times before in my Moz posts and it’s central to this strategic approach.

As a marketer, you’ll probably already be sick to death of posts explaining how to extract and turn data into useful personas so I’m not going to go into full detail on that again. You can always read a previous post on that process, or take a look at this one for some great tips.

And the best way to bring the conversation mapping process to life is to walk through it end to end with an example. In this case, we’re going to choose the PC components market.

This critical initial work will leave us with two to four personas such as in the example below:

conversation mapping personas

With these in place, we can then use a tool such as the Global Web Index to understand things like internet use motivations for each of our personas – against the overall audience profile (Grey) (Blue = Gary, Purple = Tim, Turquoise = Imogen).

graph on conversation mapping personas

For details of how to build this yourself follow this brilliant guide by the GWI team if you’re interested in giving it a go for yourself.

This kind of data mash-up helps shape the more detailed picture that we can capture from qualitative research sessions and bigger data crunching.

With a clear picture of who it is that is likely to be interacting with the products or services, it means you can more accurately map that conversation and the corresponding conversation map (more on what this looks like a little later!) because there is clear understanding about the likes and dislikes of the intended audience. It becomes much easier to imagine their conversations with this picture in your head!

Mapping the conversation with data

With the personas clearly outlined, the next phase is to gather all the data insight you can to better inform the understanding of the key questions Tim is asking around your product or service.

In this example, Tim is in the market for a new gaming PC and we want to understand what his journey is at present and where he is obtaining his information. Do this and then build a super-targeted content plan around it.

What else do you need to know?

Before we start diving into the data it is important to remind ourselves of what we are trying to achieve here. We know from the state of content marketing research that marketers are struggling to align results’ delivery to content planning and need to upskill and resource to deliver that.

Delivering it means focusing and prioritizing on the opportunity closest to the ‘cash register’ – and that almost always means the search channel comes first.

By diving into organic search engine traffic, we are most likely to be able to tap into buying intent – therefore impacting traffic, conversions, and revenue fastest.

The upside to this approach is that search really is aligned now to the wider audience picture anyway, so in building out a search-focused content plan first you are working on solving the biggest pain points that your customers have and helping them in the process.

In doing so you stay front of mind and add value, meaning that you’ll be the first port of call when they do decide it’s time to buy.

Keyword research

The obvious place to start then is by digging into the keyword opportunity for your market.

That doesn’t mean having to trawl through every opportunity in your niche but instead, we want to focus on the informational and functional content opportunities.

Informational content

By far the most important area from a content strategy perspective is the informational piece – as it is here that we can create assets that answer three of the four key micro-moments that your customer will experience.

As a reminder here are the four key moments that an audience will work through as they search for answers to key questions.

graph on key audience moments

Informational content focuses on the ‘I Want to Know’, ‘I Want to Do’ and ‘I Want to Go’ moments and this taps into a huge pool of traffic opportunity.

To give you a feel of what that looks like I have included a visual here showing the size of the prize from a selected keyword set of 4,502 phrases in the PC component niche.

Let’s look then at the process for pulling that data into useful formats to aid the content planning process.

The objective now is to establish where to focus effort in content creation to ensure you have the assets necessary to cover the entire user journey, which you can join together later.

To kickstart the process, I’ve used a tool that Zazzle Media built specifically for this task called the KIT (Keyword Identification Tool) but here’s how it basically works:

The ‘KIT’ process

We begin by extracting a large set of both functional and informational keywords using a mix of competitor keyword research and keyword explorer research. To maximize the size of the set, you can opt for multiple sources and then de-dupe using tools like Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush.

Once you have the keyword set you are going to be working from, it is best to get ranking data, so you can see where your site is ranking for this content already. This will help later when creating your content strategy, as being able to see where you currently rank for a keyword lets you know whether you need to optimize an existing page or create a new one.

We have our own in-house tools to gather this position data in bulk, there are however third-party tools you could also use, for example:

Whatever rank tracker you decide to use, after it has scraped your position data you will need to export a CSV then use VLOOKUP to pull that information into the ‘Keyword Research’ tab in this free Google sheet tool we’ve created to help pull it all together easily.

There is more detail about the different ways to then categorize that data in this blog post by Zazzle Media’s Sam Underwood, and below you can see a couple of my personal favorites:

  • Incremental informational keyword opportunity by category

graph on incremental informational keyword opportunity by category

  • Incremental traffic by an operator

graph on incremental traffic by an operator

This is useful as it helps us to understand where the persona ‘Tim’ is looking for information and across which product categories. This is the gateway from which you can dive deeper into specific areas to prioritize where to focus next.

To get further value, you could also combine the category information you already have with the most frequently used search operators. From this, you are able to not only work out where Tim is searching, but also how – allowing you to shape and prioritize what questions and pain points you write content for first.

In this example, it might make sense to prioritize ‘motherboards’ for instance and look to create content around ‘best’ and ‘reviews’.

Content auditing

Next up we need to take a closer look at the quality of what is already out there to understand the level at which we must compete to win.

‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’
Sun Tzu

To do that, you need to look both at what you already have and also what is currently out there and working.

This subject is enough to fill a post all of its own so I’m not going to dive into both elements of that here. Instead, for the content auditing part, I implore you to read this recent post by Everett Sizemore, which does a brilliant job of walking you through the perfect process. A lot of this focuses on the technical elements of content auditing but this is still an important element as to maximize ROI (the key fix here) we must also ensure that the platforms from where we publish are ‘fit for purpose’.

However, we need to focus more on the other half of this, by diving into the wider picture and answering the question, “what is working now?”.

To do that you can jump into Buzzsumo or Ahrefs’ content explorer. There are already excellent guides on using Buzzsumo for content research, such as this one so we won’t go over information that has already been covered in-depth.

The output from content research should really be some solid data on what kind of content we know people like related to a specific industry and niche. You should be able to explain the following things:

  1. The types of content that work
  2. Which social networks you should be promoting on
  3. What the ideal word count is
  4. Any topics that work well

For this piece of work, some other beneficial things to gather are below:

  • Most popular content types

graph on most popular content types

  • Traffic by word count

graph on traffic by word count

It’s incredibly clear that for Tim, articles work best and videos where in-depth ‘how’ questions are asked and that’s hugely powerful for shaping your overall content strategy.

In scenarios where we know that written content is key, the next important step is to get a better understanding of how to go about creating it – and the biggest variable is word count. Here we can look at organic traffic by word count and therefore understand the most visited (and visible) content length as well as the most shared content through social (second chart).

This data is not to be viewed as a suggestion that word count affects rankings, or indeed has any effect on the SERPs; instead, we are using it to understand content consumption patterns – and the takeaway here is that Tim likes more in-depth content, as is more willing to share it.

Conversation mapping

The challenge, of course, is bringing all this to life in the context of the user/visitor and this is where our ‘Conversation Mapping’ concept comes into play. To bring that to life let’s follow our current example journey for Tim.

The idea here is to use the usual ‘brainstorming’ meeting to work through every possible conversation around the purchase journey for your product or service.

Instead of looking for individual content ideas, we instead think about the buying process and journey Tim might take through our fictional PC component site.

Clearly, this can be a lengthy process that will spit out multiple examples. For the sake of this story, however, we will look at one – the motherboards opportunity.

And to do so it requires a second voice, not just a list of questions that Tim may ask, and as a result this is where we can also start to think about the emerging voice search opportunity and know more about where Google is taking search following the logical user journey from beginning to end around intent.

Not following what I mean? Let’s look at an example:

conversation mapping example

This theoretical ‘conversation’ is one of the many Tim will be having around this product and the idea is to take the ‘motherboard’ concept and sit in a room to brainstorm the potential conversation variations that may exist around the product.

You may find there are only one or two – or it may be there are dozens, in which case distill them down to a core of the most important ones post brainstorm, to make it easier to then think about designing the content plan around it.

Content planning around the conversation

The next phase is to then map content opportunity against that conversation, as in the below example:

So, what we have done here is to think about all of the opportunities there are along that conversation to create content to help make Tim a smarter consumer.

content planning around the conversation

Turbocharging the opportunity

With your informational and functional plan in place and your conversation mapping exercises complete you’re already looking good for returning a greater ROI when it comes to measuring impact at year end. But there’s also another reason to focus on this approach – and it’s all to do with future market share.

Featured snippets

Unless you’ve had your head under a rock these last few months you’ll have been bombarded by news about the importance of featured snippets. For those that don’t know what they are, snippets are the SERP feature that pulls out and highlights content designed to answer the question being asked by the searcher.

An example of one that Tim may come across in his search for his PC components can be seen below for clarity.

google snippet example

Claiming a snippet requires you to create the best answers to those specific informational queries and doing so better than anyone else.

Google and Bing both do a lot of testing of contenders for these slots to ensure they have the best of the best by measuring bounce rate, dwell time and other factors, and that gives you a really good opportunity to use your content prowess to claim them.

And don’t expect the format to go away anytime soon. Google has been very open in its end game plan to produce a ‘Star Trek’ computer with one answer for everything, as those answers will be triggered by snippet results. It’s something I’ve written about recently here and how the plan will push voice search to the forefront of our planning within the next couple of years as a result.

Given then that such features will only grow in prevalence and importance in the coming months and years then it pays to ensure you have a very solid snippet plan as part of your ROI-focused content planning process.

To do that we can dive back into the data to understand the current snippet share and also where the opportunity still lies ahead of you.

Snippet market share

Before we dive into the planning process it is important to benchmark. To do this we dive into an internal tool called ORT, but it is possible to use a manual process utilizing data from a tool such as Ahrefs or Moz that allow you to extract snippet information and to then use VLOOKUP to push it into separate tabs that show you pieces of insight such as:

Overall snippet market share:

overall snippet market share

  • Featured snippet opportunity by category

featured snippet opportunity by category

  • Featured snippet opportunity by an operator

featured snippet opportunity by operator

And while this level of traffic is clearly a welcome opportunity it is all critical to understand what it means for the future as well.

We’ve already discussed how snippets will play a key part in the move to voice interfaces, as they provide the ‘direct answers’ given by voice assistants such as Google Home. With 50% of all search queries expected to be delivered by voice by 2020, that key SERP has never been more important as part of a rounded strategy.

Claiming them 

Snippets themselves are important as Google is building SERP ‘real estate’ around them simply because they are part of its growing conversational search strategy. As we move towards voice-led searches the phrases we use naturally become longer and contain much more natural language.

Google wants to incentivize the building of more useful, conversational content to fuel its voice plans and snippets are therefore precisely that – a reward for creating such content and are, as a result, the perfect way in which to test your own voice strategy. Snippets serve as the perfect signposting to a great ‘conversation mapping’ plan.

To give yourself the best possible opportunity of claiming snippets the key factor is a focus on content quality and structure. Numerous recent studies like this and this have pointed at the importance of precisely structuring pages to separate paragraphs into bite-sized 40-50 word direct answers and make the use of bulleted list and tables to present information.

Other useful insights include:

  • Create lists if your users are predominantly mobile-first
  • Write succinct headers that exactly describe the answer being given
  • Use strong external links to trusted sources
  • Use HTTPS
  • Make sure your site is mobile friendly and fast
  • Use multiple images
  • Use tables where appropriate

To make it really easy you can download a really simple guide to page and content structure for snippets here.

Summary

In short, the key to getting over this clear disconnect between content strategy, production, marketing and a return on growing investments is to double down on data and make search the key focus for activity.

Of course, by becoming successful, content has the unique power to positively affect many other key indicators as it never works in a silo.

And with search engines now much better at rewarding people-based marketing efforts with more traffic, rather than keyword focused strategies, a content-led approach is the only way to attack.

Data plays a critical part of that as the days of subjectivity are behind us. By leveraging search data, we can truly understand what our audiences are looking for, what pain points they have and how we can make their journeys more informed and easier to navigate.

The process for doing that starts with the insight piece, defining key persona groups within your target audience and then in understanding their ‘I want to go’, ‘I want to do’, and ‘I want to know’ moments through the informational content research process.

In short, we need to be using data to help us map conversations and not ‘keyword opportunity.’ Do that and you’ll ensure that you deliver positive ROI from your owned and earned marketing activity.

And if you missed the wider findings from the state of content marketing survey then here’s that link again.

Simon Penson is the founder and Managing Director of Zazzle Media. He can be found on Twitter at @simonpenson.

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To Pop Up or Not to Pop Up
To comprehend how to best use pop up advertisements, it assists to comprehend that not all pop ups are equivalent and that its success is reliant on the proper phrasing, context, place, size and timing of the pop up. These types of pop ups are more reliable than brand-new page pop ups and are less disruptive and disruptive than complete page pop ups. If you’re believing of executing a pop up on your site, take time to think about the function and objective of the pop up, the pop up’s size, page and messaging place.

, the typical pop up gets a 3.09% conversion rate, with the leading 10% of pop ups getting a good 9.3% click through rate. To comprehend how to best make use of pop up advertisements, it assists to comprehend that not all pop ups are equivalent and that its success is reliant on the suitable phrasing, context, area, size and timing of the pop up. The usage of this type of pop up has actually quite much gone by the wayside as these pages are typically obstructed by a user’s computer system’s integrated pop up blocker. These types of pop ups are more reliable than brand-new page pop ups and are less disruptive and disruptive than complete page pop ups. If you’re believing of carrying out a pop up on your site, take time to think about the function and objective of the pop up, the pop up’s page, messaging and size area.