We’ve all heard of the term the “hot hand” in the context of sports. Basketball players go from missing every shot, to scoring in streaks. Sometimes players are in such a “zone” that he or she seemingly can’t miss a shot. Baseball players also tend to hit home runs in bunches.

Throughout my career and through my research at Wharton, I’ve studied the phenomenon of the “hot hand” as it relates to the way consumers tend to buy products and services or consume content. Simply put, customers who consume or buy content in bunches, then go away and come back and buy in bunches, are more valuable to companies than customers who buy at a steady pace.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a deeper look at how measuring binge consumption by customers, or what I call “clumpiness,” can be applied to maximize Customer Lifetime Value, yielding stronger sales and marketing ROI over time.

Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value with clumpiness

CLV is universally accepted as a central tenet of marketing today. In both academia and practice, it is looked upon as a goal of firm value maximization. That is, more profitable firms recognize that CLV maximization yields greater cash flows and higher long-run profits.

Relatedly, mathematical models that allow these firms to predict CLV are commonly based on a framework commonly called RFM.

•       Recency – How recently did a given customer make a purchase?
•       Frequency – How often they made a purchase?
•       Monetary Value – How much did they spend?

These are the cornerstones of CLV calculations and segmentation used by countless marketers and I’m here to tell you: They’re wrong!

Well, sort of. They are incomplete.

Through research, I have demonstrated and introduced that not only are RFM crucial components to calculating CLV; there is one additional dimension that MUST be factored in: clumpiness (C) or as some refer to it, binge consumption.

The hot hand

Let’s go back to the hot hand example and the player who is scoring points in bunches. Now, juxtapose over the world of marketing and consumers and you have clumpiness, AKA consumers who buy in bunches.

My research shows those who consume or buy content in bunches, then go away and come back and buy in bunches, are more valuable than other customers.

Let me put that another way. If a given brand knew both – how clumpy a consumer’s behavior is AND how frequently they buy – the better predictor when it comes to their future CLV is their clumpiness. I realize that may seem shocking, but it’s true. My research clearly illustrates that brands/marketers should be tracking someone’s clumpiness over time because that’s extraordinarily predictive of their CLV.

Across the board, marketers see far stronger results when they use RFMC data versus only using RFM. By focusing on clumpy consumers as their most valuable customers, brands can realize far stronger CLV and profitability.

With that overview in mind, let’s take a deeper look at what various brands have done to improve CLV and better target their marketing to encourage binge purchases by consumers.

Digital consumers behave more clumpily

We’re all familiar with binge-watching a series on Netflix, or other binge consumption of content from YouTube to gaming. But consumers have expanded this behavior beyond digital content and we’re now seeing it everywhere — from shared services such as AirBnB, Lyft and Uber to retail and online purchases.

A variety of different factors can drive clumpy behavior. In the case of content, the key driver is availability. For example, Netflix releases a new season of a given show, and suddenly everyone wants to watch it ASAP. They literally plan their lives around it.

Consumers can go weeks in between major purchases and then get the “hot hand” making multiple purchases or consuming an unusual amount of goods or services in a short period, or spending more money in a concentrated time.

The two sides of being clumpy and the demographic view

There are two types of clumpiness when it comes to consumers – visit clumpy and purchase clumpy. Consumers who are visit-clumpy are akin to the classic “window shoppers” of yesteryear. They visit both online and offline channels without necessarily making a purchase. In contrast, purchase-clumpy shoppers are far more valuable over time.

As a part of our research, we examined multiple retailers in specific product categories. Among the key findings were that millennials are more clumpy than other generations and that women are clumpier than men.

With marketers struggling to figure out how to market to millennials, this information can be helpful. By understanding clumpiness as a key facet of CLV, brands are turning the corner and seeing better results.

By understanding clumpy behavior, knowing to look for it and analyzing the level of clumpiness, marketers and other key decision makers gain a new metric for measuring and predicting CLV and choosing which customers to focus on and when. They can also gain a better understanding of customer satisfaction and react to it faster.

Defying the odds

When I first set out to conduct the research, I would have bet that the, findings would indicate that regular buyers were more loyal than those who buy in clumps. Well it turns out that my research, as well as others, suggests that regular buyers are in fact not more loyal.

Many times these are subscription customers and in fact, just buy without even thinking about their repurchase decision. A lot of research shows right now this is how you lose money. You take someone that buys in a regular pattern and try to upsell them because they don’t even think that they’re buying in a regular pattern.

We call it “poking the sleeping bear.” You poke somebody who’s just using your service regularly but isn’t even consciously … let’s say monthly making the decision to do so. And by your saying “Hey, why don’t you also buy …product?” “Holy cow! You mean I’m spending $300 a month on your product? Forget it! I cancel!” But your goal was to upsell them and instead you made them churn. So I’m not a strong believer in just observed loyalty. What appears to be observed loyalty over time, that’s not actually loyalty.

Final thoughts

I’m sure many of you reading this will have doubts. Many of you will want to stick to the tried-and-true RFM method and you are of course more than welcome to continue to do so. But I can tell you, without reservation, that if you do not begin to also factor in C (clumpiness), you will never get a true read on your customers.

Although recency/frequency/monetary value (RFM) segmentation framework, and its related probability models, remain a CLV mainstay, companies need to extend the framework to include clumpiness to predict future customer behavior successfully.

After studying thousands of data sets from companies across categories, we’ve found that C adds to the predictive power, above and beyond RFM and firm marketing action, of both the churn, incidence, and monetary value parts of CLV. Hence, we recommend a significant implementation change: from RFM to RFMC.

Measuring clumpiness has huge practical value. Clumpy consumers are worth more money and firms need to find them, and use marketing to drive customers to binge consume.

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

About The Author

Eric T. Bradlow is the chairperson of Wharton’s Marketing Department, K.P. Chao professor, professor of marketing, statistics, economics and education, and co-director and co-founder of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. He is also the co-founder of GBH Insights, a leading marketing strategy, consumer behavior and analytics consultancy. He has won numerous teaching awards at Wharton, including the MBA Core Curriculum teaching award, the Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching award and the Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Bradlow earned his Ph.D. and master’s degrees in mathematical statistics from Harvard University and his BS in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Whether you are a business owner, marketing manager or simply just interested in the world of ecommerce, you may be familiar with how a business can approach SEO.

To every person involved, the perception of SEO and its success can vary from a sophisticated technical grasp to a knowledge of the essentials.

At all levels, measurement and understanding of search data are crucial and different metrics will stand out; from rankings to the finer details of goals and page speed.

As you may know, you can’t rely solely on ranks as a method to track your progress. But there are other, simple ways to measure the impact of SEO on a business.

In a recent AMA on Reddit, Google’s own Gary Illyes recently urged SEO professionals to stick to the basics and this way of thinking can be applied to the measurement of organic search performance.

In this article, we will look to understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to understanding the impact of SEO, and how they can be viewed from a technical and commercial perspective. Before we start, it’s worth mentioning that this article has used Google’s own demo analytics account for screenshots. If you need further info to get to grips, check out this article, or access the demo version of Google Analytics.

Each of these are commercial SEO metrics — data that means something to everyone in a business.

Organic traffic

This is undoubtedly a simple, if not the most simple way of understanding the return of any SEO efforts. The day-to-day traffic from search engines is the key measure for many marketers and any increase can often be tied to an improved level of search visibility (excluding seasonal variation).

In a world where data drives decisions, these figures are pretty important and represent a key part of any internet user’s session, whether that is to get an answer, make a purchase or something else.

In Google Analytics, simply head follow this path: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels to see the organic traffic received within your chosen time period

You might be asking, “how can I know more?”

Google might have restricted access to keyword data back in 2011, but you can still dig down into your traffic from organic search to look at landing pages and locations.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by landing page 

Not all traffic from search hits your homepage, some users head to your blog or to specific landing pages, depending on their needs. For some searches, however, like those for your company name, your homepage will be the most likely option.

To understand the split of traffic across your site, use the “Landing Page” primary dimension and explore the new data, split by specific page URL.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by location

Within the same section, the organic search data can be split by location, such as city, to give even further detail on the makeup of your search traffic. Depending on how your business operates, the locations shown may be within the same country or across international locations. If you have spent time optimizing for audiences in specific areas, this view will be key to monitor overall performance.

Revenue, conversions, and goals

In most cases, your website is likely to be set up to draw conversions, whether that is product sales, document downloads, or leads.

Part of understanding the success of SEO, is the contribution to the goal of a business, whether that is monetary or lead-based.

For revenue based data, head to the conversions section within Google analytics, then select the product performance. Within that section, filter the secondary dimension by source/medium to show just sales that originate from search engine traffic.

If your aim isn’t totally revenue based, perhaps a signup form or some downloadable content, then custom analytics goals are your way of fully understanding the actions of visitors that originate from search engines.

Within the conversions section, the source of your goal completions can be split by source, allowing you to focus on solely visits from organic search.

If a visitor finds your site from a search and then buys something or registers their details, it really suggests you are visible to the right audience.

However, if you are getting consistent organic search visits with no further actions taken, that suggests the key terms you rank for, aren’t totally relevant to your website.

SEO efforts should focus on reaching the relevant audiences, you might rank #1 for a search query like “cat food” but if you only sell dog products, your optimization hasn’t quite worked.

Search and local visibility

In the case that your business has web and/or physical store presences, you can use the tools within Google My Business to look further into and beyond the performance of the traditional blue links.
Specifically, you can understand the following:

• How customers search for your business
• How someone sees your business
• What specific actions they take

The better your optimization, the more of these actions you will see, check these out!

Average search rankings

Rankings for your key terms on search engines have traditionally been an easy way to quickly get a view of overall performance. However, a “quick Google” can be hard to draw conclusions from. Personalized search from your history and location essentially skews average rank to a point where its use has been diminished.

A variety of tools can be used to get a handle on average rankings for specific terms. The free way to do this is through Google Search Console with freemium tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs, which also offer an ability to understand average rank distribution.

With search rankings becoming harder to accurately track, the measure of averages is the best way to understand how search ranking relates to and impacts the wider business.

Technical metrics – Important but not everyone pays attention to these

When it comes to the more technical side of measuring SEO, you have to peel back the layers and look beyond clicks and traffic. They help complete the wider picture of SEO performance, plus they can help uncover additional opportunities for progress.

Search index – Through search consoles and other tools

Ensuring that an accurate index of your website exists is one thing that you need to do with SEO. Because if only a part of your site or the wrong pages are indexed, then your overall performance will suffer.

Although a small part of overall SEO work, its arguably one of the most crucial.

One quick way is to enter the command “site:” followed by the URL of your site’s homepage, to see the total number of pages that exist in a search engine’s index.

To inspect the status of a specific page on Google, the Google Search Console is your best option. The newest version of the search console provides a quick way to bring up results.

Search crawl errors

As well as looking at what has been indexed, any website owner needs to keep an eye out for what may be missing, or if there have been any crawl errors reported by Google. These often occur because a page has been blocked, or the format isn’t crawlable by Google.

Head to the “Coverage” tab within Google Search Console to understand the nature of any errors and what page the error relates to. If there’s a big zero, then you and your business naturally have nothing to worry about.

Click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate

In addition to where and how your website ranks for searches, a metric to consider is how often your site listing is clicked in the SERPs. Essentially, this shows the percentage of impressions that result in a site visit.

This percentage indicates how relevant your listing is to the original query and how well your result ranks compared to your competitors.

If people like what they see and can easily find your website, then you’ll likely get a new site visit.

The Google Search Console is the best go-to resource again for the most accurate data. Just select the performance tab and toggle the CTR tab to browse data by query, landing page, country of origin, and device.

If someone does venture onto your site, you will want to ensure the page they see, is relevant to their search, after all, search algorithms love to reward relevance! If the page doesn’t contain the information required or isn’t user-friendly, then it is likely the user will leave to find a better resource, without taking any action, known as a bounce.

In some cases, one visit may be all that is needed, therefore a bounce isn’t an issue. Make sure to view this metric in the wider context of what your business offers.

Mobile friendliness

Widely reported in 2015, was the unveiling of mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. This is crucial to the evolution of browser behavior, with mobile traffic, often greater in volume than desktop for some sites.

Another report in the ever useful Google Search Console gives a clear low-down of how mobile-friendly a site is, showing warnings for any issues. It’s worth saying, this measure isn’t an indication of how likely a conversion is, but more the quality of your site on a mobile device.

Follow your metrics and listen to the data

As mentioned at the start of this article, data drives decisions. In all areas of business, certain numbers will stand out. With SEO, a full understanding comes from multiple data points, with positives and negatives to be taken at every point of the journey.

Ultimately, it often comes down to traffic, ranks, and conversions, the numbers that definitely drive business are made up of the metrics that don’t often see the light of day but are just as important.

As a digital marketer, it is always a learning experience to know how data drives the evolution of a business and ultimately, how successes and opportunities are reported and understood.

Matthew Ramsay is Digital Marketing Manager at Digitaloft. 

Further reading:

Related reading

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We reviewed the best practices of ecommerce leaders and success stories of smaller merchants. Three life hacks to make product pages convert more visitors.

How to create unique articles that encompass major on-page SEO elements, and touch the reader? A streamlined process, key benefits, and screenshots listed.

YouTube is not just a social media platform. It’s a powerful search engine for video content. Here’s how to make the most of its SEO potential.

NEW YORK — In an event laden with advertisers and influential video creators alike, YouTube’s Brandcast in New York on Thursday was a brandish of metrics, niche content development and new inventory opportunities in a glamorous pitch for ad dollars.

Key announcements included updates to the Google Preferred algorithm, a fresh YouTube TV lineup grounded in specialized interests, deeper performance insights for Google Preferred advertisers, and YouTube Originals series becoming available for free to users as an ad-supported experience.

Digging into niche markets. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki took to the stage to recognize the wide-reaching influence of YouTube creators – while simultaneously acknowledging the cultural and commercial impact YouTube has on advertisers.

“YouTube Creators are the cutting edge of culture, creating entirely new genres we could have never imagined beforehand and diversifying our perspectives in the process,” Wojcicki said. “Most people say the content they watched on YouTube is related to something that they are passionate about. And according to our joint research with Omnicom, relating to a passion is three times more important than whether or not there’s a big Hollywood name attached.”

In an effort to broaden YouTube TV’s channels, the company announced it’s making 70 broadcast and cable channels available as its own lineup under the Google Preferred reservation program. The initiative is designed to give advertisers access to more live and in-demand ad inventory with more focused targeting based on subscriber interests.

Google Preferred updates. YouTube announced key updates to its proprietary P-score algorithm, aimed at increasing visibility for videos with higher production value and content frequently watched on TV screens.

YouTube said it found a “significant lift” in ad recall (112 percent) and purchase intent (53 percent) from Google Preferred ads viewed on TV screens.

To provide advertisers with more resources for measuring offline sales, YouTube said it plans to make Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) available for Google Preferred ads in the coming months. The tool aims to give marketers and advertisers metrics into offline sales and provide deeper insights across audiences and content creative for CPG brands in the U.S.

YouTube Originals free with ads. YouTube said it’s making its original programming free for all users under an ad-supported streaming model. In addition to returning shows – featuring celebrities and influencers like Liza Koshy and Kevin Hart – YouTube plans to add a slate of new shows to the mix. While it’s a worthy effort to address viewer demands, the expansion underscores YouTube’s effort to cater to the diverse targeting opportunities for advertisers.

Why we should care. YouTube has the highest share in reach and watch time across all ad-supported OTT platforms, according to Comscore OTT Intelligence and Custom Reporting. The rising streaming trend is already disrupting addressable TV ad products, and platforms like YouTube are competing head-to-head with networks for ad dollars.

YouTube’s focus on content quality and ad-supported programming is tipping the scales for digital advertisers, who are now faced with more specialized targeting options than ever before.

About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

The last couple of years have made a few things very clear. If you have a business online, you need to make it your business to be mobile-first.

Second, your mobile experience needs to be smooth and frictionless if you want it to translate into dollars. Lastly, smartphone users are super fickle and despite downloading over 113 billion apps in 2018, users still regularly use only about 9 apps per day.

So, you need to be on mobile. You need to be awesome on mobile. And people are probably not going to download and use your app regularly. What do you do then?

Build something that combines the slick, user-friendly interface of a mobile app without actually creating an app.

Yes, I’m talking about progressive web apps or PWAs.

In the simplest possible words, a PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Users have the option to save a PWA to their phone and launch it just like an app, but it’s totally optional.

There are a whole host of perks that PWAs bring with them while overcoming the inherent disadvantages of building and maintaining a mobile site and a mobile app simultaneously. Let’s take a deeper dive to see how you can get the most out of PWAs.

Speed, thy name is PWA

This is undoubtedly one of the most exciting features of PWAs. Businesses can target users who might be on a slow data connection or even those who are offline with a PWA by using mobile development best practices like caching content ahead of time, compression, and more.

Why should you care about site speed? Because it directly impacts your SEO and your conversion rate.

In January 2018, Google formally announced what many SEO experts suspected for a while that mobile speed would be a key factor in organic search rankings for websites. With that came the mad rush to mobile optimize websites, improve page load times, improve navigation, and the works. In the case of PWAs, pages load instantly due to pre-caching and allow users a quick and simple user experience. A definite SEO win.

Research has shown over time that there is a correlation between site speed and conversion rates. A drop in site speed usually leads to a corresponding drop in conversion rates and vice versa.

Source: Think with Google

Source: One North

Websites can enjoy vastly improved conversion rates with the faster page load times that PWAs offer. Cosmetics giant Lancome switched to a PWA in 2017 and saw a significant improvement in both speed and conversion rates. They experienced an 84% drop in time until the page is interactive and a 17% growth in conversion rates.

Better engagement

Google dictates the fundamental requirements that a website needs to fulfill to qualify as a progressive web app. A smooth user experience including easy navigation, timely push notifications, cross-browser compatibility, responsive pages across all devices are a few important requirements that also lead to a growth in engagement.

PWAs mimic real mobile apps by allowing users to install them on their devices. With the app now on their mobile phones, the chances of interaction and engagement become exponentially higher, as experienced by Forbes magazine when they launched their own PWA. Users were notified every time new content was available via push notifications. With lightning-fast page load times, quick transitions and light page design, Forbes’ PWA managed to achieve the following:

• Increase scroll depth by 3x
• Improve sessions per user by 43%
• Get a 6x increase in readers completing articles
• Double their engagement rate which means a 100% increase in engagement

In the case of a publishing site like Forbes, high engagement equals high conversions, all thanks to their new PWA.

We know that website engagement metrics like session duration, click-through rates, and bounce rates have a direct impact on search rankings. As Larry Kim demonstrates here, time on site has a definite correlation with your organic search rankings. The higher the session duration, the higher your likely ranking on Google.

Source: Medium

You can say hello to page one on Google, all thanks to PWAs and their superior website engagement rates.

It’s all about the URLs

Progressive web apps truly embrace SEO best practices in every sense of the term. From clear and concise meta descriptions to adding Schema.org data for better indexing and parsing of site data by search bots; a search-optimized website is more likely to make the PWA cut than others.

PWAs don’t require different “mobile.site.com” types of URLs to offer a great experience on mobile devices. They’re automatically configured to provide a consistent experience, no matter what the device. Another bonus is that PWAs are necessarily HTTPS enabled. Not only does this bump up your site on organic search results but also reassures users about the security on your site leading to lower bounce rates, higher click rates, and likely higher conversion rates.

Each page comes with its own unique URL, making even deeply embedded pages easily crawlable and discoverable by search engines. Unique URLs for each page also makes sharing pages on social media and other sites much easier, not to mention more transparently trackable.

With pre-caching in place using service workers, all URLs on PWAs load even when your device is offline, empowering users who operate on older devices or poor network connections.

In closing

As users evolve and express their preferences more clearly, it is up to businesses to ensure that they pick up on these signals and adapt to stay relevant to their target audience. Today’s user is telling us that they expect a fast and frictionless journey on their mobile devices, without being forced to download an app for this superior user experience.

Time to pick up on those cues and invest in PWAs that combine ease of the mobile web with the speed and user-friendliness of a mobile app. Two for the price of one is what you get with PWAs. So when are you going to build yours?

Rohan Ayyar is Regional Marketing Manager at SEMrush. He can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

We reviewed the best practices of ecommerce leaders and success stories of smaller merchants. Three life hacks to make product pages convert more visitors.

How to create unique articles that encompass major on-page SEO elements, and touch the reader? A streamlined process, key benefits, and screenshots listed.

YouTube is not just a social media platform. It’s a powerful search engine for video content. Here’s how to make the most of its SEO potential.

In part three, we will learn how to automatically group pages using machine learning to recover SEO site traffic using Python.

It’s your typical overcast Saturday in downtown Portland, Oregon, and I’m heading out to the park to walk my dog, Betty. What I find this particular evening is anything but typical as instead of a few homeless guys sleeping on benches and fellow dog walkers, I encounter hundreds of people of all ages walking through the south park blocks. Their excitement was infectious, and I was delighted to see so many Portlander’s enjoying one of the cities most prized resources. But what made this Saturday different from every other and why had this happy mob descended on my neighborhood?

As I took a closer look, I noticed that everyone was engaging with their phones, some even had two, three, up to four different phones. I had to learn more about what was going on and if my suspicions were true that this was some sort of online community. My thoughts immediately went to Pokémon Go, but wasn’t that a thing of the past and had that game appealed to such a cross-section of the population? There were families, young children, groups of teens, adults – some solo but the majority were traveling in packs. I stopped one group who were kind enough to answer my newbie questions and learned this was indeed a Pokémon Go Community Day. A special global event that features rare Pokémon and other in-game goodies during a dedicated window of time. According to Wikipedia, Pokémon Go has accrued over a billion downloads worldwide and has 147 million monthly active users.

So how does this story relate to immersive retail and fashion? Good question! Love or hate Pokémon Go, there’s no denying that it is the most broadly used immersive app to date. The secret sauce its creator, Niantic, has cooked up is chock full of lessons for all of us looking to leverage immersive technologies to build brand experiences and ultimately sell more stuff. Let’s dive a bit deeper into how brand marketers can build effective fashion and retail experiences using immersive technology.

1. It needs to be social

The most successful digital disruptors over the last few years have one thing in common, they build social into their DNA. Recent examples include Pokémon Go and Peloton,  who has grown a $4 billion dollar business by replicating the community of an actual fitness class at home.  A great example of this within the fashion industry is China’s Tmall. This shopping app has leveraged immersive technology to provide their online audiences access to VIP events such as the hugely popular “See Now, Buy Now” event last year.

This “retail-as-entertainment” event is part of Alibaba’s Singles Day shopping event and featured big-name designers, celebrities, musical productions and much more all filmed live in front of a select VIP audience. The live-stream was broadcast across both immersive and 2D channels to over 57 million viewers and included a streamlined ‘see now, buy now’ app that allowed viewers to buy the products they saw on the runway instantly. The show also offered a “Play Now” feature that allowed the viewers to rank the outfits in real-time, creating an instant trend report and sending feedback to the designers. According to Sean Lane, immersive retail specialist and Technology Principal at digital studio Point B, the Singles Day event “had over 8 million users make purchases using their VR headsets. They have also been very successful with Tmall VR experiences with users watching fashion shows on the runway and leveraging the ‘purchase now’ feature.”

2. Provide value to the customer

What differentiates a good immersive experience from another is the value it offers to the user. To pay off the hassle of either strapping on a VR headset or downloading an AR app, the user must gain substantial value from the result. There are several ways that innovative brands are both meeting their business objectives while meeting the needs of customers. Immersive technology is an amazing way to take users to places they otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. Providing customers something they want and can’t get anywhere else is a good formula for success. One B2B fashion app based in Paris, Change of Paradigm, offers designers and brands the ability to do just that. Their high-quality, 3D models of luxury brand apparel are the best I’ve seen. If I were a clothing designer, I would want its Paris studio director, Franck Audrain, to create the digital version. A fashion designer in his own right, Audrain has spent years in the technology industry and meticulously mimics the most complicated garments in 3D. His team can create a hyper-realistic version of an already exiting garment or build a digital proto-type of a garment that only exists in the imagination of its designer.

This recent AR experience at Paris department store, Bon Marché, shows the detail captured in Change of Paradigm’s 3D fashion technology.

The company has a proprietary technology that digitally duplicates each fabric to realistically depict how the garment will flow when moving through space. This attention to detail and the fact that they can output the 3D assets across multiple channels such as web, VR and mobile AR make their offering compelling to luxury brands.

They are working on a virtual try-on experience that will rival anything we’ve seen to date but this is still several years away. According to founder Henri Mura, “currently effective immersive experiences for trying on apparel is limited to jewelry, accessories and footwear. For clothing, if you want to go beyond a simple 2D overlay, you really need to understand how the material will fit a customer’s unique shape in 3D and then represent that in the immersive environment. We’re working on a solution, but it has to be perfect to provide true value.”

Other ways brands can provide value to shoppers can include something as simple as easing friction along the path to purchase, such as the ‘See Now, Buy Now’ feature in the Tmall VR shopping app or creating a memorable experience. Macy’s successfully used virtual reality to allow Chinese shoppers the rare opportunity to visit their flagship store in New York without having to leave China. Ensuring that the immersive journey is as intuitive and seamless as possible is an important part of the recipe for success. Many U.S. brands are still struggling on that front as immersive experiences often require unique downloads and a series of user actions before accessing the experience. Puma’s recent launch of an AR shoe is an example where the user needs to download a stand-alone app that can recognize the shoe to use special decorative filters similar to SnapChat’s lens feature. I’m not so sure I would find that valuable.

3. Leverage the right immersive technology for the job

Before building any immersive experience, it’s essential to understand your objectives, your audience and the technologies at your disposal for bringing your vision to life. There are still quite a few challenges to consider when building an immersive experience and striking the right balance between quality and scale is essential. Are you trying to reach a high-stakes, niche audience like the 1% who can afford luxury items or anyone who has access to a smartphone? Is your marketing objective strictly to sell more product or are you looking to build a connection with your audience? These types of questions need to be clearly defined before getting started so that you can determine the best flavor of immersive – Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality or Mixed Reality – for the job.

There have been several AR, retail experiences that have been dumbed-down for mobile to scale with not so great results leading to posts like this one dismissing the value of immersive retail technology.

Immersive retail specialist, Sean Lane, breaks it down this way: “I think latency, ease of use and accessibility are still impeding factors to adoption. I have seen Virtual Reality gain limited adoption inside brands, mostly for HR onboarding, marketing and training. I have built a few pilots testing VR internally for training, planning, global development and the like. While the experiences are good, they are not good enough. Many people still get motion sickness and the graphics are not realistic enough. Interoperability with other platforms is not seamless. However, I still believe there are times when VR is the right tool for the job. When you want to have complete control over an experience and direct the process, then VR enables a brand to do that. I think that Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality have a greater chance of widespread adoption in enterprise and retail.”

Where to start?

There are several resources available for fashion brands looking to leverage immersive technology. Hiring a specialist or creative agency to build a strategy isn’t always an option but a great first step if the budget is available. Other less costly resources include publications like Medium, which hosts a community of immersive professionals sharing insights, and marketing sites like MarketingLand.com. One specific community of brands looking to solve some of the issues surrounding 3D technologies for apparel and footwear is the 3DRC (3D Retail Coalition), which is made up of brands, technologists and educators.

The best and most important advice I can you leave you with comes from Lane, who wisely proclaims: “The biggest win for any of these technologies is to ensure the use is authentic to your brand and not forced. When immersive is used to create real experiences that enhance consumer interaction with your brand or to build brand loyalty or connection, THIS will lead to better results.”

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

About The Author

Lisa Peyton is an immersive media strategist and media psychologist focusing on the user engagement and marketing applications of new technologies.

In the realm of digital marketing, brand ownership means everything. It’s safe to say that nearly all search advertisers see the vast majority of their traffic and revenue come from their branded initiatives.

Put simply, branded (search engine marketing) SEM is something advertisers need to fully own and focus on optimizing. With that being said, one of the biggest challenges within the brand space is optimizing spend as efficiently and effectively as possible, in relation to CPC (cost per click) levels.

Knowing that branded campaigns are so important for paid search, many advertisers opt to max out their keyword CPC bids. This means that the CPC headroom, or monetary gap between your max CPC bid and your keyword’s average CPC, will be much larger than needed.

In their minds, this ensures that they are capturing the maximum amount of traffic without sacrificing brand real estate. Although the theory behind that approach is technically accurate, these individuals are not being nearly as efficient with client spend. These campaign managers also allow Google and Bing’s algorithms a greater opportunity for charging extra money.

Typically, SEM advertisers fall into this trap for a good reason, because they want to ensure that they are eliminating competition on their client’s branded space.

But, we believe that minimizing the headroom between the max CPC bid and the average CPC over time will allow these advertisers to ultimately cut the spend levels without the sacrifice of user volume or traffic.

What we did to prove this theory

We ran a couple of tests to see how traffic was affected. Initially, we cut our bids in half, but we immediately saw traffic drop off as a result. Then we took a different approach and thought about what would happen if we tried shaving our bids down incrementally on a daily basis? This would allow us to keep a close eye on traffic and impression share, and bid back up if we ever fell below a certain volume threshold. Ultimately, we found that if you play this long-term dance with the search engine, the theory holds true. You can reduce your average CPC, maintain consistent traffic levels, and ultimately lower your keyword bids.

Implementation

Before launching a bid walk down test, it’s important to audit your account for potential risks and to estimate the expected impact. Here are several preliminary checks that we recommend:

1. Competitive landscape: Check the auction insights on your core keyword over the past year and note how many competitors are bidding in the auction as well as their average impression share. The higher the competition, the higher the risk, since advertisers will be able to overtake your position without bidding as aggressively. The higher competition also limits the opportunity to drive lower cost, since auction activity is a key component of Google’s quality score algorithm.
2. The headroom calculation: Another important check is looking at the past average CPC versus your current bid. The difference between your bid and the average CPC equals the headroom. Larger headroom means more opportunity for incremental efficiency. Because every advertiser lives in a unique digital environment, we don’t have a concrete headroom threshold that indicates an opportunity for cost savings. In general, we have run successful tests with advertisers who have a headroom ratio above eight. As an example, an advertiser with a two-dollar bid and a twenty cent average CPC is a qualified candidate. Our most successful case studies included advertisers with lower competition and a greater headroom spread.

Now for the exciting part. Let’s begin decreasing bids to reduce the average CPC. Keep in mind that this process may take several months, but the long-term benefits can help advertisers gain up to 40% cost savings, which can have a significant impact on profitability and frees up budget for acquiring new customers. Here are the steps:

1. Benchmark position & share metrics

Looking at the past 30 days, determine your average impression share and absolute top impressions share (as called as the new measure for the average position). For most advertisers, these metrics hover between 90-99%.

2. Launch engine bidding rules

Now that we have our benchmark share of voice metrics, we can launch two engine rules to help automate the bid walk down process. Google/Bing react poorly to major shifts, so we are going to set rules that only change our keyword bid incrementally up or down per day.

• The bid down rule – Create filters to isolate down to your core keyword and set a daily rule to decrease the max CPC if – average impression share > X, and absolute top impression share > X using yesterday’s data.
• The bid up rule – Stay at the core keyword level, but now set a rule to increase the max CPC if average impression share < X and absolute top impression share < X using yesterday’s data.

It is imperative to set both rules to run each morning. So long as your core term is maintaining adequate search impression volume, the bid down rule will make incremental adjustments daily. Once your impression share falls below your set threshold, the bid up rule will increase your bid every day until you have regained share. We set the impression share rules plus or minus a small percentage from their actuals so that the rules have more room to make changes. For a more conservative approach, set these rule thresholds to an exact percentage over the past 30 days.

Over time, you should expect to see your max CPC get closer to your average CPC, which will reduce overall cost without losing any volume. Advertisers with high auction pressure should check their core keyword daily (auction insights, impression share metrics, and live search results) to ensure that competitors are not outbidding your brand.

To conclude, as an advertiser, it is imperative to recognize the volatility of the search engine landscape. There are a lot of moving parts with branded real estate, some easy to control, and some not. This process will help you capitalize on greater opportunities without leaving anything up to chance.

Lowering brand CPC’s isn’t an overnight process by any means. But if you are willing to take a gradual approach towards efficiency, you will save your client significant money without the sacrifice of impression share on your keywords.

Steven Oleksak is Senior SEM Manager and Nicolas Ross is an SEM Coordinator at PMG Advertising Agency.

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Messenger is rolling out two new features for businesses: lead generation templates and an appointment booking interface that will integrate with calendar platforms. The new tools were launched during Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference that kicked-off on Tuesday.

The lead gen templates are housed directly in Facebook’s Ads Manager platform. Businesses will be able to create an automated question and answer flow that will be delivered via Messenger when someone clicks on a News Feed ad offering a chat option. The booking feature involves an interface within the Messenger Platform API and can be integrated with calendar systems so that customers can see a business’s availability and book their appointment based on open time slots.

Why we should care

Both new features offer brands the opportunity to close the communication gap with potential customers, giving them a personalized experience via Messenger. Facebook reports General Motors was able to generate 3,000 leads in eight weeks time via the lead gen template they created with their development partner Smarters.

Sephora had early access to the appointment book feature in Messenger and worked with Assist to build its booking experience. The beauty company saw a 50 percent increase for in-store bookings compared to other channels using the new Messenger feature.

More on the news

• Both General Motors and Sephora teamed up with development partners to create their automated Messenger experiences, highlighting the need for brands to work with companies that understand the technology and nuance of creating automated experiences.
• Facebook said both features are still in beta, but will launch later this year.
• Facebook reports users and businesses are currently exchanging over 20 billion messages over Messenger each month, according to their internal data from April.

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.

Publishing original content to your website is, of course, critical for building your audience and boosting your SEO.

The benefits of unique and original content are twofold:

1. Original content delivers a superior user experience.
2. Original content helps ensure that search engines aren’t forced to choose between multiple pages of yours that have the same content.

However, when content is duplicated either accidentally or on purpose, search engines will not be duped and may penalize a site with lower search rankings accordingly. Unfortunately, many businesses often publish repeated content without being aware that they’re doing so. This is why auditing your site with a duplicate content checker is so valuable in helping sites to recognize and replace such content as necessary.

This article will help you better understand what is considered duplicate content, and steps you can take to make sure it doesn’t hamper your SEO efforts.

How does Google define “duplicate content”?

Duplicate content is described by Google as content “within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar”. Content fitting this description can be repeated either on more than one page within your site, or across different websites. Common places where this duplicate content might be hiding include duplicated copy across landing pages or blog posts, or harder-to-detect areas such as meta descriptions that are repeated in a webpage’s code. Duplicate content can be produced erroneously in a number of ways, from simply reposting existing content by mistake to allowing the same page content to be accessible via multiple URLs.

When visitors come to your page and begin reading what seems to be newly posted content only to realize they’ve read it before, that experience can reduce their trust in your site and likeliness that they’ll seek out your content in the future. Search engines have an equally confusing experience when faced with multiple pages with similar or identical content and often respond to the challenge by assigning lower search rankings across the board.

At the same time, there are sites that intentionally duplicate content for malicious purposes, scraping content from other sites that don’t belong to them or duplicating content known to deliver successful SEO in an attempt to game search engine algorithms. However, most commonly, duplicated content is simply published by mistake. There are also scenarios where republishing existing content is acceptable, such as guest blogs, syndicated content, intentional variations on the copy, and more. These techniques should only be used in tandem with best practices that help search engines understand that this content is being republished on purpose (described below).

Source: Alexa.com SEO Audit

An automated duplicate content checker tool can quickly and easily help you determine where such content exists on your site, even if hidden in the site code. Such tools should display each URL and meta description containing duplicate content so that you can methodically perform the work of addressing these issues. While the most obvious practice is to either remove repeated content or add original copy as a replacement, there are several other approaches you might find valuable.

How to check for duplicate content

1. Using the rel=canonical <link> tag

These tags can tell search engines which specific URL should be viewed as the master copy of a page, thus solving any duplicate content confusion from the search engines’ standpoint.

2. Using 301 redirects

These offer a simple and search engine-friendly method of sending visitors to the correct URL when a duplicate page needs to be removed.

3. Using the “noindex” meta tags

These will simply tell search engines not to index pages, which can be advantageous in certain circumstances.

4. Using Google’s URL Parameters tool

This tool helps you tell Google not to crawl pages with specific parameters. This might be a good solution if your site uses parameters as a way to deliver content to the visitor that is mostly the same content with minor changes (i.e. headline changes, color changes, etc). This tool makes it simple to let Google know that your duplicated content is intentional and should not be considered for SEO purposes.

Source: Alexa.com SEO Audit

By actively checking your site for duplicated content and addressing any issues satisfactorily, you can improve not only the search rankings of your site’s pages but also make sure that your site visitors are directed to fresh content that keeps them coming back for more.

Got any effective tips of how you deal with on-site content duplication? Share them in the comments.

Kim Kosaka is Director of Marketing at Alexa.com.

Further reading:

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