Pinterest and Quora are now approved Google Tag Manager vendors, making it easy for marketers to manage their Pinterest and Quora Pixels via Google’s platform.

Why we should care

The native integrations for Quora and Pinterest makes it much easier to set up those pixels in Google Tag Manager (GTM) to track ad campaign performance from those channels. No more having to create a custom HTML tag in GTM.

Within GTM, you can set up your pixels from channels to track user behaviors such as viewing a piece of content, or adding items to the cart, without having to alter the code base.

Currently, Pinterest and Quora’s Google Tag Manager integrations only support tacking from websites not apps, according to Google’s supported tag manager list.

More on the news

• Both Pinterest and Quora shared quick steps for adding each platform’s tags into your Google Tag Manager account: Pinterest instructions here. Quora instructions here.
• Google Tag Manager currently supports more than 80 websites natively, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Adobe Analytics, Microsoft Ads and more.

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.

After testing the Search Console for more than a year, Google announced its release from beta last year.

In the previous year, maybe more, Google slowly rolled out the beta eventually doing a full open beta invite to all Search Console users and migrating their features from the old to the new version. From the new UI to the new features, the tool is currently performing at its best.

But it’s difficult to keep up with Google Search Console updates, let alone integrate them into your search marketing mix. However, because SEO is ever evolving, these updates always come at a good time. The following is a guide on the newest features you might not have heard of yet, and how to make use of them to improve your search marketing.

1. Improved UI

The main source of confusion surrounding the new version of the Search Console has been how Google is handling the transition. For starters, not all features have been moved directly into the new version. All features and the reports they provide are being evaluated so they can be modified and presented to handle the modern challenges facing the SEO manager. Google even published a guide to explain the differences between the two versions.

Overall, the tool has been redesigned to provide a premium-level UI. As a marketer, this benefits you in one major way: without the clutter, you’re able to remain more focused and organized.

You can look at reports that matter the most, and even those you don’t have to spend too much time on because they’ve been made briefer. Monitoring and navigation are also more time-efficient.

These may not seem like a direct boost to your SEO efforts, but with this improved UI, you can get more work done in less time. This freed up time can then be channeled to other search marketing strategies.

2. Test live for URL inspection

The URL Inspection tool got an important update that allows real-time testing of your URL. With the “Test Live” feature, Google allows you to run live tests against your URL and gives a report based on what it sees in real time not just the last time that URL was indexed.

Google says this is useful “for debugging and fixing issues in a page or confirming whether a reported issue still exists in a page. If the issue is fixed on the live version of the page, you can ask Google to recrawl and index the page.”

The URL Inspection tool is fairly new. It’s a useful tool as it gives you a chance to fix issues on your page. So Google doesn’t just notice what’s wrong with your page — it also tells you, allows you to fix it, and reindexes the page.

URL Inspection has other features: Coverage and Mobile Usability.

i. Coverage – This has three sub-categories:

• Discovery shows the sitemap and referring page.
• Crawl shows the last time Google crawled the page and if the fetch was successful.
• Indexing shows if indexing is allowed.

ii. Mobile Usability: It shows if your page is mobile friendly or not. This helps you optimize your site for mobile.

Overall, URL Inspection is a handy feature for easily identifying issues with your site. Afterward, you can then send a report to Google to help in debugging and fixing the identified issues. The feature is also useful for checking performance and making sure your site is SEO-optimized and your pages, indexed.

3. Manual actions report

From the menu bar, you can see the “Manual actions” tab. This is where you find the new Manual Actions report that shows you the various issues found on your web page.

As you’d expect, the report is brief and only shows the most important information. It can even be viewed as part of the report summary on the Overview page. If any issues are found, you can optimize it and request a review from Google. The major errors that can be found and fixed from here are mobile usability issues and crawl error.

This feature helps you, as a search marketer, to minimize the amount of time you take to review your website performance. It’s one more step to improving your website speed and overall performance because issues are quickly detected and fixed. And of course, it’s no news that speed is one of the key attributes of an SEO-friendly website.

4. Performance report

The “Performance” report feature was the first to be launched in the beta version of the Search Console so it’s been around for more than a year. It replaces Search Analytics and comes in a new and improved UI.

Compared to Search Analytics, the main strength of the new report is in the amount of search traffic data. Instead of 3 months, the Performance report incorporates 16 months of data. This data includes click, CTR, impression, and average ranking metrics at all levels (device, page, query, and country).

You can use this data to optimize your website, improve mobile SEO, evaluate your keywords, check content performance and more. All these activities help improve your SEO.

5. Index coverage report

Index Coverage was launched alongside the Performance report. It’s an evolution of the previous Index Status and Crawl Errors reports.

Providing site-level insights, the Index Coverage report flags problems with pages submitted in a sitemap and provides trends on the indexed pages, those that can be indexed.

By allowing you to see the indexing and crawling issues from Google’s perspective, the report pinpoints the problems limiting your ability to rank high on the SERP.

Conclusion

The Google Search Console will continue to be one of the best free SEO tools out there. Every new feature adds to it a new ability to help marketers better manage their SERP appearances. If you care about where and how you appear on search engines, these and any future updates, including how to use them, will be of much interest to you.

Joseph is the Founder and CEO of Digitage. He can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

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.

A new analysis of 73,000 business listings found that 96% of all business locations fail to list their business information correctly.

I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to define common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations.

First there was Microsoft adCenter. Then there was Bing Ads. Now there is Microsoft Advertising.

Why we should care. The rebrand emphasizes a focus on personalization and AI. “In the next year, we’re introducing more advertising products with built-in AI, more connected to your data and your business,” Rik van der Kooi, corporate VP for Microsoft Advertising, said in a blog post Monday.

It’s a bit of a back to the future move with a return to using the broader (and resurgent) Microsoft branding to signal offerings that extend beyond search inventory and search data.

“It’s a simple shift because our clients and partners already know us as Microsoft, and many are already tapping into our new advertising products that go above and beyond search, such as the Microsoft Audience Network.”

Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) launched almost exactly a year ago. The AI backbone that powers Bing has given the company the “right to innovate,”David Pann, general manager of global search business at Microsoft said during a keynote discussion at SMX East last year. He cited MSAN and LinkedIn integrations as one example.

Interestingly, LinkedIn was not named in Monday’s news. Microsoft started integrating the audience data graphs of LinkedIn and Microsoft in 2017 and made LinkedIn data available for targeting in Microsoft Audience Network and then search ads last year.

Reflects several changes. The last rebranding came out of an initiative to focus on specifically on search advertising. The Bing Ads branding replaced adCenter in 2012 at the same time as Microsoft and Yahoo dubbed their search alliance the Yahoo Bing Network.

Where once Yahoo’s name preceded Bing’s in that search alliance, Yahoo — now under Verizon Media Group — ceded search ad delivery to Bing last year in a deal that made Bing Ads the exclusive search adverting platform for Verizon Media properties, including Yahoo and AOL. That deal also pushed Google out from serving any slices of that inventory.

Also part of that deal, the Microsoft Audience Network (the early harbinger of this broader rebrand) gained access to inventory on Verizon Media properties with that new deal.

In similar fashion, Google’s brand change from AdWords to Google Ads last year reflected the platform’s evolution from keyword-based search ads into one that supports many different ad formats — text, shopping, display, video, app install — across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and a network of partner sites and apps

What else is new? The news comes as what had been dubbed the Bing Ads Partner Summit kicks off at Microsoft’s Redmond, WA headquarters this week. With this announcement, the Bing Ads Partner Program is now the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program.

The Bing brand is sticking around: “Bing remains the consumer search brand in our portfolio, and will only become more important as intent data drives more personalization and product innovation.”

Sponsored Products were also announced Monday. Sponsored Products allow manufacturers to promote their products in shopping campaigns with their retailer partners. “Manufacturers gain access to new reporting and optimization capabilities, and retailers get additional product marketing support with a fair cost split.” Sponsored Products is in beta in the U.S. only at this time.

Market share stats. Microsoft Advertising said it has 500,000 advertisers. For a bit of reference, Google passed the million advertiser mark in 2009. Facebook said last week that 3 million advertises are using Stories Ads alone.

It also said it reaches more than 500 million users and that Bing’s search share growth has grown for 100 consecutive quarters, according to comScore custom data.

This article originally appeared on Search Engine Land. For more on search marketing, click here.

About The Author

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

When Facebook’s smart display was released last year, it received mixed-to-positive reviews. However, a substantial number of them also digressed into the privacy and personal data controversies that have recently surrounded Facebook. A review from The Verge offers a representative example:

It’s not often that a new gadget gets announced and I don’t immediately want to get my hands on it. I am an extreme early adopter, both by profession and by inclination. But when Facebook’s new Portal and Portal Plus were announced a month ago, my response was a firm “no thanks.” And I’m not alone: after a year of data privacy scandals, many people’s first reaction to the Portal, a smart display device that has an always-listening microphone and always-watching camera, landed somewhere between hesitation and revulsion.

Portal currently comes in two smart display versions

Late to the market. Facebook was late to the market with the smart display device (powered by Alexa) and that fact undoubtedly hurt its position. But there is now data suggesting people may be staying away because of privacy concerns.

Facebook’s Q1 2019 earnings this week beat Wall Street expectations. The company reported nearly $15 billion in ad revenue, up 26 percent year over year. Advertiser attitudes and Facebook revenue have not been negatively impacted by the various and widely reported privacy scandals – to the surprise of some. But Portal may be a different story, and there’s evidence that these privacy controversies are taking some toll on Facebook’s relationship with consumers.

Hardware revenue down YoY. Facebook doesn’t break out hardware revenue; it resides within Payments & Other Fees. Those revenues in Q1 were $165 million, which was down 4 percent from last year (VR hardware is part of that revenue as well). And while we have no way of knowing specifically about Portal sales, the evidence suggests they’re not moving very well.

Beyond the Q1 category revenue decline, the company recently dropped the price of both portal models by $100. And in multiple surveys, consumers have indicated that privacy is a growing concern when it comes to smart speakers and smart displays.

A 2019 PC Magazine survey of 2,000 U.S. adults found that privacy topped the list of concerns about smart home products. Privacy was also at the center of a Common Sense-Survey Monkey poll about parents’ concerns about their children’s use of virtual assistants and smart speakers. A third survey from IBD/TIPP found that more than 70 percent of respondents were worried about smart speaker privacy. And there are more such surveys.

Why we should care. The smart speaker and display market right now looks a lot like the smartphone market – with two dominant companies in control: Amazon and Google. Apple is also in the running with its HomePod; and, as of this moment, so is Facebook.

If the social media company wants to compete in the smart home/smart speaker market, it will need to do a number of things: create a truly great device, price it aggressively and go above and beyond to offer privacy protection. Simple assurances are not enough.

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.

For a few quarters there, Amazon was posting triple digit growth rates. Then growth slowed to 97% in the fourth quarter of 2018 and Thursday, the company reported just 36% growth in its advertising business line for the first quarter of 2019.

Amazon reports advertising business under an “Other” category. And while advertising accounts for the majority of that category,  Amazon said that the advertising business actually grew “a bit more” than 36% in the first quarter. Another thing to note is an accounting change puts previous quarters in a more favorable light, so the actual separation isn’t as big as it looks. All that said, Amazon is clearly invested in growing its advertising and it still very early days for that piece of the business. Here is what Amazon had to say about it on Thursday’s earning call.

Focus on ad relevancy. “I would say really what we’re focused on right now is driving relevancy, ensuring that we service the most useful ad as possible. I think that’s going to be the best experience for customers and also for advertisers.” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s CFO, said on the earnings call when asked about the deceleration over the past two quarters.

Building tools to make buying easier. “So most of our focus has been on again adding more functionality, adding more products and adding — reporting for businesses and advertisers — so they can understand the incremental customers they’re seeing on Amazon through advertising with Amazon,” said Olsavsky. “So it’s more right now about tools and making better recommendations, making it easier to use our Amazon demand-side platform, things like that, operational improvements.”

Support for brands. “And then, I guess, we’re very focused on serving brands as well. That’s another theme that we have,” Olsavsky said. “These brand stores that we have are easy to create, customize, and we’ve had great pickup on that from brands, but they can show shoppers who they are and tell their story. So it builds a better engagement for the brand and the customer. It builds better customer loyalty both to that brand and also to Amazon.”

Still a nascent business. “I would just say, we’re early on in this venture. There’s a lot of — it’s having a lot of pickup by both vendors, sellers and also authors. So again, we feel like if we work on the inputs on this business and continue to grow traffic to the site, we will have a good outcome in the advertising space.”

Why we should care. So is this deceleration just reflection of growing pains? It’s likely we’ll continue to see growth ebb and flow as Amazon continues to invest in the platform and products. Amazon has made several changes that reflect the goal of  improving “efficiency and also performance of the advertisement themselves” that Olsavsky noted. In September, it streamlined its ad products in an effort to simplify ad buying in the vein of Google and Facebook’s ad platforms New display and video formats, more inventory for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads.

Among its clients, Merkle reported that Amazon advertisers saw sales attributed to both Sponsored Brands more than double year over year, as spend grew 19% and 77% for those formats respectively. More than half of spend on the Sponsored Products came from placements other than the top-of-search results, said Merkle.

Speaking of investments, Amazon also dropped the news that it is investing $800 million to default to one-day shipping for Prime members, instead of the current two-day shipping offer.

About The Author

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

Venngage is a free infographic maker that has catered to more than 21,000 businesses. In this article, we explore how they grew their organic traffic from about 275,000 visitors per month in November 2017 to about 900,000 today — more than tripling in 17 months.

I spoke with Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, about their process.

Venngage gets most of their leads from content and organic search. The percentage varies from month to month in the range of 58% to 65%.

In Nov 2017, Venngage enjoyed 275,000 visitors a month from organic search traffic. Today (16 months later) it’s 900,000. Nadya Khoja (their Chief Growth Officer) extrapolated from their current trend that by December of 2019 (in nine months) they will enjoy three million organic search visitors per month.

In 2015, when Nadya started with Venngage, they saw 300 to 400 registrations a week. By March of 2018, this was up to 25,000 a week. Today it’s 45,000.

While Nadya had the advantage of not starting from zero, that is impressive growth per any reasonable metric. How did they do it?

Recipe

There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. I’ll do my best to explain them, and how they tie together. There is no correct order to things per se, so what is below is my perspective on how best to tell this story.

The single most important ingredient: Hypothesize, test, analyze, adjust

This critical ingredient is surprisingly not an ingredient, but rather a methodology. I’m tempted to call it “the scientific method”, as that’s an accurate description, but perhaps it’s more accurate to call it the methodology written up in the books “The Lean Startup” (which Nadya has read) and “Running Lean” (which Nadya has not read).

This single most important ingredient is the methodology of the hypothesize, test, analyze, and adjust.

What got them to this methodology was a desire to de-risk SEO.

The growth in traffic and leads was managed through a series of small and quick iterations, each one of which either passed or failed. Ones that passed were done more. Ones that failed were abandoned.

This concept of hypothesizing, testing, analyzing, and adjusting is used both for SEO changes and for changes to their products.

The second most important ingredient

This ingredient is shared knowledge. Venngage marketing developed “The Playbook”, which everyone in marketing contributes to. “The Playbook” was created both as a reference with which to bring new team members up to speed quickly, as well as a running history of what has been tested and how it went.

The importance of these first two ingredients cannot be overstated. From here on, I am revealing things they learned through trial and error. You have the advantage to learn from their successes and failures. They figured this stuff out the hard way. One hypothesis and one test at a time.

Their north star metrics

They have two north star metrics. The first one seems fairly obvious. “How many infographics are completed within a given time period?” The second one occurred to them later and is as important, if not more so. It is “how long does it take to complete an infographic?”

The first metric, of course, tells them how attractive their product is. The second tells them how easy (or hard) their product is to use.

Together these are the primary metrics that drive everything Venngage does.

The 50/50 focus split

As a result of both the company and the marketing department having a focus on customer acquisition and customer retention, every person in marketing spends half their time working on improving the first north star metric, and the other half spend their time working on improving the second.

Marketing driving product design

Those north star metrics have led to Venngage developing what I call marketing driven product design. Everywhere I ever worked has claimed they did this. The way Venngage does this exceeds anything ever done at a company I’ve worked for.

“How do I be good?”

This part of Nadya’s story reminds me of the start of a promo video I once saw for MasterClass.com. It’s such a good segue to this part of the story that I cropped out all but the good part to include in this article.

When Steve Martin shed light on an important marketing question

I’ve encountered a number of companies through the years who thought of marketing as “generating leads” and “selling it”, rather than “how do we learn what our customers want?”, or “how do we make our product easier to use?”

Squads

The company is structured into cross-functional squads, a cross-functional squad being people from various departments within Venngage, all working to improve a company-wide metric.

For example, one of the aspects of their infographic product is templates. A template is a starting point for building an infographic.

As templates are their largest customer acquisition channel, they created a “Template Squad”, whose job is to work on their two north star metrics for their templates.

The squad consists of developers, designers, UI/UX people, and the squad leader, who is someone in marketing. Personally, I love this marketing focus, as it de-focuses marketing and causes marketing to be something that permeates everything the company does.

There is another squad devoted to internationalization, which as you can infer, is responsible to improve their two north star metrics with users in countries around the world.

Iterative development

Each template squad member is tasked with improving their two north star metrics.

Ideas on how to do this come from squad members with various backgrounds and ideas.

Each idea is translated into a testable hypothesis. Modifications are done weekly. As you can image, Venngage is heavy into analytics, as without detailed and sophisticated analytics, they don’t know which experiments worked and which didn’t.

Examples of ideas that worked are:

• Break up the templates page into a series of pages, which contain either category of templates or single templates.
• Ensure each template page contains SEO keywords specific for the appropriate industry or audience segment. This is described in more detail further in this document.
• Undo the forced backlink each of the embedded templates used to contain.
  • This allowed them to get initial traction, but it later resulted in a Google penalty.
  • This is a prime example of an SEO tactic that worked until it didn’t.
• Create an SEO checklist for all template pages with a focus on technical SEO.
  • This eliminated human error from the process.
• Eliminate “React headers” Google was not indexing.
• Determine what infographic templates and features people don’t use and eliminate them.

Measuring inputs

I personally think this is really important. To obtain outputs, they measured inputs. When the goal was to increase registrations, they identified the things they had to do to increase registrations, then measured how much of that they did every week.

Everyone does SEO

In the same way that marketing is something that does not stand alone, but rather permeates everything Venngage does, SEO does not stand alone. It permeates everything marketing does. Since organic search traffic is the number one source of leads, they ensure everyone in marketing knows the basics of technical SEO and understands the importance of this never being neglected.

Beliefs and values

While I understand the importance of beliefs and values in human psychology, it was refreshing to see this being proactively addressed within an organization in the context of improving their north star metrics.

They win and lose together

Winning and losing together is a core belief at Venngage. Nadya states it minimizes blame and finger-pointing. When they win, they all win. When they lose, they all lose. It doesn’t matter who played what part. To use a sports analogy, a good assist helps to score a goal. A bad assist, well, that’s an opportunity to learn.

SEO is a team effort

While it is technically possible for a single person to do SEO, the volume of tasks required these days makes it impractical. SEO requires quality content, technical SEO, and building of backlinks through content promotion, guest posting, and the others. Venngage is a great example of effectively distributing SEO responsibilities through the marketing department.

To illustrate the importance of the various pieces fitting together, consider that while content is king, technical SEO is what gets content found, but when people find crappy content, it doesn’t convert.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure

This requires no elaboration.

But what you measure matters

This probably does justify some elaboration. We’ve all been in organizations that measured stupid stuff. By narrowing down to their two north star metrics, then focusing their efforts to improving those metrics, they’ve aligned everyone’s activity towards things that matter.

The magic of incremental improvements

This is the Japanese concept of Kaizen put into play for the development and marketing of a software product.

Done slightly differently, this concept helped Britain dominate competitive cycling at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Customer acquisition is not enough

Venngage developed their second north star metric after deciding that acquiring new customers was not, in and of itself, any form of the Holy Grail. They realized that if their product was hard to use, fewer people would use it.

They decided a good general metric of how easy the product is to use was to measure how long people take to build an infographic. If people took “too long”, they spoke to them about why.

This led them to change the product in ways to make it easier to use.

Link building is relationship building

As a reader of Search Engine Watch, you know link building is critical and central to SEO. In the same way that everyone in Venngage marketing must know the basics of technical SEO, everyone in Venngage marketing must build links.

They do so via outreach to promote their content. As people earn links from the content promotion outreach, they record those links in a shared spreadsheet.

While this next bit is related to link building, everyone in Venngage marketing has traffic goals as well.

This too is tracked in a simple and reasonable way. Various marketers own different “areas” or “channels”. These channels are broken down into specific traffic acquisition metrics.

As new hires get more familiar with how things work at Venngage, they are guided into traffic acquisition channels which they want to work on.

Learning experience, over time

My attempt here is to provide a chronology of what they learned in what order. It may help you avoid some of the mistakes they made.

Cheating works until it doesn’t

Understanding the importance of links to search ranking, they thought it would be a good idea to implement their infographics with embedded backlinks. Each implemented infographic contained a forced backlink to the Venngage website.

They identified a set of anchor text they thought would be beneficial to them and rotated through them for these forced backlinks.

And it worked, for a while. Until they realized they had invited a Google penalty. This took a bit to clean up.

The lessons learned:

• The quality of your backlinks matter.
• To attract quality backlinks, publish quality content.

Blog posts brought in users who activated

At some point, their analytics helped them realize that users who activated from blog posts where ideal users for them. So they set a goal to increase activations from blog posts, which led to the decision to test if breaking up templates into categories and individual pages with only one template made sense. It did.

Website design matters

Changing the website from one big template page to thousands of smaller ones helped, and not just because it greatly increased the number of URLs indexed by Google. It also greatly improved the user experience. It made it easier for their audience to find templates relevant to them, without having to look at templates that weren’t.

Lesson learned: UI/UX matters for both users and SEO.

Hybrid content attracts

Hybrid content is where an article talks about two main things. For example, talking about Hogwarts houses sorting within the context of an infographic. This type of content brings in some number of Harry Potter fans, some of whom have an interest in creating infographics. The key to success is tying these two different topics together well.

Content is tuneable

By converting one huge templates page into thousands of small template pages, they realized that a template or set of templates that appeal to one audience segment would not necessarily appeal to others. This caused them to start to tune templates towards audience segments in pursuit of more long tail organic search traffic.

How did they figure out what users wanted in terms of better content? They used a combination of keyword research and talking with users and prospects.

Some content doesn’t make the cut

After they caught onto the benefits of tuning content to attract different audience segments, they looked for content on their site that no one seemed to care about. They deleted it. While it decreased the amount of content on their site, it increased their overall content quality.

Traffic spikes are not always good news

When they initially started creating forced backlinks in their infographics, they could see their traffic increase. They saw some spikes. Their general thought was more traffic is good.

When they experienced the Google penalty, they realized how wrong they were. Some traffic spikes are bad news. Others are good news.

When your website traffic shows a sudden change, even if you’re experiencing a spike in organic search traffic, you must dig into the details and find out the root cause.

Lesson learned: There is a thing as bad traffic. Some traffic warns you of a problem.

Links from product embeds aren’t all bad

They just needed to make the embedded links optional. To allow the customer to decide if they do or do not deserve a backlink. While this did not cause any change to their levels of organic search traffic, it was necessary to resolve the Google penalty.

Boring works

Incremental continuous improvement seems repetitive and boring. A one percent tweak here, a two percent tweak there, but over time, you’ve tripled your organic search traffic and your lead flow.

It’s necessarily fun, but it delivers results.

Lesson learned: What I’ll call “infrastructure” is boring, and it matters. Both for your product and your SEO.

Figure out what to measure

The idea of measuring the amount of time required to complete an infographic did not occur to them on day one. This idea came up when they were looking for a metric to indicate to them how easy (or difficult) their product was to use.

Once they decided this metric possibly made sense, they determined their baseline, then through an iterative process, making improvements to the product to make this a little faster.

As they did so, the feedback from the users was positive, so they doubled down on this effort.

Lesson learned: What you measure matters.

Teach your coworkers well

They created “The Playbook”, which is a compendium of the combined knowledge they’ve accumulated over time. The playbook is written by them, for them.

Marketing employees are required to add chapters to the playbook as they learn new skills and methods.

Its primary purpose is to bring new team members up to speed quickly, and it also serves as a historical record of what did and did not work.

One important aspect of continuous improvement is for new people to avoid suggesting experiments that previously failed.

Additionally (and I love this), every month everyone in marketing gives Nadya an outline of what they’re learning and what they’re improving on.

Their marketing stack

While their marketing stack is not essential to understanding their processes, I find it useful to understand what software tools a marketing organization uses, and for what. So here is theirs. This is not a list of what they’ve used and abandoned over time, but rather a list of what they use now.

• Analytics: Google Analytics and Mixpanel
• Customer communications: Intercom
• Link analysis and building: Ahrefs
• Link building outreach: Mailshake
• Project management: Trello
• General purpose: G Suite

In closing

To me, what Nadya has done at Venngage is a case study in how to do SEO right, and most of doing it right are not technical SEO work.

• Help senior management understand that some things that are not typically thought of as SEO (website design for example) can have serious SEO implications.
• Get senior management buy in to include these non-SEO functions in your SEO efforts.
• Understand what very few basic metrics matter for your company, and how you measure them.
• Distribute required SEO work through as many people as reasonably possible. Include people whose job functions are not necessarily SEO related (writers, designers, UI/UX, and more).
• Test and measure everything.
• Win big through a continuous stream of small incremental improvements.

Venngage has surely lead by example and all the guidelines and pointers shared above can surely help your organization implement its search for increased sales.

Kevin Carney is the Founder and CEO of the boutique link building agency Organic Growth. 

Related reading

A new analysis of 73,000 business listings found that 96% of all business locations fail to list their business information correctly.

I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to define common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations.

Detailed guide to conducting a branded search audit, identifying areas of concern, and making improvements. Lots of examples included.

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IAB Europe, in partnership with IAB Tech Lab, announced Thursday new technical specifications for its second iteration of the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF v2.0), designed to facilitate GDPR and ePrivacy Directive compliance for ad tech vendors.

The new specifications are currently available for public comment over the next 30 days.

Why we should care

IAB Europe’s TCF offers companies a framework with which companies can manage GDPR-approved consent collection from users and site visitors. The new version takes into account feedback from publishers for more granular controls among the requests. With more explicit terms and practices outlined in TCF v2.0, publishers and vendors have access to deeper knowledge and control when collecting and managing personal data. The framework provides more intuitive solutions and resources so that publishers, tech vendors and advertisers can more easily meet the transparency and consent requirements of GDPR.

Google, which has not signed on to the initial TCF, has that it would officially integrate this next version of the framework as a recognized TCF vendor after the release. The parties said they have been collaborating on the revision.

“Google is actively contributing to the different TCF work-tracks, both on the IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab sides, and have said they will announce the timing of their integration once Version 2.0 of the TCF is out in the market,” Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, told MarTech Today in February.

We have reached out to Google for an update. In January, Google was hit with a 50 million euro penalty ($56.8 million) for not being transparent enough about the use of personal information and for not obtaining specific consent for ad-targeting purposes under GDPR.

Key changes in TCF v2.0

The updated framework is intended to provide consumers and publishers with more transparency and control over consenting to and collecting personal data, IAB Europe said. Key changes include:

• Extending the original purposes for processing personal data from five to twelve to provide more in-depth context.
• Users’ ability to expressly indicate the “right to object” to a vendor collecting and processing their data.
• Increased control in consenting to data processing, and how the vendors might use the data (including precise geolocation data).

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

https://martechtoday.com/iab-europe-releases-new-gdpr-consent-framework-for-comment-233134

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.

DuckDuckGo could be your new default search engine if you want to focus on privacy and security. What it’s like using it nowadays?

You might have heard of DuckDuckGo in the past. Our first long post about it was back in 2016 with Rebecca Sentance trying out the new search engine for a week.

Three years later, many things have changed. More users are losing trust in big tech companies and privacy and security are more important than ever. How does DuckDuckGo fit in this change?

And how is the experience of switching into a new search engine nowadays?

DuckDuckGo in numbers

Over the last few months, DuckDuckGo has seen increased media coverage. Its growing stats among a growing conversation around online privacy make it more relevant than ever.

There are more than 30 million searches happening on DuckDuckGo every day. Its data indicates a constant growth. It’s currently the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. counting more than 1 billion searches every month all over the world.

Google is holding the reins of the market share with 88.5% of it, Bing is following with 6.12%, Yahoo! is third with 4.11% and DuckDuckGo is forthwith 0.99% of the market share.

It clearly has a long way to go to stand out as a serious competitor in the market share. However, it has already paved the way in a new kind of search engine that is serious about security and privacy. In fact, its mission is to set a new standard of trust online.

The search engine that doesn’t track you

One of the first things you notice when visiting DuckDuckGo, except for the search box, is the subheading “the search engine that doesn’t track you”.

DuckDuckGo was built as an alternative to Google and the big search engines that use tracking data to improve personalization. DuckDuckGo reassures its users that they don’t store their personal information. They don’t collect or share personal data. They are not storing your search history, which means that they are not able to sell this data to advertisers. Moreover, there’s no tracking in the private browsing mode, which sounds encouraging for everyone who is interested in a search engine that won’t track every single search.

What’s interesting is that DuckDuckGo wants to prove that they take privacy seriously. A click on their menu button at the homepage on ‘privacy simplified’ allows you to:

• Protect your data on every device
• Subscribe to their Privacy Crash Course to improve your understanding of online privacy
• Protect your devices by reading privacy guides
• Find out more about the importance of reduced tracking

Just recently, Google announced an expanded number of default search engines for users including DuckDuckGo for the first time. This was certainly a small win for the DuckDuckGo and also for people who want to focus on private searches.

It’s not surprising that more users are interested in learning more about their online privacy.

[Screenshot from DuckDuckGo’s traffic page.]

A closer look at DuckDuckGo’s stats indicates this growing interest in security and privacy. DuckDuckGo reached 10 million searches in one day back in 2015. It managed to reach 20 million searches in October 2018. In April 2019 it counts 38 million searches.

Making the most of DuckDuckGo

I’ve decided to try out DuckDuckGo after many years of using Google. The focus on online privacy along with the growing number of people switching to DuckDuckGo made it an intriguing choice.

The first impression seemed familiar. Simplicity and a minimal interface made the transition easy.

The fact that your searches are not personalized means that everyone can access the same results in a similar search. This seems to be a relief in the common pattern of the online filter bubbles that we’re used to be part of.

Another relief was the lack of endless ads before the actual search results. I’ve been used to the series of ads before the actual search results and the science of PPC from a professional perspective, but it was still a nice experience to find the direct results of my query. There was only one ad at the top of the search results, which I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a similar limit to my Google results.

In addition to these, you can also save time from your searches by making the most of DuckDuckGo’s bangs. Bangs are shortcuts that allow you to search results on other sites. If you want to search for “SEO” on Search Engine Watch and you’re actually on DuckDuckGo’s homepage, all you need to do is to type ‘!searchenginewatch seo’

There are currently more than 12k bangs so you can search any of the big sites without visiting them in a different tab.

Finding the best search results — not everything is perfect

I must admit that the lack of personalization has its pros and cons. It is obviously reassuring to feel that you’re in control of your own data. However, you should also be prepared for the additional queries you might need to find the best results.

Forget queries like “cinemas near me” and “what’s playing”

The search results will be the same for everyone all over the world without detailed queries that could possibly help you get more personalized results.

Moreover, the actual search cannot compete with Google’s sophisticated search. After years of serving as the biggest search engine, there is a learning of semantics that leads to way better results compared to all other search engines.

This shouldn’t be a surprise and it should be clear when you’re jumping into DuckDuckGo that not everything will be the same.

There will also be an initial phase of learning the ropes of a new search experience, which is expected in every new tool and site.

Are these reasons enough to abandon DuckDuckGo? Not yet. It’s good to understand that it won’t replace Google anytime soon but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve a chance, especially if you’re serious about your online privacy when searching. I’ll personally give it a go knowing that if I can’t find a specific result, I can still use Google. I also enjoy their curated stories around privacy on their Twitter feed so it was an easy decision to follow them and stay up-to-date.

The choice is yours

The online world is changing. And we’re facing with numerous dilemmas when it comes to staying loyal to the big tech companies. As more data breaches and scandals show up, it’s up to us to decide whether we want to keep personalization or not.

There’s no right or wrong answer.

Google is certainly enjoying the success of the big search giant with a large index and search features that keep us hooked with along the numerous services we use on a daily basis. However, it’s refreshing to feel that we still have alternative options. Whether we use them or not, it’s up to us.

What’s important is to be conscious of your decision and your online privacy. The more informed we are, the better our online experience.

Related reading

I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to define common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations.

Detailed guide to conducting a branded search audit, identifying areas of concern, and making improvements. Lots of examples included.

Alt text for images is an important piece of the SEO puzzle and a great area of opportunity for marketers. Ways to create search engine friendly alt text.

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IAB Tech Lab has begun the process of replacing VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) with SIMID (Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition) specifications to support interactive video ads and give publishers more control over their video ads offerings.

Why we should care

The new SIMID specifications will enable a “player-centric” model that gives playback control to the player itself — providing publishers more control over the user experience and the videos that run on their pages. With server-side ad insertion (SSAI) support, SIMID will apply to all platforms including mobile and OTT.

Before SIMID, publishers were reliant on VPAID, an outdated specification that was originally designed for creating interactive ads but had been adapted for other use cases that were outside of its intended purpose. “This gave rise to significant problems with trust, transparency and creative freedom — all of which SIMID will resolve,” said IAB Tech Lab.

“SIMID meets the needs of a number of our publisher partners to support an interactive ad format that offers more control, while providing a flexible framework for building innovative ad creatives,” said Google group product manager Peentoo Patel.

More on the news

• IAB Tech Lab is accepting public comments on the new SIMID specifications until May 24.
• Along with the roll-out of SIMID, IAB Tech Lab is releasing an updated VAST 4.2 template that will support SIMID.
• When used together with OMID and VAST, SIMID will offer ad verification vendors more insight into how video ads perform.

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.

Tough competition on the ecommerce market makes retailers continuously search for new ideas to improve web stores’ UX. Optimizing the product page is one of the key areas in this quest for enhancements.

We reviewed the best practices of ecommerce leaders and success stories of smaller merchants, and came up with three hacks that make any product page convert more visitors into customers.

1. Optimize product descriptions

A good product description is a top factor influencing customers’ desire to purchase. The problem is customers want to get answers to their questions, but they don’t want to read a lot. Average web-surfers give a web page no more than 15 seconds to capture their attention. If a product description fails to meet this deadline, it fails to convert.

Customers think about different aspects of a product: Some are interested in materials, some are more concerned about durability. To make a product page convert well, you have to strike a balance between being informative and brief. Here are the best practices in product description derived from the success of market leaders:

• Start with a unique value proposition: A brief product description that welcomes a potential shopper must clearly explain what is so special about this item. A selling product page doesn’t speak about features, it shows what particular benefits customers get when they buy the item.
• Avoid visual overload: Structure key information using headers and collapsible sections to save space on the page. This makes product pages more transparent and interactive, as well as minimizes the time required to get the key ideas.

The screenshot below shows how Oliver implements these principles on their product pages. They hide the detailed information about product features, materials and delivery options in expandable sections.

Mulberry went a step further and combined tabs for Description, Details, Material, and Size Charts with pop-ups for Delivery and Returns. The result? All types of customers get excessive information about the product without reloads and scrolling.

The case of The Sims 3 manufacturers also proved that clarity and order drive conversion. They tested six versions of the “game launcher,” all of which had particular benefits, simpler design, and lesser information. As a result, conversion increased up to 128%.

2. Give people more images to describe items

Human beings are very good at processing visual information, much better than at reading. This means pictures and colors on product pages create the first impression of items and thus are even more important than descriptions.

• Size matters: A product image is the only way for a customer to feel the product. So make sure that shoppers can zoom in to examine the product in detail (its fabric and tiny parts). These are not just words. Larger images helped Skinner Auctions by 63%. Skinner Auctions scaled their catalog images from 250 pixels to 350 pixels. And what’s even better? The amount of bidding visitors who actually filled out all the online forms required to place a bid rose to a huge 329%.
• Angles matter as well: Surprisingly, it is a common mistake to show the product only facing forward. Customers want to see the interior pockets of a purse, the back of a dress, and the outsole of a shoe. A well-selling page features the product from different angles or even provides a video showing how it looks in motion. Look at ASOS, they allow you both to inspect the skirt’s texture and buttons and to watch a short video clip.

• Customers want to try on items: Online shoppers are concerned about how items will suit real them rather than professional models. Many successful web stores show their products on people with different body shapes. This helps customers imagine themselves with items and make purchase decisions easier and faster.
• We believe people more than models: Amazon and ModCloth ask their customers to share personal photos in the product reviews. Such a gallery is included in the product description to show customers how items look in everyday life and make the product page more trustworthy.

3. Dialog with customers

Do online retailers have fewer opportunities to talk to their customers than brick-and-mortar do? Not really. Though communication between web stores and shoppers doesn’t happen face to face, merchants can still say everything customers want to hear and ask for everything they need to know.

Add an FAQ and tips to the description to clarify any doubts. An FAQ has several benefits as it:

• Answers the questions of the customers that are already on the page.
• Attracts new visitors to product pages from the browser’s search results.
• Helps keep product descriptions short.

Apart from a full-fledged FAQ, you can try short tips as RollerSkateNation.com did. Their sincere advice was not oriented on increasing sales directly. In fact, it showed customers how to replace roller states for kids less frequently by buying larger items and wearing double socks. Customers felt taken care of and increased purchases by 69%.

The position of the tips and the FAQ section is also important. In the above case study, RollerSkateNation managed to further boost revenue by 99% by placing their hint below the product description. Customers had enough time to process key details and then got really useful advice as a surprise.

Use reviews to build trust. When it comes to making a purchase decision, reviews are almost as important as product descriptions and prices. Most shoppers look for reviews and, at best, they can read credible feedback right on the product page. This way customers don’t have to leave the web store and are less likely to choose another vendor. The case study of Express Watches proves that a well-designed Reviews section can increase conversion by 59%.What does this “well-designed” mean? The product page should let shoppers sort and rate reviews, add images and stars. To show even more credibility, you can pick some reviews and put them forward as testimonials.

And for sure be careful with negative reviews. Try to express your professionalism and care. In fact, a well-processed negative review can be even more convincing than a dozen positive ones.

Ask customers how to improve conversion. Small details, like words and button colors, influence the success of product pages. Though A/B tests make attempts to polish the web store less risky, don’t be shy to ask customers directly about their impression. For example, Amazon introduced a new feedback feature that shows how shoppers rate the size of the item.

By the way, this is a great CX feature per se that allows customers to quickly understand which size to take without exploring the size guide. But now pay extra attention to their poll about the utility of the feature. Why not ask customers if you can do it?

What’s next?

However good best practices are, they work well nine times out of ten. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that your case isn’t the tenth one. Trust seals normally improve conversion as they make the website look trustworthy. But Icouponblog managed to increase their conversion by 400% by removing a security badge. What does this mean for you? The theory is worth reading, but real results appear only after you test and try. Devote enough time to validate your ideas, and you will definitely find the way to a high-converting product page.

Maria Marinina is a Digital Marketing Manager at Iflexion.

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