Moderator Ginny Marvin (@ginnymarvin), Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Kirk Williams (@PPCKirk), Owner & Minion, ZATO
• Purna Virji (@purnavirji), Senior Client Training and Development Manager, Microsoft
• Susan Wenograd (@susanedub), Sr Manager, Accounts & Ecommerce, Clix Marketing

Kirk Williams: Setting Up Shopping Campaigns for Success

Initially, if we think of how to optimize our shopping for the future, the cold, hard reality will eventually hit: you can only optimize as far as you stop that. Don’t be a dung beetle, who starts with dung and optimizes that. He’s going to suggest a setup strategy that sets up success.

Why is your current campaign setup bad? Because, bidding. You’ll bid the same for general queries as you are for long-tail high-intent queries.

Is there a way to setup campaigns so you’re not bidding on products but rather separating queries by intent? Yes! This idea was originally shared by Martin Roettgerding (@bloomarty).

Filter shopping queries by four essential aspects:

1. Campaign priority
2. Negative keywords
3. Shared budget
4. Product bids

Six things learned:

1. Ad groups trump product groups. “Let’s make keyword funneling great again.” Because of negative queries you can filter the queries in campaign structures.
2. You Be You. SKU might not work for you, and that’s OK. Identify natural query groupings by profit.
3. Bids can overrule priorities. (Google no-likey timid bidding.) Be aware you can’t bid so low you’re not appearing in the auction anymore.
4. Beware of dangling negatives. This might be a query that comes through and it’s horrible and you don’t want it to appear (like the letter “M”). Add [-m] to non-brand, branded and all other campaigns.
5. The Bing effect. You should be importing your shopping campaigns into Bing because it’s really easy to do. But there’s no shared budget in Bing and he explains that this can cause a problem with general queries jumping into your campaigns, so this kind of ruins the strategy on Bing.
6. It takes a while to soar. You have to get your client/boss on board. It takes time, build out time, but it’s awesome.

Susan Wenograd: Google Shopping Ongoing Optimizations

Let’s assume you have something set up. Now what do you do with it?

Paid search tools can often feel like a bunch of valves and you can tighten and open up different levers and valves. Shopping campaigns are like a fire hose. You tell the search engine what NOT to match to.

Air Traffic Control: Query Mapping

Negative keywords all the tings. Create negative keywords to funnel search queries towards the groups that are the most profitable. This ties back to ad groups being more important than product groups. Ad groups give you the control to negative and match queries where you want.

Don’t Burn Money: Structuring for ROAS

Evaluate your strongest ROAS performers. This is where Ad Groups come in handy vs. Product Groups. Test grouping strong ROAS ad allocating budget.

Remember, there is no Product Group tracking in Analytics.

Also note: you are not bidding on a search query. You are bidding on a product.

Evaluate product attributes beyond standard feed fields:

• Inherent attributes: physical attributes
• Client-made attributes: seasonal, sales, determined by the business as an attribute that accounts for business decisions

Use custom labels so you know what ad group to place a product in. You’re not limited to the labels they give you. Although, there will be products that could possibly live in different ad groups. So, plan your structure ahead of time. When you have the right structure, where something should live is a lot easier to figure out. Structures can evolve over time as you analyze performance. Granular tends to be better.

Bid Strategy Fussing

There’s no one best way:

• Manual CPC
• Maximize clicks
• Enhanced CPC
• Target return on spend (newish; your mileage may vary)

Mobile

A missed opportunity: if you have physical storefronts and you show inventory in a store, set up a bid modifer to a radius around your physical locations to capture nearby searchers.

Make sure your Google My Business is linked to your AdWords. Regularly evaluate performance by distance.

Check out seasonality wins and weak spots.

Wrapping it up:

• Query map and negative keywords like crazy.
• Consider grouping items based on ROAS/margin to drive how aggressively you bid.
• Utilize Custom Labels to create more specific groupings and increase your control.
• Evaluate mobile user performance based on distance from physical storefronts.
• Evaluate mobile performance vs. competition.

Purna Virji: 3 Shopping Campaign Tips That Would Make Paris Hilton Proud

The first mental image that comes to mind when she thinks of shopping is Paris Hilton. So we’re going to take inspiration from Paris.

Our agenda:

1. Labels are important — feed optimization
2. Don’t be boring — creative optimization
3. Hire bodyguards — defensive strategy

Labels Are Important

Custom labels give you more control. Utilize optional attributes for more powerful segmentation.

Heres an optimization for product feed and campaign organization. There’s nothing wrong with this structure:

But this is more efficient:

• Bids can be applied independently
• Targeting adjusted to top geos
• Increase budget for top selling products
• Monitor low-inventory and move products out

Here’s a checklist of possible custom labels:

• Price range (like: high end, low end, sale)
• Popularity (like: high demand, low demand)
• Profit margin (like: high, low)
• Stock level (like: limited supply)
• Seasonal products (like: winter clothes, swimwear)

Don’t Be Boring and Dress Cute Wherever You Go

Make sure your shopping campaigns look good. This comes down to picture, price, store. The picture is what jumps out. Don’t use boring colors. Check to see that your product image stands out in the field.

Core creative elements for shopping ad image:

• Show multiple colors
• Show product in use
• High resolution images

Bing research has showed that white background tends to perform better. You can’t use text on an image. If there’s more than 60% white space, your image might not show.

These are the core creative elements for a shopping campaign: image, price and enhancements.

• Start with regular price
• Add sale price
• Or price competitively against each other

Core creative elements for a shopping campaign ad extension/enhancement:

• Use local, product reviews and merchant promotions
• Use promo text
• Create more than one ad per ad group

Hire Body Guards: Defensive Strategy

Key defensive strategies:

• Negative keywords
• Campaign priority settings
• Bids and bid modifiers

Negative keywords save you money. Campaign priority settings let you prioritize high/medium/low and filter products. Bids and bid modifiers through custom labels will allow you to focus the majority of your time and energy on the items that work for you. Adjust by smartphones and tablets, “everything else,” and geographic bid modifiers.

Bonus tip: misattribution is not hot. One of the top pet peeves they see at Bing is importing a shopping campaign from Google but not updating tracking codes.

The post How to Care for Your Shopping Campaigns #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

In SEO we focus a lot on Google, but app developers have a special need to get their app content to show up in Apple Search as well as Google.

Take a crash course on Apple Search and Universal Links, the latter of which are used to get your iOS and Android apps to show up in Google search.

Speakers:

Emily Grossman (@goutaste), Mobile Marketing Specialist, MobileMoxie
Ian Sefferman (@iseff), CEO, MobileDevHQ

Emily Grossman: How to Optimize Apps for Apple iOS Search and iOS 9 Universal Links

Google pays Apple $1B to be the default search engine on Safari. Google makes a lot of money off iOS devices and searchers. They’re probably making a huge return on this investment. iOS users are not likely to change their default search engine.

But before the user hits enter in the search bar of a Safari browser, Apple gets to show them their own suggestions, like apps in the App Store. Apple is cutting in front of Google. Think about this: Apple’s App Store commission is now at a run-rate of $9B, more than its total revenue in the year the iPod launched.

In recent years, with the launch of iOS 9, Apple introduced Universal Links and Apple Search. These two help drive people back into apps.

Universal Links: take a traditional web URL and make it so the single URL opens up content in a website or in an app if the user has the app installed. It’s like “One Link to Rule Them All” and it’s the ideal for Apple.

Apple Search: Apple’s search engine provides results when searchers use Spotlight, Siri and Safari.

Apple has an index and will show your app content in the three areas above. Apple is expanding their index and predictive search engine.

Next, how these two things work technically.

Universal Links 101

Universal Links are not 100% universal yet; they only work in the Apple ecosystem. And there are some other problems, but the upshot is that you can get your app to show up in Google app indexing.

Anatomy of a Universal Link:

Requirements:

• A registered domain
• SSL access to your domain (the most common barrier to entry)
• Ability to upload a JSON file to your domain

Major steps:

1. Prepare your app. Modify your application delegate. Adopt an entitlement in Xcode that lists each domain associated with your app.
2. Prepare your website by associating your app with the website. Create an apple-app-site-association file for each associated domain with the content your app supports and host it at the root level.
3. Use control paths to control indexing with Google. Modify the apple-app-site-association file to specify only the content that is parallel between the app and the website.

Universal Links services: 1-click and you’re done. Branch.io, Yozio, Deeplink.me, HOKO — this may be an option if you don’t want to go through the manual process yourself.

Apple Search App Indexing

Next, we’ll talk about getting your deep link app screens in Siri and Spotlight without setting up Universal Links. Apple doesn’t have one single index; they have a public index and a local device-specific index per user. When we know any particular Apple Spotlight search, for example, is aggregating general public and personal private, we can see why Apple has three ways to get info from different indexes.

NSUserActivity is like something that might be bookmarked, something that’s been interacted with by the user.

NSUserActivity

When Apple gets enough activity on a screen in an app, Apple may move it to the public index.

CoreSpotlight

Web Markup

Corresponding content on web page and app. To do this markup, Apple knows your website exists with iTunes connect. Use either the support URL or marketing URL to point to your corresponding website.

Ian Sefferman: Apple, the Next King of Search

• Spotlight: general purpose iOS search. (This is the potential gateway for Apple to be the next king of search.)
• Universal links: mapping the web to your app
• App indexing: indexing your app into Google

Spotlight

Gett is the taxi hailing app in Israel. If you put your destination in, Gett saves that destination location in case you want to use it again. Then, next time you search for the app, those location pages are results that come up in search.

Imgur indexes all their content into Spotlight and if you have the Imgur app and search Spotlight for “cat” you’ll see Imgur app results. This is search in a privacy conscious way.

Spotlight uptake in apps has been going up linearly since iOS 9 was released. 35% of the apps that have implemented Spotlight search rank in the App Store Top Charts.

Universal Links

This is the next generation of deep links. An example is Open Table, and how you can search Google on your Apple device, and then go to the app from the search result.

Universal Links by category:

27% of apps using Universal Links are in the App Store Top Charts. The level of engagement has been going up for apps with Universal Links. Engagement here means the number of app opens that come from Universal Links (Google Search, another app using the Universal Link).

Measuring Spotlight Referrals

By adding some code you can tell how many people open your app from a Spotlight search:

Similarly you can add parameters to count Universal Link referrals:

Related liveblog from SMX East (2015):
Emily Grossman’s How Apple’s Changing Up Search: From Siri to Safari to Spotlight.

The post App Developers: What You Need To Know About Apple iOS App Search & Universal Links #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

How do you think speech search will impact ads?

What video ad tips, strategies, success stories do you have?

What tools do you use?

How do you find work-life balance?

How do you create space with your clients? How do you manage clients?

What is the biggest weakness in the PPC industry?

What are your suggestions for testing text ads?

Moderator:

Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster (@mvanwagner)

Speakers:

• Andrew Goodman, President, Page Zero Media (@andrew_goodman)
• David Szetela (@szetela), VP of Search Marketing Operations, Bruce Clay Inc.
• Christi Olson (@christijolson), Bing Ads Evangelist, Microsoft
• John Lee (@John_A_Lee), Managing Partner, Clix Marketing

Matt starts out with a quick story. In 2002, he got started in the business. Paid search is fascinating and you want to do it day and night. And as it turns out, you do end up doing it day and night. (Everyone on stage is nodding their head). Matt says he doesn’t have a good work-life balance.

How do you find work-life balance?

John: It’s the biggest challenge. The fact that it bothers a lot of us is that we care. We want to be driving performance. His wife is the voice of reason that reminds him to spend time with kids.

David: His balance has been found in age. You learn to not sweat the small stuff and there’s an awful lot of small stuff in everyone’s day.

Christi: In having a perspective from in-house, agency and on the Bing side, she sees all sides. At an agency, there’s always something to be doing. You have to prioritize. You could do all this stuff, but will it make that much of a difference if you do it. You have determine for yourself. If you’re in a busy season, you may accept 18 hour days.

John: The biggest thing is understanding the line between working and being aware because you can control campaigns from your phone.

Matt: Do you ever turn your phones off? How do you unplug?

Audience member: A group of entrepreneurs she knows meets every Tuesday for dinner and they all put their phones in a stack and no one touches their phone and instead they all have good conversation.

Andrew: The book “The Millionaire Next Door” shows that people in an environment who save (vs. spend) are more likely to be happy. Living in a small city is an environment where people aren’t stressed. His company has a lot of remote workers and they aren’t going to jump off a cliff if you don’t get a click.

How do you create space with your clients? How do you manage clients?

David: Be reasonably responsive to email. That diminishes the amount of times that they want to speak with you. Sometimes it takes actually saying to the client, “I’m not able to respond to 8 emails before 8 am.”

John: Consistent, regularly scheduled calls are a pinpoint on the map where they know they can get a hold of you.

Christi: You can set hours. Send a response so that you know you’re looking into it if the question requires in-depth research and that you’ll be getting back to them with the answer in X time frame, then meeting that time frame.

Andrew: Educate clients about the method behind the madness.

Christi: If you’re on the fifth email response in a long thread, pick up the phone.

John: Email doesn’t convey emotion and it can push you into panic mode.

Brad Geddes in the audience: If you’re getting an email response ready at 2 a.m., don’t send it then. Batch send/schedule it for 8:30 a.m. so they don’t think they can get you at any time.

What tools do you use?

John: They all have their own shortfalls.

Christi: Different tool for different clients.

Andrew: Optmyzer is the the best out there. The entry level is like $50 a month.

David: Automated ad testing on steroids: Adalysis.

Christi: Can we have a panel of tool users and not tool reps talking about what we like and don’t like about tools, and the pricing models?

David: I have a controversial view about automated bid management. I’ve said: prove to me that you can do better than Google’s automated bid manager. Vendors only have data from their own pool of users. Google has all the data, including conversion attributes on the keyword and the searcher. So how can a third-party vendor possibly do a better job than Google?

John: I wrote an article about all the little utilities and tools he uses, and he filled pages.

On Google AdWords, my call extensions are disallowed because of DKI that doesn’t match the page.

John: Use Google Search Console to blanket approve your site. This is the same issue with call tracking. The instructions are in the AdWords Help.

How do you think speech search will impact ads?

David: It’s not our problem yet. It’s becoming a problem. Stats he’s heard — people 18-24, 55% use voice search exclusively. Search engines are going to be figuring out how to monetize voice search, have ads for voice search.

John: The idea of conversational search, you start with a long-from question that has a root term, and then it will perform additional searches pivoting on the root term. One idea is that there will be another match type, like contextual match.

Andrew: Thinks this is a futurism question of whether advertising is going to be as much of a thing. Utility is the focus and none of that is monetized. Apple is not a company that monetizes, but they have a business model. Microsoft and Apple are creating utility for the future and there will be less advertising and they have to figure out as companies how they get paid. It seems to me Google is in trouble if they don’t figure this out.

Christi: Context again matters. Cortana may answer you directly, sometimes it will give you a SERP. Then it’s up to the search engine and advertisers to think through the funnel of user intent and where you can reach the consumer. It’s going to be a time to revisit negative keywords and keywords that match voice search.

David: To understand where it’s going, get an Amazon Echo. You’re conversing with a device and starts to become second nature. You’ll see where it’s all going.

John: Amazon Echo is a data collection device for Amazon to understand you and what it can sell you better.

Andrew: It was an era of freedom with the SERPs, 10 or 11 ads that could show up … and now they’ve taken away the right rail and that’s a wake up call that not everyone can show up.

Video paid ads: tips, strategies, success stories?

John: Don’t think of YouTube as a perfect direct response channel.

David: It’s demand generation display advertising.

Christi: YouTube is not the closer and never meant to be the closer channel. It’s exposure.

David: Like any display advertising, the sole purpose of the first impression is to persuade people to engage further. The important things about a video ad is the still image and the first 3 seconds of the video. This has to engage before someone has a chance to skip.

John: If you do it, be sure to have your retargeting audiences set up.

What is the biggest weakness in the PPC industry?

Andrew: The high-level weakness that hits people in the eyes is scale of business and bigger competitors. If someone can beat you by outbidding you, you need to grow, mimic as much as you can with extensions and matching conversion rates. The other weakness is broad match.

Matt: The FCC should ban search engines from allowing broad match. It’s fraud. Google should not be able to do this with good conscience.

John: Expanding on that: a long time client asked him to look at his campaign settings and he saw “search or display select,” targeting all countries, all languages, only broad match. These are all defaults.

Christi: We can get into the weeds. We don’t think about the big picture enough. Think strategy on a regular basis, and how your search campaign connects to SEO and marketing. Be part of the bigger picture working toward a goal and talking across.

John: To the platforms, he’d say that he doesn’t like “talking points.” He doesn’t like Facebook pushing video or the month of mobile.

How do we build personas for B2B leads? Customer serving isn’t always an option.

David: Sales teams.

Andrew: This is about keyword intent. Take a defensive, skeptical stance with B2B search. Assume it’s broad intent. The keyword research phase is annoyingly intensive for B2B.

John: Have theories you’re going to test but don’t make assumptions.

Suggestions for testing text ads?

Andrew: Come up with 3 or 4 concepts to test: is it about price, describing product? Headline is the biggest influencer.

The post PPC Q&A: Paid Search Roundtable at #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Moderator:

Pamela Parker, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@pamelaparker)

Speakers:

• Mark Irvine, Sr. Data Scientist at WordStream (@MarkIrvine89)
• Joseph Kerschbaum, Account Director at 3Q Digital (@joekerschbaum)
• Amy Bishop, Director: Audits, Outbound, Training at Clix Marketing (@hoffman8)

Mark Irvine: 4 Ways to Find the Audience of Your Wildest Dream — & How to Convert Them!

Mark Irvine is a data scientist who researches industry trends in PPC. Dating is a lot like audience targeting. More of us are doing it online. It can be hard to find someone interested in you. Sometimes you’re going to stalk them (just a little bit). Your first impressions mean everything. It’s too easy to lose a good fit by not following through. He suggests approaching digital marketing like a courtship.

#1: Finding Someone New

Finding your ideal match is a journey. You don’t always know what you’re looking for right away. Rethink your key audiences. 40% of baby product purchasers live in households without children! Use Google Analytics to re-think the key audiences for your campaigns. He puts up a slide showing the conversion rate per in-market segment (found by opening Audience > Interests > Affinity Categories in GA). which helps you identify the key, most profitable demographics for your campaigns.

#2: The Chase

Chase past visitors with remarketing. Remarketing is going to reengage your best visitors. Highly engaged users are more likely to later convert. Remarketing is not just for display anymore! The same trends of conversion for engaged users are true across platforms, and users are 76 percent more likely to click on a remarketing ad! Google Customer Match boasts some of the best conversion rates in the industry.

(Note: Another WordStream speaker delved into Customer Match earlier this week; you can read Cleo Hage’s session liveblog for more on that.)

#3: The First Date

Choose where to court your audience. Couple relevant audiences with relevant website targets to boast positive engagement. Find your content match. Look to GA to find top referral placements — these will also be your top ad placements.

Get off mobile and app ads, though. Nearly half of all in-app ad clicks were found to be accidental. Typically, we see mobile apps ad placements with a high CTR but a disappointing conversion rate. Exclude your ads from in-app placements.

#4: Break the Dumb Rules

Don’t limit yourself with short membership duration or impression caps. This happens because it’s an industry best practice to set low impression caps to prevent annoying users. But actions speak louder than words. Users are more likely to click on remarketing ads when they’ve seen it 4, 5 or 6 times. Impression caps can hurt more than help, and ads are almost never served to their full impression cap. (He gives a few examples: a daily impression cap of 2 is delivered an average of 1.21 times; a cap of 3 gets an average of 1.54 impressions; 4 averages 1.75 impressions; etc.) Ad exposure increases CVR.

Give people time. Use your GA Time Lag Report to determine how long users wait before they buy. Set your membership duration to include 95 percent of your sales. Nurture people who are legitimately in your sales funnel even if you’re not sure what the time period should be.

Recap

• Use Google Analytics to find new audiences and demographics.
• Remarket to your best-converting audiences.
• Identify the best relevant content to pair with your audiences.
• Stay persistent with your best converting audiences! Avoid restrictive frequency caps and membership durations.

Amy Bishop: Best Practices for Audience Targeting in Remarketing

Before we can talk about audiences, we first have to talk about the goal of the campaign. Think of what problem you’re solving or what you have that they need or want. This will help you define your audience.

Remarketing goals

• Keeping consumers engaged throughout a long buying cycle
• Closing the sale
• Bringing back previous buyers
• Prospecting (lookalikes)
• Announcing new products
• Re-engaging consumers with accessories or add-ons

Remarketing lists for search ads:

• Bid up valuable lists within search campaigns
• Exclude lists from non-RLSA
• Typically have lower CPCs and CPAs than non-RLSA campaigns.

The funny thing is this is a lower funnel audience, but we’re paying less for them.

Remarketing lists for shopping ads are similar to RLSA but for Shopping.

Remarketing for Dynamic Search Ads — RDSA is great for query mining with a safety.

Social remarketing is another push channel:

• Great for the mobile reach
• A lot of different ad formats
• Great for prospecting
• Social engagement can help provide trust and expand reach and Lookalike Audiences.

Audiences

Now you have your goals and your channel. It’s time to talk about the audience you want to achieve those goals.

Out with the old: Remarketing to everyone who hits the home page is out. Build informed remarketing lists using information you can gather from:

• Pages visited
• Source/medium/campaign information
• Actions taken on site (events, goals, conversions)
• Location
• Demographics

Example lists:

• Loyalists (via email, or UI login)
• Completed a micro-conversion
• Visited a page that speaks to their needs (product, industry)
• Remarketing lists for channels that don’t offer remarketing
• Hyperlocal lists
• Layering lists for specificity
• Seasonal or recurring needs
• Leads that haven’t closed

If they’ve visited a page that speaks to their needs, then hit them with another page, product, or industry that also speaks to that need. Layer lists for specificity.

They created lists for demographics, crossed them with segmented lists, and were able to zone in on age ranges that performed best.

You might be thinking, OK, segmented lists perform better but there’s still a lot of volume coming from other lists that aren’t segmented. So, break out segmented lists as much as you can and create a catch-all campaign that excludes the segmented list. If your catch-all is bigger than your segmented lists, you may want to capture more information. The end goal is the primary conversion, but it shouldn’t be all or nothing for data collection. What can you get from them the first time they visit your site so you can deliver the right creative and product to them in remarketing?

Example funnel:

Remarketing ads should be helpful. Align messaging with consumer needs and interests, such as:

• Product or category they viewed
• Seasonal promotion, product, service or event
• New products
• Accessories for things they have purchased
• Sale or promotion

You’re trying to be helpful and useful and facilitating the conversion from your end. So customize ads and landing pages based on the info you’ve used to create your lists. The more you know, the better you can deliver.

When to make exclusions? Sometimes your audience isn’t what they seem. Not everyone will buy no matter how many times you remarket. So they will build audiences with the sole purpose of exclusions.

As an example, they built a remarketing list targeting visitors of a page. Though CPC was somewhat high, lead volume was also high. They excluded visitors that spent less than 5 seconds on the site (to cut spend on uninterested consumers). The results? They noted a 50.3 percent decrease in CPA, from $84.61 to $42.51.

Previous purchasers shouldn’t always be excluded.

Joseph Kerschbaum: Targeting an Audience That’s Never Visited Your Site, i.e., Magic

How do you get email addresses? Second-party data exchanges, co-sponsorships with other places. You get these emails and you put them in your remarketing list and start encouraging them. Customer Match freed your email lists and gave them room to breathe.

Now you can segment audiences in your CRM, including people who have never been to your website as well as previous customers, lost customers, etc. (see slide below).

Where your Customer Match ads appear: Google search, YouTube and Gmail. Here are his points on uploading your email lists into AdWords:

• Upload first-party data in AdWords as an audience list. Lists are uploaded via a privacy-safe, hashed method.
• AdWords matches your email addresses to Google accounts (and then discards all data).
• You target or exclude your new audience list across devices and channels. This can improve the reach of your search, Gmail and YouTube campaigns.
• AdWords generates “Similar Audience” lists from original email lists when eligible (only available for Gmail and YouTube).

He sees good match rates, as we see in this data from WordStream:

There’s a magic potion made from these tasks (ingredients):

1. Pull email list from your CRM.
2. Define audience segments before uploading.
3. Upload list into AdWords and create audience.
4. Create separate campaign for these targets.

Now you’re suddenly targeting people who have never been to your website.

Here’s another magical feat, getting a repeat app user.

Typically app download = success! But sometimes you put in all that effort in getting an app download and then open an account in the app and then never come back. Then your app is like a ghost town. So, there’s a way in AdWords to remarketing to people who have been to your app.

App Remarketing Process

Remarket to your app users. Promote sales, feature updates or your company’s other apps. Here’s a flow chart:

There is just a bit of code that has to be added to the app. Don’t cry. There is help in Google Developers! The article is “Mobile Apps Conversion Tracking and Remarketing.”

Kerschbaum’s “magic potion” ingredients for app remarketing are:

1. Have a solid user base for your app.
2. Integrate additional tagging into your app.
3. Create RMKT audiences for mobile app users.
4. Create new campaigns for app RMKT.

Similar Audiences

Google’s contextual engine monitors browsing activity on Display Network sites over the last 30 days and determines other users with similar behavior. If you segment your audiences, Google creates a similar audience for you. Voila!

With Similar Audiences, conversion rates are right around the same as other remarketing, so there’s your trick for more volume.

YouTube

The YouTube ecosystem is huge:

YouTube is getting more competitive, and your competition is going to be there if it’s not already. What are folks watching? The most active industries on YouTube are media, B2C technology, B2B technology, automotive, apparel, fast-moving consumer goods, food and beverage …

Looking at funnel position on YouTube by social network, and it shows that YouTube doesn’t close very well. It’s an introducing channel. You should see YouTube as a first-click attributor. Embrace the intent.

Remarket to YouTube viewers based on:

• People who watch any of your videos
• People who take an action on any of your videos
• People who view your video as a TrueView in-stream video ad
• People who visit or subscribe to your YouTube channel

To create your video RMKT lists, you can target anyone who viewed a video or viewed an ad. A lot of marketers using video are only posting 1–10 videos a year. Here are kinds of video creative content styles your organization might use:

• Live action or on-location (70% fall into this category)
• Testimonials or executive interviews (53%)
• Combination of styles (45%)
• Motion graphic 2D or 3D (42%)
• Stock images or footage (40%)
• Moving images or slide presentations (38%)
• Animated explainers (27%)
• Spokesperson or paid actor (26%)
• Other (4%)

Everyone has the same restrictions — limited budget and time. But everyone’s facing the same challenges.

Here’s the “magic potion” task list for YouTube remarketing:

1. Link YouTube to your AdWords account.
2. Launch TruView campaigns.
3. Create RMKT audiences from YouTube viewers.
4. Allow audiences to grow in size.
5. Target YouTube audiences with RMKT.
6. Exclude customers/converters.
7. Exclude mobile devices.

The post Advanced Audience Targeting for Remarketing #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

How Google Works

Haahr opens by telling us what Google engineers do. Their job includes:

• Writing code for searches
• Optimizing metrics
• Looking for new signals
• Combining old signals in new ways
• Moving results with good ratings up
• Moving results with bad ratings down
• Fixing rating guidelines
• Developing new metrics when necessary

Two parts of a search engine:

• Ahead of time (before the query)
• Query processing

Before the Query

• Crawl the web
• Analyze the crawled pages
  • Extract links
  • Render contents
  • Annotate semantics
• Build an index

The Index

• Like the index of a book
• For each word, a list of pages it appears on
• Broken up into groups of millions of pages
• Plus per-document metadata

Query Processing

• Query understanding and expansion
  Does the query name any known entities?
• Retrieval and scoring
  • Send the query to all the shards
    Each shard
    • Finds the matching pages
    • Computes a score for query+page
    • Sends back the top N page by score
  • Combine all the top pages
  • Sort by score
• Post-retrieval adjustments
  • Host clustering
  • Is there duplication

Scoring Signals

A signal is:

• A piece of information used in scoring
• Query independent – feature of a page
• Query dependent

Metrics

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin

• Relevance
  • Does a page usefully answer the user’s query
  • Ranking’s top-line metric
• Quality
  • How good are the results we show
• Time to result (faster is better)

Google measures itself with live experiments:

• A/B experiments on real traffic
• Look for changes in click patterns
• A lot of traffic is in one experiment or another

At one time, Google tested 41 different blues to see which was best.

Google also does human rater experiments:

• Show real people experimental search results
• Ask how the results are
• Aggregate ratings across raters
• Publish guidelines explaining criteria for raters
• Tools support doing this in an automated way, similar to Mechanical Turk

Google judges pages on two main factors:

• Needs Met (where mobile is front and center)
• Page Quality

Needs Met grades:

• Fully Meets
• Very Highly Meets
• Highly Meets
• Moderately Meets
• Slightly Meets
• Fails to Meet

Page quality concepts:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Google engineer development process:

• Idea
• Repeat until ready
  • Write code
  • Generate data
  • Run experiments
  • Analyze
• Launch report by quantitative analyst
• Launch review
• Launch

What goes wrong?

There are two kinds of problems:

• Systematically bad ratings
• Metrics don’t capture the things we care about

Here’s an example of a bad rating. Someone searches for [Texas farm fertilizer] and the search result provides a map to the manufacturer’s headquarters. It’s very unlikely that that’s what they want. Google determines this through live experiments. If a rater sees the maps and rates it as “Highly Meets” needs, then this is a failing at the point of rating.

Or, what if the metrics are missing? In 2009-2011, there were lots of complaints about low-quality content. But relevance metrics kept going up, due to content farms. Conclusion: Google wasn’t measuring the metrics they needed to be. Thus, the quality metric was developed apart from relevance.

Here’s Paul Haahr’s slide deck, which is worth a look:
Update 7/19: Presentation has now been marked private by the author.

Gary Illyes and Paul Haahr Answer Questions from the SMX Audience

SMX: How does RankBrain fit into all of this?

Haahr: RankBrain gets to see a subset of the signals. I can’t go into too much detail about how RankBrain works. We understand how it works but not as much what it’s doing. It uses a lot of the stuff that we’ve published about deep learning.

How would RankBrain know the authority of a page?

Haahr: It’s all a function of the training that it gets. It sees queries and other signals. I can’t say that much more that would be useful.

SMX: When you are logged into a Google app, do you differentiate by the information you gather? If you’re in Google Now vs. Chrome can that impact what you’re seeing?

Haahr: It’s really a question of if you’re logged in or not. We provide a consistent experience. Your browsing history follows you to either.

Does Google deliver different results for the same queries at different times in the day?

Illyes: I’m not sure. In Maps, for example, if we display something maps related we will show the hours. It doesn’t change what shows up, to Gary’s knowledge.

SMX: What’s going on with Panda and Penguin?

Illyes: I gave up on giving a date or timeline on Penguin. We are working on it, thinking about how to launch it, but I honestly don’t know a date and I don’t want to say a date because I was already wrong three or four times, and it’s bad for business.

SMX: Post-Google Authorship, how are you tracking author authority?

Haahr: There I’m not going to go into any detail. What I will say is the raters are expected to review that manually for a page that they are seeing. What we measure is: are we able to do a good job of serving results that the raters think are good authorities.

SMX: Does that mean authority is used as a direct or indirect factor?

Haahr: I wouldn’t say yes or no. It’s much more complicated than that and I can’t give a direct answer.

SMX: When explicit authorship ended, Google did say to keep having bylines. Should you bother with rel=author at all?

Illyes: There is at least one team that is still looking into using the rel=author tag just for the sake of future developments. If I were an SEO I would still leave the tag. It doesn’t hurt to have it. On new pages, however, it’s probably not worth it to have. Though we might use it for something in the future.

SMX: What are you reading right now?

Haahr: I read a lot of journalism and very few books. However, I just finished “City on Fire” – it’s about New York in the ’70s. There are 900 pages and I was disappointed when it ended. I’ve just started “It Can’t Happen Here.”

The post How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer’s Story #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Read on to discover what these major brands have to say when asked questions including:

• Brands face unique challenges – what are some of the largest challenges you faces as a brand?
• How do you balance organic and paid?
• As global brands, what SEO issues come up?
• How do you optimize for mobile and web separately?
• What KPIs are your product owners looking for?
• How well do you think you’ve done with getting people in your company to understand SEO?
• Name your top three tools that are absolutely vital
• Do you use an SEO agency?
• What’s the most impactful change you’ve made in the last six months?
• How do you mitigate negative SEO?

SMX: Brands face unique challenges – what are some of the largest challenges you faces as a brand?

Adria Kyne (Vistaprint): First of all, obviously when you’re a big brand you have a big target painted on you. We constantly face people bidding on our brand terms. Vistaprint is pretty well known for business cards, but we sell other things. So trying to get our other products out there is another challenge

Jeff Preston (Disney): When we see our intellectual property in the SERP, we need to determine if it’s a site run by an eleven-year-old fan? We want to support the fan, but we want to make sure we deal someone maliciously stealing content. So we have to identify who is who.

SMX: How do you balance organic and paid?

Sharon Conner (Autodesk): We recently grew our SEO team from three to six people and pulled our paid team in house. We all roll up under the same group and that’s great. We work on having more meetings and communicating better across teams. If the PPC team is running a campaign on a product we don’t have a page up for, we’ll go and immediately ask for their keywords and get some pages up. We work together.

Vistaprint: Our SEO and PPC teams work very closely together and this is no accident. We collaborate and strive to create great holistic results. Every year we have a search summit where we all come together and educate each other. We also create a joint newsletter for the search teams, as well.

Disney: Let’s say you’re the Snapchat team — they probably don’t care about organic search. So when I need something from another team, I always try to approach it with the mentality of “what’s in it for them.”

SMX: As global brands, what SEO issues come up?

Disney: We have a lot of sites across the world a lot of Robots.txt files — it might take a lot of time before we see an issue with something like that. So we’ve set up alerts to let us know if anyone in the world changes something critical like a Robots.txt file, for example.

Vistaprint: Our content is very localized and our products are different from country to country, but the site is built on template. That means we’re able to manage things centrally. I can’t make a major to the U.S. site without it impacting all the other sites around the world. It makes things safer from a management perspective, but there are cons to this approach, too, like the inability to really localize things for some sites.

Autodesk: We use in-house team members that speak particular languages or local agencies to help us with localization across our 32 sites around the world.

SMX: How do you optimize for mobile and web separately?

Vistaprint: We really do need to have a more integrated, powerful solution for people to interact with our site on mobile and I’m pretty sure it’s eventually going to be an app. They come to our site to build a product, and customizing something on an app is a very different experience than doing so on desktop. We need to make all of those pieces fit together. We have to then, also, communicate to the users — who are not designers — that they can do those things.

We’re not fully responsive yet – we’re working toward it. But we see a lot of desktop traffic.

SMX: What KPIs are your product owners looking for?

Disney: We have a big audience, including an audience on Instagram. How can we add up all those numbers? Each audience has a specific goal, but we like to have an overall view that we can share with stakeholders.

SMX: How well do you think you’ve done with getting people in your company to understand SEO?

Vistaprint: We’re doing a lot of outreach within the company, like the newsletter I mentioned earlier. We want to stay top of mind and keep people excited. We don’t want them get involved in the nitty-gritty, necessarily, but we want them to remember us.

SMX: Name your top three tools that are absolutely vital

Vistaprint: Tableau, DeepCrawl, internal tools.

Autodesk: SEMRush, Excel, BrightEdge.

SMX: Do you use an SEO agency?

Autodesk: We have our own SEO agency that we use. I love having one. If I need to bounce a question off them, it’s great. I try to make sure we leverage their experience with other clients.

Vistaprint: We do everything in house. In the past, we’ve used external agencies but what we’ve found is that our products are complex enough that it makes sense that our in-house people work on our strategies.

Disney: I prefer to spend my budget on hiring more in-house people. They seem to have more investment in our SEO, though external agencies are really helpful in major projects like a migration, for example. Then we can say, hey, what did we miss? What about this? It’s good to have fresh insights on big projects.

SMX: What’s the most impactful change you’ve made in the last six months?

Disney: Internationally, we’re rolling out hreflang and it’s been great. I started slow because I was nervous about breaking things, but it’s been good.

SMX: How do you mitigate negative SEO?

Vistaprint: Ratings and reviews have been very helpful. Having a place for people to leave their feedback directly to us allows us more control over the conversation.

Autodesk: Sponsorships. A company I used to work for always sponsored major events, and were included in the news coverage of those events. Those news and Pr stories always pushed anything negative down.

Disney: I regularly look at what bad links are pointing at us. I have tools in place to monitor them, and then I  disavow them.

The post Big Brands Talk Search: Disney, Vistaprint & Autodesk’s 2016 Approach to SEO #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Ryan Jones, Manager Search Strategy & Analysis, SapientNitro (@RyanJones)
• Erin Everhart, Lead Manager, Digital Marketing – SEO, The Home Depot (@erinever)
• Derrick Wheeler, Sr Product Intelligence Manager, Microsoft (@derrickwheeler)

Next-Level SEO Reports

“Find the 20% that will deliver 80% of results. Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein

Forget big data. We need actionable data. We need data that helps us make insightful decisions. Or so says Ryan Jones.

The Three What’s of Actionable Analysis

1. What is it?
2. What does it mean?
3. What Should We do About it?

Consumer Journey

When Jones was in college, the consumer journey meant the funnel. But users don’t flow through a funnel anymore. There are so many different touch points that you can’t measure it in the funnel. If the old model was a funnel, the new funnel is a crazy straw.

“If the old model was a funnel, the new funnel is a crazy straw.” – @RyanJones #SEO
Click To Tweet

Making Link Data Actionable

This graph is made with the free tool Gephi. With it, canonical issues are easily spotted, as are orphaned site sections:

It works for internal links, as well:

Ranking Reports

Clients don’t know what to do with ranking reports like this:

Jones prefers to show them ranking reports that look like this:

Keyword Research

Try a tree sheet rather than an excel list. The colors seen in the tree sheet represent competition. This is free on Google sheets and it’s super visual.

Jones made this 3D report with Sketchup:

Google Fusion Tables

Tools to Make Next-Level Charts

• RAW: raw.densitydesign.org
• Gephi: network map (link analysis) #free
• Tableau #expensive
• Google Fusion Tables (found in Google Drive) #JonesFavorite
• Sketchup
• Custom Python and d3.js solution

Data Tools Jones Uses

• SEMRush
• Moz Open Site Explorer
• Majestic
• SimilarWeb
• A Hrefs
• Google Webmaster Console
• Screaming Frog

How to Prove the Value of SEO

Erin Everhart is up. Decision makers and executives may recognize SEO as important, but SEO is one of the largest underfunded channels out there.

• 92 of U.S. adults use search engines to find information.
• 56% use search engines at least once a day.
• 91% find what they’re looking for on search engines.

It’s the SEO’s job to get the C-suite to understand what all the above means. Everhart says that this begins with setting the right expectations. First, educate the executives so they understand all the money they’re investing in quarter one isn’t going to show ROI until much later. Organic search engine optimization has an incubation period that they don’t anticipate unless you tell them.

Start small. Don’t tell the executives all the problems right off the bat. For example, with Home Depot, Everhart started by focusing on redirects. Focus on small chunks that can make a big impact, then pitch bigger projects later after you’ve proved the impact SEO can have.

Show a Competitor Beating You.

Nobody likes data as much as SEO. We need to be able to get down into the data.

Give them information, not data. Don’t just tell them traffic is down, but why traffic is down. Next step: give them actions to do – not just a laundry list of possible tactics.

Stop reporting on window shoppers only. People visiting a site are just window shoppers. Who knows what they’re doing on the site? Traffic is great but revenue is better. Relate everything you’re doing back to dollars.

“Traffic is great but revenue is better.” @ErinEver #SEO
Click To Tweet

SEO at Microsoft “Insights Engine”

Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft will talk about how his team is looking at SEO.

SEO at Microsoft: Scope, Ecosystem, Roles

Objectives

• Lead generation
• Event registrations
• Sales/revenue
• Customer satisfaction
• Cost savings
• Market share

Audiences

• Enterprise
• S/M businesses
• Consumers
• Developers
• Press
• 140+ Markets

Analytics

• Webtrends
• Omniture
• MDA
• Other

Content Management systems

• Over 12 in use
• More in development

Content Types

• Pre-sales
• Post-sales
• Ecoommerce
• News/blogs
• Events
• Search engine

Stakeholders

• IT
• Designers
• Developers
• Writers
• Site managers
• Other marketers
• International subsidiaries
• Agencies/vendors
• Executives

There are two types of measurements that Wheeler cares about:

1. Reporting the business outcomes of SEO efforts to inform future levels of investment.
2. Uncovering opportunities to drive greater business value out of our SEO program.

Insights Engine: Daily and Monthly Anomaly Watch

1. Determine if traffic change is legitimate and significant.
   • Was tracking code added to, or removed from, an existing site?
     • Yes: notify analytics team.
     • No: look at seasonal trends, industry chatter and significant events.
2. Contact site owner and SEO lead
   • Were they aware of the decrease/increase?
   • Is it a brand site?
     • Yes: onboard to our SEO programs.
     • No: did they make any recent changes?
3. For Increases
   • Document changes made
   • Create case study
   • Broadly share best practices
4. For Decreases
   • Enable appropriate measurement plan
   • Investigate scope and diagnose potential causes
   • Provide documentation on best-practice “violations”
   • Recommend fixes and follow up to facilitate implementation
   • Measure impact and follow No. 3 above

The post Analytics Reports & Proving the ROI of SEO #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

You’re using Google Analytics, but, as the SMX West audience just learned from speaker Andrew Garberson (@garberson), manager of search at LunaMetrics, you’re merely scratching the surface of the tool’s usefulness in your work life. This is a retelling of Garberson’s presentation that he writes about himself on the LunaMetrics blog here.

First, a story. Your 80-year-old neighbor gives you a call and says that he wants to buy an electric car. He mostly just drives to the grocery store and around town, and everyone agrees he should probably stop riding around town on his bike.

You think of a list of criteria for a good car for him: safe, efficient, a good warranty. He drives home in a Tesla. Yes, this meets all the criteria, but it’s a little more than that. It goes 0–60 in 2.8 seconds.

Google Analytics is like the Tesla. It’s a sports car and we’re driving it like we’ve got the emergency brake on. Let’s drive it like the high performance machine it is.

Basic: Daily Reporting

Google Analytics is here for you 24/7. But we shouldn’t have to be monitoring analytics on a day-to-day basis. It’s not ideal to be worrying about analytics around the clock. Just because we have 24/7 access, it doesn’t mean we need to be there at all times.

Ideal: push notifications. “Hey, something is great/not so great.” Google Analytics Alerts is the answer!

You can tap just about every metric in GA and set an alert on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Here are 55 alerts you can set up: bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-alerts

Intermediate: Monthly Reporting

At this level, we’re spotting trends and reacting to trends to minimize negative and maximize the positive.

The Google Analytics optimization for this is Dashboards.

Take any standard or custom report and add it to a lightweight dashboard. Before doing this, look at what other people have done. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Go to the GA Gallery to see what others have built that you need. Avinash Kaushik is among the authors of these dashboards that you can import into your account.

Dashboards:

• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-seo
• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-cpc
• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-basic-adwords
• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-content
• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-pr
• bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-social

You can see that there isn’t one dashboard for everything, but specialized ones. These are helpful weekly check-ins. Choose the option to “email” (from the drop-down, changing it from CSV) and you’ll get a PDF in your inbox.

Advanced: Monthly Reporting

The perfect tool for a monthly report is in between a generalist dashboard and a specialist tool — it lets you dig deep into SEO traffic by product category or SEM campaign. The middle ground tool he’s devised is using the API and Google Sheets. bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-drive

You’re going to be able to make reports like budget tracking (current spend v. budget, and conversions from search v. other). For segmented reporting in Google Analytics, go to bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-drive-2.

Add-Ons

A plugin called Supermetrics will let you pull data from everywhere (AdWords, Bing Ads, Search Console, Facebook Ads, Facebook Insights, MailChiimp, Moz, SEMrush) into Drive. The link you want to look at here is bit.ly/smx-pwrsem-import.

Takeaways

GA can be your power reporting tool. You can do serious deep-dive reporting with Google Analytics. Or, it can be whatever you need. GA does the easy legwork reporting better than anyone else.

The post Google Analytics Power Reporting for SEO & SEM – #SMX Liveblog appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

In 2013, search marketers saw a big spike in direct referral traffic. Our speaker Marshall Simmonds (@mdsimmonds), Founder and CEO, Define Media Group, Inc. explains what is causing dark search and social traffic, traffic with no referrer data in analytics. Search marketers need to protect their budget by understanding it and explaining it to non-technical people.

Direct traffic is a URL that comes with no referral string. An analytics tool puts all no-referrer string visits in a direct traffic bucket. This direct traffic can be segmented into three buckets: search, mobile and social.

So what’s the problem with direct traffic in analytics? If you’re involved in a search or social campaign, you’re not getting all your credit because their are dark leaks in your traffic. The goal is to be able to expel that direct traffic that is affecting you negatively.

For this presentation, Simmonds looked at:

Dark Search

To extract signals. Even Google is a big source of obscured data, as you’ll recall with (Not Provided). Search Console is good, it’s one part of the picture. Another big offender is comScore and the search marketshare report, year after year published with no transparency other than “hey we get this from ISP data.”

Add to this fuzzy picture the BuzzFeed shenanigans. BuzzFeed is always saying that SEO is dead, but from SimilarWeb we can see that BuzzFeed gets a large portion of their traffic from search.

More misinformation from Google: Simmonds has seen zero ranking effect of moving a site to HTTPS. He notes that social share counts will reset if you move your site to secure, but there is a way to get it back for Facebook.

If you’re going secure, talk to tech about implementing the Meta Referrer tag. That will get you credit and keep you out of the dark social trap.

Image search is a walled garden:

There’s not really a way to optimize for image search anymore. Image optimization is a fleeting thing and instead that energy can be spent on image optimizing for Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat.

Most popular month for search is October, the beginning of Q4 as shopping is gearing up. If you’re thinking of doing development work, do it in July.

Most popular days for search:

Monday is your day for product launch.

Dark Social

It’s not realistic that people are typing in URLs several directories deep and old URLs.

Scrub the direct traffic URLs against social plays and search plays. Facebook is the biggest problem when it comes to dark referring traffic. Facebook Insights is kind of useful but not great, so Simmonds went to a third-party social analytics tool: Chartbeat. This tool has bridged the gap from a mobile and social perspective in showing where Facebook traffic is coming from.

Formula: pull direct traffic, remove home page and section friends, what’s left is dark social.

Speaking of dark, if you normalize for Facebook, remove them from the list, you’ll see all the other players. What’s missing from these players is YouTube. YouTube doesn’t drive traffic back to a site, so he doesn’t have a YouTube strategy. YouTube is a branding experience, but it’s a walled garden.

Dark Mobile

Mobilegeddon has been happening all along. Mobile search shows no sign of stopping. In the last 18 months, it’s grown 115%.

Safari and Google App pass accurate Organic referrer data. Chome mobile browser passes accurate Organic referrer data. But the Android Search App passes referrer data as Direct. Replace the Google+ share button with WhatsApp; USA Today put it on their sports section and saw 18% increase in traffic in a month. But out of the box, the WhatsApp share button won’t send the right referral data.

Read these two articles by Emily Grossman:

• App Indexing and the New Frontier of SE
• Apple Search + iOS App Indexing

Questions to ask:

• Autocomplete in mobile/web browsers? Direct or organic?
• Apple maps doesn’t pass mobile referrers
• Any new app like the WhatsApps of the world

Takeaways:

• Be aware
• Beware misinformation
• HTTPS is not an SEO strategy
• Image Search traffic is dead
• Quantify direct traffic — is it search or is it social?
• YouTube traffic is dead
• Facebook is fixing things but still obscuring data
• Twitter strategy
• When new iOS/Android releases, check referrers
• Add WhatsApp share links
• ASO is the new SEO

The post Dark Search, Dark Social & Everything In Between #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

He opens with a question: Does anyone here use consumer surveys as a major data point when creating your strategies? You can only believe half of what you hear and read. Accept that consumer surveys don’t always tell the truth.

Here are examples:

• Wal-Mart decluttered its shelves based on feedback from consumer surveys. They lost 1.85 billion dollars.
• Coca Cola, in response to the Pepsi Challenge, spent $4 million in a nationwide taste test to create NEW Coke. That was a bust.
• McDonald’s spent $300 million to create the Arch Deluxe in response to consumer feedback for an “adult burger,” which they retired as a failure a year later.

From 50 to 84 percent of consumers don’t provide honest responses about their behaviors in marketing surveys. Why? Three reasons:

• They want to sound superior to the guy or girl next to them.
• They want to fit into the social norm.
• They are too polite and won’t tell you your idea sucks.

So if we can’t trust consumers, who can we trust? SEARCH ENGINES! No one is going to lie to a search engine. You don’t type “jeans” into the search box if you’re looking for running shorts.

Amazon and Google are two powerhouses of consumer search behavior data. We can unlock this data. Get inside consumers’ heads using observable and quantifiable data to figure out the consumers’ needs and wants.

4 Tools of the Search Scientist Trade

Phases of the consumer search journey:

Using Google Trends

This tool tells us where something has been and where it’s going. Use a three- to five-year window to see a full business cycle to examine consumer search trends. Top-level trends can be misleading; compare terms to the category for a true sense of what search terms are driving the category.

For example, if we turn on the Compare to category option for terms “shampoo” and “conditioner,” we see that conditioner drives the category, and not shampoo, which appeared to be the trend driver before we accounted for category.

Get to know the category. Look at topics, queries and geographical centers that are driving the product category. Catalog, screenshot, and save for later.

For more of what Google Trends has to offer, see our 5 Enlightened Ways To Use Google Trends for Keyword Research.

Using Google Predictive Search

Using the predictive search suggestions (aka Google instant results) is like using Google’s crystal ball, and it tells us what consumers are looking for around a term. Start typing a head term keyword in to a search box and see what other related searches and predictive searches are suggested. Screen shot, catalog, rinse, and repeat.

Using Google Keyword Planner

This is where we get into the meat and potatoes. He calls it “boiling the ocean of keywords.”

1. Enter head terms, top phrases, and predictive terms using the closest category possible.
2. Review, examine, and add as many Keyword Planner groups to your plan as you can.
3. Download to Excel and prepare to start boiling the ocean.

Tip: Concentrate on just one product or service at a time.

Next, you start sifting through and refining the salt. You start bucketing how consumers are searching. This takes a long time, like 25 hours the first time Verre did it. Now he can do a similar category in four to six hours because he can recognize patterns.

For details on how to start using Keyword Planner, visit our How to Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool resource.

Using Amazon Predictive Search

If 44 percent start their searches on Amazon, you’re talking about a buy-now platform. You don’t have to do informational searches. You can use the same terms on Google. Amazon’s predictive search tool is a doorway to understanding what unbranded terms trigger purchase. You find that consumers search Google and Amazon in a similar fashion, and so you should get confirmation that you’re on the same track. Catalog and screen shot away.

Synthesizing Consumer Needs & Behaviors

Don’t walk into your boss’s office with data and Excel spreadsheets. The next step is making the data understandable. He puts up the slide below that shows taking all the spreadsheets, graphs, and screenshots and turning them into something presentable, with colorful pie charts, pictures of faces, colored labels, etc.

Make a deck that fills out the consumer journey based on search science and tools, not unreliable consumer surveys. Take data and paint a picture.

It’s more than on-page strategy that you’re shaping; it’s digital marketing.

The post Understanding Your Consumer’s Journey Using Search Science for Keyword Research appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..