The last several days provided an array of digital marketing data points, with figures aplenty about consumers’ search habits, mobile habits, social platforms, bad ads, chat bots and more.
The following eight stats particularly got our attention.
1. Santa Claus = “totally a dog person”
SLI Systems studied more than 5.5 million consumer searches on ecommerce sites during the four weeks leading into the holiday seasons, and it found dogs are more than twice as likely to receive gifts from their owners than cats. Purr-ty surprising, huh?
2. Insta-success
On Thursday, Instagram revealed it now has 600 million users. The photo- and video-sharing app has been on a rapid growth trajectory, adding 100 million accounts in just the past six months. Check out this six-year timeline to see its quick ascent in the digital realm.
3. Publishing anarchy in the U.K.
KPMG’s recent survey of 2,000 Britons found that 49 percent of them expect to download ad blockers in the next six months. Forty. Nine. Percent.
4. Irrelevance sucks, AGAIN
Speaking of bad ads, Fiksu DSP released a study on Thursday, most notably reporting that 77 percent of consumers are likely to delete an app if they repeatedly receive an irrelevant ad. It’s the second week in a row we’ve highlighted such a stat about brands’ lack of relevance.
5. Yikes, Yahoo!
With its Verizon merger at risk, this had to be a painful admission: Yahoo said Wednesday that more than 1 billion user accounts were breached in August 2013. The hack appears to be separate from the 500 million account breach that Yahoo reported this September, and it follows a history of security problems for the digital company.
So, Yahoo has 1.5 billion accounts? While there are obviously individuals with multiple accounts, just for fun, let’s imagine every user only has one: That calculates to 20 percent of the world’s population.
6. The potential marriage, by the numbers
This year, according to new eMarketer numbers, Yahoo will get $2.98 billion in total digital ad revenue worldwide, or 1.5 percent of the global digital ad market. In 2017, Yahoo’s net worldwide digital ad revenue is expected to grow to $3 billion, per eMarketer, but its market share will drop to 1.3 percent. Meanwhile, the researcher estimated Verizon garnered $1.41 billion in digital ad revenue worldwide this year, or 0.7 percent of the global ad market.
7. Ever-expanding web of influence
Meanwhile, new research from Conductor concluded that 80 percent of marketers plan to ratchet up their investments in 2017 when it comes to online marketing, SEO and content. The study’s results suggest that digital’s years of growth will continue for at least one more.
8. Chatty folks
According to a [24]7 study, roughly 29 percent of consumers stated that chat is their preferred method to contact a retailer when shopping online, making it the most popular channel of customer service over phone and email.
Bonus stat: the smartphone era
Hey, we’re not done! A Forrester Research study commissioned by SteelHouse revealed that 3 out of 5 marketers said they would prefer a single platform for media buying.
Double-bonus stat: Hey Phelps, you rule
OK, we have one more. Adweek creative editor Tim Nudd has selected Under Armour’s “Rule Yourself” spot, starring Olympic swimming great Michael Phelps, as the Ad of the Year. It has been viewed on YouTube 11.6 million times. Check it out below.
Are you reaching your audience on social media the right way? Marketing Land Columnist Jordan Kasteler takes a look at 8 brands you can take a page from. Read more
As we approach the final month of 2016, it’s time to reconsider your ongoing SEO efforts and look at ways to step it up a gear for 2017. Read more
When Onimod Global noticed significant changes in Google’s Possum updates two months ago, we knew big changes were on the way for our clients’ local search results. Read more
Security has always been critical to the web, but challenges involved in site migration have inhibited HTTPS adoption for several years. In the interest of a safer web for all, Google have worked alongside many others across the online ecosystem to better understand and address these challenges, resulting in real change. A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It’s happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome.
Today, they’re adding a new section to the HTTPS Report Card in our Transparency Report that includes data about how HTTPS usage has been increasing over time. More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory.
Percentage of pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome
As the remainder of the web transitions to HTTPS, Google will continue working to ensure that migrating to HTTPS is a no-brainer, providing business benefit beyond increased security. HTTPS currently enables the bestperformance the web offers and powerful features that benefit site conversions, including both new features such as service workers for offline support and web push notifications, and existing features such as credit card autofill and the HTML5 geolocation API that are too powerful to be used over non-secure HTTP. As with all major site migrations, there are certain steps webmasters should take to ensure that search ranking transitions are smooth when moving to HTTPS. To help with this, they’ve posted two FAQs to help sites transition correctly, and will continue to improve thei web fundamentals guidance.
We’ve seen many sites successfully transition with negligible effect on their search ranking and traffic. Brian Wood, Director of Marketing SEO at Wayfair, a large retail site, commented: “We were able to migrate Wayfair.com to HTTPS with no meaningful impact to Google rankings or Google organic search traffic. We are very pleased to say that all Wayfair sites are now fully HTTPS.” CNET, a large tech news site, had a similar experience: “We successfully completed our move of CNET.com to HTTPS last month,” said John Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering & Technology at CNET. “Since then, there has been no change in our Google rankings or Google organic search traffic.”
Webmasters that include ads on their sites also should carefully monitor ad performance and revenue during large site migrations. The portion of Google ad traffic served over HTTPS has increased dramatically over the past 3 years. All ads that come from any Google source always support HTTPS, including AdWords, AdSense, or DoubleClick Ad Exchange; ads sold directly, such as those through DoubleClick for Publishers, still need to be designed to be HTTPS-friendly. This means there will be no change to the Google-sourced ads that appear on a site after migrating to HTTPS. Many publishing partners have seen this in practice after a successful HTTPS transition. Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising for the Washington Post, “saw no material impact to AdX revenue with the transition to SSL.”
As migrating to HTTPS becomes even easier, Google will continue working towards a web that’s secure by default. Don’t hesitate to start planning your HTTPS migration today!
For more information on this topic or to answer any questions you may have, contact an Onimod Global digital marketing expert today.
I’m so tired of hearing various pundits say that SEO is dead. Maybe they are merely being provocative. Perhaps they need to fill seats in their event, and so they come up with “bait” session titles like “Why SEO is fundamentally DEAD.” (Yes, that was actually a keynote title at a very popular conference last year.) Or maybe they drank their own Kool-Aid and really believe this nonsense.
While SEO is NOT dead, the way that you’re doing it might be. Does the following describe your approach? You’ve optimized your H1s and meta tags and you’ve built a few (hopefully white hat) links. Now you just sit back and watch your site rise to the top of Google, right?
Wrong. This sort of cookie-cutter approach to SEO — one that equates SEO to tuning a guitar or to following the steps to a pumpkin pie recipe — rarely works in today’s search landscape.
It’s human to want a repeatable formula to achieve a goal. The bad news is that there is no precise formula to SEO anymore. Sure, there are best practices, and a skilled SEO practitioner can greatly increase the chances of a good outcome. But we live in a world that comes with no guarantees — especially where SEO is concerned.
Of course, there have never really been any absolute guarantees when it comes to SEO. You should run away screaming from any SEO practitioner who promises one.
But for years, many operated under the illusion that if we just tweaked our title tags a little more and got just one more link, we would be rewarded with a higher ranking.
So if we aren’t able to predict an outcome from our optimization efforts, do I agree with those pundits who say that SEO must be dead?
In a way, yes. SEO in the traditional sense is dead. Outsmarting the search engines will no longer be feasible for most. But SEO does still exist, just in an evolved form.
To understand what SEO is today, let’s look at how we got here.
Remember how Google Panda shook the SEO world? Panda was released on February 23, 2011, impacting up to 12 percent of search results. Some aspects of Panda were easy to understand — the notion of thin content, for example. But other aspects were quite subtle.
Panda was the introduction to machine learning for many in the SEO industry. Google had gathered ratings from humans on the perceived quality of a website based on a set of questions. The engineers at Google then applied machine learning algorithms to extend those subjective human opinions to the rest of the web, and Google Panda was born.
It’s one thing to tweak a title tag to have a better keyword. It’s quite another thing to ask yourself whether the page will be judged as delivering a high-quality experience.
Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book, “Blink,” that humans judge quality literally in the blink of an eye. These snap judgments, including whether a website looks “shady” or “trustworthy,” come from the gut level. It’s extremely difficult to “game” a judgment that comes from the human subconscious.
Then, on September 26, 2013, Google took artificial intelligence to another level by announcing that Hummingbird, a major rewrite of the core search algorithm, had been released. Not since the Caffeine update had there been such a significant reworking of Google’s machinery.
Most of us SEO practitioners have seen the evidence of the Panda algorithm and its spammy link penalizing counterpart, Penguin, starkly staring back at us in Google Analytics in the form of a major organic traffic drop. But when it came to Hummingbird, for most sites, there was no obvious impact. Yet when Matt Cutts said Hummingbird affected 90 percent of all searches (compare this to Panda’s 12 percent), it was clear something big had happened. But what?
A clue had come in the form of a Google demonstration of hands-free conversational search at Google I/O: the “OK Google” voice command.
It was thrilling to see we were one step closer to realizing a Star Trekkian future where we could speak to our machines using natural, everyday language, and they would not only understand us but also answer back.
But under the covers, to handle conversational queries correctly, search engines like Google needed to understand the intent of the query, not just the words in it.
We had made the leap from “words” to “concepts.” Understanding the meaning behind words, as well as the relationships between the words in a given topic, is known as semantic search.
If this ability to understanding meaning and intent behind words is not “artificial intelligence,” I don’t know what is. Google Now is only the beginning. We’ll soon be talking to our computers more than we will be typing at them.
And search continues to evolve. Last year, Google announced it had released RankBrain, which is machine learning that helps Google understand and process search queries. RankBrain has been particularly useful to Google in long-tail queries, which are often conversational and new to Google. Even today, 15 percent of search queries entered into Google are new searches never seen before. RankBrain is being run across 100 percent of all Google search queries; it’s become pervasive.
RankBrain is another step in the evolution of the true realization of semantic search.
With semantic search, Google can understand what an article is about. We see evidence of this when articles rank for keywords that are not found anywhere in the article (or in anchor text pointing to the article). One simple example of this is the search for “internet marketing,” which returns Quick Sprout’s guide to online marketing in the number one position. The word “internet” is not found anywhere in the guide.
So if you can rank for a keyword without having it in your title tag or in any of the usual optimization targets (such as the URL and H1), how much does on-page optimization really matter?
In a recent study that analyzed one million Google search results, Backlinko found that the correlation between a given keyword in the title tag and the ranking for the search with that keyword was much smaller than expected.
It used to be important in SEO to have an exact matching keyword (or at least close to it) in a title tag in order to rank for that particular search query. What the Backlinko study illustrated is that Google is now significantly better at understanding the context of your page, and thus you don’t need to be explicit with the keyword you’re targeting, especially if your content clearly discusses the related entities involved in the topic.
What do I mean by “entities?” Let’s take an example. If you have an article on list building, it’s likely that the keyword “list building” would appear, but it is also likely that terms related to list building would also be present in the article, such as “subscribers” and “email.” These terms are relevant to our topic of list building, s0 it’s reasonable to expect them to be in our article.
We know that “email” adds specificity to “list building.” For example, it further defines the type of list (it’s not a Facebook audience). So “list building” and “email” have a relationship which creates meaning beyond just the words. So in the search industry we use the term “entities” to describe these “things” that have a meaning and often have a real-life existence and relationships with other entities.
Incidentally, this may be why longer-form content is performing better in organic search today, because the content describes more fully the topic and has more of the related entities present.
My favorite new tool for exploring entities and relationships between topics is Searchmetrics’ new Topic Explorer, which I demonstrated live last week at Pubcon in the Advanced Keyword Research session. Since Google has gone beyond keywords into entities, we too need to go beyond traditional “keyword research” into “entity research.”
Winning at SEO today is not about figuring which buttons to push. Once you have done the technical due diligence to make your site Google-friendly, you need to put on your marketer’s hat and give up the old school SEO “tactics” that used to work but don’t anymore.
Yes, title tags should have keywords and should be written to entice the user to click through, but you no longer need to worry about getting the keyword precisely right. And it goes without saying that keyword stuffing your tags is not a valid practice, nor has it ever been.
Instead, focus on the experience of your site: How can you make it better?
Get deep into the mind of your ideal visitor and figure what makes them tick. What are their frustrations? What are they looking for? You need to solve for your user, not for the search engine.
Your focus should be on creating remarkable content that is clearly head and shoulders above its competitors, and then on getting users to rabidly consume and share that content.
Content has always been important with SEO. Now more than ever, extraordinary and noteworthy content that creates a conversation or adds massive value to existing conversations is an essential prerequisite to successful SEO.
“SEO is dead. Long live SEO!”
When it comes to success with paid search, it’s not just about ad copy. You have to pay attention to your ad extensions and your landing pages as well.
In this article, Mona Elesseily from Search Engine Land discusses the specific ad features and page elements that searchers/shoppers want when they’re shopping online. She also covers ways to also incorporate the elements using PPC/paid search.
Seventy-eight percent of shoppers want images.
Shoppers respond well to images. It’s the reason Google has been and is continuing to increase the number of images we see on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s also the reason good online retailers allow us to zoom in and view products from different angles.
An awesome way to increase the number of images in the SERPs is to use product listing ads (if applicable). We love how product ads allow us to take up space and show more than one product in the shopping pack. We like adding ad annotations like price drop alerts (in Bing), merchant badges and product ratings to make ads pop even more and grab buyer attention.
Focusing on feeds now will pay dividends in the future, as shopping feeds will likely appear in more places in the SERPs (Think image search and local ad units), and feed-based advertising will become much more commonplace. It’s a good idea to prep for opportunities that will come along in the not-too-distant future.
Sixty-nine percent of shoppers want product reviews.
It’s a great idea to have them on your site and also to incorporate them into PPC ads using review extensions. Review extensions are finicky, as there are lots of search engine policies related to posting “accurate and current” reviews. It’s not uncommon to have ads disapproved a few times before they get approved.
It’s worth noting that reviews can be no more than 12 months old to appear in Google Trusted Stores, and hence, review extensions. Consistently ask customers to review products, so that review extensions (and seller ratings, for that matter) will continue to appear in your account.
Forty-six percent of shoppers want side-by-side product comparisons.
These are effective ways to compare your company products or to compare your product against the products of competitors. Graph or table format tends to be the easiest to read and allows shoppers to better digest information.
Here’s an example from Phillips and some of their natural light wake-up lights:
Personally, I like to highlight (or badge) the most popular product. Badging is very effective in improving online conversions, and I’ve seen increases of more than 20 percent when tables include a badge. In the example below, the pro version of the product is the most popular and is denoted using the color blue.
This example would have been even better if the blue column were marked “best seller” (or similar wording).
Forty-two percent of shoppers want customer testimonials.
I find these very useful, especially if there’s a striking difference between you and your competitors.
I work with a company that manufactures a product that’s more expensive than their competitor’s product. Their testimonials highlight other benefits and do an effective job of making the extra cost negligible. The “negative” is offset by the awesome knowledge and customer service.
Testimonials effectively encourage people to bite the bullet because they know their overall experience will be good and that they’ll be thrilled with their purchase.
Thirty percent of shoppers want video product demos.
This is especially true if the product is complicated or hard to understand. For example, let’s say you sell car replacement parts, and the parts are tricky to install. Here’s an example of videos from 1aauto.com.
In PPC, video extensions are a good option to consider. At this point, these are only available in Bing.
Twenty-two percent of shoppers want live chat with a shopping assistant.
A good option for this is the ActionLink extension in Bing. We’ve seen higher ad engagement as a result of including this, especially in industries where people have a lot of questions, like home renovations.
Nine percent of shoppers want links to media coverage of company products.
On sites, people often include “as seen on” and other such credibility indicators. Be sure to also include links to media coverage. I test short video clips of the media coverage on pages. Sometimes, having clips in addition to links to media coverage boosts conversions.
Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to surface what you might be looking for. These signals include things like the specific words that appear on websites, the freshness of content, your region and PageRank. One specific signal of the algorithms is called Penguin, which was first launched in 2012 and today has an update.
After a period of development and testing, Google are now rolling out an update to the Penguin algorithm in all languages. Here are the key changes you’ll see, which were also among webmasters’ top requests to them:
The web has significantly changed over the years, but webmasters should be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling websites. It’s also important to remember that updates like Penguin are just one of more than 200 signals Google use to determine rank.
For more information on the above changes and how it benefits you, contact an Onimod Global Digital Marketing expert today.
