Month: September 2017

test post for updates

Google’s Ranking Algorithms Dynamically Change Based On Query & Context
The other day I reported how Google said there is no such thing as the top three ranking signals despite what may have been said before. I said it is likely because some queries weight some signals more important than others… Google Search Ranking Update Chatter Continues

First update will come under here 22nd Sept

As you know, we reported Google algorithm search ranking shifts this past Monday based on weekend chatter. That died down for a bit but overnight it spiked back up… Google Tests Indoor Maps In The Local Knowledge Panel

There will be stories posted over the next two days but all those stories were written earlier and scheduled to go live tomorrow and the day after.

I don’t anticipate Google releasing any new algorithms over the next few days but who knows, maybe they will surprise me. If they do, I obviously will not cover it until Monday, when I return.

2nd update will come under here with image 23rd

For all you Jews out there, have a happy, healthy, successful and sweet new year!

last update will come under here 24th

Hope I didn’t cause too many issues out there for the folks who read here and I do hope this site is useful to all.

But what about having different signals with more weigh based on the industry or topic of the query? John Mueller of Google said “I think it makes total sense” to have algorithms that weigh different signals dynamically based on various of factors. He said there is no one-size fits all approach to ranking signals. He said Google “probably” does value links less in some industries that are more susceptible to link spam but he qualified that saying that was from his “limited point of view.”

3 behavioral stats for retailers to supercharge your holiday strategy

See details of post 3 behavioral stats for retailers to supercharge your holiday strategy below

What’s different about the holidays this year? If you’re a marketer, you need to know how your target consumers have changed their needs, wants and shopping habits before you can truly craft your best seasonal strategy. You also had better keep an eye on what your competitors are doing differently.

At the company I work for, Salsify, we analyze aggregate retail search activity, and we’ve discovered it grows more widely distributed during the shopping period leading up to the holidays. We’ve recently conducted research (registration required) on the keywords that shoppers use around the holidays and we’ve identified important opportunities for brands to expand their keyword lists. Leading brands are also dramatically boosting the pace of their product content updates to capitalize on the opportunity throughout the season to win market share.

Let’s run through the top three takeaways from our study:

1. The 2016 holiday season drove a 30 percent increase in the number of top retail search terms — those in the 90th percentile or above in terms of search frequency.

Consumers aren’t just searching more during the holiday season; they are also searching across a much wider variety of terms. An analysis of all retail searches run across several of our company’s retail partners between January and December 2016 showed that the universe of “popular search queries” expands considerably in November and December.

What this means for brands is pretty evident: You need to be responsive to this change in behavior. Just to be found, let alone bought by your target customers, your product content on Amazon, Walmart and other channels needs to reflect relevant, holiday-oriented terms as the season gets under way.

If your product fits the description of a “stocking stuffer” or a “great gift for kids,” for example, it’s vital that you add in language during the month of October or early November — just as consumers are switching into gift-buying mode.

2. Seventy-six percent more product detail page content updates were pushed during an average holiday month versus an average non-holiday month.

Brands are indeed taking a substantially more active role in their product content leading into the holiday season.

We examined six full months of product content pushes and updates across more than 50 large retailers in the apparel, toys, home and garden and associated industries (all of them were our company’s customers). Collectively, the brands included in this sample oversee the management of more than 10 million SKUs.

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Can Robots Do A Better Job Of Building Peace?

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Every day it seems I read an article about the march of robots into our jobs and our lives. They can drive cars, milk cows and make burgers, apparently. And often, enthusiasts claim, they will do these jobs better than us flawed human beings. Logically then, let’s turn to robots to solve our most intractable problems. Human beings seem unable to kick the habit of fighting and killing one another. Enter the peacebot.

In our increasingly uncertain world, more than one in five people’s lives are affected by the rising conflicts, over 40 wars are being fought and we face the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. Those who believe in division and foster hatred have grabbed the microphone and are dominating the airwaves. It is time that all those who work quietly for peace raise their voices more loudly too if we are to be heard over the cacophony of hatred. So to celebrate UN International Day of Peace on 21 September, at International Alert we will be creating and letting loose a flock of peacebots who have been programmed to tweet away their messages of compassion supporting #peaceday.

It’s a fun action, and one that reminds us how our everyday actions can contribute to peace. As Martin Luther King said: ‘We can very well set a mood for peace out of which a system for peace can be built’.

Both the mood and the system for peace are badly needed urgently, with recent figures showing the amounts invested in proactive measures to prevent violent conflict, to bring people together and to rebuild after war are absolutely dwarfed by the towering expenditure on the military. The Global Peace Index estimates total expenditure on peacebuilding at around $10billion in 2016, just over half a percent of the $1.72trillion global military expenditure. It would be a joke except it isn’t very funny.

2017-09-18-1505753135-1490644-Organisation_RedressingTheBalance_WarCost_EN_2017.jpg

That is why we are calling on global leaders to at least double the current amount spent on building peace. We know that money will be well-invested. In a report published on International Peace Day, we have surveyed the literature and case-studies to see if there is evidence that peacebuilding does work. And the evidence is there.

Of course, peacebuilding is no recipe for immediate success. There are countless examples of when governments and communities turn their backs on dialogue, preferring die-hard habits, to pick up their trusty AK47s or to send in the troops. That is why some conflicts such as in the Philippines, have dragged on for over half a century.

But there is also extensive research and a myriad of evidence-based examples showing how peacebuilding has tangibly contributed to reducing violence and helping communities and nations rebuild and reconcile once the guns have fallen silent. From training provided to Muslim and Christian community leaders in the Central African Republic, improved political collaboration across sectarian lines in Lebanon, through to mediating land conflicts in the Philippines and community-friendly policing in Afghanistan, examples abound of initiatives that have demonstrably contributed to reconciliation or resilience. At a macro level, our report shows how a range of initiatives contributed to a critical mass of energy for peace in Northern Ireland, Nepal and South Africa.

Obviously that is good news for people. But it also makes hard economic sense. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, every $1 invested in peacebuilding, reduces the costs of conflict by $16. Clearly, conflict costs, and peace pays.

2017-09-18-1505753348-2128302-Organisation_RedressingTheBalance_PeacebuildingSavings_EN_2017.jpg

At the UN and many member states, the rhetoric on peacebuilding is good, sometimes very good. But it just isn’t yet backed-up by the hard cash and serious policy follow-through that would deliver results. New polling by Conciliation Resources and the Alliance for Peacebuilding shows that this would be popular. In the UK over seven out of ten respondents believe that peacebuilding plays a vital role in ending violent conflicts, and six out of ten state that the UK should be investing more in peacebuilding. The responses were even higher in Germany. And in the US, 74% agreed that peacebuilding plays a vital role in ending conflicts and supported greater investment in it – a significant finding in light of threatened cuts to peacebuilding budgets.

So we will be knocking on the doors of governments around the world, showing the evidence that peacebuilding works, is popular and even cost-effective. And meanwhile, we will also be getting on supporting all those communities who undertake every day peace actions: from the brave people gathering in the park in Yangoon to call for peace in Myanmar, to the refugee teachers giving traumatised children a chance to play again. These everyday actions deserve our support. Now more than ever. Let’s hope the peace bots do a great job at creating that mood for peace and that our humanity catches up.

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Podcasts: Your Next Great Marketing Channel, Or Just a Fad?

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When it comes to reaching engaged, relevant audiences, which marketing channels truly shine? Social media? Email? Webinars?

How about podcasts?

“Podcasts?” I can hear you thinking, “You mean those radio shows that were popular in the early 2000s?” Sure, podcasts may have hit critical mass thanks to Apple iTunes and the iPod back in 2004, but new research is showing that small businesses and brands alike are taking another look at the podcast as a formidable marketing tool.

Of course the question is — why podcasts? And why has this technology suddenly re-ignited? Let’s take a closer look:

Podcasts’ Surge in Popularity

According to a recent report from Infinite Dial, 40% of respondents reported listening to a podcast at least once, with 24% doing so monthly, and 15% doing so weekly. Year over year, online radio and podcasts in particular, have shown a growth that simply can’t be ignored. What’s more, according to a separate study from Triton Digital and Edison Research, Americans tuning in to podcasts on a weekly basis has almost doubled since 2013:

Image Source

Listeners Are More Receptive to Products and Services

People are tuning in — and so are advertisers. There’s a lot for advertisers to like about podcasts, since almost two-thirds of listeners are more willing to consider products and services they learned about on a podcast. Over half of them believed that the hosts of the podcasts they listen to regularly are users of the products and services they mention on their respective shows. And those respondents reacted much more positively to products and services mentioned on the shows from the host themselves rather than a pre-recorded ad from a company or sponsor.

Just look at what actions listeners took after hearing about a product or service in a podcast:

Image Source

In addition to high levels of receptiveness, relevancy and engagement, the kinds of people listening to podcasts are the very users many advertisers want to reach: relatively young, high income and high education levels, according to a survey from Nielsen:

Image Source

Now the question becomes — how can brands and companies leverage this audience attraction?

Which Brands are Seeing Success with Podcasts?

One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that no one is going to tune in to a 20 minute commercial about your business. Take eBay, for example. Earlier this summer, Brooklyn-based audio company Gimlet Creative completed a branded podcast series for the auction company called Open for Business. It became the number one business podcast in iTunes when it released in June and talks to create a second season are already underway.

On the surface, it looks like Open for Business has very little in common with eBay itself. Topics include details on how to build a business from the ground up, including: how to hire, how an immigrant can start a business in the U.S., and so on.

Mentions of eBay itself are handled in a very light-touch manner. The podcast does, however, circle back by sharing the true story of a small business owner that found success on eBay. The last episode of the first series focused on the gig economy, which includes getting short term jobs and getting paid from gig-style platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, Airbnb…and eBay.

The series was a hit — generating an average rating of 4.5 on iTunes and hitting 200% of its download goal.

And it’s not just how-to or curriculum-style podcasts that are getting noticed. GE leverages branded content by using its own sound technology in part of a sci-fi series known as The Message, where cryptographers attempt to decipher an alien message. GE itself isn’t mentioned anywhere in the podcast, but its technology is an integrated part of the storyline.

As part of their digital marketing, General Electric has started a podcast that works well with the audio format.

The Message currently has 5 million subscribers.

You can read more about General Electric’s foray into the digital marketing sphere in our post.

But before you get too excited about the potential of podcasts, it’s worth noting a few downsides.

Measuring Reach: Still In Its Infancy

Currently, the best way to measure how much reach a podcast has is the number of downloads and the number of subscribers to a given channel. Podcasts do not yet have the ability to tell you things like how long people listened or, for example, if someone played a podcast in their car with a group of friends.

What’s more, podcasts don’t correlate the number of downloads to the number of subscribers, so hosts don’t know what percentage of their listeners tune in on a weekly basis, or download an episode. How many people listen one time and then never listen again? No one knows.

Even Apple’s podcast app doesn’t provide statistics or analytics that show what kind of reach the podcast has. So, keep this in mind if you’re looking for measurable marketing gains with podcasts — the information you get is fairly shallow compared to the deep, insightful analytics you get with other marketing channels.

Podcasts Set a Higher Bar for Quality

If you’re looking at starting your own podcast, you can see from the examples above, as well as the top podcasts for your particular industry, that there’s a much higher bar set in terms of quality and consistency than with creating other types of content. Articles like this one may take just a few minutes to read, but with a podcast, you’re asking people to tune in for roughly 20 minutes or so per week – the approximate length and schedule for podcasts in general.

That means you have to commit to a standard of quality and a publishing schedule that’s both dedicated and deeply involved. It’s quite the challenge, to be sure, and many companies — even large ones — simply cannot afford that kind of time investment with so many other digital irons in the fire.

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What Facebook Watch Will Mean for Marketers

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It was only a matter of time.

Just like Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix before it, Facebook has officially entered the video streaming game.

What is Facebook Watch, and what does it mean for you your marketing strategy?

What is Facebook Watch?

Launched in August 2017 to select users in the U.S. via mobile, desktop and TV apps, Facebook Watch is the company’s entrée into episodic streaming video. Videos range from mini documentaries to live sporting events, courtesy of partnerships with Major League Baseball. There is a set group of publishers at launch, but the company plans to open it up to more creators soon.

How will Facebook Watch make money?

Facebook Watch is monetized through ad breaks. The producing partners earn 55% of ad break revenue while Facebook keeps 45%.

Facebook Watch is the company’s entrée into episodic streaming video. (Image Source)

What makes Facebook Watch different from other streaming services?

The streaming video space is undeniably crowded, so Facebook had to find a way to make Facebook Watch stand out. There are three main ways Facebook Watch is different, all of which bode well for its staying power.

  1. Original video content, which can be viewed through a new tab called “Watch,” is exclusive to Facebook Watch and can’t be seen anywhere else (with the exception of the live content available through deals like the one with Major League Baseball).
  2. Because it’s monetized through ad breaks, Facebook Watch is totally free for the viewing audience. All they have to do is be logged in to their Facebook account.
  3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Facebook Watch is hyper-personalized in a way no streaming platform has been before.

The New “Social Viewing” Trend

Facebook Watch’s personalization takes advantage of everything users already love about the platform – it’s personal, and it’s social. People love getting recommendations for the things they love, and they love sharing those things with friends.

  • Facebook Watch provides personalized recommendations in its Discover tab, using fun, Facebook-esque categories like “Most Talked About,” “What’s Making People Laugh,” and “Shows Your Friends Are Watching.”
  • Subscribing to a show instantly connects Facebook users with fellow fans through show-linked Groups.
  • During a show, Facebook users get access to a live comment section where they can chat with other viewers and friends in real-time.

All these features indicate a strong focus on social viewing. While the social viewing trend is new, we have seen it before.

For example, in April of this year, Tumblr launched its video chat service Cabana. The app functions like a Tumblr/FaceTime hybrid, where users can watch their friends’ reactions in real time as they all watch a video together.

cabana video app

Tumblr’s Cabana app brings friends together to watch and react to videos in real time. (Image Source)

Social viewing veteran YouTube has been making some changes, too. Also in August, YouTube added in-app chat to its Android and iOS apps. Previously, users could only share videos out to other apps, such as Twitter or text message, but now conversations can also happen natively within YouTube. The interface is similar to Google Hangouts and appears to be YouTube’s answer to the messaging functionality offered by Instagram and Snapchat.

YouTube has recently launched in-app chat, keeping users chatting natively with their friends. (Image Source)

When multiple social media platforms follow suit, it’s a sure sign a new trend is here to stay. Social viewing is not going away, so how can marketers take advantage of it?

What Facebook Watch means for marketers

Facebook has 1.32 billion users who check in on a daily basis. For anyone who’s wondering, their monthly active users just hit 2 billion.

Either number means Watch is a major initiative at Facebook that marketers should not ignore. Facebook plans to integrate Watch episodes into the News Feed, and the company has a track record of using the News Feed to drive new features to success.

Here are four ways Facebook Watch will change the game for marketers.

1. Ad break ads will likely become more important for Facebook advertisers

In an increasingly internet-marketing-savvy world, people are getting better at tuning ads out. Just last year, Google gave up on its right sidebar ads and removed them.

Fortunately for advertisers, Facebook Watch promises great things. There’s a lot of noise in a Facebook user’s News Feed, so it’s not always easy for your ad to grab attention. But with video, you have a captive audience who is stuck watching your ad. They can’t simply scroll down their feed to get away from it.

Longer videos will only increase the effectiveness of ad break mid roll ads. And if Facebook adds social engagement functionality within the ads themselves, such as reactions and sharing, they’ll perform even better.

Traditional television has been on a downward trend for years. Facebook Watch will only accelerate the ongoing shift of ad dollars from TV to digital and mobile.

2. Facebook Watch gives influencers and social creators a powerful new channel

As promising as the ad breaks are, it’s notable that Facebook Watch publishers can opt out of them entirely. Instead, they can make money through product placement, as long as they tag the sponsor for transparency. One can imagine the implications this has for budding videographers, actors, singers, and documentarians who hope to fund their growth via influencer partnerships.

The rise of the influencer owes much of its success in large part to YouTube. But Facebook Watch could prove to be even more fruitful for influencers.

For instance, Facebook Watch will open up new viewing patterns that are less search-oriented than YouTube. Users who watch or subscribe to programs will see those appear in their News Feed along with the other daily updates from friends, rather than having to go to YouTube to check for the latest uploads. This gives influencers a huge opportunity to increase engagement through video, as fan affinity with influencers will become even more important.

3. Facebook Live may become even more important for brands.

Facebook Live, along with Instagram Live, has been gaining popularity with brands ever since it came out two years ago.

Facebook Live allows brands to humanize themselves and connect with fans in real-time. The live shows and events on Facebook Watch will do the same.

It’s inevitable that one day Facebook will let brands join in on the fun as Facebook opens up Facebook Watch to more publishers. (Those who are interested can apply via this page on Facebook help.) Brands can start practicing now by focusing on Facebook Live.

What resonates with your fans? Do they prefer a structured video format, or something more casual? How often do they want to watch? Daily shows in particular could be a goldmine for brands. The frequency keeps users coming back, ensuring a lucrative return for product placement or ad breaks. That consistent association with their favorite show could make consumers fall in love with your brand.

4. Ultimately, Facebook Watch changes the game for video content marketers

Facebook heavily emphasized the community aspect of Facebook Watch in their official announcement:

“Watching video on Facebook has the incredible power to connect people, spark conversation and foster community,” said Daniel Danker, Facebook’s product director. “On Facebook, videos are discovered through friends and bring communities together.”

Three of the four bullet points in the release mentioned connection and bringing people together. Even the few seed shows Facebook funded are touted as “community-oriented” video series.

It makes sense: The sense of community is what led people to fall in love with the platform in the first place.

Because of this, Facebook Watch will likely see much higher sharing and social engagement than other platforms.

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SEO 101: Which URL versions to add to Google Search Console

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Google Search Console serves as an excellent (not to mention free) source of technical data about your website’s organic visibility and performance. To maximize its usefulness, it’s important to properly set up your website in Search Console by adding all versions of your domain as properties that you manage.

Let’s assume the domain name of the website is https://example.com/.

The first step here is to add the following to Google Search Console as a new property:

     example.com

Make sure to verify the domain name, preferably using the a TXT record or CNAME record in the DNS.

Google Search Console “Add a property” form

Next, add the www version as a property (even if it redirects to the non-www version):

     www.example.com

In this case, both URLs above redirect to the HTTPS version of the website (learn how to move your website to HTTPS). That means that these variations will also need to be added as two separate properties in Google Search Console:

     https://example.com/
     https://www.example.com/

Note that you must specifically include “https://” when adding these two properties, which you did not have to do with the HTTP version. If no protocol is defined when adding a property to Google Search Console, it defaults to the HTTP-protocol.

At this point, the following URLs have been added to Google Search Console as properties, even if the HTTP versions do not serve any content and redirect fully to the HTTPS versions:

     http://example.com/
     http://www.example.com/
     https://example.com/
     https://www.example.com/

To summarize, for any website on its own domain and being served only from the HTTP-protocol, at a bare minimum, two versions of your domain need to be present in Google Search Console. For any website on its own domain and being served from the HTTPS protocol, at a bare minimum, four versions of your domain need to be present in Google Search Console.

Getting more data from Google Search Console

If the website has any subdomains, or language/country/content or otherwise specific subdirectories, it will be beneficial to add these properties separately in Google Search Console. Doing so will allow you to get more data, set geographic targets or define specific site maps. (Note that this also includes subdomains that are not meant for indexing, such as staging servers, or have no data available, such as an admin login subdomain.)

Let’s assume the website has two additional subdomains (blog and news), two language subdirectories (DE and EN), two content-specific subdirectories (product and amp) and a staging subdomain all on the HTTPS-protocol variation. This means that, in addition to the URLs above, the following additional URLs also need to be added as new properties in Google Search Console:

     https://blog.example.com/
     https://news.example.com/
     https://example.com/de/
     https://example.com/en/
     https://example.com/amp/
     https://example.com/product/
     https://staging.example.com/

To be safe, it is best to also add the following as new properties in Google Search Console:

     http://blog.example.com/
     http://news.example.com/
     http://example.com/de/
     http://example.com/en/
     http://example.com/amp/
     http://example.com/product/
     http://staging.example.com/

And to be extra, extra safe, the following (www versions) can also be added as new properties to Google Search Console:

     https://www.example.com/de/
     https://www.example.com/en/
     https://www.example.com/amp/
     https://www.example.com/product/

And

     http://www.example.com/de/
     http://www.example.com/en/
     http://www.example.com/amp/
     http://www.example.com/product/

Now, Google Search Console can provide additional specific and detailed search-related data, such as Search Analytics data, for each subdomain and subdirectory.

Making the data more useful

If all the URL variations mentioned above are added as properties, there are now 24 separate properties in Google Search Console, each one providing specific and valuable insights on how Google “sees” the website. So it may be hard to know which property to check for ranking data in Google Search Console Search Analytics. Luckily, Google added a new feature called “property sets” last year.

Google Search Console “Add a property set” screen

Property sets combine the data from several properties and present the data in a unified view. To create a property set, go to the Google Search Console and click “Create a set.” Next, give the set a name and add previously verified Google Search Console properties to the set.

There are various property sets you may find useful in terms of data segmentation; below are my suggestions for grouping properties together.

All data property set

To get one source for all ranking data in Google Search Console for the website, add all 24 properties to one property set (highly recommended):

     http://example.com/
     http://www.example.com/
     https://example.com/
     https://www.example.com/
     https://blog.example.com/
     https://news.example.com/
     https://example.com/de/
     https://example.com/en/
     https://example.com/amp/
     https://example.com/product/
     https://www.example.com/de/
     https://www.example.com/en/
     https://www.example.com/amp/
     https://www.example.com/product/
     https://staging.example.com/
     http://blog.example.com/
     http://news.example.com/
     http://example.com/de/
     http://example.com/en/
     http://example.com/amp/
     http://example.com/product/
     http://www.example.com/de/
     http://www.example.com/en/
     http://www.example.com/amp/
     http://www.example.com/product/
     http://staging.example.com/

English language data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the English part of the website, group the following into another property set:

     https://example.com/en/
     https://www.example.com/en/
     http://example.com/en/
     http://www.example.com/en/

German language data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the German part of the website, group the following into another property set:

     https://example.com/de/
     https://www.example.com/de/
     http://example.com/de/
     http://www.example.com/de/

News/blog data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the news/blog part of the website, group the following into a property set:

     https://blog.example.com/
     http://blog.example.com/
     https://news.example.com/
     http://news.example.com/

Product page data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for just the product part of the website, group the following into a property set:

     https://example.com/product/
     https://www.example.com/product/
     http://example.com/product/
     http://www.example.com/product/

Keep track of staging URLs

To make sure none of the staging URLs are indexed, add the following to another property set:

     https://staging.example.com/
     http://staging.example.com/

Continue creating new property sets in Google Search Console if it makes sense for your business. Keep in mind that property sets do not show data retroactively — they only start collecting data from the moment they are created, and it can take several days before the first data becomes available for the user. Thus, creating a property set sooner rather than later is in the site owner’s best interest.

Just a start…

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Can Robots Do A Better Job Of Building Peace?

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Every day it seems I read an article about the march of robots into our jobs and our lives. They can drive cars, milk cows and make burgers, apparently. And often, enthusiasts claim, they will do these jobs better than us flawed human beings. Logically then, let’s turn to robots to solve our most intractable problems. Human beings seem unable to kick the habit of fighting and killing one another. Enter the peacebot.

In our increasingly uncertain world, more than one in five people’s lives are affected by the rising conflicts, over 40 wars are being fought and we face the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. Those who believe in division and foster hatred have grabbed the microphone and are dominating the airwaves. It is time that all those who work quietly for peace raise their voices more loudly too if we are to be heard over the cacophony of hatred. So to celebrate UN International Day of Peace on 21 September, at International Alert we will be creating and letting loose a flock of peacebots who have been programmed to tweet away their messages of compassion supporting #peaceday.

It’s a fun action, and one that reminds us how our everyday actions can contribute to peace. As Martin Luther King said: ‘We can very well set a mood for peace out of which a system for peace can be built’.

Both the mood and the system for peace are badly needed urgently, with recent figures showing the amounts invested in proactive measures to prevent violent conflict, to bring people together and to rebuild after war are absolutely dwarfed by the towering expenditure on the military. The Global Peace Index estimates total expenditure on peacebuilding at around $10billion in 2016, just over half a percent of the $1.72trillion global military expenditure. It would be a joke except it isn’t very funny.

2017-09-18-1505753135-1490644-Organisation_RedressingTheBalance_WarCost_EN_2017.jpg

That is why we are calling on global leaders to at least double the current amount spent on building peace. We know that money will be well-invested. In a report published on International Peace Day, we have surveyed the literature and case-studies to see if there is evidence that peacebuilding does work. And the evidence is there.

Of course, peacebuilding is no recipe for immediate success. There are countless examples of when governments and communities turn their backs on dialogue, preferring die-hard habits, to pick up their trusty AK47s or to send in the troops. That is why some conflicts such as in the Philippines, have dragged on for over half a century.

But there is also extensive research and a myriad of evidence-based examples showing how peacebuilding has tangibly contributed to reducing violence and helping communities and nations rebuild and reconcile once the guns have fallen silent. From training provided to Muslim and Christian community leaders in the Central African Republic, improved political collaboration across sectarian lines in Lebanon, through to mediating land conflicts in the Philippines and community-friendly policing in Afghanistan, examples abound of initiatives that have demonstrably contributed to reconciliation or resilience. At a macro level, our report shows how a range of initiatives contributed to a critical mass of energy for peace in Northern Ireland, Nepal and South Africa.

Obviously that is good news for people. But it also makes hard economic sense. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, every $1 invested in peacebuilding, reduces the costs of conflict by $16. Clearly, conflict costs, and peace pays.

2017-09-18-1505753348-2128302-Organisation_RedressingTheBalance_PeacebuildingSavings_EN_2017.jpg

At the UN and many member states, the rhetoric on peacebuilding is good, sometimes very good. But it just isn’t yet backed-up by the hard cash and serious policy follow-through that would deliver results. New polling by Conciliation Resources and the Alliance for Peacebuilding shows that this would be popular. In the UK over seven out of ten respondents believe that peacebuilding plays a vital role in ending violent conflicts, and six out of ten state that the UK should be investing more in peacebuilding. The responses were even higher in Germany. And in the US, 74% agreed that peacebuilding plays a vital role in ending conflicts and supported greater investment in it – a significant finding in light of threatened cuts to peacebuilding budgets.

So we will be knocking on the doors of governments around the world, showing the evidence that peacebuilding works, is popular and even cost-effective. And meanwhile, we will also be getting on supporting all those communities who undertake every day peace actions: from the brave people gathering in the park in Yangoon to call for peace in Myanmar, to the refugee teachers giving traumatised children a chance to play again. These everyday actions deserve our support. Now more than ever. Let’s hope the peace bots do a great job at creating that mood for peace and that our humanity catches up.

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How to Build a Lead Magnet Into Your Product to Fuel Growth

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If you’re looking for new ways to prospect new business for your product or service, a lead magnet could be a valuable investment. A lead magnet is essentially a gateway drug or a bribe to coax your target audience into your marketing or sales funnel. You ‘bribe’ a prospect with a specific piece of value in exchange for their contact information that you can then use to nurture a relationship that hopefully leads to a sale.

The value-offer of lead magnets are often pieces of content like:

  • Case studies
  • eBooks
  • White Papers
  • Exclusive videos

But they can also be:

  • Discounts
  • Free shipping
  • Free trials
  • Free tools
  • Tickets to an event

I’m sure all of these types of lead magnets have been successful for many businesses at some point in time, but at Proposify, we’ve found that a lead magnet that’s built directly into our SaaS product is the most effective way to attract qualified users who then convert to paying customers.

A lead magnet that’s part of your product is different from the examples listed above because it’s usually specific to your product and service. Done right, this type of lead magnet should demonstrate the value and benefit you can provide to your prospect if they choose to pay for your product or service.

Using our experience at Proposify, along with other examples, I’ll outline six steps to building a successful lead magnet into your product.

1. Be Extremely Specific

At Proposify, we use business proposal templates as a lead magnet to drive free trials of our online proposal software.

Proposal templates are free, but they can only be used within our product, so the user has to sign up for a free 14-day trial of Proposify.

The templates then act both as a top of funnel acquisition tool, and they help new users onboard faster.

We offer a document (proposal template) that is specifically related to our product (online proposal software), and specific to an industry (accounting, marketing, architecture, etc). Combined with some SEO work, we end up ranking quite high on Google search results for keywords our target audience is searching for in their time of need.

Someone who is banging their head on their desk trying to write a marketing proposal for a new client is likely to search for “marketing proposal template,” and may find us via our paid or organic search results. This is a key aspect of an effective lead magnet: you need to be visible during your ideal prospect’s time of need and provide a specific piece of value to help them in that moment.

Another example of this is SEOptimer. They rank first for the keyword “free SEO audit” with their free SEO Audit Tool. Someone who is not an SEO expert may struggle with where to start when tackling their site’s SEO performance. Many websites make it easy for those people to get a high-level view of their site’s performance with a free SEO/website audit/grader of some sort.

Technically, it’s just a fancy website scraper and checklist, but for someone who doesn’t know much about SEO, or who’s looking for a quick, high-level view, this tool can be extremely valuable. This lead magnet is part of SEOptimer’s product that they give away solely for the purpose of generating leads.

This tactic likely drives a lot of top of funnel traffic for SEOptimer, but could stumble when trying to contact leads, since they don’t ask for your email. They could do retargeting, or domain matching to emails, but I can’t confirm. The sixth step gets more into developing the relationship, an area where SEOptimer could improve.

2. Offer High Value

It sounds like a no brainer, but your lead magnet needs to be valuable to your lead. Content marketing is exploding, and competition for your audience’s attention online has likely never been tougher than it is today.

The only way to break through all of the noise is to create something of value that attracts your audience, holds their interest, and is valuable enough that ideally, they share it with their network. We like to think that if someone would be willing to pay for your lead magnet, but you’re giving it away at no monetary cost, then it offers value.

Our templates save time, money, and sanity. Coming up with designs and copy can be a huge time suck when you’re trying to get a proposal out the door to a potential client quickly, so our free templates are a high-value offer.

HubSpot is another great example of a company that gives a lot of value away for free; in fact, they give away an entire CRM for free. HubSpot has tons of content on lead magnets, and they certainly practice what they preach. As part of HubSpot’s marketing, they’re challenged with selling the concept of inbound marketing as well as their complementary inbound marketing products. What better way to get people into inbound marketing and the HubSpot ecosystem than to give away parts of it for free?

3. Make it Easy

You need to remove any barriers that might make it difficult for your target audience to recognize the value of your lead magnet. A common mistake is adding too many fields in your lead generation form, which results in a lower conversion rate. You need to find a way to pull as much data as you can from your lead, without turning them off from submitting.

Building a lead magnet into your product should also have the added benefit of making it easier for a user to get into your product. Our proposal templates help attract new users, but they also help speed up our customer onboarding process by making it simpler for users to send proposals faster.

The aforementioned SEOptimer makes it extremely easy to get value from their free Website Review SEO Audit Tool. All you have to do is enter your domain and go; no long forms to fill out or extra information to provide. HubSpot’s free CRM mentions right in the support documentation that they are, “Confident that you can get set up in less than 10 minutes”, making it an uncomplicated decision for the user to get started right away.

4. Provide Instant Gratification

After you’ve made it as easy as possible for your lead to get to the meat of your lead magnet, you need to provide some instant gratification. If the user doesn’t find value quickly, they’ll be less likely to continue to engage with your lead magnet, and certainly less likely to pay attention to any future lead nurturing or conversion tactics you may deploy.

Part of the reason we have proposal templates is to shorten the process between when a user starts a free trial, and when they send out their first proposal. The templates reduce the arduous task of spending hours on a design or layout and instead gets the user closer to the gratification of sending out a proposal and winning new business, an area of great satisfaction for our customers, and a leading metric of success for the adoption rate of Proposify.

With SEOptimer’s audit tool, seconds after you enter your domain they deliver a free, high-level website audit with an easy-to-understand grading system. They make it easy to learn how they break down their grading system, in addition to identifying the most necessary improvements for your domain.

Providing a high-quality, and visually appealing report like this in a matter of seconds is a great example of providing instant gratification for a lead magnet. It is something you can easily understand, get value from, and take action with right away.

5. Demonstrate Your Value

While this is a list of six things you should do when building a lead magnet into your product (and you should do them all!), this one is the most important step.

Building a lead magnet into your product should communicate your true value proposition. A lead magnet that’s part of your product helps the user understand what you can do for them, and demonstrates the potential value before they pay for it. This is the precise reason that free product trials exist.

A lead magnet that clearly demonstrates your value proposition is the holy grail, whether it’s built into your product or not. Someone who is experiencing a problem that you can solve and finds your lead magnet is a very qualified lead and will be much more likely to investigate your product or service further.

We’ve seen this with our proposal templates. Once a user signs up for Proposify’s free trial and uses a template to send a proposal, they also experience our other valuable features such as proposal metrics, digital signatures, variables, and content library.

Another great example of this is ChartMogul, a SaaS subscription reporting, analytics, and metrics tool. Although they don’t rank organically on the first page of Google for “LTV calculator,” they have a great example of a free tool that demonstrates the value of their product.

Having an LTV (lifetime value) calculator is great for a one-off calculation, and much easier than manually doing it. But, it’s very likely that if you’re someone looking to find out what your LTV is once, you’re going to want to track that on a more frequent basis, with, say, a dashboard. That’s exactly what ChartMogul does, and they have a handy call-to-action right below the calculator to let you know.

Similar to how SEOptimer’s audit tool identifies areas of improvement in your website, the company WordStream offers a tool that grades your Google AdWords account.

After using their product to grade your AdWords account, they are betting on the fact that they will find areas of improvement, and that their PPC software will be more attractive. The tool could also help WordStream segment their audience and identify accounts that spend a lot on AdWords, and could easily find a positive ROI from their software.

6. Nurture the Relationship

Finally, your lead magnet may be valuable to your user, but it’s not valuable to your business unless you nurture the relationship, bringing the prospect closer to the point of purchase.

Examples of nurturing the relationship are varied depending on where the prospect is in your marketing or sales funnel. Typically in B2B, it might include an automated email drip campaign; qualifying information such as industry, company size, or job title; following the brand’s social profile; or booking a call with a salesperson.

Users of our templates must sign up for a free trial with their name and email, and this enters them into our onboarding drip sequence. Once users enter this sequence, they can be further qualified based on their activity, like number of sessions, proposals sent, and users added.

If you’ve ever downloaded a HubSpot lead magnet, then I’m sure you’ve experienced being ‘nurtured’. I won’t go into best practices for nurturing sales leads, but HubSpot has tested more than a few different tactics. I found this one interesting: a colleague and I entered HubSpot’s CRM at different times, but by linking our company information, this “Product Specialist” was alerted and reached out to me:

SEOptimer includes two calls-to-action in their email; one for connecting you with SEO services, and another for white-labeling their lead magnet as your own. Essentially this means that their main lead magnet is not just built into their product, it IS their product, making it about the most meta example of building a lead magnet into your product that you can find!

However, SEOptimer could improve their ability to develop the relationship after you use their lead magnet. I have not once been contacted or retargeted about white-labeling their SEO audit tool. That being said, I don’t work at an agency pitching SEO services, so perhaps they’re doing a good job at weeding out unqualified leads.

WordStream does a better job of moving the user to the next stage of their funnel, as they require you to enter your email before actually using their free tools.

Lead Magnet Success Metrics

After you create your lead magnet, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best probably isn’t the best course of action. Make sure you’re tracking each stage of your prospect’s lead magnet journey with a tool like Kissmetrics.

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How long does it take to deindex low-quality or thin content published by accident? [case study]

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SEO Monsters

I had an e-commerce company reach out to me earlier in the year for help. They wanted to have an audit completed after making some important changes to their site.

As part of our initial communication, they prepared a bulleted list of changes that had been implemented so I would be aware of them before analyzing the site. That list included any changes in rankings, traffic and indexation.

One of those bullets stood out: They had seen a big spike in indexation after the recent changes went live. Now, this is a site that had been impacted by major algorithm updates over the years, so the combination of big site changes (without SEO guidance) and a subsequent spike in indexation scared the living daylights out of me.

SEO Scared.

Credit: GIPHY

I checked Google Search Console (GSC), and this is what I saw: 6,560 pages indexed jumped to 16,215 in one week. That’s an increase of 160 percent.

Indexation spike in GSC.

It was clear that digging into this problem and finding out what happened would be a priority. My hope was that if mistakes were pushed to production, and the wrong pages were being indexed, I could surface those problems and fix them before any major damage was done.

I unleashed Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl on the site, using both Googlebot and Googlebot for Smartphones as the user-agents. I was eager to dig into the crawl data.

The problem: Mobile faceted navigation and a surge in thin content

First, the site is not responsive. Instead, it uses dynamic serving, which means different HTML and CSS can be delivered based on user-agent.

The recent changes were made to the mobile version of the site. After those changes were implemented, Googlebot was being driven to many thin URLs via a faceted navigation (only available on the mobile pages). Those thin URLs were clearly being indexed. At a time where Google’s quality algorithms seem to be on overload, that’s never a good thing.

The crawls I performed surfaced a number of pages based on the mobile faceted navigation — and many of them were horribly thin or blank. In addition, the HTML Improvements report (yes, that report many people totally ignore) listed a number of those thin URLs in the duplicate title tags report.

I dug into GSC while the crawls were running and started surfacing many of those problematic URLs. Here’s a screen shot showing close to 4,000 thin URLs in the report. That wasn’t all of the problematic URLs, but you could see Google was finding them.

We clearly had a situation where technical SEO problems led to thin content. I’ve mentioned this problem many times while writing about major algorithm updates, and this was a great example of that happening. Now, it was time to collect as much data as possible, and then communicate the core problems to my client.

The fix

The first thing I explained was that the mobile-first index would be coming soon, and it would probably be best if the site were moved to a responsive design. Then my client could be confident that all of the pages contained the same content, structured data, directives and so on. They agreed with me, and that’s the long-term goal for the site.

Second, and directly related to the problem I surfaced, I explained that they should either canonicalize, noindex or 404 all of the thin pages being linked to from the faceted navigation on mobile. As Googlebot crawls those pages again, it should pick up the changes and start dropping them from the index.

My client asked about blocking via robots.txt, and I explained that if the pages are blocked, then Googlebot will never see the noindex tag. That’s a common question, and I know there’s a lot of confusion about that.

Meta robots tag and robots.txt

It’s only after those pages are removed from the index that they should be blocked via robots.txt (if you choose to go down that path). My client actually decided to 404 the pages, rolled out the changes, and then moved on to other important findings from the audit and crawl analysis.

The question

And then my client asked an important question. It’s one that many have asked after noindexing or removing low-quality or thin pages from their sites.

“How long will it take for Google to drop those pages from the index??”

Ah, a great question — and the answer can be different for every site and situation. I explained that depending on the importance of those pages, the URLs could be removed relatively quickly, or it could take a while (even months or longer).

For example, since these were thin pages generated by a faceted navigation, they probably weren’t high on Google’s list from an importance and priority standpoint. And if that was the case, then Google might not crawl those pages frequently (or any time soon). My recommendation was to move on to other items and just monitor indexation over time.

Note: I did explain that my client could add those thin URLs to an XML sitemap file once removed from the site in order to speed up the process of Google discovering the 404s. I believe my client did that based on the mobile crawl data and the HTML improvements reporting. That doesn’t mean the URLs would be immediately dropped from the index, but it could help with discovery.

The wait

So we proceeded with the remediation plan based on the crawl analysis and audit and let Google crawl the problematic pages. We monitored the Index Status report to see when those pages would start dropping, hoping that would be soon (but realistically knowing it could take a while).

And then, in late August, an email hit my inbox from my client with the subject line, “Indexation finally dropped in GSC.” It seems there was a major drop in indexation, falling right back down to where my client was before the problematic pages were indexed! In fact, there were about 500 fewer pages indexed than before the spike.

Actually, there were two drops. The first was about two months into making the changes, and then there was a much larger drop about three months in. You can see the trending below:

Indexation spike in GSC.

So, for this site and situation, it took Google about three months to drop all of those problematic pages from the index once the changes were implemented (and for that to be reflected in the Index Status report in GSC). It’s important to note that each situation can be different, and the time to deindex problematic pages can vary. However, for my client, it was three months.

Also, Google’s John Mueller has explained that the data for the Index Status report is updated several times per week, but we know the reporting graph is updated once per week. If that’s the case, then it did take Google quite a bit of time to remove these thin URLs from the index.

Google’s John Mueller explaining how often Index Status is updated (at 40:36 in the video):

[embedded content]

Moving forward and final tips

Mistakenly publishing thin pages can be problematic on several levels. First, your users could be accessing those thin or low-quality pages (which can impact user happiness). Second, Google can also be crawling and indexing those pages. We know that Google will count all pages that are indexed when evaluating quality for a site, so it’s critically important to know this is happening, understand how to fix it, and then monitor indexation over time.

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