AMP links at large: What’s a publisher to do?

AMP critics and advocates alike have welcomed the news that the Safari browser in Apple’s iOS 11 will use canonical URLs when sharing mobile content — even when the page the sharer is seeing is an accelerated mobile page (AMP).

Google’s AMP Project tech lead, Malte Ubl, noted on Twitter and elsewhere that Google had been asking Apple and others to make the change. In a Hacker News discussion forum, Ubl wrote:

Just wanted to clarify that we specifically requested Apple (and other browser vendors) to do this. AMP’s policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible.Malte Ubl, Google's AMP Project tech lead

Opinions may vary on the benefits and downsides of AMP, but both sides seem to agree unintentional sharing of AMP links is not ideal.

The scale of the AMP-sharing problem (if you consider it a problem) is relatively small; the vast majority of AMP views are driven by Google and other apps and mobile websites that intentionally link to AMP pages instead of standard web pages.

To understand how AMP URLs are sometimes shared unintentionally — and even rendered on desktop browsers — it’s useful to know how AMP links and AMP sharing work.

What’s in an AMP URL?

AMP pages can be cached and presented in a variety of ways which impact how browsers and sharing utilities handle them. The construction of an AMP URL will tell you a lot:

1) Original AMP URL: A publisher’s original AMP page will often start with amp. or have /amp somewhere in the URL, like this:

http://ift.tt/2hQCCak/amp

2) AMP Cache URL: When cached and served from the AMP Project content delivery network (CDN), URLs will look like this:

http://ift.tt/2y1tanJhttp://ift.tt/2h4OANQ

3) Google AMP Viewer URL: When Google delivers pages from the AMP Cache, Google’s Viewer frame gives them URLs like this:

http://ift.tt/2eaPoKVhttp://ift.tt/2h4OANQ

The Google Viewer is the most common user experience, since most AMP pages are encountered in Google’s environments — but referrers linking to AMP URLs can use any version. Here are some key characteristics of each:

Which link gets shared?

When an AMP page is shared, the shared link can be the AMP URL in the browser address bar, the desktop URL, or the canonical URL specified in the page source. The method of sharing makes the difference:

Here’s a visual of the three sharing methods described above:

Share method determines which link is shared. Android/Chrome shown here.

How are shared AMP links handled?

When the Google AMP Viewer URL is shared, Google’s Viewer frame detects whether the request is coming from a mobile, desktop or tablet device. Mobile users get the Google-framed AMP page, while desktop and tablet users are helpfully redirected to the canonical page. Fortunately, this is the most common experience, since users are most likely to encounter and share the Google AMP Viewer URL.

In the odd case where the Original AMP URL or AMP Cache URL is shared or linked, which usually occurs when a person manually copies the link, the browser (including Safari) will simply open the AMP page.

Desktop/tablet edge case

That explains how AMP pages sometimes show up on desktop and tablet screens. When an Original AMP URL or AMP Cache URL is pasted into a social post, or linked by a referring website, browsers will display the AMP page regardless of screen size.

Publishers might be puzzled to see desktop views in their AMP analytics, but the overall impact is minimal; in August, our company’s AMP platform tracked just over one percent of AMP views to desktop screens and two percent to tablets. Non-mobile views came mostly from Yahoo (which often links to original AMP URLs from its desktop site), user posts to Facebook and other referring websites that link directly to AMP pages.

The resulting user experience varies by publisher execution. For example, in late August, drudgereport.com linked directly to an AMP page on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (a client of our company). That meant that the substantial traffic surge from Drudge desktop users went to traffic to the Star-Telegram page. Fortunately, the newspaper has a responsive AMP page that performs well at any size.

Left: Original article. Right: Responsive AMP page.

Other AMP pages don’t display as nicely on larger screens. To see how any publisher’s AMP pages look on desktop, install the AMP Validator Chrome extension which detects and displays AMP pages.

What should publishers do?

AMP is an open web format, so it can show up anywhere. Practically speaking, there’s not much publishers can do to stop AMP URLs from leaking into social posts and referral links — other than opting out of the AMP program altogether. Browser developers could stem the frequency of inadvertent AMP shares by following Safari’s approach — but users and referrers will continue to copy and paste AMP URLs into social posts and website links.

Instead, publishers who choose to implement AMP should be aware that these pages are surfacing in more places and plan accordingly. Building responsive, desktop-ready AMP pages might be ambitious for many publishers at this point, but making AMP look halfway decent on desktop is a good goal. And AMP pages should always include social sharing tools that are configured to use the URL the publisher wishes to share.

None of this is worth losing sleep over for publishers with good, engaging AMP pages. Inevitably, more platforms, referrers and users will link to AMP URLs, spreading the intentional and incidental exposure of AMP across the mobile web.

Users might see complicated URLs sometimes, but they’ll also likely get a fast load and a quality experience, so long as the publisher has created one. Some might even prefer it.

Looking for more information on implementing AMP, AMP ads and AMP landing pages? Join us for these sessions at our SMX conference:

---

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

---

About The Author

Barb Palser is head of product for

Relay Media, Inc.

, a San Francisco-based AMP conversion and mobile distribution platform. Her 20-year career in digital content spans traditional media, digital publishing technology, product strategy and audience development. She's held digital leadership roles with Nexstar Broadcasting, McGraw-Hill Broadcasting, Morgan Murphy Media, The Poynter Institute and publishing platform Internet Broadcasting.

The limitations of Google AdWords demographic targeting

Many advertisers are well aware that Google has targeting options available in AdWords that give brands the ability to adjust bids, ad copy and landing pages for demographic groups based on age, gender and average household income.

These levers can be useful for targeting search campaigns only to the most relevant groups, as well as for improving the performance of particular demographic groups by creating catered experiences for them.

However, the current ways in which age, gender and average household income work together make it difficult to create granular demographic targets at scale. Here, we’ll illustrate the troubles that can arise, as well as explain why there is growing need for demographic targets that “talk to one another.”

The current situation with age and gender targeting

Currently, targeting an AdWords campaign to a particular age group or gender is done by exclusion, i.e., an advertiser adds age and gender groups to a campaign and then assigns those groups that should not be targeted as exclusions.

So, if a campaign should only target males between the ages of 18 and 24, all other ages and gender targets, including “Unknown” (which includes members of all ages and genders), should be added to the campaign as exclusions.

In the early goings of Google’s testing for age and gender targeting, advertisers had the option to select “Target and bid,” as well as “Bid only,” as shown by the screen shot below taken in early 2015.

The former limits targeting solely to those ages and genders launched as targets, while the latter simply layers the target on for bid adjustments and does not restrict a campaign’s targeting solely to those groups added.

However, it’s only by audience exclusion that age and gender targets can now be used to narrow targeting down, as all age and gender targets are set to “Bid only.” Both “Bid only” and “Target and bid” are still available for other audience targeting options, such as Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and Customer Match.

Unfortunately, age and gender can’t be combined to target a specific slice of the population across both attributes. That is to say, there’s no way to create a single target for males between the ages of 18 and 24 — advertisers have to exclude all of the ages and all of the genders that don’t match the targeted group separately. This makes it difficult to target a particular group in a separate campaign while also continuing to target all other genders and ages in a different campaign.

In the example of wanting to target males between the ages of 18 and 24, a brand could duplicate an existing campaign and exclude all ages outside of the 18-24 range (including “unknown”), as well as all gender targets not related to males (including “unknown”) in the new campaign.

In order to ensure that all of the individuals in that audience go to the new campaign, the original version of the campaign needs to be updated to exclude 18- to 24-year-old males. If the new campaign has higher bids than the original campaign, then 18- to 24-year-old male traffic should tend to correctly head to the new campaign, but it’s far from certain without proper exclusion in the original campaign.

However, if the original campaign is set to exclude males and people 18-24, all males would be excluded as well as all 18- to 24-year-old people. There’s no way to exclude only 18- to 24-year-old males.

That means that in order to cleanly segment traffic, as well as continue serving ads to all ages and genders, the brand must triplicate (it’s totally a word) the campaign and use the third version to fill in the gaps created by excluding segments from the original campaign.

So, if the original campaign were set to exclude all males, the third campaign would target all males not aged 18-24. Thus, one copy of the campaign would target males 18-24 years old, one would target all the other males, and the original campaign would target all non-males.

Imagine if the brand also wanted to incorporate average household income and wanted to target the top 10 percent highest income 18- to 24-year-old males in a separate campaign. They might have to create four different versions of the campaign to cover all the gaps and not overlap coverage!

Note: Age and Gender targets can be set at the ad group level, but for the sake of simplicity, in this post I refer only to campaign settings. Some duplication efforts can be carried out at the ad group level within a campaign. Average Household Income (HHI) targets can only be set at the campaign level.

Having to create multiple campaigns for the purpose of targeting a specific audience segment is annoying, and it’s a real impediment to granular targeting of different groups using age, gender and household income targets.

If adjusting bids for an audience segment is all that’s necessary, an advertiser could just layer on age and gender bid adjustments to existing campaigns and never duplicate anything, but there are big limitations to this strategy as well.

Dangers of a bid modifier stack attack

One well-known problem that Enhanced Campaigns have had since their inception is that it can be difficult to create effective bid modifiers because of how they stack on top of one another in adjusting bids. This is a problem because not all bid modifiers are independent variables, such as age and income. That means that advertisers might want to apply one modifier calling on multiple variables.

For example, say you want to push bids 25 percent for 18- to 24-year-old males searching from an area with a top 10 percent average household income without duplicating a campaign.

Since bid modifiers stack on top of one another, you’d either have to pick just one of the three attributes of age, gender and HHI to bid up 25 percent relative to the rest of the population, or set the modifiers of each of the three criteria such that they add up to a 25 percent push. In either case, bids are going to be adjusted for more people than just the individuals within the targeted group of high income, young males.

This strategy also wouldn’t allow a brand to adjust ad copy or landing pages for the target group without adjusting them for all demographic groups targeted by the campaign, and the only way to adjust copy and landing pages for just a targeted age-gender-income combination is to create separate campaigns.

Conclusion

The current AdWords levers advertisers have at their disposal to target users based on attributes like age and gender are nice, and they are certainly, at the very least, useful for collecting data on what types of users are searching and clicking on ads.

However, in practice, these targets are pretty unwieldy when trying to target specific groups of individuals based on multiple attributes.

There’s been nothing to suggest Google plans to abandon audience stacking for the purposes of calculating bids, or to allow advertisers to target a campaign to a particular slice of the population calling on multiple variables.

In the big scheme of things, these issues aren’t meaningfully hampering advertisers from investing in Google at the moment, but they do present a challenge to fully embracing audience-based optimizations. Google updates over the last couple of years, from the release of Customer Match to the expansion of maximum membership duration for RLSA audiences, have made it easier for advertisers to target members of known groups. Hopefully, it will continue to embrace updates that give advertisers better control in wielding audience targets.

---

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

---

About The Author

Andy Taylor is Associate Director of Research at Merkle, responsible for analyzing trends across the digital marketing spectrum for best practices and industry commentary. A primary contributor to the Merkle Blog, Dossier, and quarterly Digital Marketing Report, he speaks frequently at industry conferences and events.

Report: Google beats Amazon for product-search reach, but rival sees greater loyalty

Another survey has highlighted Amazon’s outsized role in shopping and product discovery. This one comes from performance marketing platform Kenshoo.

The company commissioned a survey of 3,100 consumers in the US, the UK, Germany and France. The survey findings echo others before it that show Amazon is either the starting point for product research or plays a prominent role in the customer purchase process.

According to the survey, more people across these markets actually use Google in shopping and product discovery, however, Amazon is consulted by 56 percent as their starting point. That’s the highest percentage I’ve seen to date.

Q: Which of these online sites are you likely to use to help you find product ideas and information before making a purchase?

• Google — 85 percent
• Amazon — 72 percent
• eBay — 38 percent
• Retail websites — 36 percent
• Facebook — 27 percent

The numbers were fairly consistent across markets. However, in the US, Facebook played a larger role than in the other countries, with 36 percent saying they use it before making a purchase. Bing, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs and Twitter were also consulted by shoppers in smaller numbers.

The survey found that 26 percent check Amazon in retail stores. This “showrooming” behavior is not a new finding, but it’s a significant figure. Perhaps more striking than any of the above were the following, however:

• 22 percent “won’t look anywhere else if they see a product that looks suitable on Amazon.”
• 51 percent say that “even if they find something that seems right on another site, they will usually look on Amazon to find alternative ideas, compare prices or gather more information before making a purchase.”

These numbers show consumer loyalty and the gravitational pull that Amazon has during the purchase process. And while the data show there are multiple consumer touch points and shopping tools, for a growing number of people, Amazon has become the Alpha and Omega of product search.

---

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.

Multiple Sites: Does It Hurt or Help SEO? by @Visiture_search

Having multiple websites hosted on different domains can be either a great or bad tactic when it comes to SEO.

Most of the reasons for having multiple sites are tied more to business decisions or best practices, such as focusing a product offering for one customer base or separating brands into different websites, which can help the user find their content as quickly as possible.

However, one common question that I get when discussing multiple sites is, “Are they better or worse for SEO?”

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), there is no right answer to that question. There are pros and cons of having multiple sites and having one umbrella site to house all of your content.

To understand this a little better, let’s explore the SEO benefits and negatives, and take a look into the best practices for having multiple sites.

Pros of Using Multiple Sites

Matching the Searcher Intent

Multiple sites can be beneficial for your users, especially for companies that have different brands or different products/service offerings.

If you have a portfolio of companies using different websites for each one, then it most likely makes sense to have separate domains for each company/brand. However, breaking out individual services or product offerings for each company into different domains most likely would not make sense.

Shutterfly is one example of a company that does a great job with multiple sites, making all of them ideal for their users and SEO.

Shutterfly breaks out each of their companies that they own into different domains and links them together in the footer level. This makes it so that the user can navigate to each one easily but doesn’t get bogged down with so many options had the company decided to use one site or domain for all of their brands.

You also want to make sure that each site is well optimized for not only search engines but also your users. When someone is searching, if they come to a website with a clear and concise service offering, this should solve their searcher intent. However, if your site is not optimized for the searcher intent, then they will go somewhere else, which will increase your bounce rate and could end up hurting your the rankings.

Capturing More Google Real Estate

There are other benefits of using multiple sites besides helping to match a clearer product/service offering to the searcher. For niches without too much competition, multiple sites can also help you to take up more Google real estate with additional websites or domains targeting similar keyword phrases with different unique content.

A good example of this would be if you have a portfolio of websites/brands which target similar keyword phrases, but you have different service offerings which satisfy that searcher intent. Breaking them out into different websites makes more sense than making an umbrella brand with a service dropdown or something similar.

Google is more likely to place two different domains in the SERPs for one keyword phrase than they are to place two URLs from the same domain in the SERPs for the same keyword phrase unless there is really no competition in the market.

Don’t worry if you are in a niche that is more competitive — this can still work in competitive niches as long as you have a strong backlink profile for all of your sites.

Let’s go back to Shutterfly — they also own a company called Wedding Paper Divas. They both have different product offerings, but have some overlap such as “Wedding Invitations.”

If you Google that keyword phrase, you will see both their Shutterfly and Wedding Paper Divas inner category page, which ranks for the keyword phrase (Position 3 for Shutterfly and Position 4 for Wedding Paper Divas.)

While Shutterfly offers wedding invitations, it wouldn’t really make sense to merge Wedding Paper Divas into the Shutterfly domain because it is a much more focused product/service offering. This way, they can capture more of the Google real estate.

This situation is a good example for the case to have different domains with two separate brands to capture more of the Google real estate. Even though that is a very competitive keyword phrase (an estimated 301,000 monthly searches), Shutterfly is able to get two of the top ten spots because, according to Ahrefs, their link profile score is 1,413 for Shutterfly and 57,934 for Wedding Paper Divas.

If they didn’t have such a strong link profile, then they would probably not be ranking so high for such a competitive keyword phrase.

Duplicate Content (Helps … Sometimes)

This is a bit rarer, but many portfolios that contain multiple websites, such as online retailers, have products or categories they are retailing on multiple sites. If you were to combine all of this content on just one website — the products and categories, which are the same on each domain — you would create duplicate content issues. You would need to consolidate these products or categories, which can be difficult and time intensive.

Let’s say that Shutterfly decides to merge their main site with Wedding Paper Divas. They want to create one umbrella site, but they have products and categories that are exactly the same. These crossover products and categories would be duplicates of the categories and products on Wedding Paper Divas and, therefore, would create duplicate content across the website.

This is why multiple sites can help — because you can sell the same products on different domains and not have the issue of duplicate content on one domain.

Cons of Having Multiple Sites

Splitting Link Authority

The biggest drawback of having multiple sites is that you are splitting up your link authority between them. This can be detrimental for websites in competitive niches fighting over highly searched keyword phrases.

Let’s use the example from earlier, about wedding invitations, and say that Shutterfly and Wedding Paper Divas were not in ideal positions in a highly competitive keyword phrase. Let’s say, instead, that they were in the middle of page two or three, and their link profiles were on par with their competitors on page two or three.

A good tactic, in theory, would be to combine the pages so that the link authority of both sites would combine them into a much powerful link profile to — it is hoped — then push them to the first page.

When evaluating your multiple sites, you also want to make sure that you evaluate the backlink profiles because your backlink profile generally correlates to ranking high in Google for the keyword phrases that you are targeting.

Decreases Branding Effects

It takes more than just links and content to rank in Google these days. Popular brands are winning on Google over better “optimized” websites, such as the big box retailers. I think Google can tell a site’s popularity through usability signals and uses them more than ever before.

If you use multiple sites, you also have to brand multiple sites, execute social media sites for each site, and more. This splits your resources across many different brands and website properties; therefore, in theory, making you less effective.

Obviously, there will be exceptions to this, especially companies that are leveraging multiple brands to make each of them stronger, but, generally, splitting efforts makes it more difficult. The lesser the brand you are, the less likely you will be linked to, and you will receive fewer visits and gain fewer opportunities to achieve higher positive ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.

Best Practices for Multiple Sites

Now that we have covered some pluses and minuses and you have a good idea of which direction you should go, let’s discuss some best practices for utilizing multiple websites if, in fact, you decide to go that route.

1. Combine Sites When It Makes Sense

If you have multiple sites selling the same products but none are really ranking where you want them to, then combining the sites can be a good tactic for SEO in order to increase the link profile. One “super” link profile is better than five “below average” link profiles. You must evaluate the potential growth of the keyword rankings versus the loss revenue of multiple websites.

Sometimes, it is an easy business decision to merge websites, as it means less maintenance and marketing, and fewer headaches. Other times, the loss of revenue from merging websites does not outgain the SEO benefits of having one strong link profile. You must weigh the benefits and the negatives of each before merging websites or separating out websites and brands (if they are currently one domain).

2. Link Your Sites to Each Other

If you aren’t linking your sites together, you are missing a golden opportunity to share link authority, and you stop users from being able to navigate to the other domains that you have in your portfolio.

The Envato family of businesses and Shutterfly have inner linked their websites together using the logos of each company, which I like. Depending on your preference and comfort level, you can also add the rel=nofollow tag and can add it at the footer.

You can also look for opportunities in your blog content or other various content for inner linking opportunities to each of your sites, as long as it makes sense for the user.

3. Don’t Replicate Websites Exactly

With all of this being said, I would not recommend taking all of your content and just making multiple websites. It might seem easy to “capture” more Google real estate with the same content but, in reality, it is never that easy, and it just doesn’t work that way. It has to make sense for the user, which is why making a bunch of websites, all with similar content, doesn’t work well.

Conclusion

Overall, using multiple sites can help SEO if you are using it to create unique and better experiences for the searcher and to claim more Google real estate. There are negatives as well that you will have to weigh, such as splitting your link authority, which makes it harder to rank in competitive spaces.

Before deciding to merge or keep websites separate, look at the benefits business-wise and SEO-wise, and then evaluate based on each to make a good decision. Most importantly, think what is best for the user, and the Google rankings will come.

---

Image Credits
Screenshots by Ronald Dod. Taken July 2017.

Customizable, collaborative dashboards to arrive within AdWords

In an effort to consolidate data while providing each advertiser their own important KPI stats, Google is launching dashboards to within their AdWords product. As an advertiser, your first thought might be that this already exists within the ‘home’ tab of an account. The difference with customization ‘Home’ modules and ‘dashboard’ information is that instead of enabling standardized modules, dashboards will allow for customizable tables and charts that can be created from scratch on the spot. Best yet? These dashboards can be shared.

These dashboards will adjust to the date range input and appear to be much more visual than current home modules. The new look mimics Data Studio and should be a huge hit for advertisers. Instead of setting up outside reporting or digging through data to find answers, advertisers can customize a unique look at what matters to them. This is important as the customizable home modules weren’t really custom – advertisers could simply choose what they’d like to see and where they wanted it displayed on the page.

Another crowd-pleaser will be the ability to share dashboards within teams. Much like Google Analytics or Data Studio these dashboards can be shared and tested by different users. This will allow for collaboration between team members, synchronization with clients and innovation from the community.

Dashboards are rolling out in the coming weeks and a tour can be found here. Dashboards will be available in both the previous and new iterations of AdWords.

For more information please see the official blog post.

---

About The Author

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for

Cypress North

, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (

@gregfinn

) or

LinkedIn

.

SearchCap: SEO content audits, a search marketer’s view of Facebook & a link study

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: SEO content audits, a search marketer’s view of Facebook & a link study appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

How to conduct an SEO content audit

Google has thrown a ton of changes at marketers over the last few years. From major algorithm updates to voice search, all of these changes follow Google’s ultimate goal of creating the best search experience for its users.

The upshot is that it’s not enough to develop and optimize website content for just search engines anymore. As better language processing has become a major focus for improving search results, your brand’s site content is no longer speaking to search engines alone, but to actual people.

To appeal to both people and search engines, brands must evaluate their site content through an audit process to discover what may (or may not) be working and determine where to improve. A website content audit is the cornerstone of your entire content strategy.

When done right, a content audit helps to determine whether your website content is relevant to not only your brand goals and marketing objectives, but also to the customer’s needs. Audits can identify problems with accuracy, consistency, voice and tone; they can also provide direction for SEO.

Review existing content

Not every content audit is the same; it takes familiarity in many different digital marketing channels to set up a framework for success. However, each content audit has a few things in common, like evaluating quantitative and qualitative metrics for each page of a website.

The first step in each content audit is to record all of a website’s existing content. At ZOG Digital, we find it easiest to centralize the data and break out information like URLs, page titles, conversion rates, meta descriptions and so forth in a single spreadsheet to begin our process.

Take the time to evaluate your audience’s search habits and any historical data you have available. Some of the tools we like to use include:

• Screaming Frog crawls websites’ pages, links and images and allows us to export the data to a spreadsheet.
• Google Analytics lets us export the success metrics of each page, broken out by marketing channel.
• Ahrefs allows us to look at the backlink profiles of each of our target pages.

Next, we layer in qualitative data about the page from a brand level and a content quality level. For our clients, we measure key pages against intended audience segments and brand objectives. As you evaluate each page, you should be able to appropriately grade each page and define next steps for them, too.

With each content audit, you need to define problems with your site’s overall health and identify any strengths and weaknesses. If you decide that the content lacks substance or has weak traffic but is essential to the brand, the content needs to be refreshed for current audiences. You’ll begin to see themes in each category page and be able to make informed recommendations for each part of the site.

Content creation for audience segmentation

After defining next steps, you need to be able to execute it effectively for your target audiences. Successful content marketing is all about targeting a niche and then, of course, making the most out of it in terms of engagement and revenue. Through audience segmentation, you can have laser-focused strategies around each audience type.

For an organization with a large B2B audience segment, like GE, product page or case study content may be the most important piece of content for their target audiences. For Nest, an innovative home and security brand, videos and testimonials might be more effective to establish the use case and value.

You have to refine your marketing tactics in a thoughtful manner when it comes to reaching your target audience. While defining, segmenting and prioritizing your audiences, you also need to define what content type will fill in a gap found in your content audit while also resonating your target audience.

This is where many brands will struggle — they need an agile team of experts to solve the problems uncovered by an initial content audit, while also aligning with target audience segments. Upon evaluating all aspects of current site content, you can fill in the gaps and create more appealing verbiage for your target audiences. Few brands have mastered this technique, and it’s key to be aware of their tactics and how they validate success.

For example, Mercedes-Benz ensures that a majority of their content is made for (and visible to) those who are willing to pay for their high-quality cars. However, they know they want to break into a younger demographic of drivers as well. That’s why they also create content and products that fit in with a millennial’s values, like high value for an affordable price, as well as a strong customer-brand relationship.

You’ll notice in the screen shot below that the first feature listed on the page is phone connectivity, rather than features like mileage or horsepower.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s been marketing their Prius Prime. The auto company claims this to be their most advanced hybrid yet, at a more affordable price than luxury car dealers. Toyota uses infographics to target millennials in the market for new cars who also care about energy efficiency.

Both car brands use different types of content to target their audiences on a deeper level. Notice that the goal is to focus on educating the consumer — they focus on audience segments before anything else.

It’s critical to take the time to augment the quantitative data by evaluating each page based on what humans value. For content audits, you need to appeal to both people and Google by being descriptive with a human touch. You can use the following tools to evaluate the quality of your content and formulate a clear understanding when it comes to content creation:

• Google’s definition of high-quality content includes important factors like trustworthiness and expertise.
• Triblio allows you to create personalized content for multichannel campaigns by persona.
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner provides information on the interest (search volume) of target topics.
• HemingwayApp grades pages based on how difficult they are to read.

We recommend doing a content audit every six to 12 months to ensure consistency and effectiveness of your on-site content as people and search engines evolve. An initial content audit will establish a baseline of data and insights to help you improve content quality. The subsequent content audits will then show you how your pages have grown since you implemented changes, as well as pinpointing any weaknesses that should be addressed.

Final thoughts

By developing a comprehensive content strategy around what you uncover with a robust content audit, you’ll be better able to improve your content development methods and have a baseline for any future changes or updates.

---

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

---

About The Author

Thomas Stern oversees the architecture and evolution of our services lines as Chief Innovation Officer at

ZOG Digital

. He has over 10 years of digital marketing experience through a range of industries like retail, insurance and travel/hospitality. He has been featured in numerous digital marketing publications, has received graduate level internet marketing education and is a board member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) Arizona. Follow us on Twitter

@ZOGDigital

.

Report: Google ending ‘first click free’ to help publishers boost subscriptions

According to a report (registration required) in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Google is ending its “first click free” (FCF) program, which provides users access to content behind publisher subscription paywalls when they click through from Google results. The move is intended to help boost subscription rates.

According to the story, Google will allow publishers to offer FCF on a voluntary basis, but failure to do so won’t result in any rankings hit. FCF was introduced in 2007 as a way to expose subscription content to search users so that they wouldn’t be frustrated by paywalls and to help them test-drive content as an enticement to later subscribe.

As Google explained at the time it wrote about the program:

First Click Free is a way for publishers to share their subscription-only content with Google News readers. All articles that are accessed from Google News are allowed to skip over the subscription page . . .We like to think of First click free as a simple system that allows you to test drive a news source before signing up on their site.

FCF has been unevenly enforced and adjusted by Google over the years. It has been controversial among publishers. In particular, News Corp (parent of the WSJ) has been a vocal critic of Google and its policies toward publishers. The end of FCF was reportedly “negotiated” between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson.

Earlier this year, the WSJ pulled out of FCF and saw its traffic drop by nearly 45 percent. However, the company reported “a fourfold increase in subscription conversions” despite the traffic decline — seemingly validating the decision.

Ending FCF would be consistent with a broader, multifaceted effort by Google to help publishers increase subscription revenue. When we asked Google about the report, it sent an official statement saying that no formal announcement about FCF was being made at this time.

---

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.

A search marketer’s view of Facebook’s advertising platform

I’ve been doing some work recently for a non-profit working on hurricane relief in Texas, TeamRubiconUSA. I consider myself mostly a paid search guy, but amidst a pretty chaotic week, I’ve found myself helping out running paid social campaigns on a variety of platforms, including Facebook Ads. As the old saying goes, “When the enemy comes over the hill, even the cook picks up a rifle.”

This has been a golden opportunity to take some notes from the perspective of a paid search guy who’s been thrown into the world of paid social. If the Facebook Ads team is listening, here are some thoughts about various annoyances — all of which, if solved, would translate directly to more rapid campaign creation, not to mention money spent by Facebook advertisers.

So, with no further ado, here are my initial reactions to being immersed in the various Facebook Ads interfaces.

Cloning posts, for separate tracking purposes, is quite tedious

You really can’t easily clone an existing organic post and use the clone in a paid campaign. You can boost a post, sure, but then any UTM tagging that you built into the URLs in the post will remain, tracking (and miscrediting) the organic and paid versions! Not helpful. Really, you need a separate version of the post with “utm_medum=paid-social” (or whatever your preference is) in the tracking code for the Website URL.

Another approach I dug into was creating a “dark” (unpublished) post; but when you do this, although the GUI explicitly promises that you’ll be able to edit the title and description later when you turn it into an ad, this does not appear to be the case.

So apparently, if you want full control over the post, you need to create a second version of the post via the “Creative Hub” feature. This is painful because first, you have to hand-duplicate every element of the post into a new “mock-up,” then you have to go through a clunky process to import the mock-up into your ad account before you’re able to select it in Power Editor when you create the actual ad based on it.

This is all extremely tedious. How about just letting me clone an existing post into an ad? Then I could just edit and change the tracking code — easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Inaction seems to be the default, not action

What’s with all this “Confirming” stuff? There are Campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads. Why, when I create something, does it often seem to just sit there with an inactive status? That is, until I realize I have to click on the little up arrow next to it, then review and confirm its “Status” change in a dialog box that tells me almost nothing other than that there was a status change — a change, in fact, that I initiated, so I darn well know about its existence already!

In AdWords, once you create an ad, unless you select “pause,” it just runs! Why all this confirming? It’s a barrier to spending. I put up several ads at one point and had no idea they weren’t running for a number of hours. Not acceptable.

My suggestion to the Facebook Ads team would be this: Just put in a “pause” toggle at every level, in the creation process, right before people finish creating an object, then let them un-toggle it later if they want to make it a draft before they save it. Then, have the default be for all objects to be “Active.”

Isn’t it time to discard the stone knives and bearskins?

Advertisers who use Facebook Ads are stuck in the early 2000s concept of tagging every little thing about every link — this, in contrast to AdWords, where it all happens automatically with “Auto-Tagging.”

It’s incredibly hard to believe that Facebook has not yet bought a website analytics company, integrated it with Facebook Ads and created an ID that tracks 50 things about the click, which can then be shared automatically between Facebook Ads and the analytics service. Wait, you say… they have! Well, at least, apparently they’ve had a “Facebook Analytics” product for quite some time now. (The fact I did not even know this until today, doing some background research for this article, is a whole other problem. Why are they not marketing this heavily?) At any rate, Facebook Analytics does not appear to have an auto-tagging feature.

When I described to TeamRubiconUSA’s CMO, Trip Henderson (a veteran marketer who did a lot of Display Network stuff himself back in the day), what I was doing to tag campaigns and creatives, his reaction was, “Wow… I would have thought they would have solved all that by now.”

Yes, exactly. What are they waiting for? This is the most obvious strategy in the world, and it would make marketers’ lives much easier by eliminating all of that odious UTM tagging work. Not to mention, Facebook is tolerating Google Analytics being the primary means by which most marketers analyze results across all their online marketing channels? If I were in charge of Facebook strategy and product management, heads would be rolling every day of the week until that feature came out.

Being forced to use UTM tagging for tracking is akin to Spock trying to get his tricorder to play back with 20th-century technology. It can be done, but what a hassle — tagging is a major pain point for Facebook advertisers.

There are a few third-party products that provide auto-tagging capability for Facebook Ads, but this is a feature that clearly should be in Facebook’s wheelhouse.

How about some real placement reports?

I was amazed some time ago to find that Facebook Ads’ reporting does not give detailed breakouts of performance by site (or “placements,” the standard industry parlance).

Sorry, breaking out performance in the way that Facebook Ads does, by channel (Facebook, Facebook Audience Network, Mobile vs. Desktop) is not a real placement report. That’s a deceptive name; it should, more properly, be called a channel/device report.

How about actually telling advertisers what sites the ads run on, in a real placement report that lists the actual placements? Hello, it’s 2017… brand protection… anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

While it’s laudable that one can now at least load a block list of domains (once your CEO has called you to ask you why your ads are running on some crazy site, which is always a wonderful experience for a junior marketer to go through), how about showing specific sites in a real placement report, just like the entire rest of the display industry has been doing for over a decade, so the junior marketer can get ahead of the curve?

I’m not talking asking for site targeting (which would be great, too, don’t get me wrong)… but can I at least understand where my ads are showing? Seems a reasonable ask!

Conclusion

I have to say, these annoyances aside, Facebook’s targeting is truly amazing. I’ve been doing a lot with it, but I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface. The fact that I’ve been able to figure it out at all, get our campaigns tagged and track everything in Google Analytics and evaluate campaigns beyond simple engagement metrics is a testament to how much Facebook has gotten right with this platform. Generally, the usability is pretty good; I just hope the Facebook Ads team continues to evolve and improve it!

---

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

---

About The Author

Ted Ives is founder and CEO of

SEMCopilot

, software for PPC account managers.

New Google link study shows links are as important as ever for ranking well in search

A link study done three years in a row shows how links continue to be a powerful ranking signal and will likely remain that way. The post New Google link study shows links are as important as ever for ranking well in search appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.