Stop everything you are doing and implement Accelerated Mobile Pages

What we learned from implementing AMPs

This week’s big development here at Smart Insights is the implementation of Accelerated Mobile Pages for our blog. If you are reading this on the standard HTML version (looks the same as normal) visit this post as an AMP to see what we have done.

Over the last year, we have published updates about how Google is implementing and utilising AMPs to improve everybody’s mobile web experience.

A timeline of AMP

Let me recap the main developments of AMP:

December 2015

Google announced that it was seeing 16,000 new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) every single day. This was an impressive rate of adoption and showed the extent to which publisher wanted to attract audiences of mobile devices.

February 2016

Then in February we saw Google has started rolling out Accelerated mobile pages to certain mobile search results in the form of news snippets.

July 2016

During the DoubleClick Leadership Summit in July, they announced two new features to make ad experiences better on the mobile web:

- AMP for Ads allowing advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads.

- AMP Landing Pages: fast, custom pages, built by advertisers so that when someone clicks on their AMP ad, they continue to have an AMP experience. (Source)

August 2016

Trials that Google has been conducting have gone so well that they are expanding AMPs to the SERPs.  (Source)

What difference have we seen?

Taking a blog (HTML vs AMP) from this morning we ran a series of page load speed tests and the results were, to say the least outstanding.

The standard HTML page loaded in a range of 1.12s to 13.13s and the AMP page loaded significantly quicker with a speed range  of 0.75s-2.26s.

The results:

- Standard page averaged 6.43 seconds

- AMP page averaged 1.54 seconds

To put this in perspective I’ve visited 83 web pages (it’s currently 10:39am). Assuming I visit web pages at that rate for 8 hours a day, if they all loaded 4.89 seconds faster over a year I would have an extra 131.6 hours to do anything I liked…probably wait for more web pages to load, to be honest, but you get the gist. AMP’s could save you five days of your life every year!

Considering how many of your site visitors and social followers are consuming your content on the move connected via frustratingly slow mobile internet (less than half of UK subscriptions are 4G) anything you can do to speed up the load speed of a page can only be a good thing for the user.

How will this affect your Google rankings, it is hard to tell in the long term we will keep you posted on the effects we are seeing over the coming months. Although Google has not said that a page being an AMP will be a ranking factor, Google has said that page load time is a ranking factor. Given how much faster AMPs are, they are likely to give your content a slight ranking boost. In addition, AMPs will appear with the nice little AMP logo at the start of the page description in their SERPs. That should mean more traffic from mobile users, especially if your competitors haven’t implemented AMPs. This is because mobile users will quickly learn that the AMP logo will mean a quick loading page, and so will be more likely to click. 

Quick Tip: When implementing AMPs on your site don’t forget to add the same canonical tag to both the HTML and AMP pages. We don’t want the changes to have a negative effect on you SEO ranking due to duplicate content.

Implementing AMPs

If you are considering implementing AMP now they are appearing in SERPs, you’ll need to know how to go about setting them up for your site. Luckily this won’t be difficult. We asked our resident web designer Aaron to explain how to set up accelerated mobile pages for your own site.

‘To make your existing web pages into “Accelerated Mobile Pages” doesn’t require too much work. You just need to include the required AMP script and convert some of your existing HTML markup in to AMP markup which is an extension of HTML and it works in all modern browsers

For example a standard HTML image tag might look like <img src=“”> an AMP image tag looks like <amp-img src=“”> 

• See an example of this on Github

For a detailed guide to implementing AMPs, see the AMP Project website.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/mobile-seo/stop-everything-implement-accelerated-mobile-pages/

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7 SEO tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs

Leverage local SEO and influencers to boost your business’s position in SERPs

If you’re a small business looking to get noticed on the organic search landscape with a limited budget, you’ll need to pick your battles wisely and arm yourself with a realistic and informed approach. Here are some useful things for small businesses and entrepreneurs to consider:

1. If you are a local business, focus your organic search efforts there first.

Traffic from local visitors is intentful and often more likely to convert – so it should not be overlooked. Also, the good news is that you’ll often find it much easier to dominate the organic SERPs for local search queries than you will do for broad, non-geotargeted queries. Google estimates that over 20% of all search has a local intent, so it’s worth pouncing on the opportunity.

2. From an SEO perspective, many claim that 2016 is the ‘year of the influencer’.

Influencer partnerships are a great way of boosting visibility and leveraging another person or brand’s audience to help promote your business. Find a person, organisation or company that is somehow related to your field (but not a competitor) and think of ways that you can collaborate to utilise each other’s network constructively. This can prove a successful way of increasing reach, strengthening brand awareness and building wider audiences.

In 2015, Jellyfish ran an influencer marketing campaign as part of our SEO activity for a key e-commerce client. In doing so, we partnered with influencers to produce and promote high-quality and unique niche content across relevant audiences and networks. The enhanced brand reach and engagement for our client had an exceptional impact on performance, with record-breaking growth for the business, both in terms of search performance and sales.

Results across the year included:

• 28% uplift in keyword visibility across high-value search query portfolios in 9 months
• 72% YoY increase in SEO traffic
• 103% YoY growth in organic product revenue

Snapshot of SEO Visibility over time. Searchmetrics

Snapshot of organic traffic over time. Google Analytics

3. Know the size of the opportunity.

A common mistake with SEO is not doing the research needed to understand what potential there is, leading to unrealistic expectations or a lack of goals and KPIs within your campaign. Tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trends are good starting points for ascertaining the size of the market that you are targeting online, trends, demand and seasonality.

4. Keep an eye on your competitors.

In understanding their strategies, wins and losses, you’ll be in a far better position to fine-tune your approach to SEO and learn what is most likely to displace them in Google’s organic SERPs. Some great tools for monitoring this are Moz, Searchmetrics and SEM Rush.

5. Boast!

Demonstrate the great things you are doing by encouraging happy customers to leave their positive sentiment on review platforms such as Feefo, Trustpilot or Reevo. You can also use schema mark-up to shout about how great you are in the SERPs, giving new prospects the confidence that they need to invest in your brand and increasing your natural click-through rate from search engines. SEO is increasingly being used as a trust building and reputation management channel.

6. Google’s Search Console is an SEO essential for a business of any size.

It allows you to monitor the wellbeing of your website easily and effectively, ensuring that technical problems that might affect your SEO visibility are brought to your attention and can be dealt with before becoming harmful. And, the good news is that it’s free.

7. No one-trick ponies.

In most scenarios, success in SEO is dependent on addressing a wide variety of factors, which cumulatively produce positive results. It is unusual for a campaign’s success to be determined by one single factor; an SEO specialist will typically be required to undertake technical, content and syndication tasks to drive success in the organic search results. So be varied in your approach, keep your ideas fresh and always ask yourself whether your work is likely to add value to a user’s experience on the web. If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re probably heading in the right direction!

SEO is a process of continued optimisation; you rarely get things 100% right the first time around and, in most cases, there is no distinct finishing line. Learn from your mistakes, be patient, persist and set realistic goals. Use the methodology “test, analyse, refine, repeat”.

Thanks to Nick Fettiplace for writing this blog. Nick is the SEO Director for Jellyfish, as part of his role, Nick also runs training courses for Jellyfish Training.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/local-seo/7-seo-tips-small-businesses-entrepreneurs/

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Google Analytics demo account [@SmartInsights alert]

New tool for learning about Google Analytics

Update: 1st September  2016

Jill Quick originally wrote this advisory for our blog  on July 6th 2016 based on a briefing with Google. We’re now featuring it again since Google has now featured it in their update newslettter and on their Analytics blog

Google have just launched a new string to their analytics learning bow. A fully functioning Google Analytics account that anyone with a Google account can access. This is going to be a wonderful education tool for any marketer, or business owner, who wants a better understanding of how to use Google Analytics.

One of the problems my clients and delegates face when I deliver training on Google Analytics is a real life example.  Something to play around with, learn from and use to back up your measurement plan to educate your team on the insights they could be getting and showing your boss what your time and budget is paying for, especially when you need  some extra tinkering to track the things that matter.

The demo account is populated with real data from the Google Merchandise Store. This is a real life e-commerce store where you can buy Google-branded merchandise, so the data in the account is what you would expect from an e-commerce website.

You can see traffic source data. How are their visitors getting there?  Organic, paid, display etc

When you understand how they found you, what did they do when they were on your site? You can use the demo account to look at Content data. What information to they look at, what pages do they visit, do they interact with content etc.?

Do people buy from them? Look at the conversions, dive into their goals, e-commerce transactions.

All sounds good? I think it gets better. The demo account allows you to view the Admin section, so you can see under the car bonnet so to speak.

How are the goals set up?  Head over to the Master View> Goals and you can see all the micro and macro goals they have set up.

If you click on them it shows how it was created. You can look, but not touch i.e. you are not able to amend any of the setup, so you won’t break anything!

Want access? It is very simple.

You need to sign into your Google Account. You are allowed to have access to 100 accounts for free in Google Analytics, so if you want to access the demo account, keep in mind that it will take 1 of your allowances.

Click on this link Access Demo Account.

Important: By clicking the ACCESS DEMO ACCOUNT link below, you opt into Google performing one of two actions related to your Google account: If you already have a Google Analytics account, they will give your Google account access to the demo account (accessible via the Home tab in Google Analytics). If you do not have a Google Analytics account, they will create one for you in association with your Google account and give you access to the demo account. You will still be able to create other accounts but the demo account will use up one of the total number Google Analytics accounts you are allowed to have a Google account (100 accounts for free Google Analytics). You can remove the demo account at any time.

Limitations

You will have Read and Analyze access, this means that you can access the account and see all the reports and configuration data. You can filter a table, create a segment, create a personal asset eg a private dashboard, and create an attribution model.  You won’t be able to, for example, create a goal,  import data or create a calculated metric dashboard.

I would recommend you take some time to familiarize yourself with the Google Merchandise Store, this will give you context to how the account is set up. For example, they have set up Event tracking to see how many people add to their cart, or remove from cart to give more insights into how a user behaves on the site.

I am sure that this is going to be a welcomed addition to the marketing community who wants to know more about Google Analytics.

For more information visit https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup/google-analytics-demo-account-smartinsights-alert/

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Are You Really Measuring What Matters in Social Media?

Measuring social media’s impact on your business is critical. Yet, identifying the right metrics and tracking and analyzing social media’s impact can be challenging.

In the early days of social media, when measurement was new and available data was sparse, most businesses relied exclusively on so-called “vanity metrics” to quantify success. Classical engagement — the number of “followers” or “likes” that social media channels collected — was the primary metric considered. Fast-forward a few years, and strategists had quickly realized they needed more informative metrics connected to meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflected their business objectives. They needed to determine social media’s impact on the bottom line to demonstrate social ROI.

Today, vanity metrics have a bad rap because they do not have a direct tie to revenue. Traditional vanity metrics include Facebook “likes,” Twitter “followers,” and “page views” or “unique visitors” for blog posts. While obsessing over the number of Facebook likes you collect won’t necessarily win over a buying customer, vanity metrics do have their place when used alongside other metrics.

Following are some thoughts regarding the role of vanity metrics and how aligning traditional engagement metrics with more strategic business metrics can provide the insight you need to make informed decisions about your social media strategy.

Aligning Social Media Vanity Metrics with Business Metrics — and Achieving Results
Successful social media measurement focuses on the KPIs that are linked to business objectives, with vanity metrics playing a role in rounding out the big picture. Is Facebook growing at the same rate as Twitter? How is the community responding to different strategies and different types of content? Insights from vanity metrics can help identify whether organic strategy is working or it’s time to implement a larger paid strategy across channels. Bottom line? Understand how to use them to complement KPIs, and you’ll know what’s moving the needle for you.

How to Make Vanity Metrics Work for You
Let’s look at a few metrics and the insights they can provide.

1. Focusing on Followers
You spend a lot of time and money building up your following across the multitude of channels and networks. If you monitor your follower growth over time, it will be invaluable in helping you understand what is working when it comes to community growth.

Is your organic growth picking up or slowing down? Many factors influence growth rates, but by tracking follower growth, you can pick up on revealing patterns in your data. Does certain content cause sudden drops in your number of followers? Are you reaching the right people? Digging deeper into the demographics of your followers (on platforms through which that data is available) will allow you to determine whether your followers really represent your target demographic.

Does your brand have too many accounts? Comparing growth rates on multiple accounts may allow you to assess less-active or compelling accounts and make decisions about whether account consolidations or additional paid strategies would be beneficial. It’s also important to look at other metrics to evaluate whether stagnant accounts are still performing well in other aspects such as engagement or click-through rates, traffic, and conversions.

2. Evaluating “Likes”
Analyzing customer engagement can be one of the most important ways to gain insights into your content strategy as well as your followers. Of course, all those shares, video views, and comments should yield a positive ROI for your business; however, if you know what type of content works best for your audience on each channel, it will help determine your investment strategy.

Do people “like” your content but not share it? Not all interactions are created equal, and some are definitely more valuable than others. Categorizing your content by media type, subject matter, or objective will allow you to look at which category drives the most bang for your buck.

Do your videos receive a lot of views but low completion rates? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn now auto-play videos by default. This makes it rather challenging to analyze video performance. One way to look at it is through completion rates rather than total video views. Which videos compel your followers to stop scrolling and watch long enough to reach that all-important call to action and link?

Is there a correlation between the drop in followers and the content you published that day? Sudden follower drop can be as insightful as follower growth. Understanding the correlation between your followers who are bailing out and the particular types of content you are showing or your posting frequency can help to ensure you keep those fans you worked so hard to attract.

3. Analyzing Page Views
On the surface, page views — counting the number of “hits” your webpage or blog gets — is another vanity metric. No, by itself, it will not reveal how your content on the page is moving the needle for your business. For insight like that, you will need to explore not only what happens further down the conversion path, but also the contribution of the page view to the desirable user behavior on the site. However, using page views alongside smart segmentation and a few additional metrics will help you assess the quality of the page’s content.

Does some of your blog content attract ongoing traffic while traffic to other pages tapers off quickly? This could either indicate that some pages are better optimized for search engines (look at your persistent traffic sources!), or that some content is compelling enough for people to continue sharing (check out your social shares on various platforms). It could also indicate that some content types are more relevant to your audience, so grouping your pages by content type or topic, and then assessing average lifespan for each, may give you insight into what you should focus on in the future.

How many of your page views were “bounces?” If a visitor landed on the page but did not interact with any content or visit a different page, he or she may have found the page content irrelevant or not known how to navigate to content that may be of interest. Segmenting your bouncers according to devices used may shed some light on whether your pages perform well on mobile devices or have loading issues on some browsers.

What is the best referring channel? Do people who are visiting from different sources behave differently? Perhaps one source yields more bounces than average, and a different source drives more conversions down the line. Segmenting traffic can help you fine-tune content that is targeted toward different customer segments and identify where your target customers roam free.

A Multi-Tiered Approach to Measurement
We know there’s value in social media marketing, but being equipped with the right tools to demonstrate how and why has never been easy. With only 15 percent of today’s marketers able to demonstrate the quantitative impact social media has on their businesses, it’s clear that measuring what matters is tough. Business metrics tied to objectives may be seen as more strategic, and they are certainly instrumental in showing how social media is creating value overall. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet — vanity metrics are useful for uncovering the reasons behind trends. And, when used in conjunction with business-oriented metrics, they can offer powerful insights into the details necessary for fine-tuning larger strategies at a tactical level.

The post Are You Really Measuring What Matters in Social Media? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/really-measuring-matters-social-media/

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Agencies need to stop identifying problems, and start presenting solutions

And clients need to stop listening to their HiPPOs

When I first meet a new client team, it’s always interesting to hear about how they got to where they are. It’s always different and often complex – but there are some similarities across the board – from multi £m businesses to start-ups.

The most common theme I hear surrounds clients simply not getting business advice. I use the work business pointedly here.

What can happen is clients have a back-story that then leads them to a self-perceived solution or service that they think will solve the problem.

For example:

I spoke to a really smart marketer yesterday who represented a £100m turnover membership business. She had a ‘web design’ brief for a new website and a budget of £25k. It had all kinds in there – better SEO rankings, new CMS, CRM integration, better brand experience… you name it.

She was new in post and has inherited a reasonably new website, but it wasn’t working for the organisation.

After spending 20 minutes on a call it transpired that there are 100,000 members, and membership was slowly depleting. Every year she attracts 8,000 new members, but loses 10,000 members due to a clunky retention strategy – so a net loss of 2,000 members. Each member is worth around £70 a year to the organisation.

So every 12 months they are losing £140,000 in revenues because there is a problem with their member retention strategy. Quite quickly my advice was for her to focus on fixing this problem first.

Take a look at why members fall out of love with you, and create appropriate online and offline solutions to the problem.

Drop the web brief completely.

Don’t build a new website – you don’t need one.

Yes - there will be a number of digital touch-points as part of a clever and creative retention strategy.

But our priority has to be our ability to love our members more.

Plus if we assume that we claw back £100k of the £140k loss, then you’d be delighted to spend well over £40k to solve it right? Suddenly the conversation is exciting and we are talking about real business benefit stuff!

The answer?

I’m not sure – you’d have to ask a clutch of recently exited members to find out. But the ‘solution’ probably requires a mix of:

• DM
• Personalised and rules-based e-mail
• Highly-persuasive landing pages
• Probably a compelling member video to emphasise the value of the role you play as ‘one of us’
• Revisit member benefits and keep them fresh
• Saying ‘thank you’

We had a great chat about this and I think she was interested.

But fundamentally here’s the thing.

I was giving her a new problem.

She had a problem already (‘I need a new website’) – and not only have I not helped with that, I’ve just given her a new problem that she never knew she had!!

Thinking this through from her perspective, she has already asked the board for £25k for a new website, and I was effectively asking her to go back to the boardroom to say, ‘Actually I might have got this wrong, and this guy thinks the website is fine as it is, and we need to spend £40k stopping people from leaving instead’.

No-one delights in that experience.

My next role (if she wants me to have one) is to help her raise the profile and value of digital to her board.

But my concern is that she might not want this new problem, and instead she’ll find a ‘web design agency’ that will take her £25k and build her a new website. A website she doesn’t need.

And where do you think that £25k come from as a budget for that piece of work?

Has it been carefully planned against a known amount of work effort, or some calculation based on ROI?

No.

£25k comes begrudgingly from a hacked off board of directors who have always seen ‘the website’ as a necessary business cost that they try and minimise whenever they can.

Getting £25k was probably quite a task I imagine.

As marketers we are given as little money as possible from the board to ‘build a new website’ because we ourselves don’t understand the value digital plays. Even in 2016 it’s striking how often we have this conversation.

So we get scraps from the top table.

And because they are scraps we make bad decisions and buy the wrong things, or cheap things.

And because we do the wrong things they fail. And when they fail the board points the finger at us all and say things like ‘stop wasting money’ and ‘get a new agency’ or worst still ‘get a new job’…

We are perpetuating our collective failure, and this lack of assertiveness creates dissatisfaction for everyone.

No-one wins. Not even the ‘web design’ agency who may be £25k richer, but they have a failed relationship and an unhappy team on their hands, and the chances are they spent way more than £25k of their billable time and ran over the deadline handsomely.

This story is not isolated.

Another business I know had a perceived need for an app.

So they approached an app development company to build them a new app.

So they did.

Sadly they didn’t need a new app; but yet they spent a fortune on it.

What they really needed was a world-class mobile web experience, which (at some point in the future) may have benefitted from an app experience.

But because they got the wrong advice they have wasted time and money on the wrong things. They have since had to crowbar a web strategy into an app strategy which will naturally have compromises.

So – as practitioners we have a responsibility to advise the people we speak to in their best interests – not ours.

I would like to think the marketer I spoke to yesterday will look at the role digital plays for her business in a new way. Even if she doesn’t re-engage with me, I hope she takes the decision to revisit her business problems before jumping into ‘solution’ mode.

But both parties have a shared responsibility.

Marketers and IT teams need to think about the business problems they are looking to solve; and studios and agencies have a responsibility to advise and signpost clients into the right relationships.

Especially if it means we don’t take the money and run.

Steve has over 16 years’ experience in digital, ecommerce and mcommerce; taking a leading role in client relationship and development at Code Computerlove.  Now over 80-strong, Code develops award-winning digital products for major brands and is nationally recognised for its digital excellence. To see more from Steve, read his latest whitepaper on how to De-Risk your Digital System Migration now.

Thanks to Steve Peters for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. A
Steve has over 16 years’ experience in digital, ecommerce and mcommerce; taking a leading role in client relationship and development at Code Computerlove.  Now over 80-strong, Code develops award-winning digital products for major brands and is nationally recognised for its digital excellence. To see more from Steve, read his latest whitepaper on how to De-Risk your Digital System Migration now.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/agency-marketing/agencies-need-stop-identifying-problems-start-presenting-solutions/

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