Mobile Web vs Mobile Apps: Where Should You Invest Your Marketing? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Mobile's been a hot topic for a while now. We know it's not something to be ignored, but when it comes to different mobile mediums, it can be tricky to determine where to focus your efforts. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the differences between marketing via mobile apps and mobile web, examines some criteria that can help guide your decision, and speculates about the future of the mobile world in general.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about the mobile world and specifically whether we should be investing our mobile marketing efforts into the mobile web — meaning a website that is responsive and adaptive or just specifically designed for mobile browsers — or whether we should be worried about building a mobile app to help draw in traffic and gain customers and users. I think these two worlds are actually quite different.

So I spent a bunch of time recently here internally at Moz going through a huge number of statistics, trying to gather as much data as I could to understand these two worlds, and I thought I'd share that with you. I'll give a bunch of links in this presentation, probably a good dozen of them that I'll make sure are in there.

Sources:

• Pew Internet: Smartphone Use in 2015
• Comscore & MarketingLand: Apps Eat Digital Media Time
• Morgan Stanley & MarketingLand: No, Apps Aren't Winning, the Mobile Browser Is
• IAB Study & MarketingLand: Despite Time Spent, Mobile Web Just as Important as Apps
• Fred Wilson [AVC]: Mobile Web is Top of Funnel, Mobile Web is Bottom of Funnel
• MarketingLand: Search is Number One Content Discovery Tool for Mobile Users
• SimilarWeb & Clickz: Why Mobile Web Still Matters in 2015
• Andrew Chen: Mobile App Retention Rates
• Smart Insights: Mobile Marketing Statistics
• Think with Google: Mobile Path to Purchase
• Comscore: 2015 Mobile App Report
• Forrester: Mobile Users Spend 80% of Time in Just 5 Apps
• Nielsen: So Many Apps, So Much More Time for Entertainment
• TechCrunch & Nielsen: An Upper Limit for Apps
• TechCrunch & Forrester: Only 5 Apps See Heavy Use
• VentureBeat: Mobile Browser Traffic is 2X Bigger than App Traffic
• Quartz and Comscore: Most Smartphone Users Download 0 Apps per Month

Mobile web qualities

Just to give you a broad overview, basically the mobile web kind of looks like this.

There's a lot less time spent in the mobile web, meaning on mobile websites on a mobile device, than there is in the world of apps — far, far less time spent. But weirdly, and this is very strange but confirmed by several different sources, there's more traffic overall, meaning more unique people making more different visits, which makes a little bit of sense when you think about how those things are done. Remember that a visit to a web page is a much less intense activity than loading up a mobile app and then spending time in it. So sure that can make some sense.

It's also growing faster. So the mobile web is about two times bigger in terms of raw traffic, and it is growing faster than the mobile app world, which will also make sense in a sec when we talk about apps.

This is Morgan Stanley data. I think they're using comScore as one of their sources, and there's another one that backs this up as well.

Mobile traffic is also highly distributed, and you can see that in everyone's numbers, everyone from SimilarWeb to comScore to Nielsen. They're all reporting this. It's a lot like desktop, which again makes sense.

It's not that we spend all our time on just a few websites. In fact, because so much of the time that we spend on the web in desktop is on Facebook's website and on YouTube's website, and that is mostly app traffic in the mobile web, the long tail looks really long when it comes to the mobile web. There's essentially tons of people visiting tons and tons of different websites all across there, I think on average visiting a few hundred to a few thousand unique websites in a month across mobile browsing.

For the mobile web, search, social, and word of mouth or type in or bookmarking, those are the big sources of mobile referrals, which isn't surprising. Those are pretty big on desktop as well.

So pretty distributed broad system here. A lot of similarities to the desktop web. We're pretty familiar with this world.

Mobile app world

Mobile app world qualities, kind of different though. Apps dominate. I mean dominate like they crush the times that we spend on mobile devices. So you might have seen Mary Meeker's State the Internet Report for this year showing that mobile traffic in 2014 eclipsed desktop traffic.

Desktop traffic is weird. It basically kept growing, growing, growing from 1990 to 2010, and then it's basically today almost exactly where it is in 2010. Weirdly, I think a good trivia question would be, "Do people spend more or less time on desktops today than they did five years ago?" Of course, we would all say, "Well, they spend less." But actually we spend a teensy, tinsy bit more than we did then.

It's just that mobile has gone crazy. Mobile has eaten up all of the rest of the time in our lives. We don't see our friends or family any more. We don't eat meals. We just browse our mobile devices.

So mobile is about 85% to 90% depending on the source of time spent on mobile. It's your YouTubes and your Facebooks and all those kinds of things.

It sends and receives far fewer referrals. So basically, most of the ways that people are getting to apps is not from another app or from a website. It's directly from the launcher. They're going to their home screen. They're clicking on that app. That makes pretty good sense.

But they're also not sending out as much traffic. So if you're browsing Facebook on a mobile device, it seems like, on average, you're less likely to click on to a mobile web link and then load up a web page versus maybe if you're browsing Facebook on the desktop web, which also makes sense. You want to stay in the app that you're in. Mobile speeds are slow or especially outside of countries where 4G and LTE are common.

The top 25 to 50 apps in mobile — and it depends on who you ask — some sources are showing that just the top 5 apps are responsible for 80% to 90% of all app usage. This is data from Forrester and data from comScore. Marketing Land did some work on this.

So what we're essentially saying here is if you're not in the top 25 to 50 apps on a platform, you're probably getting very little mobile app activity, because it turns out that the long tail is nowhere near like it is on the mobile web. People don't visit hundreds and thousands of apps. They visit just a few.

In fact, the average mobile owner uses about 24 apps per month, 24 unique apps per month and visits between 10 and 30 times as many unique websites in a given month.

Seven percent of heavy app users (so the people who download the most apps, who use the most apps), they're responsible actually for 50%, a full half of all download activities.

So it's sort of a small subset of app users who just go crazy. They download every app that they can. They treat apps like websites. They have this huge long tail. But for the 93% of the rest of us, a little bit different.

Most new discovery for mobile apps comes from three sources -- mobile web, word of mouth, or app store top lists. That tends to be how we get to the app world.

So these two are very, very different. They're different in usage. They're different in how they operate. They're different in how you would need to do marketing around them.

Things every business needs to optimize for mobile web

It's my general opinion, based on what I've seen about the mobile web, that every business needs to optimize for the mobile web, and you have to optimize in a few ways. That means you must have responsive or adaptive design. It's not just an option any more.

You've got to have a mobile search-friendly experience, so being able to get the mobile search-friendly tag, which means you can rank better.

But it also means that you're delivering a better user experience from search because search is so big to the mobile web world.

You should be SEO-aware and optimize your site for search engines. That's critical. If you're watching Whiteboard Friday, you're probably doing a fine job with that.

You need to load fast, even on slow connections.

I think one of the challenges is that a lot of us assume that everybody is on 4G or everybody is on LTE. That is not the case, especially in a lot of the developing world. But even in the United States and in Europe and in other countries like Japan, there are plenty of connection speeds that are slow or limited due to where people are, particularly when they travel or are inside buildings or are having connectivity issues. I'm sure you've all experienced that.

Finally, you've got to provide that great user experience and a great content experience that delivers answers quickly.

So I don't mean just loads fast. I mean gives people the answers they're looking for quickly, because as we know, Google is using click-through rate and pogo-sticking and all those kinds of things. If you have a bad experience where you're not delivering, even if your page loads fast, you're not delivering the answers someone was seeking when they performed a mobile search, they land on your mobile web page, they're going to click the "Back" button and choose somebody else. They're less likely to choose you in the future, and Google is less likely to rank you in the future. Very frustrating.

My take on mobile app development

But mobile app development — again, this is my opinion — I think that there are plenty of folks out there who have reasonable disagreements about the way that I think about this. But based on what I've seen, I would generally recommend that mobile app development is only right for your organization if you fit a few criteria.

(A) You need to have a great strategy around what your mobile app will do and that there need to be features and value that your app provides that you could not provide well or could not provide at all in a mobile web experience. Apps can do things like push notifications, even when the app is dormant. That's very, very tough for a website to do, although Google has talked about potentially making that available in Chrome someday. So maybe.

Integration with contacts or integration with other apps. Integration with the phone features itself, the calling and the device system or the root functions of the phone. Those types of things, if you can provide value off of that that you could not do through a mobile website, okay.

By the way, the mobile web provides a lot more features and functionality than many folks often think it does. I'll link you to another great piece (What the Web Can Do Today) that was on Hacker News the other day that has just a great chart of all the things that you might want to be able to do and whether they're supported on mobile web or app or both.

(B) You've got to be able to convince not only yourself but convince your team, convince your audience that you can be among the top few — let's say hundred — apps in the world, or you only need a small handful, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand people that install your app in order for it to be successful.

If you can't make one of those claims — either we're going to be one of the top few hundred apps in the world, or we only need a few hundred to a few thousand people on our app — well, the way apps work is the rich, the dominant apps get all the traffic, all the activity.

I think it can be very frustrating to say, "Hey, we're going to build a great app that sits somewhere in the middle of the pack just like our website sits somewhere in the middle of the pack." That's not how it works. All the attention goes to the most popular apps.

(C) Your app can beat the retention curve odds.

So again, in my research what I found time and time again is that mobile app retention, it's just awful, terrible. Basically, the overwhelming majority of apps, I think more than 9 out of 10 apps will never be opened again after 90 days. So you've got to find a way to make your app retain users and keep their interest, keep them coming back to you again and again, and that is no small feat.

(D) You've got an amazing team of app developers or an incredible one or two people who can do great app development and make a world-class product.

Because if you're not going to be best in class, app world just doesn't feel like it's worth it.

This could all change if...

All right. Now let me add a quick caveat at the end of this. So what I want to say is that this world of apps versus mobile web could change.

In fact, I think there's a lot of people in the SEO world who believe that it's on the verge of changing because of what Google is doing with mobile app integration into mobile web search.

So if I do a search today for "best pasta Portland" on my mobile device, I am going to get pretty much exclusively mobile web content. That's true until and unless I perform a search that really is very app-focused or app-centric. So if I were to perform a search like "find best local restaurants near me," it might come up with Yelp or a travel destination app. Google will pull up in my results probably TripAdvisor and stuff like that. That is happening a little bit today, and we do see it. I think there's folks who are going, "Hey, this is an opportunity." It is an opportunity.

But Google has also made another change where they are now indexing content inside of apps, including in Facebook, which was a big announcement a few weeks ago, and potentially will be placing those inside of the mobile search results, potentially even if you don't have that app installed. That's the game changer. If it turns out that mobile search, which is now more than 50% of all search, becomes a place where Google does sort of what they did with Google+, remember where they were giving highly biased, preferential treatment to posts that had been Google Plussed, even from people who were barely in your network or connected to another person and they made Google+ like this center of the local ecosystem and all those kinds of things.

If they do the same thing in the app world and they give this biased, preferential treatment across the board to apps rather than to mobile web content, we could see this equation start to change. Then it might make sense to say, "Hey, even if I can't attract and keep people and build the best app in the world, maybe I should build an app anyway just to be able to expose my content and get the benefit to Google."

I think it would be a little bit of an odd move from Google, but it's not impossible, and I think in 6 to 12 months we're going to know a lot more. There'll be plenty of studies and data about the clickstream patterns on mobile search and how often the results appear and how often they're clicked and how often that leads to a mobile app download. All those kinds of metrics should be available in the next 6 to 12 months. Then we'll be able to report back to you with a lot more about whether this equation has changed.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Why You Must Become a 10x Brand

Posted by EricEnge

The past 20 years have seen the fastest rate of change in human history. Breathtaking as that may have been, the reality is, that was just the beginning. In fact, the pace of change is going to continue to accelerate. Because of these changes, I see the need for brands to evolve into what I am calling a 10x brand.

This is an expansion of the concept of 10x Content that Rand Fishkin discussed in a recent Whiteboard Friday video. During this WBF, Rand showed why brands now need to produce content ten times better than anything else showing up in search. In this post, I’m proposing that not only do you need to have 10x content (as Rand called it), but you need to be a 10x brand. In other words, it's becoming necessary that your brand must be ten times better known, ten times more trusted, ten times more referenced than any of your competitors' brands.

Because of the three trends I’m about to share with you, just being “better” is no longer good enough. I'll conclude the post with a set of actionable steps you can take that will help you become such a brand. So get ready, hold on tight, and prepare to enjoy the ride!

Change #1: The rise of the millennials

It's Duane Forrester that deserves credit for forcing this change into my consciousness. The millennials are the first generation that has grown up in a world with this incredible pace of change:

Image Source: Bloomberg

Don't skip past the significance of that. Change is the norm for this generation. If you are Gen X, or a baby boomer like me, there was some real stability in the world of tech. Things changed, but not every single year as seems to happen today.

According to the above-referenced Bloomberg article, the millennials in North America stand to inherit $30 trillion in wealth from the baby boomer generation. This will be the largest generational transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, and is in addition to their own earnings. This will give them unprecedented spending power. So yes, you should care about them.

Next, consider the impact of the changes that have already occurred. The two biggest ones of these are:

The practical impact of these two things are:

1. Nearly all the world's information at your fingertips
2. Dozens or hundreds of options to consider in regards to any purchase or action you might want to make
3. Immediate connectivity with your friends and others for real-time feedback and information

These factors have all led to changes in consumer behavior — not just for millennials, but for any hyper-connected person. Here are some of the key characteristics of this modern consumer:

Demand for high quality

The demand for quality is higher than it has even been before, largely because accessing alternative choices is easier than it's ever been before.

Engagement or entertainment

They want to be engaged or entertained by the companies they do business with. This expectation has arisen because there are so many progressive brands that are willing to do it, so those that don't look stale in comparison.

Authenticity

All communications need to be authentic and backed by behavior, because there are so many ways that inauthentic behavior can get exposed.

Impatient

When they want something, be prepared to give it to them now. If you don't, someone else will.

Short attention span

You will need to work very hard to keep their attention. There are just too many enticing options available to them.

The desire for these things is not new, but the instant availability of alternative options is what has changed. Any failure to deliver on your part, is immediately actionable by the consumer - they get what they want from someone else.

Change #2: The rise of new Internet-connected devices and voice-driven interactions

Forecasts for device sales over the next 5 years show a stunning rise in the sale of new types of Internet-connected devices: wearables, smart TVs, thermostats, refrigerators, and more. This environment has given raise to the phrase "The Internet of Things."

If you look at the above chart closely, you will see that by 2020 the cumulative installed base of PCs, tablets, and smartphones (all the stuff we actively use today) will be less than 1/3 of the total Internet-enabled devices. The overwhelming majority of the new devices will have no keyboards, and they will instead rely on voice commands for interaction.

For years, people have argued that voice search will be limited because people won't want to use it in public places, but that concern appears to be becoming less of an issue. A study comissioned by Google in 2014 showed that 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search at least once a day. It also appears that the times and places where people are willing to use voice search are increasing:

The Google study also shows interesting data on why people use voice search:

In case you think the Google study is biased, data supporting the rise of voice search is available from other sources, such as this one from Economictimes.indiatimes.com:

These two studies show increases in usage of voice search on a smartphone. The trend in this direction, in my opinion, will be rapidly accelerated by the new types of Internet-connected devices. Most of these devices will have no keyboard for input. For example, if you are wearing a smartwatch, or interacting with your refrigerator, voice-driven interaction will pretty much be your only option for most functions.

Change #3: Fundamental changes in advertising models

One of the biggest drivers of Google's success on the World Wide Web has been their AdWords advertising system. It offered a brilliant model where advertisers paid on a per-click basis, and provided a massive source of revenue to the company. For the most part, this relies on people clicking on an AdWords ad in the search results, or an AdSense ad on third-party websites.

Even with the advent of the smartphone, the screen real estate needed for much of this advertising model has shrunk dramatically. In wearable devices and embedded devices, that screen real estate is gone.

It's not 100% clear how the new economic models will work in this new world. In a smartphone environment, where we still have some screen real estate, the number of ads that can be shown are greatly reduced. There are many that believe that success in this environment will depend on personalization. For this reason, major advantages come to those who have people actively using apps (where those people stay logged in by default), as they can continuously collect information about you. For reference, here are the most popular apps in 2015 accoring to comScore:

It also matters what types of information those apps are able to collect along the way. Because they know so much about you, Facebook has an extremely strong position in this new world, and Google is arguably playing catch-up. This entire story becomes even more complicated when you get to the world of wearables and embedded devices. For some of these, there may be zero real estate available for ads. This will further complicate the world of monetization, and it may all morph into affiliate models.

How will all this end up? I honestly don't know, but fundamental change is a given.

(Thanks are due to Mike Grehan for stimulating some of my thinking in this area at Pubcon.)

Why should I become a 10x brand?

The world that Google currently dominates is the World Wide Web, a world which is navigated by the browser. That world is not going to disappear, but its share of people's attention will diminish over time. Google may still be a huge player in this new world, but they will have significant competition. And, even if Google is the leading player in it, the shape of how digital marketing is done will be substantially different.

In short, the tactics that work for promoting your business in a web-driven world won't apply. You will need to view this new environment as a massively connected ecosystem. Any, and all, of your imperfections are likely to be found out and exposed. From a content marketing perspective, the landscape will look something like this:

At each corner of the Internet you touch, you have to view what you are doing as visible in every other corner. Your messaging needs to focus on building relationships across the spectrum of all that you do. For that reason, find ways to add value and help others, find ways to engage and interact, and find ways to entertain.

Why do I think this is the case? In a shifting landscape, your best defense (and your best offense) is a passionate audience. People who believe in what you do. People who believe in who you are. And, in a world where personalization is a huge factor in how information is delivered, having that audience that wants to remain connected with you is huge. In short, if a service provider does not make your products and or services available to people who want them, then those people may become dissatisfied with that service provider. What will those people do then? They might switch to another service provider.

The competition between Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others for the future is ON. They all see it coming, and how this will shake out is not at all certain. This means competing for audiences and securing their own market share. Building your own passionate, connected audience is your clear path for surviving and prospering.

Your goal needs to be becoming a 10x brand. You need to go above and beyond what others do. You don't want to simply be good; you need to be outstanding.

What does it take to be a 10x brand?

1.) View every touchpoint as an opportunity to build or enhance relationships.

By everywhere, I mean everywhere. That includes offline. Have stores? Then interactions within those stores are an opportunity. Have a customer service function? Use it to build trust and perceived value. And, of course, anything you do in social media, on your site, or through content marketing, as well.

Two brands that do this really well are Whole Foods and Marathon Petroleum. You can read more about how they engage with people both online and offline below:

• Interview with Whole Foods' Natanya Anderson
• Interview with Marathon Petroleum's Brandon Daniels

2.) Solve problems for others via content and interaction.

Do this everywhere you are present online.

Create 10x content that helps users on a regular basis (at least once per month). As mentioned earlier in this article, Rand made a great argument for why 10x content is a requirement.

Publishing great content is an awesome way to add value to the overall market ecosystem in which you live.

10x content is a baseline requirement for a 10x brand.

3.) Stop producing any sub 1x content whatsoever.

Quality is far more important than quantity. In your content marketing efforts, stop creating OK content, or 1x content — it's a waste of your time. It will not help you grow. Note: what you put on product pages will probably be more focused on driving conversion, and is likely to be more basic; the focus here is on what you do in content marketing.

4.) Freely share the best content covering your market, including that created by others.

So many brands are not willing to share great content published by others, but if it's valuable to your audience, it will help enhance your relationship with that audience. In addition, it will help grow you grow your social media audience.

5.) Build genuine relationships with other progressive industry thought leaders (influencers).

There are so many reasons to do this:

• Close cooperation with other well-known experts is awesome for your own reputation and visibility
• It opens doors to a wide range of joint promotional opportunities
• It can lead to their sharing your content through your social channels
• Ultimately, these factors all play into improved SEO

6.) Proactively engage with others on social media, including customers and prospects.

It's great to interact with influencers, but you can't make it only about them. As noted above, every interaction is a chance to build a relationship. In addition, every interaction in most places online, such as social media, takes place on a public stage.

How you treat others is public information in these environments. Take advantage of the opportunity that represents.

7.) Develop key employees into public faces for your company (what Mark Traphagen calls a PBR, or "personal brand rep").

Every company has limited funds. Enabling your employee base to participate in building your brand can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

This should extend beyond social media and into your offline activities, as well.

8.) Stop any edgy business (including SEO) practices you have been using.

The downside risk of public exposure is way too high:

Questionable business practices designed to get you an unfair edge just aren't worth it. Just ask Volkswagen about the downside of skirting the rules.

Summary

You may want to argue with me about being a 10x brand, asking why being a 2x brand isn't enough. There's merit to the argument, but the challenge for you is that the basic channels for information discovery are shifting underneath our collective feet.

If you are seeing success in today's channels, this is a threat to you. If you don't have passionate loyal fans, those new channels have no real need to make information about you available. People won't miss you if you're not there.

That's the key. You need to be in-demand. If some channel does not make it easy to find you, you need people to miss you. That's why you must behave like an authentic, engaged member of the overall community. Having a great product or service will be a requirement, but that's just table stakes — you need to be a 10x brand. If you can create this position for yourself, you win.

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Let Data Take the Wheel – Using API-Integrated Reporting Dashboards

Posted by IanWatson

Some say the only constant thing in this world is change — and that seems to go double for the online marketing and SEO industry. At times this can seem daunting and sometimes insurmountable, but some have found ways to embrace the ambiguity and even thrive on it. Their paths and techniques may all differ slightly, but a commonality exists among them.

That commonality is the utilization of data, mainly via API-driven custom tools and dashboards. APIs like Salesforce’s Chatter, Facebook’s Graph, and our very own Mozscape all allow for massive amounts of useful data to be integrated into your systems.

So, what do you do with all that data?

The use cases are limitless and really depend on your goals, business model, and available resources. Many in our industry, including myself, still rely heavily upon spreadsheets to manage large data sets.

However, the amount of native data and data within reach has grown drastically, and can quickly become unwieldy.

An example of a live reporting dashboard from Klipfolio.

Technology to the rescue!

Business intelligence (BI) is a necessary cog in the machine when it comes to running a successful business. The first step to incorporating BI into your business strategy is to adopt real-time reporting. Much like using Google Maps (yet another API!) on your phone to find your way to a new destination, data visualization companies like Klipfolio, Domo, and Tableau have built live reporting dashboards to help you navigate the wild world of online marketing. These interactive dashboards allow you in integrate data from several sources to better assist you in making real-time decisions.

A basic advertising dashboard.

For example, you could bring your ad campaign, social, and web analytics data into one place and track key metrics and overall performance in real-time. This would allow you to delegate extra resources towards what's performing best, pulling resources from lagging activities in the funnel as they are occurring. Or perhaps you want to be ahead of the curve and integrate some deep learning into your analysis? Bringing in an API like Alchemy or a custom set-up from Algorithmia could help determine what the next trends are before they even happen. This is where the business world is heading; you don’t want to fall behind.

Resistance is futile.

The possibilities of real-time data analysis are numerous, and the first step towards embracing this new-age necessity is to get your first, simple dashboard set up. We're here to help. In fact, our friends at Klipfolio were nice enough to give us step-by-step instructions on integrating our Mozscape data, Hubspot data, and social media metrics into their live reporting dashboard — even providing a live demo reporting dashboard. This type of dash allows you to easily create reports, visualize changes in your metrics, and make educated decisions based on hard data.

Create a live reporting dashboard featuring Moz, Hubspot and social data

1. First, you'll need to create your Mozscape API key. You'll need to be logged into your existing Moz account, or create a free community or pro Moz account. Once you're logged in and on the API key page, press "Generate Key."

2. This is the key you'll use to access the API and is essentially your password. This is also the key you'll use for step 6, when you're integrating this data into Klipfolio.

3. Create a free 14-day Klipfolio trial. Then select "Add a Klip."

4. The Klip Gallery contains pre-built widgets for your whatever your favorite services might be. You can find Klips for Facebook, Instagram, Alexa, Adobe, Google Adwords and Analytics, and a bunch of other useful integrations. They're constantly adding more. Plus, in Klipfolio, you can build your own widgets from scratch.

For now, let’s keep it simple. Select "Moz" in the Klip Gallery.

5. Pick the Klip you'd like to add first, then click "Add to Dashboard."

6. Enter your API key and secret key. If you don’t have one already, you can get your API key and secret ID here.

7. Enter your company URL, followed by your competitors' URLs.

8. Voilà — it’s that easy! Just like that, you have a live look at backlinks on your own dash.

9. From here, you can add any other Moz widgets you want by repeating steps 5–8. I chose to add in MozRank and Domain Authority Klips.

10. Now let’s add some social data streams onto our dash. I'm going to use Facebook and Twitter, but each of the main social media sites have similar setup processes.

11. Adding in other data sources like Hubspot, Searchmetrics, or Google Analytics simply requires you to bet set up with those parties and to allow Klipfolio access.

12. Now that we have our Klips set up, the only thing left to do is arrange the layout to your liking.

After you have your preferred layout, you're all set! You've now entered the world of business intelligence with your first real-time reporting dashboard. After the free Klipfolio trial is complete, it's only $20/month to continue reporting like the pros. I haven't found many free tools in this arena, but this plan is about as close as you’ll come.

Take a look at a live demo reporting dash, featuring all of the sources we just went over:

Click to see a larger version.

Conclusion

Just like that, you've joined the ranks of Big SEO, reporting like the big industry players. In future posts we'll bring you more tutorials on building simple tools, utilizing data, and mashing it up with outside sources to better help you navigate the ever-changing world of online business. There's no denying that, as SEO and marketing professionals, you're always looking for that next great innovation to give you and your customers a competitive advantage.

From Netflix transitioning into an API-centric business to Amazon diving into the API management industry, the largest and most influential companies out there realize that utilizing large data sets via APIs is the future. Follow suit: Let big data and business intelligence be your guiding light!

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​The Ridiculously Smart Guide to Buying Legit Twitter Followers

Posted by larry.kim

You can get 12,000 followers for your Twitter account for the low, low price of $5.

Plenty of websites offer such services:

No.

Just no.

You're better than that.

Don't buy thousands of fake accounts for cheap.

There's a much smarter way to buy legitimate Twitter followers and increase your organic reach.

Having real Twitter followers definitely will offer you more long-term benefits than any "cheap" deals you'll find.

What you have to do is buy real followers.

Adding legit Twitter followers will increase engagement and impressions because actual people will be retweeting you, replying to your posts, or otherwise interacting with your content.

Increasing your following does come at a cost, but it may surprise you to learn that, when done right, it really isn't all that expensive.

Here's your ultimate guide to running a Twitter Followers Campaign.

How to reach your future Twitter followers

Twitter makes it super easy to target users by location. For example, you could target people in specific cities, or you could target a metro area, such as Boston, MA–Manchester NH:

Your Followers Campaigns can target either by interests and followers, or by using Tailored Audiences.

Using interests and followers, you can target people who are similar to other Twitter accounts that you've specified. It's simple to find those Twitter IDs by searching for their name. You then can add interest targeting (e.g., users who are interested in advertising or business).

Remember, you aren't buying anyone's followers here. You're targeting ads at people who are like your specified user or users.

Tailored Audiences lets you include or exclude. Here, you can target people who have recently visited your website, or by using curated lists.

If there are certain influential people you want to follow you, people who follow another account in your industry, or emails your company has collected (from people who have signed up for your whitepapers, webinars, or other content), all you have to do is create a list of Twitter usernames or emails and upload it.

Because these people are in your industry and/or within your company's ecosystem (or have at least visited your site in the past), it's quite possible they know who you are. That makes them great prospects for your Followers Campaign. Take full advantage of the ridiculously powerful ability to target specific users with Twitter Ads.

The big secret to actually buying Twitter followers

Now you need to create your promoted tweet.

Twitter suggests this as a best practice: "Let the user know why they should follow you."

No. Twitter is wrong.

In my experience, people don't respond well to these types of messages.

People don't care why you think you're so great, or that you think you provide the best deals.

I tried, believe me. I promised users that if they followed me, they'd become a guru of AdWords.

Didn't work. At all.

You need to reject Twitter's advice.

So, what's the big secret? What actually does well? What inspires people to become a follower?

Be awesome and don't tell anyone to follow you.

The best way to make your Followers Campaign work is to share a unicorn piece of content — something that performed really well for you and was truly outstanding. Take that great piece of content, maybe an infographic or an amazing visual, and share it.

If what you tweet is truly is amazing, people will decide to follow you because you're cool.

Bonus tip: Consider adding emojis to your promoted tweet. Yes, emojis really do increase engagement.

What it costs to buy real Twitter followers

Now the big question: How much do you pay? How much does a Followers Campaign cost?

Twitter charges on a pay-per-follow basis for Followers Campaigns. That means you only pay when someone follows you.

You don't pay if someone clicks on your link and visits your website, goes to your profile page, retweets you, or engages with your promoted tweet in any other way.

Even though it isn't the intent, the clicks driven from these other forms of engagement also dramatically contribute to the value of your Followers Campaign.

Basically, a Followers Campaign is an auction. You identify the most you're willing to pay for every new follower you gain.

So, let's say I'm willing to pay $2 per follower. What happens is the estimated reach falls to 17,000 of the 181,000 in my targeted audience.

The more you're willing to pay, the more impression share you can grab. The less you're willing to pay, the fewer of your target audience you will reach.

The results

Even though you've told Twitter what you're willing to pay, it usually costs substantially less.

In the above example from earlier this year, I added 26 followers. The cost: $3.49, or $0.13 per follower.

I actually told Twitter I was willing to bid $0.50 per new follower. So why wasn't I charged that amount?

It turns out Twitter will give you a discount if people are more likely to follow you.

My ad produced a 0.22 percent follow rate. Seems low, right? Actually, that's pretty decent because the expected follow rate is 0.1 percent.

Translated to Twitter, this means having a higher follow rate actually gives you a discount on each click, whereas people who have worse follow rates from Follower Campaigns will pay far more.

But I got more than 26 followers for my $3.

My Followers Campaign generated 11,900 ad impressions. Also, 20 people clicked on my ad and visited my site.

All free. Again, you're only paying for followers, not any other engagements.

Not a bad deal.

Where your Followers Ads appear

Most of the time (roughly 70 percent), your ad will appear on the right near the "Who to Follow" suggestions box.

A smaller percentage of the time (roughly 30 percent), your ad will appear natively in users' timelines.

Buying real Twitter followers: 3 key takeaways

To sum up:

1. Don't buy fake Twitter followers. Having huge follower numbers and low post engagement numbers looks ridiculous. Instead, consider buying real followers to increase your reach and engagement. The value of Twitter Followers Campaigns isn't limited to the new followers you're buying. You're only paying for followers, which means you can also drive a ton of free ad impressions, clicks, and retweets.
2. Real followers have real value. Amassing a large number of followers means Twitter will view you as an influencer. Once you reach that level, you can end up "stealing" a search result (e.g., a conference hashtag) because Twitter curates popular tweets and "pins" them at the top, which means you can potentially get millions of views from anyone searching for that hashtag.
3. Ignore Twitter's "best practice" advice. Don't give people a reason to follow. Try to create a high-engagement tweet. Give them a unicorn — share the rarest, greatest-performing tweet you've ever done as your Followers Campaign. This will drive down costs while maximizing the value of those free clicks.

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Google Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets

Posted by rjonesx.

Sometimes our best data sources aren't exactly up to par. While nearly every search marketer will rely on Google Keyword Planner data at one point or another, especially while doing keyword research, the reality is that the data is often untrustworthy and should be viewed with great skepticism. Whether you plan to use it to help build a paid search campaign or determine which content to write, there are huge caveats to the numbers presented as Average Search Volume. Today, I want to walk through a number of the "gotchas" in Google Keyword Planner data so you can do better keyword research and make smarter decisions for you or your clients' sites.

Dirty secret #1: Rounded averages

By far, the most-used piece of data from Google Keyword Planner is the "Average Monthly Search Volume" metric. This key data point is used in everything from basic decisions on what keywords to use in an ad campaign to complex traffic prediction curves. But can we trust it?

Suppose you run a sports website and two keywords pop up in the recommendations: baseball scores and basketball games. Google Keyword Planner lets us know that each of these keywords has an Average Monthly Search Volume of 201,000. At first glance, you should be able to choose either of these keywords and expect similar traffic results, right?

Wrong. The "Average Monthly Search Volume" is more than just an average; it's rounded to the nearest-volume-bucket (which I will describe later). We know this is the case because Google Keyword Planner also exposes the last 12 months of traffic data. If we average that data, we will see that baseball scores receives 217,275 visits per month, while basketball games averages only 205,750! That is a difference of over 10,000 searches per month, which is obscured by Google KWP's rounding algorithm.

When we took a sample of keywords at the 201,000 Average Monthly Search volume, the standard deviation was 14,621 in the "actual average." In some cases, it was off by over 40,000 monthly searches per month! If you don't look at the last 12 months of data, your annual traffic estimates will likely be off by tens of thousands of visits. What causes this anomaly?

Dirty secret #2: Traffic buckets

Google Keyword Planner uses "buckets" to group keywords by traffic volume. When a keyword returns a traffic volume of 201,000, it isn't because the keyword was actually visited that many times, or really that it was particularly close to the number 201,000, but just that it was closer to 201,000 than the next biggest bucket of 246,000. The next lower bucket is 165,000, which gives us a nice 80,000-searches-per-month wiggle room — within which a keyword might actually fall and still be categorized as 201,000 by Keyword Planner.

After analyzing a massive data set, we found that Google has around 85 different "buckets" for traffic, which are logarithmically proportioned. This means that long tail keywords might fall into buckets which only differ by 10–20 searches at a time, while head tail keywords might see gaps of hundreds of thousands of searches per month. The bigger the search volume, the less certain you can be about the accuracy of the Average Monthly Searches, especially relative to other terms that fall in the same group. In fact, the largest buckets have variances of of nearly a quarter million searches per month!

Google uses this rounding procedure for convenience and, likely, to take into account the real month-to-month variance which can be huge for these very popular terms.

Dirty secret #3: Hidden keywords

Rand had an excellent write up on this issue a while back if you want to read the full details or want a more in-depth look at the problem. However, I thought I'd just throw out some stats here to show you just how ridiculous the recommendation system can be relative to the reality of related words and phrases. Let's start with the phrase "football." In this example, we will start with using GrepWords data to find the most valuable words that contain "football" in them. Then, we simply ask Google what they recommend. How close do they match? What is missed?

The top 3 most-trafficked football-based keywords weren't recommended to us, and only 4 of Google's recommended made it into the top 10. In fact, when we analyzed dozens of Google keyword recommendation reports, we found that only 35% of the keywords were among the most trafficked terms.

It appears that Google Keyword Planner is simply trying to provide a diverse cross-section of terms, but for marketers it means you potentially miss out on huge opportunities unless you dig much deeper. You can battle back against this "feature" by choosing more short-tail terms to seed your searches and setting volume and CPC limits, as the recommendations get stronger and stronger the more specific you get. In the end, though, you're going to miss out on some great terms if you've restricted your research to only Google Keyword Planner.

Dirty secret #4: Combination inconsistencies

If you're like me and spelling isn't your forte, you have certainly seen Google give you the "showing results for {correct spelling}." This is very useful for the searcher, but throws a pretty big wrench into keyword volume metrics. What does Google do in these situations? Does it count all the traffic towards correctly spelled keyword (which is actually showing in the search results) or does it count the traffic toward the misspelling or variation? Well, it turns out it's a mixed bag. Let's take a look at a fairly popular term Texas A&M Football.

In the above picture we see several variations of how one might search for the concept Texas A&M Football.

Keyword	Corrected?	Distinct Volume
Texas A&M Football	No	Yes
Texas A and M Football	No	Yes
Texas AM Football	Yes	Yes
Texas A & M Football	No	Yes
Texas A& M Football	Yes	Yes

Notice that whether or not the keyword is mapped to the canonical spelling makes no difference, in this case, for the total search volume. Even though many keywords will show you Texas A&M results, Google's volume count is only for the correct spelling of the term.

Now here's where it starts to matter. Let's say that you run a site that sells football attire and you're deciding which schools to include. You look up Google's Keyword Planner data and see that "Texas A&M Football" and "FSU Football" are both searched 201,000 times a month. These keywords seem equal in terms of volume but, in reality, there are many more keywords that are mapped organically to the phrase "Texas A&M Football," which makes its combined search volume much higher. In this particular case, there are several thousand visitors a year that you might miss out on by choosing "FSU Football" over "Texas A&M Football" simply because Google doesn't combine the keywords in Keyword Planner despite doing so in organic search.

This might seem like a reasonable compromise. The Keyword Planner is giving you back the search counts for the keywords, regardless of whether those searches are redirected to a different phrase. This would be appropriate if it was consistent, but with certain punctuation in terms we see Google treat the case completely differently. Take the search terms facebook.com and facebook com. Google reports that both of these terms are searched 7.8 million times a month. Clearly these two variants are not searched an identical number of times; Google has simply mapped the keywords together BOTH in organic search results AND in volume. This forces keyword researchers to build huge keyword lists and go line-by-line removing the edge cases.

Here's a quick tip for you Excel experts out there: Look into using Jaro Winkler distance to find very similar terms that have identical search volume. Often these terms are mapped both in organic and in volume, and you can find those exclusions easily.

Dirty secret #5: Strange recommendations

Sometimes Google Keyword Planner gets the keyword recommendations completely wrong. Here are a couple of the examples that I was able to pull in just a few minutes of brainstorming:

Starting Keyword	Recommended Keyword
baseball glove	boxing glove
pigeon	cabins
calamari	pork chops
rap	country music

Because Google Keyword Planner uses more than just phrase matching to build their recommended keywords, you will regularly find some truly strange entries in your recommended keyword list, or connections that a computer might make but a human never would. Unfortunately, this means you have to be very careful about what you get back, going keyword by keyword if you want to start a paid search campaign based on what's been returned. You simply can't be confident in the relevancy of the results. Can you imagine how many webmasters just blindly added Google's recommendations to their advertising campaigns?

All is not lost

Luckily, there is more than one way to get at and improve the Keyword Planner data using clickstream data sources. For example, we know of two keyword data sources — ClickStre.am and SimilarWeb — which correlate nicely with Google Keyword Planner volumes.

While this data from SimilarWeb is very useful, building a more accurate prediction of search volume for a term requires that you build a regression model comparing the user data to Google's estimates. Moreover, demographic differences between the whole Google user base and those included in the user panels of SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am mean that building a ubiquitous regression model across all the keyword data might not be the best, as the users tracked by SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am might be biased towards different topics. The solution is to build models around topically-related keywords.

For example, instead of modeling all the keywords against one another, if Google Keyword Planner gave you 2 keywords on the same topic with the same keyword bucket (like 201,000 searches per month), you could build a regression model on the fly comparing a sample of topically-related keywords, using that to predict with greater granularity the performance of the two seemingly identical keywords.

While this user data helps you defeat issues of granularity, getting better (both more thorough and more accurate) recommendations for keywords can be a little more difficult. Your best bet here is to use keyword data aggregators like GREPWords, KeywordTool.io, or the upcoming Moz Keyword Explorer.

Keyword Planner is dead. Long live Keyword Planner

Unfortunately, despite all of the strange quirks and outright deceptions of Google Keyword Planner, it's the best thing we really have going for us in terms of getting search volume data out of Google. We can potentially refine some of the data with clickstream data, or get estimates by running Google Adwords campaigns and watching impression counts, or even looking in Google Search Console. But none of these are strong replacements for the Google Keyword Planner.

Instead of letting Google Keyword Planner's problems get in the way of your keyword research, use it to your advantage. Look for the edge cases where a keyword has a ton of misspellings mapped to the correct version, but not combined into the volume score. This could be a great win that your competitors are overlooking because the head term looks smaller than it really is. Wherever there's bad data, there's also money to be made in sweating the details. So, put your gloves on and get to scrubbing your Keyword Planner data. Somewhere beneath the rough is a diamond.

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