So it seems like everyone is pushing schema, actually its one particular plugin. I’m sure its great but I personally have had enough success with implementing the codes I’m about to share with you. There is a website that generates video schema. I rather like it but the tool is limited if you don’t sign ... Read more
The post What is Schema and How do I Add MORE appeared first on Houts Graphics.
Posted by rMaynes1
[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]
There’s a lot of talk about ad viewability at present, and with big players such as Google announcing in 2015 that it would only charge advertisers for 100% viewable impressions, it's easy to see how it’s become such a hot topic in the digital marketing world.
But what exactly does it mean to be "viewable?" Does this mean people will look at your ad? We recently conducted a research study that set out to answer these questions.
The study was conducted in two parts: an online survey of 1400 participants for quantitative data, and an eye-tracking study designed to observe actual behaviors of searchers online — more qualitative data.
The goal was to measure the type of ads people noticed and engaged with the most, determining whether behavior changed depending on the intent behind the search task (research or purchase) and the relevancy of the ad. We also wanted to determine how viewable online display ads truly are and what other factors influenced whether or not people viewed them.
Participants performed tasks in Mediative’s lab while being recorded using the Tobii T60 desktop eye tracker. The key metrics measured were:
A participant conducting a calibration test on the T60 Tobii Eye-tracker in Mediative’s research lab
“The findings in this study are a powerful reminder to create engaging advertising programs that responsibly leverage first- and second-party data. Marketers are still better off complimenting user experiences than disrupting them.”
– Sonia Carreno, President, Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada
“Viewability,” as defined by the Media Ratings Council, means an ad has 50% of its pixels in view for a minimum of one second. Essentially, an ad is viewable if there's an opportunity for it to be viewed. 76% of ads in Mediative’s study were served in a "viewable" position as defined above.
An opportunity for an ad to be viewed, however, does not mean that it will be viewed. 16.6% of the ads that were served throughout the study were viewed. 50% more ads were viewed above the fold compared to below the fold, and ads above the fold were viewed for 87% longer.
Although click-through rate is a clear indicator of whether an ad was viewed or not, it doesn't give the whole picture. It gives no measurement of how many ads were seen, but not clicked on. Therefore, CTR cannot be the sole measurement of a display ad campaign's success. Ads can be seen, noticed, and influence a purchase — all without generating a click.
Buying a viewable ad impression is only the first step, however. Here are some areas for you to consider improving in order to maximize the chances of your display ads being seen.
The research showed that ads relevant to the searcher's current task are 80% more likely to be noticed than ads relevant to something the searcher had looked for in the past. Additionally, ads relevant to the search query are viewed for 67% longer than irrelevant ads. Relevant ads were visited on average 2.59 times per visitor per page, versus only 1.6 times for irrelevant ads. Relevant ads received 5.7x more clicks.
Below are heat maps for web pages containing two big box ads. The page on the left features an ad that was irrelevant to the search task. The page on the right features a relevant ad. The areas in red had the most views, followed by orange, yellow, and green.
You can advertise on sites that are relevant to the audience you are trying to reach (e.g. a car ad on a car information site). However, adding data into campaigns and purchasing impressions in real-time will increase the relevancy of your ads, no matter the site the user is visiting. With demographic data and/or intent- and interest-based data, specific audiences of people can be targeted, rather than specific sites. This is more likely to result in a higher return on ad investments, as impressions land on the most likely buyers.
In a survey, we asked people which ads they pay attention to the most on a webpage. The responses show that people believe they pay attention to the leaderboard ads at the top of the page the most. Our eye-tracking study confirmed that, yes, this ad type was noticed the fastest, and by the most people.
However, it was the ads to the side of the page (skyscraper ads) and within the page content (big box ads) that were viewed for the longest and received the most clicks. A November 2014 report by Google had similar findings, reporting that the most viewable ads on a page are those that are positioned just above the fold, not at the top of the page.
Don’t rule out ads that might traditionally have poor click performance. This doesn’t mean the ad isn’t seen!
Poor display ad design is often to blame for a poor click-through rate; if people don’t notice the ad, they won’t click it. When it comes to online display ads, images, videos, and animations are more important than what's actually being said with the text.
Invest in good ad creative. Keep ads simple, yet eye-catching. Ensure the ad features a clear call-to-action to indicate why the searcher should click on your ad so that they don’t lose interest.
Multiple relevant ads on the same page were viewed, on average, by 2.7x more participants and captured 2.8x more clicks than the individual relevant ads.
Multiple ads shown several times across different pages increase in engagement the more times they're shown. The average number of clicks increased by 162% between one exposure and two, and by 39% between two exposures and three.
Consider advertising placements such as home page takeovers or run-of-site/run-of-network advertising, where multiple exposures of the same ad will be served. Retargeted ads will also likely result in multiple exposures to the same ad. When retargeted ads were presented to a searcher, they were viewed, on average, 65% faster than ads that were not retargeted.
Ultimately, what we've discovered through this research is that buying a "viewable" ad impression does not guarantee that it's going to be seen and/or clicked on, and that there are many ways you can maximize the chances of your ad being viewed. It’s critical to understand, however, that online ad success cannot be determined by views and clicks to an ad alone. The entire customer’s purchase journey must be considered, and how ads can influence behavior at different stages. Display advertising is just one part of an integrated digital campaign for most advertisers.
For more tips on how to maximize display ad viewability, download the full Mediative paper for free.
Let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments!
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There are many free hosts that you can put a website on. Most of these have issues with downtime, no support, or they’re full of other sites that are PBN or have gotten penalties. These ways to host sites for free are fast, the run on reliable servers, probably some of the fastest available, and ... Read more
The post 3 Ways to Host a Site for Free appeared first on Houts Graphics.
Posted by ronell-smith
[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]
In 2009, I wrote a magazine story about a Japanese lure company selling high-end fishing lures in the US for $20 to $50 each. With anglers buying the lures in droves, it was only a matter of time before competitors followed suit, creating carbon copies of the best sellers, which lead to a market frenzy the industry had never seen.
Months later, I interviewed the owner of the lure company everyone was copying. His comments were eye-opening and accurate.
“I don’t get it,” he said, referring to the competition. “I sell one million lures for $25. They sell 10 to 15 million lures for $5 to $10. I should be copying them.”
Basic math highlights the truth of his words: $25 million < $50 million–$150 million.
What looked like an idea — selling more expensive products to eager buyers — sufficed as a blinder to what would become an amazing opportunity: finding a way to sell more low-cost lures.
For those of us involved in content marketing, we’re used to scenarios like these. Right?
The competition does something cool or interesting or that gets links, likes, or conversions, and we lose our minds in an attempt to copy them, even if it makes zero sense for us to do so.
Buzzfeed, anyone?
Sure, list posts can be and have been effective, but other than throwing some traffic your way, for most businesses the long-term value simply isn't there.
But we live in a monkey-see, monkey-do world, so whatever the competition does, we attempt to do it better.
Never mind the fact that (a) we don’t really know how successful they are, or (b) how successful attempting the same tactics will prove for us.
Most important, because our resources are limited, we don’t often see how choosing to chase others’ ideas means we typically cannot adequately focus on the opportunities right in front of us.
At Mozcon 2015, the word "disruption" kept being spoken by speakers on stage. In fact, a prominent theme of Rand’s opening talk was how a number of prominent brands were willing to disrupt themselves:
And as someone who was fortunate enough to stumble onto disruption (correctly called disruptive innovation) after college, hearing Rand talk about this theory made me very proud.
Problem is, what these businesses he described are doing is not really disruption.
In a strict business sense, the examples he shared are known as a pivot, where businesses re-imagine (or refashion) themselves and/or their assets in an entirely different light, as a way to grow, ward off competitors, solve big problems or grow their audience.
Disruption is something far more significant, especially for brands looking to set themselves apart in competitive markets.
Coined by current Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his 1996 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail,” innovative disruption refers to the transformation of a product or a service in such a way that it makes it more affordable and more accessible to a wider audience.
These products start at the bottom, catering to a market that cannot afford the more expensive (and more popular) option. But, as in the case of the lure companies, by focusing on the bottom of the market, there is less competition and greater numbers who can afford the product.
One of the most prominent and most vivid examples of disruptive innovation is how smartphones disrupted the laptop market, which in the 1980s disrupted the desktop market, which itself disrupted the mainframe computer.
Disruptors enter the market at the bottom, where people or industries are being underserved, which is a result of the major players in a vertical choosing to go upstream and over-serve the market, often through added features and benefits people cannot use and don't need.
But while they continue to cater to the high end of the market, disruptors slide in and gobble up market share at the bottom, before moving upstream to challenge their biggest competitors as the former's products or services improve in quality, grow in popularity, and suffice as a viable option for even those with more discerning taste.
For those of you wondering what any of this has to do with content marketing, I say "plenty." Think about the biggest challenges currently weighing down content marketing, beginning with brands...
I’m convinced this occurs because brands are too focused on better serving audiences they neither own nor enjoy the full support of, instead of looking for the next opportunity on the horizon. Or they’re too focused on ideas, instead of opportunities.
Finding your brand’s disruptive opportunity means you’re not competing in the same sandbox as everyone else, which means your chances of dominating the category are much, much higher.
When Facebook announced 2G Tuesdays, whereby it asks some of its employees to use their brand's apps over a slower 2G connection, it was billed as an opportunity for the company to see the challenges people in the developing world have when using their products.
Maybe.
That's probably only part of the story. It's just as likely that the company, which has nearly one billion active users, is looking at what additional services it can offer people in developing countries. It's a good bet that, to garner interest from the other 6.4 billion people on earth, the service they offer won't look anything like the Facebook we now know and (mostly) love.
Or what about Wavestorm, a company which sells surfboards for $99.99 and are offered exclusively at discount warehouse Costco? The company entered the bottom of the market, where surfboards regularly cost $300 to $1,000 or more. Even the brand's owner is not shy in saying that he realizes the folks who can only pay $99 today will likely be willing to spend far more in the future.
Is your brand ready to find its disruptive opportunity?
The beginning is always the most painful part, and this exercise will be no different. Begin by pulling the marketing team together for a brainstorming session.
Then throw two ideas on the table:
Here’s the kicker: You cannot limit yourself to any specific vertical.
To many of you, the idea will sound crazy at first. That is, until you re-read the questions and see that what you're really asked to do is think of where you should be looking for growth, expanded opportunities that you maybe have not and would not otherwise look for.
When I talk to brands, what I frequently hear is that they have maxed out in a market, lack the skilled staff to compete in their vertical, or are no longer able to connect with the audience in a meaningful way.
As tastes have changed, these brands have not been able to keep up.
So instead of playing catch-up, my suggestion is to slowly but surely start charting a new path, one where the territory is fertile (i.e., lots of opportunities) and the competition is not entrenched.
Don't let fear get in your way.
Maybe you’re an agency sick of losing clients. You could take options off the table, offering only those services that you've determined, during the discovery process, will benefit the client. Any prospect who wants to cherry-pick services would have to look elsewhere.
How is this disruptive? The vast majority of agencies offer a smorgasbord of services, many of which they do poorly, while many others specialize in areas where they have deep expertise. The sweet spot is often in the middle, where you identify needs but only take on the most glaring of those needs, or very specific needs, which could move the business forward. (The management consulting field is currently being disrupted in similar fashion.)
Let's take a look at a couple of examples of disruption at work.
When I first encountered strength coaches Dean Somerset and Tony Gentilcore, they were both making a name for themselves as bloggers and trainers in Canada and Boston, respectively. Fast forward seven years, and they are now two of the most well-known, most-sought-after young experts in the field.
While most trainers go after the largest piece of the pie — fat loss clients — they've focused on helping folks to move better (i.e., mobility) rather than just look better, which means clients can enjoy their newfound size and weight. Also, they spend a considerable amount of time traveling the US, Canada and Europe, teaching other strength coaches how to be better at their jobs.
One of my favorite examples of a small brand that's taken up the challenge to disrupt a sector is Boston-based Wistia, the video-hosting company that makes it easier for businesses to add their videos to the web.
The brand was founded in 2006, which is significant because video-hosting juggernaut YouTube came to fruition in 2005.
You might ask yourself, "What were [Wistia] thinking?" One word: Opportunity.
Where others saw a dominant player owning a category, they saw a dominant player opening a category so wide that others had room to thrive.
(Not shown to scale, of course)
"We had an opportunity to go deeper on one segment of this market and create specialized features that YouTube would never build as a broad-based platform," says Wistia co-founder and CEO Chris Savage.
So while YouTube focuses on being everything to everyone, Wistia has singled out a lucrative, largely ignored piece of the pie they can own and dominate.
Let me be emphatic: I have no expectation that businesses will read this post, then dramatically reshape their products, product lines, or services overnight. The point of this article is to make it clear that opportunities are all around, and the more open we are to these opportunities, the more we'll increase our chances of continued success and limit the number of missed opportunities.
In the end, the lure companies chasing the Japanese brands realized their error too late: The category is now dominated by low-cost alternatives that cost a fraction of the price of the originals.
If only one the copycats had looked more closely at the numbers, they could have seen the opportunity ahead.
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So quite a while back I built this site for a friend very quickly and showed him how to make adjustments. He just wanted a place to showcase some of his stuff and have somewhat of a portfolio of his work. He is an event DJ but wasn’t showing up or getting any traffic to ... Read more
The post SEO Case Study: Event DJ Site appeared first on Houts Graphics.
Posted by Dr-Pete
For the past couple of months, Google has been testing SERPs with 4 ads at the top of the page (previously, the top ad block had 1-3 ads), leading to a ton of speculation in the PPC community. Across the MozCast data set, 4 ads accounted for only about 1% of SERPs with top ads (which matches testing protocol, historically). Then, as of yesterday, this happened:
Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve seen a gradual increase, but on the morning of February 18, the percentage of top ads blocks displaying 4 ads jumped to 18.9% (it’s 19.3% as of this morning). Of the 5,986 page-1 SERPs in our tracking data that displayed top ads this morning, here’s how the ad count currently breaks down:
As you can see, 4-ad blocks have overtaken 2-ad blocks and now account for almost one-fifth of all top ad blocks. Keep in mind that this situation is highly dynamic and will continue to change over time. At the 19% level, though, it’s unlikely that this is still in testing.
The 4-ad blocks look the same as other, recent top ad blocks, with the exception of the fourth listing. Here’s one for “used cars,” localized to the Chicago area:
Here’s another example, from an equally competitive search, “laptops”:
As you can see, the ads continue to carry rich features, including site-links and location enhancements. Other examples of high-volume searches that showed 4 top ads in this morning’s data include:
Please note that our data set tends toward commercial queries, so it’s likely that our percentages of occurrence are higher than the total population of searches.
Along with this change, we’ve seen another shift – right-hand column ads seem to be moving to other positions. This is a 30-day graph for the occurrence of right-hand ads and bottom ads in our data set:
The same day that the 4-ad blocks jumped, there was a substantial drop in right-column ad blocks and corresponding increasing in bottom ad blocks. Rumors are flying that AdWords reps are confirming this change to some clients, but confirmation is still in progress as of this writing.
We can only speculate at this point, but there are a couple of changes that have been coming for a while. First, Google has made a public and measurable move toward mobile-first design. Since mobile doesn’t support the right-hand column, Google may be trying to standardize the advertising ecosystem across devices.
Second, many new right-hand elements have popped up in the last couple of years, including Knowledge Panels and paid shopping blocks (PLAs). These entities push right-hand column ads down, sometimes even below the fold. At the same time, Knowledge Panels have begun to integrate with niche advertising in verticals including hotels, movies, music, and even some consumer electronics and other products.
This is a volatile situation and the numbers are likely to change over the coming days and weeks. I’ll try to update this post with any major changes.
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Posted by randfish
Can a new friend you connect with at a conference be as strong of a ranking signal as a quality backlink? Can it be stronger? The power of indirect ranking signals is something that can often be overlooked or brushed aside in favor of what we know as hard truth from Google, but doing so is a mistake. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the importance of broadening your perspective and tactics when it comes to considering both direct and indirect ranking signals in your SEO.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about direct ranking signals versus indirect ranking signals. I see people ask questions like this all the time. Should I only care about the direct ranking signals? Do I even really care, as an SEO, if something indirectly impacts my rankings in Google, because I can't really influence that, can I? Or I can't be confident that Google is going to make those changes. The answer, from my perspective, is "Well, hang on a second. Let's walk through this together."
Direct ranking signals are pretty obvious. These are things like links. You earn a bunch of new links. They point to your page. Your rankings go up. Now my page for bookcases ranked a little higher because all these people just linked over to me. Great, that's very nice.
Direct ranking signal, my page takes eight seconds to load. Now I improve a bunch of things about it and it only takes three seconds to load. Maybe I move up. Maybe I move up a lot less. I put this from 3 to 2 and this one from 32 to 31. Page load speed, a very small ranking factor, but as Google says a direct one. All right, great. Page load speed, that's improved.
These are direct ranking signals. They're very obvious. We know that they are in Google's ranking algorithm. Google is public about a lot of them. They talk about them. We can test them and observe them. They are consistent. They move the needle. Great.
Maybe Gillian Anderson — she probably has better things to do what with "The X-Files" being back on the air, very exciting — Gillian Anderson: "Rand's bookcases are my favorite thing in the apartment." Wow, look. She sent thousands of people searching for Rand's bookcases. Hmm, what happens then? Well, people pick it up and write about it. Lots of people searching for it. Maybe Google's entity associations and topic modeling algorithm starts to associate Rand's bookcases as being an entity and associates the word "Rand's" with the word "bookcases." Maybe now I rank higher. Is it suddenly the case then that tweets equal higher rankings? Google would certainly tell you tweets don't impact rankings. Tweets are not a ranking factor. What's going on? It's indirect.
What about I go to my page and I decide, "Hey, you know what I think would be really cool is if I had a feature where you take a photo of your bookshelf and I will tell you all the books that you've got on it and then I'll even show them on my bookshelf on the website so that you can see how your books look on Rand's bookcases." You upload a photo. Bam, you can see all your books on there. Super sweet feature. Gets me some news. Gets me a bunch of shares. Adds time to my time on site. Improves my conversion rate. Also, weirdly, influences maybe a bunch of direct ranking factors that lead to higher rankings. Is it the case that photo upload features mean higher rankings? Again, Google would never tell you that. It's not consistent. It's not like every time I add a photo upload feature to a website it's suddenly going to rank higher.
What's going on here? Well, indirect ranking features, indirect ranking influencers are powerful. It doesn't matter that they're indirect. They can have powerful impacts on your rankings. I think for SEOs this is really hard, because Google's representatives will often say things like, "We don't use that in the rankings. That signal, that is not a ranking signal for us," which shouldn't shut down the conversation, but it really does in our industry. A lot of times we hear that Google says social signals are not ranking signals, tweets are not a ranking signal, or time on site is not a ranking signal, so why should SEOs try and influence that?
That brings us to the second problem. Clients, teams, managers, what do they say? They say, "That's not SEO. That's not your job, SEO person." They'll go back and they'll cite Google saying, "Hey, this doesn't influence rankings." Well, guess what? Both of these are really problematic because they may be technically accurate, but they don't capture the big picture, and because of that you miss out.
The other one I hear is "indirect influences take time." This is absolutely the case. You get a bunch of links. They're probably going to be counted ASAP as soon as Google finds them. You add this new feature here, it's going to take a while for all of these other things to propagate over to the ranking signals that are actually going to impact your position. That's tough. They only have the desired impact when (a) they get counted by the direct signals, and (b) when they actually work to influence the direct signals. So indirect signals are tough in all these ways.
My advice is to take a broader perspective. Stop focusing exclusively on "this directly impacts SEO and therefore is my job," and "this doesn't directly influence SEO and therefore is not my job." Say holistically I know that lots of things impact searcher satisfaction:
All of these things will indirectly positively impact your rankings, but not just your rankings. They'll impact positively your conversion rate. They'll impact positively your user experience. They'll impact positively your bottom line. That's the one that you really care about. SEO is just a path to the bottom line to sales and brand building and amplification and the things that you are actually trying to grow.
If you focus on these and you're aware of what is direct versus indirect and how the indirect things impact the direct things, I think you can craft a very smart holistic SEO strategy. If you throw out all the indirect stuff, because it's not direct, you are killing yourself. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Your competitors, frankly, the smart ones are the ones who are going to concentrate on both of these. Sometimes indirect stuff can be more powerful in the short term and the long term than direct stuff. That's just how it goes.
I'd urge you to fight for the ability to have influence on these indirect signals, especially when they also have positive impacts on other channels. Don't let rank influence be a short-term measurement only. I think one of the big problems is that folks look at their rankings and they say, "Okay, we did this. It moved up the next week. That clearly had an impact." No. Look, a lot of the work that we do in SEO has rank impact for months and years to come. We can't just measure things right away. If it has a positive impact on other signals you care about on the bottom line, on all of these types of factors, then it's going to influence rankings positively as well.
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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