Benchmark Magazine - Issue 8 - Spring 2020

SEARCH MARKETING MAGAZINE

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O W YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE NEWS

SPRING 2020

TRENDS

PREDICTIONS

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Let’s Begin...

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A WORD FROM THE CEO

CONTRIBUTORS

Hello and welcome back to Benchmark Search Magazine.

CONTENT John Warner Scott Rumsey Adam McKinley Chloie Brandrick Sophie Campbell Andrea Swan

We have written this edition under the strangest of circumstances.

The word is facing the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses are struggling to deal with the changes that this has brought.

We’ve filled this issue with 72 pages of content to help you understand the ever changing digital and search marketing landscape and to reflect on the importance of maintaining your digital presence if you want to ride out the storm of our current climate.

Businesses and brands are fighting over the digital space, especially in highly competitive markets. This means that if you are to grow then you need to stand out from the competition and give your site the best opportunity to rank for your key search terms. Over the coming pages you will get plenty of actionable advice about boosting your online performance, building trust and expanding your audience.

We know that strategy is vital if you want to be a success and get ahead of the competition and as such the small changes that you make to the information that you produce and share can be the difference between growth and recession in light of the current pandemic. Trends are always difficult to forecast, and some take longer to come to fruition than others - but rest assured that that the information featured in this issue will be pivotal to your future strategy.

We hope that you enjoy this issue and the features within and as always, thanks for reading. Do make sure you keep a look out for issue nine which will be with you in June, featuring insightful interviews and of course, actionable advice to help you get the most from your website, content and marketing.

DESIGN Lisa Anne Mittal PUBLISHED BY Click Consult Ltd ADDRESS: Willow House Oaklands Office Park Hooton Cheshire CH66 7NZ PHONE: 0333 009 8299 WEBSITE: www.click.co.uk

Until next time‌

Matt Bullas, CEO

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CONTENTS

Contents Embracing Influencer Marketing

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INDUSTRY NEWS A round up of everything search marketing, bringing you the most important updates of the last few months

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THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL Adam McKinley, Head of Social, covers all of the latest social media developments and stories of the last 12 weeks

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5 THREATS TO YOUR PPC CAMPAIGN Chloie Brandrick, Senior Marketing and Content Executive, highlights five of the biggest threats to your PPC campaign

5 Threats to Your PPC Campaign

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WHY YOU NEED DIGITAL PR IN YOUR SEO STRATEGY Sophie Campbell, Digital PR Executive, explains why you need digital PR in your SEO strategy

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EMBRACING INFLUENCER MARKETING: SIZE ISN’T EVERYTHING Chloie Brandrick, Senior Marketing and Content Executive, discusses influencer marketing and explains that size isn’t everything

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SETTING UP YOUR FIRST DATA STUDIO REPORT TO MONITOR GROWTH Our data and coding expert John Warner helps you to set up your first Data Studio report to monitor business growth

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CONTENTS

In Focus

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INFOGRAPHIC 10 SEO tips to grow your organic reach

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OPTIMISING YOUR EXISTING WEBSITE John Warner, Senior SEO Marketing & Content Executive, helps you with practical advice on optimising your existing website

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IN FOCUS Straight from Click’s Marketing team, we look at how brands can achieve digital growth through SEO, PPC and content marketing

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Optimising Your Existing Website

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IDENTIFYING TECHNICAL ISSUES IN GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE Andrea Swan, Senior Organic Search Strategist, explains how to identify technical issues in Google Search Console

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USING A CASE STATEMENT TO COMBINE SOURCES WITH MULTIPLE URLS Technical SEO is big business. Find out how to combine sources and multiple URLs

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CASE STUDY - AZURE Find out how we have helped one of our clients with technical SEO and developed their new website to boost performance - In this issue we look at Azure

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INDUSTRY NEWS

Industry News

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INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS: WHEN SHOULD YOU USE ‘SPECIAL HOURS’ VS. ‘TEMPORARILY CLOSED’?

Greg Sterling recently hosted the second Live with Search Engine Land, with four leading local SEOs discussing how local and multi-location businesses are coping with the coronavirus crisis. Google My Business was a central topic and there were numerous questions about how to handle business hours updates and specifically when and how to use “temporarily closed.”

In a follow-up, Greg asked Krystal Taing, a GMB Gold Product Expert, to summarise and clarify some of the discussion around business hours. Here’s what was said: “If your business has adjusted hours or is temporarily closed for a short period of time (less than two weeks), you should use special hours. For longer extended closures, two weeks or more, you should use the temporarily closed status if you’re able to.

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“Marking a business as temporarily closed can only be done manually in the GMB UI, so my suggestion is to only use this option if you’re managing a small set of locations or your franchisees are managing each location themselves.

This is not ideal management for a multi-location business or agency that supports chains.”

Asked if marking my business temporarily closed created a competitive disadvantage, if competitors aren’t doing the same? Krystal answered: “Now that we can confirm there is no impact to ranking, I would advise to do what you need to keep consumers informed. If you’re temporarily closed and you need to ensure people stop showing up to your location, you should update your GMB listing to reflect this. Thankfully, you no longer have to consider how this could impact long term rank or visibility.”

GOOGLE: SPAM LESS THAN 1% OF MAPS CONTENT Google posted about how it continues to build out Maps with community content. It cited the myriad of contributions made by its more than 120 million Local Guides. It also discussed spam, which it said represents less than 1% of the 20 million daily contributions it receives on Maps.

To combat listings spam, policy-violating images and fake reviews, the company says it uses “a combination of people and technology.” In addition to community reported spam (e.g., reviews), Google says its machine learning models “watch out for specific words and phrases” and various content patterns to detect suspicious content.

Despite Google’s claims of diligence, there’s a perception in the local SEO community that Google pursues spam and fake content inconsistently, in fits and starts. Indeed, there are local SEOs who say Google tolerates “dangerous” levels of spam in many sensitive categories, such as healthcare.

Of course, Google disputes such claims and cites internal data to argue that it’s diligently fighting local spam. In 2019, Google says it: • •

Removed more than 75 million policy-violating reviews and 4 million fake business profiles.

Took down more than 580,000 reviews and 258,000 business profiles that were reported directly.

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Reviewed and removed more than 10 million photos and 3 million videos that violated content policies.

Disabled more than 475,000 user accounts.

BING ANNOUNCES REFRESHED BING WEBMASTER TOOLS Bing Webmaster Tools to make for a faster, cleaner, responsive and actionable toolset for SEOs and webmasters.

The new toolset promises to offer a faster, cleaner, more responsive and even more actionable set of features for SEOs and Webmasters.

Bing is not just releasing a user interface update, but this first release will have three main new features: Backlinks: The inbound links report in the current portal has been integrated with the disavow links tool, which are now a part of the new backlinks report in the refreshed portal.

Search Performance: Page traffic and search keywords reports are also integrated as one and are a part of the new search performance report.

Sitemaps: The sitemaps page is the refreshed and looks new.

Bing said, “We are delighted to announce the first iteration of the refreshed Bing Webmaster Tools portal. We are releasing the new portal to a select set of users this week and will be rolling out to all users by the 1st week of March.”

VAST MAJORITY OF AMAZON ADVERTISERS PLAN TO SPEND MORE Eighty-one percent of current Amazon advertisers plan to increase their ad spend on the platform in the coming year, according to a Marketing Land survey of digital advertisers released Wednesday.

Of those planning to increase their Amazon ad budgets, 41% said they plan to spend as much as 25% more than the previous six to 12 months; 22% plan increases of 25 to 50%; and 10% expect Amazon budgets to increase by 50% or more.

These growth expectations are in line with the trends we saw forming in their last survey of Amazon advertisers in 2018.

Amazon’s ad business grew 40% year-over-year in 2019, to roughly $14 billion, but it is still very early days for the platform.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE CHANGE OF ADDRESS TOOL ADDS REDIRECT VALIDATION & REMINDER Google has some new features in Search Console to help you move your site. Google announced two new features to the Change of Address tool within Google Search Console.

These new features include redirect validation for top five URLs of the moving domain and a reminder at the top of both the moving domain and the destination domain within Google Search Console.

Google added redirect validation for top five URLs of the moving domain. The tool will show you the redirect flow, validate the flow, show you some examples and give you recommendations of any problem redirects. Google will also show you a reminder at the top of both the moving domain and the destination domain within Google Search Console.

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INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING TO BE APPLIED TO ALL SITES WITHIN A YEAR Google is sending out notices via Google Search Console with “Mobile-First indexing issues detected” alerts. In those emails it communicates the issues Google has when it comes to moving that site over to Mobile-First indexing. It also says “Google expects to apply Mobile-First indexing to all websites in the next six to twelve months.”

It is clear that Google is trying to be proactive and notify sites that are not yet moved over to Mobile-First indexing with specific advice on what those sites need to do to become Mobile-First indexing ready.

GOOGLE ADS OFFERS MORE GRANULAR CONVERSION ACTIONS FOR LEADS AND SALES Google is testing more granular options for tracking website conversion actions in Google Ads. The current list of options for tracking website conversions has five options: purchase, lead, page view, sign-up and other.

The new set of options is divided into two sections: sales categories and lead categories.

In addition to “purchase”, those tracking sales actions can also opt to track ad clicks that result in and “add to cart”, “begin checkout” or “subscribe” action.

For lead generation, advertisers can set up the following actions: submit lead forms, book appointment, sign-up, request quote, get directions or outbound clicks.

According to Search Engine Land: “The new more granular options can make it easier for advertisers to track microconversions and optimise campaigns for various stages of the customer journey. This also plays into the availability of Conversion Action Sets, introduced last year, that allows you to group conversion actions together.”

GOOGLE PARTNERS CLARIFIES WHY CLIENTS MAY BE LISTED AS ‘ELIGIBLE USERS’ Here’s how to see who counts toward the new 50% certification rule and what to do about it, according to Ginny Marvin.

“We strongly recommend that any user who can edit campaigns should be certified,” said Google.

There is a lot about the coming changes to the Google Partners program eligibility requirements that agencies aren’t happy about. Among them, the requirement that at least 50% of the eligible users listed in their manager accounts will need to earn Google Ads certifications (up from just one certified user with standard or admin access). The new requirements, announced last week, are set to take effect by the end of June.

The issue isn’t that the certifications are regarded as weak indicators of a user’s proficiency with using Google Ads products to create value for clients, though many hold that view. The concern about this new threshold is that the list of eligible users in manager accounts often includes numerous client representatives and others who aren’t involved in campaign management.

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TIKTOK “FUNDAMENTALLY PARASITIC” SAYS REDDIT CEO TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms but the CEO of Reddit had some harsh words for the popular app, calling it “fundamentally parasitic” at an event Wednesday.

The comments from Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman were some of the more controversial offered up during a panel discussion with former public policy exec Elliot Schrage and former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin.

During a brief conversation about the feature innovations of TikTok, Huffman pushed back hard on the notion that Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from the app.

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“Maybe I’m going to regret this, but I can’t even get to that level of thinking with them. Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it’s always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone. I actively tell people, ‘Don’t install that spyware on your phone.’”

NEW GOOGLE MY BUSINESS GUIDANCE FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS Google has published a new help document designed to help healthcare providers get started with Google My Business.

The new document is written specifically for healthcare providers like doctors, therapists, and other medical practitioners with the aim of helping them to claim and manage their practice’s info.

Healthcare providers can add details about remote services like telemedicine, which is ideal with people being under lockdown and practicing social distancing. With a verified Google My Business profile, owners and administrators of practices can engage with and update current patients, and attract potential new patients.

Google highlights the following Google My Business features that are useful to healthcare providers: • • • • •

Manage information such as hours of operation and contact info Add health services offered, like telemedicine, house calls, diagnostics, and procedures Engage with patients Upload photos to show patients what they’ll see before they arrive Control who has access to your business profiles with location groups

IAB ANNUAL MEETING A PR features on the IAB site following their 2020 Annual Meeting that details their response to the peculiarities of the current era in data privacy (with similar percentages of surveyed individuals stating that they want a personalised experience and are concerned with data privacy). Seemingly provoked by the news of Google’s imminent third party cookie cull, the IAB seems bullish in the PR, with one of the featured quotations stating:

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“The cookie’s death can lead to a better future for digital media globally. It’s an opportunity to change the practices, controls, and value surrounding personal data to favor consumers. IAB and IAB Tech Lab have already been hard at work, engaging our members to define practical solutions,” said Dennis Buchheim, EVP and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “In the coming year, Tech Lab will undertake one of its most comprehensive initiatives to create technical standards, guidelines, and potentially a compliance program to support members – and consumers.”

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INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE GIVES AD CREDITS FOR GOOGLE ADS SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES CUSTOMERS Google has announced that they want to help alleviate some of the cost for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to stay in touch with their customers during this challenging time. That’s why they’re giving our SMBs worldwide $340 million in ad credits, which can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across all Google Ads platforms.

The program could potentially work similarly to Facebook Watch, where video producers earn a 55% cut of revenue from “Ad Breaks” inserted into the middle of their content.

There’s no word on what the revenue split would be for IGTV, but since Facebook tends to run all its ads across all its apps via the same buying interfaces, it might stick with the 55% approach that lets its say creators get the majority of cash earned.

The news was announced on the Google Help Center and it was said that SMBs who have been active advertisers since the beginning of 2019 will see a credit notification appear in their Google Ads account in the coming months.

It’s not clear IGTV’s monetisation policies would be different, but on Facebook, they require that users:

This is part of a larger commitment from Google to support SMBs, health organisations and governments, and health workers on the frontline of this global pandemic.

GOOGLE UPDATES GOOGLE MAPS TO CELEBRATE 15TH BIRTHDAY Google Maps is probably the company’s second most important product after Search and this week it celebrates it’s 15th Birthday. To honour the app, Google has a refreshed version of it’s app for Android and iOS with some new features: 1. There are now five (not three) tabs at the bottom of the map screen: Explore, Commute, Saved, Contribute (photos, reviews, content), Updates (feed of recommended places). These supersede the previous Explore, Commute and For You. The idea is to provide quick access to more content and to get more content from users.

2. Google is also adding new content about public transit based on user input: Temperature, Accessibility, Women’s Section (region-specific) and Security information.

3. Google added that it’s going to expand its Live View augmented reality walking directions, which are built on top of Street View’s imagery. Live View will also gain new capabilities in the near future.

According to Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land – Google has not disclosed the specific amount of money invested to build Maps – it has spent “many billions of dollars” over the past 15 years — but the global scale and ambition of Google Maps is mind-boggling. Here are a few statistics to illustrate that: • • • •

Google Maps has “comprehensive data for over 200 countries and territories.”

Information on more than 150 million locations/ places.

40 million miles of roads.

25 million data updates on a daily basis.

INSTAGRAM PROTOTYPES LETTING IGTV CREATORS MONETISE WITH ADS Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub.

Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, they might be inspired to bring more and higher quality content to the destination.

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• • • •

Follow all its normal Community Standards about decency Share authentic content without misinformation, false news, clickbait, or sensationalism Share original content they made themselves Avoid restricted content categories including debated social issues, tragedy or conflict, objectionable activity, sexual or suggestive activity, strong language, explicit content, misleading medical information, and politics and government

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE FIXED A BUG WITH GOOGLE TAG MANAGER VERIFICATION Google has confirmed it fixed an issue with the Google Tag Manager method of verification. Writing for Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz said:

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“As many of you know, there are numerous ways to verify your site or property within Google Search Console. One of those methods is via Google Tag Manager. Google has confirmed it fixed an issue with the Google Tag Manager method of verification.

Google said you may need to reverify your site or property in Search Console if you were using the Google Tag Manager method. The issue “should be solved by now” and reverifying should work. If the properties are not verified, use one of the several methods to verify the property again.

Here are many other ways to verify your site in Search Console, as described here. These include: • • • • • • • •

HTML file upload HTML tag DNS record Google Analytics tracking code Google Tag Manager container snippet Google Sites Blogger Google Domains

INSTAGRAM GIVES UNFOLLOW SUGGESTIONS IN NEW ‘FOLLOWING CATEGORIES’ Instagram will now show you who you interact with least frequently in case you want to unfollow them. In an effort to help you keep your feed clean and relevant, today Instagram is launching “following categories” that divides the list of who you follow into batches, including “most seen in feed” and “least interacted with.”

INDUSTRY NEWS

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“Instagram is really about bringing you closer to the people and things you care about — but we know that over time, your interests and relationships can evolve and change,” a spokesperson told the team at TechCrunch.

LinkedIn revenue growth has been decelerating. Revenue increased by 24% year-over-year last quarter, down from the 25% growth of the previous two quarters. The LinkedIn audience does continue to grow and the company touted another quarter of growing engagement. Sessions increased by 25% year over year.

“Whether you graduate, move to a new city, or become obsessed with a new interest and find a community, we want to make it easier to manage the accounts you follow on Instagram so that they best represent your current connections and interests.”

“We saw record levels of member engagement again this quarter,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Marketing Solutions remains our fastest growing business as marketers leverage enhanced tools and LinkedIn Pages to connect with our nearly 675 million members.” That’s up from the 660 million the company announced last quarter.

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To access the feature, go to your profile, then “following,” then you’ll see the categories you can explore. You’re also able to sort who you follow by earliest to latest and vice versa, in case you want to clear out your earliest adds or make sure you actually care about the latest people you followed.

AMAZON’S BOOMING AD BUSINESS GREW BY 40% IN 2019 Amazon had anticipated a good holiday season, and it got it according to the team at Marketing Land. It has been revealed that the company reported $87.4 billion in net sales for the fourth quarter of 2019, up 21% from the same period the prior year. On the advertising front, the company generated ad revenues of nearly $4.8 billion for the quarter, an increase of 41% year over year. That brings the company’s annual advertising revenues in 2019 to roughly $14.1 billion, up 39% from $10.1 billion in 2018.

Amazon’s advertising business makes up the bulk of what it reports as “Other” net sales. “Advertising as a subset has been growing at about the same rate year-over-year in the fourth quarter than it did in the third quarter,” David Fildes, director of investor relations at Amazon, said on the earnings call last week.

Last quarter, Amazon expanded its sponsored display ad beta to more countries and introduced additional tools such as genre blocking and audience guarantees for over-the-top (OTT) advertisers.

MICROSOFT: SEARCH ADVERTISING REVENUE GREW SLOWER THAN EXPECTED LAST QUARTER Microsoft reported revenues of $36.9 billion for the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year, which ended December 31, an increase of 14% over the prior year. Revenue from search advertising ticked up just 6% year-over-year in the quarter that encompassed the holiday shopping season.

Search advertising growth was lower than the company had expected, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call Wednesday. The company had expected search advertising growth would be in line with the 11% seen in the previous quarter.

PINTEREST ROLLS OUT NEW COMMERCE FEATURES FOR RETAILERS Retailers on Pinterest will now have more ways to be discovered as the platform introduces new shopping features aimed at bringing products to where users are most likely to shop. Amongst the updates were: Verified Merchant Program Pinterest will now allow retailers on the platform to be verified, making their products eligible for distribution across Pinterest shopping experiences, including ‘Shop the Look’ Pins and related product carousels. Verified Merchants will have a blue checkmark badge on their profiles, and will be eligible for “high-intent shopping experiences and metrics like conversion reporting,” Pinterest said.

Conversion insights Retailers on Pinterest will have early access to organic and paid conversion insights to more accurately measure Pinterest’s impact on website visits, checkouts, and sales across multiple attribution windows.

Catalogs updates Pinterest Catalogs, which allow brands to upload a product catalog for ads and Shoppable Pins, have been optimized to “lessen the time from feed ingestion to Product Pin creation,” Pinterest said. The Catalog update also includes new metrics, near real-time feed ingestion, user experience enhancements, and the ability to schedule feed uploads.

Dynamic retargeting Pinterest has extended its dynamic ad retargeting to global markets for advertisers who want to reach users who have previously engaged with their brand online or have abandoned their shopping carts.

Now, brands can globally retarget exact or similar products that users search and save on Pinterest. The company said it will be working to build out even more “optimisation levers” to give retailers more control around dynamic targeting.

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THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

This Quarter in Social IT IS EASIER THAN EVER TO GET CREATIVE WITH INSTAGRAM STORIES As usual, when there are new updates to the Instagram social channel, especially on mobile, it seems to be focused around the Stories feature, and this month was no different. The first new feature was based around the annoying problem of having to trim your videos before uploading them in Stories.

It seems like they are testing out the option to do this in the app itself, in the same way as you can when uploading a video to timeline. Pretty handy right?

The other update is a bit smaller, and one for those that process a lot of messaging through their Stories, you can now respond to stories with GIPHY GIFs, in the same way as adding GIFs to your own post. It’s certainly an update that could get more people using the format, and helps both users and businesses show a bit more character when interacting on the app.

REVISIT OLD TWEETS AND UPDATE THEM WITH A NEW ONE It may not be the edit button that people are asking for, but after Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, explained we’ll never have this due to it not being fair, this is the next best thing. Twitter has added a “Add to thread” feature, which means when you have found one of your old tweets, you can add a new tweet underneath it, which could be a new thought you had or something to follow up the original.

This follows on from Twitter announcing its aim to become the “conversation platform” and is certainly heading in the right direction. This feature is available for everyone right away so why not give it a go.

FEATURE SAMPLES OF YOUR WORK ON YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE This one is more for individuals rather than pages, but is a great way to utilise employees as company advocates and to get content seen in front of more eyes. LinkedIn is currently rolling out a new “Featured” section on profiles, towards the top of the page, which gives you an opportunity to showcase the work you are most proud of, whether this is new content or something from the archives.

This is slightly different to the feature already there, which is the “Activity” section, showcasing new content from the last 45 days, it stays longer with the new feature. This can be added or removed at any time so be sure to keep it updated with anything that is relevant to the time of the year, or any new brand launches that might be happening at the time. You can upload external links, articles you’ve published directly on LinkedIn, documents, presentations, videos and images.

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IT’S TIME TO CLEAN UP YOUR INSTAGRAM FOLLOWING LIST This update came earlier in the month, and is one most people have probably already used, but if you head to your “following” list on Instagram, you’ll now be able to see two new categories; “least interacted with” and “most shown in feed”.

It’s the “least interacted with” we’re interested in here, as it now allows you to see a full list of all the accounts you’re following which you might not have commented on, liked or shared so therefore probably don’t need to be following.

This is a great feature for brands and businesses who might be following too many irrelevant people which tends to be a tactic in the early stages of launching on Instagram.

FACEBOOK’S “PRONUNCIATIONS” PROGRAM AIMED AT SPEECH RECOGNITION TECH In an attempt to improve its speech recognition technology, Facebook is recruiting users to be part of its “Pronunciation” program connected to the company’s Viewpoints market research app. Facebook is asking qualifying participants to record the phrase “Hey Portal” followed by the name of a friend from their friends list. Users who qualify to be part of the program will earn up to $5 for voice recordings, reports The Verge. The $5 payment is earned via points collected within the Viewpoints app, and the program is open to U.S. users over the age of 18 who have, at least, 75 connections on Facebook.

TWITTER TESTING NEW TOOLS TO FIGHT MISINFORMATION As the 2020 election draws nearer, Twitter is experimenting with a new feature to help curb misinformation on the platform. The site is trying out brightly coloured labels that are placed beneath lies and misinformation shared by politicians and public figures, reports NBC News.

The company confirmed to NBC that the labels are “one possible iteration” of new policies it plans to launch on March 5th. A Twitter spokesperson told NBC, “We’re exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter.”

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THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

INSTAGRAM’S “STAY AT HOME” STICKER With the UK Government urging people to stay at home during this time, Instagram introduced a new sticker to their Stories feature, which people can simply add to their posts whilst in self-isolation.

What this means is that every post featuring this sticker will be added to a new story, at the forefront of everyone’s timelines as a ‘stay at home’ story, giving a new opportunity to have your content be seen by your followers who may not usually engage with your story content, whilst giving people a new reason to stay at home. Nice move Instagram!

16% OF ALL FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS ARE FAKE OR DUPLICATES Latest data from the team at Statista shows that up to 16% of all Facebook accounts could be fake or duplicated. As well as revenue and user figures, the latest Facebook quarterly report also contains updated information on the proportion of fake accounts the platform is currently hosting. The social network estimates the proportion of duplicate accounts at eleven percent of monthly active users – that would be around 275 million user profiles. The proportion of ‘false’ – misclassified and ‘undesirable’ – accounts is said to be five percent (about 137 million user profiles).

Owners of pages can also now stream to their community with “LinkedIn Live”, which has been known to be a post format that can gain up to 24x more comments than a normal video post. The last of these new features is the ability to now post as either a member or an organisation, by simply using the toggle switch to flick between the two.

DIRECT MESSAGE ON THE WEB THROUGH INSTAGRAM This is something a lot of social media managers have been crying out for, the ability to send, receive and respond to direct messages on Instagram, but without having to use your phone or a third party software.

It is currently only available to a small percentage of global users at the time of writing this blog, but through the Instagram website it will eventually be easier to communicate when running your business account. This is something that Facebook have dipped into last year, with them announcing their option to combine Instagram and Facebook accounts, but this will now all be in one place. Keep an eye out for this in the near future.

“PROMOTED TREND SPOTLIGHT” ON TWITTER Something for the paid social marketers amongst us, there is now a new option to target new audiences on Twitter, with the ability to take over the Explore tab on the channel, an area Twitter has been updating quite a lot recently.

So what will this offer? Well, it is a new ad unit, titled “Promoted Trend Spotlight”, and it supports six-second videos, GIFs and static images, which will be on mobile devices. When paying for your business to be included in the Explore tab, users who visit the tab will see your placement as a “Promoted Trend” with the asset you have chosen, for their first 2 visits to the page in a day, giving you an opportunity to target more audiences who might be highly interested in your brand.

This feature is quite exciting for marketers, as apparently users spend 26% more time looking at the Promoted Trend Spotlight than a standard Promoted Trend, due to the visual element of this.

The chart above suggests that these figures have remained the same YoY, but it is difficult to judge any developments in this area on the basis of the data. This is due to the fact that a comparison with previous years is only possible to a limited extent due to continuously evolving detection methods.

THREE NEW FEATURES TO LINKEDIN PAGES It seems like every time we write one of these monthly social media roundups, we are including LinkedIn in there, with more and more features being added to the channel. This time, they are focusing on their “Pages” section, with three new updates announced in January.

The first of these updates is the “invite to follow” feature, which does exactly what it says, allowing admins of pages to grow their community by inviting their first-degree connections to follow the LinkedIn page. This will be a very useful feature for growing your community, allowing you to target the right interested people with your messages.

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AUTOMATIC APPROVALS FOR FACEBOOK GROUP MEMBERS This is an update specifically for those businesses who utilise Facebook’s Group feature, which has grown in popularity across the year. Again, focused around security, there is now a feature to pick and choose exactly who is a member of the group, but without the hassle of doing this manually, taking up a lot of social media manager’s time.

So what filters can you set for automatic approvals? You can filter it to your own bespoke questionnaire that potential members need to fill in before being accepted, which would allow you to set answers as correct answers for approval.

You can also automatically approve the accounts of the city or location they are based, and set a certain mile radius for this, along with anyone who is friends with members who are already in the group, and new Facebook accounts. Pretty handy right?

- ADAM MCKINLEY HEAD OF SOCIAL

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

5 THREATS TO YOUR PPC CAMPAIGN

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

Paid search (PPC) has come a long way since Google Adwords (now Google Ads) was launched 20 years ago. For many online businesses, it’s a key marketing channel – but not one that you can simply set up and leave to tick over if you want to see real results. Click Consult was among the first UK providers of PPC service to clients and through our many years gathering experience, we’ve learnt a thing or two about the common pitfalls advertisers face. We’ve identified the top five issues we encounter and laid out the steps you can take to eliminate them or turn them into opportunities for sustainable growth

1. MISUNDERSTANDING GOOGLE ADS’ IMPRESSIONBASED METRICS The ‘average position’ metric was removed from Google Ads in Sept 2019, but many marketers don’t see this as an inconvenience – far from it: the new metrics are actually more insightful for auction performance. After all, ‘average position’ was a relative metric, but this doesn’t tell you much if you don’t know what it’s relevant to. Some metrics matter to some advertisers more than others and this change allows for deeper analysis.

Also, different impression share metrics are more important to different keyword match types; for example, ‘absolute top’ is more important to exact match than it is to broad terms.

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Top impression rate tells you the percentage of your total impressions that are coming from the top of the SERP (above the organic results).

Top impression rate = Top impressions / Total impressions Absolute top impression rate tells you the percentage of your total impressions that are coming from the very top of the SERP. Absolute top impression rate = Absolute top impressions / Total impressions

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Top impression share tells you the rate at which you’re turning opportunities to appear at the top of the SERP into actual impressions at the top of the SERP. Top impression share = Top impressions / Eligible top impressions

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Absolute top impression share tells you the rate at which you’re turning opportunities to appear at the very top of the SERP into actual impressions at the very top of the SERP. Absolute top impression share = Absolute top impressions / Eligible absolute top impressions

Top impression share and top impression rate both sound like they do the same thing but give wildly different results.

The denominator difference means that sometimes one will be bigger than another (eligible impressions are bigger than impressions, and top impressions are smaller as a set than impressions, therefore eligible top impressions can be either bigger or smaller than total impressions).

It’s important not to overlook the difference between these two metrics which, interpreted accurately, can provide a dual perspective on bidding and offer scope for a more sophisticated bidding strategy.

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

2. FAILURE TO OPTIMISE CAMPAIGNS Each element of your paid search account can be optimised to boost performance and achieve the best results possible. If you’re not doing this, you’re probably wasting budget.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP Paid search allows you to track what’s working and what’s not in near real time (for example, in Google Analytics) and make adjustments as necessary to your campaign. To make the most of this efficient feedback loop, you need to: • • •

Define your objectives and success metrics Review your current performance and that of your competitors Consider the opportunities raised by seasonal and market trends, as well as your own promotions and events

INCREASE VOLUME If one of your commercial objectives is to drive a higher volume of traffic to your site, we recommend that you improve your click through rate (CTR) by: Regularly reviewing your keywords: Google Ads’ Search Terms report shows you the actual search terms people are using to trigger your ads, allowing you to optimise your keyword lists and ‘match type’ settings. If a search term is consistently generating relevant traffic, this should be added as a keyword, along with any relevant variations. Google Keyword Planner allows you to research potential new keywords and estimate how they may perform in terms of traffic and cost based on the keywords and landing page you provide.

Reviewing ad quality: To gain optimum performance from your campaigns, you must be continually looking at ways to improve your ads. Having three standard ads in every ad group which you review on a regular basis, pausing and replacing the one with the lowest performance, allows you to systematically test while maintaining consistency.

Improving campaign structure: A well-structured campaign provides the foundation for all of your other optimisation activities, so it’s essential to monitor the performance of your campaigns, ad groups and keywords. This will help you to understand if you’re grouping keywords in a way that maximises results.

Reviewing your impression share: You can use Auction Insights to keep track of your impression share for specific keywords, ad groups or at campaign level and compare your performance with other advertisers bidding on the same auctions as you.

Using ad customisers: These are powerful features that enable greater personalisation and customisation of ads dynamically, based on real time signals. They allow you to create personalised text which changes based on signals such as location, time of day, device and audience, without changing the base ad. This will allow the ads to be as relevant as possible, whilst improving Quality Score and CTR. Added personalisation can see up to 150% increases in CTR, particularly when relating to delivery.

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Expanding your network: For example, by including ‘search partners’ in a Google Ads campaign, your ads could also appear on Google-owned sites such as Google Maps and YouTube, as well as non-Google sites, like AOL. There could be less competition on additional networks.

Expanding geographical reach: You can expand the geotargeting options in your campaign settings to include additional locations, or to exclude irrelevant areas. This can be especially useful if you serve other regions or countries that you’re not currently promoting, or if your offering varies by location.

INCREASE EFFICIENCY AND PROFITABILITY Use performance data to refine your campaigns so that they reach the most qualified, highly-targeted audience possible.

Negative keyword review: Find, refine, and organise your negative keywords to help filter out unwanted clicks. You can use both Google Suggest and your Search Terms report to identify search terms that aren’t relevant to your business, and add them as negative keywords to your campaigns and ad groups.

Landing page review: More on this in Point 4.

Keyword bidding: The basic principle is to reduce bids if you’re spending over your target for a keyword, or increase bids if the keyword isn’t in position one and your spending is below-target. Remember that KPIs and targets can vary by keyword depending on how much volume they drive and their assisted value. This process reduces investment in poor performing keywords and increases investment in high performing keywords.

Day parting: Analyse which days and times of the day are most profitable or contributing the most towards your KPIs. By segmenting your Google Ads data in this way, you can drill down past the aggregate summaries (which show statistics combined from several measurements) to view deeper insights. This allows you to change your settings to choose the days of the week, hours of the day, etc, that you want your ads to be shown.

Bid multipliers: Bid modifiers allow you to adjust bids for a specific criterion without changing the targeting of your campaign or ad group. For example, by device type or location.

Review Quality Score: Quality Score is a metric used by Google to measure the quality of your ads and determine your ad rank and CPC (cost-per-click). The higher your Quality Score, the higher your ads can rank and the lower your CPC, so it’s a vital metric to keep an eye on.

Consider retargeting: Returning visitors typically perform better – try adding remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) to your campaigns with a 0% bid modifier to see the effect on returning visitors.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

3. INACCURATE ATTRIBUTION Marketers are waking up to the limitations of the default last-click model; measuring ROI this way can skew the true user journey by undermining the value of any interaction that assists a user by moving them down a purchase funnel without actually getting them to convert yet.

There are several rules-based attribution models to consider when managing your paid search campaigns. Each has pros and cons, and so the onus is on you as an advertiser to decide which one most adequately meets your business objectives – and best fits your needs and the behaviour of your visitors.

Remember that data is meaningless without if you can’t take action from it to improve your ROI. 1

Last interaction: The last interaction receives 100% of the credit for the sale/conversion.

6 Position based: 40% of the credit for the conversion goes to both the first and last interaction and the remaining 20% is distributed to the intermediate stages.

7 Data-driven attribution (DDA): Uses Google’s machine learning technology to determine how to evaluate each click in the user journey (of you have enough conversions to qualify. This means it gives credit based on how people search for your brand - and decide to become your customers - using data from your account to determine which ads, keywords and campaigns have the most impact on your business goals.

2 Last non-direct click: Direct traffic is ignored here, in favour of the last channel the consumer clicked through prior to converting.

This last one, DDA, can deliver the most accurate value of each step in the conversion funnel by taking the guesswork out of choosing a model that’s right for your audience. It also paints the clearest possible picture of success in your account by helping you to determine where to invest more.

3 First interaction: The customer’s first interaction with one of your brand’s channels receives 100% of the credit.

Some devices act as conversion assisters but don’t get credit – attribution tracking helps identify common device paths taken.

4 Linear: Each channel with which the consumer interacts is given equal credit for the conversion.

Useful tip To collect your PPC attribution data effectively, make sure all your PPC marketing channels are tagged with URL parameters (search, social, display, retargeting etc).

5 Time decay: The channel closest to the conversion receives the most credit which then diminishes the further back in conversion path the interaction lies.

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

4. HORRIBLE LANDING PAGES What’s the point in generating a high level of traffic if they’ve got little chance of finding your site relevant or interesting, and even less chance of converting?

Successful paid search (PPC) isn’t all about getting people to click on your ad - if you want a respectable conversion rate, you also need to put careful thought into what they see when they arrive on your landing page; if it doesn’t match the expectations you set in your ad, it’s unlikely they’ll convert.

Google takes the quality of your landing pages into account (along with CTR and relevance keywords of ad text) when calculating your QS, so poor landing pages have a direct impact on your cost-per-click.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD LANDING PAGE? The content of each landing page should follow logically from the ad that triggered it, giving users a consistent message.

The relevancy of your landing page is crucial to your Quality Score and performance. Review conversion rates, bounce rates and time on site for each landing page to see which are working best.

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Other essential activities when reviewing your landing pages, or creating new ones, are: •

Relevance: Cater to the expectation you set up with your trigger ad. Ideally, this would mean creating multiple landing pages with content tailored to different levels of intent.

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Design: A site must be easily navigable for the user to achieve their (and your) goal, be that to purchase an item or retrieve a certain piece of information.

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Copy: This should be persuasive and engaging, offering a useful and engaging user experience and containing a clear call to action.

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Testing: Testing different colours, placements and copy for your CTA buttons is a good way to try running A/B user tests as part of a CRO (conversion rate optimisation) strategy.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

5. DISMISSING PAID SOCIAL Paid social’s importance in a paid media strategy has been increasing steadily for a number of years. Once, paid social campaigns were primarily the domain of advertisers who didn’t have budgets large enough to make an impact with Google Ads.

Social referral to retail ecommerce sites has grown 110% since 2017, outpacing all other referral channels, and 30% of online shoppers say they would be likely to make a purchase from a social media network like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat.

Now, almost every large advertiser is spending significant shares of their marketing budget towards paid social activity.

Expect big changes in all paid social platforms as larger advertisers move more budget towards these channels, as they increase more opportunity for adding value and advanced feature usage, such as social commerce.

Once seen as just a way of driving people to your site to make a purchase, the increasing adoption of social commerce functionality by the major platforms offers the ability to make purchases without leaving a social app is big business – and a major trend for the 2020’s.

Social advertising has several advantages over media buying for other channels. For a start, you can immediately see at a glance who’s engaged with your ads and patterns in performance (each platform has built-in analytics), allowing you to refine your approach.

You have a great deal of control of the management of your campaigns and can target very specific demographics, which means you reach a highly relevant audience.

SOCIAL SELLING Consumers now routinely use social networks to inform their purchases, eg, looking to influencers for ideas, checking out product reviews and discover promotional offerings.

It supports the holy grail of online shopping: a frictionless ecommerce experience – vital in a world where consumers expect fast, straightforward and convenient experiences – they want things now and if you’re not giving it to them, someone else (ie, your competitor) will.

The players to watch are not just the ones you’d expect – Facebook, Instagram and current darling TikTok – but also Pinterest (which has been further refining its powerful visual search engine).

- CHLOIE BRANDRICK SENIOR MARKETING AND CONTENT EXECUTIVE

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

WHY YOU NEED DIGITAL PR IN YOUR SEO STRATEGY

When people think of PR, they’re used to thinking about features in the local paper or their favourite glossy magazine. But these days, most people have had to shift their gaze towards digital PR - featuring in online publications with often higher readerships and better ways of tracking how much of an impact your hard work has had.

Whilst it does mean more strategy may be needed in your work to create a successful campaign, digital PR is beneficial for businesses on the whole as it can improve your online presence and lead to visibility in many more places, reaching much farther than a single feature in one newspaper.

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FROM OUR EXPERTS

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA IS NEEDED FOR DIGITAL PR Being able to reach a larger audience is, of course, largely down to social media and the ability to create a conversation around your work with other readers within the comments sections, reviews and from tweets and posts on your businesses social channels.

When your nice bit of PR work is shared in an online publication, which is then shared on someone’s Facebook page, your work can now be accessed by an audience that may not have ever read that publication, and certainly wouldn’t have considered paying for it in physical copy, meaning it has gained extra readers through little effort of its own. But the benefits to digital PR doesn’t stop there.

WHY DIGITAL PR AND SEO NEED ONE ANOTHER For instance, promoting your business in an online publication can help grow credibility for your business and be seen as a trustworthy source by those looking for information on the topic you’ve chosen to talk about. Industry leaders are able to give insightful opinions on important matters, and if you can make your business be seen by others as an expert on this, it will increase your authority by a large sum. That’s why research on stats is useful to a campaign. In this day and age, it’s more important than ever to back up any findings or work that is stating new facts or you may fear your campaign being labelled as ‘fake news’, which isn’t a good PR strategy for anyone (we’re looking at you, President Trump).

Another important benefit to digital PR is allowing Google to recognise your business’ site as the most trustworthy and relevant source for that particular sector. By using digital PR tactics to link a press release to your business, you are opening a new door for potential customers to click through to easily. And, if your business is linked to from a lot of other trustworthy sites such as news publications which have high domain authority, this would make Google trust your site too and establish its authority. It’s a contributing ranking factor when calculating search results and can be beneficial to improving your rankings, and in turn generate more organic traffic to your site, which can then convert these site visitors to customers.

This is something that, traditionally, a mention in a lovely print publication from some top-notch PR work has not been able to help improve on and is why digital PR has become so desirable these days.

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF PR STRATEGIES So, what does digital PR involve? For most, the main tactics come from creating campaigns for your business or client by formulating ideas, building a press release around this campaign and targeting your press release to relevant journalists and publications through built relationships. An even better campaign can be built around newsworthy pieces that are timely and engaging. If a digital PR campaign is focused around something that is currently being talked about a lot in the news or on social media, then the chances of your piece being picked up by other news outlets and shared by more people is a lot higher which is a lot more of a likely outcome than when just using traditional PR tactics.

Some other great digital PR tactics include answering journalist requests on HARO, through Twitter and on ResponseSource; giving you the chance to help journalists out pretty quickly with a current story they’re running and being able to obtain that all-important backlink to your businesses site, reaping a lot of benefits with a lot less effort.

HOW OLD CONTENT CAN STILL BE A USEFUL TOOL Finally, another brilliant reason why digital PR is so great to businesses is for repurposing. A lot of time goes into the creation of a campaign, usually by multiple people researching ideas and statistics and then writing up their findings; each hoping for its success. If a campaign doesn’t garner as much interest as you’d like initially or if it becomes relevant to current affairs once again, digital PR allows you to repurpose this content and look at it from a new angle or target different audiences.

Something that was originally intended to be a blog post on your website can be repurposed into a piece for a newspaper or for a trade publication with new information relevant to that topic. For example, a car company can produce information on how to stay safe when driving in a current snowstorm or a flood warning which is imminent and pre-empt that journalists will be looking for related content to this topic for its readers.

Whilst traditional PR tactics aren’t totally redundant anymore who doesn’t love to see their work in print - a digital strategy is most definitely necessary to grow your online presence and to reach a much wider audience. If done right, it can open the doors for new customers by sending them directly to your site and by producing a much bigger ROI than with traditional PR or simple SEO tactics alone.

- SOPHIE CAMPBELL DIGITAL PR EXECUTIVE

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Embracing Influencer Marketing: Size Isn’t Everything

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Nano & micro influencers (those with between 0 and 10k followers) have the highest engagement rate, regardless of their genre, audience or topics, according to analysis by Fohr. Instead of competing with other marketers over the same audience, many brands are finding themselves shifting towards niche content in a quest to keep influencer marketing focused and authentic; what does this mean for your strategy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and will it be helped or hindered by the prospect of influencer automation?

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WHAT ARE MICRO- AND NANO-INFLUENCERS? Social media in 2020: our feeds are awash with sponsored posts and brand partnerships and ad fatigue is setting in. Where has this inevitably lead us? Demand for a return to online communities rather than social media feeds are polluted by insincere ‘influencers’, where users place increasing value on genuine connections, trust.

There’s been a noticeable shift in strategy in recent times, with brands targeting micro-influencers and nano-influencer, and moving towards smaller, but more powerful, spheres of influence where trust and communities matter more than ever.

Micro-influencers are those with between 1,000 to 10,000 followers on their blog or social media account, depending on who’s definition you’re going by, and whose audience usually revolves around a particular hobby, topic or other passion.

A report by CMS Wire is keen to emphasise the smallest of these groups, with less than 1,000 followers: the nano influencer. According to the digital news site:

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“Nano influencers are a relatively new breed of influencer.

This would be someone who has influence in the local community like a member of the local police force. The aim is to get ‘regular everyday people’ to influence a brand’s product or service to their friends and family – most of the time this can be achieved through user-generated content”

INFLUENCER AUTOMATION The global influencer marketing industry shows no sign of slowing and is estimated to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022, up from roughly $8 billion in 2019.

An emerging trend the industry is seeing is (somewhat inevitably) automation to take the legwork out of the process: the development of platforms and tools to: • •

Help brands identify creators who are most likely to become effective brand ambassadors by analysing context and behavioural patterns Automate campaign management and reporting

Marketers are already accustomed to the ease of buying automated ads on Facebook or Google, and using social scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social; technologyfocused companies have spotted an opportunity to target those using influencers and similar data-driven services.

As a prime example, Facebook launched a tool in 2018, Brand Collabs Manager, that helps brands and creators find, learn more about and connect with each other and provides detailed insights and engagement metrics on influencers and campaign audiences.

More recently, this tool has also become available to Instagram users.

These smaller influencers appeal to social marketers because of their closer and more meaningful interaction with their followers and higher levels of engagement. They can be relatively cheap in terms of cost and tend to have a greater ability to influence the purchase decision of a user.

By looking to take a more active role in an industry that it helped to create, Facebook is hoping to make more money from promoted content (brands must be existing advertisers and meet a minimum eligibility criteria).

Using Brands Collabs Manager to search for influencers is similar to ad targeting: brands can specify the desired audience of the influencer they want to work with, including country, gender, age, number of followers and interests.

Source: Fohr CEO & Founder at Social Chain, Stephen Bartlett, said: “Faced with potential advertising-fatigue, consumers are looking for friend-like creators, that they can build deeper, genuine connections with, as opposed to mainstream ‘celebrities’ with millions of followers. Not only are micro-influencers a more cost effective option for your 2020 strategy, but in my opinion, they’re actually more likely to have a greater influence.

On a similar theme, 2020 could also see in-house influencers playing a crucial role in marketing campaigns, who focus completely on building relationships with the audiences.

This gives marketers direct leadership over campaigns and to build stronger, (arguably) more authentic relationships.

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Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelance services, has expanded into influencer marketing automation with the launch of its new Influencer Store at the end of last year. The feature focuses on influencers and all the services they need to build their online. Micha Kaufman, Fiverr CEO, claims:

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“With the addition of new vertical stores, we are expanding our platform to a new group of customers from new industries.

For many of these customers, Fiverr is an extension of their teams, allowing them to flexibly add capabilities to get projects done quickly, cost-effectively and transparently.”

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According to The Wall Street Journal, there is concern that these emerging companies are shifting the focus away from what makes influencer marketing successful in the first place–authentic relationships between real people. You need natural interaction to ensure your request stands out from the rest – an influencer is less likely to buy into your campaign if they don’t feel like you identify with their audience or fit into their brand. Similarly, marketers need to consider who is an appropriate ambassador for their brand. Influencers are people at the end of the day. Not a digital ad you can simply turn on and off at the switch of a button.

The most common problem marketers have with influencer marketing is spotting fake followers and inauthentic engagement, research by Mediakix had found. It’s early days, so can we rely on current software algorithms to spot relevancy and brand affinity and to tell the fakers and the genuinely influential apart?

On the other hand, we can’t dismiss the potential for automation to make influencer marketing programs more efficient. Automating the most repetitive and data-heavy aspects of influencer marketing – such as identifying and recruiting potential influencers, workflow, and analytics – giving you more time to dedicate to building those allimportant relationships and developing creative strategy.

Advocates also say advanced algorithms allow for greater scalability and removes subjectivity (although one could argue that latter is the backbone of influencer relationships in the first place).

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TAKEAWAY 1 While, in general though, the larger the audience, the less focused it is likely to be, everything depends on: your industry; the frequency and type of interaction; the brand message and your objectives.

TAKEAWAY 2 It seems unlikely there will be a one-size-fits-all automated platform any time soon, so the key is finding the right balance between platform automation and human insights. These solutions can enhance some parts of the influencer marketing campaign but they need to be used with consideration so that authenticity and the human touch aren’t lost in technology.

- CHLOIE BRANDRICK

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SENIOR MARKETING AND CONTENT EXECUTIVE

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Through its unique Intergrated Platform, Ceuta Group offers a collective of services to enhance, grow and support the brands they represent; enabling clients to realise their ambitions for the success and profitability of their brands whilst navigating the changing dynamics of the global and local marketplaces.

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Data Analytics & Insight: We are category and shopper specialists devoted to helping our clients drive profitable growth for their brands by transforming data and research into practical insight; allowing us to get our clients’ products onto the right retail shelves and into shoppers’ baskets. We also help our clients shape their marketing activity around peoples’ shopping behaviour and the incremental sales generated by different shopping patterns.

Brand Design & Communications: We blend smart, strategic insight with boundless passion and creativity, shaping unique brand stories that challenge, innovate and inspire the world through our expertise in brand positioning, innovation, structural design (2D &3D), creative communications and brand activation.

Digital Marketing & SEO: Our search & digital marketing excellence ensures that our datadriven strategies deliver long-term results and impressive ROI for our clients. Whether you’re looking to increase your traffic or set your company apart from its competitors, our team of in-house search and digital marketing experts can help to accelerate your brand’s online growth.

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Brand Fostering - Full Service Offering: This is our full service offering, where we take ownership for the management and growth of a brand, whilst defending its equity and enhancing its value. Through our range of integrated services, we support the journey of a brand from concept to execution; delivering everything a brand owner would ever want or need from one outsourced partner.

WALKTHROUGH

Setting Up Your First Data Studio Report To Monitor Growth Whether you’ve been following the Click Consult blog since Data Studio’s beta release and decided the time is right, or you’ve learned of it lately and want to take the plunge, a blank report can be an intimidating sight when you first open up the platform While you’ll doubtless have your own system for reporting – the order and priority of different reports will vary from brand to brand, but what I’m going to do is look at setting up a basic report to overcome the fear of the blank report, you can then look to adapt it to meet your brands specific reporting needs.

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WALKTHROUGH

DATA SOURCES Your first job when setting up a new report will be to select your first data source – there are some sample data sets pre-loaded, which I’ll be using for this piece, but you’ll need to use the ‘create new data source’ option.

Once you click the option, you’ll be able to select a host of different primary data sources which will open a window to allow you to authorise the source. This includes a lot of really useful options, but if you’re looking at setting up an initial website, then your first option is likely going to be Google Analytics.

THEME I’m going to say that the next step is not a must, but it’s a nice new feature so worth mentioning – creating a custom theme from your logo.

For this, I’ve used the Tesla logo (because it’s literally the last brand I saw on Twitter).

If you click on to the main sheet, you’ll see – at the bottom of your right hand menu – a button that says ‘extract theme from image’.

Simply click on that, select your logo file and Google will do the rest – presenting you with three options pulled from the logo you have uploaded.

CHARTS Once you’ve decided what data you’re going to use and how your report is going to look, the next step is to create some charts. The first standard we can use is the timed series – which we can use to track sessions, revenue, conversions or anything else we want to see improved performance of over time.

To add charts, you can use the ‘add chart’ button in the tool bar at the top of your page and then select timed series.

Once you’ve chosen the chart, it should appear where you’ve chosen and should be connected to your data source automatically.

Then it’s a case of selecting your dimensions and metrics. For a timed series, your dimension will always be a time, but how granular you get is up to you (from ‘Hour’ which shows you how your metrics perform at specific times of the day up to ‘Month of the year’ which will show the site’s performance per month).

In the example to the right, you can see I’ve also added a date range selector and a ‘Medium’ filter – these are denoted by the calendar icon and three decreasing lines.

The reason for this is simply to give a level of control – using these, you can isolate the medium (you could equally use ‘source’ or ‘default channel grouping’) and inspect various metrics from the optional metric menu at the top right of the chart.

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WALKTHROUGH

This really simple graph is one you’ll be familiar with in Google Analytics, and the reason for using it is the same in both instances – it provides a clear and easy to comprehend display of information, allows you to monitor progress and makes for simple comparisons. Following this, I’m going to drop in another few simple charts: •

Score card (single metric): To this I’m going to add a YoY (year on year) comparison which will give the score card a little more functionality. You can choose your metrics as you did with the timed series, and you can select a comparison date range from the menu on the left.

•

Pie chart (single metric): With the pie charts, I’m going to use them to show the performance of devices across a few metrics. One of the main aims of reporting should be to offer some insight into the data as well as simply presenting the data, so showing a dimension such as device against various metrics can offer that.

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Standard table (multiple metrics): For this I’m going to use page titles in an effort to show the performance of specific pages on the site. As with all charts on this page, this is controlled by the default channel filter – meaning we can see how these pages perform with each kind of traffic.

This page now offers us a reasonable overview of channel performance – we can track key metrics over time, we can see their performance year on year, we can see how each channel performs on various devices and we can see how our pages perform organically, with paid traffic, referrals and more.

ADDING A PAGE However, this page captures a limited amount of the wealth of information available just from this one data source. So what I’m going to do next is add a couple of additional pages and add some basic navigation.

Adding a page is as simple as clicking the ‘add a page’ button on the left of your toolbar and, from there, we can highlight all of the various elements we want to keep on all pages, right click and select ‘Make report-level’ which will keep our header across all pages.

For navigation, we’re going to use what are ostensibly buttons – to do this, you can select the text box, give it a background colour and border from your theme (in the right hand menu) and then enter the name of the page you’re going to link it to.

Then it’s a case of implementing the link. You can select the link icon from the right hand menu.

PUSHING FOR INSIGHTS It is quite common for reporting to be a laborious and unenjoyable task for all concerned – for the person assembling the report it is time consuming and uninspiring, for the recipient of the report it can be a slog through a lot of essentially meaningless data. What we should be looking to do when we assemble our first Data Studio report, is to offer something more – a level of insight.

For the second page in the report, for example, I’ve tried to give some demographic insights – so I’ve switched the filter to ‘Age’ and I’ve used some additional dimensions, including a geomap chart detailing where the sessions are coming from, and a pivot table that allows me to pair multiple dimensions and metrics. In the dataset that Google provides, there is – as an example of insight – a difference between the 18-24 and 25-35 demographics: 100% of the revenue from 6000 sessions in the former age range comes from women, yet this drops to 13.3% in the latter age range. Could this indicate that there is work to be done in maintaining the engagement of women as they age?

While the needs of every brand will differ in terms of the insights they will need to gather from the data at their disposal, that insight should be the target of all reporting – displaying data on its own is of little use and, with so many options to present and compare the data, the ability to use data to monitor and also make predictions, catch problems and develop strategies.

We have plenty of resources over on the Click Consult website to help you get to grips with Data Studio, and if you’d like to have a tinker with this demo, you can find it using this link: https://tinyurl.com/click-demo-DS I’ve also added a quick Search Console query report and will try to add some more as and when I can. In the meantime, you can create a copy of the report and play around with it – plug in your own Analytics and Search Console accounts before you create your own first report.

- JOHN WARNER SENIOR SEO MARKETING & CONTENT EXECUTIVE

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10 SEO Tips To Grow Your Organic Reach When it comes to search marketing there are many aspects to examine and the most important is SEO. Our team has looked at all of the things that you can do to make sure your site grows organically and picked out the following 10 things to implement today. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s begin...

1

Make sure tracking is installed correctly such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console to measure your SEO efforts.

2

Write meta descriptions to increase click-through rate from search engine results pages. This is the first piece of content your users see - try to include benefit-driven copy and a call to action!

3 4 5

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Write content for the users first and search engines second. Content is still king! Provide useful and unique content for your customers.

Avoid stuffing content with keywords - Google understands keywords and phrases related to a topic. Always keep quality in mind when producing content.

Amplify your content across social media platforms - think about the platforms where your customers are spending their time.

6 7 8 9 10

If you have a store (bricks and mortar) set-up a Google My Business account to encourage local visibility and increased footfall.

If you have an e-commerce website avoid using manufacturer descriptions across products.

Write engaging content for your product pages keeping features and benefits in mind.

Spend some time building an FAQ contents page - ask your sales team or whoever answers the phone in your business for a bank of regularly asked questions. Publish these questions and answers on your website to target informational, long-tail queries while helping users self serve on your website.

Make sure your website loads quickly - check your site’s performance today with tools such as Google page speed insights and Webpagetest. org/. Images are commonly the culprit for a slow loading website! Reduce image sizes for your website today with tools such as tinypng.com.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly! Ensure your content is the same across all devices.

Mobile shouldn’t have less content than desktop - desktop should be an expanded experience for the user. Check if your site loads correctly on mobile with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

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OPTIMISING YOUR EXISTING WEBSITE For those businesses with an existing, but underperforming website, the opportunity presented by the current situation (if there are any bright sides to look on) is for you to optimise. As an SEO agency with almost 20 years experience, we can offer a little advice here (with plenty more available on our site).

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KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE One of the most important things you need to do to increase the SEO performance of your website is to make sure that it’s brimming with great content.

The first step in writing great content for the web is learning about your audience. You aren’t writing web content simply because you enjoy writing and you (hopefully) aren’t writing just to make the search engines happy. That means that you should be writing (mostly) for humans not robots, making the content something that users will genuinely want to read, engage with and share on their social channels. This will, in turn, make for good SEO and help to pull users through the buying process, helping to increase conversions.

In the early years of the web, overly optimised meta tags and pages of content that were stuffed with certain keywords and phrases were able to rank highly in search engines.

Although it was often unreadable, site owners didn’t really care as long as it was picked up and ranked well by search engines. They were writing for the search engines and not humans, so, although they may have been getting traffic to their site, their conversion rate would have remained fairly static as the content they produced did not encourage visitors to make a purchase or trigger them into repeat business.

Now, however, Google penalises sites that produce this type of content. This is why there has been an even greater focus, in recent times, on content. If you produce content that is informative, entertaining, solves problems and provides readers with something worthwhile, this will generate traffic, will be more shareable on social media sites and will better place your brand as a good source of knowledge about your industry. This is what will get you good results in the search engines.

You should have a specific purpose in mind for the content and a specific type of reader to write for. If you’re new to writing for the web, or are trying to reach a new audience, it’s worth going through a formal process to define your buyer personas. This is a series of fictional, character representations of those individuals that define your brand’s audience, helping you to better understand their needs and write content specifically for them.

UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE MAY SEARCH FOR YOUR CONTENT Great, so you’ve identified your audience. Now you need to make sure that the content you produce connects with them.

If it addresses the needs of your persona(s), it will be read more and shared more, helping it to rank better in search engines. People search for a variety of reasons. Common reasons in the B2B sector include searching to:

• • • •

Understand a product category Learn about a product or solution Solve a specific business problem Be informed about new approaches

Common reasons in the B2C sector include searching to:

• • •

Find the best deal Find the closest location Locate a product or service that’s advertised

As above, a basic buyer’s journey includes the following stages: Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Purchase > Post Purchase > Re-Purchase You can think about this before beginning a piece of content.

Is your persona:

• • • • • •

Looking for a general category of information?

(Awareness) Looking for a solution to a specific problem?

(Interest) Looking for an enterprise solution? (AwarenessInterest) Identifying and comparing specific products or vendors? (Consideration-Purchase) Looking for help with one of your products they already own? (Post-Purchase) Looking to replace or upgrade a product, and planning to remain loyal to you? (Re-Purchase)

OPTIMISING YOUR CONTENT Keyword research is a vital part of any organic search campaign, whether it is used to mould onpage copy or to develop brand or product positioning – it is imperative that it is not only done, but done thoroughly and well.

As search engines have improved their ability to ‘understand’ natural language (from the advent of the Hummingbird update in 2013, to the new levels of query relevancy offered by RankBrain and the introduction of BERT), a lot of brands and agencies have begun to place less importance on the role of keywords in content.

The worrying possibility this raises, however, is that, though it frees our writers to express themselves with fluency and style without having to rely on keyword anchoring, the reduced importance of keywords in on-page copy can sometimes carry over into keyword targeting.

Keywords should not and must not be overlooked, and their importance in attracting a potential consumer can be underrated.

Take, for example, someone looking to make a purchase for a new hobby. They are interested in the hobby, but lack a degree of knowledge when it comes to hobby specific key terms; in this case, they are going to be searching for more general keywords and are going to rely on brands using search marketing strategies that account for this.

The best keyword research will identify themes – around price, size, colour, etc. as well as gaps in the market with low competition from competitors. By grouping such terms into ‘themes’ (groups of keywords), they can be converted into pages of content which will represent a thorough match to a number of targeted searches, increasing relevancy and usefulness for consumers – again heightening UX at the same time as improving chances of conversion.

This is a good time to refer back to your buyer personas, what are they looking for, what will they want to know and at what stage in the buying cycle will they want to know it?

Think about how you search on a phone as opposed to on a laptop. Are there differences in your own search methods from one device to another? What are your intentions across devices?

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Think about the levels of interest and expertise possessed by your buyer personas – are consumers looking for brand specific items, using specific industry jargon more or less likely to want to buy or to need information than those searching for generic, non-specific terms? How can your keyword targeting nurture the buyer journey by delivering the right content at the right time? If you have run PPC campaigns for your goods or services in the past, there may be a wealth of useful information available to you in your Search Query reports.

Once you have assembled lists of key terms and questions, use online tools (such as Google’s Keyword Planner) to quantify search density and, therefore, which of these keywords, terms and themes should be the focus of your efforts.

Ideally you’re looking for the golden ration of low competition and high volume. Also, use Analytics to monitor in-site searches – those terms which consumers are searching for while on your page – as well as popular landing pages and seek to consolidate these terms externally.

The role of keywords in modern search marketing is in flux at the moment – and there are some which, with good reason, have suggested that the industry should be looking to move away from using specific keyword rankings as a success metric – especially as trophy keywords are likely to diminish in importance (as the way we search shifts and queries continue to trend longer).

However, regardless of the relative importance for monitoring progress, keyword research will retain its importance when determining positioning and importance as well as when considering audience targeting.

FOUR SIMPLE STEPS 1

Think like a consumer – pick short and long tail keywords likely to be searched by your buyer personas. Ranking for many, low volume, but relevant keywords will serve you better than vanity terms.

2 Look for gaps – in a crowded marketplace it can be difficult to compete against established companies.

So don’t compete, find where they aren’t present.

3 Rank for priority – it is counterproductive to spread yourself too thin, so choose your targets wisely and look for the golden ration of high volume, low competition.

4 Consolidate gains – if you begin to rank for certain terms, don’t rest on your laurels but continue to target these keywords as you expand your target list.

HOW TO OPTIMISE A PAGE It is a fact that organic search has evolved significantly since its early beginnings. Producing content that meets the needs of your audience and customers is now at the core of effective SEO. However, there are still a few things that are important that you must remember to consider in order to give those search engine robots just that little bit extra help.

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Meta title tag Though it is ultimately limited by pixel length, your meta title tag should be as accurate, concise and precise a description of your content as is possible in 56 characters.

It is one of the most important sources of information for Google’s algorithm when it comes to deciding relevance (and therefore affects SERPs position) as well as aiding in the ease of browsing for the consumer – it should always contain key terms relating to the page.

Meta description The best explanation of the ‘meta description’ tag is as a short summary of the page – a clear and concise 155 character description of the on page content (with a minimum of 90 characters recommended). However, as this is the text visible in SERPs, it should also serve to draw consumers to the page – featuring, wherever possible, some form of enticement or call to action. A good ‘meta description’ can drastically improve your click through rate. <meta name=“description” content= ”This is a concise web-page description”> Though a brand may publish a novelty blog titled ‘10 uses for unwanted Christmas knitwear’, in order to ensure the bounce rate is kept low and your potential readership is given a full and attractive account of on-page copy (deterring the searchers that may be looking for recycling or upcycling advice), you may wish to describe it as: “A Humorous List Of Unexpected Uses For An Unpopular Christmas Gift”.

Note: if you don’t include a meta description, or if Google believes it to be incorrect, then the search engine will create its own description based on what it thinks the user should see.

Breadcrumbs Like most of the other suggestions in this eBook, breadcrumbs are a useful tactic to help both your site visitors and the search engines crawling your site. Breadcrumbs take their name from the Hansel and Gretel story and are useful for helping your visitors find their way. They differ in a significant way; they are not a literal representation of the path your visitor took to get to the page they are on.

Breadcrumbs are instead a representation of where the current page lives in the site hierarchy.

Breadcrumbs typically live in the upper left corner of a page (below the primary navigation) and are an easy way to both set the context of where the content lives in your site and to help your visitors navigate to higher level content. Since these are standard links, search engines will follow them, so breadcrumbs increase the odds that a search engine will discover your content.

Google believes breadcrumbs are important in helping visitors to understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. It will include breadcrumb navigation in search results when it can.

Header tags Headers summarise the pages you create for both consumers and search engines – and should be easily read by both. They are also important stylistically.

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<H1></H1> Though wit and humour are desirable for a page title, it is more important in the digital age for it to convey the information you wish to rank for. While ‘Book lack in Ongar’ is a great headline (one of my favourites), Google’s search algorithm is looking for ‘Funding cuts for Essex libraries result in severe book shortages’ for search queries regarding library funding. Though there is no definitive limit, best practice dictates that you should attempt to keep your titles unique, between 60 and 80 characters, and featuring keywords near the beginning. <H2></H2> This is a more appropriate place to flex your creative muscle and generally serves as a sub-title. The tags are also good for use as stand-alone subheadings when seeking to break up content for ease and speed of understanding. Again, it is still recommended that keywords feature somewhere in the subheading – as each header is important to framing the relevance of page to search queries. <H3></H3> This is a tertiary emphasis tag – or your ‘sub-sub heading’, formatting of which should adhere to its role as a paragraph leader, or stand-out line. As above, ensure this header is relevant to the text it precedes or is linked to – using keywords from the text to add relevance to the passage to promote ease of reader and search engine understanding.

Alt text Alternative text is used with images (and other non-text content) to describe what the image shows. The words used within an image’s alt attribute should be its text equivalent and convey the same information or serve the same purpose that the image would. This helps the visually impaired understand what an image is about using screen reading software, and it also helps those people that use browsers unable to download images. It’s also another chance to tell search engines what the image and your page is about.

When writing the alt text for an image, ask yourself: if you were to replace the image with the text, would most users receive the same basic information? Every image on a page should have alt text.

What makes good alt text?

• • •

Shorter than 65 characters (including spaces) The alt text should be a short ‘stand-in’ in the event that the image itself is not available.

The alt text should accurately represent the image

STRUCTURED DATA While structured data (referred to as schema from here on – as a tip of the hat to schema.org) involves a little more code awareness, the likelihood that schema will play a big role in the future of search makes it worth a mention.

In addition to the prospective importance of schema, there are free plug-ins for many CMSs (such as Yoast) which can make implementation much easier. However, whether you’re using a plug-in or not, it’s worthwhile ensuring that you run your site through Google’s free checker once in a while in order to make sure everything is working as it should.

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WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP? The result of collaboration between Yahoo, Bing and Google back in 2011, there came into being a site called schema.org, this site seeks to unify the language used by webmasters to provide metadata on pages which can be easily read by search engine spiders and parsers. Schema markup is how we refer to the microdata code that provides this metadata.

If structured data is, to extend the metaphor, the scaffolding that allows for better understanding of information, then markup is the individual scaffolding poles. With hundreds of varieties of possible markup types, the aim is to create a machine readable internet – or in the words of the creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, a semantic web:

“

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.

A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

While there is a lot to cover with regards to schema, it would not make sense to cover too much of it here – instead, you can download a designated guide to schema from our website which will give you everything you need to get started.

Specific schema introduced following Covid-19 outbreak In addition to the standard schema types, there has also been a series of new schema types added since the pandemic was announced. This includes markup to indicate test centres, to make emergency announcements and for various event issues.

- JOHN WARNER SENIOR SEO MARKETING & CONTENT EXECUTIVE

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MAGENTO 2 MIGRATION SURVIVAL GUIDE With a significant proportion of all Magento powered websites yet to migrate to Magento 2, we thought we’d let you know the case for migration as the countdown to Magento version 1’s retirement begins Used by approximately 12% of all eCommerce sites on the web (according to CloudWays), and – after Shopify – is the second most popular eCommerce CMS in the world, with more than a quarter of a million sites powered by Magento or Magento 2 (source: Magento.com).

With the platform handling more than $155 Bn in transactions every year, the platform is among the most important CMS platforms available, making it no great surprise that Adobe acquired the platform for $1.68 Bn in 2018.

However, despite Magento 2 having been released in 2015, there remain a substantial number of sites still using version 1.14 and below. While these sites have no doubt performed perfectly well in the interim, it became a matter of concern when Magento announced in late 2018 that it would be withdrawing support for version 1 in June of 2020.

Your “Magento 2 Migration Survival Guide” eBook includes chapters on: • • • • • • • •

What is Magento?

What is Magento 2?

What are the differences between Magento 1 & 2?

The problem of remaining with Magento 1 How long should migration take?

How to migrate to Magento 2 (checklist) Migration flow chart The importance of remembering SEO during migration

Download the ‘Magento 2 Migration Survival Guide’ eBook and prepare yourself for your most successful year in search yet!

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In Focus Here at Click Consult we are dedicated to staying ahead of the industry and know that if you are to succeed with a complete search marketing strategy you need to be able to anticipate market changes. Over the years we have made many predictions, some have come true instantly and some have taken a little longer to come to fruition. Here are some of the trends that could see you achieve digital growth. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beginâ&#x20AC;Ś

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SEO 2020 WILL BE THE YEAR OF MOBILE Yeah, I know that was 2015, but with major roll-outs expected of 5G by the majority of networks, and the devices that can use it set to follow throughout the year, we can expect a significant uplift in mobile search throughout 2020 – and, as a result of improved performance – are likely to see an up-tick in the use of things like AR which have suffered from mobile usability issues so far. As the speed of connection improves and the handset performance meets it, the number of things we can use our mobile for is going to grow – and that means that we need to improve our approach to SEO for mobile (which, by Google’s estimations, has actually gone backwards since Mobile Friendly 2).

2020 WILL BE ANOTHER HIGHLY VOLATILE YEAR IN THE SERPS There have been two of them in a row, now, so it probably doesn’t seem like a prediction – but with 2020 likely to see at least as much volatility and at least as many update scares, we need to start examining the relationship between visibility and sessions more carefully. While I’ve seen more blogs cropping up that are encouraging brands to move away from specific keyword positions as a performance metric (looking to growth overall instead), the growth in longer searches (not just long tail, but longer in total words used) over the last couple of years and the slowly increasing number of useful (for brands at least) voice searches, the utility of being number one for the fat head term is increasingly questionable (though obviously not for every industry).

SEO IS WILL START TO BECOME WAY MORE ACCESSIBLE, BUT ULTIMATELY LESS OF A CAREER To which I’d say – how many people do you know that hang their own doors/maintain their own cars or any other of countless skills that are relatively easy to do (at least to a point)? Even if, as the explanation states:

“

“The no-code and low-code movement will make the development of both websites and internal SEO tools more accessible to a larger number of individuals. Without being a developer, you can now start to use and combine tools like Airtable, Shopify, Webflow, SquareSpace, Typeform, MailChimp, HootSuite and IFTTT to run business operations of almost any complexity.”

There is still a barrier to entry here that can be both expensive financially and time consuming. Just because there may be an improved set of tools for a job which make things easier for a professional doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly develop the time, desire or money to purchase the tools and undertake the work.

The next set of predictions (they seem to fall in to one or the other category in this collection) seems to say SEO is dead for another reason – the number of searches resulting in no click, the theory popularised by Rand Fishkin and Jumpshot.

We need to take stock of where our traffic is coming from and really examine our keyword strategy to make sure we’re worrying about the right things, because the increasingly volatile SERPs are going to give us a lot to worry about otherwise.

2020 WILL TEST BRAND’S COMMITMENT TO SEO 2020 is likely to see an economic downturn and marketing budgets are often the first things to take the hit. We are also in the midst of a global pandemic ad businesses are looking more and more at remote working, cutting costs and moving budgets to account for this unprecedented situation. While, as I’ve pointed out previously, there is ample academic research showing that maintenance of marketing budget (and increasing it) both improve performance during periods of economic turbulence, there are often cuts made.

In digital marketing, it can often be tempting to move budget from SEO – which can be quite difficult to definitively prove ROI for (especially if there’s link building involved) – to PPC which is eminently ‘provable’, but every penny diverted from organic to paid is lost ground to a competitor that maintains momentum.

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In August, SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin unsettled the industry by publishing data showing that for the first time, a majority of browser-based searches on Google resulted in no click whatsoever – confirming that many of SEOs’ efforts to drive traffic to their websites will yield diminishing returns.

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While it’s almost impossible to find (or has been for me, at least) a definitive number for the searches made per year after 2012, there have been estimates of 1.2 Trillion in 2018 and up to 3 Trillion in 2019. For fairness’ sake, I’m going to halve the second estimate (doubling seems unlikely in a year at this point). So from 2018 to 2019, I’m going to assume a growth of 0.3 Trillion.

Searches with organic clicks were, at their lowest point in 2018, at 47.27% – this produces a total number of searches with organic clicks of 0.567 Trillion for 2018.

Searches with organic clicks were, at their lowest point in 2019, 46.12% – this produces a total number of searches with organic clicks of 0.692 Trillion for 2019.

While I have a good deal of respect for the work that Rand Fishkin does, this kind of thing riles me a little. Even assuming a relatively small increase in total searches, the end result (even if the numbers aren’t those mentioned above) is likely to be a boost in the total number of organic clicks.

This is not to say that Google shouldn’t be held to account for infiltrating certain SERPs with their own tools or for trending toward their own properties, it’s just that it produces predictions like the ones in the Econsultancy blog linked to above that are filled with doom and gloom.

In actual fact, though we’re getting a smaller slice of the pie, it’s a much bigger pie (honourable mention to Will Critchlow of Distilled, who seems to be the only one who got a decent night’s sleep before making his more optimistic – and more likely – prediction) and until we have the all of the necessary information, these kinds of studies really aren’t especially helpful.

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YOU CAN’T OPTIMISE FOR BERT, THEREFORE OPTIMISATION IS ESSENTIALLY POINTLESS For a given definition of “can’t”, I agree. However, there are still things we can do to assist machine understanding of our copy and content. As I’ve stated elsewhere, there are machine learning algorithms and neural networks littered through the process of calculating any SERP and each of them is making a number of value judgements – you may not be able to directly optimise for any specific algorithm, but there are methods (from schema mark-up to correct use of HTML, and good use of the English language and its many rules) that are optimisation by another name.

There’s still a considerable distance to go before machines can make the snap judgements about quality that a human can and BERT itself is intended to determine meaning rather than quality (making it more related to entity search than a determination of quality for rankings purposes), so optimisation is neither redundant nor even reduced in importance – there are just different methods we need to employ.

HAHA! WE TOLD YOU VOICE WOULDN’T BE 50% OF SEARCH Many of these come from the same sites that have featured the phoney ComScore stat back in 2016 or whenever it first reared its head, and have made regular ‘year of voice’ predictions every previous year. This year, however, they’re right – 2020 will not be the year of voice either. You will know the year of search, because it will directly follow the year that a subvocalisation device that doesn’t make the wearer look like a plank and is cheap enough for general purchase.

Until then, we’ll see increased utility, better understanding of accents and more – all of which will add to the eventual rapidity that voice will become ‘a thing’. So, while many of these voice predictions scoff at the very idea that voice will ever be important, take more notice of the slowly increasing number of brands selling by voice on Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant and start laying the foundations, because we will not be given a great deal of warning when the year of voice finally arrives.

For SEO, this means ensuring our structured data is on the money, our content is easy to parse and that we’re well positioned in industry applicable knowledge graphs.

THINK WITH GOOGLE RESEARCH ROUNDUP Slightly more useful than the predictions this year, is the Think with Google 2019 Research Review which summarises a year of insights. Of particular relevance to SEO is point 3: Satisfying immediacy is often more important than loyalty There are nine stats in this section (including the following), all of which suggest that in addition to traditional search terms, brands need to expand their offering in local and immediate searches (online stock checks and local offers, as well as competing for ‘right now’, ‘near me’ and ‘best’ terms).

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Content Mar IMPROVING CONTENT QUALITY AND CONVERSIONS ARE TOP PRIORITIES FOR B2C MARKETERS 59% of marketer expect their next year’s content budget to be higher than 2019. 75% of B2C marketers characterise their organisation as successful (extremely, very, or moderately) with content marketing, and 73% say they are much or somewhat more successful than a year ago, the study found.

Creating brand awareness (84%), educating audiences (75%), and building credibility (65%) were the top marketing goals in the last year. Conversion (50%), content quality (50%) and audience expansion (40%) were the respondents’ content marketing priorities for 2020.

According to freelance content marketer Vijayaraj Mukundan, there will be a need to enhance creativity in storytelling capabilities for retaining audience attention – particularly among younger generations (such as Gens X and Z) who are increasingly cynical about the relevance and quality of brands.

Brands will have to find ways to deliver comprehensive experiences across the marketing funnel next year, as well as getting to grips with seamless data analytics to understand user-behaviour and craft personalised content better.

WE CAN’T IGNORE THE RISE AND RISE OF TIKTOK With an estimated 800 million monthly global users, (and the most downloaded app of Q4 2018), TikTok is a bona fide phenomenon. TikTok’s viral, short-form, meme/music video format is basically a rebrand of Musical.ly and has been compared to the now-defunct Vine.

What’s behind this major surge in popularity? The format is simple with posts easy to create, enhance and edit; feeds are automatically personalised (TikTok uses an algorithm to show content based on your interests, preferences and content you’ve previously engaged with) and, importantly in the world of jaded app users, the content posted feels fresh, spontaneous, and genuine. By encouraging users to interact and collaborate, the platform combines the best aspects of user-generated content (UGC) and the ‘social’ element of social media.

In fact, Karen Ngai, Click Consult’s Digital Public Relations Officer, says the nature of TikTok will mean put UGC creativity at the heart of social media content: “Despite the integration of AI and machine learning, TikTok’s core function is to have its users produce and edit their own videos within the app.

These videos allow Generation Z, who are digital natives, to exhibit their desire for self expression and redefine what they believe is good content (as they then become viral by sharing, replicating and built upon).”

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rketing “

“As technology becomes more and more readily available to help generate content, it will be much harder to cut through the noise. Content fuelled by unique creativity will undoubtedly be the way to help gain more traction.”

Other than creativity, there will be a greater demand for authentic marketing. When Instagram entered the market, we saw a rise in the polished, professional content and the importance of a carefully curated feed. With TikTok, we can see that trait has been reversed. The younger communities prefer creating candid, unfiltered content, which may seem like lowquality to the untrained eye.

“

“This doesn’t mean that the future of content marketing is expected to stop producing high quality content. Since digital natives grew up being highly familiar to overly decorated language and misleading statistics, there will be greater demand for authenticity from future content instead of forced perfection.”

What does this mean for marketers? Create marketing campaigns that initiate UGC by making it easy and fun to engage with your brand. The highly-customised nature of TikTok means personalised user experience is fundamental to attracting users, and emphasises the need for deep research into the interests and behaviour of niche audience groups.

SEA CHANGES FOR INFLUENCER PARTNERSHIPS In November 2019, Instagram began testing removing “likes” from their platform. The shift may benefit mental health and relieve the pressure of judgement for site users, but for social media influencers it means re-strategising their influencer marketing efforts.

Rachel Ford, President of boutique content marketing agency Ford Media Lab, is forecasting that whether or not likes are here to stay, influencer partnerships with brands will change.

“It can be speculated that influencer partnership performance will turn similarly into pay-to-play,” Ford predicts. “We anticipate that companies will seek new and creative ways to partner with influencers to prove ROI”. Which leads us onto…

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BIG FISHES IN SMALL PONDS There’s been a noticeable shift in strategy in recent times, with brands targeting micro-influencers and nano-influencers and moving towards smaller, but more powerful, authentic, spheres of influence where trust and communities matter more than ever.

Getting great content in front of the right people – rather than the most people – will be the ultimate sign of success.

2020 could also see in-house influencers playing a crucial role in marketing campaigns, who focus completely on building relationships with the audiences. This gives marketers direct leadership over campaigns and to build stronger, (arguably) more authentic relationships.

A great example of this in action is Gymshark’s Meggan Grubb who was (until early 2019) on the fantastically successful gymwear’s payroll to model their fitness fashion on social media and on her blog, helping to turn the company into one of the world’s most successful and influential fitness apparel online retailers, having grown from a bedroom start-up to a £100million business in just seven years.

INTERACTIVE CONTENT 91% of buyers are looking for more interactive content online such as shoppable posts, 360-degree video, AR/VR, polls and quizzes are some of the examples of interactive content catch viewers’ attention and gives their audience “a reason to stay and engage”.

Chief Marketer Magazine (citing research by the IAB) reports that further advances in technologies like 5G, AI, connected TVs and OTT will also enable audiences to interact with ads from their TV and mobile devices.

According to an IAB study, video which has been a focus of digital marketing strategies in 2019, will continue to be important in 2020. This article also states that influencer marketing, especially, micro-influencers will continue to be among top 2020 marketing trends.

DATA IS AN OBSTACLE TO PERSONALISATION According to the Content Marketing Institute, in 2020, 59% of B2C marketers expect larger content marketing budgets than they had in 2019. And half of respondents say their priorities are improving the quality/conversion of audiences and focusing on content quality/quantity.

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But this quest to target the most relevant audience and boost conversion has always been the holy grail of content marketing (and marketing in general). Furthermore, we’ve been told for years that in our post-cookie generation that what all marketers should be striving for – and what all consumers crave – is personalisation through strategic data use.

However, the dream of ‘mass personalisation’ is in recline thanks to a downturn in consumer trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers imposed by tech companies.

By 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalisation will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both, according to a recent study by Gartner: Predicts 2020: Marketers, They’re Just Not That Into You. This notes that 27% of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalisation – revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection. Frustratingly, consumers often express the contrary desires to have more data privacy, but also for increased personalisation of their interactions with brands – and content marketers need to get the balance right if they are to benefit from the considerable pay off in its potential to build trust and relationships with consumers.

“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” says Charles Golvin, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice.

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“However, this quest has failed to meet marketers’ ambitions and, in some cases, has backfired, as consumers both directly and indirectly reject brands’ overtures. Marketers must really adopt the basics when it comes to test and learn before investing in personalisation technology and new tactics.”

Clearly, there’s a lot of work to do before brands can claim to have implemented a successful personalisation strategy – and that they must always place the consumer first in their efforts despite the temptation to prioritise personalisation with a focus on ROI.

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PPC AUTOMATION Automation is without question the biggest PPC trend of 2020 and seems to be on the mind of nearly every PPC marketer.

Teams are scrambling to put in the hard work at the back end of campaigns to ensure that AI and machine learning can do their bit to boost the performance of certain campaigns.

There will be a bit of a balancing act to negotiate and agencies retain their value by doing the things that machines can’t. PPC professionals will have to accept that things such as the mathematical element of advertising is increasingly left to computers but the language, design and much of the bidding will be left to them.

Some of the things that will be most important will be those highlighted by Search Engine Journal, who recommends looking at target ROAS, dynamic search ads (DSAs), responsive search ads, max conversion value, and any of the other PPC automation options within Google.

One other aspect of automation which has been discussed

by Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder, Optmyzr, is ‘automation layering,’ a concept he believes is the future of PPC.

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“The idea is simple… we need to teach, monitor and guide the automations to deliver the best possible results, but instead of devoting more of our already limited human bandwidth to it, we can build lightweight automations using ads scripts, rule engines, alerts, etc. to restore some of the control we used to have before Google, Microsoft and the other ad platforms took over with their artificial intelligence,” MATCH TYPE CHANGE In 2019 there were a number of updates to match types and many of them were problematic for those creating and optimising ads, most notably the removal of true phrase match. 2020 however will offer a real change in this area.

Google look as though they will make improvements in this area and there is a lot of ‘chatter’ about the tweaks that will be made to modified broad matches, exact matches and phrase matches – just don’t hold out any hope that they will tell you about them.

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ALL ABOUT THE DATA Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft Advertising, said in 2020 it will be all about leveraging all the data without exploiting the people behind the data.

“PPC advertisers have seen successful results with more contextual and demographic targeting options such as In-Marketing Audiences offered by both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising,” Virji said. “We’re increasingly seeing new ways to leverage more understandings and insights – while still protecting people’s privacy- to connect brands and their customers differently.”

VIDEO ADVERTISING According to Cisco, the world’s IP traffic will grow to 3.3 zettabytes (one trillion gigabytes) of traffic annually by 2021, of which 82% of all traffic will be video. PPC teams across the world will be looking for a slice of this market and teams who utilise paid social as part of their strategy will be looking at new ways to entice an audience. With more and more people spending time online and especially on platforms where adverts can be displayed there is a greater need to ensure that they hit the right notes.

Streaming services like YouTube and Facebook as well as platforms like Netflix are commonplace and it is fair to say that customers will be more open to video-based advertising strategies as they use this medium more frequently.

PAID RESULTS TO OUTWEIGH ORGANIC RESULTS? Over the years we have heard various people say that the best place to hide a body is on the second page of a Google results page because nobody looks there. If this is the case (which it is) then that means that page 1 real estate is even more valuable than ever.

As a business, it makes sense for Google to display more paid ads on their results pages, so long as they fulfil the search intent of the user. Bidding will also become more expensive as is commonplace when more businesses emerge into a particular market.

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STEP AWAY FROM GOOGLE For so long Google has been the best place to advertise but all of this is changing and businesses need to think about other locations such as Microsoft and Amazon.

Microsoft’s goal has been to allow Google Ads advertisers an easy way to import their accounts into Microsoft Ads and start advertising there. Microsoft also has some features not available in Google. LinkedIn targeting is also now available in Microsoft Ads. Google may be the king of search engines but, when it comes to product search, Amazon wins hands down, with 55% of customers beginning their first product search on Amazon. As for advertising ROI – Amazon PPC see a 10% conversion rate compared with 1-2% for Google Ads. Over the past few years, Amazon has begun to realise its huge potential as an advertising platform and developed a range of flexible, self-serve solutions for sellers to promote their products. It’s power is in taking the tried and tested payper-click (PPC) model already well-established by Google Ads and combining it with its own USPs, namely: High purchase intent: Shoppers tend to come to Amazon with specific products in mind.

Rich customer data: Amazon has access to detailed customer purchase data that sellers can use to leverage their campaigns.

Ease of purchase: A familiar platform for users, with the ability to drop products from a range of different sellers in their basket without leaving the website.

By far the biggest growing opportunity for advertisers is with Product Display Ads, which account for the majority of ad spend on the platform.

If you sell on Amazon, Product Display Ads offer a powerful and versatile way for you to promote your listings, for example, to push your best-selling, seasonal or end-of-line stock up higher in search results, make them visible to a new audience. Visibility, whether paid or organic, is key to success as 70% of Amazon shoppers only purchase from the first page of search results.

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VOICE SEARCH By the end of 2020 it is said that 50% of all searches will be voice searches. This means that the search terms that trigger ads to appear are going to change as people interact in a more conversational way. Businesses will think more and more about the way the users searches, the terms and phrases they use and the relevancy of their keywords when it comes to triggering ads.

VISUAL PPC Last year, Snapchat announced a Visual Search partnership with Amazon which allows users to search products on Amazon straight from the Snapchat camera. This is an area where many brands don’t operate at the moment and it could be that there is a real push to adopt platforms like Snapchat within their marketing strategy.

SMART BIDDING Smart Bidding uses machine learning to optimise your bids to maximise on conversions and conversion value across your campaign or bidding portfolio. Target CPA, Target ROAS, Max Conversions and Enhanced CPC are all Smart Bidding strategies. Businesses need to be able to implement smart bidding on their campaigns to reach the right people at the right price.

In addition to machine learning capabilities, Smart Bidding has three other key benefits according to Google: 1. A wide range of signals to tailor bids to someone’s unique context. These include device, location, time of day, remarketing lists, browser, language and more. Find out more about bidding signals.

2. Flexible controls that allow you to set performance targets to steer bidding performance and optimise search bids to your chosen attribution model.

3. Transparent reporting and status updates to help you test how well Smart Bidding works for you and understand what’s going on under the bonnet of your bid strategies.

- THE MARKETING TEAM CLICK CONSULT

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Identifying Technical Issues In Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) analyses data and monitors campaign performance. You can uncover valuable information that can help inform a successful SEO strategy. This quick guide shows you how you can use Google Search Console to check for technical issues that could hinder SEO performance.

We will also show you how to uncover your website’s important keyword rankings and recognise your key trafficdriving pages with a few SEO tips from the team along the way.

While there are several tools that can do some or almost all of the tasks that GSC offers, there are none that you can use for free – and if you’re starting out in search, you may not want to invest the money that would be required for some of the top tier tools. While we’d definitely say that there will come a time when you’ll need crawlers and monitoring tools, GSC offers a nice intro to some of the techniques and practices you’ll need to master to succeed in search.

WHAT IS GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE? Google Search Console is a free service designed to help brands monitor and maintain their site’s presence in search results. Launched in May 2015, replacing Google Webmaster Tools, and updated in January 2018, Google Search Console is one of the many tools that developers and SEOs use to

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monitor the performance of their sites. It offers error reports, keyword reports, mobile site reports and more – making it an ideal tool for any brand, but perfect to newcomers.

So, here are just a two things you can explore in your Google Search Console account today: • •

Identify Technical Issues in Google Search Console that could be hindering SEO Discover which keywords matter the most to your business .

IDENTIFY TECHNICAL ISSUES IN GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE If your website has technical issues making it difficult for Google to crawl, SEO performance is guaranteed to suffer.

There are a few key reports to check when reviewing your websites technical health in Google Search Console, these include: • • • • •

Coverage XML Sitemaps Mobile Usability Security & Manual Actions Rendering – How Google sees your webpages

Firstly, we look at how many pages of your website Google has included in it’s index (database)…

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Coverage Report The Coverage report lets you see how many of your sites pages are currently being indexed and appearing on Google.

You can find this report by simply logging into your Google Search Console account and selecting Coverage, and then selecting the ‘Valid’ tab.

We will then go on to check if we are helping search engines find your important pages with the XML sitemap…

Tip It’s important to keep an eye on the number of your website’s pages in Google’s index. This number alone can highlight crawl and duplicate content issues. For example, if the number of pages in Google was extremely high or low when compared to actual live webpages this could indicate a range of issues and result in diluted rankings and reduced visibility.

Sitemap Report XML sitemaps are often overlooked, however, your website’s XML sitemap helps Google to find all your important pages with ease, although Google is pretty good at finding all of a site’s pages already. However, larger sites can be more cumbersome to crawl and a sitemap can be beneficial.

This report is on the left in your Google Search Console account, underneath Sitemaps:

Tips 1.

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Check the XML sitemap has been submitted, if not, submit your XML sitemap.

Check if the number of pages in the XML sitemap correlates with the number of valid pages in the coverage report? There are pages missing or other technical issues.

Make sure the XML sitemap is updated to mirror the pages you want included on Google.

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Mobile Usability Report Google has been mobile first for a while now, in a nutshell mobile first means instead of ranking websites based on the desktop content. Google switched focus to ordering websites in results pages by mobile content instead.

The Mobile Usability Report helps you understand if your website is meeting Google’s mobile first standards.

Security & Manual Actions If your website ever breaks Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, you could attract a penalty. As stated in the Google guidelines “If a site has a manual action, some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results.”

Tip Check for any errors, if there are errors this means your pages are not mobile friendly and they are below the minimum mobile usability test. If this is the case, you should speak to your web developer about how these can be fixed. If the page is valid, this means your pages meet the minimum mobile usability level. However, there could still be other mobile related issues. If you want to be super sure a page is mobile friendly, you can check via the mobile friendly testing tool.

How does Google see your website?

Finally, check if Google sees your website content, ideally Google should be able to see a site’s content just like a user.

To check this you need to inspect a page by adding the URL to the page you want to check, like below:

Login and select Security & Manual Actions’ then Manual Actions. If you have a message in the manual penalty report we recommend an SEO expert reviews your website ASAP. You will then see a processing message

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Once this is completed you will then see a report about the page with lots of useful information:

DISCOVER WHICH KEYWORDS MATTER THE MOST TO YOUR BUSINESS The Performance report allows you to understand which search queries are drawing impressions and clicks to your website from Google. You can also see the average position in Google’s search results pages (SERPs).

Then click ‘test live URL’…

You can find this report by simply logging into your Google Search Console account and selecting ‘Performance’.

You will notice the tested pages section, instead of the ‘html’ tab the tool opens on default…

Scroll down and view a list of queries your whole website is ranking for in Google. You can filter the keywords by query and sort these keywords by number of impressions and clicks. This can help inform which keywords you should be targeting and tracking:

Tip If the screenshot doesn’t look anything like yours or is lacking images, navigation or anything. Your robots. txt is likely blocking a folder with these assets in. Click Consult recommends this issue should be prioritised with your web developers.

- ANDREA SWAN SENIOR ORGANIC SEARCH STRATEGIST

Tip Make a list of the keywords that are driving the most clicks (these are your traffic driving keywords). Google these keywords to check the position of your website. Have a look at any pages ranking above and consider – Is the content better? Does the page cover the topic in more depth? Do they include images, videos… Is the site ranking above more authoritative or trusted. Think about in comparison to competitor content, what does your page lack?

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USING A CASE STATEMENT TO COMBINE SOURCES WITH MULTIPLE URLS As always with the Benchmark Search Magazine and the click.co.uk blog, we do cover some aspects of SEO in more detail.

Here John Warner, one of our most technical writers looks at CASE statements and how combining multiple URLs can lead to business growth and better position you to get the most from your sites.

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WHAT IS A CASE STATEMENT? Put as simply as I can (in a way I can grasp, at least), a CASE statement readies the program for a set of conditional selections. This selection it makes depends on the value of the expressions that follow it, you provide the program with a set of inputs you wish it to classify by following a set of IF, THEN, ELSE or WHEN conditions. It will ascertain if any of the stated conditions are true and return the appropriate value for that condition or will, if none are true, return the ELSE value.

WHY ARE WE USING A CASE STATEMENT The nature of CASE statements makes them the simplest way to look for regular expressions and attribute a value. When we are looking at source data in Data Studio, we can often be left with manual work adding up sessions from multiple URLs from the same domain – the CASE statement I’m about to lay out allows us to look for a regular expression in those domains and attribute them all to one source, meaning we no longer have to look for the m. or app generated URL versions in addition to the main URL for the source.

HOW TO USE THE CASE STATEMENT IN DATA STUDIO For this, I’m going to assume you’re already using Data Studio to some extent and are reporting in some way on referral traffic – whether from social media, partner sites or anything else. If so, you’ll have something that looks a bit like this (or one of many variations):

If you don’t have something like this – you can set it up easily enough using the Google Analytics connector and pairing the ‘Source’ dimension with the metric of your choice (sessions, goal conversions, whichever suits). However, what you’ll also notice is that there are two instances of FACEBOOK as a referrer – and there are other referrers that are only partially represented as they have fallen in to the ‘other’ category.

In order to rectify this, we need to set up the CASE statement and we do this by creating a custom dimension.

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WHERE TO FIND CUSTOM DIMENSIONS Click on the ‘Source’ dimension. At the bottom of the pop up you’ll see ‘CREATE FIELD’.

This will bring up the field creation box – which you should name in an easy to remember way in case you need to use the same dimension when measuring another metric.

I, imaginatively, called mine ‘SOURCE (w/CASE)’.

CREATING YOUR CUSTOM DIMENSION For this we’re going to use WHEN, REGEXP_MATCH, THEN and ELSE: WHEN: – states that you’re about to set a condition that the following must meet to return a TRUE response and deliver the result.

REGEXP_MATCH: – meaning ‘regular expression matches’ indicates that the condition is that a text string must in your data set must contain the text string you’ll provide to deliver the result.

THEN: – is the outcome that will result if the conditions are met.

ELSE: – is the outcome that will result if the conditions are not met.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER CASE WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(SOURCE, “.*nkedi.*”) THEN “LinkedIn” ELSE Source END While this is only one of the lines (I’ll give a full social media version in a moment), you can see that it reads almost like a (albeit oddly phrased) set of instructions.

In the following situations: When a text string in (the source data, matches a series of characters found in each LinkedIn URL) then we will return the value “LinkedIn”.

If not, we’ll keep the name the same. That’s it.

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THE RESULT While the change isn’t massive, adding the multiple instances of each social media platform together does alter the table (bear in mind I also filter this table using a REGEXP_CONTAINS to get rid of search engines):

Here we can see that the true picture is given of FACEBOOK’s referrals (combining facebook, m.facebook and facebook. com), Twitter has moved up as all its various iterations are taken into account and it gives us the information we need at a glance (while also telling me I forgot Yahoo – but who hasn’t amirite).

The full code for this is as follows: CASE WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*aceb.*”) THEN “FACEBOOK” WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*nsta.*”) THEN “Instagram” WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*ube.*”) THEN “YouTube” WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*witt.*”) THEN “Twitter” WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*t.co.*”) THEN “Twitter” WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Source, “.*kedi.*”) THEN “LinkedIn” ELSE Source END In case you’re wondering – I tend to use the middle characters as they’re the least likely to appear as part of another site’s domain and some of the platforms don’t use the full name in some of their links – and Twitter goes a step further by using t.co (their own link shortener).

All in all, while there’s nothing exactly wrong with finding out how many sessions the mobile FACEBOOK site has sent, there are other places we should be finding this out – if we’re looking solely at performance per domain, this custom dimension really cleans things up.

- JOHN WARNER SENIOR SEO MARKETING & CONTENT EXECUTIVE

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CASE STUDY

CLICK CONSULT CASE STUDY: AZURE

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CASE STUDY

How do you grow revenue and improve search visibility in one of the most fiercely competitive markets in the UK? ABOUT AZURE COLLECTION Azure Collection is one of the UK’s leading independent travel agents. The team at Azure Collection are passionate about travel and dedicated to making sure that guests have the perfect holiday every time. Operating 24/7 – 365 days of the year, their website is at the heart of what they do and that’s why they partnered with Click Consult on the launch of azurecollection.com.

INITIAL REQUIREMENTS Azure Collection required a website that would run across all browsers and operating systems (OS). The purpose of the website was to allow users to interact with the Azure Collection portfolio of holidays and to get in touch if further information is needed or to book online.

The new site was to fit the following brief and have the following components: • • • • • • • • • • • •

In terms of the top level navigation we made sure that the website featured a full mega-navigation menu as the primary/ top-level navigation. This was developed to show/hide using CSS rather than JavaScript/jQuery to ensure users without JavaScript enabled had full access.

The top level menu can be seen above and then when we expand that to the mega menu, customers are able to see the following (below image) which brings about a better UX.

Built in Magento 2.2 Have a dedicated site structure – based on client expectations and SEO audits Have a fully responsive design for Desktop, Mobile and Tablet Top level navigation built with JavaScript in mind Advanced filtering Video integration Social integration Downloadable PDFs Live chat Pop outs Suggestive search Contact form

Another important feature of this site is that it has a fluid CMS that can be edited quickly and easily by the site administrators.

We had to make sure that changes and edits could be made to the following areas: • • • • • • • • • • •

HOW WE HELPED To meet the objectives of the client brief, we took a systematic approach with various teams involved. This allowed us to cover all bases and make sure that we had the correct areas of expertise pulling together with the final goal of achieving all of our targets. The site was built, as promised in Magento 2.2 and had a fully responsive design. We ensured the user experience across desktop, tablet and mobile was consistent and recognisable and that all future devices would be covered.

We achieved this via a fluid approach, using percentages rather than fixed width break-points in the HTML.

Home Page Category Page with filtering Search Results Page Destination Page Tailor Made Page Product Page (Hotel) Generic Content Page About Us Page Contact Page Blog Category Page Blog Post Page

Some of these areas such as the Home Page, had many editable components such as Sales Banner Text, Text Fields, Exclusive Holidays, Tailor Made Holidays, USPs, Destinations, Traveller’s Journeys and a section for Traveller’s Stories. This level of detail ensured that the site was best prepared for optimum performance.

As this website was for a business that specialises in bespoke, luxury holidays we made sure that there was advanced filtering in place. Based on the attributes saved in Magento, users are able to filter through holidays via select fields, with dropdown filters on key components. For example we may have a user that knows the destination and even the hotel they wish to visit but wants to understand the extras.

We added in content pages around starting price, activities, facilities and a price based on when the trip was booked.

Integration was a key part of this website build. For video integration and optimum performance the website featured HTML5 video, hosted locally rather than originating from an iframe. When it came to social integration the website featured a live grid of social media feeds.

Based on a timestamp, a series of channels are shown including the companies Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feeds.

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The nature of the purchases that are likely to be made on this site lends itself to the fact that much research is needed. The investment can be high and as the holidays are bespoke it is vital that the users are offered personalised touch points at every opportunity. This was achieved in a number of ways. We incorporated a ‘Guest Wishlist’ which allows users to bookmark various parts of the sites.

When a user reaches a brochure page, they will be encouraged to download the document as a PDF. This ensures quality and acts as a twofold approach as the data captured in the download form means that further emails or other forms of contact can be personalised. As this is such a vital component of a good website we also met the brief by installing a live chat feature and pop outs that answered queries and after a period of inactivity, or if a user chooses to close the website, the website will open a pop out feature box which will encourage downloading a brochure.

When we built, set up and launched the site we did so with the templates to the right in mind. We first laid out the plan for the navigation as seen on the left. Then we built out the site map further.

We also briefed in a number of key features for each page on the site.

For the ‘Home page’ as an example we understood that this is the main entry point to the site and that search functionality needed to be prominent on the page. This page also had to contain a cross-section of holidays on a carousel and a contact form.

RESULTS As you can see from the screen shots on the opposite page, this project went from an initial idea to a fully functioning, dynamic site that will aid the business growth of Azure Collection.

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CLICK CONSULT LTD WILLOW HOUSE, HOOTON ROAD, HOOTON, CHESHIRE, CH66 7NZ CLICK.CO.UK 0333 009 8299

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