Posted by angelacherry

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Much has happened since we last posted about what Twitter can teach us about the US presidential candidates. In the past three weeks, an additional 15 states have participated in electoral contests to help narrow the field of candidates who will ultimately secure the Republican and Democratic party nominations for president.

With so much activity happening offline, we were due for an update of the latest and greatest activity happening online on our beloved Twitter! As with our previous post, we’re putting our Twitter analytics tool, Followerwonk, to work analyzing the top presidential candidates. This includes tracking changes in followership, analyzing conversations and engagement, and other interesting insights we uncover on this journey. You can also follow the data we’re tracking for the current five top-performing candidates* in realtime by visiting their individual Followerwonk analysis report pages:

• Hillary Clinton
• Ted Cruz
• Marco Rubio
• Bernie Sanders
• Donald Trump

*Top-performing candidates as measured by their finishing positions in the most recent electoral contests. This list will evolve with the election cycle.

What’s happened since we last checked in?

In our first post, we examined Twitter trends around the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Since then, Nevada and South Carolina hosted contests in the second half of February, and most notably, yesterday was the BIG ONE: Super Tuesday.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Super Tuesday, it marks the single biggest day for casting ballots in the 2016 US presidential race until the general election in November. Voters in 12 states cast ballots with a significant number of delegates at stake: 595 for Republicans across 11 contests, and 865 for Democrats across 12 contests.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s dig in!

Cloudy with a chance of Trump

We wanted to know what the Twitterverse had to say about the candidates during the electoral contests in Nevada and South Carolina. To capture this, we created a series of word clouds representing the most common words associated with tweets and retweets mentioning each candidate during the 48 hours surrounding the contests.

You’ll see that each candidate’s word cloud contains popular words and slogans from their respective campaigns, such as:

• “cruzcrew” for Cruz
• “marcomentum” for Rubio
• “makeamericagreatagain” for Trump
• “imwithher” for Clinton
• “feelthebern” for Sanders

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the one word surfacing in every single word cloud: “Trump.” And while it makes an appearance in each of the five candidate’s word clouds, it’s especially significant in those of his GOP rivals.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the Nevada Caucus.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

What’s in a name?

Given Trump’s broad name recognition, his prevalence may not seem surprising. That is, until you consider that according to a recent Gallup survey, there is one candidate with slightly higher name recognition (Clinton) who did not achieve the same distinction. In addition, the most recent measurement of media coverage per candidate conducted by the FiveThirtyEight blog uncovered that while Trump received 54 percent of the GOP primary media coverage, Clinton received 77 percent of the Democratic primary media coverage.

Furthermore, at this stage in the primaries, both Trump and Clinton are considered the front-runners to win their party’s nominations, according to the latest news analysis from the Chicago Tribune and ABC News, among others.

So what gives?

If we had to speculate about the reason Trump is so prominent across the candidate word clouds — and to be clear, we are speculating — it’s likely the same reason he’s so prominent in our current political discourse: the American public is fascinated by his meteoric rise as a politician. It’s expected that someone like Clinton, who has built a long political career, would hit these milestones, but perhaps unexpected that a businessman and reality TV star would do the same. Twitter is ultimately reflection of the world around it, after all.

Tweeting up a storm

As we did with the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, we explored which states’ residents were actively tweeting during the 48-hour period surrounding the most recent electoral contests.

Once again, residents of the US capital, Washington, DC, swept the top spot across all contests.

We also found that Nevadans were highly engaged, ranking in the top 10 states tweeting about each candidate across both the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primaries.

The top states tweeting during the Nevada and South Carolina contests in February also offered a glimpse of the anticipation felt in a few Super Tuesday states. Most notably was Alaska, which took a top 10 spot for 70% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards, as well as Texas and Vermont, which took top 10 spots on 40% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards. And not wanting to be left out of the ongoing Twitter discussion, New Hampshire residents remained active in the two electoral contests that followed their own, with that state taking a top 10 spot on 60% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the Nevada caucus.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

An examination of the most active states tweeting on Super Tuesday reveals a few interesting findings, particularly for the geolocation of people tweeting about Clinton. For instance, despite winning the Minnesota caucus, Minnesota does not appear in Sanders’s top 10 Super Tuesday rankings, but it does appear on Clinton’s list. In addition, despite sweeping the primary contests in the South, no southern state ranked on Clinton’s top 10 list. On top of that, Clinton is the only one of the five candidates to not have her home state (Arkansas) rank in her top 10 list, whereas the other candidates had their respective home states make appearances in their top 10 lists. It’s worth noting though that New York, a state for which she served as senator, does appear on Clinton’s list.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during Super Tuesday.

Who’s winning the follower race?

We know which states are doing the most tweeting, but what about which candidate is winning the race for followers? It depends on how you look at it.

If you look at sheer quantity of followers, the rankings are as follows:

1. Trump: 6 million+ followers
2. Clinton: 5.3 million+ followers
3. Sanders: 1.3 million+ followers
4. Rubio: 1.1 million+ followers
5. Cruz: 782,000+ followers

Number of Trump followers as of February 29, 2016

However, if you look at net gains in followers over the past several weeks, it’s a different picture.* We decided to take this view because it takes into account the fact that some of the candidates were much more well-known prior to announcing their candidacy. We began tracking each of the candidates on Twitter on January 14, 2016, a couple of weeks prior to the Iowa Caucus. If you look at the percentage gain in net followers since mid-January, the ranking shifts to:

1. Sanders: 34.29 percent (gain of about 391,000 followers)
2. Cruz: 21.78 percent (gain of about 154,700 followers)
3. Rubio: 19.16 percent (gain of about 203,000 followers)
4. Trump: 14.55 percent (gain of about 826,000 followers)
5. Clinton: 7.99 percent (gain of about 408,700 followers)

Net gain of followers for Sanders since mid-January, as of February 29, 2016.

*Wondering what’s up with the flat line on February 21? It represents one in only a small handful of times where our social graph fetching hit a snag and failed to accurately capture the total number of followers that day. We’re bummed it happened, but rest assured it was fixed by February 22.

Shifting winds impacting followership

It’s also fun to drill down into certain moments in time to understand how changes in followership fluctuate throughout the campaign cycle.

For example, the GOP debate on February 25, 2016 marked a major shift in tone from Rubio toward Trump. Much of the news analysis the following day, including this piece from the The Hill and this one from CNN, noted that Rubio was far more critical of Trump than he’s been in previous debates. Sure enough, if you look at trends in followership for Rubio, apart from the dates of electoral contests, he experienced his biggest spike within the 24-hour period surrounding that debate, gaining about 15,000 new followers.

Change in followership for Rubio from January 31–February 29, 2016

Not to be outdone, the very next day on February 26, 2016, Trump experienced a decent bump himself, collecting about 44,000 new followers on the day Governor Chris Christie endorsed him for the presidency.

Until next time…

Keep checking back in with the Moz Blog and Followerwonk on Twitter between now and the general election in November, where we’ll keep you posted on our latest analysis and findings of all things presidential on Twitter.

We’d also love to hear from you in the comments if you have any insights to share from issues or candidates you track on Twitter, or areas you’d like to see us explore in future posts. Don’t be shy!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

[Estimated read time: 15 minutes]

Like most of you, I get a lot of email. Here’s a look at all the marketing emails I received in my personal email in one 24-hour period:

That’s not even counting the transactional shipping confirmations and informational blog post notifications. Or all the work-related newsletters I have sent to my address at Moz.

I do not open most of this email. In fact, preparing for this blog post, I’ve had a really fun time shunting it off into a folder called “content examples.” But receiving so much email is an excellent opportunity to think about what motivates me to open and email, what doesn’t, and what really annoys me. It’s also given me the chance to think about the various types of email subject lines and how we could all be using them better.

So how do you, as a savvy email marketer, stand out in your customer’s amazingly crowded inbox? I’m here to help you do just that. First we’ll briefly cover the different types of email. Then we’ll talk subject lines and take a close look at how two very different companies — Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh and Moz — compose subject lines and what you can learn from both.

Types of email

Before we get into subject lines, it’s important to do a brief overview of the different types of emails, because different types of email require different things from a subject line.

Informational

Informational emails are educational. This doesn’t mean that they have a lesson plan attached, but it does mean that they’re geared to tell a reader something they didn’t already know. Change the logo on your mobile app? Send an informational email. Publish a new blog post? Send an informational email. Updating a user on how many airline miles they have or that a new report is ready? You get the idea.

These emails are (ostensibly) all about what the recipient needs and they (often) fall near the top of the marketing funnel. Here are some examples of informational emails I’ve received recently:

The newsletter

This particular newsletter tells me all the things I need to know about what’s happening in the publishing industry. They have the unsexiest subject lines ever, but their content is valuable enough that I open the email anyway.

Another favorite newsletter is the Moz Top 10. More on that later.

The blog post

Yay! A new blog post! There are other ways to receive updates about new blog posts, but some of us are old fashioned and we are talking email here.

The informational update

What has the Park Service been up to in this, their centennial year? I’m so glad you asked. There’s an email for that.

The report

I signed up to get the latest nonprofit jobs in Seattle emailed to me sometime around the time I graduated college. In 2001. Dear Idealist keeps on sending me that report. Every day. That’s a lot of emails, but they must be doing a good job because I haven’t unsubscribed yet.

Informational emails are strictly for the reader’s benefit and as such, you can often get away with less enticing subject lines and still preserve your open rate. Although it might also be tempting to loop news about your latest sale or promotion into the “Informational” category, those emails are actually asking the reader to do something, so they fall under the next category…

Sale or offer

If your personal inbox looks anything like mine, sale or offer emails are what most marketers are good at. It’s also where we marketers look for our conversions, so it’s really, really important for us that people open sales emails. Here’s a sample of the sales emails in my inbox:

Did you spot the red herring? That email from Amazon, while containing an offer, is also a triggered email. Amazon is really good at triggered emails. More on that below.

Transactional or triggered

According to MailChimp, transactional email is “email sent to an individual based on some action.” That could be anything from a new customer welcome email to a drip campaign a reader signs up for.

In the case of Amazon, I was looking at that steam cleaner and added it to my cart as I consider it. Actually, I added it to my cart to see if they’d add it to my daily deals (because they are just that good at tracking). No luck yet, but I’m patient.

Here are some other triggered emails from my inbox:

The order confirmation

The pending invite

The drip campaign

Most transactional and triggered emails are also emails that your reader is looking out for, so we’re not going to worry as much about their subject lines. As long as you’re being clear, you’re probably fine.

Types of email subject lines

Now that you have a really good handle on the types of email you can send, it’s time to think of the style of selling that particular email. Keep in mind that although we marketers like things to align in predictable categories, some of the best email subject lines often fall into more than one of the following categories (ooh! cross-genre subject lines!).

Direct

Make no bones about it, we have a deal for you. That deal is…

The direct, straightforward, unadorned subject line works for a company like Wolferman’s which prides itself on quality baked goods. If the information or deal is interesting enough, it appeals to a wide range of people and will never offend anyone.

Playful

Make someone laugh and they’ll remember you. Or at least they won’t delete your email outright. The only thing that would have made me like this email from Shutterfly more is if there was a big ol’ kiss emoji after “Mr. President.”

I’m also really a fan of this subject line from the Bernie Sanders campaign:

Notice that both of the playful subject lines here use pop culture references? That’s not a necessity (and can be dangerous if you’re too oblique), but these references can be a great way to tap into a reader’s memory and call upon all the images that your referent conjures.

Curiosity-inducing

I’ve ranted before about how people misuse the curiosity gap in their titles. But don’t underestimate the power of curiosity to get people to open emails. If you pique just the right amount, you’re in. This subject line is specific enough and yet open enough to make me want to click:

This one is not:

Personalized

Personalizing an email doesn’t just have to mean using someone’s name. Kissmetrics nails it when they say you can use location, time, personas, and more to make your reader feel like the email is just for them. Travelocity is famous for pulling together fabulous emails based on what you’re browsing and what trips you’ve purchased. I’d show you one, but they sent me this email:

And I think I over-opted-out. As discussed above, Amazon is another personalization rock star. They’ll send you triggered emails tailored to items you’ve browsed, items you’ve bought, items related to items you’ve bought — and it’s all right there in the subject line. However, personalization can go wrong if you’re acting on bad information.

No, I did not give Classmates my correct name when I registered over a decade ago. As a result, their personalization doesn’t pull hard at my subconscious. Instead, it gives me a good giggle.

Scarcity

Humans are hardwired to respond to scarce resources. Whether that means “There are only a few tickets left!” or “This offer expires in four hours!”, letting your email recipients know that something is limited can be a good way to get them to take action.

Call to action

Most frequently used by political parties (or so it seems right now), the call to action (CTA) subject line literally calls the recipient to take an action.

The “RE:” here is extraneous and annoying, but the CTA here works. I get a lot of similar emails that tell me to contact my senator or sign a petition.

The CTA-type subject line also works for marketers.

This email from Rejuvenation is a reminder, a call to action, and (if you read down the line far enough) an offer as well. You could invite your subscribers to “Come into the store for a special discount” or the classic “Tell us how we’re doing.” Both are calls to action.

A note on formatting subject lines

Whatever type of subject line you’re using, there are various things you can do within the text to make it stand out. You can use all caps:

Or add in some symbols:

Different audiences respond to different things, but to my mind both of these come off as gimmicky. I notice them but they almost never compel me to open that email. And when my local art museum started using them I died a little inside.

You can make your subject line extra long:

Or extra short:

Just remember that if your customer is reading your email on mobile (which 65% of people do), they can likely only see the first 50 characters of whatever you write. So I hope L.L. Bean wasn’t telling me there were 70 free shirts available, because I’ll never know.

How Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh uses email and email subject lines

As a new mom who does most of my shopping online, I get a lot of email from Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh.

Sometimes I get several per day.

Which makes Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh an easy case study for us to put all our email subject line knowledge to use.

Carter’s mostly uses the sale/offer type of email (except when I order something), so we’ll focus on those types of emails (plus, then I don’t have to show you how many times I’ve ordered from this company in the same time span). I received 25 emails from Carter’s or OshKosh in one 10-day stretch:

How I respond

First of all, that’s a lot of email. Granted, they are writing to an audience (me!) who isn’t getting a lot of sleep, and, as a result, has no short-term memory. But it is a little smothering, and I sometimes run a little animated clip through my brain of the Carter’s email team doing battle with the OshKosh team over who can send the most email the fastest. It isn’t pretty and invariably I lose.

We can chat about whether this volume of emails is effective; I did, after all, admit (just a few paragraphs ago) to a large number of purchases. But that’s more because I’m caught up in their rewards cycle and because at the end of a day full of marketing and mothering, online shopping is all I have the energy for. I might have a problem ;).

Really, though, I’d say this is too much email and I have since “managed my email preferences.”

What they could do better

Mix it up

Of those 25 emails, 16 used the direct approach. That’s a lot for a retailer, especially one sending this much email. Here’s a look at what other tactics they used:

Carter’s and OshKosh clearly have a handle on how to motivate people with deals and by time-limiting those deals. But I’d love to see them try to do more with playful subject lines. To be fair, after creating the above graphic, I received the following email:

It’s a step in the right direction?

Remember that it’s important to keep your customers engaged. Using a wider variety of subject line types and testing new territory can be a great way to do that.

Personalize

All-caps aside, this subject line would have been terrific:

If I had a girl. Carter’s has enough information about my browsing and purchase history by now to know that I have a son. They might be confused about his age because I’ve been stockpiling outfits for when he grows, but he is a boy. And no matter how gender neutral I try to be, I’m probably not going to outfit my son in dresses anytime soon.

The lesson: We’re digital marketers. We have A LOT of data on our customers. If you aren’t already using that data to customize your email marketing, impress your boss by asking how to start.

Don’t cry wolf

OMG I’m so sad I missed the 50% off sale this weekend. Wait, today everythings’s 60% off?

Promotions are awesome. They get your customers’ attention. The move old inventory. They increase your bottom line. And time-limited promotions are a very good way to tie into that fear of missing out that makes scarcity subject lines so effective.

But when I’ve been a customer for less than half a year and I already know the sale gets better and better and better the longer I wait, you’ve lost all the power that scarcity offers. Instead, I feel duped if I bought at the higher price and fail to be motivated by email subject lines that mostly tout the latest deal.

Be strategic about the strings you’re pulling with your subject lines. They’re a lot more effective that way.

Am I being unfair to Carter’s and OshKosh? Maybe. I’m sure that they have thoroughly tested their subject lines and related open and clickthrough rates. And let’s face it, creating emails at that volume while trying to maintain freshness is hard. Either way, there are some good lessons to be learned here (or in your reactions to your own inbox).

How we use subject lines for the Moz Top 10

Now let’s take a look at how well I’m doing in writing subject lines for the Moz Top 10.

The Moz Top 10 is a newsletter, so we’re obviously going to take a slightly different tack than your average retailer (at least at the sales level — don’t underestimate the power of a strong newsletter for your top-of-funnel content marketing), but there is still some insight to be gained from what works and what doesn’t. To understand the difference, I analyzed a year’s worth of editions.

If you’re counting, we split test five different subject lines (each going to an initial run of about 15,000 readers) for each bi-weekly edition. That’s about 130 different subject lines. I’ve split out some of the most instructive weeks below.

Note: This is not a controlled experiment. Things other than tone change from subject line to subject line in a given week, and if you try to compare open rates from one week to another, you’ll be lost (bonus points if you can pick out the edition where everyone was on vacation).

March 24, 2015: Curiosity and personalization work

This chart is representative of the most common trend across Moz Top 10 subject lines: piquing a reader’s curiosity and personalizing the subject line by using the word “you” are winning tactics with this audience.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
How Much Traffic Will You Lose Starting April 21? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			18.57
Predicting April 21 Traffic Losses and Debunking SEO Myths – Moz Top 10	✓						17.69
Mobile SEO-Pocalypse, SEO Myths, and the Good Side of Google’s Answer Boxes – Moz Top 10		✓					17.44
Exposing SEO Myths and Measuring the User Journey with Content Groupings – Moz Top 10	✓						16.44
Google’s Mobile Deadline Looms: How Will it Affect Your Traffic? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			18.14

What I could do better: I’d love to personalize the email further, but we just don’t have that kind of data on this list. And I’m going to want to remember to avoid subject lines that sound formulaic.

February 10, 2015: Just the facts

It’s not surprising that a direct headline works well for a newsletter like the Moz Top 10. In this case, the top two subject lines were directly worded. What is surprising, though, is that personalizing the subject line a little (adding “you”) actually caused the open rate to drop. This is something that bears more testing.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Twitter Takes Over the SERPs Plus Good Ways to Break Bad News to Your Clients – Moz Top 10		✓		✓			20
Twitter Cuts a Deal with Google and 5 Steps to a Universal SEO Strategy Audit – Moz Top 10	✓						22.13
Keep Clients Happy, Learn Omniture, and Audit Your SEO Strategy – Moz Top 10						✓	19.95
SEO Strategy Audit Plus Tips for Content Creation and Keyword Research – Moz Top 10	✓						21.12
The Consultant’s Dream Moz Top 10: Breaking Bad News (Well), Learning Omniture, and Saving Time			✓				20.24

Lesson learned: Assumptions are not always right. Test, test, test.

August 19, 2014: Scarcity for the loss

This newsletter will expire in 10 minutes. Seriously, we don’t use scarcity much in Moz Top 10 subject lines. The chart below illustrates why. If you think we should, I’d love it if you shared your ideas in the comments on how to effectively do that.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Google Favors Secure Sites Plus Why You Should Use Twitter Analytics – Moz Top 10	✓			✓			15.85
Link Echoes, HTTPS as Ranking Signal, and What New SEOs Need to Know – Moz Top 10	✓		✓				15.68
The Latest Tool Tips for SEOs: Smart Dashboards, Twitter Analytics, and Excel for Link Builders	✓				✓		14.99
Increase Your Email and Twitter Engagement Plus Improve Your Rankings Using HTTPS				✓		✓	15.56
What are Link Echoes and Why Should You Be Using HTTPS? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			16.84

Fewer than 15% of people opened the “scarcity” edition. That’s a poor open rate even for a week when everyone was clearly out of the office.

The takeaway: Write for your audience. In this case, I think marketers are so used to hearing “the latest” that it’s lost its power.

July 8, 2014: Sometimes clickbait wins

Did I hate myself a little for writing the winning subject line here? You bet. Did it cause a little controversy around the office? Absolutely. Did it work? Unfortunately, yes.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Does Google Read Text in Images? And the End of Author Photos – Moz Top 10			✓				18.88
Google Sells Domains and Canada Gets Tough on Spam – Moz Top 10	✓						20.09
Are You Using Robots.txt the Right Way? Plus How to Fix a Google Penalty – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			15.82
How-to Insights for Local SEO, Google Penalties, and Email Alerts for SEO – Moz Top 10	✓						18.85
Google Says Bye-Bye to Author Photos and Puts Domains up for Sale – Moz Top 10		✓					22.76

My trick when writing clickbaity titles is to be honest while you’re being playful. This was the week Google ditched author photos and started selling domains, so the subject line is strictly correct. It can also be misconstrued and I counted on our readers here to take this as playful rather than misleading. Their clicks said they wanted to read and our unsubscribes didn’t jump, so I think I skated through on this one.

What we could do better

There’s a lot to learn when writing subject lines. Based on the above data, I’m going to keep trying a few tactics at once. I’ll definitely try to keep up the playful tone and personalize when appropriate. I may never use a scarcity-based subject line again, and will always strive to pique the readers’ curiosity and interest without being misleading. In the long run, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Want to see how well I learn from this deep dive into email subject lines?

Sign up for the Moz Top 10.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a fear of local landing pages. But don’t worry! Confusion and concern over this common challenge have made it an FAQ in the local column of the Moz Q&A forum, and my goal here is to give you a prescription for meeting these projects with confidence, creativity, and even genuine enjoyment!

Up ahead: a definition, a “don’t” list, a plan of action, and a landing page mockup.

Quick definition: What’s a local landing page?

Local landing pages (aka city landing pages) are pages you create on a website to highlight a geographic aspect of a business for its customers. Local landing pages are most appropriate for:

• Service area businesses (SABs) that need to publicize the fact that they serve a variety of cities surrounding the city in which they are physically located. In this scenario, the goal of most local landing pages is to gain organic rankings for these service cities, as they’re unlikely to earn local pack rankings unless there is minimal geographic competition for the services offered.
• Multi-location brick-and-mortar businesses that need to publicize the fact that they have more than one forward-facing office. In this scenario, the goal will often be to get multiple offices ranking in the local packs by linking from the Google My Business listing for each office to its respective local landing page on the company’s website. You may also achieve organic visibility, as well, depending on the competition.

Diminish your fear by knowing what to avoid

Knowledge is power. By avoiding these common pitfalls, you’ll feel confident knowing that you’re developing a new set of pages that will help your client’s website, rather than harming it.

1. Do not publish fake addresses on local landing pages.

Tell clients that PO Boxes and virtual offices are considered ineligible in Google’s guidelines, so it’s not a good idea to use them on the website in an attempt to appear more local.

Be especially cautious here if your client is an SAB and gives you a string of addresses. Of course, an SAB can have multiple legitimate locations (like a pizza delivery chain) but if it’s a small business, your due diligence is required to make absolutely sure the addresses are legitimate and do not represent your client’s brother’s house, aunt’s house, friend’s house, etc.

Look the addresses up via Google Streetview. Do you see residences, or even empty lots? Red flag! Let such clients know that Google can read street-level signage and doesn’t take kindly to falsified address information. Google understands that SABs may operate out of a single home, but operating out a string of homes may look (and be!) spammy.

2. Do not engage in creating local landing pages for clients who lack a reasonable amount of time to discuss their business with you.

A minimum requirement is that they can have a phone session with you for each city you’re going to cover, but a much better hope lies with clients who are willing to make an active contribution to the project. *More on this later.

3. Do not engage in creating local landing pages if you don’t have enough information about the business to avoid creating thin or duplicate content.

This is related to point 2. Writing a paragraph and swapping out the city names on a set of pages is not a good plan, and you’ll encounter this lazy scenario on countless local business websites. Don’t be tempted to go this route just because your client’s competitors are getting away with it. Properly view them as weak competitors whom you can surpass with a superior effort.

4. Do not create city landing pages if no one involved in the project (including yourself) can discover a genuine reason (apart from a desire to rank) to differentiate cities and services from one another.

Don’t create these pages unless you can honestly say that you believe they will be useful and interesting to the company’s customers. *Suggestions for inspiration to follow.

5. Do not stuff local landing pages with blocks of city names, zip codes, or keywords.

Google’s Webmaster guidelines specifically state that they do not like this.

6. Beware call tracking numbers.

If your client wants to use call tracking numbers, be sure you fully understand the risks and options.

7. Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.

Link to them from a high-level menu.

8. Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages.

At some point in your work as a local SEO, you will be contacted by a company that serves most or all of a state, or multiple states. They will say, “Our goal is to rank for every single town and city in our service area.” If your client serves California, there are some 500 incorporated cities in the state, not to mention thousands of tiny towns.

Can you honestly build thousands of unique, high-quality pages?

With enough funding and a large staff of copywriters, this might be possible, but it’s going to be the exception rather than the rule for small-to-medium local businesses. It’s generally more reasonable to have the client designate their most important cities and target these first. Then, if need be, move on from there, provided that you can avoid all 7 of the above pitfalls in creating further landing pages. Recommending PPC for more minute coverage may be a wiser alternative to prevent website quality from suffering.

Sigh of relief! Now that you know the major errors to avoid, you can move forward with the landing page development project feeling confident that your work is going to help your client, rather than harming them. Gather that tension up into a ball and cast it away!

Jump-start landing page inspiration with tools, talk and action

Here’s a ready-made process for generating ideas for the content you’re going to be developing. I’m going to make the assumption that you’ve already had your client fill out some sort of questionnaire prior to taking them on. This questionnaire may have been really detailed, or kind of generic. If it missed geo-specific questions, the following process will help you glean the initial information you need from the business owner.

1. Ask your client (more) questions

By now, you’ve assessed that your client is willing to be engaged in the landing page process. Now, either create a second questionnaire, or, if preferable for both of you, get on the phone and cover all of the following:

• Every service offered
• Every major city/town served
• Most typical type of client
• Most typical client requests/needs/questions
• Services, tips, or advice that are unique to each city (such as different requirements based on laws, weather, terrain, style, precautions, codes, etc)
• Types of satisfaction guarantees offered
• Specials offered
• Why the business is better than its competitors
• Who those competitors are
• Participation in or support of local events, teams and organizations

*As you take notes, be sure you’re jotting down not just what your client says, but how they say it. Language matters, not only as a means of learning the lingo of your client’s industry, but in discovering whether corporate lingo actually matches customer speech.

2. Assess their local landing pages

From your notes from conversation #1, you’re ready to first pay a virtual call to the websites of every major local competitor your client mentioned. Assess their local landing pages, if they have them, for content quality, usability, and usefulness. There’s a good chance that you’ll see lazy efforts that you can surpass with your own work. Take notes about what you like and don’t like in the competitors’ landing pages. Note, too, what keywords they’re targeting.

3. Transform your notes into content

Now, it’s time to take your notes and turn them into:

• Unique, introductory text regarding the client’s services in each city
• At least one unique customer question and owner answer per page
• Specific advice/tips for that city that are unique to that city

4. Discover common questions and find their answers

Next, let’s fire up a really awesome tool to start generating additional topics. Hat tip to Linda Buquet who first alerted me to AnswerThePublic.com, a free tool that enables you to type in a keyword and generate the best list of related questions I’ve ever seen. It’s available in 5 countries, and even a simple search like “house painting” turns up 24 questions you can sort through to discover what types of queries people are commonly making about your client’s business model.

Return to the business owner for expert answers. Bingo! By now, you’ve got some very useful content already taking shape to help differentiate one landing page from another. I also like combing through Google’s “related searches” at the bottom of SERPs for further ideas.

5. Incorporate appropriate visuals

Now we turn to the visual documentation of your client’s business. Have them equip a designated staff member with a camera, either to take before-and-after photos of projects or to do a full video documentary of a minimum of 1–3 projects per city.

If your client’s industry isn’t of exceptional visual interest (plumbing, HVAC, accounting) a modest visual documentation, accompanied by a text transcript, should be sufficient to give customers a good idea of what it would be like to work with the business. If your client’s industry is highly visual (landscaping, architecture, home staging), the more you can show off their best work, the better. For the sake of authenticity, be sure that photo labeling and tagging are specific to the target city and that video narratives mention the target city.

• While you’re shooting footage, consider getting 1–3 video testimonials in each city from very happy clients and write transcripts. If competition isn’t stiff, even a single video testimonial can set the business apart. In tougher markets, go to extra effort with this step.
• An alternative (or addition) to video testimonials is use of an on-page traditional review app. And don’t forget that brick-and-mortar businesses can link to their various profiles on third-party review sites (Yelp, Google, etc).
• Have widely recognized customers? Get their permission to brag about it! For example: “We clean the carpets at every branch of Bank of America in San Diego,” “We designed the Transamerica building in San Francisco,” or “We groomed the Pomeranian who won Best in Class at the Boston Dog Show.” Be city-specific with this content.
• Consider the usefulness of interviewing staff who either operate each brick-and-mortar office or who travel to serve the SAB’s customers. A short, welcoming video that displays professionalism, approachability, and company ideals can help customers feel comfortable even before a transaction occurs.
• If there is an element of the business that changes from location to location (brick-and-mortar) or from city to city (SAB), be sure you are aware of this and describing this on the page. Some examples would be a class schedule for a yoga studio that’s unique to each location, or a landscaping company’s recommended schedule of yard cleaning at high elevations versus valley floor locations. This content should be highly visible on the page, as it’s highly relevant to city-specific user groups.
• Finally, think back to your assessment of your client’s competitors. Is there something they weren’t doing and that isn’t mentioned above that your client’s business inspires you to showcase? Maybe it’s something funny, extra persuasive, or extra local in flavor that would help your client stand out as particularly individualistic. Don’t hesitate to go beyond my basic suggestions to provide a creative edge for your client.

Pulling it all together

Fear is now a thing of the past. While you may be a bit buried under a heap of notebooks, spreadsheets, and docs, you’ve gathered both confidence and a wealth of resources for getting these local landing pages built. Whether you’re working with the owner’s webmaster or are implementing the development yourself, I hope the following basic mockup will help you get organized.

*I’m using an SAB for my example — a fictitious house painter who is targeting the town of Mendocino, California as part of his service area. If your landing pages are for a multi-location brick-and-mortar business, be certain that the very first thing on the page is the complete name, address and phone number of the respective location, preferably in Schema.

Click the image for a larger version in a new tab.

Key to the mockup

1. This section covers your introductory text — including a basic description of what the company does — plus geographic-specific advice, satisfaction guarantee information, and a mention of well-known clients served.
2. Here is a vertical section featuring 3 project showcase videos + text project summaries.
3. The reviews section features an on-page review widget, a request for customers to leave a review, and an invitation to see further reviews on third-party platforms.
   
4. Here’s where we put our question research to work, with the owner answering questions he says customers frequently ask, plus questions generated by a tool and other research.
5. Here’s an area for extra creativity. We’re featuring a “Meet the Owner” video, some relevant local news, and mentioning company support for local entities, including a special deal.
6. While we’ve sprinkled calls-to-action throughout the page, never forget that final CTA in closing up!

Speaking of closing up…

Your landing pages won’t look exactly like my sample mockup (hopefully they’ll be a lot nicer!) but I do hope this exercise has helped you gain confidence in moving fearlessly forward with these projects. I want to stress again the importance of owner involvement in this scenario. Your questionnaires and phone conversations are invaluable, and even if you have to use a crowbar with some clients, the effort truly shows in the authenticity, usefulness, and persuasiveness of the finished product.

I did want to take a minute to talk about scale, because this also comes up pretty frequently in our forum. Depending on available funding and creativity, the approach I’ve described is likely scalable for a medium-to-large business with anywhere from two to a few dozen target cities. Once you get beyond that, the project might get out of hand in terms of ROI, but I want to provide a couple of real-world examples.

1. I’ve cited REI before, but I’ll do it again. They operate 143 stores across 36 states, and I continue to be impressed by the effort they’ve made to differentiate their landing pages for each location. An interactive map drills down to pages like this: http://www.rei.com/stores/san-diego.html. They’re not quite as text-intensive as my mockup, but the inclusion of a schedule of interesting local events makes these pages feel cared-for and worth visiting.
2. If you’re operating at a similar scale, like Orchard Supply Hardware with 91 stores, and don’t feel you can or should make the investment in landing pages, you’ll likely end up going with something like a city/zip code search that shows store NAP in a given radius. Granted, this approach is going to be lacking in SEO opportunities, but if your brand is big enough and your competition isn’t too tough, it’s an option.

Do you have any other good ideas for making your local landing pages valuable? Please share them with the community!

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Posted by tian_wang

With today’s blog post I’m sharing everything one needs to know about an underappreciated tool: the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets. In this post I’ll be covering the following:

1. What is the Google Analytics add-on?

2. How to install and set up the Google Analytics add-on.

3. How to create a custom report with the Google Analytics add-on.

4. A step-by-step worked example of setting up an automated report.

5. Further considerations and pitfalls to avoid.

Thanks to Moz for having me, and for giving me the chance to write about this simple and powerful tool!

1. What is the Google Analytics add-on and why should I care?

I’m glad I asked. Simply put, the Google Analytics add-on is an extension for Google Sheets that allows you to create custom reports within Sheets. The add-on works by linking up to an existing Analytics account, using Google’s Analytics API and Regular Expressions to filter the data you want to pull, and finally gathering the data into an easy and intuitive format that’s ripe for reporting.

The Google Analytics add-on’s real value-add to a reporting workflow is that it’s extremely flexible, reliable, and a real time-saver. Your reporting will still be constrained by the limitations of Sheets itself (as compared to, say, Excel), but the Sheets framework has served almost every reporting need I’ve come across to date and the same will probably be true for most of you!

In a nutshell, the Add-On allows you to:

• Pull any data that you’d be able to access in the Analytics API (i.e analytics.google.com) directly into a spreadsheet
• Easily compare historical data across time periods
• Filter and segment your data
• Automate regular reporting
• Make tweaks to existing reports to get new data (no more re-inventing wheels!)

If this all sounds like you could use it, read on!

2. Getting started: How to install and set up the Google Analytics add-on

2A. Installing the Google Analytics add-on

• Go into Google Sheets.
• On the header bar, under your Workbook’s title, click add-on.
• This opens a drop-down menu — click “Get add-ons.”
• In the following window, type “Google Analytics” into the search bar on the top right and hit enter.

• The first result is the add-on we want, so go ahead and install it.

• Refresh your page and confirm the add-on is installed by clicking “Add-ons” again. You should see an option for “Google Analytics.”

That’s all there is to installation!

2B. Setting up the Google Analytics add-on

Now that we have the Google Analytics add-on installed, we need to set it up by linking it to an Analytics account before we can use it.

• Under the “Add-ons” tab in Sheets, hover “Google Analytics” to expose a side-bar as shown below.

• Click “Create New Report.” You’ll see a menu appear on the right side of your screen.

• In this menu, set the account information to the Analytics account you want to measure.
• Fill out the metrics and dimensions you want to analyze. You can further customize segmentation within the report itself later, so just choose a simple set for now.
• Click “Create Report.” The output will be a new sheet, with a report configuration that looks like this:

• Note: This is NOT your report. This is the setup configuration for you to let the add-on know exactly what information you’d like to see in the report.

Once you’ve arrived at this step, your set-up phase is done!

Next we’ll look at what these parameters mean, and how to customize them to tailor the data you receive.

3. Creating a custom report with the Google Analytics add-on

So now you have all these weird boxes and you’re probably wondering what you need to fill out and what you don’t.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at what happens if you don’t fill out anything additional, and just run the report from here.

To run a configured report, click back into the “Add-Ons” menu and go to Google Analytics. From there, click “Run Reports.” Make sure you have your configuration sheet open when you do this!

You’ll get a notification that the report was either successfully created, or that something went wrong (this might require some troubleshooting).

Following the example above, your output will look something like this:

This is your actual report. Hooray! So what are we actually seeing? Let’s go back to the “Report Configuration” sheet to find out.

The report configuration:

Type and View ID are defaults that don’t need to be changed. Report Name is what you want your report to be called, and will be the name generated for the report sheet created when you run your reports.

So really, in the report configuration above, all the input we’re seeing is:

• Last N Days = 7
• Metrics = ga:users

In other words, this report shows the total number of sessions in the specified View ID over the last week. Interesting maybe, but not that helpful. Let’s see what happens if we make a few changes.

I’ve changed Last N Days from 7 to 30, and added Date as a Dimension. Running the report again yields the following output:

By increasing the range of data pulled from last 7 to 30 days, we get a data from a larger set of days. By adding date as a dimension, we can see how much traffic the site registered each day.

This is only scratching the surface of what the Google Analytics add-on can do. Here’s a breakdown of the parameters, and how to use them:

Parameter Name	Required?	Description & Notes	Example Value(s)
Report Name	No	The name of your report. This will be the name of the report sheet that’s generated when you run reports. If you’re running multiple reports, and want to exclude one without deleting its configuration setup, delete the report name and the column will be ignored next time you run your reports.	“January Organic Traffic”
Type	No	Inputs are either “core” or “mcf,” representative of Google’s Core Reporting API and Multi-Channel Funnels API respectively. Core is the default and will serve most of your needs!	“core” / “mcf”
View (Profile) ID	Yes	The Analytics view that your report will pull data from. You can find your view ID in the Analytics interface, under the Admin tab.	ga:12345678
Start / End Date	No	Used alternatively with Last N Days (i.e you must use exactly one), allows you to specify a range of data to pull from.	2/1/2016 – 2/31/2016
Last N Days	No	Used alternatively with Start / End Date (i.e you must use exactly one), pulls data from the last N days from the current date. Counts backwards from the current date.	Any integer
Metrics	Yes	Metrics you want to pull. You can include multiple metrics per report. Documentation on Metrics and dimensions can be found in Google’s Metrics & Dimensions Explorer	“ga:sessions”
Dimensions	No	Dimensions you want your metrics to be segmented by. You can include multiple dimensions per report. Documentation on metrics and dimensions can be found here.	“ga:date”
Sort	No	Specifies an order to return your data by, can be used to organize data before generating a report. Note: you can only sort by metrics/dimensions that are included in your report.	“sort=ga:browser, ga:country”
Filters	No	Filter the data included in your report based on any dimension (not just those included in the report).	“ga:country==Japan; ga:sessions>5”
Segment	No	Use segments from the main reporting interface.	“users::condition:: ga:browser==Chrome”
Sampling Level	No	Directs the level of sampling for the data you’re pulling. Analytics samples data by default, but the add-on can increase the precision of sampling usage.	“HIGHER_PRECISION”
Start Index	No	Shows results starting from the current index (default = 1, not 0). For use with Max Results, when you want to retrieve paginated data (e.g if you’re pulling 2,000 results, and want to get results 1,001 – 2,000).	Integer
Max Results	No	Default is 1,000, can be raised to 10,000.	Integer up to 10,000
Spreadsheet URL	No	Sends your data to another spreadsheet.	URL for sheet where you want data to be sent

By using these parameters in concert, you can arrive at a customized report detailing exactly what you want. The best part is, once you’ve set up a report in your configuration sheet and confirmed the output is what you want, all you have to do to run it again is run your reports in the add-on! This makes regular reporting a breeze, while still bringing all the benefits of Sheets to bear.

Some important things to note and consider, when you’re setting up your configuration sheet:

• You can include multiple report configurations in the the sheet (see below):

In the image above, running the report configuration will produce four separate reports. You should NOT have one configuration sheet per report.

• Although you can have your reports generated in the same workbook as your configuration sheet, I recommend copying the data into another workbook or using the Spreadsheet URL parameter to do the same thing. Loading multiple reports in one workbook can create performance problems.

• You can schedule your reporting to run automatically by enabling scheduled reporting within the Google Analytics add-on. Note: this is only helpful if you are using “Last N Days” for your time parameter. If you’re using a date range, your report will just give you the same data for that range every month.

The regularity options are hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

4. Creating an automated report: A worked example

So now that we’ve installed, set up, and configured a report, next up is the big fish, the dream of anyone who’s had to do regular reporting: automation.

As an SEO, I use the Google Analytics add-on for this exact purpose for many of my clients. I’ll start by assuming you’ve installed and set up the add-on, and are ready to create a custom report configuration.

Step one: Outline a framework

Before we begin creating our report, it’s important we understand what we want to measure and how we want to measure it. For this example, let’s say we want to view organic traffic to a specific set of pages on our site from Chrome browsers and that we want to analyze the traffic month-over-month and year-over-year.

Step two: Understand your framework within the add-on

To get everything we want, we’ll use three separate reports: organic traffic in the past month (January 2016), organic traffic in the month before that (December 2015), and organic traffic in the past month, last year (January 2015). It’s possible to include this all in one report, but I recommend creating one report per date period, as it makes organizing your data and troubleshooting your configuration significantly easier.

Step three: Map your key elements to add-on parameters

Report One parameter breakdown:

Report Name – 1/1/2016

• Make it easily distinguishable from the other reports we’ll be running

Type – core

• The GA API default

View (Profile) ID

• The account we want to pull data from

Start Date – 1/1/2016

• The beginning date we want to pull data from

End Date – 1/31/2016

• The cutoff date for the data we want to pull

Metrics – ga:sessions

• We want to analyze sessions for this report

Dimensions – ga:date

• Allows us to see traffic the site received each day in the specified range

Filters – ga:medium==organic;ga:landingpagepath=@resources

• We’ve included two filters, one that specifies only organic traffic and another that specifies sessions that had a landing page with “resources” in the URL (resources is the subdirectory on Distilled’s website that houses our editorial content)
• Properly filling out filters and segments requires specific syntax, which you can find on Google’s Core Reporting API resources.

Segments – sessions::condition::ga:browser==Chrome

• Specifies that we only want session data from Chrome browsers

Sampling Level – HIGHER_PRECISION

• Specifies that we want to minimize sampling for this data set

Report One output: Past month’s sessions

Now that we’ve set up our report, it’s time to run it and check the results.

So, in the month of January 2016, the resources section on Distilled’s website saw 10,365 sessions that satisfied the following conditions:

• organic source/medium
• landing page containing “resources”
• Chrome browser

But how do we know this is accurate? It’s impossible to tell at face value, but you can reliably check accuracy of a report by looking at the analogous view in Google Analytics itself.

Confirming Report One data

Since the Google Analytics add-on is an analogue to what you find on analytics.google.com, in your account, we can combine separate pieces in GA to achieve the same effect as our report:

Date Range

Organic Source/Medium

Landing Page Path & Browser

The result

Hooray!

Now that we’ve confirmed our framework works, and is showing us what we want, creating our other two reports can be done by simply copying the configuration and making minor adjustments to the parameters.

Since we want a month-over-month comparison and a year-over-year comparison for the exact same data, all we have to do is change the date range for the two reports.

One should detail the month before (December 2015) and the other should detail the same month in the previous year (January 2015). We can run these reports immediately.

The results?

Total Sessions In January 2015 (Reporting Month, Previous Year: 2,608

Total Sessions In December 2015 (Previous Month): 7,765

Total Sessions In January 2016 (Reporting Month): 10,365

We’re up 33% month-over-month and 297% year-over-year. Not bad!

Every month, we can update the dates in the configuration. For example, next month we’ll be examining February 2016, compared to January 2016 and February 2015. Constructing a dashboard can be done in Sheets, as well, by creating an additional sheet that references the outputs from your reports!

5. Closing observations and pitfalls to avoid

The Google Analytics add-on probably isn’t the perfect reporting solution that all digital marketers yearn for. When I first discovered the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets, I was intimidated by its use of Regular Expressions and thought that you needed to be a syntax savant to make full use of the tool. Since then, I haven’t become any better at Regular Expressions, but I’ve come to realize that the Google Analytics add-on is versatile enough that it can add value to most reporting processes, without the need for deep technical fluency.

I was able to cobble together each of the reports I needed by testing, breaking, and researching different combinations of segments, filters, and frameworks and I encourage you to do the same! You’ll most likely be able to arrive at the exact report you need, given enough time and patience.

One last thing to note: the Google Analytics interface (i.e what you use when you access your analytics account online) has built-in safeguards to ensure that the data you see matches the reporting level you’ve chosen. For example, if I click into a session-level report (e.g landing pages), I’ll see mostly session-level metrics. Similarly, clicking into a page-level report will return page-level metrics. In the Google Analytics add-on, however, this safeguard doesn’t exist due to the add-on being designed for greater versatility. It’s therefore all the more important that you’re thorough in outlining, designing, and building your reporting framework within the add-on. After you’ve configured a custom report and successfully run it, be sure to check your results against the Google Analytics interface!

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Good advice in general that also holds true for using the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets.

Supplementary resource appendix:

• Kristi Hines’ Google Analytics for Beginners guide – See title.

• Google’s Analytics Core Reporting API Documentation – Dig around here to find out how to build reports that give you exactly what you’re looking for!

• Avinash Kaushik’s Analytics Resource – Discusses the Google Analytics reporting framework and how to think about metrics and sessions.

• RegExr – General Regular Expressions resource.

• Debuggex – Visual Regular Expressions debugging tool.

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Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

How do you take your potential customers’ problems and turn them into a conversion success? If you’re having trouble with low conversion rates on high-traffic landing pages, don’t worry — there’s help. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a process to turn your landing page objections into improved conversion rates.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about overcoming objections on your landing pages in order to improve conversion rates. So this a process that I have stolen part and parcel from Conversion Rate Experts, a British consulting company that Moz has used a couple of times to help with our campaigns. Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson have just been phenomenal for this stuff.

Look, they’re not the only ones who do it. A lot of people in conversion rate optimization use a process similar to this, but it’s something I talk about and share so often that I thought, hey, let’s bring it to Whiteboard Friday.

Enter a problem…

So a lot of the time marketers have this problem where a lot of people are visiting a page, a landing page where you’re trying to sell someone or get someone to take a conversion action, maybe sign up for an email list or join a community or download an app, take a free trial of something, test out a free tool or buy an actual product, like in this case my minimalist noise-canceling headphones.

They are very minimalist indeed thanks to my subpar drawing skills. But when lots of people are visiting this page and very few are converting, you’ve got a conversion rate optimization problem and challenge, and this process can really help you through it.

So first off, let’s start with the question around what’s a low conversion rate?

The answer to that is it really depends. It depends on who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re in business to consumer ecommerce, like selling headphones, then you’re getting what I’d say is relatively qualified traffic. You’re not just blasting traffic to this page that’s coming from sources that maybe don’t even know what they’re getting, but in fact people who clicked here knew that they were looking for headphones. 1.5% to 2%, that’s reasonably solid. Below that you probably have an issue. It’s likely that you can improve it.

With email signups, if you’re trying to get people to convert to an email list, 3% to 5% with B2B. Software as a service, it’s a little bit lower, 0.5% to 1%. Those tend to be tougher to get people through. This number might be higher if the B2B product that you’re serving and the SaaS product is a free trial or something like that. In fact, a software free trial usually is in the 1.5% to 2% range. A free app install, like if people are getting to an app download page or to an app’s homepage or download page, and you’re seeing below 4% or 5%, that’s probably a problem. Free account signup, if you’re talking about people joining a community or maybe connecting a Facebook or a Google account to start a free account on a website, that’s maybe in the 2% to 3% range.

But these are variable. Your mileage may vary. But I want to say that if you start from these assumptions and you’re looking and you’re going, “Wow, we’re way under these for our target,” yeah, let’s try this process.

Collect contact information

So what we do to start, and what Conversion Rate Experts did to start, is they collect contact information for three different groups of people. The first group is people who’ve heard of your product, your service, your company, but they’ve never actually tried it. Maybe they haven’t even made their way to a landing page to convert yet, but they’re in your target demographic. They’re the audience you’re trying to reach.

The second group is people who have tried out your product or service but decided against it. That could be people who went through the shopping cart but abandoned it, and so you have their email address. It could be people who’ve signed up for an email newsletter but canceled it, or signed up for an account but never kept using it, or signed up for a free trial but canceled before the period was over. It could be people who have signed up for a mailing list to get a product but then never actually converted.

Then the third one is people who have converted, people who actually use your stuff, like it, have tried it, bought it, etc.

You want to interview them.

You can use three methods, and I recommend some combination of all of these. You can do it over email, over the phone, or in person. When we’ve done this specifically in-house for Moz, or when Conversion Rate Experts did it for Moz, they did all three. They interviewed some folks over email, some folks they talked to over the phone, some folks they went to, literally, conferences and events and met with them in person and had those interviews, those sit-down interviews.

Then they grouped them into these three groups, and then they asked slightly different questions, variations of questions to each group. So for people who had heard of the product but never actually tried it, they asked questions like: “What have you heard about us or about this product? What would make you want to try it, and what objections do you currently have that’s stopping you from doing that?”

For people who sort of walked away, they maybe tried or they didn’t get all the way through trying, but they walked away, they didn’t end up converting or they didn’t stick with it, we could say: “What made you initially interested? What objections did you have, and how did you overcome those? What made you change your mind or decide against this product?” Oftentimes that’s a mismatch of expectations versus what was delivered.

Then for the people who loved it, who are loyal customers, who are big fans, you can say: “Well, what got you interested? What objections did you have and how did you overcome them? What has made you stick with us? What makes you love us or this product or this service, this newsletter, this account, this community, and if you did love it, can we share your story?” This is powerful because we can use these later on for testimonials.

Create a landing page

Then C, in this process, we’re going to actually create a landing page that takes the answers to these questions, which are essentially objections, reasons people didn’t buy, didn’t convert or weren’t happy when they did, and we’re going to turn them into a landing page that offers compelling explanations, compelling reasons, examples, data and testimonials to get people through that process.

So if you hear, for example, “Hey, I didn’t buy this because I wasn’t sure if the right adapters would be included for my devices,” or, “I travel on planes a lot and I didn’t know whether the headphones would support the plane use that I want to have,” great, terrific. We’re going to include what the adapters are right on there, which airlines they’re compatible with, all that kind of information. That’s going on the page.

If they say, “Hey, I actually couldn’t tell how big the headphones were. I know you have dimensions on there, but I couldn’t tell how big they were from the photos,” okay, let’s add some photos of representative sample sizes of things that people are very familiar with, maybe a CD, maybe an iPhone that people are like, “Oh yeah, I know the size of a CD. I know the size of an iPhone. I can compare that against the headphones.” So now that’s one of the images in there. Great, we’ve answered the objection.

“I wasn’t sure if they had volume control.” Great. Let’s put that in a photo.

“Is tax and shipping included in the cost? I didn’t want to get into a shopping cart situation where I wasn’t sure.” Perfect. We’re going to put in there, “Tax included. Free shipping.”

“Is the audio quality good enough for audiophiles and pros because I’m really . . .” well, terrific. Let’s find a known audiophile, let’s add their testimonial to the page.

We’re essentially going one by one through the objections that we hear most frequently here, and then we’re turning those into content on the page. That content can be data, it can be reasons, it can be examples, it can be testimonials. It’s whatever we needed to be to help get people through that purchase process.

Split test

Then, of course, with every type of conversion rate optimization test and landing page optimization, we want to actually try some variations. So we’re going to do a split test of the new page against the old one, and if we see there’s stronger conversion rate, we know we’ve had success.

If we don’t, we can go back to the drawing board and potentially broaden our audience here, try and understand how have we not overcome these objections, maybe show this new page to some of these people and see what additional objections they’ve got, all that kind of stuff.

This process is really powerful. It helps you uncover the problems and issues that you may not even know exist. In my experience, it’s the case that when companies try this, whether it’s for products or for services, for landing pages, for new accounts, for apps, whatever it is, they tend to uncover the same small set of answers from these groups over and over again. It’s just a matter of getting those four or five questions right and answering them on the landing page in order to significantly improve conversion.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your suggestions, your ideas, your feedback, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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