seo

Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson

Everybody’s talking about content. And everybody’s writing content. SEOs, social media specialists, agencies, marketing departments, probably even your mom. And a lot of it isn’t pretty.

Hopefully, by now, you got the memo that if you want your content to grow your business, it can’t be crap.

And hopefully you’re ready to do something about it.

There is a very tiny (yet very significant) theme — a shift in perspective — that is important to embody when you’re generating content for your website, blog, and social media outlets (oh, and offline, too):

It’s not about you.

It’s just not.

Even though you may be one of your company’s biggest fans, you are not your target audience. If you want to attract customers to your brand and your community, your content needs to reflect the fact that you understand your customer. That you’ve actually thought about and considered the challenges they face which make your product or service a necessity in their lives.

And you need to do all that without making it about you.

Try using foundational and community building content

In general, there are two types of content that you need on your website; we call them foundational content and community building content.

Foundational content is the important stuff that permanently lives on your website. It’s the inherently self-promotional stuff that explains who you are and what you do. It’s your about page, your sales pages (products or services), and it tends to be (but isn’t always) pretty static. Foundational content is the stuff that’s pretty much impossible not to make about you because it is, in fact, about you. As a result, in order to attract customers to your community with your foundational content, you’ve got to pack it full of value.

Community building content is less about what you do and more about what you know. It usually lives on your blog, is dynamic, and indirectly promotes your brand (and earns links). It’s what bolsters your online reputation as an expert. It builds trust, establishes credibility, and naturally attracts people to you. Community building content is most effective when it’s not self-promotional. It doesn’t need to say your company name. Instead, it needs to be completely focused on your customer and the value that you can provide or point them towards.

Patagonia is a really great example of providing value in both types of content. Whether it’s foundational or community building, they focus on the customer, their needs, and the experience. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Packing value into foundational content

In Patagonia’s foundational content, they focus their message not just on how cool their product looks or even how functional it is (though they don’t hide those things), but also on the broader concerns of their target audience.

This is an email marketing promotion that my husband just recently received about the Encapsil Parka:

Notice how instead of just bragging about the fact that this is the best down parka ever made (all about them), Patagonia is also going to show you what they mean by providing value through video (all about the customer).

If you click through to the video, the content boasts “how little is used” to make the jacket, something that is important to consumers who respect (and are drawn to) the Patagonia brand. Patagonia is balancing self-promotion with something that is useful and enhances the experience.

Even though Patagonia’s intention is to sell this product, they are committed to integrating value into their foundational content so that they are serving their customer. The page is also packed with additional videos, details, social proof, customer testimonials, and the opportunity to live chat. All. Kinds. Of. Value.

What community building content looks like

About a week later, my husband also received this email from Patagonia:

This is Tommy. He climbs rocks for a living. He’s a Patagonia Ambassador (that’s code for bad-ass-rock-climber).

This email marketing promotion clicks through to a post on the Patagonia blog about Tommy. Even though it lives on the Patagonia blog, it doesn’t plug Patagonia products, it doesn’t even link to any associated Patagonia rock climbing gear. It’s all about Tommy, his (kind of scary) adventures, and his drive to be a standup guy.

This is community building content (and it probably attracts a lot of links, too). It’s indirectly self-promotional. It speaks to the kind of people that Patagonia wants to attract to their community. My guess (and presumably Patagonia’s guess, too) is that people who like guys like Tommy resonate with what Patagonia stands for as a company and they want to be a part of what they’re doing (which means buy their products and join their community).

You can do this with a content strategy

You don’t have to be a ginormous brand like Patagonia to generate the kinds of content that will attract customers to your community. You just need to have a content strategy that will get you from where you are to where you’d like to be.

An ideal content strategy aligns the goals of your business with the expectations of your target audience. If you want to build a thriving community around your company, you’ve got to have a strategy that considers the people who are going to be reading your content and the experience that you want them to have.

The best place to start is with a content audit of your existing content. If you want to attract people to your community with your content, you’ve got to make it worth reading. That means over the first several months (and possibly beyond) you’re going to need to spend some time transforming what exists: improve what’s worth revising and ditch the rest.

Re-working your foundational content

When you’re auditing your foundational content, pay attention to whether it has any value or if it’s all about you. Certainly your content is going to be self-promotional (it is, after all, your website), but you can communicate what you do or sell and still be focused on the customer and their experience.

Even with your ‘about’ or ‘policy’ pages, you can use creative ways to improve the experience and add more value. You should also put some thought into the following:

• Your why

  Have you figured out your why yet? Focus on your passion and what makes you unique in your space. Why are you different from your competition? What is it that you like to do? Get very clear about what you do well and why and then make that what you’re all about.
   
• Your customer

  Who exactly are you targeting (remember, the whole world is not your customer)? Develop a persona around them. Get to know your semi-fictional audience members and keep them in mind as you manipulate your content.
   
• Their challenges

  What challenges does your audience have? Define their pain points and then make sure your content addresses them.
   
• Where they’re coming from

  At what level in the conversion funnel might your customer be visiting this page? In order to provide the best experience possible, your content should reflect this.

Balance the ‘all about me’ in your foundational content with the value that better serves your customer. Instead of having a page with a couple paragraphs of text and some bullets like this:

Supplement the textual information with things like video, blog posts, case studies, infographics, and testimonials:

Making these simple changes can make a big difference in your lift:

Integrating value into your foundational content is really about two things:

1. Satisfying user intent

   The purpose of your foundational content is to convert. If you don’t provide anything but a couple paragraphs that give your 30 second elevator speech, you’ve just lost the opportunity for a sale. 

    
2. User experience
   
Making sure that you’re providing the best user experience and that it’s consistent across your website, blog, and social media outlets, as well as your offline efforts.

The more value you provide with your foundational content, the more desirable you become, the more trust you build, the more you appeal to the person who is on the other side of that search. Again, anything that is going to make it less about you and more about them.

The key is to balance all of your foundational content with some community building content and then you’ve won the internet.

The angle on community building content

First things first. Just because you have a blog, doesn’t mean you always have to write about the stuff you sell (remember the 80/20 rule?). Same goes for your social media outlets. That gets old quick and can be pretty limiting in terms of the audience you can engage. It’s ok to promote your products or services on your blog, but work to keep that to 20% of the time.

Focus on developing community building content on your blog. It’s the powerhouse that can help you reach the objectives you have for your business, and also attract (the right) customers to your community. But again, same thing applies: lay off the self-promotion.

Community building content can be blog posts like this one from SimpliSafe or infographics like this one that SEOgadget lovingly created for one of their clients:

Community building content can also be video like these tech product updates from Grovo:

…or even more in-depth resources like this simple and free e-book from Portent or these guides from Pippen’s Plugins.

The bottom line with your community building content is that the focus needs to be on your customer. It’s not meant to directly promote your company. You want to generate content that indirectly communicates your strengths and illustrates your expertise and knowledge. If your customers can find alignment with what they’re searching for and the content you’re providing, chances are, they will be more inclined to not only be part of your community, but also purchase your products and services.

Before you write your community building content, consider things like:

• The goals of your (potential) customer
  You know what your goals are for your business, but what about the goals of your target audience? What are their intentions with your content?
   
• Depth in your content
  What can you help them learn or better understand? Can you change their mind about an industry misconception or challenge their beliefs on a particular subject?
   
• Satisfying a need
  How can you serve their needs? Can you provide advice, ideas, instructions, suggestions, a guide? Your goal is to focus on providing quality content that that people really want (and are searching for).

As you’re creating community building content, consider following the 70/20/10 principle like Ian Lurie, Tom Cruise, and the dude from Coke do.

The basic gist is within your content strategy should look like this: 70% of your content should be a mix of mainstream stuff (knowledge, advice, and how-to type content); 20% goes along the same lines as the 70%, but with a little risk taking (controversial or attempting to attract a new audience); and 10% is the super cool stuff that may completely bomb but showcases your innovative side.

The thing about this approach is that it will help you to challenge the direction of your community building content so that you avoid just creating the same kind of stuff over and over (which will provide a more exciting experience for your users). It will both satisfy your existing customers and community members and attract new people who resonate with what you’re putting out there.

Even more importantly, the 70/20/10 principle will push who you are as a company which is really important when you’re growing a community. Your community building content needs to make a statement about your brand, showing your community what you’re capable of and what you believe in. All stuff that will attract them to you (and keep them there).

Some final pointers

A couple (ok, three) more things to keep in mind:

1. There is no magic formula
   
It’s really important to have a content strategy that will assist you in working toward goals for your business. And it’s also really important that you create an execution plan that will help translate all of the stuff you want to accomplish into actionable, chewable pieces. But keep in mind that there is no magic number of posts that will attract customers to your business and your community. It’s the quality of your business, your content, and you.
   
   

As you work to develop strong content, keep in mind that this is an ongoing process that involves constant iteration. Don’t plan an execution calendar for any longer than a few months. Let your strategy drive, but listen to your content. Allow the freedom to be agile and change course based on what happens when your content is actually released. 

    
2. Bring it back to your goals

   Allow your content to take you on unexpected journeys. Be open to new ideas, consider the feedback you’re getting in blog comments and from people who provide input in real life. If a topic in your strategy suddenly becomes urgent, move it up in your execution plan. Be flexible. Just always make sure that you bring it back to your goals. 

When you ensure that your content is always in alignment with your business objectives and what your customers need, you’re clearing the noise. You’re staying focused on producing what’s important which helps to reduce anxiety, workload, and keeps you on track.

    
3. Good content is an investment in your business
   
Quality content is an asset that builds value in your business. Whether it’s a blog post, guide, whitepaper, case study, infographic, or video, your content is going to attract people to your business and your community (ongoing).


   
   Creating content that’s valuable is not always a quick and easy task. Whether you’re committing to this for your own business or you’re an agency assisting a client with content, it’s going to take some time.


   
   Start small. We’ve found with our clients that committing to two small (quality) posts a month is a realistic frequency (but it really depends on your goals and your strategy). If you’re developing content that’s more extensive like an in-depth guide or an infographic, reduce the frequency that month. Instead of spreading yourself thin on two, put all of your energy into one heavy hitter and give it the attention it deserves. After all, it’s an investment in your business.

Your content is meant to serve a purpose

Building and growing a community around your business can be done with an investment in a good strategy, content, outreach, and a lot of hard work. But keep in mind that your content isn’t just meant to rank, it’s intended to serve a purpose. Draw people in with your community building content, and then pack your foundational content so full of value that making the sale is the natural next step.

What interesting ways are you integrating value into your content, or have you seen other companies doing? I’d love for you to share your experiences in the comments below.

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Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been hiding from my natural geekiness recently. My last few blog posts and my most recent presentations have all been about broad marketing ideas, things that play out well in the boardroom, and big picture “future of the industry” stuff.

Although those topics are all well and good, sometimes I need to feed the geek. And my geek lives on logic and maths (yes, I’m going to use the *s* throughout – it’s how we roll in the UK and that’s where I studied). One of our most recent hires in our London office is a fellow maths graduate and I’ve been enjoying the little discussions and puzzles.

(The last one we worked on together: in how many number bases does the number 2013 end in a “3”? Feel free to share your answers and workings in the comments.)

Rather than just purely geek out over pointless things, I have been casting my mind over the ways that mathematical ideas can help us out as marketers; either by making us better at our jobs, or by helping us understand more advanced or abstract concepts. Obviously a post like this can only scratch the surface, so I’ve designed it to link out to a bunch of resources and further reading. In approximate ascending order of difficulty and prerequisites, here are some of my favourite mathematical ideas for marketers:

Averaging averages

The first and simplest idea is really a correction of a common misconception. We were talking about it here in the context of some data we were visualising for a client. The problem goes like this:

Our client had data for average income broken down by all combinations of age, location, and gender (details changed to protect the innocent). We wanted to get the average income by gender.

It’s tempting to think that you can do this from the data provided by averaging all the female values and averaging all the male values, but that would be incorrect. If the age or geographic distribution is not perfectly uniform by gender, then we will get the wrong answer. Consider the following entirely made up example:

• Female, 25, London –  Average: 30,000 (10,000 people)
• Female, 26, London – Average: 31,000 (11,000 people)

It’s tempting to say that the average for the whole group is 30,500. In fact, it’s 30,524 (because of the hidden variable that there are more in the second group than the first).

You will often encounter this in marketing when presented with percentages. Suppose you have a campaign that made 200% ROI in month one and 250% ROI in month two. What’s the ROI of the campaign to date?

Answer: anywhere in the range 200-250%. You have no idea where.

Try it out on this brainteaser hat-tip @tomanthonyseo:

If I drive at 30mph for 60 miles, how fast do I have drive the next 60 to average 60mph for the whole trip?

Correlation coefficients

Although the mathematical background can look scary, linear regression and correlation coefficients represent a relatively simple concept. The idea is to measure how closely related two variables are; think about trying to draw a “line of best fit” through an X-Y scatter chart of the two variables.

The summary of how it works is that it finds the line through the scatter chart that minimises the sum of the distances of the points of the scatter plot away from the line.

The great part is that you don’t even need to dig into the mathematical details to use this technique. Excel has built in functions to help you do it – check out this YouTube video showing how to do it:

Bayes

Thomas Bayes was a mathematician who lived in the early 1700s. The break-through he made was to come up with a way of analysing probability statements of the form:

“What’s the probability of event A given that event B happened?”

Mathematicians write that as P(A|B).

Bayes discovered that this = P(A and B) / P(B)

In plain English, that means:

“The probability of both event A and B happening divided by the probability of B happening.”

And also that P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)

Which means:

“The probability of B happening given A happened, times the probability of A happening, divided by the probability of B happening”

Why is this important? It’s critical to understanding the results of all kinds of tests – ranging from medical trials to conversion rate. Here’s a challenge from this great explanation of Bayesian thinking:

“1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?”

If you want to dig deeper into the marketing implications, I really like this article.

O(n) and o(n)

One of the things I did during my maths degree was write really bad code. My lecturers suggested using either Pascal or C. C sounded like “real programming,” so I chose that. It’s incredibly easy to write horrible programs in C because you manage your own memory (reminding me of this programming joke).

When you think of programs failing, you tend to think of crashes or bugs that return the wrong answer. But one of the most common failings when you start hacking on real world problems is writing programs that run for ever and never give you an answer at all.

As we get easy access to more and more data, it’s becoming ever easier accidentally to write programs that would take hours, days, weeks, or even longer to run.

Computer scientists use what is known as “big O notation” to describe the characteristics of how long an algorithm will take to run.

Suppose you are running over a data set of “n” entries. Big O notation is the computer scientists’ way of describing how long the algorithm will run in terms of “n.”

In very rough terms, O(n^2) for example means that as the size of the dataset grows, the algorithm run-time will grow more like the square of the size of the dataset. For example, an O(n) algorithm on 100 things might take 100 seconds but an O(n^2) would take 100*100 =10,000 seconds.

If you’re interested in digging deeper into this concept, this is a really good primer.

At a basic level, if you are writing data analysis programs, what I’m really recommending here is that you spend some time thinking about how long your program will take to run expressed in terms of the size of the dataset. Watch out for things like nested loops or evaluations of arrays. This article shows some simple algorithms that grow in different ways as the data size grows.

Nash equilibria

Using words like equilibria makes this sound scary, but it was explained in layman’s terms in the film A Beautiful Mind:

“Games” are defined in all kinds of formal ways, but you can think of them as just being two people in competition, then:

“A Nash equilibrium occurs when both players can’t do any better by changing their strategies, given the likely response of their opponent.”

The reason I include this bit of game theory is that it’s critical to all kinds of business and marketing success; in particular, it’s huge in pricing theory.

If you want a more pop culture example of game theory, this is incredible:

Time series

Time series is the wonkish mathematical name for data on a timeline. The most common time series data in online marketing comes from analytics.

This branch of maths covers the tools and methodologies for analysing data that comes in this form. Much like the regression analysis functions in Excel, the nice thing with time series analysis is that there is software and tools to apply the hard maths for you.

One of the most direct applications of time series analysis to marketing is decomposing analytics data into the different seasonality effects and real underlying trends. I covered how you do this using software called R in a presentation a few years ago – see slides 39+:

Prime numbers/RSA

OK. I’m getting a little tenuous now. It’s not so much that you actually need to know the maths behind factoring large numbers or the technical details of public key cryptography.

What I do think is useful to us as technical marketers is to have some idea of how HTTPS/SSL secure connections work. The best resources I know of for this are:

• Entry-level and very readable introduction to codes and cryptography
• A surprisingly accessible technical overview of SSL

Markov chains

You might have come across the concept of Markov chains in relation to machine-generated content (this is a great overview). If you want to dive deep into the underlying maths, this is a great primer [PDF]

The general concept of Markov chains is an interesting one – the mathematical description is that a Markov chain is a sequence of random variables where each variable depends only on the previous one (or, more generally, previous “n”).

Google Scholar has a bunch of results for the use of Markov Chains in marketing.

It turns out that there are a bunch of great mathematical properties of Markov Chains. By removing any possibility of the outcome of the next step being dependent on arbitrary inputs (allowing only the outcomes of the most recent entries in the sequence), we get results like conditions for stationary distributions [PDF]. A stationary distribution is one that converges to a fixed probability distribution – i.e. one that *isn’t* based on previous elements in the sequence. This leads me neatly into my final topic:

Eigenvectors/Eigenvalues

OK. Now we’re talking real maths. This is at least undergraduate stuff and quickly gets into graduate territory.

There is a branch of maths called linear algebra. It deals with matrix and vector computations (see MIT opencourseware if you want to dig into the details).

To follow the rest of my analogy, all you really need to know is how to multiply a matrix and a vector.

The result of multiplying appropriate vectors and matrices is another vector. When that vector is a fixed (scalar) multiple of the original vector, the vector is called an “eigenvector” of the matrix and the scalar multiplier is called an “eigenvalue” of the matrix.

Why are we talking about matrices? And what do they have to do with stationary distributions of Markov chains?

Well, remember PageRank?

From a mathematical perspective, there are two models of PageRank:

1. The random surfer model – where you imagine a web visitor who randomly clicks on outbound links (and randomly “jumps” to another arbitrary page with a fixed probability)
2. The (dominant) eigenvector of the link matrix

You’ll notice that the random surfer model is a Markov model (the probability of moving from page A to page B is dependent *only* on A).

It turns out that the eigenvector is actually the stationary distribution of the random surfer Markov chain.

And not only that. The random jump factor? Turns out that is necessary to (a) make sure that the Markov chain has a stationary distribution AND (b) make sure that the link matrix has an eigenvector.

Things like this are the the things that make mathematicians excited.

I appreciate that this post has been something a bit different. Thanks for bearing with me. I’d love to hear your geek-out tips and tricks in the comments.

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Posted by RachaelGerson

When Google Analytics doesn’t know where a traffic source comes from, it assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not tagging our links accordingly.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on “dark social” and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your referrals. Take credit for the work that you’re doing, and tag your links!

Video Transcription

“Hi, everyone. I’m Rachael Gerson. I’m the head of analytics at SEER Interactive. We’re a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are growing and spreading across the world. Although we’re primarily known for our SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you about.

My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I read it this morning and went, “This is really good content. I’m going to share this.” And I put it out on Twitter.

She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, “Okay. Let’s see what happens.” In the last 8 hours, she’s gotten 74,000 page views to this one blog post. I’m looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are 1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It’s going viral.

We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we’re also seeing a lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly doubt they’re typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this page. They’re not. It’s being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s a fascinating idea, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if it’s good content, socially, organically.

Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It’s not. It’s actually really awesome and really fun to dig into. Let’s say that someone read this post earlier, and they shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the site, they come in as direct.

Direct is Google Analytics’ version of, “We have no idea what this is, so let’s call it direct and throw it in that bucket.” We know it’s not direct. That’s our dark, organic social. It’s spreading organically in all different ways, and we’re getting traffic because of it. It’s pretty amazing.

I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I’m doing on the dark social side because it’s really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I found they’re not there yet.

Here’s the problem. When we say direct it’s our catchall bucket and we need to look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can’t dig into to what’s [out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can’t do anything. If things aren’t tagged properly, you’re not taking credit for the work that you’re doing.

For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you’re not getting credit for the work that you’re doing.

You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project. You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!

What we’re talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that. It’s the online version, where you’re giving your credit away for the work that you’re doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your value.

When we talk about tagging, it’s using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic social, that’s really sexy. It’s fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are not sexy. They’re not fun, but they’re necessary. If you’re not doing this, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting your money. Now that sucks.

How are you wasting your time? If you’re not doing this, you’re putting all kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you’re looking at what you’re doing, but your analysis is based on data that’s not accurate. You’re putting your time into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think they are. You’re putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know that your stuff’s actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed decisions to help the business and drive it forward.

Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so you can do all the other stuff.

Let’s talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we’re looking at Twitter, if you don’t tag your links, things will still come in. You’ll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you’ll see Twitter as social coming in, and you’ll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as well.

If you tag your links, you’re going to always know it’s Twitter. You’re going to know which campaign it was. You’re going to know all the information you put into it. You’re also going to be protected from the other side of it. That’s when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn’t come in as Twitter unless you’ve tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter that’s untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.

If you posted on TweetDeck, they’re coming in as direct. By the way, I’m still playing with all of this, and it all changes. I’ve played with stuff that’s changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize. Just keep up with it all the time.

That’s our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don’t tag our links, they’ll come in as Facebook referral. It’s nice and easy. It’s clean. We know what it is. The exception to that is if someone’s trying to open a link in Facebook, they click on the link, it doesn’t load fast enough, they’re probably going to click Open in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that’s a direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.

There’re also a missing piece here, and that’s if you do tag this stuff, you get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, “This is all the same campaign. It’s the same effort, same content.” You can tie it together across all these different platforms, and that helps.

We get to email. If you’re putting time and money into your email marketing, you want to take your credit for it. If you’re not tagging your email, it’s usually going to come in one of two ways:  One as a referral from all the different mail things that can come in or as direct.

At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it’s mail. We can’t track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some analysis on it. If it’s direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.

Paid search. It’s nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they play really well together. It’s awesome. The problem is when you don’t tag your stuff. If you don’t tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.

This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, “Hey, guys, this is awesome.” To which the client responded, “Oh, we forgot to tell you we launched paid search,” and the account manager discovered they weren’t tagging their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their credit. We don’t want to have that happen.

Let’s say you’ve actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care of. Let’s look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist that this is done immediately.

We’ll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for conversion. They’re different from the rest of the site. They’re a totally new template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already for the site, it may not be in here. If we don’t have someone add it back in, what’s going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site, they’ll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics code, but they don’t know where it came from. This is going to show up as direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can’t have that happen. You worked too hard for that credit.

I’ve also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they’d reset the visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers were giving away their credit through that.

Let’s say you’ve got all this other stuff right. Good job. That’s awesome. There’s still stuff that you can’t control unfortunately. There are a lot of things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn’t. I have a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-rome]. If you have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.

If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can’t tell if it’s search or if it’s direct. That’s a problem. For me, if I’m doing an analysis and I really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut that out so it’s not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with that, and that’s a whole other topic.

The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of information, make sure you’re doing your part. If you’re sharing a link socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it, the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking’s in place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Now once you’ve done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there’s nothing you messed up by accident, you’ve controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind of have to accept what’s left. You know that there’s stuff that you can’t account for. There’s direct in there that may have been shared through a text, through a chat, through any other thing. You don’t know where it actually came from.

First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our data. We can trust that we’re making the right decisions for our business, and we can save our time and our money this way.

If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we’ll talk about this organic social idea.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

Posted by RachaelGerson

When Google Analytics doesn’t know where a traffic source comes from, it assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not tagging our links accordingly.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on “dark social” and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your referrals. Take credit for the work that you’re doing, and tag your links!

Video Transcription

“Hi, everyone. I’m Rachael Gerson. I’m the head of analytics at SEER Interactive. We’re a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are growing and spreading across the world. Although we’re primarily known for our SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you about.

My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I read it this morning and went, “This is really good content. I’m going to share this.” And I put it out on Twitter.

She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, “Okay. Let’s see what happens.” In the last 8 hours, she’s gotten 74,000 page views to this one blog post. I’m looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are 1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It’s going viral.

We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we’re also seeing a lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly doubt they’re typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this page. They’re not. It’s being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s a fascinating idea, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if it’s good content, socially, organically.

Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It’s not. It’s actually really awesome and really fun to dig into. Let’s say that someone read this post earlier, and they shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the site, they come in as direct.

Direct is Google Analytics’ version of, “We have no idea what this is, so let’s call it direct and throw it in that bucket.” We know it’s not direct. That’s our dark, organic social. It’s spreading organically in all different ways, and we’re getting traffic because of it. It’s pretty amazing.

I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I’m doing on the dark social side because it’s really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I found they’re not there yet.

Here’s the problem. When we say direct it’s our catchall bucket and we need to look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can’t dig into to what’s [out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can’t do anything. If things aren’t tagged properly, you’re not taking credit for the work that you’re doing.

For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you’re not getting credit for the work that you’re doing.

You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project. You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!

What we’re talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that. It’s the online version, where you’re giving your credit away for the work that you’re doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your value.

When we talk about tagging, it’s using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic social, that’s really sexy. It’s fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are not sexy. They’re not fun, but they’re necessary. If you’re not doing this, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting your money. Now that sucks.

How are you wasting your time? If you’re not doing this, you’re putting all kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you’re looking at what you’re doing, but your analysis is based on data that’s not accurate. You’re putting your time into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think they are. You’re putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know that your stuff’s actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed decisions to help the business and drive it forward.

Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so you can do all the other stuff.

Let’s talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we’re looking at Twitter, if you don’t tag your links, things will still come in. You’ll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you’ll see Twitter as social coming in, and you’ll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as well.

If you tag your links, you’re going to always know it’s Twitter. You’re going to know which campaign it was. You’re going to know all the information you put into it. You’re also going to be protected from the other side of it. That’s when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn’t come in as Twitter unless you’ve tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter that’s untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.

If you posted on TweetDeck, they’re coming in as direct. By the way, I’m still playing with all of this, and it all changes. I’ve played with stuff that’s changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize. Just keep up with it all the time.

That’s our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don’t tag our links, they’ll come in as Facebook referral. It’s nice and easy. It’s clean. We know what it is. The exception to that is if someone’s trying to open a link in Facebook, they click on the link, it doesn’t load fast enough, they’re probably going to click Open in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that’s a direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.

There’re also a missing piece here, and that’s if you do tag this stuff, you get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, “This is all the same campaign. It’s the same effort, same content.” You can tie it together across all these different platforms, and that helps.

We get to email. If you’re putting time and money into your email marketing, you want to take your credit for it. If you’re not tagging your email, it’s usually going to come in one of two ways:  One as a referral from all the different mail things that can come in or as direct.

At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it’s mail. We can’t track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some analysis on it. If it’s direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.

Paid search. It’s nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they play really well together. It’s awesome. The problem is when you don’t tag your stuff. If you don’t tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.

This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, “Hey, guys, this is awesome.” To which the client responded, “Oh, we forgot to tell you we launched paid search,” and the account manager discovered they weren’t tagging their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their credit. We don’t want to have that happen.

Let’s say you’ve actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care of. Let’s look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist that this is done immediately.

We’ll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for conversion. They’re different from the rest of the site. They’re a totally new template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already for the site, it may not be in here. If we don’t have someone add it back in, what’s going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site, they’ll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics code, but they don’t know where it came from. This is going to show up as direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can’t have that happen. You worked too hard for that credit.

I’ve also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they’d reset the visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers were giving away their credit through that.

Let’s say you’ve got all this other stuff right. Good job. That’s awesome. There’s still stuff that you can’t control unfortunately. There are a lot of things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn’t. I have a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-wrong]. If you have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.

If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can’t tell if it’s search or if it’s direct. That’s a problem. For me, if I’m doing an analysis and I really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut that out so it’s not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with that, and that’s a whole other topic.

The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of information, make sure you’re doing your part. If you’re sharing a link socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it, the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking’s in place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Now once you’ve done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there’s nothing you messed up by accident, you’ve controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind of have to accept what’s left. You know that there’s stuff that you can’t account for. There’s direct in there that may have been shared through a text, through a chat, through any other thing. You don’t know where it actually came from.

First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our data. We can trust that we’re making the right decisions for our business, and we can save our time and our money this way.

If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we’ll talk about this organic social idea.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

Posted by RachaelGerson

When Google Analytics doesn’t know where a traffic source comes from, it assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not tagging our links accordingly.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on “dark social” and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your referrals. Take credit for the work that you’re doing, and tag your links!

Video Transcription

“Hi, everyone. I’m Rachael Gerson. I’m the head of analytics at SEER Interactive. We’re a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are growing and spreading across the world. Although we’re primarily known for our SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you about.

My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I read it this morning and went, “This is really good content. I’m going to share this.” And I put it out on Twitter.

She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, “Okay. Let’s see what happens.” In the last 8 hours, she’s gotten 74,000 page views to this one blog post. I’m looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are 1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It’s going viral.

We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we’re also seeing a lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly doubt they’re typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this page. They’re not. It’s being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s a fascinating idea, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if it’s good content, socially, organically.

Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It’s not. It’s actually really awesome and really fun to dig into. Let’s say that someone read this post earlier, and they shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the site, they come in as direct.

Direct is Google Analytics’ version of, “We have no idea what this is, so let’s call it direct and throw it in that bucket.” We know it’s not direct. That’s our dark, organic social. It’s spreading organically in all different ways, and we’re getting traffic because of it. It’s pretty amazing.

I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I’m doing on the dark social side because it’s really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I found they’re not there yet.

Here’s the problem. When we say direct it’s our catchall bucket and we need to look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can’t dig into to what’s [out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can’t do anything. If things aren’t tagged properly, you’re not taking credit for the work that you’re doing.

For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you’re not getting credit for the work that you’re doing.

You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project. You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!

What we’re talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that. It’s the online version, where you’re giving your credit away for the work that you’re doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your value.

When we talk about tagging, it’s using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic social, that’s really sexy. It’s fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are not sexy. They’re not fun, but they’re necessary. If you’re not doing this, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting your money. Now that sucks.

How are you wasting your time? If you’re not doing this, you’re putting all kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you’re looking at what you’re doing, but your analysis is based on data that’s not accurate. You’re putting your time into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think they are. You’re putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know that your stuff’s actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed decisions to help the business and drive it forward.

Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so you can do all the other stuff.

Let’s talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we’re looking at Twitter, if you don’t tag your links, things will still come in. You’ll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you’ll see Twitter as social coming in, and you’ll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as well.

If you tag your links, you’re going to always know it’s Twitter. You’re going to know which campaign it was. You’re going to know all the information you put into it. You’re also going to be protected from the other side of it. That’s when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn’t come in as Twitter unless you’ve tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter that’s untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.

If you posted on TweetDeck, they’re coming in as direct. By the way, I’m still playing with all of this, and it all changes. I’ve played with stuff that’s changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize. Just keep up with it all the time.

That’s our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don’t tag our links, they’ll come in as Facebook referral. It’s nice and easy. It’s clean. We know what it is. The exception to that is if someone’s trying to open a link in Facebook, they click on the link, it doesn’t load fast enough, they’re probably going to click Open in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that’s a direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.

There’re also a missing piece here, and that’s if you do tag this stuff, you get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, “This is all the same campaign. It’s the same effort, same content.” You can tie it together across all these different platforms, and that helps.

We get to email. If you’re putting time and money into your email marketing, you want to take your credit for it. If you’re not tagging your email, it’s usually going to come in one of two ways:  One as a referral from all the different mail things that can come in or as direct.

At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it’s mail. We can’t track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some analysis on it. If it’s direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.

Paid search. It’s nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they play really well together. It’s awesome. The problem is when you don’t tag your stuff. If you don’t tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.

This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, “Hey, guys, this is awesome.” To which the client responded, “Oh, we forgot to tell you we launched paid search,” and the account manager discovered they weren’t tagging their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their credit. We don’t want to have that happen.

Let’s say you’ve actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care of. Let’s look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist that this is done immediately.

We’ll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for conversion. They’re different from the rest of the site. They’re a totally new template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already for the site, it may not be in here. If we don’t have someone add it back in, what’s going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site, they’ll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics code, but they don’t know where it came from. This is going to show up as direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can’t have that happen. You worked too hard for that credit.

I’ve also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they’d reset the visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers were giving away their credit through that.

Let’s say you’ve got all this other stuff right. Good job. That’s awesome. There’s still stuff that you can’t control unfortunately. There are a lot of things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn’t. I have a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-rome]. If you have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.

If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can’t tell if it’s search or if it’s direct. That’s a problem. For me, if I’m doing an analysis and I really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut that out so it’s not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with that, and that’s a whole other topic.

The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of information, make sure you’re doing your part. If you’re sharing a link socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it, the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking’s in place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Now once you’ve done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there’s nothing you messed up by accident, you’ve controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind of have to accept what’s left. You know that there’s stuff that you can’t account for. There’s direct in there that may have been shared through a text, through a chat, through any other thing. You don’t know where it actually came from.

First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our data. We can trust that we’re making the right decisions for our business, and we can save our time and our money this way.

If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we’ll talk about this organic social idea.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!