Six unusual steps for a successful Twitter lead generation campaign

Do you want more qualified leads?

Twitter can generate qualified leads at a lower cost than most of the other major ad platforms. Its true! But not if you follow Twitters instructions.

Why? Because Twitters advice for creating lead generation cards is completely wrong.

In this post, youll discover my unusual six-step strategy for using Twitter lead generation cards for ludicrously successful lead gen.

Please note: this article was first published on the Wordstream blog last week, and it was so darn helpful that we wanted to share it here.

Step 1: Set up Conversion Tracking. Just do it!

This is kind of buried in the user interface, but its actually the most important thing you need to do. Without conversion tracking set up youre blind.

All the major platforms, except for Twitter, have a universal tag where you put in one tag on your site so you can figure out the conversions just by typing in the URL.

But on Twitter you have to create different JavaScript tags for each thank you page. Each one gets a name and you can categorize the type (download, purchase, sign-up) so that you can report on it later.

Im blown away how many people forget this critical step. Basically you need to define a different conversion pixel for every goal completion on your site so that you can track whether everything is working.

Step 2: Choose your Twitter Ads campaign type wisely

There are six pay-per-performance campaign types, depending on your marketing objective. You specify the most youre willing to pay for each type of campaign.

Why not just specify $0.01 as your cost per action? Well, basically if you set the bids too low, youll get no impressions. Its an auction. Chances are other Twitter advertisers are willing to pay more than a penny.

The more youre willing to pay, the more likely your ads will be shown. You have to figure out what its worth to you; Twitter will figure out how much quantity youll get for that amount.

As for the campaign types, even though tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign, they offer the absolute worst ROI. Avoid like the plague!

Why? Twitter charges per engagement. This includes engagements such as a person viewing your profile page, expanding your image, expanding the tweet from the tweet stream, or clicking on a hashtag. Twitter will love taking your money, but these campaigns wont help you achieve any of your marketing objectives as you waste your budget.

What you should really be interested in paying for is website clicks, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

Step 3: adjust your Twitter Ad targeting options

At the basic level, you can simply target Twitter users by location, gender, and language.

Twitter also provides somewhat more advanced options:

These advanced targeting options include:

• Keywords: You will target specific searches or users who use with certain keywords in tweets.


• Followers: You will target accounts of people with interests similar to followers of those accounts. For example, entering @SMExaminer will target people who are likely to be interested in social media.


• Interests: You will target users interested in any categories you enter.


• Tailored audiences: This is the crown jewel of Twitter advertising. Remarketing and custom lists are so powerful. Spend here first! Tailored audiences offer the best ROI because you have certainty over who youre targeting. People who are more familiar with your brand are more likely to buy its your lowest-hanging fruit.


• TV targeting: You will target people who are interested in a specific program, TV network, or TV genre.


• Behaviors: You will target users who share specified online and offline behaviors and characteristics.


• Tweet engager: This is a brand new option its kind of like remarketing for Twitter. Its targeting people who interacted with your tweets in the last few days. If you have a business where you need to get lots of people really excited about something (like a political party trying to energize the base ahead of an election), then this can be a powerful type of targeting.


• Event targeting: You will target people who are interested in global or regional events.

Step 4: Create your ad But DONT use Twitter lead generation cards!

Now its time to create your lead gen ad. Twitter tells you to use a lead generation card. WRONG!

Never, ever use Twitters Lead Generation Cards for lead generation. I have run thousands of campaigns and the lead generation cards consistently lose and lose badly.

Even though it has a nice layout with customizable call-to-action buttons like buy now and all sorts of fancy bells and whistles, it looks more like an ad. Twitter people are allergic to advertising; when they see a Twitter ad it makes them want to click on it less!

If something looks like an ad on Twitter, users will ignore you! That means lower engagement and 2-4x higher costs.

Instead you should just attach a funny photo. Use images that have done well organically to save money.

Go nuts on the image you choose. Dont be afraid to be a bit snarky or goofy. Use funny images or memes, even if it means going a bit off-brand. Twitter is a place where youll be rewarded if your brand shows it can have a bit of fun (within good taste, of course), or youll be ignored if you go all corporate.

And of course, use emojis to further increase engagement rates by 30%.

Step 5: Set Bids No Automatic Bidding Allowed

Okay, first: Never ever use Twitters Automatic Bidding. Its for suckers.

Automatic bidding will make sure your budget is spent very quickly. Sure, it helps you win ad auctions, but you dont really have to or want to win every auction.

Keep in mind its not like search advertising where youre bidding on rare priceless keywords that get searched on 10 times per year. This is display advertising and there are plenty of ad spots available to buy.

Always use maximum bidding. For most companies doing lead generation, its not the end of the world if the lead comes in tomorrow vs. today.

The only time you would use automatic bidding is if you need to promote something heavily and you need those ad impressions today (e.g., you have a 24-hour sale) or if youre targeting a very tight audience, maybe 1,000 people. In these cases, then you do have to use auto bidding or just bid really high.

Okay, so how the heck do you set bids? Its seriously complicated its pretty much rocket science.

You need to use The Force.

Basically, youre trying to get as many impressions as you can for as little money as possible. If you bid too low your ads wont show. But if you bid too high your budget will die.

When you bid too high, youre essentially paying for premium next-day air service when usually (99% of the time) a regular postage stamp will suffice. Youre paying much more for the same clicks in order to be delivered faster.

Twitter has a tool that shows how your reach changes based on different maximum bid amounts.

Ignore! Ignore! Ignore! Its completely wrong. Even when it says I will get no impressions, I get millions of impressions. It is just trying to get you to raise bids.

Ive reverse-engineered the Twitter ad auction. Basically Twitter determines if your ads show or not based on your effective CPM. (Your max bid times applicable predicted engagement rate). So if your bid is $1 per click and youre doing a click campaign using an ad that is averaging a 1% click-through rate, then your predicted effective CPM is $10.

To win more ad auctions, you have two choices: either bid more or post higher engagement stuff.

I love promoting high engagement tweets (15%+ engagement rates) with very low maximum CPCs (5-10 cents). The higher the engagement, the less youll need to bid for your ads to be eligible to show.

Step 6: Report. Rinse. Repeat

Your last step is to figure out how things did. You can get detailed information about exactly what happened after spending money on Twitter ads: clicks, retweets, followers, conversions, etc.

In the above campaign you can see that we were able to generate 440 downloads for just $6.50 per action. Thats extremely cost-effective compared to other marketing channels. In comparison search ads in this vertical can cost closer to $5 per click (not per download).

Delete campaigns that arent working. Double down on stuff that works. Repeat.

Conclusion

Twitter can be very powerful. For example, Twitter ad campaigns can deliver a great return on your investment once you master the Twitter ads quality score algorithm.

But you have to avoid the pitfalls (hello, Tweet Engagement campaigns!). When it comes to advice, Twitter cant be trusted. Forget everything Twitter has tried to tell you about lead generation. Ignore Twitters best practice advice on bidding, creative, audience targeting, campaign types and pretty much everything else.

Instead, do Twitter lead generation my way. The RIGHT way. :)

Google is removing all Right Hand Side Ads on SERPs worldwide

As reported and confirmed by numerous sources, Google will no longer be showing AdWords ads on the right hand side of its search results pages.

Beginning Friday 19 February, ads will now only show ads at the top and bottom of the SERP. Although it may increase the number of ads from three to four if the search query is "highly commercial."

Here today, but not tomorrow.

This roll-out will effect users worldwide in all languages and will bring the desktop experience closer to the mobile experience, although whether the amount of ads shown to mobile users will increase hasn't been confirmed.

So what does this mean for marketers and users alike?

Well for regular users, the right-hand space will still be utilised for Product Listing Ads (PLAs) as well as Knowledge Graph Boxes, so you probably won't notice much of a difference there. However the continual 'pushing down' of organic listings will certainly be an issue for many of us.

For businesses this will mean the organic space is even more precious will therefore lead to an even bigger focus on SEO

For Paid Search advertisers the change will certainly drive up average CPCs as the competition for the top slots increases. It's gonna get ugly.

So why limit the amount of space for advertisers on its SERPs?

According to The Media Image (one of the first to break the story) the reason for this may well be because "Google has determined the average click-through-rate for Right Hand Side Ads is poor across verticals, and the expected CPC inflation from this major change is projected to more profitable in the long run."

The "complete and permanent" roll-out will be finalised on 22 February.

If you have anything to add to the story please comment below...

Which US sites lost the most amount of Google visibility in 2015?

Earlier this week, we looked at the US sites that made the biggest SEO gains in 2015, but now it's time to find out who the losers were.

Again, a huge thank you to Juan Gonzalez from Sistrix who spent his time evaluating 200 US domains to give us this exclusive research.

Here's Juan's insight for each of the bottom five:

1) Thefind.com

Thefind also headlined our UK losers list. When we look at the rocky landscape of Thefind.com it becomes clear that the domain managed to rush headlong into numerous Google updates, over the years. Such an erratic visibility is a sign that the page did not show the necessary quality signals where Google's algorithms are concerned, nor did it manage to live up to users' expectations.

The abrupt end for Thefind.com in 2015 came at the hand of Facebook, who bought the company in a bid to incorporate it into Facebook's advertising engine.

2) Cupertino.org

Looking at Cupertino.org we see an interesting spike in January 2015. The same spike can be found for other city websites, such as lakewood.org and austintexas.org.

I spent some time digging into this and found that between 12/22/2014 and 01/16/2015 all three domains were ranking for "department of community services", "parks department", "community parks", "parks and recreation department" and "city of parks and recreation".

Parks and Recreation is also, of course, a television sitcom, which aired its finale in February 2014.

Looking at Google Trends, US users seem to be quite interested in "parks and recreation" from December to June. But we also notice an unusual spike for the keyword "parks in recreation" from the middle of December 2014 to January 2015. (The final season aired from January 13, 2015 to February 24, 2015.)

Maybe because the show was ending, its fans started to search for information about Parks and Recreation and Google overreacted with the QDF ('Query Deserves Freshness') for this and related keywords.

3) Chow.com

The domain Chow.com now redirects to Chowhound.com, the name of the former forum for the site.

While the redirects seem to be solid, it seems as though Google does not trust the user-generated content on the new domain as much as before, leaving an overall loss of visibility of nearly 50%.

This is a little sad as Chow.com actually managed to come out of Panda quite well and even managed to gain visibility thanks to the Phantom update, before the domain name change.

4) Espnfc.com

The case of ESPNs soccer page, espnfc.com, is quite interesting.

When we look at the visibility history for espnfc.com and espnfc.us, we see a rather typical up and down which often hints at duplicate content issues. On 08/24/2015 this all changes and the espnfc.us page comes out on top.

When we look at the sourcecode of both pages we notice a canonical combined with a hreflang attribute. While the canonical always points to the .com version of the page, the tells Google to show the .us version in the Google.com SERPs.

This setup may come back to bite them later as it can confuse the Googlebot. As John Mueller from Google has noted:

"If the URLs are really fully equivalent, then using a rel=canonical like that is fine (eg if you have an informational page on a site, which doesn't mention local currencies or local addresses). On the other hand, if the pages are not fully equivalent (eg different titles, currencies, addresses, etc), then I would not use a rel=canonical. The difference is very subtle and because of that, hard to implement at scale".

5) Businessweek.com

While Businessweek did not make the top five in our UK losers list, it did get an honourable mention.

Businessweek was bought by Bloomberg back in 2009 but kept its own domain until last year, when it became part of bloomberg.com on http://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek.

When we compare the visibility for Businessweek.com with the /businessweek directory on Bloomberg.com, we find that the magazine did not pass it's visibility on to the new directory.

The reasons here are, once again, soft-404 problems when redirecting each page to the new directory. When we look at the redirects from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ through URI Valet, for example, we see the first 301 redirect to http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/technology/, next we get a 302 redirect from http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/technology/ to the start page http://www.bloomberg.com/, which constitutes the soft-404. That's the problem.

Others interesting 'losers'

Guitaretab.com

Another interesting domain on the losing side is guitaretab.com. They lost nearly all their visibility in the week of 01/04/2016. This looks like a manual de-indexing penalty as the indexed pages during this week also went down to 0.

We could speculate that the copyright removals might have played their part.

Right now, the domain is only ranking for brand keywords and not much else.

Microsoft

It also seems that Microsoft is using the same SEOs for all of their domains, as many of their service-domains show up on our losers list: Windowsphone.com, Technet.com, Msdn.com and Bing.com

Seven excellent tips for making the most of Gmail Ads

Gmail Ads are one of the more intriguing opportunities Google has given advertisers to reach people where they spend a lot of their time online - in their inboxes.

I've been obsessed with mastering them lately and today I'm going to reveal what I've learned.

Please note, this article was originally published earlier this month on the WordStream blog.

What Are Gmail Ads?

Gmail ads target users based on the account activity of their personal Gmail accounts and appear within the Promotions tab.

Formerly known as Gmail Sponsored Promotions, they've been around since 2013 and finally became available to all advertisers (for the second time, no less) in 2015.

So what do we really know about these native Gmail Ads? Quite a lot now, actually.

After collecting massive amounts of data for more than a year from spending a few million dollars on this ad format, this post summarizes my top seven most exciting findings on Gmail ads and my best recommendations for making the most of this AdWords format.

Gmail Ads tip #7: Raise CTR & QUALITY SCORE!

Hi, my name is Larry Kim, and I'm obsessed with Quality Score. We've researched the heck out of it - for AdWords, the Google Display Network, Twitter, and Facebook.

Guess what! Quality Score absolutely exists in Gmail Ads!

Gmail Ads doesn't actually show you the Quality Score. In search ads, you can view the keyword-level Quality Score, whereas in Gmail you can't see it. But even though you can't see it, a Gmail Ads Quality Score still exists.

Here's an example, looking at the Cost Per Click vs. Click-Through Rate (email open rate) for one particular campaign:

It's not linear, but there are clearly huge rewards for high open rates and huge penalties for low open rates. Put simply:

Higher CTR = Much Lower CPC

Lower CTR = MUCH higher CPC

You absolutely have to maximize your open rates because the Gmail Ads Quality Score will give you huge rewards. It's the difference between $0.10 clicks vs. $1.15 clicks, based on the awesomeness or terribleness of your subject lines.

So what do we do about this? Write irresistible email subject lines, duh! But how?

Gmail Ads tip #6: Use existing email marketing campaign data

Email marketing is the most popular lead generation channel. Most companies do email marketing - 87% of them, according to a survey by Chief Marketer:

So how can you use your existing email marketing campaigns to improve your Gmail Ads?

Even if you haven't done Gmail Ads before, you should have a library of emails you've sent out before and the ability to figure out whether they did well.

Log into your email marketing system (we use Marketo, but use whatever you have, whether it's Constant Contact, HubSpot, Salesforce, or something else). Pull an email performance report. Sort by the open rate.

Will emails that have done well for you organically do well in a sponsored email ad format? It's very likely. Sorting by open rate will reveal your unicorns. Don't bother promoting the garbage ones because no one's going to open them to begin with - and when they do it will cost you an arm and a leg.

I can't share all my secrets, but our best performing email by open rate is over 40% and the subject line is: 'Quick Question'.

You'd be crazy to not use your existing treasure trove of email subject lines when doing Gmail Ads.

Gmail Ads tip #5: Use emojis

You knew this was coming! It's really true. Emojis increase open rates.

This is a bit crazy, but you get the idea.

Inboxes are such a competitive area to get people's attention. Emojis really make subject lines pop - especially on mobile, where about half of email opens occur (though there is substantial variance in this figure, as it depends heavily on audience and industry).

It makes no sense not to use emojis. Almost any business in any industry can find a creative reason to include an emoji in the subject line. (OK, maybe not if you're in an uber-serious business like a funeral home.) Otherwise, you should feel pretty confident that adding emojis to your subject line will increase open rates by around 30%.

Just make sure your emojis are topically relevant - don't just use a smiley. If you're advertising a doughnut shop, use a doughnut emoji; if you're advertising a pizza special at your restaurant, include a pizza emoji.

Gmail Ads tip #4: No remarketing? Do keyword targeting!

Remarketing works so incredibly well because past browsing history is a great predictor of future commerce activities. Think about your email marketing. Even if you have a huge list of half a million opt-in emails, aren't you better off focusing on people who have interacted with your emails sometime within the last few months? Yes! Why?

People lose interest. Some hot prospects go cold. Someone who signed up a year ago, but hasn't opened any emails in more than six months, probably is no longer in the market for your thing now.

So how do you target people who have shown recent interest in your stuff in Gmail Ads?

Unfortunately, the most common display ad options of remarketing and 'In Market Segments' are not available targets within Gmail Ads and likely won't be in the future, due to regulations around personally identifiable information related to email marketing.

BUT there is a clever trick to get around this problem. You can do keyword targeting as a substitute for remarketing.

When people enter our funnel, we send them emails as part of marketing automation drip campaigns that contain the word WordStream, which end up in their Gmail accounts. So I can target with recent interest from WordStream by targeting my own trademarks.

Why target people who are already familiar with you and in your funnel?

Well, let's say your emails have an open rate of 15 or 20%. That means 75 to 80% of people in your funnel aren't interacting with those emails. So there's plenty of upside of targeting them with Gmail Ads, even if they're already in your funnel.

Targeting people who are familiar with your brand will also increase CTR and Quality Score, thereby lower CPCs.

Gmail Ads tip #3: Go nuts with competitor keywords

Why stop at your own trademarks? Why not also target people who have recently shown interest in the things your competition sells?

In addition to targeting your own brand terms, you can also be keyword targeting your competitors' brand terms with Gmail Ads. People who are in the market for your competitor's products are getting emails from your competitors that mention their brand terms right now.

Targeting the trademarks of your competitors is a clever way for you to potentially steal some sales! The fact that they're in market for a competing solution will dramatically increase Quality Score and lower CPCs.

Gmail Ads tip #2: Don't forget deep click analytics

Open rates are obviously important, but you still need to check what people do after they open the Gmail Ad.

Google has all these Gmail-specific campaign metrics that aren't even turned on by default! It's critical to enable and monitor these (forwards, saves, clicks to website) to track the health of your campaigns:

Gmail Ads tip #1: Mix it pp with four different ad formats

Gmail Ads offers four different ad formats to choose from:

• Gmail image template


• Gmail single promotion template


• Gmail multi-product template


• Gmail catalog template

Use them all. You might find that different types of offers work best with different Gmail ad formats. For example, having more stuff to click on might increase the chances of people finding something interesting to click on, especially if you're promoting products. The multi-product template ad looks similar to the marketing emails that Etsy sends out.

Notice what's missing from the list? Customer Match

Why isn't the new Customer Match on this list? You know, the amazing new feature that lets you target Gmail Ads based on user email addresses? Weird, right?

The reason: I'm struggling with it.

For whatever reason, even when I upload a huge list of emails, we're having trouble accruing a large number of ad impressions. We've seen this on quite a few accounts. For example, we did a campaign where we uploaded a gigantic list with 100,000 email matches and we were only getting several thousand impressions. We don't know why.

Hopefully, we'll soon see the very promising Customer Match feature reach its full potential for advertisers.

Final thoughts on Gmail Ads

Google presents many interesting opportunities to advertisers so they can make the most of the Gmail Ads format - you can reduce costs by optimizing several aspects of your campaign, reach your own (and a new) audience, and measure post-open success.

Yet there are quite a few restrictions and limitations unique to Gmail Ads which are above and beyond the normal limitations in search ads. Hopefully we'll see Google open up Customer Match feature a little bit more in the future and relax some of the ad policies.

Kelvin Newman on the major search trends of 2016 [podcast]

Today sees the release of the ClickZ Digital Marketing Podcast series, featuring some of the experts who contributed to our Digital Trends 2016 report.

It features interviews with Tessa Wegert, Brian Clifton, Kelvin Newman and Parry Malm, looking at key trends for 2016.

Here we'll be taking a look (sorry, listen) to Kelvin Newman's episode on search marketing.

Kelvin is one of the best known figures in the world of search marketing in the UK, being the founder of Rough Agenda and organiser of Brighton SEO.

In Kelvin's podcast we hear what initially attracted Kelvin to search, where he sees the biggest opportunities for marketers entering the industry today and which search marketing trends Kelvin is really excited about in 2016 and why.

SEM in 2016

Kelvin believes there are two main areas that will influence search marketing in 2016. The first being the technology that search engines use and how we as search marketers need to respond to it. In particular machine learning.

Machine learning is used to find patterns and trends in data-sets. Previously it was fairly straightforward for search marketers to use technical on-page SEO to influence ranking factors.

However now, as algorithms become more complex and machine learning becomes more practical, the systems that search engines use to rank websites becomes even less transparent than before.

The upside of this only benefits the user...

"As marketers we just have to concentrate on making our websites better, the experiences we provide, looking at who is performing well and learning from our competitors, rather than taking a 'tick-box approach' to search engine marketing."

And the second major factor that will influence search in 2016 is how search marketers are perceived within organisations and the business of search marketing itself...

"There's a greater need for any marketing professional to ensure that any of their recommendations and strategies are not only right but that they are implemented, so your role as a marketing professional is not only to understand social media or CRO or SEO, your job is to deliver business change."

For search marketers it's important to remember the traditional skills that would otherwise be forgotten if there wasn't a search engine advocate, but also to be the "advocate of web best practice."

For lots more insight, listen to the full podcast here: ClickZ Digital Marketing Podcast.

Which US sites gained the highest Google visibility in 2015?

We recently looked at the UK sites that made the biggest SEO gains in 2015, but now it's time to cross the pond to see which US sites did the best last year.

Juan Gonzalez the SEO & Country Manager at Sistrix spent a considerable amount of time last week evaluating 200 domains, and has given us an exclusive look at the top 100.

Please note, we haven't included any adult-entertainment websites in this list - of which there were only three. Also, as there were no major Google updates in 2015, most of these problems were "home-made by the website operators."

The insights below each domain are from Juan himself, so a massive thank you for his input.

1) Choicehotels.com

In May 2015 Choice Hotels consolidated all of its domains - comfortsuites.com, qualityinn.com, comfortinn.com and many more - into the main domain of choicehotels.com.

The redirects are sound but the only hazard may be the fact the consolidated domains still return a 200 status code when a Googlebot useragent visits. It might be a good idea for them to fix this potential cloaking problem soon.

2) Quora.com

We've already looked more closely at Quora in our UK review.

Basically, Quora has cornered the market when it comes to Q&A sites, and has very impressive URLs like https://www.quora.com/Can-I-burn-an-audio-CD-on-a-DVD-R-and-have-it-behave-as-a-CD-R-so-I-can-play-it-in-all-cars-and-players which themselves rank for almost 100 Keywords on Google:

3) Groupon.com

Groupon managed to massively build up their /coupons/stores/ directory during 2015, so that now a good 33% of the top 10 keywords for the entire domain are generated in this directory.

Looking at the top keywords for the entire domain, there are 65,338 top 100 keywords but only 2,545 top 10 keywords, so there's quite a bit of room for improvement.

4) Angieslist.com

The crowd-sourced local business review site may be massive when it comes to indexed pages (more than 30 million), though it seems that its quality is not what Google wants.

Out of more than 30 million indexed pages, we found only about 32,000 URLs in the Top 100 results, with less than 1,300 URLs making it into the Top 10.

5) Zomato.com

Again, a domain which we covered in our UK review. Zomato provides exactly the kind of information that Google looks for when it serves localised results to searchers - restaurant reviews, user ratings, photos and menus.

Much of its improved visibility was down to Zomato's purchase of urbanspoon.com, the content of which redirected to zomato.com from June 2015.

Here's the Top 20 US domains that increased in Google visibility in 2015:

1. choicehotels.com 397.81%


2. quora.com 394.40%


3. groupon.com 195.09%


4. angieslist.com 189.35%


5. zomato.com 185.29%


6. macmillandictionary.com 147.24%


7. etsy.com 136.76%


8. academy.com 132.74%


9. weather.com 130.98%


10. cambridge.org 129.74%


11. washingtonpost.com 123.25%


12. burlingtoncoatfactory.com 119.02%


13. wayfair.com 106.22%


14. authoritynutrition.com 103.99%


15. skyscanner.com 100.06%


16. mentalfloss.com 99.85%


17. instagram.com 98.93%


18. express.com 96.79%


19. cinemablend.com 95.22%


20. sears.com 86.87%

How to optimize images for SEO

There are many ways to make your articles easier to read on the web - lots of paragraph breaks, short snappy sentences, headings, sub-headings, Gifs of Kanye West's mood swings - but one of the key ways to make your content look attractive is by using lots of lovely images.

And the best thing about images, is that they can be used to bring in organic traffic via search engine image results.

But in order for this to happen, they need to be optimised accordingly.

Here's a guide to make you aware of the key things you need to be doing when it comes to uploading images to your site, which a surprising number of people often ignore.

Choosing images

It's important to use images related to the text of the article. This is mainly from a user experience point of you, as you don't want to baffle people with an obtuse choice of image.

Cute, for sure, but Otis the Cat doesn't belong here (although try telling him that).

Your images need to be of a good quality, in the correct aspect ration, with good resolution and of a size large enough to be visible across devices.

Another thing to consider is your use of 'stock-photos'.

We introduced a strict 'no stock photos allowed' policy when I took up the position as Editor of SEW. Stock photos are the worst. They make your website look like a marketing brochure for a characterless business that 'leverages thought-leadership into hot leads' or some such rubbish. They're also hackneyed, over-used and cheesy as hell.

And expensive.

Be really careful, even if you think an image is copyright free, the original owner could still be Getty, or Shutterstock, and you may find yourself presented with a ?500 invoice months down the line.

I've made this mistake before when I used an image of Justin Timberlake that had already been memed to death and I therefore assumed it was 'fair usage'. I was wrong.

It's also very difficult right now to give you an example of a stock photo without incurring a fee so I'll just show you one we have paid for in the past.

Look at those Millennials. They're just like you and me right?

Stop paying for stock photos. Instead pay for your own photographer to take images for you, or get out there and do it yourself.

You should also be creating your own graphs, charts and visual designs too.

But if you don't have the time or resources to do that - and frankly who does? - there are plenty of free and easy-to-use resources out there...

Free image resources

Google image search - usage rights

When you search for an image, you can filter out the results that are copyrighted. Just click on Search Tools, then Usage Rights and select Labeled for Reuse.

You won't always strike gold here, but there may be something interesting that nobody else has used before.

Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr is an awesome resource for photos, and you can use any that are labelled with a Creative Commons licence.

It's an alternative to full copyright, you just have to make sure you give full credit and link to the Flickr profile of the person who took the photo.

Be careful when you use Flickr Creative Commons, as there are various licences available, for instance some photographers only allow their images to be used for non-commercial purposes.

Unsplash

One of my favourites, Unsplash images are all copyright free, you just need to credit and link to the photographer. Occasionally they border on 'stock photo' but they are all of a much higher quality than your standard 'model looking at iPhone and smiling' images.

Other handy tools

Gif grabber

Available for the Mac, Gif Grabber is the best way to make so many wonderful Gifs for free. You can capture anything within your desktop or laptop screen, and resize and trim the finished product.

Awesome screenshot

This is a Chrome extension that allows you to take screenshots of your browser window (either partial or the whole web page) very easily, and you can also annotate before downloading it to your browser.

Piktochart

One of the most popular data visualisation tools, Piktochart is free, simple to use and has loads of great templates for infographics and other creatives.

I made the following Gif of how to use Piktochart using Gif Grabber...

Optimising images for search

Once you've found or created your desired image. You're then ready to upload to your site.

Image size

You'll definitely want to resize your photo so it's not such a massive file. It's very easy to overlook the fact that most iPhone photos can be in excess of 3,000 pixels wide (which can be 2,500 pixels bigger than you really need).

Huge image files can drag the page-load time of your site down and directly affect your rankings on search engines, so be sure to resize them before you upload.

If you're using a Mac, it's easy to resize, just open the picture, navigate to Tools then select Adjust Size.

You can also use Photoshop if you have it, or you can use one of many online resizing tools, such as Picresize.

Alternatively if you're on a PC, you can use Paint.

Yep, good old MS Paint. Just open up Paint, then click Open, choose the picture you want to resize and open it. Then on the Home tab, under Image group, click Resize.

Warning about using iPhone images

If you are uploading iPhone pictures to a WordPress site there is a bug that can become very annoying. When you've taken a picture of something with your iPhone in portrait, it can appear as landscape once your article is live. It doesn't happen for everyone and it depends on what generation iPhone you use and your WordPress template.

You can avoid this by only taking photos in landscape (with the volume button facing down) or there are various fixes available in this forum topic.

File/Title name

Before you upload the image to your site, make sure you give it an accurate file name.

Again to use the iPhone photo example, these tend to be called something generic like IMG_6056. So do yourself a favour and rename it, this won't necessarily help your SEO, but it will help if you ever need to search for it in the back-end of your site.

In WordPress and other sites, the image's file name will automatically be used as its title.

So not this...

But this...

Alt-text

Most important of all is how you describe your image in the Alt section (can be known as Alt-tags or Alt-text). Google can't 'see' your images, but it can 'read' them and what it reads is what you write in the alt-attribute.

Alt-text should be clear, descriptive, concise and not stuffed with keywords. Alt-text is also what's used by screen reader software to describe images to people with visual impairments.

In fact the one rule I always use when it comes to alt-text is write as if you're describing it to a person with a visual impairment. So the above example I would write 'black and white cat asleep on a purple pillow'.

The alt-text is also what shows up in the text box that appears when you hover over an image.

Description & Caption

In WordPress you will also see fields for Description and Caption. These don't necessarily add any SEO value to your images, but they can be useful for other reasons.

The Description can be used to add a lot more extra detail, such as how the picture was taken, when it was taken and any other interesting elements.

The Caption will show up underneath the image on the live article. It's up to you whether you use one or not. It can be helpful to describe or comment on the image.

Image reclamation

Occasionally you may feel the need to check that your own self-created images aren't being rampantly used throughout the internet without proper credit.

You can do this by using an automated reverse search tool, such as Image Raider.

Just add your images to the catalogue, then it will alert you any time another site uses your image. If that site hasn't given you proper credit, you can get in touch and ask them to do so.

You don't have to be an intimidating jerk about it though, as it was probably done by accident.

Fixing 404 Error Pages with Google Analytics

There have been multiple blog posts written over the years on how to use Google Analytics to identify and fix 404 Error Pages.

I have even written one myself and it's a common slide in many of my talks. But with the newest features that are available within Google Analytics, these blog posts are due an update.

Custom Variables vs Events

The first question is whether to capture details of the 404 Error Page within page level customisations or as an event.

My approach is to capture more information about the page using page level customisation. Since viewing a 404 Error Page is not an event, it should not be treated as one.

Google Analytics tracking

Step one in the GA tracking for Error Pages is to rename the page name to /error-page/404-error. This means all views of this page are grouped together, making them easier to identify and analysis becomes significantly easier.

There are two key pieces of information to capture on each 404 Error Page. The first is the URL of the page and the second is the referrer to the page.

Both are available as default Variables within GTM (Google Tag Manager) and so no developer support is required to capture them. The L3 Analytics approach is to capture the Page URL as a Content Grouping and the Referrer as either a Content Grouping or a Hit scoped Custom Dimension.

Previously I would have stopped at that tracking, but an Error Page view should now also be captured as a Custom Metric. It will provide an easy way to see the total number of Error Page views for the website or broken down by any session/user dimension.

Google Analytics configuration

Previously, we always recommended creating a Goal for View Error Page. It is useful to know if visitors are seeing 404 Error Pages and if this metric ever exceeds a certain value (e.g. 2%) for this to trigger an immediate action.

This should be set up as a Custom Alert within Google Analytics to notify you when visitors are experiencing an excessive number of 404 Error Pages.

To investigate the cause of 404 Error Pages, a Custom Report is required. It's fairly simple, the report is filtered to only include data from 404 Error Pages and the dimensions are the Page URL and the Referrer.

The metrics in this example are Pageviews and Unique Pageviews (basically error counts) although you can now use the Custom Metric of Error Page Views.

There are two tabs within this Custom Report with the dimensions simply reversed in the second tab. When the report is run, it displays URLs which trigger the 404 Error Page, allowing you to click through to see the referrer to this page.

Switching to the second tab flips these two dimensions, displaying the referrers that trigger 404 Errors and allowing you to click through to view the URLs of the error pages. While this doesn't solve everything, it allows you to identify the source of 404 Error Pages and where they are sending traffic to in error.

You could search the page source for these URLs or it might be obvious from their structure why there is a problem.

There was one occasion on which we really had to dig deep into the data to identify the cause of a 404 Error Page; have a look at our real-life example here.

Eight of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

It's a bumper week full of search data, stats on mobile shopping use and a rollercoaster-ride of social channel improvements. Some good, some bad.

Actually a rollercoaster is a terrible analogy, it's all good on a rollercoaster. I'll rephrase... some improvements are like being stuck for ages at the top of a rollercoaster due to a mechanical fault, with neither getting off or going backwards a possible option. Boom, hashtag analogy!

82% of Super Bowl ad searches happened on mobile

According to Google, there was a 12% rise in Super Bowl TV ad related searches on mobile during last weekend's big game. 11% percent of searches happened on desktop and seven% on tablets.

Overall, Super Bowl ads drove more than 7.5 million incremental searches for advertisers with big pockets, which 40% higher than during last year's game.

The biggest winning brand being Audi, with Acura second and the new Jason Bourne film coming third. Note for advertisers next year: more Matt Damon beating the holy heck out of people.

There's more information on the Super Bowl winners and losers in search here.

70% of mobile shoppers say the website/app experience can be improved

Facebook IQ and GfK conducted a study of more than 2,400 adult "omni-channel shoppers" (or multichannel if you prefer) and found that 56% had made a purchase on a mobile device because they were already using it, and 55% said they used mobile because they can shop anywhere, anytime.

60% of shoppers said they'll either start purchasing or purchase more on their smartphones in 2016, and 64% anticipate doing more shopping research on their smartphones.

But the report goes on to suggest that mobile needs to work harder to emulate the desktop and in-store experience. Shoppers cited a preference to desktop because of its bigger screens, and that they also prefer to touch items in-store and would rather not wait for purchases to be shipped. So remember that next time you go into a store, you'll be surrounded by impatient, far-sighted people who can't keep their hands to themselves.

The weekly Twitter death spiral

This one will not have failed to get your attention... Twitter is rolling (or rolled for some of you already) out a new algorithm-based timeline.

"We want to make it even easier and faster for people to discover and catch up on what's happening right now," a Twitter death knell blog post states.

Upon opening Twitter, tweets you're "most likely to care about" will appear at the top of the timeline. The rest of the Tweets will then be displayed directly underneath in reverse chronological order.

You can choose to turn this option on or off in your iOS, Android and web settings, before we all totally lose our minds with blind rage. Oh too late.

Digital place-based (DPB) surpassed $1.2 billion revenue in 2015

DPB ads are the ones you find on screens outside your home, on the high street, shopping malls, airports etc. According to AdExchanger these are expected to grow at a rate of 10-12% annually.

The DPAA and Prohaska Consulting also estimates that 30-40% of DPB ad sales will be conducted programmatically within the next three years, generating $15-$20 million in incremental revenue yearly for DPB networks.

Yet another nail in the Flash coffin

Google will officially drop support for Flash-based ads in January 2017. Instead it will favour HTML5 ads.

Although that might still be a year away, bear in mind that on 30 June 2016 Flash ads can no longer be uploaded on the Google Display Network.

Included purely so I could use some old Flash comic covers...

Loyalty schemes find their home on mobile

According to Juniper Research's new Mobile & Online Coupons report (pay to download), 3 billion loyalty cards will operate as mobile-only or be integrated into mobile apps by 2020, up from 1.4 billion in 2015.

Also by 2020, beacon technology woill be used to send 1.6 billion coupons to smartphones. The current figure is 11 million.

There's also some interesting examples of retailer loyalty app adoption on both sides of the pond...

In the UK, 40% of Nectar Card holders had downloaded its loyalty app by the end of 2015, but less than 4% of Tesco Clubcard holders had done the same.

In the US, 61% of Walgreens card holders had linked their card to its app, but just 27% of Target cardholders.

Fashionistas, food bloggers and narcissists rejoice!

Instagram makes it easier to switch between accounts.

No longer do you have to sign out of your personal account, then spend ages trying to remember your username and password for your anonymous Potatoes that look like Taylor Swift account.

Starting this week, you can quickly switch between up to five accounts on Instagram.

Go to options, scroll to the bottom, click Add Acccount, then you're all set. Whenever you want to switch, just hold down on your little profile picture on the bottom right of the screen and it will bring up your other profiles.

At last, a victor in the age-old battle between fruits and flowers

AdGooroo examined paid search advertising on 2,140 flower and mail-order gift keywords on Google, on the run-up to Valentine's Day between 1-9 February. It found that fruit-bouquet(!?) retailers Edible Arrangements and FruitBouquets.com came at the top of the pack, with nearly 21% of all clicks on the keyword group.

The research also shows:

• Flower retailers ProFlowers.com (6.52%), 1800Flowers.com (6.12%) and ftd.com (5.10%) rounded out the top five in click share


• 'Flowers' and 'flower delivery' topped the keyword rankings in spend, with $779,000 and $442,000 generated on desktop, respectively


• Fruit is well-represented in the top 10 - two variations each of 'edible arrangements' and 'chocolate covered strawberries' collectively generated
  
  $413,000 and $250,000 in spend

There you go, fruits are better than flowers. Presumably because you can eat them.

Although I've been wrong before.