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Kurt Krejny Speaking at SMSS Las Vegas: Twitter Analysis & Action
Fathom’s Kurt Krejny will be speaking at the Social Media Strategies Summitt (SMSS) 2012 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 7. His 2-hr. afternoon workshop—“Twitter Analysis & Action: Cater to Followers and Attract Key Influencers to Get Results that Matter!”—takes place from 3:15-5:15. The three-day conference happens February 7-9th at The Mirage. Registration for this and other social media workshops is available online.
Kurt’s Twitter workshop will cover:
- A walkthrough of free and paid tools to analyze Twitter follower data
- Refining Twitter strategy through Facebook and YouTube
- Developing personas based on your follower research
- Creating an engagement strategy that solves problems
Not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. You can follow all the event action using the official Twitter hashtag: #SMSS. Additionally, you can get updates from the conference organizers on Twitter by following @GSMIonline.
Title Tag Techniques: A Call to Action
Calls to action or “CTA’s” are typically reserved for PPC campaigns, but they shouldn’t be. Most title tags and meta-descriptions are not written to attract the end user, and they should be. Getting a solid call-to-action within your organic listing can have a huge impact on your bottom line (assuming of course: the right keywords, conversion techniques, offerings, etc.). Think about what would happen with your PPC campaigns if you used the same copy that’s reserved for your title tag. I bet your click-thru rate would plummet. Better yet, think what would happen if you used the most effective PPC ad copy in the title tag on your organic page. You would have a significant increase in traffic for that page.
But, I could lose my rankings?
I get it—if you’re on the first page in a top position for one of your keywords, it’s risky to rock the boat by changing a title tag. You could lose your top position or worse yet, move a couple pages back in Google. It does happen occasionally, and it’s a calculated risk. But I think the risk is justified … here’s why:
First, the best scenario would have been to get compelling calls to action in your title tag and meta-description before getting on the first page, but that’s not always realistic. Setting that aside, if you properly built out the site architecture, content on the page, and incoming links— essentially doing your SEO due diligence—then small changes to your title tag and meta-description shouldn’t make a huge negative impact. And if there are repercussions, they will likely result in a small loss in rankings (position #2 to #4, for example), which could actually be a good thing.
Here’s why: Let’s say you’re currently in position #2. We’ve seen that position #2 can generate 10% of Google’s estimated search traffic, while position #4 can generate 6%. If you move from position 2 to 4, you should expect to see a decrease in traffic by at least 4%, right?? WRONG! If you’ve included a solid CTA (“free trial,” “buy now,” “download the guide,” “contact us,” etc.) then you’re likely to see an increase in traffic because your listing in Google is that much more compelling and will attract a greater number of clicks.
Below are a few examples of results on Google’s first page for a search for “network security solutions.” I like the contact information and bolded exact phrase on the first listing. The second two could use some help:
In summary, title tags and meta-descriptions should be written for more than just search engines. They should be written for end users in order to grab their attention. Get some solid calls-to-action in place, and you’ll reap the benefits in traffic which should equate to leads and revenue. At Fathom, we build our SEO programs from the ground up with this in mind.
The Famous (not provided)…. NOT!
I’m sure you’ve all heard and read enough about the painful missing information from our Google Analytics organic search traffic, the (not provided) data. Yep, it’s not over. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you can read it on Google’s blog.
I’ve been tracking this so-called “(not provided)” data since Oct. 17th, and the results are interesting. I have pulled together data from 10 sites in various industries which includes e-commerce, education, health, manufacturing, lead generation, and our very own site. Daily visitors range between 3 million to less than 1K and anywhere from 60K to under 100K in daily organic search traffic.
Figure 1 is a chart that shows a week-by-week comparison of the (not provided) data from 10/17 to 1/8. The chart is too large to fit this space so be sure to click the image for a much better view. Click here to see the numbers.
Figure 1
Site 9 and 10 were the most interesting as it climbs the scale for the percentage of (not provided) search traffic. I suspected education would be the front runner of them all. I guess our younger generations are not all that interested in Google Docs, Gmail or even Google+. Are you surprised?
Now take a look at Figure 2 below.
Figure 2
This chart shows a different perspective for the (not provided) search traffic. Below are the numbers. Again, Education is still not the front-runner, but we’re still in the early stages of this (not provided) dilemma.
Figure 3
Figure 1 and Figure 3 are simple segments from Google Analytics. I’m just pulling keywords with an exact match to (not provided), and you’ll see the percentage. Now, calculating the amount of (not provided) divided by the number of organic (Google) search traffic, you’ll see a widely different percentage in Figure 4.
Figure 4
The metrics are amazing across various industries, aren’t they?
So what metric did Google project its >10% search-engine traffic on? Was it week by week? One month at a time? Or did it combine several months to project >10%?
No matter what percentage we look at, they will continue to rise now that Google has launched ‘Search Plus Your World.’ What will the impact be on the (not provided) search traffic? We’ll have to report back once we gather some data.
What are your percentages and what metrics or segments are you using to get your (not provided) information?
A few colleagues in our field have come up with some interesting points: that it’s not totally the end of the world. So let’s move forward and discover what we can do with this information to make the best of it. Check out Avinash’s post and David Harry’s post for tips and value from this (not provided) data.
Privacy Policies & You
Last spring, Google AdWords announced some policy changes that would affect all AdWords advertisers. This particular policy change dealt with privacy policies. Google stated to better protect people’s personal and financial information, a clear, accessible disclosure must be presented to visitors before they submitted any personal information. So our account teams did our due diligence and went through our clients’ landing pages to review them and see if they were going to be compliant to Google’s new policy change.
Fast-forward to early December….
I log in to one of my accounts and notice that this particular client had no clicks or impressions for that day. After digging through this account, I noticed that all of the ads were listed as “site suspended due to privacy policy.” I quickly checked the landing pages we were employing and found that we indeed were in violation as 1 of our roughly 25 landing pages was missing a link to a privacy policy (we had been running some landing page tests and used an older page that was missing the privacy policy).
We acted quickly and updated the page. I then reached out to our account reps at Google to expedite the review process to get our account back online. After a day, I received word that we were still in violation. However, even though each page had a privacy-policy link, Google deemed the client’s privacy policy not sufficient enough to pass.
So, without further ado, here is what you need to include in your privacy policy to be Google-compliant.
The Privacy Policy on the website should include the following required information:
- What personal information is collected from the user
- How this information will used by the company
- How the company transfers data to third-party companies
- How to modify/delete this information or opt-out
- A contact address for the business in case of questions
Placement of Privacy Policy
That Privacy Policy should be easily accessible for the user on all landing pages before he provides any personal information.
My favorite part of this entire exercise: While in the process of getting my client’s privacy policy revised with their legal team, Google re-enabled our ads without any updates being made to our previously frowned-upon privacy statement.
We here at Fathom value your privacy! To learn more about how you can benefit from any of the services offered by Fathom, contact us today. We promise to not sell your information to any Viagra suppliers.
College Students and QR Codes Don’t Mix
Not too long ago, I wrote a blog post about what it’s like to not scan QR codes since I don’t have a smartphone. But recently I discovered that not having a smartphone might not be what’s really keeping my general demographic from scanning QR codes.
I’m a fairly recent college grad, and on campus I never really heard much about QR codes. As it turns out, that’s pretty normal for college students, according to a survey done by Archrival Youth Marketing. Archrival worked with 24 colleges in the U.S. and surveyed over 500 students about QR codes, and they compiled their findings in this infographic.
Perhaps the most surprising result is that 81.1% of students said they had a smartphone, but 58.1% said they were “very unlikely” to scan a QR code if they came across one. This question is, admittedly, a bit vague, but it still suggests that college students aren’t very interested in QR codes.
What interests me most is that only 21.5% of the students could actually scan a code when asked. Now, do students have a hard time scanning codes because they’re simply not interested in them, and therefore never figured out how to do it? Or do they avoid scanning QR codes because they’re a pain to actually scan?
Usability appears to be a problem when it comes to the college student experience of QR codes. My experience of trying to scan a code is very limited, of course, but now I wonder how off-putting it is to simply try to scan one. For a while I thought that taking a picture of a QR code would scan it, but I learned otherwise from my coworker, Jonathan Levey—who incidentally wrote an informative blog about QR codes from a technical perspective. Anyway, this shows that misconceptions about QR codes do persist.
From what I’ve learned, I think the success of using QR codes in marketing campaigns depends on their conveyed value and the ease of trying to scan them. Essentially, what scanners need is more information—a reason to scan the code and instruction on how to do it.
*Image provided by Michael M Grant on Flickr
