New Google Metric Reveals Which Products Drive Store Visits

As the holiday season fast approaches, Google is looking to provide AdWords advertisers with better insight into what products drive consumers to their stores.

The tech giant has added a new metric called "store visit measurement" to its Estimated Total Conversions (ETC) tool to give AdWords users a holistic view of how consumers are engaging with their businesses.

The "store visit" metric for a brand is based on the company's collective search ads on Google across different devices, including product listing ads (PLA), local inventory ads, and other types of search ads. Advertisers can use insights from store visit data to decide which products are driving consumers to visit their stores.

In an example provided by Google that focuses on Office Depot, the office supply company can leverage the store visit data to see if the HP printer drives consumers to one of its stores, and further decide if it should include the HP printer in local inventory ads. In doing so, Office Depot can understand the impact of its search ads, and better allocate its advertising budget.

Data is the essence of this new feature. According to Google, the new metric has been designed to keep data private and secure. "We never provide anyone's actual location to advertisers. Instead, store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users that have turned on Location History," Google said in a statement.

A Google representative tells Search Engine Watch that the "store visit measurement" is still in its early days, as the new feature will just be rolling out in the U.S. in the coming weeks. But Google will work with more marketers in the new year to figure out how to better apply this metric.

Google declined to disclose whether the "store visit" metric will become available for advertisers outside the U.S. in the future.

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The True Value of Online Conversation

So your brand has taken off on social media. You’ve got 120,000 Twitter followers, a whopping 20 million Facebook likes, a solid Instagram presence, and are generating buzz on forums and blogs across the web. 

In the last month your brand earned over 40,000 mentions – considerably more than your main competitor.

You’re living by the book and the book says you’re winning.

While the numbers don’t lie, volume of mentions will never tell the whole story.

As any decent social analytics tool will quickly reveal, not all mentions are created equal. There are some conversations that are simply more valuable and meaningful to your brand than others.

So then how do you really evaluate how strong your online presence is?

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What social channel do you actually use?

Let’s take a look at an example of a brand that garners more volume but potentially less quality of conversation. The chart below, taken from Brandwatch’s report on Household & Personal Care Goods, shows the volume of conversation across channels for different laundry detergent brands.

Yes, Purex has the greatest volume, but do they really have a larger presence? To answer that question, there are a few things you’ll need to consider.

1. Not all mentions have the same life span. According to a bitly study, the average half life of a Tweet is 2.8 hours as compared to 3.2 hours for Facebook posts or 7.4 hours for a YouTube comment. We can expect that the shelf life for blogs, forums and news would be even longer.

2. The reach and demographics differ across channels. The graph below shows how Facebook still dominates Twitter in volume of users, especially among the elderly. What demographics are laundry detergents really targeting?

Taking another look at the detergent graph, Tide has far more mentions across every channel except Twitter and their social media allocation seems to be much more evenly distributed.

Considering the lifespan, reach and demographics across channels Tide’s social presence seems to be a clear winner here.

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What are we even talking about?

While sentiment analysis does its best to differentiate between the positive and negative mentions, the truth is these mentions lie on a very large spectrum of human emotion.

Lumping a mention into ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ categories cannot paint an accurate picture – it’s never quite that easy.

A mention that either passionately lauds or vehemently derides a product, cannot be weighted equally with mentions commenting on how funny a brand’s advertisement is.

Just take a look at advertising powerhouse Old Spice.

The majority of conversation surrounds their creative, unconventional and slightly outlandish advertisements.

Perhaps it was the brand’s intention, but their mentions have far less to do with the actual product than they do with the brand’s advertisments.

While this works for Old Spice, other brands could value conversation surrounding their products far more than those relating to their advertisements.

Yet, either way, it’s important for brands to understand where these conversations are happening in order to evaluate their social media performance.

In a similar vein, let’s take a look at toothpaste brands.

Here we see toothpaste brands’ marketing strategies in action. Crest and Colgate dominate conversation around ‘whitening’, Sensodyne and Colgate capture ‘sensitivity’ chatter, and again Crest is the leader in ‘health.’

If Arm & Hammer is looking to establish itself as the ‘healthiest’ toothpaste, it will value these mentions more than others. 

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So why does this matter?

The aim of social media should not be to simply generate as much conversation as possible.

That’s not to discredit the 40,000 mentions you earned last month.

Yet before you lean back and declare yourself the social media leader of your industry, you should take a closer look at the true value behind the conversations out there.

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Putting Metrics to Work: Selecting the Actionable Data from Facebook Insights

Comb through any business magazine or marketing website today and you’ll come across the buzzwords “big data” and “benchmarks for ROI”. As a local business owner, these buzz words translate to understanding your customers and making strategic decisions in regards to marketing and sales. With social media, we can now collect customer data from reporting tools like Facebook Insights. We sifted through Insights to find the easiest ways to convert this information to boost your bottom line. Here are our top 3 metrics to watch:

1. Look for the area that displays your Total Reach. This shows you exactly how many people are seeing anything to do with your company on Facebook. It includes your posts, posts by other people, mentions and check-ins, in other words “Organic” content. The “Paid” reach specifically refers to the affect the content you create has on your Facebook fans strictly through the use of paid advertising.

Action: Use this information to understand how many people are getting your message and create a marketing plan accordingly.

2. External Referrers: places on the web that are driving traffic to your Facebook page. This data helps you understand the flow of your customers.

Action: Track how many visitors come from your website to Facebook. This helps you understand if your other online channels are effective at helping customers engage with your brand and company. Customers should feel compelled to move through your businesses online channels and ultimately end up converting to a sale.

3. In the People tab of Facebook Insights is a veritable cornucopia of customer data. This portion of Insights shares exactly who your audience is on Facebook. It’s marketing gold! There are two ways to use this data. One is to use the data to create offline initiatives in-store or through traditional mediums like print and radio. The second is to look at your online audience and make changes according to what you see in-store.

Action: Ensure you are speaking to the correct audience on all channels.

Facebook Insights provides a great way to measure your page performance. See it as a tool to better engage with your audience in more meaningful and impactful ways by measuring what posts interest them most. Use this valuable marketing data to create compelling content that drives your followers to like and share. 

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Totally Insane Ways to Triple Your Click Through Rate

What’s the average click-through rate for a Google AdWords ad? When people ask this question, it’s often because they want to benchmark their own ad CTR’s. Unfortunately, way too many advertisers are content to reach an average click-through rate and leave it at that.

We recently held a well-attended webinar packed with crazy techniques you can use to triple your AdWords click-through rate. Sounds unbelievable, right? It’s not at all – in fact, we walked step-by-step through a process that helps marketers improve their ads to the point they’re performing in the top 1% of all ads across the platform.

First, we had to establish one very important thing: a lot of the "experts" you’re currently turning to for advice don’t know what they’re talking about.

What is a Good CTR?

There are blog posts, articles and podcasts about CTRs littering the web, but no one really likes to give a direct answer to, “What is a good CTR?” Much depends on your industry, competition and goals. However, I can tell you this: marketers who are satisfied with 2-5% CTRs, despite conventional wisdom telling you this is a good thing, are underachieving.

In our webinar, we first looked at two ads side by side and asked the audience to identify the “winning” ad.

Not surprisingly, the ad with the higher CTR was selected as the winner by an overwhelming 81% of people.

I wasn’t being entirely fair, though; it was a trick question. Neither ad had a good CTR and therefore neither were winners.

We can’t see our competitors’ data, so we don’t know if their CTRs are similar to ours. What we do know is that whether or not your CTRs are “good” largely depends on your ad position. Ads in higher positions naturally have higher CTRs than those with less prominent placement.

The above chart reflects the average CTRs per ad position, based on our analysis of nearly 100,000 advertiser accounts representing $3 billion in annualized spend. We have a pretty good idea of the bigger picture when it comes to the CTRs real advertisers are actually experiencing.

So the ad in the second position has an average click-through rate of 4%. That’s good right? No, that’s average. When you were a kid, did you lie awake at night dreaming about how you were going to achieve your goal of growing up to be average? Of course not. Even in the third and fourth positions, 2-3% CTRs are just average, so if this is what you’re seeing in your account, you have a lot of room to grow.

Averages are great, but we needed to dig into specific accounts to see just how much variance there is between advertisers. What we found is that CTRs vary widely between advertisers, as you can see in the chart below. Remember, these are not keywords – each blue dot indicates an advertiser account. To keep it clean, we eliminated low activity and low spending accounts.

In this chart, you can see the expected or average CTR curve in orange, but I’ve also added the green and purple curves, to show you what you should aim for if you want to achieve CTRs two to three times the average.

We can see from this data that there are, indeed, a few stand-out accounts who are killing it and outpacing their competitors by far. What does it take to be one those stand-out advertisers?

The bottom 50% of advertisers are achieving CTRs of average or lower. If you want to be in the Top 15% in the very competitive Google AdWords landscape, you would have to achieve an average CTR across your account two times higher than the average (we call these Awesome Advertisers). Three times the average CTR makes you a Super Awesome Advertiser, which about 1 in 20 advertisers accomplish.

Why not shoot for the stars, though? If you want to be in the top 1%, you need an average CTR six times higher than the standard – we call these “Unicorns.” They’re rare, but I promise you, AdWords Unicorns exist. They are not inherently better than you are; they simply work harder and optimize better.

Here, you can see in more detail what it takes to be an AdWords Unicorn, with the required CTR for each ad position listed in this table:

So how do they do it? First, we need to understand…

Why Unicorns Matter & How AdWords Works

Understanding how the AdWords auction works is critical if you are going to optimize and improve your performance.

AdWords is a live auction, much like eBay. Google needs to determine the ranking position for each ad, as well as the cost of each click, in real time for each ad in the auction.

Google uses Ad Rank to help determine your placement in the auction and your CPC. This is calculated by multiplying the maximum cost per click bid (the most you’re willing to pay for a click) by your Quality Score (Google’s rating of the quality of your ads). (Note: Google recently updated Ad Rank to include the expected performance of ad extensions, but the basic principle is the same.)

In this example, you can see exactly how much Quality Score can affect your performance in this live auction. The top advertiser, who achieved the #1 ad position, had a Max Bid $2 lower than his competitor, yet his Quality Score and therefore Ad Rank are far higher, resulting in a better position and lower CPC:

Google does this because they don’t get paid if no one clicks on their ads, so they give preference to the ads most likely to succeed.

Wow, Quality Score Sounds Pretty Important…

Yes, yes it is.

We’ve found that the average Quality Score is roughly 5.1 out of 10.

If you have an above average Quality Score, you can get up to a 50% discount on your cost per click. Conversely, if you have below average Quality Scores, you could pay up to 400% more. Ouch.

CPC is just one metric, though. What about the actual cost per conversion? Here, we’ve also found an inverse relationship, across billions of dollars of ad spend, that as your QS increases, your cost per conversion decreases because your clicks are so much cheaper.

So how is QS calculated? In general, the higher your CTR, the higher your QS. As you can see in the chart below, though, there is a lot of variance, thanks to ad positioning. As we discussed earlier, ads at the top of the page are predisposed to getting more clicks than those in lower positions.

The blue line at the bottom, for example, is for keywords in position 1.0 to 1.5. Quality Score isn’t calculated by your CTR alone, but by whether you’re over- or underperforming compared to the expected CTR. In this next graph, you can clearly see just how important your CTRs are to your QS calculation.

It’s all relative.

Your Quality Score, which is the key to getting those prominent ad spots, low CPCs and low CPAs, is not entirely based on your CTR. Rather, you need to have ads and keywords above the expected average. That’s the key to high Quality Scores.

The Top 1% of PPC Ads and What Makes Them Tick

So what about those unicorns?

We’ve learned so far that an above average CTR will help you get there, but to be the best of the best takes more.

When we see unicorn accounts in the AdWords Performance Grader, they share some common traits:

• Every keyword in their account has a high QS.
• They are effectively using negative keywords to reduce wasted spend.
• Their high impression share demonstrates that Google loves showing their ads.
• They have those super-high, impressive, double-digit CTRs than outperform the average by many times.
• They’re targeting highly specific longtail keyword phrases.
• Their account activity is high – they continue to optimize and improve on an ongoing basis.

If you can home in on the ad and keyword combinations that have these above average CTRs, the rewards are huge – higher impression shares, greater ad positions, lower costs per click and conversion.

Hunting Unicorns

Now you know what AdWords Unicorns look like and should have a pretty good idea why they’re so desirable. Let’s look at each of the characteristics so you can emulate this success in your own account.

Unicorn Keyword Strategy

The Top 1% of all AdWords accounts tend to focus on high commercial intent keywords. This is not surprising, as people tend to click more when they’re already motivated and have an intent to purchase. For example, “best internet marketing software” or “stainless steel dishwasher” are keyword phrases that demonstrate an intent to purchase. (Something like “Lincoln’s birthday” does not.)

Branded keywords are another fantastic opportunity for advertisers, but we’re not just talking about your own brand. Target partner brands, competitor brands, or other brands your target market may searching on when they’re in buying mode.

A third type of keyword that does well is local keywords, where the intent of the searcher is to find your business – or that of your competitor (e.g. “San Diego personal trainer”). These tend to get high CTRs, as local searchers often have a high commercial intent.

Avoid informational keywords, where possible. These are often phrased as questions, for example, “What is a dishwasher?” or “Where is Chicago?” These searchers tend to be looking for Wikipedia-type information and aren’t demonstrating an intent to buy, which can result in a lower CTR or wasted spend.

A Caution on Dynamic Keyword Insertion

If you want to achieve unicorn status, don’t overuse Dynamic Keyword Insertion, or DKI. This is a strategy whereby you use a certain syntax in your ads that allows Google to automatically substitute the keyword that triggered the ad into your ad copy or headline.

DKI is beneficial, but only to a point, as illustrated below:

Here, we have two curves: the red curve is ads with DKI and the blue is those without. The red curve shows that ads with DKI are relatively more abundant in the top 15%. However, as you move up into the top 5% of ads right into the unicorn ads, you’ll notice the red curve actually dips below the blue.

Dynamic keyword insertion ads seem to hit a wall. This tells us that it should definitely be part of your toolbox as it tends to produce slightly higher early returns, but it shouldn’t be overly relied on.

Ad Extensions – Is This the Magic Bullet?

Google seems to be releasing new ad extensions almost every week, but what’s the impact of ad extensions usage on the Quality Score of ads and will it help you become a unicorn?

This graph shows that impact and it’s not a game changer. We can see that the accounts using sitelinks on their ads did slightly better than those that did not, which is not a surprise. Extensions provide an incremental lift in CTR, but it’s not going to remedy boring copy. It’s a modest increase, but won’t double or triple your CTR rates. Again, use them, but don’t rely on this alone to shoot you to unicorn status.

Most Ads Suck. Create Emotional Ads.

A lot of search results pages look just like this, with boring ads that all look the same. This is exactly why position can make such a difference; because the only differentiator is where an ad appears on the page. Borrrrrring.

But wait – this is a huge opportunity for you, Unicorn Hunter.

When you see a bunch of boring, dry, similar ads appearing for a query, you have a chance to break out and be different. I like to call this an “AdWords Jackpot.”

The alternative is to come up with something that stands out from the crowd, that uses emotional triggers.

Creating Emotionally Charged Ads with the Swiss Army Knife Blade Brainstorm

Respected marketer Perry Marshall devised a clever, structured method of brainstorming persuasive ad copy called the Swiss Army Knife. You take different entities such as your customer, something that your customer loves, something they hate, their best friend, their enemy, etc. You then determine how your brand is connected or related with each entity and build out from there.

It’s a simple, structured brainstorming process that can help you generate more compelling ad copy for testing, by mixing and matching those concepts, like this:

This is a perfect example of a unicorn ad, with over 30% CTR, that stands out against all of the boring divorce lawyer listings.

Your ad copy has to resonate on an emotional level and it must be different to stand out. You must test the big things in your ad messaging, meaning stuff like your guarantee, your unique selling proposition, and your offer. Not just punctuation.

Understanding Relative Abundance

We’re still on the hunt for unicorns and by now, you should be much better equipped to find them. There’s still a missing piece though: effort.

Unicorns wouldn’t be all that special if they were abundant. In fact, only 1 in every 100 ads is a unicorn. The chances that you’re going to find it on your first try are slim to nil; on average, you need to try out 100 different ads to find your unicorn.

The more ads you create and test, the more likely you are to hit on that one that outperforms the average by 2x, 3x or even 6x!

You’re Not Testing As Many Ads As You Think You Are

But Larry, I already have THOUSANDS of ads in my account! The last thing I want to do is write more ads!

That may be true, but I can almost guarantee you aren’t testing as many ads as you think you are.  Certainly, they weren’t all created using the insight and process outlined above.

Have a look at this example – can you tell the difference between the top right ad (circled in red) and the one below it?

This is a real-world example where an advertiser adds a comma in the second ad and calls it a variation for testing. In fact, this example is testing six copies of the same ad over and over.

Let me tell you a secret: the bar, especially for SMBs, is incredibly low. The average SMB AdWords account has just 18 ads. Maybe you can’t get to 100 ads this month or even this year, but if you work away at this and test even 40 or 50, you’re already doing way better than the majority of your competition.

5% of Ads Account for 85% of Impressions

Here’s some more good news: you can get rid of your underperformers and boy, there are a lot of them. Across accounts, we’ve found that the top 5% of ads in an advertiser account make up 85% of their impressions. It’s not necessary to test 100 ads for every ad group in your account.

Instead, choose your top two or three ad groups and really focus your efforts there. Test those like crazy, ideally reaching 100 ads to test in each  of those top performing groups.

Bonus Tip: Mobile Ad Optimization

Mobile ads are obviously important – almost 50% of searches are going to be from mobile this year. I want you to ignore everything I’ve just said when it comes to mobile ads.

Our research has found that the calls from mobile ads convert 3x higher than clicks to a website. When you’re testing mobile ads, you need to base your findings on call rate, not CTR or conversion rates.

I repeat: go all-in on call rates and do everything possible to get people to click the click-to-call button.

What Does It All Mean?

Congratulations, you made it! Let’s recap and then I’ll send you on your merry way to go back to AdWords and slay your competition:

1. Above average CTR keywords = success.
2. Below average CTR keywords = trainwreck.
3. So… delete the bottom third of your account and re-deploy that spend to remarketing. These are your low CTR, low impression share, junk performers. Lose the dead weight, it’s dragging you down.

Crazy, right? Your boss is going to freak out if you delete a third of your AdWords account. However, the idea here is to maximize the budget you’re now spending on junk ads.

As you see here, the cost of the average click can be substantially lower across a number of industries in the Google Display Network when compared to Google Search.

Similarly, the conversion rates for display ads are comparable to those for search ads, especially when you’re using remarketing. In some industries, like automotive and travel, the display network conversion rate can be even higher.

If you can get rid of the bottom third of your more expensive search ads and shift that spend to even average performing display and remarketing ads, that would be a brilliant way to begin to more effectively scale your AdWords efforts.

Life is so much better for the unicorn. We did segment results by industry and didn’t even show it, because we found that these unicorns exist fairly evenly across industries, and for advertisers of different sizes and levels of spend. YOU can be an AdWords unicorn.

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eBay Just Lost 80% of its Organic Rankings: Here's Why

Poor eBay – they're having a pretty bad day. Thanks to Google’s roll-out of Panda 4.0 and the Payday Loan 2.0 update, eBay is suffering a massive loss in organic traffic and rankings. Adding insult to injury, they had to ask all users to change their passwords after a database hack.

Matt Cutts kicked off the SEO hysteria yesterday as he often does, with a tweet:

First released in 2011, Panda is a component of the organic search ranking algorithm designed to weed out low-quality sites, or those with "thin content." In its initial release, Panda affected approximately 12% of all search queries – by March 2013, Google had refreshed Panda 25 times, making it a constant source of aggravation in SEO circles.

This update is particularly worrisome for webmasters, given that Google had stopped announcing Panda updates/refreshes. At SMX West in March last year, Cutts said Panda would become a rolling, monthly update. Since he actually announced Panda 4.0, this seems to signal a major change to the algorithm – more than just a data refresh.

Cutts' tweet just an hour after he announced Panda 4.0 confirmed something SEOs had speculated about over the weekend – Google had also started rolling out an update to their Payday Loan algorithm, making it version 2.0.

Payday, first launched in June 2013, is unrelated to Panda or Penguin and targets particularly spammy queries. In the video announcement of that update, Cutts mentioned payday loans and pornography queries as two places they intended to sharpen their focus.

eBay’s Supposed Shift from AdWords to SEO

Last year, eBay published a paper on a "large-scale field experiment" they'd conducted that supposedly conclusively proved that "brand-keyword ads have no short-term benefits, and that returns from all other keywords are a fraction of conventional estimates." In short, the gist was that AdWords doesn’t work for companies as big as eBay, and paid search is only marginally useful for acquiring new customers. You can read more about their findings and methodology in this summary at Harvard Business Review.

As I pointed out at the time, eBay's failure to make paid search work for them had nothing to do with AdWords and everything to do with their poorly managed campaigns and atrocious misuse of AdWords features like Dynamic Keyword Insertion:

eBay's asleep-at-the-switch AdWords management style not only made them look stupid to searchers – those irrelevant ads also cost a brand a ton of money. Their failure to implement even the most basic of paid search best practices, like using negative keywords so you're not appearing in queries for vomit, made their research completely unreliable.

The implication of this report was that eBay was going to drop AdWords as a channel and focus its efforts on organic search engine optimization.

So how did that work out for them?

eBay Gets Slammed by Panda 4.0

Harvard Business Review predicted that Amazon, Walgreens and other major internet retailers would soon follow eBay's lead and ditch AdWords. If you’re doing SEO, you get that prime SERP placement for free, right?

Here's the problem: In SEO, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and eBay is learning this in spades today. It looks like their “strategy” revolved around “doorway pages” and thin content – exactly the kind of search spam that Google has been trying to eradicate from the SERPs.

Dr. Pete at Moz has already taken an early look into eBay's organic rankings, in light of the confirmation of the two Google updates confirmed/announced yesterday.

Oh noes! The main eBay subdomain has fallen completely out of the 'Big 10,' Moz's list of the ten domains with the most real estate in the top 10. It's a huge drop, considering the historical data available.

Moz’s data is showing that eBay lost around 75% of their terms from page one. They regularly crawl around 10k “head terms” – higher volume keywords.

What I’m seeing in my own research is that they’re not even ranking competitively on 80% of their “long tail keyword searches” (millions of more specific keyword searches) anymore:

The preceding figure illustrates search engine rankings for a random sampling of long tail keywords eBay was previously targeting, 80% of them are no longer on the first page, despite relatively low competition for these highly targeted keywords.

Why eBay Got Hit: Thin Content, Doorway Pages

When you search for specific products and see an organic search result, chances are, it's leading you to a doorway page – pages on eBay with very little content, like this one:

The actual product listing pages consistently have three features:

• eBay’s own, internal search results
• Ads – text ads, display ads and PLAs
• Internal links to other product results pages

They're also employing aggressive internal linking on super-long-tail keywords in their footers:

You can continue to refine your query within eBay, following search results pages, internal links and ads, and drilling down into specific products, but you aren't going to find much content on the way.

I’m surprised that Google has allowed these shenanigans to go on for so long - especially now that they have product listing ads that offer a better experience for this kind of thing:

By knocking eBay's product listings pages out of the organic rankings, Google is forcing eBay to use product ads to stay in front of those searchers seeking information about specific types of products.

It would be easy to say that profit is the sole motive here, but this is actually good for users too. eBay’s “strategy” of pushing out millions of doorway and internal site search pages was spam by anyone’s definition. For commercial queries, Google shopping ads offer the most useful customer experience.

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How to Take Advantage of the New Twitter Profile

It’s all about the images on the micro-blogging social media platform that is Twitter! Already in motion to become more image based, Twitter rolled out fresh and interesting profile improvements last week.  The long overdue revamp is a natural progression, seeing as the emerging social media networks, Instagram and Pinterest, are image centric themselves.  With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, and the fact that the brain processes visual data 60,000 times faster than text, it appears images are the way to audiences’ hearts. Closely mirroring the appearance of Facebook profiles, the Twitter enhancements bring more opportunity for brands, marketers, and influencers to capture more eyes to their content. Take a look at how you can take advantage of the new improvements.

1. Cover Photo
   The most noticeable change in the Twitter profile renovation, brands can take advantage of the larger, across the page, image-centered appearance. Upgraded from a right aligned small rectangle, to 1500 x 500 pixels, the cover photo canvas allows companies to showcase their brand and set them apart from competitors.Having a spring sidewalk sale? Design a header image to advertise. Want to spotlight your restaurant’s dessert specials for the week? Make a collogued photo of the options and watch the reservations roll in. These announcements add value to your Twittosphere audience and strengthen brand loyalty.
2. Profile Image
   Profile pictures also got a small upgrade to 400 x 400 pixels. With the larger space, pick an image for your personal page that is simple and showcases your best feature: those pearly whites! Make sure your profile picture coordinates and matches your cover photo for an eye catching flow.
3. Pinned Tweets  
   Only available to Twitter advertisers before, users can now pin a tweet to the top of their profile.  Have an announcement you want all your tweeters to be aware of? Pin it for all to see! Thinking of running a contest? Craft together an image with the competition guidelines and instructions, and pin it up to fuel audience participation.
4. Engaged Tweets   Unique to the platform, and perhaps the most difficult for brands and marketers to adapt to, is the display size of your tweets. Certain tweets will display larger than others depending on the engagement level of the tweet.  The more click-throughs, the more favorites and you guessed it, the more retweets a tweet has, the larger the tweet size will appear.  This allows for viewers to find your most appealing pieces of content, judged by your followers.  
   Cater your content to take advantage of this phenomenon. Generate content that your audience will respond to. Notice a hike in traffic with Twitter Analytics when you post behind the scenes photos? Do you get more retweets on content about how to optimize YouTube videos, or more favorites about social media statistics? You should always switch up your content strategy depending on what your audience calls for, but with this new upgrade, it has never been so critical.

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The Definitive Guide To Free Social Selling Tools

 It’s no secret that social selling reps are exceeding their counterparts and each day new tools are coming out to help sales teams embrace social selling. Today I will look specifically at tools that are free of charge. Stay tuned for my evaluation of premium social selling tools this week.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social network with the highest age, income, education and most importantly decision makers. Every sales rep and member of the organization should be on LinkedIn, which is precisely why it’s such a great sales tool. It allows you to find target prospects and connect with them. It also provides great insight into mutual relationships to get a recommendation, to show your value to prospective decision makers, and to be a thought leader by publishing posts and being active in groups.

HootSuite

The ultimate social media aggregator and platform. This is my personal social selling command center which allows me to listen, publish, and schedule messages across all of my social networks from one place. I set up all of my Twitter lists here and LinkedIn groups and have a superhuman ability to listen and engage in one view. The free version allows you to add up to 5 networks before you need to upgrade.

Twitter

Twitter is a the second most important social network to LinkedIn with regards to B2B social selling. It provides access into the personal life of a prospect, it allows you to be thought leader by sharing relevant content, provides competitive intelligence opportunities, and gives you a chance to emotionally connect with your prospect before and during the sales cycle begins.

Trendspottr

Trendspottr is my favorite content curation platform. Why I like it is because it brings in content that is trending and provides me a real-time trending score which tells me which content has the most potential of virality in my area of expertise. It really promotes thought leadership by getting you the content first and enables you to engage with others that have engaged with the post. It plugs to HootSuite via their app directory for a great in HootSuite experience.

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Pinterest: The Gentler, Kinder Side of Consumer-Generated Endorsements

When it comes to understanding the general sentiment of consumers, almost every industry has come to rely on a combination of surveys, social media, consumer reviews, and academic research on purchasing behavior. As new platforms of engagement become available, it is both smart and important to take a moment and realize the value of non-traditional engagement.

Such is the case when it comes to Pinterest. Pinterest is only four years old and boasts a membership count of over 80 million and growing. Approximately 80 percent of Pinterest users are female.

If, as a marketer, you are out searching for areas of opportunity for product or service enhancement, you are not likely to find data of value in Pinterest. But if you are out to identify what drives, energizes, and engages your customer base, Pinterest should not be neglected.

First, the bad News

If your business is principally online, and if your products can be described as visually rich and consumer-oriented, you better be using Pinterest. If, upon audit, you realize the level of engagement is low, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Failure to provide the right tools for visual engagement is a symptom of poor marketing strategy, and it should be corrected with a great sense of urgency.

But how is it fixed?

Once you have identified an opportunity for improved engagement, it is time to get the ball rolling. Start with revising and revamping your graphical website experience. To quickly address the problem at hand, the best tool available is imitation. Identify who the leader is in your segment in the Pinterest arena and don’t hesitate to incorporate their best practices. If no such leader exists, go back to the basics and address the following:

• Are my graphics appealing and marketable?
• Do I provide value in the form of solutions, in tandem with graphic material?
• Have I designed my website with the right, and most updated, sharing tools and widgets?

Tackling the basics will set the stage for Pinterest success as well as give you data that will help you understand the heart of your customer.

But I rock at Pinterest. Now what?

If, upon analyzing your Pinterest engagement, you come to the realization that you are “King of the Re-pin”, don’t settle with a simple pat in the back. Once you are done celebrating, it is time to slice and dice the data available. Identify trends and patterns of highly shareable images and content, and apply the same principles to your future campaigns.

In short, knowing what your customer loves, pins, and shares can help you create the formula for future success.

Pair and Parse Your Findings

To validate the full cycle of a product or service with a high popularity level on Pinterest, take time to compare the feedback provided in your product reviews. This is the time to know if a wonderful image or concept resulted in a great reality and superior customer experience. If pinning patterns match high-scoring reviews, you can then celebrate, having delivered a full cycle of quality and service.

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SMToolbox: Grow Your Google Plus Engagement with Steady Demand

Data is great, but insights that allow you to improve your performance are much more valuable. In my view, successful tools have to give you more than simple data. This week in SMToolbox, we review Steady Demand Pro, a good example of a tool that goes beyond data monitoring to provide practical insights and constant prompts to help you improve your performance on Google Plus.

Why Google Plus Matters

Google Plus is far more than a social network. It is part of a much bigger ecosystem that involves search, authorship and authority. There is already clear evidence that Google Plus will improve your SEO. These benefits are driving an increase in Google Plus users, as there are now over 300m active users. The increasing adoption of Google Plus creates a virtuous circle: as the network becomes more valuable, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes. 

However, Google Plus has never been the easiest of platforms, and it took me some time to get my head around things. Hence, I was very keen this week to review Steady Demand Pro, which is a tool designed to make it easy to manage one's Google Plus page. Last week, Steady Demand founder and serial entrepreneur Ben Fisher gave me a tour of the new tool.

Ben and the team wanted to develop a tool that is easy to use and which provides practical insights to help people improve their performance on Google Plus. I am pleased to say they have succeeded on both counts, as Steady Demand Pro takes the management of Google Plus pages to a new level.

Monitoring Your Google Plus Page

Steady Demand Pro provides all the the monitoring data you would expect from a social analytics tool. When you first load your profile, the tool automatically pulls in the last year's worth of posts. I have briefly outlined below some examples of the monitoring data provided by the tool: monitoring engagement by post type, engagement by time posted and top sharers. You can also review this data both for your own page or your competitors' pages.

Understanding the tabs is important. Connections relate to a page level, whereas Engagement is at the post level. This helps you see what posts caused a rise (or fall) in connections or engagement. Below is the monitoring report for your Google Plus Page’s engagement by post type.

You can see quickly how well your different post types are performing and the relative proportion of plus ones, shares and comments. What Steady Demand also does is provide useful information such as the signal to post ratio. In this case, you can see that Photos have a much higher signal to post ratio than Articles. 

Below is the monitoring report for engagement by time period.

This report clearly shows you the peak time periods for engagement and the top 5 hours. It also provides you with a complete table for each hour of the day and the signal to post ratio. The audience for the Google page here is on the west coast of the US, whereas I am in London; hence you can see that the highest post to signal rate is 3am UK time.

Below is a monitoring report highlighting the top sharers of your posts.

The tool allows you to report on comparative time periods. Thus you can compare this month to last month, but also compare the last three months to the previous three months. All reports are available as HTML and as PDFs, so it makes reporting on Google Plus page a breeze. You can also share reports by providing read-only access via email to your clients or others on your team.  

Actionable Insights To Improve Your Performance

The real aim of the Steady Demand team is to ensure you are doing well and making the most of your Google Plus page. This is where Steady Demand Pro excels as a tool. It reviews your activity, then recommends various ways you can improve your performance.

The team at Steady Demand have developed a model of a perfect Google Plus post. This has three factors: the length of a post, the use of hashtags, and the use of mentions. Steady Demand’s research has found that you get more engagement on Google Plus if you include all three of these elements in a post.

Steady Demand Pro mechanically assesses each of your posts for these elements and gives each post a score from 0 to 3. To prove the improved performance of a perfect post is not just a hunch or supposition; Steady Demand provide a live feed of all the posts for your Page, showing the average number of signals per post and their mechanical score. See the example below.

Thus you can see clearly that in this case, perfect posts gain twice as many signals as a post without any of the three elements.

Steady Demand Pro analyses all of your posts for a specified time period and provides you with a useful summary, as shown below. The great thing about Google Plus is that you have a few days to go back and edit your posts, so you can try to improve them using the insights from Steady Demand Pro.

One of the features I like about Steady Demand Pro is the way it provides you with alerts. For example, if you have low engagement on a post it will alert you and recommend some changes you can try to improve engagement.

Steady Demand Pro also alerts you about questions you are asked on Google Plus. Sometimes I can get lost in Google Plus. I may see a notification, but if I don’t deal with it immediately it disappears and I don’t always remember to find it again. Thus I can miss things and forget to reply to people. The great thing about Steady Demand Pro is the reminders. There is a nicely named ‘lonely comments’ feature: if there is a comment on the thread that has not been responded to, it will remind you with an alert. It will also prompt and encourage you if you have not posted in the last 72 hours.

Free Steady Demand Audit

Steady Demand is keen to give back to the community and provides a free audit tool. You can type in your Google Plus page address and the audit tool will run checks on your page; it will also check if you have a +1 button on your web page (in Pro this is a constant check; if your button disappears through a web update you will be notified automatically). The audit also reviews the quality of your recent posts against the three mechanical checks. Following these checks, Steady Demand provides you with a free audit report. 

Summary

If you are serious about improving the performance of your Google Plus page, then Steady Demand Pro is the tool for you. The key benefits from my perspective are ease of use, clear monitoring reports and actionable insights and recommendations.

The personal plan is $12 a month for two profiles, and the business plan is $24 a month for 5 profiles. The Steady Demand Pro personal plan is for small businesses that can’t afford an agency, while the business plan is ideal for agencies who want to manage up to 5 Google Plus pages.

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