3 Facebook Ad Segments that Increase ROI

Are you running ads on Facebook that are performing just average? What if you could get a greater return on investment without spending more? Facebook’s ...

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Moz Content Launches New Tiers and Google Analytics Integration

Posted by JayLeary

When we launched Moz Content at the end of November, we limited the subscription to a single tier. At the time we wanted to get the product out in the wild and highlight the importance of content auditing, competitive research, and data-driven content strategy. To all of those early adopters who signed up as Strategists over the last few months, a big thanks.

Since then, we’ve made a long list of improvements to both Audit performance/stability and the size of our Content Search index. Along with those updates we also added two new subscriptions for larger sites and agencies handling multiple clients: Teams and Agencies. The new tiers not only increase page and Audit limits, but also enable Google Analytics integration with Tracked Audits.

More data for Tracked Audits

For those that aren’t familiar, Tracked Audits let you trend and monitor the performance of your site’s content over time. On the backend, Moz Content re-audits your site every week in order to discover new pages and update site metrics. This allows you to compare, say, the average shares per article across your entire site from week-to-week or month-to-month.

To date, Moz Content Audits have focused on links and shares. We did that intentionally, since a major goal for the product was to enable the analysis of any site on the web, including competitors. We also wanted to give agencies the freedom to prospect or audit clients without painful integrations or code snippets.

That said (and I’m guessing you’ll agree), figuring out your content ROI usually requires a deeper look at site performance.

With Moz Content, we stopped short of a full, conversion-focused analysis suite with custom tracking code and the like. Instead we’re focused on a product that delivers content analysis and insights to our entire community of online marketers — not just the select few that can afford it. Besides, there are plenty of big-ticket tools out there filling the niche, great products like Newscred, Kapost, SimpleReach, and Idio.

So while we’re not jumping into the “enterprise” ring (just yet), we did want to give data-driven marketers a leg up in their analysis. The good news: if you’re a Teams or Agencies subscriber, you now have the added option of integrating Google Analytics with Tracked Audits.

It’s easy to get started, and if you’re a Moz Pro subscriber you’re probably familiar with the authentication flow. Just go to any Tracked Audit you have GA data for, scroll down to the middle of the report, and click “Connect Google Analytics”:

Once you’ve connected a profile, Moz Content immediately pulls in key metrics for each URL in the Inventory:

You’ll probably notice we’re only displaying page views in the inventory. While we didn’t have the real estate to include all of the metrics we’re collecting in the interface, we’ve added them to the CSV export:

Once you dump the data to Excel you’ll see the following metrics for the Organic and Paid segments, as well as a rollup of all referrers:

• Unique Page Views
• All Page Views
• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Page Value

After we’ve collected multiple audits, Moz Content also starts trending aggregated metrics so you can get a sense of performance over time:

We’re hoping this added reporting gets you a step closer to that all-important ROI analysis. Some of you will already have a sense of how much a page view is worth, or the impact of a unique page view on a specific conversion. And for the Google Analytics pros out there, properly configuring Page Value will give you a direct indicator of a page’s effectiveness.

This is just the beginning, and we’d love to hear about other ways we could make the GA data more useful. Please reach out and let us know what you think by clicking the round, blue Help button in the lower-right corner of the Moz Content app.

More to come!

We’re pushing out code every day to improve the app experience and build on the current features. We’re also growing our Content Search index with new sources of popular, trending content. If you haven’t tried it for a while, we encourage you to take a second look. Head over to http://moz.com/content and start a search or enter a domain to preview an Audit (be sure to sign into your community account to access both the Dashboard and increased limits).

On the feature front, we’re pushing to integrate Twitter data into both the Audit and Content Search. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, this has been missing in our reporting to date. While we won’t have exact share counts for individual articles (see Twitter’s decision to deprecate the share count endpoint), we’re confident we can provide related information that’ll be useful for your Twitter analysis.

As we develop this and other features, we’re always on the lookout for feedback from our community. As always, feel free to reach out to our Help team with any issues or feedback about the product. And if you’ve used Moz Content and are interested in beta testing the latest, shoot us an email at mozcontent+testing@moz.com and we’ll add you to the list.

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8 Low-cost IoT Vendors for Retailers

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New and Improved Local Search Expert Quiz: What's Up with Local SEO in 2016?

Posted by Isla_McKetta

Think you're up on the latest developments in local SEO?

One year ago we asked you to test your local SEO knowledge with the Local Search Expert Quiz. Because the SERPs are changing so fast and (according to our latest Industry Survey) over 42% of online marketers report spending more time on local search in the past 12 months, we've created an updated version.

Written by local search expert Miriam Ellis, the quiz contains 40 questions designed to test both your general local SEO knowledge and your industry awareness. Bonus? The quiz takes less than 10 minutes to complete.

Ready to get started? When you are finished, we'll automatically score your quiz.

Rating your score

Although the Local Search Expert Quiz is just for fun, we've established the following guidelines for bragging rights:

• 0–14 Newbie: Time to study up on your citation data!
• 15–23 Beginner: Good job, but you're not quite in the 3-pack yet.
• 24–29 Intermediate: You're getting close to the centroid!
• 30–34 Pro: Let's tackle multi-location!
• 35–40 Guru: We all bow down to your local awesomeness.

Resources to improve your performance

Didn't get the score you hoped for? Brush up on your local SEO knowledge with this collection of free learning resources:

1. The Moz Local Learning Center
2. Glossary of Local Search Terms and Definitions
3. Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google
4. Local Search Ranking Factors
5. Blumenthal's Blog
6. Local SEO Guide
7. Whitespark Blog

You can also learn the latest local search tips and tricks by signing up for the MozCon Local one-day conference, subscribing to the Moz Local Top 7 newsletter, or reading local SEO posts on the Moz Blog.

Don't forget to brag about your local search expertise in the comments below!

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Will Ads on Instagram Reduce Organic Reach?

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What's it Take to "Go Viral?" 11 Traits to Give Your Idea Wings

Posted by mattround

Before joining Distilled I worked for UsVsTh3m, an experimental Trinity Mirror project, where we created hundreds of games, quizzes and daft "toys." We had unprecedented freedom to try out new interactive formats, learning a great deal about what works… and what doesn’t.

The key to success was "viral" traffic. You’ve probably heard the term bandied about in reference to something popular, and might even have rolled your eyes; it’s a much-abused buzzword.

The idea is that online word-of-mouth can drive exponential traffic growth and broad media coverage with little or no traditional promotional support, but achieving this requires a certain way of thinking. This article focuses on interactive content, but many of the same principles will apply to other formats.

The viral life cycle

It’s useful to aim for interactive content to be…

1. Clickable — When someone sees a link and description (on social media or a site), it seems compelling enough to take a look.
2. Playable — The visitor sticks with it and finds it enjoyable or interesting.
3. Shareable — There’s a strong urge to tell others, often involving the visitor sharing their individual result/score.

You usually need all three aspects to be strong to get a viral hit. It’s easy to focus on one, an experienced team can usually achieve two, but it’s difficult to consistently get the full set.

Crudely, you can think of it in terms of losing potential sharers, ultimately needing to end up with more than one to start the next cycle(s). This image explains it nicely:

Congratulations, it’s going viral! That’s a massive simplification, but a helpful one.

11 ways to make it shareable

1. Attributes

Develop a concept that ties in with the player’s personal attributes: age, location, abilities, personality, etc. For example, measuring reaction time in milliseconds is fine… but if you can correlate it with age, then you’ve immediately got something far more compelling.

2. Tribes

Reinforce a sense of belonging; tribes can be regional, generational, interest-based, political, etc. Perhaps play different tribes off against each other so that your interactive content can address niche groups while having broad appeal overall.

3. Insights

It tells you something about yourself or, more likely, confirms a flattering/intriguing attribute, leading into...

4. Humblebrags

Sharing to make yourself look good… but without it seeming too blatant.

5. “One more go…”

Ensure the player is hooked and will want others to share in that. Although bear in mind that the best games often aren’t the most viral — adding multiple levels and features to a game tends to put off non-gamers and can actually reduce sharing (enthusiasm has a chance to ebb away, and the game will tend to end on a low note when the player finally fails or quits).

6. Topical

People are impressed by fast-turnaround topical content, and sharing it can show you’re up-to-date (perhaps even the first in your social circle to discover something). We regularly developed and launched games in half a day at UsVsTh3m, and more than once within an hour. This obviously isn’t feasible for most commercial projects, but with more agile development and approval processes you can reduce lead times.

7. Delight

Overwhelm the senses: strong use of music, dance, animation, spectacular explosions, anything that’s a straightforward pleasure.

8. Competition

“Can you beat this score?”

9. Comparison

“I got this result, how about you?” This is much "softer" than direct competition and typically more welcoming for a broad audience.

10. Collaborating

Things like global counters, polls, or territorial maps can create the sense of playing your part in a bigger cause. Even just clicking something to increment a number can be made hard to resist with the right "cause."

11. Quality

It’s still possible for something to succeed simply by being good, but in the absence of any other aspects it’d better be really good. Knock-your-socks-off good.

Of course, all of the above overlap and interrelate, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

Telling the world

Something that’s strongly viral can actually just be exposed to a few hundred people via Twitter or Facebook. It won’t need a big push; the viral mechanism will ensure it spreads and attracts media attention.

It’s often useful to accompany a launch with relevant press material, perhaps teasing out key angles or supplementary content/data to suit each type of media outlet. Don’t force a story if there isn’t one, though; you don’t want to jeopardize later coverage based around “this cool thing is going viral.”

If the stats are showing it’s strongly going viral (this should be obvious within minutes), you’re then in the fortunate position of planning for success. Keep an eye out for initial coverage that may benefit from additional material, and look to do a follow-up press campaign at a suitable milestone (e.g. at X million visitors, or when you have interesting data to share), broadening the coverage.

If it’s not going viral, stop and consider whether minor changes to wording might make it more clickable. Look at whether it needs to break into a niche audience or broaden its appeal, and retarget accordingly. Although Twitter drives far less traffic than Facebook, it offers more freedom to experiment, target influential individuals, and re-promote over time. If a topical angle may arise, perhaps wait and be ready to repackage and relaunch at a moment’s notice.

Case studies: Two simple games that went viral

The North-o-Meter

UsVsTh3m’s North-o-Meter (sadly, this is currently broken due to hosting issues) used multiple-choice questions to guesstimate how Northern/Southern you are. Despite being entirely UK-focused, within just 4 days of launch it had 3.6 million visitors, 1 million Likes, 1.1 million comments on Facebook, and 41,000 tweets. It went on to get millions more visits, virtually saturating the potential audience. Countless similar quizzes had used this topic before, so why did this one make such a big impact?

• It was clickable because the wording of tweets and Facebook posts worked well, teasing the Northern/Southern cultural identity element in a way that seemed intriguing and non-threatening.
• It was playable thanks to working well on mobile (people were playing and comparing scores late into Friday nights down the pub), being easy to play and giving constant visual feedback, unlike many similar things that simply ape static magazine personality quizzes.
• It was shareable by tapping into attributes (location/origin), tribes (north vs. south), insights (using mundane questions to infer something greater), competition, comparison, and quality (the visual feedback and often surprisingly accurate conclusions).
• Northern/Southern cultural identity is immensely strong in the UK. It’s a key part of how many people define themselves.
• The whole quiz was grounded in honest personal experience. One of our young journalists had written about moving to London, and the way it resonated with people led us to think about how to apply that to an interactive format.
• Naming a specific place to go with the percentage meant it sometimes got the player’s location/origin spot-on, so they were then likely to share it in a very enthusiastic way.

How Old Are Your Reactions?

How Old Are Your Reactions?, produced by Distilled for JustPark, is a simple web game where you stop a car with a tap/click. Your reaction time is then used to look up the corresponding age for that score, based on a survey of 2,000 players.

Our thinking beforehand was that it would work well due to the following aspects:

• It would be clickable by setting an intriguing personal challenge.
• It would be playable thanks to clear, quick gameplay and good presentation, including full mobile compatibility.
• It would be shareable due to attributes (age and reactions), insights (inferring age from reactions), humblebrags (impressively young age result), "one more go…" (few will play it just once), competition, comparison, and quality.
• Age is a key personal attribute, and age estimation prompts a great deal of conversation and comparison, whether the result is accurate or lower/higher than the player’s actual age. Lively conversations on Facebook help ensure visibility.
• Driving is a relevant, relatable way to dress the game up, particularly for this brand. A straightforward, bare-bones reactions test would have been "colder" and less engaging.
• The combination of elements would allow for multiple storytelling angles in coverage, to do with good-natured rivalry between generations, road safety, etc.

This all seems to have been borne out by the stats since launch: Over 3 million unique page views, nearly 300,000 social shares, and links from over 400 domains.

In summary…

Always ask yourself:

• How can we make it clickable, playable, and shareable? Judge your ideas harshly — you need all three.
• Which sharing impulses can it tap into? It should be possible to readily pick out a few motivations, or refine the concept to strengthen this aspect.
• What will be the best way to capitalize on success? Be ready to build a story around it, using popularity as the foundation for broad and varied coverage.

The way people share and interact is constantly changing, and reaching large audiences is always challenging, but the approaches I’ve outlined can help you to devise interactive content that’ll have a great shot at going viral.

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