Your Guide to Accepting Guest Posts Responsibly

Matt Cutts’ recent announcement about The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO has many site owners understandably panicked. If you’ve been relying on guest posts to generate high quality content for your site, Google’s recent announcement is probably enough to give you pause. Will your site be penalized if you continue with this strategy? What steps do you need to take in order to ensure good rankings?

My advice is simple: it’s not the time to panic, but Cutts’ article offers an important reminder that having good policies in place regarding guest blogging are essential for webmasters and entrepreneurs looking to improve their organic search visibility. Here’s a closer look at what site owners need to think about to manage their reputations and keep their search engine rankings healthy over time.

Putting Your Brand On The Line

For many site owners, Google algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin (which I covered over at the Huffington Post) reinforced the need for high-quality content. Content is measured on several levels, including quality, relevancy to the audience, uniqueness, and the frequency of updates. It’s often difficult for entrepreneurs to generate the volume of fresh content needed to stay at the top of the search rankings. Looking to colleagues and peers for guest posts has long been a natural way to fill the content gap frequency.

Things got out of hand when marketers began to embrace guest blogging as a replacement for article marketing, which has become ineffective in the last few years. The result was staggering. Site owners that publicly posted writer’s guidelines or contributor invitations were flooded with requests from authors wanting to submit guest posts. The requests were overwhelmingly poorly written, offering content that was, at best, marginally related to the website. All of this was simply an attempt to get a link back to the author’s website.

And so, as Cutts insightfully puts it, “This is why we can’t have anything nice in SEO.”

For site owners, the choice to use guest blog content is often not an easy one. Your site is an important investment, whether it’s a reflection of your business, where you focus your passions, or even if you see it as indicative of your own personal brand. Each time you publish content anywhere, you’re putting your own brand and reputation on the line.

It’s easy to lose sight of this when your focus is on generating and publishing as much content as possible. Cutts’ post underscores the need to stand back and evaluate, and to make sure that each and every article you publish is high-quality. Here are four questions that can help you determine if a guest author or post is the right fit for you.

1. Would you associate with this person in real life business and recommend them to a trusted colleague?

Your email marketing list and your blog readers are some of your businesses’ most important allies. They buy from you, look to you as a resource for great information, and help promote your content and products to a wider audience. As a result, the recommendations you give them are some of the most critical you’ll make. As you consider a potential guest blogger, it’s helpful to ask the following:

• Do you know them personally, and if so, would you recommend them based on their expertise, insights, and integrity?
• Is their brand managed in such a way that it’s professional, appealing, and likely to resonate with your audience?
• If you don’t have personal experience with them, do you know them online or have mutual colleagues that could speak to their value?
• If one of your most valuable contacts took your recommendation and chose to buy from that person, would you feel confident backing up the results?

If you feel any reservations about brand association with this person, that should give you pause when considering a contribution from them.

2. What is their unique contribution to the ecosystem of your blog?

How can they legitimately create value that’s different from what you write about? What will they add that is powerful, unique, and interesting that will resonate with your audience? If the value proposition is instantly clear, that’s a strong argument for proceeding with the post. To help you identify the value proposition behind a specific post, I recommend that you ask every proposed contributor to answer the following questions – whether you know them or not.

• What’s the proposed title of your post?
• Explain the rationale behind your title. Why do you feel this will be persuasive/interesting to readers?
• What’s your hook or angle? What makes this piece different from the 1,000s of other articles or blogs on the same topic?
• Who is your ideal audience for this piece? Describe that reader, and if possible, tie it to my blog.
• What’s the ultimate value to the reader? What insight, tactical approach, or mindset do you want them to walk away with that they wouldn’t have had before?
• Why do you think this piece is appropriate for my blog? What benefit does it bring to you and your readers, and conversely, what value does it bring to them?

It can seem overwhelming to ask people to fill out this form just to guest post on your site. I have two thoughts regarding that. The first is that if they’re unwilling to do so, it’s a pretty good sign that they’re not going to produce the quality or return on investment you’re looking for. Second, there’s nothing on this form that they shouldn’t have evaluated thoroughly before approaching you.

So filling out the form should largely be a routine matter based on motivations that they know well. If they haven’t thought the issue through, doing so will either help them articulate a stronger post idea or self-select out of the process when they realize they’re unprepared. Show people you take quality and forethought seriously, and they will too.

3. Does the quality meet your standards?

Many brands use an excellent tool called a brand guide in their day-to-day operations. In the corporate setting, it gets down into the nitty-gritty about how to use the company’s tagline, where and when it’s okay to use the logo, and even which fonts can be used. While these points are less useful in the context of guest posting, brand guides also contain vital information about quality standards, voice, and more.

Since we’re in the midst of Google’s quality crackdown, now is a good time to evaluate what quality means to you and how you’re going to enforce it. Take the time to articulate that in writing, both as a reminder to yourself and as a resource to any future contributors. Here are some basic quality guidelines to think about:

• Completely original: Except in the case of authorized reposts, you always want to verify that content is original and if possible, 100% exclusive to you. Verify through Copyscape or similar tool.
• Minimum length: Depending on the type of blog you maintain, you may want to consider a minimum (or maximum) length for any content that you accept.
• Quality of writing: What level of writing are you expecting? Is there a specific format that you like to follow? Should pieces be professionally edited or meet some other minimum standard?
• Voice: Do you have a specific voice or approach that you want reflected on your site? For example, should all posts have a touch of humor or are you looking for detailed tutorials?
• Images, visuals, etc.: What kind of images and data would you like your posts to feature? Do claims need to be backed up with major sources? Do writers need to source rights free photographs, or include other supporting materials such as infographics or video?

Develop a rigorous set of standards, and send it to every on who asks about guest posting. The more you do to ensure quality the less likely you will be to run into issues with Google.

4. Would they do it if you didn’t give them a link?

Cutts’ whole point about not guest posting for links brings up a very interesting question: should you consider accepting guest posts, but declining to give authors links? And will the other benefits be enough to keep them interested? As Cutts says:

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”

Now’s an important time to assess whether you’re limiting links, doing no follow links, or offering no links at all in connection with guest posts. If a writer is focused on other goals, such as connecting with your audience and really creating value, they’re more likely to be willing to go forward despite the absence of a link.

Conclusion

If you’re a site owner, it’s important that you pay attention to Google’s increasingly tough stance on guest posting as it relates to SEO. You need to learn to discern the context of a good guest post opportunity and the kinds of guest content that can hurt your blog. By asking the questions above, you’ll be better positioned to choose the right path forward for your site.

Why Matt Cutts Can’t Kill Guest Blogging

I’d hate to be in Matt Cutts’ shoes. He’s often in an incredibly difficult position, serving as a mouthpiece for Google, passing on the company’s unpopular and even hated policies, and then bearing the brunt of the ensuing criticism from the digital marketing industry. I have tremendous respect for Matt, and am grateful for the information and updates he shares. I have no doubt we would complain a lot more if Google refused to share any information with us as to what they are thinking and doing.

That said, I was dismayed by his recent blog post declaring the death of guest blogging as an SEO tactic, not because of the declaration itself, but because ofhow it was communicated.

While Matt Cutts is a prominent figure on both the Google and the digital marketing landscapes, he’s not the final word on Google policy. While his frustration-fueled post may be an indication of things to come from the search engine, we—especially those not in the digital marketing industry—need to keep some important things in mind.

An Abuse of Trust

Matt’s blog audience isn’t just made up of SEO and marketing professionals. Being in a highly visible position has made him known to business owners and others in the digital space as well. One of the comments on Matt’s guest blogging post came from a representative of a fitness blogger network who was expressing not just concern, but actual fear that his websites may now be penalized for the way they were handling guest blogging:

“We are a health and fitness community which has always allowed our members to submit guest articles and blogs for editorial review. We have always steered clear of spammy articles, not allowed optimized keyword links and made sure we used the correct Google+ Authorship.

I am worried now my website will be penalized for this activity ??

Are you saying “ALL” Guest blogging is bad or can high-quality publishers still carry on if we make sure the posts are high quality and relevant ??”

Despite Matt’s efforts to stress that he was referring to guest blogging as a link building tactic, there was clearly still a lack of understanding from those who are not digital marketers or SEO professionals.

Hopefully that commenter will find someone who can allay his concerns. The point is, using broad language like “guest blogging is dead” and “guest blogging used to be a respectable thing” is at best careless, and at worst, irresponsible, and can have real consequences for those who don’t live and breathe digital marketing and SEO.

SEO Isn’t Everything

In “Why Your High Ranking in Google May Be a Failure Point“, I showed just how dangerous it can be to rely solely on a high-ranking in Google. Smart business owners stabilize their marketing and conversion sources. Their businesses take advantage of multiple marketing channels.

If you think about it, guest blogging is really the Internet’s version of traditional PR. It’s a valid and legitimate strategy on its own, and doesn’t need SEO to be a powerful promotional technique. Guest blogging can be a form of link building, yes, but it doesn’t require links to be effective, depending on what your goals are.

For example, at this moment, you’re reading a post I wrote for Search Engine Journal, a respected site. My goal is not to acquire a link, but to build my brokerage’s brand and reputation, as well as my own. Whether you agree with my post or not, the mere fact that you’re reading it means I’m gaining exposure for my business, and building my authority. As far as I’m concerned, this is already an instance of successful guest blogging.

An Abuse of Trust

Matt’s blog audience isn’t just made up of SEO and marketing professionals. Being in a highly visible position has made him known to business owners and others in the digital space as well. One of the comments on Matt’s guest blogging post came from a representative of a fitness blogger network who was expressing not just concern, but actual fear that his websites may now be penalized for the way they were handling guest blogging:

“We are a health and fitness community which has always allowed our members to submit guest articles and blogs for editorial review. We have always steered clear of spammy articles, not allowed optimized keyword links and made sure we used the correct Google+ Authorship.

I am worried now my website will be penalized for this activity ??

Are you saying “ALL” Guest blogging is bad or can high-quality publishers still carry on if we make sure the posts are high quality and relevant ??”

Despite Matt’s efforts to stress that he was referring to guest blogging as a link building tactic, there was clearly still a lack of understanding from those who are not digital marketers or SEO professionals.

Hopefully that commenter will find someone who can allay his concerns. The point is, using broad language like “guest blogging is dead” and “guest blogging used to be a respectable thing” is at best careless, and at worst, irresponsible, and can have real consequences for those who don’t live and breathe digital marketing and SEO.

SEO Isn’t Everything

In “Why Your High Ranking in Google May Be a Failure Point“, I showed just how dangerous it can be to rely solely on a high-ranking in Google. Smart business owners stabilize their marketing and conversion sources. Their businesses take advantage of multiple marketing channels.

If you think about it, guest blogging is really the Internet’s version of traditional PR. It’s a valid and legitimate strategy on its own, and doesn’t need SEO to be a powerful promotional technique. Guest blogging can be a form of link building, yes, but it doesn’t require links to be effective, depending on what your goals are.

For example, at this moment, you’re reading a post I wrote for Search Engine Journal, a respected site. My goal is not to acquire a link, but to build my brokerage’s brand and reputation, as well as my own. Whether you agree with my post or not, the mere fact that you’re reading it means I’m gaining exposure for my business, and building my authority. As far as I’m concerned, this is already an instance of successful guest blogging.

The Threat to Small Business Owners

This is why issuing  a statement such as: “So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy”, is so dangerous. Small business owners may abandon a valid technique for promoting their business because they may see it lumped together with other spammy practices.  They don’t have a deep enough understanding of how guest blogging works—or should work—and they don’t have the knowledge or experience to differentiate between spammy guest blogging and the legitimate promotion tool it can be.

That’s the part I find dismaying. We all know the Internet has lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people to become business owners who otherwise may not have had that kind of opportunity. A lot of the people who make a living from their online business are single moms, retirees, students, and others for whom it may be difficult to work outside the home.

They’re not SEO experts, or even marketing experts, and they shouldn’t have to be. So when someone like Matt Cutts takes it upon himself to “call it” and declare a perfectly valid promotional technique “dead,” without a fuller, clearer explanation, those people can become frightened, and their businesses can suffer. And that is a greater travesty than a link building tactic becoming more difficult, or even obsolete.

The Unofficial Last Word

The most important thing to note about Matt’s post is that it was published on his personal blog—not the official Google blog. To the uninitiated, it may have seemed like a change in Google policy when it was actually Matt expressing his frustration with the 8,436th guest blogging pitch email he’s received.

Matt is perfectly within his rights to complain about, well, anything on his personal blog. While I do think a little more care is warranted when blogging about topics like this, small business owners must also change the way they respond to posts like this.

So if you’re a small business owner, what are your actual takeaways from Matt’s post?

• Identify good guest blogging partners: Avoid sites that offer “open invitations” to guest bloggers, unless they’re moderated and edited.
• Look for strong metrics: This is important in both the SEO and audience areas. Do they have a responsive audience? Is the audience targeted to your industry? Can you legitimately add to the conversation?
• Avoid linking to your content in the body of the article: Links to your website should be mostly saved for your bio. Focus on your brand and develop thought leadership.
• Be creative: Put in the time and effort to create high-quality content, whether it’s on your site or someone else’s. Any benefit you may get from guest blogging will be negated by poorly written, thin content. Besides, if you are paying attention to the first point (Identify good guest blogging partners), they hopefully won’t allow you to publish thin content.
• Develop relationships: Be a true partner to those sites that publish your content. Your job isn’t done once the post goes up. Be available to respond to comments, and stay in touch with the site’s publisher.
• Diversify your marketing efforts: If you’re using guest blogging as your sole method of building links or marketing your business, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Use multiple marketing techniques to not only broaden your reach, but to ride out changes such as one of those techniques eventually being killed by Google. And it will happen, whether it’s guest blogging, or some other tactic.

Stay on the Course

Above all, see posts like this for what they are—a reason to do things better. Guest posting as a link building tactic is on its way out because too many people have abused it. The same can be said for several past SEO tactics. Too many people out there look for the loopholes they can exploit, to the point where Google changes its algorithm, and the process starts over again.

Don’t let yourself fall victim to the latest marketing trend or tactic. Keep things above-board, maintain quality in everything you do, and don’t make business decisions based on one person’s blog post, whether it’s Matt Cutts or anyone else. Weigh the pros and cons, and seek out more information before you make changes that could put your business in jeopardy.

And Matt, next time you get frustrated, maybe you can give it a day or so before you write that exasperated post. I think we’d all appreciate that.

A Peek Inside a Social Media Marketer’s Toolbox: The Best Free Apps You Didn’t Know Exist

A magician is only as impressive as their tricks, a wizard is only as magical as their sorcery, and a social media marketer is only as good as their toolbox. Here’s a peek at some of the best free programs I use regularly to track, growth hack, and monitor our social media channels (no affiliation).

True Social Metrics – KPIs that Matter

Has your boss ever asked you to quantify the value of social media as to how it effects your bottom line? Have you ever had to prove why engagement is worthwhile to sales when there isn’t always a direct click path? Every day? Us too. Enter, True Social Metrics, a truly genius algorithm that measures the metrics that really matter to calculate the economic value of a Facebook fan, tweet, and a myriad of other channel-specific social metrics to determine which communities really matter to the business and which are most worthwhile to spend your time focused on.

Using non-traditional KPIs like amplification rate (how much your post was shared) and applause rate (how many likes and favorites it receives), it levels the playing field so you’re comparing apples to apples (how much a plus is worth vs. a thumbs up on YouTube) and then takes it a step further, connecting to your Google Analytics account to determine a per visit value based on your site goals.

It considers also both micro and macro goals in the calculation (as long as you’ve assigned a value to each completed action). The paid version of the program starts at $30/month and offers a unique marketplace analysis that baselines how viral and sticky your posts are vs. your competitors. All you need is their social profile links (no login required)! Another added benefit of the paid version is that you get up to a year’s worth of historical data even if your social profiles were not connected to the app during time. You’ll never have to count by hand the number of posts you did per week again because reporting just got a whole lot simpler.

Slingbot.co – Automated Twitter Engagement

Working as a background process, Slingbot slyly favorites tweets (2-3 an hour) based on keywords you enter as campaigns. What does favoriting do? It subtly gets the attention of influencers in your niche who are talking about what matters to you and strokes their ego just enough that they start to notice you, like you, and ultimately follow you.  The unpaid version caps your number of campaigns at 5 and limits the number of impressions to 1,000 a month, but for doing absolutely nothing besides adding a few industry-specific keywords, I gained 15 new followers in a very niche industry at a 1.8 percent conversion rate in a span of just a few weeks.

To get even better results, they recommend using the free version to try out a few different keyword variations,  see what sticks, and work on the balancing act between being specific (super relevant engagement but not as high quantity) and being general, especially for words that overlap multiple industries like “trading.” According to their data, the average conversion rate is 3-5 percent and each account gains 60-100 new followers a month for their free accounts, which is a whole lot easier than seeking out a whole bunch of influencers to follow on your own and hoping they follow you back. You’d have to be crazy not to use it.

Social Mention – Real-time Keyword Monitoring

A free keyword monitoring tool for real-time search and user-generated content, SocialMention.com lets you know exactly when to jump in to conversation.  You can easily track what people are saying about your brand with their easy to use, free, keyword alert system.

It also monitors the likelihood you will be discussed based on what’s trending in the news, the sentiment in which you’re being talked about, the passion of the audience, and reach of influence.  An aggregate of all the most important sites on the internet, 80+ in total, you’ll never have to log into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google separately ever again to check what’s being said about you.

Topsy – Search Analytics and Social Trends

Similar to Social Mention, Topsy provides real-time search data across various social platforms. One of only a handful of certified twitter partners, it allows you to chug through a backlog of tweets that go all the way back to 2006 to find influencers, see social trends, and view analytics for search history. Purchased discretely by Apple in December, it’s still unclear how they intend to use the data.

Whether you’re a social media expert or a wannabe guru, it pays to have an arsenal of tools in your belt that help you work smarter, not harder.  With the ever-changing social landscape, staying up on the trends is always a challenge, but becoming a master starts with asking the right questions and putting the time in to research what  successful companies are doing.

AdWords Flexible Conversion Counting Officially Launched, Welcome “Converted Clicks” and “Conversions”

Earlier this month, we covered Google’s news to select advertisers that it would be rolling out new options for tracking conversions in AdWords. The company officially announced the launchof Flexible Conversion Counting, and advertisers will see new columns in AdWords.

In reporting terms, the change means the Conversions (One-Per-Click) will be replaced with “Converted Clicks,” and Conversions (Many-Per-Click) will be replaced by “Conversions.”

Advertisers can think of the newly named columns this way:

Converted Clicks = Unique Customers. This is “the number of clicks that convert within your chosen conversion window (typically 30 days)”.  So, if a customer makes two separate purchases after clicking on an ad, they will register as one Converted Click.

Conversions: Total Conversion Actions or Total Sales + Unique Leads. The new settings here give advertisers the flexibility to set the way conversion actions are counted by All or Unique.

The change will be particularly helpful for advertisers that are driving both online sales and online leads through AdWords. In the example shown below, the advertiser wants to count every sale and each unique lead as a conversion. If the same person clicks on an ad and comes to the site twice, making two separate purchases, that will count that as one Converted Click (i.e. Unique Customer) and two Conversions (i.e. Sales). However, if a customer clicks an ad and downloads a total of four product catalogs in multiple visits, the advertiser can change the Conversions settings for the downloads count them as one unique lead. So, these actions will register as one Converted Click (i.e. Unique Customer) and just one Conversion (i.e. Unique Lead).

To set up flexible conversion tracking, go to the  conversions Settings page. A new drop down lets you choose how you’d like to count each of your conversions. The choices are “All conversions” or “Unique conversions”. As in the example above, selecting Unique Conversions allows you to count multiple PDF downloads, for example, as one Unique Lead. The “All conversions” setting is what the advertiser above has chosen for sales.

If you’re using Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, you can choose whether to have the bid management tools focus on Converted Clicks or Conversions.

By clicking on each individual conversion type, you can then select the setting of “All conversions” or “Unique conversions”. Google says this is possible as well for goals imported from Google Analytics into AdWords, but I’m not seeing this availability yet. I’ve inquired with Google and will update here when I hear back.  Additionally, if you import the same goals into different AdWords accounts, you are supposed to be able to choose a different counting setting for each account.

Some other items to note:

• Estimated total conversions will reflect your chose counting method. If you’re counting unique conversions, the estimated cross-device conversions will be based on unique conversions instead of all conversions.
• App downloads can only be counted as “Unique conversions.”
• The “Converted clicks” column can’t be segmented by conversion action, since an ad click can lead to multiple conversion actions.
• Cross-device estimates of converted clicks are not available.

Google Brings Back Right-Click-For-Directions To Google Maps

Google Maps users can once again right-click anywhere on the new Maps to get quick directions to or from the spot that they’re clicking. They can also use the “What’s Here” option to quickly get the lat-long coordinates for any spot on the map.

These are two of many features that users have asked Google to bring back from Classic Maps to the new Google Maps. There are still several other missing features — some of which Google has promised will eventually show up again.

The screenshots below show what happens when you right-click on the new Google Maps (left) compared to a right-click in Classic Maps (right).

As you can see, there are other right-click options not brought over to new Maps. There are other ways to zoom in and out on the new maps, but the “Center Map Here” feature isn’t available at all.

Twitter & Vine To Hit The Big Screen This Summer

Earlier this week, National CineMedia (NCM) announced a deal with Twitter to produce one-minute weekly shows highlighting trending movie and entertainment Tweets and Vine videos.

Scheduled to start the middle of this year, the shows will be screened in NCM theaters across the county.

NCM says moviegoers will be encouraged to take part in the social media conversations happening on its theater screens:

Through hashtags, fans will be able to share their thoughts on movies and may even see their own Tweets and Vines up on the silver screen alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

According to NCM’s announcement, the series will be powered by Twitter Amplify, the social network’s video-promotion tool. Currently there are no sponsorships listed for the weekly shows, but NCM claims both it and Twitter are seeking brands to sponsor the series.

“We’re looking for an innovative brand that wants to become part of the movie experience in a valuable way by joining in, and even leading, the social media conversation,” said NCM’s president of sales and marketing Cliff Marks.

How Adobe Used Twitter To Generate Leads For An Online College Nobody Had Heard Of, Yet [Case Study]

Anyone involved in marketing online higher education programs knows how competitive the space is. How is a new school with no name recognition supposed to compete with the plethora of institutions vying for attention at a reasonable cost per lead?

This was the challenge Adobe faced in marketing their client Mount Washington College. Though it’s owned by online education behemoth Kaplan, Inc., Mount Washington College (MWC) had changed its name and begun offering online degree programs in mid-2013. Adobe was tasked with increasing brand awareness and online engagement for the school while driving enrollment leads. Part of their advertising mix included Twitter.

I caught up with Paul Langtry, Account Director at Adobe to discuss the Twitter campaign he spearheaded for MWC (recently featured in a Twitter case study), how paid social compares to paid search and what it takes to run a successful Twitter campaign.

Langtry says the brand awareness challenge was a key reason they opted for a media plan that allocated half of the budget to social advertising. “In the case of Mount Washington College, non-brand paid search was going to be very competitive and expensive. Without that brand equity on non-brand keywords, we wanted to look at social. Social allows for great visuals and better brand positioning than a non-brand search campaign.”

The team started the Twitter campaign with standard promoted tweets and then added lead generation cards, which allow users to provide basic lead capture information — twitter handle, email and name — directly in the tweet without having to leave the platform.

When it came to audience targeting the key was to consistently drive scale. The team tested keyword, interest and username targeting. Langtry says they typically see the best performance come from username targeting then interest targeting. Keyword targeting often can be inconsistent depending on what users are tweeting about. The team began by combining interest (business, careers, job search, adult education) and username (to reach people similar to followers of accounts like @educationweek, @edutopia, @careerbuilder) targeting and then split them out to manage what was working best independently as they continued to tweak the targeting based on performance data.

In each case, ad copy was tailored to speak the particular audience targets and adjusted based on copy testing. They knew pricing information and affordability resonated with users and had success testing copy with the exact price of a specific course.

Langrtry said that when they added lead generation cards to the campaign, they considered the entire visual and made ad copy adjustments. The tweet becomes the setup, and the card has its own call-to-action with the graphic. “You don’t want to just take existing ad copy and pop in a card. You need to consider the entire ad experience.”

“With Twitter lead gen cards we could do branding plus lead generation. The performance can be very much in line with what you’d see on non-brand search,” said Langtry.

After adding the lead generation cards, Mount Washington College’s (MWC) conversion rate increased 101 percent at a 55 percent lower cost per lead. The brand’s follower rate also tripled.

Once a user submits their information, the lead data is transmitted to the client’s CRM system. There is a different follow up process for these leads than the traditional online form submissions, which typically include much more lead detail. Langtry says the email follow up is more informative for the Twitter leads because they tend to be much higher in the funnel — likely having not even been to the school’s website yet.

Which raises the question, do these leads actually convert into enrollments?  Langtry assured me MWC has been happy with the enrollment rates from Twitter leads. The campaign has been running for about seven months now and continues to scale with steady lead volume.

When asked about the differences he’s seen in managing paid search and paid social campaigns, Langtry says the major difference is that social campaigns often take more planning and experimentation to find what types of audiences and messages are going to work. Social usually doesn’t compete with the scale of paid search, but Langtry says they see success with social campaigns in most cases and recommend social to the majority of clients.

I asked Langtry what advice he would give to other Twitter advertisers. Here are his suggestions:

1. Always separate mobile and desktop. Engagement rates and conversion rates will be different between the two and need to be managed accordingly.
2. Use engagement rates as an early proxy, but they aren’t always a predictor for conversion rates. Wait until you get enough conversion data before making big decisions on segments, copy, etc.
3. From a bidding perspective, be very hands on, particularly at launch. “If you wait too long to act, the tweet might already be decaying.” Twitter requires very active campaign management.
4. Constantly test. Langrtry says they are always trying new creative and evolving targeting. They exclude poor performing targets, test new audiences and pull out top performing interest and usernames and give them their own budgets.

6 Tasks To Automate In AdWords Without Scripts Or Tools

When we think about automation in PPC, our minds tend to jump to expensive tools like Marin, Kenshoo and Acquisio or advanced algorithms and Google Scripts.

However, you shouldn’t let the word “automation” scare you into forgetting the simple things that make it great: speed and consistency. Today, I’m going to take you through six common PPC tasks you can do yourself for free in AdWords through the magic and wonder of automation.

Search Query Reports

Working with multiple clients, there are certain tasks I want to do at least once a month — things that can be fairly time consuming and also will look amateurish if I forget to do them. Mining search queries is one of these tasks. You certainly don’t want your boss or client looking through your broad match terms and finding that your “Honda Cars” campaign has spent thousands on Honda lawnmower queries (I’ve seen it happen).

With this in mind, I decided to start automatically emailing myself the data I need, saving at least 15 minutes per week, per account and much more importantly, reminding me to actually pull the reports I’m supposed to.

Now, that Honda example I alluded to might be an extreme example, but consider the other end of the spectrum: a small account that hardly changes from month to month. After doing SQRs for a year, ignoring the need for them can become an easy thing to do — “I’m pretty sure there are no useless terms showing up, so I won’t check it this month” (or next month). What happens when new search trends or products start sneaking in and your own laziness has caused you to miss them? The answer is not “good things.”

To create a useful and automated search term report, you need to first open up your Search Terms data from the Keywords tab by selecting “Details” > “Search Terms” > “All.” From here, apply the filters relevant to your particular account. In my case, this first report is looking for all Keywords that have spent twice my cost per conversion target without converting.

Once you apply this filter (or any filter that applies to how you normally do your search query mining), click on the download button to schedule this report. I do this on the first of the month for my small biz clients and weekly on specific days for larger accounts that need checking in on more regularly.

Rather than jump through these hoops every time, I just open Excel straight from my email, select the queries that look like they’ve wasted money or aren’t too relevant, and drop them back into the AdWords Editor as negatives.

I call this my “money wasting terms” report. Another SQR report I email myself is “CTR killers” — a list of irrelevant search terms sorted by high impressions and a low number of clicks, e.g. clicks 1000.

Work out what you “need” to see every week/month and set up the report. I also recommend setting up a report for “terms to add,” which might look something like: Conversions > 2, Added/Excluded matches “None.”

Automated Bid Changes

There are plenty of ways to automate bid changes that don’t involve paying any money to anybody (other than our good friends at AdWords). You could just use the Google Conversion Optimizer, and I’ve seen good success from it on larger campaigns.

However, for smaller campaigns or accounts without conversion tracking, automated bid rules can save you a ton of time as long as you make sure to check in on them.

I have one client whose ads perform way better in position three than any other position — it seems to be the sweet spot of conversion rate and cost.

For them, we have a relatively simple automated bid strategy set up, which utilizes two rules running concurrently. The first increases bids every day on keywords that have an average position less than 3.2 (with a max bid set to avoid things getting out of hand). The second rule runs exactly the same way but bids keywords down 5% that are higher than position 2.5.

There are lots of options out there for automated bid adjustments. For accounts without conversion tracking, you could try bidding down all keywords with bounce rates way above your average.

You can overlap a lot of these different bid rules to build a system that is much more robust and complex than could be done manually, and without wasting a lot of time. Make sure any overlapping rules make sense and aren’t causing anything crazy to happen (use min and max bids if worried).

Changing Ad Status

For offer-based ads, try using “Enable ads when…” and “Pause ads when…” from the “Automate” button within your ads tab.

I have a client who shows different messaging based upon the day of the week. During the week (Mon-Thurs), they run weekday package specials and for Fri-Sun they have ads showing their weekend pricing. I can automate to pause my weekday ads and unpause my weekend ads on Thursday night and vice versa on Sunday night.

The same thing can be equally useful for one-time events like pausing holiday specific ads. Nothing looks worse than ads where the content has expired — “Great Xmas Deals” tends to lose impact in February.

Dimensions Reports

Ever been in a meeting with your boss/client and have them ask something like, “Which countries are we selling well in?” or “How’s our traffic from tablets doing?”

These are the kinds of questions that, when answered quickly, show that you’re on the ball with your account — allowing you to send out exactly the kind of positive “this guy knows what he’s doing” vibes you want to be oozing with. They’re also the kind of questions for which I all too often have to stumble and say, “Err, I’ll get back to you on that.”

There are loads of these different insights you probably want to schedule for yourself:

• Geo performance
• Top landing pages
• Device performance
• Time of day
• Day of the week
• Call data
• Etc.

I schedule these reports at the start of the month for each client. That way, I can quickly go through each report and mentally check off the major areas I need to be monitoring for each account.

The automation here is all done from within the download box in your dimensions tab. Essentially, all you have to do is set up your data in a way consistent with how you regularly want to see it — for example, the past 30 days for Geo data, filtering out non US traffic and sorting by conversions. Once you’ve done that, just open up “Email and schedule report” and send on the first of the month.

Account Alerts

An easy piece of AdWords automation you should set up is email alerts.

I typically have at least 3 daily alerts set up for my accounts: one for Conversions coming in below my daily “low goal” (see example below), one for cost-per-conversion spikes, and one for costs being way over my daily average.

I set my alerts to email me at 7:00AM if the data from the previous day matches any of these conditions. This means that first thing when I check my email, I know if I have any fires to be fighting. Of course, your fancy software platform might do this for you, but there’s no reason you couldn’t be doing it easily and cheaply yourself.

Pausing Campaigns

“I want my [insert holiday] campaigns to go live at [insert unsociable hour in the morning]” is a phrase that doesn’t have to depress the account manager who is in tune with their automation inner peace.

I regularly use the “Enable campaigns when…” and “Pause campaigns when…” options in AdWords to do exactly that for me.

The most recent example I can think of was for a client whose site was going to be down on a Sunday between 2:00AM and 4:00AM for essential maintenance. I simply set up two rules: one pausing all live campaigns and another re-enabling them.

Another good example is from a client whose sales team could only handle a set number of leads per day — once campaigns hit a certain number of conversions, the automated rules which ran every hour paused for the day.

The goal with all of these automation tips is always the same — making things easier on you and eliminating errors and mistakes. If there are any others that you regularly use in your accounts, let us know in the comments below!

You Can Love Your Marketing Data, Just Don’t Fall Under Its Spell

I have a conflicted relationship with data.

On the plus side, I believe that data is one of the three biggest benefits that the digitization of the world has given us marketers. (The other two are malleability, the ability to easily change, experiment with and personalize the digital canvas, and intimacy, more direct interactions with customers.)

I believe that good, data-driven decision-making can compensate for many of our irrational mental biases and lead us to better outcomes.

And, I believe that every modern marketer should become adept at using data properly. If you’re not harnessing data to make your marketing programs better, you’re missing the 21st century.

Data Fundamentals Vs. Data Fundamentalism

However, I don’t believe that data has all the answers. In particular, I get itchy when I hear people imply that data will generate their strategy or creative.

Analyzing the linguistic data of Harry Potter and The Cuckoo’s Calling to discover, with high probability, that Robert Galbraith was actually a pseudonym of J.K. Rowling is a great example of what data and machine learning can do. Actually writing Harry Potter or The Cuckoo’s Calling is a good example of what they cannot do.

I believe that data can provide the inspiration for new ideas in strategy and creative, especially when we take an exploratory approach to all the data we have available to us. And, I believe that data, especially in the context of a controlled experiment, can provide validation for those new ideas.

But, I do not believe that strategy and creative will predictably emerge from the data of their own accord. On the supposed end of theory that big data will bring us, I call, um, malarkey.

Kate Crawford wrote a blog post on the Harvard Business Review site last year, The Hidden Biases in Big Data, where she labeled this unrealistic faith in data to have all the answers as “data fundamentalism.”

I believe in data fundamentals — using data in the right way, in the right context. But I eschew data fundamentalism. Knowing what data cannot do is equally as important as knowing what it can.

The Map & The Territory

I also get itchy when people claim that data is truth. How many times have you been in a meeting where someone brandishes a statistic to “prove” their point of view — without weighing the caveats and context in which that statistic was calculated? Things like selection bias,sample size, confidence intervals, and confounding variables matter.

Statistics show that people love content marketing. But do the characteristics of the content matter? Do the characteristics of the audience matter? (Hint: yes and yes.)

An often repeated phrase, attributed to Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, comes immediately to mind: “The map is not the territory.”

Just because someone drew a map of a mountain, doesn’t mean that is how the mountain actually is in reality. The map is obviously a simplification — otherwise the map would be as big as the mountain itself. So, there inherently must be many things missing from it. Things may have changed since the map was drawn, say, due to an avalanche or an earthquake. Or the cartographer may simply have made errors — in observation, in translation, in judgment or in drawing the map itself.

The practical wisdom of Korzybski’s insight: if you come to a cliff, don’t keep walking just because the map says there’s a bridge there.

I’m not saying that maps aren’t helpful. They’re incredibly helpful. But when you’re driving to dinner, I would recommend not keeping your eyes glued solely to your GPS. Checking out your windshield for oncoming traffic is probably a smart idea, too. (An analogy that I must credit toGord Hotchkiss.)

This is the same healthy skepticism that marketers should bring to their use of data. Data isn’t always true, and even when it is, it’s almost never the whole truth.

Let’s Not Be Rash

I know, this may not be a popular point of view in an “Analytics” column. And I should probably talk to my doctor about all these itching sensations.

So let me reiterate: data is a wonderful thing. The intelligent use of analytics is an incredible skill for a marketer to wield — and an immensely powerful asset for an organization to have within its ranks.

But recognizing the limitations of data — and the cognitive biases that arise as much from usingdata as they do from not using it — will make you a better analyst, a better marketer and more fun at parties.

You can love your data. Just don’t fall under its spell.

Welcome Martin Beck, Who Joins Third Door Media From The Los Angeles Times

We’ve grown again!

Third Door Media, the company that produces Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, is excited to welcome Martin Beckto our editorial team. He joins the team as our new Social Media Correspondent, and his first day will be Monday, March 3rd.

Martin has spent nearly 25 years in a variety of roles at the Los Angeles Times, most recently serving as the paper’s social media and reader engagement editor. With us, he’ll be providing daily news coverage and in-depth reporting on all things related to social media marketing.

For more on Martin’s background, please see our article on Marketing Land: Martin Beck, From LA Times, Joins Marketing Land As Social Media Correspondent.

We’re excited to bring Martin on board next week and we hope you’ll join us in giving him a warm welcome to our team.