Returns are the bane of existence for a lot of retailers, so they decided to try to curb


Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills Presented by Cara Harshman

this phenomenon with some data analysis and some personalization.


So they said in their hypothesis, if we deliver unique content to shoppers buying similar


size shoes, then they will be less likely to return them because they decided on a size.


Simple.


So they did the work necessary to identify which people these were, define them technically,


and then delivered this experience to them.


I'll read it to you because it's hard to read.


Not sure which size to get?


Our expert customer service can help you figure out the one for you so you don't have to return


the other.


Here's our phone number or email so you can talk to us right now.


So they just added their customer service team on the job.


They're like, people, we need you.


Come help people decide what shoes.


And this was a brilliant plan because it decreased the return rate for this audience by 80%.


That's significant.


That's way less product out there.


It's just good for everyone.


And it even increased the conversion rate.


More people were checking out and buying stuff because they were not worried they would have


to return it later.


And even their ancillary purchases of socks and other things went up and their customer


satisfaction increased.


People said they were really happy with the experience of talking to these Brooks running


support people.


So a really great example of identifying a unique audience that has a need and delivering


a great experience to them.


So here we are moving from execution to automation.


The things we need to get done, the things we need to evolve here are the prioritization


framework and the standardization of metrics, of definitions, of goals, so we're all on


the same page and we don't have to worry about any of that as we're running tests.


The third part of my journey is going from a team to advocates.


A team is the people who work with you.


They just are alongside you.


Maybe not that super jazzed to be doing that work, but they're assigned to it, so you got


to do it.


We want advocates, people who are going to promote your work, who are going to bring


more excitement and happiness and transparency to the things that you're doing.


That's who you want with A B testing.


It's not going to work, this A B testing evolution, if it's just you.


You just evolving right there.


You need more people to come and help support you.


So to make this transition happen, we need to get two things.


A diverse skill set and abundant communication.


Just so much communicating to the people who want to hear it.


Not to everyone, because that's spam.


And it turns out that we're doing pretty well on this.


From conversion excel's data, they say that a team of people is about 30% of the people


who are doing optimization.


Only 21% of marketers said nobody at their company is doing optimization.


That's sad.


We want to fix that.


And a lot of people are the lone wolf, the one-person team, just crushing it for everyone


else.


So if you're any lone wolves out there, I commend you and I hope you get some advocates


on your team soon with these skills.


So I think the top five skill sets to have on your team are someone who can project manage,


someone who can make things go from A to B, no pun intended, and who can just move the


process along and be that hub of communication, that hub of knowledge sharing for the company.


To a developer.


You need to have access to developer resources.


Even though a lot of these things make it really easy, if you're evolving like I'm suggesting


you do, you're going to be running more sophisticated, more in-depth case study, more in-depth hypothesis


and personalizations.


You're going to want someone who can help do the technical stuff for you.


Next, a designer.


Especially if you're doing personalization, you're going to have all these new content


experiences that you're delivering.


So try to have access to a designer.


I know this is hopefully not out of reach for everyone because you can make a friend


or get your buddy who's not even at your company to help you.


Or internally.


That's great.


Next is an analyst.


Someone who can help make sense of all the results that you get so you're not in analysis


paralysis situation where you don't even know what the hell that all means.


And five, just fearlessness.


Just plain and simple.


People who do great A, B tests need to be able to ask why.


They need to raise their hand at the back of the meeting and say, uh, I'm not sure I'm


connecting the reason that we're making this shift or trying this whole new plan.


Ask why and be that vocal upstart that's asking the right questions.


So hopefully everyone here is fearless.


Here's two team examples to show you how it plays out in real life.


This one is first from Craig at a company called Earnest.


They do student loan refinancing.


And they're great.


Craig is a really cool dude.


So Craig is the head of growth and he has more of a top down scenario where he's kind


of managing all these people that are all working on testing together.


So he's working on design, customer success and developer for his team.


And there's Josephine at Hotwire.


She's the current product manager for testing.


And she's more of this internal hub.


She's a bridge across all these other people who are managing testing at their own domains,


their own product pages.


So she works with a product owner for hotels, a product owner for flights, and she's this


knowledge base of brilliance.


She helps.


So there's not one way to make a testing team.


You can have piecemeal, all sorts of people managing it, but you're that product manager


making things take things from A to B, like I said, or you can have it all aggregated


in one team, the testing team.


You meet weekly.


You do these things.


People know you.


It's a team.


It's a thing.


So this is the diverse skill set that we need.


The second thing we need is communication channels.


We need to communicate what we're doing on this A B testing to generate these advocates.


First one I suggest is an opt in email newsletter.


Make it opt in.


If you're spamming people, they're not going to want to read it.


It won't be as good.


I know from growing that you're going to get a ton of email as your company is growing


and don't let your A B test one be the spam.


An opt in newsletter is great.


Weekly meetings for the core crew.


Many other teams within a company that are doing this continuous optimization or continuous


jobs have weekly meetings.


You should have one, too.


And then an internal wiki or workflow tool.


So at Optimizely, we use JIRA, but there's so many other tools out there that you can


help aggregate and see a knowledge base of what's been done, a historical record of tests


that you can look back to and say, hey, remember when we tested that, what happened?


Or hey, I want to share this with you.


Look at this crazy example.


And better yet, you can even have people vote before you release the results.


You can say, hey, everyone, what did you think?


It's really fun.


Because maybe people don't� people do get excited about SEO.


I mean, we're at an SEO conference.


Look at this.


It's amazing.


But A B testing really challenges your human intuition about what you think is going to


be right.


It's humbling.


Oh, the thing I thought was right is just crushing it or, like, losing so bad.


So it's really interesting to see these examples.


For lunch and learns, just have people bring their lunch, tell them about your tests.


Five all-hands meetings.


Pretty simple.


In the testing toolkit, you can get some examples of results sharing templates and decks so


you don't have to create your own.


We have them for you.


You can customize them as you want.


Amazing.


So, wow.


It's a long evolution.


I'm quite parched after all that evolving.


So we just went from evolving our test ideas, throwing shit at a wall� not throwing shit.


Throwing beautiful ideas at a wall.


Seeing what works to rooting our ideas and hypotheses to why this is going to happen.


Base and reason.


From execution, just making it happen, to automating, plug and play, scaling the process


that we use to make these data-driven decisions.


Then from team, people who are just by your side to help you muster and go along, to advocates,


people who are supporting you and lifting you up.


For the optimal outcome of this whole experience, again, is a learn rate of 100%.


There's no winning or losing.


If you are doing these things correctly, you're learning so much with every test about what's


working.


You're getting impenetrable insights into the depths of your customer's mind and your


analysis.


And then business growth.


You're increasing conversions, you're increasing revenue, you're increasing downloads.


Anything leads, all the goals that you have, the many different industries that are represented


here at MozCon, you can achieve higher revenue, higher growth.


And then very importantly, delighted customers.


You're just making a better experience for all when you're working on the work that needs


to be done to improve the usability and the ease of use and the happiness of your website.


Happy websites.


And last, you're making a stronger internal culture of decision making that you can take


to beyond the office.


It's not just within the walls of your meeting room.


I'm always optimizing my own life.


I say I'm an eternal optimizer.


So it's a great way to think about making changes and testing little bits of your individual


journey.


So I want to leave you with this thought that change is the only constant.


And I hope that as you all go through these next three days, you are only taking small


steps back to make huge leaps forward and you're taking these A and B testing skills


and applying them to your whole evolution, all the things that we're going to learn at


MozCon.


I'm so excited to get to know you all.


Thank you so much.


Thank you.


Thank you for submitting questions on the app.


I was going to ask for marketers who are having trouble with friction that's not letting them


get a CRO program set up internally and getting things running, what advice do you have for


folks who want to dive into all of this?


Yeah.


Well, I would say that you don't need internal buy-in for the first test.


I think the fearlessness really comes into play here.


You just have to do it and show people what you've done.


Or you go to a very similar company, someone in their peer group, and say, look, this is


what they did.


Here's why they're beating us.


And play that fear-mongering side.


Like we're going to lose all this because we're not doing it.


Because these guys are.


So if you have competitors in the space and you can easily point to something that they're


doing, I think using that fear of like the status quo that we're at is not good enough.


That's a great way to go.


Or just be fearless and do it yourself.


Great.


Looks like we have got time for a couple more questions.


More questions?


Oh, dear.


Bless you.


So someone had asked about the hackathons.


How do you include people in those hackathons who maybe don't understand the analytics data,


haven't seen a lot of this stuff before, are not deep in the marketing function, if you


have HR people, salespeople that you want to bring into that as well?


Great question.


I would say in the group.


So you will be doing the hackathon in groups.


That's a really nice way to foster more internal collaboration and more just cross functional


idea making.


So if you can pair an analyst or someone who does have a grip on the data with someone


who doesn't, just think about those pods of people who are working together and be intentional


with them.


Don't just let anyone pair off together.


Or just give some people very specific data.


Like a funnel report is really easy to read because you can just see a visual representation


of okay, this block is bigger than that block.


So I think there's ways you can dumb down the data to give people a good idea of what's


going on.


Okay.


Or just put the right people in the right room.


That's great.


Yeah.


There's also a question about tools.


And I guess you're somewhat biased about some of the A-B testing tools to use.


But any other, I mean, what's in your toolkit?


Any new things that you'd recommend at the moment?


Well, I think, so I obviously come from Optimizely.


Did.


And using Optimizely for A-B testing is great.


They now have a free trial.


So if you want to test it out, I'm not promoting it, but you can do that.


Let's see.


Others in the toolkit of things I would test is definitely a heat mapping tool.


Integrate your test with your heat map.


That is crucial.


Because it's so it's it gives you such a voice of the customer and analysis in one.


A hot jar, a qua la roux or a user feedback tool is really helpful.


And with prioritization, I think having something like Trello or Asana or Basecamp to help aggregate


all of your test ideas and assign all the data you have to them, like your scorecard,


you can do all of that with Asana or Trello.


I use Trello for my personal life and for work.


I think it's just so intuitive and easy.


What Links to Target with Google's Disavow Tool - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans.


Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Cyrus Shepard.


Today we're going to be talking about a big topic, Google's Disavow tool.


We're going to be discussing when you should use it and what links you should target.


Now this is kind of a scary topic to a lot of SEOs and webmasters.


They're kind of scared of the Disavow tool.


They think it's not necessary, it can be dangerous, you shouldn't use it, but it's a real tool,


it exists for a reason, and Google maintains it for exactly webmasters to use it.


So today we're going to be covering the scenarios which you might consider using it


and what links you should target.


Now I want to start out with a big disclaimer.


I want this to be approved by the Google spokespeople.


So the big disclaimer is the vast majority of sites don't need to disavow anything.


Google's made tremendous progress over the last few years of determining what links to simply ignore.


In fact, that was one of the big points of the last Penguin 4.0 algorithm update.


And before Penguin you had to disavow links all the time, but after Penguin 4.0,


Google simply ignored most bad links.


Emphasis on the word most.


It's not a perfect system.


They don't ignore all bad links.


And we'll come back to that point in a minute.


There is a danger in using the disavow tool of disavowing good links.


That's the biggest problem I see with people who use the disavow,


is it's really hard to determine what Google counts as a bad link or a harmful link


and what they count as a good link.


So a lot of people over disavow and disavow too many things.


So that's something you need to look out for.


And my final point in the disclaimer is large healthy sites with good link profiles


are more immune to bad links.


So if you're in the New York Times or Wikipedia and you have a few spam links


pointing to you, it's really not going to hurt you.


But if your link profile isn't as healthy, that's something you need to consider.


So with those disclaimers out of the way, let's talk about the opposite sort of situations,


situations where you're going to want to consider using the disavow tool.


Obviously, if you have a manual penalty.


Now these have decreased significantly since Penguin 4.0, but they still exist.


People still get manual penalties.


Definitely that's what the disavow tool is for.


But there's other situations.


There was a conversation with Marie Haynes that was published not too long ago


where she was asking in a Google Hangout, you know, are there other situations


that you can use the disavow other than a penalty where your links may hurt you algorithmically?


And John Mueller said this certainly was a case that if you want to disavow


those obviously dodgy links that could be hurting you algorithmically,


it might help Google trust your link profile a little more.


And if your link profile isn't that healthy in the first place, if you only have a handful of links


and some of those are dodgy, you don't have a lot to fall back on.


So disavowing those dodgy links can help Google trust the rest of your link profile a little more.


Okay, with those kiviets out of the way and situations where you do want to disavow,


a big question people have is, well, what should I disavow?


So I've done this for a number of sites, and these are my standards, and I'll share them with you.


So good candidates to disavow.


The best examples are often what Google will give you when they penalize you.


Again, it's a little more rare, but when you do get a link penalty,


Google will often provide sample links.


And they don't tell you all of the links to disavow, but they'll give you sample links


and you can go through and you can look for patterns in your links to see what matches,


what Google is considering a spammy link, and you definitely want to include those in your disavow file.


If you've suffered a drop in traffic or you think Google is hurting you algorithmically


because of your links, obviously if you participated in link schemes,


if you've been a little bit naughty, violated Google's webmaster guidelines,


you definitely want to take a look at those.


And we're talking about links that you paid for or someone else paid for.


It's possible someone bought some shady links to try to bring you down,


although Google is good at ignoring a lot of those.


If you use PBNs, now I know a lot of black hat SEOs that use PBNs and swear by them,


but when they don't work, when you've been hurt algorithmically or you've been penalized


or your traffic's down and you're using PBNs, that's a good candidate to put in your disavow file.


Non-editorial links.


Google has a whole list of non-editorial links.


We're going to link to it in the transcript below.


But these are links that the webmaster didn't intentionally place,


where things like widgets, forum spam, signature spam, really shady, dodgy links that you control.


And a good judge of all of these links is often in the anchor text.


Is it a money anchor text?


Are these money high-value keywords?


Do you control the anchor text?


You can generally tell a really shady link by looking at the anchor text.


Is it optimized?


Could I potentially benefit?


Do I control that?


And if the answer is yes to those questions, it's usually a good candidate for the disavow file.


Then there's a whole set of links in a bucket that I call the maybe file.


You might want to disavow.


I oftentimes do.


But not necessarily.


So a lot of these would be malware.


You click on a link, and it gives you a red browser warning that the site contains spam,


or your computer freezes up, those toxic links.


If I was Google, I probably wouldn't want to see those types of links linking to a site.


I don't like them linking to me.


I'd probably throw them in the disavow.


Cloak sites.


These are sites, when you click on the link, they show Google one set of results,


but a user's a different set of results.


The way you find these is that when you're searching for your links, it's usually a good idea


to look at them using a Googlebot user agent.


If you use Chrome, you can get a browser extension.


We'll link to some of these in the post below.


But look at everything, see everything through Google's eyes using a Googlebot user agent,


and you can find those cloaked pages.


They're kind of a red flag in terms of link quality.


Shady 404s.


Now, what do I mean by a shady 404?


You click on the link, and the page isn't there.


In fact, maybe the whole domain isn't there.


You've got a whole bunch of these.


It looked like it just something's off about these 404s.


And the reason I throw these in the disavow file is because usually there's no record


of what the link was.


It was usually some sort of spammy link.


They're trying to rank for something.


And then for whatever reason, they remove the entire domain or it's removed by the domain


register.


Because I don't know what was there, I usually disavow it.


It's not going to help me in the future when Google discovers that it's gone anyway, so


it's usually a safe bet to disavow those shady 404s.


And finally, sometimes you find those bad neighborhood links in your link profile.


These are things like pills, poker, porn, the three Ps of bad neighborhoods.


If I was Google and I saw porn linking to my non-porn site, I would consider that pretty


shady.


Now, maybe they'll just ignore it, but I just don't feel comfortable having a lot of these


bad, spammy neighborhoods linking to me.


So I might consider these to throw in the disavow file as well.


Now finally, we often see a lot of people disavowing links that maybe aren't that bad.


Again, I want to go back to the point, it's hard to tell what Google considers a good


link, a valuable link, and a poor link.


And there is a danger in throwing too much in your disavow file, which a lot of people


do.


They just throw the whole kitchen sink in there.


And if you do that, those links aren't going to count and your traffic might go down.


So one thing I don't personally put in my disavow file are scraper sites.


You see, you get a good link in an online magazine and then 100 other sites copy it.


These are scraper sites.


Google are picking them up.


I don't put those in the disavow file because Google is getting better and better at assigning


the authority of those links to the original site.


And I don't find that putting them in the disavow file has really helped, at least with


the sites I work with.


The same with feeds.


You see a lot of feed links in Google's list in your link report.


These are just raw HTML feeds, RSS feeds, again for the same reason, unless they are


feeds or scraper sites from this list over here.


But they're feeds and scrapers of good sites, no need.


Auto-generated spam.


These are sites that are automatically generated by robots and programs.


They're usually pretty harmless.


Google's pretty good at ignoring them.


And you can tell the difference between auto-generated spam and link scheme, again by the anchor


text.


Auto-generated spam usually does not have optimized anchor text.


It's usually your page title or it's usually broken.


These are really low-quality pages that Google generally ignores that probably you don't


need, that I wouldn't put in a disavow.


And simple low-quality.


These are things like directories, pages that you look at and like, oh wow, they only have


three pages on their site, no one's linking to them.


Leave it up to Google to ignore those.


And they generally do a pretty good job.


Or Google can count them.


For things like this, unless it's obvious, unless you're violating these rules, I like


to leave them in.


I don't like to include them in the disavow.


So we got our list.


A few pro tips when you actually put your disavow file together, if you choose to do


so.


If you find one bad link on a spammy domain, it's usually a good idea to disavow the entire


domain.


Because there's a good chance that there's other links on there that you're just not


spotting.


So using the domain operator in your disavow file is usually a good idea.


Unless it's a site like WordPress or something with a lot of subdomains.


Where do you find your links to disavow?


First choice is generally Search Console, the link report in Search Console, because


that's the links that Google's actually using.


It is helpful to use third-party tools, such as Moz, Link Explorer, Aref, Semirch, whatever


your link index is.


And that's because you can sort through the anchor text.


When Google gives you their link report, they don't include the anchor text.


That's very helpful to use those anchor text reports, such as you'd get in Moz, Link Explorer.


And you can sort through and you can find your over-optimized anchor text, your spammy


anchor text.


You can find patterns and sort.


That's often really helpful to do that in order to sort your information.


If you have a disavow file, and this happens on a lot of older sites, if you're auditing


a site, it's a really good idea to go in and check and see if a disavow file already exists.


It's possible it was created prior to Penguin 4.0.


It's possible there's a lot of good links in there already.


And you can try removing links from that disavow file and see if it helps your rankings, because


those older disavow files often contain a lot of links that are actually good, that


are actually helping you.


And finally, record everything.


Treat this as any other SEO process, record everything, think of it as an experiment.


If you disavow, if you make a mistake and your rankings drop or your rankings go up,


you want to know what caused that and you need to be responsible for that and be a good


SEO.


All right, that's all we have for today.


Leave your own disavow comments below and if you like this video, please share.


Intro to SEO Competitive Analysis - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans.


Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Cyrus Shepard.


Today we're talking about a really cool topic, competitive analysis.


This is an introduction to competitive analysis.


What is competitive analysis for SEO?


It's basically stealing your competitors' traffic.


If you're new to SEO or you've been around a while, this is a very valuable tactic to


earn more traffic and rankings for your site.


Instead of researching blindly what to go after, competitive analysis can tell you certain


things with a high degree of accuracy that you won't find other ways, such as what keywords


to target, what content to create, how to optimize that content, and where to get links.


How does it do this?


Well, instead of researching just a keyword tool or a link tool, with competitive analysis


you look at what's actually working for your competitors and use those tactics for yourself.


This often works so much better than the old-style ways of research because you can actually


improve upon what other people are actually doing and make those tactics work for you.


To get started with competitive analysis, the first challenge is to actually identify


your top competitors.


This sounds easy.


You probably think you know who your competitors are because you type in a keyword into Google


and you see who's ranking for your desired keyword.


This does work to a certain degree.


Another way to do it is to look at actually all the keywords you rank for because the


challenge is you probably rank for far more keywords than you believe you do.


Moz, for instance, ranks for hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of keywords.


We want to know at scale who are all the competitors ranking for all those different queries.


This is very hard to do manually.


Fortunately, there are a lot of SEO tools out there, Aref, SEMrush, many tools that


can tell you look at all the keywords that you rank for across thousands of SERPs and


then calculate using advanced metrics exactly who your true competitors are.


I'm happy to announce that Moz just released a tool that does exactly this.


We're going to link to it in the transcript below.


It's called Domain Analysis.


It's a free tool.


Anybody can use it.


You simply type in your domain and we look through all the keywords that your site ranks


for in our database.


We look at all the competitors and we use some advanced heuristics and we match those


up and we tell you who your true competitors are.


Once you know your true competitors, you can continue with the rest of the analysis.


The first step that most people take in doing an SEO competitive analysis is identifying


the keyword gap.


For a long time, when I was new to SEO, I heard this term keyword gap and I didn't really


know what it meant, but it's actually really simple.


It's simply what keywords do my competitors rank for that I don't rank for?


That's the gap.


The idea is that we want to close that gap if the keyword is valuable or high volume.


The trick is you can do this on your own manually.


You can see all the keywords you rank for using an advanced keyword tool and then list


all the keywords your competitors rank for and then combine those lists in Excel.


It's a long, tedious process.


Fortunately, again, major SEO tools such as Moz can do this at scale for you within seconds.


If you go to Moz Keyword Explorer, you simply enter your domain, enter your top competitors


domain that we found in this first step, and it will list all the keywords that your competitors


rank for that you don't rank for.


You can then pull this into a spreadsheet and find keywords with high volume or keywords


that are valuable and relevant to your business.


This is an important point.


You don't just want to go willy-nilly after any keyword your competitor ranks for.


You want to actually find the keywords that are relevant to your business.


After you do that, we also have the cousin of keyword analysis, link gap analysis.


This is a very similar concept because you need links to rank, but where do you find


the links?


You want to ask, who links to my competitors but does not link to me?


The theory here is that if someone is linking to your competitor on a similar topic, they


are more likely to link to you because they are in that business of linking out to that


type of content.


An advanced tip is you often want to look at two or more competitors.


The idea that if someone is linking to multiple sources but not to you, it's more likely they'll


link to you if you have superior content.


Again, SEO tools can provide something like this.


You can list all the backlinks to yourself or your competitors, combine them in a spreadsheet,


but the tools make it much easier.


In Moz's Link Explorer, you enter your competitor, you enter another competitor and yours, and


you can find all the people who are linking to those competitors but not to you.


An advanced tip that I like to use is do it at the page level.


Don't look for domains that are linking to your competitors.


Look for specific pages, and you can do this in Link Explorer.


We're going to show you a little more detail in a guide I'm going to link to at the bottom


of this post.


We understand links, we understand the keywords, but what content do we want to create?


Top content analysis.


This is very easy to do these days.


You're basically looking for content that earns your competitors a lot of traffic or


a lot of links.


The idea is if other people are linking to these things, then it's highly probable that


you can learn links with similar but better content.


The idea is you go to a tool like Link Explorer, you can sort by top pages, and you pick out


the content that has the most links for your competitor.


Then don't just recreate the content but make it better.


This is called the skyscraper technique, the idea of finding content that does really well


and then making it better.


Then once you have this, you go back to your link gap analysis and you reach out to those


people who are linking to that content and you ask them for links showing them the better


content.


That's in a nutshell.


When we put it all together, we have a very valuable process.


We can go back to our individual pages, look at those pages that are ranking for our competitors.


When you're all done, you can actually take your page, plug it into your keyword gap,


and see all the keywords the page is ranking for.


Our original keyword gap analysis looked at the domain, but now we just want to know what


the page is ranking for and we can add that into our own page and make the page even better.


We can again reach out to the same people who are linking to this page, show them our


better content, and that is the process.


I'm exhausted.


This is a huge process.


I went over it really quickly.


Fortunately, if it went by a little fast for you, we just released a guide, an introduction


to SEO competitive analysis.


We're going to link to it.


It explains all these processes in much more detail.


It's free to use.


I hope you enjoy it.


Hey, I really enjoyed making this video, if you found value in it, give it a thumbs up,


please share on social media, and we'll talk to you next time.


Social Media: People First, "Rules" Second Presented by Dana DiTomaso

Hi everybody.


Yes, this is the end of the Canadian blog for today.


There is one more Canadian tomorrow.


All right.


Social media.


We all use it extensively, especially Greg Gifford.


Do we really use it?


Now I know where he is.


Do we really use it well?


So here's your typical Facebook post, right?


20% off, cheesy wheezy potatoes on Wednesdays.


But really, a lot of social media right now is an old medium slapped onto a new product.


It's a digital billboard.


You could put that post anywhere and it would make perfect sense.


The social media rule book that we have is not necessarily thinking about social media


from what it is, but from what it used to be, from what advertising used to be.


It's not about the tactical implementation at that moment you hit post.


It's about what you're trying to say and who thinks you're worthy of your time.


Nobody gets up in the morning and says, I can't wait to engage my favorite brand on


Facebook.


Right?


I mean, who here wakes up in the morning and grabs their phone and opens social media?


You're all lying.


Come on.


I know you do this, right?


And you're flicking through and you're like, oh, cute cat, BuzzFeed.


I can't believe that happened in the election or the election campaign.


Canadians were very scared for you.


And you flip through that, but you're never like, I'm going to go see what my local Chipotle


has posted.


People don't engage with it in that way.


Why does it take, you know, bad user experiences happen everywhere.


Why does it take 14 days to remove you from a mailing list when you unsubscribe?


Why do I have to call you to get information when frankly I'd rather text?


Nobody enjoys the phone.


Why when you have given away my U-Haul reservation and I tweet at U-Haul saying, you suck, and


then U-Haul cares writes back and is like, hi, can you tell us the details of your problem?


Like cares is the last thing you think U-Haul is associated with in that moment.


And U-Haul is not the only brand.


It's just I'm picking on it because it's recently happened to someone who worked at Kick Point.


But Comcast cares, do they?


Right?


And so why are you making me do this?


You know, why are you making these experiences happen on a foundation what makes sense for


your company instead of what makes sense for your market?


Why are you approaching that from a me first perspective?


Ross just talked about this too.


What's working for you is not necessarily what's working for your market.


We need to rewire how we approach social media and start with the market in mind.


We need to stop starting our ideation process with a billboard.


If I say to you, picture an ad, do you picture a TV ad?


Do you picture a billboard, something in the newspaper that's still, you know, or do you


think about things like a really cool Facebook post or an interesting tweet?


Where does your mind go when I say the word advertising to you?


So instead of starting with that billboard, start with the people who we're actually advertising


to.


Even the words that we use to describe social media metrics are all wrong.


You know, audience, like you're in the crowd and I'm talking TV, can't talk back.


Quite similar to what's happening at this exact moment, except you're tweeting.


I'm going to see it soon.


Impressions, think of the TV ad, right?


I am one way conversation, reach, as in how many irrelevant people just scrolled on right


past your post.


Those are the words that we use to describe social media.


And what ends up happening is these aren't strategic metrics or tactical metrics.


I'm going to dive into that a little bit more in a minute, but they steer us down the path


of paying attention to the noise instead of the signal.


So what happened to social media, right?


When it first came out, Myspace, for example, right?


Zanga, that blogging platform, LiveJournal for really going way back, right?


News groups, you know, marketers have lost sight of what made social media so exciting


in the first place, which is I can talk to you and you can talk to me.


And instead we're trying to mold social media into forms in which we feel familiar.


The billboard, the radio ad, the TV ad.


But that doesn't mean that the opposite is true.


I don't necessarily mean like only high fives and group hugs on social media from now on.


We're here to make money.


Let's be honest.


Or, you know, other noble organization goals if you work for a not-for-profit or charity.


So how do you get away from that billboard and move into social?


So first I want you to think about how our brains are changing in this digital world.


And I have a story for you.


And I think there's been other stories about how things are changing.


And this is a funny one that a friend told me.


So she went to the store.


She had to replace a light switch in her house.


Went to Home Depot, bought the light switch, put it on the dining room table.


And her six-year-old walks in and says, Mom, what's that?


And she says, I want the light switch.


So he picks it up and he flicks it and he looks at the lights and says, well, it doesn't


work.


You just bought this.


And she says, no, honey, it needs to be attached.


And he says, why?


Because everything in his life is wireless.


Right?


Laptop, iPad.


You know, I heard from another friend that his TV is covered with tiny child fingerprints


because they keep trying to swipe it like it's an iPad.


Because why not?


Why wouldn't you do that?


That makes sense to us because we're old.


It doesn't make sense to them.


You know, our brains are changing and kids are just getting there faster than us.


But we're all catching up.


It's all going to happen.


How many more recently I have a story where I picked up the phone book and I looked for


a search box.


The physical phone book.


No, that's not how that works, Dana.


But our brains are changing from an analog to digital.


And yeah, the millennials are there first.


And we can talk about marketing millennials all day like there's some giant group.


But when it comes down to it, our brains are becoming digital.


So here's another example of that.


Vertical video sucks.


Right?


How many times have people said that?


Oh, vertical video.


I hate it.


Well, why do you hate it?


Well, it's because the implementation sucks.


A vertical video.


YouTube hates vertical video.


Facebook, totally cool with it.


And Snapchat, also cool with it.


Vertical video on YouTube feels like it's your parents who are like, no, no, this is


how we do it.


YouTube and how they handle video is an analog signal tossed into this digital medium.


That's YouTube being a bunch of old farts about it.


And actually the founders of YouTube, I looked them up, they're all like three years younger


than me.


So I'm an older fart.


But it's horizontal because the founders grew up when you had to get up to change the channel


on the TV.


Right?


They grew up in a horizontal world.


So of course all video should be horizontal, but that's not the case.


So vertical video is the most comfortable and easiest way to shoot video on a phone.


Evidence.


This is Beyonce.


Who went to go see Beyonce on a tour?


No one?


Come on.


Are you guys just quiet and tired?


Well, I did and it was awesome.


All right.


So this is Beyonce live in London.


Please try to find the horizontal phones in this video.


I can see, yeah, there's one over on the side.


I like the selfie stick, which I think is turned to the side at this particular moment.


And my real favorite is the guy who's taking a selfie.


Like he doesn't care that Beyonce is right behind him.


He's like, my hair is on fleek right now.


I'm taking a selfie.


That went through his mind.


Although in a British accent, this is from Wembley.


So these people don't care that YouTube is going to change their video later, right?


And I mean, the ironic thing is that when I got this off of YouTube, it was somebody


who clearly held their phone horizontally for an hour and six minutes to record this


entire video.


And it's shaky as hell.


So I don't recommend watching it, but these people are annoyed at YouTube because they


can't upload their cool videos.


They're just going to put it on Snapchat and you can actually see a couple of the interfaces


if you really zoom in are actually Snapchat at that moment.


So you go ahead and market with your billboards and your 30-second spots and you're marketing


to people who'd rather turn their face into a taco or never ever turn their phone to the


side even for Beyonce, right?


Like these people spent a lot of money on these seats.


These are not the cheap seats.


I was in the cheap seats.


It was cold.


It was like Edmonton, May, Ippy.


So these are the people who don't care that you're making them do something.


They're just going to go somewhere else.


And the thing is that we're all turning digital.


It's time to rewrite how you approach these mediums while you still can and before your


competition does because they might be sitting in this room listening to the same talk, getting


there faster than you.


So now that I've put fear in your heart, let's turn to what we recommend.


So we put together a concept that we like to call SMUX, social media user experience.


And SMUX is not, you know, Facebook is kind of crappy sometimes with their interface.


SMUX is about how the individual market engages with the post.


SMUX is about knowing when and how your market wants to pay attention to you and then giving


them what they want at that time.


And it goes beyond personas and audience research.


And personas still hugely important.


I don't want to diminish the importance of creating personas in any way.


But one of the great things about social media is you can get a lot of data and data leads


to what we call attention research.


Attention research is looking at what actually gets your market excited.


What are they paying attention to?


Hence the name.


It's very scientific.


So we use Rival IQ for attention research.


There's a number of different ways to do it.


We really like Rival for this.


Rival IQ, if you're not familiar with it, and frankly you should be, is fantastic.


At its heart it's a competitive research tool.


You put in your site, you put in your competitor's sites, and Rival says, hey, this other company


had a breakout Instagram post.


Or they change their title tag on their home page.


You can see if they're futzing with their SEO.


Or suddenly they're ranking for a whole bunch of keywords that they weren't before.


But something else you can do with Rival IQ is you can put social media profiles in it.


So when you go into Rival IQ, and they have a group, a collection of companies that you


put together called a landscape, when you go to create a landscape in Rival IQ, it says,


you put in your landscape name, and then it says, please put in the website address.


Well, instead of a website address, put in someone's Twitter handle or their Facebook


page, if they have lots of public posts, for example.


Or Pinterest or Instagram.


You can put any of those things in there, and Rival will evaluate it like it would for


anything else.


So I built a landscape of all the MozCon speakers to check them all out.


And I only looked at Twitter for this, although there was lots of, it did grab a couple of


Facebook pages for people.


And it just automatically grabbed a couple of Facebook pages, it grabbed a couple of


Instagrams.


In this case, I'm just looking at Twitter to keep the data set kind of simple.


So here's one of the things that you can see.


Top landscape posts.


So here's Rob at the top.


He had the top post in August out of all the MozCon speakers, wherein he is asking Twitter


to help build his deck for him.


So good job, Rob.


The second tweet is Zeph talking about PR and link building, and then Zeph again talking


about the layouts at Moz.


There's a lot of, and when you dig into these posts, and I think there's a thousand sixty


posts, something like that, thousand ninety something, one of those two numbers is correct.


There's lots of interesting stuff in there.


You can see about the kinds of engagement.


It also tells you what the most popular hashtags were.


What I learned from this is out of a thousand posts, MozCon speakers don't use hashtags all


that often.


The most popular hashtag, MozCon, if you can imagine that.


Post times as well.


So it goes a little bit further than just figuring out when your market is active.


On these charts, the blue line are my tweets, so you can see how inconsistent I am with


my Twitter usage, and then the dotted line is the entire landscape, so all the MozCon


speakers put together.


And in Rival, you can do some filtering, so you could pull out a certain subset of just


the people talking about content marketing, for example.


So you can see the activity by published hour, activity by published day, engagement rate,


et cetera.


And so you can see, for example, in this bottom left-hand chart, the engagement rate by published


hour.


See that funny little blip right at midnight mountain time?


What's going on there?


So apparently the time tweet MozCon speakers is midnight mountain time, 2 a.m. Eastern.


Best engagement you're going to get.


I don't know.


I tweeted out that post super late, and that's why I got all the engagement.


But these sorts of things, when you pull them together, create this foundation of attention


research.


What is making your market interesting?


So think about taking a landscape of your best customers who happen to have Instagram


accounts, for example.


Put them in Rival IQ.


See what kinds of things are happening with their accounts.


It's a deeper kind of research.


Instead of calling them and saying, hello, when do you tweet?


You just put it in there.


And this research is really the foundation of smucks.


So we'll go back to that technically perfect post on Facebook.


I could take that post and stick it on a billboard.


There's an image, adorable potato, a call to action, some supporting text.


It's not very smucksy.


So maybe you posted it at the right time and you used the right hashtags and you read the


like ten tips to a perfect post on Facebook and you followed all those rules, but it's


not enough.


You need more to make a good smucks.


So OK, Dana, what makes good smucks?


There's six elements to good smucks.


Psychographics, analytics, platform, message, intent, and play.


So I'm going to go through each of these and I really want to encourage you to start your


creative process from a smucks first perspective.


Let's stop pushing out billboard tweets.


Let's start actually doing something really interesting with social media.


So first off, psychographics.


You may be familiar with this term if you spend any time working on personas.


Chatelaine magazine in Canada did a segment called This is 40ish and you can look at the


hashtag this is 40ish.


They interviewed a thousand Canadian women between the ages of 35 and 45, my demographic


group, and they asked them a lot of questions, some super easy ones like do you look good


naked?


Do you consider yourself a feminist?


Right?


You just roll that off the tongue.


And one thing that I liked about it was that they did ask those hard questions and they


got some really interesting answers.


So here's the answers to the questions.


What makes you unique?


And we want you to watch this and pay attention to the variety of responses.


I reported to a lot of women that I know can outlast their kids and I can keep up with


them.


First of all, my height, I'm huge.


I would say it's probably my sense of humor.


I like to walk through life with an I don't really care attitude.


I'm a fighter.


I'm bubbly.


I'm a strong person, strong personality.


I had an eating disorder and when I was in my teens and 20s it was a really difficult


experience I was really ashamed of but now that I'm older I really understand what happened


and it's something that I'm most grateful for.


I think that people can depend on me for no bullshit.


People always assume that I'm married because I have two children but my partner and I decided


that marriage was not what we wanted to do.


I had a son and he was born at 22 weeks gestation and he lived for three hours and then he passed


away.


So his birth and death in our life has really made our perspective on being parents and


being a mom something special.


I think everybody's unique.


Everybody's got a story.


Everybody's got different experiences.


Everybody's got no two people could ever be the same.


So tell me after watching that that you would market to each of those people exactly the


same way.


Right?


Like each of those stories is some of them were tiny like I'm really bubbly and others


were women talking about her eating disorder or that woman who talked about her child passing


away and these are massively powerful stories that once you start to think about the people


you're marketing to as people you can get into their hearts and their motivations and


truly understand what it is that drives them and what it is that drives them to make decisions


that they do.


Your market isn't a mass of people with the same characteristics.


I know that you know this right you're thinking that it's obvious of course not but sometimes


it's easier especially when you're on a deadline to just say you know what Facebook women between


35 and 45 go and then you hope that maybe somebody is going to scroll past and be like


oh yes this speaks to me.


That isn't how you should be running social media.


So I encourage you after I just said about how people hate talking on the phone pick


up the phone call your customers actually ask them some questions and don't ask them


the usual stuff like hello what social networks are you on.


That's a nice icebreaker but really what you want to get into are the interesting questions.


So what kind of phone do you have.


What makes you share a post on Facebook.


What is the last charity you donated to.


Why did you pick the car that you drive.


What do you like about your city.


What do you like about your neighborhood.


Ask them things that will get you under the hood and then you begin to understand your


markets motivations for making the decisions that they do.


So for example we did this for a client of ours and it turns out the nurses in Alberta.


This could be true elsewhere.


Please let me know if it is.


They joined Twitter just to follow food trucks so they can follow them around at different


events that there's this cabal of nurses on Twitter and they don't talk to anybody and


they just follow like 20 different food truck accounts.


Although there is an app but they prefer the Twitter.


We also asked about that and this is what they do.


That's how they use Twitter.


So OK great.


We said to the client hey if you want nurses to come to your event invite some food trucks.


I don't know how we would have found that out any other way but picking up the phone.


Right.


And so it's I am the person at Kick Point who is most comfortable talking on the phone


so often I get to do the phone interviews and honestly they're really fun.


Pick up the phone.


Talk to your customers.


You're going to learn some cool stuff.


And if you want to be a little bit towards the creepy spectrum of things full contact


has a fantastic API where you can put in a bunch of people's email addresses for example


your best customers and then it returns all their social profiles.


Full contact has about a 60 to 70 percent success rate lower if you're in Canada.


Like most things we don't get all the cool stuff in Canada but it's great.


And I believe it's been talked about before at least a couple of times.


So if you're not using the full contact API I really do recommend checking it out.


It'll also be able to tell you if you put in a database of say all your clients email


addresses it will tell you what social networks they belong to.


One thing to note LinkedIn.


A lot of people don't use their work email addresses for LinkedIn because you know that's


what they do.


So just take LinkedIn results with a grain of salt.


As with all things LinkedIn they hate analytics and we hate them for it.


But you'll be surprised at what's capturing your audience's attention.


Grab those social profiles after full contact toss them into rival IQ build a landscape


start to do some analysis.


Next is analytics.


So this is where you separate out the strategic metrics from the tactical metrics.


Remember I mentioned that earlier.


So if you weren't here two years ago my talk was called Prove Your Value and it was about


reporting to clients and not talking about rankings ever.


I would really recommend that you watch that if you haven't because I don't have enough


time or else the red light will start flashing.


I don't have enough time to do that talk again.


And it is a good companion to this analytics part because strategic metrics are the metrics


that move the business needle.


Right.


So you do metrics are the things that keep you in business.


Tactical metrics are the stuff that we report on as digital marketers.


So strategic metrics are stuff like customer lifetime value or ticket sales or referrals


from clients.


And tactical metrics are engagement rate and bounce rate and likes and that kind of stuff.


And digital marketers are really really bad at reporting on just the tactical metrics


and not the strategic ones.


And it's because well every tool in the world gives us the data for the tactical metrics


and then you try to figure out the strategic metrics and it's really hard.


Like now there's math.


I don't want to do math.


I went into marketing to avoid stats.


Well surprise.


You know and not every company has a marketing scientist hanging around who can interpret


this kind of data for you.


So try really hard to not do that because what ends up happening is if you focus too


much on the tactical metrics you end up on this terrible hamster wheel of if we post


more we get more engagement so post more so we get more engagement and you shove out updates


as quickly as possible you got to make sure all the buffer boxes are filled at all times.


Right.


And you're not able to take the time to think about whether or not that post is actually


going to resonate more posts more engagement.


That's slow it down.


And as well as Rand mentioned this in his opening talk like how much of your site traffic


is via social media.


He said that the average from similar web is 5 percent which is I was encouraged to


hear that because we have several clients where you know when we start working with


them the amount of traffic that they get from social media is 5 percent.


This is pretty common.


And we had a client who was consistently top in the rival IQ landscape when it came to


stuff like engagement rate number of followers right.


So from the tactical aspect they looked fantastic for the strategic aspect they looked terrible.


So instead now they've increased social media traffic to the Web site by 280 percent over


the last two months by following the principles of smucks and they're actually able to track


social media traffic to ticket sales.


And although you know sometimes it doesn't necessarily work all that well analytics tools


are part of the problem.


They don't make it easy to tie down specific posts to outcomes right.


Attribution is a massive problem in social media and I think in fact social media metrics


are getting harder to measure not easier right.


Let's talk about dark social right.


Look at the continued growth of dark social posts.


We're seeing dark social account from anywhere to 20 to 60 percent of a client's traffic.


So being able to analyze your results in some sort of meaningful strategic way just became


that much more important because really it's you have to prove your value you have to prove


what you're doing or else you're not going to be around for very long in your job.


So for example we have a client who we've been working with on getting their ticket


master to report properly on you know somebody clicked an ad on Facebook went to Ticketmaster


bought a ticket.


It says direct.


Why?


And we talked to Ticketmaster like oh sorry we can't help you.


So there's any Ticketmaster experts in the room.


Come see me please.


But this is the problem attribution tools especially if you have to deal with any third


party tools like Ticketmaster like Eventbrite right.


So you end up defaulting to those tactical metrics because you can't report on the strategic


ones because the tools made it too hard.


But at the end of it tactical metrics don't pay the rent.


Platform is the next piece.


And this is when you ask yourself is this the right place for this post and is this


the right type of post.


You know Ross has talked about this quite a bit.


It is not just Twitter versus Facebook but is this a video a survey a blog a combination


of the above.


We need to ask ourselves better questions before we just start diving into social media.


For example Channel 4 News in the UK has done extremely well on Facebook.


They've grown their monthly video views from 5 million to 200 million and they did this


providing good smucks.


They have square videos which is a nice compromise between vertical and horizontal.


They caption everything and how they present the posts are really effective.


I recommend that you check out their channel because they have some excellent stuff going


on there and they've opened up two new channels as well for long form interview stuff that


didn't quite fit in with their main their main Facebook platform.


So they're respecting the platform and moving things to the right place so they're respecting


their audience.


You go back to Rival IQ and you look at that market landscape.


Well you look at top posts and say OK so obviously video clearly I couldn't blow up the screenshot


anymore unfortunately but you can see there was one video post that had the most engagement


out of everything and this is out of the MozCon speaker landscape.


So people really love video and it's so obviously more video so you don't want to over focus


on engagement but engagement can give you those hints that help you make decisions on


what you're going to put out.


And ask yourself as well are you even on the right platforms?


Does your Facebook page suck?


Is it just literally a waste of money?


So Eat24 remember how they broke up with Facebook back in March 2014 because they said you know


what Facebook we are done with you.


You make us pay for every post.


Only 2 percent of our fans see our posts forget it we're done.


And the last post they had on their Facebook page was still exists was their breakup letter


to Facebook.


And after they broke up with them they had their best year ever because all those marketing


dollars that were tied up in promoting Facebook crap was actually focused on real customers


and then they got bought by Yelp.


I'm not saying that if you delete your Facebook page Yelp will buy your page by your company


but it's a pretty convincing argument over here.


Message saying the right thing in the right way.


Last year talked about brand voice.


I recommend watching that as well.


I feel like this talk is sort of Dana's previous MozCon talks mashed together.


I talked last year about branding creating a brand voice.


Do that but also use that voice please across all channels including social media.


Do use your keyword research.


Consider the voice of the market.


Go back to Rival IQ.


Look at those top posts again and search the post content and see if they're using the


same words that came up in your keyword research that you did for SEO purposes.


Just start typing it in and it tells you the number of posts that came back.


So MozCon speakers, 1190 posts.


I almost had it right.


So out of all those posts that they made 29 of them mentioned the word SEO.


23 of them mentioned the word search.


Nine mentioned social.


Forty five mentioned the word content.


And I could have kept going because I wanted to find like a hundred posts but they were


really diverse.


You can export all this data from Rival IQ into a CSV.


Do fancy data.


Slice and dice and with it toss it in Tableau and do some cool stuff.


But people like to talk to people who are like them.


Just look at social media.


So how can your post make your market feel comfortable?


Are you using the right words when you talk to people?


And are you inclusive?


Consider if the post itself is inclusive.


Are you drawing people in?


Are you setting yourself apart?


Do you say things like get your tickets now or do you say see you there?


Which seems very simplistic but it makes a huge difference in how people respond and


engage with the post.


Also they're more likely to comment on the post if you actually say you know see you


there.


Intent.


Intent is a crucial piece of this.


Let's go back to that poor hamster wheel.


This is our social media manager.


So your goal in social media shouldn't be to hit your posting targets.


If you're posting X number of times a day and that's like one of your KPIs for your


job come come talk to me.


We would like to help you fix that.


Like I'll give you tactics for your boss especially in-house marketers.


I feel like sometimes you end up getting stuck with these really weird goals that are not


meaningful in these ways.


But for the rest of you you know I refuse to believe that the goal of every social post


is higher engagement.


What are you actually contributing to this noise?


Ask yourself why before you post.


You know are you why are you sharing that video?


Why are you tweeting out that link?


And there's a big trend in articles lately I've spent a lot of time you know on Medium


which is really also a social network if you think about it.


A lot of people talking about getting away from the desk and spending that 20 percent


time thinking well why not spend that 20 percent time before you're composing a social post


ask yourself why am I doing this?


Take that time before you hit post to ask yourself what the goal is.


What is the intent of this?


And consider all of your interactions not just the broadcast kind but the engagement


kind the customer service kind.


Why do you make me take my complaint to a direct message immediately?


Are you embarrassed that I'm mad at your company?


You know is this happening often enough that you want to hide it away?


Maybe if you're U-Haul for example.


So this is my business partner Jen and she went to the Women's World Cup in Vancouver


and rented a place through Airbnb.


And when they showed up the Airbnb host had given away her reservation and said oh sorry


no room for you.


And it was busy in Vancouver for the Women's World Cup.


There were no hotels.


So you can see Jen's increasingly desperate tweets to Airbnb about this.


And she DM them their reservation code.


That's all they asked for was a reservation code or email.


And then she called in and they already knew her backstory knew where she was knew that


she had tweeted at them and put them up in an $800 a night hotel on Airbnb's tab.


So while Airbnb is not a perfect company and have other problems that was pretty cool.


So good job on intent and also following through in a public way and not just making them take


it to DM.


So and also think is your intent even possible?


So nothing is crappier than tweeting out you know enter our contest.


And a lot of people use Twitter for example on their cell phones.


And then I go to the page and it's not responsive.


Why do you hate me?


Right or they want you to fill in your address and it's a U.S. only thing for example.


And they've got every country in there starting with Afghanistan such as the default.


Right.


That's a lot of scrolling.


Why are you making me do that?


Does your form nice?


Are you making it easy for people to do the thing you want them to do?


Like think about that part of it too.


So who here has a dog?


How many dog people are there?


Interesting less than I thought.


OK.


So BarkBox.


I'm sure there's at least a couple of BarkBox users in here.


When they send out the BarkBox which is a monthly box of dog toys.


They're really adorable.


I don't even have a dog and I like BarkBox.


They include a little card that says make sure to tweet it or post about it with the


hashtag BarkBoxDay.


This is a screenshot of Instagram with BarkBoxDay.


People post about it a lot.


The problem is that BarkBox doesn't comment or like any of these posts.


I don't know why but it's there so BarkBox if you're here please get on this massive


marketing opportunity.


Huge amounts of engagement.


People love I know the Internet is made for cats not so much for dogs but you're missing


out on this massive marketing opportunity.


And the last element is play.


Play is why Snapchat has more users than Twitter.


Period.


Like why would you hang around a boring place like Twitter when you can turn your face into


a taco on Snapchat.


Right.


Like yeah sorry Snapchat man.


It's I know you don't like it.


I made a joke that when I turn 40 Snapchat is just going to uninstall itself from my


phone.


I'm really bad at Snapchat actually.


I barely understand it but I get why people like it.


Just because I don't know how to do things with it doesn't mean that you know my market


doesn't.


Did you know that 224 million people turn their face into a taco.


Right there's more people who've ever eaten a Taco Bell.


That was on Cinco de Mayo.


Or more people use Gatorade's Super Bowl sponsored Snapchat than actually watched the Super Bowl.


And it was the 50th anniversary.


It wasn't a good game.


It was kind of sad.


But a lot of people use this filter.


It was funny.


The other thing is that the average user plays with a Snapchat lens and this is what these


funny filter things are called or Snapchat lenses.


They play with them for 20 seconds.


The first five seconds of a YouTube video ad are spent staring at a skip button waiting


for it to turn.


Right.


That's 15 more seconds than you have.


I bet you if YouTube did eye tracking that's what they would see.


And really like everybody wants to play.


Hello.


We are surrounded by video games.


This entire conference is play themed.


At the heart of marketing is emotion.


And play has some of the strongest emotions.


Like we're going to get a Lego Roger you guys.


Come on.


Play gives you permission to goof off.


And of course we've all learned these studies.


Then brief play breaks results in better productivity at work which is how I personally justify checking


out the fantasy football forum on Reddit pretty regularly at work.


And really like people just want to play.


And they're on social media.


They don't want to be marketed to.


They just want to have a good time.


But play is more than creepy taco faces.


Right.


Play may seem like the easiest element of smucks to get right.


But it's harder to be playful without trying to be like your dad coming downstairs while


you're all secretly drinking beer.


And he's like hey kids.


Like go away dad.


Like you don't want to you don't want to be like that on social media.


And I'm sure many of you are thinking my industry is too boring.


I cannot play.


So challenge accepted.


Your funeral home.


How do you make that playful?


This is how you make it playful.


So I found out about these people because we did a fax Christmas card one year.


I found out we could send out faxes through our phone system.


So we made a fax Christmas card and sent it out and we tweeted out Hey Yeg.


It's a hashtag for Edmonton.


Do you want a fax?


Tell us your fax number.


And not only did they tweet us their number but then they explained why they use faxes


so much.


Very educational.


Like these people are interesting.


I'm going to follow them.


They are a poke stop.


They also have several gyms right near their location.


I spend a lot of time hanging out in the funeral home parking lot.


The other thing that happens is they have North America's largest Fringe Festival across


the street for two weeks every summer.


So this year they decided let's do tours.


Why not.


Right.


And frankly like who wouldn't want to see inside a funeral home.


That's kind of cool.


So they did tours.


And if you look at this from an engagement perspective it got one retweet from the actual


old Strathcona which is the business association and some random person liked it.


And that's it.


So from an engagement standpoint it looks terrible.


But oh hey look there in the paper with a link.


Yeah.


A link from the paper is amazing.


They put the fun in funeral and they actually do.


The couple who owns this funeral home say that their eyes met across a crowded morgue.


They're really funny.


And so this is how you can make your industry interesting.


If these people can make funeral homes funny you can do it too.


I believe in you.


I think you can do it.


So now that you've got the six elements of Smux I want you to approach Smux not from


a Venn diagram perspective but from a building block perspective.


Think about the three pieces of Smux the three elements that are going to be easiest for


you to nail on a consistent basis.


And then when you walk out of here just work on those three for a while.


And then when you've got those three then start on another one and another one.


So you've got all six.


It's called practice for a reason.


You're not going to get it right right away.


That's OK.


And not every post is going to be the Smuxiest post in the world.


But eventually you will get there with all six elements.


And before I finish off I have an example of something that a client of ours did that


we felt and they did this totally on their own.


We'd only just started working with them and they came up with this idea and ran with it


and we thought it was so fantastic.


So I want to talk about it today.


The Edmonton Community Foundation and if you're not familiar with community foundations basically


their job is to give away money.


Well they get money from people and then they give it away to other people and they work


on mostly endowment funds which are forever funds that people set up and they use the


interest as donations of charitable organizations.


So that means that you can always give money forever and they're really cool.


And if you have a community foundation in your community I recommend setting up an endowment


fund with them.


Cleveland is a great example of another.


Basically Cleveland was saved by the Cleveland Community Foundation.


Check it out.


So they have three challenges.


First community engagement.


Most people do not think about giving away their money until they are almost dead.


Funeral home.


People might want to get in on it anyway.


So challenge two charity engagement.


Keeping the charities that they work with engaged outside of their regular granting


cycles so they only give away money at certain times of the year and how do you get them


excited other times.


And the third thing is showcasing the wide variety of charities that they support because


the general public doesn't necessarily know that instead of giving a donation to the food


bank every year why not set up an endowment fund for the food bank and then give them


food bank money for 100 years for example.


So they came up with this contest on Facebook.


No contest platform.


It is just whoever liked the post the most got it.


Charities were asked to submit a meme that explained their mission.


Not all the charities understood what a meme was.


Just going to put that out there.


And by the charity who won it was not a meme.


It was just like white text on a picture like the non meme.


But it's OK.


It's OK.


They you know they got the most likes.


They actually ended up picking two that one was really a meme.


One of my favorites is down in the bottom right hand corner.


I don't know if you guys can read it but it says fighting to protect Alberta's caribou.


I'm liking it.


That's funny.


Yeah.


But the best part is that all these charities came together to submit these memes.


They did it on April 1st.


It was kind of a non an anti April Fool's contest and it got not just massive engagement


but people who were totally unaware of the community foundation from a you know I support


this charity perspective or from a I'm a charity I need to get on this perspective found out


about it because it was it was funny.


It had a good message.


The intent was right.


The platform was right.


It was all the elements just came together into this fantastic contest and now they're


going to do it every year which is great.


This is actually my favorite did not win meme out of it.


Really well like rehabilitators they just pick up poop all day.


It's true.


So when your smucks comes together it's really about empathy.


Your customers become more than page views.


They're real people right.


Think back to that video and you feel like you know something about these women now even


though you just saw a short brief story about them on the screen when your site has a 1


percent conversion rate that means you failed.


Ninety nine percent of the people who came there.


So how do you make that better.


How do you stop failing that audience and doing this scattershot approach and hoping


that something sticks.


One of the most flat out fun Twitter accounts I follow is for a pharmacy in Halifax.


I think Ross has been there.


It's called Scotia pharmacy.


They break every single social media rule.


They tweet in all caps all the time.


They make up ridiculous hash tags constantly.


They were joking about like having the follower of the beast when they got to 666 followers


and actually tricked my business partner into becoming the follower of the beast.


They I just kept unfollowing them until they hit it.


So this is and the stuff they treat is funny like if you download the deck later and really


look at what they have here in these student essentials.


It's there's some good stuff.


And this is this is what they're like.


And when I go to Halifax I'm totally going to this pharmacy just because they're so awesome


on Twitter.


So please follow Scotia pharmacy.


Remember that you can do crazy stuff and be awesome.


We see if you Google social media tips right you see articles like this all the time.


So 13 social media rules you should never break.


19 rules for this and 21 rules for that.


The only rules need to follow on social is keep it in your brand voice.


Do your research.


Spend time being social.


Be smucksy.


Let's break this crap.


Forget about it and do something that's right for you and your market.


These rules don't necessarily apply to you.


They apply to the generic boring accounts that you're going to utterly crush after this


presentation.


So are you ready.


Let's break some rules.


Thank you.


I'm told we might be almost out of time but yeah we'll.


Oh yeah there we go.


It didn't start so I don't know.


That's great.


All right.


We'll we'll we'll ask some quick quick questions.


Couple of people asked about dark social.


So give us the give us just the lowdown on on that dark social.


OK so dark social is when somebody is using a secure connection like Instagram and they


go to your website that you have and you didn't put UTM parameters in the link and so it doesn't


report a refer.


So the best way to do this and there's actually if you go into Google Analytics and you go


to custom there is a report that you can import that shows you dark social posts and I can


tweet out a link later too we've created a custom dark social report but basically it's


direct traffic that starts at a page other than the home page and there's a couple different


ways people can get there right.


If you type on your phone and it shows a page right away and you tap that that counts as


direct but like if they're visiting a page it's a really long URL and there's a big spike


in traffic right about the time you paid for a Facebook ad probably dark social and it


happens because people talk about how the Internet needs to be more secure and that


means that we can't track things and you know it's basically you know not provided continuing


to harass us in every aspect of our lives.


Thanks Google.


Another quick question was someone asked about the phone calls you were making to customers


clients trying to get get inside the head of it more.


Love it.


What's a what's a number that's enough people to feel like you've you've actually learned


some things that aren't sort of you know single data point.


That really depends on the size of your industry or of like where you want to grow.


You know if you're a small business you could pick 10 really good customers and just ask


them and that would be fine.


If you're a huge corporation this will be a project you will do over many months but


don't do focus groups.


And I know you think I could just kill like six birds with one stone and do a focus group.


Focus groups suck because there's always that one guy who just takes over and they have


a lot of opinions and they sway the group over to their opinions.


So don't do focus groups do one on ones.


I really don't do focus groups.


And it depends.


Eventually you will get to a point where you feel like you're getting a lot of the same


answers repeated again and again.


How to Determine if a Page is "Low Quality" in Google's Eyes - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're going to chat about how to figure out if Google thinks a page on a website


is potentially low quality and if that could lead us to some optimization options.


As we've talked about previously here on Whiteboard Friday, and I'm sure many of you have been


following along with experiments that Brittany Muller from Moz has been conducting about


removing low quality pages.


You saw Roy Hinkes from SimilarWeb talk about how they had removed low quality pages from


their site and seen an increase in rankings on a bunch of stuff.


So many people have been trying this tactic.


The challenge is figuring out which pages are actually low quality.


What does that constitute?


So Google has some ideas about what's high quality versus low quality, and a few of those


are pretty obvious and we're familiar with, and some of them may be more intriguing.


So Google wants unique content.


They want to make sure that the value to searchers from that content is actually unique, not


that it's just different words and phrases on the page, but the value provided is actually


different.


You can check out the Whiteboard Friday on Unique Value if you have more questions on


that.


They like to see lots of external sources linking editorially to a page.


That tells them that the page is probably high quality because it's reference worthy.


They also like to see high quality pages, not just sources, domains, but high quality


pages linking to this, and that can be internal and external links.


So it tends to be the case that if your high quality pages on your website link to another


page on your site, Google often interprets that that way.


The page successfully answers the searcher's query.


This is an intriguing one.


So if someone performs a search, let's say here I type in a search on Google for pressure


washing, right?


I'll just write pressure wash, and this page comes up and someone clicks on that page and


they stay here, and maybe they do go back to Google, but then they perform a completely


different search or they go to a different task, they visit a different website, they


go back to their email, whatever it is.


That tells Google, great, this page solved the query.


If, instead, someone searches for this and they go, right, they perform the search, they


click on a link, and they get a low quality mumbo jumbo page, and they click back and


they choose a different result instead, that tells Google that page did not successfully


answer that searcher's query.


If this happens a lot, Google calls this activity pogo sticking, where you visit this one, it


didn't answer your query, so you go visit another one that does, it's very likely that


this result will be moved down and be perceived as low quality in Google.


Other things, the page has got to load fast on any connection, they want to see high quality


accessibility, right, with intuitive user experience and design on any device, so mobile,


desktop, tablet, laptop.


They want to see actually grammatically correct and well spelled content.


I know this may come as a surprise, but we've actually done some tests and seen that by


having poor spelling or bad grammar, we can get featured snippets removed from Google.


So you can have a featured snippet, it's doing great in the SERPs, you change something in


there, you mess it up, right, and Google says, wait, no, that no longer qualifies, you are


no longer a high quality answer.


So that tells us that they are analyzing pages for that type of information.


Non-text content needs to have text alternatives.


This is why Google encourages use of the alt attribute, this is why on videos they like


transcripts here on Whiteboard Friday, right, as I'm speaking, there's a transcript down


below this video that you can read and get all the content without having to listen to


me if you don't want to or if you don't have the ability to for whatever technical or,


you know, accessibility handicap reasons.


They also like to see content that is well organized and easy to consume and understand


and interpret that through a bunch of different things, but some of their machine learning


systems can certainly pick that up.


And then they like to see content that points to additional sources for more information


or for follow up on tasks or to site sources, and so links externally from a page will do


that.


This is not an exhaustive list, right, but these are some of the things that can tell


Google high quality versus low quality and start to get them filtering things.


As a marketer, as an SEO, there's a process that we can use.


We don't have access to every single one of these, you know, components that Google can


measure, but we can look at some things that will help us determine, you know, this is


high quality, this is low quality, maybe I should try deleting or removing this from


my site or recreating it if it is low quality.


In general, I'm going to urge you not to use things like metrics like time on site, raw


time on site, or raw bounce rate, or organic visits, or assisted conversions.


Why not?


Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.


So a long time on your website could be because someone is very engaged with your content.


It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they


need, and so they're going to return to the search result and click something else that


quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion, right?


Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it's hard to find


the X button, and they have to scroll down far in your content, so they're very unhappy


with your result.


Bounce rate works similarly.


A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you're answering a very simple query or if


the next step is to go somewhere else, or if there is no next step, right?


If I'm just trying to get, hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated


wood and I need to know whether I'll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood


at this level of pressure and it turns out, nope, I'm good.


Great.


Thank you.


I'm all done.


I don't need to visit your website anymore.


My bounce rate was very, very high.


Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you've answered the searcher's


query.


You've done what Google wants.


So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.


Same with organic visits.


You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic


traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it's still ranking for something


or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers.


This one's a little bit better in the longer term.


If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can


generally get a better sense, but still by itself, I don't love it.


Assisted conversions is a great example, right?


This page might not convert anyone.


It may be an opportunity to drop cookies.


It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up


for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you've


got, and that doesn't mean it's low quality content.


What I'm going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics.


Any time you're analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach


that you're applying.


That could be a combination of engagement metrics.


I'm going to look at total visits, external and internal.


I'm going to look at the pages that are visited after landing or the pages per visit after


landing so if someone gets to the page and then they browse through other pages on the


site, that is a good sign.


If they browse through very few, not as good a sign, but not to be taken by itself.


It needs to be combined with things like time on site and bounce rate and total visits and


external visits.


Second, you can combine some offsite metrics, so things like external links, number of linking


root domains, PA, and your social shares like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn share counts.


Those can also be applicable here, and if you see something that's getting social shares,


well, maybe it doesn't match up with searcher's needs, but it could still be high quality


content.


Search engine metrics.


You can look at indexation by typing a URL directly into the search bar or the browser


bar and seeing whether the page is indexed.


You can also look at things that rank for their own title.


You can look in Google Search Console and see click-through rates, and you can look


at unique versus duplicate content.


If I type in a URL here and I see multiple pages come back from my site, or if I type


in the title of a page that I've created and I see multiple URLs come back from my own


website, I know that there's some uniqueness problems there.


Last, you are almost definitely going to want to do an actual hand review of a handful.


Look at pages from subsections or subfolders or subdomains if you have them and say, oh,


hang on, does this actually help searchers?


Is this content current and up to date?


Is it meeting our organization's standards?


Using these combination of metrics, you can build some buckets.


You can do this in a pretty easy way by exporting all your URLs.


You could use something like Screaming Frog or Moz's Crawl or DeepCrawl, and you can export


all your pages into a spreadsheet with metrics like these.


Then you can start to sort and filter.


You can create some sort of algorithm, some combination of the metrics that you determine


is pretty good at IDing things, and you double check that with your hand review.


I'm going to urge you to put them into three kinds of buckets.


The first one is high importance.


High importance, high quality content, you're going to keep that stuff.


The second is actually stuff that needs work but is still good enough to stay in the search


engines.


It's not awful.


It's not harming your brand, and it's certainly not what search engines would call low quality


and be penalizing you for.


It's just not living up to your expectations or your hopes, and that means you can republish


it or work on it and improve it.


The third one is low quality.


Really doesn't meet the standards that you've got here, but don't just delete them outright.


Do some testing.


Take a sample set of the worst junk that you put in the low bucket, remove it from your


site, make sure you keep a copy, and see if by removing a few hundred or a few thousand


of those pages, you see an increase in crawl budget and indexation and rankings and search


traffic.


Also, you can start to be less judicious and more liberal with what you're cutting out


of that low quality bucket and a lot of times see some great results from Google.


All right, everyone.


I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week.


MozCon 2014 - 23 - A Mozzy View with Sarah Bird and John Cook

Let's get into the nitty gritty.


I'm excited to sit down with you, Sarah, and talk about everything going on at Moz.


And we'll try to have an interview here where no one gets fired, including you, Cyrus.


But it's going to be a fun interactive discussion.


And I'm going to welcome your questions here towards the end of it.


I'm also following the tweet stream.


So you can just tweet at me at John H. Cook.


And I will follow those questions.


I've already been soliciting some of those.


So if you have a specific question for Sarah, just hit me with it.


And I'll be checking my phone for those questions as they come up.


But I wanted to just start by kind of looking back about 18 months, if you will.


It's been a real tumultuous period at Moz, if you think about it.


And a lot of change has happened.


You've had a new payment system, new brand, three acquisitions.


You've really transformed the product in this period as well.


And of course, you as the new CEO.


So you seem to have gotten through a lot in this last 18-month period.


And I think a lot of people in this audience would just love to know what's next, what's


coming up, and where your vision is for taking Moz.


Great question.


You know, it feels really good to be at Moz right now, because we've been working so hard


on really big projects, really big investments.


And we've learned a ton.


And speaking for myself, I'm glad to be back in a state of the business where we get to


get back to fundamentals in a good way, getting back to how is our marketing well-targeted?


Do we really understand our customer?


Are we serving them well and making incremental improvements?


Incremental improvements is such a more fun place to be.


You can be way more innovative than doing big, big, gigantic, you know, build a data


center.


That's a long, big process, right?


It's just a big challenge.


And rebuilding the Moz Pro product into Moz Analytics, that was a huge, huge effort, right?


And it took a really long time to get that done.


And it's great to have a place now where we can focus on, okay, we made a lot of progress


in getting people's data in one place and getting tracking over time.


Now what we want to do is focus on getting the exact right piece of information in front


of the exact right person at the moment they need it.


So moving away from just all data in one place to what insight does this person need right


now to do their job?


If I only have, you know, five minutes today to look up my Moz dashboard, I want to know


the key things that have changed.


Because I don't know any marketer that's like, you know what, the one thing I have is lots


of time and I just can't wait to just dig through all this and hope I come up with something


interesting and meaningful for me today.


So you're going to see a lot of emphasis on driving insights out of the data we collect.


At the same time, we haven't given up on data because we know we have a long way to go.


I am so passionate about getting everyone the ungettable data.


Getting everyone the ungettable data.


And improving the quality, including the breadth of that data so that we can drive more interesting


insights.


Yeah, so it seems like more incremental development.


You're not going to maybe see as maybe bigger shifts at Moz coming up.


So what are the projects that Mozers are working on right now that might be maybe those smaller


things that are happening that could be interesting to the crowd here?


Great.


Who has had a chance to actually log on and check out their action dashboard yet?


So we have a new dashboard.


Got a couple people.


It's actually pretty dark.


So the action dashboard is the beginning of that incremental improvement into getting


insights focused.


So this is a very version 1 MVP.


Let's get it out there.


We put a feedback tab right there and you can toggle back to the old dashboard.


And we did that because we wanted to get something out quickly and get feedback from you guys


right away.


What is useful about it?


Where are we hitting on target and what should we be working on next?


But that isn't a set it and forget it.


It has a new look.


It has some new technology, business rules behind it.


So that is something that is going to evolve and spread throughout the product more and


more getting that insight layer.


So the action dashboard is one that you can start playing around with.


Give us that feedback, guys, because we really are going to use it to drive improvements.


Another thing I think we've heard a lot, a lot, a lot about content and content optimization.


And this is an area that Moz is really, really passionate about.


We've got lots of people on the team who are fired up and investing in content optimization.


So you should expect to see evolving tools in that area in the many months ahead.


I'm not going to give any launch dates.


I saw something on Twitter about launch dates.


Absolutely not.


We don't do launch dates anymore.


We do incremental improvements and allow us to be agile in building our product.


So you'll see that.


I mentioned before data, I'm really, really proud of domain authority and page authority.


And I think that we have a link index that allows people to do really qualitative analytical


work.


But we also want to get more breadth and we want to get fresher links.


So we're investing a lot of energy in getting the link index larger and fresher as well.


And that's a challenge.


Those are a challenge.


Those are a few things off the top of my head.


Good.


A lot happening.


I want to transition just briefly into a little bit on your background.


When we met the other day for coffee, you mentioned that you hate marketing.


You hate marketing.


So it's a little curious that you're running a marketing software company.


What the heck is going on there?


So I just hate really bad marketing.


And so much marketing, especially of my youth, was just really bad.


People forcing stuff down your throat that doesn't even relate to you, that's totally


manipulative and predatory and it makes my experience of the world worse.


But one of the reasons I'm so passionate about Moz, I'm going to talk about tag fee too that's


related.


So at Moz we're very driven by tag fee, our core values.


We are transparent, authentic, generous, fun, exceptional and empathetic.


Now I believe those things.


They motivate me.


It's what I want Moz to always be.


That's why I don't want to work anywhere else.


And that is true about the kind of marketing I love.


And what I love about inbound marketing is that when you do it really, really well, it's


very tag fee.


It's transparent.


It's not manipulative.


It's authentic to your brand and your audience.


It's very generous.


I love marketing that gives me something first.


It's about sharing.


That's about making someone else's life better to build that trust and that relationship.


That makes me want to give them my money.


I also like fun.


I usually fall for marketing that's a little cheeky.


You can see that in some of the Moz marketing as well.


And empathetic, something that's kind of a user, something that the user gets to see


when they want to see it.


And then exceptional.


I think that to be really, really great at inbound your marketing has to stand out.


So I hate really bad marketing.


And there is so much bad marketing out there.


And my hatred of that bad marketing fuels my passion for what we do at Moz because it's


totally caught up in this.


I just want the world to be a better place that's more tag fee for everyone.


And when I'm on the web and when I'm looking for stuff, I want to have that kind of relationship


with the various businesses and service providers out there.


So will bad marketing always exist?


Yeah.


Yeah, right.


I mean, it's easy.


I think it will always exist.


Will it always be successful?


I sure hope not.


Right?


And I think that the people in this room can testify that it is changing.


That businesses are starting to understand the value of having a relationship with their


clients and the value of having that direct authentic brand and being generous first.


So I'm very hopeful.


I am very optimistic.


Technology has enabled us to do so much better personalization that I get to see what's meaningful


for me.


I'm really inspired about the future of marketing.


I'm not naive about the future of marketing, though, right?


It's always going to be a battle.


Yeah.


And so you mentioned tag fee and having covered Moz for a number of years here in the Seattle


tech community.


It's one thing that's really struck me.