For years, “actionable insights” have been the Holy Grail for data analytics companies. Actionable insights, the thinking goes, are the end product of data collection, aggregation, analysis, and judgment. They enable a decision-maker to modify behavior and achieve desired outcomes.
The process begins with data collection, which can take many forms. There’s a big difference between collecting data and aggregating it in a meaningful way that can provide a picture of reality. That’s the “insights” part of the puzzle. First, you need high-quality data, then you need the technological prowess to clean and organize it.
With high-quality data that’s been cleaned and organized, the next step is to provide context. This is the realm of companies like Tableau, which provide tools that translate machine-friendly data points into human-friendly visualizations that strive to depict an objective picture of current conditions.
But whereas a snapshot of current conditions may, in fact, yield new and meaningful insights (for example, if I look ‘sales numbers’ across an organization I can see which channels are over- or under-performing), human judgment has always been paramount in choosing a particular action. A perfect picture of static conditions doesn’t by itself offer any suggestions as to how to achieve particular outcomes. We still rely on management to tweak sales incentives or redistribute resources.
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Or at least we did, up until recently. Machine learning is now shifting the balance of institutional decision-making. Advances in processing and algorithmic self-improvement mean that computers can now anticipate future outcomes and take steps to maximize particular ones. Intelligent systems can now see the world in shades of gray and evaluate likelihoods from multitudes of variables far beyond human comprehension.
That’s the world we currently live in, and the evidence is all around us. Machine learning algorithms have swayed elections by stoking targeted outrage. Our clothes, food, and consumer products are designed according to data-driven analytics. Every design feature in your favorite app is being constantly optimized according to how computers anticipate your future behavior. It’s why YouTube is actually pretty good at showing you videos that keep you engaged.
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The day is coming when we will no longer require “actionable insights,” because the action will have already been taken. Nobody at YouTube is looking at your viewing history to determine what to recommend next. Computers do that. The value of the stock market is now largely driven by automated trading algorithms, and as a consequence, there are fewer stock analysts than there used to be. Not only can computers process information far better than humans, but they’ve also demonstrated better financial judgment.
The day will soon arrive when “actionable insights” will seem like a quaint notion from a simpler time. Computers will be smart enough to act on insights by themselves. In doing so, they may, in fact, diminish the need for human oversight.
Until then, however, human enterprise is still structured around hierarchies of decision-making and judgment. The CEO of a company still needs to delegate day-to-day responsibilities to human actors whose knowledge and judgment have proven sound.
And so, for now, we still need actionable insights. Data analytics companies will continue to build better mousetraps, until the day when there are no longer mice.
Gil Rachlin, SVP of Products and Partnerships at Synup.
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On September 30th, Google turned off average position as a metric. Ways to help advertisers set up with new metrics – impression share and impression rate.
Email marketing is one marketing tool that remains powerful even after all these years. A roundup of effective tactics with examples.
Clients understood SEO and its value when the significance was explained in simple terms. Tips to educate clients about SEO, pitch services, and gain trust.
BrightEdge’s Jim Yu discusses the five levels of scaling SEO, from manual SEO all the way to real-time decision-making and automated optimizations.
This week we covered more rumors around the Google November update and how John Mueller of Google downplayed the links portion of it. Google’s recipe image bug remained an issue through the Thanksgiving cooking season. Google said your robots.txt file can be blank or allow all, it doesn’t matter. Most SEOs think understanding information retrieval is important for SEOs. Google said they thought about having engineers do SEO contests but decided against it. Google Ads had an over-reporting conversions bug for over a week, they fixed it. Google dropped the lingerie ads for the searches on Christmas holidays. Google released a bunch of new hotel search features. Google My Business adds job types for services. Google now offers tip and tricks for those searches that do not find results. Google is testing arrows and marks by the title of your snippets. Google is also testing a more spacious search results interface. And I posted the results of the best SEO at Google – congrats to all the players. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:
Google has added mobile-first indexing information including if you are on mobile-first indexing, if so, when you switched over and so on, to the toolsets and reporting within Google Search Console. This was announced on Twitter and aims at helping webmasters “understand how Google is crawling your website,” Google said.
First you can access to see what crawler is currently indexing your site by going to Google Search Console and clicking on settings. There you can see if you are on desktop or smartphone crawler and if you are on smartphone, Google will show the date you switched over.
Here is a screen shot of a site on desktop crawling/indexing:
Here is a screen shot of a site on smartphone crawling/indexing and note it says the date it switched over:
Then in some of the reporting and tools, it will show at the top right which crawler the report is using – annotation number one. And then also if within the chart period the crawler changed, it will show the annotation of when it changed, see annotation number two:
It is the Friday after Thanksgiving, so let’s have some fun. I ran a very scientific, statistically accurate, and unequivocally clear survey on Twitter (sarcasm) asking which Googler would win an SEO contest. The winner of the poll was John Mueller! Clap, clap, clap!
The poll got about 1,300 responses – yes, 1,300 people spent the time responding to this very important (sarcasm) poll on Twitter.
Here was the award ceremony, where the players took their positions on the winners podium:
Here are the final results:
Martin Splitt was a supportive person, even though he didn’t make it on the winners stand.
Congrats to everyone, because really – everyone is a winner!
Google launched yesterday, I believe, on Thanksgiving, a new feature in Google My Business for job types for services. This is where services businesses in the US can choose from suggested types of services. This includes things like “repair toilets” and/or “install faucets” for plumbers.
Google wrote “Services businesses in the US can choose from suggested types of services (for example, plumbers may see “Install faucet” or “Repair toilet” as services to add). If the type of service isn’t listed, they can add their own custom services. These standardized job types make it easier for customers to find the services they need, and help merchants generate more relevant leads for the services they offer.”
In Google My Business, you may see an option to add the services you offer, along with their descriptions and prices. To keep your services list organized, group services into sections. When customers find your business listing on Google, they’ll see your services listed under “Services.”
When entering a new market with a new website, you’re gonna want to find the absolute best keywords for your SEO strategy.
While building your list of the most relevant search terms, keep in mind: At this very moment, your competitors are doing the same! Moreover, your strongest online rivals have already ranked not only on the first page of a search engine results page, but in its top positions.
Do you have any chance of overrunning your competition? Definitely! But, you have to be smart – and start by targeting the keywords with the lowest competition.
Learning how to do keyword research is essential for businesses. Just be careful when choosing them. Before you begin placing search terms you believe your potential customers would use to find your services or products on your site, make sure you have chosen enough low-competition keywords.
Low-competition keywords are indispensable for boosting your website’s rank. How can you find them? Follow the instructions below.
1) Build Your Initial Keyword List
Go to Organic Research, then enter a competitor’s domain name and click Search. You will get a list of keywords your competitor’s website is ranking for in Google’s top 100 organic search results.
Use filters to find keywords that are most relevant to your business. For example, here’s how it looks with a filter for “vegan.”
Generate an Organic Search Positions report for multiple domains, and export the results into an XLS or a CSV file. Plan to consolidate all exported files into a single file in order to have all relevant keywords in one place.
You can also use the Keyword Gap tool to view unique keywords per domain and export your results. To collect as many keywords as possible, set the match type here to “All Keywords”
For example, we took the following five domains: fitmencook.com, sweetpeasandsaffron.com, projectmealplan.com, workweeklunch.com, and flavcity.com. In a few clicks, we built a list of nearly 200,000 keywords for the food blogging industry.
Tip: If you don’t know 5 domains that are in your website’s industry, use the Competitors report tab in Organic Research.
Export this report to another XLS or CSV and combine the list with your other exports so you can keep a master list going. The next step will help you find even more keyword ideas to add here.
2) Expand Your Keyword List
The goal of keyword expansion is to augment your initial keyword research with search terms and phrases you might have overlooked. After expanding the list as much as possible, we’ll go back and filter it down to find the most accessible targets for your site.
To find phrase match keywords, go to the Keyword Magic Tool, enter a term from your initial list of search terms and click Search. You will get a list of expanded keyword phrases that include your queried term.
To find related keywords, use the Related filter. This will list phrases that are semantically related to a particular queried search term and may not share the same phrasing but have similar search results. You’ll want to add some of these to your plan as well to cover your bases.
To find question keywords (which make for great content topics) use the Questions filter. This will display only keyword phrases that include who, what, where, when, why, or how.
Again, export your results and continue collecting them into a consolidated file with all the other keywords you’d like to target.
3) Discover High-Volume Keywords with Less Competition
Average monthly search volume for each keyword shows you how much potential traffic you can receive. The higher your rankings for high-volume search terms are, the more traffic will be driven to your website. But unfortunately, competition for most high volume keywords is very high.
There’s no sense in trying to rank for keywords you have no chance of ranking for; that’s why you need to find the right balance between a keyword’s search volume and its competition level.
To help you with this step, SEMrush has two main ways of filtering out keywords that are too competitive:
Keyword Difficulty – an estimation of how difficult it would be to outrank the current websites and webpages ranking in the top spots on Google for a particular keyword.
Competition Level – the density of advertisers using a particular search phrase for their ads. Although this metric refers to competition in paid search, it can be somewhat representative of organic search competition as well.
In all of your exports (or in the interface), you should be able to locate a column for these two metrics. Both metrics will help you find the best keywords to start targeting to find success.
Estimating Keyword Difficulty
The keyword difficulty (from 1-100%) shows you an estimate of how difficult it would be to seize your competitors’ positions in the Google top 100 with a particular keyword . The higher the percentage, the more effort you’ll need to outrank your competition for targeted keywords:
Above 80%: The most difficult keywords. You’ll have to invest a lot of SEO and link-building efforts, as well as time before you’ll be able to enter the Google top 20. If you have a new site, you shouldn’t focus on highly competitive keywords.
From 60-80%: Keywords with average difficulty. Entering the Google top 20 with these keywords won’t be easy either. However, with high-quality content and relevant backlinks, you’ll be able to seize your competitors’ positions in time.
Below 60%: Keywords that are the easiest to rank for, but the most difficult to find. Discovering low-competition, high-volume keywords will require hard work and patience. But if you are lucky enough to find a strong list of these search terms and implement them throughout your site, you’ll have a very good chance of ranking high for these high-volume search terms.
Estimating Competition Level
For estimating Competition Level, we can assume the scale is roughly the same. The main difference here is that the metric is a decimal between 0 and 1 and that it measures the density of paid advertisers.
The closer the score is to 1, the higher amount of advertiser density and therefore the harder it would be to stand out in the search results.
Above 0.80: These keywords are highly competitive among advertisers and therefore likely send traffic to paid results. You could infer that if a keyword has a high density of advertisers, the search has some intent on making a transaction.
From 0.60 – 0.80: Keywords with an average density of advertisers. You could experiment with advertising on these keywords if your organic efforts don’t work out, but it won’t be a quick win on any of these keywords, either.
Below 0.60: Keywords with the lowest density of advertisers. This could either mean that they are under the radar of most competitors that advertise in your niche, or they are simply not profitable to advertise on. Keep this in mind when dedicating
4) Filter your master list to find low-competition keywords
Now, once you understand the range of difficulty you want to attack, it’s time to dive into your master list and filter based on these competitive metrics.
Start with a filter for KD to only look at keywords with a KD score less than 75. This should still allow you to find some high volume targets that won’t be extremely difficult to rank for.
Use the Keyword Difficulty Tool
A quick way to estimate the competitiveness for keywords in bulk is by using the SEMrush Keyword Difficulty tool.
Perhaps you have a previous list of keyword targets, or a list of keywords your site ranks for exported from Google Search Console. You can drop that list in here and quickly see how we rate the difficulty of each keyword.
In the Keyword Difficulty Tool, you can view the keyword difficulty of up to 100 keywords at once. Enter one search term per line, and click the Show Difficulty button.
The report will give you the KD scores of your unique batch of keywords.
Spot Featured Snippet Opportunities
While you’re in the Keyword Difficulty Tool, you should be able to see which keywords trigger SERP Features like Featured Snippets or Instant Answers. Featured Snippets are those pop-up answers at the top of the search results page that gives searchers an answer before having to even click on a result.
These are HUGE for SEO and you should take note of each keyword in your plan that has a Featured Snippet. If you compose your content in the right way, you just might be able to take over the Featured Snippet with your link.
Recap
Learning how to do keyword research is essential for businesses. To do it well, you just need to be careful when choosing your targets.
Believe in your SEO success, and follow these steps:
Analyze competitors and build an initial keyword list
Enrich it with related keywords, phrase match keywords and questions
Estimate your competition and your competitors’ keyword difficulty
Implement keywords through your website
Conduct research of low-competition keyword regularly
Google is introducing image ads to search by unveiling a new Gallery Ad format.
While it is sometimes hard to predict what Google will come out with next, what they will do away with, or what they will update, one thing remains true: a new ad format is always on the horizon. Last year it was Responsive Search Ads, then it was expanded-expanded text ads, and now it appears their next ad endeavor will be Gallery Search Ads. Google announced during their Marketing Live event in May that this new ad format will be rolling out later this year. In this article, I will focus on the ins and outs of the upcoming Gallery Ads, but to learn about the other updates coming to Google this year check out Hanapin’s On-Demand Webinar of the Key Takeaways from Google Marketing Live.
I have long been an advocate of image ads. The rise of Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and YouTube have helped to move society away from text and towards a new, image-centric way of viewing digital content. Google has already taken steps to keep up with the trend through display ads, shopping ads, and Gmail ads – but now it is time for search to join the party.
So what are Gallery Ads?
When imagining Google Gallery Ads, it is helpful to think of them as Google’s version of Facebook’s Carousel Ads. Essentially, they consist of a series of images that searchers can swipe through. Advertisers will be able to upload a minimum of 4 images and a maximum of 8 images displaying their products or services. Google has yet to release any specifications on image sizes, quality, etc. but we can expect them to fall in line with other ad image requirements.
Gallery Ads won’t consist of solely of images, however. They will also feature up to three headlines, just like expanded text ads, and will utilize taglines that are unique to each image. These tag lines will not appear as image overlays as we see in some GDN display ads, instead, they will appear similar to that of the Facebook Carousel Ads. The headlines will always show above the gallery images and taglines will always show below, switching as users swipe through the images.
Sounds pretty great, right? Right. However, there are a few nuances to how these Gallery Ads work that we should be aware of.
Unlike text search ads, where searchers receive up to 4 ads at the top of their results page, Gallery Ads only show one at a time – there will be no stacking of images at the top of a user’s search screen. The ads will only appear in the top placement of a user’s search results, above any other text ads that may appear following it. Therefore, they will compete with all other ad formats in auction as usual. If you have Gallery Ads in your search arsenal and your bid wins top placement, a Gallery Ad will be shown. If you win the second position or lower on the page, a text ad will be shown regardless of if you have Gallery Ads in your ad groups. Finally, if you do not have Gallery Ads locked and loaded in your ad groups, but you win the first position, your normal text ads will still be shown in the top spot.
Another difference between Gallery Ads and other search ad formats is how advertisers will pay for them. Unlike most ad formats that are paid by the click, these will be paid for in one of two ways: by the click or by the swipe. By the click is exactly what it sounds like, cost per click, just like any other ad. By swipe, however, is a little different. If a searcher doesn’t click on the ad but swipes through 3 images, the advertiser will be charged. A couple of clarifications on this point, however. 1) Advertisers will only be charged once, even if a searcher swipes through 3 images AND clicks on the ad. 2) Advertisers will only be charged once if the user swipes through more than 3 images. Essentially, this plays out as an either/or scenario, therefore there is no difference in max. CPCs or bidding.
Finally, and arguably the biggest need-to-know about Gallery Ads, is that for the time being they are mobile-only ads. Yep, Google is only rolling out these new ads to mobile devices – but they hint that a desktop version may be unveiled sometime in the future.
So what can we expect from Gallery Ads?
In their reveal of Gallery Ads, Google also provided a few insights into the performance we can expect to see from the exciting new ad format. It is a well-known fact that the human eye is more attracted to images than to text, and Google acknowledges this. Based on test performance, we are likely to see 25% more interactions from ad groups containing Gallery Ads than ad groups that only utilize text ad formats. Searchers are more likely to swipe through a Gallery ad – particularly if the photos are eye-catching – than they are to read and click on a text ad. Not a big surprise, right?
Additionally, Google recognized that while these ads may have a higher interaction rate, their direct conversion rates may not be all that different from text ads. With that said, Google argued that Gallery Ads will garner assisted conversions later in the sales funnel, as users tend to remember images over text and are likely to return to a product after viewing images Gallery Ads. Can you say, “I’m a visual person?”
Conclusion
Gallery Ads are a highly unique endeavor and are sure to see some vastly different results than text-only ads. As always, start prepping your image creative and jump on the Gallery Ads train early to benefit from the low-competition period once they are rolled out. But, as with every new feature Google rolls out, be aware that initial hiccups and adjustments are likely to occur.
All in all, it is an exciting time for search. The possibilities are endless for advertisers, particularly e-commerce businesses. From displaying multiple aspects of a retail product to highlighting popular dishes on a restaurant’s menu, to taking searchers on a visual tour of an apartment, digital search strategies will be evolving to fit an image focused agenda as Google Gallery Ads enter the game.
