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Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Halloween Google doodle tells the story of Jinx, the lonely ghost

For this year’s Halloween holiday, Google pulled together its full team of doodlers to develop and produce a ghost story.

The story — told in a YouTube video called “Jinx’s Night Out” — is about Jinx, the lonely ghost, who wants to be part of the trick-or-treating activities, but thinks he must first find a costume to hide his true identity.

“The Doodle team took their time crafting a bewitching storyline, adding a little hocus pocus to make the designs dreadfully engaging,” writes Google doodlers on their blog. “Each sequence has its own color scheme, bringing the characters to (after)life with an entirely new animation process.”

The YouTube video doubles as today’s doodle, and includes a sharing icon, along with a link that leads to “Halloween” search results.

Four doodle team members — Melissa Crowton, Cynthia Chen, Sophie Diao and Helene Lerous — worked on backgrounds and design for the “Jinx’s Night Out” mini-movie. Doodler My-Linh Le was the producer; D.E. Levison did the video’s music, and Paulette Penzvalto was the “Scribbler.”

The Doodle team shared everything from initial sketches for Jinx to the following story board on the Google Doodle Blog:

Here’s the final video that’s being shared on Google’s US home page today, in addition to a number of its international pages:

“No bones about it, this was one of the most enjoyable doodles we have worked on,” writes the Doodle team, offering a few words of advice, “Don’t be afraid to show who you really are or let superstition get in the way of a new friendship and you’ll be a graveyard smash.”

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

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Author: Amy Gesenhues

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One of Google’s Biggest Mistakes Was Naming Algorithm Updates by @askreinhart

When I began my career in digital marketing, I had a tough time describing what I did to other people. SEO wasn’t a known profession back then, and it certainly wasn’t something that you could easily bring up in conversation.

I remember the weird looks, the fake head nods, and the smiles from people acknowledging that I did something they hadn’t heard of, but politely not wanting to admit it.

As the years went on, things changed. People know what SEO is now, they care about it, they are worried about it, they are held against numbers that depend on it — it’s a thing. All because it was given a name.

When something doesn’t have a name, it’s not real, and as most things at their humble beginnings, SEO was no different. No one was worried about it, it was just this thing they had heard about that may or may not affect them sometime in the distant future.

Now it has a name. And everyone is interested in this set of rules and activities that result in “free” traffic to their websites and helps their bottom line.

What’s in a Name?

So why the diatribe about the name of the profession?

I want to get the point across that when you give something a name you make it real, which gives it power — and the largest mistake Google made in SEO was naming their algorithm updates.

Why?

Because it made algorithm names a thing, which gave them an inordinate amount of power over this profession that still exists today.

Going back to the Boston and Florida updates in 2003, up until the Penguin 4 in 2016, we have enjoyed a host of memorable names that have been applied to updates, and with every update came confusion, anger, and message boards filled with hate for Google.

Matt Cutts, the former head of the web spam team at Google, stepped in and became the scapegoat for all the ire that webmasters felt toward Google. Cutts did his best to answer questions about updates, what they were, why they were doing this — to no avail.

People were mad at these updates.

They ruined businesses.

SERPs became less predictable.

In short, Google had made organic search harder.

SEOs lashed out at Panda and Penguin in comment sections across the internet and spent days and months digging into each nuance to try and find the reason why their sites dropped and cursed Google every step along the way.

People got lost in that anger and over-analysis, and ultimately spent more time in search of silver bullets than they did accepting the real reason they got hit by the shift:

Their site probably sucks.

When you think about the amount of time and energy that is wasted on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis investigating Google’s algorithms and how they may or may not have affected a site, the picture is worrisome.

What everyone should be doing is taking that time and energy and harnessing it into making their sites better, not complaining in comment sections.

We’re only hurting ourselves because while analysis into traffic drops is necessary, we need to control how far we follow that rabbit down the hole — and for the past few years, we’ve all been Alice.

We need a different perspective on algorithm changes.

Looking at It from a Different Perspective

One of the more impactful statements that I have heard in the last couple of years on this subject comes from the CEO of my company, Seth Besmertnik. He showed the featured image at the top of this post and said:

“There is only one algorithm that really matters. It’s the heart, mind, and soul of your customers.”

This really stuck with me. He has used it in several presentations since then, and I have even included it in a few of my monthly webinars, but that message has changed the way that I look at Google updating its algorithm:

Every algorithm update is a quality update.

Google hasn’t given an official name to an algorithm in quite some time, but folks in the industry have.

Pigeon, Possum, Fred, Columbus, etc. were never named by Google. They were all just labeled “Quality Updates.”

Folks in our industry took it upon themselves to give these updates a name, which gave them power and started the cycle of complaining and analysis paralysis all over again.

What if we all just thought about all algorithm updates as “quality updates” and not these separate entities that are working against us?

What if we took the changes in stride, and when we saw a decline we took action instead of going to comment sections, social media, or forums to complain?

A good example of this out in the real world:

I had a conversation with a friend the other day who was becoming increasingly worried about the shifts he was reading about from Glenn Gabe, president of G-Squared Interactive. He follows Gabe religiously and emailed me for advice on what he could do because he was seeing some fluctuations with his traffic.

I dug through his analytics and rankings and any other data I could get my hands on and realized that he had led me down the rabbit hole again. I then thought to myself, “this is an opportunity to change someone’s mind,” and I wrote him the following response:

I don’t see anything alarming, we are still up and pretty comparable to the previous weeks, so while tomorrow could look different, today we seem to be fine.

Have to look at your site through some blinders sometimes. Your site is not any other site on the web. All the work you have done has been towards upping the quality of the site, which is why you have done well. All of these algorithm shifts are quality updates, regardless if they have a name or specific purpose or not. Try not to obsess too much over them, it’s out of our control and all we can control is how well the site is taken care of.

As long as you keep down that road, you’ll be fine. Ups and downs will happen, but algo shifts are like death and taxes, there’s nothing we can do about them, so we might as well not worry about it.

His response?

Well put. Thanks.

I caught up with him a few days later and asked him how it was going. He told me his fears were dispelled and he wound up writing five really killer blog posts that are already seeing a lift for a few niche products he offers in his space.

He stopped worrying about an algorithm update, and he instead spent that time in a more productive manner which improved the quality of his site.

This is how we should be spending our time. This how I am telling my clients to spend their time.

If you are seeing declines when these shifts happen, you only need to do one thing:

Take a good hard look at your site and make it better.

Every update is a quality update, regardless of whether it has a name or specific function.

Stop spending your time searching for silver bullets and start making your site better.

Image Credit

Featured Image by Conductor. Used with permission.

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Author: Patrick Reinhart

For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services

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Ceridian CMO says internal communications are key to branding through an acquisition

Five years ago, Ceridian, a human resources management platform, acquired Dayforce, a cloud application focused on managing the entire employee process from hire to retire.

“Ceridian had always had its roots in payroll,” says Ceridian CMO Kristina Cleary. “It was actually founded in 1932, and has always managed payrolls for some of the world’s largest organizations.”

According to Cleary, Ceridian originally partnered with Dayforce to find a time and attendance-vendor to complement its payroll solutions. Before the acquisition, Cleary was the vice president of marketing for Dayforce.

“Ceridian, at the time, had been partnering with a bunch of other solutions that weren’t necessarily meeting the needs of its customers, so it was looking for a new solution.”

Cleary says Dayforce initially met with Ceridian during a trade show event. At first, the conversation centered on developing a partnership where Dayforce could fill in the gaps around the time and attendance management needs for Ceridian’s customers.

“What that turned into, about a year later, was a broader partnership where Dayforce had committed to actually building out a cloud payroll solutions for Ceridian — which became the end-to-end application that it is today,” says Cleary.

When Ceridian acquired Dayforce in 2012, Cleary was named the senior vice president of global marketing for Ceridian. In 2016, she was named CMO.

“Since the acquisition, I’ve assumed growing responsibilities, expanding my reach across our operations” says Cleary, “I have been able to take a look at all of our marketing operations, and identified the the areas of success, and obviously, areas where we can improve as well.”

With the acquisition now just over five years ago, Cleary has a large-scale view of what the branding process was like — bringing Dayforce into the Ceridian umbrella — and is sharing what she learned from the experience.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

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Author: Amy Gesenhues

For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services

The post Ceridian CMO says internal communications are key to branding through an acquisition appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/ceridian-cmo-says-internal-communications-are-key-to-branding-through-an-acquisition/

Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?

Video is booming as a content marketing medium.

People love watching videos online, and producing great video content is quickly becoming one of the most surefire ways to command attention and grow a following. In fact, by 2019, video is expected to drive an astonishing 80% of all internet traffic.

Clearly, it’s important for businesses to start working on their video content sooner rather than later. And while producing great content is essential, that’s only half the battle. For your videos to benefit your business, people have to be able to find them, and that involves optimization.

So which video search engines should you focus on optimizing for? This article will explore the differences between YouTube and Google Videos, the two biggest video search engines on the web.

Keep reading to learn more about the types of traffic these search engines will bring you – and why your videos might rank well in one but not the other.

How do people find your videos?

There’s no shortage of video search engines and video hosting sites on the Internet. YouTube, of course, is the web’s video giant, with 300 hours of new video uploaded every minute. Other video hosting sites like Daily Motion and Vimeo also get a significant amount of traffic.

Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat incorporate short video into their platforms as well. Social videos are gaining steam, and they may become a threat to YouTube in the future. For now, though, YouTube still dominates the online video world the way that Google dominates other search engines.

And while plenty of video searches happen through Google, most of them return YouTube videos. If you produce video content, there’s a good chance your watchers are finding you either through YouTube’s built-in search function or through Google Videos searches.

Google Videos returns mostly (but not exclusively) results from YouTube. This search for “video content marketing” also returned a video from lynda.com.

Comparing YouTube and Google Videos searches

If you search for the same keyword on YouTube and Google Videos, how similar will your results be? Not that similar, as it turns out. Take a look at the following example. Here are the first few results from a Google Videos search for “how to improve video SEO”:

The top Google Videos results for the query “how to improve video SEO”

And here are the first few results for the same query on YouTube:

The top YouTube results for the query “how to improve video SEO”

In this case, there’s no overlap at all between the top four results. Clearly, these two search engines don’t use the same criteria for ranking videos.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “Doesn’t Google own YouTube?” Yes it does. In fact, Google has owned YouTube for more than ten years. However, the two sites serve distinct purposes. Someone who visits YouTube probably isn’t looking for the same thing as someone who types a question into Google.

Thanks to this difference in user intent, Google Videos and YouTube don’t use the same algorithms to rank videos, so it makes sense to think about them as two different search engines.

Why YouTube and Google Videos display different results

Earlier this year, Stone Temple released a study that found that YouTube and Google Videos return different top results for the same query more than half of the time. In fact, the more YouTube results show up in a Google Videos query, the more dramatically Google’s results differ from YouTube’s.

Stone Temple found that the more YouTube videos appear in Google Videos results, the more results for that query vary between the two search engines. Source

The study goes on to explore the reasons behind these differences. In a nutshell, it comes down to both user intent and monetization.

Google as a video search engine

Specific searches

When someone goes to Google, they tend to be looking for something specific. They want to find out how to do something, track down a particular fact, or research the difference between several options. Google is most often used as a tool for finding other things, not as a medium in itself.

Immediate resources

The videos Google displays tend to be to-the-point and useful. Google’s video results tend to favor how-tos and other specific, immediate resources. Videos made for entertainment purposes are probably less likely to rank highly in Google, although of course this is dependent on the search query and the individual video.

Quality results

Google also places a great deal of importance on user satisfaction, since that’s what keeps people coming back. Thus, they’re likely to favor higher-quality videos over lower-quality ones, even if the creators of those lower-quality videos are bidding higher in AdWords than their competitors.

Of course, “quality” is a vague and somewhat subjective metric, and Google is famously tight-lipped about how their algorithm determines quality. The important thing to understand, though, is that Google won’t sacrifice good results for more ad money.

YouTube as a video search engine

Entertainment-focused

On the whole, people go to YouTube to find entertainment. Google wants to solve people’s problems and send them on their way as quickly as possible, but YouTube wants to keep users watching.

This is partly because view time is an indicator of a video’s quality. If people stick around and watch a whole video, it’s a good sign that that video is interesting, useful, or entertaining. View time also tends to be correlated with user satisfaction. People who find and watch lots of enjoyable, high-quality videos will probably keep coming back to YouTube.

Longer videos favored

For YouTube, view time is also linked to making money. The longer someone watches a video, the more ads YouTube gets to show them. This is also why YouTube tends to favor longer videos over shorter ones in its rankings.

These differences shed some light on why Google Videos and YouTube use different algorithms, but unfortunately, we still don’t know exactly what the differences between those algorithms are. Considering how closely Google guards its secrets, we’re not likely to find out anytime soon, either.

In the meantime, though, it’s important not to forget that the two search engines often have a lot of overlap in their results, even though they’re not exactly the same. Thus, it stands to reason that there are some general principles for ranking well in both places.

How to rank well on video search engines

First, and most obviously, create great content. Your bounce rate says a lot about the quality of your videos. If a lot of people hit the “back” button within the first ten seconds of a video, YouTube and Google will both assume it’s not very good. So do your best to start each video with a compelling opening, and then give people a reason to keep watching.

Include plenty of text-based information with your video. Search engines can’t watch a video and determine what it’s about, but they can read the accompanying text. Your title is important – it should be descriptive and use your main keyword, preferably at the beginning.

Take the time to write an in-depth description of your video as well. Captions and transcripts aren’t necessary to include, but they improve accessibility, and they could give you a keyword boost. Finally, tag your video with some useful and relevant tags.

Getting views and comments will help your rankings, but don’t be tempted to purchase these. YouTube has gotten smarter about figuring out when views and comments are fake. Promote your content through social media to get more engagement, and be patient – if you do great work, people will discover it in time.

So, which is better: YouTube or Google Videos?

At the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether YouTube is “better” than Google Videos, or vice versa. The two search engines tend to be used differently, but both of them are very popular, and both of them are valuable sources of traffic if you optimize your videos correctly.

The type of content you create could have an impact on your rankings in each search engine. For instance, if you make short videos geared towards answering specific questions, you might have an easier time gaining traction in Google. If you make longer, more entertainment-focused videos, you might see better results from YouTube. This is far from a hard-and-fast rule, though.

The main thing to remember? High-quality videos have a good chance of doing well in both search engines, regardless of other factors. We don’t know exactly which metrics Google Videos and YouTube use to determine rankings, but we do know viewers prefer well-made, informative, and entertaining videos.

Focus on making the best video content you can, and you’ll probably find that your rankings take care of themselves.

Have you noticed a difference in your videos’ rankings between different video search engines? Share your observations in the comments!

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer for NoRiskSEO, a full service SEO agency, and a contributor to SEW. You can connect with Amanda on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out her services at amandadisilvestro.com.

8 Ways to Measure Social with Google Analytics by @coreydmorris

The maturity and widespread acceptance of social media marketing, combined with the expectation of being able to track everything in the era of big data, has created a lot of expectations.

It has also raised deeper questions about performance.

Using Google Analytics, we have the power to go deeper to prove the impact and value of our marketing efforts.

We should never start the answer to a question months into a social media campaign with “I think” when we have the capacity to know the impact of digital marketing activities for sure.

Google Analytics can be a great source of deeper insights for the social media marketer.

This post will show you eight specific reports and areas to leverage for painting a clearer picture of how social media is involved in driving website traffic and conversions.

What is often overlooked when using Google Analytics is the full customer journey. By default, Google Analytics features “last click” attribution to conversion reporting which doesn’t show the full picture of how visitors are interacting with our websites.

1. Audience > Demographics & Interests

When running a social media campaign, we need to make sure we’re getting the right target personas to the website.

Not all clicks are the same.

When we look only at our social media platform analytics (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), we’re just seeing engagement and clicks from their perspective. We don’t see what the visitors ultimately do when they land on our site.

Even with our best attempt at demographic and interest targeting, we aren’t guaranteed that the right people are clicking through.

Google Analytics allows us to see the basic demographic information, as well as interests, of our visitors. We can filter it down to social media traffic as a segment.

This is powerful information to ensure that our social media targeting is actually driving the traffic we expect and can help with insights for related audiences to expand our targeting.

2. Audience > User Explorer

To validate what we expect and assume in the customer journey, the audience user explorer is a great tool for drilling down to see how a sampling of visitors encountered our website.

While the users are anonymous and we don’t get full details, it’s still helpful to see how repeat visitors entered the site, navigated through it, and when they returned.

Using this info you can find patterns and challenge assumptions about how visitors engage with your content.

User Explorer

3. Conversions

Conversions can be configured for e-commerce sales, lead form submissions, email signups, sessions that include visits to a specific page, and other self-defined goals.

Like most reports in Google Analytics, we can isolate social media traffic as a segment to view conversions.

What is critical to understand is that, by default, when we look at conversions in Google Analytics, we’re seeing them classified by what source a visitor entered the site (direct, SEO, PPC, social, email, referral, etc.) when they met the conversion criteria.

This is the “last click” attribution model of giving credit to the source that the conversion actually happened. This doesn’t take into consideration if the user came to the site three times prior to converting and what the source of the first and second visits were.

In a lot of cases, we see that social media drives early visits in the customer journey even when it ultimately isn’t the source of the “last click” to the site that led to the conversion.

When we only look at last click we aren’t seeing the full picture and impact of all of the marketing channels.

4. Conversions > Model Comparison Tool

To help combat the short-sighted data view of last click attribution that Google Analytics defaults to, we can use the attribution model comparison tool.

It allows you to drill down into your conversion data by channel and switch the model from “last click” to “first click,” “linear,” and other options.

You can even import models from others or create your own custom model.

You don’t have to be a statistician to learn about the attribution model concepts and Google has links to some helpful content in this area so you can better understand how the different models impact your reporting.

Attribution Model Comparison Tool

5. Conversions > Assisted Conversions

Assisted conversions is an underutilized statistic and report. It has been around for years, but wasn’t as prominent until more recently when attribution became a digital marketing industry buzzword. It can be helpful in painting a complete picture of the impact of different channel sources.

Assisted conversions are credited when Google Analytics has tracked multiple sessions for a user prior to the conversion.

While the default of last click attribution is applied, it gives credit to sources that a user entered the site through in sessions prior to the final one where they took a conversion action.

For channels like social media, this is another valuable area where you can track how much social contributes as a source earlier in the customer journey.

If you’re running an e-commerce site and have revenue data in Google Analytics, you can see an actual dollar amount attributed to the source as an “assist.”

Assisted Conversions

6. Conversions > Top Conversion Paths

While assisted conversions is an aggregated stat for channels that drove visits earlier in the customer journey, it’s important to know what specific journeys or (as Google Analytics labels them) paths to conversion based on sessions.

This report is great at showing the specific combinations of sources driving visits to the site and frequency of the combinations.

You can really see how the customer journey is playing out in this report.

Conversion Paths

7. Acquisition > Social Reports

Google Analytics has added some reports exclusively focusing on social media. While you can find all of this information in other areas of Google Analytics by going into the separate reports and selecting social media as a filtered segment, it’s nice to have all of these preset and tailored to social traffic.

The reports include:

An overview.
Drill-down into specific social media sites that are sending traffic.
The top landing pages for traffic coming from social.
Conversions specific to social media networks.
The flow of users within the site showing how they engage with content once they are on your site.

These specific reports can provide valuable insight into whether your social traffic is meeting your goals once those visitors are on your site.

While some social strategies focus on engagement and brand awareness that stays on the social media platforms, if you’re focusing on getting users to your site, you’ll want to know as much as possible about what they do when they get there.

Social Reports

8. Benchmarking

The benchmarks report in Google Analytics is great because you can compare your traffic metrics to those in your industry.

You can even change the dropdown to different industries and segments and see how the numbers change.

Whether you operate in a niche or broad category, this tool is incredibly helpful for setting expectations and goals for improvement across different channels including social media traffic.

Benchmarking

Takeaways

The key to reporting and showing our successes in social media marketing rely heavily on showing the full picture.

The true impact of social media can be known within the customer journey.

By focusing on the whole journey, and steps of consideration before a prospect becomes a lead or customer, we can get attribution right.

When we know what we’re measuring and where to get the data, we can create the reporting plan that is right for our needs to keep meaningful data coming to us and integrated into our mindset rather than having it all live in a place in the big data world that seems hard to find or too overwhelming to piece together.

More Google Analytics Resources Here:

Image Credits
Screenshots by Corey Morris. Taken August 2017.

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Author: Corey Morris

For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services

The post 8 Ways to Measure Social with Google Analytics by @coreydmorris appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/8-ways-to-measure-social-with-google-analytics-by-coreydmorris/

The New AdWords Report That Will Change Your PPC Plans

2017 Halloween Logos From The Search Industry

Yesterday we shared a preview of the Google Halloween logo which is both an animated Doodle and a video Doodle at the same time. But now that it is Halloween, I wanted to share the logos from the search industry, not just Google, but also Bing, Dogpile, Baidu, Sogou, and our very own site.

Here is Bing, but it is worth going to the site to see the full movie background, it is really scary: