Let’s talk about some simple ways to do competitive analysis. I’m just going to go through a couple of marketing tools I often use.
First and foremost is Ahrefs, which I use all the time. If you want to get access, just go to www.levelingup.com/ahrefs.
Let’s put Nike into Ahrefs, as an example. You can see that their domain ranking/domain authority is scored on a scale of 1-100. Nike has 73, which is great. They have over 105,000 referring domains pointing to their site. They ranked for over 500,000 organic keywords, which means that they drive over 8.8 million visits per month.
Related Content: Analysis of 1 Million Backlinks: Dollar Shave Club (Part 6/10)
Now, these are by no means exact numbers, but it does give you a realistic range in terms of where Nike’s at and how many keywords they’re bidding on. You can start with organic keywords and see the keywords they’re ranking for, the volume they drive, which pages they’re ranking for, and go from there.
You can also see what features they have for specific keywords. Do they have site links? Are they in the image pack? Are they in a knowledge panel as well?
If I were to search for Nike right now, just to show you what I mean…
…they have an ad showing. Then they have a link right there. They have images. They have the knowledge box, as well, and so on.
I also like to look at ads (to see what types of offers and images they’re using), as well as top pages (to see what I or my client can emulate). With Nike, there’s obviously a lot of Nike-related branded keywords, but we want to see what else they have that’s not tied to Nike specifically.
I can filter by position, from 5 to 30, if I want to look for low-hanging fruit keywords. Like “marathon training” for example or “half marathon training schedule.” Ahrefs shows me the types of low-hanging keywords that Nike is ranking well for, and then I just click on the page and ask myself, “Well, what I can do to emulate that? What can I do to beat this page?”
Alex Morgan, the soccer star, is ranking 14 for it. “Nike size chart,” “10K training plan,” I can see all these different keywords right here.
Obviously, for the brand-related keywords, they’re going to do well on those almost always. But I can get some ideas from their other top pages and see how I can emulate those.
Ahrefs can also help you see the content gap, which is just great. For example, I can type in Nike.com, Adidas.com, Reebok, etc. By doing this, we can see all the things that Nike and Adidas rank for, but that Reebok does not rank for.
Now let’s look at marketing blogs. Let’s look at Neil Patel, Quick Sprout, and Single Grain. This will give me some content ideas. We can see that Quick Sprout ranks for all the expected keywords: they’re #7 for “online marketing” and #12 for “marketing automation.” A lot of great keywords that can help me (if I were a competing marketing blog) come up with great ideas for the types of content I should be creating.
Learn More: 7 Tips to Creating Killer Blog Posts that No One Else Is Writing
Then I can just export this info, maybe select 1,000 rows, for example, and hit export.
We can also look at PPC keywords. Going back to Nike—what are they bidding on, exactly? What’s the URL? We can look at their top landing pages, too. All this will help us get an idea of what they’re doing.
So, there’s a lot that we can do with Ahrefs. Just go to www.levelingup.com/ahrefs.
Another great tool that I use is Adbeat.
Adbeat gives me a deeper look at how certain companies are spending, what ads they have, and where they’re spending. Let’s take Jet for example. Let’s say they spend $121 million. You can see that their ad spend is actually increasing over time. Most of their spend is going towards Google, and to Direct Buy as well.
Then we can look at the different kind of creative stuff they’re running, and how much spend went towards this creative component. We can also look at their newest campaigns. We can look at competitors, too. And, just as we did with Ahrefs, we can export all this Adbeat info and make it into a PowerPoint presentation. That’s a lot of actionable information at my fingertips.
One thing to keep in mind is that usually the spend amounts on these kinds of tools are incorrect. Same thing with a traffic map. I would say take the traffic or the ad spend with a grain of salt.
Finally, let’s look at SimilarWeb, another tool I love to use for investigating competitors.
Let’s go back to Nike and look at how they’re doing. We can see that this is their traffic trends over time. It’s saying that they get 54 million visits a month.
Category rank for shopping and sports, they’re number one. It shows you the different mobile apps that they have for Google Play, App Store as well. Lot of different stuff going on here. You can see their traffic by country and where the bulk of their traffic is coming from and where their referrals are coming from. It’s search, and then direct, and then you have referrals, too.
You can see keywords plus which are paid, their social and how they’re doing there. You can see their distribution and then display advertising. Their sub-domains, too. You can also dive deeper and look at certain categories.
So, with these three great competitive analysis tools, there’s a lot that you can see.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
As marketers, we know that there are a million things we could be working on at any given time: e-books, white papers, blog posts, webinars, paid advertising, e-mail marketing.
They’re all important, but part of running a successful business is about putting your focus on the highest-leverage activities. That’s the stuff that brings you the most bang for your buck — the stuff that helps you justify the ROI of your job to your boss.
One of the highest leverage activities you can spend your time on is optimizing your SEO. If you can get even one of your blog posts ranked at the top of Google for a broad keyword, it could drive thousands more visitors to your site every month.
And if you’ve got the rest of your sales funnel in place, then those thousands of visitors could add up to some significant ROI.
In this post, we’ll cover 20 tactics you can use to boost your SEO rankings.
The best, most efficient way to make your content stand out isn’t by reinventing the wheel — it’s by building a better version of what has already been proven to work.
Instead of trying to create an epic 10x piece of content from scratch, look for the blog posts or videos that already perform well within your niche and build on it. Brian Dean from Backlinko calls this the Skyscraper Technique.
For example, let’s say I wanted to write an article for a new marketing blog about Facebook ads.
First, I’d do some research to figure out which blog posts about Facebook ads have a track record of generating a lot of links. There are a few ways to do this.
I could go on Google, type in a broad search term, and see what ranks near the top.
Or I could type a broad search term into a tool like BuzzSumo and immediately get a list of highly shared content related to my topic.
Next, I’d pick one of those successful pieces of content, and build on it.
One simple way to do this is just by making the post longer. For example, one of the top Google search results for “facebook ad strategies” is an article called “5 Ridiculously Powerful Ad Targeting Strategies.” To build on this idea, you might come up with something like “25 Facebook Ad Strategies to Grow Your Business.”
Another way to improve on existing content is by making it more visually appealing.
For example, this post on Pardot.com ranks at the top of Google for the search term “buyer journey,” mainly because of how the post is designed.
According to Brian Dean, by taking a post that is already proven and building on it, you drastically reduce the likelihood that your content falls flat because you’re writing content that has already worked.
An important factor for getting a post to rank high in the search results is having a lot of other influential people link back to it. One easy way to do this is by mentioning your industry’s influencers in your content.
When other people see their name mentioned somewhere on the Internet, they’re much more inclined to share the piece on their own social media, blogs or newsletters. And because industry influencers usually have large audiences, that means more targeted traffic back to your site.
For example, this entrepreneur curated an e-book full of the best Medium posts of 2015, and then sent it out to all the writers he mentioned within the e-book:
A simple e-mail like this sent to the right influencer could be the “tipping point” that makes your content go viral. In fact, according to Blogging Wizard, with the right approach you can get up to an 80% response rate from the top influencers in your industry.
We all have pages on our blog that perform really well in search, and others that fall on page three, four, or even lower. And the frustrating thing is that some of our low-ranked content may contain amazing material. If only those poor blog posts could get a little push — like a share from an influencer or several more backlinks — they might go viral or rank at the top of SERPs.
One way to give the poor-ranking content a push is by finding the posts on your site that rank higher in Google and adding links within them to the pages that rank lower.
For example, HubSpot ranks pretty high for the search term “content marketing strategy.”
Within this post, they link to multiple articles on their blog about topics like list purchasing and developing a social media content calendar — neither of which rank as high.
This is a great way to give some of your lower ranked content the boost they need to get to the top.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post? Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
The best content is the kind that speaks to people’s emotions. Marketers who are able to connect with their audience can build a large audience of loyal readers relatively quickly.
Make sure you understand your market’s deepest hopes, fears and dreams around the subject about which you’re writing. Once you have a good grasp on this, you can weave it into your blog posts to show your audience that you really “get” them.
Steli Efti at Close.io, a SaaS product to help salespeople close more deals, does this really well.
Salespeople have a lot of hopes and fears around their job. For example, they might feel afraid of coming off as too “sleazy” or too fake.
They might be afraid of hearing a bunch of “no” responses from leads.
Or maybe they feel like they have no idea what they’re doing.
Because their content tells emotionally captivating stories that really “hit the spot” for their audience, Close.io’s blog has quickly become one of the go-to resources for salespeople.
Another great example is the Copy Hackers blog. Their content has a lot of personality infused into each post, which helps set the content apart from all the other marketing posts on the web.
Notice how friendly and fun this content sounds:
Businesses in virtually every industry can incorporate great storytelling and personality into their content if they understand their customers at a deep level. Even Pfizer was able to boost sales using this approach, according to this article by Cognitive Edge.
There are always a bunch of new SEO tactics popping up all the time, but at the end of the day, the best way to have your content reach more people is simply by writing stuff that they actually want to read! And one great way to do that is by writing posts that are fun and/or informative and appeal to the readers’ emotions.
Writing long-form content consistently takes a lot of effort. So before you start climbing that mountain, it’s important to ensure that you’re writing content for which people are actually searching.
One easy way to do this is by using the Keyword Planner on Google AdWords. It’s easy to see how many people are searching for a particular keyword, and you can even uncover related keywords to base your articles around.
Another great tool for gauging the number of search results for a particular topic is Google Trends, where you can uncover search trends over time for keywords to see if they’re worth pursuing.
Or you could use BuzzSumo to see the number of shares that certain types of content get and which keywords are getting a high rate of shares.
Moz has a great guide on how to do keyword research for SEO, including how to judge the value of a keyword and understanding how to use long tail keywords.
By creating remarkable, long-form content around keywords that have a high search volume, you make it easier for your blog posts to rank high for a topic and generate a lot of traffic to your website.
Broken link building is one of the most effective white hat strategies you can use to grow your SEO rankings.
The first step is to figure out which websites in your industry have broken links to your own site as well as your competitors’ sites. There are quite a few search term variations you can type into Google to uncover sites with dead links. According to this guide by Neil Patel and Brian Dean, here are some of them:
For example, you can type in “marketing + intitle:resources” to find posts that are filled with a bunch of links.
Next, you’ll have to scour the page to find the broken links. An easy way to do this is by downloading a Chrome plugin called Domain Hunter Plus, which scans pages for dead links.
Once you activate the plugin for a particular page, you’ll get a list of dead links on that page. You can then export the list of links, send it to the site owner, and ask to replace the dead links with your own resources.
Relying on standalone blog posts to drive your SEO rankings is a losing battle.
A few individual pieces of content might appear high up on the search results, but there are better ways to get more mileage out of your blog posts. One tried-and-true way is the hub and spoke strategy.
Through this approach, you create one giant piece of content to function as the page that people land on directly from Google (your “hub”), and from that page, you link to a bunch of other relevant pages on your website (the “spokes”).
Your hub should be something that’s highly shareable, like a meaty post that people bookmark because of how informative it is and how many useful resources it contains. This way, your hub will rise in SEO rankings, and as a result your “spokes” will rise as well.
Copyblogger created a page called “Email Marketing: How to Push Send and Grow Your Business,” and within it, they’ve included supporting posts like “Why Vanity Metrics Are Worthless (and What Really Matters),” “37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened, Read, and Clicked,” and more.
By creating a hub, or a “table of contents”-style guide around a topic in your niche that people can consistently refer to, you’re creating a larger piece of content that will rise higher and higher in search rankings.
And as a result, the content you link to within your hub will rise higher and higher as well.
As I mentioned earlier, mentioning industry influencers in your content is a great way to help your content get more shares.
And roundup posts are an efficient way to do this on a larger scale. In a roundup, you curate posts from experts in your niche and share them with your own readers. This tactic is an easy method to build relationships with the right people in your field, generate a bunch of traffic, and improve your SEO rankings.
According to Crazy Egg, these are a few key characteristics that make a high-quality roundup:
Once you’ve sourced a long list of high-quality links around a topic that your audience wants to know more about, you can ask each influencer to share the post with their own audience.
For example, here’s an e-mail that someone sent to me after including some of my content in a post:
I ended up sharing it with my list of 20,000+ readers.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post?Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more specific and “narrow” than broader short tail keywords.
For example, “facebook advertising” is very broad search term, but “facebook advertising for SaaS companies” is much more specific.
It’s natural to create content focused on broad, short tail keywords. We think that because there are a lot of people searching for these more general phrases, we should take take advantage of that. But in reality, creating remarkable content that is focused on long-tail keywords can boost your conversions.
People want solutions that are tailored specifically for their situation. If you create a piece of content called “Facebook Advertising Strategies for B2B SaaS Companies,” you’d make B2B companies feel that you understand their specific situation a lot better than someone who wrote an article called “25 Facebook Ad Strategies to Grow Your Business.”
Even though you would be going after a smaller pie, you would dominate a much larger piece of it.
For more on how to identify and leverage long-tail keywords for SEO, see this guide: How to Identify Long Tail Keywords for Your SEO Campaign.
Whatever strategy you’re pursuing — whether it’s Facebook ads, SEO or anything else — the main point is to drive more prospects along the buyer’s journey to becoming customers.
That’s the main goal of content marketing.
SEO works best when it’s part of that larger content marketing strategy.
According to this guide by Salesforce Pardot (and this image from HubSpot), customers go through the following three stages before deciding to buy:
By creating high-quality content to serve customers at each step of the process, you’ll naturally rank higher in search results while also generating more sales.
Awareness Stage
At the awareness stage, customers are usually conscious that they have a problem, but they have no idea what the right solution looks like.
For example, if you’re selling services to help CEOs improve their content marketing, they might be thinking things like: “Ugh, I don’t want to waste hours and hours writing blog posts if I have no idea what the payoff is going to be” or “I need to outsource this but I don’t know how to figure out who’s the right person to handle it.”
At this stage, 72% of people immediately turn to Google to figure out how to solve their problems. They search for content that hits their specific pain points.
If you’re selling marketing services, a good piece of content to write might be something like “How to Speed Up Your Content Marketing Success.” This way, when customers search for their problem, your blog will be the first one they see.
An example of how HubSpot attracts customers who are in the “awareness” stage.
Interest or Consideration Stage
As potential customers start to gather more information about their problem, they look for ways to solve it in the “interest” phase. At this stage, evidence-based content starts to become a lot more valuable to them.
According to Crystal Clear Communications, 30% of buyers consult white papers at this stage of the process, 29% consult case studies, and 30% of buyer influencers look to detailed technology guides.
Again, if you’re selling marketing services, good content at this stage might sound something like “The Ultimate Guide to Getting More Leads Through SEO.”
You can present these guides at the bottom of your blog posts and ask readers to fill out their e-mail address in order to receive them. This way, you help people transition from the “awareness” phase to the “interest” phase, and you capture their e-mail addresses so that you can send them more content down the road.
HubSpot does this well — when customers start off in the awareness phase searching for something like “how to speed up content marketing results,” HubSpot’s blog post is the first thing they see on Google:
And at the bottom of that post, site visitors can sign up to get a free content strategy planning guide.
Evaluation or Decision Stage
Only after customers have done their research and figured out how to go about solving their problem are they ready to start thinking about purchase options in the “evaluation” phase.
At this stage, they’re trying to decide which service to buy. Good content here might be something like “4 Steps to Picking a Good Marketing Agency,” “Why Some Marketing Agencies Don’t Get Good Results” or something else along those lines. And in these posts, you can strategically position yourself against your competition by “teaching” your audience why you’re better.
Understanding what your customers are searching for at each step of the journey is super important — that way, you can create highly ranked content to help them along the way.
There are a few specific metrics that you can track to measure your overall SEO performance.
For example, one key metric for SEO is the average time that users spend on your content page. If your content is engaging, if it appeals to their emotions, if it’s useful, then readers will stay on the page longer in order to read more of your material. For more on the right metrics to track for your SEO, check out this post by Neil Patel: Quantify Your Results: The 14 Most Important Content Marketing Metrics.
If your website does not provide quality content, visitors will “bounce” off the page and “boomerang” to a competitor’s site.
Keep in mind that there’s no specific number here that can be considered “good” or “bad.” If you’re writing short-form content, for example, then you’re naturally going to have a low average time on your site. Or if you offer a great answer to a reader’s question, you might have a high bounce rate but also a high time on your site.
The number of return visitors is also a good metric to gauge how good your content is. How many readers come back to your site on a regular basis? If you’re sending e-mails to your subscription list regularly, how many people consistently open and click?
This is one of the most useful metrics that you can measure since return visitors are usually the most likely to convert to buyers.
There are a lot of benefits you can get from associating yourself with experts in your industry.
Read More: 5 Steps to Becoming an Expert Content Creator (According to Google’s Phantom Update)
One of the best ways to leverage that association is by interviewing these experts and repurposing the content into a blog post. That way, you can rank high for the expert’s name and siphon off a large audience that searches for them.
For example, Groove did an interview with Neil Patel and repurposed it into a blog post. Now when anyone searches “Neil Patel interview,” Groove shows up at the top of the results.
Venture Hacks did an interview with Sean Ellis, which also ranks at the top of Google for “sean ellis interview.”
By interviewing influencers in your industry and turning it into a blog post, you can attract a chunk of that influencer’s audience to your own site through Google search.
Part of maximizing the effectiveness of your content marketing is repurposing your material as much as you can.
As Neil Patel and Aaron Agius write in QuickSprout’s Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience, there are at least seven different ways to repurpose a single blog post. Turn it into a:
This could skyrocket the reach of each post that you write.
Let’s say you published a blog post called “How to Leverage Influencers in Your Content Marketing.” There are tons of different formats into which you can repurpose this content to attract a wider audience.
For starters, you could take that content and make it native for different blogging platforms like Quora, Medium or LinkedIn — which allow anyone to reach a targeted audience of tens of thousands of people if the content is good.
Then, using a tool like Visme, you can take that blog post and turn it into infographic.
Noah Kagan found from analyzing 100 million articles that infographics get shared the most out of all types of content. This means that an infographic could potentially get more than double the reach of a single blog post, which makes it more likely to rank higher in search.
Then you could take the blog post and infographic and combine them into a compelling SlideShare presentation.
If you have a podcast, you could summarize the key points of the blog post in a quick 10-minute audio segment.
With a simple, structured system, you could skyrocket the reach of each piece of content you put out by making it “native” to several other platforms simultaneously, thereby increasing the likelihood that the content will rank high in SERPs.
A simple way to get more reach on your content is just to increase its length.
Longer-form posts are more comprehensive, get shared more frequently, and lead to lower bounce rates — which is why they tend to be ranked higher on Google.
According to serpIQ, average length of posts at the top positions on Google are 2450+ words.
Not only does this help with SEO, but more time spent on your page means you’d be cultivating more trust between you and your audience.
Content that’s visually appealing allows readers to digest a larger amount of information in a shorter period of time. It’s much easier to look at a graph or an infographic that’s well designed than a huge 5,000-word blog post — and as a result, it’s more likely to get shared.
You don’t need to be a design whiz to create content that’s visually appealing either. You could use a tool like Snapguide to create beautiful how-to guides, for example.
Written content is still very important, but the way the content is presented is also important. The more visual, the better.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post?Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
According to Commonplaces Interactive, both Google and Bing have reported higher search traffic coming from mobile devices than computers.
That’s why these search engines boost content in search rankings that are mobile friendly.
If you’re not sure whether your site is mobile friendly or not, you can just insert the URL into Google’s Mobile Friendly site analyzer.
The easiest way to make sure that your site doesn’t get penalized in search results for this is by making it responsive. That way, it will “respond” to the device on which it’s being viewed, and won’t encounter any problems on any mobile devices.
By writing original blog posts on major media outlets, you can get a lot more exposure to your own site.
For example, Neil Patel wrote a guest post on Entrepreneur.com.
Within the post, he included multiple links back to his own blog, Quicksprout.
One thing you might want to be wary of is reposting content from your blog to a major media outlet. Although the exposure would be good, Google penalizes duplicate content in search results.
But writing original content for major sites could help build your credibility as well as get more backlinks to your blog. For more on this, check out How to Pitch a Guest Post to Editors at 104 Major Publications by Jon Morrow.
Another quick way to get more backlinks for your blog is by using a service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO). This site is aimed at the tons of journalists out there who are writing stories on various topics and need quotes from experts.
When you sign up for HARO, you’ll get notified every time a journalist who is writing about a topic in your field needs a quote. Then you can send in a quick pitch offering a quote along with your business name and website URL.
This is a great way to get your name and blog on a news media site without having to write a unique guest post.
If you deeply understand your audience’s emotional experience at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can consistently create high-quality content that not only sits at the top of Google’s SERP, but also drives sales.
The best part is that it’s actually really easy to understand your audience’s emotional pain points.
All you have to do is set up an autoresponder message for everyone who signs up for your e-mail list. As soon as someone subscribes, you can send them something like this:
Hey [name],
I get hundreds of “marketing” e-mails everyday from random companies that are just a pain to sort through.
I want to be different. I want to send you e-mails that you actually look forward to reading.
So to make sure that I send you the best possible content, I wanted to ask you a quick question… What’s the #1 barrier that’s keeping you from [whatever success you’re trying to help them achieve]?
Just “hit reply” to this e-mail and let me know. I read every response.
Thank you,
[your name]
You’d be surprised at how many people pour out their life story in response to that, which helps you to know exactly what’s going through their mind.
It’s even better if you ask for feedback at each stage of the customer journey. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers asks non-buyers for feedback right after they make the decision not to buy from him:
This way, you’ll know exactly how to create the right type of content that resonates at a deep level with your readers, gets shared, and ends up ranking high in the search pages.
This isn’t easy to do, but if you can do it, you’ll skyrocket the reach of your blog. People who invent terminology that catches on in their industry can really boost their SEO rankings.
For example, Brian Dean of Backlinko invented what he calls the Skyscraper Technique, which is a unique approach to creating content.
Now when anyone searches “skyscraper technique” on Google, his name is all over the web on multiple different sites.
To invent your own term, you don’t need to create some crazy new breakthrough idea in your industry. All you need to do is take existing points of view that are already out there, “repackage” them, and make them your own.
For example, Tim Ferriss wasn’t the first ever lifestyle design blogger, but he was the first to package up his ideas into the “Four Hour Work Week.”
Gary Vaynerchuk isn’t the first to talk about understanding the context of social media platforms, but he was the first to position as “Jab Jab Jab Right Hook.”
So there you have it — 20 ways to boost your SEO rankings!
As marketers, there are a lot of tactics out there that we could potentially focus on. But those who get world-class results get them by focusing on high-leverage activities that deliver real long term results.
Now I want to hear from you. What other SEO tips would you recommend? Leave a comment below!
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
Creating a lucrative and scalable revenue model can be difficult, especially if you focus on the wrong end goals.
Brands often fail to generate a decent Return On Investment because they are too hung up on specific elements of their sales funnel. A preoccupation with certain types of conversions is just one of the reasons that your ROI can collapse.
Andrew Baird wrote an insightful LinkedIn post about the pitfalls of focusing too heavily on conversions. He asked a client for financial details, which apparently took the client by surprise.
“‘Why do you need to know my financials? Don’t you just need the conversion stats?’ the client asked.”
Baird pointed out that conversions themselves didn’t necessarily mean much if they failed to generate money. You can suffer a negative ROI if you are selling low-ticket items or can’t turn many of your leads into sales.
“Increasing conversions when every sale makes you very little (or loses you money!) won’t help,” Baird writes. “Equally if your conversions are at 75% [then] starting with conversions won’t give you the biggest bang for your efforts.”
Conversions are essential events in your revenue model. However, a specific conversion is useless if you view it as the ultimate end goal.
Learn More: LeadPages CEO Clay Collins Talks About How To Ramp Up Your Conversion Rates (Up To 75%!)
Do you know what your conversions are really worth? There’s no point in prioritizing them until you know, because determining the value of them is necessary to estimate your ROI.
It’s important to remember that most of your leads will never translate into sales. According to research from Marketing Sherpa, only 7% of leads turn into paying customers. Of course, this is a rough estimate, and conversion rates vary by industry and company. But it shows that the vast majority of conversions never generate any revenue.
Here is the equation you must follow to calculate your lead value:
Lead Value = Lead Conversion Rate * Average Sale from a Conversion
ROI = Lead Value / Average Cost of Generating the Lead
The math behind this model is simple, but these equations can be difficult to apply in real-life situations. Remember that some leads will convert to sales more easily than others. Also, some leads are more likely to convert into higher-paying customers.
You need to understand how certain types of traffic convert and how many of those leads will turn into paying customers.
For example, let’s assume that you are setting up a Google AdWords campaign. You bid on one keyword for $0.40 a click and another for $0.30 a click. You might find that the conversion rate (possibly an e-mail opt-in) on your landing page is 20% for both of these keywords. However, the lead-to-sales rate is 10% for the first keyword but only 5% for the second keyword.
The average revenue from leads generated with the first keyword is $30 and $20 for the second keyword.
In this situation, you’re paying 33% more for every lead that you generate with the first keyword that you’re bidding on. However, you are generating three times as much revenue from each lead with that keyword. This means that your ROI is over 130% higher by bidding on the keyword with the higher CPC.
If you were focused exclusively on generating as many conversions as you could for the lowest possible cost, you would actually be generating a much lower ROI.
Read More: Here’s How to Use Web Analytics to Boost Content Marketing Performance
There are several reasons that a preoccupation with conversions can actually be counterproductive. Here are some issues that you need to be aware of:
You could consider any action that a user takes to be a conversion. Subscribing to an e-mail list, submitting a quote request, or simply visiting your website are all examples of conversions. Unfortunately, none of these actions by themselves yield revenue.
You could easily increase your conversions just by setting lower goals when defining conversions. For example, instead of counting quote requests, you could focus on the number of users that show any interest in one of your products (such as asking a question about the product).
You’ll probably have a higher number of conversions, but you haven’t improved the effectiveness of your marketing funnel.
Free Bonus Download: Get this handy checklist of 15 simple and actionable ways to increase the numbers in your sales funnel. Click here to download it free.
Some conversions are much more valuable than others. You might encourage 5,000 people to subscribe to your e-mail list, submit a quote request, or take some other action, but few of those leads will ever pan out. Your lead-to-sales conversion rate might be especially low if you make the following mistakes:
Some brands are tempted to make these mistakes because they want to pad their conversion numbers. This can be particularly problematic if you’re relying on a marketing team that’s compensated based on the quantity rather than the quality of your leads. This is why many brands with affiliate programs compensate their affiliates for sales rather than leads.
So, if you shouldn’t worry as much about your site’s specific conversion numbers, what should you put your energy into instead? The following suggestions will help you better create and optimize a fully-functioning funnel:
As mentioned above, conversions are arbitrarily-defined concepts. If you truly want to make your sales funnel work effectively, you’ve got to isolate specific conversion cases and determine exactly which conversions mean the most for business.
Following the description above, opting in to an e-mail list, submitting a quote request or taking other actions (from downloading case studies to making sales) all constitute conversions. And if you focus exclusively on boosting conversions, you’d treat all these options equally, even though — from a business standpoint — they don’t all make an equal contribution to your bottom line.
The point of this article isn’t to convince you that tracking conversions is useless — far from it. The goal is to help you recognize that you need to be more exacting with your measurements. It’ll take some time and effort, but it’s crucial that you identify what a given conversion means to your business in terms of dollars and cents so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the conversion types that move the needle most.
If you aren’t familiar with these acronyms, here’s a breakdown:
We aren’t just talking vegan protein sources here — we’re talking about the content that’s needed to guide website visitors through all stages of your buying process. Each piece of the puzzle is important, and yet TOFU and MOFU content is often set to the side in favor of a focus on conversion-driving bottom of funnel content.
Take a critical look at the content on your website. Can the pieces you’ve created be used to attract a larger audience, as good TOFU content can? Do they help visitors get familiar with the features and benefits of your product or service, as in the case of effective MOFU content? If you’re all about the CTAs and getting viewers to take that last step (BOFU), it may be time to build out your content strategy.
Read More: How We Instantly Raised Average Order Value by 10% [case study]
As you’re expanding your content approach, take a careful look at how you’re attributing your conversions. In that rush to drive conversions and figure out what contributed to them, many marketers give full attribution to the last touch — the final blog post that was read, the final CTA that encouraged action or some other far-down-the-funnel variable. And why wouldn’t they? It’s by far the simplest approach.
That said, it’s a woefully inaccurate way of assessing the value of each piece of the funnel. Instead of putting all your emphasis on encouraging and tracking conversions, give at least some of that energy to the process of investing in and implementing multi-touch attribution technology. Doing so becomes more essential every day in this omni-channel, omni-device world.
Free Bonus Download: Get this handy checklist of 15 simple and actionable ways to increase the numbers in your sales funnel. Click here to download it free.
Generating leads is essential if you want to earn sales down the road. However, even the most targeted leads don’t turn into customers on their own. You need to carefully nurture them before a sale is made.
If you want to have a workable sales funnel, then you must execute every step correctly. You need a strategy to engage your leads and encourage them to take the next step. This process can take months, so make sure you’re committed to your goals. Keep track of your leads, define how you acquired them, and split test different variables in your marketing funnel to make it as effective as possible.
Have you found that focusing too much on conversions has hurt your ROI? Feel free to share your comments below.
Image: Wikimedia Commons, Flickr
Hi everyone, today we have Ian Blair who is the CEO of BuildFire, which provides the easiest way to build mobile apps in under five minutes. It’s a no-coding-required app-building platform where people can quickly build their own mobile apps and it works in any industry because every brand can benefit from an app.
Today we’re chatting about how BuildFire grew to a seven-figure ARR by using content marketing rather than paid advertising, the main factors that got them there in the very competitive SaaS industry, the reason keyword research is essential, and why you must have a methodology for creating and tracking your content’s progress and success.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Content Marketing as a Growth Channel Propelled BuildFire into a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company TRANSCRIPT
Episode highlights:
Resources from this interview:
Leave some feedback:
Connect with Eric Siu:
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
If you are an online retail company, you should be intimately familiar with Google Shopping. Google Shopping was first released as Froogle in 2002 and was a key growth driver of Google advertising revenue before it transitioned over to its current “pay to play” model in mid 2012.
Google Shopping is one of the biggest revenue drivers for both retailers and Google. Its engaging format drives a high click-through rate and qualifies visitors before they visit your site. The advantageous above-the-fold placement grants the valuable possibility of high traffic levels.
Too bad it’s not a secret—the ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending) on these placements are lucrative, so the competition is fierce. The average cost per click has been rapidly increasing ever since its release and it’s only getting worse.
Google has also been testing a “16-pack” of Google Shopping results that will only serve to exacerbate the pain of participating in this cost per click battleground. What’s a ROAS fanatical growth marketer to do?
When CellularOutfitter.com first participated in Google Shopping ads, it was driving a fraction of revenue. As we optimized the campaign structure over hundreds of iterations, we slowly developed a Google Shopping campaign structure that was perfectly optimized for squeezing every last penny of return from your Googlebase feed.
We will outline the structure below in our plan for the Ultimate Google Shopping Restructure.
Elite performance in the Google Shopping auction starts off with the quality and cleanliness of your Googlebase feed. Google will harvest and index your feed and serve up results based on what it deems to be the most appropriate match to the user’s search query. If you have a greater volume of optimized attributes versus your competitors, this will be a key advantage in impression share, cost per click and click-through rates.
Item title: Most e-commerce companies will simply import their product titles into this column. However, savvy paid search marketers know that Google Shopping results will bold any sort of keyword matches to help users find what they are looking for. With this in mind, you can harvest your top search queries in terms of revenue or traffic contribution from your top text ad keywords and start to optimize your product titles for the best visibility and impression share.
You will reap the dual benefits of increased CTR % as users will see more bolded keywords with your title versus the competition’s as well as higher impression share % as Google gets a more exact match to the user’s search query. Optimizing your feed in descending order of revenue contribution also ensures that your business will get the best bang for your buck.
Example: We had a high revenue contribution query of “Galaxy S6 TPU cases” doing well for our text ads. We then modified one of our highest converting products to exhibit this exact keyword in the title and descriptions in order to give this SKU more visibility in the Google Shopping results.
Learn More: The Complete Guide to Gmail Ads (How We Got $.10 CPCs & Leads As Low As $7)
Item description: With the above in mind, do the same thing with your descriptions and ensure that they are keyword rich for a few of the keyword variants that are driving the highest proportion of sales. If you are doing frequent ad rotations (which you should to figure out what type of messaging resonates well with your customer base), you can also incorporate some of those learnings into your product descriptions as well.
Example: When we ran our A/B tests for thousands of ad groups we found out that the “Up to 88% off Retail Prices” gave the highest click-through rate and conversion rates. Subsequently, most of our initial ad copy now has this value proposition and we are incorporating it into our SKU descriptions.
(CTR % over time)
The Googlebase contains a multitude of optional fields, including color, product variants and product sale information. Filling these in will allow users to better narrow their search results within the Google Shopping interface as well as grant the Googlebot better information about your products.
Having these fields appropriately filled in will also give you an edge over your competitors as most retailers are too lazy to fill them in.
Make copious use of the “Google Label” fields. The Google label fields allow you to segment your Googlebase feed into different sections that you can exploit for different optimization techniques. A few use cases I would suggest are:
The default method of setting up the Googlebase feed places an inordinate amount of control in Google’s hands: they decide which SKUs show up for which search query, they decide what is served in what proportion, and you only have a few levers to pull in order to influence performance.
However, the Alpha/Beta structure allows paid search marketers to continually harvest insights about their campaigns and maximize performance while incrementally wrestling control away from Google. As a good rule of thumb, the more draconian you are about controlling your paid search traffic, the better your performance will be.
Let’s explore the Alpha/Beta structure! If we were to map it out, it would look something like this:
First, we need to create a “catch all” campaign and assign it a low bid. This campaign will simply bid on all products in the feed at the lowest acceptable bid possible in order to get a decent amount of impressions.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s pretend that you have a catalog of 500,000 clothing SKUs and you set the bid to .50 CPC. The campaign priority for this campaign will be “Low”—this campaign level setting allows Google to better make sense of how it should deliver Google Shopping traffic if there are multiple Shopping campaigns utilizing the same Googlebase feed.
The goal of this campaign is to:
For your next campaign, we’re going to utilize either your Google custom labels or the Brand/Category columns that are present in your Googlebase in order to better sculpt your traffic. We will continue to go along with our clothing store retailer analogy and start to build out campaigns that represent the next tier of keywords that might present themselves in the sales cycle. For example, a prospective customer might search the following in order to buy a pair of dress socks:
Online clothing store > online clothing store socks > dress socks > men’s dress socks > black men’s dress socks > black Spiderman men’s dress socks
The first layer should be designed to capture search queries in the upper funnel, so a campaign structure might look like this:
And so on and so forth. The categories should have the following attributes:
By adding this layer into your Google Shopping campaign structure, you are effectively sculpting your Google Shopping traffic and will earn the following benefits:
Read More: LeadPages CEO Clay Collins Talks About How To Ramp Up Your Conversion Rates (Up To 75%!) [Podcast]
As your Catch All and First Layer campaigns collect data, they will start to provide enough user-driven insights for you to flesh out the remaining, more specific layers of your Shopping campaign. The eventual goal is to create SKU-specific ad groups that are targeting one ID; this will allow you to get the most granular performance and the best shaping of search queries to SKU IDs.
Example: you decide to click on Dimensions > Search Queries in your “Category – Socks” campaign. You see masses of search queries corresponding to rough subcategories. For simplicity’s sake, let’s vastly simplify some of your findings and assume you gathered enough data for the findings to be significant and that all five groupings have large amounts of traffic:
We now have enough data to add all five subcategories to a new campaign designed for your 2nd Layer in the Alpha/Beta hierarchy. These campaigns will have their serving priority set to “Medium” and have a higher bid than the Catch All or Category campaigns. You might structure the bids this way:
By structuring the bids this way, the profitable search queries catered toward “pink socks,” “men’s socks,” etc. will be funneled toward even more specific ad groups with their own corresponding bids, bid adjustments, negative keywords and promotion text. Performance will continue to rise as the more specific subcategory ad groups continue to gather SKU specific data.
You might be asking yourself: why would we want to bid so high on women’s socks even though the ROI isn’t there? We would want to do this because:
(Wow, terrible performance! Turned out this SKU was not priced appropriately.)
Lastly, once your subcategories start to gather significant amounts of data, you will gain the ability to build the most important piece of the Alpha/Beta structure—your SKU specific campaigns. These campaigns and ad groups will be focused toward individual SKUs that drive the performance of your entire account.
You will enjoy total control over the performance of these SKUs and will be easily able to monitor their performance with a microscope. This campaign will drive highly-defined search queries that sit at the very end of the user’s purchasing funnel. It will also be easy for you to dominate impression share % for high contribution SKUs.
The campaign should have its Priority set to “High” and have the highest bids across your entire slew of Shopping campaigns. This will ensure that AdWords will always show the SKUs you want when you want.
You can build out these ad groups by proceeding to the Dimensions > Product ID breakdown tab in any of your higher hierarchy Shopping ad groups. You will see a complete breakdown of the SKUs along with their performance:
Once you export a list of your top contributors, sort them into the following categories:
As your SKU specific campaigns gather more data, you will start to exhibit dictator-like control over your Shopping campaign traffic. An ideal situation is your generalized “Alpha” campaigns consistently and efficiently directing traffic to the places in the account structure where they can best performance while serving as “miners” looking for golden nuggets—the gold nuggets are SKUs that deserve to be in their own ad group so they can be optimized for even more traffic.
As your negative keyword structure and bids start to further sharpen your traffic stream, a greater proportion of your traffic will be funneled toward the highest ROI ad groups located in your SKU specific campaigns.
In the course of running Google Shopping campaigns for years and spending millions in ad spend, we developed a few novel techniques for further improving the ROI of our Shopping campaigns.
When mining for product IDs to add to our SKU specific campaigns, there are often SKUs that lose money no matter what. Since we don’t have infinite time or the wherewithal to figure out how to make them profitable, we might want to completely exclude them from being served.
However, when excluding product IDs across hundreds of ad groups and campaigns it can be a chore to keep track of the SKUs that you don’t wish to exclude. We wound up playing a frustrating game of “whack of mole” where a SKU excluded from one campaign would simply pop up in another.
We had our developers build a special tool for us—the SKU Exclusion Tool. PPC marketers wishing to exclude a SKU would upload a list in .CSV format. Upon our nightly feed generation, those SKUs would be completely removed from our Googlebase feed. This allowed us to quickly eliminate losing SKUs with 100% certainty and saved countless ad dollars.
Mining search queries amongst all your Shopping campaigns can be a massive endeavor. With the enormous scope of search queries that can crop up in the Search Query dimension, it can be difficult to come up with negative keyword additions that would move the needle.
We found that certain unprofitable terms such as “free” would show up countless times, but they were dispersed amongst thousands of unique search terms. This made it impossible to truly determine the ROI of the word “free.”
We had our developers build a tool that would separate each word in a list of search queries into a separate entity and then pivot all of the KPIs we needed and attach it to each instance. We could then export this list into an Excel file and quickly build a negative keyword list that would save tens of thousands of dollars. The word free might appear in the export like this:
“Free” – Appeared in 15,201 search queries. Contributed 150,304 impressions, 10,521 clicks, $5,260 in ad spend, $217 in revenue.
Once we added “free” and a host of other broad/phrase match negatives to the Shopping campaign, we would immediately save tens of thousands of unprofitable ad spend per month. We would immediately reinvest these dollars in capturing more impression share for the other profitable areas of the Adwords account.
This is a new technique we just started to implement. Export your list of search queries from your Google search campaigns into one Excel file, and export another list of your Shopping campaign search queries into another.
Perform a VLOOKUP and try to find mismatches amongst the files. These represent proven opportunities that you can quickly exploit.
You might find search queries that are performing well for your Shopping campaigns that aren’t added as keywords in your Search campaigns. Adding these search queries as keywords to your Search campaigns will boost your revenue as these proven winners will now start to appear in Google’s search results with greater frequency. You will also appear for both Shopping ad results as well as Search results and capture more impression real estate.
On the other hand, you might have search queries that are performing well for Google Search but are not contributing to your Google Shopping campaigns. For example, some of the below might be huge contributors to our fictional Google Adwords Search campaigns:
If you do carry these products, this would be a great opportunity to go into your Googlebase feed and modify the title, descriptions and attributes of these products to more prominently feature the search queries in question. Once Google starts serving the right products to the right search queries, build them out into their own ad groups and spike up the bid to dominate the impressions for that particular search query tree.
With the Search and Shopping results looking more competitive by the day, aim for granular, hyper optimized to annihilate your competition. For our core search queries, we often have 4-6 products appear in the results which can take up 75-90% of the available Google Shopping impressions.
This case study is a guest post by Edwin Choi, VP of Marketing at Mobovida, a customer-driven, vertically integrated mobile accessory brand delivering fashion forward products direct to consumer.
Let us know your experience with Google Shopping Campaign in the comments section below!
