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iProspect is the world’s leading Digital Performance Marketing agency with a passionate team of 2,000 digital advertising experts stretching across 40 countries. We build integrated digital advertising campaigns, across multiple channels, to harness consumer intent and drive tangible business performance for our clients. In doing this, we become a critical partner in terms of their business growth strategies.

Where to Find Data Now That It’s (not provided)?

Google first announced its plan to “protect the personalized search results [they] deliver” on October 18, 2011. An SSL encryption protocol (https) became the default search for users signed-in to their Google accounts. For digital marketers, that meant that visits from organic search listings no longer included the information about individual queries, i.e. keyword data showed up as (not provided) in Google Analytics. As of this month, all signs point to secure search becoming the default for everybody – signed into a Google account or not. In short, no keyword data will be provided at all in referrals from Google. Source: http://www.notprovidedcount.com/ There are several theories as to why Google is doing this; to help protect user privacy, to protect itself from accusations of cooperating with the NSA and, of course, the big elephant in the room… to boost its ad sales. As organic keyword data from the most used search engine becomes increasingly obsolete, the implications and consequences will impact digital marketing teams in different ways. At iProspect, we have been adapting to the loss in search data for a while – even when it was only a small percentage of the reported data. Knowing that Google will cease to report 100% of keyword-level organic search data in the near future, it is important to further adjust the way we approach keyword research, traffic analysis, and reporting. That said, we wanted to cover this issue not only from an SEO standpoint, but from PPC, sales, upper management and client services, as well. We crowd-sourced the opinions of our bright team to get their take on how the (not provided) spike affects the web marketing industry, as well as provide insights and actionable solutions for website publishers to extract relevant data and achieve their digital marketing goals. Here we discuss: The implications of being a digital marketer in a (not provided) world The motives behind Google’s rollout Solutions for obtaining accurate data and reporting 1. What are the major implications brought on by 100% of referral data being (not provided)? Gautier Lemesle – Director, Digital Marketing Innovation Being able to match search query to searcher intent has been vital to the execution of successful web marketing strategies. It’s what helped us define how people were searching for and landing on content, while also enabling website owners to optimize key pages to best respond to users’ intent and incite them to take action. I think the most significant impact will be on reporting practices, and to a certain degree, Google has paved the way for us. By progressively changing the game rules with blocked signed-in search queries, it forced us to change our methodology—in SEO and what we report on. Jack Allen – SEO Coordinator Realistically, the change will only make reporting slightly more difficult and client education a “must.” The thing is, with localization, personalization, knowledge graph, etc. keywords themselves have become less foundational than they have been in the past. Once seen as the critical building blocks of burn/churn SEO, they now serve as a stepping stone somewhere between awareness and conversion. Guillaume Bouchard – CEO I think that most updates from Google are for the better. Better for AdWords and for SEO, most of the time. But the value of 100% loss of keyword-level reporting is debatable from an advertising, relevancy & user experience standpoint. I agree that AdWords should own a lot of SERP real estate, as it is Google’s main business model, and a smart one! But I think SEO, as a discovery tool, should be more prominent in discovery searches. Currently, I do not think this is the case and it hurts relevancy… The unfortunate part is that many rich AdWords campaign keywords that were directly derived from SEO queries—terms that you may not have expected to rank for and end up driving qualified traffic, will go undiscovered and likely, unanswered. Unless Broad Match catches them all! Wes Walls – Team Lead, SEO and Social I think the biggest impact this change will have is in our ability to easily slice and dice keywords into clusters, and to associate them with certain website pages, events, goals, sales, etc. The kind of fast data deep-diving that we can do with an analytics tool like Google Analytics is quite powerful and insightful and, crucially, very quick and easy to access. We simply don’t get that from Webmaster Tools yet. Khalifa Yahiaoui – Team Lead, PPC and Display Analytics has always been a very resourceful tool for discovering those out-of-the-box keyword ideas and themes for paid search campaigns. While (not provided) impacts SEO most, we are still able to measure search performance and identify strong optimization opportunities by using other data resources such as using Webmaster Tools data and Rank Tracking platforms. You can also still extract useful data from GA, if your AdWords and Analytics accounts are linked up properly. 2. Why is Google doing this? Gautier Lemesle In light of the recent Edward Snowden affair and NSA issue, Google might indeed be masking people’s search queries (logged into their GMail/Google Account) for a good reason: to protect them. But by hiding 100% of search queries, I’m convinced Google is doing this in an attempt to: Push people to use Google Webmaster Tools (it’s now the only place where you have some sort of keyword information about your website) Push people start buying AdWords ads—to have information about keyword performance. Prepare marketers for the future of search engines—a time where it won’t just be a matter of search queries but also voice commands, and proactive recommendations based on your personality/humour/ feeling at the moment. This might sound like science-fiction, but with Google Glass hitting the market, it’s an approaching reality. Look at the recent introduction of Google Universal Analytics (the future of Google Analytics). We’re now able to not only track websites but any kind of device connected to internet (coffee maker, dishwasher, car, microwave…). And, when we look at the curve of innovation and adoption of technologies in the last century, chances are things are evolving much quicker than we think… Guillaume Bouchard I think it’s a blend of providing better privacy for users and harbouring data in order to improve retargeting. That’s what I would do and I can assure you that Google is not the only one doing this. It will hurt weak companies more than strong ones, and create a downward spiral for the average one… The great companies survive, the good ones usually die in dire moments. Sébastien Neveu – Team Lead SEO and Social For me it is clear that Google wants marketers to allocate more of their budgets to PPC but also to support the overall growth of their virtual service offering, like Google Shopping, Google Merchant Center, Flight Search, etc. Google quietly rolled out a car insurance price comparison service for drivers in France and has since expanded to other markets. I would not be surprised to see the equivalent arrival in North America (U.S. and Canada)in the near future. This is just a hunch, but I would suspect they would start to target credit cards. Philip Tomlinson – SEO Analyst Many think that Google has turned agencies into their customer service representatives. It’s going to be really important in our line of work to explain to clients the reason for traffic decrease for individual keyword traffic and show the value of adopting a more integrated approach to search marketing. 3. Are there workarounds for reporting? Jack Allen For reporting on boosting traffic, SEOs should already be focusing on organic growth on particular landing pages, as well as overall organic growth. These metrics are invariably more coherent and complete given the current state of (not provided). Where we run into trouble is differentiating between branded and unbranded organic traffic, but I believe that these two segments play off each other in important ways. François Berthiaume – Account Director Paid search data will increasingly become the quickest way to help monitor keyword-level performance. Google is encouraging marketers to track more macro-level metrics such as conversion rates, and this means paid search and click-throughs (using Webmaster Tools) to monitor performance will become increasingly important to search marketing strategies. Wes Walls I think there are three possible solutions: The first solution is for marketers to develop creative ways of attributing organic keyword traffic to goals and sales. I think it’s going to be more about matching keyword rankings, search volumes and landing pages to get estimated traffic per keyword. It’s a crude replacement for actual keyword traffic data but a tool will be required to do that effectively. The second solution is to somehow tie Webmaster Tools data (it is downloadable to CSV) into some kind of reporting and analytics dashboard, which wouldn’t be as useful as Google Analytics but better than nothing (is anybody on this yet?). The third solution is to wait and see what Google decides to offer additionally through Webmaster Tools, which in my mind is not a dependable solution. Gautier Lemesle We are still able to report on organic traffic as a whole and differentiate the traffic coming from Google from other search engines. When we report on the SEO work we’re doing, we’ll look at other user touch points. For example, instead of looking at the search query, we’ll study the landing page where organic traffic is growing. It’ll be a good indicator of the work we are doing on those specific landing pages. In terms of keywords, there are a couple of options. As mentioned, we can look at Google Webmaster Tools data. Currently it’s limited to the top search queries over the last 90 days, but they plan to provide a year’s worth of data in future). We can also use Google Trends to compare search terms and get a better a sense of interest over time. To discover keyword rankings we’ve found Advanced Web Rankings helpful. Finally, we can look at Bing/Yahoo data and try to create proxies that we can later use to determine Google search traffic. More options and/or a blend of options are still in the works for most of online marketers. Just as Klout emerged in the Social Media sphere to help make social more measurable, it may come down to blending several tools and methodologies to help us better assess the performance of our offsite SEO efforts. Other Tips You can also try this “Not Provided” Kit – we came across. A set of simple add-ons for Google Analytics (put together by @danbarker) “can help you understand what’s happening now that data is absent. It won’t fix the problem, but it may bring other insight around ‘not provided’ visits.” This post was originally written by Mary Montserrat-Howlett. 0 9 min read

10 Sentiment Analysis Tools to Track Social Marketing Success

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is the analysis of the feelings (i.e. attitudes, emotions and opinions) behind the words using natural language processing tools. It’s looking beyond the number of Likes, Shares or Comments you get on an ad campaign, product release, blog post, and video to understand how people are responding to it. Was the review positive? Negative? Sarcastic? Ideologically biased? As marketers, being able to capture the complexity of emotional responses helps us determine if our social and content marketing initiatives are driving the actions that we planned for, while also giving us hard cues for adapting our strategy, in the event that our touch points are not resonating with our customers. How to Measure Sentiment: “Measure What Matters” Comments, shares, Likes, re-tweets, inbound links and onsite engagement are invaluable metrics that show us how people found us and if they are engaging (or not!) with our content. But they are also what Katie Delahaye Paine, author of Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships, labels as “quantity” or “vanity metrics.” She says that if we look at numbers only, it can give us a false sense of hope that our content is generating leads for our brand or business. With sentiment analysis, we dig deeper and look at “quality metrics”. Quality metrics include opinions, feelings, satisfaction ratings, the quality of shares, comments, re-tweets, replies, ratings or conversations, as well as the quality of engagement over time. To give you an idea of what a typical sentiment analysis chart might look like, here is a good example I found: Source: Retooling Social Media Metrics To Provide Real, Actionable Insights Using a blend of monitoring tools (like Google Analytics, Radian6, and some free ones) you can start actively listening to your audience and identify which messages and initiatives are driving the right actions and desired outcomes. Here’s a shortlist of 10 practical tools you can use to track user sentiment: Meltwater: Assess the tone of the commentary as a proxy for brand reputation and uncover new insights that help you understand your target audience. Google Alerts: A simple and very useful way to monitor your search queries. I use it to track “content marketing” and get regular email updates on the latest relevant Google results. This is a good starting point for tracking influencers, trends and competitors. People Browser: Find all the mentions of your brand, industry and competitors and analyze sentiment. This tool allows you to compare the volume of mentions before, during and after your marketing campaigns. Google Analytics: A powerful tool for discovering which channels influenced your subscribers and buyers. Create custom reports, annotations to keep uninterrupted records of your marketing and web design actions, as well as advanced segments to breakdown visitor data and gain valuable insights on their online experiences. Hootsuite: A great freemium tool that allows you to manage and measure your social networks. The premium subscription provides enhanced analytics at a very reasonable 5.99USD per month. Tweetstats: This is a fun, free tool that allows you to graph your Twitter stats. Simply enter your Twitter handle and “let the magic happen.” Facebook Insights: If you have more than 30 Likes on your Facebook Page you can start measuring its performance with Insights. See total page Likes, number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption and more! Pagelever: This is another tool for measuring Facebook activity. Pagelever gives you the ability to precisely measure each stage of how content is consumed and shared on the Facebook platform. Social Mention: The social media equivalent to Google Alerts, this is a useful tool that allows you to track mentions for identified keywords in video, blogs, microblogs, events, bookmarks, comments, news, Q&A, hash tags and even audio media. It also indicates if mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. Marketing Grader: Hubspot’s Marketing Grader is a tool for grading your entire marketing funnel. It uses over 35 metrics to calculate your grade by looking at if you are regularly blog posting, Tweeting, updating on Facebook, converting visitors into leads, and more. It’s a full funnel way to help you measure your inbound marketing initiatives. Dedicating time and budget to regular online listening and monitoring will help you gather, analyze, and manage conversations about your brand in order to make educated inferences on the levels of engagement your content marketing efforts are generating. This post was originally written by Mary Montserrat-Howlett. 0 4 min read

Improving CTR in Google Adwords with Review Extensions

After quite a long beta period, Google has finally released review extensions to all Adwords accounts. For those who are not to familiar with this new extension, it will give advertisers the opportunity to highlight a specific third party review of their business directly below the ad itself. Contrary to having your reviews only on review sites this extension will enable your business to stand out from your Adwords competition. It will look something like this: As you can see, many companies have already activated these review extensions and have recorded excellent results once these extensions have been added. Statistically speaking, we have noticed an average CTR increase of 10% across many different industries. Of course, each industry has its own particularities, however every client has experienced an increase in CTR. The interesting aspect of this extension is that you can either submit an exact quote with the Source URL as your review, or you can simply paraphrase the review. Yes that’s right, Google will allow you to paraphrase your review. The major guidelines for these extensions are that the reviewer needs to approve the ad extension & the review needs to clearly be stated on the landing page. It is currently only offered in english, and will be offered in french shortly. A great strategy to use for this extension is to ask the website that hosts your reviews to create a separate landing page that only contains reviews for your business. In addition to this, brand blocking the landing page is extremely important, as you would not want a competitor’s display ad displaying directly next to your review! As far as how Google will verify these reviews, the specifics are still unclear. The actual Google advertising policy team will undoubtedly oversee the approval process, as most reviews would be too difficult for an automated system to process. (Especially for the paraphrasing submissions) Therefore, allow for some delays. Even though this extension works very well for a large corporation, we believe that this extension will be most useful for small to medium sized businesses that have a lot of PPC competition. An example of an industry that will surely benefit the most from this extension would be the hospitality industry. With so many competitors this extension not only adds to your PPC real estate but it also provides increased consumer confidence. How to setup Review Extensions The way to set up your new Review Extensions is relatively straightforward. It is very similar to any other extension set-up. Using the Ad Extensions tab under “View” select Review Extensions and then simply follow the instructions. The character limit on Review Extensions is 67, and that includes the name of the publication. Google recommends setting one Review Extension at the campaign level for greater flexibility and exposure. You can submit more than one review, but only the first one to be approved will run. Also, campaign level extensions are given a higher priority than ad group level extensions, so they are reviewed more quickly. In conclusion, we strongly suggest adding this extension to your PPC accounts. Adding this extension to your campaigns will help improve your overall PPC performance and will allow your account to differentiate itself from your competition. Let us know about your experiences with this new extension. This can be ways you’ve learned from your mistakes, or how ways you’ve found success – either way, feel free to share your experiences it in the comments section below. This article was originally written by Matthew Gangnier. 0 3 min read

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