The world of Social Media is probably responsible for more innovation in digital marketing over the past 5 to 10 years than nearly any other discipline. From ephemeral story based content to live video to all the things being done with data for more personalized marketing, staying in top of what’s real vs. the hype in marketing is increasingly difficult.

Top help marketers find great sources of marketing advice, we’ve curated the BIGLIST of marketing blogs and more recently a marketing blogs from martech companies. Adding to that curation effort and our own solid social media marketing advice is today’s list of social media marketing blogs.

This list focuses in on blogs covering all aspects of social media marketing including the usual suspects of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn as well as newer platforms like TikTok. From trends to strategies to tactics to analytics, this group of blogs about social media and marketing is a great mix of big names, publications, platforms and a few names that are hopefully new to you.

1. Adweek Social Pro Daily @adweek
Platform news, industry trends and plenty of brand examples.
Our favorite post: Social Networks Finally Bypassed Print Newspapers as a Primary Source of News

2. Andrea Vahl Blog @AndreaVahl
Everything you wanted to know about Facebook advertising plus a glimpse of « Grandma Mary ».
Our favorite post: Facebook Video Ads – What’s Working Now

3. Awario Blog @AwarioApp
Social media monitoring, selling, research and influencer marketing advice.
Our favorite post: 10 of the best social media marketing tools for 2019

4. Brian Solis @briansolis
One of the true pioneering thought leaders on social media that continues to offer strategic insights – including how to temper social media use for a more creative, productive and happy life ala Lifescale.
Our favorite post: The Past, Present And Future Of Social Media – How We Fell To The Dark Side And Why The Force Is With Us

5. Brand24 Blog @brand24
Social listening, marketing and industry news plus best practices on everything from hashtags to social influencers.
Our favorite post: A Complete Guide to Social Media Analysis

6. CinchShare Blog @CinchShare
Social Media Marketing tips for small business including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and blogging advice.
Our favorite post: Grow your team on Facebook by doing these 3 things

7. Digimind Blog @digimindci
Social insight driven marketing advice, competitive social intelligence tips and soup to nuts social media campaign direction for agencies.
Our favorite post: Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy in 13 Steps with Social Media Intelligence

8. DreamGrow Blog @dreamgrow
Social Media Marketing advice plus curated lists of resources.
Our favorite post: How To Integrate Social Media With eCommerce in 2019

9. Facebook Business Blog @facebook
Official blog from Facebook on advertising news, best practices and thought leadership.
Our favorite post: Turn Interested Shoppers Into Buyers with a Guided Shopping Experience in Messenger

10. Falcon Insights Hub @falconio
Social Media Marketing strategy, tactics and ROI measurement plus platform specific best practices.
Our favorite post: 5 Social Media Trends to Watch in 2019

11. Gary Vaynerchuk Blog @garyvee
The content machine that is Garyvee covers social media marketing thought leadership, trends, news and practical advice for specific social networks.
Our favorite post: 5 LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for 2019

12. Gleam Blog @gleamapp
A lot of how to social media marketing content, tips on using Gleam apps and advice on social contests, giveaways, coupons and product hunts.
Our favorite post: Stop Buying Likes: 25+ Tips to Drive Real Engagement on Facebook

13. Grow @markwschaefer
Mark Schaefer’s blog on the intersection of marketing, technology and humanity featuring provocative insights on industry trends, featured examples of social media and marketing in action and practical advice.
Our favorite post: What Is Your Social Media Marketing Purpose? (If You Don’t Know, This Will Help)

14. Hopper HQ Blog @hopper_hq
All things Instagram marketing ranging from trends to tips and a bit of advice on working with social influencers too.
Our favorite post: How to Measure B2B Social Media Marketing Success

15. Hot in Social Media @hotinsm
Social platform news and tips covering the gamut of social media marketing topics plus curated advice from industry experts.
Our favorite post: How to Use TikTok Like a PRO: Actionable Tips for Marketers

16. Iconosquare Blog @iconosquare
Focused information on marketing with Facebook and Instagram.
Our favorite post: Instagram Marketing Strategy: Your A-Z Guide

17. Instagram Business Blog @instagram
Official blog from Instagram sharing platform updates, features advertising advice.
Our favorite post: Creative Secrets of Instagram Stories

18. Jeff Bullas Blog @jeffbullas
Social Media Marketing best practices from Jeff and guest contributors.
Our favorite post: 9 Insider Tips For Increasing Your LinkedIn Leads

19. Jon Loomer Blog @jonloomer
This blog is Facebook marketing central – everything you ever wanted to know.
Our favorite post: How to Edit a Facebook Ad and Retain Social Proof

20. Karen’s PR & Social Media Blog @kfreberg
Dr. Karen Freberg’s take on social media marketing, PR and crisis communications.
Our favorite post: Super Bowl 2019: Trends & Takeaways from a Social Media Professor

21. Katie Lance Blog @katielance
Great example of a personal brand showcasing social media marketing advice with a slant towards the real estate audience.
Our favorite post: How to Attract Your Dream Client Through Social Media and Storytelling

22. Keyhole Blog @keyholeco
Recent attention to a variety of social media marketing tools as well as practical advice for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and hashtag marketing.
Our favorite post: Hashtags: A Beginner’s Guide and How to Use them Effectively – Keyhole

23. Later Blog @latermedia
Instagram Marketing strategy, tips, tools, resources and guides.
Our favorite post: Real or Fake: 5 Instagram Algorithm Rumors Explained

24. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog @linkedinmktg
Official blog from Linkedin offering marketing thought leadership, industry trends, news and practical advice on how to make the most of marketing and advertising on LinkedIn. (client)
Our favorite post: 10 Content Ideas for your LinkedIn Page

25. Louise Myers Visual Social Media Blog @Louise_Myers
Practice visual social media marketing tips for Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest plus advice on blogging.
Our favorite post: How to Boost Your Social Media Strategy for 2019

26. Madalyn Sklar Blog @MadalynSklar
Literally everything you would ever want to know about building and engaging a community on Twitter with plenty of attention towards tools.
Our favorite post: How to Grow Your Twitter Community: 7 Essential Tips

27. Meltwater Blog: Social Media @MeltwaterSocial
Social Media thought leadership, practical advice and featured brand social media examples.
Our favorite post: Social Sidekick: Your Monthly Guide to Social Holidays, Themes, and Noteworthy Events

28. NetBase Blog @NetBase
Advice on social media listening, analytics and practical advice plus applications for social intelligence.
Our favorite post: Social Media Monitoring vs Social Listening – Yes, There’s a Difference!

29. Planoly Blog @planoly
Stay on top of Instagram and IG Marketing with practical tips and examples.
Our favorite post: How to Stay Motivated with Your Blog and Instagram

30. Problogger @problogger
Dedicated to the art and science of blogging and no one tells that story better than Darren Rowse.
Our favorite post: How to Start a Blog When You’re Not an Expert: 11 Ways to Make it Work

31. Snapchat for Business @snapchat
Official blog from Snapchat featuring the latest launches, announcements, and insights.
Our favorite post: CPG on Snapchat: Why Gen Z and millennials make all the difference

32. Socialnomics @equalman
Erik Qualman’s long running thought leadership blog on social media and marketing.
Our favorite post: 22 Social Media Tips From The Pros To Skyrocket Your 2019 ROI

33. Social Insider Blog @socialinsiderio
A cornucopia of how to articles on social media marketing plus a fun series of interviews with industry experts called Socialinsider Insta’rviews.
Our favorite post: The Most Impactful Social Media Trend That Businesses Should Integrate It In 2019

34. Social Media Examiner @SMExaminer
Probably the most popular blog about social media marketing from Mike Stelzner and team that also run the Social Media Marketing World conference.
Our favorite post: 10 Metrics to Track When Analyzing Your Social Media Marketing

35. Social Media Explorer @smxplorer
An original social media marketing blog covering the gamut of social media topics including tips, tools, news, and case studies.
Our favorite post: Up And Coming Social Media Trends Driven By Millennials And Generation Z

36. Social Media Lab @agorapulse
A special project from the folks at Agorapulse highlighting their investment of over $15k per month to help “Crack the Code” of social media and then report those results to readers.
Our favorite post: LinkedIn Post Length: Does Data Support the Idea that Longer is Better?

37. Social Media Today @socialmedia2day
A community blog offering a comprehensive view of social media marketing including updates to social platforms, trends, strategy and tactics.
Our favorite post: Social Media Calls to Action: 19 Words & Phrases to Generate More Engagement

38. Social Media Week News & Insights @socialmediaweek
Regular updates on the famous Social Media Week events in New York and Los Angeles plus coverage of social media technologies and marketing tactics.
Our favorite post: Boost Your Instagram Stories Game for 2019 With These 10 Practices

39. Social Report Blog @thesocialreport
A collection of practical posts about marketing on all of the major social networks plus trends and examples.
Our favorite post: 10 Top Social Media Scheduling Tools to Save Time in 2019

40. Social Sorted @SociallySorted
Donna Mortiz offers awesome monthly list posts of social media marketing ideas and in between shares visual and video marketing advice for social media channels.
Our favorite post: 60+ April Social Media Ideas – Videos, GIFs and more!

41. Spiderworking @Spiderworking
Amanda Webb covers social platform updates, examples and practical advice about small business social and content marketing.
Our favorite post: Relationship Marketing With Jessika Phillips, Pots Of Gold And LinkedIn Networking

42. Sue B Zimmerman @SueBZimmerman
The guru of Instagram marketing.
Our favorite post: How To Grow Instagram Followers in 2019

43. The Social Media Hat @SocialMediaHats
Mike Allton’s blog with practical advice about blogging, social media, SEO and email marketing.
Our favorite post: How to Create 26 Pieces Of Content From A Facebook Live

44. Talkwalker Blog @Talkwalker
Social Media Marketing and analytics blog with an emphasis on social monitoring and data applications.
Our favorite post: Social media trends that will impact 2019

45. Twitter Marketing Blog @Twitter
Official blog from Twitter about product news, marketing and advertising best practices and research.
Our favorite post: 10 ways marketing changed with Twitter

46. Unmetric Blog @unmetric
Social Media Marketing strategy, industry trends, and how to articles focused on brands.
Our favorite post: Brands vie for the throne in the game of social media marketing

One trend I’ve noticed is that many individuals that have really made a name for themselves as trusted voices in the social media space during the formative years of the industry simply are not blogging as much or have diversified into other areas of marketing. At the same time, a steady drumbeat of social media marketing advice can be found amongst a smaller number of highly focused industry blogs and companies serving the social media marketing industry.

Speaking of the social media marketing industry, you may have noticed some well known social media marketing technology brands are not on the above list. That’s because we’ve already included them in the martech list, but they certainly belong in this collection, so here they are:

• • Agora Pulse Blog – @agorapulse
  • Brandwatch Blog – @Brandwatch
  • Buffer Blog – @buffer
  • Buzzsumo Blog – @BuzzSumo
  • CoSchedule Blog – @CoScheduleBlog
  • Hootsuite Blog – @hootsuite
  • Oktopost Blog – @Oktopost
  • Sharethis Blog – @ShareThis
  • Socialbakers Blog – @socialbakers
  • Sprinklr Blog – @Sprinklr
  • Sprout Social Blog – @SproutSocial

If you’re more interested in following specific people in the world of social media marketing, then be sure to check out this list of social media marketing influencers for 2019.

Which social media marketing blogs would you add?

The post BIGLIST of Top Social Media Marketing Blogs for 2019 and Beyond appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Google just turned 19, WOW…It was 19 years ago that the search engine was started in a garage, at that time it was one of the last entrants in the search space with Alta Vista, Yahoo and AOL controlling the domain.

Today 19 years later they not only dominate the web but also play a large part in the digital ecosystem. The search engine now has more than 4.5 billion people across 160 countries.

Over the years Google has created awesome doodles or interactive elements to engage users. My favorite being the tribute to Freddy Mercury and John Lennon. This year Google is celebrating its birthday with a magical Doodle, the surprise spinner lets you play 19 fun games that show up across the screen making you spend time in spinning the wheel.

While there are 19 interactive games that you can choose to play, however there is a catch here – You’ll end up spending a lot of time playing them but if you’re thrilled about online games than this doodle is meant for you.

I’ve spun the spinner a few times and realized that the more you spin the wheel the more addicted you get to playing the games. I also managed to play my favorite game – Pac Man on the doodle. Some of the other games that you can play are – Hallowe’en spells, Cricket, Snake game and also take the Earth Quiz.

Spin the wheel and let me know your favourite game, I wonder if the doodle spin the game idea was taken from the success of the fidget spinners? What do you think ?

More Original Eazl Content on the Blog: www.eazlblog.com ❃ Sometimes it seems like the world is telling us that personal consumption and social status is all …

1. Tools I use to communicate with customers: —Drift or any usage based marketing automation. —Email, duh —Uber Conference —Useloom.com —Google …

Quality Score is a key metric that should be used to indicate the potential for keyword, ad group, and campaign success in paid search.

On its face, Quality Score is simple: it measures the relevancy and cohesiveness of three components required for every PPC campaign:

• The keywords within an ad group
• The ad copy searchers see when an ad is triggered
• The landing page searchers visit after clicking your ad

The more relevant and cohesive those three components, the higher your Quality Scores will be. Simple enough, but let’s dig in a little deeper.

Why is Quality Score So Important?

Before diving into how to maximize your QS, it’s important to understand why improving Quality Score is important.

Quality Score matters because the QS of a given keyword directly impacts Ad Rank in the auction.

The higher your Quality Score, the better your Ad Rank has the potential to be. As Ad Rank improves, the chances of your ad earning a click grows and the cost you’ll pay per click can decrease.

The bottom line: Having a high QS sets you up with the best chance to pay as little as possible for the ad position you earn and the clicks you drive.

By saving money there, advertisers can see improvements in cost per conversion figures and can drive more traffic to their targeted pages if they are constricted to stay within a set spending budget.

How to Maximize Quality Score

There are three primary metrics which guide the QS assigned to a given keyword.

Advertisers can see the status of these factors when analyzing Quality Score in Google Ads as each will have a status of “Below Average”, “Average”, or “Above Average.”

Here’s a snapshot of what advertisers can quickly view in the Google Ads interface for these metrics:

Expected Clickthrough Rate

Google defines Expected CTR as “A keyword status that measures how likely it is that your ads will get clicked when shown for that keyword, irrespective of your ad’s position, extensions, and other ad formats that may affect the prominence and visibility of your ads.”

To measure Expected CTR, Google looks at your keyword’s CTR history along with those of your competitors to predicte how often it will be clicked.

To maximize Expected CTR, write your ad copy for high relevance to your keyword list. The keyword list carried within your ad group should tightly-align with the copy of your ad. The closer they align, the more relevant that connection will be and the higher your actual and expected CTR should be.

Building high relevance between your keyword list and corresponding ad copy is vital to driving Expected CTR.

Additionally, because a high ad position towards the top of a SERP can increase your chances of a user clicking through, try increasing your keyword bids to raise your average position. Over time, a higher ad position should help your historical CTR performance. But be careful doing this- if your ads continue with low CTRs at a higher ad position, you risk a decrease in QS.

Ad Relevance

Ad relevance “measures how closely related your keyword is to your ads.”

Google refers to your ad copy and landing page content to predict how relevant your ad will be to a user who triggers your ad with a given search query.

To maximize ad relevance, ensure your ad copy directly relates to the keyword list it corresponds within a given ad group. Also, ensure your ad groups contain small, tightly-themed groups of keywords so your ads can be tailored to them closely. Lastly, ensure your landing page contains content as equally relevant to these keywords and the ad copy you use.

Landing Page Experience

Landing page experience is “a measure that Google Ads uses to estimate how relevant and useful your website’s landing page will be to people who click your ad.”

To measure landing page experience, Google refers to your landing page content as well as other metrics like bounce rate and page speed to predict how good of an experience a user will have once they click through your ad.

Optimize your landing page’s content to be both relevant and authoritative to maximize your landing page experience. Additionally, think about landing page performance in regards to user experience, conversion rate optimization, and load time to drive engagement.

Does It Actually Work?

I’m sure for many of you, this all makes sense in theory. But do changes in Quality Score actually make a noticeable impact on the campaigns we optimize on a daily basis?

Short answer: Yes.

Those of us in this space have always been told Quality Score is important, but it’s hard to see how QS changes actually impact our numbers over time. Hat tip to Google for making it so difficult to analyze historical Quality Score changes. But, if you isolate some keywords which have shown a change in Quality Score and segment your data by day, you can see a very real impact.

Here’s an example from an account we manage at Portent. In this instance, a keyword saw its Quality Score increase from 7 to 8 and then back down to 7 again after a few days. To see the impact of this change, we measured against the keyword’s Avg. CPC and Lost Impression Share due to Ad Rank over the same time period of time:

*Note: we used a 7-day rolling average of both of these metrics to make the data easily digestible.

This graph shows that during a time period when we decreased bids to compensate for a lower budget, our Lost Impression Share due to Ad Rank— what Quality Score directly impacts— increases at the same steady rate as the Quality Score stays static at 7.

When the Quality Score of the keyword increases to 8, our Lost Impression Share due to Ad Rank stabilizes as bids continue to decrease a bit and stay relatively low. Once bids begin to increase again, our Lost Impression Share due to Ad Rank decreases every so slightly.

After Quality Score changes back to 7, the Lost Impression Share due to Ad Rank stabilizes again and begins to increase even as bids continue to rise.

Other Factors Out of Your Control

There are other factors Google takes into account when assigning Quality Score which you have no control over as an advertiser. Competition for specific keywords in a given industry is the most prominent example. If you’re in an over-saturated search space with tons of competitors, you might never see a quality score over 5 for certain keywords even after extensive optimization.

How do you know if you’re in an over-saturated vertical? Try searching from one of your high-volume keywords and see what type of ad results show up. If you notice there are consistently 4+ ads on the SERP each time you search, you can bet competition is high.

You can also take a look at the auction insights report in Google Ads for any given keyword(s). If you see a list of 8, 10, or more competitors, that too is a sign you’re in a highly competitive market.

Don’t stress about what you can’t control. Focus on the three critical factors you can influence:

• Expected CTR
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Experience

Quality Score has a real impact on our paid search performance and how much we pay as advertisers for a given Ad Rank in an auction. While Quality Score should never be a key performance indicator that determines the overall success of your PPC strategy, you should pay attention to how these scores change over time and what impact that has on your performance.

The post Improve Your Quality Scores With These Simple Tips appeared first on Portent.

Redesigning your website presents a significant risk from an SEO standpoint if not managed appropriately.

What can be years of optimizations to your infrastructure, design, and content are going to be overwritten, and it’s hard to predict if the organic rankings you’ve earned are going to be swept away. `

If your redesign strategy includes taking SEO into account post-launch, you’ll probably end up in for a world of hurt.

Here’s a look at organic traffic from a brand that came to us after launching a new beautifully designed site, wondering what happened to their SEO traffic.

Don’t be that website.

If your brand heavily relies on organic search to drive traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics, the risks from a redesign are real, and the impact can be devastating.

But through careful consideration throughout the redesign process, you can account for potential pitfalls and mitigate your chances of a drop in organic search ranking and traffic post-launch.

Follow along as I outline how we approach this at Portent.

How to Approach SEO Strategy in your Next Redesign

For many websites, organic search is the channel that brings in the most traffic, and inherently, conversions- whether that be leads or transactions and revenue.

Adding to that, organic traffic is the acquisition channel most at-risk through a significant website redesign.

SEO isn’t a tactic to employ after the website launches to clean up loose ends. Approaching your redesign with SEO in mind from the very beginning of the project is vital to ensure your channel’s requirements are baked into the result.

The key to preserving organic rankings through a redesign is two-fold:

1. Marketers must focus on minimizing risk pre-launch

2. Marketers must have a response plan to threats post-launch

With that in mind, our approach to minimizing risk and building a response plan requires us to include an SEO-minded team member in the project from the very start, identify and address gaps in the marketing stack throughout the redesign process, and quantify the impact on organic KPIs post-launch.

This approach lines up with three stages of the project:

• The planning and design stage (before any code is written)
• The development stage (when the website is being built)
• The post-launch stage (after the dust settles)

Let’s explore each of these stages further.

Get SEO Involved Early

The best way to handle potential SEO issues in a redesign project is to prevent them from existing in the first place. SEO for a website redesign starts long before the first line of code is written.

Get your SEO team a seat at the table from the very first meeting.

Their role on the project is to find solutions to infrastructure and content issues that may crop up. Providing a list of SEO requirements and expecting a designer or developer to take them into consideration isn’t enough.

SEO must be hands-on throughout the process.

Don’t wait for infrastructure decisions to be made for you. You may end up with a funky hosting plan, three subdomains, and two of them running on Wix.

(We’ve seen it happen.)

As an SEO, here are some of the questions to consider when kicking off a redesign process:

• Is the new CMS or framework SEO-friendly?
• Will you need to prerender JavaScript?
• Does the new information architecture include your essential landing pages?
• How many URLs are going to change?

Find the Gaps

As your new website starts coming together, you should ask yourself the question, “is this website more or less optimized than before?”

To answer this, you need to conduct two SEO audits of the website’s infrastructure and content: pre-launch and post-launch.

The goal of the pre-launch audit is to find all of the big problems that you can’t afford to launch with. Auditing a website that isn’t finished yet may seem premature, but it’s a great exercise; it allows you to correct any show-stopping bugs you may find.

This audit is where your SEO team will do most of the work involved with a typical redesign:

• Redirecting old URLs to new URLs
• Migrating title and meta description tags
• Correcting broken links and unnecessary redirects
• Testing mobile rendering
• Ensuring canonicalization

The pre-launch audit should also communicate gaps between the two websites in a few key areas:

Site speed

Does the new platform have fewer site speed optimizations?

Content

Does the new content satisfy queries better than before? Are the same Featured Snippets targeted?

Site structure

Is site navigation more or less descriptive than before? Do your important pages still have smart internal links?

Conversion

Do you expect the conversion rate to be higher or lower?

Your post-launch audit should uncover any new bugs and make sure the website is being crawled and indexed correctly.

Some important factors to review post-launch are:

• Robots.txt (It’s incredibly common for websites to go live disallowing all crawling)
• Sitemap submission in Google and Bing search consoles
• The index coverage report in Google Search Console
• Checking redirect implementation

Doing two thorough audits goes a long way toward minimizing risk.

Any major threat to your rankings will be identified and hopefully addressed before launch, and everything else will be a known quantity. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of which way your site’s performance will go.

Measure the Impact

Before you launch your new site, make sure your web analytics and rank tracking are recording reliable baseline data for your KPIs.

Also, confirm the new website has your web analytics implemented correctly. You don’t want to launch with all of your conversion goals broken.

I find these metrics and trends the most useful when gauging post-launch performance:

Organic users by landing page

If you didn’t change your URL structure, this report will be incredibly helpful in narrowing down performance gaps.

Organic users by website section

This report will help you find problems with the design or internal linking structure for sections that aren’t doing well.

Non-brand keyword rankings

For each important landing page, add the non-brand keywords contributing the most traffic to a rank tracker. If any of these rankings take a dive after launch, you’ll know which topics you need to prioritize.

Conversion rate by landing page

If your sales copy or CTA links had a drastic change in the new design, this report would let you know which pages will need their offers reconsidered.

Bounce rate and exit rate by website section

Increases in either after the launch might indicate usability problems with the new design for that section.

Common SEO Pitfalls

There are SEO problems so common to redesigns that I’ve seen one in nearly every launch I’ve cleaned up.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making these mistakes:

Unnecessarily changing the URL structure

The best way to map old URLs to new URLs is to not change them at all. Plus, you won’t break year-over-year reports in Google Analytics. Unless you have a good reason, don’t change your URLs in a redesign.

Not redirecting URLs with backlinks

If you have to change your URLs for a new website, make sure you aren’t throwing your backlinks away. Redirect your old URLs to keep the link authority flowing into your site.

Not checking robots.txt on launch day

If your traffic flatlines after launching the new site, this is probably why. Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly.

Using uncompressed images

Please don’t make your users download 4 MB of images on every page. Use the right image format and level of compression to keep your images crisp and as small as necessary.

Introducing unnecessary subdomains

Keep your content in one place. Adding a subdomain to your site will split link authority and guarantee a migration project in the future. Always base a new website on a single platform that can do everything you need.

Time to Go Live

Eventually, it’s time to go live with your redesign.

It can be a nervewracking time for every party involved, but at the end of the day, it’s going to happen.

And while redesigning your website can have profound effects (both positive and negative) on site performance, there are ways to mitigate your risk through the process you take.

Be sure to:

• Get SEO involved from the start
• Find the gaps
• Measure the impact

Sticking to this strategy can set yourself up to limit website problems that could devastate your organic traffic.

The post Use This SEO Strategy for Your Next Website Redesign appeared first on Portent.

To measure content marketing effectiveness and evaluate the ROI of your content campaigns, you should use simple, relevant, and useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The ideal KPIs are content metrics that can measure performance over time and across all levels of the conversion funnel.

This post identifies sixteen of Portent’s favorite content KPIs, sorts the content metrics by the goals they’re best at measuring, and tells you how to start tracking your content marketing efforts.

How to Measure Content Performance: Establishing and Setting KPIs

A good KPI is quantitative, relevant, and easy to calculate.

To establish relevant KPIs, we recommend following Aleksey Savkin’s rule of thumb.

Savkin recommends:

“If you are not sure if you are dealing with a KPI or a simple metric, do a simple test: imagine that you can double the value of this indicator. If you expect the performance of the business to be increased significantly, then it’s a good KPI for your business context. If not, then it is a simple metric.”

If you’re trying to set KPIs for your content, find the numbers where you really want to move the needle and use those values as metrics that matter most.

What the Conversion Funnel Means for Content and KPIs

While establishing these metrics, it’s important to know where and when to use them. Visitors to your website are at different stages in their customer journey, and your content should speak to them in different ways depending on where they are on this journey.

When you’re planning your KPIs, keep the conversion funnel top of mind; you should be able to measure content performance during every step of the conversion funnel.

A Chart of Portent’s Favorite Content KPIs

It’s tricky to pair content metrics with a user’s specific path in the conversion funnel. To help you get started, here’s an illustration showing how Portent breaks down content KPIs according to the different stages of the customer journey and their overlap.

In our content marketing strategies, users are funneled through journeys that result in three goals:

• Conversion
• Reputation
• Engagement

Each goal within these journeys has a few ideal KPIs. Some KPIs can be used to measure success across more than one goal.

Tracking your content marketing campaign performance is a tactical move that gives you ammunition to speak to stakeholders about the quantifiable value you’re creating. It also helps you learn to be a more user-focused, goal-oriented marketer.

If you want to learn more about measuring the long, messy game of content marketing, we’ve included descriptions of all the content KPIs and how they interact with each other.

Content Metrics: Conversion KPIs

Leads

If you’re writing content that’s meant to generate leads, you should track how many leads you’re generating.

For example, if you’re debuting a new gated resource, you should measure how many new leads that resource brings in. Afterward, compare that number to the leads generated by other gated resources.

This analysis will answer some critical strategy questions:

• What are your customers looking for?
• Are your customers willing to give up their contact information to get your content?
• What kind of content generates the most qualified leads?

Transactions & Revenue

For businesses focused on driving e-commerce revenue and transactions through their website, Google Analytics e-commerce tracking is highly recommended. Within those reports, add the secondary dimension of “landing page” to see how many people purchased after touching a piece of content you produced. This metric allows you to discover what copy has the highest transaction or revenue level.

If you use revenue as a KPI, your findings will vary according to how much a customer spends. If you’re just curious about how many people touched your content eventually converted, and you don’t care how much they wound up spending, use “transactions” instead of “revenue” as the guiding metric.

Goal Completions

If you don’t have enough transactions or revenue to see how those figures interact with your content, you can set goals inside Google Analytics that allow you to track conversions without a dollar value. You can see what URLs accomplished which goals you’ve set. A non-monetary goal might be filling out a form, making a phone call, or joining an email list.

Below is an example of what this looks like.

Content Metrics: Reputation KPIs

Influencer Mentions

Did key industry influencers mention your content? Even if they didn’t link back to you, mentions help your reputation. You can measure mentions with a tool like Sparktoro, or by creating a Google Alert for mentions of your brand or a particular content campaign. It’s also beneficial to track whether those mentions are positive or negative.

Keyword Ranking

If you build a content campaign around a targeted keyword, make sure you’re tracking your success. There are a lot of tools on the market for tracking your keyword rankings, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush. For most of our SEO and content campaigns, Portent uses STAT, a SERP-tracking tool out of Vancouver, Canada.

Here’s an example of what SERP position tracking looks like in STAT. We chose Portent’s ranking for the term, “choosing content KPIs.”

When you show up high in the SERPs, you’re building your reputation both with Google, its crawlers, and potential site visitors who are browsing search results. Even if they don’t click on your page, they’ll still see it in their query results, which improves awareness.

Share of Voice

Another useful metric that STAT offers is Share of Voice (SoV). This KPI measures how visible a keyword set is on Google.

STAT says the concept follows two principles:

Not all rankings are equal, and higher ranks give you more Share of Voice.

Not all keywords are equal, and earning a keyword with higher search volume gives you more Share of Voice.

You can use SoV to determine how your content is affecting brand exposure on SERPs. It’s a great KPI to monitor if you’re launching a brand-awareness campaign or implementing a content hub project.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a complicated topic that’s usually relegated to social media, but major brands can leverage this AI technology to track the way people are talking about their content campaigns, too. Sentiment analysis measures reputation from your social media mentions. If you just launched a new educational center, for example, this metric is a useful way to keep your ear to the ground for relevant Twitter chatter.

For a deep and technical dive into sentiment analysis, we recommend this story on Yelp from Stack Overflow’s David Robinson. For something higher-level, Brandwatch is one of the oldest names in the business and offers a clear, accessible explanation.

Content Metrics: Engagement KPIs

Comments

Are people commenting on your blog post with valuable insights, questions, or feedback? If you write a blog post that gets through to people, they’ll often show it in the comments. Tracking this engagement KPI will help you learn what topics resonate with users and spark conversations.

For example, check out these comments on Ian Lurie’s blog post, The Digital Marketing Checklist: 48 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t.

People read it, considered its points, and then responded thoughtfully:

As with any robust comments section, it’s important to meaningfully engage with users, too. This interaction helps build brand loyalty and further improves the value of comments as a KPI.

Scroll Depth

If you want an easy, fast way to tell whether or not people are reading your content, look at the scroll depth of the page.

Most heat mapping programs, such as Hotjar, will provide you with scroll depth tracking. After you’ve set up tracking on the page through Google Tag Manager and the heat mapping platform, take a look at your scroll depth maps. You can see where your readers are dropping off, and how fast. A rapid drop might mean your content needs to be reworked.

Time on Page

Time on page is a similar key performance indicator to scroll depth in that it shows you how long people typically spend reading your content. Instead of being measured in pixels, however, this KPI is measured in seconds.

If you’re creating a new content strategy for your blog, your goal might be to increase the average time on page for new blog posts. Generally, the longer someone spends on your page, the more they’re engaging with your content, which means you’ve successfully earned their attention.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that time spent is related to the content length. Don’t compare the content of different types and lengths for time on page. A 2,000-word guide will probably have a much longer time on page than a 300-word blog post, but 50 percent of readers might make it all the way through that blog post versus only 10 percent who read your whole guide.

Pages Per Session

You can swap out this KPI with bounce rate if you prefer — they both tell you if readers are leaving your site after viewing your content. But bounce rate only tells you the ratio of visitors who leave versus those who keep digging deeper; the average pages per session will tell you how many pages they visit.

What’s a good rate for average pages per session? This depends entirely on your business. Generally, a site that serves to generate leads will have fewer pages per session than an e-commerce site, where users often spend time browsing product pages. If your e-commerce site doesn’t see an average rate of pages per session of three or four, you need to retool your strategy. In comparison, if a blog post on the Portent site has a rate of pages per session more than two, it’s excelling at this KPI.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation KPIs

Return Customers

Returning customers are the intersection of reputation and conversion. They know your brand, they like it, and they want more.

It’s hard to measure the impact of content on return customers, but you can use Google Analytics to set tracking codes from the “thank you” page or log-in screen.

From here, you can see what kinds of content this group interacts with. Here are a few questions to consider when evaluating return customers:

• Do your returning customers visit your blog?
• Do they read your long form content?

If not, why not?

If so, which ones are popular?

Content Metrics: Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Likes & Shares

Social media is one of the best barometers for gauging the success of your content. The more likes and shares, the better the content is performing in terms of engagement, which affects your reputation.

Social media is sensitive to many factors. If you want to measure the impact of your content based on the content’s virtues alone, promote different content pieces with the same amount of money to lookalike audiences at the same time of day. If a piece does well, throw the rest of your promotional budget behind it. And then create more content like the winning article.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most crucial KPIs for content — for many writers, they are the carrot on the other end of the stick. They are also a valuable barometer for assessing who respects or enjoys your content to the point they’re willing to recommend it to others.

As SEOs often say, every link is like a vote. When you receive unsolicited backlinks from authoritative sites, your readers are engaged, and your reputation is growing in the eyes of both readers and Google’s ranking algorithm.

Content Metrics: Engagement & Conversion KPIs

Open and Click-Through Rates

These are the KPIs for measuring conversions and engagement with email marketing campaigns. Your site’s content extends to all owned channels, and that means email, too. If you aren’t setting KPIs for your email marketing campaigns, you’re squandering one of your few opportunities to speak right into a customer’s ear.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Page Views

Without visitors, you’re not going to engage, convert, or build any kind of online reputation. The more people who view your site, the more people are engaging with your brand, and the more your reputation spreads. And the wider your reach, the more likely you’ll generate conversions.

Page views are the easiest way to measure the success of content. Unsurprisingly, they’re also the most popular. And some might even say the laziest.

Unless you’re combining page views with some other metric, you’re going to be missing a big part of the picture. What sets apart great marketers is their ability to layer a versatile yet surface-level metric like a page view with other KPIs to understand whether and how a piece of content connects with readers. A click-bait headline, for example, might generate a lot of page views, but if the content doesn’t address users’ needs, the time on page won’t be very long, the pages per session will be low, and you probably won’t get any backlinks. So use this KPI in conjunction with others.

Tying it All Together

So there you have it!

We’ve shared the 16 KPIs we look to monitor when evaluating the effectiveness of content.

As we have shown, evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts is like playing a game of chess — patience and careful planning go a long way toward success. There is not one right way to track the success of your content- it’s all about identifying your goals, setting KPIs, and then iterating to find what works well for you.

So go on! Test and try a handful of metrics to find the right mix of what works for you.

The post Your Guide to Choosing Content KPIs appeared first on Portent.