The IAB Tech Lab announced a change in terminology and an expansion of its U.S. privacy compliance agreement. What had previously been the U.S. National Section of its Global Privacy Platform (GPP) will now be known as the Multi-State Privacy Agreement (MSPA) U.S. National Section.

In addition, the MSPA has now been expanded to include 14 additional states as more states advance legislation addressing privacy issues. The news follows the IAB’s launch earlier this week of IAB Diligence Platform, a third-party privacy compliance solution available for digital advertisers, agencies, adtech companies and publishers.

Why we care. In the continuing and likely indefinite absence of national, federal privacy regulations, compliance with individual state regulations is complex and challenging. Future-proofing suggests that brands should comply with, or even exceed, the most stringent regulations out there.

The IAB Tech Lab’s work supports this need and it’s good to see that it remains a work in progress.

The Global Privacy Platform. The GPP, of which the MSPA forms just one section, is part of a portfolio of solutions designed to help channel privacy, consent and consumer choice signals from websites and apps to adtech providers.

The GPP currently supports the IAB’s European and Canadian Transparency and Consent Frameworks, as well as state-specific privacy regulations. The list of states covered had comprised California, Virginia, Utah, Colorado and Connecticut, a list now significantly expanded.

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The post IAB Tech Lab expands Multi-State Privacy Agreement appeared first on MarTech.

Google has updated its guidance on core algorithm updates, providing more detailed recommendations for impacted websites.

The revised document, published alongside the August core update rollout, includes several additions and removals.

New Sections Added

The most significant change includes two new sections: “Check if there’s a traffic drop in Search Console” and “Assessing a large drop in position.”

The “Check if there’s a traffic drop in Search Console” section provides step-by-step instructions for using Search Console to determine if a core update has affected a website.

The process involves:

Confirming the completion of the core update by checking the Search Status Dashboard
Waiting at least a week after the update finishes before analyzing Search Console data
Comparing search performance from before and after the update to identify ranking changes
Analyzing different search types (web, image, video, news) separately

The “Assessing a large drop in position” section offers guidance for websites that have experienced a significant ranking decline following a core update.

It recommends thoroughly evaluating the site’s content against Google’s quality guidelines, focusing on the pages most impacted by the update.

Other Additions

The updated document also includes a “Things to keep in mind when making changes” section, encouraging website owners to prioritize substantive, user-centric improvements rather than quick fixes.

It suggests that content deletion should be a last resort, indicating that removing content suggests it was created for search engines rather than users.

Another new section, “How long does it take to see an effect in Search results,” sets expectations for the time required to see ranking changes after making content improvements.

Google states that it may take several months for the full impact to be reflected, possibly requiring waiting until a future core update.

The document adds a closing paragraph noting that rankings can change even without website updates as new content emerges on the web.

Removed Content

Several sections from the previous version of the document have been removed or replaced in the update.

The paragraph stating that pages impacted by a core update “haven’t violated our spam policies” and comparing core updates to refreshing a movie list has been removed.

The “Assessing your own content” section has been replaced by the new “Assessing a large drop in position.”.

The “How long does it take to recover from a core update?” section no longer contains specific details about the timing and cadence of core updates and the factors influencing recovery time.

Shift In Tone & Focus

There’s a noticeable shift in tone and focus with this update.

While the previous guide explained the nature and purpose of core updates, the revised edition has more actionable guidance.

For example, the new sections related to Search Console provide clearer direction for identifying and addressing ranking drops.

Read:

In Summary

Here’s a list of added and removed items in Google’s updated Core Algorithm Update Guidance.

Added:

“Check if there’s a traffic drop in Search Console” section:

Step-by-step instructions for using Search Console to identify ranking changes.

“Assessing a large drop in position” section:

Guidance for websites experiencing significant ranking declines after a core update.

“Things to keep in mind when making changes” section:

Encourages substantive improvements over quick fixes.
Suggests content deletion as a last resort.

“How long does it take to see an effect in Search results” section:

Sets expectations for the time to see ranking changes after content improvements.
States that full impact may take several months and require a future core update.

Closing paragraph:

Notes that rankings can change even without website updates as new content emerges.

Removed:

A paragraph stating pages impacted by a core update “haven’t violated our spam policies.”
Comparing core updates to refreshing a list of best movies.
The “Assessing your own content” section from the previous version was replaced by the new “Assessing a large drop in position” section.
Specific details about the timing of core updates and factors influencing recovery time.

An archived version of Google’s previous core update guidance can be accessed via the Wayback Machine.

Featured Image: salarko/Shutterstock

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed
Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

Implementing AMP

Optimizing images

Compressing and minifying code

Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.

First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

Tech companies are spending a lot of money on ads about AI, despite tons of research showing consumers’ dislike for it. 

As observed here last week, products mentioning AI are significantly less popular with consumers than the same products when they don’t mention it. Now comes word people really don’t like it in customer service.

Seven out of every 10 consumers are frustrated with current virtual agents, according to a study commissioned by AI voice solution Tenyx and conducted by Centiment. Also, 55% said dealing with a chatbot would get them to stop doing business with a company.

But, as anyone who watched the Olympics knows, ads boasting about AI are everywhere. Technology companies have spent about $196 million this year through Aug. 8 on TV commercials about AI in some way, according to TV measurement firm iSpot. That’s nearly half of the companies’ total spending on national TV commercials this year, the company said.

What would AI say about this particular marketing strategy?

Anyway, here are this week’s AI-powered martech news and releases.

MetaRouter, a provider of server-side tag management and real-time event routing, is partnering with Magellan AI, an audio intelligence, analytics, and measurement company. They hope to enhance the accuracy and breadth of ad performance data, helping marketers improve advertising strategies.

AnswerRocket, which provides gen AI-powered analytics, is partnering with Kantar, a marketing data and analytics company. They will let joint clients use genAI to reduce the time needed to understand data, produce insights and distribute the information across the organization.

Shapiro+Raj, a global insights company, launched its interactive AI personas platform. It finds patterns of behavior and uses contextual data from primary and secondary data to create AI avatars that can have open-ended conversations mimicking real consumer interactions.

HubSpot’s AI Search Grader is a free tool to help brands understand their presence in large language models (LLM) and AI search. This tool simplifies assessing brand visibility in AI search by eliminating the need for specialized AI knowledge. It provides prompt engineering for marketers and contextualizes brand performance to streamline Language Model Optimization (LMO). The AI Search Grader provides an overall grade indicating brand performance across AI search engines, a brand sentiment score, a share of voice score comparing brand visibility with competitors, and a personalized analysis highlighting strengths and weaknesses while suggesting improvements.

Conversica upgraded its Conversational AI platform. The new release enhances conversation management with flexible AI-supported messaging options. These include Flexible AI Messaging Modes, allowing users to customize conversations beyond basic domain information for improved brand alignment, localization, and formatting. Additionally, the platform introduces ‘Rewrite with AI,’ which offers supervised generative AI support for crafting and editing conversations. 

Five9 upgraded its Intelligent CX Platform with the Five9 Genius AI Suite. It lets businesses create AI-powered customer experience journeys, offering more contextual and personalized interactions that align with their business objectives. It also lets companies identify and implement high-value AI use cases to improve ROI. 

The post AI-powered martech news and releases: August 15 appeared first on MarTech.

Imagine browsing your favorite blog and spotting a visually engaging ad that seamlessly fits the content and stands out just enough to grab your attention.

That’s the power of display advertising at work.

If you’re a digital marketing professional, you’ve likely heard of display networks as part of PPC advertising.

But are you using this channel to the best of your abilities?

In a world where advertising changes daily, it can be difficult to keep up with the best ways to optimize display ads.

In this in-depth guide, we’ll explain display advertising, its different types, and how it differs from search. We’ll also provide strategies and tools to help you take your display ads to the next level.

What Is Display Advertising?

Display advertising is a type of online advertising that typically uses images or videos to showcase your brand.

Thanks to responsive display ads, this ad format becomes much more personalized and can include elements like:

Text.
Images.
Videos.
Logos.

Potential customers see these ads while browsing the internet, using other mobile apps, social media platforms, or even connected TV devices.

Display ads are meant to capture the user’s attention in a way that doesn’t disrupt their experience. At the same time, they also encourage them to take action.

While display ads are typically associated with top-of-funnel marketing, advertisers use these ads across the buyer’s entire user journey. Brands can use display ads for:

Brand awareness.
Product-specific marketing.
Promotional sales.
Promoting specific content or services.
And much more.

Types Of Display Ads

By understanding the various types of display ads available, you can choose the right format to align with your marketing goals and effectively reach your target audience.

Each type offers unique advantages and can be used strategically to maximize engagement and conversions.

Responsive Display Ads

Unique to the Google Display Network, responsive display ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces.

Advertisers provide assets such as images, headlines, logos, and descriptions, and Google uses machine learning to create the best possible combinations for different placements, unique to each user.

This flexibility allows responsive display ads to reach a broader audience and perform well across a wide range of devices and websites.

Banner Ads

Banner ads are considered a more traditional type of display advertising.

Banner ads appear across websites and apps and are placed at the top, bottom, or sides of webpages.

They’re typically static in format but can also use animation to catch the user’s eye without being too disruptive to their experience.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial ads are full-screen ads that cover the whole screen of a webpage or an app.

They typically show up during natural transition points of a web session, like waiting for content to load or going between app screens.

They’re meant to be highly engaging but should be used strategically and sparingly to not overwhelm or annoy the user.

Rich Media Ads

Rich media display ads offer a more interactive experience with a potential customer.

What makes them interactive compared to the other display advertising types?

The beauty of this ad type is the combination of video, image, audio, and clickable elements to engage a user more fully.

Native Ads

The opposite of rich media ads would be native ads. This ad type is meant to blend seamlessly with the content and overall design of a webpage.

Native ads are meant to be non-disruptive to the user experience because they can match the look and feel of the content surrounding the ad.

By blending in more cohesively, it can help increase engagement rates.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting display ads are intended to re-engage past website or app users who haven’t taken the desired action.

This ad type can look like any of the above-mentioned ad formats, or it could show dynamic content based on the user’s previous browsing history.

Unlike standard display ads, retargeting ads aren’t meant to scale broadly. They have a specific intended audience to invite them back to make a purchase.

Display Advertising Vs. Search Advertising

Display ads and search ads are both essential components of a sound digital marketing strategy.

However, they both serve different purposes and are meant to complement each other – not compete.

Below are the key main differentiators between display and search ads:

Targeting. While display ads typically use targeting like demographics, interests, and browsing behavior, search ads are primarily keyword-based and what they search for.
Intent. Display ads can help create demand by focusing on awareness and product consideration. Search ads, on the other hand, are intended to capture existing demand.
Ad format. Display ads are more visual in nature and utilize elements like images, videos, text, and logos. Search ads are primarily text-based with headlines and descriptions.
Reach. Display ads can reach broader audiences across the internet and are easier to scale. Search ads are limited to the specific search engines and their search partner networks, if applicable.

Display Advertising Examples

Display Ads come in many different shapes and sizes. Below are a few examples of ads found across the web in a variety of sizes.

Example: Leaderboard Display Ad

The example below was taken as I was browsing People.com. This ad for US Bank appeared at the top of the page before the hero content.

Example: Skyscraper Display Ad

This example was taken as I was browsing Business Insider. An ad for Oracle Netsuite showed on the right-hand side of the page on a desktop device.

Example: Mobile Display Ad

I found this ad when reading a blog post on Southern Living on my mobile device. A display ad for Best Buy was inserted between paragraphs of the blog post.

Display Advertising Strategy

Just like any other campaign type, display advertising should be driven by a sound strategy.

Let’s take a look at some of the key components of crafting a display advertising strategy.

1. Define Clear Goals

It’s important to establish the objective of each display campaign, such as brand awareness, lead generation, or sales.

If you’re not sure where to start, take a step back and consider your overarching business needs and what you’re trying to achieve.

For example, are you looking to gain new customers or re-engage existing customers? Is brand awareness more important, or are you looking to drive sales of a new product?

In Google Ads, you’ll start the campaign creation by choosing from the following objectives and then choose the ‘Display’ campaign type after choosing an objective:

2. Choose Your Budget, Bidding Strategy, And Audience

Budgets and bid strategies are set at the campaign level.

The typical bid strategy pricing models for display ads are a cost-per-click (CPC) basis or a cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) model. You’ll want to choose the one that aligns with the campaign goal and your overall budget.

In this example, I chose “Awareness” as the campaign objective, so Google Ads recommends a Viewable impressions bid strategy.

Next is to refine the audience targeting for your campaigns.

If the goal is to attract new customers, you can use your own data on existing customers to build audience profiles to target.

Keep in mind the demographics, interests, and overall browsing behavior when putting together your target audience.

3. Choose Display Ad Type, Format, And Placements

The nice part about Google Ads is the ability to target (or exclude) specific website placements or apps to ensure your ads show up in the right place.

You may be tempted to choose a short list of very specific websites, but by doing so, you could end up limiting your reach immensely. It’s also not guaranteed that your ads will show on those placements if your budget or bid is not competitive enough.

At the beginning, use negative placements to your advantage to exclude sites where your content would be inappropriate.

Now, as for ad size and format, there are two options in Google Ads:

Uploaded display ads.
Utilize responsive display ads (RDAs).

The main benefit of using uploaded display ads is that you have full control over the design. However, not all websites utilize these formats, and you may be missing out on additional reach if you opt not to use RDAs.

The most typical banner sizes for uploaded display ads include:

728×90 (leaderboard).
300×250 (medium rectangle).
336×280 (large rectangle).
300×50 (mobile banner).
160×600 (skyscraper).

If you opt to use responsive display ads, Google takes the guesswork out of ad sizes for you.

Essentially, you’ll provide the basic elements, and Google will mix and match that content to create personalized ads for each user based on when and where they’re browsing.

Be sure to provide these essentials for a well-formatted ad:

Images.
Logos.
Brand name.
Headlines.
Descriptions.
Custom colors.
Call-to-action (CTA) text.

4. Focus On Creating Compelling Ad Content

Expanding on point #3 above, the visual design is your chance to capture the user’s attention.

A boring ad won’t stand out and can turn customers away. When designing ads, make sure to design visually appealing ads that align with your brand.

Additionally, make sure to test different elements and rotate out poor-performing elements.

It’s especially important to remain visually consistent if you’re marketing across different channels like social media. Consistent brand recognition across platforms can pay dividends over time.

5. Track And Optimize Performance

Once your display campaign is launched, you’ll want to monitor the key metrics chosen for the campaign objectives.

It may be tempting to make changes immediately, but it’s important to give the algorithm time to learn before making any major changes.

Unless something serious goes awry, like showing up on inappropriate placements, give the campaign time to run and then make tweaks based on the data coming in.

For example, if an ad shows a lot of impressions but few clicks, you may need to change the creative elements to capture the user’s attention more. Or, it could be the placements that need tweaking.

Or, if an ad is getting a ton of clicks but very few conversions, it may not be the ad itself; it could mean the landing page needs to be optimized. Try segmenting the ads by device to identify if the majority of clicks are coming from mobile and if the corresponding landing page is optimized for mobile delivery.

Ongoing campaign monitoring and optimization are vital for delivering optimal ROI to your display ads.

Read More:

Top Display Advertising Networks

Believe it or not, there’s a ton of different advertising networks to choose from as an alternative to Google.

Depending on your goal and usage of Display ads, you may need a different platform.

Some of the top Display ad network platforms include:

AdRoll
Amazon
StackAdapt
AirNow Media
Yahoo Ad Tech

You can find a full recommended list of Display Ad networks here.

Read More:

Display Advertising Tools

Depending on which stage you’re in for creating or running display ads, there are multiple tools to help take your display ads to the next level.

Ad Creation And Design Tools

If you’re looking to create display ads where you have full control, there are many user-friendly tools to help guide the ad creation process.

Google Web Designer: This is a free tool from Google that allows you to create HTML5 ads and motion graphics.
Canva: A more user-friendly option that has tons of templates to start from or the ability to create from scratch.
Bannersnack: This tool is specifically for creating banner ads, but it simplifies the design process with drag-and-drop components.

Ad Analysis And Optimization Tools

Analyzing display campaigns can be half the battle, and you need reliable tools to help optimize these campaigns to the fullest.

Google Analytics: This tool is essential for tracking and analyzing the performance of your campaigns. It can help marry the metrics like impressions and clicks to user purchase behavior to help you determine where to optimize further.
Google Ads Performance Planner: If you need help forecasting potential campaign changes, this tool is for you. It takes historical data and trends into considerations to help provide budget and bidding recommendations.
Hotjar: This is a user behavior tool that can provide session recordings, heatmaps, and more to understand how real users interact with your landing page and website.

Ad Management And Automation Tools

Google Ads Editor: This tool is great for managing multiple Google Ads campaigns offline, allowing for bulk changes and uploading changes on your own time.
Optmzyr: This platform offers more automation and streamlined workflow for PPC campaigns, including display ads.
Semrush: This platform can help with competitive analysis for display ads, which can help you refine your strategies.

Summary

Display ads are part of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Because of their scalability and reach, display ads can cast a wide net to make potential customers aware of your brand and increase engagement and, ultimately, sales.

From traditional banner ads to innovative, responsive display ads, each type serves a unique purpose in capturing user attention and driving conversions.

By understanding the differences between display and search advertising, leveraging effective strategies, and utilizing various tools for ad creation, design, analysis, and optimization, you can maximize the impact of your display advertising campaigns.

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.

Every week, we feature fresh job listings for martech-ers, so make sure to bookmark this page and check back every Friday. If you’re looking to hire, please submit your listing here — please note: We will not post listings without a salary range.

Newest jobs in martech:

ABM Manager @ Aerospike (U.S. remote)

Salary: $120,000 – $140,000

Develop and drive the global one-to-many and one-to-few ABM strategies, including program creation aligned to the company’s strategic priorities.

Oversee the planning, execution and optimization of digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including SEM, paid social and display.

Senior Manager, Marketing Technology @ Unlock Technologies, Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $106,000 – $125,000

Manage and maintain the martech stack and ensure optimal setup, configuration, performance, reliability and scale.

Collaborate with marketing, sales, product and other departments to ensure alignment on a scalable technology strategy and support the execution of marketing and sales activities.

Executive Director, Chief Product Owner, Marketing Automation @ Novartis (U.S. remote)

Salary: $233,600 – $350,400

Establish and lead the development of a comprehensive Salesforce ecosystem product strategy inclusive of a three-year product roadmap for marketing automation.

Serve as single point of contact, managing stakeholders and representing the product line at Product Council, Steering Committee and Customer Advisory Board meetings.

Lead Lifecycle Marketing Manager @ Course Hero (U.S. remote)

Salary: $114,000 – $154,000

Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, creative teams and engineers to develop and execute on strategies to drive user engagement and product adoption.

Create scalable multi-channel marketing campaigns. Establish foundational infrastructure for expansion into new marketing channels such as web push, content cards or in-browser notifications.

Senior Strategist, Enterprise Tech Strategy and Design @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

Salary: $125,000 – $165,000

Assess and map client marketing and sales technologies. Lead strategy project planning and scoping exercises.

Conduct in-depth discovery. Lead client meetings. Architect growth and efficiency technology and data solutions.

Data Operations Lead @ Tinuiti (U.S. remote)

Salary: $110,000 – $120,000 (U.S. remote)

Work with a distributed Data Operations team with a heavy focus on data sourcing, availability, timeliness and reliability.

Lead the monitoring and alerting of data issues and their resolution, including identifying areas of improvement.

Performance/Growth Marketing Manager @ Apartment List (U.S. remote)

Salary: $119,000 – $144,000

Drive new renter growth by managing and optimizing paid social campaigns, with a primary focus on Meta and YouTube, continuously refining strategies to maximize ROAS.

Identify and develop new marketing channels from 0 to 1, expand reach and diversify the acquisition mix. Design and execute A/B tests. Analyze data to uncover growth opportunities.

Marketing Operations Strategist @ Directive Consulting (U.S. remote)

Salary: $70,000 – $90,000

Serve as both staff augmentation and strategic advisor for marketing operations processes for B2B Tech and SaaS clients.

Identify and communicate opportunities to grow our business with clients in the Marketing Operations line of business and other lines of business.

Associate Director, Digital Transformation @ Merkle (U.S. remote)

Salary: $110,000 – $125,000

Conduct audits to deliver assessments of the organization’s digital marketing and analytics infrastructure, processes, strategies and readiness to expand.

Analyze data collection methods, technology stack and data quality to gauge effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Develop and deliver transformation priorities and roadmap goals.

Business Development Vice President, Sales — Retail Vertical @ Epsilon (U.S. remote)

Salary: $170,000 – $190,000

Identifies and leads the pursuit of the targeted new business opportunities within major retail accounts. Leverages a client-diagnostic sales strategy and consultative approach to uncover client-specific issues and/or opportunities.

Manages resources to develop proposals that position the full range of Epsilon’s capabilities and solutions to solve client challenges.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

Director roles:

Executive Director, Digital Marketing @ Revance (U.S. remote)

Salary: $195,800 – $280,060

Execute commercial strategies for growth, including, but not limited to, sales enablement, digital marketing, account-based marketing and experiential activities.

Oversee all organic and paid digital marketing channels, leading a cross-functional team of subject matter experts to deliver highly optimized digital marketing programs, all to achieve business goals and annual targets.

Director of Brand Marketing @ The Black Tux (U.S. remote)

Salary: $185,000 – $210,000

Concept and execute comprehensive brand marketing campaigns that resonate with our target audience and drive brand awareness and loyalty.

Own The Black Tux’s brand identity, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints and communication channels.

Director, CRM Marketing @ Transformco (U.S. remote)

Salary: $150,000 – $160,000

Formulate and execute a comprehensive customer acquisition and retention strategy for Home Appliances and Services, utilizing email, SMS, direct mail and retargeting channels.

Design and implement cohesive CRM content and offer strategies that enhance customer experiences across all touchpoints, including phone interactions, communications, in-home services and digital platforms.

Director of Digital Customer Engagement Delivery Strategy & Self-Service Success @ The Cigna Group (U.S. remote)

Salary: $152,300 – $253,300

Stand up and lead a dynamic new team, playing a key role in defining and evolving the customer engagement delivery operating model.

Implement quick wins and execute on a high-level roadmap toward an end-state in which there is an automated method by which enterprise customers are personally targeted for communication, ensuring the interoperability between those communications and digital experiences.

Senior roles:

Senior Director, Digital Marketing @ Dropbox (U.S. remote)

Salary: $206,100 – $278,900

Define annual and quarterly plans that outline the media mix investment allocations and expected outcomes across Marketing channels, routes to market, and product.

Drive cross-functional alignment across key stakeholders, including Finance, Analytics, Growth, Product, Sales, and Integrated Campaign, to align on business objectives, resource allocation, efficiency goals, and revenue and engagement targets.

Senior/Lead B2C Lifecycle Marketing Specialist @ Credit Acceptance (U.S. remote)

Salary: $117,000 – $150,000

Develop a multi-channel consumer lifecycle marketing strategy to maximize customer LTV by driving customer activation, engagement and retention.

Use qualitative and quantitative data and customer insights to proactively identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and drive toward solutions.

Marketing Technology Applications Principal Architect @ Vail Resorts (U.S. remote)

Salary: $99,000 – $140,000

Build and oversee tool integrations expanding the go-to-market construct (media, email, push, SMS and digital personalization) transforming the data-driven roadmap through the use of real-time data access, a fully implemented CDP and customer journey orchestration tool and various direct end points for individual channel execution.

Learn about and grow applications with a six-month lens on what investments will be needed for operational support after implementation.

Senior Engineering Manager, Marketing Platform @ Upstart Network, Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $180,600 – $250,000

Design and build technology for serving marketing content to users via scalable and personalized landing pages, emails, push notifications and in-product content.

Work with cross-functional partners including product managers, designers, research scientists and marketing managers to design and deliver high-quality products to be served across various marketing channels.

Associate roles:

Digital Marketing Manager @ WIN (U.S. remote)

Salary: From $75,000

Oversee the CRM system, including data management, segmentation and automation.

Collaborate with sales and customer success teams to ensure smooth communication and information flow. Develop and implement email marketing campaigns, newsletters and customer engagement strategies.

Research Analyst – Consumer Insights @ Dumbstruck Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $60,000 – $75,000

Communicate with clients to gather information about project objectives

Develop survey questions that help achieve project objectives

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Google has defined a set of metrics site owners should focus on when optimizing for page experience. Core Web Vitals metrics are part of Google’s page experience factors that all websites should strive to meet.

Users’ expectations for web experiences can vary according to site and context, but some remain consistent regardless of where they are on the web.

Specifically, Google identifies the core user experience needs such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

What Are Core Web Vitals Scores?

Google recommends site owners have CWV metrics under the ‘good’ threshold specified below:

Anything in between good and poor is considered as moderate, which should be improved.

Google explains why these three metrics, in particular, are so important:

“All of these metrics capture important user-centric outcomes, are field measurable, and have supporting lab diagnostic metric equivalents and tooling.

For example, while Largest Contentful Paint is the topline loading metric, it is also highly dependent on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB), which remain critical to monitor and improve.”

How Google Measures Core Web Vitals

Google CrUX report uses Chrome data when users browse websites to gather real-world user data from their devices. At least 75% of pageviews to the site should have ‘good’ scores for the website to meet CWV thresholds.

Please note it uses 75% of pageviews of the entire site, which means pages with poor CWV and less traffic will not impact the overall website score.

This is why you may find that websites with a ‘good’ score have pages with terrible CWVs and vice versa.

This method of measuring ensures that a low number of percentage visits due to slow network conditions doesn’t take down the entire website’s ‘good’ score.

Here’s how those metrics can be measured.

How To Measure Core Web Vitals

Google incorporates Core Web Vitals measurement capabilities into many of its existing tools.

Core Web Vitals can be measured using these free tools:

Let’s dive into how to use each of these free SEO tools to measure Core Web Vitals.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights allows you to measure Core Web Vitals with both lab and field data included in the reports.

The lab section of the report provides data gathered from real users’ devices in all geos and different network conditions, whereas the field section shows data from simulated devices using just one device.

If your pages have few visits or are new, there might be insufficient historical data for field data to show a report. In that case, the average field score for the entire website will be used as a fallback if available; otherwise, it will show no data.

Once you run reports you will have a list of recommendations on how to improve your scores underneath. You can read our guide on the PageSpeed Insights report to learn how to use it.

Web Vitals Extension

Using the PageSpeed Insights tool is always a great way to debug and audit performance, but it is often not convenient. You have to open a new tab in your browser and navigate away from the page, which is distracting.

Fortunately, there is an extension available to install from the Chrome Web Store that measures Core Web Vitals metrics in real-time during your browsing and also loads field data if available.

Besides this standard UI, this addon also offers more granular debugging opportunities via the browser DevTools ‘console’ tab. Here is a quick video guide on how to do that.

Debugging the Interaction Next Paint metric is quite challenging as it may degrade at any point during the user interaction journey. In PageSpeed Insights, you get only an average value across all interactions, not which interaction on the specific element on the page was slow.

By using this extension, you can interact with the page and identify elements that degrade the INP metric by checking the console logs. For example, you can click on buttons and check the console to see how long the interaction took.

As soon as you identify which element is slow to respond, you can check your JavaScript code to see if any scripts are blocking the interaction.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source tool you can use to audit your webpage’s performance, which is also available in Chrome’s DevTools.

All of the reports that Lighthouse powers are updated to reflect the latest version.

One caveat to be aware of is that when running Lighthouse in your browser, it also loads many resources from your Chrome extensions, which can affect your metrics in the Lighthouse report.

That’s why I suggest using Chrome Canary for debugging as a good practice. Chrome Canary has an isolated installation from your regular Chrome browser where you can access experimental features. This allows you to test your website with features that will be included in future Chrome releases.

I ran a quick experiment to see how drastically Lighthouse page speed scores can vary in the Canary clean installation vs. your browser with add-ons enabled.

One important feature that Lighthouse enables is measuring scores while interacting with the webpage and measuring how certain interactions affect your scores, especially the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric.

I suggest you dive deep and master how to use Lighthouse by reading our guide written by the two of most experienced technical SEO experts in the world.

CrUX Dashboard

CrUX report is a public dataset of real user experience data on millions of websites. The Chrome UX report measures field versions of all the Core Web Vitals, which means it reports real-world data rather than lab data.

With PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or the Web Vital add-on we have discussed, you now know how to measure individual URL performance. But how do you see the whole picture for a website with thousands of URLs? What percentage of URLs have ‘good’ scores or scores from a few months ago to compare against?

This is where Google’s CrUX free Looker Studio dashboard helps. You can check segments and see your historical data.

To do that, simply copy and paste your domain into the CrUX dashboard launcher.

Then, enjoy beautiful reports for free. Here is an example report for Search Engine Journal in case you want to explore a real dashboard.

In this dashboard, you can find much more besides the CWV metrics. If you fall short of CWV ‘good’ scores but lab data shows you are meeting all thresholds, it may be because your visitors have a bad connection.

This is where the connection distribution report is highly valuable: it can help you understand if your scores’ poor performance is due to network issues.

Unfortunately, this dashboard doesn’t give you a breakdown of CWV metrics by country, but there is a free tool, treo.sh, which you can use to check performance metrics by geos.

Search Console

GSC is another tool to see how your overall website CWV metrics.

The report identifies groups of pages that require attention based on real-world data from the Chrome UX report. If you open the report by clicking on the top right corner link, you will see a breakdown of your issues.

With this report, be aware that it pulls data from CruX, and URLs will be omitted if they do not have a minimum amount of reporting data, which means you may have pages with poor CWV metrics that are not reported here.

Web-Vitals.JS And GA4

web-vitals.js is an open-source library that accurately measures CWV metrics the same way Chrome or PageSpeed Insights does. The web vitals extension we discussed above actually uses this library for reporting and logging.

However, you can integrate it with Google Analytics 4 to get a detailed performance report at scale on a website with many pages. Below is a code sample for GA4’s gtag integration.

In the code sample, ‘value’ is a built-in parameter, and ‘metric_id’, ‘metric_value’, ‘metric_delta’, ‘metric_rating’, and ‘debug_target’ are optional custom dimensions you may want to include per your needs.

If you want to see these dimensions in GA4’s exploration reports, you need to add them in GA4’s admin of custom definitions. Otherwise, if you decide to send these parameters and not add them via admin you can access raw data via BigQuery only. This provides much more flexibility but requires SQL expertise.

If you decide to include ‘metric_id,’ which, in the case of websites with a lot of traffic, will have an indefinite number of unique values, it may cause cardinality issues in exploration reports.

So, you may want to enable those additional custom parameters for a short period to gather sample data for troubleshooting.

To send CWV metrics data via Google Tag Manager, refer to this guide created by Google’s marketing solution team. As a best practice, you should use GTM integration, and the code above (which is fully functional) demonstrates the fundamental mechanics of CWV data collection and reporting.

Other than what we have discussed, freemium or paid tools such as Debugbear, treo.sh, Oncrawl, Lumar, or Semrush may help you identify your scores on all pages at a scale in real time.

However, I would like to note that from the listed tools, Debugbear and treo.sh are highly specialized in CWV metrics and provide high-granularity insights with advanced segmentations.

What About Other Valuable Metrics?

As important as the Core Web Vitals are, they’re not the only page experience metrics to focus on.

Ensuring your site uses HTTPS, is mobile-friendly, avoids intrusive interstitials, and maintains a clear distinction between the website are crucial parts of page experience ranking factors.

So think of it also from a user-centric point of view, and not only because it is a ranking factor.

For example, from a conversions perspective, if you have a slow ecommerce website, your potential customers may churn, and it will cause revenue losses.

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

Many businesses found early success with marketing automation platforms. But as marketing needs evolve, a question arises: Is it time for a change?

Join us for Stuck on Autopilot? Upgrade Your Marketing Automation where we’ll explore:

The signs it’s time to make a change

How to evaluate different platforms

Strategies for a smooth migration

A real-world example of a successful transition

Don’t let outdated technology hold you back! Sign up today to learn how to future-proof your marketing automation and unlock new opportunities.

The post Could your marketing automation be doing more? appeared first on MarTech.

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you identify it, and how can you fix it? Watch to find out! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we’re going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation. With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs. 

So I’ve got this imaginary SERP here as an example. So imagine that Moz is trying to rank for the keyword “burgers.” Just imagine that Moz has decided to take a wild tangent in its business model and we’re going to try and rank for “burgers” now.

So in position one here, we’ve got Inferior Bergz, and we would hope to outrank these people really, but for some reason we’re not doing. Then in position two, we’ve got Moz’s Buy Burgers page on the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously doesn’t exist, but this is a hypothetical. This is a commercial landing page where you can go and purchase a burger. 

Then in position three, we’ve got this Best Burgers page on the Moz blog. It’s more informational. It’s telling you what are the attributes to a good burger, how can you identify a good burger, where should you go to acquire a good burger, all this kind of more neutral editorial information.

So we hypothesize in this situation that maybe if Moz only had one page going for this keyword, maybe it could actually supplant the top spot. If we think that’s the case, then we would probably talk about this as cannibalization.

However, the alternative hypothesis is, well, actually there could be two intents here. It might be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on this SERP, and it so happens that the second best commercial page is Moz’s and the best informational page is also Moz’s. We’ve heard Google talk in recent years or representatives of Google talk in recent years about having positions on search results that are sort of reserved for certain kinds of results, that might be reserved for an informational result or something like that. So this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s cannibalization. So we’re going to talk a little bit later on about how we might sort of disambiguate a situation like this.

Classic cannibalization

First, though, let’s talk about the classic case. So the classic, really clear-cut, really obvious case of cannibalization is where you see a graph like this one. 

So this is the kind of graph you would see a lot of rank tracking software. You can see time and the days of the week going along the bottom axis. Then we’ve got rank, and we obviously want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLS, which are color-coded, and are green and red here. When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn’t even in the top 100. There’s only ever one appearing at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP. When we see this kind of behavior, we can be pretty confident that what we’re seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less-obvious cases

Sometimes it’s less obvious though. So a good example that I found recently is if, or at least in my case, if I Google search Naples, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia ranking first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first was about Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page at second was about Naples, Florida.

Now I do not think that Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in that situation. I think that they just happen to have… Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword “Naples” requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those intents.

So I wouldn’t go to Wikipedia and say, “Oh, you need to combine these two pages into a Naples, Florida and Italy page” or something like that. That’s clearly not necessary. 

Questions to ask 

So if you want to figure out in that kind of more ambiguous case whether there’s cannibalization going on, then there are some questions we might ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we’re underperforming? 

So one of the best questions we might ask, which is a difficult one in SEO, is: Do we think we’re underperforming? So I know every SEO in the world feels like their site deserves to rank higher, well, maybe most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page, where we’re doing significantly better? Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed? Because if we see behavior like that, then that might,  you know, it’s not clear-cut, but it might give us some suspicions. 

2. Do competing pages both appear? 

Similarly, if we look at examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, so perhaps in the burgers case, if the SERP for “best burgers” and the SERP for “buy burgers,” if those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here, and we just need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated.

But if actually it’s the same pages appearing on all of those keywords, we might want to consider having one page as well because that seems to be what Google is preferring. It’s not really separating out these intents. So that’s the kind of thing we can look for is, like I say, not clear-cut but a bit of a hint. 

3. Consolidate or differentiate? 

Once we’ve figured out whether we want to have two pages or one, or whether we think the best solution in this case is to have two pages or one, we’re going to want to either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history and so on, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content, that serves the slight variance of what we now know is one intent and so on and so forth.

If we want two pages, then obviously we don’t want them to cannibalize. So we need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated. Now what often happens here is a commercial page, like this Buy Burgers page, ironically for SEO reasons, there might be a block of text at the bottom with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers, and that can make it quite confusing what intent this page is serving.

Similarly, on this page, we might at some stage have decided that we want to feature some products on there or something. It might have started looking quite commercial. So we need to make sure that if we’re going to have both of these, that they are very clearly speaking to separate intents and not containing the same information and the same keywords for the most part and that kind of thing.

Quick tip

Lastly, it would be better if we didn’t get into the situation in the first place. So a quick tip that I would recommend, just as a last takeaway, is before you produce a piece of content, say for example before I produced this Whiteboard Friday, I did a site:moz.com cannibalization so I can see what content had previously existed on Moz.com that was about cannibalization.

I can see, oh, this piece is very old, so we might — it’s a very old Whiteboard Friday, so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it’s not really about that. It’s maybe about something else. So as long as it’s not targeting that keyword we should be fine and so on and so forth. Just think about what other pieces exist, because if there is something that’s basically targeting the same keyword, then obviously you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece.

That’s all for today. Thank you very much.

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