John Ayers Marketing

Are social media signals used in Googles update?

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Are social media signals being used in this next Google update?

social media signals in google SEO

Is Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media signals impacting your search engine rankings? Do we now know they are from Matt Cutts at Google himself? So we know small changes in Google’s algorithms happen daily and sometimes, multiple times per day. Similar to earthquakes in California, you usually don’t feel them unless they hit a certain height on the Richter Scale. These little tweaks in Google’s algorithm are  in order to continually refine and optimize the results for relevance. And many believe that these tweaks involve the factoring of social media signals within the SERP results. This new update, announced by Google’s Head of web spam- Matt Cutts, speaks more about the ways to differentiate popularity from authority, and what Google’s plan is to address this concern. So is Google finally admitting to using social signals in their ranking algorithms?

Well, Matt Cutts said the search engine is working on “some changes” that will help it better determine when a site is an authority on a topic. Though he didn’t provide a specific date of this new update he stated that he’s  “looking forward to to those rolling out.” And it is commonly known to be a big one,. Are you are prepared?  To all those who have stayed true to maintain white hat SEO consistency in your marketing plan  these updates don’t impact you-negatively that is.

Matt Cutts asked “how do you separate simple popularity from true authority?”

I know many people have asked him this in various ways, and there are many theories on this as there are on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, but Matt Cutts decided to step up at SXSW and provide a little feedback into some upcoming changes. This entire discussion launched when Blind Five Year Old asked Cutts, “As Google continues to add social signals to the algorithm, how do you separate simple popularity from true authority?”

 

In his video, Cutts states that common assumption by the community is  that Google IS using social signals in its ranking algorithm, however this has never been clearly found or stated by Google. Regarding the popularity versus authority theory , Cutts says, “We’ve actually thought about this quite a bit because from the earliest days it would get us really kind of frustrated when we would see reporters talk about PageRank, and say, ‘PageRank is a measure of popularity of websites,’ because that’s not true.”

If these new changes actually work, they could provide a boost to search result quality. In fact, this is just the kind of thing that it seemed like the Panda update was originally designed to do. Remember how it was initially referred to as the “farmer” update because it was going after content farms, which ware saturating the search results? Many of those articles from said farms were drowning out authoritative sites on various topics.

There has been talk  on  a “next generation” Panda update sometime as well, though it wasn’t suggested that this new update was directly related to that. That update though, he said, could help small businesses and small sites so we are anxiously looking at more information on this. One Googler on his team is specifically working on ways to help local SEO web sites and businesses do better in the Google search results. This next generation update to Panda is one specific algorithmic change that should have a positive impact on the smaller businesses.

Post-Panda update, Google began placing a higher emphasis on freshness, which led to a lot of newer content rankings for any given keyword.  However, there are many cases when more authoritative or relevant content was getting pushed further down the SERP results in favor of newer, less helpful content. It seems logical  that Google is looking more at authority by topic now, because everyone in the SEO community including Cutts has been suggesting that websites and blogs stay topic-centric .

Either way, this is another clue that Google really is looking at authority by topic or niche. We look forward to the change! Are you ready?

John Ayers is one of the contributing writers at John Ayers Consulting and can be seen on Google +

 

 

Why marketers should continue to send you e-mail

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Do you ever find your in-box jam-packed with all that email? Well, there is a reason to the madness. It still works today, yes, it does. In fact it is nearly 40 TIMES more effective than Twitter and Facebook combined to acquire customers. Actually 91% of all US customers use email daily and the rate these emails prompt purchases is 3 times that of social media channels.

So wait.. hold on there! I don’t want that SPAM you say? Right, we don’t either. Marketers need to become smarter and like all aspects of digital marketing the most effective companies have gotten smarter about it. Even though there has been a decline in email usage, and movement to social media, IM and other apps, people still use it. And use it daily. So don’t move all of your marketing over to Twitter or WhatsApp quite yet, but lets talk a little bit about how you , as trained ninja marketers, can garner the full horsepower of email.

1. Pay attention to all aspects of the journey

Ok so what does that mean.? Don’t be on your phone reading email while your commuting? Well, no but actually yes don’t do that. However what we mean is, don’t just focus on getting the click from the email. Sounds strange I know, however the email is only one part in a series of interactions so starting with the subject line, message and visuals is great but why invest all that time to only lose them when they land on your generic landing page?  Custom landing pages  can be implemented to be custom to not only device (mobile or desktop) but also demographic, geographic and even product focussed offerings. Almost 45 % of all marketing emails today are opened on a mobile device, yet still today marketers don’t optimize their landing pages for this growing traffic medium. Google confirms this by stating that 61% of users are unlikely to even return to a mobile sitre they had trouble accessing before, and worse yet, 40% end up visiting a competitor instead.

2. Spend time (lots) setting it up

Each opened email is a opportunity to learn incrementally more about your customers. Once you decide to use email you need to set clear objects and goals with your team, that involve collecting or evaluating this data you are capturing. Though the proper set up of emails can be tedious, the results are seen quickly in the delivery and response.If you utilize outsourced email service providers , each has unique data opportunities and options they allow to be used to later append or connect to your internal CRM systems. Warning though. If you aren’t going to use the data, don’t collect it. Set clear plans and goals then execute on hitting those, then incrementally add more as you progress.

3. Get down and personal

Its harder to stand out these days. Even more to be compliant to CAN-SPAM laws and be unique. According to Forrester, marketing emails is forecasted to hit 838 billion in the US this year. So being RELEVANT is key. The best emails feel personal, timed right and are relevant. For example one flash-sale website sends out more than 3,000 variations of its daily email each customized based on:

  1. past user click-throughs
  2. browsing history
  3. purchase history

Now something like this is no easy feat to manage or build, however it works. Start slowly by segmenting different customers into different groups.

4. Track and Test

In order to be better next time, we need to learn and analyze what happened before. We need to track every variable and piece of the process so we can make minor adjustments over time to see if that helped immensely (YES) or possibly behaved worse (back to the drawing board). Spend time setting up the tracking and planning out the testing variables (i.e.. creative, subject lines, landing pages, segmentation). Live, learn and prosper as the famous Star Trek quote states.

John Ayers is one of the contributing writers at JAM  John Ayers Marketing

Why you need to increase your conversions, not conversations

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What is a conversion rate?

So lets start out at the beginning.. Surprisingly, you ask five people at the same company and you get five different answers.  Here is a quick diagram on perhaps what the conversion rate may be:

conversion rate

conversion rate

Sometimes a conversion rate starts at the beginning of the sales funnel. For example, you may have a form on your website that collects an email address or some interest information, but they aren’t quite yet ready to purchase. Others calculate conversion rate based on a sale that occurs. At the end of the day, you need to have your team in alignment to understand:

  1. What the conversion rate is
  2. How its calculated
  3. How its measured
  4. What the goals and targets are

Why do you need to increase it?

So now that you have a conversion rate you are monitoring and analyzing, why do you need to increase it?  And better yet can you? Absolutely!

  1. Theres always room for improvement. Yes your mom was right! Even the best at their game, don’t stop and with technology rapidly evolving, you can’t either.
  2. Traffic is expensive. You can’t afford not to convert it.
  3. There are effective tools to help monitor and manage it.

There is no one right answer and landing page or website optimization really is still more art than science (sorry robots). But the reality, is very simple changes can dramatically impact your conversions and it grows exponentially.

If you were able to take your current 5% conversion rate, and turn it to a whopping 10%, you can no afford to:

  1. Pay up to twice as much more per customer than before
  2. Advertise on other venues on or offline
  3. Pay your affiliates more money

All of this leads to more sales. And it isn’t necessarily just your landing page or website that needs help on conversions. You can double your conversions by increasing the conversion rate of your:

  • ads by 19%
  • landing page by 19%
  • product sales page by 19%
  • subscribers by 19%
(* note that each improvement compounds so its 19% not 25%)

So stop talking about it, and lets start increasing conversions. Create the conversion rate goals and share them with your internal and external teams.
John Ayers is one of the contributing writers at John Ayers Consulting and can be seen on Google +

 

 

Should I advertise on Facebook in 2014?

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According to a end of year 2013 study completed by Nanigans, the average CPC (Cost Per Click) in 2013 with Facebook increased 35%. The Cost Per Impression increased a staggering 186% !

Should I advertise in 2014 on Facebook?

If the prices are increasing that must mean it is working , right? Well.. yes. Exactly. Facebook advertising is starting to work.  Big companies and agencies are all starting to figure it out and jumping in diverting some of their advertising budget more towards Facebook PPC and CPC ads. But more importantly than the prices increasing and more revenue coming into Facebook, is that the ROI for advertisers is beginning to show. The good news is the ROI (Return on Investment) . So is it time now to or should I  advertise on Facebook in 2014?

According to the study the ROI, measured by Revenue per click for retail advertisers, as example, increased year over year at a rate of 83%. A strong ROI jump, but does it still provide positive returns for ALL Facebook advertisers?

 

Facebook cpc ad growth

 

 

In addition to this staggering return, a staggering growth rate in mobile visitors has occurred and shows no sign of slowing down.  Almost 50% of Facebook’s 874 million daily active users are now only accessing the site from a mobile device. Fortunately advertisers are learning to also adapt, with three times more companies now tracking and optimizing mobile ad revenue over the past year. To read more, go to http://bit.ly/1elvnwR

About John Ayers
John Ayers has been an entrepreneur since age 11, with his first paper route and has since helped many other entrepreneurs grow their company through the careful execution of integrating technology with strategic design and careful planned marketing. John Ayers can always be found at the website John Ayers. John has become addicted to democratizing lead generation and can be found on Google+ and LinkedIn and many other circles. 

Four Simple Ways to Maximize Your Facebook Ads

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As a strong proponent of mixing in real-time advertising, one has to analyze the many different options to choose from.  For a majority of businesses, Facebook ads can be an extremely affordable and effective way to drive additional traffic and begin seeing results immediately.  The traffic growth of Facebook continues to increase exponentially and optimizing this marketing channel takes a little bit of art. The most immediate challenge, is determining effective ways to engage the suers to click on the ads you are creating. Views are great, but getting quality ad targeted users to click on your ads is the holy grail.  With that in mind, here are some simple methods and tricks that I use daily for my social media marketing clients to harnessing the power of Facebook ads.

1. TARGETING

When creating an ad in Facebook, you want to  dramatically narrow down the list of people you are attempting to show the ad to ensure each click you pay for is being done by a potential customer that is going to “like” or shop with you.  This targeting is both powerful and extremely important in setting up properly within Facebook, allowing you to not only improve the Click Thru Rate (fancy buzzword: CTR)  but also will reduce the amount you end up payin.   Facebook wants to provide your ad space on their platform, but wants to ensure it is relevant and useful to its users. So they are also looking at your CTR, to determine the price you will end up paying per click. So by optimizing the audience and relevance of your ad, you win in two ways. You only show ads to those who want to see it and your potential CPC (Cost Per Click) declines over time as your ad appears more relevant to Facebook.

When creating your ad, ensure that you carefully analyze your current target market and overlay that with exact details within the Facebook targeting platform.

facebook1

As you can see in this image, based on the different option or drop down menu you select, the total number of people in your audience will change.  For example you could elect to target only women, age 21-35, from North America, who have ‘fitness’ listed as one of their interests. This simple filtering will  lower the total potential audience who can see your ad however you slowly are eliminating a majority that may not click on your ad to begin with. Here is a list of the targeting filters Facebook currently has to allow you to dramatically filter and target your ad to the right potential customer:

Here are the targeting filters available in Facebook Ads.

  • Gender: Here you can restrict your ads to a male audience, female audience, or both.
  • Age: You can choose one or more age ranges of people to target with your ad: 13–17, 18–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, and 65–100. If users  have not identified their age in Facebook, they won’t see your ad if you use an age-range filter.
  • Birthday: Happy Birthday wishes and display your ad to people only on their birthday.
  • Location: Set specific countries of origin of the user, as eligible to view your ad. In the US for example, you can further target  you can specify states and in some cases, a specific city where your ad is to be shown. These are great for local businesses, for example.by specifying
  • Likes and Interests: Provide keywords that represent a user’s potential Likes or Interests that users enter into their Facebook Profile.
  • Interested In: Target people who state they are “Interested in” Men or Women, or you can pick All.
  • Relationship: Target a user based on their defined Relationship status in their Profile. Options include Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, or Married. This filter can be helpful, for example, to target Engaged people with wedding products and offers.
  • Language: Target a user based on their spoken Language(s) set in a Profile.
  • Education: Target a user based on the Education level in a Profile. Some options include In High School, In College, or College Grad.
  • Workplaces: Target a user based on the company listed as their Employer. For the user to see your ad, the spelling of the Employer name must the spelling that you provide.
  • Connections: Target users already connected to a specific Facebook Page, Event, Group, or application.
  • Friends of Connections: Target Facebook users who are not only connected to your Facebook business Page but also have at least one Friend connected to your business Page.

2. USE FACES IN YOUR ADS

Hmm Facebook and use faces. People are naturally inclined to look at faces, and thats what Facebook is about right ? So use that to your advantage.  Facebook ads have an option to add an image, so ensure you test ads including a person in that image.  It could be an image of a pretty girl, or an athlete posing for  the camera, either way you can use images to provide a great effect.  Ensure the image is relevant by carefully selecting the type of person you have in your image based on the item or service you are promoting.  Make sure to consider age, race, attractiveness, sex and anything else that might have an impact on your audience and have that aligned with the targeting filters you created from step 1. But most importantly – experiment Experiment not only with different people but also with the person in the image looking in different directions.  At johnayers.com, we have found that our clients get dramatically different CTR’s based on something as simple as the direction their image is facing.

facebook ad images

3. ASK QUESTIONS IN YOUR AD

In your ad copy, consider having the main focus area be a question.  People are more inclined to read and respond to ads that ask questions, and therefore it will be much more likely to get their attention. Whenever possible, try to identify the ‘pain points’ of your target audience, and attempt to ask questions specifically about that.

 

4. TEST. ANALYZE. REPEAT.

Always Be Testing (ABT). This is huge. There is no one formula but by repeated testing and optimization you will find sweet spots. However when you find them, get ready to adjust or reinvent yourself. As ad boredom set in, your once performing super ad, will start to drift away to oblivion. Never be complacent but be ready for the next big when, as you again- Test. Analyze. and Repeat.

John Ayers is one of the contributing writers at John Ayers Consulting and can be seen on Google +

 

Are you John Ayers?

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Well.. I guess there are a few of us with that name.

I know there are 493 people in the US with the name John Ayers (Pronounced like John Airs) according to the White Pages. Several even located in Arizona. Who knows how accurate that is. I didn’t think it was a very common name. Well, John is pretty common, but Ayers I didn’t think was.  Thanks to search engines scouring the internet though, I have found it is the 802nd most common surname in the US. Don’t ask me what the other 801 above Ayers are though, but you can read more about the history of Ayers in my blog entries.

However- the good news is. If you are looking for this John Ayers, here I am!  Feel free to connect with me. I look forward to hearing from you!

john ayers

John Ayers , Florida