What to Do if Your Search Rankings Were Hurt by Google's Penguin Update

Have ya heard? A new animal may be wreaking havoc on your ability to get found in search. But this time, it doesn't take the form of a black and white bear. No -- this time, it's even more deceptively cute and harmless. This time ... it's a penguin.

Last week on April 24, Google released a new update called Google Penguin to combat spammy web pages' ability to turn up in Google search results. In fact, you may remember a blog post we wrote last month that hinted this update was coming, conveyed as one meant to target and penalize sites that were "over-optimized" for search. While Google has now clarified that the update was engineered to be more about combatting outright spammy tactics rather than vague instances of "over-optimization," this is the update they were referring to back in March. The Penguin Update slams sites that employ such tactics as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, or misleading/hidden/cloaked links, all of which Google clearly warns against in its Webmaster Guidelines regarding quality.

So now that Google has confirmed that the new update is completely live, how can you tell if you've been bitten by an angry Penguin -- and what should you do about it if you have been? Google and Search Engine Land have both shared some great advice, so let's dig into what you can do if you're suffering from Penguin backlash.

(And honestly, is anyone else curious as to why Google is so enamored with naming its algorithm updates after black and white colored animals? What's next -- Google Zebra?)

How to Tell if You've Been Penalized by Google Penguin

Although there's no way to log in to Google Webmaster Central to determine if you've been hit, Search Engine Land suggests a quick little test you can conduct to get a sense of whether your website is suffering in search since the update was deployed. And, in fact, Google agrees this is the way to go:

Take a look at your website analytics, comparing your organic search traffic from Google a few days before and in the days after Google Penguin launched (April 24). Note: Don't be fooled by Google Panda! Google rolled out an update to Panda, called Panda 3.5, on April 19. This update targets low-quality, not spammy, websites. So if you notice that you were starting to get hurt in terms of organic search traffic prior to April 24, you probably have a Panda problem on your hands. In that case, refer to this post to learn what you can do about it. If you've ruled out Panda, you'll notice 1 of 3 scenarios pertaining to the Penguin Update:

Do you notice a drop in traffic in the days after? If so, you likely have a Penguin problem.Do you notice traffic is staying the same? This means you probably weren't impacted by the update at all; you're probably safe!Do you notice a spike in traffic? This could mean you've actually benefited from the update. Perhaps some of your competitors were penalized by Penguin, and you're swiping some of the traffic that otherwise would've been routed to them. Nice!

If the latter two scenarios are what's playing out for you, then keep up the good work. You're probably doing a good job of playing by Google's guidelines and aren't participating in spammy SEO behavior. If the first scenario sounds more like your situation, keep reading ...

How to Treat Your Google Penguin Wounds

If you're getting hit because of a spammy web presence, you're going to need to clean up those instances of spam.

First things first. Have you verified your Google Webmaster Account yet? There's a chance that Google has already sent you messages regarding your spammy behavior, but if you've never verified your account, you may never have known they were sitting there waiting for you! In fact, Google has been ramping up its attempts to notify users through its Webmaster Tools, using it to send over 700,000 messages to webmasters in January and February 2012. That's more than the total number of message it sent in the whole of 2011!

So, after you've checked your messages, your next step should be to fix any spammy behavior Google flagged and notified you about in particular. But don't stop there. Read through those Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines we mentioned earlier and check your site for instances where you may be participating in some spammy behavior. Then, well, fix those instances! Here is what you should be looking out for as you're auditing your site:

Specific Quality Guidelines From Google (Source):Avoid hidden text or hidden links.Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.Don't send automated queries to Google.Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords (AKA keyword stuffing).Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

If any of these spammy behaviors sound applicable to your website, correct them as soon as possible.

Can You Air Your Grievances if You Feel You've Been Wronged by Penguin?

You may notice there is a tempting link at the bottom of Google's Webmaster Guidelines through which you can 'submit your site for reconsideration' if you've modified it after determining that it didn't meet these guidelines, but here's the deal. Google has said the Penguin update will ding spammy sites automatically, not manually. In other words, submitting a reconsideration request won't do much because Google won't be making any manual exceptions.

If you feel like your site has been penalized unjustly, you're better off using this form to air your grievances to Google, which was created exclusively for users who feel they've been wronged by the Penguin Update. Just do so in a way that explains why your site shouldn't be considered spammy, not using an attitude that blames Google for being a bad guy.

If you know a site affected by algo update that you don't think should be affected, we made a form to provide feedback: goo.gl/nt3Pz

— Matt Cutts (

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New Gmail Image Feature Makes Email Marketing More Social

and Gmail, Google has now taken yet another step toward integrating email and real-time social networking. And this topic should concern you, my fellow marketer. 

Email to Catch up With Social; Google to Catch up With Facebook 

In early 2012, it was announced that Gmail had 350 million active users. While this is an impressive number, Gmail still has a lot of catching up to do to reach Facebook’s 800 million users. In fact, not only is Gmail behind Facebook on overall user adoption, but it also seems to be behind in terms of engagement. A 2010 Nielsen study shows email as the third online channel on which Americans spend most of their time, ranking behind social networks/blogs and games.

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Analyze Twitter Data for Any Search Term [Free Tool]

Over the past few weeks, I've been working -- mostly in secret -- on a sweet new free tool. Well, I'm finally ready to release it this week. It's called TweetCharts, and it's designed to be a simple way for you to quickly and easily obtain Twitter data on any hashtag, username, word, phrase, or URL. No longer do you have to wait for some social media scientist to run a report for you; now you can do it yourself!

To give you a sampling of the different use-cases and information you can pull out of this flexible tool, I ran a few interesting reports and highlighted what I thought was the most useful information from each. Here are a few things I learned...

Understand What Tweet Sources Are Telling You

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The 9 Must-Have Components of Compelling Email Copy

Email marketing has come a long way in just the past few years, but with all the fancy new functionality brands are utilizing, you know what’s kind of funny? A well-written plain text email can perform just as well, if not better, than a highly designed email with tons of bells and whistles. In fact, no matter how fancy your marketing emails look, if they’re devoid of well-written content, your subscribers will stop opening and start deleting your messages, and your list will quickly dwindle in value.

So how do you write a great marketing email? It all comes down to a few copywriting best practices that you should apply to both the subject line of your message, and the message body itself. Next time you draft a message for a lead nurturing campaign or just a one-time email send, ask yourself whether your copy meets all of these guidelines first.

Writing a Compelling Email Subject Line

Part of writing effective email copy is nailing the subject line. The subject line is like the gatekeeper of your email -- no one gets to read your stellar email copy if they aren't interested enough to open your email in the first place. And that interest is garnered almost wholly on the subject line of the email (with the sender name playing a role, as well). We've written an entire blog post about crafting email subject lines, but here's a distillation of what you need to know to write some excellent copy.

Use Actionable Language

With email subject lines, using actionable language doesn't necessarily mean using verbs -- though it certainly helps. OpenTable, for example, sent me an email just a few days ago that said "Take Mom to Brunch" in the subject line. This is one way to use actionable language effectively in email subject lines; by incorporating a verb -- like "take," "download," "reserve," "ask," "buy," etc. -- the reader knows exactly what they can do in the email.

But there are ways to use actionable language without relying on verbs, giving you more room to play with words when crafting email subject lines. Simply use language that makes it clear to the recipient when they can do with the information in the email should they choose to open it. In other words, keep the value for the user top of mind.

For example, TicketMaster sent me an email last week with the subject line "Don't Miss Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band." They didn't order me to purchase tickets by saying "Purchase Tickets Tomorrow for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band," though such a subject line may have performed just as well. The original subject line worked well because it was clear what I could do with the information in that email -- ensure I'm prepared for the 10:00 AM sale time so I could snag my tickets (which I did, thanks to the email)!

Personalize When Possible

Emails that are highly segmented benefit from better performance in a number of areas. Take a look at the data below from eMarketer, which shows the effect of list segmentation and targeting on email marketing performance metrics.

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Why Marketers Must Optimize Emails for HTML AND Plain Text [Infographic]

When you send an email, a lot goes on behind the scenes. And as mere marketing mortals, most of us probably don't understand the process fully, especially when we rely on software to take care of all that technical mumbo-jumbo for us. Just take a look at the following infographic from litmus, which documents an email's journey from the click of the "send" button all the way to the subscriber's inbox. It turns out, getting an email to display properly in a recipient's email client isn't so cut and dry. There are quite a few factors that can affect an email's ability to show up the way you, the marketer, originally intended!

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13 Ways to Create a Cringeworthy Social Media Presence

This week, a new free social media tool called Klouchebag hit the web. If you haven't played around with it already, it's a tool that tells you how ... uh ... annoying you are on Twitter. Yeah, we'll just go with "annoying" for the sake of this blog post. But it got me thinking: social media can be chock full of valuable content, but it's often buried among the mundane and useless social media updates, or hidden behind poorly constructed social media profiles. And this makes a marketer's job mighty hard.

So this post is going to outline all of the worst offenders we've seen in social media. If none of these apply to you, congratulations! Use these as entertainment over your lunch break. Otherwise, consider these cautionary tales to help protect your own social media strategy.

13 Ways to Make People Hate Your Social Media Presence1) Launching a Private Social Media Account

Social media is about talking with and meeting new people. It's right there in the name -- social media. So why on earth would you set up a social media account and then set it to, gulp, private? That's exactly what CVS did when they launched its CVS_Cares Twitter account. If you had tried to follow them around launch time, this is what you would have seen:

 

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Twitter Update Makes it Easier for Users to Discover Your Marketing Content

The savviest of inbound marketers know that content creation is at the heart of a successful inbound marketing strategy. But if marketers are consistently pumping out tons and tons of content, what you end up with is a cluttered web that will only get more cluttered, right?

These days, content discovery is a big problem, both as a user and as a marketer. Your audience is constantly struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff, and as a marketer, you're always looking for ways to make sure your content gets in front of the eyes of that audience.

The good news is, search engines and social networks have been trying to make content discovery and delivery a little bit easier lately. For example, we've witnessed LinkedIn's launch of more robust content targeting tools; Google's pushes to reward high quality content and penalize low-quality, spammy content in search; and various other efforts by Google and social networks to provide more relevant, personalized content to its users.

Well, here's one more for ya! Yesterday, Twitter announced an update to its Discover tab, which aims to provide users with content that is even more personalized and relevant to them.

 

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How to Leverage Thank-You Page Real Estate for Better Marketing

We've touted landing pages as one of the most crucial parts of your marketing (next to content creation, of course) for some time. But there's something that comes after the landing page that doesn't get a lot of attention in the marketing blogosphere ... that moment after a lead converts, and you say "thank you."

You do say thank you, right? Usually it comes in the form of a thank-you page that appears after a lead fills out your form, a thank-you email that goes into their inbox, or both. And there are plenty of opportunities to keep your prospect engaged with your website, content, and brand even after the conversion event. This post will break out those ways so both you and your prospect can keep reaping the benefits of your relationship!

8 Ways Your Thank-You Page and Emails Can Keep Prospects Engaged1) Include Social Media Follow Modules

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25 Little Details That Will Make a BIG Difference at Your Next Event

Throwing a killer marketing event takes tremendous planning and resources; you have to think about attracting PR coverage, turning conversations into sales, and even how you'll integrate inbound marketing throughout the thing. But you're a pro -- wouldn't forget big components like that when planning your event.

The smaller details, however, are likely to escape. And the thing is, it's the little details that make attendees walk away and say, "WHOA, that was an awesome event!" And you do want attendees saying that, right? Here are 25 ways to make jaws drop at your next marketing event. And if you're attending any marketing events in 2012, keep your eyes peeled for unforgettable details like these!

25 Little Ways to Make a Huge Impact At Your Next Event

1) Get a map from your venue that identifies all of the outlets and charging stations. Attendees will need to charge their laptops and mobile devices periodically, so if the venue doesn't provide enough outlets naturally, set up designated charging areas for this purpose. If you're selling sponsorships, this is great real estate to sell!

2) Recruit your friendliest, most knowledgeable employees to remain scattered evenly throughout the venue so someone is always available to answer attendee questions -- and make sure they stand out! At HubSpot events, for example, our employees can often be found wearing bright orange track suits. Believe me, people will have lots of questions. Making it easy to find and identify event point persons will thrill attendees and nip frustration in the bud.

3) Put together a welcome packet that includes a map, nearby places to eat, local activities, taxi or car service contact information, and emergency phone numbers. Many attendees may be coming from out of town, and they'll appreciate receiving help navigating a new city.

4) Alternately, ask your hotel to give attendees a welcome packet that you've put together upon check in. You can often negotiate add-on services like this before you sign your contract. Attendees will really feel the 5-star treatment with a welcoming gesture like this!

5) Make sure your venue has cell reception. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Too bad I've attended more than one event this year that left me incommunicado because of spotty cell reception. Your attendees will be tweeting, checking their email, and texting during your event; bad cell reception would be a huge detriment to a positive experience.

6) You know those bags you get at every conference you attend? They usually have a bunch of sheets of paper and brochures that get thrown out, a branded pen, and maybe a mug. Try including something that's actually useful to attendees! Think about mobile chargers, notepads to accompany those pens, or something else that can be used on-site during their time at your event.

7) Designate an area where people can relax, check their email, and make phone calls. Do not let any sponsors in this area. It should be a safe space where people can escape the conference. Doing this will prevent attendees from leaving the event when they need a break ... and then never coming back!

8) Make sure you have a trustworthy wireless connection, and know exactly who to contact if it stops working. It should be free, easy to access, and every conference attendee should be able to find the username and password. And if any attendee asks for the username and password, every person in an orange track suit (or however you choose to make your point persons stand out) should know the answer as well as their social security number.

9) Speaking of which, debrief everyone from your company that's attending about the details of your event. When they are asked a question by attendees, they should know the answer quickly instead of having to run around the venue searching for the conference coordinator. The most important answers to memorize are the locations of rooms, what sessions are going on and when, who is speaking, where restrooms are located, and what the wireless information is. It is also helpful to have a snapshot of the day's agenda on hand and venue maps in case anyone has lost their copy.

10) Have directional signs to the food area, restrooms, breakout session rooms, general session rooms, and the sponsor area. Make sure these signs are placed in a visible area and easily read from far away.

11) If you're hosting an annual event, have the date of next year's event ready to give to people. Then set up an area where attendees can sign up for next year's conference at a discounted rate.

12) Give different name tags to different people; you should differentiate between partners, sponsors, VIP, and customers. It will make the attendees feel special to be part of a group, recognized for their relationship with your company, and easier to network with others who are part of their group (or better, another group)!

13) Give attendees the chance to have a little fun and take home a personal, memorable keepsake from the event. At one of your evening gatherings, for example, you could set up a photo booth where people can take pictures to remember how much fun they had!

14) Lighting has a huge effect on how your audience feels. It should vary from session to session so you can alter the mood of the room. During the breakout sessions, for example, you want a normal light so people are not distracted and can comfortably take notes. For the parties, you want dim lighting (you know, for the romance). And at a general session, you need to pump up the volume -- use flashing lights in the beginning that get people excited for the conference to begin!

15) Marketers love feedback! Ask attendees what they want to see at your next event, especially those that are already signing up to attend next year's event. Make sure they see that their input from previous years has been taken into account, too.

16) When collecting speaker/session feedback, do so right after the session. If you want until the end of the day or the end of the event, specific details will have escaped attendees' minds, so the feedback will be far less helpful. But right after a session wraps up, peoples' minds are fresh!

17) Make sure your event flows. Yes, "flow" is another fluffy marketing term like "engagement" is in social media marketing. But what it really means is that you don't host back-to-back sessions that occur on opposite sides of your venue. And you don't have a buffet line with one entry, and one exit point. Keep a condensed space so attendees don't have to run around from place to place, and consider how foot traffic will naturally move in between sessions and during events.

18) Leverage mobile. You could create an app for attendees to download that includes the event schedule, a person's individual agenda, a notes section, etc. Or you could simply ensure your event website is mobile optimized so it's easy for attendees to access everything they need right from their smartphones.

19) Provide real-time updates on session changes and schedule updates. Let people sign up to be on a wait-list for sessions they couldn't get into, and if people cancel, alert them of the opening. You can use email for this, or let attendees opt in for SMS alerts.

20) Registration is a thorn in everyone's side -- attendees and conference organizers. So make it quick and easy at your event by assembling plenty of staff to help, and having all of your materials ready to go so people can move through the registration line swiftly. For an extra special touch, include a QR code in your registration confirmation email, and let people pull up their confirmation on their mobile devices, just like checking in at the airport. It's paperless, quick, and makes you look totally futuristic.

21) Make sure everyone can visually see the speaker. That might mean setting up huge screens throughout the seating area (which may increase your budget) but it's necessary for keeping attendees engaged in the session. There is something about being able to hear and see a speaker that makes a presentation much better.

22) Don't set up your rooms using long rows. Instead, opt for rounds or short rows so people can easily get up and get out if necessary without being disruptive -- to both the speaker and their fellow attendees.

23) Surprise attendees with special additions to their day! If your event is taking place in the summer, bring in ice cream or sorbet for them to enjoy. If it's winter, surprise everyone with hot chocolate and marshmallows.

24) If some of your speakers are authors, offer to host a book signing. Not only do attendees get to walk away with a signed book, but they get to meet the speaker in person to ask question about the content from the presentations. 

25) Don't just use social media, but integrate it completely into the event. Set up an event hashtag and remind attendees of it frequently to encourage conversations on Twitter. Then reference those conversations during the event so more can join in on the fun -- you can even hold contests based on social media interaction. Finally, make sure you set up screens throughout the event space that show real-time event social media updates.

What little things do you think make a big difference at events?

Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds

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The Ultimate Glossary of Performance Metrics Every Marketer Should Know

Good marketers live by their data. Why? Metrics help us set goals and track progress, and numbers confirm we did a good job. Marketers should have control of their own data, as well as determine what metrics they might need to track before starting any new campaign. By digging into results, we can understand what worked well, what didn't work well, and then learn from it.

Now be strong, you data-driven marketer, you! Jump into this, the most comprehensive metrics and analytics glossary we've ever written. After reading this article, you will have earned your own data geek super hero cape.

Content

1) Blog Traffic - We all want to know how many people are visiting our blog day-to-day or month-to-month. This metric is the total number of people who are viewing your blog content. Is that number changing over time? What is the month-to-month growth rate? That's a great measurement to gauge content success!

2) Blog Subscribers - The number of people who are subscribing to your blog (via RSS or email) is an indicator of the value of your content. If they appreciate what you're writing, they will subscribe to get more. Watch how this number grows over time.

 

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Why Landing Pages Are an Indispensable Part of Marketing

Any savvy inbound marketer "gets" that once you've done all that hard work to get visitors to your website, the next big step is to convert them into leads for your business. But what's the best way to get them to convert? Landing pages, that's what!

Unfortunately, there seems to be a major disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use by marketers. According to MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business' homepage, not a special landing page. Furthermore, of the B2B companies that are using landing pages, 62% have six or fewer total landing pages.

Landing pages are the heart and soul of an inbound marketer's lead generation efforts, so why are they still so underutilized? MarketingSherpa cites that the number one reason businesses don't use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn't know how to set them up or they are too overloaded.

But let's put a stop to this, shall we, marketers? Landing pages are much too critical to the success of your lead generation efforts to sweep under the rug, and here's why.

What is a Landing Page?

First, let's start with a simple definition:

A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor's information through a lead-capture form (AKA a conversion form).

A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular ebook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or redeem other marketing offers such as free trials, demos, or coupons for your product. Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they've converted on.

How Landing Pages Work

For a more complete understanding of how landing pages make visitor-to-lead conversions (and reconversions) possible, let's talk through a hypothetical scenario that will help demonstrate the simple pathway of a visitor into a lead through a landing page.

Let's say you own a professional painting business, and your services include a variety of professional indoor and outdoor paint jobs. You're a savvy inbound marketer, so you maintain a business blog that features articles about painting tips and tricks. You also have several more premium marketing offers like free educational ebooks on painting and free, no-obligation painting consultations.

Now let's say a mother was looking for a professional painter to paint her new baby-to-be's nursery but was first doing some research into color schemes. She comes across your blog post entitled "10 Popular Nursery Room Color Schemes for 2012" as a result of a Google search, and she clicks through to read it. When she reaches the bottom of the article, she notices a call-to-action (CTA), which is essentially an ad, for one of your offers -- a free painting consultation to help her decide which color scheme would work best with the size and type of nursery she's working with. "That would be valuable," she thinks, clicking on the CTA and visiting the landing page where she can sign up for her free consultation.

The landing page provides some additional information and details about what she will get out of the free consultation, convincing her it's worth providing her contact information on the landing page's conversion form in order to take advantage of the offer. She submits her information, and voila! -- she's now a viable lead for your painting business with whom you can easily follow up! What's more, she wants you to follow up with her. How fantastic does that sound?

And this isn't the only pathway through which a visitor can travel to convert into a lead. In addition to search, visitors can find your site and its landing pages through a number of marketing channels including email, social media, PPC, direct traffic, or referral traffic. Furthermore, they can find your landing pages through calls-to-action you place throughout your website, or directly as a result of you sharing the link to those landing pages in these other marketing channels.

They key, as a marketer, is to create these landing pages in the first place, and make it easy for potential customers to find them in your various marketing efforts.

6 Reasons You Need Landing Pages

Still not convinced that landing pages can make your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective? Here are 6 more compelling reasons:

1) Easily Generate Leads! If you could do one thing right now to drastically improve your lead generation efforts, it would be to use landing pages on your website. As we mentioned earlier, too many companies send their email, social media, and search traffic to their homepages. This is the equivalent of throwing leads away. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages. Landing pages provide a very easy way to generate leads for your sales team that you can then easily segment, nurture, or distribute to your sales team.

2) Give Your Offers a Place to Live: Marketing offers and landing pages go hand in hand. Just think back to our painting business example. Without being gated behind landing pages, your offers will do nothing to support your lead generation efforts. The idea is to require your website visitors to 'pay' you in contact information for something valuable like an offer, and your landing page is the collections tool.

3) Collect Demographic Information About Your Prospects: Every time a lead completes a conversion form on a landing page, your marketing and sales team is collecting valuable information about your leads. Your marketing team can then use this information to understand what types of visitors or marketing personas are converting, and your sales team already has a baseline of information about a lead before they reach out.

4) Understand Which Prospects Are More Engaged: Landing pages not only enable you to generate new leads; they also allow you to track reconversions of existing leads, which you can then use to identify which prospects are more engaged with your business. This also enables you to collect better intelligence on your leads' behaviors and activities on your website, which your sales team can use in the sales process.

 

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7 Clever Email Campaigns That Get Customers Buying Again

If you have a great product, customers will probably want to buy from you again. But that doesn't mean they'll always remember to. People are busy; no matter how much they love you, sometimes it's just hard to keep in touch, you know? Which is why email remarketing campaigns are great ideas for those who have purchased (or almost purchased) from you in the past!

What's an email remarketing campaign, you ask? Pretty much what it sounds like ... you send an email marketing campaign to a lead or customer in your database that encourages them to purchase from you again. And ecommerce businesses that don't leverage remarketing campaigns are missing a huge revenue opportunity -- according to Practical eCommerce, only 5% of new customers that make a purchase with a company return to the site, and only 3% make a second purchase. Them's not good odds.

But they can get better when you leverage email remarketing campaigns. Practical eCommerce also found that customers who have recently made a purchase on your site are more than twice as likely to return to your site and complete a purchase when they receive remarketing emails. Now those are numbers I can get behind.

So to get you started with email remarketing, we've gathered some creative ideas for you to consider for your own email remarketing campaigns, all from real brands that are excelling with their own programs. Take a look, and get some inspiration so you can generate more revenue out of a contact database that already loves you!

1) Abandoned Shopping Cart

We'll start with the most common email campaign used to recall customers to your website -- the abandoned shopping cart email. Take a look at how HubSpot customer Shar Music gets in touch with customers who have almost completed a purchase on their website, but abandon their shopping cart at the last minute.

 

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Why You Need Social Media, Even if Your Customers Don't

Well, here's the thing: your customers probably are on social media. Can any B2B company make the case that its target audience isn't on LinkedIn? Are there B2C companies without potential customers on Facebook? I guess it's possible, but it certainly won't stay that way for long. 79% of US adults use social media (if you were tuning into our webinar with Facebook today, you would have heard that very stat)! And eMarketer predicts there will be 1.43 billion worldwide social media users in 2012. Wow.

But this blog post isn't an attempt to convince you that your future customers are using social media. It's an attempt to convince you that there are many other reasons why social media is a crucial component of a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy -- and they have nothing to do with "engaging" with your target audience.

So let's pretend that your customers aren't on social media, or that you work for someone who thinks they aren't and, as such, doesn't see the point in investing in a social media marketing program. We all know how hard it is to convince non-believers of the importance of social media, so this post will serve as your guide for having that conversation. Here's how you can make the case for social media marketing to your boss -- even if he or she doesn't believe your target audience is using social media!

1) Social Media Activity Impacts Your Organic Search Presence

If you're investing in content creation, it would be a shame not to get it any visibility in organic search. Social media plays a bigger role in the visibility of web pages in search engines every day. In fact, Google even started to incorporate Google

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A Marketer's Guide to Optimizing Images for Google Search

There's no doubt about it: the visual content revolution is upon us, as is evident by the infographic craze, the popularity of websites like Pinterest, and the success of visual content on social media sites like Facebook and Google

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How Google Search Works, In a Nutshell

Unless you're an SEO expert, it's no surprise if you're mystified by the inner-workings of Google search. How on Earth does Google decide how to rank the pages on your website? If this question has ever crossed your mind, keep reading. This post should simplify things for you.

Yesterday, Google's head of web spam, Matt Cutts, published a video on the GoogleWebmasterHelp YouTube channel called "How does Google search work?" In the video, Cutts addresses the following question he received in the Google Webmaster Help Forum:

Hi Matt, could you please explain how Google's ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases etc. - RobertvH, Munich

"So that’s basically just like, tell me everything about Google. Right?" Cutts chuckles.

All kidding aside, this isn't an unreasonable question -- but it's not an easy one to answer, either. The Google search ranking algorithm is a big, hairy beast, taking into account a variety of factors (over 200, in fact) to deliver the best results to Google searchers. But sometimes the most helpful explanation is the simplest one. As Cutts states in the video, he could spend hours and hours talking about how Google search works, but he was nice enough to parse it into the following 8-minute video. Without further ado, here's the video, accompanied by a written breakdown of what Cutts says in the video (via the transcript provided by Search Engine Land), from crawling to indexing to ranking by Google search:

How Google Crawls the WebCrawling Then

In the video, Cutts explains how Google used to crawl the web, which was a long and drawn out process. Google would crawl for 30 days -- that's right, over the course of several weeks! Afterward, Google would take about a week to index what it found, and then it'd push that data out through the search engine, which would also take a week. "And so that was what the Google dance was," says Cutts.

Sometimes Google would find a data center that had old data, and sometimes it'd hit one containing new data. To make this more efficient, after Google crawled for 30 days, it'd recrawl pages with a high PageRank (a Google ranking factor that ranks web pages by how many other pages link to it, and how reputable those pages are), such as the CNN homepage, to see if anything new or important had been published. But Cutts admits that, for the most part, this was not a great process, since search results would quickly be out of date considering the 30-day crawl time.

Crawling Now

Today, things are a bit different. Cutts admits that Google still uses PageRank as the primary determinant in its ranking algorithm. The better PageRank your web page has, the more likely that Google will discover that page relatively early in the crawl. For example, crawling in strict PageRank order, Google would find the CNNs and The New York Times of the world, as well as other very high PageRank websites, first.

In 2003, Cutts remarks, as part of an update called Update Fritz, Google switched to crawling a significant chunk of the web every day. Google broke the web into various segments and Google crawled that part of the web, refreshing it every night. In other words, at any given point, Google's main base index would only be so out of date, because then it'd loop back around and refresh it with the newly crawled pages. This was a much more efficient way to crawl since, rather than waiting for everything to finish, Google was incrementally updating its index. "And we’ve gotten even better over time," says Cutts. And at this point, Google search has gotten very fresh; any time there are updates, Google can usually find them very quickly.

As a comparison, Cutts talks about how in the early days of Google, it'd have a supplemental index in addition to the main/base index. The supplemental index was something that Google wouldn’t crawl and refresh quite as often, and it also consisted of a lot more web pages. So essentially, Google would have really fresh content not only from the layer of its main index, but also from other pages that weren't refreshed quite as often, which Google has a lot more of.

How Google Indexes Web Pages

After Google crawls the web, it indexes the pages it finds. So say Google has crawled a large fraction of the web, and within that portion of the web, it's looking at each web page. To explain how indexing is done, Cutts uses the search term 'Katy Perry' as an example:

"In a document, Katy Perry appears right next to each other. But what you want in an index is which documents does the word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word Perry appear in? So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89, and 555, and 789. And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and 73, and 555, and 1,000. And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing, so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words, and they have it in document order."

In other words, what indexing says is, "Okay, these are all the web pages a search term appears in."

How Google Ranks Web Pages in Search Results

The last piece of the puzzle is how Google ranks which pages appear for the search terms someone types into Google. In the video, Cutts continues his Katy Perry example.

So for instance, if someone visits Google.com and types 'Katy Perry,' Google thinks, "Okay, what web pages might match 'Katy Perry'?" If web page 1 has 'Katy' but not 'Perry,' and web page 2 has 'Perry' but not 'Katy,' those two are out of the running. If web page 5 has both 'Katy' and 'Perry,' it's a possibility. Furthermore, web pages 89 and 73 would be out because they also don’t have the right combination of words. If web page 555 has both 'Katy' and 'Perry,' it's still in as well.

So when searchers visit Google.com and type in whatever their search term is, whether it's 'Chicken Little,' 'Britney Spears,' 'Matt Cutts,' 'Katy Perry,' or something else, Google finds the pages it believes contains those words, either on the page itself, in backlinks to the page, or in anchor text pointing to the page. Once Google has completed what is called 'Document Selection,' it tries to figure out how to rank those pages. It's a tricky thing, says Cutts, since Google takes into consideration PageRank as well as over 200 other factors when deciding whether a web page is really authoritative, and how to rank it.

For example, one page may have a good reputation because it has a high PageRank, but it also may only have the word 'Perry' in it once, and it might just happen to have the word 'Katy' somewhere else on the page. On the other hand, there might be a page that has the words 'Katy' and 'Perry' right next to each other (so it has proximity), and the page also has a good reputation with a lot of links pointing to it.

Therefore, Google tries to balance that -- relevancy and authority -- to surface reputable pages that are also about what the searcher is looking for. But it's not as simple as that, considering Google is taking those 200

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How to Set the Right Lead Gen Goals for Your Marketing Team

As inbound marketers, we all know the value and importance of measuring, tracking, and reporting on key metrics and goals. Let's take the data you collect around your lead generation efforts, for instance. If you know what your marketing team can generate for new leads, and you also know your average lead-to-customer conversion rate, your business can actually predict future sales! And with closed-loop marketing in place, you can even track the revenue generated from the leads that were influenced by various channels or marketing events.

That's a lot of meaty data, but how do you take that information and apply it to setting a lead generation goal that helps you meet your business objectives? Your effectiveness as a lead generator hinges on your ability to generate both the right amount, and the right type of leads. Establishing the right balance for your business is crucial, but tricky -- luckily this post will explain exactly how you can do it! Here are 4 simple steps to set effective lead generation goals for your marketing team.

Step 1: Determine if you want to measure quantity, quality, or both.

The first step to setting goals for your marketing team is to figure out what you want to measure -- remember, you can't determine whether you met your goals if you aren't measuring them! Most marketers have traditionally measured themselves on the quantity of leads they produce each month or quarter. This is easy to do if you have inbound marketing software, which allows marketers to track their lead generation progress across every campaign. For example, in HubSpot's software, all you have to do is input your lead generation goal, and easily track the number of leads you generate each day, week, month, or year!

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How Savvy Inbound Marketers Get Results From Guest Blogging

This is a guest post written by Bamidele Onibalusi, a professional freelance writer, copywriter, and guest blogger. You can learn practical tips on how to write online for traffic and money or learn more about his freelance writing services on his website.

When it comes to guest blogging, the dream of many marketers is to write for the most popular blog in their niche, generate a solid flow of traffic, get a big boost in subscribers, and maybe even achieve an overnight rise to stardom. Unfortunately, while that might have been easy several years ago, it is almost impossible today. Most people guest blog for referral traffic and subscribers, but I guest blog for inbound links; for good reason, too.

The idea of guest blogging these days usually consists of writing a guest post for a very popular blog, generating a lot of referral traffic, and repeating the cycle. Unfortunately, this method is so overused that it is hardly as effective as it used to be. The true benefit of guest blogging, rather, is inbound links.

Why Guest Blog for Inbound Links Rather Than Referral Traffic?

When people guest blog with the goal of referral traffic in mind, their thought process goes something like this ...

I'll get my article published on a blog that generates a lot of traffic, and as a result, people will click on the links in my post, driving referral traffic back to my website or blog. Through this new traffic, I'll generate more readers and subscribers!

Sounds logical, but the fact of the matter is, many people think this tactic will generate much more traffic and subscribers then it actually does, and they fail to effectively capitalize on the true benefit of guest blogging: inbound links. When you blog for inbound links, on the other hand, there's a much smarter thought process ...

I'll get my article published on a blog that aligns with my expertise, and through careful optimization of the anchor text and pages I link to within the post, I'll have control over a few inbound links that will help boost the search engine optimization of the pages I'm linking back to on my website. I may attract some immediate new traffic and subscribers in the process, but the true benefit will be from the long-term search traffic I'll generate!

A Personal Case Study

To prove how much more effective guest blogging is for generating inbound links instead of referral traffic, I conducted a guest blogging experiment 6 months ago. I’d always been a believer of the idea that writing guest posts for popular blogs is the way to go, and I’ve had a few highly successful guest posts in the past. The idea for the experiment was to write 31 guest blog posts focused on improving search (not referral) traffic to a few quality articles and specialized landing pages on my site. Of the 31 guest posts that were submitted, 28 were published, and a large percentage of them were published within a week of when I submitted them. The focus of the challenge was to see how effective guest blogging is for inbound links, and determine the impact those links had on search traffic. The guest posts were submitted to smaller blogs with an Alexa rank of 50k to 400k and a maximum PageRank of 4.

The Results

The result of the challenge was an increase of 100

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How to Use Hashtags on Twitter: A Simple Guide for Marketers

Every time we host live webinars (and as this long list suggests, that is quite often), quite a few attendees get confused about what to do with the hashtag we provide. What is it? What does it do? How do you create one? Let me explain!

What is a hashtag?

A Twitter hashtag is simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it. For example, #inboundchat and #ILoveChocolate are both hashtags.

What does a hashtag do?

A Twitter hashtag ties the conversations of different users into one stream, which you can find by searching the hastag in Twitter Search or by using a third-party monitoring tool such as HootSuite.

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7 Lead Gen Opportunities PR Pros Should Seize

Most people don't think of PR professionals and brand marketers as lead generators. After all, it's hard to measure the effect a placement or a graphic has on leads. But brand marketers actually have a lot of opportunity to help their marketing team generate and reconvert leads. It's simply a matter of thinking outside the box, considering how a person becomes a lead, and leveraging the tools brand marketers have at their disposal. If you work in PR and branding and really want to contribute to your marketing team's lead generation efforts, here are 7 opportunities to get you started!

Case Studies & Testimonials

Case studies and testimonials are an important part of marketing to your audience. Including current customers' opinions of your product and service is a tried and true way of encouraging prospects to use your business. And what's great about case studies and testimonials is that those reading them are often already leads -- and likely near the bottom of the buying funnel -- so a few more reconversions will help your sales team prioritize them as likely future customers in their sales funnel. Turning this content into a lead generator will be a huge win for lead reconversions and a better lead-to-customer conversion rate.

To do it, create videos interviewing your customers about your product or service. During the editing process, add video annotations that include a link to one of your landing pages. Then at the end of the video, include the URL for that landing page again -- something people in the video industry call a bumper. You can take a look at this type of lead generation in action in our own case study video below. Or if you prefer to do written case studies (in web or PDF form), you can insert calls-to-action within the actual case study pages.

Smart shoppers look at what customers are saying before making a purchase decision, and having these calls-to-action will encourage them to sign up for a demo of your product, speak with a sales person, convert into a customer, or maybe even become a lead for the first time.

SlideShare

Presentations on SlideShare get thousands of views on a daily basis. But often, people upload their presentations on SlideShare after they deliver them at an event (great!) without including an extra slide with a call-to-action (no good!). Adding that extra slide at the end of your presentation with a clickable call-to-action is a simple way to generate leads.

Think about it this way -- a person looks at your deck on SlideShare, recognizes you as a thought leader because of the great information you've provided, and then will want to find out more about your company. Including that extra slide at the end of the deck will be a natural next step for them to find out more. For example, on HubSpot's Slideshare account, we added slides at the end of recently created and older, high performing decks. Take a look at one example here:

News & Awards Pages

A big part of a brand professionals' jobs is not only getting placements in external publications, but applying for awards that get your company recognition. On your website, there's often a dedicated location that becomes the go-to place for people to see the publications you've been featured in and awards you've received -- you should put CTA buttons in a visible place on all of these pages. 

Many companies also maintain a separate blog that updates people on company achievements -- if you create enough content and have a wide enough audience, it makes sense to separate your educational content and more self-promotional content in this way. This is another opportunity for you to generate leads by including CTAs on each of these individual blog posts.

Other Members of the Marketing Team

Part of being in charge of your company's brand is working with other teams within the Marketing department. The brand team could work with the social media, content, or product team to create content that will interest leads. For example, our branding team worked with our social media team to create a Texts from Marketers campaign to help generate more leads. Here's how it worked.

First, we posted this picture on Facebook.

 

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Building Business Relationships to Last

Okay, you’ve made that great first impression. Now what? It’s time to build a strong relationship with this person. Your goal here is to begin asking questions and listening to find common ground.

Find out where they’re from, maybe their hometown, college, or even their favorite sport or team. This will build a stronger relationship and conversational material for future meetings or chats on the phone. The information you bring to the table in this relationship combined with your value, skills and beliefs can take this to higher roads.

What you put into this relationship is usually what you get in return. The greater the value you give this person, the stronger the business relationship will become. This will lead to possible future ties to more relationships with their clients or business partners. Giving them leads or introducing them to possible business relationships can also build a strong bond.

Not every relationship provides value, but this is something you might not know in the beginning. Consider it practice and learn from it. You might be valuable to them, and sometimes you have to give before you receive. It goes back to that saying, “When you help others reach their needs, in return you will too.

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My BIG FAT, Internet Marketing Formula

As you flip the pages of this newsletter, and gain all the priceless insights contained herein, I’d like you to take this specific article here and cut it out

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Helping Others Will Build Relationships

Think about it. It’s absolutely the one of the truest statements I know. Here’s an example. This can relate to a lot of different situations. In this case it was an unhappy person/customer:

I had a customer on the phone the other day and he was stating he needed help or he would have to cancel a particular product. You have been there. You don’t understand something, but a simple solution could be answered by someone else who knows the next step or solution to your problem. At this point, I’m starting this conversation with his wall in front of me, so to say. I have to break this wall down before I can even go any further.

Listen to the customer or possible future relation. Find out what is the real problem and find a solution that will help him and benefit you at the same time. Helping them with their problem and not putting it off shows your relation you are there to help them.

Now, I helped him overcome what turned out to be a simple problem. Not so simple for some, but I was able to help him in this circumstance. This was the first step in the process of relationship building. Helping him gained his trust and attention. He was grateful, now that I have his attention. I started to ask him some key questions about what he does for a living. By doing this I am building a relationship for future integration at this point without him even knowing it. Not only did I save a customer from cancelling, I solved his problem, and I built a relationship. I got all his contact information and followed up with him a few days later. He was thrilled to hear from me. He started to tell me more about what he did; once again I gave him some more advice.

One week later he called me to thank me because of the advice I gave him. It relieved him of a major stress factor he was having and increased his sales and production by 30%. Now that I had opened a door to a new business relationship and I started to tell him a little about our company. We are now integrating with each other, with profits I must add. So, you can see how valuable helping others will build relations and in this example bring in profits.

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Klout to Launch Brand Pages: Should Marketers Care?

Earlier this week, Klout announced its own version of brand pages -- Brand "Squads." Klout calls these pages a "way of giving influencers a place to be recognized and have a direct impact on the brands they care about most."

And while influencers get excited for their potential to be recognized by top brands, social media marketers also have plenty of reasons to be excited for this cool new tool.

This post will break down all the new features Klout Brand Squads will provide, and why they matter to marketers. But first, take a look at the Brand Squad of Red Bull -- the lucky brand being used to beta test this new feature -- so you can get an idea of what the layout might look like when this rolls out to all brands.

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32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links

This is a guest post by Corey Northcutt, who manages a Chicago-based SEO and content marketing agency called Northcutt. Follow him on Google

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How to Integrate Inbound Call Tracking With Online Analytics

For many marketers who rely on the phone, life is like living in Germany -- before the wall came down.

On one side of the wall -- the click side -- life is rich with data. You can track inbound traffic, its sources, its path through your site, and its progress through your funnel. The other side of the wall, however -- the call side -- is data poor. You get calls to your business, but you don’t know where they came from, and it's hard to track them.

Today, there's good news for marketers straddling both sides of the wall. The wall is coming down!

A new class of software tools allows you to actually track incoming calls almost the same way as you track clicks.

Why Call Tracking Is Crucial for Marketers

A recent comScore study commissioned by Google concluded that 63% of website visitors completed their purchases offline.

Think about that -- it means that a majority of website visitors who make purchases start the process on one side of the data wall (the data-rich, web-based side), then end the process on the other, whether it's in a brick-and-mortar store, or on the data-poor, phone-based side. That means all the marketing effort going into attracting and nurturing website visitors is not properly being accounted for. In order to more properly understand your customers' buying cycles, and to understand which marketing dollars are truly driving sales, you need to break down the wall. You need to set up call tracking. 

How Does Call Tracking Work?

There are a number of new tools that allow marketers to implement call tracking. Here's a typical process for setting up and using it:

First, you'll need to set up the app by following steps like the ones below:

Install the call tracking app. (HubSpot users, for example, can visit the App Marketplace and install HubSpot RingRevenue App.)Install a simple piece of javascript to your website (a one-minute job); then tag the phone numbers on your site that you want to track.

Once these two setup steps are done, you're ready to track calls. Here's how that typically works:

When a new prospect comes to your site after the javascript and tags are set up, they’ll see a new phone number.When the prospect calls the new phone number, your call tracking app should be begin tracking the caller. (If you're using the HubSpot RingRevenue app, RingRevenue will create a lead in HubSpot for the call; at the same time, it will drop a cookie on the caller’s site so it can track the caller's activity on your site. It will then add that to the caller's lead record in HubSpot. See the image below.)

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Facebook Enhances Analytics to Enable Smarter Ad Targeting for Marketers

Seems like the team over at Facebook has been eating their Wheaties. Now that Timeline for brand pages and Premium Advertising is all rolled out, they've stepped up their game yet again with some brand new -- extremely robust -- analytics that I'm sure they hope will encourage marketers and business owners to spend more (and better targeted) dollars on their ad platform.

Facebook hasn't made the official announcement yet, but luckily our friends at TechCrunch were able to get an inside scoop. Let's take a look at the changes Facebook has rolled out so you can determine if the improvements will make starting -- or increasing -- your Facebook ad spend worth your while. Honestly? I think these changes just might do the trick!

What's New in Facebook Ads Manager

In the past, Facebook's Ads API only allowed marketers to target their ads to users based on pretty basic things -- like clicks, likes, or checkins. With this newest change, however, advertisers using Facebook's API can target ads only to those people most likely to take a certain post-click action -- in other words, a conversion event that actually means something for marketers.

For example, you might be most interested in serving ads to users who share your content on their news feed, or those who redeem one of your Facebook Offers. Instead of guessing who is most likely to take this action with a mix of pseudo-demographic targeting and hocus pocus, Facebook will help you identify those people based on conversion data 1, 7, or 28 days after their clicks. So if an ad you served 7 days ago resulted in high-ROI activity for you, like an app install, you can attribute that back to the proper advertisement.

Here's a preview of the new interface, courtesy of TechCrunch:

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Understanding How Your Marketing Analytics Gives Credit for Conversions

When chatting with marketers, one of the most common questions we hear at HubSpot is regarding "first touch" versus "last touch" attribution in marketing analytics. First touch, last touch, and assist reports are all different ways to attribute conversions on your website, and each of these attribution methods will tell you something different and important about the effectiveness of your marketing and the behavior of your visitors.

The following guide will help you understand the difference between "last touch," "first touch," and "assists" attribution, as well as give you a sense of the primary use-cases for each approach. As a wise man once said, you should always give credit where credit is due!

What Are 'Attributions' in Marketing Analytics?

Before we begin, first a definition ...

'Attribution' is a way of understanding which marketing channels or campaigns contributed to a conversion on your website. In HubSpot software, for example, you'll notice that our Marketing Analytics tools report on the number of leads and customers generated through various marketing efforts -- that information is what you'd call an attribution. But because a lead's or customer's lifecycle with your company is made up of a number of different interactions, there are multiple ways to report on attribution. Understanding how attribution works will help you understand which of your marketing efforts are actually generating results.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's discuss the different attribution methods that can be used in your marketing analytics.

Last Touch Attribution

Most analytics packages, including Google Analytics, use last touch attribution as their main method of reporting. Last touch data shows you the most recent interactions and conversions your leads had on your website before they converted.

When It's Useful

As its name suggests, last touch reporting is useful in determining what happened right before your leads converted. If we were presenting last touch data for a given soccer game, for example, it would attribute the winning goal to whoever kicked the ball into the net. Last touch analytics, therefore, is often a good measure of the effectiveness of different landing pages, email campaigns, or other efforts that tend to lead to a direct conversion. What it doesn't tell you, however, is anything else that led up to that conversion. So, if we were to extend that same soccer analogy, it wouldn't give credit to the defender who made that great forward pass that made the goal possible.  

HubSpot's Landing Page Analytics report (pictured below), for instance, uses last touch attribution to help marketers evaluate which landing pages were most effective at generating leads and customers. Looking at first touch attribution for the two customers who converted on the Introduction to Business Blogging ebook offer, however, would show marketers an entirely different view. 

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Google Launches Improved Online Advertising Metrics for Brand Marketers

For traditional brand marketers, it's no secret that measuring the impact of advertising efforts has always been a struggle. But with the rise of the web and digital advertising, luckily, these efforts have gotten much easier to measure through such standardized metrics as clicks, interaction rates, and conversions.

But have these metrics ever really been good enough to measure branding?

Google thinks not. Which is why today at the Ad Age Digital Conference, Google, partnering with the industry and supporting the IAB's Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) coalition, has launched the new Brand Activate Initiative, "an ongoing Google effort to address these challenges and re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers." The new initiative aims to reduce marketers' challenges in measuring an ad's ability to cause changes in brand favorability or in driving purchase intent and, ultimately, sales.

The announcement of Google's new initiative is also accompanied by its first wave of new brand metrics, which are being built into the tools advertisers already use to manage their ad campaigns. These three measurement initiatives are the Active View and Active GRP metrics (both rolling out starting today), and the Brand Impact Survey Pilot (coming soon).

Before we dive into what these individual metrics mean, check out Google's overview video on its new Brand Activate Initiative:

Active View

The first of the new Brand Activate Initiative metrics is Active View, a technology that can count “viewed” impressions, or a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second, as defined by the IAB’s proposed standard. In other words, with Active View, brand marketers can understand more than just impressions (i.e. simply whether their ads have been served). Now they can also understand whether the ad was actually viewed. Active View is made up of two insights: the percentage of the ad that was seen, as well as the duration for which it was seen.

Active View is being submitted for accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC), will be available in the coming weeks within the Google Display Network Reserve, and will be made a universal currency that will ultimately be offered within DoubleClick for Advertisers and Google's publisher partners, meaning advertisers will have the opportunity to pay only for Active View, or viewed impressions.

Active GRP (Gross Rating Point)

Active GRP is an online metric that adopts the methodology of GRP (gross rating point), a television advertising metric used to estimate how many people saw a certain TV advertisement. Google hopes that by using an online equivalent of this standard offline metric, marketers will be able to extend brand marketing from offline to online, comparing results across the two mediums.

Active GRP, like the traditional offline metric, enables marketers to determine the reach and frequency of a given online advertising campaign. But because Active GRP is built into the ad serving tools Google's publishers and marketers already use, it also allows marketers to react and make adjustments to their campaigns in real time, a feature missing from its offline counterpart. According to Google, Active GRP also depends on a robust methodology that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data with Active View data to combat issues like panel skewing and reliance on a single data source.

Active GRP is first being used in a pilot program for Google's DoubleClick for Advertisers clients before being rolled out to other products.

Brand Impact Survey Pilot

The final brand measurement initiative Google mentioned is its Impact Survey Pilot with digital brand advertising measurement company, Vizu. While Google reported very little on what this entails, we do know that it is the result of an experiment Google reported on last month involving online brand measurement research for approximately 70 DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) campaigns. The approach leverages DoubleClick ad-serving technology to generate two groups of users that have been randomly selected. One group sees the campaign ads, while the other sees public service ads instead, and Vizu’s sampling technology is then used to administer a brand lift survey to all users to measure such variables as brand awareness, purchase intent, and favorability. According to Google:

"The brand results show how ads performed across the campaign, as well as different sites and ad frequencies. This data can be used with the other campaign metrics in DFA to help marketers to see the impact of the campaign using any metric they want -- from impressions to clicks to brand impact to conversions."

A Big Win for Brand Marketers

These three new online advertising metrics are definitely a big win for brand marketers everywhere. And Google reportedly isn't stopping there, mentioning plans to continue iterating, integrating, and providing even more metrics for brand marketers to understand how their digital advertising efforts are paying off. 

As Google says, "We think that with brand new metrics comes a new brand moment -- one that will encourage brands to invest in the web, help publishers show the value of their digital content, and stimulate digital media’s own golden age."

For many, online advertising has proven to be a great complement to an overarching inbound marketing strategy, but measuring advertising's impact on branding has always been a struggle. But with new initiatives sprouting up like Google's, brand marketers will more effectively be able to measure how well their digital advertising campaigns are contributing to their overall marketing programs, and that's certainly to marketers' delight.

What do you think of Google's new initiative? Will you be more apt to experiment with online advertising as more robust metrics become available?

Image Credit: TimWilson

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10 Foolproof Ways to Earn Your Landing Page Visitors' Trust

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8% of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8% are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92% of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offers.

The thing is, we've all been burned too many times by companies that don't deliver on their offers' promises, sell our personal information, and SPAM us with irrelevant emails. As such, we've all accrued some keen Spidey senses that kick in when we visit landing pages that tell us whether a company is trustworthy, or whether we should cut and run. But what are those landing page characteristics that kick in our feel-good senses and also help to reduce landing page friction? Well, there are at least 10 of them that I know of, and this post will break down what they are so you can earn the trust of your landing page visitors and capture more of them as leads.

10 Ways to Earn Your Landing Page Visitors' Trust1) Ensure your call-to-action (CTA) offer and landing page offer align.

When a visitor clicks on a CTA and gets to your landing page, they expect something -- they expect to see what that CTA button said they would see. Unfortunately, what happens all too often is the ol' bait and switch. There's a call-to-action that is so amazing every visitor is going to click on it (congratulations, your CTA has a great click-through rate!), but when they get to your landing page, they abandon because they realize they've been duped (congratulations, this exercise was a tremendous waste of you and your visitors' time!).

If your CTA offers a guide about how to unclog a clogged sink drain, make sure your landing page promises to deliver a guide about how to unclog a clogged sink drain -- not a tangentially related 15% off coupon for plumbing supplies.

2) Write clear copy that explains what visitors will get with offer redemptions.

Much of trust is based in perception. So you very well may be delivering on the offer you promised, but if the language you use seems different, visitors will assume you've tricked them, and they'll abandon your landing page without completing the form. For an example of someone using language to clearly explain their offers and align their CTAs and landing pages, let's take a look at one of HubSpot's customers, Andrew Harper's Luxury Travel Blog.

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How to Create Custom Tabs for Facebook Business Pages

Facebook business pages just went through quite a change with the release of the new page design that includes the addition of Timeline. But that also means your old way of customizing page tabs -- the tabs you could use to pull in your own custom content alongside the standard tabs like "Photos" and "Likes" -- has changed. These tabs are important for your social media marketing, because they let you create a much richer user experience on Facebook and control the content that your followers see when they visit your page.

So, with the new layout, how do you create your own custom Facebook tabs? Turns out it's not as difficult as you might think. Just follow these 6 simple steps to creating custom Facebook page tabs.

Wait, Where Do Tabs Exist on the New Facebook Page Layout?

Before we get started, let's make sure we're all on the same page about where tabs now exist since the layout is still new to many. Tabs now exist under your cover photo in a section of your page called 'Views & Apps,' which can be expanded by clicking on the blue arrow on the far right. You can take a look at Coca-Cola's Facebook page for a great example of a company that effectively uses custom tabs (make sure to expand the tab area by clicking the blue dropdown arrow if you're checking them out).

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When SMS Text Messaging Actually Makes Sense for Marketers

SMS, or "short messaging service," is an oft-touted component of mobile marketing that, though simple in concept, is difficult to execute correctly. It seems easy -- shoot a text message out to leads and customers to increase sales. But as an inbound marketer, doesn't that strike you as a little intrusive? When, if ever, is it a good idea to incorporate this type of communication into your inbound marketing strategy? This blog post will break down how you can successfully use SMS as part of your inbound and mobile marketing program, and provide a few words of warning to make sure you don't use SMS in an ineffective or brand-damaging way.

Ways to Make SMS Work

According to Techipedia, 98% of SMS messages sent are opened, and 83% of them are opened within 3 minutes. That not only shows the opportunity behind texting as a communications medium, but also how crucial it is to get it right -- because you're talking with people in a medium they clearly find extremely important. Do you really want to be the brand that interrupts eager texters with irrelevant, useless messages? I think not.

And although SMS is relatively low cost for marketers, it's also important to remember that it actually costs some people money to receive text messages. That means not only is it crucial you only use SMS with an opt-in list specific to your text program (that means no stealing from your opt-in email list!), but also that every message you send is highly relevant to prevent rampant opt-outs.

So let's take a look at some SMS campaigns that can provide content people actually want, instead of those spammy text messages we've all received that do more harm than good for your brand.

Fundraising and Raising Awareness

If you're a non-profit organization, you have a unique opportunity to use SMS for fundraising. You're probably familiar with popular fundraising campaigns like the Haiti Earthquake Relief or President Obama's campaign fundraising; these offer pretty straightforward text-to-donate opportunities via SMS that have been very successful, because they use other marketing channels to generate campaign awareness, and simply use text messaging as a means of collecting donations.

But non-profits (and any other businesses that are looking to create awareness around an issue or campaign) can also leverage SMS. For an example of an SMS campaign that went beyond the common text-to-donate, take a look at 'The Cove' case study from Msgme. The documentary film had a "digital social action" campaign associated with it with the goal to reach other socially conscious people, get them to join a mobile subscriber list by texting in a short code, sign a petition to send to President Obama and Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro Fujisaki, and then continue to receive updates about the cause.

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How to Design a Persona-Centric Website Experience

Face it: your website isn't just about you. After all, the main reason you even have one is to attract visitors that you can market to and later convert into leads and customers for your business, right? So shouldn't you cater your website -- and the experiences you provide there -- to those very visitors? When people land on your website, they usually ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” And as a marketer, you need to be able to deliver an experience that makes it clear to those visitors exactly what's in it for them, and why they should care.

That's why it's so crucial to craft your website's design, content, and experience with your business' buyer personas in mind. In fact, Gleanster research identifies a direct correlation between the amount of time a prospect spends on a company website engaging with relevant content and the likelihood that those interactions will lead to a sale. And according to survey data captured for the Q1 2012 Gleansight benchmark report Web Content Management, a majority of companies within the B2B realm are investing in technologies, capabilities, and resources to bring the concept of web content personalization to life, making it obvious that businesses are realizing that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is less effective than one that provides content tailored to specific segments of site visitors.

Here, we'll discuss how to design your website in a way that puts your buyer personas first, amplifying the effects of your already stellar inbound marketing.

The Importance of Buyer Personas in Website Design

Before you embark on a website redesign, one of the first things you should consider is your business' buyer personas (sometimes also referred to as 'customer personas' or 'marketing personas'). Buyer personas are the result of slicing your target audience into individual groups of people. These people are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

For instance, if you're a marketing manager for a hotel that is looking to bring in new business, you might target five distinct buyer personas: an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception. If you think about it, all of these distinct personas have very different interests and needs. A website approach that speaks to these needs in aggregate, or in general, will fall short in its ability to answer the "What's in it for me?" question specific to each individual buyer persona. However, a website approach that directly addresses the particular needs of each individual persona will make the answer to "What's in it for me?" clearer and more personalized, contributing to a much more successful website.

So if you haven't already, invest the time into identifying your business' different buyer personas. Depending on your business, you could have as few as 1 or 2, or as many as 10-20! Consider the following when building your buyer personas, and for even more in-depth information on the topic, check out this checklist of questions to ask when developing buyer personas:

Segment by Demographics: Start developing personas by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers for your products and services. You may have several different types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.Identify Their Needs: What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve? What do they need most? What information are they typically searching for? What trends are influencing their business or personal success?Develop Behavior-Based Profiles: What do they do online? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Which of your products do they spend the most time researching? How do they use those products?

Spending the time to clearly identify your business' buyer personas is well worth it, as this information will also be helpful as you create content to fuel your efforts in other marketing channels such as social media, email marketing, and lead nurturing. When executing your various marketing campaigns, you'll need to adapt the messaging of your content to fit the needs of your different buyer personas.

How to Design Your Website for Your Buyer Personas

Now that you've got a clear understanding of your business' various buyer personas and what makes them tick, you can start to cater your website experience to the interests of these different customer segments.

Include Choose Your Own Adventure-Style Links on Your Homepage

That's right; choosing your own adventure isn't just great reading for preteens. Consider including links on your homepage or in your website's navigation that allow visitors to self-select who they are to receive the most relevant content and website experience possible. This eliminates any question of what the site visitor should do next, and it allows you to more easily channel your visitors and expose them to certain content on your website, giving you more control over their actions.

In the example below, which is a screenshot of the HubSpot homepage from early 2011, we asked new visitors to self-select their persona choosing from HubSpot's two main buyer personas -- business owners and marketing professionals. Clicking one led the site visitor to a landing page with content tailored to that persona's specific interests and needs.

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10 Ways to Instantly Amplify the Social Proof of Your Marketing

An individual's purchasing decision can be influenced by a large number of factors. Are you considering how influential social proof can be in that mix? According to Google, 70% of Americans now say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. Furthermore, a CompUSA and iPerceptions study revealed that 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

While product reviews are only one type of social proof, those are some pretty persuasive statistics to consider. It demonstrates that people can heavily influenced by others' experiences, making a case for why social proof is such a powerful concept for businesses to leverage. 

Are you giving the social proof of your business the visibility it deserves? In this post, we'll lay out exactly what social proof is, discuss the various types, and explain the ways you can leverage it in your business' marketing efforts.

What Is Social Proof?

'Social proof,' also referred to as 'informational social influence,' is the concept that people will conform to the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behavior. In other words, it's the mentality that, if other people are doing it, and I trust those people, that's validation that I should also be doing it. This third-party validation can be a very powerful motivator for your site visitors' and prospects' actions.

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7 Smart Sales Applications of Marketing Intelligence

Marketing collects a lot of information about the leads they generate, much of which is made available to Sales to make their jobs easier. But it doesn't do much good if nobody actually, well, uses that information. And often all that lead intelligence falls to the wayside because nobody has explained how it can be applied to the sales process.

That's where this blog post comes in! We're going to take a look at some of the intelligence Marketing gathers on leads, and explain exactly how it can be used in the sales process. We will demonstrate where this intelligence lies within HubSpot software, but there are several free and paid tools on the market you can use to collect this information as well. Or if you'd like to follow along using HubSpot software, you can set up a free trial of the software right now!

7 Sales Applications of Marketing Intelligence1) Leverage prospects' social media profile information.

There's a very good chance your leads are active on social media, and your marketing software should be able to easily direct you to their profiles.

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An Uncomplicated Approach to Conducting Solid Market Research

Conducting market research is often the starting point for key components of businesses' marketing and sales strategies. It's what helps you draft personas, clarify your marketing messaging, set product marketing direction, and build your sales playbook.

But when you're tasked to sit down and actually ... do it ... many marketers draw a blank. Do we round up Don Draper and set up an expensive, time-intensive focus group behind two way mirrors? Isn't that what the big guns do when they conduct market research?

The big guns -- and even smaller companies -- certainly use the two-way mirror approach, but consider that we also have this amazing thing called the internet. That means we can all conduct market research for less money, across a larger sample size, and with less time investment. This post will explain both the methodology you should implement when conducting any market research, and highlight some of the tools and tactics available to you to easily glean more insight into your target audience.

First, How to Conduct Market Research

Before we get into the tools and tactics you can use to conduct your market research, let's talk about a solid methodology with which you should approach your research.

1) What do you want to know? The first key to conducting market research effectively is identifying something specific you're trying to figure out. Trying to answer everything in one round of market research usually means you won't get meaningful answers to anything. Here are some of the things many businesses are trying to figure out when conducting market research -- be sure to drill down into these categories to make it specific to your business.

Whether you're solving a problem people actually haveWhat competitors your target audience is using for their current solutionWhat people don't like about their current solutionHow much someone is willing to pay for a solutionWhether a new product or add-on is enticingDemographic and psychographic informationHow your target audience likes to communicate and consume information

2) Draft your questions and hypotheses for how people will answer. This will help you think through logical flows and the potential follow-up questions you should ask to get a comprehensive set of data. There's nothing worse than conducting your market research, and upon analyzing the results, realizing there was an entire branch of logic you hadn't anticipated that requires you to conduct your research again. For example, if you're doing market research to determine whether an add-on service would be interesting to your current customers, you'd probably want to ask different follow-up questions to those who responded positive, negatively, and indifferently. Walk through hypothetical conversations with each of those groups, and document all of the questions you'd like to ask before beginning your research.

3) Find the right group of people for your market research. Is your research targeted toward customers (as opposed to leads or the general public)? If so, what qualities should those customers possess? For example, if HubSpot was gauging interest in an add-on service, we might only need feedback from customers that use the Professional package of our software, and eliminate those using the Basic or Enterprise levels of the software. Or if we wanted to gauge whether the inclusion of that add-on service would help convert more leads, we might consult leads in our database only within a certain business size that we know are interested in the Professional version of the software.

4) Determine the best method to ask your questions. We're going to get into tools and tactics in the next sections of this post, but selecting the right method for administering market research is key for getting the best results. For example, if you're like our very own Laura "

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35 Statistics That Fuel the Battle Between Pinterest and Google+

and Pinterest have gotten a lot of attention recently. It's no surprise. Each has experienced rapid growth and adoption, leaving marketers wondering how to effectively leverage each new platform for business. So which -- if either -- are worth a marketer's time? And how do you decide?

To make the decision a little bit easier, we've compiled a new ebook, Battle of the New Social Networks, which gives you a side-by-side comparison of the pros and cons of Pinterest and Google

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How Closed-Loop Marketing Works

This article is an adapted excerpt from our free ebook, An Introduction to Closed-Loop Marketing. To learn more about how to use closed-loop reporting  to improve your marketing, download the complete ebook here.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Almost a century after John Wanamaker spoke those words, most online marketers can still feel his pain. The irony is, today, marketers have the technology they need to “close the loop” between marketing and revenue, but few are actually taking advantage of it.

Closed-loop marketing is marketing that relies on data and insights from closed-loop reporting. “Closing the loop” just means that sales teams report to Marketing about what happened to the leads that they received, which helps Marketing understands their best and worst lead sources.

To many, setting up closed-loop reporting has remained too hard and confusing to implement. To be an effective marketer, however, you need to be able to tie every single lead, customer, and dollar back to the marketing initiative that created them. This is how marketers can prove their worth and understand how to more efficiently reach their audience.

But how exactly does closed-loop marketing work, and what tools to you need to implement it? Let's find out!

The 4 Steps of Closed-Loop Marketing

Closed-loop marketing can essentially be boiled down to four steps. Before we explain each step in detail, let's take a look at how the process looks as a whole:

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How a Small VC's Commitment to Content Made a BIG Difference

This is a guest post written by Brian Zimmerman. Brian is managing director of OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support. You can follow Brian on Twitter

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How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on Your Site

The call-to-action (CTA) is an important tool for promoting your marketing offers and making sure your lead gen engine stays humming. In fact, we believe that your CTAs should be on just about every page of your website. After all, if you're putting all that hard work into creating stellar marketing offers and building the landing pages to house them, you need to let your website visitors know they exist. CTAs are a great way to do that.

But surely there should be more of a science involved than just slapping a CTA button on any page on your site willy-nilly ... especially if you've been building out your offer backlog and have several of them at your disposal. So how do you know which offer's CTA button to put on what pages of your website? Here's an easy step-by-step guide to make it easy to decide.

Step 1: Map Your Offers to Stages in the Sales Cycle

Before you do anything else, you need to conduct an audit of all the marketing offers you have at your disposal. Create a spreadsheet, and list all of your offers in column A. It's also a good idea to list their corresponding landing pages in column B, if only to have a record of all your offers and their URLs in one place.

Next, identify the various stages in your sales cycle. This may be different from business to business and industry to industry, but just so we're all on the same page, we'll go with the three most widely recognized stages: awareness, evaluation, and purchase.

Awareness: Prospects have either become aware of your product or service, or they have become aware that they have a need that must be fulfilled.Evaluation: Prospects are aware that your product or service could fulfill their need, and they are trying to determine whether you are the best fit.Purchase: Prospects are ready to make a purchase.

Identifying the stages in your sales cycle is important, because not every offer will be appropriate for prospects in every stage of the sales cycle. For example, if you sell personal tax software, a website visitor in the awareness stage might have found an article on your blog because they were looking for information about how to do their taxes by themselves. In this case, the best offer for them probably isn't a free trial of your software, because they may not even know you sell software or that they need software to solve their problem. For this new visitor who knows nothing about you or what you offer, an educational ebook called something like "10 Common Mistakes People Make When Filing Their Taxes" would probably be a much more suitable offer. That free trial, on the other hand, would likely be something you'd offer to a prospect in the purchase stage.

Once you've identified the various stages in your sales cycle, add a third column to your spreadsheet, and categorize each of your existing offers by these stages. The diagram below will help you determine which types of offers typically map to the three main stages in the sales cycle.

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