5 Google Analytics Features You Probably Don’t Use Enough (Or Haven’t Even Heard Of)

There’s no question that Google Analytics is an essential tool to understanding your digital audience. It allows you to dig deeper into the types of content they interact with, the platforms they engage on, and the path that leads to a conversion. Businesses large and small can take advantage of these benefits, giving them the data to adjust their marketing plan as needed and make the best use of their budget.

In 2014 over two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies utilized Google Analytics as part of their data collection and marketing strategies, a 6% increase from 2013. Across companies of all sizes, over half of businesses utilizing web analytics software rely solely on Google Analytics. Despite competition from Adobe, Webtrends, and many others, it’s hard for these data providers to stack up to all that Google Analytics offers (let alone for free at the basic level).

It’s hard to believe, but Google Analytics has already been around for 10 years! Despite the fact that we’ve had access to such valuable data for all these years, there are constantly new or updated features and reports hitting the platform.

While regular Google Analytics users are probably well-versed in the “Audience” and “Acquisition” reporting tools, there are so many other features that tend to go untouched or unnoticed. These are tools that could completely transform how you manage your digital presence moving forward. Even if you’re among the most avid of users, here are five Google Analytics features that you may not be as familiar with.

1. Weighted Sort

When analyzing how your web pages are performing, it’s easy to sort the table by bounce rate or by the number of pageviews. You simply have to click that attribute’s heading and you’re good to go. However, just sorting by one factor or another doesn’t give you the whole picture. Organizing the pages by bounce rate won’t necessarily put your pages in order by traffic volume, but sorting by pageviews won’t take bounce rates into account.

This is where the Weighted Sort option can help. This feature allows you to see which pages have both a high traffic volume and high bounce rate, identifying where a good majority of your missed conversion opportunities may lie. To do this is really simple. On any table, click the “Bounce Rate” column header to sort the rows. Then, click the dropdown next to “Sort Type” and choose “Weighted.” The first web page you see in the list is likely the first place you should start when evaluating both design and content elements of your site, as it has one of the highest bounce rates as well as pageviews.

Figuring out why users are leaving your site from this place is crucial. Are they unsure about next steps for contacting you or making a purchase? Are they turned off by the layout or design of your website? Or have they simply found all of the information they need at this time? Utilizing the Weighted Sort option is an important first step to making these discoveries.

2. Site Search

Practically every website nowadays has a search bar for users to narrow down what they are looking for and expedite the search process. Not only is having this feature available to visitors important, but acknowledging exactly what they’re looking for and why is equally valuable. The Site Search feature in Google Analytics can help you understand all of that. Through this tool, you can see which products or services are most important to your audience as well as whether or not your website is easy to navigate.

To start using Site Search, go to the Admin section of your account and click on “View Settings” under the website you would like to begin tracking.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

Search parameters are the letters or words that precede a query in the URL. For example, a search for Google Analytics-themed blog posts in Kissmetrics’ search bar brings you to http://ift.tt/1oIgpXs?s=google+analytics, so the search parameter would be the portion that is highlighted. All you have to do is enter those characters into the Query Parameter section, and everything but the specific search terms will be filtered out when you go to view the report.

Once the tool is turned on and tracking, you’ll find your data under the Site Search segment of the Behavior section. You can filter the data by unique search terms, time spent on the site after a search, and the number of pages viewed following the search.

This will help give you greater insight into the typical paths your visitors take once they’ve searched for a particular product or service, helping you better organize your website’s content and personalize future marketing efforts by understanding what a user is looking for.

3. Remarketing Lists

Remarketing is a valuable tactic in a marketer’s arsenal, allowing you to reach back out to potential customers that didn’t convert the first time around. Whether your initial marketing message was off, they didn’t gather enough information to make a decision, another company was recommended to them, or they weren’t in a buyer frame of mind yet, remarketing is your second chance at converting them into a customer. It’s a great way to make the most of the audience you have, without having to invest more into your marketing budget to attract an even wider pool of consumers.

The Remarketing Lists feature in Google Analytics works together with your AdWords account to help you build lists of prospects that you can target with future campaigns. That being said, you cannot utilize this feature without having an active AdWords account.

To get started, go to the Admin section of Analytics and click on “Remarketing” under the Property column.

Then click “Audiences” in the dropdown that appears to begin creating your own custom audiences. You can either let Google select your audience through a Smart List, or you can create your own based on new or returning users to your site, as well as those who visited a particular page, completed a goal, or made a purchase.

Once you’ve created one or more audiences, you can then add them to future ad campaigns in AdWords. Google Analytics does limit you to 2,000 remarketing audiences per account, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll reach this threshold.

4. Funnel Visualization

Within the “Flow Visualization” section of Google Analytics, there are several reports that shed light on the specific path each user takes through your website to ultimately end up at their final destination. You can see where visitors may have abandoned their original path to pursue something else, went back to a previous page to get more information, and where they bounced from your site (and most importantly, if a conversion was recorded).

The Funnel Visualization report focuses on how your Goals perform overall, measuring conversion rate over time. This feedback allows you to further analyze the Goals that you’ve set for your company in Google Analytics, and determine whether they meet the mark or should be reevaluated. To find this tool, go to the Conversions dropdown and click on “Goals.”

You can view each Goal’s conversion rate over the course of a day, week, or month, allowing you to zoom in on the impact of a particular campaign or see how your efforts have worked throughout the month. Looking at the sample graph above, you can see that the goal of “Request Consultation” peaked towards the end of the 7-day period on September 27th.

You should compare this to your marketing efforts on that specific day to dig into why you saw this spike. Did you promote a new blog post or product offering on social media? Did you send out an email to your subscriber list? What was it about that day that stood apart from the rest of the week? Since the 27th fell on a Sunday this year, maybe that was the best time for consumers or business owners to take the time and fill out your contact form. The Funnel Visualization report is a great way to get your marketing team talking to see what strategies have the greatest impact on that particular goal.

This feature also helps you see which Goals are working well and which ones may need to be reconsidered. From this point, it’s helpful to make a pit stop at the Goal Flow report to dig deeper into why certain goals are more effective than others. You can choose items from six categories: Acquisition, Advertising, Behavior, Custom Variables, Social, and Users. This helps you laser in on user behavior broken down by traffic type, actions completed on your site, social network, or even custom factors that you identify.

In this example, you can see that the majority of the “Request Consultation” goal completions can be attributed to organic traffic, and email had almost no impact. This is a clear indication that your website content and SEO strategies are proving to be effective, while you may want to take a look at how you’re approaching email marketing. Starting off with the Funnel Visualization report to get an initial look at your Goals and then digging deeper with Goal Flow will allow you to ensure that your priorities are in line to convert visitors into customers.

5. Trackbacks

It’s so easy to get caught up in the search and website elements of Google Analytics that you might forget that there’s an extremely valuable section dedicated to social media and its impact on SEO. The Social segment can be found within the Acquisition dropdown, allowing you to see how your social media presence drives web traffic and ultimately conversions. The Trackbacks feature takes a look at everyone who has linked to your site’s content, whether it’s a blog post, piece of downloadable content, or even one of your services pages.

What’s most helpful here is that you can see how many sessions on your website resulted from that particular link or how many times the same URL has linked to you, separating more passive users from those that are truly engaged with your content and message. For example, if you see that an industry publication has linked to one of your ebooks multiple times, that could indicate the potential for a future partnership. Maybe they would be interested in having you contribute a guest post to their blog, or they have a tool or piece of content that would be useful to you.

Regardless of the industry you operate in, partnerships are vital to making a name for your business and standing out as a thought leader. Whether it’s an opportunity to share content, services, or to co-sponsor an industry-related event, link building continues to prove its importance in both SEO and business in general. Don’t miss out on these individuals or companies who are taking note of what you have to offer; they could lead to valuable business propositions.

Keep Up With What’s New

Google Analytics is constantly adding new features and enhancing old ones, making it difficult for even the most experienced of users to keep up. It’s important that you take some time to look around your account every so often and see what’s new. You’ll likely stumble upon a feature that you never knew existed, perhaps even some of the examples above. From simply sorting current data in new ways to setting custom goals and analyzing sources of web traffic, there’s a seemingly endless number of ways to put Google Analytics to work for your business. And don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all to gain the insight you’re looking for. If you’re able to zoom in on a specific target market or goal that is top priority, you can cater your approach accordingly.

Are there some new or lesser-known Google Analytics features that you’ve recently discovered? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

About the Author: Kim Speier is an inbound marketing specialist at Mainstreethost, a digital marketing agency in Buffalo, New York. She frequently writes about social media, content marketing, user experience, and web design for the Mainstreethost blog. Connect with Kim on Twitter at @krspeier.

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10 Tips on the Inventive Mind from the World’s Best Thinkers

What advice would the world’s most gifted minds have to say on invention?Related Articles

1. The Importance of Cultivating an Inventive Mind
2. Benchmark Presents: Email Marketing Best Practices and Trends
3. New Complaints Can Come from Stale Email Campaigns (Part 3)

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Buy On Google: Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

So just how does Google's "Purchases on Google" work? You don't have to be shy if there are things you don't know (and feel like maybe everyone else does or you should). Find out everything you wanted to know about […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Buy On Google: Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

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Written by Tricia Mool, http://ift.tt/1EObAPi

The post Buy On Google: Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Too Afraid To Ask) appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

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5 Scary AdWords Mistakes Keeping Me Up at Night

Halloween is coming up, so I’ve collected what I consider to be five of the most scary AdWords mistakes. This is not a list of the most common AdWords mistakes, but five mistakes that are scary in the sense that they can wreak havoc while being all too easy to commit. By knowing these mistakes, hopefully you’ll stay clear of committing them in your own AdWords account.

1. Overspending

Most clients operate with some kind of budget, and as their PPC consultant it’s your job to stay within the limits of this budget.

But sometimes mistakes happen. Imagine that you’ve added an extra zero to the daily budget by mistake or that you forgot to include a newly created campaign in the shared budget.

Hopefully, this doesn’t happen too often, but the consequences of overspending can be truly scary. While writing this post I read a thread on Reddit by a guy who overspent by $4,100 for a client in a single month and then his boss wanted him to cover the whole thing!

If you do end up spending more money than your client has budgeted for, I would advise you to investigate the following:

• How did the extra spend perform? If it performed well, it might not be a bad thing. Try showing your client the value of the extra money you spent on AdWords.
• Can you reduce the budget for the next month? Or maybe you can spread the reduction out over several months?

After all, it may not be the end of the world if the extra money you spent brought in value or if you can reduce the budget a little in each of the following months.

If the money was straight-up squandered, things would be much more scary, which brings me to the next AdWords mistake …

2. Setting (Completely) Wrong Bids

While setting bids too high won’t necessarily result in overspending (as long as your budgets are under control), it could easily waste a lot of your client’s money.

Google will gladly accept your high bids and eat away your daily budget faster than lions feasting on fresh kill. If you don’t catch this mistake in time, you’ll most likely end up spending a lot of money on very few clicks, resulting in more expensive conversions.

But why is this scary? Isn’t it just a stupid mistake? Not necessarily – at least, not for all my fellow international PPC specialists. Sometimes you’ll find yourself shifting between the English account interface and your local language. The problem is that the decimal separator will shift from being a period to being a comma depending on the account language settings.

Why is this a problem? Because if you don’t realize you’ve just gone from an account using a decimal comma to one using a decimal period, you may end up setting your bids an order of magnitude higher than intended – and then you’ve got a problem.

But won’t Google warn you? Yes, fortunately Google will warn you if you try to change the bid for a single keyword and they think you’re using the wrong format. Below you can see how my bid of 2,0 Danish Kroner is interpreted as 20.00 DKK instead of 2.0 DKK as was my intention (in Denmark we use the decimal comma).

Also, if you select more than one ad group in order to do some bulk editing, Google won’t give you this warning. In the image below, my intention is to set the bid to two and a half Danish Kroner for two ad groups but because the number format setting is set to English instead of Danish, Google will interpret it as twenty-five Danish Kroner – a significant difference!

Language settings aside, there are other ways you might set completely wrong bids. For instance, you could mistakenly think you can rely on the ad group bids in Shopping campaigns. Shopping campaigns use ad groups like any other type of campaign does, but the ad group bid doesn’t work the way you might expect. Frederick Vallaeys has also written about this problem:

“While you have to set a max CPC for each ad group, it doesn’t do a lot… it only serves to set a starting bid for any new Product Group created under it. Once the Product Group is created, it gets its own bid and loses all connection to the ad group bid. In other words, Product Groups do NOT inherit the ad group bid the way a keyword does.”

And while we’re on the topic of Shopping, let’s take a look at another scary Shopping related mistake …

3. Not Excluding “Everything Else” in Shopping

When you start to subdivide the standard All Products product group inside every Shopping ad group, you’ll find a new product group called Everything else in ‘All Products’. The Everything else product group is created automatically and lets you set a bid for all the products that are not part of your other product groups.

This is all fine if your Shopping setup consists of a single campaign with a single ad group as shown in the image above. Here, you can use the Everything else-group to catch any product not in any of the specified product groups.

But as soon as you move on to a more advanced setup with more than one ad group, you’ll have to check the Excluded field for the Everything else product group.

If you don’t do this, all your beautifully segmented ad groups won’t matter, because Google will just use the one ad group with the highest bid (unless the ad groups are in their own campaigns with different priority settings).

Below, you can see how the Shopping campaign has been split up into 4 ad groups depending on the price of the product. The Everything else product group is excluded in order to limit each ad group to only show products from the chosen product group.

The problem is – and this is what makes it scary – even if you always remember to exclude the Everything else group when creating new targeted ad groups you may unknowingly activate it again later. For example, if you want to bulk edit bids for all product groups inside an ad group and therefore click the top checkbox in order to select everything, you’ll also select the Everything else group and thereby reactivate it. To prevent this, you’ll need to uncheck it manually every time. If the list of product groups was long, you might not realize that you’ve also checked the Everything else group hidden at the bottom.

Kirk Williams called this “the All Products Trap of Optimization Death” and I think this is a fitting name.

4. Choosing ‘Target and Bid’ by Mistake (RLSA)

When using the terribly named Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), you get to choose between two settings. Which one you choose depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Most often, you’ll pick the Target and bid option when you are targeting more generic keywords or if you want to tailor the ad based on users’ previous behavior. On the other hand, you can use the Bid only option as a kind of overlay on existing ad groups in order to raise the bids for certain users.

It’s important to know the difference between these two options, as choosing the wrong one could either leave you targeting very generic keywords without the audience applied, or you could end up cutting off all new traffic to your existing campaigns if you were to choose Target and bid over Bid only.

If you meant to set up a Bid only campaign and accidentally set up a Target and bid ad group, you’ll see your traffic from that ad group drastically reduced as you narrow down your audience to only returning visitors, buyers, or whatever audience you’ve chosen. If not detected in time, this will result in a period of significant underspending, which can be just as big of a problem as overspending.

This is a scary mistake because it’s all too easy to commit. The option is set at the ad group level and will often have to be done in bulk through the AdWords Editor. This way, you can copy the audiences from one group and paste it to all your groups. But here comes the problem: Even though you copy the audiences (and the associated bids), you don’t copy the targeting setting. It’s my experience that sometimes you’ll find some of your ad groups set to Target and bid while the rest are set to Bid only as you intended.

When you’ve pasted the audiences to all your ad groups, I recommend you check the Audiences area in the editor to make sure everything is set to Bid only as in the image below:

If you do find any groups set to Target and bid instead of Bid only, you should go to Ad groups and choose the Flexible reach tab as shown below. Here, you can select every ad group and then make sure Bid only is selected under Interests and remarketing.

5. Failing to Follow Up on Recent Changes

This is actually the one mistake that amplifies all the other mistakes mentioned in this post. It’s limited how much damage can happen to an account if you follow up the next day and manage to spot any mistakes you might have made.

Scheduling a follow-up is especially important if you know you won’t get to review the account for several days or maybe even weeks. Make it a habit to schedule a quick follow-up a few days after you make important changes to an account.

Enough scary stories from me. What do you fear? I hope you’ll share your biggest AdWords fears in the comments below.

Have a happy Halloween!

About the author:

Frederik Hyldig is a search specialist at s360 – one of the leading search agencies in Denmark. He is currently focusing 100% on the ever-changing Google AdWords platform. Follow him on LinkedIn or his personal site.

Find out how you're REALLY doing in AdWords!

Watch the video below on our Free AdWords Grader:

Visit the AdWords Grader.

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The Top 10 Blog Posts of the Month

As apple picking season comes to a close, it’s time for us to bask in the final moments where consuming pumpkin for all three meals is acceptable. Also, who doesn’t love dressing up or at least dressing their kid up in a Frankenstein costume (and let’s not forget free candy)? As we scare October away, let’s review the top 10 most popular WordStream blog posts of the month.

 

#1: New AdWords Customer Match Beats Out Facebook Audience Match Rate

Customer Match, announced by Google at the end of September, took AdWords advertisers to an entirely new level of excitement. For those of you unfamiliar Customer Match essentially allows you to target specific people, similar to email marketing, by uploading a list of emails to show your ads to (rather than targeting to strangers with keywords). Facebook and Twitter already have similar functionality. In this post, WordStream Founder Larry Kim set out to test the accuracy of customer match by uploading the same list of 357,000 customer emails to AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter. Read on to see which platforms match rate was the highest.

#2: 10 Remarketing Facts to Make Your Rethink Your Entire PPC Strategy

In this post, Larry blogs about one of his favorite marketing topics, remarketing! Larry loves remarketing so much that he spend over $500,000 on remarketing ads in one year alone. Larry shares everything he’s learned from remarketing since 2012, including why the “creep factor” is ridiculously overblown to how you can use remarketing as a powerful CRO tool. If you’re on the fence about remarketing or struggling to gain effectiveness from it, this is the perfect post for you.

 

#3: Buffer Lost HALF Its Social Media Traffic This Year! But What Does It Mean?

Man, oh man is Larry on a roll! Sometimes I’m perplexed (and impressed) by his multi-tasking abilities. Buffer is known as being a member of the top 1% (i.e. unicorn status, according to Larry) when it comes to social media thought leadership. With a massive following, the internet was shocked when Buffer author Kevin Lee announce that the platform’s lost half its social media referral traffic over the last year. But why did this happen? Larry has his theories - read on to find out why Buffer may be failing to hit traffic milestones.

#4: 8 Super-Fascinating Digital Marketing Stats Revealed at SMX East

SMX events, otherwise knowns as the world’s largest gatherings of search engine marketers, never cease to impress. SMX East took place in the city that never sleep, NYC, and I was lucky enough to attend, and collect a long list of fascinating statistics and takeaways. Check out the top 8 stats and takeaways to fuel your efforts this fall.

 

#5: The Rise of Ad Blockers: Should Advertisers Be Panicking? (!!)

Have you seen the movie, The Strangers? I couldn’t sleep for weeks post viewing, but ad blockers might be scarier for those in the paid ads space. When Apple announced that iOS9 would now support ad blocking technology, most marketers broke into an uncontrollable sweat. Deep breathes, deep breathes, WordStream’s Dan Shewan has the full scoop on whether or not this announcement is worth losing sleep over.  

#6: 5 Reasons You Should Be Advertising on Facebook

Did you know that Facebook receives 22 billion ad clicks per year? Not the mention their user population is larger than China (the largest country). In this post yours truly walks you through the top 5 reasons you absolutely need to hop on the Facebook advertising bandwagon. When the leads and conversions start flooding in you won’t regret it! Not convinced? Read the post and let me know if I’ve swayed you.

 

#7: 11 Unbelievably Specific Facebook Audiences You Can Target

I wasn’t quite sure of the outcome when approaching this post, but it turned out to be a fascinating research experience. This is likely due to the fact that Facebook’s level of targeting can dive incredibly deep, with everything from “life events” to “mom personas” (think “fit moms” and “city moms”). Check out the niche audience I created using the massive amount of targeting options Facebook has to offer.

#8: 3 Mind-Blowing Hacks to Leverage PPC for Facebook Ads

Facebook has clearly been top of mind this month. In this post I explored how you can take what you already know from your paid search campaigns and apply it to Facebook ads. This posts covers everything from why Facebook is the best place to start when advertising on social, why paying to play is necessary, how much to spend, and 3 hacks to leverage ppc data and apply it to your Facebook advertising strategy. These hacks are guaranteed to blow your mind!

#9: How Dopamine Can 3X Your AdWords CTR

You’re likely familiar with the “Kim Kardashian of molecules” dopamine. This rush of euphoria is a major factor in decision making. It can even play affect into the likelihood of someone clicking your ad and visiting your website. In this post I dived into the human brain to understand how marketers can leverage what we know about dopamine to 3X AdWords CTR’s. I also included 2 AdWords CTR dopamine hacks that are guaranteed to work wonders on your CTR’s.

 

#10: AdWords Geo Customizers Can Cut Your CPA in Half – Here’s How

This post written by Senior Paid Search Strategist, Nick D’Amato, takes a dive into one of Google’s newest betas, geo customizers. Geo customizers work similar to ad customizers by dynamically updating your ad with geo-specific information tailored to a searcher’s location or location of interest. Since Nick is in the weeds of PPC day in and day out he was able to test this beta on a client account, and the results were astounding. Check out the wonders these babies worked for Nick’s client, POP Yachts.

 

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How to Write for the Web—a New Approach for Increased Engagement - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Dan-Petrovic

We tend to put a lot of effort into writing great content these days. But what's the point of all that hard work if hardly anybody actually reads it through to the end?

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Dan Petrovic illustrates a new approach to writing for the web to increase reader engagement, and offers some tools and tips to help along the way.

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

Video Transcription

G'day, Moz fans, Dan Petrovic from DEJAN here. Today we're talking about how to write for the web.

How much of an article will people actually read?

This year we did an interesting study involving 500 people. We asked them how do they read online. We found that the amount of people who actually read everything word-for-word is 16%. Amazingly, this is exactly the same statistic, the same percentage that Nielsen came up with in 1997. It's been nearly two decades, and we still haven't learned how to write for the Web.

I don't know about you guys, but I find this to be a huge opportunity, something we can do with our blogs and with our content to change and improve how we write in order to provide better user experience and better performance for our content. Essentially, what happens is four out of five people that visit your page will not actually read everything you wrote. The question you have to ask yourself is: Why am I even writing if people are not reading?

I went a little bit further with my study, and I asked those same people: Why is it that you don't read? How is it that there are such low numbers for the people who actually read? The answer was, "Well, I just skip stuff." "I don't have time for reading." "I mainly scan," or, "I read everything." That was 80 out of 500 people. The rest said, "I just read the headline and move on," which was amazing to hear.

Further study showed that people are after quick answers. They don't want to be on a page too long. They sometimes lose interest halfway through reading the piece of content. They find the bad design to be a deterrent. They find the subject matter to be too complex or poorly written. Sometimes they feel that the writing lacks credibility and trust.

I thought, okay, there's a bunch of people who don't like to read a lot, and there's a bunch of people who do like to read a lot. How do I write for the web to satisfy both ends?

Here was my dilemma. If I write less, the effort for reading my content is very low. It satisfies a lot of people, but it doesn't provide the depth of content that some people expect and it doesn't allow me to go into storytelling. Storytelling is very powerful, often. If I write more, the effort will be very high. Some people will be very satisfied, but a lot of people will just bounce off. It'll provide the depth of content and enable storytelling.

Actually, I ended up finding out something I didn't know about, which was how journalists write. This is a very old practice called "inverted pyramid."

The rules are, you start off with a primary piece of information. You give answers straight up. Right after that you go into the secondary, supporting information that elaborates on any claims made in the first two paragraphs. Right after that we go into the deep content.

I thought about this, and I realized why this was written in such a way: because people used to read printed stuff, newspapers. They would go read the most important thing, and if they drop off at this point, it's not so bad because they know actually what happened in the first paragraph. The deep content is for those who have time.

But guess what? We write for the web now. So what happens is we have all this technology to change things and to embed things. We don't really have to wait for our users to go all the way to the bottom to read deep information. I thought, "How can I take this deep information and make it available right here and right there to give those interested extra elaboration on a concept while they're reading something?"

This is when I decided I'll dive deeper into the whole thing. Here's my list. This is what I promised myself to do. I will minimize interruption for my readers. I will give them quick answers straight in the first paragraph. I will support easy scanning of my content. I will support trust by providing citations and references. I will provide in-depth content to those who want to see it. I will enable interactivity, personalization, and contextual relevance to the piece of content people want to retrieve in that particular time.

I took one of my big articles and I did a scroll test on it. This was the cutoff point where people read everything. At this point it drops to 95, 80, 85. You keep losing audience as your article grows in size. Eventually you end up at about 20% of people who visit your page towards the bottom of your article.

My first step was to jump on the Hemingway app—a very good online app where you can put in your content and it tells you basically all the unnecessary things you've actually put in your words—to actually take them out because they don't really need to be there. I did that. I sized down my article, but it still wasn't going to do the trick.

Enter the hypotext!

This is where I came up with an idea of hypotext. What I did, I created a little plugin for WordPress that enables people to go through my article, click on a particular piece, kind of like a link.

Instead of going to a new website, which does interrupt their reading experience, a block of text opens within the paragraph of text they're reading and gives them that information. They can click if they like, or if they don't want to look up this information, they don't have to. It's kind of like links, but injected right in the context of what they're currently reading.

This was a nerve-wracking exercise for me. I did 500 revisions of this article until I got it right. What used to be a 5,000-word article turned into a 400-word article, which can then be expanded to its original 5,000-word form. People said, "That's great. You have a nice hypothesis, nice theory, but does this really work?"

So I decided to put everything I did to a test. An old article, which takes about 29 minutes to read, was attracting people to the page, but they were spending 6 minutes on average—which is great, but not enough. I wanted people to spend way more time. If I put the effort into writing, I wanted them to digest that content properly. The bounce rate was quite high, meaning they were quite tired with my content, and they just wanted to move on and not explore anything else on my website.

Test Results

After implementing the compressed version of my original article, giving them a choice of what they will read and when, I expanded the average time on page to 12 minutes, which is extraordinary. My bounce rate was reduced to 60%, which meant that people kept browsing for more of my content.

We did a test with a content page, and the results were like this:

Basically, the engagement metrics on the new page were significantly higher than on the old when implemented in this way.

On a commercial landing page, we had a situation like this:

We only had a small increase in engagement. It was about 6%. Still very happy with the results. But what really, really surprised me was on my commercial landing page—where I want people to actually convert and submit an inquiry—the difference was huge.

It was about a 120% increase in the inquiries in comparison to the control group when I implemented this type of information. I removed the clutter and I enabled people to focus on making the inquiry.

I want you all to think about how you write for the web, what is a good web reading experience, and how content on the web should be, because I think it's time to align how we write and how we read on the web. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A few notes:

There are a few things to note here. First, for an example of an implementation of hypotext, take a look at this post on user behavior data.

Next, keep in mind that Google does devalue the hidden content, disagreeing with its usability. You can read more about this on the DEJAN blog—there are further tips on the dangers of hidden content and how you can combat them there.

One solution is to reverse how hypotext works in an article. Rather than defaulting to the shorter piece, you can start by showing the full text and offer a "5-minute-read" link (example here) for those inclined to skim or not interested in the deep content.

Share your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for listening!

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How to Put Eyes on Your Content on Day One

The day has finally arrived!

You’re ready to launch your site off into the endless expanse of the internet. You content is polished and beautiful, your site delivers an amazing user experience—after all, there’s no point in driving traffic to a site that no one will like!

You wait, ready to answer any comments, thank everyone who shares your content—and spend all day refreshing your site stats, as a tiny trickle of people come and go, with barely a word to say.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, everyone starts at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you must start at zero. There are ways to make sure your reach is as large as it can be from that first day—and the faster your start, generally, the faster your rise.

So how do we go about making sure your site has the absolute best debut it possibly can?

Assess Existing Assets

Starting Big

You probably recognize the name Neil Patel. If not, he cofounded Kissmetrics, and has since created several very successful blogs. He clearly works harder than most people, and he knows his trade, so chances are good he would have found success regardless of his base. That said, the name recognition, authority, and readership he gained from working here on Kissmetrics probably didn’t hurt, right?

Chances are your first article won’t generate 12,577 views the month you launch your site.

The bigger you want to build a skyscraper, the wider and deeper you have to design the base. Likewise, if you want to build a huge following quickly, the best thing to do is to start with as many people as possible looking at you.

Starting out, you probably don’t have a blog with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to pull from, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything at all.

Today, almost everyone is active on some sort of social media, and most of those who aren’t make up for it by having friends out there in the real world. It’s worth saying, don’t be obnoxious about it, but most of your friends and acquaintances well be happy to give you a boost if you ask them. Your primary goal out the gate is to get people signed up to your email list, because that will bring people back, and your secondary goal is to convince them to share your content, because that will bring new people in. Even a few dozen or hundred people will make a big difference in the short run. We’ll get into why in a minute, but for now let’s talk about how.

Where to Amass Followers

First off, if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of conversion, it would be a good idea to read up a bit. Your goal here is to create that wide base to build off of, so you get the most out of every post. Different networks offer different advantages, and you can certainly, if you don’t have time for setting up and growing all of them, mix and match to focus on those aspects you believe will be the most important to your specific situation.

Facebook Friends

Facebook is great for starting a site out, especially your first, because they let you invite people to join your business/fan page, where you’ll hopefully have a nice conversion button to take them to your site. User engagement with your posts is higher on some other platforms, but no one else lets you bug people in quite as direct and friendly a way as Facebook. Better yet, people are used to getting invited to random things, so they’re not going to hold it against you.

Likely you’ve already seen the big problem with this, though, which is the nature of your social network on Facebook. Simply put, your friends, family, and acquaintances are not likely to be your actual target market. That’s okay, because, hopefully, a few people in their networks are.

Don’t underestimate the value of joining Facebook groups in your target area, either. These are often very active, but overlooked and underutilized by major players, meaning you only have to compete with other little fish for attention. With any luck, you’ll make some new friends struggling with the same issues you are, and help each other grow into medium-sized fish.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is a fickle beast. Unless you’re very good or very lucky, you will probably see only a trickle of traffic from this site. Even tweets that do very well from a retweeting perspective tend to have low conversion.

Somewhat ironically, given that it’s such a large and impersonal site, what Twitter is best used for early on is building relationships. Follow and reach out to established authorities in your niche. Not only are you genuinely likely to have interests in common, but many are happy to offer advice and support, and a single share of your content from a known authority can open you up to dozens or hundreds of new connections.

To put it another way, your focus on Twitter isn’t bringing floods of people to your site, it’s about bringing a handful of the right people.

Google Plus

Google Plus is another oddball. It might be important for SEO rankings, you need a profile on it, but it’s so convoluted in some respects that it’s hard to grow yourself there. One particularly great thing about it is that anything you share on G+ is almost instantly indexed.

I don’t know entirely why Google Plus is such a mess. Part of it is no doubt the learning curve for G+; while most social media platforms have a clear and obvious thing they do, G+ is trying to be everything to everyone. They want to handle the comments on your blog, they want to merge with your YouTube channel, and so on, so it’s not clear entirely what you’re there for at first glance.

Most of the people who use it fall into one of two categories:

Power Users: These people really get a lot done with G+. They’ve taken the time to figure out how to take advantage of its strengths, and they’re reaching other experts. This, oddly, makes G+ a great place for interacting with other people who are serious about what they’re doing.

Jeff Bullas’ Google+ profile has almost thirty thousand followers and is closing in on four million views.

Autoposters: These people set their blogs to autopost to their G+ page and have never, ever, been back. This is almost everyone who could be described as a beginner, novice, or casual blogger.

In other words, most people either get a lot from it, or nothing at all. If you’d like to jump into getting the maximum from Google’s own take on the social network, start with the basics, and work out from there.

Pinterest and Instagram

This is a wildcard. If you are operating in a visually engaging niche, Pinterest and Instagram are both incredibly powerful. If you happen to be able to create small montages of eye-catching images, Instagram is possibly the easiest social media network to gain a big following on.

Pinterest doesn’t amass followers as quickly, but has been show to have a high conversion rate compared to most other social media platforms. In other words, if you can get people to look at your stuff on Pinterest, there’s a relatively high chance they’ll follow it to your site.

On the other hand, if your niche doesn’t lend itself to pretty pictures, these sites will be of somewhat diminished value to you. It’s also important to note that while both Instagram and Pinterest rely primarily on visual content, they are not created equal. Pinterest is a great place to share infographics and other more complex posts, while the structure and culture of Instagram reward collages and photographs more strongly. Including infographics in your articles is a great way to expand the reach of your content on that platform.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been making big, and very overdue changes lately with how they deliver content. It now functions as something of a hybrid of Facebook’s News Feed and Tumblr, where you have a feed delivering content generated or shared by people you follow, as well as items LinkedIn thinks you might like – or was paid to show you.

One aspect which has not yet been overhauled, but is hopefully on the list, is the groups feature of LinkedIn, which is reminiscent of the forums that have existed on the internet since nearly the beginning. Like-minded people can gather together, create topic threads, and discuss those topics, to their hearts’ content. It should be an extraordinary tool for outreach to your target market, but in its current iteration is just a kind of okay one. By posting often, and linking to good content (yours and others’) you can usually bring in a pretty steady trickle of new people, with a relatively high conversion rate to subscribers, since they’re already interested in what you’re talking about.

The good news is that LinkedIn is the absolute easiest network to grow your network on. Everybody is there to, digitally speaking, exchange business cards.

The first step to creating a big following is to contact people you actually know. LinkedIn will then help you out by importing your contact lists and so on. You want to get about one hundred followers, so you look like a real person rather than a bot. Of course, one hundred people is way too small a number to really expand the reach of your content, so you’ll want to acquire more followers.

What should you do next? Well . . . This is sort of bad form, so don’t tell anyone I told you to do this, but what you should do is use the “People you may know . . .” feature to send out invitations to connect to as many people as you can. Target peers in your field in and your target audience—you want shares from the former and clicks from the latter.

Once you have five hundred friends on LinkedIn, your count simply shows as 500+ and you never have to send out a request again to grow your network, because you’ll get a steady stream of requests indefinitely.

Is this abusing the system a bit? Absolutely. Is it the best way to get something valuable out of LinkedIn? As far as I’ve been able to tell.

Other Websites

One of your biggest assets isn’t social media at all. Do you have any friends with blogs or websites? Acquaintances? Cousins of friends of friends?

Ask them to link to your new site, even just a mention. This will help you rise through the SEO page rankings by growing your domain authority.

If they have a more popular site, this can really translate to a huge bump.

Guest Posts

Even better than a link, reach out to people and ask for a chance to guest post. Many sites will be happy to extend at least the opportunity, and if you do it far enough in advance, they’ll be happy schedule the articles for your site launch or soon after. This is a three-fold win for you. It raises your domain authority, and it sends people your way, which is great. The big thing it does, though, is give you an opportunity to interact with the users of the other site, answer their questions and create rapport.

In fact, commenting on other blogs and websites is another great way to gain followers!

Many of the people you interact with (assuming the interactions are positive) will check out your own site. Even if they don’t, though, they’ve got one more reason to remember your name. If you’re showing up on a number of sites, they’ll see you again and again, and they’ll start thinking of you as someone whose advice is sought. An authority. Someone to pay attention to and follow.

Just remember to write insightful comments. Generic comments like “hey great post” won’t help. Since a lot of commenting systems allow readers to rank (thumbs up/down) comments, it becomes even more crucial to write something that will get the attention of readers. If you have nothing to say, don’t write anything.

There is some debate over whether the value of guest posts is deteriorating, but they certainly remain invaluable to sites in their early stages.

Don’t be afraid to ask

How do you get guest posting opportunities? You ask. Ask on Twitter or through email. However works, but do ask. Most sites, even relatively low traffic ones, get many, many, requests for guest blogging opportunities, but if they know you’re a real person, and you can show them you’ll do a good job, then at least a few of them will likely acquiesce.

This isn’t about taking the internet by storm, it’s about opening a door. As your name recognition increases, you’ll get more opportunities—that’s a long term concern though, and we’re talking about putting eyes on the page on day one. What you’re doing by guest blogging is diverting a tiny portion of as many larger sites’ traffic as you’re able to towards your own site. Many small streams make a river.

It should probably go without saying (but won’t) that your social profiles should be polished. You want to be wearing the digital equivalent of a nice suit, so that you look professional. Perfect formatting and grammar are necessary. The picture you choose is also important – people will judge you by this. Choose a professional photo – something you’d put on a resume.

Why Leveraging These Platforms Matters

I did promise to tell you why all this matter. Well, in all honesty it’s not critical that this all happens on day one. That’s just what this article is about, and there’s no reason you can’t have it all ready to go, so why wouldn’t you?

Blog growth tends to be happen slowly, if the blog’s doing well. You have ten in month one, twenty in month two, forty in month three, and so on. Give or take, of course, there isn’t some industry-standard growth curve. That said, you’ll have some average rate of conversion of visitors, and the more visitors you convert, the more visitors there will be to convert, so things gain steam. In other words, if you’re going to grow at all, in two or three years it won’t really matter whether you started with one subscriber or one hundred, because you’ll have thousands. However, there’s a big difference between a three month growth curve starting with one, ten, and one hundred followers.

Let’s look at a very simplified growth rate of 10% per month for twelve months.

Starting with ten followers, you’ll end the first month with thirteen, and the year with thirty-three. Starting with three hundred thirty. The math on this isn’t exactly hard. At this arbitrary growth rate every subscriber you have at the start is an extra tenth of a follower each month.

Does it really work this way? Of course not! This example is simple, and reality doesn’t have time for simple. Your growth will probably follow something close to this pattern at first, after that, things get complicated. At some point you’ll hit plateaus or viral spikes, and there will be good months and bad.

The point is, the more people you start with, the faster you’re going to grow if you’re doing everything else right. And that’s why we care about starting strong.

Followers are just the start, though, because, “. . . if you’re doing everything else right,” is a very big if.

Test All Tech

You’re going to have some technical difficulties. It’s going to happen. Still, it’s better if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot at the start of the race.

Technical difficulties can break a launch, and often do

Make sure everything is working. I can’t give you a real checklist for this, because it’s a big, complex topic, and since there are so many ways to build, host, and run a site, anything specific I wrote would be 90% irrelevant to everyone who read this. That said, there are some basic items which should be in the forefront of your mind.

Make sure your site works for all major browsers

Even Internet Explorer. There are very few things more frustrating when designing a site than making something very cool and discovering that it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and . . . not Internet Explorer, because if one browser is messing up, it’s always Internet Explorer. IE is still the browser of choice for about 10% of the internet (which is millions of people). So, if you don’t support it, that’s ten percent of your potential market, poof, gone. Maybe that’s worth it to you, maybe it’s not, but be aware.

Ensure Everything Works Properly on Mobile

More and more people are visiting sites from mobile devices, so it’s very important to make sure your site renders properly on these devices. If they have to pinch and zoom or try to adjust your site so that it is readable, it will leave a bad impression and most visitors will likely leave and never come back again. Even worse, it hurts your SEO with Google. Use Google’s mobile friendly test to make sure your site works properly.

Get Open Graph Working Correctly

You know when people share an article on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and there’s a catchy image that appears? That’s no accident. Their Open Graph is working properly.

Make sure key features work

Like I said, I can’t really give you a definitive guide, but there are some critical growth opportunities that you’ll lose if you don’t have the following features working: comments, follow, share, and subscribe.

Fully Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Speaking of following and sharing, since you have gone to the trouble of growing your potential readership through social media from the outset, it would probably be a good idea to make sure your site can properly leverage these media. This is another good reason to grow your following in advance, as you’ll have to set up the various accounts to connect them to your site anyway.

Make sure all the buttons work. Seriously.

So speaks the voice of painful personal experience! Make sure every single button you have on the site actually does what it’s supposed to be doing. Don’t just assume it will.

Make it Easy For Users To Give You Their Email Address

Remember, the prize bit of user engagement (aside from actual sales) is the email subscription. You don’t want users to leave without giving you their email. Look at Kissmetrics. What’s the first thing you see in the top left, right where your eyes look when you start reading the page? A box for your email and name . . . and this is a site which is all about the science of conversion. What does that tell you about how important email subscriptions are?

Easy signup process

So make sure they can give you their email address! Any funnels you have for convincing people to give them to you are well constructed, but also don’t put up any barriers; if the user wants to skip your pitch and just commit, don’t force them to click through a million reasons why they should do exactly what they were already planning to do.

And make it clear what they’ll be getting when they sign up. An email every time a new post goes live on your blog? Will this be everyday, a few times a day, once a month, etc? Make it very clear before they signup. And, of course, tell them that you’ll never spam them (assuming you won’t).

Ensure all content is optimized to share easily

This is another tricky one, because “optimized to share” is different for different platforms, and, also, changes for each platform from time-to-time. While individual platforms change what sizes and types of content look best only rarely, with all the platforms out there, it’s a pretty constant trickle.

What you want to consider are the sizes of the images, the length and content of your excerpts, and the length and content of your titles. There are other aspects to consider, but basically you should put some real though into making people want to click on whatever stub you’re showing them.

Keeping track of those details is a huge headache, but luckily there are sites dedicated to doing just that.

Observe Some Simple Best Practices

There are a few more miscellaneous things you can do to really maximize your return on investment right at the start, simply by avoiding missteps.

Don’t include content which will anger people unless that’s what you’re going for.

Making people angry is actually a great way to make money, judging by the number of big sites which seem to specialize in it. That said, don’t do it accidentally. What a mess that is. Just think before you post.

Don’t get too fancy

Bells, whistles, buttons, video intros, etc. There is always a new next big thing, and it’s okay to indulge now and then, but you should, especially right at the start, be focusing on strong fundamentals. You look better sinking one from the free throw line than barely missing ten from the half court.

Don’t mislead

Honesty, honesty, honesty. If people don’t trust your brand, you are sunk. You’ll be shopping for office space on the lower deck of the Titanic. So don’t be sketchy. Even if it pays off immediately, it will hurt you in the long haul.

Don’t Spam

People are trusting you with their time, their contact info, and their attention. Don’t abuse it, simple as that. Treat their time as your own. If you’re good about it almost all the time, most people will forgive you when you slip up.

Project Professionalism

This is sort of an extension of everything above. Perception is important. If you want to look like a business authority, maybe use an “about me” photo featuring yourself in a type of suit that doesn’t begin with any of the following words: swim, jump, gimp, or birthday.

An exception would be the word “space”. If you’re an astronaut, play that up.

Have a Post Bank Saved Up Prior to Launch

Start Your Organic Rise

Okay, let’s touch on the organic search results, because you should start building your domain authority right at the start. We’ve already mentioned how to position yourself to squeeze out lackluster competitors, but there are a few more things to consider.

Ensure your content is at or above the quality of top competitors in your niche.
I won’t go into this too deep, because everyone who’s even sort of an expert in internet marketing and SEO has already written an entire post on it, but the best way to rise in your niche rankings is to find searches where the top result is mediocre or worst, and answer the same question better.

Write several articles on topics related to your niche.

You want to have several articles, perhaps half a dozen, populating your site right at the word go. This way, anyone who arrives has few things to read or share—and, better yet, link back to. But take your time with writing. To write something truly insightful and useful is a lot of work. Quality over quantity.

Establish (and Keep) a Schedule.

One of the biggest predictors of whether or not a site will grow is whether or not someone keeps creating new content on a schedule. Now, this probably isn’t a perfect correlation, because the people who are busy creating content are also the people who are going to be working hard at all the other aspects of making a site fly.

Advertising

How much depends on your budget, but let’s be honest here, advertising is still an amazing way to bring people in, and expand your reach. Services like Outbrain are specialized for content.

Always Be Learning

Creating great content that gets shared and has great SEO is tough. It requires a lot of learning and practice. Don’t expect to know it all from the start. Begin with reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Read it and live it.

It’s also worth reading up on Bing’s guide to building quality content and even Wikipedia’s guide to writing.

Additionally, spend time learning why other sites rank well and are well-respected. What do the New York Times, The Atlantic, and even Pitchfork have that gets them the respect, authority, and traffic? Know what makes good content and what makes bad content.

Conclusion

This is all a lot of work, I know. Running a site is a lot of work.

Momentum takes awhile to accrue—that’s both the pleasure and the pain of it, but, generally speaking, if you follow these guidelines, you’ll have tilted the ground in your favor. All you have to do now is push as hard as you can, as long as you can, to take advantage of the friendly terrain. There’s no road to easy success, because, if the road is easy, you’re going to get lapped by all the people giving it their all.

What advice do you have to help people put eyes on their content from day one?

About the Author: Anja Skrba has been blogging for over five years. You can find her at FirstSiteGuide.com whereshe shares tips on blogging basics and trends.

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