Related Questions Grow +500% in 5 Months

Posted by Dr-Pete

Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA "People Also Ask"). If you haven't seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Here's an example from a search for "Samsung Galaxy S6":

If you click on any question, it expands into something that looks like a Featured Snippet:

Currently, Related Questions can occur in packs of between 1–4 questions and answers. Here's an example of a box with only one question, on a search for "lederhosen":

Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question.

How common are related questions?

We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward commercial queries, and the absolute percentage may not represent the entire web. What's interesting, though, is what happened after that. Here's a graph of Related Questions prevalence since the end of July:

You can clearly see two spikes in the graph — one measured on October 27th, and one on December 1st. As of this writing (December 10th), Related Questions appeared on about 8.1% of the queries we track. In less than 5 months, Related Questions have increased 501%. This is a much faster adoption rate than other Knowledge Graph features.

Where do the answers come from?

When you expand a question, the answer looks a lot like another recent Knowledge Graph addition — Featured Snippets. Digging deeper, though, it appears that the connection is indirect at best. For example, here's an expanded question on a search for "monopoly":

If you click on that search, though, you get a SERP with the following Featured Snippet:

It's interesting to note that both answers come from Investopedia, but Google is taking completely different text from two different URLs on the same site. With Featured Snippets, we know that the answer currently has to come from a site already ranking on page one, but with Related Questions, there's no clear connection to organic results. These answers don't seem tied to their respective SERPs.

Where do the questions come from?

It's clear that both the answers in Related Questions and the snippets in Featured Snippets are machine-generated. Google is expanding the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph by extracting answers directly from the index. What may not be as clear, at first glance, is that machines are also generating the questions themselves. Look at the following example, from a search for "grammar check":

Out of context, the question doesn't even make sense. Expanded, you can see that it relates to a very specific grammar question posted on Quora. While the topic is relevant, no human would attach this question, as worded, to this search. Consider another example, for "cover letter examples":

The first and last question are obviously, to a human, redundant. To a machine, though, they would look unique. To be fair, Google has come a long way in a short time — even a couple of months ago, some of these questions were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. As of this writing, I can't find a single example of either.

Finally, there are the questions that no human would ever ask:

No rational human would ever want to know what kind of meat is in a gyro. It's better that way.

What's coming next?

It's clear that Google is rapidly expanding their capability to generate questions and answers from the index. Both Featured Snippets and Related Questions have evolved considerably since their respective launches, and Google's ability to understand natural language queries and semantic data is growing daily. It may be months before we fully understand if and how these results cannibalize organic clicks, but it seems very clear that Google no longer considers these features to be experimental and will be aggressively pushing forward question-and-answer style SERPs in the near future.

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7 Domain Name Considerations

1. Size Matters Generally, the shorter your domain name, the better. That’s because it’s easier for people to remember and type in a shorter domain than a longer one. Consider the above example, Pets.com is better than something like PetsPetEmporiumAndPuppyStore.com. […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

7 Domain Name Considerations

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Written by Sameer Panjwani, Mondovo

The post 7 Domain Name Considerations appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

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[Podcast] Episode 003: How do I get more email subscribers when starting from scratch?

We are quickly approaching the new year, and with each new year comes new beginnings. If you’re planning to start a new business venture in 2016, then you’ll definitely want to listen to this packed-to-the-brim episode of Ask Me About Email Marketing.

This week’s question comes from life coach, Dr. Wasi Saleem, who recently launched his brand and is looking to attract more email subscribers. To answer his question, we’ve recruited Brandon Olson, Content Marketing Manager at AWeber.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to optimize your website by determining your primary goal
• What elements to split test to boost conversion rates
• Common mistakes that can sabotage conversions
• How to use email automation to deliver valuable content
• The importance of opt-in form consistency
• Ways to integrate email marketing with social media

Listen below to hear Brandon’s response.

Want to be on the show? Here’s how you can participate:

• Use the widget below to record and send us a question about email marketing.
• We’ll select a question from the submission pool and track down one of our in-house email marketing experts to provide an answer.
• We’ll record their response, package it up with your question and release it as a new podcast episode each week. Plus, each episode will include bonus resources to help you level up your email marketing.

There are so many topics to explore in email marketing. So if you’re struggling with design, content, analytics or just getting started, leave us a message with a specific question and we’ll start answering!

A few notes on submitting:

• Introduce yourself, and your business/email marketing venture. Please don’t share any spammy URLs.
• Keep your question brief. Anywhere between 60-90 seconds would be ideal. Two-part questions are okay, too!
• Keep it clean. We won’t accept any submissions with disrespectful or vulgar language.

If we select your questions, we’ll air it. By submitting a question, you are agreeing to allow us to use your full, submitted audio clip on our podcast and in marketing the podcast and AWeber.

Ready to ask a question? Click the green button below!

The post [Podcast] Episode 003: How do I get more email subscribers when starting from scratch? appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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A Heart of Business with Rose Bowl Parade Colored Glasses

We talked to William Flinn, the Executive Director of the Rose Bowl Parade, about the event and all the prep that goes into it. It's a great look into community, tradition, event planning and so much more.Related Articles

1. After 8 Years of Burying News Stories, Digg Buries Itself
2. Benchmark 5: The Return of Derrick Rose
3. Introducing the Heart of Business

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Do You Know How Your Email Open Rate Is Calculated?

Okay, I admit that this isn’t the most exciting topic when it comes to email marketing. You want your data, and you don’t care too much about how it’s obtained.

But it is important to consider if you’ve switched (or are thinking of switching) email marketing service providers (ESP). And here’s why: not all ESPs calculate email open rates the same way, and that can change your view on how your emails are performing.

Where ESPs and pizza places intersect

Switching to a new email marketing provider is kinda like finding a new pizza spot. Even though you have a whole new menu, you still expect certain elements to be the same. But then you realize your new pizza hangout creates their sauce differently, and nothing makes sense anymore. Even though it’s still pizza, something just seems off in comparison.

Well, moving to a new email marketing platform can be a similar experience, such as when you start reviewing your open rates on recently sent emails. Just like how no two pizza places follow the same recipes for the same pies, not every ESP uses the same formula for calculating open rates.

While this won’t impact how many people are opening your emails, it can portray different pictures of how successful your emails are.

But first, what’s an open rate?

Open rates represent the percentage of subscribers who opened your email compared to the number of emails that were delivered.

To track opens, ESPs that provide analytics add an invisible tracker image within HTML emails. As long as the email is opened using a provider that doesn’t block images, the open rate will be tracked.

This data is helpful as it provides insight into how effective your subject lines are at convincing subscribers to open your emails. It can also tell you the best times to send emails to your subscribers; if your open rates are higher between 2 pm and 5 pm on Wednesdays than any other time of the week, you might want to start sending future emails during that time.

How open rates are calculated

While ESPs track opens the same way, the road begins to split when it’s time to calculate the open rate. Here are the three most used formulas:

1. Unique Opens / Total Number of Subscribers

This approach (which we use here at AWeber) means the open rate is calculated by taking the unique opens (i.e., the total number of unique subscribers who open your email) and dividing it by the total number of subscribers on your list. So regardless of how many times a single person opens your email to look back at its contents, it will only count as one open.

For example, if you send an email to 100 subscribers and 20 people open it, your open rate would be 20 percent.

2. Total Opens / Total Number of Subscribers

With this formula, one person might count as multiple opens if they open your message more than once. Let’s go back to your email you sent to 100 people. Now, if 20 people open your message, and one person opens your message five times, the open rate would be 25 percent using this formula.

So even though the same number of individuals read your message as the previous example, the results are quite different since total opens are referenced. And this has a couple of pros and cons:

Con: The disadvantage with this number is that your rates might be skewed higher than normal if someone opens up your email a number of times.

If you were to send out an email with a link to a new ebook, someone who isn’t ready to read the whole thing might go back to that email multiple times to grab the link. Someone, or multiple people, might be re-opening your email 10, 15, or even 20 times! As a result, your open rate might seem as though more people are opening your emails, when it’s really just the same few individuals.

Pro: Total opens can also tell you more about how engaged your subscribers are with the content in a particular email. If someone goes back to your email 10 or more times, there’s something about the content that urges them to do so.

3. Unique Opens / (Emails Sent – Emails Bounced)

Sometimes your emails never get opened because they don’t make it to your subscriber’s inbox in the first place. Emails bounce due to a number of reasons, like an invalid user, invalid domain name, permanent bounce backs, etc. As a result, some ESPs calculate open rates by excluding the number of emails that bounce from an Internet Service Provider (Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL).

Let’s say you send your email to 100 people, 20 people open it, one person opens it 5 times, and 9 emails bounce. Your open rate will be calculated as follows:

20 / (100-9) = 22% open rate

You’ll notice that this open rate is again different from the previous two results. Depending on how many emails bounce, this formula might present a slightly higher open rate as the number of recipients who received your email gets smaller.

So, what’s the best approach?

That’s sort of a trick question, because there is no single right way to calculate open rate. Each formula will paint a slightly different picture of how your emails are performing, and being aware of what the story is telling you is the first step to understanding your analytics.

To get deeper into the data and learn more about how your subscribers are interacting with your emails, check to see if your ESP provides more in-depth reporting. AWeber users, for example, can view breakdowns of both unique and total opens for sent emails. This allows you to gather more insight in addition to the percentage that is presented to you.

How are your open rates calculated?

Check with your email service provider to see how your open rates are being calculated. If you’re planning on switching to a new ESP, be sure to research how they determine the rate as well.

For more tips on how to improve your open rates, here’s another great read from our blog.

Have any questions about open rates? Ask away in the comment section!

The post Do You Know How Your Email Open Rate Is Calculated? appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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The Best Resources for Account-Based Marketing

I’ve spent the past few weeks discussing account-based marketing (ABM), a powerful but under-implemented strategy. My first post covers the history of account-based marketing, from the “Mad Men” days of the 1950s to today. My second post reviews the reasons B2B firms should implement account-based marketing.

Of course, understanding why you should implement account-based marketing and actually doing it are two different things. Knowing how to implement the right technology stack is essential to unlocking the true power of ABM. For the final post in this series, I’ll go over the best resources for setting up account-based marketing.

What’s ABM, again?

Let’s quickly review the definition of ABM:

• Account-based marketing focuses marketing and sales resources on a defined set of targeted accounts, where personalized campaigns are tailored to each account.

Now that we understand what account-based marketing is, the next step is incorporating the right technology. Many times firms adopt technology without understanding its real purpose, sometimes without any real marketing strategy. Before you fall into the same trap, you need to take a hard look at the health of your Marketing and Sales departments.

Understanding Your Experience with Technology and Training

Every marketing firm is different. From client experience to employee expertise, your firm is going to have unique resources and know-how. While this might include SaaS, you have to be willing to admit when you aren’t ready for new tech.

Is your staff experienced enough with SaaS solutions to adapt to new systems and processes? Do they have good habits in place with existing SaaS solutions, like LinkedIn Business? Have you introduced new systems in the past?

After answering these questions, you’ll be able to realistically determine what you’ll need for ABM. Asking yourself the hard questions will help you determine the right resources and training for your team’s success.

Make Sure Marketing and Sales Speak the Same Language

No matter the firm, Marketing and Sales should be on the same page. Marketing and sales alignment is necessary for marketing to ensure their campaigns align with the needs of prospects identified by sales, and for sales to make sure they’re selling the right stuff to the right contacts. Both departments need to have the same success metrics, otherwise efforts from one could be counter-productive for the other.

Implementing a technology stack makes this relationship more important than ever. Solutions are built to streamline processes such as updating lead and contact information and streamlining campaigns, so the more you have your ducks in a row, the better. (And let’s not forget the cost of purchasing new SaaS.) As with any investment, you need to make sure you’re getting the most value you can.

Understand the Purpose of Your Technology Stack

It’s not uncommon for many companies, big and small, to jump on new technology. The enthusiasm is great—the fallout, not so much. Many Marketing departments don’t have a clear purpose or strategy for incorporating their chosen technology into their existing sales and marketing pipeline.

Before adding a tool to your technology stack, ask yourself what value it will add to your sales and marketing efforts. Do you want to use ABM because of its laser focus on lead generation and management? Are you looking for automations tools to help with campaigns? Many account-based marketing solution companies offer more than one product. Knowing what you need will help you and your potential provider find your ideal solution.

Identify Tools to Help Achieve Your Strategy

Finally, we’ve arrived at the most important question: What should you look for in an ABM solution? Some important features may include:

Action-Oriented Insights

Any ABM solution can slice and dice data into metrics and charts. However, these insights are useless if you can’t create actionable plans from them. Solid account-based marketing programs will provide straightforward metrics that you can readily understand and use effectively. Ideally, the system will also offer flexibility for you to create customized drill-down reports as you become familiar with your particular needs.

Lead and Contact Data Automation

The very objective of having an ABM stack is to reduce time-consuming tasks so you can focus on engaging your targeted segment. Good ABM solutions will help manage contact and lead information, such as automatically updating contact information or mapping new contacts into the appropriate accounts.

Reliable Support and Services

Just as your firm focuses on marketing and tailoring your services to your customers, your ABM provider should offer reliable real-time support. While this includes a traditional help desk, some firms go so far as to provide consultant services and host educational events.

Integration with Existing Solutions

We’ve already mentioned that account-based marketing requires constant communication with sales. ABM tools that integrate with existing solutions like Salesforce and marketing automation solutions like Marketo will keep your teams running smoothly.

ABM Technology to Add to Your Stack

Now that you understand what to look for in an account-based marketing system, I’m sure you’re wondering where to even begin looking for the solution that’s best for you. Fortunately, there aren’t too many out there right now:

• Engagio – Though new to the ABM scene, Engagio delivers reliable automation and analytics no matter the size of your target segment. This solution connects to your existing Salesforce and Marketo accounts and your website to keep track of leads, marketing programs and site visitors. The utilization of metrics such as “engagement minutes,” allow for a more straightforward way of tracking lead interest.
• LeanData – This California-based company delivers two ABM products. Sales Accelerator focuses on lead management, including automated lead conversions and contact owner assignments. Demand Management focuses on account-based reporting and nurturing, ensuring you have the proper data to adjust campaigns and properly target leads.
• DemandBase – DemandBase offers a full suite of solutions, called the Marketing Cloud, to help teams streamline every step of the marketing process. Solutions include advertising, personalized site experiences and account-based measurements. DemandBase also provides consulting services by experts that will help create a marketing plan that’s best for you.

Before You Hit “Start”

Finally, we come to the $6 billion question: Is it time for you to implement account-based marketing? To review, here’s what’s on the table:

• The opportunity to target “whale” accounts with tailored marketing campaigns.
• The power to engage contacts and create organic referrals within accounts.
• The confidence to sell more than ever before once you’ve set up your stack and hired in the right talent.

Like I’ve said before, ABM really is a no-brainer. But you have to be prepared.

Jumping the gun and setting up an ABM stack the wrong way will just make life harder for Marketing and Sales. Take the time to review your existing solutions and align your firepower with your targets. ABM will help you get where you want to go, but you need to be facing the right direction, first.

About the Author: Alp Mimaroglu is a Marketing Luminary. He specializes in marketing automation, demand generation, analytics, and marketing technology. Alp has extensive experience with both business and consumer marketing. He’s passionate about how technology is rapidly becoming the key to success in both the corporate sales and marketing landscapes. Follow Alp on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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What’s in Store for PPC in 2016? Predictions from the Pros

2015 was a jam-packed year filled with some really exciting developments in reaching our audience through digital ads.

Looking ahead, our friends at Acquisio gathered some pros in the industry to chat about predictions in paid search for 2016, and there’s some great stuff to look forward to. Let’s dive into some of the most interesting projections from the crew!

Ad Targeting in 2016 Will Be Awesome

The ways we can reach our audience get more awesome every year. When I first started advertising online, the ways in which we can target our audiences today would have been literally unthinkable. Now, we can target potential customers according to virtually any metric, demographic, or behavior, and many predict 2016 will help advertisers be über-relevant beyond keywords alone.

“Consumers want—and respond to—advertising that is customized to their interests,” says Lisa Raehsler. “Advertisers who evolve to strategies such as in-market audiences, retargeting and demographic targeting will see positive performance results.”

Greg Sterling predicts a move in the right direction as offline action and sales data will better integrate into audience segmentation and online/mobile ad targeting in the coming year. This will lead to more offline-to-online retargeting, he says.

John Gagnon predicts that 2016 will see better retargeting, too, like reaching those “you’ve engaged with at tradeshows (pixel on an event registration page)” and reengaging “folks who’ve signed up for a whitepaper (customer email list).”

I agree. Advances in PPC marketing such as customer match in AdWords and custom audiences in Facebook make PPC look and feel a lot more like email marketing. As a result, PPC marketers should prepare for 2016 ad campaigns to look and feel more like what you might expect to see in a marketing automation drip campaign.

Finally, Brad Geddes suspects enterprise companies may start questioning if their agency is the best fit for them in the coming year based on how they adopt to customer journey marketing.

No More CPC WTF?

You may be wondering, what is the future of the cost per click? (SPOILER ALERT: They’re going UP).

Lisa Raehsler points out that while search has been a “dependable stand-by,” rising CPCs are making it too difficult for small and medium-sized advertisers to rely solely on traditional keyword search and compete with the “big guys.”

But Aaron Levy points out that “given the marketplace economy and its impending saturation, I expect these rises are going to slow lest engines price their own advertisers out of the marketplace.”

Bryan Minor agrees, suspecting there will be an “overall downward suppression of CPC” due to increased efficiency in the marketplace from machine learning.  

Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to see CPCs go down, I’m pretty sure CPCs will continue to rise in 2016 and beyond.

“When competing in a world of higher CPCs, it’s more important than ever to understand the full value of search ads in order to be able to set competitive bids,” says Frederick Vallaeys, who expects Google to make it easier to understand the full value with enhancements to conversion tracking and attribution modeling.

This, Vallaeys says, will make it easier for every advertiser to decide just “how much value should be assigned to each type of interaction whether they be calls, offline sales, requests for directions, etc.”

Greg Sterling concurs that “vague digital metrics such as clicks and impressions” will give way to more tangible outcomes like store visits, offline sales and “other concrete actions more reflective of actual customer activity and value.”

Mobile Advertising … Because Duh!

Mobile advertising is not really an option anymore – it's required.

Let’s see what industry folks said is in store for mobile:

“The number of responsive sites, built-for-mobile sites and apps will flourish,” says David Szetela of Bruce Clay, Inc. Digital marketers should plan accordingly with things like click-to-call ads and shortening ad copy, he says. 

Brad Geddes believes that the best companies will “start testing mobile ads and pages completely separately from their desktop ad and page tests.”

“We’ll also see considerably more ‘m-commerce,’” says Greg Sterling, which includes scheduling/bookings and payments for offline services as well as the more traditional e-commerce transactions. 

Finally, Aaron Levy points out that store visit tracking “will grow exponentially to fully value mobile.”

Social Media Ads: Kicking Some Serious Ass

Social advertising is quickly becoming a favorite for many businesses.

In fact, Brad Geddes says 2016 will be the year of “Google trying to catch Facebook” in targeting users by more than just keywords.

Marc Poirier agrees. “The next battleground to challenge Google’s market share may very well be non-traditional search platforms. Facebook and Netflix, as an example, have shown that WHAT people search is as important as WHERE they search.”

David Szetela forecasts that advertisers will spend a growing percentage of their budgets on Facebook ads and Instagram. “They’ll be attracted by Facebook’s retargeting, custom audiences (especially email lists) and dynamic product ads.”

And Greg Sterling points out that “on the consumer side, Facebook will finally get into ‘local search.’”

“Consumers seek answers not only through search, but also through social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn,” Lisa Raehsler points out, “so exposure on these platforms is complementary to search engines.”

SMBs Rule!

On the SMB front, Frederick Vallaeys says local shops will see improvements to the Google Merchant Center where it will be easier to submit and manage small product feeds, and that AdWords “will make it easier to turn these feeds into Shopping ads.”

He also predicts AdWords will “integrate tools for retailers in Google My Business,” and that “Google Shopping Express will make it easier for small shops to start offering their inventory for sale on Google’s same-day delivery shopping service.”

Greg Sterling says that in terms of ad sales, “data will be more widely and effectively used to improve efficiency and reduce churn, in part by identifying and segmenting prospects based on their individual needs or challenges.”

And Frederick points out that “video ads are cheap compared with search ads, so they present a great opportunity for small businesses to connect with prospective buyers” in the coming year.

When it comes to tracking, Aaron Levy predicts view-based attribution and cross-device influence will grow exponentially. “No longer will they be relegated to a non-default column or hidden in the corner; instead, they’ll become core bidding functionality and must-use tools.”

He also thinks that signals to track in-store visits, which he points out are already in the works at Google, will help “measure what we can’t see with a pixel.”

Bye-Bye AdWords, Hello Bing Ads??

Several weighed in on the future of Bing Ads in the coming year – and it’s looking bright.

Marc Poirier predicts Google’s share of search in the U.S. as measured by comScore “will drop below 60 percent in 2016 as a result of Bing’s rapid growth following the acceleration of the deployment of Windows 10 with Bing globally.”

David Szetela says Bing Ads search and display traffic will finally be viewed as “must have” by a growing number of advertisers. “This will be driven by the fact that the increasing click inventory will continue to be priced below Google CPCs.”

Mona Elesseily points out that Bing Ads has also integrated search functionality into various Microsoft products like Xbox, Microsoft Office and Cortana, and is “attempting to understand search/user behavior from different platforms, different device types, etc.”

With all these fantastic developments on the horizon, we can’t wait to see what 2016 will bring to the paid search industry, and how it will allow businesses to better connect with their target audience at precisely the right moment.

You can download the predictions eBook in its entirety here.

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