the measure of a marketer's worth
TRANSCRIPT
Rand’s Fitbit Story
I Have Degenerative Disc Disease
Three Things Really Help Lessen My Daily Pain
#1: Walking #2: Back Exercises
#3: Losing Weight
I Assumed I Was Already Doing Plenty Of Them
I didn’t realize how much opportunity I had to
improve here and positively impact my health.
My First Few Days with Fitbit,I Realized I Wasn’t Nearly as Active as I Thought
Oh crap...
I Became Obsessed with Hitting My Targets Fast:
That’s better.
Tracking All These Have Made Me:
Healthier
Happier
In Less Pain
I’ve Had These Goals For Years
Tracking WORK, Not Just Progress, Made the Difference
Work
Progress
In Analytics,We Assume…
We Know the Right Inputs
+More Citations
More Links = #1!
We Know What Work Matters vs. Doesn’t
Don’t Bother Do It Every DayBlog Post CreationManual Link Outreach
Tweaking Facebook Ads New Facebook Posts
Asking for Yelp Reviews Follow Instagram Accounts
Focusing on Outcome Metrics vs. Inputs Will Bring Success
This is a great report, but it
tells me nothing about the work that went into
improving rankings.
What If We’re Wrong?
Goals of Analytics3
1) Reporting (aka measuring success & failure)
2) Diagnosing (aka finding what caused change)
3) Generating Targets (aka uncovering whichinputs are required to produce successful outcomes)
Via Moz & Hubspot’s 2015 Publishing Frequency Experiment
We’re good at #1 and #2We rarely talk about #3…
The Challenge With Generating Targets
Uncovering What Works is Hard
These elements might be well correlated with sites that tend to rank well, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best investments your site
can make?
Via Moz’s 2015 Google Ranking Factors
The Process of Experimentation, Failure, & Discovery is Rarely Embraced by Managers or Clients.
Via Rand’s Art of Product Marketing Presentation
We Need to Know What Works to Create Success
Via Groove’s Blog
Rather Than Just Measuringthe Output of Our Various Tasks
Via Moz’s 1Metric Content Tracking System
I think this may be the greatest analytics challenge facing marketers today.
It’s Not Just Software
It’s Not Just Numbers
It’s Not Just About Up-and-to-the-Right Graphs
Via Majestic’s Backlink History
It’s About Finding…the Work that Creates Improvement
It’s About Finding…Effective Targets that Impact
the Right Metrics
The Story of
Ikaria
What’s So SpecialAbout Ikaria?
Via NYTimes Magazine’s Piece on Ikaria
Diet
Exercise
Sleep
Rich Social Lives
The World’s Five Blue Zones Have These in Common:
Via National Geographic
Translating these longevity-promoting activities into measurable targets creates analytics that improve lifespan.
Via Fitbit’s Blog
Resting heart rate is a strong predictor of health & longevity. This is the work that correlates.
Via Cardiogr.am’s Blog
These lines show me the daily goal for WORK, not
just a goal for results.
This is what’s missing from our current approach to marketing analytics.
We ignore the inputs that create those results.
We measure the results.
Our Job:Find the Right Targets
What are the everyday actions that consistently improve your marketing performance?
Ongoing investments to experiment with (& measure) in the near future.7
#1: Bolster Internal Linking for SEO
Identify important keywords and pages that don’t yet rank
well
Via Rand’sMoz Analytics Account
Use a query like this to identify relevant pages for internal
linking
If it’s a broadly important page across the site, you
can use a query like this to ID good pages for internal
links.
Add in-content, relevant, useful links from those
pages to the target page.
In our experiments, and based on the
research of others, these tactics still work!
Via Shaun Anderson on Hobo Web
#2: Create New Content Targeting Long Tail KWs
Identify keywords with low volume, low difficulty, and
high opportunity, for some long tail
content creation.
Just a little content curation and a tap of the publish
button, and, if you have a relevant, reasonably
established site, you can rank.
#3: Convert Mentions to Equity-Passing Links
Set up alerts for your brand names, and you’ll see lots of sites that talk about you, but fail to link, costing you traffic
and rankings.
Via Fresh Web Explorer
You don’t necessarily need to pay for a tool;
Google’s temporal search will let you find these too.
You can manually edit the query string (the
“tbs” parameter) to get as granular as you want
with Google’s timing.
When you find a mention lacking a link, leave a comment, email the author, or use Twitter to send a
ping.
Helps readers of the piece, and helps Moz too!
#4: Test New Titles & Headlines On Ranking Pages
Via Distilled’s Blog
When there’s lots of pages using a standard
template of keyword use, small changes can
have a big impact.
Identify sections of the site that use any
templated language format in Titles/Headlines
Craft a keyword list of potential alternatives
or additions to compare volume
metrics
Test alterations on a sizable section of the
relevant pages to determine effectiveness
#5: Vary Social Sharing Automation & Scheduling
Via AppsWithoutCode Blog
Automating & scheduling a few more social updates than you currently do can have big rewards.
Via AppsWithoutCode Blog
Choose some of your best stuff to share.
Craft unique, compelling updates
Bump up your current sharing level
Tami Brehse ran a process just like this,
and experienced dramatic gains in
social following and referral traffic
Via Tami Brehse’s Tweet Automation Post on Inbound.org
Moz had great success testing and refining our social
sharing across channels to find the
right balance of quantity, diversity,
and repetition
#6: Add Related Topics to Your KW-Targeted Pages
This page looks nice, but totally lacks the terms &
phrases needed for Google to think it’s
relevant to the keywords I’m targeting
Uncover the terms/phrases most commonly used on the pages that do rank well for a
search term, and you’ve got a great starting point.
Via Related Topics Feature in Moz Analytics
#7: Contact Non-Converting Folks in Your Audience & Use Their Feedback to Improve
This might be the worst landing page I’ve ever designed.
Converts ~0.11% of visitors (and those folks already clicked on “pricing,” suggesting they’re
interested!)
I dropped a line to folks who’d signed in
to use the tool for free, looked at the pricing page, but
didn’t buy
They all said variations of the same thing – they needed to try before they’d buy. So we added a free trial CTA.
We saw dramatic, rapid improvement. So now I’m going through all the other feedback to see what we else we can fix and tweak.
Every Tactic Can Be Broken Down Into:The Work The Metrics The Goal(s)
Put up two Facebook
posts/weekFix any broken links
Pitch a guest contribution 1X/month
Participate in three discussion threads/week
FB shares, new page likes, traffic
Traffic increase
Acceptance of post, traffic driven
Traffic from discussion site
Grow reach on & through Facebook
Direct+search bump
Visibility to new audience, traffic
Brand awareness, branded search
The Classic Wayto Do Analytics:
Set Metrics to Monitor
Create Targets
Traffic will go up 30% this year!
Or I will jump on all of you!
Do Work You Think Will Reach Those Goals
OK…. I’ll buy some ads I guess.You guys… blog… or something.
Measure Improvement vs. Loss
Not good enough!
A Different Wayto Do Analytics:
Set Both Work Items & Metrics to Monitor
For the next 12 weeks,2 Facebook posts a week.
Uncover What Work Moves Which Metrics
Crap.That didn’t work. Let’s
try something different.
Measure the work against *work* targets, not just
metrics goals
That’s 177 broken links fixed. Just 81 left. You can do this, Mortimer. Breathe.
Double Down on Work that Improves the MetricsYou Care About Most
Oh damn! Those weekly discussion thread contributions are totally working!
Improve Your*Time to Goal Achievement*
I’m an unstoppable marketing force! Come at me, bro!
Some ToolsCan Help:
Google’s Calendar’s New “Goals”:
Via GoogleBlog
Some Alternatives:
Via Slant.co
Let’s Experiment
Let’s Find Our10,000 Steps
Let’s Measure Both Metric Goals and
the Workthat Improves Them.
