WordPress plugins try to do too much

All of the WordPress plugins I could find for converting my jpeg and PNG images into WebP either added javascript bloat to my site, kept trying to upsell me, or potentially added one more plugin I had to monitor for potential vulnerabilities. So instead I decided to find a way to batch convert them myself.

These instructions assume you have commandline access to your server, you feel pretty comfortable with linux, MySQL, and you know how to back things up before you start messing around with your WordPress site. Please use at your own risk. Author assumes no responsibility!

1. check if webp is installed on your server:

cwebp -version

3. If not, install:

sudo apt install webp

4. Run these three commands seperately to convert PNG, JPG, and JPEG to WEBP with 80% compression:

for i in *.png; do cwebp -q 80 "$i" -o "${i%.png}.webp"; done

for i in *.jpg; do cwebp -q 80 "$i" -o "${i%.jpg}.webp"; done

for i in *.jpeg; do cwebp -q 80 "$i" -o "${i%.jpeg}.webp"; done

5. Login to your mysql database (back it up) then run these six commands:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '.png', '.webp');
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE(meta_value, '.png', '.webp');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '.jpeg', '.webp');
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE(meta_value, '.jpeg', '.webp');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '.jpg', '.webp');
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE(meta_value, '.jpg', '.webp');

6. In WP install “regnerate thumbnails” plugin

Either run from WP-admin or through the CLI. This will make sure all of the images and variations are all connected properly and will if your site is using srcset, it will restore srcset image function on the site.

sudo wp media regenerate

7. In wordpress admin, install “performance lab” plugin. This will automatically convert your images to webp format going forward.

Clear your cache and you should be up and running!

Google AdWords continues to introduce new tools and options to better target your market and their new “Interest Categories” feature is a welcomed addition. Instead of targeting websites or keywords that you think your target audience would be interested in, Interest Categories flip the process on its head and focus on the interests of the audiences. For example, if you wanted to target young adults who ride dirt bikes.

Why is this beneficial?

With interest categories you can place ads in front of highly customized audiences even when they are visiting websites that are not associated with the category you’ve selected. By reaching highly targeted people even when they are not visiting websites related to your interest category it allows you to increase the reach and frequency of your advertising. This is especially beneficial if your target audience belongs to a sub-set of many different interest groups.

How it work

When people visit any of the millions of websites that use Google AdSense to display ads, Google analyzes the content of the page and site to show ads that match the content. Google uses this information along with third-party cookies to analyze the visitor’s interests. It takes into account the types of sites, frequency of visits to infer gender, age group, and other demographics. For example, if you visit sites that have a majority of male visitors, it may associate you with a male demographic category.

How to make use of AdWords Interest categories

• I would recommend creating separate campaign just to handle your interest category campaigns.
• Make sure that Display Network is selected under the “Networks” setting for the campaign.
• Automatic bidding with a Max CPC. We suggest starting with automatic bidding — Google will automatically adjust your bids to get the most clicks possible from your budget. You can set a max CPC to control the cost of individual clicks. When you’re done, enter your daily interest categories budget in the Budget section.
• Select or create a separate AdGroup for each interest category

Custom Combinations

The work-horse of Interest Categories is the ability to use AND/OR/NOT options to create highly customized interest groups, you can create unique campaigns for a variety of customers.

Here are the following options

• all these audiences (AND relationship)
• one or more of these audiences (OR relationship)
• none of these audiences (NOT relationship)

Using our previous dirt bike example, lets say Fox Head has joined forces with atvsafety.gov to promote proper safety gear that targets youth culture. You could create an interest group that targets this very specific audience:

• One or more of these categories:
  • Off-Road Vehicles
  • Motor Sports
• All of these categories
  • Hard Rock & Progressive Music
  • Indie & Alternative Music
  • Metal (Music)
  • Punk (Music)
• None of these audiences (These are categories kids are typically NOT interested in)
  • News
  • Laws & Government
  • Real Estate
  • Home & Garden
  • Business & Industrial

This is a very narrow sampling of interest groups that would identify youth culture and give FOX and ATVsafety the ability to create targeted campaigns just for that group.

Great SEO ranking didn’t translated into great Quality Scores

With the success we had with our organic SEO strategy it was time to implement our AdWords SEM campaigns. I picked a handful of important keywords and HashBang enabled landing pages and got started. I waited a few weeks so that the campaigns had a chance to be seasoned but with average quality scores around 3-4 I knew something wasn’t right and suspected that Google AdWords was not seeing our AJAX powered content. Doing my own research on the subject yielded zero results and a call to Google wasn’t helpful because the Google AdWords rep didn’t even know about the escaped fragment recommendations.

In case you didn’t know, quality score is how AdWords determines if you make it into the auction and the price you have to pay per click. A low quality score is going to cost you in both the amount of impressions you receive and the price you pay per click.

Google AdWords Keyword planner

Luckily, AdWords provides tools that suggest keywords based on the relevant content AdWords sees on a web page. Lets try their Keyword planner tool and see what results we get.

Control

All of the AJAX based content is in a web app we call “works with”, similar to the Google Apps Marketplace. So as a control, it makes sense to see what the keyword planner identifies as the top keywords for that page. First thing I noticed is those keywords are not very specific to the content of the web app. Also, in the right corner of the Google’s Keyword planner is an “Add all (306)” button which will be important when comparing the amount of keywords the tool finds on the other pages.

HashBanged content page

One of our first landing pages has to do with Microsoft Word, so loading that into the Keyword planner tool I expect to see some keywords related to Microsoft Word show pretty high on the relevancy list. Instead, these are the same keywords that show up in our control and the “Add all” button is still 306! Clearly the keyword planner tool see these two pages as having the exact same content.

Escaped fragmented page

As part of Google’s recommendation for crawlable AJAX pages we created these fragment pages that are supposed to be crawled by Google’s bots. Loading this page into the Keyword planner we finally get to see those Microsoft Word related keywords and our “Add all” button climbs to 866 keywords found in the page.

Keyword rich static page

As a final test I decided to create a static page that closely resembles the AJAX version of the page. It has the same content, but doesn’t have the cool AJAX application that lets the visitor switch between products works with. As you can see in the screen grab below, the results are very similar to our escaped fragment page and more proof that AdWords can’t see the proper content in our AJAX page even though we followed their recommendations for crawlable pages.

Could Keyword planner just be lame?

There is a possibility that keyword planner is just doing a simple scrap of the page you point it at and it may not be indicative of Google AdWords understanding of your page when assigning quality scores. What makes matters worse, is that Google AdWords doesn’t evaluate quality score whenever you change destination URIs even though pointing at relevant content is a major factor in a keywords quality score. The only way to get a reevaluation of a keywords Quality Score is to get enough impressions and clicks to trigger a reevaluation. For us, it means paying a much higher Max. PPC than we probably should, just to if the Quality Score improves over time.

Have you had a similar issue with HashBang web pages receiving poor quality scores, or waiting for reevaluations of keywords after you’ve improved the relevancy of your landing pages?

In the past website attempted to address mobile by creating separate mobile sites with their own content, navigation, and site options. These mobile sites typically were expensive to maintain, updated less frequently, and didn’t have the same level of functionality as the regular website. This left the mobile visitor feeling like a second class citizen and frustrated by the experience.

Building a responsive website

The modern approach to supporting variable devices is to use a single website with CSS that adapts the look and feel of the website based on the browsers dimensions. This allows you to control the users experience for each device type all from a single source. I obviously glossing over some of the details, but the basic appraoch is as follows:

Determine the best layout for each device class

There are hundreds of devices out there, luckily you don’t have to create a design for each device. Instead you can classify most devices into 6 major classes:

• Mobile Portrait (320 x 480)
• Mobile landscape (480 x 320)
• Small tablet portrait (600×800)
• Small tablet landscape (800×600)
• Tablet portrait (768×1024)
• Tablet/ desktop landscape (1024×768)

Depending on your visitor type, you may want to include a 7th class for larger screens.

For each class you need to determine the best layout to maximize the customer experience. This might seem like a lot of work, but remember, once you’ve worked this out all of your content will seamlessly scale to your visitors devices.

CSS format for handling various dimension classes

The css code for handling screen dimensions is pretty straight forward. For example, the way to specify styles for Mobile device in portrait mode, looks like this.

/* Max width of 480 pixels */
@media screen and (max-width: 480px) {
//Your CSS styles specific to this device
}


Iterate this process for each device class and your site is ready to provide your visitors with the best user experience regardless of their device.

Even if you use a responsive framework, like Twitter’s Bootstrap, its good to know how to customize the appearance using CSS in order to ensure that your visitors have the best possible experience.

The SEM industry is buzzing with the eBay Research Lab’s recent study (Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment) which calls into question the effectiveness of paid search. I’ve read a few of the articles about the study and most focus on the doom-and-gloom and don’t really look closely at the actual study. I want to cut through all of the hype and see what actionable information we can actually learn from their study.

Branded Search Engine Campaigns

A branded campaign is one where a search for your company’s brand results in paid ads at the top of the search results page directly above natural (also known as organic) unpaid links to the companies’ sites. Ebay’s study found that someone searching for your brand is likely to find their way to your website without the paid links. When they stopped their branded paid campaigns all traffic found their way through their natural search results.

Non-branded Search Engine Campaigns

Any campaign using keywords not owned by the company would be considered non-branded search campaigns, even if some of those keywords are brand names. For example, if someone does a search for “Gibson les Paul” it is clearly a brand name guitar, but not a brand name guitar owned by eBay.

Their non-branded search campaign experiments found that search advertising wasn’t effective on repeat customers for non-branded search advertising. When a frequent eBay shopper does a Google search for “Gibson les Paul” and an eBay ad for Gibson les Paul guitars shows up, it wasn’t effective at persuading the person to buy from eBay. The person was already familiar with eBay and would have eventually found their way to eBay as a resource for their search for a “Gibson les Paul” However, if a new or infrequent visitor to eBay saw the ad, there was a statistical significance to the persuasiveness of the ad. In other words, the ads had a positive ROI. The experiment reconfirmed the notion that advertising’s value comes from informing people about the existence of your product or services, not at persuading them to purchase. If the visitor is already familiar with your brand, then search advertising will have no additional benefit.

Recommendations, based on the eBay study

While the study makes it clear that eBay’s brand recognition puts them in a unique situation, there are some insights that apply to most online advertisers.

Branded SEM campaign recommendations:

• Use branded campaigns if competitors (or resellers) are targeting your brand name.
• Use branded campaigns if you’d like to highlight a special offer or new feature/service that customers, already familiar with your brand, would not be aware of.
• If neither of those above scenarios apply to your business, save your marketing dollars on something more meaningful.

Non-branded SEM campaign recommendations:

The informative view of advertising implies that targeting uninformed users is a critical factor for successful advertising. Therefore ROI calculations should be based on new visitors and not total visitors. In other words, if you have calculated a per visit value for your campaigns you should only factor new visitors.

If you  would like help optimizing your existing Google Adwords campaigns, or want to get started with AdWords and don’t know where to start, contact us!