Link Building Tools

I’ve been building links for SEO campaigns for over 10 years so I’ve seen a lot of software come and go, tested a lot of link building tools. Here is the link building software I’m using most frequently nowadays…

Ahrefs – Ahrefs is my tool of choice for link research right now. Their index of 150 billion+ pages makes them one of the biggest and freshest indexes and they have a host of tools for extracting really useful, actionable data for link research. Their custom metrics of “URL Rating”, “Domain Rating” and “Ahrefs Rank” are in my opinion the most useful snapshot measurements of the link value of a website or webpage.

Link Research Tools – LRT was the first tool I signed up for when I started freelancing and it was a huge amount of money for me at the time but I decided it was that pivotal to the type of service I wanted to provide for clients. I have been an on-off customer of Link Research Tools since and recommend them for heavy duty research based link building campaigns and link audits.

Buzzstream – I’m a big fan of BuzzStream for management of link building campaigns, whether you’re doing outreach, content promotion, guest blogging or buying links its the best way to keep your team and your links organised.

Analytics

Accurate analytics are a must whatever type of campaign you’re running. Here’s some of my preferred analytics software and apps…

Google Analytics – It probably goes without saying that along with the rest of the world I use Google Analytics a lot and its my go to web analytics tool.

Hotjar – A great little tool for usability and conversion optimisation work, HotJar is the easiest way to record heatmaps of how visitors are interacting with your pages, where they’re clicking and how they’re scrolling through your landing pages. Try it out with a free trial or their free forever plan.

ClickMeter – ClickMeter is a useful tool for doing all sorts of clever stuff with tracking and analytics that you can’t do with other software. It also has built in features for click fraud monitoring and acts as an advanced URL shortener which is great for affiliates.

SuperMetrics – If you do a lot of work in Google Sheets or Excel then you’ll find SuperMetrics really handy for pulling data and updating it automatically from a huge number of different API’s including Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, AdWords and Twitter

SEO Tools

These are the multi-purpose SEO tools I use most frequently. Unfortunately there’s no true “all in one” tool for SEO so if I have to use multiple tools and subscriptions to do different jobs…

Raven Tools – I’ve been a Raven Tools customer since about 2010 and have written a full Raven Tools Review here. Its a great tool for a number of different SEO tasks and if you’re managing campaigns across teams it keeps all your data in one place. I use it for most of the client reporting we do as an agency.

Ahrefs – Ahrefs is now much more than just a link index, their tools for tracking rankings, researching keywords and analysing content make it one of my favourite and most used complete SEO tools, hence its appearing twice on this list!

Content Marketing

Tools I use for researching and writing content for clients and for this blog, then promoting it…

Buzzsumo – Buzzsumo is the best tool for researching ideas for content thats likely to get links and do well well on social media. Its also brilliant for outreach and Twitter Ads because it lets you download lists of influencers who have shared content similar to yours in the past and target your ads at followers of those people.

Keyword research

Whether its for SEO or PPC campaigns I like to use multiple tools for keyword research to make sure I’m getting the full picture…

Keyword Explorer in Ahrefs – I love the Ahrefs keyword explorer tool because it gives global search volumes and gives the best indication of how much traffic you might actually get from an organic listing and how search clicks are split between paid and organic listings.

Moz Keyword Explorer Tool – Although not as comprehensive as the Ahrefs tool Moz’s keyword tool gives really good similar keyword suggestions and keyword difficulty scores. You can run a couple of free queries a day if you’re not a Pro member.

Long Tail Pro – Most SEO’s focus on head keywords, the most popular and obvious keywords in any given market. That means most keyword research tools are designed to find those head terms. Long Tail Pro worked this out and developer their tool to focus on finding hidden, long tail keywords that most tools won’t surface.

Rank Tracking Tools

I’m a big advocate of accurate rank tracking to measure the overall health of your website whether you’re actively doing SEO work or not. Retrieving rankings is a pain because you’re constantly fighting Google’s spam controls and personalisation. Don’t try and gather ranking results yourself, use a rank tracking tool to do the heavy lifting for you…

Authority Labs – I use Authority Labs for my large scale SEO projects when I need reliable rankings for thousands of keywords.

SE Ranking – A great little rank tracking tool I recommend to SME’s who just need to track rankings for a handful of keywords. You can track weekly rankings for up to 50 keywords for as little as £2.50/ month which is great value.

Email marketing

I think I’ve probably used every major email marketing tool over the past 10 years but these are the ones I prefer to use today…

Aweber – Aweber is my email marketing tool of choice for most campaigns. I find its easy to use, has good deliverability and their automation tools mean for most campaigns you won’t need a more complicated (and expensive) marketing automation solution.

Drip – I also really like the simplicity of Drip for setting up marketing automation and auto-responder campaigns. Check it out if you’re looking to do clever stuff with email delivery sequences.

Website Hosting

Not all website hosting is created equal! You need a reliable host with good support so if you’re thinking of switching hosts I always recommend firing off some support tickets to them before you commit to see how responsive and useful they are. I’ve had some terrible experiences with some of the world’s best know hosting providers so don’t get sucked in by a big brand…

TSO Host – I’ve used TSO Host as my main hosting provider for the past 4 years. Their support is brilliant, hosting is very affordable and really reliable. Use coupon code JMCCOM for 10% off any hosting you buy with TSO Host.

WPEngine – About a year ago I started hosting WordPress sites for new projects with WP Engine the specialist WordPress-only host. I’ve found WordPress sites run much faster on WPEngine than on any other host I’ve used (including TSO Host) so thats a massive factor for me. Starting at $29 a month its more than you’d expect to pay for your average shared hosting plan but the extra speed is worth it for me.

CloudFlare – I use CloudFlare for DNS hosting, its the best way to setup DNS for WPEngine and they have a host of great free features to help with the speed and security of your site (paid options too).

Social Media

Here’s a few tools I use to manage and stay on top of social media…

Buffer – I use Buffer to schedule social media posts on Twitter and Facebook. I have the awesome plan, but the free plan is pretty good too.

Feedly – A neat free tool to keep up to date with your favourite blogs and news channels in one place.

Gleam – Gleam make it really easy to run social media competitions where you enter by following or Tweeting .

Content Management Systems/ Website Builders

If you need to build a website these are the platforms I’d recommend to most small to medium sized businesses…

WordPress – WordPress is obviously the defacto system for blogging and I also use it for lots of other non-blog websites with content management needs.

Square Space – I recommend Square Space for small businesses/ freelancers who need to get a simple good looking site online and don’t want to pay out for a designer. I’ve used this system to help friends get online and have been really impressed with the ease of use and the quality of the sites you can build.

Ecommerce

And if you’re building an online store or need to take payments I’d recommend these ecommerce tools…

Shopify – I run the ecommerce dropshipping part of my business on Shopify and its the ecommerce platform I always recommend for anyone who wants to start an online store.

Samcart – If you’re selling a single product or just a few products and all you really need is an order form and payment processor take a look at SamCart who offer a template based hosted solution for ecommerce checkout pages

Gravity Form + Stripe/ Paypal Add-On– Similar to the above, if all you need is a simple order form and payment and you’re familiar with WordPress then I’ve built solutions before using Gravity Forms along with the Paypal or Stripe add-on. Simple but effective and there’s no ongoing fee’s for the software.

CRM

Unless you have a large organisation and a lot of customers and staff I usually find CRM systems to be more of a distraction than a time saver to be honest but if you need one, here’s what I recommend…

Infusionsoft – If you definitely need a CRM the one I’d recommend for SME’s is InfusionSoft although it can be bloody complicated to get to grips with. Make sure you definitely need a CRM and be aware if you’re mostly need a system for email marketing automation, one of the core features of InfusionSoft, then you can probably get that functionality out of email marketing systems like Aweber or Drip which offer pretty sophisticated marketing automation which is much simpler than running these campaigns in InfusionSoft.

Design

I may not be a great designer, but I know what I like. I usually create mockups of what I need stuff to look like in one of these tools and then pass them to a designer to refine before they go for development…

Mockingbird – The tool I use for wireframing sites, landing pages and funnels to share with designers.

Invision – I use Invision to bring site designs and prototypes to life and effectively communicate how I want pages to look and work between designers and developers

Instapage – There’s a few good landing page builders around these days and I’ve used most of them with different clients at some point in time but the one I personally recommend and prefer is Instapage.

99Designs – If you need to get a logo, infographic, landing page, or just about anything else designed in a hurry and don’t have a go-to design guy or gal try running a contest on 99Designs. I’ve had some great stuff designed by them for clients in the past and because of the contest format, you get drafts from multiple designers which greatly increases the chances of the designers coming back with something you like on the first attempt.

WordPress

There’s about a zillion plugins out there for WordPress but I try to avoid them as much as possible to use a single plugin with multiple functions where possible because every plugin you add is an extra resource thats slows own your site and creates a potential security risk. Here’s a few themes and plugins I would recommend though…

Genesis Theme – I use the Genesis theme by StudioPress for WordPress sites, I’ve always found Genesis themes load quickly and are really easy to customize.

OptinMonster – I’ve used a few free and paid tools for optin forms and popups in WordPress and my favourite has been OptinMonster.

SumoMe – If you don’t want to pay for a solution for optin forms I would go with SumoMe, its also a paid tool but has good features for free as well.

Day to Day Business Tools

These are the tools I probably spend most time in and they’re mostly free or pretty cheap…

G Suite (Previously Google Apps for Work) – I have 3 company accounts with Google’s pro Gmail solution because I find it much easier to have my calendar, email and Google Drive all under one account, so I only need to login once for all my business apps.

Evernote – I use the free version of Evernote for everything from quick notes to full on blog posts. Great if you work across multiple devices.

Slack – Slack is how I stay in touch with my team, VA’s and contractors. Its like a professional version of MSN Messenger! The free plan gives all the features most small businesses will need.

Google Drive – Google Drive is my default cloud storage system. Its included in Gsuite so no need to pay extra for something like Dropbox.

WeTransfer – For big file sharing and sending stuff to people who aren’t on our Google Drive I use WeTransfer. Its free to send big files like videos and high res images.

Trello – I’ve only recently got into this but I’ve moved my old to-do lists from Evernote to Trello and I’m loving it. Great way to organise all sorts of stuff. I know people use Trello for way more complicated stuff as well. I’m just using the free account at the moment

Accountancy

I couldn’t stay on top of my company accounts without these guys…

Crunch Accounting (UK Only) – I’ve been a Crunch Accounting customer for years and years and I’ve written a full Crunch Accounting review here. If you’re based in the UK and run a small business which sends invoices I highly recommend them.

Xero – I also recommend Xero and use it for my ecommerce business accounts along with their Shopify plugin.

VA’s & Outsourcing

Keep your staff overheads down and keep things simple and productive with these time savers…

Time Etc – Time Etc is a really easy way to hire competent VA’s for all sorts of admin tasks. Its more expensive than hiring a VA directly but you’ll get good people working on your task who just get on with it and get the job done.

People Per Hour – I hire a lot of freelance talent on PPH including designers, developers and writers. It has a higher quality of freelancer than you’re likely to find on sites UpWork and Freelancer.com

Moneypenny/ Penelope  – The call answering service I use to make sure phones are always answered even when I’m busy or the office is empty.

Ad Networks

We advertise all over the place but probably 90% of our 7 figure annual ad spend goes on these networks…

AdWords – No introduction needed, I spend a ton of money on AdWords whether its search, display or YouTube campaigns.

Facebook Ads – As above really, I’ve been using Facebook Ads since 2009 and its still getting better and better.

Twitter Ads – Twitter Ads isn’t as intuitive as the first 2 but when you crack it you can get some really amazing results in some markets with Twitter.

Perfect Audience – The network I usually recommend for display retargeting campaigns

Buy what exactly is a growth hack? Here’s a hypothetical before we look at over 50 examples of how real world businesses have hacked their way to growth.

Lets say you’re in a restaurant, you’ve finished your meal and the time has come to pay. Obligingly, your waiter or waitress brings you the bill and retreats to the counter while you pull a card from your wallet and decide on a tip.

Meanwhile, at another table, the same ritual has just taken place, but on this occasion the waiter has brought not only the bill itself but an extra ration of minty chocolates. According to research carried out by  the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, the second waiter is – statistically speaking – likely to receive a tip that is 23% higher than his counterpart on the other table.

This is just small and simple example of a  ‘growth hack’ –  a strategy designed to increase revenues or win new customers.

And what works in the restaurant can work equally well in the wider commercial world. Let’s take a variation on that “something extra” theme. You order a product from an e-commerce site and when you get to the payment and checkout stage you’re offered a choice of delivery options, including free (three or four days) and premium (next day in a designated time slot). You opt for ‘free’ but a few hours later receive an e-mail saying your order has been upgraded to “next day” delivery.

If the ‘hack’ works as it should, the merchant will be your first port of call next time you want to buy a similar product.

And when you look at startup businesses that scale up rapidly, the likelihood is they will have deployed their own growth hacking strategies to gain traction in the marketplace and win market share. These hacks may be simple or complex and they may take place online or offline. The common factor is they capture the attention of the target audience in innovative ways and they’re designed for, above all else, growth.

And there are plenty of great growth hacking examples in the wild to choose from. Here I’ve looked at over 50 companies that have growth-hacked their way to success. You may not agree that all of these examples should be classed as “hacks”. Some of them are using conventional marketing tactics or may have stumbled across the strategy by accident rather than deliberately setting out to do it. I don’t think that matters, the point here is that all of these examples have resulted in growth in one form or another so there should be something you can learn from it.

I intend this to be a living list of real world growth hacking case studies and I’ll add to it over time, please feel free to share your own examples in the comments and I’ll add the best ones to the article.

1) Shazam’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Spreading The Word Offline”

Music tech company Shazam came up with a neat marketing device to spread interest in its song-recognition app, while at the same time turning a problem to its advantage.

Shazam’s app allows its users to identify songs they hear at clubs, on the radio or at parties by recording a snatch of the music and matching it to an online database. When there’s a lot of background noise it can be tough for the software to do its work, so Shazam encourages users to hold their smartphones up to the speakers.

It’s a neat trick. Others see smartphones brandished and ask “what’s going on?” News of Shazam spreads quickly by word of mouth. The result – 500 million downloads.

2) Uber’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Encouraging Advocacy”

With operations in 35 countries and a valuation of more than $30bn, Uber is a poster child for rapid scale-up. But in 2009, it was just a local car-hire company with a platform matching supply and demand and handling payments.

The company knew it was solving a range of problems associated with conventional cab services but it needed traction.

Its base in San Francisco was the key. Uber initially focused on the tech community, organising events and – crucially – free rides for those attending. Those who used the service told their friends about the experience. The result was rapid growth and model that could be rolled out elsewhere.

3) Netflix’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Talk Direct to Buyers”

Like Uber, the now all-conquering Netflix drove early growth  by targeting a community of interest. The company started in the DVD rentals business. To spread the word, it used internet bulletin boards and forums frequented by avid DVD buyers. The strategy was to reach early adopters with a “soft launch” message  that Netflix offered titles that weren’t easily available elsewhere. This approach was expected to bring in just a few buyers. In fact, Netflix found itself processing 1,000 orders per day within a month, without the need for any conventional marketing spend.

Addressing target audiences through sites such as Reddit still works today and Reddit now have an ad product that can help you scale up this approach.

4) Buffer’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“The Power of the Guest Blog”

A company blog is increasingly seen as a ‘must have’ in terms of driving inbound traffic. But posting on your own site is not the only game in town.

Buffer is a case in point – an app developed to help people manage and schedule their social media posts. The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder  Leo Widrich.

The aim of Buffers guest blogs were first and foremost to attract views – and repeat views – a percentage of which will result in clickthroughs back to your own website. Widrich’s advice in an interview with Searchenginewatch.com  was to “copy the hell out of others.” So if you’re writing about social media, study similar blogs and find formulae that work. For instance,  “Ten Ways to Get the Most Out of Twitter.” Today, Buffer has around 1.5m  users across six continents.

5) Hubspot’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Taking the Inbound Train”

Blogging is often part of a larger inbound marketing strategy that uses content as a means to draw customers to the website.

US company Hubspot not only provides marketers with a set of tools to manage their inbound marketing activities, it also demonstrates the efficacy of its services by adopting its own pro-active content marketing strategies.

Like many companies it posts regular blogposts while also providing added-value content in the form of  e-books. However, one of Hubspot’s most successful strategies has been the provision of  a free site-rating tool, known as the “Website Grader.” Put simply the tool allows users to see which parts of their sites are performing well or poorly.

It’ a great freebie, but crucially it also directs traffic  to Hubspot’s portfolio of services.

6) Groupon’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Passing on the Bargain”

Increasingly, of course, word of mouth means shares and likes on social media and securing the advocacy of customers is something that online discount provider Groupon has turned into an artform.

After any Groupon purchase, customers have the option to tweet, like or share the offer. It’s not a new technique but it aligns with a wider menu of growth hacks. These include:

• A refer a friend programme (paid in groupon bucks)
• Multiple purchases – say tickets for a friends
• Daily e-mails with the latest bargains.

Hacks like these helped groupon grow 228% in one year alone

7) Paddy Power’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Getting Up to Mischief”

Irish online betting company Paddy Power is also an avid user of social media, but with the aim of raising the company profile and in doing so indirectly boosting sales.

The preferred modus operandi is the high profile stunt. For instance, prior to the Brazil World Cup, the company leaked faked pictures onto the internet, suggesting it was carving “C’Mon England” into the Amazon rain forest.  The company doesn’t measure the outcome in terms of ROI, but these campaigns keep Paddy Power’s platform in the front of target punter minds.

8) The Ice Bucket Challenge Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Driving Offline Participation”

If you didn’t take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge, you probably knew someone who did.

Launched in August 2014 it raised almost $100m by the simple expedient of asking participants to brave the experience of having ice water thrown over them to support donations to motor neurone research.

This was a truly viral event and all the more effective for having a strong offline component. This was not simply about sharing a funny video, it was about taking part and rising to a challenge. As such it attracted those committed to fighting the disease, attention seekers, natural leaders and natural doers. Once nominated, it was hard to avoid taking up the challenge.

It’s a reminder that social media often works best in tandem with the real world.

9) The Body Coach’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Achieving Media Ubiquity and Raising Sales”

Joe Wicks – AKA – the body coach has built his business by striving for media ubiquity.

The starting point was Instagram. In a bid to grow a relatively small personal training business, Wicks began posting before and after pictures of clients on Instagram, along with healthy recipes. In addition, Wicks is constantly using Snapchat to update fans on his activities. Social media fame has led to adverts for Uncle Ben’s Rice, a book deal and a television programme. His business now earns £1m a month.

10) Gmail’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Using Scarcity to Create a Buzz”

When Google launched Gmail in 2004, the company wasn’t quite the all conquering data-gathering behemoth we know today. Indeed, no one could say for sure whether Google’s offering would compete successfully with those of Hotmail and Yahoo..

But Google cleverly turned a problem into a marketing ploy. With limited server space available, Google made a virtue out of scarcity. When it was launched on April Fool’s Day, it was by invitation only, starting with around 1,000 opinion formers who were able to refer friends.

This created the impression that in signing up to Gmail, you became part of an exclusive club – something that raised interest and demand.

11) Hotmail’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“PS I Love You”

Hotmail, in contrast, used a deceptively simple technique to grow its market. Back in the 1990s when a user sent an e-mail message from a Hotmail Account, the company included a sign-off strapline “PS I love You,” which was also a link to Hotmail’s own site.

It was a small feature but a percentage of recipients clicked on the link to become users themselves, helping Hotmail to establish itself in the market.

12) Facebook’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Taking a Hard Line on Messenger”

Messenger was an important launch for Facebook, allowing the company to create a stand-alone messaging service that can be used by third parties to offer a range of services through Chat bots. Ultimately playing into Facebook’s future advertising plays.

But Facebook faces a challenge – namely that there are a great many people who already have the Facebook App itself on their smartphones. People who might well ask – why should I download Messenger?

To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook messaging masterplan.

13) OK Cupid’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Playing Games with Quizzes”

Dating site OK cupid already had a fairly compelling USP in that it was free to use, but in 2007 it sought to drive traffic by integrating with the Facebook Platform.

It was a simple plan. Quizzes of various sorts are a popular component in the Facebook universe. For anyone needing diversion on the bus, train or in the office, a Facebook quiz – usually put together by a third party – is often the first port of call.

In integrating with Facebook, OK Cupid enabled its users to participate in quizzes – on anything from music to politics – with the interactions linked to their personality type and profile. Facebook’s massive reach provided a hugely effective distribution method for the dating site.

14) YouTube’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Ramping Up With Competitions”

Quizzes also contributed to the early success of Youtube. Again the core offering – an opportunity to post videos of any sort online – was compelling, but to really succeed Youtube needed to scale up its quality content to a degree where it could pull in viewers and advertisers.

Competitions provided a means to grow the content creator community. Initially, Youtube offered its own prizes – such as an Ipod Nano for winning videos – but then extended the strategy to include partners. For instance a brand might offer a prize for the best video on a chosen theme.

Arguably, though, the most radical step for Youtube was the expansion of its partner programme, allowing content creators to share advertising revenue, thus encouraging clickbait posts.

15) Paypal’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Paying for Customers”

Competitions aren’t the only way to incentivise.

Founded in 1998, Paypal took a simple idea – that you could transfer money from account to account using e-mail addresses (rather than numbers and sort codes) to facilitate cash movement. But while the idea was visionary, finding customers was harder. Advertising was expensive and established banks were wary of partnering with a startup.

Paypal’s solution was to incentivise with cash. $10 for opening an account and another $10 for every referral. The company reputably spent around $60m on referrals, but this delivered a daily growth rate of between 7% and 10%. From there the company became the preferred payment provider on eBay.

16) Shopify’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Proving Value with a Free Trial”

It’s a technique that is almost as old as the hills, but offering a free trial helped Shopify hack its way to 150,000 users.

The company offers small businesses the chances to set up online stores. For a small company that has yet to put its toe in the e-commerce waters, spending upfront with a web designer on an online store might look risky. Shopify allowed its users to prove the value of the proposition by giving them 14 days free usage.

The trial offer was prominent on all advertising and paved the way for  paying customers to come on board.

17) WPEngine’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“A Super-Generous Affiliate Programme”

WPEngine provides hosting and optimisation for WordPress blogs. There are plenty of players in the market but the company offers a quality services and harnesses the power of existing users to bring more customers.

The strategy is a hugely generous affiliate programme which pays $200 to any existing user who refers another sign up. The payouts are unlimited with commissions paid monthly.

The audience for premium WordPress hosting is limited but the referral programme has been cost effective in finding paying customers.

18) Invision’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Giving Something Back”

The business-to-business market is different from the B2C arena and often  requires a different approach to growth hacking.

One time-honoured strategy is to provide useful business intelligence to your target audience. Witness Invision , a software company that takes basic – non-functioning – web page designs and creates functional simulations. A developer can sketch out a page, run it through Invision, and see how it works.,

To build trust with that community, Invision ‘gives back’ – for instance by producing an extensive report on design industry practices, strategies and even salaries, which was of genuine use to its audience

19) One Dollar Shave Club’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Video Comedy”

YouTube has been a catalyst for growth for countless  brands and a viral video can be hugely effective in driving sales and subscriptions.

One Dollar Shave Club are a great example of how viral videos can be used to hack growth. In the space of just three years, the company went from startup to a $600m business on the back of a subscription model that involves sending out razors and other male grooming products once a month.,

The subscription model is great for repeat business, but to first sign up significant numbers of people. The company’s approach was a relatively crude but funny video, presented by the founder with impeccable comic timing around the strapline “our blades are f**king great.” That first video scored 19 million views and was followed by others, including one for scented butt wipes. Get it right and viral videos attract customers.

20) Poo Pourri’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Content Creation and Toilet Humour”

Another example on a similar theme. Viral videos can be easy and quick to make or they can be major production numbers. Poo Pourri – a provider of scented solutions to hide all too familiar toilet smells has gone into content creation with a series of comedic videos demonstrating why their products are needed. The videos share some of the no-nonsense crudity of One Dollar Shave but add  a sitcom sheen. You can view them as entertainment, but you don’t forget the product name.

21) Shopstyle’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“A Focus on Content”

Less controversially. Shopstyle has driven a rapid increase in business by focusing on high quality editorial.

The site – owned by Popsugar – allows users to find and match clothes using criteria such as colour and its goal is to deliver qualified traffic to its retail partners. In 2015, the company achieved a 55% increase in traffic over the previous year, with much of that improved performance attributable to editorial designed generate inbound traffic. Recognising the power of advocacy, the company has established partnerships with fashion bloggers to build an audience through an “inspiration hub”

22) Dropbox’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Growth Through E-Mail Advocacy”

No article on growth hacking strategies would be complete without at least one reference to Dropbox. In the space of just five years, Dropbox grew from 0 to more than 100 million users while keeping advertising costs to a minimum.

The key was a combination of social media and e-mail. In the early days, the company used Google AdWords to get the message out but found that customer acquisition costs were too high to be viable.

Instead, Dropbox encouraged users to spread the word “virally” by social media and e-mail. There was a natural symmetry between the product and the marketing channel. Users wishing  to share files via Dropbox would naturally have to tell e-mail recipients about the channel. To access files, they in turn would have to sign up for the service.

All this was backed up by a video “explainer” providing a guide to using Dropbox

23) Buzzfeed’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Viral Mastery”

When it comes to generating traffic out of viral shares, few can compete with the mastery of Buzzfeed.

Today, Buzzfeed is not only a purveyor of bite-sized entertainment via its own website and shares on social media, it is also a serious news platform, mounting investigations with the BBC and covering politics.

But at core, Buzzfeed’s growth has been based on a thorough understanding of the kind of content that works in the digital age – and how to distribute that content.

A typical example would be questionnaire format  –  for instance,  “what kind of  parent are you.” To find the answer, you complete a questionnaire and probably share the result on Facebook. Intrigued your friends do it too.

24) TripAdvisor’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“SEO Plus Secret Sauce”

It’s a little known fact that hotel recommendation and review site Tripadvisor started out as startup, offering white label search engine functionality. Those origins undoubtedly imbued the company with a deep understanding of  the importance of SEO.

First and foremost, thanks to the company’s commitment to SEO, Tripadvisor always ranks high in travel related searches, which is half the battle. The business model also feeds the SEO effort, with the constant addition of new reviews adding to the searchable content.

But the company has a few more growth hacks up its sleeve. Some of these are brilliantly simple but effective. For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels reviews higher in their own search results.

25) TripAdvisor + Amex’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Partnering to Grow Trade”

Tripadvisor is constantly innovating, proof that a growth hacking mentality doesn’t need to finish when you seize to fall under the startup category. A great example is its partnership with American Express. Under the deal, Amex users in the UK, US and Australia use their cards to book hotels seamlessly via Tripadvisor while also leaving reviews. These appear under a combined Amex/Tripadvisor banner. It’s a move that encourages commerce while promoting both brands

26) Skyscanner’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Widgetity Goodness”

Acquiring customers is expensive so in the low margin sector of flight meta search the last thing a growth-hungry company like Skyscanner wants to do is spend money reaching out to the same customers again and again. Much better to hug them close.

That’s where widgets come in. Essentially widgets allow companies to stake a piece of prime real estate on the desktops or websites of third parties – be they partners or existing customers.

Travel site Skyscanner has used Widgets to great effect. In 2008, the company teamed up with Netvibe to create widgets that customers could place on their own personal pages or Windows/Mac desktops, allowing them to hunt for travel bargains without going through the time consuming business of running a search or keying in a travel site URL .

Not only that but the range of embeddable website widgets they offer allow other travel sites to add a useful flight search function for their visitors. But these widgets didn’t just get the Skyscanner brand in front of millions of extra eyeballs every day but also created a massive network of backlinks to the Skyscanner site, fuelling their explosive growth through high Google rankings.

27) Spotify’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Widgets to Share”

Spotify is rather the keen on Widgets too…although in this case, it provides widgets to allow artists and fans to promote their songs or share playlists on their own web pages or via Facebook and Twitter.,

All roads lead back to Spotify. Aside from previews, clicking on a widget must open a new Spotify account to hear the full track or open an existing account on their device, thus creating more users.

But Spotify’s biggest hack is the freemium model. Unlike Apple Music and Deezer, Spotify is free to use for those who don’t mind listening to ads. This has ensured Spotify is the market leader in terms of traffic while also giving it an ad revenue stream in addition to cash from subscriptions.

28) Hotel Tonight’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“The User Experience Hack”

Hotel booking apps aren’t new or unique and nor are services that enable you to get cheap deals at short notice by allowing suppliers sell unsold inventory.  So what explains the rising popularity of Hotel Tonight?

Well, sometimes getting the user experience right can be the best growth hack of them all.

Hotel tonight is focused on the mobile experience. That’s not surprising. After all, if you’re looking for a hotel in a town you’ve just arrived in – the company’s original use case – the chances are you’ll use a smartphone. So Hotel Tonight has zeroed in on the mobile experience, conducting vigorous A/B testing to ensure that customers move easily through the funnel to purchase.

29) Tinder’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Making a Game Out of Hooking Up”

In 2014, the two year old gay dating app began the year with 10 million downloads. By year end that number had risen to 100 million.

So why has Tinder done so well? Once again, part of the answer is a playful interface that turns dating into a type of game. In the background, the potential dates are filtered by their own interests – as defined by Facebook profiles – and then location. Browsing through potential partners, a user can decide hot or not and right swipe to make a choice. A right swipe by the other person creates a communications link. Left swipe and it’s over. The average tinder user, logs on 11 times a day.

Tinder is all about engagement and ease of use. The integration with Facebook means there’s no need for users to go through a protracted registration – their interests and pictures are already available.,

30) Moonpig’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“The power of the Earworm”

How many greetings card companies can you name? If it’s just one (and you’re in the UK), the chances are it’s Moonpig

Moonpig established a USP by offering personalised cards via its online platform. But that was only half the battle. The real challenge was to get customers and to that end the company owes its growth to clever TV ads with a jingle that is both irritating and probably unforgettable. In the parlance of psychologists, it’s an earworm – a tune that won’t get out of your head. Brand recognition and sales soared.

32) Compare the Market’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Small, Cute and Fictional Animals”

The comparison website model has proven its worth in sectors ranging from utilities to banking and insurance. But there are a lot of players around and brand recognition – and by extension traffic – cannot be taken as a given.

Like Moonpig, Comparethemarket.com used TV advertising to build brand recognition. And while Moonpig put its trust in an ear-worm, Compare opted for Meerkats, linked to the company’s offering by a very bad pun. It could have bombed but by building a sequence of stories around the Meerkats, the company achieved brand recognition and stellar growth. It’s an example of why it pays to stand out from the crowd.

33) Secret Escapes’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Building the Audience Before the Product”

Founded in 2010, Secret Escapes sells luxury but heavily discounted hotel breaks. The appeal to hoteliers is an opportunity to sell rooms – albeit at a discount – that would otherwise go unoccupied. But to attract suppliers the company needed a large customer base. But how to do you get customers before you have a product?

TV advertising was the chosen method and Secret Escapes risked £250,000 on its first TV campaign. To find a receptive audience, the company decided that prime time shows were not the answer as viewers would be too engrossed in programming to notice ads. Instead they went for afternoon TV with slots on Poirot proving particularly effective.

34) Slack’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Corporate Advocacy”

In February 2014, Slack had 15,000 users. A year later it 500,000. The company attributes its success to a “bottom up word of mouth” but within a very specific context.

The challenge facing slack was to convince businesses who didn’t use an internal communication tool that they actually needed one. This was tricky. After all, we’ve all become accustomed to communicating via e-mail and if that fails, there is always Skype.

But Slack offered a more efficient way to manage communication within teams. The company’s approach was to find larger companies who could be persuaded to use the system. One example of Rdio who signed up on a limited trial and then spread it out through the organisation.  Once hooked, users recommended Slack to others.

This corporate word of mouth,  grew Slack’s business exponentially.

35) Linkedin’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Giving Users a Profile on the Web”

Social media platforms tend to be walled gardens. If you want to find someone on Facebook you can but you don’t get to see that person’s full profile and history until you connect. And that’s fine. Facebook protects privacy.

But some social media users want to be seen and that’s certainly true of the business/career focused members of Linkedin. But most normal people don’t have personal blogs and websites.

The primary purpose for most Linkedin users is to make connections and build careers. Realising this, Linkedin introduced public profiles. Users not only have a presence on the site, they also have a presence on the web.

The key growth driver is that once a CEO or MD has been tracked down on Google, to make a connection, the person carrying out the search must sign up with Linkedin. It’s just one example of the tactics that have seen the company grow from 2m to more than 400m users.

36) Pokemon Go’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Mining a Familiar Seam”

Pokemon go is a triumph of discreet marketing, with massive user growth paving the way for additional revenue.

There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available.

It was an approach that fermented the creation of a cult on a very large scale, with 100m downloads by August 2016. It was a cult that was helped by public familiarity with the Pokemon Nintendo game, coupled with renewed interest in augmented reality.

By growing the game as a free download, the developers also fuelled demand for premium additions and also hardware such as wearable devices showing when a Pokemon is around.

37) Mail Online’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“A Complementary Product”

The Mail Online is the world’s second most popular newspaper website – the New York Times holding top position.- which is a surprising position for a mid-market British tabloid, albeit one with very high sales.

Perhaps more importantly, the Mail has achieved online growth without cannibalising newspaper sales.

One successful strategy has been broadening the content mix. The Mail and Mail on Sunday Newspapers have always had a high celebrity count but there is a lot more of this on the online channel, creating an abundance of clickbait.  This has served to create a much wider audience for the site, both domestically and internationally, with relatively little spent on marketing.

38) Zappos’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Addressing  Returns Head-On”

Back in the early days of the e-commerce the received wisdom was that non-tangible goods, such as books, sold well while clothes were more difficult. That has since been disproved in spectacular fashion (no-pun intended) but one area of the clothing market – footwear – was slow to go online. The reason was simple – the fit and comfort of a shoe are arguably more personal than those of a shirt or dress. People like to try shoes on before they buy them.

Shoe retailer Zappos sought to address this by providing an unquestioning returns policy, taking the risk out of buying.

Interestingly they found that their best customers tended to be those who returned the most goods.

39) Airbnb’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“The Power of the Crosspost”

In an online world where new marketplace models are springing up every day, you don’t hear quite so much about Craigslist. But there was a time when it was seen as a trailblazer – particularly in the US – and its pre-eminence helped Airbnb gain traction.

In a relatively simple growth hack’ Airbnb enabled room renters to cross-post on both the Airbnb site itself and on Craigslist, a move that greatly increased the reach of the offer.

40) Firebox’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Growth Via Affiliate Networks”

The gift and gadget e-commerce site launched in 2000 and achieved remarkable growth in its first decade of trading. By 2003 the company was posting revenues of £3.7k in 2003, rising to £1.7m by 2009. Over that period affiliates drove more than £7m in revenues. In parallel, Firebox used social media to build relationships with its affiliates.

The affiliate channel is well suited to businesses in growth mode because growth is self financing, there’s no outlay on advertising that may or may not work. To grow you don’t need to reach new customers, you just need to reach new affiliates.

To grow the strategy the company worked not with one Affiliate Network but 3 networks simultaneously, making sure they reached the biggest possible database of potential affiliate partners. Today it is still inviting website owners to sign up, with the promise of 8% commission on sales.

41) HideMyAss’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Freemium Marketing”

Launched in the UK in 2005, HideMyAss provides a range of free and paid services, united by the concept of online anonymity. For business professionals there’s a high speed, high security Virtual Private Network (VPN) function, while individual consumers can take advantage of proxy servers ( to enter restricted sites) and anonymous e-mail. That’s the first hack – a freemium model.

This is backed up by a referral /affiliate programme offering up to 100% of the value of new signups. HideMyAss has recorded exponential growth.

42) Tastecard’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Capitalising on E-mail Marketing”

Launched in 2010, Tastecard offers 50% discounts or two-for-one offers in restaurants across the UK. Launched at a time when money-off coupons were becoming both common and acceptable, Tastecard  marketed a more subtle variation on the theme. It offer was a £7.99 a month card to secure discounts.

But pivotal to Tastecard growth has been the deals they’ve secured to sell cards in bulk to organisations like banks who want to offer their cards as a perk to their own customers. Because Tastecard have virtually no costs involved in providing a service to users they can aggressively discount their cards, or even give them away for free to grow their user base. And as their users grow, more restaurants come onboard. Which in turn makes the proposition more attractive to users, which generates more users!

43) eBay’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Hacking Trust”

E-Bay is not only a global business in its own right, it has also encouraged thousands of small businesses to set up accounts and trade online.

And that was one of the drivers of eBay’s rapid growth. Individuals selling on an ad hoc basis are complemented by stores marketing anything from novelty toys to musical instruments. This has created the scale which attracts buyers. Put simply, if you want something you can probably find it on eBay.

The sticking point was potentially trust. To that end eBay has provided assurance by a system of buyer ratings and  an escrow protection.  Easy payment by Paypal has also been key.

44) Urban Spoon’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Playing With Technology”

Urbanspoon’s downloadable app provides thousands of restaurant reviews. One important growth hack was to gamefy the app using the Iphone accelerometer. To pull up a random review, users simply turn the handset to trigger the accelerometer, which in turn generates a review. It’s a simple marketing technique that encourages users to play with the app. As a by-product, it creates curiosity among those who are watching.

45) Kickstarter’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Tapping the Creative Community”

Despite having started a year later than Indigogo, Kickstarter has established itself as the world’s number one rewards crowdfunding platform.

Early traction was based on close proximity with those who might be likely to raise money via the platform. Based in Brooklyn, Kickstarter was embedded in the New York  creative community and the platform’s reputation spread by word of mouth among those who might need to raise cash for projects such as movies or innovative gadgets. Nurturing the creative community was double-sided. Some sought to raise money, while others (swimming in the same sea) were more than willing to support like minded people.

As it became apparent that Kickstarter could be successfully used to raise funds, use of the platform snowballed.

46) Ministry of Supply’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Used Crowdfunding To Test the Market”

Kickstarter and other platforms don’t simply provide a means to raise cash, they also allow young companies to test the market and acquire customers.,

Witness business-wear site, Ministry of Supply. The company raised a target $30,000 within 5 days of launching a Kickstarter campaign and went on to pull in $400k above their target. This fulfilled the company’s ambition of validating the product. As a direct result, an additional investment of $1.1m to fuel growth.

Rewards crowdfunding in particular sells products and establishes a market. If successful, it’s a growth hack that can work even for pre-revenue business.

47) Oatmeal’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Harnessing Public Feedback”

The Oatmeal Website is the brainchild of cartoonist and writer Matthew Inman. To mark the publication of a new book, Inman leveraged  his existing audience to publicise the print title.

His approach was to ask fans of the site to feed back on sales displays within Barnes and Noble bookshops. Some “Oatmeal Island” display were marked with a standard “New and Noteworthy” sign while others were flagged by an Inman cartoon.

Inman asked fans to say which were the most effective and better still to take pictures posing beside the stands. All pictures would then be “illustrated” by Inman.

The result – two photo submissions per minute on the same day. Instant free publicity.

48) Booking.com’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“The Power of Paid Search”

When it comes to genuine, high revenue growth businesses, there’s few better case studies than Booking.com. But the key to their success may not be so innovative. They just spend a ton of money with Google AdWords! In 2013 Priceline who own booking spent $1.8 billion (yes billion) on digital advertising, presumably with the largest chunk of that going on Google AdWords.

There’s more to the booking.com strategy than simply buying your way to the top though. Undoubtedly booking.com could be more efficient and more profitable by spending less on paid search and focusing spend on their most profitable keywords. But they’re not just buying bookings, they’re buying users, and brand loyalty is massively important in travel as hotel booking sites are becoming less able to differentiate themselves on price, so overpaying for a new customer on an expensive paid search keyword like “hotels in new york” is nothing to booking.com because they’ve acquired a new user who they can reach through a cheaper direct channel next time that person comes to book a hotel.

49) Moz’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Inbound Marketing Mastery”

There are few better examples of how content and community can drive growth than Moz, who started life as SEOmoz, an SEO blog and consulting firm which have grown into a 200 person strong software company turning over $38 million annually.

As impressive as that is, whats more that has come with virtually no ‘paid marketing’ or advertising. The company just continues to publish incredibly valuable content, at scale, bringing free traffic to their website which they convert into customers.

According to Moz, 150 marketers take a free trial on any average weekday and of these 52% convert to membership. 40% cancel but the rest tend to stay on subscription for more than a year.

50) GoPro’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Self Generating Publicity”

Video camera company GoPro came to the market with a product that wasn’t previously available – namely an affordable, wearable camera that was ideal for filming extreme sports. But the marketing  wasn’t focused on technology. This was all about lifestyle, and  a key hack for the company is featuring footage from users on its website. This fuels more demand from those who want not just to surf or kayak, but to preserve the memory,

Rapid growth saw the company raising $2.96bnbn through an IPO.

51) Twitter’s Growth Hacking Strategy:

“Verified Users”

Of all the examples of growth hacking used by Twitter my favourite is one of the simplest, their use of verified accounts.

While a ‘blue tick’ is less of an accolade than it once was its still an important status symbol among any aspiring online celebrity, but it fulfils a more important role in Twitter’s growth than an ego massage for high profile users. By verifying accounts Twitter tapped into what has become the biggest proponent of its continual success as a platform – its use by celebrities, politicians and the media. Verified accounts are a small thing but they help center the community around these high profile users who keep Twitter relevant in the face of increasingly stiff competition from other social networks and messaging services.

No other network has managed to foster and maintain the goodwill of influencers in the way Twitter have, thanks in no small part to their use of verified accounts.

For a long time interest targeting was the go to tactic for targeting an audience in Facebook ads. Slowly with the introduction of fancy stuff like custom audiences, website audiences, lookalikes, engagement audiences and so forth targeting people based on their interests has come to be seen by many of the Facebook pros I talk to as a bit passé. And thats a shame…

For me though interest targeting is still a big deal and its will continue to play a massive role in most of the campaigns I run. If you’re not having success with Facebook interest targeting chances are that’s because you’re not using them like we’re using them, so read on and I’ll explain how to get the most out of interests.

Firstly though…why is interest targeting important?

The beauty of targeting people based on their interests in Facebook is that it’s the best way to build large audiences of people who don’t already know about you, but who might have an interest in what you’re selling.

I can’t think of many marketing campaigns where that wouldn’t be considered a good thing. But if you’re just starting out, don’t have much traffic or an email list, or if you’re targeting rapid business growth, then its essential.

Combine the potential of interest targeting with the virtually infinite scalability of Facebook and tapping into interests correctly is the best way to reach the largest possible Facebook audiences and grow your business exponentially.

Hyperbole, maybe, but think about it like this.

Custom audiences and retargeting are great if you’ve already got the contacts or the website traffic

Lookalikes can work well if you have some good conversion data to benchmark from, but they’re limited in scalability.

but…

if you’re a small business, a start up, an affiliate of if you’re any sort of business in growth mode, you need to be reaching new people. Lots of them, and all the time. You need a source of audience data that is always growing and that expands well outside your existing networks. That’s where interests come into their own.

Strategy 1: Use Interest Targeting To Serve Better Ads

Everyone should be interested in interest targeting, even if you have your own data, let me explain.

The biggest misunderstanding I see with interest targeting on Facebook is that it’s a tool solely for creating an audience and selecting people to show ads to. That’s a big part of it of course, and I’ll come onto it, but it misses a huge opportunity which I need to explain first.

Interests, like demographics, help you to serve more relevant and engaging ads to people inside your audiences. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Let’s say you have a campaign targeting a custom audience of 1,000,000 people. A nice place to start.

But are you going to show the same as to all 1,000,000 people? I hope not. At the very least you probably want to serve different ads to men and women or younger people to older people. But you can also bring in interests here to give your ads more context for different audience members.

Let’s say I’m selling lawn mowers and from my 1,000,000 audience I’ve selected 3 interests which each have a large overlap with the people I’m targeting; football, rugby and cricket. My ad sets would look something like this:

1. Ad set 1: custom audience & interested in football – 250,000 people
2. Ad set 2: custom audience & interested in rugby – 250,000 people
3. Ad set 3: custom audience & interested in cricket – 250,000 people
4. Ad set 4: custom audience & NOT interested in football, rugby or cricket – 250,000 people

(If you’re from the US and don’t know what rugby and cricket are there’s no hope for you- sorry. Please shut the door on your way out. Just kidding. But really.)

Because I can run different ads in each ad sets I can now show my lawn mowers in the context that’s most relevant for each interest. So ad set 1 will get photos of the lawn mower used on a football pitch, ad set 2 a rugby pitch, ad set 3 a cricket pitch. Ad set 4 might see a generic shot without context.

You can obviously tailor anything else about that ad as well, the copy, the landing page, the tracking (yes if you’re fancy you could pass those interests into Google analytics as custom dimensions, pretty friggin’ sweet).

I know not everyone is going to go to this level of detail with their setup but those who do will be rewarded with better CTRs and lower CPCs. So even if you’ve already got all the data you need to reach big audiences you really shouldn’t overlook interests.

The fun with interest targeting doesn’t stop with ads though, here’s some approaches to using interest targeting to create audiences of new people to show ads to.

I call these “audience stacks” because we’re going to stack up interests on top of each other in layers and use different types of targeting alongside them.

Strategy 2: Stack Lookalike Audiences With Interest Targeting

Now I love lookalike audiences as much as the next Facebook marketer geek but have you noticed that when you create a lookalike audience of more than 1% of any given country things start to go kinda wonky?! That’s a problem in smaller markets where a 1% lookalike audience might only give you 10’s of 1000’s of people to target.

I’ll usually accept that the first 1% lookalike I create will be pretty good, then I’ll create new audiences for the 2nd, 3rd,4th and 5th %.

There’s an easy way to do that when you’re creating a lookalike audience in Facebook in case you didn’t know. Just click…

I’m then going to take these lookalike audiences and layer some interest targeting over the top of them, so I’m only targeting people who;

• lookalike my customers (according to Facebook) and
• are interested in the stuff that I think my customers are interested in

Depending on how broad or niche you go with the interests you select here you can create large audiences for mass market campaigns or tinnie tiny ones to deliver really highly tailored messages to people inside your lookalike audiences. Either way I find this approach can greatly improve the efficiency of wider lookalike audience targeting and bring more of the right people into your audience pool.

Worth noting that Facebook don’t recommend this approach if you’re using lookalike audiences alongside conversion optimization because lookalike audiences supposedly already take into account things like interests. The main issue if you’re doing this is that you keep your audience large enough to provide enough conversion data for Facebook to model off. As a guide you probably still want to the audiences to be in the 100’s of thousands of people if you’re using conversion optimization. Its less of an issue if you’re optimizing for traffic/ clicks.

Strategy 3: Layer Interests On Top Of Each Other

The biggest complaint with interest targeting seems to be its lack of accuracy. Go to your ad preferences in Facebook for a bit of fun if you want to see what Facebook thinks you’re interested in. Mine start off pretty well…

But pretty soon descend into chaos…

These interests come from all sorts of interactions on Facebook including links you’ve clicked on or videos you’ve watched so you’re likely to find Facebook thinks you’re interested in plenty of things that you wouldn’t exactly list on your CV. As a result targeting people by a single interest is prone to reaching the wrong people.

So Facebook thinks I’m interested in digital marketing but that could be because I clicked on an article a friend sent me 4 years ago that I spent 2 seconds looking at. The same could go for Adwords or Entrpeneurship, so instead of using an audience like this where I might only match 1 of your targeted interests:

I would use this audience to target people like myself:

But what I’ve found about these interests is that although some may be way out of left field, others are bang on. So if you’re advertising to someone with one relevant interest it’s highly likely to be wrong. If you’re advertising to someone who shares 3 or 4 relevant interests it’s highly likely to be accurate.

Obviously to make this approach work you need to invest a bit of time playing with interests and finding a combination that gives you a decent sized pool but remember you can use multiple interests at each layer of the stack and those will be matched as OR rather than and. So if I find each of my interests are a bit too narrow I can expand them at each level like you see below:

Strategy 4: Stacking Interests With Brands

Really similar to the above but instead of using “interests” per se I’m going to use popular brand names, which also show up as interests in Facebook Ad targeting, to narrow down my audience.

Using brands as interests in a stack is really powerful because it again limits the margin for error in Facebook’s classification of audiences.

So lets say for example I want to target small business owners but I’m not sure how accurate Facebook’s data is on the broad “small business” interest category. I can refine that targeting by only going after people who also have an interest in brands that I’d associate with small business, in this case accountancy packages…

Here’s another example, the “physical fitness” category is massive and very broad, probably not that useful for an advertiser. But combine it with some brands that suggest the person is serious about fitness and you massively increase the chances of Facebook being able to reach a real fitness enthusiast.

Strategy 5: Using Interests as Demographic Indicators

If you’ve played around with Facebooks demographic bands you’ve probably like me had mixed results. In the UK we have Acxiom data in Facebook Ads which lets us target homeowners, high net worths and so forth. But I don’t trust that data entirely.

The way old school advertisers targeted demographics was through their interests and that’s still my preferred approach. The things people “like” and particularly the brands they follow and the publications they read are massive indicators of their demographic bandings, social class, lifestyle etc so stacking these types of interests on top of other types of targeting is massively powerful.

So for example you would see vastly different results targeting this audience who may be interested in fashion & are also interested in sites like Buzzfeed:

Than you would with the same interest but stacked with the Wall Street Journal:

We’ve seen really interesting results stacking things like publications and supermarket brands on top of broad interests in this way.

Strategy 6: Build Audiences of Sharers For Viral Campaigns

Strictly speaking this strategy is more likely to use demographics data rather than interests but there’s cross over.

Facebook Ads is a great platform for launching content that you want to get in front of sharers and influencers. Take a look at the audience below from a real campaign we’re running to boost sharing. Data on bloggers, vloggers, journalists and other types of writer and internet folk is really accurate because unlike the pure interests we’ve been using in the first 5 strategies these are more likely to be self entered by the user.

We find this audience have a much much higher propensity to like and share content than ‘normal’ facebook users and they tend to have bigger and more active networks, so their reactions to your posts are going to spread further organically. Try it out when you’re next promoting a post that you want to ‘go viral’.

Time to Get Back Into Interest Targeting

So if you’re using interest targeting already, or if you’ve tried it and not got the results you want time to think again. To recap what you should do now:

• Start splitting down large audiences based on interests and serve those people ads they’re more likely to be interested in clicking on
• Start stacking interests on top of each other to remove Facebook’s margin or error
• And refining your targeting by adding lifestyle brands or publications as modifiers to reach more of the right sort of people.

95% of the stuff you’ve read about landing page optimization is bogus sales fluff. I want to set the record straight, but its going to take me about 2500 words. If you make it to the end I hope it’ll give you a different perspective on why your landing pages aren’t converting right now.

I have a big interest in landing page optimization. And a probably unhealthy fixation with squeezing the best conversion rates out of my landing pages, so I read quite a bit on the subject. It was a video I saw on the subject this week that pushed me over the edge. In this video one of the presenters “8 best practices for landing page optimization” was to make sure you’re using photos of people smiling on your landing page.

Seriously…

I won’t link to that video, that’s not the point of the post, but there’s 2 things at play here:

1. these top tips, were spurious nonsense from someone who I’m guessing had never run a real campaign in their lives and…
2. the publisher behind it was a software platform that, among other things, allows you to publish and A/B test landing pages. Hmmm…coincidence?

And herein lies the problem. Most of the information about landing page optimization out there is created by people with a vested interest in A/B design testing whether it’s software vendors or agencies, and so it follows that the way landing page optimization is taught goes along the lines of;

1. Choose a pre-built landing page template, plugin your content
2. A/B test it against a version with a different headline or a different design

I’m not saying for a minute that there’s not a place for A/B design testing in landing page optimization. But what I’m saying is that that place is right at the end, not at the beginning.

I see so many marketers who have brought into this idea, been sold on a piece of software and then seen terrible conversion rates, inconclusive A/B tests and no idea where to turn next.

So let’s, for the sake of variety, start at the beginning…

• Landing page optimization is not A/B testing, it’s not software and it’s not the colour of your buttons or the wording of your call to action. Its not even your choice of stock imagery or the omnipresent padlock symbol next to your opt in form.
• Landing page optimization IS developing a strategy that makes more of the people who hit your landing page convert to the next step. Whatever that step may be.

So here’s how I look at landing page optimization in 5 not so easy to digest steps, because frankly, landing page optimization isn’t actually that easy.

Step 1) The People

Forget about “users” or “visitors” for a second and think about people. The people who visit your landing page are not lifeless drones who will follow the most statistically likely path you set out for them. And they can’t be tricked into buying from you by slick design.

“Oops my finger slipped and I accidentally entered my email address”

Your visitors are individuals and they will respond differently from one another. For one thing that means any landing page optimization advice will never apply universally to all campaigns. For another it means you have to start the process by understanding and optimising the people who are hitting your page.

So forget about the page for a minute. Assume it’s perfectly “optimised” already. The problem is probably that you’re getting the wrong people onto the page.

No amount of A/B testing of the page is going to fix that.

Look at your ad campaigns. Where’s the traffic coming from, what ads, what keywords. There’s almost always more to gain from improving your visitor quality than trying to squeeze an extra % of conversion out of the wrong audience.

Some traffic sources just don’t work for some campaigns. Take the hit, suck it up and move on.

Step 2) The Offer

If we assume that everyone who hits your page is bang on the money, in your target audience, primed and ready to convert, then what?

A landing page in its simplest form is for me, a page with a single offer. The “offer” is different to the “conversion”, so don’t mix them up;

• The conversion is what you care about – the sale, the email address, the click through
• The offer is what the visitor cares about- it’s what they’re getting in exchange.

Let’s imagine 2 hypothetical landing pages to drill home the point;

1. The first is giving away iPhones to anyone who enters their email address. No strings attached.
2. The second is entering someone into a competition for a chance to win an iPhone in exchange for their email address.

Which do you think will convert better? The one with the stronger offer. Every time.

Too many marketers make the mistake of assuming their offer is perfect and it’s their landing page that’s not selling it effectively. The truth is that until you’re giving away iPhones to every visitor, your offer can always perform better.

Offering Ebooks and webinars that require little capital investment might be great for you but they’re of limited value to most of the people who hit your page and your conversion rate will reflect this.*

Stop thinking about landing pages as barriers that you need to shove your users over. Start thinking of them as doors that they’re going to want to run through on their own.

Give away something of ‘real value’ and see how quickly your conversion rate increases.

Put your money where your mouth is.

*theres an exception here to be aware of. If the people hitting your page already have a lot of trust invested in your brand, then the perceived value of even a weak offer will be infinitely higher. So a webinar run by Toby Robbins for example would be seen as more valuable than one run by me. But honestly there are few people in this position and those people won’t need any advice on landing page optimization, they could write their offer on a post-it note and pin it to the wall in a public WC and it would convert like nobodies business.

Step 3) the copy

By step 3 we’re assuming that;

1. everyone who comes to the page is bang on the money, interested in what you’re offering and
2. the offer is as good as it can be

By this stage you should be converting pretty damn well anyway.

Anything you can do from this point out is more about reducing abandonment, increasing clarity and instilling trust to get people over the line.

This brings us onto the copy.

I’ve been doing this stuff for a decade and I don’t remember a single example of a landing page test where anything was a more powerful driver of conversion than the copy when all other things were equal (same audience, same offer).

When you strip a web page back, what people are doing on it is reading.

They’ll spend a second considering the design and minutes (hopefully) mulling over the copy. So your landing page optimization efforts should reflect this.

Spend your time on the elements people interact with the most. Its not that photo of a smiling lady, its the copy. The idea that people don’t really read web copy is a nonsense spread by lazy marketers to sell cheap tricks.

Never was the copy more important and the design of a landing page less important than right now. Thats because if you’re driving traffic to your landing pages from Facebook Ads, from email campaigns, from Google search, from Twitter, chances are anything from 50-90% of your traffic is going to be looking at your page on a mobile phone and that numbers going to keep rising. And what happens to the landing page layout that you spent hours mulling over on a desktop? It shrinks down, hides the superfluous design and just shows the copy anyway!

So by all means when you get to this stage test – but test the copy and keep everything else the same.

If you’re using a video instead of, or as well as copy, on your landing page it’s almost exactly the same. Just read “video” for “copy” in the paragraphs above and the concept is the same.

Step 4) The Action

No, not the “call to action”.

If I had a penny for every landing page optimization article I read that talked about “having a strong call to action” I’d be a rich/ fat/ happy man.

The action is the thing you want someone to do. (The call to action is simply how you ask them to do it.)

Chances are your action will be something like;

• Opt in to some sort of list
• Signup to some sort of webinar/ training event
• Click through to another page
• Buy something
• Download something
• You get the idea

If you’ve got to this stage you’ve already got the perfect audience of people hitting your page, the perfect offer to present them with and the best possible copy to sell it. But this can all be for nothing if the action you’re asking for from the visitor is greater than the perceived value of the offer.

If you’ve ever done sales training, this would probably be called “objection handling”.

I like the offer but…

• The price is too high
• or I don’t know the price
• I can’t be bothered to complete that form
• I don’t want to give my email address
• Why do they need my phone number
• What if I’m not free on X date/ time

I see this all the time, marketers do everything right with their ad, their offer and their landing page but they get greedy when it comes to the action. Charging too much whether thats currency, information or time, for too little.

But luckily for you that doesn’t mean you need a new ad campaign, a new offer or new copy, you just need to change what you’re asking for.

So;

• Drop the price
• Increase the price
• Ask for less information
• Ask for NO information (just give me the f**king ebook if its that great I might just buy something from you anyway)
• Or at the very least explain WHY you’re asking for the information you’re asking for.
• Seek feedback and ask real people whether they’d take you up on your offer

The beauty of marketing is if something doesn’t work you can just change it. And changing your action is the last high reward play you can make to get better results from your landing page.

Step 5) The Design

So we finally got to the design and to recap if you’ve got to the stage with your landing page that you’re testing design elements you’ve already fine tuned your traffic, improved your offer, nailed your copy and sense checked your action.

Which means you’re probably already getting a stack of conversions through your landing page by the time you get on to looking at the design.

And thats kind of the point, because anything you do from here in is going to need a lot of conversion data to validate in an A/B test, will take a lot of time and traffic to test properly and will in most cases only deliver marginal, single digit gains to conversion. Hence you don’t want to start at this point, spend 2 weeks and a couple of grand testing 2 versions of a design only to find out your offer is wrong.

You just can’t test design elements until you have some conversion data to baseline against.

Without seeing your landing page I really can’t tell you what you could improve on the design, and of course design is subjective so my personal tastes might be different to what a person in your audience might have. But for me there’s 2 massive, fundamental mistakes people make with landing page design & A/B testing in particular;

1) Forgetting about brand

The problem with every landing page builder I’ve come across to date is that they all want you to start with someone else’s design. A landing page might sit externally to the rest of your site but its a touchpoint with your brand and if it doesn’t look like the rest of your collateral, even if this is the first touchpoint people have had with your brand, then its going to negatively impact your conversion further down the funnel.

2) Tweaking rather than shaking

So what I mean by tweaking is changing the colour of a button or moving the form from the left to the right. This sort of design testing is only valid on very large campaigns where you have a ton of traffic to work with. The less traffic you have the more radically different your design needs to be to illicit a statistically different response between versions, thus giving you clear results about the better converting design. So shake it up, don’t tweak it.

If you’ve made it here you either;

a) skipped to the end or

b) got at least a bit of what I’ve been getting at, maybe even agreeing with some of it

If the latter, will you do me a favour? Next time you read an article purporting to have a short cut to landing page optimization success that doesn’t go to the core of the issue and instead jumps straight to the design. Call BS on it. Challenge them to provide real examples of landing pages where rudimentary design changes have significantly improved conversion. Don’t give the snake oil salesmen an easy ride

ps. Here’s a secret that no marketing guru will ever tell you. The reason their offer pages look a bit, well… shit, is that they’re not marketing to the most savvy and intelligent people who hit their page. The most valuable visitor for a self professed marketing guru is the person gullible enough to spend $5000 on an e-course thinking it’s going to unlock some secret marketing formula.

There is no secret formula with landing page optimization. There are no shortcuts or tweaks you can make to your page to go from a 1% conversion rate to 50%. There’s no software that can make people convert. Landing page optimization is most often just real life business decisions (often hard ones) that might require you to invest time, money or both before you get it right.

pps. This post is not meant to hate on the idea of A/B testing either. By all means test things. But for goodness sakes test the big things first not the small.

Here’s some landing page tests that are actually worth running on pretty much any campaign and will almost always deliver a result (and the nice thing about split testing is that any result is a good result);

• Audience A vs audience B
• Offer A vs offer B
• Long vs short copy page
• Text vs video
• $99 vs $9 action

ppps. I have on occasion started a project by completely redesigning a clients landing page when I’ve known from experience that what they’ve got is not going to work. Thus contradicting everything I’ve said above!

While it seems like a small thing, the truth is that if part of your Facebook strategy is to get page likes, then you need to start somewhere and if you have a page that already has a few thousand likes, more people are likely to also like you. After all, who wants to be the first person at a party?

With this in mind its no wonder there’s so many people purporting to have the answer to delivering cheap Facebook page likes, whether its buying them from bots on Fiverr or using some other shady technique.

Actually its really easy to get very cheap page likes, under $0.01 per like, in a safe way and from real users using Facebook Ads.

Whats the catch?

Well the only way to guarantee you’re going to get those rock bottom costs per like is to get target Facebook users in countries where your advertising dollars go much much further than they would in the US, UK or Western Europe. That does mean that the first people to like your page are going to be highly unlikely to be useful to you as an audience for promoting your products and services later. So if you’re going to use this tactic use it sparingly and only do it to get your fan page off the ground.

Video tutorial

Here’s how its done

Step 1: Setup a new likes campaign and in Power Editor under audiences (ad set level) click the “Add bulk locations” link:

Step 2: Then paste the list of countries below into the window that opens:

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Angola
Argentina
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Bangladesh
Belarus
Belize
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
China
Colombia
Comoros
Costa Rica
Côte d’Ivoire
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Federated States of Micronesia
Fiji
Gabon
Georgia (country)
Ghana
Grenada
Guatemala
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Jamaica
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Marshall Islands
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mexico
Moldova
Mongolia
Montenegro
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nepal
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
North Korea
Pakistan
Palau
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Republic of Macedonia
Republic of the Congo
Romania
Rwanda
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
Sao Tome and Principe
Senegal
Serbia
Sierra Leone
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa
South Sudan
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
St. Lucia
Suriname
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
The Gambia
Togo
Tonga
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Thats it. You don’t need any other targeting options, although it might still be even cheaper if you target people by broad interest categories.

Step 3: You’ll need to setup an ad to encourage people to like you. In my experience it seems to make virtually no difference what you say in the ad but a nice looking photo and a clear message along the lines of “Like us for X free information” is probably a good place to start. DOn’t agonise over it, you will get likes whatever you say in the ad.

The Results?

As you can see in the video, in the demo I put together in all of 2 minutes we got 330+ likes for $2 or $0.006 per like. I’m sure you could hammer that cost down further but really you should only be using this to add a few hundred or maybe a thousand likes to your page initially. Don’t go crazy and spend your whole ad budget buying a million likes and hoping to see some value from it!

Most of them can’t be trusted.

Most are written by people who don’t know the software or haven’t properly tested it.

It’s because Raven Tools pay 50% commission on referrals through their affiliate program.

That’s good for affiliates but not good for anyone thinking about using Raven Tools and looking for an honest review from a real customer.

Here’s a few reasons you’re in the right place if you’re looking for a real, honest Raven Tools review:

• The first version of my review was published in 2010.
• I’ve been a customer of Raven Tools since they launched in 2007 (ish) when I was working for another agency. It was then called Raven SEO Tools.
• I’ve personally been a customer (and paying the bills myself) since 2011.
• As well as personally spending over $8,000 with Raven Tools, when I was consulting for other agencies I introduced Raven Tools into their internet marketing teams as well, including one of the world’s largest media agencies

So I reckon I know a thing or two about the software and am in a pretty good position to recommend it (or not).

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

Overview of Raven, What Are Its Key Features

Raven Tools is a pretty mature piece of marketing software, it has a lot of features and I don’t think if you’re reading my review you want to see a list of features, after all you can see those on the Raven Tools website or just signup for a free trial with Raven and play around with the features for yourself.

That said I’ll briefly highlight what I think are some of the most important and useful parts of the toolkit:

• Create great looking client reports that pull data from over 20 sources like AdWords, Search Console, Facebook and Analytics
• Run regular website audits that identify potential issues and impress clients
• Manage link building campaigns for SEO with their Link manager and database
• Access Moz & Majestic link data with their research tools without needing a separate subscription
• Schedule Tweets and Facebook posts from one tool without needing a separate tool subscription

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

How I use Raven Tools

In our agency we mostly use Raven Tools as a reporting tool. We have scheduled reports setup to run every week or month depending on the clients requirements. These typically pull in data from AdWords, Analytics, Bing and occasionally other sources depending on the campaign.

This saves us hours every month because when it comes to sending that report to the client all the data is already there and formatted, on a link ready to send to the client, so we can spend more time analysing the results and making recommendations – the stuff that adds value. And less time spent messing around pulling data from multiple sources and making the report look pretty!

For $99/ month there’s no question this tool pays for itself for me, even without dabbling with the other features.

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

Who Raven Tools good for?

In a word… agencies

Because client reporting is so integral to the Raven toolkit and the Raven report builder is so good now, I think agencies are their main customers.

That said I still think it has applications that would be useful to non-client focused marketers and in-house teams;

• The link manager is a really powerful tool for managing link building campaigns, particularly if you’ve got multiple team members working on a project
• The WordPress content manager is a nice feature for anyone who manages multiple wordpress blogs, particularly as you can order content from TextBroker inside Raven and publish it automatically to a connected WordPress blog.
• If you’re managing social media accounts you may find the tools for managing Twitter and Facebook posts useful. There’s better tools for doing this like Hootsuite and Edgar, but there may be a cost saving to using Raven for these tasks rather than needing a subscription to a separate tool.
• There’s also a built in CRM and task manager within Raven which they don’t make much of a feature of but for simple management of small teams completing regular tasks for SEO or PPC campaigns, or just for setting reminders for yourself its a handy addition and again something you don’t need to pay out for another tool for.

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

Why I wouldn’t recommend Raven Tools

Having used Raven for so long there’s plenty of holes I can pick in it;

• My biggest bugbear with it is its lack of keyword rank tracking. Going back many years when Raven was primarily an SEO tool it used to track rankings as one of its biggest features. They removed this feature which annoyed me at the time and I don’t honestly think its ever offered as much value since. They have re-introduced some rank tracking options- letting you import rankings from Google Search Console (which aren’t accurate) or importing from AuthorityLabs into your Raven reports, which is helpful, but requires an additional subscription.
• For keyword research the tool has really lagged behind the likes of Ahrefs and Moz which have developed much better tools in recent years. Keyword research in Raven is really just a front end of Google Keyword Planner.
• Other parts of the toolset also don’t seem to have had much love in years. The whole PPC section is pretty pointless, just pulling in top line stats from AdWords or Bing Ads.
• On the whole Raven Tools seems to be pivoting from being a “doing tool”, one that you use to actively manage campaigns, to being a pure “reporting tool” – that makes a lot of sense given that the market is so saturated with other specialist tools for things like link building, social media and PPC that an all-in-one tool could never keep up. It still provides immense value for my business but may not still be the best tool for anybody and everybody running an SEO or digital marketing campaign.

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

Comparing Raven Tools to the alternatives

There’s plenty of tools now that do what parts of Raven Tools do, but not really anything that does all the things it does. So for example;

• Buzzstream is an alternative to Raven’s link manager but link management is all it does.
• Swydo does great looking marketing reports but again reporting is really all it does, that tool starts from $60/ month
• Hootsuite does social media management better than Raven but thats another subscription
• Ahrefs or Link Research Tools have similar (and much better) tools for link research than Raven’s built in tool, but again, another expensive subscription is needed for each of these.
• Brightpod is a much more sophisticated project management tool for digital marketing projects but if Raven’s basic task manager can do what you need then you can save on another subscription.
• Moz Pro has many of the main features of Raven’s SEO suite. Letting you do link research, keyword research and run onsite audits. And it also monitors your keyword rankings, something Raven doesn’t do. But its report builder is more limited and it doesn’t have any management type tools like the task manager, link manager or social media publishing stuff you get in Raven.

So there are definitely Raven Tools alternatives that are better for each thing that Raven does. But not really any alternatives that I’m aware of that do everything under one tool, as well as Raven.

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

Is Raven Tools worth the money?

Following on from the point above, one of the main reasons I still recommend Raven so highly is that if you’re on a limited budget and don’t want to shell out for 4 or 5 different internet marketing tools every month, one Raven Tools subscription can easily replace your need for multiple tools.

If you’re particularly focused on one area or another, like Social Media or Link Building you probably won’t get value out of Raven if you just use this part of the tool, you’ll be better off with a specialist tool.

But if you’re using more than one of Raven’s tools on a regular basis I think it will work out good value for you.

And if you’re using Raven primarily for reporting (as we do) then there’s easily a direct cost saving to be made from automating client report creation and not spending hours putting together reports every week or month. For me that easily justifies the $99 we spend on Raven Tools.

Try Raven Tools for yourself with a 30 day free trial (no credit card required)

The lifeblood of funnel marketing is leads. Without leads your funnel, whatever it looks like is never going to spit out sales at the end. As a result funnel marketing often has what I would consider to be a sometimes unhealthy fixation with cost per lead or CPL.

I bet you’ve got a pretty good idea of what a good cost per lead looks like to your business?

And yes there will always be variables and outliers and there will probably never be a hard and fast figure, but I bet you’ve got a figure in your head at the moment.

Depending on what you call a lead and what you sell, your CPL probably falls into one of two camps:

1. High CPL, a large % of your average customer value, but leads are warm and highly likely to convert
2. Low CPL, often a tiny % of your average customer value but they’re cold, early stage and you need thousands of them to nurture through the funnel into sales

Having a low CPL and a long marketing funnel is a tempting proposition. It means getting leads is generally easy. You have a big and diverse pipeline which spreads your risk. Your startup costs might be lower because you don’t need to shell out big stacks of bills in advance on your marketing to grow a decent pipeline.

I know a lot of traditional lead gen businesses are moving down the funnel marketing route, and generally I would endorse it as a strategy but it’s definitely not for everyone because;

• Some businesses, particularly B2B companies, just struggle to get the volume of interest required at the bottom of the funnel to feed leads through to the top
• There’s a variable cost associated with each new lead (managing the data, sending email, handling social media, dealing with useless enquiries) they all stack up when your pipeline is bulging with thousands of leads at anyone time.
• It usually requires creative assets which most companies can’t execute well, for example email scripts
• Its overly reliant on email marketing which a good chunk of your customers will never be receptive to

But perhaps most importantly, it’s not always as easy as you think to hit that low CPL figure and it’s going to rule you out of a number of marketing channels because the figures just don’t stack up.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example of a funnel marketing campaign with a target CPL of $10 and we’ll call a lead an email signup through some sort of list building activity like a webinar.

So let’s break it down:

At least 50% of the people who sign up for your webinar won’t attend and you’ll never hear from them again, so straight away you need to be getting sign ups for $5.

Let’s then assume you’ve got a landing page that converts at 20%- that’s probably unlikely for a webinar but anyway, we need to get clicks for $1 to hit the $5 signup target.

But what can we do and what can we buy for $1 per click?

Facebook ads – yep definitely at the moment you should be able to comfortably get a CPC under $1 on Facebook. But for how long I don’t know. And being realistic, unless you’ve got a lot of your own data you won’t be able to maintain that high conversion rate forever. As you burn through your audience you’ll find it harder to get results over time, not easier.

Google Adwords – here that 20% conversion rate might be more achievable if you’ve got a good supply of niche specific keyword traffic, but a sub $1 CPC? In some niches that’ll be easy but if you’re selling high a high ticket item or service you can assume you’ve got competitors willing to out bid you, pushing your costs way above $1/ click.

Content ads – taboolo, outbrain etc. Cheap clicks abound here but a 20% conversion – no chance, this is display advertising. Let’s say you can do 5%, now you need clicks for $0.25- that’s possible but you’re sacrificing impressions and not reaching your maximum potential market.

Other social – Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Have you seen the average CPC on LinkedIn? No chance there. Twitter might be doable if you know what you’re doing and can convert well but it’s going to be tight.

SEO – you can forget about driving volume through SEO at this sort of CPL level.

So however you’re planning on driving traffic, set your CPL target too low and you’re putting an artificial ceiling on the people you can reach and the amount of targeted traffic you could generate for your funnel. You’re effectively shutting your campaign off from all sorts of great traffic because you’re too cheap to pay for it.

For most marketers the most natural response to a challenging CPL target is either;

• Plan a) Buy cheaper traffic – yes but do you think those cheap clicks will convert the same into leads and further down the funnel into sales? Maybe, but maybe not.
• Plan b) Convert that traffic better into leads – an admiral plan but at some point that’s probably going to mean sacrificing the quality of your data by accepting softer leads whether it’s email only data, single opt in or over the top ‘bribes’ that pull in the cheapskates, not the whales.

A little bit of plan A or B is usually ok but pull too hard in either direction and your $10 CPL target will soon become an $8 target and so on.

What you really need to be doing is avoiding this race to the bottom altogether and instead focus on getting more value from each lead.

Easier said than done.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Now how do we do it? When you start to think laterally that CPL figure is actually pretty fluid, there’s all kinds of ways you can pull and prod at it until it sits at a level where you’re not being too tight with your ad costs, here’s some examples (that won’t apply to everyone)

1) Improve the lead quality

The quickest way to escape getting sucked down the proverbial cheap traffic drain is to stop  focusing on traffic volume. Accept a higher CPC in exchange for better quality traffic.

And I don’t just mean ‘more likely to convert into a lead’ kind of better but ‘more likely to actually buy something from you better’.

Throw away your lead target and instead work to a sales target. So maybe that means overlaying your Facebook audiences with a demographic profile of someone who actually has money to spend.

Or focus on the Adwords keywords that are most blatantly relevant and showing buyer intent. ie “the best online personal trainer” rather than “free online personal training tips”.

2) Squeeze more sales out of the funnel

Are you actually sure that fancy sales funnel you created in your expensive marketing automation software is doing the best possible job of converting leads into sales? I mean have you tried phoning people up and talking to them, setting up a face to face meeting (the horror) or at the very least sent them a personal email that doesn’t come from some innocuous marketing software?

Don’t assume that traditional email funnel marketing is the best option for your traffic if you haven’t tried anything else.

3) Get prospects to pay their own lead costs

AKA, “trip wire products”.

Instead of giving something away in exchange for the lead. Why not create something of such immense value that you can actually sell it. Albeit at a super competitive price. In fact why not make that price your CPL figure and let your prospects cover the cost of your marketing.

You will need a stella offering and you’ll probably want to warm your leads up in some way beforehand, so they trust you enough to get out their credit card. It should also go without saying that someone who’s already brought from you is far more likely to buy your higher ticket items in the future than someone who just wants your freebies, o you know everyone in your funnel is already a buyer.

4) Increase your prices

Doh. One way to leverage a higher CPL target is just to charge a bit more higher up the funnel. Just as long as it doesn’t reduce your sales conversion rate.

5) Or drop them?

As above, but you know, like… the exact opposite.

Maybe halving your price will more than double your sales conversion rate, giving you more wiggle room with your CPL? Give it a go.

6) Go international

Investing in making your product or service suitable for an international market can profoundly effect your ability to scale and to drive cheaper leads. Ad space is always cheaper in non-English speaking markets with very very few exceptions so the ost of delivering a product internationally may soon be offset by significantly lower CPL’s.

7) Recoup your lead costs sooner

Maybe your funnel is converting well at the top but there’s a big chunk of leads in the middle that go cold when you mention the price. Introducing smaller, cheaper, but paid for products earlier not only helps to recoup some of the money you spent bringing those leads in, but also warms prospects up to the big sell.

8) Increase lifetime customer value

Sell more stuff to the people who have already brought from you. If you don’t have anything else to sell them, sell them someone else’s stuff (referrals, affiliates etc)

9) Play the long game

One last thing to think about here. If you’re doing the right things in terms of your product and/ or service delivery you will (hopefully) see your CPL improve over time naturally. You’re going to build up word of mouth and referral traffic. You might even get a bit of free traffic from SEO and you’ll develop more products or ancillary services or up sells that will help you get more lifetime customer value from your past and existing customers.

So the more customers you have, the faster you grow and the bigger impact you’ll see from this dripping down to other parts of your business.

So what I’m saying is that if you have to pay a little more on your CPL to get more customers when you’re starting out, even if that means not making any money or in some cases even losing money then that might be OK. Because you’re growing your business and the benefits of that will come back to you in time in more holistic and less quantifiable ways.

Hippy BS?

Well look at it like this. Most of the consulting clients I have today came indirectly as a result of marketing I did years ago which led to customers then and converted to referrals further down the line. Do a good job and a customer you thought was worth £2k might end up being worth £20k or £200k. This doesn’t just go for consulting, the best marketing you can do for any product is to get that product in the hands of people who are going to love it and talk about it. Play the long game, it works.

So to sum up / TLDR:

• Stop putting an artificial cap on your CPL that stops you thinking about better ways to advertise
• Your CPL target is a fluid figure that is under your control.
• Quit the race to the bottom. Look for channels that will deliver the best lifetime customer value, not the cheapest emails in your Infusionsoft marketing funnel.

So the next time someone asks what your target CPL is. Maybe the right answer should be “well…it’s complicated”.

Why Use Google Analytics With Facebook Ads

I’ll pretty much always setup Google Analytics alongside a Facebook Ads campaign, even if I’m not sure whether I’m going to need it or not. I’d rather have the data and not need it than need the data and not have it and there’s been plenty of times when Analytics has answered questions about my campaigns that Facebook reports haven’t been able to. But if you still need convincing, here’s some of the big advantages off the top of my head:

• See advanced statistics on how users behave on your site after clicking through from a Facebook Ad like time on site and bounce rate
• Take advantage of enhanced ecommerce reports and shopping behaviour analysis for ecommerce campaigns
• Compare the performance of your Facebook traffic side by side with other channels like paid search or email marketing
• For publishers, linking your Analytics account with your Google Adsense account will give you more information on the ad value of your paid Facebook traffic
• If nothing else it provides a backup data source to check conversion tracking through the Facebook Pixel is working correctly and that the number of clicks you’re paying for on Facebook broadly corresponds to the number of visitors you’re getting on your website

Understanding URL Parameters

I’m going to explain a bit about URL parameters here and how and why they’re needed, if you already understand this concept feel free to skip to the tagging section.

Now just by having Google Analytics setup on your website you’re going to start seeing visitors being referred from Facebook and you’ll be able to learn a fair bit about how your Facebook traffic behaves based just on this information BUT there’s some big limitations with the data you’ll get.

You’re going to see your traffic be attributed to one of a number of different Facebook source URL’s like you see below:

And your Facebook Ads traffic will be classified as Social Referral traffic – whereas you probably want it to be classified as paid traffic.

To get around this and get the best possible integration between Facebook Ads & Google Analytics you’ll need to tag your adverts with ‘URL parameters’.

If you don’t know what a URL parameter is here’s the 2 sentence explanation…A URL parameter is an extra bit of information you can put at the end of a URL (a web address) which won’t affect the page but will provide extra information that can read by software. So for example if I was linking to http://www.johnmcelborough.com I could add a URL parameter called “animal” to the end of the URL and it wouldn’t affect the page:

http://www.johnmcelborough.com?animal=dog

Everything after the ? in the URL shouldn’t make any difference to the page itself.

In that example “animal” is the name of the URL parameter and the bit after the = is the content of that parameter, in this example “dog” is the content.

Oh and you can also string different URL parameters together using & signs so you could do something like this if you wanted:

http://www.johnmcelborough.com?animal=dog&colour=black

Make sense? Great, so lets bring it back to Google Analytics…

You’re going to use these URL parameters to send information about your Facebook campaigns to Google Analytics. Sound complicated? Its not really

Google Analytics uses 5 URL parameters:

So with the 5 example parameters above my URL would look like this:

http://www.johnmcelborough.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=halfpricesale&utm_content=advariation1&utm_term=lookalikes

That would tell Google Analytics that anyone who hit my page with those parameters had arrived from a cost per click campaign on Facebook, they’d clicked on the ad variation 1 which was in my half price sale campaign and that they were in my lookalikes audience.

Tagging Your Facebook Ads With Google Analytics Parameters

Now you understand what URL parameters are and why you need them, lets look at how you set them up in Google Analytics.

For 90% of campaigns I think the best way to tag your Facebook links with Analytics tracking will be using the URL parameters option which you’ll find in Facebook Power Editor when you build your adverts. There are examples where this might NOT be the best option though so be sure to read the measuring viral traffic section below.

You add UTM tags at the Advert level and you can do it through Power Editor or through the Advert Manager interface (I’d recommend Power Editor). Under each advert you’ll have a tracking section near the bottom of the advert editing screen, you’re looking for the URL Parameters box (don’t mis it up with the “view tags” box above):

Here’s that full example tracking which you can copy and paste if you like, just make sure you change the campaign, content and term parameters to something meaningful for your ad:

utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=halfpricesale&utm_content=advariation1&utm_term=lookalikes

You can also use the Facebook URL builder tool to help you string together your UTM tags. But be warned if you’re going to use this tool its a bit misleading. It will give you a full URL at the end including the website URL which you enter. You definitely don’t want to copy the full URL into the URL parameters box in power editor. Only ever copy the parameters themselves, starting with “utm_source”. Also you don’t need to include the question mark (?) in the URL parameters box, Facebook will automatically add a ? to the end of your website URL and append the URL parameters after the “?”.

Measuring Viral Facebook Traffic in Google Analytics

There’s something important to understand with the URL parameters option I’ve described in the section above and it affects how you might want tag your links.

If you use the URL parameters option in Facebook Power Editor your tags will only be applied to the links of clicks that you are paying for on Facebook. For many advertisers that might be all or the vast majority of your traffic, but for others whose ads might be shared a lot and spread virally outside of the Facebook Ads environment your UTM tags will only be added to the paid clicks, the free clicks that come from your ads being shared won’t have the Google Analytics URL parameters added to them, so in your Google Analytics reports those visits will show up as referral traffic.

This becomes an issue if you’re a publisher who uses Facebook Ads primarily as a tool to get a Facebook page post off the ground and help it to spread virally through shares, likes and comments.

The solution to this is to attach the URL Parameters to the end of the URL you are linking people to from your ad. If the ad gets shared and the URL parameters are hardcoded into the link that is being shared they won’t be removed if the ad gets clicked on by someone as a result of a share, you’ll still be able to measure that click as part of the ad campaign in Google Analytics.

You used to have to fiddle around with URL shorteners if you wanted to link in this way from page post engagement ads to avoid having a massive great URL string in your ad content but luckily now you should be able to paste an URL into the text part of the ad and Facebook will automatically crop out the URL parameters when it displays the link in the post, so it doesn’t look too messy.

Here’s how that would look in your Power Editor:

But when that link is displayed on Facebook you’ll see all the messy UTM tags are hidden behind three dots…

Updating URL Parameters in bulk

The above process is fine if you’re setting up new ads, just remember to add the URL parameters with each new ad that you setup. But there’s not yet a way to make bulk updates to existing ads if you want to add UTM tags to every ad you’ve already got running.

So to do that I use the “export as text” feature in Power Editor.

1. In Power Editor, select the ads you want to add tags to, or select everything.

2. Then click the import/ export button and select “Export Selected as Text”

3. Copy the plain text that you get in the next window and paste it into a fresh spreadsheet (Excel, OpenOffice, Google Sheets etc)

4. In the spreadsheet you should find the “URL tags” column heading right over in column DW – thats the 127th column from the left!

5. If you’re comfortable working with spreadsheets you should find it really quick to now go through each ad (each row on the sheet is a separate ad) and apply your UTM tags and/ or write a simple formula to build URL tags based on the advert name, campaign name etc.

6. Once you’ve updated yoour tags in the spreadsheet don’t touch any other columns, just copy the entire sheet and go back to Power Editor and use the Import/ Export button again, this time selecting “import adverts in bulk”:

7. And then the link to “Paste text from tab-separated document”.

8. Paste all the spreadsheet contents into the box on that screen and click “Import”

9. Don’t worry about this importing new ads, it will just update the existing ads and add the URL tags that you added in the spreadsheet.

Setting Up A Google Analytics Segment

By now we should be receiving all our Facebook Ads click data in Analytics but how do we actually use that data in a meaningful way in Google Analytics? What I tend to do is to setup Analytics custom segments to let me see reports like the one below, snapshots of what that Facebook traffic has done when its come to my site.

And the really nice thing about segments is that once you apply a segment to your Analytics you can access pretty much all the normal analytics reports but only see Facebook traffic. Or you can compare Facebook traffic side by side with another channel like Twitter traffic by applying multiple segments. In the above example I’m comparing Facebook CPC traffic with Facebook organic traffic. If you’re logged into your Google Analytics account you can use the 2 URL’s below to import these segments into your own account as a starting point:

Facebook CPC – https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=JW_LfaqoQde3EoPikfBetg

Facebook Organic (non-CPC) – https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=42_mb_txRACX0Ty4JGTiLg

Setting up basic segments like this is pretty easy. Just look for the “Add segment” button near the top of the Analytics reporting screen:

Then click the red “new segment” button to create a custom segment.

Here you can apply any combination of conditions to the segment you want to build. For a Facebook CPC segment we’d just use the “source” and “medium” we defined when tagging our Facebook Ad URL’s with UTM tags earlier as shown below:

If you want to get more advanced with your Segments here’s a good primer.

Uploading Facebook Ads Cost Data into Google Analytics

This final step is the most advanced integration between Facebook Ads and Google Analytics and we don’t always do this, but its definitely worth it if you’re heavily reliant on Google Analytics data across your business (online stores who make use of Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce reporting come to mind here).

By default Facebook and Google don’t talk to each other to share cost data. So although we can use UTM tags to tell Google Analytics that traffic has come from Facebook campaign X or ad set Y, cost data isn’t passed between the two.

But Google Analytics does have a function to upload cost data from any source, including Facebook Ads. Its just fiddly because you have to download and format CSV’s from Facebook and manually upload them into GA. Luckily though the good people at Supermetrics have come up with a tool called Supermetrics Uploader to automate and streamline this process. With a few clicks you can get Facebook cost data sent automatically every day to GA letting you report on ad costs and ROI in Analytics like this:

Here’s how its done:

1. This tool is pretty intuitive, sign up for a free 30 day trial by logging in with your Google Account here (make sure you’re using the Google Account that you use for Google Analytics)

2. Then you can follow the prompts to log into your Facebook Ads account and select the right ad account to upload from:

3. If you haven’t uploaded data before its likely you’ll get this message telling you you need to add a custom data source in GA:

4. Click that red link and you can setup the custom data source as shown below:

5. Once thats setup in GA you should be set to start sending data from Facebook to GA using Supermetrics. With the trial account you’ll only be able to upload daily cost data but if you pay for the full version you can upload your historic data as well.

The summary

If you don’t have time to read my whole review of Crunch, my summary would be:

• Would you recommend Crunch? Yes (for small businesses with standard invoicing processes)
• Why? Its a solid online accountancy system with good support
• Is it perfect? No, but neither is a “proper accountant”
• Click here for a free demo of Crunch

The full review

Regular readers of my blog (is there any left?!) will know I’ve only ever reviewed a couple of products here, like Raven Tools, which I’ve been a customer of for many years. Crunch is the same, I used them as my accountants from when I started freelance consulting in 2010 and we also use them at Inbound360. So this isn’t some sort of shill article to earn some referral fees!

What is it?

Crunch Accounting is an online accounting software package which is sold as a service giving you an account manager and access to accountants. You use their online accounting system to raise and send invoices, record your expenses, pay yourself and log your tax returns. You also get an account manager who you’d contact if you have any questions about your accounts. For most complex requests the account managers will refer to one of the accountants.

Crunch will file VAT returns and corporation tax on your behalf and also prepare your annual return. For an additional fee they also complete my personal Self Assessment.

Who is it for?

Crunch is really designed around freelancers and small businesses who raise invoices (i.e. I don’t think you could use them if you ran a shop for example). You can run payroll for up to 10 members of staff, although realistically if your company is larger than this I think you’re probably better off with a traditional accountant and software like Sage. There’s more about who Crunch is and isn’t for on the website.

Price

Obviously this size company are pretty price sensitive (cheap!) so the price of Crunch’s online accounting service needs to reflect that. I pay £65 + VAT/ month for each company I have using Crunch so £780/ year if you’re VAT registered or £936/ year if you’re not registered for VAT or on Flat Rate. By comparison when I was shopping around the cheapest local accountants worked out to around £1,000/ year and most were quite a bit more expensive. Also to be honest I get the view of the accounting profession that there’s a vast spectrum of quality (a bit like SEO ) so if you’re paying a cheap accountant, there’s probably a reason he’s cheaper than the rest.

The little calculator below gives you an estimate of how much Crunch could save you if you switch from a traditional accountant.

Raising Invoices & Expenses

Invoices & Expenses are where you’re likely to spend most of your time in the Crunch system. The process here will probably be quite familiar to anyone who’s used other accounting software or online invoicing tools like FreshBooks. You setup your client profiles in the system then raise invoices against them as you complete work. Once issued you can either have the invoice emailed out automatically from the system or download it and send it yourself < I have one client who I still have to print the PDF invoice out for and send it in the post! Once your client pays you record the payment against that invoice. There’s a bunch of other features I won’t go into details of here like the option to automatically send reminder emails to clients when an invoice becomes overdue. I like this because I find those nagging emails chasing clients for payment painful to write, I’d much rather have the machines do it for me.

Expenses work in a similar way, you record details of everything you need to expense in the system. There’s not really a bulk editing feature of any sort here so if you have a lot of expenses that could be a pain, but again in those cases Crunch probably isn’t right for you. There is a recurring expense option for stuff you get billed the same amount for each month. One nice little feature of Crunch is its “Snap app” which is an iphone app which lets you take a photo of your receipts and have them turn up in your Crunch account under the expenses section a few days later. This is really handy if like me you have a load of expenses for things like train tickets and parking and usually forget to record them as expenses.

Bank reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is a way of ensuring the payments in and out you’ve recorded in Crunch match up to your bank account, so you don’t forget to record payments in the system. I’m not sure if this is an HMRC requirement or just a Crunch one to be honest but you have to do it before you can submit your annual returns. If you do it regularly its not a problem but if like me you leave it too long, reconciliation is a real pain in the arse! If like me you have loads of little payments going in and out of your accounts you tend to spend a lot of time trying to workout why that 50p came out your account 10 months ago. If you keep your payments and expenses up to date though it shouldn’t be a problem. The reconciliation feature of Crunch works well while its working but if you hit a payment which you can’t identify you can’t skip it and come back to it later so you have to go and track it down before you can move on.

Also worth noting, when I first started with Crunch the website would continually run into errors where you’d end up having to logout and log back in again and lose whatever you were working on. Thankfully the worst of those problems are a thing of the past and generally its pretty stable now but when I do still get crashes it tends to be during reconciliation.

Paying yourself

Crunch Accounting has a built in payroll feature which you can use to pay yourself and your staff salaries and issue payslips. Its nice to have all your payslips and dividends in one place. One thing I’d like to see developed in Crunch is a feature to help with your personal tax. Although Crunch will help with your self assessment for an additional fee, there’s nothing within the system at the moment for helping you manage your personal tax and keep track of your liabilities. What I’d like to be able to see is how much my personal tax liability is and how much money I need to keep stashed for my self-assessment, even if it was only an estimated figure.

Tax

VAT and Corporation Tax returns have to be the worst part about running a business, however small so I like that Crunch handles these returns with relatively little effort required on my part. They also send reminders when stuff is due to be paid so I don’t have to worry about calendar reminders.

Here’s a full list of everything which is included in the Crunch subscription.

The bad stuff

As I said at the top, I don’t want this review to read like a sales pitch for Crunch Accounting, I have had some issues and I think its only right to share some of these, such as;

• When using the Crunch for my Self Assessment they didn’t include my student loan repayments which landed me with a wrist slap from HMRC. (Personal tax is a personal responsibility even if you’re using an accountant so I have to shoulder some blame here)
• A problem with the VAT system meant we missed our first VAT return deadline, again leading to a nasty letter from our good friend the tax man.
• The problems I noted above about the system crashing, although these are much, much better than they were when I first started with Crunch. (3 years on from when I first reviewed Crunch this is no longer an issue)

Re-active vs Pro-active accounting

What I think its important to realise with a system like Crunch is that what you’re not paying for is an accountant to pro-actively look at your accounts and check you’re doing the right/ best thing for your business. Although the accountants will prepare your annual returns and flag up issues, I think there’s a limit to what you can expect them to do when paying a relatively small amount for the service. To give an example of this one year I ended up taking a smaller dividend from my company than I could of, meaning I lost out a large amount of my tax free allowance for the year. This is my mistake and it cost me several thousand pounds. Part of me wonders if I was paying a pro-active accountant to look at my books they would have identified something like this and flagged it up. If you’re organised with your own money you probably won’t have any issues like this anyway, its just my own experience or lack there of.

My review – do I recommend Crunch Accounting?

Ultimately, yes I absolutely do recommend it. In fact I’ve introduced several friends who started up as freelancers to Crunch and they’re getting on well with it. I do think this is the way small business accounting will end up going. Accounting is definitely one industry which technology should be able to simplify and while you’ll always need professional advice, for most small companies with simple books it probably doesn’t make sense to pay an expensive retainer for an accountant to complete menial administrative tasks for you.

Whether its right for your business will come down to how complicated your accounts are and how much support you need. If you know what questions to ask and you’re happy to work things out for yourself, there’s no limit to the amount of support Crunch accountants will give you so you know you’ll never end up paying more than the fixed monthly fee. As you can tell from some of the issues I’ve had with my accounts I’m certainly no expert at this stuff but if you keep on top of your accounts I don’t think it has to be that complicated.

I hope this reviews helpful for anyone considering using Crunch for their accounting. Feel free to ask me any questions about my experiences with Crunch in the comments or on Twitter.

Get a free demo of Crunch here or signup for the demo using the form below and I’ll earn a referral fee for my hard work writing this review:-)