Wetherspoons support Tax Equality Day

Wednesday 20^th September is also known as Tax Equality Day, and to support it Wetherspoons decided to reduce their prices by 7.5% for the full day.

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Brits are quite partial to a meal and drink deal in the high street pub chain, but they want to raise awareness on the high taxes that pubs charge on any food and drink they sell, whereas supermarkets don’t have to. They wanted to show customers how much money they could save if VAT was lowered permanently.

It was a great stunt to increase the amount of footfall in their pubs, but also received some great coverage including UNILAD, The Sun, The Metro and The Star, as well as a lot of regional newspapers.

Ice hotels, submarine hotels but now there’s a sand hotel

Gold Coast Tourism and Hostelworld have partnered up to create a new type of hotel, a ‘Sand Hostel’. It’s been built to try and change the perception of hostels and to show them as a more social place to stay.

The sand hostel took 21 days to build and used 24 tonnes of sand. It was created by Dennis Massoud who is also known as ‘The Sandman’. Some lucky people will have been able to stay overnight at the hostel but tonight is the last night it’s open for business.

It has been a great campaign and has more than likely achieved what Hostelworld and Gold Coast Tourism wanted it too, as it’s been covered on travel, architectural, national and lifestyle publications.

Toys R Us are looking for big kids

It’s been a week of highs and lows for Toys R Us. The business side of things hasn’t been great as they’ve filed for bankruptcy in the US and Canada, but over this side of the pond their seeing the fun side of things. They’re currently recruiting mums and dads to be their toy testers.

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Named the ‘Toyologist Programme’, the successful applicants will be sent toys to test with their children, and then must report back to let Toys R Us know whether they think they should stock them.

If you fancy the job, you can apply here.

QR code made of trees

Xilinshui village in Hebei, China has jumped on the craze of QR codes (they’re still very popular in China) and created 130,000 juniper trees to create, what could be, the biggest QR code ever.

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The code is 227m each way and is designed to be scanned by passengers as they fly over in planes. After scanning the code takes you to Xilinshui’s tourism page on WeChat, which is China’s equivalent to WhatsApp.

The stunt has gained a lot of coverage so has gained a wider reach than they thought it would. It’s gained coverage on Mashable, Digital Trends, BBC news.

Flamingos and Yellow Cabs come to Paris

Kate Spade New York opened a Parisian flagship store this summer, and they’ve launched it with an augmented reality experiences that turns iconic Parisian landmarks into an interactive playground that includes flamingos and yellow cabs.

three words: new paris shop. we repeat, new paris (!) shop: https://t.co/WuEDLydMHx #KATESPADExoPARIS pic.twitter.com/3mQAMizGA9

— kate spade new york (@katespadeny) June 21, 2017

The app has filters on 10 famous Parisian locations and when users are on the app they will experience “unexpected moments of joy” such as pink flamingos in the Seine or a yellow cab in a Parisian street.

The campaign is a great way of getting people more involved in the launch and is an ingenious use of modern technology but we think they could have done a bit more with it, such as turning it into a scavenger hunt style competition to incentivize more people to get involved.

Our favourite PR campaigns from last week included a ‘TasteFace’ app from Marmite, gender-neutral shoes from Clarks and Roald Dahl inspired Happy Meals from McDonald’s, you can read about these campaigns and more here.

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm brought synonyms and context into the marketing mix, evaluating the whole conversation and trying to decode the user’s intent. In the past, SEOs created many pages optimising for keywords with slight iterations, with the intention of targeting variations of the same keyword. With the introduction of Hummingbird, the need to do this is reduced, as we can now optimise content more effectively for the whole conversation.

To do so, we first need to export keyword data from SEMrush. In the dashboard, after searching for a domain, there is a section for ‘Top Organic Keywords’ as shown in the image below; here you can export the data. You may wish to target specific URLs and combine the data sources to reduce the number of keywords you will need to go through, as it is quite a manual process. However, it may also be useful if you have a section of the domain you want to write more content for.

Analysing the data

Once we have the export of keyword data, we can begin the analysis. Data cleansing is the first step. Clean the results in Excel by removing columns that are unnecessary, in this case Leaving Keyword, Position, Search Volume, and URL. The other data in the export could potentially be used, but for this example these will be the columns analysed.

I like to add an extra column called ‘URL Count’ to give an extra filtering dimension, and to show at a glance how many times in the export a specific URL appears (or how many keywords the URL appears for). To do this, input a COUNTIF formula: the range being the URL Column and the criteria being a specific URL cell.

The export can then be filtered to meet any specific thresholds, perhaps to only show those terms which are currently ranking on pages 2 to 3 to try move them up to page 1. Filtering may be more useful on larger websites where the export is extremely large, but for smaller sites with a digestible amount of data, you may wish to see all terms. In this example I’ve applied a filter for keywords ranking up to position 30.

From here we can filter, sort and segment the data looking for common themes and topics among URL’s and keywords. From this, we can take the learnings to either create new and exciting content for a website to fill gaps in our targeting, or potentially to rework existing content looking for quick wins to improve both user experience and SEO benefit to a page.

I’ve highlighted a couple of different categories our Top 10 Viral Marketing Campaigns page could potentially fall under, or we could look to target marketing campaigns with its own page. How granular you go is up to you. This is a manual process and will take some time to get through, I’ve only looked at a very limited amount of the data I exported from SEMrush but you could map many topics and themes across the entire domain.

At this point, the data can be taken away to brainstorm the topics found, individual pages can be analysed to discover missing areas that could potentially be reworked to improve these rankings, or brand-new content ideas can be brought to the table – all of which can be fed into your content roadmap.

Keyword research may also be done around the topics for reporting purposes and it may show keywords outside of the SEMrush database that you may wish to target.

Next level

To add further insight to the analysis, data from outside of SEMrush such as competitiveness in the SERPs and understanding the potential return for improving content could be added. SEMrush also gives you the ability to look at your competitor’s websites, where they rank and – with some investigative work – why! Analysing competitor data this way is a great way of searching for gaps in your own content especially if competitors are ranking for keywords you may want to but are not targeting already.

Don’t have SEMrush?

While I’ve used SEMrush for this example, the same analysis can be done using different SEO tools out there. Any tool that provides you access to keywords and ranking URL’s will do the trick. Tools like AHREFs provide similar exports while the Google Search Console API can be queried to provide the data needed. Try combining different sources of data to see if additional keywords can be collected.

What your client’s interests and performances are isn’t the only essential part of agency life, though; understanding and monitoring their competitors is also crucial. Below are a few different tools and techniques that I use to make sure I monitor what my competitors are up to.

Monitoring your own clients

The first step is to monitor your client’s activity, as you can see what PR activity they are up to, and make sure you are ahead of the game in terms of learning from their mistakes and using their successes as inspiration.

When I first start to work with a new client, I like to make sure I have every alert set up to monitor their activity, as well as several of their competitors.

My go-to tool for this would be BuzzSumo; this is ideal for finding shareable content ideas, and I’ve found the alert feature to be pretty accurate. It’s also a great way to pick up any articles that have gone live without you noticing.

The alerts feature is easy to use, and I’d recommend setting this up for your clients and at least two of their competitors. It allows you that extra bit of awareness about their activities in order to make sure your campaigns are always ahead of the game.

Backlink checks

About once per month I run a backlink check on my competitors, as this gives me a quick insight into their activities and whether we can learn from the campaigns they’re running.

Below are some of the tools I use to check out backlinks. I use a combination of all of these in order to get a broad range of results, and to cover all areas of Digital PR Campaigns:

Ahrefs

Fresh Web Explorer

Open Site Explorer

SEMRush

These are the four top tools for checking back-links. I use all of these as well as a simple Google search to make sure I find backlinks and coverage generated by my client’s competitors.

Social media monitoring

Social listening is another great way to monitor your competitor’s PR and social activity. At Branded3, we use Crimson Hexagon to do this, but other tools are also available. This type of monitoring provides an insight into how many followers the clients competitors have versus themselves, and the types of conversations they are having to engage with their audiences.

This tool is a useful way to inform the overall digital PR strategy, and to fill in any gaps in your plan. A full audit of each social channel is recommended to create a collaborative plan with both social and PR feeding off into each other.

Below is an example of the word clouds and topic wheels pulled from Crimson Hexagon for an upcoming campaign about Christmas markets. These are extremely useful to inform future campaigns in terms of related content and conversations, for example you can see all the related words that may help with inspiration for future ideas.

Trending data

As a final recommendation, simply monitor competitor’s activity by keeping up to date with the news, social media, and a general Google search. This may sound obvious, but with a world of tools on offer it’s easy to forget, and it’s an easy way to gain inspiration for upcoming campaigns.

Keeping an eye out for PR and social campaigns at least once per week will add to and enhance your strategy, and allow you to think further than just your own clients. At Branded3, we write a weekly blog post on the PR campaigns we’ve seen in that week and what we think worked particularly well which can be seen here.

Overall, I think it’s essential to use all of these tactics to make sure you’re helping to make your client the best in their industry.

What does “Our organic campaign drove 175 conversions” mean anyway? In Google Analytics it means that somebody used a search engine to search for something, clicked your (non-paid) result, browsed your website and completed a goal.

Think about how you make purchases online – how often do you visit a website for the very first time and buy something? User journeys are more complex than “the time they came onto the website and bought the thing”. How did they first get to the website? How many visits did it take for them to buy the thing? Which channels are best at introducing users to your website for the first time but aren’t particularly good at converting visitors?

That’s where Assisted Conversions and Multi-Channel Funnels come in.

What are Assisted Conversions and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics?

The mutli-channel report allows you to see all touch points a user had between first coming to your website and completing a conversion. Google made this video to explain these reports.

For example, a conversion journey might be: Click Banner Ad > Click Post on Social Media > Click PPC Ad > Click Organic Search Result > Buy.

In this case, by looking at a regular Acquisition report, the sale gets attributed to Organic search, as this was the medium that drove the visit that resulted in a conversion. This is because by default, Google Analytics uses a last click conversion model. The other channels that helped gain the sale are credited with nothing using this report.

The multi-channel funnel report allows you to see the effect of those channels. The banner ad is known as “first interaction conversion”, as it began the journey that would eventually lead to conversion. The organic campaign visit, which closed the sale is known as “last interaction conversion” or “direct conversion”. This is what you see listed as “conversion” in other reports. If a channel did not close a sale (in this example, Banner Ad, Social Media, PPC) this is what is known as an “assisted conversion”.

To view information about assisted conversions and other multi-channel funnels, go to Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels in the left-hand nav of Google Analytics.

Below is a summary of each report within the Multi-Channel funnels section.

Overview

The overview shows you how many conversions and assisted conversions you’ve had for the period of time specified.

You can use the check buttons to see what sort of relationship your channels have with each other. Hover over the Venn diagram to see the percentage overlap.

Assisted Conversions

This report allows you to see the number of assisted conversions you get by channel grouping, source/medium, source, medium or other things such as page.

As well as the number of conversions, it shows the value of conversions that channel has assisted with. Finally, it shows a metric called “Assisted/Last Click or Direct Assists” which shows how often channels assist vs how often they close sales.

• <1 means they close sales more often than assist
• 1 means that assist and close equally
• >1 means they assist sales more often than close

This report can be used similarly to most other Google Analytics reports. There is a search box, the ability to use secondary dimension, plot rows and an “other” dropdown to see different dimensions.

You can click “First Interactive Analysis” above the graph to look at which channels sent visits that eventually lead to conversion.

This report is similar to the Assist Interaction Analysis report that you see by default except you see first click conversions and a first/last click ratio instead of information that is about all kinds of assisted conversions.

PROTIP: Create a custom channel grouping to make the most of this report.

Top Conversion Paths

The Top Conversion Paths report allows you to see the journeys that people took into your website that lead them to conversion.

If something is written as “Organic x2” for example it means that they came to your site via organic search results, didn’t buy something, and came back via organic search again, but this time they did buy something. This report is a visual guide to how people access your website and eventually convert, showing the most common journeys first.

PROTIP: You can use the “path length” drop down to show only paths of a certain length. This is set to 2 or more by default.

Time Lag

Time lag is “how many days from the first visit did it take someone to convert”.

By default, this looks back up to 30 days but this can be changed to be between 1 and 90 days. To do this change the “look back window” above the table. By default, it is 30 days which means that if someone visited your website 31 days ago and bought something today, the first visit would not count as an assist as it is outside the look-back period. Change this to whatever best reflects your user’s buying cycle.

A smaller purchase tends to have a smaller time lag, and larger purchases often take more than one day to decide on.

Path Length

The path length report is similar to the time lag report, except instead of days it is “how many visits to my website did it take someone to convert”?

While “time lag” begins at zero (i.e. it took zero days from first visit for someone to convert) path length begins at 1 (i.e. they converted on the first session).

Limitations of Multi-Channel Funnels and Assisted Conversions

There are a few confusions and ambiguities regarding multi-channel reports. Here are a few things to look out for:

• If someone converts within the first session they visited the website that is a “first click conversion” and “last click/direct conversion” but not an assisted conversion.
• You can’t use regular Advanced Segments with the multi-channel funnels report.
• You can get assisted conversion data with the API but it can’t be fetched with non-multi-channel funnel data.
• In most reports, Google Analytics uses Last Non-Direct Click Attribution, which means direct traffic is not credited with a conversion unless no other channels were involved. Mutli-Channel Funnels show the entire funnel and “last click” means the true last click, including direct traffic.
• The numbers may not match the number in a regular report. This may be due to the sampling rate, the processing time or the attribution model used.

I would recommend using these reports as a guide, along with other data as how channels interact was a part of the sales cycle, rather than alone.

Tips and Resources

You can use the menu at the top to customise your view of multi-channel funnels.

Date Range can be changed and compared in the same way to normal.

Conversion Segments are similar to Advanced Segments except they are specific to multi-channel funnels. This can be used to investigate how a particular channel performs more thoroughly.

You can use the dropdown to change the type of conversion you want to look at the assisted conversions for.

To change what the line graphs show, click the dropdown, add a comparison metric or click the radio buttons at the right-hand side.

To learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels I’d recommend the following.

Multi-channel analysis – Google Analytics Academy

Multi-Channel Funnels – Google Analytics YouTube

If you need any further help with deciphering your multi-channel funnel reports, please contact us and we’ll help you best understand these reports.

Naughty but nice

Muscle Food, an online health food retailer, are no strangers to the fact that the fitness life is a struggle. The time-consuming meal prep combined with the delicious smells emanating from your favourite fast food chains as you walk by can cause us all to fall off the #fitfam bandwagon now and again.

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Rather than guilt trip consumers by highlighting the numerous calories in a Big Mac or steak and cheese subway (my personal favourite), Muscle Food and their brand ambassador, Dan Rayner, have revealed the healthiest options to have from Greggs, Nandos, McDonald’s, and Subway.

As Muscle Food’s core demographic are those who want to maintain a healthy lifestyle, this campaign is clever as it reinforces the belief that we can enjoy a naughty treat now and again, while still striving to maintain a healthy lifestyle instead of giving up.

Love it or hate it

The Marmite ‘love it or hate it’ dispute is a heated debate that’s almost as old as time. However, the brand has stepped into the 21^st century to determine consumer’s stance on this very important issue.

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Using facial recognition technology, Marmite’s ‘TasteFace’ app will analyse the user’s face when eating marmite to determine whether they are a lover or hater based on their reaction. Not only does the app categorise the user as a lover or hater, it also reveals the percentage of how much a person loves or hates Marmite.

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We like this campaign, as not only does the app allow the brand to reach out to a brand-new generation of potential consumers, but it also encourages people to go out and buy the product.

Happy reading!

It’s safe to say that Roald Dahl’s books played a significant role in any Brits childhood, making us laugh, cry, and learn important life lessons.

To celebrate the literary genius’ 101^st birthday, McDonald’s has released a new series of Roald Dahl’s mini books as part of their Happy Reading campaign. Based on different existing Roald Dahl characters or stories, each book includes an extract from the original novel, as well as illustrations by Quentin Blake.

It’s great to see a brand so invested in the education of young children, encouraging them to take the time to sit down with a book in a world that is so invested in technology.

Gender neutral shoes

Another staple of British childhood, Clarks, came under fire in recent months for their seemingly sexist approach in the design of their children’s shoes. The shoe brand was accused of making their boy’s ‘Leader’ shoe line sturdier than their delicately named ‘Dolly Babe’ girl’s shoes.

Clarks have listened to their customer feedback, and announced the launch of a gender-neutral shoe range which have been designed with an ‘entirely unisex approach’.

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Launching in spring/summer 2018, Clarks’ gender neutral shoe line is sure to generate a lot of positive conversation, and coverage for the brand and position them as a leading voice in the sexism debate.

We hope you liked our favourite campaigns this week! Let us know about yours below, or talk to us @Branded3! You can also read about our favourite PR campaigns from last week here.

There are still advantages to segmenting within the GA account itself, but there’s now a way to attribute all of your data using Google’s Data Studio (historical too!). By connecting Google Analytics to Google Data Studio, you can pull on the API to create new dimensions for use in your reports. These could include:

• Custom Content Groups
• Custom Channel Groups
• Sales Regions

The flexibility of Data Studio allows you to set up a variety of different groups and lets you visualise them side-by-side. For instance, if your site is a clothing brand, you may want to know how men’s products perform vs women’s products. You may also want to know how each item performs, whether this is jeans, shirts, dresses, shoes etc. Both are possible.

How it’s done in Data Studio

This is possible using calculated fields and using the CASE WHEN function available. Here’s an example of how it works:

CASE

WHEN Regex_Match(LandingPage, ‘/mens’) THEN “Mens”

WHEN Regex_Match(LandingPage, ‘/womens’) THEN “Womens”

WHEN Regex_Match(LandingPage, ‘/kids’) THEN “Kids”

ELSE “Other”

END

So, what is this doing?

The example above uses the Landing Page dimension to match with Regular Expressions (Regex) the URL of the page. It then renames the groupings to Mens, Womens, Kids or Other to be more user-friendly in the report.

This creates a dimension you can use in your reports, with the output looking something like this:

Landing page isn’t the only option here either – you have the API connection to play with, meaning you could group different pages, mediums, sources, countries, cities, campaigns, and more!

Explore how you can segment your data, and gain more insight into how your users are interacting with your business.

Last June Google’s Data Studio quietly added data export functionality, you can read about that here.

This means embracing a proactive approach to client management to maximise an account’s current and future potential. Account managers need to be one step ahead, have an overarching awareness of the opportunities available, and monitor any threats that could impact a client’s success.

There are three questions you should be asking yourself when evaluating yourself as an account manager:

Do you actually know your client?

What are their business objectives and the goals of key stakeholders within the business? And how does your agency’s work help them achieve these goals? Knowing these things are imperative to building a successful relationship and delivering the results they need.

Beyond being beneficial from a strategic standpoint for the client, having this background knowledge will ensure that you are the ‘go to’ person for team members within your agency, so you can assist and advise from a point of authority.

This insight will also support your position in all recommendations you put forward to your client, as you can ensure they align with the wider business’s strategic approach.

• So, how can you get to know them?

Through onboarding sessions! These sessions are incredibly valuable, as they can provide you with detailed insight into the structure of your client’s business, how they work, and what they want to achieve.

Our guide to making the most out of your onboarding session will show you how to gain as much information as possible from your client in terms of the background of their business, their objectives, and who is going to be involved. Knowing these things will help you learn how to find resolutions to issues that they currently have or may encounter in the future.

Once you have completed your onboarding session and know all that you need to know, that’s your job done, right?

No – in fact it’s the opposite. Throughout the project, nurturing your client relationship must be one of your priorities. Developing a communications strategy creates a structured plan for regular contact through weekly updates and progress and review meetings. Maintain an ongoing dialogue to gain updates about things that could impact future tasks or the direction of the strategy.

Do you understand their industry or sector?

The onboarding session will have given you insight into your client and their current position in their market. However, you need to understand the factors within their sector and the competitive environment that they operate within.

Conducting SWOT analysis evaluates the performance of your client and the work you have conducted against KPIs. It will help you evaluate the working relationship between them and your agency, and identify areas of opportunity as well as possible threats. This will provide strategic direction and support in updating any project roadmaps that are in place, either as a proactive or reactive method.

Having an awareness of the wider sector, including things like public policy, current affairs, and the economy, will give you deeper insight, so you can spot any potential opportunities or threats to a project’s success. This is where your proactive approach to account governance will take you above competitors and other agencies that your client may be working with.

Are you an expert in your industry?

There is a reason that your client has hired your agency, and therefore you as an account manager. Being an expert in your own industry is key to providing your client with strategic insight into how they can progress and maximise their return on investment.

Keeping up to date with changes in your own industry will provide you with expertise that the client may not possess, while also supporting the recommendations made by your agency. This expertise will help you communicate how specific tasks will impact their business and how the strategy can be adapted to respond.

To keep up to date on your industry:

• Read industry blogs or press articles related to your industry or sector
• Attend industry-related conferences
• Attain further industry experience or qualifications (Google Adwords and Analytics Qualifications are two of the numerous training courses that are valuable for account managers working in SEO)

Through answering each of the questions above, you will be able to assess your approach to account management so you can maximise your client’s success and improve your performance as an account manager.

When setting up a new test within VWO, you are given the option to ‘enable campaign for a specific visitor group’. This allows the test to be targeted at visitors who meet specific criteria and allows you to test subsections of the audience individually.

By clicking ‘Custom’ within the area that appears after enabling targeting, you can create a customised segment using multiple conditions. Here is a simple example using an IP address:

In the top right corner of the menu you can ‘Save Segment’ by clicking the floppy disk icon.

This brings up an area where you can name your segment before saving it into the ‘My Segments’ section, where it can be accessed quickly and used on other future campaigns.

Here is an example segment contained in the ‘My Segments’ area:

Don’t worry if you make a mistake and need to edit a segment in future – you can do so by hovering over the segment and then clicking the pencil icon that appears.

However, for Google Trends to pick up your campaign there must be a certain amount of attention and buzz surrounding it. A multitude of factors need to be in line for this to happen, including search volume, blog post volume, and news volume.

Fortunately, there are now a wide range of helpful tools available to aid the tracking of coverage and links. Let’s take a look at our favourites.

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Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a highly commended tool in the SEO world. While no back-link checker can crawl exactly how and where Googlebot crawls links, Ahrefs is considered one of the best technical SEO tools. It has a large link index that closely replicates Googlebot – meaning it has the capacity to pull link data from the web similarly to Google.

The link intersect feature is also effective in discovering publications that have previously linked to your client’s competitors. You can use this to identify potential quick wins for your campaigns, as well as see the type of content that is successfully working in your client’s industry.

SemRush

SemRush is also a handy tool for identifying potential quick wins for clients.

The tool includes a Competitor feature, which identifies a brand’s competitors and how they compare to your client. The competitors can also be filtered by the number of referring domains, as well as the total number of backlinks.

Semrush also includes a nifty comparison analysis feature. It analyses the link performance of your client and their competitors to produce a graph, so you can visibly compare the brand’s performance over the previous three months, one year, and two years.

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Majestic

Majestic’s Trust Flow is a fabulous metric that is super useful when conducting link audits and identifying desirable publications for clients to be covered on.

Majestic determines a site’s trust flow score based on traffic that flows through a link, the relevancy of the site the link is featured on, and the links that link to the linking site (link Inception!).

During a link audit, Trust Flow can be used to identify topically irrelevant and low trust flow links to be removed or disavowed.

When it comes to prospective publication opportunities, the user can determine whether a site is worth targeting. By submitting the potential target publication’s URL into majestic, the tool will bring up the site’s topical trust flow – such as the relevant sectors the publication covers.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a great tool that incorporates a lot of social to discover new ideas for content, as well as identifying relevant authoritative writers to target with a client’s campaign.

Buzzsumo includes a link alert feature, which can be set up to send alerts when a publication links to a client’s website – making it very easy to keep tabs on a campaign!

You can also use Buzzsumo to discover competitors’ most shared content and find out who shares it, as well as which publications are linking to their content.

Opensite Explorer

While all PR professionals are concerned about raking in the links, tracking coverage is also important as it not only still great exposure for your client, but is also an easy opportunity to get a few more links

The aptly named Link Opportunities feature includes an ‘unlinked mentions’ feature, which provides you with pages that mention the client but don’t include a link – by simply chasing up journalists, you’ll soon be raining links.

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Crimson Hexagon

Using social listening tools such as Crimson Hexagon is also a great way to track media coverage for your client.

Crimson Hexagon is a great tool to not only discover the consumer sentiment surrounding your client’s brand, but also discover which publications are talking about them.

By conducting a refined search on the topic your campaign is based on, you can dig through the post list to see the publications that are talking about your campaign. This is a particularly helpful method when wanting to track coverage on international sites, as you can translate the key search terms into the languages you want and search for them simultaneously

No platform is perfect, and no platform will be able to find all the links and coverage you have acquired during a campaign. But by using all the platforms together, you are sure to gain thorough insight about the full success of your PR campaign.

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Adidas, beer, and vomit free trainers

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Adidas is always one step ahead of other brands when it comes to ideas, which is what makes their new, outrageous trainers a brilliant creation.

They have produced the very first trainer that is vomit and beer resistant. Yes, you have read that correctly. They have brought out trainers that will survive a night out without getting too dirty. This cleverly comes in time for Oktoberfest in Germany, and makes a great marketing story.

The trainer has been named ‘The Munchen’ and will cost you £159.95, but you will receive a free beer mug to go along with it.

Adidas either really like Oktoberfest and wanted to get involved in any way they could, or they have been extremely clever in trying something new!

IT and clever guerrilla marketing

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Across Sydney over the past few days, people have been intrigued by red balloons that have been popping up everywhere. The balloons are attached to drains and the reason behind it is creative PR.

IT, based on the famous Stephen King novel, is coming out soon. To promote the release, balloons have popped up across the city, with mysterious text written next to them: “It is closer than you think. #ITMOVIE in cinemas September 7.”

It’s just enough of a teaser to make people wonder what it’s about, prompting them to go on the hashtag to find out more. The balloons have also had a lot of social coverage, and the marketing has definitely worked to get people talking about the movie, and potentially go to see it.

Peaky Blinders bar in Devon

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On the 16^th September, a Peaky Blinders bar is opening in Devon. It will emulate the hit series’ 1920s feel, with art deco features and waiters and waitresses in outfits inspired by the decade. To celebrate the opening of the bar, everyone who wears a flat cap gets a free shot.

This Peaky Blinders bar is sure to attract even more people to visit the scenic region, and locals will be able to head out and enjoy an ale or whiskey from a bygone era.

It will be interesting to see how many customers turn up for the launch for 16^th September – if you’re nearby, head down and let us know what it’s like!

Chester Zoos’ family sleepover

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To support the Wildlife Connections project, Chester Zoo is hosting a family sleepover on Saturday, September 16. The project is aimed at creating a safe place for precious local wildlife, so it was only fitting to celebrate the opening with families in a similar way!

They have an itinerary for people who want to stay in the zoo, filled with family fun activities to do with the animals. It’s a campaign that fits perfectly with the zoo’s family-centric ethos and conservational message.

You can only stay here with family though, so if you want to go, you have to bring everyone along!

Play Like Mum, celebrating mums across the world

Image source

Play Like Mum, who make toys prams for children, wanted people around the world to celebrate mothers and everything they do. They commissioned people from 56 countries to post a photo of their mum and share a short summary of why they appreciate her.

They received photos from Armenia, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Jamaica, and many more, featuring them in a lovely campaign to celebrate mums around the world.

Not only is it nice to see different pictures of mothers from across the world, but the press has given it a lot of coverage due to the heart-warming angle.

Last week our favourite PR campaigns included a gin advent calendar, a try before you buy campaign from IKEA and a #DreamBigPrincess photo campaign from Disney.

This post started off as a way of showing the typical SEO growth of businesses in different sectors as a way of benchmarking performance and managing expectations. However, it’s transformed into much more of a landscape analysis post looking at winners and losers in each sector.

The Data

I’ve taken a sample of highly ranking websites from 9 industries:

1. Finance
2. Travel
3. Legal
4. Home Retail
5. iGaming
6. Payday
7. Fashion
8. Consumer Electrical
9. Automotive

(Use the above links to navigate between industries)

I’ve selected 30 websites from each industry except for Finance and Travel which have 50 websites to compare due to the number of competitors.

Growth has been measured using Searchmetrics data for the last 10 months. I didn’t do 12 months simply due to the number of penguin recoveries affecting the results.

The initial idea was to consider average growth by industry, however as I went through the data it was clear each industry has a slightly different landscape and therefore strategies need to be customised. There were also some obvious tactics used to influence growth, some working better than others that I thought would be worthwhile exploring.

Some caveats before we go into it:

1. Searchmetrics data includes Brand keywords, therefore growth in brand can influence the results.
2. The data is based on Google organic rankings only, it doesn’t relate to actual business/revenue growth.
3. Keyword search volumes can affect visibility.
4. Increases/decreases in visibility are not necessarily reflected in visitor numbers.

The data is not an indication of good or bad SEO strategy, it is simply showing a trend in organic visibility and from it we can pick out a few key things businesses are either struggling with or doing well. Anyone who works in this industry realises there is always a lot more going on behind the scenes, different priorities and challenges within each business.

Finance

Relative gains for smaller businesses puts average growth at circa 50%, however nearly 70% of websites in this sample saw 20% or less growth, with 28% seeing declines in search visibility.

It seems to me that Panda/Penguin recoveries for certain websites have resulted in some established players seeing quite significant drops in visibility. Money.co.uk have made huge improvements to the content and usability of their website as well as consistently attracting high quality links.

Uswitch and Money Supermarket have both seen significant drops in visibility over the last 10 months, whereas competitors like Comparethemarket.com and Gocompare.com have both seen growth.

Uswitch have made several changes to the architecture of the website and the content, the biggest losses seem to be for broadband terms. The Money Supermarket decline is almost identical to the Uswitch trend and aligns with a Phantom update, this would suggest Google potentially has an issue with the quality of these websites.

The finance industry has always struggled with flexibility due to regulatory requirements, making it particularly challenging to make changes to the website and putting massive restrictions on outreach. It’s left the landscape a little stagnant with smaller niche players taking advantage.

The AA have YoY declines for the past 5 years, and have resorted to developing microsites to try and capitalise on new product/service areas, e.g. https://www.aatravelinsurance.com/trips/add

It seems to be that instead of resolving issues with the main domain, companies in this industry are building out websites for every product and offering, it makes very little sense from an SEO point of view and isn’t scalable in the long term.

Travel

Average growth in this industry is lower at 14%, half of websites seeing less than 10% growth. Again, around 30% of websites saw a decline in visibility.

It seems to be the big airline, hotel and holiday operators that have struggled to grow or maintain their market share. jet2.com saw no growth and haven’t for a few years, whereas jet2holidays.com was one of the biggest winners with 79% growth in visibility driven by a huge investment in the platform, usability and content on the website. From an SEO stand point it would make sense to merge the websites together, but differences in customers and the journey might create challenges.

Dealchecker.co.uk saw most of their 100% growth in the last 6 months, this seems to be related to the steady growth in links since February:

Some of the more recent links going live look a little aggressive but are clearly helping them to rank. It will be interesting to see how Google’s ‘Real time’ penguin deals with these tactics.

At the other end of the scale, and something we see regularly, is the Virgin Atlantic migration:

Website migrations can be seriously problematic, especially if you’re migrating to a brand-new domain name. Virgin Atlantic are struggling to regain their previous visibility on ‘flights to’ terms including core terms like ‘flights to orlando’.

We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of site migrations in the last two years, many of them going wrong one way or another, House of Fraser being the most recent. A detailed redirect plan, content auditing and a close working relationship between SEO and development is an absolute must.

Legal

The legal sector average growth comes in at 272%, wildly skewed by the growth of legalexpert.co.uk in the last 6 months, once again proving not so good for the new version of Penguin.

If we remove this result we’re left with an average of 37% growth, nearly half of businesses seeing a decline.

Before the release of the real-time Penguin algorithm we saw higher visibility for news outlets, government websites and national solicitor’s firms, in many cases the results weren’t relevant for those looking for advice or to make a claim. Now Penguin has run we’ve seen the recovery of the claims management companies and what seems to be a little more focus on local firms.

Unfortunately, it seems results are suffering from quite a bit of link spam which pushes visibility down for legitimate businesses/firms.

Home Retail

This is an extremely competitive space with serious investment in both paid and organic search, at peak periods we see aggressive brand bidding which drives up CPCs and means many businesses have to burn budget on protecting their brand.

Average growth comes in at 34%, only 23% of businesses seeing declines in visibility.

Victorian Plumbing have seen huge growth since March 17, there are no obvious reasons for this but my best guess is a huge spike in the number linking pages (not domains), which suggests new site wide links pointing to the website.

This combined with a serious amount of blogger outreach seems to be fuelling link growth and driving rankings. Some of the posts look suspicious, similar businesses being linked to in multiple blog posts.

At the opposite end of the scale we have Homebase who have been in decline for the last 2 years. Changes to site design, content and structure have probably contributed to the challenges, however I think poor mobile performance is one of the key reasons for the decline and their site speed is one of the worst in the industry.

iGaming

The iGaming industry hasn’t seen a lot of penguin recoveries, unlike other industries, however certain websites have started to see good growth in 2017 despite any serious investment in Content, UX or mobile.

Average growth comes in at 21% with 40% seeing a decline in search visibility.

Most of the winners have seen growth come in 2017, there is no consistency in the dates and no correlation with algorithm updates.

There seems to be no obvious reason for the sudden shift and those that have lost visibility seem unrelated to those that have seen gains. There was a Phantom update in February and Fred in March, however I can’t help but wonder if a revived appetite for paid links and ‘innovative’ techniques are starting to help.

Once again, we see the consequences when migrations go wrong with Poker Stars.

Payday

There has been good growth in this market across the board with a few new entrants doing suspiciously well. Only 20% of websites in this data set saw a decline in visibility.

The key thing to pick up on here is those websites that have come from nowhere to suddenly begin dominating keyword sets. It is very clear in this industry that link spam and paid links are still very much working and making it extremely difficult for legitimate competitors to grow and maintain search share.

Paydayloansnow.co.uk:

http://www.sumowebsite.com/benefits-and-downsides-of-bad-credit-loans-for-single-mothers.html

Just an example of the kind of links seemingly delivering results in this industry.

Penguin, what Penguin?

Fashion

Businesses in this sector seem to have had lower growth when compared to other areas with average growth only 3.5%. Over half the websites in this set saw declines in their visibility and only 23% saw 10% growth or more.

From experience of working in this industry getting your content and technical SEO right pays far bigger dividends than any form of link building. Pathways to different products need to be logical with optimised internal linking, URL structure and titles.

The biggest loser on the list is newlook.com. They have been through a website restructure recently and removed categories with high visibility from the main navigation, this has resulted in a huge drop in visibility in the last month.

Obviously, I have no idea how much value the lost rankings were driving in terms of revenue, but the restructure has buried and even removed some high-ranking pages that have now diminished in importance and no longer rank.

The biggest winner, Matalan, have seen the benefits of getting the technical architecture right and as such have seen impressive growth in the last 6 months.

Consumer Electrical

Despite some impressive growth in the top half, the average is pulled down to 19% due to 40% of websites seeing no growth at all.

Again, we see migration challenges hurting visibility. This time it’s o2.co.uk who seem to have recently migrated to https and had a few technical issues along the way. The homepage and various other pages seem to be blocking Google from crawling leaving bare snippets in SERPs and resulting in ranking drops across the board.

Automotive

The automotive landscape has been active in terms of updating websites, fixing technical issues and ensuring websites are mobile friendly. This is evidenced in the data with 66% of websites seeing growth and nearly half seeing 10% or more.

Lookers.co.uk have used an interesting strategy to speed up natural search gains:

If you look at their link profile you can see that they are acquiring and redirecting a number of dealership domains:

I wrote about this strategy recently and how it can drive serious results, particularly post penguin.

A company that I love but didn’t make the list is Carwow, they just didn’t appear in the top ten for some core keywords despite great content and some of the best imagery. They invest heavily in video (which is spot on in terms of the automotive journey), but it would be good to see some of these videos live and indexed on the actual website. Growth has been static over the last 12 months, but putting the videos on site and some solid link building projects would improve current visibility.

Summary

It’s simple really, the businesses seeing growth in natural search are those implementing technical changes successfully, the most common cause of decline is either ignoring technical or getting it wrong.

On the flip side, it’s clear from all the industries we’ve looked at that link spam is working again. As yet, I see no evidence that Penguin is ‘real-time’ and websites buying/manipulating links are doing well out of it. That’s not to say Google won’t penalise over time, but the idea of ‘real-time’ penguin is for them to not count from the moment they’re crawled.

My opinion is that Penguin doesn’t exist anymore, Google just turned it off and went back to the position they were in before it. As other signals grow in strength this may become less of an issue, but they are still a huge signal and working well.

To finish I just wanted to touch on the fact that all the data used above is trend data, the percentages do not relate to revenue or traffic to a given website. That said, don’t think that massive drops in visibility don’t hurt businesses.

You can clearly see above that the share price follows the drops in search visibility.

Not all companies are as reliant on traffic from Google, but poor search performance isn’t just about looking at visibility charts and rankings, it affects the revenue, profitability and even the value of businesses. Serious consideration needs to be given to your SEO strategy, particularly technical SEO as it has the potential to kill off a large portion of your traffic and sales.

And, obviously, we couldn’t go a week without talking about gin, so there’s also one of those added in for good luck!

Instagram gets real

We’ve noticed a lot of talk recently from bloggers and influencers who are struggling with the new Instagram algorithm and losing engagement on their posts.

But two bloggers who’ve really engaged not only their followers but also the national press this week are Chessie King (one part of fitness duo Two Peas In A Bod) and Lucy Mountain, AKA The Fashion Fitness Foodie.
Embracing imperfections

For a few months, blogger and fitness trainer Chessie has been sharing side-by-side photos to show her whopping 239k social followers the reality of our bodies and how unflattering they can look in bad lighting, how they get bloated after a day of eating, and how posture can change everything!

“I think the more open I am on Instagram, the easier it is for me to accept my body,” Chessie explains. “Every time I show my “wobbly bits” or my “imperfect bits” I feel a sense of freedom.”

As digital marketers, we think it will be interesting to see if brands start working more with influencers on creating content such as this, which reinforces the positive messages and values of their brand instead of just collaborating on events or product promotion. We’ll keep you posted!

Food for Thought

Lucy Mountain’s dose of reality comes in the form of simple Instagram photos, comparing the nutritional differences between foods we consider ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’.

As marketing manager of personal training company SIX3NINE, Lucy has a professional knowledge and understanding of nutrition, and how products marketed as ‘healthy’ are often are just as ‘naughty’ as those calorie/fat/ sugar-loaded snacks we wouldn’t dream of touching.

“The goal for me personally has always been to remove the idea of single foods being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. My posts (hopefully) liberate people, showing you can enjoy all the foods you love and still be ‘healthy’ in a (hopefully) really non-intimidating, approachable way,” she told Metro.co.uk.

The simplicity of these images works so well, as there’s nowhere to hide. We love how Lucy challenges food trends and the perfect images that many fitness bloggers present on social media. She makes her followers feel okay about having a handful of fruit pastels instead of almonds if you really want to. (Pass the sweets!)

Try before you buy

Ever spotted a gorgeous piece of furniture or stunning lamp and thought ‘that will go so well in my living room?’ And then, once you’ve dragged it home, you realise it’s too big, or it doesn’t go with anything else in the room, or the shop was actually some kind of ‘smoke and mirrors’ parallel universe and what you bought is actually gross!

We’ve all been there.

Luckily for us, the Swedish furniture giants have only gone and done it again! Using technology engineered by Apple, IKEA Place is a pioneering app that gives customers the opportunity to ‘try before they buy’, superimposing fully scaled products into any space in the house, simply by pointing your camera at it.

We feel there’s a positive and a negative to this idea. True, there will be no more embarrassing arguments with your partner halfway around Ikea when they insist on buying a bright orange chair to go in the blush pink bedroom. But cutting down on multiple trips means only one chance to get meatballs and hotdogs…

More than just a princess?

Although Disney’s latest editions to the Princess files have portrayed a much better image of female empowerment, some of our most loved heroines have received their fair share of criticism over the years for their gender stereotypes and the fact that their life ambition is to be rescued by Prince Charming.

The company’s latest social media campaign #DreamBigPrincess aims to promote an inspiring message to young girls all over the world, with positive images of strong female role models who may have grown up adoring the princesses and stories of Disney but also enjoy playing football, learning how to code, and wanting to lead a nation.

Kate Parker is a photographer involved in the project and author of the book Strong Is The New Pretty. She told Vogue.com, “I wanted to find a way to combine an element of empowering princess and real girls. A lot of girls feel like you have to either be a tomboy or a girly girl who dresses up.”

The #DreamBigPrincess photo campaign is live now and runs through to October, with Disney donating $1 for every photo shared using the hashtag to the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up Campaign, which promotes leadership and empowerment in young women.

Gin Gin to Christmas!

We’re being those really annoying people who talk about Christmas as soon as August is out of the way. But you might need to jump on this bandwagon quick, before it’s too late.

Last year, online alcohol specialists The Pip Stop created the Prosecco Advent Calendar, filled with 24 glorious days of sparkling wines.

With gin being the buzz word of 2017, it’s only right that this years’ version is filled with a variety of exotic tonic waters such as pomegranate and basil, tangerine, cinnamon and watermelon, alongside a bottle of The Lakes Gin.

The calendar does cost a hefty £99, but with a gin and tonic every day of December, you’ll probably have forgotten how much you spent by Christmas Day!

The ‘advent calendar campaign’ really has been a winner for marketers over the last few years. Even as adults, we still want to count down every single day to Christmas, but a disgustingly small amount of chocolate just doesn’t cut it anymore! Take that, along with the most ‘trendy’ food or drink products of the year, and you’ve got a winning formula! We’ve got a wager on the avocado calendar coming out verrrrry soon!

So, there you have it, a very positive post filled with inspirational messages to finish the week off. And if the only thing you took from this was belly rolls are fine, fruit pastels are ‘healthy’, and gin will help you through every step of December, we think we’re alright about that! Happy Friday!